JOCELYN POOK

Jocelyn Pook is a composer who writes scores for
concert, film, theatre and dance with the same apparent
ease. She sculpted her classical musical education on the
viola, which in the world of composition places her as
an artist of linear and horizontal music events. Listening
to her work more carefully, one can grasp extraordinary
delicacies to which Pook has paid attention – we perceive
the subtle and accurately elaborated melodic lines that
are captured and mingled in harmonies with a touch of
the renaissance, as well as classical and contemporary
pulses. The latter is mentioned due to the fact that
nowadays music draws from its heritage and blends it
with the more contemporary expressions such as jazz,
ethno and pop. Anyway, Jocelyn Pook collaborates with
a range of appealing musicians: Laurie Anderson, Ryuichi
Sakamoto, Natacha Atlas, Peter Gabriel, and appeared
with such bands as The Communards and Massive
Attack.

Among Pook’s film scores, was that for Stanley Kubrick’s
last film Eyes Wide Shut (1999), as well as two years
later L’emploi du temps (Time Out) directed by Laurent
Cantet, and Anne Fontaine’s Comment j’ai tué mon père
(How I Killed My Father). In 2002 she contributed one
piece – Dionysus from the album Untold Things – to
Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (the original score
for the film is by Howard Shore).

Eyes Wide Shut and How I Killed My Father can hardly
be imagined without Jocelyn Pook’s music. The sonic
minimalism that she introduces in the two films forms
the pillar of the melodic structure of both scores, and by
way of it the images of the film become multi-faceted
characters, which are as real as the filmed ones. In the
first project she communicated with Kubrick’s own visual
direction, which due to the very content of the film is at
times literally intrusive and on the edge of voyeurism.
In Anne Fontaine’s drama, however, Pook brilliantly
expressed the cutting edge of memory and exposed the
eternal oscillation of the father-son relationship. Being an
excellent connoisseur of the old masters, she never let
herself be tempted by the ear- and soul-pleasing sweetness
of popular pop-romanticism, but instead constructed
the melodic structure of her own story upon instrumental
tones. Jocelyn Pook’s music is a constituent element
of the very image of the film with which she actively
participates in the creation of the relations between the
main characters. Both films deal with relations, with confrontations
of people whose relationships are ultimately
polyvalent – either utterly eroticised and/or Oedipal - as
well as charged with every possible nuance in between.

By way of her music, Pook does not moralise nor
psychologise the complexity of such human mutual
conditions, but she rather steps aside and takes a somewhat
sideways look. She enhances the significance of
various shades of the event itself, becomes an objective
of the acoustic lens, and thus zooms, focuses and allows for a more
accurate relation to the sonorous masterpiece which is captured in the
magic of the film. As Gaston Bachelard would have put it, her film
scores are genuine intellectual experiments that break through every
epistemological barrier set up by the imaginary.
Mitja Reichenberg

Voice: Melanie Pappenheim, Manickam Yogeswaran, Parvin Cox; violin: Sally Herbert, Kelly McCusker;
viola: Jocelyn Pook; cello: Ian Burdge; ganun: Jon Banks; keyboards: Harvey Brough; visuals: Dragan
Aleksić

The concert is dedicated to our friends, who passed away this year:
Silvan Furlan, Igor Zabel, Borut Brumen and Veronika Klančnik

Organisation: Cankarjev dom
In collaboration with: City of Women