Phillip Barry Taig
The Musicality of The Sublime Romantic sensibilities in film music
The Conservatorium of Music (Musicology)
The University of Sydney
A thesis submitted to fulfil requirements for the degree of Master of Music (musicology) by research
Awarded 11/01/2021
2
I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and that all the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources have been acknowledged.
Phillip Taig 28/9/2020 3
In acknowledgment and in dedication
I am grateful to all the staff of the musicology department and at the Conservatorium of Music, Sydney, for sharing their knowledge and welcoming me in friendship. In particular, I am extremely grateful for the scholarship, wisdom and friendship of my supervisor, Associate Professor Goetz Richter. His guidance and understanding of music and philosophy proved potent and perceptive time and time again.
I dedicate this work to my wife, Julie, without whom I would not know love and the true value of living life well. It was she who encouraged me to undertake this study, and supported me with her brilliant mind, her musicianship, and her enthusiasm for embracing opportunity. She is the true beginning of my passions. 4
CONTENTS
Title page 1 Acknowledgment and dedication 3 Contents 4 Abstract 6
INTRODUCTION 7 A beginning… 8 Symphonic orchestral film music 10 A concise history 11 Matters not so straightforward 13 The Aesthetic 15 The Romantic DNA 16 Adumbration of the argument 20 A brief summary of the philosophical argument 24
CHAPTER ONE 26 Symphonic orchestral film music 26 Exemplars 27 A note of clarification 33
CHAPTER TWO—PHILOSOPHICAL 38 Das Musikalische 38 Schiller’s concept of Das Musikalische 39 Spieltrieb 41 Extension of the concept of musikalische 43 Musical and language 45 The Crisis of the Enlightenment 51 The political aesthetics of Romanticism 54 New Mythology, Longing and the Sublime 61
CHAPTER THREE—HISTORICAL 68 A history of the dark sublime aesthetic From philosophy, to art, to entertainment 68 An emerging gothic sensibility 69 Gothic Noir and the Sublime 77 Symphonic Music and the Gothic Noir 79 Victorian Melodrama 84 Melodrama in film 89 Underscoring film 92
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CHAPTER FOUR 96 A mythological interpretation of a symphonic aesthetic 96 An identity crisis 99 Thinking about mythology 101 The character of mythical thinking 104 Wagner’s new mythology 108 The philosophical complexion of mythology 110 Like a chorus in a tragedy 114 Nietzsche’s insight and film music 116 Wagner’s take on mythology 119 Wagner’s force of musicality 122 Myth making at Bayreuth 125 Wagner and filmic Leitmotive 127
CHAPTER FIVE 136 Romanticism applied: a brief interlude 136 The novella and the film 139 Personal cinematic experience 143
CHAPTER SIX 147 Romanticism applied: two examples explicated 147 Opening credits on Bond 148 Bond as Don Juan 150 Film music and mood 152 Apollo and Dionysius fight for Gotham 154 Pan-diatonic harmony transformed 158 Musical gestures and tropes 162
CONCLUSION 166
YOUTUBE REFERENCES 169
FILMOGRAPHY 172
BIBLIOGRAPHY 174
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ABSTRACT
This thesis gives a cultural and philosophical account of the meaning of music through the analysis of romantic film music as it underscores dramatic, narrative film. The argument is furnished by thinkers and poets of the Romantic revolution in thought, language and sensibility that took place at the end of the eighteenth century and into the first third of the nineteenth century. The main claim is that romantic orchestral music is particularly suited, and has become ubiquitous as a standard, for expressing the darkness of the human heart; exhilarated and awed by the thrills and terrors of the sublime; elated and tortured by its pleasures and pains; recognizing that even happiness, pleasure and love are underwritten by the dark reality of our divided selves engaging a world riven by contradictions.
Schiller’s conception of das Musikalische, as a pre-conceptual reflection of the importance of music, provides a potent starting point for this argument. The ability of music to express a characteristic darkness, which finds its way into romantic orchestral film music, is enlisted precisely because only it can express such darkness in consonance with the existential and chiaroscuro darkness of film and cinematic experience as a spectacle of the sublime.
Chapter one cites some examples of symphonic orchestral film music in order to locate the style of music to be discussed. Chapter two presents a philosophical argument that justifies the main claims of the thesis. Chapter three presents a concise historical account, connecting the dark sublime of romantic literary practice with the evolution of dark themes in popular entertainment, leading eventually to the films of Hollywood’s Golden Era. Chapter four connects the mythological programme of Wagner’s conception of music drama with the New Mythology of the Romantics, and demonstrates how this programme came to influence symphonic film music. Chapters five and six give a musical and filmic analysis that illustrates the claims made throughout the thesis. Chapter five examines an instance of music composed in the late-Romantic period being applied to a film. Chapter six gives a detailed analysis of two films that demonstrate abundantly the application of a dark sublime aesthetic to cinematic experience through the use of symphonic orchestral film music, and extends the insights gained to other, illustrative examples.
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INTRODUCTION
The studio executives were concerned about Merian C. Cooper and Ernest
B. Schoedsack’s film King Kong (1933).1 Willis O’Brien’s animated model of King Kong rampaging through a model New York was drawing derisive laughter from test audiences rather than gasps of horror. Viewed in silence (watch the clip with the mute on), the technics of animation seemed ridiculous. Their solution was to call upon the services of the composer, Max Steiner, who was tasked with the composition of music that would instil terror in the hearts of the audience as they watched King
Kong rampage through the metropolis of New York. (Now watch the same clip with the sound turned up.)
Steiner was to find in King Kong a film, “…made for music—one which allowed you to do anything and everything.” It proved to be a watershed moment in the underscoring of film (at least in Hollywood legend), for
Steiner had demonstrated resoundingly that music had, “…the power to add a dimension of reality to a basically unrealistic situation…”2.
What can Steiner’s assessment of film and music tell us about the
1 King Kong (1933) – Climbing the Empire State Building Scene (9/10)/Movieclips, accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 3:33, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qkahQVFzMI 2 Christopher Palmer, The Composer in Hollywood. (London, New York, Marion 2Boyars: Christopher 1990 )Palmer, 27-8 The Composer in Hollywood. (London, New York, Marion Boyars: 1990) 27-8 3 James Wierzbicki, Film Music: A History. (New York & London, Routledge, 2009). 8 complicated relationship between music and meaning?
A beginning...
The critical thinking motivating this thesis began with the simple observation that symphonic orchestral film music is a widespread, ubiquitous choice of filmmakers, composers and orchestrators for underscoring filmic creations. Whether that creation is a film shown in the cinema, broadcast on television, streamed online, or an action-packed game played on a computer, symphonic orchestral film music seems to be the go-to choice for underscoring dramatic emotions in any context that evokes the complex interior feelings typically associated with the darkened, chiaroscuro cinema.
To anticipate somewhat the conclusion of this thesis, an argument will be put forward that symphonic orchestral film music trades principally in a dark sublime aesthetic that says something radical and profound about our subjective experience in the world and our contemporary culture. Of course, there is no one definitive description of subjective experience, given that it is particular to each individual. But a general account can be given with some measure of confidence, because there are experiences identifiable through objective and communicable processes, demonstrably 9 held in common through the power of imagination and memory, creatively and discursively recreated in the arts and sciences.
In the case of this thesis, the common experience to which it will be argued that symphonic orchestral film music refers is the experience of conflicting emotions, connected with the rise of a self-consciously individual response to the unprecedented social and political changes wrought by the advent of modernity in the age of revolutions from the seventeenth-century onwards. In particular, we will derive our understanding of this feeling of autonomous individuality from the romantic revolution in thought and sensibility that arose in response to world-shaping events such as the American Revolution (1775-1781), the
French Revolution (1789), and the Industrial Revolution that evolved and expanded throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from its beginning in mid-eighteenth century England. This romantic revolution formed in response to the Enlightenment concept of universal critical reason, the universal declaration of the ‘Rights of Man’, and the social implications of the application of critical reason to technologies that both promise and threaten freedom.
The most potent and varied articulation of this romanticism, to which we will refer, is that of the thinkers and poets who have been identified 10 posthumously by such nominations as Weimar classicism, German
Idealism and philosophical Romanticism. Particularly during the intellectually vibrant decade of the 1790s, these principally German- speaking thinkers and poets articulated a new concept of culture that would interpret the social and political changes of a burgeoning modern transatlantic community in works of philosophy and art that knowingly constituted a shared reality. That is, our facility for language and the arts expressed a broader facility for constituting our shared world in programmes of creative action, and was not merely a symbolic tool for representing an already formed and ideationally conceived pool of objects.
Symphonic orchestral film music
How is this romantic revolution of relevance to symphonic orchestral film music? Filmmaking, viewed in the critical context of this thesis, should not be seen as the piecing together and co-operation of separate disciplines. Rather, it represents a practice of critical thinking, generating themes that further cultural life. Such critical practice opens up perspectives in the aesthetic, social and political fabric of a cultures’ artistic practice and achievements.
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From the perspective opened up by this thesis, it will be seen that symphonic orchestral film music partakes of an aesthetic that transfigures emotional pain into a pleasure that can be expressed in artistic achievement. Symphonic orchestral film music provides a superlative underscore for such a transfiguration. Romantic love, characterised by broiling feelings whetted by the erotic yearnings, is a classic subject of this transfiguration, but it is beyond the scope of this thesis, which is focused on the political expression of this dark aesthetic. It is the purpose of this thesis to explore the origin and theoretical workings of this aesthetic, and to establish its character for future creative research.
A concise history
In order to locate in our minds the kind of film music that forms the centre of our interest, let us quickly review the historical happenstance.
Symphonic orchestral underscoring for film was ‘crystallised’ as a cinematic standard around 1938-93 by predominantly European émigré composers and orchestrators who worked in the creative hothouse conditions of Hollywood’s studio system from the late-twenties to the mid-sixties. The musical apprenticeship of these composers and orchestrators was immersed in the late-Romanticism of the late-nineteenth
3 James Wierzbicki, Film Music: A History. (New York & London, Routledge, 2009). 189 12 century. It shaped their compositional and orchestration technique, their aesthetic sensibility, and their individual responses to the demands of filmmaking, including their engagement with the various musical and wider artistic trends circulating during the first half of the twentieth century.4 Composers like Max Steiner, Erich Korngold, Franz Waxman,
Bernard Herrmann, Adolphe Deutsche, Dimitri Tiomkin, Miklós Rózsa,
Benjamin Frankel, Hans Salter and Bronislaw Kaper, along with their
American born colleagues, Alfred Newman and Victor Young, bequeathed to cinematic history and contemporary culture the, “…the sonic texture of Golden Age Hollywood.”5
This historical explanation needs to be extended further by noting the rise of a ‘New Hollywood’ from the seventies onwards—after a small hiatus in the sixties, brought about by the economic decline of the old studio system, that forced filmmakers to use popular music, synthesized soundscapes, and smaller musical resources to underscore their films.
Symphonic orchestral film music as a cinematic standard, however,
“never really went away.”6 Beginning notably with John William’s award-winning scores for blockbusters like Jaws (1975) and Star Wars
4 Kathryn Kalinak, Film Music : a Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 5 Alex Ross, “Surround Sound: Erich Wolfgang Korngold, long dismissed as a Hollywood relic, has a resurgence”. The New Yorker, Aug. 19, 2019 66. 6 James Wierzbicki, Film Music: A History 189 13
(1977), filmmakers capitalised on the nostalgic cinematic experience that had been established by Golden Age Hollywood as the recipe for commercial success. The filmmakers, composers and orchestrators of
‘New Hollywood’—and subsequent film composers up to now— effectively renewed the nostalgic cinematic experience by reinstating and reinterpreting symphonic orchestral underscoring to suit constantly evolving contemporary tastes, while avoiding the overblown sentimentalism that had been a potential flaw of the more melodramatic side of Golden Age Hollywood. Composers like John Williams, James
Horner, Alan Silvestri, John Barry, Jerry Goldsmith, Alexandre Desplat,
Rachel Portman, Hans Zimmer, Howard Shore, Thomas Newman, David
Arnold, Michael Giachinno, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Patrick Doyle, Hildur
Gu∂nadóttir, Terence Blanchard and Isobel Waller-Bridge embraced (and continue to embrace) this nostalgic heritage and have provided fresh interpretations of Hollywood’s symphonic legacy.
Matters not so straightforward
It should be noted, however, that though this historical account is necessary in order to understand the phenomenon, it is nevertheless not sufficient to understand the aesthetic. It is the wager of this thesis, as it were, that we can only fully understand the aesthetic that is best 14 communicated through symphonic orchestral film music by referring to the romantic revolution in thought and sensibility driven by the German thinkers and poets of the 1790s.
The late-Romantic style of Classic Hollywood was itself prone to overblown statement and subsequent oversentimentality. Even the filmmakers and composers of Hollywood’s Golden Age were aware of this problem, and started to write music that had a psychological edge in genres like film noir and psychological thrillers. This approach ensured that stylistically the use of symphonic orchestral underscoring moved beyond its classic era, and created an aesthetic standard that persists in giving filmic content the classic and nostalgic qualities of gravitas, elegance, a timeless beauty, a whirlpool of stirring emotions, in whatever interpretation of that aesthetic at whatever period of filmmaking. If the classic Hollywood composers had not taken these steps, such a compositional filmic approach would have faded away as a historical, nostalgic curiosity. A deeper understanding of the dark sublime aesthetic of symphonic orchestral film music is therefore required in order to understand the enduring cultural presence and importance of this style of film music.
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The Aesthetic
In a practical sense, establishing the character of this aesthetic is difficult because film music can be used for a wide range of purposes, from expressing emotions to marking out the historical period of a storyline.
This problem is compounded by the possible use of the same piece of music for many different scenarios. Let us take John Williams’ scoring for a discrete section in the Star Wars franchise, The Starkiller, Episode
VII: The Force Awakens (2015),7 where he uses a string orchestra in a piece that seems to tip its hat to Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.
The piece could be used to underscore either a moment of tender love or despairing sadness, a moment of departure or homecoming, the death of a loved one or the realisation that danger is over and that one has survived.
In this case, however, Williams composes a delicate piece of string music to underscore a moment of sheer horror (reminding one that Barber’s
Adagio was often heard underscoring the news coverage of the September
11 bombings of the World Tower in 2001). The Evil Empire is using its superior technology to destroy the Hosnian System, an entire planetary system, in order to terrorise their enemies and launch the final stage of their quest to destroy the Republic forever and achieve universal
7 Star Wars Episode VII – Destruction of the Hosnian System, accessed September 28, 2020, Youtube video, 0:44, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAkJtHKttc 16 domination. The fragile and exquisite beauty of Williams’ music intensifies, to the point of being unbearable, the sheer horror of the moment as we witness pure evil and feel viscerally the catastrophe of countless individuals loosing their lives and worlds at a stroke. As we will see, this juxtaposition of beauty with evil, pain and pleasure, is a common trope and fundamental principle determining the aesthetic of symphonic orchestral film music.
The Romantic DNA
As we stated above, the historical explanation is necessary to understand where the techniques and aesthetics of composition for the definitive classic Hollywood style came from, but it is not sufficient to understand the character and broader cultural significance of the symphonic orchestral aesthetic. For this level of understanding, we need to focus on the use of symphonic orchestral film music for underscoring dramatic cinematic emotions, and call upon the themes and ideas generated by philosophical and literary romanticism, from the late eighteenth-century onwards into the ‘long’ nineteenth-century, creating a sensibility fit for a remodelled subjectivity that is both emancipated and enslaved, attracted to and repelled, by the unprecedented technological and social changes heralded by the advent of modernity.
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In short, symphonic orchestral film music is superlative at expressing a dark sublime, romantic aesthetic that captures a key part of our inner lives conducted in juxtaposition to a morally ambiguous world. Romanticism is in the DNA of symphonic orchestral film music.
Curiously enough, it is this romantic heritage that gives (so the current author argues in consonance with Max Steiner’s claim mentioned above) symphonic orchestral film music the “…the power to add a dimension of reality to a basically unrealistic situation.”8 Its power resides in its being heard, not seen. It is felt in the darkness of each person’s interior life.9
Although film and its relatives are artificial creations, intended either to edify or entertain, when symphonic orchestral film music is added to the mix, it expresses musically the dark sublime aesthetic that captures the passions and grit of our interior life, fractured10 as it is by the tension between personal desire and what other people want from us. This is our inescapable reality. In a more basic sense of watching a film, the music of an underscore both
8 Christopher Palmer, The Composer in Hollywood. 27-8 9 Friedrich A. Kittler, The God of Ears, in Kittler Now: Current Perspectives in Kittler Studies, trans. By Paul Feigelfeld and Anthony More, ed. Stephen Sale and Laura Salisbury. (England: Polity Press, 2015) 3 and 16 10 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution [Rev. ed.]. (Harmondsworth [England: Penguin, 1974). 80 18
“…follows the action and at the same time connotes it…in other words
(it) transfers to the aural channel also information that is visible, thus
characterising the way the audience sees.”11
Creatively using the ideas and themes derived from the thinkers and poets of the romantic revolution, we will argue that the strong determining factor in the application of a symphonic orchestral aesthetic to cinematic creations—discernable in principle—is a force of musicality active in all aspects of filmmaking and the worldly dynamic which filmmaking mirrors.
The theoretical underpinnings for this concept of the force of musicality will be given in the philosophical chapter, through the writings of
Friedrich Schiller. This force expresses well a dark sublime aesthetic that was articulated critically and richly by these romantic thinkers and artists who had witnessed the fragmentation of society and personal lives by the unprecedented social, political and cultural changes brought about by the advent of modernity. (It may be expected that reference to Adorno and
Eisler’s book, Composing for the Films, would be apt here, given
Adorno’s generally accepted status as a cultural commentator on
11 Alessandra Campana, “To Look Again (at Don Giovanni).” Chapter. In The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera, edited by Anthony R. DelDonna and Pierpaolo Polzonetti, 140–52. Cambridge Companions to Music. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). doi:10.1017/CCOL9780521873581.009. 145 19 modernity and Eisler’s experience as a composer and philosopher.
Adorno’s elitist championing of particular composers as being more worthy of listening to than others, however, betrays an unquestioned ideology that makes him unwieldy to accommodate in the limited scope of this present thesis.)
We will argue that our present articulation of the force of musicality and its dark sublime aesthetic is the substance of what Steiner referred to when he said that music had “…the power to add a dimension of reality to a basically unrealistic situation.”12 This is not to say that film composers are necessarily aware of this romantic heritage when they compose film scores. Rather, these two remnants of the romantic heritage, the force of musicality and the dark sublime aesthetic, are effective hermeneutic tools by which filmic experience can be better understood as a cultural phenomenon.
This added dimension of reality is not merely the power of music to engage the emotions, but rather the “fact” (as the most influential romantic music critic of the early nineteenth century E. T. A. Hoffmann felt it to be) that “its sole subject is the infinite.” Precisely because music, unlike painting or poetry, has no necessary model in nature, it
12 Christopher Palmer, The Composer in Hollywood 27-8 20
“…discloses to man an unknown realm, a world that has nothing in
common with the external sensual world that surrounds him, a world in
which he leaves behind him all definite feelings to surrender himself to
an inexpressible longing.”13
In opposition to “the external sensual world,” then, music provides access to the inner spiritual world—but only if it resists all temptation to represent the outer world.14 This is the essentially romantic factor in articulating the dark sublime aesthetic.
An adumbration of the argument
I will focus on the key points that will demonstrate and prove my argument, while positing only those alternative considerations that are requisite for constituting the context for this argument. Once again, the claim of this thesis and its substantiation is proffered in the spirit of supporting future creative research. In arguing this thesis, I follow
13 Hoffmann quoted in Strunk, W. Oliver, Source Readings in Music History. 5. The Romanitc Era New York: W. W. Norton, 1965. 775 14 Richard Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music Ch. 12 The First Romantics Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 12 The First Romantics." In Music In The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.). Retrieved 19 Sep. 2020, from https://www-oxfordwesternmusic- com.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/view/Volume2/actrade-9780195384826-chapter- 12.xml 21
Nicholas Cook15 in his caveat to those who think that empirical evidence in humanity studies are the ultimate and only acceptable proof in argument. He says that,
“…though there is a certain amount of empirical material that can be
brought to bear upon this, much of what follows is introspective…but the
reader is invited to validate, or refute, what is said by checking it against
their own experience.”
Socially and individually relevant validation through psychological interiority and introspection is a hallmark of the modern revolutions in thought and action, and symphonic orchestral film music and its dark sublime aesthetic are principally the result of a modern social and existential dynamic.
This thesis, therefore, is not a technical how-to-compose-for-film tract: the current author lacks the requisite expertise and experience. It is a philosophical and musicological examination of the dark sublime aesthetic that is principally expressed by symphonic orchestral film music, and an argument for its importance in defining subjectivity in our contemporary world and its cultural sphere.
15 Nicholas Cook, Music, Imagination and Culture, (New York, Oxford Clarendon Press,1990). 85 22
Previous examinations of the importance and influence of the classic
Hollywood film score tend to round off their enquiry by making the late-
Romantic origin of the style and technique of such music the fundamental explanation. As important as this realisation is for understanding this music and its place in filmmaking, it is not sufficient.
The argument of the thesis will be structured in the following way. A short, preliminary chapter will outline the various possible uses of symphonic orchestral film music to express a dark sublime aesthetic, by citing some examples from the history of filmmaking.
The second chapter will give the main philosophical argument for the romanticism of the aesthetic promoted by symphonic orchestral film music.
The third chapter will give a focused history on how this aesthetic moved from the romantic period, via its transformation into gothic and melodramatic literature and theatre, to the popular and avant garde entertainments of the twentieth century, especially film. In particular, we will see how melodramatic theatre practices established the basic techniques of musical underscoring for dramatic narrative, and how this influenced the advent of the classical Hollywood film score. 23
The fourth chapter will complete this history philosophically by looking at the complexion of the new mythology that Wagner sought in his creation of the Ring cycle. By critically underpinning Wagner’s achievement with
Nietzsche’s critical appraisal of culture based in the twin artistic principles of Apollo and Dionysius, the human facility for mythmaking will be placed in the broader context of the cinematic experience to come. That is, the unified artwork of Bayreuth foreshadowed the dark sublime and chiaroscuro quality of cinematic experience, all on the basis of a music heard, but not seen.
The fifth chapter is a simple interlude, demonstrating how the romantic sensibility that forged the modern individual is applicable to film by using an established piece of late-Romantic composition. The example has persuasive power because it is a combination of Visconti’s film Death in
Venice, based in Thomas Mann’s rich novella of the same name, and
Mahler’s Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony. Mann’s philosophical criticism provides the glue for this account, giving us a strong sense of the dark sublime aesthetic that is possible through symphonic music.
The sixth and final chapter will cite several examples of symphonic orchestral film music, and give an analysis of the fundamental sound of 24 the dark sublime aesthetic in terms of transformational pan-diatonic harmonies.
A brief summary of the philosophical argument
In this thesis, a philosophical argument will be put forward that symphonic orchestral film music is a dominant standard in filmmaking and underscoring because it expresses and communicates a dark sublime aesthetic that is of relevance to us, products as we are of the various modern revolutions in society, politics, technology and culture. Romantic love and popular culture partake in this standard, the focus of this thesis, insofar as love, pleasure and humour are underwritten by worldly tensions and contradictions that are the subject matter and emotional motor of this dark sublime aesthetic.
This aesthetic refers back ultimately (even if unconsciously) to the critical and cultural intentions of philosophical Romanticism, articulating a worldly presence for the fractured interior of personal emotional life, the ironic, but sublime foundation for a free individual autonomy continually threatened by the tension between personal desires and socially-imposed demands.
In conjunction with this philosophical Romantic context, we will more concretely argue that symphonic orchestral film music transfigures the 25 experienced darkness of the cinematic environment that envelopes the audience and the chiaroscuro presentation of the narrative on the silver screen into the personal darkness of our interior life, by dint of music transfigured as sublime passion.
That is, the aesthetic of symphonic orchestral film music, in conjunction with all the other aspects of the art of filmmaking, transfigures the individual beyond the darkened room of the cinema into the imaginative, intellectual and affective sphere of a culturally shaped world.
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CHAPTER ONE Symphonic orchestral film music
It is important to establish in our minds, ears and memory the kind of film music to which the current author is referring in writing this thesis. As we have already stated, symphonic orchestral film music is ubiquitous simply because it is principally and practically the go-to style of music used for underscoring dramatic, filmic emotion. More particularly, in this thesis we will be arguing that the aesthetic quality of this overwhelmingly widespread choice is due to its romantic heritage: not so much as a necessarily conscious choice on the part of composers, orchestrators and filmmakers, but as a cultural heritage that permeates artistic endeavour in the modern age and our own time.
The romantic heritage of symphonic orchestral film music gives it a great capacity for expressing the dark sublime character of human existence and our emotional responses to that existence.
As a shorthand reference point, the dark sublime plumbs the depths of human passion, ultimately inaccessible by the light of worldly action and rational discourse, transfiguring the pains of existence into pleasures that are expressible as an aesthetic sensibility in the world. In practice, this connects symphonic orchestral film music, as a correlate to all the various 27 elements that constitute filmmaking, to the complexity of worldly existence reflected in filmmaking. The underscoring of film with symphonic orchestral film music is a correlate to our aesthetic response to our worldly existence.
Exemplars
Let us look at a few pertinent examples of how symphonic orchestral film music, and its romantic heritage and aesthetic, is used in film. The basic late-Romantic techniques and aesthetic of the classic Hollywood film score are so well established that they constitute a nostalgic expectation for film buffs. Constantly evolving chromaticism within the basic cadential structure of western tonality leads the ear to hear the promise of resolution being deferred continually. Whether it is the straightforward arpeggiating of a diminished seventh chord, moving stepwise by semi- tones through the three possible forms of this chord-type:
Or the use of augmented, diminished, major or minor triads on top of a pedal point, a diminished seventh chord, or any other variation on the 28 dominant seventh chord, setting up the tension of an expected perfect cadence, but never resolving in order to maintain this tension:
There is also the basic practice of expanding and contracting triads, one, two or three notes at a time, to make a progression to key centres that are dictated by the cycle of fifths. This gives also gives us a bass line progression of an interval of a third, rather than the usual cycle of fifths, in what Richard Cohn calls ‘the triad’s second nature.’16
This is the harmonic language of horror films, film noir, melodrama, adventure and psychological thrillers.
16 Richard Cohn, Audacious Euphony : Chromaticism and the Consonant Triad’s Second Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) p. ix onwards 29
Consider this scene from Robert Z. Leonard’s film The King’s Thief
(1955), with a film score composed by Miklós Rózsa, which gives all the basic late-Romantic elements of this approach to classic film scoring. The tension of the music underpins the anxiety of watching a man attempting a seemingly impossible task by climbing out of a dungeon. Diminished chords ascend in anguished struggle, with the man symbolised by a chromatically ascending melody line, beginning from the bottom again each time the man fails in his ascent.17
Let us consider Miklós Rózsa’s film score for Robert Aldrich’s 1962 film
Sodom and Gomorrah.18 This classic and dramatic use of late-Romantic chromaticism, rather than a strip-tease saxophone howl or a cheesy
Cockney ditty, tells you right from the start that this scene of plastered debauchery will not end well by the film’s conclusion. Use the other kind of music, and you are telling an entirely different story, as we saw in the example from John William’s score for The Force Awakens, quoted in the introduction. Horror films, like Erle C. Kenton’s 1944 film The House of
Frankenstein,19 with a score by Hans J. Salter and Paul Dessau, create
17 The King’s Thief (Preview Clip), accessed September 28, 2020, Youtube video, 3:00, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmtJLo7XxBc&list=PLt4w97p9I0GGUwR3DlX 23A1Q4Czle9xFn 18 Sodom and Gomorrah. 1962. Full Movie, accessed September 28, 2020, Youtube video, 2:22:59, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rJTbb0rFCw 19 The House of Frankenstein (trailer), accessed September 28, 2020, Youtube video, 2:52, 30 late-Romantic tension right from the start, maintaining it by toggling between harsh chromaticism and melodramatic pathos.
The capacity of this style of film underscoring to take the audience through a range of emotions in a very short span of time is the trademark of classic Hollywood. Consider the opening credits and beginning of John
Huston’s 1941 film noir, The Maltese Falcon,20 with a film score by
Adolphe Deutsch. The film begins as it means to proceed and end, with a hard orchestral film score, taking us from the dark deeds of film noir, through the exotic story of intrigue with the Knights of Malta accompanied by a solo romantic violin, to the hustle and bustle of Los
Angeles streets using the clash and open sound of modern American and mid-twentieth century art music. The late-Romantic sensibility melds in with the chiaroscuro cinematography of film noir, melodrama and horror genres.
Or consider Bernard Herrmann’s opening score for Alfred Hitchcock’s
1958 film noir psychological thriller, Vertigo.21 Herrmann’s knowledge and skills as a composer and as a film composer allowed him to combine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeWfAC4kU3I&list=PLeeKR9EGkPHSvKJ9pE CykfWs3k6kAqCS_ 20 The Maltese Falcon (excerpt), accessed September 28, 2020, Youtube video, 4:05, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kk3Xvw7jn0&list=PLbaZ1iS15- nsrznPDjLIZO60whtAu41to 21 Vertigo (1958) title sequence, accessed September 28, 2020, Youtube video, 31 the dark romantic aesthetic of Hollywood with the uncanny modernism of the surreal. Here is an example of arpeggiated, augmented triads sounding over a counterpoint of lower brass in a transformational, pan-triadic relationship. His work remains a benchmark for film composing.
Symphonic orchestral film music brings the cultural authority of the opera house and the concert hall to a film, and can be used to establish a historical period. Consider Anatole Litvak’s 1940 melodrama, All This, and Heaven Too,22 with a film score by Max Steiner. Although the story gives some background to the 1848 revolution, grand cultural references are obtained by Steiner’s use of Gluck’s Armide Overture, while using all the musical tricks of romantic melodrama to capture the romance of true love.
Composers can play with historical styles to express a point of the narrative and its associated feelings. Dario Marianelli composes a score for Joe Wright’s 2005 interpretation of Jane Austen’s novel, Pride &
Prejudice, by mixing an original piano parlour piece, reminiscent of nineteenth-century soirees, with various shades of full romantic orchestration when Elizabeth (Keira Knightly) rejects Darcy’s (Matthew
22 All This and Heaven Too (trailer), accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 3:35, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTTqPiRqLhA 32
Macfadyen) marriage proposal (while being soaked with rain), and when
Elizabeth contemplates her life and the beauty of the English counties much later in the film. A romantic sensibility, both orchestral and parlour, underscores the film throughout; but the orchestration reflects the sensibility of a younger audience in 2005 watching a version of Pride &
Prejudice.23 This is what a competent composer does—he or she interprets the filmmaker’s intentions and the audiences’ expectations.
It is open to question whether or not a continual orchestral film score works. Consider Max Steiner’s endless and broiling late-Romantic score for King Vidor’s 1949 interpretation of Ayn Rand’s novel The
Fountainhead.24 Right from the beginning of the film, when a classical bust is smashed by Patricia Neal in contempt of classical artistic values, the passions broiling underneath the character facades are expressed by the continually unfolding chromaticism of Steiner’s music.
Now consider Patrick Doyle’s non-stop score for Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.25 Apart from establishing that
Branagh has set his Hamlet in the nineteenth-century, Doyle follows the
23 Pride and Prejudice (2005) – The Rain scene, accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 4:13, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZehXqer0-3k 24 The Fountainhead (trailer), accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 2:15, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cC0kGlIEfU&list=PLSFIzVRbXrdnP- gX7htgNOhrXfmCKOIF7 25 Hamlet 1.5 Hamlet and ghost, accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 3:20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g05x9X7mpcY 33 course of emotions with his music, but in a manner that could be described as a classic Hollywood cliché, and in danger at times of being mawkish.26
Consider the following example from the film, where Hamlet finally holds conference with his father, the ghost of Old Hamlet. What begins as a subtle underscoring of a dramatic tale, ends up as an homage to Elgar as
Hamlet swears to revenge his father’s death.
A note of clarification
Of course, the description of the classic Hollywood film score as ‘late-
Romantic’ is not entirely accurate. Film composers and orchestrators use any and all musical styles and techniques to fulfil their brief, portray the emotions of the filmic narrative, and still stay within orchestral parameters that express the dark sublime. Consider Victor Young’s score for George
Sidney’s 1952 swashbuckler, Scaramouche.27 The protagonist André
Moreau (Stewart Granger) flirts with Aline de Gavrillac (Janet Leigh), whose carriage has broken down, in a prolonged section of lovemaking that is underscored by a luscious string section playing the theme in closely written harmonies. French horns and woodwinds sustain notes as
26 Of course, there is no objectivity possible in making personal likes and dislikes known: I personally enjoy every aspect of Branagh’s Hamlet, including Doyle’s score; but I am a critic first, and recognise the potential problem of mawkish over-sentiment. 27 “Scaramouche” (1952). HD. VICTOR YOUNG carriage scene, accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 4:42, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bz9EaEwEHo 34 colouring above extended triads, incorporating romantic harmonies, impressionistic orchestrations, and every harmonic trick/progression in the
American songbook and jazz. The strings play I-VI alt 7-ii-V7 progressions, altered and modified by the various colourings (major sevenths, dominant ninths and thirteenth chords with a flattened ninth degree, etc.) of the extended triad, in a manner reminiscent of jazz piano voicings from the fifties. It is a moment of pure romance and erotic flirtation—and pure Golden Age Hollywood.
This eclecticism in film composing and orchestration is an indispensible ingredient in making a film with wide appeal. Contemporary film composers and orchestrators may refer continually to the Golden Age of
Hollywood when they do their job, but they interpret it in a myriad of ways that entertain the audiences for the time in which they are writing.
John William’s scores for the Star Wars and the Indiana Jones’ franchises can be described in countless ways, even though the basic, nostalgic classic Hollywood sound is essentially and foundationally dominating.
One can hear, for instance, references to the symphonic power of the first movement of Gustav Holst’s The Planets28 in William’s march for Darth
28 Holst: The Planets, ‘Mars’ – BBC Proms, accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 6:57, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXOanvv4plU 35
Vader,29 and the middle movement of Bela Bartok’s Concerto for
Orchestra30 in the opening for Raiders of the Lost Ark31 (with a healthy diet of classic horror film scoring).
Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto, in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2015 film, The Revenant,32 use the dark sublime of romanticism and minimalism to capture the frozen harshness of Dakota wilderness with a sustained, spare adagio of strings and subtle, synthesized wind sounds.
Isobel Waller-Bridge calls upon a range of musical styles to cover a dizzying array of genres. She moves from the romantic drama of Tom
Harper’s interpretation of Tolstoy’s novel War & Peace (2016 TV series),33 through the dark psychological thriller of Agatha Christie’s The
ABC Murders (2018 TV series; directed by Alex Gabassi)34 and the joyous rococo/romanticism of Autumn de Wilde’s 2020 interpretation of Jane
29 John Williams & Vienna Philharmonic – Williams: Imperial March (from “Star Wars”), accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 3:49, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsMWVW4xtwI 30 Bartók Bèla: Concerto For Orchestra – III Elegia (3/5), accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 7:04, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyuODWFVj6E 31 Raiders of the Lost Ark – 1st 10 Minutes (Iconic opening scene FULL), accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 9:47, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUWYmTpYdP4 32 The Revenant – Ending Scene, accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 3:00, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3DP7ggjxkI 33 Battle of Borodino – War & Peace (Battle of Borodino), accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 3:31, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuPor1QvRIA 34 THE ABC MURDERS Trailer (2019) John Malkovich Crime Amazon Series HD, accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 2:19, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mGS-GCv-K8 36
Austen’s novel Emma,35 to the eclectic musical-scape (rock, classic film underscoring and modernist) of her sister Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s comedy
Fleabag (2016-2019 streamed online).36
There are also briefs for film composers where they are expected to compose underscores that pay clear homage to the classic Hollywood film score. Thomas Newman’s score for Steven Soderbergh’s The Good
German37 is pure Hollywood film noir, a mix of late-Romantic Hollywood and modernist art music. The opening music behind the credits works in tandem with Soderbergh’s technique of combining real footage from post- war Germany with fresh footage shot in black-and-white (the entire film is shot in black-and-white). The second example, the love theme,38 is a classic New Hollywood mixture of genres and transformational pan- triadic harmonies.
Currently streaming on Netflix is a series called Ratched, created by Evan
Romansky, and underscored by Mac Quayle. It is a psychological thriller
35 “Emma Woodhouse (from Emma)” by Isobel Waller-Bridge, David Schweitzer, accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 1:48, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuZSk-0Ex5g 36 Fleabag – Wedding speech by The Priest, accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 2:26, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZbV-bZdmFY 37 The Good German Main Title: By Thomas Newman, accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 2:26, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7cy2uceP5U 38 “The Good German” (Love theme) – “The Good German” OST by Thomas Newman, accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 2:10, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smFDOH_3Icg 37 that freshly interprets the film noir legacy of Alfred Hitchcock and
Bernard Herrmann. Quayle’s music captures the dark romantic aesthetic and modernist spirit of a Bernard Herrmann score, uncanny and disquieting. The trailer gives you a wide sense of the underscoring.39
Symphonic orchestral film music can be found everywhere in the history of cinema and its close relatives: there is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to illustrating and auditioning examples.
Now it remains for us to look at the philosophical roots of this dark sublime aesthetic that such film music expresses so well.
39 Ratched/Final Trailer/Netflix, accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 3:01, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2tbRZn7tpY 38
CHAPTER TWO—PHILOSOPHICAL
To understand the aesthetic of symphonic orchestral film music, it is important to look at the romantic revolution in thought and sensibility that occurred fifty to thirty years before and after 1800 respectively. In particular, there is significant insight to be found in the ideas and themes forged by the thinkers and artists who worked during the 1790s in what posterity has come to identify as classical German philosophy, German
Idealism and philosophical Romanticism.
Das Musikalische
Symphonic orchestral film music exerts a force of musicality, a pre- conceptual and pre-determinate sensuous energy that produces a given state of mind and feeling, without the need to represent any given object.
In this way, this style of musical underscoring for cinematic output is superlative at expressing passions that do not appear in the worldly sphere in a determinate way, but are palpable in their affective presence.
Filmmakers, composers and orchestrators commonly choose this style of musical underscoring because it ensures that the emotional impact of the dramatic narrative of a film is felt personally—even viscerally—by the cinematic audience. We will articulate this force of musicality as the best 39 way to understand the dark sublime aesthetic that symphonic orchestral film music is good at expressing.
Schiller’s concept of Das Musikalische
Friedrich Schiller’s key argument for musicality is found in his essay On
Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (1795) and is quoted at length by Lydia
Goehr.40
“(M)usikalisch (is)… the dual affinity (Verwandtschaft) of poetry to
music and plastic art. Accordingly, as poetry either imitates a given
object as the plastic arts do, or whether, like music, simply produces a
given state of mind, without requiring a given object for the purpose, it
can be called plastic or musical. The latter expression, therefore, does
not refer exclusively to whatever is music in poetry actually and in
relation to its material, but rather in general to all those effects which it is
able to produce without subordinating the imagination to a given
object…”
Musicality is an elective affinity tying together aesthetic powers that can be variously used to interpret the arts and the culture in which they are made and received. Music, poetry, rhetoric, sculpture, painting, literature,
40 Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical essays on the history of aesthetic theory (Columbia University Press, New York, 2008). 53 40 ballet, theatre, cinema, photography, architecture—the aesthetic powers of each of these art forms (together and combined) can be used in making searching criticisms of artistic achievement, unveiling shades of meaning that would not see the light of worldliness were it not for the efficacy of these aesthetic powers. These arts are allied in a manner similar to
Goethe’s account of an elective affinity, where elements and persons appear to
“…adhere but also repel one another, as if each were choosing its own
particular arrangement: Wahlverwandtshaft…each compelled to spring
into activity to form novel and unexpected constellations…”41
The imagination is freed from the rules selected to guide artistic work and reception, while able to play ironically with those rules if they serve to further cultural meaning. For art involves the ad hoc making of rules for a given practice (whether applied consistently or not), for which there are no rules.42
Schiller argues that the very complexion of the emotions, often driven in opposing directions at one and the same time, means that they cannot be
41 Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities 2 42 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, (1790) translated by Werner S. Pluhar, (Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Company, 1987). AK 194 41 represented directly in rational discourse. Music rather, without the encumbrance of the codified signifying elements of the spoken and written languages, expresses well the complex changes and movement of emotions. Poetry also imitates this movement of emotions with words, and in this musical sense, affects us with its musicality.43 In Schiller’s terms, musicality marks where sense and thought are unified, and a beautiful personhood is called upon to express moral and political values, constitutive of a unified community, and given an audible presence by dint of the musicality of life.44 Bildung (education) prepares individuals for such a political life.45
Spieltrieb
Music and play disclose aspects of the world that would not be accessible otherwise.46 Feelings of the individual, and the yearning to communicate to others what seems obtusely incommunicable, points towards the aesthetic powers of a well-considered hermeneutics encompassing a cultural sphere. As we will see for Enlightenment thinkers like Schiller, reason reveals itself as defined by formulating laws that cut directionally
43 Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: 50-1 44 Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities 49 45 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man. (1795) Translated by Reginald Snell, (Mineola, New York, Dover Publications, Inc. 2004). 57 46 Andrew Bowie, “Music And the Rise of Aesthetics.” In The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, 29–54. (Cambridge University Press, 2001). 30 42 and with purpose. To attain the ends and satisfaction of a fully human life, however, the passionate will and energised feelings of individuals singly and corporately must be engaged as an impulse. Schiller’s concept of impulse stems from his reading of Kant, where his concept of
Spieltrieb, the ‘playful impulse’, unites in a harmonious fashion Kant’s
Sinnestrieb, the ‘sensual impulse or drive’, with his Formtrieb, the ‘formal impulse’. If the truth of a fully lived life is to overcome the melee of fragmented perspectives, then it itself must be transfigured into a force that is an impulse to action.47
The force of musicality can be compared to the force of poetry.48 Equally the art of interpretation can be viewed as a force applying the cultural standards derived from the arts to the workings of society and politics.49
All of these forces bring something new into the world, without which these advents would not be, providing a platform for our intellectual and imaginative abilities and impulses to act in the world of ostensible cause and effect.
Each force and impulse can be rendered into an effective means of aesthetic critique, applicable to any or all the arts. This means that film
47 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man. 48 48 Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1984). 49 Walter Bagehot: The English Constitution (Oxford, Oxford University Books, 2001). 8 43 music can be critiqued by the standards of rhetoric, for instance, because rhetoric is, “…the art of managing the voice.”50
Extension of the concept of musikalische
For Friedrich Schelling, “…the chorus represents the real face of the work of art and musicality the inner ideal face.”51 In the case of film, the totality of the art forms is pulled together to make the film present the narrative to the audience in a clear, comprehensive manner. It acts like the chorus in providing a full interpretation of a completed work—keeping in mind that the underscore for a film is generally the last art form to be added to the filmmaking process before final editing. The sublime character of the musical underscore ennobles the audience in much the same way that Schiller’s advocacy of beauty ennobles the given instincts such as sexual love.52 For Friedrich Schelling, musicality moves the audience away from mundane interpretations to the higher truths demanding sublime respect. This sublime aspect of musicality is connected with the basic requirement of aesthetic distance in German
50 James Porter, “Rhetoric, aesthetics, and the voice” The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rhetoric. (Cambridge University Press, 2009). 92 51 Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: .57 52 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man. 28 44 aesthetic theory, ensuring that aesthetic judgements are free from particular desires and are objectively shareable.53
Schelling extends Schiller’s concept of musicality by emphasising how musicality asserts the inner ideal of music as an audible phenomenon.
Where Schiller continues the classical idea of arts representing the ideal of human attainment, Schelling emphasises the immanence of this ideal in the arts.54 When understood in the Ancient Greek context of providing a chorus for tragic drama, the inner meaning of a musical piece is captured by the totality of sublime humanity auditioned by musicality, where the chorus brings the audiences’ attention to that which is inner through musicality. This inner meaning caught by drama is the tension between the freedom of the subject and the drives of necessity that can impinge on that freedom, a tension that is felt emotionally and characterises worldly experience.55
Arthur Schopenhauer reinforces the connection between musicality and the will by emphasising that the relationship rests more on movement
(Bewegung) than on the obvious art form of tones and rhythm.56 The
53 Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: 58 54 Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: 57 55 Friedrich Schelling, The Philosophy of Art (1859) translated by Douglas W. Stott, (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 251 56 Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: 11-12 45 movement of musicality, resulting from the interplay between consonances and dissonances, expresses the inner reality of the world not represented by Kantian categories of phenomenal appearance. It expresses the Will that moves by impulse. Music, the empty signifier,
“…gives the innermost kernel preceding all form, or the heart of things.”57
While for Schopenhauer, music is the expression of the metaphysically fundamental Will and transcends the world of Kantian representation, for a philosopher like Hegel music reflects the Innerlichkeit of the self in formal, abstract terms.
This formal limitation compels composers to join music with words, and to bring the dramatic chorus back into purely instrumental forms like the symphony.58
Music and language
The problem of the meaning of music stems (I suggest) from a reduced conception of the human facility for language: namely, the simplistic notion that the spoken and written languages are nothing more than the means by which we convey propositions to each other. This basic linguistic task is undoubtedly the most common and obvious feature and
57 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, translated by E. F. J. Payne, (New York, Dover publications, Inc., 1958). 263 58 Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: 71-2 46 use of our facility for language. It is achieved through the grammatical and syntactical coded elements that are purpose-built into spoken and written languages. Such elements make words into what linguistic scientists call “filled” signifiers, understandable because they contain coded syntactical elements that can be decoded by competent language users. By focusing exclusively on this basic linguistic task of language, a reductive, pseudo-empirical argument can be made that music is nothing other than an art form of tones and rhythms that is meaningless because it cannot convey propositions in the manner of the spoken and written languages. Music, on this account, lacks the referential dimension that enables the spoken and written languages to represent predetermined concepts and content59 and communicate efficiently complete and discrete bits of information and meaning.
This problem gains its piquancy from the simple observation that most people seem to be moved by music in one way or another, finding listening to music an enjoyable and meaningful experience, and saying that it touches directly upon their emotions.
The false polarity of this problem, however, can be obviated by construing the force of musicality on the model of the force of poetry. That is,
59 Andrew Bowie, Music and the rise of aesthetics, 29 47 language itself can be rendered an empty signifier by the metaphorical, technical rhetorical and allusive60 uses of language (typical of poetry) to express those aspects of reality which would not be expressed were it not for this extended use of language. On this broader, more radical account, language forms (and crucially underwrites!) a cultural plenum with all the arts, including music, giving us access to the world that is not possible without the arts. We have before us a hermeneutic practice that urges the definitive
“…move from regarding language exclusively as the symbolic means of
representing pre-existing ideas and of representing already constituted
objects in the world, to regarding it as ‘constitutive’ or ‘expressive’ of
what becomes intelligible to us.”61
Through cultural activity and achievement we ‘constitute’ and ‘express’ that which is intelligible about the world and thereby constitute our world.
We truly realise the full implications of the Old English word for the world: weor-old (“Man” and “Era”), ‘the Age of Man’62, emphasising that it is from our human, subjective perspective that we transform the material earthly existence that we have been dealt into a home where we can live.
60 Please keep the term ‘allusive’ in mind, as it will become important in the discussion connecting play, aesthetics and symphonic orchestral film music. 61 Andrew Bowie, Music and the rise of aesthetics, 29 62 John Macquarrie, Existentialism, (England, Penguin Books, 1972). 79 48
The metaphorical flexibility and functionality of our facility for language underpins all the arts, and will allow us to apply critically the aesthetic of musicality to any or all aspects of the artistic constitution and expression of our worldly experience in the form of a force. A power, that is, to make change and bring something new into the world that did not exist before: new ideas thrown out there and fresh understandings of the world expressed in art forms linguistic and non-linguistic. Think power in terms of its French etymology pouvoir, the ability ‘to do’, and you are taken right back to the Ancient Greek word ποιησις63/poiêsis, the origin of our word ‘poet’ and basically meaning ‘to do’.
As Andrew Bowie speculates, “Music’s ‘meaning’ might lie precisely in the fact that we cannot say in words what it means…’ And then he raises the rhetorical question, “…why does music exist at all if what it ‘says’ could be said just as well in other ways?”64
63 Please excuse my inability to ‘pepper’ my Greek words with the appropriate accentuation, due to the limits of my word processing package. For this feat of etymology, I consulted my copy of Liddell & Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, New Edition, Stuart Jones & McKenzie, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1940, Supplement 1968). 64 Andrew Bowie, Music, Philosophy, and Modernity. (Cambridge, UK ; Cambridge University Press, 2007). 3 49
As Friedrich Schelling65 stated, “…very few people reflect upon the fact that even the language in which they express themselves is the most complete work of art.”66 The Kantian dualism between appearances and the ‘things in themselves’ does not make sense when you comprehend our facility for language and the arts as an entirety generating and receiving cultural meaning constitutive of the world. A sound hermeneutic practice is able to provide comprehensive interpretations, even if it is carried out in full recognition that all knowledge comes necessarily from a particular perspective, because the various ways in which we receive the world through our bodily senses are linked together as phenomena and rendered intelligible by dint of our mental faculties—mind, imagination and will. It is this act of will, in particular, as spontaneity that provides this hermeneutic unification.
As Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote,
“Just as reason is not to be posited as a separate entity, apart from its
existence in nature, because each individual entity, in relative opposition
to the whole, forms a coexistence of receptivity and spontaneity in life,
65 These names of philosophical movements are mere fictions created posthumously. None of the thinkers involved would have thought of themselves under these nominations, much less as reducible in their part to a movement. 66 Quoted in Andrew Bowie, “German Idealism and the Arts.” In The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, edited by Karl Ameriks, (Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 248 50
so the original positing of reason in human nature means that it is
submerged in the receptivity of nature in the form of understanding and
in the spontaneity of nature in the form of will.”67
Understanding and will, receptivity and spontaneity, work together in the constitution of our world. Our knowledge of the world, therefore, can be shared in communicative action because we all exercise these faculties of receptivity and spontaneity. Our feelings, however, are ours alone, private in the darkness of our interior life.
The problem arises, therefore, as to how we can be certain that we understand each other. Schleiermacher ties together hermeneutics with dialectic, where the former establishes the meaning of what is said or gestured, and the later establishes the truth.68
Film music plays this hermeneutic role in film, and symphonic orchestral film music plays this hermeneutic role with great emphasis on this romantic conception of feeling.
67 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Lectures on Philosophical Ethics (1812/13), Edited by Robert B. Louden, Translated by Louise Adey Huish, (Cambridge University Press, 2002). 9-10 68 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism and other writings, edited by Andrew Bowie, (Cambridge University Press, 1998). § 1ff, p. 5ff 51
The Crisis of the Enlightenment
Two dicta capture the philosophical, cultural and political aims of this period of thought bookended by the Enlightenment and Romanticism:
Kant’s Horation borrowing of Sapere aude!—Dare to be Wise!69—and
Novalis’s declaration that “The world must be romanticised.”
For Kant, the result of enlightenment must be the maturity and responsibility to think for oneself, to be an autonomous subject who is not at the mercy of a heterogeneous and arbitrary authority. For Novalis, to romanticise the world is “…to convert what is ordinary and mundane into something extraordinary and mysterious, and conversely, to make what is unknown, known.”70 The romantic thinkers carried on the project of the enlightenment, but also championed that which critical reason left behind.
In this way, the Romantics articulated an “aesthetic of fear” that appreciated the dark underside of worldly existence. This aesthetic of fear has it origin in eighteenth century articulations of an aesthetic of the sublime. As we will see, symphonic orchestral film music auditions both aesthetics in an expression of modern subjectivity, commanding rational
69 Immanuel Kant, An answer to the question: What is enlightenment? in Practical Philosophy: The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Tr. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge University Press, 1996). Footnote b, 17 70 Jane Kneller, Kant and the Power of Imagination. (Cambridge University Press, 2007) 22 52 resources, but also undermined by the darkness of moral ambiguity and the ever-present threat of nihilism. For crises are
“…the signature of the modern. Rather than simply replacing something
old with something new, the moment of crisis redefines the very
parameters according to which we remember the past and envision the
future.” 71
Crises open up the philosophical and political “…recognition that on issues of ultimate value reasonable people tend naturally to disagree.”72
The ultimate response of the philosophical Romantics to unprecedented crises was the call for a New Mythology that would re-enchant a disenchanted modern world.
A crisis emerged, however, when the Enlightenment standard of critical reason was universalised, radicalised and extended beyond theoretical and practical boundaries. Indeed, if this standard is to be adhered to fully and faithfully, then it must be ultimately universalised and radicalised! Any limitation on this exacting standard of reasoning is unacceptable and intolerable, either as a form of obscurantism where the claims of reason
71 Lutz P. Koepnick, Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood. (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002). 164 72 Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity. (Cambridge University Press, 2009). 191 53 are rejected, or as a form of dogmatism where reason is arbitrarily curtailed by an imposed authority. The crisis of reason took the two- prong form of a radical criticism and a radical naturalism. The former mired enquiry in an unshakeable scepticism, notably about the existence of other minds and God. The latter mired mechanism in a reductive materialism that refused to accept the existence of anything outside material nature, such as ideational expressions in human affairs and intellectual life. Paradoxically, the dictates of this radicalised standard of reason undermined the claims and aims of both radical criticism and radical naturalism. Ultimately all claims to truth and understanding, and all values were undermined by a radical nihilism.73
The successes of technology pragmatically ‘instrumentalised’ reason by universalizing this new standard of critical reason. The accompanying critical and humane concern for the working poor being crushed by the machines of industry was echoed in the romantic criticisms of burgeoning modernity and swelled by liberal and socialist calls for justice and political reform.
73 In making this description of the Enlightenment concept of reason and its crisis, I followed closely the brilliant account by Frederick Beiser in his essay “The Enlightenment and Idealism.” In The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, edited by Karl Ameriks, (Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 19-22 54
In the work of thinkers like Adam Smith and Karl Marx, we see the peculiarly modern emergence of the study of political economy: an oxymoron for the Ancient Greeks, who separated the political realm of freedom (πολις) from the family home (οικος), the purpose of which was to sustain physical life against the potential depravations of social necessity.74 Discontent about these new social realities emerged in the general social consciousness, and gradually found voice in the arts.
The political aesthetics of Romanticism
The early Romantics formed themselves into an intellectual society in
Berlin and Jena from around 1797 to 1799. Friedrich Schlegel,
Schleiermacher and Novalis were key thinkers in this period, specialising in a vast range of critical and artistic achievements, and influenced by potent predecessors and contemporaries, such as Goethe and Hölderlin.
They were the advanced guard in the criticism of modern civil society, developing a novel “organic concept of society in opposition to the mechanical model of the paternalist tradition.”75 In reading their thought as social commentary, we will be able to recognise the middle path often
74 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (London, Faber and Faber, 1961). 148 75 Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism : The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992). 222 55 trod by popular entertainments, like Hollywood’s classical films and today’s blockbusters, with regard to liberal views about freedom of expression for individuals.
German romanticism was given ballast by the view that genuine social, political and cultural progress can only come from the critical combination of philosophy and art. They observed historical and political phenomenon like the French Revolution and saw in this event a fruitful relationship of philosophy, literature and politics.76 By dint of their intellectual and artistic efforts, the romantics aimed to revivify German culture and public life by activating the powers of art to bring into the shared public sphere new and unprecedented aspects of the world. These new aspects could not exist without the art forms from which these idiomatic powers stem, and reflected the deeper truth that we knowing and acting subjects
‘constituted’ the world that we know, rather than discover and represent symbolically a world already ‘out there’.
German romanticism sought to fulfil its goals by articulating a philosophical and political project that was first and foremost an aesthetic movement. It sought, “…the rebirth of German culture and public life
76 Dieter Sturma, “Politics and the New Mythology: the turn to Late Romanticism” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism. (Cambridge University Press, 2010). 219 56 through the magical and miraculous powers of art.”77 This was the project of the New Mythology outlined by the pamphlet, The Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism, written by possibly Schelling, Holderlin or Hegel as young students at the Tuebingen Stift, and had precedents in thinkers like Schiller and his book, Aesthetic Education of Man. Schiller78 and the writers of the Oldest Programme79 wanted to make poetry philosophical and philosophy poetical so as to bring to bear on the world the power of aesthetics.
The New Mythology represented a strong romantic theme of looking to the past in order to find cultural values robust enough to forge a viable future.
It is from this mentality that the current author devises his concept of the gothic noir. That is, the combination of mythological thinking—where society is ruled by a hierarchy that rests on mysticism and obscurity (as represented by the gothic middle ages)—with a new mythology that negotiates proactively the moral nihilism of modern urban life, represented potently by film noir. Roughly hewn, this gothic noir aesthetic is intended for popular entertainment and the voice of contemporary mores, but it was shaped by the romantic sensibility:
77 Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism 227 78 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man. (1795) Translated by Reginald Snell, (Mineola, New York, Dover Publications, Inc. 2004). 79 Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, edited and translated by Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth, (London, Penguin Books, 2009). 341 57
“The rise of Romanticism at the turn of the nineteenth century was a
solution to the conflict between two historical principles: completed
antiquity and the never-ending perfection of modernity.”80
The early Romantics believed that the revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity could only achieve a political form that was true to a life fully lived, in a republican constitution. Reformism, rather than revolution or reactionary politics, became the goal of political action for the philosophical Romantics, who viewed an aesthetic hermeneutical critique as the primary way to achieve a genuine Bildung (education) that would build an organic community on the republican model.81
German Idealists and philosophical Romantics traded in concepts like organism, individuality and imagination. They opposed the mechanistic interpretations of the new sciences, and the divisions and atomism that resulted from a mechanistic conception of society and nature.82 Critical concepts and their identifying nomenclature proved eminently transferrable from the aesthetic sphere to the political. Artistic categories, such as das Musikalische, das Lyrische and das Äesthetische, acquired a
80 Asko Nivala, The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel's Philosophy of History (New York, Routledge, 2017). 148 81 Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism 229 82 Dieter Sturma, Politics and the New Mythology: 219 58 political and philosophical potency as German aesthetics evolved in the modern social and cultural dynamic. Consistent with this organic conception, many romantics championed equality between men and women and advocated sexual freedom.83 This universalization and embedding of personal freedom in an organic society found its way into the new forms of social awareness represented by the social novel and theatrical forms such as melodrama—especially with the virtuous, but struggling, woman winning the hearts of those absorbed in the drama.84
These themes still strike us as progressive modern concerns, and the mood and feeling of endangered justice still pervade popular entertainment values.
As such, the romantics advocated the value of community, and this is why they sought meaning in interpretations of the past, such as the medieval gothic, and recreated them in mythopoetic forms that drove artistic achievement. Nonetheless, this romanticism was couched in the
Enlightenment project of achieving individual liberty and self-realization.
They sought the true realization of these Enlightenment values in tradition and history, but avoided the conservatism of Edmund Burke and De
Maistre, who advocated adherence to the mystical and unfounded
83 Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism 222-3 84 Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939-48 (London, Routledge, 1992) 104 59 prejudices of traditional society as the surest defense of social unity and thriving. They engaged with the new critical standards of Enlightenment reason as the path to freedom, but with the critical awareness that such standards are in danger of being radicalised to the point of destructive nihilism. From this Enlightenment standard of reason they inherited the classical ideal of Bildung, but they were critical of the elitism of Goethe and Humboldt, advocating instead that the public sphere and the realm of culture should be open to all. They even advocated the need to be stewards, not consumers, of our natural environment, anticipating modern ecological arguments against the exploitation of nature, respecting its organic provenance as opposed to the mechanical view of nature in mechanistic sciences.85
The Romantics tried to navigate between the Charybdis of conservatism and Scylla of liberalism. They rejected as too radical the demand for a personal liberty that did not care about social bonds. Equally they rejected the conservative assertion of the authoritarian and paternal imperatives of community over the individual yearning for freedom. As its middle path, romanticism sought the communitarian values and practices that the
Romantics interpreted as being exemplified by the gothic past, but eschewed the paternalism of feudal hierarchical relations. Equally the
85 Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism 223 60
Romantics rejected the self-interested political economy of the new individualism. Initially, they welcomed the liberty, equality, and fraternity promised by French republicanism, but were horrified by the violence unleashed by the abuse of liberty and the brutal bending of reason to instrumental ends and political domination. In its stead, they proposed the individual right to participate in the formation of the laws under which they will live as the proper basis for an organic society. This placed the emphasis on Bildung, education and enlightenment forming the basis of true freedom; some even forecasting the end of the need for state structures guiding political and social life—a call that was to be taken up much eventually by Marxists.86
Later romanticism moved away increasingly from the early Romantics’ republicanism and their faith in the spontaneous initiatives of the people to build an organic community that promotes a substantial standard of freedom. Later Romanticists viewed with alarm the social disintegration caused by the increasing violence of the French Revolution. They were also concerned about the advent and spread of (what we would now call modern) capitalism, brought on by newly evolving free-markets. As a result, romanticism started to idealise the corporate and hierarchical structure of The Middle Ages in opposition to what they took to be the
86 Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism 223 61 alienating and corrupting influence of modern social life. From 1800 onwards, they increasingly allied themselves with the conservative ideal of the paternal state.87 Some, like Novalis, even valorised the old hierarchical authority of the Church and Monarchy as the surest preservers of mythological cultural themes, best positioned to re-enchant a divided world.88
This toggling between conservatism and reformist republican liberalism is a key romantic legacy felt in modernity and our own times. It is the perfect cultural environment for Hollywood’s classical cinema of nostalgia and melodramatic passion trying to reach a paying middle class audience.
New Mythology, Longing and the Sublime
Friedrich Schlegel, in his Brief über den Roman, sought to critically address modern skepticism and anarchism through his concept of romantic art. He wanted to restore a fruitful sense of community by means of a new mythology, where his concept of romantic art aims to present, “…a
87 Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism 223-4 88 Dieter Sturmer, Politics and the New Mythology 220 62 sentimental content in a fantastic form."89 The spirit of love is the bonding agent of social and community ties, and it must therefore be, as
Schlegel said, "invisibly visible" at every level of romantic art. 90 We are reminded of Wagner’s attempt in composing music drama to realize his ideal of “musical deeds made visible.”91 Note that this can be equally said of symphonic orchestral film music in its underscoring of cinematic narrative, sublimity and passion. This conception of romantic art alone,
Schlegel argued, is the antidote to the burgeoning egoism and materialism of modern civil society. 92
Likewise, the sublime plays its part in this discussion. The first-century author, Longinus, in his treatise On the Sublime focused verbal and literary expressions of the sublime, and called upon all the resources of ancient rhetoric to locate the origin of the sublime in the human capacity for thought and imagination. Tethering great thought with great passion, he reinterpreted the µεγαλοψυχος, the greatness of spirit that Aristotle93 argued was the goal of a well-formed humanity, in the terms of the strength of expression that was less about clarity in revealing meaning and truth, and more about the darkness that surrounds great things when they
89 Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism 231 90 Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism .231 91 Richard Wagner, Opera and Drama. (Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska, 1995) Also refer to Lydia Goehr: Elective Affinities: 58 92 Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism 232 93 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1123b2 63 emerge from obscurity. Rhetorical features of our capacity for language come to the fore in the well-chosen figures of speech, effective enunciation and the well-wrought composition.
On the opposite side to Longinus’s presentation of the sublime through the powers of imagination and the word, Thomas Burnet alluded to the natural sublime and what it revealed about divine presence in his book Sacred
Theory of the Earth (1681). Burnet argued that prior to the great deluge that overwhelmed the earth, proportionate beauty reflecting the divine presence dominated existence. The perfect beauty of this proportion was disturbed violently by the Great Flood and the smashing of mountains with surging rivers and seas. When we now review this post-deluge world, we are reduced to awe and rapture as we realise the full extent of divine wrath at our sinfulness. The earth resembles a great ruin reflecting long lost past wrongs. This evocative regard for ruins will shape the romantic and gothic love of ruins as expressions of the darkness of the human lot.94 Ruins parallel the romantic use of fragments to allude to truths that are perpetually obscured by contradiction and ambiguity. The ruins of the past express fragmentally the truths that we need for today.
We will see this aesthetic of ruin and fragmentation in the practice of
94 Fredrick Burwick, Romanticism : Keywords First edition. (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2015). 272-6 64 montage (capturing the passage of time by the careful editing of images) that shaped so much filmmaking. Longinus and Burnet, therefore, represent two key aspects of what will become compelling in modern popular entertainment.95
Longinus and Burnet also equally foreshadow well the eighteenth century concern with aesthetics, branching out into the beautiful, the picturesque and the sublime. The picturesque dovetails well into Burnet’s theological interpretation of nature in terms of the sublime. The picturesque focuses on the rough and rustic beauty of landscape, and reveals once more the critical flexibility of an aesthetic quality, where the framing narrative of painting is transferred to the imagined narrative of landscapes. Edmund
Burke combined Longinus’s imaginative sublime with Burnet’s theologically-shaped natural sublime in his work A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), arguing that we are astonished by the great and sublime and nature, and that the consequent state of suspension that we feel in all our movements and emotions combine this passion with a state of horror. Likewise, Burke affirms the artistic virtue of shrouding narrative in obscurity and mystery.
For, when danger is revealed in the light of day, it loses its sensation of
95 Frederick Burwick, Romanticism 301 65 horror. In Burke’s vision of the terrible in literature and nature, we see a presage of the gothic noir aesthetic:
“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite ideas of pain and danger, that is
to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible
objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the
sublime.”96
In his critical philosophy, Immanuel Kant removed the power of imagination from the sphere of the senses and placed it in the realm of reason where judgment would be determined by the principles of purposiveness and disinterestedness. For Kant, the sublime stems from ideas of reason, and not simply from experiences of greatness in nature or human deeds, the latter overwhelming good judgment and the requisite quality of disinterestedness. As a consequence, Kant distinguishes between beauty that is associated with the form of the object of contemplation defined by boundaries, and the sublime that is associated with boundlessness and formlessness. The sublime found in either mathematics or the dynamics of nature is ‘absolutely’ great when the absence of any defining form makes it seem incomparable with anything
96 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), edited by David Womersley, (London, Penguin Books, 1998). 101-03 66 else that has been experienced.97 Aesthetic judgment attains the requisite quality of disinterestedness when there is no moral or emotional agenda guiding the judgment: it is purposive when the object of a judgment agrees with the form dictated by the free play of the rational faculties (that is, it is neither a judgment of the theoretical understanding or the practical reason). Kant admits only one case where sensation and reason do interact in aesthetic judgment, and that is the sublime.98
In this case of the sublime, the free play of the intellectual faculties
(including the imagination) leads to a feeling of instability in aesthetic judgment, caused by an inherent opposition between reason and emotion.
The presence of greatness in nature does overwhelm our senses with sublime feelings, but our experience of our intellect’s capacity for dealing with the infinite eventually calms down the emotional response, and the purposiveness of our aesthetic judgment reveals aesthetic harmony.99 The sublime is more about the response of the subject to the greatness perceived, than the greatness itself in nature or human affairs. We can take this to our understanding of the role played by symphonic orchestral film music, where the cinematic audience brings their sense of the dark sublime to their appraisal and enjoyment of the film.
97 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, (1790) translated by Werner S. Pluhar, (Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Company, 1987). 97-100 98 Frederick Burwick, Romanticism 303 99 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 25, p. 103-06 67
Perhaps the romantic master of the gothic, ETA Hoffmann, is the best author to capture this role of music in underpinning feelings of the sublime. Consider his short story, Don Juan, where he speaks of music as plumbing the hidden, “…depths of her soul were many mysterious things that were inexpressible in words and intelligible to the singing voice.”100
The darkness of the human heart is expressed eloquently by music, and is utilized by film composers to express all the varied emotions called upon to tell a cinematic story. Such filmmakers are inheritors of the gothic romanticism of authors like ETA Hoffmann.
100 ETA Hoffmann, Don Juan, tr. by Douglas Robertson, https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnx0a GV3b3JsZHZpZXdhbm5leHxneDoxZDU5ZmYxZjMyNjJkNWJk, 2008, 4 68
CHAPTER THREE—HISTORICAL
A history of a dark sublime aesthetic From philosophy, to art, to entertainment
We have seen how the romantic revolution in thought and sensibility framed, among an array of cultural meanings, a dark aesthetic of the sublime that the current author argues will eventually find its way into the pervasive aesthetic communicated by symphonic orchestral film music.
Now our task is to trace the development of this aesthetic in literature, theatre, music and popular culture. We will see how a fantastic gothic sensibility emerged from romanticism that was robust in its creative and entrepreneurial energies, continually reinventing itself in culturally resonant and financially lucrative popular outlets such as novels, plays and eventually Victorian melodrama. In particular, melodrama with its innovations of using music to highlight and enhance the emotional affect of the theatrical drama as it unfolded on the stage is essential to our understanding of both the techniques of film underscoring and, more importantly, the way in which an evocative musical aesthetic connects the emotional content of the drama to the inward emotional makeup of each member of the audience. 69
A key aspect of this transferral of melodrama to film is the cultural authority and resources offered by opera and the symphony at the end of the nineteenth century. It is through performative art forms like these that the substantial link between melodrama and film can be found in the popular and serious literature of the nineteenth-century, providing a broad exploration of the darker motives that drive human action. The reader of such literature in solitude eventually looked for a broader representation of these themes in the vibrant art forms of the stage, and ultimately in the cinema.
An emerging Gothic Sensibility
As we have seen in the last chapter, the Romantics agreed with the progressive aspects of the Enlightenment, aimed at emancipation of individuals from the ignorance of prejudice. They were concerned, however, by the materialism of the mechanistic sciences and the social divisions caused by the misplaced application of the Enlightenment principle of critical reason to the industrial revolution and to the political sphere. In common cause with the German Idealists, the Romantics countered the potential nihilism of materialism with their critical principles of the organic wholeness of existence, their more detailed 70 theoretical account of the autonomous individual and subjectivity, and the power of the imagination.101
On a cultural and aesthetic level, romanticism opposed the Neo-classical sensibility brought about by the Enlightenment’s “…emphasis upon clarity, precision and the subordination of contemporary art and literature to the examples of ancient Greece and Rome…”102
Their opposition took an aesthetic and politicised form in a Gothic past re- created from a nostalgic view of medieval society unified by a common set of values. Both Neo-classicism and romantic Gothicism were imaginative re-creations for a political and cultural purpose—ideal creations produced by particular readings of history that projected into the present normative values that could guide future actions.103 Academic historical standards had yet to benefit fully from the exacting contextualisation required by the new modern standard of critical reason.104 In the case of Gothicism and its actualisation in literature and
101 Dieter Sturma, “Politics and the New Mythology: the turn to Late Romanticism” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism. (Cambridge University Press, 2010). 219 102 Adam Roberts, “Gothic and horror fiction” The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, (Cambridge University Press, 2012). 22 103 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (1939) (England, Penguin Books, 1973). 83 104 Jerrold E. Hogle, “Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture.” In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, 1–20. (Cambridge University Press, 2002). 1 71 theatre, it promoted a mood and emotional affect that was steeped in the mystery and fantasy of medieval myth.
This tone of fantasy initially stemmed from the epics, poems and stories of the medieval romance or romaunt. They related tales of chivalry that mostly took the form of a knight on a quest, and were frequently composed in verse.
Written in one of the romanz languages that had evolved from Latin, such as Italian, French, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese or Provençal, they inspired later authors of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to put aside classical forms, and explore a picturesque and fantastical style. Authors like Dante, Cervantes and Shakespeare were to provide models and material for latter romantic and gothic imaginations.105
When the gothic sensibility did emerge during the 1760s, it was accompanied by an underlying social, political and cultural shift away from the cosmopolitan values and universal principles promoted by the current culture of the Enlightenment. Local achievements and attachments were promoted instead, focusing on subjective affect,
105 Azade Seyhan, “What is Romanticism, and where did it come from?” The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2009). 1 72 sympathy and simple responsiveness to experiences.106 It was the beginning, moreover, of the gothic sense of feeling outside the mainstream and being the ‘other’ to society’s expectations. A taste for delicious danger evolved in artistic creation and imagination that would gradually infuse a lot of popular entertainment with either a strong or barely perceptible whiff of the enticing combination of social transgression and the exotic.107
The Gothic sensibility arose as a rudimentary literary and theatrical category in 1764 when Horace Walpole published his novel The Castle of
Otranto, and privately printed his play The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy in 1768. Walpole’s play was eventually published publically in 1781 because he had to negotiate the potential for scandal caused by his chosen subject matter of incest. But the success of Robert Jephson’s adaptation of Otranto in the play The Count of Narbonne (1781) masked somewhat the scandal, and fixed the Gothic sensibility in the public imagination.108
A spate of Gothic works followed, with Clara Reeve publishing her novel
The Champion of Virtue in 1777 (she changed its name to The Old English
106 James P. Carson, “Enlightenment, Popular Culture, and Gothic Fiction.” Chapter. In The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, edited by John Richetti, 255–76. Cambridge Companions to Literature. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). doi:10.1017/CCOL0521419085.012. p. 256 107 David Punter, Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law, (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998). chapter one. 108 Michael Gamer, “Gothic Melodrama.” In The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama, 31–46. (Cambridge University Press, 2018). 33 73
Baron), and during the 1790s, novels like Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Matthew
Lewis’s The Monk (1796), established Gothic literature as a major and popular fiction form in English. With Mary Shelly’s publication of her novel Frankenstein in 1818, the gothic novel as such declines, and transforms into genres such as, “…ghost stories, vampire tales, sensation novels historical romances, and detective fiction.”109 It is important to note that this transformation is vital for the subsequent sensationalism of
Victorian melodrama and eventually film.
An eloquent exposition of the point and substance of Gothic literature and theatre can be found in Walpole’s introduction to The Castle of Otranto,
He draws insistently his reader’s attention
“…directly to the catastrophe. Never is the reader’s attention
relaxed…Terror, the author’s principal engine, prevents the story from
ever languishing; and it is so often contrasted by pity, that the mind is
kept up in a constant vicissitude of interesting passions.”110
109 James P. Carson, Enlightenment popular culture, and Gothic fiction. 257 110 Horace Walpole, Preface to the first edition of The Castle of Otranto, (London, Penguin Books, London England, 2001) 6 74
Sensation in the form of the uncanny is the coinage of the Gothic:
‘otherness’ placed at the centre of a narrative, throwing off its feet any pretence to knowledge and certainty. Note that film music can be used to either relax or keep the audience on their toes in tracing the narrative in an emotional journey. The unpredictable emotional journey of a well-written film fed into Hollywood’s (and other studios around world, like Britain’s
Gaumont and Gainsborough Pictures) contemporary versions of the
Gothic sensibility, brought to life and amplified by the use of symphonic orchestral film music and all the musical affects of nineteenth-century romanticism.
Walpole observed, more or less, the rules of classical drama, in particular those articulated by Aristotle in his Poetics.111 That is, the action, time and place of a drama should be maintained as a unity if the drama is to cohere in the minds of the audience. But, in addition, Walpole wants to combine what he calls ancient and modern romance, where, “…the former all was imagination and improbability…the latter, nature is always intended to be…copied with success.”112 In other words, he wished to make his characters, “…think, speak and act, as it might be supposed mere
111 Aristotle, Poetics, Translated by S. H. Butcher, (Mineola, New York, Dover Publications, Inc., 1951), Section 5.4 112 Horace Walpole, Preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto, 9 75 men and women would do in extraordinary positions.”113 In this way,
Walpole struck a tone of voice that we will eventually hear eventually in modern popular arts, where the entertainment value of sensation will be tailored to the realistic expectations of a modern audience. We will see this in the classic Hollywood films that relied on the old Aristotelian principles of story structure, inherited from the ‘well-made play’ of the nineteenth century, with their adherence to classical drama plots and their concise storytelling that moves the audience directly to the key emotional points of the plot in a clear trajectory that does not “…leave audience members wondering about characters’ motivations or the workings of plot devices.”114
Given this classical narrative structure, the uncanny ‘otherness’ typically expressed in Gothic literature’s themes sets out contrapuntally conflicting value systems. Behind the Gothic tropes of, “…castles, imprisoned heroines, rapacious and tyrannical villains…”115, we see the classic romantic themes of beauty, the sublime and longing.
113 Horace Walpole, Preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto, 10 114 James Wierzbicki, Film Music: A History. (New York & London, Routledge, 2009). 137 115 Angela Wright, “The Gothic” The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in the Romantic Period. Edited by Devoney Looser. (Cambridge University Press, 2015) 61 76
For instance, in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), two high-born characters, Ellena and Vivaldi, admire the sublime beauty of the landscape between San Stephano and Naples, punctuated by the beauty of ancient ruins. Vivaldi’s manservant Paulo, however, is insensitive to such aesthetic concerns, and simply enjoys the reminders of his beloved
Naples. In addition, Ellena and Vivaldi savour their aesthetic appreciations in distinct, culturally gendered ways. Where she observes the beauty of a landscape shaped by human cultivation that stands in stark contrast to the “awful grandeur of the mountains”, Vivaldi is stuck by the dark sublime of mountains that threaten life with their hard and towering might. Paolo’s national chauvinism makes him focus on the beneficence of Mount Vesuvius, which, if they were in Naples, would provide them with the light that they lack now—even though he concedes Vivaldi’s point that volcanoes can be destructive of life. Paolo reminisces about the good provided by the volcano in terms of an illumination night, a spectacle of light for the populace.
This old theme of the volcano as sublime stems back to Longinus, but
Radcliffe brings it into the Romantic/Gothic context where it provides both the fascination of spectacle and the moral guidance provided by the 77 wholeness of nature and its exposition of sublime truth understood as through a glass darkly.116
Gothic Noir and the sublime
In this Gothic example from Radcliffe, the themes of romantic aesthetics can be seen in juxtaposition to what will become a gothic noir sensibility in filmmaking. The dark sublime is illuminated by spectacle. It is important to rehearse concisely at this stage of the argument Burke’s psychological and Kant’s philosophical account of the sublime. Burke notes the effect of power and terror upon our emotions, observing that terror can give us pleasure when experienced from the distance offered us by the arts. Influenced by Burke, Kant looked at the cognitive process whereby the sublime, when experienced by a rational being, produces the idea of infinity in response to experiences that can be neither fully comprehended by reason or understanding, nor conceived fully in the imagination.117 Greatness of nature or the trials of human action overwhelms our intellectual faculties and produces in us the feeling of the sublime.
116 James P. Carson, Enlightenment popular culture, and Gothic fiction. 255-6. The scriptural reference is, of course, to St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, using the magisterial language of The King James Bible. 117 Christophe Den Tandt, “Masses, Forces, and the Urban Sublime” The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2014). 127 78
This Gothic sense of the sublime will be recalled in the film noir creations of the forties and fifties in Hollywood and beyond. In this genre, we can make a distinction between the romantic sublime and the post-modern sublime, especially in relation to the urban environment. For the
Romantics the chief object of the sublime was nature, followed by human actions and adventures. The post-modern suspension of questions of value, due to the moral ambiguity of modern urban experience, translates feelings of the sublime into terms expressing bewilderment at the incomprehensible magnitude of urban populations and the dehumanization caused by industrialisation.118
Before we leave the Gothic for the Melodramatic, let us restate a key argument of this thesis; namely that symphonic orchestral film music forms a paradigm, for today, of our favoured sublime aesthetic expressing the darkness within and without. Just as David Punter articulates the
Gothic as, “…the paradigm of all fiction…” because it is the spectre that haunts the texts of literature, by representing all the various shades of meaning that has not been written.119
118 Christophe Den Tandt, Masses, Forces, and the Urban Sublime 127 119 David Punter, Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law, (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998). 2 79
So too does our conception of symphonic orchestral music have a spectral quality, between film and cinematic audience, giving a wordless voice to the sublime meanings of our lives that never emerge form the dark recesses of our subjectivity, but are richly and expansively alluded to in an inherently collaborative art form like film.
Symphonic Music and the Gothic Noir
Symphonic orchestral film music can be used typically to express a gothic noir in creative endeavour, just as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Das
Kapital can be construed as a gothic noir tale. From the opening phrase,
“A spectre is haunting Europe…” Marx and Engels tell of a hidden meaning to history that will be unlocked by their conception of class struggle. Calling on the Romantic criticism of modern society and its roots in bourgeois industry and markets, Marx and Engels tell a gothic noir tale (combining romantic and urban criticisms of modern social dynamics) about humanity being ravaged by the dynamics of capitalism:
“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to
all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the
motely feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left
remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, 80
than callous ‘cash payment’.120 It has drowned the most heavenly
ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine
sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”121
The musicality of such statements seems to exert a force that hyperbolically overarches the particular argument conveyed by the language, and proclaims prophetically warnings of coming doom for the capitalist and promised reclamation for the worker. A sublime and utopian conception indeed, occupying no particular place in the world, but exerting a force that spectrally brings meaning to the lived experience of a tumultuous time. These words are symphonic in character, uttered to bring people together in a grand vision of a unified humanity projected into a future condition—a condition that may never be realised, but under the sway of impassioned belief, exerting the influence of being pervasively significant.
And just like the nineteenth century symphony, made possible by the unprecedented developments of modern ingenuity, and bringing together these new forces for the benefit of all, Marx and Engels shape the modern
120 They took the phrase from Thomas Carlyle. 121 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, translated by Samuel Moore, 1888, (Notes and Introduction by Gareth Stedman Jones, 2002) (England, Penguin Books, 1967) 222 81 forces that they are critically appraising into a new vision of what humanity might be.
It is important to remember at this stage of the argument that the public concert, as the main medium for the public performance of music, emerged from about 1800 onwards, forging a key aspect of the new bourgeois world of culture and entertainment. Prior to this age of revolution, opera and concert music were the exclusive preserve of the court and the aristocracy. All others were barred from hearing this music due to their lowly social status. With the age of political, social and technical revolution, ever expanding urbanisation commercialised every aspect of society, making art forms like music into a commodity to be bought and sold. This democratisation of the social and cultural scene means that anyone who can afford entrance can gain access to the new public concerts. As a consequence, the emerging ‘middling classes’ looked to artists to forge art forms that reflected their interests and tastes.
Composers, freed from the patronage of the court and church, were now at liberty to invent new musical forms such as the symphony.122
122 Tim Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture Old Regime Europe 1660-1789 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 161-2 82
Such liberation, however, came at a price, for the demand for entertainment made by the new middle classes stemmed from the drives of necessity maintaining biological and social life.123 As Schiller noted of this new social reality, “Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance.”124 Whereas artists, when formerly serving under the patronage of the court and church, had to create art forms that matched the representational power of aristocracy and state, now their newly found liberty to create new art forms had to conform to a new public sphere shaped by the necessities of social forces.
This dilemma, affecting the quality of cultural output, has shaped modernity ever since, setting up a tension between culture and entertainment that underpins modern mass culture. At the dawn of this modernity, artists used the material and cultural resources that had been established by the aristocratic order. But, instead of using them to represent the glory of the aristocratic authoritarian state, they used them to celebrate the glory of the artist and the arts. This is the principal reason why classical art music attained the status of cultural authority, and why film composers were to subsequently call upon this authority when
123 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (London, Faber and Faber, 1961). 208 124 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man. (1795) Translated by Reginald Snell, (Mineola, New York, Dover Publications, Inc. 2004). 26 83 wanting to give a sense of gravitas and cultural weight to cinematic output. Romanticism latched onto this glorification of genius and the arts: the arts were sacralised and the artist became the high priest of culture in the modern world.125
Marx and Engels remind us of the Romantic call for a New Mythology in order to “…transform the fragmented echoes of the Enlightenment into a symphonic age of scientific knowledge, Bildung, and political freedom that would sanction the normative values for the future.”126 We are witnessing the use of aesthetic categories for not only criticism, but also for the communication of cultural meanings that are significant for the whole human being, underpinned by an interior affective existence. This is what symphonic film music, calling on the emotional and cultural resources of the romantic sensibility, achieves when it underscores dramatic narrative in film. We will explore this in greater detail in the next chapter on the mythological aspect of this kind of film music’s cultural meaning. In the meantime, however, we will see how this understanding of the force of musicality worked in the formation of
Victorian melodrama.
125 Tim Blanning, The Culture of Power and The Power of Culture, 182 126 Bruce Matthews, “The New Mythology: Romanticism Between Religion and Humanism.” In The Relevance of Romanticism. Oxford University Press, 2014. 202. Note that the word, ‘symphonic’ was italicized by the current author. 84
Victorian Melodrama
Michael Gamer writes succinctly that, “…Gothic was the first language of melodrama, and many of melodrama’s roots can be found in the music and sonic effects of late eighteenth-century Gothic plays.” As the melodramatic genre developed in the nineteenth-century, a tried and trusted aesthetic for attracting audiences became fixed, revealing a public taste that, “…revelled in conspiracy, the supernatural, and the darker side of human motivation and consciousness.”127 Victorian melodrama stands as a link between the emergence of a dark gothic sensibility from the romantic aesthetic of the sublime and the eventual crystallisation of this dark sublime aesthetic in symphonic orchestral film music.
As entertainments, they were aimed mostly at the working and middle classes128, the latter having more expendable income than the former, and were therefore more influential in shaping popular trends.
Melodrama digs deeply into the theatrical tradition of fusing drama with music. The form of this genre is characterised by discrete rhythmic nodes that support the narrative with discernable moments of emotional expression. The effect of breaking the narrative up into discrete waves of
127 Michael Gamer, Gothic Melodrama, 33 128 Michael V. Pisani, “Melodramatic Music,” The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama, edited by Carolyn Williams, (Cambridge University Press, 2018). 95 85 emotional affect washing over the audience is uniquely achieved by the insertion of tableaux that fix for the moment and the emotional impact of what just occurred in the narrative. Left to contemplate and absorb the emotional and narrative import of the passage just enacted, the music that had accompanied the passage and the current music accompanying the tableau (whether continuous with the previous passage’s underscoring, or new material) enhanced the emotions being felt by the audience: it
“…holds that beholder fixated or enthralled before it.”129
It is this force of enhancement that creates an audio-visual field130 that is operative both in a melodramatic theatre and what was to become a film underscored with music—or indeed, for that matter, a MTV music video or a video game. The audio-visual field is voco-centric, placing primary emphasis on the spoken words that convey the narrative.
Following closely behind the voice in importance are the actions that reveal the narrative. Music, sound, costume, staging, etc., are placed within this voco-centric hierarchy behind voice and action. This audio- visual field works in a musically backed drama or a sound film. That is, any issues that relate to the audio-visual field of sound film can be traced
129 Carolyn Williams, “Melodrama” Victorian Literature and Culture, Volume 46, Issue 3-4, Fall/Winter 2018, pp. 769-773, Cambridge University Press online: 30 August, 2018, p. 770 130 Carolyn Williams, “Melodrama” Victorian Literature and Culture. 769 86 from Victorian melodrama to Hollywood and beyond, with the caveat that the issues vary in complexion according to the genre and medium concerned.
Tableaux in melodrama projects are the background to what early watchers of film called ‘moving pictures.’ In melodrama, the tableau appears to be ‘moving’ because it seems to vibrate with the action that had preceded it, emotionally charged—“…their sudden stillness moves…spectators into affective states of sentimental or violent feeling accompanied by aesthetic detachment.”131 The tail of this quote points to the Kantian heritage in the debate about aesthetics and the arts. In a strange way, we can experience this tableau effect through the nostalgic bites of classic films offered on YouTube, playing our favourite film themes as an underscore for a collage of scenes pasted together. It is not the same experience as hearing, consciously or unconsciously, the underscore tailored for each moment of the film. Rather, you are listening to the favoured music being used to remind you of your enjoyment of the film as a whole synoptic picture.
131 Carolyn Williams, “Melodrama” Victorian Literature and Culture 771 87
Consider the following example of Elmer Bernstein’s theme for the film,
The Magnificent Seven (1960).132 This nostalgic bite is not just functional, but emphasises the original aesthetic intent and rhetoric of the music— indeed, reminding us and enhancing that aesthetic intent through the rhetoric of a nostalgic collage presented on YouTube. Note, for instance,
Bernstein’s interpreted reference to Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ symphony with the stabs of E-flat major triads opening the theme, connecting the heroism of the romantic age of symphonies with the new heroes of the American
West. We can almost see Beethoven’s hand scratching out the name of
Napoleon and writing ‘Eroica’, then scratching that out and writing ‘The
Magnificent Seven.’ This begins the symphonic treatment of the unity that is this collage, emphasising the role of this musical theme as almost the eighth member of the ‘magnificent seven.’ In the play of nostalgic memory, imagination and interpretation, this collage of fragments of the film perform less like the film that unfolds a narrative over a few hours, and more like the melodramatic sense of the tableau, a ‘moving picture’ that trades in the memories and feelings that you hold about a favourite film.
132 The Magnificent Seven · Main Theme · Elmer Bernstein, HD Film Tributes, accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 3:35, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yulmgTcGLZw 88
The music used and arranged for melodramas was printed in various forms. A common practice was to compile character and action pieces written down in music manuscript. This music expressed typical emotions associated with a particular mood. They were called by names such as hurries, agitatos, plaintives133, and were printed in booklets that guided the conductor’s choices of music as the play unfolded. In addition, they had a kind of running sheet called the ‘music plot’,134 where the theatrical prompter could indicate to the conductor where to place the musical cues.
Most of these books and associated printed material were either not archived or lost a long time ago, because popular theatrical entertainments like melodrama did not have the cultural status of opera or the symphony.
The music that these books notated was regarded as purely a technical requirement for a professionalised theatrical practice.135 These printed guides, however, resemble the catalogues and cue sheets that guided the early cinema musicians who played mood pieces for the silent films. The underscoring skills and aesthetic judgements honed in melodrama and silent film were to eventually guide the underscoring of sound film, when the audio-visual field became fixed by the advent of a fixed sound track.
133 Michael V. Pisani, Melodramatic Music, 96 134 Michael V. Pisani, Melodramatic Music, 102 135 Michael V. Pisani, “When the Music Surges.” In The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies. Oxford University Press, 2013. https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195328493.001.0001/ oxfordhb-9780195328493-e-007, p. 569 89
This means that the writers of melodramas thought in terms of the visual and the aural when presenting narratives in a theatrical genre.136
The placement of music in a melodrama is in direct response to the emotional impact of a scene. Filmmaking has several advantages over theatre in terms of the intimacy with the action and narrative offered to the cinematic audience.137 Changing camera focuses, close-ups, the ability to change the mise-en-scène quickly, and the use of montage, give the filmmaker, composer and orchestrator much more scope to fine tune the placement of music to express the finer details of emotional change and impact.
Melodrama in film
It seems as though melodrama was made for film and symphonic orchestral film music, when you consider the overarching aesthetic message rhetorically conveyed by the wonderful black-and-white melodramatic creations of Hollywood and Gainsborough Pictures. The intensification of modern social fragmentation felt in the late nineteenth century carried over into the twentieth century, and continued to twist in
136 Michael V. Pisani, Melodramatic Music,. 100 137 Michael V. Pisani, When the Music Surges: Melodrama and Nineteenth-century 570 90 unprecedented technological changes that, at times, threatened our very existence: the killing fields of the First World War come to mind, where advances in technology made the killing of people more efficient, leading to the postmodern questioning of the so-called value of modern progress.
On a popular culture level, the arts of theatre and film expressed audience perceptions
“…of a rapidly changing, unstable, threatening, and increasingly secular
world, where explanations for suffering, poverty, imperial expansion,
urbanisation, and social upheaval were not immediately apparent…It was
still far easier and far more theatrically effective to blame villainy,
human malevolence, greed, lust, or jealousy than to identify and
analyse—let alone dramatize—their root causes.”138
Melodrama’s stich, “…villain-driven depredations on innocents and the eventual exposure and discomfit of the villain, with the concomitant restoration of stability and harmony…”139 worked well in film with a symphonic orchestral underscoring expressing the passions and emotional turmoil of the drama.
138 David Mayer, “Melodrama in Early Film”, The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama, edited by Carolyn Williams, (Cambridge University Press, 2018). 224 139 David Mayer, Melodrama in Early Film 224 91
The rhetorical complexion of a melodramatic aesthetic transferred very well to film, where paying audiences wanted the entertainment of a simplified world they could not have in real life. Such entertainments offered a re-enchantment of their real worlds by means of dreams being realised on the stage and in film.140 But these entertainments carried the basic realisation about sublime feelings and passions that we derived from
Kant. Contrasting our feelings for the beautiful with the sublime, Kant noted that, while the extreme experiences associated with the sublime aroused fear and pain, they subsequently become a source of pleasure.141
Melodramatic film explored popular themes like “…sex, violence, and the possibility of happiness…”142 in genres like costume melodramas that combined the romantic practice of examining contemporary concerns through historical recreations. British films of the forties and fifties, like
The Man In Grey, Fanny By Gaslight and The Wicked Lady, presented patriarchal villains who often ruined the lives of women, the resolution by the possibility of happiness proving very popular with audiences.
The greater attendance of women in cinemas, due to the absence of men during WWII and women having more expendable income, meant that
140 Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939-48 (London, Routledge, 1992) 103 141 Sarah Hibberd and Miranda Stanyon, Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture, 1680-1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 5 142 Robert Murphy: Realism and Tinsel 104 92 female movie stars came to the fore, with the majority of their fan mail coming from women.143
Underscoring film
It is important at this stage to note the history of the darkened cinema, presenting the chiaroscuro of the film to the audience. From the mid-
1870s onwards, with the introduction of electric stage lighting, theatres could jettison the bright lighting of gaslights, and reduce the illumination to the point of completely darkening the auditorium. When the early practice of showing films alongside theatrical performances evolved (as films were cheaper by the yard and cost a lot less than a cast), both were seen in complete darkness, a factor that suited the new technology and the aesthetics of film.144
It is also equally important to note the connection of Gothic theatre to filmmaking in the work of early filmmakers like Georges Méliès.
Creators like Méliès saw the entertainment potential of magic effects in theatre and technical innovations, beginning with lantern-show
“fantasmagorias” from eighteenth-century onwards, for firing the imaginations of audiences to create the spectacles that would bring them
143 Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel 104 144 David Mayer, Melodrama in Early Film, 226 93 back again and again. From light and shadow images projected on a white sheet in a darkened room to the presentation of the marvellous stories of magic, demons and haunted houses, the early filmmakers learnt from theatrical innovations of the nineteenth-century how to transfer insight to film by “…transforming an actual two-dimensional screen into a spectral three-dimensional world…projected onto a white surface… whose movements render palpable an immaterial world hover(ing) between the actual and the imaginary, the present and the past.”145
This process of transformation was continued with the advent of sound films, making it possible to include music in the sound track, and to activate the inherent force of musicality that resides in film. We can see and hear this in the following example described concisely by Michael
Pisani. Referring to Miklos Rozsa’s scoring for the 1949 film Madame
Bovary, he focuses on a theme that is played three or four times in the film, to represent the protagonist’s, Emma, longing—that key romantic theme. A sonorous string cue, it ‘…surges with romantic ardour and passion.”146
145 Elisabeth Bronfen, “Cinema of the Gothic Extreme.” Chapter. In The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic, edited by Jerrold E. Hogle, 107–22. Cambridge Companions to Literature. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). doi:10.1017/CCO9781139151757.011. p.107 146 Michael V. Pisani, When the Music Surges: Melodrama and Nineteenth- p. 19 of 28 94
Miklós Rózsa, sketch excerpt from Reel 5, part 1 In Madame Bovary; manuscript. In the Rózsa Collection, Syracuse University Library, Special Collections.
95
Pisani suggests that it “…conforms to the romantic notion of the thematic melos: it follows clear musical phrasing and symmetrical patterns…to create audience sympathy with a character and his or her predicament.”147
As we will see more clearly in the essay on mythology, symphonic orchestral film music is best placed to promote the ideas and themes of romanticism in an entertainment context. Underlying all of the possible emotions evoked by watching a film, this romantically shaped style of film underscoring activates passions and feelings that are not necessarily anchored in any given object of representation.
The very musicality of this music ties in with the force of musicality being exerted by the various aspects of the film, evoking a personal and cultural history of passionate movement within the private sphere of individuality.
The movement is the important factor, not this or that represented object in the filmic narrative.
147 Michael V. Pisani, When the Music Surges: Melodrama and Nineteenth- p. 19 of 28 96
CHAPTER FOUR
A mythological interpretation of a symphonic aesthetic
An important bridge between the philosophical and historical chapters of this thesis is laid by an understanding of mythology as a modern cultural force. Since every aspect of this thesis refers as a matter of course to the creative power of intellect and imagination, the romantic proclivity of its subject matter to recreate an idealised past that will be projected into the future, calls upon the form and practices of mythic narrative.
If symphonic orchestral film music and its dark sublime aesthetic has an inherent romantic heritage, then one needs to understand the cultural impact of the romantic call for a New Mythology, as the romanticism of the long nineteenth-century projected idiomatic aesthetic ideas and themes into the twentieth-century where such film music was to be eventually forged. As Tom Shippey tells us148, it was from “…the New Mythology, not ancient folk-tradition…(that writers like Tolkien and Rowling found)…the orcs and trolls, the elves and dwarfs and dragons and werewolves which now crowd the shelves of every bookstore.” His reference to “…the shadow-walkers…shapes from the cover of
148 Quoted by John Deathbridge in in his introduction to Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung, introduction and notes by John Deathridge, (England, Penguin Classics, 2018). p. xxviii 97 darkness…which now haunt the imagination” came from the creative mentality behind the New Mythology that came to inform the modern imagination that produced cinema and symphonic orchestral film music.
We will, therefore, look at discussion about mythology that is made possible by the relationship between the composer Wagner and the philosopher Nietzsche. Wagner is arguably a principal forerunner of the modernist aesthetic that was to find popular form in filmmaking.149 As we have already stated in the introduction, symphonic orchestral film music is not simply the result of a late-Romantic sensibility. If it were so, then it would have died with the demise of Hollywood’s studio system, as a monument to oversentimentality.
Hollywood’s classic composers, however, and every subsequent orchestral filmic composer, delved into the modernist mix of musical and broader aesthetic styles in order to say something meaningful to contemporary audiences. The irreducible plurality of possible values that characterises our contemporary world is reflected in the smorgasbord of possible styles and aesthetics of contemporary artistic practice. Those elements of the
149 Roger Scruton, Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2010 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195166910.001.0001 p. 195 98 late-Romantic heritage of film composing, that were found relevant to the task at hand, were reinterpreted in the wider context of our contemporary world and the various art forms that it has engendered. As a consequence, symphonic orchestral film music expresses the darker aspects of the contemporary human predicament. Nietzsche is a master at thinking critically via the rebus of irreducible plurality and perspectivism, and an eloquent articulator of our contemporary predicament.
By looking closely at the dialogue about mythology between Wagner and
Nietzsche, we will observe the emergence of a key aspect of our contemporary art scene and cultural sphere. Filmmaking, underscoring with symphonic orchestral film music and the making of new myths are all cultural activities that are worth considering in their practical and theoretical unity. As Lawrence Kramer stated
“Music, among other things, is a form of activity: a practice…As a
practice, music should be subject to the same kinds of rigorous
interpretations that we customarily apply to other cultural practices, be
they social, artistic, technical, discursive, ritual, or sexual.”150
150 Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1990). p. xii 99
Mythological thinking often provides the capstone for such an examination.
An identity crisis
Between a philosopher like Nietzsche and classical German philosophy, with its influence on German idealism and philosophical Romanticism, loomed an identity crisis for philosophy that profoundly affected intellectual and cultural life from 1840 onwards. According to the varied speculations of idealists like Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, the
Enlightenment ideal of philosophy to provide an a priori and deductive foundation for all the sciences—whether that be “…reasoning from self evident principles, intellectual intuition, a priori construction, dialectic”— ought to protect knowledge and ethics from the corrosive force of radical scepticism.151 The synthetic method of speculative philosophy, however, was no longer a convincing way of founding knowledge and action, when compared to the technical successes of the analytic method employed by the sciences.
The philosophical aspect of this identity crisis can be summarised by the importance of Kant’s achievements in relation to the Idealist and
151 Frederick Beiser, After Hegel, German Philosophy, 1840-1900, (Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2014). 15-6 100
Romantic philosophers that read, absorbed and critiqued him. Kant’s position can be flagged by the predicament of humanity standing between the causal determinism of the laws of nature and the call to freedom. That is, it is difficult to see how freedom can be instantiated in an existence that is causally determined by the laws of nature. As Hegel complained, Kant left us in an amphibious position of being free subjects of the moral law, while simultaneously being determined objects of the laws of nature, in a modern world that has been disenchanted by the loss of an unquestioned heritage that ensured our values, and from which we have been alienated because we are aware of our predicament. Kant’s principal intellectual achievement had been the demonstration of the
“…cognitive meaninglessness of the traditional claims of speculative,
dogmatic metaphysics, whilst establishing the regulative moral necessity
for the primacy of practical reason, that is, the concept of freedom.”152
For idealists like Hegel, the reconciliation required to dissolve
“…Kant’s radical dualism between autonomous subject and determined
natural object, between rational freedom and material nature, can only be
completed by a thoroughgoing reconciliation of nature with freedom.”153
152 Simon Critchley, Ethics Politics Subjectivity : Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso, 1999). 217-8 101
Kant attempted to bridge the gap between Verstand (scientific and discursive understanding) and Vernunft (ethical reasoning premised on subjective freedom) with his critique of judgement, described earlier in our philosophical chapter. For many of Kant’s readers and critics in
German Idealism, philosophical Romanticism and beyond, aesthetics became the centre of social, cultural and political criticism, the key to understanding life in the modern world.
As the young Nietzsche wrote in his first book The Birth of Tragedy,
“…only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.”154 As Nietzsche matured in his criticism, however, he moved away from the philosophical world of the German Idealists and philosophical Romantics, towards our own world of irreducible plurality and the continual threat of nihilism.
Thinking about mythology
The modern conception of mythology was largely formulated in German thought during the period when romanticism emerged from the
153 J. M. Bernstein, “‘Our Amphibian Problem’: Nature in History in Adorno’s Hegelian Critique of Hegel.” Chapter. In Hegel on Philosophy in History, edited by Rachel Zuckert and James Kreines, 193–212. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). doi:10.1017/9781316145012.012. p.193 154 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (London; Penguin, 1993). 32 102
Enlightenment, from the late eighteenth-century into the long nineteenth- century. Formulated against the background of a dominant Christian culture, myth was regarded with either suspicion as a pagan residue, or welcomed as a
“…luminous, life-giving symbol or narrative with the power to reach
across the barriers of time, transcend the limitations of theoretical reason,
and grant an experience of the divine far more immediate than that
contained in the seemingly dead letter (of Scripture, of the law, or of the
realistic novel).”155
Herder connected the particular geography and climate of each peoples with the forming of a unique mythology, providing the key to understanding their unique language, customs and arts. He argued that,
“…each human society, each epoch of human history, each and every human collectivity was a unique entity—and uniquely valuable.”156 He also argued that modern Europeans should no longer refer to the foreign myths of Greece, Rome and the Bible, but should seek aesthetic resources from their own unique national mythologies. For the German speaking
155 George S. Williamson, “Myth” The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought, edited by Joel D.S. Rasmussen, Judith Wolfe, and Johannes Zachhuber, Online Publication Date: Aug 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198718406.013.35, p. 196 156 Richard Taruskin, Music in the Nineteenth Century: The Oxford History of Western Music. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010). 121 103 peoples, this meant Norse mythology.157 Herder hoped that this would lead to tolerance of differences amongst peoples; unfortunately it also led to the increasing intolerance national chauvinism.
Whether or not artists took on Herder’s recommendations, a plurality of mythological material recovered from the past flooded the creative palettes of European and transatlantic culture. Mythical narratives of the past gave expression to higher truths, with regard to human existence, where past peoples lacked the requisite abstract philosophical language.158
Indeed, mythical narrative reinterpreted gave the romantic sensibility its personal access to Truth not sanctioned by a universal authority, but perceivable and to be cherished in the inner sanctum of personal consciousness.159
Just as myth making itself is a potent hermeneutic practice that communicates by means of hyperbolic figures and gestures, not trying,
“…to match the real world, precisely because the meaning of the world is
not self-evident but needs to be deciphered and translated. A myth is
required to exceed the rationally demonstrable truth, to magnify and
157 George S. Williamson, “Myth” 197 158 George S. Williamson, “Myth” 197 159 Richard Taruskin, Music in the Nineteenth Century: 63 104
supplement what is visible and tangible with a mystifying aura, but also
to conserve an essential message.”160
Cultures share with religions, as a particular instance of cultural activity and solid mythmaking, the following characteristics as outlined by Linda
Woodhead. In her view, religion is
“…more flexible than a philosophical system, and works not only with
abstract concepts but with vivid stories, striking images, resonant
symbols, and life-shaping rituals. It appeals to heart and senses as well
as mind, and offers a range of prompts and provocations for guiding and
shaping the lives of individuals and societies.”161
The character of mythical thinking
A key way by which romantic thinkers and artists yearned for the
(supposed) cultural and moral unity of the pre-industrial past was to adopt a mytho-poietic mode of thinking. Of course, their ideological prejudice about the past in relation to the present distorted their academic approach to myth: modern scholarship about mythology was in its infancy. But the
160 Jane Caplan, Nazi Germany: A Very Short Introduction. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004). 2 161 Linda Woodhead, Christianity: A Very Short Introduction. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004). 1 105 hermeneutic revolution had been started, and the new understanding of past mythologies affected artistic trends.
It is important to be clear about the distinctions between past mythological accounts of the world and the present use of reinterpreted mytho-poietic thinking in artistic endeavour.
Past pre-scientific cultures, of course, do not enjoy the benefit of discursive thought practices that were developed with the advent of modern hypothetical-deductive methodologies. Instead, they forged mythological stories in order to deal with the defining problems of life that required solutions to which seem to lie beyond sensible experience.
Intelligible forms derived from everyday experience were imposed on events and issues that were not based in immediate experience. Symbolic representations were based principally and typically on the experience of personal initiative and activity. Natural events, therefore, were explained as initiatives and actions of gods motivated by personal reasons.
Anthropomorphism guided mythological and artistic representation and thinking.162
162 John L. McKenzie, “Aspects of Old Testament Thought” The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, (New Jersey, Geoffrey Chapman, Prentice Hall, Inc., 1990). 1288-9 106
Mythological thinking is essentially an act of belief, starting from an intuition that unites senses, reason and imagination. It is not intended to solve the problems that human beings face, but expresses an attitude to these problems that is the posture of being mystified by a presence, the intention of whom is unknowable. This attitude of mystery is consonant with the aesthetics of the dark sublime.
The force of musicality can be viewed as the adoption of this faculty for mysterious comprehension, without need of symbolic representations. It is this faculty that symphonic orchestral film music gives to cinematic audiences when they respond to the dark sublime of passions evoked by a romantic aesthetics. It further connects with the romantic symphonic aesthetic developed in the long nineteenth century “…a symphonic age of scientific knowledge, Bildung, and political freedom that would sanction the normative values for the future.”163 Just as the force of musicality expresses the romantic notion of the autonomous subject and its relation to the sublime, so too
“The combination of an extreme subjective expressive immediacy and an
unspecified or ‘objectless’ context is what gave rise to the sublime
romantic notion of ‘absolute music’.”164
163 Bruce Matthews, The New Mythology. 202 164 Richard Taruskin, Music in the Nineteenth Century 139 107
It is important in this immediate context to remember that our overarching thesis is that symphonic orchestral film music expresses a dark sublime aesthetic that has a romantic heritage. This aesthetic and heritage ties this style of film music with a culture of Innigkeit or Innerlichkeit, where autonomous individuals find refuge from a fragmented contemporary existence through a sense of inwardness that has personal, cultural and aesthetic significance. We have taken the romantic notion of a force of musicality, being expressed by symphonic orchestral film music, as
“…some sort of pure Innerlichkeit, or powerful pre-conceptual or pre-
determinate expressivity, an emotional or sensuous energy or drive of
deep aesthetic, moral, cultural, religious, and social significance.”
Kierkegaard adds to this by making the distinction between action
“…undertaken with consciousness of the goal…” which cannot be
expressed in music, whilst immediate action can be expressed by music,
expressing a mood that sustains the drama.165
165 Richard Eldrige, “Hidden Secrets of the Self”: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Reading of Don Giovanni”, Goehr, Lydia, and Daniel Herwitz. The Don Giovanni Moment : Essays on the Legacy of an Opera (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006). 34 108
In this sense, symphonic orchestral film music plays its part in the long- established and still echoing romantic project of the
“…yearning (Sensucht) toward collectivity, unification, or expressive
synthesis as it surpasses both in origin and effect the divisions brought
about by reason, representation, and concept.”166
Wagner’s new mythology
This specific understanding of symphonic orchestral film music can be extended further by unpacking the romantic notion of a New Mythology in terms of a hermeneutic relationship between Wagner’s concept of music drama and the art of filmmaking. The notion of an inter-working relationship of art forms producing a result that is greater in quality than the sum of the parts lends itself to mythological expression.
In the case of this thesis, we will compare the workings of symphonic orchestral film music to the chorus operating in Ancient Greek tragedy.
Wagner’s mythological debt to Beethoven is best symbolised by his decision to conduct Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the laying of the
166 Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical essays on the history of aesthetic theory (Columbia University Press, New York, 2008). 50 109 foundation stone for his Bayreuth Theatre in 1872. It will be at Bayreuth where Wagner will eventually perform his music drama, The Ring, the flagship of his new concept of a mythology for the German people and
Europe. In line with the reformulated mythologies of romanticism that looked to the Germanic past, Wagner hoped for a strong and unified
Germanic society that could hold its own in the struggles of Europe.
Schlegel captured this feeling of nostalgia for a medieval Germanic past, by claiming that, “The poetry of the ancients was that of possession, ours is that of longing.”167 As we saw in our philosophical chapter, Sensucht, longing is a leading motif of Romantic poetry and philosophy, the longing to recreate the Germanic/Gothic world of the Middle Ages.
By introducing a chorus in the final movement of his ninth symphony,
Beethoven re-introduced the chorus of Ancient Greek drama to modern life. The chorus, like the orchestra based on a string section, is the voice of humanity, sounding out in expression of those conflicted conditions that characterise human affairs and worldly experience. In the case of symphonic orchestral film music, the narrative is carried by the words and actions of the actors. But the symphonic orchestral music itself is the pre-
167 Stewart Spencer, “The ‘Romantic operas’ and the turn to myth” The Cambridge Companion to Wagner. Edited by Thomas S. Grey, Cambridge Companions Online@Cambridge University Press, 2016. DOI.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521642996.005 p. 67 110 conceptual sound of humanity in its joys and pains, and all the emotions in between. The audience feels its humanity in the symphonic film score.
The philosophical complexion of mythology
Philosophically, we have seen how symphonic orchestral film music can be construed as exerting a force of musicality in a filmic context, a pre- conceptual emotional energy that ties “…the individual’s more lonely, inner questioning of existence”168 with the broader significance of cultural life. Historically, we have seen how this dark sublime aesthetic moved from romantic thought and literature, through Gothic literature and theatre, Victorian melodrama, German Expressionist opera, to the entertainment industry represented by Hollywood’s studio system and the classic Hollywood underscore with symphonic orchestral film music.
Now let us take the romantic articulation of a New Mythology for a modern age, and see how symphonic orchestral film music can be transformed into a hermeneutic tool for understanding our contemporary culture.
168 Paul Raimond Daniels, “The Birth of Tragedy: Transfiguration through Art” The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, eidited by Tom Stern (Cambridge University Press, 2019) 147 111
The specifically romantic and historicist view of mythology arose after the resolution of the Napoleonic wars (1815) as an intellectual and cultural imperative. This was a project intended to articulate collective identities for each burgeoning European nation state in idiosyncratic languages that supported “…narrative scripts creating the memory of a common past.”169
Authoritative, monarchical regimes were restored as heads of these newly conceived nation-states, and the romantic advocacy of the autonomous individual moved to an articulation of mythologies as the best expression of an interior life.
This move is best seen in the concerns of Jacob Burckhardt, one of
Nietzsche’s senior Basel colleagues, who viewed with alarm the place of the individual in a burgeoning modernity. Associated with the emergence of these new sovereign nation states was the political emancipation and liberation of the ordinary person—especially the emerging bourgeois middle classes with varying levels of proficiency in the emerging free markets. This newly found individuality, freed from the traditional protocols and expectations guiding association and authority, was now threatened by the emerging modern dynamics of market capitalism, determining behaviours through communicative practices shaped by
169 John Toews, “Historicism from Ranke to Nietzsche” The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought, edited by Warren Breckman and Peter E. Gordon, (Cambridge University Press, 2019). 301 112 unprecedented modern administrative structures. The creative dynamics of difference were reduced to the private sphere.170 Mythologies attempting to re-enchant this dis-enchanted modern world serviced this new interiority.
The young Nietzsche, who wrote The Birth of Tragedy as his opening salvo in his freshly minted professorship (having been appointed at the age of 24), fashioned himself as a ‘self-styled prophet’ of a Germanic community with a new voice in Europe that expressed its implicit strengths. Calling on his youthful admiration for the philosophy of Arthur
Schopenhauer, he advocated the formation of “…self-conscious individuality out of the unconscious energies of natural life. ”171 Calling on his youthful admiration for Wagner, he advocated the formation of
“…communal identification through aesthetic experience of the mythic representation of emergent individuated ethno-cultural forms.”172 From the perspective of Wagner’s music dramas, Nietzsche could envision the
German people as plumbing and utilizing the hidden dynamics of nature through a new mythology that sublimates the primordial instinctual energy that aids them to face “…the terrors of individuated existence and
170 John Toews, Historicism from Ranke to Nietzsche321 171 John Toews, Historicism from Ranke to Nietzsche, 326 172 John Toews, Historicism from Ranke to Nietzsche, 326 113 transcended the agony of division and separation in the ecstasy of a unifying aesthetic experience.”173
In such a new cultural dynamic, modern individuals could take advantage of the wisdom gained from Ancient Greek tragedy. To this end, Nietzsche proposed the Greek deities, Apollo and Dionysius, as the twin poles defining our ‘tragic culture’: together they personify aesthetically the fundamental drives that constitute human subjectivity.174 Apollo represents the light of dream or illusion illuminating our world with clear narrative form, while dark sublime passions broil indistinctly but palpably beneath the appearances of the Apollonian world, and are celebrated by
Dionysius and his followers through the intoxication of music.175 On the one hand, in mythical terms, Apollo represented the Greek ideal of wisdom (σωφροσύνη) interpreted particularly as sobriety, the observance of form and temperance.176 On the other hand, the definitive art form that mythically expressed the influence of Dionysus is music. Music takes over the individual in mind and body like the inebriation of a drunken dancer.
The inhibitions of individuality are abandoned in the ecstasy of dancing
173 John Toews, Historicism from Ranke to Nietzsche 326 174 Paul Raimond Daniels, The Birth of Tragedy: Transfiguration through Art, 148 175 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy This polarity is the point of the entire book. 176 Paul Raimond Daniels, The Birth of Tragedy: Transfiguration through Art 152 114 exclusively to Dionysius’s music, an experience that is both terrifying and liberating.177
“These mythological metaphors were so vivid and rich that they assumed
a living reality and pervaded the life of the Greek in her education and
self-understanding: she had no need for philosophy or natural science
because her world was an aesthetic whole.”178
In this postulation of modernity as a ‘tragic culture’ supported by the twin aesthetics pylons of Apollo and Dionysius, Nietzsche experiments
“…with a new mode of philosophy which places aesthetics at the centre
of a far- reaching revaluation of subjectivity, ethics, cultural value and
the individual’s more lonely, inner questioning of existence.”179
Like a chorus in a tragedy
In any tragic presentation, all the possible horrors of life lived in a complex world are “…laid out, dramatized, (and) experienced, by the
177 Paul Raimond Daniels, The Birth of Tragedy: Transfiguration through Art 154 178 Paul Raimond Daniels, The Birth of Tragedy: Transfiguration through Art, 155 179 Paul Raimond Daniels, The Birth of Tragedy: Transfiguration through Art, 147 115 whole community, which (has) come together…”180 in a theatre or cinema. Words and action bring in the Apollonian element of order and temperance, a flame burning lambently over the turmoil and intoxication of the Dionysian appeal to pleasure and pure emotion. Hearing a symphonic orchestral film score in the context of a film unites Apollo with
Dionysius. As in theatrical tragedy, the music, action and words of film are united in a participative experience that reaches directly into the interior being of individuals where abstract philosophical reflection only reaches the discursive logical mind.181
The inherent unity of interacting creative intentions and art forms that is revealed by filmmaking makes it eminently susceptible to a mythological and hermeneutic interpretation in the terms of Ancient Greek tragedy.
In the practical terms of the modern entertainment industry, this dark sublime aesthetic became a staple of attracting paying customers, whether they are buying novels or tickets to the theatre or cinema. Spectacles of horror or melodrama, adventure or romance ensured the return of ever- growing democratised audiences through sheer entertainment value,
180 Mark Berry, “Nietzsche and Wagner.” Chapter. In The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, edited by Tom Stern, 97–120. Cambridge Companions to Philosophy. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). doi:10.1017/9781316676264.005.. p. 105 181 Paul Raimond Daniels, The Birth of Tragedy: Transfiguration through Art, 147-8 116 providing momentary values in a world characterised by a smorgasbord of values, with no universally accepted authority guiding choice. The dark sublime aesthetic provided an emotionally satisfying alternative to the equally desirable comic aspect of entertainment, together constituting the twin supportive pillars of our modern, contemporary tragi-comic culture.
Nietzsche’s insight and film music
Nietzsche’s interpretation of Greek tragic drama can be used to understand the place of music in film. A musical underscore applies the aesthetic force of musicality to the visual unfolding of the narrative on the silver screen, underwriting that narrative with feelings of a dark sublime nature that reflect the deep fracture that exists within all our psyches, torn between socially imposed duties and insatiable personal desires. Indeed, the musicality of the underscore responds to, and richly enhances, the inherent musicality (simply put, the changes of emotions) of the filmic narrative as a whole.
Nietzsche’s framing of modernity as ‘tragic culture’, by calling on the
Greek tragedies of playwrights like Aeschylus and Sophocles, gained access to an ancient understanding of suffering, conflict and futility, transformed into an aesthetic and participative experience that surpassed 117 abstract and discursive insights of rational philosophy.182 Outside the aesthetic and cultural context of participative tragedy, the seemingly futile conflicts of personal and social life deprive us of hope and meaning, providing confirmation of Schopenhauer’s pessimism regarding this world as a vale of tears where chance and error trip up the righteous and favour the wicked.183
Yet, for Nietzsche, the tragic view of the Greek drama transfigured this suffering into a sublime and seductive aesthetic experience. He consequently developed a philosophy that affirmed life, in all its gritty contingencies, by saying yes to participation without reserve—even if this life were to repeat itself in every single detail!184
This is where the dark sublime aesthetic of symphonic film music comes from. The recognition of the pain of life is transfigured into an aesthetic expression in the medium and technique of an art form. In this case, the force of musicality effects this transfiguration.
Nietzsche eventually worked himself free from his youthful Wagnerian dream of a revived Germanic culture at the centre of a revived Europe.
182 Paul Raimond Daniels, The Birth of Tragedy: Transfiguration through Art, 147-8 183 Paul Raimond Daniels, The Birth of Tragedy: Transfiguration through Art 148 184 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1887), translated by Walter Kaufmann, (New York, Vintage Books, Random House, 1974). 273 118
He came to regard bids for a collective national identity through mythology and pseudo-scientific postulations as attempts to escape the truth of existence as presented aesthetically in tragedy and experienced in modern life. Such escapism diminished the responsibility of each individual to creatively shape his or her own life.185
Nietzsche criticized the efforts of his philosophical and historicist colleagues to base human knowledge and ethics on created pasts as epistemological and moral foundations. He argued that they were replacing traditional authoritarian religion with new, equally repressive ideas such as historically nation-based ‘species-being’. In response, he announced the death of God as the death of claims to the universal truth, and embraced nihilism with regard to values.186 We make the values by which we can live well.
In this move of Nietzsche’s philosophy, we can see a parallel move made by Hollywood composers expanding upon and re-interpreting their late-
Romantic techniques of composition, and eluding the latter’s tendency towards over-sentimental emotionalism. Filmmakers wanted to reflect the realities of their time and the creative individualism of the judging
185 John Toews, Historicism from Ranke to Nietzsche 326 186 John Toews, Historicism from Ranke to Nietzsche, 327 119 audience. Hollywood’s composers wrote symphonic orchestral film music that reflected not only the many trends and fashions in music, but also, and more importantly, the strength of modern individualism confronting creatively the darker, grittier aspects of human existence.
Wagner’s take on mythology
Let us now take a step back and look at Wagner’s take on this new mythology. As we have seen in our philosophical discussion of chapter two, the philosophical Romantics articulated a New Mythology,
“…capable of transforming the fragmented echoes of the Enlightenment into a symphonic age of scientific knowledge, Bildung, and political freedom.”187
That is, the Romantics tended to agree with the Enlightenment project of founding individual autonomy and political freedom on a rational basis, but rejected the rationalist’s narrow focus on discursive knowledge.188 By sharing with German Idealism a favouring of the concepts ‘organism’,
‘individuality’ and ‘imagination’ as an antidote to the divisive mechanism
187 Bruce Matthews, The New Mythology 202 188 Dieter Sturma, “Politics and the New Mythology: the turn to Late Romanticism” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism. (Cambridge University Press, 2010). 224 120 and atomism of modern rationality expressed in the industrial revolution,189 the Romantics formulated a cultural and political programme that would inspire a ‘symphonic’ unity capable of influencing minds and action on a theoretical, spiritual and political level.
For the romantic thinkers and artists who advocated a new mythology for our times, the organic values of the future were possible and viable because they had been realised in the ancient and medieval past.190 In early Romantic documents, such as the Oldest System Programme of
German Idealism, by attempting to unite
“…the discordant notes of reason and sensuous nature into a symbolic
narrative of hope, this new mythology would beget a ‘new religion’ that,
unlike its predecessors, would be one that joins hands with humanism to
create idea whose aesthetic power would sanction the new normative
values of this coming age.”191
This New Mythology of the philosophical Romantics found nineteenth century advocates in composers like Richard Wagner, who in turn
189 Dieter Sturma, Politics and the New Mythology 219 190 Dieter Borchmeyer, “Critique as Passion and Polemic: Nietzsche and Wagner.” Chapter. In The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, edited by Thomas S. Grey, 192– 202. Cambridge Companions to Music. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). doi:10.1017/CCOL9780521642996.012. p. 194 191 Bruce Matthews, The New Mythology 202 121 articulated their own project of a new mythology.192 Though he is open to severe criticism for the racial ideology to which he put this idea of a new mythology, he also gave it a cultural life and newly minted prestige in his music dramas as Gesamtkunstwerk.
The idea of combining the strengths of each art form to express adequately and powerfully a new mythology that would transform a cultural sphere also has its place in understanding symphonic orchestral film music and filmmaking in general. It also contributed to the general cultural theme of bringing to life in artistic and entertaining formats “…shapes from the cover of darkness…which now haunt the imagination.”193
This new mythology, therefore, found new expressions in artists like
Wagner. This new art and its compelling aesthetic had a ‘vampiric’ quality, sucking the vital energies of artists and audiences alike, with impassioned listeners investing “…their most intimate desires and private sufferings.”194 Wagner developed a comprehensive musical language
(another version of the force of musicality) empowered to evoke “…erotic
192 Tom Shippey, “A Revolution Reconsidered: Mythography and Mythology in the Nineteenth Century” The Shadow-Walkers: Jacob Grimm’s Mythology of the Monstrous, edited by T.A. Shippey, (Tempe, Arizona, 2005). 1-2 193 Tom Shippey, A Revolution Reconsidered 1-2 194 Laurence Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, (USA, Harvard University Press, 2010) 1 122 stimulation, passionate ecstasy, and the torment of love.”195 Reaching in practice right back to the eighteenth-century aesthetic theory of the sublime and the articulation of fear as an aesthetic quality that can be utilised in artistic creation, Wagner recreated the spirit-world that is at once both frightening and familiar, and fed the romantic sense of longing
(Sensucht) for a golden age of cultural and spiritual unity.196
The Romantic call for a New Mythology may be utopian in the sense of no one expecting it to be realised in practice, but the call was made with a serious and urgent intention to make up for the loss of meaning in modern culture.197 By dint of our thesis about the force of musicality asserted by symphonic orchestral film music, we can speculate fruitfully about the application of a filmic force of musicality to re-enchant our morally ambiguous world.
Wagner’s force of musicality
Wagner’s radical conception of music drama, formulated in opposition to a limited conception of opera as a commercial proposition and
195 Laurence Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse 2 196 Paola Mayer, The Aesthetics of Fear in German Romanticism, (USA, McGill- Queen's University Press, 2019). 304 197 Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities 76 123 entertainment for the new middle classes, is an effective prism through which to examine critically the cultural significance of symphonic orchestral film music, highlighting that such music has a cultural significance beyond commercial interests. It also provides a working lens through which to view our thesis about the force of musicality exerted by such film music, revealing how music written for a dramatic context both constitutes and expresses a full range of human emotions in the art of filmmaking.
Not a few people have commented in a manner similar to the prolific
Hollywood composer Heinz Roemheld that, “…if Wagner were alive today he would be involved in making pictures and picture music.” Or as
Max Steiner put it succinctly, “…he would have been the Number One film composer.”198 This connection of Wagner to Hollywood should not be made on the obvious basis of filmmaking fulfilling Wagner’s concept of music drama as a Gesamtkunstwerk (‘the total work of art’), or on the fact that Hollywood comes after Wagner, but that filmmaking could be construed as his ideal of Zukunftsmusic (‘music of the future’) realised.
198 William H. Rosar, ‘Bernard Herrmann: “The Beethoven of Film Music?” The Journal of Film Music, Volume 1, Number 2/3, pages 121-150, ISSN 1087-7142, The International Film Music Society, Inc. 2003, p. 121 124
Rather, the connection is made in this thesis on the basis that both Wagner and the film composers who made symphonic orchestral film music the industry standard wrote “…music in terms of its relation to drama…”199; and that their writing for drama evolved as the tensions of modern society tightened and made greater dramatic demands on ever-evolving art forms.
This is the principal reason why—so the current author argues— symphonic orchestral film music became the industry standard for expressing dramatic emotion, and still fulfils this standard today.
Accordingly, we still see, in some strong measure, the tensions of modern life through the romantic lens of the ‘symphonic age’ of the nineteenth- century.
This is also why, so the current author argues, symphonic orchestral film music is still a viable standard for underscoring dramatic filmic emotion, because it expresses so well our contemporary predicaments that are the result of the unprecedented tensions raised by the advent of modernity.
199 Hollywood composer, Herbert Stothart, quoted by William H. Rosar, Bernard Herrmann: The Beethoven of Film Music? p. 122 125
Mythmaking at Bayreuth
When Wagner elected to conduct Beethoven’s ninth symphony at the laying of the foundation stone for his new theatre at Bayreuth in 1872, he was communicating to the world his new programme for the arts of the future. Wagner’s admiration for the achievements of Beethoven meant that he did not simply regard the symphony as an exhausted art form, to be relegated to the past by the advent of his Ring cycle. Instead, Wagner recognised the cultural significance of Beethoven re-introducing a chorus of the human voice, singing Schiller’s hymn to freedom and fellowship, as a reference to the role played by the chorus in classical tragedy in bringing to bear profound humanity in commentary on worldly affairs. Wagner’s total conception of an artwork was, in Wagner’s assessment, a continuation of the revolution inaugurated by Beethoven in underpinning artistic endeavour with fundamental human values sounded as the force of music. Whether or not an artwork is presented for serious consideration or as entertainment, this musical expression of the force of humanity can be brought to bear on the sensibilities of the audience.
This humanist mentality, expressed as programme and practice as mythology-through-drama, can be traced fruitfully from Wagner’s Ring to the symphonic film composers of today. 126
At Bayreuth, Wagner warned his audiences that he would dim the lights in order to achieve “…the correct effect of the scenic image.”200 Where the common practice had been to light up the theatre space with gas lamps,
Wagner wanted to immerse his audience in darkness, so that they would not be distracted by trivial elements, and immerse themselves psychologically and intensely into the music drama unfolding before them. Wagner’s guiding principle was that the actors must “…exceed human proportion (das Menschliche Maß).”201 Consistent with this principle, the orchestra was hidden in a pit. “Not even the orchestra should be in the way. It must affect the ear, Wagner decreed, but remain invisible.” As Deathridge noted, the “…allure of cinema, television, of smartphones and modern media in general was already on the horizon.”202
This is the same artistic aim of the cinema, where (according to my argument) the music transfigures the darkness of the cinema into the psychological darkness within each individual, immersing the audience into the emotional drama unfolding on the ‘silver screen.’ Of course, it is not just darkness, but darkness shaped and determined by chiaroscuro affects; much like the metaphor of the light of worldly action bringing
200 Wagner quoted by John Deathridge in his introduction to Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung, p. xvi 201 Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung (John Deathridge quoting Gottfried Semper, the architect of Bayreuth), p. xxvi 202 Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung p. xxvi 127 some insight into the dark recesses of our psyche, the darkness of which is the result of a fracture in our well-being, caused by the tension between our personal passions and publically imposed duties.
We peer into the chiaroscuro darkness of the filmic drama much like we peer into the dark recesses of our own and other’s motives: we can see some truths, but never the complete truth. As Wagner said of his music drama, “…the mysterious entry of the music will prepare you for the unveiling and distinct portrayal of scenic pictures that seem to appear from an ideal world of dreams.”203
Wagnerian and filmic Leitmotive
Wagner’s formation of the music drama, as a new dramatic and musical genre, re-thought the possible usages of harmony and orchestration in order to perform a role more radical than that which had been used hitherto in the history of opera. By composing the text and score of the
Ring through the use of ‘leading-motives’, or leitmotiv, he was able to marry music and text into a relationship far more intimate than that of a mere instance, showcasing the skills of a singer. Each leitmotif, or musical idea, expresses a recurrent theme that is developed throughout the
203 Wagner quoted by John Deathridge in his introduction to Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung, p. xviii 128 opera, recalling previous instantiations of meaning, and entwining this meaning into the dramatic fabric of the cycle. Dramatic significance bleeds into cultural significance. They are anything, therefore, but the crude idea of a musical theme being used to label and identify a character or object as the narrative unfolds.204
The psychological depth gained by this specific use of leitmotivs activated the romantic heritage of Wagner’s attempt to forge a new mythology through the Ring. That is, the music activates for the audience the romantic priority of interior experience in the context of calling upon cultural memories to re-vivify constructive values from past times idealized. As Wagner, the self-conscious theorist of his own music dramas wrote:
“The orchestra has its own peculiar, its endlessly expressive faculty of
speech which it indisputably possesses . . . the faculty of uttering the
unspeakable. That which poetry could not speak out is imparted to the
ear precisely by the language of the orchestra.”205
And:
204 Thomas S. Grey, “Leitmotif, Temporality, and Musical Design in the Ring.” In The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, 85–114. (Cambridge University Press, 2008). 88 205 Richard Wagner, Opera and Drama 315-6 129
“The orchestra thus takes an unbroken share, supporting and elucidating
by every hand: it is the moving matrix of the music, from whence there
thrives the uniting bonds of expression.”206
Wagner’s musical instantiation of leitmotifs therefore provided the context in which meaning evoked from the past infuses the present with an epic history, activating a musical and collective memory that re-interprets the past in the new contexts of the present.207
Likewise, we will find that effective film scoring highlights emotional significances that have a wider, cultural and hermeneutic bearing. In the case of our thesis, the romantic heritage of symphonic orchestral film music brings themes to the critical and pleasurable reception that dig deep into the lived experiences of our current age. The dark sublime aesthetic connects the audience personally—not just intellectually—with the themes covered by the film, and expresses the kind of feelings that our modern/post-modern world evokes as values that have a past, but not their former authority.
206 Richard Wagner, Opera and Drama 335 207 Laurel E. Zeiss, “The dramaturgy of opera” The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies, (Cambridge University Press, 2012). 193 130
Leitmotifs in film may be used to identify characters and narrative points to guide the audience through the plot, but their purpose always remains a higher one of incorporating creatively into the fabric of the film the emotional and cultural meaning implied by the ideas and themes explored.
Christopher Nolan in his film Inception (2010) navigated intentionally and masterfully this double use of leitmotif.208
Of equal importance to symphonic film music was how Wagner extended the use of western tonality beyond the common practice resolution of tensions based in the cycle of fifths, as part of the compositional trend that was the hallmark of the nineteenth century, but through the cultural watershed of his music dramas. That is, he extended his compositional resources to meet the emotional needs of his drama. Thus he created a
‘sea of harmony’209 where strategic harmonic “…forecasts and delays play directly upon the listener’s expectation…on the desires that the music induces in the listener…(translating)…directly into the intensified emotion that the fulfillment or frustration of desire produces in any context.”210 Wagner’s famous Tristan-chord—F, A-flat, C-flat, E-flat—a
208 Felix Engel and Janina Wildfeuer, “Hearing Music in Dreams: Towards the Semiotic Role of Music in Nolan’s Inception.” The Cinema of Christopher Nolan: Imagining the Impossible. Edited by Jaqueline Furby and Stuart Joy, Columbia University Press, USA, http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.7312/furb17396.22 233 209 Richard Taruskin, Music in the Nineteenth Century 520 210 Richard Taruskin, Music in the Nineteenth Century 529 131 half-diminished chord used in a nonfunctional, diatonic way reveals his wider compositional practice.
This compositional practice dovetails into the practice of integrating meaning via use of leitmotiv. Indeed, Wagner’s “…use of chords and harmonic progressions in a motivic- and symbolic-rich fashion…”211 created a practice of Leitharmonie that focused audience and critical attention on the hermeneutic, interpretative aspects of the dramatic structure that needed to be felt as though it were a lived experience.
Wagner’s compositional practice, forged by his new concept of music drama, is the direct forerunner of what became symphonic orchestral film music in Hollywood and beyond.
211 Frank Lehman, Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the Sound of Cinema. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018). 127 132
The most relevant description of transformative, nonfunctional harmony
(or harmony not being used in a traditionally functional way) that we encounter in Wagner and symphonic film music, influenced by the classic
Hollywood sensibility, is pan-triadic. That is, we are dealing with music that “…uses fundamental materials of tonality in tonally indeterminate ways, one by using diatonic scales without triads, and the other by using triads without diatonic scales.”212 This flexibility of harmonic movement could then be guided by the romantic themes of emotive life expressed in drama. Typically (but not invariably) structuring the roots of the triads an interval of a major third apart213 (and thereby obviating the tendency of cyclic resolution found through interval movements based on seconds, fourths and fifths), the movement of each note a semitone to a neighbour created a shifting musical progression that is not the result of a perfect or plagal cadence, but intensely expressive of the romantic soundscape.
212 Richard Cohn, Audacious Euphony : Chromaticism and the Consonant Triad’s Second Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). p. xiv 213 Scott Murphy, “Transformational Theory and the Analysis of Film Music” The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies. Edited by David Neumeyer, Online Publication Date: Dec 2013, DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195328493.013.019, p. 494 133
We will see this in the final chapter, with Hans Zimmer and Howard
Newton’s score for Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, expressing the emotional impact of Bruce Wayne’s ever-deepening transformations into the Batman through leitharmonie.214
Voice leading without reference to triads gave the composer the freedom to shift the tonality in unexpected, contrapuntal ways, with a single line meandering against pan-diatonic triads. This element of surprise and shifting paralleled the movement of the emotions expressed in the drama.
We heard this use of voice leading earlier in Miklós Rózsa’s score for the tense scene from The King’s Thief,215 where a man is climbing out of prison in a tight spot, almost as though the contortions of his body is a chromatically climbing melody line on a sea of twisting diminished and augmented seventh chords.
Bernard Herrmann was a master of this kind of chromaticism based in pan-diatonicism. His work is a clear example of the late-Romantic influence of composers like Wagner, Strauss and Mahler combining successfully with the various modernist experiments with compositional
214 Frank Lehman, Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the Sound of Cinema, 131 215 The King’s Thief (Preview Clip), accessed September 28, 2020, Youtube video 3:00, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmtJLo7XxBc&list=PLt4w97p9I0GGUwR3DlX 23A1Q4Czle9xFn 134 techniques in contemporary music. Herrmann’s modernist sound gave to his use of pan-diatonic harmonies a sparer sound than his more late-
Romantic sounding colleagues, such as Max Steiner and Erich Korngold.
Exposed without a melodic guide, closely voiced triads used in the nonfunctional chordal relationships of pan-diationicism gave Herrmann’s scores that spare sound, frequently in the minor mode to express the fantastic subject matter of the films that he was frequently commissioned to underscore. One can often hear the minor triad with a raised seventh
(e.g. a c minor chord with a B-natural on top) or the major seventh chord with a raised fourth suspended (e.g. a C major seventh chord with a suspended F-sharp).
Herrmann was the master of an ethereal and spooky underscore for suspense, filled with Wagnerian tritonal, diminished and augmented intervals used in nonfunctional, diatonic ways. Consider the opening scene in Don Chaffey’s 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts (a rare example of a Herrmann score without strings!). We hear a tightly arranged chord sequence in the lower woodwinds—Dm⇔B♭m⇨Dm⇨
B♭m⇨Dm⇨A♭M64⇨E♭m/D (each chord corresponding with a note), played above the following melody.216
216 Frank Lehman, Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the Sound of Cinema, 132 135
It is easy to see the continuity between Wagnerian mythmaking and
Hollywood filmmaking as ‘the maker of dreams.’ In the next chapter, we will look at two instances of filmmakers exerting the force of musicality through the dark sensibilities of worldly existence by calling on the romantic heritage of symphonic orchestral film music.
The first essay, a small interlude, tips its hat to the use of previously composed music (namely, Gustav Mahler’s Adagietto from his Fifth
Symphony) to express the romantic aesthetic typical of film music, and
Thomas Mann’s criticism of modernity and the impact of modern social changes on the individual.
The second, more sustained, essay looks at the composition of symphonic orchestral film music that can be interpreted mythologically in the terms of the Don Juan story and Nietzsche’s Apollonian/Dionysian duality.
136
CHAPTER FIVE
Romanticism applied: a brief interlude
The focus of this thesis so far has been on original orchestral scores composed for films that reflect a romantic heritage: and this will remain our primary focus. To be more precise, our interest is in the application of a philosophical romantic sensibility to filmic content, in terms of the ideas and themes that were forged by romantic thinkers in response to the advent of Enlightenment reason and a burgeoning modernity.
These themes acquired an aesthetic significance and were amenable to artistic treatment because they had a profound impact on the emotional life of individuals regarded as radically free and autonomous in a world alienated by modern social and political forces. The expression of these emotions, whether then or now, in art forms such as symphonic orchestral film music through the sheer force of its musicality, has a profound and productive bearing on our shared cultural life. The film director, Luchino
Visconti, recognised a cultural connection established between the work of Thomas Mann and Gustav Mahler. Applying the late-Romantic sensibility of the composer Gustav Mahler to the modernist sensibility of the novelist Thomas Mann in a filmic context, Visconti was able to bring the primordial force of musicality, to film, via the sheer maximalising 137 tendencies of Mahler’s symphonic resources.217 Music, film, and philosophy are combined in a force of musicality that pushes beyond the contained limits of rational discourse and given cultural resources.
The film in question is Morte a Venezia (1971), Luschino Visconti’s interpretation of Thomas Mann’s novella Der Tod in Venedig (1912). The piece of music in question is Gustav Mahler’s Adagietto from his Fifth
Symphony, used by Visconti to express the all-consuming passion that the protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach, feels for the youth, Tadzio, as the erotic personification of von Aschenbach’s artistic ideal of beauty. The lulling gentleness of the Adagietto is a deft touch, once applied by Mahler, but now freshly applied by Visconti. This gentle deftness is underpinned by the broiling passions of deep strings and chromatic transformations. It captures the feelings of von Aschenbach being simultaneously enveloped by the holiday warmth of Venice, and the illicit danger (mirrored by the epidemic) of his passion for Tadzio. It captures especially the romantic aesthetic with which we are concerned, transfiguring emotional pain into an aesthetic pleasure that is communicable through artistic endeavour.
This aesthetic can accommodate and harmonise opposing qualities, such as beauty and ugliness, love and hatred, violent passions and passionate
217 Richard Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century: The Oxford History of Western Music. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010). 6 138 violence, the erotic and the grave, the elegant and the human-all-too- human. It is perfect for Mann’s artistic intention of exploring Plato’s advocacy of beauty as attracting us to the Form of the Good, ironically taught to us by the signs of ugliness in the world.
As we have seen in the previous chapters, via the very force of musicality and the romantic heritage of symphonic orchestral film music, such underscoring expresses and enhances the pre-conceptual feelings and passions that the filmmaker wants to evoke from his or her audience when they are confronted with the dramatic narrative and images of his or her film.
Symphonic orchestral film music is very good at expressing these feelings that arise prior to any particular articulation in discursive language. In the musicality of romantic harmony and rhythm, these emotions are taken from the dark depths of our shared humanity and brought to bear on our experience of film in the chiaroscuro atmosphere of the cinema or lowly lit environment of living or games-room. Using selected quotations from
Mann’s Platonic interpretation of the modern tensions shaping Europe’s nineteenth-century culture as it hurtled towards the catastrophe of World
War One, we will be able to see how a symphonic, romantic aesthetic is 139 used as an orchestral film score to underpin a sensuous energy of emotions that are unleashed by tragedy and passion.
The novella and the film
The basic plot of the novella/film can be relayed succinctly. It is about a successful, but sickly, independent intellectual, von Aschenbach, who finally seeks rest after a lifetime of dedication to philosophy and literature.
He eventually chooses the exotic clime of Venice for his holiday, in complete contrast to the rigorous high culture of his Germanic background. At Venice, he falls in love, but from a distance, with a beautiful Polish youth, who represents the ideal of love and beauty that he has pursued dispassionately—and therefore inauthentically—throughout his intellectual career. Now in the feverish heat of an exotic city beleaguered by a creeping epidemic, he pursues his ideal of love and beauty realised in the sensuous and forbidden form of a youth traversing the streets of Venice and the beach on the Lido. Eventually, the epidemic claims von Aschenbach’s life, on the beach of the Lido as he watches his love from the distance—in the case of the film, to the underscore of
Mahler’s Adagietto.218
218 Morte a Venezia – scena finale. Accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 5:19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36QBU474nqM 140
In Visconti’s film, von Aschenbach is recast as a radical composer, in a veiled fashion as Gustav Mahler: the connection being made complete with the use of Mahler’s Adagietto whenever the emotion of von
Aschenbach’s illicit passion is referred to in the film. Underlying Mann’s more general theme of modernity heading to catastrophe (a common concern of fin-de-siecle intellectuals), of a cultural facade being underpinned and even driven by the corruption of human values, is his
Platonic interpretation of intellect pursuing an ideal. The force of the
Apollonian ideal is energetically belied by Dionysian sensuousness upending reality.
In developing this theme, Mann calls upon his reading of Nietzsche’s criticism of Platonism, in particular the question of the possible deleterious influence of the old lover Socrates on the young Plato.
Throughout the novella, von Aschenbach comes across grotesque and strange old men who disturb him and threaten to undermine his sense of decorum and balance. These ugly intrusions represent Nietzsche’s critique of Socrates the great moralist. Socrates had walleyes and was 141 ugly. “But ugliness, an objection in itself, is among the Greeks almost a refutation.”219 Nietzsche relates how
“A foreigner passing through Athens who knew how to read faces told
Socrates to his face that he was a monstrum—that he contained within
him every kind of foul vice and lust. And Socrates answered merely:
‘You know me, sir!’”220
According to Nietzsche, Socrates introduced dialectics as a tool to overcome aristocratic virtues. He made ‘a tyrant of reason.’ For
Nietzsche, Socrates was guilty as charged, and had corrupted Athenian youth like the aristocratic Plato.
“The moralism of the Greek philosophers from Plato downwards is
pathologically conditioned: likewise their estimation of dialectics.
Reason = virtue = happiness means merely: one must imitate Socrates
and counter the dark desires by producing a permanent daylight—the
daylight of reason. One must be prudent, clear, bright at any cost: every
yielding to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards…”221
219 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1889), translated by R. J. Hollingdale, introduction by Michael Tanner, (England, Penguin Books, 1990, ch. 3, p. 40 220 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols ch. 3, p. 40 221 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols ch. 10, p. 43 142
Von Aschenbach had tried his whole life to make his prudential reason into an artificial daylight that can dispel the darkness of ignorance. He achieved this, however, at the cost of his health and a growing sense of sterility in his own creative output at this point of his career. Now, in the exotic and feted atmosphere of Venice, his pursuit of an illicit passion melts away the bonds of his former intellectual discipline. Now, von
Aschenbach pursues his darkest desires downwards into the underworld of passion perverted, mirrored in the dark recesses of a diseased city. Now, he tastes the ecstatic pleasures of passion given to his followers by
Dionysius.
In the terms of Plato’s Socratic dialogues interpreted by Nietzsche, von
Aschenbach is the old Socratic man who had corrupted his own youth by clinging to cold reason. The dark sublime of symphonic orchestral film music is consonant with the Nietzschean case that we should follow our passions downwards into the depths of feelings. The Apollonian daylight of reason is abandoned for the chiaroscuro, the half-lit world of the cinema, and all the passions of the dark depths of our humanity are given not an articulate voice, but the Dionysiac voice of music. Let us dwell on this point for a bit, in the words of Mann, and in this process, outlining the role of symphonic orchestral film music in film and in the private experience of each member of the cinematic audience. 143
Personal cinematic experience
In a strong sense, the “…observations and encounters of a loner who seldom speaks are both more nebulous and more penetrating than those of a gregarious man.”222 The dark atmosphere of the cinema, transfigured musically by the symphonic orchestral underscore, places each member of the audience alone with the film showing on the silver screen, sharpening their engagement with the total filmic experience by aligning personal emotions with those evoked by the film. The nebulous character of the force of musicality ironically makes it more evocative and penetrating in the perceptions about life that it affords an audience engaging in the filmic context. His or her “…thoughts are more intense, more peculiar, and never without a touch of sadness.”223 The Romantic themes of the dark sublime and longing are brought to the fore by symphonic orchestral film music, enriching the experience of the film, bringing more and more to each viewing by digging into a shared cultural past that exerts an emotional aura.
222 Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1912), translated by Joachim Neugroschel, (England, Penguin Books, 1998). 311 223 Thomas Mann, Death in Venice 311 144
In a like manner, symphonic orchestral film music takes on the character of a journey undertaken for the duration of the film. This provides access to the audience an entire range of affective experiences.
“Images and perceptions, which might easily be brushed aside with a
glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions, occupy his (or her) mind
unduly; they…take on significance, become experience, adventure,
emotion.”224
Or as Mann writes later in the novella about von Aschenbach’s reforming his intellectual attainments while he pursues his new passion with abandon:
“His mind was in labour, his cultural foundation was heaving and
seething, his memory cast up ancient thoughts that had been handed
down to him in his youth and that had never, until now, been animated
by his own fire.”225
We can see and hear how Mann uses words and the affective experiences that they evoke like a film music underscore, capturing our passions in
224 Thomas Mann, Death in Venice 311 225 Thomas Mann, Death in Venice 333 145 words whose import resides in the emotional impact they exert beyond the confines of discourse:
“…an entirely self-contained experience that was concrete to his senses
even though he did not see himself as present and moving through space
beyond these events.”226
Time and space are suspended from the ordinary course of events in the cinema, and symphonic orchestral film music plays an important part for the audience attaining the requisite ‘suspension of disbelief.’
From this perspective of personal cinematic experience, we can better understand Max Steiner’s point that symphonic orchestral film music adds a dimension of reality to the artistic creation that is film—a dimension that would not be available to us were it not for this music playing its part in the filmic experience:
“Solitude ripens originality in us, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry.
But solitude also ripens the perverse, the asymmetrical, the absurd, the
forbidden.”227
226 Thomas Mann, Death in Venice 357 227 Thomas Mann, Death in Venice 311 146
The romantic aesthetic of symphonic orchestral film music gives the filmic audience an aesthetic experience, but also access to the dark sublime in all its dimensions.
We will now look in more detail at two examples of composed film scores that connect the music with broader cultural and mythological themes.
These two examples will give us a stronger perspective with which to view further instances of the cultural importance of symphonic orchestral film music and the romantic dark sublime aesthetic.
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CHAPTER SIX
Romanticism applied: two examples explicated
We examine here two instances of where symphonic orchestral film music expresses the dark sublime aesthetic, built of cultural values derived from a romanticised past, that sits in the darkened heart of the modern individual. We will first interpret the Bond film, Skyfall (2012), in terms of the Don Juan story, with reference to a key moment in Mozart’s operatic treatment of Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto for Don Giovanni
(1787). Then we will interpret Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy
(2005, 2008, 2012) as an instance of Nietzsche’s Apollonian/Dionysian duality played out in the tragic culture of our time.
The respective composers of the underscores for these films, Thomas
Newman and Hans Zimmer/ James Newton Howard, used symphonic elements in conjunction with elements from contemporary art music and popular music to capture the defining moods of contemporary culture.
The use of symphonic music is a deliberate plan to express emotionally and dramatically the dark heart of their protagonists and the cultural themes of the films relevant to subjective, lived experience.
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Opening credits on Bond
As is the established practice in the Bond franchise, a preliminary action is shown to the audience prior to the opening credits. In the case of Skyfall,
Bond and his colleague are pursuing a professional assassin through the streets of Istanbul. At the denouement of this preliminary scene, Bond is struggling with this adversary on the top of a fast-moving train that is about to go into a tunnel. Bond’s colleague is aiming at the adversary with a high-powered rifle from a limited vantage point, the purpose of which is to take him out. Bond’s colleague misses the shot and accidentally hits Bond. As far as everyone is concerned, Bond has been fatally hit. He falls off the train as it goes into the tunnel, and he plunges into the river below.
As he hits the surface of the water, an orchestral string section, playing a spaced out c-minor chord with a French horn playing the ninth degree on top, strikes a sforzando chord and initiates the opening credits and Adele’s performance of the title song, beginning with the words “This is the
End.”228
228 Skyfall – Opening part 1 (DB film Scenes), accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 6:16, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dcTNWOoZlg Skyfall – Opening part 2 (DB Film Scenes), accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 5:30, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBCN8qf_kMk 149
Throughout the entire preliminary section, the music underscore brings in every genre of modern film music, reminiscent of the standard that John
Barry established in defining the Bond sound. There is a minimalist soundscape at the opening of the film—whether synthesized or not, it is effectively a reference to the single note played tremolo on high strings and to modernist art music—establishing the tension of Bond entering a dangerous and darkened interior where several people have been butchered. Once he leaves this situation and bursts into the sunlit and insanely busy streets of Istanbul in pursuit of the assassin, the music takes on a Middle Eastern quality, with percussion that evolves into a contemporary popular sound score that accompanies the extreme action of chasing down the assassin via various modes of transport—including a
Rover four-wheel, a motorbike, and a bulldozer on top of a train, ripping of the train’s roof like a can-opener!
Throughout this extremely intense action sequence, the Middle
Eastern/popular contemporary musical sound is underpinned by dramatic orchestral punctuations. Once again, this is a reference to the achievement of John Barry, who established the combination of orchestral and popular music in order to capture musically the action and sophistication of the
Skyfall Opening Credits (HD), accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 3:52, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4gdhsVKTcs 150
Bond character. Through the dark sublime aesthetic ensured by the orchestral base of this music, the romantic sensibility of the darkened interior life of Bond is ever present in a Bond film.
This romanticism turns gothic in the opening credits after Bond has been shot and plunges into the water. This references the long-standing Bond heritage of surreal opening credits, created definitively by Maurice Binder and the Barryesque film score. In the case of Skyfall, the opening song sung by Adele combines a popular sensibility with the romantic symphonic orchestral, expressing the psychological darkness of Bond and his tortured past, and inviting us to empathise and see ourselves in Bond’s inverted world. Gothic images of Scottish cemeteries and decrepit manors, gothic images of the Mexican ‘Day of the dead’, knives, guns, blood flowing and cracked mirrors, the darkness of Bond’s life is unfolded in an digitally generated sequence that brings his past into a future that is about to unfold over the next few cinematic hours. And it does not look good!
Bond as Don Juan
This is a reversal of the conclusion of the Don Juan story, as told by
Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte in their opera Don Giovanni (f.p. Prague 151
1787). Skyfall begins effectively with a c-minor/added ninth chord that marks Bond’s plunge into the waters of death. In Mozart’s case, a powerful d-minor chord marks the downfall of Don Giovanni (mirroring the overture, but with diminished chords), the denouement of the opera where he descends into hell as just punishment for his selfishly cruel and dissipated life. In Bond’s case, his seemingly dead body plunging into the waters of death presages possible redemption, for Bond is an already established cultural hero. For Don Giovanni, however, we know that he has come to his just end, and he must now pay for his crimes and misdemeanours.
Both Don Juan and James Bond are workable archetypes of the dark- hearted fellow, the stuff of high drama and a dark sublime aesthetic.
Mozart’s opera can be interpreted as the beginning of a romantic conception of opera229, and Bond’s descent into a personal darkness continues this cultural standard and memory into the post-modern political realities of our own times. A reading of the enduring cultural significance and impact of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, through the writings of thinkers like Søren Kierkegaard and E. T. A. Hoffmann, strangely enough, can
229 Richard Taruskin, "Chapter 12 The First Romantics." In Music In The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.). Retrieved 19 Sep. 2020, from https://www-oxfordwesternmusic- com.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/view/Volume2/actrade-9780195384826-chapter- 12.xml 152 give us an understanding of the cultural significance and impact of symphonic orchestral film music in a film like Skyfall. Through the cultural critique of their words we gain a cultural critique of symphonic orchestral film music.
Film music and mood
The various fragments of a film’s narrative, presented in a potentially disjointed form by the very character of the various takes of cinematography, are unified by the interacting techniques of filmmaking.230
In the case of film underscoring, the music sustains the unity by providing a supporting mood.
230 Look at the various descriptions of filmmaking techniques in David, Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Jeff Smith, Film Art : an Introduction Eleventh edition. (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education, 2018); David Bordwell, Jane Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema : Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1988); Michel Chion, Walter Murch, and Claudia. Gorbman, Audio-Vision : Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies : Narrative Film Music (London: BFI Pub., 1987); Kathryn Marie Kalinak, Film Music : a Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Kathryn Marie Kalinak, Settling the Score Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); Kathryn Marie Kalinak, “The Classical Hollywood Film Score” Neale, Stephen. The Classical Hollywood Reader. (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012). 153
As Kierkegaard wrote about action in opera:
“Action in the strict sense of the word, action undertaken with
consciousness of the goal, cannot be expressed in music, but what one
could call immediate action certainly can.”231
In Skyfall, like all Bond films, the director maintains the audience in a feeling of immediate action with a musical and supporting mood provided by the underscore. By always touching on the dark sublime expressed by the symphonic orchestral aspect of the underscore, exerting that particular force of musicality, no matter what other styles of music are being called upon, the audience is always in the driver’s seat with Bond, through the emotional journey that unfolds in the narrative action.
In a like fashion, E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote a short story, Don Juan (1813), which captures a personal and emotional response to Mozart’s Don
Giovanni. The protagonist of this story plays out his desires for Donna
Anna in a dream-like fantasy that reveals the internal logic of such desire and humanity, rather than act in response to the demands of reality in time and space. Desire and its intensification through diverse frustrations
231 From Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, quoted in Richard Eldrige, “Hidden Secrets of the Self”: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Reading of Don Giovanni”, Goehr, Lydia, and Daniel Herwitz. The Don Giovanni Moment : Essays on the Legacy of an Opera (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006), 34 154 becomes the protagonist of Hoffmann’s tale, and the same could be said and felt in relation to Bond envisioned and heard through a dark sublime film score. Both assert the Romantic yearning,
“…the ineradicability of desire, leading to a sense of outsiderliness and
stiltedness in relation to the ordinary, leading often even to longing for
death.”232
In Skyfall, Bond hides behind his newly found anonymity of being deemed dead, and lives beyond the boundaries of society. Pursuing sensuous pleasures and contemplating the meaning of his life, Bond stakes his claim of being outside ordinary life, and pushes the boundary between life and death. Throughout this dark spiritual journey, even when popular cultural elements pleasantly intrude, a symphonic orchestral film score sustains our mood in sympathy with Bond.
Apollo and Dionysius fight for Gotham
This force of musicality, sustaining the audiences’ mood while they journey with the characters of a film, is exemplified well in Christopher
232 Eldrige, “Hidden Secrets of the Self,” 34
155
Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard use the transformational practices of pan-diatonic harmonies that carried a large amount of the chromaticism of the late-Romantic period and influenced the Classic Hollywood orchestral film score. But they use it in a simple and transparent way that acts as a leitmotiv for guiding the unfolding of the trilogy’s narrative.
In all the installations of Nolan’s trilogy, Bruce Wayne struggles with his own interiorised dark past, as well as with the dark villains undermining peace. He puts on the mask of the Batman, not only to represent a concrete ideal for the citizens of Gotham in the fight against crime, but also to resolve his own anger at his parent’s senseless death while he was a child. Feeling responsible for their death at the hands of a down-and- out thief—they would not have been in the dark alley if the child Bruce had not been frightened by Arrigo Boito’s opera Mefistofele (1868), especially a scene of demonic bat-like creatures in a Dionysian frenzy—
Wayne can only overcome his guilt by overcoming fear. Essentially,
Batman defeats criminals by making them fear the darkness within. The scene of this symphonic struggle is Gotham city, a dark representation of
New York as the ultimate expression of modern urban life.
156
Of course, the romantic gothic credentials of the Batman trilogy are significantly established by the reference to Boito’s interpretation of the
Faustian legend. The scene is from Act Two, Scene Two, "Rampiamo, rampiamo, che il tempo ci gabba." All the romantic harmonic tropes are in full flight: agitated orchestrations with insistent repeated notes underscored with a counterpoint of diminished seventh chords and tri-tone intervals descending. The demonic melodrama of Grand Opera is not to the taste of the young Bruce Wayne, who had recently been attacked by bats in a cave. Frightened to his very core, he asks his father and mother if he can leave immediately. They exist the opera house via a back lane.233
This reference to the Faustian theme adumbrates Batman’s fight with evil individuals, who strike fear into others in order to dominate and rule.
Gotham is the moral climate in which this Wagnerian symphonic, operatic fight takes place, and Zimmer and Howard’s dark score throughout reinforces and enhances this romantic Gothicism.
The entire trilogy can be interpreted as the tension between two moral forces represented as Nietzsche’s twin artistic principles of Apollo and
233 Batman Begins – Opera Scene, accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 0:49, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgmJb-P_ZMA 157
Dionysius, shaping the desires and mores, the culture and values of
Gotham.234 Especially in The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight
Rises (2012), we see the Apollonian Batman assert social standards of harmonious behaviour and order against the Dionysian disorder of the
Joker (in the 2008 film) and Banes (in the 2012 film).235 Both the Joker and Banes assert a ‘repellent mixture of lust and cruelty’236 in order to demonstrate, especially to the Batman, that we are all the same underneath, that we all dance to the same Dionysian music of intoxicated pleasures, and that we must examine ourselves in the light of Apollo undermined by Dionysius.237 It could be almost argued that the Joker and
Banes exert their intentions for Gotham with the force of Dionysian musicality, an unheard melody238 that surreptitiously brakes down the principium individuationis239 posed by the Apollonian Batman, representing the billionaire, Bruce Wayne and departed father’s, dream of a perfect crystalline city.
234 David Bullen, “Dionysus Comes to Gotham: Forces of Disorder in The Dark Knight (2008)” Cyrino, Monica S., and Meredith E. Safran. Classical Myth on Screen (Basingstoke, U.K: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 183ff 235 David Bullen, “Dionysus Comes to Gotham: Forces of Disorder in The Dark Knight (2008)” 186 236 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (London; Penguin, 1993). 19 237 David Bullen, “Dionysus Comes to Gotham: Forces of Disorder in The Dark Knight (2008)” 189 238 In a strong sense similar to Claudia Gorbman’s examination of film music exerting an influence on an unaware and subconsciously receptive audience. Gorbman, Claudia, Unheard Melodies : Narrative Film Music (London: BFI Pub., 1987). 239 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music 16 158
For Nolan, the sublime darkness is the artistic principle that helps Batman to understand his adversaries, and for his films to reconcile good and evil on the same filmic canvas. The ever-moving dark sublime aesthetic of
Zimmer and Howard’s music underscores this never-complete reconciliation and ever-evolving relationship where “…good may triumph over an agent of evil—but not over evil itself.”240
Pan-diatonic harmony transformed
Let us look more closely at Zimmer and Howard’s use of transformational and pan-diatonic use of harmonies that is typical of Romanticism and classic Hollywood film scoring. We will not be able to treat comprehensively the neo-Riemannian theory behind such uses of harmony, for this is beyond the scope of this thesis. This study of harmony as transformations is good for analysis of chromatic progressions because it does not base itself on tonic-centered functional harmony, but relates the triads directly to each other.241 We can demonstrate, however, in simple and constructive terms the chromaticism that uses consonant triads, not in the cadential manner of common practice harmony, but in a
240 David Bullen, “Dionysus Comes to Gotham: Forces of Disorder in The Dark Knight (2008)” 190 241 Tom Schneller, “Modal Interchange and Semantic Resonance in Themes by John Williams.” Journal of Film Music, The vi, no. 1 (January 1, 2013): 49–74. https://search.proquest.com/docview/1745747039, Note 17, page 51 159 transformational way that highlights pan-diatonic relationships, in order to express the romantic project of sublime wonderment at human existence.242
This pan-diatonicism is best understood initially from Wagner’s music and when it sounds ‘like’ film music to our ears trained by years of going to the cinema. Rather than resolving harmonic tensions by progressions according to the cycle of fifths, chords progress by one, two or three notes changing in an expanding or contracting fashion. Consider the progression of chords for Wagner’s “Wanderer’s Introduction (mm.
1289), Act 1, Scene 2 of the opera Siegfried.
B major 1st inv.èD major 1st inv.èB-flat major 1st inv.èE majorèA major 1st inv.èC major 1st inv.èA-flat 1st inv.èD major.243
Composition in this manner does not mean avoiding perfect, plagal or half cadences. Rather it means taking whatever opportunities arise and working with the music that you hear, always on the lookout for harmonic
242 Frank Lehman, Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the Sound of Cinema. Oxford University Press, 2018, 6 243 Frank Lehman, Hollywood Harmony, 50 160 progressions that further the dramatic expression of the music in its given context.
As we have already established in the introduction, symphonic orchestral film music involves far more than late-Romantic compositional and orchestration techniques and aesthetics. The film composer is a veritable bowerbird, gathering all sorts of musical influences for the nest that is a film composing practice.244 The argument of this thesis is that, given the dramatic narrative character of filmmaking based in the history of popular entertainment, film underscoring tends to trade in the dark sublime aesthetic that is expressed well by symphonic orchestral film music.
In the score Hans Zimmer and James Newtown Howard created for
Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, they used transformational pan-diatonic harmony with a mixture of orchestral and synthesized sounds, including the leitharmonic ideas outlined in manuscript below.245
244 Frank Lehman, Hollywood Harmony, 16 245 Frank Lehman, Hollywood Harmony, 131 161
In the first film of the trilogy, Batman Begins (2005), bars 5 to 6, the melodic line of D to F (ascending the interval of a minor third), played over the d minor triad, marking the beginning of Bruce Wayne’s transformation. As Wayne grows into the Batman persona and mission, the progression is transformed into the chordal progression of d minor to
B-flat major. In the second movie, The Dark Knight (2008), bars 7 to 8, the progression is darkened by going between a d minor and b-flat minor triad, which is then finessed by going down a semi-tone from d minor to
D-flat major (D-flat major being the relative major of b-flat minor).
Similarly, in the third film, The Dark Knight Rises (2012), bar 9, the d minor to F major progression marks the hope of Batman having a successor in Robin. It also marks the transformation of Batman’s feelings over the death of his parents when he was young—two deaths for which he feels personally responsible. The shade of darkness that overshadows
Bruce Wayne’s life shifts in its quality of seeming impenetrability.246
The leitharmonie idea demonstrates the importance of context, both musical and dramatic, created by each moment of a film. Just as each note evokes a different sound in an evolving harmonic context that is the result of transformation, so too does the potential to evoke emotional and narrative change remain viable as the mutli-layered context of a film made
246 Frank Lehman, Hollywood Harmony, 131 162 evolves.247 In the case of Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, the leitharmonic ideas and the leitmotive mark continuity across change, and change against the background of continuities. Bruce Wayne traverses a steadily ascending trajectory in becoming Batman, even if he is bruised and battered along the way.
Musical gestures and tropes
Zimmer’s musical sound for his films tend to have a repeated motif and an almost minimalist approach that was popular in the eighties. He firmly establishes the place of his music in the dramatic line of the narrative, supporting characters and moods. It is possible, therefore, to look at a range of musical tropes that express the various moods that are evoked in film. Transformational harmonies are frequently used to mark out the fantastic quality of cinematic production.248
In heroic music for films, a frequent trope is that of a ¯ VII triad
247 Frank Lehman, Hollywood Harmony, 128ff 248 Frank Lehman, Hollywood Harmony, 165 163 preceding a half cadence on a V triad or V7: in the case of John Williams score for the “Men of the Yorktown March”249 from the film, Midway
(1976), in the key of C major, at the end of the phrase, a B-flat major triad precedes a G triad, a half-cadence: 250
The same chord progression is used to great effect by Elmer Bernstein in the main phrase of his theme for The Magnificent Seven (1960)251, creating an enduring sound of the American West and the outdoors.
This opens our analysis to another way of describing transformational harmony and diatonicism. We can refer to the harmonic choices as modal inflections, or substitutes, that give exotic colour to what would be ordinary, common practice chord progressions.
John Williams’ music is replete with this practice, where he substitutes diatonic minor and diminished chords with major triads taken from the
249 The Men of the Yorktown (From “Midway”) Film Symphony Orchestra, accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 5:03. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQeVxIedEcw 250 Tom Schneller, “Modal Interchange and Semantic Resonance in Themes by John Williams.” Journal of Film Music, The vi, no. 1 (January 1, 2013): 49–74, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1745747039, 51 251 The Magnificent Seven · Main Theme · Elmer Bernstein, HD Film Tributes, accessed September 28, 2020, YouTube video, 3:35, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yulmgTcGLZw 164
Aeolian, Mixolydian, Lydian and Phrygian modes. So the classic Jerry
Goldsmith ending of a ÑVI-ÑVII-I takes from the Aeolian mode, while the
Mixolydian ÑVII-I substitutes for a perfect cadence. It gives Williams’ music a bright muscularity when scoring for heroic themes. Consider his main theme for Star Wars franchise. After the fanfare, the main theme toggles between I and IV major triads, with a ÑVII adding spice before the
V triad. These tropes of musical underscoring give the film a grand and epic force of musicality.252
Likewise, romantic love interest can be portrayed by the musical tropes working on the I-IV minor, I-ii half diminished, and I-ÑII. Williams’
“Marion Theme” from the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) sprinkles the ii half diminished throughout the piece, giving the sharp intake of love and romance, to finish the phrase with a Ñii proceeding a I chord, a VII triad with a raised third, to be followed by a V triad with a sustained fourth resolved to its third.253
252 Tom Schneller, “Modal Interchange and Semantic Resonance in Themes by John Williams.” 52 253 Tom Schneller, “Modal Interchange and Semantic Resonance in Themes by John Williams.” 65 165
One can hear the same romantic musical mentality in Miklós Rózsa’s love theme from the film Spellbound (1945).254
It is with this small sampling of the transformational use of harmony by film composers that we can see how the romantic sensibility of the dark sublime is communicated in cinematic experience.
As we saw in the film scores for Skyfall and the Dark Knight Trilogy, the dark psychological depths of the protagonist is best felt through the music played by a symphonic orchestra, calling on the romantic philosophical and literary heritage of the romantic revolution in thought and sensibility.
254 Tom Schneller, “Modal Interchange and Semantic Resonance in Themes by John Williams.” 66 166
CONCLUSION
Symphonic orchestral film music expresses and communicates a dark sublime aesthetic that says something profound about our subjective and cultural experiences, a product of modern social and political changes that stem back to the seventeenth century. Like the Renaissance conception of poetry, such music exerts a force that aids us in creating new worlds. In art forms like filmmaking and composing film music, we can make and experience inventions that reveal new truths about us, and transcend that which nature and the world have dealt us. For the Romantic postulating a new mythology, we can reverse the Fall and give birth to a new golden age.255 Such flexibility marks the modern individual’s yearning for freedom from subjection, and freedom to create something new and expressive of our personality.
Symphonic orchestral film music, therefore, can play the underscore for our own times. Its strength is transfiguring pain into pleasure via the force of musicality. It penetrates into our dark interior where discursive language and worldliness cannot. This is why such a standard of film scoring is the go-to standard for underscoring dramatic filmic emotion,
255 David Norbrook, The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse 1509-1659, edited by H. R. Woudhuysen (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1992). 1 167 both today and in the past, in Hollywood and across the globe. This is why it is continually being reinvented as contexts change in filmmaking and in the wider world. The gothic character of the individual imagination256 can find its expression in symphonic film music that interprets yearnings for past values, in music that evokes memories and creates new ideals.
Due to this force of musicality, expressing this dark sublime aesthetic, symphonic orchestral film music gives filmmakers the power to transfigure the physical darkness of the cinema into the private darkness of each person’s interior life. Sublime passion expressed in music resonates with the sublime passions that sit deeply within us all, because we are torn between our own desires and social demands. When we engage with a film, or a related media genre, that is underscored by such music, we can privately explore and deal with the emotions that are generated by this primal personal tension.
Composers of this style of film music frequently trade in the late-
Romantic musical sound that was definitively crystallised in the studio system of Hollywood’s Golden Age. This involves a rich diet of triads
256 Nick Groom, Groom, Nick, and Maureen N. McLane. “Romantic Poetry and Antiquity.” Chapter. In The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, edited by James Chandler, 35–52. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. doi:10.1017/CCOL9780521862356.003. p. 36 168 transformed in non-functional ways (that is, in contrast to common practice harmonies where cadential tensions are resolved according to the tri-tone matrix of the cycle of fifths), creating a pan-diatonic atmosphere that is superlative for expressing the fantasy of cinematic experience.
This is not to say that symphonic film composers do not call upon any and all musical resources for their creative endeavours. Such composers are hungry for musical sounds that will aid them in evoking the most effective mood for a given film.
Rather, the basis for this romantic choice of musical sound reflects the romantic sensibility that has engaged the tensions of modern social experience right up to our own time. The darkness of our own time need not condemn us to suffer in silence, when we have the relief and pleasure of an aesthetic that meets our feelings. Symphonic orchestral film music meets this need and desire.
169
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172
FILMOGRAPHY OF COMPOSERS CITED
Berstein, E, The Magnificent Seven, directed by John Sturges, (Beverley Hills, United Artists, 1960)
Deutsche, A, The Maltese Falcon, directed by John Houston, (California, Warner Bros., 1941)
Doyle, P, Hamlet, directed by Kenneth Branagh, (California, Sony Pictures Releasing, 1996)
Herrmann, B, Jason and the Argonauts, directed by John Chaffey, (California, Columbia Pictures, 1963)
Herrmann, B, Vertigo, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, (California, Paramount Pictures, 1958)
Marinelli, D, Pride & Prejudice, directed by Joe Wright, (United Kingdom, United International Pictures, 2005)
Newman, T, The Good German, directed by Steven Soderbergh, (California, Waner Bros., 2006)
Newman, T, Skyfall, directed by Sam Mendes, (California, Sony Pictures, 2012)
Rózsa, M, Madame Bovary, directed by Vincente Minnelli, (Beverley Hills, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1949)
Rózsa, M, Sodom and Gomorrah, directed by Robert Aldrich, (California, 20th Century Fox, 1962)
Rózsa, M, Spellbound, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, (Beverley Hills, United Artists, 1945)
Rózsa, M, The King’s Thief, directed by Robert Z. Leonard and Hugo Fregonese, (Beverley Hills, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1955)
Sakamoto, R., and Alva Noto, The Revenant, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, (California, 20th Century Fox, 2015)
173
Salter, H. J. and Paul Dessau, The House of Frankenstein, directed by Erle C. Kenton, (California, Universal Pictures, 1944)
Steiner, M, All This and Heaven Too, directed by Anatole Litvak, (California, Warner Bros., 1940)
Steiner, M, King Kong, directed by Merium C. Cooper and Ernest B Shoedsack, (New York, Radio Picutres, 1933)
Steiner, M, The Fountainhead, directed by King Vidor, (California, Warner Bros., 1949)
Waller-Bridge, I, Emma, directed by Autumn de Wilde, (California, Focus Features, 2020
Waller-Bridge, I, Fleabag, (TV series), created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, (United Kingdom, BBC, 2016, 2019)
Waller-Bridge, I, The ABC Murders (TV series), directed by Alex Gabassi, (United Kingdom, BBC, 2018)
Waller-Bridge, I, War & Peace, (TV series), directed by Tom Harper, (United Kingdom, BBC, 2016)
Williams, J, Midway, directed by John Smight, (California, Universal Pictures, 1976
Williams, J, Raiders of the Lost Ark, directed by Steven Spielberg (California, Paramount Pictures, 1981)
Williams, J, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, directed by J. J. Abrams, (Califonia, Walt Disney Studios, 2015)
Young, V, Scaramouche, directed by George Sidney, (California, Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer, 1952)
Zimmer, H, The Dark Knight Trilogy, John Newton Howard worked on the first two films with Zimmer, directed by Christopher Nolan, (California, Warner Bros., 2005, 2008, 2012)
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