Hearing Film

Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music

Anahid Kassabian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135957193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Music is central to any film, creating a tone for the movie that is just as vital as the visual and narrative components. In recent years, racial and gender diversity in film has exploded, and the making of musical scores has changed drastically. Hearing Film offers the first critical examination of music in the films of the 1980s and 1990s and looks at the burgeoning role of compiled scores in the shaping of a film. In the first section, "A Woman Scored, " Kassabian analyzes desire and agency in the music of such films as Dangerous Liaisons, Desert Hearts, Bagdad Café, Dirty Dancing and Thelma and Louise. In "At the Twilight's Last Scoring, " she looks at gender, race, sexuality and assimilation in the music of The Hunt for Red October, Lethal Weapon 2 and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. And finally, in "Opening Scores, " she considers how films such as Dangerous Minds, The Substitute, Mississippi Masala and Corrina, Corrina bring together several different entry points of identification through their scores.Kassabian ensures that modern film criticism has a new chapter written through this book. Her important and long-overdue analysis is not to be ignored. Also includes eleven musical examples.

1
How Film Music Works

There has been a tendency in European and American thought since the Enlightenment to categorize music as a particularly pure art. Music has been understood to produce meaning only on the most abstract, spiritual, or formal levels. Baroque and pre-Baroque notions that, for example, specific scales or phrases might have specific meanings have been denounced since the Enlightenment. Music became the foremost example of autonomous art, art for art’s sake. Communication of meaning came to be considered outside the realm of music’s tasks; western instrumental art music is called “absolute.” As Stravinsky put it:

. . . I consider that music is, by its very nature, powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality. (1936: 91)

Expressing the same view, Adorno argues in his typology of musical listeners that music listening ought to be concerned with form, not imagined meaning. The fourth type of listener in his hierarchy is the “emotional listener,” about whom he says:

The type extends from those whom music, of whichever kind, will stimulate to visual notions and associations to men whose musical experiences approach the torpor of vague reveries. . . . At times such people may use music as a vessel into which they put their own anguished and, according to psychoanalytical theory, “free-flowing” emotions; at other times they will identify with the music, drawing from it the emotions they miss in themselves. (1988: 9)

And for one last example—film composer Irwin Bazelon states definitively that:

the language of music expresses only musical aesthetics: . . . in its pure and absolute state [music] does not describe anything. . . . [T]he images it seems to conjure up in the listener’s mind’s eye are not implicit in its pure sound environment. These responses are daydreams, programmatically triggered by an individual’s own range of personal experience, by undirected or lazy listening habits, and perhaps by associations deep-rooted in childhood. (1975: 74)

Bazelon suggests here that music speaks only in and of its own aesthetics; according to him, music is both nonrepresentational and nonreferential. Bazelon, Adorno, Stravinsky, and many other writers on music thus contend that meanings heard in music stem simply from the bad habits of listeners who have not been trained properly.

Recent music scholarship suggests otherwise. But even if we were to accept Bazelon, Adorno, and Stravinsky at face value about most musics, film music would still raise questions. Film music has always depended on communicating meaning; in terms of the western art music tradition from which it stems, it is a special case. From the very beginnings of film to the present, music for film accompaniment has been catalogued according to subject and emotion. An organist in a silent movie house might well have turned to Erno Rapee’s Encyclopaedia of Music for Pictures (1925), and would have found such categories as “Aeroplane,” “Oriental,” and “Sinister.” A contemporary corporation producing in-house industrial videos (used for sales, marketing, and training) can turn to a production music library such as Network Music. Production music libraries are recorded collections of music indexed by mood (e.g., romantic, eerie, light), geography (Western, oriental, panoramic), time (historical, contemporary, futuristic), genre (classical, rock, marches), structural function (introductions, links), and action (travel, crime, sport). In such a library, directors, multimedia presentation authors, and others can find very much the same possibilities that Rapee’s collection offered, with the advantage that they are prerecorded and indexed in a database. Our corporation (or film/video student or market analyst or lowbudget film/video producer) can now “rent” music, complete with meaning, for “Fanfare,” “Space,” or “Fashion.”¹

Most film music scholars assume that classical Hollywood film music is a communicative system that can be “read” by listeners. For some, the position that film music is a meaning system requires no support. For instance, in Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music, Claudia Gorbman performs a commutation on a bicycling sequence from Jules et Jim, which means she describes what would happen to that sequence if a series of single aspects of the score were altered. A minor mode would make the scene sadder, an increase in tempo would make the bicycling seem faster and the sequence more optimistic, an orchestration change might lend more pathos (solo violin) or humor (solo tuba), and so forth (1987: 16–17). This commutation makes sense—and there’s no doubt that it does—because we all understand classical Hollywood scoring and can easily imagine the effect these score changes would have.

Descriptions of film music such as this one serve at least as a convenient shorthand. They have by far the most connection with how listeners actually perceive film music: they function somehow subliminally or subconsciously, evoking meanings and moods rather than explaining ideas.

On the other hand, most descriptions tend to be too broad, encompassing a constellation of meanings rather than a narrower one. For example, Frith (1984) lists some “casual musical descriptions: ‘middle-of-the-road,’ ‘background,’ ‘up-beat,’ ‘Close Encounters climactic,’ ‘new-exciting-world-just-around-thecorner,’ ‘youth music,’ ‘homely, healthy, folky’” (1984: 83). His “Close Encounters climactic” most likely includes (at least) epicscale, high-tech or futuristic, and climactic. Each of those meanings corresponds to musical features that can be agglomerated to form “Close Encounters climactic,” but might also be combined with other elements to produce other constellations of meanings: epic seafaring, futuristic sexuality, etc.

More detailed analyses do exist. Kalinak (1982) has shown some of the elements that communicate the only two female sexualities—the fallen woman and the virtuous wife—that Hollywood imagined in the forties and fifties. She describes the genres, instrumentations, rhythms, melodic shapes, and harmonic languages specific to each stereotyped woman. While the fallen woman gets dotted rhythms, increased chromaticism, and saxes, often in jazz or blues style, the virtuous wife’s violins and flutes sweep upward melodically in even rhythms and lush but simple harmonic language.

Kalinak’s brief study is supported by empirical research done by Tagg and Clarida (n.d.); their study describes in detail how film music communicates certain meanings.² Tagg asked listeners to respond to ten film and television title themes by writing down what they saw or imagined while listening.³Tagg and Clarida then grouped the responses and began to correlate them to musical features. Taken individually, responses varied quite widely. Grouped together, however, they read like descriptions of the series or film to which the theme belonged, particularly in regard to genre and style.

For example, the theme to the TV series Miami Vice was played to 105 respondents, who produced a total of 328 verbal-visual associations. While no one reported recognizing the tune, the music indicated aggression, speed, and urban environments to most listeners. No one heard qualities like reflection, love, ritual, religion, or animals. Thirty percent of the listeners heard clubs (discos, bars, nightclubs), 28 percent heard cars, 24 percent heard chases, and 20 percent heard dynamism, using words such as “excitement” and “action.” Fifteen percent heard young people, and 12 percent heard youth subcultural ideas such as “rebellious,” “cool,” and “rad.” Similarly, responses to Alex North’s theme for A Streetcar Named Desire included “drama,” “bar,” “threat,” “slum,” “1940s,” “1950s,” “struggle,” “smoky,” “intense,” “tension,” “night,” “sweat,” “underworld,” and “excitement.” In other words, the verbal-visual associations for a theme sum up the show’s terrain quite neatly.

A comparison of the respondents’ associations with those in a mood music catalogue points out the stability of film music’s meaning system. Using the question of gender as an example, I calculated the frequency with which respondents “saw” either men or women in the scenes they imagined in relation to the themes, correlated those responses to other categories, and compared those correlations to mood music catalogue titles. For instance, in the themes the listeners identified as female-associated, 27 percent wrote “rural” associations, making this a highly feminine category. In the Selected Sounds mood music catalogue, tunes with women’s names appear most frequently in the category “Pastoral/Romantic.” Mood music cataloguers and the respondents to the Tagg and Clarida study make similar—and similarly gendered—associations with music.

Tagg and Clarida’s study, especially in connection with mood music catalogues, suggests that in mass-market, narrative film music, correspondence between producer’s intention and consumer’s reading, between transmission and reception, between encoding and decoding, and among decodings, is high—so high that it seems safe to conclude that it can support using strategies from communications and linguistics. On the other hand, it is important to remember that the responses to this study were by no means identical. In other words, as in language or any other code, there is a certain degree of consistency among productions and receptions, but not complete consistency, and the relationship between productions and receptions is by no means either simple or unidirectional.

The skill that generates consistency in encodings and decodings of film music is “competence.” Clearly, competence in this sense can only function for speakers (and listeners) of the same language (or musical genre⁴), and the consistency will vary according to fluency (extent of experience in the genre), personal history, etc. Competence is a culturally acquired skill possessed to varying degrees in varying genres by all hearing people in a given culture.

The notion of competence must be distinguished from literacy. Together, these terms raise some important questions about the absence of music in film theory and the possibilities for finding ways to include it. As was the case in Tagg and Clarida’s study, and as Adorno has argued, the “subjective content of a musical experience” is difficult to discern:

Experiments may tell us about degrees of the intensity of the reaction; they will hardly reach its quality. . . . Besides, most people who have not mastered the technical terminology will encounter insurmountable obstacles in verbalizing their own musical experiences, quite apart from the fact that the verbal expression itself is already prefiltered and its value for a knowledge of primary reactions is thus doubly questionable. (1988: 4)

The language for discussing music to which Adorno is referring is that of institutionalized music studies: European art music composition, performance, theory, and musicology. Competence in this particular language for music is what I’m calling here literacy. It has a very specific ideological history of its own, and has created a situation in which music can be spoken of only in terms of its intramusical features: form, harmonic language, orchestration, etc. The discourse of musical analysis has, in other words, interiorized itself, so that only trained musicians and music scholars are literate, are permitted to speak about music—and never in terms of the extramusical associations that nonprofessionals generally understand as the music’s meaning.

This discursive sleight-of-hand has had many consequences for musicians and musics. Peter Winkler has suggested that it leads immediately to assignments of value:

Many Western musicians think of a piece of music not in terms of musical sounds but in terms of a musical score. . . . This essentially “visualist” orientation can be seen as an outgrowth of the high value Western culture places on visual evidence in general and writing in particular. Such an orientation easily leads to ethnocentrism. In the curricula of many of our music schools, “musicianship” is synonymous with “musical literacy”: the clear implication is that if you can’t read music, you are not really a musician. And music that does not rely on a notated score for its transmission tends to be seen as an abnormality, a musical “other,” something that is not really, or not fully, music. (1997: 171)

(In the world of contemporary film music, Danny Elfman became a magnet for such dismissals. David Mermelstein wrote in the New York Times, “Ask about composers who have prospered despite a lack of formal training, and the first name to come up is Danny Elfman’s.” Elfman is not fully, smoothly, comfortably literate in music, a fact that has caused a whirlwind of controversy about his work. And yet, Elfman’s scores make a great deal of money in both box office and soundtrack album sales, and they display not only sophistication but also a sense of humor.)

As Stockfelt has argued, there have been consequences not only for music making but also for listening as well. Listening practices that were developed in the latter part of the nineteenth century have become institutionalized as “culturally superior,” and have conditioned analytical practices that are not now (and may never have been) applicable to everyday listening:

In a way, a relatively functional explicit language has been created, in verbal and graphic form, to describe the experiencing and experiences of a certain type of music, of a certain type of listening. This language, to some extent and for lack of better alternatives, could be used to communicate verbally and graphically even around other forms of listening. This language has hence become one of the material prerequisites for the development of communication and value-systems around music even in environments that show few external similarities with the bourgeois idealized concert hall. (1997: 162)

Stockfelt has proposed that, in order to analyze everyday music experiences, one must “develop one’s reflexive consciousness and competence as an active ‘idle listener.’” Film music competence, as opposed to literacy, requires just such a rethinking of analytical tools.

Competence is based on decipherable codes learned through experience. As with language and visual image, we learn through exposure what a given tempo, series of notes, key, time signature, rhythm, volume, and orchestration are meant to signify.⁵ But the acquisition and modus operandi of competence are rarely questioned or examined. Film composers have spoken in interviews and books about scoring films, discussing the various musical techniques and elements that carry specific messages. For example, Bazelon, himself a composer who has done some work in film, uses a series of unquestioned categories to describe the effects of music in particular moments:

To this day the opening to Citizen Kane (1941) remains a brilliant example of the total fusion of music, sound, and symbolistic imagery. Bernard Herrmann’s low, ominous array of sounds intones dramatic doom . . . the music evokes portentous associations and feelings of awe at the vacuous grandeur of God-Kane’s castle. Extraneous voices and echoing sounds act as counterpoint, enriching the tonal ambience and enhancing the images. (1975: 98)

While Bazelon can describe the elements that make the music “intone dramatic doom,” it does not seem to occur to him to question how or why we know that this is so. Gorbman’s commutation of the Jules et Jim sequence described above functions similarly; she assumes the changes she suggests would be interpreted similarly by others.

As I suggested earlier, these writers are all quite reasonably assuming the results of studies such as Kalinak’s and Tagg and Clarida’s. Within the realm of classical film scoring, with its reliance on late-Romantic (especially German) art music practices, most members of western cultures are competent. Audiences have simply seen enough films to know what “low, ominous sounds” or tubas mean. While this still does not answer the question of how tubas have become humorous, it does give us a beginning for a different kind of analysis of filmmusic.Once we acknowledge that we understand these codes similarly, we can begin to work out ways of talking about music that may not be sanctioned by institutionalized academicmusic practices, but will permit film scholars to institutionalize music as part of analyses of films. We can develop, in other words, a language of musical competence.

But the same information and arguments that support this notion of competence also point to the existence of a communicative system; the two are mutually dependent.

Music and Discourse Analysis

Communication can only take place through a set of cultural conventions through which one member of a society communicates— that is, interacts socially through messages—with herself or another member of that same society (Fiske 1982: 1–3). The study of communication requires a vocabulary for elements of its functioning, including language specific to analysis of its code; such language has been developed in semiotics for language and film, but less so in music.

In his first major work, Tagg included an extensive list of musical parameters for use in locating and analyzing these features of music (1979). It enumerates forty-three different features of any single example of music, from time and timbre to acoustics and studio effects. While now long out of date, this list is one important way that Tagg’s work differs from that of the few other semioticians of music (e.g., Nattiez 1975). It ensures a careful examination of each aspect of a musical event, including the signifying features of technological manipulation. This is particularly important for semiotic studies of film music, since technological manipulation makes possible, for example, the production of space that Gorbman describes in her still singular study of Sous les toits de Paris (1987: 140–50). In this sense, such a list encourages examination of the meaning produced by all aspects of a musical instance, rather than just traditional musicological or music theoretical features.

For example, in an eleven-page discussion of the theme from the TV series Miami Vice, Clarida (in Tagg and Clarida) analyzes the musical sources of the effects and associations of the study’s respondents described above. He accounts for the extremely high appearance of associations such as “chase,” “action,” and “rebellious” as follows:

To return to the “inhospitable”/“aggressive” scenario, which was far more common among our Miami Vice listeners, we may wish to begin by considering the referential function of the percussion sounds which have concerned us so far. The bongos and the “hihat” noise of the introduction aren’t likely to contribute much to this negative scenario for several reasons. . . .

The timbales, for all their fashionability, may contribute quite a lot to the grim interpretation, though. In particular, the initial timbale entrance at m.2 (a loud, low, reverberant boom which completely obscures m.1’s high, dry ticking) is in keeping with a long tradition of sharp attack, low register doom sounds: Frank Skinner’s 1950 Underscore refers on page 13 to a low register sforzando-piano as a “menace” note, and Erno Rapee’s 1924 Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists catalogs Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, with its opening of long fortissimo low C’s, under “Sinister.” (n.d.: “Miami Vice,” 6–7)

This is precisely the kind of musical discourse analysis that reception studies should generate. Clarida begins by considering what the musical reasons might be for the associations the listeners made, and having located a possible source of these associations, examines the source carefully both intrinsically and extrinsically. In this way, he is able to place particular musical features in a larger field of musical discourse that is embedded in social interaction; he describes this instance of music, in other words, as an act of communication.

But musical discourse analysis has some limitations as well. While music and lang...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Listening for Identifications A Prologue
• 1 How Film Music Works
• 2 How Music Works in Film
• 3 A Woman Scored
• 4 At the Twilight’s Last Scoring
• 5 Opening Scores
• Tracking Identifications An Epilogue
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Works Cited
• Videos Cited
• Notes