CineConcerts met with composer Yair Elazar Glotman to discuss his score to the new Netflix film Reptile!

CineConcerts (CC): How has your training in orchestral contrabass and electroacoustic composition influenced your approach to film scoring? 

Yair Elazar Glotman (YEG): The beginning of my musical path started before that; my main instrument is the upright bass. I originally started from a jazz background, and when you are playing this instrument, just with the fingers, just pizzicato, you're really unlocking only half of its possibilities. When I picked up a bow, I realized that there is this whole other aspect to the instrument that I was excited to get to know, which is how I got into classical music. My interests shifted immediately to the bass in the orchestra, and I started playing as a kid in youth orchestras. Being part of the orchestra is such a special feeling, playing together with the big section, it's a totally different thing. 

But also playing bass in a way, it’s inherent that you're always like a sideman, whether it's in the context of jazz and classical music or even with rock. You always need at least one other person, ideally with harmonic possibilities. I then became really interested in how and what I could do in order to create music by myself and expand the possibility of the instruments. That's how I became interested in electronic music since it gave me the freedom to be able to create whole musical ideas by myself. My path was always kind of going into different direction. I was also captivated by electroacoustic compositions and spectralism and by different kinds of composers. It was then that I abandoned the classical, traditional orchestral playing. 

But only when I started working on film composition, I realized that all of those different paths provided valid tools in my toolbox. It all became useful knowledge, the understanding of orchestration and string playing articulations was very handy, but also the understanding of improvisation and improvisational instruction and language from jazz really made it easy to collaborate with other musicians. Some aspects from electronic music and also music engineering and production became very beneficial. I had much more understanding of recording, editing, and processing and treating sound. So, all of that kind of clicked together when it came to scoring films. 

CC: So, what you're talking about is this textural and spatial way of composing music. Can you talk a little bit about how that type of composition played a role in Reptile? 

YEG: I really like the textural aspect and the spatial properties of the composition. These are just as important for me as a valid way of expression as harmony, harmonic progression, or melodic thematic materials. For me, it's another way to express a musical idea and I think with the film, there is such a level of deception, ambiguity and abstraction that was really interesting for me to try and mirror in the music. 

I don't want to spoil too much about the film, but the idea of an enigmatic point of view was really important because the perception of characters shifts, and I was concerned about not giving too much away. I think sometimes melody and harmony, especially melody, is like face recognition - when you hear it you cannot unhear. Of course, we are trained to hear melodic fragments. It could be even a three-note melody and we latch onto it. I also realized it has so many references and connotations and I wanted to break free from those, so working with slightly more textural focused composition meant that I could convey more ambiguous feelings and relationships to the picture. It almost mirrors the arc of the main character played by Benicio Del Toro, the way in which things keep on changing and things are gradually revealed. And also, in a way it feels like reality is kind of closing in on the main character, which I tried to mirror in the music as well.

CC: Was there anything in the film that was a specific challenge for you as a composer? Whether it was finding the right instrument or the right sound to define a tense moment?

YEG: I don't know if challenging is the word. It was more about trying to come up with this sonic language, like the universe of the score. Instrumentation wise, we knew we were going to work with the string ensemble and have those references to traditional film noir or string writing. It was really important for me to find a way to integrate it into this Reptile universe. I was really interested in how I can process it to create this slightly colder feeling to the strings, which is somewhat discordant. Once I found how I wanted to treat those instruments, I made them almost sound metallic and blended it back into this slightly warm string playing. That was a moment where everything clicked. I was like, okay, we have a vocabulary, so to speak, to work with. 

It was interesting to find a way to plant certain musical ideas and gestural parts early on when the arc is slightly more tense, more urgent, kind of propelling moments in the score that, when they are happening, this will still be cohesive with the rest of the composition. This is why all the percussive elements are also originating from the upright bass. There are no real drums. It's all kind of different treatments and different extended playing techniques on the bass that creates those kinds of percussive elements. 

CC: Was your creative process unique for this film? I imagine every project is different, like finding that aha moment. But do you begin sitting at a piano or sketching out your ideas?

YEG: A lot of it originates from the way I respond to the script or the imagery or the conversation with the director. Grant [Singer], the director, has a past of working on music videos. He’s worked with amazing artists like The Weekend and Taylor Swift. So his understanding and knowledge of music is pretty vast. We were able to kind of riff on the references early on, throwing out different directions and ideas.

CC: Did you write temp music for the film before it was shot, or did you only write music after it was done? 

YEG: No, I didn't write temp. I think a lot of the conversation Grant was thinking about different pieces by Bartok or like traditional scores, like Bernard Herrmann. But also speaking a lot about electronic scores and this gave a ballpark idea of the sound or the mood that we were going to go after. 

CC: Tell me a little bit about your collaborations, you've worked with Jóhann Jóhannsson and Hildur Guðnadóttir, of course. How have they helped shaped your own unique personal style?

YEG: I feel very, very fortunate to collaborate with friends that I also look up to so much as artists. Each person has shaped the way I think about music immensely, but also as a human being and work ethic. Sometimes you learn more about the approach rather than, oh, here's a musical lesson. Working with Jóhann, for instance, I learned so much about his approach to composition, and it kind of broadened my perception of what being a composer means. Everyone has this fantasy, sometimes a romantic notion, that a composer is a solitary job where a composer sits by himself in front of the piano with a pen and paper. But it was so much about community and about collaborating with people and the way he composed was almost…He was like a curator of people. He knew how to bring different people from totally different contexts for example, a classical player, opera singer or someone who's coming from the experimental music scene, playing only modular synth, and he would know how to create this fertile ground for experimenting that became a form of composition.

I was lucky to be invited into this community in Berlin where I shared the studio space, in a complex where both Jóhann had his studio and also Hildur. Dustin O'Halloran was also working there at the time and a lot of other inspiring people. It would be a place where everyone would work on their own projects, but there was a lot of cross-pollinating. People were collaborating and that was a really unique moment in time where that was possible. That studio was how I kind of got invited into this world because beforehand I was very invested in my own artistic research and artistic output. Jóhann, invited me to record bass on Ryuichi Sakamoto reworks that he was doing back in 2016. This is how I was introduced to this community and Jóhann shared some of his projects and asked if I would be interested in working on some of his own, which ended up being Last and First Men. 

CC: Yeah, that's amazing. I know that you worked with Arca on this score, how was that? 

YEG: Arca has such a unique talent, sound, and voice. Adding her voice into the score creates such a different aspect, it enriches and augments the score in a really deep way, which I'm really excited for everyone to hear.

CC: You blend analog and digital elements into your music, obviously. How do you find that right balance of sound? Is it just a feeling or is it something that you’re constantly tweaking up to the last minute? 

YEG: I guess, in a way, it’s really thinking almost as an orchestrator. The digital processing, analog processing and acoustic instruments and synthetic instruments. There are different voices, different sounds and different colors and palette. It's all about creating your vision to that specific piece. I think for this specific piece, it was really important for me to find ways to abstract again, like I mentioned before, and alter the familiar sounds. But it was important for me not to have too many elements that could necessarily date this specific period or have reference to the time where people worked with specific digital equipment. I'm always interested in how to play with materials that are not necessarily revealing the time it's been made. Ideally, it could be perceived like it was made 40 years ago or 20 years from now. 

CC: And you've done a ton of different mediums, you've done film, TV, dance, and opera. In terms of the medium itself, do you have a preference? I assume you love them all, but is there a medium that you actually prefer to compose for? 

YEG: Not really. For me, at the moment, it's really about the people. I'm really interested in the people to collaborate with, and I think music and sounds have such an immense role in amplifying emotions, abstract emotions and complex emotions. It fits in so many different mediums. Right now, I'm really interested in the people around the projects. So, it's not necessarily being interested in one medium or the other as much as. exploring what music and sound can do in different realms that I haven’t worked with before. I like to think about my trajectory as more organic, that things could go from one place to another. It happens a lot of the time, that for example, a dance piece idea that originated in this context would later inform something else in a totally different medium. I like to keep it open. 

CC: That's interesting. So, what you're saying is that you discover new things ultimately, by these collaborations and these people that you work with. You find something new and that idea, whatever it is, could be a melody or could be a technique or something you can apply to a later project. And so, you're just accumulating all of these experiences that enhance your ability to compose or express ideas, right? 

YEG: Exactly. 

CC: That's really cool. Is there anything that you're working on now that you’re allowed to talk about?

YEG: There are a few things that I cannot speak about, but I am working on a collaboration - a string ensemble with an amazing violinist and composer named Viktor Orri Árnason. He’s an Icelandic musician that was also part of this community. We are currently working on a different approach to writing string music, which originates from improvisational material that we recorded as a duo. We each took the materials after we composed a piece out of it. We each orchestrated the different elements and then recorded the string ensemble. It's in a way, a reverse engineered concerto for a duo. You have a lot of this play of perspectives when you're able to record in different places and different sections. So, you have this very detailed, close mic’d, textural playing of the duo, but then we really wanted to accompany it with much more of a lush, full section of strings. We are both very excited for this. 

CC: That's great. So, it'll be a record? 

YEG: For now, it will be a record, but we would love to find a way to perform it at some point. 

Reptile is now streaming on Netflix!