Introduction

Notes Introduction 1. Mathematically speaking. See the work of Georg Cantor, which also inspired a musical ‘set theory’ promoted by Howard Hanson, Allen Forte, and Milton Babbitt. 2. I used to maintain and repair towering 35 mm mag dub machines at American Zoetrope Studios. They were loud, noisy, and sometimes finicky machines that were a marvel of mechanical engineering. These machines served the film business faithfully for many decades. It is not within the scope of this book, but there is a ‘tangible’ element that has been lost with the move to all-digital workflows. It would be fascinating to correlate this mechanical element with film music and queerness as well. 3. Vampires, beyond being a humorous bon mot here, have an established connection with queer fascinations, as discussed in Benshoff’s Monsters in the Closet. 4. For more on the Code, homosexuality, and ‘sexual perversion,’ see Schumach (1964). 5. This oversimplification neglects sociomusicology, ethnomusicology, and comparative musicology, which predate the 1970s, and other developments; unfortunately I have not enough space here to embark on a complete historiography of the field. 6. I don’t believe that we can accurately date such tropes at all; it is pure speculation. Consider that we have tropes for imitating birds during the Renaissance, as heard in ‘Le chant des oiseaux’ by Clément Janequin. And while clever, even that had likely been done before, even if we lack the sheet music to prove it. Tropes and imitations like this may date to the dawn of humanity. 7. Musical signification was an awkward topic for scholars who resisted the new musicology. ‘Nonprofessionals are extremely adept at comprehending and even explaining affect and rhetoric in music, while professionals tend to divide into two camps: those who think they are above such nonsense and who supply formal explanations for everything they hear, and those who have not surrendered their conviction that music signifies but who have kept this carefully hidden, rather as though they were adults who still believe in the Tooth Fairy’ (McClary 1991: 22). 8. Imagine the possibilities of a queer reading of Sony’s The Interview (2014) and its surrounding political and corporate intrigue. 9. For a discussion of ‘diegetic’ music, the ‘fantastical gap,’ and ‘liminal space,’ see the work of Robynn Stilwell. A ‘sound advance’ and ‘prelap’ are the same thing: music (or dialogue or sound effects) begins before a picture cut, and draws us in to the next scene. ‘Procedural’ music, as in a crime or legal drama, marks time or keeps something ‘alive’ during scenes with low action but nar- rative necessity. ‘Perspective’ is any sound treatment, like reverb or EQ, used 227 228 Notes to position ‘diegetic’ music into an acoustic space in the onscreen world; as music moves through the ‘fantastical gap,’ ‘perspective’ may be applied to make music less part of the ‘foreground’ and more a part of an ‘ambience.’ 10. Some of these latter arguments and criticisms are sourced, summarized, and quoted in Flinn (1992: 39). 11. I am indebted to musicologist Ben Winters for this observation, which we discussed at the 2014 Music and the Moving Image conference. 12. See Bryan Magee, The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy, especially discussion of Schopenhauer’s influence on Wagner, Wagner’s criticisms of Italian opera, and Wagner’s own changing beliefs in the role of music in the staged music drama. Wagner’s operas were a reaction to those wherein the impor- tance of the orchestra had become secondary. 13. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking at Columbia University, said, ‘In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals, like in your country’ (http://www. cnn.com/2007/US/09/24/us.iran/index.html reported 9/24/07, accessed 13 October 2014). 1. Louisiana Story, Homoeroticism, and Americana 1. For a broad and reputable survey, see Reed (2011). 2. For an extensive discussion of the Motion Picture Production Code, see Schumach (1964). 3. See Hubbs (2004) for more on this circle of influential gay composers. 4. Some of these photographs can be seen in Rotha (1983: 277–78), and in Louisiana Story: The Reverse Angle. 5. For an extensive discussion of ‘erotic age orientation’ and distinctions between pedophilia, hebephilia, ephebophilia, teleiophilia, and geron- tophilia, see the work of evolutionary psychologist Jesse Bering (2013: 169–208). 6. The painter Maurice Grosser (1903–1986), Virgil Thomson’s most significant longtime lover and companion, was seven years younger than Virgil. 7. I wish to reemphasize that there is nothing uniquely homosexual about an appreciation of youthful beauty. From an evolutionary standpoint, repro- ductive ability is maximized during a youthful age (see Bering 2013: 199). 8. Louisiana Story’s film editor, Helen van Dongen, criticized Flaherty’s script that made the boy’s father seem ‘simpleminded’ by making his language more ‘primitive,’ and she questioned whether this emphasis was ‘a leftover from behavior of primitive people such as the Eskimos or the natives of Samoa’ that were similarly exploited or stereotyped in other Flaherty films (van Dongen 1998: 31). 9. Van Dongen recalls, ‘The sounds that are used were recorded on the rig, on discs, by Benji Donniger, the sound cameraman. I asked him to record everything, the general sounds, the individual sounds – to put the microphone everyplace. Tape recorders were not yet in existence. We used a disc recorder because of the difficulty of getting constant electricity, the distance from source of power to the recorder being rather long. It couldn’t be used as it was, so I had to re-record all that onto film separately in a recording studio before I could even start working with it. Some of it had to be slowed down Notes 229 a little because of the unevenness of the electricity’ (Achtenberg and von Dongen 1976: 51). 10. Arguably, the sound construction begins with the steady chugging of derrick machinery at 0:22:38, towards the tail end of Reel 3. For technical reasons, film sound cannot continue across a reel change, so the audio ducks out briefly and begins again at the start of the next reel. Reel 4 begins at 0:25:20 and runs until 0:35:23, running a full ten minutes. If one includes the chugging on Reel 3, van Dongen’s sound construction runs roughly 12:40. 11. Van Dongen recalls, ‘This sequence had to be edited in New York where I took it because we had no sound equipment in Louisiana. Flaherty was a little suspicious about that because it meant that I was out of his con- trol’ (Achtenberg and van Dongen 1976: 51). Furthermore, while it is easy to regard Flaherty as an ‘auteur,’ this is an example of how some of his most powerful work was accomplished within a complex, collaborative environment. 12. Musicologist Neil Lerner argues that ‘only a small proportion of Thomson’s score for The River consists of originally composed music; most of Thomson’s melodies are taken from hymns, folk songs, and popular tunes with which he had become familiar through a study of the region’s music’ (Lerner 1999: 105). Similarly in Louisiana Story, much of the raw melodic material is provided through folk tunes, but this has a long tradition in Western concert music; consider Gustav Mahler’s adoption of ‘Frère Jacques’ in his first symphony, Johannes Brahms’ ‘Hungarian Dances,’ and Percy Grainger’s ‘Country Gardens.’ The way the melodic material is manipulated moves it away from its folk music origins, and towards original Western art music compositions. 13. Manvell and Huntley propose seven categories of what they call ‘functional music’ for film. They are: ‘Music and Action; Scenic and Place music; Period and Pageant music; Music for Dramatic Tension; Comedy music; Music of Human Emotion; and Music in Cartoon and Specialized Film’ (Manvell and Huntley 1957: 73). 14. Hollywood film music is widely regarded as a direct descendant of German– Austrian art music, specifically Mahler, Strauss, and Brahms, via Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Waxman, and Max Steiner. 15. Following established convention, bracketed figures [1D] indicate sections and rehearsal marks as indicated in the score. ‘mm’ indicates measure num- bers as used in the score. Timings in parentheses (0:07:24) reflect timings from the commercially released DVD of Louisiana Story, and these timings include the bumper for film restoration credits that has been inserted at the beginning of the video file. 16. For a discussion of the bar sheet or bar chart in animation, see Dubowsky (2011). 17. Such contrapuntal textures such as the fugue have often been discouraged in film music. ‘For the composer of concert music, changing to the medium of celluloid does bring certain special pitfalls. For example, melodic inven- tion, highly prized in the concert hall, may at times be distracting in certain film situations. Even phrasing in the concert manner, which would nor- mally emphasize the independence of separate contrapuntal lines, may be distracting when applied to screen accompaniments. In orchestration there 230 Notes are many subtleties of timbre – distinctions meant to be listened to for their own expressive quality in an auditorium – which are completely wasted on sound track’ (Copland 1957b: 259). 18. For a discussion of the baroque fugue form, its construction, and explanations of related terminology, see Owen (1992: 230–66), one of many good counterpoint texts. 2. Musical Cachet in The Living End and the New Queer Cinema 1. In particular, note Altman’s book on Silent Film Sound; Mera’s work on Mychael Danna’s The Ice Storm with its attention to the scoring process and computer files; Goldmark’s various work on Tin Pan Alley and music in cartoons; and Wierzbicki’s detailed Film Music: A History.

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