This story about “The Banshees of Inisherin“ Composer Carter Burwell first appeared in TheWrap awards magazine’s Race Begins issue.
To Carter Burwell, it made perfect sense. He had just finished reading the script for Martin McDonagh’s black comedy “The Banshees of Inisherin”, and his thoughts were quite clear.
“It’s a script about two guys on a little island off the coast of Ireland during the Irish Civil War,” he said. “And I said to Martin: ‘Is there any reason why music I would not do it somehow be Irish?
Well yes, there was a reason. “He alone hated that idea,” Burwell said, laughing. “It clearly hit a nerve of some sort, so I never brought that up again. But it wasn’t obvious what else it should be, so I waited until I saw some of the footage before I started thinking about it again.”
Of course, McDonagh didn’t even try to remove other sounds of Irishness from his story of a pair of friends, played by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, who have a fight that turns unexpectedly gruesome—unexpectedly, that is, just for people. who aren’t familiar with McDonagh’s brutal humor.
Gleeson’s character Colm plays the violin at the local pub and listens to records by Irish tenor John McCormack. “You’re very much in Ireland, but I think Martin wanted the score to take you out of there and not just be an Irish story,” Burwell said. “Everything else in the film throws you into the Irish: the scenery, the clothes, you name it. but he wanted something that would take you away a bit, and that ended up being what I focused on.”
McDonagh gave Burwell some clues. He chose a piece of Bulgarian choral music to open the film and placed a montage midway through the film with gamelan music from Indonesia. “I love it, but it was a bit unusual in this setting,” Burwell said. “But I thought I could make that piece work if I used some gamelan sounds in my score before that piece played. That way it won’t sound like it came out of nowhere.”
Burwell placed low gongs and marimbas under his melodies to prepare the audience’s ears for the arrival of the Indonesian piece, but McDonagh later asked his composer to write the music for that sequence as well. “It was the right decision,” said Burwell, “but it means that the gamelan still lives like a ghost within my orchestration, even if we got rid of that piece.”
Burwell, whose frequent work with the Coen brothers shows that he is well attuned to dark humor, also made heavy use of percussion instruments in his score. “I got to those instruments because there’s something very childish about the Colin Farrell character, and they’re the kind of instruments you’d find in an elementary school.”
Another characteristic of the score is how unobtrusive it is; even when the action turns (quietly) creepy, the music stops. “If you describe the action to someone who hasn’t seen the movie, it can sound extreme,” Burwell said. “At the same time, no one raises their voice. Nobody runs faster than a walk.
“That’s one of the interesting things about it and it makes it a Martin McDonagh production. This extreme violence and emotional darkness continues, but within a completely normal context. I don’t know if I ever got up forte in music writing. “It’s just about two guys, and the way it’s filmed and scored is designed to be intimate.”
Read more of the Race Begins issue here.
