by Huss, John
We might first confirm our sense that the score for Planet of the Apes carries meaning by imagining the movie without its music. We would still have the spectacular performances from Charlton Heston, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, Roddy McDowell, and the other cast members. We would have the dialogue and story, the remarkable prosthetic makeup and the settings that bring the world of the apes to life. But would the alien and desolate landscape of the Forbidden Zone seem quite so desolate without the music? Would the apes seem more or less alien (or human) without the music accompanying their activities? Would the film’s pointed social commentary be as biting without the musical score?
Certain Young Cynics Have Chosen to Study Man
Planet of the Apes was a movie ripe with meaning for audiences in 1968, which allowed for the possibility and even the expectation that the music would carry meanings. Planet of the Apes appeared at the beginning of a cycle of science-fiction films that featured a dystopian future as a vehicle for critique of the present. This trend lasted into the mid-1970s and included all the movies in the original Apes series.
Planet of the Apes was also part of a broader movement in American cinema that saw filmmakers experimenting with existing film genres even as they used their films for social criticism. Although initially promoted as an action film, Planet of the Apes has since been widely discussed as an allegory for race relations and as a broader commentary on the place of “others” within Western society. It also includes pointed statements on the relationships between science and religion, the distinctions between “primitive” and “advanced” cultures, and the degree to which technology and progress mitigate humanity’s own aggressive tendencies.
The meanings carried by Planet of the Apes resonated with several cultural currents coming together at the time of the film’s release. The Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and environmental concerns all posed challenges to existing social and political values that became the subtexts for films and other artistic works of the period. The newly achieved artistic self-consciousness of American cinema enabled it to engage these social questions even as it explored and manipulated film conventions in ways that film audiences found meaningful. When considered in this social and cultural context, what would the unique score for Planet of the Apes bring to the table? Could it satisfy traditional functions of film music while also reinforcing other ideas?
The ability of instrumental music to convey meaning by itself has been debated since the flowering of instrumental music in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although composers and critics acknowledged that instrumental music could suggest emotions, they had greater regard for vocal music and its ability to convey specific ideas through words. In his Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant summed up this secondary status given to instrumental music when he called it “more pleasure than culture.”
The status of instrumental music rose significantly during the nineteenth century, largely due to the influence of Romanticism, which placed great value on emotional experience. Questions of meaning in music stood at the center of debates between advocates of absolute music, which focused almost exclusively on form and thematic development (such as the instrumental music of Johannes Brahms) and a “poetic music” that sought to create meaning by combining music with poetic subjects (as in the program music of Franz Liszt and the operas of Richard Wagner).
The rise of modernism in the years after World War I saw composers rethinking fundamental attributes of music, especially harmony and form. In his autobiography of 1936, Igor Stravinsky famously wrote that he considered music to be “by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc.” His statement resonated well into the second half of the twentieth century as modernist composers emphasized music’s separateness from the idea of expression and celebrated musical works as autonomous aesthetic objects.
The music of Planet of the Apes sounds very much like the works of these composers as they explored new ways of creating and organizing music. But if the film’s score was modeled on music that is assumed to carry no expressive content or outside meaning, how could the score do its job? Could it still carry meaning anyway, and where would that meaning come from?
For the More Ancient Culture Is the More Advanced
The significance of modernism generally lay in its break with the artistic practices of the past and the critique implied by that artistic break. Critics like Theodor W. Adorno frequently wrote about the “stylistic ruptures” at the heart of modernism and how those ruptures brought our attention to conventions, whether artistic or social, that were so common and familiar that they were treated as “natural.” Modernism’s advocates praised its austerity and intellectual purity over the commercialism and sentiment of popular culture.
During the Cold War, modernist art, with its implied critical stance, was promoted as an example of the freedom of expression available in the United States and the West. Its abstraction and emphasis on formal organization contrasted sharply with the overt appeals to sentiment and nationalism found in the state-sanctioned socialist realism of the Soviet Union and other communist countries.
As the most prestigious examples of modernist music, the severe and intellectually rigorous works of composers like Milton Babbitt, Roger Sessions, and Pierre Boulez took their places alongside the visual artworks of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning as pillars of high art in the West. But this elevated status also conferred on modernist art and music the very sort of political and social associations that their austerity and abstraction sought to deny. Modernist art and music inadvertently stood for the Western values actively promoted by the United States, with its pervasive mass culture, its economic and military power, and its technological superiority. This music even symbolized the space program that, in the context of Planet of the Apes, would send Taylor and his crew on their fateful journey.
Reactions to modernism as part of the broader turmoil of the 1960s brought about a new artistic prestige for cinema that made movies like Planet of the Apes possible. Young, up-and-coming directors in the US banded together into a “New Hollywood” and explored familiar movie genres like westerns and science fiction to give critical perspectives on current events and conditions.
These filmmakers took an unfavorable view of Cold War politics and values and the ways that these shaped American society. By adopting recognizably modernist features into their films, such as the musical style used in Planet of the Apes, the filmmakers turned the critical power of modernism back onto the Western culture that was its chief patron and advocate. In the case of Planet of the Apes, the score’s modernist style implicated Western culture as the cause of human self-destruction even before the movie revealed that Earth is the Planet of the Apes.
A Gorilla to Remember
By “modernist” music, I mean music that deliberately avoids the traditional practice of consonant functional harmony that informs most film music, popular music, and most familiar classical music. The music of Planet of the Apes is marked by unusual and exotic instrumentation, frenetic and relentless rhythms, eerie and off-kilter melodies, and unsettling atonal harmonies, all reminiscent of modernist concert music from the middle third of the twentieth century. These features were comparatively rare in movie music up through the 1960s, which encouraged their associations with that concert music and, by extension, its associated ideas.
Unusual timbres and instrumentation supply some of the most striking qualities of the music for Planet of the Apes. In addition to the standard orchestra, the score features a ram’s horn, a slide whistle and a variety of exotic percussion instruments including log drums, scraped gongs, metal mixing bowls, and a Brazilian cuíka. Many of these sounds simply contribute to the oddness of certain settings. The agitated rhythms beaten on the mixing bowls create a bizarre sound that underscores the surreal barrenness of the Forbidden Zone as Taylor and his companions hike across it. Likewise, the sc
raped gongs add to the sense of arid, open space in these scenes. (The struck mixing bowls can be heard beginning at 16:19 and 26:01 on the Fox Home Video DVD. The scraped gong produces “whooshing” sounds that start at 15:42 and can be heard throughout scenes in the Forbidden Zone.)
The slide whistle and cuíka allude to the apes more directly by evoking simian vocalizations. The slide whistle, heard during the main titles and intermittently throughout the score, gives a soft hooting sound. The sounds of the cuíka are more animated, suggesting anything from short squawks to bellows and whoops. The cuíka’s sounds appear during scenes of ape violence and aggression, notably Taylor’s first sight of the marauding gorillas during the hunt (32:13 on the DVD), Taylor’s escape and capture in the ape city (57:01 and 59:08), and the ape soldiers’ ambush of Taylor’s party in the Forbidden Zone (1:31:07 on the DVD).
The ram’s horn, log drums, and similar instruments carry cultural associations with their striking and distinctive timbres. The log drums and other exotic percussion heard throughout the score sound reminiscent of instruments from non-Western cultures that in the past would have been called “primitive.” Similarly, the rough, shrill timbre of the ram’s horn has an almost primal sound that intensifies the war cries it emits during the scenes of the hunt and the ambush at the cave in the Forbidden Zone (33:10, 35:04, and 1:47:06 on the DVD).
Unusual rhythms abound in the score. Many musical passages rely on ostinati, or incessantly repeated rhythmic and melodic fragments. Other passages use syncopation, or emphasis of “off-beats,” sometimes to the point where any clear sense of a regular meter or time signature is lost. The hunt and Taylor’s first escape both feature rapid ostinati churning under a succession of punctuated chords (31:09 and 54:47 on the DVD).
Although these incessant ostinati and syncopations sometimes obscure the music’s meter, they still emphasize the underlying pulse of the music. That pulse has a visceral, almost primal quality to it that can connote notions of “primitive,” “non-civilized,” or even “savage” to whatever the music is accompanying. When used to accompany scenes featuring apes, it marks the apes as “primitive.”
He Keeps Trying to Form Words
Many composers of modernist concert music would have had little interest in cultivating these types of associations, preferring instead to think of these sounds as materials for abstract music. But John Cage was one composer who worried less about the construction of music and more about the experience of music. Although Cage took positions that some considered extreme (he regarded any sound experience as musical), he did allow for the possibility that music could carry meaning. For Cage, however, any meanings related to music lay primarily with the listener and the listener’s musical experiences.
Cage’s ideas resonated with those of sociologists, musicologists, and other composers who increasingly saw music as a medium capable of carrying meanings even if it held no inherent meanings. These individuals understood music as a communication system that’s much like language and able to convey meanings in similar ways. Comparisons between music and language were themselves nothing new; even Kant’s contemporaries wrote of the importance of using language as a model for creating music with internal coherence. What was different about this newer thinking was its focus on how music is received and perceived rather than on prescriptions for composition.
Jean-Jacques Nattiez is one of several musicologists who include music among other “symbolic forms” that can carry meaning using words, pictures, “sound-images,” or other signs that can refer to objects or concepts. Drawing on the works of pioneering linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce, Nattiez describes “meaning” as the result of an individual’s receiving signs and using them to understand and make sense of his or her existence. These signs possess meaning only in relation to other signs, and they are able to possess and convey meaning only because and only as long as we collectively agree on the references and associations that they carry.
Just as words and other signs acquire meaning through repeated association with objects and concepts, music can take on meaning through repeated association with a particular context or experience. Listeners learn that certain musical gestures can carry particular associations by hearing those gestures used multiple times in similar contexts. Because the musical score for Planet of the Apes sounds like modernist concert music, it recalls that music for listeners who are familiar with those sounds.
Traditional Hollywood movie music, music of the “Classical Hollywood style” from the 1920s through the 1950s, is replete with associations like this, carried by music. Beginning with silent films and continuing through the early years of sound films, Hollywood composers developed an extensive stockpile of gestures, styles, and other “codes” that they regularly used to evoke moods, settings, and characterizations, all to enhance the film being accompanied. Hollywood cultivated these associations because it assumed the ability of music to convey the meanings implied by these musical codes. Noel Carroll has called this movie music “modifying music.” Carroll compared the functions of film music to the ways that adjectives and adverbs modify and give information about nouns and verbs in a sentence. Similarly, movie music works in tandem with other film elements such as image, story, and dialogue, contributing its own associations to the meaning of the whole.
None of these elements, including the music, has any inherent meanings. However, all of them carry associations accrued from the broader range of cultural experiences that audiences bring with them. It’s the interaction of these associations with the audience’s cultural knowledge that produces meaning in a film and in its music.
What I Know of Man Was Written Long Ago
In the case of the music for Planet of the Apes, the musical features that make it unique—the sounds of specific instruments, the rhythms and harmonies used, and even the compositional techniques used by the composer, Jerry Goldsmith—all carry their own distinctive associations. These allow the music to modify the images, story and dialogue of the film with ideas associated with those styles. In turn, those ideas affect how we receive the characters and understand the story based on our understanding of the cultural implications of the distinctive musical features of the score.
Angular, jagged melodies and discordant harmonies are features of the score that are probably most recognizable as “modernist.” All of these materials are essentially atonal, meaning that there is no primary pitch or tonic that provides the music with a harmonic resting point. Because all of the melodies and harmonies in the score are non-conventional, they don’t convey pathos, triumph, humor, or other moods in ways that are readily perceptible to the audience. Perhaps the most immediate and consistent impression that a listener might get is one of unease; otherwise, the music may seem dispassionate, with no sense of mood.
Jerry Goldsmith created the melodies and harmonies in Planet of the Apes using methods of twelve-tone composition, a modernist technique that contributes to the score’s unsettling dissonance. The film’s main theme juxtaposes wide leaps and closely spaced intervals to avoid any suggestions of a more traditional melody. This theme appears prominently in the movie’s main titles, sounding successively by the flute, oboe, and clarinet, all while being accompanied by ostinati in the strings and piano. Versions of this theme also underscore scenes in the Forbidden Zone, where the slow tempo and widely spaced accompanying chords emphasize the desolate and open space of the setting (22:29 and 1:48:45 on the DVD among others).
“Twelve-tone methods,” or “Composition with Twelve Tones,” was a means of creating music using the atonal sounds often found in modernist music, but in a methodical way that brought coherence and unity to the otherwise unfamiliar and frequently discordant harmonies. The Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg first wrote about the practice in the early 1920s and is credited with the concept, although other composers adopted and used a variety of individualized versions of these methods. Goldsmith self-consciously chose to use twelve-tone met
hods in the score, describing the process as “not avant-garde anymore; it’s sort of old hat, but for film it is still sort of new.”
Essentially, a composer using twelve-tone methods first creates a “tone row” from the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale (C, C-sharp, D, E-flat, E, F, F-sharp, G, G-sharp, A, B-flat, B). The composer then manipulates the row in a variety of ways to generate the melodies and chords used throughout a given piece. In Planet of the Apes, Goldsmith used a complete tone row to create the movie’s main theme and used fragments of the row to create melodies and ostinati elsewhere in the score. The rapid piano figuration accompanying Taylor’s escape in the Ape City derives from the main theme’s tone row. Other short, percussive piano gestures, such as those heard in the opening titles, also have their source in that series.
Because a primary goal of atonal music is to give all tones equal emphasis, there is usually no contrast between consonant and dissonant sounds to create a sense of harmonic tension and release. This gives the harmonies and gestures in atonal music an abstract quality comparable to works of abstract expressionism such as the paintings of Jackson Pollock. As with modern art, most mainstream audiences found such music puzzling and unsettling because of its unfamiliar, dissonant sounds and its cerebral aesthetic. However, they could accept sounds like those of twelve-tone music more easily when they were included as part of a movie score, especially for a horror or science-fiction film like Planet of the Apes. The startling, disturbing, and uncanny scenes and subjects from these films provided a context that gave meaning to the otherwise bizarre and disconcerting musical sounds.
Part of Goldsmith’s purpose in creating his twelve-tone score was to characterize the strangeness of the setting and story with some suitably strange music. But by using these methods throughout the score, he left no room for any heroic or triumphant music. How does this affect his underscoring of the movie’s hero, Taylor? And how else might Goldsmith’s use of this culturally charged method affect the perception of Taylor as a heroic and sympathetic figure?
