Guest Blog: Composer Philip Miller On PAPER MUSIC

The long collaboration between the South African composer Philip Miller and artist William Kentridge is celebrated in a new song-and-film cycle at the Print Room next month, featuring Kentridge's charcoal and ink drawings and animated films, and live musical performances. Miller explains the project's genesis.

It's not easily definable. Firstly, there are projections of William Kentridge's films; some go back as far as 1994, like Felix in Exile (from his Soho Eckstein series), when we first worked together in Johannesburg - just a piano, a VCR machine, a VHS tape and scribbles of music jotted down in a notebook. William's films are accompanied - no, not really "accompanied", more accurately are transformed into a live theatrical experience.

On stage there are three performers: the concert pianist and wannabe foley artist Vincenzo Pasquariello, who is astounding and funny and plays with such pathos and intelligence. Then there is the singular performance artist and singer, Joanna Dudley, whose vocal range and acrobatics defy description (I sought her out on YouTube because I discovered she could sing "Somewhere over the Rainbow" in reverse). And then there is the equally compelling singer, Ann Masina, jumping from exquisite choral hymns to rap and ending with the most lush of romantic lieders: "Le Spectre de la Rose" by Hector Berlioz.

We put this show together in a small farmhouse in Tuscany when the wonderful composer and festival organizer Andrea Cavallari invited us to perform Paper Music in Bargello, Florence, in the summer of 2014. Each day we walked through fields of lupines to the barn which served as the rehearsal studio. Even the excellent costume designer, Greta Goiris (who designed the costumes for The Nose and Lulu at The Met), pushed her sewing machine in a wheelbarrow through these fields! In little more than a week, the months of improvisational work finally came together with William's new films.

The Paper Music programme is in two sections. The first looks back at some of the music I composed for William's films when we were still exploring and developing a sound and musical language. These were the days when I would record the city sounds of preaching evangelists and street-sellers on the streets of Johannesburg, all with my cellphone. So much of my sound world was influenced by these soundscapes - even the distant singing of congregants of the Zionist Church on the koppies (small scrubby hills) and the plangent cries of the "hadeda" birds became part of it. So much so that I composed a lullaby for sending an alarmed house to sleep. The alarm sounds are transcribed into musical pitches and then performed by Joanna Dudley with astonishing accuracy using just her voice.

The second half of the concert is really a celebration of our years working together. How that working process has changed! No longer do I wait for a completed film before I start to compose. Now we work often in tandem or in a constant dialogue, jumping between sound and image. I record a musical idea; he responds to it with a sequence of images. His mark drawn on a piece of paper becomes an impulse for me to create a sound. A sound or a musical note heard by William can spark a drawing - or sequence of images. This really takes the audience into the essence of Paper Music.

But with each new film or project we still return again and again to the fascinating question: how does this music, when played with these moving images, change the meaning for the audience? Or in reverse: how do these moving images change how we hear the same piece of music?

So much of these new films develop out of moments of playfulness in the artist's studio: testing things out, making mistakes, and just being silly. We often have no idea what the end result will be, but always trusting that the collaboration will bring moments of unexpected delight which we can share and invite the audience to enjoy.

Paper Music is at the Print Room 9-14 October

Picture credit: Ellen Elmendorp, Christopher Hewitt