But I think there's always the wish, I guess, for everyone who wants to get back to a warm and secure place and having - and doing something that you like. I know that there are many other people who have a different feeling when they wake up, and they are forced through that. That is, in a way, something that I think is very spiritual for me personally because then I know I have 12 or 15 hours to do something that I really love and maybe - at least for me, that is. In a way, the feeling that you have, maybe, in the morning when you open your eyes and you know that you have another day that you can fill up with things that you love. I think this music wanted - I wanted to be in a - maybe in a sort of Bach area - what I feel when I listen to Bach music because it has this very deep sense of existence. (SOUNDBITE OF VOLKER BERTELMANN'S "SCARF")īERTELLMAN: I mean, that's, for me, the religious theme, you know, the lost humanity that is, I think, a very religious aspect of the film because - the fact that through being a soldier, you're losing, very quickly, all humanity and everything that you've believed in and that you had beforehand, and you are wishing to come back to that place at some point and get that back. Here's how you reimagine them later in the film. And you do that in some really beautiful ways with "All Quiet On The Western Front." Here's a piece called "Scarf" that completely reimagines those opening notes - those three notes that are really pretty brutal when we first hear them. It's fairly common for film composers to take a theme and rework it throughout the score. HILTON: I want to get back to those three main notes that you used at the top of the film. And at the same time, you have these elements of horror. So you can actually see how everybody is getting ready until you hear these sounds of yearning in a way, and you have something that is ticking very slowly and building. They are really - I mean, they want to move onwards, and you can see that the soldiers are stalling. And underneath, you have just the pulse of the negotiations in a way because time is passing by. You know, these kind of shouting sounds that are a little bit even, like, yearning or something like that. And we recorded a lot of these war horns that were, you know, doing these (imitating horn). I had a guy coming here, and he's having a huge collection of very old war horns, and - in all sorts of sizes. And the piece that you wrote for this incredible moment is - it's just called "72 Hours."īERTELLMAN: It's actually a lot of war horns. And, you know, what they're essentially saying in that moment is that the human slaughter will continue until you have given us everything. And then France says the fighting will continue until Germany has signed. And the French demand a full surrender, and they tell the Germans, you know, you have 72 hours to accept these conditions. HILTON: There's this incredible moment in the film where Germany asks France for an armistice. (SOUNDBITE OF VOLKER BERTELMANN'S "72 HOURS") And I want to have a snare drum that is played by somebody who can't play the snare drum (laughter).īERTELLMAN: So that were the three sentences that he said.īERTELLMAN: And there was nothing else (laughter). I want to have that - the feeling from his stomach that he feels always when he's in the trenches. And then he said, I want to have something for the main protagonist. They started by talking about the instructions that the movie's director, Edward Berger, gave to Bertelmann.īERTELLMAN: Edward said to me, please do something that is destroying the pictures that is not, you know, underlining what we already see. SUMMERS: NPR's Robin Hilton sat down with Bertelmann to talk about creating the score, which is nominated for an Oscar this year. You could hear the breathing and the wood working as a machine, and that whole thing is played through a distortion. Like, the crackling is actually the wooden paddles. Bertelmann did give his great-grandmother's harmonium a job - creating the opening theme for the film.īERTELLMAN: All the sounds in there are harmonium. SUMMERS: A harmonium - a 19th century organ that uses reeds instead of pipes. And then my studio - there was the harmonium of my grand-grandmother (ph) that I refurbished a year before, and it was just, like, sitting there waiting for a job. VOLKER BERTELMANN: When I saw the film the first time, I was thinking I need an instrument from that time. (SOUNDBITE OF VOLKER BERTELMANN'S "REMAINS") SUMMERS: And for the past decade, he's been scoring films - most recently for "All Quiet On The Western Front," last year's drama about World War I. In the 2000s, he began to experiment with prepared pianos, adorning the strings with tape and foil, marbles and erasers. SUMMERS: In the early '90s, he was the keyboardist in a German hip-hop group. The composer Volker Bertelmann has led many musical lives.
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