I interviewed him back in 2002 for a short piece in the
Wire... very cool man, very intelligent and articulate and open.
Here's a draft of the unedited, pre-published version (I think).
Jonathan Bepler & Matthew Barney's Cremaster Films
by Philip Sherburne
You can't see New York's iconic Chrysler Tower from Jonathan Bepler's home studio, a low brick building amid vacant lots and squat apartment blocks on a quiet street in Williamsburgh, Brooklyn. But the two buildings are linked nonetheless: it's here that Bepler composed the soundtrack to Matthew Barney's latest art-house epic, Cremaster 5. The Chrysler Tower, or at least a mythologized version of it, is that film's primary setting. Even, in fact, its protagonist.
Bepler steps out of his building to smoke a cigarette just as I arrive. Earlier, over the phone, he admits to having just lit his first smoke of the day. "I feel like an addict," he confesses, half-wry, and half-morose. But perhaps one has to be a bit obsessive-compulsive to turn out music detailed enough to keep up with Barney's aggressively fantastic vision, a surreal cinematic cycle that's cost millions of dollars, built its own cottage industry of limited edition prints and sculptures, and drawn equal parts praise and condemnation from a public grappling with its overwhelming excess. In contrast to all this, and even to his own music, which has the tendency to erupt into soundclash excess, Bepler is quiet -- not reticient, but contemplative, a careful speaker. The mark, perhaps, of a composer who meticulously scores every note. In Bepler's work, what sounds like a post-production mashup -- the swing band cutting arrhythmically against a molten string crescendo, for instance -- is all written down beforehand.
To call the Cremaster films unconventional is an understatement. Loosely narrative, the surreal, feature-length projects could hardly be confused with even the most outré of Hollywood product. The cycle, filmed out of order (4, 1, 5, 2, 3), addresses the theme of artistic creation and destruction from variously incompatible perspectives: Cremaster 5 recreated a late 19th Century opera, whereas Cremaster 2 tackles The Executioner's Song, a 1982 account of the executed killer Gary Gilmore. In that film, Bepler's score offers dissonant organ tone clusters, the Tabernacle Bass Choir, Patty Griffin singing a ballad drawn from Gilmore's own writing, and an apocalyptic face-off between Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo and 200,000 honey bees. Cremaster 3, which runs for three dialogue-free hours, is propelled largely by Bepler's labyrinthine soundtrack. The film ranges from creation myths on the Isle of Man, to a hallucinatory allegory inside the Chrysler Building, to an even more nightmarish setting inside Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum, where a pink-clad Highlander (played by Barney himself) scales the walls to the tune of a drunken electro jig. As he climbs, moving from level to level like some character in a video game, he encounters the Rockettes cavorting in sheep costumes, hardcore punk bands Murphys Law and Agnostic Front squared off in a soundclash, and the ravishing athlete, model and double amputee Aimee Mullins towering on two stiletto-tipped, Plexiglass legs. The score unfolds as unpredictably as the film's visuals, touching on planar string sequences, Gaelic ballads, note-perfect renderings of Big Band jazz, and a Theremin fugue so intense it could strain even Ryoji Ikeda's ears.
A trained composer, choreographer, and improviser, Bepler's background with dance, installation, and free-music ensembles prepared him for Barney's non-traditional approach. Introduced to the filmmaker through his director of photography, Peter Strietman, Bepler first collaborated with him on Cremaster 1, arranging show tunes and composing Muzak-styled incidental music. But for Cremaster 5, Bepler's contribution took a much more dominant role. "I always thought of that as an opera, as a self-contained piece of music," he says. The music was written before anything was shot, developed only in relation to abstract concepts and narratives. "I got to avoid this idea of, 'Here's an image; what's the perfect sound?' That's what I like about collaborating with Matthew – my work is integrated early, so I don't have to have what I call this pornographic moment, where you have an image and are self-consciously adding the sound to create an effect for the viewer," an approach he describes as "manipulative."
The soundtracks function as efficient backing for Barney's grand tableaux, but both Cremaster 2 and Cremaster 3 stand confidently on their own. This is apparent from listening to both scores on CD, which Bepler has self-released through his own website. (Due to the length of the film, portions of Cremaster 3 were left off the double CD, but Bepler and Barney are discussing the development of a DVD to take advantage of the score's Dolby 5.1 surround sound, as well as the film's non-linear qualities.) Creating music that escapes servitude to the visual image is a difficult task, given the way that certain tropes -- swelling string passages, for example -- immediately signify "film music." In one of Cremaster 3's more understated passages, says Bepler, "I was concerned with continuing an ascent harmonically, moving higher and higher, like a teetering building, and also with describing the texture of the hard steel skin of that polished tower, which was captured by the muted trumpets…. It was not much about the emotional state of the characters. And then when you put it with film it suddenly has this real emotional drive to it. I said, 'Oh my God, now it sounds like a dramatic sort of horror score.' And then it becomes a question of whether that's ok -- which it was, in this case."
But the composition of Barney's visuals and Bepler's score often proceeds dialectically. "We start talking about sounds before the film is even ready to be shot at all," says Bepler. "Matthew often has basic concepts and narratives that he's already thinking about, but it's often unknown what form they'll really take. Then I immediately start working on little sketches, and my own ideas, my own resonances for those concepts and narrative ideas. [But] because they're pretty abstract and open in the beginning, there's a lot of room for me to interpret and develop. I think he allows the music to change, or to influence his thought, and I certainly allow the new material he brings to influence mine."
Indeed, at times the sonic element becomes the driver for the narrative. In Cremaster 3, the character called the Entered Apprentice scales the elevator shaft of the Chrylser Tower, stringing outsized piano wire up the shaft; a maitre d' in the penthouse lobby alternately strums the impromptu harp and heaves the elevator doors open and closed, channeling the airflow in such a way as to turn the building into a literal wind instrument. "We talked about wanting the Chrysler Tower, because it is a kind of organism, and is one of the most important actors in the piece, to have a voice," Bepler says. "Matthew knew he wanted to deal with the elevator shaft, so we talked about how the wind in the shaft and the elevator cables could make sound in response to, and as part of, the action. The music was then created as a kind of expression of the building itself." Elsewhere, beer kegs become bagpipes, and towel racks turn out to be Theremins. "The desire for certain sounds sometimes determined parts of the physical set," Bepler explains. "The Theremin sound was related to the idea of the tower being a kind of transmitter, and that this instrument and the building were both prototypes, in a way. They ended up being installed as part of the bar. It’s a bit like writing for orchestra, where your instrumentation decisions are determined by what is there, but in this case we could identify the players by extracting them from the architecture."
Given that Cremaster 5 largely concerns itself with icons and symbols, fetishism and overdetermination, the score indulges in its own iconographic play -- a tendency that Bepler calls "problematic." "I've always hated quotations in music and jokes in music. It feels insincere to me; I feel it takes you out of the vitality of the piece itself," he says. "It is a little strange to find myself using elements that are obviously taken from a specific style. It's always important to me that the elements I'm using are actually written by me, so I wouldn't quote a jazz tune or a swing tune -- I wouldn't feel comfortable." Instead of simply quoting -- much less sampling, something he never does -- he tries to reference recognizable styles in his own voice. "My hope is that if I approach a swing band, I've learned a lot about it somehow, and found what I like about it, and then what comes out the other end is equal parts me, and its history." He even considered writing the parts for Murphys Law and Agnostic Front, but in the end they played their own songs. It was Bepler, though, who instructed them to draw out the intros, turning the classic hardcore motif into a bizarre musical fetish object. "The question," he says, "is how to use these elements but have them be really sincere."
Sincerity -- or the lack of it -- has been a sticking point for critics unable to see beyond the films' sprawling scope and cryptic expressivism. Surprisingly, Bepler is able to see both sides of the argument. "I think people relate to how the project is a phenomenon," he says. "It implies bigness and success, and a financial excess. I can certainly understand feeling an aversion to that. Also, and I don't know if it’s the right word -- there is something a little shameless in the music and the projects in general. In a lot of ways there's nothing subtle about some of the work. But I feel that you have to go for it and not try to hold it back in some ironic way, which I think is what a lot of people would do."
"There's something about irony, for me, which I don't accept. I think it's worth it to make a big gesture even if it almost seems obscene. As long as it's sincere. I understand how people could find it a little excessive, I definitely understand that, and sometimes it feels that way to me too. I would just say that we're aware that there are parts that are not subtle, but if something wants to get big, then just let it get big. That's sort of the only choice. I think some of the work is quite aggressive and it's not holding back from that. And it’s sometimes sentimental, and not holding back from that either. But I believe that that kind of sincerity and directness is a valuable thing."
Of course, after September 11, there was plenty of railing against irony, but somehow the stakes seem higher for Cremaster 3, whose towering, teetering skyscraper figures so prominently -- and which was itself in production when the World Trade Center collapsed.
"As contemporary artist, I feel that there's a responsibility to try to subvert the kinds of excessive bullshit you see people accepting all the time that feels empty," acknowledges the composer. "But I found, from the improvising days, and my contrarian younger days, that if that becomes your only motivation, then it's an exclusionary proposition, it's a completely negative proposition. I don't like functioning in that realm, and don't think it's so helpful to communicate that. I think it’s important to acknowledge that we hate a lot of the stuff that we have to deal with in our culture, but we still should be able to do something true.
"Matthew’s got such an involved construction and system of his own that I think it's almost entirely positive. Sometimes we talk about how things are going to be taken by an audience, but generally the idea is we can't worry about that too much. People often misunderstand it because there’s some money and success around it. People believe he's trying to create that, and I really think not. I think he's just totally devoted to the system he has, and that is really the most important thing."
― philip sherburne (philip sherburne), Saturday, 9 September 2006 14:09 (nineteen years ago)