The Temp Track is going to go on a short break for about week. Yours truly is teaching a few courses in the coming weeks and needs to do prep work. But do not fret, only saying goodbye for a short while.
Month: June 2009
Film Score Friday Top 5: ‘Star Wars’ Cues, Part I – A New Hope
So, time for another special three week countdown here at the Temp Track. Partially due to my being busy the next couple weeks, and just plum out of ideas at the time, I’ll be counting down my top 5 cues from each of the original Star Wars films, scored by Mr. John Williams. A few rules to begin with: 1) I’m discounting the opening title theme just because it is too obvious, but not the music immediately following it; 2) Likewise I’m also nixing the end credit suites, but not the music leading into them; and 3) No individual themes, I’m doing cues, not themes (so no just “Imperial March,” but this does not discount cues involving said themes, of course).
For the names of the cues, I’m using the track listings from the two disc releases from a few years ago that are still available. So, let’s go to the tape:
1) “The Hologram/Binary Sunset”: I’ve got to give it up to this cue, while not the first instance of the Force motif in the film, that occurs in “Imperial Attack,” it is used here to underscore one of the most powerful and iconic images in the film series: Luke gazing at the sunset over Tatooine and contemplating his future. As mentioned in an earlier post, it is also here where in the “Blue Harvest” episode of Family Guy that Chris Griffin turns to the camera and says “John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra!” When I teach a course on film music, you can be sure that I’m going to show that clip. Oh, we also have appearances in this cue of Leia’s theme and the main theme.
2) “The Dune Sea of Tatooine/Jawa Sandcrawler”: For starters, I remember from an early age thinking that “The Dune Sea of Tatooine” portion of this cue sounded like Rite of Spring, and while I’ve never done a side-by-side comparison, I’m pretty sure there is more than a little similarity, especially the opening wind solos. But the Jawa portion is pretty genius, Williams really does capture the nature of the strange scavengers quite well, and it blends quite effectively with the “Dune Sea” portion due to its use of winds (especially the double reeds, not to mention the tuba solos).
3) “Cantina Band” (Both tracks): These songs might just be the best piece of diegetic music ever written specifically for a film, and really, I kind of like the second one more than the first. Sure, everyone knows the first one, but how many people really notice the second song that starts playing as Han sits down to talk with Luke and Obi-wan? Well, I’m sure the readers of this blog do, but how many others?
4) “Ben Kenobi’s Death/Tie Fighter Attack”: When I hear this cue, I always hear Han yelling to Luke, “Blast the door kid!” See, back in the early days of CD-Rom tech, Microsoft had a program called Cinemania that was kind of like IMDB before the Internet really became the “The Information Superhighway.” In this program were a few select clips for a few films, including Star Wars, and the clip from it started towards the end of Obi-Wan and Vader’s duel, and ends right as Han tells Luke to shoot the door controls. And the cue for the Tie battle I can always hear because it was used over and over in the computer game X-Wing and Super Star Wars for the old Super Nintendo. Oh, and the music is pretty great too.
5) “The Throne Room”: I always have a weird feeling when watching the end scene of the film because this cue gives me a sense of unease. I can’t explain it, but after the initial fanfare, I always expect that something is going bad is going to happen because of the pervading minor key, the march feeling, and timpani hits. Of course, then the music changes to major as Leia gives them their medals, Chewie growls, R2D2 appears all shiny and new, and the universe is saved…at least until The Empire Strikes Back is released three years later.
But you won’t have to wait three years for my top 5 favorite cues from Empire. Just tune in next Friday.
Like Kuorsawa I make mad films, okay I don’t make films, but if I did they’d have a samurai…
So one huge thing that came out of my recent trip to New York is a renewed interest in the sound design/auraltrack in the films of Akira Kurosawa. My initial research came in the Fall 2008 semester for my Asian Aesthetics paper, then I later presented a revised version of that paper at a local AMS meeting, and then revised it again and submitted it to an academic writing competition within the College of Music and won. In other words, I’ve gotten some good mileage from the paper. I’ve toyed around with the idea of it as a dissertation topic, but just one among many. After NYC and the panel on sound design I went to (read more here at The Temp Track), I got started thinking more about it. On my last full day in New York, I wandered into a bookstore and picked up four books on Kurosawa (three of which I had used in my paper), and I’ve already read two of them (including his wonderful autobiography Something Like an Autobiography). These books have only increased my interest. I’ve also watched five more Kurosawa films since I’ve returned, and I could say something on each one of them in terms of sound design.
Kurosawa is so meticulous in crafting how sound and music are used, and unlike most Hollywood productions, he did the bulk of the work himself (something he learned how to do in his days working as an assistant director). I hope to have viewed all his films by the end of the summer (something which is largely possible, but his four early films made towards the tail end of WWII might prove a bit troublesome to track down, everything else I either own or can be had in the school’s library or ordered from another library in our lending system), so I will know more about his work as a whole.
Just some quick thoughts that are on my mind.
Music and the Moving Image 2009
AKA 3 Days and 27 Papers Later…
It’s hard summarize a conference, even if it was on the concentrated topic of “Music and the Moving Image.” So I’ll start in broad terms: it was a good experience for me in many way, I heard many great papers, and listening to other scholars in the field speak has given me confidence in my own research. And even though my shy nature kept me from asking many questions and talking to everyone there, I was able to force myself to talk to a few and very much enjoyed the brief conversations I did have. In short, I definitely want to go back next year, and hopefully I can present this time (I did submit for this year, and will do so again for next year). But even if I’m not presenting, I would still like to go if possible.
Anyway, I’ll discuss briefly two of the 27 papers I heard. First is Matt Young’s “Who is the Iron Man?: Establishing Identity in Comic Book Films.” Unfortunately I didn’t take notes on this one, but I remember most of it. Basically, Mr. Young’s paper dealt with how the identity of the hero is constructed in a superhero film, both in terms of plot and music, but goes on to discuss how the establishment of the heroic identity is frustrated in the recent film Iron Man, directed by Jon Favreau (who is so money and doesn’t even know it…sorry, just had to quote Swingers there).
This establishment is three fold: first a music theme is tied to the hero (usual during the opening credits sequence), the hero states their new identity (the “I’m Batman” moment), and that identity is recognized by the media. Obviously much discussion was made about the music itself, but he did discuss the other two also, but I’ll only discuss the musical aspect here. The musical establishment function is undermined from the start, not only is there no opening credit sequence, the film immediately opens in the Afghani desert to the sound of wind. After the establishing shot, we are greeted to AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” which is exactly not the song one would expect to hear (which would have been Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” which had been prominetely featured in the film’s ad campaign). When, after the lengthy exposition, we finally do have a title card, there is no music, but rather just the sound of metal striking metal, and we hear Jeff Bridge’s character say “Tony Stark,” dialogue bleeding in from the next scene. Young makes the point that our hearing Stark’s name mentioned over the “Iron Man” title card further weakens the heroic identity, something further achieved by the many denials of the existence of Iron Man by the army and others.
Iron Man himself has no solid musical identity in the film, but rather is accompanied by guitar riffs and other industrial sounds in the soundtrack, while Tony Stark does have a theme (which Young pointed out was taken from the theme song of the old Iron Man cartoon), this theme is even played diegetically as the ring tone on Rhodes mobile phone. Young further more establishes that all three of the identity establishing motives come at the very end of the film. First we see the name “Iron Man” printed in the media, then Stark, in the last line of the film, states that “I am Iron Man,” and as the credits begin to roll, we are greeted by our long sought for Black Sabbath song (of which, of course, the opening line is “I am Iron Man,” but Favreau chooses to start the song after that line, and actually edits the snippet we do here so that there are no sung lyrics). All in all, an interesting reading of the film’s use of music, and one that shows that even when a film’s score isn’t the best, how it functions within it still can be a worthwhile investigation.
The other paper I want to discuss came during a panel that was devoted to sound design in film. First James Wierzbicki of the University of Michigan discussed design in six early films of Hitchcock (sometimes called the “Thriller” Sextet), and the third paper was from Liz Greene, who actually works in the industry along with teaching, discussed the work of Alan Splet. But it is Juan Chattah’s paper “Defying Sound Design Convention: A Model for Analysis” that I would like to discuss briefly.
What Chattah has done is lay out a very clear system and terms for talking about sound design, one that I touched on in my post on Diegetic and Non-Diegetic and shifts between them. But even though people have talked about these shifts and moves in the aural space, what Chattah has done is to lay out a consistent way of speaking about them (and there was discussion afterwards about the very use of terms ‘diegetic’ and ‘non-diegetic,’ which I believe were first applied by Claudia Gorbman in Unheard Melodies, though I’m not sure, but that’s neither here nor there). In short, Chattah calls the “Diegetic” and “Non-Diegetic” space “Fields” and then within each field you have three separate “planes”: the voice (dialogue), music, and noise. He then outlined three ways in which sounds can shift or interact between fields and planes. First is Overlap (in which two elements of the same planes interact between fields, for which he used the final scene of “The Conversation” as an example, a film that came up many times in various papers), second is Replacement (music replaces noise is one example), and then Transference (which can happen as music moves between fields, but also in other ways, noise shifting to music, but a move between fields is necessary…I think).
A very interesting talk, and I’ll have to be on the look out for him publishing the system, it could come in handy down the road. I also heard two separate papers on the use of Wagner in John Boorman’s Excaliber, sound and music in two films by Michael Hanake, two papers on use of sound and musique concrete in Gus van Sant, and another on Ne0-Surrealism and the MTV aesthetic in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life.
In review, a great conference, and I would recommend if you are at all interested in film and media music to check it out. The site for the conference is here and you can actually still look at the abstracts for this year’s conference. Keep a look out on the site, I think the call for papers will go out around September or so.
Film Score Friday Top 5: Themes/Cues of ‘Final Fantasy VI’
Okay, I know I’ve promised a post summarizing my recent trip to NYC, but it’s been a long week. I hope to have that up this weekend sometime. But as teased last week, I’m devoting this edition of FSFT5 to my top 5 from Nobuo Uematsu’s score for Final Fantasy VI, which is among the classics of video game scores in my humble opinion.
Some background, first, though. The Final Fantasy series is one of the longest running in the video game industry with the thirteenth edition of the franchise coming out soon for the PS3. It has also inspired numerous spin-offs and companion series on other consoles (such as the Final Fantasy Legend games on the Game Boy, though those are technically part of another franchise from the same company, but only in Japan…I won’t try to explain it here), but it is the core series which was score entirely by Uematsu for the first 9 installments, and the next 4 with various collaborators, that are nigh legend amongst many vg music fans.
The game at hand, FFVI, was released state side in 1994 as Final Fantasy III due to the fact that parts II, III, and V were not released in the US until long after the seventh installment exploded on the PS1 console. The game itself involves around 50 hours of gameplay (pretty standard among RPGs of the era), and Uematsu’s score, when released on CD, took up 3 discs. The score is made up of individual themes for all the major characters and settings of the game, with certain cues only appearing during key plot moments in the game. If you want more info on the game itself, check out the Wikipedia article.
My own personal history with the game does merit mentioning. I got it when it released in 1994, and was captivated by the music, especially the fact that the game actually featured a 30 minute opera about 20% of the way in in which the player has to participate. I didn’t beat the game, though, until years later in the fall of 2000 when I took my Super Nintendo back with me to college and set out to beat it. If you’re a fan of game music, I really do recommend tracking down the soundtrack collection. With a bit of persistence, you can find many vg music dealers stateside who sell it for a reasonable price. Many cues, including the entire opera sequence, have been performed and recorded with live performers with varying levels of success.
On to the list:
1) Celes’ Theme/’Aria de Mezzo Carrattere’ – Even though Celes is not THE main character, her theme is the one that has haunted me for all these years. The theme is used most stirringly as the aria in the opera, which Celes has to sing. The aria itself, called ‘Aria de Mezzo Carattere,’ has been recorded numerous times in various forms (I even arranged it for bassoon trio). I’ll give you two versions here: first a video of the sequence taken from Game Boy Advanced re-release, the instruments don’t sound as good as the original on Super Nintendo, but thankfully the synth voice sounds much, much better…
and secondly the version from the disc release Final Fantasy VI: Grand Finale which is a live performance of the aria…
2) Kefka’s Theme/Dancing Mad – Kefka is the main baddie of the game, starting off as just a merely annoying general, he develops into a megalomanical clown bent on destroying the world. Yes, I said clown, he basically looks like one. The final battle with Kefka is accompanied by a battle track called Dancing Mad that on the soundtrack release lasts almost 18 minutes. I’m including it as part of this selection because the middle section of it is based on Kefka’s theme. Here’s is the original theme as released originally…
and as a special treat, here is ‘Dancing Mad’ as played by Uematsu’s heavy metal/prog rock band The Black Mages which plays covers of his music. It’s split into two parts because it’s over 10 minutes long, and the max length on YouTube is 10 minutes…
I just love this version, it captures the epic nature of the song, the wicked organ solo (which is in the original version), plus it has some great guitar solo work. And yes, that is Uematsu on keys.
3) Slam Shuffle (aka Zozo city theme) – I’ve got to admit that as a kid, this was the first theme to really stick in my head. It’s got a great beat and hook to it, plus the city of Zozo, with its urban decay and seedy characters is one of the most memorable locales in the game.
4) Phantom Train – Played during a specific sequence in which our heroes have to battle their way through a haunted train, this bass heavy, plodding sort of waltz, is a great piece that ultimately bares a strong resemblance to the character Shadow’s theme (number 5 on the list) in terms of tonality, meter, and overall sound (at least accompaniment).
5) Shadow’s Theme – My childhood friend would probably tell me that is the best part of the game, but oh well. The mysterious Shadow was captured perfectly with the equally enigmatic theme, who’s whistling harkens back to Morricone’s ‘Whistling Theme’ from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
There are 14 playable characters in the game, and along with Kefka, there are 15 identifiable themes for chracters, along with many, many, many other themes that go with specific locations and/or situations in the game. Choosing only five can’t really do the score justice, really. The other truly impressive cue from the game is the ‘Ending Theme,’ which is over 20 minuts long. It accompanies the ending sequece and credits and includes all the playable charcter themes, and many others. In many ways, knowing this massive ending lay ahead was what drove me to beat the game.
Not sure what next week will be, but if you have suggestions/requests just let me know.
