Jocelyn Pook’s music is mesmerizing and evocative. It speaks with a cosmopolitan voice as it weaves musical soundworlds of the past with ethnic and ambient vibrations of the present. It is also a uniquely stylized voice that beautifully interacts with and breathes life into the films in which it has been used, and those films become hard to imagine without her music. One of Pook’s most notable scores was written for Stanley Kubrick’s last film, “Eyes Wide Shut” (1999). This project perfectly wed her haunting music, which some filmgoers found unsettling in its direct and intense eroticism. Another particularly interesting Pook score is the one she wrote for director Michael Radford’s “William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice” (2004). Here, her music hearkens back to the Renaissance era of the play’s origin. Pook also maintains an active musical life outside of her film scoring, frequently collaborating with dancers and a variety of popular and not-so-popular musical artists. Where did you grow up, and at what point did music become an integral part of your life? I was born in Birmingham and grew up in London. Soon after I was born, my parents separated and I came to London with my mother, brother, and sister. My father was a violinist, but I didn’t know him very well in my childhood, and he died when I was thirteen. So I had that in my background – the fact that my father was a violinist. My sister and my brother played the piano when I was five or six and I later learned violin at school when I was nine. So I kind of grew up in a musical family. When you were young, did you have aspirations of taking your music to the big screen? No. I did actually do some composition when I was a child, but I didn’t consider myself the kind of person who would be a composer. When I went to music college, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, in London, I just studied as a performer. I took viola as my main instrument. I didn’t study composition. It just didn’t occur to me to go on that path at that time. It all happened later. Sometime after I left college, I ended up in a very interesting theater project as a performer, and got quite bitten by that world. It was sort of an experimental world – the visual/experimental kind of theater. I was exposed to a whole new cultural world and saw other ways of composing at this time. I was learning through experiences. Prior to your own work in movies, did you have much of an interest in, or understanding of, the combination of music and movies? I would say that I was affected by music in other mediums, such as the music of Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, and Gavin Bryars. Particularly the minimalist style or, basically, the New Music being done in the eighties. I wouldn’t say I had my sights set on film music. It was just an amazing thing, started to composer my own pieces, and many of those were for theater and dance. Would you talk about your work with Peter Gabriel? I met him as a player originally. He used to have these Real World recording weeks in the summer where he would invite musicians from all over the world down to his studio. We would all be contributing on pieces together, but there were really unusual combinations of people and instruments. It was really an amazing experience to be a part of that. Then I worked with him later as an arranger on one his albums along with another release, OVO, in 2000. How did you become involved in Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut”? What were your first thoughts about this film? It was one of those chance happenings. He heard my music because a choreographer who was working on the film had my album and was playing it in a rehearsal. Stanley thought that the piece she was playing was really appropriate, so he rung me up. Actually, first of all, he sent a car over so I could give him some more music, and then the next day, the car came back for me. It was quite an incredible thing. By then, I had done quite a lot of theater and dance and had started to do some TV drama also. But I hadn’t done a feature film before. I was really thrown in at the deep end. But, to begin with, he had only hired me to do the masked-ball scene. So that’s what I started working on. I didn’t know anything about the film apart from that scene, but because it was a self-contained part of the film, I could work like that. It was much later on when I got called back to do the rest of the score for the film. What was tricky at first was that they didn’t want me to see the film. They just wanted me to work on bits that needed music in isolated. It was really quite an interesting exercise because I realized there was absolutely no way I could do that without knowing how loaded certain things might be. You just didn’t know how to pitch the music. Finally, they relented and let me see the film. I have to say that it was really enjoyable working with Stanley on that film. Obviously, I was a bit daunted at first, but he was very warm and encouraging. What was their reason for having you score parts of the film without seeing the whole film? Well, because they were nervous about the film getting into the wrong hands. There was a lot of interest in that film before it came out. Stanley understandably didn’t want it to be seen until it was ready to be seen. “Eyes Wide Shut” is an intense and bizarre story that almost works as an opera from the orgy scene to the masked ball. Your music becomes the foreground of these scenes. What were your inspirations when starting these scenes of the movie? I was told about the basic situations, the narrative of the scene, and the atmosphere. They hadn’t shot it when I started working on it. I saw pictures of the masks and descriptions that gave me a good idea of the atmosphere. I did a lot of sketches. I played around with quite a few different approaches, particularly for the orgy scene. At that time, I think the original orgy scene was going to be a bit more erotic rather than nightmarish. What we ended up working with was based on something I had done before. I remember the brief for the orgy scene was “sexy music”. That’s incredibly vague, whereas for the masked-ball scene, there was much more to go on. He was quite keen on the voice idea and the kind of ritualistic idea. I have huge admiration for Stanley. I like the fact that he would take such a risk. I think that’s very admirable and really unusual. I didn’t even have an agent, and he couldn’t care less. He had complete belief in me, actually, and knew exactly what he wanted. It was incredibly good for my confidence. Before we talk about your next film, I want to discuss the unique palette of color that you use in your music. How did you discover this? I absorb a lot from many places. My background started in classical music, and later I was influenced by the minimalist movement combined with listening to artists like Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno. People mention a religious tone, and this may partly be the influence of medieval and early church music, which I love, coming through. Many other things, like playing in the eastern European band 3 Mustaphas 3 and hearing Holger Czukay’s ‘Persian Love Song’, have had a huge influence, too. So I guess my music is a melting pot of many interests. Michael Radford’s “The Merchant of Venice” is richly filled with a Renaissance flavor but intertwined with a modern ethnic voice. Did you find yourself researching a lot of this music, or did the film itself create the setting and atmosphere for you? I knew a bit about early music, but obviously there was much more to learn. I did start off by doing some research and listening to lots of music from that period and trying to get to know the instruments. What was interesting was learning all the instruments from the period and their qualities. Early on in that film, I had to work on the scenes that were being shot with musicians. Because of that, I had to decide what instruments they would be playing. I had grand ideas with big ensembles, but the budget was restrictive. Nevertheless, the film was just a gift. The picture was just so visually rich and atmospheric. There was just so much to respond to. It was also incredible to have such amazing musicians bringing the music alive. I found it interesting that you used the Edgar Allen Poe poem ‘Bridal Ballad’. Why not use something Shakespearean? Well, I looked at a lot of Shakespearean ideas, but I like the dark atmosphere of Edgar Allen Poe. I know it was a strange choice. Setting the poem came so easily, and it just felt like the right thing. Sometimes you work with a text and it just doesn’t flow very easily. It is one of those hit-or-miss things. The rest of the text I set for the film was from the period, though. I also felt that it was allowable to use the Poe setting for the end credits of the picture; had it been for the middle, I wouldn’t have done so. Talk about how you begin what ends up being a fully orchestrated piece. Most of the time I sit at the piano and discover what the feeling is I’m trying to achieve. It’s a mixture of that and playing ideas that come up on the piano. Usually that’s how I start. Do you have instruments and colors in mind while you composer, or are they layered on after a basic map is drawn out? I start with a small idea. It may be a melody, a group of chords, or even just a drone. It is always something very simple and small like that. I also work quite a bit on the computer these days, and I can bring up sounds that aren’t too dissimilar from some of the live sounds I need. I often try things out this way.