Part File Score

“Sound has always been my primary tool. . . . I am particularly interested in the emotive and psychological properties of sound and how it can be used as a device to alter individual consciousness.” —Susan Philipsz In "Part File Score," Susan Philipsz deconstructs early Hollywood film scores by the Austrian composer Hanns Eisler. This haunting tonal landscape captures the harsh realities endured by the gifted composer, whose life and art were repeatedly under siege. In the 1930s, Eisler moved to the United States to escape Nazi Germany and settled in Los Angeles, home to a vibrant community of similarly exiled European intellectuals. In 1948, after the FBI targeted him as a suspected communist, Eisler was blacklisted and forced to leave the United States. Just before boarding his flight, he read this to the press: "I leave this country not without bitterness and infuriation. I could well understand it when in 1933 the Hitler bandits put a price on my head and drove me out. They were the evil of the period; I was proud at being driven out. But I feel heartbroken over being driven out of this beautiful country in this ridiculous way." Each speaker isolates the plaintive sound of a violin playing a single note extracted from different scores, including one intended for Charlie Chaplin’s silent film "The Circus," which was never completed because of Eisler’s deportation. The accompanying prints overlay the composer’s handwritten notes with the redacted pages from his FBI files. Eisler’s notations have uncanny visual parallels with the FBI’s crossed out text, but for diametrically opposing reasons: as evidence of Eisler’s productive creativity, on the one hand, and the FBI’s destructive paranoia on the other. A stark meditation on displacement and loss, "Part File Score" evokes the vulnerability of a man whose music, and very existence, were constantly in jeopardy.