In the spring of 2024, Daniel Blumberg had just finished writing his score for Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” for which he’d win an Academy Award. But there was no time to relax, because the day after he finished the complicated mix for that film, he had to begin working on an even more intricate job for “The Testament of Ann Lee,” the bold musical drama from Corbet’s professional and personal partner, Mona Fastvold.
“I thought we really had to work to integrate everything when we did ‘The Brutalist,’” he said, “but this was at another level.”
“Ann Lee” tells the story of the title character, a founding leader of the Shaker religion and a woman haunted by the deaths of her four children before they reached the age of 1. The film, which stars Amanda Seyfried as Lee, is a musical of sorts, but a wildly unusual one, with songs emerging from the rhythmic sounds of the sect’s work and growing into full-scale production numbers based on 18th-century Shaker hymns often twisted into otherworldly shapes.
Blumberg knew nothing about the religion’s music before he read the script, but he was intrigued by it and found a link to avant-garde improvisational singers like Phil Minton, Maggie Nicols and Shelley Hirsch. “They were the first voices I heard in my head when I read the script,” he said. “And I got the idea of connecting that with the Shaker hymns. The Shakers weren’t professional singers; they were just random people coming together and singing in these wooden rooms. So I felt a lot of freedom.”
He mined the film’s time period for clues to the initial direction of his music, adapting body sounds and bells but also leaving the period to incorporate things like the distorted electric guitars that can be heard when an eclipse takes place during one sermon. “When we pushed it, we pushed it,” he said. “And if it was working, we’d be like, ‘How can we push this further?’ It couldn’t be a halfway thing. It had to be as extreme as possible, really.”
The music stemmed from conversations with Fastvold and with the film’s choreographer, cinematographer, sound designers and others. “The script had temporary numbers in it, but Mona said, ‘Ignore the songs in the script, because we can decide what they’ll be together.’ It was a dialogue from the start. A song might grow out of the sounds of sweeping or the sound of their bells, but we had to talk about it before the shoot so that we could be in the rhythm of what they were shooting.
“The choreography, the music and the action on screen all had to grow together rather than one at a time. And no one on the whole production except Amanda had made a musical before, so it was very experimental in all senses of the word.”
Blumberg’s duties included overseeing the singing, recording actors on the weekend at his Airbnb near the Budapest location and teaching some of the Hungarian extras to mouth words in English. “Everything was thought about to the minute details, but we also just had to trust our instincts,” said the composer, who invited Minton, Nicols and Hirsch to lay their own touches over the footage.
In addition to his 100 minutes of score and the adapted Shaker hymns, “The Testament of Ann Lee” features a couple of new songs, including “John’s Running Song,” a clanky, lurching rhythmic stomper that Fastvold and Blumberg wrote as a change of pace. Very late in the game, he wrote an end-credits song, “Clothed by the Sun,” and recorded a demo with his own voice and guitar.
“I wrote it really quickly, just sort of breathed it out,” he said. “It had a loose feel, and two days before we handed it in, I recorded Amanda on Zoom and it became a duet. I love the idea of a pop song at the end of the movie.”
He laughed at the idea of using that term for the ghostly, atmospheric number. “I don’t know what pop songs are anymore, but in my head that’s what it is.”
Blumberg was still working on the sound mix for the vinyl soundtrack as late as this month, the tail end of an immersive journey. “It was total commitment for a year, every day until 2 in the morning,” he said. “It was my whole life, really. I learned so much from being on this, but I will definitely never have an experience like this again in my whole life.”
This story first appeared in the Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
