Conclave: How Does the Divine Sound?

Today we’re talking about another film that came out quite a while ago, but… honestly, I suspect I should’ve started this podcast earlier. There are some films whose music has completely shocked me — and this is one of them.But no, we started exactly when we were meant to.

The movie I’m talking about is Conclave, with music by Volker Bertelmann.

A film that, timing-wise, was almost too precise — it’s eerie how perfectly it aligned with real life, because just months after its release, we had the actual conclave.

As always, you know this isn’t a space to analyze the narrative — though, to be honest, I’d love to. Here, what concerns us is the music.

And from my point of view, this film has an incredibly powerful soundtrack.Why? Mostly because of the inclusion of a very particular instrument called the Cristal Baschet.

The Cristal Baschet is a relatively new instrument, created in 1952 by the French Baschet brothers. It’s made of tuned glass rods — kind of like the classic glass-harp game.What makes it fascinating is how it’s played: the performer wets their fingers and literally plays it with the fingertips.

That contact (that physical touch) produces a sound that, as the composer describes it, transports you to otherworldly spaces.His goal was to find something strange and divine at the same time — something that could be played with human hands.And that idea fits perfectly with the film’s themes, institutions, and the processes it portrays.

How does divinity sound?

Conclave tries to immerse us in the controversial process the Church follows to elect the Pope. So why does a soundtrack that balances the strange and the divine matter in that context?

Maybe because of music’s own principle of unity and creation.

I think what’s most revealing here is how music itself creates: the intimate thread it weaves, the feeling it tries to sediment.An institution as abstract as the Catholic Church is, at the end of the day, society and culture — and that’s what I mean when I say that music weaves.

How does this institution sound? How does the divine sound — or the political within the divine?According to these notes: visceral, somber.The music, through its conceptual unity, positions the Church as a context we might need to question — but even more, as a mirror of the human virtues surrounding that pursuit of an institutional title of “divinity.”

The score aims precisely for that: through divergent motifs and instruments, it chases the visceral hidden behind supposed spirituality.

And it’s true — as the film unfolds, it shows us multiple angles of the human condition, this time in a context close to faith and the intangible, to the symbols of divinity and perhaps even purity — historical symbols that, in the end, feel closer to human fabric than to the essence of the divine itself.

Let’s remember that only two years earlier, in 2023, this same composer won multiple awards for All Quiet on the Western Front.

So where do our thoughts go when a sound challenges the ear — when it breaks from the instruments we’re used to hearing?I think that difference creates a sense of rupture — and maybe that’s the film’s true invitation: questioning, confrontation, and at the same time, the battle for symbolic preservation.

So then… how does the divine sound when what we’re hearing is, in fact, the human?Maybe that’s the greatest strength of this soundtrack: it doesn’t try to convince us of spirituality, but to remind us that even the sacred is built with hands, with history, with bodies (and with sound).

Because if this film leaves us with something, it’s that every institution, even the highest one, has an echo.And that echo —is made of us.

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