Burkhard Dallwitz wrote the score everyone credits to Glass

Put on the soundtrack album to The Truman Show and count. Twenty tracks. Eleven of them are by Burkhard Dallwitz, who has lived and worked in Melbourne since 1979. Seven are by Philip Glass, and four of those seven were not written for the film at all; they were lifted from Powaqqatsi, from Anima Mundi, from Mishima, music that already existed and that Peter Weir had been cutting to.

The Golden Globe for Best Original Score in 1999 went to both men. Ask anyone who scored The Truman Show and you will get one answer, and it will not be the one who wrote more than half of it.

I am not interested in this as a grievance. Glass is Glass, and the temp-score problem is as old as temp scores. I am interested in it as a question of sound, because the two composers are doing genuinely different jobs in that film, and once you can hear the seam you cannot stop hearing it.

Two clocks running at once

Glass writes the show. Dallwitz writes the man.

The Glass cues are the arpeggiated machinery, that famous forward-tumbling motion, harmony that changes underneath a pattern which refuses to stop. It is the perfect sound for Seahaven as a production: relentless, immaculate, indifferent, running whether Truman is awake or not. It has no interior. That is its virtue here.

Dallwitz works closer to the skin. His cues sit lower in the mix, and they move in longer values, strings and piano and a lot of held tone, with attacks that are deliberately soft. Where Glass gives you a mechanism, Dallwitz gives you a room with someone in it. Listen to how he handles Truman’s small private mutinies, the cues built around a simple ascending figure that keeps not resolving where you expect. There is a hesitancy written into the phrasing itself, a fractional lateness on entries, the musical equivalent of a man checking whether anyone is watching before he does the thing he wants to do.

The film’s structural gag is that Truman’s life has a score and he cannot hear it. Weir stages this literally: the control-room composer, conducting to picture, cueing the emotion of another person’s morning. Glass himself appears in that room. It is one of the wittiest pieces of casting in the picture and it is also, accidentally, the reason the credit collapsed the way it did. You see Glass. You do not see Dallwitz.

Where he came from

He was born in Bad Homburg in 1959 and came to Australia in 1979 to study. La Trobe, composition, under Keith Humble, which is a lineage worth naming: Humble was a serious modernist, Darmstadt-adjacent, an electronic music pioneer at a time when Australian institutions had very little appetite for it. Dallwitz has been working as a screen composer since 1984.

You can hear the training. The Truman cues are tonal and accessible and underneath them is somebody who understands texture as a structural parameter rather than as decoration. He is careful about register. He leaves the middle of the frequency spectrum empty far more often than a commercial screen composer usually dares, which is exactly what lets Jim Carrey’s voice sit where it sits in those scenes.

The Australian career the Globe obscured

The award should have been a door. What it was, mostly, was a footnote to a career that stayed here.

Dallwitz wrote the Underbelly music for Nine, which is a piece of Australian television scoring that a generation can hum without being able to attribute. He took an APRA award in 2001 for the Sydney Olympics broadcast theme, and he wrote Olympic broadcast themes across five games from 2000 to 2008. He took an APRA-AGSC Screen Music Award in 2004 for CrashBurn. He co-founded Zeitgeist Music with Brett Aplin and Dmitri Golovko.

And in 2011 he scored The Way Back, Peter Weir’s last feature, alone. That is the part I keep returning to. Weir went back to him, without Glass, for a film about a walk out of a Siberian labour camp across four thousand miles, and Dallwitz wrote it with a restraint that borders on refusal. Long stretches with no music. Cues that come in under wind and boots and stay there. A palette of low strings and thin high harmonic material with almost nothing in between, which is the same spectral trick from Truman applied to a landscape instead of a face.

Why this keeps happening

Australian screen composers get filed under the film’s nationality, not their own, and The Truman Show is a Paramount picture with an American director of photography and an Australian director who had long since been absorbed into Hollywood’s account of itself. Weir gets claimed. The composer does not.

There is also a harder truth in it. A score built out of pattern and motion announces itself. A score built out of held tone and delayed entries does its work and then gets described as “the quiet bits”. Dallwitz writes the second kind. The room the mic is in matters more to him than the hook does, and rooms do not win credit.

Go back to the album. Track by track, notice which ones you remember as the sound of that film. Then check who wrote them. Half the time the memory is wrong, and it is wrong in the same direction every time.