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DJ Spooky, whose real name is Paul Miller, is well-known in hip-hop circles. Hip-hop lives on the sonic samples of music from recent years. A few years ago, Miller became fascinated with a symphony written by the 20th century British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. It was called Sinfonia Antarctica, and Williams wrote it for a movie in 1949 about the British and Norwegian expeditions to the South Pole in the early 1900s. Paul Miller wanted to write his own symphony to evoke Antarctica, to challenge himself artistically, and to express his concerns for climate change. And tonight at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, he’ll be presenting that new work: “Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica.” Download MP3
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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. DJ Spooky, whose real name is Paul Miller, is well-known in hip-hop circles. But a few years ago, Miller became fascinated with a symphony written by the 20th century British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. It’s called “Sinfonia Antarctica.” Vaughan Williams based the composition on his own soundtrack for a 1948 film about a disastrous British expedition to the South Pole. Sinfonia Antarctica was DJ Spooky’s starting point. DJ Spooky wanted to write his own symphony to evoke Antarctica and to express his own concerns about climate change. And tonight at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, he’ll be presenting his new work: “Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica.” The International Contemporary Ensemble will join him on stage, as he triggers various beats and sounds. He recorded those sounds in Antarctica over the course of four weeks in 2007. DJ Spooky says the splendor of Antarctica was in stark contrast to his usual gigs and parties.
DJ SPOOKY: It was just a bubble of peace in an otherwise very hectic life. I DJ all over the world. I just got off a plane from Russia. I was in Brazil a couple of days before that. Then I was in Macau, then I was in Australia. I DJ literally in a different city every couple of days for the last ten years or so. But going down to Antarctica was something where I wanted to try and figure out hitting a reset button on my imagination, getting out of this idea of the global city.
WERMAN: Your own work, Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica, begins with these kind of interlacing high pitched sounds, sounds like maybe bells, chimes, joined by strings and some percussion, it sounds like. What are we hearing exactly at the beginning there?
SPOOKY: The score is based on this idea of interpretations of landscape and one of the things with hip hop, you’ve got to remember, hip hop’s the sound of the city, the sound of the street. And I’ve always been fascinated with why people like such regular, structured music. It’s like, boom boom bap, boom bap. Or if you hear what’s going on now in South America with the cumbria or reggaeton or stuff like that, it still has that pulse, the regular structure. Going into Antarctica, I wanted to try and de-program myself out of hip hop, out of the electronic music that I usually am thinking about. As a composer, I’m intrigued with how do you build bridges between these kind of older traditions of classical and some of the newer stuff that’s going on? There’s two component. One is the natural sounds, and then there’s two, the music inspired by the natural sounds. So say for example, this is a piece that’s literally based on what I like to call the playfulness of water, and I’ll play you the natural sound and then the music that was inspired by it. So say for example you get this [water running]. Water coming in, just literally, you can kind of hear this hollow like sound, and that’s water lapping off of these large glaciers that our ship pulled up next to, and then I was able to go on land and I set up my microphones and tried to just capture this huge space. So I interpreted that into something like this. This is the same idea of recording and so on, but it’s an interpretation. Here you go.
[music plays]
SPOOKY: What you were just hearing is an interpretation of water that I wrote for a string quartet.
WERMAN: Where do the penguins have their cameo in your work?
SPOOKY: Yeah, it’s funny. People always want to hear the penguins. Everybody has the whole “Happy Feet” and penguins kind of stuff going, so I always chuckle over that. But they smell so bad, man. Anybody out there, you smell penguins, you’d rather hear them than smell them.
WERMAN: It will turn you off from penguins forever.
SPOOKY: Yeah, forever. Whoo, man, you could smell them miles away. So one of the clips that I have, this is of emperor penguins [penguin calls].
WERMAN: Mm, that’s great.
SPOOKY: So you can imagine, each of them has their own codes and system of communication, which I find translating into music was really intriguing. So what I’ll do is I’ll play you how I interpreted that into electronic music.
[music plays]
SPOOKY: So you can imagine–
WERMAN: Paul Miller’s innovative penguin-aphone.
SPOOKY: Yeah.
WERMAN: Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica, your work premiered this week in New York at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Tell us what you actually see on stage while you’re doing this.
SPOOKY: Well, I have a string quartet and a piano, and I’m DJing the string ensemble. I’m sampling and layering and looping the same material they’re playing, which is my composition, and it’s very lyrical. It’s classical music. My nickname for it is classical music in a 21st century context, saying electronics and turntables are the same components of a piece as the violin or cello or piano. And it’s funny, because I’ve been doing electronic music for the last ten years plus, but I really wanted to break out of the norms and try and figure out some other angles. And using the sound of wind as my palette or the sound of water.
[music plays]
WERMAN: With the Copenhagen climate summit beginning on Monday, I’m just wondering, having composed this work, kind of a litmus test place on planet Earth, Antarctica, what are your hopes for the Copenhagen climate summit?
SPOOKY: Actually, I was in Copenhagen two weeks ago. We had a big thing for a preview of the conference. It was crazy. It was sold out to the gills. The good thing is that on one level or another, people are very interested in, how do we solve this problem? And I think that there’s a lot of willpower. We need to figure out how to manifest it in the political and also in social arena to change behaviors, to get people to think about how music, art and literature can inspire, but also give some information about what’s going on.
WERMAN: Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky. His latest work is called Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica continues being performed tonight and tomorrow at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Thanks so much for your time.
SPOOKY: Yeah, no problem.
WERMAN: And before we go, we still owe you an answer to today’s Geo Quiz. We were looking for the name of a body of water at the edge of Antarctica. The answer is: The Weddell Sea, part of the Southern Ocean. That’s it for our program today. Our theme music was composed by Eric Goldberg. From the Nan and Bill Harris studios at WGBH in Boston, I’m Marco Werman.
Have a great weekend.
[music plays]
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That excerpt that DJ Spooky claimed he “wrote” to depict water was actually written by Claude Debussy for this String Quartet, OP. 10. Measures 13-14 of the first movement to be exact. What, he thinks people don’t know this stuff?
I found the piece on DJ Spooky’s Sinfonia Antarctica problematic. He claims to be concerned about climate change, but then talks about traveling to a different country every few days to DJ. As is well known by now, air travel has a severe impact on the environment. At the same time DJ Spooky is trying to inspire others, he should also reconsider his own lifestyle and the amount of carbon rather then dance-floor hype it generates.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, another pop musician discovers “classical” music . . . yawn!
Hey, no problem!