How ‘The Brutalist’ Score Echoed VistaVision with an Epic Sound
Composer Daniel Blumberg didn’t take it for granted that any of the world-class musicians he asked would want to work on the score for “The Brutalist.” Traveling with a suitcase full of microphones and a film production-quality sound recorder, Blumberg recorded all across Europe in order to complete the sometimes intimate, sometimes strident, but always emotional music that accompanies the Brady Corbet film.
While it was important not to limit his and his collaborators’ ideas of what the score could be by writing the score to picture, Blumberg found musical ways to inspire his collaborators and echo the quality of Corbet’s imagery and the brutalist architecture that is the obsession of its protagonist, László Tóth (Adrian Brody).
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“Brady talked very early on about VistaVision, and how it would inspire some of the in-camera effects he was going to use, and those [were] a good starting point for the way that I would work sometimes, explaining things to musicians, how I wanted the sound to stretch out — like the light,” Blumberg told IndieWire.
This musical mirroring of imagery is probably most apparent when the world starts to melt and deteriorate for László. For the cue of László and Erzsébet (Felicia Jones) taking heroin together, Blumberg traveled to a friend’s painting studio in Berlin to record with trumpeters Axel D?rner and Carina Khorkhordina and bassist Joel Grip. Before they all began to play together, Blumberg showed them images of the camera tests cinematographer Lol Crawley had done with Corbet in London.
Those, and the Erzsébet theme, formed the basis for a group improvisation to take the cue to the structural and emotional places it needed to go. “That was a really nice instance where it was very clear how [the imagery] could relate to the dynamics of the music,” Blumberg said. “The Erzsébet theme is very romantic, and it almost sounds like it’s reference cinema in a way; it’s very cinematic in the way I felt the picture was at certain points.”
But Blumberg’s idea was that as Tóth deteriorates throughout the second half of the film, the most romantic theme would get chipped away at. “By the time they’re having sex on heroin, that theme is just kind of disintegrated,” Blumberg said.
Blumberg took a similar approach to the scene in the jazz club, which was one of the first things the composer wrote to have a demo ready for Corbet to shoot with, wanting the music to feel of its era and rich but also to reflect a stretched-out quality. “[Corbet] talked about it in the script being like a George Grosz drawing, where the faces are kind of stretched,” Blumberg said. That quality is something that can be felt in the length and repetition of notes for the jazz club cue, giving an altered, somewhat manic expression to the core László theme.
“The first day of the shoot was the jazz scene. So I had to be there and get a band together for that. And [Corbet] wanted to shoot to music. So it was nice to have this structure for my focus in terms of big cues to work on. But also, you’re making choices about themes that are going to have a huge responsibility,” Blumberg said.
Blumberg wisely finds ways to share that responsibility with his collaborators, perhaps most notably with pianist John Tilbury on the 15-minute piece that plays during the film’s intermission. Blumberg and Tilbury had to think about music that holds the space for people to get up from their seats and return with snacks, of course, but also thematically preparing for the second act of “The Brutalist.” Part of what’s being worked out in that piano piece by Tilbury is how to get from László’s theme to Erzsébet’s.
“ The idea was that László’s theme, which you hear all throughout the first half of the film, this quite simple refrain of four notes, would develop into something romantic,” Blumberg said. “This recording of John was actually him trying to work out where that could go, what he could do with the Erzsébet theme.”
Blumberg wanted to capture every sound of that effort, micing Tilbury so that the sound of his hands on the keys and shiftings on his piano stool were audible. “ There’s birds walking on the roof, and there are interruptions where — I think at one point he says, ‘This is your theme,’ and then plays my theme. But if you sat and listened to it instead of going to the toilet, you’d hear Erzsébet’s theme emerging, and then you’re ready for the second half of the film.”
VistaVision isn’t the only format that inspired Blumberg’s work in the second half of the film, however. The epilogue of “The Brutalist” was shot on Betamax for the most ‘80s vision possible, and Blumberg embraced the musical equivalent.
“This early digital video format gave me the license to, you know — it felt right that I could change technologies with the picture,” Blumberg said. “This very surprising digital sound happening was exciting to me. I knew the picture would suddenly cut to this bright Venice situation, and the light in Venice is so specific, and [Corbet] shot there. So the ‘80s, yeah, it immediately felt like it would be great for the themes that you’ve heard.”
The actual synth work was the last bit of scoring that Blumberg did, and, like the film itself, it spanned an ocean. “I went to New York to work with Vince Clarke, who defined the sound of the ‘80s with Depeche Mode and Yazoo. And then, I brought this track back and, actually very late on in the music mix, because at that point the picture wasn’t locked — we wanted it to be a back and forth. And Brady came to my house with two bottles of wine, and we just had the best evening playing synth music,” Blumberg said. “We were dancing together. It was such a nice way to end the process.”
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