What to Serve: Colin Stetson's The Menu
CineConcerts was very fortunate to speak with composer Colin Stetson about the score for the new film The Menu!
Composer Colin Stetson. Photograph by Jonathan Durand.
CineConcerts (CC): I was listening to your solo records and it got me to thinking about just your physicality with your instrument. Your bio says very distinctly that you have physical engagement with your instruments when you perform and play. I'm really curious about the moment at which you discovered the instrument, but also figured out how to manipulate it.
Colin Stetson (CS): I started playing when I was nine. I started to really lean into it when I was about 15. And then, at that point, I was being taught certain techniques. My teacher taught me how to circular breathe, which is the method for which you continuously can play on a woodwind instrument without stopping for a breath. Things like that and then gradually getting more into more experimental uses of the horn throughout and learning how to play what's called multiphonics. This is all “extended technique” on the saxophone. And then starting to really unearth what it is that the instrument is in the first place. That just being it's just a metal amplifier. It's an amplifying tube. It's a cone.
When you start to understand what it is, how the sound is formed, you can then start to experiment—at that point, leaving for college and being in my own space, spending just countless hours in practice spaces and in quiet and really just pouring into the instrument in both the extremes of its—it’s a very extreme, dynamic instrument. It can play very loud and very, very quietly. And so, exploring the extremes of both those things, giving it so much air as to push it past certain thresholds of vibration, playing it so quietly as to completely flip all of the hierarchies, like the assumed hierarchies of how this instrument sounds in our greater understanding culturally of it in all these different musical genres. But, you know, flipping all that on its head and now hearing it as being something that's very percussive or hearing it as being something that is more the high-end frequency of air rather than the lower mid frequencies of tone and pitch. And so, leaning into all of that.
I was a very voracious practitioner when I was young, through all those years, and unearthed much of my idea for what the instrument could do. [I had] an appetite for delving more in more into that direction back then. I think that that phase of probably 17 to 24-25 was extremely eye opening and it set the stage for the rest of my life going forward and I'm still really in it.
I was trying to describe this to someone not too long ago, that what looks like destinations from the outside rarely are from the inside. I don't think of anything that I've done or that I'm doing as anything more, I mean, potentially punctuating but certainly not in terms of any kind of a destination definition because I am just as much now seeing potential. And things that I can't quite do yet, things that are only kind of theoretical and just starting to become practical. Now I'm seeing that just as much as I did 30 or 20 years ago, and I first started to conceive of this path. And so, I do feel very much as though it's just kind of like an ongoing, unfolding path that I'm just on.
CC: So, you are still learning as a creative artist and musician, you're still learning new things with various instruments that you were passionate about when you were a teenager?
CS: And just in learning things about music. And every time I do another score, I'm learning very specific things that I pinpoint and say, “On this one I am going to do this thing that I don't know how to do.” Like I am going to delve more deeply into this or I'm going to use an instrument that I've never used before, or I'm going to think in a form that I never thought of before or use of certain processes. There's always something new that I'm throwing into the mix so that I can really have a tangible, discernible lesson learned.
CC: That segues us into this score, which by the way, is a fantastic score. There’s these soundscapes that seem very airy and open. I was reading the description of the score and it said that there was a grotesqueness to the soundscapes. And so, can you talk a little bit about what that means, musically, to you?
CS: I'll use the word grotesque from time to time to describe certain sounds, certain aspects of the character or something. In this one there are a couple elements that I feel are the embodiment or personification, sonically, of that nastiness in the character of The Menu, the plot that's unfolding.
And so, there are a couple things. One of them I did with my own voice, very deep bass sort of sweeps that come from a combination of my voice and being doubled by a section of eight contrabass and mixed very high-forward. And then an instrument called the Nyckelharpa, which is a Swedish folk instrument, which in this instance I’m playing in no way like any nyckelharpa player would really be terribly supportive of.
So, that's the teeth, the nyckelharpa is like a sneer in the teeth of this score. And if there's something that's grotesque, it's that and certain other like very pulsating, rhythmic elements, things that come from manipulating the low end of a contrabass clarinet and stretching it and affecting it so that it becomes more or less a kind of mixture between a pulsating, a rhythmic heartbeat and almost a low growl.
Photograph by Jonathan Durand.
CC: Was this atypical manipulation something that you went into the score knowing that you wanted to do, or was it an experiment, trying to put pieces together to make something? Did you approach it knowing you wanted to do this in this way?
CS: Yeah, this one was very, very clear on the face of the script what it would sound like. Mostly there are certain things that came from some experimentation, like the nyckelharpa thing was something that came from some experimentation, playing with the instrument and going, “Oh, I can just unearth certain things.” And those are happy surprises.
Other things, like what I was describing before with the voice, I saw that happen on the on the page. And so, there's certain things that were just loaded in and I knew about them already. I remember talking to the filmmakers about it when we were first talking about the music and I said, and that's the point where this whole thing is going to happen. And so, there's certain things that were just very apparent from day one and then other things that kind of come through some amount of play.
CC: And it's interesting you mentioned reading the script because some composers come in without reading anything. They just see the rough cut or they see visuals. And I think it's really interesting that you were able to read the script.
So, when you were reading it, I assume that you were already starting to mold a musical narrative with the main characters, right? How do you approach that musically? Do you sit with these characters for a really long time and get into their head? What was your approach for that?
CS: What I try to do is, when I read the script, is to come up with what's that foundational element? What's the kind of essence of the whole of it? And then what are the pillars that the rest of it is all founded on? What are those things that orbit? And so, if I was to parse this out, the rhythmic structure of the pizzicato, there are certain metric, polyrhythms that make up the drive of this whole thing from beginning to end. So that's the foundation. Pillar one could be the dreamy, undulating sax arpeggios, the ones I think that you were just describing.
Those things having to do with the sincerity and profundity of the chef's loving embrace of, not only of his craft, but of the purity of his vision for this night. So, there's that. And then something like what happens at a particular point, when we were talking about the grotesque, that sneering, the kind of the more bestial, the kind of starkly real violence of it. There's a host of sounds that make up all that. And then there is a choral element that I think is the third pillar, so to speak, it's present throughout.
That's the sense of the reverent, the sense of the sacred, the sense of the love, of the kind of churchy, but still a very sincere embracing of what is an absurdist, I mean, the whole of it is an absurdist tale. But I tried to be as genuine and as genuinely sentimental about it as I possibly could.
CC: There’s a track called “The First Cheeseburger You Ever Ate.” We've all had those experiences where it feels like it's the first thing I read because it's so darn good.
Tell me about your composing process. Do you sit down at a piano or do you play the saxophone? How do you sketch out your ideas?
CS: The initial thing is reading the script and then spending the next few mornings with the piano, usually in the very, very beginning. And I'll work through ideas on the piano and then record them all and then go back and then take certain elements and start to flesh them out with other instrumentation.
In this instance, a lot of the meat of it, like I said, that initial skeleton was all coming from those initial piano improvisations.
But that said, it depends on what's the essence of the scene. So, is it a scene that's coming out of one of these rhythmic spaces? Is it a scene of the chef describing the act of dining that night, maybe it's coming from that. So, the basis for that is the saxophone. And so, the first thing that I do is come up with that initial bed. That's played on the saxophone, that's, that's composed on the saxophone because that's the idiomatically rooted in what the saxophone does. It's not, I could write it on the piano, but it wouldn't sit on the saxophone the way that something written from it, in the way that I play.
And again, it also has to do with the particular horn that I'm playing. So, for me, the source of the writing is usually synonymous with what it is eventually going to be. So you can write on the instrument that is going to be performing, except for strings, obviously, because I don't play strings aside from the occasional thing like the nyckelharpa. Most of the time when you know the vast amount of strings that they'll write for, I'll use keyboard, I'll use MIDI, I'll play it all, it'll all be played ultimately by me.
I'll also sometimes do that on saxophone because I want the string parts to be something that came from that horn. But then ultimately the sound of strings, or in a lot of times I will write with my voice, so that the string parts get to be something that are very aqueous and serpentine and flowing, and in those ways, nonlinear. And then my friend and collaborator Matt Combs will take all those parts and clone them on strings.
So, it's all it really just depends on what it is.
CC: Is there anything else that you can talk about that you did in the score that you hadn't ever used before?
CS: Yeah. I suppose, though, I mean I think we've touched on the main ones the fact of the choral the choir and the strings and all of the woodwinds playing that. The only other thing that is definitely evident here, although subtly so, is that I know Mark early on had questioned whether there could be some element of the kitchen. Of the culinary things like the pots and pans, things like this. Some of those sounds finding their way into the score. And I liked it as a concept and in practice there wasn't really room, or at least it seemed to attract too much attention to itself. It was if it was played more rhythmically. And so, it's sparingly used in that capacity throughout.
But one of my close friends and collaborators, Greg Fox, did come to the studio for a couple of days. And we did a lot of experiments and just deep tracking of tons of these things. And one of them that really does come into play quite a bit in a few key moments is the playing of—he is basically playing blast beats on an array of pitched water glasses. Which ends up sounding in one of the last, I think in the climactic scene. There are all of these this kind of sheen of this pointillistic sort of stars in the sky, sort of shimmer that happens, that grows and grows and grows over the course of the last cue and that's all water glasses being struck by chopsticks.
CC: You also did Tibetan bowls with forks. I was reading that, too. That's really interesting.
CS: Oh, yes. I always kind of forget to talk about the Tibetan bowls and saxophone sometimes, because every score I've ever done has Tibetan bowls and saxophones and it. That's a given and everything else is a bonus.
CC: Anything specific or any specific moments you want audiences to watch or listen for when watching the film?
CS: Oh, in the context of the film, no, I don't think I can really in any good conscience say, yeah, you should listen for this moment, because I feel like it really does go against the idea of the music, the music for film in the first place. So sure, if there was any amount of instruction, it would be to don't watch the trailers. Go in with as little expectation as possible and just follow. Just watch and let yourself really give in to the narrative because it's not only a very fun sort of romp in terms of the story that it's telling. But it also it has some genuine moments and it feels quite, quite deeply this this film, I think. And if you let yourself get into it, it’s not only hugely funny, but it's there are some very affecting moments in it.
CC: Is there anything fun that's announced that you can talk about that's coming for you next?
CS: I have a record of mine that just dropped on November 11th called Chimera, and that one is out now. I have two solo records that I'm currently working on that will be out at various points next year. So that is certainly something, there's a lot of progress in that front.
I'm working on another score soon for a feature that I can't discuss yet, but that's in the works. The score in the show for Uzumaki is coming out finally in spring of next year I believe. So that one, I'm excited, I can't believe it. It'll have been three years since I did the music for that and I’m super excited for people to actually hear that finally. And I'm excited to see it because I haven't seen footage yet. So, that's everything that's going on right now.