Gothic Music

The Sounds of the Uncanny

Isabella Van Elferen

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781783165315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Gothic Music - The Sounds of the Uncanny traces sonic Gothic through history and genres from the eighteenth-century ghost story through the spooky soundtracks of cinema, television and video games to the dark music of the Goth subculture.

Introduction ‘Baleful Sounds and Wild Voices Ignored’1

In Darkness Hidden

Uncanny sounds pervade Gothic. Hollow footsteps and ghostly melodies haunt the heroines of Gothic novels. The ‘children of the night’ ‘make music’ in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Booming leitmotifs announce the Count in Dracula film adaptations. Piercingly high violin tones or disembodied childsong indicate supernatural presence in spooky movies. The eerie soundtracks of Gothic television serials invade the safety of the home. Pounding drones of white noise guide survival horror game players through deserted cityscapes. At Goth club nights, all these sounds are mixed into a live Gothic tale.

Although sound and music occupy a prominent place in all the manifestations of Gothic, the sonic characteristics of the genre remain obscured in Gothicist as well as musicological research. The sounds and music in Gothic literature are seldom addressed; Emma McEvoy’s recent online essays, which explore theatrical and musical adaptations of works such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre, provide a starting point for such endeavours.2 Even though film music studies do address cinematic renderings of Gothic novels and scripts, they analyse the horror rather than Gothic dimensions of their soundtracks since these visual genres have become conflated in popular and academic discourses: the essays in two volumes that appeared on horror film music in recent years, Terror Tracks (ed. Philip Hayward, 2009) and Music in the Horror Film (ed. Neil Lerner, 2010) discuss films from Friedrich Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) to Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge (2004). Hardly any scholarship discussing Gothic television and video games exists and as a result their soundtracks have never been addressed in terms of Gothic characteristics or functions. While Helen Wheatley has given clear definitions of Gothic television as a twentieth-century mediator of the domestic uncanny and the haunted house in Gothic Television (2006), the soundtracks of Gothic serials like Twin Peaks and The X-Files are analysed in terms of composing styles only rather than as representatives of Gothic television music.3 The ‘eerie music’ and ‘deadly silences’ of Gothic video game music are studied – if at all – as the interactive equivalent of horror film music, which leaves their Gothic components out of the analysis.4

Unlike Gothic film, television, or game music, the music of the Goth milieu did not originate as the sonic accompaniment to a Gothic narrative in text or visuals, but as a primarily musical expression of Gothic themes. Perhaps for that reason, it is the only Gothic music that is also explicitly referred to as such, both inside and outside the scene. Curiously, any critical assessment of it reverts to adjectives that have nothing to do with music. Goth music is described as ‘sinister’, ‘sombre’ and ‘depressing’ in Paul Hodkinson’s empirical study of the Goth scene and as ‘moody’, ‘gloomy’ and ‘macabre’ in Jennifer Park’s account of Goth rock and fashion.5 Above all, Goth music is described by those who make it, those who distribute it, and those who listen to it as dark. Bauhaus’s second single was called ‘Dark Entries’; a Michigan-based Goth DJ, cypher, runs an online radio station called Dark Nation Radio; journalists describe ‘the dark reign’ of Goth music.6 Analyses of the compositional strategies leading to this supposed darkness are rare, and limit themselves to individual artists and bands.7 The research field of Gothic music, thus, is limited to Goth, and if this music is assessed in terms of its Gothic-ness this key quality is only described in the vaguest of terms: as invisible and intangible ingredients of Gothic phantasmagoria, sound and music are veiled by adjectives pertaining to the visual, the visceral and the affective.

This book addresses the problems of Gothic music research in two ways. Tracing sound and music through the various transfigurations of the Gothic genre, on the one hand, it widens the scope of Gothic music from subculture only to literature, film, television and video games. On the basis of the shared characteristics of these forms of sonic Gothic, on the other, the book develops a definition of Gothic music in musical rather than visual or tactile terms. I conceptualise sonic Gothic, and Gothic music in particular, as ‘the sounds of the uncanny’ operating on various simultaneous levels that correspond with the levels that can be distinguished in the Gothic genre at large.

The Sounds of the Uncanny

A rumbling cello. Two men in an empty corridor.

‘Did you hear it?’

‘Yes, the child.’

‘The… child?’

‘Yes yes, the child!’

‘There… is no child here.’

[Silence. Cello rumble. Brief violin motifs.]

‘But… the dogs!’

‘There are… neither children nor dogs here.’

‘No?’

‘No. Goodnight.’

As a violin tone moves up and down in a fast glissando, an opening door ends a discomforting scene from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932). This expressionist film adaptation of Sheridan LeFanu’s stories in In a Glass Darkly (1872) employs grotesque shadows and camera techniques like double exposure to create cinematic half-beings depicting the ‘shadow existence’ (Schattendasein) of vampires. Sound and music are used to heighten the ambivalence of visuals and narratives as they move on the blurry boundaries between dream, fantasy and reality. The dialogue cited above suggests that perception deceives and that hearing sound does not necessarily imply presence. If there are no children or dogs around, what did either man hear? Was there a sound at all, or did they just imagine it? And if there was a sound, did it have a physical source? The dialogue could have appeared in any Gothic novel. Authors such as Ann Radcliffe, Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson and Mark Z. Danielewski describe similar un/heard and dis/embodied sounds disturbing the silence of haunted houses. Gothic spectres are often audible before they become visible, and their ephemeral voices are all the more chilling when they sing. Underlining the uncanniness of such sounds with nondiegetic music,8 Dreyer’s soundtrack composer Wolfgang Zeller adds the low rumble of a cello, a few string motifs and, accompanying the opening of the door, a violin hovering upwards and downwards in the suggestive perpetuum mobile of the musical glissando – higher and higher, down and down, until it is out of earshot but even imperceptibly still moving, undead. Where does the door lead to?

Sound suggests presence even when this presence is invisible or intangible, and is thus closely related to the ghostly. Gothic music exploits sound’s ambiguous relation with embodiment, pushing the uncanny implications of this relation to their limits. Timbres like that of the ‘spectral’ high-pitched violin, of the ‘transcendent’ female choir, or of white noise suggesting ‘the ghost in the machine’ are privileged within the genre, whether they are described in Gothic novels, heard in film and television, or interacted with in video games and on the dance floor. Musical elements undermining closure, such as the open-ended glissando and the repetitions of drones and non-linear music, increase the sense of uncanniness in sonic liminality. Gothic music is always spectral.

Nondiegetic music such as the strings in Dreyer’s Vampyr provides a musical commentary on a film, television programme or video game. Like a voice-over, it gives the viewer information about the film, show or game that is not available in dialogue or imagery. And like a voice-over, nondiegetic music seems to emanate from nowhere, a phantom sound generated by a disembodied presence. Unlike a voice-over, however, this information is not provided through language but through music, an infinitely less stable signifier. The violin glissando in Vampyr provides a much less explicit sonic commentary than, say, a voice-over that would state ‘… and so the men felt a bit discombobulated’. The meanings engendered by nondiegetic music in film, television or video games, moreover, are always tinged with personal experience. The memories and emotions evoked by a soundtrack – which may be shared among audiences or defined by individual histories – become entwined with the way in which the screened narrative is experienced. Nondiegetic music makes the past return and overlay the present; it even does so in the case of music that the film audience has never heard, but which they will inevitably relate to other listening experiences. For this reason Kevin Donnelly has pointed out that nondiegetic music ‘haunts’ visual narratives since past experiences are absently present in the disembodied melodies floating around the film or television screen.9

The fact that film, television and game music is often only subconsciously heard, positioned as it is in the background of narrative and visual events, only adds to this effect. This seemingly subservient position is precisely what enables it to exert great influence on the ways in which foregrounded events are experienced. Watching a horror movie is much less scary when the volume is muted: the descending melodies accompanying the teenager’s descent into the basement makes our hands sweaty, and the screaming stinger at the moment the villain jumps from his hiding place makes our heart leap also. A sonic imp, this music enters perception through the back door and there performs its destabilising work. It invisibly adds layers of highly personal meaning to an on-screen narrative and increases cinematic, televisual or gaming immersion through a cunning annexation of viewers’ ears and hearts.

Gothic music makes elaborate use of both the phantom character of nondiegetic music and of its conflating past and present through personal and collective connotations. The ephemeral childsong that the men in Vampyr did or did not hear is not only eerie because it suggests bodiless, ghostly children, it is also a long-standing convention in the literature and cinema of terror. Who can hear nondiegetic childsong on film or television and not think of other scary movies or television shows or of the trope of lost innocence it so obviously plays on? Bringing back half-forgotten pleasant memories or uncomfortable recollections, sonic Gothic renders nostalgia audible: just like Gothic novels, this music does not just reproduce history but rather conjures up a version of the past that is distorted by our own memories. This aspect of Gothic music extends beyond the nondiegetic accompaniment to visual narratives only: neoromantic and pagan Goth bands, for instance, compose their own, anti-historical version of the Victorian era and the Middle Ages. Gothic nostalgia often evokes the Freudian uncanny – the return of the repressed – and so does Gothic music. The zombie leitmotifs in Resident Evil remind the gamer that these malevolent creatures may lurk behind every corner; the martial beats of Cybergoth band Feindflug bring to mind the military history of the band’s home country Germany, reminding its inhabitants that their home is sometimes unhomely. Gothic music always represents haunting.

Like many types of Gothic writing, Gothic music emphatically evacuates its own surface. Gothic foregrounds itself as a careful mixture of over-referentiality and non-referentiality, a convergence of worn-out formulas depicting ruined castles and implicit hinting at hidden terrors. Precisely through its balancing of over- and under-signification Gothic discloses the thin lines between the two, revealing the bleak emptiness of the surface that is language, image, music. The violin glissando in Vampyr exceeds referentiality, emphasising through every part of its slide upward and downward its motion away from stasis, exposing as a gaping abyss the impossibility of musical meaning. An even more disturbing example is the soundtrack to David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), a film in which reality and nightmare, desire and fear are indistinguishable. The nondiegetic soundtrack to the film consists of white noise that slowly moves from buzzing to hissing to whirring and back. Continuously present and deafeningly loud, the noise is ruthlessly indifferent to any possible referentiality or any distinction between reality and dream – perhaps it exists in lead character Henry’s head only. In contrast to such musical under-determination, Gothic music also produces musical over-signifiers such as the gongs, pizzicato violins and isolated third intervals on a piano announcing supernatural presence in Vampyr. Like Peter Murphy’s hollow voice and the repetitive bass in Bauhaus’s Goth classic ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ (1979), these clichés scream but one thing:‘this music is SPOOKY!’ Drawing listeners’ attention to nothing but their own empty surface, such musical formulas perform an expenditure of referentiality. Both the evasive sound of glissandos or white noise and the seemingly unambiguous markers of spookiness indicate the void behind the surface of music, each questioning their own capacity to transfer any meaning at all. What fears, what desires lie buried in the uncanny space beyond signification? Which ghosts are released when the surface evaporates? Gothic music always performs excess.

In excess of its own mediality, Gothic music also exceeds the borders between Gothic narratives and their audiences. Claudia Gorbman has described film music as a ‘gel’ that crosses over the boundaries of the screen:‘It bonds: shot to shot, narrative events to meaning, spectator to narrative, spectator to audience.’10 This holds true for television and game music as well as for film music: and even the unheard music described in literature has the non-verbal effect of binding reader to narrative by way of (imagined) musical immersion. While listening to music makes past and present overlap through connotations, the same performativity can blur the distinctions between reality, memory, fantasy and imagination. This aspect of musical experience is used in Gothic to draw audiences into the borderlands it depicts: Eraserhead’s soundtrack exceeds the film screen, enters viewers’ (sub)consciousness and makes them, too, wonder whether this disturbing white noise is real, imaginary, or their own dream.

Musical immersion can be so all-encompassing that the...

Table of contents

• GOTHIC MUSIC
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction ‘Baleful Sounds and Wild Voices Ignored’1
• 1 The Sound of Gothic Literature
• 2 Gothic Film Music: The Audiovisual Uncanny
• 3 Gothic Television Music: The Unhomely Home
• 4 Gothic Game Music: Hyperreality Haunted
• 5 Goth Music: Uncanny Embodied
• 6 The Unthinkable Sounds of the Uncanny
• Notes
• Bibliography