Marco Benevento

Pianist Marco Benevento never imagined his greatest career challenge would be lobbed at him by none other than Vincent Price.

Benevento was commissioned by Celebrate Brooklyn to provide a new score for Roger Corman’s adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s “House of Usher,” which starred Price. The 1960 film will be screened at Mass MoCA as part of the Williamstown Film Festival, with Benevento performing that soundtrack on Friday, Oct. 22, at 8 p.m.

Poe’s 1839 short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” features creepy Roderick Usher — played by Price in the film — and a visitor to his frightening country house. Corman, known for being creative with his very low budgets, delivered a film that changed some of the story elements in order to sex it up for the audience then, but is generally well-liked for delivering chills and style on the cheap.

Benevento is a Brooklyn-based experimental musician who is known for the weird sounds he gets out of his piano, organs and synthesizers.

In the past, he has worked with video after a song has been completed, but this was his first time scoring a film, and it wasn’t actually the type of movie he would have chosen for himself.

“I would have rather done ‘Tron’ or some sort of neon, fast-paced electronica sort of thing,” he said during an interview this week.

After watching the film, Benevento went over his own previously written music and found a few pieces that were appropriate to use in certain scenes, as well as a Leonard Cohen song and a Leadbelly song. Overall, though, he found that the mood he was after wasn’t really contained that much in his previous work. It taught him something about his music that he hadn’t realized before.

“A lot of my songs are pretty uplifting and light and electronicky, but more on the positive, melodic side,” Benevento said. “I tried sticking some of my other tunes in the movie and thought, ‘These aren’t working, I guess I’m going to have to write some new music.’ ”

He worked up a couple of progressions and melodies that oozed the dark and moody atmosphere he sought. Part of his job was to complement the film without overshadowing it, while at the same time offering some level of musical commentary that would also add his spin to the work. It was a difficult tightrope to walk.

“It was a weird position to be in, because they hired me to be me,” Benevento said, “to put my own spin musically on this movie — period. They wanted me for my creativity and they liked what I did. I almost wish that they had told me what to do, because there were so many options.

“I took a humorous approach for a month and then the dark approach for awhile, and then I decided I should do the backing track with the thunder. Then I thought I should write new music. It was this ongoing discovery of what to do, and I almost wish they had given me limitations because I was overwhelmed with ideas — daily.”

He was leery of camping up the score and turning the film into some kind of post-modern comedic free-for-all, even though he clearly viewed parts of the film as funny 50 years after the fact.

“You trap yourself, and I wanted to make sure that I didn’t trap myself by going the humorous route,” he said. “I wanted to leave my options open, so I simply stuck with the horror tone of it all. It is what it is now. It’s more true to the dark tone of what they were trying to go for 50 years ago.”

Benevento found that when he performed the score in Brooklyn over the summer, there were some parts of the film at which the audience laughed. Usually they involved Vincent Price at a weird camera angle saying something ominous. Only once did Benevento give in to his temptation to bolster the humor — during a love scene. The audience was pleased with the choice.

“There’s this super epic, funny rock song that happens when they kiss,” Benevento said. “Everybody was cheering and laughing when we played it: ‘Yeah, lovemaking music!’ ”

Benevento had some unexpected technical requirements for the piece, and it was an experience of learning on the job. Traditionally, the film scores commissioned by Celebrate Brooklyn to play with sound films would remove the original music and the dialogue, but Benevento was asked to keep the actor’s voices while inserting his own score. It was a huge challenge for him — sometimes music goes on under the dialogue — and Benevento had very little experience sound editing on video.

“I just carefully, meticulously went in and chopped up the audio file and faded in and faded out where conversations began and ended,” he said. “It was a task for some guy in a lab. There are probably people who may be able to do that much better than I did it, who are living in L.A. and do professional studio work. Somehow I found I could do it.”

Benevento also added a technical task himself, deciding he needed to add a portion of his score — the more ambient, electronic layers — to the audio track of the film itself, underneath the actors’ voices. This work was all done in his studio with various old synthesizers and electronic gadgets — he uses a Walkman for some sound filtering — in order to create thunder and wind sounds. This allowed him more freedom during the performance.

“There’s a layer of existing grayness that’s in there and which we play along to,” he said. “That’s helpful, so I don’t have all these things around the piano while I’m playing. I thought that would be fairly distracting if I was going to get all the sound I wanted.”

Benevento also decided to bring his visual collaborator and projectionist Jay Cooper into the project as a last minute decision, with the idea that Cooper could tweak the video digitally with some effects that would elevate the weirdness.

Cooper’s work adds a psychedelic quality to the movie. Sometimes it’s subtle, with light trails streaming from candles, or illuminations being added to figures in the basement. At the end of the film, Benevento says it becomes a psychedelic tour de force.

“You almost feel like you’re at a Pink Floyd show,” he said. “Even though I did a lot of work musically, I felt like it needed one more push artistically to make it my own, and also deal with that element of the scary, tripped-out thing. It works really well.”

Benevento is well known for his electronic experimentation. In his live show, he often utilizes different distortion and various amplifiers with his piano or, sometimes, Casio keyboards. This has been his fascination since high school.

“I was so into music synthesis, Moog keyboards, how sound was made and waveforms,” he said. “After school, I would go to the local college and study electronic music and music synthesis, and I learned all about the elements of sound.

“Getting into that sort of stuff and using those weird sounds in music at a young age definitely helped. That’s pretty valuable — all that time learning that stuff as well as being a dorky high school student with keyboards in his room and everybody going to bed and me staying up late with the headphones on and messing around with different ear candy, as I like to call it.”

It was the Japanese experimental recording artist Cornelius who opened Benevento’s eyes to the visual possibilities when they did some shows together. Cornelius featured visuals with his set, and Benevento took note of that.

“Back in the ‘80s, he would have VHS tapes and televisions behind the band, but now he’s got it really dialed in. I saw it effective in a musical concert setting with that band, and it was captivating for sure,” Benevento said.

Now Benevento regularly uses video as a backdrop in his performances, a precursor to the scoring work on “House of Usher.” The experience has given him ideas for further video scoring — he has recorded a version of “Pink Elephants on Parade” from the Disney film “Dumbo” that he hopes to be able to play on stage with the original sequence projected behind the band. It also works the other way — he has been able to tag some of this commissioned work to be included in his regular performances, complete with selected scenes from the film projected during the performance.

The unexpected benefit of the project for Benevento was not just the new material, but the new skills and the creative roads these provided. Thanks to “House Of Usher” and the intense on-the-job training, he is moving forward on entirely new artistic paths that did not exist before the commission.

“They wanted one guy to do it all,” he said. “They wanted me to do all the stuff and, as I did it over the months, I realized, oh my god, I now have this job and this job is an audio engineer, and now I have this job where I’m a master engineer, because I need to make the dialogue work, and so I was doing all these tasks, and I actually learned a lot doing this project. I actually did a lot more work than I thought.”