Walking that Line between Art and Entertainment

An Interview with Composer Tod Machover

Hailed as “a composer biography like no other” (The Boston Globe) and praised for its “ingenious music” (The Wall Street Journal), Tod Machover’s opera Schoenberg in Hollywood comes to the UCLA Nimoy Theater on May 18, 19, 20 & 22 for its West Coast premiere.

Tod Machover begins Schoenberg in Hollywood with a real-life meeting of legends. In 1935, the uncompromising composer Arnold Schoenberg met with Irving Thalberg, MGM’s head of production. Thalberg wanted Schoenberg to lend his composing talents to Hollywood movies. Schoenberg demanded complete control and (for the times) a rather steep fee.

Nothing came of the meeting, but it has become both legend and lore in the annals of twentieth-century music. Schoenberg in Hollywood reimagines what might have happened had Schoenberg accepted the role of movie composer.

The opera bears Machover’s unmistakable stamp as a composer, blending film and opera, electronic and acoustic music, flowing melodies and gnarly textures. Machover, the Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media at the MIT Media Lab where he is also director of the Opera of the Future group, is renowned for his pioneering integration of music and technology. Schoenberg in Hollywood tells Schoenberg’s life story and explores worlds colliding—Old World and New, high art and mass entertainment, traditional and experimental.

In a recent conversation, Machover shared insights into his musical journey—and how it brought him to Schoenberg and, eventually, to Hollywood.

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Do you remember when you first heard the music of Arnold Schoenberg?

I was very young. I grew up in New York and my dad was an engineer, one of the first people in computer graphics, and my mom was a Juilliard-trained pianist who made her career as a very creative music teacher. We always had unusual music playing in the house. I mean, we listened to and played a lot of chamber music – I am a cellist – but we also had new music playing too. My dad was into electronic music, and my mom was into more traditional new music. So, I grew up listening to Schoenberg, Boulez and Cage among others.

When did you first start composing music?

When I was a teenager, both by writing on music paper and also through wiring up my cello as part of an experimental rock band. Well, actually earlier than that. My mom had us [Tod and other neighborhood kids] composing music. She was really an extraordinary teacher. She would take the last ten minutes of our lesson and have us find objects around the house and bring them back. She would have us make sounds with the objects, combine the sounds, name them, and turn those sounds into a story. Then she would tell us to draw a picture of the story at home during the week.

It made me realize that music was all around me. Music wasn’t just notes, and it wasn’t just printed music written by a bunch of dead people. And not only could you make your own music, you could also make your own system and tell any story you wanted to tell. And by drawing a picture of the story, you can see—even as a four-year-old—that notation is just a way of remembering what you did so you can play it again.

Early in your career, Pierre Boulez brought you to the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris—how did that come about?

Well, when I got to Juilliard in 1973, I realized that the sounds I were imagining were “different,” and that I’d need to invent new ways to make and perform them. And I knew from my dad about how programming introduced a new universal language that might allow you to make real anything you could imagine. Nobody at Juilliard was working with computers, but I convinced the composer Milton Babbitt to get me access to a CUNY machine that took my punch-card programs and turned them into audio a week later.

I had met Boulez in Florence, Italy, so he knew me. And IRCAM in Paris had just been created, largely as a way of getting Boulez to come back to France. So he got in touch and offered me a one-year contract to work at the institute. It was a really interesting place, with new ideas and unparalleled resources. So, I went for a year. And then he asked me to stay on, and I stayed for seven years as director of musical research.

How did the idea of Schoenberg in Hollywood come to you?

I don’t recall how I came across the book Arnold Schoenberg: The Composer as Jew, by Alexander Ringer, but I did, and in that book was the story of Arnold Schoenberg meeting with Irving Thalberg, the head of MGM studios, where Thalberg pitched to him the idea of creating the soundtrack for the movie The Good Earth. As the story goes, Schoenberg demanded a huge fee ($50,000) and creative control over the entire soundtrack.

Those sound like exorbitant demands, as if Schoenberg wasn’t really taking the idea seriously.

Well, I think that Schoenberg took the idea very seriously. He spent time on the project, he drew up sketches. I think he loved the movies. It would be easy to think that Schoenberg felt like Los Angeles was exile, that nothing could be further from Vienna, that he felt lost. But Schoenberg loved being in Hollywood.

Schoenberg was a complicated guy. On the one hand, he was deeply serious about music, and he spent his life exploring and elevating what it meant to be an artist. He was completely uncompromising. In fact, I would say that Schoenberg was the most uncompromising artist you could ever imagine. On the other hand, he was quite playful and invented things from a new notation system for his son’s tennis matches to a contraption for drawing customized lines on his music manuscript paper.

What was the biggest challenge in writing the opera?

The first challenge was finding an opera company that was interested, and that took a long time. But when I pitched the opera to the director of the Boston Lyric Opera, she immediately said “let’s do it.” Then I went home and thought “what have I done? I’m writing an opera about Schoenberg? How am I going to write an opera about another composer? Am I going to write second-rate Schoenberg?” It seemed crazy.

How did you overcome that challenge?

After getting over the initial fear of the project, and after grappling with the question of how I was going to be true to myself and true to Schoenberg, I dealt with the challenge by immersing myself in Arnold Schoenberg’s world. I read his letters, I got to meet members of his family, I listened to his music. Writing the opera felt like collaborating with him. Eventually, telling Schoenberg’s story also became telling my story, about what Schoenberg’s story meant to me.

Musically, I was interested in how Schoenberg grappled with his desire to reach audiences while preserving his fierce artistic integrity. He was a great composer with an international reputation and found himself being asked to write music for Hollywood films, although his music was nothing like Hollywood.

The other thing about Schoenberg is that he had a real desire to reach audiences.

Well, Schoenberg did have a reputation for being standoffish with audiences, and some of his atonal music seemed almost calculated to provoke audiences.  

Well, I think it is more complicated than that. Schoenberg did have a golden touch for getting under people’s skin and for making people just hate what he did. But I think he really cared about cultivating audiences. And the stakes were different in the 1930s. The Nazis were on the rise in Europe, Jews were in danger, and Schoenberg, in part by realizing his Jewishness and by seeing what was happening in Germany, he said “I’ve really got to get this music out.” And there he was, writing music that no one wanted to listen to.

I mean, that’s partly funny, but it is also very poignant. Schoenberg wanted to communicate something he cared about, something urgent and important. He wanted to make a difference, but without selling out.

Some of your musical projects—I’m thinking here about the City Symphony—really work to upend traditional hierarchies. Does Schoenberg in Hollywood attempt something similar?

Well, they are different. But I’ve always thought it is important to compose music that pushes every boundary while also being able to communicate to everyone, to anyone. Music has to be transformative or it isn’t worth doing, but it has to cross and combine many worlds to reach people. And I think this is the perfect story to explore why that is so difficult to achieve, and to experience what it sounds and feels like when you make it work.

Your opera captures many of these juxtapositions between mass entertainment and high art by using technology. We have live opera on the stage while a movie projection plays Schoenberg’s life on a screen. The singers interact with film, just as the players interact with a complex electronic sound world.

Yes.

In what ways does the opera’s music also address this tension between mass entertainment and high art?

Musically, I was interested in the fine line that separates these. I wanted to develop a musical language for this piece that straddles that line, so that with a slight twist of note or rhythm the sound could seduce or could scare you. And right on that line is the balance between simplicity and complexity, satisfaction and surprise. Musically, as a composer, that’s where I want to be. I want the opera to connect with all kinds of listeners, and I want it to challenge them as well. I want the music to honor Schoenberg while sounding like something only I could/would have composed.

The opera opened in Boston, and has been performed at the Volksoper in Vienna and in China. Now it comes “home” to Los Angeles. What do you hope audiences will take away from the West Coast premiere?

It will be interesting to see what this feels like because Los Angeles—more than just about anywhere else—has done more for Schoenberg than almost anywhere else in the world [for the Schoenberg 150 Celebrations]. People [in Los Angeles] care. And it seems like there is more interest in Schoenberg today than there was when I started working on the opera. And the opera’s big themes – repression and rejection, exile, finding one’s identity, fighting for freedom, and embracing the urgency of the arts in troubled times – are even more relevant today than when I composed the piece. So, I’m very excited for this. I hope that the story and the music really speak to people, that audiences will fall in love with Schoenberg’s music and be inspired by his life…..and will go away humming some of our tunes!

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Tod Machover’s Schoenberg in Hollywood will be at the UCLA Nimoy Theater in Westwood on May 18, 19, 20 & 22. Tickets are on sale now.