The Form of Film Music

Greetings all! As promised I have the second instalment of factual nourishment for you so that you can read my yet-to-be-written reviews with a little more insight into the theoretical and technical trickery of film music. Carrying on from last time, we’ll take a quick look at the aesthetics of film music, its form, some tenuous rules and the reasons why it hasn’t changed all that much in quite a long time. So let’s start off with an outrageous statement; Film music is the same as ‘Easy-Listening’ music.

Woah! Calm down there! I did warn you… Before those of you that enjoy film music take aim at me with your various smelly missiles, I will assure you that an explanation awaits below this formatting, and that I shall cowardly hide behind the fact that these are not my words. They belong to a well-known film and film music scholar (inside academic circles, at least; I’d vouch that if you haven’t read her books then you won’t know her name). She compares the two types of music under the premise that neither are intended to require the full attention of the listener. Claudia Gorbman, it seems, has a few things to say about my beloved craft.

Now, I don’t really agree that we need to be ‘lulled into being an untroublesome (less critical, less wary) social subject’ as Gobman suggests. I for one like being troublesome and critical towards film, don’t hate the player – hate the game, and all that. However, the idea of film music not requiring attention is completely necessary to a film, just as most of us don’t notice all the work that’s gone into designing a set in a scene; we just absorb it. Here it could be worth noting, likewise, that we don’t necessarily notice cinematography, yet we absorb it in a more attentive way than set design or costume for instance. I’d like to champion music as an art more than a craft in this respect. We all go in to a cinema with having seen images and heard music, and we’d probably notice if the music was awful. Audio is ubiquitous to film as much as the visuals, and one should never detract from the other. Nobody wants to see the nuts and bolts, they want to suspend their disbelief and slip into a film, so the music must do its job professionally and Gorbman has nicely set out a rough list of rules for it to adhere to. I’ve stuck it in below, skim over it and you’ll start to see where I’m getting at.

I.                ‘Invisibility’: The technical apparatus of nondiegetic film music must not be visible.

II.              ‘Inaudibility’: Music is not meant to be heard consciously. As such it should subordinate itself to dialogue, to visuals – i.e., to the primary vehicle of the narrative.

III.             Signifier of emotion : Soundtrack music may set specific moods and emphasize particular emotions suggested in the narrative, but first and foremost is a signifier of emotion itself.

IV.             Narrative cueing:

·       Referential / narrative: music gives referential and narrative cues, e.g., indicating point of view, supplying formal demarcations, and establishing setting and characters.

·       Connotative: music ‘interprets’ and ‘illustrates’ narrative events.

V.              Continuity: music provides formal and rhythmic continuity – between shots, in transitions between scenes, by filling ‘gaps’.

VI.             Unity: via repetition and variation of musical material and instrumentation, music aids in the construction of formal and narrative unity.

VII.           A given score may violate any of the principles above, providing the violation is at the service of the other principles

Now, some of the more studious of you may have heard to terms diegetic and non-diegetic before; Microsoft Word, it seems, has not. Armed with their definitions and the little list above, you have all the information you need to start looking at film music in a more objective way, so I’d best pen them out! Diegetic is simply music (or any sound for that matter) that exists within the narrative of a film, within the picture – the characters are aware of it. Therefore, non-diegetic is music outside of the narrative. The characters can’t hear it, but you can, and sometimes it will make you cry, make you shiver or jump, or feel a particular sense of blood-boiling anger towards Percy Wetmore in The Green Mile, with his stupid greasy hair and droopy lower lip that just barely prevents his tongue from rolling out onto the floor like a slobbery water slide that would only be appropriate for a few seconds of Robin Williams’ magical portrayal of The Genie in Aladdin.

A scene can be scored in a variety of different ways of course, some obviously more fitting than others, you probably don’t find the birdie song blasting in during romantic kissing scenes; it’s often a lush upward-moving, swelling string passage with a few cymbals on the embrace. That’s because that makes sense, it’s typical and it’s something we’re all comfortable with as an audience. But should we just accept that? I’d like to think that within the limitations excluding the ridiculous that there isn’t a right or wrong way to score a scene, save the laziest possible attempt. What matters with film music is the emotion that the combination of image and music generate and that’s probably the best way to start looking at movies for now. How might something be if it had different music, would it have the same impact on the audience? Look for the films that really get the most emotion across and you’ll find that the music is often the keystone.

There is one last thing I should mention, something called leitmotif. A leitmotif is a recurring theme in a piece of music, usually attributed to a character as is prevalent in Wagner’s operatic labours. In film, these motifs can range from long melodies attributed to Darth Vader in Star Wars to single notes, chords, or sounds that can personify anything as small as the spinning top in Inception, as big as The Matrix or as abstract as the feeling of vertigo in, yes, you guessed it, Vertigo. Although it’s not an essential ingredient for a film score, you’ll start to notice leitmotif in quite a lot of them. Using the same thematic ideas and textures gives the film a kind of cohesive identity that has an imprint on the audience and in some cases literally makes the film and the music inseparable; Jaws, for example or maybe thinking about Jurassic Park without ‘it’s a di-no-saur, it’s a di-no-saur, holy f-‘ going through you head.

I honestly hope that you’ve enjoyed reading this, and my previous post, and that you’ve taken something from it that makes you want to think about the music in the next film you watch. My aim with these two introductory blog articles was create something of an informal guide that you could reference in your early dives into film scores. They’ve been quite lengthy, but I think I’ve been as brief as I possibly could, hopefully splitting the difference enough to tempt you into reading about my thoughts on films and their music in future. I did lightly suggest exploring failures and successes in the last testament, however, I fear if I take up much more negative space then I’ll get in trouble with the Internet, so I’ll just tease you with my thoughts on a score of each that may cause some juicy suspicions. I might even write about them in not so long. Here they are in Internet friendly speak:

WIN: Casino Royale (David Arnold)                        FAIL: Knowing (Marco Beltrami)

Alex

I’ll leave you with something fun just in case you still aren’t sold on film music. Watch E.T. The Extra Terrestrial closely next time you get the chance. When the strange looking alien spots a trick-or-treater dressed as Yoda, you’ll be rewarded with a bit of the little green man’s theme from The Empire Strikes Back. Both films were of course penned by maestro John Williams, and it might interest you to know that he did the same in Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith as well, hinting at a theme from Harry Potter when a baby Luke Skywalker is dropped off by Obi-Wan Kenobi. Similar characters, Luke and Harry, don’t you think?

Williams you little scoundrel, you…

A Brief History Of Film Music

Right: lets get started. The whole reason for starting this blog about film music was to try and help those who aren’t musicians, composers or otherwise musically empathetic people to understand film music a little more than the man who sits next to them on the train talking about Trent Reznor’s impact on the observed universe. I’d love for you all to soon be able to tell good scores from bad scores and pick apart the relationships between music and picture in order to see why a scene has been crafted the way it has; and why you feel a certain emotion from it (or don’t…).

I think the best way to start off is to do a couple of short, summary-esque chapters on the history of film music, it’s forms and roles today and how it affects a scene. So without further ado, I present to you the shortest possible history of film music, direct from my fingertips. 

‘Read all about it!’

Music existed before films. It’s obvious right? But it has a significance that is easily overlooked. Music in the form of late-19^th-century and early-20^th-century operas and symphonies was pretty much all you had on offer before films (and recording technology), so it’s no surprise that the grandeur and voracity of the orchestra was first in mind for early filmmakers. They’d have to wait a little while to open the doors, though…

It would have been great if films had pit orchestras, but it might have been a bit costly. The solution was the well-known piano playing man who would literally improvise music to the earliest monochrome picture-shows. It soon became a necessity and players even started to make a craft for the art; extensive books of piano music for all the wondrous scenarios imaginable.

Page 5: Intimidation in the office. Turn to page 46 for Car Chase/Gun Fight! 
And in she walks, Page 22: The blonde who asks for cigarette and makes their jaws drop.

And so film music was born. All the solutions to all the motion-picture equations, neatly laid bare to tinker with. However, having sound on a film changed the game a little; recordings meant planning, not improvisation. So with a quick jump we move from recording bespoke piano scores to a yearning for Wagnerian characterisation alongside our moving images. With a few years of experimentation it seemed a group of Johnny Foreigners had developed a dab hand at the craft and the world saw Erich-Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, Hans Salter, Franz Waxman and Alfred Newman (to name a few greats) grace films such as The Adventures Of Robin Hood, Gone With The Wind, Casablanca, The Son Of Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights. The late romantic sweeping melodies and ambitious harmony had made it’s way into the cinema and left itself for some of the names above to start coining certain types of sound for certain types of films. Steiner and Korngold were the late romantics, epic and sweeping. Hans Salter set the stones for the sound of suspense, Alfred Newman infused a little Jazz into his grand and lush scores and Waxman made a start on Film Noir, notably scoring some of Alfred Hitchcock’s earliest films.

Hitchcock comes in as quite a nice link on how present day film music has ended up how it is. He had one of the earliest famed director-composer relationships (not like that) with a man who’s name you really must remember after today, lest I give up all hope on the world – Bernard Herrmann.  Herrmann is quite possibly the greatest film composer to have lived: a complete arse, antisocial, distasteful, with genius that probably still wouldn’t be enough to get him a job today. I would bet that between Bernard Herrmann’s scores for thrillers, Ron Goodwin’s wartime greats and Alfred Newman’s penchant for everything else that we could trace all lineage of orchestral music in film down to a devilish thievery of their well-established elements.

If at this point I could recommend you watching one film to conjure a more tangible picture of this Old-Hollywood sound it would be Vertigo, a film by Alfred Hitchcock, score by Bernard Herrmann. Those of you that have already seen it, ten points to Gryffindor.

It is this kind of style that John Williams, the man behind all of the melodies that you can remember (Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, Superman, Harry Potter, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Jaws, Schindler’s List, Close Encounters of The Third Kind, Home Alone, Memoirs Of A Geisha and Three American Olympic Games), started to build upon. If you can remember any other film score melodies other than Michael Giacchino’s Up (or other Williams scores) then I’ll be very impressed – unless you’re one of those cheaters that likes film music already to the unhealthy degree that I do, in which case I shalln’t be – because the man who makes the melodies is the last of the old style of pencil and paper composers who are afforded the luxury of locked pictures (completed films) and hearing their music for the first time at the helm of an 80-piece orchestra.

The pencil and paper has been traded for the computer based sequencer with realistic orchestral virtual instruments and synths, and the long and flowing melodies that modulate from one key to another have been swapped for small motifs, or motives: short fragments of melody such as Hans Zimmer’s incantation for Batman in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. When Vangelis composed, conducted, produced and performed his score for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner he ushered in a new era in film music with synthetic sound, all of which has sort of culminated in something of a Tron: Legacy world of music.

Now I’m rambling, so I’ll leave a gap underneath this cluster of black and white for you to rest your eyes. The next article will cover the aesthetics of today’s film music, its form and application, its successes and failures, and shall tie in very nicely where we’ve left off. After that, you’ll never have to read another word in your life! Actually, I’d hope that you would because I’ll keep writing reviews/discussions of film scores in slightly more digestible portions than this. For now I’ll thank all of you who actually got this far; good show, good show. Tata!

Alex

Oh I forgot, if I can contextualise anything I’ve written with a few films for suggested viewing and listening then here it is (and here they are):

Blade Runner (Vangelis)

E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (John Williams) (if you haven’t already seen it)

either Rain Man (Hans Zimmer) or Enemy Of The State (Harry Gregson-Williams and Trevor Rabin)

American Beauty (Thomas Newman)

Inception (Hans Zimmer)

That should sum up the brief history somewhat chronologically. And I know. I lied. But you’re the one that kept reading…

also on www.alexlamy.com with my music.