Copyright Statement for Use of Copyrighted Material Third-Party
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Copyright Statement For Use Of Copyrighted Material Third-party materials may be subject to copyright protection. They have been reproduced under licence, through the public domain, and/or under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act as enumerated in SFU Appendix R30.04A—Applications of Fair Dealing under Policy R30. You may not distribute, email, or otherwise communicate these materials to any other person. Every effort has been made to trace ownership of copyrighted materials and to secure permission from copyright holders when necessary. In the event that questions arise pertaining to the use of these materials, we will be pleased to make the necessary corrections in future. Introduction SCI-FIDELITY Music, Sound and Genre History PHILIP HAYWARD 19 77, the Harlesden Roxy in London. The Clash is playing a sell-out gig at the peak of the early buzz around the band's edgy, energetic new wave sound. Entering the auditorium shortly before the band take the stage I'm hit by a monstrously loud, multiply echoing burst of dub reggae percussion, then the horns come in, jazzily, evoking 1960s' ska at the same time as they nail the identity of the tune. The track is the 12 inch vinyl single Ska Wars by Rico Rodrigues, a recording that updates the Jamaican fascination with popular western cinema previously celebrated by artists such as Prince Buster, with his tribute to Hollywood gangster movies Al Capone (196 7), or the spaghetti western/Sergio Leone fascination explored in The Up setter's Return of Django album (1969). The white punk association with a version of the Star Wars theme is significant in that Rodrigues's engagement with Hollywood Sci-Fi music even works in the environment of a Clash gig, in which both popular music culture ("No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones in 1977" [1977)) and American cultural imperialism ("I'm so bored with the USA" [eponymous]) are triumphantly disavowed in favour of cultural allusions and affinities to Jamaican roots reggae and Rastafarianism. As ever, the loops and transmutations of popular culture are nothing if not complex. Star Wars' release in 19 77 marked the beginning of a new wave of big budget Sci-Fi films that rejuvenated the genre by revisiting an earlier era of cinematic wonderment. The film involved an ultra-realist updating premised on cine matic special effects that recreated a sense of fantasy largely absent from a decade of Hollywood films in which gritty naturalism had been prominent. The 'updating and revisiting' approach was nowhere so evident as in John Williams' Star Wars score, which exemplified the classic Hollywood music tendency identified by Caryl Flinn (1992) in terms of its nostalgicist use of 1 . PHILIP HAYWARD previous western art music traditions to create immediately recognisable affects. Williams' score was thus doubly nostalgicist, both to classic Holly wood cinema music and the fine music traditions that this drew upon. Rico Rodrigues's reggaefication of Williams' main theme, similarly, acknow ledged and playfully refigured this series of precedents. 19 77 marked the beginning of a new period in Sci-Fi cinema that revived earlier approaches to the genre. The music for films such as Star Wars (and its sequels) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were premised on classic Hollywood approaches to cinematic scoring1 (albeit in combination with various popular music instrumentations and sound production techniques), and established these as a major strand in subsequent Sci-Fi cinema, particularly big-budget productions. Identifying 1977 as a period marker, it is possible to charac terise Hollywood, European and Japanese Sci-Fi film music history as comprising five principal phases2 : I. 1902-27 The pre synch-sound period II. 1927-45 Exploration of various western orchestral styles (while strands of the cinematic genre coalesced) III . 1945-60 The prominence of discordant and/ or unusual aspects of orchestration/ instrumentation to convey otherworldly/ futuristic themes IV. 1960-77 The continuation of otherworldly/ futuristic styles alongside a variety of musical approaches v . 1977 - The prominence of classic Hollywood-derived orchestral scores in big-budget films together with otherworldly/ futuristic styles and, increasingly, rock and, later, disco/ techno music + the rise in integrated music/ sound scores With regard to non-musical sound3 , the second strand of consideration in this anthology, the periodisation is less marked and can be characterised in terms of intermittent engagements with sound effects and sound design to convey otherworldly/ futuristic elements that become more marked and complex with the revival of big-budget Sci-Fi cinema in the late 1970s and the introduction and upgrading of a series of sound production and process ing technologies in the 1980s and 1990s. The interweaving and blurring of these two sonic fields provides a third historical strand that weaves through the anthology. [NB While the following sections discuss a number of notable Science Fiction 2 SCI-FIDELITY film scores and Sci-Fi influenced music recordings, this Introduction does not attempt to provide an exhaustive catalogue of SF films and music releases. Rather, it attempts to establish an historical framework for the films analysed by contributing authors and to complement individual studies with discussions of related phenomena. There are, inevitably, other films, film sub-genres, musical styles and/ or composers that also merit detailed analy ses in future publications on this area4 .J I. The pre-synch sound era and the establishment of Sci-Fi cinema At its simplest, Science Fiction (also referred to in this book as Sci-Fi and SF) is a cultural genre concerned with aspects of futurism, imagined technologies and/or inter-planetarism. These points of orientation allow for a wide range of inflections and speculations as to the dystopic or utopic aspects of future (and/or alternative) lives or realities, including, in many instances, contact with alien 'others'5 . It has been most prevalent as a literary form but has also manifested itself in visual art, radio, theatre, cinema and music. As with any genre, it overlaps and shares characteristics with others. Referring to Susan Sontag's 1965 essay 'The Imagination of Disaster', I.Q Hunter has identified that "SF as a cinematic genre is .. difficult to distinguish from horror" (1995: 5). (As Paul Theberge details in Chapter 7 of this anthology, the work of contemporary director David Cronenberg exemplifies this char acterisation.) Hunter also argues that Sci-Fi cinema deviates from "more optimistic and technologically gung-ho" strands of SF literature by drawing on Gothic themes and "often complements horror's fearful attitudes to science and the future" (ibid) . With the exception of the ambiguous idealism of Space is the place (19 72 - discussed in Chapter 4), the selection of post-War cinematic works analysed in this book certainly conform to this categorisa tion (and Sontag's earlier identification of disaster as a key element in the genre). While there cannot be said to be a musical genre of SF as such, Maxim Jakubowski (1999) has provided a short survey of uses of Science Fiction themes and settings in 18th-20th Century western art music that shows that Sci-Fi's exotic elements have attracted a series of composers to write material that variously references and/or is imaginatively inspired by futur ism and/or other-worldliness. (While no clear generic conventions appear to have emerged out of this work, or influenced cinema music to any apprecia ble extent, this body of music merits further analysis in its own right). Although the starting point of the contemporary genre of Science Fiction has been the subject of dispute, the work of the European writers Jules Verne and H.G. Wells is usually regarded as pioneering its emergence as a popular genre. Verne's novels 'De la terre a la Lune' ('From the Earth to the Moon') (1869) and 'Autour de la Lune' ('A Trip around the Moon') (1870) provided themes that were interpreted in the earliest example of Sci-Fi cinema, George Mdies's Le Voyage dans la Lune ('A Trip to the Moon') (1902)6 and can be seen to have influenced productions such as Fritz Lang's Die Frau im Mand ('The Woman in the Moon' 7 ) (1928) and a series of subsequent, synch-sound 3 / PHILIP HAYWARD era films. Lang's 1926 film, Metropolis - a cautionary story of a future, industrially dominated dystopia - is generally regarded as the most spec tacular production of the pre-WW2 era. Made on a large budget over two-year period by the German state-operated film company UFA, the original (German-release) version was over three hour in length and featured dramatic futuristic city sets and mechanical technologies together with a special effects sequence showing the creation of a robotic female. As befits such a costly project, souvenir brochures, publicity stunts and extensive press coverage accompanied the international release of the film. As with many major films of the period, a music score was commissioned for performance by a small orchestral ensemble at major first-run theatres (with a single piano version available for smaller venues8) . The music for the film was written by German composer Gottfried Huppertz and drew on estab lished scoring traditions to emphasise dramatic and narrative aspects of the film (rather than the futuristic strangeness of its scenarios). Extracts from the orchestral score were recorded for what appears to have been the first Sci-Fi film music released on record, in the form of two 78rpm disks put out on the Vox label. Emphasising its promotion function, the first disk featured Lang speaking about the film on the a-side, with the main theme from Metropolis on the b . A second disk features a waltz from Metropolis on the a-side and 'phantastic' dance and a 'dance macabre' on the b .