Alloy Orchestra revisits 'Metropolis'

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Since 1991, Alloy Orchestra has skirted the fringes where avant-garde music and film collide. The group’s director and co-founder Ken Winokur (percussion, clarinet), and a current lineup featuring Roger Miller of Mission of Burma (keyboards) and longtime member Terry Donahue (junk percussion) are best known for composing scores for silent films such as Dziga Vertov’s Man With the Movie Camera, F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, and Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill Jr. During live performances, the group accompanies screenings of classic silent films while performing its own percussion-based scores steeped in industrial music imagery, atonality, and singularly expressive dirges. On Sat., Nov. 12, Alloy Orchestra performs a live score to Fritz Lang’s 1927 negative-utopia masterpiece, Metropolis. Before the show, Winoker took a few minutes to talk about the group's history, and creating scores to films that exist outside of both time and place.

How did you get started playing music? Did you come into it from a punk rock background?

We’re a little older than that. I started in grade school, in band and orchestra, and played in rock bands. I went to college and studied English and stopped playing music. Because everyone knew music wasn’t a serious endeavor. When I got out of college I missed music so badly, I gravitated back into it. I lived in France for a while, played music in the subways. I converted from being essentially a drum set player into a hand percussionist, and then an orchestral percussionist using found objects. When I got back to the States punk and new wave were taking off. I was pretty inspired by that. Roger was playing inMission of Burma. Terry was a little less involved with the punk scene, but we all had a rock ’n’ roll background. That informs our playing; it taught us how to speak to people of today. A lot of silent-film musicians play music of the 1920s, which works to a point, but it leaves out contemporary audiences. In a way, we’re able to play music that is not specific to any time or style. We never play rock music, we don’t play jazz. We write music of a somewhat indefinite style. It invokes the emotional content of the film or the setting, without being too specific to the time period it was created.

When did the Alloy Orchestra begin?

We call it 1991. That’s when the current group got together. There was one show, with my original Alloy partner, Caleb Sampson, and a couple of other musicians, that we called Alloy Orchestra. But that was a one-off with a good name — worth recycling.

Metropolis is a silent film that makes projections about the future. There is a built-in sense of being out of time and place.

When we first looked at this, we were totally naive about anyone else who was scoring films. We didn't even think to look into it. But this being a science fiction film, anything that we did was seemingly fair game. The film takes place in, I think, 2026. We aren’t there yet, so anything we can conceive of is theoretically appropriate for this movie.

Do you think of yourself as the leader of Alloy Orchestra?

I call myself the director, which means I do the boring business work, booking, and publicity. I own the recording studio so I’m the recording engineer, mixer, kind of the producer. However, I am not the musical director. It’s a collaborative project and there’s no boss who inspires the music that gets created.

How much of your Metropolis performance is improvised?

It’s all very composed. Metropolis was the first show we ever did. We had about two weeks to put together a score, so we wrote some themes and we improvised on them. We’ve done something like 500 performances now, and we’ve worked with four different versions of the film. We do some improv scores, but for the most part our modus operandi is to spend a couple months writing, fine-tuning, tweaking, and rehearsing so it can get played pretty much the same each time. But within those scores there is improvisation. The chase scene lasts about six minutes. Terry and I do a wild drum barrage, and it sounds similar each time; it’s essentially a long improv. But we know the moment the body gets thrown off the parapets, and it ends abruptly, so we switch to the next piece. Everything is set in a moderately rigid fashion with some flexibility.

Does your score pay homage to Gottfried Huppertz's original score?

No. When we wrote the score, I’m not sure that Gottfried Huppertz score was even known. If it was known, it wasn’t available. We never listened to it until a few years ago when it came out on a new restoration. Our score was written with absolutely no reference to the Huppertz score, and they’re wildly different. Huppertz’s is essentially a neo-romantic score, in the style of the mid-19th century. To me it’s a missed opportunity. Germany in 1926 was a hotbed of musical innovation, with the serial composers, atonalism coming in. But they chose to go backwards in time with Huppertz’s score. It isn’t as effective as it should be.

Why do so many musicians want to score for the film?

We started with Metropolis because of Giorgio Moroder’s score from 1984. Years later, a programmer in Boston wanted to play the movie, but he didn’t want to play the Moroder score, which includes Pat Benatar, Adam Ant, Freddie Mercury, and Loverboy — kind of an ’80s, disco-rock score. Which maybe people found to be audacious at best and inappropriate at worst. It created a need for an alternative score. So this programmer casually asked us to throw together a score. Metropolis is by far the most popular and exceedingly modern-feeling silent film. Audiences love it. It’s exciting, filled with action and adventure, the sets are magnificent, the story has all these feel-good moments … workers and owners getting together. It’s naive in a lot of ways, but it presents this wonderful utopian solution to the world. You feel good when you get out of this movie. Musicians are attracted to it, A) because people want to see it. It’s a dramatic and effective moving picture that’s very emotive. It encourages musicians to match that with the emotions they create through music.

It’s a science fiction film, but it’s also a horror movie.

Yep. But they pull out the happy ending. After the city has been destroyed, the workers and the owners come together and shake hands and you’re led to believe that all is good and the world will be saved. But it doesn’t work that way in real life. It’s essentially a fascist message: The workers can’t achieve anything without having the guiding hand of the overseer, the rich elite. But it also has a Marxist quality to it, and an appreciation of the working class. And then there’s a religious aspect. The message is kind of blurred.

Tell me about some of the other films you’ve scored.

Third Man did a two LP set of a live performance of Man With the Movie Camera. We’ve done something like 18 full-length film soundtracks and a collection of shorts that have been released to DVD or Blu-ray. The most recent one we’ve done is for a film called Varieté. It’s another German film by the same production company, which came out a year before Metropolis. It’s a circus film that stars one of their biggest actors, Emil Jannings. It’s intensely beautiful, a very dark portrayal of love, betrayal, and revenge among the circus people. We started playing it in September at the Telluride Film Festival. It’s beautifully photographed, tightly edited. When you watch it nowadays, you don’t say, “Look at this hokey old, jerky film.” It works on audiences as if it was made yesterday. The other film that I’m always most happy about is Son of the Sheik. I worked on getting a copy for a long time and ended up buying a negative. It takes place in the Algerian desert, which gave us the opportunity to do a lot of hand drumming, although it’s not authentic in any way. It gives a strong sense of the setting. It’s the last film by Rudolph Valentino. He died just before it was released. He was the biggest star of the day — the great Latin lover. The world went insane when he died. The film came out two weeks later. It was the big media event of the ’20s.

Are you going to release a proper recording of your Metropolis score?

The last time they came out with a restoration, we were commissioned by Kino Video, the American distributor, to record our score for inclusion. We recorded it. It was perfect. But then they got a note from the German copyright owners saying they wouldn’t allow that, so they killed our score. We have essentially released the score on a disc that you could, if you’re ambitious, play simultaneous to the Blu-ray or DVD. They haven’t given up on putting our score on the film, but the cost involved in reissuing Metropolis is pretty high. It’ll happen one day.

Alloy Orchestra performs its score to Fritz Lang's Metropolis at the Rialto Center for the Arts on Sat., Nov. 12. $25. 8 p.m. 80 Forsyth St. N.W. 404-413-9849. www.rialto.gsu.edu.