The Polymath Film Composer Known as “the Third Coen Brother”
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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. He has wavy gray hair and a soul patch the size of a blob of shaving cream, and he was wearing jeans and an untucked collared shirt with a flower print. “For some reason, there’s a magnet and a nail on my music stand,” he told the group. “I hope I don’t have to use them.”
“Banshees” is set on a small island off the Irish mainland in 1923. Early in the film, Colm Doherty, a fiddler, played by Brendan Gleeson, tells his longtime best friend, Pádraic Súilleabháin, played by Colin Farrell, that he no longer wants anything to do with him, because he’s so boring.
“The other night, two hours you spent talking to me about the things you found in your little donkey’s shite that day,” Colm says.
“It was me pony’s shite, which shows how much you were listening,” Pádraic replies.
Colm threatens to cut off one of his own fingers if Pádraic ever speaks to him again. (Colm owns an ominously large pair of sheep shears, which, just lying on a table, could nearly account for the film’s R rating.) When Burwell read the script, he worried that the violent moments might overshadow other elements of the story, which explores the escalating stubbornness of two aging men. Their conflict gradually takes on an almost supernatural dimension—an effect enhanced by the seeming omniscience of an ancient neighbor, and by an unexplained drowning. “Martin doesn’t do anything that isn’t harrowing,” Burwell told me. “My daughter and I had been reading the Grimms’ ‘Cinderella,’ in which the stepmother tells her daughters to cut off pieces of their feet so that they’ll fit into the slipper. And I thought, What if I treat it as a fairy tale? What if I make it seem a little less real ?”
Burwell is best known for his work with Joel and Ethan Coen, beginning with their first film, “Blood Simple,” from 1984. (He has been called “the third Coen brother.”) Aside from childhood piano lessons, he has no formal musical training, and he got the job writing the score for “Blood Simple” almost by accident. In the past four decades, he has composed music for many other directors, too, among them Catherine Hardwicke, Sidney Lumet, David Mamet, Mike Nichols, and Spike Jonze. A characteristic Burwell score is spare and haunting, although he has written in many styles. He adapted parts of the main theme of “Raising Arizona,” the Coens’ second feature film, from an old cowboy song that Joel Coen first heard on a Pete Seeger record. Burwell’s score for Todd Haynes’s “Carol,” about a romantic relationship between two women, set in the early nineteen-fifties, features soaring strings, woodwinds, and piano. His score for McDonagh’s previous movie, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” contains hints of gospel music and military marches. (The “Carol” and “Three Billboards” scores were each nominated for an Oscar.)
On the first day in Studio Two, McDonagh, who had just returned from a holiday in the Lake District, told Burwell, “I’ve been humming all the tunes.” His only instruction to Burwell, he said, had been not to write anything that sounded like Irish pub music—“the easy go-to for a film like this.” Burwell’s score features the harp, an instrument so closely associated with Ireland that its image appears on the country’s coins, but there’s nothing publike about the melodies he came up with for it, which often float on a current of strings, in a way that the harpist himself called “dreamy.” The score also features a synthesized celeste, which Burwell played and recorded himself. A real celeste looks like a shrunken upright piano and sounds like tinkling bells, or a child’s xylophone; it’s the most conspicuous instrument in Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” and in John Williams’s “Harry Potter” scores. What Burwell described to me as the “plicky-plucky sounds” of the harp and the celeste created the fairy-tale effect that he was aiming for.
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. (Earlier, McDonagh had told me, “Carter and I have the same kind of outlook on life. Not a movie-studio kind.”)
Toward the end of the morning, Burwell recorded the music for a scene in which Pádraic’s sister, Siobhán, played by Kerry Condon, is riding to the mainland in an open boat. Pádraic watches from the top of a cliff, and they wave to each other. After the musicians had played the passage once, McDonagh asked Burwell to come up to the control room.
“This is a tricky one, Carter,” he said. “We’ve been working with a version where the music ends on the first wave.” In the version Burwell had just conducted, the music stopped ten seconds later. The difference was small, but it affected the emotional tone of the departure, adding emphasis to a moment that McDonagh preferred dissipate in silence. Starting the music earlier solved that problem but created a synchronization issue—a chord now arrived right before a small group of birds took flight from a pier, prematurely signalling their movement.
“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.
At lunch in the Abbey Road commissary, McDonagh asked Burwell whether he was easier to work with than the Coens.
“Honestly, with Joel and Ethan it’s all I can do to get them to pay attention,” Burwell said. “They’re in the back, reading the newspaper, and they just say, ‘Yeah.’ ”
Silent films were usually accompanied by live music, which was improvised by a pianist or an organist. (The first American movie with a dedicated orchestral score was “The Birth of a Nation,” released in 1915, but most early audiences never heard it, because it, too, had to be performed live.) Synchronized recorded sound was made possible, in the mid-twenties, by systems that mechanically connected projectors to turntables playing sixteen-inch disks, each of which ran for about eleven minutes. The first movies for which the soundtrack was printed on the film itself—in a narrow strip of spectral lines, next to the sprocket holes, which an optical reader converted to an audio signal—came a few years later.
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. The score is all exclamation marks, fluorescent highlighting, and boldfaced italicizations, and it has the effect of making Humphrey Bogart’s portrayal of a gold-maddened prospector seem even more overwrought than it would anyway. (I decompressed by watching a few “Simpsons” episodes.)
In a lecture at the Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, in Glasgow, in 2001, Burwell said that he usually urges directors to use as little music as possible, because movies, like life, are most interesting “when you don’t know what’s going on, and you’re uncomfortable about it.” Ron Sadoff, the director and founder of the screen-scoring program at N.Y.U., told me, “Carter doesn’t do what’s called Mickey Mousing, where you try to touch every little element of the film with music. His approach is much more conceptual.” In the score for “Fargo,” the Coens’ sixth film, Burwell used a Hardanger fiddle, a Norwegian instrument that has two sets of strings, one of which isn’t bowed but resonates with the other. (That choice was inspired by the Scandinavian names of some of the characters.) His goal was to help make a darkly improbable comedy seem as straightforward as a news bulletin, an effect established with the title sequence, in which a car is being towed across a white-out winter landscape, accompanied by a fiddle-and-percussion passage that swells into something like a funeral march. Ethan Coen told me, “People don’t realize how much of what they’re getting from a movie is from the score, delivered by the composer. It’s powerful, but, for the life of you, you can’t say what it means.”
Music is almost always one of the last elements added to a movie, and, as a consequence, the composer is often called on to address issues that the director no longer can. In 2015, Burwell wrote the score for “The Finest Hours,” about an oil tanker that broke up off the coast of New England during a winter storm. In one scene, a young woman has an angry confrontation with a Coast Guard officer, who she believes has doomed her fiancé and three other sailors by sending them, in a small motorboat, to rescue the tanker’s crew. “Please call them back,” she begs, repeatedly. Finally, with tears in her eyes, she returns to her car, in a gathering blizzard, without putting on her coat.
Burwell said, “In preview audiences, women would raise their hands and say, ‘Why does she leave the station without her coat on? I would never do that!’ ” That single moment caused them to unsuspend their disbelief—the character’s level of anguish wasn’t extreme enough to justify her oversight. It was too late to reshoot the scene, so the director turned to Burwell. “The last—and, certainly, cheapest—way to solve a problem is to have the composer adjust the emotion,” Burwell told me. He was able to resolve the issue by slightly altering the score. “I added a minor seventh chord,” he explained. “I had to create this extra angst, kind of juice it up, so that you could feel her blood boiling. It wasn’t in the performance, but sometimes you can sell these things with the music. It sneaks into the audience through the sides of their head.”
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.
That moment hadn’t made it into the script. It was added, and the task of writing “Bella’s Lullaby” fell to Burwell. After several false starts, he remembered a piece he had written, a decade earlier, for his girlfriend, the video-installation artist Christine Sciulli, who had just broken up with him. (They’re married now.) He repurposed the song and wove elements of it into his score.
“One of the executives objected to the opening note of the melody,” Burwell said. “He correctly identified it as dissonant, so he must have had a little musical training.” The high note was B-flat, over A and B-natural, in a three-tone chromatic cluster—a jarring sound that evokes the pang of a tormented love affair. “It resolves immediately, but the executive thought it was too complex for twelve-year-old girls. He said, ‘I don’t think our audience is going to go for that.’ ” In response, Burwell nodded, wrote something in a notebook, and did nothing. “I had written the song for Christine, so I wasn’t going to change it for this guy,” he said. When the executive persisted, he thought about withdrawing from the project, or asking that his name be removed from the credits. During a brief family vacation in Maine, though, he softened. He bought a synthesizer at a music store, and, working at night, wrote half a dozen non-dissonant variations and e-mailed them to the director. He got no response. When he flew to London to record the score, the executive wasn’t there, so he restored his original phrase.
“Twilight” was a surprise hit, and established an immensely profitable five-film franchise. The soundtrack went multiplatinum, and for years Burwell received e-mails from young girls who were learning to play “Bella’s Lullaby” on the piano. A decade after the movie came out, the studio executive wrote Burwell to apologize, explaining that his daughter had been very young when they were making the film, and, now that she was older, he had a better understanding of the musical sophistication of vampire-curious American tweens.
Royalties from the soundtrack enabled Burwell and Sciulli to buy a house on the beach in Amagansett, near the eastern end of Long Island: weathered wood, wraparound porch, huge windows, ocean views, his-and-hers car-charging stations in the driveway. Amagansett is mainly a summer community for wealthy New Yorkers, but Burwell and Sciulli live there most of the year, and Burwell is a member of the town’s volunteer fire department. They have two college-age sons and an eleven-year-old daughter.
Burwell’s office, which he designed himself, is a few steps from the living room. “If I had to leave the house to work—and I know many composers who do—I would never see my family, and Christine and I would be divorced,” he said. “Many of the composers I know are divorced.” The location of the house is professionally advantageous, too. Directors don’t hire him unless they trust him to work remotely. Studio executives don’t drop by on a whim, to see how things are coming along. “I’m as far from the industry as you can be without living in the ocean,” he said.
Burwell’s ancestors were wealthy landowners in northern Virginia, where his surname is pronounced as though it were almost a full syllable shorter: Burl. In 1713, the governor of the Virginia Colony complained that, because so many members of the family served as magistrates, “there will be no less than seven so near related that they will go off the Bench whenever a Cause of the Burwells come to be tried.” Carter’s father, Charles, graduated from Harvard in 1939, and enrolled at the Sorbonne. When the Second World War began, he drove an ambulance in France, travelled to Shanghai by way of the Suez Canal, worked in Haiphong, then returned to the United States and joined the Navy. Early on the morning of D Day, he was on a ship four miles from Utah Beach, using a rubber relief map to brief the amphibious force that was about to go ashore. After the war, he lived in China and in Thailand, and exported brightly colored silks and other fabrics to the U.S. He eventually moved his company to New York, and, in 1953, he married Natalie Benedict, a member of the editorial staff of Mademoiselle.
“My mother’s job was tracking down writers like Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, and getting them to deliver whatever they’d agreed to deliver,” Burwell told me. Doing that often entailed following them into Greenwich Village bars. “She loved the whole jazz scene,” Burwell went on. “She would close the bars, then go back to an apartment with all the musicians from the band, and they would just keep playing. It made a real impression on her that their work was the same thing as their fun.”
The Burwells moved to Connecticut when Carter was a year old, and both parents eventually became teachers. Carter attended a private boys’ school in Stamford, where his best friend was a boy named Steve Kraemer. “He had greasy, long hair, and when my parents first saw him they thought, Oh, no—Carter must be doing drugs,” Burwell told me. It was Kraemer who introduced him to music. “Steve played blues guitar, harmonica, piano—you name it,” he said. “But he couldn’t play them all at the same time.” Kraemer taught Burwell simple blues improvisation, turning him into a sideman.
Kraemer earned his undergraduate degree at M.I.T. and is now an astrophysicist at Catholic University. He told me that, when Burwell was in tenth grade, the father of another student gave the school a DEC computer terminal. “Carter announced that he was going to teach himself to use it,” he said. And he did, in part by writing a program that solved algebraic equations. “I didn’t see a DECwriter again until my second year of graduate school,” Kraemer said.
The summer after high school, Burwell drove his car, at high speed, into a tree. “I owe my life to the doctor who was in the emergency room when I was brought in,” he told me. “He was an ear, nose, and throat guy, but his hobby was plastic surgery, which he was sort of teaching himself.” The doctor moved Burwell’s nose from his left cheek back to its normal position. “Another doctor told me later that my forehead, on an X-ray, looked like a box of Chiclets,” Burwell said. He remained unconscious for several days, and had to be tied down in his hospital bed, to prevent him from rolling over onto what was left of his face. “The doctors told my parents that, when the swelling went down, I probably wasn’t going to look too good unless they rebuilt everything. So my mom brought in some pictures of my old nose—and also some pictures of friends of mine whose noses she liked.”
Burwell had been admitted to Harvard several months earlier. His mother wanted him to defer for a year, but her concern about his recovery inflamed his determination to leave home. When he arrived at school, his scars were still healing, his left cheekbone had been replaced by a plastic prosthesis, and the whites of his eyes were blackish red. He had lost his sense of smell and was having trouble reading.
“I don’t remember the accident as an awful experience at all, because I was unconscious for the awful part,” he told me. “And the only reason I know I look different is that a friend of mine from high school, who was at Tufts, came to visit me—like, six months after I’d seen him last—and when I answered the door he said, ‘Is Carter here?’ ”
Chip Johannessen, who was Burwell’s college roommate for four years, told me, “Freshman year, Carter stayed in our room and listened to blues records, and catalogued them and copied them onto cassette tapes.” Burwell had thought about majoring in math but ended up in fine arts, mainly because it had few requirements. He took an animation course and used the school’s Oxberry machine to make a short film called “Help, I’m Being Crushed to Death by a Black Rectangle”—a loop in which a good guy and a bad guy shoot at each other while a train, represented by a black rectangle, repeatedly runs over a woman tied to the tracks. Another fine-arts student told me, “This was back when student animations were little balls of yarn rolling around on a table. Carter’s films were always funny, and usually a little dirty.”
I was a year behind Burwell at Harvard, and met him on the staff of the Lampoon, the school’s humor magazine, to which he mainly contributed drawings. He was handsome and cool, and he never seemed to raise his voice or say cruel things about other people—traits that I found alarming at the time. (“Preternaturally serene” is how another classmate described him to me recently.) He had an older girlfriend, an art student in Boston, and he ate only peanut-butter sandwiches, butter sandwiches, and ice cream.
Eventually, he decided that he wanted to be an architect; Johannessen was admitted to Harvard Law School. But, in the spring of 1977, a few months before graduation, they saw Iggy Pop, David Bowie, and Blondie in concert, and resolved to become rock musicians instead. They rented a house on Long Island and got jobs they hated, doing diagnostics on the assembly line of a factory that made alarm equipment. One day, Burwell saw a help-wanted ad in the Times for a computer programmer at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a nonprofit research institution whose director, James D. Watson, had shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 for discovering the structure of DNA. Burwell wrote a jokey letter in which he said that, although he had none of the required skills, he would cost less to employ than someone with a Ph.D. would. Surprisingly, the letter got him the job, and he spent two years as the chief computer scientist on a protein-cataloguing project funded by a grant from the Muscular Dystrophy Association. “Watson let me live at the lab, and he would invite me to his house for breakfast with all these amazing people,” he said. When that job ended, Burwell worked on 3-D modelling and digital audio in the New York Institute of Technology’s Computer Graphics Lab, several of whose principal researchers had just left to start Pixar.
Johannessen found work designing computer databases for Avis, Bristol Myers, and Fidelity. (Like Burwell, he had no training but was able to figure things out.) They spent many late nights at CBGB, Danceteria, the Mudd Club, and other punk-rock venues in New York. Among the people they met was Clodagh Simonds, a singer and songwriter from Ireland, who heard Burwell play a synthesizer in a rehearsal space in the Music Building, on Eighth Avenue, which he and Johannessen were renting—and living in, illegally. “I thought, My God, he’s brilliant,” Simonds told me. “He was also absolutely the antithesis of a prima-donna type. I would read something in Scientific American and ask him, ‘What are fractals, exactly?’ He would take such trouble to explain.” They formed a band, and called it the Same. Johannessen, who played lead guitar, told me, “We were known as the teen-age millionaires, because our consulting gigs paid us a lot of money, which we would then spend on microphones, digital delays, and other equipment.”
The Same became regular performers at CBGB; their music was described in the Village Voice as “minimalist trance-dance synth-pop.” Johannessen told me, “Carter had a way of playing that was very percussive, a totally different way of generating sound. One night, I heard someone call him Mr. Music—this, in a place where everyone thinks they’re a musician.” The scientists at Cold Spring Harbor allowed the band to rehearse in one of the lab’s room-size Faraday cages, which eliminated electromagnetic interference with their instruments. Burwell and Johannessen invited the scientists to parties in New York.
One of Burwell’s acquaintances in the city was Skip Lievsay, a young sound editor. Lievsay knew two brothers, Joel and Ethan Coen, who were trying to raise money to finish a film they’d written. The Coens had never made a feature-length movie, and they needed a composer who was willing to work for what might turn out to be nothing. Lievsay introduced them to Burwell, and they showed him a partial rough cut of what would eventually become “Blood Simple.”
That weekend, Burwell watched Hitchcock’s “The Birds” on TV and noticed that some of its most emotionally intense scenes had no music at all. “It was either bird sounds, edited bird sounds, or electronic creations of bird sounds—and that was a fantastic first lesson in what a film score can be,” he said. No one involved with the Coens’ project knew much about filmmaking. The brothers had rented a recording space with a piano, and, to synchronize the music to the footage, they would tell Burwell how much they needed for a particular scene, and he would start a stopwatch and begin to play. He performed the entire score himself.
Burwell viewed his involvement in “Blood Simple” as an interesting, one-off adventure; afterward, he moved to Japan to work as a computer animator. But the movie won several awards, and, when the Coens got funding for another film, they hired him again. He has described that film, “Raising Arizona,” as a Zane Grey Western set in a trailer. His score, like the script, has a sense of humor: during a scene in which Nicolas Cage’s character steals a package of diapers from a convenience store, the song playing over the speakers is a Muzak-like version of the movie’s main theme. Burwell also incorporated whistling, humming, yodelling, and a banjo. (The Coens had credibility, but their budget was still small. The banjo player was their optometrist.)
Much of Burwell’s music for the Coens provides a counterpoint to their world view. “Their writing is ironic, even cynical, and a lot of their stories are structured to torture their characters,” he told me. “So one of the roles of music in their films is to augment the humanity of those characters, and when that works it makes the humor—and the torture—more effective and consequential.” When “Raising Arizona” came out, a reviewer praised Burwell’s “yearning strings,” and that phrase became the Coens’ shorthand for injections of musical warmth. “This usually happens when the characters realize how fucked they are,” Burwell said.
Their next film, “Miller’s Crossing,” which was released in 1990, makes striking use of what’s known as diegetic music—music that can be heard by a movie’s characters as well as by its audience. There’s an extended sequence in which an Irish Mob boss, played by Albert Finney, is lying in bed in his bathrobe, smoking a cigar and listening to a 78-r.p.m. record of the sappy classic “Danny Boy.” Two hit men come looking for him, but he manages to kill them, then uses one of their submachine guns to fire at their fleeing accomplices. The sequence is horrifying and also surreally funny—an emotional juxtaposition that is accentuated by the music, which plays throughout.
The Coens showed the scene to Frank Patterson, at the time the world’s most celebrated Irish tenor, and he agreed to record “Danny Boy” specifically for the film. “There were places where the action deviated from the structure of the music,” Burwell said. “So we’d say things like ‘It would be great if you were on this vowel during that shot, and then, when the car hits the tree, if you could hit your high note and hold it until the car explodes.’ ” They hired an orchestra and, to conduct it, Larry Wilcox, a veteran arranger and orchestrator. “It was all done backward, by comparison with the way movie music is done nowadays,” Burwell said. “Frank watched the scene on a monitor and sang along with it, using the cues we’d given him, and Larry conducted the orchestra by watching Frank, and the orchestra watched Larry. It seemed like something they would never be able to get in synch, but they did it perfectly, in two takes. Joel and Ethan and I were in awe.”
When Burwell composes, he typically starts on a grand piano in his living room. “There’s a keyboard in my office, but, if I have to turn something on, it feels like work,” he said. The piano is a 1947 Steinway D; it was originally bought for a Columbia Records studio in New York, known familiarly as the Church. “You can hear that piano in countless recordings,” he said. “By the time I bought it, from another studio, it needed some repair. I still fret about having replaced the hammers, but they were worn almost to the wood—some say by Dave Brubeck.”
His office is equipped with modular synthesizers, computers, mixers, routers, and a Guerrini accordion. The main work area is encircled by Genelec speakers, including a subwoofer that he described to me as “painted matte black, to resemble a small nuclear bomb.” As is the case with most musicians of his generation, he has lost some hearing, mainly in the higher frequencies; he has adjusted his sound system to compensate, like a whole-room hearing aid.
Burwell’s first ideas about a score are often suggested by the script, but he seldom begins writing until there’s at least a rough cut of the film, by which point the timing of the scenes is set. “Joel and Ethan will occasionally offer me an extra second, if I need it,” he said. (Burwell told me that famous composers—Stravinsky, Schoenberg—who signed Hollywood contracts in the forties and fifties were surprised to learn that their music was supposed to fit the film, rather than the other way around.) After working with the director to determine where the music will go, he creates a complete electronic sketch, on a synthesizer.
On a video monitor in his office, Burwell played me a scene from “Banshees” in which Farrell’s character is driving milk to town in a wagon. There’s music but no dialogue. The melody, consisting mainly of flute, harp, and strings, is slow and understated. “My job is to bring you into this world,” he said. “But, if it starts to seem like it’s about the music, that’s another thing.” He showed me the scene again, with a slightly different score: “This was my first version. It’s very similar, but the chords are more definitively major.” McDonagh had found it “too warm” and “too resolved,” he said. “Martin felt—and I agreed with him—that, at this point in the film, it would be better to keep the over-all tone a little gloomier.”
Studios usually hold test screenings before the composer has finished, so the director will add a placeholder score, called “temp music.” Burwell dislikes the practice, because, he said, once directors have watched a scene with temp music it’s hard for them to imagine it any other way—a phenomenon that’s known in the business as “temp love.” Temp music can also leave traces in finished scores. “I’ll go to the theatre and think, Hmm, I’ll bet they temped this movie with the score to ‘Gladiator,’ because that’s what it sounds like,” Burwell said. “I’ve also seen films in which I could tell that the temp music had been a piece of mine.”
For previews of “Banshees,” McDonagh used early versions of Burwell’s own melodies. The temp track included passages that didn’t make it into the final score, but Burwell said that the discarded elements had probably influenced the film—in a good way. “It’s like a classic story of how creation works,” he said. “You begin with an idea, then you throw the idea away, but the aroma of it is still in the room.”
Very little about Studio Two has changed since the late sixties. People who work at Abbey Road are reluctant to modify anything that might contain what someone described to me as “Beatle dust.” Also unchanged is the scene outside. Beatles fans still show up every day, all day long, to stride across the famous crosswalk, and to add graffiti to the wall and the gateposts, which are repainted every three months.
During part of Burwell’s recording session, I sat in a folding chair behind Everton Nelson, the first violinist and concertmaster. Burwell told me, “I say things like ‘I want it to be thrilling, and yet subdued, and then bloodcurdling’—and Everton translates it for the musicians into musician language.” Isobel Griffiths, who hired the musicians, and whom Burwell calls his fixer, said, “Carter is a god in my eyes. When I met him, in the nineties, I was terrified of him, because he was so different from other composers—from L.A., from here. He respects the musicians, he’s open to their contributions. And he’s funny.”
At the height of the pandemic, Burwell recorded the score for “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” directed by Joel Coen, in New York. He told me that he had tried to write the score exclusively for strings, to reduce the threat of virus-laden breath in the studio, but in the end it had needed some brass. “That was a challenge,” he said. The brass players sat twenty feet apart, and were divided from one another by screens. After they played, the room was kept empty for four hours while the air was circulated and filtered. For “Banshees,” no such precautions were taken.
One of the pieces that the musicians recorded in Studio Two was new even to McDonagh. Burwell said that, on the flight over, he had decided that a theme they were using in certain scenes—“for nature and mystery”—had never been fully developed. “I had nothing else to do last night, so I extended it to two minutes,” he said. (Sciulli told me, “There’s not a second when he’s not working, even when there’s no project.” Once, when he was taking time off between movies, he relaxed by enrolling in Columbia University’s master’s program in biotechnology.) Burwell suggested that McDonagh play the new version over the closing credits, “unless you have a big Bruce Springsteen song that you’re planning to use there.”
Among the musicians in Studio Two was Karen Jones, who plays first flute in the City of London Sinfonia and the London Chamber Orchestra. At one point, she asked Burwell whether a particular passage might not sound better on an alto flute, rather than on the bass flute he had written it for. (“A bass flute is like a real piece of plumbing,” Burwell told me. “Some people play it vertically, because it’s so heavy.”) He invited Jones up to the control room to hear what they’d just recorded. “I like the bass flute up there, at the top of its range,” he told her. She put on headphones. After listening, with her eyes closed, she agreed. ♦
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