“It’s about construction” – How Daniel Blumberg built the monumental score for The Brutalist

Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is a film that is big in every way, grappling with post-war trauma and the realities of the American Dream. To match its sweeping narrative, composer Daniel Blumberg has assembled a score that is both monumental and rich in scene-setting detail. Here he strips his creative process down to its foundations.

You hear The Brutalist before you see it. As Hungarian architect László Tóth (played by Adrien Brody) makes his way through a dark, crowded ship, dissonant trumpets and piano arpeggios crescendo into an operatic brass chorus that announces his arrival at Ellis Island. Composed by Daniel Blumberg, the score to Brady Corbet’s epic film is an astounding project, containing an overture suite, collaborators ranging from pianist John Tilbury to Depeche Mode’s Vince Clarke, and striking motifs that mutate as László is corroded by his American Dream.

Perhaps best known as the former frontman of Yuck, Blumberg’s evolution into an award-winning composer was something of an unexpected pivot. Blumberg and Corbet go way back: the former was invited by the director to a recording session of Scott Walker’s score for The Childhood of a Leader, Corbet’s debut feature. There, he met Peter Walsh, Walker’s longtime producer who would go on to record Blumberg’s solo records. Prior to that session, he had never considered composing himself. “I was massively into film, but I hadn’t really thought about scoring films and I didn’t really listen to film scores – still don’t, really,” he admits.  

When Mona Fastvold – Corbet’s partner and a director in her own right – invited Blumberg to score her film The World to Come, he understood the appeal immediately. “I draw on a daily basis and I make music, but this is thinking of someone else’s work and working out how to articulate that, and it’s very collaborative,” he explains. He arrives at our Zoom call bleary-eyed, having been up until 5am working on the score for Fastvold’s upcoming musical, Ann Lee. 

Like the cavernous halls of the building that consumes László, Blumberg’s score grows richer the more you investigate: classical instruments sound industrial, and a construction site creates its own music. Taking inspiration from the titular architectural style, the film’s sonic landscape is at once modest and grand – a foreboding monument. “We didn’t want to have ornamentation,” he says. “It’s called The Brutalist, so we were trying to use quite minimal tools to portray a lot.”

Crack: It feels like there are some similarities between your score for The Brutalist and Scott Walker’s for The Childhood of a Leader, particularly in the propulsive, percussive energy they both share. Were you inspired by Scott Walker’s past work with Brady Corbet, or did you start from a different place?

Brady and I started from the script, really. It’s one of the reasons why I wanted to start early, and Brady wanted to shoot to music on the set, so I made the first piece of music just from reading the script. When he went into pre-production, I went to Budapest to stay with him, and we started going through the script and talking about what places we wanted to score and what scenes he wanted to shoot to music. So it was working a lot before there were even images created. 

What did your initial ideas sound like when you didn’t have footage to work from?

From the script, the first instinct was thinking about the piano, just because it’s a huge space. The film has such scale in terms of covering decades, and it felt like that instrument had a lot of potential for covering a lot of different aspects of it. The first piece I made used a prepared piano, where you put screws into the strings, and when the hammers bang on the string, it makes percussive sounds. For me, it related to construction. We’re talking about hammers and screws, so conceptually, it seemed like a good starting point. 

The film begins with the three overture pieces, and each one introduces the motifs that appear throughout the film. What was the process of creating those themes?

We always talked about the first ten minutes of the film having music all the way through. I was staying in [Corbet’s] apartment in Budapest, and I was playing [the theme from Overture (Ship)], and working out what chords it could go to. I can’t read music, and I don’t have any training in theory, so it’s a lot of hanging around a piano. But Brady heard me doing this, came into the room and was like, “This is the sound of László working it out.” That theme seemed to be able to develop in the ways we needed it to. I made quite a romantic piece of music for Erzsébet when you meet her in the second half. And that’s [László’s] theme developing into something more romantic. 

The overture became this opportunity for us to introduce the musicians during the credits – you hear Evan Parker’s soprano saxophone and Sophie Agnel, who plays the strings of the piano. And [trumpeter] Axel Dörner introduces the sonic world with the first music on the ship. It was the most complicated mix because there was a back-and-forth with the sound department. The first bit of sound we were sent during the edit had these sirens at the start, and actually hearing those made me think, “Oh, I could see if the brass could do something that speaks to that.” 

Did you find yourself inspired by the diegetic sounds on set? In Picnic by the Lake, it sounds like birdsong.

Yeah, Picnic by the Lake is Axel Dörner and Carina [Khorkhordina] playing trumpet, and they sound like the birds. The overture was one where Brady wanted to shoot on set, so I did a very basic demo that was played out on the speakers, and the cinematographer, Lol Crawley, could move to that. And then Adrien [Brody] and the extras, their choreography could respond to the rhythm of it. I use a microphone called a U89, and I had about nine of them on the piano to capture a huge low end. The idea was you don’t know if it’s this piano or the ship. 

When Erzsébet arrives in the second half, there was a shit piano at the train station they were shooting at, and Brady wanted me to play the theme for the actors as they came in to set the tempo. But we ended up using that recording in the bath sequence a bit later. That was from just responding to what was there. With the overlapping of diegetic sounds, I was really inspired by the first mixes with the construction sounds – [tuba player] Simon Sieger and Axel Dörner were making these drill sounds with the brass instruments. The idea was that, as László gets more disoriented and obsessed with his project, he loses his sense of reality. Even the sound mixer started to get confused about what was a drill and what was a trumpet.

You mentioned that idea of figuring things out, and that really comes across in the cue for the intermission with John Tilbury. Can you talk about how that collaboration worked, and how this piece was created?

That’s one of my favourite pieces in the whole thing. I ended up living with John for a month. He has a studio in his garden, which is basically a Steinway piano in the shed. We were working through László’s theme, but he had this idea to add a klezmer theme to it, and so the Intermission is a combination of him trying out that klezmer theme, and also trying to work out how to play Erzsébet’s theme. You hear that forming in real time. There was a moment where he was writing down notes on the stave, and I had microphones on his piano in the room, and also on him, so you can hear him moving his stool and writing. You can hear birds walking on his roof, and it’s really beautiful because it’s very intimate. 

That was a challenge because you have this intimacy and also this broader context of László arriving in America and the immigrant story. That zooming in and zooming out – I’ve always loved that. What’s that Agnès Varda film? It’s in this fishing village, and focuses really intensely on this couple going through a crisis in their marriage. And then it cuts to the wider social situation of the fishing village.

La Pointe Courte?

Yeah, it’s so beautiful. And that idea of zooming in and zooming out – with the last cue, Search Party, I recorded Steve Noble, the percussionist, in his kitchen. He literally just had a drum skin on his lap. It was funny when I watched it in the cinema in Venice, thinking of Steve playing his drums on his lap. It wasn’t even a drum, just a drum skin, but it sounds huge. 

And then how did Vince Clarke come onboard for the Epilogue?

I knew Brady was shooting VistaVision, which is this amazing format of the period, but I also knew he wanted to shoot in video at the end when [László] moves to Venice. That early digital format made me think it would be nice to suddenly cut to synths when you get to the 80s. Vince was the first person I thought of because he defined the 80s in many ways, with his work with Depeche Mode. That was just so lovely after months and months of recording acoustic instruments, and it was just so fun to move to synths.

You said earlier that you don’t know how to read music, and it’s blowing my mind because I know you come from an improvisational background, but this score feels so precisely constructed. 

I’ve started to think I wouldn’t mind learning how to read music. I was thinking, after this film I’m doing now, maybe I’ll go to school to read music. Everyone comes to music from different places. Even within this, the sessions were so different. John Tilbury likes writing stuff down. Some people hate talking about stuff. Some people love talking. Sometimes talking about stuff is the main session, and then you record for five minutes and it’s just done.