Oscar-winning composer and producer Volker Bertelmann on prepared piano, the need for optimism and finding room to experiment
The career of German musician Volker Bertelmann can be difficult to define. Classically trained on piano at a young age, he spent his youth as a part of various rock, hip-hop and techno acts, before eventually beginning his solo career as Hauschka with 2004’s Substantial.
Under that guise he has released a string of albums that touch on elements to classical, ambient, orchestral as well as glitchy electronics. “I would describe my music as contemporary piano music,” Bertelmann explains, when pressed to try and pigeonhole his work. “I have my own tonality. But I feel the most comfortable in a kind of experimental space. If I feel there’s suddenly a sticker on my shoulder, like the ‘neoclassical’ sticker, I’m the first one who tries to shake that off.”
The one defining, mostly consistent element of Bertelmann’s music has been his use of prepared piano; the technique of modifying the instrument by placing objects on and around its strings to alter the tonality. It’s a technique he uses to blur the line between melodic and percussive sound.
Alongside his work as Hauschka, recent years have seen Bertelmann making waves of increasing size in the worlds of film and TV, culminating in recent BAFTA and Oscar wins for his expansive and emotive score to the anti-war epic All Quiet on the Western Front, which is set among the German lines at the end of World War 1.
This month sees Bertelmann return with his first Hauschka album in four years, Philanthropy, a self-described optimistic record, inspired as a response to the Covid pandemic, climate anxiety and global conflicts. “I had the feeling that I wanted to dedicate the record to acknowledging life, and acknowledging people,” he tells us, speaking from his Dusseldorf studio. “My feeling was that it’s maybe a good time to make an optimistic record…”
DO MOST OF YOUR TRACKS START WITH THE PIANO?
“It’s me at the piano with an effect pedal board, where I have a lot of guitar pedals that are creating textures on top of what I’m playing. Or some are loopers that are changing the tonality. What I’m trying to create are loop chains of different sounds, which sometimes I’m distorting too, but I record the pure piano and an effect track on top of that, so that they’re separated. So whenever I feel that I just want to use the effect track, I can mute the real piano, but I also can keep it in there. That’s my basic recording process.
“Sometimes I wake up in the morning and have a coffee and then I’ll go straight into the studio and press record. When I’m finished, I don’t look at it. I just put it in a folder and let it sit there. Those ideas that were in that folder, at some point last year, I started to
