Vents MagaZine Music and Entertainment Magazine
Related Articles
For Thilo Schaller, music composition is a non-linear process of intuition and exploration that extends to all genres and mediums. His extensive background in playing the violin and clarinet inform his sense of experimentation, which is evident in his work. With credits like the horror feature The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw and the documentary A Portrait of Redemption in Five Acts, Schaller’s music can pull sorrow from the gut, raise fear from gooseflesh, and provoke the heart to pound.
We spoke with Schaller about his approach to discovering score intuitively, his journey from multi-instrumentalist to composer, and his recent work on The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw and A Portrait of Redemption in Five Acts.
As a composer, what do you feel has been your biggest career highlight to date?
It’s hard to pick a single project, but one that sticks out was the work on a horror feature called The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw, which premiered at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal in 2020. I was brought on to the project very late, so I had a few very intense but fun weeks with it.
When I got the call from producer Gianna Isabella Magliocco, I was about to leave for a conference in NYC, so I packed some composing gear and started scoring in my hotel room. Even though it was intense, I absolutely loved working with Gianna and the post-production supervisor, George Mihalka.
For me, The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw opened up a few doors, and it solidified my relationship with Gianna, whom I’ve been working with ever since. I have scored several of her short films and her latest feature documentary called A Portrait of Redemption in Five Acts, which I definitely consider another career highlight of mine.
A Portrait of Redemption in Five Acts is a film about Giampaolo Manca, the last doge of the Mala del Brenta Mafia in Venice, who spent most of his life in prison and is now trying to make up for his violent past. Like The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw, what makes this film stand out is the great collaboration with Gianna and the rest of the production team. Not only did I compose the music for this film, but I also had the opportunity to advise on the picture cut, suggesting gaps for music, etc. It was a constant exchange of ideas.
Even though we are still waiting for the general audience to see it, the test screenings in Venice were very successful. The audience’s reaction was extremely emotional, and I even received a message from Giampaolo Manca thanking me for the incredible music and for bringing his story to life. As a film composer, receiving such a compliment from the person whose story you are painting was an incredibly humbling compliment.
How did your experience at Radio A4 influence your experience?
Radio4 was my first professional audio job, and I learned a lot there. We had an amazing team in the post-production office, and I am still friends with some of my colleagues. Initially, I was hired to help with an archive of concert recordings from all the main concert halls in the Netherlands, dating back to the 1960s. My job was to listen to the recordings, evaluate the material technically and musically, make occasional touch-ups in mastering, and then enter it into a database. Basically, I was paid to listen to music and drink coffee. I usually found the scores of the works that were played and made a list of parts that I thought sounded like good references for film scoring.
During that time, I started to score my first short film. Because I was such a professional listener, I gained an insurmountable amount of invaluable work experience that helped me grow as a composer. In any other job, I would not have been able to listen to so much music.
How many instruments has this career path allowed you to play, and do you have a favorite?
I started playing violin when I was six or seven years old and took lessons for over ten years. When I was ten or eleven years old, I started playing the clarinet, which to this day, is my main instrument. As a wind player, I actually use an Electronic Wind Instrument to play and record many of my software instruments and synthesizers for my scores. It just feels more natural to me. I also learned piano, which comes in handy when composing for film. I use my keyboard every day and have an acoustic guitar nearby at the ready. My brain works differently on the different instruments when I am in the studio, so when I get stuck in my compositions, I often find inspiration by improvising on different instruments.
When composing a piece, how do you know which instrument to start with?
Rather than thinking about instruments, I start by thinking about what I want the music to achieve in a scene. After discussing the overall concept with the filmmaker or reviewing the pitch deck, I create a pretty detailed palette of sounds and instruments I want to use to create the musical tone that fits the story that we are trying to tell. I use a large orchestral template and quite a few project-specific tracks that host, for example, synth patches or less typical instruments that I select and create specifically for each film. Then, I typically start each cue depending on its nature.
If it’s rhythmic, I start with percussion. If it’s melodic, I go with melody, and so on. So, rather than deciding on a specific instrument right away, I imagine the type of sound and then follow my intuition to select instruments that work best to bring that sound to life. But it’s never a linear process. I might swap out instruments or sometimes even change my mind on the sound I want to create, but I rarely start a cue from the beginning and normally aim to target the most important highlights and take it from there.
Do you have a favorite composer or piece of work you look up to?
I find it difficult to narrow it down to one particular composer or piece because there are so many amazing artists and great works out there. I even find it hard to decide on a specific music genre.
If I had to pick a composer, it would probably be Stravinsky because of his ingenuity and use of rhythm. For a piece, I would choose the second movement of Ravel’s piano concerto in g major[SM1]. I love Ravel’s orchestrations, and in this piece, he has these beautiful, unexpected modulations that, once you hear them, sound extremely logical. I also very much love Luciano Berio’s Requies. The way he makes use of the orchestra’s sound is stunning. Ask me again next week, and I might have a new list of favorites. Obviously, I love film music as well. For example, I really enjoy how Ramin Djawadi’s scores connect to the story or the musicality of Dario Marianelli’s music.
Is there a certain genre you normally lean towards when it comes to choosing projects for yourself?
Not really. I’ve been fortunate enough to work in drama, horror, adventure, documentary, comedy, and interactive content, like video games. As long as there is a story to be told, my music has a role to play in helping that story come to life. Each genre has its unique challenges and possibilities that I love exploring. For example, when I was asked to score A Portrait of Redemption in Five Acts, I thought, ‘Well, a documentary is not gonna give me much room to be creative with the music’, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. I remember at some point; the producer said: “I don’t want this to be scored like a documentary, but rather like a narrative”. We ended up using a lot of music, and the music drives the story and the emotions.
Any upcoming projects you would like to share?
There are a few still in the planning stages. Later this month, I am off to Italy to record sounds in Poveglia – a deserted, supposedly haunted island near Venice. I plan to use those sounds in the score for Gianna Isabella Magliocco’s next documentary feature. I get to sample the sounds of an entire little island. This will be a fun one, which I am very excited about.
Another project I can’t wait to score is a horror feature by James Dixon, an emerging filmmaker from Winnipeg. I met James last year at a film festival, and he reached out to me about a month ago while visiting Toronto for the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival. We met for a drink, and he told me about the concept for his first feature film. I was immediately sucked into his story-telling world and the world of his film, even though the script is still being finalized. We ended up talking not just about his film but about life as a creative and creative process. We connected on an artistic level, and I’m excited to work with him.
—
Thanks for reading! To keep up with Thilo Schaller, check out his IMDb page!
