The MUSIC thread

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Excerpted from an NPR interview with Randall Poster

What is it like if you're tasked to find music from the ‘30s, the ‘40s, or the ‘20s, like in “Killers of the Flower Moon?” Are there any musical moments that stand out for you in that film?

We recorded a bunch of pieces for each of the eras. The movie starts at the end of the First World War, and then we take a little stop in the ‘20s, a little stop in the ‘30s, and a little stop into the ‘40s.

We had a woman named Rayna Gellert, who is a great fiddle player in America. We did a string band that was on camera. [We] recorded some really, really hot bluegrass songs, so that was a total highlight in the movie. Then we did some recording with Vince [Giordano] and Robbie Robertson [that] has made a really special score for the film. It's a pretty good musical feast.

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I LOVE Bluegrass...

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www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/awards/story/2023-11-13/for-his-final-work-with-martin-scorsese-robbie-robertson-found-a-personal-connection

Still, Robertson didn’t want anything stereotypical on the score.

“He didn’t want to do the obvious kind of thing, the kind of Hollywood approach to Native American music,” says Mark Graham, the orchestrator who helped Robertson achieve the score. “He was very cautious about that. And when you see the movie open, you don’t really know what the story is at that point — the audience doesn’t — and to hit it with a kind of dirty rock guitar, that’s a bold move.”

Robertson couldn’t read or write music, and he was not a traditional film composer. He was initially reluctant to being set up with Graham, a veteran music man who works with such renowned composers as John Williams and Alexandre Desplat, but the two men soon found a groove. Starting in July 2021, Robertson would send Graham iPhone videos of him strumming or singing ideas. Some were conceived for specific scenes, others were just moods he wanted to create from his conversations with Scorsese — everything from dirty rock to blues to a Salvation Army-style brass band.

“Robbie had this idea about an ensemble that we haven’t heard for a film,” says Graham, who remembers Robertson being particularly obsessed with the manzarene, a jangling zither-like instrument he discovered on an old blues record, as well as some unusual guitar bows. “We had this weird guitar ensemble,” says Graham, “with lots of different guitars and mandolins, mandocellos, a zither, some keyboards — all old-fashioned stuff — bass, some percussion, a couple of cellos and a harmonica.”

This unorthodox band assembled at Robertson’s longtime studio home at the Village in West L.A. Robertson was tough on his musicians, reacting very strongly if he didn’t like a take. “The worst thing he could say was it was ‘really ordinary,’ says Graham. “You couldn’t really define what ‘ordinary’ was. You would fuss with stuff and kind of arrive at something that he felt was good.”

Robertson recorded hours of music in this band-like way, adding native flutes and shakers and all kinds of other earthy elements, and sent it to Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who would cut it in as they pleased. Much of it didn’t end up in the picture; some of it was used over and over. But Scorsese mixed it loud, and the music became a dominant character — a ghost, a heart and a time machine all in one.

The two opening sequences — of a black and white newsreel providing backstory about the oil boom that made the Osage rich, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s introduction to the town of Fairfax — strut with a confident, bluesy gait that establishes a feeling of upbeat pride that will soon be upended.

For a scene where Ernest (DiCaprio) drops off Mollie (Lily Gladstone) in his cab, “I told him I wanted something ‘dangerous and fleshy,’” Scorsese says. “He gave me a real gutbucket blues theme that not only worked for the scene, but drove the momentum of the picture. I asked for another theme that matched the scale of the landscape, the mystery. He gave me that and more.”

As the Osage deaths start piling up, Scorsese uses a sickening, arrhythmic heartbeat idea that insistently thumps under the slow reign of terror with agitated harmonica solos.

The film runs a staggering 3.5 hours, and “with a picture that big in scope, with that many characters and locations and relationships and betrayals,” Scorsese says, “the music helps to keep everything unified and moving forward. In order for that to work, it really needs to become a key aesthetic element. And for that, you need an artist as great as Robbie was.”

Scorsese adds: “We just knew each other. We trusted each other. We respected each other. We loved each other.”

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www.billboard.com/music/awards/2023-hollywood-music-in-media-awards-billie-eilish-robbie-robertson-win-1235473365/

Robbie Robertson wins Best Feature Film Score at the Hollywood Music in Media Awards

Nominees
American Fiction – Laura Karpman
Chevalier – Kris Bowers
WINNER: Killers of the Flower Moon – Robbie Robertson
Nyad – Alexandre Desplat
Oppenheimer – Ludwig Göransson
Rustin – Branford Marsalis
Saltburn – Anthony Willis, Music By
The Killer – Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross

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Album Cover

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variety.com/2023/music/news/robbie-robertson-interview-killers-flower-moon-martin-scorsese-1235764103/

And yet, when it came time to do the “Killers of the Flower Moon” score, Robertson said he found himself thinking that he didn’t “want to do any stereotypical Indian music, for sure… or old-movie Indian music. There will be none of that.” His first impulse was to build “a swarm of guitars — the sounds and textures and rhythmic feels, all just kind of swamping around one another. Of course you start out with a swarm of ideas, too; you’re just trying anything to figure what could be magical. You know, I listened to peyote hymns, and drum tonalities and the rubbing of skins and all these textures of bells and snakes and rattles. All this stuff, when it all starts to come together in its own music and these rumblings, it feels good, and it feels fresh, and it feels timeless.”

It also feels bluesy. Just as with the script, Robertson’s “Killers” music is not completely married to the point of view either of the Native culture or of the interloping white culture. (And it’s certainly not period-specific.) His masterful mixture of sounds takes elements you might associate more with one or the other of these conflicting forces and makes it all add up to the feeling of a bad moon rising. It’s frequently ominous, to be sure, but in a propulsive way that carries you ever intriguingly forward through a three-and-a-half-hour running time that relies heavily on Robertson’s rumblings to set a pace and a way through the darkness.

As for where the balance lies, though, if there is one, Robertson said that not everything in the score needed to hark back to that essential spirit. “There are some of the cues that I did out in the streets and things that I really like that fit the scenes properly like they should,” he said. “But when the music settles in and when it really feels like what this movie is to me, that really does stay over on the side of something that has an Indian soul.”

The music for “Killers of the Flower Moon” involved a very different brief than what Robertson did on his last project with Scorsese, “The Irishman,” obviously, and that was very different from his duties on projects going all the way back to “The King of Comedy” and “The Color of Money.” His title would change on Scorsese projects, sometimes reflecting whether he acted more as a curator of outside songs or a scorer. But one thing remained the same:

“Marty usually starts from a place of ‘Well, it shouldn’t sound like movie music.’” Something about that makes Robertson laugh. “If you say it shouldn’t sound like movie music, music in a movie is movie music! And it’s kind of all-encompassing in many ways.” But he certainly knew what his collaborator meant — even though Scorsese has done movies with traditional scores, those have been the outliers, really. “In many ways, there is a line in the sand that says, ‘Nope. I don’t go there. I don’t do it that way. I don’t play this by those rules.’”