Words Without Music: A Memoir (19 page)

I soon learned another of the not so well-known tricks of
figuration
. If the day’s filming began with a crowd scene, and it usually did since that’s why the extras were hired, the best thing was to not be in the picture during the first (or “master”) shot. If you were caught in the picture, then you had to be in all the shots thereafter. If you were not in the master shot, then you could spend the rest of the workday in the canteen, drinking coffee and reading or even writing music if so inclined. Truthfully, it was dead easy
not
to be in the first shot. All the professional extras in their beautiful costumes were gently shoving their way into camera range. It’s what they lived for. I never once ended up in the picture. Though I was paid at the end of the day, I still had to wait it out in the canteen.
Figuration
paid better than
doublage
, but that was the real price you paid—a day in the canteen.

Our little company began by spending an enormous amount of time on
Play
(
Com
é
die
), a work of Samuel Beckett. Our form of collaboration depended on collective work as well as direction by Lee and music by myself. The immediate by-product of this was to develop a personal connection to Beckett. David Warrilow became the main conduit for our discussions with Beckett. He was quite willing to work closely with one of us (David) in the exchange of ideas and direction, but he was not at all interested in meeting and talking with the whole company. In any case, Beckett actually lived in our neighborhood and actively participated with suggestions of his own.

As a company and individually, we were involved in Beckett’s work from 1965 until well past his death in 1989. Among these works were
The Lost Ones
,
Mercier and Camier
,
Endgame
, and
Play
. Some were actual plays, others adaptations from his narrative works. He remained in touch with us and was aware of all of our productions of his work. Some years later, when we were all back in New York, Fred was adapting and directing
Company
, which would premiere at the Public Theater in 1983. I was asked to write music for the production. By then Fred had established his own relationship with Beckett and I asked him to inquire whether the author had any thoughts about the placement of the music. Beckett’s reply, though perhaps puzzling, was quite precise: “The music should go into the interstices of the text, as it were.” And that’s exactly what I did. That particular piece of music—four short pieces for string quartet—was later published with the same name, “Company,” and has been performed as a concert piece, sometimes with a full string section, countless times since then.

The most emphatic and long-lasting effect of the theater work I was doing in 1965 in Paris began with the music for
Play
. The play itself is the story of the love affair and death of one man, his wife, and his mistress. The story is told by all three characters—played by JoAnne, Ruth, and David—each with a strikingly different version of the tale. The telling of the story begins when a spotlight shifts from the face of one character to another. These shifts appear to be random in sequence and in length of time. We, the spectators, see only the heads of the actors appearing on three large funeral urns that are supposed to be holding their ashes. As the light falls on each character, he/she begins speaking as rapidly as he/she can, and each actor begins to tell the story of the triangle. Clearly, Beckett, who was always among the most radical theater writers, was in this work unmistakably “breaking the narrative,” by using the light to disrupt the normal story line. In that regard he was close to, if not identical with, what the earlier Dadaists—and later on, the writers Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, who would take a narrative piece, cut it up with scissors, and then paste it back together again—were doing in making his art out of cut-ups. This jumble of plot and character produced an instant abstract art form, leaving the spectator with the problem (or privilege) of completing the work. Beckett, Gysin, and John Cage, with his 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence—a strange family of artists working out an artistic strategy, in tandem with each other, probably unknowingly.

For me, the exercise of combining this theater work with a new music pushed me into what became my first really original music.
Play
itself provided no clue as to what the emotional shape of the music might be, and what the response of the audience could be. As the composer, I was thereby liberated from the necessity of shaping the music to fit the action, or even to
not
fit the action. I think that I had stumbled my way into a situation similar to the one in which the choreographer Merce Cunningham and John Cage found themselves during their collaborations—often making the dance and music separately, without a particle of reference between them.

I learned of all this later, but even so, I saw the situation then for what it was, and, considering my age and inexperience, I responded quite well and, perhaps, even elegantly. I wrote a series of short, twenty- to thirty-second duets for two soprano saxophones. Each instrument had only two notes for each segment, and they were played in repetitive and unmatched rhythmic phrases. The effect was of an oscillating, constantly changing musical gesture. I composed about eight or ten of these and then recorded them. From these short pieces, and allowing a five-second break in between, I strung together a composition that was the length of the play. The music began when the first light was seen in the play and continued until darkness had been completely restored. The volume of the music was low, but always audible. As it turned out, it worked extremely well in providing music aligned to the stage action, text, and lighting.

After the first series of performances were completed, I took the tape home and listened to it many times. I needed to teach myself how to hear the music. What I noticed during the run was that, from one night to the next, my experience of the theatrical event was substantially different, depending on how my attention was functioning. The epiphany—the emotional high point—came in different places, due to the disruption of the narrative. I had found the music that would fit with that, and that became the third element: there were the actors performing the text, there was the light, and there was the music.

The music functioned as an accomplice in triggering a moving epiphany. The way the play and the music worked together had become a strategy for tempering the attention of the spectator—making the attention solid and focused. In this way, the flow of emotion experienced by the spectator was both dependent on and independent of the theatrical event.

The musical solution I had found formed the basis of a busy stream of new music that I began to produce. The very next work I composed was a string quartet in which I applied the same technique of structure and discontinuity as the basis of the piece, but this time for four string parts. This was recorded as my String Quartet no. 1 by the Kronos String Quartet almost thirty years later.

Clearly this new music was born from the world of theater.

“If you’re not a minimalist, what are you?” many have asked over the course of my career.

“I’m a theater composer,” I reply.

That is actually what I do, and what I have done. That doesn’t mean that’s the only thing I ever did. I’ve written concertos, symphonies, and many other things. You only need to look at the history of music: the big changes come in the opera house. It happened with Monteverdi, with his first opera,
L’Orfeo
, first performed in 1607. It happened with Mozart in the eighteenth century, Wagner in the nineteenth century, and Stravinsky in the early twentieth century. The theater suddenly puts the composer in an unexpected relationship to his work. As long as you’re just writing symphonies, or quartets, you can rely on the history of music and what you know about the language of music to continue in much the same way. Once you get into the world of theater and you’re referencing all its elements—movement, image, text, and music—unexpected things can take place. The composer then finds himself unprepared—in a situation where he doesn’t know what to do. If you don’t know what to do, there’s actually a chance of doing something new. As long as you know what you’re doing, nothing much of interest is going to happen. That doesn’t mean I always succeeded in being interesting. Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t. But not surprisingly, I found that what was stimulating to me came out of trying to relate music to the theater work of Beckett. That would not have happened if I hadn’t been working in the theater.

RAVI SHANKAR

D
URING MY SECOND YEAR IN PARIS, I BECAME FRIENDLY WITH AN
English photographer named David Larcher, a young man with tons of energy and a camera. I can still see him in my mind’s eye, leaning out the back of one of the old buses in Paris with an open back deck, trying to take a picture of himself taking a picture of himself.

It happened that David got a job with a film producer to do the stills for a movie. That was routinely done to keep a running record of location, scenery, costume, and weather. It was a film being made by a young American, Conrad Rooks, titled
Chappaqua
—the name of a small town just north of New York City. One day David came to see me, very excited because Conrad had asked him to find a music person to help with the music production. What they really needed was a music producer, but Conrad—himself not much older than me and out to make his first film—didn’t know any better. I must have looked okay to him, and I actually was. My spoken French by then was quite good, I could read and write music, and I knew something about the music that Rooks himself liked. I was hired on the spot.

The first thing Conrad did was to play an Ornette Coleman score that had already been composed for the film. I thought it was a masterpiece and said so, though I knew it might well mean that I would soon be out of a job. Instead, Conrad insisted that Ornette’s score wasn’t what he wanted. He had settled on Ravi Shankar to be the composer of a new score. It was an excellent choice. Raviji, as he was known to friends and colleagues, was becoming very well-known at that time through his long-term efforts to find a European and American audience. He had a strong working relationship with the outstanding violinist Yehudi Menuhin and was also beginning to work with Jean-Pierre Rampal, the French flutist. Furthermore, his recent friendship with George Harrison of the Beatles was becoming generally known, which led to him being recognized worldwide. Besides being a superb soloist in the great tradition of Indian concert music, he was also known as a composer who worked with both Indian and European musicians. And, finally, he had extensive experience as a composer of film music, though almost entirely of Indian films. However, his participation in the Monterey Pop Festival, the Woodstock Festival, and the Concert for Bangladesh hadn’t happened yet, and the simple fact was that though I knew of him by name only, I had never heard his music or any Indian music—popular, devotional, or concert music—at all.

It was very common in the 1960s for Western musicians, even composers, to be completely ignorant of global, or world, music. It was certainly not taught in conservatories, though it was considered an interesting subject of study for musicologists—they called it ethno-musicology. Even in as prestigious a school as Juilliard there would not be more than a handful of relevant recordings. In the school’s library there were some books by A. M. Jones, including his studies of African music that were published as early as the 1940s, but I don’t remember anything as well-known as that in the field of Indian music. When I found I would be working with Ravi Shankar, I simply went out and bought a record of his—easy to find in Paris. At my first listening I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. At twenty-nine, I was completely ignorant of any non-Western music.

Things were moving quickly with the film—Conrad was well past the rough cut, and he needed the music as soon as possible. Straight away I was off to meet Raviji at his hotel. He was forty-five years old, a strong handsome man, not big by Western standards but clearly muscular enough to handle the sitar, the famously demanding principal instrument for concert music in north India. He was bursting with energy and was delighted to meet me. He told me he had met Mlle. Boulanger and was very pleased I was her student. There were endless cups of tea and a lot of talking about music, but no concrete discussion of the score that we were about to record.

By the end of our first meeting, I learned that there would be no score. Indian film music was never prepared that way. Raviji expected to see a loop of film of each scene that needed music. Then, on the spot, he would compose the music on his sitar. My job would be to notate all the parts for the small ensemble of French musicians who would be sitting there waiting for their completely notated parts. Now, my first encounters with Indian classical music had been very recent and not very encouraging. I heard my first recording of Raviji playing a concert and I had no idea what he had been doing. It could have been a moment of panic, but instead I asked—begged, actually—if perhaps we could start ahead of time. We had a whole week before the first session and I hoped to get a handle on the job before the reality of the actual recording kicked in. Raviji readily agreed and told me to be at his hotel every day at eight a.m. and we would get started.

I was greatly relieved. But the problem wasn’t resolved because, though I was there every morning at eight, there was a continual stream of friends and admirers, as well as tours and projects that needed his attention. They were lively and entertaining mornings, but nothing was accomplished regarding
Chappaqua
.

Finally, with no mornings left, I begged him again if we could get started. He, of course, agreed and asked me to be at the studio an hour early and we would have a little time together. I was there the next morning and Raviji was there, too, and not even very late. He spent the next forty-five minutes coaching me on how to play the tamboura, the stringed drone instrument that would accompany the music. He also assured me that, as he had worked with Western musicians many times before, he would retune his sitar from its customary F-sharp key, down a half step, making it F-natural, and therefore far easier for Western musicians. Soon the musicians arrived and arranged themselves just below the screen on which the film loops would be projected. It was an ensemble of nine players—a small string section and woodwinds. The plan was very straightforward: Raviji would view the segment that needed music, he would then play each instrumental part, one by one, and I would notate the part for each of the players. There would not be a complete orchestral score, only the parts the musicians actually played. I would conduct the players for a first recording while Raviji watched the film at the same time. After the ensemble was recorded, Raviji would record a solo sitar part, accompanied by Alla Rakha, his longtime tabla player (the tabla is a set of two hand drums that underscores all the music and is responsible for its rhythmic structure). I would accompany him on the tamboura. A good plan and it worked fine, once I had understood how to notate the music.