Towards a Theory of Musicodramatic Practice in Film

Journal of Film Music 5.1-2 (2012) 199-205 ISSN (print) 1087-7142doi:10.1558/jfm.v5i1-2.199 ISSN (online) 1758-860X

© Copyright the International Film Music Society, published by Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield, S3 8AF.

I Preamble

The present time sees a reassessment of the lineage of music for motion pictures, paralleled by a reevaluation of its cultural or social significance and of adequate methods for its analysis.

The classic narrative of the history of film music has been of a genre aspiring to the status of an art, and generally being seen as falling short.1 There has also been a more specific connection made to opera.2 In the reassessment currently under way, two elements have been identified as neglected—indeed, some might say, marginalized—until recently: theatrical music,

1 Consider, for example, the title of Prendergast’s 1977 book, A Neglected Art.2 A connection which persists—see Joe and Theresa 2002.

particularly perhaps the music of the melodrama,3 and (within film music itself) stock and library music.

An attempt is made in this article to set out some preliminary considerations for such reassessment, mainly in terms of metaquestions of a methodological nature. As can be seen throughout the present issue, our essays in a new approach to the musicological study of film (as with any seriously undertaken plumbing of new depths within a discipline) tell us a great deal about both ourselves and our assumptions; in connection with this, it is hoped that the methodological findings may have a wider applicability.

3 Its precise rôle remains under-researched. Has its importance been established, or are we simply hypothesizing it because it would explain perceivable effects, as astronomers did before the sighting of Pluto?

Towards a Theory of Musicodramatic Practice in Film: Questions of Method

DAvID RevIllUniversity of Maryland, Baltimore [email protected]

Abstract: Preliminary considerations are set out for a reassessment of the lineage of music for motion pictures, its cultural or social significance, and adequate methods for its analysis. These considerations mostly take the form of metaquestions of a methodological nature. Some of the strands in the development of the “language” of film, and film music specifically, are identified. Awareness of the shortcomings of a given monolithic expla-nation may lead not to a more refined explanation but to substituting a different single cause. Importantly, the field of study encompasses different generations of film music and film composer, each with differing priorities and limitations. Certain trends and key individuals create a weighting or gravitational pull in favor of certain expectations and conventions. The potential relevance of phenomenological method is considered. The impact of conceptual lag on methodology is examined. The central question becomes: What is specific to music in film compared to other types of music?

Keywords: Methodology; phenomenology; metaquestions; analysis; language; conceptual lag

ARTICLE

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II The Development of Film Language

These considerations can begin through examination of a number of strands in the development of the language4 of film and, specifically, film music. Indeed, movies provide a rare opportunity of a documented encapsulation, over a relatively short time period—a little over a century—of an entire language from the start. If it might be hypothesized that this instance is (in many respects) representative, it would offer a very useful test case for broader sociological theory.

Much more remains to be done in terms of tracing which were the earliest elements of film language, both visually and in sound, to be developed. The problems lie not only with understanding the development of the language—what practitioners saw as appropriate—but also the corresponding problem of the audience familiarizing themselves with it. In both cases, we can seek antecedents, anticipations, and conditions of possibility.

Some of the answers lie within film itself: by tracing the first appearance of a given innovation. At times, doing so points towards a particular national form, or subgenre. However, to more thoroughly address the development of the language and the audience learning the language, it is necessary to look further back. For instance, the dissolve, as a transition, has its origins in a purely chemical process. (Incidentally—as a thought experiment—if the language of film was beginning to be developed today, the dissolve might not be an element which would be pursued.) Yet that was not its sole origin. Part of the reason the chemical process could be recognized and catch on as a symbolic element is because, as John Fraser notes in his book on Méliès, it bore a resemblance to some of the staging conventions of theatrical melodrama. “The elaborately detailed naturalism of the plays of Henry Irving and David Belasco,” he writes, “depended on dissolves achieved by lights, scrims and breakaway scenery to effect smooth, rapid scene transformations without recourse to a drawn curtain.”5

And Frazer notes elsewhere, “Gauzes to simulate water were a common theatrical effect, used on stage to effect transitions from one scene to the next, the nearest theatrical equivalent of the motion picture

4 The term “language” will be used here as a shorthand, allowing for the possibility that it may need careful qualification or definition, or another term such as “sign system” or “codes” might turn out to be preferable.5 Frazer 1979: 85. One possible source on the development of the language of film might be Sanderson 1977.

dissolve”6—and Méliès drew on them for underwater scenes such as those in his Visite sous-marine du Maine.

Similarly, part of the reason that shot changes and editing techniques such as cross-cutting were able to be recognized and could catch on as a symbolic element is that comparable techniques—what might they be called? parallell?—can be found in other, earlier cultural forms. It has been suggested by scholars of the early comic strip such as Francis lacassin and David Kunzle7 that some of the groundwork for the comprehensibility of various elements of film language, such as parallel construction, the pan (in stages), and the close-up, could have come from the early strips of graphic artists such as Rodolphe Töpffer8 and Wilhelm Busch.

Procedures analogous to other elements of the language of film could be identified in literature. As Arthur Krows wrote at the dawn of “talkies,” “Stage delights, picture closeups, long-shots, fadebacks and instant changes of scene have in reality been employed in literature for centuries. Homer used them; think of that!”9 Famously, eisenstein10 points out how the agricultural fair scene from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (the book, rather than the numerous film adaptations) is intercut in a way which provides ironic commentary on Rodolphe’s attempts at seduction:

“We, now, why did we meet? What turn of fate decreed it? Was it not that, like two rivers gradually converging across the intervening distance, our own natures propelled us towards one another?” He took her hand, and she did not withdraw it. “General Prize!” cried the Chairman. “Just now, for instance, when I came to call on you…” “Monsieur Bizet, of Quincampoix.” “…how could I know that I should escort you here?” “Seventy francs!” “And I”ve stayed with you, because I couldn’t tear myself away, though I’ve tried a hundred times.” “Manure!”11

None of this is to suggest anything as clumsy as causation, but simply antecedents and, in certain cases, conditions of possibility.

The same steps might be undertaken in giving an account of the development of the musical language. In a fuller exploration, for example, the earliest conventions of sound in film to be developed might be traced. Again, however, to more thoroughly address

6 Frazer 1979: 65.7 See Kunzle 1973, 1990; lacassin 1971, 1972.8 Kunzle 2007.9 Krows 1930: 7.10 eisenstein 1977: 12f.11 Flaubert 1950: 161.

201Towards a Theory of MusicodraMaTic PracTice in filM

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the development of the language of music—and, as will be raised below, of film audio in general—it is necessary to go further back. Michel Chion sums up some of the key aspects nicely—in a postulation noted above:

[A]ll the other cases or types of voices in cinema may have derived from older dramatic forms. The synchronous voice comes from the theater; film music comes from opera, melodrama, and vaudeville; and voiceover commentary from the magic lantern shows and from older arts involving narrated projections.12

Once more, the problems are both the audience learning the language, and the corresponding problem of what practitioners found appropriate to do—the most obvious instance being the period immediately following the introduction of sound. Music was no longer going to be a continuous accompaniment, and nor was it going to be the only auditory element, so, once a couple of years of technical development (and becoming accustomed to the marvel simply of having synchronized dialog) had passed, the challenge to be solved in practice was what its place should be.

Steiner’s often-quoted memoir is useful here: “The feeling among producers and directors at this time [early 1930s] was that the music should have some reason for being in the film.” And so, he says,

A constant fear prevailed among producers, directors and musicians, that they would be asked: Where does the music come from?… Many strange devices were used to introduce the music. For instance, a love scene might take place in the woods and in order to justify the music thought necessary to accompany it, a wandering violinist would be brought in for no reason at all.13

While it may be very easy to smile condescendingly about this, just as people are tempted to do when watching performers break the fourth wall and bow to the audience in early story films, it is not appropriate at times such as these when the codes were either not established or differ from those which became established.

III Against Univocal Explanations

If the examination of the development of the language of film can serve as a background for a more subtle

12 Chion 1999: 4.13 Steiner in Hubbert 2011: 222, 223, latter also quoted in Prendergast 1977: 23.

reassessment of musicodramatic practice, the risk in the consequent paradigm shift (in this case, moving from the valorization of the art music strand to theatrical, stock, and library music) is that awareness of the shortcomings of a given monolithic explanation might not lead to a more refined explanation but to substituting a different single cause. Reassessment should not automatically, in other words, replace art music dominance with an idea of theatrical or library music dominance.

The problem is not the particular form of explanation but the pattern of inappropriately reducing to univocal explanations—taking one inaccurately simplistic notion and replacing it with another: the greatest obstacle here is oversimplification, of throwing out the baby with the pendulum swing.

One factor is that the subculture of film is not comprised of a unified group of actors, socially speaking. It is useful here to draw on theorization in the sociology of organizations, where numerous studies have shown how an apparently unified social entity has subsets of disparate aims and goals within its horizontal and vertical structure. With music for film, there has tended to be a tension between its position in the schedule and in the organizational hierarchy and the high art aspirations of some of those composing it. Composers may have artistic aspirations; the front office goal, all things being equal, is to make money.

Sociological theory has been grappling for generations with the idealism versus materialism debate, the interminable argument concerning whether ideas or material conditions are dominant. The immediate problem with this is that, like the nature versus nurture argument, the question of which is dominant is simply not solvable. People who think it is are either stupid or they allow a neurotic desire for conceptual simplicity to trump their intelligence.

Does the fact that it is impossible to answer the question rule it out as a question? The allusion here is, of course, to the verificationism of the logical positivists: the doctrine that a proposition is “cognitively meaningful” only if there is a finite procedure for conclusively determining its truth.14 Is, indeed, the reason this might not be cognitively meaningful because it is the wrong question? Are there multiple determinations or, more precisely, multiple influences? In this case, a model could be proposed in which all levels are considered and all are a factor,

14 See, for instance, Carnap 1932.



but none, a priori, are assumed to be dominant. W. G. Runciman has carried out some interesting work in this direction in his Treatise on Sociological Theory,15 but there is much more to be done.

This, then, is one of the metaquestions referred to at the start, which might help us approach the development of musicodramatic practice in film with a greater degree of subtlety and then, in a benign circle, contribute to developing methodological principles of wider applicability.

IV

So in which specific cases, and how, might priority be established? One aspect to bear in mind is that our purview takes in different generations of film music and film composer, each with differing priorities and limitations. As a minimum, we might separate silent cinema and sound cinema; perhaps the prehistory of cinema should be added (Méliès, the edison films, Porter) and the brief transitional period of the early talkies—to add categories within the assumed subcategory, a model of reframing or refocusing akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s substitution of the various machines for the presumed unified subject.16 At a later stage, it can be broken down further by asking whether there is potential value in considering individual practitioner’s priorities and limitations.

The advantages of library music for the silent cinema are clear: while a pianist could watch the screen and improvise, the composition of live ensembles in different movie houses was variable, limiting the scope of a specially composed score, and so music had to be chosen to suit each film. Sound film, by contrast, embodied the move from the individual player or players and their more or less improvised live accompaniment to multiple analogs of

15 Runciman 1983, 1989, and 1997. This is not to proffer the assumption that Runciman’s work is authoritative or conclusive in any respect, nor, perhaps, without (as is often the case) its own political program; but it opens up some directions which avoid the univocal explanatory model under discussion here, and is unusual in recent decades simply by virtue of broaching broader questions of social theory on the large scale. With respect to film studies, Noël Carroll’s advocacy of “piecemeal theorizing” (Carroll 1996: 58; see p. 2) has some similarities to the idea of multiple influences rather than monolithic determinations; Carroll is writing against what he understandably capitalizes as “Theory”, meaning the sweeping brushstrokes of Althusser, lacan, and Barthes and those who have applied their ideas to film. For Carroll, “piecemeal theorizing…means breaking down some of the presiding questions of the Theory into more manageable questions” (p. 58). This approach to film studies and the approach to social theory proposed here share a common pragmatic wish to focus on useful, answerable, questions. The polemic against what the present author has elsewhere termed “creative misunderstanding” (of, in this case, the Continental theorists) underlines the dangers of importing specialist concepts and terminology into another discipline, and thereby reinforces what usefully might be a new golden rule for intellectuals: don’t dabble.16 Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 1, 36, 284-85.

the same recording of the same score—mirroring the distinction drawn by John Berger between the value of the unique cultural object versus the value generated by multiple copies, a distinction which originates in Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.17

Whenever one sees a strand which is valorized within a field while another is not, an interesting question is why this came about. Should the dominant discourse be one which valorizes art music—and why that was the case, and then ceased to be the case, would be the next question—the connection to demotic theatrical music is likely to be downplayed. likewise, cue sheets and library music function according to a kind of industrial, production-line model, which sits well with the realities of film production, but ill with any kind of artistic aspiration.

Another aspect to bear in mind in establishing priorities is that certain trends and key individuals create a weighting or gravitational pull in favor of certain lines of development. There are key figures historically (or, at least, in each successive version of history, bearing in mind Aragon’s suggestion that history is something which needs to be invented). Griffith, for example, was a key figure in establishing shot conventions, even if not all survived the advent of sound.

There are also key demographics. A critical coincidence here is that at a pivotal moment in the development of sound film there was a sizeable migration of Austro-German composers to the United States. Certain composers had parallel careers in concert music (Korngold being the obvious instance). Many more (probably most) were trained in art music—Steiner, Waxman, and Salter, for example—sometimes by teachers who were eminent within that field (Schönberg being perhaps the best example). It is therefore unsurprising that their compositions worked motivically and evince a taste for a late Romantic harmonic language—and that they sought to stress their art-music credentials. These inclinations may have already been present within film music (art music being valorized as it was at the time), but the wave of migration may have given it critical mass.

From here it is possible to identify a kind of apostolic succession: Rózsa, although born in Budapest, studied at the leipzig Conservatory under Reger’s successor Hermann Graebner, and Rózsa in turn taught Goldsmith.

17 Berger 1972: 34; the Benjamin text is available online at www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm , accessed 15 March 2012.



V Phenomenological Perspective

In turn, might it be important to examine what the composers thought they were doing, their own statements and views? Which composers saw themselves as continuing a tradition emerging from art music? Or as jobbing tunesmiths? This opens up questions which would require considerably more than another paper for effective consideration. Is it defensible to accept the subject’s own categories and work within them, or is it more useful to apply the general categories of the discipline? When is it appropriate to place the researcher’s interpretation above the subject’s own statements? Whatever the answers, it still will be necessary to choose a position between an objective and a subjective methodology and to follow through the consequences of that position.

The latter has a longer history, but the former has been fruitfully developed over the last century in developments of phenomenological method in philosophy, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and sociology. The broader issue at stake in this part of the argument is the old methodological chestnut: how can the object of study be comprehended, rather than simply confirming existing patterns and expectations?

A related problem is carry-over or lag—the tendency, well explored in the sociology of science, to give undue weight to preexisting methodologies and conceptual connections, at the risk of overlooking what is unique, and at the expense of generating a methodology better suited to the new subject. Historical and structural connections often tempt writers into reductive thinking.

One of the regularities of the social construction of the discourse of a given field is that the range of examples (the musical repertoire or corpus, for example) on which the argument is based is much narrower than one might expect, making it what might be dubbed a covert synecdoche. For example, what little work has until recently been carried out in relation to cinematic performance seems to lead inexorably to Charlie Chaplin,18 without any explicit evaluation of whether studying one actor (Chaplin) within one point in the history of cinema (silent cinema) can give general lessons.

VII What is Unique?

Perhaps, however, the most important question to emerge from resisting univocal explanations is: What

18 See Naremore 1988: 114-30; Baron and Carnicke 2008: 89-112.

is unique here? The subject of cinematic performance was touched on in the previous paragraph, and new, ongoing work in performance theory,19 while accepting the connections and precedents of film performance in stage performance, is exploring what is specific to acting in movies, including factors such as discontinuity of delivery and the importance of the technical context, for instance lighting, photography, editing (and, indeed, underscoring). As a similar corrective, a theorization of film music could usefully explore not only its historical connections, but characteristics in its own right.

Features specific to mature sound film include the relation of musical structure to the temporal structure of the edit, and notation in relation to time. One aspect is the locking to a very specific time position, be it cues spotted to time code or feet and frames or simply minutes and seconds. This is not a feature of music in theater nor of concert music (except for electroacoustic pieces involving fixed-timing electronic sounds and live instruments), and it was technically impossible for it to be a feature of silent cinema. At the other extreme is the floating (non-metered) cue. The closest thing in traditional art music is the flexibility of the orchestral parts within a recitative or cadenza, but in many ways it anticipates certain open-form elements of post-World-War-II art music.

Also, it is possible to see more general orchestration principles extended due to the peculiarities of the medium. Steiner, for instance, noted how

[I]t pays to watch the particular pitch in which a person talks. A high voice often becomes “muddy,” with high-pitched musical accompaniment, and the same is true of the low pitch. I rarely combine these except when I want to obtain a special effect, such as matching voice and orchestra so that one is indistinguishable from the other.20

VIII Ways Forward

As can be seen throughout the present issue, our essays in a new approach to the musicological study of film (as with any seriously undertaken plumbing of new depths within a discipline) tell us a great deal about ourselves and our assumptions. In the present article, some preliminary considerations have been outlined for a reassessment of the lineage, cultural, or social significance and analysis of film music. Since much of this reassessment has been accomplished

19 By the British film scholar Sharon Coleclough.20 Steiner in Hubbert 2011: 226.



through methodological metaquestions, it is hoped that the findings may prove more widely applicable. As a first step in this direction, this article will conclude with a brief discussion of further avenues for analysis and practice—mostly in terms of extending these methodological concepts to audio technology and post production in film (ADR, Foley, effects, sound design, and, indeed, music qua mix element).

When and why, for instance, did sound film develop the convention of presenting interior monologue and/or flashback through a band-limited voice-over with artificial reverb? It can be found, for instance, in Hitchcock’s Rebecca, but this is unlikely to be the earliest example. When and why, too, did it become feasible for the sound to bridge one scene to another, in split edits such as the J or l cut, letting audio lead out of the previous or anticipate the next?

Again, there are multiple influences and key figures—Welles in Citizen Kane is one, given the importance of his radio experience in his sensitivity and innovations. Many approaches to library music might also be applicable to effects, and stock or library effects specifically. For instance, the B.B.C. Year Book of 193121 included an article on “The Use of Sound Effects” which lists six “totally different primary genres of Sound Effect”:

The Realistic, Confirmatory effect The Realistic, evocative effect The Symbolic, evocative effect The Conventionalised effect The Impressionistic effect Music as an effect

21 British Broadcasting Corporation 1931: 194ff.

And finally, what would constitute an adequate means for the analysis of production elements? Faltering steps are being made in analyzing popular music production as such—as production, rather in terms of the musical content, the songwriting or composition, for which it could be seen as the medium. And, as is also the case in terms of analysis of (for instance) spatialization or the use of tone-color in contemporary art music, it is unclear which, if any, of the analytical models used for music will be relevant.

The highly-specialized global ghetto world to which all kinds of professionals (whether intellectuals, doctors, engineers, or rabbis) are condemned may seem inimical to making discoveries; it may seem that the time of big strides is long gone. Then all that is needed is the realization that a given program of research has led to deeper insight but also to more questions, and opened up the possibility that this circumscribed field could blow open in terms of its priorities and methodologies. It is hoped that the present article, necessarily sketchy, offers a framework for investigation not only in the area under immediate investigation, but more broadly too.



References

Baron, Cynthia and Sharon Marie Carnicke. 2008. Reframing screen performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Berger, John. 1972. Ways of seeing. london: B.B.C./Penguin.

British Broadcasting Corporation. 1931. B.B.C. Year Book of 1931. london: British Broadcasting Corporation.

Carnap, Rudolf. 1932. The elimination of metaphysics through logical analysis of language, Erkenntnis 2; reprinted in Logical positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer, 60-81. New York: Free Press, 1959.

Carroll, Noël. 1996. Prospects for film theory: a personal assessment. In Post-theory: reconstructing film studies, David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 37-70. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Chion, Michel. 1999. The voice in cinema. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1984. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. lane. london: Athlone Press.

eisenstein, Sergei. 1977. Film form. San Diego: Harvest.

Flaubert, Gustave. 1950. Madame Bovary. Trans. Alan Russell. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Frazer John. 1979. Artifically arranged scenes: the films of Georges Méliès. Boston: G. H. Hall.

Hubbert, Julie, ed. 2011. Celluloid symphonies. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Joe, Jeongwon and Rose Theresa, eds. 2002. Between opera and cinema. london: Routledge.

Krows, Arthur edwin. 1930. The talkies. New York: Henry Holt & Company.

Kunzle, David. 1973. The early comic strip: narrative strips and picture stories in the European broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825. Berkeley: University of California Press.

———. 1990. The history of the comic strip, vol. 2: The nineteenth century. Berkeley: University of California Press.

———. 2007. Father of the comic strip: Rodolphe Töpffer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

lacassin Francis. 1971. Pour un neuvième art: la bande dessinée. Paris: Christian Bourgois.

———. 1972. Pour une contre-histoire du cinéma. Paris: 10/18.

Naremore James. 1988. Acting in the cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Prendergast Roy M. 1977. A neglected art. New York: New York University Press.

Runciman W. G. 1983, 1989, 1997. A treatise on social theory, 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sanderson, Richard. 1977. A historical study of the development of American motion picture content and techniques prior to 1904. New York: Arno Press.

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Towards a Theory of Musicodramatic Practice in Film

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