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MUSIC BEFORE MOTION
Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir’s haunting score steers Arthur’s downward spiral
By Jon Burlingame
Cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir could’ve been seen as an offbeat choice for the soundtrack to “Joker.” The Reykjavik-born, Berlin-based composer had released several solo albums and written the score for 2018’s “Sicario” sequel, “Day of the Soldado,” when Todd Phillips called.
“He seemed to know my work pretty well,” Guðnadóttir says of the writer-director. “He asked if I was interested in writing music based on my feelings from reading the script. He really didn’t give me much direction in those first calls—he was curious to see how I heard it. But I knew he was keen on the cello, so that was the leading voice from the start.”
Guðnadóttir began improvising music on her halldorophone, an electro-acoustic cello whose extra resonating strings and feedback mechanism produced an especially cutting-edge sound. “I connected really strongly with Arthur’s loneliness and his sense of being lost,” she says, “not understanding how circumstances had affected him and this underlying turbulence. I had a strong physical and emotional reaction to that and was able to find the notes that became his theme.”
She sent the music to Phillips, who was still months from shooting. Later, as the director was capturing the now iconic bathroom scene, he played the composition to Joaquin Phoenix, who right away began dancing to it. “The scene is his actual reaction to the music,” Guðnadóttir says. Without expecting to, she had helped choreograph one of the film’s signature moments. A year later, she wrote the full underscore and recorded it with a 72-piece orchestra in New York City. Adding the sometimes harsh sound of baroque stringed instruments to more conventional strings, brass and woodwinds (along with her cello tracks, which she’d already recorded in her Berlin studio), Guðnadóttir created a unique musical tapestry, at once melancholy and disturbing, for Arthur Fleck’s gradual descent into the mad clown.
“In the beginning, you feel like you’re only listening to a solo cello,” the composer says of the finished product, “but as the film develops, the orchestra steps more and more in front and in the end suffocates the cello. It’s what I felt was happening with his personal transformation.”
