For Netflix’s anti-war drama, nominated for best picture and best international feature, Oscar nominee Volker Bertelmann embraced the haunting and thundering sounds of war.
Bertelmann is best known for his Oscar-nominated work on Garth Davis’, which received an ASCAP nom for score of the year . In, the composers stripped out horns and strings to deliver a piano-driven sound that managed to be emotional while never being predictable. For“Coming from the independent scene, I have a different approach to composing,” says Bertelmann. “It’s very intuition-driven, just trying something out and seeing what happens.
The result is both old and modern, like a wooden turn-of-the-last-century synthesizer, and — as it plays over post-battle scenes, as boots and uniforms are stripped off corpses, thrown in piles and then trucked off to be washed, repaired and handed out to a new crop of cannon-fodder recruits — perfectly evokes the horrifying machinery of war.
“For that scene, I used this really fragile string motif, recording them in a clear pure way,” he says. “When Edward heard it, he said it was too emotional and overpowering the scene. But I thought we needed that feel, so I put a filter on the whole instrumentation, just cut off the high end. It made it sound a bit like the music is coming from underneath a blanket. It’s muffled, but the emotion still comes through.
“With fights and battle scenes, the music can very easily get swamped by all the war sounds,” he says, “so we tried to find the frequencies for each other’s instruments and complement, not compete. Say there were explosions. That could be the bass drums. So I wouldn’t use bass on that section, or I’d go even lower, deeper in tone, below the explosions. Or for an ambush scene, in place of the main rhythm portion, I use the specific metal sounds of the gunfire.
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