Know The Score: Julia Holter on Andrei Rublev

When singer-song­writer Julia Holter sud­den­ly became obsessed with the sound of church bells back in 2010, a friend rec­om­mend­ed she watch leg­endary Russ­ian direc­tor Andrei Tarkovsky’s stir­ring 1966 film Andrei Rublev. It’s fair to say the film, which depicts medieval Rus­sia as a bru­tal, uncom­pro­mis­ing place, isn’t the eas­i­est watch. Yet Holter instant­ly fell in love with its per­sis­tent use of bells and how they mark the pass­ing of time, with their ethe­re­al chimes pow­er­ful­ly cut­ting through the strug­gle of 15^th cen­tu­ry Russia.

“It’s a film that’s got a lot of suf­fer­ing in it, but when­ev­er the bell rings out it feels like Tarkovsky is show­ing that there is still a glim­mer of hope on the hori­zon,” says Holter. ​“There’s some­thing about the way the bell func­tions that is so spir­i­tu­al to me, as the bell’s count­ing of time sig­ni­fies some­thing very poet­ic. I love that this one musi­cal instru­ment could rep­re­sent some­thing so important.”

She con­tin­ues, ​“There’s a scene at the end of the film where all the peo­ple erect this bell tow­er. The way the rope blunt­ly stretch­es sym­bol­is­es the col­lec­tive pain of the Russ­ian peo­ple. When you hear the bells’ per­cus­sive clink­ing, you also hear a woman’s chant­i­ng, and it is so haunt­ing and pow­er­ful; the way the non-diegetic and diegetic sounds work togeth­er is so genius.”

Holter’s music has long been described as avant-pop, with her albums known to switch unpre­dictably between gen­tle intro­spec­tion and organ­ised chaos – she’s just as inspired by Gyor­gy Ligeti as she is Joni Mitchell. Holter believes this kind of jux­ta­po­si­tion is also present in com­pos­er Vyach­eslav Ovchinnikov’s score for Andrei Rublev. ​“It’s obvi­ous­ly a very frag­ment­ed film that’s more about emo­tion than plot, and his score speaks to this, but very sub­tly,” she explains. ​“You can feel the sounds right in the pit of your stom­ach. I like that the score can cre­ate this atmos­phere of dread but then knock you away with a gor­geous choir or string sec­tion. It has an ele­ment of unpredictability.”

A street jester dances with his last ounce of ener­gy in the hope of being giv­en some veg­eta­bles by admir­ers; starv­ing, shiv­er­ing peas­ants des­per­ate­ly eat snow as ants crawl across their bod­ies; a woman del­i­cate­ly braids her mur­dered friend’s hair; hun­gry dogs vio­lent­ly fight for just a morsel of food. These are all hor­ri­fy­ing images, impos­si­ble to erase from the mem­o­ry, but Holter says the way Ovchinnikov’s sparse score cuts through them is ​“deeply beautiful”.

Anoth­er mem­o­rable scene depicts a group of rebel­lious naked bod­ies hav­ing a late night skin­ny dip, which then descends into a chaot­ic orgy that cli­max­es in both plea­sure and death. Dur­ing this scene, the score tran­si­tions from still­ness to a tor­na­do of scream­ing vio­lins, reflect­ing the con­trast of their car­nal adven­ture with the more regres­sive val­ues of the author­i­tar­i­an soci­ety that they are all still shack­led by. ​“The music in that scene is both vis­cer­al and sen­su­al, and that isn’t an easy bal­ance,” adds Holter.

Tarkovsky’s film is loose­ly based on the life of painter Andrei Rublev, show­ing how reli­gion and war forced Rus­sia into rev­o­lu­tion across his life­time, and why his art was ulti­mate­ly a great tri­umph over such pain and tur­moil. But one of the rea­sons the Tarkovsky’ mas­ter­piece, which for many years was banned by the Sovi­et Union, still packs such a vis­cer­al punch is down to the bold way in which it shows how the poor inevitably suf­fer the most when­ev­er soci­ety under­goes a cul­tur­al meta­mor­pho­sis. It’s a pre­scient idea. ​“This idea that it’s always the poor that strug­gle more deeply when­ev­er there’s a rev­o­lu­tion says so much about our world right now,” Holter agrees.

The way the film, and its music, shifts between light and dark­ness reminds me of Holter’s own work. ​“Every­thing is just van­i­ty and decay,” Theo­phanes the Con­fes­sor tells Rublev in one mem­o­rable sequence, which encap­su­lates the themes of the morose lul­la­bies present on Holter’s 2018 album ​‘Aviary’. She even con­firms that one of her more exper­i­men­tal songs, ​‘Under­neath the Moon’, was direct­ly inspired by Tarkovsky’s film; its dream-like lyrics (“Writhing in the laugh­ter like / The jester’s high”) direct­ly ref­er­ence the film.

Through­out Andrei Rublev, there are moments of thick elec­tri­cal synths that don’t seem to go any­where. How­ev­er, Holter says this speaks direct­ly to Tarkovsky’s vision for the future of film scor­ing. ​“In his book, ​‘Sculpt­ing in Time’, Tarkovsky says that elec­tron­ic music has the ​‘right capac­i­ty to be absorbed by a film’s sound’,” Holter recalls. “‘It can be hid­den behind oth­er nois­es and be dis­tinct. It’s like the voice of nature. It can be like some­thing breath­ing.’ The fact he was instill­ing this vision way back in 1966 is so clever.”

In recent years Holter has start­ed scor­ing films her­self, includ­ing the 2016 box­ing doc­u­men­tary Bleed for This and 2020’s crit­i­cal­ly-acclaimed abor­tion dra­ma Nev­er Rarely Some­times Always. She says she’d love to score a hor­ror film next, which makes per­fect sense: check out the sur­re­al romance of ​‘Hel­lo Stranger’, a song that sounds like it was made with David Lynch in mind.

She admits film scor­ing requires, ​“a lot more restraint. I can’t go as crazy with the music as I don’t want to detract from the film, which I am in ser­vice to.” Yet you sense her admi­ra­tion for Ovchinnikov’s work on Andrei Rublev has great­ly helped her with this tran­si­tion. ​“Ovchin­nikov and Tarkovsky were great believ­ers that film music should dis­solve into a film and become an organ­ic part of it. That even if some­thing is dark, it should still be inti­mate and have a roman­ti­cism to it,” Holter adds, ​“I think they were on to some­thing, don’t you?”