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Composing the rating for a war film can be, apologies for the metaphor, a minefield. Go too heavy on the orchestral zest — all skyrocketing strings and growing base — and you can rapidly swing into schmaltz. Go too little and minimalist, and the onscreen surges can subdue your music. Plus, there’s the threat of familiarity, of echoing the grand and impressive ratings of war movies previous.

So, when director Edward Berger asked his routine composer, Volker Bertelmann, to compose a rating for his antiwar drama All Quiet on the Western Front, he informed him to break all the guidelines.

“I said, ‘I want something different, something we’ve never heard before,’ ” states Berger, “then, and this is almost the most important thing: I said, ‘I want you to destroy the images onscreen. Don’t beautify or sentimentalize.’ [I wanted] a sound that feels like it’s coming from inside [lead character] Paul Bäumer’s stomach. I want the sound of fear, of hatred, of rage, of what a soldier feels when he has to kill in order to survive.”

“Something different” is practically Bertelmann’s M.O. The German pianist, who records and carries out under the name Hauschka, becomes part of a cadre of speculative artists who turned up in the Berlin indie electronic devices scene and have actually silently begun to alter the noise of Hollywood motion pictures. Others from that scene consist of Oscar-winning composer Hildur Gudnadóttir (Joker, Tár) and the late Jóhann Jóhannsson (Arrival, Sicario, The Theory of Everything), a two-time Oscar candidate.

Bertelmann is best understood for his Oscar-chosen work on Garth Davis’ Lion and his rating for Francis Lee’s Ammonite, which got an ASCAP nom for rating of the year (both were co-written with Dustin O’Halloran). In Lion, the authors removed out horns and strings to provide a piano-driven noise that handled to be psychological while never ever being foreseeable. For Ammonite, a little, moderately utilized chamber orchestra types the movie’s psychological core.

“Coming from the independent scene, I have a different approach to composing,” states Bertelmann. “It’s very intuition-driven, just trying something out and seeing what happens. Like, if I want a bass drum sound, instead of getting an orchestra to record it, or going through all the recorded bass drum loops to find just the right one, I’ll put contact mics on the wall and bang on them to see if that works.”

Bertelmann produced the signature three-tone concept that echoes through All Quiet — a rumbling dom-dom-DOM! seeming like a trumpet of doom — by getting his granny’s old harmonium.

“When I played it, pressing the paddles and using these old panels on the side with my knees, it created this weird wooden sound,” he remembers. “You could hear all the technical bits from the materials of the machine creating the music. Normally, in a classical recording, you’d work to take those out. I amplified them. I stuck microphones inside the harmonium, underneath it, on the wood, everywhere, to capture that sound.”

The result is both old and modern-day, like a wood turn-of-the-last-century synthesizer, and — as it plays over post-battle scenes, as boots and uniforms are removed off remains, included stacks and after that trucked off to be cleaned, fixed and given out to a brand-new crop of cannon-fodder employees — completely stimulates the terrible equipment of war.

But when intimate feeling is required, as in a late wrenching scene when Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) lies next to a French soldier he has actually completely stabbed, listening to him gradually pass away, Bertelmann’s rating can go quiet.

“For that scene, I used this really fragile string motif, recording them in a clear pure way,” he states. “When Edward heard it, he said it was too emotional and overpowering the scene. But I thought we needed that feel, so I put a filter on the whole instrumentation, just cut off the high end. It made it sound a bit like the music is coming from underneath a blanket. It’s muffled, but the emotion still comes through.”

For the fight scenes, Bertelmann worked carefully with the movie’s sound designer, Frank Kruse, to balance his rating with the rat-a-tat-tat of the gatling gun and the monstrous thumps of the blowing up shells.

“With fights and battle scenes, the music can very easily get swamped by all the war sounds,” he states, “so we tried to find the frequencies for each other’s instruments and complement, not compete. Say there were explosions. That could be the bass drums. So I wouldn’t use bass on that section, or I’d go even lower, deeper in tone, below the explosions. Or for an ambush scene, in place of the main rhythm portion, I use the specific metal sounds of the gunfire.”

Bertelmann’s preferred piece of music in the All Quiet rating, he states, can be found in the last scene, as Bäumer, mortally injured, climbs up out from underground to see the sky one last time. For the piece, called “Making Sense of War,” the composer go back to his three-tone concept, however this time classically managed.

“It sounds a little bit like an opera,” he states. “It gives this moment of clarity and pause, where we question everything that we’ve seen, and what the whole point [of war is].”

This story initially appeared in a Feb. stand-alone problem of The Hollywood Reporter publication. To get the publication, click here to subscribe.