Alexander Grebtschenko

REGEN
(NL 1929)

Regie: Joris Ivens
Musik: Alexander Grebtschenko (2012)

Musikproduktion: Studio für Filmmusik der MHS Freiburg
Einspielung: Ensemble des Instituts für Neue Musik MHS Freiburg
Dirigent: Manuel Nawri

14 min

A NEW MUSIC EXPERIMENT: ACCOMPANYNG RAIN
IVENS MAGAZINE 2013

In 2011, I was given the opportunity to compose film music to Joris Ivens’ Regen (Rain, 1929). This work was part of the grand opening concert for the Studio for Film Musik at the Freiburg Musikhochschule, Germany, in 2012. During this concert, Ivens’ film would be showed five times, firstly as a silent film and then with music by Lou Lichtveld, Hanns Eisler, Ed Hughes and myself. The only practical limitation to my composition being that I utilize the instrumentation already present in the other compositions. I purposefully chose to forgo the use of electronics in this piece as this limitation proved interesting, especially due to the stark contextual dependency of the film.

The beginning of my compositional process was the analysis of the film. I looked at an array of different elements using diverse criteria, such as: movement and direction of movement; how the camera was used (static or in motion, for instance); repeating motives (flowing water, rain drops); the variety of machines (airplanes, cars, trams, bicycles,boots, ships, ect.); whether a multitude of people are to be seen in the picture or not; whether man-made or naturalobjects are seen; rhythmic events etc.

Through this analysis, I was able to build a multidimensional matrix which, among other things, showed me the various motives that span throughout the film (I admit that this type of analysis provokes this result). At this point I want to make clear that I purposefully ignored any extraneous information seen in the film. I wanted to inform my viewpoint exclusively through this analysis. I had not given any thought as to what the music would sound like during this process. It was easy to see that the evocativeness of Regen could very easily be diminished by music and that the film worked very well as a silent film! My next step was to find or create an exigency for the film music as I never had the intention of creating an atmospheric music for this film. My solution was as follows: the ambient sound is missing from the silent film, which helps lend a more realistic depiction of each scene and thus give it a contextual right to exist. If I used certain aspects of the ambient sound in a compositional manner, then the music would not be independent of the film but also not simply background music. Music and film can blend together in this way. At the same time I have the possibility, especially since I am not using the real ambient sound, to highlight the role of music in the film.

The result of this concept is as follows: each element is paired with a sustained chord and some elements are also musically accentuated, which I see as an artificial ambient sound. In addition, an ostinato is used as a ‘soundtrack’ for an overarching motif. As the film progresses these two layers blend more and more together to an extent that their clear roles at the beginning are at the end more ambiguous. Also, elements of the film that are musically accentuated become increasingly frequent as time passes. For instance, the same cello pizzicato can be heard in the following different contexts: indicating a new scene; accentuating an action in the film (window closing, footsteps, raindrops, windshield wipers, an umbrella closing, ect.; as a remnant of the soundtrack. (I setup the work as follows so that this ambiguity would be effective: I first developed a tempo matrix of eighth notes using a computer program coupled with the length of each element that I analysed. In this way each element ‘fits’ exactly onto this matrix. The natural deviations in tempo were kept to a minimum and each element had its own tempo which varied minimally from the others. A conductor must then conduct with a click track that is synchronized with the film during a live performance).

The first half of the film was composed with this method in mind. In the second half of the film the material is drastically reduced because of the lack of foreseeable rhythmic patterns which occur during an scene change or an action in the film. The number of these coordinated actions are so low that the viewer cannot be sure if such actions are on purpose or not. In a way, the audience member is ‘conditioned’ through the compositional process of the first half of the film so that he will begin ‘hearing’ rhythmic elements during the later part of the film (for instance, horse hooves or raindrops whose rhythm is coupled to the eighth note matrix but not heard in the music). Through this process, it is my wish that the viewer will hopefully observe new details in the film and the music that they normally would not have.

Alexander Grebtschenko 2013

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