Hildur Guð­nadót­tir: ​‘Music is a way to express your­self beyond words’

At first glance, Tár and Women Talk­ing have lit­tle in com­mon. Tár is the fran­tic, bom­bas­tic sto­ry of a renowned con­duc­tor whose order­ly life is spi­ralling out of con­trol. Women Talk­ing, which is set almost entire­ly in a hayloft, fol­lows a group of Men­non­ite women as they delib­er­ate over their futures – it is far more mea­sured and sedate. Both, how­ev­er, fea­ture haunt­ing scores writ­ten by Ice­landic com­pos­er Hildur Guð­nadót­tir – and both works, though vast­ly dif­fer­ent in their tone and style, are defined as much by their silences as they are by their sounds.

Restraint is typ­i­cal of Guðnadóttir’s work, who prefers to keep her music free from excess – to dis­till it into exact­ly what it needs to be. Often this means long, heavy paus­es, or as she puts it, spaces. ​“My approach to film music is very sim­i­lar to how I imag­ine hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion goes,” she tells Lit­tle White Lies. ​“I think the most inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions are the ones where each per­son par­tic­i­pat­ing has space, to both con­tribute to the con­ver­sa­tion, and also to take the space to listen.”

Silence and still­ness per­vade both Tár and Women Talk­ing. As Guð­nadót­tir told IndieWire of Tár, ​“The score func­tions in a way that you bare­ly notice that it is there. You will prob­a­bly walk out of the film think­ing there was no score.” Both films fea­ture long shots with no dia­logue and, notably, no ongo­ing under­scor­ing. This may be jar­ring to a mod­ern audi­ence used to promi­nent music in cin­e­ma, but it serves a pur­pose. ​“In my per­son­al opin­ion, I feel like a com­mer­cial trend in a lot of today’s film music is to pret­ty much have music under the whole film,” Guð­nadót­tir explains. ​“For me as a musi­cian, it’s much more inter­est­ing to be par­tic­u­lar about where you place the music and to be par­tic­u­lar about what the role of the music in the project is.”

Under­scor­ing, Guð­nadót­tir says, is effec­tive­ly designed to enhance the emo­tions por­trayed on screen. ​“If a per­son is falling in love, you will have sen­ti­men­tal, sweet music to enhance the feel­ing,” she says. ​“Music, obvi­ous­ly, is very emo­tion­al­ly manip­u­la­tive.” Guðnadóttir’s sparse scores aim not to manip­u­late the audience’s emo­tions, but rather to ele­vate impor­tant emo­tion­al touch­stones through­out the sto­ries. ​“I’m very delib­er­ate about plac­ing music. It’s one of the most effec­tive ways that you can real­ly allow the music to make big­ger state­ments. When you choose your state­ments, when you choose your phras­es more care­ful­ly, the music can become almost like a sep­a­rate character.”

Of course, these musi­cal ​“char­ac­ters” are very dif­fer­ent in the two films. Women Talk­ing fol­lows a group of women in a remote rur­al reli­gious group who have come togeth­er to dis­cuss their options fol­low­ing a series of attacks from men with­in their com­mu­ni­ty. No longer feel­ing safe in their homes, they debate whether to stay, fight, or leave. Their dis­cus­sion is both heat­ed and heart­felt as sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions of large­ly une­d­u­cat­ed women find them­selves wad­ing into a tan­gled inter­sec­tion of sex­u­al pol­i­tics, famil­ial love, com­mu­ni­ty duty and reli­gious belief.

Guð­nadót­tir land­ed on a more tra­di­tion­al score for the film. ​“It’s based on true events, but it’s told as a fable – it could be hap­pen­ing wher­ev­er and the time­line is very ambigu­ous,” she says. ​“So, the role of the music had to kind of fol­low that form of nar­ra­tion, so we chose to go about it that kind of rather the­mat­ic way, which is a very tra­di­tion­al, old-school way of working.”

The theme that Guð­nadót­tir and direc­tor Sarah Pol­ley found at the heart of the sto­ry was that of poten­tial. ​“The music starts off by telling us, ​‘This sit­u­a­tion they’re in, it’s hor­ri­ble – it’s the worst pos­si­ble sit­u­a­tion that you could pos­si­bly imag­ine being stuck in. But there is the oppor­tu­ni­ty for some­thing out there,’” she says. ​“That’s what the music tells us right away.” As the film goes on and this spark of poten­tial grows, the score begins to build, too. While the film begins with hard­ly any musi­cal under­scor­ing, by the time they have reached their final deci­sion, the theme reach­es its peak. ​“The poten­tial opens up and the music leads us through this journey.”

While Women Talking’s score became a the­mat­ic beat­ing pulse that drove the sto­ry towards its emo­tion­al crescen­do, Tár’s score oper­ates very dif­fer­ent­ly. Instead of dri­ving an emo­tion­al jour­ney, it works to play off of what is essen­tial­ly a fea­ture film-length char­ac­ter study of a woman in cri­sis. Guðnadóttir’s score became a son­ic por­tray­al of the inside of her head: ​“It lives in a more sub­con­scious realm.”

“My role was not just to enhance her sto­ry of Lydia Tár with music, but the music was also very much a part of the char­ac­ter itself,” says Guð­nadót­tir. ​“I’m writ­ing the music that she’s writ­ing, I’m set­ting the tem­po and the inner land­scape of the char­ac­ters. When you’re writ­ing music, or rehears­ing music, that music that you’re liv­ing in, it affects your whole life.”

In Tár, the score is com­posed pri­mar­i­ly of Mahler’s Fifth Sym­pho­ny and an Elgar cel­lo con­cer­to, which the film’s tit­u­lar char­ac­ter is rehears­ing. Along­side the sweep­ing orches­tral sounds of Elgar, Guð­nadót­tir lay­ers in more ghost­ly, uncom­fort­able and increas­ing­ly men­ac­ing tones. ​“We have a lot of dif­fer­ent types of music that serve var­i­ous spe­cif­ic roles,” she explains. ​“We have the musi­cal which she is rehears­ing on stage, we have the music that she’s writ­ing, we have the sounds that she’s influ­enced by that also are very impor­tant to her as a character.”

Despite the role of music being so dif­fer­ent in each film, the two scores are both pre­cise and rel­a­tive­ly sparse, which ulti­mate­ly means they both serve to make moments and emo­tions that stand out from the rest.

In Women Talk­ing, the spar­si­ty of music leads to a few key musi­cal moments. First, there are the hymns sung spo­rad­i­cal­ly by the women. Then, there’s the moment when a cen­sus col­lec­tor dri­ves through the com­mu­ni­ty with The Mon­kees’ ​“Day­dream Believ­er” blast­ing from his car’s speak­ers. In a film filled with silence, the raw, a capel­la voic­es of the women and the almost oth­er­world­ly sounds of The Mon­kees become emo­tion­al gut punch­es remind­ing the audi­ence of the women’s resilience, strength and isolation.

The final big moment comes in the film’s final scene when the women final­ly take their first steps away from the com­mu­ni­ty towards a new life. ​“It’s all lead­ing up to the end, where, spoil­er alert, they actu­al­ly leave – that, for me, was def­i­nite­ly the big moment.” In these moments, Guðnadóttir’s theme final­ly blos­soms into its final, full form: ​“That’s the only moment where we real­ly hear a full orches­tra and it becomes very full and large for the first time to real­ly dig into that poten­tial.” And with the full theme comes the sat­is­fy­ing, but heart-wrench­ing final emo­tion­al blow.

“I shouldn’t admit this, but the first time I set up the last scene and I scored the last scene, I start­ed cry­ing,” says Guðnadóttir.

Tár, on the oth­er hand, doesn’t lead to one final moment of emo­tion­al release. Instead, it’s punc­tu­at­ed by small, unex­pect­ed moments through­out, and the score fol­lows suit. The moments that stand out are often linked to Lydia’s rela­tion­ship with music. ​“One moment that I want­ed to be very clear, is the moment when Olga changes this one note in Lydia’s melody,” says Guð­nadót­tir. ​“The melody changes so dras­ti­cal­ly. Even though we can feel very stuck with what we’re cre­at­ing, it will be the small­est change that can have a very big impact on how you expe­ri­ence the melody.”

There is one oth­er strik­ing sim­i­lar­i­ty between the two films – the musi­cal scores play with the del­i­cate bat­tles for con­trol that the women in both films are qui­et­ly or not so qui­et­ly wag­ing. We have Lydia Tár, a world-famous mae­stro, whose obses­sion with con­trol goes beyond her role as con­duc­tor and spans from her dom­i­neer­ing approach to her assis­tant and pro­teges all the way to the pre­cise cuts of her tai­lored suits. And then we have the women of Women Talk­ing, who grap­ple for a mod­icum of con­trol in a world where it is stripped from them at birth. And at the cen­tre of both bat­tles for con­trol is music.

“The music – it’s almost cre­at­ing a way out for the women in both films,” Guð­nadót­tir says. ​“Because Lydia Tár cre­ates this fic­tion­al char­ac­ter for her­self to kind of cre­ate a path out of this life that she’s born into – you know, she’s just Lin­da from New Jersey.”

“And obvi­ous­ly, in Women Talk­ing, the music is the dri­ving force out of the rough and into the light,” adds Guð­nadót­tir. ​“Ulti­mate­ly, it’s about music being a vehi­cle of expres­sion. And music is such a beau­ti­ful way of expres­sion – it’s a way to express your­self beyond words.”