A Mixed Bag of Composer/Director Film Collaborations

The Miller Theatre, arguably the most adventurous outlet for new and innovative concert programming in New York city, recently gave the public a chance to see collaborations between composers and film directors, with live music provided by the ever-fearless Ensemble Sospeso. The results were mixed, but well mixed, with careful planning going into the project. The teams were wisely chosen, each composer’s music aptly co-ordinated with the cinematic visuals.

First on the program was the small-but-wonderful The New Math(s), a collaboration between composer Louis Andriessen and director Hal Hartley (with some additional electronic music composed by Michael Van Der Aa). This quirky cinematic contemplation on math and time (which strangely featured the dance-like stylized violence of a martial arts film), took place in a ramshackle school building, and it was well matched by Andriessen’s spare, eccentric score. Soprano Marije Van Stralen sang with appropriate reserve and a deep, throaty tone; baroque flutist Wendy Rolfe played with clarity and precision, performing throughout the daunting task of playing one note and singing another. The most effective aspect of this score was how little noticed it was, a high compliment for film music.

Composer (and recently, notorious persona non grata) Karlheinz Stockhausen is the perfect sound stylist for the Brothers Quay. His electronically generated sounds and eerie psychological-depth-plumbing chanting suited to-the-minute the filmmakers’ post-apocalyptic nightmare of insanity. In Absentia is a black and white film about a woman in a lunatic asylum composing letters to herself, full of repeated images with obsessive consistency: the cavernous inside of a pencil sharpener, a decaying clock-face, an insect-like creature bent over and laughing, a fat and dirty hand scribbling in a moldy diary with a stub of a pencil. The score matched the images, with slightly jarring washes of sound giving way to one-another, and an occasional voice (spoken or sung) interjecting, all put through a sound filter to give the already artificial atmosphere a palpable other-worldy eeriness.

The Sound of Claudia Schiffer, a film by Nicholas Roeg with music by Adrian Utley was a delightfully strange examination of the phenomenon of birth as shown through the eyes (proverbial and literal, in this instance) of a supermodel. The sound was a montage, with various types of musics overlapping, matching Roeg’s repetitive and spacy visuals. It continued to entertain, being short enough to carry off its spare subject matter with interest. It wasn’t so much a score as a collection of found objects electronically arranged, but in this instance that sort of music concrete worked well.

The evening’s longest and most involved piece was, sadly, the hardest to take. Werner Herzog’s Pilgrimage, with a score by John Tavener, was as pretentious as it was dull – a series of gratuitously mawkish closeups of religious fanatics in various states of supplication, crawling or walking on their knees, weeping with ecstasy on trips to various holy shrines. The music was unadulterated New Age, with long, sustained chords and a chant-like vocal line... which never shifted, never expanded, and wore out its welcome as quickly as the film did. The talents of the instrumental forces present, especially conductor Rand Steiger, were wasted.

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