Category: Articles

Frank J. Oteri Photo by Molly Sheridan

According to my family, the first motion picture I ever attended was The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night the year of its original release, 1964, when I was just a few months old. They tell me I provided my own soundtrack of loud cries and hollers and that I had to eventually be removed from the theater but I don’t remember that first exposure to the movies at all.

I can’t honestly remember what the next movie I saw was, but what I do remember from my early exposure to films was that I was always more interested in the music than in the movie and my attitude has remained mostly the same to this day. And when I analyze the films I enumerate as favorites—Vertigo, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T., Koyannisqatsi, even Woody Allen’s Sleeper—it’s largely because of the ways these films use music.

So, when people decry film music as “background” rather than “foreground,” it’s a bit of a disconnect for me. To me, the music is always foreground even in a movie where the images and storyline are frequently just background, especially if the music is good. The movies I treasure most are the ones celebrating the music contained in them: the endless car drives in Vertigo which are largely window dressing to Bernard Herrmann’s amazing score; the gratuitous treks through the kitchen in Cook, Thief to observe a boy soprano singing Michael Nyman’s ravishing Miserere; the over-the-top ballet featuring Dr. Seuss impressions of orchestral instruments in Dr. T.; the wonderful temporal displacement that Woody Allen’s faux ’20s clarinet-led Dixieland band gives to a science fiction narrative that is supposed to be taking place 200 years in the future; and, of course, Koyannisqatsi is all music.

Few composers are more articulate about what the film world and the concert hall can learn from each other than Elliot Goldenthal, who has maintained a triple compositional career writing for motion pictures, the concert hall, and theatre. Four composers who have created music for films as well as the concert hall—Paul Chihara, Laura Karpman, Roger Treffhouse, and Douglas J. Cuomo—describe the different realities in which these realms exist. And we ask you “Where do you see the relationship between film and music going in the future?“.

Throughout its history and to this day, film music, whose first century is summarized in a massive HyperHistory by Nicole Zaray, is still somehow perceived as a second-class musical citizen in certain quarters of the music establishment. Nowadays, this seems stranger than ever when music, originally intended as foreground—the enshrined masterpieces of Beethoven et al.—are introduced to most listeners as background music: a recording which almost always competes unsuccessfully with life going on around it or as a radio broadcast which has signal in addition to life as added counterpoint… Ironically, as the results of the Knight Foundation’s Classical Music Segmentation Study as well as an NPR survey of the core values of classical music radio sadly confirm, film music may be more in the foreground to more people than classical music is these days!

Greg Sandow

Last month, I celebrated the diversity of new music—or, more exactly, how impossible it is to find a central style, tone, or meaning in what composers do right now. All of us are on our own; it’s fun to learn to live with that.

This month, I want to go to an opposite extreme. Why doesn’t new music have a central style or trend, or at least something so new and forceful that we all have to take a stand on it? Why don’t composers make big statements any more?

So what do I mean by a big statement? Lately, perhaps by accident, I’ve run into them in other arts. These are statements from the past, but that shouldn’t be an issue; it only puts in sad relief how little seems to be at stake for us right now. For instance, I was reading essays by William Carlos Williams. I’d become besotted with his poetry, found the book of essays, and was fascinated. In the first decades of the last century, Williams knocked himself out to define the job he thought he and his colleagues had to do—to forge modern American poetry, its language, its content, its very nature. One major benchmark (or monument or obstacle) was T. S. Eliot. He was American and seemed to be the voice of all modern poetry in English, but Williams thought he wasn’t American enough. This mattered. Williams couldn’t write a single line without descending into burning flames to learn by trial, error, and instinct what kind of language he should use.

Years later, in the ’40s and ’50s, Williams wrote his book-length magnum opus, Paterson, and still battled with these questions, not finding answers even at the end of his life. He fought with larger questions, too, since he wanted to penetrate the heart of the small city he lived in, to penetrate it and surround it totally, to describe it and account for it, starting with the force of its geography and ending with the lives its people lead, not leaving out the most circumstantial, anecdotal detail, whether that would be a mink fighting with a cat near Clark’s Hardware Store in 1878 (great commotion, recorded for posterity) or painful letters he received from someone angry with him. To use his own words, he wanted to record “the resemblance between the mind of modern man and a city.” Whether he succeeded would be another story; the book-length poem strikes me as a mess. But it’s a pregnant mess, full of wonder and reality, mostly Williams’s, but also America’s. Has any composer tried anything that so urgently stretched and questioned the art of music and even doubted it? While trying, of course, to say something crucial about the world? Maybe Ives and Messiaen did, in very different ways. Certainly Ives’s Essays Before a Sonata sets forth the kind of large artistic goal we don’t see much of nowadays.

And then, centuries ago, there was Monteverdi, who in the foreword to his eighth book of madrigals wrote:

Having considered that our mind has three principal passions or affections—anger, temperance, humility, or supplication—as the best philosophers affirm and, indeed, considering that the very nature of our voice falls into a high, low, and medium range and musical theory describes this clearly with the three terms of agitated, languid, and temperate [he’s naming three musical styles that theorists had described]; and never having been able to find in all the compositions of past composers an example of the agitated style as described by Plato in his third book On Rhetoric in these words: “Take up that harmony which, as it should, imitates the voice and accents of a man going bravely into battle”: and knowing that it is contraries that deeply affect our mind, the goal of the effect that good music ought to have, as Boethius affirms when he says: “Music is associated with our lives, either to lend honor to our manners or to overthrow them,” I therefore, with no little research and effort, set myself the task of discovering it.

He then describes his discoveries. And while the references—Plato, Boethius, old music theory, which, interestingly, considered not just the structure of music, but also aesthetics and even morality—are distant from us, we still can taste the scope both of Monteverdi’s ambition, and his success. What, he asked, is music supposed to do? Does it really do those things? No, he said, and went forth to do them, inventing string tremolos and in fact creating much of the musical language we still use to embody agitation and excitement. The piece in the eighth book of madrigals where he most crucially did all this was Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, not strictly a madrigal, but rather 17-minute drama with narrator, soloists, and instrumental accompaniment, full of rhythmic excitement that had never been heard before. At the Aix Festival four years ago, I saw a striking production, a kind of play within a play, in which the Combattimento was shown as it might have been staged in its time for an audience of preening, bored aristocrats—who, by the end, were shocked into attention, sitting open-mouthed, eyes wide with amazement. Does anything in music do that for us today?

And then I watched Antonioni‘s L’Avventura, a film that had transfixed me—struck me to my core—way back in 1960, when it came out and I was in high school. I was both struck dumb and devastated; somehow, I think I felt, the movie understood me, even though it was about rich and blank Italians, people I had no knowledge of, people who, though they couldn’t say so, did things with no real purpose, alienated from themselves and their relationships. Two of them fall in love, the man jaded, the woman hopeful. The woman finds the man with someone else, someone really cheap. At dawn he straggles out to a bench overlooking the ocean. Standing behind him, she looks at him with pain, then moves closer, and (to quote the script) “slowly, gently, and with an overwhelming sense of desperation, she caresses his hair.” End of the film, and, as Antonioni composes it, one of the most unforgettable
scenes in cinema…

What did it mean to me? Well, I’ve been thinking of an essay I wrote in the ’80s about a moment from Mozart‘s Cosi fan tutte, when (in the E major trio in the first act) the unexpected chill of flutes combines with a diminished seventh chord under the word “desire” to become, with no warning, an avatar of endless longing. And the longing isn’t only endless—it’s also unappeasable and all but unrecognized, since the music moves from that chill into the most perfectly conventional of 18th-century cadences, as if the longing couldn’t be connected to anything in aboveground life.

That, I thought, might help explain why Kierkegaard and many others have so famously found Mozart not just poignant but inexplicably so, as if his emotions weren’t from this world. And I think I’m on to something: you can see from the objective facts of music how the emotions erupt and then disappear. But, as I look back, I’m unhappy with this essay, because I never said what desire meant to me or tried in any way to connect its chill in Mozart to the modern world. I’ve wondered (thinking now of rock critics, who include themselves and their world in anything they write about what music means) if I could redo this essay, to make it both more personal and more grounded, to use it, in fact, to dig out what all classical music might mean today.

To do that, I thought, I should compare it with other things in art, things about desire, that similarly have stopped me dead. L’Avventura would be one of those. I wondered if it still would hit me hard. So I bought the DVD and was once more transfixed. And I found, perusing the many supplements to the film included on the DVD release, that Antonioni had his own view of what was going on:

Today the world is threatened by an extremely serious split between a science that is totally and consciously projected into the future and a rigid and stereotyped morality which all of us recognize as such and yet sustain out of cowardice and sheer laziness…[T]oday a new man is being born, fraught with all the fears, terrors, and stammerings that are associated with a period of gestation. And what is even more serious, this new man immediately finds himself burdened with a heavy baggage of emotional traits, which cannot exactly be called old and outmoded but rather unsuited and inadequate. They condition us without offering us any help; they create problems without suggesting any possible solutions…

Why do you think eroticism is so prevalent today in our literature, our theatrical shows, and elsewhere? It is a symptom of the emotional sickness of our time. But this preoccupation with eroticism would not become obsessive if Eros were healthy, that is, if it were kept within human proportions. But Eros is sick; man is uneasy, something is bothering him. And whenever something bothers him, man reacts, but he reacts badly, only on erotic impulse and he is unhappy.

Now, there’s always something a little sententious about Antonioni, and I can sympathize with people who’ve found L’Avventura static, inexplicable, or else obvious. Certainly Antonioni’s pronouncement, divorced from the artistic power of his film, seems to make a lot out of very little, especially now, when the thoughts in it are reasonably common.

Maybe he’s more sympathetic when he goes on to say: “And here we witness the crumbling of a myth, which proclaims it is enough for us to know, to be critically conscious of ourselves, to analyze ourselves…The fact that matters is that such an examination is not enough. It is only a preliminary step. Every day, every emotional encounter gives rise to a new adventure.” The point for me, though, is that—in 1960—he was on to something. My teenage gropings toward relationships all went on in the limbo Antonioni fingered; there literally were no ideas that could explain them, except the old ones of love and marriage, which couldn’t help us with the entitlement to freedom that we also felt.

Nor, of course, were teenagers the only one to feel this. Nor was Antonioni the only filmmaker who addressed it. Think of two other classics from that era, Godard‘s Breathless and Truffaut‘s Jules and Jim, both of which show morality suspended (Godard’s bandits on the run) or upended (Truffaut’s woman, moving at whim between two men) with consequences more dramatic than anything that Antonioni cared to show. An older generation would have staged these films as moral tales, with retribution (even in film noir) for those who stray. In Godard, Truffaut, and Antonioni there’s no morality, just consequences.

And, working this around to music, I’ve read an interview in which Philip Glass, who was in Paris at around the time these, films came out, compares them to Boulez. Or rather, when he’s asked about Boulez, he says more or less that Boulez and the new-music concerts he gave didn’t matter; the biggest thing in Paris arts were all those films. And of course that’s right. What did the world outside music care about back then? Certainly not Boulez and Stockhausen. But Godard seemed intensely important and in some ways still does. Artists, intellectuals, and others in what ought to be our music audience still care about him (and Truffaut and Antonioni and films today), while they neglect us almost completely.

Which brings me to my final point. Music has made statements. Steve Reich made them, not to everybody’s satisfaction, in Three Tales at BAM this season. John Adams made enough of one, at least implicitly, to get his choruses from The Death of Klinghoffer taken off a program at the Boston Symphony. And there are countless other examples.

But how much do these statements mean outside of music? Who notices? Who’s aroused, inspired? Whose life is forged? One sign of trouble stuck me long ago, when Adams’ Nixon in China had its New York premiere at BAM. Two people, well-known figures on the intellectual end of the classical music world, came up to me in great excitement, saying “Finally classical music that’s about something!” Meanwhile, people in theatre and dance were complaining to me, “But what this says about Nixon is ridiculous!” I don’t care, for the moment, whether they were right, but look at the gap—the awful gulf—between their reaction and the classical music one. Classical music people were thrilled that the opera said anything at all. People from other arts went straight for what they thought it said. These other arts thus seem more grounded and more contemporary than ours because the people in them care what something means. W
e in new music…well, really what excites us, then and now, is, too often, merely that something got performed at all.

Or look at the parade of history. Music once made statements (look at Monteverdi) both about itself and about the world it functioned in; these statements mattered because a lot of people cared. Or else, with Bach and his Passions, there were large, important statements made that everyone accepted because the music effortlessly reflected what most people in its culture thought.

Then you had Beethoven, straining toward an unknown future (but unlike Antonioni, embracing ideals with unashamed optimism). Then the romantics wrote music full of sadness, longing, and dislocation as the world began uncontrollably to change around them. Unlike Antonioni, they didn’t show people lost and helpless, groping for the very minor victory of feeling, if nothing else, compassion; their protagonists—in opera, most spectacularly—simply died. The power that had is clear from many sources, including novels of the time; performances of operas like Lucia seemed exactly to sum up what many people felt.

Then came Wagner, with his slightly aimless revolution, still grounded, though, in a perception that society was forced and artificial and attracting—transfixing—everyone in Europe who was adventurous and artistically advanced. And then (hopscotching through history) Debussy and Pelléas, important for Parisian aesthetes (Proust, home in bed, listened to performances through a special telephone connection). Then Stravinsky, and Schoenberg, moving to atonality embraced by abstract painters.

Then Schoenberg’s 12-tone system, which, whatever its musical value, not many people outside music cared about. Then serialism, a mighty statement inside music, but not, I think, influential in the outside world (despite attacks from the likes of Lévi-Strauss, aroused to anger because they thought the serialists ignorantly trespassed into subjects, like the nature of language, that they didn’t understand). Shostakovich, of course, was making large and sometimes dangerous, if mostly hidden, statements, but that was outside what then was seen to be the musical mainstream. And Cage and Feldman, moved in a wide artistic world, full of dance and painting. So did the minimalists and in part because of that—and because they were grounded in a culture bigger than themselves—Einstein on the Beach became the only new music event I can remember that jumped over the new music walls to arouse nearly everyone with any feeling for contemporary arts.

And after minimalism? Well, we returned to tonality and gratefully shook off the modernist yoke. We then were free to write anything we liked. But these, I’d suggest—no matter how avidly I said the opposite last month—are small artistic goals. Like the classical music reactions to Nixon in China, they focus on the act of saying something, not on what is said. The reaction in the outside world, I think, is “Well, how nice for you! But why should I care?”

I myself care (to reconcile last month’s column with this one) because I’m besotted with music, love new music just as much as old, and make my own connections with the world outside it. But people in that outside world, who don’t follow music on their own, need connections made for them. Or rather they need, and spontaneously react to, music that makes the connections by itself, that jumps to their attention.

Obviously non-classical music does that; I haven’t said so here, in part because we all know it. What we don’t acknowledge strongly enough is that our music doesn’t get to people. Sometimes we bitch that it’s not performed or publicized enough. But how could it be? The people who plan performances and do publicity, even deep inside the corporate machine, still live in the same culture they address. They can’t make famous something no one cares about. And in fact my experience in pop music showed me that things change all the time in mainstream culture, normally (though this is a longer story than I have time for now) without the machine having much to do with it, except to jump on the wagon when it’s already moving on its own.

What we might need is something with scope enough to make a difference. At the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce has his hero Stephen Daedalus say—in what’s accepted as Joyce’s own ideal of art—”I go for the millionth time to encounter the reality of experience, and to forge, in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated conscience of my race.” Do we have composers bold enough to do that?

Dean Suzuki Photo by Ryan Suzuki

With all of the interest in and investigation into world musics, from scholarly studies to the integration of non-Western styles, forms, instruments, and compositional techniques to popular world fusion styles, it is curious that more composers have not tapped into uniquely American musics. The appeal of various world music styles, especially non-Western styles, has become widespread and it is quite understandable. There is the allure of the exotic, the unfamiliar, and the curious. Instrumental timbres offer a new and broader palette to composers. Characteristic rhythms often present a higher degree of complexity and sophistication or a different approach or concepts (additive rhythms as opposed to the sub-divisions of the beat in Western music.) Melodies may be in just intonation and incorporate microtonal intervals, and unique formal design or compositional constructs may be present. Even the function of non-Western music can differ. Rather than creating music as art and entertainment, music may be seen as part of rite, community, sacrament, or everyday life.

Certainly, the influence of Native American culture and music has begun to make itself known and felt in recent years, whether in the faux, new age-y, touchy-feely presentations of ceremonies, dance, and music turned into pop performances as seen recently on PBS or the work of composers such as John Luther Adams and Daniel Lentz (who is of Native American extraction.)

However, what I am suggesting in this column is the use of instruments found in American folk and vernacular culture such as the pedal steel guitar, lap steel guitar, Dobro, mandolin, Appalachian dulcimer, hammer dulcimer, banjo, or ukulele, and even washboard, whiskey jug, washtub bass, and Jew’s harp. These instruments of the American vernacular tradition offer a different and broader sonorous palette to the composer.

In addition, each of these instruments is identified not only by its timbre, but also by idiomatic and characteristic techniques most often associated with regional and/or historical styles of music. For example, banjo techniques include finger style with finger and thumb picks, as found in bluegrass; rapid strumming, as in Dixieland; and “frailing” and/or “clawhammer” techniques (some regard the two as synonymous, while others discern a difference) found in so-called “old timey” and folk music. Each technique is associated with its own style or styles and both style and technique could be fodder for the thoughtful composer.

Why is it that of the few composers to use the banjo, one is George Crumb in his Night of the Four Moons? Another is Jo Kondo, a Japanese composer. Off the top of my head, I can think of only two composers who have written for the pedal steel guitar—Chas Smith (who plays the instrument) and Sasha Matson—and only one who has composed for the Dobro (again Smith).

A while back, I wrote a column on the appropriation of rock elements into the classical lexicon with an emphasis on the electric guitar. The electric guitar is used with increasing frequency, though it too is hardly a staple. Still, both the Paul Dresher Electro-Acoustic Band and the Bang on a Can All-Stars feature the guitar as a central player, and others, including Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Steve Mackey, Scott Johnson, and numerous other composers have written for the instrument often. The classical guitar has been around since the 19th century, albeit marginalized and characterized. Recently, it has been served by a repertoire from mostly second- and third-rate composers such as Mauro Giuliani, Fernando Sor, Manuel Ponce or Federico Moreno-Torroba. Still, the instrument is no stranger to contemporary composers.

On the other hand, the steel string acoustic guitar, though not a uniquely American instrument, is seldomly used and is hardly considered a legitimate instrument. Like all guitars, the instrument can provide melody, accompaniment, and even a kind of bass figuration. The steel string guitar, in a manner that parallels that of the electric guitar, offers a rather wide range of colors and sonorities. Whereas the classical guitar has variants of relatively subtle shades of color (spruce versus cedar tops, Indian versus Brazilian rosewood, and the like) there are significant differences in body type and construction in steel string guitars: the classic dreadnaught, jumbo, single, double and triple ought sizes, archtop with f-holes, and the unique Maccaferri guitars (made famous by Django Reinhardt) and resonator guitars (Dobros and National guitars, with their metal resonators and grills). These different types and style
s of guitar offer very different timbres, sustain, attack/decay envelopes, and idiosyncratic character. The steel string guitar has a tradition of multiple techniques, from flat-picking to fingerstyle, with and without finger and/or thumb picks, with fingernails or with the flesh of the fingertip. Additionally, string type makes a tremendous different in timbre: bronze, phosphor bronze, flat wound versus round wound, silk, and steel strings all dramatically alter the instrument’s sonority from smooth and velvety to robust, bold, and brilliant to bright, brittle, and jangly.

What about the slide guitar? Like the pedal and lap steel guitars, it offers a pitch continuum. Certainly with the host of guitarists able to play new music, a significant number play or could relatively easily learn slide techniques.

Of course, one obvious drawback to some of these instruments is the availability of performers who can read music and also have an interest in new music. That being said, Stravinsky and others were able to track down virtuosos on instruments such as the cimbalom (a Hungarian hammer dulcimer, one of many variants of the hammer dulcimer) which appear in several of his works (Les Noces, Renard). Harry Partch certainly was not reluctant to write for instruments that no one had ever played before. Stephen Scott composes works for bowed piano then teaches them to an ensemble of students at the university where he teaches. If these composers found solutions to the problem of finding adequate, even virtuoso performers on unorthodox instruments, so can others (i.e. you). Even if there are relatively few performers, they can be ferreted out and it seems a shame that these instruments, with their unique color and character, remain little used.

Overtone singing has become the rage, at least since the 1980s. David Hykes has made a career out of overtone singing and it is a technique that many vocalists know and employ. The musical progeny of Pandit Pran Nath alone, including both La Monte Young and Terry Riley, among a host of others, speaks of the influence on non-Western vocal techniques and styles. Yet where does one see the influence of American slave field hollers (outside of popular/vernacular styles such as the blues shouter) or the yodeling style of Jimmie “the Singing Brakeman” Rodgers and Hank Williams? Similarly the flat, straight, and nasal vocal timbres in old time, bluegrass, and other folk and country styles offer as viable an alternative to bel canto singing as overtone singing, Eastern European, Asian, Indian, and other exotic styles and techniques of singing.

Even the jazz and rock drum kit seems to be avoided by composers. Is it due to some kind of lowbrow inference or less than classical status? Why not have the percussionist use feet as well as hands? The high-hat cymbal, with a distinctive character and sound all its own, seems to be perfect for the classical percussion battery. Jazz musicians understand the subtle beauty and sophistication of brushes, but they are not often found outside of jazz. As composers have explored the many possibilities in the world of percussion—dating back to Edgard Varèse‘s Ionisation and further widening with the West Coast Percussion School in which composers such as Henry Cowell, John Cage, and Lou Harrison used brake drums, rice bowls, string drums, bull roarers, and other unorthodox instrument and devices—techniques from the rock and jazz world seem to have been left in the lurch.

How about the blues harp (harmonica, for those not familiar with the colloquial name for the instrument) with the now standard technique of cupping the microphone and harmonica in the hands? Isn’t it time that we heard a power chord not only from an electric guitar but from an amplified, heavily distorted string quartet? Sure, Crumb’s Black Angels is for amplified string quartet, but the sound is pusillanimous when compared to Metallica, Korn, or King Crimson.

In other cultures, indigenous, often ancient instruments are either used or are used as a source of inspiration. Japanese composers throughout the twentieth century have composed works for koto, gagaku orchestra, shamisen, taiko drums, and a host of other indigenous instruments. There are so many works for these instruments, it is almost as if it was unthinkable that they not compose for these instruments.

Many Scandinavian composers have drawn inspiration from the hardingfele (or hardanger fiddle), with its sympathetic strings and brittle, steely tone, and the kantele, the Finnish zither. Of course, Aaron Copland drew inspiration from American fiddling, as found in the square dance, as well as the music of the Shakers and so-called shape-note notation and its attendant musical style with open harmonies and bucolic melodies. But the style of Appalachian Spring or Rodeo is so romantic and quaint that perhaps it created a barrier for future composers. Is it that Copland’s brand of Americana is deemed somehow embarrassing, trite, or crass? Didn’t Charles Ives teach us a thing or two about the virtues of traditional American music?

Why all of this searching around the globe for new instruments, timbres, and techniques and ignoring of the wealth of the same here in America? Is there some kind of self-loathing when it comes to our vernacular traditions? This is in no way an indictment of those wishing to study and discover non-Western music, but it seems odd, even foolish, that we ignore the riches that surround us. I know, the grass is always greener on the other side, but honestly…

Photo by Robert Millard

I wrote my first feature in 1974 for Roger Corman (Death Race 2000), which was also Sylvester Stallone‘s first Hollywood movie. (We have both worked in the movie business continuously ever since!) At that time, I was completing my last teaching year at UCLA, where I had just resigned my position as a tenured Professor of Music. I continued to write concert music, however, as the composer-in-residence with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (under Neville Marriner) and the San Francisco Ballet (under Michael Smuin), as well as fulfilling commissions from the Boston Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. And shortly thereafter, I began working on Broadway (Sophisticated Ladies in 1980). Thus began a bi-coastal and a tri-commercial experience on Broadway, Hollywood, and the concert world. Of these three worlds, the toughest without question is Broadway, though potentially the most rewarding artistically. The time pressures on the composer vary wildly, as does the size of remuneration, for each different type of project. In Hollywood, I became accustomed to hearing “We want it yesterday,” whereas in the concert world, a year to fulfill a commission was not uncommon. Broadway’s demands were often artistically impossible, financially devastating, and uncompromisingly idealistic. I worked diligently for ten years with James Clavell and John Driver on Shogun, The Musical, which opened at the Marriott Marquis in 1991.

And then there is television. Doing a weekly series (China Beach, 100 Centre Street, etc.) is the most exhausting of all the projects I have undertaken. The single biggest difference I see in comparing Hollywood to the concert world is the interaction with a director (or producer). Movies are a collaborative effort, and the composer is part of an expository team, as well the principal “emotional colorist.” Often, I was told to make someone’s performance believable or emotional, when the actor failed to do so. In the concert world, I cannot hide behind any directorial fiat. The composer creates his world and is its principal (and only) actor. It is always center stage there, with no excuses for failure or lack of communication. Stand-up comics often refer to their feelings of vulnerability when performing before a live audience, of being “naked from the waist down.” Composers should always feel that way, even when working exclusively in the recording studios (as we do more and more these days, even in “serious” music). Do I feel bipolar working simultaneously in these different fields? Yes, and occasionally I think this is reflected in my music. I am not sure this is a bad thing. In fact, it is what is happening to a lot of contemporary composers—very good composers.

Photo by Sharon Guskin

I can only speak for myself of course, but I find writing for each medium a distinct process with concerns of its own. Here are a few of my thoughts on the subject.

The single most profound difference in the composing process (leaving aside the differences in producing the music in the studio as opposed to preparing it for live performance) is that in film underscoring, for the most part, many critical musical parameters are rigidly predetermined by the visual and dramatic aspects of the particular scene you are writing for. The picture (and the director) tell you when the music stops and starts, to the fraction of a second, as well as its overall shape. This is often very specific—the music must start out very subtly but then 10.5 seconds in it must immediately shift to something with a lot of forward motion, but not too frantic, and be sure the music acknowledges the exact moment when you see the character through the door etc., etc. In concert writing one must also determine how long a piece or section is and where formal changes occur, but that would be left to the composer.

Certain textural considerations are somewhat predetermined as well. You have to be quite careful about being too busy; it is rare that there is much counterpoint, and melody must also be used with care. Often the dialog of the scene is the melody and underscore is accompaniment, or at the least the composer must take into account the placement of the dialog and “leave holes” for it by weaving the melody, harmony, and rhythm around it.

I also find that every small musical emphasis—be it a rhythmic accent, a harmonic change, or melodic leap—accrues a large meaning when played against the picture. One often has to work within a very constricted range of gestures because any time the music draws attention to itself it also draws attention to and highlights what is happening on screen at that moment. This of course is used to great advantage but also must be monitored extremely closely. Rarely can a gesture be made for purely musical reasons, the constant challenge is to find something musical that works dramatically.

A difference so obvious it seems scarcely necessary to state it is that most underscore cues are very short; few are even four minutes long, very few over six. Much concert music is of course longer.

Having said all that, in a given measure of music I’m not sure there is anything that one could write as concert music that couldn’t be written as film music or vice versa. Context is all.

Photo by Catherine Byrd

Composing for film is probably most closely related to composing an opera. Whereas in most 20th-21st century concert music, formal structure is an issue—whether one chooses to revert to 18-19th century forms, chooses serial techniques, or to invent one’s own structures—in film music the structure is dictated by the film’s narrative. Composing film music has improved my sense of dramatic timing and this has had a positive influence on my concert music. Composing chamber music maintains my ability to structure my own work without the aid of an external force.

The most striking difference between the two is that the performance of film music is most often in recording; therefore, recording techniques play a crucial role in how the music is executed.

Photo by Kathleen Tréfousse

Concert pieces are like oil paintings: drawing on the canvas in charcoals, weeks of underpainting, then working and reworking the final canvas. Working this way, I’ve explored many creative possibilities and approaches and even elements eventually discarded are sometimes new beginnings for my next work.

A film score has to be written very quickly, so it’s closer to painting in watercolor—once the piece is complete, it’s done and you move on the next one. There’s a kind of Chinese brush painting where the aim is to have practiced your brushwork so fully that when you sit down to paint a branch of cherry blossoms, the painting emerges in one continuous series of brushstrokes. It’s an exhilarating way of working; I feel like I’m writing more directly out of the unconscious. The Hollywood film composer Lee Holdridge once said to me, “I just close my eyes and write.”

Sometimes the urge to rework a piece feels like an onerous task. When I return to concert music after having completed a film, the chance to work more slowly becomes an unexpected luxury.