'Cinematic' Music - Analogies, Fallacies, And the Case of Debussy

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Cinematic Music:Analogies, Fallacies, and the Case of DebussyAuthor(s): Scott D. PaulinSource: Music and the Moving Image, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 2010), pp. 1-21Published by: University of Illinois Press

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FromMusic and the Moving ImageVol. 3, Issue 1.

"Cinematic" Music: Analogies, Fallacies, and the Case of Debussy

Scott D. Paulin

As one among many analogies commonly used to describe music as "cinematic," a supposed

affinity is often identified between musical discontinuity and film-editing or montage techniques.The modernist assumptions behind these claims (abetted by translation errors) have led todistorted interpretations of Claude Debussy and his music vis--vis cinema.

The movies have learned a great deal from music, and now music can learn a few things from the movies.

Charlie Chaplin

No longer content with being a mere actor, screenwriter, director, and producer, Charlie Chaplin announced in925 that he fancied himself a composer and conductor, too. Quick to pounce on this news, the music press leavened itoverage of the filmmaker's musicianship with a few of his more abstract pronouncements, including the foregoing

epigraph.1Here, Chaplin proposes a reciprocal influence between music and cinema, in the form of a favor to be repaid

This notion should challenge us to rethink the limits of any potential relationship between the two media: what would itmean for music to take lessons from the movies? In context, Chaplin refers not to the musical accompaniment of silentlms, nor to the recorded scores of future synchronized sound films, nor indeed to any combinationof music and movingmage. Rather, Chaplin is positing an intermedial resemblance whereby the moving image can be musical, and music cabe cinematic.

Chaplin may not have realized it, but he was revisiting the Laocon problem, framed as such by Gotthold EphraLessing in the eighteenth century: the possibility, and the propriety, of one art aspiring to recreate the qualities or effectsof another. Lessing came down against it, but the venerable questions continue still to structure aesthetic discussionsabout ekphrasis and "medium specificity."2Leaving the larger debates aside, the specific trajectory of influence advocatby Chaplin remains obscure within the scholarly literature on music and film. To be sure, the "musical analogies" of filmheory and practice are well known, at least within cinema studies. They are also largely exasperating to the musicallyterate reader, who is bound to wonder, for example, just how legitimately Sergei Eisenstein's "visual overtones" can rea

be compared to the acoustics of the harmonic series, and just why Germaine Dulac needed to assert, again and again,hat cinema should strive to become a "visual symphony."3As David Bordwell pointed out in a classic essay on the topihese analogies of the 1920s were partly dependent on a familiar ideology of music as absolute, autonomous, andonreferential, but also on the supposed amenability of music to formal analysis. All of these qualities were attractive inarying degrees to filmmakers intent upon exploring the possibilities of their medium as distinct from other narrativeorms.4As suchand rather ironicallythe musical analogies were fodder in the search for an essential, specificaesthetic of the cinematic medium. A more detailed account of this quest will occupy a central point in my discussion,although its consequences will reverberate throughout the material presented in this essay.

As the mirror image to the discourse of musicality, "cinematic analogies" have received comparatively little serioor sustained critical attention. Unlike the musical analogies, which have tended to be prescriptive in intent, cinematicanalogies (Chaplin's aside) have been mostly descriptive in nature. But, no less than the musical analogies, these too a

ounded on an array of assumptions that are partial and reductive: assumptions about cinema, in this case, and about thways in which a musical work might be understood to have cinematic qualities. These assumptions, often indebted toessentialist ideas derived from the discourse of medium specificity, deserve to be put under some pressure: What

nderstandings (or misunderstandings) of cinema and "the cinematic" underpin such analogies? What (if anything) do theeally tell us about any music so described? How might a historically responsible approach to interpreting musiccinematically" proceed?

Cinematic analogies were nothing new in 1925 despite the novelty that Chaplin's comment might imply. They habeen activated as early as the twentieth century's first decade, and they have recurred in various forms ever since. I wileturn to some of the earliest formulations after first examining the broader outlines of "the cinematic" as it has been

attributed to music, and then focusing on an especially resilient set of ideas about montage and modernism. One specifioutcome, undertaken in the present article's second half, will be to correct a common misunderstanding of ClaudeDebussy's work in relation to cinema, but the larger purpose of this critique is to propose a departure from receivedanalogies and a reconsideration of what music might, in fact, have learned from the movies.

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Listening to Music, Hearing Cinema

At the risk of overkill, the following litanywhich could be vastly expandedbegins to map out the variety of cinematicanalogies that music has attracted. In what follows, apples and oranges are willfully mixed to demonstrate how broadlyanalogies to cinema can be found across various modes of engagement with music, directed to different readerships. Thources are eclectic: academic musicologists, composers, performers, music critics, even publicists. The range of musichey describe is equally wide. As for the underlying assumptions about cinema, some are specific to genre or era, whileothers have been widely shared.5

On works by Richard Strauss: the Symphonia Domestica(19023) offers "concrete cinematic depictions of the

everyday"; Salome(1905) and Don Juan(188889) "feature colorful, evocative, quasi-cinematic orchestration."6

On Alexander Zemlinsky's Psalm 23(1910): "Zemlinsky recalls the temple music of his youth, the organ that heplayed on high days and holidays, the sunlight shining through stained-glass windows. . . . [H]ere, with almost

cinematic realism, [these memories] represent a declaration of solidarity with the Jewish people." 7

On Aram Khachaturian, conducting his own works: "[H]e favoured lush, generousportamentiwhich, combined witthe technicolour sonics created by the Decca production team, give his performances an unusually strong, almost

cinematic character."8

On Carl Nielsen's Fifth Symphony (192122): "this cinematic symphony, this unclean trench music, this brazen

deception."9

On the voice of soprano Rene Fleming: "[C]inematic clarity, directness, naturalism and intimacy in her delivery

speak eloquently to an era of democratized communication in which nothing can be hidden."10

On the voice of folk-revival singer Anne Briggs: "emotionally evocative to the point of being cinematic without eve

stepping foot into theatrics."11

On Scottish post-rock band Mogwai's The Hawk is Howling(2008): "[W]ith only two songs under the five-minute

mark, this is maybe their most 'cinematic'-sounding record to date (which is saying something)."12

On Georges Bizet's Les pcheurs de perles(1863): "[T]he librettists anticipated a cinematic technique for isolatinone portion of a larger scene: the close-up. In act 3, scene 2, we find Nadir in the forest amid a wild scene ofdrinking, dancing, and singing. Initially, the audience sees these 'furious dances'; then, as though the stage has

shrunk to Nadir's space, everything comes to a halt, and only the tenor is heard."13

On an indie-rock album by the Microphones: "Music is too often described as 'cinematic,' but Mount Eerie[2003]

evokes that exact quality; it's almost possible to envision the sets."14

On Wolfgang Rihm's Jagden und Formen(19952001): "It has an almost cinematic quality: The constant

movement, unpredictable texture changes and touches of quirky humor conjure images of an intensely dramatic,occasionally zany film, full of action, jump cuts and dissolves."15

On the music of German composer Matthias Pintscher: "intricately assembled self-contained blocks of sound

juxtaposed in jump-cut edits. . . . [O]ne could make a case for ties with the culturally voracious filmmaking of

Herzog and Fassbinder."16

On an entire repertoire: "Classical music is like cinematographyit's using all the moods that exist in ways to ma

larger designs."17

This miscellany may leave the reader suspecting that Jean-Luc Godard was right, in another context, to assert that

everything is cinema."18For the moment, I want to set aside the issues of cinematic technique, specifically editing, that2This content downloaded from 169.229.11.216 on Wed, 21 Oct 2015 01:17:10 UTC

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ome of the citations raise. These issues will soon become central, but first consider the other qualities that writers seizpon when they listen "cinematically": realism, clarity, emotion, visuality, expansiveness, action; the concrete, the

evocative, the colorful, the dreamlike, the all -encompassing. Some music is said to anticipatecinema, some is similar toinema, and some is influenced bycinema, but the boundaries among these relationships often remain blurry. 19Franklyhere are references here that make little sense at all, and there are very few in which the analogy to cinema is at onceaccurate and necessary. Too often, "cinematic" becomes a glib synonym for the intense, the atmospheric, or thepicturesque; a careful copy editor might simply reach for the red pencil. 20

Amidst this confused body of analogies, almost any type of music can be assimilated to "the cinematic"an all-purpose, radically unstable signifier that contradicts its own promise to signify something specific about the medium. Eveince the 1920s, theorists and filmmakers have attempted to prescribe cinema's proper, narrow domain, but, decades

urther on, "the cinematic" only seems to become more and more promiscuous: the analogy's constitutional vagueness ishe key to its power and its mischief alike. To call something "cinematic," in an era dominated by cinema as a commonongue, is to abet the medium's own omnivorous assimilation of other cultural practices. It is almost guaranteed, in someense or other, to be true.21Our register of intellectual fallacies may thus need to admit another entrya "cinematicallacy"to identify the range of reductive and often anachronistic analogies through which we have been enjoined to hea cinematic music.

The Composer's Cut

All of these analogies merit interrogation: what exactly is at stake in understanding cinema to be, at its base, a mediumniquely exemplifying "clarity," "realism," or any of these qualities, and how are they imagined to be transferablein

specificallycinematic termsto music?22But one tendency has persisted in a particularly interesting way: the desire to

nd meaningful analogues for music in editing, among other technical and form-building elements of film. This analogyeems to hold a special appeal for musicologists and theorists for reasons that will emerge in the following discussion. eserves the deepest scrutiny here precisely because of its apparent intellectual authority.

A detour into another discipline will lay the groundwork. Literary scholars, searching for cinematic qualities in proand poetry, have gravitated to the same technical analogies as music scholars, especially when modernistliterature is tanon in question.23Some recent work, however, has critiqued this habit. In an article with the agenda-setting title "This Not a Movie," Maria DiBattista revisits one of the usual suspects, James Joyce's Ulysses(1922), in order to challengehe role that "cinematographic form" has come to play in accounts of the modern novel, expressing unease about "theboldness with which we rhetorically cross the generic borders between film and novel like bounty hunters after quarryving openly in neighboring territory."24David Trotter echoes this critique and articulates a concern almost identical to

mine:

The great majority of the enquiries into literary modernism's relation to cinema undertaken during the pastthirty years or so have been committed, implicitly or explicitly, to argument by analogy. The literary text, weare told, is structured like a film, in whole or in part: it has its "close-ups," its "tracks" and "pans," its "cuts"from one "shot" to another. Writers and film-makers were engaged, it would seem, in some kind of exchangeof transferable narrative techniques. The transferable narrative technique which has featured mostconsistently in debates about literary modernism is montage.25

Setting the loaded word montageaside for an interrogation to follow later in this essay, it would be easy to rewrite thispassage with reference to music scholarship. Interpretations of Joyce's cinematic techniques could then be matched withhose attributed to Mahler, Dos Passos's with Stravinsky's, and so on, triangulating literary and musical modernismshrough film technique. Trotter shares my skepticism, however, toward the assumption that editing has played, or mustplay, the defining role in cinema's influence on its fellow arts, and in this article he demonstrates that T. S. Eliot'sengagement with cinema has been misunderstood or minimized because the poet's interests were focused not on theevel of form or technique, but rather of content. In the end, Trotter is most keen on establishing how an author's creativeprocess may, through a historically plausible connection, be indebted to cinema, and his test is commonsensical: "Anyaccount of the literary use to which a writer may or may not have put a cinematic device must be based on an

nderstanding of the uses to which that device was put, at the time of writing, in cinema."26This focus on the act ofmaking, if pursued too strictly, would lead us into Richard Taruskin's "poietic fallacy," but Trotter's criterion must

evertheless hold for music, too, if any immediate and nonfanciful cinematic influence is to be substantiated.27For themoment, however, I am interested in reception, not intent, and the pressing task is to unpack the values that have incitea desireto valorize the "cut" and have thus encouraged misreadings of the "cinematicity" of Debussy's music, amongothers.

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But, first, a bit of sarcasm. In 1934, the composer and critic Constant Lambert suggested that certain leading modernistsad chosen the wrong line of work:

It is a tenable theory that much of our dissatisfaction with post-war music derives from the fact that the mosttypical post-war composers are cinema producers manqus. . . . Instead of producing null and voidconcertos, Hindemith should be the camera man, Honegger should be in charge of the sound effects andStravinsky, with his genius for pastiche, should be entrusted with the cutting.28

Lambert may be more dedicated to an ostentatious cleverness here than to any kind of serious analysis, and yet hisnterpretation, with its Laocon-like assumptions, epitomizes one significant train of thought: if techniques imagined asessentially cinematic can be found in the music of these composers, their work must bein a wordunmusical.

Cinematic," in a common early spin on the analogy, functioned as code for structural incoherence, with Stravinsky figurere as a special representative of the problem, his music constructed as if by editors' shears rather than logic.

Lambert clearly did not intend to praise, but the terms of his critique have since been thoroughly neutralized.Musical discontinuity may now be validated precisely becauseit can be interpreted as cinematic. Another set of examplein addition to a few already citedwill demonstrate the penchant for hearing musical equivalents to film editing. Toemain with Stravinsky, Peter Hill has much more recently cited examples of such editing in both The Rite of Spring1913) and Petrushka(1911). In the latter, he observes "a collage of brilliantly characterised vignettes which [Stravinskyhen 'cuts' together like a film editor; each block belongs to a stream of music, woven together with other streams just a

a director intercuts different angles of view of a scene."29Hill's point here is heuristic; he is wise not to claim an actualinematic influence, since in 1911 there were not yet films that looked like Petrushkasounds. Even so, Hill'snderstanding of filmmakingof what "a director" and an (apparently interchangeable) "film editor" actually dois

ymptomatically slanted to privilege the act of cutting, as if abrupt edits suffice to evoke an aural cinema. Analysts tend apply this particular emphasis most pointedly, however, not in reference to accepted modernists like Stravinsky, but to alightly senior cohort, composers whose careers overlapped with early cinema, but whose place in music history lies on

he often uncomfortable cusp between Romanticism and modernism.30

Thus, in a description of the late- (or post-)Romantic composer Franz Schreker's overture to Die Gezeichneten1918), we find a typical example: "There is at this point a sudden cinematic cut of a kind that is not uncommon in

Schreker. Suddenly we find ourselves caught up in the music of the grand masked procession."31The cinematic analogs stated bluntly and pursued no further, eliding the distinction between a composer's appropriation of film technique andmusicologist's convenient metaphor. When another study promises "almost cinematographic techniques of discontinuity aey formal moments" of Sir Edward Elgar's Cockaigne Overture(1900), analogy is pitted against anachronism, for the

work predates any similar techniques in cinema.32The same is true of La Bohme(1896), yet Jrgen Leukel finds cuts

and dissolves in this and other Puccini scores, citing them as evidence of the composer's "cinematographic technique"and hencesignificantlyof his "Zeitaktualitt," his up-to-dateness.33Jean Sibelius typically eludes cinematic analogiesbut music critic Alex Ross has recently filled that gap: "Sibelius's early works, like contemporaneous works of Strauss,obey a kind of cinematic logic that places disparate images in close proximity. But where Straussand later Stravinsky

sed rapid cuts, Sibelius preferred to work in long takes"; revising his Fifth Symphony (1915/19), then, the composerproduced "a cinematic 'dissolve'" when he "cut off the ending of the first movement, cut off the beginning of the second,and splice[d] them together."34The sheer frequency with which the music of this era attracts description in terms of somind of editing should arouse our suspicion: why the desire to hear precisely thismusic in this way?

We can approach an answer by noticing that the analytical gaze in these instances seems perennially to be fixedpon musical transition pointsor, rather, upon puzzling moments where a proper or conventional transition is lacking.Other film techniques, such as the close-up, have also inspired analysts to cite musical parallels. But these cases, too,nvolve transition points: not just the close-up, but the edit fromlong shot toframed detail.) Troubling transitions provokeomething like a gnostic attitude: they cry out for interpretation and meaning.35A vocabulary rooted in cinematicechnique can offer the false security of explaining away such apparent transgressionsjustifying a violation on therounds that it obeys a different set of laws. Here the cinematic and musical analogies reveal their reciprocity, for music

analyzable rhythmic and architectonic features (as already noted) were a part of its fascination for early film culture. 36Fmusic scholars, in turn, a discovery of "cinematic form" can assuage a phobic resistance to the "formless," and thedentification of edits in a score thus plays handily into the music-analytical habit of valuing structure, technique, poiesisabove all.

Yet the value of these discoveries, apparently rooted in an assumption that editing is the essence of cinema, isompromised by the untenably narrow view of the medium that guides them. An obsession with technique means alwayalking about the join, never about what has been joined together; always about form, never about content. (This shouldemind us of Trotter's and DiBattista's critiques of the hunt for cinematographic form in literature.) As a symptomatic

example, when Richard Burke sets out to analyze Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 15(1974) for possible traces of4This content downloaded from 169.229.11.216 on Wed, 21 Oct 2015 01:17:10 UTC



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inema, he gravitates immediately to the "boldly discontinuous," to transitions and editing, systematically classifyingmusical gestures in terms of film technique: the dissolve, the overlap, the cut.37This is not to discount Burke's findings,which are intriguing, but simply to ask, what about the rest of the music, and the rest of the filmthe parts that comebetweenthe edits?

Modernist Montage; or, What Movie Are We Listening For?

[P]eople began to say: "That's cinematic. That's not cinematic." At first a charming witticism, this way ofpassing judgment soon became doctrine.

Henri Fescourt and Jean-Louis Bouquet (1925)38

The question of a cinematic essenceof "medium specificity," as already defined in passinghas been a long-standingpreoccupation in serious writing about film. If the very earliest film theorists "struggled to give to cinema the stature of arn Dudley Andrew's words, their subsequent project was more prescriptive: as David Bordwell delineates it, "defininginema as a specificart or medium. What feature of film set it off from literature, theatre, painting, and other arts? Whathe nature of cinematic representation, and what relation does it have to the physical and perceptual world it portrays?" 3

This drive to designate the specificity of the medium became so central to discourse about film that already by 1925 itnvited parody as an almost unhealthy obsession: Henri Fescourt and Jean-Louis Bouquet follow the foregoing passageby imagining a dogmatic cinphile who makes the shrill assertion that "the cinema has no other reason to exist except no resemble any other form of expression." 40

It would not be possible to do justice here to the full variety of specificities that have been claimed as absolutes

inema's behalf; a methodical account would bear some resemblance to the compilation of disparate cinematic analogiealready presented in this essay. But the variety itself should be enough to make us hesitate before defaulting to any oneof them as the solution. Certainly it ought to be obvious that "the cinematic" cannot be reduced to the edit, much less toan especially discontinuous, paratactic variety of editing. Yet there is a long tradition of asserting the contrary. Frenchheory advanced this argument, drawing again on music for analogies of rhythm that could explain the effect of combininhots of certain durations in particular patterns; musical or not, the "rapid editing" explored by Abel Gance in La roue1923) was often cited as a touchstone of truly cinematic innovation.41But even if French filmmakers could lay claim to

early exploration of the possibilities of editing, posterity has most closely associated their Soviet counterpartsLevKuleshov, Vsevolod Pudovkin and, most famously, Sergei Eisensteinwith such techniques, no doubt partly because of

ow audaciously they seized this mantle for themselves. For Eisenstein, it was axiomatic not only that "cinema is, first aoremost, montage," but also, speaking on behalf of Soviet achievements, that "montage . . . owed its full development,efinitive interpretation, and world recognition to our cinema."42

As promised earlier in this essay, "montage" is a term that requires some dissection. Based etymologically in thebroad concept of "assembly," it can casually refer to editing practices in generalto any way of putting pieces of filmogetherthough via Eisenstein it acquired connotations of an especially aggressive fragmentation and even "dissonantuxtaposition" of images.43In truth, Eisenstein's conception of montage was capacious. It evolved over time as heelaborated a set of categories increasing in complexity from "metric montage" through "rhythmic," "tonal," and "overtonalo "intellectual montage" (the musical basis for most of these will be apparent); his theory of montage further

encompassed movement within the shot, and later the relationships between image and sound, as well as theelationships among successive strips of film.44Although he ultimately determined that "the principle of montage isommon to all the arts," a claim that points against the grain of cinematic specificity, Eisenstein also argued that this too

was "at its most specificand significant as a method of influence in the field of cinema." 45Thus, cinema alwaysmaintained a special relationship with montage in Eisenstein's theory; it represented the fulfillment of the technique's

potential.

The montage principle owes its enduring circulation largely to Eisenstein's authority; in the judgment of posterity,according to Jacques Aumont, "Eisenstein equals montage."46But, in reception, the concept has tended to trickle downa simplified form, without the shifts and nuances it acquires across Eisenstein's theoretical uvre as a whole. This can attributed partly to the limited cross section of his writings that were available through most of the twentieth century;47the canonical status (and again the broad availability) of a few of his films and more particularly of a handful of sequencrom those films, such as Potemkin's "Odessa Steps"; and to the sheer quotability of some of the more aggressivetatements from his early writings of the 1920s. Here he advocates a montage-based cinema that provides "a series of

blows to the consciousness and emotions of the audience"; he demands "not a 'Cine-Eye' . . . but a 'Cine-Fist.' Sovietinema must cut through to the skull!"48Although the later Eisenstein found montage within the shot as well, his youngelf had firmly insisted, "We must look for the essence of cinema not in the shots but in the relationships between the

hots, just as in history we look not at individuals but at the relationships between individuals, classes, etc."49

This, withhe Marxism either foregrounded or silenced, depending on personal ideological preference, is the Eisenstein whose5This content downloaded from 169.229.11.216 on Wed, 21 Oct 2015 01:17:10 UTC



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implified presence can be felt behind casual references to montage as an art of abruptness and shock. This is also theEisenstein whose legacy can be felt among the theorists Nol Carroll has dubbed "montage-essentialists," who have hehat which holds that the "stylistic choices in any film concerning scripting, set decoration, lighting, etc., must beubordinated to facilitating rapid editing."50Only thus, according to thisview of medium specificity (which, again, ought no be attributed to Eisenstein himself), can cinema realize its potential ascinema.

Within film studies, montage-essentialism has enjoyed a long shelf life, sometimes reducing the "stylistic history inema" to a chronicle of mere "differences in editing," according to a critique mounted by Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs

These theories of montage outlasted by decades the school of filmmaking that gave rise to them, Brewster and Jacobsargue, and have also deformed our understanding of films made prior to their articulation in the 1920s.51Outside of filmtudies, this cohort of concepts has wielded disproportionate influence, as well, garnering intellectual credibility thanks to

he prestige of their source. I suspect that they have acquired an additional academic cachet thanks to the ease withwhich they can be mapped onto the perennially fashionable ideas of Walter Benjamin, whose most famous essayprivileges "the shock effect of the film," its "constant, sudden change" of images, and the "multiple fragments which areassembled under a new law" in cinema.52Crucially, the strategy of defining cinema as montage (which is equally atrategy for constraining cinema) relies on sources with distinctly and respectably modernist credentials. 53Scholars from

other disciplines, looking across the border into film studies, have latched onto some version of montage theory not simpo find "transferable narrative techniques," as Trotter says, but to seek an exemplary cinema that conforms to someombination of the accepted standards of modernist aesthetics: difficulty, progress, innovation, shock, alienation,

opposition to mass culture. The last of these should not be underestimated; with different emphases, it was shared byertain French theorists in their advocacy of an abstract "pure cinema" against one driven by narrative (and likely importrom Hollywood), and by the younger Eisenstein in his elevation of the cinema's didactic potential over its (bourgeois)entertainment value.54

In music scholarship, the spirit of early Eisenstein usually seems to hover nearby whenever the language of edits applied to music. The specific debt, conscious or not, emerges whenever emphasis is placed on the abrupt, theiscontinuous, or the violently paratactic in a musical scoresomething we have already seen several times in this essa

for, once again, Eisenstein's emphasis, more extreme than that of his Soviet colleagues (or his French contemporarieswas squarely and polemically fixed upon "montage as a collision."55As an explicit example, Richard Burke makes a poof describing musical elements that "collide" in Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony (193536), prompting a quote fromEisenstein's The Film Senseabout montage as "juxtaposition."56In the context of an article on Shostakovich, Burke'shree-page excursus into Soviet avant-garde cinema of the 1920s may seem unexceptionable, and yet, of the cinematicelements he speculatively identifies elsewhere among the composer's scores, the majority would not be out of place inany MGM melodrama of the same era. But Eisenstein's name provides a modernist prestige that correlates withShostakovich's own and assures the reader that cinema could be an intellectually respectable influence in spite of its

mass-culture connotations (not to mention the low-culture stigma of slapstick filmBurke does also note the "KeystoneKops" element that others have identified as a cinematic resonance in some of Shostakovich's scores). Burke is anexception in directly citing Eisenstein, but the director's presence can often be felt even when he is not mentioned by

ame and even when the word montageis not uttered. When Peter Hill, for example, imagines "a director" building acene out of juxtaposed blocks, analogous to a Stravinskian musical construction, it's not just any director: it's implicitly a

montage-essentialist. But how sturdy is any conceptualization of cinema that takes the "Odessa Steps" as the rule rathehan the exception?

* * *

To bring the discussion of medium specificity deeper into the twentieth century, and to rehearse a dispute in filmaesthetics that will already be familiar to many readers: the long take, depth of field, and expressive mise-en-scne arearguably just as cinematic as a rapid or jarring montage, and, in the view of some theorists, preeminently Andr Bazin,

hese are morecinematic than montage. As with montage theory itself, it is impossible here to explore these positionswith the rigor they deserve; what must be made clear is simply the extent to which the place of montage within "theinematic" has been contested across the theoretical field. Bazin, critical of what he saw as montage's tendency "tompose its interpretation of an event on the spectator," preferred to valorize a cinema "in which the image is evaluated naccording to what it adds to reality but what it reveals of it."57Writing in the 1950s, Bazin wished to valorize recent Italia

eorealist cinema and Hollywood directors such as Welles and Wyler, but also filmmakers going back to the supposedeyday of silent-era montageStroheim, Murnau, Flahertyfilmmakers in whose work "montage plays no part." 58Bazin

was hardly alone in this position; Siegfried Kracauer, too, issued polemics claiming that photographic realism was the

medium's essential quality, and that editing makes "no more than a minor contribution to the cinematic." 59

However, to the extent that editing hascontributed to cinemaand Kracauer surely goes to an extreme inminimizing itthe most widely accepted practical language of editing, as developed in the American industry during the

ilent era, bears scant resemblance to Eisensteinian montage. Here, the typical goal was continuity and the seamlessne6This content downloaded from 169.229.11.216 on Wed, 21 Oct 2015 01:17:10 UTC



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of time and space: the invisibilityof technique, not a jolting, self-conscious laying bare of it.60Even to speak of a cutis emphasize division rather than the act of connectionthat editing typically accomplishes.61For example, when D. W.Griffith crosscuts between parallel actions (a method for which his innovations were crucial, even if theater and literatureprovided him with models), the spectator should be absorbed in suspense, not in recognition or admiration of theechnique: the editing connects two actions (temporally) as powerfully as it juxtaposes them (spatially). As a sonicequivalent to the visual experience of mostcinema, radically discontinuous musical blocks are a poor analogue indeed. he classical Hollywood style were to be given its historically appropriate duean anathema for theorists with a doctrinaantagonism toward mass-culture cinemaanalogies to its fluid camera motions and continuity editing might be moreappropriately identified in seamless, meticulously prepared musical modulations.

In the end, taking sides either with Eisenstein or with Bazin/Kracaueror even with Hollywoodis to choose on

among several restrictive traps. Attempting to dismantle the viability of medium specificity for film studies, Nol Carroll haargued that claims about "the supposedly unique features of a medium" actually work to promote specific stylisticpreferences, to validate one agenda among many, and to consign alternative approaches to the uncinematic.62Further,heories of medium specificity have typically been mobilized with special force in the service of modernist aesthetics:Clement Greenberg's insistence that painting restrict itself to exploring the properties of paint; Michael Fried's assaultagainst the "theatricality" of minimalist art.63I would argue that most attempts to discover "the cinematic" in music arepredicated on unexamined assumptions about medium specificity, and that they tend to be deformed by the modernistbaggage they carry.64The ideological stakes should be coming clearly into focus: to hear cinematic montage in the musof a Puccini, Elgar, or Strauss is to grant those composers a modernist prestige they are often deniedrecall JrgenLeukel on Puccini's Zeitaktualitt.65(It can also act as a counterweight to less flattering species of analogy, such asConstant Lambert's reference, in the case of Puccini again, to "the cinematic emotions of Madam Butterfly."66) Working oncert with the lure of modernism, as already argued, editing analogies may satisfy the urge to legitimize music throughhe demonstration of underlying formal principlesand hence the particular attraction to Eisenstein's apparent rigor inheorizing montage, completing the circuit that began when film theory first looked to musicfor a model of rigorous formand analyzable pattern. Whether or not the technique is truly transferable to music, the concept is transferable to theinds of stories that many scholars want to tell aboutmusic: stories that take an assumption about what cinema is, map

onto an ideology of what music should be, and assimilate both to the strictures of modernism.

When we think we hear a "cut," then, we would do well to hesitate and perhaps to contemplate an argument maby Ali Weyl-Nissen in 1929: "Montage is a chief principle of our music. What else is a Wagner overture but a theme-montage. What else is any program music? What is music from Bach up to the last consequences of Romanticism, up to

Pfitzner?"67Although it stretches any usable definition of montage to the breaking point, Weyl-Nissen's objection shouldemind us that even if paratactic juxtaposition in music might feelanalogous to sensations familiar from the movies, thesensations need not be inherently cinematic.68Roger Shattuck would lead us toward a similar conclusion, proposing tha

a broad twentieth-century urge to imitate the "sudden leaps" of "subconscious thought processes"and not the influencof filmencouraged composers, poets, novelists, and artists alike toward a "seemingly rough and arbitrary technique ofuxtaposition."69But there are also specific musical precedents, and Stravinsky points the way back to one of them.Richard Taruskin attributes the elevation of juxtaposition over traditional (Germanic, symphonic) values of developmentand transition in Stravinsky's music to a specifically Russian, precinematic, and premodernist aesthetic: drobnost', orsplinteredness," a "calculated formal disunity and disjunction."70Drobnost'leads forward from nineteenth-century Russ

music; it need not be a protocinematic anticipation of Soviet montage. In turn, for composers of Stravinsky's time andater, writing music that sounds like montage is just as likely a Stravinskian gesture as a cinematic one.71Eisensteinimself was well aware that the techniques he prioritized in cinema had a history, one that he traced back variously

hrough Dickens, Flaubert, Pushkin, and Milton to the Acropolis and the hieroglyph.72By foregrounding these models inis writing, he necessarily downplays the cinematic specificity of montageas already discussed in this essayeven if ites these precedents with a teleological faith in cinema (hiscinema) as their preordained heir. But for commentatorsoday to accept this trajectory, and to follow Eisenstein in seeking precursors and analogues to montage for the sheerpurpose of labeling them as retroactively and essentially cinematic, is an ahistorical pursuit, to say the least. It ought to blear in hindsight that technical resemblance is neither an ontological nor a genealogical truth.

Composing a Film: From "musique cinmatographique" to "le traitement de cinmatographe"

The composers have not had much to say for themselves in the foregoing discussion, and it is time to give them the floAmong those who pondered the cinema, however casually, not all believed that it offered useful technical lessons.Quoting Constant Lambert again: "It is impossible . . . to achieve in music the equivalent of the 'quick cutting' which is thbasis of the Pudovkin-Eisenstein technique. There is no real equivalent in music even of the 'wipe-dissolve' which leadshe eye gently but quickly from one scene to another."73On the other hand, some composers openly admitted anattraction to, or a deeper knowledge of, cinematographic techniques. Elliott Carter not only saw Eisenstein's films, but a

ead, and quoted, his theoretical writings; analyses of Carter's music may well ask whether he transferred the idea of7This content downloaded from 169.229.11.216 on Wed, 21 Oct 2015 01:17:10 UTC



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montage into his work and with what results.74Stephen Sondheim has acknowledged the influence of the French NewWave films of Alain Resnais (with their disorienting, anticlassical editing), among others, and technical implications may

rawn when he asserts that "I think cinematically when I'm writing songs. . . . I stage them like a movie."75As little ashey otherwise have in common, these composers pass Trotter's test if intention is what interests us: they wereemonstrably aware of certain technical principles, inviting the question of how they understood those principles and to

what uses they put them. But even an acknowledged influence may well provoke a creative misunderstanding. ThoughLambert's offers no systematic analysis of the problem, intuitively he was on the right track: influence need not be equao an "equivalent" or a transferable technique, and to listen for "cuts," even in the music of Carter or Sondheim, is notnherently the most productive angle. As Bordwell points out, such equivalences can reach an absurdly reductive point:An advertisement featuring a roller-skating pizza-delivery boy is not comparable to the Odessa Steps sequence merely

because both use 'fast cutting'."76Even withinthe realm of moving images, it is too easy to discover similarities that areot truly analogous.

This brings us, in a roundabout way, to Debussybut not yet to his music. First, we need to consider his work aa critic, for Debussy may well have been the first to mention Richard Strauss and cinema in the same breath. In a Marc

903 review, Debussy responded first to the narrative and visual qualities of Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel(189495): "[O]nannot doubt that the music is meant to recount anecdotes and that the orchestra has a role comparable to the amusinglustrations in a book."77Debussy gives kinetic and mimetic examples: clarinets soar into the air and a bass drum kickske a clown, with Strauss's music proceeding through one such "illustration" after another. In Ein Heldenleben(189798

Debussy is further impressed by "a frenetic motion, which carries you along whereverand for however longit wants

o"; there is a force of continuity that sweeps away any concerns about heterogeneity. 78Like Till Eulenspiegel, Debussyoes on, Heldenleben"is a book of images," but here he adds, "[I]t is even cinematographic. . . . But it must be said tha

he man who can construct a work of this sort with such continuity is very close to genius."79

There is a slight ambivalence here: Heldenlebensucceeds musically in spite of being "cinematographic," notbecause of it. For Debussy, this language implies neither praise nor derision. It simply refers to descriptive music

nfolding in time, translating discrete "images" into sound one by one. (As a quality shared by music and film, temporalits often the underlying basis for the analogies made between them.) Crucially, Debussy's frame of cinematic reference in903which could have ranged from the documentary actualitsof the Lumire Brothers to the fantastical special effec

of Georges Mlisis embedded in what Tom Gunning has defined as a "cinema of attractions," a prenarrative cinema,ominant until roughly 19067, that prioritized the act of showing rather than telling, spectacle rather than story. 80

Eisenstein must be taken into account once again here, for his early essays were the source from which Gunningextrapolated this concept. Eisenstein's "attraction," as prescribed for both theater and cinema, is an "aggressive momentalculated to have a specific emotional effect on an audience; these attractions are then to be arranged in a montagetructure to maximize their impact in an ideologically effective "agit-cinema."81While the elements of shock and

onfrontation do persist in Gunning's projection of a "cinema of attractions" onto filmmaking two decades prior toEisenstein, the nuances of his account are somewhat different; in particular, the model of audience reception is lessmechanistic, and sociopolitical efficacy is no longer a necessary condition. Spectators of this cinema, as defined byGunning, are astonished rather than assaulted; attractions are "attention-grabbing" rather than ideologically coercive. 82

Even if the concept has been subject to debate and revision since Gunning introduced it, the cinema of attractions shoube an essential part of any historically grounded speculation about cinematic tendencies in music of this period. 83

Consider Debussy's analogy of a cinematographic Strauss once more. Perhaps counterintuitively, it is notprompted by the narrative content of the tone poems. Nor, by any means, should it be read as a reference to editing,

iscontinuity, or shock. On the contrary, Debussy remarks precisely upon the surprise of Heldenleben's continuity. If thecore strikes him as "cinematographic," it is because of the episodic "attractions" themselves, which grab our attention ihe act of illustration and offer delight in the moment of their hearing. They're like pictures in a book, but, better still, the

movethus precisely referencing the etymology of cinema.

Debussy's words here, along with his other written comments on cinema, brief and scattered though they are, habeen used to frame cinematic readings of his own music. But an essential context for his subsequent remarks is provideby another French composer, Vincent d'Indy, who offered his own definition of "cinematographic music" in an article of

913. D'Indy's general view of film was withering; a few years later, he insisted that "[t]he cinema [has] nothing to do witart" and refused to discuss the possibilities for its musical accompaniment.84In the 1913 essay, d'Indy uses his praise fa work by Jean Roger-Ducasse,Au jardin de Marguerite (19015), as a springboard for an extended diatribe. This work

'Indy writes, is

a musical composition of very high standards, where the composer sacrifices very little to the fashion of theday, in other words to cinematographic music.

Allow me briefly to explain this term, which I have used here very seriously. It seems to me that a8This content downloaded from 169.229.11.216 on Wed, 21 Oct 2015 01:17:10 UTC



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great many modern symphonic compositions, those in which sensation overtakes feeling, would gain fromthe addition of a cinematograph,which would be called upon to explicate and to demarcate the varioussections of the piece.

From the moment that all musical formis banished, as something antiquated and old-fashioned, itwould seem to me to be indispensable to have all such "sensorial" music accompanied by its plasticrepresentation.

This would have a double advantage: (1) to make comprehensible what the composer wanted to say[. . . and] (2) to present to the eye an agreeable flickering, which would harmonize marvelously with the littleorchestral chichis and other auricular titillations that generally constitute the principal merit of these

compositions.

This is a question worth studying . . . perhaps a commission could be appointed . . .85

Suffering from a twofold lackhaving neither form nor the capacity for concrete representation"cinematographic music

s defined for d'Indy by its sheer incomprehensibility in the absence of a continuous visual supplement.86

D'Indy's notion soon received an indirect response in the same journal. Twice within a year, Debussy madeambiguous comments about cinema and its potential to revitalize public interest in art musiccomments that have beenited to support his own cinematic credentials. On 1 November 1913, Debussy suggested the following:

There remains one way for us to revive the taste for symphonic music among our contemporaries: let us

apply cinematographic treatments to pure music. It is the filmlike Ariadne's threadthat will allow us toexit this worrisome labyrinth.87

Those sentences, echoing d'Indy's call for adding a film projection to performances of concert music, have received themost attention. They have also been widely misconstrued and will thus require further analysis. But first, let us continuewith Debussy's train of thought:

The countless listeners who are bored when they hear a Bach Passion, or even the Mass in D[Beethoven'sMissa Solemnis] would rediscover all their [capacity for] attention and emotion if the screen would take pityon their distress. Sequences could even be added to show moments of the composer's life that passedwhile composing the work. . . .

Just think of the misunderstandings that would be avoided! The spectator is not always responsiblefor his errors! He cannot always prepare for his listening as if writing a thesis; the normal life of a citizen isnot particularly favorable to the suggestion of aesthetic emotions. The author would no longer be betrayed,we would be rid of false interpretations, we would finally know with certainty the truth, the truth, the truth! . ..88

Somehow, commentators have missed the ironic tone. Crying out for la vritin a climactic crescendo, Debussy echoesone of his own creations, the character Golaud from Pellas et Mlisande(1902), demanding concrete answers from awife who is unable to grasp what "truth" he is asking for. This is hardly the most sympathetic of intertexts. Debussy beinDebussy, can he really have meant for music, any more than Mlisande herself, to give up its mysteries in the name ofinematographic clarity? Surely, he is not just responding to d'Indy's attack on modern composition, but also blatantly

mocking its demand for a visual supplement that would "make comprehensible what the composer wanted to say."

Debussy continued in this vein on 1 February 1914 by mentioning recent rumors about "filming the nineymphonies of Beethoven." Here he suggests, however, that such films would actually "have nothing to do with music, sess with Beethoven."89In case a reader did not get the previous article's joke, which had also referenced a work byBeethoven, this statement clarifies Debussy's attitude toward films as visualizations of music. It also adds a layer to hisesponse to d'Indy, for rather than compensating for formless compositions, these films would fit (or fail to fit) theepertoire's ultimate paradigms of structure.

But more than Debussy's tone has been misread. An error of translation, perhaps guided by the commonpreconceptions about cinema already discussed, has skewed the discussion further (at least in English-language circlesRichard Langham Smith's 1973 article "Debussy and the Art of the Cinema" deserves credit as one of the first seriousattempts to explore cinematic influences in anymusic.90However, in citing Debussy's article of November 1913, Smithnterpreted the phrase traitement du cinmatographeas "techniques of cinematography" rather than simply

cinematographic treatment" or "adaptation."91From this, he concluded that Debussy was advocating a renovation in9This content downloaded from 169.229.11.216 on Wed, 21 Oct 2015 01:17:10 UTC



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musical style through the cross-fertilization of the cinema's technicalmeansthe montage fallacy in a modernist nutsheBut, as we have seen, Debussy was actually riffing on d'Indy's notion of making films to be projected in concerttheeference to Bach and Beethoven in Debussy's article makes this unambiguousand not suggesting that contemporaryomposers should imitate cinematic editing in their music. These cinematic treatments, if they were actually meant to beealized, would of course have employed cinematic techniques, but they would have done so withinthe medium ofinema. Contrary to what Smith's translation implies, this sentence says absolutely nothing about the composition of

music; it refers strictly to the making of films. Smith's original article rendered another passage from Debussy incorrectlyas well, amplifying the composer's personal investment in cinema by misconstruing his comment (as quoted earlier) abolm sequences that would depict composers at work. Smith directed the reader's attention here to "Debussy's openonfession that the images of the cinema have not been entirely without influence on his own work: 'One might add here

moments of cinema which passed through the composer's mind just when he was composing his works.'"92Debussy w

of course, confessing nothing of the kind.

This latter error was silently corrected in the volume of essays that Smith translated and edited a few years laterDebussy on Music. However, the other mistake ("technique" for traitement) was not fixed; it has been perpetuated to thi

ay in the musicological literature. This essay, as taken in translation from Smith's anthology, is one of three by Debussyo be included in the 1998 revised edition of Strunk's Source Readings in Music History: prominent advertising for amisleading (but apparently attractive) notion about Debussy and cinema.93The error has thus been granted the status oa central pillar of the composer's aesthetics, shoring up his claim on modernity while also appealing to the fetish forerifiable formal principles.

The sentence in question is regularly quoted in Smith's translation or paraphrased, in either case as an acceptedact.94On its basis, scholars have been encouraged to hear cinematic traces in Debussy's music, precisely by listening

iscontinuous montage. (Note the presumptive fixation on thistechnique, even if "technique" itself were the correctranslation.) Smith himself refers vaguely to "the film-like sequence of 'Ibria'," which "moves from scene to scene, andwithin each movement it focuses on this idea, then that."95Subsequently, Jonathan Dunsby has used the translatedpassage to claim that Debussy was "seized by film," going on to speculate,

Anyone who cares to make an analysis of [Debussy's] En blanc et noir[1915] by analogy with film-cuttingtechniques in the emergence of black and white cinema can have a field day. It is entirely plausible thatDebussy took his conception of programme music . . . to be a cinematographic scene captured in music. . . .[The] scene-changing musical contrasts, . . . each in quicker tempo, might derive from the then relativelyfresh experience of the "cut," a new mode of expression endemic to cinematography after its invention in1895.96

Dunsby also claims a cinematic resonance for the work's title, translated as "In white and black" (unaware, perhaps, thatblack and white" film was quite often color toned and tinted in Debussy's time). What is again most striking, however, ishe music analyst's eager gravitation to the cut as the ultimate sign of cinematic influence. "Endemic" is a telling wordhoice, with biological connotations that naturalize the cinematic essence of the cut, asserted here as if contrast anduxtaposition evolved only along with the cinema. (Of course, Debussy was no stranger to Russian music; he must havead more than a taste of drobnost'even, by 1915, from Stravinsky's own pen.) As a further anachronism, Dunsby'sescription of "cuts" linked to tempo shifts seems like it may be predicated on the Eisensteinian concept of rhythmic

montage or alternatively on the "accelerating montage" of Abel Gance, but in either case on a technique that was not

heorized or innovated until some years after Debussy's death.97Even if the translation of this mischievous passage weorrect, and Debussy really had wanted to import film techniques into music, greater care in assessing the techniques to

which Debussy had access would be required (as David Trotter would wish to remind us).

Rebecca Leydon's work on Debussy and cinema is much better grounded in the filmmaking practices of the

omposer's time and draws interesting conclusions related to French film and nationalism. However, she also quotes themistranslated passage to set up a specific correlation between the "formal disruptions" of film technique and Debussy'ssolutions for the problem of continuity and succession": "Cinematic devices, in other words, may have served as a sour

of new formal options that became available with the advent of a new narrative medium." 98Indeed, they may have (evef the place of "disruption" in cinema is once again overvalued here), and I cannot prove that Debussy never thought aboinema in these terms. But once the composer's words are translated and understood correctly, the comparisons assertn this study"punctuation shots, for examples, like the dissolve and the direct cut, have musical counterparts inDebussy's techniques of transition and enchainment"99come to seem more like correlations without causation, heuristat best. Leydon is openly convinced, however, of a genuine intermedial influence, proposing that Debussy's " Jeuxmightbe understood more specifically as a cinematic rendering" of the Prlude l'aprs-midi d'un faune, for example, and pabecause of its abundant 'formal discontinuity,' a quality assumed here yet again to be somehow essential and original toinema.100Even if Leydon does locate persuasive examples of what mightbe heard as sonic close-ups or crosscuts in

Debussy's works, her privileging of syntactic discontinuity as the sign of cinema falls prey to a familiar fallacyencourag10This content downloaded from 169.229.11.216 on Wed, 21 Oct 2015 01:17:10 UTC



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and abetted by this persistently appealing error of translation.

As a historically grounded corrective to the "cinematic" tendencies that have been projected on Debussy, theappeal that his music actually held for film theorists and practitioners of the 1920s merits a brief digression. BothEisenstein and Dulac mention Debussy in their essays; Dulac also engaged with his music in her silent-era films,

epicting the heroine of La souriante Madame Beudet(1923) at the piano playing "Jardins sous la pluie" from Debussy'sEstampes, and basing the nonnarrativeArabesque(1928) on another Debussy piano work.101But, to the extent thatDebussy provided a model for Eisenstein and Dulac, musical editingseems to have had nothing to do with it. Of coursehis proves nothing about Debussy's own thoughts on the cinema, but it does point to the terms through which cinemati

affinities for Debussy's music were expressed at the time. For Eisenstein, Debussy (along with Scriabin) was notable forexploring the "whole series of secondary resonances, the so-called overtones and undertones," which Eisenstein

onstrues in "collision with one another and with the basic tone"; this notion, nebulous as it is, becomes a model forEisenstein's concept of "visual overtones."102Thus, it does play a role in his broad theorization of montage, though it isar removed from the general understanding of montage that guides the musical analyses discussed earlier. As for DulacDebussy (along with Chopin) plays into her"musical analogy" as a model of artistic creation that derives from emotionather than narrative:

A composer does not always write music under the inspiration of a story, but more often of a feeling.Debussy's Jardins sous la pluieor Chopin's "Raindrop" prelude, for example, are the expressions of a soulthat overflows and reacts to things. . . . The composer's heart sings in the notes, which, perceived in turn bythe listeners, gives birth to the emotion within them.

A filmmaker, she continues, should do the same, but with "light and movement."103When Dulac inserts a watery,

ondiegetic shot into La souriante Madame Beudetto create a visual translation of the Debussy "Jardins sous la pluie,"he suspends narrative for a momentary "attraction," though not by any means a shocking one; in doing so, she mayirect us back to an attractional quality in Debussy's music, as well.

Beyond the Cut: A "Music of Attractions"?

Much of the foregoing critique would amount only to so many slaps on the wrist in the absence of a constructive endpoint. Assuming we can get beyond listening for aural equivalents of the edit, how might we actually discover the fullbreadth of possibilities that composers perceived in cinema, and the ways in which they were genuinely inspired oraffected by it? To redirect the discussion comprehensively is beyond my scope here, but a few suggestions are in orde

One is to stop dredging the canon for traces of cinema and to delve instead into an almost untapped body ofmusic for which cinematic intertexts or inspirations can be unambiguously established. Elsewhere I have defined thisepertoire asparacinematicmusicmusic with a relationship to film other than that of planned accompaniment: Alfredo

Casella's Pagine di guerra: Quattro films musicali(1915), John Philip Sousa'sAt the Movies: Scenarios ofCinematographers(1922), Bohuslav Martinu's Film en miniature(1924), Charles Koechlin's Seven Stars Symphony1933), Yves Baudrier's Le musicien dans la cit (1937), identified as apome cinmatographique, and dozens, if notundreds, of others.104We even have works like Huib Emmer's Montage(1977) to satisfy quite explicitly an impulse

oward the technical, but the heterogeneity of this list should recommend skepticism toward any attempt to boil thenfluence of film down to one phantom paradigm of " thecinematic." Discerning the very different ways in which theseomposers chose to represent, respond to, or substitute for cinemaand the mere fact that they openly sought to do so

opens up a fresh angle for thinking about the relationship between film and music, one that places "film music" itself intoelief and situates the composer more carefully within the cinema audience.

But there are also other tracks to pursue, and a careful reading of Debussy points us toward one of them. Recal

hat, for Debussy in 1903, "cinematographic" referred not to the presence of edits or close-ups, but rather to thepicturesque quality of discrete musical objects: literally, "moving pictures." This is important because it shifts attentionaway from the edit and toward the objects (whether musical or visual) that are "edited" together, and it acknowledges thentensity of perceptual experience offered by those objects. Once again, by analogy to Gunning's "cinema of attractions,"his means emphasizing the act of showingrather than the structural joins between the successive things shown.

According to another theorist of this cinematic mode, "The attraction is there, before the viewer, in order to be seen.Strictly speaking, it exists only in order to display its visibility," and not to absorb the viewer in a narrative.105Can wemagine, by analogy, an attraction that is there to be heardthat exists only to display its audibility? What might a "musof attractions" offer us as a category for considering music's potential debts to film within this historical context? To be

seful, of course, it would have to be modified, detached from the modernist assumptions that lead Gunning still toprioritize the attraction's shock effect and to link it with the aesthetics of the avant-garde. Spectacle need not imply anaggressive jolt; certain forms of spectacle (again, whether visual or musical) can be received in a state of contemplativeabsorptionnot of narrativeabsorption, but of absorption just the same.106Taking the attraction into this broader terrainas it crosses from the visual to the acoustic, a music of attractions would avoid projecting a cinematic meaning onto the



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mere fact of discontinuity. It would recognize, instead, a musical agenda that devalues structure and meaning alike at thexpense of showing: of isolating the striking (audible) detail and keeping the listener's attention invested in the facts of t

moment. It would acknowledge music's attraction to spectacle while resisting the lure of narrative.107

Some contemporary evidence exists to establish this as a mode of thought about "cinematic" music. In 1925, theFrench literary journal Les cahiers du moisdevoted a special issue to Cinma; in one section, contributors ponderedwhether the cinema might transform conventional approaches to the artsarchitecture, plastic arts, theater, literature, anmusiceven independent of a cinematic context. Rarely has this question been posed so directly with respect to

music.108One respondent was the young Swiss composer Frank Martin, who unwittingly theorized something akin to amusic of attractions. He suggests that, even beyond the collaborative process of writing music for a film, cinema may exan influence on the composer's "creative sense itself, by suggesting to him a new way of perceiving succession and

me."109In Martin's view, the experience of cinema is defined by a particular spectatorial attitude: "the capacity to followmmediately each type of visual or emotional shift, never to linger on the previous scene, an unprecedented swiftness theads to the destruction of the personal inertia made up of memory, thought, dreams"; at the cinema, we becomeelectromagnets reacting to the slightest variation of current and capable of instantly reversing polarity."110What sets

Martin's insights apart is his grasp on spectatorship, his realization that how film is perceivedby the composer in theaudience, among otherswill be a key factor in any influence that film might exert. The spectatorial experience is, ofourse, conditioned by the technical processes through which film is made, but it is not identical to that process, and thormer, or the memory thereof, is what an audience takes home from the theater.

In response to this kind of experience, Martin continues, music will become "an art of succession, of themmediate, requiring of the listener a clear consciousness, ready at every instant to savor each detail, [like] the attentionan infant held in surprise and marvel in a perpetual present."111The instantand the detail: adding up these discrete

moments could produce a music of fragmentation and discontinuity, but, for Martin, it is the attraction-like momentsandhe spectatorial experience they solicit that are potentially cinematic, and not the edits that join them. The cinema is willto establish no relationship between two successive facts," and it is the experience offered in the moment by each factot the unestablished or paratactic relationships between themthat can render an elective affinity between music and

one sort of cinematic experience.112

Listening beyond the cut (or simply between the cuts) might help us better to understand the utterances of otheromposers, too. Maurice Ravel, for example, said of an unrealized Jeanne d'Arcproject that he could "clearly envision t

cutting' adopted by Delteil [the text's author]: short tableaux in quick succession, along the lines of the episodes in alm."113Arnold Schoenberg deployed similar language in a description of counterpoint: "In the course of [a contrapuntal

piece, the new shapes formed by rearrangements (varied forms of the new theme, new ways for its elements to sound)are unfolded, rather as a film is unrolled. And the way the pictures follow each other (like the 'cutting' in a film) produce

he 'form.'"114It would be easy to latch onto each composer's reference to "cutting" (helpfully scare-quoted in both textsand, then, buoyed by the notion of Ravel and Schoenberg composing under the influence of film editing, to embark upona montage hunt in their scores. But this would miss the point of each quote. Note how Ravel's attention shifts from editso the tableaux themselves, the "episodes" edited together. Schoenberg, too, is more interested in the "pictures" thatarrive, one after another; the continuity of "unfolding" and "unrolling" outweighs the discontinuity of the cut. Read careful

either Ravel nor Schoenberg seems to be emphasizing a montage technique of construction. Rather, their "episodes"and "pictures" might productively be construed as attractions, if further cinematic parallels are to be drawn.

It may seem that this suggestion only adds another bullet point to the analogy countanother potential rubric fothe cinematic," another musical quality to be sought out and labeled neatly as a lesson learned from film. Perhaps theame works would even still be heard as cinematic, but now for different reasons. Debussy's music could be recuperate

with ease to "the cinematic" based on these ideas, considering his ability to absorb the listener in the moment, to "showetail in the form of an "attraction," to emphasize the immediacy of the instant while "establish[ing] no relationship

between two successive facts." But if these descriptions do resonate with our experience of Debussy, or of other musicpotentially composed under the sway of cinema, then we might do well to consider dethroning montage or, given theapparently compulsory interdependence between the two, at least making room nearby for the attraction. In a small wayhis shifts the balance away from fetishized form and the techniques of making, and toward the experience of thendividual and ephemeral moment. It acknowledges, that is, the centrality of such experience, whether the moments inuestion are cinematic or musical in natureor both.

Endnotes

1Helen M. Miller, "Charlie Chaplin, as Composer, Emerges 'From the Dark,'" Musical America, 6 June 1925, 7.See also "Charlie Chaplin a Composer," Metronome, 1 August 1925, 45. Chaplin did go on to create scores for his filmsaided by a series of music assistants.



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2Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon(1766). Horace'sArs poetica,the other classic presentation of this questioakes the opposite side, favoring inter-art influence. For a virtuosic exploration of the Laocon problem's twentieth-centuamifications, see Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2000).

3On "overtones," see Sergei Eisenstein, "The Fourth Dimension in Cinema" (1929), in Selected Works, vol. 1:Writings, 192234 , trans. and ed. Richard Taylor (London: British Film Institute: 1988), 18194. For Germaine Dulac andhe "symphonic," see Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema(Urbana: Universof Illinois Press, 1990), 4748. These two elements alone, however, do not exhaust the full significance of the "musical"or Eisenstein and Dulac.

4David Bordwell, "The Musical Analogy," Yale French Studies60, no. 1 (Fall 1980): 14156; see esp. 142, 155

5Although most of my references use the word cinemaor cinematic, it is worth noting the distinctions that somheorists raise between cinemaand filmand thus the cinematicand the filmic. Separate qualities may pertain to "the

material base that must be dematerialized in projection" (film) and "the screen effect that results" (cinema), according toGarrett Stewart (Between Film and Screen: Modernism's Photo Synthesis[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999],3). Because attributions of "the cinematic" to music have not been sensitive to this subtlety, I have mostly collapsed theerms here.

6Bryan Gilliam, "Visual Voice," Opera News, March 2004, 2324. Gilliam is a musicologist, but was writing heror a nonacademic audience; however, he has also persistently linked Strauss to cinema in scholarly publications,ncluding "Strauss's Intermezzo: Innovation and Tradition," in Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer andHis Work, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 26667. Elsewhere, describing the criticalesponse to the October 1915 premiere of Strauss's Eine Alpensinfonie, Gilliam writes that "some went as far as toescribe it negatively as 'cinema music,' a remarkable claim given that film was still a new medium." Gilliam offers nopecific documentation or context here, so it is impossible to discern what the critics actually meant, but his conclusioneems exaggerated, perhaps with the specific aim of associating the supposed modernity of cinema with Strauss as anp-to-date composer (and this for a stage of his career when he was commonly held to have fallen away from the cuttin

edge). Film, after all, was two decades old in 1915, and the medium's prestige had recently risen in Germany with theAutorenfilmeof the earlier 1910s; also, we will see later in this essay that Strauss's music was described ascinematographic" as early as 1903, which might qualify more appropriately as a "remarkable claim" (Bryan Gilliam,Strauss, Richard," in Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online,ttp://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40117pg7 [accessed 27 September 2008]). Gilliam makhe same point in The Life of Richard Strauss(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 96.

7Antony Beaumont, Zemlinsky(London: Faber, 2000), 416.

8David Gutman, "Khachaturian Conducts Khachaturian: Spartacus and Gayaneh Excerpts," liner notes toKhachaturian: Spartacus/Gayaneh(Aram Khachaturian/Vienna Philharmonic), Decca CD 460 315-2 (2000), 67. Here thanalogy seems to refer to an essentialized soundof film music itself, a category that merits a full article in its own right.The accusation that something "sounds like a film score" is often (although not here) intended to dismiss a work as trivietrogressive in its romanticism, and suspect in its populism. Take a classic insult, Stravinsky on Olivier Messiaen's

Turangalla-Symphonie (194648): "Like the [Benjamin Britten] War Requiem[196162], it contains passages of superiolm music ('Charlie Chan in Indochina')" (Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Themes and Episodes[New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1966], 15). Such remarks virtually always assume a particular kind of Hollywood film scoring and, as such, aim toisparage mass-culture moviemaking; often deliberately anachronistic (when applied to nineteenth-century composers),

hese analogies also tend to be emphatically ideological.

9Victor Bendix's review referred in the original Danish to "denne Symfoni filmatique" (quoted and translated inDaniel M. Grimley, "Modernism and Closure: Nielsen's Fifth Symphony," Musical Quarterly86, no. 1 [Spring 2002]: 151)

10Benjamin Folkman, liner notes to Strauss: Four Last Songs, Songs with Orchestra (Rene Fleming/ChristophEschenbach/Houston Symphony), RCA Red Seal CD 82876-59408-2 (2004), 4.

11FT [Fred Thomas], review of Water, by Anne Briggs (1971; reissued 2008), Other Music Update, 17 Septemb2008, http://www.othermusic.com/2008september17update.html (accessed 19 September 2008).

12Mogwai biography page, Matador Records, http://www.matadorrecords.com/mogwai/biography.html (accessed

September 2008).13This content downloaded from 169.229.11.216 on Wed, 21 Oct 2015 01:17:10 UTC



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13Herv Lacombe, The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Edward Schneider (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2001), 129. Lacombe attributes the innovation to librettists, but his description implies thathe composer executed the scene in a fittingly cinematic way, toonot only creating a sonic "close-up," but also the edo this "shot."

14Eric Carr, review of Mount Eerie, by the Microphones, Pitchfork Media, 21 January 2003,ttp://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5267-mount-eerie/ (accessed 16 September 2008).

15Allan Kozinn, "In a Cinematic Soundscape, the Hunt Is On," New York Times, 22 October 2007,ttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/arts/music/22rihm.html(accessed 22 October 2007). Kozinn's description could be

nformed by knowledge of another Wolfgang Rihm composition titled Cuts and Dissolves(1977).16Robert Kirzinger, review of Hrodiade-Fragmente, etc., by Matthias Pintscher, Fanfare, November/December

2001, 24950.

17Michael Tilson Thomas, quoted in James Jolly, "Farewell to Philosophy," Gramophone, May 2003, 26.

18As quoted in Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard(New York:Metropolitan, 2008), xiii.

19I have avoided mentioning Wagner here because he is persistently overrepresented in discussions of musicand cinema, and often attributed the paternity of film music (or even of film itself). For a critique of certain aspects of this

enealogy, see Scott D. Paulin, "Richard Wagner and the Fantasy of Cinematic Unity," in Music and Cinema, ed. JamesBuhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000), 5884.

20A more rigorously developed approach to the question, locating a particular pictorial quality (defined asBildhaftigkeit) shared between cinema and the music influenced by cinema, can be found in Dietrich Stern, "Komponiste

ehen zum Film: Zum Problem angewandter Musik in der 20er Jahren," inAngewandte Musik 20er Jahre, ed. DietrichStern (Berlin: Argument-Verlag, 1977), 1058.

21If and when the oft-proposed "death of cinema" occurs, however, "cinematic" may come to connote somethinuaint, old-fashioned, and faulty. Will we have another set of analogies at the ready to replace it?

22Some of the complexities that arise in aligning "realism" with cinema are explored in W. Anthony Sheppard,

Cinematic Realism, Reflexivity, and the American 'Madame Butterfly' Narratives," Cambridge Opera Journal17, no. 1March 2005): 5993.

23Space does not permit citation of the extensive scholarship on cinema and literature, but a helpful overview owork on the topic can be gleaned from the background presented in Gautam Kundu, Fitzgerald and the Influence of FilmThe Influence of Cinema in the Novels(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008). The influence of cinema on the theaterncluding especially, but not limited to, issues of staginghas also produced a substantial scholarly and critical discoursewhich then circles back to music via opera and other musical theater. Cinematic influences have also been explored byartists and/or investigated by scholars in the visual arts, photography, architecture, dance, and most likely in every otherreative field.

24Maria DiBattista, "This Is Not a Movie: Ulyssesand Cinema," Modernism/Modernity13, no. 2 (April 2006):

22122. Already in the 1950s film theorist Andr Bazin expressed skepticism regarding the supposed influence of cinemof the novel (see "The Virtues and Limitations of Montage," in Bazin, What Is Cinema?vol. 1, trans. and ed. Hugh GrayBerkeley: University of California Press, 1967], 6164).

25David Trotter, "T. S. Eliot and Cinema," Modernism/Modernity13, no. 2 (April 2006): 238 (emphasis in theoriginal). I discovered Trotter's work shortly after presenting my very similar critique (on which the present article is basen the introduction to Scott D. Paulin, "On the Chaplinesque in Music: Studies in the Cultural Reception of Charlie ChaplPhD diss., Princeton University, 2005).

26Trotter, "T. S. Eliot and Cinema," 239.

27Richard Taruskin, "The Poietic Fallacy," Musical Times145 (Spring 2004): 734.



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28Constant Lambert, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline(1934; repr., London: Hogarth, 1985), 226.

29Peter Hill, Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 53.

30It has also been applied to composers such as Berlioz and Bizet. (The adjective "cinematic" should be heldnder even greater suspicion when modified by "proto-.") For Bizet, see note 13; for Berlioz, see David Cairns, Berlioz,ol. 2: Servitude and Greatness, 18321869(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 357, 552.

31Peter Franklin, "Style, Structure and Taste: Three Aspects of the Problem of Franz Schreker," Proceedings ohe Royal Music Association109, no. 1 (198283): 142.

32Aidan Thomson, "New Thoughts on Cockaigne: Elgar, Urbanization and German Criticism," in Program andAbstracts of Papers Read(Brunswick, ME: American Musicological Society, 2003), 80. This language appears in anabstract, but Thomson's talk as delivered at the Houston AMS meeting did not address the point.

33Jrgen Leukel, "Puccinis kinematographische Technik," Neue Zeitschrift fr Musik143, nos. 67 (1982): 2426.

34Ross's grasp of film technique is shaky: a "dissolve" is not created with a simple "splice," but rather by doubexposing film to superimpose two shots (Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century[New York:Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007], 16263, 167).

35On "gnostic" tendencies in musical hermeneutics, see Carolyn Abbate, "MusicDrastic or Gnostic?" Criticalnquiry30, no. 3 (Spring 2004): 50536. The musical transition points under discussion may appear precisely to behermeneutic windows" as defined in Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 18001900(Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1990), 914. But others besides Abbate have questioned the kinds of knowledge that are produced onhe basis of an analytical attraction to norm-subverting musical moments, including Suzannah Clark, "From Harmony toHermeneutics in Schubert's Ganymed" (paper presented at the sixty-ninth annual meeting of the American MusicologicaSociety, Houston, November 2003).

36See notes 3 and 4.

37Richard N. Burke, "Film, Narrative, and Shostakovich's Last Quartet," Musical Quarterly83, no. 3 (Fall 1999)414, 41819. For an overview of Shostakovich's work for cinema, see John Riley, Shostakovich: A Life in Film(London:

B. Tauris, 2005).

38Henri Fescourt and Jean-Louis Bouquet, Idea and Screen: Opinions on the Cinema(1925), translated inRichard Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 19071939(Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 1988), 1:37475.

39J. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction(London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 12; anDavid Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 112 (emphasis added). Toeiterate an already noted irony, in marking film's territory off from the theatrical and the literary, some theorists fledappily into the musical analogy, apparently unconcerned about any challenge to cinematic specificity that this strategy

might pose. Germaine Dulac, for example, saw no contradiction between calling for cinema to become cinematic anduggesting that it might do so through becoming symphonic.

40Abel, French Film Theory, 1:378.

41For praise of Abel Gance's editing in La rouefrom his contemporaries, see Jean Epstein, "For a New Avant-Garde" (1926), and Germaine Dulac, "The Avant-Garde Cinema" (1932), both in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader ofTheory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 27, 4546.

42Eisenstein, "Beyond the Shot" (1929), in Selected Works(see note 3), 1:138; and "Dickens, Griffith andOurselves" (1942), in Selected Works, vol. 3: Writings, 193447(London: British Film Institute, 1996), 199. See alsoacques Aumont, Montage Eisenstein, trans. Lee Hildreth, Constance Penley, and Andrew Ross (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1987), 145.

43Bordwell, Cinema of Eisenstein, 12021; and Aumont, Montage Eisenstein, 2930. Yet another specific15This content downloaded from 169.229.11.216 on Wed, 21 Oct 2015 01:17:10 UTC



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meaning for montagecomes from Hollywood parlance, where it signified isolated sequences of rapidly edited visuals,sually used to collapse time within a narrative. Slavko Vorkapich, for example, is credited with "montage effects" for suequences in numerous films of the 1930s and 1940s, whereas other personnel receive the standard editing credit.

44The categories from "metric" to "intellectual" are discussed in Eisenstein, "Fourth Dimension in Cinema," 18694. For levels from "micro-montage" (within the frame) to "macro-montage," see Eisenstein, "Laocon," in Selected Worol. 2: Towards a Theory of Montage

'Cinematic' Music - Analogies, Fallacies, And the Case of Debussy

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