Austin360 blogs > Austin Movie Blog > Archives > 2009 > November > 04 > Entry
Interview: David Lang, composer for ‘(Untitled)’
Does Adrian Jacob’s character compare at all to your life?
I guess a little bit, yeah. The way I set it up is it’s sort of unfolding; he’s learning how to do things, he has a small audience and then he figures out a bunch of things by doing a lot of things in public in front of almost nobody. That’s definitely something I’ve been through, but I wouldn’t say that I got into a relationship and then got dumped and then all of a sudden I was a good composer. I’m not exactly sure that I believe that people who suffer make better art.
So with your music, especially Bang on a Can, it seems that the physical performance is as much a part of it as the auditory and I see a lot of crossovers between that and “(Untitled).” Was this intentional, since they’re both experimental forms of music?
I really wanted to make it so that it wasn’t just like the music was described, but you actually see it being made and you’d actually not just see people doing things with classical instruments, which is sort of secret and arcane, you know, how do you scrape a piece of horse hair across a box and come out with a beautiful sound. There’s something mysterious about that. I really wanted it to be everyday things that people would understand, like ripping paper and dropping glass so that there’s an attempt to make music out of things that are in everybody’s lives all around them. Again, that’s very much like Bang on a Can. The physicality of making the music should be part of the appreciation of making the music.
I also think of Bang on a Can, the actual name of the organization, and then the whole kicking the bucket as correlated? Was that intentional?
Actually it was not part of the original thing and it was not my idea to have the character kick the bucket, that was the director’s idea.
Why did he want that, do you know?
I think he was trying to think of some action which was ridiculous. He was trying to think of a musical instrument that would be ridiculous and I think that’s how he thought of it.
So how were you approached by the director?
The director got in touch with me and his idea was that this composer would write this really idiotic music and then he would have this experience and be changed and that he wanted to see him going through this crisis moment out of which comes this little piece of piano music. And he came to me and said, ‘I heard this piece of piano music of yours and I want to license that for the film, I want him to go through this experience and come out the other end and I want real music there and I want it to be your piece.’ So I had him describe for me what was going on in the rest of the movie and I said you can have all this silly music; I can write the silly music, too. You know, I’m a professional. So I sort of talked him into letting me do the rest of the score, I had never done one before. It was really kind of a leap of faith on his part.
Did you work with Adam Goldberg in helping his performance?
We did a bunch of dummy performances. I wrote a bunch of music that was essentially the same music that they played on screen with the paper and the dropping things and kicking and screaming and yelling. I did all that in a recording session as a kind of model for what they should do and Adam came to that. He watched that whole recording session take place and sort of saw that music and listened to it. I didn’t work with him in that I was sitting there on screen going, ‘Okay, well now at this moment why don’t you try to yell higher or something.’ … But one of the things I did in the recording session, which I thought was so useful was that I recorded him yelling a bunch of stuff. I just made up a bunch of stupid stuff with him yelling, which is what he ends ups doing on screen and so I thought if at the beginning of this exercise of letting him know what this character is about, I’m going to make him yell this stuff and it’s going to be so embarrassing that the only way you’d be able to do it is with complete conviction. So I think very subtly it sort of told him the attitude that he needed to have for the rest of the music, although he’s a musician so he understands all this anyway. He was really great and he really understood what he was supposed to be doing.
I know that you had your initial ideas with how you wanted the score to be written. How much of it changed from the beginning to the end, or did it change at all?
The interesting thing for me about this film was that having never done one before is that the music was used in all these different ways. Music is usually used, in film at least to my untrained, unobservant background, as a helper. … So what’s interesting is that exists in this movie, there is that kind of underscoring that tells you their emotional lives, but there are all these other layers of music. There’s music that’s played on screen that’s supposed to be in a live concert; there’s music that’s composed on screen, where you see him actually writing music; there’s things where he’s assembling the sound through sampling to make a piece of music and there’s also a concert where there’s a real piece of music that gets played. … There’s a lot of music in the film which I wrote really for concert, so I felt that I had all these different kinds of uses for music and I would go back and forth between each world and go, ‘well, which category is this? Is this underscoring, is this live concert, which actually also tells you their inner life.’ It was interesting because the categories could all get blurred. The thing that surprised me the most was that the least satisfying part of it was writing the music that works the way some music works normally. So those things that actually are … okay well here’s 10 seconds where no one is supposed to be listening to the music but you’re supposed to see what is in his mind, or her mind. You know that stuff turned out to be, because it was the most normal, the least fun.
So what did you think of the final film?
I enjoyed it. I thought it was really funny. The weird thing for me was that I’d only seen it really on a computer monitor at a certain size and then you see those things over and over again and you’re writing music to them, so none of the jokes are very funny after you hear them 10,000 times. So what was really great is that I went out to the opening with my wife in Los Angeles at the LA County Art Museum and I got to walk down the red carpet … that was really fun and then you go into this room and there’s 600 people watching this film and a little joke comes on and everyone laughs. All of a sudden I felt like I saw the movie for the first time, because when you see it with other people around you, all your little impulses get completely magnified and I thought that was really beautiful. I had sort of forgotten how funny it was.
At that premiere, what kinds of responses did you get afterward? Were people coming up to you?
Yeah, people really liked it. The music is such a big part of it.
It’s a character in itself.
It is really a character. And again that’s why I was trying to make sure it had a shape from beginning to the end; that it was really kind of respectful to the idea that music and musicians are important.
It seems like a great first film for you to work on as a composer.
It was really great because the music actually was present. The thing I thought was interesting that I didn’t really understand while I was working on it was that it pokes fun of so many things. It pokes fun of art, music and people who aren’t really commercial. Some of those are really easy targets and some you don’t really know exactly where it’s going, but at the end it’s really clear that this composer … after two hours of making fun of everybody, it’s actually really serious.
In your work, “Cheating, Lying, Stealing,” I feel like there’s two different kinds of voices, you know you have your stringed instruments met with the percussive instruments and they each tell a different story. But in the end they come together and complete a whole picture. How much of your emotional input goes into your work?
I never set out to say, ‘okay today I’m really miserable so I’m going to write a really miserable piece, or I’m just going to sit and think about the problems of my life and how I can translate that into high art.’ I never do that although that’s a very kind of traditional way for people to think of what they’re doing. Certainly in the media that’s the way a lot of art is portrayed. In this film the way it’s shown how he goes and has this hard experience and that hard experience makes him better. It makes him a more sensitive artist. I don’t really like that. I don’t really think that that’s the way it works and if it works that way it can’t work that way that directly. What’s interesting about music is that it is about a certain kind of emotional expression, it’s not like working with language where you tell somebody something specific. This is actually something else. It goes some place else other than language. It uses these emotional vibrations and that way it sort of enters people on this emotional level. It comes out of you on this emotional level, whether you want it to or not. So I do spend a lot time thinking about what interests me and what I believe in and what music I love and what sounds I love and about being honest about making sure that all those things are satisfying to me. I do think there’s something fundamentally expressive about that act. And I think that because music doesn’t come in mediated by intelligence or language that’s the place where it goes inside you when you receive it.
Would Adrian Jacobs’ character make a good fit in Bang on a Can since the mission of the organization is for people who are trying things that don’t necessarily have an easy fit in any other art world?
Bang on a Can’s mission has always been to support people who are pushing some boundary, who are experimenting in some way. It’s not really about finding a style of music that we like and saying this is the best style. So a lot of the pieces which I get interested in as a presenter for Bang on a Can are pieces that may not even be great pieces. They may be things, which are just about a great vision. And so I think one of the weird things about Adrian is I wrote that music to remind me of a certain period of music history. … Let’s break down the barrier between instrument and non-instrument, the barriers between sound and noise and I associated that so much with a historical period that anybody working in that mode now, I wouldn’t be interested in presenting their music. I would be interested in presenting the music from the early sixties, which does that by the composers who are figuring that out for the first time.
So how would you describe the music of Bang on a Can now and where it’s headed?
I think it still has the same mission. I think what’s been interesting as a presenter, we started with classical music because that was our background, but we were primarily about looking at the boundaries around contemporary classical music and so over the years, what we’ve been able to do is look at the people in all the other disciplines of music … who’s pushing the boundaries and we’ve been able to expand the area that we’ve been looking at, but the criteria for judgment has always been then same. We don’t want to find a traditional thing in a traditional culture. The mission hasn’t changed at all, but the area that we’ve been applying it to has changed. As far as where it’s going, I don’t know. And I also feel like I don’t want to know where it’s going.
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