UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM MINORITARIAN MUSIC REVISITING MUSICAL NOISE THROUGH CINEMA OF JIM JARMUSCH A Master's Thesis by Lev Fišer, a student of Arts and Culture: Music Studies, Graduate School of Humanities, University of Amsterdam supervisor: prof. dr. Julia Kursell, Second reader: prof. dr. Barbara Titus, Academic year 2017/2018 Acknowledgements I express my warmest gratitude to prof. dr. Julia Kursell, my supervisor, and prof. dr. Barbara Titus, the second reader. They gave me considerably more than merely official supervision and grading. During their lectures and consultations with them, I have gained knowledge to be cherished for years to come. This text would not exist without infallible support of my family. My parents have represented a point of stability in a life of uncertainty both in research and beyond. My friends can never be thanked enough for their kindness and reassurance. * * * Ministry of Culture of Republic of Slovenia ensured that my research was generously financed, for which I remain thankful. The ministry provided me with a grant for the entire academic year. Abstract The goal of this thesis is to approach the music that is used by Jim Jarmusch in The Limits of Control (2009), a film he scripted and directed. On the basis of close listening and viewing, selected songs from the soundtrack were read as minoritarian music. Minoritarian music is a term newly introduced in this thesis, and it serves to conceptualise the particular musical expression either created or insterted by Jarmusch into his film. It is an attempt to (re)theorize musical noise and timbre. During the course of the research, significant correlations with the idea of the minor by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were observed. Hence, findings of their work have been included into the argument in favour of minoritarian music. The soundtrack case studies are songs and song excerpts by the groups Bad Rabbit, Boris, Sunn O))), and The Black Angels. They are based on electric guitar distortion, monotonous repetition, and superposition of disparate timbres. A comparative case study analysis to once again scrutinize the concept of minoritarian music is also included. Key Words Jim Jarmusch, noise, timbre, minor, minoritarian music Contents 0 Opening ................................................................................................................................... 5 Methodology .......................................................................................................................... 8 1 Jarmusch as a Musician .......................................................................................................... 9 The Limits of Control and Its Shift to Music ....................................................................... 12 2 Noise and Recognition .......................................................................................................... 17 On Timbre ............................................................................................................................ 20 3 Toward Minoritarian Music .................................................................................................. 25 On Minor Literature ............................................................................................................. 25 Toward Sound ...................................................................................................................... 26 Minoritarian Music .............................................................................................................. 28 Minoritarian Music as a Material Imprint ........................................................................ 32 4 Expressions of Minoritarian Music ....................................................................................... 34 Repetition and Its Frame ...................................................................................................... 34 Yorgos Lanthimos and Music in The Lobster ..................................................................... 38 Voiceover Narration and Beethoven's String Quartet op. 18, no. 1 ..................................... 40 A Music that Lingers: Fuzzy Reactor, Police Sirens, and You on the Run ......................... 46 Coinciding Events: Sunn O))) and Boris in the Kidnapping Scene ..................................... 53 5 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 58 6 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 60 7 Appendix ............................................................................................................................... 63 0 Opening What if we fail to take music for what it is? Sometimes, what seems banal might not be such at all. Uncertainty remains regardless of experience, knowledge, and intuition giving the verdict of banality. Such disposition rarely seems to coincide with a scrutiny of our judgement. Understanding seemingly trivial things according to their proper content is central to the films of Jim Jarmusch. It deeply relates to their music as well. The object of this research are the songs of a 2009 film that he scripted and directed, The Limits of Control. The film takes place in today's Spain. A mysterious loner is hired to carry out a criminal job. His contacts only give him cryptical information about things he needs to do to reach his target. The assignment involves countless hours of waiting. Days sometimes pass without him meeting anybody. He is often instructed to wait at a café, where time elapses as he observes the world go by with people attending to their daily errands, birds flying, bells ringing. There are occasions when he is joined by one of the informants. He silently listens to their tirades on art, science, human perception, and history. Each interlocutor tells about a different discipline – music, cinema, science, art in general, hallucination. The lone protagonist then presents a matchbox he has been given by the previous contact. The boxes contain coded messages which he promptly reads and swallows. By starting each day with tai-chi exercises, he trains the awareness of the surroundings. When in Madrid, he makes four visits to modern art gallery Reina Sofia, and views four different paintings in total, immersed in art and his relentless concentration. It may be the case that this film requires repeated viewings, since it lacks a coherent plot to immerse the viewer. Whereas the story is simplistic, the film's power lies in its atmosphere, determined by thought-out frame composition and music. In fact, the latter was so important to the director that he decided to record some of it himself – in cooperation with a band that he at that time was a member of, Bad Rabbit. It is here that our critical doubt may arise once again. How can something that is exclusively atmospherical contain artistic value? Should we assume that there is no artistic value, but a different meaning behind, what could that be? Rather than a cinematic work that addresses the thinking viewer explicitly, The Limits of Control leaves a bothering imprint on one's artistic 5 perception. Not particularly fulfilling or pleasant at first, it is a bothering piece of cinema that burns slowly inside us, questioning our critical judgement of film – and especially music. How can the impact of music in Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control on me as a viewer be explained? How can the meaning conveyed by this music be theorized, and which musicological frameworks correspond to it? How can a subjective interpretation of cinematic music be articulated as a general approach to music listening? This thesis argues that despite the fact that any film music is embedded in cinematic narrative, film serves not only – or even not at all – as a skeleton for the songs to tie upon. Instead, it provides a superposition of meaning to the music. In The Limits of Control, this makes the music convey its proper substance whether it is reproduced in- or outside of the film. The case studies are used to prove this. Along with the film by Jarmusch as a primary research object, a Yorgos Lanthimos film from 2015 will serve as secondary case study to conduct a comparative analysis. The Lobster is considered for its recurring use of Beethoven's String Quartet op. 18, no.1, second movement. The test analysis proposes that any cinematic music can become minoritarian if minoritarian framing is imposed on it. However, the comparative enquiry also shows that music turned minoritarian by sound imposition does not exist outside of the imposing context. Selected excerpts in The Lobster show another, contextually confined way of music becoming minoritarian whereas The Limits of Control represent a source of minoritarian music that has place even outside of cinematic context. Music in Jarmusch's films is given a concise coverage in Sara Piazza's Jim Jarmusch: Music, Words and Noise. The book provides an engaging comparison betwen the earlier films – his graduation attempt Permanent Vacation, and a project where Jarmusch worked together with Wim Wenders – Lightning over Water, directed by Wenders and Nicholas Ray. Piazza compares the films' concluding sequences, but stops at short descriptions of their music, even though it is the sountrack that she claims to be a decisive factor in the comparison.1 More importantly, she touches upon the power of music's projection,