Blood, Glass, and a Cannibal’s Beating Heart — Brian Reitzell
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Blood, Glass, and a Cannibal’s Beating Heart — Brian Reitzell
Amazing Moments in Timbre | Timbre and Orchestration Writings
by Kate Schau
For film composer Brian Reitzell, the invitation to score NBC’s experimental horror-drama Hannibal was the opportunity he’d been waiting for. “I’m all about timbre,” Reitzell said in a 2013 interview with Your Classical. “Disguising things, pulling out harmonics, losing fundamental pitch, taking off the attacks of instruments … Everything is fair game.” He had been looking to score a project in the horror genre, and Hannibal, with its cerebral tone and indulgent but artful blood spatter, fit the bill perfectly. The resulting score is dizzyingly rich in its timbral complexity; it features hundreds of instruments, including traditional Japanese, Gamelan, and a several homemade pieces. Reitzell wields this broad palette of timbres to create a soundtrack that is undeniably horror: sometimes creepy, often tense, and occasionally beautiful, but always chilling.
Reitzell conceived of Hannibal as existing in a “constant heightened state of reality;” from the lush sets (reportedly so frequently and thoroughly soaked with fake blood that production had to be temporarily halted due to mold growth) to the surreal dialogue (“I find the trout to be a very Nietzsche-ian fish,” protagonist Will Graham murmurs in one episode with nary a trace of irony) to the art-house cinematography on display in every episode, Hannibal invites its viewers into a space that is frequently surreal and yet deeply affecting. It seems like a miracle that a show so concerned with cajoling its audience into the warm waters of its bizarre aesthetic could survive for three seasons on network television, where frequent commercial breaks make full immersion an impossibility. But survive it did, in large part due to the hypnotic quality of Reitzell’s work.
One standout from a consistently outstanding score is “Bloodfest (From Mizumono),” composed for the season two finale. In a 2014 interview with Vulture, Reitzell describes it as “musically, probably the crown jewel of the whole season.” While most of Reitzell’s work for the score is predominantly sparse and percussive, “Bloodfest” adopts a more tonal, texturally dense approach. As a nod to The Silence of the Lambs’ association of Bach’s Goldberg Variations with Hannibal the Cannibal’s violent impulses, “Bloodfest” takes its well-known opening aria and slows it down by a factor of twenty; here it also undergoes pervasive electronic distortion. The resulting work is beautiful, haunting, and utterly essential to the atmosphere of the scene. The syrupy-slow melody of the aria gives it the trancelike quality of meditation, but none of the objectivity; like a premonition of heartbreak, it seems to operate in a temporally detached space of reminiscence where emotion is both immediate and far away.
Much of the piece’s effect is accomplished by Reitzell’s intentional manipulation of timbral signifiers. Most attacks have been removed in a kind of electronic vivisection – a commingling of the known and the unknown that creates ambiguity in the sonic space. If pressed, we could identify the fingerprints of string timbres. Possibly, there is a piano or harpsichord present, although the attacks are absent and the sustains have been artificially drawn out. Liberally applied reverb further obscures matters, denying us a temporal foothold in the space – like putting the damper pedal down on the world. With temporality temporarily abandoned, the overwhelming impression of the piece becomes that of a kaleidoscope, or a mobile: fractals; shards of glass, suspended in the air, catching light as they spin. Changes of note in the melody feel somehow aimless and yet monumental. Electronically modified string sustains take on a crystalline edge in the upper register, adding a shimmering effect akin to golden gauze caught in a breeze.
Reitzell’s choices are all the more fascinating in the context of the show. During the final moments of Hannibal season two, protagonist Will Graham is gutted by Hannibal with a curved blade and forced to watch as Hannibal slits the throat of Abigail, a young woman that both men feel fatherly affection for. At first read, it seems like “Bloodfest” would be a bizarre juxtaposition. But what makes Reitzell’s music tonally appropriate, despite the shocking violence of the scene, is the complex web of relationships surrounding these characters. Hannibal is, at its core, a show obsessed with the intersections of violence and love. This isn’t just a case of ironic scoring underlying the barbarity of a character’s actions; for Hannibal, this violence is an act of love. Thus, the finale is shocking, not for its violence, but for its tenderness. It speaks to Reitzell’s masterful manipulation of timbre, with its sensitivity to both the lovely and the grotesque, that viewers can interpret Hannibal’s actions in this scene as not only sympathetic but genuinely tragic.