Daniel Blumberg: ​‘The ingredients were there to…

Daniel Blumberg is an omnivorous artist, bringing intense conviction and curiosity to song form, improvised live performance, visual artwork and film composition. As a composer for Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet, he is part of arguably the most exciting musician-filmmaker team working today: a partnership that began with The World to Come in 2020 and continued with his Oscar-winning score for 2024’s The Brutalist. For The Testament of Ann Lee, Blumberg has co-authored a maximalist, avant-garde musical of original songs and Shaker-hymn adaptations, performed by the cast alongside a mass of experimental musicians.

LWLies: Could you tell us about the process of researching the Shakers that came before you started writing the score?

Blumberg: When Mona wrote this script with Brady, it was the first time that I had learnt about the Shakers, so I started reading as much as I could and listening to existing recordings of their hymns, which were all quite simple melodies. Through researching, I found that the Shakers didn’t use instruments or harmony. They weren’t professional singers and they weren’t singing in churches, they were singing in wooden rooms that they had built themselves.

How did you work with Mona’s script?

She had put placeholders in the script for the hymns that I was adapting. I was just trying to work out how far I could push the material. I was really focused on how radical the Shaker movement was, and the tools that Mona was using to make the film as extreme as it is. Before production I went to New York to work with her. We’d work together in the daytime, then she would leave me to record. Initially I was making demos for Mona, then Celia [Rowlson-Hall, the choreographer] so she could start building the dance routines. There were epiphanies along the way, like ​‘Hunger and Thirst’, which was restructured to make it more like a contemporary pop song.

It’s such a striking contrast to hear Amanda sing this beautiful pure melody surrounded by these wild vocalisations.

With the vocalisations, one of the first things that I got from the script was thinking about what the Shakers could have sounded like before they were properly organised. I was drawn to Phil Minton and Maggie Nichols, improvising singers who are very influential. I would send videos of Maggie and Phil to all the actors to listen to when they came on the project.

How did you get the actors to access that method of singing? Obviously Maggie and Phil are experts at this kind of vocal work, but it’s a challenge for people who might not even be trained in traditional singing.

It’s hard to switch those things on – everyone can make weird sounds, we’ve been doing it since we were little. But to do it in the way that these artists do is special. I got some of the actors based in the UK, like Thomasin [McKenzie] and Stacy [Martin], to do some workshops with Maggie beforehand. Amanda did some workshops in New York with [the experimental vocalist] Shelley Hirsch. Amanda was great to work with and Shelley was really impressed with her too.

A lot of the experimental vocalists you worked with are on screen in the film too.

We talked really early on about getting them in the picture. Freya Edmondes, Josephine Foster, my sister Ilana, and Maggie are all in the film. Maggie came on this set with so many people – the actors, the extras, but also the lighting team, sound, everything – and she just improvised with Mona letting the camera roll. At the end of the first take, everyone stood up and applauded. It was amazing.

As well as the singing cast, you recorded lots of singers to make up the cacophony of voices in the film, similar to your process of ​‘collecting’ performances for The Brutalist score.

One of the funny appearances on the score is Alan [Sparhawk] from Low, who recorded before a live show – he did the vocals, took an Uber to the venue and was on stage topless five minutes later. I also recorded a few choirs, one led by Phil Minton, and an amateur choir that my cousin goes to after work on a Tuesday. She showed me a video and I was like, can I record them for the film? The third choir was Freya, Shelley, Phil and Maggie, who did improvisation to the whole film. I’ve got stems of them singing from start to finish that we used in the sound mix.

At the London Film Festival screening of the film Mona mentioned that the Shakers were inclusive of formerly enslaved people, whose spirituals influenced Shaker hymns. How did this influence show up in your score?

Patsy Roberts Williamson was a Black slave whose freedom was bought by the Shaker community in about 1812. She wrote one of their most famous songs, ​‘Pretty Mother’s Home’, which I combined into a medley with another hymn, ​‘I Love Mother’. It’s sung during the montage of the Hancock settlement, when we first see all the beautiful furniture and inventions that the Shakers became famous for.

How did you develop the three original songs that you wrote alongside the hymns that you adapted?

For the first song in the film – the title song – I edited some writings from the Shakers’ Testament that Mona had put in the script. ​‘John’s Running Song’ was written using the account that Mona had found about their journey to discover their first settlement. She wanted a change of pace and we made something quite humorous, almost slapstick. ​‘Clothed by the Sun’ came right at the end of the process, in the last few days of the sound mix. I sat down with an electric guitar and the whole song came out in one go, I think because my head was so inside the film and the story that it was all there. I approached it in the same way I write songs for my records. I was thinking about Ann’s relationship with her brother as a starting point.

Did your visual art practice cross over with your composition – did you make any drawings while working on the score?

Yes, hundreds of drawings. I filled the studio in New York with drawings while I was writing the music before the set. Then when I went to Budapest for preproduction, I filled the walls of my Airbnb. For me, drawing is a good way to clear my head or change direction.

I also wanted to ask about the instrumentation on the score, which is an element you brought in to accompany these hymns, which were originally sung a cappella. 

I was lucky to get to work with people like Rhodri Davies on the harp, Billy Steiger on violin, [the cellist] Okkyung Lee, and Tom [Wheatley], who played these strange-sounding instruments called viols – like early cellos with thick strings. Then there’s Steve [Noble], who is just the greatest drummer of all time.

I agree! My thought is that somebody like Steve approaches his instrument in the same way as a vocalist – when he plays percussion he explores it from every possible direction.

I was very focused on that extreme. For example, bells felt really important because they had bells in the Shaker settlement. I recorded a lot when I was staying with a painter friend in New York who coincidentally collects bells. I brought all the bells in his house up to my room for the first demo. Then Mona and I went into a music shop and found this little hand bell from 18^th-century northern England, which was immediately on the first track. When I started to work with Steve I was using a celeste, otherwise known as a bell-piano, which has hammers that hit these metal bell plates. So I asked Steve, ​‘What’s the extreme version of that?’ We went to this warehouse that rents percussion and they had these huge brass plates, with one tuned to each note. They also had church bells for rent. When we’d finished walking around, I was like, shit, I’m gonna spend all the budget on renting bells! But the warehouse people said we could record there, so Steve was basically able to use whatever he wanted.

For The Brutalist you were writing before production as well as recording on set. You were on set for Ann Lee as well, including singing on screen.

I was there before preproduction started, then on the set every day, then in the edit with Sofía [Subercaseaux, editor] and Mona. Then I had to do the score, then finally I was in the sound mix. I remember Andy Neil [re-recording mixer/​sound designer] had all these sound effects. At one point, a cow walks past during a song and moos, and I was like, let’s tune that cow to the song!

It sounds like there was great energy through the whole thing.

I think Mona is particularly good at getting a group together. It wasn’t a studio film at all, it was the most independent. The producer Andrew [Morrison] was really just trying to keep the set going, in terms of trying to get money for that week. Me and Will [Rexer, cinematographer] were helping unload the costumes from the van. For me, that related to how I’m used to working with musicians. Whatever the resources we have, we’re trying to make something with what there is, and we’re committed to it. The film felt like that – like the ingredients were there to make something special and unique, from Mona to Amanda, the actors, the sound team, production design, everyone.