Hausch­ka on Jon­ny Greenwood’s There Will Be Blood score

Volk­er Bertel­mann may not be a house­hold name, but under the alias Hausch­ka the avant-garde com­pos­er has spent the best part of the past two decades recon­fig­ur­ing the sounds of clas­si­cal music. Exper­i­ment­ing heav­i­ly with pre­pared piano, in which the instru­ment is manip­u­lat­ed by all man­ner of unusu­al objects, Hauschka’s strik­ing­ly uncon­ven­tion­al work falls some­where between elec­tron­ic and classical.

Not lim­it­ed to his work as a solo artist, Hauschka’s ven­tures in film have seen him pro­vide the scores to var­i­ous shorts, doc­u­men­taries and fea­tures in his native Ger­many. His most recent work, on Garth Davis’ Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed Lion, saw him col­lab­o­rate with fel­low com­pos­er Dustin O’Halloran. Here, as part of a new series, Hausch­ka dis­cuss­es his favourite film score, and how it con­tin­ues to inspire him as a composer.

“My favourite film score is Jon­ny Greenwood’s work on There Will Be Blood. I think the music cap­tures exact­ly the mood of the film. It’s not push­ing you into an awk­ward­ness where you feel like the music wants to make the film bet­ter. You can quite eas­i­ly feel like the weak­ness is in a script or in a sto­ry when the music actu­al­ly is try­ing to over-do the emotions.

“There’s a spook­i­ness about it – this dark­ness – but at the same time this guy [Daniel Plain­view] is very dri­ven, there’s a lot of force in him as a per­son and there’s always the feel­ing that the music con­tin­ues this force. There’s ten­sion all the time. Jon­ny Green­wood did a great job with the string arrange­ments. The glis­san­do of the strings, the descend­ing vio­lin lines are a very force­ful thing. He seems to be play­ing a lot with detun­ing and using the strings a lit­tle more like poly­phon­ic synths in glis­san­do mode.

“I’m a big fan of clas­si­cal film scores, but at the same time com­posers like Jon­ny Green­wood and Mica Levi are def­i­nite­ly help­ing to open things up. The main prob­lem is that more exper­i­men­tal scores are still not seen as ​‘cred­i­ble’, some peo­ple think they will destroy a film’s com­mer­cial suc­cess. Scores are always col­lab­o­ra­tive – you have to work with some­body else’s ideas – and it’s great to work with some­one who chal­lenges you. If the direc­tor lets you do what you feel intu­itive­ly is the right way to go, then you have a lot of options to, not rein­vent the score, but at least think about it beyond a way of describ­ing the images on screen. Hope­ful­ly in the future, film music will be much more experimental.

“The thing with the There Will Be Blood score is it’s very exper­i­men­tal, very hor­ror-like, but still very acces­si­ble. A lot of hor­ror sound­tracks are not music that you want to lis­ten to while you’re sit­ting at home with a glass of red wine, but I can imag­ine lis­ten­ing to that score just by myself and not being extreme­ly hor­ri­fied, even though it’s a very awk­ward, very dark score. Before There Will Be Blood, I had nev­er seen a movie deal­ing with such a dra­mat­ic top­ic where every­thing was real­ly beau­ti­ful­ly done. Every part of that score has mean­ing. I was very struck by the com­bi­na­tion of music and film and it helped me to believe that I might one day be in a posi­tion to work on films like that. Lion is the first movie where I had a sim­i­lar feeling.

“Every­thing I’m doing now has to bat­tle with a lot of com­par­i­son. There’s so much music out there and when you release a record, there are many oth­er peo­ple who have done music like that already. At the same time, I feel like by using the pre­pared piano, I’ve been able to get out of this box pret­ty fast, because I forced myself to make elec­tron­ic music with an acoustic instru­ment. That’s already very dif­fi­cult, and I think it’s the same with a film score.”

Hauschka’s eighth stu­dio album ​‘What If’ is released 31 March via City Slang.