Re: Nosferatu/Hello Earth music

[IEDSRI@aol.com]

Gadi Guy writes:

 > I copied down these credits from the video:
 > Music:  Popol Vun / Florian Fricke and Richard Wagner: 
 > "Rheingold"  Charles Goumod: "Sanctus"

More than a decade ago IED went on a wild goose chase
tracking down and listening to the above (well, he knew
it couldn't be the Wagner, but ruling out the Sanctus from
Gounod's St. Cecilia Mass was a bit more difficult) before
going back to the film credits again and discovering that
there was also a mention of a choral group called 
"Zinzcara" (sp?).  This was clearly the group responsible
for the music in question, but IED could never find any 
recordings by the group, let alone this particular one.

He next wrote to Michael Berkeley, who is credited on the
album as the arranger of the choral passage on the Hounds
of Love album.  He replied with a very full and courteous 
explanation of Kate's problems with the choral passage, 
even including a photocopy of the score as he had notated
it for the singers in Kate's studio.  Apparently Kate had 
seen Nosferatu and loved the eery choral sequence during
the surreal, otherwise silent scenes of the town's 
infestation by rats following the arrival of Dracula's ship
into the harbor.  She had worked with Berkeley at some length
to come up with a choral passage that evoked the same atmosphere as the one
she had been struck by in the movie, 
but in the end decided that the most appropriate thing to do 
was to return to the original music itself.  This she did, though it was no
small task.  The original music could not any better be tracked down by Kate
than it could by IED or you, so in the end (after due effort had been made to
resolve the issue with Popul Vuh and Werner Herzog) she and Berkeley
reconstructed the music as they heard it on the film's soundtrack, making up
phonetics for the singers that closely approximated the (then)
unknown language of the original.  The Kate Bush reproduction is arguably
more expressive than Zinzcara's.  (By the way, this kind of painstaking
reconstitution of a sonic source is not unprecedented in Kate's work:  for
one reason or another she decided not to use the actual soundtrack from the
film "Night of the Demon" for the spoken line "It's in the trees!  It's
coming!" which introduces "Hounds of Love", but instead reproduced the sound
and timbre of the voice with remarkable accuracy in the studio.  This was the
story told, if IED recalls correctly, by one of Kate's brothers during their
appearance at the 1985 Homeground Romford Convention.) 

Much more recently Karen Newcombe and at least one other then-AOL Kate Bush
chatgroup member independently identified the piece of music as a specific
folksong of 
Georgian origin.  (Karen even found a CD which included a 
different performance of the song, still immediately identifiable as from the
same source.)  At the time, however,
Kate Bush had no way of knowing this, so the lyrics of the original can have
only coincidental, if any,  relevance to the themes of The Ninth Wave.

-- Andrew Marvick (IED)
     S             R              I