The gorgeous, well-received film “Frida” by director Julie Taymor, starring Salma Hayek, has an additional star: the music. The amazing, authentic soundtrack is selling well. Gina Amador, an ethnomusicologist of Mexican-American descent and music supervisor for Industry Music Factory in Los Angeles, spoke at length with the charming, self-effacing composer Elliot Goldenthal.
Latin Style Magazine interviewed Elliot Goldenthal when he was in Los Angeles after the first of the year. Composer for the Miramax motion picture, “Frida”, starring Salma Hayek, Elliot Goldenthal’s successful career spans a full spectrum of genres. He is a dynamic musician and composer, creating works of musical art for orchestra, opera, ballet, and film. A small sampling of his gift ranges from the orchestral piece “Fire Water Paper: A Vietnam Oratorio” to the ballet “Othello”, and other film scores such as “Alien 3”, “Drugstore Cowboy”, and “Heat” to Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for “Interview with the Vampire” and “Michael Collins”. He also won the prestigious L.A. Film Critics Award for Best Original Score for “The Butcher Boy”.
Elliot Goldenthal spent one year on the “Frida” project preparing and composing the film score and the songs for the movie. He approached writing the music as a character that mirrored Frida’s isolated and intimate personality. He collaborated with his partner, director Julie Taymor, with whom he has worked on 15 projects. The director-composer relationship is vital in allowing emotions to drive a successful film project. In fact, they co-wrote ‘Burn It Blue’, sung by Caetano Veloso and Lila Downs, which plays over the end credits.
The “Frida” soundtrack employs melodies and tunes rather than motifs to achieve a Mexican folklore sound. Truly, Mexican music varies regionally; however, Elliot’s use of acoustic instruments – viguela (small Mexican guitar), accordion, Mexican harp, marimba, and glass armonica – along with simple harmonic structures, make up a powerful and enchanting Mexican-inspired film score.
Obviously, you are not Latino. How did you research and prepare for this Latin-genre music film?
I grew up in New York City, which is a long way from Mexico. All you have to do is stick your head outside the window or turn the dials on the radio or go out with friends and you have a whole kaleidoscope of world music. Music, and dance, of course, is one of the first influential things that seeps into your blood. However, the specific research for the movie was in an entirely different category. I wanted to know exactly what Frida and Diego would have been listening to.
What tempted you to do this project? Obviously, the film’s director, Julie Taymor, had something to do with it.
Well, what tempted me was the fact that I knew it would require music that was very intimate and also very melodic. I worked on many projects that tended to involve very big orchestras. So it was a delight for me to get a situation to write very intimate music with five or six musicians and even solo guitar.
It seemed that you utilized few musicians with “Frida”.
Well, for the most part, yes. For the most part, it was very intimate and guitar-oriented. But there were orchestral and also big-band music cues in this movie. There was an orchestra that played during the time when Trotsky arrived.
Where did you go for the orchestra?
That was in New York City. There was also original big-band music recorded in New York City. Most of the recording was done in Mexico City, New York City, and Rio de Janeiro. The end credit song, ‘Burn It Blue’, sung by Caetano Veloso and Lila Downs, was recorded in Rio.
Have you used other orchestras? I’ve been hearing about orchestras in Budapest, Bulgaria, and Prague that specialize in film music?
Yes. There are wonderful orchestras all over the world.
Are there notable orchestras in Mexico?
There are wonderful orchestras in Mexico. However, I’m used to working with a specific orchestra in New York. I know all the musicians on a first-name basis. In terms of your question, many factors can help you decide to want to record in a specific country and for what reason. Some orchestras are faster sight-readers than others; some orchestras are used to having earphones on them and having what’s called a click track or metronome in their ears while others don’t like it. They have different concert halls. Some cities don’t have large enough studios to bring an orchestra in, so you have to record them through a truck parked outside the concert hall.
When you were outside of the U.S., were you in a bilingual environment? Were you treated as a gringo from New York?
It was a complete bilingual environment. On an artist level, there are many musicians from many countries of the world. Men and women are equally qualified, so you immediately recognize that the boundaries between sexes and the boundaries between borders are immediately broken down. When I went to Mexico City there was a very evenhanded sharing of musical ideas. As a matter of fact, the engineer was a Cuban woman and the other engineer was Mexican. So, between my Spanish and their English we got by very well. Not a problem.
Can you tell us how it was working with the singer Lila Downs?
Lila is the most incredible, deliciously, bicultural person I have ever met. Her mother is from Oaxcaca; an Indian, I believe. So, I think she speaks Zapotec and some of the native Mexican languages. Of course, her Spanish is perfect and her English is perfect, because her father was from the Midwestern U.S. She relates completely to the traditions of Chavela Vargas and some of the regional music of Mexico but also to the jazz music here in the U.S. So, she’s a wonderful combination.
I see her as another instrument as opposed to just a singer.
Oh, she can sing. Her range is unbelievable. She has so many textures in her voice. It’s an art.
The musical styles you used seem to be a cross between the Huasteca and Jarocho regional styles, which tend to utilize more acoustic and stringed instruments as opposed to brass and trumpets.
Right, and also corridos, Veracruzana, and, of course, all of the popular music that existed. Many corridos also carried a political message, although veiled. Let me backtrack just a little. A lot of the music that’s not original that we decided to put in, that was source of music of the time, we derived from the writings of Hayden Herrera. In her biography of Frida, she lets us know what Frida’s favorites were. They tended to be on the popular side or the folk-oriented side, and, certainly, Chavela Vargas was one of them. Of the music that existed in Mexico, we tried to choose music that folks in North America were not as familiar with. Above the border of Mexico in the U.S., mariachi is usually the music that is heard, but there are so many regional styles of music that, for me, it was refreshing to feature these styles. But, also, from a compositional point of view, I wanted to feature instruments like the guitar and the hammered dulcimer and the accordion for the original part of the score. I felt that it very smoothly worked itself into the music of those other regions because it’s not heavily brass or trumpet.
You used some interesting-sounding instruments in the score. Can you describe the glass armonica?
Yes. The glass armonica, spelled with an ‘a’, is an instrument that was invented by Benjamin Franklin. It’s just like playing champagne glasses or wetting fingers and running them over glasses to get different pitches. The glass bowls are on a rotary that constantly gets moistened by water underneath. You run your fingers over them almost as if it were a keyboard. Wedges of glass from largest to smallest turn a wheel like a sewing machine pedal that turns it as you play all these wedges of glass. It creates a very ethereal sound.
Is the glass armonica specific to a region of the world?
I guess it’s specific to the northeast U.S. when Benjamin Franklin invented it. Even Mozart wrote a little serenade for it. What I like about it is its unearthly ethereal sound. In the beginning of the movie when you see Frida being taken out of the house, you’re not sure whether she’s already dead or not. There’s a tune playing called ‘Vida la Vida’ which is heard again later in the movie. It is almost disembodied, as if you’re hearing a memory of a piece of music. When she finally gets in the truck, things get solid again and you realize she’s alive, and there’s a flashback to her youth.
Have you worked on Latin themes before? I noticed ‘Juan Darién’ in your bio.
Yes. “Juan Darién” is a piece of theater that Julie and I toured. It won many awards; this , that, and the other thing…
An Obie award!
Yes. And it’s recorded on Sony Classical. It’s a work by Horacio Quiroga when Quiroga was considered the first magical realist of South America. He wrote a series of books and short stories – very magical stuff. One is about a jaguar that was transformed into a boy. I created a Requiem Mass and set it at the carnival. We called it “A Carnival Mass: Juan Darién”. It was a theater work that ran about an hour-and-a-half, with masks and puppets, entirely in Spanish and Latin. It was very well-received in many non-Spanish speaking countries. That was first performed in the mid-1980s. Before that, I wrote a song cycle based on the poetry of Cesar Vallejo, who is a Peruvian writer also in the same period as Quiroga in the mid-to-late-’20s. Vallejo is considered a contemporary but also he’s often mentioned with Pablo Neruda. So, from my teens on, I’ve had the joyful experience of composing music to the Spanish language. It’s a beautiful language and spoken so much in New York. So many of my girlfriends and buddies spoke that language and it was something that I was drawn to as opposed to French or Italian.
Do you speak Spanish?
I can get myself in trouble in Spanish. But I cannot get myself out of trouble. [Both laugh]
I wanted to ask you about storyboards. You have such a varied background in theater, ballet, and film. Do you work with storyboards, for example, to score a scene for a big dance number? Does that help you?
Well, in terms of dance numbers, the music usually comes first. And then the choreographer works on the storyboards or choreographs to what music existed already. Like in “Frida”, the tango piece ‘Alcoba Azul’, was something I composed before the movie was shot. So musicians had a chance to practice it. Lila had a chance to sing it. And Julie and Salma had a chance to work out the choreography.
Did you find that the choreographer or director wanted the music changed? As I read about with “Moulin Rouge”?
Well, when you’re working on giant projects like that, you better be prepared for a lot of change and a lot of adjustment. It’s all about the actual clock. They usually ask you to trim, say, a minute off of this, a couple of seconds off of that, a minute-and-a-half more of that. Then, we’re not even talking about minutes; we’re talking about frames. O.K., we cut 28 frames, which are like a second and 1/24th, and you have to accommodate.
What advice do you have for young artists on becoming musicians or composers? For example, do you think it is more important to play the instruments or to read and write the music? Or, read, write, and perform at the same time?
Do whatever you can to express yourself. It becomes more rewarding when you learn about theory and music notation because it becomes an easy way of collecting ideas and expressing yourself. If not, just do whatever is necessary to express music. There are many outlets. My advice is to go wherever you’re wanted. Wherever you can be accepted, that’s where you should go.
For example, every big city has hundreds of little regional theaters with 90-seat theater houses and sometimes even 50 seats. [There are] also little theater companies and little dance companies. If you want to express yourself dramatically, I think that’s a good way of starting. That’s how I started.
If you enjoy movies, there are film schools with students who need music for the many films they make every year. That’s a great way to learn about the art of filmmaking but also how the music synchronizes with movies.
The other thing to learn is that music doesn’t need passports or green cards or anything like that. Music travels throughout the world freely. And any society or any culture or anybody that thinks music isn’t free to travel is not being helpful to world peace.
What was the first music you ever wrote? When did you know that you wanted to be a composer?
I started very early at 8, 9, 10 years old. I remember I could composer things ten to twelve minutes long at the piano and perform them. Little by little, I got much more of a formal education.
You had piano lessons?
In the beginning I had piano lessons and then I stopped taking them because it was a little bit too rigid. So, I started doing things on my own, by ear. But then I went back to learning piano again in more of a formal way. I went through high school learning music and a conservatory and got my bachelor’s and master’s degrees and all that stuff. But throughout that time I was constantly searching and composing in different styles. I never limited myself.
What inspires you musically?
I don’t need inspiration. I mean, music seems to be around me like trees or grass. I just go out and mow the lawn.
What have been the highest and also the lowest points in your career?
O.K. The truth is that I like to look at my art as something that doesn’t have any highs and lows, so that I don’t get too excited or I don’t get too disappointed. I find that the process of composing and the process of making music is good enough on its own. It doesn’t need any high points and it doesn’t want any low points. The beauty is in the process.