Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media

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NEW YORK • LON DON • NEW DELHI • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury AcademicAn imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Sound and Music in Film and Visual MediaAn Overview

EditorGraeme Harper

Film EditorRuth Doughty

Music EditorJochen Eisentraut

Bloomsbury AcademicAn imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK

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BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in 2009 by the Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd

© Graeme Harper, 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission

in writing from the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication

can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataSound and music in film and visual media: a critical overview/edited

by Grame Harper.p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN–13: 978-0-8264-5824-7 (hardcover: alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8264-5824-6 (hardcover: alk. paper)1. Sound motion pictures. 2. Motion picture music-History and criticism

I. Harper, Graeme. II. Title. PN1995.7.S67 2008

778.5’344—dc22 2008028617

ISBN: HB: 978-0-8264-5824-7 ePDF: 978-1-5013-0543-6 ePUB: 978-1-5013-0544-3

http://www.continuumbooks.com

The power of sound to put an audience in a certain psychological state is vastly undervalued.And the more you know about music and harmony, the more you can do with that.

-Mike Figgis

I like creating these rhythmic patterns. These interlocking rhythmic things are really fun.-Danny Elfman

Contents

Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction 1Sound in Film and Visual MediaGraeme Harper

TECHNOLOGIES

1. Sound Technology 15Sounds Reel: Tracking the Cultural History ofFilm Sound TechnologyMike Alleyne

2. The Soundtrack 42Music in the Evolving SoundtrackDavid Neumeyer and James Buhler

3. The Transition to Sound 58A Critical IntroductionMarina Burke

4. Silence 87Film Sound and the Poetics of SilenceDes O'Rawe

vijj Contents

5. The Click Track 100The Business of Time: Metronomes, Movie Scoresand Mickey MousingThomas E Cohen

6. The Synthesizer 114The Electronic Musical Instrument in Film Song and SoundNicholas Laudadio

7. Video Game Music 129High Scores: Making Sense of Music and Video GamesSimon Wood

SOUNDSCAPES

8. Sound Effects 151Strategies for Sound Effects in FilmBarbara Flueckiger

9. Leitmotif 180Persuasive Musical NarrationStan Link

10. The Western 194Affective Sound CommunitiesFelicity J. Colman

11. Comedy 208They Go Boom! Some Reflections on Sound in Film ComedyLaurie N. Ede

12. Horror 219Music of the Night: Horrors SoundtracksPeter Hutchings

13. Science Fiction 231How High the Moon?: Science Fiction and Popular MusicDave Allen

14. The Film Musical 250Showcasing Musical PerformanceCorey K. Creekmur

Contents ix

15. Television Musicals 261Unifying the Audience: An Overview of Television MusicalsSandy Thorburn

16. Rockumentary 284Reel to Real: Cinema Verite, Rock Authenticity andthe Rock DocumentaryRobert Strachan and Marion Leonard

CULTURE

17. Sound in Indian Cinema 303Beyond the Song Sequence: TheorizingSound in Indian CinemaNeepa Majumdar

18. African American Film Sound 325Scoring BlacknessRuth Doughty

19. Sound in Italian Cinema 340But the Bells are the Voice of God: Diegetic Musicin Post-War Italian CinemaAidan O'Donnell

20. Sound in French Cinema 352To Cut or Let Live: The Soundtrack Accordingto Jean-Luc GodardLaurent fullier

21. Hong Kong Cinema 363Sound and Music in Hong King CinemaGary Needham

22. Women in Hollywood Cinema 375Women Through Music in Golden Age Hollywood CinemaAlexander Binns

23. Television Talent Shows 388'Thank You, Voters*: Approaching the Audience for Musicand Television in the Reality-Pop PhenomenonSu Holmes

x Contents

24. MTV 406Contemporary Music Video Culture in Television andFilm Drama: Narrative, Performance and (Post)ModernityChristopher Pullen

PEOPLE

25. Voice 425A Semiotics of the VoiceTheo van Leeuwen

26. Hitchcock and Herrmann 437Music, Sexual Violence and Cultural Change inVertigo, Mamie and Psychofochen Eisentraut

27. Murch and Burtt 452Walter Murch and Ben Burtt: The Sound Designer as ComposerStephen Keane

28. John Williams 463The Film Music of John WilliamsDana Anderson

29. Randy Newman 472Randy Newman: Shaping a Complicated Musical LandscapeA. Mary Murphy

30. Brian Eno 480Brian Eno: Discreet VisionJonathon Dale

31. Philip Glass 493Cultural Recycling, Performance and Immediacy inPhilip Glass's Film Music for Godfrey Reggios Qatsi TrilogyBruno Lessard

32. John Barry 505007 and Counting: An Assessment of John Barry'sSoundtrack Work on the Eon/James Bond Seriesfrom 1962 to 1969Van Norris

Contents xi

33. Danny Elfman 524Danny Elfman: 'Funny Circus Mirrors'Neil Lerner

INDUSTRY

34. BBC 533The BBC: A Public Service Sound?Heather Sutherland

35. Sound Design 555Sound Design in New Hollywood CinemaWilliam Whittington

36. Emigre Film Composers 569Emigre Film Composers and Hollywood'sGolden Age (1933-1955)Jonathan Hiam

37. Avant-Garde Film 574Sound, Music and Avant-Garde Film CultureBefore 1939Jamie Sexton

38. Art Animation 588Music in Art AnimationMaureen Furniss

39. Disney 602Steamboat Willie and the Seven Dwarves: The DisneyBlueprint for Sound and Music in Animated FilmsRobert C. Sickels

40. TV News Music 612Television News Music in North AmericaJames Deaville

41. Advertising Music 617Strategies of Imbuement in Television AdvertisingMusicRonald Rodman

xii Contents

APPROACHES

42. Musematic Analysis 635Film Music, Anti-depressants and Anguish ManagementPhilip Tagg

43. The Sound of Fear 657Psychoanalysis and Affection in Film MusicMarcela Antelo

44. Minimalist Music 671Parallel Symmetries? The Relationship BetweenMinimalist Music and Multimedia FormsPwyll ap Sion and Tristian Evans

45. Scoring East of Eden 692The Division of the 'One': Leonard Rosenman andthe Score for East of EdenGregg Redner

46. Film Musicology 725The Development of Film Musicology: An OverviewAlexander Binns

47. Metamusic 739Metamusic in the Age of MetamediationHolly Tessler

Notes on the Contributors 755Bibliography 767Filmography 819Musicography 837Broadcast Bibliography 849Index 853

Acknowledgements

The editors wish to sincerely thank all the scholars from around the worldwho contributed to the making of this book; their considerable contribu-tions have amassed an understanding of the field with great enthusiasm,energy and commitment. Warm thanks to you all!

Thanks to Pip Smith, who assisted with communications in the firstyears of the project; this was much appreciated.

In particular, the editors would like to thank Dr. Samantha Rayner,Research and Development Manager in the National Institute for Excellencein the Creative Industries (NIECI) at Bangor University (UK), whose atten-tion to ensuring final contributions were gathered in, thoroughly checked,and in good order, was both considerable and delivered with much goodgrace. This has made this project a pleasure. This book owes much to her, asdo its editors. The editors would also like to thank Simon Holloway, Con-ference and Project Officer in NIECI, for his keen assistance, as well as theteam at Newgen Publishing and Data Services.

Finally, sincere thanks to Continuum Books and to Dr. David Barker,US Editorial Director for 'Film, Music, Popular Culture & Polities' Withoutyou, David, this book could not have been written! With thanks, and verybest wishes.

Graeme HarperRuth Doughty

Jochen Eisentraut

IntroductionSound in Film and Visual Media

Graeme Harper

Sound was an ancient discovery and is an equally venerable invention.Simply put, the recognition of the sense and sensation of sound is both anatural and a human-centred story. While there is no doubt that animalsand, it is reported plants too, recognize sound, the human ability to detectit and differentiate one sound from another, join one to a thought or actionand consider the phenomenon of sound in the context of our other sensesis distinctive. We process and produce sounds in relation to our humanunderstanding of its importance in our world. Nothing could be moreobvious, of course, especially when you compare the way humans considerand use sound compared with other considerations and uses in the naturalenvironment. We are, decidedly, active end users of this 'tool' - for commu-nication, interpretation, investigation, access, articulation and presentation.

But when did we begin to think of it this way? When did sound andmusic - which might be considered by the lay person to be most obviouslya combination, layering or juxtaposition of sounds - develop a language ofits own? And how do we access and compare our senses of this language?The reader s thoughts about this are largely only the wider context here;nevertheless, it is an important context. In the specific case of film and thevisual media, the presence of sound becomes both an historical story anda story instilled with cultural, technological, personal and public identities.Sound in this realm is articulation and entertainment; it is the backgroundand/or foreground to the other textual conditions that prevail in theseforms; it is design and art, communication and exchange, manipulation,transmission and invention.

1

2 SOUND AND MUSIC IN FILM AND VISUAL MEDIA

Not simply the story of application and discovery, sound in film and thevisual media is also an exercise in uncovering the nature of our sensoryand social involvement in forms of media communication and enter-tainment, whether individual or mass involvement. Sound here, by thisdefinition, asks us to consider the relationship between sight and sound(i.e., between the visual image and sound and/or music), between one formof communicative presence and another. Likewise, because sound in thefilm and visual media incorporates the found and the made, the surfaceand the undercurrent of our experience of media forms, in consideringsuch sound we ask ourselves to consider both the condition of the naturallypresent and the shapes and styles of the humanly created.

The visual media is by far the most likely contemporary location foranyone experiencing or considering sound generally; and this constantlyrelates back to this as an act of discovery. Film editor and sound designerWalter Murch, writing in his foreword to Michel Chions Audio-Vision:Sound on Screen, remarks:

the most successful sounds seem not only to alter what the audiencesees but to go further and trigger a kind of conceptual resonancebetween image and sound: the sound makes us see the image differ-ently, and this new images makes us hear the sound differently, whichin turns makes us see something else in the image, which makes ushear different things in the sound, and so on.1

Conceptual Resonance

Murchs use of the term conceptual resonance' is extremely useful here,because it underpins a key element in any discussion of film and mediasound: that relating to the collaborative and communicative nature of theacts of making these sounds and of interpreting them. 'Resonance' can referspecifically to the intensification and prolongation of sound - and certainlyin the case of film and the visual media the intense and prolonged natureof our engagement is valid. Sound in this area comes to us frequently,repeatedly; and today it does so for our entire lives. Once we might havespoken only about sound in film and then later about sound in film andtelevision; now, of course, we can speak about these things and about soundin a range of other media forms, including computer games. We can look atmultiple sites in each case: at genre, at individual creative contributions,and at historical and conceptual evolution. We can note technologicalchange and consider cultural distinctiveness. And we can create models or

Introduction 3

theories about sound in film and the visual media. TTie degree of resonancehas therefore increased considerably; and with our commitment andengagement not abating, it seems certain that these manifestations of soundwill continue to increase even further.

Thus, taking Murchs lead, it is important to think of what the idea of reso-nance also means: that it is a term referring to richness and significance.In all senses, film and the visual media has had exactly that - in the pastcentury film alone has been one of the most successful, if not the most suc-cessful of art forms. Of course, not all film has been sound related; but thestory of the relationship between sound and film is one story associatedwith the evolution of new relationships between sound and the visual andbetween sound and the media.

There are resonant stories, of course. There are those relating to sound andmore domestic forms of media, such as those we experience in television. By'domestic' we mean media that exists more in the domestic space than inthe public space. Also, there is resonance in the relationship between soundin the media and media technologies that have taken it into more portableforms, that have joined sound and vision in areas of entertainment - suchas hand-held electronic games or even in the less material realms of tele-vision advertising music - and taken them out into the world. In this sense,the resonant aspects relate to prolongation and evocation and to the takingaway from fixed media sites the sounds we experience in and through them.In this way, we can also see media sound as part of a human landscape. Thatis, if film and media sound were to be viewed only as something that isfound in specific locations or in very particular technological situations itwould be simple enough to dismiss it as a captured thing - or a containedportion of the world that we might visit but with which we might not nece-ssarily always engage. However, sound does not stay in one place, it comesalong with us: sometimes quite literally and sometimes more metaphori-cally. Rick Altman, referring to sound in the cinema, suggests:

A film does not carry a single message, unified, unilinear, and univocal.Instead it is more like a scarred palimpsest, at various points revealingdiverse discursive layers, each one recorded in a different point intime This recognition of the text s layered, potentially contradic-tory nature offers a new opportunity for attention to sound s discursivecontributions.2

To jump around momentarily through some significant technological his-tory, sound s discursive contributions range through the levels of meaning


of a television commercial to the sound communities depicted in the filmicWestern; to the indications of gender, class and meaning contained in thehuman voice; to the construction and manipulation of sound effects', tothe contributions of individual composers to the artistic evolutions of filmor television music; to the contributions of organizations, companies andinstitutions, such as the Walt Disney Company or the British BroadcastingCorporation (BBC) and to the impact of technologies such as the synthesizeror those of Dolby laboratories or RCAs Photophone system,. Discursiveness -or the ability and willingness to cover a range of situations and instances -makes sound a topic found in a broad landscape (a soundscape, moreaccurately) with other sense-based, interpretative, aesthetic, explanatoryand investigative modes of engagement.

James Lastra, writing on Thomas Edition and others as to how theyrelate to American cinema, talks of fthe imagination of technology';3 and,indeed, sound in the visual media is such that it creates in its relationshipwith the forms and creative artefacts around it circumstances not dissimilarto those that inform, sustain and propel the imagination generally - in thiscase, multi-layered and polysemous in language terms, a vista that incorpo-rates notions of frequency, amplitude and speed, along with the elementsof music that relate to pitch, rhythm, structure, timbre and texture.

Soundscapes of Film and the Visual Media

'Soundscape' is a term used to define an acoustic environment. There ismuch emphasis on natural occurrence in such a term, but there is alsosome notable concern for modes of design and acts of composition. In thisregard, it is productive to imagine the film and media soundscape and tolook and, indeed, listen to it carefully in order to begin to discuss it criti-cally and creatively.

The considerable influence of sound on perception generated by mediais one important starting point. Take, for example, the way in which anaudience reacts to the heralding sounds of the music that announces tele-vision news programmes. To slip briefly into a subjective mode here: Cananyone who has regularly experienced television news fail to recall thesounds that announce it or, indeed, have those sounds not been responsiblefor drawing that person into the room that the news is being played out onsome screen or another? Perhaps there are children, we could speculate,who are currently escaping that very same room in search of somethingother than adult news programming! The domestic media soundscapeis such that the impact of computer games, MTV, certain composers,

Introduction 5

particular advertisements and a particular genre cannot go without notein our analysis. And yet, frequently it does in everyday life; not because itdoes not impact, but because sound can be consumed in both active andpassive modes, consciously and unconsciously. Sound has an impact onour perception of time and space. A child escaping television news mightwell associate some other time of the day with the tonal qualities of chil-dren's cartoon programming or some other part of their domestic spacewith the computer sounds of a lively Internet game.

The film and visual media soundscape, then, has a variety of thresholdsof influence. What we cannot hear right now we cannot, of course, drawdirectly from our immediate soundscape; but we can do so by generic asso-ciation or through the powers of memory. There are, therefore, interpretivepoints of engagement and release, based on whether our experience isimmediate or carried with us beyond what can be called the immediate'sound event'. Sound has a linear as well as a chronographic function inthe media: the media uses it to designate movement and time. The closingcredit sequences of a film - depending, in part, on the point in cinematichistory to which we are referring - carry with them the conclusive tones ofan ending, the finishing notes of a narrative. Contemporary sound design-ers, working to extend the acoustic realm, have established and challengedcodes of sound convention associated with synchronization and mixing;they have both chosen and created sounds, expanded the experience ofcinema while encouraging audiences to re-assess it. There is no doubt thatmedia soundscapes have ranges and rhythms. They also have styles.

What, we might ask, is the sound style of the talent show, the avant-gardefilm, the comedy or the rockumentary? Do particular national media haveculturally identifiable styles - say the cinemas of India, or the films of par-ticular countries in a continent such as Europe, or in certain portions ofa national population, such as the films of the African-American popula-tion within the context of American cinema generally? Do particular peri-ods suggest different things in the evolution of the sound track? Or, indeed,do different forms, such as animated film, have stylistic conventions thatwe might equate with our recognition and, perhaps, even our understand-ing of their acoustic environments? And what is the role of the listener inall this?

Seeing and Hearing

Human beings can most often hear sounds with frequencies between 20 Hzand 20 kHz. We can discriminate differences in loudness and pitch and


timbre, and make from these discriminations decisions about the kind ofsound we are hearing, its intention and its relationship to us. We can, in agreat many instances, determine where the sound is coming from. Thismight be in the simple sense of a direction, but it might also be in termsof a culture or cultural condition. Thus, it might be the system of culturalsigns that are incorporated into the sound or, indeed, the music - that itselfis often considerably culturally charged, often so much so that audiencescan determine even the minor influence of particular local or distantstyles.

These cognitive dimensions of the experience of sound determine ourresponse to it. Is it noise, or is it sound, for example? Is it sound, or is itmusic? If it is music, is it music we like or music we do not like? If it ismusic we like, why do we like it? If we can determine why we like it can wedetermine what emotions it invokes and how it organizes and responds tothese emotions? And so the analysis goes. Listening, and hearing, are farmore than physical reactions of the basilar membrane, the primary physi-cal site for sensory cells relating to hearing. Listening, in the case of thevisual media, also includes the 'hearing' of the visual - by which is meantthat the positioning of sound in the temporal and spatial worlds of theimage. The image then asks the audience, both viewer and listener, to placeit in conjunction with the acoustic realm, with a more or lesser degreeof mutual occupation. And this acoustic realm is not on a single plane orrelated in only one way to the listener.

For example, the listener recognizing the difference between sound inthe foreground and sound in the background is one of the most elementalaspects of the delivery of film and visual media. Imagine if one could notemploy sound in this way. Imagine how difficult it would be to relate narra-tive, to recall setting, to suggest contrast and tension in the visual spaceif the acoustic space was flattened into a singular plane. Similarly, what ifambient sound could not be distinguished from the relational diegeticsound that renders a creative idea teleological; that is, the sound that givesdirectional purpose to the visual or - stating this less controversially per-haps - that at the very least colludes with the visual in the sense of declar-ing a purpose to the creative artefact?

Listening, notably, is a skill we learn, even if hearing is one with whichthe vast majority of us are born. We have learned to listen to films, tele-vision, soundtracks, video games, recorded voices, cartoons, comedies andmore. Conventions of creation have been accompanied by conventionsof consumption and interpretation: and not necessarily professional criti-cal interpretation; rather, the lay consumption that spreads throughout

Introduction 7

entire communities. Media representations of the human voice, in conver-sation, in song, in juxtaposition, contrast and harmony have picked up thematerial, experiential, semiotic and social aspects of speech and returnedthem to us. We also listen to be heard. It is no coincidence that our relation-ship with film and media sound is often based on the notion of an arrangedset of sounds and silences, sometimes reminiscent of a conversation.Silence, even just in this one respect, is far more important in a discussionof sound than at first might be realized. TTie same conventions of not speak-ing over the speaker prevail in many media circumstances. The desire tohear visual media as well as see it has determined the design and fittingout of cinemas, the shape and technological evolution of television, theinvention and evolution of portable devices such as headsets, earphones,the positioning of technology in the domestic space and the ways in whichwe deal with such technology in the public arena.

Of course, even our sense of hearing and listening must be placed withincultural and, just as importantly, historical context. What is recognizableand acceptable to the contemporary audience was not necessarily thatexperienced by the media audiences, or producers, of the past.

Sound in Time

The cinema was becoming a sensorium and, in the darkness, music(foreign body or no) proved a vital tool in the assault upon thespectator with the offer of transport from the humdrum into thefantastic.4

Russell Jacks analysis here relates back to the arrival of film music in thesilent film era of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. It refersto a condition specific to the era, yet recalls a contemporary condition inwhich sound, now delivered in technologically sophisticated and oftenenhanced ways, forms part of our cinematic experience. In that sense,media sound exists both in the time of media experience and in the time ofhuman experience. To add sound to the moving image at first could be seeneither as innovative support for, or as a challenge to, film art. In the sense ofan innovation it related to notions of naturalism or to more abstract con-nections with filmic montage. Of course, there were also practical aspectsand the relative loudness of early cameras and projectors, the difficulty ofrecording voice and the impossibility of offering effective, rudimentarysoundtracks to a larger audience; all made the inclusion of sound an inno-vative act. At least that was one view!


However, there was another view: that sound was more novelty thaninnovation. From this perspective, sound detracted from the possibilitiesof what was, at its very core, a visual medium; and therefore sound, and inparticular dialogue, was something of a poor cousin to image. This view, ina slightly different form, also found its way into the statements of some ofthe great innovators of early cinema -such as Eisenstein, Pudovkin andAlexandrov - and was connected with a concern about how sound mightbe used to enhance the visual art that so haunted their ideas of film.

Film sound thus came with a sense of its place in time; and, if techno-logical improvements soon made for a greater likelihood of the inclusionof sound they also raised the question of how film art might advance, whatits values might be and where creative and, indeed, financial investmentmight occur. Here the question of the place of the orchestral, the popular,the seasonal, the experimental, the composed and the 'found* among otherofferings, comes into play. Likewise, questions of genre also arise - what ofrock music? Jazz? Folk? Similarly, if we can identify particular film periods,film styles or even directors with the use of particular musical genre, canwe travel some way along the track of better recognizing a component ofaudience taste and response? These questions come with historical as wellas textual relevance. They relate likewise to notions of the use of sound andmusic: for example, they relate to questions of politics in the choice andpositioning of music; or to questions of cultural hegemony in the favouringof a particular sound or set of sounds, or in the manipulation of the rela-tionship between sound and image. To take this idea further, it is entirely inkeeping with such analysis to note the conditions prevailing in the choiceof particular accents, tones and gendered pitches in the construction of allkinds of media products. Sometimes this can border on the stereotypicaland therefore open itself up to comedic reinterpretation: today, the bari-tone cowboy, detective or adventurer, the high-voiced or breathy femalebeauty, are no longer innocently voiced staples of contemporary cinema.They come with their own sound as well as visual baggage.

Television has, likewise, increasingly sent into the domestic space itsown historical and contextual soundscapes. Often these have been linked toparticular genres and to the evolution of those genres as televisual entities.The sports programme, for example, has its traditions of site-specific evoca-tion - of the ground, the pitch, the atmosphere of the bleachers. The sitcomhas its canned laughter and staccato acoustic pacing and the game showfeatures its jingles and acoustic bridges ('The money or the box? Drum roll,please...'). Then there is the authoritative clarity of the hard-hitting current

Introduction 9

affair programme. Television musicals, perhaps most tellingly, reveal theways in which the media has both adopted and adapted other forms andactivities to the domestic space: here music theatre or opera is delivered tothe living rooms of viewers. None of this, of course, could be achieved byimage alone; much of this is associated with the emotive context of soundand music.

In more recent times, the computer game has introduced further con-siderations, taken such things as the long-discussed connections betweenmusic and drama and transposed them into new, interactive situations inwhich the listener is also an active participant. Sensory stimulation can beaided by haptic devices or by objects such as joysticks, steering wheelsand console controllers to apply force, create vibrations or involve motionin the user. In some senses this is a kind of dance, a physical action thatis further stimulated by the insistence of sound or the narrativizing ofmusic.

In the age of digital interactivity, expectation has become that forwardmotion - or, indeed, sideways shifting - will be brought about, or met by,a tempo and volume associated to some degree with the interaction.Similarly, interactive success or failure in the gaming tasks at hand is metby associated sound and music - a situation not so very far removed fromthose first cinematic experiences, perhaps, when film was accompanied byan orchestra or pianist who interpreted and heightened the audiencesexperience. The languages of sound in film and the visual media have per-sisted or evolved through a very considerable historical arc.

Sound Languages

Beyond the straightforward recognition that music has a notable place inthe media, one of the most obvious manifestations of sound as languagehas been that heard in the production of sound effects. Even the expressionsound effects is indicative of an expectation; that is, of an effect. Sound hereis capable of being categorized into types and forms. Labels can be attachedto match sound and image; some sense of order is created. The listener,offered something that acoustically 'illustrates' an image, is able to compre-hend the world in manageable if not necessarily simple ways. Sound effects,too, bring with them notions of connection and notions of movement.Effective sound, sound in action, contributes to narrative shape and pace,to the connective tissue and to the form and function of film and the visualmedia.


Language, of course, is connected with the creation and distribution ofmeaning. Conventions, leitmotifs, social norms, communicative strategies,environmental pointers: all these can be transmitted in the form of mediasound. Frequently, media sound languages work to produce an action ora reaction - an action in the realm of the film or visual scene, a reaction inthe realm of the audience. Where somewhat less Mainstream* uses of soundoccur, clashes and confrontations of sound and image can work to raisequestions about how visual and acoustic language can produce stereotypesor how convention can hide the possibility of re-interpretation of our world.

Language is both denotative and connotative. Sometimes in its symbolicnature it brings to communication a way of crossing between planes ofreference. That is, language has a metaphoric thrust. So it is with the lan-guage of sound in film and the visual media. Think of what the foghorn ofa ship might indicate in a film concerned with the sea; or, perhaps, the soundof bells in a school yard; or, in the case of television, the rapid steps of aninvestigative reporter as they make their way into a building; or, in a com-puter game, the pop music soundtrack that underscores the car chase scene.

Expression, as a result of language, gives aesthetic dimension to a com-municative sound act. Dominant modes emerge, minor modes providecontrast, juxtaposition or support. Musical expression involves personalresponses and gives credence to different interpretations. So expressionhere, born in the use of a language and instilled with individual or groupideals, can reveal certain forms of articulation or dynamics. Indeed, expres-sion marks' in music - those such as /(forte, meaning Toud') - are used tohighlight the importance of dynamics, the connections between forms ofexpression and engagement with the act of producing music.

Christopher Metz, discussing what he calls 'aural objects', says this:

In the metacodes of sounds, the most complete identification is obvi-ously that which simultaneously designates the sound and its source(Yumble of thunder'). But if one of the indicators has to be suppressed,it is curious to note that it's the aural indicator that can most easily besuppressed with the least loss of recognizability. If I perceive of a 'rum-ble' without further specification, some mystery or suspense remains(horror and mystery films depend on this effect): the identification isonly partial. However, if I perceive 'thunder' without giving any atten-tion to its acoustic characteristics, the identification is sufficient.5

Sound language, as a characteristic, becomes Metz's analytical focus, andthis focus reminds us that, as a characteristic of film and the visual media,

Introduction 11

sound language relates to identification, telling apart and recognizablydescribing.

Approaching Sound in Film and the Visual Media

It is possible, when critically approaching sound in film and the visualmedia, to undertake this in several ways.

Firstly, to consider the aspects of sound creativity - the uses andmodes of creation and their resulting artefacts. This can either be doneby considering the creators or case studies of the creations. In either case,the aim is to get closer to the act and actions that produce identifiableresults.

Secondly, to look at the cultures and cultural characteristics of soundin this realm. Some of this can be done by contrasting one cultural artefactwith another, across geographic space or, indeed, across historical time.

Thirdly, then, a consideration of the historical background to sound infilm and the visual media reveals something of its evolving nature, as wellas something of its innate characteristics. Understanding the aesthetic aswell as the industrial context of sound in this way can unearth a sense hereof media soundscapes in time, themselves a record of how we have viewed,interpreted, and presented the world in sound.

Fourthly, sound in film and the visual media is linked to technologicaldevelopments and innovations. Some technologies have simply supportedthe requirements of creators, producers and audiences; others have initiatedchange and brought with them new ways of aurally presenting environ-ments, individuals, situations and events. Technologies can take on enablingroles or transmit aesthetic innovations which otherwise may have remainedlittle more than fantasies.

Fifthly, people play a very significant role: individuals as well as repre-sentatives of group ideals. People as innovators, users, creators and asaudiences. People also, quite simply, as consumers. Not all the uses, expres-sion and materializations of sound in film and the visual media are locatedin commercial media; and, yet, the role of the consumer remains at veryleast notable, if not more often pivotal.

Finally, each of these areas needs to incorporate alternative approachesto show the ways in which criticism or, indeed, theoretical application canresult in alternate ways of understanding. The understanding of sound infilm and the visual media can be located in a consideration of the varietyand range of its manifestations, and give us what Michel Chion has calledits 'forms and textures!6


Notes

1. Walter Murch, 'Foreword' in Michel Chion (ed.), Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen.New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. xxii.

2. Rick Altman, 'General Introduction in Rick Altman (ed.), Sound Theory SoundPractice. New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 10.

3. James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representa-tion in Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, p. 16.

4. Russell Lack, Twenty Four Frames Under: A Buried History of Film Music. London:Quartet, 1997, p. 8.

5. Christopher Metz, 'Aural objects' in John Belton and Elisabeth Weis (eds), FilmSound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, p. 155.

6. Michel Chion, Audio- Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press,1994, p. 210.

TECHNOLOGIES

1

Sound TechnologySounds Reel: Tracking the Cultural History of

Film Sound Technology

Mike Alleyne

[T]he history of film sound cannot be properly understood unless it is correlated with themajor sound practices of each era.

-RickAltmatf

Introduction

This is an historical discussion of ways in which innovations in soundtechnology employed in the film industry have shaped cinematic cultureand how they have also been interrelated with the recording industryand popular music. As several writers have noted in recent years, theacademic analysis of the role of sound in cinema has traditionally beenmarginal at best, although there is now an emerging body of literaturetransferring sound from its omnipresent background in the mix of cine-mas ideological hierarchies and challenging the hegemony of the visual infilm scholarship. However, there is a need for coherent narratives whichprovide overviews of the history of sound in cinema in technologicalconjunction with important non-filmic contexts. This history includes thevarious interfaces between film sound techniques and popular musicalperformance and recording practices which underscore what Rick Altman

15


refers to as cinemas borrowings from the music industry'.2 The technologyassessed in this chapter is not entirely restricted within this context, but itprovides a central focal point.

Despite the clear focus on technological developments, this analysisdoes not highlight the technical minutiae of sonic production but accentu-ates the synchronicities between sound technology developments in therecording and movie industries. This is primarily a discussion of interrela-tionships between the aesthetics of the aural and visual spaces occupiedby these industries, the simultaneous but often divergent trajectories offilm technology and music and the connection of all of these elements tothe politics of commercial success. It is also an attempt to address theimpact of the application of the respective technologies. As Ian Inglis hasnoted, late-nineteenth-century technology activated developments inboth popular music and film.3 The relationship between these two sphereshas continually expanded through both technological commonality anddivergence.

This chapter does not comprehensively examine the considerable breadthof sound theory, but the relationships of sound technology to its audiencesdemand recognition of the effects of the technology. The chronologies dis-cussed are primarily focused on America, whose Hollywood film industrycontinues to wield significant international influence, but the historicalcontours of sound technology integration into the film world are notidentical in other countries. India, which annually produces the highestnumber of films globally, serves as a useful point of comparative historicalreference. India's first talking movie, Alam Ara> was made in 1931 some fiveyears after Hollywood's first film feature with sound. Apparently, there areno remaining copies of the film, but like Hollywood's first talkies, Alam Arawas music centred, reportedly containing about a dozen songs. Conversely,the development and implementation of sound technology in India ischaracterized by an almost entirely different series of manufactured devicesthan occur in the American narrative (Chatterji). Gomery discusses thecartelization of European and American film industry interests to imposeeconomic control and cultural imperialism in international cinema.4 Thissituation implies that operational variations from one country to anotherhad to be brought into alignment to ensure profitability for a very limitednumber of beneficiaries. As one example, the strategy manifested itselfwith Hollywood threatening to boycott the German market when the soundcompany Tobis-Klangfilm attempted to challenge American dominance oftheatre sound-system technology by asserting exclusive patent rights withinGermany. Commercial conflicts evolved into the informal formation of

Sound Technology 17

a cartel which split patent and distribution rights profits and effectivelydominated corporate aspects of global cinema until World War II.5

In considering cinemas aural texts, Jeff Smith discusses the roles ofmusic in film and astutely notes in The Sounds of Commerce that much ofthe pre-existing music soundtrack historiography focuses on conventionalclassical Hollywood representations without serious engagement with thepopular.6 While his own descriptive language ironically often leans heavilytowards clinical formalist musicological deconstruction, he clearly recognizesthat the pop score possesses significant aesthetic differences in articulation,performance interaction and overall sonic rendition. Although this chapteris not an analysis of soundtracks, music has been a crucial catalyst fordevelopments in film sound technology. As far as a direct mechanical rela-tionship is concerned, David Morton argues that 'the techniques and hard-ware developed by moviemakers for recording and reproducing soundwould strongly influence recordings made outside the industry from the1930s on.7

Realism and Representation: Theorizing the SoundScape

Sound recording has been described as a side effect of other research intoelectrical communication, and even within the realm of academic researchthe aura of the image has overshadowed the importance of sound in ani-mating the image in audience consciousness. Sergi comments that

sound technology impacts on the way films are made and received asmuch as image technology; the soundtrack is an area of creativity asfertile and exciting as any in filmmaking, yet the majority of scholarsand critics have by and large remained impervious to all things soundfor nearly a century.8

A March 2006 edition of Post magazine, an industry publication on post-production techniques and technologies, examined editing approaches inthe genre of Reality TV. Its front cover included the phrase 'Making realityshows sound a little less real', highlighting (perhaps inadvertently) the man-ner in which the deconstruction of the aural text is designed to produce animagined and fabricated sonic imprint. Equally significant are many of themethods designed to fuse existing real sounds to create a newly constructedamalgam which intends to supersede reality itself. Award-winning sounddesigner, Gary Rydstrom suggests that in developing this hyperreal envi-ronment, 'You start collecting raw sounds from the world and those raw


sounds become the building blocks with what you come back to the studioand create!9

In Repeated Takes, Michael Chanan emphasizes the post-productionrealities of the film studio as 'a factory for the manufacture of parts tobe assembled subsequently into a totally constructed aesthetic entity'.10

Examination of the nascent film technologies of the early twentieth centuryoften tacitly overstates the supposed absence of sonic cinematic accompa-niment. Sound technology transformed the cinematic world by expandingthe soundscape accompanying the silent movie which was otherwise madenot so silent by the performance of live music to provide dramatic punctu-ation and pathos. There is also evidence that basic sound effects deviceswere also employed in this era.11 Interestingly, the artificiality of the silentfilm which had come to be perceived as Veal' visual representation by audi-ences was propelled further into realms of unreality by the integration ofsound. Although this inclusion of sound was itself ultimately intended tomagnify the reality of the cinematic experience, its inevitable function as aform of technological mediation led instead to spatial and sonic distortionswhich were never present in the same ways in daily life experience. As onekey example, from the beginning of the 'talking movie', the microphoneassumed an omniscient presence transcending the capabilities of thehuman ear. It represented sound with relatively consistent clarity despitethe continual changes in actual spatial conditions and the movement of theobjects (human and otherwise) being recorded. Nonetheless, it is preciselythis sonic peculiarity which we have come to accept as authentic in cinemain the midst of its innately fictional world. The constructed cinematic real-ism inherently alters spatial perspective. Inevitably, the decisions that aremade about how sound should sound are based on subjective technicalperspectives which in turn help shape what the public perceives as accuratesound reproduction.12 Dolby Laboratories innovator loan Allen observesthat the company's noise reduction system (discussed in further detaillater) was a key component in expanding the boundaries of what could beperceived as real in the cinema:

By applying the noise reduction, it allowed us to extend the frequencyresponse, so there was a degree of reality to what the audience heardthat was never possible before. From low bass to high tinkles, madepossible by the application of noise reduction. (Allen)

Allen further cites Terrence Malick's 1978 film Days of Heaven as a cine-matic breakthrough because of its 'artistic use of sound' focused on subtlety

Sound Technology 19

'to make the audience feel participants' (Allen). Nonetheless, he suggeststhat the audience is perhaps not consciously aware of how 'real' a filmsounds.

Technology always has consequences beyond the immediate intuitionof either its inventors or earliest users. Sound technology has concurrentlyrepresented several leaps into the future of its application by humans, witheach stage providing a foundation for the next, and yet fundamentallyreiterating the relationship between creator and consumer. Of course, incontemporary terms, our collective sense of amazement has been bluntedby an increasingly rapid pace of innovation and mass-marketing to chang-ing sound reproduction technologies and their physical media, whetherprimarily as aural or audiovisual devices.

Sound has continually evoked graphic actualities in the minds of itslisteners, and that has allowed filmmakers to more vividly represent theirontological visions and projections utilizing ever-more-versatile tools. Thisraises the issue of our historical reliance on sound technology as a meansof both enriching our entertainment experiences and validating percep-tions of our individual and collective worlds. Sound technology effectsreification of our emotions and sensory responses in ways which we havecome to accept as normal. However, the constructed aural combinationof dialogue, sound effects and music in a film virtually demands that weestablish new frameworks for what constitutes experiential reality. How,for example, is our reception of recorded soundtrack music affected bythe technological mediation and the constructed nature of performanceswhich do not necessarily occur simultaneously and are often, in the digitalage, the creation of a single musician accompanying their own previousrecorded fragments? These 'realities' are, in a cinematic context, constructedfrom our perceptions of sound and representations of composite sonicunreality. Cinematic sound offers the transparent illusion of unmediatedrepresentation, made less remote by our capacity to 'believe' in the realismof what we are hearing (and seeing), even though we might never haveactually heard many of the sounds outside of the theatre in the real world.In many ways, sound technology in cinema has created the referentialsoundscape on which we base the reality or inauthenticity of sonic events,potentially making the experience of sounds in real life conversely other-worldly. But as Gary Rydstrom asserts, 'We hear 360°, we are always hearing360° so why shouldn't movies reflect that reality when its dramaticallyappropriate?'13

There is also the idea that the cinema achieves its levels of spectacle pre-cisely because of its inherent fantasy framework, antithetical to considerations


of attempting to reproduce a less compelling and dramatic reality. In thiscontext, film may be considered a fabricated dream which can thereforeoperate outside of normal boundaries. Commentary on the work of thefamed psychologist Carl Jung notes his observations 'that dreams arebeyond the categories of time, space and the usual dynamics of cause andeffect'.14 The limitless cinematic latitude afforded by applying this perspec-tive invites examination of the sonic fabric of film fantasy.

In any event, our perceptions of what constitutes audiovisual reality areshaped by a kind of learned subjectivity, a highly subtle sensory recondi-tioning process through which norms - whether 'normal' or not - areestablished. Moreover, despite the technological tools employed to some-how place the audience in the world of the movie being watched and heard,a vicarious dimension always remains.

The struggle of stereo to establish itself as a cinematic norm lay partlyin the critical perception that its qualities were unrealistic relative to thecompressed aural (and narrative) space of mono. The spatial expansionsoffered by stereo were critiqued from the perspective of safety with theknown, and fear of reconditioning to accommodate the lesser known.As Belton describes it, 'mono had come to be associated by audiences withrealistic representation', demonstrating how a sonic norm can be estab-lished as a matter of aural practice rather than an authentic apprehensionof its relationship to the spaces beyond the theatre.15 Moreover, it empha-sizes the ways in which the commercial implications of audience prefer-ences have influenced the formation of sound technology in cinema.16

From our twenty-first-century perspective, cinematic sonic clarity is anelement which we can practically take for granted; however, even whensound initially became a part of the theatre experience there were alarminginconsistencies in volume and overall quality to an extent rarely toleratedsince then in the commercial arena.

1920s: The Emergence of Talking Movies

The interface of sound and vision as cooperative commercial counterpartsbegan a remarkable process of trial and error. In addition, the developmentof talking movies was greatly influenced by corporate capital and manoeu-vres, battles over patent rights, issues of industry standardization and ulti-mately profit imperatives. Prior to the practical precursory experiments ofthe nineteenth century and the actual introduction of Edison's cylindricaltin foil phonograph in 1877, sound technology existed primarily in the

Sound Technology 21

theoretical and imaginative realms. Ironically though, the componentsconstituting the phonograph already existed but had not been previouslycombined for sound reproduction.17 Notably, as early as December 1877,Scientific American published the first account of Edison's phonograph andconsidered the possibilities of linking the device with the comparativelybasic photographic projection of the era.18

Edison had unsuccessfully attempted to merge the aural and visualwith his kinetoscope sound motion picture system (later modified andreferred to as a kinetophone) which was temporarily shelved in 1894.19

By the following year William Dickson, one of Edison's assistants, hadrecorded an experimental film, but mechanical linkage between audio andvideo remained highly problematic. This inability to synchronize the filmwith sound from a phonograph foreshadowed the complications whichother inventors would unsuccessfully confront until the 1920s.20 In an era(1909-1913) during which the playback of recorded sound had spawnedmore than a dozen phonograph systems, effective linkage with film wasstill distant, as typified by the failure of the Cameraphone system whichlacked affordability, satisfactory sound and consistent synchronization.21

In 1895, the French Lumiere brothers first exhibited what have beendescribed as 'living pictures1 and provided a catalyst for unifying soundwith compelling visual magic. In 1906 Eugene Lauste, a French inventorassociated with both Edison and Dickson, developed an elaborate methodof recording sound on photographic film as an image, but the playbackvolume was inadequate.22

Altman points to the virtual explosion of experimental sound-on-disc synchronization formats largely based on the Cameraphone, whichattempted to replicate vaudeville performances.23 Phonofilms inventor LeeDe Forest demonstrated his system in 1923, but the verdict of the Journalof Sound and Motion Picture Engineers was that the sound was sadly so'incomplete in harmonics' and too 'limited in range and intensity' that itsartificiality was too clearly apparent.24

In the popular music world, the emergence of electrical recording in the1920s facilitated systematic sound amplification for the first time and itsintroduction was particularly timely and well suited to the dynamics ofjazz and blues which were then emergent genres in the recording world.Electrical recording was soon utilized in the film industry and the technol-ogy, further propelling the development of movie sound as techniques forpractically combining sound-on-film eventually began to bear fruit afterthe predictable failures of sound-on-disc. Beyond Hollywood, the 1919


patenting of the German Tri-Ergon system (the rights to which wereacquired by the Fox Film Corporation in 1927) demonstrated the interna-tional scope of innovation efforts.25

The advent of sound accompaniment to film was hardly straightforward,with several different systems simultaneously competing in the market-place, three of which were developed with involvement by Western Electric,indicating the influential role of large corporations in bringing technologi-cal innovations into wider use.26 These were Western Electrics Vitaphone,Fox's Movietone, and RCA's Photophone, which were all incompatible.Perhaps not surprisingly, the major motion picture studios of the era fromabout 1900 to 1920 avoided sound technologies. They had little incentive toadopt any of the flawed systems given the commercial success of silentfilm.27 The upgrade cost implications were staggering, potentially involvingrewiring of thousands of theatres nationally, with the possibility of havingto accommodate competing systems. The 1927 cost of installing a Vitaphonesystem is estimated to have been as much as $25,000 per theatre.28 This wascoupled with the displacement of orchestras which, by this time, hadbecome integral to the cinematic experience. Significantly though, at leastin the case of Vitaphone, the synchronization of the disc - the recordingindustry's primary medium - with film was at the heart of the system.

Vitaphone was the first commercially operative system, though itdebuted in 1926 as a post-production afterthought in the film Don Juan,more than a year before the appearance of The Jazz Singer, which is fre-quently identified as a major catalyst for the widespread adoption of soundin the industry.29 Experimental versions of the system had been demon-strated in 1922 and 1924, allowing time to resolve major technical issues asfar as possible before commercial introduction. The arrival of electricalrecording and amplification coincided to improve the sound quality ofVitaphone records 'with a wider frequency range and lower distortion thanbefore'.30 It is also notable that this electrical technology found its way intothe theatres in speakers and amplifiers. Western Electric imposed acousti-cal standardization on theatre owners, forcing them to follow the compa-ny's prescribed installation methods.

As audience expectations of sound quickly developed, Vitaphone discscontained not only the human voice but also music to replace the perform-ers of the orchestral pit who had formerly provided live accompanimentto screen events.31 But as a disc-based system unlike its rival formats,Vitaphone was at a strategic and basic cinematic disadvantage since therewas no mechanical link interlocking the film and sound synchronization.The slightest malfunction with either medium would immediately produce

Sound Technology 23

audiovisual disconnection and narrative chaos. Vitaphone was fundamen-tally vulnerable and frequently unreliable, presenting the challenge of syn-chronizing disc to film and the ever-present threat of a jumping needlecompletely undoing the process.32 In addition, the limit of 20 plays as thelife span of a Vitaphone disc exposed its vulnerability to rapid deteriora-tion and further reduced its long-term potential. Movietone at least offeredthe combination of sound and vision on a single film strip, althoughattempts to simultaneously process both led to a compromised product.33

The appearance and market acceptance of sound-on-film rapidly usheredall disc-based systems towards obsolescence. One lasting legacy of theVitaphone system was the disc speed of 33 1/3 rpm which later becamethe record industry's standard for the long-playing record (the LP) in thelate 1940s, though not at the 16-inch diameter of the Vitaphone discs.34 Butthe vinyl revolution, combined with other technological innovations, gaverise to the LP, overcoming the commercially threatening inadequacies ofVitaphone.

Despite these technological shortcomings, Vitaphone influenced earlyideas about speaker configuration since its commercial introduction in1926, seemingly promoting placement of individual speakers behind thescreen and in the orchestra pit.35 In reference to the role of music inthe development of sound technology at this stage, the feature Don Juanis described as having '99 per cent musical accompaniment' when releasedin August 1926.36

RCAs Photophone was a sound-on-film system which was first demon-strated in the summer of 1927 and developed for RCA by General Electric.37

Chanan describes sound-on-film as a process

whereby signals from a microphone were used to modulate a lightbeam which could be photographed, laid alongside the picture on thesame film strip, and then reproduced through a photoelectric cell.38

There appears to have been a lack of theatre support for the Photophonesystem partly due to the costs of upgrading equipment. Magnetic tape rec-ording almost achieved an early presence when Louis Blattner, an Englishmovie producer, obtained a license to manufacture a slightly modified ver-sion of the machine developed by Curt Stille. However, the subsequentlynamed Blattnerphone failed commercially.39

The commercial success of The Jazz Singer, which starred versatile enter-tainer Al Jolson, definitively indicated that the recorded music soundtrackwould have a long and fruitful business relationship with film - with one


often relying on the other to establish marketplace presence. The impor-tance of the musical in sustaining commercial survival in the businessduring the grim Depression years cannot be underestimated. Jolsons insen-sitively denigrating reliance on minstrelsy personae as a platform for hisstardom also suggested - in hindsight - that sound as entertainment wasnonetheless imbued with ideological layers making explicit racial and socio-logical judgements. These could be manifested in the cultural purposesof the drama enhanced by the music and also by the genre of the musicitself.

Donald Crafton argues at length that the idea of cinema becoming dra-matically and rapidly transformed in 1927 following the debut of The JazzSinger starring Al Jolson is a myth. He suggests that not only were therenotable if technically ineffective precursors to the public exhibition ofmovies with recorded sound but also that following the seminal momentof 1927 there was only a gradual transition into a fully fledged talking-movie market, even accompanied by resistance to the technological inno-vation by many theatre owners.40 Nevertheless, The Jazz Singer helped topropel the acceptance of sound as an inextricable component in the filmsfrom major studios. Given the enormously transformative effect, perhapsit is not surprising that the advent of talking movies was met with consid-erable resistance in some sectors of the film industry - among both criticsand the film makers themselves. The demands of recording sound for filmwere portrayed by these opponents as a technological inconvenience alter-ing the established processes of filmmaking.41 Crafton describes the late1920s and the early 1930s as an era which produced 'a change in the funda-mental conception of movie sound1 by prioritizing the construction ofa technically practical soundtrack versus capturing the actual sound of thedramatic event.42 Still, the pace at which other studios followed the aggres-sive lead of Warner Brothers and Fox meant that by late 1930 only talkingmovies were produced in Hollywood.43 According to one estimate, by 1930,talking movies accounted for 95 per cent of Hollywood-produced films ata time when globally there were about two hundred competing film soundsystems, many of which existed in Europe.44

By 1929, speaker placement underwent another transformation wherebythere was no longer a need to replicate the location of the now-defunctorchestra as the source of musical sound which was instead centred behindthe screen to solidify audience identification between sound and image.45

In the midst of this technological watershed for movie makers and theatreowners, audiences were simply attracted to new cinematic spectacles. Thepublics appetite for films with sound forced previously resistant studiosconcerned about undermining the value of their silent film catalogues to

Sound Technology 25

conform to the new trend, so that by 1932 sound equipment conversionand standardization had been completed and sound-on-film was the rec-ognized system for both filming on location and cinematic exhibition.46

While sound quality improved considerably, the almost simultaneousintroduction of colour to the screen was probably the main audience attrac-tion, and it would be decades before the varied visual textures would becomparably reflected in theatre sound reproduction.

1930s and 1940s

Generally, where sound was concerned the 1930s was arguably a phaseof consolidation rather than dramatic innovation in the film industryundoubtedly affected by the Depression, although several roots of latertechnological advances were planted. The first reverb devices were intro-duced in 1930, and the same era witnessed the emergence of early devicesfor mixing and equalization.47 While the deployment of reverb wouldlargely become the domain of the recording industry, it later had a majornon-musical film impact in the 1940s in the western, crime and horrorgenres, as a means of dramatic emphasis.48 The first stereo research hadalso been undertaken at this time by inventor Alan Blumlein at England'sEMI and also by Bell Laboratories. However, EMI aborted Blumleins workin this area, and it would be decades before his ideas for cutting stereo discswould resurface.49 Sound designer Tom Holman emphasizes that the BellLabs' three-channel stereo demonstration is the conceptual centre of manymodern multi-channel systems.50

By the mid-1930s, the practicalities of sound-on-film had helped theformat establish a solid industry presence, and by one estimate sound-on-disc had been phased out as early as 1930.51 There is little to suggest thatconsumer audiences were aware of any transition in cinematic soundreproduction methods; and it seems far more likely to have been the con-scious concern of the studios and theatre owners.52 Williams notes thatdubbing only became an integral component of Hollywood cinema in thelate 1930s.53 Prior to the advent of dubbing or post-synchronization, directrecording of dialogue was employed, which limited filmmakers to what-ever could be captured live. The new era of sound-on-film also made adramatic impact on film editing techniques which initially struggled tomaintain variety in camera shots under constraints of accommodatingsound which was not always accurately synchronized.54 However, dubbingcreated previously impossible opportunities for post-production with sound,enriching the cinematic experience when creatively applied.


Sound films were also exported to Europe in the 1930s following anintensive equipment conversion program spearheaded by Western Electric sElectrical Research Products Inc. (ERPI) and RCA. New systems wererapidly adopted in Britain, but they were implemented at a slower rate inGermany and France, in part because of the exclusive patent rights assertedby the Tobis-Klangfilm cartel.55 This export initiative propelled the global-ization of stylized representations of American popular culture which forcedthe British parliament as early as 1927 to impose foreign film quotas.56

The Disney film Fantasia, which debuted in 1940, seems to have beenprimarily a visual vehicle for sound exploration in the theatrical environ-ment, though some suggest that it was also a creative response to Disney sfinancial problems.57 A system labelled Fantasound had been developed byBell Laboratories in the 1930s and subsequently adopted by RCA, whowere involved in making the film. The system involved simultaneous play-back of the audio tracks on three separate systems, creating a multi-channelsoundscape with the illusion of spatial depth.58 As the first film released instereo (however simulated it may have been), Fantasia is a sonic milestonein cinema history, utilizing multiple recorders and unusual improvisedtechniques which were necessary, since no precedents had been established.Not only did Fantasound involve a five-channel system similar to 5.1 sur-round sound but it also represented one of the earliest instances of over-dubbing in cinema. However, this preceded the crucial introduction of tape,which simplified a procedure which would arguably have a more revolu-tionary impact on the recording industry than the film world. Significantly,'The idea to add surround sound to frontal stereo arose in the film industry,but in the context of music recording/59

The film opened in New York in November 1940, but its exploration ofnew sonic possibilities was largely lost on audiences which were apparentlyattracted more by the potential visual spectacle. Even so, the poor initialbox-office receipts suggested that sound technology beyond the talkingvoice and basically rendered musical soundtrack was not yet independentlyattractive to audiences, and this would remain the case for some time.The commercial failure of Fantasia also meant that the ambitious plansfor continually using multi-channel sound were shelved, and by 1942 thefilm existed only in mono. According to Blake, the original installation atthe Broadway Theatre included 54 speakers and cost $85,000.60 In total, theFantasound system was installed in only fourteen theatres with each sys-tem costing $45,000 and weighing 15,000 pounds. Apart from the limitsimposed by price, the diversion of resources necessitated by Americasentry into World War II halted construction of these units.61

Sound Technology 27

In 1946, the Motion Picture Academy's Basic Sound Committee wasapproached by engineer Semi Begun of Brush Development; he providedrecommendations on the possibilities for using magnetic recording tech-nology in motion pictures. These recommendations indicated the vitalimportance of technological compatibility with existing optical sound equip-ment and inexpensive costs. Initial synchronization issues were addressedwith the manufacture of conversion kits by Western Electric, RCA and oth-ers, although many film editors resisted the change which required techniqueadaptations they were unwilling to make.62 Sound-effects storage, locationrecording and foreign language dubbing all provided magnetic recordingtechnology with inroads to the production side of the film industry, butalmost all theatrical prints still employed optical sound.63 Although the1940s witnessed the establishment of the Ampex Corporation and itsmagnetic tape recorders in the radio industry, the interface between thiscompany and the visual world was marginally manifested in the 1950s.

1950s: Cinerama and the Introduction of Magnetic Sound

Altman notes that in 1940, Bell Laboratories had demonstrated a four-trackstereo system geared towards the recording industry. Although it was inthis industry that stereo first established its commercial viability, this waspreceded by numerous attempts to apply it to the cinematic environment.64

Even as the visual spectacle of film literally widened the canvas uponwhich it would viewed, its sonic accompaniment shrank in dimension as amono representation despite technological developments which providedstereo as an advanced option:

[T]he panning of dialog across a wide screen and back ran directlycounter to the expectations of both cinema spectators (who had beentrained to expect single-source sound by classical Hollywood filmsand speaker placement and home high-fidelity listeners (who hadbeen trained to regard monaural reproduction as the norm.65

The film designed to promote the new stereo format, This is Cinerama,debuted on 30 September 1952, and in the following year 32 other filmswere released in stereo.66 This is Cinerama is a key instance in which thevisual spectacle exists almost solely in promotional support of the auralimperatives. There is no plot, no thematic or narrative thread around whichthe visual content coheres; the unity that does exist is based on varieties ofsonic exhibitionism.67


Stereo magnetic playback in film theatres only began in the 1950s. Thecinematic employment of magnetic sound in this decade arose from thedevelopment of the tape recorder. Despite its initial mass commercializa-tion in America, magnetic tape recording had been developed in Germanyand was first publicly exhibited in 1934. The Germans had already madethis technology functional as a tool of their propaganda machinery, butit was yet to be as fervently applied to popular culture. By the late 1940s,several American record companies had already adopted magnetic tape,facilitating greater flexibility and options in the recording process in con-junction with the development of new two-track machines.68 The technol-ogy was one of the spoils of war reaped by the victors, and in this instanceit was liberated by American troops, one of whom - Alexander Poniatoff -created the Ampex Corporation in California. Adapting the German tech-nology, Ampex manufactured the first professional audio tape recorderin 1948 and the first practical video recorder in 1956.69 Ampex also playeda pioneering role in introducing the first magnetic theatre sound system in1954 for Todd-AO and Cinemascope.70 The latter was employed in the1953 feature The Robe, in order to appropriately complement the widervisual panorama. Twentieth Century-Fox Studios introduced the four-trackmagnetic process using three speakers behind the screen and one monosurround speaker behind the audience (as in Apocalypse Now). This wasalso one of several instances whereby competition from television promptedpresentational upgrades in cinema.

Radio preceded the film industry in its adoption of magnetic tape withpopular crooner Bing Crosby, using it to record his radio show with thehelp of engineer Jack Mullin,71 it was no coincidence that he became one ofthe early investors in the Ampex Corporation. Ampex not only introducedmagnetic tape to the American market but, by 1956, had also developed thefirst practical video recorder. Tape recording had an immediate, visible andaudible impact on musical recordings and radio broadcasts. Its initial effecton film sound was no less significant, though perhaps rather less transparent.John Belton summarizes the technical benefits of the magnetic revolutionin the context of its apparent failure to become a cinematic trend: "Magneticsound provided an unprecedented fidelity, a dramatically expanded fre-quency range a significantly improved signal-to-noise ratio, and a largerdynamic volume range1.72

He also notes that it "briefly disrupted established sound recording, edit-ing, and mixing practice', though its impact was far more evident to soundtechnology practitioners than theatre audiences. He further suggests thatcontinued use of optical rather than magnetic sound prevented the sonic

Sound Technology 29

improvements from being noticeable to popular film consumers, despitethe fact that recording and mixing in the magnetic medium reduced pro-duction costs.73

It is notable that by the mid-1950s, stereo systems had not been installedinto many theatres, and so mono remained dominant despite the existenceof a more expansive sonic medium.74 Foxs attempts to homogenize cinemasound by coercing Cinemascope users into utilizing a four-track format for35 mm film and a six-track format for 70 mm proved unsuccessful.75 Fur-thermore, the major film studios stubbornly refused to assimilate the ideaof stereo panning of dialog, preferring instead to maintain the mono statusquo. While surround channels remained available, they fell into disuse andredundancy.76 Incredibly, stereo surround for 70 mm prints would not beintroduced until 1979.77

Even where recorded music audiophiles were concerned, the first pre-recorded stereo (reel-to-reel) tapes only debuted in 1954, and it was anotherfour years before stereo records were issued.78 Such records were, however,available much earlier than this, as evidenced by the appearance of thestereo Oklahomal soundtrack in 1955; but the mass marketing of stereorecords did not begin until at least 1957.79

While theatre owners rejected the sonic possibilities of stereo as artifi-cial, there remained the inherent paradox of the musicals high box-officepopularity versus its profoundly unrealistic framework. The idea of indi-viduals bursting into song - and cinematically this would usually be a songnot previously performed' by the character - seems the least realistic sce-nario of all. This is further compounded by the accompaniment of vocaland instrumental background - emanating from indeterminate sources -coupled with coordinated dance moves, all magically and convenientlycaptured in the precise moments of emotional fervour. Moreover, the enor-mous popularity of the cinematic musical spectacle in the 1950s raises keyconcerns about the extent to which American society in particular engagedin narrative escapism divorced from the harsh realities of its domesticsocial contradictions. In this context, Beltons observations that black andwhite remained dominant over colour in signifying realism assume greaterliteral semiotic value as an ironic reflection of Americas collective racialschizophrenia and moral certitude within which no shades of grey wereopenly acknowledged by the status quo. The cultural dominance of themusical was equally reflected in soundtrack record sales with titles such asthe previously mentioned Oklahoma (with a stereo orchestral soundtrack)and South Pacific ranking highly among the top selling albums of the entiredecade.80 While South Pacific was thematically centred around a pair of


interracial relationships, the cinematic realism was undercut not onlyby contextualization within a musical but also aurally because several on-screen cast members mimed dubbed singing voices which were not theirown.81

However, this seems to have been the end of an era, since the mid-1950switnessed a transition towards a pop-oriented soundtrack.82 Ironically,however, the recording industry's sonic developments applied to produc-ing this music were not similarly applied within the film sphere whichremained with mono. Avoiding the costs of upgrading speaker systems wasone significant motivation to reject stereo adoption, and this also coincidedwith audience indifference to the new format s spatial potentialities. Soundinnovator Ray Dolby suggests that surround sound existed in some formin the 1950s.83 There is however no indication that this was surround inthe technological sense that we have come to understand the word in thedigital era.

From the 1960s into the Twenty-First Century: Stasis and Rapid Evolution

Silence, as well as sound, is clearer with Dolby.-Charles Schreger*4

Cinema sound developments in the last third of the twentieth century arelargely defined by a handful of groundbreaking technological innovationsand specific major works within which they were artistically applied. Theemergence and evolution of sound design would not have occurred at thesame rate without the collective impact of, for example, Dolby noise reduc-tion and films such as Apocalypse Now and Star Wars. The main impor-tance of the Dolby Corporation lies in its pioneering noise-reductiontechnologies which paved the way for dramatic and long-overdue improve-ments in film sound, which had remained in the doldrums during the1960s; this was in sharp contrast to the experimentation that characterizedthe recording industry during that same phase:

The release in 1977 of George Lucas' Star Wars was to the DolbyStereo System and stereo film mixing what The Jazz Singer had beento Vitaphone and film sound 50 years earlier.85

Moreover, the company's sonic innovation is inextricably interfaced with theadvancement of sound processing in the recording industry. Dolby Labo-ratories was established in 1965 when its founder, Ray Dolby, decided to

Sound Technology 31

follow through with commercial production of a noise reduction system -Dolby A - which he had developed. In his words, this system £was perfectfor cleaning up the ills of professional studio recorders* and this technologyalso had direct benefits for average music consumers when it was appliedto the compact cassette.86

Interestingly, he views the effect of Star Wars on the company's successin the film industry as grossly exaggerated', citing three earlier hits withwhich Dolby was associated. However, Dolby's invaluable technologicalpartner, loan Allen, who was directly involved in integrating the company'sinnovations with Hollywood films believes that Star Wars really did repre-sent a critical turning point in the representation of sound in film.87 StarWars also inspired the development of a new low-frequency speaker toovercome the inadequacies of existing theatre systems, referred to as the'Baby Boom' channel.88

Although Dolby is now inextricably associated with multi-channel sonicspectacle, there were films recorded in Dolby mono early in the company'shistory.89 Dolby A was employed in the company's first product, the A301noise reduction (NR) unit, which was marketed mainly to record compa-nies, with the first units sold to Decca (UK) in 1966 (Dolby Web site). It wasthrough application as a music recording studio enhancement that earlyDolby technology first made its aural presence felt, if not seen; thoughAllen notes that 'there were no spatial or more artistic changes that ensued'and the Dolby system simply addressed the hiss level coming from thetape recorders (Allen interview). The rapid advancement in multi-trackrecording capabilities in the late 1960s and early 1970s offered artistsa vastly expanded range of creative options, but the overall sonic integritywas in danger of being compromised without Dolby NR. The companyWeb site suggests that 'Without it, the high tape hiss resulting from thecombination of narrow tracks and multiple mixdowns would have beenintolerable' (Dolby Web site). By late 1966, Dolby's A301 system was beingintroduced in both major and independent music recordings in the UnitedStates.

It is perhaps a significant coincidence, in view of the historical domi-nance of orchestral film soundtracks, that the first commercial recordingsession and the first LP utilizing Dolby-processed master tapes both fea-tured classical works. Conversely, popular music soon provided the plat-form from which Dolby could establish itself as integral to recording. loanAllen notes the importance of his access to the rock music recording worldin raising the company's visibility beyond the esoteric and comparativelyclosed classical world.90


Nonetheless, the Dolby A-type NR was a professional product with nodirect consumer applications. The consumer market entered the picturewhen Dolby-B was introduced in 1968 as a technology initially licensedexclusively to the KLH Research & Development Corporation which manu-factured open reel tape recorders (Dolby Web site). It was not until the useof this noise reduction method with pre-recorded Compact Cassettes, andthe availability of Dolby-B on recorders starting in 1970 that the Dolbyname began to inscribe itself on consumer consciousness. The 1973 licens-ing deal with Philips, the inventor of the compact cassette which had beenfirst issued a decade earlier, virtually ensured that the use of Dolby-B wouldbecome widespread.

At this point and still further into the 1970s, the quality of the almosttotally mono film sound was, incredibly, still based on a 1930s sound stan-dardization rubric known as the Academy curve* an optical soundtrackapplication which offered incredibly poor sound.91 Dolby states that he hadalways been interested in developing technology for the film industry, soapart from the mechanical interrelationships between the recording andmovies worlds, the expansion seemed wholly logical.92 The Model 364emerged in 1972 as the first Dolby product for cinema use. In line with theexisting film sound limitations of the era, it was a mono decoder; and bythe end of the year the first film employing Dolby-A encoding on its monooptical soundtrack (Speed Merchants) had been released (Dolby Web site).The use of mono into the 1970s in film is made all the more remarkableby the already well-established and spatially exploited presence of stereo inthe recording industry, which was already attempting (however tentatively)to move into the eventually unsuccessful quadraphonic realm. In hindsight,one might view this as an early, more expansive version of surround soundwhich was decidedly more technologically authentic than recent cinematicattempts at surround. However, there were both economic and technologi-cal factors contributing to the lack of sound improvement in cinema andthe marginalization of magnetic recording and playback:

By the 1970s, the expense of magnetic release prints (more than tentimes that of optical prints), their comparatively short life (comparedto optical prints), and the high cost of maintaining magnetic play-back heads led to a massive reduction in the number of magneticreleases and theatres capable of playing them. (Dolby Web site)

Backwards compatibility proved critical to the enhancing the chances ofmarketplace success, since it facilitated the use of pre-existing systemsin film theatres.93 The high cost of magnetic prints versus their optical

Sound Technology 33

counterpart and the required conversion of projection equipment in cine-mas were significant disincentives to adopt new sound technologies,94

Equally if not more crucial at the pre-exhibition stage was the active par-ticipation of Dolby consultants in the application of the technology in filmproduction to ensure consistency and quality control.95 This was not a straight-forward process, since it sometimes involved recalibrating standard soundequipment and altering engineers' long-standing audio practices - thereforerequiring considerable tactfulness in order to achieve the desired result.96

loan Allen recalls that although Dolby noise reduction had already beenapplied to some film recording, A Clockwork Orange (1971) 'was the firstmovie to use a lot of noise reduction on all the pre-mixes'.97 Allen notes thatthe application of Dolby noise reduction in film sound produced 'a seriouscultural change' which in technical terms involved the provision of stereoand extending frequency response to improve the overall sound and to cre-ate what he describes as 'an homogenous sound field' in cinema which hadnot previously existed (Allen). He also recognizes that the film and record-ing industries had sharply contrasting responses to noise reduction:

I would say it was much more difficult to get the film industry to dowhat we wanted them to do than the recording industry becausethere was more of a built-in inertia in the film industry to change. Therecording industry was much more ready to try new technology thanthe film industry where it was a real struggle in the mid-70s becausewe required such radical change in technique.

For directors who had been brought up in mono . . . the idea of alsothinking about where to place sounds in a horizontal plane was a verychallenging thought. (Allen interview)

Allen observes that many practical concerns factored into the film indus-try's reluctance to embrace noise reduction:

Why were they reluctant to do it? Because it warranted a huge changeand what we were recommending was a change in loudspeaker char-acteristics, the use of stereo, people were frightened of how long itwould take to mix, they thought it was more involved in the editing,there was no arsenal of sound effects in the library they could go tothat were in stereo. A major sea change. Nowadays you go to a soundeffects library and everything's sitting there in stereo ready to go. Inthose days all your sound effects were in mono. What do you do withthem? It just looked like a huge challenge and it was only the moreprogressive directors who said, hey I'm gonna do this. You'd think of


people like Ken Russell. He was prepared to take on any kind of chal-lenge there was then; Terry Malick, who was doing Days of Heaven;Gary Kurtz, who was really the decision maker in using Dolby Stereoin Star Wars. Those are the imaginative ones. (Allen)

By 1973, Dolby sought to improve the cinematic playback experiencewith the release of the Model E2 Cinema Equalizer. The first Dolby stereooptical soundtrack for the film, Lisztomania, was only released in 1975,featuring the classical, flamboyant articulation of Yes keyboardist, RickWakeman. This followed the installation in London of the CP-100, 'the firstmulti-channel Dolby cinema processor introduced for playback in theatresof Dolby Stereo magnetic and optical soundtracks' (Dolby Web site).Significantly, the first film shown using the system was the film adaptationof the Whos rock opera, Tommy, directed by Ken Russell (who had helmedLisztomania). The year 1975 also witnessed the first cinematic use of DolbyA noise reduction: in A Star Is Born (Hilson).

When Star Wars was released in 1977, its sound according to loan Allenwas characterized by good stereo definition . . . and much better bassresponse in the cinema than was common at the time* (Apocalypse Now).The 1978 debut of Francis Ford Coppolas Vietnam War epic, ApocalypseNow, marked another historical landmark as the first stereo surroundrelease, which is now essentially regarded as the most closely related andsignificant forerunner of 5.1 sound. Randy Thorn notes that, 'A moviesounds great because the movie has been designed for sound, and no moviein history was as thoroughly designed to use sound as Apocalypse Now'.98

Underlining the technological tug-of-war between filmmakers andtheatre owners, Coppola had the ambitious idea that exhibitors would 'playthe picture on our terms, with our sound, the way we want them to show it'(Apocalypse Now). He had considered employing Sensurround, developedin 1974 by Universal Studios as a sonic means of communicating thevisceral aspects of the cinematic experience, exemplified by films such asEarthquakel The special low-frequency capacity of the Sensurround speak-ers would simulate the shaking and rocking of an earthquake to enrich thesense of authenticity. Apocalypse Now was reproduced in quadraphonicsound, which was a sonic quantum leap from mono.

While Dolby continued developing cassette noise reduction, incremen-tal improvements on existing film-related technologies were complementedby landmark innovations such as the M360 Motion Picture SurroundEffects Decoder issued in December 1982 and the later introduction ofDolby's first digital encoder.

Sound Technology 35

In 1992, Batman Returns became the first film released in Dolby Digital, aformat which kept analogue audio intact on the film print. By December 1995,Dolby Digital was specified as the 'mandatory multi-channel soundtrackformat for NTSC countries' The globalization of Dolby through Hollywoodhas been tremendous - with over 12,000 films using the encoding technol-ogy and almost 70,000 cinemas using Dolby equipment." Equally signifi-cant is the official Oscar and Grammy award recognition which Ray Dolbyand loan Allen have received.

Among competing platforms, the MCA/Matsushita DTS format basedon a sound-on-disc format synchronized with film conceptually seemsremarkably reminiscent of the Vitaphone system used in the 1920s. TheTHX system was developed in 1982 by Tom Holman as chief engineer atGeorge Lucas' Skywalker Sound, though its public introduction occurredin 1983 (when THX Ltd. was actually founded) with Return of the Jedi.It has been described as a sonic ideal for movie theatres, but Holman notesthat it was originally developed for in-house use.100 THX engineer GaryGrimani was responsible, along with Gary Rydstrom, for the creation ofDolby Surround EX which inexpensively added 'a new surround signal forthe rear wall of the cinema auditorium' (THX milestones'). Its cinematicdebut took place in 1999, some two years after its initial development,and this too was associated with another Star Wars movie, The PhantomMenace. Theatres and individual films have to be certified by THX asauthentically reproducing sound to the required standards.

In 2005, Dolby Digital Cinema was released as a file-based digital formatwith encrypted video. In an era characterized by digital piracy of entertain-ment, the playback of movies encrypted in this format is only made possi-ble through the key code issued with the usage license.

Perhaps the largest irony in Dolby's illustrious association with the filmindustry resides in the fact that the widespread use of its noise reductiontechnology coincided with an era in which there would be more cinematicnoise than ever - produced by the studios' effort to bombard the viewer inthe sonic overload which still characterizes Hollywood's mainstream bigbudget films.

Sound Design

The recognition of sound as a vital and technically separate component inmodern movie making was made clear with the designation of sounddesign within film credits, and sometimes quite prominently. ApocalypseNow is widely acknowledged as the seminal sound-design landmark, and the


sonic sculptors Walter Murch and Ben Burtt were the first to describe theirwork in more specific terms as 'sound montage' and 'sound designer', reflect-ing the creative rather than purely technical degree of their contribution.101

Oscar winner Gary Rydstrom describes the role of the sound designer inthe following terms:

They used the term to mean someone who was really the architect ofa soundtrack from the earliest point in the film all the way throughthe mix so it was really the equivalent of an art director, someonewho thought of the whole soundtrack and how it was going to cometogether to give it a consistency.102

Interestingly, Gary Rydstrom samples different sounds using a digitalkeyboard-based instrument, the Synclavier, normally associated with therecording of popular music, particularly in the 1980s. Musician/producerssuch as Nile Rodgers, Sting and Stevie Wonder reinforced their commerciallysuccessful soundscapes by utilizing the Synclavier as both a demo compo-sitional and recording performance tool. As with other digital sequencingtechnology, it allowed them to sketch complete and sophisticated song pic-tures with multiple parts played back simultaneously, thereby advancingthe point at which the art becomes tangibly manifested.

Almost inevitably, realism (or the lack thereof) becomes perhaps an evengreater issue given the unprecedented flexibility afforded by digital tech-nologies. Nevertheless, whether digitally generated or not, the constructionof sound remains an ongoing aesthetic point of concern. Rydstrom evensuggests that the approach to sound based in replicating reality is flawed:

I wish that in general filmmakers were more open to using sound ina less realistic way. I think that everybody in the film industry, includ-ing sound people, sometimes restrict themselves to being more literalthan they should.103

loan Allen notes that recognition of the sound designer as a key cinematiccontributor seemed especially evident in the 1980s and early 1990s andsuggests that perhaps now we have begun to take the importance of thesound designer for granted.

The ubiquity of high-volume cinema sound, especially from mainstreamHollywood offerings, raises a key question about excess in modern sonicapplication. Given the vastly magnified importance of sound in the cinematic

Sound Technology 37

experience, Allen laments the apparent lack of stylistic economy and signi-ficantly observes that

the trend towards loud chase movies is unfortunate, I'd like to seemore dynamic and more subtle movies. Chocolat was a good movie interms of soundtrack. This year, you'll see chase movies in the top twoor three, and if you look at the sound editing - Academy Awards -they tend to be three of the loudest films there are because theycapture most attention. Its not necessarily the best mix.

The stark thinness of soundtracks that I like - they're uncommon.You can do a whole load of message with a single bell coming outof silence. You don t need to pile stuff up. In fact, back in the days of16-track mixing, there was always this tendency with bad rock groupsto add instrumentation: 'This is free, lets add a 12-string, lets adda harp.' In fact, the good producer would thin things out, and if youlisten to the best of The Beatles' music you'll discover they're prettythin. There's not many emblems being simultaneously presented.And the opposite is true of film sound today. There is a tendency topile on more and more effects. When you have a street scene - a longshot, and you see lots of cars and buses going you don't need to put inthe soundtrack the sound of every bus and car that you see visually.You can put two cars in, but it implies a bunch of cars and you finishup with a cleaner soundtrack in which it's easier to write a message.(Allen interview)

This idea of sonic inscription provides a useful visual metaphor and com-municates the intense aural disarray characterizing so many films in theera of sound design.

In the 1980s the music industry was irrevocably affected by the digitalinstrument revolution whereby synthesizers, samplers and drum machinesbecame highly affordable, visible and trendy. More significantly though,this technological wave was facilitated by a level of standardization whichwould not be reflected in the film industry for years to come. The develop-ment and accessibility of the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI)allowed products by different manufacturers to communicate with eachother. Ironically, the film industry's soundtracks would benefit immenselyfrom the aesthetic and cost-cutting potentialities of digitally generatedmusic without following the lead towards mechanical normalization at


that point. Remarkably, despite the many and often dramatic technologicaladvances discussed in this chapter, the current state of cinematic exhibitionstill leaves considerable room for improvement. Film remains the mediumof choice largely out of economic efficacy rather than durability or visualexcellence.

The film scholarship focus on full-length dramatic features has limitedthe attention paid to other significant short-form cinematic texts.104

Throughout cinematic history the movie trailer has played a vital role inattracting audiences, using not only visual excerpts but also attempting toencapsulate the sonic landscapes of the respective feature films they pro-mote. Similarly, the imprint of much of film sounds evolution can be iden-tified through the text of trailer sound and the aesthetic and ideologicalstatements it makes. The trailer is essentially a movie of the movie - butcrucially with a superimposed narrative beyond the aural text of the actualfilm. The narrator who summarizes the core of the story (or at least theversion which might have the most initial commercial value) speaks froma mediated omniscient position, and although fragments of film dialogueare inevitably integral to the trailer s character, what we view is a represen-tation of a cinematic encounter. Moreover, this is usually underscored byhighly manipulative use of music to establish emotional cues intended toguide the audience back to the theatre to satisfy their stimulated appetites.In effect, the trailer compresses (and perhaps essentializes) the audiovisualaesthetics of cinema, relying heavily on the presence (more often the absence)of sound and sound design to achieve impact.

Sound designer Randy Thorn is clear about the representational role offilms, inclusive of sounds function:

Movies are not about depicting reality, no matter how dramatic thatreality is. Movies are . . . saying something more interesting aboutwhats really true than you could possibly say if things were real.105

This represents the paradox of cinema in general and the pivotal role ofsound within it: underscoring and magnifying dramatic scenes through adifferent, yet related language.

Notes

1. Rick Altman, 'The sound of sound: a brief history of the reproduction of sound inmovie theaters', Cineaste, 21 (January 1995), 2. Filmsound.org, available at http://www.geocities.com/hollywood/academy/4394/altman.html (accessed on 25 November 2006).

2. Rick Altman, Introduction: Sounds Dark Corners', in Rick Altman (ed.), SoundTheory, Sound Practice. New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 173.

http://www.geocities.com/hollywood/academy/4394/altman.html


Sound Technology 39

3. Ian Inglis, 'Introduction: Popular music and film', in Ian Inglis (ed.)> Popular Musicand Film. London: Wallflower, 2003, p. 1.

4. Douglas Gomery, "The coming of sound: Technological change in the Americanfilm industry', in Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (eds), Film Sound: Theory and Practice.New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, p. 26.

5. Ibid., pp. 29-30.6. Jeff Smith, The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music. New York:

Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 3.7. David Morton, Sound Recording: The Life Story of a Technology. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 2004, p. 79.8. Gianluca Sergi, The Dolby Era: Film Sound in Contemporary Hollywood. New York:

Manchester University Press, 2004, p. 4.9. Ibid., p. 164.

10. Michael Chanan, Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects onMusic. London: Verso, 1995, p. 77.

11. David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film. New York: Norton, 1990, p. 254.12. Altman(1995),p. 1.13. Sergi (2004), p. 172.14. Eugene Pascal, Jung to Live By. New York: Warner, 1992, p. 234.15. John Belton, '1950s magnetic sound: The frozen revolution', in R. Altman (ed.),

Sound Theory, Sound Practice. New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 164.16. Altman (1995), p. 4.17. Chanan (1995), p. 2.18. Ulano(1992), p. 3.19. The Kinetophone was publicly reintroduced in 1913, but by the following year its

mechanical inconsistencies had ruined any possible market potential (Gomery 1985: 7).20. Morton (2004), p. 72; Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to

Sound, 1926-1931 (History of American Cinema 4). Berkeley: University of California Press,1997, p. 8; Chanan (1995), p. 71.

21. Gomery (1985), pp. 6-7.22. Morton (2004), p. 73.23. Altman (1995), p. 3.24. Bob Allen,' Why The Jazz Singer?' AMPS Newsletter, 23 (1997). Filmsound.org.25. Cook (1995), pp. 255-6.26. Chanan (1995), p. 71; Gomery (1985), p. 5.27. Morton (2004), pp. 73-4.28. Cook (1995), pp. 258-9.29. Chanan (1995), p. 72; Morton (2004), p. 75.30. Morton (2004), p. 74.31. Altman (1995), p. 4.32. Chanan (1995), pp. 72-3.33. Ibid., p. 73.34. Morton (2004), p. 74.35. Altman (1995), pp. 4-5.


36. Ibid, p. 5.37. Crafton (1997), p. 12; Chanan (1995), p. 74; Morton (2004), p. 76.38. Chanan (1995), p. 71.39. Morton (2004), pp. 111-12.40. Crafton (1997), pp. 12-13.41. In 'Lets Hear It For Sound', Bob Allen notes that 'Those who were opposed to sound

claimed that the technical requirements of recording, restricted directors, prevented cameramobility, inhibited actors and caused great problems for cameramen.'

42. Crafton (1997), p. 235.43. Gomery(1985),p.5.44. Morton (2004), p. 76.45. Altman(1995), p. 6.46. Cook (1995), pp. 258, 266.47. Chanan (1995), p. 77.48. Peter Doyle, Echo & Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording 1900-1960.

Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005, pp. 7-8.49. Morton (2004), pp. 94-5.50. Holman (2002), p. 12.51. Barry Salt, 'Film style and technology in the thirties: Sound', in Elisabeth Weis and

John Belton (eds), Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press,1985, p. 42.

52. Morton (2004), p. 77.53. Williams (1992), pp. 136-7.54. Cook (1995), pp. 278-9.55. Ibid., p. 361.56. Ibid., p. 362.57. Holman (2002), p. 12.58. Morton (2004), pp. 78-9.59. Holman (2002), pp. 12-13. Holman makes a technical distinction between the

method used on Fantasia and what he describes as the 'Sel-Sync' overdubbing approachutilizing tape developed in the 1950s which is credited to guitarist Les Paul.

60. Larry Blake, 'Re-Recording and Post Production for Disney's Fantasia\ in FilmSound Today. Hollywood: Reveille, 1984, p. 20.

61. Larry Blake, 'Mixing Dolby Stereo Film Sound', in Film Sound Today. Hollywood:Reveille, 1984, p. 1.

62. Morton (2004), pp. 124-6.63. Ibid., p. 126.64. Altman(1995),p. 7.65. Ibid.66. Blake (1984), p. 1; Belton (1992), p. 155.67. See Belton (1992), p. 161.68. Mark Coleman, Playback: From the Victrola to MP3, 100 Years of Music, Machines,

and Money. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2003, p. 58; Starr and Waterman (2003), p. 155.69. Sergi (2004), p. 54; Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, American Popular Music:

From Minstrelsy to MTV. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 155.

Sound Technology 41

70. Sergi (2004), p. 16.71. Morton (2004), p. 123.72. Belton(1992), p. 155.73. Ibid.74. Ibid, p. 154.75. Altaian (1995), p. 7.76. Ibid., p. 8.77. Holman (2002), p. 23.78. Chanan(1995),p. 133.79. See Charlotte Greig, The 100 Best-Selling Albums of the 50s. London: Igloo, 2004,

p.208;Belton(1992),p. 164.80. Greig (1992), pp. 208, 217.81. Ibid., p. 186.82. Smith (1998), p. 3.83. Sergi (2004), p. 47.84. Gharles Schreger, Altman, Dolby, and the second sound revolution, in Elisabeth

Weis and John Belton (eds), Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1985, p. 352.

85. Blake (1984), p. 1.86. Sergi (2004), p. 42.87. Ibid., pp. 51,102.88. Holman (2002), p. 16.89. Sergi (2004), p. 97.90. Ibid., p. 92.91. Ibid., p. 103.92. Ibid., p. 92.93. Ibid., p. 48.94. Schreger (1985), pp. 353-4.95. Sergi (2004), pp. 94-5.96. Ibid., p. 103.97. Ibid., p. 93.98. Randy Thorn, Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier, dir. Francis Ford Coppola,

DVD, Zoetrope Studios, 2006.99. Sergi (2004), p. 11.

100. Vincent LoBrutto, Sound-On-Film: Interviews with Creators of Film Sound. Westport,CT: Praeger, 1994, p. 203.

101. Sergi (2004), p. 182.102. Ibid., p. 163.103. Ibid., p. 169.104. Scott Curtis, 'The Sound of the Early Warner Bros. Cartoons', in Rick Altman (ed)

Sound Theory, Sound Practice, New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 191.105. Randy Thorn, 'Designing a Movie for Sound', in Larry Sider, Diane Freeman and

Jerry Sider (eds), Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures 1998-2001, London: WallflowerPress, 2003, p. 124.

2

The SoundtrackMusic in the Evolving Soundtrack

David Neumeyer and James Buhler

Introduction

Musics functions in film may be classified as narrative (or temporal),emotive and referential. The most remarkable fact about the history of filmmusic is the continuity of these basic functions; that is to say, in its essentialaspects, music is used in films in 2008 in much the same way it was inthe 1920s, which was the highpoint of the silent-film era marked by high-prestige dramatic feature films produced by large studios.

Music may serve narrative through temporal unity - a piece of musiccovers the time of a scene, for example, as was common in silent-film per-formance practice - or through temporal conjunction, as when a transi-tional cue overlaps two scenes (accompanying the imagetracks fade to blackor lap dissolve). Music may also assist narrative through recurring motifs,phrases or cues: like a visual motif, recurring music invites the viewer/listener to make associations between temporally disparate segments. Alove theme, for example, when first stated relies on emotion and a culturalcode for romantic music; when repeated later, this music will remind us ofa romantic relationship, developed or potential, desired or past, and willprompt us to regard that narrative element as important. A system ofthemes (or leitmotifs) can impose temporal order on long or complex films,and is therefore especially useful in epics, such as the recent Lord of theRings trilogy. This device was employed as early as D. W. Griffiths Birth of

42

The Soundtrack 43

a Nation (1915),1 and examples may be found among many large-scalehistorical films, such as Quo Vadis? (1951) and Ben-Hur(l959).

One of musics most powerful roles is to introduce or intensify emotion.As Claudia Gorbman puts it, 'Soundtrack music may set specific moodsand emphasize particular emotions suggested in the narrative . . . but firstand foremost, it is a signifier of emotion itself'.2 At the most immediatelevel, music may trace second-by-second changes in an individual charac-ters mood and feelings. It may set the overall mood of a scene (suspense,dramatic conflict, comedic, etc.), or even pass beyond individual feeling tothe mythic (as happens repeatedly in The Lord of the Rings, especially in thescenes preceding and following battles but also in the final minutes of thethird film for the imminent passage out of Middle Earth of Frodo, Gandalfand the elves).

Finally, music can be referential; that is, it can reinforce or augment nar-rative through familiar codes: bagpipe music evokes Scotland, whether ornot we see images of that nation on the screen, for example. These codes arestrong but rarely unequivocal; contexts are usually needed to direct ourinterpretation - the Scotland evoked might be urban (Glasgow) or rural(the Highlands), contemporary or historical. The hymn 'Rock of Ages' mayrefer to religious feeling, but it could refer more narrowly to funeral rites,or to traditional Protestant practices (or even communities characterizedby those practices). In films of the last two decades, older popular songs arefrequently used as nostalgic references (their titles or lyrics can be referen-tial in a very direct way, as if substitutes for speech - notable instances haveoccurred in films directed by Nora Ephron - but in fact almost all recentfilms map popular songs onto a film with some level of referentiality).Songs or musical styles can also be tied to individual characters (as hap-pens in High Fidelity [2000] or, among classic films, Laura [1944]).

Although the functions are distinct, a film cue in fact almost alwaysserves more than one function at a time. The 'Shire' theme in The Lord of theRings is a good example. It is certainly referential - it 'names' a place in the(imagined) physical world of Middle Earth. But the theme is also emotive(it invokes the pastoral but also the nostalgia of traditional English folk-song), and it is used as a temporal function, that is, as a recurring theme.

The continuity of functions links music practices in early and contem-porary film, but in addition they share a basic aesthetic premise of stylisticdiversity. Film music is any music used in a film. Although the musical per-formance practices for silent film exhibition varied widely, it was commonfor theater musicians to play popular or traditional songs (particularlyballads), to draw dramatic, suspenseful or comedic music from Tchaikovsky,


Mendelssohn and other classical composers, to play music familiar fromhousehold music-making (marches, romances and similar pieces), andeven to introduce contemporary dances such as the tango and foxtrot.We can see this diversity in the score that Joseph Carl Breil compiled andcomposed for The Birth of a Nation; it includes twenty-six borrowed tunes(ranging from 'Auld Lang Syne and 'Camptown Races' to 'The Star-SpangledBanner'), plus extended borrowings from the symphonic repertoire' foraction scenes, and a substantial amount of original music that creates asystem of leitmotifs 'for the leading characters'3

There are certainly some significant differences between the early prac-tice of film music (in both silent and classic sound eras) and contemporarypractices, but those differences are not in musics narrative functions orits stylistic diversity. Instead, they stem from the transformation of thesoundtrack itself, partly due to changes in aesthetic priorities over time,partly the result of technological advances (initially sound-on-film itself,but more recently Dolby stereo and digital editing). In films of the late1930s and 1940s speech and music predominated, with sound effects keptto a minimum. Music (or active dialogue) served some of the functionsthat sound effects increasingly have in modern soundtracks. As a result,music's role has receded somewhat, but at the same time it has becomemore marked; that is, music is less often used to structure the timeline ofa scene in the way ambient sound does. But when music is used, its time-articulating effect is that much more noticeable. Music to underscore dia-logue is far less common now, as are highlighted performances (where thenarrative effectively stops and all details of the image are controlled by themusic); but songs used in the referential capacity we described above(where title or lyrics act like a comment on the action) are ubiquitous.Finally, it has become standard practice to commingle effects and musicin the soundtracks of sci-fi, action and thriller films - to model the musicto emphasize its sound, its texture and timbres, rather than melodies.

In the section below, we comment further on differences and continu-ities by looking at possible historical narratives of music's place in the filmsoundtrack. Two case studies then augment these observations by compar-ing historical and contemporary treatments of main-title sequences andthe underscoring of dialogue scenes.

Music and the Narrative of Film History

One could write a film-music history in terms of the composers who spe-cialize in background music. In early sound film, the composer was on the

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top rung of the studio music department ladder (except for the departmenthead, the administrative supervisor - who was often a composer himself).The creator of the background score was typically the only music depart-ment member to receive a credit in the film (the most successful compos-ers received titles to themselves). Writing such a history would also seema legitimate enterprise given the strong and distinctive influence of indi-vidual musical styles over the years (one need only think of Max Steinerin the 1930s, Bernard Herrmann and Miklos Rozsa in the 1950s, ElmerBernstein and Ennio Morricone in the 1960s, and John Williams since the1970s). The literature does include a number of monographs, many inter-views and a very few composer biographies.4

The weakness of this approach is that it privileges symphonic back-ground music and tends to emphasize style traits over narrative functions.Thus, most writers on film music focus on music in film narrative and onmusic as a soundtrack element, rather than on construction of a 'master-works' historical narrative. Although not large, the serious recent mono-graph literature has made significant contributions in this area.5

Building a historical narrative on music as sound allows us to align ouraccounts more effectively with film history - the familiar division of that his-tory into two large historical periods (plus one, overlapping transitionaldecade) is in fact based, not on editing, acting, or exhibition practices, but onchanges in sound practice. Silent film belongs to the first large period (roughly1895-1927), and into the second goes sound film (after 1927). The transitionmight be said to run from 1927 to 1933, if we take the boundaries as therelease of The Jazz Singer, at the early limit, to the development of effectivepost-production sound re-recording, at the late limit. But we could readilyset the transition at a true decade (from 1926 to 1935), if we place the begin-ning point at the introduction of Fox Movietone newsreels and Vitaphoneshorts and the endpoint at the first Academy Award for an original score toa dramatic feature film (Max Steiner s music for John Fords The Informer).

As is always the case, these period definitions are not perfect. They dotell us much that is fundamental to an understanding of the developmentof the cinema and its sound practices. For example, the division into twoperiods matches well the highly heterogeneous, local character of soundpractices during the silent era (which were mostly - but not exclusively -musical) and the far more homogeneous quality of all sound film produc-tion and exhibition practices (in which we include a long-term trendtowards greater and greater homogeneity). The transition decade, then, isa true transition that moves practice on an uneven but ultimately decisivepath from one practice to its replacement.


The period definitions, however, also conceal some things that are equallyimportant. Scholars have repeatedly emphasized that the so-called silentfilm was rarely ever silent and, thus, the basic opposition silent/sound isitself problematic. From the earliest years, films were accompanied by apianist or organist or by ensembles of varied sizes. On the other hand, evensound films might be shown truly silent - in whole or in part - but only byaccident, literally so if the projectionist dropped one of the gramophonerecords that were synchronized to the film in the Vitaphone system; in sucha case, one or more reels of the film would be shown without any accompa-nying sound, as might also have happened in the silent era when a smallhouses only pianist was obliged to take a break.6 During the transitionyears, and especially in the period 1927-1931, some films were released inboth silent and sound versions, or in partial silent versions. Theaters thatlacked the appropriate sound system - or any sound system - would oftenshow sound films silent, with the traditional live musical accompaniment.Thus, not only did silent film exhibition include a lively sound practice, butthe heterogeneity of that practice spilled over into the early sound film era.

The period articulations into silent and sound also give a false impres-sion that the technology of synchronized sound developed fairly quickly inthe early 1920s and was applied to feature films virtually overnight in 1926and 1927. In fact, film and recorded sound developed in tandem, beginningin the 1880s, and early versions of the two basic methods for sound syn-chronization - sound recorded on film and physically ganged gramophoneand projector - were already in existence by around 1900. The impedimentto general use was not in a films production but in its exhibition: soundreproduction systems adequate to even modest-sized theaters did not existyet. These problems were eventually overcome in the 1920s through applica-tion of the rapidly advancing radio technology to amplifier/speaker systems.Even then, production and post-production technology issues with micro-phones and re-recording systems delayed the arrival of a complex, 'modernsoundtrack until the 1930s.

As Rick Altman tells us, most of the fundamental aesthetic issues insound film were worked out by the late 1930s, which thus mark the begin-ning point of a homogeneous practice in American sound film.7 (Politicalevents in the other major film-producing countries delayed similar deve-lopments there for a decade or more - or diverted them away from dramaticnarrative films to the documentary and propaganda genres.) The transitionyears, then, are neatly framed by the two most important aesthetic develop-ments in film history: codification of continuity editing in the early 1920s(before the transition), and of the so-called well-tempered or modulated

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soundtrack within a few years after the transition.8 Later events of greatsignificance -the introduction of stereo, Dolby stereo, and digital editing -did not alter the fundamentals of this traditional aesthetic; but they didmake a far more complex and detailed soundtrack both possible andpractical.

Music and the Film Sequence

One might say that the central task facing filmmakers in the transitionaldecade was to learn how to use music and sound to subjugate the individ-ual shots to the hegemony of larger filmic units, the sequence and scene.Microphone and recording technology made ambient sound difficult toemploy as a structuring device, except in special cases (where the sounds,such as galloping horses, sirens or strong winds, were actually made byFoley artists), and therefore the duty fell to dialogue and to music. Amongthe film genres of the transition decade, stage plays adapted for film anddialogue-rich romantic comedies were popular, as were musicals, whichtypically alternated active dialogue scenes with musical performances.

Once post-production re-recording became practical in 1932, compos-ers and directors returned to the musical practices of the silent era to findmodels for background music. The latter is music heard on the soundtrackbut not understood as having a place in the physical world of the film;other terms for this are accompanying music and non-diegetic music.'Diegetic' refers to musical performances, such as music coming from aradio on screen, or a pianist s playing off screen in the next room, and soon: that is, to music that belongs to the films physical world, its diegesis.Background music, as in the silent film, fulfils the three functions we iden-tified above: (1) to articulate formal articulations of scene and sequence,or to add a layer of rhythmic movement that has the effect of speeding upor slowing down action; (2) to provide intensified expression of moodand emotion; and (3) to provide narrative references and connections.Composers experimented with various ways to achieve and apply thesefunctions. Among the early products were Max Steiner s original music forSymphony of Six Million (1932) and King Kong (1933), as well as HerbertStotharts score for Grand Hotel (1932), which was mostly compiled fromexisting compositions. Already by 1934, the outlines of a conventionalpractice were visible, so that even modern audiences will find little out ofthe ordinary in Steiner s music for The Informer, Erich Korngold s CaptainBlood, Franz Waxmans The Bride of Frankenstein (all from 1935), orSir Arthur Bliss s Things to Come (1936).


After 1935, dramatic films typically had a large amount of backgroundmusic - Hitchcocks Rebecca (1940), for instance, runs about 120 minutes,90 of which have background music. The 1940s, however, saw a gradualchange that greatly reduced the average amount of background music,thus effectively erasing the last obvious vestige of silent-film performancepractice. Extensive scoring has been periodically revived since for use inparticular film genres, first in the historical spectacles of the 1950s and laterin the 'space operas' and sci-fi thrillers that followed from the success ofStar Wars (1977). Still, the crucial idea is the very possibility of backgroundmusic itself. Diegetic music could, in principle, serve most of the samefunctions, but conventionally the task has fallen mostly to non-diegeticmusic.

In the following, we will compare early and recent examples of thetreatment of background music for main title sequences and for dialogueunderscoring. This has the advantage of generality: the conventions orcodes for film music functions are usually defined by the scene or sequence,which are basic narrative structures (analogous to book chapters) that crossall film genres.

Main title sequence

The framing functions of music at beginning and end of a film originatedin silent film performance. The main title sequence may be said to begineither at the studio logo or the main title (the inter-title that names thefilm), and it runs to a fade to black or dissolve to the first scene. By the late1930s the three elements of a main-title musical cue were an opening flour-ish, a theme and a dramatic conclusion, often followed by a transition intothe opening moments of the first scene. In many American dramatic filmsthe design was fleshed out as: (1) dramatic flourish (sometimes with a clearmelody but often not) for the main title itself; (2) break to a lyrical theme;(3) return to a dramatic flourish as the titles finish; and (4) a transition -music usually goes out under the first effect or sound of speech. As onemight expect, the basic scheme undergoes variations for different filmgenres. For example, when popular song arrangements were used, as wasoften the case for comedies, the bridge (or B in the AABA design) was usu-ally assigned to the lyrical themes position. In highly dramatic films, thelyrical theme was expendable, and in women's films, the dramatic flour-ishes could disappear and an intense presentation of a lyrical theme couldtake over the entire main title cue.

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Casablanca (1943) comes close to the conventional model, except that itreplaces the lyrical theme with a patriotic song, and it expands the transi-tion to accommodate a prologue. As Martin Marks explains, the main titlesequence retains the quality of the silent-film era overture, though it is 'atbest a mini-overture . . . contain [ing] six distinct bits of music smoothlylinked, ranging in length from a few seconds to more than a minute'.9 Thebeginning of each section corresponds with a change in background gra-phics, and 'each works in musical code, designed to indicate somethingabout the setting and other particulars of the narrative'. The six fragmentsare: fanfare for the Warner Brothers logo; a 'frenzied exotic dance' (Africanor pseudo-Arabian); 'La Marseillaise' ('to symbolize French - and by exten-sion, Allied - resistance to Nazi oppression'); then an impassioned lament,pseudo-Arabian source music, and 'Deutschland iiber alles' for the pro-logue (164-171). The fanfare and dance occupy the position of the openingflourish; the position of the lyrical theme is taken by the Marseillaise,a clear melody [that] probably has the most powerful impact of any in themain title' (168-169); and the transition is expanded into a prologue withvoice-over narration.

To Have and Have Not (1945) is the best-known of several sequels toCasablanca, and this heritage is obvious in its main-title music, whichopens with similar dramatic flourishes - the music behind the main titleitself is dramatic and colourful rather than thematic - then shifts to a secondmelody (clearly recalling the frenzied exotic dance); this melody quicklybecomes slower and quieter, forming the transition; music goes out shortlyafter the first scene starts, when Humphrey Bogart speaks.

In Henry V (1944), gong sounds for the studio logo are separated entirelyfrom the main-title music (as the logo itself is separated by a fade to black).A brief introduction with high swirling woodwinds illustrates a piece ofpaper floating in the air, and this leads into a strongly contrasting dramaticflourish. With a cut to a miniature set depicting London in Shakespeare'sday, the music suddenly drops off and we might expect a lyrical theme;instead, a bass figure is repeated and varied, building up after a choir enterstowards a long-sustained, dramatic and sedate music whose coda-likewinding down eventually signals transition. The cue ends as it began, withhigh swirling figures illustrating the unfurling of the Globe Theater's flag.(Music drops out as we hear crowd noises, but returns shortly thereafterin the entirely different guise of diegetic music whose performers we seeonscreen.)

In the beginning of 1950s, filmmakers began experimenting with differentways to present the opening material of a film. By the 1960s, the traditional


design was frequently compromised or even ignored (especially in filmswith rock and roll scores and, more recently, in many action-thriller films),but it has never entirely disappeared - it can still be found in many roman-tic comedies and dramas. But the nature of film openings has changed radi-cally, in that the bulk of the credits, which were in the main-title sequenceof the classic film, have migrated to the end of the film (where they havealso greatly expanded). At the outset, it is now common to see nothing butthe main title itself, often several minutes into the film.

In one relatively early example of a common variation, Out of Africa(1985) begins with a long prologue: Isak Dinesen (Meryl Streep) is shownwriting the memoir on which the film is based, and we are shown someearly events that precede the events of the main story. Only after five anda half minutes does the main title appear; from that point on, the sequenceis conventional. Action continues in the background as the main titlesequence unfolds: we are shown several views of a train moving (silently)across the Kenyan landscape. The films main theme appears and swells atthe appearance of the main title. This theme, however, has a definite musi-cal form that continues till music goes out at 7:30 under the noise of thetrain. The form is the standard AABA design of the popular song, and com-poser John Barry distributes the elements of this design across the sequenceas follows: the theme phrase (A) is played in a robust, firmly expressivemanner; the bridge (B) drops back to a quieter, tentative state; and the repriseof (A) swells again to provide a dramatic conclusion, its final momentstapering off as a quiet conclusion/transition.

Action intruding into the frame in the form of a prologue is perhaps themost common variant of patterns for opening films. The Lord of the Rings:The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) goes even further than Out of Africa,exploiting the intuition that a prologue may replace a main-title sequencealtogether in performing the framing function of drawing the audiencecomfortably, and not too abruptly, into the films narrative. A long historicalprelude with a variety of images and brief scenes is controlled by voice-over narration (as in both Out of Africa and Casablanca). Only at 7:20 doesthe main title appear, as we see Frodo sitting back against a tree and hearthe 'Shire' theme. This theme, however, drops away quickly as off-screensound alerts Frodo to Gandalf s arrival; effects emerge sharply with a cut toGandalf in his cart and music goes out shortly thereafter. No inter-title everappears other than the main title itself. By the time we reach that main title,we are thoroughly drawn into the film, and the few vestigial nods to main-title cue functions are unnecessary.10

A cleverly comedic variation may be found in Bridget Jones' Diary(2001), where yet another lengthy prologue narrated in voiceover (by Jones

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[Rene Zellweger]) is followed by a dissolve to what we take to be thepresent; a song begins in the background ('All by Myself, sung by JamieO'Neal), and several credits appear (principal actress/producer/director/etc.); among these is the main title - it is neither first nor emphasized visu-ally or musically. Action continues behind these inter-titles, however, asJones confuses the diegetic/non-diegetic boundary by miming O'Nealssinging, at first with small gestures but then with increasing energy. Onlyafter this 'monothematic' main-title sequence with its embedded secondprologue does the action proper begin.

Dialogue underscoring

Dialogue underscoring (that is, non-diegetic instrumental music played'under' speech) is one of the most characteristic features of film music inthe 1930s and 1940s and the one least like any other genre of music. Becauseit was expected to follow the shifting emotions, associations and referencesof speech, a dialogue cue sacrifices musical form to conform to the shapeof the scene. Max Steiner perfected the technique in the early 1930s, anddialogue underscoring quickly became one of three models routinelyemployed to satisfy most requirements for background scoring. (The otherswere overall scoring', which established a mood or tempo but did not try tofollow action closely - this became much more common in the 1950s andlater - and the musical-performance cue, where the design of the music fitand emphasized a musical form type, such as a march, dance or song.)

Steiner s music for a famous scene in Casablanca is a good representa-tive of his method. In the course of a little over two and a half minutes, themusic cycles through the following elements (time markings are takenfrom the composer's sketches):

1. A stinger chord (to 0:5 1/2)2. Two phrases of 'As Time Goes By' played over the stinger, which is held

until a three chord cadence at 0:30 to 0:36 (the final chord is held to0:42 3/4)

3. Fragments of'As Time Goes By' (0:51 to 1:21), first with a harmonicallyunstable waltz accompaniment (0:51 to 1:00), then a new stinger chord(at 1:00), against which we hear 'Deutschland iiber alles' in a minor key

4. Neutral, unthematic music used as an 'unhurried hurry' to accompanymovement of characters onscreen (1:21 to 1:45)

5. Fragments of'As Time Goes By' in three different guises (1:45 to 2:34 2/3),first with slow-moving mid/lower range chords (at 1:45) derived fromthe earlier three-chord cadence, then after 2:03, an even slower moving


derivative that is rhythmically flattened-out (that is, all chords are nowof the same duration, except the last, which is sustained), and from 2:19to the end, another rhythmically flat three-chord series, now as a wedge(the bass moves downward by step, but the upper voices - which are stillquoting As Time Goes By' - ascend, also by step).

Here is a summary of the action associated with this music. The chorus forAs Time Goes By' was played as diegetic music just before this scene: Sam(Dooley Wilson) plays and sings at the request of lisa (Ingrid Bergman).Rick (Humphrey Bogart) hears the music, rushes towards Sam and stops atthe piano as Sam ceases playing. Sam gestures toward lisa; cut to a close-upof lisa on an eyeline match; the held stinger chord (1 above) accompaniesthis shot: the audible analog of the gaze. The tight shot/reverse shot close-ups of Rick and lisa push the rest of the diegetic world outside the frame,just as the non-diegetic score displaced the diegetic music associated withSam and the cafe. The melody finally moves forward (2) as lisa and Rickhold each others' gaze, despite the arrival of Captain Renault (Claude Rains)and Victor Laszlo (Paul Heinreid). The diegetic world then fully intrudes,and the gaze sonority' slowly dissipates. lisa breaks the gaze first, since sheneeds to acknowledge and introduce Lazslo. The music pauses here untillisa speaks again. She makes a veiled reference to her Paris romance withRick, and the second section begins with a new statement of'As Time GoesBy', now compressed into slow waltz time (3a). As Rick mentions a Pariscafe, the music begins to wander and disintegrate. Recollection of their lastday in Paris invokes music that mirrors those earlier events: the musicexplodes in an enigmatic diminished seventh chord on E# over an F# pedal,a distorted version of the gaze sonority, and a highly dissonant polytonalcounterpoint prolongs the chord as lisa makes a reference to the Germansmarching into Paris (3b) - this summons up 'Deutschland' (in G#), the firstmotivic intrusion into the non-diegetic space demarcated by As Time GoesBy' and the gaze sonority. This music goes nowhere, and Laszlo interruptsto tell lisa that the night is well advanced and they must leave. The musichere (4) is distinctly less committed, even motivically indifferent; it seemsto follow the kinetic activity of the scene and wholly lacks the intense inti-macy found earlier in the cue.

An incomplete version of the gaze sonority returns as Rick again looksintently at lisa; although this reopens the non-diegetic space, it now hasa nostalgic feel, rather than the mysterious immediacy it possessed at thebeginning of the cue. Three motivic entrances of As Time Goes By' (5) areguided by the diegetic world, but the space remains Rick and lisa's as these

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entrances coincide with their dialogue: first motive, m. 27- Rick: Anytime';second motive, m. 28 - lisa: 'There's still nobody in the world who can playAs Time Goes By' like Sam'; third motive, m. 30 - Rick: 'Goodnight'. Afterthe third statement of the motive, lisa and Laszlo exit, and Rick slumpsdown in his chair as a series of parallel minor ninth chords mimics hisdescent. On the cut outside to lisa and Laszlo, the music lands on a C majorseventh chord as Laszlo asks about Rick, whom he describes as Verypuzzling'. lisa's response is vague, but she admits that she 'saw [Rick] quiteoften in Paris'. This evokes the fourth and final statement of the As TimeGoes By' motive. Now played in E major over the C major seventh chord,the motive sounds out of tune, ethereal, unreal. The final notes of the motiveare in the form of a firm cadential tag that brings the scene to a close.

This reunion scene is typical of Steiner's dialogue underscoring practicein its complexity, its close alliance with screen action and its fluid treatmentof devices, gestures and melodic quotation. The opposing technique, over-all scoring, was also employed in the 1930s and 1940s, but some of its bestexemplars are in the 1950s. Bernard Herrmann in particular wrote manycues that established a mood or particular emotion but otherwise made noattempt to coordinate with screen action and were often unmelodic (andtherefore did not cite or restate themes). Abundant instances maybe foundin the well-known films of the Hitchcock-Herrmann collaboration, suchas The Trouble with Harry (1954), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho(1959).

Steiner's and Herrmann's methods represent extreme positions in dia-logue underscoring practice. Since the 1970s, a more flexible manner hasevolved somewhere in the middle ground between these positions - itsblending and interweaving of speech, music and effects (usually ambientsound) is characteristic of modern sound design practice.

A typical example maybe found in Good Will Hunting (1997). Will (MattDamon) is a young genius but also a delinquent who has been assigned totherapy as part of his probation. After some false starts, his therapist Sean(Robin Williams) decides to take Will out of the office and talk to him ina neutral setting. The scene begins at about 46:00; we hear speech and faintindoor ambient sounds, the most distinctive being the click of the officedoor opening. At 47:00, a simple cut to outdoors and an establishing shotof the two sitting on a park bench; outdoor sounds are strong - traffic,dogs, birds and the faintly heard speech of adults and children. On a close-up, Sean speaks for some time as a sharp foreground/background distinc-tion is maintained in the soundtrack; an essential element of this momentis that the background sounds do not decrease in volume. At about 48:00,


Wills face is included at the right edge of the frame. At 49:00, the sound ofa low-pitched motor (airplane?) is added to the ambient sound under Scansreflections on his wife's losing fight against cancer. Shortly thereafter theshot reverses to a close-up of Will with Sean at the edge of the screen,as Sean begins to home in on Wills vulnerabilities; in the background, wehear car horns and sirens throughout this segment, until a reverse again atabout 50:00. As Sean connects and Will is clearly affected, an emotivebut not tuneful orchestral music enters very quietly (50:25) and graduallydisplaces most of the ambient sounds except that of birds, which fill thesilences between Scans sentences. He leaves at 50:52 and speech is gone;music takes over and dominates through a two-minute montage of thefollowing day(s?) (we hear only occasional sound-effect accents and little ifany speech until the final segment): Will is picked up for work, a brief viewof the construction site, a phone call in the rain, the interior of a car withWill and his friends. During the phone call, speech, music and effects (rainnoise) are equal, but music goes out as Will climbs into the car.

Throughout the sequence, the three soundtrack elements are interwoven.Continuous speech, of course, structures Scans monologue, but the 'neu-trality' of the outdoor setting is maintained by the background sounds,which compete with as much as they complement Scans monologue. As thescene continues and Sean bears down more on Will, ambient sounds beginto reinforce narrative detail - in the low motor sound that adds gravity toScans mention of cancer, and in the 'warning* noises of horns and sirens asthe camera focuses on Wills face. For a short time after music enters, allthree soundtrack elements are in balance, but music eventually takes overalmost entirely. This music is clearly an expression of Wills Anteriority - theproof that Sean has touched his emotions. (Music used in this way is some-times called point-of-view music.)

Another recent example may be found in White (1994), the second ofKrzysztof Kieslowski s Three Colors series. Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski)is a Polish hairdresser hired by a professional card player who wants tocommit suicide but cannot bring himself to carry it out. 'The Appointment*begins at about 48:00 as Karol descends the stairs of a subway station; thesound of music and feet overlap one another at the beginning, then loudfoot sounds predominate over suspenseful music as he walks though theempty station. A series of synch points interrupt; music goes out with asharp sound that makes Karol jump slightly; he turns and sees the cardplayer, Mikolaj (Janusz Gajos). Dialogue with silences leads to a gunshot,from which there is strong reverberation (as might be expected in a subwaytunnel); it turns out that Karol has used a blank bullet, and dialogue again

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ensues with silences; Mikolaj raises his voice to insist that Karol take theenvelope with his payment; the volume of music rises very sharply justbefore a cut to the outdoors and the next scene. Music serves an emotive,not a unifying, function in this scene - the series of foot sounds at thebeginning and the persistent rhythms of alternating accents and silence indialogue and effects efficiently tie the images together on their own.

Conclusion

The main title sequence and dialogue underscoring cues are not the onlycharacteristic sequence types with music. Musical performances, as weremarked above, superimpose the design of the music - its temporal pat-terning - on a scene. This can be extreme, as in many musicals, where thenarrative stops and all attention goes to the performance itself; but it s alsopossible to continue action over a performance, especially if the music is inthe background (as non-diegetic music or as neutral music, such as diegeticcafe music that murmurs in the background of patrons' conversation), buteven in these cases classical practice tends to situate articulations of scenesegments and music together. Music also has a long history of associationwith action scenes in the theater, and in the classic sound film, music wasalmost obligatory for action scenes. Famous examples may be found in theswordfight scene of The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) or the battle ofAgincourt in Henry V. Music is still common in such scenes today, thoughsound effects typically are foregrounded in the soundtrack, with music fre-quently struggling for attention or merely providing a bit of additionalemotional edge'. A good example of this can be found in the prologue toTerminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), where it is often difficult to separatemusic and sound effects in the opening battle sequence. The montage istypically treated as a variant of the action scene, in that the function of themusic is split between tying the rapid sequence of shots together throughits continuous presence and providing a rhythmic impulse to drive themontage forward (montages in classic film are typically used to showquickly the passage of time). Finally, music for end credits in the classicfilm was brief (often there was no more than an end title and a cast list)and rarely related to the film score itself. Gradually in recent decades endcredits lists have become extensive, often running to five or six minutes,and music is almost always used throughout. Sometimes, as in the classicfilm, unrelated pop tunes are used; at other times, a symphonic develop-ment of music from the film is used; at still others, a succession of differentmusic is used.


The continuity of practice represented in these classes of sequences isa remarkable feature of film music history and reinforces the claim that thebasic aesthetics of the sound film were in place by the late 1930s, since thecharacteristic treatment of music in film sequences that we have examinedabove evolved throughout that decade. It was probably musics strong roleat the intersection of design and narrative that preserved the silent-film erapractice of non-diegetic or background music, even if, over the course oftime, musics role became more complex and variable as the soundtrackitself became more complex, active and highly crafted.

Notes

1. Martin M. Marks, Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895-1924.New York/London: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 138; Jane Gaines and Neil Lerner,'The orchestration of affect: The Motif of Barbarism in Breils The Birth of a Nation Score',in Richard Abel and Rick Altman (eds), The Sounds of Early Cinema. Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 2001, pp. 252-68.

2. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1987, p. 73.

3. Marks (1997), p. 142.4. See, for example, Christopher Palmer, The Composer in Hollywood. New York: Marion

Boyars, 1990; William Darby and Jack Du Bois, American Film Music: Major Composers,Techniques, Trends, 1915-1990. Jefferson, NC/London: MacFarland, 1990; Steven C. Smith,A Heart at Fires Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann. Berkeley/Los Angeles:University of California Press, 1991; Laurence MacDonald, The Invisible Art of Film Music:A Comprehensive History. New York: Ardsley House, 1998; Jon Burlingame, Sound andVision: 60 Years of Motion Picture Soundtracks. New York: Billboard, 2000; David Morgan,Knowing The Score: Film Composers Talk About the Art, Craft, Blood, Sweat, and Tears ofWriting for Cinema. New York: Harper Collins, 2000.

5. For example, Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Blooming-ton: Indiana University Press, 1987; Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, andHollywood Film Music. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992; Kathryn Kalinak,Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film. Madison/London: University ofWisconsin Press, 1992; Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music.Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993; George Burt, The Art of FilmMusic. Northeastern University Press, 1994; Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film: TrackingIdentifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music. New York/London: Routledge, 2001;K. J. Donnelly, ed., Film Music: Critical Approaches. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,2001; though it is on sound rather than music specifically, Michel Chion, Claudia Gorbman(trans.), Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 alsobears importantly on the subject.

6. On the issue of variation in accompaniment practice during the silent era, see RickAltman, Silent Film Sound. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, pp. 193-201.

The Soundtrack 57

7. Altman, Rick. Sound Theory/Sound Practice. New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 56-8.8. Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinemas Transition to Sound, 1926-1931.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.9. Marks (1997), p. 164.

10. For an extended analysis of the prologue to Fellowship of the Ring, see James Buhler,'Enchantments of The Lord of the Rings: Soundtrack, myth, language, and modernity', inMurray Pomerance and Ernest Mathijs (eds), From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on PeterJackson's Lord of the Rings. Editions Rodopi, 2006.

Films

Ben-Hur. MGM, 1959.Birth of a Nation, The. D. W. Griffith/Epoch, 1915.Bride of Frankenstein, The. Universal, 1935.Bridget Jones' Diary. Working Title Films, 2001.Captain Blood. Warner Brothers, 1935.Casablanca. Warner Brothers, 1943.Fellowship of the Ring, The. New Line Cinema/WingNut Films, 2001.Good Will Hunting. Miramax, 1997.Grand Hotel. MGM, 1932.Henry V. Two Cities Films, 1944.High Fidelity. Touchstone/Working Title Films, 2000.Informer, The. RKO, 1935.Jazz Singer, The. Warner Brothers, 1927.King Kong. RKO, 1933.Laura. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1944.Lord of the Rings, The. New Line Cinema/WingNut Films, 2001; 2002; 2003.North by Northwest. Paramount, 1959.Out of Africa. Universal, 1985.Psycho. Paramount, 1959.Quo Vadis?MGM, 1951.Rebecca. Selznick, 1940.Star Wars. Lucasfilm/Twentieth Century-Fox, 1977.Symphony of Six Million. RKO, 1932.Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Tri-Star, 1991.Things to Come. London Film Productions, 1936.Three Colors: White. France 3 Cinema/Miramax, 1993.To Have and Have No£. Warner Brothers, 1945.Trouble with Harry, The. Paramount, 1954.

3The Transition to Sound

A Critical Introduction

Marina Burke

Prologue

As has been extensively documented, the introduction of fully synchronizedsound in the late 1920s triggered an can avalanche of manifestoes'1 intenton laying down some establishing principles and which for subsequentdecades influenced the critical perception of cinema as predominantly avisual medium, with sound forming at best a supplement and at worsta distraction. While opposition to sound had spanned the continents, thebulk of the theorizing came from Europe. Bela Balazs as early as 1923 hadexpounded his theory that language itself is always less expressive than thepanlinguistic gestures that accompany it and that, along with the physiog-nomy of the face, constitute the visible language of the cinema; RudolfArnheim argued that the addition of dialogue added nothing to the alreadycomplete and perfected expressivity of the moving image and remained anunrepentant opponent of sound, and the 'Statement' on sound issued by theSoviet directors Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov, while expressinga cautious (and pragmatic) acceptance of sound in general, also expressedfears about the perceived destructive effect of synchronized dialogue.2 BasilWright, the English documentarian, expressed one of the more extremeversions of this position when he argued that 'the film is visual, so muchso that the perfect film should be satisfactory from every point of viewwithout sound, and, therefore, shown in complete silence1.3 While not all

58

The Transition to Sound 59

filmmakers rejected the advent of synchronized sound - and even thosewho did had more nuanced positions than is commonly acknowledged -this hostility to sound continued to be perpetuated by generations of criticsfor whom the cinema remained essentially a visual art, with sound servingas little more than a superfluous accompaniment. In recent years however,many of these 'uninterrogated assumptions'4 have begun to be dissectedand fiercely challenged, not the least of which is the idea of sound as a kindof an 'add-on of secondary importance to the cinema. As a purely historicalargument, this notion fails to withstand careful scrutiny. As Altman pointsout, it falsely (or deliberately) misinterprets the very diverse sound practicesof the so-called silent cinema, and it sets up a false opposition of on the onehand, an ethereal cinema of silence, punctuated only be carefully chosenmusic; on the other, the talkies, with their incessant, anti-poetic dialogue',5

which is a highly fallacious assessment of the first thirty years of cinemahistory.

The Sound of the Silents

To begin with, the issue was not sound as such. In what has become one ofthe truisms of recent critical studies, the so-called silent film was rarely ifever silent. James Lastra offers an elegant overview of the period beforewhat he quite correctly qualifies as the 'putative coming of sound' as one inwhich 'two new technologies with sometimes overlapping and sometimesquite distinct histories - namely, cinematography and phonography - couldcombine to form an integrated sensory experience that was neither audionor visual, but distinctly audiovisual'.6 From the beginning, pioneers suchas Thomas Edison saw the mechanical reproduction of sound and imageas inextricably linked. Edison's earliest films were visual recordings andeven came in the same format as his sound recordings.7 There had beendozens of experiments with sound-on-sound synchronization, as detailedby Altman and others.8 Synchronized sound films are as old as the cinemaitself, with William Kennedy Dickson producing the 'Dickson Experimen-tal Sound Film' at the Edison Co. as early as 1894. From the 1900s theyenjoyed nearly unbroken development, exploitation and even a degree ofcommercial success.9 In France, Alice Guy made over a hundred films withGaumont's Chronophone system.10 In Britain, the Vivaphone system, deve-loped by Cecil Hepworth, had a distinguished career. In the United States,the Cameraphone (circa 1908), an avowed attempt to can vaudeville perfor-mances for inexpensive distribution, had a host of imitators - The Electro-graph, Phoneidograph, Picturephone, Phonoscope and others, culminating


in 1913 with Edisons ill-fated Kinetophone. Comparable systems weredeveloped in Germany and other European countries.

Lastra details how sound - 'discursive, participatory, emphatically present,and lucrative for exhibitors' - constantly threatened to usurp the image.11

It addressed audiences directly; and remaining one of the last areas of exhib-itor control, sound offered opportunities for shaping audience response.A plethora of critical writing attests that the space of the silent film projec-tion was filled with sound and music.12 This took various forms: a lecturercommenting on the film and guiding audience reactions, a manager fillingin while reels were changed, a specially written score played by a full orches-tra or simply a lone pianist struggling to keep up with the images or just thesound of the projector whirring and the conversation and noise of specta-tors accustomed to entering and leaving the theatre at random.13

Music

While the solo piano is the accompaniment most people associate withsilent films, between 1894 and 1929 music was provided by instrumentsranging from piano or organ to piano, violin and drums to large-scaleorchestras, and the relationship between the film image and music rangedfrom entirely improvisational to minutely synchronized and orchestrated.14

Noel Burch argues that contrary to what has often been claimed, the func-tion of music during all these years was, only for a brief period, used tosimply drown out the noise of the projector. Rather, music was used (con-sciously or otherwise), to 'spell out' a film, with or without the presence ofa lecturer: to sustain the tempo, the rhythm of the film, to create a spacecommon to spectator and film in a period when frontality and cameraplacement kept the spectator, in a visual sense, outside the diegetic space.Music was even introduced into the studios themselves, in certain situa-tions, to accompany the actors during shooting.15

At the same time, as Lastra argues, the modes of audience address char-acteristic of film music were occasionally at odds with the typical addressof the image track. The so-called compiled score, fashioned from existingselections chosen to match (or 'synchronize' with) the scenes in the film,dominated musical accompaniment. The use of an original score was com-paratively rare. Film scenes were commonly matched with musical selec-tions whose title, style, tempo or formal qualities were considered somehowrelated, though often without regard for the connections between scenes:somewhat like a musical revue. Other discursive practices satirized scenesor entire films through musical puns or catered for the particular ethnic,


class and religious affiliations of the audience. Even as the cinema institutionmoved towards more 'respectable' middle-class forms, including musicalaccompaniment that minimized interference with diegetic absorption, thesealternative modes of presentation and spectatorship persisted well into thesilent era.16 But only in ethnic enclaves or theatres with a single pianist ororganist: in general, like the film images themselves, silent film musicmoved from a mode of intermittent 'attractions', which stressed the auton-omy of individual elements, to a form that stressed the absolute continuityof the music from one end of the picture to another. Live sound actualizedthe image and provided an early means of constructing a common imagi-nary space for spectator and fiction. While Edison had been concernedwith a close synchronization of sound and image, such synchronizationwas hard to achieve; and as time went on, this was most often likely to beachieved only in the elaborate presentations of the biggest film theatres orin large theatre chains. D. W. Griffith's presentation of The Birth of a Nation(1915) for instance, with a full symphony orchestra playing a score that wasextremely closely synchronized and based on the operatic compositionalpractice of leitmotifs was a watershed, as Gillian Anderson points out.17

In its wake, large orchestras became de rigeur in upscale film theatres.Such arguments somewhat disguise what seems to have been the chaotic

nature of much film accompaniment and presentation; other sources fromthe same period suggest that in some theatres music accompanied only thefilm. In addition, Rick Altman re-establishes the role of silence in manyearly film performances, arguing that

silence was one of a number of acceptable film exhibition approachesthroughout the pre-1910 era. Indeed, in certain regions and in smallertheaters, silence during the film remained the rule even after 1919; inother situations, and for a limited number of years, silence was simplyone of many operative strategies.18

Francois Jost has similarly insisted on the central role of silence in theFrench films dart.19 While Tom Gunning has qualified the latter argumentby arguing that silence formed a 'sort of oasis within a noisy environment',20

rather than being a consistent strategy, this rediscovery of the role of silencein silent cinema undercuts subsequent arguments that 'the soundtrackinvented silence',21 as well as Eisler and Adorno's theories on the absolutenecessity of music as an accompaniment to the silent film to counteract'the unpleasantness involved in seeing effigies of living, acting, and evenspeaking persons, who were at the same time silent'22 for the spectator.


While Adorno and Eisler were primarily concerned with the depth thatthey felt music restored to the two-dimensional photographic image, forother commentators the 'uncanny' effect of silent film, linked in part 'to theseparation, by means of intertitles, of an actor's speech from the image ofhis/her body',23 was a 'lack' reflected in what would appear to be the contin-ued aspiration of the cinema to have a Voice' as well as an image.

The Voice in Cinema

Indeed, Altman argues, what every one of the many experiments in earlysound systems aimed at was not a synchronized musical accompanimentbut a reproduction of the human voice. From 1908 to the early teens, thevoice commonly accompanied film projection. As the decade progressed,actors would sometimes be concealed behind the screen, speaking syn-chronously with the characters in the film.

In this context however, Altman argues, while the voice becomes anothermeans of anchoring the film experience in reality, and is a major step awayfrom the earlier illustrated lecture format, it is not in any sense a predeces-sor of the 'talkies' of the late 1920s.24 In the United States, by the early teens,these sound-on-disc systems fell foul of a systematic producer-led campaignto feature continuous musical accompaniment and narrative sound effectsin preference to the human voice, with the human voice being relegatedentirely to the written form of intertitles by the mid-twenties.

In European cinema, the voice was also an important element of filmproduction, though in a less corporeal manner. Norman King details howimplicit speech was as an accepted convention in European cinema fromthe early 1920s.25 In Germaine Dulac's La souriante Madame Beudet (1922),there is a long telephone conversation with frequent close-ups of the prin-cipal actress clearly speaking her lines where there are very few intertitles,and the acting style is naturalistic rather than exaggeratedly gestural. InGance's /'Accuse (1919) the central character, Jean Diaz, is a poet who atvarious moments declaims fragments of one of his compositions, with thecomplete text appearing in the intertitles. King argues that the significanceof this is that the voice is already an important part of film production andthat actors spoke scripted lines even though these might never be heard, orindeed seen, in the cinema. Thus the 'lack' identified by Doane and otherswas the presence of the human voice in lip synch with the body in frame,which was introduced so definitively (if briefly) by The Jazz Singer in 1927and which awoke in so many early theorists the fear that cinema wouldbe thrust back into 'the dread language-orientation of theatrical practice'.


This was in fact, it has been argued, the 'images repressed*,26 and a clueto the mystery of why audiences, in the wake of the clumsy and onlypartly sonorized Jazz Singer, suddenly embraced the talkies, and why the'silent' film, apparently up to then so satisfactory, met with such a speedydemise.27

The Adaption of Synchronized Sound

Other possible answers have been posited to the question of why audiencessuddenly embraced the talkies in the wake of one specific and not particu-larly noteworthy film. As Abel and Altman point out, at different points invarious countries, sound cinema was repeatedly presented as the comingtechnology. Why then did synchronized sound fail to become the industrystandard long before it was finally adopted? Faulty synchronization andinadequate amplification were usually offered as explanations, but thesedeficiencies were fairly quickly remedied. They argue that the main obsta-cles were not so much technological as conceptual and linked to the turn tolonger narrative forms in the teens. Synchronized sound remained almostwholly identified with shorter forms and the reproduction of vaudevilleacts, with sound as spectacle, rather than with the production of complexstories through the emerging continuity system. Not until the late 1920swould the essential reconfiguration of synchronizations representationalstatus occur.28 Alan Williams also points out that for decades after it becametechnologically feasible, sound cinema seems to have had little appeal forspectators, beyond its curiosity value. For Williams, the ultimate adaptationof synchronized recorded sound in the cinema had arguably little to dowith demand and much to do with the logic of industrial production andthe completion of a process begun long before: the progressive mechani-zation of the cinematographic spectacle. Williams also raises the questionof the increasing difficulty of introducing novel effects within the rigidlyestablished system of conventions of a mature art form. We can look toEisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov's 'Statement' for an admission thatforms of cinema which diverged from these modes, such as montagecinema, had similarly run into a number of 'blind alleys': the problem ofintegrating intertitles into montage structures and the disruptive need forexplanatory sequences, such as establishing shots, in montage sequencesmore generally composed of rapidly edited close-ups.

Arguably then, the truly 'revolutionary' significance of the coming ofsound lay in the power the cinema acquired to represent the human voice.Thus, The Jazz Singer, while containing a minimal amount of synchronized


dialogue, 'inaugurated a dramatically new relationship between spectatorand film?9 While its soundtrack continued the 'silent' tradition of recordedmusical background, also seen in Warners first feature-length Vitaphonefilm, Don Juan (1926), it occasionally breaks into sequences of sync soundin which Al Jolsons Jackie Robin speaks and performs musical numbers.While the latter are still in the tradition of performances, the dialoguesequences are electrifying. Synchronized speech occurs only in two scenes.In the first, the Jolson character has been persuaded to entertain a restau-rant audience with a performance of 'Dirty Hands, Dirty Face', and duringthe applause, improvises around a phrase he had already made famous inhis stage act, before launching into the song. The second spoken section,and the most successful, consists of a dialogue sequence between Jolsonand his mother, played by Eugenie Besserer, during which he sings 'BlueSkies' while accompanying himself on the piano. Crackling sound and ahighly self-conscious performance from Jolson notwithstanding, we havethe impression of eavesdropping on a private conversation between thetwo (an impression reinforced by the fact that the conversation betweenthe two actors was apparently ad libbed).

Economic/materialist historians such as Douglas Gomery take issue withthe focus on The Jazz Singer (1927) or its predecessor, Don Juan (1926), ashaving decisively opened the market for sound films, an argument promul-gated by Jean-Louis Comolli and others. Gomery argues that shorts andnewsreels were more important than these features during Hollywood'stransition to sound and as part of economic expansionist strategies by bothWarner Brothers and Fox. In conjunction with Vitaphone, Warners initialstrategy for sound was to record vaudeville and musical acts and distributethem at low prices to first-run theatres. These would replace the live enter-tainment which in the mid-twenties was an accepted part of the perfor-mance in such theatres, a mixture of musical prelude, live entertainment,newsreel, short and feature film. Sound films would eliminate the needfor the orchestra which accompanied many films and present the mostfamous live talent on film, a major money-saving consideration. In addi-tion, Warners could sign the vaudeville acts and musicians to exclusivecontracts, thus raising its overall profit rate and enabling reinvestmentin production, distribution and exhibition. In the first Vitaphone show inAugust 1926, for instance, Vitaphone recordings of mainly classical musicreplaced the typical musical overture, live entertainment and short; fewcritics commented on the 'Vitaphoned' music which accompanied the fea-ture, Don Juan\ here the recorded orchestra simply replaced the live one.30


During 1926-1927 Warner Brothers pursued its 'shorts' policy; it alsoreplaced concert attractions with major vaudeville stars, including Al Jolson.The acts covered the complete spectrum of 1920s vaudeville, from comicsto singers and bands and even recitations, and they were reviewed ascanned' vaudeville. In the autumn/winter of 1927 Warner Brothers decidedto create features with implanted Vitaphone musical sequences within other-wise silent narratives; The Jazz Singer was the first of these. Sophisticatednarrative shorts also continued to be produced, with the part-talkie featuresand shorts being released as packages. During the spring of 1928 one suchpackage, including sound shorts and the sound version of The Jazz Singer,began to break box office records. In April, the shorts production staffmade a long gangster* film, The Lights of New York, which was released inJuly by Warner Brothers as its first all-sound narrative feature. The rest, aswe know, is history: Warner Brothers quickly moved to full-time produc-tion of all-sound features and shorts, reaped immense short-run profitsfrom its temporary advantage in sound films and invested the money intonew production facilities, distribution outlets and first-run theatres; and by1929 they were the most profitable American film company and a memberof the industry's dominant monopoly.31 Within a year, Fox was copyingWarner Brothers' strategy, using its 'Movietone' system, though initiallywithout great success. Fox then moved into sound newsreels, premieringin April 1927. Movietone News demonstrated that sound could give tre-mendous impact to the factual coverage of historical events: audiences nowboth saw and heard parades, marches and the speeches of world leaders.The synchronous filming of Charles Lindbergh's plane, The Spirit ofSt Louis,taking off on its trans-Atlantic flight, caused a sensation. By the end of 1927Fox had regular weekly sound newsreels; a fact not lost on Hollywooddirectors was that Movietone also demonstrated that sound on film couldbe recorded very effectively in exterior locations.32

Impact of the Talkies

As is clear, the boundaries dividing Hollywood 'before and 'after' were inno way clear-cut, with no unanticipated landmark event or watershedfilm which separated the golden age of silents from the modern age of thetalkies.33 The 'rupture thesis' nevertheless stalks the pages of popular filmhistories and represents the transition to sound as a cataclysmic event forfilm directors, technicians and audiences alike.34 Dialogue 'demanded atten-tion, it enforced silence on the audiences who had hitherto been able to


swap comments on the movie below the music of the pianist or the pitorchestra. Now one had to shut up, sit up and pay attention to a plot thatwas more and more conveyed in words, not pictures?5 The Jazz Singer'made a movie star out of Jolson. But above all, it turned the film industrytopsy-turvy and consigned the silent picture to the scrap heap'.36

More prevalent in academic discourse is the continuity thesis', whichdenies any irreconcilable opposition between late silent and early soundcinema, with sound seamlessly co-opted into the dominant narrative real-ist ideology of Hollywood cinema, with the change being almost entirelytechnological. For David Bordwell synchronized sound did not fundamen-tally change the stylistic norms within the Hollywood system, but arguablymade them stronger. In Bordwell's argument, fully synchronous soundproduced only certain adjustments in film style ... Sound cinema was nota radical alternative to silent film-making; sound as sound... was insertedinto the already constituted system of the classical Hollywood style'.37 WhileNancy Wood38 also argues that dominant cinemas modes of represen-tation were consolidated rather than disrupted by the introduction of syn-chronized sound, she draws attention to the way in which the addition ofthe recorded human voice in particular meant a certain shift at the level ofspecific devices involved in the construction of a homogeneous fictionalworld. Sound cinema established a particular relationship between speech,background music and sound effects. Crucially, in the maintenance of therealist effect, Wood argues, the voice as the presence of the body in theframe must be audible as a major support for the fiction, while the manag-ing of sound effects is one of containing their presence and circumscribingtheir intrusion upon the spectator's attention.

The more 'pliable temporality' of the late silent cinema in particularenabled temporal lags or compressions to be recuperated and the per-ception of a smooth-flowing narrative maintained. Diegetic sound bothheralded a 'supplement of reality' (Chion's 'added value') and a more strictlimitation of filmic representation to a linear temporality. In Wood's read-ing, this did not imply a 'slavish correspondence of image time with thelength of a given piece of dialogue',39 but led to a 'temporalization' of speech,achieved by such techniques as dialogue overlap, that preserved andenhanced faster silent cutting speeds. Reaction shots, off-screen sound andthe use of the travelling shot, which tracked with the speaker, also helped toease temporal exigencies. In contrast to the minimum number of settingsand sequences typical of silent cinema, sound cinema saw the introductionof numerous short sequences, deemed necessary to offset the potentialdeceleration threatened by a temporality paced according to the needs of


the dialogue. Wood argues that non-diegetic music was used to cover scenetransitions, while ambient sound offered itself as a continuous and palpabletemporal support of the fictional scene'.40

As numerous critics have pointed out, sound cinema established a par-ticular relationship between speech, background, and ambient sound, withthe voice as presence of the body in frame the most important componentas a support for the fiction.41 Indeed, Altman argues, the single most impor-tant question occupying Hollywood sound technicians during the late1920s and early 1930s was concerned with the 'proper' relationship betweenimage scale and sound scale with the ideal of dialogue intelligibility con-tradicting early efforts to achieve sound scale matching.42 The reality thatprevailed of mismatching sound and image scales was justified by theconviction that the voice 'must not be allowed to become actually unintel-ligible for any length of time, even when this might be so under naturalconditions'.43 A particularly noteworthy example of a violation of this rulecan by found in Rouben Mamoulian's Applause (1929), as will be discussedbelow.

While for a time 'the movies ceased to move when they began to talk',44

as the bulk of soundproofed cameras inhibited screen movement, longertakes for a time became the order of the day to cope with the demand fordialogue and the constraints sound placed on the editing process.45 Andindeed conventional wisdom on the early sound period in America isthat the earliest sound films were static, dull and anchored to the spokenword. However, more recent criticism takes a more nuanced position.46 AsMottram points out, 'canned theatre' was plentiful, but there were manyfilms that successfully overcame the interconnected technical and aestheticproblems posed by early sound production and demonstrated the potentialrichness of American sound film. It took remarkably little time for film-makers to realize that new methods would have to be devised to cope withthe problems that accompanied the introduction of sound.

A number of the best films from the early sound period were thosewhich mounted a 'frontal attack' on the restrictions of sound recording.Despite the limitations of early sound shooting, numerous exemplary filmswere produced, both by already-major silent film directors and by directorswhose earlier experience was in theatre. Raoul Walsh and Irving Gumming sIn Old Arizona (January 1929), while bogged down in numerous slowlypaced and drawn-out dialogue sequences - the bane of early talkies - isnevertheless distinguished by its highly expressive camera placement, astrength attributable to its director's silent film experience. Victor Fleming sThe Virginian (November 1929) is similarly plagued by poor dialogue


delivered in an awkward, stilted manner, but also contains a number offluid tracking shots which counteract this disability. The process of addingsound later to scenes shot with a silent camera played an important role infreeing directors from the belief that everything seen must be heard or thateverything heard must be seen. King Vidor shot much of Hallelujah (1929),his first talking picture, as a silent film, later adding an impressionisticsoundtrack for all but the direct dialogue passages. The whole final sequencefor instance, a frenzied pursuit through a swamp, was shot silent with beau-tiful, long travelling shots of pursued and pursuer. Later, back in the studio,Vidor added the magnified sound of breaking branches, birds, agonizedbreathing and the suck of footsteps stumbling through the mud. Vidorshowed that sound can create an emotional resonance in a scene indepen-dently of the words and actions of the actors. Lewis Milestone worked inmuch the same way making All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), photo-graphing his scenes of troops on the march and in the trenches with a silentcamera and later adding sounds of the whine and crash of bombs, the clat-ter of small-arms fire and the shrieks and moans of the wounded and thedying. In this way, Milestone created a synchronous use of sound, puttingsounds of gunfire over shots of soldiers being killed, and over the youngsoldier reaching out for a butterfly with only his hand and arm visible onthe screen; and he includes the conversation between Lew Ayres and theFrench girl over the shot of their clothes hanging on the end of the bed.

Josef von Sternberg similarly uses sound asynchronously in Thunderbolt(June 1929) to create off-screen space, when we hear conversations, sing-ing, gunshots, sirens and a baby crying, without seeing the sources ofthe sounds. The prison sequences which make up the second half of thefilm are particularly noteworthy for their use of sound, and in particulardialogue, both of which create the unity of a group of men waiting on deathrow and their antagonisms. We either see the prisoners in their individualcells, or we hear them constantly talking to each other from the cells off-screen. At times Sternberg uses music - the singing of a black inmate andthe playing of the prison orchestra - to comment ironically on the state ofcharacter relationships and the actions taking place in this closed world.47

As with these other directors, von Sternberg brings to this film the freedomof camera movement and placement of the silent cinema. Von Sternberg sThe Blue Angel (1929), originally conceived as a vehicle for Emil Janningsbut which was the occasion of the 'discovery' of Marlene Dietrich, succeedsbrilliantly in its ambitious setting of dialogue against songs and audiencereaction in the eponymous nightclub. A dual language production made


at the newly sound-equipped UFA studios in Berlin, the film was shotsimultaneously in German and English and is a good illustration of thedifficulties inherent in this short-lived transitional strategy. The Englishlanguage version suffers from leaden and truncated dialogue from itsobviously uncomfortable German-speaking cast. Sternberg's understand-ing of the difficulties of working with sound can be seen more clearly inthe German language version: for instance, in the clever method he devisedof using the opening and closing of doors and windows to control theentry and exit of continuous sounds that carry on behind the foregrounddialogue and action - as a way of dealing with the restrictions caused bysingle-track sound recording.

Rouben Mamoulian, one of the imported stage directors who was notcontent to use the cinematic medium for a variation of dialogue-boundtheatrical mis-en-scene, refused to be bound by these restrictions in shoot-ing the justly celebrated Applause. The film made innovative use of two-channel recording, its frequent tracking shots, close-ups and an intensesense of its outdoor New York locations; but these advancements were notcome by easily:

Everyone was against change, against rocking the boat, or rather,moving the camera or jigging the sound . . . The camera had to beenclosed in a booth so that the whirring of the motor didn't get on thesound track, and the sound technicians kept telling you that 'mixing'was impossible. For a certain scene in Applause, I insisted on usingtwo separate channels for recording two sounds: one, soft whispering;the other, loud singing; which later would be mixed, so that the audi-ence could hear both simultaneously.48

Mamoulian also violated a contemporary rule of sound-film practice inApplause by creating a highly textured and layered acoustic atmospherein a period when it was the aim of most sound engineers to eliminate allambient noise in order to foreground the spoken text. Lucy Fisher arguesthat the sense of reality, density and depth achieved through sound in thefilm functions in tandem with a visual establishment of depth to create asense of'palpable' space.49 In his second film, City Streets (1930), Mamoulianused a character's voice on the soundtrack to produce an audible innermonologue over a silent close-up, one of the very first uses of dramaticvoice-over and an obvious reflection of his belief that 'sound on screenshould not be shackled by naturalism'.50


Sound in Europe

By late 1928 Hollywood's major corporations (Warner Brothers, RKO,Fox, Paramount, Loew s, Columbia, United Artists, Universal) had begun toexport sound films to Europe, with Western Electric and RCA the domi-nant US suppliers of sound. The period of 1928-1929 would become theyear of the international diffusion of talking pictures.

Factors of language took on a more crucial aspect for the Americans inregard to the Continental film market, because of the obvious languageconversion difficulties. Initially, dubbing, subtitles and native languagenarrators were tried with little success. Initially, what seemed like the mostpromising solution, dubbing, was fraught with technological difficultiesand caused adverse audience reactions. As a result, for a period the majorstudios began to multi-language versions of feature and short films. In 1930Paramount established a huge studio at Joinville, outside Paris, to createforeign versions of its films in five languages. The other studios joinedParamount and by the summer of 1930 Joinville functioned on a round-the-clock schedule, creating films in twelve languages. On a much smallerscale the British, French and German film industries also produced theirown foreign films for export. However, high costs and improvements indubbing techniques meant that this multi-language production of filmsultimately had a short lifespan, and by 1932 their production had ceased.51

Great Britain

The British market had the advantage of a common language, whichcombined with the fact that UK theatres wired for sound most quickly(22 per cent of cinemas by 1929, with the figure rising to 63 per cent by1930)52 meant that Britain became Hollywood's first important foreignmarket for sound films. Following a confused period of numerous compet-ing systems and massive investment by the major Hollywood companies,Vitaphone, RCA and the British Acoustic system eventually emerged as thefrontrunners in the British production system. By 1930 out of 717 filmsshown, 524 were sound films, the vast majority 'fully-talking'.53 Americanfilms had long dominated the British market, a situation which continuedwith the coming of sound, especially with competition from Continentalfilms hugely lessened, though the Cinematograph Act of 1927, which intro-duced a quota system for domestic production, rectified this to some degree.British films increased their share of the market from 4.4 per cent in 1927


to 24 per cent by 1932. The quota helped the larger companies adjust tosound because the influx of capital which it encouraged enabled them toequip their cinemas and studios for sound, but could not save the smaller,more precarious companies which had been set up in the its wake.54

Of the bigger and more successful companies, British InternationalPictures, had a huge commercial and critical success with the productionof the first British 'talkie' in 1929, Alfred Hitchcocks Blackmail55 This suc-cess appeared to give BIP the edge over its biggest rival, Gaumont-British/Gainsborough, and in the transitional period 1928-1931 BIP released morethan twice as many features as its rival.56 Apart from BIP there were a num-ber of other British studios involved in sound production from the start: inaddition to the short sound films, the topicals and speeches and vaudevilleturns and songs, many feature films already conceived - and even madeas silent films - were hastily adapted to sound by the addition of musicand sound effects and occasionally some passages of dialogue.57 HughCastles description of one of these early features, To What Red Hell (EdwinGreenwood, 1929), allows one to appreciate Hitchcocks precocious dem-onstration of how sound could be made an integral part of film techniquein Blackmail:

Nearly all the long-shots are silent picture material, and the '100%dramatic dialogue' consists of close-up cuttings. The delicious wayin which a noisy jazz band is synchronised with the inevitable long-shots, only to be completely cut out from talking close-ups of peoplesupposed to be sitting on top of the dancers, is too funny to miss.58

On the other hand, most critics were impressed by Hitchcocks deploymentof techniques such as off-screen dialogue and the sound bridge, of sound as'acoustical montage' and especially by the exaggerated or impressionisticsound the celebrated 'knife' sequence, with its expressionist distortions ofsound to convey the mental disorder of the same character. Even the editorof the oppositional film journal C/ose-l/p, which had been the locus ofcritical opposition to sound, was moved to declare himself 'touched andamazed' by the film's highly expressive use of sound, which made it 'farand away the best talkie we have seen.'59

Like Blackmail The Informer (1929), directed by the German ArthurRobison for BIP, was also shot semi-silent, and it is both a demonstration ofthe technical and aesthetic merits of the 'silent sound film' and an exampleof the international nature of much late 1920s British cinema - with its


expressionist lighting and sets. Another German veteran of the silent cin-ema, A. E. Dupont, shot Atlantic (1929), noteworthy as the first Europeanall-talking film and the first British dual-language production - a strategypioneered by BIP - and the outstanding Piccadilly (1929).

Blackmail's expressionist use of sound helped it straddle the two branchesof film culture, the commercial and the artistic, which characterized Britishfilm culture in the period of the transition to sound. Regarding the latter,there was an increasing tendency amongst those with a serious interestin film to cluster around documentary filmmaking, in particular theGriersonian wing. The latter, while commonly associated with a didacticform of filmmaking aided by the addition of a voice-over with the comingof sound, may more properly be appreciated as also incorporating anavant-garde ambience in this period.60 At the GPO Unit, the abstract avant-garde cinema of the 1920s was reconstituted in the visual and rhythmicexperiments of Len Lye and Norman McLaren, while Basil Wright, anamateur experimental filmmaker who had become Griersons first recruit,produced one of the most interesting of the sound productions of thisearly period: the highly complex sound montage of Song of Ceylon, (1934).Wright, who declared himself 'acutely aware' of the Soviet manifesto onsound when embarking on his documentary filmmaking career,61 and whowas a stalwart opponent of synchronized dialogue, had come under theinfluence of the Brazilian filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti, a veteran of boththe French avant-garde and commercial filmmaking, who had come towork with Grierson in 1933. This was the moment when the British docu-mentary filmmakers were grappling with the problems of the conversionto sound; and, by all accounts, Cavalcanti s influence was crucial.62 As doc-umentary filmmaker Harry Watt testifies, the arrival of Cavalcanti 'was theturning point of British documentary... Nobody had cut sound at all untilCavalcanti arrived. So he sat down, first of all, to teach us just the funda-mentals, but his contribution was enormously more than that'.63 Cavalcanti sideas on sound montage were to have a crucial effect on this period of theBritish documentary movement, as illustrated not only in Wright s film butalso in such films as Coal Face (1935), and Night Mail (1936). Coal Face hadmusic composed by Benjamin Britten and employed non-synchronoussound and montage editing, in conjunction with a critical commentaryabout harsh working conditions in the mines, while Night Mail containsthe well-known sequence in which the poetry of W. H. Auden and themusic of Britten construct a poetic accompaniment to images of the postalexpress speeding to Edinburgh. Subsequent documentary productionswere to employ more conventional sound usage: in particular, a use of the


voice that would subsequently be pejoratively dubbed the 'Voice-of-God'commentary.

In fiction film, British audiences infatuation with Hollywood continuedunabated. Interestingly, John Caughie argues that particularly noteworthyis a split which emerged in the audience in the 1930s; the cleft was centrednot around language but around accent, with a marked preference forAmerican films among the working class and a greater predilection forBritish films among the middle classes.64 British films that appealed to theworking class were those of music-hall entertainers such as George Formbyand Gracie Fields; indeed the Americans noted that the coming of soundhad given British producers the opportunity to develop certain types of filmthat audiences found more acceptable than their American counterpoints.One study in 1931 revealed that 'farces were among the most successful ofBritish pictures, while most of the American were entirely unsuccessful...Farce is a form of humour more appreciated on its native heath thanelsewhere1.65

France

While in Germany Tobis-Klangfilm posed a serious and viable alternativeto American technology, Richard Abel argues that in France the transforma-tion of the silent film industry into sound was to a large degree imposed onthe French by the American film industry.66 None of the sound film record-ing systems on which the French held patents proved commercially viable,and they found themselves excluded from the Paris Conference in June1930 at which American and German-Dutch companies divided up world-wide control of the production and distribution of sound film technology.

Technological factors aside, the transition to sound provoked strongreactions from both critics and filmmakers. Writers and filmmakers wereforced to rethink the parameters of each of the major narrative and non-narrative film forms for which the French had developed some sort of the-oretical basis. Some, such as Jacques Feyder and Marcel Pagnol, embracedthe shift with either 'tempered enthusiasm or outright glee!67 Others, suchas Rene Clair and Abel Gance, cautiously accepted the shift from silentto sound film as long as it did not constitute a fundamental disruption ofsilent film practices. Clair called for a cinema which would 'remain visualat all costs',68 and he cautioned against losing the achievements of the silentfilm. Still others such as Marcel L'Herbier and Germaine Dulac, veterans ofthe 1920s avant-garde, initially exhibited an open hostility to sound cinemaand went so far as to defend the continued existence of a separate silent


film form. Nevertheless, Abel argues, most filmmakers and critics eventu-ally came to terms with the sound cinema:

Generally they considered the new technology - whether the soundcomplemented the image or vice versa - as a significant means ofeither representing the 'real' with more verisimilitude, telling a storywith more psychological Anteriority, or else expressing more directlyan artist's thinking and feeling.69

Jean Epstein was initially particularly enthusiastic, conceiving of a photo-genie of film sound, by which he meant the transformation of reality bymeans of the audio recorder, to complement his theory of the photogenicof the film image. Epstein, like a number of other early enthusiasts, becamediscouraged, however, as his own film practice, and the avant-garde ingeneral, was compromised or silenced altogether by the changing economicconditions of the cinema and the corresponding decline of the once-numerous 'independent' production units and cine-clubs. While the Surre-alists had welcomed the Violent oneric power'70 of badly dubbed soundproductions such as King Kong (Cooper and Schoedsack, 1933), the costsof sound production prohibited the realization of any Surrealist projectsafter Bunuels first sound production, LAge dor (1932). This film mocks thenewly constituted voice-over in documentary through setting up what canbe termed a crisis of perception between sound and image. Jean Cocteausquasi-Surrealist Le Sang d'un poete (1932) also makes distinguished use ofthe voice-over, which here, however, is of the allusive, poetic variety whichso characterizes the use of the voice in subsequent French documentaries.

While the advent of the sound revolution silenced much of the 1920savant-garde, at the same time it consolidated the dominance of a certainkind of narrative cinema. The idea of what was so pejoratively dubbedcanned theatre' by so many opponents of sound was enthusiasticallyadopted, for instance, by such directors as Marcel Pagnol, who felt that thetalkies would make available 'effects never before possible on stage'.71 ForPagnol, sustained verbal language or dialogue was the prime mode of dis-course; at best, by learning the new technical resources of the cinema, theplaywright or poet might be able to reinvent the theatre and thus, at somelater time, conceive original works for the cinema. This was an idea of filmas essentially an adaptation, and it was dubbed the 'Paramount ideology'by critic Nathan Altman.72 Paramount had set up a 'mini-Hollywood' atJoinville outside Paris which in the years 1930-1931 - using the WesternElectric sound system - produced one hundred features and fifty shorts


in as many as fourteen languages. Andrew argues that while very few ofthese films were of lasting interest, the Paramount operation was hugelyimportant as a training ground for many young directors as well as asecond chance for a number of silent film directors.73

Paramount s chief rival in France and the rest of Europe was the GermanTobis-Klangfilm. Tobis's strategy involved making dual-language films inParis using the very top scripts and personnel available. One of the mostnoteworthy directors was Rene Clair, who made a particularly successfultransition from silent to sound filmmaking. Inspired by Henry Beaumont sBroadway Melody (1929), which integrated song and dance, sound effects,camera movement and a form of acoustic montage which alternated orjuxtaposed image and sound, Clair produced a trio of sparklingly stylizedmusical fantasies which made him one of the most admired and imitateddirectors worldwide. Clair was the leading opponent of any form of Vannedtheatre', and in Sous les toits de Paris (1929), Le Milion (1931), and A nous laliberte (1931), he worked with a minimum of dialogue, using music, cho-ruses and sound effects to counterpoint and comment on his visuals. InSous les toits de Paris, Clair utilized three different uses of sound: one inwhich sound is used as straightforward orchestral accompaniment, anotherin which the images are made comprehensible by means of natural sound;and a third in which speech is used either to produce a special effect or elseto explain the action. In Le Milion, he added improvised dialogue for greaterspontaneity, and he included satirical songs and speeches rather than themore conventional duets.

All three films testify to Glairs desire to continue to make films at'the level of poetry',74 in which dialogue would be at the service of the image.The first thing to strike the ear is the predominance of music, the minimalrole of speech and an almost complete absence of natural sounds. In Sousles toits de Paris, there are numerous sequences where dialogue is eithercompletely masked by the music track, or only crucial lines are audible.Elsewhere, there is absolute silence as we see images of slamming doors,shattering glass, footsteps and punches; this is a reflection of Clair s beliefthat 'It is unimportant to hear the sound of applause if you see handsclapping'.75 One of the most dramatic uses of a sound/image dialectic in thefilm is the scene of the street fight at night between Albert and Fred, tworivals for the affections of the pretty Rumanian Pola, where Clair subvertshis carefully constructed auditory hierarchy. Unlike much of the rest of thefilm, where music is used to cover any kind of awkward moment, this scenebegins in absolute silence. While the scene is lit by a street lamp, and wecan see Fred's men grouped around the two men grappling, the fight itself


is obscured by the men's backs, the distant framing and the camera angle.The scene uses a careful counterpointing of light and sound: when we cansee the scene, there is no sound; when the street lamp is broken, we becomeaware of the largely unintelligible shouts and mutterings of Fred's gang asthey egg on their leader. In A nous la liberte, an anarchic, almost slapstickmusical, Clair goes so far as to satirize the whole notion of synchronoussound in a sequence which shows the heroine 'singing' away at her windowwhile the hero, Emile, watches admiringly from below. Suddenly, the voicewhines and whirs, then fades away. A moment later, while Emile is stilllooking up at the window, the girl appears in the street, the song beginsagain and we realize that what we have been listening to all along is a pho-nograph record from inside the apartment.

In contrast to the stylized decors of Clair s films, other French filmmakerssuch as Marcel Carne and advocated a cinema practice where fiction filmswere to be conceived and shot like documentaries, and they would be filmswhich would document working-class French life, part perhaps of a 'generalshift towards realism' in the 1930s.76 Renoir had been one of those directorswho welcomed sound with delight, seeing 'the human voice (as) the bestmeans of conveying the personality of a human being'77 and 'real', or location,sound as more desirable than fabricated sound effects. His use of sound inLa Chienne for Andre Bazin became the natural complement to a distinc-tively realist style which for Bazin made him 'the most French of directors'.78

Jean Gremillion's strangely critically neglected La Petite Lise had a simple,discreet use of dialogue, sound effects and silence which created a quasi-realistic atmosphere of dread and suspense79 which was apparently soeffective that it made Henri Langlois stop 'regretting the passing of silence'.80

One of the particularly noteworthy ways Gremillion uses sound is to signalthe 'fatal key' of his tale in a number of sequences, such as the openingsequence when we hear sound of the tick-tock of a clock for nearly aminute during which we see nothing but black leader (a device echoed inFritz Lang's Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) when the uncanny nature ofMabuse is similarly signalled by an off-screen, unidentified and sinisterpounding noise), and a sequence in which Lisa and her fiance walk awayinto a gloomy night while we overhear their expository conversation set-ting up the terms of the drama. This single long take both clearly avoidsa difficult sync sound problem and expresses the doom-laden tenor of thedrama through the very length of this shot and the pathetic quality ofthe voices over it.81


Germany

Only in Germany did stiff resistance to the talkie' invasion materialize,spearheaded by the Government-backed Tobis-Klangfilm conglomerate.Essentially two years behind Hollywood, the German film industry workedfeverishly from roughly mid-1929 to mid-1930 to establish competitivesound reproduction, including the imposition system.82 A full-sound ver-sion of The Jazz Singer did not appear in Berlin until September 1929, andit was even then shown as a silent. It was, in fact, the subsequent Jolsonvehicle The Singing Fool that became the breakthrough talking film andthe catalyst for German critical reactions to sound. While admiration wasvoiced for the technical achievements of the film, The Singing Fool alsoconfirmed fears that, thematically and stylistically, sound would set filmculture back decades to its theatrical roots. Subsequent releases, while notexclusively lachrymose musicals, did little to allay German perceptions ofa culture where technological innovation outran and displaced artistic val-ues. Along with interventions by such critics as Rudolf Arnheim, SiegfriedKracauer and Bela Balazs, a chorus of nationalist and volkish commenta-tors classified the embryonic talkie as a typically American solution to achronic state of national cultural backwardness whose uncritical adoptionposed the danger of further economic and cultural subservience.

In a climate fuelled by calls for German cinema to draw on its own rootsrather than indiscriminately borrow from America, German producersmade astonishingly rapid progress with synchronized sound, allowing, atleast for a period, a situation where 'the German cinema (became) master inits own house as it had not been since the American invasion of 1923-1924'.83

At the beginning of 1929 UFA sent a team to the United States to studysound production and then quickly moved to make the switch. In the sum-mer of 1929 UFA built in record time four state-of-the-art sound studiosin Nuebabelsberg.84 In September of that year, only 3 per cent of Germanproduction was in sound. By September 1930, the total had jumped to84 per cent.85 While import restrictions meant that German filmgoers weretreated almost exclusively to the more advanced examples of the newAmerican sound cinema, with King Vidor s Hallelujah being particularlyadmired, American-made German language films failed to impress thepublic, and a decline in the American share of box-office successes led torenewed hopes for a domestic revival. In the period 1930-1931, and whileGerman studios in general produced enough kitsch to make Hollywood's


redundant, a spate of sound films from both new and established directorswere demonstrations of both technical efficiency with the new mediumand examples of its artistic possibilities. Although the early sound films ofestablished directors such as G. W. Pabst and Fritz Lang are justly acclaimedand have attracted the bulk of critical attention, a group of socially realisticfilms made in this same period also merit mention: Menschen am Sonntag(dir. Robert Siodmak, 1929), a lyrical semi-documentary with minimal dia-logue and a musical score; Kuhle Wampe (dir. Slatan Dudow, Bertolt Brecht,1932), another semi-documentary with a dynamic score by Hanns Eisler;and there was Leontine Sagans anti-authoritarian Mddchen in Uniform(1931), which uses sound as a thematic element in its own right, particu-larly in its use of sound effects and motifs such as bugle calls, chiming bellsand marching feet.

G. W. Pabst s films also fit into this realist aesthetic: Westfrontl 918 (1930)set during World War I, combines the advanced camerawork of the silentera with a sophisticated use of natural sound - from whispers to whistlesto blaring sirens - for subtle transitions; while Kameradschaft (1931), asNoel Carroll observes, is the forerunner of films observing Bazins realistaesthetic - where sound, like the camera work, is used to record rather thanto reconstitute reality.86 Fritz Langs M (1931), on the other hand, usessound as a manipulative montage element. Lang, the last major Germandirector to adopt sound, created in M the quintessential transitional* filmin its sparing and expressive use of sound. Sound in the film is edited in thesame way as the visuals, with the primary continuity in the famous openingsequence, for instance, coming from the soundtrack. Sound is also used toextraordinary effect to open up off-screen space, with seen space beingplaced in a constant interchange with unseen space. This technique, used ina more simple manner by Hitchcock in Blackmail to build suspense - andto great effect in Mamoulians Applause, as noted - here transforms thesoundtrack radically, so that at any moment 'the frame can haemorrhagetoward an unseen area simply by including a sound whose source is notseen.87 In The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932) Lang exploits to even greatereffect the possibilities of off-screen sound, signalled from the very begin-ning of the film by the unidentified deafening, pounding noise whichaccompanies the opening virtuoso tracking shot and which establishes thesense of menace that underlies the entire film. In particular, the voice as anoff-screen presence, deployed so effectively in M in the opening scene, isdeveloped even further through the use of the disembodied voice ofMabuse as a central plot device. The film was a radical example of whatcould be achieved with the use of the voice in cinema, and it was a rare


counter-statement to the perceived destructive effects of synchronizationthat had been widely expressed with the coming of sound.

The Soviet Union

Among these early opponents of synchronized sound, the Soviet directors''statement' - a Vish list freed from practicality'88 - holds an importantplace. While opposition to synchronized dialogue was widespread, in theSoviet case there were were considerations peculiar to the montage schoolof filmmakers, as Ian Christie makes clear.89 By the mid-1920s he arguesthat the idea of montage had developed far beyond its beginnings as atheory of the specificity of film and had become linked to the formalistconcept of 'inner speech', a kind of constant subjective internal 'accom-paniment' to the experience of film viewing which facilitated the connec-tion between separate shots.90 'Inner speech' was both the guarantee of filmintelligibility, and the basis on which filmic metaphor and other rhetoricalstructures depend. Thus, argues Christie, if the whole edifice of montagewas believed to rely upon the institutionalized activation of inner speech,then the 'outer speech' of the talkie posed an obvious danger. Not justin terms of an essentially visual art threatened by language, but of theplasticity and allusiveness of inner speech suppressed and replaced bya 'pre-formed, externalized address from the screen which would make thespectator little more than a passive eavesdropper'.91 On a broader level,the addition of speech meant the addition of specific languages, a hindranceto the international traffic in films that had not only bolstered Sovietfilms role in the cause of proletarian internationalism but had also madeEisenstein in particular a celebrity.

Read in those terms, the 'Statement' can be seen to be both a cautiouswelcome for the new 'double-edged invention of sound cinema and anattempt to relocate the inner speech/montage relationship within the newensemble. Briefly, the early sound period would require two stages: one ofexperiment simply with non-synchronized or disjunctive sound/image rela-tionships and a later one with orchestral counterpoint'. The latter was neverclearly defined; Pudovkin's cameraman Anatolii Golovnya attributed it to an'imperfect knowledge of sound films'.92 Writing in 1929, Pudovkin himselfcontinued to argue for a contrapuntal relationship between sound andimage, but one that is less dialectical than associational, whose 'first functionwould be to 'augment the potential expressiveness of the film's content'.93

Eisenstein's writings of the period suggest that he did not conceive coun-terpoint as a radical and constant disjunction between sound and image,


Eisenstein indeed seems to have offered the most unadulterated welcomefor sound of all the montage theorists, Kristen Thompson argues. He wasalready looking forward to working with sound 'as a new montage element'while making The General Line, which he also considered turning into asound film with music by Edward Meisel.94 In 1930 while in Paris he opinedthat the sound film was 'a thing of great interest and the future belongs toif.95 Like the other Soviet and European theorists, Eisenstein's main objectionwas to synchronized speech. Synchronized sound used non-naturalisticallywas perfectly acceptable; indeed Eisenstein was a great admirer of suchusage in the Disney Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies cartoon series.

Eisensteins second brush with sound was Romance Sentimentale, madewith Alexandrov in France in 1930 with the Tobis-Klangfilm system, withEisensteins usual cameraman Eduard Tisse as cinematographer and musicby Alexis Archangelsky. The film was widely greeted as a debacle, andEisenstein subsequently distanced himself from its production, but notbefore he pointed out in a letter to Leon Moussinac in the same year thatTn any case, we got what we wanted from the movie: we made some veryvaluable montage experiments and... we had enough money to stay in Parisuntil the transatlantic journey'.96 The film combines a visual style which isheavily indebted to French avant-garde practice of the 1920s (rapid cutting,canted framings, both rolling and static upside-down shots, blurred anddistorted visuals and superimpositions), with a disjunctive use of soundand music. It opens on a blank screen accompanied by an aural melange ofunidentifiable sounds created, according to one source, by running thesoundtrack backward or using 'drawn sound': that is, inscribing graphicfigures such as letters, lines and profiles onto the soundtrack of the film andthen playing it back through the projector.97 This technique of'drawn sound'in fact had already been used on the soundtrack of Abram Room's The Planfor Great Works, released in March 1930 and credited with being the firstSoviet sound film and no doubt familiar to Alexandrov and Eisenstein. Thisis succeeded by an extended fast-cut passage of waves, clouds and leaflesstrees, with accompanying stirring orchestral accompaniment. The combi-nation of camera tricks, cutting and music paves the way for the onlynarrative action of the film, a woman singing a sad Russian love song whileaccompanying herself on piano, punctuated by bursts of sentimentalorchestral accompaniment. The most interesting feature of the soundtrackcomes some minutes later, when a succession of rapid close-ups of thewoman and a Rodin statue are displaced by starbursts of light and bursts of'raw' sound, including a clashing of cymbals. This long abstract passage,while an obvious attempt to convey a tonal effect of emotion and pathosthrough a combination of sound and visuals, in Eisensteinian terms, is


also strikingly similar to the synchronized sound experiments of OskarFischinger and others in abstract animation.

As Eisenstein spent most of the early sound period abroad, for examplesof early sound practice in the Soviet Union we must turn to other film-makers, most obviously Pudovkin and his near-unique experiments withasynchronous and counterpoint sound. Pudovkins Deserter (1933) wasone of the Tew films wholeheartedly committed to implementing the pro-gramme proposed in the "Statement"' in Ian Christie s estimation.98 A numberof sequences in Deserter can be singled out as exemplary examples of a useof a dialectical relationship of sound and image. In the first, we see a typicalbig city going about its daily business in a kind of lilting waltz tempo, bothvisually and musically. Over shots of the heroine selling a workers' news-paper on the street, passages of a non-diegetic, cheery waltz alternate withthe woman's cries: the quiet tenor of life under capitalism is literally dis-rupted by their sudden intrusion, which cut directly into the waltz. Thisironic use of music is an aural equivalent of the numerous instances ofirony familiar from the juxtapositions of montage editing, and also recalls,as Ian Christie points out, Shostakovich's music for Kozintev and Trauberg sThe New Babylon (1929), which uses quotations and paraphrase fromOffenbach and other nineteenth-century French composers to both poi-gnant and satirical effect." Other sequences in the film, particularly thosein the industrial, shipyard setting, are a montage of heavy industry imagesaccompanied by a battery of metallic, industrial sounds. This raw soundcounterpoint recalls the Futurist 'noise experiments' of Luigi Rossolo, fleet-ingly evident in Romance Sentimentale, and also beloved of Pudovkinscolleague Vertov.

As might be expected, Vertovs views directly challenged those of the'Statement'. Long interested in the possibilities of sound, in 1916 Vertov hadset up a 'Laboratory of Sound' in which he conducted Futurist-inspiredsound experiments. Vertov had already anticipated the potential of soundreproduction as a mass medium with his film Radio Kino Pravda (1925)and manifesto 'From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye' (1926). While Eisentein andPudovkin had experimented with implied sound in their silent films,Vertov had gone furthest in this regard. All of his major films of the latterhalf of the 1920s contained events and objects denoting sound, along withformal motifs and movements suggestive of sound.100 In 1930, while work-ing on Enthusiasm, his first sound film, Vertov made his own statementon the new medium, partly in reaction to that of Eisenstein:

In the sound cinema, as in silent cinema, there are only two kinds offilm to be rigorously distinguished; documentaries (with dialogue,


authentic sound, etc) and played films (with dialogue, artificial soundspecially created during shooting, etc).

Neither correspondence nor non-correspondence of the visible and theaudible is obligatory, either for documentaries or for played films.Sound images and silent images are edited according to identicalprinciples; their montage may make them correspond with or not, ormix different forms of combination. The important thing is to endthis stupid categorisation into talking, noise or sound films.101

In Enthusiasm Vertov produced a film whose sounds as well as visuals area radical attempt at the demystification of the cinematic illusion. To achievethis, Vertov produced a complex interaction of sound with image, usingdisembodied sound, sound superimposition, sound and visual time rever-sal, abrupt sound breaks, abrupt tonal contrasts, mismatching of sound andvisual distance, mismatching of sound and visual location, among others.In other places Vertov varied the speed of the sound or reversed it.102

While Vertov boldly seized the opportunity to link his polemic for doc-umentary with the new technology, a crucial link was being forged in 1930between this same technology and the 'new themes1 of the cultural revolu-tion, as Ian Christie makes clear.103 Undoubtedly the assimilation of soundplayed an important part in the construction of Socialist Realist cinema,the new guiding doctrine for all Soviet art in the 1930s; what is also clearhowever is the importance of the legacy of the silent period in the earlyyears of sound.

Conclusion

While the introduction of sound transformed the film industry, its effectswere different in different countries. In the United States the extent to whichthis change was directly attributable to the 'talkie* is not clear. The realign-ment of the film industry and the Depression particularly had given animpression of chaos and revolution, but the national economy, not the talkies,was the more plausible explanation for the major changes in Hollywood.104

The disjunctive possibilities for sound which had been theorized and tosome degree put into practice in Europe and the United States in the transi-tional period had little effect overall. While critics were impressed, as Craftonpoints out, the box office did not reward efforts at experiment (as in Hallelujaand Applause], and 'anything tending to be jarring or disconcerting tendedto be greeted with jeers or laughter, not interest or appreciation.105 The sound


revolution passed without making any fundamental changes in film styles,outside of a few experimental or avant-garde filmmakers who made use ofthe possibilities of sound as an independent signifying element, not tieddirectly to visual images, speech and story. In critical discourse, sound con-tinued to be regarded as a 'plus', with the image reigning supreme. Even inrecent years, when the soundtrack has become increasingly complex andsophisticated, the cinema has kept its ontologically visual definition intact,as Chion has argued: 'A film without sound remains a film; a film with noimage, or at least without a visual frame projection, is not a film'.106

Notes

1. Winters (1941), p. 153.2. See Balazs, Der sichtbare Mensch, considered the first major work in silent film aes-

thetics; Rudolf Arnheim, 1957, p. 227, and S. M. Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovkin and G. V.Alexandrovs 'The sound film: A statement from the U.S.S.R', which first appeared on5 August 1928 in the Leningrad magazine, Zhizn iskusstva; new translation in Taylor andChristie (eds) (1994), pp. 234-5.

3. Wright, in Weis and Belton (1985), p. 96.4. Altaian (1992), p. 35.5. Ibid., p. 36.6. Lastra (2000), p. 93.7. Anderson (1987), p. 258.8. Altman (1995); Abel and Altman (1999), passim.9. Abel and Altman (1999), p. 395.

10. McMahan (2002), p. 46.11. Lastra (2000), p. 102.12. Altman (1996), pp. 657-8.13. Burch(1981),p. 37.14. Anderson (1987), p. 262.15. Burch (1981), pp. 37-8.16. Lastra (2000), p. 113.17. Anderson (1987), p. 259.18. Altman (1996), p. 677.19. In Abel and Altman (2001), p. 51.20. Gunning (1999), p. 68.21. Bresson (1977), p. 21.22. Adorno and Eisler( 1947), p. 75.23. Mary Anne Doane in Weis and Belton (1985), p. 162. See also Gorbman on theoreti-

cal perspectives on the voice as a supplement to the 'reality effect', Gorbman (1987),pp. 42-50.

24. Altman (1996), p. 697.


25. King (1984), p. 10.26. Altman(ed.)(1980),p. 79.27. Williams (1992), p. 128.28. Abel and Altman (1999), pp. 396-7.29. Gorbman(1987),p.46.30. Gomery, Towards an economic history of the cinema: Tlie coming of sound to

Hollywood' in De Lauretis, T. et al. (1980), 38-46.31. Gomery (1980), p. 43.32. As noted by Fairservice (2001), p. 226.33. Crafton(1994),p.434. Higson(1984),p.76.35. Walker (1986), p. 97.36. Deems Taylor (1943), quoted in Crafton (1999), p. 2.37. Bordwelletal.,(1985),p.31.38. Wood (1984), pp. 16-2439. Ibid., p. 18.40. Ibid., (1984), p. 19.41. See Wood (1984); Fairservice (2001) and Stephen Heath (1981), pp. 176-93.42. Altman (1992), pp. 47-51.43. Dreher(1930),p.416.44. Cook (1996), p. 261.45. Faster cutting was generally reintroduced with the technological advances of the

early thirties. See Salt, 'Film style' in Weis and Belton (1985), pp. 37-43, for a discussion ofthis and other developments related to sound recording in this period. For a succinctand illuminating discussion of the problems of editing for sound in this early period, seeFairservice (2001), pp. 228-90.

46. Mottram, 'American sound films, 1926-1933', and Knight, The movies learn to talk'in Weis and Belton (1985), pp. 221-31 and 213-20.

47. Mottram (1985), pp. 225-7.48. Interview in Sarris (ed.) (1971), p. 62.49. Fisher, Applause: The visual and acoustic landscape in Weis and Belton (eds) (1985),

pp. 232-46.50. Sarris (1971), p. 64.51. Gomery in Weis and Belton (1985), pp. 27-8.52. Gomery (1980), p. 92.53. See Low (1997), pp. 202-6.54. Ryall, in Murphy (ed.) (2001), p. 19.55. Hitchcock was shooting Blackmail as a silent film when the decision was made to

reshoot the final reel with dialogue. The sound version of Blackmail premiered in June 1929;the silent version, intended for showing in theatres not yet equipped for sound, was releasedtwo months later. Much critical attention has been devoted to this film, and there's a particu-larly useful discussion of the differences between the silent and sound versions to be foundin Don Fairservice (2001), 232-4.


56. Ryall, in Murphy (ed.) (2001), p. 30.57. See Ryall (1996), p. 95, and Low (1997), pp. 212-13 for brief discussions of these

productions.58. In Low (1997), p. 213.59. Kenneth McPherson, 1929, in Close-Up 1927-33 (1998), p. 92.60. See Dusinberre, in McPherson (ed.) (1980), pp. 34-50 for an illuminating discussion

of the intersections of documentary and avant-garde filmmaking in Britain in the 1930s.61. Wright (1974), p. 114.62. See Guynn, 'Basil Wrights Song of Ceylon' in Grant et al., (1998), pp. 85-6.63. Quoted in Guynn (1998), p. 86.64. Gaughie (ed.) (1996), p. 2.65. US Department of Commerce Report (1931), p. 8, in Murphy (ed.) (1997), p. 19.66. Abel, 'The Transition to Sound', in Abel (1988), pp. 5-37. In this chapter, Abel pro-

vides an outstanding overview of critical and practical reactions to this period in France aswell as a collection of contemporary texts. See also Dudley Andrews, 'Sound in France: Theorigins of a native school' in Altman (ed.) (1980), pp. 94-114.

67. Abel (1988), p. 8.68. Glair, Talkie versus Talkie' in Abel (1988), p. 39.69. Abel (1988), p. 10.70. Jean Levy (1934) in Abel (1988), p. 16.71. Pagnol, 'la Vieillesse precoce du cinema^ Le Journal 1 (1930), 23-5, in Abel (1988), p. 17.72. Altman (1931) quoted in Abel (1988), p. 18.73. Andrew, in Altman, (1980), p. 100.74. In Abel (1988), p. 40.75. Gorbman(1987), p. 142.76. Andrew (1980), p. 95.77. Renoir (1974), p. 105.78. Bazin(1973),p.22.79. Abel (1988), p. 20.80. Langlois in Andrew (1980), p. 109.81. Andrew (1980), p. 111.82. See Gomery, 'Europe converts to sound' in Weis and Belton (1985), pp. 25-36, for

a discussion of the court cases and patent disputes that led to the Paris Agreement of 1930and the subsequent disagreements and attempts at cartelization that culminated in theSecond Paris Agreement of 1936.

83. Saunders(1994),p. 222.84. Kaes (2000), p. 18.85. Carroll, 'Lang and Pabst: Paradigms for early sound practice in Weis and Belton,

(1985), p. 266.86. Carroll, in Weis and Belton (1985), p. 269.87. Gunning (2000), p. 165.88. Kahn (2002), p. 147.89. Ian Christie (1993),'Soviet Cinema: Making sense of sound', WideAnglelSA (1993), 35.


90. Boris Eikhenbaum, 'Problems of film stylistics (1927) quoted in Christie (1993), 38.91. Christie (1993), p. 38.92. See Taylor and Christie (1994), p. 410.93. Pudovkin, 'Asynchronism as a principle of sound film', in Pudovkin (1954), p. 184.94. Christie (1993), p. 41.95. Eisenstein, 'Les principes du nouveau cinema russe' (April 1930) quoted in Thompson

(1980), p. 118.96. Italics Eisensteins, Kahn (2001), p. 153.97. See discussion between Alexandrov and the American film critic Harry Potamkin,

in Kahn (2001), p. 153.98. Christie, 'Asynchrony' in Sider et al. (2003), p. 165.99. Ibid., p. 165.

100. Kahn (2001), p. 141.101. Dziga Vertov, 'Articles, journaux, projets', Cahiers du cinema 10.18 (1972), 149-50,

Ian Christie (trans.), quoted in Christie (1993), p. 42.102. Fischer, 'Enthusiasm: From Kino-eye to radio-eye' in Weis and Belton (1985), p. 257.103. See Christie (1993), p. 45.104. See Crafton (1999), pp. 534-44.105. Ibid., p. 544.106. Chion(1994),p. 143.

SilenceFilm Sound and the Poetics of Silence

Des O'Rawe

Now the sirens have still a more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. Andthough admittedly such a thing has never happened, still it is conceivable that someonemight possibly have escaped from their singing; from their silence never.

- Franz KaM

Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence.- Robert Bresson2

For me, film is essentially silent.- Kitano Takeshi3

Silence has vigils, conspiracies, judgements, gestures, kingdoms and clowns.It is synonymous with rituals of time, memory, and death. To be silent -whether through dissidence or devotion - is to be in the company of onesown mortality, one step closer to that great silence in the sky. For the artist,then, it can represent a choice between a poetics of speed, intensity, con-creteness on the one hand, and one of slowness, ellipsis and abstractionon the other: for example, Erik Satie, John Cage (music); Samuel Beckett,Franz Kafka (literature); and Mark Rothko, Francis Bacon (painting).4

Among film teachers and critics, silence still tends to be a historical issuerather than a theoretical one, invoked in relation to the birth and earlylife of the cinematograph rather than in terms of its range of expressiveproperties and possibilities within the sound film. As a critical concern or

87

4


feature of mise-en-scene, silence has traditionally - even within the rapidlyexpanding field of film sound studies - been the foremost casualty of thegreat leap forward into (synchronous) film sound and the institutionaliza-tion of narrative realism. This chapter will attempt to redress this anomalyby focusing on those filmmakers and theorists who have been particularlyattentive to the formal and structural significance of silence within thesound film. It draws on some of my other work on this subject to arguemore generally that the presence of filmic silence is never merely theabsence of sound - never a nothing - but is aesthetically important, recon-ciling modern and contemporary cinema with their true origins.5

The Sound Revolution

Despite the crackling arc lights, the new restrictions on screen movementand speech, and the need for longer takes, synchronous sound immediatelyenhanced the acoustic realism and commercial profitability of the cine-matic experience, particularly in Hollywood. Elsewhere, without resourcescomparable to those available to the 'dream factory5, competition andinnovation was difficult. In France, the coming of sound 'traumatised' thefilm industry (1928-1934), damaging independent production and facili-tating the acquisitive practices of foreign companies such as Tobis andParamount. Furthermore, the quantum conversion to synchronous soundin the American cinema did not bode well for more experimental andartistically committed filmmakers: 'The result was a general stratification,at least of the US film world, with the foreign and the avant-garde banishedtogether to the commercial periphery and fewer opportunities for thegeneral audience to see movies that did not conform to the classicalHollywood model'.6 It is hardly surprising, then, that the most impassionedopponents of sound were filmmakers and film intellectuals closely associ-ated with the modernist visual culture of the period and the ambitions ofEuropean avant-garde movements.

In the face of the inexorable spread of sound, the attitude of this 'anti-sound' lobby often seemed hopelessly idealistic. However, with the excep-tion of photogenistes such as Germaine Dulac ('The cinema is a silent art[and] silent expression is its categorical rule'7), or Marcel L'Herbier, it isimportant to remember that the first critics of sound were essentiallycritics of dialogue-orientated cinema: it was 'talk' in particular, rather thansound in general, that bothered them, and their arguments against soundwere not necessarily arguments for silence.8 Eisenstein, for example, did notargue against the institutionalization of synchronous sound per $e (which

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he regarded as inevitable). Instead, his anxieties about the 'talking film' wereprovoked by the fact that the contemporary Soviet film industry was notyet capable of competing with the US and German film industries in thisarea of production. Without the technological resources to protect thesound film from itself - so to speak - Eisenstein believed that the Sovietcinema was in danger of regressing into the facile dramatic genres and the-atrical forms of its recent past. Obviously, for Eisenstein, the true destiny ofthe cinema as an art form lay in the development of dialectical montagetechniques and not in pandering to Hollywood's conservative preferencefor 'high cultural dramas' and filmed dialogue.9 The Soviet attitude to soundwas supported by the modernist editors of Close Up, the Geneva-based filmjournal that in October 1928 published the first English language versionof'The Sound Film: A Statement from the USSR', co-authored by Einstein,Pudovkin and Alexandrov.10 Although never simply or unanimously 'anti-sound', the contributors to Close Up did develop a fairly coherent set ofarguments in favour of silence during its short lifetime (1927-1933). LikeEisenstein, figures such as Bryer (Winifred Ellerman), Ernst Betts andDorothy Richardson argued that synchronized speech jeopardized theinternationalism of cinema. In other words, the persistence of silencehelped to nurture a culturally heterogeneous and artistically inventive filmculture as opposed to one dominated by the technological prowess andindustrial sophistication of Hollywood.11

Rudolf Arnheim's contention that sound, like colour and alternativeaspect ratios, undermined the artistic specificity of film - destroying the'wondrously fragile' equilibrium between representation and distortionthat was unique to this medium - is also typical of the more sophisticatedobjections to the coming of sound. For Arnheim, 'the silent film, preciselybecause of its silence, was forced to be delightful'.12 However, his positionon this issue was compromised by the fact that he did not consider formsof musical accompaniment and film scores as syntactically incompatiblewith the moving image13 and - for all his insistence on the formal beautyand psychological power of the 'silent screen' - nowhere does Arnheimdelineate the forms of silence available to the sound cinema, particularly infilms that eschew the illusion of a necessarily synchronous relation betweenimage and sound.14 Bela Balazs was similarly concerned with the ways inwhich sound seemed to emasculate the essential qualities and artistic spec-ificity of film art, and like Arnheim and Close Up's Kenneth McPherson,Balazs began to modify his opposition to sound and by the late 1920s wasespousing a form of'sound-montage' that explicitly identified an expressiverole for silence within the aesthetic structures of the sound film. Of all the


arguments and anxieties that were generated by the coming of sound,Balazs's defense of silence remains the most suggestive and the leastemotive.

Betwixt and Between

The arguments and apparent contradictions that emerged - particularly,within the 'Formalist' resistance to synchronous sound - are worth bearingin mind when considering the continued use of silence in European soundfilms produced in the 1930s. In the midst of all the turmoil that the adventof synchronized sound occasioned, there were some directors who inge-niously harnessed its disruptive potential within their 'sound-montage'experiments. In this regard, 'silent sound' films from this period exemplifya response to innovations in sound technology that augment, rather thanimpair, the artistic achievements of early cinema. A canon of such filmsmight include: Blackmail (dir. Hitchcock, 1929, British International),Enthusiasm (dir. Vertov, 1930, VUFKU), A nous la liberte (dir. Clair, 1931,Tobis), M (dir. Lang, 1931, Nero-Film), Testament of Dr. Mabuse (dir. Lang,1932, Nero-Film), and Vampyr, (dir. Dreyer, 1932, UFA). According to NoelCarroll, what is realized in these films is derived 'from a penchant for asyn-chronous sound based on a paradigm of montage juxtaposition as a meansto manipulate, to interpret, and to reconstitute pro-filmic events'.15 Indeed,it may also be the case that this 'penchant for asynchronous sound' wasderived from the fact that (throughout the 1920s and early 1930s) the rela-tionship between popular filmmakers and avant-garde artists and theo-reticians (particularly in Germany and France) was more intimate than ithad ever been before (or has ever been since). It is undoubtedly true thatthe dream of a cinema - a seventh art - shaped by a productive symbiosisbetween film and the other arts (painting, music, architecture, theatre,poetry, etc.) was a victim of the 'sound era' with its fetishization of sound-image synchronicity.

Films such as Testament of Dr. Mabuse or Vampyr, for example, certainlyshare various expressionistic forms and themes, but their 'silent sound'aesthetic owes something in spirit, if not in substance, to the Bauhausexperiments of this period (for example, Kandinsky's 'colour music' andMoholy-Nagy's work on the geometric construction of silence), and tothe work of graphic artists such as Hans Richter, Walter Ruttmann, VikingEggeling and Oskar Fischinger who, throughout the 1920s, attempted toextend into film their experiments with sound painting, tone colour, rhyth-mical imagery and aural animation (for example, Rhythmus 21, 22, 23

Silence 91

(Richter, 1921-1923), Opus I //, ///, IV (Ruttmann, 1921-1924), DiagonalSymphony (Eggeling, 1924), and Studies 1-12 (Fischinger, 1925-1932)):

On 3 May 1925 the first public screening of Eggeling s work tookplace at the UFA Palast theatre in downtown Berlin. The Programmeconsisted of Hirschfeld-Macks Colour Sonatasy Richter s Rhythmus,Eggeling s Symphonic Diagonale, Walter Ruttmanns Opus, 2, 3 and 4,Leger and Murphy's Ballet Mechanique and Picabia and GlairsEntr'acte. In effect, this was all the best work available in avant-gardefilm at the time: an astonishing programme which laid the founda-tions of a new film aesthetic.16

These associations recall Dadaism, and Futurism (which directly influ-enced Vertovs early writings and experiments) and its conception of'a radio of silence' (an aspiration that was partially realized by Orson Wellesin the silences that remain the most memorable feature of his famous Warof the Worlds broadcast in 1938). Carroll also mentions Luis Bunuel's HAged*Or (1930); a 'silent sound1 film that is a direct product of surrealism andthat belongs in the company of Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Rene Clair andBenjamin Fondane: 'The wish of the silent film was to a large extent cata-strophic: to suppress all speech and all logic which underpins speech andall conception of man which logic underpins . . . All that cinema wantedwas for the audience to lose its balance'.17 Similarly, it is inconceivable thatdirectors like Hitchcock or Lang were not sensitive to the major artisticissues (and exhibitions) of the day: sequences in The Lodger (Gainsbor-ough, 1926) are strongly influenced by pre-war French surrealist andDadaist films; Hitchcock's desire to involve Len Lye in the production of ananimated sequence for Secret Agent (1936, Gaumont/Rank); the collabora-tion with Dali on Spellbound (1945, Selznick IP); Langs collaborations withRuttmann on part one of Die Nibelungen (1924, UFA); and with Fischingeron his last silent film Die Frau im Mond/Woman in the Moon (dir. Lang,1929, Nero). Such examples only scratch the surface, but they confirm thatthe development of an experimental (i.e., non-naturalistic) use of silencewith sound creates endless expressive abstract possibilities for filmmaking,possibilities realized brilliantly in M (dir. Lang, 1931, Nero).18

Situating such 'silent sound' films within the wider context of theEuropean avant-garde also generates a range of questions that directlychallenge conventional treatments of the historical and aesthetic relation-ship between 'silent' and 'sound' cinema and the place of silence within thatrelationship. The arrival of synchronized sound did not just herald the


demise of the silent film, it obliterated an invaluable, if fragile, vision ofcinema as an art form. With sound came the dominance of new film con-ventions and categories ('continuity', 'narrative', and 'genre'). With sound,a cinema that could derive its artistic specificity from the visual arts andmusic, a cinema of images, and images of images, was supplanted by acinema of plots and protagonists, dramatics and dialogue. The 'invention'of sound - so the historians insist - was a defining moment in the develop-ment of film language, and yet the construction of this definitive 'moment'is itself contingent upon a questionable teleology that has, among otherthings, culminated in the equation of silence with absence and nothing-ness. As Michel Chion has remarked: 'Although all histories of cinemaallude to [the] plethora of experiments [between 1895 and 1927] to oneextent or another, they don't challenge the neat division of film history intoa silent period and a sound period'.19 In short, this 'neat division may wellbe disguising the fact that the coming of sound was an aesthetic disasterthat has chronically debilitated the cinema's capacity to experiment andinteract with other visual arts and has instead reduced most of it to a basestorytelling cultural commodity. If much of today's cinema is a dead cinemaof visual gimmicks and noise and of banality and repetition, it is becausethe 'talkie' triumphed.

Secrets and Acousmetres

In The Voice in Cinema, Chion himself challenges this 'neat division' byexamining the ways in which the 'deafness' of early cinema continues toexist in the sound film's mise-en-scene, in its renderings of cinematic'muteness' and in its presentation of the curious intercourse betweenbodiless voices and voiceless bodies. (It is hardly coincidental that Lang'sTestament of Dr. Mabuse and Hitchcock's Psycho (1960, Universal) figureprominently in Chion's treatment of the disembodied voice.) Central toChion's analysis of the relationship between voice and image in audio-visualperception is the concept of the acousmetre: 'a kind of voice-characterspecific to cinema that in most instances of cinematic narratives derivesmysterious powers from being heard and not seen'.20 In addition to gener-ating suspense and/or signifying insanity or the presence of the super-natural, the acousmetre can also function (a la Balazs) to make silence avisible subject within the sound film. Although the unseen voice and thesilent character should not be confused with the character in the silentfilm, they still inhabit a pro-filmic environment capable of registering theabsence of sound: 'So it's not so much the absence of voices that the talking

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film came to disrupt, as the spectators freedom to imagine them in theirown. If'[voices] in silent film, because they are implied, are dreamed voices'then the acousmetre 'allows us [again] to dream the voices - in fact, to dreamperiod'.21

The acousmatic dimension, in a film such as Testament of Dr. Mabuseor Psycho (or, according to Chion, The Invisible Man (dir. Whale, 1933,Universal), Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (dir. Lang, 1960, CCI/Aristo),The Wizard ofOz (dir. Fleming, 1939, MGM), etc.) disrupts the illusion ofaudio-visual synchronicity and redeems the essential ambiguity of thevoice in 'silent' film. This is an attractive idea - the persistence of silencethrough the concealment of a sonic source - but it is only plausible if,as Peter Wollen has commented, 'the acousmetre [stays] unexplained, un-revealed, unmatched'.22 It is questionable whether or not this is ever reallypossible. (Within this context, for example, the difference between the useof the acousmetre in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse and its use in films suchas The Wizard ofOz, Dr. No (dir. Young, 1963, Eon) or 2001: A Space Odys-sey (dir. Kubrick, 1968, Hawk/MGM) can too readily seem more incidentalthan fundamental to this act of redemption.) Chions discussion of themute character in the sound film, on the other hand, offers a more intrigu-ing connection between 'sound' and 'silent' cinema: 'The silent ones ofthe sound film should bear no particular relation to the silent cinema, andy e t . . . In the modern cinema they can represent, by a sort of proxy, thememory of a great Lost Secret the silent movies kept'.23

The body without a voice, like the acousmatic voice, is a source ofboth diegetic and pro-filmic ambiguity. The mute in the sound film is bothelusive and ubiquitous, both an absence and a presence: 'to encounter themute is to encounter questions of identity, origins and desire'.24 Chionbriefly outlines the typical roles performed by the mute: as the 'double','shadow' or conscience of the protagonist (e.g., 'the Kid' [Dickie Moore] inOut of the Past [dir. Tourneur, 1947, RKO]); as the enunciator and agentof retribution (e.g., 'The man with no name' (Clint Eastwood) in Leone's'dollars trilogy'; as the unobtainable object of desire (e.g., Gitone [MaxBorn] in Fellini-Satyricon [1969, EPA]).25 Given that these dramatic Voles'are not necessarily specific to the cinema, Chion attaches an additional setof possible functions performed by the cinematic mute: functions thatenable the body without a voice to 'refer back to the origins of cinema . . .[to the] "great secret" of silent film'.

The mute accentuates the mise-en-scene of early cinema - masking,exclusion, off-screen space, etc. - and foregrounds the cinematic economyof absence and presence. Furthermore, the mute, like his acousmatic


counterpart, emphasizes the essentially unstable nature of'language, speechand the voice in the cinema. India Song (dir. Duras, 1975, Sunchild/FilmsArmorial), for example, creates a new space for silence through its montageof'an image track of voiceless bodies, mutes, moving about, and a soundtrackwhere disembodied voices speak among themselves!26 Chion discussesLes Enfants du paradis (dir. Carne, 1954, Pathe) in terms of how the'historic* antagonism between silent and sound cinema merely reconvenedthe 'pre-historic' antagonism between pantomime and theatre. Not onlydoes Game's film suggest 'the abyss of mutism' ('which is what the talkingfilm retrospectively constructed as its silent infancy') but - ultimately - itwagers on the possibility of retrieving the great secret' of a lost cinema:

Les Enfants du paradis is ... about a certain impossibility, a certainmalediction at work in the relation between language and desire, andwherein the mute plays a role of revealer and of focus of projection.The film refers back to the myth of innocence and knowledge at thetime of silent cinema, the guardian of the 'great secret'.27

There are some films - Les Enfants du paradis and India Songy for instance -that are aware of this great secret', films that acknowledge the probabilitythat only the innocent have a future. The rest of us have secrets and (as TheTestament of Dr. Mabuse and Psycho intimate) the form of a secret is moremeaningful than its content.28

Forms and Variations

Writing in the late 1960s, Noel Burch welcomed the fact that certainEuropean directors had 'at last begun to be aware of the dialectical rolesilence can play in relation to sound'. In particular, Burch commended theintelligent way in which 'these film-makers' were separating 'the "colours"of silence (a complete dead space on the sound track, studio silence, silencein the country, and so forth), [and were glimpsing] some of the structuralroles such silences can play'.29 Burch refers solely to Godard s 2 or 3 Thingsthat I Know About Her (1967, Anoucka/Argos), but his comment (and thispassing reference) suggests any number of other possibilities (Dreyer,Bresson, Tati, Fellini, Bergman, and Antonioni, for instance).30 Within thecinema of such directors, rediscovering the spectrum of silence assisted inthe creation of new formal possibilities: new ways of configuring alienationand fragmentation, absence and the asynchronicities of Being. However,the modernism of these directors does not reside in their supposed reaction

Silence 95

against an intellectually impoverished (and politically insidious) cinemaof narrative realism. If they articulate an argument, it is one that relates,primarily, to the cinema and to a vision of the cinema that treasures itsgreat secret'. Films such as La Notte (dir. Antonioni, 1961, Nepi), The Silence(dir. Bergman, 1963, Svensk), Gertrude (dir. Dreyer, 1964, Palladium) andVivre sa vie (dir. Godard, 1962, Pleiade), for example, encounter politics(in the widest sense) through aesthetics; they are films that rejuvenate thedream of a cinema of genuine synthesis rather than one of antithesis: whatthey are for matters more than what they are against.

In La Notte, Antonioni creates a soundscape in which the relationshipbetween a noise and its source is approximate rather than exact. In such anenvironment, the dissonance between things and the sounds they makebegins to convey a sense of the world as a place where a universal silence isonly ever interrupted by sounds, where even the sound of a footstep cannever be synchronized with the image of a stepping foot. The boundariesbetween onscreen and off-screen sound increasingly dissolve as the cityand its noises (car horns, engines, sirens, a helicopter and even the sound ofrust crumbling from the lock of a disused door) accompany the disintegra-tion of a love affair. Sounds are intrusive in La Notte\ they are profoundlyinconsequential gestures that may scratch but can never puncture thefirmament of silence that envelops the soul. The rituals and routines of lifecreate a structure for communication and interaction; but in the end theycannot protect us, and our relationships, from the persistence of silence. Themost significant moments in La Notte are moments when silence itself isgiven 'a living face! Lydia (Jeanne Moreau) sits in a car talking and laughingwith Roberto (Giorgio Negro), but we hear nothing other than the inces-sant rain; Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni) listens silently to Valentinas(Monica Vitti) recording of her reveries on life and solitude ('A gardenssilence is made of sounds; press your ear to a tree and listen') which shethen erases as if to remind Giovanni of his own spiritual 'muteness* - thevanity of his words. Outside, when the party is over, Giovanni listens toLydia as she reads him a love-letter that he had once written to her. He canno longer recognize the sincerity of his own words: Giovanni has becomean absent presence in his own life: lost, empty and silent.

There are expressive points and counterpoints here with both Dreyerand Bergman. In Gertrude, for example, silence textures the films lingeringimages of impossible dreams and disappointed desire. Conversationsabound but they are always straining against the true 'uneventful-ness' oflanguage; merging immaculately with Dreyer s long takes and the relentlessimmobility of the films cinematography. The incessant naming of names,


chiming of bells and ticking of clocks - the films vertiginous cacophony ofrepetitions and reverberations - are part of the great refusal that Gertrudeboth resists and accepts. Her final farewell to Axel is little more than a lookand a wave: a silent gesture that communicates everything. Similarly, inBergmans The Silence, spoken language is as omnipresent as authenticcommunication is absent. As in Dreyer s film, the only sound that can beginto inhabit the spaces created by words and their meaninglessness is music.The Silence explores the disintegration of a relationship between two sisterswho are bound by the incestuous and deeply antagonistic nature of theirrelationship. The city, and the hotel they are staying in, resonates with for-eign voices and alien sounds. The underlying silence of everything is onlyinterrupted when J. S. Bachs Goldberg Variations are heard on the radio byEster (Ingrid Thulin) and the elderly waiter. They realize that they have oneword in common, one word that can briefly break the spell of silence:'music! This simple coincidence of meaning is sufficient to initiate a rela-tionship between the two that very obviously parallels the erotic relation-ship between the younger sister, Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), and the waiterfrom the bar. The other source of mediation between the sisters, the truewitness to 'the silence1 that the film portrays, is Annas young son, 'Johanri.Bergmans cinema, like that of Antonioni, is not a silent cinema but it isoften a cinema of silence.

In Godards cinema, silence becomes an instrument of fragmentation, abase element that assists the processes of separation and reconciliation thatare integral to Godard s artistic principles and practices. The most famousexample of the Godardian use of silence is probably that moment duringthe cafe sequence from Band of Outsiders/Band a part (1964, Anoucka/Orsay) when 'a minute of silence' lasts 38 seconds. In Vivre Sa Vie, the closedand facile synchronicities of narrative cinema are subverted by the waysin which the film reconvenes the elemental dialogue between images, texts,gestures and voices; for instance, the document and the fiction, Zola andPoe, Dreyer and Renoir, Montaigne and Parain, Anna Karina and Jean-LucGodard. In Vivre sa vie, silence exists clialectically', creating gaps and ellipsesto texture his intricate tableau. A Brechtian influence is undeniable, but itshould not be misunderstood: Godards interruptions utilize the Alienation-effect5 to transcend it: Tt is of course possible to understand [thel turn toBrecht in terms of politics... [but] it is probably more illuminating to thinkof Godard s engagement with Brecht in terms of modernism'.31 In suchmodernist films, the disruption of sound, like the diffusion of citations andthe rich coincidence of connections and disconnections, liberates the cin-ema from the prison-house of narrative and the banality of synchronicity.

Silence 97

Afterword

Despite the global dominance of narrative ('noisy') cinema, directors asdiverse as Cassavetes, Tarkovski, Angelopolous, Rubric, Lynch, Kiarostami,Hou and Kitano have consistently been producing work available to theinventive use of silence. This practice is also evident within contemporaryEuropean documentary filmmaking where the images are more frequentlyfree from the control of voice-over commentaries, where longer takes andmore abstract compositions are often aesthetically necessary. In this con-text, one thinks of the filmmakers such as Raymond Depardon, Johan vander Keuken and Philip Groning, whose 4-hour Into Great Silence/Die GrosseStille (2006) uses silence to blur the boundaries between observationaldocumentary and DV artwork, cinematic exhibition and gallery piece.There have always been avant-garde and structural filmmakers, such asMaya Deren, Andy Warhol, Michael Snow, Stan Brakage and NathanielDorsky, whose work clearly manipulates silence in the pursuit of Visualmusic', i.e., releasing the music within the image itself, or Capturing' thesound of light. Brakhage's work (e.g., Anticipation of the Night (1958), TheArt of Vision (1961-1965), and The Riddle of Lumen (1972)) is particularlyrelevant in this regard:

It is no accident that Brakhage has consistently claimed music as a deepsource of inspiration to him as a film maker. His frequent statementthat he makes silent films because sound tends to dominate image isimportant in this regard: the absence of sound gives the images, and alltheir subtleties, a new priority in the viewer s consciousness, and allowsthem to speak with their own unique, music-like rhythms.32

And yet, if we are to explore and develop more fully our understanding offilmic silence, its forms, variations, and interpretive implications, thenmaybe we should look not to traditional film theory and criticism butrather to the body of critical work on silence that exists in the field of musicand sonic arts.33 In this way, we might even begin to realize John Cage'ssuggestion for the future of film: '[T]he most important thing to do in filmnow is to find a way for it to include invisibility, just as music already enjoysinaudibility (silence)'.34

Notes

1. G. Steiner, 'Silence and the Poet', in Language and Silence. London: Faber, 1967, p. 74.2. Bresson (1975), p. 63.


3. H. Hampton, 'Good-as-Deadfellas', Artforum, 55.8 (1997), 72.4. For discussions of silence and painting, cf. M. Hafif, 'Silence in paintings: Let me

count the ways', in Adam Jaworski (ed.), Silence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Mouton deGruyter: Berlin/New York, 1997, pp. 339-50. There is an extensive body of theoreticalwork on the role of silence in music: J. Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings^ Middietown,CT: Wesleyan University Press, p. 1961; T. Clifton, 'The poetics of musical silence', MusicalQuarterly, 62.2 (1976), 163-81, A. Edgar, 'Music and silence', in Adam Jaworski (ed.), Silence:Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997, pp. 311-28; J. Judkins, 'Theaesthetics of silence in live musical performance', Journal of Aesthetic Education, 31.3 (1997),39-53; and Z. Lissa, 'Aesthetic functions of silence and rests in music', Journal of Aestheticsand Art Criticism, 22A (1964), 443-54, are particularly relevant within this context. OnBeckett, music and silence, see M. Bryden, 'Beckett and the sound of silence', in M. Bryden(ed.), Samuel Beckett and Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, pp. 21-46.

5. D. O'Rawe, 'Ten minutes for John Lennon', Film Studies: An International Review,9 (2006), 64-8, and 'The great secret: Cinema, silence, modernism', Screen 47.4 (2006),395-406.

6. Michael North, 'International media, international modernism, and the strugglewith sound', in J. Murphet and L. Rainford (eds), Literature and Visual Technologies: Writingafter Cinema, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, p. 52.

7. G. Dulac, 'The expressive technique of the cinema (1924)', in R. Ahel. (ed.), FrenchFilm and Theory Criticism: A History/Anthology: 1907-1939, Vol. 1. Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1988, p. 305.

8. R. Abel and R. Altman, The Sounds of Early Cinema. Bloomington, IN: IndianaUniversity Press, 2001, pp. 232-40; Altman (2003).

9. S. Eisenstein, in R. Taylor (ed.), The Eisenstein Reader. London: BFI, 1998.10. Ibid., pp. 113-14.11. Michael North, 'International media, international modernism, and the struggle

with sound', in J. Murphet and L. Rainford (eds), Literature and Visual Technologies: Writingafter Cinema, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 53-8; J. Donald, 'From silence tosound', J. Donald, A. Friedberg, and L. Marcus (eds), Close Up: 1927-1933, London: Cassell,1998, pp. 79-82.

12. R. Arnheim, Film Essays and Criticism, B. Benthien (trans.). Madison, WI: Universityof Wisconsin Press, 1997, p. 41.

13. Ibid., pp. 47-9.14. Arnheim's (1936) study of radio is more promising in this regard, but any connec-

tions with the forms and functions of silence in sound cinema are very tenuous.15. N. Carroll, 'Lang, Pabst and Sound', Interpreting the Moving Image. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 93.16. P. Wollen, 'Mismatches (& Acousmetres)\ Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film. London:

Verso, 2002, p. 53.17. Quoted in E. Freedman, 'The sounds of silence: Benjamin Fondane and the cinema',

Screen, 39.2 (1998), 168.18. In Spring 2002, a special issue of Trafic (41) was devoted to 'Hitchcock-Lang' and

several essays in this edition address this question, albeit indirectly.

Silence 99

19. M. Chion, The Voice in Cinema, Claudia Gorbman (trans.). New York: Columbia

University Press, 1999, p. 11.20. M. Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, Claudia Gorbman (trans.). New York:

Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 221.21. Chion (1999), pp. 8-9.22. Woollen (2002), pp. 254.23. Chion (1999), p. 95.24. Ibid., p. 96.25. The filmic functions of silence in the Spaghetti Western might itself represent a

productive area for further study. In addition to Leone's films (and Morricone's scores),one could also consider, for example, 'muteness' in Corbuccis The Great Silence/11 GrandeSilenzio (1968, Adelphia). Films such as Bergmans Persona (1966, Svensk) or Herzogs TheLand of Darkness and Silence (1971), however, would certainly complicate the search forneat distinctions between forms of voluntary, involuntary and non-voluntary 'muteness'in sound film.

26. Chion (1999), p. 100. See, M-C. Ropars-Wuilleumier, 'The Disembodied Voice(India Song)', Yale French Studies, 60 (1980), 241-68.

27. Chion (1999), p. 106.28. Chion has also presented a notable discussion of the implications of Dolby sound

for the reproduction of silence (2003: 50-4). A number of technical and aesthetic issuesassociated with the cinematic 'projection of silence are addressed in Walter Murch's reflec-tions on his recent re-mixing of the soundtrack for Touch of Evil (Welles, 1958, Universal);W. Murch, 'Touch of silence', Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures: 1998-2001. London:Wallflower Press, 2003, pp. 83-101.

29. N. Burch, 'On the structural use of sound', in E. Weis and J. Belton (eds), Film Sound:Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, p. 207.

30. For an analysis of silence in Fellinis La voce della luna (1990), see C. Degli-Esposti,'Voicing the silence in Federico Fellinis La voce della luna [1990]', Cinema Journal, 33.2(Winter 1994), 42-53; a discussion of the relationship between sound and silence in Tati'sMon Oncle (1958) can be found in J. Fawell, 'Sound and silence, image and invisibility inJacques Tati's Mon Oncle [1958]', Film Quarterly, 43.1 (1990), 221-9.

31. Colin MacCabe, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70. London: Bloomsbury, 2003,p. 158.

32. F. Camper, 'Sound and silence in narrative and nonnarrative cinema, in ElisabethWeis and John Belton (eds), Film Sound: Theory and Practice, New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1985, pp. 377-8. See also S. Brakhage, 'The silent sound sense'. Film Culture,21 (Summer 1960), 65-7, and 'Film and music: Letter to Ronna Page'. Essential Brakhage:Selected Writings on Filmmaking. New York: McPherson/Documentext, 2001, pp. 78-84.

33. For example, Z. Lissa, 'Aesthetic functions of silence and rests in music', Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism, 22 A (1964), 443-54; T. Clifton, 'The poetics of musical silence,Musical Quarterly, 62.2 (1976), 163-81; J. Judkins, 'The aesthetics of silence in live musicalperformance', Journal of Aesthetic Education, 31.3 (1997), 39-53; Edgar (1997), pp. 311-28.

34. J. Cage, 'On film', in Richard Kostelanetz (ed.)> John Cage. New York: Praeger, 1970,p. 116.

5The Click Track

The Business of Time: Metronomes, Movie Scoresand Mickey Mousing

Thomas E Cohen

That's the business of time. Tick, Tick, Tick. You can almost hear it go by.- Bette Davis as Judy Trahemein Dark Victory (1939)

Although the ticking clock has become the conventional mark of timespassing, before the modern era, the suns shadow, the falling sands of thehourglass, or water draining from a basin have all served to measure tem-poral intervals.1 Temporal duration can be elastic or inflexible accordingto the context or situation. Certain sports and other forms of play allowfor fluid periods (e.g., the nine innings of a leisurely softball game), butcommerce demands that time be measured in discrete standardized units.In the movie industry, time, like everything else, serves business.

Although it is a platitude that film music must suit the picture, the crite-ria for judging suitability rarely extends beyond whether or not the musicsets the appropriate emotional tone of a scene. The only technical consid-eration involves checking that the musics duration corresponds more orless to the length of the cue for which it is written. Occasionally, however,a composer wants to match the tempo of a character s walk, to punctuatecertain gestures or to emphasize the dramatic impact of particular events.Because the ear can detect discrepancies between sound and picture oftwo to three frames (between a twelfth and an eighth of a second), such

100

The Click Track 101

instances demand precise synchronization. Hitting the visual cues calls forknowledge of how the cinematic apparatus works. Whereas a spectator'spleasure entailed repressing the mechanical link between sound and image,musicians quickly became aware that film music is not composed toactual pro-filmic events but to images on a celluloid strip running througha projector. Once this mechanisms speed became standardized, finding aprocess for synchronization required only basic mathematical skills andsimple engineering sense.

In the 1930s, various techniques emerged to lock musical tempos withscreen images for composing and recording - the most popular and endur-ing being the click track. Initially, this process involved punching holes ina strip of leader at appropriate intervals. When these holes passed acrossan optical sound head, they produced a click that served as a metronome.In the late 1920s, when shooting and projection rates assumed a constantvalue - 24 frames per second or 90 feet per minute for 35 mm - bothmusical motion and the moving image became subject to rigorous tempo-ral measurements. Composers could then match tempos with screen actionexactly using only a stopwatch, a metronome and a little rudimentary math.

In this essay, I take a close look at the process that transformed the filmprojection apparatus into the governor of musical tempo, and I examinesome of the consequences for musical composition, performance andconducting. I attempt to place these developments within the general trendtoward rationalization and mechanization typical of the modern epoch.Within the narrower history of film style, I also chart the vicissitudes of cer-tain representational practices associated with the technology. Specifically,I examine the decline of strict audio-visual correspondence known as'Mickey Mousing'. In this historical instance, style and technology that wereborn together struggle to survive separately. I suggest that Mickey Mousingbecame unfashionable because it tended to subvert the classical paradigmby interfering with dialogue and competing with 'realistic' sound effects.Of the early sync-sound period, Rick Altman observes, 'Throughout thethirties, nearly every important technological innovation can be tracedback to the desire to produce a persuasive illusion of real people speakingreal words'. This desire coincides with 'a felt need to reduce all traces ofthe sound work from the sound track'.2 Illustrative music committed theoffence of calling too much attention to itself as it describes what is hap-pening on the screen'.3 But whereas Mickey Mousing waned, the click trackendured for so long because the industrial mode of production accommo-dated it. Although the technology emerges ostensibly to match musicalmotion with moving images, its effect was to ensure that the product of the


various divisions and subdivisions of the studio system remained virtuallysynchronized according to clock time as a common measure.

On 6 August 1926 in New York City, Warner Brothers launched Vita-phone, the first viable synchronized sound system. Vitaphone worked wellenough. Sound and image stayed in sync as long as the mechanical linkbetween phonograph and projector operated correctly. However, sound-on-disc systems were prone to mechanical failure, and phonograph records werefragile, easily scratched and wore out quickly; thus, reliable synchronized-sound exhibition would arrive only with the advent of sound-on-filmprocesses. As successful as early Vitaphone events were, they constituted, asEdward W. Kellogg notes, 'a demonstration of synchronized sound, and notof sound motion-picture drama.4 Obviously, the narrative cinema couldnot restrict itself to reproducing performances that had been captured in asingle take. To facilitate the editing on which narrative continuity depends,5

it would be necessary to separate music, dialogue, sound effects and visualimage and reassemble them later. Also, the division of labour typical of theclassical Hollywood system dictated that composers be able to work auton-omously, yet still produce music that suited the other components.

Before we trace the history of the technology that facilitated the coordi-nated production of moving pictures and sounds, lets consider an exampleof virtuoso audio-visual synchronization from 1960s television. The open-ing credit sequence of the US television series / Spy (1965-1968) featuresthe silhouette of a man playing tennis. Each swing of the racquet is punctu-ated by a musical chord - called a 'stinger'- that begins with the swing andends precisely when the racquet makes contact with the ball.6 ClaudiaGorbman defines a stinger as ca musical sforzando used to illustrate suddendramatic tension'.7 In her chapter on Steiner, she introduces Mickey Mousingand the stinger as two types of illustration dependent on the click track. Wethus have a musical event rhythmically timed to correspond to the tennisplayer s gestures. This music is also linked to other gestures not representedon screen: those made by the musicians who performed the parts and bythe conductor who supervised the recording session. It is not too difficultto imagine the connection between the racquet raised over the tennis proshead, the violinists bow poised to set the string vibrating and the conduc-tor s baton ready to trace the musical line in the air. Less obvious perhaps isthe operation of the recording and photographic machinery that unitesthese gestures.8

The theme for I Spy was composed by Earle Hagen, who began his filmcareer working for Alfred Newman at Twentieth Century-Fox but soonmoved to television, where he scored several series besides / Spy, including

The Click Track 103

The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mod Squad.Hagens influential book Scoring for Films begins by giving the ratio of feetof film to seconds (3-2). Hagen explains the logic behind this expositorytactic: 'As all of the editing crafts work in feet of film and the composerworks in seconds of film, it is absolutely necessary to understand how thisratio works1. Significantly, instead of discussing the importance of, say,setting the appropriate mood for a scene, he tends to emphasize cold, pre-cise calculation - the sort that allows the composer to 'hit a dead cue withinI/185th of a second'.9 He thus puts ratio or reason before emotion. Toexpress a relation as a ratio means to put it in rational terms. It also suggestsrationing, dividing a whole into parts and meting out or measuring things.

What Samuel L. Macey calls the rationalization of time measurementbegan with the mechanical clocks increasing ubiquity from the fifteenthcentury on. However, inaccurate fifteenth-century clocks did not permitthe rigorous measurements demanded by the modern science of mechan-ics. Even as recently as the end of the sixteenth century, the hour was not yetdivided into 60 equal minutes nor had the latter been divided into seconds.Partitioning the temporal continuum into discrete equivalent units waspossible only after Christian Huygens patented the pendulum clock - thetechnology that provides the basis for the metronome.10

Before the modern era, from about 1200 to about 1600, the basic unit formusical tempo was the tactus, derived from the movement of the chief can-tor s hand in beating time. Corresponding roughly to the resting pulse of thehuman body, the tactus lacked a fixed temporal value, yet the seventeenth-century s impulse toward rationalization would hardly tolerate this condi-tion. French mathematician and acoustician Marin Mersenne (1588-1648)endorsed regulating the tactus by means of a pendulum made from a musketball attached to a three-and-a-half-foot string. The swing of this pendulumsarc lasts a second.11 What Mersenne describes, of course, is a crude metro-nome, a device that both Diederich Nicolaus Winkel and Johann Maelzelclaim to have perfected in the early nineteenth century.

About a century before the cinema emerges, the metronome began to setmusical tempos with increasing frequency. Beethoven was the first com-poser to indicate metronome markings for his symphonic compositions,yet these did not rigorously dictate tempo. That task fell to the conductor,whose ascendancy can also be attributed to Beethoven's intricate scores forlarge orchestras, which called for an authoritative presence to maintainorder. The nineteenth-century conductor arrived to replace the practice ofan orchestra member beating time audibly on a desk or floor. Of course,a leader who is also an orchestra member cannot concentrate equally on


supervising the musicians and performing a musical part. Moreover, he orshe cannot easily see the entire ensemble nor be seen by fellow members.The modern symphony orchestra required an individual dedicated to thetask of commanding the others. Many changes had to occur before autho-rity was centralized in a single conductor wielding a baton from the podium.In Germany and Vienna the Concertmeister, usually the first violinist, andthe Kapellmeister, who typically directed while seated at a keyboard, sharedconducting responsibilities. For unwieldy symphonic pieces, a third con-ductor might be enlisted to oversee the chorus.12 However, by the late nine-teenth century, the autocratic conductor of the type personified by ArturoToscanini had come to power.13

However, the institutions that support 'serious' music and the industrythat makes movies treat employees quite differently. Hollywood demoted theconductor from absolute maestro of the concert hall to efficient Werkmeisterof the studio sound stage, charged primarily with keeping work runningsmoothly. Although so-called silent film exhibition tolerated a degree ofindividual license, with projection speed occasionally adjusted to suit musi-cal tempo, orchestra conductors desiring proximate synchronization werestill compelled to accommodate the film projector and conform to temposcalculated with a stopwatch and a metronome. In short, the process of scor-ing for film contrasts sharply with the traditional situation in which thecomposer expresses musical ideas through a score that the conductor trans-lates for the players. Whereas, in live performances, the conductor keepsthe orchestra 'in concert' by imposing his or her interpretation of tempoand dynamics, in recording film music both conductor s gestures and play-ers' movements become subject to clock time.

Composer and conductor Max Steiner, who adopted the click trackmethod in the thirties, seems unruffled by this loss of control: 'My orchestrais used to following these click tracks, which sound something like a met-ronome', he proclaims proudly. 'In fact, in some cases, they don't even needa conductor; the click track leads them'.14 Steiner s insouciance while dis-cussing the conductor's obsolescence may appear strange, yet his pragmaticattitude towards automation surely played a part in his vast output - as didhis amphetamine use, which in many instances fuelled his hurried scoringprojects. According to Gary Marmorstein,15 the composer was introducedto Benzedrine by David O. Selznick, who, quips Marmorstein, 'operatedon an even higher octane level' than Steiner.16 Indeed, Hollywood adoptedthe model of an engine efficiently converting energy into power. Oncefilm production embraced the general model of industrial production inthe late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, the film-music industry

The Click Track 105

quickly followed suit. By the mid-1950s, all the major studios containedvertically integrated music departments staffed with composers, orchestra-tors, copyists, editors, etc. Although very often only the musical directorreceived screen credit for the pictures score, the staff routinely shared com-posing chores on a single film. Composer David Raksin characterizes thissort of teamwork' - which he dubs the Ynovie-score-by-relay system' - astypical of'nearly every studio in town'.17

While the motor provides a structuring metaphor for individual andcollective human endeavour, for technical operations the effects of automa-tion were quite literal. Although Thomas Edison and W. K, L. Dickson hadexperimented in the 1890s with battery-driven cameras, they soon aban-doned the idea. Cranking by hand held sway until the late 1920s, whenthe invention of the rheostat allowed a tireless electric motor to replace thefatigue-prone cameraman and projector operator. Without this transfor-mation, synchronous sound would not have been possible. This drivetowards automation affected the music-scoring process as well, for the pro-jectors evolution from mechanical machine to electric motor demandedthat tempo be regulated to the same degree.

The click track arose as one way to signal tempo during recordingsessions. Although Steiner is often credited with inventing this technique,Walt Disney had already employed it for his Silly Symphony series and MickeyMouse cartoons - thus the appellation 'Mickey Mousing' to designate thestrict correspondence between visual and sound images.18 Composer CarlStalling, who worked for Disney before moving to Warner Brothers, wasprobably the first to use the technique.19 Wilfred Jackson, an animator whobegan working for Disney in 1928, recalls the genesis of the click-trackmethod:

I knew what a metronome was. So I brought one to work and showedit to Walt. I set the metronome at 60 and it ticked sixty times ina minute-one tick every twenty-four frames. I set it at 120 and got atick every twelve frames. I could make it tick in any multiple of framesWalt wanted. Then I got out my harmonica and played 'Turkey in theStraw' while the metronome ticked away, and Walt could tell how fastthe music was going.20

Jackson's anecdote gives an empirical demonstration of the mechanicalprinciples for synchronization. First, he establishes the relation betweenthe metronomes pendulum and the clock's second hand. Since film speed -twenty-four frames per second - is given, Jackson then demonstrates the


mathematical operations that reveal that doubling the metronome speedhalves the frame rate. Disney tested several methods before settling on anaudible click track, however. William Garity, another Disney employee,recounts the studios attempts to synchronize sound and picture employingwavy lines and a bouncing ball, all of which were eventually abandoned infavour of the aural click process.21 Disney also experimented with project-ing blank film with holes punched in the centre of the frame at appropriateintervals. But this solution proved impractical, since, as Shamus Culhaneobserves, 'the musicians went crazy trying to read the music, watch theconductor, and look at the screen.22

Nevertheless, some composers and conductors favoured visual cues.At Twentieth Century-Fox, Alfred Newman and Charles Dunworth deviseda method using streamers and punches - diagonal lines that move acrossthe screen followed by circular flashes made by literally punching holesin the centre of frames to mark important events such as downbeats. Thistechnique became known as the Newman system.23 Others adopted thistechnique to supplement the click track. Russian composer and authorLeonid Sabaneev describes the practice of alerting the conductor with'three signals, in the form of zigzags'. Unfortunately, 'the conductor mustguess at the tempi and make sure that the music coincides well with theevents on the screen.24 To reinforce such unreliable methods, conductorsmust share the podium with various automatic timekeepers such as thestudio stop-clock, which was a sort of large stopwatch mounted on thepodium. Kurt London's Film Music (1936) catalogues several alternativedevices of this sort. His book contains the only reference I know to aninvention by Carl Robert Blum called the rhythmonome or the phono-rhythm. This device, which translates physical movement into rhythmicnotation, was placed on the conductor's desk and coupled with a projector.London also mentions the cinepupitre, used by Arthur Honegger to scoreAbel Gance's La Roue (1922). Another oddball practice London describesentailed showing a conductor on film, to whose gestures the 'live' conduc-tor in the orchestra pit would try to synchronize his own movements.Alternatively, a synchronized score would scroll across the bottom of thescreen. In any case, although the above techniques avoid the annoying tick ofthe metronome, the click track guarantees the most reliable synchronization.

Formulas for calculating a click track are not difficult. Since metronomemarkings are expressed as beats per minute, we can divide the number ofbeats by 60 seconds and then multiply this result by frames-per-second. Forexample, suppose a composer estimates a metronome marking of 48 quar-ter notes per minute for a certain film sequence. If there are 48 beats in

The Click Track 107

60 seconds, one beat would take a second and a quarter. This operationrenders a click track value of 30 frames (30-0).25 To produce this click,the editor punches a hole corresponding to every 30 frames in a lengthof leader, which is then looped to provide a regularly repeating click. Ofcourse, the practice of actually punching holes became less typical with thearrival of magnetic film stock and the development of accurate electronicmetronomes. Nevertheless, these digital metronomes still express temposin terms of frames rather than beats. In a recording session, the click trackoffers precision no conductor could deliver. While, as Hagen observes, 'it isnot possible to accurately catch a 10th of a second with the baton, the useof a click track 'can remove the human frailties of conducting, playing, andholding strict tempos in the orchestra.26 It also provides a finer resolutionthan the mechanical metronome would allow.27 Since a click track is calcu-lated by dividing a single 35 mm frame into eight sections marked by thesprockets and the space between sprockets; and since a frame equals l/24thof a second, the resulting click track can provide a resolution of 1/192 ofa second.

Nevertheless, performing such calculations for each and every film seg-ment proved inefficient once computers could generate and collate suchdata quickly and on a large scale. Consequently, the mid-1960s saw thepublication of technical manuals such as Ruby Raksins Technical Hand-book of Mathematics for Motion Picture Music and the widely popular clicktrack book, Carroll Knudsons Project Time (1965). For these accomplish-ments, both men won Academy Awards in the Scientific/Engineering cate-gory in 1966. Knudson, a film cutter who worked for Twentieth Century- Fox,devised his book to help film composers match tempos with appropriateclick tracks. The book lists timings in seconds and fractions of seconds forbeats from 0 to 599 for click tracks from 6 to 8 frames (a little more than afourth of a second) to 36 frames (a second and a half). The procedure forusing a click track works as follows. Before establishing any tempos, thecomposer, in the company of the music editor, director and producer,'spots' the film in order to decide where music should go. Next, the musiceditor, working on an editing machine called a Moviola, translates theaction in each section or 'cue' into minutes/seconds and footage and pre-pares a detailed list of timings for the composer to use as guide. The com-poser then approximates a metronome marking for each musical cue andchecks the click-track manual to see how many beats or clicks fall on impor-tant visual 'hits'. Using the charts to cross-reference stopwatch timings withbeats, the composer can choose a tempo that catches the optimal numberof hits.


Hagen warns that, although the Knudson book correlates each clicktrack to a particular metronome marking, the latter may not render entirelyaccurate tempos. To ensure tolerable synchronization (deviation of lessthan two frames), the metronome must be augmented by another indis-pensable tool for the film composer - the stopwatch. In fact, composerIrwin Bazelon calls the stopwatch 'the only mechanical gadget a composerneeds!28 Introduced in 1690 by Samuel Watson to assist physicians in takingpulse rates, the stopwatch soon became used to monitor the efficiency ofworker s movements. As Macey points out, employers subjected workers totime-motion studies long before Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced hissystem of scientific management in the 1910s. Nevertheless, Taylor firstpromoted the widespread practice of managements scrutinizing labouraccording to Accurate, minute, motion and time study'.29 Compare the situ-ation of the film-music conductor, who epitomizes the role of overseer.From the podium he can survey the stop-clock, the screen and the musi-cians, who see neither the screen nor each other in many cases, since soundseparation often requires isolating baffles.30

Before the advent of digital synchronization systems, the click track pro-vided impressively precise synchronization. However, video productionpresented obvious problems for a system based on punching holes in film.In 1967 the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers introducedSMPTE time code, which marks tape and film location in hours, minutes,seconds and frames. At first, SMPTE was neither as precise nor as simple asthe click- track book. The frame counter presented special difficulties dueto the rather complicated solution proposed to accommodate colour tele-vision broadcasting in the United States. The move from a standard frame-rate expressed as a simple integer (30 fps) for black and white to 'drop-frame'format (approximately 29.97 fps) for colour was an awkward compromiseat best. In this system, the relation of frames to seconds could no longer beexpressed as a rational number. 'Drop-frame* SMPTE took a step backwardin terms of time rationalization. Nevertheless, SMPTE has the advantage ofreducing to binary code, making it, if not quite ideal, at least functional forthe digital age. In the eighties, personal computer programs such as Cueand Auricle arrived to calculate tempos and generate click tracks. Today,integrated systems such as Fairlight s, or programs such as Digidesign ProTools linked with non-linear editing systems such as AVID, Premiere orFinal Cut Pro allow audiovisual post-production to be accomplished virtu-ally, with several alternate versions stored on hard drives. Tempos are nolonger subject to the rate of frames passing through the projector but toincredibly fast computer processor clock speeds. Since the 1980s, when

The Click Track 109

SMPTE time code became compatible with Musical Instrument DigitalInterface (MIDI), composers working with electronic synthesizers and sam-plers have been able to create, edit and mix nearly unlimited music trackswithout degeneration. These innovations provoked a reaction from thestandard bearers of tradition, prompting veterans such as Jerry Goldsmithand David Raksin to bemoan the number of younger musicians unable toread and write musical notation.31 Fred Karlin, whose On the Track (1990,coauthored with Rayburn Wright) contains an updated click-track manualby Alexander R. Brinkman, comments on the current state of affairs: 'Withtheir computers locked into sync with videotape copies of the film, theirmusic can be as synchronous as they wish'.32 Apparently, they desire onlya minimal amount of strict synchronization.

Of course, shifting tastes as well as technological changes affect stylisticpractices. To connect a certain practice with a specific technology is not tolink their fates. As a matter of fact, the decrease of Mickey Mousing coincideswith an increase in click-track usage.33 Kathryn Kalinak notes that 'MickeyMousing has come to represent the worst excesses of the Hollywood filmscore. Perhaps as contemporary spectators we are no longer used to hear-ing Mickey Mousing in films'. Kalinak observes that the practice 'radicallydiminished in the 1950s and after'.34 The postwar trend away from actiontowards psychological depth is partly to blame. The ascendancy of Methodacting in the fifties exacerbated this trend, with filmmakers counting onmusic to provide insight into the psyche of the inscrutable and inarticulatehero as portrayed by a James Dean or Marlon Brando.

Even so, criticism of Mickey Mousing and its chief practitioner, Steiner,began earlier. In 1937 David O. Selznick blames Steiner s habit of'interpretingeach line of dialogue and each movement musically' for his (temporary)break with the composer.35 For Selznick, dialogue and movement shouldstand in relief against a musical background. 'The purpose of a score', hedeclares, 'is to unobtrusively help the mood of each scene without theaudience being even aware that they are listening to music'.36 Selznick per-sistently argued that composers should work with the script rather thanthe finished film - a logical expectation if one believes that film music iswritten to dramatic situations rather than to moving images.

Writing in the early 1970s, composer Irwin Bazelon labels Steiner spenchant for close synchronization a 'special weakness' Bazelon denigratesMickey Mousing as both redundant and obvious because it unnecessarilyduplicates visual information. But his main objection is that MickeyMousing distracts the viewer, draws attention to itself and thereby destroysnarrative illusion.37 How this practice can both reinforce the obvious in the


frame and distract the viewer's attention is unclear, yet Bazelon's complaintsecho those of silent film lecturers who often objected that trap drummerswere more concerned with catching trivial visual cues than with promot-ing narrative continuity.38 Of course, the talkies elevated speech over visualaction. The shift in musics function is reflected in Karlin and Wrights listof the appropriate uses of music: (1) to establish 'dramatic point of view',(2) to get inside a characters head1, (3) to 'emphasize emotion1 and (4) to'provide rhythmic pulse to drive action.39 Notice that the rhythmic functionoccupies last place. Contrast the list by Manvell and Huntley originallycomposed in 1957, which mentions 'Music and Action' first and 'Music ofHuman Emotion sixth.40

If music must carefully avoid obscuring dialogue, it must also, for the sakeof 'realism', surrender to sound effects the privilege of providing rhythmicmomentum and dynamic punctuation. Restricted thus, music is primarilycharged with conveying emotion. In the silent era, visible expression usu-ally marked strong feelings, but the modern acting style has narrowed theacceptable range of expression. Music serves to fill the void. Successfulcomposers are those who can capture the atmosphere, mood or 'feel' ofa scene - what Stephen Handzo might call the scenes 'implicit values'.41 Theindustry promotes and fosters this ability. Karlin and Wright, for example,advise composers to 'monitor your emotional reactions, and make mentalnotes about emotionally affecting scenes and moments'42 Contemporarycomposer Amin Bhatia agrees that dialogue carries the story; effects pro-vide 'the reality' and music emphasizes emotion. Rather than impinging onnarrative and realistic domains, music should confine itself to underscor-ing 'the emotional reaction of the scene, rarely leading the story or accent-ing a visual moment'.43 The practice of closely linking musical and visualmovement is sanctioned to an extent outside naturalistic drama. In fact,Mickey Mousing persists in animation and is still practiced at the studiowhere it began. Kathleen Bennett, music editor at Disney's Buena VistaSound, states: 'In animation, you can get away with not playing a real effectif the music is stinging something, where it just doesn't feel right in liveaction'.44

A click track may seem inessential for musical segments that requirestart and stop points only. Nevertheless, precise calculations are still neces-sary to prevent music from running past the end of the cue. The tendencyof directors to treat the soundtrack as a pastiche of classical pieces or popsongs has not obviated the tools for composing, performing, conductingand editing film music. The click track survived for so long because it wasnot tied to a specific stylistic practice or to a particular mode of production.

The Click Track 111

However, use of the click-track book has virtually faded away. In fact,the latest edition of Karlin and Wrights On the Track no longer includesBrinkmans click-track manual. Karlin justifies this omission by noting that'almost everyone writing music for any sort of film or video project todayuses a computer as a timing aid'.45 Although the tools for composing havechanged from mechanical to digital, the end of the studio system did notresult in less specialization in the commercial movie industry. A produc-tion system in which projects are but-sourced' to independent composersand firms has succeeded the vertically integrated studio system. This dis-persion of labour makes standardization and precision more essentialthan ever.

Notes

1. Samuel L. Macey, The Dynamics of Progress: Time, Method, and Measure. Athens:University of Georgia Press, 1989, pp. 6-8.

2. Rick Altman, 'Evolution of sound technology', in Elizabeth Weiss and John Belton(eds), Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, p. 47.

3. Goldmark (2005), p. 6.4. Edward W. Kellogg, 'History of sound motion pictures', Journal of the Society of

Motion Picture Engineers, 64 (6) (June 1955), 357.5. Cf. David Bordwell, in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The

Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1985, p. 305: 'Given the centrality of editing within the classical paradigm,the coming of sound represented a threat. For both economic and stylistic reasons, theoption of editing had to be preserved.'

6. Claudia Gorbman defines a stinger as 'a musical sforzando used to illustrate suddendramatic tension' (Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1987, p. 88). In her chapter on Steiner, she introduces MickeyMousing and the stinger as two types of illustration dependent on the click track.

7. Gorbman (1987), p. 88.8. Rick Altman claims: 'Throughout the thirties, nearly every important technological

innovation can be traced back to the desire to produce a persuasive illusion of real peoplespeaking real words'. This desire coincides with 'a felt need to reduce all traces of the soundwork from the sound track' (Altman (1985), p. 47).

9. Earle Hagen, Scoring for Films. Los Angeles: Alfred Publishing Co., 1971,1.10. Gerard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal

Orders, Thomas Dunlap (trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 287.11. George Houle, Meter in Music, 1600-1800: Performance, Perception, and Notation.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987, p. 5.12. Adam Carse, The Orchestra: From Beethoven to Berlioz. Cambridge: W. Heffer and

Sons Ltd, 1948, p. 305.


13. See Lebrecht (1995) and especially Theodor W. Adorno, 'The Mastery of the Maestro',in Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999,pp. 40-53 on Toscanini, power, and fascism. For Adorno, Toscanini did not exercise sover-eign authority for his own glory but for the sake of mechanization, precision andorganization.

14. Quoted in Tony Thomas, Film Score: The Art and Craft of Movie Music. Burbank:Riverwood Press, 1991, p. 71.

15. Gary Marmorstein, Hollywood Rhapsody: Movie Music and its Makers 1900-1975.New York: Schirmer, 1997, p. 72.

16. Ibid.17. Quoted in Clifford McCarty, Film Music L New York: Garland, 1989, p. 174.18. Handzo, (Stephen Handzo, A narrative glossary of film sound technology', in Elizabeth

Weiss and John Belton (eds), Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia Univer-sity Press, 1985, p. 410) for instance, credits Steiner with inventing the click track. Goldmark(2005: 6) notes that the term 'Mickey Mousing' probably originated with Selznick, whocoined the term to deride Steiner s habit of closely mimicking screen action with music.

19. See Scott Curtis's essay 'The Sound of Early Warner Bros. Cartoons' in Altman et al.,for Stalling's role in formulating the click track. Curtis claims that 'the first click tracks wererecorded on disc, but later holes were punched into black leader that would be read by anoptical reproducer' (Altman, 195).

20. Quoted in Ross Care, 'Cinesymphony: Music and animation at the Disney Studio1928-1942', Sight and Sound 46(1), (1976-1977), 41.

21. William Garrity, 'The production of animated cartoons', Journal of the Society ofMotion Picture Engineers. XX (4), (April 1933), 321.

22. Shamus Culhane, Animation: From Script to Screen. New York: St. Martin's Press,1990, p. 258.

23. For a detailed explanation of the Newman system see Milton Lustig, Music Editingfor Motion Pictures. New York: Hastings House, 1980, pp. 107-114. See also Kathryn Kalinak,Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film. Madison, WI: University ofWisconsin Press, 1992, p. 96. For a general overview of Newmans career and particularly histenure as head of Twentieth Century-Fox's music department, see Marmorstein, pp. 209-31.

24. Leonid Sabaneev, Music for the Films, S. W. Pring (trans.). New York: Arno, 1978, p. 98.25. There are several ways to calculate a click track. For a thorough list of synchroniza-

tion formulas, see Appendix C of Jeffrey C. Rona's Synchronization from Reel to Reel, 1989,pp. 116-17.

26. Hagen( 1971), pp. 37,38.27. In Mark Evans's words: After the introduction of the click track technique,

coordination became an exact science' (Mark Evans, Soundtrack: The Music of the Movies.New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1975, p. 32).

28. Irwin Bazelon, Knowing the Score: Notes on Film Music. New York: Van NostrandReinhold Company, 1975, p. 49.

29. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management. New York:Norton, 1967, p. 25.

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30. Compare the sound-on-film system Walter Wanger and associates put together forParamount in 1928. According to Scott Eyman, this 'Rube Goldberg device . . . involvedtwo projectors running in sync - one for the picture, one for the sound - a stopwatch anda metronome' (Scott Eyman, The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution1926-1930. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997, p. 179).

31. David Mermelstein, In Hollywood, discord on What makes music', New York Times,

(2 November 1997), 11,17, 30.32. Quoted in Thomas (1997), p. 18.33. Fred Karlin and Rayburn Wright, On the Track. New York: Schirmer, 1990, p. 103.

34. Kalinak(1992),p. 116.35. Kate Daubney notes that 'The placement of music in response to physical actions

on the screen in the area of scoring practice for which Steiner has been most criticised'(Kate Daubney, Max Steiner s Now Voyager: A Film Score Guide. London: Greenwood Press,

2000, p. 27.)36. David O. Selznick, in Ruby Behlmer (ed.), Memo from David O. Selznick. New York:

Viking, 1972, p. 122.37. Bazelon(1975),p.24.38. James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation,

Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, p. 105.39. Karlin and Wright (1990), p. 48.40. Manvell and Huntley (1975), p. 89. The complete list reads as follows: Music and

Action; Scenic and Place music; Period and Pageant music; Music for Dramatic Tension;Comedy music; Music of Human Emotion; Music in Cartoon and Specialized Film. The listis, admittedly, somewhat anachronistic. Contrast the one by Aaron Copland from 1949.Quoted in Jeff Smith, The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music. New York:Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 6.

41. As Handzo notes, 'The modern trend is away from "catching" action to illuminatingthe implicit values in a scene' (Handzo, 410).

42. Karlin and Wright, p. 29.43. Amin Bhatia,'The ink and paint of music', Animation World Magazine 2.1 (April

1997). Available at http://www.awn.eom/mag/Lssue2.l/articles/bhatia2.l.html (accessed on27 February 2008).

44. Quoted in Tom Kenny, Sound for Picture: The Art of Sound Design in Film andTelevision. Vallejo, CA: Mix Books, 2000, p. 43.

45. F. Karlin, On the Track (2nd edn). New York: Routledge, 2004, p. xvii.

http://www.awn.eom/mag/Lssue2.1/articles/bhatia2.1.html

6The Synthesizer

The Electronic Musical Instrument in Film Song and Sound

Nicholas Laudadio

Introduction

For a filmgoer in the early twenty-first century, it is quite difficult to imaginea film score without some form of electronically generated sound - whetherit be the grainy drone of a synthesizers sawtooth wave in the last momentsbefore the killer strikes, or an eerily-realistic electronic string quintet settinglovers a-flutter in the latest romantic comedy. But while a culture so comfort-able with the textures of electronic timbres has not always been the norm,the sound of electronic musical instruments has played a part in the his-tory of film for nearly as long as film has existed. This essay will attempt tofollow the general development of the electronic musical instrument andits use in film scoring and sound design in an attempt to show how andwhere these histories overlap.

To begin, it seems best to start not at the beginning, but rather at whatone might term the beginnings end. By 1956 the electronic musical instru-ment in its various forms had been put to cinematic use for nearly twodecades, but it wasn't until that year that a feature-length Hollywood filmshowcased an entirely electronic score. The product of New York avant-garde composers Bebe and Louis Barron, the soundtrack for Fred Wilcoxsfilm 'Forbidden Planet', a science fiction adaptation of The Tempest, was aremarkable piece of music that on critic called one of the most imaginativeelectronic music creations of all time... [that] wrote the book on what outer

114

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space sounded like' (McGowan: 110). The Barrens' often atonal and arrhyth-mic score full of blips, pengs, and whirrs was so unfamiliar and so unlikethen-popular notions of film music that they were acknowledged in thecredits by the compellingly vague title 'Electronic Tonalities by Bebe andLouis Barron' rather than the more traditional musical composition credit.Initially, this was done by MGM to avoid backlash from the musiciansunion (the Barrons were non-union, a fact that some critics believe keptthem from winning an Oscar for this score) because they were concernedthat the score could not be termed 'music' as it combined the jobs of the'sound department, the special effects department, and the music depart-ment' (Barron: 199). As one critic puts it, the Barrons' score 'makes no dis-tinction between the emotional underscoring of the love scene, the soundsof the United Planetary Cruiser C57D whizzing toward the planet Altair,and the otherworldly strains of music created by the long-extinct Krellcivilization' (Wierzbicki: 37).

On the surface, this liminal quality of the Barrons' work highlights oneof the more pressing issues regarding the role of electronic instrumentsin film sound: electronic instruments were used as often as sound effectsgenerators as 'traditional' tools for musical composition and performance.The result, as critic Russell Lack points out, is that 'the basic tools for under-standing the musical experience [of the electronic film score] are them-selves obscured by the blurred distinction between electronic sound andelectronic music' (318). By the mid-1950s, mainstream film audiences weregrowing accustomed to the particular 'feel' of electronic timbres, yet thesenew instruments were more often draped in the warmth of more tradi-tional acoustic sounds, as in Franz Waxman's score for 'Rebecca (1940), orclearly isolated as sonic signifiers of that which is alien or monstrous, as inBernard Hermanns score for 'The Day the Earth Stood Still'(1951). In theirscore, the Barrons seem to deny the audience those familiar demarcationsand invite them to experience the sound of circuitry on its own terms. Theresult was not only one of the most engaging examples of early electronica,but a score that, through its use of unabashed electronic sound, added apalpably alien quality to the film's narrative that remains affecting to thisday even when some of the visual effects have lost their luster.

But even more than this, the importance of the Barrons' score comesfrom its ability to raise powerful questions about the role film sound playsin cinemas ability to re-present experience through the 'illusion of natural-ness' - the notion that the image, sound, and music all somehow 'makesense' together. If the audience can't tell the difference between soundon-screen and off- between diegetic and non-diegetic sound - then some


of the more fundamental assumptions about the role of sound in visualnarrative become a bit less fundamental. But regardless, in this brief exam-ple one quickly becomes aware of the power of electronic music to echo theconcerns of film sound as itself an electronic medium that struggles notonly to recreate 'natural' sound, but also to craft new modes of cinematicexperience that move beyond representation. In its ability to accomplishsuch a feat, the electronic instrument proves itself to be a valuable meansby which to explore the history of film sound and the tremendous, if some-times unacknowledged, influence it has had over our understanding of filmas one of the most important representational technologies of the twentiethcentury.

Beginnings

On 14 February 1876, Elisha Gray and his patent for the telephone arrivedat the United States Patent Office just after Alexander Graham Bell. Despitethe years of litigation that followed - and the fact that Grays design repre-sented a working prototype whereas Bells would not have functioned asdescribed - Grays role in the development of the telephone is all but forgotten.However, a fortunate consequence of his telephone research granted hima significant, if somewhat less well-known, place in technological history.In the course of his work on the telegraph that lead to his near-invention ofthe telephone, Gray stumbled across the method of generating, controlling,and amplifying sound from an electric oscillator. Elisha Gray may not beremembered for almost inventing the telephone, but he is known for usingthis electric oscillator to create what many argue is the first electronic musi-cal instrument: a two octave monophonic keyboard instrument he calledthe 'Musical Telegraph'.

Gray never put the Musical Telegraph to much use (beyond that of yetanother technological marvel for his many public demonstrations), it does,however represent one of the first of many happy accidents to come fromelectronic communication research at the end of the nineteenth century.But what makes Grays little keyboard so notable beyond being the firstelectronic instrument is that it indicates one of the more compelling aspectsof the forthcoming evolution and use of the electronic musical instrument.From its very beginnings, the development of the electronic instrumentwas more connected with the growing technology of representation andcommunication than it was with any musical community. It grew out of thenineteenth-century dream of a total representational medium - a unified

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expression of image, sound and text - that would find its most coherentarticulation in film.

Just two years after the Lumiere Brothers famously shot their first framesof film at the gates of their factory, lawyer and inventor Thaddeus Cahillwas filing his patent (#580.035) on the 'Telharmonium', considered to be thefirst significant electronic musical instrument. A massive 200-tonne instru-ment, the Telharmonium, was constructed of a series of modified dynamosthat produced alternating currents over various audio frequencies and wasengineered to explore new harmonic possibilities. The tones produced bythis sixty-foot long complex of gears and wires were controlled by multiplepolyphonic keyboards and were initially amplified by a series of giantacoustic horns. The idea was that, eventually, the Telharmonium (also knownas a Dynamophone) would be connected to a telephone network and func-tion as something of a real-time proto-Muzak,1 piping music out of tele-phones and into restaurants, stores, and theaters.

As he began to refine his invention, Cahill founded the 'New EnglandElectric Music Company' and a version of his instrument was built intoan entire floor of a building ('Telharmonic Hall') in midtown Manhattanand hooked up to the phone lines. However, due to its tremendous cost(US $200,000) and the fact that its musical messagings tended to interferewith the (predominantly non-musical) telephone network, Cahill s behemothfailed to catch on and, by WWI, had all but disappeared. Yet his concept ofa multi-timbral and highly flexible electronic musical instrument (the firstto employ additive synthesis) controlled by a traditional musical keyboardhad established, if unsuccessfully for the moment, a vision that would notagain be fully realized until the invention of the synthesizer half a centurylater.

In hindsight it is obvious that Cahill's grandiose experiment in bothmusical production and consumption was far ahead of its time. But ifCahills dream of piping music into theaters across the country was in partconfounded by noise in the telephony network, it was a similar technolo-gical obstacle that played a part in the music that accompanied early films.At the first public performance of a Lumiere cinematograph, some arguethat one of the primary functions of the improvised piano accompanimentwas to drown out the rattling noise of the projector. Of course, music hadlong been a part of nineteenth century theatrical entertainments as well asearly cinema technologies (such as the Magic Lantern shows in the 1870s),but the difference in this case was that in addition to providing a sense ofperceptual continuity (akin to the 'illusion of presence') to these early films,


the music and the instruments that created it were becoming increasinglytied up with these various technologies of communication and representation.From their very beginnings, electronic music and film were oddly inter-twined in their attempts to harness technological developments in theservice of this illusion.

The Theremin

In 1907, a year after the Telharmoniums first public demonstration, Cahillbegan a brief collaboration with inventor and 'Father of the Radio' Lee DeForest who, in January of that same year, had received a patent for whatwould become his most famous and influential invention, the Audion'vacuum tube. De Forest suggested that his vacuum tube powered radiotransmitters would provide a better mode of broadcast for the Dynamophone,but Cahill remained unconvinced. De Forest too was interested in methodsof transmitting music, specifically live opera performances, into homes andpublic places. Had De Forest been more persuasive, he and his vacuumtube certainly would have made Cahills instrument much more practical(both in size and amplification, as well as in transmission), but while theTelharmonium faded into obscurity, De Forests invention made possiblethe next major step in the production, amplification and broadcast trans-mission of sound.

But like Edison before him, De Forest wasn't content lingering too longover the technological applications and development of his inventions,as his more than 300 patents would suggest. Shortly after his failed collabo-ration with Cahill, De Forest discovered a method of combining two inaudi-ble high-frequency sound waves to produce an audible low-frequency wavecalled heterodyning or beat frequency oscillation. In 1915, utilizing his vac-uum tubes in a heterodyning oscillator system along with a method to con-trol timbre and pitch, De Forest created the first vacuum tube instrument..A small monophonic keyboard instrument reminiscent of Greys MusicalTelegraph, the Audion Piano1 (De Forest affectionately termed it the 'Squak-a-Phone'), appeared mostly alongside De Forests radio exhibitions andpromotions. Although a polyphonic version was purportedly in the works,the instrument never really caught on.

As De Forest continued to promote his Audion tube, he also began toconfront the problem of film sound. From Edison s experiments with theKinetophone to the short-lived phenomenon of the 'singing film* (a distantforerunner of the music video), there had been many attempts to makefilms 'talk5, but none had yet proved practical or profitable. In response to

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this, in 1922 De Forest developed the Phonofilm system - the first success-ful sound on film system where audio was recorded optically next to thefilm in parallel lines down the film strip. But despite the relative success ofDe Forest s early sound films, the film industry opted to use a synchronizedsound disc format known as the Vitaphone system.

Even though the Phonofilm technology was rejected, DeForest s impacton film sound was to be far-reaching. Hollywood later adopted a version ofDe Forests sound on film design and Western Electric, the company thatbought the rights to his Audion tube (oddly enough, founded by othernearly successful inventor Elisha Grey) was to play a big role in bringingsound to theaters across the country. But one of the more dramatic shifts inthe sound of film music came from the technology De Forest pioneeredwith his Audion Piano. The ideas behind his little unsuccessful instrumentwould travel across the world to serve as the basis for the first significantelectronic instrument used in film scores: the Thereminovox or simply, the'Theremin!

After noticing that the natural capacitance of the human body wouldcause frequency variation in De Forests heterodyning effect, Russian cellistand electrical engineer Leon (Lev) Termin envisioned a novel way to recon-ceptualize the most basic aspect of the musical interface: touch. In 1917, hedesigned the prototype of the theremin (or thereminvox), an instrumentthat allowed the musician to modulate an electronic tone (fixed to resemblea violin) by moving her hands in proximity to two antennae (one for pitch,one for volume). When playing the theremin, the musician seems to sculptair into sound. As if conducting some ethereal orchestra (it was also knownas an Aetherophone), the thereminist is the only musician whose perfor-mative movements are completely apart from the instrument (it is noto-rious difficult to play as there are no visual or tactile reference points).Photos of Clara Rockmore, one of the first truly accomplished theremi-nists and close friend of Termin, standing in front of a podium thereminwith a far-away look framed by her two arms akimbo seem more like some-thing from Man Ray s studio than a concert performance photo.

The sound of Rockmore s theremin dovetails nicely with the visual natureof the performance; the continuous glissando of the vacuum tubes isshaped and restrained into notes hovering somewhere between a voice anda violin with few overtones, finally becoming plaintive, melancholic, andfull of space. A trained violinist and Russian emigre who met Terminin New York in 1930, Rockmore played and treated the theremin like thetraditional concert instrument she had set aside, and she had no patiencefor the instruments novelty factor. Later in her career, she remarked on


having been asked to play the theremin for a popular film score and refused,noting that instrument shouldn't be used to make 'spooky noises'. Despiteher intentions, it was for these very spooky noises that the theremin cameto be known. In part because of the nature of the gestural controls and theinstrument's innate difficulty, it became something of an effects generatorfor the many film scores and soundtracks in the coming years.

The first film to feature a theremin was the 1931 Russian film *Alone(OdnaY directed by Grigori Kozintsev. Originally a silent film, Alone gaineda soundtrack by Dmitri Shostakovich just before its release as film soundwas just then made available in Russia. The score was to be the only timeShostakovich wrote for the instrument, yet the tremulous notes followedby the smooth and eerie glissandos in the scores Storm Breaks suggest themanner in which the instrument would come to be remembered. Butdespite its dramatic cinematography, tremendous score and emotionalintensity, the films politics weren't in keeping the tenants of the first FiveYear Plan, so it got shelved a few years later and was eventually lost in thesiege of Leningrad in 1941 (it was later pieced together from various prints).Like the first film to feature his instrument, so too did Termin come intoconflict with the Soviet authorities. After the first concert performance of theinstrument in 1924 which garnered a good deal of praise from the powers-that-be (Lenin commissioned 600 of them), Termin successfully touredwith his instrument. He later moved to New York and set up a studio wherehe continued work on the instrument, putting together a keyboard versionof the theremin as well as a 'theremin cello', which featured a traditionalfingerboard. When, in 1929, RCA decided to manufacture the theremin,it seemed as if Termin and his invention were on their way to success.However, accused by Stalin s regime of anti-Soviet propaganda, Termin waskidnapped from his apartment in Manhattan and sent to a Siberian laborcamp where he was eventually put to work on top-secret Soviet projects(including the first electronic eavesdropping device).

But where Termin and Odna were to disappear for a time in the ruthlessmachinations of Stalinism, the instrument itself was just beginning to benoticed. Prominantly featuring the theremin, 'Miklos Rozsa's score for'Spellbound' (1945) would win an Oscar for best score with a performance by'Dr. Samuel Hoffman, the most highly regarded thereminist after Rockmore.But despite concert works composed for it by Charles Ives and AaronCopeland as well as the staunch evangelism of people like Rockmore, the'spooky sounds' of the theremin in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and'It Came from Outerspace (1953) were to define the popular conception ofthe theremin.

The Synthesizer 121

The theremin was not the only instrument of this period to exploit themethod of heterodyning oscillators. In fact, despite its significant contribu-tion to film and popular understanding of electronic music, the thereminwas something of a commercial failure in comparison to one of the instru-ments it inspired. In 1928, shortly after Termin moved to New York, twoinventors were making significant contributions to the continuing evolu-tion of the electronic musical instrument. French telegraphist MauriceMartenot, also a cellist, conceived and constructed the 'Ondes Martenot'.Much like the theremin, Martenot's instrument was intended to be inte-grated into the traditional orchestra and it is still featured in orchestrasacross the world.

Some argue that the reason for the Ondes Martenots success was that it,unlike the theremin, the Ondes Martenot featured a traditional keyboardlayout and used a separate finger control for glissando and vibrato as wellas keys to adjust the timbre. The instrument's almost immediate acceptancewas greatly aided by compositions by such well-known composers asEdgard Varese and Olivier Messian. In addition to these and many other(mostly French) composers, Martenot s instrument began to appear in earlyFrench film scores. But it wasn't until 6 years after its invention that it wouldfind its way into Hollywood's aural vocabulary with 'Franz Waxmans 1936score for The Bride of Frankenstein. Later, in 1940, Waxman featured threeOndes-Martenots for his famous score for Hitchcock's Rebecca.

As Martenot was developing the Ondes, German electrical engineerFriedrich Trautwein was also using the heterodyning method to createa three octave subtractive synthesis device known as the 'Trautonium'.Visually similar to the modular synthesizers of some four decades later,Trautwein's instrument featured a fingerboard on which the musician wouldmake contact between a wire stretched over a metal strip, thus closingthe circuit at a given point and creating a tone that would then be filteredand amplified. Through the 1930s a number of composers wrote for theTrautonium, but it wasn't until the instrument was 'adopted' by composerand performer Oskar Sala, who had worked with the instrument from itsearliest stages, that it would achieve its most popular articulation in Sala'sscore for Hitchcock's' The Birds'in 1960. Sala continued to refine and developthe instrument, building more complex versions (such as the Mixurtrauto-nium) for use in his more than 300 film scores until his death in 2002. Sala'swork dramatically illustrated the flexibility of the technology developedby De Forest and one can begin to sense the growing sophistication of therole that the electronic instrument played in the soundscape of twentiethcentury film.


Along with the Ondes-Martenot s presence in Waxmans score for Rebeccawas another electronic instrument known as a 'Novachord'. Built in 1939 by'Lauren Hammond', the Novachord was the first electronic tube-basedorgan by the creator of possibly the most popular electronic instrument ofthe twentieth century. Just four years before, watchmaker Hammond hadstarted his organ company to produce an instrument that utilized techno-logy similar to that in the Telharmonium. It was in this particular combina-tion of the mechanical tone wheel and the drawbar system that utilizedCahills additive synthesis and created a most distinctive sound. Readilyidentifiable in numerous classic film scores and radio dramas, the HammondOrgan was de rigeur by the mid 1940s; it even found its way into one ofStockhausens compositions of this period. But the Hammond was to findits niche in American popular music of the 1950s and 1960s and its mostpopular model, the B3, would become one of the most revered instrumentsin American popular music history.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, as the Hammond came to definethe sound of radio drama, Raymond Scott, the young leader of the CBSradio house band was beginning to make a name for himself. His quirkybut compelling jazz-influenced scores were featured regularly on Your HitParade and, most famously, adopted by Warner Brothers' 'Merrie Melodies'and 'Loony Toons' cartoons. A Julliard graduate and aspiring engineer,Scott and his quintet performed for (and in) films of this period featuringthe likes of Ethel Merman, Shirley Temple and Eddie Cantor; however,he is probably best known for his composition 'Powerhouse', featured incartoons starting in 1943 and continuing to the present. 'Powerhouse' veryquickly came to symbolize the sound of automation and production withits metronomic urgency and jittery arrangement.

Despite his success with his quintet, Scott seemed to prefer working in thestudio with the machines rather than the musicians who could never quitekeep up with his exacting standards. His drummer once remarked that '[a]llhe ever had was machines - only we had names' and jazz singer Anita O'Dayopined that Scott 'reduced [musicians] to something like wind-up toys'(Scott). As he continued working with TV and radio orchestras, in 1946Scott founded 'Manhattan Research, Inc.', 'Designers and Manufacturers ofElectronic Music and Musique Concrete Devices and Systems', where hefocused his efforts on creating the machines that could meet his requirements.In 1949, sounding much like the Barrons 6 years later, Scott remarked:

Perhaps within the next hundred years, science will perfect a processof thought transference from composer to listener. The composerwill sit alone on the concert stage and merely THINK his idealized

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conception of his music. Instead of recordings of actual music sound,recordings will carry the brainwaves of the composer directly to themind of the listener (ibid.).

After creating a sound effects machine called the 'Karloff', Scott builtwhat was to be his most financially successful instrument: the 'Clavivox'.Originally intended to a be something of a theremin one could play with akeyboard, the instrument eventually became much more complex as Scottconceptualized new ways to shape the sound. But Scotts life work' wassomething of a holy grail for film composers and producers. In an effortto realize his notion of 'thought transference composition, Scott spenttwenty years working on the 'Electronium', an 'instantaneous composition-performance machine' which was a pitch and rhythm sequencer (Scottwas one of the first to build a working sequencer) that controlled a bank ofoscillators, a modified Hammond organ, an Ondes-Martenot and a fewClavivoxes. Earlier in his career he built the Videola, a modified pianothat allowed one to watch a film while playing along and being recorded,making real-time composition more feasible. The Electronium attemptedto facilitate the same process, just in the absence of the actual human con-tact (it had no keyboard, only switches and settings). While never quite sat-isfied with the Electronium, Scotts ridiculously forward-looking machineproduced, among other things, his three-volume work of synthesizedlullabyes called Soothing Sounds for Baby in 1960 that anticipated the workof minimalist composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

Thoughout his successful career as a composer and engineer, Scotthelped make audible the 'sound of the future1 for organizations as diverse asMotown, General Motors, Twinkies, and even the headache medicine Buff-erin (featuring a young Jim Henson). But despite his success, Scott was veryprotective (some would say paranoid) of engineering work and thus themajority of his electronic instrument research remained within the con-fines of his extensive Long Island workshop. It wasn't until much later thatthe tremendous scope of his work in electronic instruments and produc-tion was realized by the public. But his work was to directly influence thenext generation of electronic instrument designers who were to finallymake more accessible Scott's dream of what he plainly called the 'ArtisticCollaboration between Man and Machine' (ibid.).

The Synthesizer

All things considered, 1955 was a remarkable year for electronic music.In addition to Forbidden Planets recording sessions, it was also the year


that engineers Harry Olson and Herbert Belar built the 'RCA Mark I' pro-grammable digital synthesizer. Theoretically similar to Scott's Electronium,the RCA synthesizer was conceived as an electronic songwriting apparatusbased on mathematical probability systems. While still quite different frommodern conceptions of the synthesizer, the RCA instrument, especially inits second iteration, the Mark II, was an extremely powerful and flexibleinstrument for its time. It featured vacuum tube oscillators and a punchpaper interface that allowed the user to program and control a wide rangeof sound parameters. The most influential people to work with the RCAsynthesizer were Professors Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening andthe 'Columbia-Princeton Electronic Studio', the first academic institutiondesigned to promote electronic music and experimentation with electronicinstruments that they founded in 1955.

Another reason why 1955 was a remarkable time for electronic musicwas because that year a twenty year old engineering student named 'RobertMoog' visited Scott at his studio on Long Island. As a result of the meeting,Moog was later given a job assembling the Clavivox, a job he would keepthrough the early 1960s. But Scott's hermetic experimentation didn't quiteappeal to Moogs more entrepreneurial goals. Moog later remarked thatScott 'wasn't interested in marketing. He said he was, but I never got thefeeling that he wanted to do anything more than fool around' (qtd. in Man-hattan Research, Inc.). Although something of an over-simplification, thereis no doubt that when they worked together, Moog was more focused onbusiness success than Scott. By this time, Moog and his father had alreadystarted a company selling theremin kits out of the basement of their house.While Scott the engineer created instruments for Scott the composer,Moog wanted to create instruments for any musician, which is exactly whathe did.

Building on ideas garnered from Scott as well as the music concretemovement, by 1964 Moog had developed a working prototype of the Moogsynthesizer, a modular instrument made up of oscillators for tone genera-tion, filters to shape the sound, and an amplifier to make it audible. Whatmade the Moog (as well as the synthesizers being designed by 'Don Buchula'around the same time) notably different from early electronic instrumentswas that it was a voltage-controlled device. Instead of manually changingthe pitch, Moogs synthesizer used specific electronic voltages to controlthe pitch and volume of his instruments, affording synthesists greater speedand precision in their performances. Because of voltage control as well asincreased miniaturization in electronics, the Moog synthesizer was rela-tively easy to use, moderately affordable, and portable.

The Synthesizer 125

As a result of these developments the Moog, unlike most electronicinstruments before it, had begun to find its way into popular music. Butthough orders came in from bands such as the Beatles and the RollingStones, the Moog remained an exotic instrument. Most of the synthesizersMoog was building at his shop in Trumansburg, NY were being sold tostudios and composers using them for commercial sound design. In partthis was because the instruments had no method of storing sound settingsand because the instruments were monophonic, so any complex poly-phonic performance would require more than one synthesizer or the use ofmulti-track tape recording. But it was this very limitation that enableda young sound designer and composer named Wendy Carlos bring the newinstrument to a wider public.

As a masters student in music composition at Columbia in the early 1960s,Wendy Carlos worked with Luening and Ussachevsky in the Columbia-Princeton Music Studio and gained a good deal of exposure to electronicinstruments. After graduation, Carlos bought a small Moog synthesizerin 1966 and began making commercials that established her as one ofthe more technically proficient synthesists of the time. Eventually, Carlosbegan to work with Moog on the continued development of the modularsynthesizer. Not comfortable with the experimental compositions so popu-lar in electronic music of the time, Carlos (with producer Rachel Elkind)decided to record her own versions of Bach compositions on the Moogsynthesizer. The album, 'Switched-On Bach\ would go on to be one of thebest-selling classical records of all time (the first to be certified platinum bythe RIAA) and, in many ways, brought electronic music and the electronicinstrument into the popular consciousness.

After the success of Switched-On Bach, Carlos made a number of follow-up albums including The Well-Tempered Synthesizer and Switched-On Bach//, before turning her attention to film scores. She worked with StanleyKubrick writing (again with Elkind) the score for 'A Clockwork Orange' in1972 and 'The Shining in 1980. Interweaving the bubbling and 'spooky'sounds of earlier electronic film scores with the more traditional timbresof S-OJ5, Carlos' scores demonstrated not only the tremendous musicalpossibilities inherent in the new generation of electronic instruments, butthe ability of one musician to create and control such a wide range of musi-cal timbres.

Fearing this very ability, the American Federation of Musicians reactedquickly to the success of Carlos' albums by banning the Moog synthesizerfrom all union work. In part, this fear was based on the misconception thatsomething like Scotts dream of a full composition and performance


machine had been invented and that, with the push of a button, it couldcreate (or recreate) any type of performance on any type of instrument. Itwould take over a decade for the union hostilities toward the Moog torecede, but this bias toward electronic instruments was never to fullydisappear.

With the increasing popularization of the Moog synthesizer also camethe realization among musicians and producers that it was not as easy touse as the unions fears might suggest. In fact, the early modular synthesizerwas as much an experimental sound laboratory as it was a musical instru-ment, demanding a certain degree of knowledge from its users that wasintimidating. In an effort to make the synthesizer more 'user-friendly',Moog and his engineers created one of the most famous synthesizers of alltime: the 'Minimoog'.

Whereas the modular synthesizer required that users build patches fromthe ground up, the Minimoog featured hard-wired 'preset' sounds based onwhat the people at Moog found to be the most popular settings. The sizeand price of the instrument was drastically decreased and, with the help ofinstruments from new companies such as Arp, Korg, and Roland, the syn-thesizer was now finding its way into every corner of the music world. It waswith just such an instrument that director and composer John Carpenterscored his 1978 horror film 'Halloween. Reminiscent of the Barrons' score,Carpenters brutally tense work embodied the low-budget nature of his pro-duction without sounding compromised. His score for Halloween showedjust how effective the synthesizer could be, building a sonic narrative on itsown terms and providing a genuine alternative to the traditional orchestralscore.

With the popularity and success of electronic scores such as Carlos' andCarpenter s, opportunities for electronic scores became more available. Theyear before Halloween, William Friedkin's Sorcerer featured a score by theGerman electronic group 'Tangerine Dream' who would go on to be one ofthe most sought-after bands in Hollywood, scoring films such as Thief(1981), Risky Business (1983) and Firestarter(l984). The year after Sorcerer,Italian producer Giorgio Moroder (best known for his work with DianaRoss) won an Oscar for his Midnight Express score and the year after thatGreek composer Vangelis stunned audiences and the film industry with histremendously popular electronic scores for Chariots of Fire (1980) andBlade Runner (1981).

As the 1980s progressed, electronic instrument technology advanced ata quick pace. The introduction of MIDI - an industry standard for com-munication between electronic instruments - and polyphonic synths suchas the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 and Roland's Jupiter 8 dramatically

The Synthesizer 127

increased the power and potential of these instruments. Instruments suchas the popular 'Yamaha DX-7' made advanced synthesis techniques availableto a wide audience while scores from composers such as 'Harold Faltermeyer'(Fletch (1985) and Top Gun (1986)) and Jan Hammer (Miami Vice) madeit onto the Billboard charts. In many ways, the 1980s were the decade thatsolidified the cultural importance of the synthesizer. However, despite thegrowing acceptance of the synthesizer, most top-budget films still featuredpredominantly orchestral scores.

To this day the difficulties faced by Carlos and her Moog still affect elec-tronic musical instruments and their use in film scores. With the 1990scame a dramatic increase in computer processor speed and storage spaceand, as a result, the development of powerful PC-based synthesizers andsequencers. So-called soft-synths can now model in code what earlier syn-thesizers did in electronic circuitry. Digital samplers have advanced to sucha degree that only the most trained ear can tell the difference betweenthe physical and the digital instrument. But with this tremendous advancein sampling technology, electronic instruments once again face criticism.In 2004 the 'Sinfonia', a computer-based instrument that digitally modelsan orchestra in live situations, has met with a good deal of resistance fromthe musicians union. The union fears that such a device (at the time ofwriting, the union has not acknowledged the Sinfonia as a musical instru-ment) could replace the many working musicians in the orchestra pits onBroadway.

Understanding that very real problems result from these advances, itis nevertheless important to acknowledge the tremendous importance ofthese instruments in the development of representational media. Certainlythe technologies of musical production and reproduction have traveleda remarkable distance from the Telharmoniums singing dynamos and thetheremins with voices like alien ships but the artistic and scientific desiresthat drove those developments are very much the same. In the liner notesfor Forbidden Planets score, Bebe Barron wrote: 'We were delighted to hearpeople tell us that the Tonalities in Forbidden Planet remind them of whattheir dreams sound like! Barrons comment not only helps one understandthe importance of the electronic instrument for a technologically mediatedculture, but it also places the electronic instrument within the rhythm ofBergmans powerful equation: 'Film as dream, film as music7 (Bergman).

Notes

1. During this same period, General George Owen Squier was beginning his work thatwould later result m the Muzak corporation.


Audio Resources

Barren, Louis and Bebe. Forbidden Planet Score. Gnp Crescendo, 1992.Carlos, Wendy. A Clockwork Orange Score. East Side Digital, 1998.Carlos, Wendy. Switched-On Bach. East Side Digital, 2001.Carpenter, John. Halloween Score. Varese Records, 1998.Hermann, Bernard. The Day the Earth Stood Still Score. Varese Records,

2003.Rockmore, Clara. The Art of the Theremin. Delos Records, 1992.Sala, Oskar. Electronic Virtuosity by Oskar Sala. Resonanzen, 1970.Scott, Raymond. Soothing Sounds for Baby: Electronic Music by Raymond

Scott, Vols. 1-3. Basta Records, 1997.Tangerine Dream. Sorcerer Score. MCA, 1977.Waxman, Franz. Rebecca Score. Varese Records, 2002.

Web Resources

120 Years of Electronic Musical Instruments, http://www.obsolete.com.Mitchell, Doug. 'History of Electronic Music Index', http://www.mtsu.edu/

~dsmitche/rim419/history/history.htmlThe Synthesizer Museum, http://www.synthmuseum.com.The Vintage Synth Explorer, http://www.vintagesynth.com.

http://www.obsolete.com

http://www.mtsu.edu/~dsmitche/rim419/history/history.html

http://www.synthmuseum.com

http://www.vintagesynth.com

http://www.mtsu.edu/~dsmitche/rim419/history/history.html

Video Game MusicHigh Scores: Making Sense of Music and Video Games

Simon Wood

Although in existence for only three decades, the medium of the videogame has emerged as a major force in popular culture. Once limited to thelarge cabinets of the arcade, the video game has now become a ubiquitouspart of the domestic landscape, whether it is in the form of a dedicatedgame console such as the Nintendo Game Cube or the Microsoft Xbox, orresiding on the hard drive of a personal computer. Indeed, the rapid devel-opment of computer technology has been pushed in large part by the videogame industry, in its ongoing quest for faster game play, more detailedgraphics, larger environments and a higher quality of sound. US retail salesof video games have grown from $6.6 billion in 2000 to 10.3 billion in 2002,figures that rival the music and film industry. Games such as Grand TheftAuto 3 (Rockstar Games, 2003) for the Sony Playstation II and Halo (Bungie/Microsoft, 2002) for the X-Box have each sold well in excess of 2 millioncopies.1

From the ground bass of Space Invaders (Taito, 1978), its tempo acceler-ating as wave after wave of alien invaders drop from the sky, or the Jaws-like ostinato of Asteroids (Atari, 1980), similarly building in intensity as theplayer manoeuvres his frail spacecraft through fields of tumbling bouldersand hostile aliens, sound and music have always accompanied the video-game experience. And as the technology improves, game developers andcomposers become more and more ambitious in the music they use, whilethe industry as a whole has come to realize the important contributions

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7


made by music in game play. Once considered trivial, game-design confer-ences now feature papers and panel discussions on the use of music andaudio. In the United States, the National Academy of Recording Arts andScience now includes music from video games in the 'Score: SoundtrackAlbum For a Motion Picture, Television or other Visual Media' category inits annual Grammy Awards. In Japan, music from video games now appearsregularly on radio and is frequently featured in orchestral concerts. Theinclusion of an orchestral score is often cited as an important game featurein the print and movie-trailer-like promotional material for games, such asOutcast (1999, Appeal/Infogrames) and Indiana Jones and the Emperor'sTomb (2003, Lucas Arts).

While academics from a variety of fields such as English, Film and CulturalStudies are now actively engaged in the study of video games, little attentionhas been paid to the media within the discipline of music. Furthermore, asthe discourse around the video game develops, academics have begun toquestion the initial connections that were drawn between video games andwhat was thought to be their closest media relative: the narrative film. Inthe following pages, I hope to add to this ongoing discussion, with a con-sideration of the form and function of video-game music. How does thepopular discourse of composers, designers and players shape the precon-ceptions of what video game music does? What are the important threadsemerging from a scholarly consideration of video games in general? Can weapply the work of film music scholarship to this more recent medium, or isthe fit less than ideal, requiring a consideration of not only the similaritiesbetween games and film but perhaps more importantly the differences?These are the questions addressed by this chapter, which will conclude withan application of theory to the music of the highly successful and criticallyacclaimed video game: Splinter Cell (Ubi Soft, 2002).

'States'of the Industry

What are the basic elements in a typical game soundtrack? A constant tropein the discourse of game music composers and fans is the connectionbetween game music and music for film. In discussion with composer MartyO'Donnell, interviewer Aaron Marks described O'Donnells work in Haloas 'purely cinematic1/2 Peter McConnell states that when composing themusic for the film-noir influenced Grim Fandango (Lucas Arts, 1997) heckept the score cohesive by building it on a backbone of classic Max Steiner-style orchestral underscoring [such as] Casablanca, and The Big Sleep'? In areview of Lennie Moore s work for Outcast, Andersson argues that the score

Video Game Music 131

is 'a true epic, and the same style would fit in a film of epic proportions'.4

Although problematic, such claims should come as no surprise. Many ofthe composers working in the field of game music contribute scores to themedia of film and television, and frequently discuss the composition pro-cess in terms of cinematic effect. More importantly, these comments reveala common phenomenon found in the early days of any new media: a fearthat the new mode of communication is inherently inferior to more estab-lished models, defended by arguments based on similarities and continu-ities of tradition between old and new. Andrew Boyd, audio director forStormfront Studio, whose credits include highly successful games based onThe Lord of the Rings, states that:

On one hand, we resent how sexy and alluring film is, and how gamescome off as the ugly spinsters of entertainment media. We love tothrow around statistics about the gross revenues of our respectiveindustries, as if these numbers somehow add credibility to ourendeavours.5

Fans and practitioners of the game-music genre attempt to secure the samelevel of legitimacy now accorded film through discussion of commonalities.Indeed, there are several important similarities in the aesthetic and tech-nical steps involved in the creation of music for games with those of theproduction of music for film and television. A common approach has com-posers working with developers to create a consistent musical texture thatwill support narrative development, heighten emotional impact and aidin the suture of the player into the diegetic world - allowing the player tosuspend disbelief and immerse herself in a self-contained narrative space.However, the fixed linear narrative of a typical feature film allows compos-ers to create a highly synchronized accompaniment matching the narrativematerial. While some elements of a game do present opportunities for a highlevel of synchronization, most of the time spent in game-play is based onthe actions of the player, requiring a more flexible approach to the construc-tion of musical materials. Peter McConnell, a composer and music editorfor Lucas Arts Entertainment, states that depending on the genre of a givengame, a composer will have to create essentially three kinds of musical pieces:ambient pieces, event-triggered episodes, and underscoring for noninter-active movies!6

Ambient pieces are often low-key in nature, as the idea is to create ageneral emotional response or sense of place without distracting the playerfrom the game play. However, they are also the most challenging to produce


as the pace of each player engaged in tasks such as exploring, reading orsolving puzzles, will vary. Little time may be spent in one location, whilemuch longer is spent in another. McConnell comments that at Lucas Arts,ambient pieces are also described as state music, because each piece of thistype accompanies an open-ended 'state' or condition at which the gamehas arrived'. Aesthetically this music 'must be out of the way without beingboring, it must intrigue and encourage the player without getting obnox-ious and it must withstand repeated listenings'. Frequently, the track (whichmay last up to several minutes) will play once and then quietly fade out.If a longer or continuous accompaniment is required, the composer willproduce a 'loop', which may also last up to several minutes but that repeatsflawlessly for as long as the player remains in a particular location. At itsmost simple, the cue may be a quiet, abstract soundscape, blending withenvironmental sounds in a way that makes it difficult to determine whichis which. It could be a single musical cue designed to repeat numerous timeswithout an obvious start point. To hide the start point, a composer mayavoid anything that stands out in the structure, such as a strong melody orabrupt change in texture. To have a musical gesture such as a cymbal cre-scendo, or a clearly articulated melody repeating every minute or so wouldforeground the musical structure and risk becoming a distraction or annoy-ance if heard repeatedly. Furthermore, overt musical gestures are elementsthat would normally be synchronized to a particular event and may beinterpreted by a player that something is happening that needs their atten-tion. A strongly articulated chord may suggest to the player that they are indanger when, in fact they are not.

Within a particular scene or location, a player may experience a numberof different states, such as conversation, examine', 'spell-casting' or combat' -each of which would benefit from the application of state music. Because ofthe limits of technology, and depending on the design of the game, a changein state is often accompanied by a significant change in the appearance andresponse of a game's interface, the transition often creating a momentaryinterruption in game play. Composers would simply create different sets ofcues to be called upon as part of a general change of state. However, currenttechnology now allows games to transition between states without a needto alter the interface, creating a smoother, less disruptive experience forthe players. This same technology means that more complex manipulationsof sound and music are now possible, such as the use of a short openingand closing flourish, between which are heard several related loops ofvarying length and emotional intensity. The loops are constructed in a waythat allows them, under software control, to play simultaneously or to fade


seamlessly into one another. The software of the game controls the audioplayback in response to the player's progress. Such a system can providea number of different musical accompaniments for a given game section.As players frequently repeat the more difficult sections of a game, the slightvariation of musical accompaniment in response to a players change intactics can reduce the level of frustration that can develop while facinga particularly challenging obstacle, as each attempt produces a uniqueexperience. It can also keep the music better 'synchronized* to the player sactions. When music is clearly responding to a players efforts, the experi-ence is subtly shifted to one more in keeping with cinematic norms, whereactions accompanied by music are deemed to be of more importance.Marty O'Donnell, composer for Halo gives some insight into how complexthe process can become:

Most pieces could be dissembled and remixed in such a way thatwould give me multiple, interchangeable loops that could be randomlyrecombined in order to keep the piece interesting as well as a variablelength. I also would make alternative middle sections that could betransitioned to if the game called for such a change (i.e. less or moreintense). If I needed a bigger contrast I could always start a new pieceand have it either interrupt or cross fade with the piece already playing.Since I could have more than one piece playing at a time, I also made'stingers' that could just be laid over the top of another piece. It wasimportant to experiment with all the possible combinations that thegame might come up with to ensure no horrible, unintended clashes.Most of the time it worked pretty well.7

McConnells second category, event-triggered episodes, is a response toa particular action by the player. These are normally associated with a sin-gular event, or class of events such as the finding of a particular object orlocation, using an important object, triggering a device, solving a puzzle,or overcoming a difficult opponent. They are normally marked by a screenmessage ('you've found the red key!') accompanied by a short musicalflourish (a stinger), or sonic gesture that plays over any existing state musicwithout interrupting it. This calls attention to the event while also acting asa small reward for completing a task. They are events of a secondary levelof importance, necessary for the development of the game, but not signi-ficantly advancing the narrative. If a composer chooses to use musical ges-tures for event-triggered episodes, careful planning is needed to ensurethat the tonalities of the stingers are close enough to those of the state cues


as the two may run simultaneously without any synchronization. If not, the'reward' for completing the task is a burst of dissonance that conventions ofnarrative film music would interpret as a sign of danger or confusion, notsuccess.

However, game play is suspended during McConnells final category, thenon-interactive movie. Often referred to as cut-scenes', or 'cinematics'. Theseare, as the second term suggests, the game element closest to traditionalnarrative film in its design.8 Essentially mini-movies, these moments areparticularly important as they often advance the narrative in a significantway, or act as a moment of spectacle: a reward for overcoming a particu-larly challenging obstacle, such as a 'boss' character, the most difficult oppo-nent within a given game level or chapter. Cinematics normally follow whathas been an intense episode of game play (such as defeating the boss), andthey create a space in which the player can momentarily rest and become aspectator. They are also (paradoxically) a moment of tension for the player,as he or she must relinquish control of the game. As such, the element ofspectacle must be effective enough to smooth over the disorientation anddiscomfort that accompanies loss of control. It is often argued that thisinterruption foregrounds the mediated nature of the game and threatensthe player's sense of'immersion, the game equivalent of cinematic suture.9

Clearly, it is possible to be immersed while acting as a spectator, but it isthe pronounced change from player to spectator that is thought to be sodisruptive. Game designers have developed various strategies to reducethis perceived threat, the most common of which is the shift from full screenvideo during game play to a letter-boxed presentation during a cinematic.Howells notes that letterboxing was originally used for a more pragmaticpurpose: 'keeping the viewing area small' to enhance the playback of older,slower game technologies. However, it has remained a popular way forgame developers to invoke the conventions of narrative film, while inform-ing the player that their role has shifted to one of spectator.10

Cinematics are largely, if not completely, predetermined. They are, ineffect, mini movies. The player may view them or not, but the content cannotbe altered. As such, music for these elements is highly synchronized andoften contains the most complex material from the standpoint of musicalconstruction. Not surprisingly it is in the cinematic that we find music, aswell as visual and narrative elements, that most closely draws on the con-ventions of Hollywood. As we will see, the cinematic is the most importantelement in the advancement of narrative. Indeed, numerous authors haverecognized that game play is by its very nature a kinesthetic activity, largelydevoid of narrative, and that storytelling can only be done effectively by


having the game enter a state in which the player becomes a reader, a listeneror spectator. This realization has brought into question what was thoughtto be the obvious direction of game development: the interactive movie.Game designer Brenda Laural, who has long championed the idea of theInteractive story' now describes it as 'an elusive unicorn we can imaginebut have yet to capture'.11 Laural s comment is indicative of a central issuein the theory of video games: the debate over the apparent dichotomy ofnarrative and immersion/interactivity. Before turning to a theoretical dis-cussion of musics role within video games, let us first quickly examine thetwo (or more) sides of this debate.

Telling Tales

The narrative argument is frequently couched in terms of the mind/bodyhierarchy, positioning narrative complexity as the most important anddesirable feature of a video game. However, Andrew Darley states that nar-rative is compromised by the immediate physical requirements of gameplay.12 His critique of video games suggests that the kinesthetic elementsof a game - such as moving, jumping, or shooting - dominate narrativedevelopment to the point that narrative is reduced to a function of gameplay. The kinesthetic elements of the body, which he describes as 'surfaceplay' is positioned against the presumably 'deeper' engagement offered bya truly interactive narrative. This argument is similar to the implicit assump-tion that video games are an inferior relation of narrative film and shouldaspire to the condition of its more mature sibling. But is such a criticismeven valid, particularly when we consider that many feel it may be difficultif not impossible for games to fulfil the promise of becoming an interactivenarrative? Although deliberately overstated, Steven Poole makes an effec-tive point when he suggests that '[t]he "story" of what the player actuallydoes during the game would be merely a list of movements (up, down, run,shoot, open door, jump) - hardly something you'd want to sit down andread'.13 While games clearly require players to engage in other activitiessuch as problem solving, observation and memory recall, in addition tohand-eye coordination, Poole argues that the 'story' of game play is a verydifferent process from that which produces traditional narrative. In mostcases, players' choices are limited to the strategy employed in fulfilling theobjectives of the game at a given moment: Stealth or open combat? Therocket launcher or the shotgun? Which key will open the door, or call theelevator? Important objectives are predetermined and must be completed;important puzzles must be solved. Major developments in narrative are


made through the use of cinematics, during which interactivity is suspended.The player becomes spectator and can only watch events unfold; theirpower to intervene is temporarily constrained. Game play is the area inwhich the 'means' are explored, but the 'ends' are largely predetermined. Allthe player can ultimately do is succeed or fail to reach those ends.

Yet video games are considered a pleasurable activity by millions. Thisdoes not discount the possibility of pleasure through interactive narrative,but it does suggest that despite the apparent paucity of narrative withingame play, the experience is still profoundly compelling. Furthermore,how do we account for the success of numerous early arcade games such asPac Man (Midway, 1980), Asteroids, Space Invaders or their more recentrelations in the category of First Person Shooters (FPS) such as Doom(id, 1993), Quake III: Arena (id/Activision, 1999) or Unreal Tournament(Epic MegaGames & Digital Extremes/GT Interactive, 1999)? Most offersome kind of minimal back story to explain the games initial conditions,and there is some limited ongoing narrative justification for progress withinthe game. However, in all of these games, the narrative is the least impor-tant aspect of the experience. With games in the Quake and Unreal series,the most common mode of play is not in the single-player mode where oneworks through the 'narrative', but in multiplayer mode where groups ofplayers connect several systems together to engage in 'death matches', whichare gladiatorial-like encounters where whoever 'frags' the highest numberof opponents is victorious. Sue Morris argues that the success of thesegames is based not on any pretense of narrative but on the way the game'apparatus' offers 'an artificial psychosis that gives the player the illusion offull control'.14 What is important is not the story, but the way the variouselements combine to create an illusion of being in a world in which one'sactions have important consequences. Even game designers themselvesview game play as the most important aspect of a video game: 'Every greatgame story is driven by the game play. The story emerges from the game; thegame doesn't emerge from the story.15

The various elements of game play are frequently evaluated under therubric of immersion, couched in terms of the level of 'suspension of dis-belief generated by the game environment. Does the game present a con-sistent and compelling world in which a player can become engrossed tothe point of accepting the game-world as a 'real' world? Elements such aslevel design, puzzle design, graphics and sound, and the response of bothavatars (the representation of the player within the game world) and non-player characters, must offer a logical, coherent experience with patternsand rules that can be deduced by a competent player. Inconstancies in the


technical aspects of the game, or the inclusion of arbitrary obstacles orpuzzles that cannot be solved through reason or by the mastering of a seriesof moves, foreground the mediated nature of the game. The pleasure ofplay is lost with the interruption of immersion. As was discussed earlier,one of the challenges faced by game designers is to minimize the interrup-tions caused by a change of state, as well as the need to access secondaryinterfaces such as option screens or the process of saving and loadinggames in progress. Half-Life (Valve/Sierra, 1998), one of the most success-ful games of all time, is often cited as providing a high level of immersion.Indeed, part of what makes Half Life so compelling is that it is possible toplay the entire game without ever leaving the primary interface.

However, the concept of immersion, although thought to be less prob-lematic than narrative, has also become an issue of debate. Steven Pooleargues that part of the pleasure of gaming is the safety provided by a 'modi-cum of separation' from the game world:

You don't actually want to be there, performing the dynamically exag-gerated and physically perilous moves yourself: it would be exhaustingand painful. . . You don t want a Formula One car that takes years oftraining to drive; and you don't want to die after taking just one bullet.You don't want it to be too real.16

Poole suggests that many of the things that make a video game successfulare aspects that foreground the mediated nature of the experience. Forexample, if a game is too easy or too difficult, a player will quickly loseinterest due to boredom or frustration. However, if the difficulty of a gameremains at, or just above the skill of the player, the constant challenge ofworking at one's limit combined with the reinforcement provided by suc-cessfully overcoming progressively more difficult obstacles, will create apleasurable experience. He describes this experience as 'flow', a term bor-rowed from the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, originally associatedwith the exhilaration and effortlessness experienced by elite athletes ormusicians who have mastered a complex or difficult task. Certainly a playerexperiencing flow will find the interface and response of the game recedingfrom conscious thought, becoming a matter of instinct and intuition.17 Theplayer no longer has to think consciously about the manipulation of thecontroller any more than a good hockey player thinks consciously aboutthe manipulation of skates, sticks and pucks. However, there is no doubt inthe mind of either player that they are engaged in a mediated practice.Poole quotes Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo's legendary game designer, who


says that 'he is constantly playing on his audiences "desire to realizesomething exhilarating but impossible in real life." >18

A related idea is found in the work of Andrew McTavish, who has arguedthat a central but largely ignored element in the pleasure of computer gamesis what he describes as 'the meta-space of technological admiration'. . ,19

Certainly, part of the attraction of video games is the constant advancesmade in both hardware and software. Each new generation of technologyholds the promise of ever-larger and more detailed worlds to explore.According to McTavish, the engaged video-game player is constantly oscil-lating between the more traditional sense of immersion, and Astonishment[felt] at a games' technological spectacle... a games expert performance oftechnology'.20 Both Poole and McTavish suggest that the pleasure of videogames is a more complex experience than that provided by immersionand/or narrative and in fact may involve elements that foreground themediated an/or technological aspect of game play.

But what is music s role in the video game experience? With an outlineof the basic structure of video game music, and with some of the importantissues in the general theory of video games in mind, let us turn to the well-developed body of work in film music studies in an attempt to theorize therole of music in the game experience.

High Scores

As we have seen, despite some similarities, video games and film differ ina number of important ways, primarily in the fields of interactivity andnarrative. However, we have also seen that the practitioners and fans ofthe genre often think in terms of established cinematic models, so it isto the theory of film music that we first turn in search of a framework forthe analysis of game music.

Numerous scholars have discussed both the advantages and limitationsof the dramatically motivated nature of film music. Drawing on a longtradition of connections between music and drama, from Greek tragediesto Wagnerian Opera, narrative filmmakers have established a set of clearlydefined conventions that serve to reinforce the dramatic and emotionalimpact of a given scene. Royal S. Brown has noted that even documentarieshave adapted the techniques of narrative film music to create emotionalaffect where none originally existed, such as in the depiction of an animalhunting for food.21 By placing a Hollywood-influenced score over a clip ofone wild animal killing another, an act of instinct and survival is anthropo-morphized, imbued with human emotions and motivations. The predator/prey relationship may be interpreted by the audience as a struggle between


good and evil. Indeed, Brown goes on to suggest that the use of music infilm is not simply supportive, emphasizing what is already there, but con-tributes to films 'need to "narrativize." '22 Composers are able to draw on theaudiences understanding of film-music conventions to add a sense of nar-rative drive, motivation, emotional urgency and, ultimately, linear progresseven where none is obvious or even present. The viewers senses of expecta-tion and anticipation are constantly stimulated by music, their attentionsustained by the perceived progress of the sonically simulated narrative.

Brown argues this need to 'narrativize' stems from the medium of filmitself. He suggests that film occupies a paradoxical space of being an iconicart form. That which is iconic is a representation of an object. The icon isinterpreted by the spectator as having a one-to-one relationship with theobject: signifier and signified. This is to say that if the film does nothing todeliberately undermine its verisimilitude, the spectator accepts that what ispresented on the screen is a representation of something 'real' In fact, filmpresents not simply an iconic image, but a series of iconic images, produc-ing an 'iconic sense of time* in which the various elements are described asobject-events' (16). According to Brown, this dominance of iconographyhas a tendency to steer viewers towards an interpretation that privilegesobjectivity and history over subjectivity and narrative. Music is one of anumber of elements strategically employed to steer the viewer from theformer reading to the latter.

In one of history's great paradoxes, the cinema managed to becomeprincipally an art form-entertainment medium while actually encour-aging the 'prejudice of the iconic', and music was one of the principalmeans via which it pulled off this major piece of sorcery. By rein-forcing significant moments in a cinematic succession of images,whether held together by an apparent narrative or not, music has, viaits tendency to narrativize, helped lead 'readers' of the cinemas iconiclanguage(s) away from history and towards story.23

In other words, the strategies of narrative film employ iconic representations,but particular elements are emphasized within the presentation creating ahierarchy of representation, the interpretation of which leads the viewer tothe 'story'. The source of musics power to transform the objective-event intosomething that possesses an intrinsic emotional trajectory, what Browndescribes as an 'affect-event', is its non-iconic or non-representational state.It is an unconsummated signifier that may be filled with any of a numberof intended (or unintended) signifieds. When this unconsummated signi-fier is superimposed on the iconic image of film, the two combine in the


mind of the spectator. The object-event of the image lends its meaning tothe music, but is in turn transformed by the presence of music which urgesthe spectator to perceive more than what is simply seen and heard. Culturalconventions that associate music with heightened states of emotion andexperience lend a specific narrative and emotional arc to an image, whilesurrounding it with a mythic aura that distances the viewer from theirpersonal concerns drawing them deeper into the presentation.

Brown suggests that the non-representational nature of music, its statusas an unconsummated signifier, allows filmmakers to employ music as animplicit carrier of ideology. Indeed, recent scholarship in a number of areashas demonstrated how music is capable of encoding social meanings andreflecting social values.24 However, Theo van Leeuwen argues that music isstill generally perceived as a medium of emotion. As such, Leeuwen statesthat: 'music makes us apprehend what are, in themselves, "nonemotional"meanings in an emotional way, that it binds us affectively to these mean-ings and makes us identify with them!25 Applying this idea to film music,Anahid Kassabian states that

film music constitutes society while being constituted by it. The well-established code communicates groupings of ideas that are associatedwith each other in dominant ideologies, and by communicating thesegroupings on a nonconscious level, the code can buttress and repro-duce the very ideologies that produced it. In the case of film music,van Leeuwens hearing in an emotional way is crucial to how thatmusic communicates ideologies, because it makes the ideologicalwork seem personal or private and thus removes the messages fromthe realms of the political, social, or public.26

Combined, these arguments suggest that film music can generate in thespectator the sense of narrative development and progress even when noneis present. Furthermore, this artificial sense of narrative may be supportedby an implied ideology in a way that manifests itself within the spectator asan emotional response. Interpreted as emotion, the spectator internalisesthe ideology contained within, or suggested by, the music. She comes tocare about the events portrayed on the screen even though she is distantfrom them. Narrative drive also becomes an internalised element. Thespectator becomes engaged in the progress of the narrative and develops adesire to see the story reach its most 'appropriate' end. In other words, thespectator becomes immersed in the diegetic world of the film, not onlybelieving in its reality but also investing emotionally in the characters and


events depicted. These ideas are quite compelling for someone interestedin the function of music within video games, as they connect music to thetwo key areas thought to be central to the understanding of video games:narrative and immersion/interactivity. Let us finally turn to a discussion ofthe music with an application of these ideas to the highly successful gameSplinter Cell

Splinter Cell

In Tom Clancys Splinter Cell (Ubisoft, 2002), you are Sam Fisher, a highlytrained agent of the national security agency (NSA). Set in the very nearfuture, you set out to uncover the plans of a terrorist group based in Georgiathat is suspected of organizing a conspiracy to sabotage the worlds electronicand computer networks. The scope of the conspiracy grows to include arogue group within the Chinese military and the disappearance of a nuclearbomb. Stealth is the key to success, as you are always outnumbered. Severalmissions stipulate that setting off even a single alarm or killing a singleenemy constitutes mission failure.

The game features music by Michael Richard Plowman, who describeshis music as fusing elements of classical [read orchestral] electronica,ambient, and world'.27 Cinematics are divided into two types. Each missionis introduced with a 'newscast', a common convention in video games thatserves to introduce many of the important background aspects of the taskat hand, while connecting local events in the game with the wider world.In Splinter Celly the newscasts are presented in a way that simulates a viewerflipping through several channels, all of which carry news stories relatedto the game events. Clearly, the idea that 'every' channel is covering thesame news suggests that Fisher s missions are of the utmost importance.However, several key missions are also introduced with cinematics that fea-ture the game characters themselves. These are presented as conventionalHollywood narrative films during which the characters are introduced anddeveloped. Musical accompaniment is in keeping with established practice.Instrumentation is a synthesized/sampled orchestra which, in general,is louder and more insistent during moments of spectacle (such as exteriorshots of low-flying aircraft), reducing in dynamics and complexity as itmoves to underscoring dialog. Mission preparations are scored with march-influenced percussion and pedal points in the low strings, over which areheard brass harmonies that articulate the power and military associationsof Fisher and his organization. Also, important emotional elements intro-duced during the cinematics benefit from their treatment as moments from


a Hollywood narrative film. During scenes in which the terrorists strikewhile Fisher is speaking to his daughter by phone or at the death of Fisher'syoung assistant Vernon (which Fisher is helpless to prevent) Plowman usesquiet strings to underscore the sense of distance, loss and helplessness, aug-mented by piano to create a sense of intimacy and immediacy.

During game play, however, Plowman has created a series of texturesthat develop in sonic intensity depending, not on narrative structures,which are largely established during the cinematics, but on the game state.Furthermore, he moves away from an orchestral approach instead usingtimbres that foreground electronic production. One could argue that elec-tronic textures, with their perceived status as Artificial', lacking the organic'quality of an acoustic instrument, will have the effect of distancing theplayer/spectator from the action. This is often the way electronic instru-ments are deployed within the narrative film. However, if we consider theelectronic textures in light of McTavishs theory of technological pleasure,such timbres may be read as the most appropriate accompaniment for themedia, another aspect of the performance of technology. Furthermore,Fisher is a character with a command of technical devices. In fact, his verylife frequently depends on using the right techno-tool at the right time.As such, the technological realization of the music becomes an ideologicalframe for Fisher s expertise with the very devices that make the game possible.Regardless of what is happening at a given moment, the sound of Fisher sskill, manifest in music, is the dominant element on the audio track.

The music also serves to frame Fishers physical dexterity. During thecourse of a given mission, the avatar will perform all manner of physicalactions with an effortlessness that (not surprisingly) defies reality. If fact,I would argue that the spectacle of these acts, combined with the knowl-edge that the player is 'responsible' for what is happening on the screen,creates another level of technological pleasure in the simple act of watchingFisher perform. Poole describes this as 'a joyously exaggerated sense ofcontrol, or amplification of input. All you do is hold down a button, andyou get to see this wonderfully complex, rich behaviour as a result'.28 Theaddition of music simply adds another level of meaning to the spectacle.The more dramatic the music, the more difficult and intense the acts appearto be; the less dramatic the music, the more 'business-as-usual' the actsappear, adding to the myth-like status of this character who, in the courseof his job, routinely rappels down the sides of buildings or dangles by hisfingers over death-defying heights.

The game takes place in three locations: the former Russian republic ofGeorgia; Langley, Virginia and Myanmar. For each location, Plowman has


created a set of textures, all similar in design, sound selection and length:but with enough differences to inform the player that they are in a differentspace. In part, this sense of difference is achieved through the problematicHollywood convention of deploying non-Western instrumentation as aform of ethnic shorthand and to quickly evoke a sense of the exotic. Withineach mission, Plowman employs three distinct musical cues, each linkedwith one of three game states, and corresponding to the level of dangerFisher finds himself in at any given moment. At the lowest level of intensity,the player hears a slow atmospheric track including textures that vary basedon geographic location. Early in the game, while Fisher is in Georgia, theambient track includes muted pulses from a bass synthesizer, under slowlyenveloped unrelated harmonic textures from what sounds like a highlymodulated bell and vocal sound. Occasional silences are interrupted by arhythmic pattern heard on hi-hats, adding a low level of intensity to the track,which blends with the environmental sounds of a given location. Thereis also an articulation of what Plowman describes as a 'Georgian guitar',acting as a short hand for the exotic location, providing it with a briefsense of otherness! There is no clear tempo to any of these elements, and infact the music appears to vary tempos over the length of the loop whichoccurs every eighty seconds. This track creates a 'mood' for Fisher s stealthyexploration. While the electronic sounds denote Fisher s world, suggestingthat he is now in his element, it also offers a sense of veiled threat throughthe ebb and flow of sounds that seem to emanate both from the diegeticand non-diegetic realms. This blurring of boundaries keeps the listener offbalance, trying to determine what might be most important among theaudio elements. Searching for clues in the sonic landscape results in frus-tration as the stability provided by tonality and tempo are fleeting. Thenoise of the distant street, with its promise of safety, heightens the feelingof isolation and the anticipation of possible danger signified by the lack ofany clear sonic structure.

If Fisher does something to raise the suspicions of nearby guards, suchas making too much noise, moving too far into a lit area, or if a guard s bodyif located, a second level of musical accompaniment is triggered, normallyin time with a guards call of'what was that?' Rather than fading in, the cueopens forcefully with a single bass note in the piano and a more intensehi-hat rhythm, articulating sixteenth notes at 120 bpm. Under the hi-hat canbe heard deep synthetic growls, like distant thunder. Overall, the volume isnoticeably louder than the ambient cue which, combined with the abruptintro and the guard s voice, startles the player, intensifying the sense of danger.After four measures, a percussive bass ostinato joins the hi-hats, along with


sustained notes using a sampled voice. High above, a small synthetic bellarticulates whole notes on the fifth and root of the tonic established by thebass. The texture continues to build with the addition of cowbell and finallya dynamically filtered white noise adds a percussive element completingthe texture. A final moment of intensity is added when at measure 34, thetexture shifts up by a minor third. If Fisher does nothing further to attractattention, the music returns to the original key, begins to lower the intensitylevel and ends, after one minute, with a two-measure pattern in which wehear only the hi-hat and filtered noise. The end of the cue is often accom-panied with a comment from a guard (problematically speaking in Englishwith a cliched accent) such as cit was probably nothing' or 1 must be seeingthings'.

The purpose of this cue is to add to the tension - to let the player knowthat they are now at a higher level of risk. Drawn from the conventions ofcinema and television, the higher rhythmic density and bass ostinato sig-nify a higher level of excitement and intensity. Things are moving faster andbecoming more structured, yet the repetitive nature of the cue makes pre-diction of future events difficult, generating a higher level of anticipation.It may also be read as complementing the accelerated level of engagementexperienced by the player. Fisher must either eliminate the threat or evade it.The player becomes more active as they work to solve the problem; thehigher level of activity lent a sense of urgency and importance by the higherlevel of musical complexity.

Paradoxically, a player may use the music to their advantage, as it tellsthem when they are at risk and when that risk has passed. I would arguethat experienced players develop strategies based in part on the sound ofthe music. In effect, they are 'performing' with the music. At times, playerswill hear this second level of music begin even before they realize that thereis a nearby threat. It is the music itself that tells them that there is a dangerto which they must respond. This 'use' of music marks a distinct departurefrom the role of music in film, as the game character/player hears bothdiegetic and non-diegetic music. The various musical elements can thencreate feedback loop in which a player triggers a musical gesture and thenchanges tactics, which once again leads to a change in state and musicalaccompaniment. We know that Luke Skywalker doesn't hear the Star Warstheme as he roars down the trench of the Death Star in his X-Wing fighter.His decision to switch off his targeting computer and 'trust his feelings' isnot influenced by John Williams's use of the 'Force' theme at the samemoment. In fact, when filmmakers make direct reference to the non-diegetic


score, such as Mel Brooks s frequent musical jokes in Blazing Saddles (197'3)or Young Frankenstein (1974), it may be interpreted as a self-conscious orironic comment on the medium of film itself. However, this is exactly whathappens within a video game. The music has an impact on the playersapproach to game play, suggesting that music may even be more importantto the game player than it is to the film spectator.

The final state is reached when the guards see the character, and thegame goes into combat mode. The guards will now try to kill Fisher, open-ing fire when the see him, searching for him when they lose sight of him.This final level is characterized by continuous drums and bass, articulatinga complex sixteenth-note groove at approximately 140 bpm. Above this denserhythmic bed, various textures such as strings, voices, additional percussionor processed non-pitched sounds fade in and out. After 16 measures, a filteredwhite-noise enters, adding to the rhythmic density, before the bass shiftsupwards by a minor third at measure 20. At measure 24, the pitch centershifts back down, and the whole pattern begins to repeat at measure 28.This will continue until Fisher or his opponents are dead, at which point thetrack fades back into the first level, or until Fisher has eluded his opponents,at which point a low pitched percussive rumble marks a shift back down tothe second level of tension, indicating that while they have lost track of him,the guards continue to search and are at a higher state of readiness. If Fisherremains hidden long enough, the music shifts back down to the first level.

This third level of accompaniment once again adds tension and excite-ment by increasing tempo, rhythmic density and volume. The bass anddrums create a powerful sense of forward motion and excitement, furtherdeveloped by the shift up in pitch at measure 20. The non-pitched texturesthat are added at various intervals once again create a sense of uncertaintyand an anticipation of events that cannot be predicted with any precision.The music is part of an overall increase in the level of aural stimulation.Combined with the sounds of gunfire and the calls of the guard ('Hes overhere*, 'Watch out', or 'Get him') the music is part of an overall strategy thatincreases the intensity of play, while adding to the number of elements com-peting for the players attention. With so many things going on, the playermay become disoriented or even panicked. In order to escape, the playermust stay calm and move quickly. The difficulty of the game is such thateven two well-armed opponents may be more than a match for Fisher oncehe is discovered. However, like the second level of music, players can use thecue to their advantage. The moment they hear the shift to the combat music,they know they have been discovered and can act instantly to eliminate


the threat'. If they are in a situation that cannot be overcome by force, theplayer can hide, and wait for the music to shift back into second or evenfirst level, before once again moving back into play.

So, within each game state, we can see how music functions on severallevels: sensory stimulation through increasing volume, tempo and rhythmicdensity; acting as a signifier of the current threat level; and ideologicallysignifying Fishers relationship to his environment and acting as a framefor the character to perform feats beyond the capabilities of most players.However, as Leeuwen states, all of this information is perceived in terms ofemotional investment on the part of the player. The music draws the playerinto the game space in a way that they come to emotionally identify withFisher. The player internalises Fisher s successes and failures. Furthermore,the changes in state, made manifest in the changes in music, lend an emo-tionally perceived trajectory to the game as Fisher oscillates betweenmoments of danger and safety. I would argue that music is, to use Brownsterm, 'narrativizing' the game. Not that music is creating narrative wherenone exists, but that the music invokes a sense of momentum, helping topropel the player through the game; this is momentum that would betraditionally associated with narrative. It is important to note once morethat very little narrative development takes place during a given mission.Objectives and limitations are largely predetermined by the results of aprevious mission. As elements are completed, new objectives maybe speci-fied, but this rarely happens more than once within any one chapter. Musicis one of several aspects of game play that creates a sense of forward motion,compelling the player towards the completion of the required task andgiving us the illusion that we participate in not just an enjoyable kinestheticexperience but in the telling of a story.

In this chapter, I have attempted to map some of the basic issues in whatis clearly a rich and varied terrain. But this is only a first step. My studyinvolves only the briefest discussion of one particular game. Can we findsimilar patterns in games similar to Splinter Cell? Can we find similar pat-terns in games of other genres such as 'rhythm games' in which musicalstructure itself is central to the games design? A new field awaits the tenta-tive first steps of theorists and historians, to document the history of themusic in video games, to study a wide number of games across a variety ofgenres and to track to continually developing technology and the new pos-sibilities it provides.

But for now, there is a group of marines stranded on an alien world wait-ing for me to rescue them and music to accompany my every move.

If youTl excuse me . . .


Notes

1. NPD Group Reports Annual 2002 US Video Game Sales Break Record (January 2003).NPD Funworld. Available at http://www.npdfunworld.com/funServlet?nextpage=pr_body.html&content_id=354 (accessed in August 2004); J. Hu, Interview with composer Michael RichardPlowman, Splinter Cell: Ubi Soft Entertainment, 2002; J. Moran, Sales of Console and ComputerVideo Game Software Set New Record in 2002. January 2003, Game Market Watch. Available athttp://www.gamemarketwatch.com/news/item.asp?nid=2635 (accessed on 27 February 2008).

2. 'The Use and Effectiveness of Audio in HALO: Game Music Evolved: A Discussionbetween Marty O'Donnell and Aaron Marks'. Music 4 Games. Available at http://www.music4games.net/fjialoretrospective.html (accessed in August 2004).

3. Peter McConnell, The Adventures of a Composer: Creating the Game Music for GrimFandango, September 1999. Electronic Musician Online. Available at http://emusician.com/mag/emusic_adventures_composer_creating/index.html (accessed in August 2004).

4. Adam Andersson, Review Outcast, soundtracks.com, 2003.5. A. Boyd, When Worlds Collide: Sound and Music in Film and Games. February 2003.

Gamasutra. Available at http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20030204/boyd_01.shtml(accessed in August 2004).

6. McConnell, The Adventures of a Composer.7. trlhe Use and Effectiveness of Audio in HALO: Game Music Evolved: A Discussion

between Marty O'Donnell and Aaron Marks'. Music4Games.net.8. See S. A. Howells, 'Watching a game, playing a movie: When media collide', in Geoff

and Tanya Krzywinska (ed.), Screen Play: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces. London: Wall-flower Press, 2002, pp. 110-21.

9. Ibid., p. 116.10. Ibid., p. 118.11. Quoted in G. Frasca, 'Simulation versus narrative: Introduction to Ludology', in

Bernard Perron and Mark J. P. Wolf (eds), The Video Game Theory Reader. New York:Routledge, 2003, p. 229.

12. W. L. Tong and M. Cheng Chye Tan, 'Vision and virtuality: The construction ofnarrative space in film and computer games', in Geoff and Tanya Krzywinska (eds), ScreenPlay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces. London: Wallflower Press, 2002, p. 99.

13. Stephen Poole, Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution.New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000, p. 95 (emphasis original).

14. S. Morris, 'First-person shooters - A game apparatus', in Geoff and Tanya Krzywinska(eds), Screen Play: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces. London: Wallflower Press, 2002, p. 95.

15. Tong et al. (2002), p. 100 (emphasis original).16. Poole (2000), p. 63.17. Ibid., p. 168.18. Ibid., p. 161.19. A. Mactavish, 'Technological pleasure: The performance and narrative of technol-

ogy in Half Life and other high-tech computer games', in Geoff and Tanya Krzywinska (eds),Screen Play: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces. London: Wallflower Press, 2002, p. 42.

http://www.npdfunworld.com/funServlet?nextpage=pr_body

http://www.gamemarketwatch.com/news/item.asp?nid=2635

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20030204/boyd_01.shtml

http://emusician.com/mag/emusic_adventures_composer_creating/index.html


http://www.music4games.net/f_haloretrospective.html



20. Ibid., p. 42.21. Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music. Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1994, p. 15.22. Ibid., p. 16.23. Ibid., p. 17.24. For example, see W. H. McNeil, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human

History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995; C. Small, Musicking: The Meanings ofPerforming and Listening. Hanover: Wesleyan Press, 1998; R. Walser, Running with the Devil:Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Hanover: Wesleyan Press, 1993.

25. Quoted in A. Kassabian, Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in ContemporaryHollywood Film Music. New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 28 (emphasis original).

26. Ibid., p. 29.27. 'Interview with composer Michael Richard Plowman. Splinter Cell: Ubi Soft Enter-

tainment, 2002.28. Poole (2000), p. 148.

SOUNDSCAPES

8Sound Effects

Strategies for Sound Effects in Film

Barbara Flueckiger

Sound effects in film have been created since the beginning of the re-recording process in the late 1920s by three major procedures: they wereeither recorded directly on the set, gathered wild (i.e., non-sync), or createdby a Foley artist. During the classical Hollywood era most films were pro-duced within the studio environment. This practice led to a shift for soundeffects to be produced mainly in postproduction. At the same time manyfunctions of sound effects were taken over by the music, partly due to thetechnical properties of the optical track. With the emergence of magneticmulti-channel systems in the 1950s a slight change occurred. Apart fromsome notable exceptions it was not until the mid-1970s that sound effectswere widely used in a variety of functions. Explanations for this change canbe found not only in differing production conditions but also in broadercultural developments, in the influence of the European art cinema on aca-demically trained film directors as well as in a heightened sense for thepower of sound in general within the popular culture.

A Modular Framework for the Description of Sound Effects

Verbal denomination of sound effects is the foundation not only of inter-subjective communication but also of a differentiation in the perceptionprocess. Once different categories are established verbally, they are also opento thoughtful insight in the great variability of sound objects both in nature

151


and in artistic applications. It is therefore no surprise that early descriptionmodels stem from the founders of Musique concrete, especially PierreSchaeffer. With Traite des objets musicaux he provided the most compre-hensive work to date, its only drawback being the vastness of the appliedterminology.1 In order to analyze and discuss sound effects I have devel-oped a very simple modular framework for the description of sound effects,based on five questions regarding the source of the sound as well as itsacoustic shape.

This system has the aim of posing questions about a given sound objectin a series of passes. The answers to these questions lead to the individualmodules from which the description itself can be assembled. In view of thelack of a common specific vocabulary, I have decided to use well-establishedconcepts. These concepts may be less precise than would be desirable, buttheir intuitive nature led to their use by both Schaeffer and Schafer.2

What Is Sounding?

Phylogenetically - in the course of the evolution of mankind - it has alwaysbeen a necessity to deduce the source of a sound, in order to determinein a matter of seconds whether it was a prey or predator and to reactaccordingly. Such largely automatic responses play an important role in ourlives even now, for example in dealing with traffic. They are the outcomeof a lifelong process of learning from a multitude of sense impressions.Visual, tactile and auditory experiences all contribute to our perception ofobjects.

Chion calls the investigative form of hearing ecoute causale? It is a con-crete form of auditive investigation of our sound environment in responseto the question: What is sounding?

The name of the source of an acoustic event can be understood to bea label, functioning as a simplifying orientations criterion, which createscomprehensible categories in order to store them in our memory.4 So it isthat I hear 'a horse', 'a car', or 'the sea. This first process of description servesto divide the continuous flow of sounds into individual parts and to roughlycategorize them. However, I must emphasize that the ordering of soundsinto categories according to their source, while a necessary step in the pro-cess, is by no means sufficient for analyzing sound effects. The meaning ofa sound is not necessarily identical with the meaning of its source.

Furthermore, a source cannot always be identified. This case will be dis-cussed in the chapter 'The Unidentifiable Sound Object*.

Sound Effects 153

What is Moving? (The process-related nature of sound origination)

Sound is essentially related to movement. Movement only originates sounds.Thus, the second module of sound origination focuses on this process-related component.

The matter is relatively simply, when the agent is a living being, such asan animal or a person. The processes which originate the sound in this casecan be primarily divided into activities or verbalizations. Dogs bark, sheepbleat, horses whinny. The procedural forms include the many types of move-ment in space, such as those of vehicles (in the most general sense) or livingbeings: footsteps in all their variety, driving, galloping. Human activities -whether visible or not - generate an almost unlimited variety of sounds.

However, our analysis of sound processes will make it clear that thesource of the sound is not identical with the agent (in the sense of the origi-nator of an action). It is not the person who makes the sound, when heopens or closes a door, but rather the door itself, which is passively actedupon. In the uninhabited world, processes are much harder to identify,since they take place interiorly. The object as a whole appears static, whilethe movement takes place inside it: the hard disc hums inside the com-puter, the hammer strikes the bell inside the telephone, the loudspeakermembrane is driven by electrical pulses.

In many cases sounds are also generated by interactions between objects.This may lead to either both objects, the driver and the driven object, oronly one of them being set in motion. Footsteps are a good example of suchan interaction: the material of both the shoe and the ground can be heard.

What Material is Sounding?

Materials originating sounds are especially easy to describe. The materialcomponent of sound origination is perhaps even easier to generalize thanthe relation of the sound to its origin. In other words: even more than itsorigin, a sound betrays its material components. Wood, metal, water, stoneand paper all have unique signatures. Not only the material but even itscurrent material condition is expressed in sound objects: for example, wateras steam, rain or ice. Material and source can also be one and the same; inthis case the material replaces a morphologically differentiated source. Air,for example, is a material which due to its nature has no functional formbut can be heard as wind when it passes over other objects. Material tracesare of extraordinary importance to sound aesthetics.5


How Does it Sound?

In contrast to their material composition, the acoustic qualities of a soundare relatively hard to express. I believe that onomatopoeic verbs are best suitedto express the acoustic aspect of sound effects. I use them in my descriptionas adjectival gerunds: for example, blubbering, droning, howling, roaringand swishing. Onomatopoeic expressions are especially useful becausethey directly express the acoustic quality they describe. In other words,there is a relation between their form and content, in which the word itselfcreates a sensual impression.

Of course, the everyday descriptions of acoustic qualities cannot beobjectified. There are, for example, no objective criteria to distinguish 'thun-derous* from dooming'. A set of objectifiable acoustic qualities is presentedin Flueckiger.6

Sometimes even the frequency range of a sound object may be clearlyperceived, and this quality can be used in the description: low, mid or highrange. The same can be said of the sound level - loud or soft - and strikingrhythmic qualities which can be assimilated to simple concepts, such asregular, fast-paced or hasty.

Where Does it Sound?

The spatial situation of a sound is the last of the descriptive modules. Thiscovers both the location of the sound s source and the spatial qualities ofthe location itself.

The spatial location of its source is evident in the sound object as itsdistance - for example, nearby or far away, foreground or background. Thedistance is only partly a matter of volume. As a sound recedes into thedistance it changes acoustically and becomes more mid-range. The relationbetween direct and diffuse sound also changes: the diffuse sound compo-nents become more important and can be heard as reverberation. Forthe purposes of the description of sound objects we can rely on intuitiveperceptions. Is there reverberation? What type of space is characterizedby the reverberation? Long school corridors, a small tiled bathroom, anempty warehouse?

Sound objects do not only cover distances, they also pass through obsta-cles, such as walls. The sound traces of such obstacles can also be heardand described.

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Primary Semantics

From the stylised sound effect in the classic era to the emergenceof the independent sound object in contemporary films

The notion 'classic' implies a highly elaborate normative system. In con-junction with the limited significance of sound effects as mentioned abovea rather restricted vocabulary of very stylized sound effects evolved. Thestylization was carried even further by the working conditions in thestudio system with technicians pigeonholed in their editing rooms. Soundeffects were stored in each studios sound library. It was an unwritten rulethat sound effects had to be subordinate to the visual dominance in thestorytelling process.

The inter-textual references that gave birth to the individual stylistic tra-ditions were also based in the need to organize labour. As mentioned above,films used to be manufactured in the controlled environment of the studio.Under these conditions, location recording meant dialogue recording.Since the non-verbal elements were largely taken from archives, the soundlibrary was the birthplace of the strong stylization so typical of this periodof film production. The principle of aesthetic recycling led to a significantreduction of the individual sound elements. Successful sound objects weretransformed into archetypes by continual repetition: the gunshot fromShane (dir. George Stevens, 1953) or the wind from Yellow Sky (dir. WilliamWellman, 1948). Stylized in this way and dominated by dialogue and music,sound effects lost their genuine wildness.

Contemporary soundtracks, on the other hand, provide a complexacoustic arrangement. In addition to their original wildness, with an abun-dance of detail they are layered on sometimes several hundred tracks, evenup to the point where they mask each other. This strategy expresses a dif-ferent approach to the fictional construction, which tries to simulate morethe compound soundscapes in the real world than to refer to establishedformulas. With tiny fluctuations even in the seemingly most insignificantdetails these sound effects aim at a higher degree of authenticity, thus hid-ing the very thoughtful process of their construction.

In the context of the New Hollywood we can see the influence of rockmusic as well as various movements of the late 1950s and 1960s, such as theFrench Nouvelle Vague. The Nouvelle Vague had a different approach toproduction from that of the classical mainstream film: location shoots,


minimal post-production, acceptance of the chaotic complexity of theeveryday natural world, without manipulative interventions and withouta dramaturgically motivated sequence of climaxes.

However, the effect of an unstructured soundtrack was primarily theresult, in the Nouvelle Vague, of a changed production process rather thana technical principle. It was not technical innovation, but rather ideas whichguided the development of the Nouvelle Vague and led over time to therich sound culture of French film. Without this influence, some of the mostgripping soundtracks of the New Hollywood would hardly be thinkable.

In contrast to their French predecessors, American soundtracks werenot by-products of a concept but precisely calculated effects which werenot intended to overwhelm the fictitiousness of the production; they were,rather, virtuoso expressions. The aim was thus not to represent the originalmultiplicity of a natural sound space but to analyze the complex whole intoits detailed components and rebuild it on the basis of this appropriation.

The aim was to reconstruct in detail a seemingly authentic, uncleansound. The resulting extreme artificiality - which still endures - is in itselfso coherent as to be immediately acceptable as natural, as is confirmed byaudience reactions. Even the most attentive film buffs assume that thesound objects are originated in pro-filmic reality.

Walter Murch7 and Ben Burtt,8 who have both played leading roles inthis stylistic revolution, see the change in working processes as an impor-tant basis of this new aesthetic. The new creative freedom, combined withnew flexible and highly expensive technologies, have made possible theintensive detailed work on sound which is characteristic of the autonomoussound object of contemporary film. This is characterized by a sensorysurplus of the merely communicative and indicative function of sound.Minute changes in sound are used to simulate the beautiful randomnesswhich is to be found in living nature.

The Unidentified Sound Object USO

The basic characteristic of unidentified sound objects is that they have beensevered from any connection to a source. A source is neither visible normay it be inferred from the actual context. In addition, spectators are deniedany recognition cues. In general the level of ambiguity is not reduced butcarefully maintained in order to build up emotional tension in the viewer/listener.

The preservation of ambiguity is in fact an unspoken goal of the deli-berate inclusion of USOs. As early as 1939, the Brazilian filmmaker AlbertoCavalcanti had already argued for the use of USOs in order to create

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suspense: "Have you ever heard a noise in the night - non-sync - i.e., with-out having any notion of what caused it? Of course. And you left your bedand went down to find out what caused the bang, or the thump'.

Cavalcanti considered the fundamental differences between seeing andhearing to be responsible for the suggestive, emotional character of theunidentified sound object, which triggers instinctive reflexes that mayalready be observed in infants. Cavalcanti s idea was far ahead of its time.In classical Hollywood films up to the end of the 1950s the use of unidenti-fied sound objects was extremely rare. During this period, only very fewproductions made significant use of them, for example Charlie ChaplinsModern Times and Orson Welless Citizen Kane. Both films rejected theHollywood conventions of the time.

In the context of the stylized Hollywood film, Citizen Kane still seems asout of place as ever. Vagueness and indeterminacy can function as stylisticdevices only when they are not understood as errors. Thus, a technical pre-requisite for such use of sound is high resolution with precise tonal definition.As long as a sound object is generally considered unidentifiable when itssource is not clearly demonstrated by a corresponding image, every USOremains a disturbance. However, an unwanted disturbance suddenly exposesthe technical apparatus and unmasks the film as an artefact while alsobreaking the illusion.

The USO can be understood as an open, undetermined sign whosevagueness triggers both vulnerability and tense curiosity. As an empty spacein the text, it functions like a screen upon which the viewers individual,subjective creation of meaning may be projected. The ambiguous soundobject poses a question, which the viewer will attempt to solve throughinterpretation.

The longer the ambiguity - and the information deficit that accompa-nies it - persists, the stronger the emotions that are triggered. This uncer-tainty has an emotional component because it is experienced as a loss ofcontrol. From this point of view, the USO is an instrument for deliberatelyfrustrating the spectator by producing a feeling of powerlessness and fear.In the case of the USO, such feelings of fear are doubled, as they are alsotriggered on the instinctive level. Dangers in nature have been brought toour attention through noises. The most threatening, however, are the noiseswhich cannot be attributed to a known source within a reasonable amountof time. This is supported by the findings of my analysis: science-fiction,horror and disaster films use the highest number of USOs.

Within the closed narrative forms of the mainstream film with its oblig-atory happy ending, the USO represents an artistic device that does notcorrespond with genre conventions. The pleasurable experience of fear and


the temporary loss of control are underscored by this affirmative context,which continually reminds spectators on several levels that they are expe-riencing an artificial world distinct from lived reality.

Secondary Semantics

Higher order meanings are generated when a further context enriches thesimple meaning of a sound object. This includes forms of meaning modifi-cation by means of social convention or religious or ritual practices; how-ever, these may also be genre-specific phenomena which are built up byinter-textual repetition, especially stereotypes. Within filmic works them-selves, higher order meanings (so-called super-signs) can be created bymeans of structural sequencing, such as leitmotifs.

Signals

Sound objects which have a societally determined communicative content,are commonly called signals. This common expression is to be distinguishedfrom the physical meaning, in which every sound event is called a signal.The communicative content of signals is generally a spur to action, oftenlinked with a warning. Taken as sounds, however, most signals are formallyvery simple. Given their warning or indicative function they are conceivedto strike us strongly. For this reason their base frequency is in the 1-2 kHzrange, to which the ear is particularly sensitive.

From the historical point of view, signals can be seen as originating inthe growth of social formations. The extension of early settlements wasmatched to the distance to which the human voice can carry. Although aEuropean city of the size of Vienna was - even in the eighteenth century -so quiet that the voice of the watchman on St. Stephens Cathedral was suf-ficient to warn of approaching danger,9 other systems, such as gongs, hornsand bells, had already been invented to bridge even larger distances. Andthey had other communicative functions than merely warning of danger.

Honking, sirens, ringing telephones, bells and many other signals belongto the repertoire of almost every soundtrack, no matter from what period,content or genre. Two factors have led to this privileged position of signals:they are not only easy to create, but their simple structure and clear com-municative meaning makes them easy to identify even under unfavourabletechnical conditions.

In the context of film, signals are only partly to be understood as spursto action. It is first and foremost ringing telephones and doorbells whichare directed at the characters in the course of the narrative, as well as a

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number of the most common alarm signals - sirens and computer beeps -which warn of concrete danger. Their call to attention is not just a matter ofthe context, but also of the manner in which they are prominently locatedin the foreground.

But much more often their first order meaning - the indication of asource, the constitution of an object or a spur to action - is subordinateto a second order meaning. Second order meanings include the indicationof a setting - sirens hint at urban chaos, ringing telephones are characte-ristic of police stations - or even more general forms of affective meaning,such as stress, danger, threat or aggression. In brief: when signals are heard,they very often have a negative connotation. In the exposition, in actionsequences and showdowns they are an indispensable means of raising theemotional stakes, heightened by the usually hectic rhythm. In contempo-rary mainstream films their suggestive appeal to our emotions is increasi-ngly separated from their verifiable plausibility. Sirens, ringing telephonesand alarms are edited in wherever they fit the dramatic development orpsychic state of the characters. Mimesis is only loosely maintained - theillusion, that is, that the sound object has a source somewhere in the realworld represented by the film.

Stereotypes

The term 'stereotype' stems from the social sciences where it describes a shiftfrom an attitude to a prejudice. This shift serves the individual to orient itselfin a complex environment and is built up by tradition rather than directobservation. In media theory the term has lost its purely negative meaningas a result of studies of popular mass culture. This can be seen as a reactionon the part of theorists to the increasing trend in popular mass media tocontinuously recycle the same forms and motifs, as can be seen in the nume-rous series of pulp literature, TV and mainstream film productions.

What, then, are stereotypes? Lippmann imported the term from bookprinting terminology, where it referred to lead lettertype, into the socialsciences, to describe the consolidation of attitudes into prejudices.10 Eventhen, he viewed this discrepancy between simplified interior processes andthe complex outer world as serving the purposes of orientation. The sim-plification, according to Lippmann, was a result of transmitted attitudes:'We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine things before weexperience them. And those preconceptions govern deeply the whole pro-cess of perception!11

In its transfer to film theory, a number of the constitutive componentsof the concept of stereotype have been preserved, while others have


been modified. My use of the concept is taken primarily from Wuss12 andthe very exhaustive and informative work of Schweinitz.13

The fundamental characteristic of film stereotypes is to be found inthe large-scale repetition of narrative complexes and their componentoptical and acoustic representations. Schweinitz calls them 'homologous,intertextual structures',14 structures, in other words, which remain the samethroughout a very large number of films and for a long period of time. Thisretains the aspects of consolidation and transmission characteristic of theoriginal concept.

Stereotypes have to be learned. By frequent repetition they are inscribedinto our long-term memory and are anchored there as cultural constants.Due to their continual use in a given communicative context, they providea basis for latent expectations.

They are, in part, consciously perceived. Fans of particular genres greatlyenjoy their connoisseurship: they are delighted to recognize similar narra-tive structures in new contexts. In the frame of these ritualized structures,negative emotions such as stress or aggression can be experienced as plea-surable, since the ritual facilitates mastery of negative emotions.

The thoroughly automated processing of stereotypes is the basis of oneof their most important functions. Habituation renders them unremark-able and enables them to be perceived very easily and to penetrate everdeeper into the spirit.

As they are built up, stereotypes are not only consolidated but alsoundergo a very specific amplification of their meaning. Since they are alwaysexperienced in a given genre and context, they assimilate the meaning oftheir context. Thus, ricochets are the hallmark of westerns or the tirelessbeeping of futuristic computer equipment the specific trait of science fiction.The media-conscious postmodern director is a virtuoso exploiter of suchsecondary meanings and reassembles them in new ways to play with thestandard expectations of his audience. Film sound stereotypes can thus servethe purpose of efficient communication while activating a rich network ofinter-textual associations.

A specific feature of some stereotypes is that they are distinct from phys-ical reality: there is no wind on the moon, nor do spaceship engines makeany noise in space, and computers generally only beep when they are sig-nalling an error.

Sound designers with higher standards only use pure stereotypes fromthe sound library when they contribute directly to an automatic perceptionof meaning. They will much more frequently start with a precise knowl-edge of a stereotype and use it in a subtly modified way.

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Symbols

Symbolic sound effects have a second, latent connotation, which in mostcases is not necessary to the understanding of a film. The sound of bells forexample has acquired a powerful set of meanings in Western culture, whilemany animal sounds are associated with the symbolic signification of theanimal itself.

Symbols are rooted in non-filmic, generally religious, mythic or socialtraditions: religious symbols such as the cross, social symbols such as stylesof clothing, psychoanalytic symbols such as the phallus and political sym-bols such as the Nazi swastika, etc.

The concept of symbol used here refers to a higher level of abstractionwith second- and third- order significations. Symbols have no well-definedmeaning, but they do require an interpretative effort on the part of theaudience if they are to be understood. A symbol represents an abstractconcept. For example, if we hear a rooster crow three times in the deadlysilence of a Sergio Leone western when the traitor gets his comeuppance,the context is sufficient to set off a process of symbolic interpretation.

It seems to be characteristic of filmic symbols that they arise from anasymmetry of image and sound and that either the image can be seen orthe sound heard: it is very rare that both are represented together. It is thustypical that the rooster in the Sergio Leone western is only represented onthe soundtrack. This strategy prevents an overly simple subordination ofthe object to the diegesis.

The symbolic repertoire of film is far vaster than one might suppose,but it is unequally distributed between individual films. The first genera-tion of New Hollywood directors - Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola - as wellas directors of European origin - Jean Renoir, Fritz Lang, David Lean,Sergio Leone - stand out from the crowd in this respect. When symbols areedited into the soundtrack, it is in films in which visual symbols are alsoused or in which the characters are not mere actors in the narrative buthave a deeper psychological structure. Such films can be read on manylevels. In particular, the films of Steven Spielberg, in their mix of slick actionand symbolic depth, are similar to fairy tales, and it is not only rewardingbut also fun to speculate about their various meanings.

Whether a viewer is able to grasp the latent meaning of a symbol dependson his or her specific life experience, cultural and intellectual education,imagination and sensitivity. On the other hand, a latent meaning is inprinciple only available when it is correlated to a tradition or is carefullybuilt up within the filmic text. Mainstream films, as products of a medium


which must span multiple cultures, are aware of this condition, and symbolsare always kept in the background as optional conveyors of meaning. Toreturn to the Sergio Leone example above: the film can also be understoodwithout recourse to the symbolic meaning of the roosters crow drawnfrom biblical tradition.

Key Sounds

In contrary to stereotypes, signals and symbols, which acquire their second-ary meaning either inter-textually or culturally, key sounds develop it withinthe film by repetition and variation. The key sound develops a heightenedsignificance not only by narrative associations but also by the carefullyconstructed wealth of the acoustic appearance.

By the term key sounds I refer to sound objects which, due to their clearlyperceptible intra-textual frequency, their strategic placement - mostly inthe exposition and other key scenes as well as their integration into thefundamental thematic content of the film - accumulate a specific meaning.In contrast to leitmotifs, which are built on a similar mechanism, the modi-fication of the meaning of key sounds is not a consequence of their relationto special events, locations, characters or ideas. It rather arises from theirexchanges with the narrative context, with their aboutness, 'what the hellwas that about?'15 a sort of resonance, which gives key sounds their specialstatus relative to other sound objects. In terms of sound, this privilegedstatus is evident in their more careful, variant-rich structure, as well asoften in forms of transformation and enhancement.

Perhaps the most famous and, for the purposes of this discussion, mostfruitful example of a key sound is the helicopter sound object in ApocalypseNow (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979). In the opening sequence, the heli-copter flies through the theatre from all four directions, from rear right torear left, front left to front right. Its perceptible qualities alone, such as itsextreme spatiality and its acoustic difference tend to focus our attention onit. The brutality of the Vietnam War as the fundamental theme of the film -its aboutness - is immediately deepened in the opening sequence via thecomplex of images of destruction, perception distorted by drug use andapocalyptic pop-decadence.

Thus all basic components of the key sound are strongly represented:correlation with the theme of the film, strong and immediate perceptibilityand strategic placement in the exposition. More than an extension of mean-ing, we seem to be dealing here with a concentration of meaning: a sort ofimplosion of external elements into a single sound object - in this case thehelicopter.

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Leitmotif

The leitmotif on the other hand has an indicative function strictly associatedto certain characters or locations. Coined in 1851 by Richard Wagner in thecontext of his opera theory, the term describes an abstract commentaryfunction in regard to the psychological condition of the characters as wellas metaphysical aspects of their being. While Adorno et al. doubt the possi-bility of the leitmotif technique in film fundamentally,16 the close analysisof a large group of mainstream films has demonstrated that it is used notonly in its trivial function as an indication but also in a much deeper sensefor the intra-textual construction of meaning.

In their critique, Adorno and Eisler were primarily targeting thosecompositional practices which limited themselves to simply using repetitionof melodies to label persons and locations, without using the interaction ofsound and image to achieve (or even attempt to achieve) a higher levelof abstraction, whether metaphysical or symbolic. The detailed analysis ofa few examples clearly demonstrates that it is precisely in its potential tocreate complex webs of referential and abstract meaning that the leitmotifholds great promise for the achievement of a convincing dramatic structure.

The leitmotif is a mechanism capable of dynamically constructingmeaning within the work, as well as being a structure-building principle ofthe highest order. The first appearance of the leitmotif is decisive for thesuccess with which it conveys meaning. It must be strategically placed sothat there is an unequivocal and very clear interplay between the soundand the image. The concept of priming, developed by the cognitive psy-chology, is of value here. Priming means pre-activation of the attention.It opens a specific semantic register or field of meaning for subsequentinformation. Thus the initial exposition establishes whether the symbolicmeaning has to do for instance with death, danger or happiness.

The meaning of the leitmotif has to be acquired. The audience mustdevelop a system of rules or an abstract structure of stimuli, 'without pur-posefully searching for rules and without even being aware of them'.17 Onceestablished by priming, the leitmotif must be reinforced and anchored inthe memory by repeated association, until the linkage is so stable that themusical motif or sound object alone is capable of representing the entirecomplex of associations. Repetition is thus an obligatory component in thecreation of a leitmotif.

Can sound objects be leitmotifs? The original, musical concept did notprovide for the use of sounds as leitmotifs. But as early as the Baroque period,music had developed references to non-musical reality by imitating naturalsounds - a famous example is Vivaldi s Quattro Stagioni. Signals such as the


hunting horn or fanfares, animal and especially bird sounds, and naturalsounds such as thunder and lightning have all been used in musical compo-sitions as Tonmalerei ('tone painting'). The difference from the originalleitmotif consists in the fact that the sound object or its imitation carrieswith it into a narrative or visual context a pre-formed meaning (symbolic orreferential), the meaning of which changes during its interaction with thecontext as it is repeated. The relationship is thus reciprocal. Two meaningsform a super-sign at a higher level of abstraction, which develops dynami-cally by means of repeated exposition. Thus all requirements of a leitmotifhave been satisfied: the creation of an abstract symbolic meaning, increasingautonomy - the sound object is capable of representing the symbolic com-plex on its own - and the building of an overarching dramatic structure.

Sound-Image Relationship

With the term 'added value', Michel Chion introduced a very useful conceptfor the description of the sound-image relationship,18 thereby opening upthe former dichotomy between contrapuntal and redundant use of sound asestablished in early sound theory, notably by Eisenstein et al. in their famous'Statement'.19 The added value denominates an energetic flux between twoconcepts, one of them displayed by an optical and the other by an acousticrepresentation. These representations modify the perception of each otherby adding or stressing certain attributes while attenuating others.

The question regarding an adequate linkage between sound and imagewas debated especially fiercely at the beginning of the sound film era. Someof the most creative makers of silent films were far from happy about theintroduction of sound. Eisenstein et al. expressed their fear that after aninitial period of astonishing sensations, the sound film would decay intoa conservative theatrical form and lose its creative independence.20

But mainstream cinema has not heeded the recommendations ofEisenstein, Rene Clair and others. On the contrary, the few sounds editedinto the soundtracks of classic Hollywood productions were almost exclu-sively related to visible objects. This is because sound effects, in comparisonto speech and music, are strongly compromised by a limited frequency rangeof a sound medium, since they are largely non-harmonic. When we hearharmonic sound objects - composed of a fundamental and a number ofovertones, which are harmonics of the fundamental itself - our brain addsin the fundamental even when it lies outside the range of transmission.Among noises, only a number of signals as well as some animal soundshave a harmonic structure.

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The cinematic medium was thus found to be incomplete because oftechnical failings and the inexperience of the viewer. Attempts were madeto counter this incompleteness by coding objects and actions in two ways,both optically and acoustically. The resulting redundancy, which was explic-itly criticized by the authors of the 'Statement*, acted to prevent incompre-hension on the part of the viewer which, in the classic Hollywood productionhad to be avoided at all costs.

There was a reciprocal relationship between visual and acoustic repre-sentation in the classic Hollywood film, which can be summarized in themotto 'See a dog - hear a dog'.

Synchresis and Added Value

As already mentioned, motion generates sound, no matter where it occurs,and the sound must be precisely adapted to the optical representation. Thisis why, in cinema, sound not only unifies the perception of time but alsostructures its flow. The function of structuring cinematic action in time isgiven great importance by Chion for this very reason.21 He established theconcept of synchresis to describe the temporal matching of image andsound:

Synchresis (a word I have forged by combining synchronism and syn-thesis) is the spontaneous and irresistible weld produced between aparticular auditory phenomenon and visual phenomenon when theyoccur at the same time. This join results independently of any rationallogic.22

Synchresis is based on the mechanism of inter-modal matching of stimulifrom visual and aural perception. It is one of the fundamental requisites forthe substitution of original sound by means of automated dialog replace-ment ADR, Foley and sound editing. The division of the image flow intoindividual frames means that the optical representation is unable to ade-quately render very fast motions or short body contact.

Equally fundamental to the comprehension of the sound-image complexis the concept of added value:

By added value I mean the expressive and informative value withwhich a sound enriches a given image so as to create the definiteimpression . . . that this information or expression 'naturally' comesfrom what is seen, and is already contained in the image itself.23


Even more than synchresis, added value places weight on the significationof this interaction. As a basis for the following discussion of the construc-tion of meaning in the exchange between sound and image we use recentconceptions from semantics which investigate the dynamic aspects ofmeanings.24

Added value indicates an energetic flow between two concepts resultingin a third concept which can be explained neither by reference to the onenor to the other. In the interaction between two concepts - one acousticand one optical - a number of characteristics come to the fore, while othersare, so to speak, anaesthetized. Goschke and Koppelberg note that inessence concepts are by no means stable, invariant structures.25 Mental rep-resentations in long-term memory are continuously changed and adaptedon the basis of new experience. 'The impression of the stability of concep-tual structures is more likely to be an artefact of the construction of com-mon denominators over a large number of persons, contexts and tasks'This brings a variable into play which may be of great importance for thefollowing consideration: typicality. Actual representations of objects (tokens)can be perceived as more or less typical depending on the extent to whichthey agree with or differ from the above described common denominator:a sparrow is a more typical bird than a penguin, for example. Prototypes arecharacterized by the fact that they almost ideally represent this commondenominator. Examples of prototypes on the soundtrack would be, forinstance, the big sound of a gunshot, the discreet sound of a door closing ora blow from John Waynes fist.

The degree of typicality of the optical and acoustic representation deter-mines the strength of the common denominator generated by the interactionbetween the two modes. As an example, consider the notorious cloppingof horses' hoofs, created by the Foley artist with two coconut halves. Out ofthe myriads of conceivable sound objects which might be generated byhorses' hoofs on different types of terrain, this sound represents the above-mentioned prototypical average. Interestingly enough, this prototypicalstylization has been generated precisely by artificial substitution, since thesame standardized means of sound production are always used in the studio.The function of clopping hoofs is thus first and foremost that of indicatinga source, which in words might be expressed as 'there is a horse'; since theexpression does not go further than this indication, it is largely provided bythe visual perception: we see the source, which is the horse itself. Thisresults in the greatest possible redundancy between the two forms of rep-resentation, and their association is automatic and smooth. The concepts

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run together into a single, relatively stable concept, without anything newbeing created. The added value tends towards zero.

The mechanism of this interaction becomes significantly more complexwhen unstable or ambivalent concepts are associated with each other. Wediscuss this possibility in the context of a fictional object, the light swordfrom Star Wars (dir. Lucas, 1977). Switched off, it looks like a short metalrod; switched on, like a shining neon tube.

It is primarily its designation in speech as 'your fathers light sabre', fol-lowed by its first use, that makes this object into a weapon. However, thereis a certain discrepancy between the optical representation and the intendedfunction, which had to be bridged by sound designer Ben Burtt, since theimage lacked the quality dangerous' which is obligatory for weapons.

The construction of the object is achieved by integrating disparate char-acteristics, which goes far beyond their simple indicative function. Specificcharacteristics were used to establish functions including consequences,processes, a hypothetical material composition and sensual qualities. Thesound object itself is composed of various component concepts, which areassociated with various processes: the tone modulation of the hummingsound as the object moves in space, the hissing sound as it is switched on,the crackling of contact. The tonal qualities mobilize everyday sense expe-riences: the association with speed and power by means of phasing as wellas to negative experiences of electricity and heat by means of a cracklingsound.

The example of the light sword makes a trend evident: the effect of themodification is in inverse proportion to the redundancy between both therepresentation of the object on the screen and on the soundtrack. In prin-ciple, the more detailed the sound object, the clearer its effect on the visualrepresentation. In the process of intermodal association, it is the viewerwho combines the various characteristics of the visual and aural represen-tation into a meaningful whole. The more distant the representations arefrom prototypical simplification, the greater is the resulting added value.

A continuum of possibilities is available between the redundant interac-tion in the case of clopping horses' hoofs and the complex interaction inthe case of the light sword, which runs along the axis between similarityand difference. Redundancy is the outcome of maximum similarity betweenthe concepts, with zero added value. At the other extreme of the axis wehave maximum difference, which also yields a zero maximum value: If theconcepts were completely unrelated, no articulated whole could be builtfrom their interaction. This explains why the counterpoint demanded by


Eisenstein and Clair is so rare and has had little currency as a strategy inmainstream cinema, because it is located at this risky other end of the axis.If we consider the axis between maximum redundancy (complete agree-ment) and chaos (maximum difference) in terms of its potential for creat-ing added value, it will be evident that this can be maximized when there isa considerable amount of ambiguity.

Narrative Functions

Orientation

Traditionally it has been a main function of sound effects to link the frag-mented sections of pro-filmic reality and to tie them to an organic ensemble.By this process, the soundtrack facilitates orientation both in the space-timeconstruction of diegesis and the narrative structure of scenes, sequences,acts and events. The sound effects create complex environments in closeinteraction with the visuals, the text provided by dialogues and titles, andthe music.

The soundtrack has been used since its introduction to characterizelocations, since perception of the environment as an unbroken stream ofacoustic data is a fundamental characteristic of hearing. The upholstered,whisper-quiet ambience of a hotel lobby has quite a different effect fromthe cavernous reverberation of a church, for instance. Hearing impressionscatapult us - just like odours - back into our early experiences, even afteryears. They invoke internal images, entire landscapes emerge before ourinner eye and long forgotten feelings are awoken. Every place leaves itsimpression as a complex of specific sound objects.

Terminology

The classic terminology - used by Gorbman and Thompson et al., amongothers - is founded on the concept of diegesis.26 Diegesis refers to the space-time continuum in which a fictional action takes place. A sound is calleddiegetic when its source - object or character - belongs to the diegesis.Extra- or non-diegetic sounds are those which have their source outsidethe diegesis. This category covers a large part of film music as well as voice-overs, but only a few sound effects can be categorized in this way. Diegeticsounds are further categorized by Thompson et al. as on- and q/f-sounds,depending on whether their source is visible in the frame (on) or is sup-posed to be located outside it (off). This distinction between on and off is

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often, and rightly, criticized. The problem lies in a basic quality of acousticevents: they are invasive and ubiquitous, and they penetrate walls and goaround corners. In many cases it is not possible to determine whether agiven sound object has its source in or outside the frame.

My investigations have led me to distinguish the following facets:

1. The single element used to characterize a location, such as the barkingof a dog.

2. The systematic organization of these elements in specific clusters, forexample 'barking dog plus cicadas equals southern night'.

These two phenomena are related in a hierarchical, one could even sayparadigmatic, order to each other.

I use the concept of territory sound to indicate the individual element.This does not identify a specific sound object as such but rather its functionto define a location geographically, temporally, culturally, ethnically orsocially. The barking of a dog - to stay with this most simple example - canalso indicate its source and in this case would have an indicative function.The difference between the two functions is perceptible in the sound itself.The dogs bark in its indexing function is located in the foreground,while the territory sound is located in the background by reducing its volumeand adding spatial parameters (particularly reverberation). Furthermore,in its indexing function the dogs bark is related to a specific dog, whichis generally presented in the image and may even be given a name indialogue. In this case we are dealing with a token. The territory sounddog, on the other hand, is never to be seen and is not further differentiated,thus remaining a type.

As mentioned above the individual territory sounds are organized onthe soundtrack in specific hierarchical structures. I would suggest using thealready existing term ambience for these sub-structures. In technical jargonand in the organization of sound archives this concept has established itselfas a means of indicating entire sound environments, such as 'harbour','railway station', 'mountain meadows'. Its everyday meaning is also suited tothe function of atmospheres. On the one hand it is related to spatial acous-tics, the materials out of which the space is composed, its extension andgeographical location, and on the other to the people who use this spaceand their activities. These are parameters which can be immediately andcompletely comprehended and which have a very direct influence on theemotional situation. In the following, we will understand ambiences to besets of territory sounds, which serve to characterize locations.


Ambiences have a similar role to play within the soundtrack. They arethe acoustic setting, which enables both orientation in space and time andsets the emotional framework for both the viewer and the characters.

Since they have to deliver their information content immediately with-out requiring any particular attention from the viewer, they are probablythe most highly stereotyped part of the soundtrack, which must also behighly abstract and functional. Ambiences are thus reduced to a minimumand generally consist of distinct bundles of no more than three territorysounds. This strong coding is not only a requirement of the text itself, butabove all of communication with a varied audience, which has been condi-tioned to accept this schematic information. This reduction is characteristicof American mainstream cinema. In Europe, space-time indicators are muchmore differentiated, a fact which is connected with the existence of a morehomogeneous audience familiar with the vocabulary.

It would be mistaken to believe that the use of stereotypes as territorysounds leaves no space for creativity. Crickets - one of the most widely usedstandards - come in a myriad of varieties, some of which are not crickets atall but rather other insects - locusts or cicadas - which have a similar wayof producing their sound.

The highly artificial representational mechanisms which simplify natu-ral sound environments and translate them into a vocabulary of explicitmeanings according to a conventional set of rules are well known to thesound designer, but only partly to the viewer, who have a limited intuitivefeeling whether the acoustic representation of the environment is corrector not.

The transfer of information is thus extremely efficient, both in terms ofthe formation of the soundtrack and of the effort required from the viewer.When the mere screaming of seagulls is sufficient to evoke the landscapeset 'sea/beach/coast', space is left available on the soundtrack for the differ-entiated formation of secondary characteristics.

The territory sounds, or at least some of them, generally remain the samethroughout the film for a given location, except when consequential changeshave taken place or when the entire film - or a great part of it - takes placein a single location. In unusual locations, whose acoustic situation cannotbe achieved with the standard repertoire, a number of sets are created foreach location which become independent of the image through repetition.An example for this is the Evil Empire in the Star Wars trilogy, which ischaracterized by a bassy modulation. This sound object has no pre-estab-lished referential meaning but was established in Star Wars (dir. GeorgeLucas, 1977) itself. This procedure has clear analogies to the simplified form

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of the leitmotif technique and exploits the mechanism of implicit learning.The viewers are very well able, after a few viewings, to deduce the locationfrom fragments of the soundtrack; they are even struck by how clearly thewhole scenery emerges before their inner eye.

In contrary to this highly stereotyped and limited vocabulary thereexists a different strategy in films with psychological depth where an abun-dance of territory sounds does not primarily characterize a geographicallocation, but rather a relation between the attitude of a character and hisenvironment. They thus surpass the mere indication of a location in orderto provide a psychological depiction of the character s feelings. Tlie terri-tory sounds can be interpreted as elements of a latent subjective transfor-mation, which represents the environment as seen from the perspectiveof the sensitive character. In this case the soundtrack is simulating a mech-anism which is familiar to us from everyday perception. Everybody isfamiliar with this heightened degree of sensitivity, in which every soundis irritating. The subjectively coloured depiction of the environment hasgained increasing currency as a strategy in mainstream films since themid-1970s, especially where the psychological facets of the characters hasmade it possible.

A significant accumulation of optional territory sounds, often pairedwith an excessive use of them, is also to be found in certain films whichmainly exploit the repertoire of stereotypes, and especially when the psy-chical tension of the characters is clearly aggravated. These are situations ofalienation or disorientation, showdowns and darkness, in which the latterthree are often combined.

Generalization versus Dichotomization

The formulaic description of locations by means of stereotypical territorysounds can be understood to be a form of generalization, an overemphasison similarities. When crickets and barking dogs in the distance as describedabove mean 'exterior night' independently of the geographical location, thisstrategy becomes audible. At the same time, generalization means theexclusion of distinctions.

Dichotomization, on the other hand, means overemphasis on differ-ences. It also serves the purpose of orientation, since different situationscan be clearly distinguished from each other by means of contrast.

Each addition of ambience to the soundtrack can be understood as acombination of dichotomization and generalization, in which generaliza-tion usually has the upper hand. Dichotomization dominates, for instance,


when in Witness (dir. Weir, 1985) distinction must be made between therural, non-technological reality of the Amish and the urban atmosphere ofHarrison Ford's character.

An analysis of the two complementary procedures is particularly reveal-ing in structures which by their very nature place special requirementson the orientation mechanism. These are parallel montages, transitions andsimilar locations with different narrative meanings: for example, the goodguys' and the bad guys' space stations.

In the majority of parallel montages, the distinctions are made particu-larly evident, so that orientation is always possible. The contrast-rich prep-aration of the ambiences also has the purpose of increasing the hecticrhythm by emphasizing the cuts.

Subjective Transformations

Dreams, hallucinations and other forms of subjective perceptions can beexpressed by a shift of the narrative point of view to the perspective ofa character. An overarching strategy to communicate these forms of subjec-tive transformation is the dissociation of acoustic and optical cues. Whensound and image deviate from each other significantly, a logical conflictarises which has to be solved by the spectator. A set of formal processes canbe observed which are applied to the sound effects. An additional mode iscalled 'anti-natural selection: whereby the soundtrack mimics a shift in theattention of a character by augmenting certain sound effects and lesseningothers. Many of these practices stem from perceptual facets in everydaylife. They are called 'simulated subjective transformations', while others -such as reverberation - are called 'marked subjective transformations' Theyfunction as an extra-diegetic commentary provided by the enunciator.

The Dissociation of Sound and Image

The logical-causal relationship between optical and acoustic appearancesin the real world is a firm part of perception. Distortions in perceptioncan also occur in real life through the dissociation of sense impressionbelonging to different modes. Psychotic or cognitive disturbances can leadto a deficit in perception which, among other things, results in behaviouralincoherence, since the stimuli from the various different modes do notseem to match each other. Filmic narrative exploits this basis of naturalexperience, when such feelings are to be represented from the perspectiveof a given character.

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The dissociation of sound and image demands a decision to be taken.As a matter of principle, there is a variety of possibilities: either the acousticor the optical representation is felt to be more realistic and is chosen as thepoint of reference to which the distorted representation is compared, orboth codings yield distorted representations, which may each be distortedin different ways. Such transformations are often found in different layersof the narration. But these changes - and I want to emphasize this point -can only be adequately interpreted, when narrative context, image or soundare not considered in isolation.

The dissociation of sound and image can be expressed by disturbinga natural-seeming relationship of plausibility, which is the result of under-mining the empirically rooted probability that the optical and audible eventswould actually occur in the represented situation. Such a manipulation canbe seen in The Player (dir. Altman, 1992). When the leading character, in anemotional crisis, kills the person who has supposedly been blackmailinghim with letters and telephone calls, not only are the sounds of the actionreverbed, but we also hear bells, which are linked to the events as a leitmotifand echo in Millss head over the following days. TTie bells, as an implausi-ble sound object in the context of the parking lot, are filtered out of the die-gesis. The later repetition of this sound object constructs an associationwith the protagonist s internal world.

The dissociation of sound and image is an overarching technique fora range of different established component strategies, which we discussbelow.

Sounds Fade Away

The loss of auditory contact with the environment is the most widely usedstrategy for subjectivizing sound. This process is also grounded in real-world experience. Hearing is the medium of a constant sensory exchangewith the world which surrounds us: we cannot close our ears. Interruptingthis acoustic continuum in the course of a film makes a statement. The fad-ing away of sound effects marks or simulates a loss of connection to reality.The subject, the character, is decoupled from the sound environment andthus from reality itself.

In The Right Stuff (dir. Kaufman, 1983) the fading of sound expressesthe loss of consciousness. While attempting to break the speed record in hisrocket plane, the pilot Chuck Yeager loses consciousness. The flight itselfis represented very experimentally from a wide array of perspectives. Point -of-view shots are inter-cut with various exterior shots of the jet as well as


close-ups of the pilots face. In parallel, we are shown his colleagues waitingin a bar. The point-of-view shots are first transformed at a speed of morethan Mach 2. The clouds lose their outlines and change into hallucinatorygraphics. The sound world of the whole is clearly surreal in its colouring,the jet is always only audible in short clips. The sound of the wind ismore evident, as it communicates the speed and the associated border-lineexperiences. When Yeager loses consciousness and the plane threatens tocrash, the silence triggers an anticipation of impending death.

Reverberation as a Means of Subjective Transformations

Reverberation often expresses the mental state of the characters. This useis only partly based on a natural distortion of perception. It is thereforeall the more surprising that reverberation has become such a solid andlong-lasting strategy for indicating auditory subjective transformations.Examples are to be found as early as the 1940s in, among others, Murder,My Sweet (dir. Dmytryk, 1944) and A Double Life (dir. Cukor, 1947), as wellas in the relatively unknown but sonically innovative Twelve O'clock High(dir. King, 1949). In the examples taken from the film noir series it is pri-marily reverberation in voices which metaphorically echoes in the headand is thus to be understood as an acoustic flashback.

There is no doubt that this use has consolidated over time, so that wenow interpret reverberation as a coded procedure which indicates subjec-tivization without simulating it. The unchanged spatial situation providesthe frame of reference, as well as other reverberation-free sound objectsin the same locating context. In accordance with unequivocal nature ofcoding, this strategy seldom gives rise to ambivalence: the communicativeaspect takes priority.

In contrast with other subjective distortions which we attribute to thepsychical state of the characters, reverberation has a special status, since itworks directly on the viewer. If I play with a reverberation generator, aftera certain amount of time I experience feelings of dizziness and nausea. Theseparation of the visual and auditory perception of space is significantlydifferent from our normal perception: and this undermines our feeling ofsecurity.

SlowMotion

Slow motion corresponds to a phenomenon in our perception of reality.Time is seldom experienced as a static metric, but it is influenced by many

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factors such as stress, fatigue, interest, happiness and boredom; time isexperienced subjectively as either stretched out or compressed. An excep-tion to this regularity is represented by those moments which we experienceas shocking. The flow of information is extremely intense, and yet timeseems to stand still.

In most cases, slow motion is reserved for moments of extreme stress.Death in particular has been more often than not represented in slow motionsince the beginning of the 1980s. Slow motion appears as an emotional-dramatizing supplement which lies somewhere between added commen-tary and a seemingly natural distortion of perception. The death/slowmotion axis is so well established, that slow motion evokes an anticipationof death in the viewer in the presence of acute mortal danger.

Slow motion presents a formal creative challenge to the sound designer.If we slow down the soundtrack, the result is a relatively inexpressive trans-formation of all frequencies downwards, which can be compensated withharmonizer-plug-ins, digital modules in the workstation. But this type ofstrategy is an exception. It is used primarily with explosions or gunshots,which are generally slowed down to make them seem larger. Far moreoften, USOs are used - indefinable thundering or rushing noises, whichexploit the symbolic dimension of wind and thunder. The sound objectsare also selectively reverbed or even faded out. Another typical strategy forthe indication of slow motion through sound is anti-naturalistic selection^which is covered further below.

The scene in The Piano (dir. Campion, 1992), in which George cuts offAdas finger with the hatchet, employs a multiplicity of techniques. Soundsfade away, Adas piano playing is heard extra-diegetically - rubato is used inlarge extent to mimic the disturbing situation - and stops at the moment thefinger is cut off. We hear the screams of the daughter, the rain (very muted)and then the very soft sound of Adas slowed-down steps in the puddles.After a horrified pause, the piano music starts up again, delicate and slow.

Augmentation

When certain sound objects are made to emerge from the sound space,this is called augmentation. An aurally acoustically augmented object isdistinguished by increased volume, and sometimes distortion emphasizesthis distinction by transforming the sound to a lower frequency range.This technique is often coupled with increased reverberation. Technicallythis is very often achieved by means of a substitution: in other words, thevisible object is replaced by the sound of another source.


Augmentation indicates a change in the evaluation of an object or eventin the mind of a character. Such augmentation can thus be interpreted asa marked auditory form of subjective transformation. The film brings animportant sound object to our attention.

It is significant that this is a late development which occurs for instancein Lawrence of Arabia (dir. Lean, 1962) where the reverbed clacking togetherof tin spoons indicates the hallucinatory exhaustion of the Englishmen intheir threatening surroundings.

The procedure then becomes more popular from the mid-1970s, a modelexample being its use in All the Presidents Men (dir. Pakula, 1975), in whicha number of taps of a typewriter are replaced by gunshots. All the PresidentsMen describes the events of the Watergate scandal in the form of a politicalthriller. The gunshots thus serve as a metaphor for the politically explosivepower of journalistic research and journalism itself.

Breathing and Heartbeats

The complex of augmentation also includes the audibility of a character sown sounds, especially breathing or heartbeats. These sounds incorporateboth simulated and indicated subjective transformations. They are onlyconceivable as simulations, when the camera takes the point of view of thecharacter as well, so that the optical and acoustic point of view is identical.But such linkages are relatively exceptional. Heartbeats or very intimatelyrecorded breathing are usually used independently of the cameras pointof view.

Breathing and heartbeats also have a symbolic dimension. They repre-sent automatic bodily functions, without which no life is possible. Theythus indicate not only nearness but, especially in the extremely threateningcontexts in which they are most frequently used, life as a value to be pro-tected and as the opposite to death.

In a scene in Platoon (dir. Stone, 1986), in which the main character,a young and naive American who has just arrived in Vietnam, keeps watch,we can experience these considerations in concrete form. At first it is eerilyquiet. The breathing sound cuts in prominently during a close up, afterwhich we cut to Chris s view of the moonlit jungle. An indefinable rustlingmotivates the jump from a close up to an extreme close up, in which onlyChriss eyes are to be seen. We then cut again to his point of view, thesilhouette of a hidden Vietnamese soldier detaching itself slowly from thesurrounding vegetation. Cut back to the extreme close up, the heartbeatsounds in its stereotypical form of a double beat.

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As elsewhere, the heartbeat is significantly overstressed. Like many otherstereotypes, it is very different from a realistic representation. Normally weonly hear our heartbeat in situations of stress or after physical effort throughthe pulsing flow of the blood in our veins, which corresponds to its speededup rhythm.

Anti-naturalistic Selection

By anti-naturalistic selection I mean a shift in the acoustic processing by fore-grounding some of the sound effects and pushing others into the background.This selection simulates the focusing of attention of a character as a func-tion of his specific interests and objectives: for example, the scanning ofa sound space for anticipated events, the auditory zooming-in to a soundobject as well as focused listening as a correlative of optical focusing.

Anti-naturalistic selection is principally used in films whose entire worldis determined or marked by a single character. Consider for instance thefight scenes in Raging Bull (dir. Scorsese, 1980). They are formally by nomeans as homogeneous as they seem. But we can identify a number ofbasic parameters of their formation. The temporal axis is extremely fluid inall of them. There is no objective temporal metric. Moments of extremecompression with fast, staccato cutting are inter-cut with extended periodsof slow motion. The soundtrack is built of a number of sound effects, whichpartly symbolize the public status of the fights - applause, camera flashes,bells, shouts, whistling and boos from the audience - and partly the physi-cal, material aspect of the body: the highly processed sounds of blows in alltheir variants, the rushing wind-like noise of the movements and the dis-gusting squashing noises of bursting wounds. But the essential subjectivetransformation is created by a number of USOs, from shrill distortedsqueaking to swishing or growling sounds. These elements are subjected tocontinuous change which, added to the flexible description of time, createsa keynote of threatening intensity.

In the shadow of the pompously over-stylized fight scenes, the scenesfrom everyday life appear more authentic than a closer analysis reveals themto be. The authenticity is strengthened by the depressing lower-middle-classto nouveau-riche settings, as well as by the limited, slurred verbal expres-sion of the characters. The main character appears to be an animal, alwaysdriven on by his readiness to fight, imprisoned in his compulsive posses-siveness and mercilessly tormented by mistrust and jealousy. The formalcreation of these scenes is without flair, the soundtrack - especially the dia-logue recording - sounds in part disturbingly bad, and the images often


seem to have been accidentally filmed by a TV reporter. And yet all of thisis precisely calculated, and each element of the soundtrack is consciouslydesigned and edited with extreme refinement. Forms of anti-natural selec-tion come up again and again, mostly only perceptible in short significantmoments and increasingly centred on the fanatical intensity with whichthe character observes his prey - the immaculately fair Vickie.

Concluding Remarks

Our investigation of the function of sound effects would indicate an overlap-ping of semantic and sensory strategies. Both are grounded in film-historicalpractice and the routine of everyday perception. However, while many ofthese functions were delegated to the music in the classic Hollywood pro-duction, since the 1960s an extremely varied, sensorially rich vocabularyof sounds has been developed. It is a lexicon even capable of constructingthe mental attitude of the characters or complex narrative strategies - andthus contributing essentially to our experience of cinema.

Notes

1. Pierre Schaeffer, Traite des objets musicaux, Paris: Seuil, 1966.2. Ibid.; R. M. Schafer, The Tuning of the World. Rochester, NY: Destiny Books, 1977.3. M. Chion, Audio-vision. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.4. W. Dili, Grundlagen der Stereotypisierung. Goettingen: Hogrefe, 1982, p. 14.5. See B. Flueckiger, Sound Design. Die virtuelle Klangwelt des Films. Marburg:

Schueren, 2001, pp. 330-61.6. Ibid., pp. 192-243.7. Walter Murch, in Vincent LoBrutto (ed.), Sound-On-Film: Interviews with Creators

of Film Sound. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994, p. 85.8. Ben Burtt, in LoBrutto, V. Selected Takes. Film Editors on Editing. New York: Praeger

Publishers, 1991, p. 142.

9. Schafer (1977), p. 166.10. W. Lippmann, Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1922.

11. Ibid., p. 89.12. P. Wuss, Filmanalyse und Psychologic. Strukturen des Films im Wahrnehmungsprozess.

Berlin: Edition Sigma, 1993.13. J. Schweinitz, 'Stereotypen popularen filmischen Erzahlens', Arbeitsheft. Berlin:

Akademie der Kunste der DDR, 1990, p. 42.14. Ibid., pp. 10-12.15. Umberto Eco, Lector in fibula. Milano: Bompiani, 1979, p. 114.

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16. Th. W. Adorno and H. Eisler, Composing for the Films. New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1947.

17. T. Goschke, 'Lernen und Gedachtnis. Mentale Prozesse und Gehirnstrukturen, inG. Roth and W. Prinz (eds), Kopf-Arbeit. Gehirnfunktionen und kognitive Leistungen.Heidelberg: Spektrum-Verlag, 1996, p. 392.

18. Chion (1990), pp. 9-10.19. Eisenstein et al. in their famous 'Statement': S. M. Eisenstein, V. Pudovkin and

G. Alexandrov, 'A Statement,' in E. Weis and J. Belton (eds), Film Sound. Theory and Practice.New York; Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1928.

20. Eisenstein et al. (1928).21. Chion (1990), pp. 52-53.22. Ibid., p. 63.23. Ibid., p. 5.24. T. Goschke and D. Koppelberg, 'Konnektionistische Representation, semantische

Kompositionalitat und die Kontextabhangigkeit von Konzepten', in H. Hildebrandt undE. Scheerer (eds), Interdisziplinare Perspektiven der Kognitionsforschung. Frankfurt/M.:Lang, 1993.

25. Goschke etal. (1993), p. 83.26. C. Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. London: British Film Institute,

1987; K. Thompson and D. Bordwell, Film Art. An Introduction. New York: Knopf, 1993.

9Leitmotif

Persuasive Musical Narration

Stan Link

Introduction

In its broadest usage, leitmotif (and leitmotiv) connotes a concise, recurringmusical statement associated with a non-musical object or idea. The reap-pearance of a leitmotif within an extended musical context in turn acknowl-edges the presence - implicit or explicit - of its meaning under evolvingcircumstances. Appearing in orchestral and music-dramatic genres fromthe nineteenth and even eighteenth centuries, the leitmotif informed thelater emergence, traditions, and practices of cinema music. While commonlyassociated with symphonic and operatic genres, the leitmotif s transductionof the extra-musical into musical thematic analogues makes it eminentlyadaptable to the visual and narrative elements of film, and the techniqueremains the bedrock upon which traditional film scores in many musicalstyles continue to be built. Highly familiar examples include the rhythmi-cally insistent 'shark' music in John Williams s score for Jaws (1975), EnnioMorricones anguished, out-of-tune harmonica melody in Once Upon aTime in the West, (Ital. Cera una Volta il West 1968) and Bernard Herrmannsblood curdling shower-stabbing cue in Psycho (1960). The primary thematicmusical cue for each of these examples is both compact and conspicuous,returning at significant moments to reintroduce its associations in newdramatic situations. The leitmotif in film is typically a non-diegetic instru-mental or orchestral cue, but other possibilities abound. Uses of the leitmotif

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can be found in other musical styles such as pop, jazz, rap and so on, andeven in terms of diegetic placement within the film world itself.

As directly as the aforementioned examples seem to communicate, theexpressive potential of the leitmotif transcends a simple mapping of musiconto narrative components. While in Jaws, a leitmotif refers in a seeminglystraightforward way to the shark, sounding with each appearance, the har-monica tune in Once Upon a Time in the West is more complex in a narra-tive sense. The leitmotif is linked with Charles Bronsons character (alsocalled 'Harmonica in the film) from the first scene in which he performsthe tune himself. The full significance of the motive relative to his brothersmurder, however, is not disclosed until later. As much as the conflicts thattypify a Western, the long range uncovering of the trauma associated withHarmonicas music drives the film. The impact of Psycho's shower cue, onthe other hand, is mostly instantaneous. Rather than the slow exorcism ofMorricones haunted harmonica, Bernard Herrmanns stabbing leitmotifbecomes a way of visiting terror directly on the spectator, linking the showermurder with the film s denouement through the recurrence of the motive.Countless further examples would unearth this same wellspring of the leit-motif techniques enduring viability: although a simple matter for compos-ers and filmmakers to link music to narrative, and for spectators to relatemotives to dramatic elements, the ways in which motives construct, amplifyand communicate their meanings can be complex and subtle.

Historical Background

In that the leitmotif finds work from concert halls to cinema multiplexes,from silent film through the sound era, and from art-house period piece tosci-fi blockbuster, it would be a mistake to define it too narrowly. Historically,aesthetically and technically the leitmotif is a family of ideas and tech-niques rather than a single method. The term leitmotif (Teading motif)was first used by F. W. Jahns in 1871 to describe Carl Maria von Weber sfragmentary reintroduction of thematic material in his operas. But prior tothe appearance of the terminology, the practice of associating narrativeelements such as characters and situations with recurring music traces itsroots into opera of the eighteenth century. Both the term and the practice gainmusical and aesthetic momentum in nineteenth-century German romanticmusic in which quasi-literary narratives or 'programs' combined with a desireto create evocative mental imagery. The leitmotif and related thematic prac-tices became staples of symphonic and music-dramatic composition. Thoughmusically quite different, the dramatic reappearance in each movement of


Hector Berliozs programmatic Symphonic Fantastique of a musical andpsychological idee fixe signifying a sexual or romantic obsession is closecousin, for example, to the way Richard Wagner s 'curse' motive returns tonarrate misfortune in his music drama, Das Rheingold. And while the ideaof the leitmotif is indeed most famously associated with Wagner s cycle ofmusic dramas, Der Ring des Nibelung, his own use of the technique devel-oped over the course of his works, and he preferred other terminology andnuances. So, while contemporary applications of the term may feel a bitloose, the technique and its description have undergone constant aestheticexploration, development and reconsideration. During the late nineteenthand into the early twentieth centuries, the leitmotif spread from being thesignature compositional device of Wagnerian romanticism to becomeadapted by composers working outside the Germanic aesthetic such asDebussy. Richard Strauss kept the leitmotif vital into the twentieth century,when it would sustain the work of expressionist composers such as AlbanBerg.1

The leitmotif s entry into cinema was thus historically and musicallywell paved, and its application to film must be understood as part of anexpanding range intersecting with cinemas own advent and development.The most immediate avenue for the leitmotif into cinema music was in silentfilm accompaniment. 'Original scores' were neither an immediate nor wide-spread development in silent film. Musical decisions fell primarily underthe purview of musicians performing the accompaniments. Nevertheless,leitmotif practices gained several footholds. First, there was the generalsense in which Richard Wagner s nineteenth-century music-dramatic con-cept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or 'total artwork' still provided orientation forcinemas own melding of music, image and drama. In a more practicalsense, accompanists would rely extensively on selections from pre-existingmusic. Professional accompaniment manuals, encyclopaedias and guidessuggested musical themes and also detailed the types of emotions, charac-ters and images for which they were best suited. Finally, the leitmotif prac-tice also inhabits the later development of the cue sheet5, in which specificmusical cues, both original music and classical excerpts, were offered forsome films. Thus even leading into its own implementation of fully speci-fied scores, which may still have contained borrowings from other music,silent film had already grounded itself in the narrative-thematic dynamicof the leitmotif.

With the exception of animated cartoons, the musical strategies of thesynchronized sound era quickly distanced themselves from silent cinemasdesire for non-stop musical accompaniment. And still, the sound eras

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strategies in which music would now appear intermittently only heightensthe leitmotif s practicality and effectiveness. A more rarefied musical fabricentails making specific dramatic and artistic decisions about where musicshould appear and where it will not. As such, it intensifies linkages betweennarrative elements and music by making them more emphatic and less asimply nominal part of the entire cinematic experience. Further, synchro-nized sound allowed music production for a film to be centralized, withmusic and performances becoming essentially identical for all screenings.Not only was the weight of musical decision shifted from performers tocomposers and producers, the performing resources themselves couldmore easily involve larger forces. Requiring more than an organ or pianowas less practical for the silent era, as the performing resources in screen-ing locations would vary. Beyond urban centres, available instrumentationcould not be reliably known. Among the practical results of synchronizedsound, then, were the possibilities of longer-range compositional planningand execution, the expressive possibilities of varying instrumentations, anda context more hospitable to creating original musical cues. Although thesedevelopments do not necessarily point inevitably to the leitmotif technique,the technological environment of synchronized sound provided a levellingeffect. Cinema music could be composed on terms approaching thoseavailable to concert music. The sound era thus provided a context for fullyprofessionalizing film composers. The traditions of European art music,particularly of the nineteenth century, were naturally central to the educa-tion and experience of the many European composers laying the corner-stone of Hollywood s 'classical tradition' in the 1930s: Erich Korngold,Dimitri Tiomkin, Miklos Rozsa. Again, therefore, the leitmotif techniqueprefigured the 'classic* film score even during its relative infancy. And whileits centrality has indeed been challenged and weakened by other develop-ments such as the use of jazz, rock and pop styles, the electronic synthesizerand the compilation score, the leitmotif-driven score can still be understoodboth as the centre from which deviation or innovation must be measured,and as a technique which continues to be absorbed into those same laterdevelopments. The effect, for example, of linking the Radio Raheem char-acter with Public Enemy s rap tune, 'Fight the Power', in Spike Lees Do theRight Thing (1989) clearly relies on the leitmotif idea regardless of the tunesmostly diegetic appearance and the vast stylistic gulf between rap and orches-tral film music. Today, John Williams s scores continue to orient themselvesdirectly to the romantic leitmotif tradition, while other contemporary filmcomposers such as Danny Elfman and Thomas Newman have adapted thetechnique to musical styles both extending and emphatically outside that


stylistic tradition. While it may be an exaggeration to claim that cinema hasbeen particularly innovative in applying the leitmotif technique, we mustacknowledge that the leitmotif was, conversely, essential to the invention ofcinema.2

Making Meaning

The leitmotif becomes most directly linked to its subject through someexplicit visual or narrative concurrence. So, for example, the music accom-panying the first appearance of the Elmira Gulch character riding herbicycle in The Wizard ofOz (1939) becomes unforgettably associated withher. But to be effective, the motive reaches beyond mere concurrence tobecome a metaphoric evocation of its subject as well. Elmiras sour, mean-spirited disposition resonates in the motives oddly contorted melodic line,while the image of her joyless bicycle riding appears in its rhythm andtempo. Likewise, the repetitive, inexorable rhythm of the Jaws motive com-pares the beast to an eating machine*. Volume, dissonance and high pitch inthe Psycho cue at once suggest the violent arm motion, a scream, a sharpweapon and psychological distress. Baleful dissonances in Once Upon aTime in the West's harmonica parallel unresolved tensions at once dramaticand psychological. The leitmotif becomes more than merely a symbol of itsobject, embodying it as well.3

Further, the musical and narrative exchange in the leitmotif is a two-waytransaction. It isri t simply that Elmira Gulchs motive takes on the qualitiesof her disposition: her musical analogue instantly feeds back into the per-ception of her character. Her leitmotif is the way it is because it reflects her,but at the same time she is who she is because of her leitmotif- because ofthe way it inflects the spectators reaction. Our shark is more threatening,our psycho more angry and our gunfighter all the more fraught because oftheir respective 'motives', in both senses of that word. In Once Upon a Timein the West, the character of Cheyenne is significantly softened in spite ofhis talent for violence by the ambling banjo theme associated with him. Theleitmotif must be understood not only as drawing significance from itsnarrative situation but also re-circulating back into it such that any finalsense of either s priority would be difficult to isolate.

At the same time that a leitmotif relates directly to images and charac-ters it may deliver associations from outside the film. In Elmira Gulchsmusic, we hear contours of the repetitive 'nyeah-nyeah' taunting of a child ssing-song scorn. In this way, the meaning of a leitmotif may draw on thespectators own associations, both musical and non-musical, and not just

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those constructed within the film. Such associations can also be quitespecific. Run Lola Run (dir. Rennt, 1998) uses a snippet of Charles Ives'sorchestral work, The Unanswered Questiony to link the parallel deaths of itsmain characters. Spectators may then associate the musical works title andprogram surrounding 'the meaning of life' with the deaths on screen. InVertigo (1958) a Habanera rhythm threading its way through the entire filmappears briefly underscoring some of Madeleines dialogue about a Spanishmission. Less literally, Bernard Herrmanns late romantic chromatic idiomunderscoring moments of intense passion in Vertigo may evoke the simi-larly fatal romance of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde* Even an original leit-motif may therefore have rich associations in advance of those establishedwithin the film. To that extent, the significance of the leitmotif in film can-not be considered on purely structural terms. The spectator participates inthe meaning of the music through association with individual experienceand cultural memory.3

Musical Parameters

Further extending the leitmotif is its flexibility of conception. We may beinclined to think of the motive primarily in melodic terms; but while oftentrue, such is not always the case. In Jerry Goldsmiths score for Poltergeist(1982), we indeed hear a theme the composer refers to as 'Carol Anne'sLullaby*, associated with the little girl who becomes lost to paranormal phe-nomena. Likewise, John Williams s Imperial March' from The Empire StrikesBack (1980) constitutes a musical whole from which the many fragmentarystatements associated with Darth Vader are drawn. In contrast to these,however, neither the sharks motive from Jaws nor Psychos stabbing cueconstitutes a 'melody' in the same sense. The difference is not simply oneof length but also one of structure and character. Neither in the music-theoretical sense of a line-as-a-whole with small-scale structural closuresnor in the more colloquial 'tunefulness' or 'singability' can we find in thesignature cues from Jaws and Psycho the idea of a melody exhibited by thelullaby and the march. The shark and the stabbing appear simply as 'motives'in steadfastly remaining concise, proto-melodic 'building blocks' - neitherdrawn from nor building up to a larger musical structure.

The leitmotif's flexibility also lies in the fact that any musical parametermight become its identifying feature. In Vertigo we hear an obsessivelyrepeated Habanera motive.6 Recurring at various points, the rhythm remainsidentifiable through changes in pitch, melodic contour and instrumentationsuch that only the rhythm itself is the indispensable element. In Michael


Kamens score for X-Men (2000) the Mystique character is, on her appear-ance, accompanied by a sinewy, eerie melody in a low-string timbre. Later,the character s hidden presence at an ambush is signalled by the appearanceof the motives timbre and vibrato rather than its pitch contour. In Psychoy

Norman Bates runs down to the motel to 'discover' the body accompaniedby the cascading harmony of the stabbing chord without its puncturingarticulation. As a thematic marker, very often one musical parameter suf-fices, and that marker is not necessarily melodic. In all, the emergence ofa leitmotif depends less on the type of material than on its use to create andthen recreate recurring and recognizable points of narrative contact andcommentary. As with the human face, any feature in the leitmotif may beits most distinguishing and, in subsequent 'descendants', may appear as itsdominant trait.

Repetition, Variation, and Narrative

The question of recognition also raises that of a leitmotif s 'malleability' -the extent to which it might be altered and still retain a core identity.Beyond the musical, affective and symbolic features of the original motive,we might naturally look for a deepening of its expression through change.But even before that, it is worth remembering that the simple fact of itsreturn can have expressive implications. There are, naturally, many exam-ples in which characteristic motives return again and again with little or nosignificant modification. This maybe less characteristic of film than televi-sion, where shorter running times, tighter production schedules and bud-getary constraints might impact musical strategies relative to feature-lengthfilm. This is not to disparage televisions musical material, but rather to dis-tinguish its use. Indeed, even the lightest television comedies such as TheAndy Griffith Show, The Addams Family and Gilligans Island had cues asmemorable as many films; but this was in part because they might reappearunaltered from one week to another and from one season to the next.

As such, it might be tempting to question whether televisions frequentreliance on a set of fixed cues constitutes a leitmotif strategy in any but theformal sense. But in its most vivid musical examples we can find that thetelevision leitmotif constructs expressive values that are not necessarilyjust paler versions of its film counterparts. Televisions static motivic frame-work can become a powerful force in creating a stable tone or identity ofperhaps more importance to the continuing nature of television than tothe ostensible single-event film. In televisions episodic context, its applica-tion of the leitmotif technique develops its own relationships between

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characterization, affect and narrative. Episodically reappearing motivesbecome closely associated with general situations and emotions which maythemselves be episodic and repetitive. While the film leitmotif might beunderstood to characterize, say, 'this character at this time', the televisionleitmotif may often be taken to signify things like 'this character in thistype of situation or mood again' or 'this type of character in this situation.'Television music comes to imbue even its lightest fare with a kind of'ritual'in narrative moments that are cyclically recurring and archetypal ratherthan linearly integrated and individual. Unaltered statements might serveto strengthen many aspects of televisions values while the same strategy,if applied widely within film, might only weaken cinema's often more indi-vidualized expressive needs.7

Still, in the right context even literal restatements might be interpretedas specifically expressive. In Stanley Kubrick's film, 2001: A Space Odyssey(1968). The unwavering certitude of Richard Strauss s Thus Spake Zarathustrain conjunction with unaltered presentation on its return forms a convincingtestimony to the durability and stark geometry of the monolith. Kubricksuse of Strauss s prelude reminds us that, far from being confined to a formalimpact, even reiteration can yield detail. The climactic replay of a heroictheme may speak of triumph, while the reappearance of a monster's cuespells undiminished menace. At this point, we see that the narrative impli-cations of bringing a leitmotif back, varied or not, is a rich spectrum initself. At one end we might consider objective inflections such as repetitionand reiteration, as in 2001: A Space Odyssey. At the other, we find morecomplex associations. Restoration perhaps best characterizes the returnof the Carol Anne theme with the child's safe return in Poltergeist. Indeed,given the reappearance of the chromatically winding cues in Vertigo asJudy fully transforms herself back into the dead Madeleine, even the tint ofa 'resurrection' could be added to the leitmotif's palette of returns.

Perhaps far more easily than in a purely musical context, even the mostliteral reuse of a motive in film and television can avoid crossing the thinlines between coherence and predictability, persuasion and domination.Ultimately, however, the significance of change in a leitmotif is not simplya matter of avoiding tediousness but rests on the nature of narrative itself.Literal repetition defies dramatic development while musical changeacknowledges, reflects and intensifies it. In Vertigo's Habanera rhythm wefind great efficiency in this regard. The motive appears as Scotty observesJudy/Madeleine in the museum. In this incarnation, so to speak, the rhythmis a monotone, paralleling Scotty s demeanour of quiet concentration andinterest. When Scotty becomes unhinged after believing himself complicit


in Madeleines death, the same rhythm recurs in the nightmare sequence.Now threatening to tear itself apart in wild leaps, the motive reflects thethreat to Scottys psychological stability. Along with re-orchestration,higher-lower, faster-slower, shorter-longer, and softer-louder constitutesthe core set of musical values with which to effect change. But even slighttwists of such a constrained set of dials, so to speak, can amplify narrativechange in very evocative ways. The shark in Jaws moves closer not onlythrough the leitmotif s increased volume, as might be expected, but throughthe acceleration in tempo as well. In Stand by Me (1986), an unadulteratedversion of the title tune doesn't appear until the end. Framing the film areinstrumental statements in which both the decrease in tempo and theorchestration itself align us with the narrating character s nostalgic reflection.In Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), reiterated fragmentsof the main theme at various pitch levels provides a general barometer ofdramatic pressure, as in the mano a mano around the German airplane.And in Psycho, the sense of a lingering 'aftermath' as Norman runs back tothe motel is succinctly conveyed by the blurred condensation of the stab-bing cue that suppresses its rhythm.

The Leitmotif and Temporality

Change to recurring musical themes points to a subtext of the leitmotiftechnique: time. Functioning as kind of memory for the film, and engagingthe spectator s memory as well, the leitmotif has an innate relationship tothe past. At each recurrence, we are not simply hearing commentary onwhat is but on how the present moment has been informed diachronicallyby what once was. Each iteration of the motive carries the associations ofprevious statements such that its narrative past accumulates and resoundsthrough it. This effect is especially poignant in the showdown between'Harmonica and the villain, Frank, in Once Upon a Time in the West. Themournful harmonica tune came from the torture Frank devised to make'Harmonica complicit in his own brother s murder. Years earlier, with hisbrother standing on his shoulders, neck in a noose, Frank had thrust a har-monica in the younger mans mouth. As he struggles to keep his brotheraloft, the harmonica transforms his laboured breathing into sound. As theyoung man eventually loses his footing, his brother falls and hangs, etchingthe harmonica forever into the protagonists memory. After being gunneddown in revenge, Frank asks, 'Who are you?' In reply, the harmonica isplaced in Franks dying mouth. With sublime recognition, Frank understandsits meaning as his last breaths power the instruments final appearance in

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the film. Once Upon a Time in the West provides an extreme example ofthe leitmotif's inherent historicizing, as even the first soundings of theharmonica tune in the films opening scenes are already laden with a secrethistory of vengeance. But while this temporal effect may run especiallydeep, its cumulative temporality is ultimately the same as more lightheartedexamples such as the Indiana Jones theme. Regardless of its content, theleitmotif is a means of registering the passage of time.

But while the leitmotif serves as memory, it may also evoke the futureand related concepts like anticipation, projection and prediction. In themost general terms, of course, the leitmotif s description of, say, a charactermight inflect the spectators assessment of future behaviour and outcomes.The appearance of the Indiana Jones theme, for example, provides strongevidence in advance of the characters likelihood for 'beating the odds'.In a very literal way, O Brother Where Art Thou (2000) uses a non-diegeticsnippet of 'Hard Time Killing Floor Blues' early in the film to underscorea seer s prophecy, connecting the present to a future diegetic performanceof the tune around a campfire. More subtly, along with reinforcing the spiritof Madeleines ostensible ancestor, Carlotta Valdez, the Hispanic culturalassociations of the Habanera rhythm early in Vertigo help generate a kindof fate in foretelling the later importance of the old Spanish mission. In thisregard, it is worth remembering that, even in its nineteenth-century orches-tral and music-dramatic conception, the leitmotif was more than a formalor 'unifying' device. Serving as a musical works own powers of memory,anticipation, reflection and reaction, it simulates and stimulates these samecognitive powers on a human scale as well.

The leitmotifs orientation towards cumulative interpretation standsin relief against other strategies such as the compilation score', in whichthe soundtrack may consist of popular songs rather than orchestral cuescomposed originally for the film. Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990) has asoundtrack of popular music. However dramatically charged with previousevents and conflicts, each situation in Goodfellas is musically characterizedafresh, without recall and without anticipation of future circumstances.In the absence of a leitmotif strategy, the result is an unmooring that allowsthe film to navigate its dramatic waters without being anchored by musicalinterpretations and judgements. Similarly, it is difficult to imagine a scorepredicated on a progressively recurring leitmotif facilitating the temporalscrambling in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994) as readily as hiscompilation soundtrack. Though an instrumental score might have soundedout of place in any event, the deeper mismatch would have been betweenthe leitmotif s imposition of linear time and the film's attempts to skirt it.


On the other hand, the strong cinematic tradition of the leitmotif techniquefrequently reasserts itself even among other types of soundtracks. Whilecontaining some instrumental motives, the music of O Brother Where ArtThou consists primarily of country and traditional songs. Nevertheless, itlinks the recurring diegetic tunes 'Man of Constant Sorrow' and 'You are mySunshine* thematically to two of its characters. Both the character themesand the aforementioned musical projection into the narrative future areclosely related to traditional uses of the leitmotif technique despite differ-ences in the type of material and its placement within the diegetic world.

Musical Affect and the Position of Commentary

As deeply as the leitmotif articulates time, its situation relative to emotionis still more complex. If we apply the simple question, 'How does she feel?'to Elmira Gulch in The Wizard o/Oz, her bicycle music provides a believ-able surrogate for her state of mind: sour and joylessly purposive. And if wego on to ask something like, 'How do we feel about her?' the music stillsounds a convincing reaction closely paralleling Elmiras own emotionalcondition: she's both 'displeased' and 'unpleasant'. The character and hercharacterization are essentially interchangeable on both musical and affec-tive terms. However, applying the same questions to Indiana Jones duringone of his lucky escapes, we encounter a different effect. While his 'heroic'theme might work well for the spectator's reaction to Jones's exploits, itworks poorly as a musical characterization of his likely emotional stateof fear and anxiety. The forthright brassy fanfare of the leitmotif dispelsthe spectator's doubt about his chances and amplifies the 'bravery' of hisexploits. But a musical transcription of the character's emotions while, say,hanging from a vine or avoiding being mulched by a spinning propellerwould probably sound quite different. In this case, how the character feelsand what is felt about him are two distinct ideas: anxiety vs. admiration.Character and characterization have worked independently of each other,with music aligning itself to one over the other.

Naturally we can find a spectrum of variations on this difference. OnceUpon a Time in the West gives us a different type of 'hero' - but not simplyin his actions. Harmonicas musical treatment is the inverse of IndianaJones. Rather than hiding the reality of his interior world behind musicalhubris, Harmonica is characterized by the dark idee fixe of his actual feel-ings - ones whose complete meaning is still partially hidden from thespectator. In Psycho's shower stabbing the murderous feelings themselvesare brutally clear while the identity of their host is at least momentarily

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ambiguous (in several ways, of course). The leitmotif's mobility in emo-tional perspective reveals a side to Norman Bates of which even he is notfully aware. In all, the positionality of music vis-a-vis onscreen emotionsand events is far from fixed. The leitmotif allows, encourages, and some-times even forces the spectator to view its subject from different angles.8

Emotional or otherwise, the significance of the leitmotif that we mighttake with such immediacy is informed by a positioning that may otherwisego unnoticed. The Jaws motive makes the distinction between characterand characterization almost crystalline. The beast, of course, neither 'thinks*nor 'feels' anything of the vivid emotional world attached to it by its leitmo-tif: 'mortal dread' and 'loss of limb'. But though the sharks description seemsobjective, a further distinction bears remembering. 'Sutured' to onscreenevents, it is easy to forget that the characterization is made to the audienceand not by it. However much the music-dramatic description of a sharkresonates fear, it has been constructed on the spectator s behalf by otherforces that are outside of the narrative world as well. The emotions 'feel' likeones own, but even from its inception in orchestral and operatic music,there has been a kind of partnership between the leitmotif s commentaryand the auditor. At times the leitmotif might be understood as speakingto a listener and at others perhaps speaking/or a listener. But while the leit-motif appears to offer ownership', the partnership between spectator andmusical commentary is better understood as one of 'proxy'. The spectatoressentially authorizes the score to participate in a film world that is otherwiseautomatic or indifferent. The leitmotif holds out the promise of empower-ment engendered in information about the past and future and in beingable to articulate objective and subjective descriptions for what is happening.The motive serves as the spectator's agent working from within the film.

But in the spectator's absence from the narrative world itself, this musi-cal proxy becomes, naturally, a kind of'remote control', and the partnershipmay not be as transparent as it seems even if we fully concur with a score'sdescription. On initial consideration, Bernard Herrmann's scoring of Ver-tigo's stable scene offers a smouldering description of passion. And yet, themotive also helps perpetrate a deception. To appreciate the leitmotif s realposition, we must force ourselves to remember that 'Madeleine' is not reallythere and that Judy has taken her place. Frequent reinforcement by con-vincing cues obscures the fact that Judy's passion has been at least in partcontrived to lure Scotty further into the plot to murder the real Madeleine.Throughout the film, while the music has indeed evoked romantic intensityit has also toyed with its proxy relationship and helped betray the spectator.Part of the brilliance of Herrmann's score, then, is his subtle musical


seduction of the leading motive to mislead. Far less subtle deceptions, ofcourse, are often exploited in the musical landscapes of horror and thrillergenres. The restoration of the 'Carol Anne' theme in Poltergeist helps con-vince us that 'this house is clean' even when it is not.

Social Consideration

The leitmotif thus comes to the spectator from a particular position andalso chooses sides' both in portraying emotions, situations and charactersas well as in informing or misinforming the spectator. Recognizing theinherent positionality of its musical themes helps us understand cinemasmodes of communication more fully but also raises the deeper issue offilms construction of an 'authority'. The leitmotif carries with it not only thepotential for cultural association, as discussed above, but may also be readin terms of its social or political engagement. Considering its privilegedposition as a commentary, to what extent does the leitmotif 'authorize' aparticular view of its subject? In its musical reaction to Judy's forced trans-formation into Madeleine, for example, does the score voice approval ofthe power Scotty exercised over her? Does trumpeting the masculineadventurism of Indiana Jones have a real world analogue? Is there anypolitical resonance to a Shostakovich-like musical critique of Darth Vader'simperial military excess? In that it is in the nature of the leitmotif to beinextricably bound up with its narratives, questions of whether it sustainsand institutionalises them, or, conversely, becomes a tool of their critique,are inherently worth asking. However we may answer such questions, theabiding impact and conviction of the leitmotif's often persuasive musicalnarration suggests that it is seldom merely neutral.9

Notes

1. For a concise but authoritative account of its historical context, consult the leitmotifentry in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2nd edn). New York: Macmillan,2001. Related entries such as those on Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss will also be useful.For a larger historical context of musical romanticism, see C. Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-CenturyMusic, J. Bradford Robinson (trans). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989.

2. Among books on film music, the following remains the most focused on theLeitmotivic-thematic tradition: K. Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the ClassicalHollywood Film. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

3. C. Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington, IN: IndianaUniversity Press, 1987 places this type of meaning informally within the context of semeiosis,describing it as a 'cinematic musical code'.

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4. For a more musically detailed discussion of Bernard Herrmanns music refer toG. Bruce, Bernard Herrmann: Film Music and Narrative. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1985.

5. While Claudia Gorbman approaches this type of meaning as a cultural code', the ideaof music that refers to other types of music is also well developed in musicological dis-course, where it is referred to by way of topoi, or 'musical topics'. The touchstone for topicalanalysis can be found in L. G. Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style. New York:Schirmer, 1980. As with the topoi of concert music, the cultural codes' of film music can inmany instances be understood by way of their topical references to other music. Of course,such cultural codes and topoi can also be further understood within other frames of refer-ence such as race, gender, class, generation, ethnicity and so on.

6. For those unfamiliar with musical terminology, Kathryn Kalinak's opening discus-sion of some of the musical details from Vertigo is thorough, well paced and technicallylucid.

7. For a brief consideration of the differences in musics role in television and film,see C. Gorbman, (2004), 'Aesthetics and rhetoric', American Music, 22 (1) (2004), 14-26. Formore specific focus on issues in television, see R. Altman, Television Sound' in T. Modleski(ed.), Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture. Bloomington, IN:Indiana University Press, 1986, pp. 39-54.

8. An excellent overview of the emotional and affective mechanisms of film music canbe found in Smith, J. 'Movie music as moving music: emotion, cognition, and the film score',in C. Plantinga and G. M. Smith (eds), Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion.Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. For a penetrating analysis of a leit-motifs potential emotional standpoints', turn to D. B. Green, Listening to Strauss Operas: TheAudience's Multiple Standpoints. New York: Gordon and Breach, 1991. While focused onRichard Strauss's opera, Elektra, Greens concepts apply usefully to much film music aswell.

9. For an account of film music centered on its potential for social and political read-ings, turn to A. Kassabian, Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary HollywoodFilm Music. New York: Routledge, 2001. Works placing music in general within social orpolitical contexts are quite numerous. Various starting points would include R. Leppertand S. McClary (eds), Music and Society; The Politics of Composition, Performance, andReception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; S. McClary, Feminine Endings:Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991; andT. W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, E. B. Ashton (trans.). New York:Continuum, 1989.

10The Western

Affective Sound Communities

Felicity J. Colman

That weapon will replace your tongue.You will learn to speak through itand your poetry will now be written with blood.

- Nobody [Gary Farmer] to William Blake [Johnny Depp], Dead Man, 1996.

Sounds have lives, histories, cultures, politics and lands. The Western screentrades on this affective inventory of noise mixed with blood. Bullet to flesh,steel spurs to horse flesh, whip to skin, roped yank to neck, hymn to ear:these are some of the affective sonic communicators of the somatic westernexperience. These sounds are coded according to particular 'bodies', convey-ing not only aural meaning but also critical knowledge of the aesthetic, polit-ical and cultural practices of communities. It is through the sound-imagethat the systems and structures of a community are made transparent.

Actions, thoughts and behaviour are given form through sounds - whetherit is the wailing of a person in anguish causing the hero to take immediateaction (The Searchers, dir. Ford, 1956) or a song on a radio influencingresolve to undertake action (Midnight Cowboy, dir. Schlesinger, 1969). TheWesterns iconic and territorial sound conventions form a mix of soundsand noises that create a forcible entity - the audience knows that wind iseither brutal and gritty, or warm and embracing, from the form, style andforce of sounds employed to convey the wind s affect. The sound effect iswhat has produced the noise and operates as a semiotic or narrative device

194

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for the screen product; however, the sound affect is what has created thatsound s differences from, and relations with, other sounds and noises withinthe screen situation. The gunshot is a noise that writes a murder, a deaththat produces a range of affective meanings within a community s ecology.Sound absorbs the dead, and in repetition of that sound, the simultaneousexistence of those dead can be affectively heard, consciously felt and per-ceptually experienced through sound information communicating theaesthetic of the screen community.

The sound affect modifies what happens within the screen text - it causesreactions, changes in interactions and countless combinations within thescreen world. The scope of a community's affective energy is committed tohistory through its acoustic resonance, and it is with this sense of affective,modulating scale in mind that this chapter will suggest three ways in whichthe Western community is affectively and perceptually activated throughsound. Sound gives us a confirmation of the visual gestures we see on film,not just with an acoustic surface but also by becoming a vital componentand producer of the associative field of the screen. Sound on screen (includ-ing dialogue, naturally occurring, urban and chance sound and composi-tion, musical score) operates to create an affective, acoustic dimension thatconveys this field as a topological intensity of a specific community. Hiefocus of this examination of the Western affective system will be through afilm that is unfaithful to the sound limits imposed by this genre: Americandirector Jim Jarmuschs 1996 film Dead Man.

As Jacques Attali noted, noise can mark changes much faster thanmorphologies.1 The gunshot and the anguished cry precede the last breathand the rotting corpse. Dead Man reminds us that the human body is madeof meat: flesh and sinews, bones that make crunching noises, brains insidesculls that squelch when stomped on. The noise affects the spectator asmuch as the sight shadows the sound. The military tattoo of death codeseach nations Westernizing screen by sounding out the ethical dysfunctionof the performance of the war aesthetic: the hiss of feathers, the dull thudof an arrow into the thick flesh of the body, the drum, the trumpet, thesword, the electric hum of rocket launchers.2 The militarism enacted by theWestern screen produces the particular sound affects that each communityexerts in its attempt to exert or dispel forces; from each community a warcry enacts the violence of men, a mnemo-aural affective sounding out ofintention, outrage and horror that lets us hear the passage of death.

How does the Western make itself heard? First, Dead Mans film soundecology reminds the viewer that naturalized representation also occurs atthe level of audition, and further, that every national cinemas rendition of


a Western community operates a soundtrack that is mnemotechnicallyspecific to their national community. Dead Mans musical score is producedby the sound curves of Neil Youngs electric guitar (with notes on loopedsequences and feedback) parsing most of the action, along with silenceswithin the improvised, repetitive score, seguing to naturalistic sounds of theenvironments, dialogue, indigenous song and spoken poetry of indigenousand European origin. The languages of description - command, conquerand colonize - of Westernizing narratives overlay noises of their own eco-nomic fields onto the terrain traversed, territorialized and re-territorializedthrough sound codes. Second, the topology of a community is createdthrough its 'zones of intensities' as composer Edgar Varese described thethinking of the physicality engendered by specific 'acoustical arrange-ments? These zones will be discussed in terms of the auditors registrationof the dimensions of such arrangements as intensities: acoustic resonancesof specific political ecologies. In conclusion, this chapter will note thatthe material economies of both indigenous and migrant are representedin Jarmuschs reactive Western soundtrack, which operates as an audio-mnemonic of the ethnocide of the poetic spirit of all who inhabit theindustrializing Americas.

Aural Nation: Acousmatic Mnemotechnics

Westernizing sound-imagery renders the creation, maintenance anddirection of a community and its sovereign territories visible and audible.A refrain (whether birdsong, national anthem, or everyday tune) can eitherorganize or open a concept of safe/lived territory.4 Western sound commu-nities exist across multiple national cinemas, and each national screenactions its own rhythmically constructed community. The swordplay spe-cific to Akira Kurasawas screen homage to the Samurai and Ronin warriorsof Japanese feudal communities (The Seven Samurai, 1952; Yojimbo, 1960;Sanjuro, 1962) audit a different materiality to the Spaghetti Westerns exag-gerated stylistics (Sergio Leone s A Fistful of Dollars, 1964; For A Few DollarsMore, 1965; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 1966). From Bollywood style(Wild West, dir. David Attwood, 2003), the array of Hollywood imperialistand parodic Western stories (The Magnificent Seven, dir. John Sturgess,1960; Star Wars, dir. George Lucas, 1977; The Quick and the Dead, dir. SamRaimi, 1994) and post-Hollywood pan-Asian Westerns (Tears of the BlackTiger, dir. Wisit Sasanatieng, 2000; Seven Swords, Tsui Hark, 2005) to thetechnical specificities of Balkan cinema (Dust, dir. Milco Mancevski, 2001),or the distinctive migrant-colonial anguish of Australian styles (Nick Cavessoundtrack in The Proposition, dir. John Hillcoat, 2005), the Western screen

The Western 197

is coded and receded by the mnemotechnical specificity of each communi-ty s imagination of its nation, the sounding out of a model of state.5

Such affective concerns of a community s material cultures can be heardin the Western milieu s scores and noises. The Western screen has its famousscored music, such as Ennio Morricones compositions: beginning withA Fistful of Dollars (1964). Such scores have produced a Western modality,a standard that performs a fidelity to Westernizing film ecologies. This ecol-ogy is specific to the concerns of the particular Western constructed world(for example, the differences to be heard in the identifiable Thai (historical)sounds of Tears of the Black Tiger y compared to those of The PropositionsAustralian locality). Further, the Western ecology has a stylistic structurethat engages the binary structures of sovereignty and its constituent minor-ities - often reiterating commonly held (mis)conceptions of the indigenousand migratory populations of nations.6 Colonial constraints are visuallyetched in screen representations of the Western milieu by coded demo-graphic signs, through aurally affective trajectories that operate to captureand colonize a 'naturalized' sense of a people and a place concept. Theseartificially and commercially erected boundaries, nationally bounded spec-ificity of production, and aesthetic-political sensibilities are given sound inthe Western system. In a particularly affective scene in Little Big Man(Arthur Penn, 1970) the elder chief, blinded by grief, dreams his visions ofthings to come. He relates such a dream as being about the sounds of thecorralled ponies screaming. It is a chilling invocation of a noise, and whenit does come to pass, the otherwise mediocre film enacts a zone of intensitythat affectively displays the dying community's Western-imposed limitsthrough sound. Several scenes in Ang Lees Brokeback Mountain (2005)operate in a similar way, drawing on the intensities that an ahistorical scorecan inflict upon the image to open and mutate the formal and politicalboundaries of a genre. Even the Western genre with its cliched standardanthems affords a limitless, continuous and resonant chamber of sound-induced places.

Sound-places are produced through their relative position to othersound-sites within the screen composition. A reciprocality of sound-images,like images, are able to affectively resonate and continue to link with othersound-places to engender diverse outcomes for the Western screen event asinter-relational, continuous sites. Dead Man enacts a play on the captivitynarratives of many Hollywood Western films: A Man Called Horse (dir.Silverstein, 1972); Comanche Station (dir. Boetticher, 1960); Dances withWolves (dir. Costner, 1990); little Big Man (dir. Penn, 1970); NorthwestPassage (dir. Vidor, 1940); The Searchers, Soldier Blue (dir. Nelson, 1970),Unconquered (dir. deMille, 1947) - although the problematic of female or


male specific enslavement is not Jarmuschs focus, rather it is the machine-like binds of culturally specific masculine roles that provide the narrativesof indentured subjectivity. In Dead Man, the European would-be worker isguided through his journey by a mixed-blood indigenous Canadian manwho operates between both sovereign European and compounded IndianNation cultures. Both parties evidence a detachment from their subjectivebeings and both are outcasts from their natal communities, making theirpassage through their as observers and listeners; yet ultimately both mustsuccumb to the social and economic forces at play in the Western frontier.It is in this sense of a forced collective and interconnected aesthetic/historythat sound in Dead Man engenders the agency of the multiple Westerndynamisms of history as an endlessly reverberating event.

Set around the 1870s along the Northern American transcontinentalrailway line and surrounding territories, Jarmuschs Dead Man offers anillustration of a landscape when the events of the world meant that manylives were lived at the imagined and real limits of existence. In this sense, itis a landscape where 'time' resounds with 'history', past and future. TheWestern milieu has always situated itself within this sense of a boundary,on the edge of a certain community model, on the brink of a different modeof life. The style of this constructed territory is a result of available technol-ogy (such as arrow, gun or laser; horse, train or spacecraft). In two (nowinfamous) texts that influenced many readings of the Western film, TheWestern: Or the American Film Par Excellence and The Evolution of theWestern, the French film critic Andre Bazin set up the Western as a site ofessential conflicts between moral and technical orders.7 Bazin describedthe Western as a genre where an epic plot is continually played out: onethat concerns a 'Manicheism' that engages the 'forces of evil' and the 'pagansavagery' of 'the Indian against the 'knights of the true cause', none otherthan 'the white Christian' who will 'guarantee' the technical order of theWestern world.8 While the structural modality of Bazin's theory has nowbeen critically refuted by critics of the ethnic and generic orders of this'Western' construction,9 those terms of 'civilization versus the wilderness',and 'order versus chaos', have continued to set the discussion agenda of theWestern as a genre of order, to be explored in terms of motifs, styles andnarrative themes.10 Instead of a narrative of the journey and exploits of ahero, in Dead Man, Jarmusch illustrates the very substance of'the Western',its hopes, failures, attempted genocides, misogynistic behaviour, paranoiasand the utilization of the film-star economy for viewing pleasure of theaudience. The most affective force of these concepts is realized throughDead Mans soundtrack.

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Jarmuschs film engages the notion that the overarching journey of aWestern film is a refrain known as death, and that concept is heralded indifferent ways by specific cultures. In Dead Man, William Blake (the nameof the visionary English poet-artist of the nineteenth century, although thescreen character is initially unaware of his namesake) is mortally woundedearly on in the narrative. But Blake is not allowed to die until he undertakesa physical, intellectual and spiritual journey of enlightenment; it is a journeythat draws both him and the spectator of the film away from the genresboundaries and out towards an infinite site of comprehension and possibility.Blake's perceptual senses are heightened through his journey, which becomeshis quest for his somatic death: a search for relief for the (suffering) somato-sensory being. There is no struggle for an 'identity' in this film - just a sen-sory explication of what it means 'to be', as demarcated by localized cultures,even within the global processes of migration. Those local communities arerepresented through the senses - taste, touch, smell, sight and above all,sound - affecting the primary cohesive elements for the plot and style ofthe film. The prelinguistic senses are the mobile elements of many Westernscreen worlds, conveying expression in situations where there are no words.Asked to smell a paper rose by his soon-to-be-dead lover, Blake replies thatthe beautifully formed object indeed 'smells like paper', testimony to thefaux nature of the Western condition, on and off screen. The linguisticmeanings of words become secondary in the Western, as language operatesas a semiotic register, a rhetorical sound effect, marking an affective event.As Nobody solemnly informs Blake: 'The round stones beneath the earthhave spoken through the fire' [translation: you are going to die you stupidwhite man]. Just as Nobody can understand the affect of the speakingstones of his native land, he is also able to audit the affective 'power' con-veyed by the words of the English poet, William Blake, after being trainedin the conditions of sonorous and textual communication. The words andthe stones are technologies that are specific to each (national) communityand operate as memory technics for specific affective conditions. One canhear sounds but not recognize all of their inferred meanings unless holdingsome technological knowledge in the memory of that sound. An affectivesound can be heard and not 'read', but felt. Affinities between disparateacousmatic experiences may occur, not as coincidence, but rather, as affec-tive relations. A 'call to prayer' by a singing stone, an English poet or a gun-shot will affect various auditors in diverse ways, provoking various responsesand relations. Even when repeated, sounds operate divergent agencies ofthe world for the auditor.11 Technologies are specific to local operations,and in Jarmuschs film, sound functions to orient the viewer-auditor of the


material realms of the places invoked and traversed, whether or not theyhold any local experience or genetic attachment with that culture. BernardSteigler has described this process of memory transmission as a 'mnemo-technics'; that is, a system for distributing and reorganizing cultural notions.12

As Steigler bluntly contends, 'humans die but their histories remain throughobjects that were not specifically designed to transmit memories and events -such as food remains, pottery shards or paintings - but which neverthelesshave become 'the only witnesses of the most ancient episodes'.13 Many cul-tures have absolutely no mnemotechnical physical remains, due to geno-cidal practices and migratory extensions.14 However, the decimated cultures'capital' have survived not through objects, but via the performance of asonorous materiality or technics (for example, the multiple oral narrativepractices of indigenous, enslaved and persecuted communities survivingeven through the processes of global capital and religious expansion),wherein the community continues to resonate over organic time.

In screen media, the sound conveys the condition of the culture represented.The sounds of a screen text, aside from spoken dialogue, are frequentlyacousmatic, that is, the noises one hears without seeing the cause, but whichfunction as 'sonorous communication'.15 Such acousmatic music and soundscan describe for the auditor what is left unsaid or does not come into view.Noises and sounds can also become autonomous in their imposition of aphenomenologically removed meaning. The sounds of the Western are thesounds of the thinking of these sonorous relations, of expression of essen-tial modes of acting and being, of technical skills, of histories and practicesnow divorced or dust. Schaeffer s assertion is that unobserved sounds andmusic become organized into identifiable associations that become inde-pendent sources for meaning - the sound makes perceivable what imagesdo not. Schaeffer's example includes the radio; we might also think here of thesound effects of the screen. In Dead Man, frequent scenes are overlaid withNeil Young's pump organ - invoking a distinctly European noise within thepassageways of American wilderness, spiked with bird noises and crickets.This combination of sounds produces a refrain that recalls the echoes ofthe last days of a carnival, a faintly ominous expression of the past corro-sively seeping into the present. At the same time as Jarmusch investigatesthe content of a Western in Dead Man, the film illustrates the modernity ofboth indigenous and migrant sound archives.16 Represented throughsparse, Utopian and requiem sound-images, the Western screen repeatedlybuilds cultures that need to be in tune with their positions in the everydayworld to survive; but also who, in operating beside one another, developasymmetrical relations through the affective movement of trans-cultural

The Western 201

'discovery' of their acculturation. This Western sound archive is filled withexamples of Apartheid, such as Bazin upheld, and Jarmusch has described,noting Fords decision to cast Navajo- speaking indigenous Americans to'perform' as Comanche people in The Searchers.17

Acousmatics are further utilized by screen forms in a critical sense,through the transmission of affective communications - those unseen andunrepresentable powers -that specific communities have access to receive.Michel Chion identified acousmatics as the progenitor of a 'mystery'; how-ever, following Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henrys concrete explorations,we can be far more precise in the identification of the mechanisms of con-trol of acousmatic meanings, as acousmatics effectively signals the physicsof the sound affect, unsighted but perceivable.18 Musique concrete deniesthe possibility of any final or logical cognition of sound, instead the experi-ence of concrete is, as I will presently discuss with Neil Young, one of anacoustically affective ecology of sound rather than the creation of a rhetor-ically specific unilateral encounter.

Objects produce focal points of memory, sound-objects display the tota-lities of their community: their ethnic biases and ignorance, their geneticdispositions (ethical and aesthetic), ambitions, mutations, failures andachievements. An acousmatic framing of technological material culturethus has the affect of creating culturally specific sound (objects) as memorytechnics. The intensity of each re-sound can convey a 'National' sentiment,a meaning that is produced not through a structuralist difference of onesound from another, but rather the distinction is generated through rela-tional concurrences that need to be repeated to be retained as culturalinformation. Through the utilization of the cliches of nationalist colonialconditions, the Western screen frequently reduces the complexities of colo-nization and ethnocide. This political simplification is realized through thescreens acousmatic ability to construct false unities of meaning-referents.Those sounds and musical scores of triumphantly 'riding away into thesunset' act as stabilizing conditions for the 'stupid white man' of the Western,who is rendered ignorant of the indigenous inclusionist ideals of commu-nities of humans and who disregards the spiritual forces affecting the inter-connected environment.19 In his Western, Jarmusch enacts the erasure ofcultural memories by capital's vampiric transmutations, through a mnemo-technical misuse of a few key components of the Western, turning rhetori-cal sound motifs into critical acousmatic content. In Dead Man, the speakingstones bear material witness to the activities around them. For Nobody, thestones resonate with aeons of transmissions between objects and bodies ofthe universe. The stones cause a topological expansion of a cultural concept,


and this sound notion is a movement that enables Nobody to orient Blake'sphysical place and direction; to repeat and extend 'William BlakeV affectivetransmission. In this mnemo-aural distension of the mise-en-scene,sound becomes a key vector in the organization of communication. InDead Man, the pursuit of an ethnically hierarchical philology is turned onits head with the admonishing melodious tones of Nobody, the 'nativeAmerican speaking the kings English with far more finesse than the boyfrom Cleveland, Ohio.

Affective Sound Topologies

Neil Young is a Canadian-born musician, whose oeuvre places him as asinger/songwriter of American, masculinized relations. Youngs song lyricsproduce this theme, including After the Goldrush', 'Cowgirl in the Sand','Cortez the Killer', 'Last Trip to Tulsa, 'Southern Man', 'Old Man', 'Powder-finger', 'Mideast Vacation', 'Crime in the City'. Albums titled American Stars'n Bars, and Harvest further contribute to a relational dialogue with theAmerican nation. Young's musical style implicitly brings a rock praxis tothe auditors mnemotechnical awareness, a tertiary experience of the con-cepts of American territory as they are traversed by the refrain. For DeadMans soundtrack, Young created the refrain by assembling his instrumentsinside a circle of screens, playing its singular construction repeatedly inrejoinder to the film rushes. Within this circle, Young stages the Western asa call and response, becoming, as with the majority of his performances,completely lost in music: a feedback machine. In addition to his electricguitar, Young uses a pump organ squeeze box, acoustic guitar, piano andother percussive and repetitive noises, at first suggestive, then increasinglyabstracting of the movement-imagery on screen.20 Throughout the sound-track, the sounds of waves pull the characters and the viewer through thenarrative, Siddhartha-like, in a perpetual perceptive audition of the rela-tional structure of molecular beings, even being within an electric guitar'samplified electric-wave. The Western community is created, and heldtogether in Dead Man, through the rhythms of this repetitive refrain ofinterconnected sound-wave.

Young provides an exemplar of the Western generic pulse and affectivecommunity rhythms. The soundtrack of Dead Man acts as a reverberationof Western screen history, augmenting as it pares down and critiques thishistory that continues to affect the forms of practiced realities. Within theundulations of Young s Western reverb, one can audit those communitieswho were subject to genocide or succumbed to the hardships of pioneering.

The Western 203

The peoples of these discrete communities pulse in the chords of Young'sguitar. The enharmonic soundscape created within this film expressesmultiple forms of differentiated relationships, beings and languages throughits vibratory possibilities.21 The auditor is reminded that much is lost intranslation of not only words and music but also in the interpretive pro-cesses of the codes for noise - the natural and made-made elements (thewind, the smokestacks), the punctuation of emphasis (the clap of hands orgunfire), the 'sense' of meanings to-be-recognized (a continual refrainmarks the colonial passage in Dead Man with the dialogue: 'Have you gotany tobacco?' 'No, I don't smoke'). In the material zones of any landscape,there are no soundproof rooms in which to hide. The closest the pioneeringspirit might get to a safely ordered space through sound is in the familiarsaloon bars of a pounding pianola, the known chorus of a metered songor the refrain of the theme modified to fit the space or character: Star Warsin the saloon bar. The pioneering 'morality' engendered in the log cabin'sillusory soundproofing against the clamour of the spirits of the vanquishedand the oppressed was literally burned down by John Ford in The Searchers.In this film, the character of Ethan (John Wayne) is sung into being ashe pursues a phantom cultural technic 'Indian'. The theme song of TheSearchers is a Stan Jones ballad, sung by The Sons of the Pioneers, and itengages the Westerns wanderlust, beseeched by sand sirens to Vide away'.Other lives are sung into the screen space in such laments.

The Westernizing film marks its communities with an echo of the terri-tory's previous occupants. To travel into the American heartlands is tonotice the absence of Native American peoples, as invisible as they are inmainstream Hollywood films. The soundtrack of Dead Man finds thosepeople and all who have traversed the Americas in its reverberating pools,in its use of cliched sayings and coded dialogues and sound effects. DeadMans soundtrack makes a mockery of the typical Western characterizationof the peoples who inhabit Western communities and of the Indian tribes.The typical Western soundtrack can signal its character types even beforethey make an appearance: for example the simple 1:4 beat rhythm of a tom-tom codes the form of indigenous activity through its tempo - threatening,advancing or suddenly silent and dangerous.22 In its screen genre, the West-ern community is renowned for never listening to its voices - the women,the children, the indigenous and the dead. The Western communities'proclamations for living are formal, written signs of public life and of moralrealms that make no sound when they breathe or gasp as the last air issqueezed from their windpipes. Dead Man's soundtrack belies the ono-matopoeic semiotic of the classical Western genre, plugging in sound to the


voiceless, it opens the epistemological frames betrayed by Jarmuschs film:the Western thematic staples of despair, death and deceit.

Dead Man begins its entrance into Western community with one of thekey conceptual motifs of the Western genre: that of the train. This steamlocomotion of the nineteenth century enabled the expansion of whitecommunity and the reduction and extinction of indigenous ecologies. Thetrains engine and clanking wheels and carriages of metal and wood aremnemotechnically mapped through Youngs graphic guitar sounds, whichinvent a smoothly believable space wherein the auditor might become thetrain: perhaps the noisy witness to the decimation of the travelled lands,silently smoking and dying. At the same time, the guitar s sometimes stac-cato sounds become the rapid flicker of the early cinemas projector, enlarg-ing the scene through sound to include the great Westerns of the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The end of the train line is the town of Machine, its various industriesevidenced through essentialist sounds, as affective as cliches can often be: acow groans, a pig squeals, a horse pisses long and loud, a prostitute grunts,steelworks and labour, the saloon bar s pianola, brawl, gunfire and a horsewhinny and gallop. The Western soundtrack carries a narrative coherenceand autonomy that affectively can order, or unsettle, the chronologicallycorresponding movement images meaning. Although symbiotic with theimage, sound conveys the ethics of the Western community on screen;sound lends to the auditor an evaluation of the screen world. Since itsinception, one of the Western screens key themes has been the interactionof technology and community.

Jarmuschs complete soundtrack draws upon a mnemotechnical praxis,which in itself may be labelled as a cosmopolitan musical form of memory,complex in tone, rich in ironic depth, and one that excessively politicizesthe entirety of the Western sound. This is enabled through the films useof non-subtitled Native American dialects and songs, cliched frontier dia-logue, overstated electric guitar clanging and understated acoustic rhythms.The shadow of American imperialism through rocks great history is invokedin Jarmuschs film, but the process of a trans-cultural technic creates anotherlayer of acousmatic inference. Jarmuschs oeuvre has long signalled theincestuously detrimental forces of patriotic pride as aesthetically and polit-ically corrupt, and Youngs soundtrack here invokes the moral and ethicalshudders of absolute repulsion and dismay. The soundtrack of the Westernacts out the emotion that the common deadpan and ironic styles that theactors' mannerisms frequently do not convey. The gruff tones of RobertMitchum, replaying 'the Hunter', offer a different, yet comparable register of

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the dialogic than, say for example, John Wayne s tone in The Searchers - thelatter affective in the minimal sounds he makes after scalping another manand equally after saying prayer.23 In John Ford s many Western characters,ethical positions are made known through vocal modulations. Dialogicmodulations are sound codes that operate as contracts within the narrative,to consolidate the affective meaning of the story. Acting as the tone, pace,timbre and trans-media and cultural inflections of dialogue, the soundsparse and territorialize anything and anyone who might be thinking ofstraying outside their demarcated social structures. When Jarmusch insertscharacters such as Punk godfather Iggy Pop, wearing a dress, reading textfrom 'the good book', Dead Man reminds us that sound can enable thecreative and ethical re-inscription of a somotosensory and poetically pro-duced being.

In a scene where William Blakes guide to death, Nobody, explains hisname, a convergence of sounds resonate around the words and Youngsguitar vibrations. A wind sound rises, and the feint echo of a twentieth-century police siren deepens the topology of the screen space. Youngsrepetitive rhythms share their structure with the indigenous Americanpoetic legacy of the textual visualization of a community. In Dead Man wehear the refrain of the indigenous Indian voice, sung around the campfireof hallucinogenic power, together with the incantation of Blakes apocalyp-tic poems. A cross-cultural death is sung into being, materialized by thetextures of sound: oratory, prayer, song and noises of the landscape. TheNavajo performer does not tell stories with his chanted or sung poetry;instead the lyrics operate akin to the guitar on a looped and feedbackmechanism, wherein syntax is repeated within verbal loops. This structurecreates recognizable percepts: a running wolf, a lumbering bear, the move-ment of a bird in the sky.24 The appearance of this community is imaginedinto existence through the technic of affective sounds.

Some Conclusions: Sounding out an Affective Community

A community is configured through its organization of power. In Westerncommunities, we can hear this distribution of wealth and wisdom in thecliched en-spurred boot steps of'important' men along the wooden veran-das of community structures: bank, bar, brothel, prison. The sound facili-tates the values of the structure or system illustrated - the ethics of anysheriff signalled by their characters score or their localized resonance.

Sounds material ability is its affective performativity of knowledge. Themnemotechnical specificities of Dead Man act out the epistemological


through their technic - Nobody's singing of the spirits of the dead, and NeilYoungs response to the visual design of the film recites a poetic sense thatexists despite the hardships and material ambitions. Their respective tech-nics recall the sacred of both cultures: that of the homeless migrant, and thatof the displaced indigenous body, both clinging desperately to their createdplaces of being through sounds ability to invoke a perceptual meaning.Sound in the Western provides the sacred personal as a place, made realthrough its continuous and variable refrain that operates as an infiniteseries of nested places, resonating through encultured interconnectedness.

Dead Man operates its illustrative poetry through a soundtrack thatforegrounds its auditing of the permeable events and lives represented inthe permanent historical field of Westernizing - the condition expressed inthe Western film environment. Territories are given landforms and concep-tually mapped into existence through song and spoken words that act asincantations for the materialization of ideas and determined by the soundforms of industries and technologies. Dead Mans Western soundtrackenables the auditor to hear the interconnected chambers of the land of theAmericas - its migratory resonances, its now dead peoples, its mixed genes -the enculturation of a place concept over time. This place concept is neverstatic, its forms are activities signalled through acousmatics and directsound technics. In this sense of the resonance of both past and futurevoices, the onscreen Western sound forms a series of infinite possibilities -encounters that mutate into different and as yet unknowable forms.

Notes

1. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Brian Massumi (trans.).Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985, pp. 5-6.

2. See Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, Barclay Brown (trans.). New York: PendragonPress, 1986; Paul Virilio (1989), War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, PatrickCamiller (trans.). London and New York: Verso, p. 70.

3. Edgar Varese, 'The liberation of sound' in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (eds),Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York and London: Continuum, 2004,pp. 17-21; 18.

4. For further elaboration, see Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, Plateau 11: '1837: Ofthe refrain, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi (trans.).Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, pp. 310-50; and F. J. Colman, 'DeleuzesKiss: The sensory pause of screen affect', Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 16.University of Warwick, Coventry, UK, 2005b, pp. 101-13.

5. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (revised edn). London and New York:Verso, 1991, p. 69.

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6. Cf. Derek B. Scott, 'The native American in popular music', From the Erotic to theDemonic: On Critical Musicology. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003,pp. 61-79.

7. In Andre Bazin, 'The Western: Or the American film par excellence', What is Cinema?Vol. II, Hugh Gray (trans.). Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press,1971, pp. 140-57.

8. Ibid., p. 145.9. Cf. Homi K. Bhabha/The other question: Difference, discrimination and the discourse

of colonialism' in Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cornel West (eds),Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. New York: The New Museum ofContemporary Art and Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991, pp. 71-88.

10. Cf. Steve Neale, Genre. BFI: London, 1980.11. F. J. Colman, 'Cinema: Movement-image-recognition-time' in C. J. Stivale (ed.),

Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts. London: Acumen, 2005a, pp. 146-9.12. Bernard Steigler, 'Our ailing educational institutions', Culture Machine: 5 the E-issue,

Stephan Herbrechter (trans.), 2005, pp. 1-13. Available at http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j005/Articles/Stiegler.htm (accessed in May 2005).

13. Ibid., p. 1.14. Cf. Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson (eds), The Frontier in History: North

America and Southern Africa Compared. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981.15. Pierre SchaefTer, 'Acousmatics', in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (eds), Audio

Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York and London: Continuum, 2004, pp. 76-81; 77.16. Justus Nieland, 'Graphic violence: Native Americans and the Western archive in

dead man, CR: The New Centennial Review, 1.2 (2001), 171-200.17. Jarmusch quoted in Jonathon Rosenbaum, A gun up your ass: An interview with

Jim Jarmusch', Cineaste, Spring 1996, 20-3.18. Michel Chion, Audio- Vision: Sound on Screen^ Claudia Gorbman (trans.). New York:

Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 72; Pierre Schaeffer, La musique concrete. Paris: PressesUniversitaires de France, 1967.

19. Cf. Virgil Vogel, This Country Was Ours: A Documentary History of the AmericanIndian, New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

20. Neil Young discussed his method of constructing the music for Dead Man in aninterview with Terry Goss (Young (2004), n.p.). Jim Jarmusch further describes the minorediting process of this music in his interview with Jonathon Rosenbaum (Rosenbaum(1996), 21).

21. Cf. Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, Barclay Brown (trans.). New York: PendragonPress, 1986, p. 51.

22. Cf. Derek B. Scott (2003), pp. 61-79.23. Robert Mitchum played 'the hunter' role in Charles Laughtons film Night of the

Hunter (1955).24. Cf. Paul G. Zolbrod, Reading the Voice: Native American Oral Poetry on the Page. Salt

Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1995, pp. 35-6; Kenneth Lincoln, 'Native Poetics',Modern Fiction Studies, 45:1 (1999), 146-84.

http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j005/Articles/Stiegler.htm

http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j005/Articles/Stiegler.htm

11Comedy

They Go Boom! Some Reflections on Sound in Film Comedy

Laurie N. Ede

For years, the Whoopee Cushion has been sold on the promise that 'whenanyone sits down it [the cushion] emits a real Bronx cheer! The joke workson a number of levels. Social historians can dwell on the residual class con-notations, 'Bronx cheer' being an old euphemism for a raspberry issuedby the New York underclass. The rest of us can register the associationswith socially proscribed bodily functions. If its true, as Milan Kunderaonce observed, that civilization is built on a 'denial of shit', then WhoopeeCushions offer pertinent reminders of our essential animality.

So that's why Whoopee Cushions are funny, but they're especially funnybecause they tell a joke in sound form only. Sometimes words get in theway of a good gag, leaving laughter hostage to a good teller and an audiencewhich is culturally equipped to apprehend the nuances of language. Soundsare different. Doubtless, they are culturally specific to some degree, but theyalso make deep appeal to the shared psychic dimensions of human existence.We can all get the sonic gag and find a sense of togetherness through it.

This article is about the sonic gag in film comedy. I want to think aboutthe things that in the movies go beyond verbiage (and music) and therebyreveal just how precarious our crust of civilization is. The funny sounds I'mthinking form a sub-set of what Siegfried Kracauer identified as 'soundproper'. In 1961 Kracauer made a distinction between dialogue and otherkinds of'noises' in films. He found the latter to be potentially more evoca-tive, in the sense that they did not dominate the visuals (like dialogue) but,

208

Comedy 209

rather, engaged the viewer/listener in compulsive flights of fancy. The skilfulfilmmaker could exploit the human impulse to make mental pictures fromsound stimuli and thereby extend the emotional range of cinema.1

Logically, comedy would appear to provide a rich seam for the study ofsound. Even the non-Freudians amongst us are accustomed to thinkingof laughter as the expression of the subconscious. If we accept Kracauer snotion of proper sounds special appeal to the hidden areas of our psyches,then the links between proper sound and comedy seem obvious. However,it is not altogether easy to find examples of film comedians who makeextensive use of pure sonic stimuli. During the developmental phases forthis article, I immersed myself in the oeuvres of directors and performerswho appeared to be 'naturals' for proper sound-based textual analysis. Thecandidates disqualified themselves just as quickly as they emerged. So, theFarrelly brothers (Dumb and Dumber 1994, There's Something About Mary1998) turned out to rely almost exclusively on visual slapstick, while MelBrooks was discovered to use sound very often in a referential, even nostal-gic, manner (give or take the odd bout of flatus or crack of lightning).Harpo's taxi horn could provide material for a thesis in psychology (its anexpression of the Id if ever I heard one), but the Marx Brothers in toto weremasters of mime and wordplay. Similarly, I discovered the films of Zuckerand Abrahams - from Airplane 1980 through to the Naked Gun series,1988-1994 - to be devoted largely to word gags ('Cigarette? Yes, I know').

Overall, I find that three figures stand out in the field of 'proper soundcomedy' (two of them indivisible); Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, and theFrench comedian Jacques Tati. Laurel and Hardy exerted wide influencewith their instinctive use of sound. This was demonstrated to especiallypungent effect in their 39 short subjects made between 1929 and 1935.2

Tati was amongst those comedians who drew some inspiration from Laureland Hardy s 'slow slapstick! However, his five feature films made between1949 and 1971 expanded the range of sound comedy, drawing it firmly intothe realm of social satire.

The Sonic World of Laurel and Hardy

Laurel and Hardy adapted to sound with conspicuous ease. It may wellbe that their transition to sound in Spring 1929 was helped by their longtraining in Vaudeville; both John MacCabe and William K. Everson suggestthat the comedians' talkative stage style primed them to make effective useof the microphone. However, Laurel and Hardy seemed to have a naturalgrasp of the potentialities of proper sound. In 1929 Laurel joked that the


microphone would shortly compel him to apply for jobs as a janitor3 but heand Hardy coped far better than most of their contemporaries. ChesterConklin, Ben Turpin, Larry Semon, Harry Langdon and Buster Keaton allhad, at best, mixed times with the new medium of sound; even the majesticCharlie Chaplin took his time to adjust, moaning bitterly that he felt likeRembrandt being asked to turn into a house painter.4 MacCabe suggestedthat for Laurel and Hardy sound was can adjunct, not a master'.5 Quite so,but extra-linguistic sound came to form a staple of their comic technique,assaulting the characters' dignity and revealing the unexpected dangers ofthe modern world.

Early sound technology brought enough dangers in itself, both to physicalhealth and to a sense of artistic expression. To begin with, studios - fromthe Big Five down to Laurel and Hardy's employers, The Hal Roach Studios -had to find ways to accommodate, and ultimately circumvent, the desires ofthe sound companies. Western Electric saw sound films as effective adver-tisements for their product and they insisted that studios create the perfectconditions for sound recording. This led to the development of small, pur-pose-built sound stages with optimum soundproofing. Hot studio lightsguaranteed that these were hell to work on, particularly for cameramen,who additionally had to shoot from soundproofed boxes; one cameramancoined the term coming up for air' to describe his blessed moments ofrelease from his camera booth.6 Also, those technicians who yearned toexplore the expressive possibilities of sound had to cope with the soundcompanies' passion for realism. Western Electrics technical service engi-neer Dr. Donald MacKenzie wrote that the whole idea of recording was to'furnish a sound which would be indistinguishable from... the real source'.7

As would be the case with Technicolor a few years later, the language ofnaturalism was actually the language of control; MacKenzie and his cohortsdid not want any studio experiments in sound to jar the audience and thusbring the system into disrepute.

So the sound companies conspired to keep studios in check. Within thestudios, soundmen themselves could also be difficult to get along with.RKO's director of sound, Carl Dreher, hinted at this when he spoke of filmpeoples' tendency to 'misunderstand and disparage [the sound man's] modeof thought'.8 Laurel and Hardy's chief soundman exerted autocratic control.Elmer Raguse came to the Roach studios in 1929, travelling to Culver Citywith the Victor sound equipment. He subsequently worked on Laurel andHardy films up to Saps at Sea in 1940.9 Raguse was notoriously tetchy andautocratic. Roach's editor Richard Currier found that he inflated his arcaneknowledge as the means to dominate his colleagues. Raguse was also inflexible.

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Everyone, Roach included, knew that 'there was only one line you couldfollow'.10

Inevitably, the fastidious Raguse found particular difficulty in copingwith Laurel and Hardy's expansive repertoire of comic sounds. Followingtheir garrulous debut in Unaccustomed As We Are (1929), Laurel and Hardyswiftly came to favour proper sound over speech; Raguse regretted theshift. He fretted endlessly over the damage caused to his five-a-dollar soundvalves by the boys' Smashes, falls [and] bangs'. Moreover, Raguse worriedabout the registration of Laurel and Hardy s sound effects. As he observedduring the making of A Perfect Day (1929): 'It is far easier to make a smoothreproduction of ordinary voices in conversation than of fun-makingsounds... Laurel and Hardy comedies give us more trouble than any otherpictures!11

As is well documented, Stan Laurel was given to endless technical exper-imentation, particularly in the pursuit of a gag.12 It says much for his tenac-ity that he was able to persuade Raguse's sound department to join him inhis quest for the perfect onstage sounds and post-production Foley effects.13

By 1930 Laurel and Hardy had developed a full range of non-naturalisticsound techniques. Barrels of various sizes were dropped to make the 'blump'sound as the comedians fell; gurgles were created by blowing through ahose into a barrel of water; swallowed pennies were signified by droppinga car crank into a metal washboiler; slaps figured by a paddle struck againsta leather pillow and gun shots mimicked by bursting paper bags underRaguses precious mikes. The duo clearly saw sound as a vital part of mod-ern comic technique. They remarked to a reporter from Motion PictureClassic, 'We have to keep studying sounds all the time'.14

This was not to say that Laurel and Hardy allowed themselves to bedominated by sound - quite the opposite. The shorts in particular were amodel of control, featuring clean soundtracks, which facilitated a trulydynamic approach to sonic comedy. The humour lay in the contrastsbetween sounds and relative sound levels. Notably, where control was lost,so too was the comedy. This happened rarely, but we can find the oddexample. Any Old Port (1932) is cacophonous, resulting in the effacementof some good sonic jokes (such as the parson's scalping by an electric fan).Otherwise, Laurel and Hardy maintained meticulous control of theirsoundtracks, leading to the glorious promotion within their soundscapesof exploding doorbells and propellant gas stoves.

Laurel and Hardy's approach to comedy was instinctive; the press bookfor Come Clean (1931) affirmed that the duo worked 'to the barest outlineof the script'. Laurel also took a dim view of highfalutin explanations of


comedy. But close aural analysis of the shorts reveals three broad tenden-cies within Laurel and Hardy s soundtracks; their use of analogous sounds,dissociated sounds and (to use MacCabes term) 'suggestive visualisation!

Chaplin's objections to sound were predicated on a misconception. Heargued that 'the lift of an eyebrow . . . may convey more than a hundredwords'.15 Laurel and Hardy s approach was rarely sound for sounds sake(they maintained their own commitment to mime) but they swiftly cot-toned on to the imaginative possibilities of non-naturalistic or dissociatedsounds. This technique is demonstrated from the very start of their soundcareers. Thus, in Unaccustomed As We Are, Mrs Hardy s incessant naggingis suggested by an annoying jazz record. Then, in the second short BerthMarks (also 1929), the duo pull off the visionary idea (emulated later byboth Chaplin and Tati) of having a rail guard boom inaudibly through amegaphone.

Such analogous sounds clearly have something to tell us about our psy-chic relationships with the sonic world; in the case of the rail guard, we areprompted to consider the futility of everyday noises. A similar comic logicapplied to Laurel and Hardy s use of dissociated sounds, although theseseemed rather more gratuitous. These were noises that made no attempt atmimesis and, which, equally, did not have any apparent symbolic function.In They Go Boom! (1929), Hardy s flu-induced snore is represented succes-sively by a sound from a duck call followed by a blast on a swanee whistle.That same whistle is later used to underscore the somersault made by thetrunk that harbours the fugitive (Walter Long) in Going Bye-Bye! (1934).In neither case is the sound realistic (how would one characterize a flyingpiece of luggage in sound?) but they are united by an approach whichencourages the audience to make imaginative associations. The same mightbe said of the blow Hardy receives from his own rucksack in Any Old Port.We expect a deadpan thud; instead, the sound is produced by a hammerstriking a piece of wood.

MacCabes notion of 'suggestive visualisation' refers to those momentswhen the action occurs off the screen, revealed to us in sound form only.Incidences abound within the shorts. We remember the sonic kafuffle gen-erated by Laurels attempts to remove Hardy s head from an iron bedsteadin Going Bye-Byel - this despite the fact that we never see the noisy resolu-tion in the hall. Better still, we recall the fabulous sound montage (muffledhowl, furniture falling, footsteps pounding, a police siren, the worryingsound of sawing) as the jailbird Butch exacts his ghoulish revenge on thetwo hapless souls who played a leading role in his conviction. Best ofall we remember the swing door sequence of Come Clean. This brilliant

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twenty second segment displayed the fundamentally collaborative natureof Laurel and Hardy s suggestive visualization.

The idea is simple - Hardy will ultimately end up on his fundament inthe kitchen while attempting the simple task of fetching a pitcher. Of course,all kinds of modern conveniences in Laurel and Hardy transpire to be thework of the devil. Here, the swing door plays a cruel trick on Hardy. Via asuccession of cross cuts between living room and kitchen we are ultimatelyled to the scene of Hardy s greatest distress, as he slumps against a wallclutching the pitcher. En route, the story has been told largely in soundcombined with mime. Thus, Hardy moans pitifully off camera as the doorcatches him yet again square on the nose. (The sonic impulse is then sub-stantiated by a close-up of Hardy). Elsewhere there are dull impact sounds,contrasted with sharp sounds, as the door swings between Laurel and Hardy.There are vague scuffling noises, played off against loud screams. The sonicroutine is funny because the viewer is compelled to cope with the absenceof visual data within the diegetic world; Laurel always maintained that gagswere funniest when the audience was forced to imagine the action. At thesame time, this sophisticated routine demonstrates a keen collaborativesense. The disciplines of art direction, editing, acting, direction, photogra-phy, recorded sound and Foley art come together to realize a sonic gag.

Jacques Tati and the Sound of Alienation

Stan Laurel always maintained that his humour had no philosophical sub-text. As he remarked in the press materials for Towed in a Hole (1932) thefilms were just about two men who had 'never had a bright idea in [their]lives'. But there is no such as thing as a neutral laugh; all humour has psy-chological and/or sociological undercurrents. In this context, the aural irri-tants of the Laurel and Hardy comedies (from gushing soda siphons toalarm clocks that could wake the dead) spoke broadly of their ambitionsand/or frustrations. Jacques Tati s use of sound was more purposeful.Deliberating to the ultimate degree, Tati wanted to progress beyond (whathe perceived as) the exaggeration of Laurel and Hardy s sonic humour to usesound to make specific observations of contemporary society and culture.

Tati is the ideal subject for auteur study. His oeuvre was small, consistingof only five feature films; Lefour de Fete (1949), Monsieur's Hulots Holiday(1953), Mon Oncle (1958), Playtime (1967) and Trafic (1971). This factmakes his work easily absorbed. Moreover, Tati s films display a remarkablecoherency. Certainly, there is a sense of development in the features; up toPlaytime they grow ever more ambitious in scope and, at the same time,


become ever more acrid in tone. But throughout Tatis work there is a senseof an artist attempting to find the perfect way to make one essential point.Tati s art implored humankind to liberate itself from the fetters of moder-nity and thereby recover an essential feeling of innocence. Sound playeda full role in Tati s comic-drama of alienation. He said that *le gag visueFwalked arm-in-arm with 'le gag sonore'.16

Tati was a great experimenter in sound. For Playtime, he made use of five-track stereo sound. Typically, his aim here was not to create a sound spec-tacle so much as to use new sound technologies as the means of revealingas much as possible of the contemporary heard world. His more routineexperiments followed the same logic, as he sought at length to find the per-fect sounds of life. One of his sound engineers, Jacques Carrere, watched'with astonishment as he [Tati] broke glasses, one after the other... in orderto obtain the best possible sound'.17 Tatis perfectionism extended to thepost-production process, where he fine-tuned the soundtracks. He observed:It remains for me to "re-shoot" each scene, this time not for images but forsound. I take very great care with this aspect. Indeed, I consider sound tobe of capital importance.18

A strange tension therefore existed in Tatis work. He despaired at theincursions of technology into wider social life, but he took a technologi-cally deterministic approach to film craft; like Andre Bazin (whom headmired), Tati saw cinema as being engaged in a technology-led pursuit ofabsolute realism. It said much for his skill as a filmmaker that his lengthydeliberations (Tati took up to 7 years to make a film) didn't fatally under-mine the spirit of his films. Rarely do the films feel self-conscious or over-deliberated. Rather, a full range of techniques is used to provide, as Tatihimself described, an open terrace on life'.19 We get a window, from whichto both observe and listen. In the process we uncover two major themes inTati s work, concerned with the futility of language and alienation in themodern world.

Kracauer observed that Tati s comedy marked 'a shift of emphasis fromthe meanings of speech to its material qualities'.20 Peter Lewis reportedsimilarly that 'words are simply noise to Tati'.21 Tati would have been pleasedby these descriptions; throughout his career he insisted that gestures werefar funnier, and far more pertinent, than words. Words were material, theproduct of man, with all his foibles. He remarked in 1968:1 don't like the waythey do comedy today. They talk too much. For me comedy is observation.I'm a visual person'.22 This implied no sacrifice of the sound track. Matureobservation would be built on watching and listening. Doubtless, movementcame first - repeatedly, Tati stressed that the gift of mime lay primarily in

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the use of 'the legs' - but sound played a vital corroborating role. In anyevent, words got in the way of effective communication.

As ever, technique, ideology and theme were united in Tati s work. Thefundamentally semiotic use of sound that Kracauer observed in Tati wasexpressed most fully in the character that became (to Tati s eventual dismay)his alter-ego. Monsieur Hulot spoke few words in the four films in whichhe appeared. The name itself had an indistinct guttural quality that wasscarcely helped by the tendency of the two syllables to merge. But Hulothad no need for personal clarity. Increasingly, he became a quiet observerof life and thus the perfect picaro. Other characters felt the futility of lan-guage more keenly. In Mon Oncle, the wordlessness of the small boy, Jimmy,indexes his depression. He cannot speak to his parents because he isconvinced that they do not love him. Curiously, other people in the Tatiuniverse appear to be beyond words for entirely the opposite reason. Thebosses and bureaucrats of Mon Oncle and Playtime have no need for wordsbecause their possessions speak for them.

In Tatis films possessions are everything, both to certain characters(the Arpels of Mon Oncle, the businessmen and tourists of Playtime, thegormless motorists of Trafic) and by implication to Tati himself. The doo-dads of modern life are everything to Tati because they speak so fully ofhuman alienation. Penelope Gilliatt summed up his creed perfectly whenshe observed: 'No other director has ever pitted the still small voice ofhuman contact so delicately against the nerveless dominion of modernconveniences!23 Repeatedly, Tati stressed his sorrow at the loss in post-warFrance (and by analogy the rest of the world) of 'the old kindness and thespirit of things'.24 In this context, his films develop a kind of Prometheannarrative wherein the soul of humanity is progressively sold out to themachine. Sounds play a compelling role in the drama.

Sonic allusions to the perils of modernity are everywhere in Tati s work.Revealingly, the sounds that recur in the films, such as the click of footstepsand the dull clung* of a swinging door are repeated because of their specialsymbolic power. In Playtime, the faulty door of the office complex plays auralhomage to the saloon-style restaurant door of Holiday; in both instancesthey speak of mans presumption in trying to keep sound at bay. (Tatis char-acters become increasingly desperate to control sound). Similarly, the clickswhich echo from the feet of M.Arpel in Mon Oncle and the charmless bureau-crats of Mon Oncle and Playtime signify the social leaders' authoritarian zeal;of course, Hulot the innocent strides noiselessly in his hush puppies.

Such sounds are staples of Tati s sonic universe. However, the trialsof modernity are expressed best in the 'sound sketches' within his films.


Tati often spoke of the need to conceive of sound and image together; inthis context, his dislike of Laurels 'exaggerated' sound was really a critiqueof their indulgence, as he saw it, in unmotivated noise. However, there aremoments in Tatis films, sonic set pieces, wherein one can observe Tati'sworld with ones eyes closed. In Trafic we can hear how in one scene thecars finally become their owners. We can also hear the dismay of a brokenFiat as it groans its way into a garage. In Playtime, a loud zip and somerustling paper tell us all we need to know about an American businessman;he is importunate and unpleasant. Most memorably, the Arpels' kitchen ofMon Oncle is animated by sound. Engineers, it seems, have uncovered waysto keep appliances integrated and motionless, but the sounds endure. Thefloors echo like the tiled floors of an operating theatre or a morgue, cup-boards open with a hiss and a bang and plastic jugs make a basso thudwhen dropped. (We applaud when Hulot adds an aleatory sonic ingredientwhen trying to bounce a glass jug).

All of this adds up to a concerted political critique in sound form. Itwould be ridiculous to portray Tati as a Marxist, but his comedies providea coherent demonstration of alienation.25 Again, sound provides importantclues. Man is alienated from fellow man; we know this because of the din ofthe Plastacs factory of Mon Oncle and, conversely, through the obsessivelysound-tight homes of Playtime. Man is alienated from nature - why elsewould the makers of the Altra mini-camper have to resort to the tapedsounds of nature to 'dress' their stand at the car show of Trafid Most impor-tantly, man is alienated from himself. In Jour de Fete, the villagers canscarcely hear themselves think for the clamorous sounds of nature, suchas the omnipresent hens. But these sounds are organic and kind and theycontrast absolutely with the deathly clicking of Brennan's wall clock inPlaytime. To Tati, the boss's huge timepiece is the devil's metronome, itestablishes the dire rhythm of modern living.

Clearly, I can't pretend that this article offers anything like a definitivehistory of sound in comedy, but I don't think it needs to. For me, the soundin Laurel and Hardy and Jacques Tati is the aural equivalent to Blake's grainof sand; all of life is there, if one is prepared to really listen. One finalthought. It is revealing how everyday idioms express imaginative relation-ships with the invisible world of sound. Commonly, we say that somethingsounds 'interesting' or sounds 'promising'. In both cases, we use the word'sound' to be synonymous with 'appears'. In many ways, film sound is aboutthe world of appearances, but the great sound comedians extend this logic.

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They use the sonic gag to signify the vital things that often go unsaid orremain invisible in everyday life.

Notes

1. S. Kracauer, Nature of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. London: DenisDobson, 1961, pp. 124, 127.

2. Some later Laurel and Hardy silent shorts, such as Angora Love and Bacon Grabbers(both 1929), were released with synchronized music and effects on record. These quasi-sound films are excluded from this survey.

3. W. D. Gehring, Laurel and Hardy. A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press,1990, p. 151.

4. R. J. Minney, Chaplin. The Immortal Tramp: The Life and Times of Charles Chaplin.London: Newnes, 1954, p. 128.

5. J. MacCabe, Mr Laurel and Mr Hardy. London: Robson Books, 1976, p. 153.6. G. Allighan, The Romance of the Talkies. London: Claude Stacey, 1929, p. 35.7. D. MacKenzie, Motion Picture sound Recording By Western Electric Method in

Hall, H., Cinematograph Annual, Vol. 1. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1930, p. 371.8. C. Dreher, Foreword to L. Cowan (ed.), Recording Sound for Motion Pictures.

New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931, p. xviii.9. Raguse recorded the sound on 29 Laurel and Hardy shorts and features. A further

13 films were recorded by James Greene (13) and Harry Baker (2).10. R. Skretvedt, Laurel and Hardy. The Magic Behind the Movies. Beverley Hills: Past

Time, 1994, p. 158.11. Raguse in Skretvedt, p. 173.12. See John MacCabes two major works on Laurel and Hardy for evidence of Laurels

quiet authorial command of the duos comedies. A contemporary account also suggestedthat 'Whimpering Stan has more to do with the comedies than he reticently admits'(Dorothy Spensley, 'Those two goofy guys' Photoplay 1930: 72).

13. The Foley artist is that person in the studio who creates artificial sounds in post-production (famously, coconut shells for horses' hooves and wooden chairs for creakingfloors). The range of techniques is named after Jack Foley (1891-1967) who created soundsfor the Universal company from 1929.

14. H. L. Walker, 'KA-PLOP AND KA-BLOOP: Laurel and Hardy reveal What makesyou hear such funny things', Motion Picture Classic, June 1930, 103.

15. D. McCaffrey, Four Great Comedians. Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton, Langdon. London:Zwemmer, 1968, p. 64.

16. Tati in P. Gilliatt, P. Jacques Tati. London: Woburn Press, 1976, p. 69.17. D. Bellos, Jacques Tati: His Life and Art. London: Harvill, 1979, p. 114.18. Tati in B. Maddock, The Films of Jacques Tati, London: Scarecrow Press, 1977, p. 140.


19. This quote is taken from an unmarked item within the Jacques Tati microfiches heldat the BFI Library in London. The source would appear to be Film Society notes of 1958.

20. Kracauer(1961),p. 109.21. P. Lewis, 'Watching Tati at work', Daily Mail, December 20 (1965).22. P. Hart, 'Tete-a-Tete with Tati', The Sun, July 11 (1968).23. P. Gilliatt, 'The current cinema, New Yorker, 28 August (1971).24. B. Davies, Jacques Tati: Director, London: BFI, 1968, p. 8.25. Actually, Tati referred to himself as an 'anarchist' and expressed admiration for the

student protesters in 1968.

12Horror

Music of the Night: Horror's Soundtracks

Peter Hutchings

In the late 1990s Universal Studios commissioned the noted composerPhilip Glass to write a new score for Tod Brownings 1931 horror classicDracula. The original version of the film - which, of course, starred BelaLugosi as the vampiric Count Dracula - had contained very little music,and none had been specially written for the production. A comparisonwith the new Glass version is instructive for an understanding of how therole of music in the horror genre has changed over the years.

Dracula was a notable success in its day and has remained a cult favouriteever since. However, it has not dated well, especially in comparison withJames Whales Frankenstein (1931), its Universal horror companion piece -and one suspects this unfavourable comparison was behind Universalsdesire to update the film. In particular, the lack of music in Dracula canprove irritating for contemporary viewers more used to modern horrorcinema. It seems to slow down the film and draws our attention all the timeto ponderous gaps in the action - gaps in which absolutely nothing seemsto be happening. It also foregrounds the 'theatrical' and declamatory styleof acting adopted by most of the players in the film (which was an adapta-tion of a stage version of Bram Stokers original 1897 novel), a style that isdeeply unfashionable today. It does not help that what little music there isin the film is not deployed with any great nuance or subtlety. The excerptfrom Tchaikovsky s Swan Lake used for the opening credits and the briefexcerpts from Wagners Die Meistersinger and Schubert s Symphony no. 8

219


overheard in a scene set in a concert hall do not respond to the particulardramatic demands of the narrative, as modern film music usually does;instead it bestows, if only intermittently, a diffuse Romantic gloom on theproceedings.

These apparent shortcomings in Draculas musical score actually reflecttechnical difficulties with the new sound-on-film technologies, difficultiesthat ensured that background music did not become a regular feature insound films until 1932-1933.l To give two distinguished fantasy-basedexamples, by the time of Max Steiner s score for Merian C. Cooper andErnest B. Schoedsacks King Kong (1933) and Franz Waxmans score forJames Whales Bride of Frankenstein (1935), musical accompaniment tofilms was exhibiting both a high technical quality and a confidence about itsfunction that was singularly lacking in the already old-fashioned' Dracula.2

Philip Glasss response to Draculas long silences is to fill them withmusic. In so doing, he manages to bring an intensity to the film that thevisuals in themselves do not always provide. For example, Draculas famouswalk down the castle stairs to greet Renfield acquires a purposefulness viaGlasss score that it lacks in the original music-free version. There, in whatis a remarkably static visualization of an important dramatic moment, wesimply wait for the vampire to arrive and the drama to commence. In Glass sversion, by contrast, the brooding music helps to suggest a predatoryapproach, with a potential longueur thereby transformed into somethingsuspenseful that engages an audiences attention throughout its entirelength. In a film as full of music as Glass s Dracula, silence too can acquirean expressive function rather than merely marking the absence of music.For example, the scene in which Dracula attacks Mina is rendered all themore dramatic by an accompanying musical crescendo. However, the abruptcessation of music in the first part of the next scene - in which a blank-faced Mina attempts to recall details of the attack - immediately qualifiesthis through juxtaposing the musically illustrated excess of the vampiresdesire and hunger with a quotidian rationality that requires no such musicalelaboration or shading. Ironically, this is one of the few moments in the filmthat Glass leaves in its original state; but its significance has neverthelessbeen altered through its being relocated within a different musical context.

In other ways, Glass s score for Dracula offers itself as deliberately old-fashioned. The orchestration for strings alone (the score is performed bythe Kronos Quartet) is reminiscent of Bernard Herrmanns strings-onlymusic for Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). Herrmann himself described this typeof orchestration as providing 'a black and white sound', and, in its reducedmusical palette, Glasss music also seems to be subordinating itself to

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Draculas aged black-and-white imagery.3 Glass also eschews the practiceapparent in many post-1960 horror film scores of using the music to evokeoffscreen space, whether this is the space in which the killer hides in slasherand serial killer movies or the unrepresentable supernatural space fromwhich various ghosts and demons emanate. As is the case with 1930s UShorror generally, Dracula makes little use of offscreen space in either of thesesenses and therefore provides few opportunities for Glass to construct ascore that might intervene into and help to shape the play between seeingand not seeing that characterizes so much modern horror (although he isperfectly capable of doing this in other circumstances, as his impressivescore for Bernard Roses 1992 supernatural horror movie Candyman dem-onstrates). Instead, Glass's music for Dracula, by its very nature as a scoreadded long after the films production, exists primarily as an accompani-ment to and commentary on the images rather than as a more integralpresence within the film.

During the sixty-eight years that separated the original release ofDracula from its re-release on DVD in 1999 with Glass's new score, signifi-cant changes and developments took place in the way that music wasused in horror films. However, trying to neatly summarize these changes isdifficult. There are a number of reasons for this, but perhaps the mostimportant one is that horror itself is a peculiarly protean genre that sincethe 1930s has managed to encompass a wide range of narrative situations,settings, styles and themes. The genre has become internationalized so faras its production is concerned, and has also experienced numerous trans-formations and reinventions of its identity in its attempts to maintain theinterest of its audiences. Arguably as a by-product of this, the genre hasthroughout its history housed a variety of musical styles: including not justorchestral and choral scores but also electronic, jazz and rock-based musicas well as some avant-garde musical experimentation. In certain respectsthis music has served the same sort of functions that music serves in othergenres - evoking mood or atmosphere, supporting characterizations, help-ing to generate particular dramatic effects and generally working to bindthe spectator to the experience of watching the films in question. However,horrors moods, characters and effects often exhibit a generic specificitythat seems to require not just particular types of music but also particulardeployments of that music within the films. It follows that trying to identifywhat is distinctive about music for horror films requires a sense not just ofhow horror music changes in relation to the genre s history but also of theextent to which horror music deviates from the more general norms andconventions of film music.


Perhaps the single most distinctive effect associated with the horror filmis the startle.4 Other types of film might occasionally deploy this - somethrillers for example - but for certain periods of its history, the horrorgenre is heavily dependent on making its audience jump, with this proce-dure often supported by music. An important device here is the musical'stinger', which for all intents and purposes entails the idea of music asnoise. Imagine a potential victim in a horror film foolishly straying intosome shadowy location. The tension builds as the victim moves furtheraway from safety and the audience increasingly anticipates that the killerwill leap out from the shadows. And when the attack does occur, the shockor startle thereby provided will be accompanied by a discordant crash ofmusic. It might be argued that in many cases startle effects of this kind areactually generated more by the sudden musical outburst than they areby the visuals in themselves. (For evidence to support this, try watching anyslasher movie with the volume turned down.)

Like other horror musical conventions, the stinger is not a constant ele-ment in the genres repertoire but instead comes in and out of fashion asthe genre develops. There are no startle effects or stingers in the 1931 Dracula,for example, and shock effects are few and far between in 1930s horror cin-ema generally. It was Val Lewton, producer of a celebrated series of horrorfilms at RKO during the 1940s, who first developed the startle in waysthat anticipated later uses of it by having menacing objects lurch suddenlyinto view from offscreen space. However, the first and best known of theLewton startles, the bus scene from Jacques Tourneurs Cat People (1942,score by Roy Webb), turns out to be music free, with much of its suspensedependent instead on diegetic sound. As the potential victim takes a night-time walk through an apparently deserted part of the city, the only soundswe hear are echoing footsteps. Suddenly a bus drives into view from the sideof the frame, with the noise of its engine helping to clinch the startle effect(with the sound of a snarling animal apparently mixed into the enginenoise as a way of heightening the effect).

It is from the late 1950s onwards that the musical startle becomes a sig-nificant feature in a horror cinema that was increasingly reliant on shockeffects. In this period, clashes of loud music signalled the sudden appear-ance of Dracula (Christopher Lee) in Terence Fishers Dracula (1958, scoreby James Bernard) and Don Nicholas Medina (Vincent Price) in RogerGormans Pit and the Pendulum (1961, score by Les Baxter) and, mostfamously, the screeching of violins accompanied the shower murder inPsycho. Subsequently the stinger acquired a certain disreputability throughits association with the American slasher film of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

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In films such as Halloween (1978, directed and scored by John Carpenter)and Sean S. Cunninghams Friday the 13th (1980, score by Harry Manfredini),musical stingers repeatedly punctuated narratives in which killers routinelylurked in the darkness waiting to spring out and surprise their teenagevictims. These slashers were generally not well received by critics on theirinitial release, and the stingers themselves were often perceived as cheapshots' in comparison with the more artful shocks provided by movies suchas Cat People. While Lewton conjured up his bus startle through the atmo-spheric manipulation of diegetic sound, the slasher-stinger seemed toinvolve an altogether more facile application of a non-diegetic burst of musicto a scene in a manner designed to provoke a basic and automatic physicalresponse.

But even in its cruder applications, the stinger is more complex than thisaccount of it might suggest. In the case of the slasher - or the post-slashersor neo-slashers that followed in the 1980s and 1990s - the shocks or star-tles are highly conventionalized events that fit into particular narrativepatterns. They might well have something in common in physiologicalterms with Veal-life' shocks taking place outside the cinema; but they areprovoked within a very different context, one that is organized aroundsuspense and which is heavily dependent on audience expectations andcompetences. As already noted, audiences familiar with horrors musicalconventions will know that the maximum threat occurs once any atmo-spheric music ceases and we are left with a menacing silence that could atany moment be breached by an ear-splitting stinger. As if to underline theseparateness of the cinematic startle from its real-life equivalent, an effectivestartle will frequently elicit appreciative laughter from a horror audience.This kind of response seems to combine effects and emotions (i.e., shock,fear) that are normally unpleasant with a pleasurable recognition of theexperience of horror as fictive. It is a somewhat paradoxical combinationthat has itself often been seen as characterizing horror spectatorship ingeneral.5 The musical stinger clearly has a role in what essentially is a playbetween belief and disbelief, but music can contribute to this process inother ways as well.

If the stinger is essentially an assault on the audience (albeit a playfulassault) then other types of horror music also have an assaultive character.Music of this kind sets out to cause discomfort or to unnerve the audience;although, as is the case with the stinger, this is more apparent in horrorcinema from the late 1950s onwards than it is in horror films producedbefore then. This sort of discomfiture can be achieved quite simply throughvolume. For example, the scores provided in the late 1950s and 1960s by


James Bernard for Hammer and Les Baxter for American InternationalPictures are noticeably louder in places than horror scores had ever beenbefore, while the rock group Goblins eardrum-piercing score for DarioArgentos supernatural drama Suspiria (1977) and the use of heavy metalmusic in Argentos Phenomena (1985) and Opera (1987), helped to confirmthose films' deserved status as comprehensive assaults upon the senses.

It is not just the volume that is important but also the type of music. Ashas been noted by a number of critics, horror has a penchant for music thatis dissonant, atonal or in other ways discordant.6 As the horror composerLes Baxter has succinctly put it, 'The composer can use any notes that hewishes without staying in the realm of something that is pretty'.7 This canbe achieved by orchestral means, with examples including the work ofBaxter himself and James Bernard, Humphrey Searles score for RobertWises The Haunting (1963) and, of course, Bernard Herrmanns score forPsycho. Or it can be done in other ways: for example, Delia Derbyshire'selectronic score for John Houghs The Legend of Hell House (1973), WayneBells atonal music for Tobe Hoopers The Texas ChainsawMassacre (197'4),Bernard Herrmanns interlacing of orchestral music with synthesizers forBrian De Palmas Sisters (1973) and Larry Cohens It's Alive (1974); there isalso Ennio Morricones fusion of orchestral, atonal and choral music forJohn Boormans Exorcist 2: The Heretic (1977) and Alberto de MartinosHolocaust 2000 (1977) and Christopher Youngs use of Tibetan horns asaccompaniment to images of Hell in Tony Randels Hellraiser 2 (1988).

It is not clear whether this type of horror music is inherently unnervingor unnerving because of its difference from more traditional forms of filmmusic. The association of atonality with experimental or avant-garde musiccertainly helps to underline its oddness when deployed as a techniquewithin the pop-cultural world of the horror film. It follows that the unusualquality of the resulting music renders it especially noticeable and, in somecircumstances, intrusive. This seems to fly in the face of the widely acceptedbelief that good film music should remain unobtrusively in the background,quietly servicing image, character and narrative. Whether this is actuallythe case for film music in general is debatable; but it is certainly true thatmusic for horror films is often foregrounded as a presence both in its ownright and in terms of its relation to the images it accompanies. As alreadynoted, this can manifest itself in shocking or discordant effects of variouskinds that seek to support or amplify visual moments of shock or suspense.However, by making itself noticeable, horror music - and in some instancesthe same discordant music referred to above - can serve other functions as

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well, functions that have less to do with assaulting the spectator than withinvoking responsive acts of interpretation from that spectator.

This can involve the deployment of music that in other circumstancesmight be deemed completely unthreatening. It is actually quite rare to findany horror score that is wholly dissonant or atonal. Most will include har-monious themes that are usually associated with the forces of good. Inthose films where good is triumphant, this theme might be ascendant (e.g.,the Hammer Draculd) while in those other films where good does notfare well, the theme might well vanish before the conclusion (e.g., RichardDonner s The Omen, 1976, score by Jerry Goldsmith). However, horror hasother more provocative uses for this type of music, ones that stress incon-gruity and present apparent disjunctures between image and sound. Musictheorist James Buhler has suggested that this kind of disparity can reveala surplus in the image, a surplus in need of interpretation, although he doesnot go on to explore the generic specificities that might be involved in this.8

Consider, for example, music by and for children. Could anything soundmore innocent than musical nursery rhymes, lullabies or choruses of chil-dren's voices? Probably not, which is undoubtedly why horror films regu-larly use and subvert this type of music for disturbing or sinister purposes.This occurs in the genre as early as 1942 with Roy Webbs score for Cat People.Webb is an underrated composer, and Cat People is one of the finest exam-ples of his work. It was his first collaboration with producer Val Lewtonand, according to musical historian Randall D. Larson, the composer wasmore closely involved in the production than was usual at the time.9 This isapparent from the way in which a lullaby theme woven through the filmhas both a non-diegetic and diegetic character. The theme appears brieflyin the credit sequence where its inclusion in a horror film initially seemsrather strange; subsequently it becomes associated with Irena, the filmstormented heroine (and possible cat person), both as a theme played asbackground music when she is on screen and as a song heard playingon the record player in Irenas apartment and which on one occasion sheherself hums. As a traditional leitmotif, this theme helps to bind the filmtogether, but the arrangement of the theme goes beyond this. As diegeticmusic, it remains a pretty theme, one that conveys a sense of Irenas child-like vulnerability. However, as non-diegetic music, its scoring in placesbecomes discordant, with this in turn suggesting the childhood traumaand conflict that still marks Irenas personality. Appropriately for a filmas steeped in psychoanalytical concepts and beliefs as Cat People, Webbsscore seems to be offering an essentially schizophrenic treatment of the


lullaby theme, one that gives a very powerful sense of what in effect is asymptomatic relationship between the ostensible reality of Irenas life andbarely suppressed psychological anxieties traceable back to her childhood.

Other horror films also use lullabies to convey an impression of disturbedor twisted psychologies, in so doing getting inside the consciousness ofcharacters trapped by child-like obsessions and fantasies. The traumatizedserial killers in Dario Argentos The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970,score by Ennio Morricone) and Deep Red (1975, score by Goblin) are asso-ciated with lullabies and nursery rhymes, the demented killer in Bob ClarksCanadian shocker Black Christmas (1974, score by Carl Zittrer) sings anursery rhyme after killing his first victim, while John Carpenter s themefor Halloween, a theme associated with yet another childhood-fixated serialkiller, also has a child-like, repetitive quality to it. In all these cases, anapparent mismatch between image and music can actually be seen asdenoting the psychological in terms of an excess or rupture that is neverfully assimilated into the films' narratives - none of these films are detailedpsychological case studies - but which nevertheless exerts an influenceupon the behaviour of the characters within the films.

If the music of childhood is here bound by notions of the psychological,elsewhere it is rendered strange and sinister through its proximity to horri-fying events. Krzysztof Komedas lullaby theme for Roman PolanskisSatanic thriller Rosemarys Baby(l96S) is a good example of this. The theme -sung haltingly by Mia Farrow, the star of the film - first appears over open-ing credits that are in pink (not the normal colour for horror credits) andset against an innocuous Manhattan cityscape. Although audiences forRosemarys Baby were presumably expecting a horror film, what they arepresented with initially looks and sounds more like a romantic drama orcomedy, with the wistful lullaby supporting this impression. Throughoutthe first section of the film, Polanski continues to confound expectationsby suppressing or marginalizing elements of horror and suspense. Insteadhe offers a slow accumulation of sinister events that only gradually mergeinto something tangible and horrifying. However, by the end of the filmRosemary has been impregnated by Satan and given birth to the Antichrist;and in an ambiguous conclusion, she apparently agrees to be a mother tothe baby. Evil, it seems, has triumphed. On the soundtrack, in what is oneof the more unnerving moments in modern horror history, we then hearMia Farrow sing the lullaby for a second time. It is unnerving because itsposition in relation to the drama has shifted since its first appearance in thefilm. Previously it was a charming theme, albeit one that seemed out ofplace. Now it is implicated in deeply unpleasant events; the audience may

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well recognize the singing voice as Rosemarys, and in any event the lullaby,although still non-diegetic, is clearly being addressed to the son of Satan. Ineffect, this piece of music has been made strange by the changing contextof its use, with this in turn reflecting the films broader mission to disruptand ultimately transform a safe normality into something dangerous anddisturbing.

Similar transformations of 'innocent' forms of music include the chil-dren's choruses found in Stuart Rosenbergs The Amityville Horror (1979,score by Lalo Schifrin) and Tobe Hoopers Poltergeist (1982, score by JerryGoldsmith), the nursery rhyme sung by children in the Nightmare on ElmStreet films (eight films between 1984 and 2003) - which begins 'One, two,Freddys coming for you, three, four better lock your door' - and the appro-priation of popular songs done in such a way that some sinister subtext iseither revealed or implanted: for example, Blue Oyster Cult's 'Don't Fearthe Reaper' in Halloween and the Chordettes' 1950s hit 'Mr Sandman inHalloween 2 (1981, score by John Carpenter and Alan Howarth). One candistinguish this from the use of rock songs in many 1980s or 1990s Americanslasher films. Rather than having a generically specific function, the songshere seem mainly to operate as lifestyle referents both for the teenagecharacters in the films and for teenage horror audiences in the manner ofteen-centred films from other genres. In a different but related way, theGregorian-style chants heard in Jerry Goldsmith's Oscar-winning score forThe Omen and Anton Garcia Abril's score for Amando de Ossorio's Spanishhorror film Tombs of the Blind Dead (1971) become the themes for pre-modern evil - represented by Satan and his agents in The Omen and therevenant Knights Templar in Tombs of the Blind Dead. At the same time,this type of music is so much at odds with what we conventionally expectof film music and is so obtrusive that it calls for an audience's attention inits own right. Of course, this foregrounding of the music has become some-thing of a convention for horror music; but what this convention actuallymeans for the relation of music to image and the relation of audience tofilm is far from straightforward.

The blunt literalness of the musical stinger or forms of atonal or disso-nant music can be seen as working to close the distance between spectatorand image, if only temporarily. However, other uses of music seem to invokeor encourage a spectatorial distance from the image. Some of this musicdirects our attention to offscreen space, the limits of the frame and thelimits of our own restricted vision. Elsewhere in the genre, music can havea provocative function, with its incongruity requiring an audience responserooted in cognitive processes rather than in the automatic reflex promoted


by the stinger. Even one of the more traditional film music devices, the leit-motif, acquires an extra-textual quality as the genre develops. For example,Draculas theme in Hammer s seven Dracula films or Freddy s theme in theNightmare on Elm Street cycle or Jasons theme in the Friday the 13th cycleall become recognizable trademarks, binding us into particular horrorfranchises through invoking memories of where and how we heard thesethemes before.

This chapter has already pointed out how hard it is to identify any essen-tial qualities or functions within horror; the genre is too varied and change-able to permit this. However, it is often the case that horror music is notsubordinated to the image in the way that much film music is. Instead,horror music challenges or questions the image in some way, highlightingwhat is not being shown on screen or sometimes contradicting the imagein a manner that invites an audience to reinterpret music, image and therelationship between them. To some extent, this might have something todo with the fact that horror films are often low-budget enterprises thatrequire music to compensate for visual limitations. But it is also undeniablythe case that many horror narratives are, in the light of day, simply absurd;not to put too fine a point on it, they beggar belief. In this context, music canhelp to shock an audience into temporary belief while also constantly shift-ing that audiences relation to the drama, overwhelming us, surprising us,engaging us and all the time working hard to render the horror experiencea compelling one. However one looks at it (or listens to it), the horror genreis heavily dependent on its music. It is all the more surprising then that thismusic has, so far at least, not received the critical attention it merits.

Notes

1. C. Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. London: British Film Institute,1987, p. 42; B. Salt, 'Film style and technology in the thirties: Sound', in Weis, E. and Belton,J. (eds), Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, p. 43.

2. For an interesting discussion of the score for King Kong, see P. Franklin, 'King Kongand film on music: Out of the fog', in K. J. Donnelly (ed.), Film Music: Critical Approaches.Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001.

3. Randall D. Larson, Musique Fantastique: A Survey of Film Music in the FantasticCinema. Newjersey and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1985, p. 117.

4. For a discussion of the startle effect, see R. Baird, 'The Startle effect: Implications forspectator cognition and media theory', Film Quarterly, 53 (3) (2000), 12-24.

5. See N. Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York andLondon: Routledge, 1990, for a relevant discussion of horror spectatorship.

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6. See, for example, D. Neumeyer and J. Buhler, 'Analytical and interpretative approachesto film music (1): Analysing the music', in K. J. Donnelly (ed.), F/7m Music: Critical Approaches.Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001, p. 23; P. Hutchings, The Horror Film. London:Pearson Longman, 2004, pp. 146-7.

7. Larson (1985), p. 4.8. Buhler (2001), p. 49.9. Larson (1985), p. 45.

Filmography

Amityville Horror, The. American International Pictures, 1979. Directed byStuart Rosenberg.

Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The. Seda Spettacoli, 1970. Directed by DarioArgento.

Black Christmas. Film Funding, 1974. Directed by Bob Clark.Bride of Frankenstein. Universal, 1935. Directed by James Whale.Candyman. Polygram/Propaganda Films, 1992. Directed by Bernard Rose.Cat People. RKO, 1942. Directed by Jacques Tourneur.Deep Red. Seda Spettacoli, 1975. Directed by Dario Argento.Dracula. Universal, 1931. Directed by Tod Browning.Dracula. Hammer, 1958. Directed by Terence Fisher.Exorcist 2: The Heretic. Warner Brothers, 1977. Directed by John Boorman.Frankenstein. Universal, 1931. Directed by James Whale.Friday the 13th. Georgetown Productions, 1980. Directed by

Sean S. Cunningham.Halloween. Falcon International, 1978. Directed by John Carpenter.Halloween 2. De Laurentis, 1981. Directed by Rick Rosenthal.Haunting, The. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1963. Directed by Robert Wise.Hellraiser. New World, 1987. Directed by Clive Barker.Holocaust 2000. Embassy Pictures, 1977. Directed by Alberto de Martino.Its Alive. Larco Productions, 1974. Directed by Larry Cohen.King Kong. RKO, 1933. Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest

B. Schoedsack.Legend of Hell House, The. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1973. Directed by John

Hough.Omen, The. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1976. Directed by Richard Donner.Opera. ADC Films, 1987. Directed by Dario Argento.


Phenomena. DAC Film, 1985. Directed by Dario Argento.Pit and the Pendulum. American International Pictures, 1961. Directed by

Roger Gorman.Poltergeist. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1982. Directed by Tobe Hooper.Psycho. Shamley Productions, 1960. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.Rosemary's Baby. Paramount, 1968. Directed by Roman Polanski.Suspiria. Seda Spettacoli, 1977. Directed by Dario Argento.Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The. Vortex, 1974. Directed by Tobe Hooper.Tombs of the Blind Dead. Inter filme, 1971. Directed by Amando de Ossorio.

13Science Fiction

How High the Moon?: Science Fiction and Popular Music

Dave Allen

Science fiction began its life in literature and it was not until the 1950s thatcinema - especially Hollywood cinema - produced sufficient science fic-tion films to warrant the acknowledgement of science fiction as a filmgenre.

In the half-century since then, science fiction has become one of the keygenres of cinema and, more broadly, in popular culture. In cinema, litera-ture, television, computer games, arcades and fairgrounds the iconographyand themes of science fiction offer terror, excitement and warnings along-side opportunities to explore social, political and personal anxieties. Themass popularity of science fiction is now matched by serious critical analy-ses of the genre across this variety of media and forms; but to date the focushas been on literature, cinema and television while relatively little attentionis paid to the links with popular music.

Indeed when McLeod published one of the few serious examinationsof popular music and aspects of science fiction - specifically aliens andfuturism - he observed that, 'despite the rampant popularity of space, alienand futuristic imagery in popular culture, little scholarship has recognizedthe impact of such themes on popular music'.1 McLeod s work also focusedon the imagery of science fiction and the ways in which it has been utilizedto explore Nonconformist ideologies and identities.' While this chapter willecho McLeod s chronological approach, it will do so more broadly, examin-ing the links between the growing popularity of science fiction and popular

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music through the second half of the twentieth century. A key point of thischapter is that science fiction was emerging as a major genre in the 1950sat the same time that modern popular music was created in the UnitedStates.

The teenage audiences that fell in love with rock and roll in the mid-1950swere often the same people who consumed movies such as War of theWorlds (dir. Haskin, 1953), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (dir. Siegel, 1956)or Forbidden Planet (dir. Wilcox, 1956). Yet the popularity of science fictioncinema was not simply reflected in the kind of music that was popular'in the same period, although reciprocity is clearer in the development ofsoundtracks and in the centrality of technological developments to thechanging sounds of popular music. The most obvious example was the useof amplification, which made it possible for the guitar to be a lead instru-ment in ensemble playing for the first time. Vocalists could use more pow-erful microphones and PA systems, organs were amplified and portableand in the studio the multi-track experiments of the early 1950s soonbecame part of the production process.

Popular here includes 'pop' songs aimed principally at commercial successand, more broadly the development of various sub genres in rock, danceand 'urban* music. This chapter will also consider relevant developments injazz and avant-garde classical music and their influence on popular music.It begins with a chronological account of compositions with titles or lyricsconcerned with the themes and topics of science fiction. More importantly,it also documents a major shift in popular music in the late 1960s and1970s, which I believe has been somewhat undervalued because it refusesthe typical historical focuses upon single acts, genres and sub-genres orsub-cultural groups.

This shift crossed most genres of popular music and embraced a broadrange of diverse audiences in one of the most international developmentsin popular music. The music that emerged utilized and extended new tech-nological developments in musical performance and recording and refusedthe formal and stylistic restrictions of traditional genres. At its most com-plete, it comments upon consciousness and culture as science fiction cinemahas done. Like cinema, it explores dystopias, Utopias and fantasy. Many ofits performers reject the older dichotomy between showbiz glamorousartifice and streetwise rock authenticity in favour of a postmodern senseof image and inter-textuality. This often manifested itself in sonic experi-mentation, technological innovation, cross-dressing, space-age costumesor the man-machine cybernaut.

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An obvious example of this shift is to be found in the early versions ofRoxy Music. There was a clear sense in the performance and look of RoxyMusic of new possibilities in popular music - a sort of retro futurism for, asBracewell observed:

Here was a group who looked like they came from not only anotherera - the 1950s as they might be reconstructed in the twenty-firstcentury - but also from another planet. Indeed the keyboard and tapeplayer (and who had ever heard of someone playing 'tape' before?)Brian Eno, had claimed with straight-faced passivity that he was avisitor from the planet Xenon.2

Whereas the suspension of disbelief in the cinema is aided by the invisibil-ity of the technology of production and projection, in popular music thattechnology has been an important part of the meaning of popular music,whether in terms of the technology of live performance or in consumption.The latter has always offered the individual a range of choices between thecomplex 'hi fi' system, or portable transistor radio/Walkman/MP3 playerand among radio, tape, CD or vinyl - choices which underpin a sense ofself-identity. Todays virtual world and the mobile consumer signal a dra-matic shift in consumption.

There are then three key themes in examining the link between popularmusic and science fiction. One is based on content: on the themes of aliens,space travel, dystopias and other common subjects of science fiction. Thesecond is appearance: especially costumes and technology hinting of a Uto-pian or dystopian future. The third is technological change and innovationsin the production and consumption of cultural artefacts. To some extent theworld of virtual consumption means that we are already in the future. Butin this chapter I will focus mainly on technology that 'sounds' (or sounded)futuristic.

For example, during the 1950s, some established popular music genresbegan making significant use of amplification - not the least of which wascountry and blues - but while the new ensembles created a louder sound itwas still predominantly amplified acoustic music. During the 1960s how-ever, a new generation of performers transformed these traditional genresutilizing electricity, amplification and special effects to create blues/folk/country and jazz-rock. This was one aspect of the shift I am identifying inthis chapter, to be found for example in the music of artists such as EricClapton, Albert King, Gram Parsons, Fairport Convention, John McLaughlin


and Miles Davis. A new audience rejected the criticism that amplificationand electricity betrayed the essential purity or 'authenticity' of these tradi-tional genres and its success was reflected in increased album sales, goodlive attendance and column inches in the increasingly sophisticated musicpress. But in addition to this 'modernization of traditional genres, a newgeneration was also creating the next phase of popular music, which wasmore reflexive; it was pop music created from previous 'pop' music ratherthan from vernacular forms (jazz, blues and country). For example, whilethe roots of Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones lay in their coverversions of older blues or country music, the Beatles and Beach Boys werecontent to rework the pop music of earlier vocal groups or rock 'n' rollmusicians such as Chuck Berry.

Nik Cohn had encapsulated the first phase of pop brilliantly in a booksubtitled Pop from the Beginning. At the end of the 1960s Cohn noted:

It s finished now, the first mindless explosion and the second stage hasbegun. Pop has gotten complicated... Pop has split itself into factionsand turned sophisticated. Part of it has a mind now, makes fine music.The other part is purely industrial, a bored and boring business likeany other.3

Cohn then went on to predict the kind of'sophistication' and formal excel-lence that would lead to pop orchestras' and audiences 'applauding politely'while admitting that he preferred 'image' and 'heroics'.4 But writing wellabout what has passed is one thing - predicting the future quite another.While English 'prog rock' gave some credence to Cohn's prediction, it wasultimately a fairly minor, parochial incursion in the ocean of pop. Amongthe things Cohn failed to predict were the huge impact of electronics onperformances and recordings from then on, the cartoon heroics of punkfrom both sides of the Atlantic, the growing international (universal) impactof popular music and the imminent reinvention of glamorous imagery.

In some ways the essential link between science fiction and popularmusic hinges upon technological innovations in the second half of thetwentieth century. It might be argued that in one sense, all cinema was'naturally' science fiction from the first edit or special effect which movedthe narrative across space/time. In the same sense I would suggest thatscience fiction in popular music is best located in electronic technologicalpossibilities and the stimulation of consciousness (ways of thinking) thanin mere titles and/or lyrics about space travel, aliens or robots.

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The explosion in technological innovation in musical performance andrecording over the past 50 years also coincided with the period of sciencefiction and popular music, although it lagged behind developments invisual modernism. In the first half of the twentieth century very few record-ings were anything other than single track, on-the-spot reproductions of alive event. In this sense, sound recording was less innovative than cinematicmontage - especially in its exposure to a popular audience.

The shift from mechanical to electronic recording and the invention ofthe electronic microphone in the 1920s improved the quality of what audi-ences were hearing, and the spread of home-owned radios increased thesize of the audience considerably. Nonetheless, what they heard were stillsingle-track and in that sense, unmediated recordings of what performersproduced at live events. In contrast with cinema, sound recording was notyet travelling in space or time, although the widespread enjoyment of theradio meant that sound broadcasting was, in fact, doing just that.

Rosen describes how the lyrical 'focus' of the popular songs was 'radi-cally narrowed' in the inter-war period, rarely addressing any topic otherthan romantic love.5 Blues, country and folk musicians would sometimeswrite about other aspects of their daily reality, but hardly anywhere do wefind titles or topics that shift beyond romance or everyday rural experi-ences such as work, economic hardship or (earth-bound) travel. Referencesto outer space, notably the moon, tend to appear only metaphorically inlove songs.

Then the end of World War II seemed to encourage people to developvisions of the future; and in the case of a film like Destination Moon(dir. Pichel, 1950) these could be relatively Utopian. In addition, a war endedby the most terrifying technological means, the Roswell aliens, the embry-onic space race and the Communist paranoia of the early 1950s, createdthe context for the cultural significance and popularity of science fiction.Furthermore, an audience for science fiction subjects had been nurtured inthe 1940s through the fifteen-minute movie serials starring Buck Rogers orFlash Gordon and the publication of Superhero comic books.

Despite the growing popularity of science fiction cinema, the writersof pop songs showed little interest in science fiction themes for theiryouthful audience. Here, romance continued to hold sway; but a slightchange occurred towards the late 1950s as the technology for producingand recording popular music began to change significantly.

Cunningham describes how Les Paul was responsible for the first usein popular music of multi-tracking tape recordings in 1949, suggesting


that his achievement equalled that of Edison's first phonograph of 1877.6

He notes that Paul had found a way of multi-tracking on an acetate discin 1930, and there were other examples that were generally considerednovelties. But the key to Pauls innovation in 1949 was the use of tape ratherthan acetate. The recordings included a very clean-sounding tape delay andPaul added to this by manipulating the recording speed. In 1951 Mary Fordenjoyed two months at the top of the American hit parade with a futuristicrecording of a romantic song appropriately titled 'How High the MooriFrom this point, music recording began to catch up with the possibilitiesinherent in edited images, and the manipulation of sound spaces and timesbecame an increasingly important element of popular music. But 'futuristic'technologies were still not often used and neither were they reflected in thecontent of most popular songs for some time.

Meanwhile, in the performance of popular music, the key developmentwas the improved amplification of the electric guitar that distinguished thepopular music of Elvis Presley's generation from the previous preferencefor acoustic pianos, reeds, brass and woodwind. This established the electric(and soon solid-body) guitar as the key visual and sonic icon of the 'new'music. The latter was enabled through louder amplifiers and additionalspecial effects, which were creating new sounds in popular music.

While the performances became literally more electric, recording wassimultaneously shifting from a process of the documentation of live per-formance to the construction of recorded artefacts. Often these construc-tions simply enabled the kind of double-tracking that had interested LesPaul; but some composers also began to experiment with purely electronicor synthetic sounds. For example, in the early 1960s the BBC s RadiophonicWorkshop produced many pieces of sound for television, including thefamous Dr. Who soundtrack.

But that work was, in a sense, 'ahead of its time'. While cinema ledpopular music in exploiting science fiction themes, most of the early filmsoundtracks in the genre were fairly typical Hollywood orchestrations.However, in 1956, Forbidden Planet took us into a brave new science fiction/pop culture world of widescreen, robots, internal monsters, blondes andelectronic soundscapes where there once were orchestras. On the film'scredits these were described as 'Electric Tonalities' by Louis & Bebe Barron.While it must seem obvious to us that such tonalities signify the film genremore effectively than the traditional studio orchestra, it took some time tobe accepted as the normal approach to science fiction soundtracks.

In the new pop songs of the 1950s there were odd exceptions to thedominant romantic themes, and it is perhaps not surprising that Sam Phillips

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(who discovered Elvis Presley) also recorded and released one of the firstsuccessful pop songs with a science fiction theme. In 1957, as the cold warsspace race increased, Phillips recorded and released 'Flying Saucer Rock &Roll' by Billy Lee Riley and his Little Green Men (including Jerry Lee Lewis)on the Sun label. It was a typical stop-verse, sixteen-bar blues-based rocka-billy performance with the essential chorus in which Billy revealed thathis communication problems with the little green visitors did not inhibithis dancing pleasure. The vocal performance was notably enhanced byextensive use of a primitive echo effect - a simpler form of electronic tonal-ities and a technological innovation that lent itself naturally to a sciencefiction feel.

Similarly in the 1950s a number of rockabilly and country artists releasedfairly conventional songs in their genre with occasional special effects toemphasize titles like 'Honeymoon on a Rocketship' (LC Smith), 'SatelliteBab/ (Skip Stanley) or 'Sputnik* (Al Jacobson with the Cave Dwellers).None of these and other similar titles met with any significant success.

In the world of jazz the great composer, arranger and bandleader DukeEllington returned to the blues tradition for a new album released at thebeginning of the 1960s. The title track was 'Blues in Orbit' recorded inFebruary 1958, which the sleeve notes tell us reflected 'Ellingtons interestin space travel'. It is in every respect a typically mellow 'late night' twelve-bar blues with the horns gently rifling while Ellington improvises on pianothroughout the 2 minutes and 27 seconds. There is nothing in the arrange-ment, instrumentation or performance signifying space travel or sciencefiction - indeed one imagines Ellington playing such music 30 years earlier,jamming after hours at the Cotton Club or a similar venue. Nonetheless,the title is there.

In the 1950s and early 1960s the United States provided the model forsuccessful popular music in terms of genres, recording technologies, styleand image. But in the following few years, this was superseded by Britishpop music. And just as Europe had been ahead of the United States in thedevelopment of cinematic science fiction, it might be argued that Britainproduced popular music's first Space-Age 'auteur': Joe Meek. Meek was acomposer rather than performer, but he was principally an innovativerecord producer who set up an extraordinary recording studio in his flatabove a shop in North London. Meek had always been fascinated by elec-tronics and sound, and from 1953 had worked in radio until he became anindependent producer. From that point on he produced records that oftenhad an impact in the British charts, not the least of which was the first majorexample of science fiction pop: the instrumental 'Telstar' by the Tornados,


which reached number one in the summer of 1962. And before the Beatlessuccess in 1964, 'Telstar' was one of only two British records to reach num-ber one in the United States.7

The title was a tribute to a newly launched satellite at a time when everysuch event was important news. Unlike the guitar-dominated instrumen-tals of Duane Eddy or the Shadows, 'Telstar' featured the more futuristicsound of an electronic keyboard, which, within 5 years, would be the stapleinstrument of Pink Floyd in their early space-age tracks. The seeds of theTornados' instrumental hits were created by Meek a couple of years earlierwith a project entitled / Hear a New World, which he started in 1960. Therecording was never released at the time, but the sleeve notes to the even-tual CD release (1991) reveal that Meek's obsession with sound technologywas matched by his twin interests in space travel and the occult. On thisproject he was keen to demonstrate the full creative possibilities of therelatively new stereo sound and invented a world of blue space creatures(Globbots) and oppressed Sarooes. The tracks include 'Orbit Around theMoon', 'Magnetic Field* and 'Dribcots Space Boat'. While the songs deviatevery little from popular formats of the time, the use of special effects andelectronic keyboards anticipate the space-age psychedelia of the late 1960s.Eventually, four tracks were released on a limited release EP, but the com-plete album never emerged. On the original sleeve notes for the ill-fatedalbum, Joe Meek suggested that 'The Entry of the Globbots' enabled you topicture 'the happy jolly little beings . . . (with) cheeky blue-coloured faces'.

In the early 1960s, a Swedish instrumental group called the Spotnickstried to exploit the growing interest in space and science fiction with pub-licity shots featuring them in space suits. While their rocking instrumentalversions of the traditional tunes 'Orange Blossom Special' or 'Hava Nagilawere melodically conservative, they enjoyed a minor British pop hit with'Rocket Man just as the first Beatles record was released in the autumn of1962. Probably as a consequence, their success was short-lived.

More significantly, at this time Bob Dylan and the Beatles offered exam-ples of lyrical innovation which could free songwriters from the obligationto focus on romance. Although neither Dylan nor the Beatles showed muchinterest in science fiction topics, their lyrical innovations made it possiblefor other songwriters to explore a vast range of subjects from this point on.

From 1963 to 1966 much of the most innovative popular music by theBeatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and others involved an imaginative butalso nostalgic return to pop's 'authentic' roots (rock and roll, blues, folk,rhythm & blues, country). This search for 'authenticity' included a rejectionof artifice - including the artifice of special effects and new technologies.

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However this brief period was challenged when Dylan began using ampli-fication - often to a hostile reception.8 At the same time, the Beatles retreatedfrom the problems of live gigs to the creative safety of the recording studiowhere they began to construct genuinely sophisticated popular music. Inaddition Dylan is reputed to have been responsible for turning on theBeatles9 after which space exploration became potentially analogous withthe 'trip' through inner space.

The shift from pop to rock in the late 1960s coincided with a significantincrease in drug use among musicians and their audiences. Alongside thisand the associated mood of experimentation came the search for new lyri-cal content, the increasing availability of multi-tracking recording studios,more powerful amplification and the development of the synthesizer. Thisnew phase developed alongside the resurgence of science fiction cinemawith the release of the mysterious if not mystical 2001: A Space Odyssey in1968. We know that science fiction cinema went through a somewhat idio-syncratic period in the 1960s, but Kubricks film signalled the start of animportant new phase. We also know that the audience for the new psyche-delic rock music was very similar to the audience that was absorbed by thenew film - not the least of which was the 'Star Gate1 sequence which sug-gested a psychedelic light show, if not an LSD trip itself.10

The links between science fiction cinema and popular music growstronger from the late 1960s. In both cinema and music there was the con-struction of increasingly complex artefacts, the constant development ofmore sophisticated special effects, an increasing willingness to transcendestablished genre boundaries and the exploration of a range of complexcontemporary issues.

From this point onwards, the links between science fiction and popularmusic no longer depended on speeded-up voices or machine noises depict-ing the arrival of friendly aliens - and neither did it have much to do withthe amusing banality of a novelty record such as the Randells' 'MartianHop'(1963). Instead we find a common concern with key issues, new imag-ery, technological innovation and formal experimentation in both fields.

While it is possible to identify music of importance to this broader defi-nition, where the content is not explicitly about space or science fiction, inthe late 1960s a number of rock musicians made recordings which did referto those subjects. In these recordings and their live shows they often utilizednew instruments and special effects which had been appropriated fromstudio experimentation and the influence of the European avant-garde. InBritain, Pink Floyd led the way, although during their first phase they inter-spersed space-age tunes like Astronomy Domine', Interstellar Overdrive*


and Cirrus Minor' with the idiosyncratic observations of English life by SydBarrett ('Arnold Lane', 'Scarecrow' and 'Bike'). It is interesting to speculateon how the band might have developed had Barrett remained their centralfigure. Since he did not, they pursued instrumentals and soundtracks thatwere clearly space-age - especially the massively selling album Dark Side ofthe Moon (1973).

Alongside Pink Floyd came the tougher blues-based music of bandssuch as Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Although Hendrix was anAmerican, his career was built in Britain with a British band and manager;and while his music drew on his deep understanding of blues, rhythm &blues and jazz, it was always highly innovative. His experimental approachwas reflected in titles like 'EXP', 'Up from the Skies', 'Moon Turn the Tides'and from the first album in 1966 there was the remarkable 'Third Stonefrom the Sun'. The whole of the album Are You Experienced? (1967) reflectedHendrix's mastery of the amplified electric guitar, while Chas Chandler'sproduction showed the influence of the new experimental approach tostudio work.

The 6 minutes and 40 seconds of'Third Stone from the Sun' used reversetape vocals, melodic guitar and the jazzy feel of Mitch Mitchell's drumming.In the middle section, Hendrix improvised guitar and sang of exploring aremote, mysterious planet. Hendrix was already a major British star whenhe returned to his native United States and made a triumphant appearanceat the highpoint of California's 'Summer of Love', the Monterey Festival.There he shared the bill with a range of contemporary acts including HaightAshbury s leading performers, Country Joe & the Fish, Janis Joplin, JeffersonAirplane and the Grateful Dead. Although the latter were releasing albums,it was generally their live gigs that had the greatest impact; their first broadlyadmired album was Live Dead (1969) which opened with the monumentalimprovised guitar instrumental 'Dark Star' Hendrix's 'Third Stone from theSun' was unusual at almost 7 minutes, but at 23 minutes and 19 seconds'Dark Star' occupied the entirety of side one of the double vinyl album. Itwas typical of the inner-space music of a band at the height of the psyche-delic period; although the Grateful Dead released only one other track witha space-age title, 'Mountains of the Moon' on the experimental studio albumAoxomoxoa (1971).

The psychedelic era coincided with the first moon landings; other psy-chedelic- era recordings with relevant themes included the Misunderstood's'Children of the Sun and 'I Can Take You to the Sun', HP Lovecrafts 'TimeMachine', Jefferson Airplanes 'Star Track' and Van Morrison's Astral Weeks(1968). The Byrds, who had begun as a folk-rock band with a penchant for

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Dylan covers, released the album Fifth Dimension in 1966, which includedthe title track, 'Eight Miles High' and 'Mr Spaceman. Later came 'CTA-102',complete with the sounds of a spaceship.

The film 2001: A Space Odyssey was a huge success with the new youth-ful rock audience, and the soundtrack album was regularly found in hippieflats and bedsits. It set a precedent for key soundtracks of the future with itscombination of ambient tracks, traditional orchestration and aural mon-tage, which would be developed as an integral approach to the soundtrackand sound effects in major films from Star Wars (dir. Lucas, 1977) to TheMatrix (dir. Wachowski, 1999).

In 1967 the Beatles released Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, ofinterest here principally because of its experimental recording techniques.Although sometimes erroneously described as a concept album, its successdid encourage other acts such as their great British rivals the Rolling Stonesto move in a similar musical direction. For some time they had been mov-ing away from their black American influences, and this shift culminatedin the 1967 release of Their Satanic Majesties Request, which included thetracks In Another Land', '2000 Man and '2000 Light Years from Home! The3D sleeve mixed fantasy and science fiction with Jagger in a Wizard s hat andcloak and the others dressed exotically in front of a landscape of Eastern-style buildings, snowy mountains and strange planets.

The album was not a critical success, and the Rolling Stones abandonedfuturism (although not black magic) and returned to a contemporary rockversion of the blues. Captain Beefheart, a similarly inventive blues-basedperformer, produced the song 'Big Eyed Beans from Venus' and an albumTrout Mask Replica (1969), which was in many respects as futuristic as any-thing in popular music at the nadir of the 1960s. The Elektra label releasedThe Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds (1967), which was among the early 'cosmic'concept albums.

Much of the experimental studio work of this time, most notably in thework of the Beatles and Brian Wilson, owed something to the influence ofavant-garde composers. John Cage's interest in chance, derived from ZenBuddhism and the / Ching struck a chord with the Beatles in their medita-tion phase, while they also acknowledged the significance of Stockhausen'swork.11 Stockhausen is particularly interesting for this chapter because hecombined a modernist approach to the construction of his music with anexplicit interest in mysticism, space travel, extra terrestrials and futurism.

A great deal of late 1960s psychedelic music was optimistic, otherworldlyor metaphysical; but the real world of the 1970s was more complex, reflectedin the science fiction cinema of the period which had a growing focus on


issues such as nuclear holocaust, ecology, overpopulation and urban unrest.In 1970, members of Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and CrosbyStills & Nash collaborated on the space-age concept album Blows Againstthe Empire. It combined the Californian radical attitude of those years witha futuristic space trip from the 'deck of a starship' escaping a threatenedplanet.

This kind of music and such films as The Omega Man (dir. Sagal, 1971)or Soylent Green (dir. Fleischer, 1973) offered entertainment with a message;and audiences became increasingly familiar with popular song addressingpolitical protest, biographical or topical narratives, dance routines, fantasy,teenage angst and other themes including science fiction. However, this isnot always issue-based. For example, we can hear Busted (2003) singingabout cYear 3000' in the top ten or the Flaming Lips (2002) taking theirmainstream AOR sound into the top-twenty album chart with YoshimiBattles the Pink Robots. Yet in neither case are we offered insights into thisor any other world by such performances; they are merely playful, enter-taining artefacts which use the themes of the space-age to attract an audi-ence which readily identifies with such themes. In addition, neither breaksnew ground in any futuristic sonic sense, unlike the more challenging bodyof work produced by David Bowie, Hawkwind, Brian Eno, Kraftwerk,George Clinton, Sun Ra and others since the late 1960s.

Hawkwind began life in the late 1960s heartland of British psychedelia,Notting Hill Gate. But while many hippie acts sought explicitly to get 'backto the garden', Hawkwind looked to the future, often working collabora-tively with science fiction writer Michael Moorcock. Their great popularsuccess of Silver Machine, with its swirling sounds of space travel and typi-cally hypnotic pulse, reached the British top three in 1972. However, theirreal sustained success has been with live performances and albums, includ-ing In Search of Space (1971), Space Ritual Alive (top ten in 1973) and SpaceBandits (1990). Larkin notes how the latter s success 'reflected the newyoung interest... thanks primarily to the growth of the rave culture'.12

From their early days, Hawkwind s saxophonist Nik Turner wore silverclothes and face paint, adding futuristic glitter to a hippie band. Despite theearly attempts of the Spotnicks and the many exotic costumes displayedduring the late 1960s, few acts or designers had identified much potentialin a space-age image. But in 1969 David Bowie recorded Space Oddity andreached the British top ten. In 1971 his album Hunky Dory included 'Life onMars', and then in the following year he enjoyed a second top-ten hit with'Starman, a track from his album The Rise and Fall ofZiggy Stardust and

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the Spiders from Mars. With the latter, Bowie had a project that combinednarrative fiction, songs, otherworldly costumes and an overall space-ageimage. Significantly, however, his songs were not limited to trite science fic-tion themes but explored a range of social and psychological (inner space)topics and, in the context of broader theories of science fiction, exploitedan androgynous image, anticipating contemporary issues of transgressivegender and cyborgs. In Bowies live performances, the demise of ZiggyStardust was an apocalyptic moment more in tune with the dystopianimages of early 1970s science fiction cinema than the mind/space expand-ing of psychedelic rock or 2001. His next album, Aladdin Sane (1973), wassimilarly dystopian and allows us to note that the diverse themes commonto other forms of science fiction were now to be found in popular music. Asa consequence, the 'retirement* of Ziggy Stardust in 1974 did not mean theend of Bowie as a key figure in science fiction and popular music.

His subsequent album, Diamond Dogs (1974), was inspired by GeorgeOrwell's 1984, and Bowie toured North America with a spectacular stageshow version. Here, Bowie combined sophisticated lyrics addressing abroad range of themes, an understanding of musical and technologicalpossibilities and a series of images and presentational ideas that were morethan merely theatrical. Bowie shifted innovative popular music towardslavish entertainment without sacrificing the concern with broader issues,which developed during his own apprenticeship in the late 1960s. He had avoracious appetite for different genres and styles of popular music whichhe reworked and re-presented continuously. He also starred in NicholasRoegs science fiction film The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976).

Bowies androgynous, space-age images of the early 1970s were mirroredby the initial impact of Roxy Music. When Brian Eno left the band, hispost-Roxy Music work included production on albums by Bowie and othermajor acts, and he also 'invented' ambient music, producing atmosphericsoundscapes, including Apollo (1983),

During the 1970s other British acts such as Yes recorded songs withscience fiction titles. They also employed graphic designer Roger Deanto create a consistent fantasy/sci fi landscape style on their album covers.Subsequently, their keyboard player Rick Wakeman produced a series ofconcept albums drawing upon literature and history. In 1974 his albumJourney to the Centre of the Earth reached number one, and others whichfollowed included No Earthly Connection (1976), 1984 (1981) and Beyondthe Planets (1984). Similarly, in 1978 New York musician Jeff Wayne pro-duced his version of War of the Worlds with an all-star cast of narrators and


musicians. This was remixed and reissued in 2005 to exploit the release ofthe Stephen Spielberg/Tom Cruise remake of the film version of War ofthe Worlds.

While these major productions identified a logical link between 'pro-gressive' rock and science fiction, what emerged was less complete and lesschallenging than Bowies work. Similarly, in the mainstream pop world theCarpenters enjoyed a top-ten hit in Britain (1977) with 'Calling Occupantsof Interplanetary Craft', and Chris de Burgh would release his Christmashit A Spaceman Came Travelling* in the following decade.

However, during the 1970s there were three other aspects of popularmusic that were more broadly significant to our topic than these odd titlesor space-age-themed albums. The first was the development of keyboardsas an alternative to guitar-dominated popular music, the second was thedevelopments in the broad sphere of Afro-American music (including jazzfunk, disco and soul) and the third was punk. There is apparently littleexplicit to say about punk in terms of space-age pop other than to mentionAnother Girl, Another Planet' by The Only Ones. However, punk links tocertain science fiction themes in three significant ways: in its comic bookaesthetics and 'heroes', in its cross-dressing and contribution to the subse-quent idea of cyberpunk, and in its dystopian sense of inner-city politics.Punk really was a form of escape from New York to London.

In addition to Bowie, Eno and Wakeman, many of the most importantkeyboard-dominated recordings of the 1970s emanated from Europe; andthe most influential synthesizer-based band was Kraftwerk, who simultane-ously presented themselves as cyborgs with titles like "The Man-Machine'.13

Kraftwerk used synthesizers and drum machines and drew extensively onthe influence of fellow countryman Karlheinz Stockhausen. They were theantithesis of the vernacular roots and 'back to the garden' approaches ofsome rock musicians; and they were equally the antithesis of the sexual andsonic assaults of the new rock metal. Like punks, they addressed them-selves to the experiences of modern industrialized urban life so that theirtracks were as often about the experiences of mechanized travel in thepresent as about a speculative future. Bracewell delightfully described theirmusic as inspired by 'archaic visions of the future'.14 Kraftwerk had a hugeimpact on the techno and dance movements of subsequent decades and onthe keyboard-dominated new romantic acts of the early 1980s, even thoughthe image was dramatically different. Those later bands showed little inter-est in space and science fiction topics, although Duran Duran took theirname from the sci-fi film Barbarella (Vadim, 1968).

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Kraftwerk also influenced Afrika Bambaataa. The New York hip-hop DJhad a major impact in the 1980s, especially with Planet Rock (1982), whichwas derived from the German band's Trans Europe Express (1977). As Larkin(1997) records Afrika Bambaataa was a key contributor to the 'electro rapmovement which dominated the 1980s' (24). In later years he recordedwith George Clinton, who was the key figure in the successful funk/soulgroups Parliament and Funkadelic. He subsequently released the albumComputer Games, and many of his early successes provided samples forhits of the 1990s.

Funkadelic had sought to combine elements of black funk and psyche-delia at the same time that Miles Davis was beginning to work with electrickeyboards and bass guitar. In his autobiography, Davis identifies the albumIn a Silent Way at the start of 1969 as the beginning of 'a great creativeperiod for me'.15 As a jazz musician, Davis broke with the conventions ofthe great acoustic instruments of jazz, as he incorporated synthesizers,electric bass and ideas from soul-influenced rock musicians such as JimiHendrix and Sly Stone - although Davis did not record titles with space/science fiction references. One of his important sidemen, Herbie Hancock,developed the jazz-funk approach in the 1970s, utilized the new technolo-gies (including the Vocoder) and did record albums with science fictiontitles, including Thrust (1974) and Future Shock, the latter including his hitsingle 'Rockif, which reached the British top ten in 1983.

Hancock, Clinton, Sly Stone and others were at the more experimentaledge of the fast-growing disco scene while Bowie produced his dancealbums; Kraftwerk were highly influential on the development of technoand associated dance genres. This was an important antidote to the ten-dency in psychedelia and prog rock for audiences to abandon dancing toinventive music, preferring to fulfil Cohris predictions about polite seatedaudiences. The punks also rejected aesthetic contemplation in favour ofspitting, pogo dancing and the embryonic version of the mosh pit.

While many black musicians were responding to the new technologiesacross a range of styles, at the far edge stylistically was the jazz bandleaderand composer who is most obviously the space-age musician: Sun Ra.However, despite a full-length biography16 and many album releases overfive decades, it is difficult to argue that Sun Ra is clearly a popular musician.He began as a big-band arranger in the 1940s but took his name fromEgyptian mythology and claimed to be using electric piano in the early1950s. McRae records how his early 1960s work with his band the Arkestraproduced very interesting experimental jazz, but he adds, 'His obsession


with intergalactic travel deterred the sceptics. He made pronouncementsabout space travel, wrote rather naive poetry about the universe . . . Theband dressed in School play' space uniforms and titles were adapted fromscience fiction language'.17 The album titles alone confirm this.

As early as 1956 Sun Ra released We Travel the Spaceways and amongthe titles which followed over the years were Sun Ra Visits Planet Earth(1966), 'Rocket Number Nine takes off for Planet Venus', 'Secrets of theSun', 'Space Probe', 'Outer Spaceways Incorporated', 'A Quiet Place in theUniverse' and 'Beyond the Purple Star Zone'. There was also a film calledSpace is the Place (dir. Coney, 1974) and an interesting if idiosyncraticchapter by Hollings entitled 'The Solar Myth Approach - The Live SpaceRitual' about the music of Sun Ra, Stockhausen, P-Funk and Hawkwind. Init Hollings observed how, by the early 1960s, both Sun Ra and Stockhausenwere 'using electronics to connect their audiences with the future', and headded that Sun Ra's multimedia performances were 'intended to add a cos-mic dimension to humanity but also present the cosmos on a human scale'.18

The chapter was in a collection published by The Wire magazine, a Londonpublication which describes itself providing, 'A focal point for a wide varietyof global musics and sonic networks, covering genres such as avant rock,free jazz, modern composition, electronica, ethnic music and sounds fromthe outer limits'.

In many respects this range of music represents the creative possibilitiesof science fiction and popular music, including the other key developmentof the late 1960s and early 1970s: the development of musical constructionfrom an illusory activity into an explicitly creative one. This was initiallymost apparent in the recordings of King Tubby, Lee 'Scratch' Perry andother Jamaican dub producers and is now accepted as a key element ofcontemporary popular music.

What is apparent from this historical account is that in the early 1970spopular music underwent a key shift for a variety of reasons. Some weretechnological and some were stylistic; there were new audiences to reach,new images to explore and these were all responding to the issues and con-cerns of a modern technological postmodern world. Although many of theindividual artists considered here - for example, Bowie, Kraftwerk, or MilesDavis - have received full critical attention, most writing about popularmusic still tends to limit itself to discrete genres, decades, sub-culturalgroups, nationalities, races or instrumentation.

However, this chapter has sought to posit a reading of popular musicaround a version of contemporary consciousness. What I have offered hasplaced specific emphasis on titles and themes and on the important changes

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in technology that have made the new music possible. There is much moreto say about how this music responded to its Zeitgeist just as the best sci-ence fiction cinema has done and about image and the new (postmodern)authenticity in artifice.19

There is also more to be said about how popular music since around 1980has embraced this important shift, so that audiences now take for grantedthe themes and sounds of science fiction in popular music. This has beenmanifested in many recordings by artists as diverse as Laurie Anderson,Catatonia, the Beastie Boys, Tasmin Archer, Gary Numan, Metallica, AlienSex Fiend, the Prodigy, Radiohead, Lords of Acid, Portishead, Leftfield,Public Enemy and Gwar - whose live performances are, in some cruderespects, rocks answer to Sun Ra. I have given little consideration here torelevant music emerging from Japan and Asia, not the least of which areYellow Magic Orchestra and also acts such as Pizzicato 5, Kahimi Karie,Capsule and Polysics.

I have also said little about how technology and electricity have contrib-uted to other significant developments relevant to this chapter. For exam-ple, science fiction has a place in the MTV generations obsession withthe pop video and the following generations1 embrace of virtual music, theiPod, ringtones and other new ways of accessing their favourite sounds.Such modes of access are a long way from 'Telstar' on the jukebox or a1950s teenage fans Dansette record player. There are many other examplesof such changes, and it may be that a future project can produce a thoroughanalysis of how such music has developed in recent years.

My original intention in approaching this chapter was to produce achronological record of all references to science fiction and the space age inpopular music through themes, lyrics and sonic conventions. The work hasbecome more complex; but I have tried to retain the spirit of the originalproject because it encourages an examination of popular music whichresists being limited to genres - still one of the more popular critical/ana-lytical approaches. For example, one of the more interesting books relevantto the emerging topic of this chapter is Modulations: A History of ElectronicMusic edited by Shapiro, which seeks to offer 'some of the history behindthe evolution of this music from its early pioneers through todays bed-room musicians' (foreword).20 It is an enthralling book, but this history isstill recounted through discrete chapters on post-punk, house, hip-hop,techno, jungle and other genres whereas this chapter has attempted to moveacross and beyond genre boundaries in popular music.

Since 1970, the variety of ways of performing, producing, recording andconsuming popular music has expanded beyond expectation. Much popular


music is now controlled by huge multinational corporations while it issimultaneously produced and broadcast virtually in individual flats andbedrooms. The major companies are generally felt to have a tight hold onmusic, yet we can also argue that it has now reached that post-industrial,postmodern phase where it is possible for local musicians to produceand control the production of their music however they might wish it.Furthermore, we know that the digital revolution has created millions oflocalized ways of accessing music and information about music. The par-ticular kinds of acquisition popular in the second industrial phase - recordownership, large hi-fi systems, books, etc. - are being supplanted by the vir-tual creativity of the iPod and the fansite which has replaced the fanzine.

We also know that the audience for popular music is now ubiquitousand almost limitless in terms of age, nationality and gender. We encounterit on television adverts, in blockbuster films, in the shopping mall, onmobile ringtones, at weddings and at funerals. Our lives are expressed andmeasured through it and always via technology. In this sense, all pop is nowspace-age, just as all cinema can be thought of as science fiction. But in thiscurrent phase, the work that is particularly interesting is that which func-tions as specific science fiction cinema does, exploring and expressing ourinterests, fears and anxieties through displacement, analogy and metaphor.

In the cinema, the science fiction genre is no longer sufficient to containmany of the most recent films which exploit special effects and new tech-nologies to produce mythological fables for our times. In popular music(including soundtracks) there has never been a *sci fiJ genre, and there is noneed for one now. In 1996 Babylon Zoos number-one hit record 'Spaceman'used hackneyed speeded-up and electronically manipulated vocals; and itmight be useful to mark that as the end of a process that began 40 yearsearlier with Sam Phillips and Billy Lee Riley. The world no longer needsanother cliched sonic representation of outer space any more than it needsanother spaceship-to-the-moon movie. But just as the contemporary worldis now represented in movies that happily cross genre boundaries whileincorporating the possibilities of the latest special effects, so the most innova-tive popular music embraces new technologies and rejects generic conven-tions in search of relevant modes of contemporary expression. Those of uswho are the happy consumers must be alert and keep listening to the skies.

Notes

1. K. McLeod, 'Space oddities: Aliens, futurism and meaning in popular music' PopularMusic, 22.3, 2003, 337.

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2. M. Bracewell, The Nineties: When Surface was Depth. London: Flamingo, 2003, p. 263.3. NikCohn,AWOPBOPALOOBOPALOPBAMBOOM. London: Weidenfeld& Nicholson,

1969, p. 264.4. Ibid., p. 265.5. Jody Rosen, White Christmas: The Story of a Song. London: Fourth Estate, 2002, p. 87.6. M. Cunningham, Good Vibrations: A History of Record Production. Chessington,

UK: Castle Communications, 1996, pp. 15-21.7. The other, also an instrumental, was Acker Bilks Stranger on the Shore.8. See, for example, D. Hadju, Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of Bob Dylan,

Joan Baez, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina. London: Bloomsbury, 2001.9. They had certainly used amphetamines in Hamburg to sustain them through long

performances; but whereas amphetamines are about the expansion of time, these 'new'drugs (marijuana and LSD) were consciousness (space and time) expanding.

10. M. C. Miller, '2001, a Cold Descent', Sight & Sound, 4.1,1994, 18-25.11. See, for example, I. MacDonald, Revolution in the Head. London: Pimlico, 1994,

pp. 178, 230-4.12. C. Larkin, The Virgin Encyclopedia of Popular Music. London: Virgin, 1997, p. 584.13. See, for example, P. Bussy, Kraftwerk: Man, Machine & Music, 3rd edn. London: SAF

Publishing, 2005.14. Bracewell (2003), p. 289.15. M. Davis, The Autobiography. Basingstoke: Picador, 1990, p. 301.16. J. Szwed, Space is the Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra. London: Mojo Books,

2000.17. B. McRae, The Jazz Handbook. Harlow, UK: Longman, 1987, p. 215.18. K. Rollings, 'The solar myth approach: The live space ritual - Sun Ra, Stockhausen,

P-Funk, Hawkwind', in R. Young (ed.), Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music.London: Continuum/Wire, 2002, p. 101.

19. See, for example, M. Butler (2003), 'Taking it seriously: Intertextuality and authen-ticity in two covers by the pet shop boys', Popular Music, 22.1, 1-19.

20. Shapiro, P. (ed.), Modulations: A History of Electronic Music: Throbbing Words onSound. New York: Caipirinha Productions, 2000.

14The Film Musical

Showcasing Musical Performance

Corey K. Creekmur

As the only major film genre that required the arrival of sound cinema, themusical is perhaps also the only genre without clear cinematic (rather thantheatrical) precursors in the silent era. It's no surprise, then, that Hollywoodstudios, in order to fully exploit the transition to sound in the late 1920s,immediately began to produce musicals to take full advantage of the newpossibilities offered by synchronized sound. In fact, as Richard Barrios fullychronicles, as soon as the novelty of sound film began to fade, audiencesbegan to tire of the initial flood of musicals until the genre was successfully'revived' in the early 1930s.1 Thereafter the musical became one of cinemasmost consistently popular forms, in Hollywood as well as in many othercountries once they established commercially viable sound systems. Whileoften associated exclusively with American cinema, recent historicalresearch demonstrates that the musical has regularly had an internationalappeal.2 Although early sound films were identified as 'talkies', in mostlocations the desire to hear actors sing in local languages and musical styleswas evidently as strong as the desire to hear them speak. While urbanaudiences were already familiar with professional musical performancesheard on stage, radio and recordings, by the early 1930s the film musicaldidn't simply relocate those aural experiences in the cinema, but had devel-oped distinct techniques for delivering performances of popular music tomass audiences. For at least the following two decades, musicals wouldremain among the most prestigious and profitable releases from the major

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Hollywood studios, often exhibiting a remarkable combination of musicaltalent and cinematic craft. This essay will summarize some of the ways inwhich the carefully arranged sound of the movie musical might be usefullydistinguished from other perceptions of popular song and the cinema.

The film musical may be broadly defined as a narrative form designed toshowcase musical performance, especially singing and dancing, though theprecise coordination of visual and audio techniques and technologies.Unlike the standard film score (often misleadingly identified as the entireSoundtrack'), which issues from outside the narrative space or diegesis,or the realistic use of songs in films (which might be heard, but not per-formed), the musical is constructed around musical 'numbers', the elabo-rately choreographed performances that serve as the raison d'etre of thegenre. At times the ideal form of the genre has been deemed the 'integrated'musical, wherein narrative and number fully reinforce one another, espe-cially through songs that develop rather than delay the unfolding plot.(There are exceptions to these general claims, such as early 'revue' films thatstring together musical numbers without a narrative thread, or films basedin opera or ballet, theatrical modes that feature continuous singing ordancing; however, such examples remain relatively rare and are not alwaysidentified as musicals.) As Rick Altman has most fully emphasized (andI will clarify below), the songs in musicals actually occupy a curious space'between' the non-diegetic score and diegetic songs - provided with sourcessuch as radios and record players, or performers in the nightclubs of filmnoir or gathered around the campfires of Westerns - that lend aural realismto many film genres.3 In short, while music and songs are common back-ground' elements of many (perhaps even most) films, in musicals songsoccupy our central interest and obtain primary value, and so the creatorsof musicals developed especially effective ways to present songs to theiraudiences. In order to remain focused on the specific sound techniquesof film musicals, this brief essay must set aside many of the other majorelements, including dance, overall narrative organization, and culturalfunction, that critics have also treated as crucial for fully understandingand appreciating the genre.

While musicals typically include non-diegetic soundtracks, their emphasison performed 'numbers' privileges the discrete song rather than the moreextended score. At once a formal and commercial unit, the song in a musicalis offered to audiences (and consumers) as part of a whole that might alsobe understood and enjoyed as an element of a larger structure. For instance,in the enormously popular Jeannette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy vehi-cles produced by MGM in the 1930s, we often appreciate the eventual duet


of the singers because we have first heard their solo numbers, which stirour desire to hear their voices blend. But we might also prefer a song froma musical as an isolated object, the 'hit' song that may be extracted from itsoriginal context in order to be performed by other singers and free of itsearlier narrative functions. For example, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammer-stein Us groundbreaking 1927 Broadway musical Show Boat (filmed in1936 and 1951) weaves its many songs into a rich overall musical and nar-rative structure that includes significant reprises of melodic motifs heardearlier in the story; but the show has also yielded a number of individual'hits' that function as standards for later singers, who typically perform'OF Man River' or 'Make Believe' apart from their initial context. In her suc-cessful concerts and recordings in the 1950s, Judy Garland sang the mostpopular songs from her earlier films, without their original role within anarrative necessary to maintain value or meaning for audiences.

Although the numbers in most musicals are carefully sequenced foremotional impact, they also can move about both within and beyond theiroriginal organizing structures, as the common deletion or addition of songsfrom film musicals adapted from stage originals demonstrates. While manymusicals feature exceptional songs throughout, most audiences inevitablyfavour and remember specific songs, so the common experience of return-ing to a musical is often motivated by the anticipation of hearing a favou-rite song again. Musicals, like the songs they feature, are often enjoyedthrough repetition: we look forward to again hearing something that werecall with pleasure. Because songs easily circulate outside of the musicalsin which they first appear, our initial experience of a musical may involvefamiliar rather than wholly new listening. While younger audiences mighthave heard many of the songs in Singin in the Rain for the first time whenthe film was released in 1952, for older audiences, the film offered a cata-logue of old favourites from early movie musicals in a colourful new pack-age. Songs in musicals thus often play upon pleasurable tensions betweenmemory and novelty and their flexible function as either autonomous orparts of larger wholes.

In addition to the emphasis musicals place on listening to discrete songsrather than more extended non-diegetic scores, the type of song featured inHollywood musicals across the decades of the genre's greatest popularityremained relatively stable. By the time the movie musical appeared,American popular music had been effectively codified by Tin Pan Alley,the term used to summarize the commercial songwriting industry that fedBroadway and the record and sheet music companies active in New YorkCity. Dominated by the incredibly prolific composer-lyricist Irving Berlin,


and associated with other major talents including Cole Porter and theteams of George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II,and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (all eventually hired by Hollywoodto compose original songs for film musicals), the standard Tin Pan Alleysong was usually structured by an introductory (and easily removable)verse of variable length followed by a compact thirty-two-bar refrain orchorus (most commonly in an AABA pattern) that was simultaneouslyformulaic and flexible. Clever verbal play and rhyme, supported by melodicrepetition and variation - especially in the eight-bar B section, known asthe release or bridge - presented audiences with familiar musical modelsthat could be quickly learned (encouraging a song to become a hit) whileoffering talented lyricists and composers sufficient room for play. The factthat both Irving Berlins 'Blue Skies,' performed by Al Jolson in The JazzSinger in 1927, and the Beatles' 'Yesterday' from 1965 rely on the sameunderlying structure demonstrates both the continuity and range providedby the model. Informed by the musical styles (often African American inorigin) developed in the commercial varieties of ragtime and jazz, andoften driven by the slang and grammar of vernacular American English(Ira Gershwin's declaration 'I got rhythm' might suffice to summarize alarge body of examples), the popular songs heard in most movie musicalsestablished an idiom that presented itself as distinctively 'American' to earsaround the world. A vogue in the 1930s for European operettas recededby the end of the decade, as the appeal of sopranos like Irene Dunne andJeannette MacDonald with classical training gave way to the distinctlyAmerican voices of stars such as Bing Crosby, Judy Garland and FrankSinatra, who moved effortlessly between radio, records and the movies.The eventual displacement of this long-dominant form of popular song byrock music in the late 1950s (with roots in the blues, another AfricanAmerican musical tradition) would inevitably challenge the sound ofHollywood musicals, even as the revolution in popular music reassertedan American form as the most culturally significant and successful com-mercial music.

The Tin Pan Alley songs central to the Hollywood musical were alsoincreasingly defined by the capabilities of sensitive electrical recordingtechnology that no longer required that singers 'belt' loudly so that theaudience in the back of a large auditorium could hear them. Highly popu-lar crooners' such as Crosby and Sinatra mastered the use of microphonesand relied upon amplification via loudspeakers in order to sing with anintimacy that would never have served vaudeville-trained performers likeAl Jolson and Eddie Cantor. As the film industry's technological capabilities


mirrored advances in the radio and recording industries, the technique ofclose-miking' become a common practice when recording the vocal tracksfor musical films, which became increasingly natural and speech-like,replacing the powerful yet increasingly artificial singing voices of an earlierera.4 Whether their mouths are located close to the camera or a great dis-tance away (such as in the famous overhead shots associated with BusbyBerkeley's surreal choreography), the voices of singers in musicals typicallyremain at the same volume, rather than sonically reproducing the distancewe would perceive in actual space. (In film sequences featuring tap danc-ing, the rhythmic sounds of the dancer s feet are also usually heard at aconsistent level, whatever distance the performer might traverse on screen.Famously, even when Gene Kelly dances in the rain, we can hear the soundsof his tapping shoes.) This common manipulation of the spatial character-istics of sound is obviously unrealistic, but serves the performance. In orderto avoid the often static performance of singers on stage (whose vigorousdancing is now, notoriously, only made possible by pre-recorded vocaltracks), singers in film musicals enjoyed the freedom to move throughspace - even leaping through time in densely edited montage sequences -as long as their stable voices provided a number with continuity andconsistency. Moreover, the panting for breath that would be the reasonablesound of a dancer s physical exertion is also absent from the vocal trackof the musical. The voice in the musical is, in other words, carefully manip-ulated to sound as natural as possible. In this way it resembles the dancingof an artist like Gene Kelly, whose effortless appearance was of course theresult of endless practice and exacting choreography.

As Rick Altman has most fully demonstrated, the most remarkable sonicevent in film musicals regularly occurs whenever a song begins and ends:because, again, musicals feature songs rather than continuous musical per-formance (as in opera), the transitions between narrative and number,or between speech and song (or walking and dancing) provide the heartof the musicals formal play.5 Altman identifies these transitions as 'audiodissolves' in order to emphasize not only the technical manipulation theyinvolve, but their significance to the musical as a cultural form that, inAltman's words 'blurs the borders between the real and the ideaF.6 Althoughcontemporary audiences tend to experience the transition to singing inmusicals as 'sudden, Altman emphasizes that the usual arrival of music andsinging in the musical is subtle and fluid: typically, modulations in diegeticsound (with ordinary speech becoming more rhythmic while realisticsound effects fade away) welcome the arrival of non-diegetic music untileverything - even the image - is now subordinated to the music track!7


For Altman, 'this reversal of the image/sound hierarchy lies at the verycentre of the musical genre'.8 In the highly creative early 1930s musicalsby directors such as Rene Clair, Ernst Lubitsch and Rouben Mamoulian,this technique regularly transforms the mundane sounds of everyday life,particularly the industrial sounds of the modern city, into a polyrhythmicmusical performance, with hammers, trains and factory whistles support-ing the human voice in song. In more common sequences that focus onone or two performers, the incremental transformation of realistic activi-ties such as speech or walking into singing and dancing does not simplybegin a musical performance, but, as Altman argues, offers a differentunderstanding of the world. Fred Astaire, to select the genres key figure,does not 'burst' into song or dance but almost imperceptibly slips fromspeaking to singing (sometimes, as Altman notes, through the intermedi-ary vocal sound of humming): in his solo performance of'No Strings' earlyin Top Hat (1935) the dissolve from talking to singing occurs within asingle sentence, and while Astaire begins to dance he continues his earlieractivity of making himself a drink, with the sounds of this once prosaicactivity (clinking ice, a squirting seltzer bottle) now incorporated as rhyth-mic percussion for the musical number. In other words, the sequence is notsimply one in which Astaire sings and dances: his character has redefinedhis world and the film in which he appears into a musical, in which allevents and formal techniques now serve the primary purpose of illustrat-ing the song that directs the sequence. If the narrative scenes in musicalstend to privilege dialog and action over singing and music, the shift intomusical performance reverses this organization, with music guiding char-acters in the use of their voices and bodies (as well as directors and techni-cians in how to place or move their cameras, and edit their shots together).

The transition (or dissolve) into musical performance is also often antic-ipated in musicals by songs that are performed incompletely or tentatively,especially in scenes that allow us to witness the creative process of rehearsalrather than polished performances. Jane Feuer has insightfully analysedthe way in which many musicals obscure their precise choreography byincluding carefully constructed signs of spontaneity or improvisation thatsuggest even skilled singers or dancers don t get it right' the first time.9 Interms of sound, such moments allow us to hear singers locate their properkey and try out unfinished lyrics, or we may hear musicians struggle tolocate the elusive sound they are seeking as they compose a song. (In manyfilms, again, the audience already knows the hit song the performer is work-ing towards, and so we are engaged to carefully listen for the magic momentwhen the work falls into what we know to be its proper place.) As Feuer


notes, the charming performance of 'Under a Bamboo Tree1 by two sisters(played by Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien) appearing on stage' intheir family parlour near the beginning of Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)includes a number of false starts and missed cues: these minor errors'are in fact carefully planned moments that assure us that we are watchingthe spontaneous work of (unusually talented) amateurs rather than trainedprofessionals. (At the same time, the number, which includes a diegeticpiano, is eventually accompanied by horns that don t appear on screen,relying on the mix of diegetic and non-diegetic music that Altman describesas the typical bridge in the musical between realistic and ideal worlds.) Totake another typical albeit more elaborate example, a sequence in Lady BeGood (1941) depicts the romantic songwriting team played by RobertYoung and Ann Sothern composing the title song (actually by George andIra Gershwin) in fits and starts while adjusting the key to fit his vocal range.Once the song is finished, a montage sequence shows the song beingtranscribed, orchestrated and recorded so that it can be mass marketed,via sheet music, records and radio play: as the sequence continues, versionsof the song in different musical styles (serving different ethnic audiences)send it soaring to the top of the charts. The sequence summarizes theway in which a polished, hit song results from the trial and error of artisticcollaboration we were privy to only minutes earlier. Although most audi-ences only experience musicals as listeners or consumers, the (limited andconstructed) access to the sights and sounds found backstage or in therecording studio promises us a participatory role in musical creativity, withour ears allowed to judge the eventual success of songs we are given to hearin their sonically imperfect origins.

As noted earlier, the musical appeared in national variations as soon asvarious film industries converted to sound. While the Hollywood musical,due to its wide international distribution, tended to serve as a dominantmodel for national variations, the strong desire of filmmakers and audi-ences to provide and consume films featuring 'local' musical forms encour-aged the development of musicals that often appropriated Hollywood'sformal techniques while highlighting 'indigenous' sounds. For instance,the earliest sound films from Argentina highlighted tango singers anddancers, while early Portuguese films were built around the popularity offado songs and singers. At the same time, popular film industries such asthe major one that emerged in Egypt (eventually one of the worlds largestproducers of musicals) often created films that were hybrids of 'local' and'foreign styles and influences. To take a single but in fact typical example,the Hong Kong musical The Wild Wild Rose (1960), starring Grace Chang,


derives its plot from the German classic The Blue Angel (1930) but borrowsits main musical number directly from Bizet's opera Carmen, which themain character performs in Mandarin with French touches. Often filmedin the style of film noiry this Hong Kong film provides a local variation ofwhat it also acknowledges to be a wilfully international genre, displayinga mixture of heterogeneous elements that often characterizes the interna-tional musical. Indeed, international musicals often concentrate culturaltensions between tradition and modernity around the sounds they feature,which might juxtapose traditional singing styles with imported musicalforms or instruments, such as violins or electric guitars. In addition to the'local' or 'national' variations provided by the incorporation of specificmusical traditions and performers, a number of film music traditions out-side of Hollywood have constructed significant alternatives to the Americanmodel. Popular Indian cinema, which conventionally includes elaboratesong sequences in most films, does not tend to identify films as membersof a distinct musical genre, though to outsiders it can seem as if all popularIndian films are musicals: however, songs are considered a desirable ele-ment of films that might also contain drama, comedy and action as well,combined elements that most Western cinemas restrict to separate genres.Perhaps even more significantly, the singing voices in Indian cinema areknown to be provided by unseen 'playback singers' (who are announced incredit sequences). In many cases, the playback singers for films are morefamous or popular than the actors they lend their voices to: the conventionof dubbing singing voices, which Hollywood attempted to obscure when-ever it practiced this technique, is therefore openly acknowledged in India.10

Given the oft-cited fact that India produces more films annually than anyother country, including the United States, the significance of this 'alterna-tive' practice for including the singing voice in cinema is intriguing. Theemerging recognition that the musical has been (and in some cases remains)a central component of many of the world's popular cinemas promises toraise additional questions regarding the influence of- and alternatives to -the Hollywood musical in world cinema.

The decline in the popularity and frequency of the Hollywood musicalsince the 1960s might be explained in various ways, but perhaps no culturalfactor disrupted the genre's continuity as decisively as the shift in popularmusical style through the rise of rock and roll beginning in the late 1950s.While most of the films (beginning in 1956) featuring rock and roll starElvis Presley adhered to familiar conventions and often older musical styles(to the dismay of Elvis fans), by the time that the Beatles were featured inA Hard Days Night (1964) the formal techniques of the traditional musical


were being explicitly challenged, and so the film presents the groups songsthough a disjunctive visual style apparently derived from the experiments ofthe French New Wave - even while the songs themselves still rely on estab-lished sound practices. While earlier musicals often featured sequences ofperformers rehearsing, films featuring rock music began to even moreemphatically acknowledge that commercial music was a product of therecording studio as much as the live performance; and so scenes depictingengineers at mixing boards recording musicians in studios came fully intoview. A renewed and ongoing vogue for musical biopics (treating the lives ofsingers as diverse as Billie Holiday, Buddy Holly, Patsy Cline, Selena, TinaTurner, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash and Edith Piaf) also tends to veer betweenthe concert stage and the recording studio. In some musical biopics, the actorsplaying famous singers imitate the familiar voices of these figures; in othercases, the well-known recordings of the biographical subjects are employed.In either case, audiences are prone to judge the accuracy of what they hearin recent musical biopics by recourse to the recordings made by the originalperformers, rather than the memory or experience of their 'actual' voices.

Indeed, the conventional emphasis on vocal performance in the musicalhas been to some extent displaced by the prevalence of popular songs (oftena mix of familiar hits and new material) played on the soundtracks but notperformed within the narratives of films that are not generally identified asmusicals, such as American Graffiti (1973), which features dozens of songs,but only a few performed on screen. Such song-filled soundtracks havealso been used to structure (and successfully market) musicals that featuredancing but not singing, including Saturday Night Fever (1977), Flashdance(1983) and Dirty Dancing (1987). In consuming such musicals, we watchcharacters dance while remaining fully aware that we are listening to thereproduction (in often already familiar versions) of the singing voice ratherthan the vocal performances expected in earlier musicals. This sort ofretreat from the tradition of vocal performance even in mainstream filmsis even more dramatically reconfigured in works that critically challengethe model of the Hollywood musical.

Although a number of recent films, including Chicago (2002) and Dream-girls (2006), have been successful versions of the earlier model, other workshave more boldly reworked the form of the Hollywood musical, retroac-tively seen as an impossibly optimistic form devoted to guiding its audienceto misleadingly happy endings. Often, such 'postmodern or cleconstructive'musicals have also challenged the sound design of earlier models, unhesitat-ingly 'baring the device' that long protected audiences from the knowledge,


for instance, that many of their favourite 'singing' stars were dubbed withvoices of more skilful performers. The influential British television seriesderived from scripts by Dennis Potter, including Pennies from Heaven(1981) and The Singing Detective (1986) (both later remade as films) relyupon the audible qualities of old recordings (including defective pops andscratches) to create an uncanny effect when rather miserable characters lipsync to them, in stories that harshly contrast the sweet fantasies found inold songs with the grim realities of the characters who cling to the impos-sible dreams offered by popular culture. Such evident vocal mismatches areeven more pronounced when male bodies are provided with female voices.The international influence of this disruptive technique can be seen inother films that also retrieve the form of the Hollywood musical for morecontemporary audiences, including Alain Resnaiss French film On connaitla chanson (1997) and Tsai Ming-Hangs Taiwanese film The Hole (1998),the latter of which draws upon the popular songs of the 1960s Hong Kongmusical star Grace Chang. Moulin Rouge (2001), on the other hand, appro-priates familiar pop songs associated with popular singers such as Madonnaand Elton John and rock groups such as the Police and Nirvana in order torelocate them in an unexpected setting (a highly artificial 1900 Paris) andto alter them through surprising musical arrangements. Woody Alienshomage to the musical, Everyone Says I Love You (1996), allows performerswith fine but unremarkable voices to sing, indirectly revealing both theartifice of Hollywood's dubbing of less talented singers and also its fond-ness for persistently presenting many of its most accomplished singers(such as Judy Garland) as 'amateurs'. Such recent films seem to presumethat earlier audiences watched and listed to Hollywood musicals naively, alargely retrospective understanding that the relentless self-reflexivity inearlier musicals might easily challenge. Its far more likely that contempo-rary audiences have become unfamiliar with the once-familiar conventionsof the Hollywood musical than that earlier audiences actually found thealways obviously artificial genre more realistic than we do. In any case,the postmodern musical generally signals its superiority by foregroundingthe artificiality of the traditional musical even while exhibiting a residualnostalgia for a form that may now only be available for revival through theprotection of ironic distance and disavowal of its emotional power. Yet,despite its relative disregard in recent decades, the film musical apparentlyremains the model - whether deserving of emulation or ridicule - for fullyexploring the possible coordination of popular music, narrative and imagein popular culture.


Notes

1. Richard Barrios, A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film. NewYork: OxfordUniversity Press, 1995.

2. See B. Marshall and R. Silwell (eds), Musicals: Hollywood and Beyond. Exeter:Intellect, 2000; L. Papadimitrious, The Greek Film Musical: A Critical and Cultural History.London: McFarland and Company, 2006; J. Mundy, The British Musical Film. Manchester:Manchester University Press, 2007; C. K. Creekmur and L. Y. Mokdad (eds), The Interna-tional Film Musical. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

3. R. Altman, The American Film Musical. London: British Film Institute, 1989.4. A. Williams, 'The musical film and recorded popular music' in R. Altman (ed.),

Genre: The Musical. London: British Film Institute, 1981, pp. 147-58.5. Altman (1989), pp. 62-74.6. Ibid., p. 63.7. Ibid., p. 71.8. Ibid.9. Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (revised edn). Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1993.10. C. K. Creekmur, 'Popular Hindi cinema and the film song', in L. Badley, R. B. Palmer

and S. J. Schneider (eds), Traditions in World Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2006, pp. 193-202.

15Television Musicals

Unifying the Audience: An Overview of Television Musicals

Sandy Thorburn

Musical theatre has been a central aspect of television broadcasting forover half a century, and during this period, a large number of musicals andoperas have been presented on television networks throughout the world.Of course, a much smaller number of these works was actually written forthe medium, and because of the overwhelming volume of material on thesubject, this chapter will provide an historical overview of the medium fol-lowed by a focused discussion of the significant trends in newly composedtelevision musicals.1 One of the most apparent issues that arises in the dis-cussion of the television musical is 'the conflict between two media withrecognized conventions of their own, one highly stylized [music theatre],the other naturalistic [television]'.2 Staged music theatre tends to presentbroad, stylized characters, necessitated by the distance between performerand audience. There is no such distance on television, given the frequentuse of close-ups, as well as the fact that the picture emanates from a pieceof furniture in ones home, thereby creating a hitherto unknown intimacyin a performing art. In addition, the commercial nature of television inthe contemporary context has led network executives to demand a moreaccessible style of entertainment than opera, despite early successes in tele-vised opera. In 1955, Paddy Chayefsky, described by Jennifer Barnes as the'champion of contemporary realism on television',3 explained that 'lyricalwriting, impressionistic writing, and abstract impressionistic writing areappalling in television whereas they might be gauged exciting in the theatre'.4

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This view seems to be shared by most television writers and producers, andso it throws new light on the inclusion of music theatre in the medium,since by these standards, music theatre would be considered 'impressionis-tic' or 'abstract impressionistic' (notwithstanding the awkward terminol-ogy). On the other hand, in the context of television realism (which mustbe viewed as verisimilitude rather than realism), music theatre has a singu-lar ability to illuminate elements otherwise impossible to show becauseit is accepted as a way of showing subtext and nuance in relationships.Characters can emote in songs, which are treated parenthetically to thenarrative trajectory, and therefore not an impediment to the necessaryintimacy or realism of television. In fact, it can provide much-neededcontext to certain emotional situations. Sexual desire and other repressedfeelings are elucidated more directly through music on television thaneither in film or on stage.

The understanding and treatment of gender issues is broader and moreinclusive in music theatre for television than it was for its artistic forebear,the Hollywood musical of the 1940s and 1950s. Nevertheless, given the factthat television musicals developed out of the Hollywood musical, it isimportant to analyse them both through the same lens. In his seminal work,The American Film Musical, Rick Altman points out the fact that film musi-cals were defined artistically and formally by the heterosexual dyad: boyand girl.5 With this convention and divergences from it viewed through thelens of the 'dream sequence', contemporary television musical conventionscan be better understood. Thus, using these premises, I will trace the his-tory and describe the benefits and risks associated with the development ofthe television musical.

Early Broadcast History

The earliest music theatre on television is not of Broadway-style musicalsbut of light opera, and it was broadcast not from America but from Europe.The first regular television service - 90 minutes, three times per week - wasoperated by Eugen Hadamovsky of the Paul Nipkow Sender in Berlin, inMarch 1935. This early broadcasting system was supported by the Nation -alsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) as a means of dissemi-nating propaganda for the Third Reich. Between 1938 and 1940, it broadcastthree light operas: several showings of a film of Mozart's Der Schauspield-irektor, and two studio broadcasts: Mozart's Bastien und Bastienne withElizabeth Schwarzkopf as Bastienne, and Lortzings Singspiel Die Oper-nprobe in 1939.6 The first operatic broadcast by the British broadcasting

Television Musicals 263

Corporation (BBC) was in November 1936 when excerpts from AlbertCoatess comic opera Mr. Pickwick were aired a week before the stage pre-miere at Covent Garden.7 That year, Stephen Thomas, Dallas Bower andDesmond Davis were hired as directors for opera on television and pro-ceeded to present a total of twenty-nine short works, including Blowsmask, Venus and Adonis, Arnes Thomas and Sally, Pergolesis La servapadrona, de Fallas El retablo de maese Pedro, Puccinis Gianni Schicchi,Leoncavallo's / pagliacciy and Busoni s Arlecchino. The brevity of each ofthese works suggests that producers believed the medium could not sup-port lengthy broadcasts. Opera broadcasts were suspended in 1939 becauseof the onset of World War II; this period of broadcasting seems to have hadlittle effect on the public owing to the small number of television viewers inthe United Kingdom.

In the United States though, broadcasting developed as a business,different from the governmental initiatives of most Western Europeancountries, the United Kingdom, Canada, or Australia. In 1926, The NationalBroadcasting Corporation (NBC) was established and in 1928 began tobroadcast radio, under the leadership of David Sarnoff. In January 1929the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), under the direction of WilliamPaley began offering free programming to affiliates in exchange for an optionon advertising time. By 1931 NBC had erected a Very High Frequency(VHP) television transmitter on the Empire State Building, but commercialbroadcasts did not begin on a regular basis until 1941 on NBC. Televisionwas not a central concern of CBS until the late 1940s. The third commercialnetwork was created by a forced divestment of NBC s Blue network, whichshortly became the American broadcasting Corporation (ABC).8 Thefourth commercial network in the United States, Du Mont, began to broad-cast television programs over the Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band in theearly 1940s.

The radio and television business developed as one in the early yearsof American broadcasting, and although radio featured and promotedsongs from Broadway musicals and films in the 1930s, there were relativelyfew musicals actually written for radio. The Gibson Family was a musicalsituation comedy series that ran on the NBC Red Radio network for asingle season in 1935, with songs written by Arthur Schwartz and HowardDietz. That same year, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart wrote a single epi-sode musical called Let s Have Fun. The radio program Lux Radio Theateradapted hit films for broadcast, usually with some of the original stars.9 TlieMaxwell House Showboat series (1932-1937) presented a revue with CharlesWinninger as a character named Captain Henry, clearly modelled on his


portrayal of Captain Andy in Showboat. Later, from 1948 to 1954, TheRailroad Hour presented singer Gordon MacRae in a weekly series ofmusicals.10

Clearly, Broadway musicals had found a foothold in the Americanpsyche both in their stage versions, in film, and to some extent on radio, soit was natural to try to bring this synaesthetic art form to the synaestheticmedium of television. The first such broadcast of a musical comedy was on25 July 1939. Topsy and Eva Television Edition was a 1 -hour program broad-cast by NBC s W2XBS station in New York City. This program, written byCatherine Chisholm Gushing was loosely based on Harriet Beecher StowesUncle Toms Cabin, with music and lyrics by Rosetta and Vivian Duncan.It had been a popular vaudeville play and an unsuccessful silent movie in1927, which had been called 'the most extreme and racist of the silent filmspreserved by the API' according to Phillip Zito, editor of the American FilmInstitute Catalogue.11 The performers included the Duncan Sisters, a blackgospel singing group called the Southernaires,12 the Chansonettes, BillyKent, Florence Auer, Winfield Hoeney and Edwin Vail. Viewed as some-thing of an embarrassment to American history owing to its overtly racistdepiction of Topsy - a white woman playing a black child in blackface -there is surprisingly little material describing this work. Possibly becausethe program was so racist, history has chosen to forget this broadcastand concentrate either on the first American broadcast of the first act ofLeoncavallo's / pagliacci, on NBC, 10 March 1940, which was a simulcastfrom the Metropolitan opera with WJZ radio, or the first full-length musi-cal comedy written especially for American television. This program,The Boys from Boise, was broadcast 28 September 1944 on WABD-TV inNew York. The opera broadcast was overtly commercial, with appeals forcontributions to the Metropolitan Opera Fund before, during and after thebroadcast. The Boys from Boise, directed by Ray Nelson with music by SamMedoff,13 played on Western themes made popular by the Broadway pro-duction of Oklahoma!, which had opened on Broadway on 31 March 1943.It concerned a troupe of showgirls stranded on an Idaho ranch.

The First Musical Comedy Series

None of these early experiments led to further successes, and even NBC seffort to abbreviate and broadcast well-known musicals met with littlesuccess. Musical Comedy Time was an attempt to create interest in a broad-cast musical medium; on alternating Monday evenings, from 2 October 1950until 19 March 1951, a series of hour-long versions of famous musicals


were presented to little critical or popular acclaim.14 It must have been frus-trating for the producers of these works that failed to attract a following,since their similar efforts for radio had been very popular. Nevertheless,variety programming, which had proved successful in radio, was attemptedwith greater success in television. The Colgate Comedy Hour was highlysuccessful and during the programs declining years, there were severalnotable attempts to insert musical theatre, with more success than the ear-lier Musical Comedy Time. For five and a half seasons, this program ranconcurrently with CBSs Toast of the Town, hosted by Ed Sullivan. Varioushosts15 allowed the program to have a variable format, including fourmusicals that were adapted from stage shows to better fit the medium. Thefirst of the four musicals was an hour-long version of Anything Goes on28 February 1954, produced by Jule Styne. P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Boltonsoriginal book was re-written for television by Herbert Baker. The musicand lyrics were by Cole Porter but were not entirely from the original stageproduction.16 The cast featured Ethel Merman (Reno), Frank Sinatra (Billy)and Bert Lahr (Moonface), staged by David Alexander, who had worked onthe musical comedy Time productions. The second such show, Revenge withMusic17 was previously broadcast on NBC radios The Railroad Hour.18 Thisprogram featured Harpo Marx, Anna Maria Alberghetti, Ray Middleton,Ilona Massey, Edward Everett Horton and Jerry Colonna, and was pre-sented on 24 October 1954. The next month, Lets Face It starred VivianBlaine, Jimmy Gleason, Bert Lahr, Gene Nelson with cameos by Jerry Lewisand Dean Martin. This Herbert and Dorothy Fields script was adapted fortelevision by Edmund Hartmann, and it featured music and lyrics by ColePorter, not necessarily from the Broadway show of the same name.19 Thelast musical broadcast in this series was Roberta, broadcast on 10 April1955 starring Gordon MacRae, who had had success with this work on TheRailroad Hour on NBC radio on 9 November 1953.

Sylvester (Pat) Weaver was the executive at NBC behind the first success-ful series that included musical television. He went on to create the televi-sion spectacular based on his success with the early Hallmark TelevisionPlayhouse, whose inaugural production was Gian-Carlo Menotti s hour-longopera Amahl and the Night Visitors on 24 December 1951. This televisionopera was re-broadcast live several times in the next few years, each timeto popular and critical acclaim. The first opera written expressly for tele-vision, it was replayed every year around Christmas on NBC until the orig-inal video recording was lost.20

Although mainly a venue for the broadcast of theatre masterpieces,Hallmark Television Playhouse included several musical segments in the


early years. Later renamed the Hallmark Hall of Fame, the program includedOne Touch of Venus, a live broadcast from the Dallas State Fair on 29 August1955 on the Hallmark Hall of Fame Spectacular series.21 The Yeoman ofthe Guard was the next program included in this series, broadcast onWednesday, 10 April 1957, featuring Celeste Holm, Alfred Drake, Bill Hayesand Barbara Cook. Another first for this series was Cole Porters Kiss Me,Kate, the first pre-recorded broadcast on the Hallmark Hall of Fame on20 November 1958 with Alfred Drake and Patricia Morison.

Categories of Television Musicals

According to Rick Altman, film musicals can be divided into several types:the fairy tale musical, in which the plot is taken or adapted from a children'sfairy tale; the show musical, in which the musical is about a musical, com-plete with the events that occur backstage; the folk musical, which is amusical that deals with real life; and the dream sequence musical, in whichdreams form an important alternate reality to the lives of the characters.22

These categories seem to be an appropriate means of dividing up televisionmusicals as well. Max Liebman Presents was the first series to broadcastmade-for-television musicals. Owing to the risk involved in this venture, anumber of well-known musicals were also included. The first of this seriesof 90-minute television programs was the $300,000 production Satins andSpurs starring Betty Hutton, broadcast live and in colour at the NBC Studioin Brooklyn, New York, on Sunday 12 September 1954. The creative teamconsisted of Max Liebman (producer and sometime director), his assistantBill Hobin, Neil Simon (writer), Charles Sanford (head of music), JamesStarbuck and Rod Alexander (who also danced in many productionswith his wife Bambi Linn), choreographers. Written especially for televi-sion, Satins and Spurs was overtly derivative of Hutton s 1950 movie suc-cess, Annie Get Your Gun, a show musical. In it, Hutton plays rodeo starCindy Smathers, who comes to New York to ride in the Madison SquareGarden Rodeo. When a photojournalist for Life magazine (played by KevinMcCarthy) is assigned to cover her story, he makes a fool of her and simul-taneously falls in love with her. When his photos are seen by a Broadwayproducer, she becomes a star. Ten songs23 by Jay Livingston and Ray Evanswere conducted by Nelson Riddle, who was nominated for an Emmy Awardfor his scoring in the first year these awards included music. Despite theadvertising, this program did not succeed in defining the television musical(the Betty Hutton Web site calls it 'the biggest bomb of Bettys career').Nevertheless, the series continued showing new programs twice a month


from September 1954 until June 1956, but the following programs wereknown Hollywood successes, and they fared much better.

The second episode of this series was a musical that had already hada life in radio and on film. Lady in the Dark raises important issues aboutthe nature of the television musical. Broadcast on 25 September 1954, thisMoss Hart musical with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Ira Gershwinfeatured Ann Sothern as magazine editor Liza Elliott, James Daly as herlove interest, and Carlton Carpenter as a gay photographer. This productionwas notable for the early representation of same-sex desire on television.24

Both the radio broadcast and the film of this musical featured Danny Kayein the role of the gay photographer; and in both earlier productions, heplayed the character satirically, in a campy and flamboyant manner. Thisportrayal was consistent with the understanding of the film musical genre:one that presupposed a heterosexual dyad as the norm, forcing the gaycharacter into a portrayal as a caricature. It is noteworthy then that whenCarlton Carpenter played this same role on television, he played thecharacter realistically without resorting to stereotype. While it is true thatCarpenter was himself gay and Kaye was not, the fact that he was permittedto portray a marginal character in a 'realistic' manner is indicative of theability of television to circumvent the public hatred of homosexuality atthis time, because television was viewed as a more private medium thanfilm.

The Max Liebman Presents series continued with well-known musicalsincluding Best Foot Forward,25 Babes in Toyland, Naughty Marietta^ A Con-necticut Yankee26 The Merry Widow, The Desert Song, and The ChocolateSoldier. Thornton Wilder s play Our Town was broadcast in this series on19 September 1955 with a number of songs by Sammy Cahn and James VanHeusen, and featured Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint.It was well received by critics and the public; 'Love and Marriage' becamethe biggest hit song ever written for a television musical and the first songto receive an Emmy Award. The first notable failure in the Max LiebmanPresents series was the made-for-television musical Heidi (I October 1955),which used music by Robert Schumann. The following two programs, TheGreat Waltz, the musical about the life of Johann Strauss, and DearestEnemy17 were both adapted from existing successes. Episode twenty-twowas something of an accident. Thrown together in the manner of a pas-tiche, Paris in the Springtime used existing songs from other shows whena planned broadcast did not work out. No doubt because of the slapdashnature of the production, it was poorly received when it aired on 21 January1956, but the popularity of classical music adapted to musical theatre was


continued with The Adventures of Marco Polo which used music by Rimsky-Korsakov, orchestrated by Irwin Kostal, with lyrics by Edward Eager. Thiswas the first successful original musical shown on this series.

As early as 1950 CBS entered the television musical business with thenewly composed but overtly derivative The Box Supper (19 October 1950),a half-hour musical based on Oklahoma! featuring retired Broadway starWilliam Gaxton, Marguerite Piazza and David Brooks.

Fairy Tale Musicals and Children's Programs

Once Upon a Tune was a series broadcast on the Du Mont television net-work from March through May 1951. This was an early attempt to interestchildren in television musicals. With original songs by Reginald Deaneand Coleman Dowell, these hour-long parodies based on fairy tales andpopular stage plays featured Phil Hanna, Holly Harris, Bea Arthur, ElaineStritch and Charlotte Rae.28 Inspired perhaps by this attempt to introducechildren's fairy tales and musical theatre on television, CBS broadcast ahalf-hour children's opera called Miss Chicken Little on 27 December 1953.Written by Alexander Wilder, this short piece included Jo Sullivan andCharlotte Rae in its cast.

NBC entered the children's musical business when composer JohnFascinato and puppeteer Burr Tillstroms operetta St. George and the Dragonpremiered on 7 June 1953. This was a very successful live broadcast incolour from Symphony Hall in Boston (although it was only seen in colourin Washington, DC), featuring Fran Allison and the puppets Kukla andOllie, plus Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra.

The initial broadcast of Peter Pan, on NBC s Producers Showcase (7 March1955) was a stunning and media-transformative event.29 Although this wasa 2-hour live broadcast of the musical which had opened to some successat Broadways Winter Garden in 1954,30 it proved much more successful ontelevision than it had been on Broadway. It had multiple re-filmings in sub-sequent years, with similar success. Hoping to duplicate this success, NBCfollowed this spectacular 5 months later with The King and Mrs. Candle, on22 August 1955. With music by Mark (Moose) Charlap, the composer of PeterPan, but a relatively unknown cast,31 this program was not well received.

Cinderella, broadcast on CBS (31 March 1957) was Rodgers andHammersteins only work for television. Featuring a young Julie Andrews,32

this is the only musical written for television that has enjoyed both stageproductions and two television remakes (in 1964 and 1998). Sadly, becausethe original broadcast was not recorded on tape, it could not be rebroadcast,


but broadcasters estimate that its single showing had an audience of over onehundred million. Some of the songs, including In My Own Little Corner','Ten Minutes Ago', and 'Do I Love You' are still performed regularly.33

Broadcast musicals aimed at children were most popular around holi-days; and at least in the first few years, they tended to be of fairly high qual-ity and of a serious nature. The Thirteen Clocks was a fairy-tale musical of adifferent type; broadcast on ABC s Motorola Television Hour on 29 December1953. This highly successful work was written by Fred Sadoff and JohnCrilly, based on a James Thurber story. It concerns Prince Zorn of Zornasattempts to rescue the beautiful princess Saralinda from her evil uncle whohas tried to stop time to keep her in his influence. Music and lyrics were byMark Bucci and James Thurber, and it featured Basil Rathbone, John Raitt,Roberta Peters, Russell Nype and Cedric Harwicke.34 It was the second -after Amahl and the Night Visitors - of only a few live-action Christmas pro-grams that have been consistently well received. The next was A ChristmasCarol, produced as a 1-hour opera for CBS television on 23 December 1954,with words by Maxwell Anderson and music by Bernard Herrmann. BasilRathbone and Fredric March were lauded for their portrayal of Marleyand Scrooge, respectively, in this early version of the Dickens classic; it wasre-run twice, and the songs were made into a record. Perhaps because ofthe success of Menotti s opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors, Christmasbecame the time when the majority of musicals and operas succeeded onAmerican television. Live-action Christmas musicals that stand out includeA Child Is Born, Bernard Herrmanns half-hour opera, produced by GeneralElectricTheater in 1955 and the first version of The Gift of the Magi (1958),with Sally Ann Howes and Gordon MacRae.35

There have been more than fifty Christmas musicals or operas sinceAmahl and the Night Visitors appeared, and after the initial group of seriouslive-action efforts, the vast majority of Christmas musicals have beenanimated. Many of the finest of these were produced by the duo of JulesBass and Arthur Rankin Jr., with stop-time animation, (Animagic) andmusic by Maury Laws.36 Their very first effort, The Story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, is probably the most successful of the Christmas specials.This hour-long animated musical, the longest consecutively aired specialon television, was presented by NBC s General Electric Fantasy Hour on6 December 1964. Inspired by Johnny Marks s eponymous song, it was nar-rated by folksinger Burl Ives. Other animated standouts include A CharlieBrown Christmas (1965), with music by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi; Howthe Grinch Stole Christmas (1966) with music by Albert Hague; Santa Clausis Comin To Town (1970), with music by Fred Coots and the voices of Fred


Astaire, Mickey Rooney and others; The Little Drummer Boy (1968), featuringthe famous Christmas song by Katherine Davis, Henry Onorati and HarrySimeone; and The Night the Animals Talked (1970), with music by Jule Styneand lyrics by Sammy Cahn. Not all Christmas musicals have been of thisquality, however; there have also been a large number of Christmas-themedmusicals whose main attraction was the use of well-known characters(including Mr. Magoo, Snow White, Red Riding Hood, Pinocchio, the Flint-stones, the Smurfs, Winnie the Pooh and a host of others).

There have also been attempts to incorporate other seasonal events intothis category of the fairy-tale musical, including Easter, Valentines Day andHalloween. These efforts have met with varying degrees of success. AlthoughOnce Upon an Eastertime (1954) was an unsuccessful hour-long live-actionmusical with Gwen Verdon,37 director-producer Arthur Rankin and JulesBasss hour-long animated Here Comes Peter Cottontail (1971) and The EasterBunny is Coming to Town (1977) were two successful ventures. Halloweenthemes have been less successful in the area of musicals probably becausewhile fright, the pre-eminent element in that seasons sentiments, isenhanced by scoring, it is difficult to portray in musical theatre. There wereseveral notable exceptions though, including the 1980 production by theHanna-Barbera company, The Flintstones* New Neighbors (26 September1980), an hour-long attempt to capitalize on the earlier success of The Flint-stones'half-hour series (1960-1966). Featuring music by Hoyt Curtin underthe direction of Ted Nichols, this Hanna-Barbera production was reason-ably successful when first aired on NBC, but it has not been replayed manytimes since.

Folk Musicals, Show Musicals, Dream Sequences and Parodies on Television

The first and only folk musical that succeeded in American televisionhistory was the weekly musical comedy series That's Lifey which ran for onecomplete season on Tuesdays from 10 until 11 p.m., from 24 September 1968until 20 May 1969 on ABC. It followed the courtship and early-married lifeof a young couple, Robert Dickson and Gloria Quigley (Robert Morse andE. J. Peaker). Although some of the musical material was original, com-posed by Elliot Lawrence and Martin Charnin, many of the songs wereBroadway or popular standards. There were about six songs in each hour-long episode, with a mixture of existing hits and new numbers. Guest starsincluded George Burns, Ethel Merman, Tony Randall, Phil Silvers, RobertGoulet and Liza Minnelli. The program did not last beyond its first season,nor did it spawn any imitations, despite good notices.


Musicals about performances, or show musicals, were another very com-mon genre of the television musical. This genre includes musicals aboutsports figures, opera singers, music schools and series television musicalsin which the characters are already known to the audience as non-singingcharacters. Baseball has been a subject of some interest in American enter-tainment for years, but the first manifestation in television musicals wasWilliam Schuman's one-act opera, The Mighty Casey (1953), broadcast onNBC, 6 March 1955. The Mighty Casey had a single staged performancein Hartford, Connecticut, but it proved quite popular when it debuted onCBS' Omnibus, despite Variety's report that it Vent wide of the platemusically and lyrically... Principals and chorus were hampered by a scorewhich seemed too tough to sing?8 The next, High Pitch which comparedthe baseball and opera worlds, was an hour-long program broadcast onCBS' Shower of Stars on 12 May 1955, masquerading as 'an original baseballmini-musical' when in fact, most of the songs were either arias drawn fromthe standard operatic repertoire sung by Marguerite Piazza or popularsongs such as 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game', sung by Tony Martin. Theinclusion of I Love Lucy stars Vivian Vance and William Frawley (Fred andEthel) in this production may have been the inspiration for / Love Lucy toproduce 'Lucy Goes to Scotland', a musical episode, less than a year later.

The Gilligans Island episode 'The Producer' (3 October 1966) was a bizarreversion of a show musical. Based on the premise of seven very differentpeople marooned on a deserted tropical island, this episode was builtaround the premise of a Hollywood producer crash-landing on this island.In order to demonstrate the acting abilities of Ginger Grant, the moviestar, and impress him sufficiently to have him take them off the island, thecastaways mount a musical production of Hamlet. With the use of the onlyrecord they have, Bizet's Carmen, they create a hilarious hybrid of Shake-speare and Carmen and impress the producer so much that he takes theiridea and returns to Hollywood. This show-musical convention is useddifferently from the usual show musicals of earlier (and even later) years.The characters of Gilligans Island are in a singularly unrealistic situation,living as they are on a deserted island on what creator Sherwood Schwartzcalled 'a social microcosm'.39

The show-musical became more common in the 1970s and the 1980s,culminating in the landmark 2-hour musical special of The Love Boat in1982. In this episode, Broadway stars perform both the material that madethem famous (for example, Cab Galloway sings 'You're Nobody Till Some-body Loves You' to woo Delia Reese, and Delia Reese sings a public duetwith Isaac, 'You Make Me Feel So Young'), and newly composed material


for the boats musical extravaganza, 'The Love Boat Follies! Thus, the pro-gram combines a parody of other show musicals with an original musical,which is performed toward the end of the episode. The opening scene alsocontains a musical number called 'A Broadway Show' written by Ray Jesseland performed by the regular cast of the program, which convinces thecaptain that they need to mount a theatrical performance on board.

Following the success of this program, other programs began to intro-duce elements from Broadway which, rather than being a parody of theshow as I Love Lucy had been, were bona fide shows incorporating charac-ters. Thus, in subsequent years, the idea of the musical that is integral to theplot developed in several different ways. Fame, for example, was a 1980 filmdirected by Alan Parker that became a 1982 hour-long NBC televisiondrama series (subsequently it was syndicated for a further 4 years until1987) that dealt with the lives of the students and faculty at New York'sHigh School for the Performing Arts. Musical and dance numbers wereincorporated into the show with some success,40 and although most of themusic was not original, it contained elements of the show musical. Despitethe success of Fame, which was not a musical per se, there were only a fewprograms that have tried to combine music and drama (as opposed tocomedy), and none has had any significant success. In the 1990-1991 tele-vision season, Hull High was aired on NBC (September-December 1990)and promptly cancelled. It had a premise similar to Fame, which createdmusical numbers within the context of the program because it concernedperformers in a high school. This 1 -hour drama was not well publicized andnever became successful, and it seems to have been completely forgotten.Cop Rock, which ran from September until December 1990, was cancelledbecause ratings were low and the program was too expensive to mount.Steven Bochco and William Finkelstein, along with a relatively untestedgroup of performers, created a series of hour-long crime dramas set to pre-dominantly newly composed music in various popular styles. This programwas deliberately artificial, presenting singing policemen, lawyers, criminalsand juries, performing popular music in the style of the time - gospel,blues, rap and rock. Audience reaction was extreme in both directions:those who liked it were very complimentary, and those who did not (andthese were the majority) were adamant and vocal in their dislike of thepremise. Ironically, a program whose reality is musical theatre was vocifer-ously ridiculed by viewers, but this style seems to have been embracedwhen it was used as a dream, a parody or part of an elaborate artifice.

Numerous television series have capitalized on this premise throughthe years, including a single musical episode, and because of the special


attributes of a musical episode couched in an otherwise non-musical series,these tend to fall into two types: the parody or the dream sequence. Thereason for these two genres is that the 'reality' (or, more accurately, theverisimilitude) that is considered a sine qua non of television is perceivedto be the non-singing state, and so the dream sequence or parody presentsan alternate reality within the understanding of the television series. Thedream sequence is the simplest plot device available to the writer of tele-vision situation comedy and has been used to great effect on numerousoccasions. The first example of the dream sequence in a musical episode ofa series television program was the episode of / Love Lucy entitled 'LucyGoes to Scotland' broadcast on 20 February 1956. In this episode, the famil-iar characters - Lucy, Ricky, Fred and Ethel Mertz - go to Scotland in Lucy'sdream. This device allowed these well-known characters to assume slightlydifferent characteristics than they had in regular, non-musical episodes.Original songs by Eliot Daniel and Larry Orenstein including 'DragonWaltz', Tm in Love With a Dragons Dinner', 'A McGillicuddy is Here', 'TisNay a Bra Bricht Nicht', 'Two Heads are Nay Better Than One', were includedin this half-hour episode. There are several circumstances that may haveprovided the inspiration to create this special musical episode. The first wasthe series television program as a format had begun to slip in comparisonto repeated airings of specials such as Peter Pan on NBC. The appearanceof Vivian Vance and William Frawley (as Fred and Ethel Mertz) in themusical High Pitch 12 May 1955 may have provided another impetus to thecreators of / Love Lucy, and so the idea of inserting a special episode intoa series was planted in the minds of the series' creators, Madelyn PughDavis and Bob Carroll Jr., Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf. The content wasclearly inspired by the highly successful film of Lerner and Loewe's musicalBrigadoon, which had been released in 1954.41 The parodic elements mim-icking Broadway musicals proved to be successful, and in subsequent years,television series began to introduce episodes with music, most often basedon the idea of the dream sequence which, by that time, had become a stan-dard device in Broadway musicals and Hollywood film musicals.

Another accomplished use of the dream sequence for comic effect wasin Dennis Potter's 1978 BBC television series Pennies from Heaven. Thisseries, which was Potter's acknowledged precursor to his highly influentialBBC mini-series The Singing Detective, was the first time a television seriesused the 'miming' device used to great effect in his later series. Even in thefirst episode of this series, the character Arthur Parker mimes singing a1932 recording of'The Clouds Will Soon Roll By'. As the script indicates:'he appears to sing - and in a woman's voice... and he does it wholly in the


conventions of a musical - as though totally in earnest for a moment,Arthur and [his wife] Joan are in a film musicaF.42 The series though, wasnot a musical, per se, but it used these techniques to great dramatic effectand in a particularly influential manner. Potters best-known mini-series,The Singing Detective (1986) features the most effective use of period musicin a television series dream (or in this case, hallucination) sequence. Themusic in The Singing Detective illuminates the mental state of its prota-gonist, Philip Marlow (played by Michael Gambon), incapacitated by anillness and lying in a semi-conscious state in hospital. The song Tve GotYou Under My Skin introduces us to Marlow, passing his time in hospitalrecreating his own early screenplay, also called The Singing Detective. Thisimagined screenplay incorporates original recordings of popular songsfrom the 1930s and 1940s, but memories are evoked by old songs (Marlow sfather is seen singing in the voice of Dick Haymes, Tt Might as Well beSpring'), and the strangeness of the hospital ward is brought to light bya parodic rendition of 'Dry Bones'.

It has been suggested that the failed television musical series conceivedby Steven Bochco, Cop Rock (1990), may have been inspired by the workof Dennis Potter,43 although Cop Rock differs from The Singing Detectivebecause the songs were newly composed, largely by Randy Newman, pre-venting the music from being used nostalgically. It is particularly interest-ing to compare these two works, since the former is one of the most highlyregarded series in television history, and the latter is one of the most con-troversial, if not the most reviled.44 It was cancelled halfway through its firstseason and has been held up as an example of what not to do ever since.Randy Newman, its principal composer, has continued to compose musicfor various television programs, including Ally McBeal.

The musical episode in the fourth season of Chicago Hope entitled'Brain Salad Surgery' (15 October 1997) was also inspired, according to itsdirector Bill D'Elia, by the BBC mini-series The Singing Detective. Dr. AaronShutt, played by Adam Arkin, collapses with an aneurism and reviewshis life as a musical. The songs, classic recordings45 and performances ofstandards by cast members,46 do not include any newly composed music.They are consistently used to illuminate elements of Dr. Shutt's life thatwould not otherwise have been expressed by the character or by 'realistic'situations.

The recent programs that have used musical elements to great effect ina manner similar to The Singing Detective are Ally McBeal and The DrewCarey Show. Ally McBeal presented a musical episode, inspired by TheSinging Detective, at the end of their third season, airing on 22 May 2000.


This episode, entitled 'Ally McBeal: The Musical, Almost' had an originalscore by Randy Newman, but the songs were treated as standards, drawingattention to the dramatic situation rather than pushing it forward. Theopening sequence includes the full cast singing 'Searchin My Soul' whilescenes from earlier episodes are shown. When the protagonists, Brian andAlly are having dinner with Ally's disgruntled parents, the restaurantemployees and patrons burst into song. Renee, another character, sings atthe bar and all join in. Later, Ally and Brian dance together to 'You Can'tKeep a Good Man Down. In an idiomatic television segue, the scene cuts tothe office, where Fish sings the same song. At a party, the cast, includingguest star and composer Randy Newman, sing to John. The episode endswhen Allys father sings her a song he wrote about her.

The use of familiar musical material has become increasingly effectivein television musicals since television, an intimate medium, demands a cer-tain familiarity not required by film or stage productions. Consequently,parody has become an effective means of incorporating new and familiarmaterial. Animated television series have no 'reality' in the way live-actiontelevision series do. Instead, they have verisimilitude, a set of accepted (butunrealistic) conventions that govern the lives of their characters. Becauseof this lack of what television writers call 'realism', the use of dreams ismore effective as parodic companions to the story line. This state is, in fact,borne out in animated series such as The Flintstones, Looney Tunes, TheSimpsons, Tiny Toons, and South Park, all of which have achieved this clev-erly, using music. The difference, however, is that their reality would notbe disrupted by song the way a character that resembles a human beingwould.

In live-action television series, parody is often combined with dream-state or the show musical to capture a particular mood. The parody of theBroadway (or film) musical genre is more common than the parody of aspecific show, although 'Lucy Goes to Scotland' has a great deal in commonwith Brigadoon, and the episodes of Scrubs or Drew Carey have a sceneclearly modelled on West Side Story s 'Cool'. Hercules: The Legendary Jour-neys has two episodes with music that were modelled on films: the first,'And Fancy Free' is modelled on the 1992 Baz Luhrmann film, Strictly Ball-room, and the second, 'Greece is Burning' is modelled on Jennie Livingston's1990 drag-queen pageant documentary, Paris is Burning.

More recently, several series programs have incorporated completemusical episodes, using music to move the action forward in the mannerof contemporary Broadway musicals. Two notable musical episodes wereaired on the series Xena: Warrior Princess ('The Bitter Suite' broadcast on


Valentines Day, 1998, and 'Lyre, Lyre, Hearts On Fire* broadcast 22 January2000) and one on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which work in a mediumalready suffused with exaggeration. In the case of Xena, the first musicalepisode is a dream sequence, with seven newly composed songs and acontinuous soundtrack, while the second is a show musical, incorporatingpopular songs remixed to fit with the strange atmosphere of the show.Throughout this series, songs had been used periodically, so the musicalwas not a great shock to the viewers. Both programs were scored bycomposer Joe LoDuca. In the sixth year of a seven-season run, Buffy theVampire Slayer series creator Joss Whedon wrote and directed 'Once More,with Feeling1, which premiered on 6 November 2001. Working in a fantasymedium allowed the programs producer Joss Whedon to write an episodein which a magical power forces everyone in the town of Sunnydale to singtheir feelings, revealing more than they want. Although in many ways, thesemusicals are like their television predecessors - references to other musi-cals (the chimney sweepers in the background are performing choreogra-phy from Mary Poppins) - the big difference is that the scores are virtuallycontinuous throughout the program, and the songs contain dramatic plotrevealing lyrics, similar to the style adopted in recent years by such Broad-way composers as Stephen Sondheim. In addition, all the actors in the showperform their own musical material, adding a (dubious) element of realisminto the show. Whether this is an aesthetically pleasing device is not neces-sarily relevant to faithful viewers of the Buffy program. Nevertheless real-ism - a word invoked by television producers in the 1950s to discourageopera and musical theatre broadcasts - is given a different meaning whenapplied to a program that is based on an altered premise of reality. Thereare undeniable elements of 'lyrical writing, impressionistic writing andabstract impressionistic writing'47 in this episode, but because of the natureof the work, realism was also expressed in this work. Lyrics are frequentlyenjambed, drawing attention away from the rhyming couplets of most ofthe songs. There are also regular references to the fact that people are sing-ing, and naturalistic writing within the genre of musical comedy. While it isgenerally accepted that Buffy the Vampire Slayer has been a trendsettingprogram, the acknowledged difficulty in making the episode and the lackof obvious financial payoff has prevented similar projects from becomingcommon occurrences in series television.

Television Musical Audiences

What has become evident is that viewers clearly approach television differ-ently from film and live theatre. For them, it is a more personal means of


communication, allowing for more direct impressions and expressionsthan either live music theatre or film music theatre. It is personal - but notnecessarily private - because it is beamed directly into ones home, withoutbeing filtered through a public space. The reason it is not entirely private, asAnahid Kassabian points out, is that television has 'penetrated the publicsphere through . . . a wide range of complex and intersecting institutionalstrategies and user tactics!48 These institutional strategies include viewing,community Web sites, chat rooms, conventions, spin-offs, and hype toinspire water-cooler conversation. Thus, Kassabian refutes the notion thattelevision is a private sphere activity, while acknowledging that it is experi-enced in communities with a much larger degree of personal anonymitythan those experiencing film or theatre. In short, she describes the experi-ence of television as a group of individuated communities who neither see,nor hear, nor communicate with one another except through televisionprograms.

The existence of these communities and their idiosyncrasies is probablywhy television musical series such as That's Life and Cop Rock did not suc-ceed. The notion of the musical theatre series was too demanding - itrequired commitment even before there was a community establishedaround the program. Since the experience of television is a simultaneous orsecondary activity, meaning that it is frequently something one does whiledoing something else, it succeeds best when the content does not demandones full attention. This helps to explain the great success of musical epi-sodes within otherwise non-musical television series; the musical episode,per se, does not need to establish character, dramatic parameters or verisi-militude, since these have already been established by the series, and theaudience community is developed along these parameters. Consequently,when the musical episode appears, it is an opportunity for one or morecharacters to express the otherwise inexpressible. Song allows uncommu-nicative characters a window from which to express inner feelings andemotional situations to be fully dramatized. The musical episode drawsupon and enhances the experience of an extant community established bythe television series itself.

Television musicals, while clearly modelled to some extent on Hollywoodfilm musicals (as evidenced by the number of Broadway and film musicalsthat have been made into television musicals without any significant dwin-dling in recent years), are nevertheless able to reach a greater level ofintimacy with their audience, making the genre more subtle than their filmcounterparts. Even from the earliest days of television music theatre, forexample, there were benefits to drama presented on television. On the onehand, the gay photographer portrayed by Carlton Carpenter in Lady in the


Dark is much more honest, subtle, and believable than Danny Kayesexaggerated 'campy' portrayal in film (and on radio). Thus, although it isundeniable that television musicals were modelled to some extent onHollywood musicals, the honesty and realism that are unique to certaintelevision musicals are brought into relief when they are juxtaposed to thetraditional conventions of the early Hollywood film musical, which demandthat the primary aim of the drama is the pairing of the heterosexual duofrom beginning to end, as described by Rick Altman.49 Television main-tains, to a certain degree, the concept of the dyad, but given the natureof the audience who experiences a kind of public privacy, this genderedarchetype is widened to include other types of dyads. As a result, we canhave sexual ambiguity expressed without explanation or irony in Ladyin the Dark, Peter Pan, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess,Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and many other instances that were notpossible in the film musicals from the early days of Hollywood musicals.

While this possibility is available for television musicals, there is alsoa greater temptation to use this increased intimacy for parody, given thenature of the audience and the means by which the audience experiencesthe medium. Fantasy segments in both live-action series (Scrubs, The DrewCarey Show, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys) and animated series (TheSimpsons, South Park, Tiny Toons) have successfully parodied film musicals.This parodic tendency though, rather than representing a descent intostereotype, tends to acknowledge the original work as something that isgenerally known - while at the same time insisting that the work thatis parodied need not be known in order to understand the plot. This is theadvantage of a group of known characters who burst into song: they arealready known, and need not express themselves solely through music;instead, the music gives nuance to the characters, providing an additionallevel of understanding, enjoyment or appreciation to the pre-establishedaudience of each television series. The television musical, far from beinga means of distancing ones audience, is in fact a means of unifying theaudience around already-known parameters.

Notes

1. Throughout this chapter, the term 'television musical' will be used to describe televi-sion programs that include music as a central part of the narrative. Opera will only bediscussed when it is relevant to the topic at hand. It should be pointed out that the termsVideo' and 'television' were used interchangeably in the early years of television, and that


opera and musical theatre were also difficult to distinguish from one another. Throughoutthis paper, I will use the term 'television where hoth terms were used, and I will consistentlyattempt to distinguish hetween opera and musical theatre. When I want to apply a term toincorporate both opera and musical theatre, I will use the term 'music theatre'.

2. Lionel Salter, 'Television', Grove Dictionary of Opera, Vol. 4. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1992, p. 680.

3. Jennifer Barnes, Television Opera: The Fall of Operas Commissioned for Television.Woodhridge: The Boydell Press, 2003, p. 7.

4. Original citation in Paddy Chayefsky, Television Plays. New York: Simon andSchuster, 1955, p. 45.

5. Rick Altman, The American Film Musical. Bloomington and Indianapolis: IndianaUniversity Press, 1987, p. 32.

6. Information taken from Fernsehen im Dritten Reich. Available at http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/thefife/home/html/fernsehgeschichte/main_01 .htm (accessed in February2004); and B. Winfried, 'Zur Geschichte des Fernsehens in Deutschland', Fernsehen inDeutschland: Gesellschaftspolitische Aufgaben und Wirkungen eines Mediums, Mainz: v.Hase u. Kohler 1967, pp. 19-20. Die Opernprobe (The Opera Rehearsal) was the last Singspielby German Romantic composer Albert Lortzing (1801-1851).

7. This work was well received by Havergal Brian among others, although its theatricalcareer was unsuccessful. See S. Robinson, 'Albert coates', Recorded Sound, 57-58 (1975),386-405.

8. NBC had been using its two radio broadcasting networks ('Red' and 'Blue') to createartificial competition, and the Federal Communications Commission chairman James Flyproduced the Report on Chain Broadcasting which ordered that 'no license shall be issuedto a standard broadcast station affiliated with a network which maintains more than onenetwork'. This forced the selling of one or the other network. By 12 October 1943, the BlueNetwork Company became the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) when it was soldto Edward Noble, owner of Lifesaver candy, for $8,000,000.

9. Some of the features include The Vagabond King (17 August 1936), Mad About Music(18 April 1938), A Star is Born (13 September 1939), Alexanders Ragtime Band (3 June1940), Till We Meet Again (10 June 1940), Naughty Marietta (12 June 1944), Lady in the Dark(29 January 1945), Meet Me in St. Louis (12 December 1946), Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer(2 June 1947), and Charles Winninger in Showboat.

10. The Railroad Hour began as an ABC broadcast from 4 October 1948 until26 September 1949 (starting as a forty-five-minute format, and becoming a thirty-minutesegment in April 1948). The series moved to NBC with the same host in October 1949and continued until June 1954. Marvin Miller was the host and Gordon MacRae was thefeatured singer on each broadcast assisted by different leading ladies, including DorothyKirsten, Dorothy Warenskjold, Lucille Norman, Rise Stevens, Ginny Simms and MargaretWhiting, musicals included Oklahoma! and Kismet, and operettas including Robin Hood,Mile. Modiste.

11. Cited in John Sullivan, Topsy and Eva Play Vaudeville'.

http://www.unikoeln.de/phil-fak/thefife/home/html/fernsehgeschichte/main_01.htm

http://www.unikoeln.de/phil-fak/thefife/home/html/fernsehgeschichte/main_01.htm


12. Members included Homer Smith, Lowell Peters, Jay Stone Toney, William Edmonsonand Clarence Jones.

13. Shortly after this broadcast, Medoff changed his name to Dick Manning.14. Some of these works included Martha Raye in Anything Goes (2 October 1950),

Dennis King in Babes in Toyland (25 December 1950), Jackie Gleason in No, No Nannette(5 March 1951), and Bert Lahr in Flying High (19 March 1951).

15. Eddie Cantor (1950-1954), Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (1950-1955), Fred Allen(1950), Donald O'Connor (1951-1954), Abbott and Costello (1951-1954), Bob Hope(1952-1953), Jimmy Durante (1953-1954), Gordon MacRae (1954-1955), and Robert Paige(1955).

16. The music included and overture and fourteen musical numbers (several of whichwere reprises) including 'Anything Goes', 'You Do Something to Me, from Fifty Million French-men 'I Get a Kick Out of You', 'You're the Top', 'Just One of Those Things' from Jubilee,'Blow, Gabriel, Blow', 'All Through the Night', and 'Friendship, taken from Dubarry Was a Lady.

17. Revenge with Music originally opening on Broadway in 1934, it featured songs byThe Gibson Family creators Dietz and Schwartz like 'You and the Night and the Music', and'If There is Someone Lovelier than You'.

18. 23 October 1950, with Nadine Connor and Gordon MacRae.19. For example, 'You Irritate Me So', 'Everything I Love' and 'Ace in the Hole' were in the

original musical, while other songs such as 'It's De-lovely' from Red, Hot and Blue, and TveGot You Under My Skin' (from Born to Dance) padded out the material.

20. The sound recording remains and is available as an RCA-CD, 6485.21. An early version of this musical (written by Ogden Nash and S. J. Perelman, with

music by Kurt Weill) was broadcast on NBC radios The Railroad Hour, 16 April 1950. In thistelevision production, the cast consisted of Janet Blair (Venus), Russell Nype (RodneyHatch), Iggie Wellington (Stanley), Mart Marshall (Taxi Black), George Gaines (WhitelawSavory) and Laurel Shelby (as Molly Grant), directed by George Schaefer.

22. Altman, pp. 28-61.23. The ten songs were: 'Whoop-diddy-ay', 'Wildcat Smathers', 'Satins and Spurs',

'The Little Rock Roll', 'I've had Enough', 'Nobody Cares', 'You're so Right for Me, 'Sexy Sadie,That's My Name', 'Chihuahua Choo Choo' and 'Back Home'.

24. There is a recording of this broadcast on AEI, (AEI-CD 041).25. Best Foot Forward had been a 1941 Broadway hit, directed by George Abbott, and

featuring Gene Kelly's choreography. It was made into a film in 1943 by MGM starring

Lucille Ball.26. This program featured Eddie Albert, Janet Blair, Boris Karloff and Gale Sherwood

and contained several of the original songs by Rodgers and Hart ('Thou Swell', 'My HeartStood Still', and 'To Keep My Love Alive'). Max Liebman directed this production, adaptedfor television from the original script by Herbert Fields by William Friedberg and NeilSimon.

27. The soundtrack of this broadcast has been released on album and CD by AEI(10042).

28. The Coleman Dowell Papers are housed in New York University's Fales Library.


29. This production was produced by Fred Coe, directed by Jerome Robbins, with musicby Moose Charlap and Jule Styne, lyrics by Carolyn Leigh, Betty Comden and AdolphGreen. Performers included Mary Martin (Peter Pan), Cyril Ritchard (Mr. Darling, CaptainHook), Margalo Gilmore (Mrs. Darling).

30. The show ran for 152 performances before and after the telecast.31. The cast consisted of Cyril Ritchard, Irene Manning, Joan Greenwood, Richard

Haydn, Theodore Bikel.32. Other performers included Jon Cypher, Edith Adams, Kaye Ballard, Alice Ghostley,

Ilka Chase, Howard Lindsay and Dorothy Stickney.33. This was re-mounted in 1965 by Richard Rodgers featuring Leslie Ann Warren

(Cinderella), Stuart Damon (Prince), Celeste Holm (Fairy Godmother), Ginger Rogers(Queen) and Walter Pidgeon (King). This version has been released on video and is verysuccessful. A subsequent production, produced by ABC, Disney, and Whitney Houston andfeaturing Brandy, Whoopi Goldberg, Jason Alexander, Bernadette Peters and Victor Garber,was less successful.

34. Some of the songs are still regularly performed, including 'Hurry Hurry', T Dreamt'and 'Saralinda'.

35. There were at least two other versions of this story, the first by Debby Boone wasa serviceable musical, while the other, featuring Marie Osmond, was not a musical. Bothappeared in December 1978.

36. Arthur Rankin Jr and Jules Bass produced Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964),and both produced and directed The Little Drummer Boy (1968), Frosty the Snowman(1969), Santa Claus is Comin to Town (1970), The Year Without a Santa Claus (1974),'Twas the Night Before Christmas (1974), Frostys Winter Wonderland (1976), Nestor, the

Long-Eared Christmas Donkey (1977), Jack Frost (1979), Pinocchios Christmas (1980), andThe Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1985).

37. Variety (April 21, 1954) called it ca dismal failure' Cited in Joan Baxter, TelevisionMusicals* 113.

38. Ibid., 97.39. On p. 1 of Inside Gilligans Island: From Creation to Syndication, Schwartz writes:

' "A social microcosm?" asked Mr. Paley incredulously. "But I thought Gilligans Island wasa comedy!" "It's a funny microcosm!" I replied in desperate haste'. See Sherwood Schwartz,Inside Gilligans Island: From Creation to Syndication. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland,1988, p. 1.

40. Janet Jackson appeared for a single season in the program (1984-1985) as Cleo Hewitt.

41. Brigadoon, directed by Vincente Minnelli, with Cyd Charisse, Gene Kelly and VanJohnson was highly successful and likely a known commodity to parody.

42. From Episode 1, p. 10. This quotation and other details surrounding the musicalaspect of this program are discussed in detail in John R. Cooks Dennis Potter: A Life onScreen, p. 164.

43. In several interviews, creator Steven Bochco claims that an attempt to turn his

earlier series Hill Street Blues into a musical was the genesis, but he credits The SingingDetective as well.


44. Web site www.jumptheshark.com repeatedly refers to Cop Rock as 'the worst showever put on television, although Randy Newman was awarded the Emmy in 1991 foroutstanding music on the show's pilot.

45. 'Ain't That a Kick in the Head' by Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, 'You and MeAgainst the World' by Helen Reddy, 'Brand New Me' by Melanie, 'When I'm on My Journey'by The Weavers, All Along the Watchtower' by Jimi Hendrix, 'Walk Like a Man by FrankieValli and the Four Seasons, and 'Coin Out of My Mind' by the Lettermen.

46. 'Luck Be a Lady' Adam Arkin, Hector Elizondo, Mark Harmon and Vondie Curtis-Hall and Til Be There' and 'When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob Bobbin Along' byMandy Patinkin.

47. Cited by Jennifer Barnes in TV Television Opera in 'Television in The New GroveDictionary of Music and Musicians. London: MacMillan, 2000, p. 239.

48. Anahid Kassabian, 'Musicals hit the small screen: attention, listening, and TV musicalepisodes', paper presented at IASPM US (September 2003), p. 1.

49. 'The American film musical seems to suggest that the natural state of the adulthuman being is in the arms of an adult human being of the opposite sex. Pairing off is thenatural impulse of the musical... Image follows image according to the nearly iron-clad lawrequiring each sequence to uphold interest in male-female coupling by including parallelscenes and shared activities'; Altman, 32.

Sound Recordings

Adler, Richard. The Gift of the Magi, United Artists UAS-5013 (LP, 1958).Herrmann, Bernard. A Child is Born, Templeton TLP-2002 (10 inch LP,

1978).Livingston, Jay and Ray Stevens, Satins and Spurs, featuring Betty Hutton,

Capital Records, 1954 (re-released on CD, on DRG Records 19055,digitally re-mastered).

Menotti, Gian Carlo, Amahl and the Night Visitors, RCA Gold Seal CD6485-2-RG, 1990.

Rodgers, Richard. Cinderella (1957 television Cast) Sony SK 60889(BOOOOOJ28K), 1999.

Whedon, Joss. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: 'Once More, With Feeling', Rounder/Pgd, 619058 (B00006J3WH), 2002.

Films

A Christmas Carol, CBS, Movies Unlimited, 101290, 1954 (released 1999)60 minutes.

http://www.jumptheshark.com


Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 'Season Six', Twentieth Century-Fox Home Video,UPC: 024543103783, by Joss Whedon, 2001 (DVD released 2004).

Frosty the Snowman, Sony Wonder, 0307142469, 1999, 1969.Frostys Winter Wonderland, Warner Studios, 6302503809, 1976 (DVD

released 2003).Jack Frost, Delta Music, B00008G7EF, 1979 (DVD released 2003).Life and Adventures of Santa Clans, The, Warner Home Video, 6301760344,

1985 (DVD released 2003).Little Drummer Boy, The, Sony Wonder, B00005M2FE, 1968 (DVD released

2001).Nestor, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey, Warner Studios, 6301760360,

1977 (DVD released 2003).Peter Pan, RCA 1960 (Re-released on DVD by Good Times Video 8,787,

1999).Pinocchios Christmas, Warner Home Video, 1261421,1980 (DVD released

2002).Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Sony Wonder 0307514161, 1964 (DVD

released 2000).Santa Claus is Comin to Town, Sony Music Distribution, 1976682, 1970

(DVD released 2001).Singing Detective, The, BBC Video (DVD), E1699,1986.'Twos the Night Before Christmas, Warner Studios, 6301760387,1974 (DVD

released 2003).Xena: Warrior Princess, 'Season Three', Anchor Bay Entertainment,

B00012FX2C, 2004.Year Without a Santa Claus, The, Warner Studios, B00004VVPA, 1974

(DVD released 2003).

16Rockumentary

Reel to Real: Cinema Verite, Rock Authenticity andthe Rock Documentary

Robert Strachan and Marion Leonard

The 1960s saw the rise of rock as a distinct musical form with a particularset of aesthetic and discursive conventions. Distinct from the rock and rolland pop music forms that had preceded it, rock self-consciously frameditself as serious and culturally relevant with the ability to express the truefeelings of its protagonists. The period also saw the development of a newdocumentary style (through the cinema verite and direct cinema move-ments), which aimed to capture 'real* events as they happened in a suppos-edly unmediated fashion. This chapter examines the convergence of thesetwo emerging cultural forms arguing that that there was a clear discursiveand aesthetic fit between the two and explores how the stylistic and genericconventions of verite fed into subsequent rock documentary (sometimesreferred to as rockumentary). Using examples from the work of variousverite directors and verite influenced films such as Alek Keshishians In BedWith Madonna (1991) to Ondi Timoner s 2004 epic Dig! the chapter tracessome enduring themes of the rock documentary. In particular, it exploresthe construction of narratives of stardom within the music industry anddiscourses surrounding authenticity, art and commerce within rock culture.

The chapter goes on to argue that rock documentaries cannot be sepa-rated from the industrial context in which they are produced. More oftenthan not they examine the creative and industrial contexts of popular

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music production such as the tour or the studio aiming to give a behindthe scenes' look at their subjects. At the same time, these supposedlybehind the scenes documentaries are often part of the promotional pack-age behind a new album or are designed to tie in with a tour and so areaimed at elaborating and reinforcing the star personae rather than seekingto deconstruct it. In other instances the documentary maker has set out toproduce an independent film of a musician and thus the final result isintended as a confirmation of directorial autonomy. In both instances therock documentary is instrumental in constructing and upholding popularcultural narratives that are highly pervasive within what Negus terms themeta-context of popular music that is the everyday knowledge of musicfans and journalists'.1

Rock Authenticity

An obvious correlation between the documentary form and post-1960srock music is that both have had a central preoccupation with issues sur-rounding authenticity. However, despite this apparent similarity, the con-structions of authenticity are distinct in relationship to each form and it isworth unpacking each in order to fully examine how they are connected.As various critics have noted2 the mid-1960s saw the rise of an authenticityparadigm within rock culture based around a romanticism in which autho-rial sincerity became paramount. As Auslander has commented, this is whereVock music is imagined to be truly expressive of the artists' souls andpsyches'.3 In addition "rock was constituted as endogenously generated, self-conscious youth music, programmatically structured by the art-authenticity-commerce binary'.4 With regard to documentary the over-riding concernwith authenticity is slightly different and is configured around a supposedaccuracy in capturing the external realities it seeks to document. As weshall discuss, the idea that the documentary should be primarily observa-tional was specifically foregrounded by verite directors when they framedand discussed their work. This supposed 'transparency' of approach madethe observational documentary that emerged in the 1960s an ideal vehiclefor representing and upholding rock authenticity. For Sarchett the ideathat rock documentary is observational' taps into a deep seated desire forauthenticity or the real within rock culture Tor the typical rockumentarythe transparency of style exploits the audiences wish to return, to repeatand to regain the original event. That is, the rockumentary like most docu-mentary, is an inherently nostalgic genre which posit a retrieval of thepre-textual'.5


The centrality of the pretextual moment is perhaps no surprise giventhe rock documentary s roots within the concert film and its continued usesof live footage at the core of many subsequent documentaries. Jazz and BigBand short performance films had existed since the 1930s and were oftenplayed alongside feature films on cinema bills. One of the earliest and mostinfluential full-length concert films, Jazz on a Summers Day (1959), recordedthe Newport Jazz festival. This film mixed live performances, landscapeshots, talking heads and images from in and around the festival thusattempting to create slice of life tableaux. The film was taken as a blueprintfor many later films and its influence can be seen clearly in verite stylefestival documentaries such as Monterey Pop (1968) Woodstock: 3 Days ofPeace and Music (1970,) and Message to Love: The Isle of White Festival(1996). The concert footage in these films introduced the use of visual edit-ing techniques, which attempted to capture the feel of musical performance.Methods such as repeated rapid zooming of the camera lens from a wideshot to a close-up, split screens and attempts to match visual images to lyri-cal phrases became standard characteristics of concert films for the nextdecade.

The primacy of live performance within the rock documentary also hasa clear function in terms of representing authenticity. In the rock era, per-formance increasingly operated as visual and aural 'proof' of an actsauthenticity along with being a shared cultural moment between performerand audience. This function was particularly pressing as developments instudio technologies led to the ability to create recordings that were difficult(or impossible) to produce live along with the trend toward the manufactureof acts based around image whose music was in reality the work of behindthe scenes producers and session musicians. For example, Auslander posi-tions the ability to play live as a key aspect in which rock performers dem-onstrated their authenticity. He notes that:

The visual evidence of live performance, the fact that those soundscan be produced live by the appropriate musicians, serves to authen-ticate music as legitimate rock and not synthetic pop in a way thatcannot occur on the basis of the recording alone; only live perfor-mance can resolve the tension between rocks romantic ideology andthe listener s knowledge that the music is produced in a studio.6

The rock documentary therefore, provided artists with a platform to per-form their authenticity to a huge audience via cinema and television, anaudience far larger than they could reach through even the most extensive

Rockumentary 287

of tours. However, whilst important, the obvious correlation between obser-vational transparency and the primacy of live performance within rockculture is only one element in the relationship between rock and the emerg-ing documentary aesthetic. The other key elements of this close relation-ship are discursive and industrial. In order to fully unpack these issues it istherefore necessary to examine how the two movements developed intandem.

Cinema Verite and the Construction of the'Real'

Originally popularised by the French film-maker and anthropologist JeanRouch in his 1960 film Chronique d'un Etc, the term cinema verite becameused to describe an approach to documentary film making which sought todocument reality by using the camera as a catalyst.7 Here, the presence ofthe film-maker was used to 'provoke or stimulate a realistic reaction fromtheir subjects!8 At the same time a group of US film makers centred aroundDrew Associates (a production company formed by ex-Life Magazine edi-tor Robert Drew which spawned virtually all of the major American veritedirectors of the 1960s) began using new lightweight camera technologytowards a similar objective of cinematic truth. This is sometimes referredto as direct cinema in order to distinguish the US movement from its Frenchcounterpart. Both French and US movements sought to present the filmas a document of real events without the interference of a vocal narrativeinterpretation and avoiding devices such as statement of events, montagesequences, voice-over narration, non-diegetic music and talking heads.Both dispensed with documentary conventions such as formal, sit-downinterviews preferring to follow their subjects as events unfolded in order torecord authentic reactions and feelings. Despite these formal similarities,the American directors adhered to a more explicitly observational agenda.The stated goal was an attempt to let the subjects of the documentary 'speakfor themselves' with as little interference from the film maker as possible.The rhetoric of the American verite movement was that these techniquessomehow led to an objectivity that was positioned against both traditionalHollywood film making and established journalistic conventions. Forinstance, in a response to some of the critical analysis of early Americanverite films James Lipscomb of Drew Associates makes this observationalaim clear: 'The cinema-verite [sic] film maker is a special kind of film jour-nalist who is trying to record what really happens more truly than a reportertaking notes... If there is a story, it is not one that he created, but rather onethat he placed himself in the way of watching, a real-life drama.9


It should be noted that the observational remit of verite was open to cri-tique almost as soon as the movement gained prominence. Documentarytheorists almost immediately entered a heated debate around the supposedtruth or otherwise offered by the form.10 Indeed, the fact that the editingprocess is such a central part of the construction of any documentarymeans that the imposition of distinct narratives is an integral part of theprocess. In effect the documentary form itself makes any such claims toobjectivity inherently problematic. As Corner notes 'no amount of irony,reflexivity, self-deconstruction or, indeed, sheer audience familiarity withthe looks and sounds of documentary work, can get away from the essen-tial "dishonesties", perceptual but also cognitive, from which much of thedocumentary effect is produced'.11 It is perhaps better therefore, to readthe strategies and overall feel of verite as a kind of codified realism, whichself-consciously constructs a symbolic objectivity through its conventionsof image and sound. As Hall notes a number of techniques (used to estab-lish a feel of truthfulness) were utilised across differing verite films, whichserved to conventionalise its innovations to the extent that they becamecliches.12 It is precisely this symbolic realism that is interesting in verite srelationship to rock as it provides a neat parallel with the constructed dis-courses of authenticity, which underpin rock ideology.

Cinema Verite and Rock

For American verite directors, rock provided an ideally suited commercialand cultural context for their film-making, a situation which led to veritetechniques becoming standard within the rockumentary. There are a num-ber of reasons for this entwined development. Firstly, rocks huge audienceand commercial potential meant that financial backers were more willingto invest in projects related to star subjects. Secondly, there was also a clearmatch between the techniques and underlying aesthetic agenda of cinemaverite and the new discursive paradigm of seriousness and authenticitythat rock brought to Anglo-American popular music. With its aspirationstoward objectivity the genre was particularly suited to tour movies whichmix live performance with backstage footage and the day to day workingsof touring and during the decade there emerged a strong artistic and com-mercial fit between verite and a developing rock authenticity. Thirdly, themediation of rock as a culturally significant form which captured the 'spiritof the age' across differing media (such as the emerging music press and theNew Journalism of the nascent music press, colour supplements and life-style magazine sectors) meant that rock stars were ripe for interpretation as

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symbolic of a whole set of wider social and cultural changes. Indeed, the mostcommercially successful American verite films had touring rock musiciansin their 'natural habitat' as their subjects. Films such as What's Happening!The Beatles in the USA (Al and David Maysles, 1964) D. A. Pennebakersfilm of Bob Dylan Don't Look Back (1965) and the Rolling Stones filmsGimme Shelter (Al and David Maysles, 1970) and Cocksucker Blues (D. A.Pennebaker, 1973) had an extensive influence upon popular music docu-mentaries that followed establishing many of the conventions of subse-quent films in the genre. Thus techniques pioneered by the leading figuresof direct such as Maysles Brothers, D. A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacockbecame cornerstones of the generic conventions of the rockumentary.

A lasting legacy of these early verite representations of rock musiciansupon the rock documentary can be found within two enduring motifscommon to many films: an apparent revelation of the 'true* figures behindthe mask of stardom and an insight into the music business normally hid-den from the music consumer. The rock documentary supposedly looksbehind the public persona of the star by offering a glimpse into the 'privateworld' of the backstage area where performers are seen 'being themselves'.This is often illustrated very literally with the transition between privateand public spaces (musicians walking from backstage to stage, hospitalityto press conference, etc.) becoming a stock device so common that it waselaborately parodied in the 1984 spoof documentary This Is Spinal Tap.13

Hall traces the use of the technique in Dont Look Back (where Dylan isshown though a long tracking shot walking from the darkness of the back-stage area directly into the spotlight) to Robert Drews Primary, a film ofJohn F. Kennedys electoral campaign in Wisconsin (a film often cited asthe earliest example of American verite).14 Robert Frank took this to itslogical extreme in his 1972 Rolling Stones documentary Cocksucker Blueswhere Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are shown apparently sharing linesof cocaine before moving through the backstage area to the stage (a scenewhich was no doubt a factor in the film never being released after a lawsuitfrom the bands lawyers).

Partially, the preoccupation with such transitions can be framed withinverites own discursive self-consciousness about the journalistic process.As a cinematic device the offstage/onstage binary is clearly a way of high-lighting the supposed objectivity of verite by presenting the viewer withmaterial not normally offered for public consumption by traditional jour-nalistic methods. Hall for instance, positions Don't Look Back's centralnarrative as constituting a critique of conventional news media and itsreporting techniques thereby reiterating the truth of the verite process.15


Hall gives an in-depth discussion of one of the films most celebrated sceneswhere Dylan is deliberately evasive, and ultimately borderline abusive,towards a Time Magazine journalist. The implication being that Dylanscritique of the traditional journalistic process highlights its very inabilityto understand and document a changing cultural landscape.

On the other hand, the rockumentary has to be contextualised withinthe dominant narratives and mythologies of its subject matter and we can-not merely understand them as a form of reflexive media, which decon-structs its own processes. The devices outlined above are clearly bound upwith the processes and narratives of fame, performance and authenticityand the structure and editing often are fairly explicit in framing their sub-jects within such terms. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the openingsequences of two verite style films made about David Bowie in the 1970s;Pennebakers movie of David Bowies 1973 Hammersmith Odeon concertZiggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars and Cracked Actor, a film pro-duced in 1974 for BBC television by Alan Yentob (shot by American veritecinematographer David Myers). Pennebaker provides a variation on thebackstage/onstage binary by beginning his film with Bowie being made-upand dressed for the stage, a motif which punctuates the concert footagethat makes up the main body of the film. In an echo of a widely utilisedtechnique used in many psychoanalytic Hollywood movies of the 1940sand 1950s, the first shot of the film shows Bowies reflection in a back stagemirror. The shot serves to immediately establish the film as an explorationof the schism between the self and the constructed performative onstagepersona. This theme is continued in the concert sections of the film througha heavy emphasis on stage lighting (with the spots and lighting rig in shotthrough much of the film) often framing Bowie in darkness aside from thecoloured lighting of the spots.16 Pennebaker also deliberately incorporatesthe glare of the audience into the fabric of the film by editing many ofthe cuts to the flashes created by the audience taking photographs (whichwas actively encouraged by Pennebaker who posted signs outside theHammersmith Odeon urging fans to take as many flash photographs aspossible).17 The point is further reinforced by a 2-minute segment wherethe audience are bathed in stroboscope lighting lending a slow motioneffect giving the impression of an almost trancelike adoration.

Taking a different tack, the opening sequence of Yentobs documentarysituates Bowie in terms of mediation and the media process by openingwith a television interview and subsequent commentary to camera by thepresenter Wayne Katz berating Bowie for being deliberately evasive and'discussing riddles! Rather than integrating this archive footage into the

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documentary Yentob chooses to use a distancing effect by filming the tele-vision interview as if viewing it on a domestic television. The sequence(in which the frame of the television is clearly in shot) serves to bothseparate the filmmaker for other representations of Bowie and to reinforcethe notion of Bowie as a mediated persona. The inference is that Yentob isgoing to present a more intimate portrait, away from (but at the sametime exploring) the artificial glare of the television studio and one whichis more sympathetic to the craft of the artist. It is clear from the startthen that the film is to be a portrait of what it is like to live as a mediatedsubject and the constructed nature of the star persona. The point is furtherhammered home by a cut to footage of Bowies latex covered face beingcast for a stage mask. The film then immediately segues into a scene ofintimacy, Bowie and his wife being driven through the desert, happilysinging along with Aretha Franklins 'You Make Me Feel Like a NaturalWoman'.

What both of these films provide, therefore, is both a straight perfor-mance of authenticity (through the emphasis on live performance) anda representation of Bowies own deconstruction of rock authenticity. AsAuslander points out, Bowies adoption of multiple stage personae was partof Glam Rocks destabilisation of the binary distinction that pitted musical(aural) performance as authentic against theatrical (visual) performance asartifice.18 The specific filmic and editorial devices used in both films clearlymirror this engagement with rock authenticity and are thus at the sametime an exploration and reaffirmation of Bowies public image.

Truth, Representation and Control

Hence, despite these films having aspirations towards objectivity it is clearthat they construct their subjects as much as documenting them throughediting choices and narrative devices. Rock subjects have tended to beframed within very specific discursive frameworks such as the socio-politi-cal implications of youth culture or the artists' role in the entertainmentindustry (and more often than not, a combination of these two tropes). It isalso important to note that the rockumentary deals with stars who are partof in an industry where the control of image and persona is of paramountvalue. In addition, rock documentaries are clearly part of the marketing ofpopular music acts.19 Thus, the rockumentary is always (albeit to differingextents) a negotiation between the film-maker s vision and how the artist(and their attendant management, record company publicity division, etc.)wishes to be represented.


The extent of this relationship is illustrated by the fact that films such asZiggy Stardust, Dont Look Back and Gimme Shelter were all commissionedby record companies as part of their act s promotional campaigns. Whilethese projects undoubtedly afforded the filmmaker a major amount ofaccess to their given subjects, this was to a large extent undertaken on theterms of the artist, management and record company. Added to this, incommissioning film-makers from Drew Associates' (and the company'salumni) these record companies clearly saw the benefits of having theirartists represented through the stylistic conventions of verite.20 The impres-sion of unmediated intimacy provided a neat fit with rocks emergingauthenticity paradigm (the artist s connection to their audience, music as apersonal expression and the foregrounding of live performance). The rockdocumentary thus acted as a platform where the filmmaker could con-struct a public persona, which appeared truthful and congruent with rockideology. This is clearly an important function of the rockumentary as theconcept of authenticity has become integral to image production and mar-keting within the music industry.21 As Coyle and Dolan note, 'authenticityis a sign and not a quality, and like any sign it functions differentially anddeferentially. In the world of commerce, authenticity is simply a matter oftrademark'.22

Ironically, a central way in which authenticity is used in the marketing ofrock has been specifically to distance rock from it's own status as a product.As many critics have pointed out debates surrounding art and commercehave been crucial in the formulating of rock authenticity.23 Hence, the mar-keting of rock aims to simultaneously sell a product at the same time aspositioning that product outside of a primarily commercial framework.Again, the verite form provides a useful way in which to frame rock acts inthese terms. Within this rubric it is the supposed integrity and impartialityof verite, which is particularly appealing to the commissioning of the rockdocumentary. Although commercially released recordings and stage showsare immediately recognisable as industrial products which have beenthrough a process of design and manufacture with attention to their com-mercial viability, the apparently innocent, neutral and direct gaze of thecamera within verite appears as a refreshingly honest and intimate accountof an artist which represents itself as less open to the interference of musicindustry manipulation.

Again, it is the appearance of objectivity that is important here as ulti-mately the level of access, what the artist does in front of camera and inmany cases decisions relating to the final cut and release of these films restswith the artist, management or recording company. This is illustrated in the

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rare occasions when the marriage of verite and rock has proved problem-atic, most notably in the case of Cocksucker Blues, which was never givena commercial release due to the Rolling Stones' dissatisfaction with thefinal product.24 In the light of this relationship it is worth noting that thebackstage footage within these films is often as contrived and controlledas actual stage performance and merely acts to re-enforce an artists' publicpersona rather than stripping away any mythology surrounding them. Forinstance, Romney argues that all Dylans actions in Don't Look Back arelaid on for the camera and the supposedly natural backstage scenes in thefilm are a 'repertoire of the techniques used by an artist to repel criticismwhile maintaining his own mystique!25 For example, whilst it is true thatthe Time Magazine interview sequence works for Pennebaker to confirmhis film-making agenda (and the veracity of verite) it also works for Dylanto reinforce his authenticity as a spokesperson for the counterculture inconfrontation with the 'straight' media.

This type of extension of the on-stage/public persona is clearly evidentwithin the verite influenced 1991 film In Bed With Madonna. The film offersan account of Madonnas fBlond Ambition' tour of 1990 and cuts betweenblack and white sections documenting 'intimate' backstage moments shoton hand-held cameras in the verite style to colour concert footage shotwith big budget technology such as steadycam, hydraulic crane mountedcameras and camera dollies (moving camera platforms used for longtracking shots). The resultant film constitutes a kind of post-MTV veriteaesthetic which mixes unfolding as it happens' footage with meticulouslyplanned and highly stylised audiovisual routines. Despite the apparent dis-parity between the two contrasting stylistic elements of the film, both serveto reinforce its central themes: that of Madonna as the superstar who is incontrol of all of the elements of her music and image and Madonna as thetransgressive artist. Throughout the backstage sections Madonna is acutelyreferential to the fact that she is being filmed making constant reference tohow she is being represented. In a particularly telling exchange, her thenpartner Warren Beatty berates the singer for her decision to documenteverything, even a backstage medical check-up, by asking her whether shesees any point in doing anything cif it's not on camera. This scene suggestsboth Madonna's awareness of, and control over, her image while also givingthe impression that nothing is being hidden from the apparent omnipres-ence of the rolling camera.

Cvetkovich suggests that the device of moving between on-stage andoffstage moments within the film serves to highlight what is 'already evidentfrom her previous videos and live performances - her ability to assume


a variety of roles or poses - none of which can be considered her "true"self'.26 Whilst Cvetkovich is primarily interested in presenting Madonna as'transgressing' gendered identities, there is something else at stake here.Namely, that by highlighting what we 'already know' about Madonna, thefilm is clearly replicating a tightly controlled set of mediated discoursesabout the singer. Whilst Cvetkovich posits this as Madonna having control',arguably what we are witness to is the documentary maker replicatingthe dominant representation of Madonna as constructed by the musicindustry. So, while the film's central narrative can be read as Madonnabeing in control or as subversive, this understanding is in effect the pre-ferred reading offered by the music industry.

Dig\ and the Resurgence of the Documentary Form

The amount of control an artist and their record company might haveover editorial decisions is, of course, differential depending on the subjectof the film, their existing power and status within the recording industry,and who provides the funding in order to make the film. Big name stars andtheir management can clearly negotiate a high level of editorial controland indeed, ultimately set the agenda for the thematic thrust of a film.However, there are exceptions to this where the relationship between thefilm-maker and the act is complex and far from uniform. To suggest thatdocumentary makers, record companies and acts are always involved in aharmonious promotional push is to simplify the different production con-texts in which popular music documentaries are made.

A key relationship here is that of financing. If the funds to make a filmare provided by external (television or film) companies unconnected withthe subject of the film then the film-maker is obviously afforded a greaterlevel of independent editorial control. In contrast with many of the filmsmentioned above Ondi Timoner s Dig! (2004) provides an example of anindependently produced film, which has a different power dynamic withits subjects. Filmed over a 7-year period from 1996-2002 Dig! follows thecareers of two West-coast neo-psychedelic bands, the Brian JonestownMassacre from San Fransicso and the Dandy Warhols from PortlandOregon. The film records the experiences of these bands from their routesin the West Coast indie scene through to the music industry career mill oftouring, courting record company interest, recording and video making.The film was first proposed to MTV by its director Ondi Timoner as aproject, which followed ten bands through the industry process. The initial

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project idea was turned down by MTV so Timoner's independent produc-tion company Interloper films financed the film (narrowing the subjectmatter down to the BJM and Dandy Warhols). The long process of docu-menting these bands was undertaken alongside Timoners 'day job' ofproducing commissioned work including numerous music videos, TVshows for VH1 and long form video music documentaries for major recordcompanies.27

This lack of funding meant that the film was dependent on wider con-textual issues in the film industry for its release and ultimately reaching itsaudience. It was only in the editing stage that Interloper received an injec-tion of funding to complete the film, a boost which has to be placed intothe context of a remarkable resurgence in the commercial position of doc-umentary films. Dig! was completed and released in the wake of the successof Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine (2002), Jeffery Blitz's Spellbound(2002) and a rash of other documentaries which achieved widespreadcommercial success and critical acclaim. As Mintz notes 'Seven of theall-time Top 10 grossing documentaries were released in 2003 and 2004,and 18 of the 25 most profitable political documentaries were releasedsince 2002!28 Higgins relates the rise of these 'blockbuster documentaries'to several factors including a powerful independent film sector, the democ-ratisation of video technologies and the popularisation of documentarythrough reality TV.29 These factors have led to the documentary being seenas a significant genre within the 'market-media complex* leading to a climatein which distributors were clearly attuned to the commercial possibilitiesof documentary film.30

This context led to the film receiving finance and distribution from PalmPictures eventually leading to the film winning the Grand Jury Prize at theinfluential Sundance Film Festival. Timoner actually posits the initial lackof external funding for the project as affording her the freedom to makethe film that she wanted. Thus, the project was free from the temporal andbudget restrictions of the long form documentary videos she simultane-ously made during the period (such as those produced for the hip-hopartist Khaleel and the rock act Fastball for Hollywood Records). In addi-tion, Timoner indicated that the acts' lack of commercial success was a keyfactor in her autonomy from record company interference. She explained:

Neither band were Soundscanning31 enough at the time so the recordcompanies weren't really interested in the film at all. I mean, I hada good relationship with Capitol32 in that I did my first music video


for the Dandy Warhols, (in fact its the music company Tve hadmost contact with and there were some good people [within theorganisation] there) but in terms of the film . . . there was no realinterest at all.33

Despite this directorial autonomy the film is illustrative of the continuingcurrency of constructions of rock authenticity within the rockumentaryform. The film very explicitly places itself within the established art versuscommerce discourse central to indie rock.34 Indeed, the film was originallyproposed to MTV with the strap line 'Where art meets industry, who willmake The Cut?' Whilst the final film features only the two West Coastgroups the thematic preoccupation with art and commerce remainscentral. This is explicitly played out through differing characterisationsof its main protagonists BJM s front person Anton Newcombe and theDandy Warhols Courtney lead singer and guitarist Taylor who are bothframed within their respective relationships to the wider recording indus-try. Taylor is set-up as the major label career musician constantly strug-gling with the expectations of the release/promotion/tour treadmill whilstNewcombe is contrasted as the maverick outsider in the romantic geniusmode. Within the film both front men become symbolic of differing aspectsof rock authenticity: Newcombe in his refusal to compromise his artisticvision and his playing out of doomed romanticism through drug abuseand self-destruction and Taylor in his awkwardness at having to undertakecertain promotional activities.

Conclusion

As Nichols pertinently observes, documentary in general should beregarded £not as a special use of the film medium that affords a 'privileged'view of reality, but as ... [one of many film] genre[s]'.35 Similarly, ratherthan being neutrally observational there is a construction of'reality' withinrockumentary that has to be contextualised within the discursive andindustrial nexus of rock production. Indeed, the thematic and stylisticconsistencies outlined within this chapter clearly mark out the rock docu-mentary as a distinct subgenre. Whilst the examples discussed in this articleillustrate that there is a clear fit between the differential constructionsof authenticity within cinema verite and rock culture the constant use ofverite techniques in rock films has resulted in their codification as stockgeneric devices. This solidification of generic practice and the legacy of the40-year history of rockumentary means that there is a certain inevitability

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in form, content and thematic orientation within contemporary documen-tary films dealing with popular music. As a film such as Dig! shows, evenwhen the axis of control shifts from the artist/record company to the film-maker, rockumentaries are still predominantly framed within the overrid-ing discursive framework of rock culture.

Notes

1. Negus (1995), p. 319.2. Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1996; Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, Paper Conser-vatism and Postmodern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.

3. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a mediatised Culture. London: Routledge,1999, p. 70.

4. Deena Weinstein, 'Art versus commerce: Deconstructing a (useful) romanticillusion, Stars Don't Stand Still in the Sky, Karen Kelly and Evelyn McDonnell. London:Routledge, 1999, p. 59.

5. Sarchett(1994),p. 31.6. Auslander (1999), p. 79.7. See Julie Hubbert, * "Whatever happened to great movie music?" Cinema verite and

Hollywood film music of the early 1970s', American Music, 21:2 (2003), pp. 180-213; JamesMonaco, American documentary Since I960', Cinema: A Critical Dictionary. London:Nationwide Book Services, 1980, pp. 50-6.

8. Ibid., p. 185.9. James C. Lipscomb, 'Cinema-verite', Film Quarterly, 18:2 (1964), p. 62.

10. See for instance Thomas Waugh, 'Beyond verite: Emile de Antonion and the Newdocumentary of the Seventies', Movies and Methods, Vol. II. Berkeley and Los Angeles,CA: University of California Press, 1985; Bill Nichols, Ideology and Image. Bloomington, IN:Indiana University Press, 1981.

11. John Corner, 'What can we say about "documentary"?', Media, Culture & Society,22:5 (2000), p. 682.

12. Jeanne Hall, '"Don't You Ever Just Watch?": American Cinema Verite and Don't LookBack', in Barry Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (eds), Documenting the Documentary.Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998, pp. 223-236.

13. For a concentrated discussion on the ways in which Spinal Tap parodies the conven-tions of rock documentary see Carl Plantinga, 'Satirising Masculinity in This is Spinal Tap\in Barry Grant and Jennette Sloniowski (eds), Documenting the Documentary. Detroit:Wayne State University Press, 1998, pp. 318-332.

14. Hall (1998), p. 224.15. Ibid.16. These sections were shot using lightweight cameras using four cameras on the stage

and one tripod for wide shots.


17. Pennebaker, D. A., Sleeve notes to Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars DVD,EMI Music, 2002.

18. Philip Auslander, Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Tfieatricality in Popular Music.Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006.

19. It should be noted that the position of documentary as a promotional tool hasintensified since the 1970s. Since the emergence of the video retail market in the 1980s therecording industry has successfully harnessed the documentary form as both a promotionaltool and an income-generating format. Throughout the 1990s the long form video format(defined by the Grammy organization as Video album packages consisting of more thanone song or track') became a staple of major label release schedules. In addition the adventof the DVD has meant that documentaries have provided a key way for record companiesto exploit their back catalogues.

20. For instance, Rolling Stones biographer Stanley Booth states that the band wereintrigued by the verite representation of Dylan in Don't Look Back and were keen to getPennebaker on board for the project that eventually became Gimme Shelter. Indeed heimplies that the infamous concert at Altamont Speedway, California was to a large extentorganised in order to feature in the movie. The band ended up paying $143,000 to theMaysles brothers to shoot the concert footage (see Michael Sragow (2000) 'GimmeShelter: the Real Story'. Available at http://archive.salon.com/ent/col/srag/2000/08/10/gimme_shelter/index2.html (accessed on 20 October 2006).

21. Leonard and Strachan, Authenticity', in The Continuum Encyclopaedia of PopularMusic of the World Volume 1: Media, Industry and Society, (eds.) John Shepherd, DavidHorn, Dave Laing, Paul Oliver and Peter Wicke, Continuum: London and New York, 2003,p. 165.

22. Michael Coyle and Jon Dolan, 'Modeling authenticity, authenticating commercialmodels' in Kevin J. H. Dettmar and William Richey (eds), Reading Rock and Roll: Authenticity,Appropriation and Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, p. 29.

23. Frith (1992); Weinstein (1999).24. Another less drastic example is Jeff Beck demanding that the two songs he performed

with David Bowie at the filmed Hammersmith Odeon show be cut from Ziggy Stardust andthe Spiders from Mars as he felt that the glam rock feel of the show did not fit his image.

25. Jonathon Romney, Access all areas: The real space of the rock documentary' inJonathon Romney and Adrian Wooton (eds), Celluloid Jukebox: Popular Music and theMovies Since the 1950s. London: BFI, p. 88.

26. Ann Cvetkovich, 'The powers of seeing and being seen: Truth or Dare and ParisIs Burning, in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Colins (eds), Film Theory Goesto the Movies. London: Routledge, 1993, p. 157.

27. Information taken from interview with Ondi Timoner by the authors on 29 September

2006.28. Steven Mintz, 'Michael Moore and the re-birth of the documentary', Film History,

35.2 (2005), p. 10.29. Higgins, 'Documentary in an age of terror', South Central Review, 22.2 (2005),

pp. 20-38.

http://archive.salon.com/ent/col/srag/2000/08/10/gimme_shelter/index2.html


Rockumentary 299

30. B. Ruby Rich, 'Documentary disciplines: An introduction, Cinema Journal, 46.1(2006), p. 109.

31. SoundScan is an information system which calculates actual sales within the US andCanada recording industry by logging CD purchases at point of sale.

32. Capitol is the Dandy Warhols record company.33. Personal communication with authors on 29 September 2006.34. See, for example, D. Hesmondhalgh, 'Indie: The aesthetics and institutional politics

of a popular music genre', Cultural Studies, 13.1 (1999), pp. 34-61.35. Bill Nichols, 'The voice of documentary', in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods,

Vol. II. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: The University of California Press, 1985, p. 259.

CULTURE

17Sound in Indian Cinema

Beyond the Song Sequence: Theorizing Sound in Indian Cinema

Neepa Majumdar

Christian Metzs 1980 statement in 'Aural Objects', that the apprehensionof sound in film is socially and culturally conditioned, may be a truismin sound theory; yet sound has proven difficult to theorize in culturallyspecific ways.1 In discussions of sound in cinema, which consider, amongother things, the relation of sound and image and the debate over whetherrecorded sound is a new sound event or a copy of the original sound, it isdifficult to avoid speaking in universals. Yet, if we look even at the historyof technology, which, at least as far as the hardware is considered, may seemto be indubitably universal, we find geographic specificity: take, for exam-ple, the Chicago Telephone and Radio Co., which ran an ad in The Timesof India (13 January 1931) for a sound-on-film recording system 'speciallyintended for use in the tropics'. It may seem that Indian cinema, with itswell-known reliance on music and lyrical speech, might offer a potentiallyproductive site for a culturally grounded analysis of sound in cinema. Butmost studies of sound in Indian cinema have focused predominantly onmusic and song picturization, rather than on sound per se, a locally specificinstance of a general tendency in film studies to focus on the referent ofsound, rather than on its formal and material properties.2 Certainly, thetendency to gravitate towards Hindi cinemas song sequences, especiallyin studies of pre-1970s Indian cinema, is also entirely warranted given thatsong sequences frequently were the locus of the most complex uses of

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sound and image, just as they were in other ways the predominant spacefor experimentation.

Without, I hope, falling into the trap of positing radical otherness, in thisChapter I explore some ways in which Indian cinema in the first threedecades of sound provides a valuable counterpoint to some of the truismsof sound theory: such as the uncanny effect of the separation of soundand source, the tendency of commercial cinema to rely on sound synchro-nization and the imperative to remove the 'noise* of technology from thesoundtrack (the aural equivalent of the 'invisible style' of editing). I con-sider film sound in the context of other audio technologies, and focus,broadly speaking, on two kinds of noise and their implications for the rela-tion of sound and source, specifically what Michel Chion, following PierreSchaeffer, calls acousmatic sound or 'sound that is heard without its causeor source being seen.3 What I argue in this chapter is that there is a stretch-ing of the relationship of sound and image in Indian cinema, redefiningtheir relation by withholding, confusing and then revealing the source ofsound: or by the late 1940s, attributing two sources to the same soundthrough the phenomenon of playback singing, where actors lip-synched tothe voice of singers who eventually became aural stars with identifiablevoices.4 The connection between sound and its source is less naturalizedin Hindi cinema than in other mainstream cinemas such as Hollywood,despite the fact that the soundtrack of films from the first three decades offilm sound is, for the most part, dominated by sync sound.

The wider context for understanding the function of sound in Indiancinema obviously must include the history of the phonograph, gramophoneand radio in India, all of which functioned in different ways to train viewersin specific modes of listening and sound reception.5 The audio trainingprovided by gramophone is significant when one considers that 'by 1910,the Gramophone Company of India had produced over four thousandrecordings in India'.6 This training had to do, on the one hand, with privatiz-ing, individualizing and commodifying modes of listening and also makingsound more portable, for example, with the invention of the spring-woundmotor for the gramophone, that allowed listeners 'to sit at a distance with-out having to crank the machine by hand'.7 On the other hand, this trainingalso had to do with a protracted negotiation with two types of noise, oneof which was the literal noise of the machine - by which I mean the noiseof poor recording technologies and conditions. But at the same time, gram-ophone, radio and cinematic sound might also be understood as audiotechnologies that regulated and standardized a more broadly understoodcultural 'noise', specifically in the arena of music and voice: in particular the

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timbre of the female singing voice, as I discuss later. Indian cinema specta-tors brought to the movies an audio training that was being developed inthe context of other sound technologies; this training allowed for both atolerance of and negotiation with technical noise and the kind of culturalnoise that gramophone and radio were in the process of standardizing andeliminating.

Early theoretical writing on the noise of recording must include RudolphLothar s 1924 piece 'The Talking Machine: A Technical-Acoustic Essay* inwhich he says:

The talking machine . . . demands a twofold capacity for illusion, anillusion working in two directions. On the one hand, it demands thatwe ignore and overlook its mechanical features. As we know, everyrecord comes with interference. As connoisseurs we are not allowedto hear this interference, just as in a theatre we are obliged to ignoreboth the line that sets off the stage and the frame surrounding thescene...

But, on the other hand, the machine demands that we give bodies tothe sounds emanating from it. For example, while playing an ariasung by a famous singer we see the stage he stands on, we see himdressed in an appropriate costume. The more it is linked to our mem-ories, the stronger the records effect will be. Nothing excited memorymore strongly than the human voice.8

Here, Lothar points to the simultaneous effacement of technology and itssubstitution by some form of embodiment. But while an imagined humanpresence plays over the machines interference, this presence, he suggests,is bound to memory or to some form of pre-knowledge, shaped outsidethe technology. Thus, in this early reading of sound recording technology,the perception of sound is linked to personal experience, which in turn isimplicitly shaped by cultural conditions. What one hears is shaped bothby what one has previously heard and by the memory of specific forms ofembodiment that the sound represents. These two aspects of sound per-ception, memory and embodiment, are crucial to understanding the rela-tion of sound and image in Hindi cinema.

Since recording technologies register all acoustic events equally, withoutthe filtering capacity of human acoustic perception, the recording condi-tions of early gramophone and early sound-on-film technology in Indialeft audible traces in their sound quality. Accounts of the acoustic environ-ment of the early sound film in India stress two things. First, there was the


low quality of recording conditions and the consequent distortion andcrackle of noise in the film experience. Accounts by filmmakers and soundtechnicians emphasize the practical difficulties of recording sound for bothgramophone records and the cinema. For one thing, audio training andthe economics of buying and selling sound equipment became conflated.The American sound equipment salesman Wilford E. Deming also doubledas sound engineer and audio trainer.9 Similarly, filmmakers who rented theFazalbhoys' sound studio, Famous Cine Laboratory and Recording Room,in Tardeo Road in Bombay, learned the technology even as they wererecording for a film. The film producer J. B. H. Wadia of Wadia Movietonedescribes the process of recording a film in December 1933:

With motor horns blowing, victoriawallas cracking their whips andshouting at pedestrians, bullock carts grating, cyclists ringing the bells,pedestrians occasionally quarrelling at the top of their voices - allconspired simultaneously to create a medley of orchestration. Soundwhich would have outbid the cacophony of the best of our modernjazz players and made them hang their heads in shame. In result [sic]we could work in comparative peace only at night time. From 9.00pm to 4 or 5 am. It was Hobsons choice for us. But all of us were dedi-cated souls. Come what may, we remained happily up and doing withfrugal supper at midnight and three rounds of tea to keep us awake.10

Despite its longer experience with sound recording, the GramophoneCompany of India (GCI) recorded under similarly poor acoustic condi-tions, as recounted by a former recording artist and employee, G. N. Joshi.Here too, without soundproofing, it became necessary to make all record-ings early in the morning or at night. Joshi argues that it was lack of com-petition that made GCI indifferent to the quality of recording conditionsand equipment. Recordings were made on used bid machines5 from theparent company, which 'were discarded and shipped to India.11 Later, bythe early 1950s, as the cinematographer Jal Mistry recounts, cameras becamemore silent with the French camera Debris, which he used at the Siri soundstudios in Bombay. Even with the arrival of blimps, sound quality wasuneven, as not every film production company could afford those.12

In addition to poor recording conditions, the second recurrent theme inaccounts of the early years of sound cinema in India is that audiences werewilling to embrace virtually any quality of sound as long as the picture was'all talking, all singing, all dancing'. While lack of competition enabled the'noise* of the Gramophone Company of India, it was audience enthusiasm

Sound in Indian Cinema 307

that similarly enabled cinemas poor sound acoustics. This is an example ofthe process of developing lines of establishing tolerances', of negotiatingthe limits of acceptable noise shaped by local habits and desires.13 It shouldbe noted that the limits of acceptable noise could vary considerably,depending on the theatre, type of film, and location in the country, sinceurban audiences, for example, were also watching Hollywood talkies, whichwould have established different lines of audio tolerance.

Although the priorities of early sound recording in India, as elsewhere,were clarity of speech and song, it would seem that the noise of the machinewas naturalized through repetition and audience acceptance, even as crit-ics and technicians bemoaned its presence. Yet the noise of the machineis not to be understood as a homogenous concept signifying bad soundquality. Even with poor recording and amplification technologies, therewere variations in the specific type of noise that reminded listeners of thetechnology of sound reproduction. Consider this review of the 1932 filmChandidas by S. D. Burman, which appeared in the magazine Filmland inNovember 1932: 'Most of the songs sung by Mr. K. C. Dey (as reproducedon the screen) were devoid of their natural grace and delicate touches.Particularly the high notes were rendered unduly hoarse'. Burman goes onto say that 'the contrast in reproduction was all the more striking whenduring the interval two gramophone records of Mr. K. C. Dey were playedto the audience with all the beauty of the high and low notes coming outclear and distinct*. Burman, himself a musician, is interested primarily in thefidelity of musical reproduction, or what James Lastra calls 'phonographic5

sound, but his line of tolerance renders the noise of the gramophonemachine inaudible, especially in contrast to the even poorer audio qualityof film sound. Compare his review to this one of A/am Am (Ardeshir Irani,1931), in which a different reviewer says that 'the principle interest of thefilm for audiences lay in voice reproduction and synchronization. Thelatter is syllable-perfect; the former is somewhat patchy, due to the inexpe-rience of the players in facing the microphone'.14 For this reviewer, clarityof speech, or what Lastra calls 'telephonic sound' is the key criterion inevaluating film sound, and it is the noise of the machine that dominates.15

But for audiences, the excitement over the new technology overrode con-siderations of clarity and fidelity.

The year 1931 is a particularly unremarkable dividing line betweensilent and sound film in Indian cinema. Despite the first full-length soundfilm, Alam Am, in 1931, many films until the mid-1930s continued to bemade silent. We should remember that the contrast between the aural expe-rience of silent and sound film is that between live and recorded sound.


With silent cinema, there was paradoxically a fuller sound experience withthe three-dimensional spatial coordinates of sound in live accompanimentranging from a single lecturer, singer or harmonium to a fuller orchestra.In the case of sound cinema, with the unidirectional recorded soundemerging from a single speaker, audio experience was reduced by technicalnoise, despite a broader range of sound types. In this case, the gunshotheard in a film was emphatically not the same as a gunshot sound in themovie theatre,16 or, more to the point, the harmonium heard in the silentfilm theatre was not the same as the harmonium played in a sound film onscreen. But in fact, as we saw in S. D. Burmans review ofChandidas, in veryearly sound cinema a third term enters the binary between live' and'recorded' sound, as recorded sound is itself diversified into the experienceof more than one audio technology, with gramophone records supplement-ing both silent and sound films in the movie theatre. Even for audiencestrained as listeners of technologically mediated sound through radio andgramophone, there was a perceptual distinction between these differentkinds of recorded sound, and that difference registered as noise. We mustremember, of course, that accompanying these different kinds of sound,live accompaniment, gramophone record, and screen sound, there was alsothe noise of the legendarily audible Indian audiences.

What is of interest to me here is that, if we consider the three-dimensionalspatial coordinates of sound, the experience of sound in the cinema may besaid to have declined with the introduction of sound technology, even if thelevel of noise, understood as the proportion of meaningless to meaningfulsound, may have remained the same. But this decline in the spatial archi-tecture of sound was completely overshadowed for audiences by the excite-ment of the new technology, as referenced in the review of A/am Am. Thisexcitement is tapped in an ad for the film that promoted the technology ofthe Tanar sound system over the films stars. It promised that 'sound on filmrecording is now possible with the Tanar portable equipment weighing lessthan one hundred pounds, which can be adapted to your Bell and Howellor Mitchell camera.17 For audiences at least, if not for reviewers, the newtechnology quickly established new limits of tolerance for noise. In theaccount of T. S. Mahadeo, a sound operator for Select Picture Company,the 'Talkie People' were treated like visiting dignitaries wherever they tooktheir new equipment in the early years of sound cinema. For early sound filmaudiences, audio 'realism' was understood not in terms of a sound qualitythat effaced its technological underpinnings, but rather in terms of theverifiable and visible marvels of sound technology, no matter how reduced


their actual audio experience might be. The value of technological authen-ticity is indicated in Mahadeo's account of a fake talkie film:

In Conjeevaram the talkie people were beaten to the draw by a show-man who, at his 'talkie display', hid interpreter, harmonium, femalesinger, all behind the screen. But the trick discovered, chairs were bro-ken, screen torn. A justifiably suspicious audience was only asked topay for admission after the Select Pictures party showed them the realthing.18

In another incident that Mahadeo recounts, the sound equipment failed,but when the proprietor of the movie theatre offered to refund the audi-ence, they

refused outright, rightly pointing out that they'd come to see andHEAR - not to take any money back. Three long hours later a patientaudience was rewarded. The 'silent' film came back to life! Membersof the party were carried on shoulders to the bazaar; they were fedhot idli sambhar and garlanded profusely.19

Given that 'real' sounds and the multiple forms of recorded sound mighthave invited comparison, sound fidelity was clearly a slippery idea. Leavingaside theoretical debates over whether even the highest fidelity of soundreproduction is in fact a reproduction or a representation, a copy or anew sound event, a tangled issue of realism and indexicality, in the case ofIndian cinema at this time I argue that sound in the cinema is best under-stood in terms of sound representation - and moreover, with the emphasison representing hearing rather than on sound per se.2Q Nezih Erdoganpoints to a similar use of sound in Turkish cinema, where 'sound effects ...function only as "images of sounds" and are not intended to produce a real-ity effect'.21

I now turn from sound in the movie theatre to sound in the film diegesis,to the sonic identities of two kinds of sound in Hindi cinema, 'live' soundand radio or gramophone sound. If poor sound reproduction is a techno-logical given during this time in Indian cinema history, then the architec-ture of sound in space is always already compromised by the noise of themachine. In a film's diegesis, even as the technology of sound recording wasalways aurally present through the crackle of noise in the recording, to makea distinction between the sound quality of a diegetic radio or gramophone


voice and the technologically unmediated or diegetically live voice of acharacter would be to trouble those lines of tolerance for the noise ofthe machine. It would be a return to the two kinds of recorded sound thatso bothered S. D. Burman in his review of Chandidas. At stake in this dis-cussion of the noise of the machine and the foregrounding or effacementof technology is the question of presence and mediation and the radicalseparation of sound and source or voice and body enabled by audiotechnologies.

Technologies of differentiation, such as sound filtering, the addition ofreverb or echo, distant or close miking (the aural equivalent of a close-up),are only minimally present in the first three decades of Indian soundcinema. How, then, are distinctions of the sort encountered in the movietheatre marked in the films themselves? We can approach questions of dis-tinctions in sound reproduction through two sequences, one from Jailor(dir. Modi, 1958) and the other from Lajwanti (dir. Suri, 1958), both show-ing characters listening to the radio. By playing with the acousmatic natureof radio and gramophone, these films replace sound fidelity, which wouldmark distinctions in audio signature, with a multi-layered visualization ofsound source, returning voices to bodies. Michel Chion states that 'theradio is acousmatic by nature'22 since, of course, radio technology by defini-tion precludes the possibility of seeing the sources behind the sounds.Films like Jailor and Lajwanti and scores of others featuring radios at thistime in Hindi cinema played with the acousmatic nature of radio. Theyreplaced sound reproduction that registers distinctions in audio signaturewith sound representation* which embodies mechanically mediated soundin real or imagined sources.

In a sequence in the second half of Jailor, a sudden iris-out takes usunexpectedly to a female singer at a microphone, a character we have neverseen before and will not see again after this sequence. As the camera pullsback to reveal seated musicians on either side of her, it becomes clear thatthis is a performance at a radio station. Multiple shots of the musicians (allin dark glasses) end in a close-up on a microphone, after which the shotdissolves to a radio set in close-up, then pulls back to reveal the main char-acters, Dilip and Chhaya, a blind woman, who are both listening to it. Afterrevealing Dilip and Chhaya, the shot continues, and the camera turnsaround and moves out, leaving their home and going out to the street,where it dissolves to another tracking shot: this time towards another radioand another blind listener, Ramesh, listening with a rapt expression on hisface. Over the entire sequence, the sound of the song continues unbroken.When she finds out that the source of the song she has just heard was the


radio, Chhaya, the blind woman, exclaims: 'How beautifully you sing, RadioDevi (Madam Radio)!' Her reaction, of course, belongs to a familiar trope.The disembodiment inherent in recorded and broadcast sound is regis-tered in the astonishment of the naive listener in films as separated in timeand space as Nanook of the North (dir. Flaherty, 1922) and Mirch Masala(dir. Mehta, 1987), both of which use the gramophone, rather than theradio, as the technological marvel.

In the case of Jailor's Chhaya, though, her naivete is in fact supportedby the relation between sound and space in the film itself, where noaudio distinction has been made between radio voice and live' voice in thediegesis, a distinction that, technologically speaking, was not impossible toachieve at the time, as I discuss below. In response to her naive comment,Dilip laughs and corrects Chhaya, saying 'But this is a machine] using theEnglish word and implying that it is not a human. His distinction isn'tbetween live' and recorded, but between human and machine. Althoughwe are meant to be charmed and amused by her mistake, what is importantis that she is set apart from other naive listeners because she is blind andcan only hear sound, but not see its source, her blindness enabling anundistracted consideration of sound in and of itself. Chhaya's response,'But it's as if she is right here!' taps into the discourse on presence andabsence, proximity and distance, embodiment and disembodiment, humanand machine that sound technologies like the gramophone, telephone,radio and microphone invite. In this sequence, these oppositions figureprominently in the conversation that follows as Dilip explains that thesounds produced in one place can travel great distances over the air to betransmitted by the radio set in their room. In order to emphasize the poten-tial distance sound can travel, leaving behind its source, he turns to anotherstation playing a Western orchestral piece. Variations on these oppositionsof presence and absence are incessantly thematized in Hindi cinema fromthe 1930s through the 1950s through the systematic substitution of stagefor film, privileging an unmediated relation between audience and per-former - or, as with the radio voice in this sequence, returning to the livesinger in the radio studio.

In this sequence from Jailor, with no markers of distinction in the sound(but rather through camera work and editing) three spaces are connected:the radio station, with its live performers; the home of Dilip and Chhaya,with the radio playing; and the street scene with the other blind listenerand the second radio. Only two of these spaces have any connection to thediegetic events. The singer is an anonymous radio voice that is unexpect-edly given embodiment, and the song sequence returns again to her at


its conclusion. In the shift from the radio station, with its visualization ofclose miking, to the two spaces connected by a camera movement awayfrom one radio towards another, the song itself continues to have the sameclose miking of a gramophone record across dissolves and cuts. Within thediegesis, then, even though we are not blind, we do not hear any differencebetween 'live1, 'radio', and microphoned sound either: but rather we see thosemediations as representations alone. It is precisely because of the displace-ment of audio distinctions on to a discourse of presence that the singer hasto be shown even though she does not figure as a character in the diegesis.Moreover, it is hearing that is emphasized through a focus on the face andexpressions of the various listeners. Bela Balazs points out that 'the emotionproduced in a human being by music and demonstrated by a close-up ofa face can enhance the power of a piece of music in our eyes far more thanany added decibels'.23 In this case, it is not merely that the close-up enhancesthe power of the music, but rather, that the representation of sound vialistening displaces concerns over sound reproduction and 'decibels' on tothe visual domain: 'The close-up of a listener s face can explain the soundhe hears'.24 To extend Balazs s reading, one might say that the visual close-upon blissful listening allows a space to be made for a distinction betweendiegetic and non-diegetic sound experience. Even if the sound system ispoor in the theatre in which we see a film, which would be our non-diegeticsound experience, the close-up on a listening face clarifies for us the supe-rior quality of the sound experience in the films diegesis.

Sequences featuring radios in Hindi cinema of the 1940s and 50s gener-ally expended equal or more screen time on the listeners as on the per-formers, with the radio voice functioning as a signifier of separation anddesire. The narrative function of the sequence from Jailor was to connectthe two blind lovers through their love of music, with their desire displacedonto a radio voice that belongs to neither. The radio voice in Hindi cinemacould mark not only desire but also a moment of recognition, whether ofa lost loved one or of a future lover, the voice providing a truer accessto identity than the body. To illustrate the function of radio voices as ameans for recognition, we can compare the Jailor sequence to another radiosequence in Lajwanti from the same year, 1958. Here, a lawyer's conversa-tion with his clients is interrupted by a singing voice, closely miked, butalso accompanied, not by orchestral music, but by other sounds, such as thecontinuing dialogue and his footsteps as he follows the off-screen voice toits source in a radio across the street. Diegetically live sound and transmit-ted sound are mixed again with no distinction in their sound signatures.This time, it is not so much love of music, as in the Jailor sequence, as


recognition of his long lost wife's voice that draws the lawyer to the radioand propels him to inquire about the song. Recognition is signified by ajarring series of jump cuts on close-ups of his face, which is a surprisingstylistic choice but entirely suited to the intensity of the song s impact onthe listener. The lawyer finds out that the song is a live radio performance,at which point the film cuts to the building of the radio station where theperformance is taking place, the cut accompanied by a change in soundquality. All diegetic noise is eliminated, and we are now in the filtered soundenvironment of a song sequence - one, however, that still does not or can-not eliminate the noise of the machine, the scratchy tonal quality thatmarks it as a recording.

In the Lajwanti song sequence, the first part, with its inclusion of otherdiegetic sounds, instantiates an acousmatic sound whose source is invisibleand unknown. The subsequent shots show that, at least in the cinema, con-trary to common sense or Chioris claim, even with the quintessentiallyacousmatic radio, one [can] play with showing, partially showing, and notshowing' the source (lcannof is in the original).25 In this sequence fromLajwanti, the singing voice is initially acousmatic, separated from its source,but it undergoes progressive embodiment, first in the radio set, then in theradio station, then in a group of dancers filmed in a long shot of a stageinside the building and finally, only after a full 2 minutes into the song, ina close-up onto the face of the actress Nargis singing. This would be themoment of cde-acousmatization when the voice is fully returned to its body.But, given that by this time in Hindi cinema, playback singing with vocallyrecognizable aural stars had established itself, the play with showing andnot showing the source of a singing voice becomes further complicated.Here, following Lothar s suggestion of a memory of embodiment accompa-nying an acousmatic sound, we should note that when the film finally cutsto a closer shot of the singer, played by the actress Nargis, the voice emanat-ing from her mouth becomes simultaneously de-acousmatized and acous-matic, as our memory and knowledge of the actual playback singer, LataMangeshkar, superimposes itself over this image of supposed synchronic-ity. In Indian cinema there is strong investment in what Chion calls £syn-chresis' or the perception of a fusion of sound and image that goes beyondlogic or reason and is as much a product of psychology as of technology.26

Synchresis in Indian cinemas song sequences has become a psychologicaland cultural product since the mid-1940s as audiences see and hear syn-chronous sound emanating from the lips of the on-screen singer even asthey are fully cognizant of the fact that the real source of the sound isa playback singer.27


The distinction between the two halves of the Lajwanti sequence derivesfrom the inclusion in the first half, and elimination in the second, of otherdiegetic sounds, rather than from any difference between the qualities ofradio and diegetically live sound. Yet such distinctions were not entirelyunknown. The Wadia brothers' 1936 film Miss Frontier Mail, starring the'Indian Pearl White', Fearless Nadia, is remarkable not only for its discourseof technology, modernity and the human body but also for its play withaudio technologies. Despite the abrupt switches from sound effects tosilence that mark this and many films during the transition from silentto sound cinema, the films ambitious use of sound effects includes one ofthe earliest attempts to register acoustical differences between diegeticallylive and transmitted sound. One could characterize the narrative opposi-tion in this film as one between visual and audio technologies. The protag-onists have a movie camera, which plays a significant role in providingevidence against the villain, whereas the villain is a master of audio systemsthat permit long-distance communication. The villains name is Signal X toindicate his audio transmission methods, and the first time we see him usehis technology, the film visualizes sound transmission and thematizes theliteral noise of the machine. Wearing headphones, with a bulky microphoneattached to a neck brace that together look like a gas mask, the villainembodies 'high-tech' sound technology. After close-ups on a panel in hisvan, with various knobs that the villain turns to audibly sharpen a loudbeeping sound, the camera tilts up, pans the sky and trees, then tilts downto the house of his underlings, all in one take and accompanied by beepingstatic sounds. This shot functions as an explanation of how sound trans-mission works, similar to Dilips verbal explanation to Chhaya in Jailor andthe ubiquitous shots of radio towers in other films of the 1940s and 1950s.In the one scene in Miss Frontier Mail in which camera technology is simi-larly explained, it is through dialogue rather than visual demonstration ofthe difference between negative and positive film prints. The technologicalnoise is inseparable from Signal Xs sound equipment and is a key compo-nent of the sheer marvel of sound transmission. The beeping sound trans-mitted over the sky and trees continues into interior shots of the villainsgang but is now also accompanied by the diegetically live sounds of theirvoices. When they hear the beeping, they remove their sound receivingequipment from its hiding place and turn some knobs to clarify the sound,which transforms the beeping into the sudden reverberating voice ofSignal X. Its uncanny, disembodied quality is clearly signified by the upwardglances of his gang, as they look in no particular direction to hear him, asopposed to looking at the sound receiver from which his voice is ostensibly


emerging. As they look up and around, the film turns to shot-reverse shotsof Signal X in his van and the underlings in their hideout. Although hisvoice continues between the two sets of spaces, it is marked differently,abruptly oscillating between his diegetically live voice and his technolo-gically mediated voice echoing from the speakers. It is only in one splitscreen shot that interrupts this shot-reverse shot sequence, that both voicessound 'live?8

In Miss Frontier Mail, despite the victory of those who have the cameraover those who have sound equipment, there is a greater narrative interestin sound over visual technologies. Cinema as a technology of witnessing iskey to the plot, as Fearless Nadias brother films Signal Xs attempt to blowup the train tracks. Yet, despite its key role as evidence, we never actuallyget to see what they filmed, as a point of view shot or as a film within thefilm. In contrast, not only are Signal Xs sound device and the process ofsound transmission meticulously visualized, but the film also plays withother sound devices such as the Morse code machine in the office of thestationmaster with whom Fearless Nadia falls in love. While the railwaysmerely have Morse code with its coded sound, demonstrated in the plot bythe message 'I love you' with which the stationmaster teaches Nadia Morsecode, Signal X has sound equipment that transmits an actual voiced mes-sage. It is also noteworthy that although the camera succeeds in bringingSignal X to justice, it does not succeed in preventing the train accidenthe has plotted, which is, after all, eminently suited to cinematic spectacle.In fact, the diegetic camera fails precisely so as to enable spectacular dis-plays for the films camera.

An unusual alternative to both Lajwantis progressive embodiment ofsound and Miss Frontier Mail's distinctions in audio signature is to be foundin V. Shantarams film Kunku (1937). In this film, sounds and source are kepttogether with a startling literalism, as the film repeatedly shows a gramo-phone record being played as musical accompaniment to the diegeticallylive singer. Coming out of a context of criticism of the Indian sound filmsreliance on song sequences, Kunku is a social problem film that, whileindebted to an expressionist visual style, is also deeply invested in the kindof realism that must explain and justify every sound source. This filmsmany song sequences center on the human voice as few other films at thistime did, including songs with no accompaniment at all or accompanied bythe rhythm of a kitchen utensil used as percussion and, most remarkably,by a gramophone record, often in close-up, that provides and explains' theaccompanying orchestral score to the song. Not only does the musicalaccompaniment to the singing voice have a diegetic source, but the voice


itself, in this case, also predates the practice of playback singing, so that weknow that we are in fact hearing the actual voice of the actress Shanta Apte.While the orchestral score is explained by the gramophone record, there isno difference in sound quality between the recorded music of the orches-tral score and the supposedly live voice of the singer. Both, of course, arebeing transmitted through the mediated soundtrack of the film.

Distinctions between radio and gramophone in the cinema were oftenframed in terms of ideological distinctions between characters. In SunhereDin (dir. Nigam, 1949), for example, two women who are rivals for a radiosinger s love are partly distinguished by their chosen audio technologies.In a strange reversal of social realities, the rich girl listens to his voice onthe radio, while the poor girl owns a gramophone and all of his records.Though we see the gramophone repeatedly, it is never played, but it becomesalmost a fetish object that can be possessed in a way that no radio voicecan. We hear the singer sing only on the radio in sequences that intercutshots of the live singer at the radio station with shots of the women listen-ing. Clearly, live presence on radio, no matter how ephemeral, is favouredover ownership and disembodiment. This is because it is fandom that isbeing explored here, and the illusion of presence is not to be disruptedin this context. Every time the singer is on radio, the film is able to cut toshots of him singing in the studio, which would be more of a stretch withthe gramophone. Since 'the functions of singing, recording, and listening/hearing had become separated by the gramophone', cinema turned to theradio as the greater site of presence.29 It is not a coincidence that most ofthe radio singers in these examples are men. In the rare cases where theembodied radio singer is a woman, she is either anonymous as in Jailor, ora wife as in Lajwanti, or in some other way situated in a context outside thepotential for sexual desire. If a female radio voice incites fandom, it is in awoman, as in Khazanchi (dir. Gidwani, 1941), in which the heroine becomesa fan of the heros sister who is a radio singer.

For Indian audiences, the iconic moment that conflates listening, desireand moral identity located in the voice is in Barsaat ki Raat (dir. Santoshi,1960). Here, the title song alternates shots of the male singer before a micro-phone in a radio station with his female listener in her bedroom, her facepressed against the radio. In a later sequence, a different kind of listeningis marked out as the woman s father recognizes the radio voice of the singerwho has eloped with his daughter. After the song is over, the radio announceridentifies the singer who now sings under an assumed name. His friend,who is helping the father find the couple, remarks, 'He changed his name buthe can t change his voice'. Ideologically, sound is a more reliable indicator of


reality than image, and vocal quality becomes a site of true identity here,not only for the romance plot, but also for the obstacle to romance signifiedby the womans father and the mans friend. Another film that links voiceand moral character is Dil ki Rani (dir. Sinha, 1947). In its imperative toprogressively embody the voice transmitted through acousmatic media suchas the radio, the opening sequence begins with shots of a sky with a radiotower, cutting to Raj, a male singer in a radio station, and then to a womanlistening to the radio. Very quickly the film moves from a de-acousmatisedradio to a focus on recording hearing. The listening woman, with whom thefilm begins, is enamoured of the voice she has heard on radio and correctlyrecognizes the singer s moral worth, against the wishes of her father. As inother films featuring radio stars, the singer is referred to as a poet, reiterat-ing the continuum between speech and song, as also the cultural prefer-ence for musical instruments that approximate the human voice. In thiscase, the reverse is expressed as the main character says of Raj that hisspeaking voice is like a musical instrument. This is a film about hearing andmishearing that also voices a popular critique of film music as a 'disgrace tosociety' through the character of the father who refuses to let the womanlisten to Raj on the radio or even the telephone. The lyrics of one of thesongs in the film also expounds on the modern womans destruction byinstruments of hearing such as the telephone.

Such an attitude to film songs brings us to what I have called Cultural'noise in the context of cinematic sound, which centred on the regulation offilm music in general and the female singing voice in particular. By the endof the first decade of sound, singing stars began to gradually give way toplayback singers, initially known as ghost voices', to whose voices actorsand actresses would lip-synch their songs. The anonymity of ghost voicesbecame very quickly transformed into a parallel stardom, and by the mid-1950s, the female singing voice had lost its diversity and had become themonopoly of a very small number of singers, among whom the voice ofLata Mangeshkar dominated. The transformation of the female singingvoice to literally a single vocal sound has to be placed in the context of awider regulation of music in India. While the gramophone can be moredirectly linked to the lineage of both radio and cinema in India, All-IndiaRadio, which was established in 1936, had the greater administrative powerin regulating cultural' noise. A realignment of the boundaries betweennoise and music produced transformations in Indian music, and one suchnoise that the gramophone decisively regulated was the elimination inrecorded Indian musical performance of unpredictability in length andperformance style by the fixed 3.5-minute length of the 78 rpm record.


With improvisational music remoulded into a fixed length, a markeddivision emerged between the experience of the extended live music per-formance and the short, fixed duration of recorded music. This has ledGerry Farrell to call early Indian music recordings 'no more than snapshotsof particular genres and styles of performance'.30

With radio, there was a continued regulation of musical style and genrethat came from the imperatives of radio programming and the need toreshape Indian music to fit a 'reliable schedule of programs'.31 The 78 rpmphonograph recording became 'a staple of radio broadcasting', with radiocapitalising on the gramophone's effect of training performers £to acceptthe constraints of the 78 rpm recording' because performances that wereopen-ended and improvised' were thought to be 'ill-adapted to radio'.32

Cinema, especially with sound-on-film, might have enabled a return tolonger musical performances, but the need to sell gramophone records offilm songs worked to maintain and reaffirm the standardization already ineffect.

In addition to the regulation of musical duration and predictability, 'musicbecame a matter of administrative attention in All-India Radio (AIR) inother ways that had a direct parallel in the narrowing range of the femalesinging voice in cinema. Most studies of Indian cinema song sequencesmention the hostility of AIR to film music, with a ban in effect from 1953to 1957 when competition from Radio Ceylon forced AIR to start its ownfilm song station.33 Ironically of course, cinema was providing free public-ity to radio exactly at a time when All-India Radio was itself banning filmmusic as a culturally contaminated form. Hindi cinema's version of AIRalso did some ideological work on its behalf, endowing it with an aura ofpresence, with the source of all music and speech on the radio being inevi-tably a live person before a microphone, rather than the gramophonerecord that actually constituted more than half of AIR's programming.In banning film music, B. V. Keskar, the Minister of Information and Broad-casting from 1950 to 1962, wanted to promote a more authentic' form ofnational music with the goal of preserving and saving India's musical heritage.34

Yet, of course, that heritage had already been compromised by gramo-phone's regulation of time and improvisation, especially since AIR reliedequally on gramophone as on live performances for its programming.Institutions such as the gramophone, radio and cinema thus became, indifferent ways, sites of power in which the elimination of noise became'tool[s] for the creation and consolidation of a community'.35

Another form of regulation of cultural noise was the moral 'cleansing' ofthe acoustical properties of the singing voice in radio and cinema, with the


female singing voice reshaped as part of a national project of respectability.36

In 'saving' Indian musical heritage, radio and the state took over the roleof private patronage of music in the context of a highly refined courtesanculture ranging from princely courts to kothas or courtesan establishmentsin cities such as Calcutta. It was in these establishments that some ofthe first generation of female singers recorded by F. W. Gaisberg, such asthe celebrated Gauhar Jan, were musically trained. In its new role as patronof Indian musical heritage, radio mounted a cleansing of the moral conno-tations of such music:

At the turn of the 20th century, classical music in India was regardedas a low-status activity... and was yet to attain its later image, in theWest or in India, as a quintessential symbol of Indian high culture.For women, it was considered a particularly disreputable profession,only one step away from undisguised prostitution.37

Alongside the banning of film music on AIR, there was also a ban on sing-ers and musicians from courtesan culture.38 The heritage music of Indiawas thus defined against the noise of film music on the one side and cour-tesan culture on the other. As an alternative to film music, radio developed'light classical music', and as a move to make classical music more respect-able, radio transformed it into a salaried profession by drawing musicianemployees from the middle classes rather than courtesan culture. In termsof duration, vocal style and musical form, radio broadcasting thus 'led toa narrowing of range' in Indian music.39 One way to account for the even-tual vocal monopoly of Lata Mangeshkar s voice is to think in terms ofa concomitant narrowing in the range of the female singing voice in filmplayback singing.

What is of relevance here is that the moral and class identities of singerswere considered to be marked in the acoustical properties of their voicesalone, since the radio is not a visual medium. Aurally, one marker of thecourtesan' voice was often its loudness, low pitch and thicker timbre. Thechange in the quality of the singing voice was also, in part, a product ofthe impact of recording and amplification technologies. The voice projec-tion necessitated by the absence of amplification technologies had produceda type of female singing voice that was both louder and lower in pitch. It ispossible that the microphone and sound recording may have led to a vocalchange even without the national move to morally cleanse the female voiceof its courtesan affiliations. It is significant that the playback voice thatcame to monopolize cinematic sound was also seemingly brought into


being by its technological reproduction, as accounts of Lata Mangeshkar sun-microphoned voice describe it as being whisper-soft and virtually inau-dible, unlike the voices of her numerous rivals in the mid- to late-1940s,such as Noor Jehan and Shamshad Begum. Thus it is appropriate that Latasvoice is discussed in terms of its affinity to the microphone, which com-pletes and fulfills a voice that is otherwise too soft and thin.40

We see the regulation and cleansing of cinemas female singing voice inthe film Patanga (dir. Rawail, 1949), produced at a moment of transition inthis regulation, when there was still a greater vocal diversity in the cinema.It is a rare instance of a film in which more than one singing voice is givento the same character/actress. Shamshad Begum was the playback singerfor the heroine, a stage singer who falls in love with one of her admirers.At the end of the film, when she renounces her upper-class lover, the finalsong she sings on stage is visually subdued compared to the exuberance ofher earlier performances, but even more startlingly, Shamshad s rich voice isnow replaced by the thinner timbre and higher pitch of Lata Mangeshkar svoice. The substitution, which is nowhere remarked upon in the films dieg-esis, may be said to be a non-diegetic transformation of the timbre, loud-ness and pitch of heroines singing voice, erasing it of associations withpublic performance that Shamshad s voice might have had. The narrativelogic of the substitution of Shamshad Begums voice is clear: as long as theheroine is a stage performer who sings in public, it is Shamshad Begumwho sings for her. But when she decides to sacrifice her happiness and totrick her lover into marrying the woman his parents have chosen for him,her singing voice changes to the lighter tones of Latas voice. Not surprisingly,Latas voice is also given to the girl that the mans family has picked for himas a more suitable wife than the stage performer. Her song sequence isremarkable for the stillness of its performance, where the only movementon screen is a false one: that of her lips in sync with Latas voice. Here, as inthe performance in which Latas voice replaces Shamshads voice, therestrained gestures of performance signal 'the effacement of the female musi-cians body' in an attempt to make her public presence more respectable.41

While recent Hindi films have updated their representation of audiotechnologies, so that the radio is no longer the technology of choice signify-ing desire and presence, one recent film, Dil Se (dir. Ratnam, 1998), returnsextensively to radio and uses it to re-present aurally an event that has beenalready played out visually and also quotes and updates the image of thelistening woman beside the radio that transmits her lover s singing voice. Ina reverse move that disembodies a visual event, the films opening sequenceis repeated for us in its entirety as an aural event, one that is intelligible to


us only because we have seen it first before we have heard it. In the openingsequence, a radio executive, Amar Varma, meets a mysterious woman ona remote train station in the northeast. She ignores his attempts at conver-sation but agrees to let him buy her some tea. When he returns with the teain pouring rain, to his consternation, she is already in a train that is depart-ing from the station. This is a sequence with a predominance of soundeffects over speech (rain, wind and the train). In his obsessive attempt tofind the woman again, Amar Narrates' this event on his radio show. As ifto compensate for the absence of the human voice in the original encounter,his replay of the event is dominated primarily by his own voice and a fewother props by which he reproduces the opening sequences major soundevents, such as the rain, the wind, the tea being poured, the clink of coins,the train whistle and the departing train. He also repeats the entirely one-sided original dialogue, but this time with the added reverb needed toaurally mark the space of the train station on a foggy, rainy night. The auraldoubling of the opening sequence here isn't entirely accurate, as fantasyelements, such as a hero on horseback and a background song sung by amale voice, are added. This song is repeated in its entirety in a later sequencethat strongly echoes the title song in Barsaat ki Raat, with its iconic imageof the female listener before a radio. In Dil Se, the heroine, who arguablyresembles Madhubala, the actress in Barsaat ki Raat, is similarly dressedin white as she listens to the radio, albeit in a far more conflicted mode oflistening than in the earlier film, and with no intercut shots of the radiosinger until the very end of the sequence. Made in 1998 and set contempo-raneously, Dil Se uses a radio in this sequence that is an exact replica of theradio set in Barsaat ki Raat. In this film, there is no space for the femalesinging voice except in a completely separated zone of fantasy, while themale singing voice on radio is also permanently separated from its body.Even though the radio song is associated with Amar through its firstappearance in his aural replay of the opening sequence, he does not sing it.The radio sequence in which this song reappears concludes in the radiostation with a close-up on the face of Amar, a turntable in blurred and shal-low focus behind him. While the song can be associated with a character,such as Amar, it is no longer the emanation of any diegetic body. Listeningas a disembodied practice is naturalized in the contemporary film, with noneed to assert ownership over the songs sentiment through the act of sing-ing. While the song still functions as a signifier of desire and a point ofcontact between lovers, here the voice exists in relation to listeners alone,rather than to singers and listeners. Yet the need to signify the noise-freeaural pleasures of the diegesis dictates that there be no distinction between


broadcasted sound and recorded sound playing in the studio. In fact, thefull sound of the radio song is in sharp contrast to the muted and audiblymediated sounds of diegetically live voices coming from the other room. Itis also in marked contrast, in the radio station, to the silencing of Amar slarge family waiting outside the soundproof booth, who are compelled toreplace voice with gesture. Here, even as it is embodied in technology alone,music replaces and replenishes the audio signature of technology, whilenoise enters the diegesis as sound effects that boast the multiplication ofthe soundtrack.

While it is the voice that structures all of the other sounds in most films,in Hindi cinemas first three decades of sound the recurrent use of the radiovoice gave the singing voice an independent status, situated equally betweensource and auditor, and foregrounding the mediations of audio technolo-gies through the image of the radio and the listening face. More signifi-cantly, the radio voice functioned as a new form of training for viewersin the aural pleasures specific to the cinema in India, visualizing and mod-elling not only modes of listening to an initially disembodied voice, butalso the complex relation between voice and body enabled by the simulta-neously acousmatic and de-acousmatised voice of the playback singer.

Notes

1. Christian Metz, Aural objects' trans. Georgia Gurrieri, *Le percu et le nomine, YaleFrench Studies 60 (1980), p. 29.

2. Attention to sounds material properties is what Pierre Schaeffer terms 'reducedlistening' (cited in Michel Chion, ed. Audio-Vision, Claudia Gorbman [trans.]. New York:Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 29). For an early attempt at a culturally grounded analy-sis of sound in Indian cinema, see Shoma A. Chatterji, 'The Culture Specific Use of Sound inIndian Cinema', Unpublished paper presented at the International Symposium on Soundin Cinema in London, 15-18 April 1999, pp. 1-27, accessed on 5 September 2006 at http://www.filmsound.org/india/. She focuses on sound effects that have particular cultural mean-ing, such as the offscreen or onscreen sound of women's glass bangles.

3. Chion (1994), p. 18.4. See Neepa Majumdar, 'The embodied voice: Stardom and song sequences in popular

Hindi cinema, in Arthur Knight and Pamela Wojcik (eds), Soundtrack Available: Essays onFilm and Popular Music. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001, pp. 161-81.

5. F. W. Gaisbergs first Indian sound recordings on wax cylinder were made in 1902,and the first Indian sound recording factories were established in 1908 under the Gramo-phone and Typewriter Ltd. Company, which eventually became the Gramophone Companyof India, which owned exclusive rights over the HMV trademark in India; G. N. Joshi,'Concise history of the phonograph industry in India, Popular Music, 7.2 (May 1988),

http://www.filmsound.org/india/



p. 148; and Gerry Farrell, 'The early days of the gramophone industry in India: Historical,social and musical perspectives', British Journal of Ethnomusicaology, 2 (1993), p. 32. In 1925,electrical sound replaced manually operated sound recording. While All-India Radio wasestablished in 1935-1936, 'radio broadcasting made a slow and uncertain start' in Indiastarting in the mid-1920s. David Lelyveld, 'Upon the subdominant: administering music onAll-India Radio', Social Text, 39 (Summer, 1994), p. 113.

6. Peter Manuel, 'Popular music in India: 1901-1986', Popular Music, 7.2 (May 1988),p. 172.

7. Joshi(1988),p. 147.8. Quoted in Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Geoffrey Winthrop-

Young and Michael Wutz (trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999, p. 45.9. B. D. Garga, The Art of Cinema: An Insiders Journey Through Fifty Years of Film

History. New Delhi: Penguin, 2005, p. 14.10. J. B. H. Wadia, Those Were the Days, Parts One and Two, unpublished manuscript.

Portions of this manuscript published as: J. B. H. Wadia, 'Those were the days', Cinema VisionIndia, 1.1 (January 1980), pp. 91-9; and 'JBH in Talkieland', Cinema Vision India 1.2 (April1980), pp. 82-3.

11. Joshi(1988),pp. 153-4.12. Raqs Media Collective, 'Jal Mistry' in The History and Practice of Cinematography

in India, 2. Archived at http://www.sarai.net/cinematography/camera.htm (accessed on28 February 2008).

13. Ghion(1994),p. 131.14. Times of India 23 March 1931 rpt. in K. N. Subramaniam with Ratnakar Tripathy

(eds), Flashback: Cinema in the Times of India. Bombay: The Times of India, 1990, p. 89.15. James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation,

Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, pp. 138-9.16. Metz(1980),p.29.17. Times of India 18 March 1931 (rpt. in Subramaniam with Tripathy (1990), p. 87).18. T. S. Mahadeo, 'The talkie people, Cinema Vision India, 1.2 (April 1980), p. 47.19. Ibid.20. See Lastra, chapter 4 for an overview of these debates.21. Nezih Erdogan, 'Mute bodies, disembodied voices: Notes on sound in Turkish

popular cinema', Screen, 43.3 (Autumn 2002), p. 240.22. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, Claudia Gorbman (trans.). New York: Columbia

University Press, 1999, p. 21.23. Bela Balazs, 'Theory of film: Sound', in Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (eds), Film

Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, p. 120.24. Ibid.25. Chion (1999), p. 21.26. Chion (1994), p. 63.27. Majumdar (2001), pp. 163-5.28. In simultaneously representing both transmission and reception of his voice in this

sequence, the film departs from any comparison to The Testament of Dr. Mabuse that it

http://www.sarai.net/cinematography/camera.htm


might invite, because at no point does Signal Xs voice remain completely acousmatic forthe film audience, even if it is for his underlings. This comparison with Dr. Mabuse is not asfar-fetched as it might seem, given the well-documented links between Indian and Germancinematic personnel in the 1930s.

29. Amanda J. Weidman, Singing the Classical Voicing the Modern: The PostcolonialPolitics of Music in South India. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, p. 265.

30. Farrell(1993),p.48.31. Lelyveld(1994),p. 113.32. Ibid., pp. 114-15.33. Chori Chori (Anant Thakur, 1956) parodies this situation early in the film, when

a radio starts its Tilmi program', announcing itself as Radio Ceylon, and then plays thepopular Raj Kapoor film song Awara hoon'. The parody is sharper because the hero of ChoriChori is also played by Kapoor.

34. Lelyveld (1994), pp. 116-118.35. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Brian Massumi (trans.).

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, p. 6.36. For a discussion of the shaping of the respectable female singing voice in the context

of South Indian classical vocal styles, see Weidman. See also Sanjay Joshi, Fractured Modernity:

The Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press,2001 for a discussion of middle-class male interventions in and successful takeover of cour-tesan culture that occurred in Lucknow through a reframed discourse of public health andnorms of cultural refinement.

37. Farrell(1993),p. 37.38. Lelyveld (1994), p. 11.39. Ibid., p. 122.40. Harish Bhimani, In Search of Lata Mangeshkar. n.p. India: HarperCollins, 1995,

pp. 211-12 and 235.41. Weidman (2006), p. 132.

18African American Film Sound

Scoring Blackness

Ruth Doughty

Introduction

The term 'black music' has long been a cause for contention. What do wemean by music being 'black', or more specifically in the case of this chapter,African American? The music industry has typically marketed productsvia the categorization of specific genres: for example, jazz, blues, soul, funkand rap. These generic types are often classified as 'black music'. Philip Taggvehemently debates the suitability of such an essentializing label, as he cor-rectly argues that aesthetic practice is not linked to biology:

Very rarely is any musical evidence given for the specific skin colouror continental origin of the music being talked about [namely blackmusic in this instance] and when evidence is presented, it usuallyseems pretty flimsy to me from a musicological view point. (1987: 2)1

While Tagg's position is admirable and sensitive to multi-cultural society,he fails to address that 'black music' is systematically deployed by the filmindustry to gain swift entrance into the African American condition.

Before we turn to our attention to the historical condition of black America,let us first consider industrial shorthand in filmmaking. Mainstream filmslook to inform an audience in a concise and unambiguous way. Cues aregiven to connote location, period setting, and characterization. These are

325


typically communicated through visual or aural signs. Film as a mediumhas to rely on such devices, as there is a prescribed period of time in whicha narrative can occur. These limitations are not entirely due to time restric-tion; economic constraints also play a role. Directors work within a setbudget, and building up characters* back story by including numerous loca-tions and investing in period decor can significantly impinge on finances.

Historically, music has been used by the film industry to alleviate suchobstacles. Specific modes and scales have been habitually applied to reducecomplex issues of nationality and ethnicity to a sequence of tones and half-tones. Nevertheless, this form of melodic abbreviation lends itself to therestrictive limitations imposed when producing a film. The most predomi-nant modes that feature in film scores are the Ionian and Aeolian: these aremore commonly referred to as the major and minor scale, respectively.As most Western music conforms to these two sequences, the saturationof such melodies frequently renders them invisible to the general public.Conversely, the Dorian scale, with its sharpened sixth and minor structure,is used to connote Celtic culture as being different. The Phrygian mode isalso known as the 'Gypsy' scale. Here the flattened second, once more ina minor framework, evokes an exotic Flamenco or Arabic setting.

'Black Music'as Spatial and Geographical Shorthand

I have already established that 'black music' is a problematic turn of phrase.However, the inclusion of blue notes, call-and-response, improvisatorytechniques and syncopation, which Tagg justly attributes to other non-blackmusical cultures, are adopted time and time again by the film industry torepresent African American identity. The aforementioned traits are keycomponents found in musical genres that have an associative link, albeit ifonly in cinematic terms, to black America. Accordingly, 'black music' isoften used by the industry as a spatial or temporal cue. Depending on thecultural competency of the spectator, jazz, blues, gospel and other forms ofblack music can provide orientation within a filmic narrative as through-out cinematic history they have prolifically featured to evoke geographicallocations or period settings.

Let us now consider in detail the way black musical motifs can be deployedin mainstream cinema. 'Negro Spirituals', first of all, are often introducedbecause of their associative links with the Deep South. Spirituals evoke theperiod of slavery, a topic which is rarely explored by the film industry. Thetelevision mini-series Roots (Marvin J. Chomsky et al., ABC, 1977), scoredby Quincy Jones and Gerald Fried is one such example. Roots included the

African American Film Music 327

traditional spiritual Another Man Has Gone' as the main motif; and itsuse of blues notes and lilting rhythms clearly sets the scene of the sleepySouth. The spirituals fall into two categories: namely, the sorrow songs andjubilees. Sorrow songs are regularly featured in films that represent civilrights issues, as the melancholy tones evoke black suffering at the handsof racist white supremacists. Sorrow songs are used in the films MississippiBurning (dir. Parker, 1988) and A Time to Kill (dir. Schumacher, 1996).Conversely, jubilees are celebratory songs, antecedent to gospel music.Jubilees are often introduced to a soundtrack to symbolize community andempowerment.

The blues, on the other hand, is a style of music that connotes a ruralpast, embittered by economic disenfranchisement. The Mississippi Deltablues music has become synonymous with the Great Depression and hoboculture following the devastation of the Midwest farmlands. In recent years,the blues have been used as a backdrop for the wilderness of the Americanplains. Ry Cooder adapted an old Delta blues tune written by Blind WillieJohnson, for the score Paris, Texas (dir. Wenders, 1984) in order to empha-size the hobo-like character of Travis Henderson. Conversely, rather thanbeing used to illustrate the pastoral wasteland, the electric blues are oftenused to connote the excitement of lively urban life.

Traditional Jazz can also be utilized in film to symbolize both placeand era. It is often used to evoke the 1920s and generically is often featuredas an accompaniment to gangster movies. More specifically, jazz can beemployed as a backdrop to the period of prohibition due to its associationwith speakeasies: for example, in Sergio Leones Once Upon a Time inAmerica (1984). However, the film industry has predominantly used jazz tosignify the imposing isolation and alienation of the city as featured inElmer Bernstein's score for The Man with the Golden Arm (dir. Preminger,1955) and the iconic jazz saxophone in Bernard Herrmanns score for TaxiDriver (dir. Scorsese, 1976). The lonely jazz wail echoes through the emptystreets.

Rap music has been the most recent addition to the film music canon,and like jazz, is ultimately tied to an urban locale. During the early 1990sthere was an emergence of movies featuring the impoverished ghetto, hometo the black angry male youth. John Singletons Boyz (n the Hood (1991) andthe Hughes brothers' Menace II Society (1993) were amongst the social-realist films that introduced gang culture to our screens. In an endeavour toauthentically represent the specific demographic, the directors accompa-nied their pictures with rap music. Rap has since become a sonic signaturefor the confrontational militant African American.


Through the day-to-day consumption of film and television, the audi-ence is culturally conditioned to make associative links between melodicand instrumental choices and identifiable locales or time periods. Whenthese associative links are applied to African American cultural formats thesymbiotic relationship becomes further infused with the history of racialinequality.

Appropriating Race

Although we have established that musical notation is not related to anygenetic blueprint, we cannot overlook the fact that black music struggles tobecome disentangled from the African American experience. Beneath thereverberations of the honky-tonk piano, the lonely moan of the harmonicaand the flattened notes of the blues scale, the dehumanizing weight ofslavery has become fossilized. The traces of slavery have not become erasedover time but instead act as a palimpsest, open for reinterpretation, whilethe impression of the past is faded, yet ever present. The film industry hasrepeatedly used the historical association between black music and AfricanAmerican affliction to its advantage. In particular when scoring for filmblack music has been culturally exploited by white composers; on the otherhand black composers, musicians and directors have consistently beenplaced in a position of struggle for control of their musical heritage.

From the moment the illustrious blackface performer Al Jolson openedhis mouth to sing in Alan Croslands 1927 film The Jazz Singer, black musicdeveloped a profitable synergy with the film industry. In spite of the filmstitle foregrounding jazz music, which is identifiably rooted in the AfricanAmerican experience, the film told the tale of a white Jewish son turninghis back on the Yiddish heritage of his immigrant parents in favour ofembracing the cultural currency of the New World, Ironically this NewWorld was epitomized by the vernacular expression of the African Americanpeople rather than the traditional melodic refrains of white society.

In the 1920s jazz had become a signifier of modernity and industrialdevelopment; jazz signalled change and hope. This period was especiallymomentous for black Americans. After the war effort, both at home andabroad, there was an air of optimism that African Americans would finallybe accepted as U.S. citizens. This sense of hope was further fuelled by whiteinterest in black cultural forms. The Harlem Renaissance inspired whitehigh society to flock to black neighbourhoods to hear artists such as DukeEllington, Cab Galloway and Ethel Waters performing at the Cotton Cluband other black establishments. This bourgeoning interest coincided with


the mass migration of African Americans from the racist South to the liberalNorth. The North held promise of employment and an opportunity to fleethe historical scar of the rural South. Ironically as white America fashion-ably adopted jazz as a new progressive national cultural commodity, theyfailed to recognize that the dissonant chordal patterns and angular rhyth-mic motifs could be seen as an index of human suffering and a growingagitation for change.

'Black music' and its function in film can be seen as a microcosm ofprejudice within the film industry and the wider issue of American racerelations. From the birth of the Hollywood studios, African Americanshave been consistently exploited by the industry, overlooked or had theircultural voice appropriated by others. When we consider Hollywood's leg-endary film composers, for example Erich Wolfgang Korngold, BernardHerrmann, Alex North, Max Steiner, Elmer Bernstein, Miklos Rozsa, DimitriTiomkin, Victor Young, Danny Elfman, Michael Nyman, Jerry Goldsmithand Howard Shore, it soon becomes apparent that not only are the afore-mentioned white and male but they are all from Jewish backgrounds. In thegolden age of the Hollywood studio system the industry was predomi-nantly run by a handful of Jewish moguls, which may explain the influx ofJewish immigrant composers working in the field of film music. Interest-ingly, many Jewish film composers made their mark by infusing their scoreswith black musical idioms. Why so many Jewish musicians adopted theAfrican American musical vernacular rather than developing the EasternEuropean voice of their ancestry can be seen as a mixture of populardemand and socio-political necessity.

As the fight against white supremacy was being openly challenged in thestruggle for civil rights, Hitler s fascist regime took hold in Europe, as thou-sands of Jews were sent to extermination camps. With Americas hesitancyin joining the allied forces and entering World War II, Hollywood headedby Jewish studio moguls, felt uncomfortable in openly exploring Yiddishculture. Michael Rogin argues in his book Blackface, White Noise: JewishImmigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot that Jewish subjects and charac-ters disappeared from the screen, and instead Hollywood produced numer-ous films dealing with black oppression at the hands of racist whites. Thesefilms were metaphors for the Jewish plight in Europe:

Hitler s rise brought to an end Hollywood's cycle of Jewish generational-conflict film. Responding to the Nazi seizure of power, and to thefascist sympathies of the Hays/Breen Production Code Administra-tion (the industry group with the power to censor films), the Jewish


moguls evaded anti-Semitism by simply eliminating Jews from thescreen . . . As the Jewish movies were fading away, Hollywood didproduce the generational conflict film about black passing Imitationof Life (1934). Thanks largely to the performance of Fredi Washingtonas the light-skinned African American, Imitation of Life opened awindow on the issue of racism2 (1996: 209).

Rogiris book ironically highlights that during this period, the traditionallyJewish Hollwood studios were adorning a metaphorical blackface to relatenarratives about the mistreatment of the ethnic Other. The movementaway from the Jewish ancestry could in part be read as a sign of culturaldesperation. It seems apparent that numerous composers and directorswanted to disassociate themselves from their racial inheritance; JacobGershowitz became George Gershwin, whereas Julius Korngold selectedthe Germanic-sounding Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Whether this was merelya process of embracing their American identity, the Jewish preoccupationwith black cultural forms can be read as a masking device. Nevertheless,the appropriation of black musical idioms had endured a lengthy and prof-itable history for white composers.

Prior to the Civil War, American popular song was founded on the folkmelodies of Celtic and European traditions. As the divided nation turnedits attention to the issue of race, black musical tropes gained admittanceinto the populist canon. This tradition began with people such as StephenFoster who attempted to recreate the lyrical melodies of black slave com-munities. The adaptation process resulted in sanitized versions of blackfolk expression, infused with rural plantation mythology of the 'happydarky'. Rather than retaining the essential spirit of black culture, Fostertranscribed the melodies so that they conformed to Western counterpoint.This in turn made the music more easily acceptable to a white audience.Foster rid the black music of its quarter tones, guttural inflections andimprovisatory technique; and while he was not of the Jewish faith, his workinfluenced the next generation of composers who predominantly were.Collectively, they were recognized via their place of work, Tin Pan Alley.

Fosters fascination with black melodies in the 1850s was pivotal in thedevelopment of American popular song. Black musicians such as ScottJoplin and Jelly Roll Morton further entrenched the rhythmic drive andsyncopation as an essential component of popular music. George Gersh-win, Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin, while working on Tin Pan Alley, alllooked to black folk culture in order to create many memorable classics.Unfortunately, in the hands of white composers the adoption of black


music was also closely tied to the propagation of negative African Americanstereotypes. Samuel A. Floyd Jr, points out that this was inscribed in themusic from the earliest borrowings:

With the onset of the 'coon song' craze in the 1880s, Tin Pan Alleyconsolidated the production and marketing of sheet music, produc-ing such titles as Ernest Hogaris All Coons Look Alike to Me' (1896)and 'Da Coon Dat Had de Razor' (1885). Through such titles and theirillustrated covers, Tin Pan Alley consistently portrayed the African-American male as a fun-loving dandy, a chicken- or ham-lovingglutton, a razor-totin' thief, gambler, or drunkard, or an outrageouslyunfaithful husband or lover. The black female was presented in theseillustrations either as a very black, fat, large-lipped mammy orcarouser, or as a beautiful light-skinned cYaller Rose of Texas'... In thelate nineteenth century, the advertising of musical products becamethe primary means of developing, perpetuating, and communicatingnegative images of black people in American society (1995: 60).

Floyd highlights that the cultural borrowing of African American expres-sion is inherently tied to economic gain and the misrepresentation of theethnic Other. It is this misrepresentation that we should be particularlyalert to. The film industry has always had a fascination with the exotic,ethnic Other' and African American identity has habitually been exagger-ated and fetishized for this very reason. In the same way that film scoresoften reduce the complexity of black identity to a sequence of notes, andinstrumentation, the visual stereotyping of African Americans is equallyproblematic.

Porgy andBess

In order to illustrate the uncomfortable issue of cultural exploitation,stereotyping, and 'black music' let us now turn our attention to GeorgeGershwin's Porgy and Bess. I have chosen this case study for a numberof reasons. Firstly, Gershwin's music is consistently featured on manysoundtracks, including: Once Upon a Time in America (dir. Leone, 1984),Chocolat (dir. Hallstrom, 2000), Harts War (dir. Hoblit, 2002) and the Farrellybrothers' Stuck on You (2003). The frequent appearance of Gershwin's musicon contemporary soundtracks illustrates its longevity and cultural signifi-cance. Secondly, Gershwin's attempt to create a 'Folk Opera' is paradoxical.The catchy tunes from Porgy and Bess have become entrenched in the


popular music repertoire; therefore, its reputation is not necessarily oper-atic, but it is more in keeping with the musical. Thus, the opera has con-stantly received criticism due to its attempt to fuse high and low art forms;in the same vein, film has struggled to gain recognition in line with moretraditional artistic practices. Furthermore, opera is akin to cinema in thatboth mediums marry music and image. Finally, Otto Preminger controver-sially brought the opera to the screen in 1959. The film is exemplary in thatit stars many of the finest African American actors of all time: SidneyPoitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis Jr, Pearl Bailey and DiahannCarroll. The film has since become buried; therefore it is important that wediscover the reasoning behind this.

The novel Porgy was written by the white author Dubose Heyward in1925 and tells of a poor black community living on Catfish Row. The leadprotagonist Porgy is a crippled beggar who is pulled around the neigh-bourhood by a cart and goat. Bess is a whore and drug addict, who findsrefuge and love in the arms of Porgy. Moreover, the character of Crown isa violent, murdering brute and Sportin' Life is a city dandy dependent onthe consumption and selling of narcotics. Throughout the narrative, thecommunity is depicted as backward, superstitious and embroiled in gam-bling, murder and vice. George Gershwin had long exhibited a passion forblack music in his compositions. Accordingly he, along with his lyricistbrother Ira, looked to adapt the colourful, parochial novel into a 'FolkOpera. In order to immerse himself in black customs and listen to musicaltropes first-hand, Gershwin spent time observing and studying the Gullahpeople of Folly Island, just off the coast of South Carolina. The operaopened in 1935 and has long since been one of the most problematic cul-tural artefacts in American history.

The main concern black artists, critics and the general public have withGershwin's Porgy and Bess is its adoption of stereotypical Negro characters.In addition to the main characters, other members that reside on CatfishRow are either fishermen or unemployed. Many African Americans feelthat these caricatures are not a realistic portrayal of black life; instead, theyhelp reaffirm the negative stereotypes that have been responsible for misin-forming white society.

The opera has continued to confuse critics since its formation, due to itbeing too white for a black audience and too black for its white counterparts.The African American composer Hall Johnson claimed that any momentof authenticity was due to the energy and heritage of the black performersinvolved. Herein lies another problem: Porgy and Bess provided AfricanAmerican entertainers the opportunity to appear on stage in front of a


white audience, yet the chances for black operatic performers were restrictedto the folk opera and nothing else. As the opera was not regarded favour-ably with black society - to perform in Porgy and Bess often meant losingface and selling out. This became apparent when Samuel Goldwyn setabout turning the opera into a film in 1959.

Harry Belafonte openly refused to play Porgy, although it is debatableas to whether he was ever offered the role. Ultimately the part of thecrippled beggar went to Sidney Poitier. Poitier had based his career upuntil this point on attempting to rework the derogatory stereotypes thatHollywood had long used to represent African American identity. It is fairto say that Poitier was very much the integrationist hero. He constantlyplayed the middle-class, conservative, non-sexual acceptable face ofblack America. Poitier worked to give the African American communitynoble black heroes. For many, his acceptance of the role of Porgy was astep too far in the wrong direction. Gershwin's lyrics 'I got plenty of nuttinand nuttins plenty for me* were not in keeping with the ethos of the civilrights movement which was steadily building in momentum. Poitier wasaware of the disappointment many felt at his acceptance of the role butlater admitted he had been threatened with never working in Hollywoodagain.

The film industry was prepared to enforce the perpetuation of back-ward, impoverished-yet-happy black stereotypes: the same caricatures thatFoster had drawn on almost one hundred years previously. Due to pro-longed opposition from the NAACP (National Association for the Advance-ment of Colored People) and famous African Americans including LorraineHansberry, the film was taken out of circulation by the executors of boththe Gershwin and Heyward estates. Nowadays it is incredibly rare to hap-pen upon a print and the quality of those in existence is far from ideal.Preminger s film has become an embarrassment, and as a result it has beenrendered invisible. The film, like the original opera, has found itself in aparadoxical position. Visually the film depicts harmful, derogatory carica-tures of black society but musically Gershwin was looking to introducewhite America to the multi-faceted writing styles of black America. Withthe rise of political correctness this great musical text has become margin-alized, in the same way that Hollywood traditionally marginalized AfricanAmericans on screen. This film gives evidence of the mistreatment of blackrace and the cultural exploitation and white paternalism of Gershwin,Heyward and Preminger. The precarious relationship between Porgy andBess, white appropriation of black culture and stereotyping is quoted anddeveloped in the work of Spike Lee.


Spike Lee: Signifying on'Summertime'

Spike Lee is arguably the most famous African American director of all time.His work is frequently controversial and often contradictory. He refuses todefine his personal standpoint relating to African American politics, yet isfrequently outspoken regarding American race relations and the GeorgeBush administration. Regardless of his political persuasion, the authoritywith which Lee selects music for his films highlights his talent as not onlya director but also as an aficionado of black American music. Lees eclectictaste in music by black artists results in the pairing of such diverse actsas Stevie Wonder, John Coltrane, Curtis Mayfield and Public Enemy.Additionally Lee always supplements the popular music in his films withan original orchestral score. Initially, the directors father Bill Lee wasresponsible for composing scores for his films, but since the film JungleFever (1991) he has established a collaborative relationship with the com-poser Terence Blanchard.

Blanchard began his professional career playing trumpet with Art Blakey sJazz Messengers. He then teamed up with fellow messenger Donald Harrisonfor a few projects before going solo. Lees tastes in popular music arecomplemented by Blanchard s understanding of black musical tropes andWestern orchestral writing. Their partnership has resulted in originalscores rooted in the black vernacular and heightened by a sense of politicalawareness. Prior to working with Lee, Blanchard wrote for the film SugarHill (dir. Ichaso, 1994). In this feature he performed with a small jazzensemble. He introduced a muted jazz trumpet refrain as an accompani-ment to a series of flashbacks. However, as the film progresses the melan-choly melodic approach gives way to harsh atonalities to portray aggravationand hurt. Eves Bayou (dir. Lemmons, 1997) also includes a deliciously richscore executed by a more mature and experienced Blanchard:

The dark meanderings of the bayou, made more mysterious by theoverhanging Spanish moss and the switch to black and white film asdeath is remembered or predicted and underscored by the darklybluesy orchestral accompaniment (Ellison: 2005: 223).3

Throughout the film there are allusions to the idea of memory beinglikened to ca tapestry of intricate texture and the tapestry tells a story andthe story is our past'.4 This description can also be applied to Blanchard smusic in the film. He skilfully blends strings with the distinctive moan ofthe harmonica. Colour is further enhanced as he deftly peppers the filmwith musical flavours associated with the Louisiana bayous.


The score for Lees film Bamboozled (2000) is most relevant to the keyarguments raised here, as the music offers additional layers to the criti-cisms the film poses. The narrative features a television writer, Delacroix(Damon Wayans), who in fear of breaking his contract with the studio dueto his failed portrayals of middle-class African American issues, sets out ona mission to get fired. Consequently he looks to regurgitate the distastefulminstrel show in an effort to lose his job. However, the American public gowild and blackface becomes the latest fad to take the country by storm.

The main musical theme which dominates the majority of the film isemployed to represent the idea of Slacking' up. It appears in all the sceneswhere burnt cork is being applied as the actors prepare to perform inblackface. What is most interesting about this musical theme is its firstappearance in the film. The music is initially used to introduce the characterJulius Hopkins, known to his gang as cBig Blak Afrika'. The character, playedby real-life rapper Mos Def, is used to represent the contemporary stereo-type of the violent black gangsta. In placing the metaphorical blackfacetheme alongside the introduction of the militant rapper, Lee is making thecontroversial connection between the modern-day rapper being equiva-lent to the derogatory minstrel figure of the past

The secondary theme introduced to the narrative is key, as it is a rendi-tion of George Gershwin's 'Summertime'. The 'Summertime' motif appearsin various guises throughout the film and is placed in accompanimentto scenes that explore the uneasy, yet lucrative, relationship between blackstereotyping and financial gain. Blanchards performance of'Summertime'on muted trumpet is not instantly recognizable as it does not conform tothe rhythmic patterns of the original lyrics. However, this is typical of theblack cultural practice of'signifying'

Signifying is a theory expanded on by several writers and then popular-ized by the African American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr in his work, TheSignifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (1988).5

Signifying evolved as a survival technique introduced to youngsters withinslave communities. It was a teaching tool, which asserted that through witand words, punishment could be deflected. Signifying stems from the ideaof getting one over', or outwitting a rival through the art of boasting. Thepractice of signifying is founded on the idea of improvisation, humour,manipulation and quick thinking - all of which are present in Blanchard sperformance of Gershwins aria.

The sparse, acoustic tone of the piece is laid back and lazy, evoking nos-talgia for the mythic Deep South, the location of Porgy and Bess. However,the music is used in accompaniment to Delacroix's decision to resurrectthe minstrel show. In pairing minstrelsy with Porgy and Bess, Lee and


Blanchard are raising age-old questions regarding authenticity, authorshipand appropriation of black cultural forms. To complicate matters, 'Sum-mertime' is a recognizable classic from the jazz canon. Black jazz artistshave continuously and consciously re-appropriated the ballad and throughthe skills of improvisation, quoted and transformed it. Nevertheless, inusing the motif in conjunction with the ideas of stereotyping for monetaryreward, Lee could be accused of exposing the reality behind the AfricanAmerican adoption of the tune. Lee is suggesting that the motivation forperforming 'Summertime' as a black artist is a matter of survival, a case ofearning some cash.

When the theme next appears, these ideas are solidified as the famoustune is heard alongside images of the grotesque turn of the century folk artcollectable, 'the Jolly Nigger Bank', once more connecting the fetishizationof black identity and economics. Hie instrumentation at this point is farmore dense, as it is performed by a small ensemble including clarinet, oboeand jazz guitar. It is still written in the lazy jazz style, but now it involvesmoving voices in the accompanying strings. This is more in keeping withthe way Gershwin realized the melody in his opera. The contrapuntal tex-ture is compliant with orchestral writing, yet at no point does the jazz stylebecome sanitized in the way that Gershwin's opera often does. However,with each subsequent reprisal of the theme the motif is slowly stripped ofits jazz inflection, its black roots.

Lawrence Starr pointed out that ' "Summertime" is always used ironi-cally; its gentle words and flowing music portray a world that lies totallyoutside the reality of life in Catfish Row' (1984: 31).6 Starrs research sug-gests that whenever the peaceful lullaby appears it is quickly juxtaposedwith violence and tragedy. The principle of juxtaposing beauty and uglinessis in fact the premise of the film Bamboozled. Lee skilfully positions AfricanAmerican culture in a volatile environment. Black art has always founditself in an impossible situation, hinged between fetishized fascination andsubstantive creativity. Lee in his borrowing of 'Summertime' exploits themusical motif's cultural and historical baggage. Lee is posing questionsconcerning the role of black art and the reception, commodification andmisappropriation of black cultural forms by white society. This, however,was not the first time Lee had alluded to Porgy and Bess.

Do the Right Thing introduces the use of various leitmotifs, one of whichhas a distinct flavour of George Gershwin's infamous aria 'Summertime'.Unlike the direct quotation in Bamboozled, echoes of the melody are onlysuggested. The theme written by Bill Lee, Spike's father, follows the samecontour as 'Summertime', yet does not emphasize the lilting motion achieved


by dotted rhythms in the original. However, the free style interpretation,performed by Branford Marsalis, gives the suggestion of dotted rhythms ashe skilfully manipulates the tune. Bill Lees leitmotif seems to concentrateon the Gershwin lyric 'and the living is easy* Marsalis introduces the dis-tinctive rhythmic idea and then transforms it; yet the essence of Gershwin's'Summertime remains evident. This impression is given greater validitythrough the accompanying dialogue that occurs between the characters ofMother Sister and Da Mayor:

Da Mayor: Am t nuthin' like the smell of fresh flowers, Don't youAgree, Mother Sister? Summertime, all ya can smell isthe garbage. Smell overpowers everything, especially softsweet smell of flower... If you don't mind, I'm gonna setright here, catch a breeze or two, then be on my way . . .Thank the Lord, the sun is going down, its hot as blazes.Yes Jesus.

It is of interest to note the use of the word 'summertime' and the manyreferences to the heat within Da Mayors attempt to court Mother Sister.Could this be Spike Lee signifying on the ballad 'Summertime'? Is heplaying verbal games? If so, then this would suggest that the word 'nuthin'may be alluding to the ballad 'I Got Plenty of Nuttin' sung by Porgy in theoriginal stage play. Likewise should Da Mayors gesture that he 'catch abreeze or two, then be on [his] way' be another reference to a song fromPorgy and Bess - that being 'Oh Lawd, I'm On My Way'? Whether the viewerchooses to accept these subtle linguistic similarities or not the evidencecannot be denied when we consider the musical notation. Both melodiesfollow the same contour, the harmonies and intervals utilized by Bill Leeare based around minor thirds and blue notes, and additionally Lee empha-sizes a rhythmic motif which replicates the inflections found in the phrase'and the livin' is easy'.

Due to the familiarity of 'Summertime' worldwide, its employment insuch poignant scenes in the films of Spike Lee demands recognition. Thelullaby refuses to remain in the background; it fights for our attention.Harold Cruse claimed that Porgy and Bess was 'the most contradictorycultural symbol ever created in the Western World'; as not only is it a mix-ture of populist and high art forms but also an undisputable example ofcultural appropriation and exploitation.7 What is clear, however, is thatthe film industry has historically been reliant on shorthand, both visuallyand musically, to represent race and ethnicity. Accordingly African American


identity has become abbreviated to a set of formulaic semiotic codes.What Spike Lee proves is that through the re-appropriation, quotation andtransformation, problematic cultural texts can be loaded with politicalaccountability. Porgy and Bess prompts interesting questions regarding themarginalization of cultural artefacts. The fact is that Preminger s film hasbeen withdrawn from circulation, along with the equally controversialDisney classic Song of the South (dir. Harve Foster & Wilfred Jackson, 1946),is evidence of embarrassment. Yet we need to consider the appropriatenessof trying to erase evidence of cultural exploitation and racism within thefilm industry. Porgy and Bess is a symbolic text, as it is grotesquely awkwardyet innovatively brilliant on so many levels.

Returning to the film Bamboozled, and the scene where Delacroix isgiven the lolly Nigger Bank' the dialogue addresses problems that havebeen raised throughout this debate:

Delacroix: And what do we call this thing?Sloan: It is called a 'Jolly Nigger Bank! Ain't that something!

And its not a repro, its circa turn of the centuryDelacroix: Thank you I guessSloan: I thought it was appropriateDelacroix: And is that good or bad?Sloan: Well, got a brand new successful show so youTl be going

to the bank. Plus I love these collectibles... It reminds meof a time in our history, in this country, when we wereconsidered inferior, subhuman and we should neverforget.

Lee is issuing a warning to African Americans working within culturalindustries. His message warns against colluding in the regurgitation ofarchaic stereotypes. Lee, like many young African Americans, is a professedcollector of grotesque black collectables. This newfound interest in thederogatory essentialization of black identity is testimony to contemporaryAfrican Americans reclaiming their past. Therefore, maybe it is time for therecirculation of Porgy and Bess. Rather than trying to bury the past, it isnow time to thoroughly interrogate racially problematic artefacts.

Notes

1. This has been taken from the online version of Philip Taggs 'Open Letter about 'BlackMusic', 'Afro-American Music' and 'European Music' available from his website at http://

http://www.tagg.org/articles/opelet.html


www.tagg.org/articles/opelet.html. Interestingly when Tagg re-edited the piece in 1989 forthe journal Popular Music, 8.3, 285-98, this section was omitted.

2. Douglas Sirk's 1959 remake limitation of life concludes with an impassioned endingwith Mahalia Jackson singing Trouhle of the World'. Here the sorrow song resonates witha historical sense of African American martyrdom. However it can also be read as AnnieJohnsons (Juanita Moore) riposte to her white counterpart Laura Meredith (Lana Turner).

3. M. Ellison, (2005), 'Resonating screens: echoes of Africa in Charles Burnetts To SleepWith Anger and Kasi Lemmon', Eve's Bayou, African American Review, 39(1-2), 223.

4. Eves Bayou (Kasi Lemmons: 1997).5. Henry Louis Gates Jr, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary

Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.6. Lawrence Starr, Towards a reevaluation of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess\ American

Music, 2.2(1984), 31.7. Harold Cruse,c "Hollywood Has Taken on a New Color": The Yiddish Blackface of

Samuel Goldyns Porgy and Bess', in J. Gill (ed.), Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film andPopular Music. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001, p. 348.


19Sound in Italian Cinema

But the Bells are the Voice of God: Diegetic Music inPost-War Italian Cinema

Aldan O'Donnell

The ambulanti, those itinerant entrepreneurs who brought cinema toItalian fairgrounds and theatres at the cusp of the twentieth century, oftenencumbered themselves with early sound reproduction devices. From1902 on, wondrous-sounding contraptions such as the 'Graphophon', the'Cinemofono', the Tsosincronizzatore', or the 'Cronophone' promised anaudience sound to go with its images.1

Quickly though, live musical ensembles of varying sizes became a regu-lar feature of ultramontane cinematic projection2 and it seems that as earlyas 1906, original scores were being written to accompany specific films.3

During the second decade of the century, musical scores were commissionedmore regularly from Italian composers, many of whom had a backgroundin opera. In 1913 Ildebrando Pizzetti provided the music to accompanya film based on a Gabriele DAnnunzio screenplay, Cabiria, and there fol-lowed a score by Pietro Mascagni for Rapsodia Satanica.4 Music and themoving image were imagined differently by the Corradini brothers who, inthe thick of the futurist movement, conceived of cinema as what they calledca real chromatic symphony'. They made four films in 1911 which tried tocommunicate chromatic chords and other musical features visually'.5

More lasting Italian musical contributions to silent cinema were theKinothek: neue Filmmusik volumes and the Allgemeines Handbuch der

340

Sound in Italian Cinema 341

Film-Musik of Giuseppe Becce. Published in the 1920s, these compendiaof musical compositions and borrowings were organized around notionssuch as 'Gloomy', 'Sinister* 'Dark', 'Melancholy1, 'Serious', 'Happy' or 'Joyful'and were designed for use in cinema accompaniment. Their importancelies in the fact that:

Several of the themes and techniques popularized by these antholo-gies became cliches that remain firmly in the popular imaginationtoday, such as the use of diminished 7ths for villains, 'weepie' lovethemes on solo violin and the bridal march from Wagner s Lohengrinfor wedding scenes.6

With a musical title and musician protagonists, the first Italian sound film,La canzone dellamore, followed closely in the wake of The Jazz Singer.7 Aswith much early sound film, story lines and scenes were contrived in orderto exploit possibilities for the introduction of music on the screen. An earlyBlasetti sound film, Resurrectio, recounts an orchestral performance in theSt. Cecilia Conservatory in Rome which is interrupted by a thunderstormand where order is eventually restored by the conductor (foreshadowingthe plot of Fellini's Prova dbrchestra of some 50 years later).

On 22 October 1930 the Italian Interior Minister was to ban films thatcontained scenes in foreign languages.8 The talkies had arrived, and filmswere no longer transnational; restricted by language, they no longer crossedborders as effortlessly as in the silent era. One of Hollywood's first work-able solutions was to remake existing films in a foreign language by using acompletely different cast. This led, in turn, to the establishment of studiosat Joinville, just outside Paris, where films were re-shot in up to twelvelanguages.9 When dubbing techniques were improved shortly after, thesuccess of the Italian-language version of Min and Bill helped signal theend of the very brief period of foreign-language remakes and ensured thatdubbing became the preferred solution.10

The sound of the Italian language on the screen was to be crucial fromthis point on (a folk music conference of 1931 concluded that one of thefirst documents in their new film library should be a film of Mussolinireading aloud).11 At the end of the 1930s, after its exploitation in Ilforna-retto di Venezia, dubbing began to be used more widely in Italian films.Subsequently, Italian cinema would have no hesitation in bringing in for-eign actors and dubbing their lines in Italian nor, for that matter, dubbingthe dialects and regional accents of its own actors. Today, certain Italianvoice actors are almost as famous as the foreign actors whose lines they


dub. Andre Bazin, writing in the 1950s, quickly identified one of the 'revo-lutions in taste imposed by neo-realism'12 as its directors* attitude towardslanguage and dubbing on screen. What Bazin had in mind was the natural-istic practice of characters actually speaking their own language when theplot required it. One thinks here of Joe and Paisa in the Naples episode ofRossellini s Paisa which is an emblematic, if somewhat extreme, example.

The major Italian pre-war score was signed by Gian Francesco Malipierofor the film Acciaio which, like La canzone dellamore, was based on aPirandello screenplay. Other composers working in the antebellum yearswere Umberto Mancini, Enzo Masetti, Ezio Carabella and Franco Casavola.13

They worked on films directed by Blasetti, Camerini, Righelli, Bragaglia,Bonnard or Mattoli. Significantly for Italian cinema of the coming decades,the careers of composers such as Giovanni Fusco, Renzo Rossellini, NinoRota and Alessandro Cicognini were all launched in this period.

After the war, formal classes began to be taught on the musical task ofscoring films. Enzo Masetti, at the St. Cecilia Conservatory in Rome, andAngelo Francesco Lavagnino, at the Chigiana Academy of Siena, taughtthe new craft until the early 1960s.14 Over the next half-century, film musicin Italy would be dominated by a relatively small number of specializedcomposers, many of whom were to enjoy ongoing working partnershipswith particular directors. This situation has been described as falling some-where between a 'national school' and a 'privileged gang of insiders'15

Vittorio De Sica seldom used a composer other than AlessandroCicognini, Armando Trovajoli or his son Manuel De Sica. Roberto Rosselliniworked almost exclusively with his brother Renzo, turning in the late 1960sto Mario Nascimbene. Visconti relied much less on a single composer butthis was certainly due in part to his use of non-original music drawn fromthe European symphonic and operatic traditions.16 This was a repertoirethat Pasolini also relied on although in conjunction with pre-existing tra-ditional music as well as the scores of Morricone.

Fellini and Nino Rota, Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone, Antonioniand Giovanni Fusco, the Taviani brothers and Nicola Piovani, MarcoBellocchio and Nicola Piovani or Carlo Crivelli: these are only some of thelong-standing partnerships of the last decades. Today, directors may or maynot work in constant partnership with composers from one film to another.Nanni Moretti has done so (with Franco Piersanti and later, Nicola Piovani)as has Roberto Benigni (Evan Lurie and also Piovani) while directors suchas Bertolucci, Dario Argento or Marco Tullio Giordana have proved lessrestrained in their choice of composers.


For the remainder of this chapter, I wish to turn to the use of diegeticfilm music. By this term, we understand film music whose source is eithervisible on the screen or is at least clearly understood to be emanating fromthe screen-world itself. The etymological roots of the word cliegetic' lie inPlatos opposition of diegesis and mimesis: the former being the techniqueof reporting speech and events and the latter that of imitating a personageor presenting speech directly.17 In the 1950s the term was introduced inprint as a specifically cinematic concept by philosopher Etienne Souriauin order to distinguish the 'storyworld' on the screen from the Veal world'inhabited by the cinema audience.18 While classifying a piece of film musicas cliegetic' does locate it firmly in the screen-world, its bearing on the nar-rative can vary drastically from one film to the next.

Instances of diegetic film music can subsequently be classified as eitheron-screen or off-screen depending on whether the music source appears inthe shot (and so is visible to the audience) or is simply understood to existin the screen-world (but outside the shot).19 Off-screen diegetic film musicis particularly interesting since it hinges on audience perception: if thecontext is insufficient, the viewer will simply consider the music as filmscore. If, however, the context proves sufficiently unambiguous, the viewerwill consider the music as existing in the screen-world (although outsidethe shot). The importance of this for cinematic narrative has been outlinedby Mario Litwin:

The spectator is witness to a drama which happens in a universeof which he only sees a small part; access to this universe is via therectangular window that is the screen. The technique of cinematicnarrative resides in the ability to concentrate, in this window, all theinformation that is necessary to the understanding of the drama. Thedimensions of the screen do not, however, limit the access to this uni-verse: the spectator receives information in the form of sound (noise,words, music) from outside the visual field. In this way the spectator sfield of perception is enlarged.20

Diegetic film music may simply form part of the aural decor, by addingcolor and atmosphere to a scene, or it may be something without whichthe narrative could not move forward. Below I consider some of the rea-sons behind the use of diegetic film music in individual scenes as well asthe implications of its use for a film as a whole - concentrating on certainItalian films of the post-war period.21


Towards the end of Roberto Rossellini's Roma cittd aperta, a waltz isplayed on the piano and is set extremely close to the torture scene happen-ing at the same time, two rooms away. The sound of the piano heightens thesensory contrast between the two locations since we move, not only fromthe sight of the torture chamber to the sight of the German officers relaxingin the parlour but also from the sound of cries and accusations to the soundof Tchaikovsky. The music thus reinforces the clash between the two envi-ronments more than the sound of German officers quietly playing cardswould have done. Michel Chion has suggested that the piano is placedin this scene so that when one of the Germans bitterly dooms his nationsempire-building entreprise to failure, the piano music can be stopped toallow the sudden silence to emphasize the treasonable nature of hisprediction.22

Pier Paolo Pasolini s career was bookended by films that made frequentuse of diegetic song. In the early Roman films Accattone and Mamma Romasong simply constitutes another form of expression, a sort ofrecitativo arioso,for the characters. When Accattone leaves for his day of work, he sings theworkers complaint 'Voja de lavora vieneme addosso'. After his dive intothe Tiber he sings 'Barcarole Romano' which recounts a story set aroundthe famous river. Elsewhere in the same film the lyrics of a soldier song,'La sagra di Jarabub', are corrupted in order to express a character s hunger.Mamma Roma opens with a sharp exchange of stornelli (Roman song)between the young bride and Anna Magnani s character and later we hearlines from nineteenth-century songs such as 'La partenza del soldato' or'Una furtiva lagrima' which always function, through their lyrics, as ripostesor as responses to the action.

In the later films of the Trilogia della Vita series Pasolini drew on tradi-tional song from the Campana region in Italy; from England, Ireland andScotland; from Iran.23 He considered these traditional repertoires as ahis-torical24 and whatever the soundness of this theoretical attitude to tradi-tional musical styles, the songs he chose (many of which appear diegetically)remain central to the trilogy. With I Racconti di Canterbury for instance,certain songs ('The ould piper'; 'Fenesta ca lucive e mo' non luce'; 'Going upCamborne Hill'; 'Ailein duinn) appear repeatedly and, along with Chaucer'sappearance between the stories, help provide a structural backbone forthe film.

While the same film's opening credits are appearing on a white screenwe hear the song 'The ould piper' which, strictly speaking, cannot be diegeticsince the story world itself has not yet appeared on screen. Nonetheless, the


addition of diegetic sound (the bustle of a public place) tends to place thismusic close to the diegetic sphere. (Fellini, in Prova d'Orchestra employeddiegetic sound ironically by placing the cacophony of a traffic jam behindthe opening credits. He also removed the visual element at the end of thefilm by blacking out the screen for the conductor s final harangue and leav-ing the audience listening to the screenworld.) The effect of the diegeticsound combined with the song is to heighten interest in the storyworldthat has yet to appear visually but which, aurally, is already present.

In the 'Millers Tale' episode, one of the staple functions of diegetic musicand sound - the communication of physical depth or distance - is evident.We move from the boisterous dancing scene in the main hall to the sight ofthe barrels with their occupants awaiting a second diluvial punishment.From here the strains of the dancing music are still audible, if only just, andthis gives the viewer important information about the physical relationshipbetween the two locations. In this case, the hall is presumably just below ornot far from, the hanging barrels.

Lastly, in the same episode we hear lines from the twelfth century sequence'Veni Sancte Spiritus' intoned by the amorous Nicola. This text has beenheard as a subtle ironic comment on Nicolas situation: 'Flecte quod estrigidum/... ah ... ah/Da perenne gaudium' and shows the potentially self-referential nature of diegetic music.25

The ambiguity that can exist between on-screen/off-screen diegetic filmmusic has already been mentioned. It is used to good effect in Sergio Leone sCera una volta il West where the sound of the harmonica sometimes turnsout to be coming from Charles Bronsons character (and so to be part ofthe story) and on other occasions simply becomes part of the film score.The audience is never certain if the sound is heralding Harmonicas entranceor not and this contributes to the character s enigmatic aura. Another scenewhich plays on the 'diegetic music/film score' opposition is that where thehanging of the brother sets off the bell that has served as his gallows: thesound of this same ringing bell is immediately integrated into Morriconesscore.

Very early in the same film, we hear diegetic film music fulfilling func-tions that are more usually performed by film score. The farmer s daughterMaureen singing some lines from 'Danny Boy' is of course another indica-tion, albeit somewhat anachronistic, that this is an immigrant Irish family.26

A more important purpose of this music is that it allows the audience tosense that something is awry when, suddenly, the song stops and producesan unsettling silence; a silence that precedes the massacre of the family.


The impact of the diegetic music here is directly related to the absence offilm score since at this point, 20 min into the film, no music of any kindhas yet been heard and so the silence surrounding Maureen's singing isparticularly weighted.

Ettore Scolas Ceravamo tanto amati presents a different, if not infrequent,case. The key diegetic music in this film is a more or less complete renditionof the song CE io ero Sandokan' which, in the closing scene, is sung byAntonio and Nicola along with some musicians. The on-screen performedsong, as with famous predecessors such 'As Time Goes By' (Casablanca) or'Le Tourbillon' (Jules'et Jim), occupies a double position. In a sense bothrecitative and aria, it moves the action forward from inside the narrativeand, at the same time, comments on the action from outside.

Here the song 'E io ero Sandokan' serves several functions. The first ofthese is narrative-based since it causes Antonio and Nicola to move awayand so allows Gianni and Luciana to have the conversation which is crucialto the films denouement. It also has a structural function since the melodyof the song has appeared as film score in snatches throughout the film.27

Much like a musical theme whose complete statement is withheld until theend of a piece, this is the integral rendition that has been hinted at through-out the film and whose arrival signals the close of the story. It has, finally,a non-diegetic function insofar as it is used as an aural backdrop to Lucianaand Gianni's conversation in much the same way as film score would prob-ably have been underlaid if the song had not already been present.

The Taviani brothers' Padre Padrone is a tour-de-force of diegetic filmmusic as symbol. The opening scene shows a class of singing schoolchil-dren forced into silence by the surprise appearance of Gavinos father. Theend of this music coincides with the end of schooling for Gavino as he isled from the school to spend his childhood herding sheep in the silence ofthe Sardinian mountains. Years later, when Gavino is a young man isolatedon a mountainside, the outside world re-presents itself in the form of anaccordion bartered from passing musicians. The accordion accompaniesGavino as he struggles to attain some limited freedom from his father. Hebreaks free entirely of the paternal subjugation on the day he refuses toturn off the radio that is broadcasting Mozart's clarinet concerto. When hisfather silences the radio by submerging it in a sink of water, Gavino sets towhistling the melody and it is clear that the father s power has been brokenfor good. They then set to fighting physically and the mother stands at thewindow singing - as if there were still some supra-physical powers left inmusic. Added to all of this is an emphasis on the sound of the Sardiniandialect (set against the sound of the Italian language) that makes Padre,


Padrone particularly self-aware and effective in its deployment of diegeticmusic and sound.

A more recent film, Nanni Moretti s La stanza delfiglio, employs diegeticmusic when Giovanni and his family sing along to the song Tnsieme a tenon ci sto piii' while driving. This mildly comic and yet touching scene,which constituted one of the films trailers, draws its impact from the vocalefforts of the four protagonists. The sound in this scene will contrast withthe subsequent car scenes, which all involve Giovanni on his own on theday of his sons death and which are accompanied by Piovanis score.

There is a point later in the film at which Giovanni replays the same fewseconds of a CD incessantly (Michael Nymans Water Dances). This render-ing of music into noise - like the daughters aimless searching through theradio wavelengths for a station - is a highly expressive tool for communi-cating the non-verbalized suffering of the bereaved family. Towards theend of the film we find Giovanni waiting to hear a song (Brian Enos 'By thisRiver1) in a record store. As the camera remains focused on him, the audi-ence waits with him for this piece of music. When this mild build-up oftension is released, the viewer is conscious of hearing the same music asGiovanni and the aural spaces inhabited by the audience and the protago-nist are for a moment unified. The song returns for the closing scene on thebeach but now as film score invested with additional meaning. The use ofthis song at different points in the film has been accurately described asmaintaining 'the fragile equilibrium of the film'.28

The last examples are taken from Fellini who has a unique relationshipwith diegetic music. In many of his films, it is a means of creating an explo-sion of the repressed tendencies for disorder that we carry with us. The linkbetween onscreen music and the notion of the removal of repressive ele-ments seems to be the director s way of moving quickly and subtly fromEveryday life* as it appears in the story line to 'otherworldness'; a song here,a radio turned on there, a band in a bar, stage music - often coupled with asuggestion of costume - and all of a sudden the famous Fellini 'circus' hasappeared. 'Music has the power to condition you on a subliminal level' hesaid, describing film music in particular as 'too important to be relegated tothe level of an aural backdrop1.29

In Amarcord, the sequence in which the entire village acclaims thearrival of the Fascists is subverted by means of a powerful moment ofdiegetic music. When the Fascists are forced out of their bar by a power cut,they hear a solo violin playing the 'Internationale! There is a prolongedmoment of confusion as they struggle to identify the source of the music.They eventually discover that a gramophone is lodged in the village bell


tower, and they begin to fire on it. Gunshots ring out over the faint strainsof the melody, and the gramophone is shot down (almost as if it were asniper) and crashes to the ground.

In E la nave va, a group of clearly bourgeois characters is setting off ona cruise ship to cast the ashes of a deceased opera singer out at sea whentheir day-to-day life is upset by the boarding of a group of shipwreckedrefugees. These refugees act as a catalyst and introduce the carnivalesquewhen they take to their musical instruments and the bourgeois characterscross the divide to abandon their strict morality for a night. In this film, thesubversion of the bourgeois code of living is introduced through diegeticmusic.

Prova dbrchestra differs fundamentally from the films mentioned above.Instead of establishing a 'normal* situation and sparking off the collapse oftaboos through the introduction of diegetic music, Fellini chooses a situa-tion (an orchestras rehearsal) that he feels already lends itself, by its verynature, to the portrayal of the collapse of social order. His choice of anorchestra was deliberate: based on the rehearsals he had witnessed person-ally, he felt that this act of bringing together completely disparate indivi-duals in a common goal 'held in itself, emblematically, the ideal archetypeof a society that can live and express itself harmoniously'.30 He rejectedthe notion that his film was a political fable but he did suggest that hisintention was to consider social organization and its breakdown.31 Heachieves this here through a story about on-screen music and sound.

Finally in Roma, it is the episodes that extend themselves furthest intofantasy or the surreal that most effectively exploit diegetic music. The firstof these is the school projection gone wrong where the boys are made tosing as an antidote to the harmful effects of the teacher's slides. Here, songwill apparently ward off the devils who threaten the boys' moral welfare.The film closes in an equally surreal fashion with the religious fashion showcomplete with live organ accompaniment. The Topes Benediction* episodefrom early in the film gives this chapter its title. In this scene we hear churchbells described as 'the voice of God* ('Ma le campane sono la voce di D/o/')and we see the family, seized by a instant of piety, kneel down around theradio for the broadcast of the Popes benediction. The comic exception tothis is the enraged and atheistic father for whom the family's behaviour isat best a disturbance and at worst irrational superstition.

All of the Fellini scenes mentioned above put music on the screenbecause, in some way, what is termed 'reality' has been suppressed, at leastmomentarily. This is one particular use of diegetic sound but others havebeen evoked in the course of this chapter. Moving between the domains of


the plastic (communicating distance and depth; uniting audience and pro-tagonist spaces), the dramatic (being an expressive or symbolic device;increasing tension), the formal (building structure within a film; makingself-reference) and the purely auditive (heightening the effect of silence;taking on functions of film score), diegetic film music is a powerful resourcefor the filmmaker.

In the end, it must be remembered that many of these cases of diegeticfilm music fall between the domain of the scriptwriter/director and thatof the composer/musical supervisor. Music coming at us from the screen-world is not often simply a question of musical underlay nor of a singleevent in a chain of narration. Rather, as these examples show, its positionbetween two of the many aspects of collaboration that is filmmaking allowsit a rich and multi-faceted role.

Notes

1. Aldo Bernardini, Gli ambulanti. Cinema Italiano delle origini. Gemona: La CinetecadelFriuli, 2001, p. 24.

2. Bernardini (2001), pp. 24-6. He gives the period 1904-2007 as that for which there isevidence of live musical ensembles accompanying film projections in Italy.

3. Ennio Simeon, Per un pugno di note. Storia, teoria, estetica della musica per il cinema,la televisione e il video. Milano: Rugginenti, 1995, pp. 143-4. He reproduces an advertise-ment referred to in R. Redis article Tl sonoro del muto' (in the Redi edited Cinema italianomuto 1905-1916. Roma: CNC Edizioni, 1991, pp. 61-70). The Ones production houseadvertisement extols the qualities of charming, appreciated and appropriate music' that waswritten hy Romolo Bacchini for the 1906 films La malla dellbro (Alberini), Romanzo di unPierrot (Caserini) and Nozze tragiche (Velle). None of these scores being extant, some doubtremains as to their exact nature.

4. Simeon: He details the following composers for the period 1910-1919: OsvaldoBrunetti for Lo schiavo di Cartagine (Maggi, Omegan and Ambrosio), A. Berni for Nerone eAgrippina (Caserini), Pasquale Mario Costa for Histoire d'un Pierrot (Negroni), Enrico deLeva for Sperduti nel buio (Martoglio and Danesi), Giocondo Fino for Christus (Pastrone),// carnevale d'lvrea (Bacchini) and Joseph (Robert and Bacchini), Anacleto Masini for Lacrociata degli innocenti (Rossetti, Boutet and Traversa), Luigi Mancinelli for Frate sole(Falena and Corsi) and Giuliano I'Apostato (Falena), Vittorio Gui for Fantasia bianca (Pozzati)and Enrico Magni for Deusjudicat (Marsani).

5. Gian Piero Brunetta, Guida alia Storia del Cinema Italiano 1905-2003. Torino:Einaudi, 2003, p. 57. The original Corradini text is reproduced in Gianni Rondolinos, // cin-ema astratto. Testi e documenti. Torino: Tirrenia, 1977, pp. 131-44. The titles of the four filmswere Accordo di colore, Canto di primavera, Les Fleurs and Studio di effetti tra quattro colori.Comuzio has twice signalled (Ermanno Comuzio, Colonna Sonora. Dizionario ragionato delmusicisti cinematografici. Roma: Ente dello spettacolo, 1992a; Ermanno Comuzio, 'En Italic',


in AA. VV., CinemAction. La musique a lecran 62. Roma: Ente dello spettacolo, 1992b,pp. 162-71) the existence of a Manuel De Sica film entitled Concert dating from 1980.Difficult to locate, this film apparently concerns itself equally with 'the visualisation ofmusic' (Ermanno, 1992b, p. 163).

6. Mervyn Cooke, 'Film music', in L. Macy, ed. Grove Music Online, http://www.grove-music.com (section 1, part 2) (accessed on 30 July 2005).

7. The Jazz Singer was shown for the first time in Italy at the 'Supercinema in Rome on19 April 1929 (Brunetta, 2003, p. 430).

8. Brunetta (2003), p. 431.9. Douglas Gomery, 'Economic struggle and Hollywood imperialism: "Europe con-

verts to sound"', in Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, eds. Film Sound, Theory and Practice.New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, pp. 27-8.

10. Ibid.11. William E. Simeone, 'Fascists and folklorists in Italy', Journal of American Folkore 91

(1978), 548.12. Andre Bazin, 'Le cinema Italien va-t-il se renier?', Quest-ce que le cinema? IV: Une

esthetique de la realite, le neo-realisme. Paris: Cerf, 1962, p. 100.13. For biographical and work details on these pioneering composers, see Comuzio

(1992a). Other composers active before the war included Salvatore Allegra; Cesare A. Bixio;Annibale Bizzelli; Giulio Bonnard; Edgardo Carducci; Luigi Colacicchi; Costantino Ferri;Armando Fragna; Giorgio Federico Ghedini; Felice Lattuada; Felice Montagnini; GiuseppeMule; Riccardo Pick-Mangiagalli; Ildebrando Pizzetti; Pietro Sassoli, Ulisse Siciliani,Gianluca Tocchi, Antonio Veretti, Ricardo Zandonai.

14. Sergio Miceli, 'Storiografia musicale e musica del cinema' in Sergio Miceli, ed. Musicae cinema. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Siena, 19-22 agosto 1990. Firenze:L.S. Olschi, 1992, pp. 210-11; p. 217.

15. Comuzio (1992b), p. 164.16. That is, the works of Beethoven; Bellini; Bizet; Bruckner; Chopin; Donizetti; Franck;

Lehar; Liszt; Mahler; Mozart; Mussorgsky; Offenbach; Rossini; Schumann; Verdi; Wagner.17. Plato, Respvblic, chapter III, lines 392c VI - 398b in the OUP edition of 1902.18. Although Etienne Souriau was indeed the first to use the term in print - in his

article lLa structure de Funivers filmique et le vocabulaire de lafilmologie (Revue internatio-nale de filmologie (1951), pp. 7-8) - the words diegetique, diegetiquement were originallycoined by Anne Souriau in 1950 at the Institut de Filmologie de rUniversite de Paris. Cf.Anne Souriau, 'Diegese', in Anne Souriau, ed. Vocabulaire d'Esthetique. Paris: PUF, 1990,pp. 581-3.

19. Mario Litwin, 'La provenance sonore\ Le Film et sa musique. Paris: Romillat, 1992,pp. 24-5. He classifies film music as either visible screen-world, non-visible screen-world orfilm score. He acknowledges Chions similar schema that draws a parallel with opera byaligning these three types of film music with stage music, wings music and pit music.

20. Litwin (1992), p. 22.21. Considering filmed opera to be a highly specific case of diegetic film music, I have

left it aside for the purposes of this chapter.

http://www.grovemusic.com



22. Chion(1990),p.232.23. This trilogy is made up of // Decamerone, I Racconti di Canterbury and // Fiore

delle mille e una notte.24. Roberto Calabretto, Pasolini e la Musica: Yunica azione espressivaforse, alta, e indefi-

nibile come le azioni delta realta. Pordenone: Cinemazero, 1999, p. 503.25. Calabretto (1990), p. 505.26. Although the melody was collected and published in the mid-nineteenth century

(Petries Ancient Music of Ireland, 1853-1855), F. E. Weatherlys lyrics to 'Danny Boy' werenot written until the early twentieth century; after the period portrayed in Leones film.

27. It is heard at 3'; 5'; 11' 30'; 41'; 1 h 44'.28. Giles Mouellic, "Introduction (La stanza delfiglio)] La musique defilm. Paris: Carriers

du Cinema, 2003, p. 2.29. Charlotte Chandler, 'Le pouvoir de la musique (Repetition dbrchestre)\ Moi Fellini.

Treize ans de confidences. Paris: Laffont, 1994, p. 212.30. From Fellini s monologue that opens the CD recording of the Prova dbrchestra

soundtrack (CAM 493090-2).31. Speaking of the orchestral rehearsals he had witnessed, Fellini said that 'through

repeated attempts, they managed to transform this heterogenous mass into a unique, evenabstract, form which is that of music . . . this situation carried within it, emblematically, theimage of a life in society where a group expression was compatible with each individualsexpression... For a long time I had wanted to make a little documentary that would inspirethe same comforting suspicion in the spectator; that it is possible to do something togetherwhile remaining oneself: Michel Ciment, 'Prova dbrchestra: entretien avec Federico Fellini(21/12/78)', Federico Fellini. Paris: Opta, 1988, pp. 112-13.

20Sound in French Cinema

To Cut or Let Live: The Soundtrack According to Jean-Luc Godard

Laurent Jullier

In the beginning, there is a duty to be modern. Arthur Rimbaud said it inUne saison en enfer: one must absolutely be modern. With this famousquote he meant one must absolutely be a Romantic, but posterity changedthe meaning, and (especially outside of the area of academic aesthetics) theword 'modern is now used to point out novelty and even neophilia, i.e.,the systematic care and love for all that seems new. The Swiss film directorJean-Luc Godard does not, however, quote Rimbaud when slugging formodernity (even if the title Une saison en enfer appears in his Histoire(s) ducinema, and is mentioned by Anna Karina in Pierrot lefou), but T. S. Eliot,which seems fresh and new in the French context. All that is new is therebytraditional, so said Eliot', explains the English teacher in Godard s Bande apart. Far from being an oxymoron, the sentence suggests the idea of a con-tinuous artistic progress, in which what seemed new and disturbing sud-denly appears clear, obvious and pleasant, if not perfectly classical (think ofImpressionist painting). Godard s soundtracks now sound strange to theears of Hollywood blockbuster addicts who are accustomed to audiovisualtransparency; they are built following Bertolt Brecht s Verfremdung, a mod-ern strategy based upon non-transparency effects and supposed to con-struct a clesabused audience5, made up of spectators aware of all the artisticand narrative tricks. But one day - a century hence, maybe - everyone willfind audiovisual Verfremdung and unsynchronized cutting quite pleasant,

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in the same way that everyone now loves Van Gogh's sunflowers andMonet's cathedrals, now inoffensive.

Going farther, Eliot maintains that this modern/classic dependencyaffects perception in both ways, making old masterpieces appear differentin the light of new ones: 'What happens when a new work of art is created',he wrote in The Sacred Wood, 'is something that happens simultaneously toall the works of art which preceded it ... For order to persist after thesupervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly,altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art towardthe whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and thenew'.1 Bertolt Brecht will confirm this a few years later: 'Schoenberg's musicallows us to understand BeethovenV.2 And Godard will overtly and didacti-cally act this way: a number of his non-transparency effects allow the audi-ence reviewing a classical Hollywood soundtrack to notice 'how it works',with what did not seem noticeable and 'natural' now looking like arbitraryconvention.

Well, everything seems fine. Everybody is ready, artists and spectators,waiting for the modern miracle to arrive. But is it so dear\ 'And if theModerns were wrong?', asked Roland Barthes himself, both suffering andprovocative, in his posthumous diary.3

This essay will explore the different ways Jean-Luc Godard answers thisquestion when conceiving the soundtracks of his films. The first part describeshow classical cinema, according to Godard, betrayed that for which it wasmade. The second part reviews the modernist response to this betrayal,since the old recording and editing practices must be technically and ethi-cally corrected'. And the third part shows a Barthesian hesitation, a reluc-tance to commit oneself that Godard sometimes can be suspected of feeling.Indeed, Tn the end you are tired of this ancient world',4 but is it really impos-sible (if not quite immoral) to reconcile old-fashioned pleasures of sugar-sweet tunes and soft audio-editing with Brechtian imperatives?

The Betrayal

Jean-Luc Godard clearly explains in his Histoire(s) du cinema that whichwas underlined in many of his films: cinema failed - at least its mainstreamform. Glorious Technicolor movies, easygoing cousins of the noble bookswhich helped the young boy from John Ford's How Green was my Valley towalk again, all these moving grand narratives full of arms and heroes failedto prevent the unspeakable/unshowable, that is, Auschwitz. Cinema failed,


but it could have gone differently. Some directors, and Jean Renoir aboveall, used the cinematic medium in the way it was intended, as an oracle, ora diviner. If only the audience knew how to read Renoir's La regie dujeu. Butmainstream cinema preferred to keep entertaining and selling popcorn,betraying its native destiny which consisted in letting people know when aterrible storm is coming - the metaphor of the storm and the diviner comesfrom a story by the Swiss author Ramuz, which Godard used at the end ofhis Histoire(s) du cinema. Mainstream cinema preferred to be 'Lady MaxFactor', Godard says, a beautiful woman covered by sophisticated make-up,and Lady Max Factor is another name for Death - the make-up hides thehorror (<rlhe horror... the horror...' says Jean Cocteau, sampled by Godard,all along Histoire(s) du cinema).

Where soundtracks are concerned, one of the most important parts ofthis frightening make-up is the music - the lovely music. Hearing lovelymusic leads to 'believing in blue skies', but there is no such thing as blue sky,even if the very idea brings consolation.5 The compensatory happinessordinary people 'think they find' in tonal music is 'infantile', wrote Adorno.6

'My music is not lovely' the furious Schoenberg is said to have retorted toa Hollywood producer who wanted to hire him.7 Adorno criticizes tonalmusic for its ideological connotations of a humanism that has been shownto be a lie and to 'justify what was bad'.8

It is so easy to make pretty things:

-Tell me something nice . . .-Sure. What do you wanna hear?

These lines from Johnny Guitar are sampled in JLG/JLG. 'Sure, it is easy, butit is a lie, everybody knows it is a lie. How many tears for a single guitartune?' mourns French Communist poet Louis Aragon, quoted in Soigne tadroite.9 The title of the Gya Kancheli piece used in Histoire(s) du cinemay

Abii ne viderem (meaning, T turned away so as not to see') sums up thewhole situation: beautiful melodies help one to turn away from the 'horror'.So the audience must be warned, and the melodies will be cut up when theybecome too pretty. Vivaldi starts, stops, starts again but never finishes asingle complete melodic development in Pierrot le fou, when Pierrot andMarianne escape in a big American convertible. Popular music is sliced (or,say, deconstructed) all the same - Chantal Goya's tunes in Masculin feminin,or Charles Aznavour s Tu te laisses aller at the beginning of Unefemme estune femme. More transparent, Stone and Charden's // y a du soleil sur laFrance (meaning 'The sun shines on France'), is put to images of a dump on

Sound in French Cinema 355

a rainy day (Tout va bien). The most spectacular slaughtery happenswith Tom Waits' Rubys Arms in Prenom Carmen, mixed with samples ofBeethoven, re-edited and distorted - an unbearable torture for any popmusic fan.

Sugar-sweet music requires punishment, and harmonic expectancy mustbe deceived and discouraged. When perfect chords are (as a matter ofexception) used, the affective tonality is chosen against the grain: evenwhen Artur's uncle (a real bad boy) is coming, making funny things possi-bly turn into tragedy, the house-breaking featured in Bande a part is put tomusic by Michel Legrand in a melancholy mood, in order to discourageany (commercially infected) 'suspense' of any kind. Adorno explains that heargued in favour of the new music because the aesthetically critical posi-tion is also a social position. Here we see the theme of the child-people:people 'held in the vice', with their low 'intellectual level', 'ask only to hearwhat they are fed and fear anything that tears the veil because it threatensa comfort that they themselves do not really believe in'.10 Of course withGodard, the warning runs for the visual track as well. At the beginningof Helas pour moiy when the camera tracks in and stops in front of Angelicain a flattering pose, somebody shouts 'No! No! No!', and the shot is cut.The same is true in Sauve qui peut la vie, in which the shot of a beautifullymelancholic sunset is mixed with a quite uninteresting phone call to areal estate agency, which only appears on the soundtrack: 'Oui... ouais ...oui . . . au revoir madame'.

So, childish spectators believe in mainstream cinema. They go to seeVincent Francois Paul & les autres, a popular film by Claude Sautet thatGodard and Les Cahiers du Cinema found quite bourgeois, and forget aboutethics and politics: that is why the pretty music of Vincent Francois Paul &les autres ends by masking the union's catchphrases of the 'Defile du PremierMai' in Numero Deux. Or why the noise of the cash machines ends by over-powering the political debate about Karl Marx's Kapital in Tout va bien.Childish spectators are supposed to believe in voice-overs too: when thevoice says *un petit porf (Pierrot lefou; a little harbour), a little harbour isshown, but when the voice adds lun bateau a voile (a sailboat), we see ... amotorboat. Don't believe his master's voice\ (a formula Pascal Bonitzer usedin the Cahiers du Cinema). When Michel Poicard enumerates 'Helas helashelas! Jaime unefille qui a une tres jolie nuque, de ires jolis seinsy une tresjolie voixy de tres jolis poignets, un tres joli front, de tres jolis genoux, mais quiest lache\\ the only part we see of Patricia (Jean Seberg) is her nape, althoughno less than twelve shots are devoted to her (A bout de souffle; Alas alasalas! I'm in love with a girl who has got a very pretty nape, very pretty


breasts, a very pretty voice, very pretty wrists, a very pretty forehead, verypretty knees, but who is a coward).

No longer the voice-over but the real voice itself is attacked in the sub-sequent films, during the 'Mao years* - and mainly the very possibility ofspeaking as a free subject in a capitalist society. 'These are only words', Paulwill say twenty years later in Sauve qui pent la vie, and words are not auto-matically supposed to be in connexion with the world they are intended todescribe. (One might call this the Derridian side of Jean-Luc Godard.)

The Reform

Classical cinema was based on a naturalistic substractive fallacy: this is theworld, it seemed to say, minus a few negligible details, such as the depth ofobjects in 3-D, smells, tastes and tactile stimuli. This fallacy is sustained bytransparency: i.e., the softening of the audiovisual editing work, mostlyusing the fade in/fade out duo and L-cutting (a one or two-second lagbetween the audio editing point and the visual editing point). On the con-trary, the modern cinema of Jean-Luc Godard will be conceived accordingto an additive approach. This is not the world; here are images + sounds(One + one is a film by Godard). Instead of smoothing out the workof editing, Godard chooses to exhibit it, in order not to risk lying aboutthe nature of the connexion between screen data and the real world(Marguerite Duras called substractive cinema lying cinema). This choicealso explains why Godard never opted to use overwhelming experimentalmusic (say, 'cut-up jazz5 a la John Zorn) in spite of the aesthetic proximityof this music with its own cinema: filmic editing of this music would beimperceptible more often than not.

The first minutes of Unefemme est unefemme sound here like a manifesto:Anna Karina walks on the Grands Boulevards like a flaneur; sometimes weonly hear the ticking of her heels. Sometimes the ticking is masked by thenoise of the Grands Boulevards and sometimes it is replaced by CharlesAznavour s (re-edited) Tu te laisses aller - each combination according toan unpredictable causal logic. In the middle of Pierrot lefou, after the escapein the convertible has turned into a dead end, the spectator can hear some-thing which now sounds familiar to her/him, a sampling and loopingeffect. For example, reading their imaginary private diaries, Ferdinand andMariannes voices are sampled and re-recorded into loops: 'La police difflLes gens les/La police diff/Les gens les (meaning, 'Police puts/People are/Police puts/People are'). To cut or to let live here becomes an equilibrateddilemma, when to let live was almost the only choice in the Golden Ageof substractive classicism.


To mask or not becomes another equilibrated dilemma. 'Je voulais tedire', (T just wanted to tell you'), begins Paul in Sauve quipeut la vie, but atrain is coming, masking the end of the sentence. 'He bin, cest pas tristel'('Well, that's quite a story!') answers Denise to him, underlining (or playingwith, which is more Brechtian) our frustration. The same strategy occursin Week-end: 'Oh, si vous aviez entendu (Tf only you had heard'), then theroar of a jet engine masks the following words. The masking sounds arenot necessarily diegetic noises: all along Le mepris, the overlying strategy(visually explained to the spectator ofNumero deux, using the video wipe)is committed to George Delerues neoclassical score. But to cut or to maskcan sometimes have some didactic purpose. J. Aumont11 notes the aestheticvalue of Godard s fragmentation of pieces of music: 'By preventing themelody from developing, he draws attention to a different musical quality',for example in Beethoven's seventh quartet used in Unefemme mariee, he'gives the persistent rhythmic scansion its full power [...] by separating itfrom its function as an accompaniment'. For Aumont, 'a cut, however unex-pected, analyzes rather than dismembers'.12

The substractive classicism relies on vertical causality: the spectatormust be convinced of the (illusory) origins of filmic sound and temporarilyforget that visual objects can't provoke any sound at all. In a Golden Agemovie, if a glass is broken we must hear it break; this is not the case ina modern film. While vertical causality is a built-in mental mechanism,the spectator of a Jean-Luc Godard movie has to read audiovisual filmiccomplementarity against the grain. The film itself tells that its verticalcausality is a lie, which is constructed by technical synchronization. 'Nousinterrompons un instant nos emissions afin deproceder a la synchronisationde nos reseaux\ says the radio speaker in A bout de souffle ('We have tointerrupt this program in order to carry out network synchronization').And synchronizing is quite delicate work - you sometimes fail: when thelittle girl of France tour detour takes her clothes off, the speed of the visualtrack varies, but the soundtrack stays untouched, so a few seconds latervertical causality itself breaks. The search for new combinations of this typeremains constant in Godard s work. In 1970, for example, the Dziga VertovGroup he was part of sought to produce a Marxist-Leninist cinema thatcould be used as a weapon' for 'new relationships between image andsound.13 'We are not looking for new forms', said the group, 'we are lookingfor new relationships'.14 Almost thirty years later in Histoire(s) du cinema(part 4b) Godard will repeat: 'Making links between things that have neverbeen linked before and do not seem disposed to be so'.

Conventions have to be forgotten. When filming pop singers duringstudio recording sessions, Godard constructs a desabused point of hearing,


recording the singer s naked voice, without the smooth delay and the prettyreverberation the sound engineer is giving it and without the drums andguitar the singer hears in its headphones: Mick Jagger from the RollingStones in One + one-, Catherine Ringer from Les Rita Mitsouko in Soigne tadroite. 'Tu mentends ? Tu mentends ? (Do you hear me? Do you hear me?),Catherine anxiously asks her partner Fred Chichin. But the spectator is theonly one to hear her voice: wires, machines, headphones, the entire techni-cal apparatus here is exhibited in order to show how easy it is to constructand manipulate the audio-visual link.

Another convention 'deconstructed* by Godard comes from the circusand the opera: this is the orchestra pit, a virtual no mans land between thereal world and the diegetic world, where violins can be heard by the specta-tor alone, not by the characters. This frontier is no longer diegetic-proof inGodards films. (Cest quoi la musique qubn entendait?' ('Whats the musicwe heard?'), Nathalie Baye asks the maid, pointing out the lake we werewatching in previous shots while listening to (what we thought to be) theusual non-diegetic score (Sauve qui pent la vie). 'Jen aiplein les oreilles, decette musique!' (Tm through with this tune!1), complains a character inNouvelle Vague, about Paolo Contes Blue Tango, which once again the spec-tator thought was for her ears alone. Last but not least, in Unefemme estunefemme, Jean-Claude Brialy sings 'ti-ti-ti-ta-ta with a piano located inthe virtual orchestra pit. But there is another way to deconstruct this con-vention - as Tex Avery showed in his cartoons of the 1940s, followed byMel Brooks or Woody Allen in the 1970s. It consists in 'bringing up theband1 into the diegetic world: violonists enter the hotel lobby to play inPrenom Carmen, or the pianist brings his instrument to the farm of Week-end not to mention the drummer in the middle of the forest. But why playlive if machines are around? Jean Ferrat comes in persona to listen to (andnot to sing) his own tune 'Ma mome', coming from a jukebox in the coffeehouse of Vivre sa vie (and the technical know-how of jukeboxes is explainedto the spectator in Unefemme est unefemme}. As early as his first featurefilm, A bout de souffle, Godard was concerned not to deceive the spectatorabout the origins of sounds: Mozart s concerto for clarinet and stringsis shown to come from a pick-up in Patricias place (and that is not a goodenough reason for vertical causality, of course: when the visual track ofPatricia and Michel's tete a tete is edited, Mozart s concerto proceeds with-out a single cut).

Synchronizing sound and image is a childish game. As a little boy says'Bang bang!' making his fingers into a pistol, Jean-Paul Belmondo in A boutde souffle, or Marie Dubois in Unefemme est unefemme perform the same


gesture, but instead of a 'Bang bang!' we hear a real gun firing. lGardezvosyeux den/ants' ('Just keep the eyes of a child')* says a make-up advertise-ment in Bande a part, while we're listening to Michel Legrand's score forJacques Demy's Parapluies de Cherbourg. And we can look with the eyes ofa child, because the film does not try to lie to us about the nature of therelationship between images, sounds and the real world.

The Compromise

In a letter to Louise Collet, dated 14 September 1846, Gustave Flaubertwrote that one has to choose between having an orgasm and having anidea. Both are unintentional. This choice is illustrated in a shot of Soigne tadroitey in which the operator alternatively focuses on the barbed wire andthe 'blue skies' behind it, in the depth of field - the old Freudian dialectic ofthe principle of reality (the barbed wire, i.e., the tragic human conditionthat modern cinema has to show and to improve) and the principle of plea-sure (the blue skies, i.e., the beautiful things classical cinema has to show inorder to console the spectator). But Godard does not refuse all pretty things.He uses long shots of beautiful actresses: the body of Brigitte Bardot in LeMeprisy the close-up of Anna Karinas face at the beginnings of Alphavilleand Vivre sa vie. Anna Karina, once again, is compared to an AugusteRenoir Impressionist painting. He displays natural landscapes too: the seaof Pierrot lefouy Lake Leman in Nouvelle Vague. He even lets pretty tunesgo uncut: La nostra lingua italiana, sung by Riccardo Cocciante in the'music video-like' part of Histoire(s) du cinema dedicated to the glory ofItalian cinema; or, at the very end of Histoire(s), when he combines a neo-romantic ECM track called 'The Sea, by Ketil Bjornstad, with the famouspoem from Anima Poetce by S. T. Coleridge:15 'If a man could pass throughParadise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that hissoul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when heawoke - Aye, what then?"/eta/s cet homme ('I was this man'), answersGodard while reverberated perfect chords (i.e., the devil himself, accordingto Adorno and modernism) smoothly fill the soundtrack - this is nostalgia,and nostalgia needs perfect minor chords and beautiful blue melodies.

Continuing with the old fashioned way of making the soundtrack, at twopoints of Histoire(s) Godard synaesthetically associates powerful momentsin the music, using almost perfect chords, with famous moments from keyfilms - John Wayne picking up Natalie Wood at the end of The Searchers andthe close-up of the mother letting go of the pram in Battleship Potemkin.At these two points music adopts the habitual mantle of the Hollywood


composer as 'cementer' of empathetic identification. Even harsh soundediting is sometimes used by Godard in a classical manner: not to breakthe display of beauty because of its dangerous narcotic power, but to breakit because the real world itself disallows such enjoyment. The short film DeIbrigine du 21*me siecle, denouncing certain failures of the twentieth century,echoes this attitude: the beautiful music we begin to hear is cut with vio-lence and removed by the sound of bombardments. In another short filmcalled Llenfance de tart, Godard even uses the classical convention of sub-jective point of hearing, in order to convince the audience that war mayconcern us one day or another: a bomb, once again, is going to fall, we canhear it, but where exactly is it going to fall? So, maybe the problem is notclassical editing in itself but its use in an ideologically doubtful context.

It seems so sweet to think that for a few seconds we might be once againin a state of innocence - before the betrayal and the death of great narratives.The primacy of the sensorial could be the solution: 'And now that he felteverything he thought he knew nothing, says Godard in Histoire(s) - thesame idea French philosopher Brice Parain had talked about 25 years ear-lier in Vivre sa vie, when he reminded us of the ending of Vingt ans apres(Alexandre Dumas s final part of his famous Three Musqueteers saga). GoodPorthos dies because hes thinking too much: one might say the very firstidea he gets literally kills him!

If only we could combine the sensuous world and ideas, the voluptuoustouch of Hollywood and the intelligent Brechtian Verfremdung. Of coursethere is the postmodern double coding since it is the turn of modernity tonow become a great narrative, but irony has too much to do with doublecoding to make a convenient compromise. A true artist must ask for more:T wish I was both little yellow animal at the same time1/ complains Angela(Anna Karina) in Unefemme est unefemme ((Je voudrais etre les deuxpetitsanimals jaunes a lafoisl' - there is a misspelling to underline the impossi-bility of the wish to succeed); 'Well, you keep looking for impossible things',Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy) answers her (4Tu veux sans arret des truesimpossibles*).

Today, visual transgressions of modern cinema have been drowned in thepostmodern cauldron; any MTV music video is filled with deconstructiveediting, and everybody likes Verfremdung when experienced in a QuentinTarantino movie. Their ideological content has been removed and theyonly exist as formal features, but visual transgressions are still alive - theyhave even become familiar to the mainstream cinema audience. But none


of them apply to the soundtrack. Modernist sound cutting never convinceda great audience and remains weird to untutored ears. Despite old modern-ist claims, very few actually perceive unsynchronized sound and images inthe way mass audiences now look at Van Goghs sunflowers and Monet scathedrals. It seems sonic experiment in film is success-proof: maybe weare too intimately bound up with vertical causality to like seeing it broken.So, the betrayal is still not seen as a betrayal. Never mind: Godard keeps ontrying. On occasion he indicates the path to follow: 'Just close your eyesinstead of opening them', he comes to tell us in persona in Prenom Carmen('Ilfautfermer les yeux au lieu de les ouvrir), pretending he is now filmingthe world with his 'brand new camera, which is a machine that happens tobe a standard ghetto blaster.

Was compromise inevitable? One could say the pleasure comes fromthe chase, when 'Pretty Things' and Verfremdung are like Tom and Jerrycartoons; winning has less importance than the race. Maybe the person whosays such a thing belongs to those Baudelairian flaneurs doing windowshopping (Walter Benjamin wrote that cinema was made for their distractedexpertize). Perhaps it is also strange to talk of pleasure when Godards films(at least the recent ones) usually remain associated with theory and concep-tual thinking. But doesn't modern cinema call for open readings?16

Notes

1. T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the individual talent', in The Sacred Wood (1920). Onlinesource available at http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw4.html (accessed on 28 February 2008).

2. Bertolt Brecht, Journal de travail 1938-55 (Arbeitsjournal, 1973; Paris: KArche,1976), 316.

3. R. Barthes, 'Journal (1979)', in (Euvres completes tome 3. Paris: Le Seuil, 1995,p. 1275.

4. 'A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien: first line of'Zone' by Guillaume Apollinaire,Alcools (1913). Paris: Gallimard, 1920.

5. 'Vous voudriez au ciel bleu croire/Je le connais ce sentiment/J'y crois aussi moi parmoments/Comme 1'alouette au miroir': Anna Karina sings this song named 'Jentends,j'entends' ('I hear, I hear') in Godard s Bande a part. It was originally a poem by Louis Aragon,put to music by French leftist singer Jean Ferrat in 1968.

6. Ibid., p. 283.7. Cited by Adorno ibid., p. 277.8. Ibid., p. 278.9. 'Combien de sanglots pour un air de guitare', from 'II n'y a pas d'amour heureux'

(There is no happy love').10. Ibid., p. 276.

http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw4.html


11. J. Aumont, A quoi pensent les films. Paris : Seguier, 1996, pp. 265-6.12. Ibid., p. 269.13. J. -L. Godard, Godard par Godard/Des annees Mao aux annees 80 (1st edn). Paris:

Flammarion, 1991, Letoile/Cahiers du Cinema, 1985, p. 73.14. Ibid., p. 83.15. On ECM music in Godard s films, see my essay 'JLG/ECM', in M. Temple, J. Williams

and M. Witt (eds), For ever Godard. London: Blackdog Publishing, 2004, pp. 272-87.16. I am grateful to Scott Walter and Aidan O'Donnell for their help with the English

version.

21Hong Kong Cinema

Sound and Music in Hong Kong Cinema

Gary Needham

Introduction

For a long time Hong Kong cinema has been chiefly associated with themartial arts genre. Often understood in its pejorative and trivial sense asthe 'chop socky' or under the misguided all encompassing term of'kung fufilm1, the martial arts film, especially in the 1970s, was synonymous withHong Kong cinema. One of the key associations with the martial arts filmoutside of Asia in this period (but particularly in the USA and Europe) was,and to some extent still is, the question of voice dubbing and sound effects.Therefore, from its initial reception outside Asia, Hong Kong cinema hasbeen associated - consciously or not - with a particular dimension ofsound, bad and inappropriate sound at that, which has consequently over-shadowed any ability to take the films seriously. Regardless of any aestheticqualities the films possess, the quality, standard and function of their soundoccupies such a central place in their Western reception as to negate theiractual position as both a significant achievement in cinematic techniqueand as an important sociocultural response to a post-colonial context. Socommon is the stereotype of bad dubbing that it has even been used forcomic effect in several Hollywood films. In Waynes World 2 when the maincharacter played by Mike Myers meets the Hong Kong-Chinese father ofhis Asian-American girlfriend he speaks to him first in Cantonese; butwhen they clash over her, a fight ensues and they switch to conventions

363


associated with the dubbing of martial arts films. As the fight begins, initself mocking the martial arts genre, the two men transform the scenethrough these conventions of bad dubbing: in other words, there is inappro-priate voice acting and poor lip synchronization, which are key associa-tions with the Hong Kong film genre that suggests it is trashy, cheap andinferior. This scene demonstrates both the actual and imagined dominantposition that Hollywood has over other popular cinemas and in the deval-uing of Hong Kong cinema: not only through the parody of martial artsbut also in the symbolic power that Myerss character has over the fatherthrough his command of Cantonese.

This chapter on sound in Hong Kong Cinema first sets out to assess the'problem' around sound in terms of the dubbing of the martial arts filmbefore turning to examine the significant role that sound has played, as filmmusic, in the contemporary martial arts film.

Dubbing Dragons

Almost all films made in Hong Kong are produced with post-productionsound. There are two reasons for this. First, during the heyday of the martialarts genre in the 1960s, most films were produced within the Hong Kongstudio system, dominated by the well-known Shaw Brothers and Cathaystudios, which like Classical Hollywood were organized according to prin-ciples of standardization through the system of vertical integration. Forthis reason it was easier, quicker and cheaper to create all sound throughpost-production. Secondly, the number of regional accents and differencesin spoken Chinese languages would need to be managed. The cast of atypical Shaw Brothers martial arts feature would have too much speechvariation with for example, Mandarin spoken with a Cantonese accent. Asa more recent example, in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon the Cantonese-accented Mandarin spoken by Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh was con-sidered problematic, a question of authenticity in how the film sounded toits native Chinese and Taiwanese speakers, which in turn lead to its nega-tive reception in those regions.1 Since many of the male stars of ShawBrothers studios' action genres were chosen for their good looks and skillsin performance, the ability to manage their voice, particularly if they werenot predominantly Mandarin speakers or commanding in their voice, wouldbe overcome in post-production by voice actors. It is also worth mentioningthat Hong Kong is not the only cinema to be dominated by post-productionsound practices, as this is also the case in European cinema: for example inItalian, Spanish and German Cinema where dubbing is the norm.

Hong Kong Cinema 365

The quality and investment in the post-production sound of the Chinesesound mix in Hong Kong cinema equalled Hollywood and Europeancinema in terms of the precision in lip synchronization, the depth of ambi-ent sound and the arrangement of the musical score. Furthermore, soundeffects were also in line with the accepted standards of verisimilitude foraction sequences with a martial blow to the body registering similar levelsof materiality of force to the impact of a punch in a Westerns bar roombrawl. However, when one examines the exported versions of many ofthese films one finds that less care has been taken in the post-productionsound mix; in fact while certain sound elements have been reduced overallin the ambient sound (mostly 'invisible sound' like wind, traffic, crowds andanimals) the principal sound effects associated with action are often raisedto higher levels than in the Chinese versions. Both the reduction in ambi-ent sound and the exaggeration of sound effects renders the sound moreartificial, empty and 'tinny' and ultimately connotes through sound ideas ofinferiority and cheapness in relation to English language cinemas. In theAmerican-English language post-production sound mix of Bruce Lees TheWay of the Dragon one can detect changes in the sound mix that renderLees trademark vocal expressions that accompany his every move as beingfar more pronounced than they are in the Cantonese sound mix. WhileLees trademark sounds are still present in the Cantonese version, they arearranged differently within the overall mix in terms of their loudness, bal-ance and relationship to the other sounds. Further changes can be detectedin the English dub where the arrangement of different elements of ambientsound and sound effects are again used to effect a type of exaggeration suchas the films opening belly rumbles of hunger of Lees character which placesmore emphasis on the comic aspects of the scene. While it must be said thatmore care has been taken in the export versions of the films of Bruce Lee,perhaps because of his posthumously pre-packaged iconic status, the samecannot be said for the many other Hong Kong - produced martial artsfilms that exist in English-language export versions. In the Shaw Brothersfilms, there is a significant loss in terms of ambient sound that renders thesound experience of the films as being recorded in a space evacuated of theambient sound that we take for granted in the creation of verisimilitude.As film spectators our belief in the verisimilitude of sound is central to thecredibility of mise-en-scene as John Belton argues in relation to the func-tion sound plays in the construction of film space.2 Poor sound betrays ourconfidence in the veracity of the image. However, the most criticised ele-ment of sound in all English language versions of Hong Kong martial artsfilms is the voice dubbing to which I now turn.


In the Italian Westerns, like the martial arts film also pejoratively codedas Hollywood's Other, it is not difficult to detect that dubbing processeshave been used because there are varying degrees to which the synchroni-zation between dialogue as sound and lip movement as image correspondto one another. It can be so subtle as to be undetected, partly because manylanguages would have been spoken on set, including English, that wouldmatch some of the casts lip movements; but for the most part the dubbingis obvious enough as to highlight the disjuncture between the body onscreen whose lips are moving and the voice we are hearing amplified fromthe off-screen source of the speaker. The mismatching of lips as image andvoice as sound reveal to us what Mary Ann Doane has referred to as thematerial heterogeneity of the cinematic text.3 The material heterogeneity ofthe film text is the division between image and sound as separate formalelements. It is (Hollywood) cinemas goal to efface this material heteroge-neity of the text through sound synchronization and continuity editing.Doane suggests this is an ideological process since the imaginary unitybetween sound and image is central to cinema as a bourgeois form in thatit seeks to mask itself as the product of labour. What the English voice dub-bing reveals in non-English language films is disunity between image andsound in other words the material heterogeneity of the film text is exposed.Both the English language dubbing of the Italian Western and the HongKong martial arts film reveal to the spectator the constructed nature ofsound in the cinema. In theoretical terms, it renders the cinematic appara-tus visible. Those who expressly complain about imperfect English dubbingperhaps reveal in their response not only a kind of superiority (our cinemais better than theirs - it certainly helps lend the aura of art cinema to subti-tled films as somehow authentic in their foreignness) but also perhaps oneof not wishing to recognize cinemas construction, its material heterogene-ity, the nature of it as an apparatus, in as much as such a response supportsthe hegemonic position that Hollywood occupies vis-a-vis its perceivedtechnical excellence, that is, in the skilful masking of its own conditions ofproduction and exhibition.

In the case of Hong Kong martial arts film as well as the Italian Western,both Chinese and Italian audiences are well aware that the standard practiceof their cinemas is to add the sound at the post-production stage and thatthe voices they might be hearing are not necessarily those of the actors onscreen. As John Charles notes, even the prestigious Hong Kong star MaggieCheung has been dubbed by someone else in her own language most erro-neously in The Iceman Cometh where Cheung is given a wholly inappro-priate and unrecognizably different voice.4 However, there is a difference in


the voice dubbing of the Italian Western and the Hong Kong martial artsfilm. What is at the core of the martial arts denigration through sound isnot just the question of lip synchronization, although it is clearly a majorfactor, but the appropriateness of the dubbing voice to represent the body:in other words, it's a question of accord between the race-ing of the voiceand the race-ing of the body. In this particular context it is a marked divi-sion in which the Asian body is somehow robbed of its agency in thedomain of sound as it belongs to someone else whose voice is that of white-ness. The disjuncture between image and sound is one between the voiceand body where the Asian body adopts the phantasmatic voice of whiteAmerican machismo straight out of an American Western. The martial artsfilms relationship to the Western genre is therefore not unfounded. Thechoices made in English dubbing of many martial arts films are often exag-gerated vocal performances which emphasize through the texture and toneof the voice both masculinity and American-ness, hence the voices homo-phonic properties with the Western genres performative mode of vocaldelivery If the English dubbing is seen as a process of localization forAmerican audiences, then establishing links with the most American ofgenres perhaps make sense; even though I would argue it actually reinforcestheir cultural and generic difference through an Imperialism of the Englishlanguage in which the martial body the puppet of a hegemonic Americanventriloquism that stages its Western reception. It returns us to the ques-tions of power and agency posed in Waynes World 2. Very much like theventriloquists scenario, Hong Kong cinema unwillingly occupies the sub-ordinate role of the puppet awaiting the voice of its master who, throughdubbing, lends it life and meaning for its Western audience.

The one thing that I could not determine or trace was where and who isresponsible for the post-production processes of these films in to Englishlanguage versions. It might bring some clarity to the argument around thepower and agency in dubbing practices. Does it take place in Hong Kong?Is the studio or producer responsible? Is it overseen by American distributors?These are just some of the questions that still need to be answered. Somedubbing processes go even further in utilizing obviously fake 'Oriental'accents clearly not voiced by any Asian language speaker which only goesto further highlight the racist dimensions of some dubbing practices indenying any legitimacy to non-English languages and cinemas. This seemsto be more pronounced in the dubbing of some Japanese film and televisionexports such as the English language-dubbed versions of the televisionseries Monkey and The Water Margin with their Japanese-accented Englishvoice acting. This latent racist strategy of performing stereotypes through


voice has been used in the Japanization of the despotic Nemoidians inStars Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace on whose very alien lips stilllives the World War II yellow peril fantasy of Imperial Japan. It has alsobeen used in a more subtle fashion in Memoirs of a Geisha in which theChinese actresses Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi play Japanese women who speakin a Japanese-accented English voice.

Once Upon a Time in China: Music, Martial Arts and Cultural Identity

As the above examination of film sound in the martial arts film suggests,there has been a dearth of appreciation of the complexity of sound actuallyoperating in Hong Kong cinema because the resulting versions are mis-guided in their dubbing strategies and fall short of the benchmark of tech-nique set by Hollywood in its hegemonic position as the most globallydominant cinema. This supposed inferiority is not the actual case, however,and as I hope to demonstrate through the analysis of a few scenes from oneparticular martial arts film series and its important and recurring musicaltheme. In the six-part Once Upon a Time in China series (1991-1997),sound has been central to a process of reinforcing Hong Kongs own culturalidentity through nostalgia for an older Hong Kong cinema and as an imagi-ning of a relationship between Hong Kong and China in a key moment ofhistorical transformation.

Writing just before the handover in 1997, Ackbar Abbas refers to HongKong culture as expressing a desperate search for identity.5 This generalstatement about the culture of Hong Kong in this period is clearly illus-trated by the return to the period martial arts film in the early 1990s initi-ated by maverick director Tsui Harks revival of the Cantonese folk heroWong Fei-Hung in the Once Upon a Time in China series. Wong Fei-Hungwas a popular folk figure, a real person in the late nineteenth century, whohas subsequently been mythologized in over a hundred films through the1950s and 1960s by the Cantonese theatre actor Kwan Tak-Hing and evenon occasion by Jackie Chan in the martial arts comedy Drunken Master.After decades of absence since the early 1970s, replaced with the more con-temporary icons of Bruce Lee, Chow Yun-Fat, Michael Hui, Sammo Hungand Jackie Chan, the figure of Wong Fei-Hung is brought back to the centreof Hong Kong culture by Tsui Hark in the Once Upon a Time in China series.Wong Fei-Hung is now portrayed by a young actor from the Mainlandinstead of Hong Kong, Li Lian-Jie, soon to be known internationally asJet Li. The Wong created by Tsui Hark becomes central, even heuristic, toexploring the tensions between Hong Kong identity and Chinese identity


in the time leading up to the 1997 handover, and through the musicaltheme of the character, sound has a very important role to play.

What the subsequent analysis will suggest is that in order to understandthe significant shift in the two different portrayals of the Cantonese legendof Wong Fei-Hung one must examine the ideological role played by music,in particular, the characters instantly recognizable tune which has beena key musical signature since its inception in Hong Kong cinema in the1950s.

The music used for the character of Wong Fei-Hung is known as 'TheGenerals Theme' (jiangjunling), a traditional arrangement that dates backto the eighteenth century when it was used in the Southern Chinese theatreform of Cantonese Opera. However, in 1949 'The Generals Theme' becameassociated with the 1950s incarnation of the Wong Fei-Hung characterportrayed by Kwan Tak-Hing and was used with increasing routine as themusical leitmotif of the character throughout the long-running series.According to Stephen Teo, Wong Fei-Hung during this period becamea household name and his signature tune would be instantly recognizable.6

More than just popular entertainment, Hector Rodriguez suggests that thefilms themselves acted as vehicles of civic education through the moralguidelines exhibited by Wongs Confucian and Patriarchal approach tolife.7 It is worth noting that the appearance of Wong Fei-Hung at the begin-ning of the 1950s and then again in the 1990s seems to coincide withmoments of crisis, China and the diaspora around 1949 and then the 1997handover, when Hong Kongs sense of cultural identity and cultural unityare at stake. The decline in the appearance of Wong Fei-Hung seems tocoincide with a paradigmatic shift in Hong Kong cinema from one thatstruggles to confirm its local identity and audience to a cinema secure in itsidentity, an international cinema once defined on the global stage throughcommercial success and through the iconic stardom of Bruce Lee andJackie Chan. It is not until we get to the late 1980s and the beginning of the1990s that Hong Kongs cultural identity is brought to the fore around aquestion posed posthumously in the title of the film Who am /? FeaturingJackie Chan. In this context, Tsui Hark brings back to the screen WongFei-Hung as a return to the history of the Cantonese Hong Kong cinemanot just as a nostalgic and mythic variation on his earlier incarnation butas a means to explore the complexity of identity in relation to Hong Kong,China and the West. The Once Upon a Time in China series re-addressesthe past in order to allegorize the uncertainty of Hong Kongs future. Exceptfor the final instalment of the series set in North America which dealsexplicitly with questions of diaspora, racism and the making of Chinatown,


Once Upon a Time in China takes place in a period of unrest at the end ofthe Qing Dynasty in the nineteenth century when, as the opening of thefirst part dramatizes, the many territories of China were being ceded toforeign rule and modernity (as Westernization) was transforming China inmultiple ways both positive and negative. The series thus encourages itsaudience to make analogies between the past and the future and betweenChina and the West. Jet Lis Wong Fei-Hung is placed at the centre of thefilms as an agent of historical and social change; and unlike the older incar-nation of Wong, Tony Williams suggests, he is defined by adaptation andchange, keywords in the decolonization process that are allegorized aroundhis personal, cultural and martial encounters across the series.8

The credit sequence in the first Once Upon a Time in China film marksa significant change in the use of the Wong Fei-Hung theme, as it is givenlyrics and a new arrangement by composer James Wong. Wong is a promi-nent composer and lyricist connected to Cantonese popular music. Thetheme is modernized by Wong and translated as either A Man ShouldSupport Himself or A Man Should Self-Strengthen' with a contemporaryarrangement that foregrounds the sound of Chinese drums, and at theinsistence of the budget conscious producer-director Tsui Hark, a synthe-sizer to replace traditional Chinese instruments.9 The song s title is also thesubtitle of the second part of the series. The accompanying lyrics to 'A ManShould Support Himself* - 'The purpose of great strengthening is to becomea great man, since men are men they should self strengthen - cements animage of collective identity through the depiction of group martial exercise.The credit sequence is an image of men training on a beach, beyond histor-ical reference to either Hong Kong or China, saturated in tones of red andorange light which foregrounds the contours of the body and movementand the collective experience of discipline and ritual. In fact, there is adeliberate overinvestment in the image of these men, and the bodies areheavily coded as spectacle through lighting, editing and performance rein-forcing a particular version of Chinese masculinity as both powerful andmythic. Although referring to the earlier cinema of Bruce Lee, Siu LeungLi s remark that cthe restoration of a strong China and of national prideunder colonial conditions is often effected through a fetishization of themale kung fu body>10 is clearly applicable here. The credit sequence and itsaccompanying reworking of The Generals' Theme work towards definingHong Kong identity in exclusively masculine terms as national pride is per-formed through tropes of masculinity and the male body and lyrics whichstress male agency. In a related example, the Hong Kong gangster filmCasino depicts a Triad gangster played by Simon Yam who sings A Man


Should Support Himself' in a nightclub with explicit gesturing towards OnceUpon a Time in China and its overinvestment in discourses of masculinity.The crowd sings along with Simon Yam in effect to bolster his performanceas a man who self-strengthens. This scene from Casino can in fact be readin two ways, on the one hand a serious rallying of Hong Kong Chinesemasculinity and on the other, a clever parody of male fantasies of power.

'The Generals Theme' is sung in the opening of Once Upon a Time inChina in Cantonese to specifically address its local (male) audience asHong Kong subjects as Cantonese is the main spoken language of HongKong and not China. Chinas official language is Mandarin (Putonghua orCommon speech'). Most theatrical prints of the film also forgo subtitling ofthe lyrics, rectified on some DVDs, which further renders them exclusiveto its local audience. 'The Generals Theme' also taps in to the dominantdiscourse of nostalgia that saturated Hong Kong culture in the sameperiod.11 The music is evocative through Wong Fei-Hung of an older HongKong cinema for an older generation articulating a sense of loss like thatexperienced by the ghost Fleur in Stanley Kwan's Rouge. The ghost in Rougemourns the loss of a bygone era marked by a particular engagement withmusic as pleasure and gendered leisure. In one scene from Rouge, a vibrantCantonese Opera house from the 1930s fades in to a dreary 24-h conve-nience store in the 1980s as traditional culture, in terms of music and the-atre, is erased by the alienating logic of capitalism's process of commercialdrive and cultural homogenization. Therefore, £The General's Theme' inOnce Upon a Time in China works on both a younger generation - throughits contemporary arrangement by James Wong - and for an older genera-tion who remember the times when Wong Fei-Hung was a central figure ineveryday popular culture.

The credit sequence of Once Upon a Time in China Part 2 repeats theimage of the men training on the beach from the first part with a slightlydifferent arrangement of 'The General's Theme' yet in a self-reflexivemoment the character of Wong Fei-Hung is watching the same sequencefrom the first instalment featuring himself, as mise-en-abimey through thetrain window. The window clearly framed, perhaps with reference to earlycinema's own self-reflexive gesture with the train window and movement,in terms of the doubling up of two screens. In addition to the continuedideological work of 'The General's Theme' as a process of strengtheninga localized masculine identity in the face of unification with China, thefunction of music towards the end of Once Upon a Time in China Part 2works towards a different politics whose meaning is determined by theformal function of music in relation to editing and generic pleasure.


Towards the end of Once Upon a Time in China Part 2, and a conventionof almost every Hong Kong martial arts film, Wong Fei-Hung faces thefilms arch nemesis, who in this second instalment is the corrupt Manchu-rian Official Lan played by Donnie Yen. As a general rule of the genre thefinal encounter is usually the longest, most spectacular and complexlystaged encounter; and the genre works towards anticipating it as a sort ofgeneric climax. In the final moments of Wong's long duel with Captain Lan,'The Generals Theme' can be heard low in the overall mix of sound withthe sound effects of physical contact made prominent; but as the duel entersits final few minutes the music comes in full to the front of the sound mixto prepare and excite the spectator with the knowledge that defeat is closeto hand. In the scene it is precisely that moment when Wong pins theenemy's weapon to the wall and closes in for the final fatal blow to theneck that 'The Generals Theme', as the signature theme of Wong Fei-Hung,marks through its presence, almost overbearing the power of the image.What is important here is that the excitement of the enemy's defeat accom-panied by 'The General's Theme', continues uninterrupted over to the nextscene of the film which depicts the safe journey of the real historical figureof Sun Yat-Sen. Wong's defeat of Lan as a bad Chinese figure has enabledSun Yat-Sen, a good Chinese figure, safe passage to China. Sun Yat-Sen isa key figure in modern Chinese history whose political ideals would con-tribute to the formation of modern twentieth-century China. What needsto be stressed here is that 'The General's Theme' bridges together bothscenes, connecting them through music, carrying the excitement of thegeneric closure, the defeat of the arch nemesis, over to the scene with SunYat-Sen's historic departure for China. Wong Fei-Hung is therefore writtenin to the history of China as an agent of historical change. Not only doesthe narrative construct Wong's historical agency, but significantly it is'Ihe General's Theme' that bridges the genre's fictional martial arts encoun-ter with all its excitement and exhilaration by carrying those affective feel-ings generated by the generic closure over to the narrative closure withSun Yat-Sen. Furthermore, 'The General's Theme' which is specifically iden-tified as both the signature theme of the Wong Fei-Hung character andmore generally as something potentially exclusive to Cantonese culturefulfils an ideological role. The ideological function of the musical bridgingbetween the two scenes I would argue works towards an imagined processof unification between two conflicting Chinese cultural identities. As anideological work of the text, the end of Once Upon a Time in China Part 2perhaps suggests some sort of shared historical moment when Hong Kongwrites itself in to the history of Modern China through the agency of one


of its most beloved popular heroes. Importantly, this is facilitated by genericconvention and the strategic use of sound as music in 'The Generals Theme!

The Once Upon a Time in China series finished in 1997 and WongFei-Hung hasn't been at the centre of Hong Kong film culture since then,although 'The Generals Theme' can still be heard in numerous films.'The Generals Theme' is impossible to divorce from the Wong Fei-Hungcharacter. It can be heard in the Wong Fei-Hung parody Last Hero ofChina in which Jet Li reprises his Wong persona. In Last Hero in China,'The Generals Theme' is given different lyrics and is sung flirtatiously bythe prostitutes who neighbour Wongs residence in a manner which embar-rasses the young Wong Fei-Hung with sexual innuendo. Comedic uses of'The Generals Theme' can even be heard in earlier films such as The Lady isthe Boss; the theme is performed as a disco number during the demonicwedding reception in the horror comedy THY Death do We Scare. In fact,'The General's Theme' can even be heard on the deeply Orientalist 'Japanese-style' betting show Banzai, produced for the terrestrial British stationChannel 4. However, "The General's Theme' as heard in the opening creditsof Once Upon a Time in China has been used in a more politicized andemotive context in Hong Kong with newly adapted lyrics as Memorial toGreat Men. As Siu Leung Li notes it was used in candlelight vigils as late at1999 to remember the Chinese pro-democracy students killed in Beijing'sTiananmen Square on 4 June 1989.12 Therefore, Once Upon a Time in Chinaand 'The General's Theme' have been at the centre of Hong Kong culturenot just for the purposes of scoring these important contributions to themartial arts genre but also as a public performance during the decoloniza-tion of Hong Kong and the making of a culturally hybrid identity fash-ioned out of China, the West and Hong Kong's own culturally specific localself definition.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide two ways of looking at howsound has been central to the production of meaning in Hong Kong cin-ema both from within Hong Kong culture itself and from Hong Kongcinema's Western reception. On the one hand, Hong Kong cinema's Westernreception as 'kung fu cinema has been central to its trivialization throughdubbing and other post-production practices that render the films beyondserious consideration. On the other hand, I have attempted to show howsound as music in the martial arts genre, in particular the music of 'TheGeneral's Theme' associated with the Wong Fei-Hung character, has been atthe centre of Hong Kong's post-colonial cultural identity in its multipleshifts across historic, filmic and public contexts. This is an important period inboth Hong Kong cinema and Hong Kong history marked by decolonization


and through both subtle and obvious political and cultural tensions betweenHong Kong and China which I argue is also negotiated within the realm offilm sound.

Notes

1. S. Lu, 'Crouching tiger, hidden dragon, bouncing angels: Hollywood, Taiwan,Hong Kong and transnational cinema' in S. H. Lu and E. Y. Yeh, eds. Chinese-LanguageCinemas. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005, p. 227.

2. J. Belton, Technology and aesthetics of film sound', in J. Belton and E. Weis (eds).Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, p. 68.

3. M. A. Doane, 'Ideology and the practice of sound editing', in S. Heath and T. DeLauretis (eds), The Cinematic Apparatus. London: Macmillan, 1980, pp. 47-56.

4. John Charles, The Hong Kong Filmography, 1977-1997: A Complete Reference to1,100 Films Produced by British Hong Kong Studios. McFarland & Co., 2000, p. 155.

5. A. Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

6. S. Teo, Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions. London: British Film Institute,1997, p. 51.

7. H. Rodriguez, cHong Kong popular culture as an interpretive arena: The HuangFeihong film series', Screen, 38.1 (1997), 1-24.

8. T. Williams, * "Under Western eyes": the personal odyssey of Huang Fei-Hong inonce upon a time in China' Cinema Journal, 40.1 (2000), 3-24 (reprinted in Eleftheriotisand Needham, 2006).

9. W. Ho, T love him and I hate him: James Wong on composing for a truly creativemind' in S. Ho (ed.), The Swordsman and his Jiang Hu: Tsui Hark and Hong Kong Film. HongKong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2002, pp. 122-3.

10. S. Li, 'Kung Fu: negotiating nationalism and modernity', Cultural Studies, 15.3/4(2001), 515-42 (reprinted in Eleftheriotis and Needham, 2006); 516.

11. A. Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Ma, E. K. 'Re-advertising Hong Kong: nostalgia indus-try and popular history' in J. Nguyet Erni and S. K. Chua (eds), Asian Media Studies. Oxford:Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

12. Li (2001), p. 524.

22Women in Hollywood Cinema

Women Through Music in Golden Age Hollywood Cinema

Alexander Binns

'The evil eye - like the missing person - is nothing in itself*, writes HomiBhabha, 'it is [the] structure of difference'.1 Bhabha writes persuasively ofthe deep-rooted sense in which the absence of the expected hints at,or even creates, meaning around this absence. That which is missing orlacking helps to form, or intensify, the impression of that which is left. Theconstruction of women, and particularly their structured screen absence,can be a powerful promoter of their presence. The presence of women incinema, and especially in the period of Hollywood films which forms thefocus of this chapter, is structured around their role in relation to men. AsSharon Smith has observed, '[t]he role of a woman in a film almost alwaysrevolves around her physical attraction and the mating games she playswith the male characters'.2 Smith continues that *[w]omen provide troubleor sexual interludes for the male characters, or are not present at all'.3 Thisideological position was also consolidated by the score.

Classical Hollywood cinema used music, among other components, toencode the presence and aura of women and, in so doing, perpetuatedentrenched models of female sexuality.4 The cultural logic of this misogy-nist teleology in film is marked musically by an index of referential clichesannexed to the visual discourse. More than this, however, the score alsohelped to formulate the sense in which the images were read: togethersound and image promoted a set of attitudes toward gender in social terms.Music, in particular, veiled its means of producing these attitudes and was

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therefore able to play out gender politics as though it were natural: main-taining the status quo aurally.

The mechanisms by which music achieved this degree of manipulationdo not concern this chapter in detail, but a brief comment is useful to offera context. Hollywood films of the Golden Age invariably deployed asoundtrack that was specially composed. Usually this was undertaken byin-house studio composers and then performed by in-house studio orches-tras. In other words, it was a kind of production line of affect. The fact thatthe music was exclusively orchestral and that there was a convention ofsaturating much of the film with an all-purpose romantic texture meantthat the large amount of music required had to be composed within a veryshort period of time, sometimes only a few weeks. This pressure forcedcomposers into adopting a short-hand of musical cliches that guided theaudience towards the intended emotional, social or psychological sense ofa particular scene and which were readily decodable and commonly under-stood by the audience.

As a result, the intensification of emotion or, by contrast, the sharpeningof moral commentary that was the soundtracks raison d'etre, usuallyresulted in a reinforcement of dominant ideological positions towardsgender that were current at the time of filming. In fact, the very notion ofemotion, and particularly the kind invoked in classical Hollywood cinema,was used as a discourse of gender and, thus, one of women. A considerationof the film music underpinning this, therefore, offers great deconstructivepotential with respect to gender, mainly because the score works at theperiphery of active perception for the audience, and yet it offers a store-house of political attitudes and cultural prescriptions as well as revealing asense of historically situated attitudes to women.

In spite of this, however, the way in which the soundtrack had contained'women has, in general, been avoided until recently. This was due, in part, toa privileging of the visual in academic discourse on film and partly alsobecause modes of interpreting music had largely been under-exploreduntil musicology was opened up to theoretical frameworks in other disci-plines. This process of opening up enabled the power structures envelopedwithin it to be exposed and the application of this to film seemed appropri-ate for demonstrating musics gendered constitution.

In classical Hollywood films, women are constructs: '[s]ex we're born with;gender we learn5 contends Jackie Byars. Men are also constructed in cin-ema; but the ways in which the music circumscribed the domain, role and

Women in Hollywood Cinema 377

constitution of women forms the subject of this chapter since it foregroundsa nest of issues that demonstrates the crucial ways in which music wasrecruited for cinematic narratives.

For Hollywood, and especially for Golden Age Hollywood, women areconstructed; but this period of film - roughly coinciding with World War II -spawned more than the usual constructions of women because it alsointroduced a type of film, often referred to as the'Woman's Film', that flour-ished in the 1940s. These films played on the sensibilities of wartime womenwho, without their husbands or fiances, entertained themselves with melo-dramas at the pictures - the narrative themes of which were supposed tochime with their own experiences of desire and heartbreak. Therefore, thisintrinsically misogynist category of film lies at the centre of the ways inwhich gender was configured in the mass-entertainment cinema of classi-cal Hollywood. Molly Haskell notes that:

the term 'women's film* is used disparagingly to conjure up the imageof the pinched-virgin or little-old lady writer, spilling out her secretlongings in wish fulfilment or glorious martyrdom, and transmittingthese fantasies to the frustrated housewife. The final image is one ofwet, wasted afternoons. And if strong men have also cried their shareof tears over the weepies, that is all the more reason (goes the argu-ment) we should be suspicious, be on our guard against the flood of\mearning' feelings released by these assaults, unerringly accurate, onour emotional soft spots.6

For many, this is a well-considered area, but it is important to gain anunderstanding of the soundtracks role in manufacturing the ways in whichfemale desire and female allure were projected in film. Women were con-structed by the processes in the films narrative; but in this construction,they were also located as the object of masculine desire and masculine per-spectives. Laura Mulvey s seminal essay, 'Visual Pleasure and NarrativeCinema, identified women as the object of the so-called male gaze. Thisobjectification became fetishized and operated to secure male dominanceover female characters - circumscribing their permitted desire, as well asprescribing what purported to be female desires.

The mechanism and framework of the narrative - of its drive and teleo-logical impulses - are traditionally ascribed to the masculine partly becausethese control female desire, but partly also because they embody the tropeof the drive: the push forward that registers in the masculine symbolicdrive postulated by Jacques Lacan.7 Mulvey s account, however, focused


almost exclusively on the visual sense in which the objectification of womenin film took place. A good deal of this objectification also resided in theways in which the musical score channelled attitudes and underminedcharacters' positions by subverting or inflecting the way in which the audi-ence read them, tingeing their visual readings.

A paradigmatic example will serve to illustrate this point. A man anda woman's eyes lock; he wants to embrace her but, at first, she resists. As hepersists in his attempts, we hear (though we do not see) the music on thesoundtrack gradually begin to swell, at which point this seems to prompta change of feeling within the female character. The music here appears tosuffuse the scene, though it does not effect a displacement from the visualfocus for the audience. She gradually moves towards him and is drawnineluctably into an embrace. The music configures this change of heart -not the image. Or rather, the music licenses; it justifies and authorizes; andit makes plausible her apparent change of feeling. Our impression, how-ever, is that this was her 'true' attitude all along (the only right one) andthat it emerges naturally. In fact, it is the score that presents this attitude,suturing it within the fabric of the film so that it appears as though it isidentifying her attitude rather than constructing it. In this case, the musicinscribes moral and ideological attitudes, and in the process, music becomesa manifestation of the oppressive social containment that operates morewidely in society.

The'Golden Age'

The so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, which loosely refers to mass-entertainment films produced in the Los Angeles studio system from 1930to 1960, stands emblematically, not only for the social values that thisperiod of cinema held but also for the sense of archaic sheen in which thesefilms are now viewed. This era of film-making also brought with it a partic-ular fondness for lavish musical scoring. The sheer presence of the orches-tral score from films of this period can seem to overwhelm the presentationof the narrative to contemporary ears and to move, as Claudia Gorbmanhas suggested, from 'what was once coded as inconspicuous [to what] isnow perceived as intrusive and even camp'.8 The tendency to saturate muchof a film with music meant that the ways in which these films were read,and the ways in which they managed their captive audiences, were dictatedby the manner and 'type' of music that was deployed; the referential clichewas the stalwart.


Max Steiner, in particular, composed film scores that contained not onlyextended cues but also ended up enveloping most of the final release ofthe film with music. The openings of his scores often contained spans ofuninterrupted music for over 10 min in some cases. The tailor-made natureof the score ensured that it conducted its ideological business throughout;and as Steiner s notes on his short scores reveal, he instructed the orches-trators to adapt the music - in other words, orchestrate, amplify and bringout the 'sentiments' that were 'necessary' at a particular moment. Thus,music became a resource for the propagation of social values - a functionthat was clearly recognized within the compositional process. The policingof sexual boundaries by the censors of Golden Age Hollywood is well-documented. However, music sought at once to break (or, at any rate, hintat breaking) these boundaries, while also casting a kind of moral pall overthe character to which it was referring. Indeed, it might even chastise andmorally punish that character by coercing the audiences attitude into oneof condemnation for them.

Kathryn Kalinak, in her study of film music, Settling the Score, intro-duced the notion that a good deal of Hollywood soundtracks functionedaround the idea of constructing women in binary terms. This binaryapproach structured their sexuality, positioning them as either the figure ofwife or whore; or in Kalinaks words, as the Virtuous wife' or the 'fallenwoman'. On this point, Kalinak has noted how Steiner's annotations on hisshort scores seemed to support this hypothesis by identifying what themusic's function was with respect to gender archetypes:

Like the Hollywood film itself which created an image of womanas the projection of its own (male) fear and desire, the classicalHollywood film score collaborated in the dominant ideology whichpunished women for their sexuality. Visual displays of female sexual-ity were accompanied by a nucleus of musical practices which carriedimplications of indecency and promiscuity through their associationwith so-called decadent forms such as jazz, the blues, and ragtime.9

That the construction of women, or the projection of women by music,intersects to such an extent with sexuality and with sex, identifies the tropeof the feminine that Hollywood propagated: that of woman as sex object.Kalinaks binary structure posits sex as the decisive factor in mitigatingwhich of the two possibilities are adopted for those characters on screen.The extensive use of leitmotivic material in the score sought to bolster


notions of a character s sexuality and inevitably fix them in that positionbecause they could not escape from their musical frame.10 In the context ofclassical Hollywood cinema, the use of leitmotif enabled composers notonly to identify and create a link to a character - one that could be usedsubsequently to refer to that character off screen - but also as a way ofinflecting that character s personality morally. This quality could then beused (and modified musically) to contain other characters or to suggest anassociation between the original character and a subsequent character.

That Max Steiner was aware of the accusatory nature that his musicintended seems clear from the annotations that he made in his scores.Moreover, that these exhibited a gendered 'flavour' is more than clear when,in a scene from In This Our Life (1941), he states that 'the "Law" will get theBITCH! Goody-goody (Daubney, 2000, p. 16). And, in the 1942 film NowVoyager, Steiner writes 'Erwachende Liebe!! Verstehst? Or SEX rears its uglyhead!'11 Kate Daubneys contention that this, in fact, represents a milder,understated example of Steiner s sentiments is in itself true, but it does notdeal with the sense in which the invocation of gender in general termsmust inevitably play a role in the condemnation, or at any rate the contain-ment, of that character.

By invoking gender and madness, manifested in the flouting of gendercodes, the classical Hollywood projection of women concatenated thecategories of woman with a discourse of medicine that engaged the ideathat attitudes to gender are universal and are biologically inscribed. Womenare projected as having strayed from this feminine role medically if they donot conform to the virtuous wife archetype. Their medical deviations -inevitably involving sex - also raise questions of fallibility. But a failure inwhat, one might ask? In the age of the classical Hollywood film, this was afailure to conform to the family model and to observe moral and socialcodes prescribed by the dominant ideological sectors of society. Thus,women became foregrounded as moral examples and deviation becamea sign of failure.

The Case of Brief Encounter (1945)

The idea of women forming the spectatorial focus of cinema has beenwell covered particularly in terms of identification with film texts; and, inturn, this idea helps to frame a consideration of music s role in directingspectatorship and gender. The opening of David Leans 1945 film, BriefEncounter serves as a fascinating example of the ways in which music,firstly, constructs a permitted space for women, and secondly, contains the

Women In Hollywood Cinema 381

excess of female desire within this space, policing the boundary of sociallypermissible transgressions. Once again, this situation is redolent of Mulvey smasculine objedification in visual terms, since the containment of thefemale character s desires and the repression of her confessions (themselvespositioned as morally reprehensible and a let down, or even dirty) are char-acteristic of male containment of female characters and highlight why herconfession can only be invoked within the justifying cocoon of music.

The scene - which occurs towards the beginning of the film - is oneof a middle-class, suburban family (two children: a boy and a girl). Thehusband and wife are sitting in the living room. The husband is reading thenewspaper and his wife is sewing. They chat casually about incidentalmatters - crosswords, the news - and then the wife asks her husbandwhether some music would throw him off his stride, to which he repliesthat it would not. The music she chooses at this moment is a performanceof Rachmaninovs second piano concerto. We see her walk to the radio andsearch through channels until settling upon Rachmaninov. This action isa clear indication that this is diegetic music - that it is perceived by thecharacters within the narrative.

After this, she returns to where she was sitting and continues to sew asthe audience watches and listens to what happens. A little later, the musicbegins to swell - the volume and presence of the music within the narrativeseem to become too great for this to be plausibly diegetic. The narrativestatus of the music is moving from the diegetic (within the living room) tothe level of the non-diegetic (the more distanced layer of commentary;a category similar to that which contains the voice-over). This move, fromthe reality of the film to a level of emotional and ideological invocation,sets up the parameters for her voice-over confession. As the music swells,the camera dwells on her face, and she begins to explain her moral trans-gressions: 'Fred, Fred. Dear Fred . . . I've been so foolish . . . ' she begins.

What is also interesting about this example, however, is the way inwhich the music plays. Its slippage from the diegesis to the non-diegesis isthat which entitles the controlled confession to take place at all. Musicsown transgression of narrative levels stimulates confession by softeningthe membrane between character and audience. It places the audience ina privileged situation in which their confidence is elicited. By allowing thissoftening to take place, the soundtrack forces the audience into a positionin which they are required to 'read' the scene in a particular way; it is a waythat annihilates their critical sense (or, at least, it has the capacity to do so)and one that positions the female character in a weak spot - inviting sym-pathy from the audience for her constructed fallibilities.


At the same time, however, this 'weak spot' reinforces the idea of womenas vulnerable, especially within the categories of wife and mother. Themusic, therefore, ideologically underscores the action, enforcing positionsof dominant ideology. Without the introduction of music, the legitimacy ofher confession would be undermined; the music provides the context forthe playing out of ideological beliefs though it does not, itself, containthese beliefs. As a tool, therefore, music proved useful and widespread inconveying and commenting on morality.

The containment generated by the music in this scene demonstrateshow her behaviour is to be regarded as unacceptable. But, it also providesa forum in which, within this moral framework, she can nonetheless revealwhat she has done. Music is thus an identification of the confinement ofmorality, while also providing a vent for it. In a sense, the musical back-ground to her confession is intended to force the audience into identifyingsympathetically with her. In other words, the audience is positioned withher subject and this enables (even requires) empathy.

Music acts a kind of salve for morality - outlining it, while also softeningit through subject positioning. This use of music was particularly commonin the Golden Age of Hollywood usually in connection with women. Thiswas mainly because women provided a moral locus for the film; or rather,women served as the yardstick for morality and the gauge and potential formoral example. This 'use' of women as a crystallization of morality - andthus also a clear sign of moral departure where necessary - is authorized bythe way in which the musical score makes the audience believe in or evenassociate with the character under its comment.

King Kong - Rebecca

Another sense of the musical constitution of women in Golden AgeHollywood cinema may be gained by looking at examples from two genres,both of which invoke the discourse of femininity in order to establish theirgeneric territory. The first is the horror film; the second is the melodramaor 'gaslight' genre. The musical discrepancies between these two genresenable a productive case of the scores function in terms of its depiction ofwomen to emerge.

Horror films route their narrative power through configuring devianceas threatening - often deadly. In the process, gender is recruited, both asa stabilizing condition - one that establishes the norms against which devi-ance plays its role - and also as the site of deviance itself; and thus, the


horror film constructs deviance as essentially a gendered phenomenon.It achieves this, however, by capitalizing on entrenched, mass-entertainmentperceptions of gender in order then to destabilize them. Therefore, horror,by reversing stereotypes of gender, in fact, serves as the site within whichmusics role in gender politics emerges more than ever.

Women both play out - even extemporize - their perceived femininityin the horror film as well as undermine it. Yet even in undermining it, thereis a sense that classical Hollywood cinema positioned women as, in fact,conforming' to this type in all its vicarious mystery and allure. Peter Franklin,in an account of King Kong (1933), details how the horror - the frighteningimpulses - of Kong were well understood from the outset by the audience;and they were understood, implicitly, as phallocentric satisfaction:

If it works, if it 'really' thrills and frightens, then we know we have gotour moneys worth, our rush of adrenalin or, for the men specifically,our moment or two of vicarious 'feminisation' that we can compen-sate for by holding our girlfriend's hand, agreeing with Jack that 'thiswas no place for a giiT.12

Music thus enables a sense of gender confirmation (in certain instances),pushing us to affirm ourselves in the films presence. It does this by engag-ing the audience subjectively in the activities onscreen. In horror, we learnto read the horrific, precisely because this is presented as a dangerous devi-ation from the 'norms' of gender security. The construction of women inparticular in this situation is especially interesting because film - and filmmusic - draw attention to gender boundaries as a way of marking theparameters of social norms.

In Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock's first US film made in 1940, as Mary AnnDoane has noted, there is a direct confrontation with 'instances of femalespectatorship and the woman's relation to the processes of imaging'.13 Theremarkable situation encountered in Rebecca is the fusing of woman asvisual subject with woman as spectator. As Doane contends, *[h]er desiresare strongly circumscribed by her relation to spectacle . . . [Rebecca] con-tains a scene in which the camera almost literally enacts this repressionof the feminine - the woman's relegation to the status of a signifier withinthe male discourse'.14 For Doane, the visual discourse provides this circum-scription, but Rebecca is also a film whose musical soundtrack is complicitin these operations. Franz Waxman's lush orchestral score contains andregulates the gaze as much as does the camera. Moreover, it establishes a


sense of social placement, an urgent concern at the time especially withinthis film whose context deals with notions of social class and of femaleanxiety at the potential loss of newfound freedoms during the war years.

Sometimes referred to as gaslight' films, this group of films - in contrastto film noir which identifies male anxiety at the potential independence ofwomen - foregrounds women's subjectivity. As Tania Modleski has statedc[i]n many of these films, the house seems to be alive with menace, and thegreedy, sadistic men who rule them are often suspected of trying to drivetheir wives insane'.15 Thus, a particular theme of these films - and Rebeccais no exception - is the trope of class transgression. This is usually struc-tured so as to instil anxiety within the protagonist and thus mobilizes thesense of melodrama that characterizes this genre.

The ways in which music may cement social class into the audiencesmind (or ear) was part of the way in which it also sought to pinpoint issuesof gender. Gender and class are often seen as interrelated, particularly inGolden Age Hollywood. This interrelation functions not so much as a col-lapsing of the two territories into one, but instead, gender and class serve asvisceral containers: visceral because they make the audience/ee/ their senseof containment. Thus, in Rebecca, the Joan Fontaine character is markedout, not only by her feelings of being socially but of depth' in the homeof her new husband Maxim de Winter but also by an attack on the status ofher role as wife and as a woman. Here, the soundtrack serves to intensifythis sense of containment by placing the audience with the subject of theJoan Fontaine character and thereby inviting them to empathize.

The situation in Rebecca, however, is made more complex by the intro-duction of the 'presence' of the character of Rebecca herself, or rather, ofRebeccas aura, for we do not see her; Rebecca is recently deceased. She lefta husband and a household of domestic servants, all of whom rememberher well and attempt to shift her presence onto Maxims new wife, the JoanFontaine character, whose true name is not revealed - further suppressingher under Rebeccas often-repeated name. The reality of the situation, how-ever, is that Maxim hated his late wife and, in fact, murdered her for herinfidelities. Therefore, what is represented as fear of the ideal wife turns outto be horrific.

Since Rebecca herself is never seen during the film, this absence allowsmusic to offer a sense of her subjectivity. On a number of occasions, themusic seems to identify the subject position of Rebecca who can evade theusual signifiers and containers of the feminine because her visual presenceis absent; she is invoked by reference only and then by music. Music doeswhat it does best in this case: it hints at and evokes with strongly encoded


narrative power. In this way, Rebecca offers a clear sense of how womencould be constructed through the musical score as well as the way in whichit was not usually achieved, for here, we witness a numinous presentationof a woman: one whose veiled nature mysticizes and delimits her genderstereotype. The potential 'threat' lies in the fact that she evades the usualconfines of the narrative space. Likewise, music is not confined to an easilydefinable narrative space and so can collude with other aspects of the film-ing process to project a sense of Rebeccas subjectivity.

Rebecca marked one of the first in this series of melodramas which wasconcluded, in Modleski s view, in George Cukor s Gaslight in 1944. 'The factthat after the war years these films gradually faded from the screen proba-bly reveals more about the changing composition of movie audiences thanabout the waning of womens anxieties concerning domesticity.'16 Indeed,the control and proliferation of stereotypical attitudes towards women andissues of femininity continued with vigour. The so-called womens filmswere not the only ones which characterized women through music, ofcourse. Music alludes to issues of gender in film more generally, and thetrope it perpetuates often seeks to bolster pre-existent notions of gender.The genre of the Western, in particular, is predicated on strong binariesoften constructed through music. In this case, they are binaries to do withalien and non-alien; civilized and non-civilized; tamed and wild. And yet,the structure and even the sentiment of these binaries can also be found inthe ways in which the space given to women in film is delineated musically.

Conclusion

Claire Johnston noted how the presence of women in cinema was governedby myth and that a rich understanding of the means behind this lies in theways in which these myths are read:

[mjyth then, as a form of speech or discourse, represents the majormeans in which women have been used in the cinema: myth trans-mits and transforms the ideology of sexism and renders it invisible -when it is made visible it evaporates - and therefore natural.17

The iconography of Hollywood inscribes myth - and especially the mythof women as somehow eternal - but as we have seen, this need not happenas a form of speech only, as Johnston maintains. A perennial function of theclassical Hollywood orchestral score was one of myth construction in cer-tain cases but certainly of the supplementation of myths in other places.


To speak of Golden Age Hollywood cinema, therefore, as somehow con-veying a more focused stereotype of women through music is misleading.Or, at any rate, it underestimates the function music wielded elsewhere.Johnston continues her claim, stating that

[s] exist ideology is no less present in the European art cinema becausestereotyping appears less obvious; it is in the nature of myth to drainthe sign (the image of woman/the function of woman in the narrative)of its meaning and superimpose another which thus appears natural:in fact, a strong argument could be made for the art film inviting agreater invasion from myth.18

Musically, this contention holds, since the valence of musical depiction inclassical Hollywood cinema is wide and its ideological function is signifi-cantly veiled in the process, allowing it to portray, depict and bolster freely;or, as Claudia Gorbman has noted, to 'silence [...] the spectator s censor!19

Returning to Homi Bhabhas claim with which this chapter opened, thesoundtracks potential to present itself as absent - as a kind of hidden nar-rative weaver - serves to enhance the way it can underpin and frame ideol-ogy within that narrative. The presentation of women is an important wayin which this process can be understood and a way of demonstrating howHollywood cinema, in particular (but film in general) is constituted of aseries of reductive and generalizing - often oppressive - referential cliches.The way in which women are framed by music exemplifies how social atti-tudes in general are contained within cultural products and highlights theforceful and widespread power of music in relation to issues of gender.

Notes

1. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994, p. 53.2. Sharon Smith, 'The image of women in film: Some suggestions for further research',

Women and Film, 1 (1972), 13.

3. Ibid.4. In this context, 'aura' refers not to the definition proposed by Walter Benjamin in his

famous essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, but instead to the

idea that the feminine as a category had a type of emblematic projection in the films ofGolden Age Hollywood.

5. Jackie Byars, All that Hollywood Allows: Re-reading Gender in 1950s Melodrama.

London: Routledge, 1991, p. 2.6. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies.

New York: Holt, Rinehart £ Winston, 1974, p. 154.


7. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966.8. Claudia Gorbman, 'Ears Wide Open: Kubricks Music', Changing Tunes: The Use of

Pre-existing Music in Film. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, p. 3.9. Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film.

Madison, WI and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992, p. 120.10. A leitmotif, first introduced by writers on Richard Wagner, refers to a short, clearly

recognizable musical theme that becomes associated with a particular character or ideaand can undergo musical transformations that suggest changes in the thing to which it isreferring.

11. Kate Daubney, Max Steiners Now Voyager: A Film Score Guide. Westport; London:Greenwood Press, 2000, p. 17.

12. Peter Franklin, 'King Kong and Film on Music: Out of the Fog', Film Music: CriticalApproaches. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001, p. 91.

13. Doane(1988),p. 155.14. Ibid.15. Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women.

Hamden: Archon Book, 1982, p. 21.16. Modleski (1982), pp. 125-6.17. Claire Johnston, 'Women's Cinema as Counter-cinema', Notes on Women's Cinema.

London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1973, p. 25.18. Ibid.19. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. London and Bloomington,

IN: Indiana University Press, 1987, p. 55.

23Television Talent Shows

'Thank You, Voters': Approaching the Audience for Music andTelevision in the Reality-Pop Phenomenon

Su Holmes

Television has been conspicuously neglected in studies of popular music, and music has beennotably absent from most accounts of television. Unlike some subjects... where it is readilyapparent that a number of people are busily pursuing research and where there is a history ofsustained engagement ...it was not clear initially who, if anyone, was seriously thinkingabout or researching the relationship between music and television.

-Keith Negus and John Street]

It seems all the more significant that Negus and Street made this observa-tion in 2002, the year which saw the culmination of the first UK series ofPop Idol (ITV1, 2001-2002, 2003) and its subsequent launch as a highlysuccessful global television format. From the perspective of the televisionand music industries at least, this suggests that - spanning the economic,the technological and the cultural - much 'research' is indeed being investedinto the relations between the media. Negus and Streets observation iscouched within a broader acknowledgement of how, with the notableexception of music video, the relations between music and television haveoften been perceived as self-evident, uninteresting and thus lacking in ana-lytic value. As Simon Frith summarizes, on one level television is seen asplaying a central role in the circulation of popular music, indicating its sta-tus as 'the most effective tool of star-making or record promotion!2 Yet at

388

Television Talent Shows 389

the same time, 'television is thought not to be very important at all. Musichas not been a central part of its programming. The television audience israrely conceived as a music audience. TV-made pop stars almost alwayslack credibility'.3 The popular debate which has circulated around thereality-pop phenomenon, principally Popstars (ITV1,2001,2002, UK), PopIdol and Fame Academy (BBC, 2002, 2003, UK), is in many ways paradig-matic of Friths description here. Resolutely positioned as part of main-stream television culture, the apparent interest in 'music' could simply beseen as a vehicle for exploring our cultural fascination with stardom, whilethe 'artists' emerging from these series have attracted adulation and deri-sion in equal measure. It is significant that Friths willingness to acknowl-edge the economic importance of the media partnership brings into playdiscourses of value when it comes to the more ambiguous sphere of theaesthetic, cultural and ideological implications of these relations.

With this is mind, my aim here is not to 'reassess' or 'reclaim' the culturalvalue of these series as a site for the mediation of popular music - not leastof all because it would do a severe injustice to their construction, as well asthe cultural status of pop music itself. Rather, to put it simply, while theconcept of the television talent show is not new in itself, it seems undeni-able that its articulation with Reality TV has fostered one of the most visibleinterrelationships between pop music and television culture in the historyof their co-existence. What I want to suggest here is that central to this visi-bility has been a dramatization of the relationship between audience andtext as integral to their textual form. This is mediated through an increas-ingly conventionalized configuration in which 'music industry' and star,television viewer/ record consumer, intersect to produce a particular audio-visual event which transcends the boundaries of both media. My interesthere is in considering how Reality TV shapes television's relations withmusic by inviting the audience into an ideological, aesthetic and culturalspace.

The Gawp and Dial Genre': Audience and Text

A range of Reality TV programmes from Big Brother (2000, UK), I'm aCelebrity... (2003, UK) to Pop Idol have incorporated audience 'interactiv-ity' (principally in terms of telephone, digital TV or Internet voting) asa central discourse in their textual form.4 Existing work has begun toexplore the questions such strategies raise for the construction of viewerparticipation - particularly when it comes to the potential relationshipbetween the 'interactive' and the 'active' audience, if the latter is defined


in terms of how audiences negotiate the circulation of ideology in mediatexts.5 Simultaneously emerging at a time when there has been increasingcriticism of the 'active' audience paradigm across media studies more gen-erally,6 we should certainly be wary of conflating these concepts. However,this relationship is complex given that what we are encountering here arecultural products which play out debates concerning the power relationsbetween audience and text as an integral part of their televisual form.I have suggested elsewhere that the use of interactivity in the reality-popshows raises issues more specifically concerned with the relations betweenmusic industry and audience,7 a scenario largely worked through the quest'or 'struggle' to define what a pop idol or star 'is'. Particularly given theexpansion and conventionalization of these programmes since this time,what I want to do here is to extend my consideration of the audience, bothas it is textually constituted in the shows themselves, and figured withindiscourses of inter-textual circulation. In examining the construction ofthe audience in the programmes, I am not ignoring objections of textualdeterminism when it comes to conceptualizing audience response. Yet theideological complexity of these shows emphasizes the importance of inter-rogating how subject positions are mediated by popular culture in wayswhich ultimately solicit us to respond.

Succeeding the international visibility of Popstars, Pop Idol was developedby 19TV/FreemantleMedia in the UK in 2001. Following its lucrative suc-cess in both the British and American contexts (the first series of AmericanIdol emerged in 2002), the format has been launched in territories includ-ing Australia, Canada, Poland, Germany and Belgium. The internationallytelevised competition World Idol (ITVI, 25 December 2003) showcasedthe international penetration of the series, with its 'high concept'8 formatand logo consolidating its status as a global brand. In terms of its institu-tionalization in the British context, the core scheduling of the reality-popphenomenon has been the province of Saturday night, particularly if weinclude the appearance of the BBC's competitor Fame Academy here. Thisscheduling reflected the generic 'light entertainment' base of the pro-grammes, although the growth of Popstars and Pop Idol on terrestrial chan-nel ITVI also marked a bid to use Reality TV to modernize this sphere. AsClaudia Rosencratz, ITV's Controller of Entertainment, explained, tradi-tional light entertainment genres were not performing well, and there wasa wider sense that this label 'needed modernising and moving on. Popstarstook an old-fashioned talent show and [developed] . . . it in a new way'.9

Given the fact that ITVI is struggling to retain its core identity as a mass,'family' and generalist channel in the contemporary multi-channel landscape,


there was concern that the 'young angle' of the show may prove to be tooexclusive (although it is also worth noting here that this 'angle' was simul-taneously attractive to ITV given that it is weaker than other terrestrialchannels in attracting younger viewers). However, Rosencratz claims thatthe 'intrinsic drama of the show managed to secure a general viewershipwhich exploited the channels demographic,10 securing the future schedul-ing of these shows for the foreseeable future.

Although arguably less successful than its precursors on ITVI, the BBClaunched the first series of Fame Academy in 2002, an Endemol programmedeveloped from an international format. Originally based in a mansion inHampstead (the 'Academy'), the programme combined Big Brothers ethosof constant surveillance with an emphasis on the training and coaching ofthe contestants, and the light entertainment concept of the singing 'show'.Fame Academy was the BBC's first significant intervention into the eviction-based Reality TV form and at 4.5 million, it was reported to be 'the mostexpensive popular entertainment programme in the Corporations history'.11

When, in terms of ratings, Fame Academy looked to be an expensive'failure (its ratings later climbed), critics were quick to jump on the ventureas evidence of the woeful homogenization of the television schedules, andas the epitome of a public service broadcaster being driven by the marketi-zation of the multi-channel environment. This again attracted comment in2003 when the second series of Fame Academy and Pop Idol were scheduledin direct competition with one another on Saturday nights - with the mainprogrammes running between 6:30 and 7:30, and the result of 'evictionvotes at approximately 9:00 p.m.

The battle for this scheduling space is significant in suggesting that,unlike other reality formats such as Big Brother, the reality-pop shows(in both content and focus) were aimed at what some perceive to be thenow extinct concept of the 'family' audience. We only need to consider themusic here. Pop Idol, for example, has included themed weeks on everythingfrom Christmas songs, disco, ABBA music, 'Big Band', to songs written byBurt Bacharach or Elton John. As one critic confirmed, 'this is good, old-fashioned entertainment in a very skilful, new way - a way that let's every-one feel they're involved'.12 The dynamics of how this 'involvement' isorchestrated will be developed in more detail, but it is enough to stress herethat the institutional and cultural positioning of these programmes contin-ues something of the history of music programming on terrestrial televi-sion. In large part due to the mass (and domestic) address of the medium,a trajectory of programmes from Six-Five Special (BBC, 1957-1958), Top ofthe Pops (BBC, 1964) to Pop Idol, have aimed to address a youth audience


while not alienating or excluding 'Mum and Dad',13 earning televisionstreatment of popular music the status of being conservative, 'safe' andcomprehensible'.14 Indeed, Frith describes how 'the issue of authenticity inmusic has often been how to protect it from television.15 Given that 'popin itself is often set in opposition to discourses of musical 'authenticity',16

it is not surprising that this discourse becomes doubly confirmed whentelevision and 'pop' intersect. While my argument will be that notions ofauthenticity' in these shows are worked out in complex ways through notionsof 'the self, stardom and the relationship between 'artist' and 'industry', it isnot difficult to see here why the reality-pop programmes may be seen toexemplify existing value judgements when it comes to the relations betweenmusic and television.

As with television, conceptions of the audience for pop music have longsince moved toward an emphasis on the potentially 'active' nature of audi-ence response.17 Yet the focus here has arguably erred more on the side ofspecific practices of fandom or sub-cultural response. Implicitly, then, giventhe discourses surrounding the relations between the media outlined above,the audience for the pop/television intersection is at best, uninteresting(note the academic silence on the matter), and at worst, implicitly con-ceived as 'passive dupes'. This seems to be complimented by the wider dis-courses which have circulated around the consumption of Reality TV.18

Indeed, interactive reality shows have been described by critics in the pressas the 'the gawp and dial' genre.19 In fact, given the apparently popular con-ception that it is primarily the desires of teenage femininity which mostheavily influence the direction of voting on the reality-pop shows, the gen-eral dismissal of the genre is implicitly is bolstered by notions of culturalvalue where the popular cultural tastes of young girls are concerned.

These discourses are worth emphasising here because the shows explic-itly seek to construct notions of audience address that are set up in opposi-tion to these conceptions. They must in part be acknowledged so that - ina Gramscian dramatisation of 'struggle'20 - the programmes can be imag-ined as an 'intervention' into a popular cultural space that is defined bydiscourses of audience agency and power.21

The Only Place Where'Success'Comes Before'Work'is in the Dictionary':Mediating Mythologies of Fame

The concept of viewer agency in these texts is largely mediated via the con-struction of a triangulated 'struggle' between, on the one hand, the industry,and on the other, the relationship between audience and contestant/star.22


Indeed, since the first series of Pop Idol this structure has become some-thing of a convention in these shows. With the viewer functioning as a com-bination of talent show judge, record consumer and critical viewer, theyprovide an audio-visual space in which discourses on fame and stardomare worked through via a relay between audience and text. This dialogueis mapped onto an agenda which implicitly poses such key questions as:'What is "talent?"', cHow do we recognize it when we see it?' 'How impor-tant is it to the concept of fame to public visibility?' 'Who truly deserves"success", and why?' To understand why these questions are on the agenda(and why they might apparently be posed with such repetition andurgency), it is useful to briefly contextualize these discourses within shift-ing explanations of fame in modern society.

Although it is necessary to simplify the trajectory of his argument here,Joshua Gamson's work has suggested that throughout the twentieth cen-tury, there existed a pull between aristocratic (or in modern form, usuallymeritocratic) and democratic explanations of fame.23 In its earliest stages,discourses constructed fame as the province of 'the top layer of a naturalhierarchy',24 with an emphasis on a merited claim to fame defined by 'excep-tional conduct or internal qualities'.25 Yet with the growth of the massmedia, by the mid-nineteenth century, the rise to public visibility becameincreasingly detached from aristocratic standing with discourses of democ-racy - as epitomized by the American context - coming to the fore. Notionsof 'specialness' and 'uniqueness', of course, retain an important currency;but they now exist within a framework which mediates between the con-cepts of an elitist meritocracy and an 'egalitarian democracy'.26 As Gamsonsuggests, the earlier theme of greatness' becomes muted into questions of'star quality' and 'talent' and while the context is now set for a culture of the'personality', the primary narrative here is still one of'natural' and, indeed,deserving rise.27 However, what is central here is that, particularly from the1950s and the explosion of media outlets for image creation (such as tele-vision), the increasing visibility of the publicity machine itself graduallybegan to pose a threat to this myth, putting it under pressure and strain. AsGamson explains, the challenge from the manufacture-of-fame narrativehas been greatly amplified.... It has become a serious contender in explain-ing celebrity'.28 In the late twentieth century, this has fostered a range ofdiscursive strategies which aim to contain or diffuse the increasing disjunc-ture between the two claims-to-fame narratives. Primarily, these are repre-sented by the increasing bid to go 'behind-the-scenes' of the celebrity image,an accelerated emphasis on the 'power' of the audience, and the appearanceof discourses of self-consciousness and irony in celebrity texts.29


These arguments have a clear, if complex, relevance to the constructionsof stardom in the pop programmes. First, it is immediately clear that theinvitation to go 'behind-the-scenes* of fame production, combined with anemphasis on the power of the audience, comprises the central narrativestructure of these shows. Part of their claim to 'reality' is that they aremotored by a bid to 'display* the cultural power of the 'behind-the-scenes*impresarios which were once hidden from view.30 As judge Simon Cowellexplains in one edition of Pop Idol: 'Part of the "reality" of this show meansthat we must show "the reality" of the business* (23 July 2003). These showsare undoubtedly produced for the scrutiny of a media-aware audience, apublic conversant in the concept of 'image* production and construction,and entirely at ease with the economic logic which fuels this. Both Pop Idoland Fame Academy display these attitudes in typically blunt manner, dur-ing which instances concepts of'talent* or creativity are rendered irrelevant.On Fame Academy in particular, the judges persistently make reference tothe wider context of televisions commercial apparatus for record promo-tion with such comments as: 'Can I imagine you selling millions of singleswith that performance on Top of the Pops? Would that make me part withmy money?* (28 September 2003), and both programmes place an empha-sis on the commercial logic of the 'image*. In Pop Idol for example, judgeand DJ, Neil Fox, openly rejects the idea that a contestant should go throughon voice alone, by insisting: 'But when the public vote they're buying intothe image - it*s part of the package* (1 November 2003). Reflecting mypoint that perceptions of the popular music tastes of young girls permeatethe construction (and elsewhere the dismissal) of these shows, SimonCowell expands in the same edition that: 'Twelve-year-old girls from Hullhave to in some sense want to "be" you - do you see the problem here?'(Ibid.). It is important to emphasize that it is primarily in relation to visualappearance that discourses of manufacture are most willingly acknowl-edged. Indeed, in keeping with this self-reflexive rhetoric, this implicitlytrades upon the conception that the increasing importance of television tothe circulation of popular music has been responsible for prioritizing a'superficial* emphasis on 'image* over 'talent* and Voice'.31 However, this iscertainly not an anxious 'concern' for the programmes, and television isresolutely imagined as a 'natural' part of constructing the package, and acrucial apparatus in the dissemination of their fame. (Pop Idol judge NickiChapman's trademark line has become 'the camera loves you' - referencingthe contestant's immediate appearance on the show but also inferring thatthis relationship is crucial to their potential and future circulation as a popstar.) In general, it is evident that in both programmes, we openly see thestrategies of styling the image, notably quite literally trying on elements of


a new 'image' week after week, as well as occasions when the contestantsare clearly dissatisfied with the 'artificial' and 'enforced' nature of this pro-cess. Indeed, it is worth noting here that, while articulating ideologies ofindividualism in many other respects, the programmes do not trade uponthe mythic ideology of fame as 'an act of individual, personal transcen-dence'.32 They resolutely display the collective nature of this process, theTaylorist division of labour inherent to the process of image production.

However, given that the manufacture discourse ultimately representsa threat to the commercial enterprise of celebrity, these programmes pro-vide exemplary evidence of how the two claims-to-fame stories continueto jostle for legitimacy and cultural visibility. There is undoubtedly a clearemphasis on manufacture, but this is constantly chased by a parallel insis-tence on 'specialness'. Here, we are offered mythic constructions of theunique, authentic and gifted self. In terms of insisting upon an 'indefinable'sense of 'specialness' and 'charisma, the use of such phrases 'you've gotthe "X factor"' or 'star quality' have become something of a convention inthemselves. In stark contradiction to Gamsons emphasis on the strategy ofirony in contemporary celebrity texts, these shows are in many respectsa site for re-peddling more traditional myths of fame for contemporaryconsumption. In their emphasis on 'ordinariness', 'lucky breaks', 'special-ness' and 'hard work', they are literally, for example, paradigmatic of Dyer sdescription of the 'success myth'.33 As Fame Academy's singing coach andjudge, Carrie Grant, earnestly explains in one edition: 'The only place wheresuccess comes before work is in the dictionary' (14 December 2002). AsDyer suggests, although not the exclusive province of stardom, the successmyth is central to ideologies of democracy in capitalist society34: there maybe power relations and hierarchical structures, but all individuals have thepotential to 'transcend social constraints and reach the top'.35 In this respect,the narrative path of these shows is designed to explicitly take us from a'mass' population to an individual winner. In inviting the audience to shapethis trajectory this naturalizes the belief, as MacDonald notes in a differentcontext, 'that life has its winners and losers and that is only natural'.36

The Barryness of Barry': Self, Authenticity and Performance

Yet ideologies of individualism are also constructed at a discursive level.For example, in terms of Pop Idol some of Cowell's golden rules' for finding'pop success' include such strategies as 'don't imitate another performer','Don't over-style yourself, 'believe in yourself and 'be humble'.37 Indeed,similarities to existing pop artists are recurrently criticized - particularly wherevoice is concerned. In fact, in contrast to the willingness to acknowledge


manufacture in relation to the visual appearance of 'image', there is more ofa struggle for discourses of authenticity and individuality where the soundof the performance is concerned. In this respect, Fame Academy in particu-lar constantly articulates notions of both individuality and authenticity inthe discussion of the artists 'self'. For example, 'factory worker' Barry istypically chastised by singing coach Carrie in one edition because: 'We'vehad you showing you can "be" Westlife, or Bryan Adams, but have we hadBarry yet? Where, Barry, is the "Barryness' of Barry?" (19 September 2003).The camera rapidly zooms in for a close-up on the contestants face as hisfeelings of frustration and anger encourage perceptible tears to emerge inthe corner of his eyes. While the comment in itself admittedly borders onsemantic ridiculousness, it succinctly demonstrates the ideologies of indi-vidualism at work here - particularly in terms of how discourses of star-dom and musical performance intersect.

Firstly, this is many ways illustrates Dyer's argument that the circulationof ideologies of individualism is central to the discursive construction ofstardom and its social and cultural functions.38 Working from a Marxistperspective, he explains how the perpetual attempt to negotiate authenticityin the star image (the media emphasis on accessing the 'real' person 'behind'the image) works to promote a particular concept of personhood on whichcapitalist society depends: 'a separable, coherent quality, located "inside"consciousness and variously termed "the self" "the soul" "the subject"'.39

Despite the equally prevalent emphasis on performativity and falsity, thishas been a discourse invoked more generally in Reality TV: we need onlythink of the constant talk of who is 'being themselves?' and the ferventrejection of those who are considered to fail at this.40 As critics suchas Annette Hill and Janet Jones have argued,41 a key strategy structuringthe appeal of reality formats is organized around the quest or 'search for"the real'" in relation to the self,42 what Hill describes as a viewing practicein which audiences Took for the moment of authenticity' when real peopleare "really" themselves' in a wider context of artificiality and construction.43

However, given their more explicit concern with definitions and construc-tions of stardom this notion of searching for an 'inside' self - as the closerelationship with Dyer's argument makes clear44 - is doubly articulated inthe pop programmes. This is complimented by the wider shift towardsnotions of 'authentic ordinariness' in discourses surrounding pop musicperformance and stars.45 Equally, the constant surveillance of the contes-tants (in Fame Academy at least) seeks to suggest that we are witnessing allfacets of their being - that they are who they appear to be.46 In the sensethat the programmes work to combine a sense of 'on-stage' performing


presence with off-stage' existence, they often work to push for a coinci-dence of 'public7 and 'private' personae by effectively claiming to dissolvethe boundaries between them. Furthermore, despite the open emphasis onimage transformation and change, it is crucial that there is a clear connec-tion between the people we 'meet' in the first round of auditions and theirpresence on stage in the latter part of the series. Throughout this trajectorywe see an aesthetic shift from the pseudo-documentary footage of the audi-tions stage (shot with the 'intimacy' of mini DV cameras), to the arena oftelevisual light-entertainment presentation, as signified by the conventionsof stage, hidden musical source, neon lights, banks of monitors and a com-bination of mobile camerawork and smooth dissolves.47 In television terms,this may well represent the province of professional performance, effectivelythe move from ordinary' to 'extraordinary' by entering a more elite space,but the emphasis on 'ordinariness' must remain.

For example, rather than primarily the music itself, discourses on indi-vidualism are articulated through conceptions of 'authenticity' in bothmusical and televisual performance. As Alan Moore describes, given thecomplexity of debates about authenticity in popular music, and cruciallythe fact that it is always a value which is ascribed rather than 'inherent','rather than ask what (piece of music, or activity) is being authenticated' itis just as useful to 'ask who\4S Moore provides a definition of:

authenticity of expression, or ... 'first person authenticity', [which]arises when an originator (composer, performer) succeeds in convey-ing the impression that his utterance is one of integrity, that itrepresents an attempt to communicate in an unmediated form withan audience' [original emphasis].49

The importance of liveness, both in terms of the singing performance andthe televisual address of Reality TV, also functions as an important refer-ence point for 'authentication', particularly given that lip-synching has his-torically been seen to signify 'the essential inauthenticity of TV pop'.50

However, if we return to the pursuit of'the Barryness of Barry', this conceptof expression in an 'unmediated form'51 should be clear. Equally, Moore'sdescription here of 'first person authenticity' is complimented by the con-ception of Reality TV as adopting 'first person modes of expression - touse Doveys term to describe its emphasis on the 'individual subjectiveexperience as guarantor of knowledge.'52 Indeed, Reality TV's apparentlywider investment in the belief that a persons 'true core' is to be found inemotional expression ('revealed' in contexts of dramatic tension) is clearly


complimented by Moore's articulation of voice and performance here. Asa result, in their deferred role as talent show judges, the audience at homeare implored to look not only for the 'X factor' or charisma in the perfor-mance, but also to scan the screen for 'the Barryness of Barry! (If we cometo the conclusion that we cant 'see' it, perhaps we are not quite as expert'as the judges after all). On one level this suggests that the music elementof the programme is not incidental here. It is a vehicle through which par-ticular notions of musical authenticity, albeit via performance, are cleverlyexpressed through Reality TV's bid to capture 'the real'.

However, it is worth noting here that the construction of authenticitywhere the relationship between song, performer and performance are con-cerned also differs between programmes. In the final stages of Pop Idol wesee all three finalists record the winning song in the recording studio (sothat whoever wins, the CD can be produced in time for release when thetelevision competition ends). However, this brutally standardized approachto the union between 'unique' winner and song is not problematic for theprogramme given that, as argued above, discourses of authenticity in PopIdol are suggested to inhere in the authentic self: the 'person', the expressionof the song, or its sentiment. In many ways setting itself up in opposition tothe criticisms of manufacture directed at Popstars and Pop Idol (and in someways drawing on a residual opposition between the ethos of commercialand public service broadcaster), the BBC's Fame Academy was at painsto emphasize elements of the creative input and artistic integrity of thecontestants. From the very start it depicted them writing songs in theAcademy and often constructed a space for their own songs to be performed.In both series, the winners and runners-up (such as David Sneddon, SineadQuinn, Alex Parks and Alistair Griffin), all released what are claimed to beself-penned songs. The programme acknowledges and confirms a popularperception of the music industry as 'the over-rationalized, impersonal,alienating fame machine'53 while, as with the discourses on stardom, sug-gesting that there is nevertheless a space for artistic individuality, creativityand integrity.

This in many ways confirms Matthew Stahl's comparative analysis of theUS programmes The Monkees (1966-1968) and Making the Band (2000).He argues that despite considerable changes in the industrial structures ofthe music industry and the working practices which underpin them, aswell as consequent shifts in regimes of authenticity and value, 'even withinthe mainstream [there] flows a strong current of concern over issues ofauthenticity, legitimacy and autonomy'.54 Notions of'the romantic, individ-ualist discourse' of artistic control still remain in the field of pop; and while


this may now be an old and ill-fitting' rhetoric, it provides a lucrative contextfor dramatic tension and conflict.55 As Stahl explains, precisely becauseof the institutional power they represent, the figure of the 'impresario' hashistorically been a focus for conflicts over authenticity in the constructionof popular music.56 In the reality shows these figures have become integralto the construction of the 'plot', yet given the above, Fame Academy alsoplays down the power of the 'impresario' by seeking to foreground elementsof artistic control and integrity as yoked to discourses of the 'ordinary',individual, authentic self.

If we return, then, to Gamson's warring explanations of fame here - thelogic of manufacture and the authentic, gifted self - the programmes per-form something of a clear ideological manoeuvre in their insistence thatthese narratives are not necessarily antagonistic, but can co-exist in relativeharmony. Manufacture is a necessary component in the process, but it doesnot efface the importance of a unique, talented core. Equally, Gamson'ssuggestion that an increased emphasis on the 'power' of the audience hasfunctioned to smooth over the disjuncture between these 'polarities' mayhighlight how the invocation of interactivity here mediates between thetwo narratives - further insisting on their complimentary relationship byreconciling elements of both.57 Indeed, with the public constructed asthe ultimate 'discoverer' of the star, the programmes indicate the strengthof Gamson's argument where contemporary discourses of fame are con-cerned: 'You control the machine, it says. If you don't like me, you can grabthe spotlight and throw it onto someone else more worthy'.58

'Your interpretation of what a Pop Idol is, is different to ours...':Resistant Stars, Resistant Viewers?

However, it is not simply a case of these programmes circulating moretraditional myths of stardom reworked for a contemporary media audience.A highly visible and intervening discourse within this framework has beenthe concept of'resistance' - both in terms of the mediation of the relation-ship between star image and industry and the construction of a subjectposition for the audience. As indicated, a central configuration of theseshows is the narrative of a 'struggle' between contestant and judges, withnarrative structure, editing and dialogue increasingly working to align thestudio - and by implication the home - audience with the singers.59 It waswidely recognized that Will Youngs bid to challenge Cowell's 'projectedinsults' on the first series of Pop Idol was a definitive moment in propellinghim onto success in the competition. This was bolstered by the sense that,


in terms of constructions of class, masculinity, voice and musical style, hewas the less 'conventional' choice for the 'Pop Idol' crown than rival contes-tant, Gareth Gates.60 Since this time, this has set in motion an orchestratedconvention in which winning contestants are often explicitly positioned asthe ideologically 'resistant' choice - in areas ranging from sexuality, generalphysical appearance, to body image.

For example, given that her size-20 shape was clearly at odds with con-ventional constructions of pop femininity, much discussion was generatedaround Michelle McManus, the Glaswegian winner of the second series ofthe UK Pop Idol in 2003. In the programme itself, this agenda was set fromher first appearance in the show: 'Is this is about having a great voice, you'rethrough. But you are standing in front of a sign that says "Pop Idol". That'swhere we have a problem' (Cowell, 20 October 2003). At the start then,cultural definitions of a pop idol are rigidly defined in terms of what isacknowledged to be a restrictive yet also implicitly 'shared' ideal. As such,contestants are voted through by the audience week after week, and thesegoalposts are gradually seen to shift and, in Gramscian terms, ideological'concessions' are made to the pressure of challenging' discourses. As Cowelltells Michelle in a later edition: 'I'm glad we've got a girl in the final three,and I'm glad she doesn't look like a Top-Shop pop clone. I'm sick of lookingat the same image. You are a breath of fresh air to the music industry at themoment1 (22 November 2003). In magazines such as heat and Now, thesediscourses are also persistently foregrounded in the inter-textual construc-tion of the contestants, particularly when articulated in conjunction withan emphasis on the 'agency' of the audience. As judge Nicki Chapmanexplains:

Having Michelle as the winner has got across a good message... Willwas the same last time. He wasn't the conventional idea of what a popidol should look like and . . . [he] just enjoyed a massive no. 1 album.The viewers got it right when they picked Will as someone who shouldhave a pop career and I think they've done the same with Michelle.61

A long-standing strategy in constructing stars through an ordinary/extraordinary paradox,62 this is still often attended by the continued empha-sis on the value of ordinariness' - and the insistence that the winner willremain 'unchanged' by their fame: 'Jubilant Pop Idol winner MichelleMcManus has vowed that she won't let her amazing triumph change herlife - or her weight: T haven't changed since I entered the competition andI doubt I will'.63 When speaking of Alex Parks, the spiky-haried, lesbian


winner of the second series of Fame Academy, coach Carrie Grant makes amore explicit attempt to connect this sense of ordinariness* with discoursesof ideological resistance:

Finally, we have a talent show that's found something special [and]...for a non-girly girl to win is absolutely amazing . . .. She's simplyunique [and] ... so unpretentious and at 19, probably can't take it allin But for me, her winning is proof that TV and the music indus-try can work together, which I've doubted at times. So thank you,voters.64

That is not to ignore the complexity of how these (ultimately polysemic)images do signify resistant ideological discourses in relation to existingconceptions of pop music stardom nor indeed the degree to which theyeach do so in different ways. However, these discourses of 'resistance' areeffectively encoded by celebrity producers in such a way that, in terms ofthe relationship between star image and audience reading strategies, makesit difficult to apply existing conceptions of ideological 'subversion here.65

Cowells comment that Pop Idol may be 'the best market research weVe everhad, because its the public saying: "your interpretation of what a Pop Idol isdifferent to ours'"66 indicates how the use of interactivity here could indeedbe conceived in just these terms - as 'market research' (e.g., 'tell us who youwould most like to buy and we will "sell" them to you'). On the other hand,the issues of'resistance' emphasized above could act as a potentially desta-bilizing force in indicating how, despite the highly restrictive notion of'the ideal' usually fostered by record producers, the 'ideal' artist (for theindustry) is really only the one who can make them the most money at thattime. However, given my argument that the dramatization of power rela-tions in these programmes play out a distinctly Gramscian conception ofideology, we should note that 'concessions' are made to ensure that hege-mony is secured and that the dominant stay in power. These shows do gen-erate discussion about the ideological parameters of fame and stardom, therelationship between star and industry and indeed between industry andaudience. However, this is this effectively generated 'in house' - and ofcourse such interventions have hardly brought fundamental changes to themusic industry more widely. Also, while they may indeed elicit debateabout the ideological parameters of fame, the issues placed on the agendaare certainly delimited. In terms of access to 'success', they seem to readilyask questions such as girl or boy?', gay or straight?', 'fat or thin?', whileinequalities surrounding ethnicity, for example, are an 'absent' discourse


in the programmes - despite the fact that (at the time of writing), the UKwinners of Pop Idol and Fame Academy have all been white. Evidently, suchissues would undermine the egalitarian ideology of the success myth whichis elsewhere so fundamental to the shows.

Certainly, the record-breaking number of singles and albums sold as aresult of these programmes does not necessarily indicate a 'passive' accep-tance of their ideological framework. At the same time, it would seemequally problematic to deny that their ideologies must resonate with certainaudiences on some level. Again, this is not to endorse a reading of textualdeterminism in the conceptualization of audience response, mainly becausethis discussion raises complex questions about the construction of the sub-ject position in 'interactive' texts: When the 'preferred' reading67 here wouldbe one of ideological 'resistance', would a 'truly' 'resistant' response be not tovote or watch at all? In a tautological loop, this would surely also return usto the dismissal of these shows raised at the start of this article.

Conclusion

In his wider critical survey of the relations between music and television,Frith asks of the programmes discussed here:

what do... [they] tell us about music and television? Do they confirmthat television matters [to music] or that it does not? The answer . . .is both. Television makes pop stars and yet its treatment of musicseems strangely detached.68

The trajectory of my analysis in many ways confirms Friths argument here.The fact that these programmes seem to work through specific concernssurrounding explanations of contemporary fame may well suggest thattheir primary referent is stardom, as the title of Pop Idol would seem toconfirm. However, they are undoubtedly concerned with imaging the musicindustry and pop music as cultural referents: in which context the transfor-mation of the 'ordinary' person into star, the relationship between imagemakers and performers and the interaction between audience and starseem to hold a cultural fascination for us not applicable to other media inquite the same way. However, to berate television for not being 'musical'enough seems to miss the more productive issue of considering how itshapes the cultural circulation of music - how it, in fact, makes it televisualIndeed, to suggest that 'in an ideal world, music programmes should havemore of the essence of what excites people about music itself'69 seems to beas deliberately evasive and mystifying as the concept of the 'X factor'.


But in relation to the discourses of fame and audience agency whichpermeate these texts, it is worth noting here that their increasing conven-tionalization may well erode their ideological power, whether in terms ofthe construction of the winner as the 'resistant' choice, or the repeatedinsistence on finding the 'X' factor. Articulated through franchise afterfranchise on a global scale, how many 'special' people can there be? Indeed,the difficulties experienced by certain reality-pop artists in maintaininglongevity attests to the continued nature of a truly negotiated relationshipbetween industry and audience, a 'struggle' which the programmes other-wise claim to be so keen to display. In opening up a space for the ideologi-cal negotiation of the relations between pop music and its audience, it maywell be that television is offering a form of 'pseudo' agency here, of whichwe should be highly critical. At the same time, these programmes confirmthat the nexus of interaction between music and television is a crucial partof the fabric of popular culture, connecting media producers, performersand audiences in highly complex ways.

Notes

1. Keith Negus and John Street, 'Introduction to 'Music and television: Special issue',Popular Music, 21.3 (2002), 245.

2. Simon Frith, 'Look! hear! the uneasy relationship of music and television, PopularMusic, 21.3 (2002), 277.

3. Ibid.4. Although this cannot be explored in detail here, much theoretical ambiguity has

surrounded the concept of interactivity across a range of media forms and disciplines.However, a key characteristic has been defined as that of'feedback': 'the ability for messagereceivers to respond to message senders' (Kiousis, 2002, p. 359). The use of interactivity inReality TV can broadly be seen to support this conception.

5. See Estella Tincknell and Parvati Raghuram, €Big Brother: Reconfiguring the "Active"audience of Cultural Studies?', in Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn, eds. UnderstandingReality Television. London: Routledge, 2004, pp. 252-69; Su Holmes, 'But this time youchoose': Approaching the interactive audience for Reality TV, International Journal ofCultural Studies, 7.2 (2004a).

6. Tincknell and Raghuram; Holmes (2004a).7. Su Holmes, 'Reality Goes Pop!': Reality TV, popular music and narratives of stardom

in Pop Idol (UK)', Television and New Media, 5 (2) (2004b).8. Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood. Austin, TX:

University of Texas, 1994.9. Rosencratz, cited in Louise Bishop, 1TV plays Pop', Television, (May 2001), 16.

10. Ibid.11. Cahal Milmo, 'BBC begins its search for a star', Independent, (5 October 2002), 5.12. Frith, cited in Sheryl Garrett, 'Instant fame', The Observer, (3 February 2002), 16.


13. John Hill, 'Television and pop: The case of the 1950s', in John Corner (ed.), PopularTelevision in Britain: Studies in Cultural History. London: BFI, 1991, p. 90.

14. John Mundy, Popular Music on Screen: From Hollywood Musical to Music Video.Manchester: MUP, 1999 p. 8.

15. Frith (2002), p. 286.16. Allan Moore, Authenticity as authentication, Popular Music, 21.2 (2002), 209-223.17. See Keith Negus, Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity, 1994.18. See Jon Dovey, Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television. London:

Pluto, 2000.19. Milmo (2002), p. 5.20. I refer here to Gramscis widely known model of hegemony which involves a negoti-

ation between dominant and subordinate fractions. In this respect, power is not simplyarticulated from 'above', but enters into negotiations and dialogues with subordinate groupsso that hegemonic dominance can be ultimately maintained. (See Antonio Gramsci, 'Hege-mony, intellectuals, and the state', in John Storey (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture.Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall, 1998, pp. 206-19.)

21. Holmes (2004b).22. Ibid.23. Joshua Gamson, 'The assembly line of greatness: celebrity in twentieth-century

America, in C. Lee Harrington and Denise D. Bielby (eds), Popular Culture: Production andConsumption. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, p. 261.

24. Gamson (2001), p. 260.25. Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press, 1994, p. 144.26. Ibid.27. Gamson (2001), p. 264.28. Gamson (1994), p. 44.29. Gamson (2001), p. 272.30. Matthew Stahl, Authentic boy bands on TV?: Performers and impressarios in The

Monkees and Making the Band\ Popular Music, 21.3 (2002), 318.31. See Andrew Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and

Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 1993.32. Paul MacDonald, Tm Winning on a Star: The extraordinary ordinary world of Stars

in their Eyes', Critical Survey, 7.1 (1995), 65.33. Dyer (1998), p. 42.34. Ibid.35. MacDonald (1995), p. 65.36. Ibid.37. Simon Cowell, 'Michelle Vs Mark', Now (24-31 December 2003) 22.38. Dyer (1998).39. Ibid., p. 9.40. See Su Holmes, '"All you've got to worry about is having a cup of tea and doing a

bit of sunbathing ...': Approaching celebrity in Big Brother] in Su Holmes and DeborahJermyn (eds), Understanding to Reality TV. London: Routledge, 2004c, pp. 111-35.


41. See Annette Hill, 'Big Brother: The real audience', Television and New Media, 3.3(2002), 323-41; and Janet Jones, 'Show your real face: A fan study of UK Big Brother trans-missions', New Media and Society, 5.3 (2003), 400-21.

42. Jones, p. 410.43. Hill (2002), p. 324.44. I am aware that postmodern conceptions of celebrity have questioned the appar-

ently stable nature of Dyer's model when it comes to discourses of selfhood (see Gamson,1994, King, 2003). However, potentially increased audience scepticism of'authenticity' incelebrity texts may in part point to why such programmes work to shore up more tradi-tional ideologies in this respect.

45. See Elizabeth Eva Leach, 'Vicars of "Wannabe": Authenticity and the Spice Girls',Popular Music 20.2 (2001), 143-167, and Matthew Stahl, 'Authentic boy bands on TV?:Performers and impressarios in The Monkees and Making the Band', Popular Music 21.3(2002)307-329.

46. See also Stahl (2002), p. 326.47. MacDonald(1995),p.63.48. Moore (2002), p. 210.49. Ibid., p. 214.50. Frith (2002), p. 284.51. Ibid., p. 284.52. Dovey, p. 21.53. Stahl (2002), p. 327.54. Ibid., p. 307.55. Ibid., p. 327.56. Ibid., p. 309.57. Gamson (2001), p. 272.58. Ibid., 268.59. Holmes (2004b), p. 168.60. See Esther Addley, 'Glad to be Gay', The Guardian, (12 March 2002), 6.61. Nikki Chapman, 'Now its Michelle's big test', heat, (11-17 October 2003), 23.62. Dyer (1998).63. Tim Ewbank, 'My success is so scary', Now, (7 January 2004), 22.64. Carrie Grant, 'We've found a special talent', Now, (15 October 2003), 6.65. See Dyer (1986,1998).66. Polly Husdon, 'The heat Interview: Simon Coweil', heat, (11-17 October 2003),

86-90.67. Stuart Hall, 'Encoding/Decoding', in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe

and Paul Willis (eds), Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson, 1980, pp. 128-38.68. Frith (2002), p. 278.69. Ryan, cited in Anastasia Kershaw, '"Must-see" music', Televisual, (December 2001), 27.

24MTV

Contemporary Music Video Culture in Television and Film Drama:Narrative, Performance and (Post)Modernity

Christopher Pullen

Introduction

In the early sequences ofFlashdance (dir. Lynne, 1983, USA) a brief conver-sation occurs which may be considered as a metaphor for the narrative,performative and aesthetic approach adopted in the film.

[The character Alex (played by Jennifer Beals) is depicted readingFrench Vogue, her boss (Michael) approaches her and enquires]

Michael: Do you speak French?Alex: No I just like the pictures.

The proposition is that analysis of pictures/visuals without the knowledgeof the accompanying authorial text provides evidence of an emerging post-modern ethic in the construction of (film) narrative. Flashdance may beseen as a groundbreaking text which employs a segmented/fragmentednarrative approach in its use of contemporary music and performancesequences. This provides evidence of an emerging 'contemporary musicculture' where the prominence of the 'pop song' and Video' is foregrounded.The presence of (pop song/video) micro narratives may not only be vivid, butthey may also work towards constructing/informing the overall narrative

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and performative meaning. Although the idea of performance, in RichardSchechner s terms (2003), may have various functions including 'to enter-tain, to make something beautiful, to mark or change identity [and] to makeof foster community5,1 (these ideas overlap and may be seen as contextual),our focus here is a discussion regarding the fragmented appearance ofdiverse performances which may not aid an overarching performative-narrative ideology. This in turn leads us to question the 'incredulity towardsmetanarratives',2 and the emergence of 'micronarratives' which may be asymptom of postmodernity.

The foundation of MTV in 1981, with its dedication to 24hrs music/visual broadcasts, stimulated the increasing prominence of the videosequence. The bringing together of music and visuals (locked together in thevideo segment) offers a diegetic (story world) of its own. This may involvethe diegesis and visuals surrounding the performer and the performance.At the same time it may involve the narratives/myths/semiotics offered byits lyrics and music. Hence the impact of popular music and accompanyingvisuals in television and film may be considered in the light of MTV scultural influence/heritage.3 Although this work recognizes MTV s signifi-cance in informing what may be considered as contemporary music culture,it does not concern itself with the provenance of the organization, or itsrelation to consumerism and commodification, as this has been thoroughlyexplored elsewhere.4 Hence the name MTV is used here as a synonym fora stylistic movement/approach which may be considered as a synthesisof music and visual product, rather than as a signifier of globalization, capi-talization and cultural erosion. Consequently rather than commodity andcultural capital, this work discusses textual analysis, focusing on case stud-ies which discuss: Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969, USA), Flashdance,Miami Vice (Michael Mann, 1984-1987) and C.SJ. (Crime Scene Investi-gation) (CBS, 2000-present). Analysis of these may reveal evidence of the(post)modern use of narratives, and the emerging symbiotic relationshipbetween visuals/narrative and aesthetics/editing. However, we first need toconsider the emergence of the connection between film and music.

Moving Image and Popular Music

The use of music as accompaniment to recorded visual media is nothingnew. Royal S. Brown (1994) tells us that 'a key date in the history of cinemais 28 December 1895, when a pianist apparently provided for the firsttime musical accompaniment to film*5 Brown goes on to tell us that thisincident was less concerned with identifying aspects of the film visuals and


embellishing them but more with drowning out the noise of the audienceand the sound of the projector mechanics. However, it is neverthelessimportant to note that the Lumiere brothers' inventive use of this (at theGrand Cafe in Paris in 1895) stimulated a relationship which would endureand develop.

Today we may take for granted the presence of music within the televi-sual text while perhaps not being fully aware of its stimulating use and itspossible effect on us. This work does not explore a history of music in filmand television, or the significance/importance of scored music in filmscompared to the use of 'pre-existing' popular songs. It is neverthelessimportant to consider the emergence of popular music in film as an influ-ential factor before the revelation of music video, MTV and the propheticuse of popular music in diegetic terms.

We may consider that Ennio Morricone may be one of the early pioneersin the use of popular music in film6: films such A Fistful of Dollars (dir.Leone, 1964, USA) and Once Upon a Time in the West (dir. Leone, 1969,USA) may be considered as contemporary in their use of popular musicinstruments alongside orchestra. However with regard to the pop or rocksong, Ollie Kluczewski tells us that Blackboard Jungle (dir. Brooks, 1955,USA) 'is widely considered as the first "rock" film',7 despite the fact thatonly one song Rock Around the Clock appears in the film.

Nevertheless this impetus to link the idea of youth with film, bringing tothe forefront popular youth music, was a central point which contributedto the popular success of these films. In terms of 'pop* music we may alsoconsider the advent of the musical Summer Holiday (dir. Yates, 1963, UK)as highly influential. The presence of music by the Shadows and CliffRichard most certainly may be considered as a watershed, which possiblyled to the emergence of the Beatles as actors/performers in films like A HardDay's Night (dir. Lester, 1964, UK).

The participation of pop stars in film itself provided a performative andyouth identity-orientated significance which would counter the idea thatfilm music was generally scored and should be constructed as a completework. However, a defining moment in the formation/construction of whatJonathan Ronmey and Adrian Wooton (1995) succinctly call the CelluloidJukebox (the title of their book and a fixing synonym) has to be the ground-breaking film Easy Rider (1969).

Easy Rider and Narrative

Easy Rider stands out as a watershed in the narrative formation of film inrelation to music. Rather than placing emphasis on the pop performer as

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provider of music (and possibly evaluating the film as a vehicle for celebritystatus) Easy Rider uses the cultural and diegetic significance of music as acontributory factor in the formulation of its overall narrative construction.In this way, Easy Rider in its use of existing popular music, may be seen asthe forerunner of what I am discussing as Video music culture' (where thesong has its own diegetic world, and its relationship with the visual/aestheticrepresentation is contrapuntal to other elements). We may consider theideas of Roland Barthes (1977) on narrative useful in attempting to discussthe issues involved in bringing together (possibly different) narratives.Barthes tells us the following:

Narrative units are not all the same Importance': some constitute realhinge points in the narrative (or fragment of the narrative); othersmerely 'fill-in* the narrative space separating the hinge functions. Letus call the former cardinal functions (or nuclei) and the latter, havingregard to their contemporary nature, catalysers?

Similar to the ideas of Seymour Chatman (1978) of kernel and satellite, thisproposition allows us to consider the idea that there is a central narrativedrive/essence (cardinal/kernel) and a peripheral narrative impetus (catalyser/satellite). Through this observation it is possible to analyze the use andhierarchy of narrative(s) which are present.

It is possible to make the simple equation that popular songs, whichbring their own diegetic and discursive world, may be considered as pos-sessing the traits of narrative catalysers (satellites), while the central textpresented in the film may be considered as the cardinal (kernel) narrative.Although the catalyser/satellite may be subordinate to the cardinal/kernel,its presence is an important element. The catalyser/satellite may be used todrive the narrative, yet at the same time may not provide a closed narrativesituation. In this sense as Barthes tells us cardinal functions are the riskymoments of a narrative. Between these points of alternative, these 'dispatch-ers', the catalysers lay out areas of safety, rests, luxuries'.9 If we consider thepresence of music in Easy Rider, we can see how the augmented musicalnumber may be considered as a narrative catalyser/satellite which affordsboth luxury' and Vest', yet at the same time provides stimulation, if notactual progression or closure.

This may be evident if we compare the opening and closing sequences ofEasy Rider. The opening sequence contains little (English) dialogue, andinstead through visual representation and the inclusion of some Spanishlanguage a diegetic is presented which reveals the central pretext of thestory: the characters played by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper have traded


in drugs, which allows them to fund a road trip to New Orleans. Just priorto the title sequence, non-diegetic music is played which presents for thefirst time (in any depth) English dialogue. The lyrics say T know I smokeda lot of grass . . . [they have got] tombstones in their eyes' ('The Pusher',composed by Hoyt Axton). In this way it presents a background historyand a foreshadowing of the end of the film (it identifies them as drug usersand predicts their impending death). After this sequence we are presentedwith the highly iconic representation of the two bikers commencing theirroad trip accompanied by the music and lyrics of 'Born to be Wild' (com-posed by Mars Bonfire) (we may consider this a literal translation of thevisual offered). Later, at the closure of the film (as they depart New Orleans),we are presented with a sequence where Fonda tells Hopper that 'we blewit' and Hopper responds with 'you go for the big money, then you're free!'This indicates a division between Hopper and Fonda, and it foreshadows aneed to resolve this tension. This is followed by a visual representation ofthem departing again accompanied with music and the lyrics 'he that is notbusy born, is busy dying' (from 'It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) com-posed by Bob Dylan). The music fades before we witness the shockingmurder of both main characters in a dramatic silence.

These sequences provide us with narrative segments which are interwo-ven with the musical lyric. Hence, the final song (before they are murdered)not only signals impending closure but also connects two songs whichindicate the beginning of the story and the end. This occurs by predictingthat if they are 'not born' (referencing 'Born to be Wild') they will be 'busydying'. Consequently, while these musical lyrical catalysers (in Barthesterms) provide us with 'luxury' and 'rest' they are used at the same time aspremonitions of the cardinal actions. The foreshadowing of these 'riskymoments', 'tombstones' and 'death' in the lyrics, is not represented with thevisuals of these occurrences; these follow later. In this way the cardinalclosure of the story, the ultimate death of the characters is presented insilence to heighten its closing cardinal/kernel function. This brief analysissuggests that popular music used in this way is contiguous to the idea of thefunction of catalysers/satellites' in the narrative construction. These drive andembellish the syntax, but they do not provide the actual punctuation points.

While it would be tempting to suggest that the use of these songs may beevidence of an emerging postmodern narrative approach (different narra-tives are brought together from song and film - possibly without hierarchy),the actual use of the catalyser (song) narratives appears to be modern (ithas a thoroughly functional approach). Unlike the idea of post-modernitywhich according to Tim Woods (1999) (discussing Lyotard, 1979) 'moves

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away from a historical period',10 and consequently turns its back on theidea of'meta-narratives' engendering itself to be more Aesthetic' than 'his-torical',11 Easy Rider must be considered as possessing a modern approach.Evidence of this may be seen not only in the 'functional' use of the songs/lyrics in service of promulgating the grand narrative' but also in the finite clo-sure of the film (the heroes are dispatched, and pain presides over pleasure).This sense of closure may be less apparent in my next case study: a com-parison between Flashdance and Miami Vice.

Flashdance, Miami Vice: Performance and Fragmentation

Annahid Kassabian12 relates the idea of 'identification' in connection tomusic used in film. She tells us that the term 'assimilating identifications'may be applied to music 'scored' for films, while 'affiliating identifications'maybe used to discuss music 'selected' for films. This provides a distinctionbetween music which is composed to 'assimilate' with identifications in thefilm, and music which selected to 'affiliate' with the narrative/iconographyof the film. The term 'affiliating identification may be applied to the songsselected in Easy Rider. Here there is a complimentary (rather than integral)relationship between the film and the selected musical number. The sug-gestion is that the song is selected as it 'fits in with' the film (rather than hasbeen 'made to order').13 However, what occurs when the song may have astronger/contrasting presence, and the inclusion of the musical numbermay promulgate/stimulate diversification/intrusion in the idea of complet-ing the grand narrative? We may consider that this occurs to some degreein Flashdance and Miami Vice.

Leslie Harris (1995) tells us that not only would Miami Vice be consideredas providing 'a [new] template for ways of working song into narrative... theintention was to achieve the organic interaction of music and content'14.This resulted on occasions when not only would the song provide inspira-tion for the narrative construction, but moreover they could provide thelibretto for the episode.15

Moreover in Flashdance the musical number would transcend the ideaof 'inspiring' narrative construction, it would include vivid performativesequences where the song almost appears as an intrusion, engendering acollision between the micro-narrative/representation of the sequence andthe overall narrative of the film. This performative aspect of the film maybe considered as representative of Marvin Carlson's idea that 'this removalof a centre, a fixed locus of meaning, brings all discourse, all action, and allperformance into a continuous play of signification... [which] is deferred16.


Through the intrusion of the overtly' performative number, an augmenta-tion and void is apparent; the performance sequence is foregrounded, yet thefilmic diegetic world is suspended (and perhaps thrown into confusion).

Miami Vice and Flashdance may be considered as playing with narrativeorder (and hierarchy). This may occur in the evidence that the catalysed(song) narrative is not only used in a new medium (the song is taken formits original context), but its narrative potential is also modified. This maybe seen in Miami Vice where the libretto of a song becomes the stimulationfor the cardinal narrative (of the entire episode). Similarly, in Flashdancethe foregrounding of the performative sequence fragments the narrativeharmony. If we consider a performance in Flashdance involving the use ofthe song 'Imagination' (composed by Michael Boddicker et al.) and relateMiami Vice's relationship with music/celebrity we can find evidence of thisimpetus towards fragmentation, organic narrative reflexivity and disturbance.

Within Flashdance the character of Alex performs to the song Imagina-tion', occurring midway through the film. This is staged at 'Mawby V, the barwhere most performances in the film are centred. This location may beconsidered as the diegetic centre of Alex's desire to transcend her role ofamateur dancer and become a professional artist. The staged/performativenumbers occur here, involving her and peers. It provides a performativecatalysed sequence which directly references MTV culture itself. Thisinjects a reminder of Flashdances stylistic provenance and inspiration.

The Imagination sequence connects to the idea of MTV culture throughthe presentation of the performer (Alex) on stage in the presence of a largetelevision set. Also the stage setting, which encloses the performance, isdecorated in the manner of a grid pattern (referencing the idea of the fieldof vision and the matrix in which a televisual image may be generated/originate). White neon light is projected from the 'television set' towardsthe performer. The performance, involving Alex wearing white facial make-up (connecting with the idea of the television light)17 directly connectswith the idea of the televisual image by presenting a sustained sequencewith strobe lighting. This type of visual fragmentation may be seen as theclimax of the performance and as a visual metaphor for the power ofthe televisual image. Not only does the filmic image directly counterpointthe televisual image, it also involves itself in what John Thornton Caldwellcalls excessive [televisual] style'.18

Although Caldwell links this idea to television, this sequence (in tradingin televisual connotation) may be connected with:

digital video effects - and popular program styles in the 1980s . . .[tjhese tools did not cause television's penchant for style . . . they

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helped comprise an array of conditions, and a context that allowedfor exhibitionism!19

Emerging technologies associated with television and video would becometransferred to film. This highlighted the performative nature video of seg-ments, yet at the same time foregrounded a fragmented narrative approach.This scene provides a reminder of where the extra narrative inspiration forthe film may come from (MTV and televisual video culture), rather thanusing the catalyser narrative as an impetus for flow or premonition. A simi-lar situation may occur in Miami Vice, where we are provided with an inter-textual connection to the idea of celebrity and performance.

The appearance of the celebrity guest became a frequent occurrenceon Miami Vice (Miami Vice, 2003). This included numerous cameo appear-ances by pop stars, from 'lesser known' celebrities such as Glenn Frey(whose song Smuggler s Blues' formed a libretto for an episode) to moreinternational figures such as Phil Collins and Sheena Easton (the formercontributed with a guest appearance and five songs, the latter actuallyreflecting her own profession in the characterization of a singer, who in thetext became a central character by marrying the Don Johnson character).This impetus towards reflexivity (including celebrities referencing theirexistence outside the text) became more progressive with the central actorsthemselves becoming 'musical' performers. This may be seen not only inthe visual (non musical) performance of the actors while being accompa-nied by non-diegetic music (for example Don Johnson moodily driving hisFerrari accompanied by Phil Collins* Tn the Air Tonight' - in the pilot epi-sode) but also in the involvement of the actors producing and performingthe music.

Evidence of this 'hyper-reality' may be seen in the episode 'Streetwise'from season three. 'Streetwise' opens with the character played by SaundraSantiago playing the role of a prostitute (involved in an undercoveroperation). What is unusual about this performance is that instead of theusual dialogue, we are presented with a musical number executed by Santi-ago lip-synching to 'Streetwise' (to the voice of a female rapper/singer overmusic actually performed by Miami Vice co-star Don Johnson). Santiagois dressed in an opulent silver costume (taking the stereotypical visualappearance of the prostitute to excess). As she struts on set surrounded bythe iconography of the Miami 'red light' street (heat, hustlers, transactions,electric neon signs and luxury cars) she lip-syncs the words (aimed at noparticular person): 'Yeah! I'm talkin' to you, talkin' to you baby. What youtalking 'bout? You got money? Well, show it to me. I got fifteen minutes, anda whole lotta good times'. This sequence acts as a performative introduction


to the story. In place of the classic introductory sequence where tensionmay be constructed through a gradual revealing of the narrative we arepresented with a 'stage-show'-like sequence. Later in the episode the char-acters make a reflexive self-analysis of their intention (to perform) withSantiago saying (in character) 'So where are we going to take this floorshow to next?'

In this way, like Jean Baudrillard's idea of the 'simulacra',20 we are pre-sented with the hyper-real. The constructedness' of the text displays furtherevidence of distance from realism' in our knowledge that the music/perfor-mance involved in this sequence was produced by two stars from MiamiVice (rather than music writers/performers). Therefore instead of a classicnarrative' which may present a gradual revealing of the diegetic world(without hindrance), we are presented with a collage and pastiche of diverseconstructed signifiers (the foregrounding of performances relating to theheightened stage presence, and musical careers, of the actors rather thanthe characters' progression in the story).

This type of performance does not work with the cardinal narrative(as we may consider the inclusion of an 'affiliating' or 'assimilating' song mayin enhancing or explaining the narrative), it superimposes diverse discourseson the surface of the text. These diverse discourses signal a tension between'reality' and 'hyper-reality'. The presence of 'hyper-real' and 'simulation'deflects the text from confronting the real issues (police corruption, drugs,extravagance and prostitution). As Baudrillard suggests this 'is how simula-tion appears in the phrase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-realand hyper real, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence'.21 Thereal issues are displaced (and distanced) and the performance and aestheticare foregrounded (and celebrated), deflecting the real issues of concern.

Both Flashdance and Miami Vice provide evidence of disrupting theflow of the cardinal narrative. Through the use of 'performative discursivesequences' instead of easily read catalyser narratives' (which may complimentor aid the narrative impetus) we are presented with segmented narratives.This may provide evidence of what John Ellis tells us is the differencebetween television and cinema: television 'provides a variety of segmentsrather than the progressive accumulation of sequences [which we mayconsider is characteristic of] cinematic narration'22. In this way, althoughone is produced for television (Miami Vice) and the other displays traits oftelevisual iconography (Flashdance), both may be considered to bear thetraits of Ellis's ideas regarding television narrative strategies. This type ofsegmented approach allows the flow of the narrative to be less organizedaround the idea of providing a meta-narrative (in the sense of modernity)

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and may be more concerned with fragmentation and collage (as we mayconsider is postmodernity). The propensity towards segmentation directlyrelates to accommodating the narrative potential of the discrete videosequence. The ramifications for this in Miami Vice and Flashdance, are thatmicro-narratives are accommodated and foregrounded at the expense ofdisrupting meta-narrative coherence or progression. However (as discussedearlier), the converse may be true in Easy Rider: the micro-narrative com-pliments and propels the cardinal narrative. This may be considered mod-ern, rather than postmodern in its cohesive impetus towards closure (ratherthan distraction).

So far we have considered elements which inform the narrative construc-tion of film and television (the discourse which surrounds the music, the lyr-ics, the performance and the performer). However, what significance doesthe actual music have, outside discursive connotations? Anahid Kassabian(2001) tells us that 'music is understood as non-representational'.23 Thisobservation concerns debates which discuss the potential lack of 'repre-sentational value* regarding musical composition, which might be consid-ered in terms of 'atonality, serialism, aleatory music, computer compositionalprocedures, and perhaps even minimalism?4

However, I believe we can make the correlation that even if music (inessence) is understood to have no real representational value (musicalnotes and beats may not have an inherent connotation), we may make theconnection that the video/contemporary music segment may be evaluedin terms of suggesting certain duration, pace and rhythm. In this way theaesthetics and music of the contemporary video may imply a certain cul-ture of frequency and dynamics. This may translate to the musical segmentpossessing representational value: potentially bearing influence on visualediting and dialogue (as much as narrative and discursive elements). Inorder to consider this further, an examination of the ground-breaking tele-vision series C.S.J. follows. This may display evidence of bringing togetherthe stylistic traits of both popular video and cinema, yet at the same time itis anchored in its contextual relationship to popular music, and aspects ofmodernity.

C.S.I.: Editing, Dialogue and Modernity

Although produced for television, CS.I may be considered as adopting whatJohn Thornton Caldwell calls the 'film look!25 This may be considered notonly in the light of technological advances which in the 1980s engendered'televisions marked shift towards using film negative [because] transfer


units could reduce electronic noise in the picture, while at the same time[maintain] details in the darkest shadow areas of the television image',26 butalso it may also be considered in the staging, dynamics and treatmentof the images produced. This includes filmic issues such as the grandeur ofthe images produced/staged and video-like aspects such as the frequencyand punctuation of editing sequences. In this way we may consider thatC.S.L blends a filmic look (aesthetics) with a video technique look (dynamicsand expediency of editing). Evidence of this may be seen in examinationof the opening sequences (pre-titles) of an episode from series one ofC.SJ. called 'Sounds of Silence (C.S.L, 2004) (this concerns the murderof a deaf man).

A musical track is provided which may be described as like dance music(connoting urgency). Over the first ten seconds we are provided with fourconsecutive aerial shots of the Las Vegas strip (where the series is continu-ally set). These are separated by very brief bursts of white screen (as ifpunctuating or blinking). Immediately following this we see a two-secondshot of the front of a car in motion. Over the remaining fifteen secondswe are presented with the representation of two women in (excited) con-versation while one is at the driving wheel (possibly being distracted bythe conversation). This is inter-cut with shots that represent: two shotsin the car, one shot of the car exterior, three more shots in the car whichend with a sound as if they have inadvertently run someone over, six moreshots in the car (faster pace) and then a punctuation shot of a car red(brake) light to end the sequence. This second fifteen-second sequenceincludes thirteen shots in total, equating to almost one per second. The fre-quency of this is not dissimilar to that of the music video where a quicksuccession of different frames is provided to compliment the accompany-ing music. While this may not be truly video-like in manner (the musicfluctuates between foreground and background), it nevertheless trades inthe rhythmic frequency of video editing. At the same time, the dynamicsof the aerial view and the foregrounding vivid punctuation points (likethe extreme close-up of the red light and the following visual of a flaregoing off) reveal a chiaroscuro (sensitivity to light and dark) and suggesta dynamic and intensity associated with film.

Besides the mixture of filmic and video-like traits, we may also considerthat the meter and rhythm of the dialogue may be more related to fragmentedmusical lines, than realistic conversation. This may suggest that rhythmicdialogue pace is used where there is an absence of editing frequency. Thismay be seen in a further sequence of the same episode where an autopsy isin progress.

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We are presented with a (long) shot of 6 s which begins by focusingon the character Dr. Al Robbins (pathologist) and ends by panning towardsthe character Sarah Sidle (a forensic scientist, and central investigatorin the series). Here in substitution for the fast editing space, segmentationand rhythm is provided by breaking the dialogue into separate phrases(almost musical in meter).

Dr. Al Robbins: [(finger)] printed your hit and run. [(1st pause)] I justfound a match. [(2nd pause)] Brian Clemments. [(3rdpause)] Twenty Two, born in Vegas. [(4th pause)]And he's deaf. [(5th pause)]

These segmented comments (actually one line but broken up with hesitation)keep the rhythm going in the absence of visual editing frequency. Hence a6-s shot is broken down from one unit to five units. This keeps the meter/pace at approximately 1 s intervals (like the beat of a dance tune).

Similarly we also find that dialogue is shared by characters in the man-ner of musical lines, which are ended with rhythmic cadences (these aretwo chords which resolve or end a melody, signalling it as completed). If weconsider the example of a melody broken into three motifs (or phrases)and a cadence, this equates to the division of the music into four units. Thefollowing example of dialogue (broken up into four parts, by pauses andrhythm) reveals evidence of this strategy in C.S.7.:

Warrick Brown (forensic scientist): You know what this means. [(1stmotif)] Smack-Down. [(2nd motif)] Kid was in a fight. [(3rd motif)]

Sarah Sidle (forensic scientist): (completing sentence/melody) Thatended in murder [(4th cadence)]

This segmented delivery, once again, separates dialogue into bites of infor-mation which are rhythmic. This not only acts as a substitute for editingfrequency when the focus is removed from movement/progression, it alsocorrelates with the idea of musical phrasing. The completing phrase bySarah Sidle acts in a similar manner to the cadence which is

the conclusion or punctuation point in a musical phrase; the formulaon which such a conclusion is based. [In music, cadences] are the mosteffective way of affirming or establishing the tonality of a passage.27

The extract above not only reveals evidence of the musical/rhythmic tech-niques in the dialogue, it divides the execution of this between different


'performers' in the manner of a musical ensemble, who at the same timecontribute to establishing a rapport or interconnection which may suggestaccord (or like-mindedness).

However, this type of (frequent) segmentation is not always present inC.S.L There are instances where more sustained moments occur whichfocus on suspending the impetus to flow/movement/rhythm. These occurmost notably at the points when digital graphics are computer-generatedto illuminate an aspect of the story. In the scene described above (at thepoint when we discover the physical cause of the deaf mans condition)the pathologist tells us in longer bites of dialogue:

Dr. Al Robbins: Normally the malleus is shaped like a hammer: a long,smooth handle connected to a blunt head. But Brians malleus isKnotted (both of them, both defective).

The visual which accompanies this dialogue is a continuous CGI (computergenerated image). This reveals the imaginary inner condition of the cadav-ers inner ear. The visual represents a journey by camera into the bloodiedinside of his ear, travelling deep inside the ear canal and focusing on themalleus. We are first presented with the normal condition, and then asthe pathologist describes the malformation, the image metamorphosesinto a distorted/damaged image as described (representing the currentcondition). This sequence suspends the continual play with editing/dialoguefrequency (earlier scenes with editing/dialogue rhythm), and for the dura-tion of the CGI representation a more sustained period occurs whichdramatizes the proffered image.

It is possible to argue that such focus on CGI aesthetics in CS.J. may besimilar to the approaches adopted in Flashdance and Miami Vice whichrelate the idea of'simulation and 'hyper-reality'.28 If we consider the way inwhich emphasis on performance and hyper-reality are used in Flashdanceand Miami Vice, in the former it is used to blur real issues surroundinga divide between popular and classic culture; and in the latter it is usedto supplant dealing with crime and drug use with an emphasis on fashionand performance. Similarly we may consider that C.S.L encourages theviewer to de-sensitize themselves from the real meaning of'forensic evidence'(the CGI images are executed in a sophisticated manner which engendersthem to be hyper-real).

However, despite this, C.S.7. uses a didactic approach in its execution ofthese sequences. Therefore if the text may be partially guilty of'distancing'the viewer from the reality (from the aesthetic treatment), it nevertheless

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uses such means as a method of education and enlightenment. This againsuggests an emphasis towards modernity (function/depth/education) morethan postmodernity (play/surface/enjoyment).

C.S.7. does, however, 'trade1 in popular culture in a way that could beidentified as postmodern by bringing together 'micro-narratives'. This maybe seen not only in the arguments above (which relate the influence ofthe segmented music sequence) but also by (occasionally) using existingpopular songs in the diegesis. This is most evident its use of'Who Are You?',composed by Pete Townsend, as its theme tune.29 However, instead ofselecting and using 'affiliating' pop songs as part of its inherent strategy(in a collage-like manner), it adopts a pop music approach to its rhythm ofediting and dialogue (in an overall structural manner) on a larger scale.Furthermore, it breaks up these strategies with emphasis on synthesizedvisual moments, which form part of its storytelling process. Although thismaybe considered as a type of segmentation, in its process of constructionthe programme dovetails these sequences together in the manner of com-pleting the ultimate cardinal narrative. Hence, although we may find evi-dence of fragmentation, it is ordered together with a strategic plan whichreflects the completion and enhancement of its overall narrative.

In this way unlike Miami Vice and Flashdance, which may seem toprovide us with performative sequences which fragment the narrative,the fragmentation here is more related to the rhythmic staccato of both theediting frequency and the dialogue engendered to make overall cohesion.This impetus towards cohesion and fulfilment may be less concerned withobvious audience-pleasing aspects of postmodernity, and instead involvesitself with construction, engagement and organized passageway, and maytherefore be considered as adopting a modernist approach.

Conclusion: The Postmodern Debate

The influence of MTV has been described in many texts which have becomepreoccupied with discussing its impact in postmodern terms (Goodwin,2003; Grossberg, 1989; Kaplan, 1989; Straw, 2003). While this work has notessentially focused on video MTV, nor on postmodernism, these are recur-ring motifs in contemporary debates. While I have argued that aspects ofpostmodernity may be found in Flashdance and Miami Vice, the same maynot be so easily said with regard to Easy Rider and C.S.L

The influence of popular/contemporary music with regard to informing/manipulating the diegetic world of televisual or filmic texts undoubtedlywill continue to be of interest. However, the impact of the discrete video


segment has transgressed its early role as an 'add-on component/influencebrought in to complement and contrast with the larger text. It may nowform the life-blood' of the inherent structural syntax. C.S./., rather thansimply being seen as an inheritor of what we have loosely termed as video-music culture (which my quasi-historical approach may suggest), must beconsidered as a progression in structural organization which has more incommon with the video world (video rhythmic organization), rather thanwith the aesthetic (video fragmented appearance). Although we could sug-gest that C.S./. bears the signs of post-modernity (the aesthetic pleasure,the borrowing of cultural references and the synthesized constructionof visual images which may distance the audience from the 'true' reality)C.S./.s use of Vhythmic impetus' seen in the editing and dialogue perfor-mance, is evidence not of a postmodern condition' (Lyotard), but a realiza-tion of a modernist ideal (the transgression of boundaries and the fulfilmentof goals). This does not involve the contemplation of'stylistic precursors/contemporaries', it drives the impetus towards completion and desire.

This impetus may be seen as a premonition that the video segment canno longer be considered as an 'inspirational component' to be 'acquired'.It suggests that the language of video images and editing has transcendedits earlier role as a motif of reference, and have now become contemporarytools of representation. This presents us with a new realisation: programmessuch as C.S.I. are not only increasingly popular and influential;30 they trainthe eye and the ear to expect a certain rhythm, frequency and modulationand engender a new world order for television and filmic drama.

Notes

1. Richard Scheduler, Performance Studies: An Introduction (3rd reprint). London:Routledge, 2003, p. 38.

2. J. F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1979, p. xxiv.

3. MTV ('Music Television') as an organization has not only become a prominent cul-tural provider in contemporary society, it offers numerous music channels on satellite andcable TV. It reaches worldwide audiences, potentially broadcasting to '396 million homes in166 territories' (MTV, 2004).

4. E. A. Kaplan, Rocking Around The Clock: Musictelevision, Postmodernism & ConsumerCulture (2nd reprint). London: Routledge, 1989. Furthermore elsewhere (Pullen, 2004,2006, 2007), I have discussed the discursive potential of youth-orientated drama program-ming on MTV and its interest in depicting gay identity (focusing on analysis of The RealWorld [Bunim-Murray for MTV, 1992-present, USA]).

5. Royal S. Brown, Overtures and Undertones - Reading Film Music. California: Universityof California Press, 1995, p. 12.

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6. J Romney and A. Wootton, (eds), The Celluloid Jukebox. London: British Film Insti-tute, 1995, p. 7.

7. 'A discussion of the use of popular music in films, using Easy Rider as a case study'(Media Music Studies website). Available at http://www.mediamusicstudies.net/tagg/students/Liverpool/kluczezridr.html (accessed on 23 February 2004).

8. Roland S. Barthes, Image Music Text, S. Heath (trans.). London: Fontana Press,1977, p. 93.

9. Barthes (1977), p. 95.10. T. Woods, Beginning Postmodernism. Manchester: Manchester University Press,

1999, p. 22.11. Woods (1999), p. 23.12. Anahid Kassabian, 'Musicals hit the small screen: attention, listening, and TV musi-

cal episodes' (paper presented at IASPM US, September 2003), p. 3.13. This distinction is contentious as the provenance of musical material is always diffi-

cult to research. For Easy Rider: 'Roger McGuinn . . . contributed new recordings of BobDylans 'Its Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)' and his own specially written 'Ballad of EasyRider', actually co-written with Dylan, who was not credited' (Ruhlmann, 2004).

14. Harris, L. 'Miami Vice' in J. Romney and A. Wootton (eds), The Celluloid Jukebox.London: British Film Institute, 1995, p. 140.

15. Harris (1995) tells us that the song 'Smuggler's Blues' by Glenn Frey was used in thisway.

16. M. Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 1996, p. 135.17. Also possibly as a disguise, as many of the dance numbers were allegedly executed

not by Jennifer Beals, but by a male stand in.18. J. T. Caldwell, Televisuality: Style Crisis, and Authority in American Television. New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995, p. 3.19. Caldwell (1955), p. 7.20. J. Baudrillard, Selected Writings, 6th reprint. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001, p. 169.21. Baudrillard (2001), p. 174.22. J. Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema: Television: Video. London: Routledge, 1982, p. 143.23. A. Kassabian, Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood

Film Music. London: Routledge, 2001, p. 6.24. Kassabian (2001), p. 6.25. Caldwell (1955), p. 84.26. Ibid., p. 87.27. Sadie (1994), p. 130.28. Baudrillard (2001).29. Interestingly, further adaptations of C.S.J., C.S.I.: Miami and C.S.7.: New York also

use songs composed by Pete Townsend as their theme tunes (C.S.I.: Miami uses 'Won't GetFooled Again and C.S.J.: New York uses 'Baba O'Riley').

30. Since the appearance of C.S.J. in 2000 C.S.L: Miami in 2002 and a C.5.7.: New Yorkas of September 2007 it is reported that over 378 episodes have been produced (TV.com,2007a,b,c).

http://www.mediamusicstudies.net/tagg/students/Liverpool/kluczezridr.html


PEOPLE

25Voice

A Semiotics of the Voice

Theo van Leeuwen

The Voice and the Body

In 'The Grain of the Voice', Barthes opposed 'the features which belong tothe structure of the language being sung, the rules of the genre, the codedform of the composers idiolect, the style of the interpretation: in short,everything in the performance which is in the service of communication,representation, expression' to the 'grain of the voice', the 'materiality of thebody speaking its mother tongue', 'something which is directly brought toyour ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities,the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages'.1 The 'grain of the voice', heargued, affects the listener in a deeply personal, almost erotic way, escapingthe semiotic and the social. Kaja Silverman, similarly called the voice 'thesite of perhaps the most radical of all subjective divisions - the divisionbetween meaning and materiality'.2

It is true that the voice is the embodiment of language and that it funda-mentally involves the 'cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages'.But it is not true that this is opposed to 'communication, representation,expression. There is no divide between the materiality and the meaningsof voices. On the contrary, as I will try to show, the voice and its meaningscan only be understood on the basis of our bodily experience, and vocalsemiosis can be explained only by paying close attention to the physicalities

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of articulation. Speech is material and experiential as well as semiotic andsocial.

Experiential Metaphors

Lakoff and Johnson argued that we understand metaphors on the basisof our concrete experiences: 'No metaphor can ever be comprehended oreven adequately represented independently of its experiential basis? Thisincludes physical, bodily experience, such as walking upright - or tensingof the voice. When you tense your vocal musculature, your voice becomeshigher, sharper and brighter, because in their tensed state the walls of thethroat cavity dampen the sound less than they would in their relaxed state -an equivalent difference would be that between footsteps in a hollow tiledcorridor and a heavily carpeted room. The resulting sound not only is tense,it also means tense and makes tense. We can recognize tension in our ownvoice and in the voices of others, and we also know when our voice is likelyto become tense - when we are nervous, or anxious, or intimidated orthreatened, for instance. This complex of bodily experiences constitutes themeaning potential of vocal tension. It allows a metaphorical transfer fromthe domain of experience to the domain of more abstract ideas and valuesand identities. Literal tension can become metaphorical tension, expressinganything which can be said to have a component of tension in its meaning.This may be incidental, the expression of a moment of tension, deliberateor otherwise, but voices may also become habitually tense, expressing 'tense'aspects of the identity of individuals or groups. Alan Lomax wrote of thehigh degree of tension in the preferred female singing styles of cultureswith severe sexual repression of women:

It is as if one of the assignments of the favoured singer is to act outthe level of sexual tension which the customs of the society establishas normal. The content of this message may be painful and anxiety-producing, but the effect upon the culture member maybe stimulating,erotic and pleasurable since the song reminds of familiar sexual emo-tions and experiences.4

In this way of thinking, the materiality of the voice is not opposed to thesemiotic and the social. There is no divide between materiality and meaning.On the contrary, 'the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, and the carti-lages' are a fundamental resource for semiosis. Meaning needs materialembodiment, needs physical, bodily experience.

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The Material Voice

Tension is not the only resource for vocal meaning. Voices combine a rangeof vocal features, each one deriving from a specific articulatory gesture.They are high or low and soft or loud and tense or lax and so on, and allthese features are capable of fine gradation: there are many different pitchregisters and many degrees of loudness and tension. And meaning derivesfrom all of these features, in their specific combinations.

Pitch range

Our experience of pitch range tells us two things: men's voices are, onaverage, lower than those of women and children, and smaller resonatingchambers (e.g., violins) produce higher sounds than larger resonatingchambers (e.g., double basses). As a result, low voices can be threatening(in operas the tenor is the hero and the bass or baritone the villain), whilehigh voices can be used to make ourselves small and harmless, as in talkingto children. But people can adjust the pitch range they use, whether to suitthe context or to express more permanent identities. This inflects the gen-dered meanings of pitch range in complex ways. Men use the higher regionsof their pitch range to assert themselves and to dominate - only the veryhighest regions (e.g., the counter-tenor) can become ambiguous in genderterms. A man who speaks low is trying not to be dominant, he's trying tomake himself vocally small by mumbling, and the booming bass is usuallyconsidered overbearing. Women, on the other hand use the lower end oftheir pitch range to be assertive. But, as it is difficult to be low and loud atthe same time, they face a dilemma. They must either speak low (which isassertive) and soft (which is intimate), which can evoke the 'dangerouswoman* stereotype, or high ('belittling' themselves) and loud (being asser-tive), which may be considered 'shrill*. In either case the dominant norms ofthe public, assertive (and 'masculine') voice are at odds with the dominantnorms of the private, intimate (and 'feminine') voice.

Male news readers speak at a higher pitch level when they are on air thanin their ordinary 'low key' speech.5 Women news readers do the opposite:

In 1970s Tasmania the same person who represented herself as'Patricia Hughes' using a dark voice (the voice of authority) in read-ing the news on the Tasmanian 'highbrow' station 7ZL became 'Patti,your Thursday bird', using a lighter hyper-feminized voice to intro-duce herself on the 'popular' station 7ZR.6


Iconic female voices enshrine such meanings in public consciousness.Marilyn Monroe used a high, yet breathy voice, combining 'feminine'vulnerability and seductiveness. Lauren Bacall used a sensuous low voice.In her autobiography she recalls how Howard Hawks conceived of her char-acter for To Have and Have Not (1944) as 'a masculine approach - insolent.Give as good as she got, no capitulation, no helplessness'.7 To this end he notonly invented 'the look' - a quizzical look upwards with the head slightlybowed, suggesting feminine deference as well as insolence - but also toldher to work on her voice, to 'practice shouting, keeping my register low'.8

Level

The loudness of the voice relates to social distance, both literally andfiguratively. As explained by Edward Hall, at Very close range' (3-6 inches),our voice will be a soft whisper, whether for reasons of intimacy orconspiratoriality.^ At 'close range' (8-12 inches) our voice is still a whisper,still meant to be heard by one person only. At 'near range' (12-20 inches)our voice will be soft indoors, and 'full' outdoors but still low enough notto be overheard by strangers. At 'close neutral range' (20-36 inches) westill tend to speak about 'personal matters'; and softly, while at 'far neutralrange' (4.5-5 feet) we tend to speak about 'non-personal matters', in a 'fuller'voice. At 'public distance' (5.5-8 feet) our voice will be 'full with slight over-loudness', conveying 'public information, for others to hear'. Beyond thatwe are no longer talking to one person but to a whole group.

Before amplification, there was a one-to-one relation between voice leveland social distance. Voice level would signify actual relationships, alongthe lines suggested by Hall. Amplification has changed that. A soft, breathywhisper can now be heard by a crowd, and the screaming of rock singerscan be played at a comfortable background level. Level now constructsimaginary relations, whether in acting, in singing or in public speech. Insinging, the crooning' style of Bing Crosby pioneered an 'intimate, personalrelationship with fans that worked best with domestic listeners'.10 When themovies acquired soundtracks, actors had to wean themselves away fromthe projected voices of 1930s box office plays and adopt more intimate,close up styles. At the same time, politicians began to replace oratory withconversational speech, as in President Roosevelt's 1930s 'fireside chats',which addressed listeners in 'calm, measured statements . . . as though hewere actually sitting on the front porch or in the parlour with them'11 andradio speakers, too, learned to adopt low-key conversational manner,12 soas to 'sound like the listeners best friend'13

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Rough, Smooth and Breathy Voices

In rough voices we can hear other things beside the tone of the voice itself -hoarseness, harshness, rasp. The opposite of the rough voice is the clean,smooth, Veil-oiled5 voice from which all noisiness is eliminated. Much ofthe effect of 'roughness' comes from the a-periodic vibration of the vocalcords which causes noise in the spectrum.14 As this is more audible in thelower pitches, it is more easily heard in male voices and in lower femalevoices. Perhaps this is why rough voices are especially common in malesinging and highly valued in cultural contexts that encourage assertivenessand enterprise.15 Again, the meaning of roughness lies in what it is: rough.Our experience tells us that roughness comes from wear and tear, whetheras a result of smoking and drinking, hardship and adversity, or old age. Therough voice is the vocal equivalent of the weather-beaten face, the roughlyplastered wall, the faded jeans and the battered leather jacket. The smoothvoice is the vocal equivalent of unblemished young skin, polished surfaces,designer plastic and immaculate tuxedos. How this is valued depends onthe context. In Western classical music perception and polish is highlyvalued, in African American music roughness:

In most traditional singing there is no apparent striving for the'smooth' and 'sweet' qualities that are so highly regarded in the Westerntradition. Some outstanding blues, gospel and jazz singers have voicesthat may be described as foggy, hoarse, rough or sandy. Not only isthis kind of voice not derogated, it often seems to be valued. Sermonspreached in this voice appear to create a special emotional tension.16

In the breathy voice, another sound mixes in with the tone of the voiceitself - breath. Its metaphor potential derives from our experience of whatcan make our voice breathy - exertion of some kind, excitement, sexualarousal. Breathiness often combines with a soft voice, suggesting intimacy.Advertisers use it to give their message a sensual, erotic appeal, and singersuse it for the same reason.

Nasality

More has been written about nasality than about almost any other aspectof voice quality, partly because it has been difficult to define, and partly becausenasality judgments have usually been value judgments: the languages, dialectsand singing styles people call nasal tend to be the ones they do not like.


The usual phonetic definition of nasality says that it is sound producedwith the soft palate lowered and the mouth unblocked, so that air escapesboth via the nose and via the mouth. Paradoxically, however, you can pro-duce a 'nasal' sound by holding your nose closed - if you then unblock yournose again and produce the same type of sound with your nose unblocked,you will notice that you have to tense your voice a little. When you reduceoverall muscle tension, nasality will disappear. This suggests that theimpression of nasality results from the combination of two factors: vocaltension and what has been called a 'cul-de-sac resonator',17 a resonatingchamber which opens off from the passageway through which the soundescapes to the air, but is itself closed off. The nasal cavity is not the onlypossible cul-de-sac resonator - tensing of the faucal pillars (the musculararches visible in the back of the mouth on each side of the soft palate) canhave the same effect.

Nasality is thus closely related to tension, which explains why 'pinchedand nasal tones pervade many of the sounds of pain, deprivation andsorrow'18 and why we hear nasality in moaning and wailing and screaming.But these are just some of the manifestations of the nasal voice. Less dra-matically, nasality may occur whenever there is inhibition and repression:whenever we find ourselves in a stressful situation or whenever we mustcontrol or restrain ourselves.

Articulation

Some vowels are 'frontal', articulated with the tongue in the front of themouth (e.g., the [i] of heed), others are articulated in the back of the mouth(e.g., the [a] of hard). This has often been commented on in relation tosound symbolism. In many languages words meaning 'close' use frontalvowels and words meaning 'far' back vowels, (e.g., near) and/ar in English,hier ('here') and daar ('there') in Dutch, id and la-bas in French, hier anddort in German. But frontality and its opposite can also be overall speechcharacteristics, expressing a quality of being 'up front', 'confronting', or of'holding back', 'not coming out with it'.

The same can be said for 'aperture'. Some vowels are pronounced with themouth comparatively closed and the oral cavity therefore comparativelysmall, others with the mouth comparatively open and the oral cavity there-fore larger. The [i] of heed and the [u] of hood are less open, for instance,than the [a] of hard. This too has mostly been discussed in relation tosound symbolism. Words with an open' [a] have been said to be 'heavy, big

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and round', for instance, and words with the [i] 'small, light and pointed.'19

But aperture can also become an overall feature of vocal style, expressingthe idea of openness or closed-ness. Vocal settings of this kind are oftenused in puppetry and animation. In Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (dir.George Lucas, 2000), for instance, the treacherous Viceroy of Naboo, acharacter with an inscrutable fish-like physiognomy, not only has a vaguelyChinese accent but also speaks with a stiff jaw and an almost-closed mouth,using a breathy, hollow-sounding 'faucalized voice!

Resonance

Shepherd has discussed the voices of different kinds of rock singers.20

'Hard rock' voices are rough, loud and high. Their timbre reminds of shout-ing or even screaming. Resonance is produced almost entirely in the throatand the mouth. According to Shepherd this 'reproduces tension and expe-riential repression as males engage with the public world'.21 Tagg linked thesame style to the soundscape of the city: cto make yourself understood,valid as an individual, you have to shout above the din of the city'.22 In afemale rock-singing style which Shepherd describes as the style of 'womanas emotional nurturer', the voice is soft and warm, relatively low and withan open throat. It uses the resonating chambers of the chest, says Shepherd,so that the voice literally comes from the region of the heart or the breast.Softer male singers such as Paul McCartney tend to use the head as resona-tor and therefore sound 'lighter and thinner':

The typical sound of the woman-as-sex-object involves a similarcomparison. The softer, warmer, hollower tones of the woman singeras emotional nurturer become closed off with a certain edge, a certainvocal sheen that is quite different from the male-appropriated, hardcore timbre typical of 'cock' rock. Tones such as that produced byShirley Bassey in 'Big Spender', for instance, are essentially head tones,and it could in this sense be argued that the transition from womanthe nurturer to woman the sex object represents a shift, physiologi-cally coded, from the 'feminine heart' to the 'masculine head'.23

Shepherd's discussion shows that singing styles are always a combinationof features - 'soft' and 'warm' and 'hollow' and low and open' and 'comingfrom the heart or breast', and that meanings such as 'woman-as-nurturer'result from the way in which these features are combined. The famous


voice of Marlon Brando in The Godfather (1972) is another example. It isa comparatively high voice, and we have seen that men tend to use highvoices to dominate. It is also hoarse and rough, signalling the Godfather'sharsh and unforgiving side. And it is articulated with a stiff jaw and analmost closed mouth, suggesting an unwillingness to give' that keeps usguessing as to what he might be keeping from us. Yet it is also soft andbreathy, at times almost a whisper, making the Godfathers menacing pres-ence disturbingly intimate and attractive.

The Social Voice

I have sketched a 'physiologically coded' semiotics of the voice, to use JohnShepherd s term, a semiotics in which the voice is what it means and meanswhat it is, and in which meaning is made with the body, and understoodon the basis of bodily experience. Such experiential semiotics come to thefore in times of semiotic change, and the twentieth century, with its newcommunication technologies, has certainly been a period of such change.

For a time, voices had been disciplined towards uniform standards ofeducated propriety, and actors and singers had been schooled in singularaesthetic ideals. This had never meant complete uniformity. On the con-trary, it had allowed for subtle forms of individuality and distinction, moreor less in the same way that the cut of apparently almost identical greybusiness suits can signal subtle degrees of sartorial elegance and finesse.But amplification changed all this, allowing actors and singers to developtheir own, immediately recognizable timbres. Voices such as those of LaurenBacall, Marilyn Monroe, Jimmy Stewart, Marlon Brando and others builta new semiotic resource, a new language of the voice, as did the singingvoices of Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, and Astrid Gilberto, toname just a few.

Dialects and accents took part in this opening up of vocal semioticresources. In the era of semiotic uniformity, their meaning had been index-ical, signalling peoples class, gender and age. Often they had stigmatizedthe speaker. To upper-middle-class city dwellers, country dialects werebackward, working-class dialects inferior and foreign accents either suspector funny. Dialects and accents carried the kind of connotations Barthescalled 'myths' and denoted with terms such as Ttalian-ness', to indicate thatthey condensed everything the bourgeoisie 'knew' about Italians as well asthe value judgments they attached to it into a single, diffuse concept.24 Muchof this still lingers. The story of Pygmalion is still understood. Yet much

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has changed. In the early 1930s MGM worried about Greta Garbo's accent,but her voice was to become another key icon in the new semiotics ofvoices. Soon Hollywood scriptwriters would recommend the use accentsand dialects:

Dialect... is a revelatory as make-up, as picturesque as costume, ascharacteristic as gestures, as identifiable as physical disabilities, andas dramatically effective as facial expressions.25

The author of this quote, a scriptwriter who published several manualson the subject, recommended cthe dropped "h" in cockney, the "d" and "t"substitutes for "th" in German, "y" substitute for "j" in Swedish, as well as 'thedropped final "r" in Southern, Eastern and Negro speech, together with thedropped "g" in the "ing" ending words, as in "fightin" and "doin"'.26 Suchdialects and accents would soon be familiar to movie audiences the worldover, their meanings as easily understood as those of the cliches of classicalHollywood musical scores. Public speech, for instance, on radio becamemuch more varied. Even on the BBC, where not long ago only 'the QueensEnglish' had been permitted, a wide variety of accents and dialects cannow be heard, and not only in Vox pops'. When my father studied to becomea church minister, in the Netherlands of the 1930s, he had to take elocutionlessons to get rid of his country dialect. Preaching could only be donein standard, 'algemeen beschaafd' (general civilized') Dutch. Today somechurch ministers in the Netherlands have begun to celebrate regionality byadopting local dialects.

Once dialects, accents and vocal styles are no longer seen as a kind offingerprint or an indelible social marker, they lose their ties with a specificplace or social group and develop into a medium of expression. When I grewup in Amsterdam it was fashionable for left-wing intellectuals and artists(who did not come from Amsterdam) to adopt a bit of broad Amsterdamdialect, as if this would show some solidarity with the working classes -a vocal equivalent of blue jeans, you might say. When I returned to theNetherlands in the early 1980s, after an absence of 7 years, I found thatmany had now adopted a smattering of Rotterdam dialect. It was the ageof the 'yuppie', and Rotterdam was the city of commerce and capitalism.In Australia, speaking 'broad Australian is no longer a matter of destiny,indexing the milieu in which you happen to be born, but a choice as to howmuch to associate yourself with the 'Aussie' lifestyle and values. And cool'young people everywhere pick up token elements of the speech of African


American rappers. The same goes for vocal styles. As Michel Chion hasnoted, actors' abilities as actors go beyond the mastery of accents:

There is timbre, the way of creating a voice that is hoarser, moremetallic, more full-throated, more sonorous, or less harmonicallyrich. Compare two roughly contemporaneous Dustin Hoffman mov-ies. In Barry Levinsoris Rain Man, he has a metallic and nasal voiceand in Stephen Frears' Hero it is coarser. If you listen to both filmswithout the picture, it is quite difficult to identify both voices as com-ing from the same actor.27

Marlon Brandos hoarse whisper is now part of the repertoire of manyAmerican actors, to be deployed whenever a sense of brooding, yet sensu-ously attractive menace is required. The same applies to singing. ElsewhereI have analyzed how Madonna uses different voices for different songs.28 In'Like A Virgin she addresses a 'you' who saved her from perdition and madeher feel 'new and shiny', like a virgin touched for the first time'. This 'you'she addresses in a high, feminine voice which nevertheless also has an edgeof a more hardened, tense and strident sound, to signal scars of abuse andbetrayal. In 'Live to Tell', Madonnas voice is less high and tense, lower, morerelaxed, more sure of itself, as well as softer, breathier and warmer. Onlylater in the song does an occasional vibrato and increased tension add thestrength of relived emotion to some of the key moments. In short:

The voice is ceasing to be identified with a specific face. It appearsmuch less stable, identified, hence fetishizable. This general realiza-tion that the voice is radically other than the body that adopts it(or that it adopts) for the duration of a film seems to me to be one ofthe most significant phenomena in the recent development of thecinema, television, and audiovisual media in general.29

The voice ceases to be 'the body speaking its mother tongue' here. Althoughits meanings still derive from bodily experience, this is less foregroundednow and voices begin to be understood on the basis of cultural connota-tion and on the basis of familiarity with the movie roles and songs in whichthey have been used. Another socially and culturally coded semiotic regimetakes over from the physiologically coded regime that gave birth to it.

As speech synthesis proceeds, this new language of the voice may wellharden into a much more bony-structured and binary technological code.Sound engineers can already enhance recorded voices, turning up the

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tension a little, or adding a touch of synthetic breathiness. As academics,starting to write about the voice from the early 1980s onwards, we may infact have laid the foundations for such codification and virtualization, evenas we praised the materiality of the voice. Nevertheless, it is always possibleto go back to the source, always possible to reconnect with the physicalitiesof voice production and to explore the many possible voices and the manypossible meanings that have not yet entered into the mainstream of cul-tural production.

Notes

1. R. Barthes, Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana, 1977, p. 179.2. K. Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror - The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema.

Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988, p. 44.3. G. Lakoffand M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago

Press, 1980, p. 19.4. A. Lomax, Folk Song Style and Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books,

1968, p. 194.5. T. Van Leeuwen, Professional Speech, unpublished MA dissertation. Sydney:

Macquarie University, 1982.6. C. Poynton, 'Giving voice', in E. Me William and P. Taylor, eds. Pedagogy, Technology

and the Body. New York: Peter Lang, 1996, p. 8.7. L. Bacall, Lauren Bacall By Myself. London: Jonathan Cape, 1979, p. 87.8. Bacall (1979), p. 92.9. E. T. Hall, 'Silent assumptions in social communication, in D. McK. Rioch and

E. A. Weinstein (eds), Disorders of Communication, Research Publications, Associationfor Research in Nervous and Mental Diseases 42 (1964): 41-55; The Hidden Dimension.New York: Doubleday, 1966, pp. 184-5.

10. S. Frith, Music for Pleasure. Cambridge: Polity, 1988, p. 19.11. E. Barnouw, The Golden Web - A History of Broadcasting in the United States

1933-1953. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968, p. 8.12. Cardiff (1981).13. G. Leitner, 'BBC English and Deutsche Rundfunksprache: a comparative and

historical analysis of the language on the radio', International Journal of the Sociology ofLanguage, 26 (1980), 75-100.

14. J. Laver, The Phonetic Description of Voice Quality. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1980, p. 128.

15. Lomax (1968), p. 192.16. Courlander, quoted in P. Williams-Jones, Afro-American Gospel Music' A crystalli-

zation of the black aesthetic', Ethnomusicology, (September 1975), 377.17. R. West, M. Ansberry and A. Carr, The Rehabilitation of Speech. New York: Harper, 1957.18. Lomax (1968), p. 193.


19. P. Brown and D. C. Hildum, 'Expectancy and the identification of syllables',Language, 32 (1956), 411-19.

20. J. Shepherd, Music as Social Text. Cambridge: Polity, 1991.21. Ibid., p. 167.22. J. Tagg, 'Music in mass media studies. Reading sounds for example', in K. Roe and

U. Carlsson (eds), Popular Music Research, (Nordicom-Sweden) 2 (1991), 108.23. Shepherd (1991), pp. 167-8.24. R. Barthes, Mythologies. London: Paladin, 1973.25. L. Herman, A Practical Manual for Screen Playwriting for Theater and Television

Films. New York: New American Library, 1952, p. 198.26. Herman (1952), p. 200.27. M. Chion, The Voice in Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, p. 173.28. T. Van Leeuwen, Speech, Music, Sound. London: Macmillan, 1999, pp. 150-4.29. Chion (1999), p. 174.

26Hitchcock and Herrmann

Music, Sexual Violence and Cultural Changein Vertigo, Mamie and Psycho

Jochen Eisentraut

Alfred Hitchcock is probably the best-known director in the history of film.Due to his groundbreaking work at several points in his half-century career,his talent for self-promotion and the control he exercised over every aspectof his films (especially sound design and music), he is a prominent feature ofthe twentieth-century film landscape. His reputation was further enhancedthrough his lionization by the directors of the French New Wave (particu-larly Francois Truffaut),1 who emphasized the role of the individual auteurin filmmaking. This key figure, they believed, should have complete creativecontrol over a project. Hitchcock's career embodied this idea of personalauthorship because of the carefully controlled exposition of his visionthrough an immaculately honed articulacy in the language of film. Thecomposer Bernard Herrmann, who worked with Hitchcock from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, countered this with a terseness and tenacity ofstyle and an astonishing economy of thematic material which makes himremarkable as well.

M for Madeleine, Marnie and Marion

Each of the three films to be discussed here revolves around a woman andthe women in question are highly problematic. Firstly, and most obviously,

437


they are all criminals. Ihe eponymous Marnie and Marion in Psycho arethieves, whereas Madeleine/Judy in Vertigo is an accessory to murder.2

Each of them is a problem; problems need solutions and these solutions aresought, and to some extent found, by men. At the same time, these femaleleads are fascinating, complex and sexually magnetic. Crucially, Marnie,Marion and Madeleine have all struck out in a bid for self-determination.Judy (formerly Madeleine) lives the single life when Scotty tracks her downand crushes her identity and independence piecemeal. Marion in Psychosteals in order to break free of her demeaning job and to be with her lover.She is pursued by society beyond the grave after being brutally murderedin the famous shower scene. Marnie lives a life totally of her own invention,moving from heist to heist, answering to no one, changing her name andappearance as she goes.3 She is captured' and 'tamed' by Mark, the amateurzoologist played by Sean Connery. Three women with a plan and with thecourage to defy the law are brought down by men.

Two more important commonalities remain to be pointed out. The first isthe whiff of improper sexual conduct which attends these female characters.The second is that they all suffer violence at the hands of men. We're intro-duced to Marion during a lunchtime liaison in a hotel room. She is in herlingerie and the scene was boldly risque for its time and place. In VertigoJudy lives alone and tells Scotty, 'To be honest Fve been picked up before'.She had also been the lover of the wife-murderer Elster, as we discover inthe final scene. Mamie's case is more complex and to some extent inverted.Her mother was a prostitute and Marnie, partly due to a childhood traumaduring which she bludgeoned a sailor to death, is dismissive of men andfrigid. However, she does use her undoubted sexual allure to pull the woolover the eyes of her employer-victims. In the first dialogue scene of the filmMark describes her as the 'brunette with the legs' as he and Strutt recall aprevious lascivious discussion of her charms. It also transpires that Struttwas so taken with her looks that he did not bother to require references.

The violence inflicted on the three women is surrounded by issues of sexand gender. Marion is murdered by the original voyeuristic "psycho killer'Norman Bates, who phallically stabs her while she is showering naked - ather most vulnerable. During the crime he is dressed as his mother whomwe have apparently heard berating the morals of young women. Madeleine/Judy in Vertigo is literally dragged to the top of an ever-so-phallic tower,which stands for Scottie's vertigo, which in turn can represent impotence.Both have been brought to this point by their obsession with each other.Judy has twice been transformed into Madeleine by a lover, that is, her

Hitchcock and Herrmann 439

identity has been obliterated by Elster and then Scottie, and in this scenethe point is pushed home by her 'accidental' death. Mamie's case is the moststraightforward, as she is simply raped by her tormentor/analyst/husband.Clearly these are narratives of female transgression and the violent imposi-tion of male power which are played out not just in these three notablefilms, but in countless others, making them almost archetypal.

M for Music

Madeleine and Marnie both have luscious romantic themes, played mostlyby high vibrato violins in the Hollywood style. In Mamies case the themematches the rhythm and emphasis of her name and the films title. We cansing 'Marnie, Marnie' to the melody. This is a not uncommon techniquein the scoring of title sequences. The theme is played when the word is dis-played in the opening titles and again, when we first see the undisguisedMarnie after she has washed the dye out of her hair in a hotel room. Theclose-up of her face is in soft focus, and the high legato violins completethe established Hollywood cues for the female lead, inviting our (male?)gaze to feast on the beauty of the star while our emotions are sent swayingtowards romance by the charged-yet-fluid music. Like many Herrmannthemes, Mamies theme is made up of a short phrase which is transposedfor variety. Here the phrase consists essentially of the two notes whichdelineate the word 'Marnie'. These are reiterated at various pitches andlinked by little more than ornamentation, making a longer melody overall.This brief thematic building block is fundamental to the whole score andmatches Mamies limited and limiting experience, excluded as she is fromlove and sex.

Madeleines theme in Vertigo is equally romantic and feminine in thereceived language of film music. However, it is expressed in a longer arch,relating well to her more tortured trajectory, with a number of wide leapsup to a major 6th.4 The overall compass of the melody is stretched over twooctaves, compared to Mamies focus on an interval of only one tone. Wecan make a connection here with Vertigo's concern with heights, dizzinessand fear. The sumptuous scene where Madeleine and her theme are intro-duced in a luxurious restaurant are again calculated to seduce our gaze. Thegentle camera movements, the maroon room, the green silk dress, themellifluous melody which creeps into our subconscious as we track towardsthe bare skin of the actress' back. Everything is designed to enchant us, butit is also meant to catch Scottie in a carefully set trap, which will re-enact


his worst nightmare. This is a musical mise-en-scene of femininity as centreof attention, as beauty, but it is a Trojan horse crammed with deception,entrapment and disaster.

Madeleine/Judys death takes place at the final dramatic climax of Vertigo.5

Unusually for a main protagonist, Marion in Psycho is murdered at a cen-tral point in the narrative in the shower stabbing. This is not the onlyway in which Psycho is unusual. The film was made to a TV budget in blackand white but was released for cinema, and it marks a turning point in themedium of film and the wider culture. Few mainstream Hollywood featurefilms were made in black and white after this, and television came to domi-nate public consciousness. Herrmann turned the limited budget into a virtueand used only strings for his orchestra. This was a bold decision for a com-poser who often developed themes by re-orchestrating them: that is, pass-ing them around different (combinations of) instruments in differentregisters for variation and expression.6 Herrmann was also known for usingunusual instruments and ensembles, even with limited numbers of players,as is evidenced by some if his radio work. Here he apparently had only onekind of sound: that of the violin family.

The violin was also the instrument of choice for the seductive themes ofMarnie and Madeleine; but in Psycho, Marion does not have a theme that isher own in the same way. There are a number of reasons for this. One is thatwe are not plumbing the depths of Marions character in Psycho. It is ratherNorman Bates who is the 'specimen under the microscope (but neitherdoes he have his own theme). The film is thus depersonalized, alienated.The same can be said of the sound of the violins; they are stripped of theirsaccharine vibrato which connotes romance and the feminine in the codeof Hollywood's golden age. Here they are grating, scratchy, slashing, hack-ing, dry, taut and cold. They connect on many levels with the visual anddramatic aspects of the film. The single instrument family gives a kind ofmonochrome sound - a limited range of colours. The harsh, accentedattacks of the chords in the title sequence prefigure the stabbing of theknife. The long notes with little or no vibrato later in the film stretch out theunbearable tension.

Musically and dramatically, Psycho is different from Marnie and Vertigo.It does not follow the narrative arc of any leading character. It does not usea conventional orchestra and the score has no personalized leitmotiv.Instead it gives us a central 'musical sound effect': the stabbing music wehear during the two murders. This takes to the extreme Herrmanns over-riding concern with sounds rather than notes, which is usually expressedin his varied re-orchestrations of simple note sequences. In this case, the


violins play high notes in cumulative clusters and glissandi.7 As these cuesprogress it becomes difficult to determine individual pitches, but there is aniconic sound quality. Hitchcocks careful judgement of the dramatic shapeof a soundtrack in its entirety was arrived at in this case with the aid ofHerrmann stubbornly acting against express directorial instructions for amusic-free shower scene, a course of action that would get him into troubleduring the making of Torn Curtain (Smith 1991, Rebello 1990). We can seethe first instance of this music as a climax in the film, coming after sustainedscoring fades to the sound of rain, purging our ears for the assault to come.When it arrives there are clear kinetic connections between the musicalsounds and the actions and sounds of the stabbing.8 There is also a similarityto Marions screams and birds screeching. Norman, of course, stuffs birds.

In terms of the characters, Psycho portrays a quagmire of sexual inver-sion, repression and symbolization. Norman is sexually attracted to Marion,as the psychiatrist at the end of the film helpfully explains. However,his pathological psychology projects the repression of his urges onto hismother, who undertakes the killing in order to frustrate Normans desires.Since the mother is really Norman in disguise, he does in a way consum-mate his desire in the perverted act of the murder. In this reading, the stab-bing stands for the desired sexual act, the knife for the phallus,9 the musicfor the sounds of a kind of alienated psychopathic sexual climax.

Psycho was made in 1960. It points the way ahead to the sexual revolu-tion ushered in by that decade. Promiscuity, sex outside marriage, opengay relationships and especially the portrayal of sex in film were aboutto make a substantial impact on American culture. Psycho is also riddledwith the repression of the old order which for Hollywood was representedby the Hays Code. The mother tormenting the young man with warningsof loose women is inhabiting a creaky old house next to a defunct business:this is his 'whole world* the old world, the dead world of the dead, hector-ing mother. This is the post-war culture of conformity and repressionwhich is so compellingly portrayed in Hitchcocks The Wrong Man. It is aworld which has already begun to crumble with the advent of rock *n' rollfive years earlier and is now in for further seismic shifts.

M for Mother

Mamie, Vertigo and Psycho all have mother figures which loom in the back-ground and are central to the female leads' predicaments. Norman Bates*'mummy', Mamies damaged, man-hating mother, and the ghostly Carlottawho appears to be drawing Madeleine to suicide in Vertigo. They all have


their insistent rhythm and their nagging presence in sound. The knockingof the sailors on the prostitute-mothers door in Mamie is prefigured by theisolated sound of the main character's stilettos in the very first shot of thefilm. This is all the more powerful for being juxtaposed with Herrmannshectic overture. The motif is taken up by the banging window which pre-cedes Mamies nightmare and is echoed by the mother s limping down thestairs afterwards. It has sex-and-violence apexes in the battering of thesailor by the child armed with a poker (a symbolic reversal of the sexualviolation which she senses has taken place) and the marital rape of Mamieon board the honeymoon cruise ship which is accompanied by the abruptfortissimo chord pairs with which we are familiar from the overture.10

These chords can be read as rupture as well as impact: the rupture of rapeand killing and that of the mother s ability to express love for her child.They are reminiscent of the aggressive chords in the title music of Psycho,which of course connote the knife. The knife has another musical concomi-tant in the insistent rhythmic screeches underscoring the murders. Whilecommitting these, Norman is dressed as his mother, and the sound canalso be taken for an expression of the unrelenting psychological pain the(internal) mother is causing him (Nag! Nag! Nag!) with the sharp tonguewe hear from the house.

In Vertigo the 'mother rhythm' takes the form of an insistent instrumentalfigure which we hear gently in the museum where Madeleine is captivatedby the female ancestor s portrait. The rhythmic motif is that of the SpanishHabanera dance.11 The woman in the painting is Carlotta. She hailed from aSpanish family and is (supposedly) driving Madeleine to her death at the'Spanish mission'. A related rhythmic figure is used during the scenes whereScottie is following Madeleine, and it is blasted out during the psychedelic12

dream sequence animation. The reassuring pulse of mother has mutatedinto the slashing chord of trauma and dysfunction in these three films. Thisat a time when the 'cult of motherhood, which had been given circulationin America since the turn of the century, began to undergo mutation'. Theconventional nuclear family started to be questioned and blamed and themother became 'the focus of resentment' (Cohen, 1995: 144-5).

The Freudian ideas which inform these films, and have found extensiveuse in their interpretation, also revolve around the persona of the mother,particularly in relation to issues of sexual preference and identification.From Normans effeminate ambivalence, to Scottie's struggle to assert hismasculinity, to Mamies grudging acceptance of her sexuality, this is a con-stant current. And there is always a mother who somehow appears to be theroot of the problem. In psychoanalytic theory it is largely the relationship


with the mother that defines the sexual proclivities and orientation ofthe adult in later life. Norman Bates s biography, in fact, shadows closely theoedipal chronology in that he kills the mothers lover in order to possessthe mother (even as a corpse). Norman and Marion seem to have some-what reversed personae in terms of conventional sexual roles. He is theunadventurous child who cleans and listens to mother. Marion on the otherhand is enterprising and calculating. She also has the exciting pursuit music(although she is without doubt the prey), whereas Normans cues are muchmore lyrical, except when he is dressed as his mother of course. While sex-ual ambiguities in Hitchcock have been examined by feminist writers suchas Modleski (1998), Brown makes much of the contradictory qualities inHerrmanns music. A good example is the bitonal Eb minor/D major chordheard at various points of high drama in Vertigo:

For a director primarily concerned with showing the eruptions of theirrational... within the context of a solidly established ethos, perhapsthe only thing to do was to take the triadically oriented harmonicsystem familiar to listeners within that ethos and, while using it as anever-present base, turn it against itself. (Brown, 1994: 174)

Contradiction is inherent in these films and their scores, and contradictionbetween 'solidly established' and evolving gender roles is symptomatic ofthe social changes to come after 1960. The musical contrasts often bear themark of problematic gender interaction: the assertive staccato chords ofPsycho and Mamie, the breathless galloping pursuit themes (woman thehunted) and the brassy horn chords of the Vertigo overture give way tosustained and softer string scoring mainly when a woman is being sub-jected to the gaze of a man: a policeman, a voyeur, a predator.

M for Misogyny?

The objectification of women in these films is too obvious to be dismissed.They are watched, analyzed, followed, captured and killed, all underscoredwith parallel affirming music. As much as we might try to see the gaze asLacanian fascination with our own reflection, the women here are clearlyother. They are another species and are treated as such. This corresponds tothe fairly strict division of labour that still prevailed in the 1950s and early1960s. The old chauvinistic caricature of all women as whores, except forthe mother who is a saint, is here inverted: as the mother figure is eitherliterally a prostitute (as was Mamies) or has behaved in ways that earned


the censure of those around and lead to her destruction. The mothers areall victims: a matricide, a suicide and psychological damage have done forthem, and the following generation we are presented with is doomed, apartfrom Marnier she has to be raped, give up her independence and possiblygo to jail, certainly into the prison of a forced marriage, to be 'saved!

This generation of 1950s and 1960s women are at once alluring, enter-prising and transgressive. The music follows and underscores the mens las-civious voyeurism, their pursuit, their confusion and their violence. It doesnot elicit sympathy for the women, except possibly for Marnie, althoughthe declamatory nature of her two-note nominal sonic anaphone speaksmore of exasperation than pity. This is particularly expressed by the dynam-ics, with a strong accent on the first and higher note. Marions death inPsycho is met with cold musical silence as the camera meets her unseeingeye and Judy/Madeleines with the high drama of Scotties fate.

Yet despite their objectification and subjection, the women have a dev-astating effect on the men around them. They have a life-changing impactand threaten the males sanity and often his very existence. Their influenceis destabilizing; they dissemble and hide their identities, leaving the menstupefied and foundering, but fatally attracted and fascinated. The odd manout is Mark in Marnie. He keeps his cool to a greater extent, although he isdriven to the edge of his capacity for aloof analysis on the honeymooncruise. All this echoes Hitchcocks obsessive sexual interest in Tippi Hedren,the former model who plays Marnie. His pressuring of her came to a headduring the filming of Marnie, and he apparently lost interest in the projectafter she rejected him, which is one of the reasons given for its supposedtechnical ineptitudes.13 Spoto recounts the decline of Hitchcock from thispoint onwards, indicating a seismic psychological dislocation (1983:475-9).Hitchcock also breaks with Herrmann over the next film after Marnie.14

Smith claims that Herrmann saw Hedren as less of a victim and rathermanipulating Hitchcocks fascination with her (2002: 253).

The women are always the centre of attention, even when they are dead(Psycho) or the main character is a man (Vertigo). Their stories, however,are seen through the eyes of men and this male perspective is pointed outby Mulvey who writes that 'the audience follows the growth of (Scotties)erotic obsession and subsequent despair precisely from his point of view'(1993:121). We see the woman's narrative through male eyes, yet it has alsobeen claimed that 'the male spectator is as much "deconstructed" as con-structed by the films, which reveal a fascination with femininity that throwsmasculine identity into question and crisis' (Modlesky, 1988:87). The sameauthor argues cogently and extensively that despite the dominant masculine


vision and ultimate female subjection of many Hitchcock narratives, thereare significant aspects of the films which allow for an understanding of thefemale predicament in patriarchy. This maybe 'understanding' as a scientistgains understanding of a laboratory animal; but it is not understandingthrough direct male identification with the female victim, because the gulfis too great between gender roles in these films. The women are intenselyinteresting because they behave in unexpected ways: because they are up tono good, because they lie and because they are attractive. These aspects areemphasized in the music which helps us focus on them in the way that themale characters focus on them. We are made aware of their allure, theirimportance, their behaviour, of the danger they pose and of their unpre-dictability. It is in these ways that this group of films points to a more sexu-ally emancipated future. The women are neither in the background norpurely objects of love interest; and they are not concerned with tradition-ally feminine domains. They are literally on the move, running away withthe loot, accelerated by heart-thumping pursuit music which is complicitin their objectification. But the music forces us to focus our gaze* on femaleswho are more than objects, because they are primary movers in thesenarratives. The nature of the gaze' has been discussed by numerous authorsand variously identified as reflexive, patriarchal and homoerotic. In dia-chronic social terms, however, we can say that we (whether through maleor female eyes) are being made to gaze at women who are moving awayfrom their accepted traditional roles.

In the heart of a conservative, chauvinistic society these women areupsetting the established order and apparently making off with the prize.Society (in the shape of the narrative) takes its revenge, which manifestsitself in clearly sadistic and misogynistic ways. Taken together with theoverall portrayal of the main female characters as liars and thieves, thecharge of misogyny must be seen to stick. Yet the centrality of women, theirproactiveness, innovation and audacity points to a greatly enhanced futurefeminine role.

Towards Modern Popular Music

The two most striking features of Herrmanns compositional approach arehis extensive use of ostinati (repeated figures), and his concern with timbreand sound colour. Here is a composer steeped in the orchestral tradition,suspicious or dismissive of the use of jazz and pop music in film scores.15

And yet, as with the issue of women discussed above, in the heart of thisapparent conservatism, lie the contours of a very different future: perhaps


the uncertain future suggested by 'Herrmanns hanging chords for Psychosending without (emotional) resolution' (Smith, 1991: 255).

In a theoretical discussion of the difference between 'classical' and'popular' music, Chester16 points to the more extrapolative nature of devel-opment usually employed in 'serious' composition. Interest is created throughextending series of notes and varying and adding to them diachronicallyand synchronically (or horizontally and vertically in the score). This is trueof tonal melodic writing as well as of twentieth-century serial technique.By contrast, the more repetitive nature of Afro-Anglo-American popularmusic in terms of series of pitches or notes, is counterbalanced by greatattention to the actual sound produced. The sound of a given orchestralinstrument is clustered around a standard ideal sound, whereas in popularmusic the sound of any instrument or voice can be entirely re-negotiatedduring each recording session. Chester describes this way of working as'intensional' (as opposed to the classical 'extensionaF mode).

Herrmann's work in these three films bears many of the hallmarks of the'intensional' approach. Melodically he relies on relatively short figures, suchas the one on which the Mamie theme is based. He takes great care in creat-ing particular colours (witness the use of Hammond organ in Vertigo) andhe is eager to create a new sound for an instrument for a particular purpose(Psycho). Further, he modifies the constitution of the orchestras and ensem-bles he uses to achieve original tone characteristics. So in Psycho we haveonly strings, whereas in Jason and the Argonauts, there are no strings. Thissignificantly prefigures the concern with timbre and texture made possibleby better recording techniques and exploited by The Beatles17 on Sgt PeppersLonely Hearts Club Band (1967). Such procedures were later to be taken muchfurther in popular music with each instrumental sound being extensivelyequalized and subjected to an arsenal of electronic signal processing technol-ogy, from compressors and noise gates to reverberation and harmonizers.

Herrmann developed this approach independently as a way of effectivelycomplementing images orchestrally without wastefully developing themesin a way that would never communicate with a film audience whose atten-tion was mainly absorbed by the images and dialogue. This was ideally suitedto the coming multimedia sound-bite Zeitgeist, with its short attention spanso berated by cultural critic Theodor Adorno. A successful pop tune usuallyhas a 'hook'18 which is made more memorable by inexorable repetition. Thepiece will probably be initially heard on a radio or in a public place wherelimited attention will be paid to it. It has to reach the listener through a fogof other sounds and competing information. Film music jostles in a similar


way with the rich layering of film codes of which it forms a part. Herrmannsanswer to this problem was to use a short and simple phrase, express it in anarresting and original sound colour - or in constantly changing timbres -and to repeat it shamelessly. Popular music was soon to find the samesolution to its own problem of cutting through an increasingly noisy andinformation-laden environment.

By the time Mamie was being made, Hitchcock and Herrmann wereunder pressure from Hollywood modernizers. Particularly Herrmann wasseen as old fashioned, and there were calls for popular music scores.Whether this influenced his compositional style is difficult to ascertain. Hewas highly confident but also very sensitive, as numerous accounts of argu-ments and tantrums demonstrate; he was certainly not impervious to whatwas happening in the world around him. Whereas aspects of his distinctivestyle are apparent from his first film work on Citizen Kane, in the darklow-register wind instrument chords for instance, it undergoes a process ofsimplification and paring down over time. The descending binary figureswhich are a common feature of his work and of which the Mamie themeand the horn chords in the sumptuous Vertigo overture are examples,become the monumental theme of Herrmanns last film score: Taxi Driver.This is simplification to a minimal two-note or two-chord combination.Less than a riff, rather a vestigial ostinato. It was minimalism before mini-malism, pop-production aesthetics before pop production.

Sound vs. Music; Hitchcock vs. Herrmann

Hitchcock was known for his controlling nature. Janet Leigh talks admir-ingly of the minute planning he invested in pre-production.19 Tippi Hedrenfound him trying to control her private life and was unsurprisingly ratherless impressed. An aspect of filmmaking that Hitchcock did not leave tochance was sound design. He made detailed notes planning what soundswould be heard in each scene of a film. Improving technology meant thatsound effects could be more subtle, more layered and more effective.Listening to the soundtrack of an important film of the 1940s such asLaura, we are struck by great patches of silence, apart from the hiss of thetrack. Weaving the sound effects into film as a subtle creative and expres-sive thread was becoming more feasible and more widely understood. Thisinevitably lead to more time and money being spent on sound recording,editing and mixing and a certain demotion of the music track, with lessmusic being used to underscore a high proportion of even important scenes.


Hitchcocks request not to score the murder scenes in Torn Curtain andPsycho are an indication of this trend.

The inspired opening of Mamie has already been mentioned. From theenergetic overture we move to the contrastingly quiet railway station withthe stiletto heels walking. Our contemplation of the suggestive handbagclasped under the arm is interrupted by Strutt shouting 'Robbed1/ In Psychothe 'bird* theme (Crane, Phoenix, taxidermy etc.) is shadowed by the themein sound of water. Centrally there are the shower and plughole whirlpool ofthe murder. This is preceded by the toilet which fails to flush the evidenceof Marions calculations away. We see and hear the rain outside. There wasalso rain lashing her windscreen during part of her flight. Finally, we havethe bubbling of the swamp when her coffin-car sinks, fails to sink furtherand then finally does go under. This latter scene is a good example of a sus-pense scene driven by sound effects rather than music. It may be useful toemphasize here that many sound effects are not 'natural' but recorded awayfrom the main shoot, often in the sound studio, and synchronized with thefilm at a later stage.

Although their importance was increasing, the people involved in sound(post-) production; sound recordists, sound/dubbing editors, foley artistsand dubbing mixers had few artistic pretensions and would have had muchless of an overview of a film than Herrmann, who was usually involvedfrom the early stages. They also had less independence and influence.Hitchcocks much celebrated auteurism was nothing if not authoritarianand the level of control he exerted over the sound department, the camera,the actors, was not possible with Herrmann because of the composer sown standing and stubbornness, not to mention artistic integrity. Ironicallythe two men were similar in their emphasis on sound colour and timbre,as Hitchcock remarked to Truffaut: 'When musicians compose a score, ororchestrate, they make sounds rather than music' (Truffaut, 1967: 146-7).This attitude is further demonstrated by the use of Herrmann as soundsupervisor for The Birds, a film with no music as such, but electronicallygenerated bird sounds20 and other sound effects. Herrmann for his parttook his role in The Birds very seriously. Unfortunately his and Hitchcockshypersensitive personalities meant that their affinity regarding sound couldnot defuse the tensions between them in the long run.

It was a combination of this circumstance and pressure to make filmswith hit songs which brought the Hitchcock-Herrmann relationship toa crisis. Already with Marnie, Herrmann had been asked to provide sucha hit and the films disappointing box-office performance was blamed bysome on his refusal. For Torn Curtain Hitchcock was determined not to be


resisted again and sent a telegram to Herrmann in London demandingcomplete compliance. As in the recently defused Cuban missile crisis,there was much transatlantic shifting and posturing. Herrmann tried to beconciliatory but was privately working himself into a state of nervousexhaustion. Hitchcock did not trust him to be obedient and enlisted studiomanagement to reiterate his intention to exert as much control over themusic as he did over the rest of the sound (Smith, 1991).

The main demand was that there should be a rhythmic and memorable'hit' theme. Also, the murder scene should be without music. Herrmannwrote a typically idiosyncratic theme with strange orchestration includingtwenty flutes. He also scored the murder scene, thinking he could swayHitchcock as he had with Psycho. But the director was furious. Herrmannhad done what he always did, his original best. It was not what had beenasked for. The great director fired the great composer, and they never spokeagain. Herrmann was devastated, although his career was later revived, andhe was financially secure in any case. Hitchcock never regained his form;and despite enlisting the composers21 of the hit song from The Man WhoKnew Too Much, 'Que Sera Sera, no such song was included in the final ver-sion of the film. John Addisons score was no more a hit than Herrmannswould have been, and the film was not a great success. For all the emphasisHerrmann placed on how much music could finish and improve a film,ultimately music is only as effective as the film it is written for because ithas to work within its parameters.

Conclusion

Just as Herrmanns work helped to open up the way ahead for music in filmand popular culture - ironically, while trying to resist current fashions - sothe themes of female transgression and sexual violence were both harbin-gers of and a marshalling offerees against coming changes. The sexual rev-olution, feminism and the disintegration of the traditional family areprefigured in these films with their dystopian view of marriage, the familyand parenthood and their obsession with sex. They showed the early 1960ssomething of the world to come: A world of independent women, of chang-ing sexual mores and of a renegotiation of gender roles. Many of thesedevelopments were closely associated with the music of the hippie counter-culture, of whose sound aesthetic Herrmann was an unwitting pioneer.At the same time these films are judgemental, vengeful and patriarchal.Men try to understand, control and possess women by following and watch-ing, enquiring and cajoling - and if all else fails, raping and killing. The old


order is loath to relinquish control and yet cant help but be fascinated bywhat it has brought forth. The inherent contradictions in these films areamongst the reasons why they continue to provoke critical debate. Anotherreason is their position in social history and the history of film. They notonly sound the death knell of the golden' Hollywood era and its orchestralfilm music but also mark the beginning of a new cinema with elaboratesound design and a more direct engagement with sex and violence.

Notes

1. Truffaut published a volume of conversations between himself and Hitchcock andused Bernard Herrmann to score his film Fahrenheit 451. See also Rohmer and Chabrol,Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films. New York: Ungar, 1979.

2. Marnie has also killed, see below.3. Note the similarity with Vertigo in which Judy was previously also disguised.4. For a detailed analysis and discussion of the Vertigo score see Cooper D., Bernard

Herrmanns Vertigo: A Film Score Handbook. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001.5. In fact this character is killed twice, once the make-believe Madeleine stages the

death which covers up the murder of the real Mrs Elster, whom we never see, finally the realJudy meets the end she previously enacted.

6. A good example is the opening title music of North by Northwest.7. Sliding notes of partially indeterminate pitch.8. For a discussion of musical expression in semiotic terms see Tagg, P. (1992).9. 'Pecker' is American slang for penis, further connecting the beak-like knife with the

sexual act. Cf. Hitchcock's later film The Birds.10. Where they appear over the title of Sean Connery (who acts the husband/rapist)

and that of Hitchcock!11. The Habanera is of Afro-Cuban origin and has long had connotations of exotic and

dangerous sexuality, as demonstrated by its use in Bizet's Carmen.12. The style of John Ferrens animation is remarkable considering the film was released

in 1958.13. Perhaps the much-maligned back-projected riding sequence is simply anachronis-

tic, filmed by a director steeped in the practice of studio production rather than the greateruse of location shooting which was fast gaining in popularity. It simply looks more out ofkilter in 1964s Marnie than in 1958s Vertigo, which also uses it.

14. Torn Curtain.15. See Smith (1991), p. 187.16. Cited in Middleton (1990), pp. 115-16.17. Interestingly and uncharacteristically Herrmann was an early supporter of the

Beatles. He took their records to film and music companies in Los Angeles but to no avail(Smith, 1991:248-9).


18. A memorable line or trope.19. Jonathan Jones, Tea with the Hitchcocks', The Guardian 6 October 2004, G2, 11.20. Produced by Remi Gassman and Oskar Sala with the Trautonium Studio.21. Jay Livingston and Ray Evans.

27Murch and Burtt

Walter Murch and Ben Burtt: The Sound Designer as Composer

Stephen Keane

Walter Murch and Ben Burtt have been highly influential in establishing,developing and drawing attention towards the role of the sound designerin contemporary Hollywood cinema. Where sound practices were oncebracketed off in terms of'sound' or the people who create sound, the csounddepartment', the sound designer has come to be regarded as a major focusin the creation and application of film sound and sound effects. This isnot to relegate sound editors and mixers back to the level of techniciansbut to state that, where practitioners of film sound do remain relativelyanonymous, the fact that Murch and Burtt have come to be recognizedat all is testament to their work. The emergence of the sound designer can-not be considered in isolation from the directors Murch and Burtt haveworked with nor the rise and dominance of what many have termed theNew Hollywood. New Hollywood - or post-classical - cinema has beenvalued for both the fresh independent spirit that took hold after the break-down of the Hollywood studio system in the late 1960s and decried forthese new filmmaking practices being lent towards special-effects drivenblockbusters from the mid-1970s onwards.1 Whether we take this valuejudgement on board or more correctly look back on the 1970s as an impor-tant, transitional decade in the history of American film, Murch and Burtthave lent their sound talents to independent, mainstream and blockbustingstrands of New Hollywood cinema. The tendency to associate them with

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MurchandBurtt 453

certain directors - principally Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas andSteven Spielberg - is no mere casual association in this respect. The firstgeneration of filmmakers to graduate from film school, these so-calledMovie Brats have also gone on to graduate from independent filmmakersto successful producers.2 And in the case of Lucas and Spielberg, in partic-ular, entertaining film staples have come to be recycled through their over-riding interest in new film and cinema technologies of sight and sound.

It wouldn't be so bold to state that the creation of the role of the sounddesigner is entirely symptomatic of the new filmmaking practices andshifting industrial strategies that characterized the development of NewHollywood cinema. Murch began his professional film career working as'sound montage and re-recording mixer' on Coppolas The Rain People in1969 and went on to work with fellow University of Southern Californiagraduate, Lucas, on THX1138 (1970) and American Graffiti (1973). Althoughgiven a credit as 'supervising sound editor' on The Godfather (dir. Coppola,1972), the role of the sound designer arose out of a union dispute over useof the existing job title of sound editor. The centrality of sound to The Con-versation (dir. Coppola, 1974) meant that Murch was given the seeminglyseparate jobs of film editor and sound montage and re-recording mixer,and it is generally acknowledged that Apocalypse Now (dir. Coppola, 1979)was the first film for which sound design was given an actual credit.3 Alsoa graduate from USC, Burtt similarly began work with Lucas and in con-junction with Spielberg belongs more clearly to the development of whatGianluca Sergi has termed 'blockbusting sound'.4 Beginning with specialdialogue and sound effects for Lucas' Star Wars (1977), in a sense Burtt hasbenefited from more consistent use of the job titles of sound editor andsound designer from the offset, his main achievement being to draw recog-nition to the term 'sound effects editor'. Working as supervising soundeditor on More American Graffiti (dir. Norton, 1979) and as sound designerfor the first time on The Empire Strikes Back (dir. Kershner, 1980), Burtt com-pleted the original Star Wars trilogy with Return of the Jedi (dir. Marquand,1983) and has worked on some of the most successful films and series ofall time, principally E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (dir. Spielberg, 1982), theIndiana Jones trilogy (dir. Spielberg, 1981-1989) and the recent Star Warsprequels (Lucas, 1999-2005).5

The aim of this article is to look at an aspect of Murch and Burtt's workthat I call the sound designer as composer. I use this not merely in thetechnical composition of film sounds but also the ways in which sound isincorporated into the overall narrative of the films they have worked on.


The centrality of the sound designer in creating and co-ordinating soundpractices is emphasized by Burtt. Overcoming the traditional division oflabour within film, the sound designer is able to follow several jobs fromproduction to post-production. As Burtt states with regard to his work onthe original Star Wars films:

I called myself a sound designer because I wasn't really functioning asa production recordist, or a sound editor, or just a sound mixer. I didsome of the job that all three of those people might do. But I was ableto follow through from the point of production of a film... I was alsoon hand during the editing of the film to function as a sound editor...And also I'd be involved with the sound mixing and its not often thatone person gets to move through all those different jobs on a film.6

Able to follow sound processes in such a comprehensive and sustained way,the sound designer has significant control over the overall soundtrack tofilms. For the purpose of this article I will be looking at the ways in whichsound is used in conjunction with, and even as substitute for, the remainingpart of the film soundtrack; for all intents and purposes, its the most famil-iar act of composition in film sound: music. By looking at this in relation toMurch and Burtt s work with George Lucas - principally American Graffitiand Star Wars Episodes I and II, The Phantom Menace (1999) and Attack ofthe Clones (2002) - I will be highlighting the importance of sound andsound effects as part of the overall composition of the film soundtrack.From the independent remit of American Graffiti to the blockbustingpower of the Star Wars prequels, the overriding argument is that thesedesigners of sound can also, fundamentally, be regarded as composers offilm meaning and creators of cinematic experience.

American Graffiti

Made with a budget of $750,000 and shot over twenty-nine days, two mainfactors mark American Graffiti out as 'independent' and 'alternative' innature: the wall-to-wall use of period rock-and-roll tracks, and the multi-character story. Putting these two factors together, the music and soundplay an essential part in accompanying and unifying the seemingly frac-tured and unfocused narrative of the film. Based in part on Lucas's teenageyears, the film has its basis in the rock-and-roll generation of the 1950s and1960s. Relating this to meeting Murch for the first time at USC, Lucas

Murch and Burtt 455

recounts the pop-music obsessions of the sound department and the cam-pus writ large:

If you had a good soundtrack in a movie, it would pull all the studentsinto the screening room to see what was going on. It was there thatI realized that sound is really half the experience of this medium, andthat the visual and sound combine to make the experience work.7

After first working together on Lucas' student film, THX 1138: 4EB/Elec-tronic Labyrinth in 1965, Lucas makes an important distinction with regardto sound in his first two feature length films:

In THX 1138 we decided we would create a soundtrack that wasprimarily sound effects-based - the music would operate like soundeffects and the sound effects would operate like music. We carriedthat idea on to American Graffiti, where we took all the music andmade it so that it would bounce around the environment and be partof it, as a sound effect rather than as music. Then we took soundeffects and used them in the places where we really needed tensionand drama - in two or three scenes where there's real drama going on.We pulled the music out and just used sound effects.8

In his collaborations with Lucas, Murch made organic use of synthetic sounds,adding an air of electronic naturalism to the environment of the films. Onone level this reflects the technological themes of the films, the centralcharacter trapped in the futuristic labyrinth of THX 1138 and the car- andmusic-obsessed teenagers of American Graffiti. But the synthesis of soundand content also takes place within the sound composition of the films, inthe relationship between music and sound effects, and the specific uses towhich they're put within the film. Most noticeably, having spent 14 monthsand one-tenth of American Graffiti's budget on securing the rights to the42 songs in the film, the decision to use sound effects in between the songtracks was in part economical - there wasn't enough money left for theintended music score. As Lucas further states, where music is traditionallyused for 'drama in films, in American Graffiti it is used for 'realism'; con-versely, where sound effects are principally used for 'realism', here it wasused for 'drama'.9

Murch's principal addition to what would be termed the sound editing inthis respect was sound mixing, not merely the relative fade-in and fade-out


of music and sound effects but also what he has termed Vorldizing'. Withregard to the music in the film, for example, Murch specifies two levels, thepristine radio station music and the Vorldized' version; that is, the musicplayed out in different sonic environments, out in the real world*. So, wherethe narrative of the film is literally driven by three technologies: cars, rock-and-roll music and the music heard from car radios, the relative mixing ofthe tracks provides for a definite environment, a three-dimensional sound-scape; as Murch terms it, 'the sonic equivalent of depth of field'.10 Used asa more conventional soundtrack, the audience is often treated to the firsttrack, the pristine track. But cocooned in their cars, the characters also getto hear the radio track foregrounded as such. Outside their cars, however,the first track is often de-emphasized and the second track - the Vorldized'version - foregrounded, the radio music used as part of the overall climate,bouncing from car to car and echoing down the streets. The same distinc-tion carries through to what might be termed the third and even fourthtracks: up-front sound effects such as car engines and the Vorldized' ver-sion indicating the relative position of the cars.

With regard to the actual music track, what would now be the job of themusic supervisor had been embedded within American Graffiti since thescript stage. Writing while listening to old 45s, Lucas saw the endless streamof songs as essential to the narrative of the film. Where this might point tothe choice and use of certain songs to reflect what is going on in the filmtext, sound design points to the ways in which the songs are incorporatedinto the film world, both psychologically and understood within more ofa three-dimensional environment. Consider the opening scene of the film:'Rock Around the Clock' booms out over the characters' main meetingplace, Mel's Diner. This is also designed for the cinema audience and signalswhat is to come with regard to the music and activities in the film, playedout as they are over the final night and day of the main characters beingtogether. When the camera pans down, however, the music dims and wemove from the film soundtrack - or possibly the huge jukebox that is Mel'sDiner - as source of the music to the street - level ebb and flow of themusic as the characters arrive one by one. In filmic terms, certainly, themusic dims so that we can hear the opening dialogue. But the music is stillthere, in the atmosphere, and in three-dimensional terms we might also askexactly where the music is still coming from. If the two stationary cars atthe entrance to the diner have their radios off, this might well point to thediner. But the music doesn't merely come from one central source, as indi-cated by the arrival of two more cars where the music rises again and isovershadowed by the car engines. This opening sequence alone indicatesthe ways in which music will be used throughout the film.

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The characters are introduced and Wolfman Jacks radio programme kicksin as narrator, or chorus, to the action - an all-powerful force that surrounds,penetrates and binds this particular universe together. Foregrounded inrelation to individual cars, when all radios play the same programme, theeffect is to make specific sources irrelevant; and the environment, the wholenarrative, becomes saturated with music and voice. Around all of the music,however, each of the main characters are given quiet' moments whereactual songs become either a very faint background or are completelyreplaced by sound effects; most notably when John (Paul Le Mat) and Carol(MacKenzie Phillips) walk round the car salvage lot; Kurt (Richard Drey-fuss) creep ups to sabotage a police car; and the sequence where Terry(Charles Martin Smith) and Debbie (Candy Clark) get lost in the woods.Each of the main pairings in the film have their most romantic momentsindicated by music, Steve (Ron Howard) and Laurie (Cindy Williams)dancing to the bittersweet 'Smoke Gets in Your Eyes', Kurt a perennial trackof lonely hearts tunes and Terry and Debbie falling asleep to CI Only HaveEyes for You'. When Terry wakes to complete silence he realizes that his carhas been stolen and removed from the only other potential source of music(the town) they are stranded in an alien, rural environment. It is only whenDebbie tells the story of the Goat Killer that Terry becomes hypersensitiveto all possible sounds, nature given a very science-fiction mix by Murch.The sounds of a woodpecker and an owl lead to a goat and a howling wolf- a wolf being slaughtered by Wolfman Jack? - before Steve appears andthe three characters head back to the comforting car and radio sounds ofthe town.

It is with the central character Kurt, however, that sound and music mostevidently reflect his uncertain adventures. Kurt is surrounded by echoes ofdance music as he comes to leave the main group of characters. And then,running through the streets pursuing the woman in the white T-Bird, musicteases and works in separating him from his object of desire. When he firstsees her, for example, 'Why Do Fools Fall in Love?' is playing on the radio;and this combined with the car window being shut means that he can't hearwhat she says to him. He winds the window down, but by this time she haspassed by and he's only left with the thought, 1 think she said, I Love You!'Searching all around town for her, Kurt then hooks up with the Pharaohgang and almost as soon as he gets in their car, she passes again with Ain'tThat a Shame' playing on the radio. Kurt is given his own moment of dan-ger, in silence, when sneaking up to a police car to tie its undercarriage. Thepolice don't play music and instead listen to their call radio. 'What if theyhear me?' asks Kurt as he creeps up in silence, only for his footsteps to bedisguised - and dramatically enhanced - by a passing train.


The only way for Kurt to finally connect with the woman, of course, is toask Wolfman Jack for a dedication. On locating Wolfman Jacks possibleradio shack Kurt finds a could-be Wizard of Oz, dark and mysterious whenfirst communicating with him via the booths microphone but warm andfriendly face-to-face. The real Wolfman is shown to be anything but a dis-tant figure, as his live transmissions are revealed to be recorded on tape: 'theWolfman is everywhere' explains the man in the booth as he flicks a buttonand the Wolfmans characteristic voice and howl echo all over the room.It is only when Kurt leaves with advice from the man that he looks backand is able to see the man assume his Wolfman Jack persona. The dedica-tion is made but the final connection lost as Kurt can only speak to thewoman on the phone. In this sense it could be argued that it is the failure oftechnology - the distance technology puts between real-life emotionalconnections - which defines Kurts quest throughout the film and hisdeparture is suitably marked by silence. Saying good-bye to his friends overGoodnight Sweetheart' playing on his portable radio, the song competeswith the plane engine when he's flying away. From the plane he sees themysterious woman pass in her T-Bird below, smiles to himself and theradio signal eventually fades out as he clears the county to a future place.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones

George Lucas has paradoxically but fittingly referred to the Star Wars mov-ies as 'silent films'.11 Following key sonic elements established in THX1138and American Graffiti, here Lucas is referring to the importance of soundand music in orchestrating the action, story and themes across the StarWars saga as a whole. With particular regard to music, for example, whereJohn Williams s classical score contributes a sense of familiarity to this oth-erwise alien, science fiction saga, leitmotifs are also used to underscore theage-old dramatic conflict between good and evil. At root the Star Wars sagais a prime example of film pastiche, the story, characters, music, specialeffects and sound effects recycled from numerous sources: which is to saythat this otherwise hi-tech concoction of strange and disparate characters,gadgets, settings and situations is at once highly nostalgic and extremelyfamiliar. We can see in the formation of Industrial Light and Magic (ILM)a distinct garage aesthetic of recycling old model kits and spare parts forthe vehicles and miniatures in the original trilogy, special effects techniquesconstantly improvised and always in reference to old Westerns and warmovies.12 And the same follows with regard to Ben Burtts library of soundeffects: the elephant screech of the TIE fighters, Darth Vaders scuba-tank

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breathing, the humming projector motor used to accompany the light sabers,and so on.13 Similar to Walter Murch s work with Lucas but on a much moreexpansive scale, the familiar becomes newly familiar and the electronic ismade wholly naturalistic within the intergalactic context of the saga.

Whatever we may say about the Star Wars movies in terms of theirblockbusting status, this is not to forget the relatively independent natureof the first film or the technical experimentation of the saga as a whole,from the garage aesthetic of Episode IV through to the digital innovationsof the recent prequels. Like most blockbusters, however, these technologi-cal advances have opened the saga to accusations of form over content, oras it has most comprehensively been covered within Film Studies, spectacleover narrative. Where narrative is equated with drive, coherence and mean-ing, the argument is that contemporary Hollywood blockbusters disruptstorytelling with spectacular moments of visual excess.14 The further com-plaint is that the apparatus of cinema adds to that disjunction, the viewerdazzled by widescreen special effects and drowning in an electronic seaof sound. Along with the film- and music-loving Movie Brats, Murch andBurtt have simultaneously contributed to and benefited from develop-ments in cinema sound from Dolby Stereo and THX Sound since the 1970sand 1980s through to current digital sound systems. With particular regardto sound design, the advantage of such multi-channel systems is the factthat sound is faithfully reproduced and given necessary layers and direc-tion, the film text given a full, three-dimensional presence in the cinemaauditorium. As Gianluca Sergi argues, blockbusting sound and soundeffects needn't be regarded solely in terms of'size*, 'weight' and 'power*. The'detail' and 'direction also work in giving audiences a 'heightened' senseof 'realism'15 and rather than being distracted, as such, they are situated'precisely within narrative space, both in narrative and physical terms'.16

Having analyzed the ways in which Walter Murch gave American Graffitimore of an environmental depth, I will now look at the ways in which twosequences from the Star Wars prequels can be read in terms of the morecinematic dimensions outlined above: the podrace in The Phantom Menaceand the asteroid chase in Attack of the Clones.

For George Lucas one of the main advantages of using digital specialeffects in the Star Wars prequels was the ability to create larger, moredetailed worlds in which the action could take place. This is particularlyevident in the 10-minute Phantom Menace podrace sequence. The soundeffects are absolutely paramount here in giving the otherwise digital envi-ronment shape and the passage of the pods through it weight and direction.The narrative importance of the podrace lies in the first display of Anakin


Sky walkers (Jake Lloyd) instincts and after winning the race he is Treed'from Tatooine. Although a foregone conclusion that the podrace's existenceis an obvious special effects set piece, this is not to dismiss the drama andtension within the sequence or the ways in which the sound effects contri-bute to the micro-narrative elements and add a sense of physical involve-ment. As Burtt states with regard to the sequence:

I think the largest single task in Phantom Menace was the creation ofthe podrace sounds . . . I had hoped that the podrace would for themost part be a sound-effects only sequence, that it would have verylittle dialogue and perhaps no music, and it would give me the oppor-tunity to work with a full palette of just sound effects to create theaction and the story, and to control the tension, the ebb and flow ofthe race, and I did get that opportunity.17

Through use of automobile recordings Burtt is able to add weight to theproceedings and gives each pod signature sounds (Anakins sleek home-made pod versus Sebulbas imposing machine for example), the whole mixworldized as appropriate as the pods race through open desert, ravines andtunnels. Music is completely absent from the first two laps of the race.Rather than being 'directed' by the music, therefore, it is left to the soundeffects to reflect the mass of activity as all the pods jockey for position.There is a frantic clicking of switches when Anakins pod stalls and it is onlyduring this final lap that the music kicks in, complementing and in parttaking over from the sound effects in the more focused race to the finishbetween Anakin and Sebulba. Following the roar of Sebulbas explodingengine there is a split second of complete silence on both tracks; as thevillains pod crashes out of the race it is left to triumphal music and thecheer of the crowd to accompany Anakin through the finish line.

Sound effects and music also vie for effect in Attack of the Clones. Thereis, for example, Burtt s use of percussive instruments to pace the speederchase and droid factory sequences. But the use of sound effects ratherthan music is most evident in the films 3-min asteroid sequence music. AsBurtt states: 'The asteroid chase was the opportunity in this film for thesound effects to really come to the forefront and be the element in thesoundtrack that was carrying the prime responsibility for the entertain-ment'.18 Understood in strict narrative terms, the asteroid sequence hasrelatively little importance compared to the podrace, mainly acting as thenext plot step to the next planet. Understood in terms of sound, however,it is very notable for its 'silence' and the ways in which sound effects areused in place of music.

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Entering into the films only bona fide space sequence, Obi-Wan Kenobi(Ewan McGregor) pulls out of hyperspace in his sleek starfighter and thepursuer becomes the pursued as Jango Fett s (Temuera Morrison) imposingbounty hunter ship, Slave 1, bears down on him. The action progresses infour parts, the first - and probably most striking in terms of sound - beingSlave Is use of two seismic charges. Initially a vacuum of sound, there is aflash and then a full sonic blast a second later as the first charge explodes,releasing a wave of destruction that tears several asteroids apart. Given thedevice physics as well as obvious impact, Burtt has termed this an 'audioblackhole, the sonic equivalent of light as the charge works by sucking inall surrounding energy before it explodes. The next charge explodes andObi-Wan can only avoid the destruction and head into the second part ofthe sequence, attempting to avoid Jango Fett by flying through cavernousasteroids. Relative silence follows as both ships glide through the tunnelsand lead into the third part of the sequence as they fly out into the asteroidfield. Obi-Wans starfighter is rocked by an unrelenting barrage of laser bolts,a light show in terms of the special effects and a wall of sound in termsof the soundtrack. Then, similar to the use of music in the final lap of thepodrace, the music starts in order to accompany the two missiles homingin closer and closer to the starfighter. The sequence concludes with a hugeexplosion as it appears that Obi-Wan has been destroyed. He hasn't, ofcourse, but that s how the main action sequences in the Star Wars saga tendto work, in terms of cliflfhanging moments of peril and escape. And forwhich the ebb and flow of sound effects, in themselves and in conjunctionwith the music, are absolutely vital components.

Notes

1. See J. Lewis, ed. The New American Cinema. Durham and London: Duke UniversityPress, 1998; S. Neale and M. Smith, eds. Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. London andNew York: Routledge, 1998; G. King, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction. London:I.B. Tauris, 2002.

2. See M. Pye and L. Myles, The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took OverHollywood. London and Boston: Faber, 1979; D. A. Cook, Auteur cinema and the "FilmGeneration" in 1970s Hollywood', in J. Lewis (ed), The New American Cinema Durham andLondon: Duke University Press, 1998, pp. 11-37.

3. Murchs other credits include his work as sound montage and re-recording mixer onThe Godfather Part II (dir. Coppola, 1974) and since The Conversation he has acted as filmeditor and re-recording mixer on films including The Godfather Part HI (dir. Coppola,1990), The Talented Mister Ripley (dir. Minghella, 1999) and Cold Mountain (dir. Minghella,2003). He has received Oscars for sound in Apocalypse Now and both sound and film edit-ing for The English Patient (dir. Minghella, 1996). For excellent accounts of Murchs work as


film editor, which also reflect on his work as sound designer, see Walter Murch's In the Blinkof an Eye (2001) and Michael Ondaatjes The Conversations (2002).

4. Gianluca Sergi, 'Blockbusting sound' (2003).5. Burtt's other sound credits include The Dark Crystal (dir. Henson, Oz, 1982), Willow

(dir. Howard, 1988) and Always (dir. Spielberg, 1989). His film editing credits include epi-sodes of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and the Star Wars prequels. He has received twospecial achievement Oscars - sound effects editing for Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark(dir. Spielberg, 1981) - and Academy Awards for sound effects editing on E.T. and IndianaJones and the Last Crusade (dir. Spielberg, 1989).

6. B. Burtt, 'Sound Designer of Star Wars' transcript of an excerpt from an interviewfor Star Wars Trilogy: The Definitive Collection Laserdisc Box Set, 1997. Available at: www.filmsound.org/starwars/burtt-interview.htm (accessed on 28 February 2008), p. 1.

7. Quoted in M. Ondaatje, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Film Editing.London: Bloomsbury, 2002, p. 18.

8. Quoted in Ondaatje (2002), p. 19.9. Quoted from the 50-minute 'Making of documentary on the American Graffiti

DVD. The documentary also includes an interview with Murch who provides useful insightinto the use of music and sound in the film.

10. Quoted in Ondaatje (2002), p. 119.11. See, for example, the Omnibus: Special Edition documentary, 'George Lucas - Flying

Solo'. See also the DVD commentaries to The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones.12. See Pye and Myles 131-9; S. Keane, 'Event horizons: Nostalgic experience in Star

Wars and the special edition in J. Hallam and N. Moody (eds), Consuming for Pleasure:Selected Essays on Popular Fiction. Liverpool: John Moores University, 2000, pp. 314-33.

13. Burtt (1997).14. See King, G. Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster.

London: I.B. Tauris, 2000; Keane 2007.15. Sergi, G. 'A cry in the dark: the role of post-classical film sound' in S. Neale and

M. Smith (eds), Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.p. 162.

16. Sergi, G., 'Blockbusting sound: the case of The Fugitive' in J. Stringer, ed., HollywoodBlockbusters. London and New York: Routledge, 2003, pp. 148-9.

17. Quoted from the Phantom Menace DVD commentary. For further information onthe production of the film, much of which touches upon sound and sound effects, see theone-hour documentary on the DVD, The Beginning: Making Episode I.

18. All quotes from the Attack of the Clones DVD commentary. For a comprehensiveaccount of the various stages of the sound process from sound recording to the final mix,and in particular Burtts use of digital sound, see the 25-minute documentary on the DVD,'Films are not released, they escape': Creating a Universe of Sounds for Episode H.

http://www.filmsound.org/starwars/burtt-interview.htm


28John Williams

The Film Music of John Williams

Dana Anderson

Among the most successful composers in film history - and also one ofthe most prolific, with over ninety films to his credit - John Williams hasbecome an American icon, his music the theme to a new sort of cinematicAmerican dream. His classic scores to Star Wars, Jaws, Close Encounters ofthe Third Kind, E. T. and Superman have become such an integral part of thesonic landscape that it is hard to envision our culture without them. A mas-ter of many musical forms (including jazz and atonality), he is best knownfor large-scale symphonic scores in the traditional, melodic Hollywoodmanner.

John Williams was born on 8 February 1932 in New York City, the oldestchild of Johnny Williams, a jazz drummer and studio musician who wasone of the original members of the Raymond Scott Quintet and also a per-cussionist for the CBS Radio Orchestra and NBCs Your Hit Parade. He beganpiano studies at the age of seven and also studied trombone, trumpet andclarinet. When he was fifteen years old, his family moved to Los Angeles,where his father did freelance work for film studio orchestras, as Williamshimself would do in later years. After high school, he studied piano andcomposition at UCLA with the intention of becoming a concert pianist.

In 1952 he was drafted and assigned to the United States Air Force wherehe conducted and arranged music for service bands. Then, after his dis-charge in 1954, he studied for a year at Julliard as a student of Rosina Lhevine.

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While in New York, he played in various nightclubs as a jazz pianist. Thenhe returned to Los Angeles, where he continued his studies with ArthurOlaf Anderson and with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.

In 1956 Williams was hired as a pianist by Columbia Records, where heworked with Morris Stoloff, a veteran music director; during this periodhe began thinking more and more seriously about film scoring as a career.Williams s experience with Stoloff would lead to his first score for a studiofilm (as opposed to his first film score), Because They're Young (Columbia,1960), which also featured Dick Clark's feature film debut. Williams laterworked at Twentieth Century-Fox under Alfred and Lionel Newman. As anexperienced pianist, his first duties were as a staff musician, playing pianoin scores by many of the industry's great names, such as Franz Waxman andDimitri Tiomkin; then his academic training led to work arranging andcomposing original music for film. It is interesting to note that Williamsdid not set out to become a film composer - he just happened upon a path-way that led to a gradual immersion in composing for the movies. As a pia-nist he was in demand; then the process took over, and he became fascinatedwith the challenges of film music.

In 1958 he began supplying scores to a wide variety of television pro-grams for Revue Studios, which was the television department of Universal.The scores he wrote for TV included episodes of Wagon Train, GilligansIsland, Batchelor Flat and M Squad-, all were under the musical directionof Stanley Wilson, one of Williams s great early mentors and a major forcein the development of music for TV. Since Williams is best known forhis symphonic scores, this early television work is an interesting variant.M Squad was one of the first jazz-based scores for television (along withHenry Mancinis Peter Gunn). It had a main theme by Count Basic, andthere were scores written collaboratively by Williams and Benny Carter,with both men featured as players in the band as well. The first motionpicture with a John Williams score: the very forgettable and low budgetDaddy-O (made by Imperial Productions), which may be best known toviewers because of its screening on Mystery Science Theater 3000 wasreleased in 1958. The score is written in the same jazz idiom he was thenexploring in M Squad. In 1960 Williams wrote his first TV main title: it wasfor Checkmate, which also led to his first commercial recording. He wrotethe scores for all thirty-six episodes of the shows first season, and thesoundtrack album won a Grammy for best film or TV soundtrack of 1961.After this, you could say that Williams had begun to be a real player in theTV industry, and he wrote increasingly successful music for programs suchas Alcoa Presents and Kraft Suspense Theater.

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In 1965 he wrote the main title and the scores for four of the first sevenepisodes of the TV series Lost in Space and began a working relationshipwith Irwin Allen that would lead to scores for some of the classic 1970sdisaster films such as The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Earthquake! (1974), andThe Towering Inferno (1974). Although he used an unusual and unnamedelectronic instrument for the main title, Williams generally stayed with tra-ditional orchestrations in the scores themselves, developing some of thepatterns he would later use in his great disaster film scores and also for hisearly film-score masterpiece, Star Wars. Williams has said of his music forLost in Space, 'I guess the intention was probably to be pretty straight withit, but some of it, even at the time, was kind of campy. I remember doingsome silly waltzes with four flutes and things . . . I even think in my mindthat it was a kind of precursor of Star Wars in a way, because [the series]had the robots, the various character, and the broad musical treatment'.1

Williams had his first major film success with The Reivers (1970), whichmany people regard as his cinematic masterpiece. His score for this filmand for the British television version of Jane Eyre (1971), for which he wonan Emmy, are among his finest scores; all are intimate works that brilliantlycapture the emotional and physical landscapes of the stories they illustrate.These scores and the score for Superman are among the composer s personalfavourites. Prior to writing the Jane Eyre score, Williams was in England fin-ishing pre-recording for his adaptation of the Sheldon Harnick-Jerry Bockmusical Fiddler on the Roof (1971), for which he would receive his firstOscar. He took the opportunity to tour the Yorkshire moors with directorDelbert Mann, absorbing the ambiance that he would later write into thescore of fane Eyre. 'What I tried to do, was create "new" folk material, if youlike, which film composers have done so often all through the years. I wrote,I felt, the modalities that gave the ambiance of nineteenth-century York-shire - somewhat in the same way that Vaughn Williams had taken hisWelsh and Celtic airs and put them into his works. I don't mean to comparemy humble scribblings with his great music, but the process of creating inthe atmosphere and the modality of these folk tunes, "new" melodies whichcould then be manipulated and metamorphosed throughout the wholescore*2

With these works, you might say Williams s apprenticeship was over, andhe began what most moviegoers will recognize as the flowering of his art.His work in television served him well, as it was remarkably varied and puta constant pressure on him to produce work that was effective across genreboundaries. This adaptability is a trademark of Williams; and although he ismost noted for his romantic symphonic music, he has also produced works


that range from the highly avant-garde (Images) to small-scale traditionalmusic (banjo and guitar for Missouri Breaks) to Southern gospel (Rosewood).He has composed great traditional Western scores, such as his music forThe Cowboys, and minimalist jazz works (The Long Goodbye). So one couldsay that he is among the most versatile as well as the most successful ofHollywood composers.

In 1972 Williams wrote the score to Robert Altmans Images, which wasone of his greatest works and one of the more unusual within the overallcontext of his usual lush, symphonic style. The score works on two levels:the first is an unsettling but largely tonal and very minimalist theme (usu-ally played by piano and strings); the other level is a series of atonal andarrhythmic percussion cues performed by Stomu Yamashita on Baschetsculptures made of glass and steel. These two layers of musical style beauti-fully illuminate the gradual breakdown of the main character in the film,played by Susannah York. The tonal music has a darkly dreamlike intensityand a monothematic quality that easily allows for the atonal interruptions,which are disturbing but not disruptive. The films own experimental visualquality provides a perfect backdrop for this turnabout in harmonic colour.Images is certainly one of Williams s most interesting and powerful scores,and one wonders why he has so rarely been able to return to this experi-mental side of himself.

Williams began his long association with Steven Spielberg in 1974, withSugarland Express; then in 1975 he composed the score for Jaws, which hasbecome a landmark in the history of film composition. The use of a bassostinato gives the shark a sonic presence even though we rarely see it on thescreen, and this adds immeasurably to the suspense of the film. It s an inter-esting question in film-music circles about the relative merit of the scorefor the first Jaws film and that of its sequel, Jaws II, which develops many ofthe ideas put forth in the score of the first film. Many critics will say thatJaws II is significantly more interesting. For this listener, the question is dif-ficult to resolve. The direction in the first Jaws is spectacular, whereas thesecond literally falls apart at the seams; so the issue of the marriage ofmusic to image comes to the fore. In the first Jaws, the score wraps aroundthe image on the screen and heightens it, while never falling out of balance.In the second film, however, the music s beauty reaches beyond the level ofthe rest of the work, and we hear it too well. This leads to an interestingquestion about the role of music in film and the levels of presence it shouldattain. Williams has said, 'there are scenes... where I would feel better if theaudience was deliberately not aware of this music. That it would be coloris-tic, that it might be atmospheric, that it be related in its tempo to a tempo

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of the action to cause me not to notice it rather than alter the tempo whichwould cause me to notice it ... [But we must also] be prepared to say toourselves, here is an instance where we want the audience to actually hearthe music' (Emphasis mine).3

In the first Jaws film, the regular use of widescreen framing, which allowsthe characters on the boat speak to each other with the vastness of theocean spreading out between them, lets the music work in the gaps, open-ing doors to greater and greater suspense and never overwhelming thepower of the visual composition. In this case, it is possible for the music tobe heard without being a distraction. And in the quiet moments of the firstfilm, the subtleties of onscreen character development allow the quiet musicto disappear into the subconscious. In Jaws II, on the other hand, thoughthe music is more careful and sure, the direction (including the cutting andthe camerawork) is so much less so that even the quiet music overwhelms.Williams won his second Academy Award for Jaws (Universal, 1975), thesoundtrack recording of which also won a Grammy.

Of his compositional method, Williams has said:

In my own case, I work at the piano. I don t use synthesizers or elec-tronic equipment and all that stuff. My musical education is such thatit predates all of that, and although I know a little about it, I haven'tdeveloped the skills. I use the piano, that's my old friend in music.And I probably use it more for writing than any composition teacherwould tell you is a good idea, but that's been my practice always.So part of my process is tactile. It's in the hands, that certainly is true.But as the score develops and as I know the material more and more,and get towards the end of the film, I use it less and less, as the musicsort of begins to take over, and I become less oriented towards thekeyboard... I work very hard, and I work long hours, and I am not allthat quick, although people seem to think I am, because when I amworking on a film, I may have to produce a lot of music. But, I'mpatient with it ... Some films are easier than others. The materialcomes more quickly. I think it always helps to love the film you aredoing and that's a very rare experience, although I have certainly beenlucky in my life with films.4

Because of the tight schedules usual in composing for film (Star Wars,for instance, required ninety minutes of music in six weeks), Williams israrely able to do much of the orchestration himself; so he provides hisorchestrators with detailed sketches that pinpoint the sounds he is interested


in achieving. This attention to sonic detail is one of the reasons his scoreshave such continuity from film to film. Orchestration of less clearly articu-lated ideas can become remarkably interpretive.

In 1977 Williams won his third Oscar for Star Wars (1977), which wonthree Grammy Awards as well, for best motion picture score, best instrumen-tal composition (for the main theme) and best pop instrumental recording.As Star Wars has become so central to Williamss career, it seems worth-while to spend some time thinking about that score in particular. Williamshas always been associated with the great Romantic tradition of Waxmanand Korngold, and no other score of his so illustrates his marvellous abilityto write great themes and to use leitmotivs to help elaborate the psychologi-cal and philosophical aspects of a work. Also, the cinematic structure of StarWars deliberately recalls the adventure serials of the 1930s and so invitesa certain over-the-top quality that Williams seems to relish in his score.

The primary element of Romantic heroic meaning in the film in contrastto its serial plot is the deliberate organization of the musical score along thelines of Wagnerian opera. Williams created his music as a pattern of leit-motifs, giving each of the major characters his or her own musical theme,and then he developed the themes to signal important turning points inthe plot. These themes highlight, impress and create meaning for scenesthroughout the film. Primarily the sound is of German Romanticism, rely-ing heavily on Wagnerian strings and brilliant horn writing to produce itsheroic effects. As Williams has said in an interview about Star Wars for FilmScore Monthly:

The music for the film is very non-futuristic. The films themselvesshowed us characters we hadn't seen before and planets unimaginedand so on, but the music was—this is actually George Lucass concep-tion and a very good one—emotionally familiar. It was not music thatmight describe terra incognita but the opposite of that, music thatwould put us in touch with very familiar and remembered emotions,which for me as a musician translated into the use of a 19th centuryoperatic idiom, if you like, Wagner and this sort of thing. These sortsof influences would put us in touch with remembered theatrical expe-riences as well.

For the final sequence of the film, the triumphal march of the heroes througha sea of fellow officers and a hall which is reminiscent of The Triumph of theWill, Williams composed music which undercuts the conclusive nature ofthe moment - a celebration of the destruction of the Death Star - and gives

John Williams 469

great nobility to the idea of continuing struggle in the face of victory. Themusical cues here develop the themes of the series by giving us unexpectedcommentary on the action. First there is a quick shot of the verdant junglewhere the victorious rebel base is located, accompanied by the beginningof a trumpet fanfare, the music of heroic introduction. Then the cameracuts to the throne room where Luke, Han and Chewbacca are about toreceive their medals from Princess Leia. They walk into the room beaming,and the music we expect, if there is any on a conscious level, is the 'MainTheme', associated with Luke, which we heard at the very beginning of thefilm. We expect the music to be set in a major key, proclaiming for the audi-ence the culmination of the battle and the conclusion of the quest. In sym-bolic terms, the fanfare begins with a solo trumpet, the instrument of theRomantic hero winding his horn in preparation for battle and paradinghis invincibility. He is alone, singing the beginning of a challenge. Here isthe beginning of a move to undercut the visual meaning of the scene. Whyis the hero alone at the moment of his triumph?

The music progresses in typical fanfare mode by building a chord inC major, the herald of victory in the symbolic key of happiness. The chordbuilds, but it is made problematic through the insertion of an augmentedfifth, which makes it sound strident and ominous. The horn sounds overa set of drums, increasing the sense of expectation created by the buildingchord. This fanfare could still lead back to the 'Main Theme', but instead weresolve to a minor key and another theme altogether. This is the 'ForceTheme', music that accompanies all the major revelations and characterchanges in the film, which had been happy and hopeful but has been madesomber by its transposition to the minor. It is the sound of a communityturned cold. Set above a complex martial percussion notation, this musicmoves forward - but not into a safe space. The minor key does not signifymourning, this is no dirge; but this is not music of victory unless it isvictory at great cost. This is music of striving, not success, perhaps becauseof the epic, cyclical character of the endless struggle against the Dark Side.

The melody strives to achieve something, rising and returning to its orig-inal place in much the same way that the mythic story of the film is aboutstriving and then striving again in the process of growth and transcendence.It makes a circle and then comes back to its beginning with no fundamen-tal change. The melody takes off again, jumps up to the fourth, then to theoctave, trying to move ahead; then it returns to its beginning place, havingin fact gone nowhere.

As the theme progresses, it gains in power. A harp flourish signals theentrance of more instruments. These join the hero and reinforce the theme


of the necessity of community, which runs throughout the film. The herocannot survive alone. It is his nature to create community as Luke doeshere, drawing all these instruments together. The new instruments bringwith them a renewed sense of urgency.

We might ask at this moment why all of this happens while the heroesare being rewarded for conquering the Empire. The music at this momentof triumph speaks of a purpose unfulfilled. And it must be said that StarWars embodies process, not achievement. As the first film of the middlethird of an epic, there can be no beginnings, endings or completion of anykind. The war between the Light and the Dark sides of the Force runs incycles, and the music reinforces this fact.

Williams uses this sort of music to create a sophisticated aural commen-tary on the simple images with which Lucas weaves his story. Lucas wasaware of this powerful juxtaposition throughout the filming, designingthe shots to allow for the creation of multi-layered meaning. As he has said,'the exciting thing about film is it combines all the arts. It has basic rulesthat music has, combined with all the basic rules of the graphic arts and theliterary arts . . . You have a really large playing field. But when you put theelements together you have to be very controlled? In Lucass conception,the filmmaker is the unifier of the arts, the Jedi master, guided by the com-munity, who controls the substance of what the Force creates. The multiplelanguages that comprise his films' textures communicate subtly with oneanother. The dialogue can give one message while the images give another,or the sound might take one apparent meaning and turn it around.

The dialogue of the film taken alone creates Star Wars as just anotherspace opera;6 we have the hero, the girl, and the rouge battling a bunch ofbad guys. The characters are not poet-heroes; instead, they are types frommelodrama. Considered in tandem with the music, on the other hand, theexperience becomes entirely different. As one of Lucass friends who sawthe film both before and after the music was added remembers, It was amind-boggling difference. It gave the hokey characters a certain dimension.When you saw the film without the score, you couldn't take it seriously!7

As a Lucas co-worker put it, 'Star Wars came out of nowhere .. . becausethe people who worked on the film had no idea what they were workingon ... [T]hey couldn't see the vision behind it. It was in pieces. Its just thatonce you see the vision, then it all makes sense. George never lost sight ofthe vision'.8

After the phenomenal success of Star Wars, Williams went on to writea series of scores that have all become landmarks in the film music history:Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Jaws 2 (1978), Superman (1978),

John Williams 471

The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of Lost Ark (1981), and E. T.: The ExtraTerrestrial (1982). This series, all of which were nominated for AcademyAwards, won Williams accolades from all corners and cemented his reputa-tion as the dean of American film composers. His later work has continuedto evolve and grow, revealing a variety and richness of musical imagination.Among the most noteworthy of his recent scores are Jurassic Park (1993),Saving Private Ryan (1998), A.I (2001), and Minority Report (2002).

Notes

1. Jon Burlingame, TVs Biggest Hits: The Story of Television Themes from Dragnet toFriends. New York: Schirmer Books, 1996, p. 114.

2. Ibid., p. 263.3. Tony Thomas, Film Score: The Art and Craft of Movie Music. Burbank: Riverwood

Press, 1991, p. 332.4. Fred Karlin, Listening to Movies: The Film Lovers Guide to Film Music. New York:

Schirmer Books, 1994, p. 29.5. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, The Future of the Movies: Interviews with Martin

Scorcese, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Kansas City: Andrews & McNeel, 1991, p. 93.6. See the discussion in }. P. Telotte, 'The dark side of the force: Star Wars and the

science fiction tradition, Extrapolation 24.3 (Fall 1983), 216-26.7. Dale Pollock, Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas. Hollywood: Samuel

French, 1983, p. 190.8. Ibid.

29Randy Newman

Randy Newman: Shaping a Complicated Musical Landscape

A. Mary Murphy

Before he was out of his teens, Randy Newman had his first media credit,with a song written for a television series. Thus began his career in whathad become the Newman family business: composing scores and writingsongs for the movies and television, as did many of his uncles and cousins.Born in Los Angeles, 28 November 1943, Randall Stuart Newman spenthis early life in a fatherless world because his father was a physician in theAmerican military during World War II. Newmans mother Adele took himto live in the American South where her family roots were. By the time hisfamily reunited in Los Angeles in 1948, his speech patterns had been shapednot only by his mothers voice but also by his surroundings in Alabama,Mississippi and most especially Louisiana. He spent the first 5 years of hislife in the South and continued to spend summers in New Orleans untilhe was 11. The South had a great influence on his music, as well as on hisspeech, because his formative years were spent immersed in its rhythms, inmusic and in the pace of its daily life. In his examination of Newmans par-ticularly American style, Peter Winkler notes that 'most characteristic of allis his evocation of nineteenth-century parlor music . . . classical favorites,hymns, sentimental ballads, minstrel show tunes, and, later on, ragtime andearly Tin Pan Alley songs'.1 Newman himself has said his Natural inclinationis to write shuffles . . . these ancient shuffles',2 influenced most obviously bythe classic shuffles and blues songs of Fats Domino'.3 All of these are partof the Souths musical legacy and culture, music and rhythms Newman

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encountered and internalized during his childhood. It was ideal preparationfor him eventually to score Disney s The Princess and the Frog (2009), set inNew Orleans, the fairy-tale story of a black girl who lives in the FrenchQuarter.

Newmans father, Irving, came from a more formal background in theproduction of sound, in that he was a musician before he turned to medi-cine, and three of his brothers were enormously successful film composers.Alfred Newman (1901-1970) was a noteworthy musician before the familyrelocated from New York to Los Angeles. Starting in 1930, he worked onover 250 movies, winning an extraordinary nine Academy Awards for hiswork in cinema. The Twentieth Century-Fox signature tune, the rousingtrumpet fanfare that accompanies the logo at the start of every Fox film, ishis composition, probably the most famous piece Alfred Newman wrote.His children, Randy s cousins, Thomas, Maria and David, are also involvedin movie music; and altogether, they have contributed to approximatelyone hundred films among them. Alfreds brother Emil (1911-1984) workedon nearly one hundred movie projects, his brother Lionel (1916-1989) onover 200, and Lionels child, Carroll, has also worked in film production.Randy has 30 film credits and a dozen television projects. Collectively, theNewman family name can be linked to nearly 700 movies so far and, byextension, the name is indelibly stamped on American movie music sincethe 1930s. In recognition of their cumulative contribution to film composi-tion, Fox unveiled The Newman Scoring Stage in honour of the family in1997. The sound of American cinema is not so much an AmericanizedEuropean classical tradition, as it is a Newmanized tradition that perme-ates movie music in America today: both directly by Newman composi-tions and indirectly by Newman-influenced music.

Randy Newmans professional career began in 1960, when he signed onas a songwriter at Metric Music, getting his first writing credit in 1962;but his early work is not indicative of the trademark voice to emerge later.He was writing-to-order for others, love songs for consumption as uncom-plicated pop, unperturbed by ethical debates. Since then, just as audienceshave missed or avoided the ironic bite of a Randy Newman song, it is oftenthe same case with the artists who recorded them. He draws 'thorny por-traits of racists, bigots, sadists and other creeps' using a 'blend of rock blus-ter, blues shuffles and classical dissonance!4 Greil Marcus outlines Newmansparadox thusly:

He wants to be heard (in a moral sense) by the masses but realizesthat if the masses, being what they are, were to understand, it would


mean he is not peeling off enough of the surface layers to expose thedisturbing truths he sees beneath.5

The first two decades of his career are thoroughly and informatively chron-icled by Scott Montgomery in 'The Invisible Randy Newman, where thepatient reader will find the names of the very famous and the not-so-veryfamous who have covered Newmans songs up until 1980. His recording,television and movie credits ran concurrently right from the start, witha song being used for CBS* The Many Loves ofDobie Gillis in the same yearas The Fleetwoods recorded 'They Tell Me Its Summer' (1962), and only2 years before a song was used in Universals The Lively Set (1964). Thethree mediums - popular music, television and film - continue to co-existin the Newman universe, with his 2003 theme for the television series Monkdebuting in the same year as the movie soundtrack for Seabiscuit and Song-book Vol. ly a retrospective album featuring fresh recordings of classicNewman, showcasing Newmans 'street-corner singer' voice6 and his pol-ished hand at the piano.

In Randy's branch of the family, Irving and Adele Newmans two sonseach pursued one of the clearly laid paths the extended Newman familyhad prepared: Alan, the younger son, spent some time on music beforeelecting to make a career in medicine; Randy dedicated his life to musicfrom the start. His formal education included piano lessons, which beganwhen he was 7 years old, at his father s behest. According to Randy, Irvingwanted him to be seriously involved in show business,7 and there was evena piano in Randy s room. He studied composition at UCLA and 'studiedarranging privately with Mario Castel-Nuovo Tedesco [s/c],'8 whose studentsincluded John Williams, Henry Mancini and Andre Previn. Castelnuovo-Tedesco was a prolific composer, and like so many others of his time heworked in film after his exile from Italy in 1939. He was noted for hismelodic gifts, which was a trait that influenced Newman. In addition tolearning from his teacher, Randy frequently observed his uncle Alfred atwork on the soundstage, and it was there he learned 'how music transformsfilm',9 stating later that he knows his 'Uncle Al's work [as well as he knows]Brahms'. The hybrid music generated by his education in both classicaland filmic antecedents in combination with 'R&B pianists Ray Charles,Arthur Alexander, and Domino, [and] early Tin Pan Alley wizards likeIrving Berlin',10 situated Randy Newman uniquely from the start of his owncareer in music.

While popular music is familiar with the concept album, collectivelyNewman's 'albums have a narrative arc to them',11 resulting in a concept

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career, each project linked to the one before it as a continued developmentof the central interests and concerns of the composer. Certainly, Newmansphilosophical voice is as identifiable as his physical voice, which has beendescribed as a 'dense, nasal wheeze',12 sounding like a 'frightened bison*13

The wheeze is complementary to the less-than-refined personae who speakin Newmans songs. His speakers are almost never Newman himself, whochooses instead to narrate on behalf of other speaking subjects. Thesespeakers, the characters he adopts in his songs, include those whose voicesare seldom heard: his songs not only speak for lovers, but also slavers in'Sail Away (1972), murderers In Germany Before the War' (1977), 'Rednecks(1974) wherever they may be, and even God - who marvels at humantenacity in 'Gods Song5 (1972). Newman concerns himself with character-ization in a way similar to the composition of a character's theme. In fact,his songs are 'always sung as a character actor'.14 The rendering of his themefor televisions Monk (2002) is an ideal example of this ability to encapsu-late aspects of a character s identity. He expresses Adrian Monks endear-ingly neurotic title character in lyrics that allow the first-person narrator toarticulate his distress regarding the 'disorder and confusion everywhere'and warning that 'It's a jungle out there' The other aspect of characteriza-tion in his composition is the ironic voice.

Irony is an often-misunderstood strategy, one which may, and did, resultin radio stations banning songs such as 'Short People' (1977) because thefiner points of literariness escape them in favour of a literal reading. In thiscase, people thought that Newman really meant that 'short people got noreason to live'. What Newman most often seeks to do is satirize bigotry andto do it using the bigot's own voice in order to extend the critiques to theself-righteously deluded who think they are morally superior. Musically,he weds his scalding lyrical rebuke with a snappy little tune that belies thecontent of the language. Thus, 'rednecks' can participate in the pep-rallysentiment of 'We're rednecks! We're rednecks!' united in the knowledgethat Northerners stereotype Southerners as not knowing their collective'ass from a hole in the ground', and listen further to understand that thenarrator is pointing the finger north and west, to where the African Americanfundamentally is no more equal and free than in the South, where at leastthe rednecks know what they are. The listener similarly is duped by themisleading music of 'Great Nations of Europe' (1999), which sounds attimes like a triumphal march, into hearing a paradoxically cheerful historylesson that mercilessly indicts European colonialism, finishing off with asinister speculation regarding an ironic justice eventually to be done andpossibly uncomfortably near in the form of'Some bug from out of Africa.


Ever an equal opportunity satirist, the same voice is subsequently turnedon America itself in 'Political Science' (1972), a lyric no less appropriate tocontemporary current events and American foreign policy and attitudesnow than it was 35 years ago. In truth, 'His best songs implicate the listener'15

and 'his real task is to make his burden ours'.16 Newman cares deeply abouthis country and is disturbed by many of its behaviours. He wants moreAmericans to be as concerned as he, and one way that he attempts to bringthis about is to make listeners realize that they are the ones speaking in hissongs. Thus, they hear themselves from an external source, and what theyhear surprises them.

In disciplinary terms, Winkler identifies the classical touches that per-vade Newmans writing: his fondness for doubling the melody in sixths ...his penchant for appoggiaturas and chromatic lower neighbours, his con-servative harmonic sense and preference for clear, functional bass lines'.17

He incorporates his formal and informal musical training into a stylisticmelange that, when used as the vehicle for his peculiar brand of storytell-ing, is a sensuous and romantic, yet fbleak and pessimistic', commentary onAmerica.18 It should not work, but it does, and it maybe so because Newmanis, like other American intellectual dissidents such as Allen Ginsbergand Bill Maher, in love with America, so that the condemnation is neveruntempered by the intimacy of that relationship. Don Henley implicitlyunderstands that relationship tension when he observes that Newman's'songs are tough, but tender, understanding but never unctuous, caustic butmuch too caring to be cruel'.19 Newman rightly belongs in the company ofsocial dissidents not only because he is unafraid of pointing out his beloved sflaws but also because he recognizes and admits his complicity. His imagi-nary conversation with Karl Marx, discussing how 'The World Isn't Fair'(1999), is held in Newman's 'mansion on the hill', as the song says. Near theend of the song, the ironic voice emerges with a subversive vengeance toclaim the freedom of the national anthem, a freedom that makes it possiblefor the wealthy to increase their wealth without having to be troubled byexposure to the problems of poverty and the poor. Because he implicateshimself, he is more trustworthy as a cultural critic; in this instance, the fin-ger is pointed as much at himself as it is at anyone else. Newman is equalparts 'sledge-hammer ironies',20 and 'gruff yet touching vocals... [and] ele-gant, deft playing',21 bringing together intellect, art and performance in anunlikely union that succeeds because of the three-way balance.

His lifelong friend and industry colleague, Lenny Waronker, remarks, inthe liner notes for Guilty, that Newman's 'knack for conjuring people andplaces in such detail lends a real cinematic quality to his work'.22 Thus, theleap from recording to scoring is not at all surprising; his keen eye and

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musical sense come together to make the movies in which he participates'a little more artful, a little more thoughtful'.23 He does not merely borrowfrom a variety of sources and genres; he internalizes them, giving them aNewman quirk. It happens because whatever stylistic choice he makes, allis tied together by his unrelentingly mordant, trenchant sensibility. He isable to incorporate the music of the circus, the church, the ballroom andthe bar, because he knows all these styles and loves them. Because all ofthese are part of his overarching worldview, he is thus able to populatehis narratives with characters in a believable musical landscape. This iswhy descriptions of his music cannot consist of one word; he is not a one-note writer. Billboard editor Timothy White, in the liner notes for Guilty,describes the Newman variations thusly: 'classical idioms with a sultrystride piano, Gershwin with the gurgling of a gutter bum... Stephen Fosterwith a sick mind'.24

Newman loves the sound of an orchestra and the challenge of being'forced by the nature of the film to write the type of things [he] wouldn'tordinarily!25 For example, his music for The Natural is 'bittersweet celestialstrains . . . exquisite music',26 and Cold Turkey has an 'upbeat score'.27 Withthe absence of a Newman lyric to complicate the music and the require-ments of a given project to serve, his 'magnificent, incredibly powerfulsense of melody'28 emerges more clearly and is more than equal to the task.He admits a desire 'to be the best film composer'.29 Certainly, his cinematictouch has meant steady work in film over the 25 years since Ragtime.Newmans first film score was for the 1971 stop-smoking comedy ColdTurkey\ and 10 years later he received his first Academy Award nominationfor his work on Ragtime. He has even won an Emmy Award for a song hewrote for the 1990 pilot of the doomed television series Cop Rock. However,his songs written directly for recording and release have never suited thepalate of awards committees because of the biting satires that are eithermisunderstood or are understood as disturbing; it is music written for themovies that has garnered him most of his awards as well as the most praiseand public acknowledgement.

He has accumulated 17 Academy Award nominations (with one win),5 Golden Globe nominations, 4 International Animated Film Society AnnieAward nominations (winning three times), 2 Chicago Film Critics Awardnominations (and one win), 1 Golden Satellite Award nomination, and11 Grammy Award nominations (with four wins). He made Oscar historyin 1999 by being nominated for his contributions to three films in 1 year:Pleasantville, A Bugs Life and Babe: Pig in the City. Aside from industryappreciation for his work on individual projects, Newman also has producedsuch a substantial body of work that he has begun to receive awards in


recognition of his cumulative achievements. In 1999 he received the inau-gural Henry Mancini Award from the American Society of Composersfor lifetime achievement in film composing, followed a year later by theBillboard Century Award, created to honour those artists whose creativeoutput has not received the recording-industry and popular-culture recog-nition it deserves; by giving Newman the award, Billboard put him amongthe ranks of previous winners such as George Harrison (1992) and CarlosSantana (1996). A year after receiving that award, he was given the Freder-ick Loewe Achievement Award from the Palm Springs International FilmFestival, and in 2002, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

It took the confluence of many elements to produce Randy Newman,a musical being who could not have been created by design or intent. Heis the product of bemused serendipity. Aside from his varied musical influ-ences and his natural inclination toward irony, his perception of his ownmarginality - as a Jew in America - helps him to position himself lyricallyalongside the outsider. He is not a practicing Jew, and was not raised to be,but his ethnicity nevertheless has had an impact on his life, such as whenhe was barred from attending a social function at an exclusive club. Hehas suffered all his life from an irreparable difficulty with his eyes; thishandicap not only caused him vision problems but also made him thebrunt of cruelty during his childhood. Hence, he is repulsed by the kind ofhumour that depends on the mockery of disability. No wonder, then, that'the heartbreak of betrayal, the folly of bigotry, and the dangers of blindfaith'30 resonate in his work. His own vulnerability is communicated in apoignantly engaging way, deflected by his stable of characters. He couldnever be a pop star, though, because the mainstream has no place for a nar-rative voice that is variously described as 'laconic, funny, grim',31 becausepopular music is not comfortable with a complex and changing voice. Nordoes it embrace the paradox of a 'flamboyantly angry man.. . [with] eccen-tric levity',32 because a straightforward product fits pop music's slick catego-ries more conveniently. Thus, there is no slot for someone who can findsomething to sing about in 'the erotic side of arson'33 in 'Let's Burn down theCornfield' (1970). More than anything, his catalogue demonstrates his ten-dency to see a rather skewed view of the world. He lives and thinks in themargins himself, so he can do no other than write from what he knows.

Notes

1. Peter Winkler, 'Randy Newmans Americana. Popular Music 7.1 (January 1988) 16.2. Quoted in Scott Montgomery, with Gary Norris and Kevin Walsh, 'The invisible

Randy Newman, Goldmine, 21.18 (1 September 1995), n.p.

Randy Newman 479

3. Ibid.4. Rob Tannenbaum, 'Q&A: Randy Newman, Rolling Stone, 819 (August 1999), 42.5. Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock (n Roll Music (4th revised

edn). New York: Plume, 1997, p. 112.6. Tn the family', The Economist, 338.7950 (27 January 1996), 80.7. Montgomery (1995), n.p.8. Quoted in Timothy White, 'Randy Newmans America: A portrait of the artist',

Billboard, 112.50 (9 December 2000), 18.9. Lenny Waronker, in Russ Titelman, Lenny Waronker, and Timothy White, Liner

notes: Guilty: Thirty Years of Randy Newman. CD. Rhino Records Inc., 1998.10. Montgomery (1995), n.p.11. Titelman et al.12. White, in Titelman et al.13. Tusher, quoted in Montgomery (1995), n.p.14. Marcus (1997), p. 251.15. Ibid., p. 114.16. Ibid., p. 116.17. Winkler(1988),p. 17.18. Ibid., pp. 24-5.19. Don Henley, 'Billboard Century Award presentation speech', Billboard, 112.51

(16 December 2000), 84.20. Marcus (1997), p. 113.21. Melinda Newman, 'Newman and piano tackle his "Songbook" ' Billboard 115.38

(20 September 2003) 15.22. Waronker, in Titelman et al.23. Ibid.24. Ibid.25. Newman (1998).26. White, in Titelman et al.27. Montgomery (1995), n.p.28. Waronker, in Titelman et al.29. Quoted in White (2000), p. 18.30. Henley (2000), p. 84.31. Marcus (1997), 115.32. White, in Titelman et al.33. Montgomery (1995), n.p.

30Brian Eno

Brian Eno: Discreet Vision

Jonathon Dale

Brian Eno has spent the past four decades working in a slyly inquisitivemode. Born in May 1948 in Suffolk, England, Eno first engaged with theart world through studies at Ipswich and Winchester art schools, receivinga diploma in fine art from the latter in 1969. In the early 1970s he was amember of glam-rock act Roxy Music, leaving the group in 1973 to pursuea solo recording career. By this stage, Eno had already correctly divined thepotential for crossover between rock and pop music and other multimediaconcerns, collaborating with filmmaker Malcolm Le Grice and musicianRobert Fripp on a series of live performances. His solo recordings movedalong parallel tracks, with Eno dividing time between song-based record-ings such as Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and Another Green Worldand instrumental albums such as Music For Airports and Discreet Music.In the mid-1970s he formulated the genre 'ambient music*; the ambientaesthetic would prove to be a perfect manifestation of both Enos creativetemperament and his interest in realigning classic hierarchies of audienceengagement with music. Subsequently, Eno has refined his ambient record-ings, embarked on countless collaborations within music and other arts,produced (among others) U2 and James, and developed a peerless facilityand reputation for perceptive cultural commentary.

Though Enos music has been used on countless film soundtracks, myconcern here is not to simply document and 'analyse' the application of Enosound to myriad cinema. Rather, I'm interested in looking at particular

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instances of Enos engagement with visual media and discussing parallelsbetween Enos thinking and his visual 'counterpoint'. This approach willattempt to illuminate as much about Enos approach to art as it does thespecifics of the relationship between Eno and visual media, an approachthat appears altogether more instructive and pursuant to Enos aestheticthan simplistic analysis of the use of Enos music as soundtrack, whichapproach (in whatever context) often yields little more than comparativeanalysis drained of life by fossilized theoretical inflexibility.

For the purpose of this chapter, I will discuss several specific examplesof Enos rapprochement with visual media. Firstly, I will consider Enossoundtrack to Malcolm LeGrice s 1970 short film Berlin Horse. GivenLeGrice's position as one of the central figures and theorists of Englishavant-garde cinema and an exemplar of 1970s structural/materialist film,discussion of Berlin Horse gestures towards parallels between Enos think-ing and praxis and the set of ideas surrounding both Berlin Horse and avant-garde and structural/materialist film in general. For this I will draw ondocumentation on the development of English avant-garde cinema in andbeyond the 1970s, discussing theoretical works by such figures as PeterGidal. The connections between Enos music, these films and minimalistcomposition will also be explored, as this provides greater context for theideas of Eno, LeGrice and Gidal.

After briefly considering Enos Music for Films series of recordingsand their position within his oeuvre, I will finish by focusing on Enos videoinstallation work of the 1980s, such as Mistaken Memories of MedievalManhattan and Thursday Afternoon. These works will be discussed withinthe broader framework of Enos theory and praxis, displaying the conti-guous nature of Enos multifarious arts engagements and briefly consider-ing parallels with other artists such as Andy Warhol and Phill Niblock.This chapter will attempt to articulate the true impact of Enos creativityand thinking: the focus on 'scenius' as opposed to genius; the importanceof context and multi-inter-disciplinarity; the need for engagement withcreative expression on many different levels. In this way, Enos music forfilm is never just 'music for film'; it is, rather, one intervention in an ongoingdebate, another piece of the puzzle put in place.

Berlin Horse

In 1969 Brian Eno displayed several works in the Whitechapel Gallery'sSystem Art exhibition. During the exhibition, Eno encountered the films ofMalcolm LeGrice, who was also part of System Art. Amongst the films


screened by LeGrice was an embryonic version of Berlin Horse, includingan earlier soundtrack. Eno subsequently discussed different soundtrackpossibilities with LeGrice, an encounter that culminated with Eno develop-ing a new soundtrack for Berlin Horse. This soundtrack is particularlyimportant (and strangely overlooked) as it is among the earliest (if not theearliest) recorded and publicly 'released' evidence ofEnos sound work. Enowould release his first recordings with Roxy Music in 1972, whereas theBerlin Horse soundtrack dates back to 1969. As such, the soundtrack is thebest indication we have of Enos early interests outside of his ex-post-factodiscussions of his early years'. This initial interface between Enos interestsin non-narrative, repetitive sound work and avant-garde or experimentalcinema may well have helped set Eno on the course that led him to hisaudio-visual installations of the late 1970s and early 1980s (which will bediscussed later in this chapter.)

LeGrice started his artistic career as a painter, and he has also dabbledin music, but he moved into film with 1965 s China Tea. LeGrice s approachto film treats it less as a form for the extrapolation of narrative and more aspure phenomenon; his 1960s and 1970s work generally dealt with film-as-medium rather than film-as-narrative-content. LeGrice was also (andremains) one of the British experimental or 'structural/materialist' filmsmost lucid advocates, working parallel to peer Peter Gidal as theorist andpedagogue for the new film. Both Gidal and LeGrice questioned the ideo-logical presuppositions of Hollywood cinema, arguing against the 'illusion-ism' inherent in Hollywood and other narrative film forms. LeGricesposition is perhaps best articulated by the following polemic:

I want to see a cinema that is in clear opposition to dominant film andTV culture. This new and radical cinema has been in evidence sincethe 50s but its roots are in modern art. These films draw more frompainting, music and poetry.1

Berlin Horse exists in several forms. At its optimum, the film should bea twin or quadruple-screen projection, though it can be viewed in singlescreen format; indeed, the version of the film available within Australia (viaScreenSound) is the single screen version. In Berlin Horse, LeGrice uses'found' footage of a horse in training, trotting in a circle on a leash and healso sources imagery from Cecil M Hepworths 1900 film The Burning Barn.LeGrice treats the filmic material itself, placing it in negative, using colourfilters and differing film stocks to alter the original black-and-white film,lending the film a glowing, lustrous timbre: it is visually rich and opulent,

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blushing with vivid, gorgeous colours. LeGrice structures the film usingloops and repetition, layering the Burning Barn footage over the originalhorse- training sequence later in the seven-minute film. The effect of theloop printing of both the training footage and the Hepworth sequence isto distance or destroy any narrative/plot concerns: rather, hooked intothe circuitous logic of the film, transfixed by both the loop structure andthe saturated visual information, the film directs attention toward themateriality of film process itself, bringing films intrinsic material qualitiesto the fore.

Eno's music works in tandem with the loop structure of the film. Thepiece that LeGrice chose to soundtrack Berlin Horse uses loops - probablytape loops, given Enos acknowledged fascination with both tape recordersand the slippage in phase processes harnessed by Steve Reich in his earlytape pieces Its Gonna Rain and Come Out. A simple piano melody spoolsthroughout the soundtrack, locking into varying formations as differentrecordings slide against each other due to the abstruse patterns of the vari-ant loops.

The loops within Enos soundtrack are not entirely contiguous to theloops within LeGrices film; running at a different pace, the soundtrack par-allels the film on the level of structure or design as opposed to rigidifiedtemporality. Enos soundtrack connects with LeGrices film because theyboth address similar concerns when it comes to structure, including thecumulative power of loops and repetition. While the soundtrack is notexactly choreographed expertly to Enos looped score', as Orlene DeniceMcMahon states in 'An analysis of the soundtrack in the work of MalcolmLeGrice',2 the similarities in the workings of the soundtrack and film arevery clear. McMahon is certainly correct, however, when she states that'Enos sound structures are.. . effective in supporting the inner consistencyof the piece as a whole'.3

Berlin Horse's key concerns neatly dovetail with those of structural filmin general. P. Adams Sitney first delineated the theoretical precepts of struc-tural film in his late 1960s and early 1970s columns for Film Culture andalso his Visionary Film text, using the term to draw together similar ten-dencies within the work of American underground filmmakers MichaelSnow, Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr and more, though the genesis of thestructural film' is often attributed to Viennese filmmaker Kurt Kren. (TheEuropean connection was perpetuated via the work of such figures as PeterKubelka and Birgit and Wilhelm Hein.) In its original form, the structuralfilm '[designated] a group of films in which "shape is the primal impressionof the film... what content it has is minimal and subsidiary to the outline" '.4


Sitney suggested that the key qualities of the structural film included suchapproaches or phenomena as the fixed frame, flicker, loop printing andrephotography.5

However, it was the English arm of structuralist filmmakers that tookthe sub-genre to its most extreme ends, firmly positioning the structural-ist film outside of Hollywood cinema and critiquing the ideologicallyunsound nature of much filmmaking, dismissing 'illusionism' as a retro-gressive trend within film and questioning the temporal dimensions offilmmaking. Perhaps Catherine Russell sums up their position best:

Drawing on a Brechtian rhetoric of anti-illusionism and AlthusserianMarxism, [Peter] Gidal and [Malcolm] LeGrice cast structural filmas both 'materialist1 and 'minimalist.' They privileged the real-timeaesthetic, in which the time of viewing would be equal to the timeof shooting, as a means of subverting illusionist codes of montage.Duration, and the reflexive attention to the materiality of the medium,were understood as anti-idealist techniques, and outside the meaning-production mechanisms of dominant ideology. In foregrounding thetechnology and the process of film, this mode of practice was essen-tial a mode of knowledge.6

While Berlin Horse is not positioned at the dogmatically critical extremitiesof structural film, it does exemplify the structural film in its 'attention to themateriality of the medium', its use of loop printing and rephotography andits general 'minimal* approach to its material. Similarly, Eno's soundtrackdraws from minimal means, accessing a simple approach to compositionand sound juxtaposition that draws attention beyond the surface sonorityof the soundtrack itself and into the machinations of the soundtracks con-struction. His use of loops and phase patterns could well be paralleled withthe 'loop printing' that is one of the typical interventions of structural filmand the varying sound quality and use of reverb to reframe the sounds Enois using within the piece is perhaps comparable to 'rephotography', in thatthe effects and approaches used emphasize different aspects of the sourcematerial, slightly distorting the sound or perhaps amplifying its 'grain.Indeed, if one considers LeGrice's interest in multiple projection and loopprinting in the context of'simultaneous presentation... used for compari-son of different printings or organizations of the same basic material', as hestates in Abstract Film and Beyond7 one can easily see parallels with Eno'sother work, such as the half-speed patterns that flicker through his DiscreetMusic record - a work borne of simple error whose sonic source was

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coincidentally originally intended to accompany some of LeGrice's otherworks.

Brian Enos music, particularly his ambient music of the 1970s and 1980s,relies on chromatics and timbre in order to dissolve fundamental/classicistsong structure as narrative force and dictatorial discourse. His music alsodemands shifts in temporal perception, much like structural/materialistfilms interest in the real-time aesthetic. If Gidal and LeGrice questionedthe 'illusionism' of Hollywood film and its temporal dislocations, Enocould likewise be seen to be questioning a similar'illusionism' within tradi-tional song, whereby a narrative is compacted into three-to-four minuteincrements. With Enos ambient music, the sprawl is all; for one thing,he needs longer durations to allow his systems of slow-moving loops todevelop and fall in and out of sync. The composition as such is more acomposition with time than with music. Likewise, the structural/materialistfilmmakers were interested in 'the temporal dimension of the film processas the basic structure of cinematic articulation!8 The fascination with tem-porality serves as one important element of the structural/materialist film-makers desire to demystify the film making process, and likewise, Eno isinterested in moving beyond typical music making processes and address-ing what Eric Tamm calls the Vertical' elements of music, 'the harmonics,or barely audible frequencies, that are stacked "vertically" on the primaryheard note itself. This vertical harmonic spectrum determines the color ofthe sound, and how our ears and minds interpret the harmonic spectrum'.9

This verticality of sound is opposed to the horizontal narrative develop-ment of song: lyric, chord sequence, phrases, the codified 'meaning' (as such)of much pop, rock, classical and most other forms of music.

There are obvious interconnections between Enos music and structuraland structural/materialist film that move beyond the 1970s working rela-tionship between Eno and LeGrice. However, there are also great differ-ences between the two that must not be ignored. Perhaps the most importantdifference is in intent; in his Theory and Definition of Structural/MaterialistFilm, Peter Gidal states, 'Through usage of specific filmic devices such asrepetition within duration one is forced to attempt to decipher both thefilm's material and the film's construct' (1976). Gidal and LeGrice both venerate the 'engaged spectator', suggesting that structural and structural/materialist film aims to involve the spectator within the process of the filmsconstruction/interpretation instead of forcing a pre-determined meaningupon them. The spectator in this context ideally has an active role, question-ing the fundamental 'authority' of the film: Gidal and LeGrice are expresslyconcerned with eliciting an active, structuring mode in the audience'.10


Enos ambient music, however, relied in some sense on a passive listener,allowing the sound to be relegated to background where it becomes part ofthe hum of the everyday.

Music for Films and Installations

During the 1970s, Eno created a suite of four song-based albums, HereCome the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Another GreenWorld and Before and After Science, engaged in collaboration with RobertFripp on No Pussyfooting and Evening Star, and developed ambient musicthrough recordings such as Discreet Music and Music for Airports. Thisdecade saw Eno working through a complex set of ideas about music andculture, inventing new genres of music and refining an approach to musicsformal and sensual qualities that was (and remains) equal parts serious andludic. Often working from conceptual ends, Eno still treated the sensualityof sound as one of his paramount concerns. Given the affective propertiesof his music, even at its most conceptually rigid, it is no surprise that Enosmusic would be called upon for non-diegetic use within film-soundtrackpurposes. Eno actually met filmmakers halfway with his 1976 album Musicfor Films, on which, as Tamm relates, Eno was 'in a sense advertising hismusic for use by filmmakers'11 Though Eno describes the eighteen shortpieces as possible miniatures for 'soundtracks... [to] imaginary films', muchof the record s contents were eventually used in film soundtracks such asDerek Jarmans Sebastiane and Jubilee, or his three 'SparrowfalF pieces forAlan Drury s 1976 play of the same title.

The tracks collected on Music for Films are circumspect and mutedmood pieces in line with Enos previous ambient work, Discreet Music, byway of mood if not structure and duration; perhaps they are closer to theinstrumental miniatures that Eno dots through his Another Green Worldalbum. As Tamm observes, the sound world evoked by Music for Filmsincludes:

Few events, very quiet dynamics, diatonicism, repetition, gentlewashes of synthesizer colors, merging of foreground and background,frequent lack of definite pulse, a sense of timelessness. Here, however,the actual duration of each piece is reduced, often to aphoristic pro-portions of less than two minutes. The effect, then, is to evoke a seriesof miniature worlds, each with a set of characteristics involving tonecolor and melodic and harmonic procedures.12

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Many of these qualities, however, are also characteristic of Enos otherambient works from the 1970s and early 1980s. Music for Airports usestemporally elongated structures that hinge on circuitous loop systems, andOn Land utilizes field recordings or natural environments alongside elec-tronic treatment and acoustic instruments to create Enos most lastingambient work, in which his pieces come closest to exemplifying the 'soundas perfume1 discourse Eno sometimes discussed. Both of these albumswere cannibalized for the soundtrack to Enos own Mistaken Memories OfMedieval Manhattan, one of his earliest audiovisual installations.

Some of Enos first video pieces, such as 2 Fifth Avenue and White Fences,were designed specifically for airports or train stations, spaces of transitand movement where Enos visuals could 'tint' the environment withoutpresupposing any connective to classicist narrative development. To thisend, Eno created works that were quietly non-narrative. Neither 2 FifthAvenue nor White Fences are available, but from the evidence of MistakenMemories of Medieval Manhattan and 1984s Thursday Afternoon, we canpresuppose certain elements contiguous to all. These video works featurethe dissolution of narrative, the setting of the video and television/screensideways, so the works are viewed vertically rather than horizontally(another echo of Enos Vertical colour of sound', as Tamm puts it), fixedcamera positions around which the subjects (Manhattan skylines or femalemodel Christine Alicino) slowly evolve, and the further under, or over-cranking, of camera speed and, in the case of Thursday Afternoon, post-production of footage.

Enos work from this era is often described as painterly; in his notes tothe MATRIX exhibition, Ross describes the works as 'painterly video instal-lations (1981); in a recent review of a DVD reissue of these works, tellinglytitled by Eno 14 Video Paintings, Ian White articulates:

Enos sustained video gaze is like an unabashed demonstration ofMonets project in his many paintings of Rouen Cathedral - thatbuildings and light inform, infect, alter each other, that in theseinstances form is malleable (collapsible) and the look is everything.13

While these parallels are fascinating and perceptive, I find myself moredrawn to conceptualizing Enos works both within his own discursivedevelopment of 'ambient' as both a style of music and a general aesthetic,and perhaps other connections with film makers and musicians. There aredefinite echoes of Andy Warhols pioneering evacuation of the film maker'


from his 1960s and 1970s films such as Sleep and Eat, and in his lengthyEmpire (a single shot of the Empire State Building) there are parallels withEnos subsequent work documenting the Manhattan skyline.

Both films address a fundamental 'explosion/exposition of the everydayof the city, treating its constructed physical presences with a grandeurthat evacuates the corporeal engagements occurring beneath the veil ofarchitecture. In some senses both Empire and Mistaken Memories Of Medi-eval Manhattan deal with a kind of 'eulogising' of city experience, themaking-static of the complex webs of interaction presumed by the pres-ences inhabiting these buildings or skylines, or perhaps the mystificationof the city and its networks of human communication. Eno himself hasarticulated something similar: when interviewed by Musician magazine,he observed that his video works 'show everything at a distance . . . theypush the city away in order to restore it to the kind of mythical place it onceseemed - a mysterious hive of activity with all sorts of curious humaninteraction going on.14 This evacuation of the personal/individual couldalso be seen to parallel the dissolution of the 'individualized' within someof Enos ambient music, and indeed his insistence on avoiding first-personaddress in the lyrics of the pop songs that are scattered throughout his1970s run of song albums.

Other parallels could perhaps be drawn with the interface of music andvisual in Phill Niblocks work, though Niblock himself disavows any realconnections between the two in his films of people working. Perhaps themethodical intent in what Niblock films could parallel the ever-changingsame in Enos visual work, but in any case Eno is much less reliant on theoverpowering nature of the drone, preferring his music to be environmentalinstead of the immersion and envelopment particular to Niblocks mind-gorgingly loud performances.

However, it is most important, I think, to consider Enos audio-visualinstallations within the continuum of his own work and the theorizationof his practice. Eric Tamms paragraph on the context of Enos installationsis most instructive here. He correctly ascertains their multiple uses andnon-dictatorial manner, stating that:

Since 1979 Eno has been setting up audiovisual installations ingalleries, museums, at festivals, and in the occasional train station orairport. In these installations, he seeks to create a total environment,a place that emanates the same kind of ambiance as his ambientmusic, and that, like his ambient music, is able to accomodate [sic]varying levels of attention and reward them equally... He wants hisinstallations to provide for urban dwellers and experience 'like sitting

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by a river'; a viewer might drop by for repeated observations duringhis or her lunch hour, using the place whose ambiance Eno has gentlycrafted as a space in which to think.15

There are several key concerns within this quote. The first is the demandsof the space; the populated, transitory nature of certain spaces in whichEno set up his audiovisual installations - I am considering here his instal-lations for trains and airports, in particular requires a certain focus onnon-narrative and 'quiet', unobtrusive installation work. Enos interest isnot in distracting passers-by, but rather in shading the immediate spacewithin which the traveller or passer-by engages; again, his music and hisvideo work become 'perfumery', a flavour or scent added to the complexblends of modern populated spaces.

At the same time, Eno is interested in audiovisual installations that'create a total environment'. However, this total environment contains cer-tain 'passivity'. It is not about creating an all-enveloping space within whichthe author dictates the parameters of engagement for the passive reader.Rather, the passivity comes from Eno himself. While he defines what willhappen within the space of the installation, it does not impinge: once again,we return to the idea of his work being a perfume, or as Ross describes,'[h]is music/video works are designed to "tint" the environment rather thandominate it - a direct relation to his musical strategies'.16 There are toucheshere of Barthes' 'death of the author' perhaps, in Enos sublimation of'aggressive' artistic intent, and in a certain obliteration of narrative form.The visitor or 'spectator' (this term used advisedly) is immersed within theinstallation and thus becomes the active creator of 'meaning'.

If Eno revolutionizes anything within these works, it is a contextual rev-olution. It does us well to remember that at the time he created these twoworks, he was discursively placed within pop and rock music, somewhereEno still finds himself thanks to his ongoing connections with 1980s rockgroup U2 and other production work. Thus, his engagement with the visualrealm is often compared to rock and pop engagements with visual form.Tellingly, in interviews in the 1980s, Eno was often asked about his audio-visual works' relationships with both the music video and live performance.When interviewed for Keyboard magazine, he was asked if his audiovisualwork related to his earliest performances for Roxy Music: Eno correctedthis, stating that rather:

I suppose my shows do react against the rock presentations in a cer-tain way. I like to deliberately create slow-stimulus atmospheres,which are sort of the opposite of the pop video. The whole ethos of


the pop video is to do as many edits as you can. Most commercialtelevision is like that as well: There's a continuous sense of forcinginterest through rapid editing. I try to go the opposite way. I want tomake things that are very slow and hypnotic, that draw interest not byattacking, but by seducing. Its very unpop in that way.17

Eno's audiovisual installations gingerly negotiate relationships betweenmany different genres and forms. Created discursively both within andagainst rock and pop mores, his installations were/are usually presentedin the rarefied space of the art gallery: however, as Eno further discusses inthe Doerschuk interview, 'in another way... [my work is] quite pop, in thatit doesn't set out to distance itself from the interests of ordinary people'.18

While parallels between his audiovisual installations and films by figuressuch as Warhol are instructive to a degree, these comparisons presupposean art discourse that Eno only keys into provisionally. Likewise, to com-pare his static or non-narrative Visual paintings' to other non-narrativework dedicated to visual phenomena - say, the light work of Man Ray,or even the structural/materialist film I discussed earlier - doesn't reallydeal with the function of his work within pop contexts. Most of thosefilm makers were following a modernist impulse to make things new andradical. Eno, rather, wished to make things humble and inhabitable.

Conclusion

All my work aspires to the condition of painting. What I like aboutpainters is that they stay there, they persist.19

If Brian Eno's work 'aspires to the condition of painting', it is indeed amultivalent, multiarts form of painting. Whereas painters often limit them-selves to the one format or context, Eno is a habitual dabbler in the bestpossible way, making abstruse and fantastical connections between variantart forms and in the process uncovering new theories and new hybrids.This applies to the entirety of his oeuvre, but particularly to the areas ofambient music and audiovisual installation, in both of which Eno uncov-ered (or even invented) new approaches to engagement with sound andvision.

Thus any writing about Eno needs to acknowledge, and even manifest,the polyglot world of possibility that Eno creates. If the above chapter makesleaps, hints at ideas without completely thrashing them out, gestures in

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directions and then takes swerves elsewhere, I make no apology; this seemscompletely in line with Enos own practice. However, through discussingthe relationship between his soundtrack for Malcolm LeGrices Berlin Horseand by extension the relationship between Enos aesthetics and structural/materialist film, and thinking through some of Enos statements and theo-retical concerns regarding audiovisual installations, this chapter has illu-minated some avenues for exploring Enos work. His engagement withculture is complex and consistently enlightening, and often hints toward'throwing out the manual' and molding new shapes: hence IVe avoidedclassic film sound analysis where possible. Rather, this chapter hopefullyengages with Enos world and his perceptive, perspicacious character.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank James Cameron, Dr Katherine Greenwood and AlexCarpenter. My special thanks to Dr Jane Simon and Dr Nick Prescott forall their help.

Notes

1. Nina Danino, 'Experimental film and video in Britain in the 80s', in Ipek Tureli(ed.), Aesthetics and Art in the 20th Century^ 2002. Available at http://www.sanart.org.tr/publications/aesthetics/danino_experimental_film_and_video_in_britain_80s.pdf(accessed on 10 November 2005).

2. Orelene Denice McMahon, 'An analysis of the soundtrack in the work of MalcolmLeGrice', in British Artists'Film & Video Study Collection Research Papers. Available at http://www.studycollection.co.uk/soundtracts.html (accessed on 10 November 2005).

3. McMahon (2005).4. Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999, p. 158.5. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde (2nd edn). Oxford

University Press: Oxford, 1979, p. 370.6. Russell (1999), pp. 158-9.7. Malcolm LeGrice, Abstract Film and Beyond. MIT Press: Cambridge, 1977, p. 142.8. D. N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in

Contemporary Film Theory. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994, p. 129.9. Eric Tamm, Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound. New York:

Da Capo Press, 1995, p. 4.10. LeGrice (1977), p. 134.11. Tamm (1995), p. 141.

http://www.sanart.org.tr/publications/aesthetics/danino_experimental_film_and_video_in_britain_80s.pdf


http://www.studycollection.co.uk/soundtracts.html



12. Ibid., p. 142.13. Ian White, 'Brian Eno: 14 video paintings', The Wire. March (2006), 67.14. Kristine McKenna (1982), 'Eno: voyages in time and perception. Available at http://

music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/musn82.htm (accessed on 10 November2005).

15. Tamm(1995),p. 138.16. David Ross, 'Brian Eno', Matrix, Berkeley, CA:. University of California, 1981, p. 44.17. Robert L. Doerschuk (1989), 'Brian Eno - on simplicity, context, and the necessity of

urgency'. Available at http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/keyb89.html(accessed on 10 November 2005).

18. Doerschuk (1989).19. Eno in Mark Prendergast, 'Brian Eno: "A fervent nostalgia for the future" - Thoughts,

words, music and art. Part One'. Available at http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/sos 1.html (accessed on 10 November 2005).

http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/musn82.htm


http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/keyb89.html

http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/sos1.html


31Philip Glass

Cultural Recycling, Performance, and Immediacy in Philip Glass'sFilm Music for Godfrey Reggie's QatsiTrilogy

Bruno Lessard

American composer Philip Glass (b. 1937) is one of the most discussed fig-ures in contemporary music. Glasss popularity seems due to his variedcontribution to twentieth-century music and because the composer s musiccrosses different media easily. While other 'serious' composers have beenwriting music for one specific musical style (e.g., classical music, film musicand opera), Glass seems to take pleasure in diversifying his musical agendaby writing, among others, symphonies, operas, music for the theatre, andfilm music. It is to his work on the film music for Godfrey Reggios Qatsitrilogy that this chapter is devoted.

Having written film scores for several movies, Glasss most widelyacclaimed film music has been for his collaboration with American filmmakerGodfrey Reggio. Reminiscent of the Sergei Eisenstein-Sergei Prokofievpartnership, the film scores for the Qatsi trilogy cannot be discussed withoutmentioning how Glass and Reggio worked in unison to create an uncon-ventional, non-commercial trilogy that recalls the films of the 1920s inwhich symphonic music was used to seduce and enthral as much as thelyrical images.

Reggios trilogy is an engage piece of cinematic work that questions theworld in which we live. Working against the grain of filmic conventions, thethree films are devoid of any identifiable diegesis; they feature no actors;

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the only words spoken are in the Hopi1 language; and Glass s music seemsas important as the images in the message the films want to convey. In thefirst film, Koyaanisqatsi (i.e., life out of balance), the images present us witha critique of the industrialized world of the northern hemisphere to thesound of Glasss synthesizers. The sequel to this film, Powaqqatsi (i.e., life intransformation), portrays cultures of orality, and Glasss score for it is in thevein of 'world music,' the composer having been on location to study themusic of Africa, South America, and India. The last film, Naqoyqatsi2 (i.e.,life as war), looks at globalisation as civilized violence and at its potentialcultural, ecological, and ideological side effects. For this film Glass returnedto classical music with the inclusion of a solo cello played by Yo-Yo Mawhose leading parts serve as a guiding thread throughout the score.

Using the Qatsi trilogy as a case study, this chapter would like to offer analternative interpretation of film music that will be based on cultural recy-cling and performance.3 The first goal of this analysis will be to explore twotypes of recycling in Glasss film music. The first cultural recycling con-cerns the manner in which Glasss music aesthetics, which is primarilydrawn on the Indian concept of time, is influenced by the Hopi culture.Moreover, Glass and the Philip Glass Ensemble have been involved in liveperformances of the scores for the Qatsi trilogy. These live events offera new take on the concept of performance as seen in such cultures of oral-ity. The second cultural recycling occurs when Glass revisits the long-losttradition of live music in the movie theatre. Returning to the days of earlycinema when a pianist or a whole orchestra would play live music, Glassseems to be proposing an alternative way of conceiving film music and itsperformance.

This chapter proposes that, instead of discussing the evolution of filmscoring and its utilisation by the industry, we discuss the manner in whicha given contemporary film score recycles certain themes derived fromanother culture, and how its politics of performance fits into an earlier cin-ematic period that is depicted as forgotten or passe. I will suggest that inGlass s thought there is an ambiguous longing for the past via early cinemasand oral cultures' concept of performance. At work in Glasss film music isan aesthetics that recuperates and updates principles from oral cultures,and he uses his film music to resuscitate the lost tradition of live film musicin the movie theatre. Drawing on Indian and African cultures, Glass writesfilm music that is meant to be played before an audience who is watchingthe trilogy. By the same token, Glass s politics of performance focuses onthe desire to present an immediate artistic experience. How should the desirefor immediacy be received in the mediated world of the film industry?

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From oral to digital cultures, from early cinema to digital cinema, thetrilogy and its music strike a chord that is best understood by analyzingthe temporal and cultural loops that Glass and Reggio use to destabilizeour understanding of traditional film music and cinema. The followingcritical perspective thus proposes a theorisation of cinema and film musicthat focuses on specific features that relate to previous film styles or mediaaesthetics in order to reveal recycling manoeuvres that greatly enhance ourcommon understanding of film music.4

Glass's Music Aesthetics: The Indian Influence

After graduating from the University of Chicago where he studied philoso-phy and mathematics, Glass moved on to study music at the prestigiousJuilliard School. Then he went to Paris to study composition with NadiaBoulanger where he was given a stern and disciplined musical re-education.It was in France that Glass would begin experimenting with the musicalprinciples that were to be defined as 'minimalist5, which generate an unde-niable (positive or negative) emotional impact on a variety of listeners.5

Dissatisfied with the Parisian musical landscape that favoured serialistmusic like that of Pierre Boulez and his followers, Glass found the musicalroots that he had been searching for years when he got to work with RaviShankar, the Indian sitar player. His collaboration with Shankar led Glassto redefine what he wanted to achieve as a composer. Asked to transcribeShankar s Chappaqua film score in Western notation, Glass 'learned theprinciples of Indian rhythmic structure, or tala, in which rhythmic cyclesare built up by addition of different numbers of a small rhythmic unit'Gann (1997: 203).

At the heart of Glass's re-evaluation of Western musics concept of timelies the critique of its strict, linear experience that is neither related to spacenor rhythm. Indeed, as Glass has commented himself: 'What came to me asa revelation was the use of rhythm in developing an overall structure inmusic' Glass (1987:17). The revelation Glass discusses in his book is linkedto a fundamental difference between Western use of time and Eastern useof space and rhythm and their potential combination. Glass explains thedifference: In Western music we divide time - as if you were to take a lengthof time and slice it the way you slice a loaf of bread. In Indian music... youtake small units, or 'beats', and string them together to make up larger timevalues' Glass (1987: 17). This music aesthetic, which rests on addition andrepetition, would have a tremendous impact on Glass and appears as earlyas 1965 in his music for Samuel Beckett's Play.


Glass's Film Music for Reggie's QatsiTrilogy: The Hopi Language

Whereas Glass learned from Shankar the principles of Indian composition,he did not learn musical precepts from the Hopi. However, what Glass seemsto have grasped from the Hopi comes from their concept of language, aconcept that relates to Glass's understanding of time, space, and rhythm.This knowledge was then translated into musical language.

Reggio has pointed out how he felt that the English language could notdescribe the world in which we live anymore. His recourse to a languagedeprived of cultural baggage attached to it, that is, for most spectators,was taken up by Glass who used it to open two films with voices that chantkoyaanisqatsi and naqoyqatsi. In fact, Glass studied the speech patternsof the Hopi language, and he even sent tapes to the Hopi in New Mexicoin order to check if the musical settings were understandable by a nativespeaker.6

One linguist who studied the Hopi language is Benjamin Lee Whorf.In his important study of the Hopi language, Whorf notes how writing hascontributed to our perception of language as being temporal. He arguesthat language, in a culture with no knowledge or extensive incorporation ofwriting, is conceptually different from ours. Indeed, he claims that timewould be represented differently, commenting on the meaning of time inthe Hopi language: 'Instead of our linguistically promoted objectificationof that datum of consciousness we call "time", the Hopi language has notlaid down any pattern that would cloak the subjective "becoming later" thatis the essence of time' (1950: 159). Furthermore, Whorf remarks that Hopiverbs do not have tenses; they have Validity-forms ("assertions"), aspects,and clause-linkage forms ("modes")...' (1950: 161). According to Whorf,the Hopi language would have a dimensionless concept of time: 'Hopi maybe called a timeless language' (1950: 162). The linguist adds that psycholo-gical time is considered, but a time-based physics would be impossible forthe Hopi Indians. Finally, he concludes that one languages concepts of timeand matter are not given but 'depend upon the nature of the language orlanguages through the use of which they have been developed' Whorf(1950: 164). Whereas we have time, says Whorf, the Hopi have duration.

It is in this concept of duration that Glass's music aesthetics and the Hopilanguage come together. Glass's artistic agenda echoes Whorf s assertionswhen the linguist states that the Hopi's duration 'is conceived as like aspace of strictly limited dimensions, or sometimes as like a motion uponsuch a space, and employed as an intellectual tool accordingly' (1950:164).

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As Glass's music is derived from an aesthetics based on principles of repeti-tion and addition, the Hopi language similarly privileges 'persistence andconstant insistent repetition' Whorf (1950:169). Time seems out of joint inGlass s music because it favours a concept of time that is not 'regular', forA sense of the cumulative value of innumerable small momenta is dulledby an objectified, spatialized view of time like ours' Whorf (1950: 169).Whence the primordial place that accumulation and acceleration occupyin Hopi thought and in Glass's music aesthetics.

At the heart of any analysis of Glass's film music for Reggio's trilogymust lie the acknowledgement of the two matrices that fuel the scores: theIndian principles that Glass learned from Shankar and the less explicitunderstanding of the concept of time, as is understood in an oral culturelike the Hopi s, that is, as duration rather than time. Glass's joining togetherof these two influences allows him to speak to the images in a manner thatis culturally inflected. The music that Glass writes for the Qatsi trilogyemphasizes temporal, repetitive, and rhythmic modes of address andreveals a fundamental awareness of the cultural and philosophical issuescentral to the Hopi world picture.

Of course, Glass's music aesthetics cannot be separated from a politicsof performance, for which the composer revisits another tradition that isin tune with his music aesthetics. As we shall see, it is imperative to look athow film music was played live in early cinema to make sense of Glass'sartistic trajectory, but it is also crucial to link Glass's aesthetics to a concep-tion of performance art that relates to the aesthetic principles on which hebases his work. Moreover, while concepts from contemporary performancetheory may be helpful to understand Glass's artistic orientation, we shouldalso bear in mind the manner in which the composer recycles influencesin his work, that is, we should pay attention to the concept of performer incultures of orality.

One scholar who has devoted several studies to the question of perfor-mance in oral cultures is medievalist Paul Zumthor. Even though Zumthor sinsights relate mostly to oral poetry, he nevertheless makes commentsthat are pertinent for understanding a music performance that largelydraws on principles from oral cultures. The mnemonic practices character-istic of oral cultures link voice, memory, and repetition to performance.As Zumthor reminds us in a way that relates to Glass:

Some disrupted cultures based their notion of the world on repetitionand parallelism so that their stories and their oral poetry 'were


inscribed' in the fleeting nature of the voice: for example, the Hopiand the Zuni Indians in the southwestern United States . . . Zumthor(1990: 112-113).

The fragile nature of the poets voice is supplemented by the concept ofan open text' that the singer can refashion continuously. Echoing the wayin which Glass wants his compositions to be reworked over numerousperformances, Zumthor comments: '[The poet] enjoys the freedom of con-stantly reworking his text, as demonstrated in multiple renditions of songs'Zumthor (1990: 98). Glass's film scores for Reggios trilogy and their liveperformances relate to these cultural practices in the manner in which theyadopt the concept of live performance as an event that displays variousmodes of emergence.

Film Music and Early Cinema

We sometimes forget that the so-called silent film offered the spectator livemusic played by a pianist or an orchestra. Mood music at its beginnings,film music would eventually occupy a more important role and evoke morecomplex feelings in the spectator. Andre Gaudreault has pointed out howlive music gave the spectator s experience a strong element of directnessand uncertainty, making it completely different from the experience whichcame to dominate the consumption of recorded images and sounds afterthe "talking revolution"' Gaudreault (1990: 274). It is therefore importantto focus on the manner in which film music developed in early cinema,and how Glass critically positions himself vis-a-vis this tradition.

Early cinema presented the spectator not only with uncanny movingimages but also with music played by musicians who were in the orchestrapit. Invisible to the audience, the players would synchronize their notes tothe images shown on screen. We could surmize that early film music wantedto hide its production, to give an immediate audio-visual experience byhiding its origins. Claudia Gorbman summarizes the different hypotheseson the origins of early film music:

The art-historical approach links film music with dramatic traditions(and 'arts of movement*) using incidental music. Pragmatists pointto musics effectiveness in neutralizing the new mediums projectornoise. Aestheticians insist on the way music qua rhythm motivated thevisual and narrative rhythms of the silent screen. Gorbman. (1987: 40)

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Whatever is the answer to the origins of film music, its beginning is never-theless imbued with the desire to propose an unmediated film experience,a pleasure that would be natural and free of distractions.

Today the usual film experience in a movie theatre does not feature a liveorchestra to accompany the images on screen. However, the role of musicin the development of cinema should not be underestimated. Cinema, asa young art form in the late 1890s and early 1900s, used music as a steppingstone to become the most important art form ever since. As Norman Kingnotes: 'Cinema, in its ambition to become the Art Form of the TwentiethCentury and in its attempts to distance itself from the novelistic, sawmusic as a founding instance' King (1984:4). Moreover, King adds that it ismusic that allowed a director like Eisenstein to elaborate his concept ofrhythmic montage.7 As we can see, in its early phase film music was nota simple artifice and did not have an accessory role in the institutionalisa-tion of cinema. How intriguing to note that a contemporary director likeReggio uses music in a way that recalls the cinema of the 1920s.

Early Cinema and Glass's Live Performances

Along with the discussion of early film music, it should be underscoredhere that the first films did not present the viewer with the type of narra-tion that post-1907 films would. As the French musician and film scholarMichel Chion mentions, the films of Melies and the Lumiere brothers weretrick films and actuality shorts that were presented in popular venues, andthey had nothing to do with our contemporary movie theatres.8 Spectatorscould stand up, talk, whistle or smoke during the presentation of the film.Film musics soothing effect would grasp the attention of the spectators.

In a seminal essay, Tom Gunning argues that early cinema (1895-1906)was a cinema of attractions. By 'attractions' Gunning means that earlycinema deprived the viewer of story lines as we know them today, and heargues that the apparatus and the images were meant to astonish by them-selves. Gunning summarizes his theory: 'the cinema of attractions directlysolicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasurethrough an exciting spectacle ...' Gunning (1990: 58)

The Qatsi trilogy offers its own spectacle that shares a few characteristicswith early cinema.9 Three of the main features of Reggios Qatsi trilogy arethat the films do not offer a specific story line; they do not use actors; andmusic plays a central role. It seems that these films have nothing in com-mon with current blockbusters. Why are they successful then? What do


they have to offer that other films do not? Gunnings redefinition of the roleof the spectator might be helpful here. Even though he writes in the contextof pre-1906 cinema, it seems that the spectator who watches one of Reggio'sfilms revels in the spectacle of the images and is immersed in the musicalenvironment of Glass's beautiful scores. This spectator does not get involvewith plot or immediate meaning; she wants to experience the films.

The centrality of the spectator cannot be denied or underestimated if weare to situate Glass's politics of performance. In numerous interviews Glasshas commented that his understanding of music centers around live per-formance,10 the concept of performance being at the heart of the music hewrites. The priority Glass unwittingly places on live performance, when putin the context of film music, reminds us of the first music that was heardin movie theatres. Although it was not continuous music at the time, musi-cians did sit in the orchestra pit ready to play at given moments. Early cin-ema provided the spectator with live music, and, almost a century later,Glass and the Glass Ensemble revisit this early cinematic convention. Howare we to explain such a musical enterprise?

Searching for investors to produce the third film of the trilogy, Glass hasmentioned how he had the idea of performing the score of the first twofilms while the audience would be watching Reggios images. Glass hadheard of live music for the showing of Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927), and itgave him the idea that playing the film score in front of an audience watch-ing the film could result in financial success. Commenting on the Napoleonproject, Glass says:

'It was immense! I saw immediately that the live music heightenedthe impact of the images. I also realized that this was a phenomenonfrom the silent film days that we've lost track of. ... we've let thatspecial dimension that live music provides get away.' Merrell Berg.(1996: 142-43)

Glass seems concerned with the fact that, according to him, film musicis immutable, whereas live music allows moments of improvisation andrenewed interpretation: cSo, in film music there's virtually no opportunityto be an interpretative artist. But on our tour with Koyaanisqatsi, changes,as I mentioned, are taking place in the score' Merrell Berg (1996: 145).Glass's reflections highlight the way in which he envisions himself as a filmmusic composer and performer in the tradition of early cinema, a traditionthat he revisits with the Glass Ensemble in live performance. Moreover,Glass expresses the wish that every performance be somewhat new or unique,

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extending his grip on compositions that he wants to keep evolving andcontesting the assumptions of modern cinema spectators who 'know thatin principle the performance to which they are exposed is immutable fromone showing to the next' Gaudreault (1990: 274).

Live Music and the Will to Immediacy

Live music and the presence of an orchestra in the movie theatre offeredearly cinema spectators what most of us will never experience. While wecan hear the music for a film when we listen to the soundtrack or whenwe watch this film at home, Glass and his Ensemble went back to the tradi-tion of live film music and revived a practice that was thought to be a thingof the past. It is undeniable that live film music offers a different viewingexperience from the one that features pre-recorded music. As NormanKing has argued in his discussion of sound in early cinema: 'Essentially, it[live sound] produced effects in the cinema that recorded sound could not,a sense of immediacy and participation. Live sound actualized the imageand, merging with it, emphasized the presentness of the performance andof the audience' King (1984:15). Glass's understanding of film music relatesto early cinema in the sense that he pictures the soundtrack as somethingthat does not have to be recorded and crystallized in time. His desire tocontinue to present the film music for the Qatsi trilogy in a live environ-ment testifies to this aspect of his music aesthetics.

However, Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler s warnings as to the filmindustry's ideological will to immediacy remain pertinent to analyse Glassand Reggio's own desire for an organic film experience.11 In their path-breaking study of film music,12 Adorno and Eisler claim that the promotionof an immediate film experience is meant to hide the industry's ideological,commercial, and technological components. Interestingly, Glass has empha-sized that, as in the case of Eisenstein and Prokofiev, the coming togetherof music and film is an organic experience that provides us with the fulland immediate presence of the authentic film experience.

Performance theorist Philip Auslander has contested the will to imme-diacy found in contemporary performance art. Discussing the case of livemusic, Auslander deconstructs the myth of immediacy and reminds us thatwhat we want to hear in a live performance is what we hear when listeningto an album, that is, we expect the live reproduction of pre-recordedmusic.13 In such a case, what is the original performance? The one in therecording studio or the one in a live environment? Similarly, what is theoriginal music for the Qatsi trilogy: the one, pre-recorded, that one hears


when watching the film for the first time in the movie theatre, or the livemusic that corresponds to the soundtrack re-played by musicians in a livecontext? As Auslander argues: In such cases, the traditional privilegingof the "original", "live" performance over its "adaptations" is reversed andundermined: the recorded performance has become the referent of the liveone' (1989: 128). What Auslander seems to be implying is that there is nooriginal performance or authentic rendering of a music that has beenarchived at some point. Finally, the cultural logic that embraces recordingsand live performances would ultimately force us to buy, to borrow fromAuslander, 'the performers persona Auslander (1989: 128).

Isn't Glass's desire to revive the lost tradition of live film music imbuedwith the myth of immediate presence and the cult of the performer?Ultimately, doesn't this attitude contribute to deify the performer's presenceand to promote an impossible reciprocity between 'a performer and anaudience that perceives the performer's presence primarily as a reminderof his absence'? Auslander (1989: 131).

The will to immediacy is not a recent discovery in the field of film musictheory. Adorno and Eisler warned us of its effects several decades ago.However, are we facing a revival of this desire in Glass's live performancesof the scores for the Qatsi trilogy? Along with the recycling of materialsfrom other cultures that would demand its own particular analysis in thecontext of films and music scores made by two Americans' often unques-tioned appropriation of the American Indian tradition, what are the ideo-logical underpinnings of such an artistic enterprise like the Qatsi trilogyand its film scores?

These are not easy questions to answer. In the meantime, one critic hascommented that 'Glass may well be the Rossini of his century, a composerwhose works had an eclectic impact on the masses but only a portion ofwhose music seemed worthy of study by intellectuals' Gann (1997: 206).Let us hope that more researchers will contribute pieces to Glass scholar-ship that will prove the last quotation wrong, and they will show how Glass'sfilm music in particular is a fascinating and rewarding object of study fromseveral critical points of view.14

Notes

1. The Hopi are a Native American nation living in the south-western region of theUnited States.

2. Naqoyqatsi has to be distinguished from the other films of the trilogy on the basisthat most of the film footage was digitally manipulated. This film, produced using digital

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tools, is a commentary on digital culture and the cult of the computer. Reggio has com-mented that his films emhrace the contradiction of criticizing technology while using it.

3. In this chapter my interpretation of Glass's film music for the trilogy concerns liveperformances of the scores while spectators are watching the films. For other interpretationsof Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi, see Gynthia Ramsey, 'Koyaanisqatsi: Godfrey Reggiosfilmic definition of the Hopi concept of "life out of balance'", in Douglas Fowler (ed.), TheKingdom of Dreams in Literature and Film: Selected Papers from the Tenth Annual FloridaState University Conference on Literature and Film. Tallahassee, FL: University Presses ofFlorida, 1986, pp. 62-78 and Michael Dempsey, 'Quatsi means life: the films of GodfreyReggio', Film Quarterly, 42.3 (1989), 2-12.

4. The present study subscribes to the arguments advanced by James Tobias in 'Cinema,scored: toward a comparative methodology for music in media, Film Quarterly, 57.2 (2004),26-36, where he argues for an expanded study of music in film and media in which the pre-dominance of the composers score gives way to the intermedial and performative elementsthat form a cultural, technological, and affective phenomenon such as film music. Tobiassums up the problem with dominant film music interpretations: 'Musicological metho-dology cannot adequately account for discursive questions of cultural status or audiencerecognition; explicit or implicit exclusions of musical styles and performers; interplaybetween music, sound effects, and dialogue; interplay between soundtrack, visual composi-tion, editing, staging, or actors' gestures and choreography' (28). He focuses on the films RunLola Run, Music in the Air, and Time Code to exemplify his claims. For a study of Time Codethat uses the concept of performance differently, see Bruno Lessard, 'Digital technologiesand the poetics of performance' in Nicholas Rombes (ed.), New Punk Cinema. Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press, 2005, pp. 102-12.

5. First used by Michael Nyman, the term 'minimalism', refers primarily to composerssuch as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. Nyman claims that min-imalist music 'not only cuts down on the area of sound-activity to an absolute (and absolutist)minimum, but submits the scrupulously selective, mainly tonal, material to mostly repeti-tive, highly disciplined procedures which are focused with an extremely fine definition ...'Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (2nd edn). Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1999, p. 139. For accounts of Glass's years of apprenticeship, see PhilipGlass, Music by Philip Glass. New York: Harper & Row, 1987, pp. 3-24 and K. RobertSchwartz, Minimalists. London: Phaidon, 1996, pp. 108-28.

6. Charles Merrel Berg, 'Philip Glass on composing for film and other forms: the case ofKoyaanisqatsi', in Richard Kostelanetz (ed.), Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism.Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999, p. 139.

7. See Sergei Eisenstein, 'Form and content: practice', in The Film Sense. New York:Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975, pp. 157-216. For two diverging interpretations of Eisen-stein's concept of rhythmic montage, see Roy M. Prendergast, Film Music: A Neglected Art.New York: W.W. Norton, 1992, pp. 223-6 and Russell S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones:Reading Film Music. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994, pp. 134-47.

8. Michel Chion's two important studies of the role of music in cinema are Un ArtSonore, le Cinema: Histoire, Esthetique, Poetique. Paris: Cahiers du Cinema, 2003 and La


Musique au Cinema. Paris: Fayard, 1995. Chion is known for his musique concrete andtheoretical writings on the subject. His writings on cinema concern the often forgotten roleof sound. For a more historical approach to sound in cinema, see Rick Altman, Silent FilmSound. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

9. In Naqoyqatsi two direct allusions to early cinema can be perceived: the first con-cerns one of the fathers of cinema, Eadward Muybridge, and his experiments in zoopraxiscopy,and the second seems a digital rendering of Edwin S. Porters Great Train Robbery (1906),which opens and closes with the famous shot of an outlaw who fires at the spectator.

10. Tve always thought of my music as concert music.' Allan Kozinn, 'The touring com-poser as keyboardist', in Richard Kostelanetz (ed.), Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews,Criticism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999, p. 103.

11. cWe [Glass and Reggio] were using the film in a formative environmental dynamicrelationship. And a composer who enters into a dynamic relationship with the material andthe director has the possibility of creating an organic film/image experience.' David Morgan,'Life in transformation: Philip Glass on Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi', in David Morgan(ed.), Knowing the Score: Film Composers Talk about the Art, Craft, Blood, Sweat, and Tearsof Writing for Cinema. New York: HarperEntertainment, 2000, p. 152.

12. Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Komposition fur den Film. Hamburg: Europa-ische Verlagsanstalt, 1996. For a thorough account of the theories exposed in their study, seePhilip Rosen, Adorno and film music: theoretical notes on Composing for the Films', YaleFrench Studies, 60 (1980), 157-82.

13. For the elaborate version of Auslanders deconstructionist reading of immediacy,performance, and recorded music, see his Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture.New York: Routledge, 1999, pp. 61-111.

14. For a recent example of work that focuses on various cultural and cinematicmarkers to contextualize Glass's music, see Michael LeBlanc, 'Melancholic arrangementsmusic, queer melodrama, and the seeds of transformation in The Hours', Camera Obscura,61.1 (2006), 104-45.

32John Barry

007 and Counting: An Assessment of John Barry's SoundtrackWork on the Eon/James Bond Series from 1962 to 1969

Van Norris

Robert Bresson famously ruminated that: 'A sound always invokes an image,an image never invokes a sound'1 Perhaps an almost impossible theorem toprove empirically but one that surely can be brought to question here whenone considers the indelible mark made on our shared cultural memoryby the musical contribution of John Barry. The unique marriage of visualsignifiers, of guns, cars, spectacular action, far-off locations and exoticwomen now forever associated with the Eon/James Bond series seems toalso suggest to the viewer an instantly recognizable and very specific set oforchestral sounds and arrangement ideas. This is a potent fusion of soundand image that has inspired a continual stream of parodies, spin-offs andsub-genres. Indeed to most filmgoers the walls of strings, the counterresponsive percussive horn stabs, the heightened sense of drama, the blendof bombast and kitsch which can be found in most Barry/Bond themesongs simply encapsulates the entire 'Bond Phenomenon. Even seeminglydisparate pieces such as the primal-yet-seductive roar, of Goldfinger (1964)to, say, the pulsing synthesizer-driven instrumental theme to On HerMajesty's Secret Service (1969), appear forever inter-linked with imagesof gloss, location, style and glamour. Both are tied to recollections of thesignature action set pieces that define each film and are very much defini-tive of the filmic 'Bond' as we understand it.

505


Yet still it is notable as arrangements in themselves, they encompassa deceptively broad tonal range. While now embedded within our collec-tive cinematic memory, these soundtracks, which often work in deliberatecollusion with the other formal elements, are often felt to be merely func-tional at best. Signature music cues such as 'Gassing the Gangsters' and 'TheGolden Girl' (from Goldfinger), the pre-credit 'Chateau Fight' (from 1965 sThunderball) all display that characteristically dichotomized Bondianstraddle between parody and gravitas. We can now all recall that distinctivefuneral-paced, sombre, grim, melancholic sound so often rendered simplyby the careful orchestration and juxtaposition of two layered chords.A simple musical choice that now perfectly epitomizes the cool distanceand intensity commonly associated with the definitive Connery/Young/Hamilton incarnations of the 'James Bond' screen persona. It can be furtherargued that Barry's musical flourishes have now also (along with estab-lished series elements like Peter Hunt's editing to Ken Adams's set design toMaurice Binder's title montages) become something of a 'fixed' prerequisitefor moviegoers.

Rarely in modern cinema has the concept of 'theme', 'incidental music'and 'image' been so completely and totally inter-linked. Perhaps we canonly point to the likes of Ennio Morricone's work on Leone's SpaghettiWestern cycle or Bernard Herrman's iconic string arpeggios for Hitchcockfilms such as Psycho (1960), which have crossed so indelibly over intomainstream perceptions. For us the soundtrack music itself now acts as akind of cultural 'freeze-frame'. It can be argued that Bond scores between1962 and 1969, (and as filtered through our own personalized cinematicrefractions of that time) almost seem to embody the changes within societybrought about by sexual liberation, consumerism, fashion and music. Barry'scompositional practices are now indelibly associated with specific confer-ences towards 'style', a wholly singular kind of 'spectacle' and the very parti-cular idealized and undoubtedly masculinized fantasy world. As JeffreyRichards states in the introduction to James Chapman's License to Thrill:A Cultural History of the James Bond Films, this is a unique cinematicresponsibility-free, fantasy world of possibilities and one defined by: 'anunbeatable blend of conspicuous consumption, brand-name snobbery,technological gadgetry, colour supplement chic, exotic locations and comic-strip sex and violence'.2

It is the period from Dr. No, and up to and including On Her Majesty'sSecret Service, where we can see the template being forged as to whatcomprises an acceptable Bond score. While the second 007 movie (the 1963film From Russia With Love and Barry's first credited score), is where the

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musical formula coalesces it is the latter piece where the franchise movesinto a notable 'super-reflexivity'. And it is at this juncture where the musicitself becomes palpably as important an aspect of the series as the maincharacter itself. As Barry summarizes a point where we are now: 'Bondianbeyond Bondian.3

Royal S. Brown stated casually in his 1995 book Overtures and Under-tones - Reading Film Music that James Bond soundtrack music exhibits,*a certain kind of genius that cannot be judged by concert hall standards'In his assessment he consigns and simultaneously confines this highlyinfluential body of work to that as merely a 'musico-dramatic solution*.4

Now this is a point that the composer has also been happy to corroborate,by openly downplaying the significance of this collection of scores through-out his career. This offers, (a perhaps problematic), hypothesis that 'Bondmusic' has little perceived worth when removed from its cinematic context,certainly when framing this particular oeuvre against formal musical/classical settings and expectations. This being a common judgement oftenoffered towards film music. However in recent years this form has mutatedinto something of a unique cultural product. Today it is enjoyed and con-sumed within markedly different settings away from the expectations thatsurround the concert halF and indeed has found a kind of life away fromthe films themselves. This can arguably be informed by any number offactors that have arisen in recent years, from the transformation of thelistening pleasures attached to the soundtrack, to the dissolution of popularmusic categories into forms away from fixed taste hierarchies, receptionand placement, as part of a generational memory and to simply encapsulat-ing a particular cultural moment.5

'Bond' music can be considered within a multitude of readings. On onelevel the work can be seen as a purely mechanical device that serves anappropriate mimetic cinematic function. Also it can be allied to a consciousprogressive impulse built around explorations of minimalism, a movementsequestered within modernist practices. Yet conversely, within its ironicand highly reflexive combinations of musical idioms this music can nowseen as an exemplar of a post/late/high modern mode of address. Barry'sBond work has, in many ways, become the perfect artefact to reflect theseshifts as arbiters towards the accepted 'incredulity towards metanarratives'that defines the late-twentieth-century/early-twenty-first-century conditionand an index of how conceptions of taste are determined and assessed.6

At this point a breakdown of the interaction with post-war consumeristculture forms would take up too much valuable wordage, but there is anargument to be made that Bond music in itself is entirely tied into the


global' and the 'availability* of 'product' in this post-industrial age.7 Thiselevated position has mainly been aided by its curious 'insider/outsider'status. This circling of accepted understandings of critical and artisticcredibility' has served the work in maintaining its longevity. As currentBond film composer/arranger David Arnold asserts: '(These records) justfailed to recognize anything that was going on around them. They existedin their own little universe. They make no attempt at being contemporary.And the advantage to doing that is you keep one step ahead of beingunfashionable, because you were never fashionable in the first place'.8 Invery glib terms perhaps that in never being quite in the music itself is neverquite out.

Signature, Form and Expectation

Such is the overwhelming singularity of Barry's music that his successor,Arnold, has openly admitted to being trapped in something of a creativecul-de-sac. He has expressed on a number of occasions that he is oftencaught between treading a set of fine lines between parody, pastiche, con-tinuation, tradition, innovation as well as simply trying to do his job inproviding serviceable incidental music. So fixed are the expectations thatsurround the series that if we accept that the Bond oeuvre in itself iscomposed of disparate filmic elements rather than the product of just one'author', one creative intelligence that offers a unique signature or transmitsmeaning, then Barry's role in this fragmented authorship model has tobe paramount. This over time has of course created a problem for thefilmmakers. Barry is the architect of the Bond 'sound'. When he is unable(or unwilling) to supply a score for a Bond film, the results for the viewerhave presented something of an unwelcome disruption in perceptions ofthe on-screen 'brand' identity. This 'breakage' can create a jarring effect thatcan undermine a Bond film's overall identity, and in a series so dependenton maintaining a perceived canon and set of rigid cinematic anticipationsthis creates an interesting tension. Beatles' producer George Martin's intro-duction of MOR rock and cod-reggae forms into Live and Let Die (1973),Marvin Hamlisch's very contemporized Broadway and disco-influencedbackgrounds for 1977s The Spy Who Loved Me, Bill Conti's fusion ofup-tempo jazz and break-beats for For Your Eyes Only (1981) and also EricSerra's Euro-funk influences for Goldeneye (1995) have all been deemedcritically 'inferior' and have suffered by comparison. All are serviceable,if often unremarkable, action/adventure scores. Yet each score is balancedagainst and with a number of requisite perceivable Bondian elements.

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There remains in each of these separate attempts to service the legacy witha mandatory sense of rhythm and urgency, fused with implementations ofthe now-trademark Barryesque muted horn punches, string washes, etc.And it seems that, in these examples, what contributes to the dilution ofthese scores, and what implicitly renders them 'faux', is the incorporationof contemporary elements - meaning that Bond music is most efficient byremaining within (in musical/arrangement terms certainly) a self-contained,non-temporally specific world. This conception of scoring is thus tied for-ever to the 1960s and is fused to a cinematic instant or period, one that isnotably undermined by any sonic innovation. In a very literal sense itappears that anything sounding 'post-1969' often suggests a subconsciousmessage of a 'lack', a missing element of authenticity', to the listener. Anynew aural breakthrough on a Bond soundtrack reminds us that this issomehow not the genuine item but a merely a refraction of the original.This is indeed a noticeable irony in that the ethos of advancement sitscentral to Barry's entire original musical project. This certainly makes theplaying of the now-iconic 'James Bond Theme' on synthesizer, in the open-ing 'gunbarrel' sequence of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, a more signi-ficant dual act of progression and rebellion. The film acts not only as asignpost to the actual end' of the 1960s (and of the first phase of the seriesitself) but also heralds the beginning of the 'super-reflexive' films of the1970s.9 Indeed, by the time of the release of OHMSS, Barry, along withthe filmmakers Broccoli, Saltzman and series-editor-turned-director, PeterHunt, all felt that his music was perhaps one of the most consistent andidentifiable components of the franchise, now thrown into disarray by thedeparture of star Sean Connery after five successful films. It is notable thatby this point the music has become more of an essential cinematic compo-nent than the leading performer.10

Barry's music goes some way to reinforcing a sense of cohesion withinthe Bond series that supersedes the rather erratic onscreen narrative conti-nuity. It's this recurrent organizational strategy that not only aids the com-position of music quickly and functionally but also it goes some way to sealthe film cycle in its own filmic universe. This is a 'removed' milieu with onefoot placed in a deliberately staged fantasy/politico 'reality', and this on-screen continuum is one that remains temporally explicit in terms of trendsand design styles; but, as stated, is also one that appears somehow strangely'apart' from the contemporary. The 007 series itself developed a pronouncedemphasis on modernism, progression, travel, a new international classlessconsumerist identity and a certain kind of empty sophistication.11 Thus herelay a fertile territory for a pared down, innovative approach to soundtrack


instrumentation. This is an approach that reflected Barrys embrace ofHollywood Romantic forms as combined with his own jazz and rock androll background. Stephen Woolston argues that this, in many ways, presentshim as an ideal candidate in the role of composer for the Bond series in hisrespect for the old forms colluding with a willingness to push extant bound-aries. As he confirms: 'John Barry had a perfect European sensibility suitedto these films. He was the English Nino Rota, not the English (Miklos)Rosza'.12

This approach and the actual choice of having Barry as composer for theEon film series also symbolizes entirely the progressive class trajectoriesthat are now commonly associated with most analyses of the 1960s. As hismusical collaborator Adam Faith states on Barry: 'He wasn't a frightenedinsecure, working-class lad, he had an intellect that most of those guysdidn't have'.13 And indeed his ambiguous 'have-itrall' public persona, whichsaw him central to London 'Swinging Sixties' culture, very convenientlylinked him to the more transatlantic, classless conception of the film'scentral character. A key transformative element vital to the series successwas that in these narratives 007 was a coarser, more aspirational model ofmasculinity: a more brutal, less class-specific creation. In this filmic con-text, there is a move away from Flemings somewhat 1950s-bound authori-tarian, literary template; yet, one that producers Albert R. Broccoli andHarry Saltzman felt instinctively could transmit to a broader transatlanticdemographic. Thus Barrys soundtrack music here also aids this process oftransmutation and enables a convergence with a more expansive contem-porary cultural attitude. Barrys efforts conveniently function formally asthe perfect device to confer aspects of the Bond lifestyle to a mass audienceperhaps probably only familiar with the minutiae of Fleming's hermeticuniverse in a very surface fashion. In a musical sense the cues act as a curi-ous kind of ironic 'quotation', as an 'approximation, a 'bluffers' impression ofaural sophistication.14

In musical terms undoubtedly what Barry brought to the series was arange of arrangement innovations. Such as the signature percussive hornstabs and the chordal washes of blocked minor and major sevenths andninths string parts, all of which are underpinned by liberal minimal place-ment of sparse and direct single note French horn lines. Woolston alsoposits that there exists throughout his work, '(The) usage of long duetlines, the interplay of two melodies' (a stylistic choice featured heavily inthe instrumental theme to OHMSS, for example).15 Along with these trade-marks, the high strings and the aforementioned percussive and penetrativehorns are all, more often than not, set within Barrys favoured F-major key.16

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Other vital components of this distinctive aural lexicon include the place-ment of heavily reverbed electric guitar parts into symphonic settings,arranged in alliance with syncopated drum and percussion rhythms.

The key signifier for the series arrived in 1962 with the 1-min 45-s JamesBond Theme, prefaced by primitive electronica and played beneath MauriceBinder's abstract opening credits for Dr. No. This now-iconic piece of musicis, when played behind a set of images, one that takes the narrative to a dif-ferent experiential level. Even its deployment as a musical device offerssomething of a revolutionary breakage within filmic scoring traditions. Asnoted by Chapman, the theme often is introduced throughout the seriesat seemingly unusual and inappropriate moments such as 'walking acrossan airport concourse or prowling around a hotel room'.17 It is (apart fromthe counter-theme, 007), the only recurrent motif that runs through theentire series. Whenever it appears it inhabits a unique aural space thatsomehow sits 'apart' from the rest of the specifically designed mimeticcues.18 As the series progresses through the 1960s and into the 1970s thetheme begins to act as a marker towards a sense of weight* and as a percep-tion of a 'history' It implies a timelessness and temporal fluidity. This notonly typifies the franchise but the themes re-appearance at any point worksto snap the viewer back to the 1960s, a move which curiously counteracts,complements and normalizes whatever vaguely-topical, fantastical plotconceit or narrative rupture is loaded onto the film. It reminds us always ofthat 'moment of originality' In this particular usage it thus reinforces to theviewer subconsciously of the 'canon' of Bond cinema, as well as maintains'lineage' and feelings of nostalgia and completeness.19

The musical genesis of the 'James Bond Theme' is complex and is reveal-ing in its employment of a hybrid of styles.20 It is, as Walstrom isolates, anamalgam of jazz, big band and rock idioms. The now-unique signaturebrass sound was, as Barry has noted in numerous interviews, absorbedduring his time of studying with Bill Russo, the regular arranger for StanKenton:

They said he had five trumpets, five trombones, and also the low brasssound, a rich low sound. I think the genesis of the Bond sound wasmost certainly that Kenton-esque sharp attack; extreme ranges, topC s and beyond, and on the low end you'd go right down to the low F'sand below, so you'd have a wall of sound.21

Also the now-world-famous ride-cymbal-driven theme tune can be clearlyseen as a direct descendant from Barry's own arrangement, 'Bees Knees'.


This is an instrumental than can be found on his 1961 John Barry Sevenrelease, Stringbeat. And it is based unashamedly on the nearest stylisticequivalent of which Barry could conceive: an incorporation of HenryMancinis 1958 Peter Gunn Theme (along with aspects of Nelson Riddlesbig band sounds). It can also be observed as a crucial part of the embraceof'jazz' forms into the contemporary film soundtrack - an extension of thepractices ushered in by the likes of Elmer Bernstein in scores such as TheMan With the Golden Arm (1955) and here amalgamated with ClassicalHollywood practice of marrying sound to image. It foreshadows the laterBond background music itself and can be seen as embracing the sophisti-cation and complexity of modern jazz. Here the theme gamely mixes thiswith a more urgent, sparse 'rock and roll' aesthetic. This piece also registersthe culmination of Barry's intent throughout his career as a musician/arranger in propagating a composite of disparate musical styles ('We playedjazz, we played rhythm and blues, rock and roll whatever').22 It could alsobe stated that this willingness to crossover 'high' and 'low' music forms alsoacknowledges (be it unconsciously or consciously) the perceptible changeswithin popular late-modern culture and actualizes a cool disregard formodernist ideas on 'category'.

let "em Have It...'"

You just have to hit the audience with the idea that: 'we're in fora good show - We're in for anexciting evening.™

-John Barry

In many ways Barry adheres to well-worn industrial practice and composi-tional expectations in deriving key motifs from a specifically constructedcentral title song or theme. In doing so, this performs a functional role asa melodic lodestone for the range of soundtrack cues that make up theincidental music as well as acting as introduction, summation and 'in-built'commentary. The first example of this very specific device being incorpo-rated into the Eon formula is Lionel Bart's title piece 'From Russia withLove' (as sung by vocalist Matt Monro). Common practice soon dictated,after this point, that the title song would traditionally then follow the ten-to-fifteen minute pre-credit sequence that prefaces all the Bond films from1963 onwards.

The model for their construction was set and defined from the outset,within a fairly consistent template. After this song, the title songs tended tobe the result of collaboration between Barry and an established Broadway

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lyricist; they would be arranged for a full orchestra and designed for a cen-trally featured male or female solo vocal performance. What we now under-stand to be a James Bond theme tune would be very much set within atheatrical/Broadway-style mode of musical presentation. While this wouldbe vaguely 'current' in execution it would always retain a definably Bondianorchestration. As deadlines were often highly restrictive (it was not uncom-mon practice to insist on the entire score for a 2-hour film to be recordedand composed completely within a 6-week turnaround), devising a titletheme is dictated by industrial constraints. This utilitarian approach thusenforced an adherence to understood modes of song construction withina Tin Pan Alley tradition. Barry here would deploy musical frameworksthat still promote accessibility yet would also permit the composer to con-fer the requisite individuality from film to film: 'That structure - two eights,a middle eight or a bridge and a last eight - that's classic song structurefrom the Twenties. Its probably the most successful song writing structurethat anyone's come up with, but its so weird it still doesn't sound that pat'.24

This sense of organization and adhesion to repetitions of convention alsosees the title song serving not just as a descriptive tool, a branding deviceand as a marker of pitch but also as a perfect merchandising and productplacement opportunity. The song's cultural visibility affords each film a lon-gevity, a market identity and valuable capital, as well as aiding continuity.Indeed the most well-known examples from the canon ideally function inthe manner of a cultural hybrid as part folk 'standard' and part advertisingdevice. A side effect of this process is that the pleasures offered in consum-ing and 'enjoying' the title song can be seen as somehow matching thatof watching the film itself. The success of the franchise in maintaining acultural currency is sustained by how each new addition to the catalogueoperates within the context of the franchise: it is in how the alignment ofthe recognized elements is set out within the Barry-defined palate of sounds;and it is how they match and blend with newly inserted aspects by compos-ers and different performers that creates a dual sense of tension and expec-tation for followers of the series. This is a move that re-posits any newfilm, very cannily, back into the legacy of the Eon films. This allows punditsto debate this new model against previous examples. The assignment ofa vocalist (or 'group' - by the time the series reached the 1980s, Duran andA-ha being allied with Barry for the 1985 View to a Kill and the 1987 TheLiving DaylightSy respectively) has become another valued aspect of thispre-release publicity mechanism. This selection process has always beenseen (certainly by Barry) as important as the casting of the actors them-selves in determining the mood of the film and the success of the song.25


The name of the book/film itself within the 1960s movies would initiallyform the spine of the lyrical narrative and would feature, often literalized,within the name and chorus of the song. (In later contemporary modelsthis practice would diminish due to the unwieldy nature of Fleming's lesser-known titles.) And the lyric, curiously, would focus much less on Bondhimself in a direct sense. Custom soon dictated that 007 will be oftenreferred to in an oblique (and sometimes not-so-oblique) fashion as a 'thirdperson. And the songs' Voice' would be cast as a subjective/objective vieweron the films trajectory, along with a requisite projection of Bond s ethos,credo and 'distant' emotional state. The likes of Thunderball and You OnlyLive Twice exemplify this. Male vocalists Matt Monro and Tom Jones wereemployed to sing the themes of From Russia With Love and Thunderballand they in turn bring two very separate sides of a resolutely 'male' address,in terms of vulnerability and machismo. However, it's the introduction offemale vocalists such as Nancy Sinatra and Shirley Bassey that has remaineda fixed determinant from this period onwards. This factor adds connota-tions of fragility and a more clear heterosexual dimension to this construct,countering the bombast of the arrangements and providing a less problem-atic, more mainstream reading of the lyricist du jour's paeans of longingand loss. While these musical tropes begin tentatively within From RussiaWith Love, arguably they are solidified by the 1964 composition, 'Goldfinger'.This can be seen as mirroring the particular attention to structural self-consciousness within the films themselves and where also the elements ofhigh camp and the increasingly parodic tone of the series become overtlyperceptible. As Barry himself qualifies: 'Everything culminated with thatfilm'.26

It is, in a quiet way, remarkable that the song uses the film's main villain,Auric Goldfinger, as the lyrical touch point. The creative and commercialsuccess of this particular narrative device is compounded by the casting ofWelsh/Caribbean singer Shirley Bassey as main vocalist. (Bassey has sincebecome synonymous with the franchise, having sung three title songs,'Goldfinger', 'Diamonds are Forever' and 1979s 'Moonraker' - the onlysinger to reprise this role.) Her exotic blend of passion, sensuality, fragility,conviction and drama, together with an almost Wagnerian swagger, hasbrought to the concept a longevity that the composers could not have pre-dicted. This highly stylized vocal approach provides Leslie Bricusse andAnthony Newley with the creative room to offer deliberately self-consciousand often outrageous couplets such as: 'Goldfinger . . . such a cold finger'with confidence and a sure sense of comedic pitch. This supports the tran-scendence of the form from previously understood registers of 'camp' and

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'kitsch' into a cultural space purely of its own definition. In a very real sense'Goldfinger' has become the benchmark and latterly a challenge for Barry'scontemporary successors. The song achieves a finely balanced blend ofnecessary authenticity, earnestness and intensity along with the requiredbalance of scale and pastiche. And it is in that signature heraldic F to D flattwo-chord juxtaposition, as it crashes onto the soundtrack, that we can seethe precise cinematic moment where Bond becomes Bond, as the trackknowingly punctuates Sean Connerys now-trademark, pithy: 'Shocking.Absolutely shocking'. This undoubtedly dictates the transition from a cred-ible, semi-serious spy/adventure series to an iconic cultural event; and, indoing so, this distortion of the Broadway-based tradition has proven soefficient in its juxtaposing of cod-sophistication and with a histrionic musi-cal sensibility that it has become an integral part of the formula.27

When examining this creatively fertile period it becomes evident thatwhile adhering to a certain sonic consistency the title songs from 1963 to1969 also reflect Barry s ambition as a composer, as well as revealing hisstruggle to locate a tonal variety within such a restrictive blueprint. We canobserve a definable cycle of music composition, each title song discrete,each bearing its own identity while being distilled through a predeterminedgrid of recurrent musical 'tics'. 'Twins' 'Goldfinger' and 'Thunderball' followsimilar lines in employing power and volume, alongside a heightened dra-matic flavour, there is a variance in compositional address; we have, in themore sensual, lush, YOLT (1967) a theme which is notably built around setsof melancholic, highly distinctive, spiralling string lines. Not only does thisconnote the oriental locale of the film, (as of equal importance here as thecentral narrative), but this register is very much dictated by singer NancySinatra's less aggressive delivery and warmth of tone - once more reinforc-ing Barry's concept of 'song casting'. This progressive cycle can be seen asculminating in the more wistful ballad sung by Louis Armstrong, 'We HaveAll the Time in the World', for On Her Majesty's Secret Service. It is thismoment that presents a palpably linear course that charts a shift from'bombast' to 'romance' that closes this period of Bond scoring.28

'Everything Louder than Everything Else'

As stated earlier, and as Woolston has confirmed, the title song is com-pleted before the main score is created, and thus it provides the templatefor the incidental cues (2002); for example, the music that underpins muchof Goldfinger is coloured by motifs derived from those earlier-mentionedopening twin chords. This is a trick that Barry uses and re-uses to maximum


effect through most of his Bond work as much of the incidental musicis cast with an embrace of simple direct melodic lines. It also maintainsa coherent, uniform thematic soundscape to complement set cinematicconventions.

The incidental music cues that form the backbone of the films' musicoperate within a number of perceptual categories. The music follows setscoring principles in functioning as action-mimetic music and in enhanc-ing or matching onscreen 'incident' in very literal ways. It acts as 'romanticmusic' behind love scenes, as an 'establishing theme', as 'setting' music andso forth.29 Although Barry's approach to instrumentation can also be readas a negotiation of a practical problem as much it can any stylistic choice.Much of the score is designed to be heard in collusion (and often strug-gling over), a comprehensive barrage of sound effects that detail Bondianon-screen mayhem: of violence, car chases, helicopter battles and so forth.Thus the reliance of now-signature Barry arrangements for high flutes,piccolos, xylophones and heavy percussion are as much based on conceptsof 'penetration' as they are tonal preferences. This is to fill in the 'top' and'low end' of the available spectrum on the soundtrack; and that can workeffectively in sync rather than clashing with the sound. 'The style was devel-oped out of necessity at what those movies were throwing at me'.30 Asa result, Barry sought to avoid placing instrumentation pitched into the'mid-ranges'. Thus combinations of heavy low-end brass and strings withpenetrating horn and trumpets soon became de rigueur.

The palpable continuity and sense of identity among soundtracks is notjust reinforced by arrangement but can be ascribed to a consistency of soundreproduction through this period. The early soundtracks were all recordedat the Bayswater studios of CTS, an old Masonic Hall. Barry and his trustedpool of session musicians, retained from film to film, made maximumusage of the natural reverbs that arose from the recording room's 'lively'ambience.31 Envisioning the Bond 'sound' was undoubtedly informed bythe developing recording practices emerging throughout the 1960s. IndeedBarry's insistence on having instruments played simultaneously on keyrefrains, such as horns and drums, strings and xylophones and so forth tocreate combined sounds' mirrors many of the analogue multi-track record-ing experiments that were taking place parallel within the pop musicsphere. (Observe this in operation, for example, with the horn/snare drumand high-end strings/percussion combination/mirroring on the aforemen-tioned cue, 'Gassing the Gangsters' and also 'Teasing the Korean' from thesame film.)32 Indeed this sonic perpetuity can be seen as extending to notonly personnel but also as far as securing the same equipment from sessionto session. Barry's guitarist, Vic Flick, the Duane Eddy-style player who's

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bottom end tone so defined the 'James Bond Theme' refrain itself, famouslyonly replaced his regular amplifier as late as 1967, thus maintaining a uni-formity of tone between sessions.33

In his 1960s work, Barry also favours a melodic 'sparseness' and economy.TTiis is informed not only by the simplicity of the melodies but also with aformal engagement with 'repetition' as a device and a pronounced emphasison rhythm. Key areas in which Barry's work can be seen to have notablyreinvigorated mainstream film-scoring practice. Indeed in many ways it canbe possibly conceived (at a stretch) that Barry s music predicts the prizing ofminimalism, of layering sounds and of repetition over successive percussivepatterns that defines much of todays contemporary music production.34

All of the above points can be located to impressive effect in one ofBarry s more memorable cues, the 'Capsule in Space/Space March' themefirst introduced in YOLTs pre-credit sequence. This is a cue that is firstplayed as it accompanies the capture of an American space capsule in orbitabove earth, and it reoccurs throughout the film in a number of differentrelated action-intensive/space or 'spectacle' settings. It is a piece of musicthat perfectly melds the 1960s cinematic/cultural embrace of a chilly tech-nological progress with the anxieties of reaching out into the unknown.In the passages' ascending ominous-yet-majestic, harp arpeggios there is aclever subversion taking place, one that heads off expected representationsof off-world environments. (Such musical signposts, such as the electronicfield generator, the Theremin, had by this point fallen into cinematic parodythrough overuse in any number of B-movies, yet this was a trope derivedfrom initially groundbreaking work produced by Bernard Herrmann inthe early 1950s.)

Barry overturns this cliche by delineating 'space' with musical 'space'.Thus the accompaniment is rendered by the sparse usage of a bass pianoplaced beneath ethereal strings, evoking floating and conflicting associa-tions of agoraphobia and awe. As Barry qualifies in the interview withWoodell in 1992:

It has this same 5 note theme constantly all the way through first withthe strings and then you embellish it to 10 notes and its from trum-pets passed onto the tubas and then it comes back to strings I thinkthat's a real effective piece. I love repetition, there is something aboutit that intrigues me.35

The repetition here is not only relegated to the arrangement but in itsconsistent redeployment within the cues of the film soundtrack itself ina variety of contexts.


The importance of percussion in this setting is paramount as Barry bringsto the action-film soundtrack an insistence on tighter, more insistentrhythms. His influence in this sphere is palpable as it is indeed apparentthat more 'squared' 32 bar structures had (as Donnelly has noted) becomediscernible within modern film scores from a post-1960s Barry.36 WhileWalstrom also offers that Barry's unique approach to timekeeping was usedto inform his music in his application of 'a choppy beguine-like' measure, itis, as Barry himself mitigates in conversation with Michael Schelle, a prac-tice that was simply in service of narrative and one that was informed by,'the intensity level of a scene'. The signature rhythmic 4/4 push soon becamea mechanism that was 'perfect for moving things'.37

As 'location' and 'travel' became vital aspects of the movies' appeal, keyincidental passages tied to 'setting' and environment play great importancewithin the soundtracks themselves. Establishing themes is as important,if not more so, than character-based motifs. Often they can be melodicpassages that are separately constructed and not part of the main theme ofthe film, and frequently they can be adapted to feature behind characters.Indeed the cues that are used to suggest 'underwater' within Thunderball(depicted by harps and flutes and in truth derived, again, from Herrmann)are arguably as important as any character-mot if in the film. The afore-mentioned 'Capsule in Space' is once again typical of this mode that isadapted to detail various moments in YOLT from action to mood. It has tobe said, though, that this use of recurrent themes/cues falls somewhat shortof a full embrace of typical Classical Hollywood practice in this area.

In this context the leitmotif is a contrivance that has been often errone-ously ascribed to Barry.38 Indeed the clue to how he uses repetitious sec-tions is signalled by the notable lack of thematic musical continuity betweenfilms. Barry, it seems, deemed it unnecessary for individual melodic seq-uences to accompany individual recurrent characters such as 'M', 'Q' and'Moneypenny', that may be re-used from film to film. This process wouldideally contribute to a pronounced shift in emphasis onto a network ofidentification and detract from the centre of the each film's narrative, whichtraditionally has to be Bond himself, his protagonist and his designatedfemale partner for the film. This would also offer limits on Barry's optionsas a composer for each specific project and would suggest a more restrictiveconvention of narrative continuity that is at odds with the films. Woolstonisolates that in the implementation of the 'high-end' percussive clatter thataccompanies the onscreen appearance of Oddjob in Goldfinger, we canobserve something that can be (and has been) mistaken as a leitmotif. Heargues that this represents less a specific character-based 'theme' as such

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and more as a recasting of aspects of the main theme song. The effect isnot limited to a literal appearance but often accompanies causal moments,creating what Woolston sees as merely a 'thematic mood for the film?9

Barry's idea here functions less as a traditional operatic device and sitsmore in line with the insistence on recycling existing elements from themain theme. And while this may appear a pronounced feature as the seriesprogresses, in that we can cite the wistful flute patterns that accompany'Tanaka in YOLT and the whimsical reconfigurations of 'We Have All theTime in The World' throughout OHMSS, the usage is inconsistent withestablished convention. Here it is employed as an accompaniment and assimple background colour throughout the films and is often tied more intosignifications of 'setting' and 'atmosphere* than merely character!40

Conclusion

The image of Bond has now, like other, now often ironically referenced,texts such as the Carry On and Hammer film series, has become so removedand divorced from context that all that remains in the consciousness isthe 'sign' or a memory impression. Barry's work is perhaps one of the fewelements of the series that makes that cultural transition into an arenawhere we understand the text without the contextual specifics. Due to suchimmersion within popular culture, the constant replaying of key emblemsand the endless recycling and repackaging thus forces the films themselvesinto the role of a backdrop. They exist as an ongoing background dialogue.The films now seem to exist as a set of free-floating images, concepts andquotable lines that somehow Barrys music has become indelibly inter-meshed with in a way that no one could have foreseen back in 1962. Barry/Bond music now simply connotes 'fantasy'. It precipitates a collective filmicmemory and alludes to a grander universe outside of the films themselves.This is a perception notably encompassed within, (and which one couldargue were uncannily predicted by) the emblematic poster designs ofRobert McGinnis, Frank C. McCarthy and Bob Peak that graced cinemahoardings throughout the 1960s and 1970s. These are artworks that act asperfect summations and idealizations of the films themselves, and thisis perhaps where the true revelation is offered. Indeed when just castingan eye over these familiar images it now seems almost impossible to do sowithout hearing Barrys music playing in our heads. The soundtrack toa place totally embedded within shared memory as one that is defined for-ever by: 'red-hot hues... (as) phallic guns point West... the man in eveningclothes sporting the 'stud-can't-help-it' grin... half-clad, pneumatic lovelies


melting all over him . . . underwater slugfests and marauding choppers .sly suggestive copylines'.41

Notes

1. Cited by N. Burch, The Theory of Film Practice. UK: Focal Press, 1969, p. 90.2. James Chapman, License to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films.

London: I. B. Tauris, 1999, p. 8.3. Cited by E. Fiegel, in John Barry - A Sixties Theme: From James Bond to Midnight

Cowboy. London: Boxtree, 2001, p. 219. Diamonds Are Forever (1971) marked the first ofseveral departures for as a regular contributor and it not only signalled his discontentmentwith the series but also his increasingly fractured relationship with producer HarrySaltzman. Barry's post-1969 work is undoubtedly more 'knowing', much smoother sonically,and consciously reflects the more comedic modes of narrative pitch; and in time came to bethe resolutely transatlantic default template behind the series.

4. Royal S. Brown, Overtures and Undertones - Reading Film Music Brown. California:University of California Press, 1995, p. 47.

5. As outlined by Murray Smith in his chapter, 'The Disney Principle' in Steve Nealeand Murray Smith (eds), Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. London: Routledge, 1998.

6. J. F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1984, pp. xwv and 48.

7. Jeff Smith, in his 2002 article, 'Banking on film music - structural interactions ofthe film and record industries', outlines that throughout the 1960s there was a consciousmarketing strategy undertaken by United Artists (in particular) placing an emphasis onpromotion and sales towards their soundtrack releases. By 1961 UA's gross sales topped$5 million and they had, by 1964, become market leaders in soundtrack crossover sales.Whilst Barry's soundtracks were, on one level, merely an offshoot of the Eon publicitymachine, it is perceivable in the period between 1962 and 1969 that there is the beginning ofa fracture in traditional conceptions of film music consumption. This shift towards a promi-nent visibility, identity and ready availability has aided the cultural standing of such artefacts,also reinforced and refracted by temporal distance and generational time (2003: 65).

8. Cited by K. B. Reighley, 'Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: The Music of James Bond' fromCM] New Music Monthly, (April 1998). Available at http://www.ianfleming.org/mkkbb/magazine/musicof.shtml (accessed on 22 September 2005). Arnolds route through thisconundrum is to conjure up a baroque Barry pastiche in his three films to date (1997-2003),Tomorrow Never Dies, The World is Not Enough and Die Another Day.

9. While the search for authorship within the Bond series has always proven problem-atic (something Chapman raises), it is telling, and in fact well documented, that bothdirectors Gilbert and Hunt (of You Only Live Twice and On Her Majesty's Secret Service,respectively) were so very aware of the mechanical processes and expectations surrounding'the formula' that they would often leave Barry to his own devices.

10. In Hunt's signifier-laden pre-credits sequence we see a super-reflexive playing outof the fantasy perceptions that surround the 1960s film Bond. (This is outlined more fully

http://www.ianfleming.org/mkkbb/magazine/musicof.shtml


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by both Robert Castles and Jason Sperb's articles, both of which are included in thebibliography.) This opening mini-narrative itself acts as an obvious reiteration of extantcinematic codes commonly associated with Bond. This process is then cemented by aself-conscious elevation of the score to all but eliminate the dialogue (other than a direct-to-audience address posited as verbal exclamation mark by actor George Lazenby).

11. In this context, this is a hybrid construct financed by American and Canadianmoney and assembled by European and British creative personnel.

12. Woolston (2002: para 6). The influence of Classical Hollywood composers such asSteiner, Waxman and in particular, North and Herrmann, can also be clearly discernedbehind Barry's highly distinctive chord choices. And in this setting, 007 soundtracksoperate within very standard Hollywood conceptions of scoring. Caryl Flinn (as quotedby Dickinson in 'Strains of Utopia Gender, Nostalgia and Hollywood Film Music in MovieMusic - The Film Reader), usefully encapsulates this practice as being, 'a philosophy ofabstract, supra-linguistic utopianism and simultaneously a deep-rooted investment in indi-vidual struggle (2002: 3).

13. Adam Faith cited by Fiegel (2001: 63-4). It is well documented that by 1962Barry had become a major industry figure. He had achieved notable success providingfast, expensive-sounding, faux-cinematic arrangements, cheaply and to deadline. This inturn led to the job of scoring the low-budget British 'teen movie Beat Girl (1960) andthe (1963-released) Peter Sellers vehicle, Never Let Go. The classically trained Barry,a pianist and trumpet-player, was born in Yorkshire in 1933 entered the music business inthe 1950s.

14. Star actor Sean Connery s own working-class background was moulded by directorTerence Young into a hybrid, a somewhat more inclusive portrayal than the icy, public-school bon-viveur envisioned by Fleming. Yet this is a conception that on one hand couldsuccessfully imply the submergence into a lifestyle of 'triple gold band Turkish/Balkanspecially rolled cigarettes from Morlands of Grovernor Street' (Fleming, 1953: 56) and ofgrain rather than potato vodka' and 'Blanc de Bruit 1943 champagne' (61) but this incarna-tion is a marked development, and one that Jeremy Black helpfully sums up as being more,'self contained than self-satisfied' (2001: 114).

15. Woolston (1998), p. 58.16. This choice is employed by Barry to convey a 'fullness of depth' (Barry as cited by

Schelle, 1999: 27). Regular trumpet player Don Lusher also supports this by stating on therecording process: 'Oh, that'll be another week of F Minor then. It was always F Minor youcould bet on it!' (Lusher cited by Feigei, 2001: 202).

17. Chapman (1999), p. 62.18. 007 is first heard in From Russia With Love in several situations, but most notably in

that film's large action set piece where Bond escapes via speedboat from the clutches ofSMERSH/SPECTRE. It is the inception of this theme which usually prompts a broadeningof the on-screen energy to depict a particularly audacious or typically ridiculous 'Bondian'moment.

19. Continuity has always been something of a problematic conception for the Eonfilms. They exist in a vaguely asserted non-explicit lineage but play with conceits of castingand temporal verisimilitude.


20. Norman up to that point had primarily heen known as a lyricist but had failed toimpress with the score thus provided. (This is covered in detail by Woodell in his interviewwith Barry in 1992, which is included in the bibliography.)

21. Barry cited by Walstrom (2005), para 13.22. Barry cited by Woodell (1992), para 12.23. Barry cited by Feigel (2001), p. 190.24. Ibid., p. 136.25. The franchise has always maintained strong links to contemporary popular music

with diverse talents such as Chrissie Hynde, Lulu, Rita Coolidge, Garbage, Sheryl Crow,Madonna and Sheena Easton. Each performer s pedigree filtered through understood, andagreed, principles of quality of musicianship and longevity; and through received valuessurrounding 'performance' - all far removed from the avant-garde. Of course, this tooprovides a mirror action in granting the selected artists access to a distinctive and uniquekind of broad mass crossover acceptance. Deviations from the painstaking Barry facsimilespresented for Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and The World is Not Enough (1999) have faredless well, with a particularly poor reception afforded the radical retooling of the form byMadonna and Arnold in 2002. Their insistence on incorporating 'electronica' into the DieAnother Day theme song was a bold departure, cannily treating understood Barryesquecompositional signatures as musical 'samples'.

26. Barry (1987), p. 34.27. For inspiration, theatrical wordsmiths Bricusse and Newley leaned heavily upon

Kurt Weill's Die Moritat von Mackie Messer (itself another song about a villain) from his1928 Threepenny Opera.

28. This was based on Walter Huston singing September Song' from the 1950 SeptemberAffair and, as Chapman notes, it is used in the film as an interlude over a montage of roman-tic images, thus accelerating the narrative (1999: 143).

29. Barry's oft-quoted quip on what he terms 'Million-dollar Mickey Mouse music'(originally made to Michael Perilstein in 1971) highlights his own satirical view of what hesees as the true function of his music in this context. The phrase itself is a reference to thepractice coined from the American animation industry and is inspired by the practice initi-ated by the 1929 Walt Disney short, Steamboat Willie: wherein music is synchronizedprecisely to the on-screen action in a direct, literalized mimetic action.

30. Barry (1994), p. 328.31. It is noticeable that upon the move to EMI Studio One, based at Abbey Road in

1969, there is a palpable change in the sound itself dominated by more artificial reverbs inplace, despite the new environs being set up for classical reproduction.

32. The drive for a richer palette of sounds can be observed as a common goal withinthe work of diverse 1960s pop artists such as Phil Spector and taken to logical conclusionsby the likes of Brian Wilson for the Beach Boys releases Pet Sounds (1965) and the Smile(1966) albums as well being explored by the Beatles on Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts ClubBand (1967).

33. Kendall (2003), p. 23. Factors that contributed to this 'unity of sound' include the'reduction mixing' of the orchestra onto four-track Ampex machines. In this way, it was

John Barry 523

possible to record literally dozens of separate tracks and combine them into finishedrecordings of great complexity. The performances were secured 'live with the regular poolof musicians assembled and organized by regular Barry operative Sid Margo and recordedwith regular engineer Eric Tomlinson (Leonard, 2005). As Lukas Kendall isolates, it wasn'tuntil Diamonds Are Forever that the move to using all eight tracks of available sound wereutilized and a disruption in sonic continuity is readily evident on that finished recording(2003).

34. If dance music has been a way of breaking up compositional hierarchy then it isfeasible that Barry's music may have some minor influence in this sphere. This is a formconstructed using blocks of rhythm and layered percussion effects that is intended not fora melodic, lyric-based appreciation but for a more functional social setting. As SarahThornton states: Accentuating the status of the event as spectacle' (Thornton, 1995),pp. 84-5. It could be reasonably argued that Barry's use of minimalist lines, the emphasis ona percussive sensibility, of tiers of sound to an escalating intensity anticipates and prefiguresthe dance-music boom entirely. This is, as Woolston also observes, a 'layering over theformalisation of periods' (1998: 19). This building of sounds, cross-rhythms and counter-melodic lines predicts the tangible cornerstone of that form, especially in cues such as inFRWL, Girl Trouble, the syncopated counterpoint of 007 and the aforementioned 'Capsulein Space' all of which conform to these principles.

35. Barry (1992), para 66.36. Donnelly (2005), p. 150.37. Schelle (2005), para 14 and cited in Barry (1999), p. 26. A prime example of this

embrace of minimalism in collusion with cyclical repetition can be observed in Barry'spersonal favourite, the 1964 cThe Laser Table' from Goldfinger. This piece sustains andrepeats over a typical Barry F-minor chord and is used to stress Bond's impending castration/bisection via industrial laser. This passages only determinable progression is the harmo-nized second chord added in support of the eight-note motif (Brown, 1995).

38. In Hollywood contexts this has been seen as a debasement of classical forms byindustrial Hollywood practice. This device is detailed by Adorno and Eisler in their chapter,Prejudices and Bad Habits reprinted within Movie Music - The Film Reader as, '(a) trade-mark . . . by which persons, emotion and symbols can be easily identified'. It functions,certainly in a commonly understood sense, as a repetitive component of a given piece ofmusic or score. However, 'It requires a large musical canvas if it is to take on a structuralmeaning beyond that of a signpost' (2002: 28).

39. Woolston (2000), p. 61.40. Harrod has also commented that this mechanism not only works in creating an

identity and a series of signature tonal flourishes but also primarily signals a perversity andinherent fetishism that informs our understanding of Goldfinger himself. He emphasizesthat this is discernible in the cue of'Golden Girl', when 007 discovers the spray-painted bodyof Jill. He asserts that most composers would have used the strings to suggest 'dead woman'and thus make a standard dramatic musical statement here, but that Barry embellishes thiswith percussion to say golden woman. "The feeling of detachment is imperative' (1979:12).

41. Rebello(1989),p. 30.

33Danny Elfman

Danny Elfman: Tunny Circus Mirrors'

Neil Lerner

Since the mid-1980s, Danny Elfman has been one of Hollywood's mostinnovative and prolific composers. His energetic, eclectic style, rooted bothin earlier Hollywood scores and popular musics like new wave, has beenlargely typecast (and duplicated) within the genres of the action and sus-pense film, although he has also carved out a niche by working on quirkyfilms that, like his scores, defy easy categorization, such as Edward Scis-sorhands (1990) and Big Fish (2003). His collaboration with the formerDisney animator Tim Burton is one of the most successful composer/director pairings in the history of film; the two complement each other swork as naturally as Bernard Herrmann/Alfred Hitchcock, Nino Rota/Federico Fellini, and Ennio Morricone/Sergio Leone - not coincidentally,three composers whose stylistic fingerprints cover Elfman's corpus of filmscores. Elfman has a fascinating and complicated relationship with his musi-cal ancestry: he once claimed that when he writes traditionally, for instancein the style of Korngold or Rozsa, the music goes through some funny cir-cus mirrors in my head.'1 His wording is rich, as each word in 'funny circusmirrors' resonates aptly with his style, which blends the humorous, thecarnivalesque, and the neoclassical. As Elfman did not have a conventionalacademic musical training - his self-taught skills were honed as a com-poser and performer with the new wave band, Oingo Boingo - his careerhas been especially remarkable, if not threatening to some.

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Danny Elfman 525

Born in Texas (29 May 1953), Elfman grew up in the multi-ethnicCrenshaw district of inner city Los Angeles, where he was an avid filmviewer and listener, frequenting the old Baldwin Hill Theater. As a twelveyear old he first became aware of musics role in a movie, as BernardHerrmanns groundbreaking score for The Day the Earth Stood Still caughthis attention. In lieu of attending college, Elfman traveled to Europe andAfrica. Elfman decided to learn how to play the violin in part because ofthat instruments portability (he flipped a coin to decide between violinand flute). He met up with his brother, Richard, who was in Paris and partof Le Grand Magic Circus, an avant-garde musical comedy troupe; Richardgot Danny his first professional music gig, hiring Danny to play congadrums with the group as they toured through Europe. Danny then spenta year in Africa, while Richard returned to Los Angeles where he foundedan Absurdist musical comedy troupe known as the Mystic Knights of theOingo Boingo in the early 1970s. Richard served as the troupes director(or 'Grand Potangf) and Danny was its composer (or 'Grand Hoodoo ofMusical Voodoo'). The Mystic Knights appeared in Forbidden Zone, a mid-night movie cult film by Richard that served as Dannys first opportunityto compose for cinema. By the late 1970s, the group had transformed intoa new wave band called Oingo Boingo (later just Boingo), building a strongfollowing of fans in Los Angeles.

Some of Oingo Boingos songs appeared in films like Weird Science(1985) and Back to School (1986), and it was through the bands popularitythat Danny came to the attention of Paul Reubens and Tim Burton whenthey needed a composer for the first big-screen appearance of Reubensscharacter, Pee-Wee Herman. Burton and Elfman worked well together, andafter the success of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, the two continued to collabo-rate. The two shared a keen interest in early horror films (Burtons idol wasVincent Price, Elfmans was Peter Lorre). Elfman would compose severaloptions for each scene, and then conduct what he described on the Pee- Weecommentary track as a sort of optometrist s test, playing two possible cuesand asking Burton if he preferred version A or version B, then continuingon to version C and so forth. Elfman has scored all of Burtons films withthe exception of 1994s Ed Wood, where James Newton Howard replacedElfman after a temporary rift in their relationship. Elfman likened the breakwith Burton to the famous point in film music history when Hitchcock andHerrmann parted, during the filming of Torn Curtain, but unlike the ear-lier dynamic duo, Burton and Elfman reconnected and have proceeded towork together on Mars Attacks!, Sleepy Hollow, and the remake of Planet of


the Apes. Elfman and Burton reached a new level of sophistication in BigFishy a film that tells the tale of an inveterate storyteller, close to death, andhis sons efforts to understand those stories, and through them, his father.Director and composer s talents blended synergistically to create a film thatpoignantly complicated the boundaries between the fantastic and the real,as Elfmans music veers between atmospheric and melodic. In addition toBurton, Elfman has worked repeatedly with Gus Van Sant (To Die For, GoodWill Hunting, and arranging Herrmanns score for the remake of Psycho)and Sam Raimi (Darkman, the theme for Army of Darkness, A Simple Plan,Spider-Man, and Spider-Man 2).

After the tremendous commercial success of Batman in the summer of1989, more critical attention began to focus on Elfman and his score. Notall of that attention was positive, especially from those who doubted thatsomeone rooted in the world of rock could also think symphonically.After an interview in Keyboard magazine speculated that the Batman score'may qualify as the blockbuster soundtrack of the year' and rhapsodizedthat 'Elfman demonstrates that with sufficient talent and dedication, "thelittle guy" . . . can transcend the idiom formerly defined by the technologyof his studio, and write effectively for orchestra,2 a music theory and com-position teacher from Ohio criticized Elfman for not having a conserva-tory training. Arguing for the virtues of traditional academic musicaltraining, the teacher lamented that 'lack of theory might allow [students] toplay and write bubble-gum rock and roll, but in the complex world of filmand orchestral music, there are no shortcuts.'3 He accused Elfman of notbeing able to read musical notation. Yet he seems to miss several importantpoints, not the least being that when it comes to that 'complex world of filmand orchestral music', there are in fact shortcuts, and the case of Elfmanoffers a powerful model of how effective those shortcuts can be. Composerslike Steiner and Korngold commonly utilized orchestrators and copyistsduring the so-called 'golden age' of Hollywood film music, and while theirbackgrounds in musical theater and opera, respectively, may have allowedthem to communicate more precisely with their musical co-workers, theyhad, like Elfman, the ability to imagine, quickly, suitable dramatic musicwhen confronted with the cold reality of the unaccompanied image.Elfmans response to the embittered theory teacher, in the form of a lengthyletter, contained salty retorts about his ability to understand musical nota-tion ('yes, you dumb fuck, I actually wrote it down) and an assertion ofhis pride in being self taught, claiming these credentials: 'Graduate, withhonors, American College of Hard Knocks, Post-graduate studies, Nose tothe Grindstone University'4

Danny Elfman 527

Despite not having studied academic modes of composition, Elfmanhas sometimes employed avant-garde techniques involving extended dis-sonances and non-traditional playing techniques, as in the cue called 'SelinaTransforms* from Batman Returns and the track called 'Edgars Truck/ANew Man' from the Men in Black soundtrack, which has col legno effectsin the strings. Some of Elfmans cues have an additive quality commonlyassociated with sequencing technology; that is, they begin with a single lineof melody and gradually more sounds and melodic lines are woven into themix, the result of laying down one line on a digital sequencer and thenbuilding up from it. For example, the main theme to Men in Black openswith a repeating bass melody (B-flat down to F, then up a third to A-flat anddown to D-flat), and as it recurs, somewhat in the manner of a baroqueground bass, various other melodies are introduced above the bass melody.Since the late 1990s his scores have generally contained fewer memorablemelodies as he has turned towards more atmospheric and impressionistictechniques in his writing.

Listening closely to earlier film composers formed the basis for Elfmansfilm music education and earlier styles and voices continually surface in hiswork. His knowledge of opera and concert hall music comes indirectly, asfiltered through film composers; for example, while claiming little firsthandawareness with the music dramas of Richard Wagner, Elfman nonethelessabsorbed some of Wagner s sound world through Korngold and Herrmann(e.g., Vertigo). He considers himself an unlikely inheritor of these tradi-tions, as he explained on the commentary track of the Pee-Wees Big Adven-ture DVD: 'It s almost like being a spectator, a fan, of a race, and then gettingpulled into the race itself, arbitrarily, as if one is standing there on the sideof the road and a runner collapses, hands you the torch, and says, "you, takeit, go" \ The Pee-Wee score alone contains direct musical allusions to severalof the most recognizable film cues in cinema history, including Herrmannsshower murder music from Psycho, the motif for the bicycling WickedWitch of the West from The Wizard o/Oz, the whistling melody from TheGoody The Bad, and the Ugly, and John Barry s theme for the James Bondfilms. Elfman mentions many film and concert-hall composers as influ-ences, including: Erich Korngold (e.g., The Adventures of Robin Hood); IgorStravinsky (e.g., Le sacre du printemps); Max Steiner (e.g., King Kong);Kurt Weill (e.g., Die Dreigroschenoper); Franz Waxman (e.g., Bride ofFrankenstein); and Bernard Herrmann (e.g., Mysterious Island). Herrmannsmodel of scoring - namely his inspired use of repetition and sequencing(i.e., repeating a melodic idea at a higher or lower pitch level) as a composi-tional technique for building suspense within the confines of film music s


paradoxical inaudibility - seems to have been instructive for Elfman. At thesame time, Herrmann and Elfman do much more than simply repeating andsequencing. In the Pee-Wee score, for instance, Elfman revealed a strongsense of development, as several musical ideas reappear throughout thefilm, but continuously varied and transformed, sometimes through changesin instrumentation and sometimes through modifications to melodic con-tour and rhythm.

The other important lesson learned from Herrmann is an imaginativeand non-traditional approach to orchestration and tone color. Herrmannboldly experimented with unusual combinations of instruments, mostfamously in Psycho, where he employed only string instruments (perhapsas complement to the black-and-white photography) but also in The Daythe Earth Stood Still, where the orchestra consisted of brass instruments,pianos, organs, harps, percussion, theremins, and electrically amplifiedstrings. While most of Elfmans best known film scores utilize a full orches-tra he has almost always augmented his live players with electronicallygenerated sounds, coming in the form of synthesizers and samplers. Hehas shown an ongoing interest, somewhat uncommon within contem-porary Hollywood scoring, for using choirs as part of his timbral palette.Important choral cues appear in such films as Batman, Sleepy Hollow, andSpider-Man, although rarely as effectively as in Edward Scissorhands, wherethe wordless choir combines with the prominent harp and celesta parts(all three together have been traditionally coded in film music as represen-tative of religiosity) to help reveal the films thinly veiled religious subtext.

Overall, Elfmans greatest strength as a musical dramatist rests in hisability to discern the appropriate tone for a film, to know whether a sceneneeds a light or a heavy touch. Ironically, given the criticism directed atElfman for not having a 'classical' training, Elfmans approach to scoringmirrors Erich Korngolds technique, one developed earlier in respect toopera, whereby he would improvise at the piano while watching the film,figuring out the major musical motives and then piecing together the entirescore.5 Without expressing any idea that Korngold had worked in that way,Elfman similarly describes his own compositional process as somethingakin to a jigsaw puzzle: after picking what he believes to be a charactersmost important scene, and then developing a musical motif for that char-acter, he would only then go back and score the earlier scenes. That tech-nique, utilized to great if subtle effect in The Family Man and Spider-Man,brings a sense of unity and organicism to his film scores. In Spider-Man,Elfman used his first theme for the character of Spider-Man as a launchingpoint for a second theme connected to his alter ego, Peter Parker.

Danny Elfman 529

In the holiday season romantic comedy The Family Man, Elfman struckout further from his action-fantasy base, attracted - as he describes it onthe commentary track of the DVD - to director Brett Ratner's desire for anold-time, . . . classic' score. That film, a kind of Orpheus story but witha happy ending (its main character, Jack, a Verdi-singing Wall Street busi-nessman, loses, regains, loses, and ultimately regains his college sweetheart,Kate), was another score generated backwards, so to speak, with Elfmancompleting first the extended love scene at the end of the film, and thenbringing in teasing bits of that melody earlier. The early part of Elfmanscareer saw him scoring films that offered a range of criticisms against thebanality of middle class life; films like forbidden Zone, Pee-Wees Big Adven-ture, Beetlejuice, and especially Edward Scissorhands present scathingmockeries of existence in the suburbs. (His theme for the suburban melo-drama television series Desperate Housewives follows that trend.) Elfmansmost famous work may be his theme for the animated television show, TheSimpsons, a long-running and heavily syndicated series that also straddlesthe line between criticizing and embracing suburban life. Simpsons creator(and Oingo Boingo fan) Matt Groening explained that to inspire Elfmanfor the theme, he gave him what he called a 'flavors' tape that included 'TheJetsons theme, selections from Nino Rotas Juliet of The Spirits, a Remingtonelectric shaver jingle by Frank Zappa, some easy-listening music by Esquivel,and a teach-your-parrot-to-talk record.'6 Elfman successfully wove thesebits into a theme that one of the shows former producers, James L. Brooks,described as 'lemmings-marching-to-their-death music',7 an apt character-ization for much of Elfmans music.

Notes

1. D. Schweiger, 'Danny Elfman returns', Soundtrack!, 11.43 (September 1992), 17.2. R. Doerschuk, 'Danny Elfman: the agony and the ecstasy of scoring Batman]

Keyboard, 15.10 (October 1989), 85.3. M. D. Rubenstein, '[Letter about Danny Elfman]', Keyboard, 16.1 (January 1990), 10.4. D. Elfman, 'An open letter from Danny Elfman, Keyboard, 16.3 (March 1990), 47,62-3.5. B. Gilliam, 'A Viennese Opera Composer in Hollywood: Korngolds Double Exile in

America, in R. Brinkmann and C. Wolff (eds), Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migrationfrom Nazi Germany to the United States. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999,p. 231.

6. M. Groening, 'The musical prehistory of The Simpsons', Liner notes for the Simpsons:Songs in the Key of Springfield, Rhino R2 72723, 1997.

7. Ibid.

INDUSTRY

34BBC

The BBC: A Public Service Sound?

Heather Sutherland

What is sound? 'Sound' as a term refers to numerous different elementsand qualities including noise, loudness, harmony, accent, voice, intonation,music and tone, but it can be used as a verb, meaning to give impression!1

Everyone believes they know what sound is, but when the generic term isbroken down into its constituent physical and abstract aspects, it becomesclear how complex the idea is. With regard to the BBC then, the questionthat needs to be asked is Is there such a thing as 'public service soundT AndIf there is, then how do we trace its development and how it adapts?'

The BBC is known worldwide. People trust it, look to it for reliable, trust-worthy information and rely on it for quality entertainment. The soundthat accompanies the BBC s programmes is an integral part of this image;programmes would not exist without the sound component. However,sound in programmes is often overlooked and is taken for granted becausewhen it is at its best it is such a sympathetic part of the overall programmethat the audience does not distinguish it as having any special effect. Soundworks most persuasively when it is used as a vehicle within a programme:to enhance whatever the content may be. We only tend to notice soundwhen it is the focus of a programme (for example, as in a documentary ona particular composer), or if it is 'bad', as in there has been some kind ofobvious mistake within the flow of the programmes sound.2 This thereforemakes it most interesting to consider the production of sound, particularlywithin the BBC.

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Since its inception the BBC has been inextricably linked to the idea of'public service broadcasting'; this is both the BBC's fundamental premiseand the justification for the licence fee it receives every year from Britishhouseholds. As such, its programmes are often analyzed in terms of howthey fulfil the BBC s 'promises'; do they inform, educate or entertain theaudience in a way that is 'beneficial' to them? Do they conform to the highstandards of quality that has come to be expected of the corporation? Thearguments over the BBC's programmes and its role as a public service arecyclical and are unlikely ever to be resolved in a universally satisfactorymanner. The notion of'public service' in itself has always, and will always,change in relation to society's ideas at any particular point in time.However, the way in which it is decided whether or not the BBC providesa 'public service' worthy of funding via a compulsory licence fee seemsto give little consideration to the elements of programming that largely gounnoticed: for example, picture quality, and, in this case, the sound.

A programme is not purely about the script, the presenter and the over-all 'story' of it. The audience may well only see the final product, but a pro-gramme is the overall welding together of different elements. The BBC'sunique status and funding depends on its being able to demonstrate a uniqueand distinctive style of service. It must provide high-quality programming,placing the audience firmly at the centre of the production process. Thequestion for this particular paper is, 'How much does this apply to soundin the BBC?' Music and sounds are often described as having a Vital job insignalling programme identity through signature tunes',3 how then, in amore general sense, does sound signal the BBC's identity as a whole? In the1980s, was there a 'public service sound' emanating from the BBC?

Background to the Research

On 25 November 2005 a group of six members of the sound staff4 from theBBC gathered in one room to talk about their corporation's sound. Theroles they currently hold range from operations managers for the WorldService and Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4, to senior operations managers, engineersand equipment buyers. All have dealt with different elements of sound inthe BBC from classical music to pop, to speech and voice, to live recording.They joined the BBC in the late 1970s and early 1980s and had passedthrough the extensive training process through to working on programmesbefore rising to their current senior positions within the institution. Assuch, they have an excellent knowledge of both the development of soundand of the BBC through the 1980s. This chapter draws on their stories

BBC 535

(as well as literature and previously unreleased archived material), linkingthem into the story of the shape of BBC sound into the 1980s.

The Tradition

During its first years the BBC could hardly help producing a recognizablesound due to it being the only British broadcaster. The notion of'branding'the corporation would have been alien to those in charge of it; a 'brand' isnecessary only if there is competition, and this did not appear until theintroduction of commercial television in 1955. However, the BBC didestablish 'a sound' in the 1920s. At that time, the BBC did not need to paysuch attention to detail in terms of the sound, but it did. Sound grew out ofthe philosophy of the organization as a whole. The ideas of the first directorgeneral, John Reith, involved the whole corporation, not just single parts ofit. According to Reith, the BBC should provide an all-round high standardin order to enhance the knowledge and cultural experience of the audi-ences; and that was to include the elements not usually noticed by listeners.It was this 'added value' element of the BBC's approach to sound that madeit so significant. The BBC thought of sound in a more particular way thanwas perhaps necessary during its initial development, and this was to pro-vide the background to the work of sound technicians in the 1980s.

Speech and Language

One aspect of the initial development of a 'BBC sound' was the care givento 'spoken sound'. What words to use in a broadcast, and the manner inwhich they were to be conveyed (e.g., accent), both played a part in deter-mining the 'BBC sound'. These two aspects, the 'what' (the words used) andthe 'how' (how the words are communicated) were equally important informing the character of the 'BBC sound', although at first the latter issomewhat more perceptible. The idea of 'the BBC voice' or 'BBC English'has long characterized the BBC as different to its broadcasting competitors,as Michael Rundle points out: 'So synonymous was Received Pronuncia-tion with the broadcaster that it also came to be known as BBC English'.5

From 1926, an Advisory Committee on Spoken English operated to ensurebroadcasters did not go their own way.6 It was formed to discuss and decidewhat would be the most efficient form of English to use.7 This committeealso published pamphlets (which first appeared in 1928, under the titleBroadcast English) in an attempt to 'influence popular habits' (Briggs, 1965:434). The idea of this work was to focus on what would be most appropriate


for the listeners. John Reith himself possessed a strong Scottish accent, buthis main consideration was to be able to communicate information clearlyto the listeners; 'Reith and his colleagues were in part merely followingthe reasoning of [William] Caxton: the selection of a language form thatwould be understood and tolerated most widely'.8 Reith s idea of the 'publicservice' role of the BBC was for it to act as an intellectually enlighteningservice for the listeners throughout the United Kingdom, and as such thewords needed to be spoken in the clearest possible form of English, a formthat could be understood by everyone. Much emphasis was placed on pro-nunciation and BBC announcers received extensive training to ensure theyspoke correctly. Alvar Liddell, a former BBC announcer, recalled how hehad received, under John Reith's orders' tutorials from Professor LloydJames, who was head of Phonetics at London University. This would involvethe 'reviewing and criticising [of] recorded samples of our previous weekswork and teaching us semantics and pronunciation during the session'.9

The role of the BBC throughout World War II further added to the ideaof'BBC English'; the BBC was viewed as the most authoritative Voice of theAllies'. The news reports of the BBC were heard throughout the world andthe familiarity with 'the BBC voice' grew. As such the BBC had developednot only a national but international reputation for quality, impartialityand reliability in its news reports during the war - inevitably it had alsodeveloped an internationally, as well as a nationally, recognizable sound.The World Service and its programme of teaching English By Radio, whichbegan in the 1940s, further cemented this very British service sound as theprime object of series was teach people in all destinations to 'speak Englishand with an English accent, not an American one'.10

Foreign Speech

A key aspect to the BBC's spoken sound is the role it played in controllingthe service received by those in foreign countries. This is always a matter ofpragmatic persuasiveness. Foreign listeners should be able to hear theirlanguage spoken by the BBC as they expect a native speaker to speak itand this constitutes part of the BBC's sound. However, under certain con-ditions this general principle becomes peculiarly highlighted. Thus when,for example, running propaganda stations into enemy territory, in order forthe BBC to do their work effectively they have to be aware of local soundsin order to appear reliable. The BBC has felt that it had a special expertisewith regard to this issue; for example, during World War II, a battle devel-oped over the accents of those used for propaganda broadcasts into enemyterritory. Couched in language that today would seem anti-Semitic, some

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argued that, at that time, 'Jewish accents' were inefficient for propagandapurposes, due to the political and social conditions in the countries to whichthe broadcasts were aimed. Each country had different regions with differ-ent accents representing different classes and politics; and as a result, therewas much discussion before it was decided within the BBC that 'Jewishaccents were 'undermining' 'the effectiveness of the Rumanian, Hungarianand Polish services'.11 The Polish service for example, 'appointed an "assessor",primarily for the purpose of detecting traces of the Jewish accent andmanner'.12 This argument was about the efficiency of the service and theimportance of sound in convincing and holding listeners in enemy territory.

A similar dispute arose in a later conflict in the 1980s. Again the BBC feltit had a superior, professional understanding of the detailed impact ofsound and accent on how broadcasts were received by audiences. Duringthe Falklands conflict, BBC staff highlighted the problems with decisionsmade by the Ministry of Defence over what Voice' to use for broadcastsinto Argentina. During the conflict, the ministry set up Radio Atlantico delSur as a British propaganda station. The MoD had failed to appreciate theneed to tailor its broadcasts to the Argentine people; it played Mexican popmusic as opposed to the appropriate Argentine music, and the accents ofthe presenters were actually Chilean. The ministry had thought nothingof accents; all that was required was that the presenters spoke the rightlanguage.13 The BBC, however, pointed out that by not tailoring the stationto the intended listeners, the propaganda messages would not get through.Chilean accents would have been instantly recognized by the Argentine lis-teners who would then in turn recognize they were listening to propaganda.In that sense the voice would have detracted from the meaning of theprogrammes. The BBC, therefore, from its inception has understood whatlisteners can deduce from voices and accents. The corporation had anongoing commitment to the pragmatic efficiency of its service, particularlyfor foreign listeners by taking care not to use the 'wrong' voices. This issue,while focusing on the voices used for foreign listeners, had a further 'publicservice' property. The BBC also viewed its expertise in this area as partof its public service to the British audiences; through getting it right andserving the listeners outside of the UK, the BBC was also serving its homeaudience.

Music

The public service theme can also be seen as prominent in the corporationsearly approach to music. Policies and decisions about programme contentwere based on five simple aspirations: 'to cater to all tastes; to enlighten; to


achieve the highest possible standards; and to reach the greatest number ofpeople'.14 This simple definition of what it was to provide a public service(and in turn a public service sound) can be seen particularly in the embry-onic BBC's approach to music. The principal aim was to allow the audienceto hear new sounds and music that were otherwise unattainable culturalexperiences to the British population.15 The underpinning idea was thatsound and music should be used to educate and inform the audience;to increase their knowledge of sound and music was to perform a publicservice. The commitment to music was demonstrated when, in 1927, themusic publishers Chappell withdrew as sponsor of the annual Promenadeconcerts: 'On the personal initiative of Reith the BBC took them over'16 andthe broadcasting of 'the Proms' continued through to the 1980s.17 Theestablishment of the BBC s own symphony orchestra in the early 1930s alsosignalled the BBC s wish to produce quality music for its audience; it wasvital to the BBC s public service role.

In the 1980s, the supplying of the audience with music was still significant.The BBC studios at Maida Vale were used for numerous live sessions,18

highlighting the BBC as a source of talent as well as simply playing records.New popular music, such as punk, caused internal arguments, just as con-temporary music had done in the 1920s; but as in that decade the BBCprovided a "public service' through ensuring new music was still heard bythe audience.

Loudness and Silence

Music for the BBC was not purely about what was played but how it wasplayed; the BBC has always tried to focus on the actual qualities of sound.American radio in the 1920s was very much about how loud the stationcould be heard on the radio; Toudness' was used as a mechanism to drawthe audience in. The BBC, however, particularly with reference to music,has broadcast sound in such a way that highlights detail. Classical music isvery much characterized by light and shade; the dynamic range within thisparticular type of music means that to focus purely on making the radiosignal as loud as possible would not be an option for the BBC. It would ruinthe quality of the music and as such the reputation of the corporation'ssound. In the 1980s this appreciation for sound quality was still of para-mount importance. For example, staff members recall the Toudness wars',centring on the fact that

someone had got into their heads that listeners decided on what theywere going to listen to by going up and down the dial and listening to

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whatever was loudest. . . they wanted Radio 3 to be as loud as theypossibly could on air which of course ruined the music.19

The staff knew that the music quality was not at its highest standard due tothe desire for loudness and ended up having to go through the back door1,as it were, fooling the processors in order to ensure a better quality of musicfor the listener.

This appreciation for the range of sounds also extends to the quietestone of all: silence. The 'BBC has adopted that as a sound as well becausethat in itself is a sound'.20 Silence is needed in numerous types of program-ming, from breaks in classical music pieces to actually signalling the end ofa programme or the start of a new one (depending on when the audiencetuned in). Within the BBC the staff 'weren't afraid of silence',21 whereas,particularly in the 1980s (primarily due to time and financial constraints),'some broadcasters... were afraid of leaving a gap'.22 The corporation there-fore had ca sound' from the early days through to the 1980s by essentiallynot being frightened to use sounds that those broadcasters under differentpressures may well have distorted or even not included. Essentially theBBC let sound 'speak for itself, and in doing so helped the audience tolearn how to listen. The corporation in a sense explored sounds on behalfof the audience, encouraging them to do the same.

Technology and Training

Aside from the actual content of the programmes, the development of soundtechnology was significant at the young BBC. The corporation has alwaysbeen at the cutting edge of sound technology and since the birth of theBBC sound staff had experimented with it. Peter Eckersley, as the BBC'sfirst chief engineer, encountered many problems that were 'formidable.There was no standard to rely on'.23 Eckersley and H.J. Round of the MarconiCompany 'set to work to develop microphones, loudspeakers and studios'.24

By World War II, BBC engineers overall were viewed as leaders in theresearch and development of technology, a reputation illustrated by thefact that during the war, 'Most of the BBC's own technical staff had beendiverted from the television development to radar in order to win the war'.25

The BBC designed and built much of its own equipment; they did not relyon equipment supplied to it by external companies. Engineering at the BBCrelied upon skills and abilities within the staff to, for example, 'improveacoustics even when they had to use improvised materials'.26 By the 1960sthe Engineering Division at the BBC was being highly praised for its abilityto handle an 'impressive variety of tasks, which ranged from research,


designs, and transmitter and studio planning... to equipment engineeringand development',27 and by 1972 'some 350 British patents . . . [had been]granted for inventions by BBC staff?8 Some of the most important ofthese related to 'acoustics and sound absorbers . .. several forms of auto-matic monitor ... limiters and volume compressors, loudspeakers, micro-phones . . . sound recording and reproducing equipment',29 and the listgoes on. Equipment therefore was being manufactured specifically to suitBBC requirements and to ensure that it could fulfil all its public servicerequirements, including meeting the audiences growing expectations ofthe corporation.

In the 1980s there was an element of this that still existed. The BBCengineers would 'design and build all our own monitoring loudspeakers forthe sake of consistency'30 maintaining the professional ethic of the corpo-ration; it did everything 'in house', from scripts, design, makeup and scen-ery, to direction, production and transmission. The BBC sound engineersin the 1980s were still continuing this aspect of the legacy left by thosefrom the earlier engineering teams, specifically tailoring the equipment tothe BBC's needs as a 'public service broadcaster'.

Training was also a large part of the early BBC sound31; the idea of therebeing 'a signature sound' of the BBC has as much to do with the people whocreated the sound as it does with the actual sound heard in the final broad-cast programmes. By 1941 the BBC had a large 'Engineering TrainingSchool', headed by Chief Instructor D. H. Schaschke: 'Between then [May1941] and July 1942 it trained 707 Newcomers... and gave refresher coursesfor 249 existing staff'.32 This 'school' also produced 'an impressive Engineer-ing Training Manual'.33 Training at the BBC was not solely about the phys-ics of sound or about how to use technology. Training was very much aboutthe BBC as a whole, and many recruits found that the ideal of the BBC aspublic service broadcaster had been 'drilled' into them by the time theywere let loose on air.

By the 1980s, little had changed. Whereas engineering training wasstructured, making use of tests and examinations, the training for theoperations side of sound was a combination of formal teaching and trailingcurrent staff. All this had to be completed before they would be allowedto take charge of a programme. However, the whole point of the trainingfor all sound staff was that 'the BBC wasn't recruiting people who alreadyhad skills',34 it was recruiting so it could train the staff in how to work spe-cifically for the BBC. It 'looked for somebody who would be at home withinthe organisation'.35 In a sense the training is an essential part of the BBC'ssound purely because those who passed through it wished to continue to

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implement the same style of training for new recruits, once they had beenpromoted to senior staff.36 By continuing the tradition of training the BBCalso continued the tradition of its sound.

Managing the 1980s Change

The BBC had established a strong tradition in its approach to sound andthe principles to which the staff worked. Many of these traditions, as previ-ously mentioned, endured and continued into the 1980s. However, thisdecade did see changes to the BBC s approaches in sound; while many ofthe working practices and principles did not die out, they did mutate. Thequestion therefore becomes not 'did the BBC have a "public service sound"in the 1980s?* but 'what form did its "public service sound" take?' Whatthe BBC experienced through this decade was a shift from unitary publicservice principles' to a multiple set of 'public service' sounds, an idea thatcan seen from a number of different angles.

The Audience

The audience is central to any development of BBC sound: mainly because,as a public service broadcaster, the BBC has to tailor its work to serve theaudiences needs. The idea of the BBC is that should not 'put its own stampon stuff'.37 The BBC is not there to sell the audience things. Its relationshipwith the audience is different; programmes are made to involve and movethe audience. Therefore, so the argument goes, the BBC's duty is to work onthe sound quality of programmes in a selfless manner, entirely focusedon the final, one-time reception of the programmes by the audience. Indeed,Pawley stated in 1972 that the trend at the BBC 'Since the mid-1950s hasbeen to produce the kind of sound that the listener wants to hear ratherthan a faithful reproduction of the sound originating in the studio'.38 Thiscontinued into the 1980s, particularly in reference to the development ofstereo.39 The BBC had the capabilities to broadcast in stereo but was awarethat not all of the audience possessed the technology to receive it. As such,the corporation, although able to continue experimenting with, and devel-oping, its use of stereo, was still focused on being able to serve the majorityinstead of the minority, as this BBC employee implies: 'In the 1980s wewere far more interested in the mono listener really. Although we weremaking and transmitting in stereo ... it was a sin to make something inau-dible to the mono listener'.40 Similarly, care and attention was given to theaudiences of the different BBC television channels. According to former


Radiophonic Workshop41 composer Peter Howell, the first question he askedat any briefing for a new programme was Is the programme to be broadcaston BBC 1 or BBC 2?' Discovering what channel the programme was to bemade for enabled the sound staff, particularly those who were composingoriginal sounds in the Radiophonic Workshop to, as Howell explains, put'a frame round what you are doing . . . automatically you'd have ideas thatwere more akin to the BBC 2 audience!42 In this respect the work was verymuch tailored to the audiences needs and expectations, but the questionarises, 'what happens if the audiences tastes, requirements, needs change?'The 1980s, as in any era, did see new factors affecting what the audiencewanted and as such the notion of a 'public service sound' remained fluid.

To Lead or to Follow?

Much of the change experienced in terms of BBC sound in the 1980s wasdue to the relationship the corporation had with its audience. Within allaspects of the BBC, be it through the choice of what comedians to show orwhich bands to allow on Top of the Pops, the question 'Should the corpora-tion lead or follow the public?' looms large. The debate was no greater thanin speech.

In the 'Thatcher decade', the idea of there being a 'BBC sound' in termsof speech still endured. One Scottish pupil, when asked by her teacher,'What do we mean by Queen's English?' replied, 'It's like how the guy on theBBCT1 talk'.43 The sound of the BBC was therefore still a familiar concept.The procedures for the monitoring of speech and pronunciation in theBBC, used since the BBC's first broadcasts, were still in operation. ThePronunciation Unit at the BBC was firmly established as an authoritativereference for any enquiries on language; Graham Pointon, head of the BBCPronunciation Unit in the 1980s, was asked to appear in three lecture toursof Scandinavia, where he was viewed not only as a representative of theBBC but also as an authority on the English language. For people outsidethe UK, as well as those who lived within it, the BBC was still certainlyproviding a 'public service' in terms of making clear what was the correctway to speak English.

However, while still being viewed as a 'leader' in the correct way to useEnglish, the BBC began to feel the pressure of audience desires to utilizemore diverse English accents. The need for the BBC to reflect audiencesback on to themselves, in order to engage them, became a primary concern.In 1982 the introduction of Channel 4 came with a remit specifically designedto focus on minority groups. The 1980s therefore saw another reinterpre-tation of the idea of 'Public Service Broadcasting'. There had already been

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a reinterpretation of the Reithian ideal with the birth of ITV in 1955, butthe reinterpretation of the 1980s recognized exactly how multi-culturalBritain had become. Essentially what the BBC saw in the 1980s was analteration in the notion of what it was to be 'British! With the expansionof minority groups in society, the unitary idea of 'Britishness' was beingredefined as multiple; and as a result, the BBC needed to adapt its soundto represent and reflect this. Regional accents were not the only ones to berecognized: those from the new ethnic minority groups were recognizedtoo. This change in the makeup of Britain's population needed to be reflectedin the BBC's sound. According to Professor Peter Trudgill, speaking aboutthe 'Received Pronunciation' accent on a BBC programme in 1985, 'as faras we can tell, probably no more that 3 percent of the population of thecountry actually speaks with an R.P. accent'.44 Therefore the sound of speechfrom the BBC could never be described as representative. The BBC, ratherthan appearing neutral in its sound was 'promoting... that R.P. accent',45 thekind associated with public schools and people educated to a high standard.Given the polarization between the rich and poor in society, and the grow-ing desire to include minority groups in British society, the BBC needed toalter its idea of what it was to have a 'public service sound'. As a result of thechange in society, the BBC worried about its role: Did the corporation havea duty to 'uphold standards' by promoting an 'ideal' accent and languagethat the majority of the country did not use? Or should that duty be toreflect the society it was talking to? 'Should BBC speech be continuous withcurrent modes of speech as a matter of principle? Or should it hold itselfaloof from these modes which it regards as unacceptable?'.46 The argumentson these questions were rife in the 1980s, with one side claiming 'the BBChas a clear duty to uphold the standards of spoken English . . . It has doneso in the past, a fact that is recognised all over the world',47 and the otherargued that the BBC encouraged children, in particular, from areas asidefrom the Southeast of England, to experience 'a bit of an inferiority com-plex with their own accent. They believe it is not equal to BBC English'.48

With such discrepancies in opinion it can therefore be stated that the BBCwas being forced to seriously consider changing its traditional use oflanguage and speech - ultimately changing the overall BBC sound.

Home Technology

The development of technology for home use posed further problems forthe BBC. The intention behind the sound and the actual reception of it maynot be the same; as such, while the staff at the BBC may have been tryingto create the very best quality of work, creating a 'house style' for the BBC,


whether or not that translated as intended to the audience was moreproblematic. The development of technology within the home cannot beoverlooked when considering BBC sound, particularly in the 1980s. Therehad always been difficulties in that audiences had not always possessed thecapable technology to receive the BBC perfectly. This was still the case inthe 1980s. BBC staff were aware that 'a lot of people were listening to usin less than ideal conditions'.49 No matter how well the sound staff at theBBC worked or how good the quality of the work was at the point of broad-cast, they were hampered by the fact that the equipment the audience hadto receive that quality was not good enough; for example, classical music washampered by the poor quality of reproduction provided by manufacturersin domestic sets' Chanan (2002: 372).50 As a result, sound staff occasionallyaltered their approach, as former Radiophonic Workshop composer PeterHowell demonstrates: If you... put bass in your recordings, it didn't reallycome out the other end'.51 Similarly, although transistor radios52 were animportant innovation in that they allowed audiences to listen virtually any-where, the technology did not enable a listener to receive the intendedquality of sound: 'We created them [sounds] in an ideal situation . . . andthen someone is listening to it going down the M3 ... in a knackered mini,I mean they're just not going to hear anything'.53 The technology enabledaccess to the broadcasts, but it did not enable the broadcasters to put acrossthe sound that they wanted. To add to this, by the end of the decade societyhad moved from where 'the radio was the best thing in the house to themid-80s when the CD came along. Suddenly . . . people had effectivelya broadcast quality piece of kit... playing better at home than you could geton the radio'.54 As a result, the BBC was forced to address how it producedsound quality. Rather than focusing on the competition with CD soundquality, trying to emulate it, the aim of the BBC was to work to traditionalprinciples. Staff members are known to have kept transistor radios in theBBC buildings so as to be able to listen to how the audience listened totheir work.55 Rather than the public sound being perfect, the aim of theBBC was to give the audience a sound that was as good as they could get it.By knowing what the audience was listening to at home, the sound techni-cians, operators, etc. could aim to make the BBC sound high quality aspossible.

Setting the Standards

Nonetheless, internal technological development was still important tothe corporation. In terms of technical standards the audience still held thesame high expectations of sound quality at the beginning of the 1980s as it

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had in the 1930s. Indeed, the training received by new recruits in the early1980s was still ca major element of BBC culture'56 and reinforced the needfor the engineer and operators to think about, and work to, the higheststandards. The training programme at the BBC was well known, primarilybecause the corporation was the only broadcaster to offer such training. Asa result, the BBC was viewed throughout the world as the standard bearerin terms of quality of sound. On trips abroad to conferences, for example,BBC sound staff members were viewed with great respect: 'I remembergoing out to Swedish radio... and.. . everybody came to you... "How doesthe BBC do this? Tell us how you do this . . . you're the guys doing it right,tell us what it is you do and how you do it because we wish to try and emu-late what it is youVe doing" '.57 As inheritors of the legacy of pioneeringsound engineering, the engineers and operators of the 1980s continued tobe inventive with technology. It was still commonplace in the BBC in the1980s for engineers to 'take all those disparate pieces of equipment froma lot of different manufacturers and weld it into a coherent professionalstudio',58 and they also produced, for example, items such as the Syncwriter,a system designed by Radiophonic Workshop59 staff Ray White and JonathanGibbs, in order to save time and enable composers to create rather thanfocus on the 'mental arithmetic and thinking about machines'.60

However, one particular problem affecting the BBC in the 1980s was thefact that the BBC had set all the standards for the industry as a whole. Thenewer broadcasters adopted the BBC style of sound by following the samehigh standards, as one interviewee commented: 'The BBC was the ... defacto standard that everybody else aspired to'.61 As a result, the BBC in the1980s was being forced to change 'its sound'; it had lost its original soundthrough its domination over training. Paradoxically, the fact that the BBCwas the only broadcasting organization to offer such extensive trainingactually resulted in a difficulty in its ability to maintain its 'sound'. In a sensethe original idea of 'a BBC sound' spread to the commercial broadcasters.Many staff joined the BBC, received the training and then left, for higherpay, to join the corporations competitors, as it was noted in the early 1980s:'An unfortunate feature of recent years has been the drain of qualified engi-neers away from the BBC for more lucrative positions elsewhere'.62 In fact,'there was an awful lot of BBC culture in ITV'.63 As a result, there was a dif-ficulty in describing the BBC as having its own' sound: 'A lot of the top ITVproductions at that time have quite a similar sound'.64 This process alsoproduced some competitive distortion in the pursuit of expertise aroundsound. Some argued that, in response to the competition faced by the BBC,a focus on technological superiority was often developed, sometimes at theexpense of the audience. At times it appears as though staff became so


'wrapped up in their roles they occasionally forgot about the audience.Indeed, one staff member recalls how the whole process was Very indul-gent . . . we were . . . here doing this stuff and actually didn't care too muchabout the listeners in many respects, we just wanted to make it as good aswe could for our own gratification'.65 Engineers, for example, were gratifiedby rumours that loudspeaker manufacturers went bust because... the BBCspecification was so difficult to meet!66 The BBC appeared to be looking tolead the industry rather than solely looking to serve the public, as a resultof the impact of the growing competition faced by the corporation in the1980s. This spread of 'BBC sound' therefore was forcing the corporation inthe 1980s to alter how it approached the production of that sound.

The Internal Politics of Sound

Sound at the BBC was not created or maintained by one body of operatorsand engineers who worked in all areas. Indeed, even the training pro-gramme had developed into two halves; there was one for the engineersand one for those who were to work in operations. By the 1980s, due tochange over time with regard to aims of the BBC, the sound staff did see acertain amount of antagonism appear. Staff members working in the 1980srecall how divisions existed between those who dealt with sound for televi-sion and those who worked for radio, as this comment demonstrates:'There's always been an antagonism between the radio and television whenit comes to co-editing .. . there's always been a very much "we'll do it ourway" '.67 Even within the radio networks the issue of 'public service sound'was problematic, most notably within Radio 1, the 'young people's radio',which wished to detach itself from the old' image of BBC Radio. The con-troller of Radio 1 described his vision of the network as providing ca uniqueservice, separate from the rest of BBC radio and hopefully untainted bythe old "Auntie" image'.68 Throughout the 1980s, Radio 1 began to separateitself from the 'BBC style', and by 1987 it was openly drawing ideas fromcommercial stations in America, such as utilizing their style of jingles,69

an activity that would have previously been discouraged. Radio 1 in effectwas contributing to the disbandment of a BBC public service sound and anestablishment of multiple public service sounds - an idea that was empha-sized in other sectors of the corporation.

There are also accounts of difficulties between the sound staff whoworked within the different regions. Take for example this comment:

there was definitely a sense of rivalry between all the different regions. . . with the Proms, if you were doing the Scottish Orchestra, then

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they'd want to bring their own balancer down, because he was theman that did the Scottish Orchestra... same with the Welsh ... therewas always a battle.70

What this example illustrates is the problem of people; BBC staff membersare supposed to work towards the same goal, even in sound, to give the audi-ence the best quality of programmes. This suggests that staff had their ownversions of what the BBC sound should be. As such, the unitary BBC soundwas mutating as the relationships within the BBC altered in relation to shiftsboth in society and the perceived role of the corporation within that society.

Authenticity

One further issue with regard to the BBC's handling of sound that rose tothe foreground in the 1980s was the idea of authenticity and legitimacy inthe sound heard by the audience. Was the audience hearing what was real?Sound in the BBC, according to those who worked there at the time was allabout 'false creations*71 While the traditional rhetoric about the BBC givingthe audience the cbest seat in the house' appeared, when the actual use ofsound is examined it can be suggested that the listeners were not alwaysreceiving the Veal' sound they were expecting. While to the audience thesound was authentic, behind closed doors, the BBC knew it was, on occa-sion, otherwise. For example, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, followingfrom a comment made in the Annan report, published in 1977, the BBCwas engaged in talks with the Association of Broadcasting Staff (ABS).These talks centred on establishing a BBC code of practice with regard tothe dubbing of audience effects (particularly the use of banned laughter' asit has come to be known). The Annan report had stated that the BBC didnot dub audience effects, when in actual fact it was 'done quite frequently'.72

The ABS were still concerned that, in 1981, the BBC had still not correctedthis comment and felt that the 'BBC was misleading the public in this areaand . . . the morality and honesty of the practises were, at least, dubious'.73

The ABS drew attention to this issue by highlighting particularly recentexamples: the Christmas 1980 edition of Top of the Pops used audienceeffects that 'were added to give the impression of an audience being pres-ent, when in fact this was not the case'.74 This illustrates a change within theBBC with regard to 'public service sound'. Rather than the essential focusrevolving around the relay of a 'natural' sound to the audience, as had beenthe case at the start of the corporation, by the 1980s the authenticity,or 'realness', of sound seems to have been less important in a 'BBC sound'.The corporation appears to have used the fact that sound is not the most


obvious component of a programme to manipulate audience responses.The Television Services response to the ABS criticism in itself demonstratesthis; it 'absolutely refuted that our practises were immoral, dishonest or inany way dubious for it could be held that the essence of Television . . . wasto persuade75 the audience that what was happening was "real" '.76 For thecommercial stations the use of dubbed audience effects in such cases wouldnot have posed a problem; it was almost expected on the commercial com-panies that they would use such material. The BBC, however, had a contractwith its audience. This contract involved promises to audiences that whatthey would hear, while appearing neutral, would nevertheless be real. Theaudience expected the BBC to hold to this contract and, therefore, if thecorporation did not honour its promises there was a worry, not leastbecause the BBC's survival depended primarily upon the support andrespect it had from the audience for its public service ideals. In the BBC,new ideas about the purpose and use of such sounds highlight a definiteshift in terms of what constituted the 'public service sound' in the 1980s.

The Rise of the Celebrity DJ

Stemming from the idea of authenticity, the rise of the personality DJ isthe last feature to demonstrate the changes in the BBC s sound in the 1980s.A shift in influence away from the technicians, who had previously hadabsolute control over the nature of the sound produced, towards the pre-senters, or 'talent', was starting to develop during the decade. Take forexample the case, (or disc jockeys), on Radio 1. The presenters on this net-work began to take over in terms of the sound they wanted to have for theirshows. Previously, the sound operators and studio managers instructedthe radio presenters as to what could and could not be done in terms of theBBC 'house style'. Their aim was to achieve the most natural sound forthe audience. DJs, however, began to demand that the settings on micro-phones reflect how they wanted their voice to sound, rather than how theyactually did: '"Actually I want to sound punchy, I want to sound warm,I want to sound full of MID-range" and what have you'.77 The DJs began toconstruct their own sounds, creating an original style for the programmes.According to the technicians, who were (and are) less than pleased aboutthis development, one DJ in particular was responsible: 'We can blamemost of i t . . . on Steve Wright'.78

Up until the 1980s the BBC worked on trying to make the radio present-ers sound 'natural and intelligible . . . if they couldn't be heard over the

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music, you turned the music down a bit or you peaked the speech higher!79

However, DJs were becoming more aware of the alternative styles of theircontemporaries across the Atlantic and this began to impinge upon theBBC s Radio 1. Steve Wright joined Radio 1 in 1979, and by 1982 had firmlyestablished his style of presentation in the daytime show Steve Wright in theAfternoon. He had become aware of the American style of radio80 followinga visit there and, according to interviews conducted for this project, became'dead set on getting this really commercial American toppy sound*81 Assuch, the trend he started for Radio 1 was for the DJ to decide on their ownsound settings, to enhance the sound of both their voices and the pro-grammes, as opposed to leaving those decisions entirely to the studiomanager. Because such radio presenters were importing ideas from outside,there was from then on arguably less of a distinct BBC sound. The increasein competition, for example, resulted in the BBC s radio presenters learningfrom their counterparts in the commercial world: How could it be a specificpublic service sound', unique to the BBC, if those who presented the pro-grammes were using techniques employed by commercial broadcasters?With the prospect of competition looming at the end of the 1980s82 theBBC needed to take into consideration how it would combat the newcompetition, and one mechanism was to provide a different sound for eachradio station. Unitary sound was no long the way to secure the BBC s future;it had to present multiple sounds to ensure survival.

Conclusion

What must be taken into consideration in this case, due to the unique his-tory and position of the BBC, are aspects of the corporation itself and thepressures it faced; its remit, its staff and its relationship with the audienceall impact upon the way in which BBC staff handled and employed 'sound*.How the BBC perceives itself in society, in terms of whether it is there tolead or to follow the audience, is of paramount importance in understand-ing why they employed the working practices they did and how theydecided on which sounds to use. Indeed, a consideration of what is actuallymeant by the phrase 'public service broadcasting* in general is necessary tobe able to understand what ideas the sound staff at the BBC were workingand contributing towards at that particular time. Sound at the BBC comesdown to ideas about who it should tailor its sound to at any given time andas such a consideration of'BBC sound* cannot be separated from the rest ofthe corporation; it is one part of a big whole.


The question becomes not so much about whether there is or is not a'public service sound' but how that sound has changed over time. The 1980ssaw the final disintegration of a unitary BBC sound, which was subse-quently replaced with multiple BBC sounds. The idea of a 'BBC sound' hadbecome more complex with the arrival of new channels, new audiencesand, indeed, new sounds. This is not to say that the sound staff did not con-tinue to value, and work to, the traditional principles of a single BBC sound,but they were having to respond to an increasing amount of competition,which was to increase after the end of the decade. The definition of'publicservice' had shifted from the start of the 1980s, causing the corporationa problem in maintaining a 'BBC sound'. However, this problem was solvedby the application of the old' established set of principles to the new situa-tion; the practices changed but the principles remained the same. Havingpreviously been in control of one BBC sound, essentially what the corpora-tion was trying to do in the 1980s was to work out how to control the newmultiple 'public service' sounds without losing its traditional principles. Whatthe BBC developed in the 1980s therefore was a new set of BBC soundsthat still took into consideration the original values laid down throughoutthe BBC's history. The new circumstances of the 1980s had resulted inchange to, but not a loss of, the BBC sound.

BBC Archive Files

The major resource for this chapter comes from BBC archive files suppliedby the Written Archives Centre at Caversham, near Reading, Berkshire.

They are listed first by location:

BBC WAG: Written Archives CentreBBC RAPIC: Records and Programme Information Centre

They then have a number and name attached:

RAPIC 10015386: Programme Presentation and Planning Policy.RAPIC 10070648: Radio 3 Announcers.RAPIC 10065532: Jingles.RAPIC 10070644: Announcers: General.RAPIC 10070646: Radio 4 Announcers.RAPIC 10110266: Pronunciation.RAPIC 10117832: Programme Presentation and Planning: Programme

Production Techniques Part 2. 07/02/78 to 30/09/92.WAC R97/13/1: Radiophonic Workshop, Studios and Equipment Articles.

BBC 551

WAC R97/31/1: Radiophonic Workshop General ProgrammeCorrespondence.

WACR97/54/1: Radiophonic Workshop, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.RAPIC 10065377: Radio 1 Jingles, Part One, 01/01/86 to 30/11/89.RAPIC 10088065: Pronunciation Unit, Part 1, 09/07/70 to 12/12/89.RAPIC 10114803: Jingles Part 2, 01/01/88-31/10/91.WAC R97/11/2: Radiophonic Workshop General, 1953-73, File 2.WAC R97/12/1: Radiophonic Workshop, First Twenty Five Years.

Institute of Electrical Engineering Archives

UK0108 SC MSS166/12/3/9: The Foundations of a Broadcasting Policy:A Symposium, 1979-1980.

UK0108 SC MSS 166/13/28 Fifty Years of Changing Standards, 15 October1988.

UK0108 SC MSS 166/10/3/01 Correspondence, 1980.

Interviews and Acknowledgments

My thanks go to the following interviewees:

Graham Pointon, 7 October 2005.Mark Ayres, 10 October 2005.Sean Hardie (via e-mail), 10 October 2005.Dick Mills, 11 October 2005.Peter Howell, 14 October 2005.Brian Hodgson, 17 October 2005.Peter Copeland, 17 November 2005.

My thanks also to Dr. Anthony McNicholas (Westminster and BBC His-tory team); Professor Keith Negus, (Goldsmiths, University of London);Tim Day (British Library Sound Archive); Alban Webb; Daniel Day;Martin Sutherland and the six participants of the group interview held atthe BBC on 25 November 2005; Martin Hollister, Ian Astbury, JenniferDavies, Adam Askew and Paul Newis.

Thanks must go to the AHRC, BBC Heritage and the BBC WrittenArchives Centre (for the privileged access to BBC files). Particular mentionshould be made to Mr Robin Reynolds, Louise Weston and James Codd.

Special thanks also must go to Professor Jean Seaton.


Notes

1. http://thesaurus.reference.com/search ?q=sound.2. 'Unfortunately the good often passes unnoticed or is not remarked upon by the

listeners, and comment and complaints pour in abut the not-so-good'. Andrew Timothy.Report on the Quality of Spoken English on BBC Radio. Held in BBC RAPIC file 10110266:Pronunciation, 1979, p. 1.

3. John Corner, 'Sounds real: music and documentary', in Popular Music, 21.3 (2002), 357.4. Martin Hollister, Ian Astbury, Jennifer Davies, Adam Askew, Huw Robinson and

Paul Newis (BBC Sound Witness Seminar, 25 November 2005).5. Michael Rundle, Plain Speaking. Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/

magazine/4166036.stm (accessed in August 2005).6. Randolph Quirk, Speaking into Thin Air. Speech presented at 'The Foundations of

a Broadcasting Policy: A Symposium' (Held in Institute of Electrical Engineering ArchiveSC166/12/3/9, 17 May 1980), 2.

7. Forty Minutes: Talking Proper. Broadcast on BBC1 (17 January 1985). BBC TVArchive, VC146108.

8. Quirk 5. Institute of Electrical Engineering Archive SC166/12/3/9.9. Alvar Liddell, quoted in Robert Burchfield, Report on the Quality of English on

BBC Radio (Held in RAPIC file 10110266: Pronunciation, 1979), 2.10. Peter Copeland, Former BBC Sound Operator, Interview with the author,

17 November 2005.11. J. Seaton and B. Pimlott, (eds), The Media in British Politics. Aldershot: Gower, 1987.12. Seaton's quotation was taken from BBC WAC file R13/192: Polish Service

(11 April 1941).13. 'Radio Atlantico crackles with pop and old news' in The Times (20 May 1982).

All held in RAPIC file: World Service Press Office: the Latin American Service - RadioAtlantico Del Sur. (No classification number given for this file.)

14. Doctor (1999), p. 26.15. Ibid., p. 333.16. Crisell (2002), p. 36.17. The purpose of this article is to look at the 1980s, but it is worth noting that the

Proms still continue today.18. BBC Sound Witness Seminar, 25 November 2005.19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid.

23. Eckersley(1941),p. 107.

24. Ibid.25. Briggs(1979),p. 170.

26. Briggs(1970),p.48.

27. Briggs (1995), pp. 830-1.

http://thesaurus.reference.com/search?q=sound

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4166036.stm


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28. Pawley(1972),p. 528.29. Ibid.30. Ibid.31. See E. Pawley, BBC Engineering 1922-72. London: BBC, 1972, for a comprehensive

account of engineering developments at the BBC up to 1972.32. Briggs(1970),p. 496.33. Ibid.34. BBC Sound Witness Seminar.35. Ibid.36. This has carried on into the present day: 'When I became more senior, [I wanted] to

try and recreate those sort of training situations ... that was invaluable. BBC Sound WitnessSeminar.

37. BBC Sound Witness Seminar.38. Pawley (1972), p. 431.39. It had begun 'regular stereophonic transmissions in 1966' (Pawley, 1972), p. 428.40. BBC Sound Witness Seminar.41. The Radiophonic Workshop was an experimental music and effects' department of

the BBC which 'in the beginning .. . [had an] . . . emphasis . . . on special sound effects andbackgrounds' Gibbs, J. 'Music made to measure', Broadcast Systems Engineering (January1986) 18. Held in WAC file R97/13/1: Radiophonic Workshop Studios and EquipmentArticle. The Radiophonic Workshop began in 1958 and was most famous for music createdfor Dr. Who. It was still very active in the 1980s, working on science, drama and light enter-tainment programmes such as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy See Briscoe, D. andCurtis-Bramwell, R., The Radiophonic Workshop: The First 25 Years. London: BBC, 1983.

42. Peter Howell, Former employee of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Interview withthe author, 14 October 2005.

43. Forty Minutes: Talking Proper, Broadcast on BBC1,17 January 1985. BBC TV Archive,VC146108.

44. Ibid.45. Author's own emphasis.46. Denis Donoghue. Report on the Quality of Spoken English on BBC Radio, 1979, 7.

Held in RAPIC file: 10110266: Pronunciation.47. Andrew Timothy. Report on the Quality of Spoken English on BBC Radio, 1979, 7.

Held in RAPIC file 10110266: Pronunciation.48. Forty Minutes: Talking Proper.49. BBC Sound Witness Seminar.50. Chanan, Michael, 'Television's problem with (classical) music', Journal of Popular

Music, 21 (3) (2002), 372.51. Peter Howell, interview with author.52. Transistor radios were first developed in the USA in 1947, marketed there in 1953

and from the beginning of the 1960s ownership in the UK increased. 'By the end of the1970s the transistor meant that nearly 70 percent of radios were portable . . . By the end ofthe 1980s they were standard equipment in all new cars' (Crisell, 2002), p. 138.


53. BBC Sound Witness Seminar.54. Ibid.55. Ibid.56. Sean Hardie, Former BBC Producer, Interview with the author via e-mail,

10 October 2005.57. BBC Sound Witness Seminar.58. Brian Hodgson, Former Radiophonic Workshop Organizer. Interview with the

author, 17 October 2005.59. See note 27 for clarification.60. Lament, Richard, 'Syncwriter', in Studio Sound (April 1985). Held in WAC file

R97/13/1: Radiophonic Workshop Studios and Equipment Article.61. BBC Sound Witness Seminar.62. BBC Handbook (1981), p. 64.63. Peter Copeland, interview with author.64. BBC Sound Witness Seminar.65. Ibid.

66. Ibid.

67. Ibid.

68. BBC RAPIC file 10015386: Programme Presentation and Planning Policy. Letterwritten by Derek Chinnery (Controller of Radio 1), 26 June 1980.

69. BBC RAPIC archives. File 10065377: Radio 1 Jingles, Part 1 01/01/86-30/1189.Series of memos from Johnny Beerling (Controller Radio 1) to staff on 21 August 1987,asking them to consider adopting/adapting the formats of winning promotions from theNew York Radio Festival Awards.

70. BBC Sound Witness Seminar.71. Ibid.72. Minutes of a meeting held with the ABS on 13 January 1981, cited in a letter written

by Gary Richmond, (Senior Assistant to Controller Personnel Television), on 27 January1981. Held in BBC RAPIC file 10117832, Loc.No. A3464. Programme Presentation andPlanning: Programme Production Techniques Part 2. 07/02/78-30/09/92.

73. Ibid.74. Ibid.75. Author's own emphasis.76. Minutes of a meeting held with the ABS on 13 January 1981 (see Notes 58-60).77. BBC Sound Witness Seminar.78. Ibid.79. Ibid.80. This style has been called 'Zoo' broadcasting (BBC Sound Witness Seminar 25

November 2005 and http://www.sidthemanager.co.uk/career.htm). It is a style which involvedthe presenter surrounding themselves with a crowd of people who all contributed to a formof on-air gossip'.

81. BBC Sound Witness Seminar.82. The UK airwaves were to be opened to commercial radio stations by the start of

the 1990s.

http://www.sidthemanager.co.uk/career.htm

35Sound Design

Sound Design in New Hollywood Cinema

William Whittington

The term 'sound design was initially introduced by Walter Murch to describehis innovative sound work on the 1979 Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now.Murch 'hung' sounds in the motion picture theatre much like a productiondesigner would hang fabric on a film set. During the 'Ride of the Valkyries'helicopter sequence, the sound of AK47s and radio chatter were groupedinto one set of speakers, while rocket blasts and munitions fire were focusedin another.1 These stems of sound were then layered within a bed ofWagnerian strains that fill the front and surrounding speakers. Murchsapproach to sound placement in the exhibition space was made possibleby multi-channel technology that was being refined during the 1970s (andcontinues to be refined in digital formats today). As a result of this newtechnology and Murchs aesthetic approach, filmgoers were no longer sim-ply watching the film; rather, they were experiencing it much like an amuse-ment park ride. The sound design of the film deployed a sonic envelopethat masked the ambient sounds and space of the motion picture theatreexpanding the experience of the film narrative and its emotive and visceralimpact on audiences. Additionally, these constructions challenged filmgo-ers and film scholars to re-evaluate traditional image and sound relations.This particular example changed the cultural associations of the Wagnerpiece forever, offering a spectacle dealing with the insanity of war and asharp commentary on colonialism. As filmgoers found themselvesimmersed in this experience, they were challenged to listen to film sound

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in a more attentive manner. It is not surprising then that the term 'sounddesign' entered the mainstream discourse dealing with cinema andaudio, but even Walter Murch who coined the term could not contain itsmeaning - on or off the screen.

In this chapter, I will trace the origins and applications of the term'sound design' and explore how the concepts of sound design have beenutilized in contemporary Hollywood cinema. In doing so, I will explore theconvergence of sound history, theory and practice as it informs this newcinematic endeavour. Of particular interest will also be the utilization ofportable recording technology and digital audio workstations and theirimpact on the design process as well as meaning production. Additionally,I will outline the subtle shifts in the division of duties within the mode ofproduction and how they have allowed sound designers to emerge as audioartists. While sound design may have begun as a term describing the place-ment of audio within theatres and as a production designation, I wouldargue that when unpacked, it has the potential to serve as a useful criticalmodel that can be applied across media, genres and national cinemas.

Origins and Applications of Sound Design

The early origins of sound design in New Hollywood cinema can be tracedto another sound construction: sound montage. The production credit of'sound montage' was in part a clever ambiguity in the credits of the filmTHX 1138 (1971), the first feature film by director George Lucas, based onhis 1967 student film produced at the University of Southern California.At the time of the feature film s production, the Hollywood labour unions(or more accurately the San Francisco labour unions) did not recognize'sound montage' as a production designation, and that was in part theintention. According to Murch, At the start of my career, I was workingnon-union, and the title csound montage' appeared vague enough not to setoff any alarms'.2 The 'alarms' that Murch and his producers wished to avoidwere fines or sanctions by the unions, which demand a strict division oflabour within the production ranks. These rules had been carried overfrom the Hollywood studio era. Within the Classical Hollywood system,sound recordists were typically responsible for the capture of on-set dia-logue; sound editors were responsible for synchronizing, assembling andediting the various tracks of sound (dialogue and effects); music editorswere responsible for organization of music tracks; and mixers were respon-sible for creating the final composite soundtrack for theatrical presentation.The head of post-production or a sound supervisor in a managerial capacity

Sound Design 557

would oversee these positions and all of the completed work. As a result ofthis system and the limits of the re-recording technology, the compositenature of a soundtrack would often not be heard until the final mix, whenthe edited tracks would be strung up for review and folding down on themix stage. This dubbing strategy limited somewhat the potential for experi-mentation with sound effects.

By overriding the rigid divisions of labour and employing newer tech-nology, Murch, in contrast, could move between the positions of soundrecordist, sound editor and sound mixer to create the unique sound mon-tages for the film THX 1138. This subtle shift in the mode of productionallowed for greater experimentation in designing specific sounds in relationto the images presented in the film. A compelling example of this experi-mentation can be found in the opening sequence of THX 1138. A point ofview video angle reveals the characters of THX (played by Robert Duvall)and LUH (played by Maggie McOmie) checking their shared medicinecabinet. A mechanical voice asks, 'What's wrong?* The soundtrack bristleswith the sounds of computer data punches, mechanized calculations andelectronic beeps. The mechanical voices are flanged and characters' res-ponses are subjected to echoing effects as if being analysed for content andstress levels. It is later revealed that 'drug violations' are in fact beingrecorded and evaluated. The montage of sounds reveals how technologyand authoritarianism converge in this bleak portrayal of a dystopian andcollapsed world. Throughout the film, the image track and sound montagesare in a constant dialogue, sometimes in agreement though often not. Themontages that Murch created challenged traditional image-sound relations.They diverge from realistic synchronization and often present self-reflexiveand experimental constructions that demand careful evaluation. The intentis to call attention to the constructed nature of sound and its design as anaesthetic element within the film. This challenge is contained somewhatwithin the genre context - science fiction has always been somewhat trans-gressive in its formal and narrative construction - but the intent is alsoderived in part from the influence of the French New Wave; hence the useof the term 'montage' to describe the soundtrack.

New Hollywood filmmakers such as Francis Ford Coppola and GeorgeLucas, among others, embraced this approach in the construction of theirsoundtracks in part as homage to the New Wave filmmakers but also asa means of differentiating their work from previous Hollywood filmsand targeting a younger market of filmgoers. Lucas has previously noted,T loved the style of Godards films... the graphics, his sense of humour, theway he portrayed the world'.3 The visual and aural influences of Godard


resonate strongly in a film such as THX1138. In Alphaville (1965), Godardis similarly fascinated with technology, the voice and speech. The narrativeof Alphaville utilizes a layered pattern of voice-overs from detective IvanJohnson (played by Eddie Constantine) and an omniscient computer,the Alpha 60. Particularly innovative is the voice of the Alpha 60 computer,which is composed of a series of gurgles, gasps, whistles and croaks pro-duced by an actor with a laryngictomy' or a larynx tube. The assemblage ofvoices and the sound effects evoke a sense of formal play within the sound-track that challenged filmgoers and filmmakers such as Lucas to unpackthe implications and mysteries of this alternative yet equally dystopianworld.

In many respects the term 'sound montage' hinted at broader changesin film sound and its mode of production following the breakup of theHollywood studio system. The fragmentation and elimination of the studiosound departments left producers and directors such as Coppola and Lucasto contract directly with independent sound personnel and mix facilities orto build their own (Lucas established Skywalker Ranch to construct andmix the soundtracks for his films and has leased out these facilities to otherfilmmakers). As a result, these filmmakers devised their own idiosyncraticapproaches to film sound construction as was the case with THX 1138 andother films such as American Graffiti (1973) and The Conversation (1974).It is not surprising then that since a number of these New Hollywoodfilmmakers came from university film programs such as New York Univer-sity (NYU), the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and theUniversity of Southern California (USC) that they would appropriate fortheir feature work the mode of production encouraged in these academicenvironments. In these university programs, production duties and respon-sibilities were far more fluid. Given the limited resources and productionpersonnel, film students were required to work in multiple areas of theproduction process from sound recording to picture editing. As a result,these filmmakers gained expertise in all facets of cinematic technology anddesign and could easily shift roles during the production process. Veryoften student directors were required to record and edit their own sound,which is still the case at USC today.

It is important to contrast this mode of sound production to theapprentice-based system of the Hollywood studio era, which carefully regu-lated the crossover of duties and responsibilities. Within the studio system,a sound assistant might move from the category of sound recordist tosound editor but not on the same picture. The move would typically comeafter a promotion in which technicians had mastered the duties of one role

Sound Design 559

and were prepared to move on to another. A review of production callsheets at the USC Warner Brothers archives also reveals that continuity ofwork assignments on a particular film were never assured, and all assign-ments were based on the needs of the overall studio. While this model ofproduction did not deter audio experimentation - certainly many filmsfrom King Kong (1933) to Citizen Kane (1941) employed innovative uses ofsound under the guidance of sound-conscious directors and producers -the hierarchy limited departmental personnel from challenging the tradi-tional sound-image models, which favoured strict synchronization andrepresentation.

In contrast, New Hollywood filmmakers such as Francis Ford Coppola,Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, StevenSpielberg and William Friedkin were among the first to encourage theirsound personnel to blur the lines between audio recording, editing andmixing as a means of transforming image and sound relations. Examples ofthe innovative sound work these sound designers created can be heard inthe gunshots recorded for Bonnie and Clyde (1968), the sound perspectivesbrought to the music in American Graffiti, the syncopated and jarringeffects in The Exorcist (1973), the montage of sound effects cut for THX1138 and The Conversation, and the layered dialogue exchanges recordedfor Nashville (1975). In fact, nearly all of these narratives call attention tothe sound apparatus or audio recording processes in some way. The dramain American Graffiti is punctuated by the rock-and-roll play list of the localradio station and narrated by DJ Wolfman Jack; The Exorcist features scenesin which demonic voices are recorded on a Nagra tape recorder and playedback for analysis; THX 1138 and The Conversation, both centre on audioand visual surveillance, the latter no doubt inspired by the Watergate para-noia around recording technology; and finally Nashville features an endlessseries of recording sessions and performances, all caught on tape. Thishyper-awareness of sound use and sound technology may be generational.These filmmakers and sound designers grew up in a period in which longplay (LP) records, FM radio and consumer stereo equipment became thenorm. These were not simply baby boomers but stereo babies, fascinated bysound technology and its utilization, especially in relation to the musicindustry. Highly influential to the audio of the period is the musical outputfrom Motown to the Beatles. These works become the soundtracks for thefilms of this era and continue to resonate across all media even today.

As various New Hollywood filmmakers eschewed in the blockbusterera, 'sound montage' was discarded in favour of csound design! As IVe dis-cussed in the opening of this chapter, sound design supplanted the term


in relation to Apocalypse Now primarily because the film employed denselayers of sound with the 70mm widescreen format to create the immersiveeffect. In specific road show venues, the multi-channel theatre array con-sisted of six channels of sound, specifically left, centre, right, left surround,right surround and a low frequency subwoofer channel, which was man-aged by a decoder and surround-sound adapter.4 This configuration wasa precursor to the multi-channel digital formats found in theatres todaysuch as Dolby Digital, DTS and SDDS. For Walter Murch, the multi-channelformat allowed the planning and deployment of the audio signals to spe-cific speaker channels within the theatre environment. During the courseof the film, the sound sweeps through the quadrants of the theatre in care-ful choreography. Sound effects and music function as not just sonic wall-paper, but rather the sound design shrouds the theatre space in a spectacleof movement, music and immersive environments. This conception ofsound design did not last long in Hollywood circles, however. The termrapidly expanded in meaning and method as it became popularized. In theAmerican press, sound design became a means of discussing film sound ina much broader sense. In countless reviews and feature stories, individualsound artists 'designed sounds' and films such as Close Encounters of theThird Kind (1977), the initial Star Wars series (1977-83), and Raging Bull(1980) were praised for their 'innovative* and 'spectacular* sound design,presumably referring to the mix of dialogue, music and sound effects in rela-tion to the image. For popular critics, the term was broad enough to coverany aspect of sound construction and its overall impact on filmgoers.

The term also became a job designation, as sound recordists, editors andmixers appropriated the term 'sound designer* or were labelled as such bythe popular press. Most notably, Ben Burtt acquired the title for his workon Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi(1983). Each of these films featured the unusual sounds of laser-gun blasts,spaceship rumbles and a host of computer noises and alien languages.Many of these sounds have since become sound icons in popular culture,particularly the data chatter and whistles of R2-D2 and the shimmeringoscillations of the Jedi light saber. In part, these constructions have formeda lexicon of sounds utilized in a host of Lucas film ancillary productsfrom audiobooks to computer games, reaching far beyond the bordersof cinema. Burtt s innovative sound constructions for this film series andthe Indiana Jones series won him two Special Achievement Awards fromthe Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and firmly solidified hisposition as a sound artist and designer.

Sound Design 561

Burtt s aesthetic approach and his notoriety as a sound designer expandedthe meaning of the term 'sound design', making it more specific to sound-effects creation. For filmgoers, these unique creations would become partof the expectations for genre films within the New Hollywood. As with thenew visual effects, audiences expected high levels of innovation, aestheticexperimentation and integration in all formal areas of filmmaking. Sounddesign then functioned on two levels: the overall concept for the soundtrackand the creation of specific sound effects.

With the success of the blockbuster phenomenon and with more attentionfocused on the 'sound designer', Hollywood unions grew concerned aboutthe blurring of traditional boundaries for sound personnel. Jurisdictionaltensions were inevitable as the utilization of the term 'sound designer'seemed to privilege the contributions of one individual sound specialistover the entire sound team. Aptly, Bill Varney, longtime re-recording super-visor at Samuel Goldwyn Studios and later at Universal, questioned theposition designation and the broader conception of sound design withskepticism:

I don't think that any one individual designs a sound track. It wouldbe nice to think that someone sits down and has a very concise idea,from the beginning of reel one to the very end of the movie. But allthese things get compromised.5

Varney does acknowledge the importance of 'sound creators' but only intheir ability to serve the images or environments established within a film.6

As a re-recording supervisor, Varney has a considerable stake in main-taining his role as the overall coordinator of the sound mix for a film, buthe does not view himself as a sound designer; though like Murch he hasa considerable hand in where sounds are positioned within the theatrespace.

The resistance to the designation reveals a tension within the field ofsound production over whether film sound should be viewed as a technicalcraft or as artistry. Traditionally, good sound' has meant clarity and fidelityin capture and reproduction, particularly in the areas of music and thevoice. Within the New Hollywood, innovations in conceptual design andconstruction are emphasized. For a sound designer, capture and fidelity areonly tools and techniques for creating an integrated tapestry of sound,which is attentive to larger considerations such as space, spectacle, meta-phor and thematic motif among others.


Currently, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences doesnot recognize the term 'sound designer' for its awards process, nor do theHollywood sound or editorial unions list the position among their rosters.Jurisdictional battles over duties, responsibilities and, most importantly,screen credits have prevented the adoption of the term into these formalcircles. Recently, though, Gary Rydstrom (Toy Story, Jurassic Park andTerminator 2) and others have taken sound design as a credit on screen buthave made sure also to take credit for their actual technical designations,such as mixer or sound editor. By taking multiple credits, a sound designeris assured a place at the podium during the Academy Awards ceremonies.The other alternative is waiting to be honoured with a special achievementaward in the area of sound.

Nonetheless, the shift in the application of the term 'sound designexpanded its meaning to include the specific design of sound effects as wellas the overall design of the film soundtrack, which includes the placementof sound within the theatre space as Murch had originally conceived. Theterm has even integrated itself institutionally into many university filmprograms (bringing the term full circle) where it has become a sanctionedmethodology of studying and teaching film sound production. At theUniversity of Southern California, Sound Professor Tomlinson Holman,who is also the inventor of THX Sound, describes sound design as gettingthe right sound in the right place at the right time'.7 Included in this defini-tion is the ever-expanding range of historical, technical and theoreticalissues of contemporary film sound. The Vight sound' is encoded with factorssuch as the history of sound effects, canons of taste and narrative require-ments. The Vight place" and Vight time1 refer to the codes and conventionsof sound-image editing such as synchronization and sound perspective aswell as the pragmatics of mixing and presentation. The equipment available'places the practice within economic and technical parameters.

As is evident, the notion of sound design is far from fixed. It has beendefined, re-defined and expanded upon over the past three decades.Technology and creativity remain the constants, however, in its definition.For this reason, the remainder of this chapter will focus on the most influ-ential technologies and techniques in the process of designing particularsounds for the motion picture soundtrack.

Technological Influences and Sound Choices in Design

It is important to underscore that the shift in the mode of production thatbrought about sound design (the blurring of duties and job responsibilities)

Sound Design 563

was made possible in part by development of new portable audio recordingand re-recording technology over the past four decades. Particularly influ-ential was the Swiss-made Nagra III, a portable 1/4-inch magnetic taperecorder, designed by Stefan Kudelski and introduced in 1957. This modelwas subsequently upgraded utilizing silicon transistors in 1969 and releasedas the Nagra IV. The recorder featured a self-speed-check, precise levelmeters and multiple redundancy systems to assure recording quality andreliability. The Nagra became a staple of independent filmmakers workingin the new documentary stylistic of cinema verite. Portability and economywere central to the adoption of this recorder by Hollywood s independentsound designers. The recorder eliminated the need for large studio trucksthat had once held all of the equipment necessary for sound capture. TheNagra unit was also inexpensive, under $10,000, so it could be owned by anindividual sound person or by a production unit. Subsequently, a sounddesigner could be contracted by a producer or director for both their soundexpertise and their recording equipment.

According to Ben Burtt, this portable recording technology alongwith smaller mixing boards allowed the creative potential of sound to be'rediscovered' during the early period of the New Hollywood.8 Utilizinga Nagra recorder, Burtt was able to collect the raw sound effects for StarWars throughout northern and southern California. The recording of aLos Angeles freeway through a corrugated tube became the sound of theland-speeders in Star Wars, while the sound of a broken air conditionerwas recorded and re-pitched to become the rumble of the spacecraft in theopening shot of the first film. Burtt s mobility and creativity positioned himto draw on sounds from a variety of sources: from zoos to airports. Theseraw elements became the basic library of materials at Skywalker Ranch,which continues to be added to as subsequent productions are undertaken.

Re-recording and manipulation of sound effects was also aided by theintroduction of the 'rock and roll' transport system and start-stop capabili-ties on sound re-recording dubbers that could be controlled on mixingpanels. The advantage of this technology, which was introduced in the late1950s and refined over the following decades, was that entire reels of soundno longer needed to be mixed in a single pass of recording. Instead, multi-ple passes and a start-stop approach were now possible and encouraged,allowing for an ease of experimentation with sound levels, filtering effectsand composite soundtracks. With newer portable mixing systems, sounddesigners could also create sound effects well in advance of the final mix,refining and experimenting as time allowed and pre-screening them fordirectors and producers. Ben Burtt used this technology on Star Wars to


create the vocalizations for the character of Chewbacca (played by PeterMayhew) by layering and editing together the sounds of various bears,a seal, walrus and badger.9 Each of these sounds brought a mix of differenttextures, frequency ranges, rhythms and even emotional content to con-struction of the creatures dialect. The raw sounds were recognizable asbeing drawn from real animals as opposed to synthesized with a computer;however, their organization into dialogue and the complexity in their layer-ing transformed them into unique sound designs. This approach authenti-cated the Star Wars universe by anchoring the images of the fantasticwith familiar sound structures. According to Burtt, 'We weren't going tofollow the science fiction style in sound prior to Star Wars - like ForbiddenPlanet. . . That style of sound was very electronic*10 It is ironic that theintroduction of new audio and electronic technologies coincided witha movement away from incorporating the style of electronically generatedaudio into genre sound designs.

With the recent advances in computer audio workstations and editingprograms such as Pro Tools by Digidesign, the mode of sound production(mixing, editing and even recording) has been collapsed even further andsoundtracks have subsequently become more complex and dense in theirdesigns. The digital medium and editing tools have allowed detailed stylingof the even the most minute effects from footsteps to gunshots. A film suchas Terminator 2: Judgment Day is rife with this complexity of design, whichhas implications in terms of reading strategies and the notion of spectacle.In one of the initial action set pieces of the film, the Terminator/Protector(played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) intervenes as the T-1000 Terminator(Robert Patrick) attempts to assassinate the teenage John Connor (EdwardFurlong) in the back hallway of a shopping mall. Sound designer GaryRydstrom notes that the different layers just for the sound of the firstshotgun blast are a composite of four different sound effects that include:a phased .38 pistol, a rifle echo in a canyon, a cannon firing and anothercannon firing that has been sped up.11 He does not include the sound of anactual shotgun. All of these effects were cleanly recorded and close miked.Additionally, these effects were recorded on both a Nagra and DAT (DigitalAudio Tape) recorder to allow the 'warmth' of the tape medium and theprecision of the digital medium to compliment each other in the designwhen they were combined on a digital audio workstation.12 These carefullyplaced sound effects affirm the traditional codes of image-sound relationsin terms of synchronization, but the sounds are hyper-realized in theircomplexity, dynamic range, texture and overall rhythm. In the final digitalformat, they are densely layered; they cover the entire sound spectrum

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from the lowest to the highest frequencies. And they are encoded withspatial perspectives through the addition of reverberation. These gunshotsburst with both theatricality and technological precision to represent aspectacle of mayhem and excess that is essential to genre expectations.

This sound-design process in the digital realm has direct implicationon the filmgoer and their subjectivity as well. In short, the work of sounddesigners is meant to be heard in more ways than one. As with computergenerated imagery (CGI), sound can be buffed and polished without loss ofquality, matched perfectly to the image and even deployed in specific quad-rants within the theatre environment with relative ease; however, the workof the sound designer is not invisible - even todays best CGI is still recog-nizable to most filmgoers - and the same is true for the digital work on thesoundtrack as well. In his article 'Technology and Aesthetics of Film Sound',John Belton notes, 'The work of technology can never quite become invisi-ble. Work, even the work that seeks to efface itself, can never disappear-While sound designers strive to create sounds that are contained withinthe diegesis of a film and that adhere to traditional codes of synchroniza-tion, the technology and the digital medium in conjunction with genrecontent charge soundtracks with sonic spectacle that demands attention.In the creation of these complex sound designs, as with the gunshotsmentioned above, there is an integrated self-reflexivity that stands in starkcontrast to Walter Murchs original notion of'sound montage', which soughtto challenge filmgoers into an awareness of film form as construction.Today, self-reflexivity and excess are now part of the codes and pleasure ofthe high-concept film. As Annette Khun notes, 'Big-budget science-fictionextravaganzas offer the total visual, auditory and kinetic experience of theGesamtkunstwerk: the spectator is invited to succumb to complete sensoryand bodily engulfment'.14 Sound designs can have an emotive and visceralimpact that can move us as well as any performance, even while we acknowl-edge their production.

In the T2 sequence, it is important to unpack how a key aspect of sounddesign - sound perspective - functions in creating this cinema of sonicattractions. The close recording of the sound effects in this scene drawsthe filmgoer to a specific subjective perspective that evokes reading codesof immediacy and intimacy. Similar codes are engaged for voiceover narra-tion. The close and cleanly recorded sounds in T2 focus the filmgoersattention to the gun holster, the metal weapon being removed from leather,the movement of clothing and leather and the discharge of the bullet. Thisis akin to a set of sonic close-ups. As the gun battle commences, a patternforms in relation to the gunshot itself- the weapon dry fires, the propelling


explosion occurs, the bullet travels through the air and hits its mark withsignificant audible impact into metal or bone. Filmgoers are cued to thesonic point of view of the bullet.

According to Alan Williams:

In sound recording... the apparatus performs a significant amount ofthe perceptual work for us - isolating, intensifying, analyzing sonicand visual material. It gives an implied physical perspective on imageor sound source, though not the full, material context of everydayvision or hearing, but the signs of such a physical situation. We do nothear, we are heard. More than that: we accept the machine as organ-ism, and its 'attitudes* as our own.15

Filmgoers are placed in a hearing position that encourages them to Videthe bullet'. These are like fireworks of perception and identification, and thephysiological effects on the filmgoer are tangible. According to MichaelChion:

On one hand, sound works on us directly, physiologically (breathingnoises in a film can directly affect our own respiration). On the other,sound has an influence on perception: through the phenomenon ofadded value, it interprets the meaning of the image, and makes us see inthe image what we would not otherwise see, or would see differently.16

The digital sound technology and sound design have allowed filmgoers tonot simply hear films in a new way but to see them differently.

While this technology and approach have offered unprecedented controlover the film soundtrack, there is the potential for loss as well. The empha-sis on sound effects layering and the psychological impact of audio leaveslittle room for silence. In recent Hollywood genre films from Armageddon(1998) to The Matrix Revolutions (2003), the spaces of the soundtrackare being filled to capacity - and this has unfortunately become the norm.Filmgoers must navigate the constant competition of dialogue, music andeffects. It is not that the soundtracks are necessarily louder (though theyare), they are often more densely packed with effects and spectacle in amove to offer 'added value' to the picture. The worry is that sound designcould be lost or diluted in the process. I would argue that selectivity is criti-cal to the artistry of audio in the cinematic medium. It is the 'design aspectof sound design.

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While the origins and applications of sound design continue to expandwith the addition of new technology and techniques, perhaps the conceptis most useful in the critical realm. Recent analysis of sound in the majorityof introductory film and media texts has centred on the science of soundfrequencies, amplitudes and the like. With a broader understanding of thesound history, theory and production practices that I have only touchedupon in this chapter, a new approach to sound studies could be undertaken:an approach that bridges the gap between science and aesthetics. Throughsound design it is possible to examine the planning and patterns of the filmsoundtrack as well as the mental project that results from its deploymentwithin the exhibition environment. We are at a critical juncture in termsof audio studies. While past work in the field has been limited by issues ofavailability of films, lack of proper reproduction standards and inadequateavailability of technical expertise, these hurdles are somewhat eliminatedtoday. The DVD format, home theatre systems and the Internet offer solu-tions to these impediments. Even the issue of sound referents (examples ofaudio) can be overcome by the inclusion of CDs or DVDs with writtentexts. With a renewed emphasis in the field of audio, we have the opportu-nity to explore the variations of sound in cinema with a model such as sounddesign that can cut across genres, national cinemas and even mediums. Thequestion is: Are we willing to listen?

Notes

1. J. Fox, 'Making beaches out of grains of sand', Cine/ex, 3 (1980), 55.2. V. LoBrutto, Sound-on-Film. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1994, p. 84.3. D. Pollock, Skywalking - The Life and Films of George Lucas, the Creator of Star Wars.

New York: Ballantine Books, 1983, p. 49.4. Fox (1980), p. 55.5. D. Chell, Moviemakers at Work. New York: Microsoft Press, 1987, p. 107.6. Chell (1987), p. 108.7. T. Holman, Sound for Film and Television. Boston: Focal Press, 2002, p. 194.8. J. Forlenza and T. Stone, Sound For Picture: An Inside Look at Audio Production for

Film and Television. Emeryville: Mixbooks, 1993, p. 17.9. Pollack (1983), p. 196.

10. LoBrutto (1994), p. 143.11. G. Rydstrom, Invited Lecture on 'sound design' at the University of Southern

California, 2003.12. Ibid., 2004.


13. J. Helton, 'Technology and aesthetics of film sound', Film Sound: Theory and Practice.New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, p. 63.

14. Annette Kuhn, Alien Zone II. London: Verso, 1999, p. 5.15. A. Williams, 'Is sound recording like a language?' Cinema/Sound Yale French Studies

60. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1980, p. 58.16. M. Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press,

1994, p. 34.

36Emigre Film Composers

Emigre Film Composers and Hollywood'sGolden Age (1933-1955)

Jonathan Hiam

Films from Hollywood's Golden Age (1935-1955) are as recognizable bytheir music as they are by their images and dialogue. The lush, chromaticand often highly emotional music characteristic of the eras films has sincecome to define a genre. Yet the sound of Americas great works for the screenwas invented largely by composers whose origins lie outside the bordersof the United States itself. During the 1930s and 1940s especially, thosewho would become Hollywood s first generation of major film composersjoined the mass migration of intellectuals, artists and musicians from war-torn Europe to the refuge of the United States. As this essay explores,a steady stream of composers from Germany, Austria and Russia broughtwith them a set of musical traditions that would bear great significance forthe creation of the Classic' Hollywood score.

The composers who arrived in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940sfound themselves among a large and diverse population of European emi-gres, many of whom, such as Thomas Mann or Salka Viertel, had establishedthemselves at the top of their professions in Europe. Many musicians in par-ticular had resettled throughout Los Angeles, yet not all were determinedto find work in the film industry. Los Angeles had become home to some ofthe leading composers on the international scene: Igor Stravinsky and ArnoldSchoenberg, for example, based their American careers in Hollywood,although neither contributed to the silver screen in any significant way.

569


On the other hand, large numbers of anonymous emigre musicians didindeed find careers working for major companies such as Warner Brothers,MGM, and RKO, studios that easily drew from the large pool of foreign -born instrumentalists to populate their in-house orchestras.

Many of the emigre musicians employed by the major studios broughtwith them a strongly Germanic musical tradition. For the composers, thismeant a compositional style identifiable with late Germanic Romanticism,also known as post-Romanticism. The Germanic music of the post-Romanticperiod (ca. 1890-1910) employed a tonal idiom much informed by themusic of Richard Wagner (1813-1883). Wagner explored the tonal possi-bilities of advanced musical chromaticism in order to support the largemusico-poetic structures of his operas, which he called 'Music Dramas'.His particular use of musical chromaticism allowed for relationshipsbetween distantly related keys, simultaneously creating greater perceptualuncertainties on behalf of the auditor, and thereby increasing the potentialfor dramatic effect. The compositional demands of such tonal relationshipseffectually expanded musical space temporally, both permitting and neces-sitating large-scale musical forms. Such highly chromatic and monumentalmusical forms became the norm for the leading Germanic composers ofthe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Gustav Mahler(1860-1911) and Richard Strauss (1864-1949), who in turn exercised tre-mendous musical influence over the generation of composers who servedthe Hollywood studios during the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and even into the1960s.

Advanced chromaticism furthermore possesses surface qualities thatlend themselves well to dramatic representation. The intensity, for example,that a slowly rising chromatic passage and its consequent resolution appro-priate in clearly defined ways a basic and non-specific dramatic function.Likewise, the most compositionally advanced usages of chromaticismapproached atonality: that is, music that no longer maintained the func-tional relationships of traditional harmonic practice, including accepteduses of consonance and dissonance. A large number of works by Strauss,for example, pushed the limits of traditional tonal music, the aural effectsof which were often considered jarring, unpleasant and even horrifying.The musical language of works such as these informed Franz Waxmansscores for films such as Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Dr. Jekyll andMr. Hyde (1941), which in turn set the musical standard for horror films.

Mahler and Strauss also inherited from Wagner a broader, more sophis-ticated use of the orchestra. For post-Romantics such as Mahler and Strauss,

Emigre Film Composers 571

the orchestra functioned much as a painter s pallet, in that smaller combi-nations were extracted from the larger totality to create an array of coloursand effects. Composers of the post-Romantic period also utilized orchestraslarge in numbers, which allowed for a greater variety of combinations ofinstruments and therefore a greater variety of sonic effects and associations.Furthermore, orchestras of the age often contained a handful of relativelyunusual instruments that could be exploited as special effects. Largeorchestral forces also enabled composers to push the dynamic range ofsymphonic music to greater extremes. Clearly, greater numbers of instru-ments rendered possible the performance of extremely loud music; butalso, by way of sonic contrast, this led to the possibility of extremely softmusic. Such a diversity of instrumental sounds and the possibility forattending associative meanings and effects further supported the dramaticpossibilities engineered by Wagner and now inherent in the large-scalemusical forms of the era.

To the 'maximized' musical language of the Germanic post-Romantics -large, dramatic musical structures, intense chromaticism, and refined soniceffects - must be added the use of popular and folk music within the classi-cal symphonic form. The music of Mahler in particular draws notably uponGermanic folk tunes, both specifically and generically, to create musicalmeaning through quotation and association. By drawing upon populartunes, Mahler was able to interpret and re-interpret music within a largermusical work that was both familiar and already meaningful to much ofhis audience. Max Steiner (1888-1971) was particularly skilled at incorpo-rating popular tunes into his film scores, such as the use of 'As Time GoesBy' in Casablanca (1941). Certainly Steiner s success as a composer forBroadway prior to his transition to Hollywood would have inflected hisskills at popular music appropriation; his student experience under Mahlerhimself would likely have born influence as well.1

Wagner s innovations in chromatic harmony and the expansion of musi-cal form generated a musical system capable of expressing dramatic forms.For Wagner, his 'Music Dramas' required such a form in order to structurea dramatic poetics that could function over lengthy imagined time schemes.The further expansion of both tonality and musical form during the lastdecades of the nineteenth century embraced the possibilities posed by dra-matic form by further exploiting the music towards more narrative forms.Although not mutually exclusive, dramatic and narrative forms can anddo function differently. In Wagners case, musical form was synchronizedwith stage drama, the two forming an inseparable mode of presentation.


However, many composers in Wagners wake utilized the new narrativepossibilities of music in other ways. Strauss, for example, was prolific atcomposing 'tone poems,' which were symphonic works that approximatedin a purely musical fashion a particular poem or narrative. Likewise, thesymphonies of Mahler, although not considered tone poems, typically drawupon a narrative idea.

A key element in the maintenance of narrative musical structures isrepetition. Musical form typically articulates specific musical ideas throughstrophic repetition, formal recapitulation or variation of a musical idea.A musical idea can take the form of a short rhythmic or harmonic expres-sion or, more commonly, a melody or melodic fragment. The manner inwhich a composer develops a musical idea through some form of repetitionplays heavily into the way in which a musical narrative can be represented.Wagner utilized a type of musical idea now commonly known as a leitmo-tif, commonly defined as any cogent musical idea that represents a specificcharacter, object, state of mind or idea and that retains its musical identitywith each repetition. The alteration, or lack thereof, of a leitmotif over thecourse of a musical and/or dramatic form invites narrative interpretation,and it is therefore an ideal element in the scoring of films.

Those emigre composers who brought with them musical training andexperience born of the Germanic post-Romantic tradition found theircompositional style readily adaptable to the screen. Some, such as Waxman,cultivated incredibly prolific careers. He composed over 130 original scoresand supervised countless others, earning Oscars for Sunset Boulevard(1950) and A Place in the Sun (1951). Waxman, who emigrated in 1934,maintained a particularly high reputation in the composition of music forhorror and suspense films. In addition to the aforementioned Bride ofFrankenstein and Dr. fekyll and Mr. Hyde, he produced the scores for suchclassics as Rebecca (1940) and Rear Window (1954). Like Waxman, BronislawKaper, a Polish emigre who arrived in Hollywood in 1940, excelled in thehorror genre, earning particular praise for the 1954 film Them! His mostsuccessful scores for the big screen came later with Mutiny on the Bounty(1962) and Lord Jim (1965). Milos Rosza, of Hungarian origin, emigratedin 1939 and was awarded the Oscar three times, for Spellbound (1945),A Double Life (1948) and Ben-Hur(l959). The other key emigre composersin Hollywood at this time were Daniele Amfitheatrof, Adolph Deutsch,Ernest Gold, Werner Heymann, Friedrich Hollaender, Cyril Mockridgeand Dimitri Tiomkin.

Viennese emigre, Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957), arrived inHollywood having already established himself as one of Europe's foremost

Emigre Film Composers 573

composers, particularly of opera. Korngold produced what are arguablythe most masterful of all Hollywood scores, perfectly synthesizing theGermanic post-Romantic tradition with the possibilities of the screen.Whereas Korngold s Hollywood counterparts composed nearly one hundredscores, Korngold composed only thirteen original scores, all for WarnerBrothers. His reputation and his personal acumen obliged him to sign acontract for only one production at a time, and he received an uncharacter-istic amount of freedom and control over his work. Korngold conceived ofhis compositions in a projection room, where the film was played in frontof him as many times as he demanded. He clearly watched the film as hewould an opera, composing themes as the picture rolled by. He wrote,'Never have I differentiated between my music for the films and that for theoperas and concert pieces. Just as I do for the operatic stage, I try to inventfor the motion picture dramatically melodious music with symphonicdevelopment and variation of the themes!2 The type of symphonic devel-opment and thematic variation characteristic of Korngold s technique arefound throughout his works for film. His use of theme, effectually equiva-lent to the leitmotif, defines the musico-dramatic trajectory of his scoresfor the swashbucklers that made Errol Flynn: Captain Blood (1935), TheAdventures of Robin Hood (1938) and The Sea Hawk (1940).

Notes

1. It should be noted that Max Steiner emigrated to the United States during WorldWar I. He was one of many Hollywood composers who first found work on Broadway, latermaking the transition to Hollywood as the major film studios bought the rights to many hitmusicals.

2. Quoted in Brendan Carrol, The Last Prodigy. Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press, 1997,p. 299.

37Avant-Garde Film

Sound, Music and Avant-Garde Film Culture Before 1939

Jamie Sexton

Introduction

In this chapter I will mainly focus on approaches to, and applications of,sound and music within a number of avant-garde films, summarizing someof the dominant approaches within the filmic avant-garde up until 1939.l

The major concern will be the coming of sound and the reactions that thismajor technological shift engendered from writers and artists concernedwith the formal and artistic side of cinematic expression. Following this,I will chart the main connections between discourse on sound and themanner by which it was employed in some key avant-garde films. First,though, I will summarize some of the relations between sound and avant-garde previous to the actual 'sound era.

Avant-Garde Film and Sound in the'Silent' Era

The major drawback of summarizing sound and cinema within the 'silent' erais that a lot of information regarding the use of musical (and sometimes otheraural) accompaniment has either been lost or is incomplete. Generally,though, available evidence seems to indicate that not a great deal of thoughtwas put into the use of sound by many avant-garde filmmakers. This wouldhave undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that many artists and critics whowere exploring the artistic potentials of cinema in the 1920s were primarily

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Avant-Garde Film 575

concerned with the medium as a visual art. Thus, many films were createdas visual artefacts, while the musical accompaniment to such films wasoften subject to the whim of the exhibitor.

There were some avant-garde films, though, which had original musiccreated especially for their screenings. These included Eric Satie's score forRene Glairs Entr'acte (France, 1924), the Dada-inspired film that wasscreened in the interlude of Picabias ballet Relache, which starred Satiehimself. The score of this film consisted of rather minimalist, repetitivefragments of melodies. Satie used only eight measures for the score in orderto match the rhythm of the film, which consisted of cuts averaging around8 s that, according to Roger Shattuck, made for transitions "as abrupt andarbitrary as the cuts in the film'.2 Another notorious avant-garde film thatemployed the services of a modern composer to produce a score reflectingthe abrupt mood of the film was Leger and Murphy s Ballet Mecanique(France, 1924). For this film, Georges Antheil produced an elaborate andcomplex piece for a number of instruments, as well as 'non-instruments'such as propeller mechanisms. Unfortunately, the score was too ambitiousto be realized at the time and therefore did not accompany screenings ofthe film when it was released on the small-cinema circuit.3

There were also a number of original scores made for what are oftenreferred to as narrative avant-garde films. Perhaps the most famous ofthese is Edmund Meisels score to Eisensteins Battleship Potemkin (Russia,1924), a collaboration in which the conventional practice of musical accom-paniment was more consciously transformed into an act of audio-visualinteraction. Meisels score contained sudden shifts in rhythm and disso-nant passages and was created in order to provide a dynamic counterpointto the images, so that the 'inner voice' of the moving images becamedramatized.4 Other innovative uses of music include the soundtracks tothe films of Abel Gance. Gance, who was interested in the visual rhythmof films, saw music as able to enhance the dynamic, rhythmic essence thathe saw as inherent in the medium. Not only did he commission ArthurHonegger to produce original scores for his features La Roue (France, 1924)and Napoleon (France, 1927), he also experimented with the productionof non-musical sounds. In Napoloeony for example, actors were employedto recite the principal speeches in sync with the images, which were com-plemented by a choir. These scores also featured a number of montagesequences where music was carefully chosen to match the visual rhythmsof the image track.5

The interest in film as a rhythmic medium also connected to a numberof non-objective filmmakers who were experimenting with the concept of


film as Visual music'. The most productive area of this type of filmmakingoccurred in Germany in the early 1920s through the films of Viking Egg-eling (e.g., Diagonal Symphony, 1924), Hans Richter (e.g., his Rhythmusseries, 1921-1924), and Walter Ruttman (his Opus series, 1921-1925). Intheir different ways, these filmmakers were influenced by what they feltto be the formal purity of musical language, and thus they were visuallyinfluenced by musical ideas. Nevertheless, the actual use of music itself toaccompany these films was not particularly noteworthy: Eggeling actuallyrefused to have music played during screenings of his films, insisting thatthis would detract from the musical qualities of the images themselves.These films influenced the most prolific creator of Visual music', OskarFischinger, who began to synchronize his films to existing music (such asBach and Wagner), reversing in the process the traditional pattern of thesoundtrack being influenced by the image track. Fischinger moved towardsthe creation of synaesthetic films, where images were abstract representa-tions of music and both combined to produce a multimedia sensorium.

Dudley Murphy, co-creator of Ballet Mecanique, had also producedsome earlier experiments in which film was situated as part of an overallmultimedia environment. In America in the early 1920s he had experi-mented with short films, such as The Soul of Cypress and Aphrodite (bothUSA, 1920) - these were to be shown with a live orchestra, opera singersand dancers. While these films are now lost, his later film Danse Macabre(USA, 1922) was conceived along similar lines: a combination of footagefeaturing Russian ballet dancer Adolph Bolm and animated sequences,some of whose choreography was carefully synchronized with a live score,the symphonic poem by Saint-Saens.6

The Incursion of the'Talkies'

Despite these occasional experiments with vision and sound (or, at least,vision as sound), it was the advent of talking pictures that really stimulatedmany filmmakers and critics to think carefully about the combination ofsound and image. When the impending transition to synchronized soundfilmmaking first made itself felt, however, there was general hostilitytowards this technological transformation. The arrival of sound was, formany avant-gardists, something that threatened to destroy the advancesin cinematic art they had worked hard to establish. They had expendedtheir energies, for the most part, on developing cinematic art along pri-marily visual lines, and the transition to sound was an event that imper-illed such work.


The objection to the transition to sound cinema was both aesthetic andindustrial. On an aesthetic level, sound endangered the visual sophisti-cation of film art, because the creation of a sophisticated moving visuallanguage - considered to constitute the cinemas 'essence' - would be com-promised by the attention paid to the construction of the soundtrack. Onan industrial level, sound threatened the very existence of an avant-gardeculture of film production and exhibition: the facilities needed to makesound films, for example, were expensive and beyond the means of mostsmall-scale filmmakers. While the projection of sound films was alsoextremely costly: so much so that most film societies and small cinemas -venues where avant-garde productions were screened - could not afford toconvert (at least within the short term). Up until the late 1920s, critics andprogrammers working within alternative film culture had regarded theiractivities as feeding into the commercial industry, so that they constitutedan advanced guard of creative workers. Now they became cut off and isolated,only able to show silent films that were not going to feed into the art of thesound film.7 We should thus regard the industrial threat of sound cinemaas interlinked with the aesthetic disillusionment felt by many critics. Themanner by which many critics condemned sound cinema as 'regressive'was a reaction to the process in which their own cinematic ideas were aboutto be rendered obsolete by technological renovation.

While the introduction of sound cinema did not take off in Americauntil 1929 (and in Europe a year later) hostility towards sound began tobe expressed around early 1928, when the transition looked increasinglylikely to take shape. And yet, by the end of the year, a group of filmmakersand critics had emerged (some modifying their earlier, outright hostilitytowards sound) who were starting to map out alternative uses of sound.This was in opposition to the likely, and eventual, avenue that sound cin-ema would take: the synchronization of voice and environment, so that a'realistic' or 'naturalistic' sound world was created. The main aim, to allowcharacters to talk and sing, was disagreeable to many connected with avant-garde film culture, because it threatened to align cinema with theatre, thushindering the evolution of cinema as an art on its own terms. (This wouldgenerate the further problem of hindering the internationalism of cinema,as the predominance of speech would create stronger national boundariesto comprehending films.) There are a number of problems with such aconception of cinema, chief of which is an assumption that the mediumis capable of attaining a kind of purity which downplays the validity of inter-sections with other artistic media. Such an approach, as Rick Altman haspointed out, erroneously claims that sound is an addendum to an essentially


visual medium, when in fact experiments merging sound and image hadbeen occurring since the very beginning of cinema.8 Nevertheless, thesepositions did engender interesting conceptions of the ways in which visu-als and sounds could be combined.

The most influential intervention concerning the alternative applicationsof sound came from Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and GrigoriAlexandrov, whose manifesto on sound was first published in August 1928and was discussed internationally by a number of critics, stimulating dis-cussion of sound within avant-garde circles.9 In this manifesto they ralliedagainst naturalistic applications of sound, where sound would be synchro-nized with onscreen actions, but they nevertheless adopted a positiveapproach to sound, believing that it could extend the creative possibilities ofcinema. Sound usage was conceived along similar lines to visual montage,where separate images were juxtaposed in order to create new meanings.For these writers, a contrapuntal application of sound was necessary if thecinema was going to advance further as an art. Thus, sound and imageshould be combined in asynchronous ways, so that new meanings could begenerated out of the clash of aural and visual units. So, interestingly, the useof musical metaphors - employed in relation to 'silent' film - returned inorder to construct a self-consciously 'progressive' use of sound. As the writ-ers argue, only an asynchronous marriage of sound and image 'will givethe necessary palpability which will later lead to the creation of orchestralcounterpoint of visual and aural images'10 Not only would this line ofartistic creation heighten the expressive possibilities of the medium, but itwould also not confine the sound film to a national market, thus perpetuat-ing cinemas status as an international art.11

A number of factors, including Eisensteiris absence from Russia duringthe early 1930s, the late development of sound technology in the country,as well as the imposition of Soviet realism from 1934 onward, have ledSoviet cinema historian Jay Leyda to claim that the manifesto on sound didnot feed into practice.12 This has been questioned by Kristin Thompson,who has argued that despite the fact that counterpoint applications ofsound were rare, they were detectable in a number of films made between1930 and 1934.13 I'd like to suggest that the manifesto was actually moreinfluential than this, for it was propagated within specialist film culturesaround the world and led to critics and theorists taking a more positiveview towards sound film. It may be the case that the radicalism inherentwithin the manifesto was not fulfilled by many sound films produced, yetmanifestos tend to be hyperbolic, while the practicality of actually makingfilms is a much more compromised situation.


I'll now look at the various ways in which sound was used along'contrapuntal' lines within Soviet films, and then go on to assess experi-mentation with sound in a number of other selected films.

Practice: Soviet Film

Thompson, in her article on counterpoint sound and Soviet cinema in theearly 1930s, claims that she has discovered eleven films up until 1934 thatuse counterpoint regularly or occasionally, or employ Isolated disjunctivesound devices'.14 In order to focus this overview, I'll concentrate here onthree notable examples: Eisenstein and Alexandrov's Romance Sentimentale(1930, actually made in France but by exponents of the manifesto onsound); Vertovs Enthusiasm (1931); and Pudovkin's Deserter (1933).15

Though counterpoint' is never fully defined in the manifesto, there is animplication, as Thompson points out, that it is a continuance of the mon-tage theories propounded by Eisenstein et al., in which separate units (light,tempo, graphics, to which we can add sound) are placed in conflict witheach other in order to create abstract and rhetorical ideas. Sound could alsobe employed in an experimental manner that was not as conceptual orIntellectual'; for example, it could be used in a disjunctive manner thatcalled attention to itself as a constructed element so that the viewer wasaware of sound as non-naturalistic.

Romance Sentimentale is far from consistently radical in its combinationof sound and image, though it does feature strikingly experimentalsequences in its first part. It uses a score by Alexis Archangelsky and is anaudio-visual exploration of the feelings of a woman who sits at her piano,recalling lost love. The first part of the film contains fast pans of variousnatural scenes that are rapidly edited together. This image sequence repre-sents Volatile' nature and is accompanied by a soundtrack that is suitablyvolatile. In one sense, then, image track and soundtrack are synchronous.However, any straightforward synchronism is disrupted: there is a slightout-of-kilter discrepancy between the two tracks. The tense rhythmicinterplay of the edited images seems to move forward relentlessly, but thesoundtrack, which is predominantly filled by a stormy orchestral score, ispunctuated by more dissonant, non-musical motifs, such as treated cymbalcrashes (which sound as though they are being run backwards) as well asa strange, high-pitched noise. The orchestral score is not only interruptedby these motifs, it is also disrupted by sudden silences at times and theoccasional naturalistic sound, such as that of the ocean.


Here, the soundtrack itself is subject to abrupt editing principles, in thesame manner that Soviet montage proponents treated image combinations.It also, through briefly employing natural sounds before swiftly cuttingthem out, reminds viewers what this is not: naturalist or realist sound,where the soundtrack is a diegetic representation of the images. In thissense, the cutting up of sounds, and the manner in which they are loosely(but not neatly) synchronized with the tone of the image track, means thatsound here is used in a manner that Thompson refers to as 'perceptualroughening! This is where the spectator is confronted with an 'unusualdevice' which is difficult to perceive smoothly, thus stimulating the viewerinto a more intense, active perception.16

In Vertov's Enthusiasm it is only the first section of the film that usessound and image in a markedly experimental manner, yet this section isnevertheless quite disorienting at times. Lucy Fischer writes of the 'incredi-ble tension that exists between the two tracks in this part of the film, that'the two seem related in the manner of magnets with poles aligned - physi-cally separate, but interacting through lines offeree'.17 The first sequence,for example, shows people praying at a church, intercut with drunks in thestreet (religion akin to a drug). This is followed by images - often brokenup within shots through prismatic lenses and split-screen techniques, aswell as between shots through montage - of a church being pulled downand replaced by a workers' club. Accompanying these images is a numberof 'found sounds' mixed together rather 'roughly': sounds of church bells,choirs, prayers, birds singing, clocks ticking. Most of these sounds mirrorand reinforce the images, or - considering that Vertov reputedly conceivedthe soundtrack first - are mirrored by the images. There is a certain parallelbetween the two tracks: though they do not match in any naturalistic way,they do match together at a more conceptual level. The sounds heard arecongruent with the images seen, but not in any synchronous manner;rather, they are edited together in a 'montage' that accumulates meaningssimilar to that of the image track.

It is important to note Vertov's use of found sounds in the majority ofthe soundtrack for this film, which follows his pre-sound practice of filmconstruction as adumbrated in his 'kino-eye' theories, and thus differs fromother Soviet practitioners. Vertov was, of course, opposed to the 'illusionist'fiction film and preferred documentary film because it relied upon the 'real'and could thus be used as 'evidence.' Following on from this latter wordusage, Vertov himself adopted a kind of scientist role, in which he collectedvisual evidence but then transformed this into the construction of an arte-fact that probed the real mechanically, revealing new facts that were beyond


the realm of everyday, human perception. Following this, he used foundsounds for the most part (though there are a few exceptions throughoutthe film), but then manipulated these, using techniques such as aural super-imposition, acceleration and abrupt editing strategies.18

Pudovkins Deserter has gained status as one of the more radical filmsthat uses sound-counterpoint from this era. The film depicts a strike andits violent suppression in Germany, which creates the means whereby pro-paganda for the Communist Party is infiltrated into the narrative. The filmemploys a number of interesting uses of sound, including the consciousabsence of noise at various points in the film, which has the effect ofalerting viewers to the use of sound; but the film also builds up a senseof expectation (for example, of impending violence). There are a number ofoccasions when sound is abruptly cut, or when different sounds are editedtogether extremely rapidly in order to create a discordant, edgy soundfabric that is often mirrored by the extremely fast, visual montage. Forexample, after images of the strike are shown, we see a leisurely paced mon-tage of city life, of (rich) people driving around the streets in cars, accom-panied by an upbeat waltz. A female newspaper vendor announcing newsof the shipyard strike, however, interrupts this prevalent tone. The soundsof her announcement are then intercut with the music at a tempo thatincreases until the musical track itself begins to jump around, so that thecomfortable ambience of bourgeois city life is ruptured by the intrusion ofworkers' concerns. Deserter contains a host of other interesting soundexperiments, including the use of metallic, industrial noises to create rhyth-mic symphonies, or the occasional treatment of sounds (such as runningnoises backwards), to create overt sonic markers.

Practice: Outside of the Soviet Union

As I mentioned, the Soviet manifesto on sound was published and com-mented on within a number of international journals. In addition, otherwritings and lectures by Soviet filmmakers meant that such ideas wereinfluential outside of the Soviet Union. Yet because sound technology wasbeyond the realms of most small, personal filmmakers, the application ofcreative' sound use tended to be taken up either within commercial featurefilms, or state and industrial-sponsored documentary production: twoareas that many avant-gardists had gravitated to by the 1930s.

In Britain, for example, a great deal of writing about sound emergedafter the publication of the Soviet sound manifesto in the specialistjournal Close Up in 1928. And one of the earliest British films to use sound,


Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929), further alerted cinephiles to the possibilitiesof sound being used in a creative rather than merely naturalistic manner.The now-famous scene in which the murderers perception is distortedthrough paranoia was seen as particularly impressive, as it used sound inorder to create an expressive, psychological dimension to the film, whichcould work against the objective' movements of the characters on thescreen. In the scene, the background dialogue that the murderer overhearsbecomes a vague assemblage of muffled sounds, except for the occasional,and clear, articulation of the word 'knife*. This form of experimentation isnot, like some of the Soviet examples, used in order to perceptually roughen'the spectator, or to make an extra-diegetic rhetorical point; it was nonethe-less received as a contrapuntal use of sound in Close Up, thus emphasisingthe extremely loose manner in which this concept was used.19

There were a few other commercial films in Britain that used soundintermittently in a manner that was broadly 'non-naturalist' and which oftendid so in order to signify subjective, non-verbal feelings. These include, forexample, Anthony Asquith's war film Tell England (1931), HitchcocksMurder (1930), and Brian Desmond Hursts The Tell-Tale Heart (1933)(where the motif of a loud heart beating is used throughout the film).20

While sound experimentation was used sporadically and in small doseswithin commercial British filmmaking, it was employed with slightly morefrequency in some of the films made within John Griersons General PostOffice (GPO) Film Unit. And while this unit made use of non-naturalistsounds, it did not do so in order to probe character subjectivity, as in theabove examples. The GPO unit had purchased a British Visatone soundsystem in 1934, a relatively cheap system in relation to systems used withincommercial productions. Yet because of the less commercial environmentwithin which GPO filmmakers worked, they were permitted greater free-dom to experiment with the use of sound. Alberto Cavalcanti, who hadpreviously made avant-garde films in France such as Rien que les heures(1927), was hired in order to impart his knowledge of sound to other, lessexperienced directors within the unit.

Basil Wright and Walter Leigh's Song of Ceylon (1934) contains one ofthe most impressive soundtracks within a GPO film, in which sound isemployed in a variety of ways, some straightforward (such as explanatorynarration), others not. Much of the soundtrack, for example, is a carefullyconstructed mosaic of music and 'non-musical' sounds, as well as silence.The influence of Soviet theories is evident in Walter Leigh's score, as well asin an article that he wrote regarding the possibilities of film sound. Heargued that the soundtrack should be carefully and thoughtfully composed


of four separate elements: music, synchronized natural sound, counterpointnatural sound and sound effects. The first was seen as emotional, the sec-ond informational, the third expressive, and the fourth atmospheric. Onlyvia such means, argued Leigh, would the soundtrack add up to a dynamicconstruction that can interact with the visuals on equal terms, rather thanmerely being a subservient accompaniment to the images.21

Synchronized sound is not actually used in Ceylon, due to the limitationsof the Visatone system at that time, though the other uses are employed:music is used mostly to represent the music of the Sinhalese in the film(though these are reconstructions rather than field recordings). However,in constructing this music, experiments were made such as playing soundsbackwards and treating them in other ways, in order to construct a densersound fabric. Again, the result is not one of 'perceptual roughening' somuch as a means to provide a greater sound world that the viewer maypotentially become absorbed within. There are, however, moments in thefilm where the use of sound is more dissonant, thus calling attention toitself in a more overt fashion. In the third section of the film (titled 'TheVoices of Commerce'), in which the effects of modernity upon Sri Lankaare dramatized, an edgy sound montage of the bleeps and crackles of tele-communications systems, in addition to snippets of economic commentar-ies, is constructed.

Song of Ceylon represents possibly the most experimental use of soundin a British documentary of the 1930s, though it was far from an isolatedexample. Other striking uses of experimental sound include the acclaimeddocumentary Coalface (dir. Cavalcanti, 1935), which though mostly domi-nated by an explanatory narrative voice, occasionally gives way to a moremodernist sound design. In a montage sequence showing men working inthe mines, human voices are rhythmically chopped into repetitive motifsand paired with a monotone beat, so that the machine-like regulatory ofwork tasks is dramatized. Night Mail (Wright and Watt, 1936) includesthe famous sequence in which the narrated poetry of Auden becomesrhythmically intoned, so that audio-visual tracks attain a kind of synchro-nous musicality. Cavalcantis rather odd advertisement/suburban satirePett and Pott (1934) featured some notable, stylish sound transitions, suchas a cut from a woman screaming in bed to the interior of a train, whereinthe scream merges into the sound of the train passing through a tunnel.22

This was a use of sound that carefully matched aural transitions throughformal patterning - a kind of sonic poeticism.

While this chapter has mainly focused on sound experiments withinthe Soviet Union and Britain, there were a number of other experiments


occurring in other parts of the world, mainly in feature films. They includethe early sound films made by Rene Clair, in particular Under the Roofsof Paris (1930), the first sound film produced in France. The film, whichfeatures music as a central component (as it concerns a street singer), incor-porates many 'disembodied' sounds. For example, in the oft-cited exampleof a crowd watching a fight, it is difficult to identify sounds with on-screenobjects, so that the soundtrack becomes muffled and blurred. In line withan increasingly indistinct visual track, a sharp, clear noise of a train passingruptures the rather hazy feel, in turn drawing attention to the possibilitiesof the presence and significance of sound as an expressive force.

Other feature directors associated with sophisticated sound usage includeRouben Mamoulian and Ernst Lubitsch. Mamoulians Applause (1929), forexample, has been analyzed in terms of how it uses sound in a way thatconstructs palpable space, adding depth to the image.23 Mamoulian famouslyused a double-channel soundtrack so that he could mix different soundstogether and also included an early use of a sound flashback. Lubitschsearly sound films, meanwhile, have been singled out for the way in whichhe innovatively combined song, sound effects and dialogue. For example,in One Hour With You (1932) the dialogue is rendered as rhyming couplets,to create a dynamic tempo.24

Conclusion

Although it cannot be claimed that all early sound experiments were stimu-lated by debates circulating within avant-garde, minority film culture, therewere a number of connections to suggest that such debates provoked someof this experimentation. For example, many filmmakers noted for experi-menting with sound in the commercial feature film were people who wereassociated with alternative film culture or the avant-garde in some way:Hitchcock and Asquith in Britain both frequented the Film Society (whileAsquith was a key figure in promoting independent cinema); Clair, ofcourse, had played a key role in the avant-garde film of the 1920s, whileLubitsch was championed in the 1920s as an artistically advanced filmmaker.And if we relate the commercial films mentioned in this article to sounddebates of the 1920s, we can postulate that they represent a continuation ofa narrative wing of avant-garde film practice.

Many of the experiments with sound can be connected to modernistexperimentation in other areas, particularly those related to musical theoryand composition. In the cpre-sound' era, then, we have Antheil, Satie andMeisel writing special scores for avant-garde films. When sound arrived,


the theories of modernist thinkers in such areas often spilled over into'alternative' ways of thinking about sound and film. Opposition to natural-ist reproduction of dialogue led many filmmakers and composers to thinkof the soundtrack as a more dynamic constitutive element within the over-all audio-visual experience. This can be related to the artist Moholy-Nagyarguing at the beginning of the 1920s for the phonograph to be usedconstructively as well as reproductively (Maholy-Nagy, 2004). In addition,many artists were beginning to think about the distinctions, or lack of,between music and noise, so that the whole sound environment became thefocus of musical composition. Russolo is an important figure here, thoughmany soundtracks of films discussed contain moments that seem to prefig-ure the tape experiments that emerged with 1950s musique concrete.

While avant-garde film culture had an ambivalent relationship withsound in cinema, and while many critics and practitioners certainly over-stated the lack of creativity involved in 'naturalistic' dialogue reproduction,their own critical interventions were nevertheless important. While the1930s dispersal of avant-garde filmmakers into both documentary andnarrative feature production meant that experimentation was limited, itwas nevertheless undertaken in various areas. Some of the techniques, suchas contrapuntal clashes of sound and image, have remained marginal buthave still fed into subsequent experimental film work (Godards use of soundbeing a prominent example). Other experiments forged in this climate,such as the use of sound to convey subjective experience, have fed intocommercial filmmaking and become standardized. Overall, then, thoughtpaid to uses of sound in this period has proven to be extremely important,providing the first real theoretical templates as to how sound could becombined with the moving image in a creative manner.

Notes

1. Obviously, the actual term itself is rather problematic, interpreted as it has by practi-tioners, critics and academics in a variety of ways. There is not space in this chapter toattempt a thorough investigation of the term. The films discussed here, though, are eitherpart of an avant-garde canon of films (in that they invariably appear in overviews of avant-garde filmmaking in this period), or they were seen as important works at the time withinalternative cultural circuits (small cinemas, film societies and small film journals).

2. Quoted in D. Toop, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and ImaginaryWorlds. London: Serpents Tail, 1995, p. 199.

3. Information on the score and screenings can be found at The Ballet Mecanique Page,http://www.antheil.org.

http://www.antheil.org


4. Russell Lack, Twenty Four Frames Under: A Buried History of Film Music. London:Quartet Books, 1997, p. 40.

5. Lack (1997), p. 26.6. William Moritz, Americans in Paris: Man Ray and Dudley Murphy', in Jan-

Christopher Horak, (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde1919-1945. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995, pp. 122-5.

7. For more details on the arguments against sound, see Abel, R. 'The transition tosound' in Abel, R., (ed.), French Film Theory and Criticism: 1907-1939, vol 2 (Princeton, NJPrinceton University Press, 1988), pp. 5-37; Malte Hagener, 'Networks of art, the film avant-garde, and the coming of sound', llluminace (March 2003); Jamie Sexton, 'The audio-visualrhythms of modernity: Song Of Ceylon, sound and documentary filmmaking', Scope: AnOnline Journal of Film Studies (May 2004), www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk; David Bordwell,On the History of Film Style. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997,pp. 35-8.

8. Rick Altman, 'The evolution of sound technology', in Elisabeth Weis and John Belton(eds), Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985 andRick Altman, Sound Theory/Sound Practice. New York: Routledge, 1992.

9. Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Grigori Alexandrov, A Statement', in Weisand Belton (eds), Film Sound, 1985, pp. 83-5.

10. Weis and Belton (1985), p. 84.11. Ibid, p. 85.12. Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of Russian and Soviet Film. New York: Collier Books,

1973, pp. 278-9.13. Kristin Thompson (1980), 'Early sound counterpoint', Yale French Studies, 60 (1980),

116.14. Ibid., p. 117.15. The other films that she mentions are: The Road to Life (dir. Ekk, 1931); Alone

(dir. Kozintsev and Trauberg, 1931); Golden Mountains (dir. Yutkevich, 1931); Outskirts (dir.Barnet, 1933); The Great Consoler (dir. Kuleshov, 1933); Lieutenant Kizhe (dir. Feinzimmer,1934); Revolt of the Fishermen (dir. Picastor, 1934); Three Songs of Lenin (dir. Vertov, 1934)(Thompson: 116). It should be noted that the majority of these films are currently difficultto obtain.

16. Thompson (1980), p. 121.17. Lucy Fischer, 'Enthusiasm: From Kino-Eye to Radio-Ear', in Weiss and Belton (eds),

Film Sound, p. 250.18. Ibid.19. Even though Kristin Thompson has sought to define this concept more clearly, she

also admits the manner by which it was hazily defined in the Soviet manifesto (Thompson:117); Kenneth Macpherson, As Is', Close Up, 5.4 (October 1929), 257.

20. Asquith had experimented with sound in his earlier, more experimental featureA Cottage on Dartmoor (1929), though the sound section of this film has been lost. Fordetails on the use of sound in this film, see Murray Smith, 'Technological Determination,Aesthetic Resistance, or; A Cottage on Dartmoor: Goat-Gland Talkie or Masterpiece?', WideAngle, 12.3 (July 1990), 80-97.

http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk


21. Walter Leigh, 'The musician and the film', Cinema Quarterly, 3.2 (Winter 1934), 70-4.22. A transition that is also used in Hitchcock's later The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935).23. Lucy Fischer, 'Applause: The visual and acoustic landscape, in Weiss and Belton

(eds), Film Sound, p. 233.24. Lack (1997), p. 87.

38Art AnimationMusic in Art Animation

Maureen Furniss

Animators have explored the elements of sound - dialogue, music andeffects - in many interesting ways throughout the history of this art form,which is long and varied. Likewise, music composers have been increas-ingly attracted to animation as another means of expressing time-basedart. This essay surveys the relationship between music and art-orientedanimation created outside an industrial context. Because the scope of artanimation is huge and the application of music within this significant prac-tice is widely varied, it would be impossible to cover every aspect of thetopic in detail. Primarily, this essay focuses on the practices of visual musicand direct sound, as well as instances of close collaboration between musicand visual composers.

For various reasons, music tends to be more significant than other com-ponents of the soundtrack in art-oriented animation. Aesthetically, art-oriented animation often is structured thematically or conceptually, ratherin terms of a linear narrative, which generally relies on dialogue. While it isdifficult to imagine an industrially produced film made without spokennarrative (the acclaimed 2003 feature The Triplets ofBellville, an interna-tional co-production originated in France, provides an unusual exception),that practice is common in terms of art-oriented animation. Due to its rela-tively abstract nature, music tends to integrate well with the conceptuallyoriented exploration often found in art-oriented work. Economics alsoplay a role; the added costs of time and money necessary to record and

588

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then lip sync dialogue discourage its use, and therefore music assumes evenmore significance. Animation without dialogue is international in its appeal(not being expressed in any one spoken language) and thus plays better atfestivals that are the primary exhibition venue for art oriented animation.Some filmmakers, such as Stan Brakhage, have abandoned sound - includ-ing music - altogether, preferring silence to foreground the visual nature oftheir work (and for those concerned with costs, it is economical to excludesound).

Today, with the advent of digital tools, more and more composers haveembraced the art of animation, applying the aesthetics of music composi-tion to the development of motion picture imagery; however, art-orientedanimators have employed music in films dating back to the early years offilm history - even during the so-called silent era. Actually, it is somewhatmisleading to use the term 'silent cinema1, since there was hardly a timewhen motion pictures were not thought of in conjunction with sound ofsome sort. Some of Thomas Edison's earliest designs for motion picturetechnology developed out of his model of the phonograph, which he firstenvisioned as dictation equipment but later found successful as entertain-ment; upon visiting a public parlor containing a number of such devices,for a small fee, people could record their own voices and play them back.Some early designs for motion picture technology were disc-like, followingthe model of an audio recording on records. Despite such early relation-ships, it was a number of years before a successful sound-on-film processwas developed. From the time when cinema was 'born' in 1895, at the firstpublic screening of a film in Paris, to the release of Warner Brothers' hitfilm The Jazz Singer in 1928 (considered to be the 'turning point' in theAmerican film industry's decision to shift to sound-film production), vari-ous attempts were made to record sound to accompany a projected film.Even though it took many years to perfect the process, the cinema wasnever quiet. It was standard practice to screen 'silent' films to the accompa-niment of live music, even in the smallest theaters.

The particular musicians hired to accompany a screening generallydetermined the music that would be heard with these silent films. However,as the silent era progressed, it became more common to find composedscores accompanying films, especially those that were considered 'special'in some way - typically, made by accomplished directors and involving bigbudgets. Animation of the 1910s and 1920s rarely fit either criterion. Therewas little in the way of 'prestige' commercial animation, and the realm of'art animation was only beginning to develop in the 1920s, as various arti-sts embraced cinema as a 'modern art'.


Within this context came an important film, a great anomaly within thedevelopment of animation history: the 1926 feature-length Die Geschichtedes Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed), directed by LotteReiniger. Wolfgang Zeller was commissioned to write a score for PrinceAchmed, and on more than one occasion he even conducted the orchestraaccompanying the films projection. It is interesting that the score containssmall images from the film that could be used to cue the conductor asto where the music and effects should occur in synchronization with themotion picture. Reiniger s film is a landmark in history because it was oneof the first (some say the first) animated feature-length films ever produced.However, it did not produce a model that would be repeated. Reiniger sstatus as a woman and her technique of using ornate backlit silhouettefigures cut from heavy paper and thin metal made her film an anomalywithin a male-dominated field that came to be overwhelmingly character-ized by the cell animation process. Nonetheless the film remains impressivetoday - all the more because of the Zeller score, which accompanies it onthe films recent Milestone Film and Video DVD release.

Among the individuals working on Reiniger's film was the GermanWalter Ruttman, who in the mid-1920s created a series of silent abstractfilms that helped pave the way for the practice of Visual music' that wouldinspire generations of filmmakers to come. Ruttmans interest in 'symphonicstructure' in film is evidenced in the films of his Opus series of four animatedabstract works made between 1921 and 1925 (as well as his live-action doc-umentary from 1927, Berlin: The Symphony of a Great City, which depictsthe 'rhythms' of the metropolis using a wide range of techniques).1 At thetime Lichtspiel Opus 1 (Lightplay Opus 1) was released, in 1921, LeonhardAdelt wrote commentary about it. He described painting and music as twoseparate realms, one being 'frozen form' while the other is structured in'rhythmical sequence'; however, he said, 'This antithesis is now bridgedthrough the moving picture of the music-painter Ruttman . . . Ruttman,who sees music as a painterly movement of form, just as other people mightperceive it as an emotional experience or a law of harmony, technicallycontinues the tradition of the animated film in order to find an immediateexpression for his vision'.2

Opus 1 was hand tinted and accompanied by a synchronous musicalscore composed for the film by Max Butting. It is commonly believed thatthis is the first abstract film to be exhibited to public audiences, though theconcept had been explored as early as 1912 in the work of Leopold Survage,who proposed a work in 'Colored Rhythm' that got at least as far as numer-ous images that could have been employed in creating an animated work.

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Survage was careful to point out that 'Colored rhythm is in no way anillustration or an interpretation of musical work. It is an autonomous art,although based on the same psychological premises as music'.3 In additionto Ruttman and Survage, other artist/filmmakers began exploring the rela-tionship between animated graphics and musical form using film to expresstheir artistic visions. In Rhythmus 21 (1921), Hans Richter employs geo-metric forms to explore movement and time, and in Symphonic Diagonale(1924), Viking Eggeling experiments with the possibilities of using abstractimagery in the development of a new visual language. In all these works,time-based art largely considered in terms of music is combined with the tra-dition of static painted imagery, using the medium of motion picture film.

Oskar Fischinger probably is the best known of the visual music anima-tors to emerge from Germany at this time. He, like many other abstract art-ists, was greatly inspired by Wassily Kandinskys Concerning the Spiritual inArt (1910), though he also was influenced by the work of Ruttman andother filmmakers at the time. Fischinger s work reflected his interest in anarray of aesthetic and cultural practices, as well as the principle of'synaes-thesia; Kandinskys discussion of it motivated many modern artists, who,like Fischinger, explored synaesethetic experience, in particular the idea thatcertain forms, movements and colors could suggest sound to the individualwatching them. Discussing the impact of these concerns on the develop-ment of modern art, Jeremy Strick explains, 'According to the principleof synaesthesia, sensory perception of one kind may manifest itself as sen-sory experience of another - one example being the phenomenon of seeingcolor when one hears certain sounds . . . Synaesthetic associations werethought to result from a heightened state of aesthetic awareness in theperceiving subject'; he adds, 'The idea of synaesthesia served to mediatebetween music and visual art in the early twentieth century and provedessential to the development of abstraction,' such as one finds in the anima-tions of Oskar Fischinger.4

However, Fischinger s approach to filmmaking was somewhat differentthan most of his peers in the realm of fine art, as he was very engaged withthe technology - he was a filmmaker first and a painter second (in fact, hefully dedicated himself to painting only in the latter years of his career).5

His work from the 1920s encompasses experimental fragments and somecompleted films created using a wide range of media, including wax, liquids,cutouts, drawings on paper, scratching on film and live-action imagery. Latein the decade he began making a series of fourteen black-and-white 'Studie'films, dated between (ca.) 1929 and 1934. These films were synchronizedwith various pieces of music; for example, StudieNr. 6 (1930) plays with the


fandango 'Los Verderones' (Finches) by Jacinto Guerrero, Studie Nr. 7(1930-1931) is matched with Brahmss Hungarian Dance No. 5. and StudieNr. 8 (1931) is animated to Dukas's The Sorcerers Apprentice. The use ofthese recordings was sometimes problematic because Fischinger at firsthad not cleared the rights to them, resulting in the eventual withdrawal ofsome of the films from exhibition. This situation was somewhat ironicbecause, as William Moritz points out, Although most people today knowFischinger primarily as a man who synchronized his abstract films tightlyto music, Fischinger himself only accepted the burden of musical accom-paniment reluctantly. To him, music functioned primarily as an aid to theaudience toward the understanding and acceptance of the visual images...he adamantly insisted that his films are not visualized or illustrated music,and that any one of them could and should be viewed silent as a purelyoptical experience of communication'.6

Our understanding of Fischinger s goals and production methods areaided by the fact that he sometimes articulated them in writing. For example,he discussed his work related to Sounding Ornaments from 1932, in whichdrawn images are run through the optical reader of a projector to createa variety of sounds. Fischinger explained, If you look at a strip of film frommy experiments with synthetic sound, you will see along one edge a thinstripe of jagged ornamental patterns. These ornaments are drawn music -they are sound; when run through a projector, these graphic sounds broad-cast tones of hitherto unheard of purity, and thus, quite obviously, fantasticpossibilities open up for the composition of music in the future'.7 WilliamMoritz described the range of approaches used in Fischinger s syntheticsound experiments: 'Some are merely graduated tones written out in wedge-shaped teeth that approximate variable density, and some are differentcombinations and durations of a wide range of assorted "ornaments".>8 Heexplains that Fischinger saw these experiments as 'both scientific and phil-osophical problems, and they required intensive research and analysis'.9

In 2005, a traveling exhibition and accompanying book called VisualMusic: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900 included Fischinger asone of several filmmakers working in the realm of visual music. Strick, oneof the events organizers, describes visual music as highly characteristic oftwentieth-century art. He writes, 'Even if visual music is not the singlemode through which music and the visual arts have interacted over thepast century, it is certainly the most consistent. Indeed, the tradition ofvisual music might be said to be among the most tenacious stylistic strainsof the past 100 years, continuing to find new arenas for aesthetic explora-tion even as other, more famous movements and styles eventually faltered'.10

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It can be found in the contexts of painting, abstract cinema, installationart and digital media. Among the visual music filmmakers identified inthe exhibition are Len Lye, John and James Whitney, Jordan Belson, StanBrakhage, Larry Cuba, Michael Scroggins and Stephen Beck.

In the early 1930s, Mary Ellen Bute began to make abstract animatedfilms, becoming the first American to do so. After studying painting, includ-ing the work of Kandinsky, she became interested in the relationshipbetween music and visuals in film. She was attracted to the color organsof Thomas Wilfred, and she studied with Leon Theremin, who aided herexperiments in the pursuit of a kinetic visual art form. In 1932, Bute workedwith musicologist Joseph Schillinger on the unfinished Synchronization(made in conjunction with Lewis Jacobs); he asked her for help creatingthis animation to illustrate his theory that music could be reduced to aseries of mathematical formulae. After that, she began making a series ofSeeing-sound' abstract films, beginning with Rhythm in Light, completedin 1935; these films draw upon the music of Johann Sebastian Bach andEdvard Grieg, among others. In conjunction with her producer, husbandTed Nemeth, Bute made twelve of these works, which range from 3 to 9 minin length. Bute became increasingly interested in electronic media, and inthe early 1950s she was among the first to explore the use of such imageryin film.

A young Norman McLaren worked for Bute at one point. He drewfigures on film for the production of her Spook Sport from 1940, and someof his imagery was reused in later films as well. McLaren became wellknown as the head of the animation unit at the National Film Board ofCanada, where he explored many types of animated imagery, includingcameraless animation - that is, work created directly on the surface of thefilm. Like Fischinger, McLaren was very interested in synthetic sounddrawn or photographed into the optical sound portion of the film strip, andhe also saw these techniques as being linked to the concept of synaesthesia.McLaren documented his production processes with thorough notes, whichhave preserved the master animators techniques for future generations toexplore.

To create synthetic (or 'direct') sound on film, McLaren used two tech-niques, one employing cards that were photographed and the other inwhich he drew onto the film itself. For the card method, McLaren createda series of 'pitch cards' measuring 4 x 20 inches that were photographedinto the audio portion of a film strip. McLaren used them in complex ways,controlling the volume and attack of the score, and finding ways to controlunwanted noises. The other method he used employed clear film marked


with pens, brushes and ink, as well as black film that could be scratched.McLaren actually recommended the latter, as it does not pick up dust anddirt (which is read as 'sound' along with images drawn on the film).11

McLaren created synthetic sound in a total of ten films, including Dots(1939, the first film he made with animated sound), Neighbours (1952), andMosaic (1965). On the whole, the animated sounds are quite mechanical innature; some say the 'blips' and 'zips' sound like audio from early videogames. A film like Neighbours works well with this type of track. Its twocharacters move through pixilation (the frame by frame animation of liveactors), which makes them look somewhat robotic, thus complementingthe rather mechanical-sounding audio track.

Although direct sound can be considered somewhat esoteric, it is actuallya relatively pervasive technique that spans across cultures. Several Russianartists working in the late 1920s and early 1930s conducted some of thefirst experiments in direct sound. Heading one group was composer ArseniiAvraamov, who invented a universal 48-tone approach to music called the'Welttonsystem'12 When sound film made its appearance in the late 1920s,Avraamov, together with book illustrator Mikhail Tsekhanovskii and engi-neer Evgenii Sholpo, began to develop ideas about creating artificial sound -their intention was to create a system capable of playing 'universal' musicautomatically, without the need for a performer. Other conceptions of syn-thetic sound arose at that time as well; Nikolai Izvolov estimates that therewas 'a minimum of four separate "schools" of artificial sound [existing] inthe USSR, each of which employed its own technique'.13 Although theseapproaches were not actually used in productions, they were described ina Russian book published in 1936.14 Also, Solev wrote a paper on the topic,which was published in American Cinematographer the same year.15 It islikely that McLaren knew of the Russian experiments and was influencedby them; he also knew of 'early attempts in synthetic optical sound' madeby Swiss filmmaker Rudolf Phenniger in Toenende Handschrift (TonalHandwriting, 1931).16

Artists continue to regularly incorporate direct or photographed soundinto filmmaking practices. For example, in Bloodlust, Thorsten Fleisch usedhis own blood for the visual material of the film, allowing the imageryto overlap into the optical soundtrack area. The result, when the projectorreads the imagery as sound data, is abstract 'noise', soft and fluttering.Canadian Richard Reeves is also well known for his use of direct sound infilms such as Linear Dreams (1997), which was in production for 2 years -beginning with more than 7 months devoted to the soundtrack.17 Reevescreated the sound by scratching shapes into the sound stripe of 35 mm film.

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He recorded this sound into a computer and added reverb to the compo-sition to create a feeling of depth; he refers to the effect as a kind of'persistence of sound' that might compare to the 'persistence of vision asso-ciated with continuous frames of images.18 Reeves used the completedsoundtrack to guide creation of the films visuals.

Also interesting is the work of Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky,who began making films in 1979 and has become known for his use ofexposed stock.19 Tscherkassky s film work includes a series of three produc-tions - VArrivee (1997-1998), Outer Space (1999), and Dream Work (2001) -that are referred to as £The Cinemascope Trilogy'. All three employ thewidescreen Cinemascope format, utilizing black and white exposed foot-age from live-action films that have been manipulated in various ways. Thevisuals of LArrivee begin with sprocket holes running through the framewhile blips are heard on the soundtrack. Slowly, footage of a train emergesinto center frame, appearing to be pulled in front of the camera, out ofproper registration. The 2-min work - an homage to film pioneers Augusteand Louis Lumiere - ends with the image of a woman emerging from thetrain and kissing a man. This footage was taken from Mayerling (1969),a film by British director Terence Young. Except for assorted 'noise', thefilm is essentially silent. Tscherkassky writes, Tn VArrivee the originalsoundtrack was copied past the edge of the unexposed film strip so that theprojectors pickup reads parts of the image as sound, thereby making themaudible'; he explains that 'the result is vaguely reminiscent of the ItalianFuturists' intonarumori - "noise instruments" '.20

Tscherkassky s Outer Space and Dream Work both employ footage fromAmerican director Sidney J. Furies horror film, The Entity (1983). OuterSpace contains bits of music that are mostly fuzzy and non-continuous, butDream Work has a relatively more 'recognizable' soundtrack, with bits andpieces of the original sound compiled in a non-synchronous fashion: score,effects, and dialogue strobe as images of the original film are distorted andrapidly passed before the viewer's eyes. The director has elaborated on theproduction technique used in the three films, explaining that they weremade in a darkroom using a complex copying process, which was precededby detailed note taking that Tscherkassky likens to musical notation. Theoriginal film footage was studied by the filmmaker until he practicallymemorized it, and in the process he took detailed notes on paper to recordits dramatic structure. At that point, 'A second plan resembling a musicalscore was worked out for the darkroom work: The precise microstructureof each strip of film stock before it was exposed was determined, and all thechanges it underwent were noted; the result resembles graphic notation for


each film strip'.21 He used this form of documentation to track the complexprocess of direct printing pieces of film to unexposed film stock and other-wise building the images for his film.

During the 'Golden Age' of Hollywood animation, generally spanningthe 1930s to the 1950s, commercial studio production benefited from thetalents of such composers as Carl Stalling and Scott Bradley, best knownfor their work on Warner Brothers and MGM animation, respectively.Beginning in the early 1970s, the realm of'art animation' has grown signifi-cantly on a worldwide basis, creating wider breadth for applications ofmusic in animated work of this sort. Within this domain, a few particularlynotable composers have emerged. One of the best known is CanadianNormand Roger, who has scored a wide range of award-winning works:among them are Frederic Backs The Man Who Planted Trees (1987) andAlexander Petrovs The Old Man and the Sea (1999), both of which wonOscars. The American twins known as the Brothers Quay (Stephen andTimothy) have sometimes teamed with composer Lech Jankowski; forexample, he created the brooding, memorable music for their Street ofCrocodiles (1986).22 Larry Sider was the sound designer and sound editoron this film and other Quay projects. Numerous other accomplished musiccomposers have carved out niches in the field of art animation as well. Forexample, in 1997, Nick Phelps founded The Sprocket Ensemble as a collab-orative performing arts endeavor combining the work of composers andperformers of live music with that of animators, resulting in a series hecalls Ideas in Animation'. Among his collaborators is animator Nina Paley;he created original music for her film Fetch! (2001). While live music per-formance was standard in the 'silent era', today it is rarely experienced;modern audiences are generally surprised by the ambiance generated bylive performance during a screening, as music fills the space of a screeningroom.

In his 'Divertimenti' series of six films, Welsh painter Clive Walley workedwith different composers who were of central importance in shaping thefinal look of each 3-min piece. Because each score is so different, the filmsare quite distinctive visually, despite the fact that all are made using Walley stechnique of oil on glass created with his self-designed multi-plane rig (ituses many planes of glass that are aligned on top of one another, allowinghim to paint on several surfaces at one time). Divertimento No. 1 - Windsand Changes depicts a leaf-like object floating through the breeze in vari-ous contexts, with a score by Janine Swinhoe that metamorphoses fromglass-like, to mechanical, and to organ-like, while Divertimento No. 3 -Brushstroke, with music by Ian Mellish, is more ethereal in sound and image,dealing with the somewhat intangible process of creating a painting.

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Animator Stephanie Maxwell works closely with composer Alan Schindlerin creating visual music compositions such as passe-partout (2002), whichcombines camera-less imagery and hand-cut mattes in combination withdigital music. Their Time Streams (2003) is described as visuals composedof'animations and manipulations of hand-painted 35 mm motion picturefilm, small objects, copier art, and liquid mixtures that are extensively inter-woven and layered in digital post production', while 'The principal soundsources of the music are generic samples (digitized recordings of instru-mental and vocal tones and of environmental sounds such as ice cubesand ping pong balls). However, in re-synthesis the spectral structures (tonecolors) of these sounds often have been retooled and their attack and decayarticulations have been altered!23

There are of course, limitless examples of animation that have beenaccompanied by pre-recorded music of all sorts. Some animators, such asJohn and Faith Hubley, became well known for their use of jazz scores; toname just a few examples, Voyage to Next (1974) features music by DizzyGillespie, Of Men and Demons (1969) includes music by Quincy Jones, andThe Tender Game (1958) is accompanied by Ella Fitzgerald and the OscarPeterson Trio. Len Lye is among those who found inspiration in worldmusic: for example, both Colour Box (1935) and Kaleidoscope (1935)include music by Don Baretto and his Cuban Orchestra, and Colour Cry(1952) features blues musician Sonny Terry, while Particles in Space (1957)and Free Radicals (1958/revised in 1979) both include African drum music.Italian animator Vincenzo Gioanola animated imagery to accompany thepopular Italian rap song Tight da Faida (Fight the Feud), recorded byFrankie Hi NRG, in a 1994 film of the same name.

In some cases, individuals have played two roles. German filmmakerBaerbel Neubauer is her own composer; she generally creates sound andimage simultaneously, with shifts in one affecting changes in the other.Roots, Neubauer explains, is a 'metamorphosis of color and form which ispainted, drawn and stamped directly on blank film and corresponds torhythm and music. The main symbols of the film are the sun and sunwheels'.24 She says, 'When I started to make this film, I had some of themain images in my mind. I started by painting without having a concreteplan. I had composed some elements of the music on the computer sothere was a rough structure. From there, both music and images were thendeveloped in union'.25 She worked in a straight-ahead mode, one imageleading to the next. Neubauer has been composing sound for her camera-less films using a computer since she bought her first one, an Atari, in 1994.Part of the appeal of using digital sound, she says, is the fact that the filesbecome visual material that can be manipulated as curved lines, as a sound


wave - an experience that is quite different from composing in a traditional'analog' way.

Dennis H. Miller, too, has determined that his own best creative partneris himself. In films such as Factura (2003) and Cross Contours (2005), Millerinvestigates the ways that aspects of his music composition can be appliedto sequences of visual images. Whereas film students often are told thatmusic should be a background element supporting the visuals, he feelsquite differently. In his work, he aims for a dual-layered experience whereboth media are equally important; when asked if his music can 'stand on itsown, he says 'no', since the images and sounds he composes are integrallyconnected. Music composers such as Miller sometimes migrate to anima-tion because they feel it is compatible with their experience in time-basedart; they can take a small number of thematic concepts and translate themto visual imagery using such approaches as modulation, transposition,inversion and other aspects of music composition.

In several essays, composer Brian Evans has written of his work combi-ning sound and visual data using digital mapping and concepts related tosynaesthesia; one of the most recent is Time Slices to Sonic Maps', which hepresented at SIGGRAPH in 2005. In this paper, Evans discusses the similarways in which the brain maps data that is seen and heard. Then he writes,'Like the brain, digital technology stores information in a single format. Indigital it's all bits. Audio and image are abstracted to binary numbers. At thelevel of number, sound and light are the same and so easily mapped intoeach other. For an artist some of the fun is finding interesting ways to createthese maps'.26 In his 'Animation Notes' related to his works meledy amaziliaand limosa, he further explains, All is number in the computer. I takenumeric models and see what songs and pictures they will make. How canI map numbers to the senses - turn numbers into a tangible experience?Then I wonder how the senses map to each other. I map the maps'.27

Although this paper has focused on the application of music in artanimation that generally has been aimed at connoisseur' audiences, ratherthan the general public, there are examples of interesting sound/animationdevelopments that have been more broadly consumed. An obvious exam-ple is Fantasia (1940), which Walt Disney originally described as a 'ConcertFeature': this animated feature is structured around well-known pieces ofclassical music that are illustrated with animated figures ranging from stan-dard Disney-style cartoon caricatures to relatively more abstract imagery.Today, large numbers of the population are being exposed to visual musiccompositions through technology many of them use every day: most com-puters come with programs such as iTunes that include 'music visualizers'

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that bring the phenomenon of abstract imagery united with music intothe home. The visuals are formulated by the music being played on thecomputer using a series of parameters controlled by the software.

Though it is widely overlooked in historical analyses, the role of musicin animation of any kind - but especially art-oriented work - is obviouslycrucial. It is not only animators who have embraced the aesthetics of musiccomposition but also music composers who are increasingly lookingtowards animation as a way to extend their art practices. In this age whenMTV threatens to replace 'listening' to music with 'watching1 music, it isinteresting to consider the role that innovative sound/image compositionscan have in furthering the art of both music and animated imagery.

Notes

1. A few years later Russian Dziga Vertov employed stop-motion to create visual effectsfor his impressive 1929 city symphony' film Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with the MovieCamera), for which he constructed a unique score (played by the Alloy Orchestra) thataccompanies some versions of the film in current release.

2. Leonard Adelt, 'The filmed symphony', Berliner Tagblatt (21 April 1921), cited inRobert Russett and Cecile Starr, Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art. New York:Da Capo, 1988, p. 42.

3. Leopold Survage, 'Colored Rhythm^ Les Soirees de Paris (July-August 1914), citedin Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art, p. 38.

4. Jeremy Strick, 'Visual Music', in Kerry Brougher et al. (eds), Visual Music: Synaesthe-sia in Art and Music Since 1900. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2005, pp. 15-16.

5. Fischinger s influences were many, including a range of spiritual practices (such asBuddhism) and space technology. For more on Fischinger, see William Moritz, OpticalPoetry: The Life and Work ofOskar Fischinger. London: John Libbey, 2004.

6. William Moritz, 'The films of Oskar Fischinger', Film Culture, 58-59-60 (1974), 50.7. Oskar Fischinger, 'Sounding Ornaments (1932)', Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (8 July

1932), in Moritz (2004), p. 179.8. Over the years this film stock shrunk and was rendered unprojectable: Moritz (1974)

57-188; 143. Eventually, Moritz was able to print these works, but the result was unsatisfactory.He writes, 'Elfriede Fischinger and I were never able to get a really good version of the syn-thetic sound with the shapes visible, but we did make two attempts. In one of them, theornaments are optically printed along the side of the image, displaced so that you do seeexactly the ornament that makes each sound when that sound is heard. But it all goes by soquickly that you can hardly ponder it'. William Moritz, e-mail to the author, 14 July 2003.

9. Moritz (1974), pp. 51-2.10. Strick (2005), p. 18.11. McLaren, 'Handmade Sound Track for Beginners', 2. Unpublished production notes,

National Film Board of Canada.


12. Nikolai Izvolov, 'The history of drawn sound in Soviet Russia,' James Mann (trans.),Animation Journal 6.2 (Spring 1998), 54-9; 54.

13. Izvolov (1998), p. 55. Influenced by Futurism, Avraamov was most interested in thesounds of simple geometric forms. Sholpo came up with a sort of automated machine.In Moscow, Avaraamov worked with animation artists Nikolai Voinov and Boris lankovskiiat the Scientific Research Cinema and Photographic Institute, which closed in 1932. Bothmen came up with their own systems; the former employed cutouts photographed in thesound area, and the latter has been described as a kind of combination of Sholpo andVoinov s approaches. Izvolov (1998), pp. 56-7.

14. Izvolov does not give the name of an author; he refers to the book itself as TheAnimated Film. Moscow: Moscow Press, 1936.

15. V. Solev, 'Absolute music by designed sound', American Cinematographer, (April1936), 146-8, 154-5.

16. Izvolov writes that Norman McLaren confided in the Russian animator IvanIvanov-Vano that he was particularly well acquainted with the experiments of the Russianinventors of drawn sound because he had helped to translate the Russian text AnimatedFilm into English - the only book in which all these experiments had been systematicallydescribed'. Izvolov (1936), p. 58. McLaren includes a brief overview of early attempts insynthetic optical sound', in his unpublished film notes, Norman McLaren, 'Technical Noteson the Card Method of Optical Animated Sound', produced at the National Film Board ofCanada, written in 1952, revised and expanded in 1984.

17. Julie Pithers, 'The Hometown Screening May 13-16, The Garry Theatre and TheQuickdraw Animation Society', FFWD Weekly, Available at http://www.greatwest.ca/ffwd/Issues/1999/0513/cover.html.

18. Richard Reeves, 'Information on Selected Animated Films Produced/Directed andAnimated by Richard R. Reeves'

19. He has organized a number of festivals and also co-founded Sixpack, a film distribu-tion company based in Vienna. He also teaches filmmaking at the Academies of AppliedArts in Linz and Vienna. Like his productions, Tscherkassky s critical writing - which isextensive - is concerned with the boundaries of the film form; he explores these boundariesfrom both historical and theoretical perspectives.

20. Peter Tscherkassky, 'How and Why? A Few Comments Concerning the ProductionTechniques Employed for the CinemaScope Trilogy'. Available at http://www.tscherkassky.at (accessed on 28 February 2008).

21. Ibid.22. He is credited at Leszek Jankowski.23. 'Time Streams', Stephanie Maxwell's Homepage. Available at http://www.rit.edu/

-sampph/W_TimeStreams.html (accessed on 28 February 2008).24. Barbel Neubauer, 'Roots: An experiment in images and music', Animation World

Magazine 3.6, Available at http://www.awn.eom/mag/issue3.6/3.6pages/3.6neubauerroots.html (accessed on 28 February 2008).

25. Ibid.

http://www.greatwest.ca/ffwd/Issues/1999/0513/cover.html

http://www.greatwest.ca/ffwd/Issues/1999/0513/cover.html

http://www.tscherkassky.at

http://www.tscherkassky.at

http://www.awn.com/mag/issue3.6/3.6pages/3.6neubauerroots.html

http://www.awn.com/mag/issue3.6/3.6pages/3.6neubauerroots.html

http://www.rit.edu/-sampph/W_TimeStreams.html

http://www.rit.edu/-sampph/W_TimeStreams.html

Art Animation 601

26. Brian Evans, Time Slices to Sonic Maps' (pdf file, presented at SIGGRAPH 2005,Los Angeles, CA), online at http://www.ghostartists.com/academic/index.htm. SIGGRAPHis a huge computer graphics related conference held annually in Los Angeles and otherlocations across the United States. The latest innovations in the field are displayed and indi-viduals deliver research on their current research and artistic investigations.

27. Brian Evans, Animation Notes', Available at http://www.ghostartists.com/academic/pages/notes.htm (accessed on 28 February 2008).

http://www.ghostartists.com/academic/index.htm

http://www.ghostartists.com/academic/pages/notes.htm

http://www.ghostartists.com/academic/pages/notes.htm

39

Steamboat Willie and the Seven Dwarves: The DisneyBlueprint for Sound and Music in Animated Films

Robert C Sickels

Seemingly all film fans love animation. Shorts, features, it doesn't matter.And it s the animated films of Walt Disney that are generally recognizedas the fount from which all else in mainstream commercial animation hasflowed. This is especially true of the narrative structure of Disney s films; vir-tually all animation owes some debt to Disney, especially animated features.However, contemporary film scholarship has moved away from highlight-ing Disneys influence in filmmaking and much more towards the com-pany's cultural influence as wrought not just by its films but also by itsaggressive brand marketing of ancillary products, its stores and its themeparks. For example, recent representative texts include Annalee R. WardsMouse Morality: The Rhetoric of Disney Animated Film (2002), Sean GriffinsTinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the InsideOut (2000), Douglas Erodes Multiculturalism and the Mouse: Race and Sexin Disney Entertainment (2005) and From Walt to Woodstock: How DisneyCreated the Counterculture (2004), and Rethinking Disney: Private ControlPublic Dimensions (2005), a collection edited by Mike Budd and Max A.Kirsch. These books are invaluable in their own right and have only addedto 'Disneyfication - both the idea and the word - becoming an inextricablepart of the world s shared cultural lexicon. But as Disney criticism movesever more into the realm of cultural studies, what s typically lost in the new

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scholarship is some of the more subtle workaday influences Disney filmshave had on the work of other animators. And perhaps no other aspect ofDisney film has been given shorter shrift than Disney's trailblazing useof music.

Disney gets credit for having released both the first sound animatedshort, Steamboat Willie (1928), and the first feature length animated film,Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937). But what's rarely discussed andperhaps of greater importance is the reason why that matters beyond justtheir being the first. It matters not just because Disney was the first in theserespective things, but because they did it so well that few if any mainstreamanimators have done it any differently since. In most fields an initial inno-vation is crude and rudimentary but it nevertheless paves the way for futureadvancements that will both radically improve upon the original and alsotake said breakthrough into previously unimagined territories. Take flightas an example. The Wright Brothers probably never dreamed that theirshort flight at Kitty Hawk would eventually lead to space travel. But it did.Conversely, while technological advancements have allowed future anima-tors (as well as Disney itself) to do what Disney did with Steamboat Willieand Snow White and the Seven Dwarves better, few if any mainstreamanimators have even tried to do it differently. And when folks do try todepart from the Disney blueprint as established by Steamboat Willie andSnow White, then their deviance in and of itself almost by definition makestheir work avant-garde; indeed, the influence of these two early Disneyfilms is so profound that the use of sound and music in animated shortsand features remains virtually unchanged ever since.

Steamboat Willie: The Mouse Swings

Steamboat Willie actually isn't the first Mickey Mouse cartoon. It's the third.Plane Crazy (1928) and The Gallopin Gaucho (1928) came first. But theyweren't talking pictures, so they haven't gained the notoriety of SteamboatWillie, which is widely cited as the first sound animated short. But eventhat's kind of a misnomer. The fact is, virtually all silent films had soundaccompaniment, either in the form of an actual score that was meant to beplayed simultaneously, or at least a piano player in the theatre who wouldimprovise as he watched. But Steamboat Willie was more than just the firstcommercial animated film to marry music, sound and image: in many waysit was the first talking picture of any kind to do so.

Struggling young filmmaker Walt Disney, like virtually every other movielover, had seen The Jazz Singer in 1927. Disney was immediately convinced


that the addition of sound to his Mickey Mouse cartoons could push them(and him) over the top. He was right beyond his wildest dreams. But theinitial difficulty was deceptively simple: How does one synch sound toanimation? Nobody had ever done it before.

[Indeed], 'in 1928, no one knew how the drawings of the cartoon andthe notes of the music could be planned together. It was easy enoughto improvise a score to a completed film, but to figure out ahead oftime where the beats would occur on the drawings was beyond every-one. Walt insisted there must be a way the two could be worked togetherand be controlled and worked upon and changed. Thomas et al.(1981:287)

The solution was about as simple as it gets. Disney and his collaboratorsdesigned the film to match the click of a metronome. After several monthsof work, they had their film shot and the score written out - complete withsound effects, which at the time had to be recorded simultaneously as multi-tracking didn't yet exist! In September of 1928 Disney went to New York toget the score professionally recorded.

As Richard Schickel notes, one of the harder things to do was to devise away for a conductor to keep an orchestra precisely on the beat. Tliey finallyfigured out that at 24 frames per second there was a beat every twelveframes. Accordingly, the print was slashed with India ink every twelfthframe, which meant a white flash would appear on screen every half second.If a conductor made sure the beats coincided with the flashes, the score andthe film would be synchronized. There was a disastrous and costly initialattempt at it, during which conductor Carl Edwardi refused to match hisbeats to the onscreen flashes, arguing that a man of his skills (he was wellknown as the leader of the band at New York City s Capitol Theater) shouldbe able to conduct such simple songs without the aid of a visual metro-nome; subsequently, Disney retooled. First, he convinced Edwardi of theimportance of his adherence to the visual beat cues. He then pared downthe orchestra by letting many of the musicians go, figuring correctly that asmaller orchestra would have an easier time matching their beats to theflashes. Lastly, he canned two foley artists and took over their work himself.The second time was a charm, and Disney had his score. Not long after-ward Steamboat Willie's initial release took the country by storm (1997:120-123).

One could argue that Steamboat Willie succeeded because it was the firstof its kind as much as for any qualitative reason. While talking pictures

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were relatively new, its being released at the right time is only a small partof its success. Instead, it was the pictures revelatory use of sound thatwowed audiences. Its not just that there was music and sound effects, itsthat these elements are inseparable from the story; in fact, in many waysthey almost are the story. The films opening shot is a long shot of a steam-boat on a river. The boat chugs along rhythmically to the music and thesound of the paddles turning and the steam coming out of the smokestacks.Immediately the score and sound effects are integrated. The next shot is ofMickey himself, steering the boat and swinging his hips in time. He beginsto whistle, joyously and marvelously, the sound of his whistle a perfectmelody over the score that's soon accentuated by his pulling on the stringsthat trigger various whistles (which, like all the animals in the film, areanthropomorphized - a still-extant Disney trademark) to blow in time.The relatively few early talkies couldn't touch the auditory sophistication ofthis mouse.

It's been said that when the movies first learned to talk they sang instead,which has to do with the primitive technology of the early sound era. It wasfar easier to record the music and then have the actors lip synch to it thanit was to record anything live. Live synchronous recording was initiallyvery difficult and sounded poor. Disney circumvented this by not evenattempting to have his characters actually talk. Instead, they just kind ofmumble inaudibly. But we can tell what they're saying by the musical cuesas well as the great sound effects that convey mood. That it s a cartoon, it'sall lip-synched, is easy to forget as you're watching the incredible synchro-nization between character, sound, music and narrative. As Steven Wattsobserves:

Music joined comedy and dance as the entertainment trinity in theearly Disney films. The introduction of sound in animation, of course,gave prominent roles to musical scores much more quickly thansophisticated dialogue. In the early films, characters' voices remainedlittle more than distinctive monosyllabic noises and their words werefew and far between. But the music flourished. (1997: 34-35)

The film's high point occurs when a goat eats the sheet music to Turkey in theStraw' that had been brought aboard by the boat's lone passenger, MinnieMouse. In a gallant attempt to help regain the music, Minnie cranks thegoat's tail and out comes the notes (literally), wafting in the air. Respondingto Minnie's delight, Mickey begins a madcap syncopated melodic run overthe score in which he plays animals like instruments. He swings a cat by the


tail with abandon, the yowling of which pulses in time; he squeezes a duckso the honks accentuate the score; he pulls on the tails of suckling pigsbefore then squeezing the sow like a bagpipe (the sound of his tweakingher teats is perhaps the films funniest moment); lastly, in a kind of grandfinale, he plays the teeth of a bull like a xylophone. Through it all, Mickeyswings, ebullient, delirious and seemingly filled with the driving spirit ofthe pure rhythmic force of the music. For contemporary audiences, watch-ing early sound films such as The Jazz Singer is a rather painful experience,so primitive is the technology; but Steamboat Willie is still really quite fan-tastic; one can only imagine the effect it must have had on audiences atthe time. For them, Steamboat Willie must have seemed like it came fromthe moon, it was so different from anything else that came before it. AsSchickel writes:

Disney was the first movie maker to resolve the aesthetically disruptivefight between sight and sound through the simple method of fusion,making them absolutely coexpressible,' with neither one dominantnor carrying more than its fair share of the films weight. To put it evenmore crudely - and rather as one imagines many of his first audiencesmight have put it - che made things come out right! (1997: 131)

Walt Disney had freed film from the bounds of silence; and by makingsound such an integral part of the narrative, he created the blueprint notfor just animated films but for live-action ones as well, in which music andsound effects are an essential part of virtually any film made. And concern-ing short animation, Disney opened up the floodgates. Other animatorswould soon follow Disney's template to create their own influential andpopular cartoons, such as Walter Lantz Productions' Woody Woodpeckercartoons and King Features' Popeye shorts (both distributed by UniversalPictures), Hanna and Barberas Tom and Jerry cartoons (distributed byMGM); and perhaps most notably there was Warner Brothers' LooneyTunes and Merrie Melodies series, featuring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, PorkyPig, et al. As concerns more recent cinema, one only need think of theDisney subsidiary Pixar's Oscar-nominated animated short Boundin(2003), which played theatrically as a pre-feature short before The Incredi-bles (2003). While there's voice-over narration, the music and sound effects,created by a raft of prairie animals, is every bit as important to the narrative.Walt Disney's seemingly unpretentious Steamboat Willie, with its revolu-tionary use of what has since become known as 'Mickey Mousing' - in whichmusic mimics and/or enhances the onscreen action - created a template that's

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still the industry standard in all forms of filmmaking, not just animation.But as concerns Disney itself, *[t]he animal concert in Steamboat Williepresages those wonderfully intricate animation sequences that were to bethe high points of the studios work in years to come' (Schickel, 1997: 131).

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves: The Big Picture

Snow White is typically considered the feature-length animated film. Butdespite its 83-min running time, Snow White isn't necessarily a narrativeadvance on Steamboat Willie. What it is, however, is a technological advanceboth as concerns how it s synched to the music and the complexity of themusic itself- and, perhaps most importantly, the use of lyrics as a means offurther enhancing the narrative. As Annalee R. Ward notes:

Disney animated films rely heavily on music as background, transi-tion, emotive vehicle, and carrier of theme. The lyrics in particular arean important carrier of rhetoric... [ultimately] Disney s use of songsis an important vehicle for communicating its films themes. (2002:86-87)

Earlier Disney films certainly began to have more and more complicatedmusic and as dialogue became easier to incorporate fluidly into films,greater themes began to emerge in Disney s films as well, but Snow Whitewas the one that brought all the disparate elements upon which Disney hadbeen working together into a singular, unified whole.

After the success of Steamboat Willie, and the subsequent Mickey Mouseshorts, the goal for Walt Disney was to take it to the next level. Simple 4/4rhythms and homespun tunes from the American popular songbook weregreat, but they could only take a picture so far. Accordingly, in 1929 theWalt Disney Company started making films they'd release as part of theirTechnicolor Silly Symphony series. These films were by design much morecomplicated than their rodent brethren. Whereas in the Mickey cartoonsthe action was tailored to the music, in the Silly Symphonies the musicwould take precedent. As Thomas writes:

While the shorts featuring Mickey and action gags were giving themusicians such problems, the Silly Symphonies were pushing into anew relationship of music and animation. Here the integrity of themusic was more important, and the action had to do the adapting.When a theme from Rossini or Schubert was used, it had to be used


intact or the whole effect was spoiled... and considerably more workwas required to find actions that fit the music, told the story, and stillbuilt a personality. A move that was right, visually, would seldommatch the sound on the track at that point, and the animators had tobecome more like choreographers, trying to build a unified statementin movement rich in emotional content and with a cohesive flow - allwithin the confines of an established score. The visual material couldnot be choppy or fragmented; it had to have the same unity as themusic. (1981:288-9)

The early Silly Symphonies were fairly simple, but Disney insisted hisanimators push the envelope and gradually the films got more and morecomplicated, featuring increasingly greater numbers of characters andevents, moving in ever more complicated and surprising ways. While simple'Mickey Mousing' was still present, the overall look, feel and sound of thefilms was moving further away from a hoedown and closer to a moderndance piece. As Disney collaborator Wilfred Jackson said:

[there wasn't] much thought given to the music as one thing and theanimation as another... we conceived of them as elements which wewere trying to fuse into a whole new thing that would be more thansimply music plus sound'. Thomas et al. (1981: 288)

The Silly Symphonies, with their seamless integration of music and narra-tive, resulted in unprecedented new heights for animated shorts. The publicloved these films (as well as just about every other animated short Disneymade), and so too did critics which was unexpected at the time. Animationwas appreciated by audiences, and a required part of any film program, butit fulfilled almost the same function as the newsreels or live-action serialsthat played before features: it was expected to be included with the price ofa ticket, but cartoons weren't thought of as an art form unto themselves.The Silly Symphonies changed that perception and elevated animation intoa new realm. And it was in large part the integrated use of music thathelped Disney and his animators take their work to the next level. New YorkPhilharmonic director Arturo Toscanini reportedly leapt to his feet afterseeing The Band Concert (1935) and yelled 'Surely it is impossible! It ismagnificent!' Likewise, American composer Jerome Kern went so far asto say, 'Walt Disney has made the twentieth century's only important con-tribution to music . . . Disney has made use of music as a language' (Watts,1997: 122-123).

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The next logical step for Walt Disney was to take advantage of emergingtechnologies (such as multi-track recording) and the skill of his seasonedanimators and composers and try to apply what they'd learned to a featurefilm. After shopping the idea around to investors (despite their successes,Disney still didn't have the funding to make a feature that in the end wouldcost over $1 million), Walt Disney finally got RKO's Floyd Odium to agreeto help back the movie, and with that so began a 3-year ordeal during whichDisney would make a feature-length animated film. In addition to a fleetof animators and technical workers, Disney's Frank Churchill wrote allthe music and Larry Morey wrote all the lyrics. The film was released inDecember of 1937, and the finished film is nothing short of astounding. Itsnot so much that it did anything that Disney hadn't done before; rather, itwas that it took the best of everything they'd done and brought all thesethings together in one film.

Visually, the film is never anything less than stunning. It starts with along shot of a castle and through a series of fades moves into its interior inwhich we meet the wicked queen for the first time. The breadth and scopeand detail of what we see in those initial shots is so much bigger than whatwe've seen in the earlier shorts; and yet, impressive as it is, it pales incomparison to what will follow. When we first meet Snow White, she singsher famous song, Tm Wishing' (sung by Adriana Caselotti, who also voicesSnow White). Particularly stunning in this sequence is the reverse angleshot from inside the well looking up at Snow White as she's singing. It wasan unnecessary shot for the narrative, but it's the first of many shots theDisney team incorporated simply because they could; they wanted to showthe world just how far animation had come from it's stick-figure flip-book-style roots. In just a few short years the combination of technology and theskills of animators had concomitantly increased to the point that it seemedto be a whole new form audiences were seeing (the same was of true of liveaction films - the ability of filmmakers had escalated so exponentially thatit's hard to even compare something like Gone With the Wind (1939) withThe Jazz Singer, even though they were only separated by little more thana decade).

In addition, this is the first in a long line of songs by Disney animatedcharacters that comes early in a film and literally lays out the basic premiseof what follows. In this case, Snow White lets us know that she's 'wishing forthe one I love to find me today'. This singing of a song that also helps toboth establish plot points and set them in motion would become the stapleof live action musicals in general and animated films, Disney and other-wise, in particular. For instance, while one doesn't immediately think of


Disney or Snow White when considering the denizens of South Park (1998),its hard not to see that the shows opening song, 'Mountain Town', owes adebt to its Disney predecessors.

When Snow White is confronted by a would-be assassin sent on behalfof the queen, her beauty overwhelms the man and he tells her to flee. Herflight through the forest towards what she hopes will be a safer place isspectacular, as the forest morphs into a kind of nightmare in which thebranches of the trees and the residents of the forest take on the characteris-tics of what we can only assume are Snow Whites worst dreams. Its a greatmixture of the pictorially real and visually fantastical, perfectly punctuatedby the score, which heightens the audiences sense of Snow Whites terror.We're as relieved as she is when she finally happens upon a clearing and islead to the safety of the dwarves' house by what appears to be an army ofanthropomorphized critters - of which there are so many that the frameseems as though it may burst (perhaps another instance of the Disney ani-mators' exuberance over what they were able to do).

When we finally meet the dwarves themselves, its the music as muchas anything that helps bring their various personas to life. As Jack Zipesnotes, 'they all have names - Doc, Sleepy, Bashful, Happy, Sneezy, Grumpy,Dopey - representative of certain human characteristics' (1995:36). Further,in a kind of visual onomatopoeia, they act and look like their names.However, equally important in conveying their names is the music thataccompanies their actions. This is true throughout, but especially evidentin the scene in which they first meet Snow White, where the score perfectlyaccentuates their traits: for example, the music mimics the hesitation ofSneezy as he prepares to sneeze or underscores Grumpy's grumpinesswith short staccato bursts that convey his general affectation of discontentwith the world.

While there is much that is seemingly different than that which appearedin earlier Disney shorts, it's not as if Disney suddenly got high-minded.The film's basic narrative is still dirt simple and music retains its utmostimportance and perhaps the films' best scenes: where Snow White andthe animals clean the house and the after-dinner concert the dwarves playfor Snow White seems clearly descended from the 'Turkey in the Straw'sequence in Steamboat Willie. Here there is a clever mixture of action,music, lyrics and sound effects serving as punctuating melody. In the end,Snow White s prince does indeed come - the fruition of her confidence asexpressed in the film's signature song, 'Some Day My Prince Will Come' -and all is right in the world and audiences then and now let out a collectivesigh of contentment. At the time, the publics clamor over Snow White was

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unprecedented; with a box-office gross of $8 million Snow White becamethe highest-grossing film in history (a title it held until 1939 and GoneWith the Wind). Music played an essential role in the films reception, as themusic was able to convey feelings and emotions that actions and expres-sions alone couldn't:

Feelings of isolation, rejection, an awareness of beauty, a sense ofgrowing strength, of hope, of devotion - these are all inner emotionsthat are difficult to show. Fortunately, this is the area of greateststrength for music... Since music is so closely associated with most ofthe major events in our lives - nursery songs, campfire songs, schoolsongs, religious songs, dances, weddings, and, finally, funerals - itbecomes the soul of our memory, forever coloring our impressions.Just the playing of a familiar theme brings back the emotions of pastexperience, and through associations we can be made to feel empathyeven for peoples of distant cultures. This becomes a vital element inmaking fantasy worlds believable - not just a place observed from thecomfort of our seats, but a region we actually inhabit for the durationof the film. (Thomas et al, 1981: 286)

Visually, Snow White remains an amazing film, but the ingenious way thatmusic is incorporated as an essential part of the narrative is likely lost onmost contemporary audience members. This is testament to the power andlasting influence of how music, lyrics and sound effects are used in SnowWhite; Disney s integration of the audible with the visual was so effectivethat most commercial films since - not just animated features but live-action films as well - adhere to the pattern it established. It sounds exactlyas contemporary audiences expect it to sound, which means that a personwho didn't know any better would never guess it was the first to do what itdoes. But that film, along with Steamboat Willie, was groundbreaking, andtogether they established the blueprint to which virtually all commercialfilms still adhere. The song remains the same, and likely will forevermore,all because of the unprecedented innovations wrought in the bringing tolife of a dancing mouse and some singing dwarves. Walt Disney believedthat music was the missing element in making movies as good as theycould be. And he was right.

40TV News Music

Television News Music in North America

James Deaville

In its various forms of dissemination, the news has always exceeded itsfundamental presentation as published or spoken text. Not unlike the mod-ern televised news announcer, the town crier delivered the news throughthe ages with the assistance of musical sound (produced by a hand bell),which would attract the attention of auditors/viewers. In the nineteenthcentury, after newspapers had become the principal vehicles for the disper-sal of news, publishers discovered that photographs enhanced the messageof their texts. The twentieth century brought new media that were put inthe service of news delivery, whether radio, television or the Internet. Beforethese broadcast media came of age, however, film was already providingthe public with images, text and music about the latest occurrences in theworld, through the theatrical newsreel. Pioneered before World War I byCharles Pathe, the newsreel became popular during the war as a means ofseeing actual moving images from the front lines. Until the introductionof sound-on-film technique in 1927, music accompanied the newsreels inthe same manner it did for feature films, through live musical performancein the theatres. In the 1930s and 1940s, music for newsreels tended towardsthe overly dramatic, whether adapted from Wagner or recognizable folkand national songs, or drawn from a library of cues composed to accom-pany radio broadcasts, feature films and newsreels.1 Music accompaniedthe unfolding events of World War II in cinema theatres and radio notonly in North America and Western Europe but also in Germany and

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German-occupied territory, where for example the fanfare of Liszt's LesPreludes announced special news reports from the war.

Although the technology for television existed before the war, it wasnot until the early 1950s that the broadcasting medium established itself asfinancially viable. Music accompanied shows, advertising and special newsprograms during the first decade, but not until the 1960s did the 'eveningnews' incorporate musical sounds - and then only in a very limited capacity.As networks moved to a half-hour evening news format in 1963, NBCclosed its newscast with the first bars from the scherzo of Beethoven'sNinth. Richard Salant, president of CBS News through the 1960s and 1970s,banned the use of music and sound effects from their news programs, withthe intention of keeping the news free from elements of entertainment andthus maintaining its credibility. This policy was so entrenched that the CBSEvening News did not feature a musical theme until 1987, although WalterCronkites newscasts did exploit the authoritative sound of the teletype,which could be construed at least as having a strong rhythmic component.ABC's first news theme dates from 1975; and NBC commissioned HenryMancini in 1977 for an original theme. In general, we can observe thattelevision news directors of the 1960s and early 1970s were skeptical ofadding music to the news, fearful of adding an emotional element to whatthey regarded as the objective reporting of the days events.

As a result, the entire conflict in Vietnam - arguably the most significantcontinuing news story of the 1960s and early 1970s - played out in livingrooms across North America by and large without the support of music.We can observe in hindsight that the absence of music lent those televisualimages an intensity that news coverage of the Persian Gulf War and theWar in Iraq lacked through the reliance on high-concept entertainmentvalues in newcasting. Diegetic music was a regular feature of televisionreporting about anti-war protests - but only because the songs and chantsbelonged to the news items themselves.

Some local television stations added music to their newscasts soonerthan the national networks did. According to SouthernMedias News MusicSearch Archive, early station news themes in part derived from film scoreslike John Barry s From Russia with Love (Philadelphia's KYW from 1965 to1971) or Lalo Schifrin's 'Tar Sequence' from Cool Hand Luke (New York'sWABC from 1968 to 1984, Los Angeles' KABC from 1969 to 1991, Chicago'sWLS from 1969 to 1980). In the early 1970s companies emerged that pro-vided music for radio and television newscasts, initially themes such as 'MoveCloser to Your World' by Mayoham Music, 'Catch 5' by Gari Communi-cations and 'NBC Radio-TV Newspulse' by Fred Weinberg Productions.


These opens' are characterized by brass fanfares to establish authority andby driving strings and percussion to suggest a busy office of breaking newsstories (a musical elaboration of the teletype sound). They also serve abranding function for the particular station/network and newscast.

As the use of music in the news expanded during the course of the late1970s and the 1980s, so did the packages of musical elements that pro-duction companies sold to networks and stations. (It should be noted thatthe terms for these elements vary within the industry.) It became custom-ary for local and national newscasts to extend the open into 'promo beds',which involve music against images and voice for the major stories to becovered - the music is looped to accommodate texts and images of variablelengths - and for them to place a shortened version of the open at the endas a 'close'. Moreover, television newscasting developed musical cues forgetting into and out of commercial breaks called 'bumpers'. Perhaps themost important element was the so-called stinger, which is a newly com-posed musical theme to accompany graphics and narration for major ongo-ing stories. As the most original and freest musical production element,the stinger announces the item to follow (and in certain cases also helps tocreate an attitude about the item within the audio-viewer). The nationalnetworks' newly composed 'war themes' for military conflicts (beginningwith the Persian Gulf War of 1991) serve as the most prominent examplesof stingers and their persuasive potential.

When combined with graphics and narration, these production elementsprovide a structure for the primary evening newscasts of national networksand stations. The opens and closes establish the boundaries of the half-hournewscast, while bumpers and commercial breaks divide it internally, intoever-shortening segments (the first commercials usually occur after tenminutes of news). The presence of a stinger will signal to news consumersthat something special demands their attention. When twenty-four-hourcoverage of a story disrupts that structure, as occurred in the days after9/11, audio-viewers at home will be unsettled until the 'normalcy' providedby bumpers and closes is re-introduced.

An industry has arisen from this need for news music in radio andtelevision. Production companies sell individual packages of elements thatare based on a central theme, usually that of the open. Packages are namedaccording to the impact the company wishes them to have, such as 'HighVelocity' of 615 Music, 'Eyewitness News' of Gari Communications, or'Brave New World' of Shelly Palmer Company. Musical tracks within thepackage identify news function (investigative reporting, sports, entertain-ment), or style (orchestral, jazz, rock), or even time of day, so that stations

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can choose what they think is most effective for their market. The primarycomposers of the production music often own the companies, whetherFrank Gari, Stephen Arnold or Edd Kalehoff, although they typicallyemploy other, unnamed musicians for tasks like editing, scoring and evencomposing.

A landmark in television news music occurred in 1985, when NBC Newscommissioned John Williams to compose a full package of musical elementsfor their Nightly News program. With 'The Mission', high-concept Hollywoodvalues fully entered the television newsroom, mainly because of the com-posers personal association with that type of film. (Indeed, it is probablyno coincidence that the rise of television news music after 1975 coincidedwith the emergence of high-concept film during that same period.) For twodecades, NBC mined cThe Mission for musical material, although it wasnot the longest-lived news theme: for example, Buffalo's WKBW featuredMayoham Musics 'Move Closer to Your World' theme for over 30 years(1972-2003).

However, it took the major crisis of the Persian Gulf War to create theopportunity for an enterprising network (CNN) to take the final step intopresenting the news as high concept 'entertainment', which would involvecoordinating all production elements - titles, graphics, still and movingimages, music, diegetic sound, narration, live broadcasting - to create aspectacle that tapped into the audience's experiences with film. Inspiredby CNN's brilliant 'War in the Gulf stinger, that musically featured a V-Idissolving tympani roll, all networks adopted the special-item stinger as astandard feature for major, long-term stories, whether the O. J. Simpsoncase, Bill Clinton's 'Zippergate' crisis or the Iraq War. The next generation oftelevision news provider, represented by Fox News (beginning in 1996),drew its interaction of graphics and music more from the video or computergame rather than high concept film: as accompanied by laser whooshesand enhanced diegetic sounds, the brash, rock-inspired scores fit in wellwith the frenetic editing that targets a youthful audience.

As news is increasingly consumed from Internet sources, some of thestrategies from television news will undoubtedly migrate there. Even as thenews departments of television and radio networks and stations enhancetheir Internet presence through video and sound, blogs and podcasts havethe potential of incorporating music into their online 'news' offerings.Wherever the possibility will exist in broadcast media for communicatingmatters of importance to the public, music will have a role to play.

Television news music has not attracted significant scholarly attention,in part because of its invisibility. Even in studies of television news, media


specialists tend to ignore the musical component, to the same extent thatfilm scholars neglect the soundtrack. For their part, musicologists havedismissed this music because of what they consider to be its 'poor quality*.Nevertheless, music has participated in network and local televisionbroadcasting of the news since the mid-1970s, and if we believe NicholasCooks designation of music as the 'ultimate hidden persuader',2 its influ-ence upon generations of North American news consumers should not beunderestimated.

Notes

1. Raymond Fielding, The American Newsreel: A Complete History, 1911-1967(2nd edn). Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006, p. 161.

2. Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction (2nd edn). Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2000, p. 122.

Advertising MusicStrategies of Imbuement in Television Advertising Music

Ronald Rodman

© 2004 by Mort Walker. Used by permission of the author.

Levels of Meaning in Television Commercials

Television commercials are essentially closed' texts, meaning that theirraisons d'etre are to sell products and services to a consuming viewingaudience, or as Winfred Noth puts it, 'to have consumers and producersparticipate in the act of commodity exchange'.1 Once the consuming audi-ence is aware that a particular bit of television they are watching is a com-mercial, they become fully aware of the addressers intention to attempt topersuade them to purchase the goods or services being advertised. In otherwords, the audience internalizes the conventions of television advertisingand accepts them as advertising.

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Because they are television texts, commercials have developed throughoutthe history of TV in order to capture the viewers attention and imagination.Early TV commercials usually featured talking heads extolling the virtuesof a product; but as these type of commercials became commonplace,advertisers sought more dramatic solutions to capture the viewing audi-ences attention. Soon, commercials became mini-narratives or dramaswhere actors extolled the virtues of a product by dramatizing the need foror benefit of the product in quasi-dramatic situations. By the mid-1970s,the proclivity to dramatize commercials soon became the norm. Many adsbecame mini-narratives while others foregrounded the spectacle of thevisual images, sound and music over the primary focus of the ad; that is,the intent of commodity exchange. Such is the case in the Beetle Baileycomic strip shown above. In the strip, Beetle and Killer are so enthralled bythe great music, beautiful girls, and funny stuff' of the commercial, thatthey have no idea what the commercial is trying to sell.

Noth calls the practice illustrated in the Beetle Bailey strip 'masking!In a 'masked' commercial, the appeal for commodity exchange has beenobfuscated by the 'surface text' of the ad - the great music, beautiful girls,and funny stuff' - and thus has hidden the true intent of the ad. In themasked ad, the pragmatic frame message is often restricted to a mere pre-sentation of the commodity or its brand name without the imperativeappeal to purchase the product. Noth uses the example of the old enam-elled Coca-Cola sign that bears the inscription: 'Drink Coca Cola' insteadof'Buy Coca-Cola'. In spite of the closed nature of advertising texts, Nothexplains that surface messages have tended to use elaborate visual and/oraural components in artistic ways. These surface texts tend to hide or ignorethe deeper level of the advertising text in what Charaudeau calls 'strategiesof occultation'. Such strategies substitute the deeper- level message 'Buy X'with a surface message, 'Enjoy X'.2 The practice of airing masked ads is cer-tainly prevalent on television, especially American television. Due to thenature of television texts, this masking process in commercials is poten-tially much more significant than in the print media to which Noth refers,due to the additional surface elements of the text, notably the televisualimage, sound, dialogue and music.

In formulating the notion of masking, Noth recognizes a dual-levelledstructure of ads. Borrowing from cognitive psychology, artificial intelli-gence and text linguistics, Noth refers to advertising as a 'frame message',defined as an organizational principle relating a number of concepts thatby convention and experience somehow form a unit that may be actualizedin various cognitive tasks.3 Such frames are multi-faceted, consisting of an

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outer pragmatic frame and an inner textual frame. The pragmatic framedescribes two actions in every advertisement: persuasion and selling. Thetextual frame is embedded in the pragmatic frame and contains the expres-sions of these actions, whether through visual images, sound, dialogue, etc.

Before beginning my discussion of music in television advertising, I wouldrefine Noth's conception of the semantic frame when describing the rela-tionship of music to television. The notion of 'frame' is useful in delineatingunits of semiosis in a television text. We may also delineate multiple levelsof such frames by employing the aspects of signification put forth byCharles Morris.4 Taking his cue from Peirces tripartition of the sign (rep-resentmen, object and interpretant), Morris describes three ways that signsrelated to each other: syntactics, 'the formal relations of signs to one another',semantics, the 'relation of signs to objects to which signs are applicable', andpragmatics, the 'relation of signs to interpreters'.5 In a later work, Morrissimplifies this explanation by stating the syntactics is a study of the waysigns are combined; semantics is a study of the signification of signs andpragmatics study the origin, uses and effects of signs.6

By citing Morris here, we may conceive of frame messages as containing'semantic fields', each with a syntactics, semantics and pragmatics. Syntacticsis the 'semiotic space' where the discursive elements of television are relatedto each other, these elements including aspects of image, sound and music(upon which I focus). Semantics will include the representational aspectsof the commercial itself, including its narrative and its artistic aspects.Finally, pragmatics refers to how these artistic aspects of a commercialrelate to everything/anything 'outside' of the text, or the 'intertextuaF aspectsof the ad. These inter-textual aspects include not only audience interpreta-tions but also an ads relationship to other texts, including other ads. Often,inter-textual aspects of music are important in adding meaning to televi-sion advertisements.

Music and Commercials

According to David Huron music in television and radio advertising ismeant to entertain, achieve structural continuity of the text, spur memora-bility from the audience, help target a demographic or psychographic groupor establish an authorial voice for the ad: all the while also adding a 'lyricallanguage' to advertisements.7 This 'lyrical language' coincides with Nothsnotion of the 'artistic surface message', which 'sugar-coats' the appeal to buya commodity with an aesthetic dimension of music. Implicit in Huron's listof functions are two categories: (1) a semantics where the lyrical language


of music that is meant to entertain, and (2) a pragmatic and cognitivedimension, where perceptual effects of music are meant to elicit a responsefrom a listener: spur memorability, target demographic or psychographicgroups or establish an authorial voice. Through Hurons (and others*) obser-vations, music can be viewed as a frame message with an inner textualartistic surface (the lyrical language of music) and an outer pragmatic framethat engages human cognition, identifies socio-economic groups and per-forms other extra-musical functions.

A brief consideration of the history of music in television advertisingreinforces Hurons two main categories. Music has been a staple of adver-tising in the electronic media from the earliest days of film and radio. Thefirst musical advertising jingle was heard on the air in 1929 when a barber-shop quartet sang a song about the breakfast cereal called Wheaties on aMinneapolis radio station. Such jingles became prevalent in the aurallybased medium of radio, becoming effective as a means for the audience toremember a product. When television developed in the 1940s and 1950s,advertising practices were transferred to the new medium, only now withvisual images to accompany the music (or vice versa). In early television,advertisements tended to be direct sales pitches to buy products, and jin-gles were effective mechanisms to deliver memorable, lyrical sales pitches.The 1950s and 1960s witnessed a plethora of jingles, selling products rang-ing from breakfast cereal ('Snap, Crackle, Pop, Rice Krispies') to gasoline('You Can Trust you car, to the man who wears the Star', etc.). As completemusical works with accompanying 'poetic' lyrics, these jingles were usefulas mnemonic aids for an audience. Because the lyrics almost always con-tained the name of the product being advertised, the music appealeddirectly to the pragmatic level of the text and thus created open texts.

By the 1970s (with many examples occurring earlier), the practice ofmasking became more prevalent. Television commercials, especially nation-ally televised ads, were increasingly less explicit about showing the productor presenting the explicitly appellative function of buying a product orservice. Also, as viewers became more sophisticated and competent withthe nuances of television, they now understood the purpose of an adver-tisement, and ad agencies and sponsors felt free to be more creative inselling precuts. Consequently, the musical jingle went into decline (or atleast changed dramatically), and music took on other functions in commer-cials, especially as mood signifiers or accompaniments to mini-narratives.

Hurons categories show that music can function as a frame message, orsemiotic system, with both an outer pragmatic frame and an inner textual


frame. Moreover (as Huron implies) music can signify on both inner andouter frames of the commercial at once, permeating all levels of the framemessage. However, different commercials use music in different ways andthis permeation of levels differs, depending on the relationship of musicand visuals, and on the use of music itself. To illustrate three scenarios inwhich music permeates both the inner textual level and outer pragmaticlevel of ads, we shall analyze three commercials shown in the late 1990s toearly 2000s.

Animating the Artistic Surface: Music and Dancing Images

A recent advertisement for an American discount department store chainconsists of a rapid montage of women's (or more specifically young adoles-cent girls) apparel: shorts, purses, shoes, bathing suits, etc. These items arecomputer generated into geometrical patterns that literally 'dance' acrossthe screen (Example 1). Background colours change rapidly as the itemsmorph into other items.

Example 1

The only sound that occurs in the ad is up-beat pop/light rock style pieceof music, complete with rock-band instruments: guitars, drums, bass andblues-style piano. An excerpt of the music played is shown in Example 2.

The ad begins with a slightly distorted electric guitar playing a typicalrock gesture. After the third repetition of this figure, another guitar doublesthe first guitar, and drums and bass join in. The drums lay down a heavybackbeat feel with an upbeat tempo, synchronized to the movement ofthe clothing on the screen. Meanwhile, the bass plays long notes overa pattern of D-B-flat-C. In measure eight, an acoustic piano comes in witha typical blues/rock gesture. By measure twelve, the two slightly out-of-tuneguitars play another gesture rhythmically based on the first gesture, withthe bass descending through C-B-A-and F before returning to the tonic C.


The music ends abruptly on beat one of the sixteenth bar, just as the com-pany s logo appears.

The ad is masked by Noths definition, as there is no verbal appeal to buyproducts, and the logo of the company is shown only at the very end of thead. The ad also conforms, at least partially, to Charadeaus 'strategy ofoccultation' where the appeal to shop at the store is hidden until the lastmoment and then only referenced by the company's logo. As masked texts,Noth and Charadeau might suggest that the ad only entertains through thecolourful computerized 'dance' of women's apparel. The commodities to be

Example 2


exchanged (shorts, purses, shoes, bathing suits, etc.) are certainly presenton the screen, but they are portrayed more as aesthetic objects that literallymove, dance and march through the magic of computer animation.

The music of the department store ad plays a significant role in relation-ship to the images on the screen. Music serves as sonic accompaniment forthe images on the screen, as they are synchronized to move in rhythmto the music. Indeed, the music 'animates* the apparel, which is seen nolonger as just moving by computer generation, but actually 'dancing' on thescreen. The commercial seems to be about the images moving together,masking the appeal to shop at the store. In terms of frame message, theinner text of the frame is about the play of visual and sonic signifiers on thescreen. The ad focuses on the syntax of images and music. Here, musicplays a traditional role, common in theories of art, where the meaning of apiece of art, music or dance is derived solely from the interplay of its syn-tactical elements (colours, sounds, musical patterns, bodily movements),and their relationship to each other. In this ad, the syntactical arrangementof both image and music permeate the inner semantic frame of the ad, cre-ating a 'dance' or 'part/ of the apparel items and music.

The visual and musical frames reinforce each other, in what ClaudiaGorbman and Nicholas Cook call 'mutual implication'.8 The music of the adis essentially light-rock party music, newly composed for the ad. While notof the quality or duration to make a contemporary hit on a radio stationplay list, the music does suggest a light contemporary rock style and wouldbe appealing (perhaps marginally) for young viewers (especially adolescentgirls - the target audience for this ad), while not being offensive (too loud,raucous, bawdy, etc.) for parents who probably will be buying the clothes.The music interacts with the computer-generated animation of dancingclothes to produce a mutually reinforcing semantic of'fun'. These represen-tations within the inner textual frame then permeate to the outer prag-matic frame, where they are then subject to ideological interpretation. Thesyntactical elements of the ad (young women's apparel) are representedthrough computer animation as 'dancing', leading to an ideology that shop-ping at this particular store is 'fun'. The music (while an original piece andnot an imitation of any hit song) uses tone colours of light-rock music,provides a steady up-beat light-rock-style beat, and is thus construed as'party' music: imbuing the ideology of the store as a fun place for youngpeople to shop. Thus, while the music operates primarily on the syntacticlevel and contributes to the occupation' of the ad through its artistic sur-face, it also permeates to the outer frame of the ad to imbue the store withthe message that 'shopping at this store is fun'.


Musical Representation and the Commercial Mini-Narrative

Another example of music imbuing the qualities of a company in televisionadvertising in a different form is a commercial for the American freightdelivery company, the United Parcel Service (UPS).9 The UPS ad features amontage of various urban, rural and even celestial scenes, all of which havea brown square superimposed somewhere within the image (see Example3). The brown square is an icon with a dual focus: it represents both thepackage delivered (implying the customers package) and the UPS serviceitself (those who deliver the packages). The square is brown, as that is UPSssignature colour - employees wear brown uniforms and drive browntrucks, etc. The ad also features the disembodied voice of actor Ed Harris anda musical score that can be described as 'background music' in a cinematicsense.

Example 3

The images of the ad are arranged in a 'simple-to-complex' temporalarrangement, where simple images (empty sky, uncluttered landscapes)give way to complex images of telephone/power lines, a shipping dock, awarehouse, satellite dishes, etc. In each image, a brown square is superim-posed, representing the logo of UPS. As the succession of images becomesmore crowded and complex, the number of brown squares in each shotincreases. The commercial reaches a climax as it shows brown squaresbeing transmitted by a satellite dish and then being bounced off the satel-lite back to earth. Finally, we see hundreds of squares floating or drifting upand down a big cityscape complete with skyscrapers and traffic. A momen-tary visual repose occurs as an image of a little girl sitting on a step appears,but the image track finishes with a sky-view long shot of downtown Rio deJaneiro.

The commercial is essentially a mini-narrative extolling the virtues ofUPS and their ability to 'synchronize' deliveries. The images, though appar-ently disconnected, relate a narrative that the company can handle largeand small packages (warehouse, wharf scenes), that it is technologically


sophisticated (phone lines, satellites) and that it can handle large volumesof packages (big city) but that it also focuses on the individual (little girl).

Though the ad features a montage of images, the overriding visual leit-motif of the ad is the brown UPS square. Ed Harris's narration helps tounify the disparate images by extolling the virtues of UPS' 'synchronicity!Finally, the images are unified by the music that ties together the imagesnot only with a unified, continuous musical score but also by conveyingthe mood of the message. The music is essentially a chaconne, a highly uni-fied variation type form that consists of a repeated harmonic figure thatrecurs throughout the music of the ad. The music of the ad opens with anostinato figure on D-A-D (engineered with a strong reverb effect) and con-tinues with another ostinato of a descending tetrachord on a synthesizer(see Example 4).

Example 4


The musical texture builds throughout the ad, first with the addition ofthe strumming chords of an acoustic guitar, then with long tones played ona synthesizer. Meanwhile, the dynamics also build, continuously gettinglouder: first, with the shot of the satellite, then the large city scene. Just asthe music builds to a climax, suddenly the texture and dynamics thin out,synchronizing with a shot of a little girl on the step. Such a shot remindsthe viewer that although UPS is a large, 'synchronized' company, they canstill serve individuals with a personal touch'. The image of the girl is super-ceded by a long shot of Rio, signifying the international scope of the com-pany, as the musical texture and dynamics build suddenly for a loud finishand cadence on tonic.

The music of the commercial reinforces the idea of the narrative in twoimportant ways. The repetition of the chaconne figure may be interpretedas a representation of the constancy of the company: its dependabilityand reliability. The building of the texture of volume of the music creates asense of Vectorization', or goal-directedness and denouement in the ad.The building of the music creates at once a sense of suspense and confi-dence. The building texture and dynamics also hints at a heroic ethos, the'synchronicity' of the UFA Company that is almost superhuman in itsscope. The company is portrayed as larger than life through the buildingtexture of the music.

This goal of the ad is to sell a service, not a product, so the ad seeks to'win the consumer over' and persuade people to subscribe to UPS for theirdelivery needs. So, while the music plays an integral role in the inner tex-tual frame in creating continuity to the disparate montage of seeminglyunrelated images, it reaches out into the pragmatic outer frame and signi-fies the reliability and constancy of the UPS service. The excitement of themusic imbues the service with a sense of confidence in the service of deliv-ering packages by employing musical topics that denote heroism and reli-ability. UPS is a vast, technologically sophisticated company, but theseaspects help in synchronizing packages for accurate, personal delivery. Asthe music builds in the ad, the consumer's confidence in the company alsobuilds.

Intersection of Frames: Musical Significance Beyond the Text

The music of both ads discusses are similar in that the significance of themusic lay largely in its relationship of music with other aspects of the ad.In the department store ad, significance lay in the syntactical relationshipof images and music, while in the UPS ad, it was with the music that you


could create (or at least reinforce) a narrative. Significance in these con-texts is what concerns Cook in his own study of music and TV commer-cials: in particular, how music relates to images for mutual implication. AsCook observes, music like the kind brought forth here really have very littlemeaning outside the text of the ads themselves.10 While the departmentstore ad imitates light rock music, it really is not rock music as heard on theradio or bought in audio stores. Even farther removed is the music for theUPS commercial: it has traits of popular music (electronic sounds, guitars,etc.) but its meaning lies in its building of texture and dynamics in relationtot the images and narration of the ad. Musical meaning is dependent uponthis mutual implication, and in these two commercials, music relies on thecontext of the ad to impart meaning, just as the visual images rely on themusic to animate a semantic frame.

While dependent on images for meaning, music also has the capacity toact on its own as a signifying system - i.e., as its own semantic frame. Musicmeans something outside of television, if only to identify its listeners. Here,I cite one more example of an ad where music signifies in a different way:that is, through the pragmatic or inter-textual level of signification. In a long-standing advertising campaign in America, the General Motors Corpora-tion (Detroit, USA) bought the rights to Bob Segers song 'Like a Rock' touse as the musical jingle for its Chevrolet truck line. Seger is a pop starconsidered by many rock critics as part of a trilogy of American Rock'artists popular in the mid-1980s and early 1990s (the other two being BruceSpringsteen and John Cougar Mellencamp). Seger s song first appeared onhis Like a Rock album in 1986. The lyrics of the song are a wistful reflectionof Seger s youth when he was young and strong. According to an article inthe Village Voice (17 May 1992), General Motors approached Seger to buythe song in 1990, but he originally refused. However, with the countrymired in an economic recession, Seger ultimately agreed to sell the song,citing his desire to help auto workers in his hometown of Detroit.

One of the ads run in the 'Like a Rock' campaign shows the Chevrolettruck in various work scenarios: hauling heavy oversized loads, drivingthrough snow and mud, etc. (Example 5) The montage of images of thetruck are accompanied by the continual refrain of the song: 'Like a Rock,I was strong as I could be', etc.

In addition to the shots of the trucks, the images in the ad are over-whelmingly male and blue collar. When combined with these images, thesong sounds like a country song rather than its original roots of AmericanRock'. The timbres of acoustic guitar and piano along with Seger's mascu-line vocals all lend an air of the country/western genre/style. Even the lead


Example 5

guitar takes on the timbre of the pedal steel slide guitar popular in countrymusic.

The dual nature of musical style exhibited in the ad creates an addeddimension of semiosis in the ad. Like the other ads discussed in this article,the 'Like a Rock' ad lends meaning to the images. The lyrics of the songhave been transformed from the personal sentiment of Segers youth todescribe the durability of the Chevy truck. We see the images of the truckplowing through snow and mud, so we believe that it is the truck (and nolonger Seger) that is 'like a rock*. Furthermore, the 'American Rock* styleof the song has also been transformed and broadened to encompass alsoa country-style topic, to more easily accommodate the images of working-class males.

While the images of the ad have transformed the song in these ways, theprocess of semiosis is reciprocal here: the song also transforms the imagesto add meaning. However, the way meaning is imparted is different thanthat of the other two commercials discussed in this article. Meaning isimparted largely through the pragmatic or inter-textual outer frame of theframe message. In the case of the Chevy truck commercial, the music refersto the durability of the truck, but relies more on the message exchange ofthe intended audience of the commercial. Those who drive a Chevy truckare likely to be American working-class males. Country music forms acultural bond with such a sub-culture, as demonstrated anthropologicallyby some,11 and commercially by others.12 It also summons ideologies ofAmerican patriotism/nationalism and work ethic. The act of commodityexchange in the commercial is likely to occur not because the syntax of thecommercial is 'fun like the first commercial in this article, or because ittells a story like the UPS ad, but rather because of an affinity for Bob Segeras an artist or that the style of Seger s music in the ad aligns with the musi-cal tastes of a target demographic group of working-class males, or both.


The use of a popular song is a relatively new strategy in advertising, butthis practice has become prevalent. Note, for example, the use of the Beatles'song 'Revolution' in an ad for Nike athletic shoes. The Seger/Chevy cam-paign was so successful in the 1990s and early 2000s that the Ford MotorCompany sought to imitate it by using a revised version of blues artistK. C. Douglass 1949 song, 'Mercury Blues', for their 'Crazy 'Bout a FordTruck' campaign. The song for the ad was sung by country-music artistAlan Jackson, and Douglas's lyrics remained mostly intact with only theline 'Crazy 'bout a Mercury' changed to 'Crazy 'bout a Ford Truck'. Thecampaign had a short-lived but popular success, notably because Jackson,whose music is perched securely within the country musical format, doesnot display the stylistic plurality of Seger, and thus the audience for theFord campaign was more narrowly targeted.

Strategies of Imbuement

As the Chevy truck commercial illustrates, nothing in a media text isdeveloped in a vacuum. Television works through the knowledge of theviewing community to construct meaning. The images of the Chevy truckcommercial may resonate with American working-class men, while alsoromanticizing or stylizing the work that they (and the truck) do. Thisstylization is augmented by the use of Seger's song. A naive reading of thead would entail an interpretation that it is a country singer performinga country song. Such a style certainly resonates with many working-classAmerican men. A more in-depth knowledge of the music, however, wouldentail the fact that Seger is an American rock icon (albeit of the 1980s) witha blue-collar persona shared by other 1980s rockers such as Bruce Springs-teen and John Cougar Mellencamp. Knowledge of Seger's Detroit rootsalso plays a role of significance in the ad, as Detroit is Seger's hometownand also the headquarters of General Motors, where thousands of workersare employed.

The 'Like a Rock' ad illustrates a complexity in television commercialsthat goes beyond a simplistic reading of a single semantic frame. Becausetelevision commercials are so brief and ephemeral, they must draw them-selves into the viewer's consciousness in as quick and efficient a manner aspossible. To do this, commercials often draw upon more than one semanticframe. While Noth discusses notions of 'frame conflict' or 'frame ambigu-ity', I would call the process of music and advertising as frame intersectionand frame permeability. To illustrate such a process, we might consider


TV Text(Images,Sound)

Audience Music

Product

Example 6

four separate frames for consideration in a TV commercial: the TV textitself, the product being advertised, the audience and the music. The inter-section of these semantic frames are represented in Venn diagram inExample 6.

The large circles represent the fields of the television text, the audience,the product and music. The intersection of the circles represents the inter-section of these semantic fields. The outer intersections represent globalrelationships of two semantic frames. For example, A/M is the field whereaudience and music intersect and where a particular type of music attractsa certain demographic group. This is the semantic field cultivated heavilyby American commercial radio, where radio stations seek out a specificdemographic/psychographic group through choosing a style of music (rock,country, etc.) in order to attract advertisers. M/T represents music in

Advertising Musk 631

television generally: music for TV dramas, news programs, sporting events,musical TV shows, etc. P/T represents the intersection of a product andtelevision in general: that is, commercials in general.

The smaller intersections in the interior of the diagram represent morespecific intersections. A/P/T would represent the outer frame' of televisionadvertising where product and TV intersect to produce a commodityexchange. M/P/T is an intersection of music, product and TV text, represent-ing the production of music for TV commercials, irrespective of audience.A/M/T is music on television broadcast for a particular audience (such asMTV videos)

The locus of these four semantic frames is the area CX' on the diagram -the actual TV commercial advertising the product with music targeted fora specific audience. In terms of frame messages, this area represents theinner frame of the television commercial. If one considers only the area X,then the advertising is masked where music, images, etc. only serve theartistic text of the ad. However, what happens in commercials is that theboundaries of each frame are permeable and transparent. Viewers are freeto interpret any one of the semantic frames and investigate the large seman-tic field of each frame. In the Chevy truck ad, we cannot consider the musicalone in the ad, but we must consider the style of music (American rock/country) and even the artist for a fuller meaning. While meaning in musicis specific to a specific ad (area X), it also carries with it the semiotic residueof the remainder of its semantic field (in this case, areas A/M/P, M/P/T,M/T, A/M and M.

The resulting semiotic structure is one of imbuement rather thanoccultation. Music imbues the surface text of commercials because it is alyrical language. But music also permeates the boundaries of the framemessages and imbues each with a quality or qualities. For the discountdepartment store ad, significance occurred primarily at the syntactic level,imbuing the ad with a Tun or 'partying' quality. For the UPS ad, significanceoccurred primarily on the semantic level, constructing a quasi-heroic nar-rative out of the ad. For the Chevy truck commercial, significance occurredprimarily on the pragmatic level, through inter-textual knowledge of BobSeger and his hit song. Such inter-textuality is made to resonate with theviewer s own values - in this case American patriotism and work ethic.

Notes

1. Winfred Noth, Advertising: The frame message', in Jean Umiker-Sebeok (ed.),Marketing and Semiotics. Berlin, New York and Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter, 1987.


2. Patrick Charaudeau, Langage et discourse: Elements de semiolinguistique. Paris:Hatchette, 1983.

3. N6th(1987),p.280.4. Charles Morris, Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938).5. Morris (1938), p. 6.6. Charles Morris, Signs, Language, and Behaviour (1946), p. 219.7. David Huron, 'Music in advertising: An analytic paradigm', Musical Quarterly, 73

(1989), 560.8. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. London: British Film

Institute, 1987 and Nicholas Cook, A Guide to Musical Analysis. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1994.

9. My thanks to the UPS company for granting permission to use their material in thisarticle.

10. Nicholas Cook, Analyzing Musical Multimedia. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.11. See Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music. Milton Keyes and Philadelphia:

Open University Press, 1990 and Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London:Methuen, 1979.

12. See Ken Barnes, 'Top 40 radio: A fragment of the imagination', in Simon Frith (ed.),Facing the Music. New York: Pantheon, 1988.

APPROACHES

42Musematic Analysis

Film Music, Anti-depressants and Anguish Management

Philip Tagg

Introduction

Amitriptyline, Celexa, Clomipramine, Dothiepin, Doxepin, Effexor, Fluox-etine, Flupenthixol, Imipramine, Lexapro, Lofepramine, Mianserin, Paxil,Prozac, Serzone, Trazodone and Zoloft are all anti-depressants. Accordingto the Prozac Survivors Support Group in California, over 36 million peoplein the USA have been prescribed that particular anti-depressant, while EliLilly, the corporation producing it, grossed between 2 billion and 2.8 billionUS dollars each year between 1998 and 2001.1 What, you may well ask, dothese pharmaceutical business statistics have to do with film music?

One connection between anti-depressants and music is obvious: bothhave to do with feelings, or, more precisely, with expressing and communi-cating feelings in specific cultural terms under specific cultural and poli-tical circumstances. The basic hypothesis here is that the analysis of recentchange in musical structures demonstrably associated - by means of lyrics,film narrative, social environment, etc. - with sadness, depression, despera-tion, anguish, frustration and so on can inform our understanding of radi-cal changes in patterns of subjectivity in society at large.

Given the current paucity of research into the issues just mentioned, I cando no more here than focus on one small set of musical structures associatedwith no more than one aspect of all the kinds of emotion just mentioned.Therefore, the first part of this article will establish the existence of that one

635


small set of musical structures as a prerequisite for identifying their relativepresence or absence in recent years. The final section attempts to explainhow those changes in musical structuring relate to the political issue of'anguish management' as a means of socially controlling certain aspectsof popular subjectivity. We will, however, need to start by stating, verybriefly, some basic points of theory and method underpinning those laterparts of this presentation.

Theoretical Position

Since the advent of TV and home video, more people living in the media-saturated culture to which I belong hear more music in conjunction withmoving pictures than in any other way. The fact that computer games, withtheir more or less constant music, now generate greater global sales thanthose of the music industry reinforces this tendency. Yet music analysis,as it is still generally taught, pays little heed to such facts. Indeed, it is nolonger just works from the Euro-classical canon that music academicsdissect as if their sonic structures had no meaning beyond their syntacticrelation to each other: even pop songs are now given the Schenkeriancrossword-puzzle treatment. If music analysis is to be of any use to themajority of people living in the same culture as I do, it must clearly dealwith music as if it meant something beyond itself. As I have repeatedlyargued in numerous texts and courses, musematic analysis can help uscarry out this semiotic task.

Musematic analysis allows for the identification of musical signifiers andsignifieds on the basis of two types of demonstrable consistency: (1) inter-objective or inter-textual, in the sense that the same or similar musicalstructure (designated at this stage of research in constructional terms)2 areused in different works by different musicians belonging to the same basicmusic culture; (2) the same or similar para-musical phenomena are linkedby different individuals, belonging to the same basic music culture, to thesame or similar musical structures.

What follows is therefore based on inter-textual and inter-subjectiveprocedures set out in Ten Little Title Tunes,3 a study which addresses struc-tural, theoretical and ideological issues of musical semiosis. Ideological'refers here not only to overtly political categories (e.g., gender, normality,ethnicity and military) but also to other general semantic fields which, whenexamined historically in terms of patterns of subjectivity, appear no lessideological (e.g., heroism, urgency, speed, fashion, family, violence, love).This chapter presents a brief discussion of one such covertly ideological

Musematic Analysis 637

semantic field which, for want of a better label, we shall call anguish. In fact,respondents (mainly Swedish, some Latin-American) providing the empi-rical data identifying this type of musicogenic semantic field never men-tioned anguish. Their connotations were expressed in such terms asdifficulties, problems, trouble; against the will of. . ., despite . . ., externalobstacles; destiny, fate; pain, suffering; sad, tragic; lonely, abandoned; mel-ancholy, longing, languishing; parting, separating, etc. Such connotationsoccurred in response (and in varying degrees) to only four of the ten titletunes played to respondents.

Tonal Determinants

Although slow tempos and, in three of the four tunes, minor keys wereamong the structural common denominators of the music eliciting the sortof response just enumerated, they were not the main tonal4 determinants ofthe Anguish' connotations just listed. Three other tonal elements were moreoperative in distinguishing 'anguish' from other semantic fields - funeral,dirge, depression, for example - which, in mainstream Western culture, alsorely on slow tempo and minor mode. The three tonal elements recurringin the four tunes heard by respondents as connoting 'anguish', but absentin the six other tunes giving rise to no such connotations, were: (1) the'minor add 9' sonority (abbreviated madd9); (2) the half-diminished chord,i.e., 'minor seven flat five5 (m7b5) and its inversion as 'minor six' (m6, i.e.,a minor triad with added major sixth); (3) a 'tortuous tune', i.e., a melodycharacterized by disjunct profile and/or emphasized melodic dissonance.5

Minor Add Nine

The minor-add-nine chord has a long history in the West. It is, for example,a common device for madrigal-like woe, underscoring words like 'where-with I mourn and melt' (Byrd's 'Wounded I Am') and 'Ay me! I sit and cry'(Morleys 'Fire! Fire!') (all ca.1600). It also turns up in }. S. Bach's harmoni-zations of such penitent or agony-related chorales as Christ lag in 'Todes-banden' or 'Ach, wie nichtig! Ach, wie fliichtig!' and Schubert uses it in theaccompaniment to Gretchen's bitter complaining (Example 1). The madd9

chord is no stranger to film scores. For example, it is heard during most ofMorricones cue for the scene in The Mission (1985) in which Carlotta tellsa devastated Rodrigo (played by Robert De Niro) that she loves not himbut his brother. It also plays a prominent part in three of the four tunesconnoting 'anguish' to several hundred respondents, for example in response


to Rotas theme for Zeffirellis Romeo and Juliet (Example 2). It is also afavourite of Morricones in situations where poignant sadness, tragedy,separation or bitter fate are on the narrative menu, as in the 'Ophelia cuesfrom Hamlet (1990), in the theme underscoring the death of young Cock-eye in Once Upon a Time in America (1984), in the cues 'Abduction' and'Death of Oahn for Casualties of War (1989), in the title theme from Lolita

Example 3

Example 1

Example 2

etc


(1997), or in 'Nostalgia of the Father' from Marco Polo (1982, Example 3),to name but a few.

The same chord type also turns up in connection with lyrics of fatefulsadness in post-war popular song. For example, the Bovary-like 'Madame'of Alain Bashungs Madame reve (1991) dreams longingly and hopelesslyof un silence si long and of un amour qui laflingue to the accompaniment ofthe same minor-key semitone dynamic between major second and minorthird. In Western Eyes (1997), Portisheads Beth Gibbons whines, Tmbreaking at the seams just like you' with the minoradd-nines semitonebetween degrees 2 and b3 (94-»blO) pulsating in the background. The samemadd9 semitone device is treated more melodically than harmonically bothin Radioheads 'Life in a Glasshouse' (2001): 'again I'm in trouble with anold friend' - and in Elvis Costello's 'For Other Eyes' (1993): 'I don't knowwhat I should do'/'Its over and done'. Among the most striking pop-rockexamples of the madd9 semitone crunch's semantic field are Aerosmith's'Janie's Got A Gun' (1989, Example 4) at 'Run, run away-ay-ay' (from thepain of sexual abuse) and the piano track heard for at least 25% of LionelRichie's 'Hello' (1985) whose vocal persona sadly regrets never getting thegirl' (Example 5).

As stated earlier, madd9 featured prominently in three of the four titletunes respondents connected with 'anguish', including Rota's Romeo andJuliet theme (Example 2). Even though the other two, the title music forA Streetcar Named Desire (1951, examples 5a and 22a) and Deep Purple's'Owed to "g" ' (1975, examples 5b and 22b), produced a response profile ofcrime and its detection in rough urban settings which differed markedlyfrom Romeo and ]ulie(§ with all its tragic love set in a rural past, all threetunes shared both madd9 and a significant response rate for adversity,difficulty, problems, trouble: away from, departure; lonely, abandoned.

Example 4


Example 5

Example 6

Half-Diminished

The two urban tunes just mentioned featured both madd9 and the second ofthe three tonal traits linked with 'anguish' responses - the half-diminishedchord or its inversion as 'minor add six' (m6, Example 5).

For musicians and musicologists let it be known here, in parenthesis,that I am treating minor-[add]-6 (m6) and minor-seven-flat-five (m7b5)paradigmatically as mutually invertible variants of the same half-diminishedsonority (Example 6).

Like madd9, the half-diminished chord has a long history in Western artmusic. For example, John 'sempre dolens' Dowland uses it in such anguishedcircumstances as the 'Lachrymae Pavane5 (£Flow, My Tears', Example 8)and at 'consumed with deepest sins' in 'From Silent Night' (1612), as doesCampian to underscore the breaking of vows in 'Oft Have I Sighed' (1617).The chord also features prominently, as both a Cm6 and an Em7b5, in thefamous suicide aria from Purcell's Dido & Aeneas (Example 9). The verbal


Example 7

Example 8

Example 9

accompaniment to these and other English instances of m7b5/m6 is quitetragic: living or dying forlorn, broken friendship, disclosing shame, etc.

Just for the musicological record, I should of course clarify that thereis nothing anguished in the Baroque tradition about a half-diminishedchord in the middle of a run of sevenths anticlockwise round a virtualcircle of fifths. However, we are not dealing with the chord in such syntac-tic functions but with its occurrence in highlighted positions, where it hasconsiderable semantic value, for example: (1) as second chord after an initialtonic; (2) in precadential contexts, often in crisis-chord position about 75%of the way through a romantic melody; (3) as modulatory (key-changing)pivot chord.

Restricting the Baroque part of this story to the works of J. S. Bach, thehalf-diminished 'second chord* turns up repeatedly in the first Kyrie ofthe B minor mass ('Lord, have mercy', Examples 10 and 11), as well as inthe opening chorus to both the St. Matthew and the St. John passions.


Example 11

It also occurs in the same position or precadentially in at least thirty-sixsettings of chorales with the following sorts of text: 'Herrn, ich habe mifige-handelf; 4Wo soil ich fliegen hin?'; 'Ach! Was soil ich Sunder macherf; 'Achwie nichtig, ach wie fliichtig1/; 1O Traurigkeit; Jesu Leiden, Pein und Tod;Durch Adams Fall ist ganz verderbf; 'Christ lag in Todesbanden1; 'Herr,straf mich nicht in deinem Zorn'; CO Haupt voll Blut und Wunden; 'MeinesLebens letzte Zeif. Add to this barrage of second-chord and pre-cadentialwoe the vii7-s or iv^-s accompanying 'his disciples forsook him and fled1,'the price of blood' and Peters denial 'I do not know the man (all from theMatthew Passion) and we are back to an anguished semantic field unam-biguous enough to survive in instrumental works of the rococo and classicalperiods. Indeed, if we accept Rosens description of sonata form as 'a dra-matic performance1,6 it will come as no surprise that Mozarts fortieth

Example 10


symphony (K550), with Cm6 as its prominent second chord, was charac-terized by early nineteenth-century commentators as 'impassioned grief',ranging from 'the saddest' to the 'most exalted?

Turning to the pivot aspect of our diminished-fifth tetrad, it is worthnoting that C.P.E. Bach considered 'no chord . . . more convenient' . . .than the diminished seventh, 'as a means of reaching the most distantkeys more quickly and with agreeable suddenness'.8 We would hold that thehalf-diminished chord is pretty useful too, especially for modulating torelated keys.

Mozart often uses the half-diminished chord as pivot, for example ina impassioned chromatic progression in the development section of theslow movement from his Eb Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola(Example 12).

Schubert puts second-chord half-diminished semiosis to good use in hisnerve-wracking 'Erlkonig' chase music, in the tragically listless 'Einsam-keit' and, most markedly, to accompany the travelling stranger on snowyroads in an inhospitable world where mad dogs howl outside their masters'homes (see Example 13).

Wagners famous Tristan chord is both potential pivot and prominentsecond-chord if the anacrustic cello arpeggio is heard as an initial D minortonic (see Example 7). While it is possible, using a couple of intermediatechords, to complete a perfect cadence in any key from Tristans initialFm7b5, its immediate continuation into another two accentuated half-diminished 'second-chords' (the last one repeated to boot) with no inter-vening modulation is evidence that the sonority had, at least for Wagnerin 1859, a semantic charge of its own. Indeed, it was a dramatic device thathe used again, for example when presenting Alberich's curse of the ring tothe tune of a rising F#m7b5 arpeggio (Example 14).

The same sort of non-modulatory, quasi-autonomous harmonic deviceis used at breakneck tempo by Grieg to start the 'Abduction of the Bride'section of the Peer Gynt suite (Example 15). The anguished Dm7b5s of thatGrieg extract may well have helped establish half-diminished pathos as

Example 12


Example 13

Example 14

an element of musical code in the modern mass media because those fourbars constitute the only 'Horror* entry in one of the silent film eras mostwidely used anthologies (Rapee, 1924: 173; Example 15).

Half-diminished chords are two a penny in European romanticism,where they seem to work less technically as links to other keys; they func-tion more as signs that a modulation could occur, with all the uncertaintyof direction that such ambiguity might entail in terms of heightened dramaand rhetoric. In the final reprise of Liszts Liebenstraum (1847), for exam-ple, every other chord is half-diminished in a chain of chromatic slides.


Example 15

It is worth noting that the harmonic language and orchestration of Liszt'stone poems resurface in many of Max Steiner s film scores, especially inGone With the Wind (1939), the half-diminished chord appearing in thelanguishing first bridge section of the films overture, as well as in the cue'Scarlett walks among the dead! Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov show aparticular penchant for the pre-cadential half-diminished chord. The waythey use the device in crisis-chord position, i.e., at a point about 75% of theway through a particular period or section,9 is common and familiar(Example 16). It is also important, for two reasons, in the development ofwidely understood notions of pathos in mass-mediated music.

First, the Tchaikovsky theme cited above has been used and abusedtoo many times as the sonic representation of 'deep feelings' on radio, TVand film to mention here, while Rachmaninov's second piano concertoin C minor fulfilled so convincing a 'passionate-but-hopeless-love' func-tion in Brief Encounter (1945) that its connotations could be parodied adecade later in the Marilyn Monroe box-office success The Seven Year Itch(1955). The popularity of ivory-bashing popular classics like these gave riseto a series of piano-concentrate clones that were used in films, many ofwhich were produced in the UK during World War II and which film crit-ics Halliwell and Purser (1986) review in terms like 'harrowing', gripping','tearjerker', 'romance suffused with tragedy', etc. Addinsell's Warsaw Con-certo (Example 17) was one such clone, composed for Dangerous Moonlight(1941), an 'immensely popular wartime romance' in which a Polish pianist

Example 16


Example 17

Example 18

escapes from the Nazis and loses his memory after flying in the Battle ofBritain' (op. cit).

Example 17s anacrustically catapulted Cm7b5 is far from the only m7b5/m6

in the piece and the Warsaw Concerto is not the sole representative of agenre in which half-diminished chords recur so often as to act as one ofits style indicators. That repertoire also includes, for instance, Rotas musicfor The Glass Mountain (1949), Rozsas Spellbound Concerto (1940) andBrodzskys score for RAF, The Way to the Stars (1945, Example 18). Allthese films fit the melodramatic pathos bill alluded to earlier and all appearon the album Big Concerto Movie Love Themes (1972). Brodzskys maintheme, like Mendelssohn's Wedding March (1843), cuts straight to the half-diminished chase on its first downbeat and stays there for six beats at q = 56(Example 18).

Second, half-diminished tetrads occur pre-cadentially as melodramaticcrisis chords in many a pre-war popular tune, and in the usual sort ofposition, for example at bar 26 (of 32) in Tierney s Alice Blue Gown (1920),Rodgers' 'Manhattan (1925) and Rapees 'Charmaine' (1925), or at bar 14(of 17) in Breils 'Love Strain* (Example 19), etc. Crisis chords in thisposition do not need to be half-diminished, but they have to contain fouror more different pitches, at least one of which must be key-extrinsic (e.g.E7+, Fm6, Ff dim, Ab7 or F#mb5 in bar 14 of Example 19). The wholepoint is to insert a touch of melodrama offsetting the subsequent V-I


Example 19

Example 20

cadences 'happy ending! The fact that half-diminished chords often fulfilsuch a function confirms their status as signifiers of drama and pathos inhighly familiar types of popular music.

One category of half-diminished tetrads has yet to be discussed: the'jazz' minor sixth (m6) chord, as quoted in Example 6. Superficially thechord seems to be little else than a colouristic alteration of a standard minortriad; after all, major sixths can be added to minor triads other than thetonic, as, for example in Ellingtons 'Koko' (1940) or in Billie Holliday'srecording of'Gloomy Sunday* (1941), or in Gershwin's 'Summertime' and'It Ain't Necessarily So' (Porgy and Bess, 1935). If so, Debussy's 'autono-mous' Fm7b5s underscoring the heroines tears in Pelleas et Melisande(Example 20) ought also to be qualified as colouristic, but that is hardlylikely since the composer's choice of harmony is clearly related to theexpression mark plaintif he has written in the score.

Although technically correct from a syntactical viewpoint, the notion ofharmonic 'autonomy' just presented misses the semiotic point on at leasttwo counts.

First, the sonority contains the same array of pitches as those half-diminished chords which are, as argued earlier, often treated with


relative syntactic autonomy in film music and popular song. It is highlyimprobable that musicians exposed to such widely disseminated music asTchaikovsky's first piano concerto, or Rapee's 'Charmaine', or Steiner's scorefor Gone With the Wind would be oblivious to the obvious connotativecharge of its half-diminished chords.

Second, the jazz minor sixth chord was, in the hegemonic WASP(=White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) mentality of inter-war years in the USA,often associated with music performed by particular people (AfricanAmerican) in particular places (e.g., smoky dives). It was also linked eitherwith lyrics dealing with death and crime (e.g., St. James Infirmary) orwith other aspects of a threatening' subculture (e.g., Ellingtons jungle'style). Due to these connections, the chord came to function as genresynecdoche for a semantic field including such phenomena as seedy USurban locations, African American subculture, night, danger and crime.10

It is therefore no coincidence that Gershwin used plenty of minor triadswith added major sixths for Porgy and Bess scenes located in an AfricanAmerican slum, no wonder that Harlem Nocturne' was the title chosen byEarle Hagen for his C-minor piece Tor Eb saxophone and concert band'(Example 21).

Example 21


In short, the jazz minor sixth chord embodies a dual semiosis in whichthe synecdochal particularities of its inter-war usage in the USA combinewith the general melodramatic pathos value of the classical and popularclassical half-diminished chord to reinforce rather than contradict oneanother.11

Of course, the semiotic interaction between classical and popular tonalidioms in dealing with anguish does not stop with the half-diminishedchord.

Tortuous Tunes'

Harlem Nocturne (Example 21) contains all three of the 'anguish' traitsdiscussed in this text: (1) madd9, complete with semitone crunch between 2and b3; (2) a half-diminished chord (as m6); (3) a melody characterized bydisjunct profile and/or emphasized melodic dissonance - a 'tortuous tune'.All three traits also feature prominently in two of the four tunes elicitingthe 'anguish' connotations that enabled us to posit the general semanticfield in the first place. The harmonic traits, cited in example 5, accompanythe melodic lines shown here as Example 22.

In addition to all the adversity, crime, danger and seedy locations envis-aged by respondents hearing these tunes, 'detective' was another commonconnotation, i.e., the individual, usually a white male, supposed to bringsome semblance of order and justice into his inimical surroundings. Theonly trouble is, at least in a stereotypical film noir plot, that the detective'sown life is such a mess: apart from the consolatory whisky bottle in thedesk drawer of his ramshackle office, he is usually out of pocket. He's beatenup by hoodlums, thwarted by 'jobsworth' police officials and often unhap-pily but passionately involved with the femme fatale implicated in the webof deceit he has to unravel, only to end up alone in stakeouts, alone tailingsuspects, alone philosophizing about the evils of this world. The 'anguish'of such a P.I.'s theme tune is therefore just as much 'his' as the listeners,

Example 22

mainly because the relationship between the visual narratives foregroundfigure (the P.L) and his environment can also be identified in the melody-accompaniment dualism between melodic figure and 'backing' parts. Sincewe have discussed these and other aspects of detective music semiosis atlength elsewhere (e.g., Tagg, 1998) we will do no more here than cite two ofthe most familiar English-language TV detective themes (Example 23) andadd that Harlem Nocturne' (Example 21) was revamped as theme for theCBS TV detective series Mike Hammer (1983).

Of course, "tortuous tunes' in the minor key, with their altered fifths,sharp sevenths, 'dissonant' ninths, etc. are by no means exclusive to TVdetectives. Marconi (2001: 66-110) cites enough musical outbursts ofanxiety, complaint, desperation, etc. to substantiate a long history of simi-lar semiosis in the European classical tradition, including examples fromMozart's Don Giovanni, Verdi's // trovatore and Ai'da, and Bach's MatthewPassion. In musical-rhetorical terms of the Baroque period, we are dealingwith phenomena that might well have been given such labels as pathopeia,saltus duriusculus and so on,12 that is, the sort of tortuous line to whichBach sets Peter s remorseful tears after denying Christ in both the Matthewand John Passion fund weinete bitterlich'), or the anxious penitence of theKyrie Eleison fugues in the B Minor Mass, including their half-diminishedand Neapolitan chords, or the F# minor aria 'Ach, Herr! Was ist einMenschenkind?' with its minor-sixth and diminished-seventh leaps

Example 24

Example 23



concurring with the Lord suffering such great pain to bring about theredemption of the wayward child of Man.

Although it may seem sacrilegious to lump divine suffering for theredemption of humanity together with the urban angst of private detec-tives, it is clear that their musical and paramusical commonalities are quitesubstantial.

Musemes and Ideology

So far we have presented evidence of consistent correspondence, withinthe broad context of Western musical traditions over the last few centuries,between certain tonal structures and certain paramusical phenomena.Since we focused on the particularities of musical structures connectedwith the general semantic field we labelled 'anguish', the discussion mightbe termed 'musematic' in the same sense that the deconstruction of(verbal) language into its meaningful constituent parts could be qualifiedas 'phonematic

Of course, it is evident from differences in timbre, orchestration, rhyth-mic articulation, accentuation, etc. between most of the extracts cited, thatanalysis of musics tonal (harmonic and melodic) aspects is insufficient.Other, more obvious sonic characteristics of anguish have been absent fromthis discussion: for example, yelling, screaming, a grating or complainingtone of voice and so on. We need only think of Kurt Cobains spine-chillingvocal delivery in 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' and 'Lithium' to make the point,but even these recordings contain elements of tortuous melody (all thoseflat fifths and seconds) that are absent from less anguished anthems ofalienation.

Despite these and other problems of method, it is possible, using thesort of approach sketched above, to demonstrate some important aspectsof musical semiosis in our culture. Not only can such an approach contri-bute to the development of musicological method: by highlighting musico-genic categories of meaning it can also raise issues of ideology relating tothe social patterning of subjectivity under changing political and economiccircumstances.

For example, we have argued elsewhere13 that the decline of foregroundmelodic figures and the prominence of backing loops in some kindsof techno music not only represented a radical departure from the basiccompositional strategy of Western music since Monteverdi - the melodic-accompaniment dualism - we also argued that the abandonment of sucha central element of musical structuring in our culture ('what Haydn and


AC/DC have in common') corresponded with a rejection of 'the big ego*(of melodic presentation in opera, jazz and rock, for example) which, in itsturn, related to a rejection of the perverted selves of capitalists let looseunder Reagan and Thatcher.

Similar questions need to be asked about recent changes in the musicalrepresentation of 'anguish'. If, for the increasing number of marginalizedmembers of our society (including my ex-students who, despite their edu-cation, are unable to find satisfactory employment), there is little credibil-ity left in bourgeois notions of the individual (e.g., the 'American Dream',the 'self-made man, the opera diva, the big rock star, the greedy capitalist),how can impassioned musical statements of the deep anguish such mar-ginalization surely causes be made or heard? Worse, where are this society's'successful' role models from whom we 'lesser mortals' can take a lead inrecognizing the injustices of the system under which we all try to surviveand in expressing appropriate remorse for all the pain and suffering itcauses? Worse still, how can individuals express any kind of anguish if theyfail to develop, through learning the social skills of guilt and reparation,the object relations that enable humans to distinguish between self andenvironment?14 It is a learning process under constant threat from all theadvertising which regularly exploits a psychotic symbiosis that is quitenormal in 2-year-olds but that is (or, at least, was until recently) considereda symptom of social disorder in adults.

These questions need to be addressed from a musicological viewpointtoo, because it has been possible recently to discern a certain reluctance togive Hollywood movies, whose story lines veritably seethe with anguish, anunderscore bearing any resemblance to the sort of impassioned grief thatthe on-screen characters clearly have to live through or to the indignationthey must surely feel. American Beauty (dir. Newman, 1999), Monsters Ball(dir. Asche and Spencer, 2001) and The Life of David Gale (dir. Parker, 2003)are three such films. Although their visual-verbal narrative is full of pain,injustice, dignity, bitterness, loneliness, etc. 'against all odds', their scores aregenerally conceived in a restrained, ambient vein, tinged by the occasionalinsertion of subdued accompaniment dissonances.

A 4-min passage, taken from near the start of American Beauty,15 illus-trates this tendency. The character played by Kevin Spacey has just lost hisjob due to 'management restructuring' and is being driven home in thefamily's useless SUV by his ambitious real estate agent wife.16 There is bitterirony and tragedy in this extract, especially when father and daughter tryin vain to communicate with each other in the kitchen. It is clear that thelatent charge of anguish and unhappiness in this extract is left latent by


the music. After the ironic 'elevator music' accompanying dinner in theperfectly appointed dining room,17 a simple minor-key piano melodyappropriately emphasizes sad nostalgia for an illusorily innocent 'ParadiseLost' rather than any desperation or anger at the system that has brain-washed them into believing that a crippling mortgage, a monstrous familyvehicle and relatively useless consumer fetishes in general, are essential toa good life.

Of course, the music in the American Beauty example paints a realisticpicture of latent anguish and of repressed frustration and anger. However,it is not unreasonable to ask whether such musical (and political) restraintcannot also be interpreted as an emotional self-censorship mechanismechoing tendencies to repress reactions of anger and indignation againstthe societal causes of grief and pain. Is this a new sort of musical 'anguishmanagement' strategy? The questions pile up, and there are more.

Where, in North American or European popular music, can we find theforceful expression of indignation against injustice or of the anguish thatgoes with the alienation experienced by an increasingly large proportion ofthe population? Maybe some kinds of political rap music represent onesort of oppositional outlet; or is such rap music little more than the embit-tered ranting of those who preach to the already converted? Where arethe heirs of Nirvanas Cobain? Will Radiohead's Tom Yorke ever yell again(to an enharmonically twisted accompaniment, incidentally, as he did in1994) the disgust of considering himself a 'creep and a no-one', or is self-invalidation the order of the day?

I have no answers to any of these questions, but one thing is clear: theinvalidation of individuals who express pain and anguish has becomeendemic to the society I live in. It is in an invalidation that hits youngpeople hardest18 and which has disastrous consequences for both the indi-vidual concerned and for society, firstly in a literal sense because, as theUS American Self-harm Information Clearing House reports: 'One factorcommon to most people who self-injure, whether they were abused or not,is invalidation. They were taught at an early age that their interpretationsof and feelings about the things around them were bad and wrong.'19

Indeed, a political system whose commercial propaganda tells us we canbuy individual happiness now, often by claiming that we will 'win' or 'save'in the process of parting with the little money we may have, is unlikely tocherish those who express discontent. Such people, especially the young,will naturally feel invalidated, believing it is their own fault if they do notsucceed, if they have no job and if they have not pushed their way pasteveryone else to the front of the line. With no legitimate outlet for the


anguish this system causes them, their discontent and pain is invalidatedand repressed so that self-inflicted pain becomes the only way out. AsMiller and Favazza explain, self-harm has several functions:

It is an expression of emotional pain and provides relief. Whenintense feelings build, self-injurers are overwhelmed and unable tocope. By causing pain, [self-harmers] reduce the level of emotionaland physiological arousal to a bearable one, Self-injurers also haveenormous amounts of rage within. Afraid to express it outwardly,they injure themselves as a way of venting these feelings.20

These are patently serious issues because an increasing number of youngpeople in Europe and North America resort to self harm. Over 1% is thefigure for officially reported cases in the UK, but the rate is much higher forpeople aged between 11 and 26.21 Of course, anti-depressants are usuallyadministered to such officially reported cases of self-harm, and it is herethat we come full circle to document the real extent of collective emotionalmisery in Europe and North America. In the USA, for example, childrenaged six to eighteen received 735,000 prescriptions for Prozac and otheranti-depressants in 1996, which was an increase of 80% since 1994.22 Thereal horror is that the expression of anguish caused by the culture and soci-ety in which young people grow up, now seems to have very few legitimateforms of public expression and that the negotiation of such conflict conse-quently becomes impossible, to the extent that those who do express suchanguish are clinically categorized as depressive and in need of physicaltreatment. Society has, so to speak, no need to apologize and no need tomake amends if their behaviour can be altered by Selective SerotoninReuptake Inhibitors (SSRI, the clinical term for the most widely used typeof anti-depressants).

Now, whether the tendency towards musical anguish management canbe verified or not, it would have been difficult to ask any of these questionsor draw any parallels with the proliferation of anti-depressants withoutexamining the phenomenon in terms of musical signifiers and signifieds.That examination is facilitated by musematic analysis which focuses atten-tion on musical-structural detail and on the relation of such detail to life'outside' music. By paying attention to such detail it is possible for musico-logy to start mapping musically determined categories of thought which,in their turn, may contribute to a much broader understanding of howpatterns of subjectivity are formed in this media-saturated society.


Understanding the expression or non-expression of anguish as a musi-cal category may be an important step in developing strategies to deal withthe alienation and disempowerment felt by so many members of oursociety. This article only scratches the surface of that issue. One thing issure: if, as a musicologist, I fail to meet the challenge such uncompletedwork implies, I will owe a huge apology to those who are most likely to beaffected by my neglect.

Notes

1. http://www.pssg.org/about.htm (22 May 2004).2. For descriptions and definitions of the four basic types of musical knowledge, see

Philip Tagg and Bob Clarida, Ten Little Title Tunes. New York: Mass Media Music, Scholars'Press, 2003, pp. 9-11.

3. Tagg and Clarida (2003), pp. 94-152.4. 'Tonal' is used in this text as an adjective qualifying parameters of musical expres-

sion definable in terms of pitched tone(s) as opposed to those definable in terms of timbre,duration, rhythm, metre, tempo, period, dynamics and so on.

5. For more detailed discussion of the minor add nine and the half-diminished chords,see Tagg and Clarida (2003), pp. 180-203, 453-66, 566-73.

6. Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, London: Faber, 1976,p. 155.

7. Ola Stockfelt, Musik som lyssnandets konst. Goteborg: Musikvetenskapliga institu-tionen vid Goteborgs universitet, 1988, pp. 21-2.

8. C.P.E. Bach, Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments. London:Eulenburg, 1974. Original: Versuch iiber die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen. Berlin: 1753,1762, p. 38.

9. Tagg and Clarida (2003), pp. 211-4.10. Tagg and Clarida (2003), pp. 99-103.11. In the version of this article presented to the IASPM Latin America conference

(Rio de Janeiro, June 2004; see |http://tagg.org/articles/iasprio.html|) I played a montage ofhalf-diminished chords, compiled from numerous sources, in order to convince scepticsof the rather dry verbal arguments presented here. See |http://tagg.org/articles/iasprio.

html#m7b51ist| for contents of that montage. That version of this article also includesseveral audio clips (mp3 format) of some of the music referred to here.

12. Dietrich Bartel, Musica Poetica. Musical-Rhetorical Figures in German BaroqueMusic. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997, pp. 357-62; 381-2.

13. Philip Tagg, 'From refrain to rave: the decline of figure and the rise of ground',Popular Music, 13/2 (1994) 209-22. Also as 'Dal ritornello al "rave": tramonta la figura,emerge lo sfondo' in E. Collini and S. Granelli (eds), Annali del Istituto Gramsci Emilia-Romagna 2/1994,1995, pp. 158-75.

http://www.pssg.org/about.htm

http://tagg.org/articles/iasprio.html

http://tagg.org/articles/iasprio.html#m7b5list

http://tagg.org/articles/iasprio.html#m7b5list


14. Melanie Klein, in R. Money-Kyrle, ed., The Writings of Melanie Klein, Vol. 1: 'Love,Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, 1921-1945'. New York, Free Press, 1975.

15. Chapter 2 on the NTSC region 1 DVD (Newman, 1999), from 0:06:13 to 0:10:17.16. Keith Bradsher, High and Mighty. The dangerous rise of the SUV. New York: Public

Affairs, 2002.17. Peggy Lee singing 'Bali-Hai" from South Pacific.18. For example, 'a British study of nearly 6000 students shows that over their lifetime,

13% of teenagers aged fifteen and sixteen had carried out an act of deliberate self-harm'.WebMD Medical News Reviewed By Brunilda Nazario, MD; by By Jennifer Warner onThursday, 21 November.

19. http://www.selfinjury.org/docs/factsht.htmL20. Miller (1994) and Favazza (1986,1996).21. http://www.drinkdeeplyanddream.com/realvampire/SMS.html. Self-Injury No

Longer Rare Among Teens: Cutting and Other Dangerous Acts Becoming New Cries forHelp, by Jennifer Warner: WebMD Medical News Reviewed By Brunilda Nazario, MD onThursday, 21 November 2002, referring to The British Medical Journal 23 November 2001.

22. http://www.pssg.org/huffington2.htm.

http://www.selfinjury.org/docs/factsht.html

http://www.drinkdeeplyanddream.com/realvampire/SMS.html

http://www.pssg.org/huffington2.htm

The Sound of FearPsychoanalysis and Affection in Film Music

Marcela Antelo

A touch of cymbals may rock the lives of an American family^-Alfred Hitchcock

Fears

Analysts come into daily contact with fear as a signifier. Were we passionateabout statistics or as entertained by protocols as are neurolinguists, wewould be aware of the word Year' entering our consulting rooms some50 times a day, to guesstimate an average.

A list of some of the occurrences of this privileged signifier from theappeals for help we hear might read thusly:

Fear of losing oneself, fear of speaking, fear of talking too loud, fearof not being listened-to, fear of failure, fear of choice, fear of loss, fear ofseparating, fear of marriage, fear of going crazy, fear of temptationsof the flesh, fear of lying, fear of ending up alone, fear of stammering,fear of vomiting, fear of buying, fear of giving birth, of becomingpoor, of taking drugs, fear of cutting oneself, fear of killing oneself,fear of killing, fear of withering, of growing old, of becoming vile, offlying, of walking, of swimming, fear of AIDS, fear of cancer, fear ofthe night, fear of noises, fear of ones own voice, fear of the telephoneringing, fear of being kicked out, fear of being stuck inside, fear of

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43


impotence, fear of being cruel, fear of working, of unemployment,of loving, of hating, of suffering, of becoming ill, fear of knowing, ofdying, of living.

Although a mere sample, this list could provide sufficient demands tosupport a veritable market economy, which for every spoken fear finds itsappropriate object: 'You're lonely? Then join a singles group!', 'You're afraidof giving birth? Then use an anesthetic!' and so on. It is a banal ethicsmarket' flourishing in the margins of the politics of fear.

To cite one commodity included in the offer: if we are frightened ofeverything, we go to see an analyst. What the analyst says must give voiceto fear's real ethical dimension. We may look into this dimension furtherthrough the function of art.

Art feeds from the trough of fear; it poeticizes, sculpts, paints, films, nar-rates, photographs, sets to music, composes and dances around an infinitecatalogue of human fears. The latter abundance can be attributed to thelatent anguish behind every fear, which means the possibility of inventing anew fear always exists. Art aims for a formal representation of the object offear, so as to tame that which has no form - anguish, affect of the shapeless,the sinister, the uncanny as defined by Freud. According to Roger Dadoun'sradical view, the function of art has always been to treat violence.2

In 1911, Hugo Munsterberg saw a silent film, and it occurred to him thatthe mass media would end up saturating the senses. In one of the films hewas to see and comment on, 'the outside world lost its weight, found itselffreed from space, time, and causality'.3 He feared this would lead to filmscausing a total alienation from the real world. The poet Antonin Artaud, hiscontemporary, viewed the sensuality of cinema's effects from another pointof view:

Cinema is more exciting than a lighted match, more captivating thanlove, demands themes of excess and a minute psychology. It demandsspeed but above all repetition, insistence, a constant return to a sametheme, the human soul from every one of its aspects. In cinema weare all cruel.4

For Artaud, distance from real life was what made cinema superior, ratherthan its gravest sin. 'Cinemas virtue above all others is that of an immediateand harmless poison, a subcutaneous injection of morphine'.5 Cinema, as aremarkable sensory stimulant, calls upon the highest states of the soul andits passions. Today, a certain school of thought is reclaiming the morphine

The Sound of Fear 659

hypothesis, aiming its rhetorical weaponry at a narcotic CNN, an anaes-thetic MTV, a stultifying Tarantino and a hypnotic Hot Channel. The sub-ject raised above all is the audiences tolerance level: tolerance, in this case,relating to a need for the administration of ever increasing doses to obtainthe initial effect. Morphines initial effect: a state of satisfaction of allimpulses and desires - a toxic orgasm.

Demonization of the cinematic image has developed as an intrinsicaspect of cinema and forms part of the iconoclastic tradition. Greekmythology was also an image-factory in polytheistic and pre-industrialtimes, and archaic evidence can still be found of contemporary condemna-tion of the appetite of the eye. Privileged among the infinite encyclopaediaof complaints of the flesh, the hunger to see palpates all images. OlivierMongin, in his book dedicated to violence in cinema,6 suggests that themore the gaze devours violence onscreen the better to ignore it in real life:hyperconsumption. With its flesh does the gaze embrace, as MauriceMerleau-Ponty noticed.7 The concept of flesh appears in his final works,influenced by Bataille: flesh is that excess within us which opposes itself tothe law of decency. The gaze lodges itself in the flesh. Jacques Lacan seesthe gaze as an object, issued from a self-mutilation suffered by the being.8

In agreement with Merleau-Ponty and against Sartre, he separates thegaze from inter-subjective space, from the subject-to-subject relation. Thegaze exists previous to the visible, since we are beings watched in the spec-tacle of the world, according to Merleau-Ponty.9 When the threshold ofthe visible is amplified, the gaze retracts. The invisible is not the oppositeof the visible; it is its secret counterpart. On this secret of the visible does theever-hungrier eye feed. In cinema, something is at stake beyond the visible.Nietzsche posed the necessary question: For everything which man allowsto be made visible, we may ask ourselves: What is it he wishes to hide?

Psychoanalysis teaches that the eye satisfies its own will primarily in thebody of the self, and only then does it direct itself to the body of the other,to return to itself as a desire to be seen. The body of the self then goes onto support itself in the others gaze. The alternating of the looking subjectand the observed object creates the background for violence as function.Pleasure and pain inscribe the alphabet of places in the body, and we know,since Foucault, that the body does not belong to us. It is the object of bio-politics, which traces its cartography and manages its jouissance.lolt is thebody we are, and not the body we have.

Sex and death, the experience of satisfaction and of pain become thosesigns capable of capturing the others desire and satiating the eyes appetite.The body as mortal flesh evokes horror; its beauty, on the other hand,


covers it. Contemplation pacifies for a while. We knew about the opium of thepeople, now we know something about the morphine of the audience. Thescreen offers relief before the void that opens up the space of representation.It is in the treatment of this void that the genius of a Kubrick lies: someonewho was able to return the spectator to the experience of seeing, turningcinema into a weapon against a violence that cannot be uprooted. In oppo-sition to images that observe the subject and eradicate him, Kubrickscinema calls upon the subjective experience of the gaze.

The cinema screen is the sphinx that awaits travellers walking up to theentrance of the city, tossing riddles at them. In antiquity, if the travellerfailed to find the answer, the sphinx devoured him. Today hardly anyoneenters cities on foot. Today there is no longer anything definitive to see,nothing which can be symbolized once and for all and no word or imagewhich might serve to effectively kill the Thing in order to formulate the truthconcerning our absence of freedom. Nowadays, melancholically free, wereturn to the darkened screening room whenever we have a spare moment.Cinema is no means of exhibition. It is a matter of experience. Cinema isnot the technique of the imaginary, as Metz and Baudry stated, nor is itthe articulator of visibility as a builder of identities - a translation machine,as feminist critics suggest.11 Because cinema is experience, it is not subjectto the application of psychoanalysis seeking to decode it as a product ofculture. The repetitive song of the return of the repressed says nothing atall nowadays.12 It may, yes, timidly take a place - though some may accuseit of arrogance - among its seats to learn what this nocturnal art can teach itabout the production of the unconscious and about consciences nightmares.

The strict conditions of our experience put us in company with a fearshaped by desire, a fear rarified of desire as when one speaks of air rarifiedof carbon where desire is fear s formal envelope. Not only are we fearfulcreatures: we even desire fear. Alfred Hitchcock was a master of what, in hisown words, was his specific field: the field of fear. He was able to identifythis formal envelope and extract pleasure from fear.

The Voice of Violence

A contemporary picture of fear might conjure up the cities of fear in whichmany of us live. Here to the south of the Equator, the raw face of terror, theseverest expression of fear, which makes itself felt regardless of signifiers orgiant stereophonic movie screens, is especially deaf-mute. According to thecritic Daniel Caetano: 'There is violence to be found in some places all ofthe time, and there is violence in all places at some point'.13


A real peculiarity of our cities' culture is hunger. The hunger-culture the-ory was elaborated by the modernist Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha:'Latin American hunger is more than an alarming symptom of social pov-erty: it is the very essence of its society. Thus we can define our culture asa culture of hunger*.14 For Glauber Rocha, speaking at Columbia Universityin January 1971, this truth was almost impossible to carry across effectivelyto his audience: 'Neither does Latin American man communicate his truemisery to civilized man, nor does civilized man truly understand the mis-ery of the Latino'. More recently, the 2004 Oscar-nominated movie City ofGod shouldered the burden of communicating some of this veiled truththrough a sample of images of the real misery and violence which existsin our cities. The Contemporary Latin American man has no escape fromviolence as the language of the twenty-first century. Local voices in Brazilpiped up to condemn the film for banalizing, estheticizing and glamorizingviolence for the benefit of the civilized. Curiously, it was mostly thesoundtrack which felt prey to the reigning spirit of '} accuse: described asbanal, clipped musical language, designed to seduce trendy young hordesfrom all over the globe. It seems that 30 years later, Glauber Rochas assess-ment remains undeniable. The truth remains hidden, as defined by itsessential structure.

Art in Brazil, as in other Latin American countries, is about transmittingthat very essential structure. Frederic Jameson teaches that film aestheticsare geopolitics - and just another formal envelope deserving of our atten-tion (1995): Mango Yellow, City of God, The Invader, The Man Who Copied,The Bandit of the Red Light, Bus 174, The Prisoner of the Iron Bars, The LittlePrinces Rap Against the Wicked Souls, News from a Personal War, Carandiru,the list grows and multiplies along this same black path.

This visual and sound nitroglycerine, of violent acts and the fears thatthese engender, has provoked great debates in the illustrated press, the syn-tagmas of which are, as we have glimpsed above, that they glamorize poverty,exalt crime, fetishize weapons of war, banalize evil and aestheticize violence.There is a tendency to develop an eruptive conception of violence: waves,explosions and a recrudescence that appears to deny the part played bystructure. Even today it is hard to listen to the Freudian assertion that hatredis primary and love is secondary; and, as concerns that which interests ushere, a debate is necessary with those who insist on denying that art has beendealing with violence and fear since these concepts have been around andsince Babel received its divine punishment - afauvisme avant la lettre.15

The fear violence inspires is experienced as unmentionable, unthinkableand inaudible. There are places where it is not a product of contingence but


rather a necessity. There are places where fear always returns and never saysanything. It is voice. It is mute. Pablo Neruda described it thusly: 'And thedeath of the world falls upon my life/There is not an ear on Earth to hearmy sad lament/And there is a scream in my mouth which my mouth doesnot scream'.16

Lacan teaches us that it is the other s response that transforms a shoutinto a cry - a demand. If there is no other there is no call and no appeal. Ifthere is no one to sanction with a listening ear, a shout is not turned into anappeal.

This notwithstanding, we concur with the formulation of the non-existence of the Other which Jacques Lacan sustained throughout his laterwork. Lacan noted the crumbling of the symbolic Other in our time, theinconsistency of symbolic determination, the impotence of the law in bar-ring access tojouissance, in sum: the fragile nature of any kind of guarantee.Faced with the politics of fear, screams remain inside a mouth that does notscream. Mute screams like those of the character in Munchs painting[1893], a coil of barbed wire that to this day pricks anyone that dares tolook at him. Lacan comments on Munchs The Scream thusly:

When we see the image, the scream is crossed by the space of silencewithout inhabiting it. They are connected neither by being togethernor by following one another. The scream makes the abyss into whichsilence plunges. This image is where the voice makes itself distinctfrom any modulating thing, as the scream differentiates it from allforms of language.17

Cry, scream, shout. Cry comes from the Latin quiritare' which impliescitizens making demands for help. The cry/shout is a perforating soundemitted with violence by the voice. Strong and sudden. We cry when facedwith fear, surprise or pain. So we are asking for help by means of our voice.To cry corresponds with the situation of a fall, when man no longer feelssupported. The cry emerges from the fall as the announcement of thecoming void; the cry minds the gap, as London Undergrounds anonymousvoice mechanically instructs. The scream is the most dramatic appeal forthe existence of the other. It is not articulated; it is pure jouissance and amere phoneme that does not need to pass through signifiers to make sense.The scream is driven by passion and needs to be discharged, to use Freudsterminology. Just like the electric discharge that is the thunderbolt, thevoice of God. In his 'Project for a Scientific Psychology' Freud says:


The filling up of nuclear neurons has as a consequence a necessity fordischarge, a drive that is going to achieve itself through motricity.Experience demonstrates that the first path to follow is the onethat leads to an internal modification (manifestations of emotion,screams). But, as we have said, none of this sort of discharge dimin-ishes the tension, because new endogenous excitations remainflowing, and tension is reestablished.18

Soon after this paragraph, Freud will introduce the neighbour, the complexof the Nebenmensch, which is the source for his distinction between thefamiliar and the uncanny.

There are several variants of the cry: the lupine howl, the mariachi-likelament and the bellow or the low cry of the complaint. Sometimes theseend in tears, other times they are brutally silenced. He who shouts is listen-ing to his own voice and to the echo of his voice. It is worth rememberingthat Echo was a fan of Narcissus, who mutely and unsuccessfully followedhim. She is able only to reflect the voices of others, and not her own, sincebeing punished for distracting Hera with long stories, while Zeus wasengaged in love affairs with the nymphs of the forest. A couple of years pre-ceding his comments on The Scream Lacan had said:

If the voice, as we know it, has any importance, it is not because itresonates inside a vacuum in space . . . rather because it resonates inthe emptiness' of the Other as such . . .; and it is a property of thestructure of the Other to constitute a certain void, the vacuum of itslack of guarantees.19

The composer James Wierzbicki raises the questions that most pertain toour subject. He asserts that, for many, music has become the equivalent ofsilence: 'Music has become a buffer that protects individuals both fromundesirable noise and from the undesirable music of others'.20 He readsin Cage that music is contained within silence, and it does not saturatesilence. 'A Cagean koan might ask: What do we hear when we hear silence?Changing but one letter poses a much more pressing question: What do wefear when we hear silence?'21 The void, the emptiness of the Other as such,conduces us to appeal for the irresistible company of music: radio accom-paniment when we read our newspapers, company for driving our car,musical accompaniment for love scenes, the company that television'sanonymous and senseless voice affords us when wandering alone at home.


These days it is as though an iPod were stuck into our flesh so as to conjureup the void of the Other or the silence of his voice.

'Fear isn't foolish' the saying in Spanish goes; this is a view which con-cerns fear as an artifice of the Ego, or the type of fear that saved severalfrom the crematoria, as Jorge Semprun tells it in Literature or life, manda-tory reading for those wishing to understand the politics of fear. Fear asdefense, the fear that saves our skin, which signals danger, when fear man-ages to turn a scream into an appeal and the famous cry for 'help!'

We may distinguish this instrumental fear from that which, taking thevoice as an object, serves no purpose other than jouissance. Jouissancehere becomes a political factor as usually pointed out by Slavoj Zizek.22 Thesocial bond as discourse is organized so as to distribute \hejouissance of abody affected of the unconscious. Jouissance is understood by Lacan asusufruct: enjoyment without ownership, and rebellious before the law. Itcan neither be divided nor counted, nor accumulated or capitalized. Jouis-sance is a surplus, a product of social life from the very beginning, whichsociety has to deal with by means of law, either patriarchal or modern.

Lacan once again states that: 'We have found in the unconscious, insteadof beneficial, favourable objects, objects of a certain type, which, after all,can serve no purpose. They are the 'little a' objects, the breast, the faeces, thegaze, the voice'.23 The voice falls from the organ of the voice, falls from theOther. As Lacan said during the year in which he tackled anguish: 'objectiv-ity is correlated to the pathos of a cut'.24 Every causal function supportsitself in a piece of flesh, torn away from itself by the formalism of the signi-fier. The signifier cuts human flesh by nomination, by forcing a way ofsaying, as Roland Barthes stressed during his famous Le$on: '[Language] issimply fascist; because fascism is not to prevent from saying; it is to obligeto say'.25 So when fear is able to name the object of its discontent, this allowsthe subject to overcome the anguish - the unsayable, unthinkable anguish.

We can assert that fear releases from anguish and that this provides avery good reason to spend some frightened hours in front of our favouritescreen. Hitchcock thought that the 'anguished expectation' - in Freud'swords, was futures indeterminate quality: suspense gives us pleasure andaffects our bodies. He drives suspense in between fiction's shadows and anyreal terror that might present itself when we reach the top of the stairs,playing his audience like a piano. Fear anticipates and defends us againstpanic. We had already given him credit for discovering desire as the formalenvelope for fear. 'Give them pleasure - the same pleasure they have whenthey wake up from a nightmare'.26


The essential thing is that the price must not have been paid. We haveto feel the same fear the hero feels - hands shivering, our heart in ourmouth - but we cannot have paid the price. Fear s jouissance has freedomas its condition.

A web of signifiers cast over the world acts as a jow/ssawce-apparatusfor anyone who speaks. The loss that this brings about lays the basis ofhope for its recovery. With this jouissance the subject produces himself asa cut. Without this fall from the Other, the subject cannot possibly appear.It appears to me that it is at this exact crossroads that the psychoanalystsenunciation is to be found. A voiceless enunciation. The ethical dimensionof jouissance. An ear to the ground.

Film

It is worth recollecting that fear has been associated with cinema from thevery beginning. In 1664 an erudite mathematician called Thomas RasmussenWalgenstein travelled around Europe with an optical cage, which PierrePetit, owner of a curiosities cabinet, baptized a lantern of fear! An unfor-gettable magic lantern session was performed by Walgenstein before theking of Denmark and Norway, Frederic III. Walgenstein may well havebeen inspired by the finite nature of human experience, subject to time andending in death, which Hans Holbein had depicted almost a hundred yearsearlier in his famous picture 'The Ambassadors'(1533). One should notethere the inclusion of the skull, an anamorphic representation, as a reminderof our vanity which was to merit a full session of Lacans seminar, held in1964.27The distorted skull is the residual trace of a kind of knowledgewhich is unattainable for the subject, just as the object of anguish is.

This time, Walgestein portrayed figures of death that, although theyhorrified Frederics subjects, did not have the same effect on the Kinghimself, who like a child asked for more and more, in what was to be threedays before his own death in 1670. Early manifestations of the close rela-tionship between cinema and death can be sought in by the ten macabrefigures designed by the physicist Christiaan Huygens in 1659, for presenta-tion on the convex glass panels of a magic lantern. Again, Huygens pickedup his idea from a painting by Holbein: The Dance of Death (1538).Huygenss morbid images represented a skeleton, sometimes surroundedby a circle, which threw his own skull off or replaced it - or moved his rightarm - introducing the will to create an artificial movement. He loved thistheme to such an extent that he amplified the skeleton, which had been


thumbnail-sized, to full 'life'-size on the wall of his garden. 'Paradoxically,the first luminic artificial recreation of life was a representation of death'.28

We must not fail to mention phantasmagoria^ a genre of luminic specta-cle which emerged close to the end of the eighteenth century. The equip-ment involved, while veiled by a curtain, enabled the sudden appearanceof a phantom, which immediately began to increase his size, seeming tomove towards the panicked audience. The macabre mise-en-scene increasedthe anguish and fear caused in the audience by the moving projection:a somber silence, or lugubrious sounds emanating from a glass marimba - anoptical and acoustic ensemble for the production of fear. Etienne GaspardRobert, known as Robertson, received the credit for having invented thephantasmagoria in 1798. Its soundscapes were profoundly sophisticated:voices of thunder, lamenting voices suggesting pain and despair, the chat-tering of teeth and clatter of bones, spirits with raucous and terrible tones,the roars of a tempest; all resources to instill fright among the audience.Rain, hail and winds conducted as a symphony of fear. The acoustic effectswere produced by a Flanders sheet: a tube of iron sheeting through whichthe voice of the sinister was emitted.

In film, fear is the preferred effect when it comes to bringing out whatFrench specialist, Michel Chion called the rendu sonore,29 sound as a prod-uct and as data. Images relating to fear always demand a sound which,without necessarily breaking from a realist function, gives the idea, thefeeling of something, rather than that which might faithfully reproduce asupposed acoustic real. Through sound editing, film teaches us the topol-ogy of panic; these are the mechanisms that draw the dark path of fear, asWilliam Irish, that master of suspense, put it. The Blair Witch Project is anexperience of the talons of the night, as anyone who has seen it can testify.

The real in sound is produced, and not recorded raw the way realityserves it up. Sound in film exists precisely for the purpose of producingthat real. The voice has been the main tool for this since the days beforetalkies (or better still, as Michel Chion suggests when film was deaf).30

Film has always understood fear to be an event that comes to life in anaudiosphere. Fear-inducing sap needs to be watered with sound. AlejandroAmenabars recent film The Others exemplifies sounds upper hand overimage when it comes to the business of inducing fear. Even characters*solitary dialogues with their own fears are the objects of sublime soundtreatment: for example, the use of silence in Mystic River, to stay amongthe more recent productions, or David Lynchs Wild at Heart, where fearin the body is listened to, even stethoscopically.

That other master of his craft, Boris Karloff, who teased out the biggestchildhood fears, distinguished horror from terror. Horror encompassed all


those works of a repulsive connotation characterized by gory details, whileterror - that which he termed 'clean' terror - consisted simply in creatinga sense of fear in the viewer through suggestion, or the unknown counte-nance and dark continents. Karloffs rule for administering the level ofthe shiver was to be indirect in presenting the causes of fright, keeping theemphasis away from showing and on withholding evidence and operatingby default. An empty space, layered with shadows, operated as pure con-centrated potential. 'Espace quelconque' is how Deleuze (1986:109) termedthis 'threat-zone' where any kind of virtual conjunction could take form; it'sa space where the other is silent, where fear lives.31

Dario Argento, director of The Stendhal Syndrome, Inferno, Bird with theGlass Feathers, and master of the sinister, knows how to draw the materialelement of fear from celluloid's evanescent nature.

Sculpting things from light and shadow, articulating what we see withwhat we don't; creating an immersion sphere where the movements of thehuman soul oppose each other, and, operating thusly, producing an effectivesymbolism - are all ways of conjuring up an other capable of listening.

For Hitchcock, the existence of the other was necessary in order to findpleasure in fear: the 'protective mantle' being the Hitchcockian term. Witha mantle the other guarantees us that the young girl will not suffer the worst.It's just that sometimes the mantle becomes a tunic of Nessus. FollowingVivian Sobchack (1992), we may suggest that identification with what hap-pens on the screen constitutes a form of corporeal relation to it. Belief in areal image underpins this identification, a kind of umbilical cord, whichforms between the thing filmed then and our gaze here and now, as RolandBarthes said of photography.32

Avant-garde cinema, daily the wiser to the power of images with sound,satirizes this cord, offering up scratched, faded, decayed, broken and rottedmovies that aim to make plain the tenuous connection with the real towhich they refer; all appealing calling for a gaze of loss and mourning,denying visual coherence, and fullness of image to the contemporaryviewer, a voyeur who is starving for a planetary gaze, quoting Lacan. Thisis the point Laura Marks makes in her writings: to oppose optical drivesto haptic ones, the predominance of the visual to sensitive perception,the closeness of perception to the distance of symbolic representation.33

Some critics make a facile opposition between Marks's work and Lacanianpsychoanalysis,34 considering the latter a form of praising romantic subjec-tivity and ignoring the later Lacan who relied upon the body and itsjouis-sance - the real clue to understanding spectatorship.

Sound's prestige increases while that of image disappears. When such ageneralized acusmatization of the real occurs, it is with one's hearing that


one sees. CI see you with my ears',35 Slavoj Zizek pointed out this Tristanwords, somewhat in the manner of the analyst, acusmata of our times.

Film is an open door for infinite heterotopias of spaces (a rectangularroom, two-dimensional screen, which during the projection opens onto athree-dimensional world). The soundscape is similarly plural. In it we findthe source of the myths and fictions about the impossible that we imagineand which imagines us. Once outside the screening room, an authenticaudiovisual architecture of fears rules the design of home and 'control -space' alike, a voyeurism of power that listens with its eyes wide shut. In aworld swept by violence, as Romain Rolland saw it,36 the masses observe,listen to and admire themselves through mirrors and amplifiers. This wouldbe 'homo violens' crazy complexity, as postulated by Dadoun,37 which radi-ates aesthetic jouissanee.

Voices of violence are voices that lead. We know there would have beenno Auschwitz without a relevant soundtrack: Hitler without radio, murder-ous brothers without hymns and crusades without canticles. The Latinetymology of violence comes from the word Vis', signifying force, power,vigor and more specifically, the use of force. There is also a well-knowninterpretation of Vis' which leads to 'masses': 'Multitude, your name isviolence', as Dadoun paraphrased.38

Music and the Beasts

In closing, I'd like to recount an experience: In Salvador, I am involved withan NGO39 that seeks to promote music as a resource for fighting violenceamong the young. Armed with Lacan's teachings on music as a defenseagainst the voice - the voice of fear in the case which concerns us here -added to that which literature teaches us about music as a cure for melan-cholies, or common sense through the misappropriation: 'music tames thesavage beast'. I was very surprised. Conducting Internet research on therelationship between music and violence, the surprise was that analysingarguments in support of musics pacifying, soothing, tranquilizing, con-tenting properties - music against civilizations discontents, as Freud's title40

becomes when translated into English -1 found the opposite. Lessons fromcyberspace. Texts, texts and more texts against rock, jazz and punk music -all considered savage, violent, beastly and feral. There were voices raisedagainst the Sex Pistols and their prescription to destroy and against themovie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Even Andre Breton was caught inthe net, for having requested to let a few shots fly to epater les bourgeois.41


Curiously I came across US terror-movie fans complaining about insuf-ficient stimuli in current cinema (they are kinder to television).The curiouspart is that when they go to the voting urns, it is they who leave us (the restof us) in fear.

Notes

1. Alfred Hitchcock used this as an opening epigraph of The Man Who Knew TooMuch (1956).

2. Roger Dadoun, A Violencia: ensaio acerca do 'Homo violent', Pilar Ferreira deCarvalho and Carmen de Carvalho Ferreira (trans.). Rio de Janeiro: Colecjio Enfoques.Filosofia, Difel, 1998, p. 18.

3. Ismail Xavier, A setima arte: um culto moderno.Sao Paulo: Perspectiva/Secretariade Estado da Cultura, 1978, p. 11.

4. Antonin Artaud, El Cine. Buenos Aires: Alianza Editorial, 1994, p. 8.5. Ibid.6. Olivier Mongin, Violencia y cine contempordneo. Buenos Aires: Paidos, 1999, p. 133.7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968), p. 138.8. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XL The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis [ 1964],

Alan Sheridan (trans.). New York: Norton, 1981.9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Alphonso Lingis (trans.).

Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968, p. 138.10. Alan Sheridan, who translated Jacques Lacan's Ecrits from the French, says in his

notes: 'There is no adequate translation in English of this word' so we decided, as manyauthors do, to keep it in the original form.

11. Vicky Leheau, Psychoanalysis and Cinema. The play of Shadows, in Short Cuts Series.London and New York: Wallflower, 2001.

12. Michel Levine, A Fun Night out: Horror and Other Pleasures of the Cinema in Freud'sWorst Nightmares (extract of a chapter published by Cambridge Studies in Film series).New York: Cambridge University Press in Senses of Cinema. Available at http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/15/horror_fun.html (accessed on 26 September 2005).

13. Daniel Caetano, O cinema e o Rio de Janeiro. Available at http://www.otrocampo.com/8/rio_port.html, (accessed on 20 September 2005).

14. Ricardo Parodi, 'Glauber Rocha: El hambre, el mito, la muerte' in La Caja. Revista deEnsayo Negro. No. 4. Argentina: 1993.

15. French expression for vanguard: avant-garde.16. Pablo Neruda, Crepusculario (1923), p. 28.17. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre XII, Problemes Cruciaux pour la Psychanalyse.

Paris: Lecon 17/03/1956 (unpublished).18. Sigmund Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) (standard edn), v. 1,

1966, p. 281.

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19. Jacques Lacan, El Seminario: Libro 10 (1962-1963) La Angustia. led. Buenos Aires:Paidos, 2006, p. 298.

20. James Wierzbicki, Silence. St. Louis Post-Dispatch 16 July 1989. Available at http://pages.sbcglobal.net/jameswierzbicki/silence.htm (accessed on 20 September 2005), p. 2.

21. Ibid.

22. Zizek, Slavoj, For they know not what they do: enjoyment as a political factor, London:Verso, 1991.

23. Lacan (1964), p. 68.24. Lacan (1963), p. 232.25. Roland Barthes, Aula. Sao Paulo: Editora Cultrix, 1989, p. 14.26. Sigmund Freud, 1974. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works

ofSigmund Freud, 24 Vols, James Strachey, et al. (trans.). London: The Hogarth Press, 1974.27. Holbein's painting appears on the cover of the 1973 French edition. LACAN,

Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. [1964], Alan Sheridan (trans.).New York: Norton, 1981.

28. Laurent Mannoni, A grande arte da luz e da sombra: arqueologia do cinema,Assef Kfouri (trans.). Sao Paulo: Editora Senac: Unesp, 2003, p. 171.

29. Michel Chion, La Parole au Cinema. La Toile Trouee. Cahiers du cinema. CollectionEssais, Paris: Editions de 1'Etoile, 1988, p. 20.

30. Michel Chion, La Voix au Cinema. Cahiers du cinema. Collection Essais. Paris:Editions de 1'Etoile, 1993, p. 94.

31. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Hugh Tomlinson and BarbaraHabberjam (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. 109.

32. Roland Barthes, A Camara Clara, Nota sobre a fotografia, Julio Castanon (trans.).Guimaraes. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1984, p. 65.

33. Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis, MN:University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

34. Claire Perkins, This Time It's Personal: Touch: Sensuous Theory and MultisensoryReview of Laura U. Marks. Available at www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/ books/04/33/touch_laura_marks.html (accessed on 5 September 2005).

35. Zizek, Slavoj, Salecl, Renata (eds.), "I hear you with my eyes" In Gaze and voice as

love objects. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 3rdprinting, 2005, p. 90-126.36. Romain Rolland, Au dessus de la melee. Editions Ollendorff, 1915.

37. Roger Dadoun (1998).

38. Ibid.39. Non-Profit Organization.40. 'Civilization and Its Discontents' (1929), Freud's article first published in English by

James Strachey in 1961.41. French expression meaning 'the purpose to scandalize the bourgeoisie'.

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Minimalist Music*Parallel Symmetries? The Relationship Between

Minimalist Music and Multimedia Forms

Pwyll ap Sion and Tristian Evans

[Movie] musk in any cose... acquires its own autonomy within the modernist loosening offorms, and often develops a formal power not inferior to the visual image itself.1

Introduction

The aim of this article is to explore the relationship between minimalistmusic and various types of multimedia. Directing the enquiry is the beliefthat elements of minimalist music and multimedia possess the ability toform powerful symbiotic relationships when combined. Our study alsoreveals that the nature of this relationship deviates from normative pat-terns established between sound and image. Unlike other musical types,minimalist music does not usually dissolve into the supporting image.Instead, it retains, affirms and even strengthens its own musical meaningin such contexts. As a result, the sound-image relationship is dialectical inmost contexts where minimalism and multimedia interact. A dialogue ordiscourse is set up between the two elements, broadly based on the princi-ple of complementation, but one which allows for - indeed, may evenencourage - opposition or parallelism, rather than integration. At least, thisappears to be the case in most film contexts. In television commercials,

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44


minimalist music assumes a more conventional, supporting role. The natureof this relationship is examined in detail in the second half of the article.The first part will look at connections and associations between minimalistmusic and different visual media in order to explore the applicability ofexisting theoretical models in relation to them.

Background

Minimalist music has since its inception in the late 1960s been stronglyassociated with other visual media.2 Initially drawing inspiration fromthe conceptual and geometrical works of artists such as Donald Judd(1928-1994), Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) and Richard Serra (b. 1939), mini-malist composers worked closely with other media in order to realize theirown musical aims and objectives. During these formative years, minimalistmusic was often performed in galleries or lofts which exhibited minimalart, and composers such as Steve Reich (b. 1936) and Philip Glass (b. 1937)often drew parallels between their own approaches to texture, surfaceand form with those of contemporary artists working in similar spheres.3

Theatre and film also helped shape the nascent minimalist aesthetic ofthe time. Glass's route back into composition in the mid-1960s came via histranscription of music written by well-known Indian sitar player RaviShankar for the film Chappaqua (1966), and he also worked closely at thetime with theatre group Mabou Mines.4 Likewise, Reich collaborated withthe San Francisco Mime Troupe and composed music for Robert Nelsonsexperimental film Plastic Haircut (1964).5

Minimalist music therefore traditionally drew upon, and worked with,other art forms; and its ability to adapt to - and function within - a wholehost of multimedia contexts was further developed in the 1970s. Figuresworking on the fringes of the post-experimental, minimal and post-minimaltradition, such as Robert Ashley (b. 1930), Meredith Monk (b. 1942) andLaurie Anderson (b. 1947), regularly combined music with video, dance,theatre and other visual media. Soon, minimalisms influence extendedbeyond its traditional home in New York art galleries and lofts to main-stream culture. Musicians and bands including Brian Eno (b. 1948), MikeOldfield (b. 1953) and Tangerine Dream incorporated characteristicallyminimalist techniques, such as interlocking patterns and extended repeti-tions, into their own film and media compositions. The fragile, hauntingostinato figure from Oldfield s hit album Tubular Bells (1973) was used topowerful effect in The Exorcist (1973), arguably eclipsing Jack Nitzschesoriginal soundtrack, while Tangerine Dreams music for the film Risky Busi-ness (1983) owed a great deal to Reichs harmonic and rhythmic sound world.6

Minimalist Music 673

Eno's delicate montage of gently rocking tape loops likewise provided suit-ably atmospheric accompaniments to Al Reinerts 1983 film documentaryon the Apollo missions in space. Glass's interest in music theatre during the1960s extended to opera in the mid-1970s, and within a decade of compos-ing Einstein on the Beach (1976) he had completed an ambitious operatictrilogy. Never wishing to confine himself to more traditional visual media,Glass also provided music from Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi film trilogy between1982 and 1991. Likewise, during the 1990s Reich's musical emphasis alsoshifted towards visual media, when he wrote a multimedia opera The Cave(1993) and later, the documentary video opera Three Tales (1998-2002).

Strangely enough, and in apparent contradiction with its all-embracingoutlook, minimalist music also emphasised extreme formal abstractionand internal objectiveness. Early compositions eschewed any referential orprogrammatic content, preferring instead to foreground generic musicalqualities such as repetition, imitation, variation, cyclical patterns and mod-ular forms. Compositions were accordingly given abstract titles, such asFour Organs (1970) and Six Pianos (1973) (Reich) or Music in ContraryMotion (1969) and Music in Twelve Parts (1974) (Glass). In such instancesthe aim was to explore internal musical mechanisms, and in doing so themusic often closed off any external references and suggestions. In somerespects, then, minimalist music was the complete antithesis to traditional,functional film music: it stubbornly resisted references, clinging instead toa distilled, extreme form of musical absolutism.

How then did minimalism become successfully matched up with visualimages? If the musical content was abstract, minimalism neverthelessemerged from composers' direct contact with performances of their ownmusic rather than through theories developed either cerebrally or intellec-tually. Reich crystallized his compositional methods experientially, throughtrial and error, and both he and Glass established their own ensembles inthe late 1960s because their music demanded skills and techniques thatwere in many important respects diachronically opposed to traditionalclassical or then current modernist performance practices. Minimalistmusic also shifted the interpretative emphasis away from the composer andperformer to the listener - a shift that allowed the work to remain open todifferent audience responses. The fnow moment' was given particularemphasis by minimalist composers, where unique and often indeterminatespatial or acoustical by-products - harmonics, difference tones and tonalfluctuations - were factored into the composition's overall dimensions.7

Furthermore, performances of minimalist music demanded extreme kindsof physical stamina and response mechanisms, creating music often ofvisceral directness and immediacy. Abstract sound was thus viewed by the


minimalist composers as possessing highly colouristic, indeterminate andtactile qualities. In effect their goal was to animate sonic sound sculpturesthrough the act of performance. If the music s content was abstract, then,its mode of communication was totally different: it precipitated an audi-ence response and duly received it.

Minimalisms ability to be both self-sufficient and open to outside influ-ences allowed it to become a parallel analogue to other media rather thanmerely imitating or reflecting them. Its aim was to set up musical equiva-lences with painting, sculpture, dance or film, in order to allow music tocoexist with - rather than become subservient to - these forms. Minimalismsimpact within a multimedia context is partly explained through this com-plementary pairing of image and sound: a composition would retain itsown autonomous space while at the same time relating to a specific visualmoment. Music s relationship to moving images could best be described asallegorical and associative rather than metaphoric and integrated. Insteadof being absorbed into the other s dimensions, it existed alongside othermedia on essentially equal terms.

While minimalist techniques and methods made inroads into popularculture during the 1980s and 1990s, it was arguably through the success offilm soundtracks by Glass and Michael Nyman (b. 1944) that minimalismgained a much wider and more diverse audience. The ubiquity of Glass'smusic in Reggios Qatsi film trilogy was partly determined by the absenceof any spoken narrative, and in Nyman s score for Jane Campions The Piano(1993) the result of the main characters mute disposition. However, suchobservations do little to cast light on the vexed question of why minimalistmusic functions particularly well with regard to certain image-based con-texts and situations. Little research has been done thus far to try and deter-mine minimalisms appropriateness to specific film and media contexts.8

By providing a more refined understanding of minimalisms relationshipto moving images, such a study would hope to shed further light on visualmeaning in general while also determining the meaning of minimalistmusic per se. Could musical minimalism require the presence of images inorder to make it function completely, thus forming one element in a post-modern Gesamtkunstwerky yet doggedly reasserting its own autonomy?

Theories

Some theoretical justification in establishing the dialectical relationshipbetween image and sound in media-based minimalist works may be foundin Nicholas Cooks 'Three Basic Models of Multimedia. Cook first seeks to


identify various media used in a particular work by posing the question,c[H]ow far does each medium create the effect of being complete andself-sufficient, and how far does it seem to embody a meaning of its own?>9

He then separates the component parts that make up any particular multi-media moment in order to deconstruct and reconstruct its combinedmeanings:

[h]ow far does each medium create the same effect when heard orseen on its own as when experienced in the context of the [instanceof multimedia] as a whole? Where it isn't possible to separate themedia physically, is it easy to focus on one or the other, or is therea strong perceptual fusion between them?10

In doing so, Cook establishes a methodological framework which allowsfor the possibility of discussing different cross-media relationships basedon a test involving similarity and difference.11

As outlined in Figure 1 from Cooks theory, the three models of confor-mance, complementation and contest are subjected to this test to establishsimilarity or difference. Consistency and coherence determine whether ornot a relationship passes the similarity test. By using linguistic analogies,including metaphor, Cook sets up different levels of meaning betweencoherence and consistency. When a multimedia relationship is deemed

Figure 1 (See Cook 1998: 99).


Similarity Difference

Figure 2

consistent, then, it passes the similarity test and belongs to the confor-mance model.

If a multimedia relationship fails to be consistent, it is subjected to a dif-ference test. A relationship is thus deemed to be contrary or contradictoryand is placed within the complementation or contest models, respectively.Drawing from Greimass theory of narrative grammar and the 'semioticsquare', Cook states that 'contrariety might be glossed as undifFerentiateddifference [while] contradiction implies an element of collision or con-frontation between the opposed terms'. A contest model is constructedwhen 'each medium strives to deconstruct the other, and so create spacefor itself. A model of complementation serves as a kind of 'mid-point'between conformance and contest, wherein 'different media are seen asoccupying the same terrain, but conflict is avoided'.12

Figure 2 attempts to visually replicate, in basic terms, the relationshipbetween Cook's three types. As shown here, the conformance model (;c),denotes similarity between multimedia elements, and is placed indepen-dently from the two forms of difference models, although its relationshipto the complementation model (y) is recognized by means of the hatchedportion representing common ground or terrain. At the opposite end ofthe scale, the contest model (z) is also connected to (y) through the hatchedportion.13

Within this pattern of conformance, complementation and contest,minimalism appears to lie mainly within the V or 'y' domains. Rarely doesit provide a straightforward union with an image's meaning, at least notin examples from the film repertory. This may be due to the fact thatminimalism's origins lie in an 'art' aesthetic rather than in popular culturalperceptions. As a result, minimalist music has been used in films whichoften set out to question, challenge and confront rather than merely attempt


to excite, distract or entertain. Its use in the area of the television commer-cial, where the minimalist sound has been applied to great effect, is morenebulous, however. While some kind of response from the audience isusually desirable if the advert is to serve any real function, minimalistmusic sometimes plays a more conventional, supporting role in allowingthis to happen.

Concepts

What are the principle conceptual concerns that have helped shape theminimalist aesthetic, and how can they shed light on its efficaciousnessin certain media contexts? Minimalism is essentially different from othertypes of classical or modern music due to its emphasis on repetition. Soimportant is this component that Rebecca Leydon has developed a typol-ogy of minimalist tropes based on its effects on the listener. What oftenhappens in minimalist music is that the traditionally heard and perceived'linear trajectory' of 'musical syntax* is superseded by 'obstinate motivicrepetition! This radical form of repetition results in a series of varied sub-jective interpretations.14 Using Naomi Gumming s work on 'the musicalsubject' (Gumming, 1997), Leydon establishes three parameters attributedto subjective responses to musical phenomena. First, timbre has an imme-diate effect upon the listener. Secondly, this is followed by gesture, whichallows the listener to gain 'access to a vicarious kinaesthesia: physical ges-tures of the body serve as interpretants for motivic shapes, rhythms andcontours'.15 Thirdly, syntax is related either to 'causality' and 'intentionality',engaging or disengaging with the musics direction or goal-orientatedmotion. Therefore, while non-minimalist music usually 'speaks, moves andintends', syntax in minimalist music on the other hand 'is undermined bythe obstinate repetition of a single motivic gesture'.16

Developing on Cumming's observations, Leydon's typology of six mini-malist tropes represents different subjective conditions or states. Thesesubject positions or tropes are described respectively as maternal, mantric,kinetic, totalitarian, motoric and aphasic. The maternal represents a 'hold-ing environment', the mantric 'a state of mystical transcendence', kinetic 'acollectivity of dancing bodies', totalitarian an 'involuntary state of unfree-dom', motoric suggests an 'indifferent mechanized process', and aphasic theidea of cognitive impairment, madness or logical absurdity'.17 AlthoughLeydon cites examples from instrumental music and opera, these typolo-gies can be applied to any multimedia situation either in order to supportor contest the visual meaning.


For example, the interaction between these elements in Glass's secondinstalment of the Qatsi trilogy, Powaqqatsi (1988), depicting 'life in trans-formation, utilizes various types of repetition that may be related to Leydonstypology, particularly the kinetic and motoric. The opening scene, 'SerraPelada' depicts workers in the open air toiling under harsh conditions,suggesting the kinetic type: although the 'bodies' are not dancing, a strongemphasis on physical movement pervades the scene. However, the slow-motion visual techniques simultaneously employed by Reggio in this scenesuggest complementation rather than similarity. In minimalist multimediacontexts, fast music can be effectively combined with slow visual move-ment in a state of purposeful co-existence rather than straightforwardlysimilar.

In Michael Nymans soundtrack to Peter Greenaways film A Zed andTwo Noughts (1985), however, scenes featuring sped-up time-lapse photog-raphy are accompanied by frenetic playing on violin and harpsichord,suggesting speeded-up music.18 Despite the degree of similarity betweensound and image here, a level of disassociation remains: Nymans musicwas originally composed for a dance production featuring the LucindaChilds Dance Company, called Portraits in Reflection (1985) before beingseized upon by Greenaway for his film. The neutral and objective nature ofNymans music - and of much minimalist music in general - allows it to beadapted to a variety of visual contexts. In this scene from A Zed and TwoNoughts the motoric type is the most relevant repetitive type, given themechanical process involved in time-lapse filming.

An analogous scene from Reggios Powaqqatsi depicts a train progress-ing rapidly in the foreground with a seemingly infinite number of cargocarriages and is juxtaposed with Glass's percussive repetitive music. A clearlack of goal-orientated motion is conveyed in the accompanying music,and this is visually represented by the fact that the scene has been shotusing a locked-off camera angle obscuring the moving object. The vieweris therefore made unaware of the origins of the trains movement or itsultimate destination. The resulting effect of repetition in this scenario isagain motoric, where an 'indifferent mechanized process' takes place. Bothmusic and image appear related, and the points at which both elementsconform suggest that at certain times a synthesis or resolution betweenthe sound-image dialectic does take place. In the case of Powaqqatsiy thepurpose of these moments is to reflect the general subject matter of thework, which deals with the consequences of mechanization as a symbol ofmankind s progress and ultimate demise.

Closely connected to the use and effect of repetition in minimalism isthe musics non-linear element. Non-dialectical use of repetition, according


to Wim Mertens, causes the music to become non-narrative and not teleo-logical.19 Repetition is thus used in and for itself and is not constrained ordictated by factors such as harmonic movement, melodic periodicity, met-rical hierarchy or formal principles. Neither does minimalism set out totell, in musical terms, some kind of story or narrative, nor strive towardssome ultimate goal or resolution. In principle at least, listeners could enteror exit a minimalist composition at any point, although they would risklosing out on important observable features, such as the gradually unfold-ing audible processes heard in early Reich or Glass. In composing Einsteinon the Beach (1976) - an uninterrupted opera of over four hours' length -Glass commented that it 'was never intended to be seen as a whole, narra-tive piece', and duly expected audiences to walk in and out of any singleperformance as required.20

Einstein and other works from this time created not so much an impres-sion of a work that existed in a perpetual state of fragmentation but ratherthat any perception of a work was by its very nature incomplete. Likewise,any musical narrative originally intended for the film soundtrack is oftenobscured or obliterated by scene editing and rearranging. Even in a conciseform such as the television commercial, a piece of pre-existing music mayoften be radically adapted from its original version to suit the purposes ofan advert.21 If the narrative logic and unity of a classical composition isrendered meaningless by fragmentation and distortion imposed by suchediting and splicing techniques, minimal music loses very little 'meaning'in comparison. Indeed, repetitive patterns and modular units ideally lendthemselves to such filmic operations and configurations.

Minimalisms emphasis on pacing and repetition also encourages filmsequences to be edited according to rhythmic rather than visual cues. InNyman's film collaborations with Greenaway, for example, images are oftenchoreographed to sound, abiding by rules governing musical processesrather than filmic ones. The entire final scene of Greenaway s postmodernJacobean pastiche, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989),when a funeral procession culminates with evil gang leader Albert Spica'ssubmission at gunpoint to eat his murdered victim Michael, is edited toNyman's rhythmically intense and dramatic 'Memorial' - a compositionoriginally written to accompany a multimedia collaboration with artistPaul Richards, staged near Rouen, France, in 1985. Allowing such musicaltechniques to dictate picture editing has led Laura Denham to describeGreenaway s films as 'so diligently rhythmic as to create an almost musicalresonance'.22

The emphasis on repetition by minimalists has drawn comparisonwith popular music or non-Western forms. Writing about popular music,


Musematic Discursive

Repeated Repeated Repeated Expositional'riffs' phrases strophes repeat in a sonata

Figure 3 Middletons 'repetition strategies' (in Leydon, 2002).

Richard Middletons theory of repetition is also applicable to minimalistmusic. His use of 'repetition strategies' differentiates musematic repetition(the repetition of 'short motivic fragments') and discursive repetitions oflonger unit lengths.23 Figure 3 is a reproduction of Middletons strategyas set out in Leydon, drawing attention to the fact that certain types ofrepetition have structural implications: musematic repetition 'tends toproject a single-levelled formal structure .. . while the discursive strategyprojects a hierarchically organized discourse - as in "strophic form" '

In traditional Western music, then, musematic repetition is shaped bydiscursive repetition. Thus a large section, such as an exposition in sonataform, is subdivided into sub-sections, and sub-sections into periods, peri-ods into phrases and phrases into themes. Likewise, rhythm is also dictatedby a tactus: smaller rhythmic units are subdivisions of larger ones. Glasshas compared rhythm in Western music to slicing a loaf of bread.24 Inminimalist music, however, discursive repetition is generated by smaller,musematic units. Rhythmic patterns on a micro-structural level are thuscombined to create larger blocks. This additive technique again works wellwith regard to film because a short musical unit is not defined in relationto a larger section (as in sonata form), but exists in and of itself, or in termsof its potential to replicate similar units.

Unlike narrative film music, which makes use of powerful, memorablethemes and leitmotifs, minimalist music is less prescriptive in terms ofwhat it communicates or is meant to say. This results from allowing parallelmusical processes to function as a kind of analogue to the visual and occursbecause film directors and minimalist composers often adopt differentworking methods to mainstream producers. Traditionally, the role of filmmusic has been to enhance and heighten visual and emotional narratives.Collaborations between Glass and Reggio or Nyman and Greenaway set upa radical alternative where music exists separately and autonomously fromthe visual narrative. Nyman has commented on how he would often startwriting music before Greenaway had even started to shoot the film, therebyallowing him the freedom to 'work independently of the films immediatecontent by creating sound structures which precisely parallel (but do not


. . . reproduce) the visual structures'.25 This approach reinforces musicsindependence while simultaneously allowing it to affect and influence thefilms images and narrative, reinforcing Nymaris view thatc[music] doesn'tmerely support what is going on: quite often the character of a scene existsonly because of the music!26

Echoing Jamesons quote which prefaces this article, Nyman has statedthat 'sound has a fundamental tendency towards autonomy'.27 His sound-tracks have, 'never functioned as a background to the plot [and .. . have]nothing to do with the interplay between the actors'.28 This view, clearlyshared by both composer and director, partly comes out of Nyman's beliefthat music should never be composed as an adjunct to a film. His attitudetowards film composition is therefore essentially the same as when com-posing 'art' or concert music, and this difference in approach and applica-tion clearly alters the viewer's grasp of the relationship between sound andimage in film.

In discussing Nyman's music, De Gaetano explains that the 'figurativeand musical discourses represent independent paths that meet in theaudiovisual film dimension creating in literary terms a metonymic associ-ation between image and sound rather than a symbolic one.29 Glass hasalso talked about music as an 'allegorical visualization' of the image.30 Thetwo forms are not inextricably linked, but rather provide differentapproaches to a given context. De Gaetano claims that Nyman's musictherefore 'proposes independent discourses which are parallel to images'.31

This approach allows for a degree of indeterminacy between music andaction: both director and composer follow an agreed set of guidelines butwork independently of one another.

It's Only a Car?

If the music in Greenaway's films, therefore, often exists 'as an independentpiece, with a continuing history and life of its own, whatever the negotia-tions with the images it accompanies - images often still unfilmed whenthe writing of the music began',32 what about the conscious appropriationof minimalist music in television commercials?33 A television commercialused throughout 2006 called 'It's only a car' by the manufacturers, BMWserves as an example of minimalist music reinforcing and supporting thevisual narrative.34 The music for this advert was sourced by BMW fromReggio's film Koyaanisqatsi. Originally released in 1982 to a soundtrackby Glass, Koyaanisqatsi means 'life out of balance'. The music used by BMWfrom Koyaanisqatsi is entitled 'Pruit Igoe'.35 Koyaanisqatsi represents in


non-narrative form a view of life in the late twentieth century by empha-sizing the uneasy, 'unbalanced' relationship between natural, ecologicalforces and those of a driven, consumerist and mechanized society in apost-industrial, post-technological age. Reggio's dehumanized images,according to Michael Dempsey, '[embody] a half-acknowledged fascina-tion with the notion of wiping out the human race'.36 Glass's 'found' musicalmaterials, such as major and minor triads, arpeggios and repeated chordsequences, are also reflected in Reggios use of'found documentary evidence'.In adopting a documentary approach Reggios film suggests detachmentand cool objectivity. Both sound and image are projected symbioticallyinto a futuristic tense often by means of the non-narrative juxtaposition oftime-lapse and slow-motion sequences, which result in a kind of Visual,musical, rhythmic, visceral* truth.37 Glass's music thus acquires a 'premoni-tory' sheen, reflecting Reggios concern with '[viewing] the present fromthe point of view of the future, as if it's over with'.38

It may not be entirely coincidental that the narrative used in the BMWcommercial is constructed as a poem. Although diachronically opposed ina variety of ways, the small-scale form of the television advert mirrors theepigrammatic nature of poetic form, in addition to its use of poetic tropessuch as metaphor and metonymy.39 The commercial's transcript, shown inFigure 4, sets out an inventory of generic features found in cars, rangingfrom basic elements such as 'nuts and bolts' to more sophisticated appara-tus, such as 'intelligent' wipers.

Distribution ofmusical material

A It's only a car.B A car is a car is a car.

With nuts and boltsand leather and cogsand steel and wood

A and glass.

Intelligent wipersB and head-up displays,

alloy and oil,sensors and sound,

A digital mapping and satellite tracking,C twists and turns and smiles, and miles

and one little key.

A car.A It's only a car.

Figure 4


These metonymic features ostensibly serve to uphold the notion that theBMW model is only a car', but the gradual introduction of more advancedtechnological features into the poetic narrative implies the exact opposite.Supported by alliterative effects (Censors and sound') and rhyme ('mapping/tracking5), the inclusion at the end of one little key5 only serves to Unlock*the adverts poetic meaning while simultaneously offering a kind of endlessadventure the acquisition of such a car might afford.

Therefore, the description of the car heard at the very beginning as 'justa car' increasingly acquires a sense of 'false modesty'. According to NicholasCooks theory, the statement only a car' lies in contest with the underlyingmessage of the commercial. This is in fact 'far more than a car', even possi-bly representing the car in an ideal form. The slogan revealed in conjunc-tion with the manufacturers logo at the commercials conclusion - 'TheUltimate Driving Machine' - affirms this conflict. Modesty and understate-ment are used here to communicate supreme self-confidence in the prod-uct's quality and performance, which therefore clearly conflicts with thenarrative.

The visual elements of the commercial may be reduced to two basic types:atmospheric and descriptive images. Atmospheric images mainly consistof moonlit shots of a forest or a birds-eye view of spaghetti junctions, mul-tiple-lane motorways and sprawling cityscapes. Descriptive elements con-sist of close-up images of the car's component parts. These images conformto the descriptive text. The listed features are visually represented in theirmost basic form: an image of a tree, for example, is visually shown whenthe narrator informs us that the car contains 'wood'. Furthermore, the factthat the commercial draws attention to the car's use of wood - an organicelement in a predominantly mechanized, synthetic metal product - maybe perceived as the manufacturer's attempt to demonstrate how naturalelements co-exist with humanity's technological advancement.

The use of a moonlit scene conforms to the narrator's delivery of thetext, whereby a sense of mystery, solemnity and quietude is expressed: hereis a car that blends into the surrounding environment, almost as if it hadnaturally sprung out of it. Therefore a clear relationship is formed betweentext and visual imagery. Furthermore, the moonlit forest s mystery is tingedwith dark foreboding: a threatening presence traditionally associated withworks such as Schoenberg's monodrama Erwartung (1909) or in recentfilms such as The Blair Witch Project (dir. Myrick and Sanchez, 1999) or TheVillage (dir. Shyamalan, 2004). The commercial draws on the psychologicaluncertainty of the forest in order to convey the sense of security affordedby such a car when travelling through a desolate area at night.


Glass's 'Pruit Igoe', as heard in the commercial, supports and conformsto the images employed. Its use of a minor (or modal) tonality - a scaleconflating transposed phrygian and A harmonic minor - is distributedstrophically and comprises three elements, as shown in Figure 4. The Amaterial, consisting of an oscillating pattern around a central E pitch, pro-vides a solemn ostinato, the chromatic melody B, and a repetitive patternaround a tritone interval C.

The music is seen to interact at a structural level with the text, withthe concluding words, ca car, it's only a car' (a repetition of the openingstatement in retrograde form) heard in close proximity with the musics Astrophe. The poems ABCA form is therefore reflected in the music s variedAB(ABA)CA organization. The breakthrough of the C material towardsthe end of the commercial is of great significance due to its interaction withthe text. It accompanies the words 'and miles' (emphasized by the narrator)and is represented by a new harmonic progression in order to lure the pro-spective purchaser with an idealized image of an open road and the plea-surable journeys entailed therein. Its purpose is to heighten the effect of theconclusion, wherein the viewer is brought back to reality by the openingstatement and accompanying theme. Therefore, the musico-textual associ-ation at this point suggests that the overall relationship between the twincomponents is that of conformance: both music and text share a cyclicalpattern, which is typical of Glass s musical language.

Koyaanisqatsi

In order to identify the reason (if any) for employing this particularmusical extract in the BMW campaign, the following section will discussthe relationship between the latter commercial and the origin of its musicin Koyaanisqatsi. Establishing the relationship between the commercialand the original source of the music requires consideration of the generalcontext of Koyaanisqatsi in addition to the specific scene where 'Pruit Igoe'is employed.

The organization of the musical material differs from Koyaanisqatsi tothe BMW commercial as the former begins with an introduction (a varia-tion of the C segment), juxtaposed with a cityscape scene from afar, fol-lowed by close-up shots of skyscrapers. This contrast between backgroundand foreground perspectives is roughly analogous to the contrast betweenthe Atmospheric' and the 'descriptive' scenes in the BMW commercial.Following these short scenes, the remainder of'Pruit Igoe' is based on des-olate images of derelict buildings, rubble, poverty and graffiti.


Both solemn and chromatic, Glass's music conforms and interacts withthe images conveyed in both the film and television commercial. However,Koyaanisqatsi's visual depiction of a life but of balance' conflicts with thecar commercial's Utopian representation of cityscapes and its effortless nego-tiation of lonely forest roads. The meaning of the music in Koyaanisqatsiclearly differs in function to that of the BMW commercial. If so, how canthe same music be applied to quite different ends? If both visual examplesare 'in contest' with each other, how can the same music adapt itself to suita variety of contexts?

If there is a link between both examples, then this is represented in thetheme of technological advancement and its interaction or interventionwith natural life. This is emphasized further through the application of theword 'machine' rather than car' at the end of the BMW advert. The atmo-spheric visual scenes of the commercial are similar to the urban and rurallandscapes of Koyaanisqatsi: both reflect the duality of nature and civiliza-tion. Furthermore, a view of urban life from above, or even beyond, is anintrinsic part of Koyaanisqatsi s visual and pictorial effect. As Koyaanisqatsiand the commercial share similar characteristics, while also displayingdifferences, it would therefore appear that their relationship to Glass'smusic is based on complementation. As suggested by this term, complemen-tation allows the same piece of music to function in a wide variety of con-texts, provided that some overlapping features are maintained. Given theimportant inter-textual dimensions belonging to film and media - minimal-ism's adaptability to a variety of situations makes it particularly appropriate.

Carbon Trust

A different extract from the same work by Glass, the so-called Cloudsscene, has been employed in yet another television commercial, namely theCarbon Trust's 2005 advertising campaign. Unlike the BMW advert, the aimhere was to 'raise awareness of the effect of climate change and encourageorganizations to cut carbon emissions' by resorting to visual archived mate-rial depicting Robert Oppenheimer (the so-called Father of the AtomBomb) observing the first-ever nuclear explosion tested in 1945. The follow-ing statement is read out during the commercial, quoting Oppenheimer:

One man has stood where we all are today. When he saw what he haddone he said 'I am become [sic] the destroyer of worlds'. Now we allhave to face up to what we have done.40


Figure 5 Snapshot of the Carbon Trust Campaign (in www.adwatch.tv).

Carbon Trusts advert implicitly compares the consequences of humanity'seffect on the environment with the destruction caused by Oppenheimer screation. His actions are visually represented by black and white imagesof an individual observing the atomic bomb test (see Figure 5) and thenjuxtaposed with colour (i.e., present day) images of electrical grids, time-lapsed sequences of multiple-lane traffic, visually representing the conse-quences of 'what we have done'. The commercials concluding shots depictbrooding clouds and crashing waves, suggesting that the uncontrolled andpotentially destructive forces of nature have been unleashed by mansexploitation of them.

Unlike the BMW advert, the Carbon Trust commercial develops atgreater length the subject matter of Koyaanisqatsi. The testing of an atomicbomb (and the scene depicting its aftermath), pylons, cityscapes, cloudsand the sea are all omnipresent visual elements in Koyaanisqatsi. As thetitle suggests, the 'Clouds' scene focuses on the movements of clouds inthe sky - a scene that is also included in the conclusion to the Carbon Trustcommercial.41

Dense brass clusters heard at the beginning of the 'Clouds' scene suggesta certain 'heaviness' which is at odds with the lightness and airborne char-acteristics of cloud formations. At the same time, the time-lapse sequencesgive the impression of vast cloud migrations across space and time, sug-gesting the 'awesome magnificence of nature'. In fact the oscillating tonesand semitones, and rapid semiquaver ostinati of single pitches could sug-gest clouds' fluttering motion. Glass's unsettling harmonic changes - alter-nating between A minor and F-sharp minor and drawing out the uneasychromatic shift between C and C sharp - is also a reflection of natures unpre-dictability. Furthermore, the placement of these oscillating chords as bottom-heavy triads in the brass section contributes to a dark undertone that enhancesthe visual effect by paradoxically reflecting the 'dense' nature of the clouds.Glass also sets out a spatial dichotomy in the music: the heavy brass clusters

http://www.adwatch.tv


are pitted against a descending scale in the high brass register. This spatialdichotomy could be seen at one level to represent earth and sky.

Glass's description of music's function in multimedia contexts as goingwith or against the image' has parallels with Cooks concept of similarityand difference, complementation and opposition, while also drawingattention to musics multi-dimensional relationship with moving imagesin their foreground or background positioning.42 According to Glass, musicis often 'under, on top, or next to the image' in any given visual context.43 Inhis description of the 'Clouds' scene from Koyaanisqatsi, Glass touches onan emerging dialectical relationship emerging between the two elements.On the surface sound and image initially appear to be in conflict with eachother, but this opposition is synthesized on a higher level.44

The relationship between the commercials text, visual images, musicand the environmental repercussions of Oppenheimer's actions as an indi-vidual and humanity's actions in general all conform to the visual scenerydisplayed on-screen, but the relationship of music to image in Reggio's filmis more complex. While the scene from Koyaanisqatsi and the commercialshare similarities in their portrayal of clouds, which suggests conformance,Glass's music in Koyaanisqatsi fluctuates between similarity and difference.The underlying message of human intervention with nature forms theoverall subject matter of both examples, but in Koyaanisqatsi the dialecticalinterplay between sound and image is only ultimately resolved on the levelof the film's overall message.

Figure 6 provides a graphic overview of the manifold relationships thatbecome apparent through looking at these three 'instances of multimedia'to adopt Cook's phrase. As shown in the key at the bottom left corner, dif-ferent types of dotted lines distinguish the three types of relationships,while a thicker continuous line represents Koyaanisqatsi. Twin hierarchicallevels are highlighted in this diagram: the overall relationship betweenGlass's work and the BMW commercial, in addition to the relationshipbetween Koyaanisqatsi and the Carbon Trust, is illustrated by means ofa connecting line of medium thickness between the three symbols, whilethe complex interrelationships between the various media elements areexpressed by finer lines. The diagram reflects the fact that the relationshipsbetween Koyaanisqatsi and BMW are a mixture of conformance and con-test (thereby creating an overall complementary relationship) while therelationships between Koyaanisqasi and the Carbon Trust commercial aremore consistently conformant. The music in Koyaanisqatsi is less consis-tently conformant, however, often serving to contrast, juxtapose or under-score the visual narrative, sometimes going with or against it.

SOUND AND MUSIC IN FILM AND VISUAL MEDIA

Figure 6 A Diagram of Interrelationships between Koyaanisqatsi, The BMWCommercial and The Carbon Trust Campaign.

Conclusion

This study of the relationship between Koyaanisqatsi, BMW and theCarbon Trust productions has demonstrated that the meaning and functionof minimalism may vary significantly, depending on context and subject.The music in Koyaanisqatsi provided a different perspective in the BMWcommercial, as the music in the former had no direct relevance in the lat-ter. The music s primary context depicted a tragic situation of destructionand poverty; in its secondary context, the music became linked with imagesof moonlit countrysides and cityscapes. The Carbon Trust commercial,however, evoked in a more direct manner the relevant scene in Koyaan-isqatsi as both scenes employed images of clouds. Different contexts, in thiscase, could share similar meanings. We can conclude from these analysesthat minimalist music can adapt to a variety of media contexts, particularlyin film and television commercials. Minimalist musics neutrality, objectiv-ity, malleability and colouristic aspects allow it to shift across differentvisual landscapes or emotional spaces. These transformations which giveminimalism a chameleon-like character serve to reposition it in relation tospecific visual moments. At times, minimalism merely underpins or sup-ports the image, but often the music will enter into dialogue with the visual

688


narrative by contesting or opposing it. In such contexts minimalisms rela-tionship with media becomes increasingly dialectical, and the antithesisbetween sound and image can only be finally understood due to the paral-lel symmetries that exist between them.

Notes

*An abridged version of this article was delivered as part of the First InternationalConference of Music and Minimalism, held at Bangor University, UK, from 31 August to2 September 2007.

1. F. Jameson, Signatures of the Visible. London: Routledge, 1992, p. 209.2. A definition of minimalism has been provided by M. Nyman, Experimental Music.

London: Studio Vista, 1974 and W. Mertens, 1981.3. J. W. Bernard, 'The minimalist aesthetic in the plastic arts and in music', in Perspec-

tives of New Music, 31.1 (1993), 86-132.4. K. Potter, Four Musical Minimalists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000,

pp. 255-8.5. Ibid., pp. 161-2.6. In particular, Tangerine Dreams 'Love on a Real Train resembled Reich's Music for

Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ, 1973.7. S. Reich, in P. Hillier (ed.), Writings on music 1965-2000, Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2002, p. 35.8. In fact, the use of film music in general is widely regarded as an under-researched

area. In the field of Soviet silent cinema, Sergei Eisenstein wrote about the dialecticsof visual montage, for which he postulated five types of editing techniques: the metric,rhythmic, tonal, overtonal and the intellectual or ideological. However, this typology wasintended to identify different relationships between visual scenes, as opposed to musico-visual correlations (see David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film. New York and London:Norton, 1996, pp. 169-74).

9. N. Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998, p. 134.10. Ibid.11. Ibid., pp. 98-9.12. Ibid., pp. 102-4.13. The relationship between (y) and (z) is understood as being closer than between (x)

and (y) as both are, to a varying degree, forms of differences.14. R. Leydon, 'Towards a typology of minimalist tropes', Music TheoryOnline, 8(4) (2002). Available at http://mto.societymusictheory.Org/issues/mto.02.8.4/

mto.02.8.4.1eydon_frames.html (accessed on 19 April 2006).15. Ibid.16. Ibid.17. Ibid.18. The track is called Angelfish Decay'.

http://mto.societymusictheory.org/issues/mto.02.8.4/mto.02.8.4.1eydon_frames.html

http://mto.societymusictheory.org/issues/mto.02.8.4/mto.02.8.4.1eydon_frames.html


19. W. Mertens, American Minimal Music. London: Kahn & Averill, 1983, pp. 16-17.20. P. Glass, Opera on the Beach. London: Faber and Faber, 1988, p. 57.21. For example Mendelssohn's piano piece No. 32, from the composers Songs without

Words, in an advert for the Volkswagen Jetta car resulted in some forty bars of the originalpiece being omitted - almost two-thirds of its entire contents.

22. L. Denham, The Films of Peter Greenaway. London: Minerva Press, 1993, p. 11.Eisensteins montage theory, within a mixed-media context, would suggest that rhythmicmontage takes place at this point, 'in which the cutting rate is based upon the rhythm ofmovement within the shots as well as upon predetermined metrical demands' [D. A. Cook(1996), p. 173].

23. See Leydon.24. See liner notes to Philip Glass's Two Pages, Contrary Motion, Music in Fifths, Music

in Similar Motion (Nonesuch 7559-79326-2).25. M. Nyman, P. Sainsbury and P. Greenaway, 'A Walk through H', Catalogue of British

Film Institute Productions 1977-1978. London: BFI, 1978, p. 91.26. L. Simon, 'Music and film, an interview with Michael Nyman', Millennium Film

Journal, 10.2 (1982), 226.27. Nyman (1978), p. 92.28. M. Haglund, 'Interview with Michael Nyman, in Filmmusik x 8. Filmkonst, J. Lif

(trans.), Gothenbourg, 1994. Available at http://www.december.org/pg/text/articlevS/nyman.htm (accessed on 19 February 1998).

29. D. De Gaetano, 'La Musica di Greenaway', in R. Santagostino (ed.), AppuntamentoGreenaway. Piedmont: Circolo del Cinema, 1994, p. 18.

30. P. Glass, in R. Kostelanetz (ed.), Writings on Glass. Berkeley, CA: University ofCalifornia Press, 1997, p. 137.

31. Ibid., p. 18.32. A. Woods, Being Naked Playing Dead, The Art of Peter Greenaway. Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 1996, p. 129.33. In Repeating Ourselves, Robert Fink locates the role of minimalist music in

American cultural practice by associating it with the use of repetition in early advertisingstrategies (2006:120-66).

34. The BMW 'It's only a car' commercial was strategically introduced during January2006. The WCRS Agency received the commission and creative artists included Leslie Ali,Yann Jones and Simon Robinson, directed by Daniel Barber. The commercial is available atwww.adwatch.tv archived under January 2006 and accessed on 15 February 2006.

35. The title of this scene derives from the name of an abandoned housing projectin Missouri, Pruitt-Igoe, which 'was designed in the high-modernist International Styleby Minoru Yamasaki, who designed the World Trade Center' according to Robert BurnsNeveldine. The project symbolized 'the homogenizing, the deadening, power of standard-ization effective by the cooperation of big ideas with big money'. The apartments were,however, subsequently demolished in 1972. See R. B. Neveldine, Bodies at Risk: UnsafeLimits in Romanticism and Postmodernism. New York: State University of New York Press,1998, pp. 114-18.

http://www.december.org/pg/text/articlevs/nyman.html

http://www.december.org/pg/text/articlevs/nyman.html

http://www.adwatch.tv


36. M. Dempsey, 'Qatsi means life: The films of Godfrey Reggio', in Film Quarterly, 42.3(1989), 7.

37. Ibid., 8.38. Ibid., 8.39. According to Guy Cook, the textual content of advertisements often falls into one

of the following categories: 'poems', '"borrowed" and commissioned poems', 'jingles', 'bor-rowed songs' and 'the prosodic ad'. See G. Cook, The Discourse of Advertising. London:Routledge, 1992, pp. 120-7.

40. http://www.defra.gov.uk/news/latest/2005/climate-0616.htm (accessed on 21 December2006).

41. The concluding musical segment of the commercial has, however, been derivedfrom the subsequent scene in Koyaanisqatsi, entitled 'Resource', wherein a descendingsecond inversion A minor chord is repeated in triplets and in contrary motion to the bass.

42. Glass (1997), p. 137.43. Ibid.44. In Eisensteinian terms, such a relationship could be classified as an example of intel-

lectual or ideological montage, as '[he] conceived that montage was capable of expressingabstract ideas by creating conceptual relationships among shots of opposing visual content'SeeD. A. Cook (1996), p. 174.

http://www.defra.gov.uk/news/latest/2005/climate-0616.htm

45Scoring East of Eden

The Division of the'One': Leonard Rosenman andthe Score for East of Eden

Gregg Redner

Leonard Rosenmans score for Elia Kazan's 1955 film East of Eden wasunlike anything that had been heard in Hollywood up until that point. Thescores aggressive use of a modernist compositional style established it assomething completely new in Hollywood. East of Eden would be the firstof over 40 films that Leonard Rosenman would score. Prior to his involve-ment in the project he had been a composer of art music and also per-formed as a concert pianist. Rosenman, who was born in New York Cityin 1924, developed an interest in music at the age of 15 after his Aunt pur-chased a piano. However, his original intention was to study art and to bea painter. Following military service in World War II, Rosenmans intereststurned to music and he embarked on a period of musical study that gave himan opportunity to work with several of the leading composers in modernmusic, including Arnold Schoenberg, Roger Sessions and Luigi Dallapiccola.Rosenman flourished under Sessions' tutelage, because Sessions encour-aged the tendencies and tastes of his pupils, rather than imposing his own.Sessions encouraged Rosenman to find his own voice and to not be restrictedby the adoption of other composers' language and influence. This ledRosenman on a path in which he developed a compositional style thatrelied heavily on avant-garde serial techniques and generated music which

692

Storing East of Eden 693

can only be described as intellectually challenging. By 1953 Rosenman wasinvited to serve as the composer-in-residence at the Berkshire Music Centerand had received a Koussevitzky Foundation commission for an opera,which was to remain uncompleted. From 1962 to 1966 Rosenman livedin Rome where he scored television programs and gained experience asa conductor. His entry into the world of film music came in 1954 when hewas offered the opportunity to compose the score for Elia Kazan's East ofEden. In addition to his film work and private composition, Rosenmanhas also taught at USC and NYU and has served as musical director of theNew Muse, a chamber orchestra specializing in performances of avant-garde music.1

Rosenmans extensive experience as a composer of both art and filmmusic has provided him with a unique position in the world of film scoring.He has maintained the individual integrity of his own personal style, whilesuccessfully adapting this style to serve the needs of his work within the filmindustry. Rosenman refers to the genre of film music as functional music;music which is 'written not primarily for performance alone, but specifi-cally for literary-image media over which the composer has no control*.2

He suggests that film music is unique because while it has all the attributesof music, namely melody, harmony, counterpoint, it is 'something less thanmusic because its motivating pulsation is literary and not musical? ForRosenman what makes the world of art music and film music different isthat in art music the composer maintains a degree of control over mixedmedia forms such as opera, while in film music the composer has no con-trol over the text or the mise-en-scene, but rather is composing to a cir-cumscribed form. Rosenman suggests that this creates a challenge whichhe considers extra-filmic. This view of course seems somewhat paradoxicalwhen one considers Rosenmans highly collaborative relationship withKazan and the fact that elements of East of Eden are in themselves not onlymelodramatic but also operatic. On this we shall have more to say later inthis chapter.

According to Rosenman the challenge for the composer is one of dra-maturgic talent, and the film composer, he suggests, needs to develop theability to project musically and build suspense over the long term. He sug-gests that a composer s score is successful dramaturgically if the spectatoris able to feel a sense of fulfilment when the villain gets punched in thefinal reel because it has been successfully prepared in a musical senseduring an earlier reel.4 Indeed, Rosenman draws a very substantial line


between the work of the film and the art music composer. He suggeststhat one need not even be a trained composer in order write film music. Hecomments that

all you have to have is a sense of drama and a sense of sound. Youhave to, perhaps, appreciate music to some degree - or you don t evenhave to appreciate music: all you have to do is appreciate the relation-ship between sound and visual media to organize music for films.5

From the beginning, Rosenmans affinity for film scoring allowed him toview the place of music in film realistically. He suggests that it is essentialfor the composer to bear in mind that we live in a society which is visuallyoriented. Rosenman believes this to be biological, suggesting that 'more ofour brain is given over to vision than to hearing'.6 In his work he arguesthat film music must serve as an analogue to the action of the film and thatthe film must also, on some extended level, 'become an analogue of thedramatic action of the music'.7 It is for this reason that Rosenman valuesinstances where the composer is able to work directly with the director.8

As we shall see below when discussing Rosenmans score for East ofEden, the composer views the interaction between the image and the filmin a much more aggressive fashion than many of his colleagues. He suggeststhere are times when the intent of film music is to intrude obtrusively intothe filmic universe in as direct and overt a fashion as possible. Rosenmanargues that film music must enter directly into the plot of the film, becauseit is only by doing this that it can add ca third dimension to the images andthe words!9 Indeed, writing about the music for his second film-scoringassignment, The Cobweb (dir. Minnelli, 1955), Rosenman suggests that thevery point of the score was to enter the plot in such a way that it illumi-nated aspects of the film that would not have been otherwise perceived onscreen. By doing this Rosenman was able to create a kind of atmospherethat would have otherwise been completely lacking in the film.10

Rosenmans approach to film music is also realistic; and while he recog-nizes the need for the score at times to purposefully invade the cinematicspace, he also understands that few people when listening to film musicactually understand or are aware of the formal techniques being used bythe composer. He suggests that the average spectator, when seeing a film, israrely aware of the way in which that score interacts with the image; buthe says that on some level, they understand it as analogue to the film, orvice versa.11 Rosenman does, however, recognize a certain symbio/catalyticrelationship between the film and the score,12 suggesting that in film music

Scoring East of Eden 695

a catalytic musical effect can be greatly enhanced psychologically whenencapsulated in the form of a theme, ballad or motif.13 For Rosenman, thiscombination of the catalytic and the psychological makes it increasinglyclear that the score has the power to help to change cinematic naturalisminto a form of reality. He suggests that to a certain degree, the role of thescore should be to create a sense of supra-reality: a condition he under-stands as one where the elements of literary naturalism are perceptiblyaltered.14

Because Rosenmaris method of composition privileges the idea of devel-opment, he is able to adapt himself more easily to film music compositionin a Deleuzian sense. As Phil Powrie suggests, Deleuze and Guattari regu-larly 'point out how music naturally deconstructs itself even as it constructsitself'.15 As it sends out lines of flight functioning as a series of transforma-tional multiplicities, in many respects music overturns the very codes thatstructure and arborify it. Indeed, because of this film music can be under-stood to be especially rhizomatic. It rarely accompanies what is viewedcontinuously but instead surfaces occasionally much like 'mushrooms outof the mycelium'.16 For his part, Rosenman attempts to discern the largestmicrocosm in the narrative and then works backwards in order to derivethe remainder of the score from it, an approach which is truly rhizomatic.This approach allows him to perhaps better understand the various typesand forms of conflict present in the film and to understand where they areheaded musically17 Rosenman avoids the use of leitmotifs, establishinginstead a system of thematic gestures which can be used in various ways todelineate various characters. These gestures, he places in different situa-tions in order to facilitate a collision of sorts in climactic scenes.18

Leonard Rosenman's Score for East of Eden

The imprint of Sessions and Schoenberg on Rosenmans compositionalstyle can best be understood in his marked taste for the expressive possibili-ties of dissonance, combined with a generous use of contrapuntal textures.19

Indeed, film composer George Burt refers to Rosenmans score for East ofEden as expressionistic,20 adding that in 1955 the use of expressionist stylein film composition was still considered relatively unorthodox.21 Rosenmansteacher, Arnold Schoenberg, viewed the concept of expressionism as a formof 'inner reality', one associated with an internal truth which demandedemancipation from the constraints of convention and tradition. This under-standing of the concept had its roots in a direct opposition to the cult ofbeauty which was found in post-Wagnerian music. It was in this very sense


that Schoenberg claimed that his 1908-1909 song cycle Das Buck derhangenden Garten broke with previous aesthetic norms.22

Expressionism had appeared in a limited fashion in earlier scores byHans Eisler and David Raksin, however in Rosenmans scores for East ofEden and The Cobweb it came into full flower.23 What makes Rosenmansscore for East of Eden all the more striking is the fact that he was able toachieve such a successful harmonic synthesis between the traditional andthe modern.24 Indeed, Rosenmans score successfully alternates between asort of 'Americanist* folk style and a more aesthetically challenging atonalstyle with a fluency that is not only remarkable but also striking.

Rosenmans entrance into Hollywood film scoring came in an unex-pected and unusual fashion. He had been James Deans piano teacher inNew York, and despite being just 7 years older than Dean, he had in someways become a surrogate parent to the young actor.25 Dean, who had beeninvited to Hollywood to be part of the cast for East ofEdeny took Kazan toa concert of Rosenmans music at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.26

Kazan at first seemed to be reticent to engage a composer whose style wasso thoroughly modern. Yet, the two seem to have hit it off personally andsoon negotiated a common ground, agreeing that Rosenman would scorethe theme for Cal, the films main character which was to be played byJames Dean, in a dissonant fashion, while reserving the simpler tonal lan-guage for the other characters. Rosenman suggests that during the initialdiscussions with Kazan, the two endeavoured to 'find a way to score thefilm so that the music [was] inextractable from the dramatic framework ofthe whole project1.27

Indeed as we have mentioned above, Rosenman and Kazan avoided thethen-conventional approach to film scoring and agreed that the scoreneeded to be intrusive. Rosenman remarks that the two envisioned a scorethat would enter the film medium as a positive part of the plot and notmerely as just a form of sound effects. By doing this they wanted to avoid amere repetition of what the eye and ear had already perceived and insteadcreate a sort of dramatic necessity which intruded upon the unreal or illu-sory element with the purpose of creating a new and imaginative reality. Byextension the two attempted to create a score that would illuminate thedeepest well of inner life within the character and situation, all the whilegenerating dramatic excitement in an almost operatic sense.28

Because he knew so little about filmmaking, Rosenman asked Kazan toallow him to be present during the entire filming of East of Eden, therebyenabling him to make his sketches for the score during the actual filmingrather than as a portion of the post-production. Luckily for Rosenman,


Kazan considered this way of working to be extremely exciting.29 Kazanand Rosenman conferred directly on those scenes where the music was tobe a determining factor, thereby allowing Kazan to shoot with the agreedupon musical material in his mind.30 Rosenman wrote the cues as the filmwas being shot and even played the music for the actors before they filmedtheir scenes. In those scenes where the rhythmic quality was created bythe music rather than the dialogue, Kazan allowed Rosenman to dictate theaction as if he was directing an opera.31

It is not the purpose of this paper to conduct a formal musical analysisof the score. Such an analysis would tell us a great deal about how the scorefunctioned as a piece of music but little of how it interacts with the filmsmise-en-scene. Indeed, it is the inability of music theory and film theoryto discourse on a common theoretical level that accounts for the lack ofsuccess of much film music analysis. Therefore, it is my not intention hereto discuss Rosenmans score musically in the traditional sense but ratherto find a way to bridge the methodological gap between film and musictheories - and in so doing help us better understand the way in which thescore interacts with, influences and drives the films narrative. However,before undertaking this task it is important that we take a moment to con-sider the thematic make up of Rosenmans score for East of Eden.

Rosenman composed three principal themes for the score for East ofEden. The first theme (Example 1 a below), which we shall call the Cal theme,is associated with the films primary character and is more a series ofextended gestures, rather than an easily definable theme. By extended ges-tures I mean that the Cal theme is a series of constantly developing melodicand harmonic units, rather than an easily identifiable melody. Rosenmansneed to depict Cals highly conflicted psychological state called for him touse a less traditional musical vocabulary here, and therefore it seems onlynatural that he elected to use atonality as the compositional platform for thetheme. The initial intervallic structure for the Cal theme can be seen below.

Example la Cal 'Theme Group': Initial Chord Configuration.

A subsequent modification in the intervallic structure of the Cal theme(Example Ib below) demonstrates the way that Rosenman varied the scores


initial series of perfect fifths, causing them to become more dissonant andtherefore more expressive of Cals inner conflictedness.

Example Ib Cal 'Theme Group': Transformation.

Rosenman orchestrated the Cal theme in a reductivist manner featuringsmall groupings of solo instruments, most often woodwinds. It is interest-ing that Rosenman orchestrated this theme using solo woodwinds. Onone level he may have chosen to do this as a direct reaction against theimplied romantic sentimentality that was often associated with stringwriting in Hollywood film scores. On another level the choice perhapsshows the influence of Rosenman s time with Schoenberg, who often scoredhis smaller expressionist works in a similar manner. Tony Palmer pointsout that the Cal theme seems in some ways to have been conceived notso much in terms of Cal himself, but rather in terms of his relationships toother people.32

The scores second theme is a very simple folk-like tune (Example 2below), which we shall refer to as the CFS theme! Early in production Kazanasked Rosenman to compose a simple 'farm song' in a style he thoughtmight have been typical of the films period.33 One has the sense, however,that Rosenman could not bring himself to do this, because the FS themeitself is not reminiscent of any American folk song of the period. Rather, itis more reminiscent of the folk- inspired music written by the Americanistcomposers such as Copland, Thomson and Harris during the 1940s.

Example 2 Folk Song Theme.

Rosenman harmonizes the FS theme by using simple chord progressionsdrawn from the primary chords of the key, but he also includes the occa-sional use of chords built on the flat seventh degree of the scale. Rosenmansdecision to utilize this harmonic vocabulary reinforces the 'Americanist'folk-song nature of the theme and also prevents the theme from having thestrongly tonal directional sweep that we will later associate with the scoresthird theme, to be discussed below.

Scoring tor of Eden 699

The FS theme is first introduced into world of the diegesis by Adam,who hums it. Rosenman may have used this as a way of grounding the folk-ness of the FS theme, thereby allowing it to be identified as a folk-songstyle, or a singing style if you will. Adams humming of the tune also evokesa sense of simplicity, which Rosenman may have used to suggest bothAdams lack of modern sophistication and his preference for life on theranch over the increasingly complex world of the city. On a certain level,perhaps the choice to introduce this theme and the one to follow by havingthem hummed evokes a sense of nostalgia for the past.

The scores third and final principal theme is the 'East of Eden' theme(EofE theme) (Example 3 below), which is first introduced into the diegesisby Abra as she hums it to, and then later with Aron in the scene in the icehouse. The first fully orchestrated version of the EofE theme does notcome until the mid-point of the film when Cal and Abra are together onthe Ferris wheel.

Example 3 East of Eden Theme.

This theme, which has a grand and open sense of sweep, and a simple tonallanguage, reminds one of the lyrical style of much nineteenth-century Ital-ian opera, a fact which will be further reinforced below by Rosenmansdecision to begin the score with an overture. Unlike the Cal and FS themes,the EofE theme has a clear sense of harmonic direction and does not makeuse of any unexpected or modernist chordal progressions. One has thesense here that because the theme is clearly associated with the films under-standing of American values in the early twentieth-century (the impor-tance of God, family and the hometown) that Rosenman scored it in a stylethat evokes both simplicity and sincerity. Indeed, Rosenman came mostclose to the traditional Hollywood approach to film scoring in this cue.

The theme is most clearly associated with Abra or with those who arerelating to Abra. In its way it represents the musical and emotional antithe-sis of the Cal theme, but it is also in many ways the pivot on which theentirety of the narrative revolves. On this we shall have more to say later.

The two existing academic musical analyses of the score for East ofEdeny

concentrate respectively on the musical aspects of the score (Missiras, 1999),


and on a combination of the psychological and musical parameters of thescore (Burt, 1994). Missirass analysis, with its reliance on the traditionaltools of music theory is hampered by the same problems that we identifiedabove. Conversely, Burt s discussion of the musico/psychological aspects ofthe score and their relationship to the harmonic duality represented by theatonal/tonal dyad seems to offer more hope of generating a deeper andmore complete analysis. Rosenman himself indicated that the filming ofEast of Eden coincided with a general increase in interest in the variousaspects of psychology on the part of the entertainment industry.34 However,Burt s analysis of the films opening quickly thwarts our hopes of enlighten-ment by arguing that the Cal theme represents primarily the conflictednature of Cals inner psychological turmoil. He cites the end of the musicfor the opening credits, which as it transitions into the first cue, suggestssomething psychological relating to Cals inner life.35 Burt suggests thatthis reading is borne out by the difference in musical style and the suddendifference in the orchestration.36 Certainly, on a simple level Burt is correcthere; yet his argument that the Cal theme is internal, rather than serving toopen the score to further analysis, seems instead to close off the discussionentirely. The mere fact Burt has observed the obvious, the connectednessof Cal as represented by Rosenmans atonality, and later the purity andsimplicity of Abra/cAmerica in general as represented by simple tonalityand lyrical beauty, would seem to leave him with little else to say, and thisis borne out by his subsequent analysis.

As we explained above, the Cal theme is essentially a series of gestures.If we follow the usual formalistic analytic device of identifying these ges-tures (the Cal theme) as a leitmotif which represents Cal, we provide themwith a meaning that excludes further exegesis. In other words, if the Caltheme functions as a leitmotif through which Rosenman represents Calmusically, then the theme is limited to this role and is unable to represent,suggest or infer deeper levels of meaning in relation to other aspects of thefilmic universe. In essence we become boxed in by the very thing whichat first seemed to offer so much promise of freeing us. Once we establish arole which identifies a meaning there is little else that can be revealedthrough traditional analytic methodologies. The identification of a 'mean-ing' becomes a straight]acket preventing us from seeing anything else.

Thus, I would like to suggest that we might consider moving away froma traditional theoretical analysis of the music for the score of East of Edenand instead consider how employing the Deleuzian concept of sensationmight provide us with a new foundation for a reconsidered methodologyof film-music analysis. The concept of sensation allows us to understand

Scoring East ofEden 701

music as a construction of unmediated musico-emotional sensation thatexists on an abstract level as the interaction of internal and external sensa-tion - an artistic rhizome of sensation from which all other aspects of thescore will grow. As Eugene Holland points out, the concept of sensation canbe understood as the material singularity of a given medium, somethingthat comes to embody in the artists hands, what Deleuze and Guattari calla sensation.37 However, if we attempt to apply this concept to an analysis ofEast of Eden we are immediately confronted with a problem caused by thescores atonal/tonal harmonic dyad; one which would seemingly denythe possibility of a discussion privileging material singularity. In order tosuccessfully discuss the score for East of Eden in this fashion we will needto employ an additional level of abstraction which will allow us to reconcilewhat at first appears to be two irrevocably opposed core areas of sensation.In order to do this we will have to view the concept of sensation throughthe lens of another Deleuzian concept: nomadology. As we shall see below,this will provide us with a proper platform from which to discuss Rosenmansscore and its intimate interaction within the internal world of Kazan's film.

Nomadology as a Theoretical Concept

While the abstraction of music as an area of sensation allows us to relateit to the various aspects of the films universe with greater ease, Rosenmansscore for East of Eden presents a methodological problem, because thescore makes use of two distinct and separate musical universes, in essencea bifurcation of the core area of sensation. In order to make these twoinstances of sensation communicate on a level that does more than describewhat can be inferred, we need to find a way to allow the two to build anexpressive relationship, not one that merely communicates in a representa-tional or figural manner. To accomplish this we will press the Deleuzianconcept of nomadology into service. However, before discussing the whyand the what of nomadology, we will need to provide a bit of historic con-text for our decision.

Prior to the late compositions of Richard Wagner, the majority of har-monic movement in music proceeded teleologically towards a final tonicchord. The arrival at this final chord needed to be achieved in order for anyrigorously constructed classical composition to be concluded.38 An exam-ple of this makes this easier to understand. When first studying piano asa young child I played exclusively in the key of C major. The reasons for thiswere simple: the key of C major uses only the white keys of the piano andthereby avoids the need for the beginner to play any of the black keys,


which makes performance simpler. Thus every piece of music that I playedbegan on the C chord (the tonic/principal chord of C major) and wentthrough a series of simple progressions in order to re-achieve the point ofrepose and finality represented by the C chord at the end of the piece.Within the key of C major, every chord, as codified by Hugo Riemann inhis 1893 treatise on harmony, Vereinfachte Harmonielehre, relates in someway to the tonic chord of C major.39 Thus, there exists a structural hierarchyin traditional classical music which is represented by the chordal structureof any given key.

On a basic level this sense of order and teleological process governedand organized Western art music until the music of Richard Wagner s latemusic dramas destabilized its influence and sent music on a new course.Wagner s advanced vocabulary of late nineteenth-century harmonic pro-gressions liberated music from the tyranny of classical control and pushedthe limits of harmonic progression far beyond pre-established limits. AsRick Nesbitt points out:

in a general sense, the problem of internal difference can be said to bethe problem Western concert music addresses from Wagner s Tristan(1857) through to the period in which Deleuze constructs his properlyphilosophical notion. The concept of internal difference transformsour understanding of music in opposition to a classical model of har-monic analysis.40

Indeed, as Nesbitt posits, it is possible to trace the crisis in traditional har-monic practice at the end of the nineteenth-century to the destabilizationof the traditional harmonic progression that reached its first full floweringin the music of Wagner.

Following this Wagner-imposed harmonic crisis, music turned in a newdirection which ultimately culminated in 1920 with Arnold Schoenbergscomplete 'dehierarchizing codification of a 12-tone system of harmonicpractice'.41 In this system, none of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale bearsany relation of dominance or superiority over any other; each becomes aninternally differentiated entity unto itself, each of which must simply followanother in a predetermined order.42 As Nesbitt suggests, this new system ofmusical governance broke away from the control of a Riemannian imposedteleology and instead worked to cut off externally imposed forms andreplace them instead 'with internally generated distinctions'.43

Thus, in a Deleuzian sense it is possible to understand music before theWagnerian crisis as one predicated on order, universal process and control


(the State-science), while in turn viewing music after Wagner as one of inter-nally generated distinctions. In other words, in a nomadological sense, thepre-Wagnerian in music represented the empiricism of a state-controlledsystem, a royal science, which Deleuze argues must proceed by extractinginvariant ('universal') laws from the variations of matter, while keepingthis in line with the binary opposition of form and matter.44 This state-imposed science represents a type of interiority that has at its core a needto reproduce itself, remaining identical to itself across its variations yetremaining easily recognizable within the limits of its pole.45 As such it ispossible to understand the role of state-imposed royal science to be an'ideal of reproduction'.46 This is in great part because the modern statedefines itself in principle as 'the rational and reasonable organization ofa community';47 it's a community in which 'reproduction implies the per-manence of a fixed view that is external to what is reproduced'.48 This con-cept can be best understood as what Deleuze calls the 'striated space of thecogitato universalis\ a method which traces a path that must be followedfrom one point to another in order to conform to the state-mandatedsystem.49

The post-Wagnerian system of music occupies a position not as state-mandated science but as nomos: the one outside the city walls, free from theempiricism, teleology and organization imposed by state-controlled royalscience.50 In other words, as Deleuze says, the atonal system developed afterWagner created a musical space which was 'no longer a division of thatwhich is distributed' but was instead 'a division among those who distributethemselves in open space - a space which is unlimited, or at least withoutprecise limits'.51

Viewed in this way it is possible to understand the atonality in Rosenman'sscore not as an extension of the sensation world of the tonal but instead asone which is charged with 'warding off the formation of a State apparatus',and instead making such a formation impossible.52 This of course allows usto view the two sensations as part of one world thereby allowing us to viewthem as a derivative of the essence, or 'the power that creates difference'.53

As Claire Colebrook states, 'An essence is what allows for invention, cre-ation or time in its true sense, a time of change not a time of sameness'.54

Deleuze also suggests in a different but helpful context, that these twopoles, the tonal and the atonal, stand

in opposition term by term, as the obscure and the clear, the violentand the calm, the quick and the weighty, the fearsome and the regu-lated . . . But their opposition is only relative; they function as a pair,


in alteration, as though they expressed a division of the One or con-stituted themselves a sovereign unity'.55

Employing the Deleuzian concept of nomadology will thus becomeextremely important to our discussion of Rosenmans score for East of Edenbecause it enables us to develop a plane on which these two seeminglyopposed worlds, the atonal and tonal can exist separately and yet as partof a greater whole; the division of the One. This allows a conceptualizing ofthe 'becoming music* of Rosenmans two poles of core sensation whichdo not have to be either uniform or homogenous; but instead they are abecoming in which, as Claire Colebrook states, 'there is no overall goal orend towards which change is directed. Each flow of life affirms its distinctpower to become; there is no evolutionary trend in general, only the striv-ing or creative change of singularities'.56 Therefore, in a sense Rosenmansscore is true to the open ended- ness of the film and the lack of a senseof closure in the narrative. We really do not know what happens to Adam,Cal and Abra after the films final scene; and as such, the film remains trueto the immanent movement in music.

This freedom to explore the bifurcated area of sensation, which existsdistinctly as a pair united not only as opposites but within a whole, gives usthe freedom to move past the simplistic reading which intuits the score asa communication of a basic good/bad psychological framework, a readingagainst which Deleuze would caution us. As Brian Massumi reminds us,Deleuze and Guattari viewed the concept of communication as a question-able one. Instead they preferred to suggest that the essence of communica-tion was a kind of expression.57 Massumi goes on to suggest that one of thereasons Deleuze and Guattari found the basic communicational modelquestionable was because adopting it assumed that there existed a world of'already-defined things ready for mirroring'.58 In other words, if we merelyattempt to understand Rosenmans atonality as a referent for Cals psycho-logical displacement we are guilty of merely replacing one set of signs withanother. By asking what it means we do not consider how the score actuallyworks. The result is that we learn little about what Rosenmans two tonalworlds express - only what they refer to.

Deleuze suggests that one can never assign the form of expression thefunction of simply representing, describing, or averring a correspondingcontent: there is neither correspondence nor conformity.59 This is extremelyhelpful to the unresolved conundrum represented by Rosenmans two tonalworlds, because it gives us permission to do away with our initial expecta-tions and instead allows us to move beyond them. We do not have to simply


rely on the music as representing or fulfilling an expectation: an implicationif you will, which is not conscious or explicit. Instead, we can understand itas a force which pushes the music forward without specifying where it can,should or must go.60 In other words, we no longer have to understand thepoint of the atonality in the Cal theme as merely representing Cals innerturmoil, a simple becoming-other in music, but instead are now free to seeit as one pole of a core of sensation: a division of the One that results ina becoming-Cal, or even more excitingly, a becoming of the entire filmicuniverse of East of Eden.

We will see as we move forward that the nomadological aspects ofCals theme make the theme more immediately sensitive to the connectionbetween the content of the narrative and the emotional and affectiveexpression of the internal in Cal than the scores other two themes do. Thereason for this can be found in the fact that the atonality of Rosenmanstheme can be understood to represent the various streams of becoming inCal: his search for the truth, his need to understand the past, his psycho-logical conflictedness, and his longing to communicate and engage with hisworld. However, the Cal themes atonality, the otherness of the themesmusical language, enables it to project not only the immediately obviouselements of Cal but the also various elements which are less obvious inhim, such as his internal-ness. It is the atonality of the Cal theme whichplaces Cal in opposition not only to the other characters in the film, butalso to all film music that precedes Rosenmans score. Thus, Cal and the Caltheme represent the nomadological essence of the war-machine61 perfectly,for they stand in opposition not only to the other themes in the score butalso to the history of film composition up to that point.

It is for this very reason that Deleuze argues that nomad science isnever a prepared and therefore homogenized matter, but is essentiallyladen with singularities*.62 In essence the Cal theme exists as local singular-ity in the film but also an historical one in the film music universe. How-ever, this realization does not by itself refute the possibility of dialoguebetween the two harmonic cores in Rosenmans score. As Ronald Boguesuggests, every milieu is in contact with other milieus, and each code isin a state of perceptual transcoding and transduction.63 The films threethemes, although drawn from two separate and unique tonal worlds arederivative of the same core area of musical sensation. Certainly, the syntac-tical elements of the two harmonic worlds may differ, but they are none theless drawn from the same core area of sensation, albeit a bifurcated one,and as such communicate and interrelate with each other on various levelsof complexity.


Therefore, when approached in a nomadological sense, the two worldsof the score remain equal and indivisible parts of the One which is thescore. As such they are able not only to embody an entire series of dualitiesbut also the whole, the core area of sensation that is in a constant state ofbecoming throughout the film/score. We can understand this by illustrat-ing the point with a number of the dyads represented in the film/score:honesty/dishonesty, good/bad, love/hate, American/foreign, traditional/untraditional, tonal/atonal, and territorialized/unterritorialized. Each ofthese represents a division of the One and is a separate part of a divisibledyad, yet each is counterbalanced by its* opposite to create a whole withinthe film. Deleuze reminds us that cthe nomad can be called the Deterritori-alization par excellence.64 Throughout the film/score the nomadologicaldeterritorializes the conventional, the accepted status quo. However, thisvery fact serves to remind us that the purpose of the atonal in the score isto be the deterritorialization of the filmic score/world/universe. In turn theworld of the tonal serves to be expressive of the opposition end of the dyadpole inasmuch as it serves to construct a territory. That territory, constructedby the state, defends against the anxieties, fears and pressures of the dyadinalconflict present in the films diegesis. It does not do away with these; instead,it gives them a proper form.65 Therefore, if as Deleuze reminds us, articu-lated sound was at first a deterritorialized noise that is again reterritorial-ized in sense, the same now becomes sound itself that is deterritorializedirrevocably and absolutely.66 Because of this it is possible for the dyads ofthe atonal/tonal division of the One to exist as both separate and yet com-plete within the whole that represents the score, for as each traverses thenew deterritorialization it no longer 'belongs to a language of sense, eventhough it derives from it, nor is it an organized music or song, even thoughit derives from it, nor is it organized music or song, even though it mightappear to be'.67 Instead it is possible to view it as a dyadinal oppositionalstructure represented as two sensations that are a dividual part of the wholethat is the score: the One.

With this in mind, the harmonic duality which originally appeared tocreate a methodological straightjacket for us when first considering Rosen-mans score for East of Eden can now be viewed through the liberating lensof Deleuzian nomadology to allow for an unlimited number of lines offlight. In fact the very idea of a duality represented as an inextricablepart of a dividual whole present in whatever manifestation, cuts to the verycore of not only Rosenmans score for East of Eden but also to the veryessence of the film itself.


A Nomadological Analysis of Leonard Rosenman's Score for East of Eden

In every sense, Elia Kazan's East of Eden is a film that embodies the veryDeleuzian concept of nomadology. The film creates a series of divisions ofthe One that are constructed from seemingly opposed poles. As we men-tioned above, these poles, which often appear to stand in direct oppositionto each other, are opposites only in a relative sense. They stand as a pair inalteration, as though they expressed a division of the One or constitutedthemselves a sovereign unity'.68 In East of Eden the simplest most directdivision of the One derives from the narratives good/bad dyad whichdominates the entire film. However, we can extend this much farther byincluding other divisions of the One; each of which serves in some waydrive and propel the narrative:

Monterrey/SalinasOcean/ValleyOpen/ClosedWorldly/UnworldlyMother/FatherLies/TruthUnrepentant/RepentantImmoral/MoralAway/HomeFar/CloseHeathen/ChristianNo communication/CommunicationConstrained/FreeExternal/InternalWar/PeaceUs/Them

In an extra-filmic sense we might also draw interpersonal, extra-filmicdivisions of the One from the internal struggles and tensions that existedboth on and offscreen between Raymond Massey, a stage-trained classicalactor of the repertoire school, and James Dean, an actor of the new schoolemerging out of New York. This conflict created an interesting series ofrelational dynamics that might be enumerated in the following way:

Massey/DeanTraditional/Renegade


External/InternalRehearsed/UnpredictableRational/Irrational

Thus, the divisions of the One in East of Eden exist on a number of filmicand extra-filmic levels, which serve to create a professional tension thatallowed for the onscreen dynamic relationship between actors to beenriched.

Indeed, on one level the film seems to be structured as a litany of polardichotomies. This of course can and should be extended to include LeonardRosenmans score for the film. On the surface it would appear that whatfor us will become the primary division of the One can be assigned tothe composer s bifurcation of the scores harmonic scheme into tonal andatonal areas. However, this is only the beginning of Rosenmans nomad-ological approach to scoring the film. Lets begin by taking a closer look atone of the films anomalies: the overture.

If we look closely at the only existing soundtrack recording of LeonardRosenmans score for East of Eden we will note that the score seems tobegin with the music for the opening credits. However, when we watch therecently restored print of the film available from Warner Brothers (2005),!

we are struck by the fact that the film actually begins with an overture. Thiswas not entirely unusual during the 1940s and 1950s when many majorstudio films were premiered in spectacular road-show presentations. Theroad-show process allowed studios to open large budget films in limitedrelease in selected major markets such as New York, Los Angeles andChicago. These reserved-seat-only screenings often featured additionalmusic such as overtures, intermezzi and epilogues which were subsequentlystripped away when the films were shown in general release in smallermarkets. This resulted in a shortening of the film, allowing theatre ownersto screen the film more often, thereby raising revenues. The majority offilms treated to road show treatments were either epics or large budgetproductions. Films such as Gone with the Wind (dir. Flemming, 1939), TheRobe (dir. Koster, 1953), The Ten Commandments (dir. Demille, 1956),Ben-Hur (dir. Wyler, 1959), Lawrence of Arabia (dir. Lean, 1962), Dr. Zhivago(dir. Lean, 1965), and 2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Kubrick, 1968) all fea-tured overtures. However, what is striking here is not so much that East ofEden contained an overture, whether for road show purposes or not, butexactly how that overture functioned within the film. While most over-tures were performed with either a black screen and no visuals (KingKongyLawrence of Arabia, 2001: A Space Odyssey, etc.) or with a camera shot

Scoring EastofEden 709

fixed in place on a title card or piece of matte art (Ben-Hun Gone with theWind, The Ten Commandments, The Robe) Rosenman and Kazan choose toopen their film in a very different fashion.

The film, which was shot in Cinemascope, opens with a stationary shotof the open ocean taken from off the California coast. In the camerasview we can see a rocky shoal and the wide open expanse of the ocean. Thisshot is held for two minutes with the word 'Overture' imposed over it.At slightly over two minutes the camera pans to the right and a smallvillage is brought into view. The question which immediately strikes one iswhy would Rosenman and Kazan choose to open the film this way? Onecould argue that the films production in Cinemascope lends a certaingrandeur to visuals of the film; but even with this said one can still hardlyclassify it as an epic or big-budget blockbuster. The question of why thebeginning of the film was treated to such a theatrical opening is a perplex-ing one, and the treatment remains unlike any 1950s film overture withwhich I am familiar.

On a basic level, the genre of the overture can be understood as a com-position of short to medium length which is used to introduce a dramaticwork. We are most familiar with this type of overture through its associa-tion with opera, theatre and Broadway. In the case of an opera or Broadwayoverture the composition serves to introduce the primary musical themesof the work that is to follow, making the themes or melodies more familiarto the audience, and by extension more enjoyable to them when they arereheard later in the work. Certainly, one could argue (and I believe wrongly)that that is what is happening here. It is possible to read the overture asRosenman and Kazan's attempt to familiarize their audience with a newand challenging style of film music. This reading, however, seems not onlyoverly simple but also unnecessarily manipulative, because the same thingcould have been accomplished without the overture simply by composinga similar piece for the opening credits. In fact, there is something very dif-ferent going on here.

The overture to East of Eden serves the purpose of territorializing thecharacter of Cal before the narrative begins. The concept of establishinga territory is particularly appropriate to a nomadological consideration ofthe score, because it allows us to understand the role of Cals theme veryclearly form the outset. In other words, most readings of the score under-stand Cals theme to represent the inward manifestation of Cals psycho-logical conflict. As we noted earlier, on one basic and simplistic level thiscertainly is true. However, on a more complex level such a reading clearlystifles any ability to understand the role of the theme and its inherent


atonality in any deeper or more expansive way. Rosenman composed theoverture using gestures drawn from the Cal theme, thereby completelyavoiding any suggestion of either the EofE or FS themes. This was obviouslyan intentional choice on Rosenman parts, for there is a moment in theoverture which seems to prepare the way for the introduction of the EofEtheme in a manner that is very similar to one he will use momentarilyin the music for the opening credits; however, Rosenman purposely elidesthe EofE themes entrance and blocks, if you will, its entrance into theworld outside of the film. However, during the cue for the opening creditswhich follows shortly on, we will hear the very same progression; but hereRosenman will allow the EofE theme to emerge in and become a co-partnerin the score.

Rosenmaris possible reasons for doing this may be more complex thanthey at first might seem. Rather, that simply presenting his Cal theme aspart of an overture designed to familiarize the audience with an unfamiliarstyle of music, he is instead establishing a musical and psychological terri-tory which will serve to motivate and propel a majority of the films subse-quent narrative. As we mentioned above, Rosenman often suggested thatthe role of film music was to create a sense of supra-reality. Indeed, in manyrespects, Rosenmans score not only creates a sense of supra-reality but infact also creates a secondary hyper-narrative (a metatext if you will) withinthe greater filmic narrative. Thus the role of the overture serves not only tointroduce the supra-reality he seeks (Cals psychological and emotionalconflicts) but also to set up the subsequent deterritorialization of the filmsremaining musical and narrative elements. In essence, everything that pro-ceeds from the overture onward will be shaped, affected and determined byits interaction with the essence of Cals theme.

The Nomadological Structure of the Score for East of Eden

As we stated above, it is possible to understand the very essence of LeonardRosenmans score for East of Eden as a musical and narrative study of the'division of the One' Rosenman develops this on an initial level by dividingthe scores primary area of musical sensation into two polar regions repre-sented by the atonal and the tonal. However, we can expand the implicationsthat are inherent musically in this duality by understanding the Cal themeas an itinerant territory which will be used nomadologically to deterritori-alize the films other characters and musical themes. By virtue of its dyadinalstructure we can conceptualize Rosenmans score as a series of musical/character interactions that serve as a series of nomadological conflictsbetween the various polarities enumerated above. By conceptualizing the


score in this way, it is possible to understand the films structure as theatonal deterritorialization of the conventional tonal/narrative aspects ofthe score, both in a musical and filmic sense. In essence, Rosenmans con-ception of the score allows him to illustrate the films dyadinal conflicts ona much deeper level than a more traditional approach would have allowed.

However, before illustrating this, it is important that we understand thevarious relationships that are affected by this division of the One. Becauseof the films operatic musical structure, it is nearly impossible to under-stand the unwinding of the narrative isolation chronologically. Therefore,before understanding the scores narrative implications musically, we mustfirst understand the narratives implications structurally. We will then be ina position to understand the relative de/territorializing effect of the filmsvarious themes.

1. Adam deterritorializes Cal:Adams role as the patriarch of the family, the guardian of traditionalvalues and by extension of the truth as he wishes to portray it causes himto deterritorialize Cals sense of self. Cal wants to understand his father,to be noticed and loved by him as his brother Aron is.

2. Cal deterritorializes Abra:Cal by virtue of his position as other, i.e., his innate dangerousness,causes Abra to be attracted to him. Abra realizes that she is not as perfectand pure as Aron believes her to be. Her attraction to Cal deterritorial-izes her relationship with Aron.

3. Abra territorializes Adam:Abra territorializes Adam because he accepts her as pure and theembodiment of good. She in essence restores his belief in the goodnessof woman, which had been destroyed by his wife Kate.

4. Adam territorializes Aron:Adams love for Aron and his belief that Aron is both morally and per-sonally superiority to Cal territorializes Aron.

5. Aron deterritorializes Cal:Arons perceived moral and personal superiority over Cal deterritorial-izes Cals relationship with Adam.

6. Cal deterritorializes Kate:Cals discovery that his mother is Kate deterritorializes Kate and causesher to reengage with her past.

7. Kate deterritorializes Aron:Kates position as Arons mother deterritorializes his idealized notion ofwho his mother was, and deterritorializes his relationship with Adam,who lied to him about his mother.


8. Aron deterritorializes Adam:Aron, who has been deterritorialized by meeting Kate, now deterritori-alizes Adam by becoming everything that Adam dislikes in Cal.

9. Adam territorializes Cal:Adams acceptance of Cals help after his stroke territorializes Cal.

This series of relationships can be represented by understanding as aseries of dyads as demonstrated below:

The relationships in this chart can be read beginning from the top centredyad, represented by Adam and Cal and then continuing around to theright successively with the Cal/ Abra dyad, etc. This chart represents thevarious relationships that are inflected not only by the narrative but also byRosenmans score. However, not all of these relationships functions in thesame manner, and so it is necessary to expand the graph by demonstratingthe manner in which each relationship impacts the other:

What is interesting in presenting the films narrative structure in this way isthe manner in which it becomes possible to understand each character s rolein effecting the others in the narrative. The two most obvious exceptions to

1/9. Adam/Cal

2. Cal/ Abra8. Aron/ Adam

7. Kate/ Aron SENSATION:-Tonal/ Atonal

3. Abra/ Adam

4. Adam/ Aron6. Cal/ Kate

5. Aron/ Cal

1/ 9. Adam deterritorializes/ territorializes Cal

8. Aron deterritorializes Adam 2. Cal deterritorializes Abra

3. Abra territorializes AdamSENSATION:Tonal/ Atonal

7. Kate deterritorializes Aron

6. Cal deterritorializes Kate 4. Adam territorializes Aron

5. Aron deterritorializes Cal


this understanding can be seen in Abras relationship to Adam and Adamsinitial relationship to Aron. In both these cases, rather than deterritorializ-ing the other in the dyad, their relationship actually helps to territorializethe other. It cannot, however, go unnoticed that in both cases, the relation-ship between the pairs is remarkably superficial, allowing them, as we shallsee, to also be treated insignificantly from a musical standpoint. In otherwords, Abra simply makes Aron feel good about his view of the world,while we of course are aware from Abras own words that his view of her isnaive. Similarly, Adam understands Abra as the antithesis of his formerwife Kate, another untruth in many ways. Thus, Abra finds herself in a typeof triadic relationship stuck between Aron and his father, both of whomhave simply accepted that their view of her is her view of herself.

The remainder of the relationships in our graph set up a series of deter-ritorializations that can be best understood in terms of their musicalrelationships:

1./ 9. Adam deterritorializes/ territorializes CalNO MUSIC/ EofE

8. Aron deterritorializes AdamCal Theme - FS Theme

2. Cal deterritorializes AbraCal Theme -EofE

7. Kate deterritorializes Aron SENSATION: 3. Abra territorializes AdamCal Theme -Cal Theme Tonal Atonal EofE - FS Theme

6. Cal deterritorializes KateCal Theme -Cal Theme

4. Adam territorializes AronFS Theme - EofE

5. Aron deterritorializes CalMr. Albrecht Theme

What is interesting in the relationships established above is the way inwhich Rosenman uses the score to create deterritorializations which helpto create the very sense of supra-reality that he stated he wished film musicto facilitate. We will spend the remainder of this chapter understandingjust exactly how he accomplishes this.

The principal relationship in East of Eden involves Cal and his fatherAdam. Interestingly, Kazan and Rosenman choose to represent this relation-ship as a musically silent one. As we mentioned above, Rosenman believedthat music contributed a quality of supra-reality to the film. We mightunderstand the musical silence here more in a Lacanian sense. TTie absenceof music here allows for the real rawness of the relationship between the twoto come out. Indeed, until the final scene in the film, there are no important


instances where the two are communicating with each other, that we heareither of their themes being played. Of course this is an effective way torepresent Adams inability to communicate personally/musically with hisson Cal. At the same time the musical silence between the two has theeffect of refuting the initial suggestion that the Cal theme simply representshis psychological conflicts. Obviously, if this were the entire emotionalmessage behind Rosenmans atonality, the conversations between Cal andAdam would have been a very good time to reveal this.

Thus the initial musical component in the relationship between Adamand Cal is silence. This of course does not imply that no music is presentin their relationship but rather that what music is present is unable to becommunicated and therefore cannot resonate between them because oftheir relationship as nomad-science and state-science. In other words, Calsposition as outsider to his fathers conventional views makes the fatherequally unable to understand the 'new music' Rosenman has composed torepresent Cal. Because of this, Cal is not able to communicate with hisfather in Rosenmans supra-reality - and as such their relationship remainswithout music for the first two-thirds of the film. Interestingly, the oneinstance where Cal does share music with Adam comes privately and com-pletely unbeknownst to Adam, who is quietly humming the FS theme asCal observes him through the window. When watching Cal gaze throughthe window at his father, one senses that there is a moment of resonancehere that is both musical and catalytic. Interestingly, as we mentioned ear-lier, Rosenman chose to have Adam hum the FS tune in its first completeincarnation within the filmic universe, thereby establishing that Adamhas the capacity to emanate and create music but cannot always hear it.However, while this is the first diegetic statement of the FS theme, it isnot the first time we have heard the theme, which was alluded to earlier inthe film when Cal returns to Salinas on the train after first encountering hismother in Monterrey. As the train passes the sign for Salinas, Cal jumpsinto the farm field and the FS theme is briefly suggested by the underscore.This brief statement suggests that the FS theme can be understood not onlyas the musical-other of Adam, but also as the musical midpoint of thebecoming-home, which Cal so longingly desires.

As we mentioned above, Cals theme serves less to reveal things abouthimself than it does to illuminate aspects of his relationships with others.Therefore it is not surprising that the Cal theme serves not only to deterri-torialize Abra and draw her to Cal but also to illuminate the falseness ofher feelings for Aron. However, unlike the stubborn disruption of thetransmission of sensation between Adam and Cal, in this instance thedeterritorialization is gentler and less intentional. As with the previous


introduction of the FS theme, the initial intra-filmic statement of the EofEtheme is also introduced diegetically by Abra who hums it to Aron in thescene in the icehouse while being observed surreptitiously by Cal.69 Whatsets this statement of the EofE theme off from Adams diegetic statementof the FS theme is the manner in which Abra introduces it. As he did whileobserving Adam through the window, here Cal also observes Abra andAron surreptitiously. However, in this case the implication of Abras diegeticstatement is completely different from that of the FS theme. In that instance,the theme served to communicate a sense of who his father was to Cal, toterritorialize the position opposite to that of the Cal theme, the positionthat can only be expressed outside of Cals presence. It is in essence a rein-forcement of the fact that the two themes cannot exist together, becausethe presence of the Cal theme serves to deterritorialize Adams world. Bycontrast, Abras introduction of the EofE theme serves to prevent Aronfrom answering the questions she has asked him about their future together.Abra introduces the theme in effect to silence Aron, a practice she willrepeat again moments later when she senses that the two of them arebecoming too intimate. In essence the beauty of the EofE theme allows it topersuade both Aron and eventually Adam of Abras simple purity. It is forthis reason that she is musically able to remain what they believe her to be.

Abras attraction to Cal is due to what she understands as a certainsimpatico between the darker qualities of their two natures. With Cal shecan be honest and not posture herself, she can be what she is: an imperfecthuman. Her attraction to the darker recesses of Cals character is anotherreason why a simple reading of the atonal/tonal duality of the score cannever sufficiently serve to capture the complexity of the themes nature. It isthe very darkness and complexity of Cals internal self, represented here bythe atonality of the Cal theme that attracts Abra to Cal. However, it is notmerely the theme as the musical-other of Cal but the themes ability torelate to the polar opposite in Abras theme, providing a partial completingof the division of the One, that enables the two to attract each other in theDeleuzian world of sensation.

Interestingly, the first fully orchestrated statement of the EofE themewill again be used to stifle Abras true feelings. It will happen when she is onthe Ferris wheel with Cal, after the two are drawn to each other sexuallyand have kissed. In that case the EofE theme will be used to reterritorializeAbra's false feelings for Aron, thereby momentarily deterritorializing theCal theme, in essence bringing her into line with the state-mandated trium-virate of Aron and Adam. She is living their lie about who she is. We willfurther understand this when, after kissing Cal she exclaims, CI love Aron,I really do!' Here, the use of the EofE theme serves to fracture the polar


dyad she has momentarily restored with the Cal theme and returns her fora brief moment to the simplicity of her univocal relationship with Aron.

Two other scenes which revolve around the Cal/Abra dyad need to bebriefly explored. The first takes place during the harvesting of the lettuce,before it is shipped to New York City under refrigeration. The music at thebeginning of this scene is drawn from the FS theme which emerges infull orchestration from Adams hummed diegetic statement of the FSwhich concluded the preceding scene. Cal, in an attempt to please hisfather, is working fervently at the harvest and so the majority of the musicfor the beginning of the scene is underscored by the FS theme. However,when Abra comes to Cal the FS theme ceases and no music is heard againuntil Abra finishes sharing with Cal about her own poor relationshipwith her father when she was growing up. As Abra tells Cal that she nowviews her father simply as her father now and nothing more, the FS themereturns and is destabilized by harmonies drawn from the Cal themes atonallanguage. Thus Abras speech serves to bring together both the FS themewith the Cal theme and the two briefly deterritorialize each other. Thisunion is then disrupted by Arons entrance which introduces a corruptedversion of the EofE theme into the cue and silences the earlier compositestatement of the FS and Cal theme entirely.

What happens here? On a simple level we might say that by sharingher story about her father with Cal, Abra has softened him enough toallow him to entertain his father s theme; but in essence this is not what hashappened. Musically Cal is not being brought closer to his father, butinstead is being brought closer to Abra, and it is the introduction of theEofE theme as embodied in Aron which silences the dialogue of the twothemes. This of course is similar to what Abra does to both Aron in theicehouse and Cal later on the Ferris wheel, but here it is a foretaste of therelational shift that Cal and Aron will eventually undergo during the last15 minutes of the film.

The second scene that we must briefly consider takes place outside Abrasbedroom window. As Cal tells Abra about his plan to raise money to giveto his father as a birthday gift in the form of a repayment for all he has loston his failed lettuce venture, Rosenman introduces the first destabilizedstatement of the EofE theme, which is combined with a lighter palate ofatonal harmonies. Here, unlike the scene we have just considered above,the effect is not to deterritorialize the Cal theme, but rather for the Caltheme to reterritorialize the EofE theme. In essence Rosenmaris atonalgesture for Cal has caused the simplicity of the EofE theme to be musicallydeepened, making it more interesting and less simple and naive. By doing this


the EofE theme has been, along with Abra, given the chance to experiencea new beginning - one which is not stereotypically pristine and simple, butrather recognizes the truth about both Cal and Abra. It is perhaps at thismoment that Cal has deterritorialized Abras relationship to Aron, andwhile the two cannot verbalize or recognize it yet, the score establishes thatthey have found a common ground musically, one which will ultimatelylead both of them to a new beginning. The EofE theme will never again beassociated with Aron and in fact the EofE theme is in the process of beingreterritorialized as a 'new' theme, expressing a new union. Thus, in essencethe score also becomes deterritorialized.

It is interesting and perhaps telling that Rosenman chose to utilize thesame theme for Kate that he composed for Cal. Here of course the musicalsimilarity acts as a counterbalance to the shared thematic world of Abraand Aron (EofE) and Aron/Adam & Abra/Adam (EofE/FS). Rosenmancreates musical territories in both these instances that involve shared char-acteristics within appropriate dyadinal parings. What is interesting is thatwe do not know whether Kate actually possesses a musical identity beforecoming into contact with Cal, beyond that of the honky-tonk piano thatplays in her bar. What we do know is that Kate is deterritorialized by Cal,who invades the world of the bordello and brings the complexity of theCal theme into her otherwise emotionally closed off world.

Rosenman introduces the Cal theme into Kates world in a very unusualway making use of a procedure that he does not use for any other character.As the cue for the opening credits lapses, we are drawn into the complexityof Cals world through a series of starts and stops of the Cal theme.However, once Cal becomes more and more sure of who he is the themeachieves a level of confidence which allows it to become more completeand developed. This approach demonstrates clearly that the Cal thememust relate to someone else in order to gain completeness, to become theOne. This is another example of the fact that the Cal theme expresses Calin relationship to other characters and not merely to his internal relation-ship to himself.

Cals theme finally emerges in all its complexity when he invades theclosed off world of Kates office for the first time. Interestingly, the hallwayto Kates office, which Kazan frames in a manner that effectively cuts off allreference to the Cinemascope film technique, also acts as the insulatorbetween the honky-tonk (the pianist in a later scene is Leonard Rosenman!)world of Kates bar and the eventual intrusion of the Cal theme into her office.

The second time Kate speaks with Cal, she meets him on the road andthe two discuss Cals need to borrow $5,000 from her. The music used for


this conversation is again the Cal theme, but what is interesting is that asthey pass into Kates office and she learns that the money Cal needs is to goto help Adam, the music ceases entirely. In effect Adam has not onlysilenced the becoming music in Cal, as we saw at the beginning of ouranalysis, but still has the power to silence the music in Kate as well. Calserves the same purpose for Kate here that he did for Abra, in that he pro-vides her with an opportunity to become music; music that is not artificialin the honky-tonk sense, but although painful, is real. In essence, Cal pre-vents Kate from being silenced by her past with Adam: a past we have tobelieve she has long attempted to forget, and a past which has been perhapsreplaced by a superficiality represented by the music of the bordello.

In much the same way that Kate is deterritorialized by Cal s presenceand forced to remember, embrace and reterritorialize the Cal theme asher own, Aron is similarly deterritorialized by his interaction with Kate.In what appears to be a moment of extreme and unexpected cruelty onCals part, Cal forces his brother and mother to confront each other byphysically shoving them together. The resulting collision, which is bothphysical and emotional, creates a coming together of Cals theme and theEofE theme that effectively reterritorializes both. In other words, the twothemes/worlds having collided have now in essence become the internalcharacters' dyadic completion and restoration of the One. Cal and Aronhave effectively been reterritorialized by fulfilling and completing thedyadic opposition of their own divisions of the One.

This restoration of the division of the One in Aron now compels himinto a collision with Adam, one that places Aron in the position of other,the possessor of the Cal theme, and results in Adams eventual reterritori-alization with Cal. In essence, Aron has become the musical and psycholo-gical embodiment of what both Adam and Aron believed Cal was. Thedifference here, is that Rosenman now Corrupts' the Cal theme, compellingit to represent a darkness and anger that it has not heretofore embodied.Remarkably, Aron has adopted the implication of the Cal theme, thepsychological turmoil, the anger, the instability, but rather than this nowbeing implied in Aron, they have become a visual and psychological reality.In other words Aron has become what Cal was perceived to be and thisresults in the most shocking reterritorialization of any division of the Onein Rosenmans score; the suggested has become the understood.

Arons behaviour and its subsequent deterritorialization of Adam servesto complete the circle of deterritorialization that drives the musical sub-narrative. Interestingly, this final shock now removes from Adam his abil-ity to communicate verbally, let alone musically with Cal. It is possible to


read the final scene of the film as the internal musical expression of Adamsreterritorialized feelings for Cal. However, I believe that such a reading istoo simple and naive. Instead, I would like to suggest that we understandthe final section of the film, the part following Adams stroke, as a sort offulfilment of the large division of the One that began with the overture,a study of immanence versus transcendence. Reading the final scene inthis way will help us not only to understand why Rosenman begins thefilm with an overture but also how the immanent progression of the threethemes results in a sub-narrative that produces a much more significantfilm. I will go on to explain this in the next section.

It is important for us to take a moment to discuss the only secondarytheme that Rosenman introduces into his score (Example 4 below). Thiscue, which was omitted from the soundtrack recording, accompanies themarch of the angry townspeople to the home of Mr. Albrecht, following thecarnival scene. This is the only non-diegetic cue in the film which is notdrawn directly from one of the three major themes in the score. It is inter-esting because it serves, as we shall observe at the end of this chapter, as aline of flight that allows the three major themes in the score to be disturbedand reterritorialized.

Example 4 Albrecht Theme.

The Albrecht theme in essence serves as a pivot, a musico/dramatic rhizomicintersection within the narrative. This cue, with its unusually jaunty rhythmand almost clownish countenance provides the perfect foil for the othertwo worlds of the score because it is so easily distinguishable from them.In fact when the cue first appears, its newness is almost shocking. It is theAlbrecht themes position as outsider to both worlds: a sort of midpointbetween the Americanist folk-song syntax of the tonal cues, and the severeangular syntax of the atonal cues, that upsets the dyadinal equilibriumthat has existed between the two thematic worlds throughout the film. TheAlbrecht theme essentially represents a courage, forthrightness and good-ness that, as Mr. Albrecht himself does in the film, upsets the dyadinalequilibrium that has existed between the opposing divisions of the One.It is something new, something unexpected; and it is this very position asother, halfway between the two tonal worlds that will allow it to set in placea movement of fulfillment in the trajectories of immanence that began, aswe shall see, in the next section with the overture.


The Division of the'One'as Organizing Principle

As we have seen repeatedly, Leonard Rosenmans score for East of Edenprovides an enlightening study in the nomadological uses of film music.The film is a veritable catalogue of war-machine-like divisions of the One,which result in a series of de/reterritorializations, which in turn drive andcomplete the narrative. We have also seen how Rosenmans score acts onthe sub-surface level as a sort of metanarrative, which reveals, commentson and challenges our experience of the narrative. However, such an epis-temological application of film music cannot be in and of itself consideredrevolutionary. What is remarkable is the manner in which Rosenmansscore creates a trajectory of immanence among the principal characters/themes, which allows him to maintain the scores core of sensation/divisionof the One, while embracing consistent nomadological attacks that resultin a series of narrative reterritorializations that reorient the filmic universe.The subtlety with which this is achieved in the film would not have beenpossible without Rosenmans score; and therefore a full understanding ofthe way in which this is accomplished is essential to grasping the filmsmusico/narrative structure. Earlier we explored, on a more microscopiclevel, the way in which this takes place in relationships between individualthemes characters; however, it is now important that we attempt to under-stand how the largest instance of the division of the One functions.

We began our analysis by attempting to understand Rosenman andKazan's reasons for beginning the film with an overture. We suggested thatthe overture helped to open Cals theme to the filmic universe; however,this does not give us a full picture of its function. This can only be under-stood by seeing the overture as part of a whole, the largest structural divisionof the One in the score. In essence we need to identify the missing part ofthe scores musical dyad in order to do this. Understanding this is the keyto grasping the becoming-music, the becoming-human, the becoming-Calof the film. Lets examine how this is so.

The Cal theme, as we have discussed above begins the film associatedwith Cals character and with aspects of Cals relationships with other people.It functions as the musical truth of the beginning of the film, but in andof itself it is not a complete truth which in the Deleuzian sense is as itshould be. James Williams reminds us that Deleuze defines truth both interms of creativity and construction but not in terms of definable systems.Williams says:

We create truth in complex constructions of propositions and sensa-tions that express the conditions for the genesis and development


of events. Truth then would not be a property of single propositionsin a book or paper. It would be a property of a series of them througha work as it captured and changed our relationship to the eventsexpressed in the work.70

In other words it is the very musical path which Rosenman begins with theoverture, which must be allowed to become in order for us to truly under-stand the truth that is expressed both musically and narratively and thatis realized in the closing of the division of the One. However, here we arenot only interested in closing the musical division of the One by restoringour core of sensation to completeness. Rather, we are also interested inunderstanding how the musical atonal/tonal dyad functions nomadologi-cally in the film.

The work of the overture is to open the Cal theme to the world of thefilm. However, Cal is not the only one without a voice, nor the only onewhose theme is detached from the traditional world - the opposite pole ofthe dyad. There is of course Adam, whose music cannot be heard by Cal butcan only be sung to himself. There is the relationship between Abra andAdam, whose theme is used to interrupt rather than complete at the filmsbeginning. In fact, all of the themes at the film s beginning are in search ofa defined territory, and it is the movement of these very themes that servesto create and reinforce this fact during the first section of the film. Calstheme deterritorializes Abras EofE theme, which cuts Abra off emotionallyfrom Aron. Rosenman expresses this by allowing the EofE theme to becorrupted by the gestures from Cals theme during the scene on Abrasporch roof. This sets in place a series of increasingly violent deterritorial-izations that culminate in the fight between Aron and Cal in the front ofMr. Albrecht s home.

You will recall that earlier we referred to this scene with its secondarysub-theme, as the films pivot. There was an important reason for doing this.In essence the sub- theme serves as a 'line of flight' which allows the themesto move towards reterritorializing themselves at the films conclusion.It was necessary for Rosenman to introduce a new theme here because toutilize one of the existing three themes would have resulted in an inabilityfor that theme to reterritorialize itself. Thus, the Albrecht sub theme, allowsthe very deterritorialization of both the Cal theme and the EofE theme tobe achieved. Indeed, following the Albrecht scene we will never hear theEofE associated with Aron again. Aron will instead move in an immanenttrajectory towards becoming the Cal theme, a fact that will result in hisdeterritorializing Adam and removing the Cal theme entirely, leaving Abraand Cal to reterritorialize the EofE theme.


Thus, by the time we reach the films final scene, at the time one ofthe longest musical cues ever recorded at almost ten minutes,71 we are leftonly with the FS theme and the EofE theme with which to contend. Ofcourse Adams internal forgiveness of Cal allows the EofE theme to becomethe dominant thematic element at the films conclusion, but the FS themeremains present if in a less audible and forceful way.

Rosenman scores the final moment of the film is a lush and sentimentalway, one that allows the EofE theme to be in a sense fulfilled. However, weare not allowed to merely drift away on the simplicity of the EofE theme,for the scores final sonority is instead a massive added note chord that,while not completely atonal, is still dissonant. This chord suggests to usthat on some level we are about to be led back into the Cal theme; however,this does not happen. This elision of our expectations suggests a sort ofmirroring of the technique Rosenman used to abort the entrance of theEofE theme during the overture. Thus, the inclusion of the EofE and FSthemes in the final scene, and the avoidance of the Cal theme altogether,completes the immanent trajectory which Rosenman began during theoverture, when he opened Cals theme and Cals theme only to the filmicuniverse. He has restored and completed the division of the One. The coreof sensation has been restored to its completeness and the score s sub-nar-rative has come full circle. The division of the One has been reterritorial-ized, albeit in a new form, a form which reorients and reshapes, a new formwhich is drawn from itself, no longer a bifurcated area of sensation, butnow complete.

Notes

1. C. Palmer and F. Steiner, Leonard Rosenman, in L. Macy (ed.), Grove Music Online.Available at http://www.grovemusic.com (accessed on 11 February 2007).

2. L. Rosenman, 'Notes from a sub-culture, Perspectives of New Music, 7 (1968), 122.3. T. Thomas, Music for the Movies. South Brunswick: A. S. Barnes, 1977, p. 207.4. Ibid.5. Irwin Bazelon Knowing the Score: Notes of Film Music. New York: Van Nostrand

Reinhold, 1975, p. 181.6. Thomas (1977), p. 207.7. Ibid.8. Ibid.9. Rosenman (1968), 127.

10. Roy M. Prendergast, Film Music: A Neglected Art: A Critical Study of Music in Films(2nd edn). New York: Norton, 1992, p. 119.

11. G. Burt, The Art of Film Music, Boston, MA: North Eastern University Press,1994, p. 8.



12. Rosenman(1968), p. 130.13. Ibid., p. 123.14. Ibid., p. 127.15. P. Powrie, 'Outing the synch: music and space in the French heritage film', in

M. Mera and D. Burnand (eds), European Film Music. Burlington: Ashgate, 2006, p. 95.16. Ibid.17. Burt(1994),p.234.18. Ibid.19. Prendergast(1992), p. 108.20. Hurt (1994), p. 184.21. Ibid., p. 186.22. D. Fanning, 'Expressionism', in L. Macy (ed.), Grove Music Online, Available at http://

www.grovemusic.com (accessed on 11 February 2007).23. Burt(1994),p. 186.24. Palmer (2007).25. D. Hofstede, James Dean: A Bio-bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,

1996, p. 9.26. J. McBride, Filmmakers on Filmmaking: Volume One. Los Angeles, CA: J. P. Tarcher,

1983, p. 112.27. L. Rosenman, 'East of Eden, in ). L. Limbacher (ed.), Film Music: from Violins to

Video. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1974, p. 86.28. Ibid., p. 87.29. Thomas (1977), p. 203.30. C. Palmer, The Composer in Hollywood. London: Marion Boyers, 1993, p. 302.31. McBride (1983), pp. 119-20.32. Palmer (1993), p. 303.33. M. Missiras, Musical Reference, Syntax, and the Compositional Process in Film

Music, PhD Diss, NYU, 1998, p. 83.34. Rosenman (1968), p. 127.35. Burt(1994),p.26.36. Ibid.37. E. Holland, 'Studies in Applied Nomadology', in I. Buchanan and M. Swiboda (eds),

Deleuze and Music. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004, p. 23.38. N. Nesbitt, 'Deleuze, Adorno, and the Composition of Musical Multiplicity', in

I. Buchanan and M. Swiboda (eds), Deleuze and Music. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2004, p. 58.

39. Ibid., p. 57.40. Ibid.41. Ibid., p. 59.42. Ibid.43. Ibid., p. 61.44. Holland (2004), p. 22.45. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine, B. Massumi (trans.).

New York: Semiotext(e), 1986b, p. 16.




46. Ibid., p. 36.47. Ibid, p. 42.48. Ibid, p. 36.49. Ibid, p. 44.50. Holland (2004), p. 21.51. G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, P. Patton (trans.). New York: Columbia

University Press, 1994, p. 36.52. Deleuze (1986b), p. 11.53. C. Colebrook, Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Continuum, 2006, p. 14.54. Ibid., p. 15.55. Deleuze (1986b), p. 1.56. C. Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2002, p. 57.57. B. Massumi, Introduction: Like a thought', in B. Massumi (ed.), A Shock to Thought:

Expression after Deleuze and Guattari. London: Routledge, 2002, p. xiii.58. Ibid., p. xv.59. G. Deleuze, and E Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,

B. Massumi (trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 86.60. A. Evens, 'Sound Ideas', in B. Massumi (ed.), A Shock to Thought: Expression after

Deleuze and Guattari. London: Routledge, 2002, p. 181.61. The term 'war machine' refers to Deleuze s understanding of the nomadic as an

anarchic presence outside of the states area of control. It suggests a position which is one ofalteriority to the usual discipline and control of the prevailing order. The 'war machine' isuseful as way of positioning the itinerant's position as one of migrant territoriality.

62. Deleuze (1986b), p. 31.63. R. Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts. New York: Routledge, 2003, p. 17.64. Deleuze (1986b), p. 52.65. I. Buchanan, 'Deleuze and music', in I. Buchanan and M. Swiboda (eds), Deleuze and

Music. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004, p. 16.66. G. Deleuze, and R Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, D. Polan (trans.).

Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986a, p. 21.67. Ibid, p. 21.68. Deleuze (1986b), p. 1.69. The EofE theme is first heard in the music for the opening credits. However, for the

purposes of our discussion, this cue is not considered a part of the actual filmic universeand as such does not represent the characters musically.

70. James Williams, 'Truth', in A. Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2005, p. 289.

71. Thomas (1977), p. 203.

Film MusicologyThe Development of Film Musicology: An Overview

Alexander Binns

Film musicology now has a history, but it was not always so. With thebeginnings of cinema on 28 December 1895, came the comment, tradition-ally attributed to an audience member who was present at the Lumierebrothers* screening, that it was the 'discovery of the universal language!'(Heath: 1981,3). This claim, which, until then, had been reserved chiefly forthe domain of music, threatened musics primacy, promoting a disintegra-tion of divisions between the arts and exposing their interdependence.Film musicology was born out of this critical shift in thinking. It was offeredthe broad-critical license it needed in order to flourish by virtue of its rele-gation, at the outset, to the edges of legitimate musicological and cinematicscholarship. Examining the process by which film music was absorbed intomusicology also highlights what music - especially classical music - stoodfor and what its recruitment in film sought to achieve.

'Forms'of Film Musicology

David Neumeyer and James Buhler s account of film music illustratesmusicology s slow pace of change:

In the . . . New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the term'analysis' warranted an essay of nearly fifty pages (Bent 1980: 34-88 inSadie (1980)). In the recently published Oxford Guide to Film Studies

725

46


(Hill and Church Gibson 1998), the term rarely appears and is whollyabsent from section labels and titles for the sixty-two individualessays. Instead, one finds 'film interpretation', Critical approaches*,and 'theoretical frameworks'. (Neumeyer and Buhler: 2000, 16-38)

Musicology per se had largely resisted engaging with music in film. KayDickinsons similar claim that long gone are the days when film studiesseemed a mono-sensory discipline concerned only with visual categorieslike "the spectator", "the gaze" and "the mirror stage" '(Dickinson: 2003,1)certainly holds true in general terms. While a truism, the broadening of filmmusicology s ambit has also drawn attention to its selective fields of coverage.What at one time seemed like a plural coverage of film music 'in all itsguises' - a bold widening of musicology s field - in fact turned out to be apartial consideration of another example of a musical hegemony in all itsdisguises.

The dominance of the orchestral underscore in discourse on film music,of its 'High' Romantic, symphonic, Germanic roots and a preoccupationwith using this as the preferred basis from which to begin discussing filmmusic in fact only achieved a similar re-interpretation of that originalmusicological domain within film: one in which the same restrictions ofaccess are re-inscribed. However, since the mid-1990s there appears to havebeen attempts to prise open this hegemony and expose its resistance tointerdisciplinarity and popular culture. It would also seem that there hasbeen a convergence of the aims of musicology and the consideration offilm music as a result of the broadening of the field of musicology, assum-ing a compatibility with the more critically varied arena of film studies. Inspite of Neumeyer and Buhler s more general claims of continuing diver-gence between these two disciplines, recent research has embraced bothfields in a more mutually interdependent way.

Musicology needed to change in order to be able to deal with the condi-tions of film music; and, as a result, the consideration of film music hashelped to refresh the study of music and demonstrate its diverse condi-tions. Lawrence Kramer, in his pioneering quest to revitalize musicology,Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, claimed the following over tenyears ago:

For those who care about 'classical' music, the possibility of tappinginto new sources of cultural and intellectual energy may come nota moment too soon. It is no secret that, in the United States anyway,this music is in trouble. It barely registers in our schools, it has neither

Film Musicology 727

the prestige nor the popularity of literature and visual art, and itsquanders its capacities for self-renewal by clinging to an exception-ally static core repertory. Its audience is shrinking and graying, andoverly palefaced, and the suspicion has been voiced abroad that itsclaim to occupy a sphere of autonomous artistic greatness is largelya means of veiling, and thus perpetuating, a narrow set of socialinterests. (Kramer: 1995, 3-4)

Kramer s appeal for the critical situation to change implicitly called for filmmusic to be included as a part of this change and, since the mid-1990s, thishas increasingly been the case: musicology nourishing itself on a larger andtastier array of possibilities.

Musicologys involvement with film can be divided into three verybroad stages, a division I use here as a means of structuring this overview.However, each stage is replete with the kind of generalizing reductionsthat broad categories usually possess. And yet, film musicology tied, as itnecessarily is, to both film and music, and young as it also is, has produceda range of accounts that have forced change within more rigid musicologi-cal schools of thought.

The first broad category deals with the beginnings of film music criti-cism until the 1980s. The second broad category was instigated by ClaudiaGorbman but was, by no means, confined to her. Her groundbreaking bookUnheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music, published in 1987, was the first ina series of accounts of film music written by film and literature scholars.Kathryn Kalinaks Settling the Score published in 1992 and Caryl FlinnsStrains of Utopia: Gender Nostalgia and Hollywood Film Music, also pub-lished in 1992, followed on from Gorbman, by focusing on the ideologicaland affective functions of the film score.

The third category is more diffuse, and it is harder to discern clearchanges between Gorbmans work and that which followed. However,one important distinction, matched also by its burgeoning consideration inmusicology more widely, was the broadening of the field of film musicol-ogy to include music other than the orchestral underscore. Gorbman et al.had focused almost exclusively on the pseudo-Romantic orchestral filmscores of Hollywood in its so-called Golden Age - roughly 1930-1960 -and, in so doing, had, to a certain extent, intellectually stipulated legitimateand illegitimate film music.

This third category of film musicological consideration originated morein musicology s domain than film studies' as an outgrowth of the major shiftsin approach that were taking place in the study of music. These 'paradigm


shifts' attempted to site the consideration of music within the field of expe-rience and culture and to invite strong social contextualization. In a sense,what had been the sole domain of film and literary theorists was now opento musicology and was ripe for the picking. And yet, this situation has rarelybeen included in accounts of the development of film musicology in recenttimes.

Annette Davisons (2004) introduction to the ways in which film musicin the 1980s and 1990s developed, avoids discussing film musics intersec-tion with musicology.1 She concluded her formal introduction to 'recentfilm musicology' with an account of the major contributions largely out-side of musicology and written ten or more years ago. Although there existsan increasing body of scholarship driven by and originating from musicol-ogy, this has failed to make any large scale impact within accounts of filmmusicology.

Early Technical Accounts -'Vom Atelier bis Theater'

Key tomes tend to define domains of scholarship and yet, if we are to believeRoy Prendergast, whose Film Music: A Neglected Art was first published in1977, few such exemplary works existed for the first 80 years of the genre,a fact he famously announces from the outset:

This book is the first attempt at a comprehensive look at the history,esthetics, and techniques of film music. Seldom in the annals of musichistory has a new form of musical expression gone so unnoticed.[Emphasis added] (Prendergast: 1977, i)

This period was strongly defined - in line perhaps with criticism moregenerally - by technical analysis and accounts of the craft' of movies andtheir scores but, in fact, what Prendergast called for was largely what existedalready. To be sure, many of those accounts were primers - guides to howmusic should be applied to the film and even what music or styles of musicwere appropriate for certain designated emotions or styles - but none-theless, film music was being considered. This happened as early as 1909,with the Edison Kinetogram in a weekly column entitled 'Suggestions forMusic'.2

This approach, which served as guidance for the performer accompany-ing silent films, grew into multi-volume handbooks prescribing musicalgesture and genre and relating this tightly to the desired tempo, meter andmood of a particular scene. These anthologies advised how a film 'score'

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may be compiled by the resident pianist, organist or even orchestra, from acollection of musical excerpts appropriate for specified moods. Of these,Erdmann and Becces compilation in particular - coinciding, as it did in1927, with the advent of the 'talkies' with The Jazz Singer - saw the needfor an explanatory account of film music. Their work consisted of twovolumes: the first volume contained essays on the history and technique offilm music and the second contained a compilation of musical excerptsindexed by mood. Martin Miller Marks has noted the following:

[i]t opened a door to altogether new kinds of research - a door,however, which no one at the time passed through. It was an unusu-ally complex book, and published too late in the day to have such animpact. (Miller Marks: 1997, 11)

This lateness was the demise of live improvised musical performancesto film screenings. The music for The Jazz Singer by Louis Silvers was con-tained on a phonograph and Vitaphone-synchronized with the film reeland was thus the same wherever it was projected, removing the need forresident auditorium musicians.

Miller Markss account notwithstanding, Erdmann and Becces com-pilation, regardless of its impact on the practical side of the movie musicindustry, does mark a significant moment in the development of writingabout film music - about creating a musicology of film - because it recog-nized the need to set itself apart from existing criticism on film music.Important offshoots of this newer writing about music were the articlesthat dealt more politically with the possibilities of music in films in mod-ernist terms and appeared in the journals Die Musik and Melos. Here, musicwas regarded as a potential new way forward, embodying a means of com-bining artistic forces as part of a new avant-garde aesthetic. Melos, inparticular, saw itself as a forum for the future of film music.

In 1935-1936 Kurt London and Leonid Sabaneev published two workson film music (London: 1936; Sabaneev: 1935). These works differed incharacter, though both helped to identify and maintain a degree of criticalinterest in film music. London's book concentrated largely on the reasonsfor using film music and offered practical explanations for its presence:such as the ability of film music to drown out the noise of the early filmprojector. However, this book did not engage in the kind of tutorial com-mentaries that formed the basis of most of those works that preceded it.Instead, London put forward an account of what film music did. Followingon from the first volume of Erdmann and Becces work, London, like others


before him, offered possibilities for film music especially in the sphere ofrecording practice. He developed the idea that the very means of recordingthe music - its distortions of sound and of the nature of the instruments -could yield a new way of composing and a new possibility that was alsoapparent in Sabaneev s book.

Apart from their common appeal to compositional possibilities, Saba-neev s book differs quite markedly from London's and takes the form of astructured primer for the film composer. This approach was still commonin spite of the decline in improvised film music accompaniment. It nolonger directed the improviser as to which portions of music might con-note what sensation or emotion; but it did outline the process and methodof film scoring in 'primer' format.

The late 1930s and early 1940s, scourged by war, brought a halt for themost part to this approach to writing on film music. Emigre composersfleeing from Fascism in Europe and settling in America developed an alter-native type of writing. Miller Marks has noted how a distinction developedbetween American literature on film music and that written by emigresduring this period:

In the thirties, American literature [on film music] had followed itsown course. It was, in general, less concerned with theoretical prob-lems than with descriptions and techniques . . . French composerMaurice Jaubert was preoccupied by the aesthetic principals of'Music on the Screen, while Max Steiner .. . described the processesand history of'Scoring the Film.' (Miller Marks: 1997, 14)

A common feature of these works was the fact that the composers them-selves were keen to explain their preoccupations with film music.

Far from neglected, therefore, this period witnessed a keen interest infilm music - both in reporting its trends and in explaining the means bywhich it came to be applied to the screen. George Antheil was appointed asfilm music reporter with the journal Modern Music (a journal whichstrongly promoted the cause of film music) from 1936 to!940.3 Even bythis stage, film music was a point of discussion, something to be arguedover; and this was fuelled even more by the influx of emigre composersfrom Europe, who were keen to reap the significant financial rewards thatfilm scoring offered after their escape from Fascism.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold is perhaps the most famous, but debates overthe possibility of film scores by Schoenberg and Stravinsky were also to befound and offered a good deal of aesthetic agonizing. This brings to the fore

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a knot of issues that film music and mass-entertainment cinema in generalgrappled with: the mixture of popular entertainment, geared towards large-scale audiences, and the pretensions and reservations of composers whosefinancial needs necessitated their roles in writing 'commercial' music butwho felt artistically compromised in being forced to compose what wasoften regarded as 'light* orchestral music. This situation is well documentedelsewhere (Franklin: 2001,143-62), but it serves to outline the associationsand social access that music brought with it.

This situation was further exacerbated by processes in the studiosthemselves where the direct appropriation of classical music or the use ofemigre composers was seen as a way of affording artistic prestige and cred-ibility to the film product. The deliberate use of music in this way sowedthe seeds of tension that came to define this period of film music and itsintersection with composition and music criticism. The film industry'sembracing of a form of European romanticism in musical terms proved tobe for a curious mix of reasons. On the one hand, it was clear that it waspartly to differentiate film from other forms of entertainment consideredlower and to surround it with an aura of luxury and social sophistication.On the other hand, the music that was recruited to achieve this was, by nomeans, that which was current in the contemporary musical scene of 1930sEurope. Modernism was certainly not an agenda that Hollywood wished tofollow at all.4 And, the standardization of musical cliches that developedthrough the film scores use of a high Romantic style became the brunt ofTheodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler s criticism in their study of film music,Composing for the Films, first published in 1947.

Emigres themselves, Adorno and Eisler s treatise was a tirade againstwhat they regarded as the dangerous and subversive function of the Holly-wood underscore up to their time of writing in the mid-1940s. It standsas the first significant work on the significances and psychological effectsof film music. Thoroughly modernist and uncompromising in its tone, itcastigates the film score for numbing the audiences critical senses andmanufacturing cliche as means of controlling the spectator. Much of whatwas written was adopted, if tacitly, by those who wrote critically on filmmusic in the 1980s and onwards.

Perhaps it was before its time, but Composing for the Films did not spuron a wave of responses or provoke more critically considered scholarshipin the decades following its publication. Its strains of high Marxism satuneasily with the political climate of the Truman and Eisenhower admin-istrations of the 1940s and early 1950s. This is not to say that film-musicwriting was absent - it was far from so - but it lacked as, Miller Marks has


observed, a strong critical impulse: cthe literature expanded impressively...[though] retrospective views and scholarly works were few in number'(Miller Marks: 1997, 18).

In Britain, by contrast, a few more critically guided accounts did appearand, interestingly, by musicologists. Frederick Sternfeld and Hans Kellerpublished a selection of pieces both on film music generally and specificexaminations of its use in certain films (Keller: 1947; Sternfeld: 1947a,b,1951). The choice of generally film-related journals reveals the institutionaldisapproval shown by musicology to the study of film music during thistime. Even a respected figure in musicology did not, for the most part, pub-lish these articles on music in journals of music, and this situation contin-ued in much the same fashion for the next forty years.

The Technique of Film Music, published in 1957 by Roger Manvell andJohn Huntley, did little to change the pattern of understanding of filmmusic even if its approach differed from what preceded it. Once again, it setout the case for film music, its history and mechanics but not its experien-tial, cultural, or psychological underpinnings. This is something that wasnot considered at any great length until the work of Claudia Gorbman inthe 1980s, and her writing paved the way for a stream of highly invasiveexaminations of the function and effects of film music on the spectator.

Gorbman's Unheard Melodies and Suture Theory

Probably the most-cited work on film music criticism nowadays, ClaudiaGorbman s Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music was published in 1987.It had, however, appeared in various guises before this date, growing outof the literary criticism Gorbman had been educated in as well as herdoctoral thesis (Gorbman: 1987). Although this work had forebears in the1980s (Brown: 1980; Rosar: 1983; Bruce: 1985), the theories that Gorbmanembraced in order to explain the effects of the musical soundtrack stoodapart from what came before and paved the way for a series of studiesmotivated more by the psychological, semiotic and psychoanalytic effectsof the film score.

'Suture theory1, first outlined by Jacques Alain Miller, the son-in-law ofJacques Lacan, describes the point at which the subject enters into language.In film, subject-positioning and the creation of subjects are strongly affectedby the tenderizing process of the underscore, which smoothly gels subjectpositions together and connects the audience with the narrative, persuading'them to occupy the various fictional positions called forth by the film: thuscoercing the spectator into becoming part of the film. Suture theories

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describe how processes in the film draw in spectators and stitch up gapsthat are created between these varying positions. These gaps are closed up -or sutured together - by the language (or music) used to signify the subjectposition in question. As a result, suture theories explain how meaning isenveloped by a series of veiling devices. It is this aspect that attracted theattention of Gorbman and subsequent writers to the classical Hollywoodunderscore and to the way that it helped in the construction of subjectpositions in film.

Gorbmans thesis deals with the idea that film music operates in the con-scious background of the film audiences mind: 'that gray area of secondaryperception least susceptible to rigorous judgement and most susceptible toaffective manipulation' (Gorbman: 1980,183). Like the claims of the suturetheories above with regard to language, Gorbman claimed that the classicalHollywood film score is used as a way of directing the audience emotion-ally as well as politically and socially. It places characters within the frame-work that was populist American society at the time of filming and,significantly, it does so in a way that its modus operandi are not noticed inthe process, since the film scores existence serves to suture the gap createdby cinemas partial and constructed make-up:

Music removes barriers to belief; it bonds spectator to spectacle, itenvelops spectator and spectacle in a harmonious space. Like hypnosis,it silences the spectators censor. It is suggestive; if its working right, itmakes us a little less critical and a little more prone to dream .. . Filmmusic is at once a gel, a space, a language, a cradle, a beat, a signifier ofinternal depth and emotion as well as a provider of emphasis on visualmovement and spectacle. It bondsf.] (Gorbman: 1987, 55).

Because musics location and its meaning are hard to pinpoint but becauseits presence is widespread, Gorbman argued that referential musical clichesbuilt up around certain musical phrases, styles, gestures or sequences. Theabsorption, regurgitation and interpretation of these referential cliches is,for Gorbman, key to the guiding purpose of the orchestral underscore andthe means by which it can suture sequences together and fill in the gaps leftby the partial narrative of the camera. '[Music] greases the wheels of thecinematic pleasure machine by easing the spectators passage into subjec-tivity' (Gorbman: 1987,69) and in doing so, it engages the audience in add-ing to (and changing) what they see and hear. The orchestral underscorewields a good deal of power in the narratographic strategies deployedwithin film because music can support and affect other components within


the narrative; it can add significance to a scene and it can alter significantlywhat we see without becoming the dominant narrative focus at thatmoment.

Imagine a scene in which we see a cornfield on a sunny day, whose cropis ready to harvest, gently swaying in the breeze. The visual clues give notonly the impression of peace and tranquillity but also of safety. Add to thisa high-string pedal or a low pulsating figure in the musical underscore -perhaps also with the addition of dissonance - and a sense of impendingdanger is immediately suggested. In spite of the lack of visual clues, webelieve in the underscore without question; we assume it to be informingus of the films truths. This is partly because the musical figure of a high-string pedal or a low pulsating bass has come to signify danger, tension orsomething unexpected and when it is used, it usually refers to somethingwhich does then subsequently occur. In other words, we have learned the'truth' of such musical clues. As a result, a film score, capitalizing on thisbank of musical references, may afford a strong sense of truth-value toa film and successfully manipulate a captive audience.

The way we understand and interpret this information conveyed in themusic is more direct and immediate than visual or spoken references bothof which are less immediately comprehensible and more open to questionand doubt. A voice-over or explanatory onscreen note could convey thesame information, but it would appear less visceral and more disembodiedfrom that which it is explaining and would thus become a trite and evenironic comment on the scene in question. Music, by contrast, connectsdirectly to the thing being explained and, therefore, can seem to reveal themeaning of a naturally rich sequence or scene more immediately.

Gorbmans psychologically perceptive comments on the thoroughlymanipulative power of the underscore opened the way for further rigorousstudies of the effects of film music. Caryl Flinn's 1992 book Strains of Utopia,in particular, suggested that music in classical Hollywood cinema invokeda sense of Utopia, promoting a return to a kind of child-like innocencethrough the use of the style of late romantic European orchestral music,which she views as inherently nostalgic. In doing so, it was free to 'commit'an array of ideologically motivated 'crimes', since in this state of innocence,the audiences mind is more susceptible to manipulation through a dulledcritical capacity.

A forebear of Flinn is the work of Mary Ann Doane, a suture theoristwhose claim that 'music marks a deficiency in the axis of vision (Doane:1988,85) in Hollywood cinema, helped to lead to a broader consideration of

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film music and theory (see Doane: 1980). Doane focused on the 'Women'sfilms' of the 1940s which played on the sensibilities of war-time womenwho, without their husbands or fiances, entertained themselves with melo-dramas at the pictures the narrative themes of which chimed with (or con-structed) their own experiences or desires and heartbreak.

Doane regards the classical Hollywood film score as filling what LawrenceKramer termed, 'a medium specific lack' (Kramer: 1995, 112). For Doane,this lack is the emotional content that is absent from the deliberately (emo-tionally) restrained 'women's films' under discussion:

Desire, emotion - the very content of the love story - are not accessi-ble to a visual discourse but demand the supplementary expenditureof a musical score. Music takes up where the image leaves off - whatis excess in relation to the image is equivalent to what is in excess ofthe rational (Doane: 1988, 97).

Music in these films acts as a Voice' and outlet for the repression of femaledesire. For Kramer, however, this lack resided in the very apparent artificialnature of film for which music was recruited to provide a sense of narrativedepth against the alienating flatness of the cinema screen. His commentsare clearly derivative of Doane s work.

Post-Gorbman Accounts

Although the accounts of film musicology up to this point paved the wayfor a richer understanding of music in cinema, much less had been writtenabout films that do not use the orchestral underscore in a conventionalmanner. The interest in film music and the means of discussing it hadbecome as tight and hierarchical as the structures of more traditional musi-cology in terms what was being considered. The demands from criticalmusicology became those of explaining musical usage in film, of its signifi-cation and functioning outside of the concert-hall; public domain music,in particular, would necessitate this.5

As James Buhler and David Neumeyer have noted, 'film theory andinterpretative practice... profited greatly from the cultural snobbery of theAmerican academy' (Buhler and Neumeyer: 1994, 364). This profit mani-fested itself in the freedom extended obliquely to scholars of film duringthe 1960s and 1970s. Excluded from the mainstream of academia, filmstudies was forced into exploring traditionally unorthodox areas of research


using a cocktail of, if not illicit, then dubious critical methods in the eyes oftraditionalists. As well as marginalizing film studies as an opaque hybrid,the academy was extremely wary of approaches that considered mixedmedia. Until recently, film music, as an object of study, occupied a position,first and foremost, within music (though largely through exponents indepartments of literature and film). And, even where its consideration wasfully contextualized within the film-work, rarely did this considerationventure away from an examination of specially-commissioned orchestralunderscores. Popular music or appropriated (pre-existing) classical musicwas rarely considered.

This latter group, though invoking cultural references in the same way asthe composed underscore, does so in a more conspicuous manner. This isbecause the music can be recognized from its versions and incarnationsoutside of the film and is deployed within a film often for this very reason.Unlike the composed score, the compiled score draws its justification ina film, from the specific references that it draws into a film. This approachto film scoring has benefited from recent scholarship which is expandingthe field of film musicology.

An important 'post-Gorbmarf contribution to this type of scholarship isAnahid Kassabians book Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contem-porary Hollywood film music, published in 2001. This book puts forwardthe idea that film music creates an identification between the film and theaudience. The type of identification that is created depends, according toKassabian, on the type of music used. Broadly, she proposes two types ofidentification - affiliating and assimilating respectively - and they refer tothe direction, scope and function of the identification created:

[cjomposed scores, most often associated with classical Hollywoodscoring traditions, condition what I call assimilating identifications.Such paths are structured to draw perceivers into socially and histori-cally unfamiliar positions, as do larger scale processes of assimilation...compiled scores [however] offer what I call affiliating identifications,and they operate quite differently from composed scores. These tiesdepend on histories forged outside the film scene, and they allow fora fair bit of mobility within it. If offers of assimilating identificationstry to narrow the psychic field, then offers of affiliating identificationsopen it wide. This difference is, to my mind, at the heart of filmgoers'relationships to contemporary film music. (Kassabian: 2001, 2-3)

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Kassabian introduced a new idea into film musicology and suggested thatapproaches until then had lacked such distinctions. She intensified this,stating that scholarship on film music had lacked critical variety:

[T]here is far too little work in the area. Film music scholarship hasprivileged mass-market U.S. films of the first half of the twentiethcentury, from silents to 'classical Hollywood.' (Kassabian: 2001, 3)

More recently, the impulse to carve out a critical space for the consider-ation of pre-existing music has spawned further study. Changing Tunes:The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film (Powrie and Stilwell: 2006) offerscompeting ways in which this use of music might be approached. Theessays in this book are grounded more firmly in practical accounts of themusics function than in developing new theories. This tendency groupstogether recent writing, in which a move towards, what Paul Strohm hastermed engaged or practical theory' (Strohm: 2000, xi), which seeks tokeep the object of its elucidation in mind, marks the focus of inquiry. Like-wise, Terry Eagleton (Eagleton: 2003, 2) has claimed recently that the eraof'high theory'6 has come to a close and with it, the sense of critical fresh-ness and abstraction that it engendered. What followed this period was oneof contextualization - one of absorption of those groundbreaking ideasthat had preceded the current critical scene and an interpretation andapplication of them. How musicology will develop to embrace such con-textualization is, as yet, open.

Notes

1. Annette Davison, Hollywood Theory, Non-Hollywood Practice: Cinema Soundtracksin the 1980s and 1990s, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.

2. The Edison Kinetogram was published in 1910 hy Edison Films, London. It was ashort-lived periodical on film music.

3. Modern Music: A Quarterly Review was published from 1924 to 1946 in New York,originally under the title The League of Composers Review and then, from April 1925 until1946, as Modern Music. It promoted the cause of new trends in twentieth-century musicand offered a column entitled 'On the Film Front' devoted to developments in film scoring.Regular contributors to this column included George Antheil and Paul Bowles.

4. Hollywood's adoption of a kind of distorted musical modernism as part of thehorror genre only reinforced the strongly anti-modernist characteristics of this period ofHollywood cinema, because it deployed dissonance as a reference to the malign, horrific


and uncomfortable and thus invoked the commoditized referential cliches that modernismattempted to counter.

5. 'Public domain music' refers to music already in existence which is appropriated intothe film, in some cases, because of its existing fame.

6. For Eagleton, 'high theory' refers to the ideas of key thinkers of the twentieth century,such as Althusser, Barthes, Derrida, Bourdieu and Said.

MetamusicMetamusic in the Age of Metamediation

Holly Tessler

Introduction

This chapter is about some of the potential consequences of the inter-relationships and tensions between music, media and technology in thedigital age. In 1964 Marshall McLuhan famously wrote 'the medium is themessage'.1 By this he meant that we are as affected by how we get informa-tion as we are by the information itself. When this idea is applied specifi-cally to music, McLuhans point is self-evident. Take the example of Nirvanas1991 anthem Smells Like Teen Spirit'. Its ominous, vaguely threatening gui-tar intro and raging, angry chorus heralded a sea change in popular musiccomposition style compared to the slickly produced, lyrically benign butcommercially successful power ballads of the late 1980s. By the time it wasreleased as a single, 'Teen Spirit' propelled Nirvanas album Nevermind tosales of over 7.65 million units (MTV.com, 2001).

But the reception of the 'Teen Spirit' video was decidedly different thanthe single. The dark and dystopian view of an American high school pep rallypropelled Nirvana, along with other Seattle grunge bands like Pearl Jamand Soundgarden, to the status of postmodern spokesmen for a lost gener-ation, Generation X.2 However, the so-called Grunge phenomenon fuelledin large part by the Teen Spirit' video lasted only briefly as its visual, aural,social and even fashion cues led to its rapid commodification. Mainstreamfilms such as Singles (1992) and Reality Bites (1994) and televisions 1994

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47


launch of the ubiquitous sitcom Friends sought to capitalize on a family-friendly, anaemic version of the overeducated, under-utilized, disillusioned,twenty-some thing Grunge slacker.

The Nirvana Unplugged CD and video, released posthumously after KurtCobains 1994 suicide had an entirely different reception yet again. The low-key, subdued performance, seen and listened to in retrospect, seems to tele-graph to its viewers Cobains troubled emotional state. Gone was the angstand rage of Grunge, in its place an eerie and placid performance by a pal-pably frail Cobain. Similarly, Tori Amoss 1992 cover of'Smells Like TeenSpirit' - now a ballad with Amos' thin, fragile voice complemented only bypiano - suggests not an anthemic rallying cry for a generation but insteada quiet, resonant elegy for people who cannot speak for themselves. It is notunreasonable to believe that Amos, a high-profile supporter of several dif-ferent women's aid charities, deliberately intended just such a connection.

The same song heard and viewed in these very different milieus pro-duced, and continues to produce, dramatically different effects on us, thelisteners and viewers. This is at the heart of McLuharis argument: how wereceive music (the medium) affects how we interpret it (the message). Butwhat McLuhan could not foresee was a dialectical twist: an accelerationtowards a kind of fusion between medium and message - global digitalconnectivity.

Albrecht, in extending McLuhan's medium-message concept, argues forthe importance of viewing music, media and technology from a 'mediaecology' standpoint, where

the emphasis [is] on the role of technology in structuring the form bywhich information is transmitted, recorded, and collectively understood.The use of the term 'ecology' suggests a concern with media not somuch as passive conduits of information but as constituting environ-ments that limit and direct what is and can be communicated.3

Using Albrecht s ecology' concept as a point of departure, I intend to arguethat an ecology' is an interactive set of relationships in which interdepen-dencies can also produce symbiosis. Returning briefly to the Nirvana exam-ple, once broadcast and mediated, 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', as a text, wasopened to interpretation. The video and Amoss cover of the song addeddeeper dimensions and further implications to the interplay between song,performer, medium and message - an inter-textuality that increased thepower of the original text almost exponentially. But what was unavailableto end-users', or consumers, in the 1990s is commonplace today: digital

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access to the ones and zeros of the recorded track. As Albrecht indicates,the tensions between media and technology have significant environmental(or ecological) impacts on the ways in which we, as a society, experienceand conceptualize music. This chapter will explore not only media, tech-nology and expression but also media, technology and commerce. Then,in the final section of the chapter, I will apply these ideas specifically to theInternet as a discrete online environment/ecology/medium, using Sawhney sconcept of meta-mediation as a point of departure.

In building on McLuhans notion, numerous scholars have created vari-ous histories (and even pre-histories) of music, media and technology. Frith,for example, has divided music technology into three stages: 1) the folkstage; 2) the art stage; and 3) the pop stage.4 In the first, or folk, stage, 'musicis stored in the body (and in musical instruments) and can only be retrievedthrough performance!5 In this phase, music serves a discrete functionwithin a civilization, passed from one generation to the next through social,religious or cultural oral traditions. Religious hymns, work songs and lulla-bies are all examples of how 'folk' music serves specific purposes within agiven culture.6

The most important characteristic of folk music is its absolute relianceon performance. So in a sense, folk music is inherently portable. That is tosay, it has very little dependence upon external instruments or devices.A mother, for instance, needs nothing more than her voice to sing a lullabyto her child. Anyone who knows the words and melody to a song can be afolk musician. But if songs are not sung, if they are not heard or learned bysuccessive generations, they will eventually die out.

This continual risk of cultural extinction disappears in Friths secondstage, 'art! Here, 'music is stored through notation. It can still only beretrieved in performance, but it also has now a sort of ideal or imaginaryexistence'.7 In the folk stage, music could be performed by anyone. But inthe art stage, music is now the domain of the literate - those who can readand write music, the professional musician. Through the act of recordingwords and music on a page, music becomes transformed. It becomes a newmedium. Music is no longer just something to be performed or heard, butnow something that can also be read and be seen. Through the invention ofmovable type, printed musical scores and sheet music travelled farther thanever previously possible across both time and space. The works of Mozart,for instance, are still performed today even though Mozart himself diedover two centuries ago.

And, according to Frith, music passed into its third stage, 'pop', when musicbegan to be 'stored on phonogram, disc, or tape and retrieved mechanically,


digitally, electronically' (p. 227). Once more, music had undergone a radicalmedia shift. In the form of recordings, music could now be transportedanywhere - to places where it was never heard before: shop floors, automo-biles, sitting rooms. Unlike 'art' music, 'pop' music no longer relied on musi-cians. Through devices such as player pianos, radios and phonograms,music could be played and heard without the need for musicians, or indeedany kind of human intervention. Music was no longer something to experi-ence, but instead something to possess - something of tangible and mone-tary value: a commodity. Yet while commodity production continues tocharacterize the popular music industry, the recording industry strugglesto retain the ways that these commodities fix their sounds. So perhaps,Friths tripartite history of music and technology demands the inclusion ofa new, fourth stage: digital meta-mediation.

Music and Mediation

Whether held to be a lullaby, an orchestral score, a 45 rpm record, or anMP3 file, the production, consumption and reception of music is invariablyinfluenced by the media and technologies surrounding it. But that is notto say technology and media are interchangeable terms. A technology is adevice, a tool, or an instrument and only becomes a medium when societyfinds specific functions and uses for it.8

Think, for example, of magnetic tape and tape recorders. Developedduring the course of World War II, tape recorders were designed to capturethe voices and spoken words of military commanders. But after the war,artists, engineers and musicians began to experiment with magnetic tapeand tape recorders. Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrete movement inFrance and the elektronische musik movement in Germany each developednew, artistic uses for tape and tape recorders. This notion of using 'foundsounds', or sounds of everyday life, such as train whistles or a slammingdoor, or indeed, creating entirely new tape-based effects such as loops andsonic collages formed the basis for what became known as 'electro-acoustic'music; but experimenting with sound through the treatment of sound car-riers could not be confined to the world of modern classical composition.Popular-music technology pioneers such as Les Paul, Sam Phillips, PhilSpector and Joe Meek all explored the limitless ways in which tape delays ordistortion could add character to the music they created. Perhaps nowherewas the marriage (or the friction) between popular music, media and tech-nology more visible than with the Beatles and Abbey Road studios. Alongwith their producer, George Martin, John Lennon and Paul McCartney

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transformed the recording studio into a new site of popular musiccomposition. Absorbing the avant-garde influences so prevalent in 1960scounterculture, Lennon and McCartney competed with each other intocreating increasing flights of fancy, resulting in technological landmarkalbums such as Revolver (1966) and Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band(1967). Popular music genres that followed, like progressive rock, dub,hip-hop, dance music and electronica, have since blurred or even eradicatedthis 'high-brow'/'low-brow' divide within the cultures of sound technology.

Media, Technology and Expression

Brian Eno has written that, 'from a classical perspective the major revolu-tions in music have been described as changes in the ways composersput notes, chords and instruments together'.9 He rightly observes that thisviewpoint omits a critical element: how listeners experience, or receive,music. This section shall focus then on the aesthetics of music, what Joneshas labelled the 'the consequences of technology for how music reachespeople and for how people reach music'.10 Drawing further from the mediaecology perspective, I will explore how the concepts of musical space or'soundscapes' impact the aesthetics of production, reception and consump-tion of music. I shall then explore the emergence of a new phase in therelationship between music makers and music consumers: the emergenceof practices that allowed music receivers to enjoy music in new ways - asre-senders of music.

Music is inseparable from the space in which it is created and in whichit is consumed.11 As Friths taxonomy of music technology demonstrates,historical and contemporary advances in technologies and media havesteadily transformed music making from participatory and communal innature to something that is consumable and inherently personalized. Bythe early decades of the twentieth century, vaudeville and music hall sing-a-longs began to yield to far more private and small-scale experiences:radio programmes, records and films. Particularly during the Depressionand war years, music (and other media) had the power to move its listenersto new emotional, if not physical, places. Songs such as Vera Lynns 'We'llMeet Again' or Judy Garland's 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' seemed to'speak' directly and personally to radio listeners and filmgoers as so manyin the audience faced the pain of wartime separation. This emphasis onsentimentality, encouraged by troubled times, was facilitated by develop-ments in sound reproduction technology. As Lahr argues: '[Frank] Sinatra'sphenomenal impact had to do not just with musical timing but the timing


of the technology that saturated the nation with sound'.12 Technologicaladvancements enabled microphones of the 1930s and 1940s to amplifysound with unprecedented clarity: 'louds' were more robust than everbefore and 'softs' such as whispers and whistles were heard without distor-tion, buzz or hiss. Crooners now had the technology (microphone) andthe media (radio and records) to sing gentle romantic ballads as if to anaudience of one in the intimate setting of their own home or to the fantas-tic fancy of a daydream within a darkened cinema.

While early twentieth-century technology resituated the musical envi-ronment from the music hall to the front parlour, 1960s music technologyexplored a more metaphysical space. The aesthetics of popular music con-verged with technology in entirely new ways as bands like the Beatles andPink Floyd experimented with what Jones has labelled 'headphone music',a type of music designed to maximize the physiological experience of music:'The feeling is one of immediate intimacy, of music coming from insideones head'.13 Psychedelic songs faded in and out, from the left channel tothe right, mixed vocals and instrumental with various tape and studioeffects, all with the intention of transporting the listener to a new musicalplace: a soundscape.

While it can be defined in many ways, in its broadest terms a soundscapeis simply an overall sound environment. It can be a musical composition oran audio effect intended to generate a specific mood or feeling. It can alsoserve an acoustic or engineering function through the development oftechnologies that can create, enhance or alter how listeners listen to sound:'Music technology affects the content of music during its creation as well asits consumption'.14

Whether through microphones, multi-channel recording, or overdub-bing, technology in its many guises has wrought tremendous change on themedia of music: its soundscapes, its environments. By the 1970s artists suchas Kraftwerk, Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream began to integrate the ideaof soundscapes into to the concept of 'ambient' music. Today, ambientmusic is commonly synonymous with 'chill out' music - quiet, soothingsounds designed to imbue its listeners with feelings of relaxation, tranquil-lity and inner peace. Ambient music is also quite often classed in same genreas New Age or even 'smooth' jazz where sounds of nature or vocal-freeinstrumental pieces are designed to soothe its listeners. However, as Enoand Buckley explain, the philosophy of true ambient music is far more com-plex: 'Ambience is defined as an atmosphere or a surrounding influence'that 'must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention with-out enforcing one in particular: it must be as ignorable as it is interesting'.15

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Toop underscores this point by further arguing how the genres 'disturbing,chaotic undertow'16 and 'Ecstasy-fuelled liberation, the very things thatcreated the need for 'chill-out rooms and quiet clubs'17 in the first instance,are often overlooked or deliberately sanitized in historical-political retell-ings of the origins of ambient music.

Technology and media each have influenced forms of musical expressionand, consequently, aesthetics through their combined capacities for trans-porting both creators of music and consumers of music to new and uniquespaces and places: vaudevilles bawdy concert hall, the romantic candlelitmilieu of Sinatras ballads, the trippy psychedelic world of the Beatles''Revolution 9' or even the metaphysical space of the music of the mind.In other words, the howy where and when of a musical soundscape hasan undeniable effect on its production, consumption and reception. Thinkabout the last time you listened to music. Were you at a concert, in a stadiumwith 65,000 other people? Were you in a club listening to a DJ? Were you ata party where there was a radio playing in the background? Were you on abus listening to your own selection of music from an iPod or mobile phone?How would your feelings about the music you were listening to change ifyour environment changed? How would the music of Radiohead differif they had started recording in the 1970s and not the 1990s? Musics aes-thetic qualities cannot be divorced from the technology that mediates it.But this is not to say technology and mediation serve only an artistic func-tion in the creation of music. In the next section, the commercial impact oftechnology and media on music will be explored.

Media, Technology and Commerce

Simon Frith defends against critics of what he has called the 'industrializa-tion of music' by writing:

What such arguments assume... is that there is some essential humanactivity, music making, which has been colonized by commerce . . .The 'industrialization of music' can't be understood as something thathappens to music but describes a process in which music itself ismade - a process, that is, that fuses (and confuses) capital, technical,and musical arguments, [emphasis original]18

Indeed, we need not look very far for contemporary illustrations of Frithspoint. On 27 June 2005, the US Supreme Court held that motion picturestudio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) could proceed in its copyright


infringement lawsuit against peer-to-peer (P2P) software developers Groksterand StreamCast Networks (manufacturer of P2P program Morpheus). Thedecision by the High Court was just the most recent in a near-decade oflitigation highlighting tensions between creators of intellectual property(artists, musicians, writers) and developers of digital media and technology.

Lawyers for MGM argued that over 100 million copies of Grokster andMorpheus' P2P software have been distributed and downloaded, resultingin billions of files shared freely between P2P users each month.19 MGMfurther alleged that of those billions of shared files, over 90 percent areheld in copyright control.20 If true,21 in artistic terms, this means creators ofpopular music (songwriters, performers, record labels) have no controlover how their work is being utilized. In legal terms, if these same artists,songwriters and record labels have not explicitly granted permission fortheir music to be traded on P2P sites, their intellectual property rights havebeen violated and they are entitled to compensation under US law. In finan-cial terms, statutory damages awarded from copyright infringement varyfrom $750-$30,000 per work and can reach $150,000 if infringement isproved wilful.22 With billions of copyrighted songs traded on P2P sites likeGrokster and Morpheus each month, the economic implications for themusic industry are truly staggering.

In a press release supporting the Grokster ruling, music publisherBroadcast Music International (BMI) President and CEO Del Bryant stated,'The Supreme Courts unanimous decision today is good news indeed forthe creative community whose work has been blatantly infringed by illegalfile-sharing networks' (BMI.com, 2005). While perhaps not a surprisingsentiment, taken in a broader historical context, however, BMIs stance onP2P becomes quite interesting.

In 1940 US broadcasters formed their own publishing company,Broadcast Music International, BMI, when ASCAP (the American Societyof Composers, Authors and Publishers) decided to double its licensing feesto broadcasters for the use of its music. Rather than pay the exorbitantincrease, radio programmers across the US decided to boycott music fromASCAP members - encompassing effectively all of Tin Pan Alley s song-writers and virtually all popular music of the day.

The boycott had two unintended consequences on music, media andtechnology. First, by losing practically all of their playlist material, radioprogrammers were forced to seek out non-ASCAP music. As Furia notes,this created national radio opportunities for musicians and genres over-shadowed by the Tin Pan Alley/ASCAP monopoly, chiefly Southern'hillbilly' music and black rhythm-and-blues music.23 The ASCAP boycott

Metamusic 747

then, unintentionally, created a broader national musical hit parade andgenerated a youth-oriented national audience for early rock-and-roll actslike Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley.

Second, in seeking to retaliate against ASCAP, what BMI representedwas a cultural transition in media dominance, moving from sheet musicto radio. The ASCAP boycott 'left Tin Pan Alley without a stage to plugits tunes while effectively creating a space on the dial that needed to befilled*.24 From a theoretical stance, the creation of BMI shifted culturalfocus away from the sound of Tin Pan Alley and towards rock and roll -and away from the dominance of the live performance business modeltowards an emphasis on the recording industry. By extension then, thetechnology and media that Grokster and Morpheus embody is simply oncemore shifting our cultural focus. This time it is moving away from tradi-tional music industry business models (such as BMI) towards more decen-tralized ones.

The intended effect of litigation against P2P providers may providelegal and financial remedy to MGM and supporters like ASCAP, BMI andthe RIAA. Legal, pay-for-play alternatives to P2P are beginning to have animpact on the behaviour of music consumers. In the past year alone, thenumber of people utilizing legal download sites like Apples iTunes hasnearly doubled - from 23 percent to 41 percent, while the number of peo-ple using free, illegitimate P2P sites is steadily declining.25

But it is likely to be the unintended consequences of the lawsuits that willhave far greater impact. In just the five years since the demise of Napster,the music industry has had to reinvent itself. Returning again to the MGMcase, the ruling will, in all likelihood, force Grokster and Morpheus out ofbusiness: which is, ostensibly, exactly what the petitioner (MGM) is hopingto achieve. But removing two of the largest P2P sites on the Internet is notthe same as removing P2P file sharing altogether. It is safe to assume thatseveral million people will not simply stop sharing files because Groksterand Morpheus are taken offline. They will invariably find a new outlet forobtaining and sharing online music. But more than this, it seems likely thatin travelling a route similar to that of the ASCAP-BMI dispute in the early1940s, we have now arrived at a point at which new kinds of music willmake their debut in the, until now, heavily policed mainstream.

Music fans can already create and listen to music on any number of tech-nological gadgets: MP3 players, mobile phones, PDAs, computers, Mini-Discs, CD players, cassette players and turntables. 'The music industry usesnew instruments and devices to do old things more efficiently or cheaply;it is musicians and consumers who discover their real possibilities!26


And what MGM has failed to take into consideration is the larger socio-industrial issue of the unintended consequences of media and technology.'This is not to say that there are no longer contradictions and strugglesin the music business, but that they can't be reduced to a simple line-up ofgoodies and baddies*27 The simple fact that millions of P2P users can anddo trade billions of files every month speaks to just how far Internet musicand technology has permeated modern culture. Shutting down one tech-nology and media outlet will invariably lead to a different mode of musicalexchange. But what is new is that new modes of exchange encourage newmodes of production.

Metamusic and Metamediation

The Internet provides a new digital milieu, or media ecology, for the waysin which the aesthetic and industrial functions of music come together.The way people produce, receive and consume music online blends intoone technologically and digitally mediated object, 'metamusic'. Sherburnedefines metamusic as cmusic about music . . . the array of versions, mash-ups, remixes, shoutouts, lyrical putdowns and experiments in genre thatcomprise the pop music universe'.28 Metamusic is no longer fixed in anytangible format. Through digital musical instruments like synthesizersand samplers, and through digital modes of transmission like the Internet,MP3 and WAV files, music is no longer something static. Creators of musiccan virtually interact with collaborators where they cannot physically interact.Music can be constructed, de-constructed, and re-constructed endlessly.Simply. Anyone using the proper computer hardware and software canbecome a musician now and interact with other musicians across anynumber of Internet sites, user groups and forums. The privileged but stillsubstantial layer of people with high-speed, home access to the Internetnow contains large numbers of people whose pleasure is to reconfigurethe music they download and share, sometimes endlessly. And in thesere-configurations, the message has become the medium.

Beyond just its aesthetic elements, metamusic functions within a uniquecommercial online environment, one that could be understood as beinga 'metamarkef, or a marketplace of clustered activity driven by consumerinterest. Sawhney writes:

The concept of metamarkets stems from a simple, yet profoundinsight - customers think about products and markets very differ-ently from the way products and markets are bundled and sold in the

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physical marketplace. This misalignment arises from the fact thatcustomers think in terms of activities, while firms think in terms ofproducts. Metamarkets are Markets in the minds of customers'.29

Of course, the relationship between manufacturers of correlated goodsand services is nothing new to industry, the music industry included. Frithdetails a series of mergers, partnerships and alliances dating back to the1920s that sought to commodify music in entirely new ways. RCA andGeneral Motors, for instance, formed the GM Radio Corporation in 1929'to exploit the possibilities of car radio'.30 Where metamarkets differ, how-ever, is in the notion of the consumer-derived marketplace. That is, a marketis determined not through interplay of business and industry but one thatis activity based, through user interaction and exchange. Sawhney hasstated that:

The essential conditions for a viable metamarket are:

• A rich set of related activities within the activity cluster• Significant demands on consumer time and involvement• A need to aggregate information from many fragmented sources• A need to deal with firms spanning multiple industries• Ineffective middlemen and unpleasant customer-buying

experience

He further extends the metamarket concept to include 'metamediaries' - or'trusted third parties that provide a single point of contact between a com-munity of customers and a community of suppliers'.31 While it may seem acomplex idea, metamediaries cover the middle ground between Internetportal sites and business aggregators. Portal sites are simply starting pointsfor acquiring online information. Google, Yahoo!, MSN or even the homepage of ebay.com are portal sites. They provide an Internet user with ameans of searching for any kind of information, generic or specific. Internetaggregators bundle a series of industry-specific and industry-driven onlineproducts and services. For instance, the Web site realmusicgroup.net pro-vides links to a series of music-oriented sites that provide concert tickets,sheet music, online piano lessons, cassette duplication and independentartist homepages. It is unlikely that any one person would utilize all of theseservices, certainly not at one time. Moreover, realmusicgroup.net wouldappear to be an independent site with little or no clear affiliation with anywell-known industry manufacturers or organizations.


Metamediaries, by contrast, serve generally similar functions to bothportals and aggregators, but retain a distinctive niche in the online world.Perhaps the most prevalent metamediary is Amazon.coms zShop service.The Amazon.com website explains the zShop concept as being a 'home totrusted retailers and independent third-party sellers who showcase theirproducts alongside Amazon.coms own huge selection* (Amazon.com,2005). In this instance, the metamarket, the activity-driven event wouldsimply be 'shopping'. In addition to utilizing all of Amazons own features,like the option to read product reviews, access gift registries, receive per-sonalized product recommendations and the like, an online consumercan also buy an array of goods from any number private, third-party sellersthrough the primary Amazon.com Web site, using her Amazon.comaccount, payment and shipping details. Instead of going to one site to pur-chase books, another for clothing, and a third for home furnishings, allshopping could be completed through the Amazon page.

An example of a music-specific metamediary is Synthopia.com (2005),dedicated to the electronica music genre. Synthtopia provides twenty-onedifferent users forums, news, music reviews, gear* reviews, articles, inter-views, links to artist homepages, an auction finder, a download database ofsoftware and audio samples and loops as well as an interactive calendardetailing upcoming electronica events around the world.

If the concepts of metamusic and metamediation are considered in tan-dem, the theoretical implications for a so-called networked environmentare significant. Firstly, it demonstrates the overtly (and overly) deterministicnature of McLuhans idea, that the medium is the message. Clearly, if meta-music and metamediation show nothing else, they show the undeniabledominance of human creativity and agency over technology. Technology -and its associated media - do not operate on some higher, independentlevel to human creativity, but instead, as Taylor writes, function in 'social,historical, and institutional webs'.32 In other words, technology does not'trickle down' from industry and government, forcing its will on humanity.Technology is dependent on the social, political and cultural milieus of itsage. This is a sentiment echoed by Albrecht who argues that media ecologyis then a far better theoretical stance to take, as it allows for multi-facetedanalyses of the operational dynamics between technology, media, socialinteraction and 'perception, thought, feeling and expression.33

Second, it could be argued that through the idea of the Internet as ametamediated environment, its true democratizing power is most readilyevident. At first glance, it would appear as if musicians - both as creatorsand consumers of metamusic - can act as autonomously as they like with-out the commercial, political or social pressures and restrictions of the

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terrestrial world. But is the Internet really an egalitarian milieu, placingtechnology, media, economy and human agency on equal footing? AsTheberge argues, 'The exact nature of the manufacturer/user relationshipvia networking is not easy to define... Whether these [types of interactions]represent the power of consumers to participate directly in the evolution oftechnology or are simply good marketing strategies on the part of manu-facturers is a matter of interpretation.34 Just as media ecology depressurizesthe stringent, deterministic nature of McLuhans media-message stance,metamediation allows for the unpacking of overly simplistic notions of theInternet as being a 'great democratized. That realistically, tensions betweenaesthetics and commerce exist in the virtual world, just as they do in theterrestrial one.

What has changed, however, is that consumers can now act on music inways that far exceed the magnetic tape experiments of the 1950s or thesequencer-sampler aesthetic of the 1980s and 1990s. The emergence of newmodes of music through unfettered access and experimentation remains asource of power if not yet profit for formerly disenfranchised 'consumers':if popular music still predominantly flows 'top-down, metamediationencourages lateral or horizontal exchanges that extend beyond its temporalor even novelty value as a new way of doing consumer-oriented Internetmusic business.

Conclusion

To reiterate then, Friths three stages of music technology - folk, art andpop - have blended into this new ephemeral, metamediated environmentto create what I suggest could be considered a fourth stage in the evolutionof music: the digital stage. In the digital stage, music, media and technologyfuse into an environment created through literal and figurative networksand hubs. The electronic networks and hubs that link one computer toanother, from one server to another, also link the users of those computerstogether in social groupings that are no longer bounded by geographicspace but, instead, digital or ephemeral space. Sawhney s e-business argu-ment for metamediaries is that they occupy a point between cognitivespace and the online marketplace. That simply by rethinking businessmodels from a new (consumer) perspective can profoundly alter how thatnew milieu operates. But extended beyond the boundaries of e-business,metamediation serves as a compelling means of exploring the complexitiesof technology, creativity, media and music. What metamediation allows usto do is to put a humanized spin on technology, which in turn, releasesus from systemic technophobia. Think what could have been, for instance,


if the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) had fully consid-ered the power of P2R If instead of litigating Napster into oblivion it hadworked with Napster developers to harness the collective power of havingmillions of the most avid music fans in one place, many of whom arewilling and able to become new music creators. Metamediation invites thecollaboration of commerce and aesthetics in the same way metamusicinvites collaboration between creativity and technology.

Notes

1. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (3rd edn).London: MIT Press, 1995, p. 7.

2. D. Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. New York: St. MartinsPress, 1991.

3. R. Albrecht, Mediating the Muse: A Communications Approach to Music, Media,and Cultural Change. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc., 2004, p. 56.

4. S. Frith, Performing Rites. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 226-7.5. Ibid., p. 226.6. Ibid.7. Ibid., p. 227.8. Albrecht (2004).9. Eno (2001) in M. Prendergast (ed.), The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Moby:

The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age. London: Bloomsbury, 2003, p. xi.10. S. Jones, Rock Formation: Music, Technology and Mass Communication, Foundations

of Popular Culture, Vol. 3. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications, 1992, p. 213.11. Eno in Prendergast (2003), p. xi.12. Lahr (1997) cited in Albrecht (2004), p. 150.13. Jones (1992), p. 159.14. Ibid., p. 7.15. Eno cited Buckley n.d.16. D. Toop, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds.

London: Serpents Tail, 1995, p. 36.17. Ibid., p. 37.18. S. Frith, 'The industrialization of popular music', in J. Lull (ed.), Popular Music and

Communication. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications, 1992, p. 50.19. US Supreme Court ruling (2005), p. 5.20. Ibid., p. 4.21. Grokster and Morpheus dispute the methodology and procedural means of how

this statistic was reached, US Supreme Court ruling, p. 4.22. M. Evans, 'End of the peer-to-peer show?', Guardian, (4 July 2005), Media 14.23. P. Furia, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of Americas Great Lyricists. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1992.

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24. Albrecht (2004), p. 158.25. Evans (2005), p. 14.26. Frith (1992). p. 70.27. Ibid., p. 69.28. P. Sherburne, 'Splitting bits, closing loops: Sound on sound', Leonardo Music

Journal 13 (2003), 79.29. M. Sawhney, Meet the Metamediary (1999), Available at http://www.siliconindia.

com/Magazine/fullstory.asp?aid=EHF490345954 (accessed on 15 May 2005).30. Frith (1992), p. 56.31. Sawhney (1999).32. T. Taylor, Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture. New York: Routledge,

2001, p. 31.33. Albrecht (2004), p. 59.34. P. Theberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology.

Hanover, New Hampshire and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1997, pp. 141-2.

Internet Sites

Amazon.com zShops: http://www.amazon.com/zshops (accessed on 16July 2005).

Ebay.com: http://www.ebay.com (accessed on 16 July 2005).Google.com: http://www.google.com (accessed on 16 July 2005).MSN.com: http://www.msn.com (accessed on 16 July 2005).MTV.com: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1451583/20011220/nullnir-

vana.jhtml (accessed on 16 July 2005).RealMusicGroup: http://www.realmusicgroup.net (accessed on 16 July

2005).SynthTopia: http://www.synthtopia.com (accessed on 16 July 2005).Yahool.com: http://www.yahoo.com (accessed on 16 July 2005).

http://www.siliconindia.com/Magazine/fullstory.asp?aid=EHF490345954


http://www.amazon.com/zshops

http://www.ebay.com

http://www.google.com

http://www.msn.com

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1451583/20011220/nullnirvana.jhtml

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1451583/20011220/nullnirvana.jhtml

http://www.realmusicgroup.net

http://www.synthtopia.com

http://www.yahoo.com

Notes on the Contributors

Dave Allen began his 'adult' life as a professional pop musician in the late1960s. After a few years of resounding failure, he resumed an academiccareer shifting from art and design teaching through media, film andcultural studies. He has continued to play music semi-professionally but formany years his research focus was on visual arts pedagogy. In recent years hehas begun publishing on popular music including papers on the WoodstockFestival and British blues in the 1960s.

Mike Alleyne is an associate professor in the Department of RecordingIndustry at Middle Tennessee State University. He is a former broadcasterand has also created original music for television and radio in Barbados.His research has largely focussed on commercialization and cultural repre-sentation in Caribbean popular music and Black British music, while hehas also taught in Sweden on the history of the album cover. He has writtenseveral book chapters and his articles have been published in journals suchas Popular Music & Society and Small Axe.

Dana Anderson is a scholar/artist who writes about film and photography,mostly from a Zen inspired Phenomenological perspective. His scholarlywork has appeared in History of Photography, the Millennium Film Journal,Film Quarterly and Environmental Ethics.

Marcela Antelo practices psychoanalysis in Brazil. She trained in philosophyand psychology at the Argentine College of Philosophy and the NationalUniversity of Buenos Aires, where she also lectured on both disciplines.More recently she has taught courses on film theory at both undergraduate

755

756 Notes on the Contributors

and graduate levels. Her most recent academic monograph is entitled 'Theuncanniness of the technical object'.

Alexander Binns is Lecturer in Music at the University of Hull, where he isalso Head of Graduate Studies in Music. His primary research deals withmusic in film and especially the ways in which musical categories inflectand shape our understanding of culture. He is also interested in opera and,more generally, music as an interdisciplinary phenomenon; in its relationswith space and geography, in particular the city, and its intersection withliterature and visual culture.

James Buhler is an associate professor of music theory at The University ofTexas at Austin. He is currently working on a book-length study of how dis-courses on sound and music exhibition practices shaped the cultural formof early cinema. In addition to being one of the editors of Music and Cin-ema, he is also co-author with David Neumeyer and Rob Deemer of Musicand Film Sound, a textbook to be published by Oxford University Press.

Thomas R Cohen lectures at SUNY Plattsburgh. He has published essayson documentary cinema and on the history of broadcasting. He is currentlycompleting a book on musical performance in documentary cinema.

Felicity Colman is Senior Lecturer in Film & Media Studies in the Schoolof History of Art & Design at Manchester Metropolitan University. Herresearch areas include creative audio-visual philosophy, and critical theory.Felicity is the author of Deleuze And Cinema: The film concepts (BergPublishers, forthcoming).

Corey K. Creekmur is an Associate Professor of English and Film Studiesat the University of Iowa, where he also directs the Institute for Cinemaand Culture. He has published essays on film and music, early AfricanAmerican film, popular Hindi cinema, and film genres. His forthcomingworks include a study of gender and sexuality in the western, and a volumeon the international film musical.

Jon Dale is currently researching post-punk, industrial and noise music atThe University of Adelaide, where he also teaches English and Media,and engages in education research. He writes on music and culture forCamerawork, Dusted, Earplug, Paris Transatlantic, Plan B, Signal to Noise,Uncut and the Wire. He has taught in Communication and Cultural Studiesat University of South Australia, and from 2005 to 2007 was an RA for

Notes on the Contributors 757

Australia's Cultural Research Network. He also makes music, organizesgigs, self-publishes in both print and online form, and runs a record labelin his spare time.

James Deaville is Associate Professor in Music, School for Studies in Art &Culture, Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). Among other publications,he has contributed the following articles on television news music to essaycollections: 'The Sounds of American and Canadian Television News after9/11: Entoning Horror and Grief, Fear and Anger' to Music in the Post-9/11World (Routledge, 2007) and 'Selling the War in Iraq: Television News Musicand the Shaping of American Public Opinion to Floodgates: Technologies,Cultural (Ex)Change and the Persistence of Place (Peter Lang, 2006)

Ruth Doughty is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Portsmouth University,School of Creative Arts, Film and Media. She has published articles thatexplore racial identity in contemporary European film and is co-authoringa book on Film Theory. She is currently working on the topic of nationalguilt in a post 9/11 context.

Laurie N. Ede is a Principal Lecturer in Film and Media at the Universityof Portsmouth. He has written a number of articles on British film history,notably in areas of film aesthetics. He is currently completing a book on thehistory of British film design. Laurie s interest in film sound has been influ-enced by his work as a musician. Away from University, he occasionallyperforms as a singer at blues and soul festivals.

Jochen Eisentraut has lectured at the universities of Bangor and Liverpooland has worked extensively as a composer for film, television and theatrefor over 20 years. He has made two ethnographic documentaries in Braziland completed a doctorate on musical accessibility in 2006. He is also activeas a jazz performer and composer.

Tristian Evans graduated with first class honours at Bangor University in2005 before embarking on an MA analysing Steve Reich's Three Tales. Hisdoctoral thesis, supported with funds provided by the Art sand HumanitiesResearch Council, explores relationships formed between minimalist musicand other media, particularly in the works of Philip Glass and Steve Reich.Along with Pwyll ap Sion, Tristian helped organize the first ever Interna-tional Conference on Music and Minimalism at Bangor University, heldduring August-September 2007, and established the Society of MinimalistMusic.


Prof Dr. Barbara Flueckiger has designed the sound tracks for more than30 feature films, including work with the Swiss directors Markus Imhoof,Daniel Schmid and Claude Goretta, with Lea Pool in Canada and SilvioSoldini in Italy. She studied German and film theory in Zurich and Berlin.She is a lecturer on the theory and practice of film design at various univer-sities in Switzerland and the Germany and has completed research projectson 'Sound Design, 'Digital Cinema and computer generated' Visual Effects.She is the author of 'Sound Design. Die virtuelle Klangwelt des Films'(Schiiren, 2001, 3rd edn, 2006), which has established itself within theGerman-speaking countries as a standard textbook. Currently she holdsa position as a guest professor at the University of Zurich.

Maureen Furniss PhD is on the animation faculty at California Instituteof the Arts, where she teaches courses on animation history, researchtechniques, and experimental production. She is author of Art in Motion:Animation Aesthetics and The Animation Bible: The Art of Animation fromFlipbooks to Flashy and founding editor of Animation Journal.

Graeme Harper is a professor and director of the National Institute forExcellence in the Creative Industries™ (NIECI) at Bangor University, UK,and an Honorary Visiting Professor in the School of Art, Design and Mediaat the University of Bedfordshire. An elected Fellow of the Royal Societyfor the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) he isalso a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He is co-director of theEuropean Cinema Research Forum and he is co-editor (with Dr OwenEvans) of the journal Studies in European Cinemay and associate editor(with Prof Simon Roodhouse, editor and Debi Hayes, associate editor) ofthe Creative Industries Journal and editor-in-chief of New Writing. He holdssuch awards as the National Book Council Award (Australia) for NewWriting.

Dr. Su Holmes is reader in Television at the University of East Anglia.She is the author of 'British Film and TV in the 1950s' (Intellect, 2005);Entertaining TV: The BBC and Popular Programme Culture in the 1950s*(MUP, 2008), and 'The Quiz and Game Show' (EUP, 2008). She hasco-edited the books Understanding Reality TV (Routledge, 2004), FramingCelebrity (Routeldge, 2006) and Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader (Sage,2007), and has published several articles on topics such as quiz shows, fameand television genre.


Peter Hutchings is Professor of Film Studies at Northumbria University,Newcastle upon Tyne. He is the author of Hammer and Beyond: The BritishHorror Film (1993), Terence Fisher (2002), Dracula (2003), The HorrorFilm (2004) and The Historical Dictionary of the Horror Film (2008). Healso co-edited (with Joanne Hollows and Mark Jancovich) The Film StudiesReader (2000) and has contributed essays on British cinema, the horrorfilm, and genre theory and criticism to numerous books and journals.

Laurent Jullier is professor of Film Studies at the University Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle. His most recent books include 'Star Wars anatomied'une saga, 'Hollywood et la difficulte daimer', and in 2007 'Le son aucinema, published by Les Cahiers du Cinema (in French and Spanish).

Stephen Keane is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at The Universityof Northampton. He is the author of Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catas-trophe (Wallflower Press, 2001 and 2006) and CineTech: Film, Convergenceand New Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Nicholas Laudadio is an assistant professor of English at the University ofNorth Carolina Wilmington where he teaches classes in popular culture,critical theory, the study of literature and technology, and writing aboutfilm and music. He is currently working on a critical study of the electronicmusical instrument in film, fiction, and popular culture called SingingMachines.

Marion Leonard is a lecturer at the Institute of Popular Music, Universityof Liverpool. She has published on a wide range of subjects relating topopular music including gender, DIY media, and cultural policy. Hermonograph Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse and Girl Powerwas published by Ashgate in 2007. She is currently working with NationalMuseums Liverpool on a popular music exhibition project.

Neil Lerner Associate professor, Davidson College, has written numerousessays on music and visual media, including studies of film scores by MaxSteiner, Dimitri Tiomkin, John Williams, and Aaron Copland. He co-edited Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music, the first set of essaysaddressing the overlap between music scholarship and disability studies.He currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals American Musicand Music, Sound, and the Moving Image.


Bruno Lessard is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Filmat York University (Canada). He has published articles and book chapterson digital technologies, new media art, cinema and philosophy, contem-porary opera, and intermedia adaptation. He is currently working onpost-cinematic environments and video games.

Stan Link is an associate professor of the Composition, Philosophy andAnalysis of Music at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he teachesmusic composition, theory, film sound tracks, and interdisciplinary topics.He has published on film music and sound in the journals Screen andAmerican Music, in Ashgates Silence, Music, Silent Music and in theforthcoming Cambridge University Press Companion to Film Music. He isactive as a composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music which is per-formed and broadcast in the US, Europe, and Australia. His compositionsare recorded on the Albany Records, Capstone, Soundworks Unlimitedand Vox Novus labels.

Neepa Majumdar is an assistant professor of English and Film Studies atthe University of Pittsburgh. She has published in Post Script, Film Analy-sis: A Norton Reader, and Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and PopularMusic and has recently completed her book, Wanted! Cultured LadiesOnly: Female Stardom and Cinema, 1930s to 1950s (University of IllinoisPress).

A. Mary Murphy has a PhD in English and teaches literature and creativewriting at The University of Winnipeg, and periodically, film and IrishStudies at Hie University of Calgary, both in Canada. Her work in filmfocuses on BioPics, national cinemas, and reviewing.

Gary Needham teaches in the media and cultural studies department atNottingham Trent University. He is the co-editor of Asian Cinemas: A Readerand Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2006) and co-editor of Queer TV(Routlegde, 2008). He is also the author of the Brokeback Mountain volumefrom the American Indies series that he also co-edits for Edinburgh Univer-sity Press. He has also written more widely on film and television includingchapters on Hong Kong musicals, American television, and disco.

David Neumeyer is Leslie Waggener Professor in the College of FineArts and Professor of Music in the School of Music, The University of


Texas at Austin. He holds advanced degrees from Yale University, and hispublished work is on music of the early twentieth century, theories oftraditional tonal music, music in film, and, very recently, music and socialdance. He is the author of The Music of Paul Hindemith (1986), a co-editorof Music and Cinema (2000) and co-author of a forthcoming textbook,Music in Film Sound.

Van Norris has been a senior lecturer in Film and Media Studies at theUniversity of Portsmouth in the School of Creative Arts, Film and Mediafor the past five years. His research areas include British and American filmand television Animation, American graphic narratives and British andAmerican television and film comedy modes, forms and performance.Previous to this tenure he also worked previously as a film reviewer andfreelance journalist. He is currently completing his PhD thesis, 'Drawingon the British Tradition: Mapping a picture of Britain through the narrativesof Mainstream Adult Television Animation from 1990 to the present day'.

Aidan O'Donnell is attached to the Centre de Recherches en LangagesMusicaux at the Universite de Paris-Sorbonne where he is completingdoctoral research on the role of guitar notation in the evolution of musicalsystems in early 17th century, Italy. He has conducted research on NinoRotas film music and on the role of diegetic music in Pasolini s cinema.He teaches in the Universite Paris 8 Saint Denis.

Des O'Rawe has been teaching Film Studies at Queens University, Belfastsince 2001. His research interests include: film aesthetics; relations betweenthe cinema and modernism; and Irish film and visual culture. He isco-editor of the Cinema Aesthetics series (Manchester University Press,with Sam Rohdie) and he recently co-edited a special issue of Screeningthe Past (Vol. 21, 2007).

Dr. Christopher Pullen is senior lecturer in Media Studies at BournemouthUniversity. He has published a number of articles on gay identity andreality television, and is the author of Documenting Gay Men: Identity andPerformance in Reality Television and Documentary Film (McFarland,2007) which explores how gay people as; teens, devoted couples, parents,and influential media producers have contributed to the progression of gayidentity within domestic arenas. He has forthcoming work on French queercinema and queer television drama, and is currently completing his second


book with the working title of Gay Identity, New Storytelling and the Media(forthcoming, Palgrave). His continuing research interest is minority iden-tity in contemporary media.

Gregg Redner is an honours graduate of the Juilliard School in New YorkCity, from which he holds a double Master of Music degree in Organ andHarpsichord. He has toured and performed throughout North Americaand Europe both as a conductor and harpsichordist. He also completed thecourse work towards a PhD in Historical Musicology from the City Uni-versity of New York. He is currently a PhD researcher in The Film StudiesDepartment at Exeter University, UK, where his dissertation involves usingDeleuzian philosophical concepts as a bridge between music and film theory.

Ronald Rodman is a Professor of Music at Carleton College in Northfield,Minnesota. He earned his PhD in Music Theory from Indiana Universityin 1992. His research interests include analysis of music in the electronicmedia, tonal theory in the 20th century, Schenkerian analysis, and musicalnarrative and signification. He has published articles for the Journal ofMusic Theory, College Music Symposium, and Indiana Theory Review,and has contributed chapters to several books on music and film. He is cur-rently completing a book on television music to be published by OxfordUniversity Press in 2008.

Jamie Sexton is lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Aberystwyth.His other research interests include experimental and cult media. He isthe co-editor (with Laura Mulvey) of Experimental British Television(Manchester University Press, 2007), editor of Music, Sound and Multime-dia: From the Live to the Virtual (Edinburgh University Press, 2007) andauthor of Alternative Film Culture in Inter-War Britain (Exeter UniversityPress, 2008).

Robert Sickels is an associate professor of American Film and PopularCulture at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Hes publishedtwo books, edited a 3 volume series on the business of entertainment, andwritten numerous articles on subjects including John Ford, Woody Allen,the Coen Brothers, and Paul Thomas Anderson. He teaches courses onboth Classical and contemporary Hollywood as well as filmmaking.

Pwyll ap Sion is senior lecturer in music at Bangor University. He read musicat Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating in 1990, then was awarded a


Vaughan-Williams scholarship to study composition at Bangor University,receiving a doctorate in 1998. He is active both as composer and musicolo-gist. His monograph on The Music of Michael Nyman (Ashgate Press) waspublished in 2007. He writes regularly for Gramophone magazine and hascomposed music for baritone Bryn Terfel, pianists Llyr Williams and IwanLlewelyn-Jones. In 2005 he was commissioned to write new music for thefirst-ever Welsh-language talkie, YChwarelwr (The Quarryman, 1935). He iscurrently working on a collected edition of Nymans writings, funded bythe British Academy's research grants scheme.

Robert Strachan is a lecturer based at the Institute of Popular Music,University of Liverpool. His research is concerned with the history, discur-sive practices and industrial contexts of popular music. He has publishedwork on documentary film, music video and independent record companies.He is commissioning editor of the journal Popular Music History and isalso involved in a variety of musical projects including co-promoting Hive,an international electronic music and visual art event.

Heather Sutherland is the postdoctoral researcher for the AHRC fundedproject, Acting With Facts: Actors Performing the Real in British Theatreand Television Production since 1990! She completed a PhD at the Com-munication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) at the University ofWestminster, London. The title of her thesis is 'Where is the Public Servicein Light Entertainment? An Historical Study of the Workings of the BBCTelevision Light Entertainment Group, 1975-87?' Heather was also a mem-ber of the research team, funded by the Arts and Humanities ResearchCouncil and led by Professor Jean Seaton, working on Volume VI of theOfficial History of the BBC

Philip Tagg (1944) is a musician and composer turned musicologist with abackground in both popular and art music. In 1981 he co-founded theInternational Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) and in1991 initiated work on the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World(EPMOW). He is an internationally recognized authority on topics likePopular Music Analysis and Music and the Moving Image, both of whichhe currently teaches at the Universite de Montreal.

Holly Tessler is completing a doctoral thesis at the Institute of PopularMusic at the University of Liverpool. Her research is concerned with howthe story of the Beatles is performed and is organized as an industrial


process. Holly is a part-time lecturer in the School of Music and has alsotaught in the Department of Media Studies at the University of CentralEngland in Birmingham. She has recently been appointed as ResearchAssistant on an AHRC-funded project on mapping music within Mersey-side. Research interests include music industries, music and technologyand music and the legal system.

Theo van Leeuwen worked as a scriptwriter and director in his nativeHolland and Australia before becoming an academic. He is now Professorof Media and Communication and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities andSocial Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney. He has publishedwidely in the areas of social semiotics, critical discourse analysis andmultimodality. His books include Speech, Music, Sound (Macmillan, 1999),Introducing Social Semiotics (Routledge, 2005), and, with co-author DavidMachin, Global Media Discourse (2007) The second edition of his ReadingImages - The Grammar of Visual Design (co-authored with Gunther Kress)was published in 2006.

William Whittington PhD is the assistant chair of Critical Studies at theUniversity of Southern California in the School of Cinematic Arts, wherehe teaches courses in audio and digital culture, adaptation, and genderand sexuality in media. Between 1993 and 1997, he served as the curator ofthe USC Warner Bros. Archives, assisting with research on various films,documentaries, music scores and books. He is currently the ManagingEditor of Spectator, the USC Critical Studies Journal of Film and TelevisionCriticism. His scholarly work includes articles and interviews on genre,sound design and digital culture. He is the author of Sound Design andScience Fiction (University of Texas Press, 2007). His website is located at:http://web.mac.com/williamwhittington.

Simon Wood Following the completion of his Masters in Music Criticism(McMaster University) Simon embarked on a busy teaching career cover-ing a variety of topics in popular culture including the history and aesthet-ics of western popular music and music for western narrative film. He hasalso taught extensively in the field of music and technology. He is currentlycompleting the research for his doctoral thesis 'Real Life Needs DangerMusic: The Aesthetics of Music in Video Games' Simon is also active asa composer, performer and producer of music for film, theatre andmultimedia. He was the in-house composer for the Southam-Interactive

http://web.mac.com/williamwhittington


Multimedia Studio, one of the first such production houses in Canada, andmore recently served as the composer/music director for the HandmadeTheatre Company.

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Filmography

2 ou 3 choses queje sais delle (Godard, 1967)2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)A bout de souffle (Godard, 1960)A nous la Liberte (Clair, 1931)Accattone (Pasolini, 1961)Acciaio (Rittman, 1933)Adventures of Robin Hood, The (Keighley & Curtiz, 1938)L%e <fOr (Bunuel, 1930)Airplane! (Zucker & Abrahams, 1980)Alam Ara (Irani, 1931)All Quiet on the Western Front (Milestone, 1930)All the Presidents Men (Pakula, 1975)Alone (Kozintsev & Trauberg, 1931)Alphaville (Godard, 1965)Always (Spielberg, 1989)Amarcord (Fellini, 1973)Amarelo Manga (Assis, 2002)American Beauty (Newman, 1999)American Graffiti (Lucas, 1973)Amityville Horror, The (Rosenberg, 1979)Annie Get Your Gun (Button, 1950)Anticipation of the Night (Brakhage, 1958)Any Old Port (Home, 1932)Aphrodite (Murphy, 1920)Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979)

819

820 Filmography

Applause (Mamoulian, 1929)Armageddon (Bay, 1998)Army of Darkness (Raimi, 1992)LArrivee (Tscherkassky, 1997-8)Art of Vision, The (Brakhage, 1961-5)Artificial Intelligence: A.L (Spielberg, 2001)A Time to Kill (Schumacher, 1996)Atlantic (Dupont, 1929)Babe: Pig in the City (Miller, 1998)Back to School (Metter, 1986)Ballet Mechanique (Leger & Murphy, 1924)Bamboozled (Lee, 2000)Band Concert, The (Jackson, 1935)Bande a part (Godard, 1964)Barbarella (Vadim, 1968)Barsaat ki Raat (Santoshi, 1960)Batman (Burton, 1989)Batman Returns (Burton, 1992)Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1924)Beat Girl (Greville, 1960)Because They're Young (Wendkos, 1960)Beetlejuice (Burton, 1988)Ben-Hur (Wyler, 1959)Berlin Horse (LeGrice, 1970)Berlin: The Symphony of a Great City (Ruttman, 1927)Berth Marks (Foster, 1929)Big Fish (Burton, 2003)Big Sleep, The (Hawks, 1946)Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The (Argento, 1970)Bird with the Glass Feathers, The (Argento, 1970)Birds, The (Hitchcock, 1963)Birth of a Nation, The (Griffith, 1915)Black Christmas (Clark, 1974)Blackboard Jungle (Brooks, 1955)Blackmail (Hitchcock, 1929)Blade Runner (Scott, 1981)Blair Witch Project, The (Myrick & Sanchez, 1999)

Filmography 821

Blazing Saddles (Brooks, 1973)Bloodlust (Fleisch, 1999)Blue Angel The (Von Sternberg, 1929)Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 1968)Boundin (Luckey & Gould, 2000)Boyz fn the Hood (Singleton, 1991)Bride of Frankenstein (Whale, 1935)Bridget Jones' Diary (Maguire, 2001)Brief Encounter (Lean, 1945)Brigadoon (Minnelli, 1954)Broadway Melody (Beaumont, 1929)Brokeback Mountain (Lee, 2005)Bowling for Columbine (Moore, 2002)Bugs Life, A (Lasseter, 1998)Burning Barn, The (Hepworth, 1900)Cabiria Itala (Pastrone, 1914)Candyman (Rose, 1992)La canzone dellamore (Righelli, 1930)Captain Blood (Curtiz, 1935)Carandiru (Babenco, 2003)Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942)Casino/Ho kongfungwan (Hin Shing, 1998)Casualties of War (De Palma, 1989)Cat People (Tourneur, 1942)Ceravamo tanto amati (Scola, 1974)Chandidas (Bose, 1932)Chappaqua (Rooks, 1966)Chariots of Fire (Hudson, 1980)Chicago (Marshall, 2002)La Chienne (Renoir, 1931)China Tea (LeGrice, 1965)Chocolat (Hallstrom. 2000)Chronique d'un Ete (Rouch, 1960)Citizen Cane (Welles, 1941)City of God (Meirelles & Lund, 2002)City Streets (Mamoulian, 1930)Clockwork Orange, A (Kubrick, 1971)

822 Filmography

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg, 1977)Coal Face (Cavalcanti, 1935)Cobweb, The (Minnelli, 1955)Cocksucker Blues (Frank, 1972)Cold Mountain (Minghella, 2003)Cold Turkey (Lear, 1971)Colour Box (Lye, 1935)Colour Cry (Lye, 1952)Colour Sonatas (Hirschfeld-Mack, 1923)Comanche Station (Boetticher 1960)Come Clean (Home, 1931)Conversation, The (Coppola, 1974)Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover, The (Greenaway, 1989)Cool Hand Luke (Rosenberg, 1967)Cottage on Dartmoor, A (Asquith, 1929)Cowboys, The (Rydell, 1972)Cracked Actor (Yentob, 1974)Cross Contours (Miller, 2005)Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Lee, 2000)Daddy-O (Place, 1958)Dances with Wolves (Kostner 1990)Dangerous Moonlight (Hurst, 1941)Danse Macabre ((Murphy, 1922)Dark Crystal, The (Henson & Oz, 1982)Dark Victory (Goulding, 1939)Darkman (Raimi, 1990)Day the Earth Stood Still, The (Wise, 1951)Days of Heaven (Malick, 1978)De Ibrigine du 21 erne siecle (Godard, 2000)Dead Man (Jarmusch, 1996)Deep Red (Argento, 1975)Deserter (Pudovkin, 1933)Destination Moon (Pichel, 1950)Diamonds are Forever (Hamilton, 1971)Die Another Day (Tamahori, 2002)Dig! (Timoner, 2004)Dil ki Rani (Sinha, 1947)

Filmography 823

D/7 Se (Ratnam, 1998)Dirty Dancing (Ardolino, 1987)Divertimento No. 1 - Winds and Changes (Walley, 1992)Divertimento No. 3 - Brush Works (Walley, 1994)Do the Right Thing (Lee, 1989)Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Mamoulian, 1931)Dr. No (Young, 1962)Dr. Zhivago (Lean, 1965)Don Juan (Crosland, 1926)Don't Look Back (Pennebaker, 1965)Dots (McLaren, 1939)Double Life, A (Cukor, 1947)Dracula (Browning, 1931)Dracula (Fisher, 1958)Dreamgirls (Condon, 2006)Dream Work (Tscherkassky, 2001)Drunken Master/Chui kuen (Yuen Wo-Ping, 1978)Dumb and Dumber (Farrelly & Farrelly, 1994)Dust (Mancevski, 2001)E la nave va (Fellini, 1983)E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (Spielberg, 1982)Earthquake (Robson, 1974)East of Eden (Kazan, 1955)Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969)Ear (Warhol, 1964)Ed Wood (Burton, 1994)Edward Scissorhands (Burton, 1990)Empire (Warhol, 1964)Empire Strikes Back, The (Kershner, 1980)Les Enfants du paradis (Carne, 1954)English Patient, The (Minghella, 1996)Enthusiasm (Vertov, 1930)Entity, The ("Fury, 1983)Entr'acte (Clair, 1924)Eve's Bayou (Lemmons, 1997)Everyone Says I Love You (1996)Exorcist 2: The Heretic (Boorman, 1977)

824 Filmography

Factura (Miller, 2003)Fahrenheit 451 (Truffaut, 1966)Family Man (Ratner, 2000)Fantasia (James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe, Norman Ferguson,

Jim Handley, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, PaulSatterfield, Ben Sharpsteen, 1940)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Gilliam, 1998)Fellini-Satyricon (Fellini, 1969)Femme est unefemme, Une (Godard, 1961)Femme mariee, Une (Godard, 1964)FefcW(Paley,2001)Fiddler on the #oo/(Jewison, 1971)Fight da Faida (Gioanola, 1994)Firestarter (Lester, 1984)Fistful of Dollars, A (Leone, 1964)Flashdance (Lynne, 1983)For A Few Dollars More (Leone, 1965)For Your Eyes Only (Glen, 1981)Forbidden Planet (Wilcox, 1956)Forbidden Zone (Elfman, 1980)France tour detour (Godard, 1977)Frankenstein (Whale, 1931)Frau im Mond, Die/The Woman in the Moon (Lang, 1929)Free Radicals (Lye, 1958/revised in 1979)Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980)From Russia With Love (Young, 1963)Gallopin Gaucho, 77ze (Iwerks, 1928)Gaslight (Cukor, 1944)General Line, The (Eisenstein, 1929)Gertrude (Dreyer, 1964)Geschichte des Prinzen Achmed, Die (Reiniger, 1926)Gimme Shelter (Maysles, Maysles & Miechell Zwerin, 1970)Glass Mountain, The (Cass, 1949)Godfather, The (Coppola, 1972)Godfather Part II, The (Coppola, 1974)Godfather Part III, The (Coppola, 1990)Going Bye-Bye! (Rogers, 1934)Golden Mountains (Yutkevich, 1931)

Filmography 825

GoldenEye (Campbell, 1995)Goldfinger (Hamilton, 1964)Gone with the Wind (Flemming, 1939)Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, The (Leone, 1966)Good Will Hunting (Van Sant, 1997)Goodfellas (Scorsese, 1990)Grand Hotel (Goulding, 1932)Great Consoler, The (Kuleshov, 1933)Grosse Stille, Die (Groning, 2006)Hallelujah (Vidor, 1929)Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)Halloween 2 (Rosenthal, 1981)Hara/ef (Zeffirelli, 1991)Hard Days Night, A (Lester, 1964)Harts War (Hoblit, 2002)Haunting, The (Wise, 1963)Helaspour moi (Godard, 1993)Hellraiser (Barker, 1987)Henry V (Olivier, 1944)Hero (Frears, 1992)High Fidelity (2000)Histoire(s) du cinema (Godard, 1988-98)Holocaust 2000 (De Martino, 1977)Hole, The (Ming-Hang, 1998)How Green was my Valley (Ford, 1941)/ Racconti di Canterbury (Pasolini, 1971)Iceman Cometh, The /Gap dungkei hap (Yiu-Leung, 1989)Ilfornaretto di Venezia (Bard [pseud. Coletti], 1939)Images (Altman, 1972)Imitation of life (Stahl, 1934)Imitation of Life (Sirk, 1959)In Bed With Madonna (Keshishian, 1991)In Old Arizona (Walsh & Gumming, 1929)Incredibles, The (Bird, 2003)India Song (Duras, 1975)Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Spielberg, 1989)Inferno (Argento, 1980)Informer, The (Robison, 1929)

826 Filmography

Informer, The (Ford, 1935)Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel, 1956)Invisible Man, The (Whale, 1933)It Came from Outerspace (Arnold, 1953)Its Alive (Cohen, 1974)Jailor (Modi, 1958)Jason and the Argonauts (Chaffey, 1963)Jaws (Spielberg, 1975)Jaws 2 (Szwarc, 1978)Jazz On A Summer's Day (Stern, 1959)Jazz Singer, The (Crosland, 1927)]yAccuse (Gance, 1919)Le Jour de Fete (Tati, 1949)Jubilee (Jarman, 1978)Jules et Jim (Truffaut, 1962)Jungle Fever (Lee, 1991)Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993)Kaleidoscope (Lye, 1935)Kameradschaft (Pabst, 1931)Khazanchi (Gidwani, 1941)King Kong (Cooper and Schoedsack, 1933)Koyaanisqatsi (Reggio, 1983)Kuhle Wampe (Dudow & Brecht, 1932)Kunku (Shantaram, 1937)Lady Be Good (McLeod, 1941)Lady is the Boss, The/Cheung moon ya (Kar-Leung, 1983)Lajwanti (Suri, 1958)Last Hero in China/Wong Fei-HungJi titgai dau nggun (Jing, 1993)Laura (Preminger, 1944)Lawrence of Arabia (Lean, 1962)Legend of Hell House, The (Hough, 1973)Lichtspiel Opus 1 (Ruttman, 1921)Lieutenant Kizhe (Feinzimmer, 1934)Life of David Gale, The (Parker, 2003)Lights of New York, The (Foy, 1928)Linear Dreams (Reeves, 1997)Lisztomania (Russell, 1975)

Filmography 827

Little Big Man (Penn, 1970)Live and Let Die (Hamilton, 1973)Lively Set, The (Arnold, 1964)Living Daylights, The (Geln, 1987)Lodger, The (Hitchcock, 1926)Lolita (Lyne, 1997)Long Goodbye, 77ze(Altman, 1973)Lord of the Rings, The: The Fellowship of the Ring (Jackson, 2001)Lord of the Rings, The: The Return of the King (Jackson, 2003)Lord of the Rings, The: The Two Towers (Jackson, 2002)Lord Jim (Brooks, 1964)Los Otros (Amenabar, 2001)M (Lang, 1931)Mddchen in Uniform (Sagan, 1931)Mamma Roma (Pasolini, 1962)Man Called Horse, A (Silverstein, 1972)Man Who Fell to Earth, The (Roeg, 1976)Man Who Knew Too Much, The (Hitchcock, 1956)Man Who Planted Trees, The (Back, 1987)Man with the Golden Arm, The (Preminger, 1955)Magnificent Seven, The (Sturgess, 1960)Mamie (Hitchcock, 1964)Mars Attacks! (Burton, 1996)Masculin feminin (Godard, 1966)Matrix, The (Wachowski, 1999)Matrix Revolutions, The (Wachowski, 2003)Mayerling (Young, 1969)Memoirs of a Geisha (Marshall, 2005)Men in Black (Sonnenfeld, 1997)Meet Me in St. Louis (Minnelli, 1944)Menace II Society (Hughes & Hughes, 1993)Menschen am Sonntag (Siodmak, 1929)Le Mepris (Godard, 1963)Message to Love: the Isle of White Festival (Lerner, 1996)Midnight Cowboy (Schlessinger, 1969)Midnight Express (Parker, 1978)LeMfBow (Glair, 1931)

828 Filmography

Min and Bill (Hill, 1930)Minority Report (Spielberg, 2002)Mirch Masala (Mehta, 1987)Miss Frontier Mail (Wadia Brothers, 1936)Mission, The (Menges, 1986)Mississippi Burning (Parker, 1988)Missouri Breaks, 77ze(Penn, 1976)Mistaken Memories Of Medieval Manhattan (Eno, 1981)Modern Times (Chaplin, 1936)Mon Oncle (Tati, 1958)Monsieur's Hulots Holiday (Tati, 1953)Monsters Ball (Asche & Spencer, 2001)Monterey Pop (Desmond, Feinsteing, Leacock, Maysles, Pennebaker &

Proferes, 1968)Moonraker (Gilbert, 1979)More American Graffiti (Norton, 1979)Mosaic (McLaren, 1965)Moulin Rouge (Luhrmann, 2001)Murder (Hitchcock, 1930)Murder, My Sweet (Dmytryk, 1944)Mutiny on the Bounty (Milsestone, 1962)Mysterious Island (Hubbard, 1929)Mysterious Island (Endfield, 1961)Mystic River (Eastwood, 2003)Naked Gun (Zucker, 1988)Naked Gun 21A: The Smell of Fear (Zucker, 1991)Naked Gun 33 1/3 : The Final Insult (Segal, 1994)Nanook of the North (Flaherty, 1922)Napoleon (Gance, 1927)Naqoyqatsi (Reggio, 2002)Nashville (Altaian, 1975)Natural The (Levinson, 1984)Never Let Go (Guillermin, 1960)New Babylon, The (Kozintev & Trauberg, 1929)Neighbors (McLaren, 1952)Nibelungen, Die (Lang, 1924)Night of the Hunter, The (Laughton, 1955)

Filmography 829

Night Mail (Wright & Watt, 1936)North by Northwest (Hitchcock, 1959)Northwest Passage (Vidor, 1940)Noticias de una Guerra Particular (Lund & Moreira Salles, 1999)La Notte (Antonioni, 1961)Now, Voyager (Rapper, 1942)Numero Deux (Godard, 1975)O Invasor (Brant, 2002)Onibus 174 (Padilha & Lacerda, 2002)O Home que Copiava (Furtado, 2003)O Bandido da Luz Vermelha (Sganzerla, 1969)O Brother Where Art Thou (Coen, 2000)O Prisioneiro da Grade de Ferro (Sacramento, 2004)O Rap do Pequeno Principe Contra as Almas Sebosas (Caldas & Luna, 2000)Of Men and Demons (Hubley & Hubley, 1969)Old Man and the Sea, The (Petrov, 1999)Omega Man, 77ze(Sagal, 1971)Omen, The (Donner, 1976)On Connait la Chanson (Resnais, 1997)On Her Majesty's Secret Service (Hunt, 1969)Once Upon a Time in America (Leone, 1984)Once Upon a Time in China/Wong Fei-Hung [Tsui] (Hark, 1991)Once Upon a Time in China Part 2/Wong Fei-Hungjiyee laam ngai dongchi

fcetm#(Hark, 1992)Once Upon a Time in the West (Leone, 1968)One + One (Godard, 1968)One Hour With You (Lubitsch, 1932)Opera (Argento, 1987)Opus III III /V(Ruttmann, 1921-4)Out of Africa (Pollack, 1985)Out of the Past (Tourneur, 1947)Outer Space (Tscherkassky, 1999)Outskirts (Barnet, 1933)Padre Padrone (Taviani, 1977)Paisa (Rossellini, 1946)Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (Demy, 1964)Paris Blues (Ritt, 1961)

830 Filmography

Par/5, Texas (Wenders, 1984)Particles in Space (Lye, 1957)passe-partout (Maxwell, 2002)Patanga (Rawail, 1949)Pee-Wees Big Adventure (Burton, 1985)Pennies from Heaven (Ross, 1981)Perfect Day (Parrott, 1929)La Petite Use (Gremillion, 1930)Pett and Pott (Cavalcanti, 1934)Phantom Menace, The (Lucas, 1999)Phenomena (Argento, 1985)Pianoy The (Campion, 1992)Piccadilly (Dupont, 1929)Pierrot lefou (Godard, 1968)Pit and the Pendulum (Gorman, 1961)Place in the Sun, A (Stevens, 1951)Plan for Great Works, The (Room, 1930)Plane Crazy (Disney & Iwerks, 1928)Planet of the Apes (Burton, 2001)Plastic Haircut (Nelson, 1964)Platoon (Stone, 1986)Player, The (Altman, 1992)Playtime (Tati, 1967)Pleasantville Gary (Ross, 1998)Poltergeist (Hooper, 1982)Porgy and Bess (Preminger, 1959)Poseidon Adventure, 77ze(Neame, 1972)Powaqqatsi (Reggio, 1988)Prenom Carmen (Godard, 1983)Primary (Drew, 1960)Princess and the Frog, The (Clements, 2009 [In production])Proposition, The (Hillcoat, 2005)Prova dorchestra (Fellini, 1978)Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960)Psycho (Van Sant, 1998)Quick and the Dead, The (Raimi, 1994)Quo Vadis? (Le Roy, 1951)

Filmography 831

Radio Kino Pravda (Vertov, 1925)Raging Bull (Scorsese, 1980)Ragtime (Forman, 1981)Raiders of the Lost Ark (Spielberg, 1981)Rain Man (Levinson, 1988)Rain People, The (Coppola, 1969)Rapsodia satanica (Oxilia, 1915)Reality Bites (Stiller, 1994)Rebecca (Hitchcock, 1940)La Regie dujeu (Renoir, 1939)Reivers, The (Rydell, 1969)Resurrectio (Blasetti, 1931)Return ofthejedi (Marquand, 1983)Revolt of the Fishermen (Picastor, 1934)Rhythm in Light, (Bute, 1935)Rhythmus21, 22, 23 (Richter, 1921-3)Riddle of Lumen, The (Brakhage, 1972)Rien que les heures (Cavalcanti, 1927)Right Stuff, The (Kaufman, 1983)Risky Business (Cassidy, 1983)Road to Life, The (Ekk, 1931)Robe, 77ze(Koster, 1953)£oma (Fellini, 1971)Roma citta aperta (Rossellini, 1945)Romance Sentimentale (Eisenstein, 1930)Romeo and Juliet (Zeffirelli, 1968)Roots (Neubauer, 1995)Rosemarys Baby (Polanski, 1968)Rosewood (Singleton, 1997)La Roue (Gance, 1922)Rouge/Yin chi kau (Kam-Pang, 1987)Run Lola Run (Tykwer, 1998)Le Sang d'un poete (Cocteau, 1932)Sanjuro (Kurasawa, 1962)Saps at Sea (Douglas, 1940)Saturday Night Fever (Badham, 1977)Sauve qui pent la vie (Godard, 1980)

832 Filmography

Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998)Sea Hawk The (Curtiz, 1940)Seabiscuit (Ross, 2003)Sebastiane (Jarman, 1976)Searchers, The (Ford, 1956)Secret Agent, The (Hitchcock, 1936)Seven Year Itch, The (Wilder, 1955)Seven Samurai (Kurasawa, 1952)Seven Swords (Hark, 2005)Shane (Stevens, 1953)Shining, The (Kubrick, 1980)Show Boat (Whale, 1936)Show Boat (Sidney, 1951)Silence, The (Bergman, 1963)Simple Plan, A (Raimi, 1998)Singing Detective, The (Gordon, 2003)Singing Fool, The (Bacon, 1928)Singin in the Rain (Kelly & Donen, 1952)Singles (Crowe, 1992)Sleep (Warhol, 1963)Sleepy Hollow (Burton, 1999)Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (Hand, 1937)Soigne ta droite (Godard, 1987)Soldier Blue (Nelson, 1970)Song of Ceylon (Wright, 1934)Song of the South (Foster & Jackson, 1946)Sorcerer (Friedkin, 1977)Soul of Cypress, The (Murphy, 1920)Sounding Ornaments (Fischinger, 1932)La souriante Madame Beudet (Dulac, 1922)Sous les Toits de Paris (Clair, 1929)South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut (Parker, 1999)Soylent Green (Fleischer, 1973)Space is the Place (Coney, 1974)Speed Merchants, The (Keyser, 1972)Spellbound (Hitchcock, 1945)Spellbound (Blitz, 2002)

Filmography 833

Spider-Man (Raimi, 2002)Spider-Man 2 (Raimi, 2004)Spook Sport (Bute, 1940)Spy Who Loved Me, The (Gilbert, 1979)Stand By Me (Reiner, 1986)La stanza delfiglio (Moretti, 2000)Statement, A (Eisenstein, Pudomn & Alexandrov, 1928)Star Is Born, A (Pierson, 1976)Star Wars (Lucas, 1977)Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (Lucas, 2002)Steamboat Willie (Disney & Iwerks, 1928)Stendhal Syndrome, The (Argento, 1996)Street of Crocodiles (Quay & Quay, 1986)Strictly Ballroom (Luhrmann, 1992)Stuck on You (Farrelly & Farrelly, 2003)StudieNr. 6 (Fischinger, 1930)StudieNr. 7 (Fischinger, 1930-1)StudieNr. 8 (Fischinger, 1931)SM£arHi7/(Ichaso, 1994)Sugarland Express (Spielberg, 1974)Summer Holiday (Yates, 1963)Sunhere Din (Nigam, 1949)Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950)Superman (Donner, 1978)Suspiria (Argento, 1977)Symphonie Diagonale (Eggeling, 1924)Symphony of Six Million (La Cava, 1932)Synchronization (Bute, 1932)THX 1138 (Lucas, 1970)THX 1138: 4EB/Electronic Labyrinth (Lucas, 1965)Talented Mister Ripley, The (Minghella, 1999)Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976)Tears of the Black Tiger (Sasanatieng, 2000)Tell-Tale Heart, The (Hurst, 1933)Tell England (Asquith, 1931)Ten Commandments, The (DeMille, 1956)Tender Game, The (Hubley & Hubley, 1958)

834 Filmography

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Cameron, 1991)Testament ofDr Mabuse, The (Lang, 1933)Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The (Hooper, 1974)Them! (Douglas, 1954)There's Something About Mary (Farrelly & Farrelly, 1994)They Go Boom (Parrott, 1929)Thief (Mann, 1981)Things to Come (Menzies, 1936)Thirty-Nine Steps, The (Hitchcock, 1935)This Is Cinerama (Cooper & Von Fritsch, 1952)This is Spinal Tap (Reiner, 1984)Three Colors: White (Kieslowski, 1994)Three Songs of Lenin (Vertov, 1934)Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, The (Lang, 1960)Thunderball (Young, 1965)Thunderbolt (Von Sternberg, 1929)Thursday Afternoon (Eno, 1984)Time Streams (Maxwell, 2003)To Die For (Van Sant, 1995)To Have and Have Not (Hawks, 1945)To What Red Hell (Greenwood, 1929)Toenende Handschrift (Phenniger, 1931)Tom Sawyer (Taylor, 1973)Tombs of the Blind Dead (De Ossorio, 1971)Tommy (Russell, 1975)Tomorrow Never Dies (Spottiswoode, 1997)Top Gun (Scott, 1986)Top Haf (Sandrich, 1935)Torn Curtain (Hitchcock, 1966)Tout va bien (Godard, 1972)Towed in a Hole (Marshall, 1932)Towering Inferno, The (Guillermin & Allen, 1974)Trafic (Tati, 1970)Triplets ofBellville, The (Chomet, 2003)Trouble with Harry, The (Hitchcock, 1955)Twelve O'clock High (King, 1949)Unaccustomed As We Are (Foster, 1929)

Filmography 835

Unconquered (DeMille, 1947)Vampyr, (Dreyer, 1932)Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)View to a Kill A (Glen, 1985)Village, The (Shyamalan, 2004)Vincent, Francois Paul... et les autres (Sautet, 1974)Virginian, The (Fleming, 1929)Vivre sa vie (Godard, 1962)Voyage to Next (Hubley & Hubley, 1974)War of the Worlds (Haskin, 1953)War of the Worlds (Spielberg, 2005)Way of the Dragon, The/Maang lunggoh kong (Sin-Lung, 1972)Wayne's World 2 (Surjik, 1993)Week-end (Godard, 1968)Weird Science (Hughes, 1985)Westfront 1918 (Pabst, 1930)What's Happening! The Beatles in the USA (Maysles, 1964)Who am I?/Ngo shut sui (Chan & Muk-Sing, 1998)Wild at Heart (Lynch, 1990)Wild West (Attwood, 2003)Wild, Wild Rose, The/Ye meigui zhi Han (Wang, 1960)Willow (Howard, 1988)Witness (Weir, 1985)Wizard ofOz, The (Fleming, 1939)Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace and Music (Wadleigh, 1970)World is Not Enough, The (Apted, 1999)Wrong Man, The (Hitchcock, 1957)X-Men (Singer, 2000)Yellow Sky (Wellman, 1948)Yojimbo (Kurasawa, 1960)You Only Live Twice (Gilbert, 1967)Young Frankenstein (Brooks, 1974)Zed and Two Noughts, A (Greenaway, 1985)Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars: The Motion Picture (Pennebaker,

2003)

Musicography

615 Music, £High Velocity' Date unknown.Addinsell, Richard, cThe Warsaw Concerto', Big Concerto Movie Themes 1972.Adler, Richard, The Gift of the Magi, 1958.Aerosmith, 'Janie's Got A Gun', Pump, 1989.Amos, Tori, 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', Crucify, 1992.Asche and Spencer, Monsters Ball (Original soundtrack recording), 2002.Aznavour, Charles, fTu te laisses aller', 1960.Bach, Johan Sebastian, Goldberg Variations, 1741.Bach, Johan Sebastian, Passion according to Saint John, 1724.Bach, Johan Sebastian, Ach Herr! was ist ein Menschenkind', Cantata 201,

Was mein Gott will, das gscheh allzeit, 1724.Bach, Johan Sebastian, Passion according to Saint Matthew, 1729.Bach, Johan Sebastian, Mass in B minor, 1737.Bambaataa, Afrika, Planet Rock, 1982.Barron, Louis and Bebe, Forbidden Planet (Original soundtrack recording),

1992.Barry, John, Dr. No (Original soundtrack recording), 1962.Barry, John, Diamonds are Forever (Original soundtrack recording), 1971.Barry, John, From Russia With Love (Original soundtrack recording), 1963,Barry, John, Goldfinger (Original soundtrack recording), 1964.Barry, John, On Her Majesty's Secret Service (Original soundtrack recording),

1969.Barry, John, The Man With the Golden Gun (Original soundtrack recording),

1973.Barry, John, Moonraker (Original soundtrack recording), 1979.

837

838 Musicography

Barry, John, Thunderball (Original soundtrack recording), 1965.Barry, John, You Only Live Twice (Original soundtrack recording), 1967.Bashung, Alain, Madame reve, 1991.Bassey, Shirley, cBig Spender', 1967.Bassiak [pseud. S. Rezvani], Le Tourbillon, ca. 1962.Beach Boys, The, Pet Sounds, 1966.Beach Boys, The, Smile, 1966.Beatles, The, 'Revolution #9' The Beatles, 1968.Beatles, The, Revolver, 1966.Beatles, The, Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967.Beatles, The, 'Yesterday; 1965.Berlioz, Hector, Symphonie Fantastique, 1830-1845.Bizet, Georges, Carmen, 1875.Bjornstad, Ketil, 'The Sea, 1995.Blue Oyster Cult, '(Don't Fear) the Reaper', 1976.Bosi, C. A., Lapartenza delsoldato, ca. 1848-59.Bowie, David, Aladdin Sane, 1973.Bowie, David, Diamond Dogs, 1974.Bowie, David, Hunky Dory, 1971.Bowie, David, 'Space Oddity', 1969.Bowie, David, The Rise and Fall ofZiggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,

1972.Branigan, Laura, 'Imagination' (Original Soundtrack from the motion

picture Flashdance), 1983.Breil, Josef Carl, 'The Love Strain Is Heard' (From the motion picture Birth

of a Nation) Filmmusik - Musik Aktuell-Klangbeispiele, 1982.Brodzsky, N, 'The Way To The Stars' Big Concerto Movie Themes, 1972.Busted, 'Year 3000', 2003.Byrds, The, 'CTA - 102', 1967.Byrds, The, Fifth Dimension, 1966.Byrd, William, 'Wounded I am', 1589.Campian, Thomas, 'Oft Have I Sighed', 1617.Captain Beefheart, Troutmask Replica, 1969.Carlos, Wendy, A Clockwork Orange (Original soundtrack recording), 1972.Carlos, Wendy, Switched-On Bach, 1968.Carlos, Wendy, Switched-On Bach II, 1974.Carlos, Wendy, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, 1969.

Musicography 839

Carpenter, John. Halloween (Original soundtrack recording), 1998.Carpenters, The, falling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft', 1977.Chordettes, The, 'Mr Sandman', 1954.Cocciante, Riccardo, 'La nostra lingua italiana', 1998.Collins, Phil, In the Air Tonight', 1981.Conte, Paulo and Pallavicini, Vito, Tnsieme a te non ci sto piu', 1968.Conte, Paulo 'Blue Tango', 1990.Costello, Elvis, 'For Other Eyes', The Juliet Letters, 1993.Crosby, David, Garcia, Jerry, Kantner, Paul, et al. (later credited to Jefferson

Starship), Blows Against the Empire, 1970.Davis Miles, Ascenseur Pour VEchafaud, 1958.Davis, Miles, In a Silent Way, 1969.De Burgh, Chris, CA Spaceman Came Travelling', 1975.De Torres, E A., and Simeoni, A, La sagra di Jarabub, M. Ruccione 1940.Deep Purple, 'Owed To "g"' Come Taste The Band, 1975.Douglas, K.C., 'Mercury Boogie' (a.k.a. 'Mercury Blues'), 1949.Dowland, John, 'Lachrymae Pavane', 1610.Dowland, John, 'From Silent Night', 1612.Duinn, Ailein, coll. by Lomax and Kennedy, Songs of Courtship, 1961.Edwin Hawkins Singers, The, 'Oh Happy Day', 1969.Elfman, Danny, A Simple Plan (Original soundtrack recording), 1998.Elfman, Danny, Army of Darkness (Original soundtrack recording), 1992.Elfman, Danny, Batman (Original soundtrack recording), 1989.Elfman, Danny, Batman Returns (Original soundtrack recording), 1992.Elfman, Danny, Beetlejuice (Original soundtrack recording), 1988.Elfman, Danny, Big Fish (Original soundtrack recording), 2003.Elfman, Danny, Darkman (Original soundtrack recording), 1990.Elfman, Danny, Desperate Housewives (Theme), 2004.Elfman, Danny, Edward Scissorhands (Original soundtrack recording), 1990.Elfman, Danny, Good Will Hunting (Original soundtrack recording), 1997.Elfman, Danny, Mars Attacks! (Original soundtrack recording), 1996.Elfman, Danny, Men in Black (Original soundtrack recording), 1997.Elfman, Danny, Pee-Wees Big Adventure (Original soundtrack recording),

1985.Elfman, Danny, Planet of the Apes (Original soundtrack recording), 2001.Elfman, Danny, Sleepy Hollow (Original soundtrack recording), 1999.Elfman, Danny, Spider-Man (Original soundtrack recording), 2002.

840 Musicography

Elfman, Danny, Spider-Man 2 (Original soundtrack recording), 2004.Elfman, Danny, The Family Man (Original soundtrack recording) 2000.Elfman, Danny, The Simpsons (Theme), 1989.Elfman, Danny, To Die For (Original soundtrack recording), 1995.Ellington, Duke, 'Koko' Take the 'A Train, 1988.Ellington, Duke, 'Blues in Orbit', 1958.Eno, Brian, Another Green World ,1975.Eno, Brian, Apollo, 1983.Eno, Brian, Before and After Science, 1977.Eno, Brian, By This River, 1977.Eno, Brian, Discreet Music, 1975.Eno, Brian, Here Come the Warm Jets, 1973.Eno, Brian, Music For Airports, 1978.Eno, Brian, Music For Films, 1978.Eno, Brian, On Land, 1982.Eno, Brian, Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy), 1974.Eno, Brian, Thursday Afternoon, 1985.Eno, Brian, and Fripp, Robert, No Pussyfooting, 1973.Eno, Brian, and Fripp, Robert, Evening Star, 1975.Flaming Lips, The, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, 2002.Fleetwoods, The, cThey Tell Me Its Summer; 1962.Ford, Mary, 'How High the Moon, 1951.Frankie Hi NRG, Tight da Faida, 1994.Franklin, Aretha, 'You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman', 1967.Frey, Glenn, 'Smugglers Blues', 1984.Gari, Frank, (a.k.a. Gari communications), 'Catch 5', 1974.Gari, Frank, (a.k.a. Gari communications), 'Eyewitness News', 1993.Garland, Judy, 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow', Wizard of Oz (Original

soundtrack recording), 1939.Gershwin, George, Porgy and Bess, 1935.Gershwin, George, 'Porgy and Bess', Selections, 1992.Glass, Philip, Einstein on the Beach, 1976.Glass, Philip, Music in Contrary Motion, 1969.Glass, Philip, Music in Twelve Parts, 1974.Glass, Philip, 'Pruit Igoe' Koyaanisqatsi (from the motion picture

Koyaanisqatsi)y 1982.Grateful Dead, The, Aoxomoxoa, 1971.

Musicography 841

Grateful Dead, The, Live Dead, 1969.Grieg, Edvard, Per Gynt, Op. 23, 1876.Hagen, Earle, Harlem Nocturne, 1942.Ham, Al, (a.k.a. Mayoham Music), 'Move Closer to Your World', 1970.Hamlisch, M., The Spy Who Loved Me (Original soundtrack recording), 1977.Hammerstein II, Oscar, and Rodgers, Richard, Oklahoma! (Original sound-

track recording) 1955.Hammerstein II, Oscar, and Rodgers, Richard, South Pacific (Original

soundtrack recording), 1958.Hancock, Herbie, Future Shock, 1983.Hancock, Herbie, Thrust, 1974.Hatch, Tony, 'Romeo and Juliet' (theme by Rota, Nino), Hit the Road to

Themeland, 1974.Hawkwind, In Search of Space, 1971.Hawkwind, Silver Machine, 1972.Hawkwind, Space Bandits, 1990.Hawkwind, Space Ritual Alive, 1973.Hendrix, Jimi, Are You Experienced?, 1967.Hendrix, Jimi, 'EXP', 1968.Hendrix, Jimi, 'Moon Turn the Tides', 1968.Hendrix, Jimi, 'Up from the Skies', 1968.Herrmann, Bernard, A Child is Born, 1978.Herrmann, Bernard, Mysterious Island (Original soundtrack recording), 1961.Herrmann, Bernard, arr. Elfman, Danny, Psycho (Original soundtrack

recording), 1998.Hermann, Bernard, The Day the Earth Stood Still (Original soundtrack

recording), 1993.Hogan, Ernest, 'All Coons Look Alike to Me', 1896.Hogan, Ernest, 'Da Coon Dat Had de Razor', 1885.Holliday, Billie, 'Gloomy Sunday' Billie Holiday - the Original Recordings,

2001.Huston, Walter, 'September Song' (from the motion picture September

Affair), 1950.Ives, Charles, The Unanswered Question, 1906.Jackson, Alan, 'Crazy "Bout a Ford Truck" (a.ka. "Mercury Blues")', 1997.Jackson, Mahalia, 'Trouble of the World' (from the motion picture Imitation

of Life), 1959.

842 Musicography

Jacobson, Al, with the Cave Dwellers, 'Sputnik', 1957.Johnson, Don, 'Streetwise', 1986.Jefferson Airplane, 'Star Track', 1968.Korngold, Erich, The Adventures of Robin Hood (Original soundtrack

recording), 1938.Kraftwerk, The Man-Machine, 1978.Kraftwerk, Trans Europe Express, 1977.Langton, Stephen; Pope Innocent III, attrib., Veni Sancte Spiritus, late 12th

Century.Liszt, Franz, 'Liebstraum' (Op. 62, no.3) Masters of Melody (Richard

Clayderman, piano), 1999.Livingston, Jay and Ray Stevens, Satins and Spurs, 1954.Lomax and Kennedy, coll, 'The Ould Piper' Fair Game and Foul, 1961.Lomax and Kennedy, coll, 'Going up Camborne Hill' Songs of Animals and

other Marvels, 1961.Lovecraft, H. P., 'Time Machine', 1967.Lynn, Vera, 'We'll Meet Again', 1939.McGuinn, Roger, 'It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)' (Original Soundtrack

from the motion picture Easy Rider, 1969.Madonna, 'Like A Virgin, 1984.Martin, George, Live and Let Die (Original soundtrack recording), 1973.Meek, Joe, / Hear a New World, 1991.Menotti, Gian Carlo, Amahl and the Night Visitors, 1990.Misunderstood, The, 'Children of the Sun', 1966.Misunderstood, The, 'I Can Take You to the Sun', 1969.Morley, Thomas 'Fire fire!', 1594.Morricone, Ennio, Marco Polo, 1982.Morricone, Ennio, Cera una volta I 'America, 1984.Morricone, Ennio, Casualties of War, 1989.Morricone, Ennio, Hamlet, 1990.Morricone, Ennio, Lolita, 1998.Morrison, Van, Astral Weeks, 1968.Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, Concerto for Clarinet (K622), 1791.Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, Sinfonia Concertante for Violin <& Viola in

E$ major, K364 (Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields), 1982.Newman, Randy, 'Let's Burn down the Cornfield', 12 Songs, 1970.Newman, Randy, A Bugs Life (Original soundtrack recording), 1998.

Musicography 843

Newman, Randy, 'Great Nations of Europe', 'The World Isn't Fair', Bad Love,1999.

Newman, Randy, 'Rednecks', Good Old Boys, 1974.Newman, Randy, Guilty: 30 Years of Randy Newman, 1998.Newman, Randy, cln Germany Before the War', 'Short People', Little Criminals,

1977.Newman, Randy, Pleasantville (Original soundtrack recording), 1998.Newman, Randy, Ragtime (Original soundtrack recording), 1981.Newman, Randy, 'God's Song', 'Political Science', 'Sail Away', Sail Away, 1972.Newman, Randy, Seabiscuit (Original soundtrack recording), 2003.Newman, Randy, Songbook Vol. 1, 2003.Newman, Randy, The Natural (Original soundtrack recording), 1984.Newman, Randy, Cold Turkey (Original soundtrack recording), 1971.Nirvana 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'; 'Lithium', Never Mind, 1991.Nirvana, Unplugged, 1994.North, Alex, 'A Streetcar Named Desire', Fifty Years of Film Music, 1973.Nyman, Michael, A Zed and Two Noughts (Original soundtrack recording),

1985.Nyman, Michael, Water Dances, 1994.O'Neal, Jamie, 'All by Myself (from the motion picture Bridget Joness Diary),

2001.Oldfield, Mike, Tubular Bells, 1973.Only Ones, Ihe, 'Another Girl, Another Planet', 1978.Palmer, Shelly, 'Brave New World', date unknown.Parker, Alan and Jake The Life of David Gale (soundtrack), 2003.Pink Floyd, 'Arnold Lane', 1967.Pink Floyd, 'Astronomy Domine', Bike,' 'Interstellar Overdrive', 'Scarecrow'

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, 1967.Pink Floyd, 'Cirrus Minor', More, 1969.Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon, 1973.Pizzicaria, P, and Balzani, R, Barcarolo Romano, 1920s.Portsihead, 'Western Eyes' Portishead, 1997.Pottier, E. and Degeyter, P, ̂ Internationale, 1871.Public Enemy, 'Fight the Power', 1989.Purcell, Henry, Dido and Aeneas, 1690.Rachmaninov, Sergei, Piano Concerto N°2, Op. 18 (Jeno Jando (piano) with

Budapest Symphony Orchestra, Gyorgy Lehel), 1988.

844 Musicography

Radiohead, 'Life In A Glasshouse' Amnesiac, 2001.Randells, The, 'Martian Hop, 1963.Reich, Steve, Four Organs, 1970.Reich, Steve, Six Pianos, 1973.Reich, Steve, The Cave, 1993.Reich, Steve, Three Tales, 1998-2002.Richie, Lionel, 'Hello', Back to Front, 1992.Riddle, Nelson, The Untouchables, 1960.Riley, Billy Lee, and his Little Green Men, 'Flying Saucers Rock & Roll'

Sun, 1957.Rockmore, Clara, The Art of the Theremin, 1992.Rodgers, Richard, Cinderella (1957 Television Cast), 1999.Rodgers, Richard, 'Manhattan, 1925.Rolling Stones, The, Their Satanic Majesties Request, 1967.Romani, F, Lib, Donizetti, G, Mus, 'Una furtiva lagrima Lfe/isir damore, 1832.Rozsa, Miklos Spellbound Concerto, 1946.Rota, Nino, Juliet of The Spirits, 1968.Schoenberg, Erwartung, 1909.Schubert, Franz, 'An die Musik', 1816.Schubert, Franz, 'Erlkonig', 1814.Schubert, Franz, Symphony no. 8, 1822.Schubert, Franz, 'Winterreise, Op. 89', 1827.Scott, Raymond, Soothing Sounds for Baby: Electronic Music by Raymond

Scott, Vols. 1,2, and 3, 1997.Seger, Bob, 'Like a Rock' Like a Rock, 1986.Smith, L.C., 'Honeymoon on a Rocketship', 1950s.Spotnicks, The, 'Hava Nagila, 1963.Spotnicks, The, 'Orange Blossom Special', 1961.Spotnicks, The, 'Rocket Man', 1962.Stanley, Skip, 'Satellite Baby', 1956.Steiner, Max, Gone With The Wind, 1974.Steiner, Max, King Kong (Original soundtrack recording), 1933.Steiner, Fred, 'The Perry Mason Theme' Televisions Greatest Hits, vol. 1,

1986.Steppenwolf, 'The Pusher', 'Born To Be Wild' Steppenwolf, 1968.Stone and Charden, 'II y a du soleil sur la France', 1972.Strauss, Richard, A/so Sprach Zarathustra, 1896.

Musicography 845

Stravinsky, Igor, Le sacre duprintemps, 1913.Sun Ra, 'A Quiet Place in the Universe', 1975.Sun Ra, Beyond the Purple Star Zone, 1981.Sun Ra, 'Outer Spaceways Incorporated', 1970.Sun Ra, 'Rocket Number Nine takes off for Planet Venus', 1965.Sun Ra, Secrets of the Sun, 1962.Sun Ra, 'Space Probe', 1970.Sun Ra, Sun Ra Visits Planet Earth, 1966.Sun Ra, We Travel the Spaceways, 1956.Tangerine Dream, Sorcerer (Original soundtrack recording), 1977.Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, Swan Lake, 1875-6.Tierney, Harry, 'Alice Blue Gown', 1920.Tornados, The, 'Telstar', 1962.Trad. (Italy) Fenesta ca lucive e mo non luce, 1800.Trad., Weatherly, E E., (Lyrics), Danny Boy, ca. 1910.Trovajoji, A, E io ero Sandokan, ca. 1974.Wagner, Richard, Der Ring des Nibelungen, 1876.Wagner, Richard, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, 1845-67.Wagner, Richard, Tristan, 1857.Wagner, Richard, Tristan und Isolde, 1856-9.Wagner, Richard, Tristan und Isolde (Bayreuther Festspiele, Carl Bohm),

1966.Waits, Tom, 'Ruby's Arms', 1980.Wakeman, Rick, 1984, 1981.Wakeman, Rick, Beyond the Planets, 1984.Wakeman, Rick, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 1974.Wakeman, Rick, No Earthly Connection, 1976.Waxman, Franz, Rebecca (Original soundtrack recording), 2002.Waxman, Franz, The Bride of Frankenstein (Original soundtrack recording),

1935.Wayne, Jeff, War of the Worlds, 1978.Weill, Kurt, 'Die Moritat von Mackie Messer' The Threepenny Opera, 1928.Whedon, Joss, 'Once More, With Feeling' Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 2002.Who The, 'Baba O'Riley', 1971.Who, The, 'Who Are You?', 1978.Who, The, 'Won't Get Fooled Again, 1971.Williams, John, A.I. (Original soundtrack recording), 2001.

846 Muslcography

Williams, John, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Original soundtrackrecording), 1977.

Williams, John, Daddy-0 (Original soundtrack recording), 1958.Williams, John, E. T.: The Extra- Terrestrial (Original soundtrack recording),

1982.Williams, John, Earthquake (Original soundtrack recording), 1974.Williams, John, Fiddler on the #oo/(Original soundtrack recording), 1971.Williams, John, Images (Original soundtrack recording), 1972.Williams, John, Jaws (Original soundtrack recording), 1975.Williams, John, Jaws 2 (Original soundtrack recording), 1978.Williams, John, Jurassic Park (Original soundtrack recording), 1993.Williams, John, Minority Report (Original soundtrack recording), 2002.Williams, John, Raiders of Lost Ark (Original soundtrack recording), 1981.Williams, John, Rosewood (Original soundtrack recording), 1997.Williams, John, Saving Private Ryan (Original soundtrack recording), 1998.Williams, John, Star Wars (Original soundtrack recording), 1977.Williams, John, Sugarland Express (Original soundtrack recording), 1974.Williams, John, Superman (Original soundtrack recording), 1978.Williams, John, The Cowboys (Original soundtrack recording), 1972.Williams, John, The Empire Strikes Back (Original soundtrack recording),

1980.Williams, John, The Long Goodbye (Original soundtrack recording), 1973.Williams, John, <rThe Mission', 1985.Williams, John, The Missouri Breaks (Original soundtrack recording), 1976.Williams, John, The Poseidon Adventure (Original soundtrack recording),

1972.Williams, John, The Reivers (Original soundtrack recording), 1970.Williams, John, The Towering Inferno (Original soundtrack recording), 1974.Wilson, Dooley, 'As Time Goes By' (from the motion picture Casablanca),

1942.Wong, James, Once Upon a Time in China/Wong Fei-Hung (Original

soundtrack recording), 1997.Young, Neil, After the Goldrush, 1970.Young, Neil, American Stars 'n Ears, 1977.Young, Neil, 'Cowgirl in the Sand; 1969.Young, Neil, 'Cortez the Killer; 1975.Young, Neil, 'Crime in the City1, 1989.

Muslcography 847

Young, Neil, Harvest, 1972.Young, Neil, 'Mideast Vacation, 1987.Young, Neil, 'Old Man, 1972.Young, Neil, 'Powderfmger', 1979.Young, Neil, 'Southern Man', 1970.Young, Neil, 'The Last Trip to Tulsa, 1968.Zodiac, The, Cosmic Sounds, 1967.

Broadcast Bibliography

Addams Family, The, ABC 1964-6Adventures of Marco Polo, The, MaxLiebman Presents, NBC 1945Alchemists of Sound, BBC2 2005Alcoa Presents: One Step Beyond, ABC 1959Ally McBeal: The Musical, Almost, Ally McBeal, Fox Television 2000American Idol, Fox Television 2002-An American Musical, Happy Days, ABC 1981And Fancy Free, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Renaissance Pictures

for Studios USA Television/Universal TV 1997Andy Griffith Show, The, CBS 1960-8Anything Goes, Musical Comedy Time, NBC 1950Anything Goes, The Colgate Comedy Hour, NBC 1954Arlecchino, BBC 1936Babes in Toyland, Max Liebman Presents, NBC 1954Babes in Toyland, Musical Comedy Time, NBC 1950Bastien und Bastienne, Paul Nipkow Sender, Berlin 1938Best Foot Forward, Max Liebman Presents, NBC 1954Big Brother, Channel 4/E4 2000-Bitter Suite, The, Xena: Warrior Princess, Renaissance Pictures for Studios

USA Television/Universal TV 1998Box Supper, The, CBS 1950Boys from Boise, The, WABD-TV New York 1944Brain Salad Surgery, Chicago Hope, CBS 1997Britain's Best Sitcom: Yes Minister, BBC4 2004

849

850 Broadcast Bibliography

C.S.I.y Alliance Atlantis and CBS Productions, in association with JerryBruckheimer Films 2000-

CS.J: Miami, Alliance Atlantis and CBS Productions, in association withJerry Bruckheimer Films 2002-

Checkmate, CBS 1960-2Chocolate Soldier, The, Max Liebman, Presents NBC 1955Cinderella, CBS 1957Connecticut Yankee, A, Max Liebman Presents, NBC 1955Cop Rock, ABC Television 1990Cracked Actor, BBC 1974Dearest Enemy, Max Liebman Presents, 1955Desert Song, The, Max Liebman Presents, NBC 1955Desperate Housewives, ABC 2004-Dick Van Dyke Show, The, CBS 1961-6Dr. Who, BBC 1963-El retablo de maese Pedro, BBC 1936Fame Academy, BBC 2002, 2003Fame, NBC 1982-7Flying High, Musical Comedy Time, NBC 1951Forty Minutes: Talking Proper, BBC1 1985Friends, Warner Brothers Television/NBC 1994-2004Gianni Schicchi, BBC 1936Gibson Family, The, NBC Red Network 1935Great Waltz, The, Max Liebman Presents, NBC 1955Greece is Burning, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Renaissance Pictures

for Studios USA Television/Universal TV 1999Heidi, NBC 1968Heidi, Max Liebman Presents, NBC 1955High Pitch, Shower of Stars, CBS 1955Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, The, BBC 1981Hull High, NBC 1990Ipagliacci, BBC 1936Ipagliacci, NBC 1940 simulcast with WJZ radioI Spy, NBC 1965-8I'm a Celebrity..., Granada Television/LWT 2003-Jane Eyre, Omnibus Productions/NBC 1971Jasper, CBS 1950

Broadcast Bibliography 851

Jetsons, The, ARC 1962-8King and Mrs. Candle, The, NBC 1955Kiss Me, Kate, Hallmark Hall of Fame, CBS 1958Kraft Suspense Theater, NBC 1963-5Lady in the Dark, Max Liebman Presents, NBC 1954Lets Face It, The Colgate Comedy Hour, NBC 1954Lost in Space, CBS Television 1965-8Love Boat Follies, The, The Love Boat, ABC 1982Lucy Goes to Scotland, 7 Love Lucy, CBS 1956Lyre, Lyre, Heart s On Fire, Xena: Warrior Princess, Renaissance Pictures for

Studios USA Television/Universal TV 2000M Squad, NBC 1957Making the Band, ABC 2000-1, MTV 2002Many Loves ofDobie Gillis, The, CBS Television 1959-66Marco Polo Cristaldi-Labella and Radiotelevisione Italiana for NBC 1982Merry Widow, The, Max Liebman Presents, NBC 1955Miami Vice, Michael Mann Production Company/NBC 1984-9Mighty Casey, The, NBC 1955Miss Chicken Little, CBS 1953Mod Squad, The, ABC 1968-73Monk, Mandeville Films Television 2002-Monkees, The, NEC 1966-8Mr. Pickwick (excerpts), BBC 1936Mystery Science Theater 3000, HBO/Comedy Central 1989-96 The Sci-Fi

Channel 1997-9Naughty Marietta, Max Liebman Presents, NBC 1955Nightly News, NBC 1970-No, No Nannette, Musical Comedy Time, NBC 1951Omnibus: Special Edition, 'George Lucas - Flying Solo5 BBC 1997Once More, With Feeling, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twentieth Century

Fox/Warner Brothers Television Network 2001Once Upon a Tune, Du Mont 1951One Touch of Venus, Hallmark Hall of Fame, CBS 1955Open Air, BBC Radio4 1988Opernprobe, Die, Paul Nipkow Sender Berlin, 1939Our Town, NBC 1955Paris in the Springtime, Max Liebman Presents, NBC 1956

852 Broadcast Bibliography

Pennies from Heaven, BBC 1978Peter Pan, Producer's Showcase, NBC 1955Pop Idol ITV1 2001-2, 2003Popstars, ITVI 2001, 2002Producer, The, Gilligans Island, CBS 1966Railroad Hour, The ABC 1948-9 and NBC 1949-54Real World, The, Bunim-Murray for MTV 1992-Revenge with Music, The Colgate Comedy Hour, NBC 1954Roberta, The Colgate Comedy Hour, NBC 1955Roots, ABC 1977Satins and Spurs, Max Liebman Presents, NBC 1954Schauspieldirektor, Der, Paul Nipkow Sender, Berlin 1938Serva padrona, La, BBC 1936Simpsons, The Twentieth Century Fox Television 1989-Singing Detective, The, BBC 1986Six-Five Special, BBC 1957-8St. George and the Dragon, NBC 1953Steve Wright in the Afternoon, BBC Radio 1 1981-94Thats Life, ABC 1968-9Thirteen Clocks, The, ABC 1953Thomas and Sally, BBC 1936Top of the Pops, BBC 1964-2006Topsy and Eva Television Edition, W2XBS New York 1939Venus and Adonis, BBC 1936Wagon Train, NBC 1957-62 ABC 1962-5World Idol, YYVI 2003Yeoman of the Guard, The, Hallmark Hall of Fame, CBS 1957Your Hit Parade, NBC 1950-9

Index

2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 187,239, 241

33 1/3 rpm 239/11614

A nouse la liberte (film) 75, 76ABC 263ABC News 613Abel, Richard 73, 74Academy Awards 37, 107, 471, 473,

562Academy curve 32Accattone (film) 344accents 432-5Acciaio (film) 342acousmatic mnemotechnics 196-202acousmatic sound 304, 310, 313, 317acousmetres 92-4acoustic realism 88acoustical montage 71action scenes 55action-film soundtrack 518Adam, Ken 506added value 165-8Adorno, Theodor 501, 731Adventures of Prince Achmed

(film) 590Adventures of Robin Hood (film) 55advertising music 617-31Advisory Committee on Spoken

English 535Aeolian mode 326affective sound communities 194-206affective sound topologies 202-5affiliating identification 411, 414African American experience 328-31

African American film sound 325-38African American identity 337-8African American stereotypes 331,

332Afro-American music 244A- Ha 513Alam Ara (film) 16, 307, 308Alexandrov, Grigori 58, 80, 578, 579alienation 96, 213-17All India Radio (AIR) 317-19All Quite on the Western Front

(film) 68All the Presidents Men (film) 176Allen, David 231Allen, loan 18, 31, 33-4, 36-7Allen, Woody 259Alleyne, Mike 15Ally McBeal (TV series) 274-5Alone (film) 120Alphaville (film) 558Altman, Nathan 74Altman, Rick 3, 15-16, 46, 59, 61, 62,

67, 101, 251, 254-5, 577Altman, Robert 466, 559Amarcord (film) 347-8ambience 169-70ambient music/sound 67,131-2,

485-6, 744-5American Beauty (film) 652-3American broadcasting 263-4American Broadcasting Corporation

(ABC) 263American film industry, see

Hollywood cinemaAmerican Graffiti (film) 258, 454-8,

558, 559

853

854 Index

American Society of Composers,Authors, and Publishers(ASCAP) 746-7

Amos, Tori 740Ampex Corporation 27, 28amplification 233-4, 236, 428Anderson, Dana 463Anderson, Gillian 61anguish 637anguish management

half-diminished chord 640-9minor-add-nine chord 637-9musemes and ideology 651-5tonal determinants 637'tortuous tunes' 649-51

anguished expectation 664animals 1animated films, of Disney 602-11animated television series 275animation, music in art 588-99Antelo, Marcela 657anti- depressants 635anti- naturalistic selection 175,

177-8anti-Semitism 329-30Apocalypse Now (film) 34, 35-6, 453,

560Applause (film) 67, 69, 78, 584apprentice -based system 558-9appropriation 336Arnheim, Rudolf 58, 89Arnold, David 508art and commerce debates 284, 292,

296art animation 588-99Artaud, Anton in 658articulation 430-1assimilating identification 411, 414Association of Broadcasting Staff

(ABS) 547Astaire, Fred 255asynchronous sound 90Atlantic (film) 72

atonality 570, 696-7, 700-6, 708,710-11, 714-16, 721

audienceBBC 541-3expectations 22-3television musical 276-8

audience interactivity 389-90, 399,401-3

audio tape recorder 28, 742audio training, in India 304-6Audion Piano 118, 119Audion vacuum tube 118audiovisual installations 487-90audiovisual reality 20audio-visual synchronicity 93augmentation 175-6aural objects 10Auslander, Philip 501-2authenticity 336

at BBC 547-8construction of 397-8performance and 395-9rock 285-7, 292, 296

authorship 336automated digital replacement

(ADR) 165avant-garde film 72, 74, 88, 91-2, 97,

241, 574-85, 667outside of Soviet Union 581-4in silent era 574-6Soviet 579-81talkies and 576-9

Avraamov, Arsenii 594

Baby Boom channel 31background music 44-5, 47, 48, 67

in main title sequence 48-51backwards compatibility 32-3Balazs, Bela 58, 89-90Bambaataa, Afrika 245Bamboozled (film) 335, 336, 338Barron,Bebe 114-16, 127Barron, Louis 114-16

Index 855

Barry, John 505-20Barsaatki Raat (film) 316-17, 321Bart, Lionel 512Barthes, Roland 409, 664Basic Sound Committee 27Bassey, Shirley 431, 514Batman Returns (film) 35Battleship Potemkin (film) 575Baudrillard, Jean 414Bauhaus 90Baxter, Les 222, 224Bazelon, Irwin 109-10Bazin, Andre 198, 342BBC, see British Broadcasting

Corporation (BBC)BBC Engineering Division 539-40BBC English 535-6, 541BBC sound 533-50Beatles 125, 238, 241, 257-8, 742-3Beaumont, Henry 75Bees Knees 511Beethoven 103Begun, Semi 27Belafonte, Harry 333Belar, Herbert 124Bell, Alexander Graham 116Bell Laboratories 25, 27Bell, Wayne 224Belton, John 28-9Bennett, Kathleen 110Berg, Alban 182Berlin Horse (film) 481-6Berlin, Irving 252-3Bernard, James 222, 224Bernstein, Elmer 45Bhabha,Homi 375, 386Big Brother (TV show) 389, 391Binder, Maurice 506, 511Binns, Alexander 375, 725Birth of a Nation (film) 42-3,44,61black identity 337-8black music 325-38Blackboard Jungle (film) 408

Blackmail (film) 71, 72, 78, 582Blanchard, Terence 334, 335Blattner, Louis 23Blattnerphone 23Bliss, Arthur 47Blue Angel The (film) 68-9blues 21, 327Blum, Carl Robert 106Blumlein, Alan 25BMW commercial 681-5body, and voice 425-6Bond music 505-20Bordwell, David 66Bowie, David 242-3, 245, 290-1Boyd, Andrew 131Boys from Boise, The

(TV musical) 264Boyz fn the Hood (film) 327Bradley, Scott 596Brakhage, Stan 97Brando, Marlon 434Brazil 661breathing 176-7breathy voices 429Breil, Joseph Carl 44Bresson, Robert 87, 505Brian Jonestown Massacre 294Bricusse, Leslie 514Bride of Frankenstein, The (film) 121Bridget Jones' Diary (film) 50-1Brief Encounter, A (film) 380-2Britain 26British Broadcasting Corporation

(BBC) 4, 262-3, 533-51Advisory Committee on Spoken

English 535audience 541-3authenticity 547-8BBC Engineering Division 539-40BBC English/received

pronunciation 535-6, 541canned laughter 547celebrity DJs 548-9

856 Index

British Broadcasting Corporation(BBC) (Cont'd)

changes at 541-3English By Radio 536foreign speech 536-7home technology 543-4internal politics 546-7JohnReith 535, 536, 538loudness and silence 538-9music 537-8Peter Eckersley 539Radiophonic Workshop 545regional accents 543responding to competition 544-5speech and language 535-6, 541standard setting 544-6status of 534Steve Wright in the Afternoon 548,

549technology and training 539-41Top of the Pops 547tradition of 535

British cinema, transition to soundin 70-3

British filmavant-garde 581-2transition to sound in 70-3

British International Pictures 71British pop music 237-8, 238-44Broadcast Music International

(BMI) 746-7broadcasting 263-4Broadway Melody (film) 75Broadway musicals 264Broccoli, Albert R. 509, 510Brothers Quay 596Brown, Royal S. 138-40, 407-8, 507Brush Development 27Buffy the Vampire Slayer

(TV series) 276Buiiuel, Luis 91Burch,Noel 60, 94Burke, Marina 58

Burton, Tim 524, 525-6Burtt, Ben 36, 156, 452-61,

560-1, 563Bute, Mary Ellen 593Byrds 240-1

Cage, John 97, 241Cahill, Thaddeus 117, 118Caldwell, John Thornton 412-13,

415Cameraphone system 21, 59canned laughter 547canned theatre 67, 74, 75Carbon Trust 685-8Carlos, Wendy 125, 127Carne, Marcel 76Carpenter, John 126Casablanca (film) 49, 51-3, 571Castle, Hugh 71Cat People (film) 222, 225-6Caughie, John 73Cavalcanti, Alberto 72, 156-7, 582,

583CBS 263CBS News 613celebrity DJs 548-9Cera una volta il West (film) 345-6Ceravamo tanto amati (film) 346Chanan, Michael 18Chaplin, Charlie 157, 210, 212chase movies 37Chayefsky, Paddy 261Chicago Hope (TV series) 274children's choruses 227children's programs 268-70Chion, Michel 2, 11, 92, 93, 164,

304, 310, 313, 343, 434, 499,666

Choral music 221, 224, 528, 642Christie, Ian 79, 81Christmas musicals 269-70Chronophone system 59Cinderella (TV musical) 268-9

Index 857

cinema veriteconstruction of the Veal' and

287-8rock and 288-91, 292-3, 296

Cinemascope 28cinematic experience, sound in 7-8cinematic realism 17-20cinematic sound, history of 15-16cinematic violence 659cinematics 134Cinematograph Act 70cinepupitre 106Cinerama 27-30Citizen Kane (film) 157, 559City Streets (film) 69Clair, Rene 73, 75-6, 164, 584classicism vs. modernity 356-7Clavivox 123click track 100-11clocks 100, 103Clockwork Orange, A (film) 33, 125close miking 254, 310, 312Close Up (journal) 89, 581-2close-ups 312closing credits 5CNN 615Coal Face (film) 72, 583Cobain, Kurt 740Cocksucker Blues (film) 289, 293Cocteau, Jean 74cognitive dimensions, of sound

experience 5-6Cohen, Thomas 100Cohn, Nik 234Colman, Felicity J. 194colour films 25Columbia Broadcasting System

(CBS) 263Columbia- Princeton Electronic

Studio 124comedy 208-17commentary, musical affect

and 190-2

commercial impact, of technologyon music 745-8

commercial music 253, 258, 731compact cassettes 32compiled score 60complementation model 676composers 44-5

emigre 569-73, 730-1sound designers as 452-61

Composing for Films (Adorno andEisler) 731

computer audio workstations 564computer games 9concept albums 474-5conceptual resonance 2-4conductors 103-4conformance model 676Connery, Sean 438contemporary music culture 406-20contest model 676Conti, Bill 508continuity editing 46continuity of practice,

1930s-present 56continuity thesis 66control 291-4Conversation, The (film) 453, 558, 559Cook, Nicholas 674-7Cook s theory of multimedia 674-7Cop Rock (TV series) 272, 274, 277Coppola, Francis Ford 34, 453, 557,

558, 559corporate aspects 16-17counterpoint 167-8, 579, 581-2courtesan voice 319CP-100 34Crafton, Donald 24Cream 240credits 55Creekmur, Corey K. 250Crosby, Bing 28, 253, 428Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

(film) 364

858 Index

C.S.I. (TV series) 415-19, 420cue sheet 182cultural characteristics, of

sound 11cultural exploitation 330-3cultural identity 368-74cultural imperialism 16cultural noise 304-5, 317-22cultural recycling 494-502cultural referents 402cultural signs 6culture of hunger 661Gumming, Naomi 677Cummings, Irving 67current affair programmes 8-9cut-scenes 134-5

Dadaism 91Dale, Jonathon 480dancing images, music and 621-3Dandy Warhols 294Darley, Andrew 135Davis, Miles 245Davison, Annette 728Days of Heaven (film) 18-19De Forest, Lee 21, 118-19Dead Man (film) 195-6, 197-206death 665-6Deaville, James 612deconstruction 17, 288, 291, 651Deleuze 701-6Deming, Wilford E. 306demonization 659Derbyshire, Delia 224Deserter (him) 81, 581dialects 432-5dialogue 58, 65-6, 416-18dialogue underscoring 51-5dichotomization 171-2Dickson Experimental Sound

Film 59Dickson, William 21, 59, 105diegesis 168-71

diegetic music/sound 47, 48, 55, 66,115-16, 168-71, 312-14, 321-2,343-9

Dig! (film) 284, 294-6, 297digital encoder 34digital format 35digital instruments 37digital interactivity 9digital sound 36-8digital sound technology 564-6Dil ki Rani (film) 317Di/Se(film) 320-2direct cinema 284, 287direct sound 593-5disc speed 23disco 245discordant 581discursiveness 3-4disembodied voice 92, 94, 313,

314-15, 320-1disembodiment 310-11Disney films 26, 602-11

Snow White and the SevenDwarves 603, 607-11

Steamboat Willie 603-7Disney, Walt 105-6,603-4displacement 312dissociation of sound and

image 172-3dissonance 649-51dissonant music 224-5, 227DJs, celebrity 548-9Do the Right Thing (film) 336-7Doan, Mary Anne 734-5documentaries 72, 284-97Dolby A 31, 31-2Dolby Corporation 30Dolby Digital 35Dolby Digital Cinema 35Dolby Laboratories 4, 18, 30-1, 33, 34Dolby noise reduction 30, 33, 33-4Dolby, Ray 30, 30-1Dolby stereo 34

Index 859

Dolby Surround EX 35Dolby-B 32Don Juan (film) 23, 64Don't Look Back (film) 289, 289-90,

293, 298n20Dorian scale 326Doughty, Ruth 325Dr. Who soundtrack 236Dmcula(fAm) 219-22drama 618, 642, 644, 647dramatic flourish 48drawn sound 80dream sequence musicals 266, 273-4dreams 20drop-frame format 108dubbing 25, 70, 341-2, 364-8Dulac, Germaine 62, 73, 88Dunworth, Charles 106Dupont,A. E. 72Duran Duran 244Dyer, 396Dylan, Bob 238, 239, 289-90, 293,

298n20Dynamophone 117

E la nave va (film) 348East of Eden (film) 692-722

division of One, as organizingprinciple 720-2

nomadological analysis of scoreof 707-10

nomadological structure of scoreof 710-19

Easy Rider (film) 408-11Eckersley, Peter 539ecology 740Ede, Laurie N. 208Edison, Thomas 20-1, 59, 60, 61, 105,

118, 589editing software 564editing techniques 17-18, 416-17,

419Eggeling, Viking 576, 591

Eisenstein, Sergei 58, 79-80, 80-1,88-9, 164, 578, 579

Eisler, Hanns 501, 731electrical recording 21-2Electrical Research Products Inc.

(ERPI) 26electro-acoustic music 742electronic musical instruments

114-27, 236Elect ronium 123Elfman, Danny 524-9Eliot, T. S. 352-3Ellington, Duke 237embodiment 305EMI 25emigre film composers 569-73, 730-1Emmy Awards 244emotions 19emotive function, of music 43, 110Empire Strikes Back, The (film) 185encrypted video 35end credits 55English By Radio (radio show) 536Eno, Brian 243, 480-91, 672, 673, 743

Berlin Horse 481-6music for films and

installations 486-90Enthusiasm (film) 81-2, 580-1Eon/James Bond series 505-20Ephron, Nora 43epics 42-3Epstein, Jean 74escapism 29Europe, export of sound films to 26European cinema

transition to sound in 70-9voice in 62

Evans, Brian 598Evans, Tristian 671event-triggered episodes 133-4Everyone Says I Love You (film) 259Eves Bayou (film) 334experiential metaphors 426

860 Index

expression 10expressionism 695-6

fadeaway 173-4fairy tale musicals 266, 268-70Faith, Adam 510Faltermeyer, Harold 127fame

mythologies of 392-5reality television and 388-403

Fame Academy (TV show) 391, 394,395, 398, 399, 401

Fame (TV series) 272Fantasia (film) 26, 598-9Fantasound 26fantasy 19-20farce 73fear

cities of 660-1in film 665-8as signifier 657sound of 657-69types of 657-8violence and 660-5

Fellini, Federico 347-9Fellowship of the Ring (film) 50female singing voice 317-20, 426female voices 427-8Feuer, fane 255-6Feyder, Jacques 73Tight the power' 183film, and multimedia 671-89film history, music and narrative

of 44-7film music

for dialogue underscoring 51-5functions of 42-4, 47

film musicals 250-9see also musicals

Film Music (London) 106film musicology 725-37

early technical accounts 728-32forms of 725-8

Gorbman and 732-5post-Gorbman 735-7suture theory 732-5

film sequence, musicand 47-8

film sound 1-11, 7-8early attitudes toward 58-9transition to 58-83

film soundscape 4-5films dart 61Fischinger, Oskar 591-3Fisher, Lucy 69Flashdance (film) 406-7, 411-15Fleisch, Thorsten 595Fleming, Ian 510Fleming, Victor 67flesh 659Flick, Vic 516Flinn, Caryl 734flow 137Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. 331Flueckiger, Barbara 151folk music 741folk musicals 266, 270footsteps 153Forbidden Planet (film) 236foreign language remakes 341foreign speech 536-7Foster, Stephen 330four- track format 29four-track magnetic process 28Fox Film Corporation 22, 64, 65Fox News 615fragmentation 411-15frame intersection 629-31frame permeability 629-31France 26Frank, Robert 289French cinema

avant-garde 584films dart 61impact of sound on 88Nouvelle Vague 155-6

Index 861

sound in 352-61transition to sound in 73-6

Freud, Sigmund 662-3Friedkin, William 559Frith, Simon 388-9, 392, 741-2, 743,

745-6funkadelic 245Furniss, Maureen 588Futurism 91

game shows 8Gamson, Joshua 393Gance,Abel 73, 575Garland, Judy 252, 253gaslight films 384-5gaze 445, 659gender codes 380General Line, The (film) 80General Motors (GM) 627-8General Post Office (GPO) Film

Unit 582generalization 171-2genres

musical 8television 8-9

Germanic Romanticism 570-1Germany 16, 26, 28, 77-9Gershwin, George 330, 331-3, 335Gertrude (film) 95-6Gidal, Peter 485Gilligans Island (TV series) 271Gimme Shelter (film) 298n20Glass, Philip 219-22, 493-502, 672-4,

678, 680Godard, Jean-Luc 94, 96, 352-61, 557-8Golden Age of Hollywood 376, 377,

378-86, 569-73Golden Globes 477Go/danger (film) 514-15Goldsmith, Jerry 109, 185, 225, 227,

329Gomery, Douglas 64Good Will Hunting (film) 53-4

Goodfellas (film) 189Gorbman, Claudia 43, 102, 732-5GPOUnit 72Grammy Awards 35, 130, 468, 477gramophone 304-5, 308, 310, 311,

315-16,317Gramophone Company of

India 306-7Gray,Elisha 116, 119Great Britain, see British cinemaGreenaway, Peter 678, 679, 680, 681Gremillion, Jean 76Griffith, D.W. 42-3, 61Grimani, Gary 35Groening, Matt 539Grokster 746Grunge music 739-40Gunn, Peter 464, 512Gunning, Tom 61, 499Guy, Alice 59Gypsy scale 326

Hagen, Earle 102-3, 108half-diminished chord 640-9Half-Life (video game) 137Hallelujah (film) 68, 77Hallmark Television Playhouse

(TV series) 265-6Halloween (film) 126Hamlisch, Marvin 508Hammer 519, 650Hammer, Jan 127Hammond, Lauren 122Hancock, Herbie 245Hard Days Night, A (film) 257-8, 408Hardy, Oliver 209-13Harlem Renaissance 328-9harmonic crisis 702-3harmonizer-plug-ins 175Haskell, Molly 377Hawkwind 242-3hearing 5-7heartbeats 176-7

862 Index

Hendrix, Jimi 240, 245Henry V (film) 49, 55Hepworth, Cecil 59Herrmann, Bernard 45, 53, 191-2,

220, 437, 445-50, 527-8heterodyning method 121Hiam, Jonathan 569High Pitch (TV musical) 271, 273high-concept film 565, 613, 615historical background 11historical narrative 44-7Hitchcock, Alfred 48, 53, 71, 78, 91,

383-5, 437-50, 582, 664, 667Hollywood cinema

apprentice-based system 558-9emigre film composers in 569-73,

730-1Golden Age 376, 377, 378-86impact of sound on 88influence of 16role of sound designer in 452-61women in 375-86

Hollywood musicals 250-9Holman, Tom 25, 35, 562Holmes, Su 388Hong Kong cinema 363-74

cultural identity 368-74dubbing in 364-8introduction to 363-4

Hopi language 496-8horror 666-7horror films 219-28, 382-5, 570Howard, James Newton 525Hull High (TV series) 272human understanding 1human voice

media representations of 7see also voice

hunger- culture 661Hunt, Peter 506, 509Huntley, John 732Huron, David 619-20hyper-reality 17-18, 413-14, 418

/ Love Lucy (TV series) 271, 273I Spy (TV series) 102-3idee fixe 190-1identification 411, 414I'm a Celebrity (TV show) 389image scale 67images, dissociation of sound

and 172-3Images (film) 466immediacy 494, 501-2Imperial March' 185, 509implied sound 81impressionistic 68, 71, 261, 527,

262, 276In Bed With Madonna (film) 284,

293-4In Old Arizona (film) 67incidental music 515-16India 16Indian cinema 257, 303-22Indiana Jones and the Raiders

of the Lost Ark (film) 188,189

individualism 395-7industrialization of music 745-6Informer, The (film) 71-2Inglis, Ian 16inner speech 79instruments 114-27, 236interactive movies 135international cinema, cultural

imperialism in 16Ionian mode 326Iraq War 613irony 475Italian cinema 340-9, 366Italian Westerns 366-7Its only a car' (commercial) 681-5Ives, Charles 120, 185

J'Accuse (film) 62Jack, Russell 7Jackson, Wilfred 105

Index 863

Jailor (film) 310-12James Bond series 505-20Jarmusch, Jim 195, 198, 205Jaws (film) 180, 181, 184, 185, 188,

191, 466-7jazz 21, 237, 245, 327, 328-9, 336Jazz on a Summers Day (film) 286Jazz Singer, The (film) 22-4, 45, 62-

77, 253, 328, 589, 603-4, 729Jewish identity 329-30Johnston, Claire 385-6Joinville 70, 74-5, 341Jolson, Ai 23-4, 64, 65, 66, 77, 253,

328Jones, Tom 514Jost, Francois 61jouissance 659, 662, 664-5Judd, Donald 672Jullier, Laurent 352Jung, Carl 20Ju ngle Fever (film ) 334

Kafka, Franz 87Kalinak, Kathryn 109, 379Kamen, Michael 185-6Kameradschaft (film) 78Kandinsky, Wassily 591Kaper, Bronislaw 572Karlin,Fred 109, 110, 111Karloff 1230Karloff, Boris 666-7Kassabian, Anahid 140, 411, 415,

736-7Kazan, Eli 692, 696-7Keane, Stephen 452Keller, Hans 732Kellogg, Edward W. 102Kelly, Gene 254Keshishian, Alek 284key sounds 162keyboards 244Kinetophone 21, 60, 118King Kong (film) 383, 559

King, Norman 62Knudson, Carroll 107, 108Korngold, Erich Wolfgang 47, 330,

572-3, 730-1Koyaanisqatsi (film) 681-8Kracauer, Siegfried 208-9Kraftwerk 244-5Kramer, Lawrence 726-7Kubrick, Stanley 187, 239, 660Kunku(film) 315-16Kurtz, Gary 34

La cazone dellamore (film) 341LaNotte(film) 95La Petite Use (film) 76La souriante Madame Beudet (film) 62La Stanza delfiglio (film) 347Lacan, Jacques 377, 662, 664Lady in the Dark (TV musical) 267Z%e dor (film) 74, 91Lajwanti (film) 310, 312-13, 314Lang, Fritz 76, 78, 91language 10language conversions 70Lastra, James 4, 59, 60Laudadio, Nicholas 114Laural, Brenda 135Laurel, Stan 209-13Lauste, Eugene 21Lawrence of Arabia (film) 176Le Milion (film) 75Le Sand d'un poete (film) 74Leacock, Richard 289Lee, Bill 336-7Lee, Bruce 365Lee, Spike 334-8Leeuwen, Theo van 140LeGrice, Malcolm 481-6Leigh, Walter 582-3leitmotifs 42-3, 163-4, 180-92

Bond music and 518-19commentary 190-2historical background 181-4

864 Index

leitmotifs (Cont'd)in horror films 228introduction to 180-1meaning making 184-5musical affect 190-2musical parameters 185-6repetition 572repetition, variation, and

narrative 186-8social consideration 192temporality and 188-90

Leonard, Marion 284Leone, Serigo 93, 99, 161, 162, 196,

327, 331, 342, 345, 351, 408, 506,524

Lerner, Neil 524Les Enfants du paradis (film) 94Lessard, Bruno 493Le Witt, Sol 672Lewton,Val 222, 223Leydon, Rebecca 677L'Herbier, Marcel 73, 88'Like a Rock' campaign 627-8, 629Lindbergh, Charles 65listening 6-7Lisztomania (film) 34Litwin, Mario 343live music/sound 308, 310, 311, 314,

494, 498-9, 499-502live performance 286, 499-502London, Kurt 106, 729-30long-playing record (LPs) 23Lord of the Rings trilogy 42, 43, 50Lothar, Rudolph 305loudness 538-9Love Boat, The (TV series) 271-2low-frequency speakers 31Lubitsch, Ernst 584Lucas, George 453, 454, 556-60

American Graffiti 454-8Star Wars films 458-61

lullabies 225, 225-7Lumiere brothers 21, 117, 408

Lye, Len 72lyrical theme 48

m(film) 78M360 Motion Picture Surround Effects

Decoder 34Macey, Samuel L. 103Mackenzie, Donald 210Madonna 284, 293-4Magic Lantern shows 117magnetic recording technology 27magnetic sound 27-30, 32magnetic tape 28Mahler, Gustav 570, 570-1main title sequence 48-51major scale 326Majumdar, Neepa 303Malick, Terrence 18-19Malick, Terry 34Malipiero, Gian Francesco 342Mamma Roma (film) 344Mamoulian, Rouben 67, 69, 78, 584Man with the Golden Arm, The

(film) 327Mancini, Henry 464, 474, 478, 512,

613Mangeshkar, Lata 317, 319, 320Manhattan Research, Inc. 122-3Mann, Thomas 569Manvell, Roger 732Mark I 124Mark II 124Marks, Martin 49Mamie (film) 438, 439, 441-4, 447,

448Martenot, Ondes 121martial arts films 363-74

cultural identity and 368-74dubbing in 364-8

Martin, George 508, 742Marx Brothers 209'Masterworks' historical narrative 45materials 153

Index 865

Max Liebam Presents 266-7Maxwell, Stephanie 597Maysles Brothers 289MCA/Matsushita DTS format 35McCarthy, Frank C. 519McConnell, Peter 130, 131-2, 133-4McGinnis, Robert 519McLaren, Norman 72, 593-4McLuhan, Marshall 739-40McManus, Michelle 400Mctavish, Andrew 138media

music, technology and 739-52see also multimedia

mediation, music and 742-3Meek, Joe 237-8Meisel, Edmund 575melodic dissonance 649-51melody 132, 180, 185, 186, 336, 346,

348, 351, 357, 417, 439, 469, 476,477, 483, 610

memory 305men, pitch range of 427-8Menace II Society (film) 327Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 659Mersenne, Marin 103metamediation 746-51metamusic 739-75metanarratives 407, 414-15metaphors, experiential 426Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

(MGM) 745-7metronome 103-4, 105-6, 106-7, 108,

604Metz, Christopher 10, 303Miami Vice (TV series) 411-15Mickey Mousing 101, 105-6, 109-10,

110, 604micronarratives 407, 415, 419Middleton, Richard 680MIDI format 37, 109, 126Mighty Casey, The (TV musical) 271Milestone, Lewis 68

Miller, Dennis H. 598Miller, Jacques Alain 732Miller Marks, Martin 729, 730, 731-2minimalist music 503n5, 671-89

background 672-4Carbon Trust 685-8concepts 677-81introduction to 671-2'It s only a car' (commercial) 681-5multimedia and 671-89theories 674-7

Minimoog 126mini-narratives 624-6minor key 51, 469, 637, 650, 653minor scale 326minor-add-nine chord 637-9mise en scene 88, 92-3, 202, 365, 440,

666, 693, 697misogyny 443-5Miss Frontier Mail (film) 314-16Miyamoto, Shigeru 137-8Model 364 32Model E2 Cinema Equalizer 34Modem Times (film) 157modernity 96, 414-15, 419modulated soundtracks 46-7Man Oncle (film) 215-16Mongin, Olivier 659mono sound 29, 32Monro, Matt 512, 514montage 55, 79, 89-90, 556-8mood 43Moof, Robert 124Moog synthesizer 124-5, 125-6Moore, Alan 397-8moral identity 316-17morphine hypothesis 658-60Morricone, Ennio 45, 197, 408Morris, Charles 619Morton, David 17motifs 42Motion Picture Academy 27Moulin Rouge (film) 259

866 Index

movement 153movie trailers 38Movietone 22, 23, 45, 65Moviola 107MTV 406-20Mullin,Jack 28multi-channel technology 555, 560multimedia

minimalist music and 671-89models of 674-7

mult i- track recording 31Munsterberg, Hugo 658Murch, Walter 2, 36, 156, 452-61,

555-7, 560Murphy, A. Mary 472Murphy, Dudley 576musematic analysis 635-55

half-diminished chord 640-9ideology 651-5minor-add-nine chord 637-9theoretical position 636-7tonal determinants 637tortuous tunes' 649-51

music 1advertising 617-31ambient 67, 131-2, 485-6, 744-5in art animation 588-99background 44-5, 67BBC 537-8black 325-38commercial 253, 258, 731for dialogue underscoring 51-5diegetic 47, 48, 55, 66, 115-16,

168-71, 312-14, 321-2, 343-9electronic 114-27emotive function 43, 110film sequence and 47-8functions of 42-4, 47, 110in Hitchcock films 439-41, 445-9live 494, 498-9, 499-502in main title sequence 48-51media, technology and 739-52mediation and 742-3

minimalist 671-89narrative function 42-3, 138-41narrative of film history and 44-7non-diegetic 47, 55, 67, 115-16referential function 43response to 6rock 31, 155, 233-48role of, in sound technology

development 23in silent films 7-8, 60-2television news 612-16video game 129-46see also popular music

music dramas 570, 571, 702Music for Films (Eno) 486music industry 37music press 288music soundtracks 23-4music video culture 406-20musical affect 190-2musical comedy series 264-6Musical Comedy Time (TV

series) 264-5musical expression 10musical genres 8musical idea 572Musical Instrument Digital Interface

(MIDI) 37, 109, 126musical performances 55musical startle 222, 223musical stinger 222-4, 227-8Musical Telegraph 116musical tempos 100-1, 100- 11musical-performance cue 51musicals 24, 29, 29-30, 55

Broadway 264Christmas 269-70dream sequence 266, 273-4fairytale 266, 268-70film 250-9folk 266, 270show 266, 271-3television 261-78

Index 867

musicology, see film musicologymusique concrete 152, 585, 742mute character 93-4Mystic Knights 525

NagralV 563narrative

leitmotif and 186-8use of popular music in 407-20

narrative avant-garde films 575narrative function

of music 42-3, 138-41of sound effects 168in video games 135-8

narrative realism 95nasality 429-30National Broadcasting Corporation

(NBC) 263naturalism 7, 69, 210, 455, 695NBC 263NBC News 613, 615Needham, Gary 363negro spirituals 326-7Negus, Keith 388neo-realism 342Nesbitt, Rick 702Neubauer, Baerbel 597-8New Babylon, The (film) 81New England Electric Music

Company 117New Hollywood 155, 452, 555-67New Orleans 410, 473Newley, Anthony 514Newman, Alfred 106Newman, Randy 274-5, 472-8Newman system 106Newman, Thomas 652news music 612-16newsreels 64, 65, 612-13Niblock, Phill 488Night Mail (film) 72, 583Nirvana 739-40noise 304-5, 308

noise reduction system 18, 30-4nomadology

analysis of East of Edenscore 707-10

nomadological structure of score ofEast of Eden 710-19

as theoretical concept 701-6non-diegetic music/sound 47, 55, 67,

115-16, 168-71, 312non-diegetic space 78non- inter active movies 134-5non-linear elements 678-9Norris, Van 505North by Northwest (film) 53Noth, Winfried 617-19, 622Nouvelle Vague 155-6Novachord 122nursery rhymes 225Nyman, Michael 674, 678, 679, 681

O Brother Where Art Thou (film) 189,190

Odna(fi\m) 120O'Donnell, Aidan 340O'Donnell, Marty 133off-screen sound, see non-diegetic

music/soundoff- screen space 78Oingo Boingo 524-5Oklahoma (soundtrack) 29Oldfield,Mike 673Olson, Harry 124On the Track (Karlin and Wright) 109,

110, 111Once Upon a Time in America

(film) 327Once Upon a Time in China

series 368-74Once Upon a Time in the West

(film) 180, 181, 184-5, 188-9One, division of, as organizing

principle 720-2onomatopoeic expressions 154

868 Index

opera 138, 163, 181, 193, 229, 251,257, 263, 269, 271, 332-3, 336, 358

optical soundtracks 34O'Rawe,Des 87orchestral underscore 726orchestras 60, 61orchestration 528orientation 168, 172Other 331, 366Out of Africa (film) 50overall scoring 51, 53overture 49

Pabst, G.W. 78Padre Padrone (film) 346-7Pagnol, Marcel 73, 74Paley,Nina 596panlinguistic gestures 58parallel symmetries 680-1Paramount 70Paramount ideology 74-5Paris, Texas (film) 327Parks, Alex 400-1parody 275-6Pasolini, Pier Paolo 344pastiche 110, 267, 414, 458, 508,

515, 679Patanga (film) 320Paul,Les 235-6Peak, Bob 519peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing

745-8Penn, Arthur 559Pennebaker, D. A. 289, 290Pennies from Heaven

(TV series) 273-4perception, sound and 4-5performance 407

authenticity and 395-9cultural recycling and 494-502fragmentation and 411-15live 286, 499-502in oral cultures 497-8

Persian Gulf War 613Peter Pan (TV musical) 268Pett and Pott (film) 583phantasmagoria 666Phantom Menace, The (film) 35Phelps,Nick 596Phillips, Sam 236-7Phonofilm system 119phonograph 20-1phonorhythm 106photogenic 74, 88Photophone 22, 23Phrygian mode 326piano accompaniment 60Pink Floyd 239-40piracy 35pitch range 427-8plants 1Platoon (film) 176playback singers/singing 304,

313, 317, 319,319-20

Playtime (film) 215-16pleasure principle 359Plowman, Michael Richard 141Poitier, Sidney 333Poltergeist (film) 185, 187, 192PoniatofF, Alexander 28Poole, Steven 135, 137Pop Idol (TV show) 389, 390-1,

391-2, 393, 394, 398, 399-400,401-2

pop starsin film 408, 413reality television and 388-403

Popsters (TV show) 390-1, 398popular music 31, 43, 393-403

black music and 330-1in film 408-20in Hitchcock films 445-7metacontext of 285moving image and 407-8reality television and 388-92

Index

rockumentaries 284-97science fiction and 231-48

Porgy and Bess (film) 331-3, 335-6,337-8

portable recording technology 7,563-4

Porter, Cole 253positionality 191-2postmodern double coding 360postmodernity 407, 415, 419

MTV and 419-20narratives and 407-20

post-production 25post-production re- recording 47post- Rom antic tradition 571-2post-synchronization 25Prendergast, Roy 728prerecorded stereo tapes 29Presley, Elvis 257Primary (film) 289priming 163Pro Tools 564Prova dbrchestra (film) 348psychedelic era 239-41, 241-2Psycho (film) 53, 92, 93, 180, 181, 185,

188, 190-1, 220, 438, 440-4, 446psychoanalysis 657, 658, 659-60Public Enemy 183, 247, 334public service broadcasting 534publicity machine 393Pudovkin, Vsevolod 58, 79, 81, 578,

579, 581Pulp Fiction (film) 189punk 244

Qatsi trilogy 493-502quadraphonic sound 34

race, appropriation of 328-31racism 329radio 28, 263-4, 310-11, 315-16,

317-19Radio Atlantico del Sur 547

Radio Kino Pravda (film) 81radio sound 314radio voice 312-13, 320-2Radiophonic Workshop 545Raging Bull (film) 177-8Raguse, Elmer 210-11Raimi, Sam 196, 526Raksin, Ruby 107rap music 327RCA 4, 22, 23, 26RCA Mark I 124real, construction of the 287-8realism 17-20, 29, 36, 66, 110, 455

acoustic 88narrative 95television 262

reality television 389-92Rebecca (film) 48, 122, 383-5recorded sound 308recording noise 304-5, 308recurrence 181, 188Redner, Gregg 692redundancy 167Reeves, Richard 595-6referential function, of music 43Reggio, Godfrey 493-502, 678, 681-5Reich, Steve 672, 673Reiniger, Lotte 590reiteration 187, 521Reith, John 535, 536, 538Repeated Takes (Chanan) 18repetition 186-8, 252, 572, 678-80representation 17-20, 38, 291-4re-recording dubbers 563resistance 399-400, 401-2resonance 2-4, 431-2reverb devices 25reverberation 174rheostat 105rhythmic dialogue 416-18rhythmonome 106Richardson, Dorothy 89Richter, Hans 576, 591

870 Index

Right Stuff, The (film) 173-4Rimbaud, Arthur 352Robe, The (film) 28Robison, Arthur 71-2rock authenticity 285-7, 292rock music 31, 155, 233-48Rockmore, Clara 119-20rockumentaries 284-97

authenticity 285-98cinema verite 287-91, 292-3, 296resurgence of 294-6truth, representation and

control 291-4Rodman, Ronald 615Roger, Normand 596Rogin, Michael 329Rolling Stones 125, 238, 241, 289, 293,

298n20Roma cittd aperta (film) 344Roma(fAm) 348Romance Sentimentale (film) 80,

579-80romanticism 731Roots (TV miniseries) 326-7Rosenman, Leonard 692-701, 707-10,

720Rosza, Milos 572Rota, Nino 342, 510, 524, 529Rouch, Jean 287rough voices 429Roxy Music 233, 243, 480Rozsa, Miklos 45Run Lola Run (film) 185rupture thesis 65-6Russell, Ken 34Ruttman, Walter 576, 590Rydstrom, Gary 17-18, 19, 35, 36

Sabaneev, Leonid 106, 729-30Sala, Oskar 121Saltzman, Harry 510, 520Satins and Spurs (TV musical) 266satire 475-6

Schaeffer, Pierre 152, 304, 742Schillinger, Joseph 593Schindler, Alan 597Schoenberg, Arnold 569, 695, 702science fiction 231-48Scorsese, Martin 189, 559Scott, Raymond 122-3, 124screen -world 343secrets 94seeing 5-7Seger,Bob 627, 628, 631segmentation 414-15, 417-18self 396, 398Selznick, David O. 109semiotics 425-35sensory responses 19Sensurround 34Serra,Eric 508Serra, Richard 672Sexton, Jamie 574sexual violence 438-9Shaw Brothers 364shorts 64Show Boat (film) 252show musicals 266, 271-3Sickels, Robert C 602sight, sound and 2, 5-7signals 158-9signature 508signification 619, 627signifiers 657, 664-5signifying 335silence 61, 87-97, 538-9, 663-4Silence, The (film) 96silent films 45

avant-garde 574-6in India 307-8Italian 340-1music in 7-8, 42-4, 46, 60-2, 498-9sound in 59-60soundscapes of 18

Silly Symphony series 607-8simulacra 414

Index 871

Sinatra, Frank 253, 743-4Sinatra, Nancy 514Sinfonia 127Singing Detective, The (TV series) 274Singing Fool, The (film) 77singing styles 431-2Sion, Pwyll ap 671sitcoms 8six-track format 29Skywalker Sound 35slavery 326-7, 328slow mot ion 174-5'Smells Like Teen Spirit'

(Nirvana) 739-40Smith, Jeff 17Smith, Sharon 375smooth voices 429SMPTE time code 108-9Snow White and the Seven Dwarves

(film) 603, 607-11social class 384, 432-3social voice 432-5Socialist Realist cinema 81-2soft-synths 127Song of Ceylon (film) 72, 582-3Song of the South (film) 338songs

in Indian cinema 310-22in musicals 251-3

sonic gags 208-17sonic inscription 37sorrow songs 327sound

acousmatic 304, 310, 313, 317acoustic qualities of 154ambient 67, 131-2, 485-6, 744-5asynchronous 90BBC 533-50concept of 533cultural characteristics of 11diegetic 47, 48, 55, 66, 115-16,

168-71, 312-14, 321-2, 343-9digital 36-8, 564-6

dissociation of image and 172-3fadeaway 173-4of fear 657-69in film and visual media 1-11history of cinematic 15-16identification of source 152influence of, on perception 4-5key 162live 308, 310, 311, 314live vs. recorded 308, 311materials and 153movement and 153non-diegetic 168-71, 312response to 6sight and 2, 5-7spatial characteristics of 154, 254spoken 535-6synchronized 59, 61, 63-5, 89-90,

100-1, 100-11territory 169-71in time 7-9

sound affect 194-206sound amplification 21, 22sound communities, affective 194-206sound creativity 11sound design 35-8, 555-67

origins and application of 556-62technological influences and sound

choices in 562-7sound designer

role of 36, 452-61title of 560, 562

sound effects 9-11, 18, 151-78added value 165-8anti- naturalistic selection 177-8augmentation 175-6breathing 176-7in comedy 208-17dissociation of sound and

image 172-3fadeaway 173-4generalization versus

dichotomization 171-2

872 Index

sound effects (Cont'd)heartbeats 176-7key sounds 162leitmotifs 163-4modular framework for description

of 151-2narrative functions 168reverberation 174semantics 155-6, 158signals 158-9slow motion 174-5sound-image relationship 164-5stereotypes 159-60, 170subjective transformations 172, 174symbols 161-2synchresis 165-8terminology 168-71unidentified sound objects

(USOs) 156-7sound experience 312sound experimentation 579-84'Sound Film: A Statement from the

USSR' 58, 79, 89, 164, 578sound films, see talking moviessound languages 9-11sound montage 556-8sound perception 305sound perspective 565-6sound revolution 88-90sound scale 67sound styles 5sound synchronization 22-3, 100-1sound technology 4, 15-38

of 1930s and 1940s 25-7in 1950s 27-30American dominance of 16-17backwards compatibility in 32-3BBC 539-41, 543-4click track 100-11commercial impact of, on

music 745-8computer 129-46developments in 30-5, 46

digital 36-8digital sound 564-6early, in India 304-9electronic musical

instruments 114-27emergence of talking movies 20-5impact of 17, 19-20in India 304-7introduction to 15-17magnetic recording technology 27multi-channel 555, 560music, media and 739-52noise reduction system 18, 30-4phonograph 20-1portable recording

technology 563-4sound design and 562-7sound-on-disc 21, 25sound-on-film 21, 23, 24-5, 305-6,

589stereo 20, 25, 26, 27-30, 34synchronized sound 100-11synthesizers 124-7

sound theory 303, 304sound topologies, affective 202-5sound-image relationship 164-5,

671-2sounding 152-3sound-montage 89-90sound-on-disc technology 21, 25, 62sound-on-film technology 21, 23,

24-5, 305-6, 589sound-on -sound synchronization 59sound-places 197-8soundscapes 4-5

comedy 208-17concept of 744film musicals 250-9horror 219-28leitmotifs 180-92rockumentaries 284-97of silent films 18television 8-9

Index 873

theorizing 17-20Westerns 194-206

soundtracksfunctions of 42-4ofGodard 352-61horror 219-28James Bond 505-20modulated 46-7musicals 29-30narrative of film history and 44-7optical 34pop-oriented 30unstructured 155-6

Sous les toits de Paris (film) 75-6South Pacific (soundtrack) 29-30Soviet Union

film industry in 89, 578-81transition to sound in 79-82

space operas 48spatial cue, black music as 326-8speaker placement 24speaker systems 30spectacular 265, 268, 315, 372, 459speech 67

foreign speech 536-7synchronized 80temporalization of 66

Spielberg, Steven 161, 453, 466-7, 559spirituals 326-7Splinter Cell (video game) 141-6spoken sound 535-6sports programmes 8Spotnicks 238Sprocket Ensemble 596St. George and the Dragon (TV

musical) 268Stahl, Matthew 398-9Stalling, Carl 105, 596Stand by Me (film) 188star image 399Star Is Born, A (film) 34Star Wars films 30, 31, 34, 48, 170-1,

454, 458-61, 468-70, 560, 563-4

stardomconstruct of 392-5, 395-9, 399-403narratives of 284, 290

startle 222, 223Steamboat Willie (film) 603-7Steiner, Max 45, 47, 51, 53, 104,

109-10, 379, 380stereo 20, 25, 26, 30

Dolby 34magnetic sound 27-30

stereo records 29stereo surround 29stereotypes 159-60, 170, 331, 332Sternfeld, Frederick 732Steve Wright in the Afternoon

(programme) 548, 549Stille,Curt 23stinger 102, 222-4, 227-8Stone, Sly 245stopwatch 108Stothart, Herbert 47Strachan, Robert 284Strauss, Richard 570, 570-1Stravinsky, Igor 569Street, John 388structuralist film 483-4stylistic diversity 43subjective transformations 172, 174subjectivity 20subtractive fallacy 356-7subtitles 70Sugar Hill (film) 334Summer Holiday (film) 408'Summertime' motif 335-6SunRa 245-6Sunhere Din (film) 316surrealism 74, 91surround sound 30, 32Survage, Leopold 590-1suspense 664Sutherland, Heather 533suture theory 732-5Switched-on Bach (Carlos) 125

874 Index

symbols 161-2symphonic background music 45,

493, 571synchresis 165-8, 313synchronisation vs.

desynchronisation 357synchronized sound 59, 61, 100-1

adaptation of 63-5resistance to 89-90technology 100-11

synchronized speech 80Synclavier 36synthesizers 4, 37, 124-7

tactus 103Tagg, Philip 325, 635Takeshi, Kitano 87talent shows 388-403talking movies (talkies)

audience embrace of 63avant-garde and 576-9British 70-3critics of 88-9emergence of 20-5in Europe 70-9in France 73-6in Germany 77-9impact of 65-9in India 304-9, 307-9resistance to 89-90in Soviet Union 79-82transition to 46, 47-8, 58-83

Tamm, Eric 488-9tape recorders 28-9, 742Tarantino, Quentin 189Tati, Jacques 213-17Taylor, Frederick Windlow 108technological innovations 11, 234-5technology, see sound technologytelevision

children's programs 268-70leitmotifs 186-7soundscapes 8-9

television commercialsdancing images 621-3It s only a car' 681-5levels of meaning in 617-19mini-narratives 624-6music and 619-21musical significance beyond the

text 626-9strategies of imbuement 629-31

television musicals 9, 261-78audiences 276-8broadcast history 262-4categories of 266-8comedy series 264-6dream sequence 273-4fairytale 268-70folk 270parodies 275-6show 271-3

television news music 612-16television realism 262television talent shows 388-403Telharmonium 117'Telstar' (Tornados) 237-8tempo 100-1temporal cue, black music as 326-8temporal unity 42-3temporality 66-7, 188-90tempos 100-11Ten Little Title Tunes 636-7Termin, Leon 119-20Terminator 2 (film) 55, 564territory sound 169, 170-1terror 666-7Tessler, Holly 739Testament of Dr. Mabuse (film) 76,

78-9, 90, 92, 93That's Life (TV series) 270, 277theatres

acoustical standardization of 22sound systems in 46

theatrical 219, 243, 250, 251, 272, 291,468, 513

Index 875

themes 42-3theremin 118-23Thirteen Clocks, The (TV musical)

26977ns is Cinerama (film) 27This Is Spinal Tap (film) 289Thorn, Randy 34, 38Thompson, Kristen 80Thorburn, Sandy 261'Three Basic Models of Multimedia

(Cook) 674-7Thunderbolt (film) 68THX 1138 (film) 453, 455, 458, 556-8THX system 35, 562time 100

sound in 7-9Western concept of 495

time measurement 100, 102-3Timoner, Ondi 284, 294-6, 298Tin Pan Alley 252-3, 330, 331, 747Tiomkin, Dimitri 183, 329, 464, 572title songs 512-13, 515-16To Have and Have Not (him) 49To What Red Hell (film) 71Tobias, James 503n4Tobis-Klangfilm cartel 26, 75, 77Todd-AO 28Tommy (film) 34tone color 528Top of the Pops (programme) 547topoi 193Topsy and Eva Television Edition 264Torn Curtain (film) 448-9'tortuous tunes' 649-51trailers 38transistor radios 544transition decade (1927-35) 45-7,

58-83transitions, in musicals 254-5Trautonium 121Trautwein, Friedrich 121Tri -Ergon system 22Trilogia della Vita (film) 344-5

Triplets ofBellville, The (film) 588Trouble with Harry, The (film) 53truth 291-4Tscherkassky, Peter 596-7Twentieth Century- Fox 28two-track machines 28typicality 166-7

Under the Roofs of Paris (film) 584Unheard Melogies (Gorbman) 732-5unidentified sound objects

(USOs) 156-7United States

television broadcasting in 263-4see also Hollywood cinemaUniversal Studios 34, 219unseen space 78UPS (United Parcel Service) 624-6

VanSant, Gus 526variation 186-8Varney,Bill 561vaudeville 64, 65vertical causality 357Vertigo (film) 185, 187-8, 189,

191-2, 438, 438-9, 439-40,441-3

Vertov, Dziga 81-2, 579, 580-1video game music 129-46

narrative function 135-8role of 138-41Splinter Cell 141-6state of the industry 130-5

video tape recorder 28Videola 123Vidor, King 68, 77Viertel, Salka 569Vietnam War 613viewer agency 392-3violence

in cinema 659voice of 660-5

Virginian, The (film) 67-8

876 Index

visual mediaBrian Eno and 481-91sound in 1-11

visual media soundscape 4-5visual music 576, 598-9visual signifiers 505Vitaphone 22-3, 45, 59, 64, 102,

119Vivre Sa Vie (film) 96vocal mismatches 259vocal performance, in musicals 258vocal styles 433-4voice

articulation 430-1BBC 535-6body and 425-6breathy 429in cinema 62-3, 67courtesan 319disembodied 92, 310-11, 313,

314-15, 320-1female 427-8female singing 317-20, 426-8level 428live 310-11materiality of 426-8nasality 429-30pitch range 427-8radio 310-11, 312-13, 320-2realism and 66resonance 431-2rough 429semiotics of 425-35smooth 429social 432-5of violence 660-5

voice actors 341-2Voice of Cinema, The (Chion) 92voice-character 92-4'Voice-of-God' commentary 73volume 223-4von Sternberg, Josef 68-9

Wagner, Richard 163, 182, 570-2,701-3

Wakeman, Rick 34, 243Walgenstein, Thomas Rasmussen 665Walley,Clive 596Walsh, Raoul 67Walt Disney Company 4war 613War of the Worlds

(radiobroadcast) 91Warner Brothers 64, 65, 102, 559Waxman, Franz 47, 121, 570, 572Way of the Dragon, The (film) 365Wayne's World 2 (film) 363-4, 367Welles, Orson 91, 157Welttonsystem 594Wesfront 1918 (film) 78Western Electric 22, 26, 210Westerns 194-206

acousmaticmnemotechnics 196-202

gender and 385Italian 366-7

White (film) 54-5Whittington, William 555Wild Wild Rose, Tlie (film) 256-7Williams, Alan 63, 566Williams, John 45, 463-71, 615Wilson, Brian 241Wizard ofOz, The (film) 184, 190women

as constructs 376-7female singing voice 317-21,

426-8in Hitchcock films 437-45in Hollywood cinema 375-86objectification of 377-8, 379-80pitch range of 427-8

Wood, Nancy 66Wood, Simon 129World War II 28, 329-30Wright, Basil 58, 72, 582

Wright, Rayburn 109, 110, 111Wright, Steve 548, 549Xena (TV series) 275-6X-Men(film) 186

Yamaha DX-7 127Yentob, Alan 290-1

Yes 243Young, Neil 202-3

Zeller, Wolfgang 590Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From

Mars (film) 290Zumthor, Paul 497-8

Index 877

Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media - NIBM eHub

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