A Profile of Carter Burwell, the composer behind the scores for “Carol,” “Twilight,” most of the Coen brothers’ films, and, most recently, “The Banshees of Inisherin.”
In May, the composer Carter Burwell flew to London to record his score for Martin McDonagh’s new movie, “The Banshees of Inisherin.” The sessions took place in Studio Two at Abbey Road—the Beatles’ old studio. The ensemble consisted of six violins, four violas, three cellos, two double-basses, a flute, a clarinet, and a harp. Burwell, who is sixty-seven, stood on a low platform and opened an annotated copy of the music on a large stand in front of him.
Studio Two’s control room is at the top of a long flight of stairs, behind a glass panel that overlooks a large, open space, where the musicians play. McDonagh sat on a gray couch in the back, watching two monitors. One showed Burwell conducting, and the other showed the corresponding movie scenes. After most takes, Burwell, over the P.A., asked for comments. Occasionally, McDonagh wanted to tone down a passage that seemed too dramatic, but mostly they agreed.
“It looks like it’s early by a few frames,” Burwell said. “The music can sometimes happen after the picture, but you can’t have it before.” He said that he would adjust the tempos in his hotel room that night but leave the “ink” unchanged—meaning that new scores wouldn’t have to be printed. One function of music in movies has always been to guide the audience. A clear impression you get from many movies, especially older ones, is that directors don’t always trust viewers to follow emotional cues on their own. On an airplane recently, I re-watched “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” which was released in 1948.
In 2008, Burwell was hired to write the music for “Twilight,” based on the novel of the same name, about a romance between a teen-age girl and her high-school classmate, who turns out to be a vampire. When filming was nearly complete, it became clear from posts on social media that the book’s fans, most of whom were young girls, were eager to find out what the movie would make of “Bella’s Lullaby,” a song that the vampire composes, on a piano, for his mortal girlfriend.
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