This transcript is from the Greenaway mailing list by David Pye.
Here is what PG had to say in the BBC Radio 4 programme called 'Britannia - the Soundtrack' that was on last Sunday:
Presenter: Is film music basically pastiche or as PG, a filmmaker who is no admirer of conventional film music, would put in, merely pragmatic.
PG: "Essentially I suppose the relationship of music being a secondary or even tertiary adjunct to the business of making image is endemic. Its been part of cinema history of 100 years - finish a picture, pick up a phone, find yourself not a composer, who's a different animal, but a man who writes music for movies and I do think that's a different animal. That man is disciplined to the stopwatch. He can provide you with 3 and three quarter seconds of tears or two hours and ten minutes of laughter. That's not the way, it strikes me, the best music is composed so I would try very hard to avoid that sort of process."
Extract of music from The Draughtsman's Contract
Narrator: Michael Nyman's striking music for Peter Greenaway's first feature length film The Draughtsman's Contract. Very different from pragmatic music, intended simply to trigger emotions, create atmosphere or paper over the joins. This is foreground music.
.....what about the other more fitful tradition of assertive, foreground music - the tradition of Bliss, Walton, Gerard and, more recently, Michael Nyman's inventive post-minimalism. Perhaps the inspiration for this alternative tradition lies in the idea of film as a new kind of opera ......... this is the tradition that Peter Greenaway feels he belongs to:
PG: "I've always been fascinated with the very tightly constraining disciplines of opera with all its extraordinary conventions which are totally unacceptable, apparently, in any other art form. And I certainly want to use them and work with them. There are things that you can do which are fascinating me more and more and more. The Baby Of Macon originally was conceived as an opera. It still retains a lot of those characteristics. Like a piece of grand late 19th century opera it has three acts, an epilogue, a prologue, three intervals. People don't exactly sing in the film, although on occasions they do actually sing in the film. I feel also that if I were to take the last 15 minutes of a film we made several years ago call The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover we're talking very much about notions of putting dialogue, I won't say lyrics, but dialogue to music. So my interest as a filmmaker in association with music is not just simply to do with the phenomenon of using music to empower the drama in some way by elaboration or description or encouragement but to actually structure and organize it.
Extract of music from The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.