18. November 2019

Man Ray Trilogie

For the next Monday concert at the Musikfabrik on November 25, Dirk Wietheger curates a special evening of music and film. Nicolas Tzortzis’ Man Ray Trilogy includes three compositions to silent films by Man Ray, important photographer and filmmaker of 20th century surrealism and modernism. In the blog post, Dirk Wietheger answers a few questions for us about his program.

You decided to perform the Man Ray Trilogy in your Monday concert – music to three experimental silent films by Man Ray, composed by Nicolas Tzortzis. What makes good film music for you?

I am very careful to speak of good or bad. But since I myself had the opportunity to write music for a short silent film a few years ago (The Insects’ Christmas), I can think myself into a composer much better and know what basic decisions he is facing. I pay much more conscious attention to a film’s music, especially when it’s a silent film like this one. In contrast to a sound film, the music has a much greater weight there, standing on an equal footing with the image. It cannot be inserted only occasionally, in order to strengthen a mood here or there, but is composed for the entire duration of the film. So you really have to write a real piece, which is then put into a relationship with the image. And it’s that relationship that interests me. Is it a pure illustration of what you see? Or does the music take on a life of its own and would work without the film? Does it take on the form, structure, or other elements of the film, or does it deliberately go against it? Do film and music perhaps even run completely unrelatedly side by side? Is there a balance between image and sound, or is one of the two elements more prominent? These are all questions on which a composer must position himself. And Man Ray’s films are really great “compositions”. A high bar! A composer must be measured against them and against the tasks he sets himself.

These are three pieces that are independent of each other. Is there a development or a connection between the pieces?

The pieces of Nicolas Tzortzis were created in a period of a few years. Triggered by a commission to write music for the film “L’étoile de mer”, his wish arose to deal more intensively with Man Ray and also to set the films “Emak Bakia” and “Les mystères du chateau du Dé” to music. In consultation with Nicolas, we have decided to keep the chronological order of creation for the performance in order to emphasize his very personal development regarding the relationship between image and sound. We are pleased that Nicolas has announced his coming and will certainly tell us something about this. But Man Ray’s films were also made in a similarly narrow period of time: After experimenting with smaller films shortly before, he was commissioned in 1926 by the American couple Arthur and Rose Wheeler to produce a longer film every year. This is how he first made “Emak Bakia,” a surrealist film entirely without a plot. It consisted of improvisations intended to reflect the current “state of cinema”, and in which he combined various techniques he had worked with up to that point, in particular “rayography” – a special form of photograms in which objects are exposed on photographic paper in the darkroom without a camera. This was similarly followed in 1928 by “L’étoile de mer” inspired by a poem by Robert Desnos, and in 1929 by “Les mystères du chateau du Dé” inspired by the Villa Noailles in Hyères, a modernist house of the 1920s. It’s a pity that after that (partly due to the advent of the talkies) he hardly bothered with the medium of film.

What specifics need to be considered when playing live to a film? Are there differences in performance practice?

From an artistic point of view, it is an important task to keep the balance between image and music in mind. Under certain circumstances, this can mean something different than in music theater or opera: the musicians are not simply part of a total work of art, but are confronted with their “work of art,” the musical composition, with another “work of art,” the film. On the purely practical level, of course, the question of how the coordination between film and music and between the musicians themselves is ensured must be clarified. In Tzortzi’s pieces, it is actually intended that a conductor follows the tempo indications of the score while, in addition, images of the film are inserted in the score so that the conductor can check the synchronicity. However, in this concert we decided to play without a conductor. Therefore, we use a click track that each musician has in his ear via headset. Due to the complexity of the works, this is a special challenge!