My Composing Process: Man Ray's "Le Retour a la Raison" (1923)

Dear Readers,

Yesterday, on a whim, I decided to score Man Ray’s iconic 1923 short film “Le Retour a La Raison” (The Return to Reason). It is a kaleidoscope of quickly edited images. A truly confusing and, at times, disturbing visual experience.

I composed an original score, from start to finish, in an hour and 45 minutes.

The speed at which I worked was inspired by the film itself. Watching the blizzard of visual information inspired me to create an equally blizzard-like sonic work. The entirety of this score is improvised. I seldom did re-takes on recordings, so what you are hearing is basically a collection of first-take improvisations. The result is a score that reflects the high-octane short that Man Ray created.

My Improvisational Composing Process

I watched the film through one time and then immediately began composing. I set the tempo in my Logic File to 100 bpm, and thought initially that I would create a series of object rhythms (similar to my work on Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant). Instead, as I began layering tracks in, I realized that a free, less tempo-constrained sound functioned better in the world of the film. Man Ray’s short has a distinct tempo to its editing, and I wanted to call attention to the tempo by specifically having no tempo in the music. You can hear the film’s editing in your head as you watch it, and the music simply sits underneath, creating a sonic environment for the film to exist freely in.

From an orchestration standpoint, I utilized a number of live instruments. Throughout the last six months i have been learning to play the guitar and, recently, I have also been learning the mandolin and the harmonica. I also have been using an auto harp and a melody harp in recent work of mine. Finally, while based in Edinburgh, I purchased a tin whistle and began learning how to play it. All of these instruments make appearances in my score for Man Ray’s short.

And the live, spontaneous, improvisation with these instruments went a long way to creating the distinct sound of the score. For most of the live instruments, I added stereo delay, sample delay, echo and a pitch shift. Most of the time I had these parameters set prior to playing in an improvised part. So, what I was hearing through my headphones while I was playing the tin whistle was this disturbing, delayed sound that did not resemble the live sound of the instrument. The augmentation of sound allowed for me to play odd gestures (like over blowing and then quickly under blowing to make the tin whistle have a "voice crack).

While playing these live instruments, the notes took a back seat to the sonic gestures. This created a clashing and atonal sound that also felt spontaneous and evocative. For example, while doing picks and trills on the mandolin, I wasn’t thinking about the notes I was playing (partly because I’m still learning the instrument) and instead was focusing on dynamics and speed to reflect moments near the end of the film.

Below you can hear small, isolated, excerpts from a number of the improvised live recordings. Pay attention to the shape and speed of the musical gestures, and how the processing elevates the live acoustic sounds.

Sounds Become Music

This film’s series of edited images string together a tumultuous view the city and of objects through Man Ray’s eyes. In addition to instruments I sought to also bring real-world soundscape recordings into this score.

As I did in Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant, I utilized a series of ambient soundscapes that I recorded while in Europe and the US over the past year. For this score, I used street recordings from Barcelona, Paris, London and recordings of water from Killin, Scotland and Oxford, Maine, USA. I created sampled instruments out of a small segment of the Barcelona recording and of a pontoon boat riding through Thompson Lake in Maine.

The blending of different city soundscapes reflects the edited and layered quality of the film itself. I picture this film as a reflection of a dreamscape. As Sigmund Freud writes in The Interpretation of Dreams: “If a day has brought two or more experiences which are fitted to stimulate a dream, then the dream fuses the mention of both into a single whole: it obeys an impulse to fashion a whole out of them” (159). The repetitive, chaotic and layered nature of the film equates to Freud’s view of the world and the rules of dreams. Therefore, different recordings from disparate places, processed, and edited together to seem like a coherent whole deftly describes the process of dreaming.

Capturing the Live Sound

Recently I have been listening to a ton of vinyl albums from the 1970’s, specifically Linda Ronstadt, Moody Blues, Paul Simon, Rod Stewart and Carly Simon. Something that I noticed while listening was that you feel as if you are in the recording studio with these artists. You can hear them breathing, and you can hear small little mistakes, and their fingers as they move across the guitar strings, and even the sound of the recording space. The albums feel raw, and personal.

In this score, I seek to create a sonic space artificially, and in doing so make a track that feels live and improvised. You can hear me moving around, my fingers hitting the wrong notes on the guitar and mandolin, the autoharp out of tune and my breathing.

It is no where near a perfectly performed track, and that was my goal.

Conclusions

This score represents another creative step for me in terms of discovering my own musical voice. I see it as a natural follow-up to my score for Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant. In both scores, I seek to reflect the psychology of the film through the music. For Le Retour a la Raison, I pushed the experimental nature of my music even further by giving way completely to improvisation. This resulted in an automatic score that still contained musical motifs that, instead of planned and notated, were made up entirely in the moment of performance.

As always, thank you for reading. If you have further questions about how I created this score, feel free to email me at nicholasescobarcomposer@gmail.com. Keep a look out for future blog posts about my composing process!

Your’s Musically,

Nicholas Escobar

The Logic File. You can see the long-form live recordings for the different live instruments. Mostly unedited and mostly the first improvised takes.