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Interview: Daniel Blumberg on Composing the Monumental Music of ‘The Brutalist’

Blumberg discusses developing the film’s main musical themes, his collaborators, and more.

Daniel Blumberg on Composing the Monumental Music of 'The Brutalist'
Photo: Ilana Blumberg

Brutalist architecture derives much of its power from reconciling two seemingly contradictory extremes. The simple structuralism of its design and materials lead many to characterize the style as minimalistic. However, the scope of the buildings made in the style often has a maximalist impact on those taking them in.

A similar paradox lies at the heart of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, a decade-spanning saga tracing the travails of Adrien Brody’s László Toth, a Hungarian immigrant attempting to achieve his most ambitious architectural project in post-World War II America. This is a towering epic that takes a country’s national character as its very subject without ever losing its footing in the intimacies of a character study. While a cinematic undertaking of such colossal proportions requires the orchestration of many below-the-line collaborators, one stands out in harmonizing the various inputs: composer Daniel Blumberg.

Before any images appear on screen in The Brutalist, the notes of Blumberg’s overture announce the ambitions and ambiguities of the film. His sonic compositions provide booming, bellowing melodies that endow a classical grandiosity befitting the monumental mid-century works evoked by Corbet’s colossal work. Yet Blumberg also brings his background in indie rock and experimental music to bear with contemporary flourishes that undercut any easy emotionality from the boldly declarative score. It’s an engrossing and consistently enigmatic odyssey for the ears on par with the majesty experienced by the eyes.

I spoke with Blumberg ahead of The Brutalist’s release. Our conversation covered the unique nature of his collaboration with Corbet to develop certain pieces of the score ahead of shooting, developing the main musical themes between the start of production and the film’s completion, and what choosing specific musicians to record adds to the texture of the work.

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You have a background in visual arts in addition to music. Is that something that informed the way that you approached scoring The Brutalist?

I think everything bleeds into each other. Drawing is how I discovered improvised music. I felt like I was improvising on a piece of paper. There was a white space, and I was moving along that space and didn’t know where I was going. When I heard free improvised music for the first time, I was like, “Wow, that relates to my drawings.” Different processes inform your work. Since I was 17, I got really into watching films.

What were the films that got you invested in the form?

I stumbled into Kielowski. I watched A Short Film About Killing quite randomly, and I just was like, “What is this?” Then I watched Dekalog, and it changed my life. I watched all of Kielowski’s films and then moved on to Tarkovsky, then Bresson, then Fassbinder, and so on.

The Brutalist seems like a unique partnership given that your music preceded some of the images, and the overture was shot to the music you had already composed rather than fitting it to the picture.

Brady and I started talking about the process from the script. Since I met him, we’ve had this dialogue about each other’s work, so it’s quite natural for us to talk about our work. In pre-production, we went through the script evaluating pieces that he wanted to shoot to. There were practical reasons for me to be on set, like the first day of shooting was the jazz scene. That was done with a live band playing the theme. He wanted to shoot the overture to music, and we created this from the script talking about what the potential picture would be with Adrien Brody going up the stairs. We made this demo, and he shot to that. Lol [Crowley, director of photography] could hear the rhythm and move the camera to the music. Adrien and the extras—the whole choreography was in time with the prepared piano tick.

There were a lot of [similar such scenarios]. Brady wanted to shoot the bus to music, and there was a piano in the train station scene. I was playing the piano for the actors to get a sense of how everything was flowing on top of each other: the picture, the sound, the performances. For me, being on set as well and hearing the way that Brady speaks to the actors, there are a lot of clues there for what temperature he wants the scene to be. Therefore, there are clues for me to take into account for the music as well so that when I’m working with musicians, I have all this information and shared instincts with Brady.

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How did you come to conceive of the overture as a three-part piece?

We always talked about there being constant music for the first 10 minutes of the film. It’s where we introduce the key players and the sonic world of the film. [There are] the blaring sirens at the start, then you hear John Tilbury’s intimate piano that follows László through the film, and then the main theme that’s the warm brass of the bus. One of the reasons why we gravitated toward brass was the way they can be warm and optimistic and then quite harsh. There are a lot of sounds in the film that may sound like construction sounds, but it’s Axel Drner’s trumpet. The reason why I recorded in Berlin was I wanted to work with him, and he has very unique sounds.

Even the sound mixer would get confused about what was diegetic audio and what was the trumpet, which is kind of the whole point. We always talked about like László’s disorientation as he gets more obsessed with the project and loses his sense of what reality is. You might not know that it’s a trumpet, but the idea is that the audience feels those things rather than necessarily picking them apart while they’re engrossed in the film. The overture introduces a lot of these sounds. And also Evan Parker, whose saxophone you hear coming up during the bus.

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Were you thinking at all about calibrating your music in relation to those sweeping scores that define the grand mid-century epics that The Brutalist resembles?

In general, I try and think of the world that we’re creating and not really think of historical [comparisons]. Obviously, one of the concerns was scope in terms of instrumentation that could travel through the eras and themes that could travel through the story. When there are these huge brass moments at the end, like when you see the institute. They sound like cinema. Quite epic, in a way, but I like that. Brady was also nodding to the history of cinema with his some of his choices, like shooting a lot of The Brutalist in VistaVision. Then it ends up in this ’80s digital format at the Venice Biennale, and it’s the same with introducing the synths.

At what point do you start thinking about the instrumentation? Is it as soon as you’re hearing the notes in your head?

When I read the script, I thought of prepared piano. The grand piano has these long strings, and obviously, lots of hammers are hitting those strings. That’s what a piano is: a percussive instrument. Prepared piano is where you interfere with those strings. John Cage lodged screws in between the strings so that when those hammers hit, it would make a percussive sound. That was something that I immediately heard when I read the script. It’s almost conceptual.

Sometimes, those things sound like good ideas, but when you actually hear them, it’s not right. But that felt good, you know? The piano is this huge acoustic space; you can really focus microphones in different corners of the piano and get a lot of sound out of that instrument. It felt quite architectural as a starting point. And the piano was definitely the starting point in terms of instrumentation. I also liked the scope of how it could be very intimate and melancholy.

John Tilbury was someone who I thought of immediately when I read the script, as a player and extraordinary artist who could have the responsibility of following László throughout the film. That 15-minute intermission is solo piano [emphasizing] his use of space in his playing and touch. For me, it has a lot to do with players as well. Because I don’t think, “Oh, I want a trumpet player.” It’s like, “No, Axel Drner would be brilliant for this.”

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What went into composing that intermission music for John Tilbury to play? It sounds different than a traditional entr’acte.

John is 88 [years old], and I went and recorded him. He’s got a Steinway in a shed at his house. We did weeks of recordings together for the sequence that we chose for the intermission. I had the main theme, which is a few notes played by the brass at the start, and then is the starting point for László’s theme. It develops into Erzsébet’s theme in the film’s second half, where László’s theme goes into this romantic piece of music that we subvert with “Heroin,” the erotic love-making music that’s based around that theme. The music for the intermission is John working out in real time that theme and trend. He actually, at one point, said, “Here’s your theme,” and played Erzsébet’s theme very basically on the piano. A lot of it was him writing notes on his staves, and you can hear his stall creaking. I had microphones on him as well as on the piano in the room. It really fit finding Erzsébet and this quality that Brady loved about the pianist being present and the artist working things out. It was all these things, and John was trying to introduce Klezmer music. It was a moment that felt perfect for the intermission.

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Were you approaching the music of the two halves differently?

I’m constantly referring back to the arc of the whole film, and it’s one of the difficult things about it being three-and-a-half hours long: If I put music in, I sometimes need to watch a hell of a lot of the film—if not all of it—to see how that’s flowing. I watched it over and over again. But it’s nice to have that punctuation mark of the first half and second half. The first half ends with this optimism getting into gear and the very strange percussion that Michael Griener played. And then when you hear Erzsébet’s [theme], it suddenly opens up. The beginning of it has this really beautiful, romantic music, and then it disintegrates. By the time that you hear the theme at the end, it’s stretched out and druggy.

The themes function as extensions of characters, especially László and Erzsébet. How often is it representing the characters themselves, and how often is it commenting on the characters?

It’s a mixture of both, really. It depends on what the scene is. With László, we were focusing on the artistic process of his character. That loneliness of the solo piano—you hear that a lot when he’s on his own, like when he’s building the library. One interesting thing about the sequence called “Heroin,” when they’re on heroin and having sex for three days, is that that was actually Axel Drner, the trumpet player, and his partner, Karina, who’s also an amazing trumpeter. It was this beautiful dialog between them. That was a moment where I introduced the theme, and we did improvisation around that. It was something that we just immediately placed on the film, and it worked. It helped that those two were in love.

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Vox Lux demonstrated that Brady Corbet is someone who’s thought a lot about how music can both shape and reflect society. Were you all talking about that history with The Brutalist and trying to reflect that in the score?

In terms of storytelling, one of my responsibilities was evoking the era. It was quite extreme improvisation in the ’40s sequence, but I knew the players that I worked with could [also] play that kind of bebop stuff when [the narrative] fast-forwards 10 years to New York in the 1950s. That was Axel Drner playing trumpet, Simon Sieger playing piano, and Tom Wheatley playing double bass. Particularly in the ’40s sequence, when they go to the jazz club, they were kind of playing this, the theme, in this jazzy way. And then when they take heroin, they come back in, and the music’s stretched in the same way that they use in-camera effects in VistaVision where the light is stretched across the image. I worked with musicians who I knew could do both of those things, where it’s relating to the era but, then, when it’s stretched out, it’s relating also to this foggy, druggy situation that they’re in. It was great working with Vince Clarke as well, who kind of defined the sound of the ’80s with Depeche Mode and Yazoo. It was very nice to work with synths after a long year of acoustic recordings!

Brady said you had basically no budget for the score. Did those limitations spur any kind of ingenuity?

I’m used to working with whatever I have. With music, you kind of have to do that. A lot of the musicians I worked with were used to adapting to what they have. I have a high-quality remote recording setup, so I can record in different spaces. Most of the music wasn’t recorded in a studio. The “Heroin” music was recorded in my friend’s painting studio in Berlin. John was recorded in his garden in Kent. I worked with Simon Seager, the tuba player, in Marseille. I just bring this small setup and set up the microphones. Obviously, it defined the process of working. There are positives and negatives about working in studios; it would have been a different score if everyone had just come to the studio and done it in a very condensed way.

But I think that’s one of the interesting things about it. It’s very much led by the specific musicians that I wanted to work with. Rather than just a pianist, it was Sophie Agnel. She plays very particularly on the strings of the piano, bouncing balls on the strings of the piano and different objects that she uses to manipulate the strings like no one else. We had to find a time in Paris to record together. Evan Parker, who’s just a seminal saxophone player, I recorded him in a space in Kent for the Carrara sequence. I actually wanted the sound of Carrara, so I went with my recording setup and recorded the impulse response of the valley. You literally shoot a gun and record the way that the valley echoes that gunshot. Then, we applied the algorithm that we created onto Evan’s saxophone so his saxophone from Kent is in the valley in Italy.

What connection do you make, if any, to László’s work in your own?

Some of my favorite films are films about making films. Truffaut, Fassbinder, they all made meta films about making films. One of the things that I loved about The Brutalist is that Brady made a film about his struggle making films. Of course, I relate to that as an artist. That artistic struggle was quite moving for me.

Marshall Shaffer

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based film journalist. His interviews, reviews, and other commentary on film also appear regularly in Slashfilm, Decider, and Little White Lies.

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