“All Music is Created Equal”: A Conversation with Composer Gene Pritsker
It’s said that Carl Theodor Dreyer was not entirely content with the orchestral score performed at the 1928 Paris opening of his seminal silent film, The Passion of Joan of Arc. Nor was he satisfied with the one matched to the 1933 cut, which set his heart-rending account of the peasant-turned-military-leader’s fatal heresy trial to music by Bach and Vivaldi. Had he lived into the present day, he’d have had the chance to hear many more interpretations, from Richard Einhorn’s 1994 “Voices of Light” oratorio to the Orlando Consort’s soundtrack of medieval vocal music to scores by pop musicians like Cat Power, Nick Cave, and Julia Holter.
That so many artists have been drawn to The Passion of Joan of Arc is a testament to the film’s enduring power, but it also belies a crucial fact of silent film — it was never a silent medium at all. Though recorded dialogue and music would not become a staple of cinema until the late 1920s, sound was nonetheless an essential part of the theatrical experience throughout the so-called silent era. During this period, pianists, organists, or occasionally orchestras would perform scores live inside the theater, playing along to designated sheet music or simply improvising to the images. Through the years, the lack of a fixed, uniform soundtrack has created unique opportunities for musicians to intervene and engage with silent films, creating new scores and soundscapes to match their own era, style, or creative vision.
It’s an opportunity recently taken up by composer Gene Pritsker, who will perform his new electro-acoustic score for The Passion of Joan of Arc live in-theater at Bryn Mawr Film Institute on Thursday, September 26, accompanied by trumpeter Franz Hackl. I had a chance to talk with him about his new Joan of Arc score and his approach to scoring film.
You have many endeavors as a musician and a composer. Is there a central theme that ties your work together?
I consider myself an eclectic composer. For me, there’s only one genre of music: good music. I write chamber music, orchestral music, hip hop music, movie music, you name it. I have over 720 compositions to date, so I’m what they call prolific, I guess. I like to combine various types of music that people might think, “how could this go together?” The idea is that all music is created equal, and, as a composer, you should be able to have your voice heard, regardless of what kind of genre or style, or culture you are exploring at the moment.
You often use an instrument called the Samplestra. Maybe it’s not right to call it an instrument. A tool? A technique?
It’s a word I invented. I write a lot of electro-acoustic music, where it’s electronic and acoustic instruments. The electronic part, I call Samplestra. You record things and you play it back and you play with it. I call it Samplestra because I have a score to it, as if I was writing for an orchestra, so it’s basically an orchestral score of samples. Samplestra.
The Passion of Joan of Arc is not your first silent film score, right?
I was commissioned some years back to do Battleship Potemkin, and I really enjoyed it. We did it in Nuremburg with Ensemble Kontraste, an eight-person chamber ensemble. I mostly conducted and played the electronic part. For The Passion of Joan of Arc, I didn’t have a big ensemble, so the electronic part is a little bigger. A lot of accordion samples just happen to be in this one, with some other strange and unusual things.
How do you approach scoring silent films?
With silent films, a lot of the time, you get music that adds a general feel, but it doesn’t add to the whole soundscape. In modern movies, besides the music, you have sound effects — things falling, things moving. So I put all that stuff into the score. Somebody moves something, you hear vmmmmm! It’s interesting to go back to these old movies and score it in such a way that it’s not just a piece of music playing over it and giving it a vibe, but really scoring the action, scoring everything that’s happening.
How did this score develop?
I was just going along with the film and developing certain melodic ideas that seemed to narrate what I was getting out of the movie. There’s at least three or four melodies that are constantly coming back, because the film is really about Joan. She’s always there. She’s on trial, and there’s a tension between the accusers and the accused. You hear these similar themes come back in various guises, not like motifs, but more like an underlying thing. They’re constantly growing, and pulling and pushing. Sometimes it seems like things are bad, sometimes it seems like it’s okay, just like in the movie.
Some of the instruments that you sample and some of the musical idioms you draw on are anachronistic. There are sounds you might not traditionally associate with the period where the film is set, or what we think of as the silent movie era.
Absolutely! That is what I like about these silent films — you don’t have to write like, “this is the scene where they’re in the eighteenth century, so we need some harpsichord,” or whatever. None of that matters here. I’m writing music to set the movie in a different place, in the place where I want to set it. I wanted to keep my voice, which is very eclectic. So there are some hip-hop things going on, some techno music in the middle of it. It’s so not what you expect, and that’s what I like. Sometimes the question is, how could things work, will they work, and what are the oddest combinations we could do, but still make sense.
Do you feel that your score brings out new aspects of the film, things that might not be on the surface?
At one point, there’s this electronic, four-to-the-floor thing going on. Starting it, I was just trying to see whether this type of music would fit. But now, I really feel that it works. Because it’s kind of like a heartbeat, with the tension of her getting more and more agitated. That boom boom boom on the bottom, constantly. That kind of music is usually supposed to be a kind of release, but here, because of what we’re seeing on screen, it’s a tension building thing. Agitation music.
You’ve also worked on some non-silent film and TV projects. How did working on the Joan of Arc score compare to those experiences?
I do a bunch of that stuff. I’m an orchestrator for films, and I do have some music used. The last one I did was called Cloud Atlas, and I’m in the middle of a TV show for Netflix called Babylon Berlin. But I don’t consider myself a film composer in any respect. Because film composition is meant to add music to support another art, not to be heard. This is the exact opposite of what I do in composition. That’s why silent film really works for me. Because that’s the only time you hear anything. You can’t have background music. There is no such thing. It’s all foreground.
What’s it like to perform the piece live?
I’ve done it twice. First, I did a fifteen minute clip of it, which was fine, but then we did it all in this big theater with a huge screen, and it was really quite amazing. I felt very connected to it. With this huge screen, Franz and me playing off each other, we were kind of living this movie, and playing with it. The music is written, of course, we’re not improvising, but it almost felt like those old days where a guy would be sitting at a piano and just improvising. It had that feeling to it. In the big space, with the audience, it just really took off. It flowed. We enjoyed it. We’re looking forward to doing it again.
Visit our website to learn more and purchase tickets for this screening and performance.
See you at the movies!
— Jacob Mazer, Special Programming Manager, BMFI
