HOOKED ON AETHEROPHONICS The Day the Earth stood still

REBECCA LEYDON

In 'Farewell to the Master' (1944), Harry Bates' short story upon which the film The Day the Earth stood still (1951) is based, an extra-terrestrial called Klaatu visits the Earth and is promptly killed by a deranged citizen. It is left to the robot 'Gnut' to somehow bring him back to life. The task is eventually achieved by reconstituting Klaatu's body from a tape-recording of his voice. This last intriguing plot detail was dropped in the reworking of the original story for the script of the 1951 film. In Robert Wise's adaptation, Klaatu is killed by military police, after moving covertly among the inhabitants of Washington, DC. His corpse is retrieved and reanimated by the robot, 'Gort', by means of a mysterious medical operation ("Nikto"?) conducted inside the space ship. Yet the notion of the alien being's essence as fully encrypted in pure sound remains a crucial part the film: the extra-terrestrial 'voice', as represented by Bernard Herrmann's score, plays a central role, for it is primarily through musical clues, rather than special visual effects, that Klaatu's alien nature is enacted. After all, Klaatu looks and behaves exactly like an ordinary human, as the two Medical Corps officers who examine him in the hospital observe:

Major:

(studying a series of X-ray films)
The skeletal structure is completely normal.
(pointing)
Same for the major organs – heart, liver, spleen, kidneys.

Captain: And the lungs are the same as ours. Must mean a similar atmosphere – similar pressure.

Klaatu blends in and moves inconspicuously among the human population. For the cinematic spectator, the only consistent evidence of his alien origins is the halo of otherworldly sounds with which the musical score envelopes him. The link between particular sonic elements and things extra-terrestrial is forged during the film's opening titles as the camera peers through celestial nebulae toward the planet Earth. But the music's defamiliarising function becomes important precisely in the unexceptional scenes, like those showing Klaatu walking through the streets of Washington. As Royal Brown might put it, Herrmann's music acts as a "fictionalizing" force against the iconicity of the cinematic visuals (Brown, 1994).

The film's score is often noted for the prominent role it assigns the theremin, a vintage electronic instrument developed by the Russian scientist Lev Sergeyevich Termen in the nineteen-teens. The instrument has always seemed highly peculiar because it is played without actually touching it: the distance of the performer's hand from an antenna controls a radio-frequency oscillator, which, combined with a second, fixed-frequency oscillator, generates a difference tone that is amplified through a loudspeaker. Movements of the hand towards and away from the antenna thus create a continuous glissando across some four or five octaves. (The lowest note on the instrument is determined by the frequency at which the two oscillators 'lock', ie when their difference approaches zero.) Volume is, likewise, controlled by movements of the performer's opposite hand, toward and away from a metal loop that projects horizontally from the side of the instrument. Skilled performers use precise adjustments in volume to mask the unavoidable 'swoop' that marks the movement from one pitch to another. The instrument is fiendishly difficult to play, not only for the physical coordination it requires to synchronise the hand movements around the two antennae, but especially for the demands made on the performer's sense of pitch. The player must be able to remember precise positions in three-dimensional space, without reference to frets or a fingerboard. Moreover, small inadvertent motions of the right arm will cause the pitch to fluctuate noticeably; in ensemble playing the performer usually compensates for flaws in the intonation with a deliberate measured vibrato produced by shaking the right hand.

By analogy with 'idiophone', 'chordophone', and other terms for instrument 'families', Termen's instrument was initially classified as an 'aetherophone', since its sounds were supposed to emanate from the ether, the imaginary propagating medium for electromagnetic waves. Termen and his disciples envisioned that the instrument would take its place in the concert hall along side respectable classical instruments. Much to the dismay of Clara Rockmore and other serious practitioners, however, it quickly found its way into movie music, where its 'action-at-a-distance' method of sound-production led to its use as a sonic marker for 'unseen forces': magnetism, unconscious drives, even substance abuse. As Philip Hayward describes, "it was a virtual instrument, one which involved the instrumentalist conjuring sounds by means of moving his/her hands in the air" (1997: 31), and this "conjuring" was easily mapped onto narrative situations involving mesmerism and the supernormal.

Herrmann's inventive orchestration in The Day the Earth stood still is developed through the combination of electronic sounds with more conventional orchestral resources. His use of the theremin – actually two theremins, to accommodate polyphonic writing – is only the most conspicuous of several unusual instruments in the score: a pair of Hammond organs plus a large studio organ, electric violin, electric cello, and electric bass (one of each), a trio of vibraphones, and electric guitar. Equally unexpected are the sounds Herrmann obtains from conventional orchestral instruments, through odd combinations and additive layering: muted brass, tam-tams struck with nail-files and triangle sticks, whole families of suspended cymbals, special effects performed on multiple harps, chimes, celesta, and glockenspiel. Figure 1 shows some of these resources as they are employed in the opening measures of the densely scored overture.

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