I first saw A Page of Madness more than 25 years ago in Chicago and remember immediately thinking I should compose music for it. The opportunity first came in 2010, with a commission from the International House Philadelphia to commemorate their 100th anniversary. That first version was in fact a collaboration between myself and the Japanese shakuhachi master Akikazu Nakamura, in which we each composed half the music. That version was premiered at I-House Philadelphia and then in New York at the Museum of Modern Art in October 2010. Then in 2012 the PHACE ensemble in Vienna proposed that I compose a new score for the film – one for their ensemble plus the Japanese koto and shō instruments and all the music by me. This new version, jointly commissioned by the PHACE Ensemble, MaerzMusik Festival, and the American Academy in Berlin, is the version we hear tonight.
A Page of Madness is an amazing Japanese silent film, the subject of academic essays and an entire book by Aaron Gerow. It is acclaimed but rarely seen, partly because it has never been made available on DVD. It was made in 1926 by Teinosuke Kinugasa, a director just starting his career at the time and part of circle of writers and directors in 1920s Japan who were intent on creating an original form of cinema. The print of the film was believed to have been destroyed during World War II, until Kinugasa found a negative print of it in his shed. Teinosuke Kinugasa made nearly 100 films and his drama Jigokumon (1953) won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1955. What impresses me most about this film is the radical nature of the cinematic language. If you didn’t know it was made in 1926 you might think it was made much later, as the use of very fast montage, superimpositions, and other techniques make it a harbinger of the experimental film movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This extraordinary film calls for a bold musical language, one that takes the relationship of the music and the film into entirely new dimensions, with layers of texture and sound colour that amplify the visual language and intense emotional nature of the film. I think we have reached a point where the conventional relationship of music and visual media has to change; this music is one example of my efforts to do that and one of the best scores I have produced in my 30-year career as a composer.
My approach greatly differs from the standard ways music is used with silent films (and in a general any film, TV, or media work that uses images and sound). The main point is that sound can greatly alter the perception of the film object—especially if the time is taken to really analyse the film’s structure. When the structure is used, then it is possible for the sound to do many interesting things that don’t happen in the normal situations. Examples would be using the sound to lead and contextualise the image/action and the use of sounds outside “musical” norms, which can greatly expand the emotional and psychological range of the whole experience. Also, now we are dealing with live music, which creates much different conditions for the audience—I would say more “visceral” and more exciting because the sound is live, creating some of the conditions of theatre.

Gene Coleman