Music by Graham Tardif

(Cast)

Paul (band singer) Paul Philpot Little Greg (keyboards) Todd Telford Big Greg (drummer) Paul Simpson Middle Greg (bass) Stephen Smooker Steve (guitarist) Peter Monaghan

Violinist Emma West

Sincere thanks to John Reynolds Music City

Largo from ‘Xerxes’ by G. F. Handel performed by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jose Serebrier licensed from KEM Enterprises Inc USA

Organ improvisation performed by Norman Kaye

“Bad Boy Bubby Blues” devised by Peter Monaghan

“If You See Kay” devised by Paul Philpot

Music in the film:

There are a number of sequences involving singing and performing of music.

When the young violinist (Emma West) appears in the film, de Heer says he originally thought of using sourced music, and he’d been collecting bits of music so that he could put all his favourite bits of music in the film. He originally intended to use Vivaldi in this sequence, but composer Graham Tardif’s view was that they should go original. His view prevailed, and so he composed an original piece for the violin, but knowing what de Heer had been after. (Below: the Emma West appearance)

Bubby and the Salvos:

Live music in the film starts early, with Bad Boy Bubby encountering Salvos when he emerges into the world.

Bubby and the band:

Bubby then meets a garage band. Rolf de Heer had in his early days been in a band, and its membership was made up of people he knew, and would be able to deliver the grunge sound he was after: Dressed in preacher gear and with a fondness for sex aid props, Bubby becomes a singer with the band: The band scenes that happen after the ninety minute mark of the film were all shot on the one night. Hope had a tape of the music to work out the timings of his ‘Pop’ contributions.

De Heer confesses in the DVD commentary that he didn’t know how to shoot the final concert song, but with enthusiastic extras to hand, he decided to go the old hand held and shoot it five times (de Heer was so pleased with one of the extras that he gave Jamie Nicolai a credit as “number one fan” - de Heer says he couldn’t take his eyes off Nicoali’s obsessive fandom work. Hope jokes he’s having a religious experience).

In the same commentary track, Hope says a lot of people sees the end concert as a Nick Cave performance, but he wasn’t channeling Cave - Bubby uses props that have previously been established through the film, with the big breasted dummy that turns up at the end the capper to all the big breast moments that run through the film. De Heer notes that all the words were in the script, which was written at a time he knew nothing about Nick Cave - though he’s since come to know Cave.

Bagpipes:

Bubby is also notoriously anally raped in prison while enduring the sound of bagpipes.

The sequence featuring the bagpipes in the jail came from another script de Heer had stopped working on, but the idea of which he liked enormously. He confesses to loving the sound of bagpipes, and thinks Bubby also has a strong emotional connection to them, but acknowledges some people think Bubby goes berserk because he hates the sound. The intention was that Bubby likes the music and wants to get closer to it and be part of it, “and those who love the bagpipes would understand it completely.”

Hope tells a yarn about one viewer who told him that this and the next sequence which also included the bagpipes was the peak of horror for the Bubby character. “Not only is he being raped, but he’s also subjected to the bagpipes.” (they both laugh, and de Heer sighs that he loves ‘em, but Hope insists that it’s a bizarre scene which has that Elizabethan era sense of torture to it):

A couple of guitarists also strum while Bubby is in a restaurant checking out Angel: Organ Theme:

Unlike the Vivaldi, replaced by a live violinist, the bit of organ music used in the film - when the band puts headphones on Bubby while they discuss his fate - was as originally conceived.

Composer Graham Tardif prepared three different replacement versions, but de Heer preferred the original.

Even a different version of the same piece of music lacked what he was after and found in his original choice, which had helped inspire the writing of the scene, he says in the DVD commentary. Remarkably, he adds, the original was just a disc he’d picked up somewhere, recorded in Adelaide in St Peters (the Anglican cathedral) where one of the following scenes was shot.

Later when the organ theme returns (over Bubby looking at his desolate home, marked with drawings of the body positions of his dead mum and pop), de Heer notes again how hard Tardif tried to make alternative versions work, but didn’t capture what was in the original.

De Heer admits that part of it was because they used the original as a temp track in editing, “but part of it was really ‘yes, this piece of music was astonishingly correct.’”

The original has been released on a number of discs, as in this collection: Norman Kaye:

Norman Kaye, who was an organist in real life, improvised his piece on the organ, which was recorded in real time for the film on location in St Peter’s Cathedral. Composer Graham Tardif:

Composer Graham Tardif worked with Rolf de Heer on his first feature, the children’s film Tail of a Tiger, and became a long term musical collaborator, working on many of de Heer's later films. Real Time features a profile of Tardif here: Since meeting de Heer when the budding writer/director/producer was still at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, and composing the music for his diploma short, The Audition, Tardif’s subsequent career highs include The Tracker (2002) which he says “was built around the idea of these paintings [by Peter Coad] and these ten or eleven songs going through the film. To a large extent, the music informs [de Heer’s] thinking.” Certainly, de Heer is a director attuned to sound designer Randy Thom’s demand that directors should be “Designing a movie for sound” (www.filmsound.org), not simply leaving it to the end in the hope it may be somehow improved by the hasty addition of some great music.

Tardif explains how early he is usually involved by de Heer in the process: “We’d have a lot of discussions and we’d sit down and talk about what it should be like and we’d plot the film out together and then I’d come up with the music based on that discussion […] but I’d actually start serious thinking when there’s a finished script.” I asked Tardif how he communicates melodic ideas to someone without musical training: “We speak in terms of the feeling of the scene or the underlying emotion that he’s trying to convey rather than discussing diminished sevenths or anything like that. We can talk musical styles, I mean he’s not musically illiterate to the extent that we can’t talk about whether it would be a western style or a percussive, or, you know, he’ll understand that, or whether it’s classical or orchestral or rock.” Thus, Tardif and de Heer decided early in pre-production for The Tracker that they wanted the feel of a live band fronted by an Indigenous male singer. The result was Archie Roach later performing the songs— which de Heer had penned and Tardif had composed—live at a screening of the film in the Melbourne Concert Hall. Awards were received for best score from the Film Critics Circle and the IF Awards. The songs serve as an extra character, expressing the sorrow of a subjugated people, and Tardif’s music positively charges the text of the screen’s image.

But Tardif’s scores are not guilty of simply retelling the story or redundantly repeating what the dialogue or visuals have already made clear. He illustrates his occasional intention to juxtapose conflicting emotions by referring to a scene in The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2000), a film characterised by a lush, epic score performed by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and a 40-voice choir: “Where they were rowing back across the river after the leopard had been killed, now that was something where I think I used music against what was going on in the action to give a lot more depth to the scene, rather than just replicate what’s going on in the action, to juxtapose the visuals which were quite fast paced, but the music was quite slow and glorious in a way. Rather than give a sense of the pace of the boats and the rowing it was more a sense of what the homecoming actually meant: it was an achievement and a victory but at the same time, because the death of the leopard was not something the old man had wanted to happen, it was a tragedy as well.”

Alexandra’s Project (2003) had an entirely different kind of score. Within a minimalist, synthesised soundscape, the non-diegetic music evokes a sense of tense foreboding that maps the deterioration of suburban family life. Tardif identifies this as one of his favourite works because “unlike other films in which I had multiple tones and dynamics and instruments to work with, I wanted to push the tension with the minimum tonal range that would actually work with the minimum palette possible, so it was probably my most experimental film.” With such a spare, unobtrusive, electronic score, ambient sounds like the turn of a key in a deadlock take on an almost menacing aspect and the hyper-reality of these sounds, amidst the relative silence, informs the audience that Steve, the beleaguered husband, is very isolated and disconnected from any outside help. The sound scenarios in Alexandra’s Project transcend the traditional role of the soundtrack of merely supporting the onscreen image. The auditory elements of the film’s metallic timbre highlight not just Steve’s mental terror but also further the depiction of the suburban brick veneer house as family prison. The integration of all the aural ingredients communicates these ideas effectively, and rather than following the eye, they lead it.

In 2007, de Heer returned to Tardif to compose for his slapstick silent comedy, Dr. Plonk, which Tardif identifies as another film score he is proud of “because it was 90 minutes of wall-to-wall music.” Performed by Melbourne band The Stiletto Sisters, the combination of violin, piano accordion, double bass and piano is beautifully lively, and one senses this black and white homage to Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin would not have worked as well with de Heer’s original idea of accompaniment by a single Wurlitzer organ, regardless of any period authenticity it may have lent. But Tardif acknowledges the expense involved in composing and recording original music for films rather than pre-recorded songs, “Whenever you go into a studio you have to be really prepared because of the cost of time—$50,000 a day for the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. If you’re not ‘there’ when you go into the studio you’re just spending studio time rewriting and that’s really counterproductive. With The Stiletto Sisters I worked with them for a week after the score had been written...we got the score right and then went into the studio for three days to do the recording.”

De Heer’s reliance on original music is in stark contrast to the Australian film industry’s tendencies, as identified by Rebecca Coyle: “In the period from the so-called renaissance of Australian film that occurred in the 1970s, there have been two identifiable ‘eras’ in film music. In the first period, orchestral arrangements were frequently used [… as opposed to] the subsequent era, when Australian film followed an international tendency to include popular music in soundtracks.” (“Introduction: Tuning up”, Screen Scores, AFTRS, Sydney, 1997). But de Heer’s bucking of the trend is not surprising, for as Tardif puts it: “With his combination of the sound and the music, he is an aural auteur.”

There is another feature on the sound design in de Heer's films which mentions his colloboration with Tardif, here. Go to the original for footnotes etc: … In The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, de Heer’s troubled foray into the larger-budget international film world, the ongoing sounds of the jungle maintain an intensity and tension throughout the film that has a more powerful effect on the viewer than Graham Tardif’s rather over-dramatic orchestral score. Sound designer James Currie also gives special attention to different locations in the film – the ambient sounds define spaces such as the riverside, a large hall, a small hut or the open jungle at night, enhancing the way viewers differentiate between these places – and to the colour and texture in the voice of the Old Man (Richard Dreyfuss) as he reads his trashy love novels, reinforcing this film’s emphasis on the pleasure in the simple things of life. Like David Cronenberg with Howard Shore, Joel and Ethan Coen with Carter Burwell or Fellini with Nino Rota, de Heer has used the same composer, Graham Tardif, for the majority of his films (one notable exception being a film about music: Dingo). It is interesting to follow the development of the de Heer/ Tardif relationship, leading to extraordinarily powerful results in their most recent collaboration, Alexandra’s Project. In conjunction with no less than three sound designers (James Currie, Andrew Plain and Nada Mikas), Tardif’s minimal electronic score inAlexandra’s Project implies the undercurrent of invisible electro-magnetic signals in an urban landscape, making an ordinary street seem like a harbinger of impending doom. This creates a tension that sets the scene for the entire film, echoing the atmosphere of other suburban thrillers such as Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1996). The score is electronic, a minimal collection of colours and depths; it leaves room for ambient sounds to play a significant part, as often occurs in de Heer’s other films – such as the wonderful moment in Dingo on a traffic island in the middle of Paris, where the trumpet solo of John “Dingo” Anderson (Colin Friels) mingles with night-time traffic and he searches for a sound he hears in a subway labyrinth. All atmospheric sounds in Alexandra’s Project are exaggerated: the keys turning in locks, steps in the carpet and mechanised blinds leading to the ultimate household appliance, the vibrator. A similar emphasis is present in the mise en scène, with close-ups of household objects such as the toaster and light switches. The powerful, central role of video in this film significantly changes the way the viewer hears the audio – like Steve, we are listening to Alexandra pre-recorded on video, allowing the film to be understood as “a critique on the way we watch so-called erotic entertainment”. The presence of the television screen is conveyed beautifully with actual boxy television sound, and the sequences were filmed with the video running on the television, allowing Steve to respond to it in real time and creating a complex sonic situation. Steve’s interaction with the television set allows him control over the pace of the film up until Alexandra’s broadcast becomes “live”, giving her the control she so lacked in their relationship. At one stage, Steve takes refuge from the television screen behind an overturned couch, but continues his discussion with Alexandra and is drawn out again by her vocalised threats. Until then he was able to stop and start the video, crunching the buttons on the remote control. The eerie vocal loop “cheers dad” accompanying the last remaining images of Steve’s children on tape is a piece of sound art in itself. Again breathing features in the soundscape – especially in the piercing scene where Alexandra’s tense breathing is the only audio provided, making us complicit with her actions; as she nears the camera and the volume increases we feel more and more uncomfortable. The most meaningful collaboration of de Heer and Tardif is perhaps in The Tracker, with Tardif as composer and de Heer as lyricist for songs performed by indigenous performer Archie Roach. This not only adds an extra layer of narrative to the film, but also personalises the de Heer/Tardif working relationship and gives it a new voice. After much experimentation, de Heer claimed the songs needed to be performed by an indigenous performer in order to “attach” themselves to the film(11). The songs comment on the action, putting a sympathetic white man’s words into a black man’s mouth for a tale of revenge, and thus emphasising the most potent themes in the film whilst retaining the concept that this is a tale of a group of individuals. Again the silences carry the greatest emotional tension in this film, allowing the outback to speak for itself, similar to the way Jon “Dingo” Anderson’s trumpet speaks for the outback in Dingo. This, in addition to the use of paintings by Peter Coad, makes this film an important combination of artistic media – perhaps a direct result of the film being an arts festival commission (by the 2002 Adelaide Festival of the Arts under the artistic direction of Peter Sellars). Roach later performed the songs live with the film in Melbourne and Adelaide, almost in the spirit of the silent movies – demonstrating how much narrative and emotional power the songs themselves hold. It would appear that Tardif has a separate life working for World Vision, at least according to this link here:

Graham Tardif is director of World Vision’s Australia Program, and composed the scores for Rolf de Heer’s films The Tracker and Charlie’s Country.

That link shows this thumbnail photo of Tardif:

There is another link on the site which led to a YouTube video talking about the work of World Vision (link now dead).

(Below: Graham Tardif in that video)