Transcripts

STEVE HEITZEG: This is a woman who saw life in bones and skulls and not death and who can paint and paint what she feels and what she hears. It's just like the Copeland quote that composers should compose what they hear. And I think that's good, because in society there are far too few individuals. And for me, O'Keeffe is a very positive thing. And, of course, her paintings are nothing short of brilliant.

SPEAKER: How much do you know about her life?

STEVE HEITZEG: Quite a great deal. But there's a lot of things that are unknown about O'Keeffe, and I think that's partly to her credit. But Jane Alexander told me many stories about O'Keeffe. She was able to meet O'Keeffe in the early '80s, went down and had gone down just to Santa Fe and Abiquiu for the intention of meeting O'Keeffe, and she was just about ready to leave. She was unsuccessful.

And Juan Hamilton, who was taking care of O'Keeffe at the time, calls her up and says, you've got one hour. Be at the train station at 3:00. So she goes, and she gets to be with O'Keefe. They were just by themselves for, like, three or four hours, and they wrapped it up. They had a beer together. And they're both kindred spirits.

SPEAKER: I'm very curious to know how you got involved in this project in the first place.

STEVE HEITZEG: Yes I wrote my piece, Flower of the Earth homage to Georgia O'Keefe, in 1987, in celebration of O'Keefe's birth 100th anniversary. And I greatly respected O'Keefe's paintings and still do. And so I wrote the piece, and I based the piece on four specific paintings of O'Keefe's. And before I finalized the piece, I called the Georgia O'Keeffe estate to ask for permission to include her actual titles in my piece, which they granted me. And at the time when I talked with them, I spoke with the executive director, and she said that I should be certain and let Jane Alexander know about the piece, because she was working on a film about O'Keeffe.

SPEAKER: So that was the first you knew of--

STEVE HEITZEG: Yes.

SPEAKER: --this television project.

STEVE HEITZEG: So then that was four years ago. And I sent Jane Alexander a tape, and she liked the piece, and we kept up a correspondence for four years. and then--

SPEAKER: Oh, splendid.

STEVE HEITZEG: --when my endangered was performed. Then I also sent her a tape of that because I felt that with the solitary cello piece, that maybe would be very conducive to O'Keefe's solitary scenes or her painting the individual aspect. And I sent in Jane like that, too. So then, this March, she gave me a call and said they had finished shooting the film and-- or the video portion, and that they wanted to include my music.

SPEAKER: Tonight. People all over the United States are not only going to see this, they're going to hear your music. How does that make you feel?

STEVE HEITZEG: I'm very, very excited. And yet I'm very humbled too, because it's something that I have always dreamed of doing, writing film music. Whenever I was a kid, I'd go to movies and always wanted to know who wrote it and the whole thing, the film score. I would hope that people not so much remember my name that I wrote the music but that the music is interwoven into the film, and that they get the image that we had hoped to-- or the vision that we wished to portray about O'Keeffe and Stieglitz life.