Composer and performer Jonah Rapino spent much of his youth in Ohio, where he took interest in violin at the young age of five. Moving to Boston in 1993, Jonah attended Boston University for the Arts and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in classical violin. Filled with years of violin experience, Jonah created his first project, New Millennium String Ensemble, which allowed him to experiment with other forms of artistic expression. Since 2001, Jonah has been performing live soundtracks for silent films, as a member of a rock trio known as The Devil Music Ensemble (DME). In the last eight years DME established themselves as one of the primary American groups to compose and perform scores for silent films, which included touring across the U.S. performing a soundtrack to F.W. Murnau’s 1922 classic silent film, Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror. This year, showcasing at Toronto the DME has again translated their amazing musical talents into creating a live soundtrack performance to the only surviving silent martial arts film Red Heroine (1929).

Red Heroine is the oldest, most rarely seen silent Chinese Wuxia (swordplay) movie—a simple story of an innocent victim seeking revenge on the villain with the help of a marital arts master. Despite the disapproval from the political parties of the time, the Nationalists and Communists of China, the movie gained immense popularity amongst impoverished workers as an emotional tale of heroism and justice. This week, I had the opportunity to interview DME’s Jonah Rapino.

Who did you idolize growing up? Whether it be music-related or not, and why?

Because I loved sports when I was younger, I idolized baseball players the most. In fact, the only musician I idolized was my violin teacher - he was an amazing violin player, and I wanted to play just like him.

How and when did you know you wanted to go into the music industry?

There wasn’t any specific time in my life where I said to myself that the music industry was where I wanted to go. It just kind of happened. I took a music major in college because I didn’t know what else to do, and from then on I just kept making and playing music.

Do you have a signature or style to your work that makes it distinguishable from others'?

Devil Music Ensemble is different in itself because we tend to score the silent films second-to-second and spend months collectively composing the music for it. Each cut and each scene is considered when making music for the overall feeling, mood and action. I feel like a lot of performers of soundtracks to silent films work more openly and rely on chance, which is more of the traditional way of working with a silent film—and also a good way to do it. For DME, we take our film projects and create very concrete steps in order to produce music that perfectly compliments each moment of the film. We strive to make music become truly a part of the film and not something separate from it in any way.

Why of all the modes of storytelling, did you choose score silent films to portray it?

We came to do live music soundtracks to silent films very randomly. First we started as an improv kind of rock band that would sometimes use silent films to influence our direction, or at other times we would feature silent films projected simultaneously in the background. One day, someone asked us to do a score for a silent film of our choosing for a festival called Celluloud, which was a festival that featured rock bands who scored old silent films. The show turned out to be a huge success and we really got some inspiration for writing original music. So, the next time we toured, we decided to try to really take some time and write a score for a silent film and see if we could do shows at movie theaters. From there, it just continued.

What are some of the major challenges you face with Red Heroine?

One of the challenges we faced with this film was to trying to make music that connected with the fact that the film took place in China. We felt that it needed Chinese sounding music as well as a kung fu soundtrack, and this was something we had very little experience with. Throughout the creative process, we researched both traditional and classical Chinese music, as well as watched and listened to some of the great 60‘s and 70‘s kung fu films. In the end, it was a wonderful learning process.

What kind of message(s) do you want to send to your viewers through the performance of Red Heroine?

We chose Red Heroine because it was something that almost no one had ever seen or heard of. Red Heroine was hidden, especially in a genre where there is so many marital arts films that people have seen—Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan films, for example. This was our chance to show something rarely seen, like sharing a secret. And also it was the chance to make the very first contemporary score for this specific film. We also wanted our audience to understand that the current action and kung fu films of today had their origins not in Hong Kong, but from the 20’s and 30’s of Shanghai, China.

What do you think is the best or worst thing about the music industry.

The worst thing about the music industry is that it is an industry which is spurred towards innovation, not to make better art, but to sell more music and make more money. This is why a lot of important music is never heard by the majority of people.

What advice would you give to prospective artists who want to enter the music
industry?

There seems to be very little financial opportunity in the middle ground between the institutionalized music of the conservatory and the pop music of the conglomerate music industry. If the thing that you want to do falls between those two worlds, be prepared for a long tenure of obscurity and little monetary success. Success does come to some who are in that realm, but only after a lot of perseverance. It is a good thing that music is such a fun thing to do, because if it wasn’t, the only music that would exist would be Beethoven and Beyonce.

Profiler’s Quote:

“Silent films are like buried treasure.”

By Christina Jung for Schema Magazine.

Red Heroine is scheduled on Friday November 13 2009, 8:00 PM at The Royal

Filmmaker Profiles are done in partnership with Schema Magazine.