Music, Movies, Meanings, and Markets

Cinemajazzamatazz

Morris Holbrook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136715754
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Jazz Music

Music, Movies, Meanings, and Markets focuses on macromarketing-related aspects of film music in general and on the cinemusical role of ambi-diegetic jazz in particular. The book examines other work on music in motion pictures which has dealt primarily with the traditional distinction between nondiegetic film music (background music that comes from off-screen and is not audible to the film's characters, to further the dramatic development of plot, character, or other themes) and diegetic music (source music produced on-screen and/or that is audible to the film's characters, adding to the realism of the mise-en-scène without contributing much to other dramatic meanings). This book defines, describes, and illustrates another hitherto-neglected type of film music –ambi-diegetic film music, which appears on-screen but which contributes to the dramatic development of plot, character, and other themes.

Consistent with an interest in macromarketing, such ambi-diegetic film music serves as a kind of product placement (suitable for commercialization via the cross-promotion of soundtrack albums, for example) and plays a role in product design. It also provides one type of symbolic consumer behavior that indicates choices made by film characters when playing-singing-listening-or-dancing in ways that reveal their personalities or convey other cinemusical meanings. Morris Holbrook argues that ambi-diegetic film music sheds light on various social issues –such as the age-old tension between art and entertainment as it applies to the contrast between creative integrity and commercialization. Music, Movies, Meanings, and Markets explores the ways in which ambi-diegetic jazz contributes to the development of dramatic meanings in various films, many of which address the art-versus-commerce theme as a central concern.

Part I

Introduction: Ambi-Diegetic Music in Motion Pictures

1	The Role of Ambi-Diegetic Film Music in the Product Design of Hollywood Movies Macromarketing in La-La-Land

As detailed in the Preface and despite the obvious importance of film music to (macro)marketing-related questions about designing a popular form of entertainment, sometimes with aspirations to the stature of artistic creation, the use of music in motion pictures has inspired only a smattering of serious scholarly attention—though the occasional anthology has slowly begun to appear, often enough to suggest that this area of inquiry enjoys growing vitality. Studies of the film musical are even more sparse—again, with a few scattered collections beginning to emerge. And work on our particular area of interest—namely, jazz in films—remains scarcer than teenagers at a Benny Goodman memorial concert.

Among the few who have studied aspects of product design related to film music, most have devoted primary attention to the classic Hollywood musical score intended to reinforce the dramatic development of plot and character while remaining largely in the background without attracting the conscious awareness of the movie audience. For example, borrowing from the tradition of Nineteenth Century Romantic music (Wagner in particular), a leitmotif (that is, a short musical phrase) might be associated with a particular narrative object (character, setting, theme, or event) in such a way that playing that motivic phrase might serve to indicate the presence or immanence of the relevant referent while altering the phrase might signal changes in its meaning (e.g., Adorno and Eisler 2003, p. 27; Altman 2007, p. 219; Brown 1994, p. 98; Karlin 1994, p. 73; Neumeyer and Buhler 2001, p. 28; Prendergast 1992, pp. 40, 73, 232).

Such uses of externally-generated music as part of a film’s background score are considered nondiegetic. By contrast, those uses in which internallygenerated music is foregrounded as part of the on-screen action are diegetic in nature. Before proceeding, these terms deserve a bit of clarification.

Conventional Wisdom on Diegetic and Nondiegetic Music in Motion Pictures

The noun diegesis and the adjective diegetic fail to appear in my Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and, I would assume, are therefore likely to fall outside the purview of the typical (macro)marketing-oriented reader. Bordwell (1985) traces the term diegesis back to Plato’s Republic where—in a usage retained by Aristotle in the Poetics—it referred to “a story or narration” (Gabbard 1996, p. 300). As described by Gorbman (1987), the term diegesis had its murky reawakening within the context of film criticism in work by the French filmologues during the 1950s. Thus, in some rather obscure publications that we won’t be finding at our local Barnes & Noble, Gérard Genette defined diegesis as “the spatiotemporal universe referred to by the primary narration” (quoted by Gorbman 1987, pp. 20–21), while Etienne Souriau offered a definition of diegesis, diegetic as “all that belongs, ‘by inference,’ to the narrated story, to the world supposed or proposed by the film’s fiction” (Gorbman 1987, p. 21). Picking up the definition proposed by Souriau, Metz (1974) regarded diegesis as “the denotative material of a film” (p. xi) or, expanding a bit, as “the narration itself, but also the … characters, the landscapes, the events, and other narrative elements, in so far as they are considered in their denoted aspect” (p. 98). In his book on How to Read a Film, Monaco (1981) preserves this connection between diegesis and denotation (p. 144). To this, Gorbman (1987) adds her own definition of diegesis as the “narratively implied spatiotemporal world of the actions and characters” (p. 21). Drawing on the work of Burch (1979), Tan (1996) conceptualizes the diegetic effect as “the illusion of being present in the fictional world” or, in Burch’s terms, the “experience of the fictional world as the environment” (p. 52) where “the events appear to be real, concrete, and taking place in the here and now” (p. 53). With respect to the soundtrack, as explained by Gabbard (1996), “diegetic sound refers to what the characters might actually hear” (p. 300).

By common agreement, diegetic music—also called source music—is produced within the film as part of the on-screen action or mise-en-scène (even if the music itself comes from off-screen but is still audible to the on-screen characters). As defined by Gorbman (1987), “Diegetic music” is “music that (apparently) issues from a source within the narrative” (p. 22). Referring to this “distinction that has long been noted” in the applications of such names as “diegetic,” “actual,” and “objective,” Chion (1994) proposes the term screen music to designate “music arising from a source located directly in the space and time of the action, even if this source is a radio or an offscreen musician” (p. 80). Such music attracts the attention of the viewer and serves to reinforce the realism of a particular scene or to establish the ambience of a setting—much in the manner of costumes, décor, scenery, landscaping, or other props. Thus, if a character switches on a radio, we will most likely hear a piece of pop music. If the two young lovers attend a fancy dress ball, they will whirl to the sounds of a waltz played by the dance orchestra. If the heroine’s kid brother joins a grunge band, we will experience its unsavory sounds when she opens the garage door. According to the critical consensus, such diegetic uses of music in film enhance the verisimilitude of the mise-en-scène—augmenting its realistic depiction without adding much to the film’s depth of meaning, narrative significance, connotative richness, or dramatic development.

By contrast, nondiegetic music—or background music—is produced from outside the film and provides an underscore to the events unfolding on the screen. Gorbman (1987) defines the nondiegetic as “narrative intrusion upon the diegesis” (p. 22) via what Gabbard (1996) calls “extradiegetic music … that the characters do not hear” (p. 300). Noting the correspondence of such names as “nondiegetic,” “commemorative,” and “subjective,” Chion (1994) adopts the term pit music to designate “music that accompanies the image from a nondiegetic position, outside the space and time of the action” (p. 80). Such music remains largely in the background, generally goes unnoticed at the conscious level, and serves to enrich the meaning of the film’s plot, the subtleties of its characterizations, the connotations of its events, and/or the significance of its narrative themes. As a classic example, noted by Gorbman (1987), “the menacing ‘shark’ theme, heard even before the camera in Jaws reveals the deadly shark closing in on the unsuspecting swimmers, gives the viewer advance knowledge of the narrative threat” (p. 58). Thus, whenever the heroine approaches, we may hear a haunting love ballad associated with her sweet innocence, her virginal purity, and her tremulous sensitivity. Or an appearance of the villain may prompt the rehearsal of a nasty electronic wail that serves to represent his evil intent, his callous scurrility, and his maleficent machinations. Such nondiegetic uses, they say, establish associations and identifications that further the dramatic development of the plot, flesh out the persona of a particular character, or add depth to key story-related themes.

In sum, the conventional wisdom has suggested that diegetic music adds to a film’s realism, whereas nondiegetic music contributes to the dramatic development of plot, characters, and other themes. Think, for example, of the difference between (say) Bernard Herrmann (nondiegeticist supreme) and (say) Henry Mancini (master of the commercially accessible diegetic filler song). Until the relatively recent revelations by Smith (1998), the former type of approach had received the lion’s share of attention from those writing about film music. Indeed, rather imperiously, Rosar (2002) actually defines film music as including only the nondiegetic type of background scoring. Notice, then, the set of implicit homologies that underlie such contrasts— with the last three entries recapitulating the terms stressed by Chion (1994):

Diegesis :	Nondiegesis
Source Music :	Background Music
From Within :	From Without
Realistic Depiction :	Dramatic Development
Mancini :	Herrmann
Neglected :	Given Precedence
Screen Music :	Pit Music
Actual :	Commemorative
Objective :	Subjective

As we shall see, such parallel binary oppositions permeate the writings of many whose work we shall consider in what follows.

Amplifications

Work That Focuses on Purely Diegetic or Nondiegetic Uses of Film Music

Studies that maintain the traditional diegetic/nondiegetic, source/background, realistic/dramatic, and related parallel binary distinctions—that is, the familiar homologies just described—are not hard to find. These would include the following examples.

Atkins (1983) suggests that “The categories of background scoring and source music are logical ones into which all film music can be divided” (p. 14). For example, in Casablanca (1943), the song “As Time Goes By” begins as source music played by Sam (Dooley Wilson) in the nightclub owned by Rick (Humphrey Bogart) but then migrates to Max Steiner’s background score where it serves “in lushly orchestrated music cues behind many of the most dramatic and romantic scenes in the film” (p. 14; see also Neumeyer and Buhler 2001, p. 33).

In describing music from the Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s, Flinn (1992) emphasizes what she calls “the ‘classical’ understanding of film music”—namely, “that the [nondiegetic background] score” (such as uses of the aforementioned leitmotif) “supports the development of the film’s story line, that it exists to reinforce the narrational information already provided by the image” (p. 14). Examples include Max Steiner’s music for Gone with the Wind (1939), where we find “leitmotivs for Scarlet O’Hara, Rhett Butler, and the other characters within the film” and where “‘Tara’s Theme’ works in much the same way, although it identifies a place and not a character” (p. 108).

As described by Prendergast (1992), Leonard Rosenman’s nondiegetic background score for The Cobweb (1955) uses Schoenbergian atonal compositional techniques to probe the mental states of residents at an insane asylum (p. 119). Thus, Rosenman explained his choice of twelve-tone or serial forms as an attempt “to show what was going on inside characters’ heads” (p. 119), as when dissonant music indicates that “two individuals have troublesome problems within themselves” (p. 123). Later, Prendergast (1992) discusses the score by Bernard Herrmann for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), remarkable for its use of a strings-only orchestra in an effort to complement the film’s black-and-white photography with a “black and white sound” (p. 133). In the famous shower scene, the brutality of the murder is reflected by the violently strident music with its widely spaced diminished chords and major sevenths (p. 144). Still later—speaking mostly of nondiegetic (background) music and drawing on a discussion by Aaron Copland—Prendergast (1992) mentions some key ways in which the musical score helps to realize “the meaning of a film” (p. 213). These include its powers to create an “atmosphere of time and place” (p. 213); “psychological refinements” such as “the unspoken thoughts of a character” (p. 216); or an “underpinning for the theatrical buildup of a scene” (p. 222). Such non-diegetic musical functions are beautifully illustrated in Prendergast’s analysis of David Raksin’s score for William Wyler’s Carrie (1952) where “an elegant waltz tune … is used … to recall those times between Hurstwood and Carrie when their problems did not involve mere survival” (p. 228).

Brown (1994) staunchly maintains the diegetic/nondiegetic, source/background, realistic/dramatic contrast(s) as a basis for his work (p. 67) and considers this distinction to be one of “the cinematic givens”—namely, “(a) that there will almost always be an invisible nondiegetic score to boost the affective impact at key moments, and (b) that source music … is being or can be heard by the characters in the narrative” (p. 68). In preserving, this diegetic/nondiegetic distinction, Brown (1994) makes it quite clear that he intends to focus primarily on the latter: “Film music, in its ‘pure’ state is nondiegetic … , and it is this type of music that will serve as the principal object of discussion” (p. 22). Toward this end, Brown (1994) provides an excellent example of dramatic meanings in nondiegetic background music drawn from Miklós Rózsa’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), wherein similar-but-different love and suspense themes help us anticipate such events as an embrace between Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman (strings playing the love theme in a major mode) or physical violence (the suspense theme played by a somewhat weird-sounding theremin in a heavily chromatic minor mode) and wherein “The interrelatedness of the two themes [especially in their rhythmic structures] suggests that love and madness are two sides of the same coin” (p. 7). Elsewhere, Karlin (1994) agrees that “what Rózsa did with the theremin in Spellbound … immediately summarized the psychotic condition of the hero” (p. 34) so as “to emphasize [his] psychological disturbance” (p. 105). Later, Brown (1994) describes Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s score for The Sea Hawk (1940) in terms that leave no doubts concerning his nondiegetic focus on “the association of the heroism abstractly evoked by the fanfare theme with the character of Thorpe” (p. 103). Further, Brown (1994) explains quite perceptively how certain harmonic practices create certain emotional effects or other meanings, as in Bernard Herrmann’s use of the “Hitchcock chord,” otherwise known as a “minor major-seventh chord” (p. 153)—for example, reading upwards in the key of C minor, C-E

-G-B. Brown points out that “this type of chord frequently appears in modern jazz, an idiom that has often been heard by traditional musical ears as definitely belonging to the domain of the irrational” (p. 153). Thus, “What characterizes the Herrmann/Hitchcock sound are the ways in which … novel harmonic colorations make descent into the irrational felt as an ever-lurking potential” (p. 153) where—in films such as Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960)— “the ‘Hitchcock chord’ … immediately throws the viewer/listener off the rationalized center of normal Western tonality into a more irrational, mythic domain” (pp. 159–160). This level of musicological detail goes far toward making Brown’s analyses of nondiegetic film scores all the more convincing. Later, when explicitly discussing the use of jazz in films, Brown (1994) focuses especially on two nondiegetic background scores—one by John Lewis for Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) and another by Miles Davis for Louis Malle’s Ascenseur Pour L’Échafaud (1958)—both discussed at length in Chapter 13. In Brown’s view, Lewis provides “a consistently moody interplay of timbres and dissonant harmonies that strikingly parallel the coldness and loneliness of the film’s winter settings … and the bitterness of its narrative” (p. 185), while Davis “communicates” via “a set of minor-mode improvisations, filled with tritones and minor thirds, with Davis’s trumpet wailing softly over a slow, grim accompaniment” in a way that “bleakly creates most of the film’s musical affect” (p. 185) to convey a mood of desolation and despair.

Karlin (1994) also carefully preserves the traditional diegetic/nondiegetic, source/score, or on-screen/background distinction where “Source music can be well used to give the flavor of a particular period in time” (p. 69) and where “The score, also called ‘underscoring’ or the ‘background score’” (p. 68) will serve “all the emotional and other dramatic needs of the film” (p. 41) insofar as it reflects “the film’s dramatic theme(s), its characters, its rhythms and textures, and most important, its dramatic requirements” (p. 86). Quoting composer Jerry Goldsmith, Karlin (1994) sees “the real function of scoring” as “to support the film’s impact on the mind and the emotions of the audience” (p. 87). Further, Karlin (1994) suggests, “The specific sound of a particular instrument or group of instruments can characterize or represent a major dramatic element”—as when Karlin himself used recorders as appropriate instruments to capture “the personality (nonassertive and wispy) and background (medieval literature)” of Sandy Dennis (as a school teacher) in Up th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Introduction: Ambi-Diegetic Music in Motion Pictures
• Part II: Ambi-Diegetic Jazz and the Development of Character
• Part III: The Plot Thickens: Cinemusical Meanings in the Crime-Plus-Jazz Genre
• Part IV: Jazz, Films, and Macromarketing Themes: Art versus Commerce in the Young Man-with-a-Horn Genre
• Part V: Ambi-Diegetic, Nondiegetic, and Diegetic Cinemusical Meanings in Motion Pictures: Commerce, Art, and Brando Loyalty . . . or . . . De Niro, My God, to Thee
• Part VI: God Is in the Details
• Part VII: Jazz Biopics as Tragedy and Comedy: Pivotal Ambi-Diegetic Cinemusical Moments in Tragedepictions and Comedepictions of Jazz Heroes
• References