The Polymath Film Composer Known as “the Third Coen Brother”

Burwell’s office, which he designed himself, is a few steps from the living room. “If I had to leave the house to work—and I know many composers who do—I would never see my family, and Christine and I would be divorced,” he said. “Many of the composers I know are divorced.” The location of the house is professionally advantageous, too. Directors don’t hire him unless they trust him to work remotely. Studio executives don’t drop by on a whim, to see how things are coming along. “I’m as far from the industry as you can be without living in the ocean,” he said.

Burwell’s ancestors were wealthy landowners in northern Virginia, where his surname is pronounced as though it were almost a full syllable shorter: Burl. In 1713, the governor of the Virginia Colony complained that, because so many members of the family served as magistrates, “there will be no less than seven so near related that they will go off the Bench whenever a Cause of the Burwells come to be tried.” Carter’s father, Charles, graduated from Harvard in 1939, and enrolled at the Sorbonne. When the Second World War began, he drove an ambulance in France, travelled to Shanghai by way of the Suez Canal, worked in Haiphong, then returned to the United States and joined the Navy. Early on the morning of D Day, he was on a ship four miles from Utah Beach, using a rubber relief map to brief the amphibious force that was about to go ashore. After the war, he lived in China and in Thailand, and exported brightly colored silks and other fabrics to the U.S. He eventually moved his company to New York, and, in 1953, he married Natalie Benedict, a member of the editorial staff of Mademoiselle.

Cartoon by Jared Nangle

“My mother’s job was tracking down writers like Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, and getting them to deliver whatever they’d agreed to deliver,” Burwell told me. Doing that often entailed following them into Greenwich Village bars. “She loved the whole jazz scene,” Burwell went on. “She would close the bars, then go back to an apartment with all the musicians from the band, and they would just keep playing. It made a real impression on her that their work was the same thing as their fun.”

The Burwells moved to Connecticut when Carter was a year old, and both parents eventually became teachers. Carter attended a private boys’ school in Stamford, where his best friend was a boy named Steve Kraemer. “He had greasy, long hair, and when my parents first saw him they thought, Oh, no—Carter must be doing drugs,” Burwell told me. It was Kraemer who introduced him to music. “Steve played blues guitar, harmonica, piano—you name it,” he said. “But he couldn’t play them all at the same time.” Kraemer taught Burwell simple blues improvisation, turning him into a sideman.

Kraemer earned his undergraduate degree at M.I.T. and is now an astrophysicist at Catholic University. He told me that, when Burwell was in tenth grade, the father of another student gave the school a DEC computer terminal. “Carter announced that he was going to teach himself to use it,” he said. And he did, in part by writing a program that solved algebraic equations. “I didn’t see a DECwriter again until my second year of graduate school,” Kraemer said.

The summer after high school, Burwell drove his car, at high speed, into a tree. “I owe my life to the doctor who was in the emergency room when I was brought in,” he told me. “He was an ear, nose, and throat guy, but his hobby was plastic surgery, which he was sort of teaching himself.” The doctor moved Burwell’s nose from his left cheek back to its normal position. “Another doctor told me later that my forehead, on an X-ray, looked like a box of Chiclets,” Burwell said. He remained unconscious for several days, and had to be tied down in his hospital bed, to prevent him from rolling over onto what was left of his face. “The doctors told my parents that, when the swelling went down, I probably wasn’t going to look too good unless they rebuilt everything. So my mom brought in some pictures of my old nose—and also some pictures of friends of mine whose noses she liked.”

Burwell had been admitted to Harvard several months earlier. His mother wanted him to defer for a year, but her concern about his recovery inflamed his determination to leave home. When he arrived at school, his scars were still healing, his left cheekbone had been replaced by a plastic prosthesis, and the whites of his eyes were blackish red. He had lost his sense of smell and was having trouble reading.

“I don’t remember the accident as an awful experience at all, because I was unconscious for the awful part,” he told me. “And the only reason I know I look different is that a friend of mine from high school, who was at Tufts, came to visit me—like, six months after I’d seen him last—and when I answered the door he said, ‘Is Carter here?’ ”

Chip Johannessen, who was Burwell’s college roommate for four years, told me, “Freshman year, Carter stayed in our room and listened to blues records, and catalogued them and copied them onto cassette tapes.” Burwell had thought about majoring in math but ended up in fine arts, mainly because it had few requirements. He took an animation course and used the school’s Oxberry machine to make a short film called “Help, I’m Being Crushed to Death by a Black Rectangle”—a loop in which a good guy and a bad guy shoot at each other while a train, represented by a black rectangle, repeatedly runs over a woman tied to the tracks. Another fine-arts student told me, “This was back when student animations were little balls of yarn rolling around on a table. Carter’s films were always funny, and usually a little dirty.”

I was a year behind Burwell at Harvard, and met him on the staff of the Lampoon, the school’s humor magazine, to which he mainly contributed drawings. He was handsome and cool, and he never seemed to raise his voice or say cruel things about other people—traits that I found alarming at the time. (“Preternaturally serene” is how another classmate described him to me recently.) He had an older girlfriend, an art student in Boston, and he ate only peanut-butter sandwiches, butter sandwiches, and ice cream.

Eventually, he decided that he wanted to be an architect; Johannessen was admitted to Harvard Law School. But, in the spring of 1977, a few months before graduation, they saw Iggy Pop, David Bowie, and Blondie in concert, and resolved to become rock musicians instead. They rented a house on Long Island and got jobs they hated, doing diagnostics on the assembly line of a factory that made alarm equipment. One day, Burwell saw a help-wanted ad in the Times for a computer programmer at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a nonprofit research institution whose director, James D. Watson, had shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 for discovering the structure of DNA. Burwell wrote a jokey letter in which he said that, although he had none of the required skills, he would cost less to employ than someone with a Ph.D. would. Surprisingly, the letter got him the job, and he spent two years as the chief computer scientist on a protein-cataloguing project funded by a grant from the Muscular Dystrophy Association. “Watson let me live at the lab, and he would invite me to his house for breakfast with all these amazing people,” he said. When that job ended, Burwell worked on 3-D modelling and digital audio in the New York Institute of Technology’s Computer Graphics Lab, several of whose principal researchers had just left to start Pixar.

Johannessen found work designing computer databases for Avis, Bristol Myers, and Fidelity. (Like Burwell, he had no training but was able to figure things out.) They spent many late nights at CBGB, Danceteria, the Mudd Club, and other punk-rock venues in New York. Among the people they met was Clodagh Simonds, a singer and songwriter from Ireland, who heard Burwell play a synthesizer in a rehearsal space in the Music Building, on Eighth Avenue, which he and Johannessen were renting—and living in, illegally. “I thought, My God, he’s brilliant,” Simonds told me. “He was also absolutely the antithesis of a prima-donna type. I would read something in Scientific American and ask him, ‘What are fractals, exactly?’ He would take such trouble to explain.” They formed a band, and called it the Same. Johannessen, who played lead guitar, told me, “We were known as the teen-age millionaires, because our consulting gigs paid us a lot of money, which we would then spend on microphones, digital delays, and other equipment.”

The Same became regular performers at CBGB; their music was described in the Village Voice as “minimalist trance-dance synth-pop.” Johannessen told me, “Carter had a way of playing that was very percussive, a totally different way of generating sound. One night, I heard someone call him Mr. Music—this, in a place where everyone thinks they’re a musician.” The scientists at Cold Spring Harbor allowed the band to rehearse in one of the lab’s room-size Faraday cages, which eliminated electromagnetic interference with their instruments. Burwell and Johannessen invited the scientists to parties in New York.

One of Burwell’s acquaintances in the city was Skip Lievsay, a young sound editor. Lievsay knew two brothers, Joel and Ethan Coen, who were trying to raise money to finish a film they’d written. The Coens had never made a feature-length movie, and they needed a composer who was willing to work for what might turn out to be nothing. Lievsay introduced them to Burwell, and they showed him a partial rough cut of what would eventually become “Blood Simple.”

That weekend, Burwell watched Hitchcock’s “The Birds” on TV and noticed that some of its most emotionally intense scenes had no music at all. “It was either bird sounds, edited bird sounds, or electronic creations of bird sounds—and that was a fantastic first lesson in what a film score can be,” he said. No one involved with the Coens’ project knew much about filmmaking. The brothers had rented a recording space with a piano, and, to synchronize the music to the footage, they would tell Burwell how much they needed for a particular scene, and he would start a stopwatch and begin to play. He performed the entire score himself.

Burwell viewed his involvement in “Blood Simple” as an interesting, one-off adventure; afterward, he moved to Japan to work as a computer animator. But the movie won several awards, and, when the Coens got funding for another film, they hired him again. He has described that film, “Raising Arizona,” as a Zane Grey Western set in a trailer. His score, like the script, has a sense of humor: during a scene in which Nicolas Cage’s character steals a package of diapers from a convenience store, the song playing over the speakers is a Muzak-like version of the movie’s main theme. Burwell also incorporated whistling, humming, yodelling, and a banjo. (The Coens had credibility, but their budget was still small. The banjo player was their optometrist.)

Much of Burwell’s music for the Coens provides a counterpoint to their world view. “Their writing is ironic, even cynical, and a lot of their stories are structured to torture their characters,” he told me. “So one of the roles of music in their films is to augment the humanity of those characters, and when that works it makes the humor—and the torture—more effective and consequential.” When “Raising Arizona” came out, a reviewer praised Burwell’s “yearning strings,” and that phrase became the Coens’ shorthand for injections of musical warmth. “This usually happens when the characters realize how fucked they are,” Burwell said.

The Polymath Film Composer Known as “the Third Coen Brother”
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