Eastman Showcase 2005
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Disturbing Images, Exciting Sounds
For more than 30 years, Nexus, whose founding members include Bill Cahn (BM ’68) and Rob Becker (BM ’69, MM ’71), has been one of the world’s leading percussion ensembles – and also has a history of creating and performing movie soundtracks, starting with the 1975 Oscar-winning documentary The Man Who Skied Down Everest.
One of Nexus’ most unusual film projects is the Japanese silent film A Page of Madness, by director Teinosuke Kinugasa. Produced in 1926, it was long thought to be lost, and rediscovered in 1971. In it, a retired sailor hires on as a janitor at an insane asylum to free his wife, who has been imprisoned there after attempting to kill herself and her baby. Acted by an avant-garde theater troupe, the hour-long drama employs distorted, stylized images, flashbacks, and quick cuts, showing the world as it is seen by the insane.
All that the rediscovered film needed was a live musical score that enhanced the mystery and rhythm of the film’s bizarre images, and that’s where Bill Cahn came in. In fact, Kinugasa originally intended a percussion accompaniment for A Page of Madness; Bill’s score, performed by Nexus on percussion instruments from around the world, has been praised as a perfect parallel to the film’s unique vision.
Nexus gave the European premiere of A Page of Madness with Cahn’s music this summer at Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, to great acclaim. In a review headlined “Ecstatic Sound Experience,” the Hamburg Morning News praised “an impressive stock of sounds and noises…the music developed an undertow nobody could escape,” and summed up: “Never before has the tranquil balcony at Metropolis Cinema trembled with such relish.”