All Quiet On The Western Front

Released under his own name instead of his better-known, piano-associated alias, Hauschka, composer Volker Bertelmann does a lot with a little on his menacing, minimalist score to Edward Bergers All Quiet on the Western Front (2022). The most striking -- unforgettable even -- part of the score is a repeated, pounding three-note motif introduced with the first cue and recurring only occasionally to ominous effect (notably on "Search Party," "Retreat," and "The End"). The composer has revealed that those tones were produced on his great-grandmothers harmonium, making use of its double-bass function (allowing users to replace one register with a lower octave). Much of the rest of Bertelmanns music here is a somber mix of ambient and bleakly percussive atmospheres; he deliberately omitted brass and woodwinds, opting for slow-shifting strings and more-mechanical sounds, such as layered snares, ratchet noise, and a gran cassa with objects placed on it to create a sound tail after being struck. Two of Bergers early notes to Bertelmann were to "destroy" images -- not sentimentalize -- and to aim for something never heard before, especially in a war movie. On those points, its safe to say that Bertelmann delivered. ~ Marcy Donelson