(Alexei Aigui Photo by Georgy Bezborodov)
For a country that helped put modern film music on the map with Sergei Prokofiev’s “Alexander Nevsky,” one of its most interesting, and now reluctant native son-turned expatriate is Alexei Aigui. The offspring of Chuvash national poet Gennadiy Aygi, Aigui’s first work was in the John Cage-inspired minimalism of his band The 4’33” Ensemble (named after said modernistic composer). His first score to make international festival waves was with 1998’s “Country of the Deaf,” following it with dozens of Russian films and series.
(Alexei Aigui Photo by Georgy Bezborodov)
Aigui’s eclectic voice would truly be heard beyond Russia’s borders in his partnership with agitprop, Haitian-born documentarian / filmmaker Raoul Peck. His score for Peck’s Oscar-nominated 2016 documentary “I am Not Your Negro” would be the composer’s first soundtrack to get overseas distribution courtesy of France’s Music Box Records label. It was a score whose powerful encapsulation of the black experience showed just how well Aigui’s ears were tuned to other cultures. Taking a detour for an intimate, evocative approach to rabble rousers in the making with “The Young Karl Marx,” Aigui and Peck’s collaboration would reach a new level of provocative scoring and visuals with the genocidal textbook of “Exterminate All the Brutes” (on Max), a series that took a beyond powerful and bleakly eye-opening ironic look at the history of colonial genocide.
Now Peck’s documentary “Silver Dollar Road” (on Amazon Prime) focuses on a distinctly American address of injustice as the Reels family finds their inheritance essentially ripped from them by a development company – a situation more than sadly familiar to a black people forbidden to hold land deeds, even in seeming freedom from slavery. Like “Negro,” Aigui’s symphonic and piano score powerfully captures cultural roots ripped asunder while also evoking a family’s perseverance in blues-jazz roots as ingrained in their cultural soil as their assaulted, imprisoned but never vanquished birthrights.
With dozens of scores to his credit, it’s about time for Aigui’s champions at Music Box to put out a wonderful compilation of the composer’s Russian work. Clocking in at nearly 78 minutes, it’s a stylistic travelogue that ranges from boisterous kid’s adventure to eerie horror and offbeat humor, with of course Aigui’s distinctive voice for drama, one as effective alongside Peck at championing those fighting injustice as it is in a world of melodic cinematic fiction.
Alexei Aigui and The 4’33” Ensemble
Tell me about how your scoring career started?
I started studying the violin at the age of 6, then there was a fairly traditional path of studying classical music, but in my teens I became interested in rock music, then the academic avant-garde, free improvisation, then minimalism. I got into cinema more or less by accident, I thought I was just playing concerts and doing some musical projects.
In the beginning I wrote music for a short meter. A cassette with my music got to the director Valery Todorovsky, who was looking for a composer for his film “The Country of the Deaf.” I remember that to convince him, I played the violin in the editing room, which I took with me as I was going to a concert of my band Ensemble 4’33’’. “Deaf” then made it into the main competition of the Berlinale along with Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown” and the Coens’ “The Big Lebowski.” But like them, we went away without any prizes. After this work, the Ensemble and I became quite a fashionable group in Moscow. My band is now celebrating 30 years together this year, even though we are in different countries. With the musicians of Ensemble 4’33” we recorded a lot of soundtracks when we didn’t need a big orchestra, including music for “I’m Not Your Negro” and many other works.
Another important score for my beginning in film music was the works for “silent” movies, I wrote and performed with the band, including soundtracks for Boris Barnett’s “House on Trubnaya” and “The Girl with the Box”, Medvedkin’s “Happiness” and even Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” for the Berlin-Moscow festival. After writing more than 100 minutes of music for Lang, nothing is scary anymore!
How did you and Raul first meet? And what was it about each other’s work that intrigued you?
I met Raul during the filming of his series “School of Power”, in fact, this was our first work. Someone, probably Pascal Bonitzer, recommended me as a composer. Raul attracted my attention, probably due to his calmness, confidence in what he was doing and his interesting approach to music. There was a lot of different material in this film, I had to make my own version of a Stevie Wonder song, jump from jazz to symphonic music and look for a variety of solutions.
The thing that immediately impressed me about Raul was his attitude towards his team – he has been working with the same people for years and has built a special kind of relationship with them that is rarely seen in modern cinema. Raul always pushes you to do new things. For “Exterminate the Brutes,” he told me to write something I’d never written, to forget the notes I’d written before. So I went to the studio and spent the day recording several dozen violin parts, improvising and mixing them. This music became one of the main themes in the series. I partially replicated this by overlaying the orchestra’s improvisation on the already recorded violin parts. My free-jazz background helped me here when it came to working with large groups of musicians without precise notation of the music. I still enjoy playing improvisation concerts with my new trio FAR (violin, bandoneon and double bass) and regularly improvise with the organist in my village in the Alps.
Tell us about your first collaboration on “Moloch Tropical.” Even though it’s a fictional film about a Haitian despot, do you think this began a running theme for your work together in terms of dealing with exploitation and violence that’s been dealt toward black people and the impoverished in general?
“Moloch” became my first film work with Raul. “School of Power was a TV project. Yes, I think the roots of our work are here. For me it was, of course, a completely new world – a country familiar only from news reports, an exploration of the nature of power and racial problems. It must be said that “Tropical Moloch” is a paraphrase of Alexander Sokurov’s film “Moloch”, which tells about the last days of the main tyrant of the 20th century – Hitler. To work on this movie, we had a very limited budget and no money to buy music, except for one song. So we had to write a song from the TV and our own version of “Happy Birthday” and it was one of the first times when you had to go from someone else’s song to your own music within one song and blend them seamlessly. Since working on “Moloch,” I have had a special relationship with Haiti, following the news from the country and worrying about the fate of the people. Shortly after that movie, there was a terrible earthquake there, and I took it very personally.
You’d both return to Haiti a few years later with “Murder in Pacot,” about things going awry when a once-rich couple invites outsiders to live in their house after the January 2010 earthquake. Do you think anything changed this time in your approach?
Yes, this is a completely different story, the story of survival after a disaster, where classes are mixed. We see the same problems from a different angle. In terms of music, here I used two sopranos to give a certain “detachment” from what was happening, two high voices, as if they were above the story. And in both films, I also worked with the Russian singer Olga Rozhdestvenskaya, who gave a special color to the story. She, by the way, appears in four soundtracks to Raoul’s films – “School of Power,” “Tropical Moloch,” “Murder in Pacot” and
Exterminate All the Brutes.”
With “I Am Not Your Negro,” you played the black-American experience through the eyes of author and poet James Baldwin. What was it like looking at injustice and prejudice in a supposedly “civilized” country?
I grew up in the Soviet Union, where one of the main features of propaganda was the story of the oppression of blacks in America, but in reality, we knew almost nothing about what was happening overseas. In the Soviet Union, the myth of the brotherhood of nations had its own problems and injustices. Several of Baldwin’s books were published in the Soviet Union, but he was not well known. Naturally, I knew about racial segregation in the USA, but it was very important to look at the problem with different eyes, this happened just yesterday, and continues to happen in several other forms. When you watch “I Am Not Your Negro,” you are shocked to see how, in a country that “brings democracy to the world” it was possible to do such a thing not so long ago, such as segregation and massacres of the population. But humanity continues to depress, and there is no end in sight.
In 2017’s “Young Karl Marx” you returned to fiction, but in terms of a biopic about menage a trois of sorts between the founders of Communism. What was it like to go for a bigger sweep with this movie, and was it something you felt was particularly in your wheelhouse?
In my Soviet childhood, Marx and Lenin were something constantly present in school, college, and society. But no one was seriously interested in this. While working on a historical film was interesting, the task is not easy. This is not a blockbuster, yet it is more or less clear where to go. I wanted to show in music some powerful movements of underground layers. After all, this is the story of a man who moved the earth from its place. There were also simpler tasks – for example, coming up with some Irish motifs in the music.
As “Young Karl Marx” was a coproduction of the countries, part of the work was in France and editing in Belgium, with the final mix in Germany, I had to travel a bit to the places where Karl Marx lived. I recorded the soundtrack in Moscow, where we had a budget for an orchestra and I could afford a symphonic score. Raul was able to come to Moscow for the recording, I remember that I came to the recording with my three-month-old son and Raul was very happy to babysit him.
2021’s HBO miniseries “Exterminate All the Brutes” was an especially disturbing and unsparing look at how the world’s superpowers committed genocide upon those they viewed as savages. How did you want to blur the lines between a documentary and fictional film here in your approaches. And how far did you think you could go, especially in an America that’s now trying to bury these sort of atrocities while other countries have come to terms with them?
I think that we should talk about what happened, because trying to forget all the horrors of world history will not lead to anything good. I really liked Raul’s idea of mixing several types of storytelling, turning the situation inside out, sometimes people need to stand up and look at the situation through the eyes of another, through the eyes of the victim. Here Raoul introduced animation into the narrative, which had an unexpected effect when combined with documentary footage and artistic footage. My work on the film was very long at four hours. There were three big recording sessions, two with an orchestra for six months, one with a band (Ensemble 4’33”) for jazz episodes and one with improvisations both solo violin and with an orchestra and a rock band.
How important is the musical point of view in “Silver Dollar Road?”
My task was to structure the chapters of the film, to accompany the heroes in their story, and the most important part – the climax of the film, the exit of the heroes from prison, it was all done with a large musical composition. Once again I was immersed in American history, this time contemporary. So the voices of the characters were important to me. They gave me the opportunity to draw from the timbres of their voices to create music. As one of the main characters with a very distinctive voice – I wanted to back him up with a jazzy bass, as his story already sounded like music in itself.
Were there any composers or scores that you wanted to recall here when it came to films that captured the history of a slave-owning south that’s still up to its old tricks of disinheriting black people?
I really love old American blues, but I wouldn’t try to imitate it, the beauty of this music is in its real roots.
Is there ever a point in documentary scoring where you feel that the music is forcing a point, or do you think that’s its job to clearly show the “bad” and “good” people?
Yes, music can impose a point of view and manipulate. But directly showing a “bad” person will be quite stupid, it will not work. We need music to give emotion, some inner voice of the characters or the narrator. That’s the most important thing.
Give that, tell us about the importance of choosing when to use score in “Silver Dollar Road?
I work quite intuitively. The reference points for the composition in this movie were clear, but you never know how and what kind of music will work in a particular place. Of course, you have to choose exactly the instruments that will sound in the film. Sometimes you realize that you need certain instruments or even certain musicians with their own special sound. This soundtrack was recorded in France in a studio in a small town called Rochefort. It was my first studio work in France, I had to explain everything in French, everything was new – the studio, the piano, the orchestra. It was good that I invited two musicians with whom I had already performed or recorded. They helped me a lot.
With such a complicated history of the land, how important was the use of the graphic “family tree” to convey the Reels’ family saga?
I really like the idea of using animation in documentaries. The family tree here helps us feel the roots of these people who don’t want to be “ripped” out of their land. So I think using that device was a great idea.
Alexei, what instrumentation did you want to use in “Silver Dollar Road,” and why go for a classically-oriented approach as such? And why a piano in particular?
It seems to me that this was an intimate story about a family, so a classical approach was best suited. The piano is one of the most convenient and versatile instruments. On the one hand, one or two notes are enough to convey the mood; on the other hand, it can be quite cold and distant. Still, I am one of the composers who work more with acoustic instruments. With all the wealth of electronics, music created on computers often lacks individuality. Well working with acoustic instruments, despite their seeming banality gives a lot of personal sound.
How did you want the music to give a sense of the family’s spirit to hold onto their land through unimaginable adversity?
I tried to convey the joy and unity of the family in the central composition; I wanted to convey in it both the joy of meeting and the bitterness of lost years, some kind of hope. Piano and sparse string notes were important to accompany the more intimate parts of the movie and its storytelling.
The most elating scene in “Silver Dollar Road” is when the brothers get out of jail after an unfathomable eight years. How did you want to capture their joy while still conveying that the Reels’ struggle was still far from over?
Music goes through several stages and ends, in general, with the question of what will happen next? This composition was the most difficult task. I made four or five completely different themes, but they were all in the same development, which did not suit Raul. So I had to work hard to convey these emotional swings in the music.
In the end, do you think the point of an “activist” documentary is to appeal to people at a plain level in terms of storytelling and music?
Music and film can be both simple and complex, the main thing is that the film contains an idea and emotion, then the form is not so important.
When music and filmmaking come together in a documentary, do you think it carries a particular force to enact real change, especially in the lives of people who’ve been engaging in a seemingly hopeless fight? If so, what do you hope that “Silver Dollar Road” does to help the Reels Family?
I am sure that we can change the world at least a little, otherwise why do we need all these films? And I think that our film will help in this particular case and in general will help to understand this problem. Or to put it another way: We can’t change the world, but we can do something for specific people.
Alexei, you’re now essentially in “exile” because of Russia’s Ukraine invasion. In that sense, do you feel closer to Raoul’s worldview now more than ever?
I don’t know, maybe I began to understand what was happening more and take it more seriously.
(Alexei Aigui Photo by Georgy Bezborodov)
What would you both choose to make a documentary about if you could? And how would choose to score?
I don’t know, I’ve been in a state of some kind of endless nightmare for a year and a half now because of what’s happening in the world, I don’t even know what I would like to make a movie about. It’s my dream to see a movie about the end of the war
In the end, what do you think makes your collaborations with Raul particularly impactful?
Humor and respect for each other.
Music Box Records has done a consistently great job of releasing your soundtracks, and now they’ve done a big compilation of your Russian film scores. Can you tell us about what’s on the album and what these works represent to you?”
This is certainly not a perfect album of my Russian soundtracks, as many great works have already been released or there were difficulties with publishing rights.
“The Adventures of Chuk and Huck” is my first work for a “family movie”, a kind of Soviet fairy tale about children going to Siberia to find their father. It has lots of moving and varied music, which was quite new for me. In fact, one of the most challenging. As I was writing the music, the war in Ukraine broke out and I had to leave, first to Montenegro because my family didn’t have a French visa, then to France. I then had to write the score in my friends’ apartment watching the horrible news, and I had to write funny music about two children, about their funny adventures – chasing wolves, meeting fairy tale characters. The music was recorded remotely, and I finished the mix in a rented apartment in Belgrade, sitting with headphones on in 35 degree heat.
“First Oscar”
“Domovoy” is my first soundtrack for a horror movie, but the CD contains the most “lyrical” compositions, where there is no special clash with the forces of evil and no special horrors. The movie hasn’t been released yet. “The First Oscar” is a war drama about World War II cameramen who shot the very first movie that won an Oscar for Moscow back in 1943. The task from the director was “simple” to make the theme no more complicated than “Schindler’s List. I don’t know how well it turned out, but I’m very happy with my violin theme, plus it was recorded by the wonderful musicians – OpensoundOrchestra. I’m on “Rewind” and “Happy End” – two commercial comedies, as Music Box wanted to show that I write not only gloomy and minor music. “The Wedding Chest is a Russian-French-Kyrgyz film shot in Kyrgyzstan with Natacha Regnier, the oldest work on the CD (2004), a chamber story about a French girls journey to Kyrgyzstan. It has a very small cast of musicians – the soundtrack was recorded by musicians from my band, violin, viola, cello, bass, trumpet. And two works almost unrelated to Russia – “The Anger, a Lebanese chamber drama about the clash between Eastern and Western mentality, and the American “Our Little Secret”, the story of two girls who lost their mother during the attack on the World Trade Center. Unfortunately, this movie has not been released yet either, but with director Yuri Zeltser we recently finished a new work – “Circumcision,” the music for which, ironically, I recorded in a Catholic church in France.
(Alexei Aigui Photo by Georgy Bezborodov)
Watch “Silver Dollar Road” on Amazon Prime HERE
Watch “Exterminate All the Brutes” on Max HERE
Buy Alexei Aigui: Film Music Collection on Music Box Records HERE