With only two features under his belt, British musician Daniel Blumberg has already cemented his name in film history. After debuting scoring abilities on 2020’s The World to Come, the composer extraordinaire is back four years later with a monumental sophomore effort––one that reflects the work of a vetted master.
Blumberg’s 32-track, 82-minute score for Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is a vast, varied, odyssey-inducing epic that subtly clues you into the film’s expression, the soul of its architect lead, and the dawning sense of hard-earned revelation that runs through the sweeping immigrant story.
With a Golden Globe nomination for the score already, multiple awards from critics circles, and an all-but-guaranteed Oscar nomination on the horizon, Blumberg sat down to talk with us about composing the score, the various and experimental approaches he took to recording, and the beauty of working with an assured, hyper-involved director like Corbet.
Daniel Blumberg: I was up ‘til 5 working, so I’m a bit, like… tired.
The Film Stage: What are you working on?
Another film that I started on straight after The Brutalist, right after the sound mix.
What’s the film?
It’s Mona [Fastvold]’s next film [Ann Lee]. Brady’s partner. They wrote it together. She just got it together and it just happened to be back to back.
Is Corbet making that one with her? Or did they just write it together?
They normally do second unit for each other. And they kind of support each other through it all. They’re an amazing team.
I mean, The Brutalist is proof enough. Let’s get into it. You were big in the indie-rock scene a long time ago, and for more than a decade now you’ve been creating more experimental music with various artists, focusing on live sound, etc. How did you get into composing film scores?
The stuff you talked about is when I was, like, a child. Like, Brady was in Thunderbirds many years ago, but it’s very distant. I’ve been working with mainly improvised music since I was 22. I’ve always drawn pictures, and when I discovered improvised music it was like a relationship to drawing. And I think with film it was more like, I stumbled into Kieslowski when I was 17––just randomly got a DVD of A Short Film About Killing, and that got me into cinema. And then I watched all of Kieslowski’s films. Then someone recommended me another director; then I was watching all of Bresson’s films. It was always very much driven by discovering directors. I wouldn’t even really listen to or particularly notice the score or the performances of the constructs of the films. It was quite like a magical medium for me––unlike music, which I’d been making since I was 15. It was mysterious.
When I met Brady, he was making his first film, The Childhood of a Leader. And we immediately connected, became very good friends. Similar taste in many things. He introduced me to film scores because he invited me to the sessions when they recorded the brass for his first film. And then I met Peter Walsh, who was co-producing [the score], and saw how he was working. And we started working together. We made three records together. Now, this is the second film we’ve made together. Mona asked me to do her first film [The World to Come]. That was my introduction; that was the first time I’d worked on a feature. It was just really interesting, because I was working primarily with improvising musicians where it’s so open. You don’t know if someone’s gonna play a percussive note for half a second or if they’re playing the saxophone they might circular breathe for an hour.
But film is time-based in the sense that the scene is three minutes, 40 seconds, and 23 milliseconds. That was really interesting to me––like, how to retain the qualities of the music that I was excited about. And maybe someone like Mona had listened to my records, so how to kind of make that work fluidly with the responsibilities of scoring where you’re part of a wider team and you’re all trying, hopefully, to work together to execute what the director’s vision is. How I fell in love with film was through directors, so immediately it was all about how to do what I do in service to the director and their vision and still make it feel like [the film] is one person’s work.
Speaking of directors: I saw that you scored a short film directed by Peter Strickland, which is about GUO, your project with saxophonist Seymour Wright, if I understand correctly. I’m curious how you ended up working with Strickland. I know he’s hyper-focused on the sound of his films. Specifically sound design, but I imagine that extends to music as well, and the importance of those fusing together for a film.
That project was interesting because I had this duo with Wright, who also played alto sax on The Brutalist, and we were working in a more improvised way. But we would bring, like, an image before we played or a piece of text. It was a really nice way to start playing. We’d just meet and bring something. And then, when we started recording and making records, we wanted to kind of do the same: we’d ingested these images and text into the music, and we thought it’d be nice to give it to a writer or an artist to make an ekphrasis.
It’s quite an old-school thing where a write would, like, respond to a painting. Brady and I actually really connected on that. One of the first books he bought me was a László Krasznahorkai, who wrote a lot of Béla Tarr’s films. He had an ekphrasis book. I can’t remember what kind of paintings they are; I think they’re like prostitutes. But yeah: he has this beautiful book of, like, a single sentence that Krasznahorkai wrote in response to these images.
Anyway, the first record we had David Toop––who’s a really beautiful writer; he writes about music in an amazing way––he responded to our music. Peter’s film actually came from that process. We asked Peter to respond to the record that we’d made, and he came up with this film. He heard the lockers and, yeah, it went from there. But it was from the music that the film was generated. But yeah: he’s great. He’s really massive. When I met Peter I was a fan of cinema and he was a fan of music––I have a great DVD collection and he has a great record collection.
What does the music-writing process look like for a score that’s this gargantuan?
Well, we started from the script––Brady and I talking about it really early on. The first instinct was this kind of prepared piano sound where you interfere with the strings of a piano. I was literally putting screws into the strings, wedging them inside. You prepare the strings with different objects and then, when you hit the keys, the hammer hits the string and it makes this kind of percussive sound. I thought of that just in terms of construction. It’s funny, because it’s like hammers and screws, but it actually sounds light. So it was like a mixture of that and thinking about John [Tilbury]’s playing, and also the potential of the piano in terms of, like, it’s a vast acoustic instrument.
The idea that it has bass, like with architecture. I was wondering, and one of the things we talked about was what spaces they’d be shooting in. Obviously a lot of it’s shot on a film set, which doesn’t particularly sound exciting, but it was very thorough. When he got the film together and he went to Budapest to start pre-production, I went there to live with him through the shoot. So we were really sharing space.
So you were composing just off-set while they were filming?
Yeah. I mean, it was a combination. The first day of the shoot was the jazz scene, where Adrien and Isaac’s characters go to a jazz club and shoot up and come back in the room. So I had to get a jazz band together for that, because we did live music on that. And then––what would they be playing? I had a theme that we had done quite early. I really tried not to get too involved with obsessing over it until it was in pre-production. But I had done a piece of music that kind of became the construction theme. And there was this idea that that jazz music that they heard, he would retain that throughout his life, that he would never forget it basically. And it forms the construction music at the end of the film. That band was specific musicians: two guys from Marseille, Antonin [Gerbal] on drums, and Joel Grip on double bass. They played music that kind of evoked the ’40s but then also would be able to deconstruct it when they came out high.
It’s all acoustic, the score, until you get to the ’80s. Those players have very specific improvising practices in their own right, and I knew they could both play the jazz and the more open music that we wanted for when they emerge from the toilet and Brady is using this in-camera effect from the VistaVision that stretches the light. I showed the band the camera tests as an example of how they could kind of stretch it out. But it was great doing that at the start, because it was, like, immediately a collaboration between departments. I was hiding microphones and the cinematographer was operating to the music they were making and the actors were responding to it. And it was really nice to start that process, and that kind of continued through the shoot.
How much of the film’s score was composed by the time the film was done shooting?
I like working before the pictures are made because the ceiling starts coming down; even just seeing images. I like to have the opportunity to rely more on my conversations with Brady. The thing is: I don’t want to illustrate stuff. You want to find this balance where it’s really part of it, really integrated. One of the things for me was that Brady wanted to shoot certain scenes to music. Obviously I was talking about the jazz scene, but that was live. But then the overture––like, when he’s arriving on the boat at the start of the film––he wanted to shoot that to the music. So I made a demo.
I mean, that was literally Brady and I sitting next to my keyboard and him sort of saying, “Yeah, and then László goes up the stairs, and he’s going up and up and then the Statue of Liberty.” And we were really sketching it out, and then I bounce it. I mean, that was played really loud on set, again, so the cinematographer could move to the beat or against the beat. And then Adrien and the extras, it was like a whole choreography that was shot to the music. And then later, the sound mix came in with sirens. This sort of rough sound immediately inspired the brass. When I started recording acoustically, one of the things I’d do at the end of each brass section is like, “Hey, can you make siren sounds?”
What was the back-and-forth like between you and Brady in the scoring? Is he typically involved on an intricate, note-to-note level, or are you composing full pieces and getting back to him with those, then sharpening them, etc.?
As involved as possible. I mean, it’s his piece of work. One of the great things about being on set is: if I see scenes where he’s communicating with the actors, I get a real sense of what his intentions are for the temperature of that scene. And those things, when I’m with the musicians recording the music, those are the moments where my instincts are almost trained to his. So it’s like I know I can be there with the musician, because I don’t have anyone in my sessions. The people I work with are artists mainly. It’s definitely a lot about communicating, and they’re all quite uncompromising, and it’s a lot of trust.
Someone like Sofia Agnel––she’s an incredible artist in her own right. She’s been making work for much longer than us. [John] Tilbury is in his late 80s. It’s a combination of kind of asking people because you want them in the process, not just their instruments. They’re not just classical players. I want them to feel free in themselves but also to have the right amount of context so that it hits the seam or hits what Brady wants. It’s a lot about communication and setting up those sessions in a way. I have a beautiful remote recording set-up; it’s very small.
Do you record everything live? As in: is each track a live, individual track? Or are you recording sounds and stacking them onto different tracks across sessions?
Peter Walsh, who mixed it, is just, like, amazing at making quite complicated sounds work together. And you can hear that in his records with Scott [Walker.] But it’s a real mix because with The Brutalist, the nature of the film––this kind of [makes metronome sounds], the precision in some of the cues, I mean it was the first time I was using a metronome. And so some of the cues are very specific. Sofia Agnel––I recorded her in Paris––there was one cue where I really wanted her to play with Axel Dörner, who’s in Berlin, and they’re all very busy. But they’d played together before so it was almost like live. So there was an element of that, and then there were some cues where it’s about retaining the live quality of it. Like the jazz, the bebop, you know that was, like, a take.
The heroin cue where they’re kind of making love for three days––that was a really improvised session. We recorded that in Joel Grip’s painting studio in Berlin. And I had the mics set up on two trumpets, Axel Dörner and his partner Carina. And then Joel was playing double bass and I was playing piano, and it was like a live take that, as we were playing it, I was like, “Oh, Brady’s gonna like this.” I got back from the Eurostar and went straight to his hotel room in London because he was over for pre-production. I played it for him and he was so excited.
Brady Corbet’s music video for Daniel Blumberg’s single CHEERUP
Are you classically trained? Like, are you writing out compositions ahead of time and then iterating on it? Or is the kind of composing you’re doing more along the lines of directing various music sessions?
I can’t read music and I’m not classically trained at all. My friend Tom Wheatley, who played double bass on the film, he knows how to write music, so he translated a demo recording I did into score for a group of brass, like a trio, that play together often in Berlin. And they have quite a specific way of intonating between each other, and also their breath. With brass, when it’s a group that plays often together, they breathe in the right places and they needed sheet music. And that was more for, like, building the warm brass, like in the bus. Those cues are written out and it was much more, like, “This is what you need to play.”
For that cue in the painting studio, I brought Erzsébet’s theme. In the film I wanted that to kind of disintegrate from the moment they meet, and it’s so romantic and beautiful and then fit to disintegrate by the time they’re fucking on heroin. But it needed to be that theme, so I brought it in its most simple form––I played it for them on the piano––and then we improvised around that and that was the limit for that improvisation.
When did you land on that 3-4-note refrain that is the theme?
That just came from, well, me and Brady went through the script during pre-production and I just started playing piano. And Brady’s really good to work with because he knows when he likes something. There was this day where I was working on that theme and whether it could go to different places, and he heard me messing around on the keyboard, kind of starting and stopping, because I don’t know music theory, so it’s a lot about playing and trying. And he heard that process and immediately was like, “That’s László. It needs to sound like he’s working it out.” I had my dictaphone on, and for the temp he was using a lot of that dictaphone recording where I’m like starting, stopping, changing this setting on the keyboard, you can hear me dropping things.
That was one of the hardest things to work on because there are imperfections, these beautiful imperfections. I did it with John Tilbury, and that’s why I mic’d him; I mic’d his piano. I recorded him in the garden. He has, like, a Steinway in a shed basically, his studio. And I had a mic on the strings, in the room, and on him. So you can hear the piano still screeching and you can hear him scribbling on the stave. In the intermission, you can really hear that working-it-out process. I was trying to work out where that melody could go, which I brought to Erzsébet’s theme. The idea is that you hear it for the first half and then it develops into Erzsébet’s theme in the second half.
Like, I recorded John Tilbury trying to work out Erzsébet’s theme in real time, you know, and it was really nice. You can hear the birds walking around on the roof. That’s something where I can really listen to it. He’s trying to work out a klezmer integration because he had this idea of introducing klezmer into the theme. And just, for me to listen to that––it’s a collaborative piece, you know? I think of being with John and his wife Janice during that period, and it was very amazing to be able to work with an artist like that. You know, he’s made a body of work. Brady and I are young, just starting to make stuff.
Had you ever done something that was this diverse across instrumentation and style? And did you know the range would be immense going into it?
I knew the script was huge. Brady got a lot of shit when he was making it. By the end, they were trying to make him make it shorter. He was just, “No.” He doesn’t let anyone come in. He made it exactly how he wanted to. I just found it so funny that people thought it could be shorter, because the script was always so long. I was always aware that this was a really important piece of work. The script reads so beautifully. Like, it’s a really beautiful text that he and Mona wrote. My thing was like: I wanted to get to the end of the process and really feel like I’d done everything I could. It was really hardcore for me and for Brady. Just timewise. And for Pete, the mixing was insane; it was like mixing two films. So it was absolutely crazy.
But it was always, I think, about trying to get these elements that would speak to the scale of it. But also, the score can really help a film when it can be, like, the glue. Especially on a film like this, where there are lots of elements to it and characters and new places. The score can really help tie stuff together. So, it’s like choosing instruments or musicians that could really… yeah, like the brass: it can be really harsh but also really warm. It was, like, how to use as little elements as possible to do as many things as possible in a cohesive way. But then the ’80s cue is kind of the most extreme jump in terms of aesthetics.
That was inspired, because in the script Brady wanted to shoot on video––early, digital kind of video for the ’80s when it goes to the Biennale. And it was like, “Oh, that would be interesting for it to suddenly cut from these very acoustic instruments to a digital sound.” And yeah: that was definitely the most fun cue. I’ve had a Moog for years and I’ve always used it, but not for finishing stuff––it was more like a notepad or something––and that was fun. I worked with Vince Clarke on that. He, like, defined the sound of the ’80s with Depeche Mode and Yazoo. I worked with him and brought it back to London to work with Brady. The last day with the music was just me and Brady with two bottles of wine around my Moog just finishing that song. I’m like, “Please can you do a film that’s just synth one day.” [Laughs] It’s so fun.
The Brutalist is now in theaters and expands wide on January 24.