with Tarkovsky

Most film directors come to have an effect on composers during the course of their work; not many continue doing so from beyond the grave, as Andrei Tarkovsky has. In 1987, the year after his death, two distinguished composers, Nono and Takemitsu, independently wrote musical memorials to him. Four years after that Abbado put on a concert in Vienna to include the Nono piece, commissioning for the occasion further tributes from Kurtág, Rihm and Beat Furrer. Now a recording of that concert has been released as ‘Hommage à Andrei Tarkovsky’, whose appearance, coupled with the recent screening of Tarkovsky's films at Anthology Film Archives, prompts some thoughts about why this director has become such a talisman for musical creators.

Part of the answer, surely, has to do with his persona as an unreconstructed Romantic, with his insistence on the high calling of the true artist, his impatience with mere entertainment, his assertion of art as an ethical force, his total unwillingness to compromise. In his book Sculpting with Time he speaks in terms that could have been endorsed by Schoenberg, even Schumann. He belongs philosophically to another age, yet there he was, in our own time (or something not so distant from it), making films unlike any that had been seen before.

That would be one reason for composers to honour him, but there are others that have to do more specifically with how he used music in his films and how he handled film as a musical medium.