I know you were involved in composing before scoring films, but what were your earliest impressions of film music?
I have been doing other things before I was doing film music and continue by dividing my life in thirds, which is music for film, a beloved part of what I do; music for theatre; and music for the concert stage. I find that each one of those gives the other ones of those thirds lessons; they cross-fertilize each other.
My earliest impression of film music would have to go back to when I was about five or six years old, when the old thirties horror movies used to scare me. My father used to say, “It’s just the music that’s scaring you. The imagery is not that horrific.” He’d turn it off and it wouldn’t be as scary. I was a very early composer; at the age of six or seven I was already writing large twelve- or thirteen-minute long type compositions. I was always keenly aware of music and found that in film or cinema there was a lot of wonderful music. I remember hearing Bernard Herrmann, Nino Rota in particular, and some scores that Duke Ellington did in my teens that really stuck out as terrific work.
What attracted you to film composing?
I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in an area which was multi-ethnic. If I stuck my head out of the window I could hear salsa, merengue, soul, klezmer, polkas, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, so it was an incredibly fertile ground for cross-fertilization.
In 1962, when I was nine years old, I met a young composer who composed his first piece called ‘Fern Hill’, based on Dylan Thomas the poet, at Midward High School. His name was John Corigliano. In 1972 I started studying with him when I was at the conservatory of the Manhattan School of Music. I was his student in composing and orchestration for seven years. Along the same lines at the same time I was an informal student of Aaron Copland. I was living at his place and helping him out with his daily chores. In that time I had the luck of being able to spend thousands of hours at the piano with him with my scores, but also reading through his scores, four hands at the piano, very slowly, and asking him zillions of questions about his work. He was very generous at all times with his memories and theories. Corigliano encouraged me to do anything where I was needed or wanted, that a composer very often was looked at like an unwanted object in a museum. Basically, if you are going to write a string quartet, maybe you’ll get it played. I started writing pieces that I knew would get played, like brass quintet pieces, because a lot of brass players wanted new material. My first piece was published by Schirmer and Sons when I was twenty-three years old, a brass quintet. I got a very good review about the performance at the Carnegie Hall Recital. Then I realized that if I wrote these chamber pieces, like bass or clarinet sonatas, very practical pieces, I’d get them played. If I go ahead and write a giant requiem or a symphony, no one would play them.
At the same time in the seventies there was a lot of alternative music going on, minimalism, eastern influences, and there was a great deal of theatre and dance, little companies; the National Endowment for the Arts was very strong, so I became involved with being the composer-in-residence for different dance and theatre companies. I started composing for theatre at the American Repertoire Theatre at Harvard. I also worked in San Francisco and Milwaukee with all these companies composing incidental music for theatre. By doing this I started to become very sensitive of and learned about drama; not only do you learn how to write a fugue or you learn counterpoint, but when you start to work with actors it’s like their Gold’s Gym of working on the screen. Then there’s the actual ritual event of sitting there with a bunch of actors inventing theatre from scratch and the tremendous challenge of supporting them on the stage with live music every night. This is what was going on when I was in my twenties.
At the same time I met this German producer, Christopher Giercke, who had these films for me to do in 1978 with this director who was associated at the time with Fassbinder named Ulli Lommel (later he became a very peculiar character at best). This is when I scored “Cocaine Cowboys” and “Blank Generation”. “Blank Generation” was the good film and “Cocaine Cowboys” was the laughable one. “Blank Generation” got great reviews at festivals, but it didn’t get released. That was with Andy Warhol and Carole Bouquet; she was the beautiful girl in “That Obscure Object of Desire” by Bunuel. “Blank Generation” clearly had the most dignified score; the other one was just trying to do something commercial at the time. During this same period I was mainly doing chamber music and composing symphonic music; then these two little films cropped up and afterwards I went back into the loving arms of theatre again.