FREYJA RISING
/An Interview With Herdís Stefánsdóttir
Just when you’d finally figured out how to pronounce Guðnadóttir, here comes another Icelandic aurora. Herdís Stefánsdóttir, born in Reykjavik but beaming regularly into L.A., where she is ably represented by Patty Macmillan. Herdís most recently scored M. Night Shyamalan’s apocalyptic revery, KNOCK AT THE CABIN (IMO, his best film in years). As soon as I’d seen the film, I knew I wanted to interview her, because the score—from its first unsettling notes to its final elegiac adagio, is captivating. Recorded both in her home country and with the renowned London Contemporary Orchestra at Air Studios, it’s not only the latest indicator of the influence of the Icelandic Sound on mainstream cinema, but also a significant new exemplar of Shyamalan’s always distinctive use of score as storyteller. Herdís received her M.A. in film scoring from New York University’s Steinhardt School, and worked as an intern for the late Jóhann Jóhannsson. She is also a founding member of the progressive pop duo East of My Youth (named after a Jack Kerouac quote). Her previous credits include THE SUN IS ALSO A STAR and the HBO series WE’RE HERE.
AH: Hi, Herdís. Thanks for doing this. If you’ve scanned my Spotting Notes composer blog, you’ve seen that most of the composers I speak with are newcomers whose stars are on the rise, as yours is, but most importantly, have produced work that’s really distinctive. Keefus Ciancia (Killing Eve), Lele Marchitelli (The Young Pope), Daniel Hart (A Ghost Story, The Green Knight), Amie Doherty (Battle At Black Rock). These are the composers my students can relate to, because what they’ve achieved doesn’t seem impossible!
AH: Before we dive in, let’s make sure I’m not mangling the pronunciation of your name! Can you say it for me?
HS: It’s Her-dís, with the accent on the first syllable.
AH: And a slightly soft H, like Herr-dees, right? More or less!
HS: (laughs) Yes.
AH: Let’s start with KNOCK AT THE CABIN, since that’s the score that drew me to you, and then we can go back in time a bit. It’s a striking score, and anytime this happens, I’m intrigued by how it came to be. First, What sort of brief did M. Night give you, if indeed you got one?
HS: I didn’t get one! I went to Pennsylvania to meet Night for the first time, and he said, “I don’t like to use temp, and I don’t want to plant any ideas in your head. I just want you to figure it out.” Well, this was great, right? But also completely terrifying. Total freedom. So I went back home with one direction: figure it out. I did about two months of just exploring with sounds and tonalities, trying to match the way he had shot the film. It has this vivid, golden, classic 1990s look, and then this dark visual centerpiece: the cabin in the woods, which is something we’re familiar with from the history of cinema and especially of horror. Light and dark. The challenge was finding a palette to bring them together.
AH: Were there any classic scores/films you kind of “went to school” on as guiding lights?
HS: There’s a strong nod to Bernard Herrmann, not in the sense that I wanted my score to sound like his, but to capture some of the same qualities he did. I’m not a composer with years and years of formal training in things like analysis, but I could hear that he used a very special kind of harmonic language, and I wanted to steal some of that because it was the right language for this film. And it worked for Night.
AH: Right. Sultry and serrated at the same time. Or, in another sense, light and dark. Herrmann called himself a romantic, but to many people, his music is very disturbing. We’re still not accustomed to hearing that much diminished harmony in film music. Were there any particular Herrmann scores you latched onto?
HS: I really love the VERTIGO score.
AH: Well, you’re in good company. I’m curious…in the Prologue for KATC, and in other cues, a solo voice is used very evocatively, more as instrument than as a ‘voice,’ per se. Is that your voice?
HS: Yes, all the voices in the score are me.
AH: Ah, okay. And this carries through to other projects of yours, too, right? Not just film scores but also your album work, and the Nightbird track for Reworks. Do you think of yourself as a singer?
HS: No, not at all. I use the resources I have, and if I have to choose between a sample library and a sound I can make on my own, I make a sound. I feel like voice and fingers come from different places. Fingers on the keyboard connect to the brain and to your training, and they go to certain habitual places. But the voice comes directly from the heart.
AH: I want to go back for a minute to how you and Night found your way to common ground. Obviously, you did “figure it out.” All of his films are, in some way, what we call “think pieces.” Idea films. They ask us to ponder what it is he’s really trying to say. It can be very hard to score an idea. So I’m interested in knowing if the two of you ever talked about the bigger, broader themes of the film.
HS: Yes, but it’s funny…the first time we met we didn’t really talk much about the film. We mostly talked about life, the universe, etc. It was all very inspiring. Later on, when we got into the details of scoring, I had this bigger worldview as a foundation. Yes, sometimes we would interpret a scene very differently and he would need to say, “well, this is how I see it.” But he was always open to my take.
AH: You said earlier that some of your references were classic horror films from the 80s and 90s, and yeah, the isolated cabin in the woods, no phone service, scary intruders—
HS: I actually didn’t end up placing the film in the horror genre—not once I understood it—because it’s not a horror film. It’s a love story.
AH: Tell me how you mean that.
HS: Well, sure, the situation is your worst nightmare. The most horrifying thing we can imagine. But in the middle are these three individuals, not connected by blood, but by their unconditional love for each other…and for humankind.
AH: Those values come out so powerfully in your Epilogue—which is a gorgeous piece of writing—and they help explain why that cue is so different from all others in the score.
HS: That was intentional.
AH: It’s a a strong musical and thematic statement that basically accompanies our realization that the world has just—barely—been saved from demolition by the choice of a single human being. I’m guessing that this cue was not a first draft, that it took some time.
HS: Yes. My first reading of that ending scene was very dark. I thought, “Okay, maybe God exists, but he is an asshole. This story is a tragedy. Or maybe it’s a kind of allegory of what is happening now in the real world—with climate change, AI, conflict and hatred everywhere—and that this apocalypse is God’s punishment rained down on us for how badly we’ve screwed things up. I saw it all very pessimistically. But Night was, like, “No, this is a resolving of things.” Eric has sacrificed himself for the love of his family and for humanity, and they are realizing what a big thing that was. In the end, love saved the world. And that’s the best explanation I can give you of how the Epilogue happened.
AH: All good scores direct the audience to a certain feeling tone. Maybe we (and the director) want them to feel uneasy, agitated, thoughtful, reflective, or enchanted. What qualities were you and Night most after?
HS: I always look at the music as the fifth dimension of the storytelling. Often, the composer is saying something that isn’t being said by the dialogue. Or bringing out things that are under the surface. Night’s direction was never “do more of this or less of that.” It was “this is what’s happening. This is what the scene is about.” I tried to aim for those qualities.
AH: The cue called “Breaking In,” which is reprised in the end credits is one of the most thrillingly jagged and assaultive I’ve heard since Scott Walker’s score for CHILDHOOD OF A LEADER. It grabbed me right away. How’d you come up with this cue?
HS: It so hard to answer where things come from…out of the ether. Well, for one thing, I knew I was going to be working with the London Contemporary Orchestra (LCO) at Air, so I was mocking the cue up with the LCO sample library. I found a patch that seemed to work, but something magical happened when we went to record. Now, I’m not a string player, and when I mock up strings—especially extended techniques—I’m never sure if it’s going to work. But these players are amazing, and they just seemed to understand intuitively exactly what I wanted. I was also working with a great orchestrator, Rob Ames.
AH: But the motive that drives that cue was something you created at the keyboard, right?
HS: Yeah. But the sound was created in the studio by the players. You get spoiled by them. I don’t know how you go back from that to a sample library!
AH: I was very happy to see that M. Night saw to it that every single musician who played on your session was credited. Did you urge him to do that?
HS: Yes, I asked him for that.
AH: I also saw a number of Icelandic names in those credits. Did you export them to London?
HS: No, I’m not that big yet! I always do a lot of smaller or solo sessions with players as I build the score, so these were done in Reykjavik. I do this to get the textures I’m after.
AH: The Sacrifice and Departure cue is my favorite. Everything about it works, and it does indeed provide a fifth dimension to the movie. Were there a ton of revisions of that one, or did you hit it right away?
HS: I have to say that I hit it pretty much right away, and thank God. It was a Friday night and I was chilling, eating pasta with my kid, and I get this text from Night saying, “This cue is the one, Herdís. We have to get this right. It’s the most important scene of the film. We’re going for cosmic love…infinite love without boundaries.” And I’m, “Okay. No pressure there!” So on Saturday morning, I went into the studio, and instead of my usual piece by piece process, I wrote it in one pass. It was just there inside of me, waiting. I sent to Night, and seven minutes later, he texted back, “Oh, my God. I love it.”
AH: Well, you may not always see that happen, but in this case, I guess I’m not surprised.
AH: Let’s make a segue to your life pre-KNOCK AT THE CABIN and talk about East Of My Youth, the art-pop duo that you and Thelma founded in 2015. When you started the band, could you see on the distant horizon that one day you would score a film, or was that not even in your head at this point?
HS: When I started the band, I was studying classical composition, but I hadn’t yet found my voice as a pure composer, so I was working with visual artists, dancers, filmmakers and exploring music in a collaborative way. My mind was still very much open, and if I hadn’t moved toward film composing, I might have gone to filmmaking. Later I went to study film scoring specifically at NYU, but curiously, it was East Of My Youth and not my film music training that got me my first scoring gig. The director had seen one of our music videos and tracked me down.
AH: You mention working with dancers. All of EOMY’s music seems to lend itself to movement of an archetypally watery, feminine kind. You could almost choreograph ballet to it. How much of this—if I’m right—is intentional and how much just a happy accident of the two personalities involved?
HS: I wasn’t thinking specifically of choreographing the music, but I definitely saw myself as writing music for people to dance to…to move to…in an expressive way.
AH: If I’m reading the cultural tea leaves right, it looks like the breakout tracks from the album are Broken Glass and Go Home. Is that right?
HS: Yeah.
AH: I’m really curious about how the two of you up in Iceland came up with Go Home, because it could almost be coming out of the Mississippi Delta!
HS: Yeah, I think sometimes that I had a past life somewhere in that part of the world! The sound and the soul of gospel and early blues…yeah, there’s some connection.
AH: I often tell my students that, these days, part of your artistic persona needs to include live performance. Mica Levi, Hildur, Daniel Hart and even Max Richter are examples. Do you agree? It feels like this slightly different avenue, one that allows you to show the world an alternate facet of yourself.
HS: Yeah, listen, I think that people who want to be film composers need to understand that filmmakers are interested in artists. Artists who bring something unique to the table. You can have the whole skill set down and be able to write like Jerry Goldsmith or Hans Zimmer, and still you might not end up working with the really distinctive filmmakers, because they are looking for a certain voice.
AH: Is the you that we see in live performance the same you that we hear in your film music, or have you developed separate personas, as people like Danny Elfman and Trent Reznor did?
HS: The me in my music is just me. But as a film composer, I’m serving a story and also another artist’s vision, so it’s good to be able to change colors.
AH: I understand that your career path was originally set on law, and was then happily detoured by music. What a switch, straight from the analytical left brain to the intuitive right. What magic moment happened at the keyboard that convinced you you could make that switch?
HS: I didn’t even know I could write music. I played the piano, but I was a very bad piano student, partly because it always seemed like a tool for playing other people’s music, which I was not interested in. I didn’t even bother to learn to read the notes. But I was so deadly bored as a law student that for relief I would go into the piano rehearsal rooms and sit by myself, picking out ideas. Suddenly, those ideas started to become interesting to me. I began to realize I had this inside me, and then I expanded into arranging for choir and other small groups. I finally learned music theory properly, and discovered the basic of composing for strings. But the idea that I could actually study composition—be trained as a composer—was completely alien for me. It wasn’t until a friend who was studying at the Academy in Reykjavik opened my eyes that I got it. I threw together a bunch of music and applied to the program, never thinking I’d get in, but I did, and one thing led to another.
AH: I’m guessing from your chronology that you began interning for Jóhann Jóhannsson while you were a student at Iceland Academy. How did that come about?
HS: No, actually I was at NYU. I was living with his niece by total coincidence, and during that time, I ran out of money for my tuition—
AH: Yeah, NYU costs a small fortune.
HS: Right. Anyhow, I had started this composing thing and I didn’t want to stop just because I was out of money. So his niece said, “Well, why don’t you just write to my uncle? Maybe he’ll hire you.” So I did.
AH: Wow. Talk about a cold pitch. Jóhann told me once that he’d originally set his own path on the study of Icelandic mythology, and then been bitten by the same music bug that bit you. I’ve since felt that his rapid growth as a composer was influenced by his studies of storytelling. What are the most important things you learned from JJ? What did he pass on to you?
HS: One day, he took me into his studio and said simply, “Why are you here? What is it you want to do?” I told him I wanted to find a way to make music my life, because there was nothing I loved more. But I also knew that this was impossible unless I could also find a way to earn money. I was doing some pretty hardcore jobs, like working in a fish factory. He looked at me and said, “Well, you could grind away for ten years as my assistant or some other composer’s assistant and never find out if you have a genuine voice. Go be an artist. Get out there and risk it.” He was basically urging me to quit the internship gig, and I did.
AH: When will your Kónguló album project be released?
HS: This is a personal project I’ve been working on for a long time. Four years. But it’s finally all coming together and I think I’ll be able to get out next year.
AH: Finally, I can’t end these things without asking for your advice to those who follow in your path. Like the composers who are now my students, and students at other schools. They’ll read this interview and say, “I think I have it in me to do what she’s done, but right now it feels so far away.”
HS: You gotta dig deep. And digging deep takes time. I’m not talking about the business and career stuff. I mean the writing. Somewhere in there there’s a voice that wants to get out, and you have to dig until you find it. And don’t just listen to film music. You have to broaden your palette with as much color as you can. On the practical side, so much of making success in the film music business is just about meeting people. But especially about meeting young filmmakers—people your age who are where you are--and scoring short films, student films, low-budget indie films that will allow you to develop your voice. And sure, if you can find a working composer who really is a mentor, be an assistant for a while. You’ll learn a few things, and if you’re lucky, you might even get paid!
AH: If you’re lucky! Again, Herdís, thank you for sitting down with me, and continued good luck with what’s to come. I can’t wait to hear what’s next.