Popcorn Youth: Where do you see the corpus of Alloy Orchestra fitting in with the broad spectrum of music in the last 100 years?
Ken Winokur: Well that is a really good question, one that I have not been asked. That’s great — a question that does not ask a stock response. Let’s see, we do think of ourselves as being fairly different from traditional silent film accompaniment, although we do find our music to be based in the continuum of film music, including the “sound era.” Even though I listen to all the old silent scores and I love them, we feel that it is better for our audience to accept the fact that there has been very amazing development in the 20th century of musical styles — harmonic and melodic developments — and we can’t turn our back on that. We use whatever there is available that works for us.
Our goals always is to support the picture, the director’s viewpoint of what the film was trying to say. And however we arrive at that, whether it’s banging on bedpans or horseshoes, or playing a very traditional melody, however it requires us to do it, we will do it. And the tradition of Bernard Herrmann, Danny Elfman, one of our favorite contemporary composers, all of that stuff is fodder for us to pull inspiration from.
Popcorn Youth: Is there any kind of alliance between the old silent films and your more modern music, aesthetically or otherwise?
Ken Winokur: There is an alliance, that’s actually a good way to put it. We look at a film, it’s a scene by scene thing. We look at a scene, we look at what needs to be explicated from the movie. What are we going to express in our music that’s going to make the movie more powerful? How are we going to look at what the director has to say and use his vision to direct the music we’re going to have? Now sometimes a lot of people will just play music from the time period, which I think is a valid way of going about this, but for the most part, the contemporary audience doesn’t really … they don’t enjoy that music, they don’t follow that music, that music is not music that they are necessarily familiar with or even want to hear.
So our job we feel is to take a film from the 1920s or 10s and bring it into the modern world. Because there is no denying the fact that we are playing in 2006, we are playing to a group of people who live in 2006, in an auditorium that’s got the technology — whether it’s a high tech PA system or it’s the high tech projection system. They are famous in a different way. They are not paying a nickel and going to the nickel audience, they’re paying 12 to 15 dollars to see it. You really have to look at the whole experience and say what is it about theis experience that we can help out? How can we augment it? How can we make the audience enter into this movie that comes from a different period of time from them?
Popcorn Youth: If the music is meant to be heard with the film, can it also exist on its own terms, without the film? Or is the music meant to be secondary to the film that you’ve chosen? If you listen to the music without the film, is it possible to construct an alternate, new narrative?
Ken Winokur: Again, our goal is always to support the film. Does it exist separately? Yes it does. We sometimes put out CDs of our music, but they have mixed effects, frankly. People sometimes enjoy them a lot, but people sometimes scratch their head and say, “They’re doing this nice song, and then there are all these bangs and crashes. What’s this all about?” So our music is very odd to listen to, divorced from the film itself. We actually did one performance in our fifteen-year history without a film. One. (Laughs) And we had a video monitor playing the film in front of us, because we literally cannot play the piece withouththe film to direct us. The audience couldn’t see us, it was in Brooklyn, about ten or 12 years ago, and we felt that it was a very unsuccessful performance. People just couldn’t understand why we were up there. (Laughs) And some people have some specific excerpts from the radio and play them, NPR plays us, or play it on the stereo and it’s fine, but it really doesn’t have the effect when you watch it along with the film and listen to the music together.
Popcorn Youth: What are the considerations in the early stages of the compositional process?
Ken Winokur: When the whole process starts with me watching the film many times.
Popcorn Youth: How do you decide what film to pick?
Ken Winokur: The choosing of a film is a very complicated process, and it has to do with a film that we think is very exciting, we think actually works well wth Alloy’s style of music, or the style of music that we are interested in and trying to experiment with, but it also has a lot to do with its availability to a distributor — can we get this film on a regular basis? Will it cost too much money for us to get regular access? Is it a giant stdio that’s not going to care about us, and in three weeks say, “Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t care to rent that film to you anymore,” and that has to do with a lot.
So it’s a very complicated series of decisions before we pick a film. But once we pick the film, I make a storyboard, all of the scenes with a little description of what’s going on, and we all watch the film in its entirety, one, two, three , four times, whatever is required, and then we go through scene by scene and say “Ok, this is the title scene” and “What is the music that is going to give a sense of what the film is going to be like,” and usually we leave the title scene until last.
We try to determine what the message of the film is, what’s the attitude, what’s the tone. And then we create a piece of music to go along with that. We go to the next scene, we do the same thing and so forth throughout the entire film. Typically, then we go back to the first title scene and ask, “What’s the best theme that we’ve composed?” and put that at the beginning, and then we go through the whole thing againm making corrections — if a scene doesn’t really work with what we’ve done, or we’ll pull a theme that might have occurred to us later in the compositional process and put it in early, so we go over the film over and over and over and over again, [taking] very simple themes and making it more complete, more complex. How do you deal with strange interludes in the middle of a scene, how do you deal with a transition to the next scene? And we end up composing a fairly complex hour and a half score.
We write a theme for a character, or a particular theme or setting that might reoccur. If the character is in his bedroom and is doing something, and it happens two or three times in the film, we’ll use the same theme for that. We definitely work with leitmotifs, and it really works for our audience. Because an audience member will listen to it and they’ll kind of subliminally learn it, and the next time it comes back it’s a little familiar, and the next time it comes back, they’ll feel like they actually know it. Once you’ve known a piece of music, it becomes much more a part of you, and much more interesting to you. So we definitely work with recurring themes, and they are typically a theme composed around a particular character or a particular scene.
Popcorn Youth: Do you find that working with film creates new restrictions for the kind of music you create? Like, somehow limits the range of what you would like to do creatively?
Ken Winokur: (Pauses) You’re doing really good with these questions, by the way. Thank you very much. I get the same questions over and over again, and it’s so boring. (Laughs) Doing film music, to me, is wonderful because it provides some ideas to start from, but it’s continually new. We’ve done 27 feature-length performances, and every one has required completely different music. And so it’s wonderful to take that from the music, an idea of a mood or an attitude, and try to turn it into music. But I would feel really restricted working in the same musical style. Now we do music from the 20s, we do modern composers’ music such like Stravinsky or Bartok, we do a little bit of swing music from the 40s and 50s, we do a little bit of stuff that borders on rock’n'roll, jazz, swing rhythms. So I think the movie determines for us where the music is supposed to go. So I think we try to just open ourselves to be flexible to that particular film.
Popcorn Youth: Creating music for a variety of films, directors, actors, time periods — does Alloy have a musical consistency?
Ken Winokur: Well, yes and no. That’s a not very good answer, but our music definitely runs the gamut in styles and sounds. We have be conventional, almost classical, piano melodies to crashing and banging hideous metal objects, but somewhere in the middle we are three musicians who are always in the same role. [So] I think you find a style in there. One thing that I think is pretty obvious in there is that the two of the three of us are native percussionists. Both Terry and myself have careers and have done most of our work as percussionists. So, you listen carefully and you say, “Oh, there is definitely two percussionists playing, and one keyboard player. It’s a given, it’s the Alloy Orchestra, it’s as simple as can be!” (Laughs) But we try to make it a little more complex. Terry plays a lot of accordion, the musical saw, in the past he’s played a little banjo, a little tenor guitar, and even a little singing. Now I play clarinet, we both play a little glockenspiel, so we try to work against our own style to some extent. Our style became so identifiable that we began to realize that we need to be more flexible about what we need to do. And both of us have spent a lot of time learning some other instruments in order to expand our stylistic limitations.
Popcorn Youth: And Roger just plays the piano? Why not the guitar?
Ken Winokur: Well, as you know, he is a very good guitarist, and he has played the guitar in other walks of life. He never ever played the guitar in our band, he only plays keyboard — and of course the keyboard is capable of doing any orchestral sound, any sampled sound, lots of metal, lots of percussion, lots of whatever you program into it. It’s not restrictive. With the exception of one of our newest films which is called Chang, which is a documentary about rural life in Thailand, and he plays the banjo — just one string of the banjo because that sounds like a traditional Thai instrument that’s got a gourd resonator and a skin attached to it and a single string. And that was the closest we could get to sounding like that string which he plays in the movie Chang. And hopefully we’ll have that available in the next year or so, we did it once so far. But generally Roger plays most orchestral sounds and fairly organic and fairy realistic samples of real instruments. Occasionally he goes into samples of usually real instruments such as a “prepared piano,” a piano that’s got nuts and bolts in the strings, ala John Cage. Or he’ll go into some percussion sounds which are sampled from real life.
Popcorn Youth: It says on your website that you play junk percussion. Is there a reason why you don’t play from a more traditional setup, like a drum kit?
Ken Winokur: There is, yes, absolutely. The drum kit to me is very restrictive. Whether youre playing with Ornette Coleman or with the Rolling Stones, the drum kit is very similar from one to the other. I’m sick of the drum kit! It’s great, its fine, it’s a wonderful instrument, but it’s so restrictive. I need more sounds, I need more flexibility in what I play, and whether that means playing plumbing pipes or horseshoes or bedpans, those all are percussion sounds that are just as good as a Zildjian cymbal.
But it’s different. It’s not something that you hear everyday. And of course it works also for sound effects. If somebody rings a doorbell, there’s no way you can get a doorbell out of a traditional drum set, but if I get a truck spring and a metal key and I roll on it, I’ve got a sound that’s not unlike what a doorbell sounds like. When a cannon goes off, we use an orchestral bass drum. A big roomy, boomy huge deep sounding thing that gives you a sense of a cannon. If I use a regular drum kit bass drum you’re like, “Somebody shot off a popgun.” So all of these sounds contribute to the ability of the orchestra to integrate with the movie. I hope you’ve got a recording going on and on cause I’m just rambling on. Because if youre trying to take notes with that, then you’re a goner.
Popcorn Youth: (Laughs) Don’t worry, this is being recorded. In live performances, is there any element of spontaneity or improvisation, or is it all very composed beforehand?
Ken Winokur: There is very little different between our recorded corpus and our live shows. We do occasionally do an overdub; I find that if I’m going to play the clarinet and play the drums, the drums overwhelm the clarinet and I just have to put it in later, that way I can correct my mistakes. But for the most part, what you hear on a DVD or a CD is very, very similar to what we play live. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t improvisation. Our live shows involve improvisation. We write very elaborate scores; we write incredibly extensive notes about what we are doing, musical notation, storyboard; my music is basically a storyboard that tells every scene that is going on, all the major changes, and then another column has got the music that I’ve got to play. Roger has very traditional music; our scores are completely different from one another, it’s kind of funny. Roger has traditional music notation, which he is able to print out on the computer. He plays the keyboard, the computer memorizes it, and actually plays it out for him; Terry uses very little in way of notation, and actually writes his notes in crayon. He likes the color coding that crayon allows. And he writes in big bold letters so he can be far away and still see the cue, but he memorizes most of his stuff.
Popcorn Youth: So the compositional process is very collaborative?
Ken Winokur: Absolutely. It’s absolutely one of the most important parts about our band. It’s the only absolute in our band. It’s always collaborative. When we’re writing something, we’re always in the same room together — one person or another can throw out an original idea, somebody else follows him, joins him, and how we end up with what end up is a mystery of music composition, but it always involves the three of us contributing ideas. Which I think is very, very unusual. It’s a common thing in the rock’n’roll world; rock and roll bands collaborate. Composers for films are almost invariably a “composer slash genius” who’s expected to write all the music. And he may give it to an orchestrator or an arranger who will make a very simple idea into music for a 70-piece orchestra, but the origin comes from one guy. And we think that’s really limiting.
The three of us have very different backgrounds, and really different musical capabilities. Each one of us is contributing musical ideas, Roger might have a melodic idea, but I’ve done a lot of African music, so I’ll start a rhythm that I think will allow Terry to play another rhythm that syncs with it, interweaves, and Terry will do that; and Terry will say, “Oh, this is the perfect opportunity for the musical saw” so we can really show what is going on in the film. So we are very open to each other’s creative input and insist on it always being collaborative.
Popcorn Youth: During live performances, what sort of visual role does Alloy Orchestra play?
Ken Winokur: We lurk in the shadows. Which works fairly well for shows like Phantom of the Opera. We like to see what we’re doing [and] the audience sees us as less bright than the film. So they can kinda see what we’re doing, they can get a general idea of us moving around and playing certain things, but we try to let them focus their attention visually on the film. We try not to take center stage, we try not to trap the vision from the film itself.
But in silent films there are a lot of long scenes, and without live accompaniment, [those scenes] would be too long. At that point, they’ve read the titles, they’ve got it. The titles tend to go on two or three times as long as you are required to read them, basically because in the day that they were made, the audience was only barely literate. They left the titles up a really long time, so everybody could have a chance to read them, so we take those oppoturtunies and we think at some point you’re going to say, not consciously, “I’ve seen what’s on the screen, let’s check out what the band’s doing.” But we try not to force you to watch us, mostly you should be watching the film itself and listening to us. And the lights have a lot to do with that. If the lights are too bright, people’s eyes gravitate towards those lights. If the lights are too brights, then it distracts from the film. So we try to keep the light to a low level.
Popcorn Youth: Was Mission of Burma influential to you?
Ken Winokur: All three of us actually have our roots in the early 80s punk/new-wave era and we had all been in bands at approximately the same time. Mission of Burma was very influential for me. When I went to see them for the first time, my jaw dropped and I thought, “Wow, these guys have the energy of punk, the attitude and feeling of rejecting all of the bad ideas that had been foisted upon us in the 70s, but deep below their music, it’s sophicated, it’s elaborate.” And the first day after I saw Mission of Burma, I was traveling through Harvard Square, and I saw Roger Miller playing on a portable army surplus pump organ playing Bach toccatas and fugues! I think I gave him a quarter, and I thought, “This guy actually knows music!”
I don’t mean to denegrate the rock musician, because I have great respect for rock musicians, but many of them do not have that background. Roger’s background was rock’n'roll, punk rock, avant garde, he can do it all. He’s really very flexible. My background had more to do with the origins of 60s and 70s rock but a lot more to do with contemporary classical music, experimental music, avant garde music, and specifically Latin and African music because I was a percussionist that played all of that stuff. So a lot of very straightforward rock’n'roll, a little jazz, and a little performance art, and we bring all these different influences — there’s no music that’s out of bounds for us.
Popcorn Youth: Why do you call yourself an orchestra if there are only three of you?
Ken Winokur: Because if you actually experience one of our shows, if you did it with your eyes closed, and somebody asked you, “How many members are in this group,” you would say 15. We play so many instruments, we play so many different sounds, the music is so full and overlapping, that we feel it has the effect on an orchestra. And the second answer is, in the silent era, every band was called an orcestra, and if you had three members or more, you were considered an orchestra, so we’re following in that tradition as well. At the same time, we know it’s a joke.
Alloy Orchestra will play three times this weekend: To the Paul Fejos film “Lonesome,” tonight, Nov. 10, at 7:15pm. To the Albert Parker film “The Black Pirate” tomorrow, Nov. 11, at 2:00pm. To the Clarence Brown film “The Eagle” tomorrow night, Nov. 11, 7:15pm. For more information about these films, check the Cornell Cinema website. Tickets $12 general/ $8 students & seniors.