Julia Holter: 'The alternative state of consciousness is interesting'

Now at last the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter and composer is due to team up with the Chorus for a live performance of her score for the 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc in Huddersfield next week.

“I’m curious what the music would’ve been like (in 2020) because honestly I’ve written most of it this year,” the 37-year-old says via Zoom. “I had a lot of stuff already actually at that point but I just feel like it’s changed a lot, so who knows what it would have been like. It’s cool to think how time changes things.”

Now Holter, best known in the UK for her 2015 top 30 album Have You in my Wilderness, feels grateful for the extra time she was afforded. “There’s always different routes you choose based on your current neural pathways,” she says.

She first came across Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s black and white masterpiece when she was offered a commission for an event in Los Angeles in 2017. “I actually hadn’t seen the movie, I should be more cultured,” she jokes. “I’d heard of it and seen shots from it. Anyway, I was really lucky to be asked to score this film with some musicians I work with for this group in downtown LA.

“Although I was assigned it, this film is obviously incredible and a great piece of work to score. Live scores are probably done to it all the time because it’s so forgiving and so beautiful. It sort of has one setting but then it has crazy cinematography. It has sudden movement but not sudden narrative movement. It’s all in this one setting with this one tone.

“I’ve scored film and TV a little bit, but I’m not an expert. I would say this film is very different from all those (things I’ve done before). It’s really fun to put music to this movie.”

The language of film has long been an influence on Holter, and she has in the past cited such cinematic auteurs as Alain Resnais, Andrei Tarkovsky, Lars Von Trier and Vicente Minelli. “To hear them all together makes me sound so pretentious,” she chuckles. “I’m not a film person but I do like movies when I allow myself to watch them. I don’t know what it is that brings all those together, I think it’s all different things, but maybe for a musician it’s nice to have an influence that’s not music sometimes; when you see poetic sensibilities that you like that isn’t in the same medium.

“I feel a lot of times I’m talking about Andrei Rublev, the Tarkovsky movie, and it’s funny, it’s like The Passion of Joan of Arc, it’s this incredible masterpiece – what’s the point of saying that’s an inspiration but I love the pacing in that movie, for example, and Last Year at Marienbad, I like the tone. But they’re all different.

“The Gigi movie that inspired Loud City Song (her 2013 album), I just grew up watching that when I was a kid. Maybe it’s just an assortment of things but I guess the answer is for the same reason I have books around me when I’m writing music is because all these other mediums inspire me a lot as a musician.”

Holter says she was fascinated by the story of Joan of Arc, one of France’s greatest historical heroines and military leaders who was burnt at the stake by the English for heresy in 1431. “She’s a very captivating person,” she says. “I haven’t thought creatively about her a lot but I’ve always been curious about mystics. Maybe it was early on reading Anne Carson’s writing about mystics or the Decreation essay, just early on I got interested in people that are having alternative experiences of what we call reality.

“You experience the whole movie of The Passion of Joan of Arc by the look on her face, she’s on a totally different place to the interrogators. I think it’s just appealing as an artist, that other state of awareness. It’s not that I’m specifically interested in religion, but the alternative state of consciousness is interesting.”

The film was Renee Jeanne Falconetti’s second an last big screen outing, having found making the film an ordeal. Holter says: “Her expressions are for me, and probably for a lot of people, what makes the film so iconic. A lot of it’s in the cinematography too and all these choices the director made, but her performance is...so real, it’s so unpredictable and powerful.”

While composing, Holter adapted two medieval chants “that are relevant to Joan of Arc’s time period”. “One of them the townspeople of Orléans were singing when she rode in in victory, that’s the Te Deum and Laudate Dominum, I harmonised them with chords and altered them a little melodically,” she says. “(In the first place) it wasn’t written out notation but I had some harmonised chords and some melody tha I had written out for the musicians. They were musicians I’ve worked with a lot so I knew that they could take it on. Sometimes I’d give them the chant melody and they’d do something with that or the one that I had adapted and they would play fragments or loop the new harmonised version. I basically made a 15-page written out timecode of what happens – at 2.52 the bass drum starts rolling or three minutes in the viola starts droning on high E.

“The current one for this choir is fully notated, it’s like 50 pages of notation, with some moments that are similar. I still do have musicians that I’m working with, it’s a slightly smaller ensemble – Tashi Wada is going to play bagpipes and synth, Sarah Belle Reid is going to play trumpet and electronics and Corey Fogel is going to play percussion, I’m going to be singing – and then the Chorus (of Opera North). It was honestly a lot of work and very fun, but I don’t really know how it’s going to turn out. I’ve never worked with a chorus, I know that I’m inexperienced in that and there is a lot of room for error, but I’m very excited to find out what I’ve created.”

Julia Holter and the Chorus of Opera North perform The Passion of Joan of Arc at Huddersfield Town Hall on November 23. For more details on Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, visit https://hcmf.co.uk/