Month: September 2009

FSFT5: Avant-Garde Film Scores

Posted on by filmscore80

So in what will hopefully be one of many guest bloggers, Herr Vogler has given us this wonderful Film Score Friday List!

Dictionary.com defines “avant-garde” as: 

-adjective  

2. of or pertaining to the experimental treatment of artistic, musical, or literary material.

Beyond that, one’s definition of “avant-garde” is extremely subjective; my “normal” might be another’s “extreme”. For the purposes of this particular entry I want to set certain parameters that more-or-less define avant-garde scoring in narrative filmmaking in the following way (without trying to be overly rigorous):

 1. A score that utilizes experimental techniques in conjunction with traditional techniques throughout.

2. The use of avant-garde techniques is not self-conscious. It is a means toward the end of enhancing the narrative.

3. The reasons for using advanced or experimental techniques are because it could be no other way. The final film would almost be unimaginable with a different score. (Really an extension of #2).

With that in mind, I submit for your approval the following Top 5 avant-garde film score nominees:

 #5.) The Cobweb (Leonard Rosenman, 1955). More often written about than listened to, this score opened the door for avant-garde scoring in narrative films. The Cobweb was the first notable use in narrative film of the 12-tone technique as a unifying compositional device for an entire score. Rosenman has said in interview that the Piano Concerto, Op. 42 of Arnold Schoenberg (one of his teachers) was a major influence in writing the score.

 #4.) The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 (David Shire, 1974). You’re probably thinking to yourself Seriously? Yep. Shire brings together big band-style writing centered around 12-tone organizational techniques. The score is jazzy, gritty, percussion-oriented and a snapshot of the composer’s idea of the “sound” of New York in the mid 1970s. The CD release from several years back was one of Film Score Monthly’s earliest releases. I believe it was Doug Adams who wrote up a terrific little companion essay in that month’s issue giving a basic explanation of 12-tone technique and how Shire used it in the film. For me the great thing about this score is that, beyond the grittiness of it, it has atmosphere to burn. This was well before atmosphere meant “keyboard drones” (which is another post).

 #3.) Altered States (John Corigliano, 1980). John Corigliano probably wouldn’t have developed certain aspects of his compositional technique had it not been for this film. He invented a number of techniques (many of which seem to be derived from the Polish avant-garde) including certain improvisatory/aleatoric techniques for creating a lot of orchestral activity. One of these techniques Corigliano refers to as “motion sonority”. In this technique two pitches (a fifth apart for example) are placed inside a box and the performers are told to improvise between those two pitches for a predetermined period of time (incidentally, many of his techniques were absorbed by his former student Elliot Goldenthal who has, over time, deployed them in his own creative ways. But that’s also another post. The music is highly theatrical (though quite lyrical at times, too) and measures up to the theatricality of the film itself and it’s difficult to imagine anything else with the film.

 #2.) The Matrix (Don Davis, 1999). There are plenty of examples of narrative film from the last 20 or so years with isolated cues that utilize minimalist techniques but The Matrix is the only example I can come up with (by a composer who makes their living primarily in film that is) that utilizes minimalist techniques to unify a score. But it’s much more than that, too. On the surface it seems to be a battle between post-1945 modernist writing (representing the Agents and the Matrix itself) and a postminimalist aesthetic (associated more with the protagonists) that the composer himself refers to as a postmodern aesthetic.

 #1.) Planet of the Apes (Jerry Goldsmith, 1968). Few composers wrote so many interesting scores in so many different genres as Jerry Goldsmith, but science-fiction is where his talent was truly allowed to shine. This is the crème-de-la-crème. Honestly I could have chosen any one of at least a dozen scores to fit the bill but this is the high-water mark for Goldsmith and the avant-garde. For Planet of the Apes Goldsmith combines together a quasi-serial-to-freely-atonal harmonic language and Bartókian percussiveness with (for its time) inventive orchestration techniques; wind players are instructed to blow air through their instruments while depressing keys without making traditional sounds; horn players are instructed to reverse their mouthpieces and play; strings and harp are all echoplexed from time to time and the percussion section is heavily augmented (no more famously than the metal mixing bowls utilized in “The Searchers” or the addition of the Brazilian cuica).

 Posted by Herr Vogler http://musicinventor.blogspot.com

“Ikiru” and the Sound of Silence

Posted on by filmscore80

Hello dear readers.  I hope my abrupt departure has not caused anyone to go running to hills in fear that my life has been cut short by a “death panel” or some other such nonsense concocted by the Party Out of Power.  Sorry to drop in political commentary, but Kurosawa’s film Ikiru cannot help but make one think of the health care debate since it is about a man finding out he has only 6 moths to live and then trying to come to grips with his life and giving his remaining days meaning.  Granted, had this film taken place today, he might have had more time to live, but in the end, the question of the film is, “what has my life meant?”  But I’m not here to really discuss the film’s plot, but rather it’s sound and music…or rather, it’s lack.  One of the truly remarkable things about Kurosawa’s use of sound in this film is his manipulation of silence.

The first true silence occurs after our protagonist has received the news of his condition.  Kanji Watanabe (played beautifully by Takashi Shimura in one of his greatest roles), walks along a street but there is no sound.  As the scene continues, we realize that there isn’t just no sound indicating a quiet street, but literally no sound.  It is not until Watanabe takes a step into the street and is almost run down that the cacophony of the street comes screaming onto the audiotrack.  In many ways, this moment marks a structural break in the film, as it is this moment that Watanabe makes the decision that something has to change in his life.  Kurosawa uses similar aural cues in subsequent scenes to mark, literally, life-changing decisions of Watanabe’s (first the deafening sound of a train and then a chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’ – royalties paid to the estate of Patty and Mildred Hill? – in a restaurant).

But where Kurosawa’s use of silence is at its peak is in the last third of the film during the wake for Watanabe (yes, for the last 50 minutes of the film, the lead character is absent except for a photo and flashbacks).  To begin with, there is no underscoring for the wake scenes.  As recounted in Teruyo Nogami’s memoir, Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa, composer Fumio Hayasaka had written music for the scene, but after viewing a rough cut with the score, Kurosawa decided that the music overwhelmed the sequences and ordered it cut out.  The resulting sequence does indeed incur most of it’s power precisely becuase there is no score that could have made it more sentimental by it’s presence.  Instead, the absence of music creates another aural hole which parallels many of the temporal holes that the plot’s construction creates (a hole most visibly obvious by the absence of Watanabe as a living person in the last third of the film).

Where the silence is most deafening is when, many times, in the transition from flashback to present, the flashback will end with a long shot of a slowly weakening Watanabe in silence, and that silence will continue for a beat into the present and then the people at the wake will resume talking.  It is almost as if Kurosawa left the silent beat prior to saying ‘action’ in the final cut of the film.  In the end, he created a hole in the audiotrack, one that heightens the absence of the character of Watanabe.

Stephen Prince in The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa comments on the temporal “ellipses” in the film’s plot – how Watanabe will be absent and we’ll learn of his absence though dialogue from his co-workers or family, or though the occasional narrator.  I believe that Kurosawa very consciously uses these aural gaps in the wake scene to much the same end, just as Watanabe’s phyiscal absence to his co-workers is as if he is already fading from this world, the aural absence of sound reminds us of the loss.  The large silence on the street is almost our theme: Watanabe is so shocked by the news of his illness that he feels as if death has already taken him, but he returns when the sound returns – shocking both him and the viewer.

Kurosawa is a master of manipulating sound in his films, something that is rarely commented on by critics.  Yes, they will mention things such as the street scene, but I have yet to see anyone provide a description as detailed as those given to his visual technique.  It is my hope to one day rectify this deficiency.