The Daily - The Sunday Read: ‘The Composer at the Frontier of Movie Music’

Episode Date: September 19, 2021

You have almost certainly heard Nicholas Britell’s music, even if you don’t know his name. More than any other contemporary composer, he appears to have the whole of music history at his command, shifting easily between vocabularies, often in the same film.His most arresting scores tend to fuse both ends of his musical education. “Succession” is 18th-century court music married to heart-pounding beats; “Moonlight” chops and screws a classical piano-and-violin duet as if it’s a Three 6 Mafia track.Britell’s C.V. reads like the setup for a comedy flick: a Harvard-educated, world-class pianist who studied psychology and once played in a moderately successful hip-hop band, who wound up managing portfolios on Wall Street.That is until he started scoring movies, and quickly acquired Academy Award nominations.“What I’ve found in the past,” said Jon Burlingame, a film-music historian, “is that people have found it impossible to incorporate such modern musical forms as hip-hop into dramatic underscore for films. When Nick did it in ‘Moonlight,’ I was frankly stunned. I didn’t think it was possible.”This story was written by Jamie Fisher and recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

My name is Jamie Fisher, and I'm a research editor at the New York Times Magazine, and I'm also a freelance writer. My latest piece is about the film and television composer Nicholas Bertel. I don't have a single memory of the first time I heard his music. I just gradually realized that all of the film and television music I was drawn to invariably when the credit sequence came up, it would be by Nichols Bertel. How could all of these different projects that are also, I mean, the sound is so accessible and wonderful. How could they all come from the same person when they're so varied? And I wanted to know, who is Nicholas Bertel?

How did he score, like, a comedy epic like Vice? epic like Vice. But also If Beale Street Could Talk, which has this beautiful jazzy analog sound. And I have a memory of like watching Succession and like more than the plot, what kept me going through the first season was just waiting for this theme that he had written. There's just this fresh sound to it where it's classical music, and then there's these heavy beats, there's a sleigh bell, and there's this pop that almost sounds like a can of LaCroix popping open. And it just felt like relentlessly contemporary in the most wonderful way. And I just, I had to know more. I spoke early on with a teacher of Nick's when he had first started to try writing film music, who told me he was just amazed by the cheerful way Nick would scrap everything and start over if he was asked to, just completely in a good spirit without mourning for

the work he'd lost, you know? And he just made me feel like nothing is ever lost. The energy that you put into that informs the approach that you take later. And the final thing that you get, it's not just what you wanted, it's also what the director wanted. So I reached out to Nick and we met in his studio back in the fall of 2019. At that point,

he just started working on the score for the limited series, The Underground Railroad. And since then, that score has been nominated for an Emmy Award. So here's my story, The Composer at the Frontier of Movie Music, read by Julia Whalen.

This was recorded by Autumn. Autumn is an app you can download to listen to lots of audio stories from publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The Atlantic. The first time I understood what it is that the composer Nicholas Bertel does for a film, understood with my whole body, I was in his studio, listening to a mistake he had made and the way he had fixed it. Earlier, in a cafe off Lincoln Center, I had asked him about the process of making Moonlight, the Oscar-winning coming-of-age story he scored for Barry Jenkins.

Bertel told me about a scene early in the film in which the protagonist's mentor teaches him to swim. I was looking at the sequence like, oh, Juan and Little swim, Bertel said. It's a beautiful moment. This will be something special he can carry with him. So Bertel wrote a sweet piece in F major, an orchestral swell with a clarinet singing a variation on Little's theme on top. He played it for Jenkins. The response was a visceral nope. Jenkins urged him to think of the scene as a spiritual baptism. This wasn't simple optimism or happiness. It was the first day of the rest of Little's life. And I still get moved even just thinking about it, Bertel said, because I immediately knew. On the spot, he began improvising something darker, in D minor, with the virtuosic feeling of a cadenza. I was playing it on my keyboard with

a kind of fake violence, he said. Barry was directing me from the couch, and so right there, I just made it in front of him. In his studio, Bertel played me the scene. First, he queued up his original attempt over footage from an early cut. It was tender, unambiguous movie music that could have scored any rite of passage. I pictured a high school football team triumphing against all odds. Then he queued up Middle of the World, the music he made with Jenkins. The violin plays jolting waves of arpeggios, wild and exhilarating. Little vanishes into the ocean, one holding him, but somehow not protecting him, only initiating him into a kind of violent abandon.

You watch with your heart in your throat. It's beautiful and also, somehow, terrifying. The studio I was listening in, seated in the same spot Jenkins occupied as the music was written, is the size a New York realtor would market as a child's bedroom in an apartment overlooking the Hudson. It's dark, the walls covered with gray acoustic foam, and Bertel often works with the lights off. He shares the apartment with his wife, the cellist Caitlin Sullivan, who is constantly and correctly

encouraging me to take walks. She also worries that he drinks too much Perrier. There are bookshelves and vintage movie posters on the walls, chariots of fire greets you at the entrance, and a small The End woofer the size of a washing machine. Brittel's scores include tones so low that they feel less like something audible and more like approaching weather. Last year, in February, Brittel invited me back to the studio to watch him and Jenkins at work. The two hadn't previously allowed anyone to sit in on their sessions, day-long confabs that involve near-clinical infusions of Shake Shack. They were still early in their work on The Underground Railroad, a ten-part series based on the novel by Colson Whitehead. It is Bertel's first television collaboration with Jenkins, and his compositions for it are less a single score than ten intersecting, fully realized musical universes. The first piece

he played me at the session was something the two men made hours before. A dark, inquisitive piano sequence, only a few bars long, circling the drain of a few dissonant notes. circling the drain of a few dissonant notes. One of the things we keep discovering is, for some reason, pianos, he said. Really specific pianos, like slightly warped. He played another sequence to demonstrate. It's felted. The piano's hammers are padded with extra cloth, so it's really muffled.

But it's always like, piano works. Jenkins sauntered in after finishing his burger in the kitchen. All he had on hand were a few unedited shots, he explained. But I like to have some kind of picture while we're working. If it works with this picture, it feels like you can tell it's part of the world. He had been shooting in Georgia since August and flew up to spend the weekend with Bertel before heading back to the set. By this point, his voice sounded felted too. 92 days, 24 to go, he said, rubbing his face. We don't normally work like this until we're done. But yeah, no choice. In hindsight, this wasn't quite true. Only weeks later, the pandemic would shutter production for months,

leaving them to finish their work in a sun-drenched quarantine pod in Los Angeles. Still, by the end of the session, Jenkins had slid down until he was sitting on the floor, slumped against the couch with his hoodie tugged over his face. You can't make a meal of how tired I am when you write this, he warned. I was more struck by how comfortable the two men seemed together. Bertel's voice even sounded different when he was with Jenkins, half an octave down, words running together easily. You have to understand, Jenkins said,

when we did Moonlight, I didn't really know Nick at that point. This is the origin of the Jenkins-Brettel partnership, the filmmaking equivalent of buying a house unseen. The producer Jeremy Kleiner had arranged an afternoon coffee between the men, which turned into evening drinks, the two of them talking for hours, mostly not about music. They just vibed the whole time, Sullivan told me, and Barry hired him. He hired him never having heard any samples of Nick's music of any kind. We had one meeting, Jenkins said. We went off and shot the film, and then it was like, oh, just come to New York. and said. We went off and shot the film, and then it was like, oh, just come to New York. And so I walk into this place, he said, giving considerable side eye to the premises.

We're gonna work in your bedroom? How's that gonna work? But he made all this wonderful music. So yeah, now it's like a little home away from home. It's a little mystical, Bertel said, deflecting credit to the tiny studio. I think a lot of it is just feeling like it's a little mystical, Bertel said, deflecting credit to the tiny studio. I think a lot of it is just feeling like it's a safe space where you can kind of zone off and go on these little journeys. He sat back and smiled, happy to vanish into the acoustic foam. You have almost certainly heard Nicholas Bertel's music, even if you don't know his name. He is one of the hardest-working film composers of the past decade, despite having spent its early years wrapping up a career at a hedge fund.

More than any other contemporary composer, he appears to have the whole of music history at his command, shifting easily between vocabularies, often in the same film. You may have seen The Big Short, 2015, the manic, Oscar-winning story of the 2008 financial crash, whose score tried to musically embody subprime mortgages. Or maybe Moonlight, 2016, narrated by a violin and piano theme that matures with the protagonist, tugged lower and richer by techniques borrowed from southern Maybe you remember Bobby Riggs' sleazy, upright piano

competing with Billie Jean King's majestic Concert Grand in Battle of the Sexes, 2017. The vinyl soft crackle of If Beale Street Could Talk, 2018. Or the alluringly deranged sweep of Vice, 2018. Brutel also scored HBO's Succession, whose title sequence would become the most unexpected hit of 2019 that wasn't Old Town Road. A piece initially indistinguishable from the period music for frou-frou costume dramas, except that in the background, maids are carrying value packs of bounty and wealthy sociopaths are making penis jokes. The theme is dementedly catchy, classical phrases capped with an industrial fizz that sounds like a can of LaCroix popping open,

or a cash register. Why is the Succession theme so memeable? The website Vulture asked. On the same day, the rapper Pusha T put out a remix with Bratel's enthusiastic collaboration. Nick Bratel, the film music historian John Burlingame told me, is a fascinating example of where film music has gone. Consider what movies sounded like in their earliest years. The swashbucklers that Eric Korngold scored in the 1930s, or Max Steiner's lush Casablanca,

or the sweeping historical epics like Ben-Hur that Miklos Rocha wrote for in the 50s. These composers had been classically taught and turned out symphonic, romantic scores. By the 60s, film composers like Henry Mancini and Quincy Jones were coming up through a different musical education, rooted in jazz and pop. The next few decades featured competing visions of what film music could do. Vangelis's triumphal synths, but also John Williams, whose blockbuster orchestrations wouldn't have been unfamiliar to Korngold. Hans Zimmer managed to do both, inflecting his classical scores with a menacing buzz. And then, Burlingame says, you get to Nick Britell. His classical training gives him a fairly large toolbox from which to

draw, including the traditional orchestra, like the 90-piece ensemble in Weiss. But his age and experience have also informed him in terms of much more contemporary musical forms, Burlingame points out. From hip-hop especially, Briteel learned how to make sounds speak by ripping them open, warping notes to convey an affecting emotional arc rarely heard in cinema. The composers and filmmakers I spoke to about Brattel emphasized the poetic intelligence he brings to his work, but his emotional reach is equally important. But his emotional reach is equally important. Part of his job is helping directors and producers feel things they can't explain but know they want to feel.

As Jesse Armstrong, the showrunner for Succession, told me, I'm a musical Neanderthal, really. Nick speaks Neander. Dee Dee Gardner, who produced The Big Short and Beale Street and is an executive producer for the Underground Railroad, told me that when you introduce Bertel to someone, it's like the air starts to vibrate and hum. He is, she says, the perfect person. He's so expansive. The director Adam McKay, who worked closely with Bertel on The Big Short and Vice, likes to joke that you can't talk about Bertel in factual terms because all you'll do is gush about him. Bertel's only flaw that he can think of, he says, is that the composer doesn't have true perfect pitch. He has relative perfect pitch. McKay delights in reciting Bertel's CV, which reads like a setup for one of his comedies. A Harvard-educated, world-class pianist who studied psychology and once played

keys in a moderately successful hip-hop band. And then he graduates, and you think, oh, he's going to go into music. No. Instead, McKay says, Bertel winds up managing portfolios at one of the biggest currency trading hedge funds on Wall Street. And then he goes and starts scoring movies. And within five years, he's nominated for Academy Awards. You could practically hear McKay

shaking his head through the phone. Brutal. Bertel, who is 40, grew up mostly in Manhattan, in a home with the kind of devout enthusiasm for the arts characteristic of many Upper West Side Jewish families. His father, a lawyer, had a layman's love of music, and Bertel remembers figuring out the distinction between Bach and Mozart as his dad toggled between classical stations on the car radio. His mother was a musical comedy actress before becoming a teacher. In the 1940s, in West Palm Beach, Florida, she was a child star on a local television program called something like

Aunt Lollipop's Story Hour, and the apartment was filled with old books of Rogers and Hart show tunes. Bertel learned to play on a broken player piano that his grandmother picked up from a neighbor. He began tinkering with it when he was five, driven by an overwhelming desire to figure out chariots of fire. Slowly, he started writing his own boyish pieces. He and his younger brother

each fondly remember a repetitive number called the Train Symphony, and then, as an adolescent, imaginary scores. I would write fake TV themes for myself all the time, he says. This is a fall drama on ABC, or this is a family comedy, or this is a detective story. He went to private school in New York City until he was 13, when the family moved to Westport, Connecticut. On weekends, he commuted into the city for the Juilliard Pre-College Program, where he trained as a pianist. He commuted, too, between musical worlds. It was the early 90s, and Bertel was transfixed by the hip-hop swallowing the city. The lyrics and the beats you could feel in your chest, and the mystery of early samples, recordings of recordings that gradually morphed, leaving a fossil record of every person who touched them.

He thought of hip-hop as otherworldly in the same way that he found Bach otherworldly. He remembers being walloped by the opening of A Tribe Called Quest's excursions, the almost muddy double bass sample, the way Q-Tip drops in, the drum break adding some final alchemical element. It was like learning, as a teenager, that there were more letters to the alphabet than he'd been taught.

He arrived for his freshman year at Harvard, loving everything, math and history, Brahms and Gangstar, and was abruptly confronted by the necessity of choice. Lost and unsure, he left. For a year, he tried to see if he was meant to become a concert pianist, living with his parents and scraping up work around the tri-state area. Cocktail gigs, the Jewish organist at the Episcopal Church. The loneliness was sharper than he had anticipated. After a year, he went back to Harvard with the same sense of indecision, only now with the understanding that he couldn't work alone. At a party soon after he returned to campus, he approached two guys rapping along with a DJ and drums and asked if they needed keys. rapping along with a DJ and drums, and asked if they needed keys. The group they formed,

the Witness Protection Program, consumed his next three years. At its height, the group toured the Northeastern College and club circuits and opened for acts like Blackalicious and Jurassic Five. At the same time, Bertel became close with another classmate, Nick Lavelle, who was working on a film and invited Bertel to write the score. They spent hours together watching films John Williams worked on, pausing often to interrogate the music. Bertel thinks about Lavelle often. He died in 2015 in a car accident, just as Bertel's musical career was taking off. He was the first person to ask Bertel to write a score, and the question proved transformative. We were always working on this movie, and I was always with the band, and those experiences really defined my life, Bertel says.

But the band broke up after college, and the film he'd done with Lavelle wasn't headed to theaters anytime soon. A classmate who worked at Bear Stearns suggested that Brattel consider interviewing. He got an offer and took it. I was thinking to myself, oh, in six months I'll probably go, Brattel recalls. Lavelle's film would break out. People would snap up the beats he was sending around. Someone would hire him to produce. Except none of that happened. For years. Caitlin Sullivan, Bertel's wife, has played on nearly all his scores, including a melody symbolizing love in Beale Street. She is also the reason Bertel is not researching emerging market currencies in a midtown office. The two first met when they were 18, studying music at a summer program in Aspen, Colorado, this despite years of attending the same Juilliard program. They reunited after college,

when Sullivan was embarking on her career as a professional cellist. She took Bertel out for a birthday dinner in 2005, and they have been together ever since. By that point, Bertel had been in finance for about a year, traveling to interview central bankers and people in finance ministries in Europe and East Asia. He thought he was happy. If you're a curious person, Sullivan observes, a hyper-competent person, it's sometimes hard to actually parse out your true feelings. For years, she watched him come home and play the piano or improvise beats on his old keyboard. He'd be up, in a suit, gone around 7.30 a.m. every day and home around dinnertime, she says, but he would need to touch the piano. He scrounged time for projects with friends, including short films for a former

classmate, Natalie Portman. In one of her films, he made a cameo as a cocktail pianist, tucked discreetly behind Lauren Bacall. In 2008, on a vacation, Sullivan watched the heavy way Bertel would pull out his BlackBerry to check the markets. For months, he had been so depressed that it felt like vertigo, but until Sullivan told him he was unhappy, he hadn't fully known it. The markets, meanwhile, had guttered, Bear Stearns had folded in front of his eyes, and terrifyingly, the smartest people he knew had no idea what was going on. People were traumatized, he says.

It was scary to see that end to what I knew about the way the world's economy worked. The demolished instrumentals leading up to the market's implosion in the Big Short are the closest Bertel gets to a vocabulary for what it was like to watch the world crash down. In 2010, Bertel proposed to Sullivan. A month later, he gave notice. By the time they married, he had started to make trips to Los Angeles, a two-year odyssey of bouncing couches and trying to arrange coffee dates with directors and producers. I was down to do anything, he says. I wrote telephone hold music for free. For free. One evening, Jeremy Kleiner, an executive at Plan B Entertainment,

attended a party and noticed someone playing Gershwin in the corner of the room. We had just gotten a green light for the script of Twelve Years a Slave and hadn't really gotten into the question of composers, Kleiner says. And here's this guy playing on a grand piano at a cocktail party. Kleiner introduced Bertel to the film's director, Steve McQueen, then Plan B introduced him to McKay, and then to Jenkins, and within five years, Bertel was being nominated for Oscars. If there's a through line across Bertel's work, it may be his fascination with winding melodies that make harmonic missteps. The most ambitious example is Vice, a kind of anti-heroic symphony with an evil heartbeat at its center. It's a profound technical achievement, buzzing with double fugues and

allusions to multiple styles and genres, gesturing toward big band jazz before ducking away into solo piano or full orchestra. But it's also a statement about how much Adam McKay trusts Britell. I don't even know how to describe our working relationship, McKay told me. He's almost like a producer, because I'll tell him the idea from the second I have the premise, and he and I will just start kicking it around. When McKay was beginning to think about a Dick Cheney mock-you biopic, Bertel sent him a note about Mahler's Ninth. The symphony was the last Mahler completed. While working on it, he was slowly

dying from a heart condition. Leonard Bernstein suggested that the symphony's skewed, percussive opening was a reflection of Mahler's own uneven heartbeat. This seemed like an appropriate reference point for a movie about a man whose life has been framed by repeated heart attacks. a man whose life has been framed by repeated heart attacks. McKay began listening to the Ninth constantly, writing the script to it, and when he finished, Bertel wrote a twisted, magisterial, Ninth-like score. Vice sounds like Peter and the Wolf, if Peter were also the wolf. Dick Cheney's heart is central to understanding his story, Bertel told me in his studio. What is a malignant rhythm? How rhythmically could you play with it? And then I started doing

that harmonically as well. He turned to his Triton keyboard, the same one he used in the Witness Protection Program, and played the theme slowly, landing hard on the dissonant chords and staring at me intently, as if he were channeling either Dick Cheney or the Phantom of the Opera. It has the shape of something strong, another brilliant, energetic Jewish kid who infused the classical canon with the buoyant new genre he loved. Bertel's most arresting scores tend to fuse both ends of his musical education. Succession is 18th century court music married to heart-pounding beats. Moonlight chops and screws a classical piano and violin duet as if it's a 3-6 mafia track. What I've found in the past, John Burlingame told me, is that people have found it impossible to incorporate such modern musical forms as hip-hop into dramatic underscore for films. When Nick

did it in Moonlight, I was frankly stunned. I didn't think it was possible. Hip-hop was Bertel's initiation to the fragility of sound, how it could be sampled, stretched, and broken, and somehow, through the breaking, made more powerful. He loves hearing a story in the sounds around notes, the hiss of spun vinyl, or the musician's breathing. Bertel's signature may be music that's been through something. As Barry Jenkins puts it, a productive line of inquiry for

the two of them has been, how can we break this? Take the scene in Beale Street when Daniel struggles to tell Fonny what happened to him in prison. A rape, unmistakable in James Baldwin's novel that the movie seems to allude to through Brattel's music and Brian Tyree Henry's remarkable face. On the surface, Miles Davis plays coolly on a record player, but underneath, Brattel has taken the cellos from Eros,

which scored an early romantic scene, and bent them. We talked about it almost like we were harming them, he told me, hurting the sound, making it feel like the sound is damaged. You find similar damage in Brattel's breakout score for The Big Short. similar damage in Bertel's breakout score for The Big Short. As the movie opens in the 1970s, funky horns are the sound of irrational exuberance. Later, when Steve Carell's character realizes the industry is built on 40 years of sand, they return as a faint whine, like a chastened mosquito. That's what happened to his understanding, Bertel said. It's been mangled and stretched out and transformed.

The question of what hip-hop means for Bertel may come together most concretely on succession. He had read the pilot script and visited the set with Adam McKay, who suggested him for the project. The show had to have gravitas, Jesse Armstrong told him, but it was also deeply absurd, and the music would have to say both these things at once. It wasn't clear how Bertel could make that happen. Then he started thinking about Kendall Roy, one of the heirs apparent who anchor the show. The first thing you see, one of the heirs apparent who anchor the show. The first thing you see, Britell said, is he's in the back of this car rapping to the Beastie Boys. It's hard not to think about Kendall as a failed Britell, a parallel universe version of what he might have been if he had stayed in finance,

a Wall Street bro who hides inside his headphones and disconnects from the world he chose. who hides inside his headphones and disconnects from the world he chose. The scene, a young man rapping earnestly inside a chauffeured car, offered a window into how the Roy's self-conception might contrast sharply with their destructive incompetence. What if the sound that they imagined for themselves was this dark, courtly, late 1700s harmonic sound, Bertel asked himself. I played Jesse some of these chords, he said, and he was just sort of like, yes. It was just a wonderful, hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck feeling that you don't often have, Armstrong told me. To get that feeling, to feel like, oh my god, this is something which just feels like the show. The waltz-like rhythm reflecting the unsteady dance between the

three central siblings was a smart insight that continues to shape the way Armstrong writes the series. The show's addictive title sequence was the last recording Bertel made for season one. He had structured the season's music like a symphony. The title theme, like an overture, introduces you to all the elements you'll hear in the show, which Bertel recited for me. The beguiling melody, the detuned pianos, the cello melody, the idea of these huge beats, the weird sleigh bell. The sleigh bell?

That's its own thing, Bertel admitted. That actually doesn't appear in other parts of the show. The main theme is everything but brighter. You're presented with these ideas so you will both recognize them, but also notice how they change, and you'll have this set of expectations. This is the world you're about to enter. When Bertel sent the title theme to the production team, he reminded himself that the nature of his profession is adapting. He's used to coming up with a hundred ideas, presenting a director a few dozen, and possibly seeing them all rejected.

But he also thought, I really don't know what to do if they don't like this. I'll never forget it, Bertel said. Jesse sent an email back, and he was like, I think the right words for this are f*** yeah. As Jenkins and I sat on the little studio couch, Bertel played an early sketch for the opening of the Underground Railroad. A violin bent into a brass fanfare, and then a piano waltzed in, suggesting mystery, another winding melody that makes bewitching missteps. At this point, he and Jenkins had about three hours of music drafted,

and at least as many still to go. He scrolled down a long list of file names. Some of these things, we have a sort of very loose, amorphous idea, he said, hitting play on another piece. So this is an idea of descending downward. I think this comes from the cicada, Jenkins said, just that one melody. He started singing softly. Do, do, do, do. Jenkins had been making recordings on set, collecting natural sounds that Bertel would pitch down to make instruments. The piano track he'd played me earlier started out as a field recording, the whistle of cicadas and bird noise, an airy crackling that turned out to be cotton. I just do play-doh with some of this

audio, Bertel said, filtering out high frequencies and adding reverb until the cicadas sounded blurry and spectral. In one track, an insect caught in the play-Doh turned into a bell, tolling the same three ghostly notes. We don't know what that is, by the way, Jenkins said. We just call him Fred now. Bertel started a new piano track, Jenkins, and this piano was to match Bertel trying to match Fred's melody Jenkins so Fred the bug has to get a co-producer credit Jenkins had also been drawn to the noises of the human environment during the shoot we were shooting down in Savannah he said and there was a construction site next to our set and I was like oh that drill has a really nice rhythm to it. And so I had the PAs go out and record it and sent it to Nick. Bertel started laughing. I remember getting these texts from you in the

middle of the day, he said, and it was just noise. There's a slight Willy Wonka vibe to Bertel in his studio. And as I processed Fred and the drill, he and Jenkins grinned like the inventors of the everlasting gobstopper. Over time, the two have grown more comfortable with thinking about a score in terms of manipulated recordings, not just a composition for instruments. If everything's in context, Bertel said, the drill is music. In Moonlight, they used ocean sounds. In Beale Street, subways. They were looking forward to getting new fire sounds. We actually do have people on set burning things, Jenkins said.

Bertel queued up early footage from the show. Images of an enslaved family in ragged clothing, faces stinging with confrontation. A white-haired black man standing alone in a cotton field as cicada noises crackled, as if the field were catching fire. Two young black women seated at a dance, a man bowing and offering his hand, a fairy tale sequence that feels more like a horror movie. I don't mind the fire being out by that point, Jenkins said, right as he reached for her hand. I didn't fully understand what they were up to until Bertel played me a trailer they made for the Television Critics Association, a summary of the show's music that starts with frantic arpeggios, almost unbearably high,

then moves through the waltzing mid-range of the Fred the Bug piano melody, and settles gradually into a resonant bass. It's that descending idea, he said, going underground, going downward. The final bass notes were made from the sounds of the drill. You literally hit earth. They weren't drawn to the drill just because they wanted to allude to the show's title. It was an attraction Jenkins had

to a sound that felt right and then became right. We start with an idea, Bertel said. It's a feeling. It could even be really subtle. That's why I'm so sensitive to these early things. We need those early places. And the great part is when you start with these things and you don't know why, and then they actually start to make sense, Jenkins said. And you're just like, oh, that's why we've been following this. Sitting in the dark with empty bottles of seltzer, none of us could have anticipated that the world was about to shut down. By the time the show neared completion a year later,

Bertel and Jenkins would be engaged in their most radical experiments to date. By that point, in their most radical experiments to date. By that point, Bertel's language for parts of the project were bracingly tactile. He spoke of stripping sounds down to an abrasive, raw surface, peeling them to their bones. When he bent notes enough, he says, they revealed whole other characters. The Underground Railroad emerged from last year broken and changed, but still recognizable. You can feel that February session still underfoot. It all winds up somewhere, Bertel had told me. There's no wrong turn. As we wrapped up, Jenkins concluded, the piano just works for the show. It does.

Like, I can see the episodes when I hear this stuff. And what's so interesting is at no point in any of the other projects did we feel that way, Bertel said. The piano's just the bedrock, man, Jenkins said. The piano and Fred. you