Silent Films/Loud Music

New Ways of Listening to and Thinking about Silent Film Music

Phillip Johnston

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501366413
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Silent Films/Loud Music discusses contemporary scores for silent film as a rich vehicle for experimentation in the relationship between music, image, and narrative. Johnston offers an overview of the early history of music for silent film paired with his own first-hand view of the craft of creating new original scores for historical silent films: a unique form crossing musical boundaries of classical, jazz, rock, electronic, and folk. As the first book completely devoted to the study of contemporary scores for silent film, it tells the story of the historical and creative evolution of this art form and features an extended discussion and analysis of some of the most creative works of contemporary silent film scoring.
Johnston draws upon his own career in both contemporary film music (working with directors Paul Mazursky, Henry Bean, Philip Haas and Doris Dörrie, among others) and in creating new scores for silent films by Browning, Méliès, Kinugasa, Murnau & Reiniger. Through this book, Johnston presents a discussion of music for silent films that contradicts long-held assumptions about what silent film music is and must be, with thought-provoking implications for both historical and contemporary film music.

1

Music for Silent Films

From Synchronicity to Polysynchronicity

Of the music of the silent film era overall, more is known about general practices than about specific musical performances. The few complete notated scores that survive, mostly from the later years of that period, present only a partial record of the music for films, both notated and non-notated, composed and improvised, that would have been performed. The exact content of the vast body of work of improvised scores for historical silent films created by both professionals and inspired amateurs is lost forever.¹

Silent film music scholar Rick Altman writes,

Not only are the performances themselves forever lost, but even their traces. . . . Many original performances were improvised and thus from the start lacked a written record. Where sheet music was used, it has by and large gone the way of other cheaply produced century-old paper documents. Even when the printed music remains, we rarely know when it was used, how it was performed and what its relationship was to which film(s).²

The foundational assumptions of these scores regarding the relationship between music and narrative/image were established in the pre-film era of melodrama, magic shows, opera, and dance. They were further developed in the specific context of silent film and then evolved in a related form in the era of synchronized sound that is generally regarded as beginning with The Jazz Singer (1927). Many film music practices, such as the use of leitmotif and the mirroring of narrative, have continued largely intact since the late nineteenth century.

Over the last thirty years, the practice of contemporary composers of all genres creating new scores for early films has grown into a rich and diverse new art form, ranging from the historical to the avant-garde. However, the vast majority of these scores adhere, in differing degrees, to century-old tropes in terms of the relationship between film and music. While composers for contemporary sound film have a variety of concerns, contemporary composers for silent film inherently have greater freedom to experiment with this music/film relationship at its most basic level. There is a palpable excitement being generated in the art form by these possibilities, and later in this chapter, I will introduce the term “polysynchronicity” in order to discuss the possibilities and the wider opportunities that lie therein. While the polymorphous perversity of these investigations questions some of these tropes on multiple levels, one must begin with the Romulus and Remus of academic and critical film discourse, synchronicity, and asynchronicity.

Synchronicity and Asynchronicity

The term “synchronous” film score, which still describes the most common model in both commercial Hollywood and independent films, refers to a relationship between the music and the image/narrative whereby that which is on the screen is being reinforced or echoed by the music. This approach has also been referred to as parallelism.³ When the scene is a “sad” scene in narrative terms, the music will have qualities that have become popularly associated with sadness: slow tempo, minor key, and wide vibrato.⁴ The asynchronous model involves music that provides information that is in one way or another different from what is apparent in the image/narrative, appearing to function in a contradictory manner, or at the very least to add additional subtext. One oft-cited example of this approach is Oliver Stone’s use of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” in the opening of Platoon (1986), in which a slow minor-key string quartet accompanies a scene of men going off to the war in Vietnam. The melancholy mood of the music contradicts the convention of martial snare drums and brass that had historically accompanied such scenes in “classical film scoring” (cf. Gorbman, to follow) that imply that war is a glorious affair (at least at the beginning of a film). The unexpected music creates a mood that would not have been there without it (until we see the body bags anyway). Another example of asynchronicity, in which additional information is added, is Francis Ford Coppola’s use of Pietro Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana” in the final murder scenes of The Godfather, Part III (1990). On the most basic level, the “high culture” implication of the Corleone family sitting at the opera in beautiful clothing is contrasted to the low culture being intercut of their enemies being slaughtered in the streets by thugs, though this is a more complex use of licensed music.⁵ But although the asynchronous approach opens a rich field of new associations, it nevertheless adopts the same perspective as the synchronous as the choice of music expresses the director’s intent of a primary narrative, and that the music is defined strictly in terms of its relationship to that narrative.

Gregg Redner’s Deleuze and Film Music cites the development, concurrent with the development of synchronized sound, of two “concurrent, but aesthetically- and theoretically-divergent”⁶ courses: parallelism and counterpoint, which roughly coincide with the terms “synchronous” and “asynchronous,” as explained earlier. However, Nicholas Cook, in Analysing Musical Multimedia, sees them as two sides of the same coin, the second being a mere inversion of the first as long as the second is still dependent on the image.⁷ He posits a third relationship, that of being complementary, which I interpret to mean juxtaposition (“the two media are complementary but the film is primary”).⁸ But the description is not definitive, and he moves on to Kathryn Kalinak’s argument that the problem with classical theory is that music and film are considered separately: “the assumption that meaning is contained in the visual image and music either reinforces or alters what is already there.”⁹ For them, the idea of film itself is unitary, music being only a component of the whole. Herrmann’s music for Psycho (1960) doesn’t amplify tension, it creates it. However, in the case of silent film, the music is not inextricably part the silent film; even when music is written to be performed live, it is inherently separate.¹⁰

Foundations of Film Music Analysis

It is worth recounting here Claudia Gorbman’s influential “Principals of Composition: Classical Film Music: Principles of Composition, Mixing and Editing” (1987): (i) invisibility: the technical apparatus of non-diegetic¹¹ 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—that is, to the primary vehicles of the narrative; (iii) signifier of emotion: soundtrack music may set specific moods and emphasize particular emotions suggested in the narrative (cf. #IV), but first and foremost, it is a signifier of emotion itself; (iv) narrative cueing/referential narrative: music gives referential and narrative cues, for example, indicating point of view, supplying formal demarcations, and establishing setting and characters, and 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; and (vii) a given film score may violate any of the aforementioned principles, providing the violation is at the service of the other principles.¹² Later she writes:

The danger of dwelling on the “classical Hollywood model” of film scoring is that it might give the erroneous impression of uniformity and sameness in studio era film music. The model must not prevent us from seeing the enormous variety of musical discourses and figures it was able to encompass. However unconventional or avant-garde a Hollywood musical score might be, the film always motivates it in conventional ways. [my italics] Thus, there is little that’s progressive or subversive about jazz in the milieu of drug addiction in The Man With The Golden Arm, the electronic sounds that waft over the strange Forbidden Planet, or the electronically generated music complicit with the alcoholic dementia of Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. David Bordwell in fact cites Hangover Square’s score to argue for Hollywood’s capacity for “non-disruptive differentiation,” as the film’s discordant music is narratively motivated by its connection to a deranged character.¹³

Writers who approach film music more from a psychological vantage point, rather than a historical/procedural one, offer comparable analyses.¹⁴ Annabel J. Cohen gives what she calls the congruence-associationist framework for understanding film music communications in her Music as a Source of Emotion in Film:

1. Music masks extraneous noises.

2. It provides continuity between shots.

3. It directs attention to important features of the screen through structural or associationist congruence.

4. When unassociated with a particular focus, it induces mood, as often occurs during the opening credits of a film.

5. It communicates meaning and furthers the narrative, especially in ambiguous situations.

6. Through association in memory, music becomes integrated with the film and enables the symbolization of past and future events through the technique of leitmotif.

7. Music heightens the sense of reality of or absorption in a film, perhaps by augmenting arousal, and increasing attention to the entire film context and inattention to everything else.

8. Music as an art form adds to the aesthetic effect of the film [my paraphrase].¹⁵

These rules function as psychological corollary to Gorbman’s “Classical Principles,” but, taken together, they illustrate a foundational overview of the “classical” model of the functional role of film music, from both a critical and a psychological viewpoint.

In Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music, Anahid Kassabian acknowledges the dichotomy of synchronicity versus asynchronicity: “Since the early history of film, film scholars have attempted to describe the possible relationships between music and visuals. Historically, film theorists generally relegated the music to one of two possibilities: parallelism or counterpoint.”¹⁶ These rules-after-the-fact affirm not only the synchronous/asynchronous dichotomy but also many of the other foundational assumptions about the relationship between music and film that have been carried from the silent film era into the sound film era, such as “inaudibility,” the audience’s “absorption in the film,” and the priority of narrative. David Neumeyer and James Buhler affirm,

[T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Prelude
• 1 Music for Silent Films: From Synchronicity to Polysynchronicity
• 2 Scores for Silent Film: Then and Now
• 3 Opportunities in Contemporary Scores for Silent Film
• 4 Contemporary Scores for Silent Film: Four Case Studies
• 5 The Application of Polysynchronicity: Five Case Studies
• 6 Jazzin’ the Silents: Jazz and Improvised Music in Contemporary Scores for Silent Film
• 7 Imaginary Authenticity: Scores for Modern Silent Films
• 8 Wordless!: Music for Comics and Graphic Novels Turns Time into Space (and Back Again)
• 9 Silent Film Composers Speak!
• Appendix 1: Scores
• Appendix 2: Contemporary Composer for Silent Film Interview
• References
• Index
• Copyright