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she covers his wounded legs with her beautiful kimono. This scene is symptomatic of the blooming of the lovely flower of lyricism at the very apex of dramatism. And for this pregnant moment in the picture I prepared an appropriately compassionate score. It is not, however, the type of music suitable for concert performances. Even after the reflection of the two characters vanishes from the screen, this lyrical note should be symphonically emphasized in harmony with the dense clouds of smoke that now begin to rise from the crater’s pit. In short, the music I prepared for these scenes is composed step by step in conformity with this scheme of thought and with scrupulous consistency.
Yet, in the completed version of “The New Earth”, this design of mine has been mercilessly obliterated. To be sure, this may be attributed to the difference in points ot view with respect to motion picture production between Dr. Fanck, the director of the film play, and myself as composer. Nevertheless, the task of matching the rumble of a volcano with scenes of rising billows of smoke can be said to constitute no more than a musical superimposition. Dr. Fanck may not have intended this. Again, the musical accompaniment throughout the scenes on the mountain has been deliberately drowned out with the reverberations of the rumbling volcano in a most regrettable fashion. The smoke scenes are invariably accompanied by detonating sounds. The result is a twoffold reproduction of music and an egregiously harsh and violent effect. It may be likened to the commission of an error in a baseball game in which a batted ball that goes soaring into the right field is missed by the player in that position when the center-fielder, un¬ necessarily worried lest the former muff the catch, comes running up and rattles him in a near-collision. The effectiveness of a motion picture is as spice is to cookery, and the ceaseless iteration of volcanic reverberations in a mountain scene serves no other purpose than to deaden the titanic force of the volcano, so that what is intended as an element of effect becomes, on the contrary, a very ineffective thing. If I were to keep on enumerat¬ ing such defecte, there is really no end to the task.
These deficiencies are not, however, confined to the music I have composed for “The New Earth”. One can observe such types of imperfection everywhere in the mo¬ tion pictures of Europe and America, to say nothing of those of Japan. Wherein lies the cause? The answer is simple. It lies in the fact that motion picture producers know something about composed music, but nothing at all about the intrinsic nature of music itself. Even a knock at the door, or a spoken word, must be considered as an element of rhythmical music.
The “talkie” is as yet in its early stages of progress. Consequently I have not lost faith in it. Thus, I shall bring this article to a close by expressing the hope that when the views enunciated here have been embodied in the motion picture, the “talkie” will have achieved its place as a new and original art, just as the silent “movie” became a new form of artistic expression entirely different from the stage drama.
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