As a percussionist with the world-renowned Alloy Orchestra - described by Roger Ebert as "the best in the world at accompanying silent films" - Ken Winokur reveals that the group doesn't have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on musical upkeep. A simple trek to the kitchen or garage will suffice.
"Our standard rack includes horseshoes, plumbing pipes, truck springs, that sort of thing," Winokur says. "Pots and pans, hubcaps, scraps of metal ... our most talked-about instrument, perhaps, is a bed pan. If it makes noise, we'll play it."
The Alloy Orchestra has been making noise for 15 years now, and not just on household items; since 1991, the Boston-based ensemble, with its assemblage of "junk percussion" instruments, has been accompanying silent-film presentations across the globe. Annual performers at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, the musical trio - composed of director, percussionist, and clarinet player Winokur, and fellow musicians Terry Donahue and Roger Miller - has performed at such venues as Lincoln Center, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, and even the Louvre, and on September 7, will perform in Iowa for the first time, at the University of Iowa's Hancher Auditorium.
At this benefit performance for the renovation of Iowa City's Bijou Theatre, the Alloy Orchestra will accompany a presentation of the legendary 1925 silent horror film The Phantom of the Opera. The Lon Chaney classic is the 27th feature-length silent work for which the Alloy Orchestra has composed an original score, yet Winokur reveals that the group's fame as silent-film accompanists began quite by accident.
"The band actually came together not to do films," he says, "but to do a performance with a kind of huge installation of homemade junk, assembled for a performance in Boston. Terry and I had been working together in a variety of bands; he was the other percussionist in town who did this kind of avant-garde percussion, using found objects. And the keyboard player at the time, Caleb Sampson, and I had done a million scores for Sesame Street, contemporary animation, and performance art. So, you know, we were just guys working together in town, and we kind of came together for this thing."
They were called by David Kleiler - a programmer for Boston's Coolidge Corner Theatre - to perform at his venue, and Winokur says, "At that performance ... Kleiler thought of the idea of having us write a score for the silent film Metropolis." According to Winokur, Fritz Lang's science-fiction masterpiece from 1927 seemed to be "a very perfect film for Alloy - for what we had been, which was this kind of junk-metal assemblage that you can think of as a post-catastrophic, you know, city, in a way.
"So we realized this was a great idea," Winokur continues, "and jumped into it. We only had a few weeks to do it, and we composed a score as opposed to just sitting there and improvising."
Then as now, the group began composing their musical accompaniment with a screening of the film. Winokur says, "We get a video of it - nowadays, we actually transfer it to the computer - and we start from the first scene and we just improvise. Everybody throws out ideas, and we all just try to do something that sounds good."
For a group that utilizes so many found objects, Winokur explains that creating music "that sounds good" isn't as difficult as you might imagine. "We're not opposed to using conventional gongs - we have gongs from all over the world - and bells and that kind of thing. [But] we actually have, for instance, eight steel pans, and because there are eight different ones, they're tuned in their own way. Not to specific notes, but high to low, eight notes, the same amount you'd have on a regular scale. So we can play a tune on 'em. A lot of this junk percussion is a lot more melodic than what you would get from a drum set."
Once the group has improvised its way through a first screening, Winokur says, "we do it a time or two until we feel we've got something that works for a scene, and without thinking about it too much, we just move on to the next scene. We go through the whole film, and then back to the beginning again. And," he says, "then we say, 'Heh. That was no good. Let's try it again.'"
By all accounts, that first performance of Metropolis in 1991 was good. "We had a whole weekend's worth of shows," says Winokur, "and every time we performed them, the audiences got bigger and bigger, until by the end of the weekend we were pretty much selling out this really large movie theatre. And it kind of occurred to us," he says with a chuckle, "that this was a pretty special combination, music and silent film. At this point, there hadn't been a lot of this going on in the country."
Following the Metropolis performance, there would soon be a lot more. "About two years after that," Winokur says, "the Telluride Film Festival got wind of us, and they had a score they wanted us to do for a German expressionist film called Sylvester, and invited us out to the festival to perform a new score."
The Alloy Orchestra's performance at the 1993 Telluride Film Festival is widely considered one of the most spectacular in the festival's history; Kenneth Turan, in the Los Angeles Times, wrote that the Sylvester score was "so rich and remarkable it seemed to reinvent the concept of silent-film music."
"From that moment on," Winokur says, "we kind of jumped out of the local Boston scene and started playing on a more national kind of circuit. And ever since then, we've been writing scores - many of them for the Telluride Film Festival - and performing all around the world."
Reviews for the Alloy Orchestra's silent-film compositions have been nothing short of rapturous - literally dozens of accolades can be found at the group's Web site (http://www.alloyorchestra.com) - and after their friend and bandmate Caleb Sampson committed suicide in 1998, Winokur and Donahue were fortunate to find a replacement in percussionist Roger Miller. Winokur says of Miller, "We had worked with him many times on soundtracks, and he's also had experience doing silent films on his own. So of all the guys in town, he was the only choice. He's a fabulous musician and a really great composer, so we were able to pick up from a fairly dismal prospective future."
The Alloy Orchestra's original score for The Phantom of the Opera - first performed for the Maryland Film Festival in the fall of 2005 - was, says Winokur, "something we'd been looking forward to for a long time. We actually almost wrote that one in our sleep. Not that we didn't put any work into it," he says with a laugh, "but we really have this kind of very dramatic style of music." With horror and science-fiction films among the group's fortes, says Winokur, "in some ways it was a very easy one for us to sit down and create.
"In fact," he continues, "the composition is, oddly, the easiest part of our job. But after we've done those simple kinds of melodic ideas, it has to be turned into music, and that takes a lot of work. Not only does the song have to work as a song and fit with the picture - which is always the most important criteria - but then how do you get from Point A to Point B in the movie in a kind of logical transition? We end up with, by the end, something like 75 songs, many of them very short, all strung together in an elaborate kind of transition. The scores end up being on the level of complexity of a symphonic piece."
Yet Winokur believes that in addition to the quality of the music, those witnessing the group's Phantom performance will be equally impressed by the quality of the film. He says, "I was able to actually purchase a fabulous, quality negative of Phantom of the Opera," which he did through Alloy's sister organization Box 5. That's a collaboration with his wife (filmmaker Jane Gillooly) that Winokur says is dedicated to "restoring films to the highest degree possible, and presenting some of the classics of the silent era with new prints that we're responsible for.
"It was a very elaborate color production originally," he says of the 1925 Phantom, "and we were able to get a hold of the only remaining color scenes of the film from a collector in California. We also imitated what would have been a approximation of the color scheme - 218 different tint changes. We believe it's the uncontested best print of Phantom of the Opera available in the Western hemisphere. We have one print of it, and that's what we're showing."
So Winokur is as committed to film as he is to music? "Nowadays, financially, I'm really committed to film," he says with a laugh. "It's another question whether that was the best idea in the world, but it makes for some great Alloy shows."
The Alloy Orchestra will accompany The Phantom of the Opera at Iowa City's Hancher Auditorium on Thursday, September 7, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets for this benefit production for the Bijou Theatre are $28, and are available by calling (319) 335-3041.
