Edgard Varèse Inside Hollywood and Out

For all his smouldering looks, the composer Edgard Varèse never had the most fruitful relationship with the silver screen. Despite persistent attempts, he never wrote a feature soundtrack. Even today, while contemporaries like Bartok and Webern, responsible for equally forbidding bodies of work, can lay claim to a string of posthumous cinematic credits, only Woody Allen has found a use for Varèse. In the sombre Bergman tribute Another Woman, he matched the sweeping theremin and strident brass of Ecautorial to one of Gena Rowlands's more unsettling fantasy sequences. Adam Harvey, in his book about the music of Allen's films, makes a point of insisting that this must be a rare insistence of Allen using music "purely for its effect" and surely not because he enjoyed listening to the music himself.

But in the early twenties he did act, largely uncredited, in a number of silent films. Most notably, his heavy brow appeared in the role of a policeman, alongside John Barrymore, in John S. Robertson's (1920) Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. The musician Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, has cut scenes from the film to some of Varèse's own music and put it on YouTube. It gives you a startling idea of just how effective and expressionistic a soundtrack composer he might have been, had he ever been given the chance.

The composer's overtures to the studios reached their peak in the 1930s, a decade during which he seems to have completed more press interviews than actual musical works. Finally, having hawked his wares round the backlots and hobnobbed at as many parties as he could bear, at the end of the decade he even penned a manifesto of sorts, entitled 'Organised Sound for the Sound Film'and published in The Commonweal. Here  he wrote of music as an "art-science", with a brief mention of "all the recent laboratory discoveries which permit us to hope for the unconditional liberation of music" (hinting, perhaps, at what may have been his real motivation for working in cinema - the chance to investigate recent progress in graphical sound techniques). None of which seemed to do any good, however; until several years later, when an old acquaintance first met through The Commonweal's editor Walter Anderson, finally got back in touch. 

Boris Morros, Hollywood producer, music director, and Russian spy, was, in 1946, working on a romantic comedy called Carnegie Hall, involving the New York Symphony Orchestra and such notables as Leopold Stokowski and Artur Rubinstein. He asked Varèse to compose a short piece for a particular scene and the composer immediately began work on a kind of musical skit involving quotes from his own work and a few famous pieces from the repertoire emerging haphazardly out of a bed of improvisation around the note A.

Morros, a former Paramount music director and producer of Laurel and Hardy's Flying Deuces and Julien Duvivier's Tales of Manhattan, had been named as a KGB agent in a letter sent to J. Edgar Hoover three years earlier. In December of that same year, 1943, the writer Martha Dodd and her husband Alfred Stern met with Morros in order to invest $130,000 in a music publishing company that would serve as a front organisation for a Soviet spy ring.

By the time Morros got in touch with Varèse in 1946, things were perhaps not going so well for Morros. The Boris Morros Music Company had collapsed and the KGB had come increasingly to view its putative boss with suspicion. In June of 1945, after a series of minor indiscretions, the Soviet secret service had ordered Morros be deactivated, only for the latter to come back to them, a year or so later, with a suggestion to start up a film distribution venture - if they would just be willing to invest a few hundred thousand dollars. In fact, this proposal was an FBI sting operation, the Feds having approached Morros in early 1947 and recruited him as a double agent.

Somewhere in the midst of all that, Morros had cooled to the idea of hiring Varèse, a composer somewhat notorious for his never-completed so-called "Red Symphony", Espace. His music never appeared in Carnegie Hall (which went on to be quite a success) and the work he had begun for it remained unfinished. Until many years later, that is, when his student and protégé, Chou Wen-Chung completed a performing score for the piece which now holds a place amongst Varèse's complete works under the title, Tuning Up.

... pushed on by solar winds : Denny Zeitlin's music for Invasion of the Body Snatchers

There is a moment towards the end of Don Siegel's original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, from 1956, when the hero, Miles Bennell, is rushing out of the town onto the motorway beyond. The town alarm is going, and the music comes in, strings beating in time, even seemingly in key, with the wail of the siren. The effect recalls the music of Edgard Varèse, who had been complementing his orchestra with sirens since the 1920s. Varèse had a certain notoriety in America at that time, in the early years of the Cold War. On the one hand, some suspected him of communist sympathies; others claimed the scientists at Los Alamos listened to his music while working on the bomb. His public image, as Anne Schreffler has remarked, was less that of a musician, more some sort of mad scientist, "a prophet of the atomic age."

A similar thing happens in Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake of the same film. There is no 'town alarm' here. Kaufman's film is set in San Francisco; not across the bay in sleepy Mill Valley. But composer Denny Zeitlin creates his own alarm, with jerkily alternating, high-pitched and dissonant synthesizer chords.

Zeitlin was and remains a professional psychiatrist, rather like Leonard Nimoy's character in the film. He is also a highly respected jazz pianist, praised by Down Beat and positively fawned over in Leonard Feather's Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Sixties. Thelonius Monk once said of him, "He knows what's happening." In the years before Invasion of the Body Snatchers he worked with Joe Reposo on the music to Sesame Street, composing this gem while he was there (featuring Grace Slick on vocals),

Kaufman's film is a real delight, surely one of the best science fiction remakes of its time, with The Fly and The Thing still a few years round the corner. In a way, though, it resembles less any other science fiction film of the period than certain political conspiracy thrillers from earlier in the decade, like The Parallax View. Such films of which Fredric Jameson said they represent an attempt to "think a system so vast that it cannot be encompassed by the natural and historically developed categories of perception with which human beings normally orient themselves."

Its first act is full of these wonderful long takes, in which frequently next to nothing is really happening - or if it is, it is partially obscured, seen only in reflection or silhouette. But these moments are invested with incredible tension thanks to the minimal input of Zeitlin strumming piano keys, or easing out a low Moogy throb, or beating some strange and unidentifiable percussion instrument. Later in the film, these scenes are gradually faded out in favour of some increasingly repetitive chase scenes which never for a moment feel repetitive. This at least partly because of the strange things coming out of Zeitlin's band, which at one point in particular - just shortly before the scene mentioned above - starts playing decidedly free.

Even without Zeitlin's music, this would be a great sounding film. Ben Burtt, who provided "special" sound effects, had just finished work on the first Star Wars the previous year and had built up a tremendous library of synthesizers and concrète sounds in the process. Burtt's sound effects are so rich, so interesting, that they sound like music; while Zeitlin's instrumental treatments are so strange as to become like sound effects. At the score's finest moments, these extended techniques and electronic treatments will suddenly burst forth into a full lush orchestral sound, like life bursting out of some alien seed.

In order to survive, protagonists Bennell and Elizabeth Driscoll have to keep awake, guzzling fistfulls of speed along the way to help them do so. Before long, Driscoll is begging for sleep, "I can't stay awake anymore!" Things were evidently going much the same way for Zeitlin himself, who was so punished by the weeks of non-stop twenty-hour days working on the soundtrack that he refused to work on another film score again.

A Knife, A Fork & A Spoon Will Beat Out a Happy Tune

Kanye West, we are told, will dine only with the very finest of cutlery. "Everything is the best quality." His knives and forks, apparently, are made of gold. I wonder, does he play the spoons with his golden spoons?

When, in 1967, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were asked to create a new signature tune for Radio Sheffield, David Cain, thinking of the city's steel industry, called for knives and forks. His thirty-second jingle was composed from the plucked tines of steel forks, recorded onto tape and sped up or slowed down for different pitches.

Perhaps Peter Sinfield, former lyricist to King Crimson, ELP, and Bucks Fizz, was thinking along similar lines when he composed this - a "music for impossible cutlery":

More often, however, the relationship between notes and knives, or tunes and tines is less harmonious, betraying moreover a certain anxiety best illustrated by two famous quotations.

Wagner is supposed to have said that when he hears Mozart he sometimes fancies he can hear the clatter of the Emperor's dinnerware interfering with the music ("Contemporary attitudes towards the musical inheritance suffer," claimed Adorno, "from the fact that no-one has the confidence to be so disrespectful.")

Erik Satie might almost have had this slur in mind when he turned to Fernand Léger one evening over dinner and stated the need for a "furniture music, that is to say, music that would be a part of the surrounding noises and that would take them into account. I see it as melodious, as masking the clatter of knives and forks without drowning it completely, without imposing itself."

I saw anxiety because both of these quotations suggest that there are at least certain circumstances when music might be forced to compete with other, more pressing activities. Wagner's remark might be regarded as the symptom of a time when feudal patronage was waning as a source of income for composers. Satie's of the burgeoning of another time, when mechanical reproduction and increased time for leisure was making music both more ubiquitous and less venerated than it had been. 

The irony, perhaps, is that when Satie went ahead and created his musique d'ameublement the audience refused to ignore it and listened in silence; while Wagner's music would become the template for the unheard melodies soundtracking a thousand Hollywood films.

Whatever Satie may have had in mind when he made his comment to Léger, I'm fairly sure it wasn't this ...