Composer Phillip Miller finds his music on the township streets, writes Alex Dodd
Press play. Slowly the room is filled with spirits and memories. Geographies shift: now an empty Johannesburg, now a misty Warsaw. Here an empty leather suitcase, there a red silk dressing gown left on a chair. A violin stretches heavenwards thinly, sadly, underscored by the earthly gravity of the cello.
The music of Phillip Miller is full of longing and melancholy. His is a world in black and white, a world well matched to the words of Kafka and Kundera, but married to the images of William Kentridge. It is Miller’s music that liquifies the animated sequences in Kentridge’s films, bringing their movement to life, taking them one step closer to the place in your throat that constricts before your eyes well up.
“The relationship of music to the moving image is so powerful and unpredictable that even now after five films it still feels as if we are at the beginning of understanding the process,” writes Kentridge on the sleeve of the recently released CD of Miller’s compositions. Phillip Miller: Music for the Films of William Kentridge features eight pieces, including Memo, Felix in Exile, Weighing and Wanting and the recent, much- acclaimed Stereoscope (currently being screened at the Goodman Gallery). It also includes edited extracts of an interview with Miller and Kentridge by Mary Rorich on Classic FM. The sleeve features a series of classic photographs shot by FNB Vita award-winner Jo Ractliffe of the artist and the composer (each viewed as the other’s shadow or nemesis).
Miller’s music is solitary and soaring. An accordion evokes images of a dwindling gypsy circus or a night of mampoer and madness on the stoep in a story by Herman Charles Bosman. Histories surge through the strings. A piano solo is interrupted by the sound of a chair being pulled across a wooden floor and a child tinkering on the ivories in the afternoon light.
“I grew up with music – studied piano and clarinet,” says Miller. Yet when he finished school he made a decision that surprised even himself. After completing a law degree, Miller returned to music. “I went to music school in Cape Town and I remember, within the first month of being there, a composition teacher said to me, ‘Your music sounds like schlock music for a movie.’ And I thought, ‘Gosh, great – that’s what I want.’ Which, of course, was not what he was saying to me.”
Shortly after that Miller moved to Johannesburg where he worked as a lawyer for the Performing Arts Workers Equity in the heady early Nineties surrounded by characters like John Kani, Vanessa Cooke and Carol Steinberg.
But it wasn’t long before the music bug bit again. Although he’d never heard anything Miller had done, Angus Gibson (of Yizo Yizo fame) took the risk of asking the aspirant composer to try writing something for a documentary on the history of Soweto. “Then William contacted me. Once I started doing a little bit for William I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”
This led Miller to a year of study at Bournemouth University. “At the time it was the only university that had a postgraduate course in film music. It had some fancy name like the Electro Acoustic Composition Course for Film Music or something. I had a lot of regret at the time, wondering, ‘What am I doing here in Bournemouth? I should have gone to the Royal College of Music.’ But, in retrospect, I’m glad I did it. It taught me a lot about how to use technology and not be afraid of it. To be in film music today without a sense of how to use technology and computers is really difficult. You need to be able to know how to sample a piece of sound and how to integrate it.”
It is precisely this talent that makes Miller’s music so distinctive. He makes no distinction between found sounds and instrumental sounds. Both are essential elements in his evocative aural landscapes. Unlike Stockhausen and other self-consciously clever experimental composers, Miller never uses sampled sound in an obviously atonal and alienating way. Sampled sounds are as integral to the music as the cello or the piano.
“At the moment I’m doing a TV documentary on the history of three comrades growing up in Alex,” says Miller. “The first thing I wanted was to get some sort of sound of the place, so off I trundled to Alex and just walked around recording sounds I thought might be interesting. I stood near crowds of people. Got the sounds of conversation in a shebeen. Someone whistling. An ice cream seller. Women washing their clothes and the water in those tin buckets dripping down .
“I tape those sounds, I go home and put them into a computer and digitise them. Then I start playing with them in terms of echoing, reverb. Then I add the sampled sounds to the different fragments of music I’m writing and it becomes a kind of sound collage. It’s almost the equivalent of a painting in that you’re hearing sounds that pull you in to a kind of acoustic landscape.”
Miller is currently composing the music for an opera called O&E and the Art of Memory, with Jane Taylor, Kentridge and Ractliffe. A fragment will be performed at the Cape Town Planetarium on November 28. Phillip Miller: Music for the Films of William Kentridge is available at the Goodman Gallery and selected branches of Exclusive Books and CD Wherehouse