Combining music with the spoken word is a tricky business, which explains why it has so rarely been tried. Novelist Jonathan Coeexplains how the chance to work with one of his favourite bands, The High Llamas, persuaded him to write a script to accompany their gig at Dublin's Analog festival
DURING ONE OF his famous dialogues with Robert Craft in the 1950s, Igor Stravinsky was asked to give an opinion about one of his lesser-known works, Persephone, written in collaboration with André Gide. It is not exactly an opera: Stravinsky himself described it as "a masque or dance-pantomime coordinated with a sung and spoken text". But Craft's question was specific and to the point. "What is your feeling now," he asked ("now" being about 25 years later), "about the use of music as an accompaniment to recitation?" Stravinsky's reply was equally direct: "Do not ask. Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven."
The "sin" of combining music and the spoken word, which Stravinsky came to regard with such unequivocal abhorrence, is for me an especially tempting one. I've always loved music more than I've loved language; and because I invariably find a line of melody more compelling than a line of thought, I find listening to songs an unsatisfactory experience. When a song is sung, all that I really hear is the music: the words wash over me and the human voice becomes just another element in the instrumentation. (For that matter, I'm just as happy listening to a song in a language I don't understand as to one in English.)
Yet there's something intriguing about what happens to prose - whether printed or spoken - when it's buoyed up by musical accompaniment. I write while listening to music, and if I read a particular passage back to myself after a book is finished, I can usually remember the music I was listening to when I wrote it. My own novels therefore have a "soundtrack", as far as I'm concerned, but it's an entirely private and interior one, which readers are unable to share.
Perhaps that word "soundtrack" gives the game away. My conception of the relationship between words and music has nothing to do with song, or opera, and everything to do with the way that music has been deployed in the cinema during the last 70 years or so. As a teenager in the 1970s, before the age of domestic video recording, I used to record the soundtracks of my favourite films off the television on to two-hour cassettes, and listen to them over and over again in bed at night. With no visuals to distract me, I was free to concentrate on the way that words and music (and, occasionally, sound effects) interacted. Heard in this way, the greatest of the director/composer collaborations (Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, Billy Wilder and Miklos Rozsa) seemed to imply new areas of congruence between the two art forms, which have never really been exploited to the full. Ever since, I've been hungry to venture into this territory.
Of course, there have been many instances of prose writers and musicians working together. One has only to think of William Burroughs's work with Laurie Anderson or Kurt Cobain, or Stan Tracey's recording of his suite inspired by Under Milk Wood, with extracts from the play being read by Donald Houston. But in most of these cases the words came first, and were written independently of music; the relationship between the two is not really organic. It is much harder to think of works in which the relationship between the music and the spoken text was inscribed from the outset.
But then there's an obvious reason why such collaborations are rare: they are expensive to mount, and logistically difficult. Just recently, however, the organisers of the Analog festival in Dublin have boldly brushed these objections aside. The festival's brief leans towards the untested and the experimental (this year's headlining act being Tortoise), and in keeping with this ideal, two collaborations between like-minded musicians and writers have been commissioned. Iain Sinclair will be writing something during the festival itself, to be performed with live music by Susan Stenger, while my contribution will be a 60-minute play for three actors, inspired by, and to be performed alongside, an hour-long set by The High Llamas.
I've loved The High Llamas ever since I discovered their album, Hawaii, about 10 years ago. For those who don't know their music, it's composed by Sean O'Hagan, who back in the 1980s was a key member of the fondly remembered Cork quartet, Microdisney. Microdisney's sound was distinctive, deriving from the friction between O'Hagan's strong, accessible melodic sensibility and the furious political radicalism expressed in Cathal Coughlan's lyrics. In pop music, perhaps only Robert Wyatt understood the new economic energies of the 1980s as thoroughly as Coughlan seemed to; and, like Wyatt, he remains one of the music world's most brilliant and underrated lyricists.
AFTER MICRODISNEY, Coughlan and O'Hagan went their separate ways, Coughlan into The Fatima Mansions and O'Hagan into The High Llamas, a vehicle for his compositional skills that gradually became more and more idiosyncratic and left-field. If I were to call The High Llamas an experimental pop group, this is not to say that their music is difficult. In fact, it's the exact opposite - so melodic, seductive and inviting on the surface that some of their critics (who seem not to listen closely enough) assume that there's nothing substantial going on underneath. O'Hagan is a supremely literate composer whose music nods not only in the obvious directions (The Beach Boys, Steve Reich, Ravel) but also pays explicit tribute to less pivotal figures such as jazz harpist Dorothy Ashby.
O'Hagan writes beautiful tunes, but what he does with them chimes conveniently with my own aversion (as expressed earlier) to songs as such. His voice is fragile and lightweight, and is usually put somewhere low down in the mix so that it doesn't call attention to itself: often it is no more prominent than, say, the bass guitar. The typical listener, then, who is waiting for some grand, emphatic gesture from the lead vocalist, waits in vain.
Meanwhile, O'Hagan frustrates another of the pop fan's expectations by refusing to sing about feelings: in the course of eight albums, The High Llamas have not, to my knowledge, recorded a single love song. Instead he sings about architecture, landscape, buildings, coastlines, in lyrics that flaunt a kind of teasing obscurity. (I once asked him what his song, Green Coaster, was about, and he answered bemusedly, as if I was some kind of idiot: "An environmentally conscious yachtsman.")
This lyrical obliqueness presents a particular problem for the collaborator. O'Hagan and I agreed quite quickly on the parameters of our piece: about an hour in length; written for three actors (two male, one female); and scored for his regular band, a fairly typical pop line-up, but with an unusual emphasis on tuned percussion, and augmented by a string quartet. That all fell into place easily enough, but it left me with one problem: what exactly was I going to write about?
I started by compiling a provisional 60-minute playlist of High Llamas music. Not necessarily my favourite tracks, but a dozen or so which, when played in sequence, suggested some sort of narrative arc. Then I listened to the playlist, repeatedly, waiting for inspiration.
It was a long time coming. Four anxious weeks went by in this state, not made any less anxious by the sceptical looks I received from people whenever I tried to describe the nature of the theatrical piece we were trying to create. If I felt my faith in the enterprise flagging, I tried to reassure myself with some historical precedents. Hadn't JB Priestley experimented with new combinations of music and theatre in Music at Nightand Johnson Over Jordan? And, of course, there was the towering, more recent example of Stoppard and Previn's Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. But in neither of these examples was the music composed to be played continuously, throughout the piece. Also, to the best of my knowledge, in both cases the text had come first, and the music had followed. I had an uneasy sense of doing something that had not been attempted before, and for a good reason.
GRADUALLY, SOME SCENES of dialogue started to emerge. I attempted to hug the contours of the music closely, allowing for pauses whenever an especially attractive melodic idea or touch of instrumentation demanded to be heard. (The text, when completed, looked like a conventional stage play except that the length of every speech has been specified in minutes and seconds.) But still, after more than a month, I was getting nowhere fast. I'd decided upon a setting - a brutalist housing project - and one image (children playing games on a dome-shaped mound they referred to as "the moon", a memory from my own childhood), but it wasn't until I chanced upon a newspaper article about the proposed demolition of the Robin Hood Gardens housing project in east London that these ideas started to become - if you'll excuse the pun - concrete.
To me, Robin Hood Gardens symbolises the poignant gulf between the idealism of those who designed it (check out the visionary lyricism that runs through the theoretical writings of its architects, Alison and Peter Smithson) and the bleak, quotidian experience of the people who actually have to live there: a potent subject for drama. Whether my words and O'Hagan's music will succeed in evoking any of that, I've no idea. Perhaps this attempt to explore the possibilities of a relatively untried art form ("spoken musical theatre" is the best way I can describe it) will fall flat on its face. But our director, Tom Creed, already fills me with confidence, and at the very least the audience will get to listen to some good music for an hour. And if it does all go wrong, I can always retreat to some quiet place afterwards, go down on my knees, and privately murmur: "Forgive me, Igor, for I have sinned."
- Guardian service
• The Analog music festival, presented by Dublin Docklands Development Authority in association with Note Productions, takes place this weekend, July 18-20, at various venues with a hub at Grand Canal Square. Say Hi to the Rivers and the Mountains, by Jonathan Coe and The High Llamas, will be performed at the Sugar Club in Leeson Street, Dublin, on Sun, July 20.
