Un Chien Andalou (1983)
(with the composition Szenario)

The composition was commissioned by Swiss television in 1981/82 to set the film Un Chien Andalou (1928) by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí to music. I would like to confess right away that this task seemed almost impossible to me. To add a musical scene to a true classic of the silent film era initially struck me as unsuitable for enhancing the unsettling effect of these images and even a hindrance to the viewing of cinematic art, where the viewer's sensuality and intellect are systematically shaken up anyway. Some of the threatening sentences of the pamphlet that was distributed in the streets of Berlin at the beginning of the 1930s came back to my mind: similar contradictions as those made clear in this leaflet (for example, fighting for the preservation of silent film, but for one with orchestral accompaniment ...) were also audible at the premiere of Chien Andalou. Buñuel himself accompanied the first public screening with records of very contrasting provenance: alternating excerpts from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and Argentinian tangos. It may be that the choice of these pieces of music was influenced by the tastes of the time and that the same filmmaker would prefer different sounds today.
But precisely this authentic episode from the history of cinema made me think about various possibilities in the relationship of images to sounds, especially those where a wealth of heterogeneous moments of action are associatively strung together, similar to the generation of forms in a rhapsodic piece of music. The secret, actual theme of this film, as in other exemplary examples of surrealism, is the nature of the invention of motifs themselves; this invention is in any case characterized here by clearly perceptible visual rhythms that are constantly reminiscent of acoustic progressions.

Many surrealist manifestos and documents written at the time of the creation of Chien Andalou mocked this artistic expression, which is articulated in full consciousness. In 1927, Dalí wrote the essay “Art-Film – Anti-art film”, where he culminates his radical aesthetic demands in the paradox: ”Silent, deaf, even blind film [...], because the best film is the one that can be perceived with closed eyes.” In contrast, “An Andalusian Dog” is a movie that you have to watch with your eyes wide open, because from the very beginning you can feel that rare physical tension that sometimes accompanies mental alertness and curiosity.

Even the title of the film cannot be interpreted. For a while, people speculated about the geographical origin of the dog, probably on the grounds that both authors of the script were born on the Iberian Peninsula. Unfortunately, this is just as misleading and schematic as the assumption that every Hungarian composer is capable of writing Csárdás. (And yet the force and despair of the expression, the blasphemous passion of some moments, the oppressive fondness for razors, for example, is unthinkable without Spain in the background). The title in particular inspired me to choose the final cast for my piece. By taking Un Chien Andalou literally, as if the ominous dog were a central subject of the cinematic anecdote, I tried to recreate a plot as surrealistic as Buñuel and Dalí did in naming their work. In contrast to the use of my tape, where a composite of solo dog sounds is audible, here the inclusion of the string orchestra, like the ripieno of a concerto grosso, serves as a tactful, traditional sound source. In this way, I aimed for a musical form that is initially reminiscent of a symphonic poem, but which, on careful listening, confronts the independent parallel course of a piece of absolute music for strings with a series of concrete events via loudspeakers.

An ostinato on the alternating notes E and F in the low register of the cellos and double basses runs through the piece from the beginning until shortly before the end. This motif is constantly varied in articulation and timbre, in sections of different lengths. The frequent changes of stroke types and the different bow and finger pressure of the ostinato are supported by wide-ranging chords and noisy accents in the remaining strings.

Before I wrote this music, I watched Chien Andalou on video recorder perhaps 40 times in a row over two days until I had absorbed the rhythmic structure of the montage and the inner tempo of the images as if in a state of intoxication. Every detail - whether visible or only hinted at - became as familiar to me as if it had been conceived by myself. In this way, I wanted to avoid any precisely measured synchronization process at the moment of composing, which could lead to an impoverishment in the later addition of image and sound. In two places I paid homage to Buñuel and his original soundtrack. Once I quote the first four chords from the prelude to Tristan; towards the end there is a timid tango that I wrote on my own theme. Thus concludes this piece, which in its dedication makes the necessary distinction between the work and the agnostic Luis Buñuel:

For L. B., his work, in reverence

M.K.
(Translation by Edition Peters)