Recomposing the Past: Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen

James Cook, Alexander Kolassa, Adam Whittaker, James Cook, Alexander Kolassa, Adam Whittaker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351975513
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Recomposing the Past is a book concerned with the complex but important ways in which we engage with the past in modern times. Contributors examine how media on stage and screen uses music, and in particular early music, to evoke and recompose a distant past. Culture, popular and otherwise, is awash with a stylise - sometimes contradictory - musical history. And yet for all its complexities, these representations of the past through music are integral to how our contemporary and collective imaginations understand history. More importantly, they offer a valuable insight into how we understand our musical present. Such representative strategies, the book argues, cross generic boundaries, and as such it brings together a range of multimedia discussion on the subjects of film ( Lord of the Rings, Dangerous Liasions ), television ( Game of Thrones, The Borgias ), videogame ( Dragon Warrior, Gauntlet ), and opera ( Written on Skin, Taverner, English 'dramatick opera'). This collection constitutes a significant, and interdisciplinary, contribution to a growing literature which is unpacking our ongoing creative dialogue with the past. Divided into three complementary sections, grouped not by genre or media but by theme, it considers: 'Authenticity, Appropriateness, and Recomposing the Past', 'Music, Space, and Place: Geography as History', and 'Presentness and the Past: Dialogues between Old and New'. Like the musical collage that is our shared multimedia historical soundscape, it is hoped that this collection is, in its eclecticism, more than the sum of its parts.

Part 1

Authenticity, appropriateness, and recomposing the past

1 Representing Renaissance Rome

Beyond anachronism in Showtime’s The Borgias (2011)

James Cook

Picture the scene: the year is 1492, the date 26 August. Rodrigo Borgia—recently elected pope—begins the procession towards his coronation as Alexander Sextus. The streets are thronged with his subjects, making their pious devotions to the newly appointed father of their faith. With great pomp, he makes his way through the triumphal arches that line the streets extolling his virtues and predicting a return to the golden age of Rome.¹ As he draws closer to the Basilica of St Peter, the heralds signal his approach and, with miraculous prescience, begin to play Handel’s Zadok the Priest…

Few historians would argue with much of the detail of this historical vignette and yet (it is to be hoped) one detail sticks out: Zadok the Priest being performed some 193 years before its composer was born. Why, then, was this music chosen for Showtime’s The Borgias, the television show from which this depiction is drawn? For some, it could be seen to epitomise the apparently contradictory way in which early music is used and, more broadly, the past is scored in popular television, film, and video game.² The very same episode makes full use of other examples of pre-existent music—far more temporally appropriate to the episode—and also newly composed music free from the same questions of historical propriety. What then might we infer from this choice? That music is seen as less important than other aspects of otherwise well-researched historical dramas? That the audience are not expected to know any better? That writers, directors, producers, and composers do not either? That this was simply a mistake?

If the answer to any of the above is yes, then perhaps this is where the story ends. We can cast such choices as inauthentic and anachronistic and move on, safe in the knowledge that we know better. And yet, this seems a wholly unsatisfying and unsatisfactory response. It tells us nothing of the ways in which early music is used in popular media or how other music is employed to evoke the past, and it ignores the often highly imaginative and thoughtful act of scoring for popular media and the kinds of representational codes on which such actions depend. The principal contention of this book is that the evocation of the past in popular media is worthy of detailed analysis since it tells us much about how we, in the present, conceive of it. Central to this claim is the belief that music is not merely of lesser concern here but works on a level beyond mere composer biography or temporal propriety. Within this framework, my intention in this chapter is to offer a reading of the first episode of The Borgias, moving beyond ideas of anachronism or inauthenticity and,³ in doing so, suggesting some broader ideas about approaches to the use of pre-existent early music in popular media. This is certainly not the only possible reading and others are positively welcomed.

Pre-existent material in film and television

The use of early music in film and television taps into a long tradition of using pre-existent material. Such material functions differently from music that has been specifically composed for a film. As Anahid Kassabian has outlined in her seminal Hearing Film (2001, p. 70), the pre-existent creates ‘affiliating identifications’ and the newly composed ‘assimilating identifications’ (p. 3). In other words, the pre-existent plays on the relationship that the viewer has already formed with works whilst the newly composed attempts to control our relationship with the image on screen through the use of certain representational codes. To an extent, according to Kassabian, this opens a broader hermeneutic field for scores that rely on pre-existent material.

Not all pre-existent music has the same role or effect and it is perhaps more useful to view ‘affiliating’ and ‘assimilating’ identities on a continuum rather than as binaries. Gorbman’s (1987) division of musical meaning into ‘pure’, ‘cultural’, and ‘cinematic musical codes’ is perhaps helpful as a framework for understanding this (p. 13), though the degree to which any phenomenon could be understood as ‘purely musical’ should, of course, now be questioned.⁴ Take, for instance, the famous scene in The Godfather: Part III (1990) where an assassination attempt takes place during a performance of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, mixing diegetic and non-diegetic use of the pre-existent operatic score. On a ‘musical’ level, Mascagni’s score, full of operatic tension, heightens the dramatic tension. At a cultural level, it speaks of the ‘high-brow’ nature of the characters on screen as people who usually attend opera and even, for those with sufficiently detailed previous knowledge, invites parallels between the themes of the opera and the themes of the film.⁵ Finally, in terms of cinematic code, this can be seen as an example of the frequently used trope of anempathetic scoring.⁶ We can even see this scene as the progenitor of, or at least an important staging post in, a cinematic musical code itself, picked-up—sometimes parodically, sometimes entirely straight-facedly—by many other films and television shows in which the mafia, and associated people or acts, are connected with opera.⁷ Clearly, and as Mike Cormack (2006) has previously noted, pre-existent art music can engage with each of these codes simultaneously, producing multiple plausible meanings dependent, perhaps, on the competence of the audience. Those who failed to recognise the opera may not have understood the narrative parallels; those who failed to recognise it as opera may not grasp the cultural associations. Nonetheless, the ‘musical’ effect may have continued to have dramatic and narrative impact on most average viewers.

Pre-existent early music in television and film

Perhaps the most important question is whether the use of pre-existent early music is different from the use of the pre-existent art and popular music which most scholars discuss. Is it even fair, or helpful, to distinguish early music from these? The answer to this depends entirely on how people—composers, directors, sound engineers, listeners, etc.—frame history (and, crucially, not just early history). Some early music is, after all, now a staple of the concert hall repertoire and could therefore be seen as a part of the art-music canon. Similarly, as Elizabeth Upton (2012) has suggested, early music has often borrowed performance practice from the world of popular music.

There is no one answer to the question of whether early music either is or is not art music. Such a discourse has clearly changed with prevailing musical and historiographical trends. Writing in 1993, a period which, with the benefit of hindsight, may be seen as something of a tipping point, Paula Higgins outlined some interesting and contrasting perspectives on this question: the ‘petrified’ early music of Einstein and Dahlhaus’ conception (c. 1941 and 1967, respectively) giving way to classical chart saturation and even popular engagement by groups such as Enigma (Higgins, 1993). Clearly, for some, early music may represent the earliest phase of the central art-music tradition; for others, a clear break with it. Such a distinction depends on aesthetic, historiographic, and perhaps even ideological positions on the parts of scholars, performers, and listeners. One example may be drawn from early scholarly interest in the topic. As Andrew Kirkman (2010, pp. 3–5) has noted, much of this focussed on the Mass Cycle since it could be seen as the first recognisably multi-movement form, a prime candidate for a kind of proto-symphony and therefore the primordial slime from which our Great German Masters arose. Such early scholarship⁸—early but with an undeniably lasting reach—often spoke in terms of organic unity, melodic development, and proto-tonality.⁹

In his seminal essay on the art-music canon, Burkholder (1983) argued that it was such organicism that provided the fundamental aesthetic principle on which the canon of art music (a social construct) was founded.¹⁰ Kerman had already described a process in which analysts (to him the evangelical wing of art music) sought to extend its reach by demonstrating how organicism is present in musics outside of the original canon of Germanic masterworks (1980, pp. 319–323). Early music has therefore, through certain analytical approaches, been constructed as a part of what became seen as the mainstream of music. Such analytical approaches are not without critique, however. Scholars such as Bent (1998) have attempted to root analysis of early music instead within its contemporary theoretical practice, viewing it as a repertoire to be understood in and on its own terms rather than for how it might connect to other arbitrarily selected points in musical history.

Performance too has tended to characterise early music either as a precursor to music of the common practice period or as a distinct break from it. Upton (2012) has framed the question as follows: ‘was Early Music to be seen as a part of Classical music, representing an earlier stage in a narrative of the development of European musical style, or was it to be seen as unrelated to the Classical music that came later?’ She has noted that, though ‘classical’ music was once held as ‘normative’, those who lived through the explosion of recorded popular music in the second half of the twentieth century began to view it as a ‘temporally specific kind of music’, with earlier musics therefore starting to sound out of place when performed with a ‘classical’ sound. Rather than seeking to adapt earlier music to modernise it (through the addition of more recently invented instruments, for instance), as once had been common, post-war early music revivals instead began to attempt to approach the music ‘on its own terms’. Without an unbroken performing tradition for this period, sounds from outside of the classical tradition combining scholarly approaches from the historically informed performance practice movement with popular conceptions of the ‘difference’ of the past were sought. Upton’s discussion of the repertoires from which such performers of early music sought their ‘acceptable sounds’ will be taken up in later chapters (see Breen, 2017; Nugent, 2017, for instance).

A distinction between early music within or without the canon clearly still weighs heavily on approaches to performance and programming. We may still see echoes of these two positions in the manner in which early music is programmed in the concert hall and in recorded media today. Whilst many concerts will use art music from various times, places, and genres, often without contextualisation other than as music that belongs in the concert hall, there can be a tendency to historicise the early music concert. Early music, treated from the position of outside of the musical mainstream, is less likely to be included alongside later art music; such concerts often attempt to provide a cultural and historical context. In doing so, a degree of the original cultural context is sought, perhaps suggesting that the status of art music is not quite sufficient to understand this music. Alternatively, such music can be treated as other forms of autonomous art music, mixed with other works from divergent times, places, and genres, and treated as material to be reinterpreted for modern taste just as any other form of art music.¹¹ These divergent positions spring from two very different cultural and marketing positions—but both certainly coexist today.

These divided approaches can have an impact on early music in screen media. Whether it is to be understood as ostensibly historicising may depend not only on the approach of the composer and director but also on the experience of the listener. Pre-existent art music in film is most frequently treated as giving an ahistorical connotation more linked to the kind of societal strata which regularly attends art-music concerts.¹² When treated as a part of this tradition, early music may very well have the same effect, but when positioned in contrast to this central tradition, early music may instead be seen as inherently historicising. This analysis may even be extended to musics more certainly within the central art music tradition but treated through the lens of the historically informed performance tradition. This movement, which began for early and baroque music, has gradually extended to encompass a variety of different historical periods up to (and perhaps beyond) Elgar. A prime example of the impact that this kind of aesthetic approach to music can have on film would be the BBC film Eroica (2003). This film uses a period performance of Beethoven (by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique under Sir John Eliot Gardner) as a central part of its narrative. By extending aesthetic positions taken by the historically informed performance movement to Beethoven’s music, this film positions these works as historicising, replacing the traditional cultural and filmic conventions associated with them.

Pre-existent music in The Borgias

Whilst the scene outlined at the outset of this chapter is probably the most immediately obvious use of pre-existent material in this episode, it is far from the only one. Instead, it is one of six cues which take pre-existent music from a variety of different sources. Maria and Stephen Kingsbury (2014) have recently proposed a reading of these, which they universally class as anachronistic, as offering a narrative which revolves around the articulation of private and public space. I wish to offer an alternative interpretation here. Perhaps most importantly, I would argue that the music is far from anachronistic. Anachronism rather fails to describe the musical processes in The Borgias, or indeed in any other historically situated on-screen drama. The Borgias is not historical fact (if such a thing can be said to exist). It is a modern creation, setting a modern narrative in a historically constituted but still essentially fictive setting. As Ben Winters has recently argued, filmic reality ‘negotiates subtly between constructions of the real and the reel’ (2014, p. 2). Whilst his study focuses squarely on art music and therefore is perhaps only directly...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures, music examples, and tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction: understanding the present through the past and the past through the present
• PART 1 Authenticity, appropriateness, and recomposing the past
• PART 2 Music, space, and place: geography as history
• PART 3 Presentness and the past: dialogues between old and new
• Index