Musique Concrète for the Eyes

It's been a while since I last reported on the gems I've found inside Netflix that travel the same waters as yours truly. And I've found a nice one, My Cinema For The Ears, directed by Uli Aumüller and featuring mostly Francis Dhomont and a bit with Paul Lansky. The film's continuity and direction come from watching Dhomont work on a piece entitled Another Spring, which was released in 2003 on Dhomont's album Jalons.

Another Spring takes off from the Spring concerto of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. Each concerto in Vivaldi's set has an accompanying sonnet printed in the score, sometimes as a suggestion to the performer, sometimes a propos of nothing in particular. Dhomont parses the Spring sonnet for all the references to things that make noise, then he captures the various sounds and uses them in his composition. One of the sounds that Aumüller follows is the "barking dog" allusion over the viola section in the score at the beginning of the second movement. So we follow Dhomont into the field, literally, where he captures a shepherd dog's bark, and back into his studio, where he blends the bark with the viola strokes in a commercial recording. After the Lansky interlude (where one segment is filmed with a doggie-cam), Dhomont has to persuade violist Jean René to create a savage sound, closer to nature. He uses the dog montage we're following, and Dhomont of course adds René's viola to become part of Another Spring as well. The last section of the film is an animation video by Robert Darroll with the completed piece as the soundtrack.

Around this skeletal continuity, we have a couple of extended conversations about composing, about using environmental sounds, which sounds are interesting or not, etc. These segments provide a conceptual framework perhaps for the uninitiated, and the two interlocutors, Christian Calon and Lansky, each bring their own perspectives.

The glory of the film, though, is the editing and more abstract sections set to works by Dhomont and Lansky. Parts of it recall Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisquatsi, especially during Aumüller's urban montages. But the nature segments are vivid and abstract, using field recordings to retain the referent for the viewer or creating parallel transformations with the music. There are a couple of extended sections without dialogue where Aumüller gets very creative. The Princeton segment with Lansky and Dhomont having coffee is a virtuoso editing job, talking heads interspersed with clinking spoons and soundtracked with Lansky's Table's Clear, which was created with exactly these kinds of sounds.

It turns out My Cinema for the Ears was released on Bridge Records and is still in print. One piece by Dhomont (En Cuerdas for guitar and tape, not Another Spring) and three by Lansky are included on an audio-only page, all four pieces in stereo and all four available on other albums.

Pousseur on film

A few years ago, Belgian composer Henri Pousseur donated all of his papers to the Paul Sacher Foundation in Switzerland. For his fourth trip to deliver his archives, he was accompanied by filmmakers Guy-Marc Hinant and Dominique Lohlé. The resulting documentary, Hommage au Sauvage, was released on DVD by Sub Rosa's video branch, OME. Most of the film is Pousseur seated in the back seat with the camera fixed in the same position, talking about various topics from the history and theory of the avant-garde to his views on aesthetics and the open work. Most of the chat relates to his music, although he also recounts a few personal moments of special significance. There are some sequences filmed at the Sacher Foundation, going over some of his papers with the archivists. What comes across most vividly in this 52-minute film is Pousseur's engaging personality and his incisive attitude.

Four interludes present his music directly. Two of them use selections from his electronic works Scambi and Trois Visages de Liège with a succession of images. There's a longer section of Pousseur rehearsing a very short string quartet (Piccolo Ricercare, about 2.5 minutes long) and its performance by the Quotour Musiques Nouvelles. At the time of filming, this was Pousseur's most recent work, and the rehearsel fragments illuminate the melodic aspects of the piece that were so important to him, but often easily lost in the abstractions and the angles.

I've written before about Pousseur's approach to open works, and the filmmakers get some interesting discussion about one particular problem, how to make an open work for more than one musician. One of Pousseur's solutions was the piece Les Ephémérides d'Icare 2, a 1970 work for unspecified soloists and ensemble. For the fourth musical interlude, he goes over a few pages from the score, then provides commentary from the old LP recording (unfortunately not reissued on CD).

The DVD, which is available as a purchase from the usual suspects or as a rental from Netflix, comes in both NTSC and PAL formats (on each side of the disc) and unfortunately has no extras. Archival footage of his musical theater would have been most welcome, or a moderately restored version of the ensemble work Les Ephémérides d'Icare 2 together with its score. In any event, another nice addition to the Pousseur legacy from Sub Rosa.

Takemitsu — film composer

Netflix has the DVD of Charlotte Zwerin's 1994 documentary about Toru Takemitsu's Music for the Movies. Interleaving interviews with excerpts from the movies, it shows Takemitsu as much more than a composer, often taking the role of sound designer for the entire movie. He had a much more collaborative role than most film composers, often spending time on the set when the movies were being filmed instead of the more typical behavior of not seeing any of the movie until it is nearly complete. Interview subjects included Takemitsu and several directors, including Masaki Kobayashi, Nagisa Oshima, and Hiroshi Teshigahara. All of the directors commented on Takemitsu's collaborative role for a larger scope of their films.

The documentary brought to light a couple of interesting trivia. Takemitsu always wanted to write music for comedies and lighter movies, but never got the opportunity. But there is a brief excerpt of an light-hearted animated film, Love, which uses the electronic music Ai. I was familiar with this piece from an old LP of Takemitsu's electronic music, and seeing the clip with the soundtrack was decidedly odd. There are also some details on the sound design for Kobayashi's ghost story film Kwaidan, where for various scenes Takemitsu used the sound of wood being split and otherwise destroyed. He always took great care to place the sounds in unexpected locations. Kwaidan was also the first instance of using Japanese instruments in soundtracks, even for Japanese movies. It also highlighted Takemitsu's use of studio manipulation of the sounds, even when the original was based on musical instruments, in order to heighten a particular scene in a film.

The documentary concludes with a beautiful segment on Japanese gardens, which Takemitsu loved and used as a model for several of his concert works. The Smithsonian Institution produced an Emmy-award winning documentary on Japanese gardens, entitled Dream Window, which unfortunately does not appear to be available on DVD. Zwerin also used a clip of a blizzard of flowers from Shinoda's film Under the Cherry Blossoms. Takemitsu discusses how he placed sounds in the same way as features are placed in the gardens, using the single distinctive sound to demarcate the surrounding silence.

Zwerin has done a number of other music documentaries, including the famous documentary about the Rolling Stones at Altamount, Gimme Shelter (with the Maysles brothers), and Clint Eastwood's documentary about Thelonius Monk, Straight, No Chaser. The DVD includes no extras, not even previews for other films in the series (which include Bernard Herrmann and Georges Delerue). But the documentary is successful in creating an interest in seeing the original films, many of which are available on DVD, as well as enhancing the experience of the music.

The Art of Sounds

Buried in all of Netflix, one can sometimes find some unusual gems. Most recently, I turned up a documentary about one of the founders of musique concrète, Pierre Henry entitled The Art of Sounds. The documentary, by Eric Darmon and Franck Mallet, was filmed a couple of years ago and runs about an hour. It follows Henry through a concert in his home, putting together a new piece, some fascinating footage of his sound library, all with a voiceover from an extended interview. Many of Henry's pieces were composed for ballets by Maurice Béjart, and the film contains several excerpts from the ballets.

While the documentary was interesting enough, the extras were fascinating. First, there is a concert from 2003 of Henry's 1953 piece The Veil of Orpheus. The concert footage is unexciting, basically showing Henry at a large mixing board. At the end of the piece, the camera pans back to show a stage full of speakers of different sizes. One only becomes aware of what's really going on during the subsequent footage of the rehearsel for the concert, where Henry and his technical director discuss speakers in the loft, to the right and left, behind the audience, basically all over the place.

The second big extra is a 20-minute film by Gérard Belkin called Le Candidat. Belkin is listed at IMDB only for Fait à Coaraze, a short film that won the Jean Vigo prize in 1965. But this film was fairly impressive. The surrealistic imagery alternates between political rallies, the candidate and his entourage traveling on a lonely road, and a brief sex scene, but the film is entirely without dialogue, using only Henry's sound montage throughout. Although Henry synchronizes his sound scenes with the ones in the film, within each scene there is no synchronization at all. He supplies only crowd noises during closeup scenes that should have a conversation. The political rallies are accompanied by the Javanese monkey chant. The sound is on equal footing with the image.

The Art of Sounds is part of the DVD collection Juxtapositions, which focuses on contemporary music. A couple of the other DVDs in the series are available at Netflix, and one can only hope that they eventually get them all. The previews included here make them all look fascinating.

How to play inside the piano

One of my recently discovered joys-of-Netflix is that they carry new music DVDs released on the Mode label. Mode has long been a premiere souce for new music, with an early emphasis on the New York school composers, and now including many first recordings from across the US as well as Europe and Asia. They have also been one of the first new music labels to release material on DVD, including opera, concerts, and short films. A while back I rented a DVD of four movies by or about John Cage, and currently we're watching Margaret Leng Tan playing and discussing George Crumb's pathbreaking piano suites Makrokosmos, volumes 1 and 2.

Crumb has a unique place in the history of post-WWII piano music. I remember when the Makrokosmos series was released on vinyl, and it was a very different perspective on contemporary music from both the Darmstadt and New York composers. I was very excited about Crumb's music, and bought the scores for Makrokosmos II and his earlier Five Pieces for Piano. Makrokosmos is a gorgeous and unique (and oft-reproduced) score. Both volumes are exquisitely drawn, with some of the pieces in non-standard layouts, such as the one on the DVD's cover, taken from Agnus Dei, the last piece in book two. He was the first to popularize, if not introduce, many extended techniques for playing inside the piano, including pizzicato, glass tumblers, sheets of paper, chains, playing the beams, etc. The techniques are related to Cage's prepared piano, but Cage generally modified the piano's timbre by weaving objects between the strings of a single note (such as coins, screws, bolts, bamboo shoots, and pencil erasers), which then stays fixed for the duration of the piece. Crumb's preparations are more dynamic and often require a different sort of performance technique. Crumb's piano works are a sensuous and delicate music that never sounds like anyone else.

Leng Tan is, by her own admission, a virtuoso of extended techniques on the piano. She has previously recorded Crumb's Five Pieces as well as a number of Cage prepared and toy piano pieces. Although here she's in concert dress, the performance seems to have been filmed in a bare backstage room, with breaks between the pieces (which you can see from the presence or absence of scores and various preparations) and no audience. The film's director, Evans Chan, indulges in some occasional trickery, with odd lighting and color effects. But with Makrokosmos, the pianist is always moving, whether to pluck the strings on the inside of the piano or using the various props. So the camera is also always moving, following Leng Tan closely, using frequent double exposures to show her hands and her body simultaneously. The film is a very effective view of Leng Tan's excellent and dynamic performance.

The DVD also includes a 45-minute conversation between Leng Tan, Crumb, and Don Gillespie from Crumb's publisher, Edition Peters. Although it seems pretty ad hoc sometimes, there are some real nuggets in here. Leng Tan provides some context for the extended techniques, comparing the canonical three B's (Bach, Beethoven and Brahms) for classical composition with the three C's for extended piano techique (Henry Cowell, Cage and Crumb). She could have found one more C with Curtis Curtis-Smith, who developed the bowed piano with his 1973 piece Rhapsodies, but that's a minor quibble. There's also a fascinating anecdote about one of the pieces that quotes Chopin's Fantasie-Impromptu. Crumb had originally quoted a Rachmaninoff piece, but he had to re-compose a week before the premiere because they couldn't get the rights to the Rachmaninoff. And we thought sample theft was new to the digital era!

Crumb's piano music remains somewhat controversial, even now, thirty-five years after its first performance. Many pianists, teachers and technicians don't like playing on the inside of the piano, believing that the piano strings will become damaged because of the oils in the pianist's hands. But the pieces have a life of their own, and many improvisational pianist, such as Sophie Agnel and Andrea Neumann, use these techniques in their own work. Mode has done a great job with this DVD, capturing not only the music, but the visual performance as well.