Ernst Reijseger on the role of music in Werner Herzog's films

In one of the first scenes in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a small group of academics stroll through a vineyard in France. In itself, not a particularly compelling image: it’s drizzling and the academics look a bit awkward in their cagoules and muddy walking boots. Nevertheless, it’s immediately clear to us as viewers that something very special is about to happen. Herzog’s inimitable voice-over explains that these academics are on their way to the ‘Grotte Chauvet’: a cave where paintings that are over 30,000 years old have been found, in an almost immaculate state of preservation. The cave has been sealed to the public but, having been granted exceptional access, Herzog and a small film crew are being allowed inside. “The cave is like the frozen flesh of a moment in time”, Herzog says. A perfect time capsule, as the entrance to the cave remained hidden for 20,000 years by a huge rock that slid down, obscuring it.

It’s not so much Herzog’s voice, but the music that lends the start of the film its special tension. Even before we’ve had the slightest glimpse of the cave itself, the almost angelic choral voices elevate the images to something mythical. This is typical of Herzog’s style – often managing to transform a mundane image into something transcendental, without lapsing into cliché. Music plays a major role in this, at times completely dominating the feel of such a scene.

“Music really gets a chance to shine in Werner Herzog’s films,” Ernst Reijseger says. Which is why it was a dream come true for him when he was asked to provide music for a Herzog project. Before working with Herzog, he had made music for various dance and theatre productions, as well as a number of films. He started out playing classical cello as a child, but realised at a very young age that he preferred to improvise – even before he knew that there was such a word as ‘improvisation’. He has been doing so ever since, influenced by jazz as well as blues, Indian and guitar music. He has always collaborated with other musicians, across all genres. Like Herzog, in fact, who refuses to restrict himself to a single genre in his films, preferring to play at the boundaries between many different genres.

So how did the collaboration with Herzog come about? In 1999, Ernst made a record, Colla Voche, with a traditional male choir from Sardinia. Herzog was given the record by his son for his birthday and knew straight away that he wanted this music for his next film. He contacted Ernst, telling him that what he wanted was in fact exactly what was on the record.

“So we actually started off with a quarrel,” Ernst says, laughing. “I had always wanted to compose music for Werner Herzog’s films, and now he wanted something that I’d already made. I told him I’d only do it if I could make something new, and change the line-up a bit. He agreed to this, and I brought in the Senegalese singer Mola Sylla.” And so with Sylla, the Sardinian choir and Ernst himself playing cello, he created the music for two films: The White Diamond (2005) and The Wild Blue Yonder (2005). This was the beginning of the long-term collaboration between Ernst Reijseger and Werner Herzog.

In 2009, Herzog approached Ernst for a very special project. He had just returned from the Grotte Chauvet and was completely under the spell of the 33-thousand-year-old cave paintings he had seen there. He had only been inside for a very short time and hadn’t yet shot any footage, but he just knew that Ernst had to make the music for this film.

“I worked in parallel with Werner; I started making the music before he’d filmed anything. He spoke with such passion, such intensity, about this cave and about what he’d seen there, I didn’t need any concrete images before starting the composition.”

The only pointers Werner gave was that he wanted archaic sounds. “So then straight away I knew that I wanted to work with a choir, a kind of cave choir,” Ernst reveals. “But what should such a choir sing? My wife and I recorded the vocal sounds made by our five-month-old baby. We then transcribed these recordings and what we were able to make into reproduceable sentences we set to the music, like a puzzle. That’s what the choir is singing: it’s actually baby talk, the meaning of which is all in the sound.”

If you listen closely you might hear the voices in the choir echoing, as if they were recorded in the cave. As the cave is not easily accessible to visitors, it wasn’t possible to record there so the music was in fact recorded in an old wooden church in Haarlem. Herzog was present during recording. He brought a camera with him and later released a short film about this, called Ode to the Dawn of Man (2011).

As a filmmaker, Herzog frequently takes his first intuition as his guide. He believes in the spontaneity of the moment and a kind of primal nature of the first shot, something that cannot easily be reproduced. “This is why he doesn’t work with back-ups or shots from different angles. And this is also how he sees music,” Ernst says. “When he came along to the rehearsals, his whole attitude was: ‘there, we’ve got it, marvellous, next.’ But for musicians it doesn’t work like that. We have to warm our muscles up, stretch our focus. Once you’ve played a piece of music through a few times, you reach a different kind of concentration, you can communicate more easily with one another and the various different sections merge together better. It’s noticeable that Werner doesn’t have the patience for this type of process – but then you give him take three and he’s over the moon.”

“Otherwise, Werner mainly just lets us get on with it,” Ernst says. “Although every now and again he’ll make a comment that isn’t very useful to musicians, such as ‘we need intensity.’ In that way he’s a typical non-musician, even though he has a tremendous love of music.”

Music also plays a prominent role in Herzog’s films. At times the music is louder than the dialogue and the soundtracks are often epic and rousing. For him, music is not just background or an underscoring of the image. It’s more like sound and image enter into an interaction with each other. “There’s a real opportunity for music to make an impact here,” Ernst says. “Not only in Werner Herzog’s work, but in almost all good films. The music very often determines the atmosphere, giving you a sense that all kinds of things are going on which we the viewers know nothing at all about. The music doesn’t explain, but superimposes; it places you in a particular atmosphere.”

“Werner also doesn’t use sound effects,” Ernst stresses. “Often there will be a sound designer working on a film, for example recreating the sound of someone walking along a path strewn with fallen leaves in autumn. He absolutely refuses to do this, because we all know what this sounds like already. We’ve all had that experience, so it’s not necessary to reproduce it. He wants to allow us to experience the unknown.”

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Ernst Reijseger

Listen to the music that Ernst Reijseger made for Cave of Forgotten Dreams.