Music



HOW FILM MUSIC WORKS

How film music works in relation to the image was a lively subject of debate among the first critics to consider the subject seriously. Beginning in the 1930s, classical film theorists as well as the first historians of film music posited that film music either paralleled or counter-pointed the visual image. Even today, much popular writing on film music perpetuates this model, limiting film music's function to commentary: music either reinforces or undercuts the visual image. But in the 1940s, the composer Hanns Eisler (1898–1962) and the philosopher and music critic Theodor Adorno, in one of the earliest and most important studies of film music, Composing for the Films (1947), raised objections. Eisler and Adorno pointed out the futility of conceptualizing film music in terms of the image: "A photographed kiss cannot actually be synchronized with an eight-bar phrase" (p. 8). The model based on the assumption that music either parallels or counterpoints the image, of course, cannot account for music that responds to what is not evident in the image, its subtext; moreover, it assumes that the visual image is a direct and unproblematic form of representation. Contemporary film music scholars have posited a different model for film music's operation in which music and image are interdependent, sharing power to shape meaning. As Claudia Gorbman put it in her pioneering study, film music works by anchoring the image, shutting off certain readings and emphasizing others, policing the ways in which the audience interprets the film.

Film music is, of course, music, and as such it brings to its functioning in film the basic principles of music: melody, harmony, rhythm, meter, volume, tempo, form, timbre, and instrumentation. Music derives its power largely from its ability to tap into conventions derived from these principles. Conventions, shared between composers and audiences, harness musical affect to concrete meaning through the power of association; through repetition, conventions become ingrained in a culture as a kind of collective musical experience. Composers can use conventions as shorthand to produce specific and predictable responses on the part of listeners. For example, brass instrumentation, because of its association with the military, is linked to heroism and became a staple of Hollywood scoring in historical epics, especially swash-bucklers. When John Williams (b. 1932) relies on the brasses in his score for Star Wars (1977) rather than electronic instrumentation or futuristic musical sounds, he underscores the heroic arc of the film and connects the narrative, not to the genre of science fiction, but to the great swashbucklers of the classical Hollywood era. Composers can also deliberately contradict conventions to unsettle an audience. The waltz, for instance, has historical associations of lyricism and romance; yet Bernard Herrmann (1911–1975) chooses a waltz to accompany the deterioration of a marriage in the break-fast montage of Citizen Kane (1941), an unconventional choice that dramatically underscores the couple's failed romance. Film music also has at its disposal the conventions of song, especially lyrics. When Quentin Tarantino chooses the 1970s pop rock hit "Stuck in the Middle With You" to accompany a graphically violent scene in Reservoir Dogs (1992), his unconventional musical choice, coupled with the song's innocuous lyrics, creates disturbing effects.

Musical conventions change across history and culture and operate differently from one musical style to another. Some composers depend on conventions more than others, and some refuse to use them at all. But musical conventions generate responses so strong that listeners are affected by them whether they are consciously aware of it or not. In fact, film music can short-circuit listeners' processes of conscious recognition and create meaning on something less than a fully conscious plane. Thus film music is one of film's most potent tools to shape and control our response to what we see.

The origins of musical accompaniment to moving images, and the evolution of this pairing over the course of film history, point to a psychic realm that needs to be considered in order to understand fully the ways in which film music works. This realm is the unconscious. Psychoanalysis seeks to understand the operation of the unconscious and in the 1970s and 1980s French and North American theorists used psychoanalysis to bring music into focus. From our earliest moments inside the womb, we experience the elements of music: the rhythmic patterns of our mother's heartbeat, breathing, and pulse as well as the pitch and dynamics of her voice. After birth, the newborn continues in a blanket of aural stimulation, including and especially the mother's voice experienced as music. (Think of the ways in which language itself incorporates musical elements such as rhythm, pitch, dynamics, and intonation.) From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, the reason why music is so pleasurable and indeed a central part of human experience is that it is experienced as repressed longings for a return to the original state of fusion with the mother. For critics adhering to this approach, film music both stimulates and encourages us to regress to that complete sense of satisfaction and pleasure. This facet of film music transpires in the unconscious and is thus inaccessible to our conscious selves. But it cannot be discounted in a study of what pleases and engages us when we listen to film music.

A theoretical investigation into the pleasures and power of film music also, however, leads in an outward direction, into culture. Beginning in the 1920s, Marxist critics associated with the Frankfurt School, especially Adorno, and other German intellectuals such as the play-wright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) and the composer Ernst Bloch (1885–1977), began to examine the nexus of economics, politics, and culture that shapes music as a social discourse. The Frankfurt School maintained that all art, including music, is a form of cultural ideology, largely reinforcing but potentially resisting or subverting the dominant ideological values of a culture. In staking out this position, the Frankfurt School attacked long-held assumptions about music's autonomous function, the unique creativity of the composer, and the ability of the individual subject to resist cultural ideology. For these critics, music served a political function under advanced capitalism: to pacify dangerous, anarchic impulses by lulling listeners into an acceptance of (or at the very least, a diversion from) their social conditions, thereby supporting the status quo. Even something as seemingly countercultural as rock music has been studied through this perspective by contemporary British and American cultural studies critics. Adorno, in collaboration with Eisler, extended this argument to the film score. Music holds the film together and masks its material constitution as a technological product. Film music's adhesion stems from its exceptional ability to create and resonate emotion between the screen and the spectator. In so doing, film music distracts spectators from the two-dimensional, often black and white, and sometimes silent images. Thus film music fulfills a potent ideological function: to promote the audience's absorption into the film. The audience is thus positioned to accept, uncritically, the ideology circulating through the film. Indeed, Eisler and Adorno refer to film music as a drug.

BERNARD HERRMANN
b. New York, New York, 29 June 1911, d. Los Angeles, Calfornia, 24 December 1975

Bernard Herrmann was a Hollywood rebel—cantankerous, combative, and brilliant. Working both inside and outside the studio system, he managed to put his unique stamp on a series of films for a variety of directors. His scores, sometimes brooding and anxious, sometimes sweeping and lyrical, sometimes jarringly modern, and sometimes lushly romantic, are always inventive (and some of them are decidedly more interesting than the films they "accompany").

Arriving in Hollywood with Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater in 1941, Herrmann scored Citizen Kane and, in 1942, The Magnificent Ambersons . Angered by studio changes to his Ambersons score, he insisted that his name be removed from all prints of the film. He would in later life proclaim that Welles was the only director he worked with who knew anything about music. He is most well known, however, for a series of films he scored for Alfred Hitchcock.

Herrmann championed modern music throughout his life, and his music for Hitchcock bears its imprint: unusual instrumentation (the all-string ensemble for Psycho [1960]; the all-brass ensemble for the discarded Torn Curtain [1966] score); arresting rhythms (the opening moments of Psycho , the fandango from North by Northwest , 1959); dissonant harmonies (the shower scene from Psycho ), and polytonality (the famous Vertigo [1958] chord—two perfectly conventional chords, in two different keys, played together). Never reticent about expressing himself, Herrmann parted ways with Hitchcock over the Torn Curtain score, which Herrmann completed but Hitchcock discarded under pressure.

Reclusive and uncompromising, Herrmann spent a significant portion of his creative life working outside Hollywood, scoring films internationally and composing and conducting music for the concert hall and operatic stage. He adamantly protested being defined as a film composer, preferring instead to be known as a composer who also scores films. At the end of his life, Herrmann found himself rediscovered by the young directors Brian De Palma and Martin Scorcese. He died the night he finished conducting his score for Scorcese's Taxi Driver (1976). Herrmann's final collaboration with Scorcese would be a posthumous one: the director reused Herrmann's 1961 score for Cape Fear when he remade the film in 1991.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), Psycho (1960), Cape Fear (1961), Obsession (1976), Taxi Driver (1976), Cape Fear (1991)

FURTHER READING

Bruce, Graham. Bernard Herrmann: Film Music and Narrative . Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985.

Smith, Steven C. A Heart at Fire's Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

Kathryn Kalinak

That art serves a political function was a radical notion, and in postwar America it raised suspicions.

Bernard Herrmann.

Eisler, working as a composer in Hollywood, paid the price for his leftist views. He became a target of the Communist "witch hunts," was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee for alleged communist activities, and deported. That art is inextricably tied up with politics is clearly evidenced in the lives of many of the composers cited here, whose music, careers, and even lives were threatened and sometimes claimed by political events of the twentieth century.

Considering the form and practice of film music as an ideological mechanism has profound consequences for our understanding of how film music works within individual films as well. This ideological function of film music has been an especially rich site of investigation for contemporary film music scholars who have examined how such ideologically loaded concepts as gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity are encoded through music. Cultural ideology manifests itself in a work of art in indirect ways, operating on less than a conscious plane. Yet the results of that process, though complex, sometimes contradictory, and often elusive, are clearly audible. Can you recognize North American "Indian music" when you hear it and what does it mean when you do? Hollywood composers depended on a set of clichéd musical conventions to represent Indians on screen but also to encode a response consistent with the dominant cultural ideology of the era. Tomtom rhythms, descending melodic contours, and harmonies built on fourths and fifths were powerful indicators of the primitive, the exotic, and the savage. (It should be noted here that genuine native American music is not on offer.) In Stagecoach (1939), for instance, when the camera pans from the stagecoach wending its way through the western landscape to the Indians poised on a bluff, the "Indian music" we hear tells us not only of the Indians' presence but of their threat. Despite the fact that Stagecoach takes place during a period of western history when the government repeatedly reneged on its treaty obligations to many tribes, it is the Indians who are positioned as savage and untrustworthy. As culture changes, however, so does the film score. In Dances with Wolves (1990) the cliches for "Indian music" have been replaced by John Barry's (b. 1933) symphonic themes for the Lakota composed in the romantic idiom of the classical Hollywood film score.



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