Large polyphony. A conversation with Arthur Muscat about cinema music

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I remember a silent movie movie show when Ainars Rubikis conducted the LNSO, playing music for Edgar Poe ‘s story “The End of the House of Asher”. If I’m not mistaken, the music was mostly from the 20th century. written by a French composer. It took me a while to get used to the need to focus on the music, the images, and the interactions between the two. I even closed my eyes for a moment to listen only to music.
Baster Kitton’s 1924 film has such clever drama and plot that the film is shown in the film, as the main character is a film mechanic. Suffering from the misery of love and the pain of his soul, he arrives at work and falls asleep at his projector. And there you can see the tapier as down playing the piano, there is also a violinist. We can see how this happened at that time.

Andris Poga and I, thinking about this kind of show, listened to several versions that the composers had created especially for this film, but none of them seemed so accurate, witty, lively, unexpected and paradoxical. It was not that the music gave the impression that the film creates. The film stands above everything one way or another. We wanted to find music that matched our genius. That’s why we chose Shostakovich’s music, which was written more or less in the same years as the film. This is a brand new Shostakovich, he is a little over twenty.

What are they about opuses?
In those years he wrote quite a lot, was to demand a film and theater composer. This and that will sound from Grigory Kozincev’s film The New Babel (1930), for which Shostakovich has written completely destructive music in his precision and wit. It is worth remembering the name of this director, because Shostakovich meets him later, in the 60s, when Kozincev invites him to write music for two of his films: first “Hamlet”, then “King Lyres”, in which Gertrude played our Elza Radzina. These films could be said to be the late Kozincev. So they made friends with silent cinema in the 1930s.

There is another film that may not even be known to even film historians today, called “The Adventures of Korzinkin”, and in fact it doesn’t matter what happens there. It is an eccentric comedy with different situations, jokes and misunderstandings. If “New Babylon” is remembered because of Grigory Kozincev, then “Korzinkin’s Adventures” is remembered perhaps only because of Shostakovich, because again – it is the work of the 1930s – he has written absolutely fantastic music, which, in my opinion, parodies some elements of jazz. There is one duo with four hands, completely dug by two pianists. The film is about chasing cars. There is such a chase in Bassert Kitton’s film “Sherlock the Younger”. And we also used this episode of music.

Then there will be music from the theater performance “Blakts”. It is a legendary theater performance directed by Vsevolod Meierhold. This is 1929. There are excerpts from what Shostakovich has arranged for his jazz suite for symphony orchestra, which are basically his various theatrical and cinematic arrangements and arrangements. It seems to me that he understood quite well what can work well even apart from a film or a show, what music can live its own independent life. These are the main whales on which we have soundfully built the 45-minute Baster Kitton comedy. You will see how it works. There is still music from a slightly different era, this is probably the most popular theme of Shostakovich’s cinema music. For the romantic line of the film, we have used the very popular Shostakovich romance from the film “Dundurs”, it was written in the 1950s. But it suited us. No one probably remembers what happened in the film “Dundurs”, it is a cinematic monument of the time of social realism, but Shostakovich’s music is again what has survived and is known all over the world.

And in the context of this, we decided to invite Rein Zariņš to play Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto, which is music of the same time, and it represents all the features of the style that are in Shostakovich’s cinema and theater music. Of course, it is also a captivating and witty concert genre, one of the most important piano concerts of the 20th century. This is the structure of the evening expected on August 8 in Cēsis.

The Russian Philharmonic and conductor Thomas Zanderling has an album where eight waltzes are pulled from Shostakovich’s cinematic music and put together in one suite. As far as I remember from lectures on Shostakovich’s symphonic music, the waltz can also have semantic weight. Why do you think he paid so much attention to the genre of dance in film music?
Perhaps because genreism can lead to very strong characteristics. Both lyrical and eccentric, of very different kinds, but not only with the waltz. But yes, with the waltzes Shostakovich continues to some extent the tradition of the Russian waltz. The most widespread Russian waltzes in history are Tchaikovsky and Glinka. It’s romantic music. For Shostakovich, too, some waltzes are extremely romantic, they have already become self-portraits. Andris Poga and I immediately understood that we will not put this famous waltz from the Second Jazz Suite in the solminor, it should simply not be put on, no matter how we want it at times. But then I found out that those waltzes are different for Shostakovich – light, humorous and drastic.

Don’t put a solminor waltz because it will distract you from the movie?
Yes, it already bears some of its mark. Maybe for every listener it is associated with something else that does not go along with the film. It’s like watching a Latvian movie and suddenly putting on a “Melancholic Waltz” in one episode. What will happen? Either it will be ingenious or everyone will bring their own feeling.

Do you have a tapper experience yourself?
No, I haven’t played the piano in movies like that. But there is one moment that I remember from time to time with an inner tremor. It wasn’t so long ago that the soundtrack for the film “The Chronicle of Melania” was created. Viesturs Kairišs sat in one room, the sound director in the other, sometimes both together, in another room there was a piano, which I had removed the cover and practically did not touch the keys, the whole action took place around the strings. Together with violinist Sandis Steinbergs, we improvised on motifs or themes given me, chose timbres or tricks and played music. The sound came when we saw what was happening on the screen.

Viesturs told us about what he would like there, how he felt it in shape. That’s how we took it for hours, but it was extremely interesting. I can’t call it composing directly, rather it was a creative process in which we actually tried to help the bottom below the picture. It turns out that different sound assumptions can have completely different effects on how we perceive what is happening on the screen. With sound, diametrically opposed things can be achieved.

How is this process different from composing music for a film in the classical sense?
It has a very big element of improvisation, because I don’t think you can just go and improvise. It must be prepared. You need to feel the form, know the right moment and understand the director’s idea. The director already understands what he wants to feel at the bottom of the frame. We can go quite the opposite, far apart. It may be that we manage to get closer, and that is desirable. The ideas of a sound director, who can say completely unexpected things, are of great importance there. They look at the whole complex in a completely different way, at the sound of cinema as such. He looks at it like a big polyphony. It is a common creative process.

Is it possible to compare writing music and choosing a movie?
Sometimes you can, but sometimes it’s harder to find, because when writing you can fit in those two minutes to 15 seconds, try to do it accurately with tempo or musical things. Selected music is just what is given. The timing or energy will be distributed in the way the music itself is organized. And you can’t change that anymore.

All that remains is a banknote.
Yes, but don’t want to ruin good music. At work with Andris Poga, we do not make any notes. It seems to me to be a violent interference in the music left by other composers when we start cutting and warping something there. I never like it.

But it can also be seen as an assembly.
Yes, but I don’t even like to watch a ballet with pasted classical music at the bottom, cut as the ballet master seemed to need at the time. Even great ballet masters sometimes sin in this regard. I perceive music as a certain process.

Immediately comes to mind a recent interview where Dzintra Geka a Pēteris Vasks told about the film “Every day of the century. Seasons. Autumn”. Dzintra Geka said about it that the directors are selfish, but the composers are even bigger selfish.
This is difficult to say unequivocally. Directors in this situation are more selfish because I don’t ask me to be put in a movie anymore. The music is picked up by the director. It has also happened to me that the director asks for permission, and in the film only two bars are looped from the edge of the piece. I like it less, but what can I do there?

Perhaps it is as dangerous as asking a poet to write an opera libretto from his own material, because he will not delete a line from what he has written.
Ui, a dangerous topic. Then the director comes and says – I need this and that. In the end, when you compose, you really see what’s starting to take shape there. Until then, everything might seem fine. But when I write a song, I try not to change anything in great poetry. Opera has become more difficult for me.

Okay, that’s another story.
I was once faced with such a process. It was together with Normunds Šnē at least 13 years ago, when we also created a music montage from Shostakovich for the documentary “Man with a Camera”, such a famous director of the 30s Dziga Vertovs, and Augusts Sukuts had created a film montage. And Normunds Šnē with the Festival Orchestra at that time in the opera accompanied it with music. I was there closely and studied the articles collected by Shostakovich’s youth, which is a huge edition. It brings together everything from his film and theater music, including symphonies and everything we know as the canon of his academic music, but where there are many unexpected things that are unknown. Jazz suites also, I think, became popular in the 70’s or 80’s, no sooner. They were not so much played during Shostakovich’s lifetime. They later became popular all over the world.

How do Shostakovich’s musical drama and tempo fit in with Baster Kitton’s tempo?
Let’s see how it goes together. We seem to be going. That Baster Keaton film is not just about eccentricity, it has a wide range. There are also unanswered feelings of love, the aesthetics of dreams, a nightmare, so that the film has several layers, it is not just a naked eccentric comedy. It also attracts when you feel there is something else.

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