In lieu of commissioning a musician to compose an original score for Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese took the somewhat unusual step of asking his longtime collaborator Robbie Robertson to assemble a collection of modern classical music to be used at key moments throughout the film. Among the musicians Robertson chose are Gustav Mahler, John Cage, Gyorgy Ligeti, John Adams, Max Richter, and Brian Eno.
Teddy Daniels first meets Dr. Jeremiah Naehring while the latter is listening to Mahler. For this scene, Robertson and Scorsese chose "Quartet for Strings and Piano in A Minor" by the German composer, whose work was famously banned by the Nazis—an early clue that Dr. Naehring is not a Nazi sympathizer like Teddy suspects. In Teddy's first dream with Dolores Chanal, Scorsese uses Richter's emotional and dramatic composition "On the Nature of Daylight" to convey the whirlwind of emotions that her ghost still inspires within him.
Robertson and Scorsese employ a string- and bass-heavy instrumental selection of music. Teddy and Chuck's initial approach to Shutter Island is accompanied by a low, staccato brass noise that almost resembles a foghorn, recurring again in the final moments of the film. The string-heavy score is likely a nod to the work of Bernard Hermann, whose similarly string-heavy compositions provided the score for Alfred Hitchcock classics like Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960).
Also notable is the film's use of silence, especially in its most violent and traumatic scenes, such as Teddy's flashbacks to Dachau, or his recollection of his children's deaths. Scorsese uses naturalistic silence as a way to intensify some of the film's most shocking moments, increasing the audience's immersion and sense of suspense. Like many films in the horror genre, Scorsese alternates between silence and cacophony to convey the impact of the traumatic and disturbing events in the story.
