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Overtones and Undertones

University of California Press

When I was young and would go to the movies with my parents and other family members, I would often come out after the show and make some comment on the music I heard in the film. "What music?" would generally be the reaction. A girlfriend was less kind as we walked out of Psycho: "Only you would sit and listen to the music," she growled. Well, I didn't just listen to the music while I was watching Psycho. But it is true that I have had a lifelong fascination with film music, and this book marks the culmination, if not the end, of that fascination. It is also true that almost all casual movie goers and many noncasual film watchers pay little or no attention to the music behind the films they see and sometimes analyze. I would be tempted to suggest that this deafness to the film score justifies an attitude on the part of commercial filmmakers that film music should be "seen" and not heard. But, in fact, film music as it generally functions is intended to be neither heard nor "seen." Music by and large remains one of the two most "invisible" contributing arts to the cinema. The other is montage.

In writing this book, then, I am inviting readers not simply to hear the film score but to see it, not simply to become aware of the presence of music "behind the screen" but to scrutinize its interactions with the other arts that contribute to the cinema. Numerous studies?scholarly, nonscholarly, and in between?have explained how film music works, and have critiqued the film industry for its cavalier treatment of composers, not to mention its Philistine attitudes towards and understanding of music. Going beyond this, Claudia Gorbman, in her Unheard Melodies, has done for the film score what many nonfilm-music studies have done for other areas of the commercial cinema by offering a sociopolitical reading of how a Max Steiner score (for MichaelCurtiz's 1945 Mildred Pierce) manipulatively hyperexplicates the action of the film for which it was composed. In the first chapter of the present study I likewise examine many of the sociopolitical implications of the film score, and in a way that tends to cast at least a partially negative light on the whole film/music situation. The second and third chapters present a fairly uninterpretive survey of the technological and historical underpinnings of the film score. It is no accident that directors such as Eisenstein, Hitchcock, and Godard have attracted the bulk of the attention from writers on film, since artists such as these are the ones who, in one way or the other, have broken down the various codes that have trapped lesser filmmakers (and their composers) in a vicious circle of triviality. Thus it should come as no surprise that films by Eisenstein, Hitchcock, and Godard, along with their scores, have occupied a good deal of my attention, although I have also examined a number of other less-scrutinized, but in my opinion significant endeavors as well, whether several-instance collaborations such as Robert Altman/John Williams, or a major partnership such as Sergio Leone/Ennio Morricone.

And so, from chapter 4 through chapter 8, I zero in on a number of examples of the best that the film/music interaction has to offer, presenting highly interpretive, deep (I hope) readings that depend on a close analysis of the film/music interactions, whence the title of this book. In certain instances, such as Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, the actual score (in this case by Dimitri Tiomkin) plays a subordinate role to the manners in which the director has manipulated parts of the music. Because of this orientation toward rich film/music interactions, certain film scores considered a milestone, such as Miklss Rszsa's Oscar-winning music for William Wyler's 1959 Ben-Hur, have been entirely passed over in the main text of my study. I have to say that, from my perspective, Wyler's film will remain an insignificant footnote in cinema history, whereas the whole of Rszsa's score for Ben-Hur does not offer the interest of the ten or fifteen seconds of music that form the "transition theme" in Billy Wilder's 1944 Double Indemnity. This does not mean that I have chosen only major works of cinema with no regard for the quality of their music, although this is indeed the case with Altman's Nashville and its spate of mostly mediocre country-western songs. The works that I find to be high points in this book generally have that status because of the quality of both their film making and their music.

Because of the ways in which books on film are currently classified, this study will probably end up in the music section of most libraries. It is not, however, intended primarily as a book on music, and it does not presuppose any major, technical knowledge of music on the part of the reader. Nonetheless, just as various technical elements such as editing and photographic composition play a significant role in how we "read" a cinematic text, certain tools of the composer's trade cannot be ignored when considering film/musicinteractions. I therefore offer the following brief summary of some of the elements of the musical art, in particular western music's harmonic language, which turn up in my discussions in this book. Some of the more structural elements of music, both classical and popular, are examined in chapter 2.

The bulk of all music?jazz, popular, folk, classical, or whatever?composed and/or performed in the West can be labeled as tonal. Simply stated, this means that a given piece centers around a particular single tone or note that exists as both a point of departure and a point of return. Even here, there are various non-Western ways in which music can be tonal. In the performance of a raga in Indian music, for instance, an instrument called the tambura drones on continually with a single note throughout the entire performance, which can last an hour or more. One of the gimmicks of Western tonality, by comparison, is to constantly move away from its tonal center in ways that cause the listener to anticipate the return, sooner or later, of that tonal center. Psychologically and aesthetically speaking, tonality sets up a certain order, creates a sense of loss and anxiety in its various departures from that order, and then reassures the listener by periodically returning to that order, which will generally have the final word. Western tonality, then, involves a) one of the myriad ways in which the gamut of musical tones, from the lowest to the highest theoretically audible, can be divided up; b) the dividing up of a given tone-block into twelve equally spaced tones (half steps, or half tones), that form the chromatic scale, which repeats at either a higher or a lower pitch level after each twelfth note; c) the hierarchical valorization of these twelve tones through the formation of a seven-note series whose individual tones are labeled, in English, with letters from A to G. This series skips over five of the half steps to produce a scale of five whole tones and two half tones that repeats at either a higher or a lower pitch level after each seventh note. A scale can be formed using any of the basic twelve notes as the point of departure to create the key for a given work of music. The degree to which a given work or segment of music remains within the seven-tone scale is the degree to which it is harmonically diatonic; the degree to which it allows the other five notes, which are labeled as either sharps or flats, to creep into the harmonic...