Nascuy Linares on building the sparse, transportive score for Embrace of the Serpent

For Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent, composer Nascuy Linares set aside the orchestral conventions that had defined his work in favour of something far more elemental: minimalist textures, stretches of silence, Indigenous field recordings and the sounds of the Amazon rainforest itself.

Years ago, the Venezuelan composer Nascuy Linares was left gobsmacked by The Wind Journeys, a film by Ciro Guerra about a man wrestling with a cursed accordion. Then, mere days after he watched it, a producer friend called with an unexpected question: did Linares want to work on the score for Guerra’s forthcoming project? “I said yes right away,” Linares recalls.

That project, 2015’s Embrace of the Serpent, was unlike anything Linares had worked on. Raised in Venezuela, he cut his teeth as a composer by working with musicians in the publicly-funded El Sistema network of orchestras flecked across the country. But Guerra had something much more minimal in mind for the film, meaning no orchestra at all.

Instead, Linares assembled the score from sparse piano lines, occasional guitar, and cuatro – a four-stringed instrument used in some regions of Latin America – alongside maracas, a touch of percussion, and synthesisers. The music weaves its way through the film sparingly, giving the story, and its potent sense of a world that no longer exists, an especially poignant heft.

Shot on location in the Amazon rainforest, both the score and sound design are rooted in Indigenous field recordings, which parallel the film’s story of Karamakate, the last surviving member of his community, and the two scientists who descend upon the Amazon River in the early 1900s in hopes of finding a rare plant. By situating these voices squarely in the narrative, the film and Linares’ accompanying music act as a gesture of preservation. “I have this feeling that this film is like a song,” Linares says. “The body leaves, but the song stays.” 

What was the first film score that you remember feeling intrigued by, and what fascinated you about it?

Ennio Morricone’s Cinema Paradiso changed my life. It was like a dream pill: I could fall asleep and travel with the music. I felt it transported me to a different place. I was studying music when I watched that film, and I couldn’t find the score, so I recorded it from VHS to cassette and wrote the score transcript to see how it worked. I was so fascinated with that. I think it was 1988 when I watched that film. 

What was your trajectory with music up until that point?

When I was finishing high school, I started playing guitar and making songs with friends, and we created a band. We used to mix salsa with medieval music and use a harpsichord. We played boleros, a bit of rock, and a lot of folk.

Then, my friend was going to make his first long feature, and asked me if I could write the score. It was at the same time I watched Cinema Paradiso. So at a small school of music in my town in Mérida, Venezuela, I started studying and writing that score. It was all happening at the same time.

How did you approach writing for a film for the first time? Did you have guidance from a mentor?

No, I didn’t have a mentor. Somebody told me, “You have to know The Principles of Orchestration, by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, if you want to write for an orchestra.” So I went to buy that book. I had just a little knowledge of harmony and music composing. That book was my mentor, really.

What was that film about?

It’s the story of a little kid raised in the Andes, in a village in the Páramos. He travels to the city, and he makes his life outside of the countryside. He’s forgetting all that he was when he was a little kid. And then he comes back [to the village] at the end of his life, when everybody is gone. It was based on a true story of a very famous guy in Mérida, who was raised in this little town, and after he grew older, he made a lot of money and became a big star in the city. But he always had the remembrance of his childhood, and the things that he lost in his childhood.

There’s a similar undercurrent of memory and preservation of culture in Embrace of the Serpent, too. Are you attracted to these kinds of stories?

I think I’m very nostalgic. It’s part of my soul. Maybe I’m attracted, or these stories are attracted to me.

How did your career in scoring progress after that?

It changed my life completely. After I made that score, I never stopped. It’s funny because my first film was with like 70 musicians, and now, with my last films, I do almost all the music myself. I’m coming back to the guitar. With Embrace of the Serpent, I was used to, at that time, a medium-sized orchestra. Embrace of the Serpent was really minimal. I just had a few instruments.

Was that a challenge for you?

It was a challenge because my knowledge was that, if you want to write music for films, the best way is with a big orchestra. That was my mindset. [Ciro Guerra] didn’t want to have an epic score. He was looking for textures and an experimental approach.

How did you put the score together?

I recorded almost everything – the piano and the guitar. There’s a cuatro and the maracas, some percussion, but I had sampled that from a friend. And the rest is synthesisers. There’s also a lot of field recordings [of the Guahibo, Yaruro, Piaroa and Kurripaco people]. My father had sound recordings of indigenous people, and Ciro also sent me some. My father used to record a lot of sounds. He’s a forest engineer, so he used to travel a lot to the Amazon in Venezuela. He had to do more technical work, but it was his hobby to record birds and people singing.

What do the isolated field recordings sound like?

Mostly, they were chants. These chants are made in trances. It’s very hard to recreate in another place. I don’t think it’s impossible to do it in the studio, but this real, honest expression from the people singing in this trance, you can only have in a field recording.

How have you engendered trust with different indigenous communities and ensured that you’re presenting their voices in a respectful way?

I think these communities are very connected with truth. They can feel when someone is showing their real intentions or what they really want to make with art. That’s the most important thing to me. But I’m not sure, maybe some communities don’t like what I do. And it’s OK. For me, I’m trying to be the most honest that I can be with myself and with them.

Could you expand on your thoughts about film and music’s role in preserving Indigenous cultures, in Embrace of the Serpent and other works you’ve either seen or been a part of?

The role of music and cinema in preserving Indigenous cultures has been profoundly powerful throughout history. Films such as Araya by Margot Benacerraf come to mind. Although their directors did not belong to the Indigenous cultures of the subjects they portrayed, these films have helped shape an understanding of the diversity and distinctiveness that Indigenous cultures represent within humanity.

For my part, I had the good fortune to collaborate on several documentaries during the Varan Workshop held in Venezuela at the beginning of the 21st century, where I was able to share experiences with Indigenous cultures from the Amazon and the Orinoco Delta. In my particular case, having grown up in the Venezuelan Andes, this experience allowed me to become aware not only of the country’s cultural diversity, but also of how little we Venezuelans know about people who live so close to us. Cinema opened a window for me to experience and share the particularities of these communities. I also worked on Uýra: The Rising Forest by Juliana Curi, a Brazilian documentary for which I had the honour of composing the original score. The film explores intersectionality and sexual diversity within communities in Manaus, focusing on an Indigenous artist who confronts social structures and embodies the transformative power of art.

In Embrace of the Serpent, one concept that deeply captivated me was that of the ‘Chullachaki’, mentioned by the protagonist, Karamakate, when referring to a photograph in which the image is deprived of its soul. I also remember another moment when Karamakate speaks about the song each person carries within themselves, establishing a kind of metaphysical relationship between the human being and their representation.

From this idea, I believe that cinema and music are indebted to Indigenous peoples for having shared their songs, possibly recreating a not-so-distant past, allowing an art form to emerge and helping to establish, among human beings, a sense of spiritual affinity that transcends words. This debt is gradually repaid each time a film allows the viewer to be transformed through a process of education.

Part of what makes the Embrace of the Serpent score potent to me is that it’s not constant, so it feels weightier when you do hear it. Was that intentional – to not only want to have a minimal score, but to have it come across in a sparse way?

From the beginning, yes. I remember saying [to Guerra]: “You don’t need music for this film. You just need the sound of the jungle, and that’s it.” What they recorded and made in the sound design was very rich. We have to respect that. When music comes, it’s because it has to be music; there’s nothing else that can express that. But yes, it was very intentional to have this sensation of silence. It’s like working with silence as music. I learned a lot from that. I wasn’t used to it.

What has been the most significant change you’ve seen in film scoring since you’ve been a part of it?

When I started making film scores – in Venezuela, for sure – it wasn’t taken seriously. I mean, I don’t remember anyone else in my group of people that I know, in my generation, who wanted to be a film composer. Nobody. With this new generation, everyone wants to be a film composer. One of the first books that I bought in that period was Film Music: A Neglected Art. I think it was a neglected art then, but not now.

Are you concerned about the rise of AI, and perhaps its increased role in the industry?

I hope it doesn’t take humanity away from films. Music is what we hear, but it’s also something else. There is a thing that we cannot perceive with our senses, but it’s there. The uniqueness of a human being, it’s unreplaceable. That’s what I believe. So I’ll be optimistic for the moment.