David Shea

Sampling the Cinema

Published in Cinesonic - Cinema & the Sound of Music - AFTRS Publishing, Sydney © 2000
Transcribed & edited by Philip Brophy from the talk delivered at the conference in 1999
Satyricon © 1969

Introduction

David Shea is emblematic of a recent and ongoing transcultural shift wherein composers have gained inspiration from the realm of cinematic scores. While this has created a surfeit of 'ambient' works which mimic the appearance of film soundtracks, Shea is a composer who deeply investigates both the musical and musicological echoes which carry through an eclectic set of interests - from Tex Avery cartoons to Hong Kong action and fantasy films to exotica concept recordings to noted modern composers like Nino Rota, Bernard Herrmann and John Barry. Aligned with the vibrant and scintillating approach to collage and eclecticism which has emanated from the Downtown New York music scene (as promoted by the John Zorn), Shea has developed a unique approach to both the incorporation of sampling into his compositions and the live performance of his work.

Philip Brophy


David Shea in Conversation

How do you prepare material for a live performance?

My live solo performances typically involve a sampler and a hard drive. On the hard drive are of a bunch of sounds, phrases, bits and pieces of collage. Some are from CDs and some from records. Other bits are scored and written for musicians. I take those recordings and sample them on the keyboard, and then I try to develop some kind of keyboard technique. It's a fairly simple process. Nothing is sequenced, so if I have a sixteen bar phrase and cut it up across sixteen keys, I can play it straight or layer things and create a lot of noise from it. Plus, I maintain some kind of physical connection to the music. If I miss part of the pattern I've laid out on the keyboard - you hear it. If my finger comes down at the wrong time and misses the beat - you hear the mis-matches. The idea is to make it as physical as possible: to take the acoustic and physical planes into computer music. This kind of collage approach and other turntable approaches start to achieve that aim.

How much of the music is composed and how much is it sampled?

The structure is all scored, as are the individual sequences. In a certain way they are inspired by film scores: they are set out like scenes. If I have parts based on something like Satyricon, I figure put how they were scored. A scene might be a combination of a bit of a Mahler symphony, a bit of Peruvian folk music, some sound effects, and so on. My more recent work like Satyricon basically has no samples. It's mostly made up from live players who have been scored, recorded and sampled so as to make up something I can perform as a solo sample piece. The end result is something an ensemble couldn't do, or at least it wouldn't be practical for an ensemble.

Most of my pieces are combinations of the sampler, CDs and live players - jazz players, classical players. Some of my earlier pieces are created mostly from records, because I was broke, I didn't know how to play and I had a lot of records. I was DJing at the time so it was a practical choice not to orchestrate. I think that's true of a lot of young people. We never had much of a chance to be in front of orchestras. I think of Bernard Herrman and the way he was in front of radio orchestras every day working out those ideas. But in a studio you can still do that . There's a kind of studio orchestration and electronic orchestration that collage artists can do. That's what I went through to now arrive at working with a lot of players. The samples I was using turned out to be really interesting instruments - physically played instruments that produced sound in a different way due to the way they were recorded. That combination of recording performers then sampling those recordings is of great interest to me. Many of my pieces concentrate on film music - composers like Ennio Morricone, Bernard Herrman, Alex North, Jerry Goldsmith, Henry Mancini, as well as Japanese composers like Masaru Satoh and Toru Takemitsu. Even though the structure isn't coming from contemporary classical music or free jazz improvization, they all kind of glue together.

This approach occurs in a film like Jean Luc Godard's Masculine & Feminine. That film is many films in one: flicker films, structural films, narrative interviews, all kinds of things. Very few pieces of music I knew at the time did that, so I thought I would compose music in a similar way. Things would be broken down in separate parts: this structure needs to be chance procedures so I'll use John Cage's straight-up chance procedures; this part needs to be completely funky; this part needs to be Schubert. The way each part is put together requires an appropriate method which is also generated by what the piece needed. The resulting composition assumes a kind of natural interconnection between the styles.

My pieces are not about multi media or deliberately being eclectic. Those connections are usually evident, so it's not fascinating to try to 'bring together the history of the world's music within pop music' as some people claim. You would have to first believe that differing styles and methods are 'separate' before you can be fascinated with bringing them together. So if those divisions between music styles and methods are 'unnatural' what does that mean? Obviously some of the divisions are practical, but in my pieces I'm engaged in a way of figuring that out. Usually when I put on four records and take my hands away, it will be much more interesting than if I did something. When those four records play together, I can hear connections that are there despite my involvement. They didn't need to be synthesized or forced into each other. So the line of what is mine or what is collage or whether I'm scoring wasn't very important when I started making these pieces. Then I developed them further as I concentrated on orchestration, and a sense of bringing studio orchestration into live performance. It is aligned with computer music, sample technology, DJs, contemporary classical electronic music - all areas which are working on many of the same things, so it's not really a 'new idea' by now. Instead of just saying all this stuff I wanted to make pieces that really explored those connections the way they already existed.

How do you keep track of all the different samples you use?

That's a really tricky question about copyright: how do I sensibly credit the sources I employ? What happens when I have nineteen pieces on top of each other, playing simultaneously? Is that a completely different piece of music or is it nineteen sources that have to be acknowledged and nineteen copyrights that have to be cleared? As far as I know the laws in the States dictate that you have to clear everything: there's no distinction between sampling one track in its entirety and making $10m off of it, and making something in an art gallery out of 500 sampled fragments. I'm not working with samples so much now, as I try to concentrate on the music more than the argument of who owns it. This is not to dismiss the issues of copyright because they are very serious issues. People like Negativland and the Canadian composer John Oswald deal with that. I didn't want to jump on either side of their arguments: for me, using sampled material involves a type of composition. I wasn't attached to sampling through trying to be a champion of free speech or slam it to the big companies. I just think that collage is a valid form of work.

What I've usually done to acknowledge people is try and write out the references on the records, and also put further information on web pages. Once I mistakenly put my address on one of the records, asking people to write to me so I could send them the samples or where they could find them. In fact that was a major reason for using these samples: so I could make connections between all the sources and share that information by paying tribute to a lot of my heroes. But how to reference this approach remains a very tricky question. I'm not sure anybody is going to figure it out. In hip hop now the record companies have lawyers who sit there all day long trying to clear samples. In the early days nobody did that; they'd say, well we've got some records, a DJ and a rapper: let's make some music. These days it's mainly a legal issue, and the laws are nuts. There also seems to be a generational side to this culture of sampling. I meet a lot of younger people who grab things off TV & the web, and sometimes they'll come up after concerts and say: "Yeah, we've sampled a whole bunch of your records and put this thing together." I should be thrilled, but the question arises in me afterwards: "Did you clear that forty-two seconds of the score from Farenheit 451?" Everybody has different feelings about all of this, but I do think that continuing collage in some way is a valid form of figuring out the interconnections which reside in music.

The music you have sampled was initially created by highly physical acts. When you perform, the touching of a keyboard releases an amazingly active sound. What are your feelings on the relation between the keyboard and the effects which arise from you triggering a sample on that keyboard?

The use of the keyboard is quite deliberate in my performances. It's nice to have this 19th century icon on stage producing all these other sounds. A problem with a lot of electronica is that the music is really incredible, but usually performed live by some guy sitting at a table of equipment turning dials. The music can be fantastic, but when the visual component is so dry, a big contradiction is presented. People think that music just exists by itself, but music is theatre. There's always a visual element coupled with the sonic element. The stage is always set up very deliberately. Symphony orchestras don't wear pink bunny suits for a reason; if they did it would really change the nature of the symphony. It was always strange back in the late 80's with the hype of the 'DJ as artist' because they would usually just take the club music out of the club & put the DJ in a sterile concert hall and say, "This club music is not bad." But if you're in an actual club with the lights and people jumping up and down you have no contest: the original context of the music is so powerful. Since the idea is to make my performance as physical as possible, I too have a visual element: the 'Franz Liszt edge' of the mad pianist and composer.

There are many other ways to trigger sounds for music. The keyboard is arbitrary in a sense. Other people put electrodes on their bodies & trigger the music way that way. Video can trigger sounds, or even other instruments can trigger the sounds. By using the keyboard, I'm trying to be conscious of the whole theatrical aspect of what I'm doing.

To what extent have you prepared the music for The Tower of Mirrors - the piece accompanied by the montage of scenes from Hong Kong cinema? Is your performance of the accompanying music scored or improvized?

Not much of it is improvized. It's a score written from beginning to end, with scenes written in a fairly detailed way. The music was written for an ensemble and recorded in sections or scenes. I made the video compilation with a Hong Kong fanatic who I knew in New York. I gave him the script as I based it on the novel The Tower of Myriad Mirrors (Hsi-Yu Pu), and he was able to find fragments of Hong Kong cinema which could be used to visually relate to the action in my script. Hong Kong's cinema was one of the strongest cinemas in history. However with the return of Hong Kong to the Chinese government, it's basically gone, so we were paying tribute to the disappearing cinema. The collage of all those scenes from Hong Kong movies follows the score like an unfolding map of the score. Hopefully soon a live performer could control those visual or cinematic energies by playing them the same way via a modified keyboard, and develop a technique where if you hit the key harder it would change the colour or sequence. Soon things will be as flexible as what the music alone is now.

I was impressed by how your music echoed the East/West connections evident in the Hong Kong movies - especially in the way their films reference the Western. How do you explore those sorts of connections in your compositions?

Some of the shots in the Hong Kong westerns are pure Peckinpah. The directors of these Hong Kong films used Chinese and Buddhist mythology, yet they made very Westernized films which in some ways seem like western action films, but which are really Chinese films. They wouldn't have been made any other way. That's how I developed my approach to using the Chinese novel The Tower Of Mirrors. It would have been very artificial of me to make some kind of Chinese piece, or work with Chinese traditional musicians, so I composed from the reverse perspective of how the Hong Kong directors made their action movies. I try to deal with Chinese history and its influences from my perspective, my conditioning, my language, my background. I think they're doing the same thing, so it's a parallel process and my use of the narrative is critical. I'm following the 100 chapters of the original text Journey To The West (Hsi-Yi Chi) literally (of which The Tower of Myriad Mirrors comprises only one interlinking chapter). For example, the epicentral battle between two mythical kingdoms: that's The Killer by John Woo. His movie features the same thing with the two brothers in church at the film's gunfight climax. My score represents that scene with a drum & bass sequence. In these ways, I'm structurally following the narrative. Some of my other records are composed in a like fashion. Shock Corridor sets up the characters from Sam Fuller's film not to follow the film, or to follow the soundtrack of the film, but to try to do musically what Sam Fuller was doing directorially with his film.

Do you find that many acoustic instrumentalists are hybridizing their instruments so as to move into electro-acoustic performance?

I hope not. I think things are fine the way they are. Things are sort of connected already. It's nice when people are inventing that kind of technological synthesis, but that exploration happens in other ways, too. San Diego has a crew of hardcore acoustic players who hate electronic music. They're all around 18 or 19 and they say, "No, man, the future is acoustic music that's been informed by computers and sampling." So they play these pieces that sound like tape manipulation - but it's all acoustic. It's totally amazing because they couldn't have been done without samplers and computers, but they've completely rejected those technologies. They treat DJs as something for their grandfathers; they think it's ancient history. It was interesting to see how they assimilated electro-acoustic composition because it wasn't necessary for them to change the instruments.

I don't know if the electronic and the acoustic need to be actually or technically merged. It's semantic, because the mergers are already there. What's more interesting is how acoustic music is connected to electronic music, and those connections involve a sense of visual theatre and musical culture. I hope that composers who work with acoustics could regard the computer as an acoustic instrument. My sampling keyboard in a sense is a physical acoustic instrument, because my body is an electric instrument that goes through the keyboard instrument, triggering electric samples of acoustic sounds. All acoustic instruments are electric in the sense that they conduct the electricity of the human body, so I think it is just a matter of finding out what those connections are. That will probably mean different types of pieces have to be written, or maybe it just means that things will co-exist. That's what I'm realizing in my music, but it can definitely be realised in other media as well, which is what a lot of people are exploring.

Are there any connections between the way you have described working with musicians to re-interpret genre film music, and the way Ry Cooder developed the score for Walter Hill's re-interpretation of the western in his film Trespass?

No, not at all as far as I know. Film composing is a strange process. I don't want to be too critical, but the involvement of John Zorn and myself in that project was complicated. Originally the film was called Looters , but when the LA riots happened they immediately had to change the title to Trespass due to studio politics. We sat in the studio for a week and a half and talked about John Ford, Orson Welles, Henri Clouzot - we really got specifically into it. Most of the downtown New York players are cinema fanatics, so all we had to say was "It's Touch Of Evil meets Duke Ellington meets Xenakis." It was a nice way of scoring - but none of that ended up in the film. Even though there was a kind of Hitchcockian interest to have the music carry the psychology of the images, it didn't really make it into the film. Maybe that has something to do with the Hollywood system; maybe that has something to do with Walter Hill.

I haven't had too many experiences with narrative film makers where they know how to deal with music or have a sense of how the images and the music can be combined. Really, as a composer you should be on the set meeting the actors. Henry Mancini and John Barry did that a lot on certain films. That kind of sensibility in general seems to be lost. I would love to work in film, but I haven't met many directors who simply care that much about the musical process. I mean, you don't have to do this - Goodfellas is a great film without a score - but the sensibility of working with a composer just isn't around. I could sit around and get depressed about it, but instead I chose to make my film with sound, using the editing methods of Godard in a musical context. Why wait for a film to come around when there's this whole other compositional area to explore - of concert music derived from film techniques.

Randy Thom talked about the problems with having too many sounds occurring at once, generating pink noise. When you collage so many samples together, do you experience similar difficulties?

Well, I don't have access to the sophisticated technology which Randy uses at Skywalker studios. I have a pretty flexible machine - the ASR10 - but it only has 16mg of RAM. It's a commercial workstation, so it's not developed as such by researchers. I'm always having to push it within the limits of the technology. It crashes often and has its own mind. I just go with it when that happens. I abide by the principle that if it happens once it's an accident, but if it happens more than once it's a structure. But this is the same as working with any instrument, which will have its own characteristics.

Sampling technology is comparatively new, and a lot of people really don't know how to work with it. It's a good challenge to work within its limitations. When we consider what Randy does with his sound effects, though, we must remember that he's doing it live. It would make a really good performance, because what he's doing could be regarded as concert music. It's for a specific function for the film, but all that sound can be listened to as music. If you had a full stage of people at mixing boards worked into a performance, that would be fascinating. My next project involves me working with two sound effects guys. The combination of sound effects and music in film has always been music. This is something I explored in Screwy Squirrel based around samples taken from the Tex Avery MGM cartoons. The recent rise in releases of complete soundtracks - music and sound effects - makes me think: yeah, it's about time. Sound design is amazing the way it works with a score. Concert music is starting to reflect that because no-one cares about the distinction between the two any more. It's not a postmodern concept; it's a natural consequence of growing up with movies. Similarly, we see connections in the fascination DJs have for Pierre Henry and Karlheinz Stockhausen. These connections have always been there.

A lot of my ideas came from early old skool hip hop. Grandmaster Flash should be regarded as a film mixer because of the way he originated the use of three turntables. He deserves to be ranked among the most innovative composers. From film mixing and things like live hip hop DJ-ing, I also derived a sense of how music lives in a context - of how it has a life and condition, and of how it came from somewhere and somebody. In this sense, there's a spiritual part in each piece. If I'm playing some samples from a James Bond film which I then layer with some Chinese folk music and some fascist Japanese marching music, and you have no familiarity with any of that: it's just a musical piece. If the meanings are important to you, it can then be an important and intense emotional piece. Each person will experience those connections differently.


Text © David Shea & Philip Brophy 2000.