How did you meet Elliot?
He was my student at the Manhattan School of Music where I was teaching. He might have met me earlier when I had ‘Fern Hill’ done at Midward High School.
What do you think Elliot learned from you in the seven years you taught him?
He was a private student of mine; every student in a conservatory has a private teacher. When Elliot came in he was this kid from Brooklyn who was like a little Mahler. He was wonderful, totally full of passion, and would hang at the piano and sing while he was doing it. I saw this raw talent just going crazy with so much trying to get out. You work with and help him to be a better musician, teach him things you know which he doesn’t know that has to do with the craft of composing. You try to get his imagination going so it doesn’t become just academic. I did the best I could, which is to bring Elliot out and make him a better composer. The result is that Elliot always had a strong personality and he learned how to use it composing.
Did he pick up an extension of your techniques or a basis to form his own style?
The thing about style is that it’s like handwriting. Techniques you can absorb; style you can’t. People don’t realize this. If you sign your name like when you sign a check, you don’t think about it, but it’s unique. Style is that part of the composer you don’t think about, but techniques are the part you do. So I taught him a lot of techniques.
Elliot’s style is something that he got out of his own amalgamation of all those things in his brain that came out Elliot. I had nothing to do with that; that’s Elliot being Elliot. Style you can’t teach, but techniques you can. Twelve-tone techniques, tonal techniques, rhythmic techniques, orchestrational techniques; they’re all techniques. They’re very important to know and they can help influence your style, but the choice of what notes you pick very often is something that is not thought-out; it’s instinctual. That part is what really makes a composer have a style.
How do you feel about Elliot’s style?
I think that Elliot’s style ranges through all the different techniques he writes. He told me that when he did “Interview with the Vampire” he was in his Corigliano mode because a lot of the techniques he used were things that I did and he absorbed. Then again there are other movies with completely different kinds of techniques that he uses, but overall Elliot’s style has to do with a very heightened sense of drama. He told me that he looks at people’s eyes a lot because he can pick out what they’re really thinking, not what the action is. Sometimes it’s very contrary. Elliot is able to go into the mind and understand the psyche in order to translate that into highly visceral musical images; that’s part of his style.
Elliot mentioned that you influenced him not to conduct because, unless you’re a professional conductor, you start to compose pieces that only fir what you can conduct.
Partly that and partly the reason had to do with my need to be in the studio listening. One of the problems about conducting is the physicality about it. If you get involved in the physicality, you’re not listening as closely sometimes. It takes a real skill to be able to listen.
Also, all films are recordings, and what you’re hearing on the podium is not what they’re hearing in the control room. If you react to what you’re hearing on the podium, it’s smarter to use your time to sit in the control room and get it. Of course, you get more money when you conduct, so a lot of film composers want to do that. If I have any control over it I hire a conductor who is highly skilled. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted “The Red Violin”; I don’t think I could have done that the way he did. I like the best people to do it; conducting is an art, and a highly-crafted one. Why do a second-rate job when I can get a first-rate conductor to come and do it?
Goldenthal’s very interesting as a composer because of his huge contribution to composing outside of film.
A lot of film composers have written concert music and they all suffered terrible prejudices against them from the critical establishment. I think it’s a terrible shame and Elliot suffers from a bit of that too. I think they all do. There’s a horrible feeling that if you’re a film composer, you’re not a real composer. It’s only snobbism, but unfortunately that kind of snobbism can be very painful because there are a lot of composers in film music who have written symphonies, string quartets, and certain pieces; but every time they get played, the establishment of critics in the concert world say, “Oh, well, this is just film music.” By relegating it that way they don’t take it seriously. It’s a terrible problem and I think they are going to need people like Elliot to just barge through this whole thing and turn them upside-down and say, ‘That’s nonsense.’
One thing about him is, he’s very strong and is going to make it that way, making it in through the critical establishment, which is a very hard nut to take. It’s one thing to write a film or two, but when you are basically a film composer that writes concert music then you have a lot of prejudice to deal with. It’s very unfortunate because there are a lot of fabulous film composers.
What do you find unique about Elliot?
One of the things about his theater music, specifically The Transposed Heads and Juan Darien – he does wonderful things with the addition of incongruous instruments together. Things that you would never put together. Like didgeridoo, which is an Australian outback instrument, he mixes with an Asian flute, a cello, and electronics. He takes instruments that I haven’t heard in concert use and puts them in that context. Also he takes electronics and mixes them in concert use very successfully, which is a hard thing to do. His use of percussion and pitch is very interesting; he does this very fast East Indian music where has rapid percussion passages in which melodies play exactly with the percussion instruments, these rather rapid things. I think they’re just wonderful and something that’s not heard.
Where do you currently teach music?
I was teaching at The Manhattan School at the time, but now I’m teaching at the Juilliard School at Lincoln Center and also at Lehman College. I’ve had quite a few wonderful students, but Elliot probably is the most famous, in the sense that the world knows. There have been quite a few other students that have not gone into film necessarily, but gone into concert music that are doing well. Elliot’s taken a different road than most of them; in fact, I encouraged that because I was the one who called up Sam Schwartz, who was my agent at the time, and told him to listen to Elliot; and that’s how he got into film music. I knew he could write for film and would be phenomenally good because he really knows how to translate visual action into music.