X International Film Music Congress in Valencia – Nov 2024 – SUMMARY
Nuestro compañero Frederic Torres acudió al 10º Congreso Internacional de Música de Cine de Valencia (leer más), que finalmente se celebró los días 22 y 23 de noviembre, y nos ofrece este estupendo y exhaustivo artículo resumen, en exclusiva para SoundTrackFest.
X INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF FILM MUSIC OF VALÈNCIA
[NOTE: AUTOMATIC TRANSLATION]
When, at the beginning of October, it was announced the recovery of the “International Congress of Film Music“, to be held within the framework of La Mostra de València-Cinema del Mediterrani, on October 30 and 31, we fans could not help but feel overwhelmed by a joy that, to a large extent, was linked to the positive emotions experienced in the nineties, a decade in which nine consecutive editions were held, with such illustrious guests as Lalo Schifrin, Maurice Jarre, Gabriel Yared, Armando Trovajoli, Angelo Francesco Lavagnino, Carlo Savina, Francis Lai, Jean-Claude Petit, Michel Legrand, Luís Enríquez Bacalov, Patrick Doyle, John Addison, George Fenton or Bill Conti, apart from the no less illustrious local composers, such as Manuel Balboa, Carles Cases, Alberto Iglesias, Roque Baños, Víctor Reyes, Eva Gancedo and a long etcetera.
A whole artistic lineup that delighted an audience that was not used to maintain contact with the creators of the specialty (those were not the times of the internautics), which in Spain had only been preceded by the International Meetings of Seville during the previous decade, that of the eighties. The Congress was therefore a golden opportunity to get to know closely the authors of the music that was enjoyed in the movie theater, and in the recordings listened to in the living room at home, opening a whole new world, which after its cancellation due to budgetary problems (shortly after the Mostra itself would have its turn), gave the baton to other festivals such as the one in Úbeda (converted into the current MOSMA in Malaga), the Soncinemad in Madrid, which was only held twice, or the oldest of all, FIMUCITÉ, which is still led by the indefatigable Diego Navarro. Therefore, the news was very well received at first, especially when it was announced as “X Congress”, showing a clear will of continuity with those held during that longed decade of the nineties, first by the hand of Antonio Domínguez, first, and the ineffable Lluís Fernández, later (read more).
But the disaster caused by the DANA, of catastrophic proportions, which occurred on October 29, i.e. the eve of the celebration of the Congress, forced its suspension, as was to be expected in view of the tragic events that took place that unfortunate evening, and from which we Valencians have not yet fully recovered. And just when we thought we would have to wait another year to see and check the willingness of commitment to this recovery on the part of those responsible for the Palau, and especially Nieves Pascual, who seems to be the alma mater of this initiative, suddenly (in the same week of its celebration) it is announced the recovery of most of the lectures that were planned, divided between the afternoons of Friday, November 22 and Saturday, November 23, losing along the way some of them, such as the one that was to be held by Lidia López Gómez, from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, entitled “From pianists to synthesizers: Discovering the history of film music“, in addition, of course, to the two concerts that were scheduled. One, the traditional one starring the Symphonic Band of Valencia, conducted by Cristóbal Soler, and which was to have as the main part of the program the “Symphonic Dances” from West Side Story, by Leonard Bernstein (which anyway could already be heard in the concert of the Municipal Orchestra of Valencia -OMV-, considered extraordinary and linked to the celebration of the Mostra, the previous year by Leonard Slatkin, no less), and another, programmed by the Palau itself, with Henry Mancini (a New York composer who, it must be said, was not very Mediterranean) as the main protagonist, as well as Nino Rota and Ennio Morricone, already well known to the general public. Needless to say, neither of the two concerts has been recovered.
Friday, November 22 – Day 1
Arrived on the 22nd, without any presentation by those responsible, and after a minute of silence for the victims of the DANA, the expected “X International Congress of Music of Cinema” began with the “concert-conference” by Pablo García-Berlanga, pianist and relative of the well-known Valencian filmmaker, Luis García Berlanga, The concert was complemented by Professor José Miguel Sanz, from the Conservatorio Superior de Música de València, who between pieces played by the pianist, commented on some aspects of the director’s career, and his opinions and opinions about film music and the (poor) role played in his work.
A show that premiered a few years ago and that arose from a compilation album commissioned to García-Berlanga by the Generalitat Valenciana. An interesting idea if it were not for the strange inherent contradiction between the pearls (in the worst sense of the word) that the filmmaker dedicated to music, and the stupendous interpretations of the pieces “reduced” to the piano, due to the hand of composers like Jesús García Leoz, of whom some fragments of Esa pareja feliz (1951) were interpreted, specifically the “Tema de Esa pareja feliz” and “Marcha Florit”, and ¡Bienvenido, Míster Marshall! (1952), with several pieces entitled, “Cabecera”, “El Pueblo de Noche”, and “Españolada”. To that first stage of the filmmaker belongs also the work of Angelo Francesco Lavagnino and Guido Guerrini for Calabuch (1956), formed by “Cabecera”, “Solo de Trompeta”, and “Escena Final”, in which obviously the trumpet was replaced by the piano.
After the premature death of García Leoz, Berlanga enlisted the services of Maestro Miguel Asins Arbó, whose “Foxtrot” was interpreted, with Rotian connotations, as Professor Sanz explained, since that was what the director asked for, a sort of “disheveled” circus melody, in the style of what Rota did for Fellini, which indeed cannot deny its origin. The film, which was nominated for an Oscar, preluded another “Foxtrot”, this time for the extraordinary El Verdugo (1963), with an unforgettable Pepe Isbert and the majestic Nino Manfredi, in which the least outstanding thing was precisely Arbó’s music.
Previously, the “Tanguillo del Organillo” had also been performed, belonging to the episode shot by Berlanga for the international production Las Cuatro Verdades (1962), a film quite unknown to the general public, which opened a great parenthesis in the director’s career, who could not return to the screen until La Boutique (1967), a commission shot in co-production with Argentina of which the filmmaker did not have very good memories. Despite having the great Astor Piazzolla, whose “Cabecera” and “Escena Final” were interpreted, the Valencian director did not like anything composed by the great Argentine artist. Of course, given Berlanga’s general opinion about film music, and the fact that he could be called a “deaf” director for that very reason, it is not surprising. In fact, his well-known trilogy “Nacional”, made up of La Escopeta Nacional (1977), Patrimonio Nacional (1980), and Nacional III (1982), which made the Valencian director famous, does not even have music.
Almost at the end, “Suspiros Austrohúngaros”, and “Marcha de SOS del Rey Católico” were performed, two new pieces by Asins Arbó, for the emblematic La Vaquilla (1984), a film whose genesis is in the forties, as Sanz recalled, and that could not be shot until so late, in which the composer seems to be more inspired by the figure of the filmmaker himself (always joking with the “Austro-Hungarian Empire), and in the colorful Aragonese town of SOS, where Ferdinand the Catholic was born, and where the film was shot, set as a kind of off-key march, as requested by the filmmaker himself and explained by his relative when interpreting it, lest the audience mistake the director’s intentions for a poor interpretation.
The recital concluded with the fragment “A Ninguna Parte”, from París-Tombuctú (1999), Berlanga’s last film, and a clear exponent of the filmmaker’s last stage, which counted with the collaboration of Bernardo Fuster and Luís Mendo, his last composers, who also worked with the filmmaker throughout the nineties in Todos a la Cárcel (1993), and the television series dedicated to Blasco Ibáñez (1996), and who were also at the base of the final encore, dedicated to the victims of the DANA.
After the recital, an important part of the not too large audience left the Rodrigo hall of the Palau de la Música, with capacity for more than four hundred people, where the Congress was taking place, to which seemed to have come exclusively to listen to the recital, being already in a reduced number of attendees that probably was around twenty people. Immediately after, it was the turn of Professor Virginia Sanchez Rodriguez, from the University of Castilla-La Mancha, who gave her presentation on “Women in the Soundtrack of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century“. What a priori seemed an interesting presentation, given the unknown presence of women composers in Spanish cinema in the second half of the last century, developed, from the doctoral thesis presented in 2013 by the speaker, by ways somewhat alien to the proposed topic due to its sociological depth, since an important part of it focused on women as “filmic object”, as well as the roles embodied in the cinema from its very birth.
Finally, the field was narrowed to talk about a figure as important as unknown in film music as Ana Satrova, composer of Argentine origin who was actually named Ana Martha Satr Torres, and who after marrying the director José María Zabalza, a specialist in B movies, if not even Z, composed a large group of films of different themes and contextual arcs, ranging from gangster films (Homicide in Chicago -1969-, The Return of Al Capone -1969-), to horror (The Fury of the Werewolf -1972- , The Return of the Vampires -1985-), passing through the spaghetti-western (Los Rebeldes de Arizona -1970-, Plomo sobre Dallas -1970-, Al Oeste de Rio Grande -1983-), without disdaining some drama (El Vendedor de Ilusiones -1971-, or in another line, Un Torero para la Historia -1974-).
From the vindication of the figure of Satrova, in which Sanchez Rodriguez insisted on her ability as a composer-woman (as if somehow questioning this ability, which may have been so at the time, but that today, in spite of living in a society in which there is still much to be done in egalitarian issues, nobody questions), the speaker also went on to vindicate the duo Vainica Doble, formed by Carmen Santonja and Gloria van Aerssen, who were in charge of some emblematic films during the seventies such as Un, Dos, Tres… Al Escondite Inglés (1970), and Furtivos (1975), and therefore closely linked to director José Luís Borau. Finally, he went on to talk about a more contemporary and closer figure like Eva Gancedo, composer who won the Goya for La Buena Estrella (1997), the award-winning film by Ricardo Franco, with whom he collaborated again the following year, in what would be the director’s last film, Lágrimas Negras (1998). For a decade Gancedo, today dedicated mainly to teaching, composed for film and television, her last work for the big screen being La Mirada de Ouka Leele (2009), a documentary about this plastic artist.
Also without a break, the next speaker, the composer Isabel Latorre, gave a presentation on “New Perspectives in Film Music: Looking for the Sound of each Project“, which focused on the characteristics of commercial film music, with patterns inspired or directly taken from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These patterns have the symphony orchestra as a vehicle, in addition to the structuring of the scores by leit-motifs, composed of recognizable melodies and usually performed in concerts (with a series of names as a reference, such as Williams, Horner, Shore, Elfman or the late Morricone and Horner, in which Latorre also included Hans Zimmer, who in principle would be somewhat more distant from these patterns, in the opinion of the undersigned), distinguishing it from the music in experimental cinema. The speaker referred to some of its greatest exponents in directors such as David Lynch, Maya Deren or Jean-Luc Godard, since in the latter “new combinations of music and image are proposed, which imply different interpretations by the audience”, as could be the case of the relationship with Lynch of the composer Angelo Badalamenti.
After insisting on timbre as the central point around which music in cinema revolves, Latorre offered some current examples, such as As Bestas (2022), the film by Rodrigo Sorogoyen made with his regular composer, Olivier Arson, both Goya winners for their collaboration, and Poor Things (2023), the film by Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos for which Jerskin Fendrix worked, in their first collaboration for the cinema (and which eventually earned him an Oscar nomination for best score). The composer concluded that film music “is becoming an avant-garde laboratory, a space to experiment with new sounds and musical textures that redefine the concept of soundtrack (and therefore of cinema)”.
Saturday, November 23 – Day 2
The following day, Saturday 23rd, the public attendance was still much lower, as there were no more than a dozen people to attend the documentary on Arnold Schönberg-L’Inlassable Visionnaire, by the German director Andreas Morell (and we do not know why it was announced in French on the website dedicated to the Palau de la Música Congress, when the original is Arnold Schönberg-Der Rastlose Visionär, 2023), where an interesting review of the figure of the important Austrian composer is traced.
Exhibited without subtitles in Spanish and with the voice-over narration in English, being subtitled only in English the parts of the guests who spoke in German, the screening of the documentary became an arid test of endurance for the audience, who did not quite understand the reason for the programming of this film, until we got into its generous hour-and-a-half-long footage, we could see the presence of the Orquesta de Valencia (actually, Orquestra Municipal de València -OMV-, which is its real name), with its current conductor, the German Alexander Liebreich, who has managed in a few years to revolutionize the programming of the last seasons of the Palau with a much more contemporary program that we subscribers are very grateful for. In this case, it was the rehearsals of the famous “Variations for Orchestra”, by the Austrian composer, as well as “The Warsaw Survivor”. This is what the program of the Congress referred to, when one could read that the Orquesta de Valencia was participating, as more than one attendee speculated that it could be a show similar to the one offered with the recital of the previous day dedicated to Berlanga’s cinema.
After the desertion of half of the dozen of those initial attendees produced during and after the screening of the documentary, and with the time too tight, it was the turn of Sergio Lasuén, from the International University of Andalusia, who presented his lecture, entitled “Music and Cinema: Beyond conscious listening“, who, starting from some concepts already present in his book La Armonía en las Bandas Sonoras del Cine Español de los Noventa, such as the concept of the so-called “Global Creative Process”, in which music is defended as part of an interdisciplinary work, structured his presentation around the analytical approach and the essential parameters in the analysis of the object. To this end, he asked in the first case, what is analysis for, what is analysis, who analyzes and for what purpose, and in the second, what can be the specific parameters of film music, such as synchrony, the integration of sound design, the relationship with other extra-musical variables, the possibilities of diegetic music, as well as other elements that modify perception, in addition to the reinterpreted parameters, such as form, structural coherence and continuity, as well as timbre.
On some examples, Lasuén focused on what he had time to present, such as synchrony, for which he used some sequences of his own composition for En el Lado de la Vida (2008), and The Shadow (2008), as well as Los Amantes del Círculo Polar (1998), by Alberto Iglesias, as an example of the filling of spaces left by the main element. Focusing on synchrony, he also talked about Micky Mousing, and composer Manel Gil-Inglada’s clever use of it for the animated film D’Artacán y los Mosqueperros 2021), where the Catalan composer applies his concept of empathetic, not just sympathetic, Micky Mousing. The speaker still had time to talk about specific parameters such as the integration of music in sound design, with an example of a sequence from Stones (2002), with music by the great Pascal Gaigne, before ending his incomplete presentation in a somewhat stressful way, given the time delay on the program.
So, almost at the stroke of nine o’clock in the evening, and with a very small number of attendees who remained in the stalls (three people who had met the speakers for dinner and two anonymous attendees), Alejandro Román, composer and professor at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Madrid, took the stage to talk about “The Musical Language: composition and application of musical elements to the creation of fear in thrillers and horror films “. The reason for this very specific note was that in its original program it should have been developed just before “Halloween night”, on October 31, being then suspended and now somewhat distorted by being misplaced from its initial context.
Unafraid of discouragement, Román stepped out onto the bare stage of the Rodrigo Hall to the sound of the “diabolical” tritone popularized by Berlioz, to explain his concept of musical language (which Román has expounded in detail in three volumes, El Lenguaje Musivisual, Análisis Musivisual, and Composición Musivisual, published by Visión Libros between 2008 and 2024), and to ask himself about what film music is, highlighting from among the most diverse definitions the one that claims to be the “soul” of the film.
From this introduction, Román developed the concept of “musical associationism”, as a form of interaction between music and image, in addition to detailing the musical-visual functions, distinguishing between “external or physical” (temporal-referential, cinematic, plastic-descriptive), “internal or psychological” (prosopopoeic, characterizing or descriptive, emotional, pronominal, anticipatory, illusory, underlining, informative, conceptual and transforming), and “technical or cinematographic” (aesthetic, decorative, unifying, sonorous, rhythmic-temporal, transivitive, structuring, corrective and delimiting), conceptual and transformative), and “technical or cinematographic” (aesthetic, decorative, unifying, sonorous, rhythmic-temporal, transivitive, structuring, correcting and delimiting), all applied to several concrete examples of horror films, such as the significant and very popular shower sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), which Román passed without music, and later with Bernard Herrmann’s music.
Also, a quick analysis of John Carpenter’s music in his own films, such as Halloween Night (1978), was included, as well as a sequence from Poltergeist (1982), with a score by Jerry Goldsmith. At about half past nine in the evening, and abusing the kind patience of the staff of the Palau de la Música, Román ended his presentation, which was also incomplete, as there was no time for more, thus concluding the X International Music Congress of Valencia, in which, if there was no initial presentation, there was no farewell either.
At the dinner that followed, which was personally arranged by the undersigned with the speakers of the day and some friends, we commented on the circumstances of the recently concluded Congress, in which we all agreed in praising the initiative, but in which there was also unanimous agreement on the conclusions regarding the proposed objectives and the results obtained. Beyond this pleasant informal meeting that the half-dozen participants celebrated, it is possible to distinguish several circumstances that led to the specific celebration of the Congress.
First of all, the lack of a common thread with respect to the proposed theme, since the programming of certain presentations with no other connection than film music, without any link to the specialization implied by the Mostra festival, is something that should be delimited in a much more concrete way. Taking up an already existing show such as the Berlanga recital may be interesting because of its coherence with what the Congress can propose, although this show is in itself already quite contradictory, as has been mentioned in the paragraphs dedicated to it. The rest of the presentations all had technical profiles that were perhaps too specialized, especially if the intention is to give continuity, as it seemed on paper when naming the event “X Congress”, tracing that line of continuity with those held at the time, which were characterized by round tables between composers, or simply master classes, in which they shared with the public their experiences with certain conductors or projects throughout their careers, something completely absent from this Congress. Equally absent was the celebration of concerts. Yes, there were several concerts scheduled to be held on October 29 and 31, as has been said, which were cancelled, but much of the limelight fell, one on Leonard Bernstein, and the other on Henry Mancini, excellent composers, but without any link to the Mediterranean, as has been said.
On the other hand, the inclusion of a documentary on Arnold Schönberg, who was never related to cinema, just because the Municipal Orchestra of Valencia appeared, is also a very strange reason to program it, besides causing the delay of the following lectures, which had to be held against the clock and remain incomplete (those of Lasuén and Román). The anti-pedagogic of celebrating without interruptions the two days, in which the personnel entered before six in the afternoon to the Rodrigo hall to finish after nine in the evening without solution of continuity, caused a torrent of specialized information that not even students of a conservatory (that also did not make act of presence, it is necessary to point out it) would have resisted with certain solvency.
Topics of all kinds and conditions such as women composers, horror films, the timbre characteristics of film music today, the figure of Schönberg, or that of a director like Berlanga, so Valencian as little inclined to understand and use film music, seem more like a hodgepodge of a very technical profile, rather than a Festival of film music, which is what the Congress really was during the nineties, where there was an active participation of the attendees, coming from all over the State, who thus managed to approach their idols for the first time, in addition to making themselves known to the general public.
In the present event, the absence of composers was evident, and only the presence of some of them (Latorre, Lasuén and Román), was due exclusively to casual aspects, since they were there in their capacity as teachers. Let’s hope, then, that the development of the Congress is redirected towards more transversal paths, and if it is really going to be integrated within the Mostra de València-Cinema del Mediterrani, that the proposals are in accordance with the contents, at least minimally. International” should be left for future celebrations, because in this case (unless we consider the aforementioned documentary on Schönberg), they were conspicuous by their absence. Nevertheless, it is worth emphasizing the positive aspect of its recovery, and the will that this implies on the part of those responsible for it. That is the first stone of any project.
Article and pictures by Frederic Torres
