Music in the Classical Hollywood Cinema - The Most Romantic Art of All

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The Most Romantic Art of All: Music in the Classical Hollywood Cinema Author(s): Carol Flinn Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Summer, 1990), pp. 35-50Published by: on behalf of the University of Texas Press Society for Cinema & Media StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1225315Accessed: 21-10-2015 01:41 UTC

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The Most Romantic Art of All: Music in the Classical Hollywood Cinema by Carol Flinn

When E. T. A. Hoffmann described music as "the most Romantic of all the arts," he had no way of knowing that his comment would provide an entire entertainment industry with a guiding aesthetic principle. In 1810, of course, the cinema was still a long way off. Seventy-eight years later, Nietzsche's quip that "Our big theatres subsist on Wagner" appears to bring nineteenth-century romanticism a little closer to the screen, even though he was addressing dramatic

opera and not M-G-M or Warner Bros. Yet romanticism has left its mark on film, especially on the Hollywood studio film, and more still, on the music it produced. Nowhere is this better exemplified than from the mid-1930s to the 1950s, film music's "golden age."

Not surprisingly, this classical age of film composition coincides roughly with Hollywood's classical period of production. Following Bordwell, Staiger, and

Thompson's use of the term in their authoritative study, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, "classical" here designates at once a style and a mode of industrial

production (although Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson argue that its mechanisms were in place much earlier-in the 1910s).1 It makes immediate sense that

Hollywood's classical age of scoring emerged out of this period of larger economic

vitality and gain, and while the latter clearly did not "cause" the former, it nevertheless provided it with the technologies to stabilize and keep intact an overall coherent style.

There is a certain terminological irony that the "classical" film score had so little to do with "classical" art music (the period dominated by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven) and so much to do with romanticism, particularly the late romanticism of Wagner and Richard Strauss. There are the oft-noted formal resemblances: film music's rich harmonies and orchestral color, its reliance on

large, symphonic forms and instrumentation (best exemplified in the work of Viennese composer Erich Korngold [The Sea Hawk, The Adventures of Robin Hood, King's Row]) as well as on smaller, intimate forms and techniques like the Wagnerian leitmotiv and use of solo instruments (the ubiquitous violin in films like Humoresque, an instrument Adorno was to equate with the ascending ideology of individualism). Even before the advent of sound, critics were com-

paring the emergent entertainment form to Wagner's idea of the Gesamtkunst- werk (the "total artwork" that would allegedly synthesize all of the arts) and

Carol Flinn is an assistant professor of English at the University of Florida. This essay is taken from a work in progress on theories of classical film music. ? 1990 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Cinema Journal 29, No. 4, Summer 1990 35



noted the presence of leitmotivs in the music that regularly accompanied its "silent" pictures. Of course, these kinds of details demonstrate that the style of composition I am describing did not emerge "all at once" in the mid-thirties (nor that it reigned unchallenged, as the use of jazz and atonal techniques in films like Phantom Lady and The Cobweb exemplify). Yet romanticism's aesthetic and ideological imperatives gave Hollywood film music-and the discourse surrounding it-a distinct set of directives, one whose influence was wielded over a very wide terrain. Its effects are measurable in legal, critical, economic, and theoretical circles; in this essay I will concentrate on its influence within the critical and aesthetic discourses of the time.

Of all the ideas associated with the romantic imagination, several have had a special influence on Hollywood film scoring, and many are Wagnerian in conceit. First is the belief that music should perform a dramatically supportive role; another establishes music as a fundamentally abstract and nonreferential phenomenon (a claim that threatens to undo the first, as we shall see). Others tie it to a literally romanticized notion of the ineffable and inexpressible, to human emotions and, by extension, to subjectivity and human agency more generally. Equally crucial was the romantic interest in universality, in plenitude and in coherence, ideas that (for Wagner) were believed to be musically achieved through the Gesamtkunstwerk or through the "unendlichkeit melodie" (unending mel- ody).

The issue of unity becomes suggestive when considered in the context of contemporary film studies, whose theoretical tradition has been, in the words of Kaja Silverman, "haunted... by the specter of a loss or absence."2 The notions of lack and loss, and the many techniques and technologies deployed to dispel them, have for some time engaged our theorizations of the cinematic apparatus, editing, spectating, and subjectivity itself. Critics have noted how the classic cinema in particular arduously veils over its numerous gaps, fissures, and con- tradictions. (Mary Ann Doane has discussed the importance of synchronous sound as one way to stave off these potentially disunifying threats, noting how routine production procedure unifies--actually, "marries," a term that suggests a certain domestication is at work -sound and image tracks through synchronous recording and editing practices.)3 And while most critics indenture classical Hollywood cinema to this principle of unity, few conceive of the ways the cinema has achieved this beyond the realm of the image (as in theories of suture, Bazin's interest in the long take, and so forth). From this it follows theoretically that film music was somewhat deficient, epistemologically or semiotically bankrupt in an economy ruled by the ideology of the visible, to borrow Jean-Louis Comolli's phrase. This has not escaped the notice of film music scholars who continually assert that their object of study has yet to receive its fair share of critical attention. (Roy Prendergast calls it "a neglected art").4 Yet whether classical film music is actually as "neglected" or "lacking" as this framework suggests remains to be seen.

36 Cinema Journal 29, No. 4, Summer 1990



For Wagner, the Gesamtkunstwerk arose naturally from its context; its aesthetic

synthesis for him was sufficient testimony to the natural harmony of the culture

giving rise to it. This was last achieved, he maintained, in the dramatic art of ancient Greece. Since then, these arts-poetry, rhetoric, music, dance, philosophy, and sculpture-had splintered into separate disciplines and, according to his

gloss, reflected the enfeebled and fragmented state of contemporary Europe. It was of course the Wagnerian music drama, his "artwork of the future," that was

supposed to restore this lost unity. Hollywood's ambitions were somewhat more humble, even if its drive for

unity was nearly as strong as Wagner's. Both maintained that music at its most

satisfactory would work with other elements of the text toward a single dramatic end; all of these elements would be, in large measure, mutually reinforcing. The critical difference between Wagner and classical film music commentators, however, was that for the former, unity was achieved through a synthesis of elements in the music drama whereas for the latter, cinematic unity was gained not through additive blending but through redundancy and overdetermination. According to

proponents of this classical school, film music was supposed to "repeat" or reinforce activity conveyed by the image: it should not "go beyond" it or draw attention to itself qua music. After all, it was only "background" music.

The score's chief classical function was to embellish visual material and reinforce information the image was believed to have already put into play. As studio composer/orchestrator Hugo Friedhofer advised, "the composer should

regard the visual element as a cantus firmus accompanied by two counterpoints, i.e., dialogue and sound effects. It is his problem to invent a third counterpoint which will complement the texture already in existence."5 Of course, this could be pushed to an extreme. Hanns Eisler, well known for his critique of Hollywood film music, argued that such music was forced to serve a "hyper-explicit" illus- trative function, something clearly exemplified in the practice of "mickey-mousing."6 "Mickey-mousing" accompanies visual activity, such as running down stairs, with music that appears to mimic it, here a descending scale-think of Mickey Mouse and the broomsticks in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." Here, the music underscores visual and narrative meanings in such an exagerrated, literal way that it becomes, as the term suggests, comic.

This tradition of image-music relations has been labeled "parallel" (as distinct from a "counterpoint" relationship). Each of these traditions, as Claudia Gorbman observes, has emerged from different aesthetic and industrial contexts and has dominated film scoring practice (as well as theoretical understandings of it) at different times. Appropriately, Gorbman associates the classical Hollywood film era with the parallelist tradition (the counterpoint school features Clair, Eisenstein, and others).7

But to what exactly does music run parallel? Critics vary on this. For some it is the image, while for others it is the plot, the theme, or the overall "mood" of the picture. Despite this difficulty in detecting music's textual "other," one idea emerges quite clearly: so closely have commentators affiliated narrative and




its visualization that, in the end, the two prove to be virtually indistinguishable. Yet in spite of this affiliation, and in spite of the fact that in most cases critics describe the score as running parallel to the image, it is finally narrative that requires music's fullest servitude. This point was driven home by one music educator in 1945: "Remember, the most important feature of any film is its story content. You paid your admission to be entertained by a story and not by a concert. No matter how distinguished the score, it is not successful unless it is secondary to the story being told on the screen. If you find that you are conscious of the music where drama is the thing, it means that the story has hit a new low or that the music is just plain terrible."8

Commentators frequently used this assumed narrative function of music in their attempts to explain or justify its presence within film texts. Herbert Stothart, a musical director at M-G-M, wrote in 1941: "We learned that a musical episode must be so presented as to motivate a detail of the plot, and must become so vital to the story that it cannot be dispensed with. The test today is-If a song can be cut out of the musical, it doesn't belong in it."9 Ironically, Stothart's remarks are taken from a discussion of the film musical, a genre defined in both structural and narrative terms by the presence of song and music. Even here, music is supposed to play a subservient role.

Much was involved in keeping this role in place. For music to be integrated into the film as a whole, orchestrators had to adhere to specific principles. As composer Max Steiner advised, "We should be able to hear the entire combination of instruments behind the average dialogue," adding that composers and arrangers ought to avoid solos that are "striking" due to unusually high or low timbres or that produce "sharp or strident effects." What is preferred? Instrumental color that, according to him, enhances a meshed sound.'? The studio composer Oscar Levant expressed a similar interest in the idea of musical integration, lamenting that critics were not concerned with the "whole" of the film score: "You never hear any discussion of a score as a whole. Instead the references are to 'main title' music, 'montages,' 'inserts' [isolated musical segments used for dramatic emphasis], and so on, with no recognition of the character of the complete score. It is much as if one would discuss a suit in terms of its buttonholes, pleats, basting and lining, without once considering its suitability to the figure it adorned.""

Naturally, classical commentators were greatly displeased when film music appeared to function in isolation from the rest of the picture. Primers, advice columns, and criticism for studio composers constantly alerted their readers to the "problem" of film music's ability to distract its auditors and to draw attention to itself as music, separate from the filmic whole.

For composer Miklos R6zsa, this was an important lesson to learn: When I finally came to do the music for Thunder in the City I made any number of novice's 'howlers.' In one scene an English family was taking tea outside on the lawn, all talking animatedly. This I underscored with an energetic scherzo for full orchestra. The director patiently explained to me that in order to allow the dialogue to be heard the music would need to be dubbed at such a low level that all we




would hear would be a vague irritation of upper frequencies, principally the piccolo. So far from enhancing the scene the music would merely distract the audience. A pastoral oboe solo over a few strings or something of the sort was all that was needed. Well, I soon learned.'2

Steiner offered other ways to avoid film music that might distract the listener. Like so many other composers and critics, he defended the usual studio practice of using original compositions (the argument here was that since existing material might be familiar to the audience, it ran the risk of drawing attention to itself- again-as music): "while the American people are more musically minded than any other nation in the world, they are still not entirely familiar with all the old and new masters' works and would thereby be prone to 'guessing' and distrac- tions."'3 The point is echoed by Ernest Lindgren in The Art of the Film: "The use of well-known music is... distracting, and has the additional disadvantage that it often has certain associations for the spectator which may conflict entirely with the associations the producer wishes to establish in his film.... The use of classical music for sound films is entirely to be deplored...." 14

This same sentiment has been voiced from composers whose careers lasted well beyond the heyday of the classical era. Ernest Gold, who scored Exodus

(1960) and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), in addition to films of the forties, argues that "[Classical music] interferes. If you know the music, it draws more attention to itself than it should ... [And i]f you don't know the music, it doesn't support the picture because it wasn't written for the picture."'5 (Hollywood, however, did not always follow this principle, many well-known pieces were used to "carry" their films, for example, Dvorak's "Humoresque," which appears diegetically and extradiegetically in the film of the same name.)

The questions of appropriateness, applicability, and distraction, of course, presume that the film auditor becomes distracted from something, and it should by now be clear that that "something" is narrative. And even though most commentators tackle this point implicitly rather than explicitly, it finds remarkably direct expression in a 1967 piece called "Jazz at the Movies": "If [the film composer] does not do his job well, he will be noticed, either because he does not contribute to dramatic effect well enough or because, one might say, he contributes too much--he distracts one from the drama and draws too much attention to himself. We would not underline a dramatic film with a Beethoven symphony because, no matter how good the film, the audience might end up listening to Beethoven. In short, good film music is a purely functional aspect of one kind of drama."'6 For the classical critic, then, the worst film music is readily noticed; the best, on the other hand, is heard the least.

Many critics then go on to harness this idea of musical decorum to the unconscious. For most, the connection is made largely to reinforce the subor- dination of "background" film music to the more noticeable and consciously apprehended storyline. In 1936, film music theorist Kurt London wrote that "Music heard in the concert-hall differs fundamentally from music heard in films, because absolute music is apprehended consciously, film music uncon-




sciously.... [During a film the] music may have struck the filmgoer once or twice but otherwise he could hardly have told you, especially in an instance of well- made music, what he had really heard. Only at points where the music diverged from the picture, whether in its quality or meaning, was his concentration on the picture disturbed. Thus we reach the conclusion that good film music remain 'unnoticed.' "17

The same idea is suggested by studio practitioners. Roy Webb, RKO's chief composer from 1935 to 1952, writes that "unless you want them to be aware of it for a particular reason... you can hurt a picture a great deal by making audiences conscious of the music."'8 The score then is best unheard-or, as Hanns Eisler argues, unseen, since he once remarked that Hollywood film music per- formed a "vanishing function."'9 (I should add that this silencing of music, while characteristic of the classical studio film, is by no means restricted to it. It endured well past the demise of the studio era, as some of my comments have indicated. Even European art directors well known for their innovations in narrative, mise- en-scene, and editing adhere to this extremely conventional prescription for their scores. For Fellini, for example, film music is "a marginal, secondary element that can hold first place only at rare moments"; for Antonioni, "The only way to accept music in films is for it to disappear as an autonomous expression in order to assume its role as one element in a general sensorial impression.")20

Hoffmann's famous claim to music's "pure" romantic status makes clear that romanticism constructed-and valued-music as a fundamentally abstract, nonreferential phenomenon. At odds with conventional notions of language, representation, and even society itself, music seemed always to be doing battle with

(or "rising above") the banal facts of everyday existence. Similarly, the classical studio system believed that music was a force that defied-or at the least, troubled -conventional (read: rational, visual, and narrative) modes of expression. Yet here the connection between romanticism and Hollywood splits. Since the Hollywood score was placed into a passive, acquiescent relationship in regard to the film's more "important" visual and narrative elements, its untraditional semiotic properties can scarcely be said to have been cherished. In fact, often they were simply denied. According to this classical perspective, film music was incapable of generating meaning on its own. Kurt London baldly states that, in film, the score "must have its meaning," and that to "play music as an accom- paniment to a text, without a definite justification of meaning, is one of the most criminal blunders possible in sound direction."2' (Of course, if music can never impart its "own" meaning-since its presence is always contingent upon the image and the narrative-one wonders how it can be considered a real threat in the first place.)

For these film music critics, music's signifying capacities (if it is granted any at all) are duplicitous, false, unreliable. Film music is believed to dupe and even seduce its listeners, becoming an object of critical scorn and derision even, at times, for the most sympathetic critics. London, for example, states that when non-diegetic music "is employed to strain after effects which the film itself cannot




induce, then it degrades the film and itself."22 Irwin Bazelon labels Hollywood scores of the classic era "banal," stating that "film music was born illegitimately as a literal-practical child of necessity," and that, ultimately, "film music is almost

composing, but not quite."23 Such arguments are fueled by the belief that unlike other music, cinema

music is flawed or incomplete since it interacts with other elements such as narrative, mise-en-scene, and so forth. The very phrasing of the above comments is revealing in this regard, since film music ("illegitimate" and "degrading") is contrasted to music's other "pure" and "autonomous" forms, and suffers consid-

erably in the comparison. This is a far cry from the romantics, who for the most

part did not consider the music of opera or lieder to be thus tainted, even though it too worked in tandem with other formal and textual elements.

To reiterate: Hollywood classicism and late nineteenth-century romanticism share the belief that music poses problems to standard representation, narrative, and epistemology. Yet for romanticism, with its interest in the ineffable and in the limits and insufficiencies of language, music was championed for the challenge it seemed to pose, whereas Hollywood appeared to tolerate these kinds of "chal-

lenges" and disruptions only to dismantle or contain them. Hollywood films were

supposed to absorb their scores, render them "silent," unnoticeable and indistinct from other more prominent-and, to be sure, narratively central-elements.

Yet for anyone who has seen/listened to movies and been affected by their scores, it is difficult to believe that classical film music is as passive as these observations indicate. Moreover, at the same time that classical proponents char- acterize music in terms of deficiency and lack, they also find in it something else, namely, the promise of making good these lacks. In fact, one of the central functions of classical film music is this ability to compensate for the deficiencies of other cinematic elements, a compensatory function that reveals that music contributes much more to the production of meaning in cinematic forms than is traditionally acknowledged. It also suggests that what ultimately preoccupies the classical tradition is not so much the representational deficiencies of film music but the deficiencies and inadequacies of other areas. For music has been

truly instrumental in extending an illusion of fullness and cohesion to the cinema, an illusion that has been carried out at three levels: within the cinematic apparatus, in the film "itself," and in the viewing/listening situation.

The Apparatus. The introduction of music-and sound more generally-into the cinema has elicited claims and debates from film scholars and practitioners that usually fall in one of two camps: it is either enthusiastically welcomed or

passionately decried. Either way, though, critics are virtually united in casting the advent of sound into a scenario of loss and restoration. Those who lament sound's arrival focus on the former, stressing the notions of absence and regression. For them, as Rick Altman has observed, "the coming of sound represents the return of the silent cinema's repressed," a repressed that Altman links back to a dialogue-heavy nineteenth-century theatrical model. Such a model threatens




the cinema because, as Altman notes, its emphasis on dialogue is borne at the expense of other, nonverbal sounds.24 In A History of Narrative Film, David Cook unwittingly upholds a similar idea, associating the cinema with earlier, supposedly less sophisticated textual practices. He writes, "It is almost axiomatic to say that the movies ceased to move when they began to talk, because between 1928 and 1931 they virtually regressed to their infancy in terms of editing and camera movement."5 Cook makes this remark in a discussion on how cumbersome new sound technology such as immobile camera units and oversensitive microphones with restricted range limited early sound filmmaking. Yet he remains surprisingly uncritical about drawing a connection between film sound and regression-a connection that, as he admits, has become very nearly perfunctory or "axiomatic." Rudolf Arnheim puts the case even more dramatically in "A New Laocoin" where he addresses another kind of cinematic loss. Here he perceives the advent of sound as a violation of what he considers the previously established ontological status of film, a status that for Arnheim remains fundamentally visual.26

These concerns over the losses and regressions that sound imposes on the cinema are frequently tied to the issues of realism and verisimilitude. For many writers, the introduction of recorded sound or music into the cinema was believed to have diminished film's ability to convey a sense of the real. In 1945, Virgil Thomson argued that unlike earlier kinds of music, twentieth-century music was not "made on the spot .. [and therefore was] never wholly realistic" since reproduction reduces, among other things, its original dynamic range. He called contemporary music "processed" and compared it to canned, processed foods which, in his words, though sufficiently "nourishing," suffer for lack of "flavor."27

Although the gastronomic metaphors provocatively raise the question of consumption, it is clear that Thomson's chief concern, and what he finds most

regrettable about recorded music, is the loss of the phenomenally "real" com- ponent he attributes to live performance. For him, it is not music so much as the fact of its transmission that poses the real problem.

Unlike Thomson, commentators who have welcomed the coming of sound insist that music partially restores a verisimilitudinous element to the cinema.28 As I have already indicated in regard to the notion of textual unity, most theorists account for this idea visually since the camera's relation to pro-filmic objects is

generally understood to be the means by which a phenomenal "real" is captured. (Techniques like the long take, for instance, are claimed to visually represent phenomenal reality with a minimum of technological interference or mediation.) The idea of verisimilitude, therefore, has primarily been promoted through the apparent reduction of distance between the visual signifiers of cinema and their referent.

Yet much the same work also operates on the soundtrack. Auditory verisimilitude, like its visual counterpart, is carefully constructed; it is an illusion based on techniques, rules, and established conventions that have no natural connection to the real. Recently, scholars have begun to consider the ways that different periods have encoded auditory verisimilitude in the cinema, be this in terms of




spatial depth cues, temporality, or synchronization.29 Nancy Wood comments on music's role in this way: "[In 1931,] non-diegetic music would make a discrete entry within the individual scenes... concealing potential temporal ambiguities in auditory space by its self-effacing presence. In the words of a transitional composer, 'tonal figuration' supplied by non-diegetic music fills the tonal spaces and annihilates the silences without attracting special attention to itself."30 Pro- ponents of the classical tradition, however, downplay the ways in which the soundtrack negotiates and orchestrates the idea of realism. One practitioner writes that, "The ultimate aim of the recording engineer is to secure such a degree of realism in recording and reproduction that the sound from the screen appears to be identical with the sound which originated during the photographing of the scene."31

In theoretical terms, music works to re-equip the apparatus with a sense of otherwise lost realism. One writer in the 1940s argued that "the desire to add realism to the active silent film resulted in the use of various devices in back of the screen" first, by producing sound effects, and later, through the addition of music.32 Kurt London accounts for the development of non-diegetic music in a similar fashion, arguing that film music "was meant to serve as a compensation for the natural sounds [for example, sound effects] which were [initially] absent," and maintaining that the visual element alone could not sufficiently represent "life."33 (London, however, is careful to avoid claiming that music guarantees cinematic realism, or that it is its automatic conduit.)

Just as music classically is said to enhance cinematic verisimilitude (or, as Virgil Thomson argued, endanger it), so too is it claimed to bestow a sense of "the human touch" on the cinematic apparatus, a sense the apparatus is believed to lack due to its technological basis. Film composers have often considered the cinema's technical components to pose significant obstacles to them as "artists." Non-diegetic music, although never directly bound to human forms on the screen, associates itself with diegetic characters by other means -most frequently through the use of the leitmotiv-imparting a sense of humanity in this way. And due to its widely understood connection-via nineteenth-century romanticism-to emotional expression more generally, music is further able to convey the impression of human feelings.

In these ways, music offers the apparatus a means of rounding itself out, of "adding" a human dimension to its technological base, to impose upon it the stamp of subjectivity. This idea is powerfully exemplified in the following passage by Charles M. Berg in his work on early film music: "Unaccompanied film images were described in negative contexts as 'noiseless fleeting shadows,' 'cold and bare,' 'ghastly shadow,' 'lifeless and colourless,' 'unearthly and flat'."34 Berg associates these ideas with the discomforting "silence" of the pre-sound cinema, but I think they would be more fruitfully considered as a demonstration of concern over the perceived lack of liveliness and human presence in the early cinema (each of the words Berg cites describes death or an otherwise barren condition). Thus the "negative" critical contexts to which Berg refers finally have less to do with




disfavor than with cinema's presumed non-anthropomorphic condition. His argument moves closer to my own, however, as he goes on to observe how the introduction of music into the cinema redressed that lack, the fundamental quietness of the silent picture.

This silence of the cinema before the advent of "talkies" refers to precisely that-its lack of talk and human speech. Of course, non-diegetic music, which is rarely vocal, can never directly stand in for speech. Still, it is constantly being coupled with the idea of dialogue, as if critics saw in this affiliation another way to align it with human agency. Silent film critics in particular seized upon this connection, using the words "speech" and "music" almost interchangeably. Max Winkler, active in the early film music publishing business in New York, put the matter plainly by stating that "On the silent screen music must take the place of the spoken word."3

The notion of substitution at the heart of the classical perspective of film music explains the failure of attempts to accompany silent pictures with live human narration. The defeat might seem surprising given its popularity in Japan, whose benshi narrated films even after the advent of sound, and given that in the States, magic lantern shows (cinema's influential predecessor) routinely fea- tured live accompanying narration. But in American film the idea never caught on-at least not in the way that music did.

All of these factors point to a consensus in the classical position that film music performs a more or less singular function of "filling out" the apparatus, of giving it a sense of plenitude and unity that, as Walter Benjamin would remind us, is normally lost in mass industrialized production. As a significant aside, however, it must be remembered that music restores these "lost" dimensions to the cinematic apparatus only at the same time that it carries the threat of denying that completeness and of exposing the material disunity of the apparatus, the separateness, for example, of the sound track and image track, as Doane's work has shown.

The Film Text. Just as classical film critics argue that music veils the lacks of the cinematic apparatus, so too do they claim that it compensates for deficiencies within the film itself. For although in typical studio procedure the score was not started until the picture had been fully shot and edited (leading many to conceive of film music as an "afterthought"), it bears noting that the score offered the film its final possibility of unification as well. Industrial and nonindustrial discourses alike argued that music could "come to the rescue" of a film, correcting any errors that might have been incurred during production, such as mis-paced or poorly acted scenes. It was widely believed that such production problems could be redressed through the addition of appropriate scoring, and an anecdote surrounding Bernard Herrmann's famous score for Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) illustrates this. Herrmann maintained that although the director initially told him not to produce music for the famous shower scene, later, when Hitchcock was dissatisfied with what he felt was the slow pace of the completed scene, he asked




the composer to correct the problem.36 In a significant quote Herrmann elsewhere stated that Hitchcock "only finishes a picture 60%. I have to finish it for him."37

Accounts such as these are clear in their references to lack and to compensation. A recent study of Max Steiner's early work at RKO claims that part of his job there was to compose music that would, in the author's words, fill in the "lacunae" of studio films going into foreign translation.38 Discussing cinema music in a general sense (and not in regard to his collaboration with Hitchcock), Herrmann argued that its compensatory function was a consequence of an essential, inherent deficiency of the cinema. For him, "The real reason for music is that a piece of film, by its nature, lacks a certain ability to convey emotional overtones."

Elsewhere in the same passage Hermann reveals some of classical Holly- wood's other chief concerns about film music-specifically, its role in the larger drive to produce cohesive, "seamless" texts, and the idea of a lost, original unity. He writes: "When a film is well-made, the music's function is to fuse [it] so that it has an inevitable beginning and end. When you cut a piece of film you can do it perhaps a dozen ways, but once you put music to it, that becomes the absolutely final way. Until recently, it was never considered a virtue for an audience to be aware of the cunning of the camera and the art of making seamless cuts. It was like a wonderful piece of tailoring; you didn't see the stitches."39

The somatic and sartorial metaphors Herrmann employs in this passage deserve special attention, for they raise more than the issue of anthropomorphizing the film text. Indeed, if the film is likened to the human body, it is a body considerably bereft of strength. Studio composers frequently referred to their work in terms of "dressing" or "curing" a weakened picture or even of preparing the body of a corpse. As film sound scholars Roger Manvell and John Huntley commented, "[t]he more banal the dialogue, the more the words can be made to seem dramatically significant if 'dressed' with a heavy musical backing. Used as an emotional prop, music can only too easily help the filmmaker disguise weak acting and weak dialogue."40 Tony Thomas writes that "Bernard Herrmann often said he feared producers calling on him in somewhat the same manner they called upon a mortician-to come in and try to fix up the body."41 This idea that music "rescues" or "doctors" the film text is even more dramatically stated by Irwin Bazelon: "If the film-makers were unable to fulfill the dramatic requisites of their films-because of oversights, errors in cinematic judgment, or simple lack of talent-the composer could apply his witchcraft of technique to soothe the sick film's ailments and, in some cases, completely cure it. In short, by doctoring the dramatic failures of the film, music could save the picture."42

Clearly, the metaphors of lack and lacunae that pervade these critical discussions of Hollywood film music reveal preoccupations with deeper kinds of losses, losses that are frequently tied to the human body. Doane's notion of the "fantasmatic body" is useful in this regard since, as she describes it, it is shaped and upheld by Hollywood's strict use of synchronized sound-image relationships. This "body" is further characterized by (and also relies upon) the illusion of




organic cinematic unity and coherence and is as essential to the film text as it is to the subject who watches and listens to it.43

Film Reception. The sense of totality with which music is believed to furnish the film text and apparatus is also extended to the act of film consumption- and to the individual "bodies" doing the consuming. In many ways, in fact, this last point appears to be theoretically guaranteed by the other two. A studio editor writes: "Picture and track, to a certain degree, have a composition of their own but when combined they form a new entity. Thus the track becomes not only a harmonious complement but an integral, inseparable part of the picture as well. Picture and track are so closely fused together that each one functions through the other. There is no separation of I see in the image and I hear on the track. Instead, there is the I feel, I experience, through the grand total of picture and track combined."44

As this comment indicates, film music (or here, sound more generally), is as involved in promoting the sense of unity and plenitude that theorists have usually affiliated with the image. In other words, cinematic wholeness (or the illusion thereof) is one both of sight and sound. It should be added that this position carefully preserves the idea of union, as terms like "fused," "combined" and "grand total" suggest. As Herrmann put it, music in the cinema "is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience."45 From Eisler's perspective, it is a socializing "cement" that not only glues audience members to the film, but binds them to one another as well. This is remarkably similar to what Wagner wanted at Bayreuth: he believed that in a theater carefully designed to keep the orchestra lowered and out of sight, audience members would directly experience the music drama in front of them.46

It is impossible to stress too highly the impact of Wagnerian romanticism on Hollywood's classical conception of film music. Not only did scores of the thirties and forties emulate its formal and stylistic techniques, but composers and critics upheld a number of its aesthetic and ideological positions. The effects of this affiliation were felt in economic, industrial, and legal terms,47 just as they were engaged in criticism and theory. It has, of course, become something of a cliche to compare "the" cinematic art form of the twentieth-century to Wagner's nineteenth-century Gesamtkunstwerk. But it remains a crucial comparison to be made given Hollywood's interest in a unified product and Wagner's desire for synthesis within the Gesamtkunstwerk. For it is a connection that is as intricate as it is pervasive.

Yet lest we make too much of the "parallels" between romanticism and classical film music theory, it should be remembered that significant differences distinguish them. These differences are primarily evaluative in nature: whereas romanticism esteems music for its distinction from language, its irrationality and "lack" of mimeticism (believing these features allow music to express things




normally hidden from the phenomenal world), Hollywood tends to dismiss it for

precisely these same features, treating music as a minor, somewhat expendable element. Thus, despite their different responses, Hollywood and romanticism share the idea that music is a primarily emotional, irrational, and human phenomenon. And, of course, both camps-albeit in different ways-subscribe to music's ability to generate a sense of plenitude and unity.

I should stress once again that this illusion of unity is only an illusion. Because non-diegetic film music is rarely unified, continuous, or sustained, its

patterns of development are notoriously fragmented and inconclusive. Inter-

spersed between dialogue and other sounds-not to mention nonauditory elements-it rarely achieves any sustained exposition or development on its own. Otherwise put, the completion and synthesis that film music promotes does not derive from the music itself but rather from-and only from-the critical claims that have been made about it. What is more, these claims give film music a

fundamentally contradictory status: it is excess and distraction as much as en- hancement and completion, a threat to cinema as much as its cure.

I have only hinted at the important role nostalgia plays in these classical accounts of the film score. Repeatedly cast into scenarios of loss and restoration, the score is treated as if it were able to restore an original quality currently found wanting, operating as a sourvenir or trace of lost, idealized moments. Scores are constantly associated with anterior states (think of how "Tara's Theme" evokes the grandeur of the antebellum South in Gone with the Wind) or with other kinds of lost objects (the famous theme song of Laura conjures forth the woman whom the infatuated Mark McPherson believes has died). In theoretical accounts this sense of nostalgia is frequently linked to the idea of a lost humanity, as I noted in regard to critics who believed that music restored a human dimension to the heavily technological apparatus of film. This conception of Hollywood film music is, in a word, obsessive in its search for traces of human agency.

I would argue here that the investment in nineteenth-century romanticism

during the classic film scoring era reflects a nostalgia involving more than a quest for lost aesthetic wholes or even renewed "traces" of human imprint. As important as these ideas may have been to studio composers, the stakes for them were also

quite real. The discourse of romanticism offered a means of escaping then-

perceived deficiencies-problems such as an increasingly alienating work milieu and industrialized setting, one that would be antagonistic to workers whose

backgrounds had led them to believe that "music was not a business." The high esteem romanticism accorded to individual creativity would no doubt be alluring to a composer contracted to one of the Big Eight. Of course, the actual social, economic, and discursive power of the subject in the romantic era was not as

expansive as might be believed, but that is not the point. The point is that the romantic subject was constructed and perceived in this manner. In other words, the subject was believed to wield social and economic power, just as he was assumed to enjoy forms of discursive control, and to be able to express himself




through music, literature, or other art forms. This, in short, was the promise of the romantic past.

But this is not to imply that Hollywood was alone in its nostalgia or in its investment in bygone eras. Just as studio practitioners and theorists of the thirties and forties looked to romanticism as a source of restored cohesion and unity, so too did the romantics turn to earlier periods for their models of aesthetic integrity and strength. Wagner, of course, ascribed tremendous coherence to ancient Greek culture (in terms of its alleged unified culture, nature, politics, art, spirtuality, and so forth). The composer's belief in Hellenic totality, like Hollywood's in romanticism's, can be understood in terms of a desire to get beyond his contemporary milieu-one which, it must be remembered, Wagner (and Nietzsche even more so) described as fragmented and impotent.

Yet classical studio critics and practitioners were probably the most adamant in associating music with an idealized and unified past. Popular writers, theorists, composers, lawyers, and studio personnel united around this idea. For them the impact of nineteenth-century romanticism was obvious; it was simply a matter of detecting signs of its forms and styles. From this unified group a new romanticism sprang, one whose music recalled the times of Richard Wagner. Film music was seen as humanity expressing itself, the agent of wholeness and restoration, the apparatus making itself good again, always looking backward- regression, compensation. Strange that so much nostalgia should be generated by something associated with the "artwork of the future."

Notes

1. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson assert that much of Hollywood's classical style was set in place by the 1910s. See their The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Although some aspects of film music from this period anticipated its role in the classical era (the use of leitmotivs, for example), it seems to me that the advent of sound and the slow development of composing, recording, and editing techniques did not fully consolidate the "classical" score until the mid-thirties. Early scores like Max Steiner's for the 1932 Bird of Paradise, for example, sometimes ran the entire length of the film, a practice soon abandoned in favor of giving music an intermittent, dramatically supportive role.

2. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 2.

3. Mary Ann Doane, "Ideology and the Practice of Sound Editing and Mixing," in Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, ed. Film Sound: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). For other discussions of the fundamentally dis- harmonious relationship of sound and image, see Philip Rosen, "Adorno and Film Music: Theoretical Notes on Composing for the Films" in Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 157-82 and Kaja Silverman's studies of the disembodied voice in The Acoustic Mirror.

4. Roy M. Prendergast, Film Music: A Neglected Art (New York: Norton, 1977). 5. Quoted in Roger Manvell and John Huntley, The Technique of Film Music, 2d ed.

Revised by R. Arnell and P. Day (New York: Focal Press, 1975), 229. 6. Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (London: Dennis Dobson, 1947), 13-14.




7. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). See her introductory chapter for an elaboration of the cat- egories of parallelism and counterpoint. Gorbman correctly argues that this binary conception of film music's functions has curtailed film scholars' understanding of music's active and interactive position vis-a-vis narrative.

8. Leonard Quinto, "Some Questions for Music Educators on Film Music," Music Publishers Journal 3, no. 5 (Sept./Oct., 1945): 27.

9. Herbert Stothart, "Film Music Through the Years," The New York Times, Nov. 1941 (from New York Times Film Review Anthology), page unknown.

10. Max Steiner, "Scoring the Film," in We Make the Movies, ed. Nancy Naumberg (New York: Norton, 1937), 225. Sheer musical duration, however, was used to promote the sense of totality and synthesis to the Hollywood film before it was achieved through instrumentation. From the beginning of the silent film through the sound films of the early thirties, it was not uncommon for music to saturate the entire length of a film; the premier example of this being Steiner's score for the 100 percent saturated Bird of Paradise (1932).

11. Oscar Levant, A Smattering of Ignorance (New York: Doubleday, 1940), 90. 12. Miklos R6zsa, Double Life: The Autobiography of Miklos Rozsa (New York: Hip-

pocrene Books, 1982), 66. 13. Steiner, in We Make the Movies, 225. 14. Ernest Lindgren, The Art of the Film (New York: Collier Books, 1970), 190. 15. Quoted in an interview with Randall Larson in CinemaScore 10 (Fall, 1982): 19. 16. Martin Williams, "Jazz at the Movies," in Film Music: From Violins to Video, ed.

James Limbacher (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1974), 42. 17. Kurt London, Film Music, trans. Eric S. Bensinger (London: Faber and Faber, 1936),

37. 18. Quoted by Randall Larson in Musique Fantastique (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press,

1985), 47-48. 19. See chapter 7, "Suggestions and Conclusions," in Eisler, Composing. 20. Quoted in Manvell and Huntley, The Technique of Film Music, 242. 21. London, Film Music, 126 and 144. 22. Ibid., 125. 23. Irwin Bazelon, Knowing the Score: Notes on Film Music (New York: Arco Publishing,

1975), 7; 12. 24. Rick Altman, "Introduction," Yale French Studies, 60, no. 1 (1980): 13. 25. David Cook, A History of Narrative Film (New York: Norton, 1981), 247-48. 26. Rudolf Arnheim, "A New Laocoon: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film," in

Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 199-230. 27. Virgil Thomson, "Processed Music," Music Publishers Journal 3, no. 5 (Sept./Oct.

1945): 33; 60. 28. See Kaja Silverman's The Acoustic Mirror for an excellent discussion of how this

desire to gain verisimilitude and to make up for its loss operates as one of film theory's central preoccupations.

29. See, respectively, Alan Williams, "The Musical Film and Recorded Popular Music" in Genre: The Musical, ed., Rick Altman (London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1981), 147-58; Nancy Wood, "Towards a Semiotics of the Transition to Sound," Screen 25, no. 3 (1984): 16-24; and Mary Ann Doane, "Ideology and the Practice of Sound Editing and Mixing," in The Cinematic Apparatus, Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, ed. (New York: St. Martin's, 1980), 47-56.

30. Wood, "Towards a Semiotics," 19. 31. Nathan Levinson, "Recording and Re-recording," in We Make the Movies, 198. 32. Mortimer Browning, "Establishing Standards for the Evaluation of Film Music,"

Music Publishers Journal 3, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1945): 23.




33. London, Film Music, 34. 34. Charles Merrell Berg, An Investigation of the Motives for and the Realization of

Music to Accompany the American Silent Film, 1896-1927 (New York: Arno, 1976), 24.

35. Max Winkler, "The Origin of Film Music," in Limbacher, ed. Film Music, 16. 36. James Naremore, from Filmguide to Psycho, quoted in Roy Prendergast, Film Music:

A Neglected Art (New York: Norton, 1977), 144. 37. Quoted in Graham Bruce, Bernard Herrmann: Film Music and Narrative (Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Studies in Cinema, no. 38, 1985), 216. 38. G. A. Lazarou, Max Steiner and Film Music (Athens, Greece: Max Steiner Music

Society, 1971), 8. 39. Quoted in Manvell and Huntley, The Technique of Film Music, 244. 40. Ibid., 65. 41. Tony Thomas, Film Score: The View from the Podium (New York: A. S. Barnes,

1979), 9. 42. Bazelon, Knowing the Score, 22. 43. Mary Ann Doane, "The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,"

in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 335-48.

44. Helen Van Dongen, discussing her work for Louisiana Story, quoted in Karel Reisz and Gavin Millar, The Technique of Film Editing (New York: Hastings House, 1968), 155.

45. Bernard Herrmann, "Music in Motion Pictures: A Reply to Mr. Leinsdorf," Music Publishers Journal 3, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1945): 17.

46. Curiously, this idea of fusion in Wagner's theatrical scheme is achieved at remarkably individualized and isolated levels. In the darkened Bayreuth theater, there was really very little that would have kept the theatergoers' experience of the artwork from being intensely personal or private.

47. In Strains of Utopia, the work in progress from which this article is taken, I make this point in relation to studio composers' battles for authorship and copyright control.




Music in the Classical Hollywood Cinema - The Most Romantic Art of All

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