by Captain Cupcake » February 21st, 2015, 4:12 am
Actually, the history of who composed that theme is a little shaky. After Alan Silvestri's music was dropped due to Bruckheimer desiring a different kind of style of music, Hans Zimmer was the one originally intended to be the first choice to do the replacement score. However, he was contracted to do The Last Samurai at that time and couldn't be involved. Still, he wound up composing most of the motifs(including "He's a Pirate") and Badelt would finish up the project doing by a lot of the final arrangements, with Zimmer being left uncredited due to the aforementioned contract. So essentially, it was Zimmer's theme all along.
Other people were involved with the score and contributed cues of their own as well(Geoff Zanelli, one of those worker bees involved, is actually the one who did the final He's a Pirate arrangements). This is apparent as some material shares similarities with past Zimmer works, like that small theme for the Black Pearl's pirates(originally used back in Road to El Dorado which he co-composed with John Powell) and such.
What's funny is that "He's a Pirate" itself seems to have been a musical idea of Zimmer and his associates for some time before that, though. There was a very similar motif used in Lion King II's score by Nick Glennie-Smith(someone who often collaborates with Zimmer and also contributed some work on PotC), and Zimmer's work for Gladiator also had a theme with a similar melody. Then comes PotC and we hear it fully realized. It'd be interesting to see how far back that idea went and where it first started, although it'd probably be difficult to recognize in its earliest form.