\n<\/p>\n
Z<\/span>den\u011bk Li\u0161ka became one of the eastern bloc\u2019s pioneers of electroacoustic music by accident. After breaking through making music for ads and animations, the revolutionary film-makers of the 1960s Czechoslovak new wave asked him to soundtrack their movies, which he took as his greatest inspirations. With the help of radio engineering enthusiasts at Czechoslovakia\u2019s film powerhouse, Barrandov Studios, he could imitate the whoosh of a spaceship or birds chirping. He composed underwater electroacoustic symphonies and music to be played on typewriters. Despite his innovations, he famously proclaimed: \u201cI only write music under the pictures.\u201d<\/p>\n Li\u0161ka was as productive as he was innovative: from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, he would score eight feature films a year, as well as numerous shorts and TV series. He could go camp or avant garde, channel Disney-like beauty and loved a waltz. His peers recall him composing on the night train or sketching the next cue while the orchestra was still recording the last one. Czechs from across the generations can whistle some of his melodies, such as the carnival-style theme from crime series The Sinful People of Prague.<\/p>\n The longer he worked, the more he saw things in these films that their directors hadn\u2019t even noticed. Li\u0161ka scored 10 of surrealist director Jan \u0160vankmajer\u2019s short films. \u201cHe didn\u2019t attempt to go with the mood of the film,\u201d the director once said. \u201cHe was able to discover rhythms that even directors weren\u2019t aware of.\u201d Li\u0161ka would compose with a stopwatch at the editing table, and often took on the additional role of film editor, suggesting cuts to fit his music. No other musical figure could match his influence on the Czech socialist film industry.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/span>Zden\u011bk Li\u0161ka: Ikarie XB\u200b-\u200b1 \u2013 video<\/span><\/p>\n Finders Keepers label head Andy Votel first discovered Li\u0161ka through the Czechoslovak new wave, and later rereleased his scores for Ikarie XB-1 and The Little Mermaid. He likens his impact to that of Ennio Morricone. \u201cHe was solely committed to the film score medium and should be credited as someone who revolutionised how film music is made, despite his music being behind politically landlocked,\u201d he says. He also sees parallels between Li\u0161ka and electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram: \u201cThey were here to communicate with emotion and humour. The process was merely a vessel. But in Li\u0161ka\u2019s case, the history books, via the setbacks of socialist secrecy, are in need of a remix.\u201d<\/p>\n When Li\u0161ka died of complications resulting from diabetes in 1983, aged just 61, his work had been almost forgotten. During his lifetime, only two records of his music \u2013 including his score for the 1965 Oscar-winning movie The Shop on the Main Street \u2013 were released. He wasn\u2019t interested in live concert presentations, believing the sound shouldn\u2019t be disconnected from the vision. He also produced communist propaganda, which complicated his legacy for Czechs.<\/p>\n More than 40 years later, archivists and composers have been restoring his reputation. His music has been staged live on numerous occasions, including by the Prague Symphony Orchestra. Scholars study his electroacoustic inventions, his famous editing table is on display at the Czech Museum of Music and a 2017 Czech documentary, Music by Zden\u011bk Li\u0161ka, told younger Czechs his story and underscored the reverence in which he is held. Last year, the Czech label Animal Music launched an archival vinyl series of Li\u0161ka\u2019s work, promising to open up his archive and release a new album every year. The first was dedicated to his collaborations with \u0160vankmajer; the second, Music to Films by Franti\u0161ek Vl\u00e1\u010dil, arrives this month.<\/p>\n <\/span>A scene from Karel Kachyna\u2019s 1975 adaptation of The Little Mermaid, scored by Li\u0161ka.<\/span> Photograph: TCD\/Prod.DB\/Alamy<\/p>\n Petr Ostrouchov is the label\u2019s curator and composer. Compiling these releases has been a challenge that entails trying to get inside Li\u0161ka\u2019s head. \u201cThanks to the trust of the family, I was able to study his sheet music and understand his compositional logic a bit better,\u201d he says. \u201cLater, I was entrusted with access to his personal archive, and I retrieved digitised tapes from an old computer sitting in one recording studio\u2019s cellar in Prague.\u201d For each volume, Ostrouchov digs unnamed files from the hard drive and compares them with the film and sheet music. \u201cA bit of detective work,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Li\u0161ka was born to a mining family in central Bohemia in 1922. His father led the miners\u2019 brass band, giving Li\u0161ka a close connection to music (and inspiring the countless brass motifs in his scores). After the second world war, he began his career at the Ba\u0165a shoe factory and its film studios in Zl\u00edn, far from his home town, where he composed music for commercials. (The studios were originally founded as the factory\u2019s marketing department, but after the company was nationalised by communists and the city renamed to Gottwaldov, it continued separately as a counterpart to Barrandov.) Li\u0161ka honed his craft on puppet stories by Herm\u00edna T\u00fdrlov\u00e1, a Czech animation film pioneer, and befriended her then assistant, Karel Zeman, whose steampunk style can be seen in the craft of Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton.<\/p>\n After the award-winning success of Zeman\u2019s adaptation of Jules Verne\u2019s Invention for Destruction, Li\u0161ka became Czechoslovakia\u2019s number one film composer, in demand by the likes of V\u011bra Chytilov\u00e1 and Juraj Herz. The government also took notice. During the Normalisation after 1968, when four Warsaw Pact countries jointly invaded the country, Li\u0161ka composed a symphony celebrating the Persian empire for Iran\u2019s Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and scored the TV detective series 30 Cases of Major Zeman, a propagandist project overseen by the communist ministry of the interior. But he never joined the party or any artistic union. As a composer, he didn\u2019t feel the same pressure as directors or writers.<\/p>\n <\/span>A scene from Ikarie XB-1, 1963.<\/span> Photograph: Everett Collection Inc\/Alamy<\/p>\n \u201cI think he was neutral to the regime,\u201d says Li\u0161ka\u2019s oldest daughter, Hana. \u201cHe composed no matter the political system, and he was left to do his job, because his music was an important export and brought significant money back.\u201d (The state agency Art Centrum arranged for him to work on multiple international expos, among other jobs for western countries. Li\u0161ka also soundtracked expos in Montreal, Canada, and Osaka in Japan.) Prague Symphony Orchestra programme director and longstanding Li\u0161ka scholar Martin Rudovsk\u00fd suggests that he was a \u201cconformist\u201d, albeit one who \u201cdoubted, in private, some of the propaganda films or TV series he scored. Certainly, he was not in opposition, for instance, as composers like Jan Nov\u00e1k.\u201d<\/p>\n Li\u0161ka was making capitalist money in communist times, which attracted the attention of the politburo, but Li\u0161ka was too successful to be persecuted. \u201cHaving a microwave or washing machine \u2013 let alone a swimming pool \u2013 was an unimaginable luxury for many at the time,\u201d his daughter Barbora remembers. But not for Li\u0161ka\u2019s family. \u201cWe were used to these odd things.\u201d<\/p>\n At the end of Li\u0161ka\u2019s life, his daughters remember him spending \u201cmore time between hospitals and the recording studio than anywhere else\u201d, until his death in July 1983. His legacy trickled through the iron curtain. Julian House \u2013 Ghost Box Records co-founder and then art student \u2013 had his first encounter with Li\u0161ka when the Brothers Quay\u2019s 1984 stop-motion short film The Cabinet of Jan \u0160vankmajer, a surrealist tribute to the director that featured Li\u0161ka\u2019s music, was shown in the UK. \u201cLi\u0161ka\u2019s compositions seem to have strange angles; they fit together in an odd way,\u201d he says. House is also a graphic designer: \u201cSomething about them reminds me of collage, similarly to the film posters of the Czech new wave.\u201d<\/p>\n When the Berlin Wall came down, Oscar-winning film editor Joe Walker, a close collaborator of Denis Villeneuve, started noticing Li\u0161ka\u2019s name attached to many extraordinary films, he says. \u201cIt became, for me, a guarantee of quality. For a few years, when the editing work I hoped for was out of reach, I wrote music for documentaries, dramas and lots of children\u2019s programmes. I tried to honour Li\u0161ka every day by providing a diet of good music \u2013 serving up advanced harmony and jagged rhythms \u2013 even when the images were relatively banal.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/span>Trailer for the documentary Music by Zden\u011bk Li\u0161ka \u2013 video<\/span><\/p>\n Animal Music\u2019s newest archival volume presents two lesser-known scores from Li\u0161ka\u2019s late career, collaborations with director Franti\u0161ek Vl\u00e1\u010dil. It\u2019s personal for the curator, Ostrouchov: Vl\u00e1\u010dil\u2019s 1967 existential medieval tale Mark\u00e9ta Lazarov\u00e1 introduced him to Li\u0161ka in the early 1990s, when the movie won a critics\u2019 poll for the greatest Czech movie of the century. Li\u0161ka\u2019s darkly ambient score pairs monumental choral music with tape manipulations and distant screams and whispers. (It\u2019s so epic and timeless that the contemporary Czech post-hardcore band Lvmen have sampled bits of the score on every one of their albums since 1999, bringing Li\u0161ka\u2019s legacy into punk venues.) His score for Vl\u00e1\u010dil\u2019s 1976 Smoke on the Potato Fields is the complete opposite, using melancholic string arrangements to tenderly guide the narrative about an \u00e9migr\u00e9 doctor who returns home in his twilight years.<\/p>\n The archive still presents a gargantuan task for the future: Ostrouchov is imagining albums focusing on Li\u0161ka\u2019s music for documentaries or children\u2019s programmes. His dream is to release Li\u0161ka\u2019s score to the questionable detective series 30 Cases of Major Zeman. \u201cLi\u0161ka scored a lot of schlock, but on the musical side, it was always ingenious,\u201d he says. \u201cHe never phoned in.\u201d<\/p>\n Music to Films by Franti\u0161ek Vl\u00e1\u010dil (Archives Vol 2) is out now on Animal Music<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Zden\u011bk Li\u0161ka became one of the eastern bloc\u2019s pioneers of electroacoustic music by accident. After breaking through making music for ads and animations, the revolutionary film-makers of the 1960s Czechoslovak new wave asked him to soundtrack their movies, which he took as his greatest inspirations. With the help of radio engineering enthusiasts at Czechoslovakia\u2019s film<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21933,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[1280,8037,1171,5526,13434,686,13432,1955,13433],"class_list":{"0":"post-21932","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-composer","9":"tag-czech","10":"tag-film","11":"tag-legacy","12":"tag-liska","13":"tag-music","14":"tag-revitalising","15":"tag-revolutionary","16":"tag-zdenek"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21932\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}