This article was published on February 27, 2025. At the 97th Academy Awards, The Brutalist won the Oscars for Best Score.
When you imagine a capital-B Big Movie, what do you hear? Pounding timpani. Cheerful trumpets. Weeping strings. Films like Gladiator, The Lord of the Rings, and Titanic all have them: epic orchestral scores from Hans Zimmer, Howard Shore, and James Horner that soundtrack the battles and tragedies occurring onscreen. Even the quieter domestic dramas vying less for box-office glory and more for Academy Awards acclaim feature music lush with classical detail, like Carter Burwell’s melancholy strings in Carol, giving twinkly lyricism to the emotional violence roiling beneath the characters’ skins. The past 50 years of blockbusters and Oscar-nominated films have been one giant exercise in sweeping maximalism; what we hear is also what we see.
This past year has felt different. Take Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, the three-and-a-half-hour Holocaust-survivor story shot in VistaVision that could earn lead actor Adrien Brody his second Oscar. The period piece opens on its protagonist, László Tóth, a Jewish Hungarian architect immigrating to America in the 1940s, who emerges from the bowels of a ship on the Hudson River with nothing but dread. How long has he been at sea, and what precisely has he been through? Unclear. Even the view ahead of Tóth is obscured by darkness and crowds. All we have is composer Daniel Blumberg’s Oscar-nominated score, announcing itself with familiar, overwhelming brass. The triumphant melody chugs along, like the gears of industry, preparing the audience for an American Dream drama of valorous proportions. But then the theme starts vanishing. Gradually, the music mutates into something more alien: off-key chiming of a clock, percussive piano clanking and plucking, atonal saxophone solos that sound as if an instrument is being dropped. What was once capital-B Big and brassy now feels claustrophobic as glissandi descend into chaos. The longer the film goes on, the harder it is to identify which instrument we’re hearing, if we’re hearing instruments at all.
The Brutalist’s score is a prime example of film music’s tilt toward electroacoustic classical music, in which composers combine elements of the organic instrumental sounds we’ve come to expect in a film with electronic manipulation. If the past 50 years of scores were all about boundless emotionality, these newer scores are pulsing and discordant — closer to Steve Reich or Karlheinz Stockhausen than European Romantic composers like Beethoven or first-generation Americans like Leonard Bernstein. That doesn’t mean that everything sounds like Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s techno-inspired, banger-rich score for Challengers but rather that composers are manipulating sounds we know (and even some we don’t) to heighten or refute the images onscreen. Think Hildur Guðnadóttir’s relentless Joker theme, Volker Bertelmann’s pummeling All Quiet on the Western Front score, and Mica Levi’s terrifyingly modest music for The Zone of Interest. These new impulses have been fed both by technological advancements in sound producing and an increase in composers from independent-music backgrounds. We’re now far more likely to hear a film scored by someone who came up playing weird basement shows than someone who is classically trained. While the success of a score once relied upon its enduring quality — like, say, whether anyone would go see it played live at a symphony hall — for artists who have never been part of a studio system, what responsibility is there to uphold tradition?
“Sometimes you have to go against what you actually see,” says Bertelmann, who wrote the music for the 2024 papal drama Conclave, nominated alongside The Brutalist for Best Picture and Best Original Score this year. “I love to use music to bring tension but not to direct the audience’s emotions.” Rather than focusing on distinct plot points or emotional denouements, Bertelmann tasked himself with finding a sound for the Vatican writ large but one that didn’t repeat tropes we already know. “What could it be if not a choir or an organ but had the ethereal beauty of a choir or an organ?,” he recalls asking himself. He landed on the Cristal Baschet, a keyboardlike percussion instrument that requires wet fingers to generate sound from glass rods. The contemporary instrument plays behind Cardinal Lawrence as he takes on the unseemly administrative task of finding a new pope — long, unwieldy notes echoing as he glances up to the sky for a sign.
Blumberg similarly eschewed typical symphonic tools in favor of a Brutalist score built around field recordings. To achieve the metallic tick-tick-ticking of the film’s construction scenes, he “spent a day putting pieces of paper and screws on piano strings.” For a staggering scene in which Tóth and his patron, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), visit a marble quarry in Carrara, Italy, Blumberg went to a valley to record ambient sound and later applied it to a saxophone part played by soloist Evan Parker. Fellow Best Original Score nominee Kris Bowers also used an environmental-first approach to his score for the Best Animated Feature contender The Wild Robot, a watercolor animated film about a well-meaning robot who learns to survive in the woods. Bowers collaborated with the Brooklyn ensemble Sandbox Percussion, giving them musical cues to interpret with the raw materials one might find in the film: branches, metal pipes. “I thought it might be like ASMR on top of the orchestra,” Bowers says.
For Veronica Fitzpatrick, an adjunct professor of modern culture and media at Brown University, the changes in composition date back to Clint Mansell’s work with the Kronos Quartet for Darren Aronofsky’s 2000 film, Requiem for a Dream. Mansell’s score blended myriad genres — hip-hop, electronic, conventional classical — to establish a memorable and overwhelming theme repeating descending melodies as the characters submit to their drug addictions. “The score is less a supportive apparatus than a distinct entity that seems to both motivate and respond to the images onscreen,” says Fitzpatrick. “Lux Aeterna,” the film’s signature song, has become so distinctive that it actually pops up in trailers for other films, as though the music itself is as canonical as “Clair de Lune.”
In a conversation with NPR, Reznor specified that while Mansell’s work hadn’t directly inspired his scoring with Ross for The Social Network, “he’s proven you can do it without 20 years of university studies.” Blumberg, like Mansell, is self-taught; their shared originality comes from their willingness to shed the conventionality of classical scoring and trust in their own artistic ethos. It’s the kind of music that’s built on instinct more than theory. “I’d just say sirens and see what he did,” Blumberg says of the instructions he gave trumpet player Axel Dörner. A number of this past year’s composers also credit Mansell for laying the groundwork for independent artists who might have nothing but recording equipment and a laptop to make music for the big screen. “To be honest, I was never that much into ‘film music’ until I heard what Clint Mansell was doing with Darren Aronofsky,” says Cristobal Tapia de Veer, the composer for Babygirl as well as The White Lotus. “When something attracts my ear, it’s often that the composer came from a band.”
“Cinema has become a refuge for creative music,” says Bryce Dessner, who worked on the 2024 movies Sing Sing and We Live in Time. (His previous credits vary wildly, working with directors like Alejandro González Iñárritu and Mike Mills as well as on his own chamber and contemporary classical work — not to mention the music he makes with his brother and Matt Berninger in the National.) “You can see what an algorithm is doing to homogenize people’s taste, but with film music you see all these different approaches,” he says. In Dessner’s film work, there’s usually a minimalist, airy quality. It’s undeniably melodic, yet he often chooses to leave a musical phrase unfinished, letting the listener fill in the blanks. Like many of today’s composers, he turns to a smaller group of musicians, as opposed to a bigger orchestra (“I’m not setting down a score in front of them as if I’m Brahms,” he jokes).
Babygirl, another of this year’s awards-season contenders, starts out with a piece of music so familiar it’s almost funny, something you might actually hear if you went to the philharmonic. “We give you two themes for one person. In the beginning, we have this diva presented with her amazing perfect life and family,” says Tapia de Veer — referring to Nicole Kidman’s high-powered SheEO, Romy Mathis — “and then the music, and that life, starts to degrade very quickly.” The opening waltz gives way to “the wolf,” as he and director Halina Reijn call the desire that builds throughout the film. The breathy, percussive chanting that emerges from the ashes of Mathis’s midlife crisis lacks harmony completely, as if to suggest she is alone in the woods of her own desire, trying to outrun that which she craves. Only in the film’s final scene, when Mathis returns to the bedroom with her husband, does Tapia de Veer’s score introduce a second voice to the rhythmic panting: her desire echoed.
For decades, unless the film was a musical, scores like Tapia de Veer’s or Blumberg’s would likely have been added into movies during postproduction; a director would score a work with temporary music in order to work through the edit, and the composer would get post-shoot rough cuts as the starting point of their contributions. “Sound design was kind of an afterthought,” Dessner says. That the sound designer, sound mixer, and composer are now more regularly in communication with the director during the production of a film, if not in preproduction, came up again and again in interviews with working composers. Where image once dictated sound, sound can now influence, if not direct, the image and the edit. The overture to The Brutalist predates the sequence’s shoot: Adrien Brody’s journey as Tóth from the bottom of the ship up to the open air was choreographed to the music rather than filled in during postproduction. Just as melody can enhance image, so too can image elevate music into something propulsive and alive.
Most composers lived and died long before the invention of film — a medium that is only about 100 years old. Music, in turn, has been democratized: You no longer need to know Chopin or Bruckner to get by; you don’t have to go to a conservatory to make a career of it. The film composers working today are also, to a degree, self-made — they built their canon of personal sound and then movies adapted. Now, the quality of a film or television score lives in its ability to transcend its original images: Could you hear it at the club? Can this music be repurposed for memes or jokes? Can you put it over a different scene from something else to evoke a new feeling altogether? “Every project — film, dance, opera, song — meets its own requirement,” Bertelmann says. “Every time, I’m starting from zero. If I repeat myself, it’d be my death.”