Sergei Prokofiev – music for Alexander Nevsky, a film by Sergei Eisenstein

——————-

Nothing shook the world of artistic creation like the advent of cinema. At once admired and feared since its inception, the new medium offered an unprecedented way to tell a story in moving images, mimic life and conjure up impossible visions, an imitation and a distortion of reality all at the same time. Unsurprisingly, film was used as an ideological weapon by the Century’s most polarizing dictators and their regimes, and cinema became for them the ideal vehicle for their propaganda. Let’s tell the masses what they need to hear, and let’s package it in a sensational spectacle, full of sweeping shots, self-aggrandizing closeups, gleaming metal machinery and sweaty athletic bodies. The greatest achievements in cinema sprung out of the necessity to captivate an audience, whether it was DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi documentaries, or Sergei Eisenstein’s paeans to the proletarian ideals.
While still in its infancy, cinema had tapped into the people’s need for escape, but it also firmly established itself as the most immediate and accessible form of art there was, making it the bridge between what Adorno would describe as high and low art. Intellectuals and more traditional critics resisted the moving images initially, but it soon became evident that cinema was here to stay. Progress, in all its guises, has this thing about scaring people only to fascinate them to addiction.

Progress also heralds and celebrates new milestones in technological achievements: speed, machines, the wonders of science and engineering. The first ever motion picture is a single shot of a train arriving in a station after all, a moving subject for a moving medium. And with this new, exhilarating potential, a whole industry burgeoned and flourished. And of course, it wasn’t long before cinema amalgamated other artistic fields to become the art form of the Century.

By the time technology allowed movies to include a soundtrack on the projection reels in the 1930s, music had already been playing a major role in silent pictures. Metropolis was usually accompanied by an orchestra playing live in the pit of the theater, and smaller projections usually had at least a piano reel playing along with the movies. But being able to include dialogue, sound effects and music as part of the entire film-making process meant that a film would become the sum of its interdisciplinary parts rather than a silent reel with live accompaniment. The emotional gain was unprecedented, and composers started thinking in very pragmatic terms about the visual aspect of music. The greatest films of that decade all had memorable scores, usually including songs that would become immortal classics such as Someday My Prince Will Come or Over the Rainbow. Think of Gone with the Wind and the main theme would come to mind, a sweeping sentimental melody evoking the scale of the movie’s ambitions.

Movies launched the careers of many composers in the West who were not visionary enough to be recognised on their own strength, but rather used a filmmaker’s vision as a springboard for their creations. Think of the special bond between Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone or Federico Fellini and Nino Rota: their masterpieces exist on a mutual plane. Take the visuals or the score away, and you feel how one informs the other, and vice versa. The filmmakers’ visual flair was matched by a distinctive musical language, one that was created for the specific purpose to illustrate moving images.

In Soviet Russia, however, directors and producers turned to their most iconic modern musicians, Shostakovich and Prokofiev. As films were commissioned by the Party for ideological reasons, so were the composers asked to contribute to the cause. Both Shostakovich and Prokofiev, already quite prolific on their own merit, took the challenge as a new form of collaborative project, a ballet of celluloid, an opera on silver halide. Of course, you can draw parallels between their scores and their symphonies, but the music becomes even more descriptive and focused now that it is matched by a specific set of movements, images, shots and sequences.
Prokofiev would set the standard for the classic ‘epic’ soundtrack we are all familiar with: evil lurking suggested by trombone glissandos, impending doom and bloodshed marked by hypnotic ostinatos, pathos and mourning led by string legatos. The battle scene in Alexander Nevsky is still the blueprint for all big-budget battle scenes, and neither the camera work nor the evocative power of the score have aged a single day since their release in 1938.
In fact, I would define most of the modern-day movie composers as post-Prokofiev: it’s impossible to watch any Spielberg or Lucas film and not hear echoes of the 5th Symphony in John Williams’s music. Hans Zimmer, another brilliant illustrator, is hugely indebted to Prokofiev for his use of texture and instruments in setting the mood of a scene (think of the climactic sequence of Inception or the brooding overtones of Nolan’s Batman movies and you can trace their genealogy to Prokofiev’s work for Eisenstein).

Michael Giacchino has been receiving the praise that he justly deserves. His contribution to the wonderful world of Pixar is exquisite, a savvy mix of pastiche and original wit, and his forays into mainstream Hollywood projects have put him on the map of the important composers of our generation. But his real masterpiece is of course the 100 hour-long symphony he composed for LOST over its 6 season course. In his New Yorker piece, Alex Ross demonstrates the ingeniousness displayed by Michael Giacchino in his choice of instruments and sonic palette, the meticulous craft behind the characters’ leitmotifs, and his comprehensive view of the Island’s mystery. In the music he wrote for LOST, you can of course find the elements put forth by Prokofiev, but the real inspiration is, I think, Shostakovich: the harp never sounded spookier than in his 11th Symphony, muted trumpets never so pungent and manic, and his sentimental interludes hardly carried any saccharine overload. As far as made-for-TV soundtracks are concerned, LOST is as Russian as it gets.
Music of epic proportions.

———————–
This concludes the Russian Cycle. The post-rock lover’s guide will hibernate until the next year. Time to get new perspectives, and start working on more amberhaze-related material. Thank you for reading.

(apologies for the lack of podcast this week. The podcast will resume on the 1st of December)

—————

” Meaning in music – that must sound very strange for most people…What was the composer trying to say? What was he trying to make clear? The questions are naive of course, but despite their naivety and crudity, they definitely merit being asked. And I would add to them, for instance, Can music attack evil? Can it make man stop and think? Can it cry out, and thereby draw man’s attention to various vile acts to which he has grown accustomed?”
Shostakovich, preface to the 11th Symphony.

I ask my students whether they think that there is still a place for ‘classical’ music in today’s world, and whether there are still people making ‘classical’ music in a time where culture has been channeled through the radio/TV/internet rather than the concert hall. To put things in context: as Shostakovich was finishing his eleventh Symphony, Elvis was singing “Blue suede shoes”. One is a monolithic work featuring long drones and dirge-like passages, the other is the first big hit of rock ‘n’ roll.

Yet, Shostakovich is very much a man of his time, a man about his time. As a Soviet composer, he faced the pressures of being an artist under the Stalin regime, and though he did not suffer the hardship of the Gulag like many of his contemporaries, he did fall out of line with the Party’s doctrines and was forced to ‘realign’ in order to regain his status as a major Russian artist.

So the 11th Symphony comes as an anniversary of sorts. Initially meant to be published in 1956 (his fiftieth birthday), Shostakovich pushed the date a few months to make it coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the successful 1917 Revolution. And as a program piece, he chose to depict the tragic events of the failed attempt to overthrow the Tsar in 1905 (the same events that had been the basis of the Battleship Potemkin), in an attempt to get in the Party’s good books, but also to raise important questions, reflect and comment on the atrocities committed in the name of an ideology, regardless of which side of the fence you are sitting on.

Not that music should be political, or that it should have a message. But the place of the artist in the Twentieth Century is not the same one as that of the court composer, or the self-imbued Romantic virtuoso in his cozy Parisian salon. You wouldn’t have Guernica without the Spanish Civil War, you wouldn’t have the War Requiem without the Canterbury and London bombings, and these works not only serve as reminders, alarm bells and cautionary tales, they also strive to see what still makes us human after all.

The fact that Shostakovich uses sounds to convey his message makes his music ambiguous by nature, and he intended it to be. Words are more easily interpreted, whereas music can still carry different meanings, and his Western supporters saw his later works as subtle critiques of a Regime he was forced to embrace. The eleventh symphony embodies this dichotomy. For the Soviets, it was a celebration. For others, it was a eulogy.

—————-

The first movement is almost glacial in its static pace and tone. As a master in the use of tone colour, Shostakovich evokes the bleak landscape of an early cold January morning, on a desolate Palace square.

—————-
The bloodbath.
Elements from the first movement are reintroduced, only here the setting is more anguished and ultimately desperate. The tension and violence progress towards the ineluctable outcome. And again, as a closure to the second movement, the themes borrowed by Shostakovich from the popular folk tunes of the time reappear, in much more subdued and somber tones.

—————-
The Tocsin.
After the requiem-like composure of the third movement, Shostakovich sums up the thematic content of the whole symphony into one last swooping soundscape.
The ambiguity of the symphony’s brutality at the end is striking: are we mourning the crushing of the rebellion of 1905, warning the Tsar that his time will come during the next one, or hinting that the success of Lenin’s 1917 attempt would still mean the death of many?
On a programmatic level, the dignitaries of the Communist Party would of course side with the former, but as a convinced humanist, Shostakovich lets us hear otherwise as well.

—————-
As usual, pieces here are for illustrative purposes only. If you like what you hear, buy the composer’s records, or go to their gigs and get a t-shirt!

I just found this new trailer for Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Where the wild things are. The previous trailer had me convinced already, but this one just seals the deal. I don’t remember the last time I had been expecting something more eagerly…well, maybe the Dark Knight last year, but this just has the potential to be much, much better. At least more uplifting, which can’t hurt these days. The photography reminds me a little of that quality of light found in Eternal sunshine or the virgin suicides, and the Arcade Fire song seems to have been waiting for these images to take an even more emotional turn. I really hope the rest of the movie will be like this!

I didn’t grow up reading Where the wild things are. I don’t think they had it in France in the 80’s, but they had other great great books, and I have the fondest memories of some of my old illustrated fairy tales collections. There was this bi-monthly (or weekly, i don’t remember) series called Il racconta storie in Italy, and my grandparents used to send me each volume. It came with a tape, and when you heard the little bell sound, you had to turn the page. The usual stories, but they somehow managed to get all these great actors and voice talents, and each story had a cute retro 1980s soundtrack. Recently I found one guy on ebay who digitised the whole thing and sold it for the price of the DVD he burned it on. I think his profile is full of ecstatic comments from people in their 30’s now!

When Luca was born we started buying children books, and started from the classics. Sendak was one first obvious choice, and I totally understand why. In a way, I am thankful for the kids, because when you have children it’s up to you to find books that will please and challenge them, and the wealth of literature is just incredible. And the best kick out of the whole thing is to read those stories aloud. Clearly the writers had it all planned: you’re really missing out if you’re just letting your kids look at the pictures by themselves.

One thing I’ve noticed is how they actually prefer books that are well written, books that treat children like people and don’t assume that you only have to use monosyllabic words. “Let the wild rumpus start!” I’m not sure Luca knows what rumpus means yet, but he just loves reading this sentence aloud. And I think we are very lucky to be able to show him how beautiful books can be.