Movies and Meaning- Pearson New International Edition

by Stephen Prince

  Once the music has been composed, the next step is performance and recording of the score on a sound stage while a copy of the film is projected on a large screen or video monitor. Timing of music to film action is facilitated by the use of clicks to 203

  Principles of Sound Design

  PLATOON (ORION

  PICTURES, 1986)

  The score for Platoon

  deliberately avoids using

  conventional war-film

  music. Instead, com-

  poser Georges Delerue

  employed an already-

  existing classical compo-

  sition—Samuel Barber’s

  melancholy “Adagio for

  Strings”—and used it

  to emphasize the film’s

  haunted, tragic tone.

  Frame enlargement.

  establish tempo, streamers —lines imprinted on the film or video—that travel across the screen and mark the beginning and end of each cue, and a large analog clock with a sweep second hand. The performance of the score is often attended by the director and producer of the film.

  The final stage in the creation of movie music is the process of mixing, which is the blending of the various sound tracks, effects, music, and dialogue. The fact that movie music is mixed along with dialogue and effects has influenced the attitude of composers to the kind of music they create. Because dialogue is regarded as the most important sound in a movie, music typically is mixed at a lower volume when it accompanies dialogue. Composers know this and work accordingly.

  Hollywood composer Miklos Rosza pointed out that when music accompanies di-

  alogue, it should be simple, without a lot of ornamentation, because this will be lost in the mix when the music is buried beneath the dialogue. He also recommended that music in dialogue passages be scored with strings rather than brass instruments because he felt that strings blend better with the human voice. While there is much variation among composers in their approach to scoring, these remarks indicate something most would agree on—the film score is not autonomous. It should be written with the action in mind and be capable of blending with all other sound sources in the movie.

  So much for the technical steps involved in producing movie music. What of its dramatic functions? Why is it used, and what does it accomplish in movies?

  FUNCTIONS OF MOVIE MUSIC The great U.S. concert hall composer Aaron Copland occasionally ventured into the world of filmmaking to compose scores for such pictures as Of Mice and Men (1940), Our Town (1940), The Red Pony (1949), and The Heiress (1949). Copland discussed the functions of movie music as he saw them, emphasizing five basic functions.

  Setting the Scene Film music creates a convincing atmosphere of time and place. Movie music characterizes the locations, settings, and cultures where the story occurs. Often, this may involve the use of special instrumentation that reflects regional or ethnic musical characteristics. Jerry Goldsmith, who was one of the industry’s most prolific and respected composers, employed pan flutes in his score for Under Fire (1983), a film dealing with the 204

  Principles of Sound Design

  UNDER FIRE (ORION

  PICTURES, 1983)

  Movie music helps es-

  tablish place and locale,

  often by employing re-

  gional or ethnic musical

  instruments and tradi-

  tions. Jerry Goldsmith’s

  score for Under Fire used

  pan flutes, associated

  with peasant cultures of

  Central America, to mu-

  sically characterize the

  film’s Nicaraguan setting

  and the popular basis of

  that country’s revolution.

  Frame enlargement.

  revolution in Nicaragua in 1979. By using an instrument that was not specifically tied to Nicaragua but was found in many peasant cultures in Central America, Goldsmith was able to create a musical score that tied the Nicaraguan revolution, musically, to its peasant origins, but in a way that included echoes of the peasant cultures of other Central American countries, much as the revolution itself did in the 1980s.

  Sometimes the time and place that a composer wishes to create do not exist in reality. For his celebrated score for the science fiction film Planet of the Apes (1968), Goldsmith relied on the use of unusual instruments, such as ram’s horns and brass slide whistles, and unusual musical techniques, such as clicking the keys of wood-wind instruments directly on the microphone. The result was a score that many people thought was electronic, though Goldsmith has pointed out that he did not use any electronic techniques. He used existing instruments in an unusual fashion to enlarge the sound possibilities of the orchestra. These new and unusual sounds perfectly suited the film’s futuristic fantasy set in an alien and frightening world.

  Unfortunately, the scene-setting function of movie music sometimes draws on and fosters cultural stereotypes. Dimitri Tiomkin, who composed the score for Howard Hawks’s Western Red River (1948), needed music for a scene in which Indians attack a wagon train. He wrote music with a stereotypical tympani beat in order to telegraph the idea that the Indians were about to attack. Tiomkin knew that this Indian music was quite artificial and without any real historical basis, but he believed that authentic tribal music would have been less effective because it was unconventional. Tiomkin elected to use the musical stereotype because the audience was familiar with it.

  Adding Emotional Meaning All motion picture composers stress the importance of this function. Composer Hugo Friedhofer pointed out that music has the special ability of hinting at the unseen, whereas images can only show what is visible. Music extends an image’s range of meaning by adding psychological or emotional qualities not in the picture.

  The tonal range of Western music, particularly the highly coloristic rendering used in the Romantic period of the late nineteenth century, has become the model for orchestral movie music because the emotional content of this musical style is extremely familiar to audiences. Think of all the romantic melodramas in which the teary lovers are about to be parted and the violins are sawing away on the soundtrack 205

  Principles of Sound Design

  BLACK HAWK DOWN

  (COLUMBIA PICTURES,

  2001)

  The sound design eliminates

  realistic sound from por-

  tions of the helicopter attack

  sequence and uses music to

  quietly imitate the whoosh-

  ing helicopter blades. The

  design creates a subjective

  perspective that portrays

  the mental concentration of

  the American soldiers in the

  helicopters, about to go into

  combat. Frame enlargement.

  or the way the strings in John Williams’s soaring score for E.T. capture the pathos of Eliot’s goodbye to E.T. at the conclusion of that film.

  Movie music emphasizes emotional effects most often by direct symbolization: The music embodies and symbolizes an emotion appropriate to the screen action. An alternative approach is to employ a contrast of image and music. Though less common than direct musical symbolization, it can be quite effective.

  An especially impressive example occurs during the helicopter attack sequence in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001). The Black Hawk helicopters in reality are very loud, but the film’s sound editor minimized the realistic sound of the engines, sometimes eliminating it entirely. Hans Zimmer’s music score substituted for the engine sounds and musically portrayed the whooshing of the helicopter blades. The result was subjective and psychological. The musical evocation of an absent sound effect worked to convey the stress and concentration of American soldiers about to land in a battle zone. Their minds on the upcoming battle, they were not “hearing” the helicopters. The film viewer does, but only indirectly, by way of the music.

  Director Stanley Kubrick famously combined picture and music in counterintuitive w
ays. In Dr. Strangelove (1963), the world ends in a nuclear holocaust, which is scored with the lilting 1940s melody “We’ll Meet Again.” More cruelly, in A Clockwork Orange (1971), Kubrick used the exuberant title song from MGM’s beloved musical Singin’ in the Rain (1952) as the accompaniment to a rape scene.

  Japanese director Akira Kurosawa loved to contrast music and image. In

  Drunken Angel (1948), the central character of the film, a small-time gangster, loses control of the local neighborhood he dominated. Furthermore, he is dying of tubercu-losis. He wanders the streets shunned by shopkeepers, coughing his life out. To emphasize the character’s despair, Kurosawa instructed his composer, Fumio Hayasaka, to accompany the action with a silly and mindless cuckoo waltz. Kurosawa knew that the mindless optimism of the waltz, in its extreme contrast with the character’s situation, would underline and emphasize the gangster’s despair and sadness.

  Serving as Background Filler This use of movie music was more typical in older films than it is in contemporary filmmaking. During the Hollywood period in the 1930s and 1940s, films were distinguished by so-called wall-to-wall music. Music accompanied almost every scene, and it often assumed a kind of background filler function, just as Copland noted. Contemporary films tend to use music more

  206

  Principles of Sound Design

  A CLOCKWORK

  ORANGE (WARNER

  BROS., 1971)

  The thug Alex (Malcolm

  McDowell, center) dances

  and sings “Singin’ in the

  Rain” while his gang as-

  saults a husband and wife

  in their home. Director

  Stanley Kubrick’s appropri-

  ation of this cheerful song,

  best remembered from the

  classic MGM musical that

  starred Gene Kelly, was

  an act of cruel subversion,

  placing the music in a new,

  horribly violent context.

  Frame enlargement.

  LEAVING LAS VEGAS

  (MGM, 1995)

  For this grim story about

  an alcoholic (Nicolas Cage)

  and a hooker (Elizabeth

  Shue) who have a brief af-

  fair while he drinks himself

  to death, the filmmakers

  used music to counterpoint

  the bleakness of the story.

  The main musical theme

  is the song “My One and

  Only Love,” a tender and

  sentimental ballad given a

  lush, sweet orchestration for

  the film. The song creates

  a sharp counterpoint to the

  drama. Frame enlargement.

  sparingly, and composers such as Jerry Goldsmith have believed that less music is better because, when used, it becomes more significant.

  Creating Continuity As with dialogue and effects, music can bridge shots in ways that link and unify them. In montage scenes, for example, where many shots are edited together, music often supplies a unifying structure for the montage. When Julia Roberts goes on her shopping spree in Pretty Woman , the Roy Orbison song, from which the film derives its title, accompanies and unifies the montage.

  A classic example of music unifying a montage occurs in Bernard Herrmann’s score for Citizen Kane (1941). A famous sequence in the film shows Charles Foster Kane and his first wife Emily in a series of brief encounters across the breakfast table. The montage telescopes many years of marriage into these breakfasts. Each encounter registers further decay and disintegration in their marriage. Herrmann wrote a little waltz for the montage, 207

  Principles of Sound Design

  CITIZEN KANE (RKO, 1941)

  Composer Bernard Herrmann

  provided a waltz and variations

  to link musically the different

  shots of Citizen Kane’s famous

  breakfast montage. Frame

  enlargement.

  established it in the first scene, and then used a series of variations for each succeeding scene in the montage, with the music growing colder and more forbidding as the montage progresses in order to capture the deepening alienation between Charles and Emily.

  One of the most important ways that film music creates continuity is by using a leitmotif structure. Indeed, this is one of the most common ways of scoring a motion picture. A leitmotif is a kind of musical label that is assigned to a character, a place, an idea, or an emotion. Once assigned, a leitmotif can be repeated each time the character or idea or emotion reappears. This helps to make the music recognizable to an audience, especially after stretches of film where no music has been heard, and it also helps to characterize the character, place, idea, or emotion. The leitmotif can be presented with great invention and variation, restated in differing rhythms and colors. Leitmotif is derived from the operas of Richard Wagner, who used it as a way of helping his audience recognize and understand the characters and their emotional situations.

  The Italian composer Ennio Morricone’s score for Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in the West (1969) employs a very explicit leitmotif structure. Each of the four major characters in the film has his or her own theme, and the themes reappear as the characters do throughout the film so that one can easily follow the story and its conflicts simply by listening to the music. Almost every motion picture score is structured as a set of themes and variations, and this repetition of familiar musical material is a powerful means of creating continuity.

  Music also can establish continuity by creating pacing and tempo within scenes.

  As soon as music is added to a scene, the images take on a rhythm and pace they did not otherwise possess because relationships are established musically across the shots.

  Elmer Bernstein, composer of the score for the popular Western The Magnificent Seven (1960), has pointed out that his music for this film is actually faster than the action on screen. He wanted the music to help speed along an otherwise slow film.

  Bernstein’s now-classic score adds immeasurably to the pacing of the movie, providing excitement in scenes that would otherwise lack it.

  Emphasizing Climaxes Movie music emphasizes climaxes and concludes scenes or the end of a film with finality. Music in movies tends to begin and end on specific 208

  Principles of Sound Design

  ONCE UPON A

  TIME IN THE WEST

  (PARAMOUNT

  PICTURES, 1969)

  Each character in this

  epic Sergio Leone

  Western has his or her

  own highly distinc-

  tive musical theme.

  The leitmotif structure

  of the score is espe-

  cially explicit. Frame

  enlargement.

  actions: doors opening and closing, cars pulling away, monsters jumping out of the dark. In these ways, musical cues alert the audience to the climaxes and the emotional high points of scenes. Danny Elfman’s score for Batman (1989) is exceptionally accomplished in catching action and emphasizing climaxes.

  Music need not always be used to heighten action. Sometimes, its absence can be very effective. In The Silence of the Lambs (1991), the climactic confrontation in a dark basement between Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) and serial killer Buffalo Bill features spooky ambient sounds and source music coming from Bill’s boom box, but no film score. One had been composed for the scene, but the filmmakers elected to go instead with the ambient sound. In the police thriller Bullitt (1968), during the famous car chase, the music ceases early on. As detective Steve McQueen starts his pursuit of a pair of suspected killers, the music begins in a tense and ominous fashion, but then it stops so that sound effects—screaming engines, squealing tires—take over to carry the sequence. Most movies use music to make car chases more exciting, but the chase in Bullitt is historically important for avoiding this obvious strategem.

  CONTEMPORARY TRENDS IN FILM SCORING Although movie music today performs
the basic functions noted by Copland, the styles employed and the importance of music for the industry have changed since his era. The use of romantic orchestral THE SILENCE OF THE

  LAMBS (ORION, 1991)

  Sometimes no music at all is

  more effective than a score.

  One mark of intelligent scor-

  ing is knowing when not to

  score. Composer Howard

  Shore wrote music for the

  climactic scene where an FBI

  agent (Jodie Foster) confronts

  a serial killer in a dark base-

  ment. On seeing the edited

  sequence, however, he felt

  it worked better, with more

  suspense, without the music.

  Frame enlargement.

  209

  Principles of Sound Design

  music to score films in the Hollywood period gave way in the 1950s to more modern approaches. Elmer Bernstein composed a jazz-oriented score for The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), and Leonard Rosenman composed an atonal, 12-tone serial score for The Cobweb (1955). Folk and rock scores in the late 1960s distinguished The Graduate (1967) and Easy Rider (1969). At this time, the symphonic orchestral score fell out of style, but it made a triumphant comeback in the mid-1970s in the work of John Williams. His scores for the Star Wars films and Steven Spielberg’s pictures re-established the symphony orchestra as an essential scoring resource.

  Today, film music is a key part of the movie business. Studios often market films using contemporary music supplied by popular bands and singers and rely on sales of recorded film music as a supplementary source of income. (The parent corporations that own studios also own music publishing and recording businesses.) Because of this, studios are often interested in scores that can be marketed in the format of popular songs. This trend goes back at least to David Raksin’s score for Laura (1944) and could be found in the 1950s with films such as High Noon (1952) and in the 1960s in The Magnificent Seven, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), and Dr. Zhivago (1965).

  Today, it is firmly established and is extremely common. The soundtrack of Forrest Gump (1994) was essentially a collection of popular tunes from the 1960s, whereas Natural Born Killers (1994) featured the work of popular 1990s performing groups.