PERFORMING ARTS : Tuning Up at the Movies : When composers like Richard Einhorn and Philip Glass take on film classics, it’s the music--performed live--rather than the image that leads the eye.

For years, audiences have watched Buster Keaton fall in love with Brown Eyes the cow in the 1925 silent film “Go West” while sentimental orchestra music sweetened the moment. But that scene has lately proved a lot less sappy, thanks to the laconic guitar playing of Bill Frisell, one of the best new music/jazz guitarists around, who often performs live along with this and other Keaton films.

Similarly, George Benjamin, an intellectual young British composer, has made a specialty of enlivening new music festivals by improvising at the piano to the silent “Ben-Hur,” and Jonathan Lloyd, one of today’s odder British composers, recently added a suitably weird chamber accompaniment to the silent version of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Blackmail.”

Even the Hollywood Bowl has gotten into the act: A few years back, Peter Sellars put a new gloss on “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” combining it with a live, unsynchronized performance of John Adams’ “Harmonielehre,” played by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Indeed, just about everywhere you look these days, new music and live performances are transforming the old equation of movies and sound into something completely different. It’s a radical change from conventional film scores, new or old, live or recorded. The music here becomes the occasion for--and more important, the reason for--viewing the film. It leads the eye, unlike the typical soundtrack, which merely tries to mimic the action.

Now two more composers are taking the trend to a new and curious level--writing opera that is meant to accompany film. On Friday, Saturday and next Sunday, Richard Einhorn’s operaoratorio “Voices of Light,” intended to accompany Carl Dreyer’s famous silent film “La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc,” will have its West Coast premiere at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre. It will be performed live by the Los Angeles Theater Orchestra, I Cantori and four vocal soloists, conducted by Lucinda Carver, to a pristine print of the film. Then on Nov. 18 at UCLA, Philip Glass’ latest opera, “La Belle et la Be^te,” will be performed along with Jean Cocteau’s beloved film, in place of the film’s original soundtrack.

Actually, accompaniment is not the proper term for Einhorn’s score, since the New York composer, who has experience both in the concert hall and with film and television, says he intends the music to coexist with the movie, rather than underscore it.

“What interests me about ‘Jeanne d’Arc,’ ” Einhorn said in a recent interview, “is not that it is a silent movie but that it is a work of art that happens to be silent and a movie.”

It also happens to be generally regarded as one of the most beautiful films ever made, but one that has long had music problems. Some new ideas were needed, Einhorn believed, in order to solve them.

“The way I decided to score it,” Einhorn continued, “was not to score it but to do my own piece that had its own integrity and happened to synchronize.”

When Dreyer made the film in 1928, at the beginning of the talkie era, he conceived it with a soundtrack, but he didn’t have the technology to realize one. Nevertheless, he produced a remarkable film so sensitive in its startling close-ups of the actors, and its transcendental performance by French actress Maria Falconetti in the title role, that some purists believe that the film is most effective when shown in true silence.

They believe that, in part, because the film has suffered some pretty awful music through the years. Dreyer wanted to use Gregorian chants, but the film’s producers hired two hack operetta composers to do a pastiche of the “Marseillaise” instead. Dreyer hated it. Later, the movie got bits of Bach and Albinoni attached to it, and Dreyer hated that as well. Numerous other composers have tried their hand at writing original music for “Jeanne d’Arc,” but none has been widely accepted.

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And music has only been part of the film’s troubles. Its two original prints were lost by the Danish censors; its negative was destroyed in a fire in Berlin. Dreyer made a new version of the film from outtakes, and that too was lost until its rediscovery in 1952, when it was re-edited. Miraculously, however, an original print, complete and in excellent condition, was discovered in 1982 in the cupboard of a Danish mental hospital; the institution’s director had apparently requested the film in 1928 to show his patients and then never returned it.

Einhorn happened upon stills from “Jeanne d’Arc” while researching another project at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1987. Intrigued despite never having seen the film, he screened it and was so transfixed that he dropped the original project, eager to give Dreyer’s work new life.

Since Joan heard voices, Einhorn heard voices. He turned to ancient mystical texts in Latin, old French and Italian, ranging from mystical medieval composer Hildegard of Bingen to a 13th-Century misogynist poem.

“I wanted to build layers and layers of text and meaning,” Einhorn says. “There is the visual text of the film, the narrative text, then there are the musical ideas and the texts, which serve as a context and a polyphony for the film.”

That context and polyphony are, of course, quite different if the score is performed by itself--the texts are not meant to be apprehensible during a performance with film.

And in this instance it seems that not only has Einhorn’s music added a new awareness of Dreyer’s masterpiece--the score and film were first performed together last year in Northampton, Mass.--but the score also will clearly have a life of its own. After the Los Angeles performances, Sony will be recording it with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic and Anonymous 4 as soloists for release in the fall. At that time “Voices of Light” will be given its New York premiere by the Brooklyn Philharmonic, when the film is screened as part of the high-profile Next Wave Festival of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Einhorn’s stand-alone operatic work raises the question of what kind of music is appropriate to silent film, but it is nowhere near as audacious as what Glass has done with “La Belle et la Be^te.” In this case Glass, who has often performed his scores for the Godfrey Reggio films “Koyaanisqatsi,” “Powaqqatsi” and “Anima Mundi” live with the films, has written his own opera to the Cocteau screenplay, which is then lip-synced live to the screen. To add even greater confusion, the performers are not hidden, and the singers even offer a minimal re-enactment of the drama under the projected film.

Thus, while Einhorn keeps his opera in its own space, Glass confuses foreground and background. Is this an opera with a “film” set? Is it a new way to approach a familiar film? Or is it, as Glass says he intended, its own entity, in which one quickly forgets the radical disparity between sight and sound as they fuse into something new in the imagination?

The work, which has toured Europe and was performed at last season’s Next Wave Festival, is also available on a Nonesuch CD.

“There will never be a film of the final, synchronized version of this production,” Glass writes in the CD liner notes. “There already is a soundtrack to the original film by Georges Auric, whereas mine is a music-theater work with a film. And I think that the counterpoint between performer and image is wonderful.”

Such a counterpoint also happens to be precisely what many aurally sensitive filmgoers are beginning to believe is missing from the film experience these days.

In the other time arts, theater and the live performance of music, every performance is different, and there is always an interaction, on some level, between performer and audience. There is always room for the unexpected. In the non-time arts, readers of prose and, especially, poetry are permitted a very personal relationship with the work. Each reader reads in an individual way. Similarly, we each look at visual art in our way, from our own angles and in our own time frames (unless trapped by taped museum tours).

But film commands. And lately it has been doing so with a prison guard’s determination. At the three-dimensional Sony IMAX Theatre in New York, for instance, viewers sit zombie-like in Space Age goggles, their ears wired for multidimensional sound, and are transported wholly inside a film environment.

Both Glass and Einhorn seem to be rebelling against just such a mandate of the senses. In the case of Glass’ opera, even though it must fit in lock step with Cocteau, the worlds of film and music are so different that an illusion is created where the film can seem to come, strangely, to new life.

And Einhorn has noted a similar revelation in working with “Jeanne d’Arc.” Although his music, too, is fairly closely matched to the film so that it will coincide at certain key moments, it has turned out that in every performance the conductors have done it differently--sometimes slowing down a lot, sometimes speeding up a lot. Each time, the composer says, it has changed the whole nature of the film.

“There have been some really lucky moments,” Einhorn exults.

And lucky moments are something previously unknown, at least since the days of the silents, in the showing of a movie.*