How Did Daniel Blumberg Follow Up His Oscar Win? With Another Banger Score.

Daniel Blumberg “never thought of making film scores, ever.” At least not until he met the director Brady Corbet, with whom he’s forged a friendship and creative partnership anchored by their shared love of music and cinema. Nowadays, the English composer is best known for his Oscar-winning score for Corbet’s The Brutalist , but his musical education, as he told Corbet on a call last month, began with his high school band (he won’t reveal its name) and deepened later on with frequent visits to London’s famed Cafe Oto. It was no surprise, then, that Corbet’s wife, the director Mona Fastvold, called on Blumberg once again to dream up the pulsing score for The Testament of Ann Lee, her high-flying musical drama about the Shakers religious sect and its hypnotic founder Ann Lee, played by Amanda Seyfried. Once again, Blumberg has pulled it off, crafting a rich, strange, and historically faithful sonic landscape to match Fastvold’s story of devotion, community, ego, and gender equality. So how does Blumberg continue do it? It’s not unlike how Corbet feels about Japanese cooking: “It’s four ingredients, and yet those four ingredients are reinvented time and again in very, very nuanced ways.” Below , the collaborators let us in on a wide-ranging conversation about literature, London, and the language of cinema.-CHARLOTTE ZAGER --- BRADY CORBET: Hey, DB. Where are you? You’re in L.A. still, right? DANIEL BLUMBERG: Yeah. CORBET: Oh, it’s early for you. BLUMBERG: [Laughs] I just woke up. I’ve been sleeping so crazy. We watched 15 minutes of [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder and fell asleep- Ali: Fear Eats the Soul . It’s a good one. I haven’t watched it in ages. It’s the best. CORBET: It is the best. BLUMBERG: We should do this more often. CORBET: Well, I’m going to do my best. I haven’t prepared anything, so we’re going to see how it goes. There are a few things I obviously already know, but I think it’s probably helpful for readers to quickly contextualize. I know you had your band when you were a teenager, but how long have you been playing? Since you were a kid? BLUMBERG: Yeah, but when I was a child, I was just trying to learn the clarinet and piano and I wasn’t very good at it. I was always in the orchestra, trying to read the sheet music at school, and I couldn’t do it. So I only really started when I was 15, when I got asked to be in a band. CORBET: Were you primarily playing piano or guitar or both? BLUMBERG: I was just singing. CORBET: Oh, you were just singing? BLUMBERG: Yeah. I ended up playing guitar because we were recording at Edwyn Collins’ studio-you know, Orange Juice, “Never Met a Girl Like You Before.” It was his studio, and he had this massive collection of vintage guitars. And that made me want to play guitar. CORBET: Who else in your family is musical? BLUMBERG: My brother and sister are really...

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