Obituary: Black coats followed him around Prague. The composer of the music for Twin Peaks has died
Czechoslovakia was still ruled by communists, recalled Angelo Badalamenti, when he visited Prague for the first time in the 1980s. Director David Lynch’s court composer died this Sunday at the age of 85. Although he created the soundtrack for eight dozen titles, he never surpassed the fame of Twin Peaks Town, for which he won a Grammy Award in 1991.
Badalamenti died at his home in the US state of New Jersey, his niece announced. After the author of the music for the pictures Fury in the heart, The Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive a strong Czech footprint remains. Just as his Italian peer Ennio Morricone was close to the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, Badalamenti, the American son of Sicilian immigrants, attached himself to the recording studio in Ve Smečkách Street in Prague.
I walked here on the icy street. Decades later, Badalamenti remembered how he and David Lynch had arrived behind the Iron Curtain in the winter of 1985 at the entrance to the dumpster, then a dark corridor poorly lit by a flickering light, and finally a long staircase to even darker rooms. They arrived in Czechoslovakia to record the soundtrack for their first film together Blue velvet.
Angelo Badalamenti also composed the music for the film The Beach or the third part of the horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street. | Photo: AFP / Profimedia
They didn’t know each other for long. Already an established director Lubricating heads or The elephant man Lynch was looking for a voice coach for his actress. A friend recommended him the nearly fifty-year-old son of a fishmonger. Angelo Badalamenti had a conservatory degree, taught high school and worked for a music publisher. Although they created arrangements of a few songs sung by stars Shirley Bassey and Nina Simone years ago, they did not break through in the film. One of the few on which he worked under the pseudonym Andy Badale was the American film by the Czech exile Ivan Passer called Law and disorder from 1974.
However, David Lynch saw talent in Badalamenti. He verified it during the filming of Blue Velvet back in the USA, when they created the title song together Mysteries of love. The director scribbled the text on a napkin, for which Badalamenti devised the music and had it sung by Julee Cruise from New York Broadway in an atypically muffled voice. Lynch, musically inclined himself, was impressed: finally someone who could translate his enigmatic ideas into moody music.
Wiretapped rooms
The path to Badalamenti becoming his court composer led through Prague. “We arrived in the winter. People in the streets, musicians, technicians, everyone we met was afraid to speak and no one smiled at all,” recalls Badalamenti in the Czech version of Mósto snění, a combination of Lynch’s biography and memoir, published last year. “Our hotel rooms were bugged, someone was filming us on a video camera in the dining room, and we were always being followed by some men in black coats,” he describes the filming of the Blue Velvet soundtrack in 1985.
Prague made similar impressions on Lynch. “For example, you were walking down the street, looking into clothing stores, and you saw beautiful racks of dark wood, and maybe three stars everywhere. Everything was empty. And bleak. No one was talking to you. You came to the hotel and in the lobby they were lined up prostitutes,” adds the director.
Every day they visited the studio at Ve Smečkách 22. It was called Fisyo after the Film Symphony Orchestra based there, which was the only one in Czechoslovakia to play music for feature films.
Angelo Badalamenti took it to heart. After the Velvet Revolution, he began to return. He repeatedly collaborated with conductor Štěpán Koníček, who is no longer alive. And he flew in again with Lynch twice: in 1996 for the film Lost Highway, again in December 2000 while working on Mulholland Drive. Several members of the Czech Philharmonic also perform on the soundtrack. Lynch and Badalamenti supervised for several days.
“The local atmosphere has one characteristic. The music first rises into the air and before it is picked up by the microphones, it takes on such a special Eastern European flavor,” said the director of the now-defunct Czech TV station TV3. In the same way, in last year’s wooden book, he claims that thanks to the Prague studio, the paneling “radiates something that I call an Eastern European atmosphere, which also reaches the microphones”. According to Lynch, it sounds “not sad, but old and terribly beautiful”.
Badalamenti himself recorded a soundtrack for a sci-fi film in Prague Town of Lost Children. They dedicated the composition entitled to the Czech metropolis Picture from Prague.
The love motif from the movie Mulholland Drive was composed by Angelo Badalamenti, recorded in a Prague studio by Czech musicians. Photo: Universal Pictures | Video: Orchestra of the Capital City of Prague
He was better known in Europe than in Hollywood. When about him in 2005 wrote the New York Times, described him as a gregarious, slightly overweight man who enjoys golfing while composing, but doesn’t seek out parties and doesn’t know most people in the business. At that time, Badalamenti’s opus magnum had already existed for 15 years: the music for Lynch’s series Twin Peaks.
Timeless music
Wren on a branch. Sawmill. Sparks flying from the saw blade. Then a pine tree, a snow-capped mountain peak, a waterfall. Unforgettable music. The opening jingle sets the mood for several images, as does the soundtrack. Twin Peaks town theme as if reflecting one plane of the plot: a deception, a pretense on the surface hiding something sinister.
In a small logging town in rural America, prom queen Laura Palmer has been murdered, and things are clearly not as idyllic as they seem. The same is true of Badalamenti’s music: nostalgically dreamlike, calm, veiled in a kind of timelessness, simultaneously creating tension, suppressing menace.
The composer accompanied the series with melodramatic, romantic, even cheesily overwrought leitmotifs that emerged and disappeared from evocative synthesizer surfaces. The repeated decline and rise of the melody prolonged the tension on the screen. And it perfectly served director Lynch’s intentions. “I composed most of the music for Twin Peaks without seeing a single shot,” emphasized the author.
The soundtrack is associated with period instruments. The opening theme was created thanks to the groundbreaking synthesizers of the time based on the principle of so-called frequency modulation. Not only can you start with an electronic tone and smoothly move into an imitation of an acoustic piano, they opened up a wider palette of sounds.
Unclassifiable is already the first one, then constantly repeated from the beginning of Twin Peaks: distorted, slightly trembling, with an echo reminiscent of the deep register of an electric guitar from the 50s. Badalamenti sampled rock ‘n’ roll guitarist Duane Eddy’s note, which he doubled and shifted an octave lower on the synthesizer. “For decades, people wrote to me about what that sound was. I kept it to myself for a long time. I didn’t want anyone to copy it,” he said later.
Similarly, it was crucial that string instruments emulated on synthesizers. The art of sound supports the ambiguity of what is happening on the screen. And it all fits into Badalamenti’s unique vision: the soundtrack mixes 50s music like jazz, see the sax motif in Dance of the dream man or Audrey’s dance combining swing, digital imitation of the vibraphone and sudden howls of clarinets, with the procedures and technological possibilities of the 80s.
From dark minor surfaces emerge liberating primitive crescendos, all the more effective the longer the composer delays the climax. Badalamenti deliberately chooses the so-called extended fourth chords, inducing an expectation of change.
Laura Palmer theme from Twin Peaks by Angelo Badalamenti. | Video: Lynch/Frost Productions
They often worked in such a way that David Lynch described the atmosphere to him in words and the composer looked for an equivalent at the keyboard. “Imagine you’re in a dark forest. It’s night. There’s a light breeze. The moon is visible. An owl is hoot. Now play this,” he instructed him once. As Badalamenti arched a menacing surface in the lower register, the director suggested slowing down. “I’m imagining a teenage girl now. She’s in a tight spot. She’s running towards us. She’s getting closer and closer to filling up the space in front of the camera,” Lynch continued, with Badalamenti climbing the keyboard with the melody until he reached the top. In the end, he went back to the dark beginning. “This is how we wrote Laura Palmer’s theme,” he summed up the creation of the second most famous tune from Twin Peaks.
The series, whose first two series premiered in 1990 and 1991, gradually gained in importance. At one time, he uniquely overturned the genre conventions of the detective story, horror or telenovela. In retrospect, however, he walked all the way through the branches of artistic television creation and the understanding of the concept of pop culture. It became probably the first television work that was lectured at universities. Only the commercial response was small.
Angelo Badalamenti’s Grammy-winning, chart-topping and Billboard-launching soundtrack for US musician Moby, who used Laura Palmer’s theme for his breakthrough dance track in 1991 Go.
How much the music from Twin Peaks influenced the next generation also became apparent years later. For example, the American pop star of the last decade Lana Del Rey lends herself to her she signed up. British band Bastille she filmed a song called Laura Palmer. And others, from The Flaming Lips to producer Zola Jesus, celebrated the Twin Peaks soundtrack at a 2015 benefit concert. he said for example, Deník composer Jan P. Muchow.
When David Lynch made the third season five years ago, he again collaborated with Badalamenti. And in the same way, they again invited the singer Julee Cruise, who stood at the beginning of their collaboration on Blue Velvet, from their composition Falling the instrumental theme of the town of Twin Peaks was born and which in the series she portrayed bar singer.
The two left less than half a year apart this year: Julee Cruise committed suicide at the age of 65 due to pain. Twenty years older, Angelo Badalamenti has now died of natural causes.
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