Bach

John Carpenter has this one recurring nightmare.

“I’m in a huge, massive town I don’t really know,” he says, “and I’m looking for the movie district. And inevitably all the theaters are closed down. They’re all closed down. That’s what the dream is.”

I’m visiting Carpenter at his longtime production house in Hollywood on one of L.A.’s unjustly sunny October afternoons. A vintage “Halloween” pinball machine and a life-size Nosferatu hover near his easy chair. I tell him I don’t think Freud would have too much trouble interpreting that particular dream.

“No, I know,” he says, laughing. “I don’t have too much trouble with that either.”

Nonetheless, it truly haunts him — “and it has haunted me over the years for many dreams in a row,” he continues. “I’m either with family or a group, and I go off to do something and I get completely lost. [Freud] wouldn’t have too much trouble figuring that out either. I mean, none of this is very mysterious.”

Carpenter is a gruff but approachable 77 these days, his career as a film director receding in the rearview. The last feature he made was 2010’s “The Ward.” His unofficial retirement was partly chosen, partly imposed by a capricious industry. The great movie poster artist Drew Struzan died two days before I visited — Carpenter says he never met Struzan but loved his work, especially his striking painting for the director’s icy 1982 creature movie “The Thing” — and I note how that whole enterprise of selling a movie with a piece of handmade art is a lost one.

“The whole movie business that I knew, that I grew up with, is gone,” he replies. “All gone.”

John Carpenter with John Mulaney, appearing as a part of “Everybody’s in L.A.” at the Sunset Gower Studios in May 2024.

(Adam Rose / Netflix)

It hasn’t, thankfully, made him want to escape from L.A. He still lives here with his wife, Sandy King, who runs the graphic novel imprint Storm King Comics, which Carpenter contributes to. He gamely appeared on John Mulaney’s “Everybody’s in L.A.” series on Netflix and, earlier this year, the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. gave him a Career Achievement Award — a belated lovefest for a veteran who was sidelined after “The Thing” flopped, cast out into indie darkness and was never personally nominated for an Oscar.

The thing that does keep Carpenter busy these days (other than watching Warriors basketball and playing videogames) is the thing that might have an even bigger cultural footprint than his movies: his music. With his adult son Cody and godson, Daniel Davies, Carpenter is once again performing live concerts of his film scores and instrumental albums in a run at downtown’s Belasco this weekend and next.

The synthy, hypnotic scores that became his signature in films like “Halloween” and “Escape from New York” not only outnumber his output as a director — he’s scored movies for several other filmmakers and recently made a handshake deal in public to score Bong Joon Ho’s next feature — but their influence and popularity are much more evident in 2025 than the style of his image-making.

From “Stranger Things” to “F1,” Carpenter’s minimalist palette of retro electronica combined with the groove-based, trancelike ethos of his music (which now includes four “Lost Themes” records) is the coin of the realm so many modern artists are chasing.

Very few composers today are trying to sound like John Williams; many of them want to sound like John Carpenter. The Kentucky-raised skeptic with the long white hair doesn’t believe me when I express this.

“Well, see, I must be stupid,” he says, “because I don’t get it.”

“The true evil in the world comes from people,” says Carpenter. “I know that nature’s pretty rough, but not like men.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Carpenter is quick to put himself down. He always says that he scored his own films because he was the only composer he could afford, and that he only used synths because they were cheap and he couldn’t properly write music for an orchestra. When I tell him that Daniel Wyman, the instrumentalist who helped program and execute the “Halloween” score in 1978, praised Carpenter’s innate knowledge of the “circle of fifths” and secondary dominants — bedrocks of Western musical theory that allowed Carpenter’s scores to keep the tension cooking — he huffs.

“I have no idea what he’s talking about,” Carpenter says, halfway between self-deprecation and something more rascally. “It all comes, probably, from the years I spent in our front room with my father and listening to classical music. I’m sure I’m just digging this s— out.”

Whether by osmosis or genetics or possibly black magic, Carpenter clearly absorbed his powers from his father, Dr. Howard Carpenter, a classically trained violinist and composer. Classical music filled the childhood home in Bowling Green and for young John it was all about “Bach, Bach and Bach. He’s my favorite. I just can’t get enough of Johann there.”

It makes sense. Bach’s music has a circular spell quality and the pipe organ, resounding with reverb in gargantuan cathedrals, was the original synthesizer.

“He’s the Rock of Ages of music,” says Carpenter, who particularly loves the fugue nicknamed “St. Anne” and the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. “Everybody would go back to Mozart or Beethoven. They are astonishing — Beethoven is especially astonishing — but they’re not my style. I don’t feel it like I do with Bach. I immediately got him.”

Carpenter was also a film score freak since Day 1. He cites the early electronic music in 1956’s “Forbidden Planet” and claims Bernard Herrmann and Dimitri Tiomkin as his two all-time favorites. Just listen, he says, to the way Tiomkin’s music transitions from the westerny fanfare under the Winchester Pictures logo to the swirling, menacing orchestral storm that accompanies “The Thing From Another World” title card in that 1951 sci-fi picture that Carpenter remixed as “The Thing.”

“The music is so weird, I cannot follow it,” he says. “But I love it.”

Yet Carpenter feels more personally indebted to rock ‘n’ roll: the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors. He wanted to be a rock star ever since he grew his hair long and bought a guitar in high school. He sang and performed R&B and psychedelic rock for sororities on the Western Kentucky campus as well as on a tour of the U.S. Army bases in Germany. He formed the rock trio Coupe de Villes with his buddies at USC and they made an album and played wrap parties.

He also kept soaking up contemporary influences, listening to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” while location scouting for “Halloween.” Peter Fonda later introduced Carpenter to Zevon and he wanted the director to adapt the song into a film that never happened (starring Fonda as the werewolf, but “this time he gets the girl,” Carpenter recalls). In the ’80s he blasted Metallica with his two boys and he still loves Devo.

It’s incredibly rare for a film director to score their own films, rarer still for one to spend decades on stage as a performing musician. The requisite personalities would seem diametrical.

“My dad was a performing musician, so it was just part of the family,” Carpenter says. However, until 2016, when Carpenter first toured with his music, he was consumed with stage fright. “I had an incident when I was in a play in high school,” he says. “I went up and I forgot my lines. Shame descended upon me and I had a tough time. I was scared all the time.”

The director credits his touring drummer, Scott Seiver, for helping him beat it.

“Your adrenaline carries you to another planet when that thing starts,” he sighs with pleasure. “You hear a wall of screaming people. It’s a big time.”

He pushes back against the idea that directors “hide behind the camera.”

“The pressure, that’s the biggest thing,” Carpenter says. “You put yourself under pressure from the studio, you’re carrying all this money, crew, you want to be on time.”

He remembers seeing some haggard making-of footage of himself in post-production on “Ghost of Mars” in 2001 and thinking: Oh my God, this guy is in trouble. “I had to stop,” he says. “I can’t do this to myself anymore. I can’t take this kind of stress — it’ll kill you, as it has so many other directors. The music came along and it’s from God. It’s a blessing.”

John Carpenter is grateful but he doesn’t believe in God. He believes that, when we die, “we just disperse — our energy disperses, and we return to what we were. We’re all stardust up there and the darkness created us, in a sense. So that’s what we have to make peace with. I point up to the infinite, the space between stars. But things stop when you die. Your heart stops, brain — everything stops. You get cold. Your energy dissipates and it just… ends. The End.”

This is not exactly a peaceful thought for him.

“I mean, I don’t want to die,” he adds. “I’m not looking forward to that. But what can you do? I can’t control it. But that’s what I believe and I’m alone in it. I can’t put that on anybody else. Everybody has their own beliefs, their own gods, their own afterlife.”

He describes himself as a “long-term optimist but a short-term pessimist.”

“I have hope,” he says, “put it that way.” Yet he looks around and sees a lot of evil.

“The true evil in the world comes from people,” says Carpenter, who has long used cinematic allegories to skewer capitalist pigs and bloodthirsty governments. “I know that nature’s pretty rough, but not like men. You see pictures of lions taking down their prey and you see the face of the prey and you say: ‘Oh, man.’ Humans do things like that and enjoy it. Or they do things like that for power or pleasure. Humans are evil but they’re capable of massive good — and they’re capable of the greatest art form we have: music.”

The greatest?

“You don’t have to talk about it. You just sit and listen to it. It’s not my favorite,” he clarifies, alluding to his first love, cinema — “but it’s the one that transcends centuries.”

Music has always been kinder to him than the movie business. That business recently reared its ugly head when A24 tossed his completed score for “Death of a Unicorn.” (At least he owns the rights and will be putting it out sometime soon.) In addition to the high he gets from playing live, he is currently working on a heavy metal concept album complete with dialogue. It’s called “Cathedral” and he’ll be playing some of it at the Belasco.

It’s essentially a movie in music form, based on a dream Carpenter had. Though not one he finds scary. What scares Carpenter, it seems, is not being in control.

That happened to him in the movie world, it’s happening more and more as what he calls the “frailties of age” mount and it happens in that nightmare about getting lost in a big city and not finding any theaters.

“But I can’t do anything about it,” he says. “What can I do? See, the only thing I can do is what I can control: music. And watching basketball.”

The heart and soul of suites by Bach and Handel are often found in the slow, central sarabande, said to be a dance of Spanish origin. In Bach’s cello suites, the sarabande stops time. Watch Yo-Yo Ma play a sarabande. His eyes seem to recede under his eyelids, as though entering a profound state of hypnosis. He can make a Bach sarabande work anywhere, including on a river rafting trip with a background of gurgling water on his latest Bach recording.

The sarabande from Handel’s D-Minor Keyboard Suite is well known as the theme from “Barry Lyndon,” about to thrill Stanley Kubrick fans all over again with the new 50th anniversary 4K restoration screening Saturday night at the Egyptian.

That Handel sarabande was one of the catchy opening numbers of “Sarabande Africaine,” Ma’s joint appearance with Afropop singer-songwriter Angélique Kidjo at the Hollywood Bowl on Thursday night. Ma and Kidjo met seven years ago at an event in Paris commemorating the end of the World War I. That led him to look a little deeper into music he had been playing since he was a young boy and was by now ingrained in his DNA.

And it led him to loudly exclaim, before playing the sarabande from Bach’s Second Solo Cello Suite in his short solo set, “Who knew?”

Musicologists have discovered the origin of the rhythmic patterns of what became this Baroque era vehicle for the transmigration of souls in dances carried by enslaved Africans to 16th century Spain. The church banned the sarabande for its perceived lusty eroticism. But when the dance later reached the hands of a certain German father of 20 children, Bach made sarabandes of such mystical serenity that eros equaled the sacred miracle of new life.

That Ma, an old Silk Road musical warrior, and the multifaceted Kidjo bonded is hardly surprising. But that they could put on a show with a fabulous family of African drummers, Caribbean piano and percussion, and assorted electric guitars and brass and dancers in which all the world — not just Bach but Philip Glass, Dvorak, Gershwin, Ravel, you name it — seemed to be just waiting for the right African accent, and that traditional African music needed no translation at all for some 17,000 at a near full Bowl, that was something.

Even so, Kidjo and Ma are an odd couple. Kidjo proudly transforms anything she comes into musical contact with. To hear “Summertime” in Swahili, a beautiful language for song, is indescribably touching. Kidjo added words to “Bolero.” They were not translated and didn’t need to be. Ravel’s rhythms had a riveting new freshness.

Ma’s cello, on the other hand, fits in, often remaining in the background, though not a distant background. He got into playful duets with drummers and a moving one with Kidjo as an intro to “Summertime.”

There was talk of peace, a better world where we understand each other, by both Ma and Kidjo. They demonstrated how that might work, with Kidjo commanding the stage, brilliantly dressed, while Ma, seated and in a sport coat for the first part, speaking a different yet compatible musical language. Even so, it was the big, crowd-pleasing Kidjo numbers that ultimately sent the audience home dancing.

There was, however, one particularly fascinating area of communality. Glass has written important pieces for both. Ma is featured in Glass’ 2002 score to “Naqoyqatsi,” the third in the “Qatsi” trilogy of silent documentary films by director Godfrey Reggio. Although the least known, “Naqoyqatsi” has an antiwar theme that would have fit right in with “Sarabande Africaine.”

Glass also fell under Kidjo’s spell, first composing three enchanted “Yoruba” songs for the singer, and then his Symphony No. 14 (“Lodger”) for her and premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2019. The third in another Glass trilogy, this of symphonies based on David Bowie albums, “Lodger” consists of seven Bowie songs sung by Kidjo with new music by Glass.

For “Sarabande Africaine,” Kidjo sang the first of the songs in the symphony, “Move On,” arranged for cello, piano and percussion. Ma carried the main orchestral melodic lines. Bowie, who sometimes felt the need to move on, could well have written the song for Kidjo, with lines like, “Somewhere, someone’s calling me.”

The two-hour “Sarabande Africaine,” without intermission, could get a tad preachy. The evangelical mixing of musical genres and geography had its touristy elements; however engaging and engrossing the wonder-making, it was always fleeting.

But, ironically, “Move On,” in its new setting, had the powerfully intimate feel of stopping and reflecting. This was the one composer Kidjo and Ma both knew personally. They were equals and equally at home with his style, and the movement put the moving on, the “drifting like a leaf,” “feeling like a shadow,” stumbling “like a blind man,” in revealing relief.

“Move On” ends with Ma tracing a haunting, fleeing cello response to Kidjo singing “Can’t forget you / Can’t forget you” She might have been speaking for how her audience hears her, but also of the forgetful nature of the history of music, in which we are maybe not meant to remember. You hear something, make it your own and move on.

Los Angeles is neither a dance center nor a dance desert. We don’t have much of a history of nourishing major ballet companies. We do have a plethora of smaller companies — modern, classical and international.

You may have to look for it, but somewhere someone is always dancing hereabouts for you.

I sampled three very different dance programs last weekend at three distinctive venues in three disparate cities and for three kinds of audiences. The range was enormous but the connections, illuminating.

At the grand end of the scale, Miami City Ballet brought its recent production of “Swan Lake” to Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa — beginning a run of varied versions of Tchaikovsky’s beloved ballet this summer. It will be Boston Ballet’s turn at the Music Center this weekend. San Francisco Ballet gets in the act too, dancing excerpts at the Hollywood Bowl as part of this year’s Los Angeles Philharmonic “Tchaikovsky Spectacular.”

On a Television City soundstage in the Fairfax district, American Contemporary Ballet, a quintessential L.A. dance company that explores unusual sites around town, is presenting George Balanchine’s modernist classic “Serenade,” along with a new work by the company’s founder, choreographer Lincoln Jones. Meanwhile, on Saturday night, violinist Vijay Gupta and dancer Yamini Kalluri mingled Bach and Indian Kuchipudi dance tradition at the 99-seat Sierra Madre Playhouse.

Miami City Ballet has attracted attention for mounting what is being called a historically informed “Swan Lake” by the noted Bolshoi-trained choreographer Alexei Ratmansky. He has done his best to re-create the 1895 production at the Mariinsky Theater in Ratmansky’s hometown of St. Petersburg.

Historically informed performance, or HIP, is a loaded term, and “Swan Lake” is a loaded ballet. HIP came about when the early music movement discovered that trying to re-create, say, the way a Handel opera might have sounded in the 18th century by using period instruments with what was believed to be period practice techniques proved deadly boring. Eventually, the movement realized that using the old instruments in sprightly, imaginative and contemporary ways instead made the music sound newly vital, and even more so when the staging was startlingly up to date.

Ratmansky’s reconstructed “Swan Lake” does much the opposite with modern instruments and old-fashioned ballet, and it got off to a disorienting start Sunday night. Tchaikovsky’s introduction was played glowingly by the Pacific Symphony in a darkened hall meant to prepare us to enter a different world. But the modern orchestra and distractingly bright audience phones only served to remind us that it is 2025.

The orchestras of the late 19th century had lighter, more spirited-sounding instruments, a quality that matched the choreography of the time. But when Sunday’s curtain rose to archaic scenery, costumes, choreography and acting, it felt, in this context, like wandering into a tacky antique shop.

That said, Ratmansky has a lot to offer. Going back to 1895 can, in fact, signal newness. There is no definitive version of “Swan Lake.” Tchaikovsky revised it after the first 1877 version but died before finishing what became the somewhat standard version in 1895. Even so, choreographers, dancers, producers and even composers have added their two cents’ worth. The ballet can end in triumph or tragedy. Siegfried and his swan-bride Odette may, individually or together, live or drown. “Swan Lake” has become so familiar that modern embellishments become just a lot more baggage.

In this sense, Ratmansky’s back-to-the-future compromise with modernity is an excellent starting place for rethinking not just an iconic ballet but ballet itself and the origins of its singular beauty. The two swan acts display an unfussy delicacy.

Cameron Catazaro, a dashing and athletic Siegfried, and Samantha Hope Galler, a sweetly innocent Odette and vivacious Odile, might have been stick figures magically wondrous once in motion. Meaning was found in Siegfried’s impetuous leap and the Black Swan’s studied 32 fouettés. All else was distraction.

That is precisely the next step Balanchine took 40 years later, in 1935, with his “Serenade,” which uses Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings,” written just after he composed “Swan Lake.” In Balanchine’s first ballet since arriving in the U.S. in 1933, the Russian-Georgian choreographer wanted to create a new kind of ballet for a new world — no story, just breathtaking design.

Although ACB made no mention of the fact, Balanchine moved to L.A. in 1938, three years after the American premiere of “Serenade,” to a house just a few blocks up Fairfax Avenue from Television City. In the few years he spent in Hollywood, he played a significant role in making dance for the movies that entranced the world.

ACB, though, did seem to have movies on its mind in the darkened soundstage with the dancers lit as though in a black-and-white film. But with the audience on bleachers very close to the makeshift stage, the musicians unseen behind the seats and the dancers up close, there was also a stark intimacy that exposed the exacting effort in re-creating the beauty of Balanchine’s steps. The effect was of being in the moment and, at the same time, going into the future.

“Serenade” was preceded by the premiere of “The Euterpides,” a short ballet with a score by Alma Deutscher. The 20-year-old British composer, pianist, violinist and conductor wrote her first opera, “Cinderella,” which has been produced by Opera San José and elsewhere, at 10. “The Euterpides” is her first ballet, and it offers its own brand of time travel.

Each variation on a Viennese waltz tune for strings and piano represents one of the classical Greek muses. The score sounds as though it could have been written in Tchaikovsky’s day, although Deutscher uses contemporary techniques to reveal each muse’s character. “Pneume,” the goddess of breath, gets an extra beat here and there, slightly skewing the rhythm.

Jones relies on a dance vocabulary, evolved from Balanchine, for the five women, each of whom is a muse, as well as the male Mortal employed for a final pas de deux. History, here, ultimately overwhelms the new staging in a swank contemporary environment.

Gupta makes the strongest conciliation between the then and the now in his brilliant “When the Violin.” On the surface, he invites an intriguing cultural exchange by performing Bach’s solo Violin Partita No. 2 and Sonata No. 3 with Kalluri exploring ways in which she can express mood or find rhythmic activity in selected movements. She wears modern dress and is so attuned to the music that the separation of cultures appears as readily bridgeable as that of historic periods.

Well known in L.A., having joined the Phil in 2007 at age 19, Gupta has gone on to found Street Symphony, which serves homeless and incarcerated communities, and to become an inspirational TED talker. He is a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship and, since leaving the Phil, a regular performer around town in chamber programs and plays a Baroque violin in the L.A.-based music ensemble Tesserae.

For “When the Violin,” Gupta employs a modern instrument in a highly expressive contemporary style, holding notes and expanding time as though a sarabande might turn into a raga. He pauses to recite poetry, be it Sufi or Rilke. His tone is big, bold and gripping, especially in the wonderful acoustics of this small theater. The Bach pieces are tied together by composer Reena Esmail’s affecting solo for “When the Violin,” in which the worlds of Bach, Indian music and Kuchipudi dance all seem to come from the same deep sense of belonging together and belonging here and now.

It took only a violinist and a dancer to show that no matter how enormous the range, the connections are, in such a dance, inevitable.