How do you write music for a Greek tragedy when you don't understand the lingo? Arild Andersen explains all to Ray Comiskey.
It was the immortal Bard, William Shakespeare, who first put the expression "It's all Greek to me" into the mouth of a character in one of his plays - a character who hadn't a clue about what was going on. The great - and, not incidentally, very genial - Norwegian composer and bassist, Arild Andersen, could have said the same when he was asked to write the music for a modern production of the blood-feud tragedy, Electra, by Sophocles, to be unveiled beside the Acropolis in June 2002 as part of the cultural events in connection with the Athens Olympics.
Scandinavians are among the finest linguists in Europe, but, like most of us where Greek is concerned, well, it's all Greek to them too. So when he was asked by the director, Yannis Margaritis, to write the music for this production, he got himself an English translation of the text and then went to see some rehearsals.
It wasn't the first time he had addressed something Greek musically. His 1996 recording, Hyperborean, for which he composed the music, was inspired by a Greek legend about the cool, timeless land they believed was beyond the mountains to the north of the country. But he still had some serious problems with Electra.
"I didn't understand word by word what was going on," he says. "I knew the story and how they developed it. I was reading the English translation of the Four Choruses and Electra's song, for which I had to write music to an ancient Greek language which I don't know how you pronounce. It's very difficult, then, to know how the melodic line should go, how to make a rhythm of the words; you don't know how to beat it."
Not only that. The important words and which ones should be stressed in each line, the sense of cadence and resolution to each sentence or groups of sentences, are veiled in mystery if the language is impenetrable. His solution to the dilemma was ingenious.
"Just to find out how to do it took me like, some nights, you know, thinking 'How shall I do this? How is it possible?'"
Fortunately, he had a friend in Greece who is also a composer. "He sent me a fax, like 16th note, eighth note, triplet notes, on how the lyrics should be pronounced; like" - he hums the rhythms - "ba, ba-ba, ba, ba, ba, ba-ba, ba, ba, break, da-da, da, da, da. And then I asked him to tell me where in the lyrics I could make a four-bar pause for instrumental things and I put it all into my computer." That gave him the rhythmic breakthroughs he needed.
"I got the rhythm together on each song and then I started to write the Four Choruses, built on a Norwegian folk music scale. I wrote all those Four Choruses and the other songs with the rhythm that he sent me, and I sent it back to him, and it was like, 98 per cent correct," he says, laughing.
"But I had to do it very fast. It was February I got the call and they had the premiere in June, and the music they started rehearsing with right after Easter, so it was like some kind of things that were needed quickly. But I have experienced before, if I have that pressure, I have to do things fast.
"Sometimes you don't stop and think about what it is, what it does. You just go for it, and in the end it turns out to be some kind of organic, natural way of writing music."
No less a composer than Duke Ellington always claimed he didn't need inspiration; all he needed was a deadline. But to use a Norwegian folk music scale for a Greek tragedy written almost 2,500 years ago might also strike some people as rather strange. It's not as bizarre as it might seem on the surface, however, because a lot of Norwegian folk music is very modal and could conceivably lend itself to the timelessness of the passions dealt with in the world of Sophocles.
The particular folk scale Andersen used as the basis for the music in Electra was, he says, like a D minor scale. But it was one which, to oversimplify, combined a major and a minor third, and a perfect and a flattened fifth. It's a scale that is somewhat more complex than might be expected, but one whose flexibility, formality and ambiguity lend themselves to a lot of different contexts.
"It's the kind of thing where Edvard Grieg says 'folk music is like life; you don't know if it's minor or major'," he says, laughing again. "So it's somehow that blending. And, yes, I think it's been used in a lot of places.
"And the funny thing was that one of those Choruses I sent back to Yannis Margaritis, just a demo with the piano, he said 'Oh, it sounds a little bit too Greek!' And I said 'Well, this is very close to what an average Norwegian folk song would sound like'. And then I just changed a couple of flattened fifth intervals on that one song and that change made it a little less an Oriental-sounding song. As a theatre director he knew very well about music and it was really nice to work with him."
The music was then pre-recorded and used on stage with the play. But while much of it is the bedrock of the eventual CD made a year and a half later and recently released on ECM, there are significant differences between the music used in the stage production and that on the CD and the concert version he has played since and will play in Dublin tomorrow.
For the play, certain instruments, such as trumpet and guitar, were kept low in the mix so as not to interfere with the frequencies of the voices on stage. But these constraints were not there to the same degree when he made the CD. He also brought out a lot more guitar in the mix and added a lot of drums.
"So the CD is quite different from the play. We played the music in concert a few times and some people say 'Wow, we wish we could have seen the play with it'. But actually I looked at the music as a concert of music, and the concert is not re-playing some theatre music." Nevertheless, the music is stunning and hearing the CD does evoke the feeling of the tragedy in an astonishing manner.
"I understand that because the music starts making pictures in your head, somehow. And the basis of the music, the feel of the music, and the atmosphere from the piece - it's very close to what that opening night in Athens was. It was really a fantastic feeling. But at the same time I hope that people can more or less listen to the music and not think so much about what is the story about this song or that song. I feel it stands by itself.
"But definitely I understand very well that additional pictures come very easily to your mind, and if you know the story, then sometimes you might think of how this music would fit it. But still the music is so" - he pauses to find the word - "strong. I mean, it's so modern compared to this old piece, so I think it can be listened to as just a concert and as music. And, if you feel like it, you can always put the Electra story on to it."
Arild Andersen's Electra group plays the O'Reilly Theatre, Belvedere College, Great Denmark Street, Dublin, tomorrow at 8pm