Today, where the list of practitioners frequently overlap, how does film music translate to concert music adaptation? On the Sono Luminusrelease Skjálfti (translated: Quake), the Icelandic composers Páll Ragnar Pálsson and Eðvarð Egilsson present a compelling album length suite that is more ambitious than the clip show often heard on soundtrack recordings.
The cello concerto Quake is Pálsson’s best known piece, but Skjálfti doesn’t feature music from it. Instead, it is from Tinna Hrafnsdóttir’s film of the same name, for which Pálsson and Egilsson composed the soundtrack. The album isn’t merely excerpts, but fully developed pieces based on the themes and mood of the film. Electronics, piano, strings, and subtle use of voices populate the music with a hybrid ensemble. It’s not dissimilar from the makeup of totalist ensembles such as Bang on a Can and Icebreaker, but the vibe is far more ambient than the prevailing one for these groups.
“Saga” is one of the best movements of the work. It is like a mini-symphony, developing an ambitious amount of material in three minutes. “Safavél” and “Miklabraut” are other favorites, the former starting with a string and keyboard ostinato until, partway through, a pause, and then guitars and drums join. The accumulation of material and long crescendo is reminiscent of post-rock. Tortoise watch out.
“Gleyma” is listed on the streamers as the hit tune. It begins with mysterious drones and pentatonic shimmering, to which is added an undulating guitar pattern, pattering percussion, and string synth pads. Ostinatos are a time-honored tradition, but they get bogged down in lots of film scores. Pálsson and Egilsson avoid this by creating asymmetric shifts in the texture. Here, a melody and counter melody wend their way around the chord progression in a pleasingly asymmetric fashion.
Skjálfti is an intriguing and enjoyable project: one hopes for further collaborations by the duo, both for film and concert music adaptation.
If you’re up for seeing Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s much-heralded Leonard Bernstein biopic, then try to do it now, in a movie theater, before it gets remanded permanently to Netflix. The big-screen experience is worth it, for reasons I’ll get to momentarily. But let me preface this by noting that—as was the case with Todd Field’s Tár—the last place to look for cogent analysis of Maestro as a film is the throng of classical music professionals offering strong opinions about its errors and omissions. Maestro—again like Tár—is permeated by music but is not primarily about music. It’s ultimately a Hollywood love story about a historical figure, like Oppenheimer without the hearing scenes.
Maestro begins with a short prologue featuring an elderly Bernstein seated at a living-room piano. As a camera crew looks on, he plunks out sparse, bitter music that he reads from a handwritten score, before confessing how much he misses his late wife Felicia (née Felicia María Cohn Montealegre). Although not acknowledged in the dialogue, the music comes from Bernstein’s late opera A Quiet Place, a distended portrait of a dysfunctional family, including an estranged gay son whose mother has just died.
Lenny debuts at Carnegie Hall
The story then commences in earnest with a flashback to 1943 and the fateful early-morning phone call informing Bernstein that his services as the New York Philharmonic’s backup conductor would be required that afternoon. The tableau is striking: a groggy Bernstein grasping a telephone in a dark room faintly illuminated by slivers of light leaking past an enormous curtain that resembles a proscenium drape but turns out to be an apartment window. When Lenny leaps out of bed, we see that it’s shared by another young man (later identified as David Oppenheim, a clarinetist who went on to head Columbia Masterworks). Lenny rushes down the hallway which transforms into the wings of Carnegie Hall, from which the nascent superstar emerges onstage for his triumphant, nationally-broadcast debut.
Young black-and-white Lenny (Bradley Cooper) and Felicia (Carey Mulligan)
Soon we’re at the 1946 piano party where he and Felicia meet. With Lenny’s bedroom habits already revealed, the film now enlists the tension between his sexual dependence on men and his emotional dependence on women as the primary driver of the ensuing drama.1 The performative nature of the couple’s future lives is prophesied in a flirtatious vignette where Felicia—an actress by trade, who’s later shown filming Walton’s Façade for CBS—leads Lenny to an empty theater where the two sweethearts reenact a love scene from a play.
The events of the 1940s and 50s are depicted with black-and-white imagery shot in the 4:3 aspect ratio of the classic Edison rectangle. As the narrative advances through the 60s and 70s, the clothes and hairstyles change accordingly, but so does the cinematography, evolving to color and then widescreen photography by the end. The impact is greatest when seen projected in a large theater, but you can sample the effect at a more modest scale in the film’s trailer.
Middle-aged color Lenny
Along the way, we encounter Mahler (Cooper’s widely-seen reenactment of the 1973 Resurrection Symphony at Ely Cathedral), Lenny’s agonizing choice between a career in musical theater versus becoming “the first great American conductor”, his and Felicia’s extramarital dalliances with men, and Felicia’s death from cancer in 1978. A poignant moment comes during a period of estrangement from his family when a bearded, disheveled Lenny introduces Shostakovich’s gloomy 14th Symphony at an open rehearsal as a plea for aging artists to act and create as authentically as possible. Afterwards, we see him drinking, smoking and snorting cocaine with several men. Ironically, neither Shostakovich, trapped in the yoke of Soviet totalitarianism, nor Bernstein, trapped in the closet of sexual politics, were ever able to live their lives truly openly.
Cooper’s portrayal of Bernstein has been aptly praised: a genuine tour-de-force, the result of six years of dedicated study and practice (and up to five hours a day in makeup and prosthetic nose prep). So impeccably does Cooper capture the mannerisms of his subject that archival footage of the real maestro can be inserted over the end credits with no loss of continuity. His counterpart Carey Mulligan is less impressive, giggling too much as young Felicia while adopting a stiff actor’s English as middle-aged Felicia. But her character admittedly presents fewer opportunities for range or development. Among the other cast members, Sarah Silverman stands out as an inspired choice to play Lenny’s snarky sister Shirley.
Also noteworthy—and easier to appreciate in a theater equipped with Dolby Atmos—is the audio production skill on display here. All of Maestro‘s dialog was captured in real time during filming. Even the musical performances were recorded live, not pantomimed, as evinced by the exaggerated “conductorial” bow strokes seen from the concertmaster in the Ely Cathedral scene. It wasn’t that long ago that extensive ADR, pre- and post-recording, and Foley artistry would have been required to deliver these results.
“Listen, there’s something you might wanna know about my brother…”
I would have appreciated more glimpses of Bernstein the craftsman. The penultimate scene, in which the widowed master critiques a conducting student’s gestures during a fermata in the first movement of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony,2 is a rare occasion where the technique of rehearsing an orchestra is deftly depicted (Yannick Nézet-Séguin was one of Cooper’s advisors on the project). At a disco party that evening, Lenny aggressively flirts with the male student as the young crowd dances to Tears for Fears’ Shout, an allusion to the indiscretions that plagued Bernstein once he no longer had someone in his life to tell him “no”. The film mercifully declines to linger on this however, returning quickly to the scene of the suburban prologue before giving the last, silent, word to the image of a healthy Felicia, the bereft maestro’s quondam muse.
Old widescreen Lenny
The inauspicious track record of composer biopics tempers one’s expectations for a film like Maestro, even as its craft and realism evince a quantum leap from the likes of The Music Lovers and Un grand amour de Beethoven. Beginning as it does with the quote “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them”, it’s perhaps disheartening that when either Lenny or Felicia asks “Any questions?” in Maestro, they’re met with silence from their audience. Aside from Amadeus—which of course isn’t a true biopic—films of this genre have had trouble captivating viewers who are not already fascinated by their subject. But in its willingness to embrace the complexity and imperfections in its central characters, Maestro succeeds better than most in conveying an insight into the dilemmas and contradictions that have burdened many a creative genius.
Bernstein’s friend Shirley Rhoads Perle said in an interview that she felt he “required men sexually and women emotionally”. ↩︎
“You’re ritarding into the fermata…what happens afterwards? What are you going to do? ‘cause they don’t know. You gonna bleed out of it? Are you gonna drip out of it? …Leak out of it, that’s what it sounds like…”↩︎
Something I’ve seen little mention of in the tributes to Harry Belafonte (1927–2023) is the dark 1970 urban drama The Angel Levine, which Belafonte produced and starred in. Based on a short story by Bernard Malamud (whose movie credits include The Natural), adapted for the screen by Bill Gunn (Ganja & Hess) and directed by Slovakian filmmaker Ján Kadár (The Shop on Main Street), it’s something of a working class New York knockoff of It’s a Wonderful Life, with Jimmy Stewart replaced by Zero Mostel as the old impoverished Jewish tailor Mishkin (whose wife is dying of a heart ailment), and Belafonte as his unlikely guardian angel Alexander Levine.
Its overlapping cuts (as in the opening montage where Mishkin witnesses Levine stealing a fur coat and subsequently being struck, apparently fatally, by traffic while fleeing), its perplexing shifts between color and black-and-white (and between flashback and story time), and its equivocal ending and narrative ambiguities (how much of the action really happens rather than being imagined) places it within a lineage of lightly surrealist American feature films of which Tár is a more recent example. Indeed it seems remarkable in retrospect that this gloomy, sluggish, sentimental and somewhat abstruse Belafonte vehicle (which marked his first film appearance since 1959’s Odds Against Tomorrow, and which led to a pair of popular 70s blaxploitation pairings with Sidney Poitier), could be released by United Artists and widely distributed in American movie theaters. I remember being confounded by it, along with most of the (predominately adult) audience, when my parents took me to see it during the heyday of family moviegoing in the US.
Of the two principals, it’s Belafonte who seems more comfortable portraying his character: a hustler in life turned angel-on-probation in death, tasked with rekindling Mishkin’s faith within 24 hours in order to earn his wings. It’s his lot to be as harshly judged in the afterlife as on Earth (“Every white mother up there was going through them gates—but me, they put me on probation, same kind of shit I’ve been having down here all my life”). Mostel, by contrast, often seems to struggle with his non-comic role, and one wonders how someone like Rod Steiger might have fared instead. Among the other cast members, Ida Kaminska is notable as Mrs. Mishkin and Gloria Foster (of The Matrix) as Levine’s jaded girlfriend-on-earth Sally.
The music was contributed by the Czeck composer Zdeněk Liška, who’s best represented by his electronic tracks for several Švankmajer animated shorts, as well as the Brothers Quay’s The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer. This score is straightforward 70s film music, harpsichord-heavy and sometimes Klezmer-tinged (as in the intro’s slow waltz), with nary a hint of the calypso that Belafonte had popularized in the 1950s—though there is a bar scene with 70s funk blaring from the jukebox, and in the closing montage set in Harlem the harpsichord is replaced with a more gospel-shaded Hammond organ. A notable cameo in this sequence is made by Harlem’s old Commandment Keepers Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation, where a distraught Mishkin searches for Levine, who has vanished following his allotted 24 hours. In the dialog-less conclusion, Mishkin sees a black feather fluttering down from the sky. Is it from a crow, or did Levine really get his wings? Mishkin grasps for the feather, but is unable to reach it.
A product of the “crisis of faith” zeitgeist that also brought forth works like Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, The Angel Levine follows the distinctly Jewish custom of offering no easy answers to its parables on the nature of faith, friendship and love, here refracted through a contemporary prism of race relations. Like life, this obscure film confronts us with the need to cope with loss and ambiguity.
Thelonious Monk, piano, composer, arranger; Charlie Rouse, tenor saxophone; Barney Wilen, tenor saxophone; Sam Jones, double bass; Art Taylor, drums
Since its arrival at our house, this release has been in heavy rotation. After it seems as if everything that the famed modern bebop pianist Thelonious Monk put to record had been issued, a treasure like this surfaces: the pianist’s soundtrack for Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the 1960 Roger Vadim film adapting Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ famous 1782 novel. Buoyant versions of Monk classics such as “Rhythm-a-Ning,” “Well You Needn’t,” and “Crepuscule with Nellie” are abetted by excellent soloing from two tenor saxophonists, Barney Wilen (in whose archives these recordings resided) and Charlie Rouse, a frequent partner of the pianist’s. Monk’s playing, varied here in approach from succulent balladry to rousing uptempo soloing, spurs on the rhythm section of bassist Sam Jones and drummer Art Taylor to ever more complex coordinations. A previously unissued cut, the gospel number “By and By” by Charles Albert Tindley, receives a particularly sensitive reading.The recording contains a bonus disc that features alternate takes and a quarter hour of the group rehearsing and discussing “Light Blue.” To top it all off, the sound is excellent. Heartily recommended.
How awful is the dystopia in The Hunger Games? Well, if you listen to one cue in the movie, you might be led to believe that only pitch-drifting analog synthesizers are available, and multitrack recordings are made with the greatest of difficulties.
At least that’s what one might believe encountering Laurie Spiegel’s 1972 composition, Sediment, during the cornucopia scene in the Hollywood blockbuster. (Steve Reich’s music also makes an appearance!)
Geeta Dayal has the full story, along with an interview of Laurie Spiegel, here.
Vicky Chow performing with Ekmeles at the Avant Festival about a year ago; 2/12/11 (Photo courtesy of Avant Media)
Celebrating John Cage at 100
Avant Music Festival
The Wild Project, NYC
February 11th, 2012
The Wild Project (a tiny venue that is kind of like The Stone with bleachers) is where the Avant Music Festival is going on from now (it started on Fri, Feb 10) until Saturday the 18th. This is the third annual festival, and on this particular night, I witnessed a program that I never dreamed I would have been able to sit through when I was younger and still shunning the works of modern composers like David Del Tredici. An entire program of John Cage in person seems like a lot to swallow, but it seemed to have something for everyone. (more…)
The job requirements of a working composer are elusive, perhaps especially for composition students enrolled in University degree programs that fail to provide graduates with the interpersonal and business skills necessary for survival outside the walls of academia. One student composer told me recently: “We are all being trained to teach.”Woody Allen famously said: “Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym.” But those who compose and don’t teach do find ways to sustain themselves and their passion for music through a variety of collaborative and creative means, some perhaps less “traditional” than others. With this in mind, let’s have a chat with my friend composer Tom Myron.
The range of Tom Myron’s work as a composer includes commissions and performances by the Kennedy Center, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Portland Symphony Orchestra, the Eclipse Chamber Orchestra, the Atlantic Classical Orchestra, the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra, the Topeka Symphony, the Yale Symphony Orchestra, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the Bangor Symphony and the Lamont Symphony at Denver University. He works regularly as an arranger for the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall, writing for singers Rosanne Cash, Kelli O’Hara, Maxi Priest and Phil Stacey, the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, and the Quebec folk ensemble Le Vent du Nord. Le Vent du Nord’s new CD Symphonique featuring Myron’s orchestra arrangements is receiving an incredible amount of positive press throughout Canada and will be available for purchase in the U.S. soon. A video preview of the recording is included in this interview.
His film scores include Wilderness & Spirit; A Mountain Called Katahdin and the upcoming Henry David Thoreau; Surveyor of the Soul, both from Films by Huey. Individual soloists and chamber ensembles that regularly perform Myron’s work include violinists Peter Sheppard-Skaerved, Elisabeth Adkins and Kara Eubanks, violist Tsuna Sakamoto, cellist David Darling, the Portland String Quartet, the DaPonte String Quartet and the Potomac String Quartet.
Tom (I’ll call him Tom now) graciously took time out of his schedule to answer a handful of questions including several having to do with the “business” of making music.
Chris Becker: You arrange and orchestrate music for a variety of artists and have a career composing concertos, string quartets, and various settings for voice. Are these two separate careers that you have to juggle? Or do they intersect providing you with even more musical opportunities than if you were focused only one or the other?
Tom Myron: From a purely logistical point of view it’s a juggling act. Both types of work tend to lead to more opportunities within their respective areas, but there isn’t a lot of overlap. That said, they DO intersect for me on a more personal, creative level. I love getting to know all kinds of musical idioms in a very practical, mechanical way. I also love just about everything that goes into handling, preparing and rehearsing music for live performance. My training in composition and the orchestral repertoire has benefited my commercial work by giving me the flexibility to consider (and rapidly execute!) multiple solutions to specific problems. The commercial work in turn informs my composition by instilling a disciplined work ethic and keeping organization and clarity of intention foremost in my mind.
(Visual Abstract, First Movement, Music by Pierre Jalbert, Film by Jean Detheux)
On January 8th, 2011, at 7:30 p.m. in Zilkha Hall of The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, the Houston TX new music group Musiqa presents Real and Imagined – a concert collaboration with Aurora Picture Show featuring Theo Loevendie’s Six Turkish Folk Songs as well as music by Eve Beglarian, Paul Frehner, and Evan Chambers. Houston-based composer Pierre Jalbert’sVisual Abstract for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion will be performed live to a film created by Jean Detheux. The concert will be conducted by Houston Symphony Assistant Conductor Brett Mitchell.
Led by five composers (including founding member Pierre Jalbert) Musiqa is receiving a great deal of notice for its innovative multi-disciplinary concert events (dance, visual art, and theater are always integrated into Musiqa performances) as well as its educational programming that annually reaches thousands of Houston area students. Next season, Musiqa will celebrate its ten-year anniversary.
Pierre Jalbert graciously responded to a few questions about Visual Abstract:
Chris Becker: Did Jean Detheux create his film before, after, or during the composition of Visual Abstract?
Pierre Jalbert: He created the film after the piece was written. The music was commissioned and premiered by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble a few years back. Jean and I worked on a project last year in which he created a film first and I wrote the music to the film. That work was entitled L’œil écoute (The Eye Listens), and was also premiered by PNME. This time around, we decided that we would reverse the process, and he would do his film to the already existing music.
Chris Becker: In performance with the film, is the conductor watching the film for the timing of some of your musical events? I’m thinking of the third movement where rhythmic hits coincide with abrupt changes in the film.
Pierre Jalbert: Yes, the conductor is looking at the film for cues from time to time, and we rehearse many times through to get the timing down. As you can imagine, it’s very difficult as each performance is slightly different. But Jean made the film to not have too many abrupt changes. But still, there are a a few that make it challenging.
Chris Becker: The layers of images in Detheux’s film are very rich and tactile. They remind me of natural phenomena, weather, or even what we “see” when we close our eyes and listen to the sounds around us. Speaking as a composer, what do you think makes an “abstract” work of visual art successful?
Pierre Jalbert: I think when one looks at the film and hears the music as a single entity, and one does not dominate over the other, but each enhances the other, then we have something interesting.
Chris Becker: Next season, Musiqa will celebrate its ten-year anniversary. As one of the people who founded the organization, how does it feel to look back on all Musiqa has accomplished?
Pierre Jalbert: It’s amazing to look back and see how the organization has grown. I remember a few of us meeting at Tony Brandt’s house 10 years ago and brain-storming about what the organization could be. We wanted to get new music out into the community and into downtown and offer up repertoire that wasn’t being heard in Houston. All of the composers on the Artistic Board work really well together (Anthony Brandt, Karim Al-Zand, Rob Smith, Marcus Maroney, and myself), and that has been crucial in keeping things going through the years.
Tickets for Real and Imagined – including discounted tickets for seniors and students – are available for purchase on the Musiqa website.
(UNTITLED), an original film satire of New York’s avant-garde art scene, will appear in theaters across the nation this fall. By poking fun at the idiosyncrasies of 21st century Bohemia, (UNTITLED) introduces American audiences to some of the best that contemporary art has to offer, notably a score by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang, who merges the artistic expressions of the composer protagonist with his own musical voice.
(UNTITLED) revolves around melancholy composer Adrian (Adam Goldberg) and his whirlwind affair with a Chelsea gallerist (Marley Shelton), who unbeknownst to Adrian sells vacuous commercial works to high-paying corporate clients. The film explores the idea of true art and the question of integrity lost through commercialism – all with tongue in cheek. At the beginning, Adrian’s music comprises cliché contemporary classical music elements, such as crinkling paper and breaking glass. Once his perspective and emotions achieve depth and insight through his blossoming romance, his music becomes more profound.
John Clare had a chance to send questions to both David Lang and Adam Goldberg. In the second part (part 1 is here with David Lang), John Clare finds out more about (UNTITLED) from its star, Adam Goldberg.
1. Often with a joke, there is some seriousness or truth behind it. Is there some truth to this movie even though there is some fun being poked?
Well, actually upon my last viewing of it, the second time I watched it with an audience, albeit at LACMA–the perfect audience–it seemed to have a real weight to it. The film sort of takes a turn once the absurdity is established I think. For me the film really has always been about this righteous indignation, this sort of defensiveness of one’s position–whether as an artist or a audience member or a critic or an art dealer, in this case–that really is front for enormous insecurity. These characters are all wayward and tend to overcompensate with very stringent , often absurd, points of view.
2. There are some outrageous sounds and art. How does your taste run in real life – in both “new concert music” and “art”?
I definitely have always been obsessed with sound and strange sounds and repetition, but usually incorporated into something melodic or hypnotic in some way. I have for a long time been a fan of Steve Reich–whose work began with simple tape loops and phasing of found material, but eventually he applied this process to beautiful symphonic pieces. I have also been a fan of some conceptual art, but usually when it engages the viewer, interacts with him or her in some way or tells a story. I don’t like things that seem to aim merely to shock or to alienate. Basically if it moves me or I can relate to it in some way then, well, I like it.
3. David Lang is a Pulitzer Prize winner and incredibly gifted composer, but unfortunately not a household name – how was he chosen for the movie, and how was collaboration with Untitled?
I believe Jonathan, the director, knew David from music school. He had an interesting job, both to score the film and create the ‘sound’ pieces our little group performs–though in the end it was so bizarrely structured and arranged that we could often only barely perform to playback so much of the “music” we’re making we actually are making. David also served I think as a bit of a consultant to Jonathan when he was writing this, creating my character. I love David’s music and this score is quite beautiful I think.
4. What is the possibility of Untitled 2, or Untitled – the Showtime series?
Ha!
5. There have been quite a few composers in pop culture these days, from “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” (Jason Segal) to “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium” (Natalie Portman’s piano/composer) and the likes of Paul McCartney & Billy Joel writing new classical music. Is composition a new cool as nerds (think Big Bang Theory) are?
Hmmm….I’ve never thought “Big Bang Theory.” Well, I remember years ago Elvis Costello put out a sort of classical record with the Brodsky Quartet that was pretty innovative. Conversely, Philip Glass many many years ago started I think to incorporate a sort of popular music element–singing an so forth–into his music. I think there’s always been some overlap. I saw a great piece that a childhood friend of my girlfriend’s put on. Michael Einziger from Incubus of all things. It was fantastic, sort of Reich meets Bernard Hermann. I think there’s something that feels for lack of a better word “legitimate” about working with classical elements. I know that some of the stuff musically I’ve done musically, with my project LANDy, that I’ve been most proud of incorporates some classical elements–arrangements of strings and that sort of thing. Albeit I’m usually humming the arrangements like a crazy person to the poor violinists.
