Hildur Guðnadóttir

Hildur Guðnadóttir: The Cello as an Instrument of Dread

In August 2018 an Icelandic cellist put on a hazmat suit and walked into the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania with the field recordist Chris Watson. They recorded reactor halls, hallways, turbine saws, the hum of machinery, walls, the engine room door. No orchestra was involved and no theme was written. "I wanted the power plant — and the radiation — to be a voice in itself," Guðnadóttir said. The result, seven months in the making, won a Grammy, multiple Emmys and a BAFTA, and gave HBO's *Chernobyl* the sound of what she called creeping death.

A House Where Everyone Played

Hildur Guðnadóttir was born in Reykjavik in 1982 into a household where everyone played something. Her father is a clarinettist, composer and conductor; her mother is an opera singer. She has described the Icelandic music community as "extremely informal and very family-based," a scene small enough that a child could see what a working artistic life looked like — she grew up with Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, the country's president, and Björk among her visible role models.

She started the cello at five. By about thirteen she was playing in bands, and the range was deliberately indiscriminate: pop at one end, experimental music and doom metal at the other. That double education — formal string training running alongside amplified noise — is the single most useful fact about her, because everything she has made since sits in the space between the two.

The Long Apprenticeship

She studied at the Reykjavik music academy and the Iceland Academy of the Arts before moving to Berlin, balancing classical string-orchestra work against experimental electronics and band work. For years she was a collaborator rather than a name: most importantly she worked repeatedly with the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, whose approach to slow, textural, orchestral-electronic film scoring was the closest thing she had to a peer tradition.

Her own material blends acoustic and electronic sources, borrowing from Icelandic post-rock and traditional music, and she plays the halldorophone — an electroacoustic cello, feedback-driven, built to sustain and distort what a cello would normally let decay. Critics describe her writing as clean, choral brushstrokes laid over unusual timbres. She composes more or less constantly and captures fragments as voice memos. "Music wakes me up sometimes," she has said. "I record it to get it to leave me alone."

Ignalina

*Chernobyl* is the score that made the method visible. Rather than write themes and lay them over the picture, Guðnadóttir went to the source of the subject and treated an industrial building as an ensemble. Working with Watson, she built each episode its own soundscape out of the plant's own noise, using reverb to make it sound, in her description, like singing in the rooms of a nuclear power plant. There is almost nothing in it a listener could hum, and that is the point: the score does not comment on catastrophe, it reproduces the texture of an environment that is quietly killing everyone inside it. It won the Grammy for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media at the 62nd Grammy Awards, along with Emmys, a BAFTA TV Craft Award and a World Soundtrack Award.

Arthur Fleck's Cello

*Joker* arrived in the same period and inverted the approach. Where *Chernobyl* began with a place, *Joker* began with a text. Guðnadóttir read Todd Phillips's script and wrote before a frame was shot, settling on the cello as the character's interior voice. "The story is a journey of one man trying to figure out his past," she said, and she wanted to "get inside his head." When the main theme arrived she described it as "almost like being struck by lightning in my chest" — "the strongest physical click that I had between a script and music."

Then something rare happened. Because the music existed before the shoot, her cues were played on set during filming. She watched the actors respond to the score in real time and called it one of the most beautiful collaborative moments of her career. The bathroom sequence — not in the original script — became the film's hinge, with Joaquin Phoenix improvising a balletic dance to her cello. Her music was not laid over the performance; the performance was built on top of it. As one account of the film put it, her work altered Phillips's direction and Phoenix's performance.

*Joker* brought her the Golden Globe, the Critics' Choice Award and the Academy Award for Best Original Score. She was the first solo female composer to win the Golden Globe in that category, and the first Icelander to win an Oscar.

After the Award

She kept working in film — *Tár* in 2022 among them — while pushing outward. She wrote *The Fact of the Matter*, a BBC concert commission, in 2022, scored the video game *Battlefield 2042* with her husband, the producer Sam Slater, and released *Where to From*, her first solo album in a decade. After roughly seventeen years scoring pictures she has been stepping back from major film projects to concentrate on ensemble commissions, solo performance and her own recordings.

Asked what the awards changed, she gave a characteristically unsentimental answer: "It shows that you might know what you are doing and that you should be trusted for the projects that you take on."

Why Hildur Is Called a Genius

The specific faculty here is not melodic invention, and pretending otherwise does her no favours. It is a compositional decision made before any notes exist: the choice of what the music will be made of. Most film composers begin with instruments and apply them to a picture. Guðnadóttir begins by asking what the subject sounds like, then goes and gets it. For *Chernobyl* that meant a decommissioned reactor hall in Lithuania and no themes at all. For *Joker* it meant reading a script cold and finding a single cello line before there was any footage to accompany — which, because the cues then played on set, made her the first author of the performance rather than its last commentator. That inversion of the normal order is the substantive claim on her behalf, and it is verifiable: her music demonstrably changed how the film was directed and acted.

The counter-case is fair and worth stating. Almost all of her celebrated work is applied art, made to specification inside other people's projects, and much of it was made with collaborators — Chris Watson on *Chernobyl*, Sam Slater on the game score — so attributing it to a single mind flattens the reality. As a concert composer she has a thin catalogue by the standards of the word "genius," and her harmonic language is deliberately spare rather than complex. Her deepest debts, to Jóhannsson and to the sound-art tradition of field recording, are ones she does not hide. What she has is an unusually reliable instinct for the one right material, and the nerve to build an entire score on it and nothing else. That is craft of a very high order, executed with unusual discipline — which is a more accurate description than genius, and a rarer thing than the word suggests.

Legacy

In two years Guðnadóttir became the most decorated screen composer of her generation and, more consequentially, moved the job description. Her scores made it ordinary to argue that a film's music might precede its images and shape them. The cello, an instrument with three centuries of settled repertoire behind it, now carries her association: not warmth, but the sound of something going wrong slowly.

Achievements

• Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media — 2021
• Academy Award for Best Original Score — 2020
• Instruments: cello
• Genres: electronic music