kagablog

Michael Blake composed the music for Aryan Kaganof’s cellphone film SMS Sugar Man between May and July 2006.

Q: Michael, you have known Kaganof for a while, how did you meet and what have you done together previously?

I met Kaganof around 2000 through a mutual friend Trevor Steele Taylor (film festival curator and an old school friend of mine). My wife and I had just bought a bolthole in Cape Town and Trevor bought Kaganof to the flatwarming. Kaganof and I talked about a number of mutual interests and he put me in touch with Frank Scheffer, the Dutch director who has made marvelous films about new music (Cage, Boulez, Stockhausen, Zappa etc). I later saw some of Kaganof’s films at the Grahamstown Festival and I was blown away.

We met again early in 2003 at his house in Johannesburg over several bottles of wine; on that occasion I gave him a CD of several pieces of mine. He phoned me a few days later, or maybe even the next day, I don’t remember now: “Michael, would you come around, I’d like to show you something”. He had edited images to a 12-minute piece for two pianos, Reverie, which I wrote in 1995. By the next day he had another version, different images – in fact just one image that took the duration of the piece to come into focus. It was the most stunning response to a work of mine that I had ever seen. It’s not been shown because we’ve been waiting for a new version of the music that will appear on a CD of my piano works, which I’ve just about finished editing and which will be released in 2007.

After that Kaganof and I began meeting regularly at The Ant in Melville, and conceived a number of projects, one of which we pursued with some tenacity. We wanted to make a multimedia piece for the interior of the ABSA building in Johannesburg, and even had a meeting with the original architect. But convincing the conservative powers at ABSA was…so we moved on. In 2004 Kaganof filmed the rehearsals and South African premiere performance of my piece Untitled for clarinet and piano, and he made a short portrait as well as a radical remix.

In 2005 during a visit by an Australian ensemble on the last leg of their world tour, Kaganof heard them perform my First String Quartet. We conceived the idea of making a piece for violin, cellphone and video for the leader of the ensemble, brilliant Japanese virtuoso Yasutaka Hemmi. This was premiered at the Grahamstown Festival/New Music Indaba in July this year.

Q: Tell me a little about yourself, what is your background?

My musical background is fairly conventional. I studied music from an early age, did a music degree at Wits University in the 1970s and then moved to London in 1977 where I read for a masters degree at Goldsmiths College. I spent most of the next twenty years composing, playing the piano, organising new music concerts, writing articles on new music, and teaching at various institutions (including Goldsmiths College). I moved back to South Africa in 1998 and taught composition at Rhodes University where I also met my wife Christine Lucia, and obtained a doctorate in 2000 for work composed during the 1980s and 1990s. We moved to Johannesburg in 2002.

Since my student days I have always programmed and performed radical new music. My own work, mostly written for the concert hall, has evolved out of a merging Western and African aesthetic – quite overtly ‘African-sounding’ in pieces loosely collected as my African Journal (late 1970s to early 1990s), when I lived outside South Africa, and much less so since I’ve been living and working back in South Africa.
I have been a film junkie since I was at school. I used to go with Trevor (Steele Taylor) to see horror films every Saturday afternoon at the Cape Town ‘bughouses’: those tearoom cinemas that sadly no longer exist. 1960s horror films had some of the most experimental soundtracks I’ve ever encountered (modernist composers like Elisabeth Lutyens used to do these to earn bread and butter, their concert music not being the most pleasing to the conventional ear).

In the 1970s I did some music for documentaries in the early days of SATV, and back in South Africa I worked on director Liza Key’s two debut films The Furiosus (aka A Question of Madness) and The Man Who Knows Too Much. I’ve worked on a few pilot projects and so on, but my main experience as a composer (and performer) in the area of feature films to date has been ‘silent’ movies. In 2000 I composed almost 90 minutes of live music for Gustav Machaty’s Erotikon, and in subsequent years improvised scores for Joan d’Arc and Nosferatu. These were all commissioned by Trevor Steele Taylor for the Grahamstown Festival.

Q: How did Kaganof approach you to work on SMS Sugar Man?

Sometime in March this year, he came around to have lunch and listen to a computer version of my recently-completed Quintet for Piano and Strings, which I was about to go and premiere in England. Before he left he said, “Mr Blake, if you are free on Friday I would like you to come to a viewing of SMS Sugar Man, and if the film takes your fancy I would like you to compose the score.” Just like that.

Q: What is your attitude to the fact that the film was filmed on mobile phone cameras, and how did this affect your approach to the music?

When we first talked about it, before I’d seen even an early edit of the film, I thought of using ringtone-sized bytes as the basic material. And that stuck. Ideas such as recording the music on cellphone microphones did enter my mind, but they seemed a bit unnecessary in the end. After all, the innovation here was to do with cellphone cameras, and the music was going to be part of a soundtrack with songs that had been recorded conventionally, so I did not want to disadvantage the level of the film score recording. But I hope that different versions of the main theme of the film will become available as downloadable ringtones!…

I was nevertheless quite influenced in my approach by the intimacy of the cellphone camera images - the settings and shades or colours. This prompted my use of intimate chamber ensembles rather than an orchestra. I was also fascinated by the almost microscopic structure of the surface of the images, the fact that the montages were not conventionally smooth and you could literally see the pixels rearranging themselves - well that’s how it struck me as a non-technical film person. Musical (and painting) surfaces interest me enormously.

Q: How did you and Kaganof collaborate? What were your starting points?

We only took up the initial discussion after the re-edit in which the structure of the film changed quite drastically. At this point the structure was no longer linear (ABCDE) but could be read as CADEB. I’ll explain later how this structure was reflected in the music.

I should say, importantly, that working on SMS Sugar Man always felt like a collaboration. It was not, as so often happens in the cinema, a case of the composer brought in at the last minute when the film is complete, to add the music. I felt that the music could affect the images as much as they in turn inspired the music; and on several occasions Kaganof said: “I’ll re-edit that scene to your music”. Music can complement images, but it can also go much deeper and take one to places that images simply cannot go. Such is the importance and power of music in the cinema.
We talked about the music giving textural cohesion to the various sex scenes, for example, and about the haunted hotel space and creating a horror effect for which Kaganof suggested the cello.

As it happens the cello appears in a more conventional role underscoring some of the love scenes, and in the hotel corridors instead we have music played on the theatre organ – perhaps appropriately for such ‘silent movie’-type scenes.

We worked like this: With the DVD on my screen, I created pieces of music on the computer, gave Kaganof a CD, he laid them down on the film soundtrack and called me up to go around to his house to look and listen. We would change things, try things elsewhere in the film, or simply abandon them. Eventually I started going to him with new stuff on my laptop, so I could alter things on the spot. I think eventually we were both happy with the result.

We discovered early on that we both work intuitively, and this is something that has drawn us together artistically. I tend to jump in, not quite knowing the outcome and simply letting my music take me where it will, making important decisions on the way rather than deciding too many things in advance. I know that Kaganof’s approach to his medium is comparable. In the case of this film, my only real pre-planning was the construction of several themes. The rest happened en route.

Q: The underlying narrative structure of the film is innovative and unusual. It is not a linear plot. How did this affect the score and you approach to composing the music?

Back to CADEB, and getting a bit technical. ABCDE are letter-names for musical pitches, and using the German nomenclature for B (B-flat), the SMS Sugar Man musical structure reads like this:

Fortunately this turned out to be a pleasing musical line with enormous potential for harmonisation (adding chords) and so on. This becomes a musical motif in the movie, signifying the structure (quite unconsciously, for most people) throughout the film. I used serial manipulation (in the Schönbergian sense) so this theme is also heard backwards and inverted. I should say at this point that I have not previously worked much in this way in my concert music, but it is an acknowledged fact that many composers experiment in film scores with techniques that they haven’t yet used.

So with the structure of the film firmly encoded in the musical score, I went a stage further and encoded the musical letter-names of Kaganof, myself, Trevor and even Adorno in the score. Theodor Adorno, the great Marxist philosopher and writer on music, for whose work Kaganof and I both share a passion, also wrote one of the finest books on film music, in collaboration with Hans Eisler.

If we take Wagner’s music dramas (Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal) as the prototype of the cinema and multimedia art, it is not surprising that the use of the ‘leitmotif’, which identifies particular characters and so on in the music, plays an important role in film music, though much less so these days. So perhaps my score is also a statement of regret about this ‘loss’.

Q: What overall mood did you want to achieve in your score?

I suppose the overall mood I was after was underlining the ‘fairytale’ element in the film, an element that could so easily be lost in the seedier scenes in the film. Its Christmas Eve setting is referenced in one of the piano pieces (a parody of The Twelve Days of Christmas), and the fairytale mood is brought out in for example the particular music that reaches glorious fruition in the Love Theme. However, I did not want to – and I don’t think I could even if I tried - write music that was conventionally sentimental. Too much of this around already! I was in film composers’ heaven with SMS Sugar Man, working with a director who has a rich musical sensibility and who reacts to what one writes on far more sophisticated a level than one normally gets. Another thing I wanted to achieve was some kind of link between my music and other music (songs and instrumental pieces) used in the film. I did this in one or two places through references either to material or texture or mood.

Q: What other films or music influenced you in preparing for the score?

I’m very interested in the way that director-composer teams have worked: Eisenstein-Prokofiev, Hitchcock-Hermann, Greenaway-Nyman and Kieslowski-Preissner. These have given us some of the finest scores for ‘classic’ movies, such as Ivan the Terrible, Psycho, The Draughtsman’s Contract, Three Colours Blue, and so on. Each film builds on a previous one too, and the collaboration gets tighter and more inventive. And of course Ennio Morricone is one of the greatest movie composers, whoever he’s collaborating with; but then many people don’t know that Morricone is also a ‘free’ music improviser (he plays the trumpet) so he has a much richer musical sensibility than, say, John Williams or Hans Zimmer.

When I’ve lectured to film students at AFDA, I‘ve always talk about these collaborations and shown students how well they work. Then I take for example some Williams from one film and transplant it onto another film to show how little collaboration seems to count in his case: the music interchangeable, the same mood every time.

I don’t think any particular music influenced me except perhaps for Astor Piazzolla in the Love Theme – it’s a kind of tango, and ironic (in a sense) because this is not a traditional love scene. Kaganof commented that he could ‘hear’ the musical gestures Piazzolla would have composed, but of course they aren’t on the surface, they’re a kind of built-in memory. You can’t write a tango in 2006 without referencing the history of the form in some way.

Q: What specific instruments did you choose, and why?

There are several different kinds of music in the film with attendant instrumentation. Firstly the horror-type music in the corridor of the hotel which is always played on a theatre organ. Secondly, pieces of piano music that accompany slightly ironic scenes. Thirdly, a rather ominous recurring piece, which I called the Bad Feeling Chorale, played by a small 6-piece brass ensemble of trumpets, horns and trombones. The rest of the music is mostly played by a string quintet (two violins, viola, cello, and double bass). I love strings because they are so versatile. They can be warm, melancholy, seductive; they can be chilling, and so on.

Additionally I used a clarinet in the Wallet #3 scene (with John Matshikiza) to underscore the melancholy of that particular scene in the film. (I think this is one of the best image-music marriages in the film.) In the Love Theme I shadowed the solo strings discreetly with synthesised strings to underscore the almost dreamlike quality of this scene in which there is no diegetic (source) music or any other soundtrack, apart from the musical score. I experimented with an electronic harp as the rhythm section – it provides a colour that you do not normally hear in tango, and an ‘attack’ that the orchestral harp doesn’t have.

Q: How did you differentiate between theme, mood and incidental music? And how did you weave these threads together into the score?

The basic CADEB motif binds the whole film score together, but it appears in very different guises (horror organ music, tango Love Theme, Bad Feeling brass chorale etc) and with different degrees of variation (sometimes exact repeats). The instrumentation has a lot to do with creating moods for the different guises. The only real incidental music might be the Hillbrow Tower piece for viola and piano and the two piano parodies for the Wallet #5 and Wallet #2 scenes. I would go so far as to say that the music is integral to the emotionality and expressivity of the story and its characters. I’d like to think that it takes the viewer beyond the place where the image goes and adds further layers to the meaning. If that happens then I feel that my contribution to the film has been a success.

Q: The film is quite specific in terms of its locations. Did this influence you in your choice of music to complement the sound?

Not really. The images do that so well and the music’s function in this film was, I felt, not so much to do with literal place as with imagined place; for example at the beginning and the end where the music locates the action in Sugar Man’s mind. There is no music that specifically locates us in Hillbrow, or an urban setting or anything like that.

Q: Did you lay down a temp score for Kaganof to edit with, and if so with what technology?

Well Kaganof had laid down a temp score for me to compose with, and in some cases I used this as a point of departure, for example in terms of mood or emotion or instrumentation but in almost every case we lost the temp score very quickly and the composed score took over and then sometimes migrated into other scenes. Although I compose at the piano initially, I migrate to the computer pretty quickly, using the standard music writing software used by most composers worldwide – Sibelius – into which video can be imported. I then tweak tempi and other details so the music fits exactly. The downside is that the instrumental samples are not as good as live instruments, but they do give you an idea of what is intended.

Q: What technology did you use to score the film?

So I used Sibelius to create a score and individual parts for live musicians to read from – an enormous labour- (and money-) saving device. The music was recorded in August at the SABC Studios, Johannesburg with my own ensemble, MBE, made up of very good local musicians. It was mixed and mastered in Grahamstown at Sonic Art Studios. Engineering by Corinne Cooper, a fantastic sound engineer that I have worked with since 1998. Unusually for engineers, she reads music very well, so I can give her the score and she can just get on with the editing, even when I’m not around.

Q: What plans are there for releasing the music for the film on other platforms?

I suppose first prize (for me) would be a soundtrack album of all the music in the film – the songs as well as the score. But I am working intermittently on a Concert Suite possibly in two versions: one for orchestra (and gun!), and one for a smaller group that might be played by MBE (Michael Blake Ensemble) and toured next year.