JIM LOCHNER: I went back and re-read your liners notes for SOMETHING WILD (1961) to try and get some background information for this interview. Not much information comes up when you Google your name.

MARK LENEKER: Good! (laughs)

Tell me how your interest in Copland began.

The whole thing with the Copland music, especially the two scores for OF MICE AND MEN and OUR TOWN, goes back almost 11 years. SOMETHING WILD was something that happened as an offshoot of this, and just happened to come to fruition years earlier.

The initiative to do this was a rhetorical kind of request that came from this trumpet player that was trying to put together this orchestra [to perform film music] here in New York that would be a mixture of session recording and people from the [New York] Philharmonic, stuff like that. They did that Jerry Goldsmith concert at Carnegie Hall in 1998. They were looking for volunteers. I went to that concert and I thought it was a good idea so I got in touch with him. One of the things he said was, you know, if we’re really going to do this, we need to find material to do. Copland’s centenary was coming up and it seemed like a good bridging content.

So I just took it upon myself—it seemed like a semi-lunatic thing to do—and got permission from Copland’s estate. I got some [scores] sent to me from the Library of Congress, and I also went there and extracted some things. I don’t know if they’d let people do this now, but they just sent the stuff over, these disintegrating pages, and gave it to me. And I sat there and photocopied it—not all of it but a lot of it—on a regular photocopier.

Then there was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin that got in touch with me. At the time, he was part of the library system there and they had an archival recording of the motion picture score [for SOMETHING WILD]. I thought it fit in really well. Once again, I did something sort of lunatic and got in touch with the director, Jack Garfein, who was living in Paris at the time. He only directed two films and SOMETHING WILD was one of them. He thought it was a really good idea. I think he was kind of charmed by the whole idea of getting this stuff out there. He just took it upon himself and met with his lawyer.

There was a period of time where they were trying to find the music. He knew that there were some unopened albums but he couldn’t find his. And then literally his wife stumbled across it in the attic. About the same time that that happened, [Robert] Townson at Varèse Sarabande got involved because M-G-M was licensing a lot of titles. I guess Garfein’s lawyer decided to include this or something. So that moved forward and they asked me to write the liner notes. That’s how that came about.

That came about fast because you didn’t have to do anything other than remaster the LP. So the whole engine at Varèse kicked in for that. They didn’t do enough PR for that album, I don’t think. On their site they act like it’s this major thing and you’d think that they would have done something which they don’t do with a lot of their releases, which is get review copies out to not just film music magazines but classical music magazines and cross-fertilize. But it didn’t really seem like they did that. It did get reviewed, but they could have made more of a bigger deal outside of their website. I remember reading the description on the website. Oh it doesn’t get any better or more important than this…Well, if it’s really true then you send out copies to The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and that sort of thing. Still, it was great to do that. It came together much faster because they just remastered the album. You didn’t have to go through this really long process of trying to re-record music.

The other thing that happened sooner than that was “The World of Nick Adams” concert. One of the other scores that Copland did, this was for television [in 1957], was to accompany a bunch of short stories by Hemingway, the Nick Adams short stories. I got in touch with the guy who wrote that screenplay [A.E. Hotchner]. He was a screenwriter and he was a friend of Paul Newman’s, and they started his food company.

It’s a small world!

It is. It’s really weird. I went over to his apartment and he said, “Oh my God, you found [the music]!” And he has a charity that he does for kids with cancer and terminal illnesses. He did a staged reading of that music and the screenplay at Lincoln Center [in 2001] with all these stars, and he repeated it at the Kodak Theatre in L.A. the next year. He used to trot it out as a fundraiser. I think there’s still more life in that. I think at some point it would be interesting to do that as a piece for narrator and orchestra or something like that.

So those things happened in the interim when I got the music for OF MICE AND MEN and OUR TOWN and now. In between, I was weaving in and out and pitching it to record labels. There are less record labels now than there were in 1999! It’s all changed. The spectrum is different now.

God bless Naxos! I started out with little street cred on this whole thing. Even when I pitched it to Naxos I guess I had built up a little stuff with SOMETHING WILD. I literally wrote an email to the CEO. He got back and said, “This seems like a good idea.” (laughs) It took a little while for the engine on that to get moving. That was in 2005. So they had to take the music which, even though it was complete, needed to be put into a computer program so that they could produce parts and everything. They did that, and they needed to schedule a time, space, and an orchestra. Last year they recorded it in February in the Czech Republic. That’s how that came about.

These things that you received from the Library of Congress, were they just conductor’s scores or did you have parts with them?

There were no parts, but it was the fully orchestrated scores. Otherwise, I don’t think this would have happened. We were really, in that sense, extraordinarily lucky that Copland kept such tremendous records.

And they’re all there in D.C. now.

Yes, they are! I don’t think they trot them out as much. Things are different now. In 1999, I stood over a photocopier. Now they digitize a lot of it, which is great, because I think it keeps people’s hands off of material that is already disintegrating. It allows them to look at it without disturbing the originals. But back then the collection was far from fully digitized.

It was the fully orchestrated score to OF MICE AND MEN on paper and the fully orchestrated score to OUR TOWN, which was also on disintegrating paper. OUR TOWN was missing a few pages and I was lucky enough to ask for not just the score but also the folder that contained the original suite that Copland put together, because that had the missing pages. I was able to put the pages back in. There they were.

Incidentally, the OUR TOWN score, the person you can thank for that, other than Copland for keeping such good records, was the person who worked with him who, I guess, was basically the copyist, Jerome Moross.

I remember taking a photocopy and faxing it to Moross’ daughter to verify his handwriting. What they would normally do back then was that you’d have the conductor’s score, which Copland wrote out, and he put in all the specific orchestrations. Someone like the copyist would then look at that and if he knew what the hell he was doing, he could write up the parts from that. That’s usually how they would do it.

But he took the extra step of writing out the complete score for Copland and he even inscribed it. There’s an inscription on the first page that says, “Score from the movie OUR TOWN, music by Copland, but not his handwriting.” So we can thank him for creating that.

So that was there and it was just a case of me putting back in the pages that he had extracted from the suite. They sent me a few other things as well. I don’t think I photocopied everything there. I also paid for them to just send some stuff as well. That’s what was used. From there, some poor guy must have gone blind (laughs) putting that all in the Sibelius music program so that they could extract the parts.

He got paid for it. That makes it a little easier.

Yes it does. What it got down to was what it needed somebody eyes of steel and a lot of patience to set that up in Sibelius. But all the notes were there, so there was no guesswork, no mystery. And there was no difficult work of reconstructing the music by ear or something like that. That was not needed at all, which was good. If you listen to, for instance, the fight cue from OF MICE AND MEN, I should imagine it would be very difficult to replicate that sound wall at the end or something like that. We knew when things were coming in and when they were going out, what was fluttering, if they were fluttering up a half step or down a half step, things of that nature. We were really lucky like that.

You really would not have been able to pull anything off a DVD of OUR TOWN.

Exactly! (laughs)

That is in bad shape.

It’s in terrible shape. Even the one that was “restored” was bad.

It needs someone with some very deep pockets and some expendable income to restore it. Maybe some day.

That film is in public domain so the prints were thrown out. I don’t know what they could do. They may be able to improve the picture. I don’t know what they could do with the soundtrack.

It’s almost unwatchable, it’s so bad.

Exactly. And “unhearable” too sometimes. (laughs) It was quite an eye opener to listen to what the orchestra did later on. Speaking of the Library of Congress, that would be a really worthy one for them to take up, from their cinema section or something.

Both films were serious movies that were sort of anomalies because they were produced by guys who were generally doing shorts and comedies, B-movie sorts of stuff. OF MICE AND MEN was Hal Roach and the other one was Sol Lesser. Hal Roacch [produced] Laurel and Hardy. The guy who produced OUR TOWN did a lot of cheap Tarzan movies and shorts and stuff like that. I’m not saying they’re bad, they were just sort of anomalies in the sense that the one time that they did something sort of serious.

It may be ultimately that the films were clearly the victims of mismanagement. I mean, letting your film’s copyright expire… (laughs)

That’s sad.

That’s pretty funny, you know.

What is your role on these recordings?

My role really was to come up with the idea and initiate the project, sort of get it into the hands of a company that wanted to do it. It was my idea and then I just pushed the idea. I don’t know what word there is for that. I would like to think, this is a good word for it: “It was my idea and I ‘curated’ the music.” How’s that?

That’s good! I like that!

I can’t take credit for that. There’s a clarinet player in the New York Philharmonic who said, “You know, you need to curate this music.” That seems as good a term as any.

Surely they’re giving you some credit on the CD.

Well, the CD isn’t out yet. I did the notes on the download and those are going to be the same on the CD. I would love to do some big, huge booklet but it’s just not going to happen as far as I know. To be able to email the CEO of Naxos and say, “I have this idea…” That’s pretty good too. There may be follow-ups to this. And not just Copland, other stuff as well. I’d love to tell you they’re paying me thousands of dollars but nobody’s makes thousands of dollars off stuff like this. But to have that connection is quite valuable, and especially with Naxos. Naxos is huge now! They’re bigger than Sony Classical. They ate everything up. When they started, people laughed at them. They’re the only game in town now.

They’re the only ones putting any money behind these reconstructions.

Yes, exactly! They’re the only ones putting money behind anything. I really can’t knock ‘em. With this recording, they did things that even they normally wouldn’t do. When something like this comes to them, like with Stromberg, they would have everything set up. I didn’t have everything set up! They had to do work that they normally don’t do, which is to get the music in shape and hire an orchestra. Usually orchestras come begging to them. That’s also why I’m so glad that the download has been quite popular. I like looking and seeing that it’s the #1 downloaded album at ClassicsOnline. It’s good to know.

I was hoping for a really good recording, and it far surpassed what I expected.

They did a terrific job!

It’s extraordinary that 70 years later we’re finally getting to hear these scores.

Yeah. That is what I was advocating for a decade. Even when all the compromised quality in OUR TOWN, I could still hear things and think, “Oh my God, this is really good.”

I think that OF MICE AND MEN, in particular, is an unsung opus of Copland’s. This is a level of quality and importance on par with Billy the Kid.

At the same time, the great thing about these scores is that they’re steeped in his populist style, which everybody loves, it sticks with us today. And yet he was able to experiment and do things that you don’t hear until decades later, and stuff that he did in the ‘20s. You got this unique kind of something that sounds like classic Copland, but then you’d have these bursts of dissonance and other stuff. I hear things from SOMETHING WILD in OF MICE AND MEN occasionally, little phrases, little things here and there. He did that decades later. That’s one of the things I find most fascinating about the scores is that you think they’re one thing—and they are—but there’s a lot more going on.

And to think we’ve only heard two or three cues from these films all these years.

They were re-arranged and scaled down. To listen to [the suite] Music for Movies and think you know anything of the score for OF MICE AND MEN is pretty inaccurate. (laughs)

And you don’t! There’s so much more to it. Even with OUR TOWN, there’s so much more to the score than that 8-minute suite.

No one can answer this now, because he’s dead. Why did he choose what he did? But he did. I know why he orchestrated the suite the way he did. He scaled down the orchestrations because that was the fashion of the time. But also, if you’re a composer that makes a living from orchestras playing your stuff, then you want as many orchestras as possible to play it. If you have extraordinary orchestration demands, that’s not going to help you. (laughs) He had more than usual amount of woodwinds and a full complement of brass for the film scores. And not all orchestras could have done that. I think that’s one reason he scaled [the suites] down. I think he may have chosen the parts that he chose because they fit into the suites as he envisioned them and also they could exist without any narrative beats behind them. They were just pure music. They just evoked something that didn’t need any picture behind it.

“Threshing Machines” is just this perpetual motion sort of thing. “Barley Wagons” is just plain. You didn’t need visuals to get the gist of what was going on. It’s just the music. Just the fact that he was able to put movie music into orchestras in the 40’s is pretty amazing. That has never really been repeated too much. (laughs) I mean, Corigliano, right? He’s the only other one. And that was decades later. Of course, [Leonard Bernstein’s] ON THE WATERFRONT. But once again that was in the 50’s. But Copland did it in 1943! That was pretty amazing to do anything like that.

Since you’ve looked at the conductor’s score for a decade now, talk about some of the different instruments we hear in there, like the Jew’s harp and the saw in “Emily’s Dream.” There’s a point in the main titles for OF MICE AND MEN, it’s so dissonant, I don’t know if it’s the strings playing harmonics or what. It’s a very odd sound.

Yeah, I know the point. They’re playing a note and the harmonic above that note. It’s all dictated out in the score.

You don’t hear that in 1939 film scores.

No, probably not. You sure as hell didn’t hear a 26-second-held clashing chord that sounds like something out of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS or Ligeti from 1960’s concert music. That was really ahead of its time. And yet at the same time, you didn’t hear something that was so, I don’t want to use the word sparsely, but he orchestrated in a way that was not lush for the most part and was not the European music that was going on at the time. Even though, I have to say, he used the number of instruments, which is about 52 or so, a lot of studio orchestras were that size back then for non-epics. He just tamped everything down to get that sound that he wanted.

I know that one of the things Virgil Thomson is known for is his documentaries. There is a similar sound. But as far as their influence goes, if you look at an independent documentary as opposed to what was at the time a major studio release, maybe why [Copland’s] influence in film was more widely felt, because more people saw the film. And he got nominated for Academy Awards and that sort of thing.

Before OF MICE AND MEN, they didn’t know what they were doing with western film. And then they heard that and they said, “Oh, it’s not all little ditties and stuff like that.” You can actually come up with a complete, “original” sort of palette of what the American west sounded like.

It’s so interesting to hear these two scores next to each other. They come attached to two major authors of the time. OF MICE AND MEN almost looks back to Copland’s more dissonant work of the 20’s and early 30’s. And yet OUR TOWN is pure and clean and simple, which is what you need for any production of the play, without any sentimentality in there at all.

That’s right, except for “Emily’s Dream,” which actually stands out. Listen to “Emily’s Dream” and then listen to the opening bars of SOMETHING WILD. They’re similar, believe it or not. It’s just that one has a much larger orchestration. Which just goes to show that Copland was really quite ahead of his time. These ideas were floating around in his head for much longer than people think. It was always there, I guess.

I didn’t have any big thesis in mind when I collected these scores. I was practical. There they were and they didn’t need to be reconstructed. But it was nice to have these scores back to back—because they were written within months of each other—because they’re so iconic, so American by these great American authors with these great American themes. That’s why I thought an album of those two would be nice. And they do contrast with one another. And you have these two things that people always associate with Copland—the West and quiet, small villages.

It’s amazing that they’re just as fresh now as they probably were back then.

I know. Some of the music sounds like it could have been written yesterday. It sounds like film music you’ve heard in the past 20 years. That just points out his influence.

There are people who would say that Copland started an entire school of film composing. And I think they may be right. There was this European style, which was very predominant and was used a lot. It got recharged again with John Williams and all of his big epic scores. But Copland came along in 1939 and did this whole kind of style that was different. I mean basically his influence is French, right? But to us it sounded innately American and entirely original. It struck some composers. I think his film work and his concert work struck a lot of composers. And slowly but surely, they started working in that vein as well, with Hugo Friedhofer and Elmer Bernstein.

You can hear it in Alex North, Leonard Rosenman and others as well.

Oh yeah, absolutely. They took up that style. We still have the two big schools. We have the [Max] Steiner school, I guess you could call it, and then the Copland school. It hasn’t left us, with the exception if someone’s doing something really experimental or songs or something. That was the interesting thing about 1939. It was such an amazing year for movies. Not just for movies, but it was also because maybe that was the year when the two big schools started. You had GONE WITH THE WIND, which was traditional, sweeping, symphonic, European. You had OF MICE AND MEN, which introduced this whole “American” style. And then you had THE WIZARD OF OZ, which showed that song and score could be amazingly popular.

What are your next plans with Copland? I know you had talked about the possibility of doing THE HEIRESS. Is that still in your plans?

Yes it is. And so is THE RED PONY. It’s all very preliminary at the moment. I hope it doesn’t take another 10 years. (laughs) It’s definitely something I’d like to do. It’s the only logical follow up to this, for me to do those two scores. We’ll see what happens. There’s definitely interest.

It will help if this sells.

Absolutely! (laughs)

Those acetates for HEIRESS are in bad shape.

I know. I have the files on my computer.

You can’t listen to them too terribly much. They’re harsh.

The word “archival” is being kind. When THE HEIRESS gets done, if I have the chance to make that happen, when it gets recorded, you get one shot at it. So everything is going to get recorded, everything that Copland wrote, everything that was thrown out, everything that was replaced (even if he didn’t like it), because you don’t get another chance at it. Everything that could possibly be recorded we’d at least try to get recorded.

There’s also a practical side to that too. A lot of those cues are short. You want an album that’s over an hour. So you include all the source cues, the little dances and stuff. You just do as much of it as you can. And you’ll be happy to know that Naxos shares that vision. With OF MICE AND MEN and OUR TOWN, they wanted to do as much of it as was out there. They don’t have any kind of prejudice against short cues or anything like that. They wanted to do as much of it as possible.

It’s amazing that they stepped up to the plate and did this.

Yeah, I have to give them props.

You’d still be pounding the pavement with this idea.

While record companies fold left and right. (laughs) It was so overdue. It’s very funny how it slipped under everybody’s radar. There must have been this feeling, I think, that some of the music from the suites had been around for so long…Maybe there was this feeling that it had already been done. Nothing could be further from the truth. You listen to it and you think, “Oh my God!” Maybe there was this feeling, “Oh, wasn’t it done?”

It doesn’t matter because it’s done now. And it’s a great recording.

They did a great job. The orchestra [Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic] has been around for several decades. They’re named after a famous Czechoslovakian composer who moved to the States in the 50’s and taught in New York City and wrote a fair amount of stuff. The orchestra has been used for a lot of low-budget film projects. They had some English conductors who probably trained them a bit on the style. They had done a recording of The Tender Land [Copland’s only opera], the full opera had never been set down. They did that in 2002, so they were not strangers to this. You can hear it. They know how to achieve that particular type of sound.

It sounds like an American orchestra that’s been playing Copland their entire lives.

Copland was such an ambassador. If we can play Tchaikovsky, then obviously other orchestras can play Copland, and able to do other types of composers.

Thank you for all your years of pulling it together, because it paid off.

Yeah, I’m happy. I’m glad that it’s had the amount of downloads that it’s had already. I hope it keeps going. It bodes very well for doing a follow-up. I wish they would have bumped up the release of the physical CD, but there are a lot of releases on the site where they say the CD will be released later. I think they have a backlog of releases that they need to do. I think what they may be learning is nobody is buying CD’s anymore. I think there’s a point where it doesn’t become economically feasible in the year 2010 to release 40 physical CD’s in a month, or whatever it is they do. They release a lot.

If we do the albums of THE HEIRESS and THE RED PONY, one of the things I would try to get settled, now that I know, is the digital release and the physical release would have to be, if not at the same time, then within very close proximity to each other. It’s a little weird. You get excited about the release, it’s download only, and then months from now you have to go through the whole thing again.

At least their prices are cheap.

You can’t beat that, for sure!

Even if buying both, like I will, it’s still cheaper than a regular CD.

I know. And I don’t know what’s going to be cut from the physical CD. I gave them my choices. It won’t be an internal cut—that would be ridiculous!—but it have to be an actual cue or two. It’s 82 minutes long and I think you can get away with 78 minutes from the manufacturer. Something will have to go.

I guess one legitimate argument would be that you’re getting double-dipped. And in a sense you are, but I can’t do anything about it. (laughs) Like I’ve told people, if you want the CD out earlier or if you have an issue with this, you need to talk to Naxos.

It’s a great recording. Congratulations, your work paid off!

And let’s hope it produces a bit more. That would be nice. You can be rest assured that I’m thinking about it. I definitely want to follow up with THE HEIRESS and THE RED PONY. There’s no other thing to do.

Look for my review of the Naxos recording OF MICE AND MEN and OUR TOWN tomorrow.

You’ve been a busy man! Five film scores this year, three of which are all premiering within a month of each other…

And a couple more in the works! [laughs]

…And a new album! Tell me about Bittersweet.

Bittersweet was a labor of love and joy actually. I met Kate Ceberano about five or six years ago and we just got along so well. Even though we come from very different worlds and different continents, we found we both enjoyed performing together and we discovered this mutual love of Tin Pan Alley, the classic American Songbook, if you will. We talked about it for a number of years—Oh, wouldn’t it be fun!—so finally we said, “Let’s just stop talking about it and just do it!” So we did it and it’s had quite great success in Australia and it’s sort of now dribbling forth in America and starting to pick up some momentum. We love it and we’re just very, very pleased!

How did you choose which songs to include on the album? With Tin Pan Alley as a basis, that’s certainly a treasure trove of great songs to choose from.

Well, it certainly is. I think it was one of the things that made it so effortless to do. We said maybe we should just trade back and forth some emails on what are your favorite songs and what are your favorite recordings of them. So we’d also get a sense of the styles we might share. And it turns out that the first email was practically duplicates of each other. We’re both big fans of Nancy Wilson. In fact, on both of our lists I think the top five spots were her versions of some of these songs. We just took it from there. It was very easy to come up with what we wanted to do.

As a performer and a composer, how do you find the time to fit it all in?

Well, that’s an ongoing…

Challenge?

Challenge, that’s exactly the right word. At the end of the day you just put it on the calendar, you know, like a birthday or something. It’s on there and you’re just not going to not do it. And things have to mold to that. Part of the way you could also do it is you pick a really good band. You pick an excellent studio and you know it’s going to get done efficiently and very professionally so that you’re not wasting any time. I’ve done enough pre-production now in my life as a film composer that I know what to do. I also know enough about jazz players and the jazz environment to know not to over-prepare, so that you have just the right balance going in so that you can do an album like that in three days and feel confident that you’re going to get a fantastic, stellar product. It doesn’t have to take weeks and weeks.

Do you have any other albums in the works?

Well, I do actually! I have yet to figure out which one is going to surface first. [laughs] I have a brand new band here in L.A. called Houston Street which I’m very excited about. It’s a real jazz band. In other words, it’s “take no prisoners.” [laughs] And somehow you know what’s interesting about this band to me is that we’ve done about three or four gigs now, and every single gig people have come up to me and said, “You know what, I don’t really like jazz, but I really love what you’re doing.” And I can’t quite put my finger on why that is except that as a band we have this idea that even though you’re improvising, people can still be invited to be a part of that. It doesn’t have to be this stand-offish stance that a lot of modern jazz has taken in the past.

One of the things that we’re doing in the band is we’re playing tunes that are recognizable, even though the first thing we do is sort of completely deconstruct them. The fact that we’re playing a bunch of Radiohead tunes, for instance, I think it invites people into the experience. And then actually they find, “I remember that song. I really like that song!” and “Wow, isn’t it interesting what they’re doing with it?” Even if they don’t have any appreciation of Charlie Parker or John Coltrane or that tradition, they still find they can have a great affinity for what we’re doing. So that’s a band I’m recording live and want to get a record out in the next six months. I’ve just started working on a project with Bobby McFerrin which I hope will show the light of day pretty soon. That’s very exciting to me because he’s an amazing talent.

He’s like an instrument all to himself.

Really! Well, more like an orchestra to himself! He’s really just remarkable! And I’ve been working on a Christmas album for a number of years and I keep missing the deadlines so it won’t make it this year. [laughs] Hopefully by next year. It’s really interesting. It’s trumpet with electronic versions of Christmas material, which is about halfway done. One of these days I’ve just got to finish it. And a few other odds and ends, but I’m getting back into playing and enjoying it immensely.

I have a really stupid question. I live in New York, and when I first moved here I thought it was really odd that they pronounced Houston Street like HOW-ston Street. I’m from Texas and we called it Houston down there. Why do you pronounce the name of your band HOW-ston Street?

[laughs] Well, because it is after the street in New York not the city in Texas, I’m afraid.

But why Houston Street in particular?

Because that’s sort of the spirit of the band. The spirit of the band is that we play very open, improvised music. I feel that New York is still the one city in the planet that sort of exemplifies that. And that neighborhood still has the main clubs that promote that and offer that to the world as a real art form. Even though we’re not residents there, the hearts of many of the guys in the band sort of half live there. [laughs]

Having been to both places, you made the right choice. Nobody particularly wants to be associated with Houston, Texas.

[laughs] Yeah…

So you have three films coming out within weeks of each other. How did you become involved with MY ONE AND ONLY?

That one came through the music supervisor, Steve Lindsay, who is also a music producer. And he and I have worked together a number of times actually. He produced a track for me once a number of years ago and I also have played on some records he’s produced for Adam Cohen and some others. So when he got the job, he found a writer and produced the title song for the movie. Since the movie was based around an original song for the movie, he was brought on quite early. And then as they were finishing the shooting of the film, the style of the score became apparent what it needed to be. He initially called me up and said, “Can you recommend somebody? I’m not sure we can afford you.” And I said, “Well, let me take a look at it.” I do movies for a variety of different reasons. Yes, I like getting paid, but if the movie strikes my fancy, money isn’t always the object. I took a look at it and I really liked it. And I had a month open in my schedule and I said, “Look, if you can keep it within this timeframe, I’ll do it.” So I did it! It was a lot of fun because, quite frankly, there are not many movies that come along that actually ask for a score in the jazz tradition. So it was a lot of fun to do.

I read on the Scoring Sessions website that you recorded the score with a small number of musicians. Was this a budgetary choice?

This is an interesting question. You come up against this all the time in the film scoring business. How do you handle these ever-diminishing budgets? [laughs] Crash was the ultimate example. But this one also, I think, falls in the same category. I can give you several examples. In this film, I took a look at it and said, “You know what, it won’t help you any to have 60 strings and a big band and all that stuff. You can do this with 20 strings and a jazz quartet.” It’s an intimate film and what the score needs to supply are the intimate moments. Some of the more larger moments are already covered with source material and things like that. And some songs. They had some songs in the film also. So I said, “Look, the good news here is that you’re going to have enough money.” Obviously there was a negotiation that took place and I tried to get as much money out of them as I possibly could. [laughs] And I think they spent more in the end than I really think they wanted to. But it was the right amount for me and what I knew would be a really good score. And it didn’t break the bank. It was the right score for the movie.

The same thing with Crash. Crash had actually less money and, at the end of the day, an intimate, electronic score, I personally think, was the best choice for that movie. We could have thrown a million dollars at it and I don’t think it would have improved the music in the movie. The opposite example that I can think of it is a movie called Bobby a number of years ago, the story of Bobby Kennedy. They had no money and they said, “You just do it electronically.” I said, “Actually, I won’t do that. This movie will suffer if you do an electronic score. It needs an orchestral score. I will do my best to keep the costs in line.” And we just negotiated and we went around to the producers and I just said, “Look, you have to come up with it. You have to find the money because that’s the right way to do this movie.” And they did. And it was the right way, and everyone agreed. So, ultimately if I have a strong opinion about it, I will fight to get the money that is needed to support the film. And that’s the basic attitude I keep these days. We have lots of clever tricks for doing things efficiently and on budget, and we get a lot out of our money. But that’s the point of view I keep.

I also read that the musicians played the score without a conductor. Is this a common practice with other composers for smaller ensemble scores or was this your choice for this film?

You know I can’t speak to other composers. I haven’t asked around these days. I’ve done it a couple of times now. I feel you have to know your musicians well. I’ve only done it when I’ve known the group really, really well. We did this in L.A. and this is the core group of people I’ve used for years. The orchestra leader is Sid Page and Sid is just a marvelous musician and I can trust him to control the group and lead them well. Quite frankly, if everything’s clicked out… And in this case we had a rhythm section, so it was more important perhaps to make sure that the rhythm section was in the can and everybody got the groove and how they would phrase things. I went through and waved the baton for a few rehearsals and things like that, which is not a pretty sight, I’ll tell you! [laughs] I can get people through it so we could find out if there were any mistakes in the parts. But it worked out quite well. I’ve also done it in London with a small group there, which is the core of the London Chamber Symphony. So, again, I can trust an ensemble like that. Obviously the bigger groups I wouldn’t do that. And I have some wonderful conductors in London and L.A. that I work with that for most ensembles I wouldn’t do without.

Let’s talk about BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS. Now that’s an awkwardly titled film.

[laughs] Yup!

What was it like to work with [director] Werner Herzog?

Well, Werner’s a unique and wonderful man. He definitely has a point of view and a way of filmmaking. It’s actually one of the reasons why I chased down the film myself. I heard he was making a film with Nic Cage, an American film, and I said, “Well, this should be a fantastic opportunity to work with one of the icons of cinema.” He’s fascinating! He’s almost childlike in his approach and, from what I’ve heard of the way Clint Eastwood and some other real veterans of the craft work, knows exactly what he’s going to do, has it all worked out so there’s very little fooling around. He just goes right to it.

And he was that way dealing with the music too. He had a very clear idea of what he needed to hear, what he wanted to hear. But at the same time very, very open for the creative input of the collaborators. That’s always a wonderful thing when you do what you do and I’ll give you the overriding sort of brief on how it needs to work and other than that, if you’re getting that, it’s really up to you how you want to do it. And he was very much like that. We had very few meetings. He came out and said a few things about the first pass that certain directions were going outside what he wanted and other directions needed to be stronger going where he wanted. And then he came back out the second time and said, “Perfect! You’ve got it. Just carry on and do the whole rest of the score like that. If you stick to that point of view, you’ll have exactly what I want.” It was a very open and creative environment to work in.

Since the film is traveling the festival circuit right now, most of us haven’t seen the film or heard the score. Tell me a little bit about the score.

It definitely has a film noir side to it. I did a real film noir score a number of years ago for [Brian] de Palma on The Black Dahlia. So I had really delved into that as a real genre, my take in 2007 (I think it was) of what a modern noir score could be, but very much in the traditional style. But I felt that having done that and even playing some of the stuff up against this picture I felt it wouldn’t work. It needed to be connected much more to the picture, the images and the time and place.

There’s trumpet in it, there’s bass clarinet. There’s some interesting sort of slightly jazzy instruments in it, but there’s very little jazz influence in it. There’s a slight zydeco feel to it. There’s a rhythm that pulses underneath the orchestra and it has this sort of New Orleans swagger to it. I think that’s the best word for it, a sort of swaggering feel. And yet the harmony is very, very dark and yet childlike. Because [Cage’s] character is so dark and depraved that you almost have to sort of have fun with it at that point. He sort of crosses a line where you can’t take it that seriously anymore. And so the score tried to do that and keep this sort of lightness about it at the same time. I think it achieved that. I was quite pleased with the balance of things at the end.

We had a very dark string section. It was mostly violas. I think we only had six violins, but 18 violas and 14 cellos and eight basses, something like that. It was very dark and we used the violins only if we needed some of those top notes that the violas couldn’t get. A fair amount of distorted, screwed up zydeco percussion, a trumpet, a bass clarinet, some alto flutes… Just some weird colors in and around it to keep the noir feeling. A celeste to keep this sort of childlike twisted perverse idea floating through it. [laughs] That’s basically it.

That sounds interesting. I look forward to hearing it. Now let’s move on to the film I really want to discuss, oddly enough—FAME. The original came out in 1980 just as I was graduating high school and getting ready to pursue my own music career. So that film has a special place in my heart. Do you think it’s premise of kids pursuing their dreams still appeals to a new generation?

I absolutely do. I saw the premiere last night and there’s a moment when the one person in the film who is sort of against people following their dreams, the practical dad [laughs] who feels that art is too risky, etc., when he turns and relents I had tears in my eyes. I’ve only seen the damn thing 15 or 20,000 times, you know. I took my 18-year-old son who is a burgeoning filmmaker and just about to leave high school and he was on his feet just roaring. I definitely think that it’s a theme that will never be old and tired and not speak to many, many people. My 14-year-old also loved it and my wife loved it. I think the film is very well made. It’s got some tremendous, amazing young talent in it. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

How did talent shows like American Idol impact the sound of the film?

Well, I’m not an American Idol watcher. I can’t say that I could really give you an honest answer. I mean, from what I know of American Idol, this movie is much hipper than that. The artists are hipper. I think that this film, unlike American Idol, still celebrates the diversity in art. And that’s my big problem with American Idol: I don’t see a lot of celebrated there. I only see formulaic pop music being celebrated. And this film still points out that a classical violinist and a ballet dancer are as beautiful and wonderful a profession as a pop star. Not that they don’t accentuate the pop stars obviously, because that makes the movie. But there’s no one view to what a great career and a great pursuit of art can be in our culture. In fact, there’s a wonderful moment where a teacher explains the value of understanding Bach and what that can do for you even if you’re a hip-hop producer. And it’s messages like that which I find really valuable and very true, and not a lot of in our culture today.

The soundtrack album that Lakeshore recently released has around an hour of songs on it. How did you fit your score into a film where the songs are so prevalent?

[laughs] Well, that was the challenge! Because there’s not that much score in the movie. But what you come up with has to feel at home amongst all of that and yet scores the emotions, the moments that are left to me to underpin. And it was a balancing act, to be honest with you. And we went through a lot of experimenting, a lot of trials and tests to get the final product. It ends up being a vocabulary of popular music, but chosen to work in an instrumental way and to still supply the other types of emotions that the songs aren’t going to give you in the places that you need them. And I don’t know how to summarize it any better than that. It was just a choice of sounds and a choice of types. There are some guitars, there’s piano, there’s a lot of electronic stuff. Ultimately it was a particular balance and orchestration of modern contemporary music we found that worked.

You mentioned that there’s not much score in the movie? How much?

I forget the final minute account. But it is definitely not a tremendous amount of music. There’s a tremendous amount of “music” in the film, obviously, but the score itself is not long.

Do you have plans to release any of these three scores?

I would love to release BAD LIEUTENANT. That’s a substantial score that would make a wonderful listen. In fact, I’ve got communications out to various people how to do that. The other two, I don’t know. I may just post them up on my radio site or something. I honestly don’t know. I think Lakeshore may have some restriction since they have the song album out about what they will or could do with the score [for FAME]. I don’t know. I haven’t honestly looked into it.

How much of your career is focused on film music?

Well, that balance has changed over the years. Obviously when I first started doing films, I did a film every couple of years and was doing a lot of performing and touring. And that slowly shifted until I was doing a couple of films a year and still touring. That was the first four or five years of my film scoring career up until I got to about half and half. And then I got married, started having children, and that had a big impact on my desire to tour. [laughs] So for the last 10 to 15 years, the performing career has really taken a back seat. That’s why this last year for me to start getting out there again and making records and starting to perform, at least locally, is a fairly substantial change for me. My kids are getting older, but I’m still not going to get out there 40 weeks a year and tour like most touring acts have to to survive. I’m not going to do that, but I’m going to try and get out there and do a couple of tours a year.

How do you see your film scoring career in the future?

I would like to, how can I say this… I would like to do the right films for the right price. [laughs] Which I think the business is having a hard time supplying that for anybody, even for Tom Cruise, shall we say, or Russell Crowe. [laughs] That’s always the thing: How do you do the exact film you want to do for the money you want to make for it? And that will be constant problem. That’s the one I keep trying to solve and I will keep working hard to solve that, I guess, along with everyone else [laughs], so I can buy myself some more touring time and performing time. But do I not want to do film? No, not at all. I love scoring films. I want to continue to do it and widen my career as wide as I possibly can.

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At this point in the interview, Skype dropped the call for the second time. I apologize that you won’t be able to read Isham’s responses from the last 60 seconds or so our of interview. But Isham kindly reminded me of his upcoming film projects with two of his favorite directors. First up, Isham will be scoring director Gavin O’Connor’s (MIRACLE, PRIDE AND GLORY) new film entitled WARRIOR. And Isham reteams with Paul Haggis (CRASH) for THE NEXT THREE DAYS, starring Russell Crowe. And what better way to wrap up the interview with Isham’s own words: “I am very excited about both!”

Last week, Kaada joined me from Norway for a delightful half-hour phone interview to discuss his current projects and his score for O’HORTEN.

* * *

JIM LOCHNER: Thank you for calling. I really appreciate it.

KAADA: Sorry it took some time. I’ve been working my ass off on different projects and my inbox has just been filling up with administrative stuff…There have been so many projects.

You’re not just a film composer. You have all these other different musical careers going on.

Yeah, I guess you could say so. I’m actually currently writing a ballet and an opera for the Norwegian State Opera. We’ve just gotten this great new opera house in Oslo…It’s this huge, fantastic building and they have ordered me to write an opera and ballet for them.

Is this the one that’s being built in the water or that a different opera house somewhere else?

Yeah, it’s the one being built in the water.

I just happened to see a picture of that on the internet and it floored me. It looked so great.

It’s fantastic! And they just told me that I have 670 artists at my disposal. [laughs] I could write whatever I want. It’s a big kick!

This is going to be a very big, big project.

Yes it is. It’s going to be a “monster opera,” where we’re writing about the monsters in fairy tales and how they interact with each other. The daily life of trolls and monsters and the underworld in our Norwegian fairy tales.

So when is this all supposed to debut? The opera house isn’t even fully built yet, is it?

Oh yeah, it’s finished now but the first show will be in Spring 2011.

Well, it does take years and years to get those operas done.

Oh, it takes a lot of time, just to write out all the voices and orchestra and everything. It eats up all my spare time. But it’s really fun. I’m learning a lot by jumping into a different tradition, because I don’t really know much about opera at all. And I haven’t been to many opera shows that I like. So I’m kind of searching whatever has been done before and I’m just trying to find my way in, by the past, which is inspiring.

It’s also means that you’re necessarily hidebound by all the traditions that come with opera. It allows you to be freer to explore other things that people who are much more traditionally-minded may find it a little bit more difficult to do.

Absolutely. And on several of the compositions that I have been writing, I have stopped myself because I noticed that I wrote something which sounds like how I think an opera should sound like. Suddenly, I’m not writing my own music anymore. I’m writing something that I associate with that opera tradition. I have stopped myself several times. [laughs] I need to realize that and find out what my music would sound like on the opera and do my stuff instead.

It sounds like a great project.

It is, and it’s really fun. It’s nice for me also to get out of my studio once in a while. With the film music job, it’s a little bit isolated. You work pretty much on your own. But [with] the opera there are a lot of meetings, and you talk with the dancers, and singers. It’s really nice to get in touch with the artists, and listen to what they really want to do. It’s different kind. When you do film music, you’re the boss, together with the director, of course. You get musicians in, you hire them to do the job, and bang bang bang, record, record.

How did you become involved in film music?

I just kind of fell into it. It was almost a coincidence. A friend of mine made a movie with no budget in Norway ten years ago. It turned out to go really well. The film was a success at the cinema in Norway, and many described that movie as a turning point in Norwegian film history because there were a lot of artistic risks and things that we did that everybody thought the movie was really fresh. We got a lot of attention for that movie. It was called MONGOLAND. I made cuts of American ’50s music, lots of doo-wop style in the doo-wop tradition. Lots of oom-ba-ba ba-boom-ba-ba, that kind of music. It generated lots of attention. From there on it’s just been going steady since and it’s just now the last few years that I’ve actually started to see the film music job as a real job. I’ve always thought that when they call me and ask me to a new film, I always felt this just had to be the last one. This is just too good to be true. But the films just keep coming in. [laughs] So I guess I have to start to see it as a job now.

You’ve done quite a few movies in the last ten years. It’s not like you do one every two or three years. You’ve kept up a steady stream since then, as well as your other musical projects, with Chloroform and your own solo albums and everything. It’s not like you have much of a time for a breather.

I get bored pretty fast, so I like to do stuff all the time. It’s a really nice job, and to do music is still fun. So I try and do as much as possible. But I have to say, I’m just doing two movies a year. In 2002, I did five movies in a year and that was just too much. I got overworked. So now I’m really careful with what I put my hands into and just try to calm down a little bit. [laughs]

Let’s focus on O’HORTEN for a minute. On most films the composer comes in at the last minute and doesn’t have hardly any time to write the score. But apparently you came in from the very beginning, before they even started filming.

That’s the way I like to do it. [laughs] If they call me up and they say, “Hey, Kaada, we’re working on this movie.” Then I ask, “How far down the path are you?” And if they say, “Oh, we have just started cutting the movie and we’re almost done cutting it.” Then I just say, “Thank you for calling.” And they get someone else on the job. Because then it’s no fun at all to work on it. You just get in when everybody’s anxious and everybody’s really tired of the project. The director and the producer, everybody’s just nervous. That’s why I need to be in there from the beginning, so that everybody starts to think music from an early point. Because everything gets so much better. The director starts to think about music when they are cutting the movie. They really don’t know what they’re missing. If you start to think about music already when you are filming, and even when you are scripting and writing, when you go in and do the music, the music just gets sucked into the picture in a more natural way. It’s more like a unity.

It’s better to have your music on their mind than a temp track.

It’s much, much, much better. I find that to me it’s really important. I try to do something new on each project. It might not be revolutionary in terms of what has been done before by others. But I told myself I need to do something else on each movie. I don’t want to repeat myself; I try not to repeat myself. I need time to come up with a new universe, a new soundscape. It just takes time to make good music. One or two months is just not ideal to make art. [laughs]

What attracted you to the script of O’HORTEN?

I think it was the openness. There was not much dialogue. There’s not much talking. The movie’s just about an old man who retires and he’s just walking around a little lost. It all sums up with him ski jumping from the biggest ski jump in Norway. It was more like the quiet, strange thing that an old man is starting to live his life at the age of 67. It was an intriguing plot. It just sounded like a movie that needed something strange and unusual. [laughs] And that was inspiring, much more inspiring than on work you’ve heard before.

How do you find those moments to score when you’ve got nothing actually necessarily happening onscreen, it’s all sort of this internal dialogue within these characters, and this old man trying to find his new life after all those years of working?

It’s really hard to describe because most of the stuff in film music, it’s usually an intuitive process. It’s difficult to put in words. You just have to experiment and see what works. The most challenging thing with this movie was that the music was not to dominate the characters.

You certainly don’t have tons and tons of Hollywood strings in there.

It was very easy to run over the characters so I had to do something that kind of built up underneath. There was a process that he was going through. It’s so difficult to put in words.

How did you come up with this group of instruments that you chose and different combinations? How did you come up with this unique sound? This is not certainly something we hear in scores here in America very often, if at all. Because most of our executives wouldn’t put up with it.

[laughs] No, and that’s sad for the American film industry, I guess.

That’s a whole other conversation!

I guess it comes from me collecting instruments. Almost every day I’m on eBay and I’m buying all the strange instruments I can find. That’s more like the reason. It’s not like I think, “Oh, I need this. I need this timbre on this scene.” I just pull out whatever I have in my closet with instruments and I just play around. It’s more like a playful process where I just make a lot of stuff with my instruments. It’s not every movie that I can use all these instruments, so it was really nice for once to get to use them. Yeah, I collect instruments. I have maybe 500-600 string instruments. I have a building filled up with different crap. [laughs] I need to have a lot of toys to play around with. When I’m bored or get uninspired because I don’t know what to do, I just pull out something else and I think, “Hmm, I wonder what this one sounds like today.” And then you get going. That’s maybe why I can do so much music also, because I just jump from instrument to instrument and keep it going that way.

That’s an interesting way to do it and certainly with a bunch of different instruments, it would keep your mind constantly revolving a bunch of different harmonies and timbres.

Exactly! And different tunings. You end up doing stuff you wouldn’t think of if I was sitting with a notepaper…The instruments bring up the chords and the melodies sometimes. You just do what the instrument tells you to do kind of.

For O’HORTEN, did you come up with the soundscape first or did you come up with certain themes? How did that score take shape?

I delievered a CD to Bent Hamer, the director, before they started to film. I think it was maybe 60 minutes worth of music, maybe 40-50 tracks, really short tracks. And he just pointed out a few of those, three or four. He was unusually clear about what he wanted to have. Usually a director often has a hard time making decisions that early on. Bent Hamer was really clear. He just said, “We will use this theme, this theme, and this theme.” I’ve never encountered that kind of thing. He made up his mind immediately and just followed his gut. He just picked out a few things and then I made a few variations of them. He also told me about the opening sequence in the movie which is a chopper scene where a helicopter flies over the mountains and the train. He told me he needed some music to go with that scene. I actually made that track before they started to film. They used it on the set with headsets. I don’t know, it might have inspired them to do something. I don’t know if it made much difference. At least it’s a good feeling to know that maybe my music made them make some different decisions based on music. I don’t know. At least they had it on their ears while filming. That’s really a good feeling.

The score really does fit the movie. Because it’s winter—I mean, I’ve never been to Norway—but I picture it very cold, very snowy. And you have these very open sonorities in the score. And the main character has this sort of empty feeling, like what is he going to do with his life. So the music, whether intentionally or not, because you started it so early, if it helped the filmmaker, it just matches perfectly.

Oh, thanks. I hope so. I don’t know. [laughs] But I would really advise all directors to get in touch with a composer as early as Bent Hamer did on that movie. It just feels wrong to put music on when the all the pictures and everything is cut, all blocked together. You will miss all the great interaction. And there is just too much good stuff that can happen if they get the music in early. So I don’t know why they don’t call the composers at an earlier stage.

We’ll have that discussion some other time because that’s a long one!

[laughs] I know, I know.

Do you have any other film projects coming up?

We will start to work on hopefully the next Bent Hamer film this autumn. I think he will maybe start filming this winter, but I’m not totally sure when he will start. But at least I will have my music ready when he starts. [laughs] But that’s one of the projects, a new Bent Hamer movie. And I’m really looking forward to it. This script is really good. I’m not sure when it will premiere. Maybe 2010, 2011. Probably 2011. That’s one of my projects.

It’s not like you don’t have anything else to do, right? You have plenty to occupy your time in between.

[laughs] There’s always something. I’m actually spending my spare time studying electronics. So I’m going to school.

Electronics for music or electronics in general?

In general. I hope to use it to make my own instruments. You can go on to my blog where I take pictures of the instruments I make. It’s Wrongroom.blogspot.com.

John, I really appreciate your time. Thank you for calling. I hope to talk to you further when it gets closer to your opera, and your next film. We will keep in touch. I really appreciate this.

Thank you, thank you. It was really nice talking to you.