Time Stands Still in Recent Works by La Jolla Composer

For a young composer accustomed to working with synthesizers, samplers, and tape loops, Michael Roth seems to be caught in a 1920s time warp.

Roth recently completed the musical score for Howard Brookner’s film “The Bloodhounds of Broadway,” which takes place New Year’s Eve, 1928. And, earlier this month, he put the finishing touches on his score for the La Jolla Playhouse production of “Once in a Lifetime,” George Kaufman and Moss Hart’s vintage 1930 satire on Hollywood’s transmutation from silent pictures to talkies.

Though Roth, as the La Jolla theater’s resident composer, is expected to be flexible in designing music for its various productions, he also sees the American composer as heterogeneous by definition. An accolade tossed to his former teacher and mentor, recent Pulitzer-Prize winner William Bolcom, sums up his point.

“Bill is dazzlingly eclectic,” Roth said. “What he does most successfully is to encompass all the things it is to be an American composer, but tries to do it unself-consciously.”

Roth defines his own style as “somewhere between Elliott Carter and Fats Domino,” an apt designation for someone who is drawn to academic serial composition but quickly admits humbler origins.

“I am an old rock ‘n’ roll pianist who grew up listening to the Beatles--I did not study Beethoven at age 6.”

For a composer who is mildly apologetic about his musical beginnings, the 34-year-old Roth sports an enviable track record. Since coming to the La Jolla Playhouse in 1983, he has worked on some of its most lauded productions, including Lee Blessing’s “A Walk in the Woods,” which opened on Broadway this February and received a Tony nomination for best new play.

If Roth had some apprehension about writing music for “Once in a Lifetime,” which some might casually dismiss as a period comedy, he was relieved to discover the play’s darker side, but he stopped short of defining it as a morality play.

“It is, however, more than a fun comedy type of play. In the last scene, when the main character goes back to Hollywood, it’s really a journey to chaos, to an industry of egomaniacs.”

Apparently, the lure of “going Hollywood” remains as much a concern to Roth as it did to the “Once in a Lifetime” playwrights, who portrayed the follies of the emerging motion picture industry from the remote purview of New York’s theater enclave.

“It’s what’s going on today,” Roth said. “Hollywood is the place where people create all this work, and there is lots of money to do it. It’s what we have to deal with as artists when we want to go to that monstrous place. All of us who want to work in music theater or do serious film work as a composer have to deal with the crass, egotistical system. We are often at the mercy of decision-makers completely oblivious to our artistic concerns.”

Roth was able to put aside his allegorical reading of the play long enough to derive a clue from the plot that would suggest his instrumentation.

“Since the play is about going from silent movies to talkies, I decided to underscore it like a silent movie. At the outset, the audience sees a pianist in the pit. It turned out that the set designer had left the pit open, so I saw no reason not to put the pianist in there.”

Roth has composed a number of set pieces for the pianist, a slow blues and some updated piano ragtime.

“The fast rag piece has lots of notes, serially drawn here and there. It’s definitely not a Scott Joplin rag. The fast rag is sort of Bolcom-like--I suppose it’s a kind of congratulation to my teacher for his Pulitzer.”

Coincidentally, the pianist in the La Jolla production is Chris Hertzog, who followed Roth at the University of Michigan as a Bolcom protege.