Space for Music: Stage vs. Screen, Final Act

More than half a year ago, it feels as if there still was snow, I wrote my previous blog posting. It dealt with the difficulties to find space for music on the theatre stage. During summer, I had once again the opportunity to perform thorough research on this. Not least on grounds of complete absorption by the rehearsal process, I was not in the position to cover here work on Cechov's Seagull at Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus. Now I shall catch up, but not until briefly having talked about the film score for Volker Schmitt's Schattenlinie, which I took up recently.

A pre-premier of this film is scheduled for December 8, 2010 at Metropolis-Kino Hamburg. The soundtrack begins to take shape. Which shape and why will be a future subject of this blog. However, a core piece of music leads over to the topic "space for music" right away: it plays along a voice-over.

What is a voice-over? Contrary to an off-text, i. e. an audible text of a figure who features on scene but is out of sight (for the moment), a voice-over is a narrated text that comes from another time and space, so to say. In off-text one could, in contrast to voice-over, in theory display the speaker by adjusting the camera's position in the picture's story space. A voice-over can nevertheless be spoken by a figure who is part of the plot - but without watching her or him speaking, even if on screen. This is exactly what happens in Schattenlinie: two closemouthed characters are on the road in St. Pauli for several minutes, while their thoughs are told by their respective voices. This epic moment is a typical function of the voice-over technique.

Insofar as voice-over (who has heard this on stage, and where? Please comment!) strongly relies on the specific possibilities of sound mix in film - intimate voice-over against fully orchestrated music an street or subway noise -, there could be no sharper contrast to the conditions of the Düsseldorf Möwe production. The rehearsal stage C2 at Central in der alten Paketpost, serving as main stage during the renovation of the regular stage, is a slightly over-acoustic vast room. It remains empty in Möwe, accept some chairs, a low footbridge, some foliage and a curtain.

Director Amélie Niermeyer leaves everybody on stage throughout. Apart from a couple of turbulent moments, the figures converse in a moderate, well-nigh "realistic" temperature, given today's state of affairs in theatre. Her focus on dialog (by the way, Cechov is brillant! An exhilarating read!) and on driving the story literally tolerates interruptions between the acts only, when backfitting is inavoidable. Moments without dialog bear tense silence. There are three "special situations" where there is music under the scene, namely the theatre performance in the middle of act I., the beginning of act II. / Boule game, as well as the beginning of act III. / good bye party.

In short: first, the project to put, apart from those three moments, only the faintest Cello dots under the scene finally had to be abandoned for forlorness. Annoying. Secondly, the rigid limitation in space for music only allowed for fragmentary an low-key concoctions, at least this is what I was able to achieve. Therefore, I do not see why I should receive these as music in its own right, and record them and put online, or so. This is just too little.

The (however well audible) pieces of music between the acts are only three in number, last only a couple of seconds each, and are, following hours-long minimalism, accompanied by frantic actors, curtain, light shift, props and a stage rotating speed all of a sudden. Things which distract attention from the music. Two out of those three exceptional moments mentioned above are bound to repetition and monotony for scenic reasons, and subject to the actors need to "put their words all delicate" in order to get their attitude right. Solely remains the theater performance halfway through the first act. Might be we shoot a video of that one...

To make it complete, there is one more thing the severity of which has been clear in my mind since a long time, but has not been covered in the technique-focused March Space for Music posting: inside the branch Big Houses of Contemporary Theatre, on average (!), music ranks quite low concerning experience and - correspondingly? - regard. The shares, ranging from the average theatre rehearsal over the house's expenses to sentences per press critique, even how long one has the floor at the after-rehearsal pub meeting, are constant: 40% director, 40% actors (star roles 35%, supporting roles 5%), stage and costume design 15%, the rest music, if one is lucky. Apart from individual deviations which can, as always, be substantial, these shares only change by any kind of star status (only culture/entertainment really counts) or personal juice.

For daily work this means that, given a standard two months production period, not even a single hour of regular rehearsal time is sacrified for checking out music. Then, actors would be spear carriers of music; then, work on scene x would not be pushed on. On the other hand, it is absolutely common that music serves as spear carrier of acting, because it is of course impossible to retrieve or develop the right attitude without the music played in earlier rehearsals. In addition, the musical director has to close-mesh follow what is going on on rehearsal in order to be able to react to new requirements at short notice and well-informed. As a result, attendance is generally required, be it to fill the rehearsal stage with sound, be it in order not to miss a thing. Yet it is awkward to work on music during rehearsal. Soundcheck begins at 10.30 p.m., past the lighting rehearsal. "Space for music".

What I have thus said is of course not valid for every production I have luckily been part of - on the contrary, to name only a few, there was luxuriosly large space for music in Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso at Thalia Theater 2001/2002, directed by Tomasz Pandur, including the rehearsals. Likewise, all children theatre productions were different in that respect. But I could have made exactly the same points on the Volksfeind production earlier this year, with the only difference that I have been recording plenty of music "in its own right" for it - which however appears in the performance only briefly.

Leaving aside my obvious deficiency to cope with such conditions and just function, I can hear a leitmotif. To say it with (German seventies comedian) Otto Waalkes: In The Seagull my shirt is mouse gray in the first half, whilst in the second half it sports a light dash of ash. Curtain.

Space for Music: Stage vs. Screen

On February 20, Ein Volksfeind premiered at Staatstheater Stuttgart, before I did the soundtrack of NOWHERENOW, and a movie soundtrack comes next. I take the opportunity to muse about the differences between film music and playback stage music which are all so obvious concerning production and result.

This is not meant to address the differences due to reception history - a groundbreaking film, or rather a groundbreaking soundtrack, has more influence on film than on theatre, and vice vera. By the same token this is not meant to address the differences due to budget, distribution, target audience, and the organisational condition of corporate or non-corporate theatres versus film production enterprises. There are, so I hold, differences which immediately follow from fundamental properties of making plays or films. (This text is, like some on this blog, controversial by purpose: I appreciate any hint (comment-functionality) to films or stage plays contradicting my elaborations!)

Two aspects seem to be of particular relevance. On the one hand there is volume adjustment between (overdubbed) dialoge, original soundtrack and film music; on the other hand there are the specific capabilities of the camera, i.e. optical zoom, perspective, tracking shot, cut. Both are limited on stage. While microphones and a mixing console are available on stage, there are "hard" limits. The same is true for stage design/light, where impressive effects are possible, but nothing like those camera tricks.

Let's begin with volume adjustment. When mixing a soundtrack, a whispering actor can well be put beyond a furious orchestra of 120 people, or a whispering reed-pipe can be effective against a thunderous blizzard or a cried dialog. Here, not only sound level is a parameter. Rather, a subtle combination of panorama and reverb can precisely place a sound signal spacially. A Dolby Surround film in a THX certified cinema is much more transparent than a theatre stage could ever be, given varying reflecting surfaces with moving actors whose microphones, if they wear some, not only transmit their voices but also all kinds of environmental sounds.

The use of support microphones at the theatre, be they attached to the actor or fixed somewhere on stage, is generally not unproblematic. An accentuation of speech level is quickly realised by the listener. On the one hand she feels that the actor cannot produce the volume by herself (which does not happen in a decently mixed film), and on the other hand she registers those tiny sound colorations which can never be completely eliminiated on stage, e.g. wind and plop sounds, amplitude variations, impact noise, comb filter effects etc. As soon as the microphone is noticed it feels at least unnatural. Frequently it even raises the quest of a scenic justification - which sometimes leads to actors wearing visible hand microphones just to state the obvious.

Underlying unamplified speech with music on stage is a difficult enterprise all the more. In case the music is played so soft that speech comprehensibility does not suffer, the music gets stuck below a level where it can unveil its effect. Music needs a minimal volume in order to make significant elements (like melody, harmony, rhythm, sound colour etc.) reach the listener's mind. A music played too soft sounds like a disturbance, like an unspecific irritation. An actor declaiming aloud might drown out music played with functional volume, but his dynamic bandwith is severely restricted. Normal speech gets lost. Common rules of thumb known from film help, but not so much, e.g. to restrict oneself to slow and even movements, or to avoid frequencies which are important for speech comprehensibility. One faces the choice between music under amplified speech, with all unwanted consequences, or no music at all. This is a major handicap in the fight for "time slots".

Another handicap at claiming space for music results from the fixed position of the theatre audience. While the audience normally takes place on stationary seats the eye has a wealth of possibilities in film. These considerably expand the narrative options in favour of music. The camera follows a figure, it zooms into something, it slowly pans over a landscape, a room - this all creates moments, sometimes very long moments, where music not kept underneath speech can unresistently unfold its effects. Cuts helps in a similar fashion to establish extended passages without dialog, or with few bits of speech. Cuts make it possible to proceed with a plot without someone speaking. Classical example: car chase. To carve out a lengthy action scene on stage which is full of suspense is difficult - as difficult as a 100% long shot action scene without a single cut. Something like this can rarely be seen at the movies (counterexamples? Comment in!)

It seems to be complicated to find perspectives on stage which grant space to the music. Music with no text beyond tends to have a retarding effect. The plot does not keep moving. This need not be the case, of course: at the ballet, the plot moves on without anything being told. Maybe here is is no hard, but a soft factor at work, namely theatre tradition. According to theatre tradition, a play is a text in the first place. If not text, it is picture. Working with the actors is in the foreground who, in a consistent picture and costumed consistently, are to act consistently.

Stage is however not inferior towards film in every respect. The restriction of a room, or a finite number of rooms, which are obviously "made", the physical presence of actors who obviously "act" - these factors highlight the fictional character of the whole matter. The consciousness of fictionality can be utilised, and theatre has gained considerable mastery at this. Nobody wonders why there is a musician sitting on top of a guitar amp or at a piano right in the middle of the stage, even if he does not intervene at all. At the movies, the reception attitude, just because film can do, is more like diving into a world, what suggests to ask about the role of a figure and renders the establishment of a non-acting musician amidst all the action more challenging.

Yet there are hundreds of films which are capable of producing claims offside the realistic plot: finally, reception attitude is no hard limit for stage music. I meant to show that, instead, these consist in, on the one hand, problems with sound mixing on stage, impeding music below speech, and on the other hand music lacking space on stage which speechless narrative forms made possible by the camera open up easily.

Leitmotifs in NOWHERENOW #2

In the NOWHERENOW soundtrack not only the (but two) figures entertain a signature melody. Instead, I have attached motives to the figure's returning emotional states, central goals and character traits.

One of the professor's character traits remains musically uncommented, namely his queerness. The bizarre labatory of the mad professor is so unaquivocally visible that I didn't want to cap it all, and thereby reiterate the obvious.

The first leitmotif denotes the journalist's loneliness. The latter is not consciously felt by him initially, but the music is meant to conceive this view to the recipient. The motive is presented with the first fade-in in a straightforward manner:



+ The Journalist.mp3

The "loneliness motive" appears again in, e. g., Euphory, Triumph, Fight from bar 99 played by the Glockenspiel, where it contrasts the journalist's decision to support the professor by following him into the water in order to stop him. In the Final, bar 25 ff. or letter B, respectively, the process of insight of the journalist from his own failure to diving into the professor's phantastic vision is driven by this motive.

A necessary condition for being a leitmotif is its repeated appearance, in order to construe the reiteration of a thought. This condition is not quite met by the motive for the journalist's cynisism; it is a guitar lick consisting in no more than one repeated note emanating from his headphones:

+ Headphones Music.mp3

The "Where Do I Begin" of NOWHERENOW is played by four celli, put in 9/4 time signature, which is the motive for the professor's vision:



+ The Professor's Vision.mp3

This motive appears whenever the professor's eyes are shining. This is the case, e. g., when he explains the spaceship's function to the journalist, or (at double tempo) when he finds the spaceship's key after all, and performs a jig. In the Final the motive becomes the accompaniement for the "fantasy triumphs over cynicism"-melody, whereby we have reached the final leitmotif.

The ending of the film remains quite open. By contrast, the music unambigiously sounds like a professor who is hovering on air (Final, bar 42 or letter E ff., respectively):



+ Accomplished.mp3

In the middle of the film the professor already feels as if the start was a success. From bar 89 in the "Triumph March", the motive is (in slight modification, because of different harmonies) passed through the brass voices, subdivided into half bars.

What film music can do

On this year's Summer Academy of Forum Scientiarum I have been presenting excerpts from the short film NOWHERENOW. The snippets were underlayed with different pieces of music in order to show how drastically perception of what is seen on screen can be influenced by it. This posting includes part of the workshop material.

To begin with, here's five different soundtracks for the first one and a half minutes of the film. As the snippets are meaningful in this blog posting only, they are password protected. The password for all videos simply is: blog.

The first example features the original soundtrack, on which I've been posting recently:

The illustration music beginning with the fade in is meant to introduce the journalist as a rather pitiful character, in spite of his arrogant appearance and his indifference towards the sublimeness of the sea (at first, he pees, then he puts up his headphones). The music on his mp3 player, in contrast, is no comment but what the guy on screen is in fact listening to: too complicated, cold, pretentious.

To approach the possibilities slowly, the second soundtrack is children's music (first from Die kleine Hexe, secondly from Pinocchio). Here, not more is to be shown than our inclination to accept even such a contrast.

The music establishes a children's film, and if we'd zap into something like that it would not occur to us that this is no children's film. Naturally, in the next scene a girl with a Pippi Longstocking outfit appears. We buy into the music even if the picture does not match.

The next music added turns the film into a whodunnit:

A suspense atmosphere with threateningly billowing surface and a Harmon mute trombone (from Früchte des Nichts) is anxiously asking which terrible thing is going to happen soon, and on the headphones there is a "battleground the morning after" music (aus Die Judith von Shimoda). Interestingly, the headphones music does not seem to be what the protagonist is in fact listening to, but one commenting on the horror of the oncoming deed from the audience's perspective. I would not be surprised if the man, a hitman rather than a journalist, would, after voicing "excuse me!" produce his automatic pistol.

The next music added is one more step into the same direction. Instead of a hitman we here might have a serial killer:

The sacral illustration music (from Novemberszenen) does not match the totally un-meditative scene, so that it thwarts the interpretation of what can be seen. The putatively reserved arrogance is then best reinterpreted into mania. Such a contrasting has been widely used since Hitchcock. Now, the headphones music seems more like his actual mp3 player: he stimulates himself. Instead of the clean pistol the professor is more likely to be assassinated with a more emotional thing, maybe a wire sling or an axe.

My favourite example is the following one (with a world hit by Burt Bacharach and a snippet taken from D'Angelo):

The illustration music is obviously not "into the scene" any more, but an explicit comment. The journalist all of a sudden is a likeable rascal dogged by bad luck. On his mp3 player he fancies music which is so cool as he wants to be.

Finally I have to offer three different music additions to an "action" scene from the same film. To begin with, there is a classical (Tchaikovsky symphony) dramatical music which has been heard like this thousands of times as accompany of action scenes since the times of silent picture:

Because important details of the scene do not yield action seriousness (the calm see, the professor's measured treads, the professor being an old fogey and not Bruce Willis - consider however the shaky hand camera and the 100% action compatible journalist), the music has an ironical impact. The sequence reminds me of a Monty Python film.

Conversely, it is easily possible to make the scene part of a comedy in spite of the fisticuffs, the hand camera and the drama on the journalist's face and in his acting. Here's the same sequence with Schützenfest from Die kleine Hexe:

To conclude, consider the same scene again, now with the jazz standard Unforgettable, sung by the unforgettable Nat "King" Cole:

Matching the winking Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head version of the beginning, we here have the jinx back again. To me this sequence is like from a Woody Allen film. Technically speaking, this music does not emphasise one of the visible aspects of the scene and makes forget the rest, but adopts a third attitude of its own.

Thought from behind - the first minute in NOWHERENOW

Well, the short film has already been presented to a conservatory audience last week... but for the final DVD and festival application version there will be additional brass recordings with Philipp Haagen. I affirm to uploading more music then! For now consider some text and a couple of sound bites around the beginning of the film.

NOWHERENOW begins with a fade-in of the journalist standing at the beach, somewhat lost, and relieving himself. He is looking for the professor whom he plans to interview. As he cannot locate him, tramping along the beach, he puts on the headphones of his mp3 player and listens to - well, he listens to what? He listens to some hard, analytic, urban, over-ambitioned, difficult music which is no fun but which he is anxious to like. That is, something like the music of Steve Coleman / M-Base ;-)

It would be a lost opportunity if the mood music for the first shot which is, volume-wise, below attention threshold and thus introducing the journalist as a loner on a subconscious level, and the loud and thus consciously perceived mp3 player music were unrelated and juxtaposed just like that. Could not these two pieces of music in fact be one and the same, only having totally different impacts when listened to individually?

Like this one: on Michael Brecker's disc "Now You See It, Now You Don't" there is a track named Escher, which, guess what, deals with Escher's picture puzzles. A triplet swing part (i.e. each quarter note is subdivided into a quarter triplet and an eighth triplet) is overlaid with a binary funk part which quarter notes correspond to the quarter triplets of the swing tempo (thus the swing is 33,33% slower than the funk). Those two grooves integrate to one song, with each meter.

The NOWHERENOW headphones music and the initial mood music can play simultaneously and melt down to an integrative piece although they are totally different, listened to individually. However, departing from Brecker, they both have the same meter. The Escher effect is instead accomplished by reinterpreting the harmonies of the journalist's mood music by different bass notes put forward in the headphones music. Here is the mood music:

+ The Journalist

The descant and a counter voice are performed by remote and heavily filtered solo celli which are, in their unsentimentally crotchety melancholy, inspired by Wayne Shorter's soprano saxophone play. Totally different: the poser music the journalist burdens himself with:

+ Headphones Music

In order to present the two pieces as non-accidentally belonging together I do not simply turn up the headphones music's volume. Rather, putting up the headphones exactly matches the first beat of the first bar of the form, and the subsequent cut exactly happens on the first beat of the ninth bar of the form. Hence the cut determines the duration of the eight bars. It follows that, given the 7/8 time signature of the music, the tempo of the song must be 111,7 BPM.

This is how both pieces sound together (you are in the journalist's shoes, that is, the headphones music is softly present with the headphones put down, but with headphones on the music is so dominant that background noise is completely masked):

+ Track 1

Just for fun, consider the headphones music with the synth solo I originally planned but which turned out to be to "fiddly" and, above all, in too good a temper. The guitar has no crunchy sound anymore accordingly. The track is longer; it lasts until the headphones are put down again:

+ Track 1 alt

(Drums: Christian Jung. All other instruments are played or programmed by me)

WDR Lokalzeit (German TV Broadcast)

On Monday I got company by WDR (West German Broadcast). Kurt Gerland produces a small three and a half minute TV broadcast about music by me for the (German)  Lokalzeit. They shot at the Hühnerstall (chicken shack; this is my little studio), outside and in my flat. There are some interview bites and five songs:

• Die kleine Hexe Exposition from Die kleine Hexe
• Piano Sonata 2 by Chronique de notre vie (comp.: Philipp Haagen)
• This Guy's in Love With You from my old trio repertoire (comp.: Burt Bacharach)
• Traum from sic
• Mimi from Minna von Barnhelm

The song titles are linked to the audio section of my homepage. There you can listen to the tracks as .mp3 audio files. This is the team; you can see Kurt Gerland top left...

Trau is built from no more than four samples. We shot the production of the samples: a blown half-full beer bottle, the starting sound of a vacuum cleaner, a pattering shower and the squeak of the foot in a half-full bath tub. In interaction with the filmed computer monitor where you can see the arrangement in the audio software it is revealed how sample based electronic music can be made!

See it on TV at April 16, 2009 during Lokalzeit on WDR 3 at 7:30 p.m. or on April 17 at 10:00 a.m. 

And here is the result:

Leitmotifs in NOWHERENOW #1

For the music for NOWHERENOW (a film by Volker Schmitt, cf. also my previous posting) I would like to have a go at the construction principle 'leitmotif'. After Carl Maria von Weber, Beethoven, Berlioz and others, Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, in particular, have gained complete mastery in the use of leitmotifs or 'musical refeferents'. An exceptionally enlightening example is Sergei Prokofiev's splendid Peter and the Wolve. Leitmotifs are also quite common in movie scores; among the most quoted examples is John William's Imperial March from Star Wars which is associated with Darth Vader. But even in a genre as much committed to the song form as pop music, leitmotifs can be heard, e. g. on concept albums like Genesis' double LP The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.

Leitmotifs are an attractive option for NOWHERENOW as the music will presumably play during the whole film (almost a quarter of an hour) without interruption. Fitting a song to each scene is thus not available. Lukas, the cynical, hip journalist gets a beatbox rhythm as leitmotif which recalls the Ibiza compatible lounge music he is likely to prefer. The manic professor is supplied with a complex network of strings reminiscent of Hindemith's, Bartók's, and other 20th century composer's string quartets. It will mirror his complicated calculations and his vintage metering devices.

Departing from Peter and the Wolve and most other musical instances, the NOWHERENOW music will not only provide figures with leitmotifs  (especially as there are only two of them...), but also certain aspects of their personalities or certain emotions. For instance I am considering to coin a motive for the enthusiastic belief in the impossible (i. e. that in a moment a spaceship with a water drive will take off). It will be heard every time when the professor gets into his vision - and, at the end of the film, it will also touch Lukas when he is sitting in the sand and listens to the professor cheering the successful start at the can phone.

Leitmotifs cannot only help elaborating the 'psychograms' of the protagonists - Igor Stravinsky, following Wagner critic Eduard Hanslick, ridiculed leitmotifs as 'cloakroom numbers' of the figures, identifying them all too rigidly. They can also be used to retrace the evolution of the characters. This is the more manifoldly so with leitmotifs which are not attached to figures. Yet the do secude one to write a film music closely along the scene, an illustrative music without a message of its own by construction, contrasting what is seen. But this dose of Hollywood is allowed this time...

NOWHERENOW

This week I am taking up work on a score for a short film by Volker Schmitt named NOWHERENOW. A scientist claims to have built a spaceship with a pure water drive. He is interviewed on the beach by a cool metropolitan journalist. Is the queer professor mad?