{"id":611934,"date":"2023-02-25T16:06:00","date_gmt":"2023-02-25T22:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/25\/how-all-quiet-on-the-western-front-composer-scored-a-soldiers-musical-themes\/"},"modified":"2023-02-25T16:06:00","modified_gmt":"2023-02-25T22:06:00","slug":"how-all-quiet-on-the-western-front-composer-scored-a-soldiers-musical-themes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/25\/how-all-quiet-on-the-western-front-composer-scored-a-soldiers-musical-themes\/","title":{"rendered":"How \u2018All Quiet on the Western Front\u2019 Composer Scored a Soldier\u2019s Musical\u00a0Themes"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\tComposing the score for a war film<\/a> can be, apologies for the metaphor, a minefield. Go too heavy on the orchestral oomph \u2014 all soaring strings and booming base \u2014 and you can quickly swing into schmaltz. Go too small and minimalist, and the onscreen explosions can overpower your music. Plus, there\u2019s the danger of familiarity, of echoing the grand and epic scores of war films past.<\/p>\n

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\n\tSo, when director Edward Berger asked his regular composer, Volker Bertelmann, to write a score for his antiwar drama\u00a0All Quiet on the Western Front<\/em>, he told him to break all the rules.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI said, \u2018I want something different, something we\u2019ve never heard before,\u2019 \u201d says Berger, \u201cthen, and this is almost the most important thing: I said, \u2018I want you to destroy the images onscreen. Don\u2019t beautify or sentimentalize.\u2019 [I wanted] a sound that feels like it\u2019s coming from inside [lead character] Paul B\u00e4umer\u2019s stomach. I want the sound of fear, of hatred, of rage, of what a soldier feels when he has to kill in order to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSomething different\u201d is pretty much Bertelmann\u2019s M.O. The German pianist, who records and performs under the name Hauschka, is part of a cadre of experimental musicians who came up in the Berlin indie electronics scene and have quietly started to change the sound of Hollywood movies. Others from that milieu include Oscar-winning composer Hildur Gudnad\u00f3ttir (Joker<\/em>,\u00a0T\u00e1r<\/em>) and the late J\u00f3hann J\u00f3hannsson (Arrival<\/em>,\u00a0Sicario, The Theory of Everything<\/em>), a two-time Oscar nominee.<\/p>\n

\n\tBertelmann is best known for his Oscar-nominated work on Garth Davis\u2019\u00a0Lion<\/em>\u00a0and his score for Francis Lee\u2019s\u00a0Ammonite<\/em>, which received an ASCAP nom for score of the year (both were co-written with Dustin O\u2019Halloran). In\u00a0Lion<\/em>, the composers stripped out horns and strings to deliver a piano-driven sound that managed to be emotional while never being predictable. For\u00a0Ammonite<\/em>, a small, sparingly used chamber orchestra forms the film\u2019s emotional core.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cComing from the independent scene, I have a different approach to composing,\u201d says Bertelmann. \u201cIt\u2019s very intuition-driven, just trying something out and seeing what happens. Like, if I want a bass drum sound, instead of getting an orchestra to record it, or going through all the recorded bass drum loops to find just the right one, I\u2019ll put contact mics on the wall and bang on them to see if that works.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBertelmann created the signature three-tone motif that echoes through\u00a0All Quiet<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 a thundering\u00a0dom-dom-DOM!<\/em>\u00a0sounding like a trumpet of doom \u2014 by picking up his grandmother\u2019s old harmonium.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen I played it, pressing the paddles and using these old panels on the side with my knees, it created this weird wooden sound,\u201d he recalls. \u201cYou could hear all the technical bits from the materials of the machine creating the music. Normally, in a classical recording, you\u2019d work to take those out. I amplified them. I stuck microphones inside the harmonium, underneath it, on the wood, everywhere, to capture that sound.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe result is both old and modern, like a wooden turn-of-the-last-century synthesizer, and \u2014 as it plays over post-battle scenes, as boots and uniforms are stripped off corpses, thrown in piles and then trucked off to be washed, repaired and handed out to a new crop of cannon-fodder recruits \u2014 perfectly evokes the horrifying machinery of war.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut when intimate emotion is called for, as in a late wrenching scene when B\u00e4umer (Felix Kammerer) lies next to a French soldier he has brutally stabbed, listening to him slowly die, Bertelmann\u2019s score can go quiet.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cFor that scene, I used this really fragile string motif, recording them in a clear pure way,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen Edward heard it, he said it was too emotional and overpowering the scene. But I thought we needed that feel, so I put a filter on the whole instrumentation, just cut off the high end. It made it sound a bit like the music is coming from underneath a blanket. It\u2019s muffled, but the emotion still comes through.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFor the battle scenes, Bertelmann worked closely with the film\u2019s sound designer, Frank Kruse, to harmonize his score with the rat-a-tat-tat of the machine guns and the monstrous thumps of the exploding shells.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWith fights and battle scenes, the music can very easily get swamped by all the war sounds,\u201d he says, \u201cso we tried to find the frequencies for each other\u2019s instruments and complement, not compete. Say there were explosions. That could be the bass drums. So I wouldn\u2019t use bass on that section, or I\u2019d go even lower, deeper in tone, below the explosions. Or for an ambush scene, in place of the main rhythm portion, I use the specific metal sounds of the gunfire.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBertelmann\u2019s favorite piece of music in the\u00a0All Quiet<\/em>\u00a0score, he says, comes in the final scene, as B\u00e4umer, mortally wounded, climbs out from underground to see the sky one last time. For the piece, called \u201cMaking Sense of War,\u201d the composer returns to his three-tone motif, but this time classically orchestrated.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt sounds a little bit like an opera,\u201d he says. \u201cIt gives this moment of clarity and pause, where we question everything that we\u2019ve seen, and what the whole point [of war is].\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThis story first appeared in a Feb. stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter<\/a> magazine. To receive the magazine,\u00a0click here to subscribe<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Ashley Iasimone<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Composing the score for a war film can be, apologies for the metaphor, a minefield. Go too heavy on the orchestral oomph \u2014 all soaring strings and booming base \u2014 and you can quickly swing into schmaltz. Go too small and minimalist, and the onscreen explosions can overpower your music. Plus, there\u2019s the danger of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":611935,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38541,534,2874],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-611934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-all","category-financial","category-quiet"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=611934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/611935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=611934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=611934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=611934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}