In the documentary film Landfill Harmonic, music provides a beacon of hope to men, women and children seeking to overcome difficult circumstances. Directed by Brad Allgood, Graham Townsley and Juliana Penaranda-Loftus, now in limited theatrical release and streaming via Vimeo on-demand, the film tells the remarkable true story of the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura, Paraguay. Led by their conductor, guitarist Favio Chavez, and with instruments meticulously constructed out of garbage and other materials found in the city’s landfills by garbage picker/craftsman Nicolas “Cola” Gomez, the orchestra’s young members were inspired and determined to pursue their previously unheard of dreams of playing music.
Soon, these musicians achieved an unexpected level of worldwide fame thanks to their live performances, including a memorable guest appearance in concert [in 2013] with the legendary heavy metal group Megadeth on their hit “Symphony of Destruction.” When their sudden rise was halted in the aftermath of deadly flooding back in Cateura, Chavez, Gomez and the young children who make up the Recycled Orchestra used their talents to persevere and persist through adversity the way they always have: through music and through each other.
Since its premiere at the 2015 South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, Landfill Harmonic has had a profound effect on both its audiences and its filmmakers. Perhaps its greatest impact, though, was felt by its composer, Michael A. Levine (Cold Case, Film U). Levine’s music for Landfill Harmonic underscores the journey of the Recycled Orchestra and features unique instrumentation compiled from disposed items found in his own trash bins. Along with the film’s incidental music, he and his daughter, Mariana Barreto, collaborated on Landfill Harmonic’s uplifting end title song, “Cateura: Vamos a Soñar (We Will Dream).” This past September, Levine performed the song live with members of the Recycled Orchestra and various young musicians from New York and New Jersey youth orchestras during a joint concert at New York’s Trinity Church. His score and several live performances by the orchestra will be on an upcoming soundtrack album set to debut early next year on J2 Records.
Chris Hadley: As a musician and a composer yourself, what was it about the story of the Recycled Orchestra that led you to compose for Landfill Harmonic?
Michael A. Levine: Well, I’m a firm believer in the transformative power of music. I think that music is one of the oldest languages of the human race. It may even predate spoken language. We don’t know, but it certainly co-evolved with it. It’s one of the ways that we manage to connect with each other and become stronger than any of us can be individually. These kids grow up in this incredibly hostile environment, where they have very few opportunities other than working on the landfill or worse. Through the power of music, and music played with each other, they have transformed their lives. This is very much a result of the vision of their conductor, Favio Chavez, who really saw this as an opportunity to not just bring music to the community, which of course he felt passionately about, but to assess the individuals involved so that they could, through their efforts of learning music and playing together, learn these essential life skills that have really aided them all.
I think it’s fascinating that some of the kids he started with 10 years ago are now graduating college, and not just in music. One’s a radiologist. These are opportunities that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago, so to me that was a very inspiring story. It also paralleled my own feeling of the liberation that music provides for me in my own life. I’ve often said to people that the music business is untrustworthy, but music will never betray you.
CH: What sets your work on Landfill Harmonic apart from the other projects you’ve done for film, TV, concert and pop music?
MAL: Well, it’s an extension of what I’ve done in the past. I’ve always had eclectic interests, and I’ve always been interested in both the social issues that it represents and the sense of musical eclecticism. That was hard as an extension, but what’s different is that this is the first time I’ve ever done anything that’s based on Paraguayan traditional music. It’s the first time I’ve written something where there was a closing credit song in Spanish.
CH: How did you react upon seeing the film for the first time, both during production and during its premiere release?
MAL: Well, you can’t help but be inspired. I think you’d have to be the Scroogiest, Grinchiest personality to not hear this story and go, “Wow, that is really something.” People who have nothing achieving something like this. One of the things Favio says at the end of the film is, “Just because you have nothing, don’t let that be an excuse to do nothing,” and those of us in the first world who have an awful lot really have no excuse to do nothing. I found it very inspiring, and it resonated a lot with my personal beliefs.
When you finally see something on the big screen, it’s always a whole lot better than it is on your screen at home. I’ve got a pretty nice screen at home, but you’re working with stuff that’s got time code all over it. It’s not color corrected, the sound is all screwed up and so forth, and it always feels a little amateur. When you finally see the finished, sound balanced, color corrected big image, it’s pretty awesome, and it’s always inspiring. I will, however, say that I think the first thing I said to my assistant afterwards was, “Next time, I’ve got to mix the bells softer.” CH: How did working with Chavez and the filmmakers involved help you determine the direction of the score?
MAL: During the process of writing the score, [co-director] Graham Townsley was already no longer involved with the picture, so I never met him until the premiere. Brad Allgood was the director that I was working with and he was originally an editor on the film, and then took up the reins as a director. He is a wonderful documentary filmmaker with a real sense for story. I also dealt with the producers, like Juliana Penaranda-Loftus and Rodolfo Madero, and to a lesser extent Alejandra Amarilla. These are the three main producers of the film. Rodolfo, as a musician himself, was very smart about the use of music, but Brad really is the great storyteller of the whole bunch. He had taken what was a whole lot of really intriguing footage, and transformed it into a compelling story.
They thought they were done with the film, then the flood happened in Cateura, which is the climax of the third act of the film. Brad and Juliana talked about this—they said, “We’ve got to figure out a way to go down there and shoot some more.” Even though they were out of money, they were out of time and they were out of everything, they made it work somehow.
CH: Did the change in tone during the third act make you adjust your approach to scoring that section?
MAL: There’s always a sense of striving against difficult odds throughout the film. There are places where it seems like they’re on a roll, and there are places where it seems like they hit a wall. The music always has to reflect that inner reality much more so than the external factors. In terms of what the music had to represent, it becomes something that is an ideal composer’s assignment, because you get to run the gamut from joy to despair, and everything in between.
CH: It’s basically as if the people that are featured in the film are characters in their own right, even though this is a documentary. The peaks and valleys, story-wise, are reflected by their real-life experiences.
MAL: From an audience’s viewpoint, there’s very little difference between a dramatic film and a documentary. These are still stories about humans dealing with human problems, and how they respond to them. In this case, it’s a classic story of a group of people who really had very little, yet they managed to achieve something of importance in the world through their sheer determination and a little bit of luck.
CH: In addition to the violin (constructed from the landfill materials) that you played on this score, what were some of the other recycled instruments found in the soundtrack? And where in the score can people hear them?
MAL: I felt that I couldn’t do justice to this story without at least incorporating some degree of recycled instruments into the score. The violin itself was one that was made by Cola, who’s the instrument maker for the orchestra, and the orchestra was kind enough to give it to me. However, everything else was stuff that came from my own recycled trash. That includes bottles that were used as flutes and various objects used as drums and percussion instruments. Even a plucked instrument, whatever I could find. My wife got used to the sight of me digging through the blue container out in front of her house and saying, “Hey, I wonder if this would work.”
You’ll hear it throughout the score, especially in the places where you hear the references to traditional Paraguayan music, because I also did a little bit of extra musicology study of Paraguayan music. To be clear, this is not an authentic reproduction of South American music. It’s more like my interpretation of it based on the listening that I did. The instruments that I used in the score add that sense of unpredictability to the sound that I really feel gives it a special kind of life that you just can’t get by using the usual palette.
CH: Did you construct these found instruments yourself?
MAL: I’m no Cola. I’m pretty much all thumbs when it comes to construction, so I would grab something; if it was a percussive thing, I would try to figure out what I had that I could hit it with that it would sound good. I didn’t do any construction. The only complex recycled instrument I had was the violin.
CH: What was the composing and recording process like for the score?
MAL: Because I have my own recording studio and this was a small budget film, I played most of the instruments myself. We did have a couple of folks who helped out, including a couple of outstanding guitar players on the score. We had a number of people who contributed this and that, but for the most part, a large part of the score is just me recording in layers. I’m a firm believer in the idea of having a thematic through line. This is something that has kind of gotten out of fashion in film and television in the last few decades. It used to be a very common thing. I think of the work, particularly of Henry Mancini for example, who would oftentimes write a song. That song would have a lyricist, but that song would be the basis of the theme of the movie, whether we’re talking Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Two for the Road or Days of Wine and Roses. Anything like that. I like that philosophy of composing. The first composition written for this film was the song.
CH: Speaking of the song (“Cateura: Vamos a Soñar (We Will Dream)”), how did that come together and how does that tie back thematically to the score itself?
MAL: Well, the lyrics of the song are based on things that Favio said, and it is pulled from the viewpoint of the kids in the orchestra. A number of lines come specifically from him addressing the audience in the very last scene in the movie, so the idea was to do something that felt a little bit like a South American piece but a contemporary pop song at the same time. It’s in English and in Spanish. My daughter, Mariana Barreto—technically my step-daughter, although I never think of her that way—her first language was Spanish. She wrote the initial Spanish lyrics, based on some ideas that I had. The lyrics were divided by a number of people, but most notably Mariana.
I took the music from that and it’s woven throughout the score as a theme. For example, if you listen to the song, then you listen to the opening of the film, which sounds very different in terms of rhythm, color and so forth, you realize it’s the same tune—it’s just much slower and very different in instrumentation. That happens again and again, so the heart of Cateura is what the song represents.
Favio said that everybody has the right to dream. That’s the hardest part, I think, about being really poor, is that you are told directly or indirectly, from the time you’re an infant, that you don’t have the right to dream, that your life is going to be stuck wherever it is you are. Favio said, “No.” There are variations of the chorus, but it says, “Cateura, come with me, Cateura, we will succeed, Cateura, here we live, we will fly, we will fly, we will dream,” and it plays off a little in Spanish. It means “we will fly” and “we will dream.” It rather summarizes my feeling about it.
CH: You also performed the song live in concert with the orchestra this past September at New York’s Trinity Church. What was that experience like?
MAL: It was so much fun. A good chunk of the orchestra from Cateura was there, then there were also some excellent musicians from the InterSchool Orchestras of New York. It was one of the best feeling concerts I’ve ever attended. The audience was psyched and the place was packed. Trinity Church just sounds great, so it was a peak experience, let’s put it that way.
CH: What are your hopes for the success of Landfill Harmonic, and for the music you wrote for it?
MAL: I would love as many people as possible to see it. It’s in limited theatrical release now. It’s done the festival circuit and a certain number of people got to see that, but I believe once it’s on television, which will happen later in the winter, it’s going to reach a much broader audience. There are a number of different goals that I would have for it. One is that the orchestra becomes sustaining enough that it becomes a permanent institution for the town of Cateura. Right now, it’s still very much in its infancy, in the sense that it’s only 10 years old. I hope that interest in the orchestra, and in its story, continues and it becomes a classic, as opposed to a flash in the pan. It looks like that’s what’s going to be happening, so that’s great.
I also think that it can inspire efforts all around the world, including here in the United States. One of the organizations I’ve recently started working with is the Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation. They raise money to pay for instruments for disadvantaged schools. This was something that was started by the late, great composer Michael Kamen. They’ve been around for about 20 years, and they’ve done a really fine job. There’s something like 10,000 instruments that they have managed to distribute. I don’t really know the exact number, but that’s something I’ve only recently gotten involved with. That kind of mission is one that I feel the Landfill story inspires.
CH: Give us a quick rundown of what you’re working on now.
MAL: Right now, I’m scoring a film that has a working title that is kind of secret, but it’s an independent film out of New York that I think is going to be really fascinating and a character study. I’m also scoring Lego DC Super Hero Girls: A Case of the Mondays, and I’m involved in a number of other songwriting/song producing projects. I’ve been working on an album with Evelyn Glennie, the wonderful Scottish percussionist. She’s one of the world’s most respected classical percussionists and we’re doing an album tentatively titled Marimbalin, in which her marimba playing and my violin playing are featured.
—FSMO
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