Reorienting Grass: How a Musical Score Transforms an Orientalist Documentary

The original score of Iranian, Turkish, Arab, and Kurdish music created for the 1992 Milestone Films re-release of Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, deserves more attention than scholars have given it. This essay aims to fill this gap in the critical literature by providing context for the Milestone soundtrack and analyzing its musical and cultural implications and its potential impact on viewers of the film. The essay sets the context for this study by speculating about the lost 1925 score by Hugo Riesenfeld, especially in relation to his reputation for scoring Westerns. It also builds on other scholars’ examination of Aryan race theory expressed in the film’s intertitles, placing this racist ideology within more recent critical theory. I go on to discuss how Amir Vahab, one of the composers, approached the score. I argue that the music is an example of locative cosmopolitanism. Within these contexts, the essay analyzes the score in detail by focusing on the regional elements of the music, its relationship to traditional dances depicted on screen, the choice of modes and instrumentation, and the use of sung Turkish and Persian poetry. The essay argues that the culturally and regionally relevant score challenges and even displaces the racializing ideology of the intertitles.