From the Archives #15

Musica Elettronica Viva in Zabriskie Point (1970)

The following are excerpts that were cut from a draft of a chapter of my dissertation, that I came across recently while thinking about the passing of David Lynch. I’ve lightly edited them and present them to you here.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) isn’t among his most critically acclaimed films, as the Italian director’s vision of America doesn’t quite sit right with many American audiences. If it’s remembered at all it’s usually for the memorable long climactic montage of a modernist house being exploded from various angles, set to Pink Floyd’s "Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up" (a version of "Careful With That Axe, Eugene"). The so-called desert orgy scene earlier in the film is also notable for featuring Joe Chaikin’s Open Theatre as playful and joyous phantom-lovemakers who appear in contrast to the protagonists, Mark and Daria. The scene features uplifting and energetic non-diegetic music, which Antonioni collaged multiple takes by Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead.

Many won’t be aware that the score to the film also features contributions from Musica Elettronica Viva, owing in part to their friend and erstwhile collaborator Vittorio Gelmetti. Most of MEV’s contributions were not used in the film, a fate also shared by other contributors, including John Fahey, The Doors, and Pink Floyd. Unlike most of those other artists, however, the more abstract nature of their music also meant that they were excluded from the OST, and what was included was limited to a very short scene.

MEV were meant to score the opening credit sequence, but that was set to Pink Floyd’s “Heart Beat, Pig Meant” instead, what Alvin Curran suggests may have been the result of studio meddling. In fact, Antonioni was very particular about the sound design and use of music in this film, and rejected much music and heavily re-edited much of what he did use.

The one scene in the film that did feature MEV’s music features the protagonist, Mark, and a friend driving a truck through an industrial area of Los Angeles. This short sequence [10’00” – 13’40”] prominently features a variety of passing billboards with a variety of slogans. As Marks’s truck pulls off an idyllic mural of famers is revealed on an actual warehouse, the images in the mural turning more violent as the music strikes dissonant high frequencies. Motorcycles pass by, examples of diegetic sound that play off the abstract electronics, before beginning a misaligned montage of industrial logos, their highway billboards shot from road level, displaying the sides of trucks and a garbage dump before transitioning into a scenic row of palm trees. A near miss car accident puts an end to the sequence, and that’s the end of MEV’s contribution to the film. Much of the sound design leans heavily into industrial and abrasive sounds, while the electronic noodling is more restrained than the material the ensemble had released up to that point.

MEV’s angular and abrasive howls seemingly suited to the bleak landscape scarred by factories and extractive industries. Electronic music at this time tended to evoke a hopeful future, linked in the cultural imaginary to the optimistic Space Age hope in progress due to its overuse in science fiction, full of sterile white settings and such. But the winds were shifting by the 1970s, as a New Wave of science fiction emerged, and electronic music in film scores found new avenues freed from those techno-optimist ideologies.

MEV’s “junktronics,” their use of amplification of simple materials like a pane of glass or an oil can, are instead juxtaposed to the emerging post-industrial stagnation of the 1970s, anticipating the kind of dark ambient, industrial, and noise music of the 1980s, often inspired by the sound design of David Lynch’s cult classic Eraserhead (1977). But this small contribution to the film allowed the New York Times, in Feb 15 1970 to write the headline “Concert By Film Musicians.”

Musica Elettronica Viva began in Rome during the spring of 1966. An early version of the group coalesced around the American ex-pat trio of Alvin Curran, Fredric Rzewski, and Richard Teitelbaum, with a number of other key members: Allan Bryant, with his homemade electronics; Jon Phetteplace, a cellist from California who had studied in Florence with Pietro Grossi; the American soprano singer Carol Plantamura, who had worked with Luciano Berio and been part of the inaugural Rockefeller-funded Creative Associates at SUNY Buffalo; and Ivan Vandor, a Hungarian-born Italian composer and saxophonist. They were occasionally joined by many others, including saxophonist Steve Lacy, by the composer Gelmetti, and by the venerable Giuseppe Chiari, a Fluxus artist from Florence whose compositions they frequently performed in their early performances (and whose work the trio were still performing as recently as 2016).

Gelmetti was a composer about ten years older than the core trio of MEV, who became something of an advisor and supporter of the young Americans living in Rome. Gelmetti was particularly a composer of film music, including contributing an electronic music score to a scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Deserto Rosso (1964). Ivan Vandor, another early member of MEV, also cultivated a career as a composer of film scores.

Rzewski had worked with Nuovo Consonanza, whose members included prolific soundtrack composers Ennio Morricone and Egisto Macchi. Vandor also cultivated a career as a composer of film scores, and had studied with Goffredo Petrassi (as did Cornelius Cardew), as well as with Nuovo Consonanza. His credits include Mino Guerrini's Omicidio per appuntamento (1967), Giulio Questi's Se sei vivo spara [Django Kill] (1967), Nelo Risi's Andremo in città (1966) and Diario di una schizofrenica (1968), Valerio Zurlini's Seduto alla sua destra (1968), and Michelangelo Antonioni's Professione: reporter [The Passenger] (1975). Thus between Gemelli and Vandor, MEV had bonafide credentials outside the context of academic music, something somewhat obscured is one focuses solely on the core trio of Curran, Teitelbaum, and Rzewski which persisted until the deaths of the latter two in recent years.

In addition to being a composer, Gelmetti had strong links to the Roman poetry and experimental theatre scenes. Curran remembers that it was Gelmetti who suggested they be called Musica Elettronica Viva, while watching the core trio improvising in Rzewski’s apartment early on. Whatever the origin, the name stuck, encapsulating a literal descriptiveness but also something more provocative.

Looking back on their contribution to the revolution in Italian music from the vantage point of the early 21st century, the writer and musician Valerio Mattioli emphasizes the importance of liveness come from the evocation of its opposite.

If Rzewski and his companions’ electronics are alive [viva], it means that those of all the others—from Stockhausen to Maderna—are at least implicitly dead, or if nothing else arid, empty, bloodless. Put in these terms, the moniker found by Gelmetti was not limited to marking a boundary: it was a real battle name, a guerrilla slogan of the pentagram, a call to arms. (Superonda, 188)

And it was a call to arms that was heard. In January 1967 they collaborated with a local musical theatre company at the Teatro dei Satiri, and that spring played the second Avanguardia Musicale series, which included music by Feldman, George Brecht, and the Sonic Arts Union.

MEV only pursued film music when convenient, as indeed their practice with junktronics could be said to have aligned them more closely with foley artists than rock groups, and certainly they are not alone in this; Annea Lockwood, the composers of the BBC Workshop, and others pursuing experimental and electronic music in these years found institutional support producing special effect sounds. Many members of Nuova Consonanza, as well as other Italian composers, found regular work making soundtracks for films (Ennio Morricone, most famously), while others, such as Egisto Macchi, became renowned as producers of Library Music, royalty free music to be easily incorporated into the production line of cheap Italian cinema. Curran went on to produce multiple work for radio, and while this radiophonic tradition is under-appreciated, still, its unfortunately more film collaborations didn’t occur.

I’ll leave you with the famous final scene and a few thoughts on what does work in Antonioni’s portrayal of America on the brink of the 1970s.

Many commenters have noted they found Nicolas Winding Refn’s Too Old to Die Young ( 2019) too slow and drawn out, indulgent, “not art,” etc, accusations that have often been hurled at drone music as well. For this reason I suspect it might appeal to many of our readers. The influence of Ed Brubaker, who co-wrote the series, is there, but there’s no doubt this is Refn’s work, his status as auteur given space to be self-indulgent, an object lesson in the dangers of lack of constraints, or else testament to what can be accomplished when the rules of a medium are in flux. Taking place in Los Angeles and the deserts of the southwest, filmed by a European auteur filmmaker, I can’t help but draw parallels to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point. In both cases, the view of America is very much that of an outsider looking in, part of what makes both works so interesting if not always successful. Cliff Martinez’s score is given plenty of space to breath, mostly over slow still scenes full of dark shadows and neon lights.