Lost Highway Suite: An Unorthodox Orchestra

I want to talk about the Lost Highway Suite composed by Olga Neuwirth. A little backstory on this piece tells you that the piece was inspired by the cult classic film “Lost Highway”, duh. A little more information on this piece is its use of live performance mixed with electronic sound to create a sort of hallucinatory effect. Other then this I had no real knowledge of what I was walking into and what I was about to hear.

So here is what truly stands out about this piece. The music starts playing and all around the room are different instruments/elements that would not be seen in a regular orchestra. Such as a bass, singing, screaming, harmonica, gong, static from a radio. And to make it worse the way they played certain instruments was very unorthodox such as using the bow of a violin on a gong, or the use of a harmonica to create a screeching noise, or this huge metal ball on top of a tuba to muffle the sound. But with all this what comes out of it?

The beginning of the piece starts very quiet and does not follow any particular harmony. It’s a repetition of sound aiming to put the listener in a trance. This continues for a few minutes and occasionally the tempo would speed up and the volume would increase to eventually die down again. This happens many times in the beginning, but the sound never comes to a complete halt. Theirs this buzzing/rattling noise that does not stop which makes the listener feel anxious as the music dies down but there is still sound being heard. When the music does stop the composer uses this sudden suspense in sound to completely change the song and bring about a new emotion. Coming to the end of the piece there is actual harmony coming from the orchestra. This quickly subsides as everything becomes sporadic and becomes overshadowed by a man screaming as if he was in agonizing pain. The man screaming is the last sound you hear before an utter silence holds the crowd in suspense for what seems like several minutes. Following this silence is a round of applause and the piece is over.

This piece utilized many different technologies and different ideas to capture this environment and emotion. The best element about it in my opinion is its ambiguity. Throughout the piece, I closed my eyes and tried to see what story a piece like this would portray and I couldn’t help but think how my story would be different from someone else’s. There is no visual to a piece like this, but this piece does paint a picture and does have a story. There were some parts that felt hopeful and other parts that felt dreadful and at the end it felt like the character you followed since the beginning has succumbed to an agonizing end. By the end, I understood the reason for the ambiguous use of instruments everything came together to captivate the audience in a dreary and mystifying story.