Title: Composing For 'The Brutalist' (The Big Picture)

[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart, and this is from the score of best picture nominee, The Brutalist.

[score of The Brutalist]

Alison Stewart: The composer of that score is my next guest. Daniel Blumberg worked with musicians all over the world to create a score that felt like a cohesive collage. The result is as epic as the story of Hungarian architect László Tóth coming to America, but also as intimate as the love story between László and his wife. That theme and the rest of the excellent compositions earned Daniel Blumberg an Oscar nomination for Best Original Score, and he joins me now as part of our series, The Big Picture, that's when we speak to Oscar nominees who worked behind the camera to make excellent film. Daniel, it's so nice to have you on the show.

Daniel Blumberg: Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: When were you first approached about composing the Brutalist?

Daniel Blumberg: Well, I've been friends with the director, Brady, for many years, and he sent me the script as soon as he'd finished writing it. We started to work on it straight away.

Alison Stewart: I understand this is only your second time scoring a film. What did you learn the first time that was useful to you this time?

Daniel Blumberg: I think it's just you have to sort of keep up with all the production schedule and you're really working for someone else's vision. It's very much trying to help the director basically achieve what they want to, and particularly with this where Brady wrote the script with his partner Mona. It's like just basically trying to help them musically, sort of say what they want to say.

Alison Stewart: What did Brady Corbet tell you about what he wanted to achieve with the score of this film?

Daniel Blumberg: Well, it was part of the conversation that we've been having since we met about 10 years ago. Just everything--We've always spoken about music and films that we love, but we spent a lot of time together. I was staying with him during the shoot and since the pre-production started, and we were living in a same apartment. Yes, we worked very closely together throughout the whole thing.

Alison Stewart: You were living in the same apartment?

Daniel Blumberg: Yes. Yes, he had a place in Budapest, and I had a room in his apartment with a keyboard, and we sort of huddled together around the keyboard when he got back from set and worked on the cues, because he wanted to shoot a lot of the film to music, so the first aim with it all was to make the cues that we would play out on the set.

Alison Stewart: That's so interesting, the idea that you were with your keyboard down the hall. He comes home from his set, says, "Hey, this happened. What we can we do with this information I'm giving you?"

Daniel Blumberg: Yes, I would visit the set as well, but definitely we would be up late in the evening and his assistant would sometimes knock on the door and say, "Brady, you've got to go to sleep. You're waking up at 7:00 to shoot." Yes, it was great, because it meant that this sort of music was part of the picture from the beginning. There was a real dialogue between the departments. I had some live music on set as well. I got a jazz band to come and play on set, and that was the first day of shooting, so that the cinematographer could move the camera to the music, and Adrien, the lead actor, was able to sort of respond to the music in real time.

Alison Stewart: That's interesting. What did you learn from watching them respond to the music in real time?

Daniel Blumberg: Well, I think when we went and they did the edit and then we were in post-production, you're sort of looking at the picture and you feel like really part of that world, so it's easier to make decisions when I'm working with musicians afterwards because I sort of feel like I'm part of the world, so my instincts kind of can react to the story and Brady's vision.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Daniel Blumberg, composer for the score for the Brutalist. He is nominated for Best Original Score at this year's Academy Awards. The opening scene includes your overture, and it begins with the ship overture. It's the chaos of the scene is really reflected into the music. Let's listen to a little bit, and we can talk about it on the other side.

[overture]

Alison Stewart: I just experienced something going through that, just listening to that. What did you want the audience to feel as that explodes, that sound just explodes in that minute?

Daniel Blumberg: Well, we always spoke about the overture, the first 10 minutes of the film being constant music, and we wanted to introduce all the sort of protagonists, the musical protagonists of the score. There's some amazing players like Evan Parker on soprano saxophone and Axel Dörner on trumpet, Sophie Agnel on piano. They're really special artists in their own right.

Also the soundscapes, like this sort of sonic world of what the score would be, introducing all the instruments that you'd hear, but it was a real collaboration with the sound mix as well. Like they would send a sketch and then I would have to speak to Steve, who was doing the sound about how the tubers would interact with the sound of the ship. One of the interesting things about that conversation was he sent sirens for the opening of the film, and I ended up getting all the brass players to play sirens at the end of each session. There's these kind of this cacophony of sirens being played by the brass at the start.

Alison Stewart: I want to talk a little bit about László's theme. I want to play three clips. Let's hear it in its most simple form from the Library.

[theme 1]

Alison Stewart: Then let's hear an intense bit from the Overture (Ship).

[theme 2]

Alison Stewart: Now let's listen to once again from the Library.

[theme 3]

Alison Stewart: Daniel, how did you arrive on that theme for László?

Daniel Blumberg: Well, I don't know music theory and stuff, so when I write, I sort of try and use my instincts and just retain the conversations I've had with Brady, and I came to this theme and thought it would be-- When Brady was into it, I started working out how it could develop in--, because the film is three and a half hours. When I was looking at the themes and writing them, I was sort of hoping to find things that could sustain the narrative. In the second half of the film, the theme turns into this romantic piece, when he meets his wife after the Holocaust, they meet for the first time. I like the simplicity of it, because it meant that it could be quite malleable.

The library sequence was amazing. Pianist called John Tilbury, who was 88 at the time we recorded, and he just has a really beautiful touch on the piano. I actually put microphones on him so you could hear his presence, because it was sort of married to the artistic journey that the character László was going on through the film, so me and Brady wanted that to be like this feeling that the artist, the pianist, is present throughout the film.

Alison Stewart: All right. There's two things you said I have to ask you about. You don't know music theory?

Daniel Blumberg: No, I can't read music, I don't write it down on the paper. I just sort of do it by ear.

Alison Stewart: Then you give it to someone who will transcribe it? Is that the way it works?

Daniel Blumberg: No, I don't really use notation-

Alison Stewart: At all?

Daniel Blumberg: -in the work. There was actually the bus theme. My friend who knows, he studied jazz, and he knows how to write music down. I worked with the brass trio, and he transcribed this demo that I did for that, but in general, I like to just work by ear with the musicians and I show them things on the piano. I have a little keyboard, that I'll play something to--, and then we just-- A lot of it is done through communicating, just talking about it, listening together, and trying things.

Alison Stewart: The movie has a built-in 15-minute intermission. Anybody who has seen it knows. The music is composed by you and I believe it's by the pianist you mentioned earlier, yes?

Daniel Blumberg: The intermission?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Daniel Blumberg: Yes, that was a really beautiful collaboration because it was-- I recorded him, and all of the recordings with John were done in his garden. He has this shed in his garden where he has a grand piano. I had a portable recording set up, and I'd mostly work with the musicians where they were comfortable. With him, it was in his garden in Kent. You can hear birds walking on his roof and him sort of scribbling notes on his stave, because he was trying to work out how to introduce klezmer to the piece that I'd written.

I recorded him in real time trying to work these things out, and the Erzsébet's theme starts to emerge. Brady and I really like that quality of someone--, working something out during the intermission. Yes, I really like that recording.

Alison Stewart: Well, let's listen to a little bit of the Intermission.

[Intermission theme]

Alison Stewart: Dan, [crosstalk] a little bit of a practical question. The intermission may be a time when people are thinking about the films and maybe talking to their friends. They may be coming and going. Did you keep that in mind?

Daniel Blumberg: Oh, yes, definitely. We spoke about the intermission for the whole duration of working on it, because it was in the script, and that was definitely a consideration that we wanted it to acknowledge that people might be leaving the room or having a conversation. I think the fact that it's that dynamic recording where you can hear his piano stool creaking and birds walking on the roof and all that. That was something we felt was correct when we landed on that piece. I showed it to Brady. We both really immediately thought that was the right part for the intermission.

Alison Stewart: I'm curious, as a composer, you have to span decades from the '40s to the '80s. I mean, there's obviously ways that you can make it sound different, but what are the subtle ways that you made time move on in the score?

Daniel Blumberg: Well, one of the main cues where we wanted to do that was it sort of jumps from the '40s to the '50s quite suddenly, and that was the first jazz scene, evokes the '40s, and they're playing this theme that recurs. I called it the "building" theme. Then when Brady wanted time to move quite fast to the '50s, I worked with a band who played it kind of more bebop style.

Then later in the film, it quickly goes to the '80s, the Epilogue, and I used synthesizers. I worked with Vince Clark from Depeche Mode, Yazoo because he really defined the sound of the '80s to me. I was really excited because the whole score is acoustic instruments. Then it was really exciting the idea that people would be sitting in the audience for three hours, and then suddenly these digital sounds would appear. Then, Brady was using this Betamax, which is like an early digital format for the '80s, so both the picture and the music suddenly goes into this '80s technology, which I thought would be exciting because it's quite abrupt and shocking. I've just ruined it for everyone, but you'll see it there. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: You're giving them more information. They'll appreciate it more. My guest has been Daniel Blumberg. He is composer for The Brutalist. He is nominated for Best Original Score at this year's Academy Awards. Congratulations on your work, Daniel.

Daniel Blumberg: Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it.

Alison Stewart: We'll go out on an overture from The Brutalist.

[overture]