Weren’t there two titles for this film?
Right. “Voices” and “Voices from a Locked Room”.
How did you get the job to score “Voices”, and why did you want to do it?
Why wouldn’t you want to do a film about another composer who’s schizophrenic, who’s both a composer and a critic? This project came out of a relationship I was building with Sony Classical and Peter Gelb. Sony was recording my oratorio “Fire Water Paper”, plus Peter was recording “Juan Darien”, so it was a situation where I had a relationship. Peter was the producer of “Voices”.
Who starred in this picture?
That was Jeremy Northam. It was a story about an English composer named Peter Warlock and an English critic named Peter Hazeltine. Hazeltine had some sort of an intellectual vendetta against this composer and would embarrass him in The London Times to the point where the composer sued The London Times. Hazeltine fell in love with this woman who couldn’t understand at all why this critic had a vendetta against this composer, until she found out they were the same person and he was a schizophrenic living a double life, who finally committed suicide. It’s a true story, by the way.
What happened to the film?
For one reason or another, it wasn’t entirely successful as a film, but it’s one of my best scores.
Was it orchestral?
It was orchestral and we recorded it at Abbey Road with up to sixty musicians in the orchestra. I’d love to release the score, but the problem is that Sony Classical did the movie. So Sony Classical, who also have released some of my scores, would have to sort of eat corporate pie and say, “All right you can have it, that’s the deal.” The score is up there with some of my best work.
What was your scoring style to “Voices”?
It was both serving a composer that was a 20th-century composer and trying to expand upon the style that he created, so I was living as a walking living ghost in his style. On the other hand I was also scoring the movie dramatically divorced from the fact that it was about a composer.
Did your score connect up with the creativity of this composer?
It did in the sense that I lived through a lot of his songs and arranged them for the chorus and things like that. When I started arranging this composer’s songs for choir and boy soprano, I started to share his journey as a composer. When you arrange for someone who’s dead, as possible Ravel did when he was doing ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ for Mussorgsky, you think about that composer and live a double life with that person.