Roberto Musci

You work a lot with silent movies. What do you like in this style of play ?
Some years ago (middle of 90')  I read a book about the life & art of F.W. Murnau ( I am not sure about  the title, may be  " 8 Uhr Abendblatt" 1931 ) .I was very struck by an interview with the director about sounds in the movies : Murnau said " It is too early for making audio movies ; we have just started to explore the great possibilities that give us the   silent movies and now (1927) we are obliged to change our way of working for the words!". So I wondered how could  be the cinema if non one has invented spoken movies  , but with a normal evolution of musical history. So what happen if I see a silent movie with experimental or electronic music for soundtracks ? And I try to experiment this mix . And I found myself in some strange situations :
-the music changes the feeling of the movies ( I am a musician so I " see " a movie with my ears  ; I think that the music is more important than the image ! ) ,
-old and fashion images can mix with new musical technologies with no problems , like old piano player mix his music in the old cinemas.
-a lot of people , that never in his life had seen a silent movie, uncovered the born of cinema with the help of the music.

How do you approach the link between music and silent movies ?
I played with a lot of musicians in different ways : with Keith Tippett we are very close to the story of the movie like a real soundtracks of the feelings of protagonist . With Jon Rose and Chris Cuttler we play improvised music on images . The link  between music and silent movies depends more  from the interplay of musicians than from the kinds of images. In 70' and 80' I travelled around the word for studying Ethnic non European music and I saw  Shadow Theatre shows ( the "Wayang Kulit" in Indonesia and the " Shadow Puppets "  in Turkey ) with  live soundtracks with musicians in backstage. I remember that the soundtracks were very different from a day to another for the same show. So I remembered this experience and I try to use an European silent movies ( our  "Shadow Theatre")  to mix images  with experimental music.

Do you think it is necessary to know very well the movie to play and improvise on it ?
Sure. Even if you don't want to use a soundtracks for a passive commentary of images you must know the movies very well and you must know more as possible about the director . I played live soundtrack of "Vampyr" directed by Dreyer .It is one the strangest and greatest Vampire movies of the history of cinema (in my opinion more than Murnau' s  Nosferatu ). It is a movie about dreams into dreams and the strange feelings of the protagonists about it. If you don't know very well the movie  you lost the way of music for the soundtrack.

How do you choose the movies on which you work ? And what are your most outstanding works with silent movies in your mind and why ?
I chose the movie in a simple way : I like it or not.  One of my favorite movie project  is "Vampyr" by Dreyer. As I told you it is  a movie in "different reality" : dreams , feelings , shadows . This is not a silent movie ; Dreyer used  only 10 or 12 spoken words (in German and in Danish) on all the movie .On my musical work on "Vampyr" I sampled from the original soundtrack these words and with computer and digital effects I create music and sounds with them. An other movie that I is in my mind that I should  like to play is "Salomè directed on 1923 by C.Bryant . It is a crazy movie with  Kabuki Theatre , African Pigmy masks , a Catholic history mixed with ethnic flavors.  And my secret dream is to play on the first  silent  movies of the great " freak" Tod Browning ( " The unholy three"  , "The mystic"  and "The show"  ) and every things by Erich von Stroheim (but in original version : from 6 to 12 hours for a movie!  Great! )

Do you work differently since your first projects with silent movies ?
Yes , of sure .More you play with movies and more you learn how to work with images. Maybe the music of the early movies are more close to the images than the last . In the movie in which I play with Keith Tippett we try to follow the feeling of the protagonists ; with Jon Rose ,Chris Cuttler and Claudio Gabbiani we play more free on the images.

Is the approach different when you work with ensemble or in duo or trio ?
No I think it is the same. Maybe more structured and complicated but the approach to the movie is not different. My next project is for a small orchestra (if I was allowed to do it ; today in Italy is impossible to play different music project than commercial music. Our politicians and the state organization deputed to the culture are unable to create spaces and situation and to find money dedicated to this kind of music even if these projects have a low cost . Here in Italy the idea is : is better 3 big concerts instead than 30 small concerts or strange projects. This is a  stupid thing , because the vitality of a musical scene is important for the growth of the ideas and the musical culture). As I said , my next project is a work for a small orchestra  on a silent movie from France (Belfagor directed by Henri Desfontains , 1927). I found the original  4 hours first movie about  Belfagor , the well known phantom that lives in Louvre Museum , in a wonderful and fashioned Paris in the beginning of the century. It is a great movie . But I don't know if I try to play this project in Italy.

Let's speak about your CD  Steel Water Light. How is born this project ?
On the end of November 1999 I was invited to the Festival " Without Words" a silent movies festival  in Milan. The theme of the 3 day festival was " The cities at the beginning and at the end of the century". So with Claudio Gabbiani  proposed tree movies (Rain ,The bridge and Manhatta) and we  asked to Chris Cuttler ( some months before I played with him the live soundtrack of Drayer's vampyr) to play with us. I played also in Claudio Gabbiani 's cd " Nightnursing" with Australian violin player Jon Rose and so we decided to made a quartet for this project. We recorded the live performance and I made the master with a digital remix and some cut & paste (the original recorded music was around 2 hours ) ; too much for a cd. 

Can you speak to us a little about the Joris Iven and Paul Strand's work ?
Joris Ivens was a "nomad " film maker. He was born in Holland , studied photographic technique in Berlin,   works in the Amsterdam begins taking first film experiments . Here he made his film "De Brug"  (the bridge). The vertical lift-bridge is the object of study in The Bridge. Normally it seems to be a very static object, but Joris Ivens made a very dynamic film out of it.  he said : "For me, the bridge consisted of a laboratory of movements, tints, forms, contrasts, rythms and the relationship between all these phenomena".  The film was immediately recognized as a masterpiece by international critics and colleague film makers; Joris Ivens was at once the most famous avant-garde film maker of the Netherlands. In Amsterdam Joris ivens make also "Rain" :  a day in the life of a rain-shower. As a city symphony Joris Ivens films Amsterdam and its changing appearance during a rain-shower. A very poetic film with changing moods, following the change from sunny Amsterdam streets to rain drops in the canals and the pooring rain on windows, umbrellas, trams and streets, until it clears up and the sun breaks through once again. Although it seems to be one day it took Ivens a long time to film what he wanted to film (for even in Amsterdam it doesn't rain every day). With The Bridge, Rain became his major breakthrough as an avant-garde film artist. In 1932 Joris Ivens asked Lou Lichtveld (who also made the music for Philips Radio) to make a sound version of it, and in 1941 the film inspired Hanns Eisler to compose his "Fourteen ways to describe rain" in the context of a 'Film Music Project'. Than he made  controversial social films at time of depression such as "Nieuwe Gronden" and "Borinage", after which he left Holland for Russia and  America and made anti-fascist films. He travelled in Spain and made  "Spanish Earth"  together with Ernest Hemingway and the "400 Million" in China. In Canada and America (a.o for the USA War Department) made films for the war against Japan and Germany and made  film-commissioner for the Dutch government, in solidarity with the Indonesian Republic and makes "Indonesia Calling" . He lived  in Eastern Europe, forced because his Dutch passport has been confiscated and makes some trade union films such as "Lied der Strome" in collaboration with a.o. Brecht and Sjostakovic. He  settled in Paris and wins Golden Palm in Cannes and Golden Gate Award in San Francisco with "La Seine a rencontre Paris". He made films in France, China, Italy, Cuba, Mali, and Chile. He  died in Paris on 28 June 1989 Paul Strand began photographing in New York in the 1910s. During the early 1920s he received recognition for both his painting and his photography. Strand subsequently traveled to Mexico, where he photographed the landscape, architecture, folk art, and people and in 1934 produced a film about fishermen for the Mexican government. Thirteen years earlier he had collaborated with Charles Sheeler on a film, Mannahatta, a study of the urban high-rise environment. Having returned to New York late in 1934, Strand devoted his energies to theater and film making cooperatives. He traveled and photographed in  New England ,  northern Italian agrarian community of Luzzara , Outer Hebrides, islands off the northwest coast of Scotland. North and West Africa in the 1960s.

How did you work for this project ? (for the scene and for the CD)
We alternate music very close to the images for the movies with duet &trios & quartet of improvised music. For the  cd I cut off all the music that lived only with images and I made on master only music inspired by the movies but that lived also without them . We thought to made a DVD but there was a lot of problems about royalties.

How did the public receive the music ?
At the beginning in a strange way . The movies are very different from usual silent movies.15 minutes of rain and 15 minutes of a bridge that moves his part may be very unusual. And the music was not a commentary of the images but a 3° dimension of them ( we try to fell the rain on us and to move the bridge with our instruments). The results is on CD.

Is it important for you to realize a CD of a cine project ?
No. I played a lot of silent movies but I made only 2 cd with soundtracks : "Unintentional beauty" with Visna Mahedi ensemble for "Der Golem" in the middle of 90' and this CD. Of sure the best way to performs these project is DVD but there are a lot of problems in making them (costs and royalties for the movies).

Propos recueillis par Sabine Moig