The potent power of movie music

We drove to Fort Smith last week to help out with a concert of movie music--I emceed a performance by the Metropolitan Winds of Dallas, led by Randol Bass--performed during the Arkansas Bandmasters Association annual convention. As part of my preparation, I wrote this essay, which I knew was too long and formal to deliver at the concert. So imagine this read in Morgan Freeman's voice:

I went to school in the days before home video--we didn't have VCRs or laser discs. But when I was in law school my roommate had an open reel-to-reel tape deck and a library of soundtrack tapes. When he felt like seeing Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark, he'd put on his headphones, start the tape and close his eyes. This was how he re-watched his favorite films.

I understand that better now than I did then, for I think of movies differently. We all create our own version of every film we see, and every time we see it we bring something different to the mix. It's a mistake to think of a movie as something that plays before our eyes, for that's only how we apprehend the dancing light. The ultimate screen is the one in the back of our heads, where our imagination conspires with the light bouncing off the wall and noise that fills our ears. It's sound and vision, mixed in our heads.

Even before the movies talked, they worked this way.

Silent pictures were never a dumb-show; most of them were accompanied by pianists or organists, if not by a full orchestra. Film distributors supplied these accompanists with cue sheets, or even printed scores, or at minimum a "suggestion list"--ideas for scene music, categorized by mood, event, or element.

While French silent features The Assassination of the Duke of Guise (1908) and Queen Elizabeth (1912) had original scores, The Clansman, a 1915 film we know as Birth of a Nation, is widely regarded as the first Hollywood film to completely integrate music into the moviegoing experience. D.W. Griffith commissioned Joseph Carl Breil, who composed the music for Queen Elizabeth and conducted the music that played on the sets of Griffith's silent films to set the mood for his actors and crew, to create a three-hour-long musical score that combined adaptations of existing works by classical composers, new arrangements of well-known melodies, and original music in an effort to fulfill the director's vision of "flowing sound" to accompany his tumult of images.

To this end, Griffith spent eight weeks with Breil, selecting, arranging, composing theme-tunes and transitions, and rehearsing a full orchestra for The Clansman. They fitted music to the movie's more than 1,500 scenes, and Griffith--who didn't play an instrument but was musical enough to compose some themes for his pictures--was deeply involved, drawing upon his own memory of folk songs and genuinely earning the "music by" credit he shared with Breil.

(The first completely original score for a film didn't come around until after the advent of talkies when, in 1933, Max Steiner wrote one for King Kong. Eight years previously, Edmund Meisel had--in a scant 12 days--written a nearly complete score for the Berlin premiere of Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. In the famous Odessa Steps sequence, Meisel used the dramatic section of Prokofiev's "Love of Three Oranges.")

Music serves to define a movie as something apart from real life, as a qualitatively different kind of experience, a fantasy or a dream. An intuitive, non-intellectual communication working on emotional rather than rational levels, music is the ally of illusion because it insinuates itself into the unconscious. You don't have to understand what music "means," you need only let it affect you, wash over you and pull you along in its channels.

We develop certain associations--when you hear Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries," you might associate it with Robert Duvall and the smell of napalm in the morning in 1979's Apocalypse Now (though Breil used it as the theme for the marauding clansmen in Birth of a Nation). Or maybe you remember Elmer Fudd singing "Kill the wabbit" over it, and Chuck Jones used it in the 1957 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon short "What's Opera, Doc?"

Personal associations aside, human beings are tuned to be very good at interpreting sound. We were likely to hear a prehistoric predator before seeing it; those who quickly picked up on the snapping of twigs had a better chance of escaping to pass down their genetic material. Certain sounds evoke physical responses that transcend cultural differences--the screechy violin glissandi of Bernard Herrmann's score for the shower scene of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho simulate the dissonant cries of animals in distress.

Some films, such as Irreversible, Gasper Noe's realistic horror drama from 2002, and the found-footage haunted-house story Paranormal Activity from 2007, have experimented with nearly inaudible low-frequency bass sounds designed to induce a sense of unease in the audience. (Many audience members reported becoming disoriented and nauseous during Irreversible, where an infrasonic tone was played for the film's first half hour as the prelude to a particularly brutal rape scene.)

Music is an important if not indivisible part of what we think a movie is. There have been movements to eliminate the artificial score, first in the '50s, when filmmakers thought that deleting scores might make their work more true to life. (It didn't, it made them flat and lifeless.) Then in the '90s, the Dogme 95 school eliminated music scoring, permitting only "source music"--for instance music playing from an onscreen radio or live band--in films they certified. (The "Ride of the Valkyries" scene from Apocalypse Now would pass this test; its ambient music played over helicopter loudspeakers designed to scare the Viet Cong.)

But music is such a natural and important part of the moviegoing experience that even its absence seems to comment on the text; that there is no music in The Grapes of Wrath (1940) underlines the impoverished nature of the characters.

But music is too effective a tool for most serious filmmakers to forgo. Its power is deep and only partially parsable. It reaches us where words cannot. We close our eyes and it paints for us a cosmos.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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Editorial on 08/03/2014

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