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VISITORS
A FILM BY GODFREY REGGIO, PHILIP GLASS AND JON KANE SYDNEY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA | AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE USA/AUSTRALIA
VISITORS
A FILM BY GODFREY REGGIO, PHILIP GLASS AND JON KANE SYDNEY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA CONCERT HALL SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE 23 & 24 JANUARY 87MINS NO INTERVAL
A NEW FILM BY Godfrey Reggio
GODFREY REGGIO Director
IN COLLABORATION WITH Philip Glass & Jon Kane
Godfrey Reggio is a pioneer of experimental documentaries, creating poetic film and images of extraordinary emotive impact. He is best known for the Qatsi Trilogy – essays of image and music which question the world in which we live. Born in New Orleans in 1940, Reggio originally entered the Christian Brothers, a Roman Catholic Pontifical Order, at age 14 and remained as a monk until 1968. As a Christian Brother in New Mexico during the 1960s, Reggio co-founded various community organisations including Young Citizens for Action, La Clinica de la Gente, La Gente and later, the Institute for Regional Education, a non-profit organisation in Santa Fe. It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that Reggio’s progressive political agenda made its way to film. In 1974 and 1975, in collaboration with the New Mexico Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, Reggio co-organised a multimedia public interest campaign on the
PRESENTED BY Steven Soderbergh MUSIC COMPOSED BY Philip Glass A LIVE CINEMATIC ORCHESTRAL EVENT WITH THE Sydney Symphony Orchestra CONDUCTED BY Michael Reisman Visitors Live was originally supported by Singani 63 and PHI Centre. Special thanks to Tim Fox/Alison Ahart Williams,Columbia Artists Management LLC and Karl Mehrer, K2Imaging
All photos: Cinedigm 02
invasion of privacy and the use of technology to control behaviour, which lead to the creation of his first film, Koyaanisqatsi. Made in collaboration with composer Philip Glass and director of photography Ron Fricke, the film gained a national and international audience, critical acclaim and launched the Qatsi Trilogy. As of 2010, Koyaanisqatsi has been played live with projection and orchestra over 200 times in venues worldwide. Collaborating with Philip Glass across all his films, Reggio’s filmography includes: Koyaanisqatsi (1982), Powaqqatsi (1988), Naqoyqatsi (2002), Anima Mundi (1992) and Evidence (1995). In 1993, Reggio was invited to develop a new school “to smell the future”, in Treviso, Italy. An enterprise of exploration and production in the arts, technology and mass media was created, called Fabrica – Futuro Presente. For the past 13 years, Reggio has been on the faculty of the Telluride Film Festival as a resident curator and presenter of films. He also lectures on technology, culture and cinema.
PHILIP GLASS Composer Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Philip Glass is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the Juilliard School. In the early 1960s, Glass spent two years of intensive study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and while there earned money by transcribing Ravi Shankar’s Indian music into Western notation. By 1974, Glass had a number of innovative projects, creating a large collection of new music for The Philip Glass Ensemble, and for the Mabou Mines Theater Company. This period culminated in Music in Twelve Parts, and the landmark opera, Einstein on the Beach, for which he collaborated with Robert Wilson. Since Einstein, composer Glass has expanded his repertoire to include music for opera, dance, theatre, chamber ensemble, orchestra and film. His scores have received Academy Award nominations (Kundun, The Hours, Notes on a Scandal) and a Golden Globe (The Truman Show). Symphony No.7 and Symphony No.8 – Glass’s latest symphonies – along with Waiting for the Barbarians, an opera based on the book by J.M. Coetzee, premiered in 2005. In the past few years several new works were unveiled, including Book of Longing (Luminato Festival) and an opera about the end of the Civil War entitled Appomattox (San Francisco Opera). Glass’s opera, Kepler premiered with the Landestheater Linz, Austria in September 2009 and his latest
opera, The Perfect American, about the death of Walt Disney, premiered at the Teatro Real, Madrid in January 2013 and was performed by the English National Opera in June 2013. His Symphony No.9 was completed in 2011 and was premiered by the Bruckner Orchestra in Linz, Austria in January 2012 and his Symphony No.10 received its European premiere in France in August 2012. Glass’s most recent opera, Spuren de Verirrten, ‘The Lost’, premiered at the Landestheater Linz, Austria on 13 April 2013. JON KANE Associate Director, Producer and Editor Described by The New York Times as “psychedelic”, Jon Kane has done notable work as a commercial director and editor. In the early years of MTV, Kane filmed and edited the original show opening to The Real World and worked on the “Moon Man” campaign. His series of branding spots for the VH1 “Behind the Music” campaign were famously parodied by Saturday Night Live. 2002 saw Kane as the editor and sound designer of Naqoyqatsi, the third film in the Qatsi Trilogy directed by Godfrey Reggio and scored by Philip Glass. He has since collaborated with Reggio and Glass, along with Steven Soderbergh as the associate director, producer and editor for Visitors – a film produced and edited out of his company opticnerve™’s studios based in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Frequently
noted for his successes, Kane has been nominated for a Clio Award, and a spot he created for Time Warner was included in MoMA’s Department of Cinema collection. In addition to his commercial work, Jon Kane has edited and directed several short films and music videos, and has been active as a house music DJ since the early 1980s, touring worldwide as the DJ for Fischerspooner and editing and directing several of the band’s music videos. STEVEN SODERBERGH Presenter Steven Soderbergh is a writer, director, producer, cinematographer, and editor. He lives in New York. MICHAEL RIESMAN Conductor A multi-talented composer, conductor, keyboardist and record producer, Michael Riesman has influenced many of today’s greatest talents as the innovative musical director of the worldrenowned Philip Glass Ensemble. Riesman has had a long-lived collaborative relationship with Philip Glass – when Glass received his Golden Globe Award in 1999 for The Truman Show score, he publicly proclaimed Riesman “a genius”. Riesman has been playing keyboards in The Philip Glass Ensemble since 1974, and has served as its musical director since 1976.
BASSOONS
David Robertson Chief Conductor and Artistic Director
Sandro Costantino Rosemary Curtin Jane Hazelwood Justine Marsden Felicity Tsai
FIRST VIOLINS
CELLOS
HORNS
Andrew Haveron Concertmaster Kirsten Williams Associate Concertmaster Lerida Delbridge Assistant Concertmaster Marianne Broadfoot Brielle Clapson Georges Lentz Nicola Lewis Alexander Norton Léone Ziegler Elizabeth Jones* Emily Qin* Nicholas Waters†
Umberto Clerici Principal Henry David Varema Associate Principal Fenella Gill Timothy Nankervis Elizabeth Neville Christopher Pidcock
Ben Jacks Principal Geoffrey O’Reilly Principal 3rd Euan Harvey Marnie Sebire Rachel Silver
DOUBLE BASSES
Paul Goodchild Associate Principal Anthony Heinrichs Daniel Henderson*
SYDNEY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
SECOND VIOLINS Kirsty Hilton Principal Emma Jezek Assistant Principal Maria Durek Emma Hayes Shuti Huang Stan W Kornel Benjamin Li Philippa Paige Rebecca Gill† Belinda Jezek* VIOLAS Roger Benedict Principal Tobias Breider Principal Justin Williams Assistant Principal
Alex Henery Principal Neil Brawley Principal Emeritus David Campbell Steven Larson FLUTES Emma Sholl Associate Principal Rosamund Plummer Principal Piccolo Lamorna Nightingale*
Matthew Wilkie Principal Fiona McNamara
TRUMPETS
TROMBONES Scott Kinmont Nick Byrne Christopher Harris Principal Bass Trombone TUBA Steve Rossé Principal
OBOES
PERCUSSION
Shefali Pryor Associate Principal David Papp Alexandre Oguey Principal Cor Anglais
Rebecca Lagos Mark Robinson Timothy Constable* Brian Nixon* Philip South*
CLARINETS
HARP
Lawrence Dobell Principal Christopher Tingay Craig Wernicke Principal Bass Clarinet
Louise Johnson Genevieve Lang* * = Guest Musician † = SSO Fellow
VISITORS: THE MUSIC PHILIP GLASS: The first film I did was with Godfrey. It was Koyaanisqatsi, and we began working in ’77 and ’78 ... Coming out of the experimental theatre world, which is where I came from and I had been working in, I had been writing music for plays since I was 20. I didn’t write my first film score until I was 41, so for 20 years I had been working in more traditional ways of matching images with music ... though by industry standards they were unconventional. I developed a very precise concept of how it worked. I would see the image being here and there was a distance between the music and the image and between the spectator and the image, and the music was the way that we get to the image. When the spectator uses their own imagination to make that journey, the experience becomes very personal. I’ve done a lot of commercials. The commercials basically are dictating exactly what you’re supposed to feel. When you work in the theatre arts it’s quite different. We expect the spectator to complete the message, and what they bring to the message is what makes it personal, so that I often describe it as a distance. I was very fortunate to work with Godfrey as my first filmmaker because he didn’t know anything about writing film music either. He didn’t know and I didn’t know, so we made it up. And I took ideas that I’d been working with in the theatre, which was experimental theatre. That would be besides the Americans, but the Europeans would have been people like Jeney and Beckett, very cutting-edge stuff at that time. GODFREY REGGIO: [Philip Glass] looks at everything ad nauseam. I don’t want him to write note one until he’s been completely marinated in the image. In this shoot he went to Louisiana, he went to the swamps, he’s come out to Brooklyn when we were in the studio, comes over to this studio frequently. He’s in effect hammered by us with these images because more than what I tell him, it’s his response to the image, and knowing Philip, it’s his response in the moment.
JON KANE: We didn’t have any music at all until very, very late in the edit process, until we actually had a film. We worked without music for six months of editing, but in that time we would have Philip come to the studio and watch assemblages. You know, first we call them assemblages – they’re not really edits yet – to do what Godfrey calls marinating him in imagery, which we would do silently. We’d watch hours and hours of assemblages, little edits, little ideas that we were coming up with, some of which stuck through until the end and many which didn’t. But they were illustrating the language of the film, and then at a certain point Philip feels that he has it and he’s ready to start writing music. We started to get the new music in and then we began the process of trying to articulate, as a group, Philip, Godfrey, the whole crew, what it is that we liked or didn’t like about the first rounds. And it’s a very tricky process because you’re trying to put into words something that’s pretty difficult to describe. We went through about a two-week process of trying to find the voice of the music, and then Philip just got it. And then we were off to the races. GODFREY REGGIO: Composers tend to write in the medium that they’re in at the time, the “period”, they call it, of composition. The period of composition Philip’s in right now is orchestral, but it’s symphonic orchestral with big highs and lows. The first piece of music that came in was like that and it was gorgeous, but it would blow this film out of the water. So after a number of discussions and writing pieces – Philip is remarkable in that he wants criticism, he wants feedback – it finally came clear. He says, “Oh, I get it, Godfrey.” He says, “You want me to write music for the attention of the audience, not in any way to illustrate this image.” Now, he knows that already, but “for the attention of the audience” was a breakthrough, so I got what I wanted.
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