1. There are inexplicable affinities in the area of art, almost magical ones. A relationship such as this was born from my collaboration with Theo Angelopoulos. In my person, he didn’t seek to find the “professional” film music composer, but simply a composer who had the sensitivity and the antennas required for a deeper artistic connection. There undoubtedly was an earlier relationship and an aesthetic and ideological concordance which created a special chemistry in our communication from the start. There is no specific method for me to musically approach an Angelopoulos film. Usually, and this happened from the first moment, I enjoy the narration of his story, I penetrate into the deeper concepts, into the main idea, I travel into the mystical world of the unspoken circumstances and the inner selves of the characters. And almost immediately, before shooting starts, my musical ideas are born. Usually, they are completely whole and it has never been necessary for me to change them during shootings or the editing. I happen to know Angelopoulos cinema very well, and long before the shootings I can grasp the inner rhythm of his scenes and of the whole film. Above all, I can grasp the dominant musical tone of the film and this is unique. Apart from the fact that I find my themes from the beginning of our conversations, it happens often that variations, songs, dances become dramatically integral parts of the film. These ones also come before the shootings since the shootings require this live music. It so happens that it has never been necessary to change my themes when the time comes for me to see the images. I simply have the secret anxiety as well as the marvellous satisfaction to finally see that what I had approached intuitively, works and creates a special chemistry with the image. What I work on very hard and with a lot of intensity is what we call orchestration, which for films, especially Angelopoulos’, is the key which unlocks underground, hidden situations and throws light on them. 2. In 1982, Theo Angelopoulos, as Chair of the panel of judges of the Thessaloniki Cinema Festival gave me the music award for my music for Christophoros Christophis’ film Rosa. I believe this was the beginning of our collaboration. A little later, came the shootings for Voyage to Kythera and Theo asked me to write the music. At his country house, near the sea, meetings over the script took place. It was there I heard, in his voice and in his own expressive way, my first voyage with him come alive, Voyage to Kythera. An as the narration went on and he, as is his habit, was pacing up and down, lighting by voice colours and gesture rhythms the details of the action, the main musical theme that was supposed to penetrate the film according to the director’s story, started taking shape. At times as a concert, at times as a folk song or as blues or rock... The following day, I woke up early in the morning, sat on my piano and started playing. I had found the theme and all the variations. Even the song was there, with “rough” lyrics, made from words of the script, speaking of an unfulfilled journey “Always waiting for the moment to come again, the ship to show up in the harbour again, a sea bird in our dreams”. In the end, even the words of the song remained unchanged and the music was immediately loved by Theo. I started orchestrating feverishly and a few months later I was in the studio. Shooting had only just begun... 3. For someone who has been born in Greece, the Mediterranean with its rich sounds and magical rhythms definitely haunts the soul. For someone like me who has, moreover, sought passionately to know the musical traditions from the Spanish flamenco to the Arabic taxim and from the wonderful polyphonic Corsican songs so closely connected to our own pentatonic Epirus songs, from the asymmetric rhythms of the Pontian lyre and the weeping of the Constantinople lyre and from the incredible rizitika Cretan songs and the ritual music of the whirling dervishes from the Black Sea to the marvellous droning table songs of Eastern Romylia, undoubtedly the Mediterranean is my own source of inspiration. As for the journey theme which penetrates my entire music, this is definitely in my blood, in my cells and as a Greek, as a person who has had to part from people and places, I am acquainted with what we call uprooting at first hand. 4. My first contact with music started from a tender age. I remember my grandfather playing the mandolin and singing traditional songs on the wooden, covered balcony of my family house in the mountain village where I was born, as we were waiting for the little moon to appear on the thickly forested slope. However, the defining, climactic moment of the real encounter with music was a little later, when at seven, having moved to Athens, I saw and touched a grand piano at my school. I went crazy! I pushed my father to take me to a teacher. That was it! 5. It was natural that by starting my piano studies so early ( I was already at the conservatory at 10) I would adore the greats of classical and pre-classical music - they were my models. In adolescence I admired Beethoven and knew his symphonies, which I used to listen to, conducted by Toscanini, by heart. I loved Bach and loved studying his work, as well as Chopin’s, Tchaikovsky’s, Mahler’s. Yet, I believe that my first hearings in Athens, from the neighbouring yard’s radio, Traviata and Rigoletto left their marks on my young soul. Anyway, I used to sing certain arias I had learnt just by listening. Today, my scope of preferences is much wider and definitely in the “classics”, to whom I owe a lot of great emotional experiences. I would include many, such as Vivaldi, Sostakovitch but also some great ones from film music like Nino Rota, Bernhard Hermann or Duhamel... 6. From my beginning as a composer, what enchanted me was the sound-colours of orchestration. I love the classical orchestra, especially the strings and their possibilities, but also some of the wind instruments to which I always return and which inspire me. Yet the harp has been one of my first choices and from the beginning I discovered that I liked well-known sounds, colours belonging to my familiar Greek tradition, like the santouri or the accordion, to blend with the sound of the rest of the orchestra. Surely some instruments such as the zither, the santouri, the Constantinople lyra, the oud, we would also find in Turkey, in Iran and in the Northern African countries. To me they were familiar from our own musical tradition and they are part of my musical palette. Now, when and why I use these hues and these instruments, this is dependent on the inspiration of the moment, the feelings that I would like to express, the themes and the main idea of the composition, along with many other inexplicable elements. Of course, especially the accordion has often been one of the first choices, necessary for music made for films by Theo Angelopoulos such as the recent one, The weeping meadow, where the young hero is an accordionist. 7. The way in which my memory recalls the events of my life is so film-like that I would say that the first “film” I saw in my life was my first trip from my village to Athens. My first “uprooting”. The route through woods with red berry bushes, on a mule, on a saddle covered with a red woven mat and many baskets. The meeting with the first car I’d ever seen (a truck), with the sea and the arrival at a naked Athens, without trees, smelling of gasoline, where the walls of the buildings were wounded by bullets fired in the civil war. Upon arriving at the house we were supposed to live in, (it was the basement of a school where my father would teach) that same evening I met with my first film. Through the school windows, surrounded by sweet smelling flowers, I watched on the Flery Cinema screen, in Ambelokipi, a Russian fairy-tale, I think, called The Stone Flower. And I was really enchanted! 8. It was completely natural that everything looked new and extraordinary to me. I was a child who had just discovered the world of technology, having known and abandoned a lost paradise, where she had grown up, a small, green village, covered by oak trees, plane trees and walnut trees and also with cherry trees; water running everywhere from sources from which we used to carry water, with oil lamps which peacefully lit the friendly windows of stone houses. With the marvellous polyphonic songs being the only company of women who peeled corn in the fields at night while we, the children, who always accompanied them, lying on our backs would count the stars in a sky which filled us with awe by its secrets... 9. My great love used to be and still is Tarkovski. In his films I discovered poetry blended with the deepest philosophical thinking. I love Antonioni because he represents a timeless, classical cinematic presence, Fellini because he fascinated us with his imaginary travels and Bergman because he is the great choreographer of human emotions. 10. I t is with great difficulty that I can select one out of Angelopoulos’ films. They are all part of a unified corpus of work which needs all its bits of mosaic. Anyhow, the first one that would come to my mind is The troupe. It was the first encounter of Theo with Greece and its history through his own poetic and political look. Out of the seven films for which I have composed music in the last 21 years, I would say that Ulysses’ Gaze touches my feelings, particularly. It is a kind of seeking for lost innocence. 11. Italian cinema is the soul of world cinema. It was the one which fed our dreams in our adolescence. From of the older, historical films by De Sica, to Pasolini and the Taviani brothers, my contact with Italian cinema has been and still is, an unending voyage to a world and a culture which exerts a special kind of appeal to me. Greece’s “Tenth Muse”: If Homer had written music, it might sound something like this: dark and brooding, redolent of rich red wine and the salty brine of the sea. At once plaintive and erotically lyrical, it would sing of love and loss, of the passion that motivates humans to achieve great things. It would, in short, sound very much like the music of Eleni Karaindrou, Greece’s most eloquent living composer –and a movie– music composer at that… She creates such a powerful space where the echo of all sorts of nostalgia travels, that, even without the film, she creates in the listener his own personal images, slowly unfolding as if they slide from within him. Long lasting sounds, almost painful, whence voices hesitently emerge -viola, oboe, cello, accordion- in order to sink again in a river of sympathy. These are the characteristics of this evocative music. In its central piece, the suite “Ulysses’ Gaze” it climaxes into the fluttering of a melancholic dance which dies again abruptly. The music, intensely evocative, is constantly on the verge of an unceasing lyricism, free of compromise and coyness, carrying a dangling and melancholic melody, often insistent and tantalising, which plays an important role through its long, insinuating silences at the climax of the dramatic tension of the film… The musical form is a melodiously fragile theme, which along with the quiet sounds of the string orchestra comes to a climax when the solo viola arrives (Kim Kashkashian) and varies with the help of the oboe, the violoncello and the accordion: in the light of varying sound shades, it often hesitates, is interrupted, rarely becomes dancing, and it remains nailed to an atmosphere of sorrow, pain, desertion and melancholy. Yet, through all the tests, it overcomes the moments of total silence and resignation and radiates such calm power, such certainty, sensitivity and courage in the face of pain and sympathy… Imagine a more modern, Balkan version of The Swan of Tuonela, strangely inflected melodies against mysterious drones that seem to exist outside of time. Imagine music aching with nostalgia, as mixed between sharp and blurred, real and imagined, as memory itself… Actually, now that I am listening to the record once again, I have the feeling that I am listening to the story of a soul - Eleni’s soul - that stops being Greek, or Balkan, but becomes universal since her “Ulyssean adventure” is no other that the human blues, melancholy as a quality of pure emotion in a world that re-entered the phase of uprooting all such emotions. Come to think of it, this world of ours has actually never stopped this uprooting process in the first place, as every Ulyssean soul on this planet has known for quite a long time... Karaindrou’s admirable concision (whether or not the shortness of the tracks is dictated by the visual strictures of Theo Angelopoulos’s Cannes-stormer of a film –to which this is the soundtrack– isn’t clear) is a diverting take on this careworn musical genre. For once, it’s as well that the long-breathed phrases don’t get much of a chance to over-extend themselves or languish in spiritual stasis, and the miniaturism is accomplished and never clumsily handled. And in stark contrast to the cold-front sobriety of so much of this kind of stuff, there is an inviting interior warmth to Karaindrou’s modally sumptuous, folk-inflected harmonies, and indeed the plaintive themes transposed onto them, suitably evocative of unspoken, diasporadic nostalgia and chilly, forbidding winter sunlight. Following in the footsteps of such melodic neo-Romantics as Henryk Gorecki and Arvo Pδrt, Eleni Karaindrou pens music of haunting stillness, creating sounds that highlight the elusive passing of time. Her score for Ulysses’ Gaze (…) suggests that such simplicity of sound can be as riveting as the fury of a Mahler symphony. The relationship between Theo Angelopoulos and Eleni Karaindrou, reminds us of the relationship between Michael Nyman and Greenaway, Nino Rota and Federico Fellini: it is a special relationship, not only technical, but of deeper communication, like a story within the story. Nowadays it’s something of a relief to encounter a soundtrack album what it contains is by definition art with an application a reminder of the way music used to be, from Monteverdi to the Miracles… The music either flows gently like a river off Smeltana’s “Moldava”, or enriches with some Greek pollen the “Theme of flowers” by Mahler - in which case even during the moments of overflow the tone remains low… Karaindrou’s music has a deliberately abstract quality absent in traditional film scores: it does not follow action or dialogue, but attempts to seek out some unseen or unspoken aspect of the film… Karaindrou’s music is sheer introspection; it shares common grounds with jazz, it approaches Nino Rota (…), wanders around the great classical tradition and comes upon every single trace of religiousness that may still dwell deep in our hearts; her music becomes a passionate love-affair consummated through the sounds of the accordion... Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou combines the sadness of a single oboe, the tradition of the accordion, and the passion of a viola to create a haunting, sensuous masterpiece. Karaindrou is generous in orchestrating melancholy and chimera, through the miniature orchestra which vaguely reminds one of Mahler’s Adagio and also of abstract, transformed specimen of Greek tradition. In a moment stilled to motionless calm the music begins and we find our hearts, as well as our captivated ears, open to the subtle complexities of nuance. In this realm of rich emotion and near silence we find the beautiful and earthy compositions of Eleni Karaindrou… Karaindrou’s work (pitched, perhaps, between Michael Nyman and the Estonian Arvo Pδrt) could become as central to the European jazz tradition as the large ensemble work of Miles with Gil Evans or the sacred works of Ellington are to the American. Beautiful and deeply moving. Eleni Karaindrou’s music offers us richly what we are looking for - consciously or unconsciously- what we expect from music: a gentle stroking of our soul, becoming again human. Without losing any of its great qualities, without losing its Greek elemens, poetry and clarity. The music, balancing steadily on the verge between art and tradition, becomes a centuries old womb, mother both to feeling and conscience. The slow moving melancholy gives birth to the black and white images of the improvised story the imagination brings out… Its elegiac compositions bring to the surface the essence of things. She toys with the contrast of the primitive Greek Santouri together with oboe and accordion and the neo-romantic sound of a string orchestra and brings together classical and traditional elements. It is a music which penetrates… Her constant presence in the midst of an outspreading decadencereveas something deeply spiritual that underlies her lyricism:hidden in the cave of Time, a birth in the boundaries of Memory and Oblivion... Anybody curious about where the important symphonic scores will come from in the future should check out the young Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou, and her contribution to Theo Angelopoulos’ movie “Ulysses’ Gaze”. This is as evocative a track as I’ve heard in years. The simple hounding score by Eleni Karaindrou begins with a five-note motif, Ulysses’ theme… The music of Eleni Karaindrou has, indeed, the strength of an independent music composition. It has the ability to provoke strong impressions, to charm, to remain alive in memory and above all, to be heard without needing the support of a film. One could bear the film in mind or forget it, but either way, its music always remains alive… |