It's all songs considered from NPR music, I'm Robin Hilton, and this is the opening music

of All Quiet on the Western Front.

On the surface, it's very beautiful, it's mournful, it feels appropriate.

But just when you're getting comfortable, just when you think you know what to expect,

composer Volker Bertleman punches a hole through everything.

It's just three notes, three simple notes, a pattern that he repeats in lots of different ways

throughout the score for the film. All Quiet on the Western Front was released late last year

on Netflix, Volker Bertleman, who some may know for his work under the name Haushka. He just

won a BAFTA for best original score for his work on the movie. He's also up for an Oscar for

Best Score. He says that he and director Edward Berger faced a number of challenges when working

on the film. One of them is how do you surprise audiences with a story that's been told so many

times before? How do you make the expected unexpected? Bertleman says they started by breaking down

conventions. Edward said to me, please do something that is destroying the pictures that is not

you know underlining what we already see. We don't need that. It's already all there.

And then he said, I want to have something for Paul Boima Stomach, who is the

you know the main protagonist. I want to have that the feeling from his stomach that he feels

always when he's in the trenches. And I want to have a snare drum that is played by somebody who

can't play the snare drum. I love that. So there were the three sentences that he said. There was

nothing else. So that's some good direction. The idea being that if you destroy a scene

with your music, you're probably doing the opposite of what some might expect. Like with the

opening piece for the movie, it's called Remains. I want to hear a little bit more of it here.

Those strings are just so lovely. And then those three huge, just massive notes. And the instrument

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