The drive for sublime communication and its breakdowns sits at the core of the dizzyingly immersive film TÁR. Written and directed by Todd Field, the film revels in its study of a high-profile classical composer attempting to write her own masterpiece while simultaneously fighting through noise and conflict — often of her own making. The always-magnificent Cate Blanchett turns in a tour de force as Lydia Tár, while the unparalleled sound design demonstrates how even the smallest intrusion can pick and pluck at any shred of calm she hasn’t already destroyed with her own choices.
In her first score since her Oscar-winning work for Joker, Hildur Guðnadóttir faced the unenviable task of writing music for a film about a music virtuoso. But rather than merely attempt to write the career-defining music at the story’s core, the Icelandic composer masterfully crafted a score about the act of rehearsing, making, and struggling to make music instead.
"That's what I find so unbelievably interesting about music," Guðnadóttir says. "What you hear as the final version is just the very tip of the iceberg because, behind the music, are so many years of practicing, rehearsing, failed attempts."
The result is a score that haunts the film’s edges: the chatter of musicians, wordless vocals, and snippets of music as viable and important as any concerto or symphony. "It's almost like an invisible layer, as if there's a ghost in the room that you can feel, but you don't see," she explains. The music represents one layer of an intricately stratified sonic whole, roiling at all the right places and darting out of sight at others.
TÁR was released nationally on Oct. 28, alongside a concept album on the legendary classical label Deutsche Grammophon (a vinyl release, and international release of the film, will come early next year). The GRAMMY-winning composer spoke with GRAMMY.com about "tempo mapping" each character and scene before a second of the film was recorded, and the difficulty of representing a conductor’s role via music.
How does it feel to be finally sharing the finished product of all of your work?
Oh, it's feeling wonderful. It's amazing how the film seems to be speaking to people. When you finish a project, you never know what life it's gonna have beyond the finish of post-production.
When you're writing music or recording or creating something, you're having this conversation either with yourself or with other people. In the process of making a film, you're obviously having a large conversation with quite a few people. When what you're working on actually reaches the audience that you're speaking to,as in any conversation, it always really feels lovely when you feel like you're being heard.
It feels really lovely to feel that the conversation is actually continuing, like the audience is resonating with what you're saying, and continuing that conversation actually.
And that's an absolute testament to the film and the work that you did. There are so few places in the music world where communication is as important as it is for the conductor. It was so striking listening to your score with that in mind and thinking about the communication breakdowns that run through the film.
Music is just communication. It's a conversation that goes beyond words. A conductor can use words to express, like, "Okay, it should be in this tempo" or "imagine this when you're playing," but then what's actually being performed or rehearsed or what's being composed goes beyond that. And that's what I find so unbelievably interesting about music, especially about the process of making music. It's so much more than just what you end up hearing.
What you hear as the final version is just the very tip of the iceberg because behind the music are so many years of practicing, rehearsing, failed attempts, having to re-record takes, all of this. And that's the part of music that I almost find more interesting than the actual track or record. As a performer, that's something that I've thought about a lot: How do you just connect to an audience without having to tell them how? How do you just reach that subconscious level of communicating without having to say anything about it?
And I think that's what the film is dealing with in such a beautiful way. The frustrations that Lydia Tár is experiencing in the film [have] so much to do with the miscommunication and misalignment with her own musical drives, and what she actually wants to be doing. The music that she's writing…is from a completely different world from the music that she's conducting and that she's best known for. And that's bringing her to this tough place.
That's probably why she subconsciously works so hard at tearing that down and coming back to the place that she genuinely wants to be working from, which is a place of softness and experimentation. In the very early stages of the script, this was one of the main ideas that formed her character: Where does her actual music that's not this frustrated, angry version of her — where does that actually lie?
Where does it lie for you? Having followed your music for a while, it's clear that it's a natural, living thing for you. How do you approach a project like TÁR that requires that kind of emotional connection and communication?
I try not to work on many projects simultaneously. That's why I basically haven't been working on that many films. I think most people were expecting me to do, like, 10 films a year with a big crew of assistants and all of this after the success of Joker. But that's just not really how I work.
I really enjoy taking enough time for every single project that I work on to really be able to live in the universe that we're creating. Every film is a universe of a story that's being told. And for me to really fulfill my creative needs, basically, I need to have the time and the space to live in that world, in order to serve it best. That means that I can't really work with a whole bunch of assistants and a lot of people that I have to navigate. I have to be by myself a lot with a project to be able to really be honest to it. When I take on a project, it's important that I really feel like I can honestly bring something to the table that is of benefit to whatever's being told. If I'm just taking on a project to sprinkle some underscore, it doesn't fulfill my creative engine in the same way.
Like with TÁR, when I can really work from the script on and I can really be a part of the strands of the DNA of the film, the character building and the temp mapping of the whole film, that's when it's really interesting to me. Music is just such a powerful part of the storytelling process. Having the music existing parallel to the making of the film and getting to grow with the making of the film is just so much more fun for me than running after an edit and post-production.
You live in Berlin, which is also where the film is set. The city has such a powerful musical lineage. Was there any particular inspiration or touchstone that inspired you there?
Yeah, absolutely. What was quite important was that the music and the film was European. From the geological aspect of the film being set in Berlin, it really felt like the music needed to be as European as the setting.
Tell me a little bit about the concept album — which combines recordings of Gustav and Mahler, which Lydia conducts in the film, with your vision of the completed versions of her compositions. How did you initially conceive the project and how it would live alongside the film?
I thought it was incredibly important for this record to exist, because the film itself is all about the process of making music. We're really looking at what it is to write the music, what it is to rehearse the music, but we never actually really hear the music. We just hear snippets of it.
That's what's so beautiful about the film: that's not the important part. The important part is the process. It's such a rare opportunity to be able to work in that way. But it felt like the music still needed to exist as it's finished form. In the film she's working on a release for Deutsche Grammophon, so we thought it was just very important that we did that in reality, in our parallel universe. I recorded the finished version [of the music in the film] and there are also pieces [from] the tempo mapping of the film that Todd and I did with the script before they started shooting. We started by tempo mapping each character and the scenes. And then also there's parts of Mahler that Cate is conducting. And there are also snippets of me talking to the orchestra during the recordings, telling them the emotional direction that I imagine would be helpful for the recordings.
It was a rare and beautiful thing to get to do, this whole musical universe, all of the aspects of music that are so important and so necessary, but the parts that someone that's not a musician will probably never be privy to. There's a lot of score that you don't actually hear. So it's almost like an invisible layer, as if there's a ghost in the room that you can feel, but you don't see.