In 1966 and 1967, Margheriti made these four sci-fi films loosely connected by the same space station (Gamma One), the same sets, and the same characters. (Margheriti also directed, among many other films, Devil of the Desert Against the Son of Hercules (1964) which was part of my sword and sandal obsession over the past couple of months). Ivan Reiner wrote the screenplay for all four movies.
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Symphony No. 1 – Reassessments and confessions
I was cleaning up the 2nd movement and, more and more, it started feeling alien to me. It was another me, another person, that wrote it and I no longer had any ownership or control. With distance you leave the work and become the listener. In some phrases I knew, for example, a trombone would add to the depth or rolled cymbals would provide that “radio static” sound, but I was really only giving editorial notes after-the-fact. Even if it wasn’t perfect or complete, I had to leave it.
Side observation: From the start of these notes I had been afraid that documentation would soil the creative process (the social media affect: you become the performative you instead of the intentional you). So far, I don’t feel that’s the case. The fear of exhibitionism would come from posting each movement as it’s complete but not from documenting the battlefield of creating each.
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Hercules vs. the Giant Warriors (1964)
Symphony No. 1 – Finishing the 2nd movement, starting the interlude
A few days back, I felt like I was failing with nearly the entirety of the 2nd movement and was ready to scrap, a month-and-a-half in, the entire score. It was at ~13 minutes of music so I hadn’t listened to it in its entirety–just read through and listened to shorter sections as I worked or re-worked–and so it would have been easy for the cohesion to be in my head, not my ear. But after getting to what I planned to be the final two sections, I listened through for the first time and felt vindication and relief. My intent came through. (Although I can read and hear to a decent degree, I marvel at the modernist composers of the mid- and late-20th century who did not have software and who wrote–sometimes creating new notation in the process–some of the defining new orchestral sounds of our lives.)
This weekend I listened to Finnissy’s string quartet Multiple Forms of Constraint, Schnittke’s String Quartet No. 3, and re-listened to Penderecki’s Threnody. While researching I found out or re-found out that Penderecki died this year in March. That feels like living in the era in which Beethoven or the era in which Chopin died. I could have met him.
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