Street Sounds in the City of Music: HK Gruber

The latest work from HK Gruber, the Austrian composer from whom the word "enthusiastic" is never far away, received its French premiere under the composer's baton at the Cité de la Musique, in Paris last night.

Wedged awkwardly between Kurt Weill's majestic Berliner Requiem, and Vom Tod im Wald (itself, formerly part of The Berliner Requiem), like a bicycle caught between two steam locomotives; the trumpet concerto, entitled 'Busking', got off to a rather rickety start. It's first section careening about a jaunty little melody, trying to squeeze as many blunt changes of tone colour as possible into as short a time as possible by the simple expedient of multiple mute swapping. But then, after this hectic and even rather daft beginning, which seemed at times like little more than a raspberry blown truculently in the face; a moment of repose.

It came so suddenly that it was more of a shock than any loud blast could have been. Like a sudden gust of cool air, a moment of near silence. A few plaintive notes plucked from a banjo over a deep low string drone, finally joined by very high harmonics from the first violin. After a while, the trumpet re-enters but without its former bluster, now bruised and crepuscular. The effect is cinema - recalling Angelo Badalamenti's music for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, or Ennio Morricone's soundtrack for Marco Ferreri's Harem.

Gruber is probably the most prominent member of what became known, in the 1960s, as the Third Viennese School, a kind of playful, postmodern riposte to the rigour of Schoenberg and his students. Dubbed 'clowns' by the people he in turn derides as the "dictators of Darmstadt," Gruber has never been afraid to live up to the insult, whether scoring for children's toys and swannee whistle, quoting Johannes Strauss, or appending multiple exclamation marks (how very modern) to the title of his most famous music theatre work, Frankenstein!!!

'Busking' delivers all the seductive pleasures of tonal music without its queasy predictability, and still finds time to be just as caustic as Gruber's early twentieth century countrymen. More so, in a way, as those fleeting moments of strychnine are surrounded by sweet spots. But nothing in the piece is quite as beautiful as that deep breath it takes after the opening section. And though Gruber may have inherited Weill's taste for the cabaret and the carnival-esque, he ultimately lacks his hero's bite and his commitment. So the potency of cheap music is here used less to incite than to amuse.

"You became a priest because you were too much of a coward to do what I do"

When Eli Wallach's Tuco talks to his brother, the priest, in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, he sets up a structural equivalence between church and bandit. The central, unspoken third term here, as in Freud's A child is being beaten, is the state. Under Italy's postwar imperfect bipolarism, that left the Christian Democratic party in power, practically unchallenged, from the foundation of the republic after World War Two until the Tangentopoli scandals of the early nineties, there was a very real equivalence between church and state that may well have equivocated criticism of the former for that of the latter (just as when, interviewed in 1994, the year of Berlusconi's first abortive government, Lucio Fluci rails against the censors - "They should censor the news instead of my films" - there was a very real equivalence between the state and the news media). Anti-clerical themes would continue to pervade pulp Italian cinema throughout the seventies. If Fulci and Dario Argento tended to respond somewhat cryptically to accusations of anti-catholic imagery in their films, there is little doubting the intent of the sustained orgy of blasphemy that characterises such films as Bruno Mattei's L'Altro Inferno (ingestion of the eucharist leading a nun to vomit blood; a rotting, worm-ridden head in the tabernacle; nuns boiling babies, etc.).

There is a kind of direct continuity between the spaghetti westerns of the sixties and the gialli of the seventies - and if I use the term giallo in its broader, anglo-american sense, it is because their is an even greater unity between the urban thrillers of the early seventies - gialli proper - and the gore horror of the late seventies. This concatenation is marked most obviously by the music of Ennio Morricone and his repeated use of certain kinds of unorthodox instrumentation (such as the harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West and L'ultimo treno della notte). In fact there is a remarkable continuity of personnel and production: Lucio Fulci made several westerns before switching to horror and Argento wrote westerns (contributing the memorable opening scene to Once Upon a Time in the West). Leone's editors on the Dollars trilogy, Eugenio Alabiso and Giorgio Serrallonga, went on to work on several gialli, as did their assistant art director (graduating to production designer in the process). Also, the production company behind the Django series went on to make a number of successful gialli. What links these two filoni is this certain reference, alluded to, in relation to gialli, in a previous post, to the Lacanian Real.

Before Jodorowsky's El Topo, Leone had already captured the hallucinatory potential of the desert though the lens flares and dizzying photography of Clint Eastwood's ordeal in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. The desert becomes itself a character and, like the Overlook Hotel, a merciless one. Driving through a "sidereal" America, Jean Baudrillard describes a desert denoting "the emptiness, the radical nudity that is the background to every human institution . . culture as a mirage . . . The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity's language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity's disappearance." Preceding the desert of the Real, the Real of the desert; a Real at once compulsive and pulsional, like the undead persistence of a cat re-animated by another's murderous impulses in Il Gatto Nero, the hysteria of murder in Tenebrae, the knot of a memory that refuses reinscription in Profondo Rosso and L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo.

"The world doesn't exist."

Addio, fratello crudele (1971, Giuseppe Patroni Griffi)

A beautiful, painterly film, shrouded in mist and haze and dappled in soft light, with a Jodorowsky-like, hallucinatory mysticism. The Financial Times review justly referred the cinematography to Michelangelo and Titian, but one might also compare it to the sinewy richness of Caravaggio. Truly, Giovanni in the well is Christ on the cross. The only disappointment is Ennio Morricone's music, which for, most of the film, lacks the arresting strangeness of other contemporary scores of his, such as those for Chi l'ha vista morire? or Gli Occhi freddi della paura, and sounds closer to the bucolic classicism of later Hollywood films, such as The Mission. Until, that is, we reach almost the very end of the film, and one of the strangest, most poetic scenes in a very strange and poetic film. As a great black dog sniffs around a dining room full of corpses and splattered in blood, a delicately haunting solo flute melody starts up, twisting and turning around an absent tonal centre, reserved yet softly unsettling. The flute's limpid breathiness should not be mistaken for the beatific sigh of souls rising to heaven, but rather the quiet terror of an empty, godless universe.