Edward Berger’s German-language version of “All Quiet on the Western Front” packs a cinematic punch for a lot of reasons, as evidence by its seven BAFTA Awards, including Best Film. One of the winners was composer Volker Bertelmann, whose score is one of the year’s most singular.
The film’s theme is minimalism cranked to the max: three huge, distorted notes, played on a 100-year-old harmonium and hanging in the air at unexpected times throughout the film. At times, a vicious snare drum patter comes out of nowhere and feels as if it is attacking the viewer; at other times, more bucolic, pastoral music frames both the beauty of the European countryside and the barbarity of the fighting.
Bertelmann is a sometime rock musician who sometimes records under the name Hauschka and has a long history as an experimental composer working with everything from prepared piano to orchestras. He began writing film scores in 2015, often with Dustin O’Halloran, and was first nominated for an Oscar with their collaboration on “Lion” the following year. “All Quiet” is Bertelmann’s second Oscar nomination and his first BAFTA win in three nominations. (He was also nominated for “Lion” and for the television series “Patrick Melrose,” which was also directed by Berger.)
He spoke to TheWrap after his Oscar nomination but before his BAFTA win.
When I moderated a screening with you and Edward and Daniel Bruhl, I said, “Your music scares the hell out of me,” and the audience applauded. You must have known going into “All Quiet” that you needed something dark and foreboding and a little scary.
Absolutely. But when you talk about dark and foreboding, it can easily get into an area where it’s detached suddenly from the movie, because it’s maybe too much horror or too heavy in a way that it doesn’t fit the picture. So it actually needs a very well-balanced way of creating horror. I think the horror in this case is not only the sound itself in the beginning, it’s also the surprise of how it comes in and the gaps between the times it comes back. You never know. “Oh, is it coming now? No, it’s not coming. Oh, yes, now it’s coming.” The surprise in that makes it pretty scary.
The music doesn’t feel like a traditional score in the way it is used. Sometimes it comes in unexpectedly, and almost feels like an attack.
It’s maybe used like in an art installation or an art piece or a dance piece. I wrote a couple of theater pieces, and there you have more of an artistic approach of using music not only in a purely composed way. In a lot of compositions, there’s always a structure continuing onward. There can be other elements, but there’s always a time-frame underneath. And once you hear the time-frame, the surprise is gone.
When you were writing this music, do you know where it was going in the movie?
I would say that the first piece I wrote, the three-note motif, was based on my impressions of the first 10 minutes of the film, I did that 24 hours after I’d seen the film. There’s no dialogue in that section, and it’s so well edited that you totally understand the mechanism of the war machine, and how humans are used as material. And I wanted to have something in that fits with that, and also fits with the sound of the sewing machines.
I sent that to Edward Berger and asked him if that is something he liked. If he didn’t, I wouldn’t know how I would continue, because that was something that I really loved and that really worked with the film. And he called me and was in a way cheering into the phone. That was avery nice feedback where I had the feeling, OK, he’s really supporting my idea of being more abstract or more minimal.
Were you thinking of something like that even before you hit on the idea of using the old harmonium that your grandmother had given you?
Before the harmonium came in as an instrument, I actually thought that it needed a very short element, like a war horn or something that is very loudly shouting into the space and saying, “the machine is coming.” I knew that it would be a short motif. I didn’t know about which notes.
Did you worry if three notes would be enough for a theme?
Of course you always think, is that enough? I mean, you never know. And sometimes it’s not me that is saying what’s the best for the film. But in this case, I was pretty sure that these three notes are enough. I had a four-note motif at some point, and then I cut one note off because I felt that in these three notes, you have a conclusion. It’s finished somehow.
When you have a theme or motif that is so strong and powerful and makes such a statement on its own, how does that affect the music that you have to compose around that?
When you have a strong statement, it’s difficult in the beginning to answer the question, “Can I keep that level of tension and that level of intensity? Can I keep that on the same level? Or now that I’ve made a statement, does everything go downwards?” (Laughs.)
I felt that over the film, I needed to implement that motif in all sorts of different cues – just repeat the motive in a way that is not always as strong or as dark as it is in the beginning. So for example, there’s one scene where the three boys now know that they are on the front and they have very quite dark times ahead. They’re sitting together around a pot, eating a goose that they have stolen from a farmer. It’s one of the warmer scenes, with a little bit of lightness. And therefore, I wrote a cello theme that used the base element, but at the same time it creates this warmth and beauty with the same motif. So I had the feeling that I want to keep the motif infiltrating all the other pieces, but I also wanted to find interesting length and range. For example, the high violin parts are also the motif, but they are much longer notes, much more airy than how we hear it in the beginning.
There’s also some choral music in there as well.
Yes. Even in the battlefield, there’s one cue. I think it’s the second battle that begins with a very high single vocal line, where it, it’s nearly like an angel type of vocal. I had the feeling that it’s nice to find somebody who can sing crystal clear, very high, and where it maybe shimmers through the darkness and through the harshness of the music. Maybe it’s a little bit like the boys thinking about their homes, maybe their girlfriends, maybe their school where they studied. They’re just remembering the nice things that we were doing before they went there.
It’s a nice contrast to the harmonium, which is so clearly a mechanical sound.
Absolutely. I would say the high vocal and the high violin is very, very closely miced up. And sometimes I doubled it with a string ensemble in the back, but the biggest string ensemble is just the shimmer behind the solo violin. I had the feeling that these instruments somehow reflect the innocence they’ve lost.
And the harmonium is deliberately used to emphasize its mechanical aspect.
Yes. For the opening motif I used a big amplifier for distortion, and I boosted the bass so that it’s nearly sounds like a modular synthesizer. But at the same time, there’s a cue called “Paul” that is completely played by harmonium. And I miced the harmonium up with little mics. They are as big as my fingernail, and I put them inside of the harmonium where they record the mechanics very closely.
Normally, you would take a day just to take all the noises out because you don’t want to have them. You want to have the pure sound. But in this case, I wanted to have all the cracklings that make you think that you are in an old ship. It has a wooden sound of mechanical noise. And I recorded that and also separated it so that I could actually say, “Here I want to have just the mechanical noise, and here I want to have a little bit of quietness, but here I want to have the mechanical noise again.”
