THE NEWYORKER, DECEMBER 13, 2021 81
have in mind? A program note made
general mention of “ongoing states of
emergency,” of which there is no short-
age at present. I found myself thinking
about environmental crisis, particularly
because I’d seen a work on that theme
at the Geffen Contemporary in Octo-
ber: Lina Lapelytė’s installation opera
“Sun & Sea,” which has been touring
the world since its première, in Lithu-
ania, in 2017. That piece attempts a
lightly ironic, musically ingratiating cri-
tique of complacency and obliviousness
in the face of climate change, with sing-
ers lounging on a man-made beach while
the audience looks down from galler-
ies. Such aloofness was impossible in
“Hive Rise”: Fure’s acoustical tidal wave,
ravishing and dangerous, left a construc-
tive kind of panic in its wake.
O
n the same weekend that “Hive
Rise” unfolded at MOCA, the Los
Angeles Philharmonic presented “Reel
Change,” a festival devoted to fresh en-
ergies in film music. The curators for
the series, which took place before good-
sized audiences at Disney Hall, were
the composers Hildur Guðnadóttir, Kris
Bowers, and Nicholas Britell, each of
whom hosted a concert. The pieces on
offer formed less of a contrast to Fure’s
soundscapes than might be assumed.
Hildur, a thirty-nine-year-old Icelander,
veers toward the experimental, and her
L.A. Phil program, under the direction
of Hugh Brunt, featured her own work
alongside modernist and minimalist
classics by György Ligeti, Arvo Pärt,
and Henryk Górecki.
Avant-garde disruption is by no
means a novelty in movie-music his-
tory: the likes of Ingmar Bergman, An-
drei Tarkovsky, and Stanley Kubrick
mobilized the unrulier end of twenti-
eth-century musical discourse. In the
past ten or fifteen years, though, gritty
ambient textures have entered the main-
stream. Jonny Greenwood’s other-
worldly, glissando-heavy score for
“There Will Be Blood,” from 2007,
marked a turning point: Paul Thomas
Anderson, the film’s director, entrusted
long, nearly wordless stretches of the
film to Greenwood, who first won no-
tice as the lead guitarist of Radiohead.
The composer now has three films in
theatres: “Licorice Pizza,” “Spencer,”
and, most notably, “The Power of the
Dog”—a sustained masterwork of scor-
ing that builds tension and shapes char-
acter in equal measure.
Like Greenwood, Hildur is a dual
citizen of the pop and classical realms.
She studied composition in Reykjavík
and Berlin but is also a presence in al-
ternative rock and pop, having played
cello with the ear-scouring black-metal
band Sunn O))) and with the venera-
ble noise collective Throbbing Gristle.
One item on the L.A. Phil program
was “Bathroom Dance,” a track from
her score for “The Joker,” which last
year won her an Oscar. The piece is
built around a pensive alternation, on
the cello, of the notes C-sharp and E:
other string instruments slide in with
single tones and chords drawn from the
C-sharp-minor scale, yielding a slow-
motion kaleidoscope of melancholy har-
mony. This is a Pärt-like process, and
the L.A. Phil made the connection clear
by giving an immaculate account of that
composer’s “Fratres.”
Much wilder is Hildur’s score for
Battlefield 2042, a first-person-shooter
computer game that is set in an apoc-
alyptic future ravaged by climate change.
Hildur and Sam Slater, her co-com-
poser and partner, unfurled a spectac-
ular barrage of live-orchestral and elec-
tronic textures, including sounds
extracted from materials that match the
landscapes depicted in the game: metal,
glass, sand, gravel. Next to it on the pro-
gram was Ligeti’s “Atmosphères,” a land-
mark of postwar modernism that seemed
almost serene in this context, its dense
sonorities becoming transparent and lu-
minous in Disney’s acoustic.
Britell fostered a more buoyant vibe
at his concert, although excerpts from
Greenwood’s “There Will Be Blood”
and from Mica Levi’s shivery score for
“Jackie” kept Hollywood glitz at bay.
Britell is a stylistic omnivore who spe-
cializes in churning, off-kilter riffs on
familiar forms. He has won pop fame
with his music for HBO’s “Succession,”
which walks a tricky line between cel-
ebrating and satirizing monopoly cap-
italism. A happy roar went up from the
crowd when the seductively lugubrious
chords of the show’s theme kicked in:
a Baroque progression with hip-hop
beats on top. I grinned, too, though part
of me wanted Ash Fure’s music to rise
up and wipe it all out.
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