If you’ve seen so much as a trailer for The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s Oscar-nominated, decade-spanning epic, you’d likely not imagine that its towering score was recorded nomadically—with equipment that fits snugly in a carry-on compartment. Composer and visual artist Daniel Blumberg ventured near and far for the project: to his beloved London haunt Cafe Oto, the film’s set in Budapest, locales in New York, Berlin, and Paris… and even a marble quarry in Italy. Along the way, he worked with no fewer than 20 musicians to capture the score. Among them: renowned British pianist John Tilbury, trumpeter Axel Dörner, saxophonist Evan Parker, and percussionist Steve Noble.
“I have a very specific recording setup that fits in a suitcase that 90% of the score was recorded on,” Blumberg told me recently over Zoom, just days before his Oscar nomination for Best Original Score. “Half of the suitcase is filled with mics and the other half has a Sonosax recorder, a small, digital, but very high quality recording device that allows me to be able to go to [double bassist Joel Grip’s] painting studio and record something that will be able to be played out in huge cinemas.”
Corbet’s historical fiction film The Brutalist follows László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a prestigious Hungarian Jewish architect who relocates to America after surviving the Holocaust. While weathering the ups and downs of his new life in Pennsylvania, Tóth’s monumental portfolio catches the eye of local industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), sparking a turbulent, decades-long relationship between the two men. Despite his veiled bigotry, Van Buren houses Tóth and welcomes his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), who were violently separated from Tóth for years during World War II. The exchange between artist and patron, however, becomes corrosive, a tumultuous dynamic fueled by Van Buren’s megalomania and Tóth’s creative compulsion.
Blumberg related to the theme of artistic obsession and applied it to his score on a thematic and practical level, pushing his own work to the side while developing pieces for The Brutalist. When he did perform his own music, it was solely to fund his travel and recording equipment. “It was a small budget to work with, so I was doing two or three shows a month to sustain being able to work on it for so long,” he said. This single-minded approach, paired with his roaming recording studio, allowed Blumberg to work with artists at their own pace, honoring their unique methods—a freedom Tóth is rarely afforded in the film. Blumberg worked with Tilbury, for instance, for around two weeks, sitting in the garden shed where the pianist keeps his Steinway, with Blumberg recording as Tilbury scribbled notes on a stave and played fragments of song. These sessions became “Overture (László),” and their in-progress feel reflects the artistic process so crucial to The Brutalist.
Elsewhere, Blumberg commissioned piano-string improvisations from Sophie Agnel, a synth-pop beat from Vince Clarke, and frenzied bebop jazz, played live on set by drummer Antonin Gerbal, double bassist Joel Grip, saxophonist Pierre Borel, and pianist Simon Sieger. Pitchfork spoke with Blumberg about artistic fixation, prepared piano, and weeping in the screening room.
Daniel Blumberg: He came to London to cast his first film, The Childhood of a Leader. He was casting the child in the film. We had dinner together and started drinking, and then I took him to [Cafe] Oto, which is this venue near where I live, where I go to regularly. We saw some noise show and then ended up just drinking till three o’clock in the morning, four o’clock in the morning in my flat. He slept on the sofa and had to wake up at seven in the morning to go and cast this nine-year-old. The casting director got so annoyed with him because he was having to speak to parents and he smelled of whiskey.
While he was writing, he sent me the script and we started discussing it. Since seeing [Corbet’s] first two films, I really felt that he’s someone who will make films for my generation… for the whole of my life. The script that Brady and [co-writer and partner] Mona [Fastvold] wrote reads really beautifully. They could publish it. The film is about an artist and the artist’s struggle, and I’ve dedicated my life to my work for better or for worse. There were definitely elements of it that I felt like I could relate to.
Like, in terms of sacrifice, in terms of how it can affect the relationship between your work and your relationships in life. Getting obsessed or monomaniacal about projects. I was really aware that it was a film about Brady making films. I’m very close to him, so I know how he’s been treated by certain people in the film industry.
The overture is interesting because it introduces the main themes and the main protagonist on the score. So on the bus ride, when it’s the credits, you have all the players introduced: Evan Parker’s saxophone suddenly comes in and Axel [Dörner]’s trumpet and Sophie [Agnel]’s [piano strings]… everyone has a solo. [The overture] is sort of split up into three parts. So the first part was the ship, and we did a demo using some of the samples that I’d created in a prepared piano session. [Corbet] wanted to shoot to the overture so that Adrien [Brody] and the cinematographer could move to the music.
For the bus scene, [Corbet] was talking about warm, optimistic brass. And then the scene in the brothel with the piano, that was the first instance of being alone with László and having a more intimate moment with him. So we talked about there being solo piano interacting with the music that they’re listening to in the brothel.
All of that is very particular, like the way that I miked John Tilbury. Two mics—a classic stereo pair—on his piano, a stereo pair in the room, and then a microphone on him. So you could hear his stool and him breathing and him touching the piano with his hands. The mics in the room pick up rain on his glass roof, or birds walking on the roof. Brady and I really wanted that piano that follows Adrien’s character to have this intimacy, because it’s in a lot of the scenes when he’s alone, and it’s about his artistic process.
That was the first day of the shoot. We wanted to evoke the era of the 1940s. The idea was that [drummer Antonin Gerbal, double bassist Joel Grip, saxophonist Pierre Borel, and pianist Simon Sieger] could play jazz that would evoke that era. I knew that they’d be able to play out of this quite rigid jazz beat into something more abstract, which was in line with Brady’s idea for the picture. [Adrien Brody and Isaach de Bankolé] would be in this scene in the club, and then they’d go and shoot up and the sound would continue through the wall, and then they would come out again.
The idea with the picture was that they would use this in-camera effect in the VistaVision camera that sort of stretches the light in this weird way. And I knew the musicians would be able to do that as well—stretch it out and make it sound more druggy.
Well, I was initially interested in what spaces they’d be shooting in. I went and visited the space with Brady. They’d gotten a gutless piano… a real piano, just with the guts taken out so you could move it on a film set. So the musicians came and they found a real piano to borrow, last minute.
The biggest fear for me was that I wanted them to play this theme. The idea was that [László Tóth] heard this music in the ’40s, and then, later, when he starts making the building, it’s the cue for “Construction.” But burning that theme onto the film was quite scary because it was quite early in the process.
One of the big days was the Yom Kippur scene. It’s the Day of Atonement in the Jewish calendar, so it’s the most important service. There’s a prayer that was in the script, this prayer where you bang your chest [hits chest with fist]. It’s very beautiful, and we wanted it to develop into score for the next scene, which is when there’s this big train crash. I went to the set so that I could get the actors to sing in the right tune, the extras and everything. There was this tiny synagogue that they were shooting in, and I was literally standing behind the camera just playing the chord every time before they shot. I had to rehearse with all the extras; they shot in Hungary, so a lot of them couldn’t speak English.
We messed around with the voices a bit in the mix, but, initially, it’s that prayer and then suddenly the drums, the percussion when they hit [their chests] becomes the beat. That was recorded in Steve Noble’s kitchen in London. The percussion, it sounds so big, but it’s literally just him with a drum skin on his lap.
Well it’s such an overwhelming idea: for [László] to meet his wife who he’s been separated from through all that trauma of the war. Even thinking about it is quite overwhelming. I liked the idea of hearing László’s theme throughout the first half and then it developing into Erzsébet’s theme when you meet her. I really wanted the theme to have this journey of disintegration. So you hear it in this really pure form at the start of the second half. And then by the time they’re fucking on heroin, it’s really weird and druggy. That was this session that I did with Axel [Dörner] and Carina [Khorkhordina] where we used Erzsébet’s theme as a starting point, playing that quite precisely. And then moving into an improvisation and then back into the theme. The idea was that everything sort of disintegrates in the second half [of the film].
My session with the prepared piano was at [Cafe] Oto way before we started the production. I spent the day with Billy Steiger and Tom Wheatley, who I’ve worked with for many years now. And we were experimenting with bits of paper, screws, Blu-Tack. It was a day of really miking up the piano in quite interesting ways with stereo and vocal mics. There were about 16 mics on the prepared piano at Oto. I use a microphone called the U 89 for a lot of my recording, and they’re very accurate. I used a stereo mic on the bass, just on the low end [of the piano]. So we could really get this huge sound out of the percussion, because a lot of the stuff that might sound like drums is low end [of the piano]. So I got really rich sounds from that session that I used throughout the film.
John Tilbury definitely is related to [John] Cage in the way that he prepared the piano. John [Tilbury] used mostly screws and coins. His wife, Janice, came into the studio and had this little bag… she actually puts the coins and stuff on the strings. It’s really beautiful watching them.
Sophie Agnel doesn’t prepare the piano; Sophie actually plays the strings of the piano. I’m partly saying that because I think that’s quite a distinction for her. She bounces balls on the strings. There’s this beautiful sound where she’s rubbing them with a mallet, playing a lot of strings at the same time, so they’re resonating and it’s like an orchestra.
When I saw the images from the set, I wondered how sound ricocheted off those marble slabs. I knew you could record reverb, so we shot a gun into [the marble quarry in Carrara]; you record that gunshot, and the effect [the marble] has on the echo of it, basically. And then you take that and bring it into this program and it basically removes the gunshot. So it makes an algorithm of the response of the raw sound, and then makes it into a reverb that you can then apply to anything. So, in this case, we applied it to Evan Parker’s saxophone.
Brady always talked about wanting to shoot some of the 1980s stuff on Betamax, so I thought it’d be interesting to mirror that with the music and ’80s technology. Because, before, [Corbet uses] VistaVision, which is 1950s technology, and then he moves to Betamax. So it came from the way he was describing how he was going to shoot, and this idea that it would suddenly cut to the 1980s.
And then I thought of Vince Clark because he defined the sound of the ’80s with Depeche Mode and Yazoo. [Clarke and I] worked on [“Epilogue (Venice)”] in New York, and then I brought it back [to London]. It was the last piece of music I finished, actually in [my flat] with Brady. We just got two bottles of wine and just played my Moog. Well, I played the Moog.
In post-production, we would have screenings with the sound team and Brady. But I had this problem where, every time I watched the film, I just cried at the end. The first time it happened, I just ran out the room. I just remember standing in the toilet of this post-production studio just crying with Brady.
