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Einhorn has emphasized that Voices of Light is not a film
score for The Passion of Joan of Arc, and he feels that any
attempt to compose one would be folly. As he told me a few
weeks after the Avery Fisher performance, “There have been
some 30 scores written for the film. This figure comes from an
article I’ve read; I’ve been able to document about 17. All of
them, according to my informants, are awful. The reason is
obvious. The movie is about as complete as it can be. The
rhythms of the film contradict any typical film score approach
– trying to Mickey Mouse the action, underscore the emotion,
etc.” But to present the two works
back to back would make for a very
long evening and would also be, the
composer noted, “a bit didactic,
like having everyone gather to read
Nietzsche after a performance of
[Richard Strauss’] Also sprach
Z a r a t h u s t r a.” So, the hall went
dark and, with Anonymous 4
singing the Old Testament passage
that opens Voices of Light, the film
rolled.
The movie and the music fin-
ished virtually simultaneously, and
along the way were many striking
correspondences. For example, a
section in the oratorio called “The
Jailers” began just as Joan, on
screen, is being abused by leering
guards. The texts at this point are
drawn from Thirteenth Century
misogynist verse (“When it comes
to women, men, hold your tongue! On the outside she’s reli-
gious, on the inside keen and venomous...”). This, and many
other instances, were not merely happy coincidences, nor
was the music meant to “accompany” the action. Rather, they
quite naturally fell out of Einhorn’s effort to follow the struc -
ture of Dreyer’s film in devising his own work. The result is
that The Passion of Joan of Arc and Voices of Light illuminate
each other. Seen together, they seemed inseparable; yet I
knew from experience that each was entirely self-contained.
This is new territory, and I found that some of my own
personal rules didn’t necessarily hold anymore. Walking into
Avery Fisher, I was disconcerted to see a large mixing console
halfway back in the hall. Every singer was miked, along with
the chorus and orchestra. But once the concert began, it was
apparent that this decision did not deserve the scorn earned
by much of the “sound reinforcement” heard in Broadway
musicals these days. True, I missed the nuanced delicacy of
Anonymous 4’s singing, as I’ve heard it in a Philadelphia
church. But the four vocalists, singing softly for most of
Joan’s music, would never have been heard in the large audi-
torium. In addition, Einhorn likes the aural sensation that
electronic enhancement engenders. “The sound of amplified
instruments is different from non-amplified. Not worse: sim-
ply different. If, say, a violin has a pickup attached and is
amplified so that it is far larger than life, it has an amazing
sound for me. It’s the aural analogy to the ‘magic realism’ of
South American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez.”
Although the composer doesn’t insist upon amplification for
all performances of Voices of Light, it was certainly his origi-
nal intention. “It gave the music a hallucinatory quality that I
thought was entirely appropriate for a represen-
tation of Joan of Arc. It was also a sounding ana-
log to the visual displacements that are a hall-
mark of the visual style of Dreyer’s film.” So, the
nature of one medium informed the technical
realization of another.
1
Was anything lost at the performance that night? One pos-
sible casualty, it occurred to me, were the words Einhorn had
chosen to set to music in Voices of Light. The texts are a rich
composite drawn from biblical sources, medieval female mys-
tics, and Joan of Arc’s own letters.
They are sung in the original lan-
guages: Latin, Italian, and Old and
Middle French. Needless to say,
translations are necessary and they
were provided in the program at the
concert, as they are with the Sony
recording. But in the darkened hall,
it wasn’t possible to follow along.
Would Einhorn consider projection
of the texts in some fashion – as
supertitles, or on something like the
LED screens that are installed on
the backs of seats at the Metropoli-
tan Opera House? “We have not
tried this yet and I would like to,”
said the composer. “It would change
the piece dramatically, but not nec-
essarily for the worse. By projecting
my texts, the balance of image,
music, and word would be shifted
to the word and to the tension
between the linear narrative of Joan’s trial in the film and the
non-linear organization of the music texts. I would love to find
out what that feels like!”
In fact, Einhorn was far less worried than I was about the
audience missing something. “The notion that the experience
of a piece of music begins and ends when the music begins
and ends is an odd one to me. If we are moved, we carry that
emotional experience with us for quite a while. In the case of
Voices of Light, I quite consciously wanted to provide an audi-
ence with more information than they could apprehend at one
performance. Why? Because that’s what makes art fun and
different from simply entertainment. You come back to it, to
experience something that you haven’t grasped before.”
The feeling, then, that there was more going on in the hall
that night than I could take in – this despite familiarity before-
hand with the component parts – may have been the best indi-
cation that I was in the presence of something different,
something we might truly call “multimedia.” I have a growing
understanding that it can be exceptionally demanding, can
mean abandoning some old ideas about how we should per-
ceive art, and that it can be very, very wonderful.
Andrew Quint has written on musical subjects and
reviewed classical recordings for The Absolute Sound. He
lives in Philadelphia.
1 Einhorn reports that reverb was added to the amplified signal. He’s not
certain if there was any compression or equalization, but said he wouldn’t
be surprised if there were; it’s a common practice with amplified music.