# FILM MUSIC

## NEW FILM MUSIC FOR NEW FILMS

### Mary Ellen Bute

The usual service of music to films is the portrayal of character to set the mood for the plot and to form a fabric for the knitting together and pointing up of documentary or literary ideas. It is often used as a running commentary developing in parallel or contrary motion with the intellectual mood of the film, and serves as a basic fabric out of which the sound effects and dialogue emerge. It sets the rhythm and pace for the audience's impression of the action.

For all this integral relationship with the current cinema, MUSIC plays an even more salient part in the ABSOLUTE film where it is actually inter-composed with the visual material. I have been dedicated to the advancement of ABSOLUTE film for some time and my interest in it is growing and branching out.

Many contemporary composers have been intrigued with the idea of one kinetic composition to be realized in the two materials (aural and visual) in such a way that they were inter-dependent and neither the musical composition or the picture would be complete alone. I have worked to such an end with the late and deeply lamented Joseph Schillinger and George Gershwin, and with the brilliant and forward looking composers, Henry Cowell and Edwin Gerschofski.

For some years, in order to explore the possibilities of the film medium, I have been working on the visual perception of classical and semi-classical music such as Saint Saens' "Dance Macabre" for "Spook Sport", Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody #2" for "Color Rhapsodie" and Shostakovich's Polka from his "Age of Gold" ballet for "Polka Graph", which uses the graph pattern of the music as a springboard for the visual interpretation.

VOLUME XII NUMBER IV

I am doing two films with Leopold Stokowski, who has long been actively interested in this field. The first film which is completed is PASTORAL, a visual interpretation of Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze". The second, EXUBERANCE, is a visualization of excerpts from "Carmen",

The acute reaction of an inspired musician to the visual development of my work is a source of great concern and excitement to me. For instance, in the following passage from Carmen:

> I have a series of pictures which start in the background on each note and zoom out at the audience. The effect is cumulative and at the end of the phrase I feel that I have approximated the sound effect of Bizet's music. Mr. Stokowski feels that one visual element in a continuous zoom from distant field, would be more eloquent of the music. As it was his immediate and spontaneous reaction, I will try it that way and see how it fits in with my overall idea.

EXUBERANCE is like a painting which reveals itself in time continuity. In this way the painter can control the succession of visual impressions delivered to the on-looker and involve his audience aurally at the same time. The picture is part of EXUBERANCE which is more than a "visual interpretation" of the music. It has the elements of an interrelated composition.

My story is one of metamorphosis, which I am sure no creative worker who may read this will be in the least surprised to hear. As a painter desirous of expressing movement and controlled rhythms in time sequence, I turned to the then existent optical instruments and color organs and went to work with Leon Theremin, the inventor of electronic musical instruments, among which his Theremin Ether Wave instrument is the widest known.

There seemed to be no idea that was foreign to Leon Theremin. Among his many incredibly wonderful inventions and devices he had platforms surrounded by magnetic fields. One could dance on these and with the gestures of his arms and legs make his own music. Joseph Schillinger, who was most outstanding himself, said that Leon Theremin's mind was of such a high order that he made everyone else he (Schillinger) knew seem atavistic.

From the first half hour with Theremin I was installing tiny mirrors, about 1/8th inch in diameter, on minute oscillators in tiny tubes of oil to cut down the friction and make them amenable to control. We would reflect light through prisms on these mirrors to get a range of spectral colors, then move the point of colored light about on the screen. We felt that much form is latent in a point, that a travelling point inscribes a line; a point returning on itself a circle, a cube, an angle. From a vibrating point we got a spiral, the figure 8 "line of beauty" and so on.

Needless to say these visual "goings on" were accompanied by electrical tones and sounds of the most unusual order. The wave lengths of the colors were arithmetically related to the wave length of the sounds and I found the results exhilarating as did the little group in the workshop. But it wasn't enough for wide public demonstration. It was the kernel of something marvelous, but it needed money and concentrated effort to make it grow and flourish.

None of us had any money or the ability to interest venture capital in our ideas and Theremin had no bump of self-preservation. So he left the world poorer than it would have been had he been able to sustain himself in it longer.

As this phase of my work shut down, I turned to the film medium and found that with careful budgeting I could buy an adequate amount of 16mm film, use borrowed cameras and carry on with my experiments.

One day a girl, a friend from Houston, came to see me. Naturally I exposed her to some of my ideas and showed her my films. She said that she couldn't understand why I skimped and struggled. Why didn't I go to a bank and borrow money to make a proper movie? I put on my hat and went to a bank. With a little research I found I knew two boys with adequate jobs to act as co-makers. So I took a personal loan and made my first ABSOLUTE film, RHYTHM IN LIGHT, which was then booked by the Radio City Music Hall.

Ted Nemeth, ace cinematographer and film producer, photographed RHYTHM IN LIGHT. He not only filmed my first productions but taught me enough about motion picture photography so that I now expend only about 9½% of my vital energy on the technical realization of my ideas and have a full 2½% left over for creative work.

My next film, which is taking shape in my head and is charging my emotions, is entirely new visually and aurally. For it I have turned back to many of my early experiments which I am now technically equipped to develop.

A mathematical system serves as a basis for this picture. I take the relationship of two or more numbers, for instance 7:2, 3:4, 9:5:4, fraction them around their axis, raise to powers, permutate, divide, multiply, subtract and invert until I have a complete composition of the desired length in numbers. Then I realize this composition in the materials I have selected to employ. I use this composition of numbers to determine the length, width and depth of the photographic field and everything in it. This numerical composition determines the length, speed, and duration of a zoom, a travel back with the camera, the curve and angle at which the camera approaches a subject. It determines the shape, size, color and luminosity of the subject; how, when and in what relationship to other elements of the composition it develops and moves. The melody, harmony, rhythm, dynamics, etc., of the sound are elaborated from the same numerical composition, thus setting up an exquisite relationship between the structural and rhythmical influences of the combined materials.

If at some time I compose a visual and aural combination that stands my hair on end I assure myself that it is my art impulses that are at fault. I am not necessarily to blame, but rather long generations of dull training of visual and aural perceptions have retarded my aesthetic tastes and emotional responses to a point where they are far behind the type of art I am capable of realizing.

But I and my indefatigable and far flung confreres feel there are indications that the day is close upon us when we will cast aside our atavistic art attitudes and impulses, leaving ourselves free and unencumbered to be exhilarated by the ever expanding revelations of this art which is expressive of our culture and refreshing entertainment for modern man.