Words Without Music: A Memoir (48 page)

What happened to Foday Musa was similar to what happened to Ravi Shankar. When Raviji first came to America and then went back to India, he was criticized for the success he had. He would have to calm the critics who thought he couldn’t play anymore. He would put on a big concert in New Delhi or Bombay and play the traditional music fantastically well. He had to prove to them that he could still do it. That stopped after a while—they knew that he was able to do both. When Foday Musa would go back to the Gambia, because he had changed the tuning on his Western recordings, they thought he had lost the music. But when he returned to the original tuning of the kora, they were satisfied that he could still play the traditional music. Foday Musa and Raviji were able to move between musical cultures, and the real entry for them began with retuning their instruments.

Through my contact with both of these men, I learned to adapt my playing to music that was not part of Western traditions. Recently I made a record with some indigenous Wixárika musicians from central Mexico. I didn’t know what they would play, but I knew whatever it was, I would manage it. I listened to the music and said to myself, “Where is the music? Where does the music go? What can I play?” And then I began to play.

The work with Godfrey opened up a world of music for me, because it meant that in the end I could go and play with almost anybody. I’ve experimented widely with musicians—Raviji; Foday Musa; Mark Atkins, the Australian didgeridoo player; Uakti, a group from Brazil; Wu Man, the Chinese
pipa
player; and the Wixárika musicians. All of this music has been performed live or been recorded. Traveling with Godfrey for the film shoots had made it possible for me to have regular encounters with skilled musicians in other traditions. The time I spent with them gave me the confidence to pursue new directions, and my forays into global music—Indian, Himalayan, Chinese, Australian, African, South American—have widened and deepened my understanding of my own musical roots. And not only that, over the years and as I ventured further and further away from my musical “home base,” I have come to understand that all music, without exception, is ethnic music.

In 1990 I became the artistic director for the annual benefit concert for Tibet House US, which had been established in New York City in 1987 at the request of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. It followed his stated wish for a long-term cultural institution to ensure the sustainability of Tibetan culture in exile and to create an awareness of Tibet’s contribution and relevance to the world’s cultural heritage. The founders of Tibet House US included Robert Thurman, Richard Gere, Porter McCray, Elsie Walker, Elizabeth Avedon, and myself. The first concert was held at the opera house at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and included Allen Ginsberg, Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray, and me. Having lived and worked in New York since 1967, I had developed, with the help of a committee from the music world organized for this purpose, a large pool of talent to draw from in making the evening’s lineup. I discovered that almost none of the players I knew had ever played in Carnegie Hall, and that seemed to have been a major attraction for them.

Perennial performers have been Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, and myself. Guest performers have included Angélique Kidjo from Benin, Caetano Veloso and Marisa Monte from Brazil, Ashley MacIsaac from Cape Breton, Pierce Turner from Ireland, and Foday Musa Suso from the Gambia, as well as such Tibetan musicians as Nawang Khechog, Yungchen Lhamo, Tenzin Choegyal, Dechen Shak-Dagsay, and Techung. In addition the concert has featured hugely popular performers like Paul Simon, David Bowie, Debbie Harry, Lou Reed, Ray Davies, Michael Stipe and REM, David Byrne, Richie Havens, Iggy Pop, Shawn Colvin, Emmylou Harris, Taj Mahal, Rufus Wainwright, Sufjan Stevens, Rahzel, the National, the Black Keys, New Order, and the Flaming Lips.

This extension into the pop-commercial-folk world has become the living confirmation for me that talent is among our most universal qualities, appearing where it will regardless of gender, race, age, or nationality.

When I studied with Nadia Boulanger, she was basically teaching central European art music. That was her tradition, and that was what she taught. She was not interested in teaching anything else, for the very good reason that that was really what she knew. When I finally left her, I possessed an important skill and the tools with which to adapt music to different needs. I learned to move with ease from one tradition to another. Now, when I’m conceptualizing music on my own, it’s easier for me to leave Western music behind. Piano was my instrument—that’s where I started—but I had come to see that it was just a small part of the world of music. It wasn’t the whole world.

SHORTLY AFTER
KOYAANISQATSI
HAD BEEN COMPOSED
and had come to be known, Paul Schrader, the director and screenwriter, called me and we began talking about his film
Mishima
, about the life and work of the controversial Japanese author Yukio Mishima. This would become the first studio film on which I worked. Paul was filming in Tokyo in November 1983, when I was there performing with the ensemble, and I was able to be on location a number of times. Besides being on the set, I spoke extensively with Paul about his ideas for his film. I also met Eiko Ishioko, whose visual imagery for the film was so beautiful and who would work with me on the Doris Lessing opera
Making of the Representative for Planet 8
.

The music had an important role to play in the film. The score I composed was not meant as a musical decoration of the film. It was, in fact, used to help articulate the film’s structure. Of course this approach grew directly out of working with Godfrey, and in that way, and particularly with
Mishima
, I think that integrating the composition of image and music into a unified endeavor can provide the most powerful tool for a filmmaker.

With
Mishima
, Paul had a clear idea. There are three threads that run throughout the film. The first is the last day in Mishima’s life, which begins with him putting on his uniform to lead his private army in the attempted takeover of an army base. This last day is distilled into music—a snare drum and strings—that provides a military aspect. This march will become a march to his death.

The second thread is stories from Mishima’s life: the young boy, the young man. We see him becoming a writer, becoming famous. The music of a string quartet is generally considered to have an introspective quality, and here it is used for these autobiographical passages. Schrader chose to shoot these sections in black and white, further separating them from the fictional aspects of the film taken from his novels—
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
,
Kyoko’s House
,
Runaway Horses.
This, the third thread of the film, contains the most lyrical and sumptuous music.

At the penultimate moment of the film, Mishima, looking out from the cockpit of a plane, receives a profound revelation about his work and his life. The string quartet music now takes on the orchestral colors of the music associated with the novels, and leads him to the confrontation that is about to take place at the army base. His life and the stories he has told have merged and will culminate in his
seppuku
(suicide).

There may be no writer more autobiographical than Yukio Mishima. Everything he wrote was about himself. The film
Mishima
is a portrait of the writer Mishima, and the music of
Mishima
is meant to add a further dimension to the film. With the Mishima material I used my total immersion strategy, reading every book in English I could find. I was very impressed with his writing. It was passionate, it was modern. In his life he had arrived at a transcendent experience that was at the core of what motivated him to be a writer. For all the writers I personally know, writing is a way of accommodating themselves to the world, of making the world a bearable place in which to live. Mishima became a writer in order to make the world understandable to himself.

That’s very different from having an agenda, let’s say, an existentialist agenda that has an ideological or theoretical basis. Mishima’s solution derives from his experience, and in that way, he resembles Céline and Genet, writers who were not political writers but who were working out of the crisis of being alive, the crisis of experience itself. This applies to the whole postmodern generation, of which we have to say we are a part. That which authenticates our work is the genuineness and spontaneity of our intuitions. In this way, the activity of writing makes the world meaningful. It has no political status, and I would say it has no real social status. That’s precisely the way it is transcendent—it goes beyond the visible world into a world in which being alive makes sense. For the postmodernists, writing becomes the remedy. One of Allen Ginsberg’s T-shirts said, “Well, while I’m here, I’ll do the work. And what’s the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.” That’s at the core of the postmodernist movement, and even now, nearly two decades after Allen’s death, we respond to his poems immediately. They need no explanation.

WHEN I HEARD IN THE MID-1990S
that Marty Scorsese was making a film,
Kundun
, about the life of the Dalai Lama, I was immediately interested. I had previously had some contact with Marty in the 1980s through Thelma Schoonmaker, his longtime film editor. She was married to the filmmaker Michael Powell, director of
The Red Shoes
, who wanted to make a film out of my opera
The Fall of the House of Usher
, based on the Edgar Allan Poe story. Michael was quite an elderly gentleman by that time and there was some concern among the producers that the film might get started and he might not be able to finish it. Thelma asked Marty whether he would be the back-up director, in case something happened. We met, and we talked about it, and he said he was willing to make that commitment. The idea then was that there would be a contract that would involve Michael Powell, and the back-up director would be Marty, so that the people in Finland who were producing the film would be guaranteed a completed film. But before we finished the agreement with Marty, Michael Powell passed away, and the project never materialized. But it had put Marty and me in touch with one another, so that later I was able to call Marty and he took the call.

“Marty, I’d like to talk with you about this film that Melissa Mathison has been working on with you.”

“Come on over and let’s talk about it.”

When I saw him, I told him that I knew Melissa, the screenwriter for
Kundun
, through Tibet House, where we were both on the board of directors, and that I had had a long association with the Tibetan community. He must have known my music, because we had spoken before about the
Usher
project. He never told me he had heard it, but I don’t think he would have agreed to be the stand-in for Michael Powell if he hadn’t known something about the music. Also, by that time
Mishima
had been done, and Paul Schrader was one of Marty’s favorite writers, having written the screenplays for
Taxi Driver
and
Raging Bull
.

I was passionate about wanting to work on the film, and Marty accepted my request. At that meeting I proposed that I do “advance” work on the score—actually sending him music while he was shooting. At first he was a little puzzled and hesitant. Industry films normally do not tolerate innovations of this (or scarcely any) kind. Finally I think he just succumbed to my enthusiasm and acquiesced, and it became one of the few times I was able to follow my preferred working methods with a film made by a major studio and with a well-known and highly regarded director.

When Marty was in Morocco filming
Kundun
, I was sending him tapes of music for the scenes he was shooting. I knew that Thelma was there making a rough “assemblage” of the film, staying perhaps no more than a day or two behind Marty’s shooting schedule. At one point, he found that I had fallen behind on my film composing, and he urgently needed the music for reel 5, the “Escape to India” reel of the film. I had a few days off from my concert tour in Europe, so I flew to New York and quickly sketched out the music for the scene. The score I was composing included contributions from Tibetan musicians, some of them known by the actors, who themselves were Tibetan men and women whom I knew from my work with the Tibetan community in New York City. They were able to hear the music that would eventually become the sound track of the film, and I’m told that the music was very warmly received.

Working with Marty, I became interested in everything he did. I would go to the editing room in New York almost every day that he and Thelma were working. Marty is famous for his knowledge of film history, and, for almost every scene that we worked on, he could elucidate something about that scene from the history of filmmaking. When I looked at his script, I found he had put in the camera positions when he was writing. He knew how he was going to shoot it, and he knew how it was going to look. He talked a lot about his own films and how his working methods were developed for them.

At one point, he had been talking about
Taxi Driver
for a while. I didn’t say anything—I just was listening, which I normally did—but something must have piqued his interest.

“Wait a second, have you
seen Taxi Driver
?”

“No, I didn’t see
Taxi Driver
.”

“You didn’t see
Taxi Driver
?”

“Marty, I
was
a taxi driver. During the time when you were making that film, I was out driving a hundred miles a night in New York City. On my night off, the last thing I was going to do was see a movie called
Taxi Driver
.”

“Oh my god, we’ve got to fix that. I’m going to have a special screening for you.”

Before the special screening took place, I happened to be in an airplane on one of my music tours and, by luck, they were showing
Taxi Driver
and I watched it.