Orchestration Oddjob

In an idle pause last night I swept once through the eight TV channels we receive and landed on the German first channel's broadcast of Goldfinger (1964), of all things, a movie I remember from my childhood (watched, IIRC, from the backseat of my parents' 1960 Pontiac Tempest in one of those Southern California drive-ins that has long since been replaced by a track of condominiums or a strip mall.) The famous music — the Bond and Goldfinger themes and their direct derivatives — was well-impressed in my memory, but somehow I had completely forgotten the other soundtrack music (by John Barry), not directly connected to the famous tunes (and only tenuously connected to them by chromatic character and the emphasis on winds) and much of it a- or non-tonal. There is a common argument made against non-tonal music that it has never secured any wide acceptance. But bits of film music like this are indisputable evidence against that argument: the music, while — with the exception of some superb writing for solo contrabassoon* — not particularly sophisticated, is perfectly functional. While I personally have little interest in effective film music (and, by extension, effective films), it's clear that a- or non-tonal music can be extremely effective in supporting a whole array of settings, moods, or situations in which some form of common practice tonal music will probably not work well and may well not work at all.

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* I have to really wonder how that contrabassoon sounded from the little drive-in loudspeaker that hung from the car window...

Oscar rant obligato

(First and last Academy Award-themed item on this blog.) I generally side with Robert Bresson that the best movie music is diegetic — made by sources (on-or off-screen) understood to be part of the scene itself rather than an external accompaniment — and the handful of non-digetic scores I like are few and far between, so I've had to learn to not listen to scores. I do listen closely to sound editing and mixing, however, and find, as a composer, that the sound design is often the most interesting, subtle, and complex part of a film. As far as I'm concern, last year presented some classic examples of mainstream sound design done both very well and very poorly, particularly in the mix. But my ideas of what works or doesn't in a sound track seem to go against the grain: Inception took both sound Oscars this year, but boy, I thought it had a dog's breakfast of a mix. The look of the film was great, but there was almost no differentiation or detail to the sound mix, the leaden Zimmer score (how leaden? it manages to drain all life out of some perfectly good Philip Glass-y turn-around enharmonic chord sequences) was both too continuous and too dominant in the mix which, as a whole, was too dense in the lower registers. While I suppose that an acoustically oppressive sound design might have been chosen for some psychological resonance with the storyline, I think that there are alternatives which would have been even more effective. In fact, if the visuals were not so attractive, the relentless, all-boom, no bite of the sound would had me me walking out mid-film. (And that's saying a lot: I have managed to sit all the way through O.C. and Stiggs. Twice.) On the hand, Ren Klyce & Co.'s mix for The Social Network is a superb example of getting the sound design right. It works without calling overt attention to itself but strongly reinforces the narrative, whether in creating discrete acoustic spaces onstage (the isolated character of these spaces commenting, perhaps, ironically on the whole network topos) or in punctuating the flow of the film with a diverse set of elements, not least of which is the rhythm of the lead actor's speech. (Quite how impressive that the computer screen-based social network of the film was conveyed in the film most vividly by the sound track.)

From the Dept. of Film Music Clichés

An old friend, pointing to the soundtrack to The Day the Earth Stood Still, remarked that Nothing says, "Little green men approaching" quite like a theremin...in this case, TWO theremins!,  to which I had to reply that  "Nothing says 'here comes an ass in a perm and a leisure suit' better than a vibraslap and a heavy brass section."  So between the two of us, we've just got the 1950s sci-fi and 1970's action film music genres down.  

[We're still working on a pithy formulation of the early 21st century aspiring-to-hipness genre, with the obligatory faux-Philip Glass enharmonic common tone arpeggiated turn-around chord sequences.]  

Satie...Milhaud...Bacharach?

An old friend recently pointed out this title clip from the 1967 film of Casino Royale, with a dare that I couldn't blog about it.  The movie is notorious as an incoherent mess, due to a production gone wrong in just about every way a film can, proving that the more large ego-ed filmmakers and stars you can gather together the worse the outcome will be.  It ought to be unwatchable for too many reasons to count, but somehow, almost every awful bit manages to contain some spark that keeps you glued and — the neural receptors for pleasure and pain being as proximate as they are — willing to endure more.   

With the major exception of Alan Price's score to Anderson's O Lucky Man!, I actively dislike pop music soundtracks*, but Burt Bacharach's score here is not one of the film's problems, and although the score (much of it played by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass) was very much part of the commercial music of the era, it has so many features that are untypical of mid-60's pop music that it ultimately has to be put into a category of its own.  First of all, it provides precisely the continuity that the movie's producers threw out when the last traces of the source novel were ultimately abandoned to the horde of actors, directors, and screenwriters who assembled this dog's breakfast.  If, however, with the passage of time, we can look — and listen — again to this film, not as a work of mainstream narrative, but as an effort — if only in part intentional — in '60s-pop-tinged avant-garde filmmaking, then the strengths of the score become even clearer.  

I will even venture that the block-like construction of the opening credits above reveals Bacharach standing in an authentic lineage, via his teacher Milhaud, back to Milhaud's mentor, Satie, and Satie's score for the ballet Parade, and the film insert Entr'acte, in particular.  While there are details of Bacharach's harmonic practice — modal progessions, chords with "added tones" — that immediately make a Satie-via-Milhaud connection, and the negotiation of all three composers with popular genres is obvious, the important shared features here are really formal, with the deployment, almost at random, of a limit set of blocks of distinct material without development in terms of tonality, figuration, or texture.  Where Bacharach here innovates is in the sound production, in which the various blocks are assigned distinctive dynamic profiles and discrete positions in the stereo field, an innovation in projecting the block structure which I find entirely within the spirit of the Satie-Milhaud tradition. 

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* For that matter, I'm skeptical about the whole notion of a musical soundtrack for film; Robert Bresson's rejection of non-diegetic music almost convinces me, but I can't be that strict and serious: as long as we grant films license to suspend disbelief, there will be a place for music in film.

       

Henry Brant as composer and orchestrator for films

It's well-known that the late composer Henry Brant had an active parallel career as on orchestrator and composer for film, but a lot of his work took place under- or uncredited, which is standard practice in film music.  During his life, Brant was always modest about his work as an orchestrator for the scores of colleagues, characterizing it as always implementing the style and preferences of the composer rather than in his own.  Mr Brant's musical executor, Kathy Wilkowski, has been kind enough to share the following list of films on which he worked.  

First, his collaborations as orchestrator:

for Virgil Thomson:  The River (1937), The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), Louisiana Story (1948; the score won Thomson the Pulitzer Prize in Music, Brant was credited as "music technical assistant".)

for Aaron Copland:  The City (1939)

for George Antheil:  The Scoundrel (1935)

for Marc Blitzstein: at least two films.

for Douglas Moore: Power on the Land (1940) , Youth Gets a Break (a WPA-related film; Brant stated: "it was for full orchestra; he left it to me."

for Alex North: The Misfits (1961), Cleopatra (1963), Cheyenne Autumn (1964),  Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff (1966), Africa (ABC-TV documentary, 1967),  2001: A Space Odyssey (the score was not used in the released film), The Devil's Brigade (1968),  Carny (1980; includes two compositions by Brant which were organ solos extracted from Brant's 1956 opera The Grand Universal Circus), Dragonslayer (1981), Good Morning Vietnam (1987)

for Gordon Parks: The Learning Tree (1970)

Brant's own work as a film composer was also extensive, particularly for documentary and independent films.  It includes:  Playing Fields of America (aka Sport Film) (1943), Capitol Story (aka Public Health, for the OWI)(1944), the Pale Horseman (OWI)(1944), Journey into Medicine (1946), Osmosis (1946), Outbreak (1947), The Big Break (1951), Ode to a Grecian Urn (1953; an avant-garde film to which Brant improvised on dulcimer, double-flageolet, ox-bells, double-ocarina, celesta, bass recorder, and Persian oboe), The Secret Thief (1956),  Your Community (1956), Dr. "B" (1957), Endowing our Future (1958), Fibres in Civilization (1958), Peace Music for U.N. Day (1959), a “Wind quintet film” (1960), Early Birds (1961),  Fertility & the Physician (1965), Jack Levine (1966), Chartres Cathedral (1970), Marcel Duchamp (1978; improvised by Brant), The Trappers (1981), and Noch Ist Polen Nicht Verloren (1991)

See also these posts about Brant: On the Nature of Things, and Brant on Orchestration

Arpeggiated Bleg

My son pointed out this trailer for the upcoming film Watchmen, about which I know nothing. Please have a look, or more precisely, a listen to the soundtrack, and let me know what you make of it. I don't know if the trailer includes the final score or is just a mock-up from existing sources, but it sure does sound like...

Dr. Chicago Returns

I wonder how many famous composers have been captured performing in theatrical films? Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric and Erik Satie appear in Entr'acte (1924, 22 min. Black & White), the film insert in the Satie/Massine/Cocteau/Picasso Ballet Parade, Milhaud again appears, this time along with Paul Hindemith, in Hans Richter's Vormittagsspuk (Ghosts Before Breakfast) (1928, 6 min. Black & White), Oscar Levant — whose serious compositions seem to have disappeared — had a regular career on the Hollywood screen, and there is also John Cage's shirtless stroll through a field in Maya Deren's At Land (1944, 15 min. Black & White).

But perhaps the most significant film appearance by a composer is that of Alvin Lucier who, in addition to appearing as Prof. Alvin Lucier, a role based in part on himself, in Nam June Paik's A Tribute to John Cage, (1973, 29 min. Color) had a starring, title role in George Manupelli's trilogy of full-length Dr. Chicago films: DR. CHICAGO (1968 118 min. Black & White), RIDE DR. CHICAGO RIDE (1970 109 min. Black & White) and CRY DR. CHICAGO (1971 96 min. Color).

In the series, Lucier plays Dr. Alvin Chicago, an outlaw surgeon on the lam with a, shall we say, gift for seriously incorrect and punning wordplay, accompanied by his sidekicks Sheila Marie (Mary Ashley) and Steve (Steve Paxton), the latter of whom is mute and dies, dancingly, in each episode. It's hard to choose a favorite part of the trilogy, but for me it's either one of Dr. Chicago's monologues — reciting The Raven or the MLK, Jr. I Have a Dream speech, or the sequence in RIDE DR. CHICAGO RIDE in which the good doctor separates the counter-villain's (Pauline Oliveros) conjoined twin daughters (played by the multi-cultural musical virtuosi Betty and Shirley Wong).

Director Manupelli may already be familiar to some readers of this blog for his short advertisement for the San Francisco Art Institute, with Don Novello as Father Guido Sarducci, Become An Artist (see here) and others may recognize his name in connection with the legendary ONCE Festival and Group of Ann Arbor, MI.

You can see some stills and — better yet — order your own copy of the complete trilogy DVD collector's edition here.

Complete Works

I've emphasized (again'n'again) that what's important for me is not a repertoire and not a composer, but rather the individual work, and often only a moment in a work. Both repertoires and individual pieces are inconsistent in quality, and composers can be marvelously uneven, a state of affairs that troubles me -- fallible, inconsistent, uneven me -- not a bit. But a repertoire and a composer is something like a brand name, a signal about quality, and there are some repertoires I always try to pay attention to and some composers whose every work I try to follow.

Sometimes, it's made easy: some composers have written so little (Varese, Ruggles), or so little has survived of their work (Machaut, Ockeghem, Monteverdi), or their work comes in such convenience-sized packages (Wagner, Berg, Webern) that it's possible to become familiar with everything. Some (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Schoenberg) have had complete works sets of recordings or scores commercially packaged (isn't having the NMA or every surviving classical Greek music manuscript online a really good thing?). Other composers are trickier, but the sport of chasing down every Stravinsky or Cage, or Partch , or Feldman score is great fun, and there was a time, there was indeed a time, when it was really important to know the latest from Stockhausen or Boulez, and a bit later Reich and Glass and Adams and so on. For myself, I'm pretty much on top of the music of my teachers and many of my friends. I pay attention to every bit of news from a few contemporary colleagues and each work of Ives enters my life as if it were the work of a contemporary. I'd like to do the same for Rossini and Sibelius and there are a couple of Debussy pieces left to conquer. But, to be honest, there are composers whose brand names have not worn well, and seldom recommend further listening (names withheld, but seriously, I don't think I'd walk across the room to hear another orchestral work by Roger Sessions... well, honestly, would you?) . Some brand names have worn better than others for me after complete works experiences (i.e. Mozart better than Bach) and there are still a few composers (Telemann) for whom a complete works, in any format, still doesn't exist*, so judgement is still reserved.

But I'm probably more faithful to complete works when it comes to literature or the movies. I suspect that it's probably because my engagement with the media in question is less intense than with music, so the brand name has become an efficient tool for choosing what to read or see. My canon includes all of Joyce and Beckett and Borges and Percy, Broch and Mann are almost complete and the arrival of each new book by Pynchon or or DeLillo or Wallace is an excuse to drop everything else. Each new book by Harry Matthews, Steve Erickson, or China Mieville is a guilty pleasure and, yes, when I was 20, I collected every P.K. Dick or LeGuin novel then available and I will admit to having gone through my share of complete readings of bestselling airport novels. With movies**, my allegiance to particular directors is unwavering. I want to see all of Ozu and Buñuel, and I've managed all of Huston, Bresson, Antonioni, Lynch and several others much less impressive. Sometimes a name brand will force me to sit through a torturous film (e.g. Altman's Three Women, Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut) and sometimes I persist, hope against hope as the case may be, in insisting that something redemptive is to be found (e.g. Altman's O.C. & Stiggs; Lynch's Dune) in a work that everyone else I know and trust has a perfectly reasonable case for loathing.

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* Isn't it astonishing that there is not a complete works edition of Leopold Mozart?
**I'm from Southern California. I watch movies, not films.

Love as a continuity error

Readers of these pages must know by now that I'm obsessed with the issue of continuity in music, an obsession probably originating in my Southern Californian youth (where the continuity specialist is a perfectly ordinary member of a film crew), but made rather more articulate by experiencing the "cuing" pieces of Christian Wolff, in which a score may often be, in essence, a series of instructions for arriving at a continuity through attention to successions and simultaneities.

More articulate, but not yet articulate enough.

And now, once again, filmmaker Erroll Morris arrives on the scene, or rather in his blog, Zoom, with some spectacularly articulate ideas about re-enactments (something profoundly interesting to musicians), continuity and our perception of continuity. The discussion of Buñuel's use of two actresses to play the same role in That Obscure Object of Desire is just great, culminating in Morris's bittersweet speculative sentence: "Perhaps Buñuel sees love as a series of continuity errors?"

(A map of the entrances and exits of the two actresses in Buñuel's film, and the time separating their entrances, could be usefully construed as something a series of late Cagian time brackets, but with the duration of the brackets and the intervals between them becoming evermore shorter, so that eventually one actress leaves and the second almost immediately re-enters. I've always wished that Cage had begun to apply time deformations* of this sort more systematically in his "number" pieces, as the richness of these pieces lay largely in their formal invention, and such tempo changes would have made this quality even more intense.)

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* in this case, an accellerando, but it could have been just as interesting with a ritardando, or any of the other possible tempo-deforming shapes. Time deformation, by the way, is a term I steal, cheerfully, from Ron Kuivila and David Anderson's program, Formula ("FORth MUsic LAnguage"), one of the profoundly smart things to come out of 1980's electronic music.

A comic muse

A challenge is now going around to name the best score for a comic film. I suppose a lot depends upon how you define "comic" (I may be alone in defining Eraserhead or O Lucky Man as comic, but I do and their respective scores, by David Lynch and Alan Price, are both fine), and the function of music in a comedy is somewhat different from that in a drama. For example, musical kitsch is almost always a liability in a drama, but in a comic film score it may well be unavoidable and a asset. Here are some favorites:

Bernard Hermann: The Trouble With Harry
Andre Previn: One, Two, Three
Laurie Johnson, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Alex North, Prizzi's Honor
Steven Hufsteter: Repo Man
Toshirô Mayuzumi, Ohayô
John Morris: Young Frankenstein
Charles Chaplin: City Lights

(If I had to choose a favorite, the Morris and Hermann scores are very close, but Mayazumi's wins for its perfect fit to Ozu's sunniest film).

Quotas

Fred Himebaugh observes:

Just as we expect 5 percent of all music sales to be classical, it seems nowdays we expect 5 percent of each movie soundtrack to be classical as well.

Notes on Continuity

I'm drawn to two extremes, as separate as continents, of musical continuity. One is smooth and seamless, unrelenting in its progress, and the other moves in fits and starts, interrupted by new ideas, or broken by silences as much as by noises.

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Some musicians hear music as lines, but some lines are full and others dotted, branched, or even broken.

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Traditional forms, whether song or dance in origin, derived continuity from rhythmic movement, on the one hand, and tonal expansion and closure on the other, and combined the two in the form of the cadence, which in essence was a signal that the continuity, the movement, was over.

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Traditional continuity was challenged in two ways, first through backgrounding the continuity, in a figure and ground arrangement (c.f. the second movement, "Szene am Bach", of the Pastorale Symphony), and second through making continuity out of continuous change (Brahms' "developing variations") or of continuously refreshing a small set of source materials, as in the fugue.


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Christian Wolff's essay On Form in die Reihe: a shattering experience, redefining the extent of a piece as the time available in a program, and continuity within a piece reheard simply as a sequence of events, adjunct, overlapping, or separated by silences. The system of cued continuities used in many of Wolff's scores shows how rich this terrain might be (John Zorn's game pieces were related).

James Tenney's Meta+Hodos introduced the terms of cohesion and segregation, useful notions in characterizing the relationships between materials, whether successive or simultaneous. (Ezra Pound's little book George Antheil & The Theory of Harmony described an economic relationship between the distances among sounds in terms of time and type; late in his life, John Cage would advocate an ecological balance among sounds based upon loudness: when quiet, any sound could follow an other, but louder sounds required greater separation in time).

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The form of much electronic music has been based upon a substitution of the basic binary nature of a circuit -- either on or off -- for the system of movement and cadence. The tendency of pieces of electronic music to fill their entire durations with sound is a pronounced one, from La Monte Young Dream House to Douglas Leedy's Entropical Paradise to the convivial worlds of house and techno; examples in which electronic music has turned toward a more broken continuity, via a more frequent use of the switch (my favorite is Gordon Mumma's Pontpoint with its rich islands of sonority divided by oceans of silence), are rare but rich.

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Always keep your ears out for a reconciliation of opposites. The experimental music important to my musical youth included both the broken continuity heard in some of Cage's or Christian Wolff's music and the breathtakingly non-stop continuity of 60's/70's minimalism. Bridging the two continents seemed an essential and urgent task, but solutions were rare. Jo Kondo's music offered one solution; its mixture of tonal ambiguity and quasi-repetition created an environment in which everything heard was recognizably a part of a whole, yet it was seldom certain why this should be precisely so.

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In my imagination, the minimalism of my youth shares a compartment with a few pieces of extraordinary film-making. One of these is that magnificent last shot in Antonioni's The Passenger. A single non-stop camera shot that moves up and out of a room, through (how?) a barred window and onto the dusty street, while the "action" takes place, audibly only, and off and presumably behind the camera, in the it has left. Absolute continuity and a eventful narrative are placed in counterpoint by the severance of sight from sound. Another is Claude Lelouch's legendary C'était un Rendezvous, a high-speed race (probably in a Ferrari 275 GTB) through Paris in early morning light, an uncut single-reel shot, in which the continuity is continuous broken by details -- the scenery, the changing noise of the transmission, the sudden appearances of pedestrians rushing for dear life away from the on-coming traffic offender, and the shockingly neat finale which gives the film its name (again, how was that done?). Both of these bits of camera work have an odd effect on the viewer in that we become separate ourselves so comfortably into schizophrenic halves, one of whom is intensely aware of the technical achievement, and the other of whom is fully lost to the moving image and its wealth of details.

The connection here is to the music of Young, Riley, Glass, Reich, and others in which our attentions drifted inevitably to the complex and unpredictable acoustic graffiti or halo of combination effects while the actual physical "notes" played on instruments or sung by voices -- which were not necessarily interesting in their own rights -- vanished below the threshold of attention. (A friend pointed to a funny moment in a recent online interview with the composer Nico Muhly in which he talks of this music being "about maths" but still being heard with an emotional charge (excuse my paraphrase if I got it wrong) -- but it was never "about maths" in the first place but always rather about the potential of music to go beyond a reduction to maths, and the composer's task was to locate musical scenaria in which this potential would be realized in a clear and vivid way. )

Happy Fingers

The Internet Archive now has the trailer for The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T., the 1953 live action film to a script and design by Dr. Seuss, the pre-eminent moral philosopher of the late 20th century. The movie, for which the trailer is no substitute, is really sort of a mess, but brilliant at times, atomic even, and the best film yet about evil piano teachers. The young hero of the film, by the way is one Bartholomew Collins (left, played by Tommy Rettig, wearing the beany of the Dr. Terwilliger Happy Fingers Institute), who, of course, has grown up to write a well-known blog about pianoing and other things.

Minimal Film

One of the benefits of recent technology is a resurgence in experimental film, and an amazing increase in their availability. (I'm particularly fond of the offerings at UbuWeb, which include Robert Ashley's Music with Roots in the Aether, a work which changed my musical life.)

The webcam, in particular, has reopened a chapter in experimental film, the one in which the camera, unmanned, is simply allow to roll, whether in front of live actors, objects, or simply the weather. As impressive an experience as the 24-hour film Empire (1964) -- in which Andy Warhol let a camera run 8 hours, from dusk to dawn, in front of the Empire State Building -- was, I have to say that it really has nothing on the live Cheddar Vision TV, which shows a piece of West Country Cheddar Cheese doing what it does best: age. If Empire was boring, this is really boring. This is minimalist, it represents a gradual process, and it's arguably even a kind of music made visual, as the process is the end product of vibrating spores and bacteria. Is it art? The cheese making, for sure, inasmuch as it is a form of artifice, modifying natural processes for aesthetic ends. But the film itself, Ithinks, could do with some more inventive lighting. And maybe a soft filter...

No going back

"'Yes, it continues to puzzle me,' Roswell agreed, 'this irrational worship of the Geneva movement, and the whole idea of a movie projector being built like a clock--as if there could be no other way. Watches and clocks are fine, don't mistake my meaning, but they are a sort of acknowledgement of failure, they're there to glorify and celebrate one particular sort of time, the tickwise passage of time in one direction only and no going back...." -- Pynchon, Against the Day, p. 456-7)

Now I know why I've never been able to wear a watch: I like going to the movies, but would hate to live in a movie. Music, on the other hand, not being governed by inexorable forward motion of a maltese cross, is all about the possibility of time travel both forward and back.

More Movie Music

Just some questions, no firm opinions at all: is there a useful distinction to be made between the film music of composers who specialize in film music and those who come to film music from outside? Does the film music of Shostakovitch, Thomson, Copland, Glass, or Takemitsu fall into a different category than that of Korngold, Hermann, or any one of the Newmans? Does coming from inside or outside of the film branch give a composer a different perspective on the conventions of the genre?

And: What can be usefully said about the concert music composers who failed to break into the movies -- Schönberg and Stravinsky, for starters -- is that failure due to a mismatch in musical or personal temperaments? A variety of expressionism, with a real debt to Schönberg has become a familar trope in film music, but it seems to me to be more an import of external stylistic features than any deep structure (which shouldn't be surprising: musical concepts of coherence and closure take a back seat to those of film narrative, effect, and pacing*). On the other hand, with the exception of the famed disneyized dinosaurs, Stravinsky seems to have had less impact on film music.

(I've set aside the music of those composers working in experimental film environments, which are presumably less constraining).

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* On the other hand, why can't you try to have it both ways? There was an interview somewhere recently with a Hollywood blockbuster composer who mentioned starting a job with some fibonacci-derived materials, and then giving them up in favor of more or less improvising to the screen image. While there's nothing necessarily good or bad about using fibonacci sequences in music, I believe that there was something terribly empty in the gesture of just giving up on the potential for a score to incorporate structural relationships of both music and film genres. What a loss!

Film music

At Slate, Jan Swafford makes a case for Toro Takemitsu as the best film composer of all time. Such a category is hopelessly qualified by context -- and the context is one in which a composer is only one part of a corporate effort, with very little influence how, in the end, her or his music will be used. That qualification taken, my personal choice would be Alex North (with Henry Brant orchestrating), although, as I have noted here before, Bernard Hermann remains the most influential.