Possible Films

No Such Thing (As Monsters)

Hal Hartley

01. Lookout (1:02)
02. Opening (1:50)
03. Rush Hour (1:25)
04. Dear Jim (1:50)
05. Night Flight (1:58)
06. Boat Song (2:32)
07. North (1:57)
08. Girl At Sea (1:46)
09. Worst News Possible (2:26)
10. Sacrifice (2:33)
11. Rock (0:54)
12. Scared Of You (1:52)
13. No Such Thing (As Monsters) (6:57)
14. Attack (2:05)
15. Communiqué (3:30)

*

Composed and performed by Hal Hartley

Thanks to Jeffrey Taylor for additional arrangements on Attack, and to Andy Russ for general rhythm, programming, and tech advice.

*

It’s about ten years now since the film No Such Thing was shot and I returned to New York from Iceland to edit and compose. While we were making the movie it was called Monster. But a certain (to remained unnamed) global entertainment conglomerate threatened to sue me if I released a movie of that title. No Such Thing, however, was also a title I liked as it had always implied the unsaid “as monsters“.

I’ve come back to this music several times over the years, hoping to rearrange a selection of the movie’s cues as songs in themselves or as suites because I felt I made a big leap in my music with this project and it led to everything else I did musically for the next ten years; that being the music for the films The Girl From Monday and Fay Grim, as well as the second, US, production of my play, Soon.

It was nothing gigantic, just a confidence equal, at last, to my ambition and curiosity. And this, I think, resulted from my collaboration in 1999 with Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. Working with him on our short film, The New Math(s), I spent much more time listening closely to – and discussing – twentieth century orchestral music; everything from Stravinsky to Varese, Messiaen and Schoenberg to Shostakovich, all the way along to Steve Reich and Andriessen himself.

Simply put: music as far as can be from what I myself did.

Still, I was fascinated by what I learned about how “real” composers worked. And I was encouraged to try and make some music as music. It sounds funny to say it that way, but I had always made music I could play myself. I am not a great player, so my music stayed relatively simple, which is not a problem for me; I like simple music and there is, in fact, some very simple music in No Such Thing As Monsters. But I was anxious to try my hand at what I had heard called “pure music” and for the first time in my life, I sat down with pencil and paper and wrote four measures of something like a canon for four voices. I just sort of enjoyed the architecture of the music I was writing on the page.

My tech assistant at the time, Andy Russ, programed these four lines into the Yamaha QY70, a tiny portable digital workstation I was taking with me to Iceland. The result, when I heard it a week later, was a jagged, angular chord progression with a melody kind of punching and clawing its way to the surface. I was very excited. But it was only months later that I saw this little canon had become the quarry out of which most of the score’s motifs were drawn; almost everything I used was in that original collision of notes.

Anyway, one result of all this was that I had to learn to play better. Or get better musicians to play what I was composing. By that time (the early months of 2001) I was making music on the Roland XP80, the industry standard digital music workstation. So this meant becoming a better piano player or programer. I progressed from bad to only fairly bad as a pianist. But I became a competent programer. Finally, I invited my friend Jeff Taylor to work with me for a weekend on arranging what I thought at the time was going to be the opening credit music – the fullest, most orchestrated variation on the canon in the film. Specifically, I needed help with it’s middle “break”. My canon tended to help create “Piano Attacks”, brash uncompromising walls of sound that made me think of boulders and stones raining down on skinny bicycles; fun for a while, but it had to let up occasionally. I needed a tense, quiet interlude in the middle. My “big musical idea” during those weeks was what Jeff pointed out as “seconds” or “thirteenths” – a harmony of two consecutive notes but played an octave away from one another. This can have a wrenching, dissonant, squealing effect and was, within reason, what I was after – ascending chords that twisted and stretched forward, sometimes screaming with the effort. Jeff worked with me to refine the intervals, then suggested starting the ascending progression on the second beat of the measure, so the string arrangement seemed to be pursuing its own course while the rest of the song sawed its way through it.

Nothing, of course, that Bernard Herman hadn’t done fifty years before. But it was a watershed two days for me.

It’s now called “Attack” and was not used in the film. But Opening, which became the credit sequence cue, is a variation on the arrangement we did that weekend. And so is Lookout.

Then, there’s the simple music…

North and Girl At Sea were exercises I gave myself, remembering the Anglo-Irish folk songs I heard as a kid sung unaccompanied at various kitchen tables by my Uncle Leo and – much earlier – by my mother and her sisters. Simple, plaintive melodies sung without rushing. I had never started a song by creating its melody. I had always made chords and then poked around for a melody which suited them. This was just the opposite.

Boat Song is the first song I made for No Such Thing, mostly by banging around and pushing buttons on the XP80 to see what the machine could do. Days later it began to sound like a song and I followed on from where I left off with my melody exercises the year before.

Some of these tunes, like Rush Hour, Sacrifice, and Dear Jim, were begun in 1996 when I was making the score for Henry Fool.

Scared Of You and Night Flight are the same composition simply assigned to different sounds on the machine. It was made as a guitar piece as you hear it in Scared Of You on the little QY70 in the apartment in Rekjavik where Miho and I were living during the film’s production. As an experiment, I switched the sound patch and was met with this weird gasping, hyperventilating, wall of synthetic strings. When we returned to New York, I added flute, light percussion, and this strange sample called “Tape Echo” which is some sort of reversed orchestral noise. (I use it often in these pieces.) I left Scared Of You as it was, with its occasional, impossibly low notes – as if played on a guitar with an extra, lower, string below E.

No Such Thing (As Monsters) is a suite of the secondary musical themes. Worst News Possible is also a recurring theme in the film associated with the character of the Boss and her hi-jinx in the New York scenes.

In the end it’s just some movie music. But it is the most confident music I had made up till then. I’m glad I finally got the best of it organized and presentable.

Hal Hartley, March 2010