A conversation with Volker Bertelmann

Photo © Hannes Caspar

In this interview we meet Volker Bertelmann, composer, producer, and performer, and Academy Award winner for Best Original Score for All Quiet on the Western Front. His work moves between prepared piano, film scoring, and studio-based sound practices, where acoustic instruments, technology, and spatial listening converge.

In this conversation, Bertelmann reflects on the hybrid role of the contemporary composer and on the fluid boundaries between composing, producing, and performing. The dialogue explores sound as a compositional material, the challenges of notation, the relationship between music and sound design in film, and the role of space as an active musical element.

Explore more of Volker Bertelmann’s work on his official website.

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Today we often speak about the hybrid figure of the composer–producer–performer. Do you identify with this description, and how do these three dimensions coexist in your work?

Yes, absolutely. I would say I embody all of these aspects in my musical life. I’m composing, I’m producing the music, and I’m performing it.

Almost everything I know about composition I learned by doing – learning by doing, really. I never formally studied music; I actually studied medicine, so my background is quite different. But from a very young age I learned a lot about producing. As a child I already had synthesizers, I was recording myself with multitrack recorders, I had microphones… it was a hobby of mine when I was a young boy.

That hobby gradually developed into performing. I was already in a band when I was about twelve, so I started playing concerts quite early. The stage has never been a foreign place for me.

Do you see choices of sound, time, or texture, as well as production and mixing, as a separate space for composition, or as an inseparable part of the creative act itself?

It really depends, and it’s always changing. Sometimes production, mixing, and sound feel like an extra layer, but very often I don’t just see sound as an integral part of a composition – I see sound as the composition itself.

I really believe in John Cage’s way of thinking: even a bird outside can be part of a composition, or the wheels of a car. When I hear rhythm, I don’t really care who or what is producing it – whether it’s a human, an object, or the wind. I just trust what I hear, and for me that already is composition.

So it depends on how I start. Sometimes, when I begin writing, I first want to find a mood through sound, and only then I start to write melodies, because the sound gives me an atmosphere to react to.

When I made the first Hauschka records, for example, my very first piano pieces felt a bit dry to me. So I recorded restaurant noises and layered them on top of the piano recordings, and suddenly the piano sounded as if it was being played in a restaurant. I loved that, because the recording immediately felt more human and tangible, instead of a pure classical piano sound from a pristine Steinway or Fazioli, where you don’t even want to hear a needle drop. That kind of perfection is beautiful too, but I feel there is sometimes an obsession with perfect sound. I actually love imperfection: I love mistakes, I love human aspects in music.

There is a lot of memory and feeling in music that is not perfectly in tune. I even think that concerts or pieces we now hear in perfect pitch – Mozart, for instance – probably didn’t sound that way at the time. They might have been slightly out of pitch, and I really love that idea.

Speaking of technology, what role does it play in your process? For some composers today, the digital audio workstation has become a primary creative space, almost replacing the score, while for others it’s more a tool to refine or finalise ideas. How does this balance work for you? Do you use technology for both sound and structure?

Oh, I use it for everything you just described. I use it like a tape machine, as something I record with. I use it for cutting up material – for example, I might play something very long and then start chopping it into small sections, and I find ideas I probably wouldn’t have discovered just by thinking compositionally in the first place. Sometimes the randomness of a performance is very nice, but you need help to structure it a bit.

Because I love to work by ear rather than starting from notation. I know some people write directly into Sibelius, and that is their composition. I don’t really like to go to notation first. I prefer to play and listen, and when I listen and feel, “This is very nice,” then I move on from there. A DAW is very helpful to get closer, for example, to an orchestral arrangement.

What’s more difficult is working with specific gestures on instruments like the violin, especially if you want to use extended techniques – like some of the techniques Helmut Lachenmann invented. For those things, you won’t find samples or library sounds that really do it; you need real instrumentalists. So in my studio, besides the DAW, all the synthesizers, technology, and plug-ins, there is almost every week a cellist or a violinist coming in, and we experiment together.

And do you find yourself thinking in visual terms, even when you are not composing for pictures or images?

Yes. I think so, although I would not say it is very intentional.

I hear music that is sometimes inspired by something similar to synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is, for example, when you see colours connected to sounds. Alexander Scriabin, for instance, was composing with colours in mind. I sometimes experience that, but I would not really describe myself as a synaesthete.

I feel more as if I enter a kind of natural trance. I do not need any drugs or anything like that. I can put myself in a space where I lose the connection to the real world, disappear into something, and forget about time. That state is, in a way, my own form of synaesthesia.

I also love walking in the woods and in the forest. The connection to nature is very helpful to reach a more metaphysical state of mind, where you are able to dream.

Have you ever felt the need to annotate, when using a score, parameters that go beyond pitch and rhythm? For example the physical preparation of the piano, or performative elements. Do you use unconventional strategies such as sketches, verbal structures, or other non-traditional forms of notation to capture these ideas?

I mostly start with verbal instructions, and then I record the idea. After that, my orchestration team finds a way to notate it if we want to reproduce the material later. There are, as I mentioned, composers like Lachenmann and others who use very expressive forms of annotation.

Sometimes I use symbols to organise improvisations. These symbols create entry points in the structure. For example, everyone knows that after four bars or two bars we switch to the “triangle”, and the group immediately understands what that means. It is a bit like intuitive conducting, without actually being the conductor. Everyone in the improvising group knows when this moment is coming. This is similar to the way some ensembles use symbolic notation to make improvisation more concrete, and I think it is a very beautiful method.

Staying with this idea of documentation, I am interested in the creative mechanisms behind it. Sometimes, the material that emerges inside the DAW is so fluid that notation struggles to capture it. Do you experience this tension? Is the written score still a capable tool for communicating these complex ideas?

Absolutely. It is very important that someone you do not speak to directly can take the score and understand what you have written. Otherwise, nothing is really concrete. At the same time, for me, the non-concrete has the same value as the concrete. I love randomness. But you have to decide what you want. Do you want something fixed, reproducible, and clearly defined, or do you want openness?

When I write, I improvise and compose in a loose way. Then I have to put that material into a frame for the orchestra, so that the players know what they have to perform. Yet there is always room for interpretation, even when the notation is very precise.

Over the years I have discovered that the musicians, the space where the piece is performed, and the conductor all influence the result. If any of these variables changes, the piece can sound completely different. It can almost become another piece.

You mentioned that the acoustic space influences the result. Does that mean you consider the room itself not just as a container, but as an active part of the orchestration?

Absolutely. For me, a room is not just a container but an active element that shapes both the music and the listening experience, almost as if it were part of the instrument itself. This applies both to live performance and to working with composed music and playback. Certain kinds of music, for example very bass-heavy and rhythm-oriented pieces, simply do not work in a church: the reverberation is so diffuse that rhythmic structures lose their definition and the composition begins to fall apart. There is no clear form anymore.

This is exactly why, in my Hauschka concerts, I love improvising. It allows me to respond to the room and to the instrument I am playing, and to adapt everything I do to what people actually hear in that specific space.

When I have a fixed programme, however, the situation is very different. I arrive at a venue where I am expected to play a specific piece by a particular composer, and sometimes I immediately think, “This is not the right room for this music.” But I still have to perform it, because it is printed in the programme. That is why I often ask concert organisers not to announce a detailed programme in advance: quite simply, I cannot know beforehand what I am going to play, because it depends on the space.

When acoustic instruments, especially strings, enter amplified or digitally treated contexts, what kind of challenges do you notice in rehearsal and performance?

It is very different, and it also requires a different way of thinking. For example, when you work with amplified music and strings, it is very hard for string players to adapt. You almost need a training period so that they can get used to it.

In many conservatories, at least in Germany, the institutions are still very traditional. They are not very used to digital treatment or amplified contexts. So when you ask classically trained musicians to work with amplification and processing, it can be a real challenge at first.

I am currently working on the idea of an expanded score, closely connected to a composition I will write in the next months. The aim is to develop a model that can reflect the continuity between acoustic space and digital space, and include the kinds of processes we have been discussing. I would like this to become an operational tool for composing: not too conceptual, but intuitive and accessible for different kinds of musicians, not only electronic musicians but also classically trained players, so that these processes are made clear in the score. It is inspired by what many great composers of the last century did with new technologies, but adapted to today’s much faster tools. What do you think about this kind of approach?

I think this idea is great, and in a way it is already being practiced to a certain extent. People like me are constantly forced to come up with ways of notating things in the score that are not traditionally notated. This includes certain kinds of expression and very specific ways of playing, for example bow pressure or how close to the bridge you play on string instruments.

Often we cannot really “notate” these things in a conventional sense. We can only describe them in the score, for instance with a line above the staff and some comments. The problem is that if someone hires the score for their orchestra and I am not there, they might not understand what I am asking for in those comments, or they might decide to ignore them and just play it in the usual way. Then the music will not sound as it is meant to sound.

So you also need someone on the other side who understands what bow pressure means, or what it means to ask for sounds from an acoustic instrument that are not traditionally beautiful: noises, scratches, things that a classical musician might initially feel are “wrong” or even harmful for the instrument. If you really want those sounds, it is important to have a way of notating them.

I know there are many different gestural and graphic approaches. I once invited a musician called Philip Corner to my festival. He studied with John Cage and is a very experimental musician from that generation. When he sends me his compositions, they are often just on a piece of paper with arrows and shapes, like escalators. At first you have no idea what he means. But once he explains it, you suddenly think, “Ah, now I understand what he is talking about.” It shows that the question is always: what kind of notation do you want to use? Is it something that is mainly for you, to fix and remember a process, or do you want it to function as a universal language that others can also understand?

I work in both directions, because I need to practise these things myself, and I really like the idea of sharing them with other musicians to see whether they find them useful.

When I created my first notated book for Hauschka, I realised that my notation could only ever be a kind of average of what someone who buys the book might actually be able to play. Every instrument used is different. My measurements for certain piano preparations do not work in the same way on every piano. I think it is the same with classical instruments in general.

You have instruments that are very bright, others that are harsh, others that are cheap and have almost no resonance. Sometimes this simply does not work for certain compositions. The score needs to acknowledge that you are writing for a whole range of instruments in the real world, not for a single ideal instrument that exists only in theory.

The prepared piano inevitably evokes the historical reference of John Cage, but in your work the preparation seems to serve a very different function. How do you position yourself in relation to the Cage tradition, and what does “preparing the piano” mean for you today?

When I started working with prepared piano, I actually didn’t know John Cage. That was one of the most interesting aspects for me. As a musician you often live inside a certain scene — hip hop, electronic music, pop, whatever. You stay within the same group of people, the same references, and a whole part of musical history remains invisible to you.

So when I began using preparations, I asked a musicologist and writer to research the history of the prepared piano for the booklet of my album. I didn’t want to appear as if I had “invented” anything. I wanted the record to sit inside a lineage of people who had already explored this instrument.

The first name he mentioned was Henry Cowell, who taught John Cage. Cowell was, in a way, a punk: he took the grand piano — the establishment instrument — and “destroyed” it with sounds. There was a kind of social movement inside that gesture. Cage continued this in his own way.

When I later toured in America, people would sometimes ask me if I had invented the prepared piano. I would say: “No, there’s a guy from your country who lived in New York and was doing this already in the 1940s.” I was genuinely surprised by how few people actually knew Cage.

Seeing myself in that lineage came only later, but I always loved Cage’s musical theory, his sense of humour, the way he described his work. I don’t think my music continues Cage’s tradition directly. My influences were much more from modern electronic music, techno, danceable structures. I used the prepared piano in a more contemporary context.

I was also not so interested in using bolts and screws, because I wanted to be invited back to venues. If you show up at a classical music hall with a bag full of screws, they will stop you at the door and say, “No way you are touching this piano.” So I developed other materials and methods that make preparation more acceptable and more practical in classical contexts.

For me, preparing the piano today is a way of expanding its language — not an act of provocation, but a way to open the instrument toward modern musical environments and to create a sound world that fits the music I want to write.

Much of your music seems to emerge from a very physical interaction with the piano, almost as if the instrument becomes a sound laboratory. How does this exploratory, hands-on phase feed into the structure and form of your pieces?

I am no longer using the piano as a pure piano. I use it as a reverb chamber, as a string instrument, as a percussion instrument, and as a piano. So, in a way, I have five or six different instruments in one.

The way I play is also not traditional. Sometimes I use only one hand on the keyboard, which might look as if I cannot play, but with the other hand I am working on a small mixing desk, choosing effects and shaping the sound in real time. I treat the piano much more as a sound source than as a classical instrument.

I also use it like a synthesiser: I change the waveform of the strings with tape, I shorten the sound, I use e-bows to extend it. I try to find in the piano all the qualities that a synthesiser has, while remaining independent from electricity.

This means I can create something that feels almost electronic even in a completely acoustic context — for example, playing in a shopping mall without any amplification.

Within film music, which composers or soundtracks have influenced the way you approach writing for images? Do you have any special composers particularly close to your heart?

I would say one of the most influential for me was Ennio Morricone. When I was young, he was writing a lot of music that felt very pure, but it always had a kind of wild undertone. You could sense that he had played in bands, that he had a different background than a “normal” classical musician. What I loved in his work was that the emotional language was very clear, and at the same time the instrumentation was always interesting and, for that time, often quite new.

He was probably the first big influence. I met him once when he was already older, and we spoke briefly. It was very special to meet him in person.

Another important figure for me is Jonny Greenwood, especially with his score for There Will Be Blood. It was the first time I heard a film score where the notation and the use of the strings felt really striking and unusual. I found it very inspiring how he wrote for strings there.

Later on, Jóhann Jóhannsson also became an important reference. We were on the same label at one point. He transformed the way you might think about combining electronic music with strings and drums. The way he treated those elements was different from how I would have worked before, but hearing his approach gave me a kind of assurance that I could work in my own way as well.

For example, I often record my scores in a modular way rather than with a full orchestra all at once. I record the high strings separately from the low strings, the drums separately, the bass separately. I treat the orchestra almost like a band. This allows me to process each group individually, with distortion, filters, or other treatments. In this way I can change the sound of the orchestra simply through production choices, rather than recording it in the traditional way you would use for a full symphonic session.

When you compose for film, do you feel that your musical language remains in continuity with your solo work, or does the presence of images transform your process in more fundamental ways?

I would say that my approach to the prepared piano is, in a way, similar to my approach in film scoring. The prepared piano is not only a way of playing the instrument; it is also a creative device. By putting obstacles into the piano, the instrument stops behaving the way you were taught to play it. That forces me to think differently about the piano, and I often work on film scores in a similar way.

Sometimes I choose instruments that I cannot really play, and I experiment with them. I try to discover sounds I can extract from them, and those sounds can become a starting point.

At the same time, the prepared piano is not always a very welcome instrument in film scores. It draws a lot of attention, and film music is, in a sense, a service to the picture. It is not meant to always be in the foreground. Film scoring requires a different approach: it is a collaboration with other art forms, and you have to acknowledge them.

For me this is not a limitation. On the contrary, I love it. I feel as though I am in a band with the other departments, and that is exactly how I try to work.

Speaking of All Quiet on the Western Front, your score is a powerful example of how just a few sounds can define an entire narrative. I really love that kind of writing. How did you arrive at that specific sonic choice for the film?

I would say it came from a mixture of different thoughts. The first one appeared right after I watched the film for the first time. I felt I wanted to base the score around an instrument from that historical period, something from around 1905 or 1906.

On my way back from Berlin to my studio, I remembered that I had a harmonium, a pump organ from my great-grandmother. It stood in her living room around 1900, and it was used to accompany Bach chorales. A few years ago, my great-grandaunt asked if I wanted to take it because otherwise they would have thrown it away. So I picked it up from the small village where I grew up and refurbished it. It was in perfect condition in my studio, almost waiting for a moment to shine.

Driving home after seeing the film, I realised: this is the instrument I prepared for this project, without knowing it.

There was also something emotional connected to it. Many times when you enter your grandparents’ or someone’s old house, there is a very specific smell, a sense of time and memory. My grandparents used to heat water on the stove and bathe in a metal tub in the kitchen. Their whole house somehow smelled like the First World War to me. That memory gave me an additional, very personal inspiration.

The other aspect is that a war film is incredibly loud. Musical elements have to be very short so they can live between the explosions, gunfire, and dialogue. They must shine in the brief moments when they can actually be heard. I often dislike film scores that sit in the background without clarity, buried under shouting, bombs, tanks — all occupying frequencies where music cannot really exist.

So I felt the need to establish very small motifs, and from there I could expand them. Toward the end of the film, for example, I developed the three-note motif into a longer string piece.

Through this process I learned how much can be done with a minimum of material, how a very small idea can grow into a rich musical piece. Since then, in many of my scores I try not only to find small motifs, but also to find ideas that allow many variations. The harmonic structure may change, but the essence of the motif remains.

In a way, it is similar to what Wagner did with his motif book: small cells that return again and again in different forms. I really like that approach.

In Conclave you work in a completely different context: a psychological thriller set in very enclosed and controlled spaces. What was the main challenge in defining the sound for this film?

I think the main challenge was to find something that creates tension but also works in terms of dynamic arcs. In Conclave the music is very functional, but at the same time I would also call it emotional.

The difficulty is that when music works in a functional way, driving the pace with pulse and rhythm, it can be hard to keep a sense of warmth, to stay close to the characters. For me, one of the challenges was to find something that could push the plot and the thriller aspect forward, without losing the humanity of the hard decisions being made during the election. Moving between those two poles was not easy.

I tried to solve this by using the cello, and especially the pulsing elements of the cello, more on the functional side, and the violins, with their arpeggios and more romantic gestures, as the warmer and more human aspect of the score. I wanted to connect these two worlds. Romantic writing, depending on how you play it, can also become very dramatic and existential, as if you are about to lose something or someone you love. I really like this kind of expression in the violins, and that was a key part of the idea.

There was also one very important turning point in the composition, which is the second cue, when the dead body of the Pope is driven away in the car. I think the cue is called “Seal the room”. I was never sure I could write that cue in the right way. It felt wrong for a long time, even when the rest of the score was already finished.

In the end we decided to replace it again, so I started from scratch. When I wrote the new cello motif for that scene, Edward and I both felt it finally worked, and we liked the theme so much that we went back and replaced several earlier cues with this new material. That was really the central challenge and breakthrough for the score.

While scoring Conclave, were you at any point thinking about Arvo Pärt’s Pro et Contra? Did that piece influence your approach in any way?

Arvo Pärt is always an inspiration for me, because I feel his music is very religious. For me it is a bit like a modern Bach. I get a lot of reflections from it.

I was not thinking specifically about Pro et Contra while working on Conclave, but his music is always somehow resonating with me. Whenever I think about music that expresses the limitation of life — the fact that we are only on this earth for a certain amount of time, and that, in my opinion, there is no second life — I feel that Pärt’s music speaks about that.

It speaks about the transition into death, and at the same time about the happiness of being alive while you are still experiencing life. And I think that in many films this is a central topic: the existential question of the joy of life and the awareness that, at some point, that lifetime will be lost.

In One Life, the musical world is characterised by a more orchestral palette, very different from All Quiet on the Western Front. How did you define the emotional direction of the score, in terms of harmony and timbral choices?

With One Life I felt that, once again, we were dealing with a very deep and difficult chapter of German history. For me it was very important to stay away from making the experience of the Holocaust feel overly pathetic. I did not want the music to be sentimental or manipulative. I wanted it to be emotional, but not overpowering, not too cheesy.

At some point I found a motif that always reminded me a little of a Jewish melody. It had a kind of Eastern European colour, which I felt was very appropriate. The challenge was to shape this without making it sound like klezmer or like a klezmer band. I wanted to stay within a very emotional theme, but keep it restrained.

The first time we hear this motif in a big way is when Nicholas Winton is on the game show and discovers that the people sitting behind him are the children he saved. That scene is extremely moving, because it is a surprise for him. He was such an unselfish person: as a broker, he went to Prague and rescued those children without any concern for his own safety.

I felt that this was the right place for a melody that could be heroic, but at the same time fragile and deeply human, not simply sentimental. That was the core idea behind it.

For you, where do you draw the line between musical composition and sound design in films? Do you see them as separate processes, or as parts of a single creative continuum?

I think they come very much from the same mother. Very often the sound design is already integrated into my music. As a musician who works in that way, I always collaborate closely with the sound designer, because it is also a question of frequency. Sound design always occupies certain frequencies in the spectrum of the film.

I once wrote the score for a film called Adrift, and around eighty percent of it takes place on the ocean. So you constantly have the sound of water. The water has a frequency range that almost covers everything. Finding music that works with water and waves in that situation is not easy.

You have to talk with the sound designer to decide, for example, when you can turn down the sound of the water so that the full score can be heard, or which frequencies each of you will occupy. I do not experience this as a problem. I actually enjoy the challenge of composing music that has to coexist with a very strong sound design.

When people ask me whether something is “music” or “sound composition”, I sometimes say: go to a big street crossing, sit on the corner, close your eyes, and listen to the rhythm of the cars. Sometimes the birds and the people on the street syncopate with each other. You can hear rhythmic compositions emerging by accident, from random events.

That is also my philosophy for film and sound design. I am a big fan of incorporating sound design into my composition.

When working on film scores, do you prefer to be involved from a very early stage — for example during scriptwriting or pre-production — or not?

There are advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that if you read a script and really love it, it can be wonderful to write music even before the film is shot. I think Fellini often did this: music was written first, and then scenes were filmed to that music. It can be very inspiring to focus only on the music without the images.

The disadvantage is that when you finally see the film, your music might be completely wrong. You may read a script imagining a fast-paced thriller, and then watch the edit and realise that no one is running at all — the tempo is very different. In that case the music you wrote might feel too big, too fast, or emotionally mismatched.

Which approach works best also depends a lot on the director. Sometimes it is better to start late, because then you have only a limited amount of time to work. And I am a big fan of limitation — including time limitation. If I have too much time, I don’t get anything done. I need a deadline, a clear frame. Within that frame, I feel I can do my best work.

If you compare the great film music tradition of the twentieth century with today, in terms of aesthetics, production, and function, what do you see as the most significant changes in the role and function of music for images?

If you look at the history of film, and even before film, music was in a way doing the job of both music and cinema, only without the images. All the great classical compositions for opera and theatre were already “music for drama”. They fulfilled many of the functions that film music has today, because there were no moving pictures yet.

Then silent film arrived, and the music written or improvised for silent movies was very close to that earlier tradition. It described almost everything you saw on screen: chases, sadness, happiness, danger. It was almost a one-to-one translation of the image into sound.

With the arrival of dialogue, music had to step back. There were now moments when music could no longer fill all the space with melody and movement. The spoken word became central, and the image itself became more interesting than simply listening to music over it.

Today we are in a phase where films are incredibly full for the senses. They are dense with sound, dialogue, effects, and visuals. As a result, I think the music is often reduced. There are only certain filmmakers, like Edward Berger for example, who still give the score real space: stretches of time where there is only music, and then long sections without music, just film and language. I really like that approach, where pieces of music are placed very clearly and deliberately.

If the acting is strong and the scene is well written, it does not always need music. Maybe just a small touch here and there. Thrillers are a bit different: in thrillers you sometimes need the pacing of the music to keep you on the edge of your seat, something that pushes you forward. The same is true for horror films, where music can be very helpful.

But in general, a lot of the music I hear today is more reduced than, for example, film scores from the 1940s and 1950s. I am quite happy about that; it feels as if things are slowly finding a new balance.

If you listen to some big blockbusters, like certain superhero movies sometimes I finish watching and realise I have no idea what the music was. I cannot hum a single melody. The music is there, but you hardly hear it as a distinct voice. It has become simply a part of the overall sound design.

Do different spatial formats influence your composition process itself? For example, does your approach change when you write for stereo, multichannel, or immersive loudspeaker setups?

Yes, absolutely. It influences me massively. I always write for the format I want to use. If I am asked to work with, say, 46 speakers, I cannot write as if it were stereo. I have to find musical ideas that really live inside that specific setup.

That is why, whenever I am invited to compose for a particular sound system, I always say: I can do it, but I want to write specifically for these speakers. I do not want to perform something in one format and then have it simply blown up into a bigger one.

The same applies to film formats. I do not like the idea of mixing in 7.1 and then shrinking everything to stereo with one button. The proper approach is to mix in 7.1 and also create a dedicated stereo mix.

You also need different mixes for different listening conditions. A laptop, for example, has no subwoofer, so below a certain frequency you hear almost nothing. You need something that is made for each listening constellation. I am a big fan of acknowledging that.

In your creative process, do you think about spatialisation right from the start, or is it something you shape later in post-production?

I think about it from the start, but not in the same way for every project. In my own work outside film, I definitely compose with spatialisation in mind.

In film, it is different. For a film score I usually think in stereo, and then the dubbing mixer thinks in 7.1 or Atmos. The spatial parameters in a film are not led only by how you record the music, but by the space you see on screen. If you see a vast open space, for example, you cannot always just use recordings that feel like a small room. You have to acknowledge that the story takes place outside, or even in a vacuum, as in space, where there is technically no sound. You can only really decide how to translate that once all the components are together in the mix.

I also conducted an experiment called Echo with Nick Wollage, Prof. Hyunkook Lee, and Dr. Katia Sochaczewska, who works extensively on augmented audio. We went to Air Studios in London and invited eight of the best sound engineers we could find. Each of them built their own Decca Tree, and I wrote music specifically for surround so that sound would travel through the room. We recorded three pieces there, and then listened to all the mixes in a Dolby cinema and in a much smaller surround room.

The interesting thing was that when I moved around the cinema, the differences between the Decca Trees were not huge. But when I sat in a specific spot, suddenly you could really hear the differences. In the small room every Decca Tree sounded different. So the result depended massively on where you were sitting.

In a way, it means you are almost recording for the person in row three, seat three, if you want surround sound to work perfectly. There are already experiments with technologies that can create a slightly different surround image for each seat, using many speakers and complex calculations, but at the moment this is still very expensive.

Maybe one day the future will be a kind of 7.1 that is calculated for each listening position, so that everyone really has a sense of the room. Right now, a lot of what we imagine for spatial formats does not fully come across in the final experience, because it depends on many parameters we cannot yet completely control.

How important is live performance in your work?

Live performance is important because it gives me a lot of freedom. And I also enjoy travelling and meeting people. I’ve always made music to meet people — not just for the sake of making music.

For me, the concert itself is just one part of the experience. Everything around it is what I really love: travelling to different countries, performing for different audiences, seeing their reactions. It’s all about interaction with people.

That is why I still play live. I wouldn’t need to, but I love it.

Today music is often experienced in fragmented ways — streamed, shuffled, embedded in fast-changing media landscapes. How do you think a composer can make their own voice truly stand out in this context?

I think this question is not only about composers. It’s a question every human being faces with the internet: How can I be someone whose work others feel is worth engaging with?

First of all, you have to make sure the simple things in life are in place: food, a home, family, friends. That is what you really need. Everything else — including your art — is something you build on top of that.

If you are one of the few people who want to turn their passion into a profession, you have to be convinced that your work, your expression, is not primarily about success. It has to be connected to you first. Only then can you find out whether it is something that should be shared with the world, and how people might react to it.

In my experience, when you are confident in what you are doing without looking too much at success, the resonance tends to grow. People respond to authenticity. They respond to something that is genuinely yours — something that may even look backwards rather than always trying to be “modern.” Often the thing that gives you a voice is simply following what fascinates you.

I personally love research. I love asking questions, digging deeper, understanding how things work. I’m mathematical in that sense: I like solving problems, and I can’t let something go until I find a solution for myself. That process of searching can help you find your voice — the path that is authentically yours.

But the result of the search is not always what you expect. You may spend years trying to become the best composer in the world, and along the way realise that you are actually a much better taxi driver — and end up choosing that life instead. The path is the important part, not the outcome.

And sometimes standing out is not even the real goal. You may feel drawn instead to helping others, working in a hospital, being useful in ways that are not public at all. You can be in a deeply meaningful position without anyone knowing your name.

So that is my long answer to your short question.

There is a lot of discussion about artificial intelligence in the music community right now. How do you personally look at these developments, and what seems most important to you?

I have a couple of thoughts about it. My feeling is that if I can read content that is on the internet, then AI systems, which also use that content, should at least be able to name the source when I am the source. Ideally, everything that is used in AI should have some kind of source code embedded, maybe through blockchain, so that everyone can see where it comes from. And if this material is used for commercial purposes, then the sources should be compensated.

If one day I worked with a programmer, I could even imagine creating my own AI identity as a source: a system that is fed only with my own material. That way, if a processor “takes” something, it takes it from a space that I myself have defined, instead of this sort of Wild West where everyone can copy and pass things around without control. In that sense, AI could become a helpful tool in my working process, especially for the many repetitive or automatic tasks that are part of what I do.

At the same time, I am a very free soul. I love to be in front of the wave. AI always seems to be somewhere else, because I am changing directions frequently. If at some point it “copies Volker”, I have already crossed to the other side of the river. That is how I see it.

So, I am not really afraid. I just keep doing my own thing. And if AI wants to copy me, it can try.

Today the professional landscape for composers and artists is changing rapidly. If you think about the profession as it is now, what kind of changes would you like to see in the future?

From my perspective, I am still a relatively young film composer – not in terms of age, but in terms of when I started working on bigger films. I really began around 2017, so I’ve been writing large scores for about seven years. In that time I had to learn everything: working with assistants, how to organise production, even changing DAW – I started out in Pro Tools.

What I noticed along the way is that the community of composers has started to connect much more. At the beginning it sometimes felt a bit closed: people were protecting their own work, wondering, “Why is he asking this? Why does she want to know that?”

I remember, for example, a concert where I played prepared piano in Italy – Francesco Donadello and Dustin O’Halloran came to see me. Afterwards they asked if I could show them how my prepared piano setup worked, because Dustin wanted to use prepared piano in one of his film scores. Of course I could have said, “No, I won’t show you anything, this is my secret weapon.” But I think the moment you start to protect things like that, it’s the beginning of your own artistic death. All your energy goes into holding on to something, and if you lose it, you feel like you lose everything.

For me, knowledge should go into the air and be available to everyone. So, Dustin and I spent two hours together, I showed him all my tricks, and afterwards we became very close friends – and we still are. For me that is a kind of metaphor for what I would like to see: less protection, more sharing.

I also think it is important that we are not too lonely in this profession. Sharing time, knowledge, experiences, and helping each other is crucial. Your problems are often my problems too – I have experienced that many times. And this, of course, can be extended to many other groups of people, not just composers.

So what I wish for the future is a field where composers – and human beings in general – meet each other as much as possible in real life, not only on screens.