Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film

Robynn Stilwell

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351572439
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoria: Música

The study of pre-existing film music is now a well-established part of Film Studies, covering 'classical' music and popular music. Generally, these broad musical types are studied in isolation. This anthology brings them together in twelve focused case studies by a range of scholars, including Claudia Gorbman, Jeongwon Joe, Raymond Knapp, and Timothy Warner. The first section explores art music, both instrumental and operatic; it revolves around the debate on the relation between the aural and visual tracks, and whether pre-existing music has an integrative function or not. The second section is devoted to popular music in film, and shows how very similar the functions of popular music in film are to the supposedly more 'elite' classical music and opera. Case studies in part 1: Eyes Wide Shut, Raging Bull, Brief Encounter, Detective, The Godfather Part III, three versions of the Carmen story (DeMille's, Preminger's and Rosi's), Amadeus, The Birth of a Nation, M: Eine Stadt sucht einen MA rder, Needful Things, Rat Race. Case studies in part 2: various films by AlmodA^3var, Young Frankenstein, Pulp Fiction, Trainspotting, Amelie, High Fidelity, Ghost World, Heavenly Creatures, The Virgin Suicides, and the video Timber by Coldcut.

PART I
Pre-Existing Classical Film Scores

Chapter 1
Ears Wide Open: Kubrick’s Music

Claudia Gorbman

In the study of directors as auteurs, music has tended to hide in the shadows, deferring to other elements of storytelling, visual style, and directorial praxis. Auteur criticism is the province of those trained in visual and narrative analysis and the examination of character and theme, critics and scholars who have proven notoriously uninterested in what emerges from the loudspeakers as they watch movies. In all fairness, how could the auteurist even broach the subject of, say, Fritz Lang’s choices and uses of music, when in thirty years of sound films Lang worked with twenty different composers ranging from Franz Waxman to Hanns Eisler and Miklós Rózsa. Still, numerous film directors have taken music seriously to heart: among older generations, such directors as Mamoulian, Clair, Sturges, Welles, Bresson, and Ford come to mind as artists keenly aware of a well-placed cue’s evocative force.

It becomes increasingly interesting and necessary to attend to ‘auteur music’ beginning in the 1960s. With the breakdown of the studio system, the cinema broadened its range of musical idioms, and old rules that had dictated music’s deployment in films were relaxed or broken. In some quarters, at least, the film score began to be more frequently considered not so much as a layer to be added in post-production by the studio music department, but rather as an integral thread in the fabric of the film. In the auteur cinema, bom of the New Wave in Europe and the Film School generation in the United States, music would take on an unprecedented primacy as an element of personal expression. This essay examines the latter half of Stanley Kubrick’s career, with especial attention to his final film, and with an ear to his idiosyncratic choices in music.

There is relatively little to indicate that the music of Kubrick’s first features (apart from Alex North’s distinguished score for Spartacus, USA, 1960) arose from uniquely thoughtful collaborations with composers. Gerald Fried scored Kubrick’s first five works, including The Killing (USA, 1956) and Paths of Glory (USA, 1957). The versatile composer/arranger/conductor Nelson Riddle scored Lolita in 1962. The prolific British composer Laurie Johnson (The Professionals, The Avengers) scored Dr Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (UK, 1964). Arguably the most memorable musical moment in these films is the use of the 1939 song ‘We’ll Meet Again’, popularized during World War II by Vera Lynn, heard over the apocalyptic final images of Dr. Strangelove. As it happens, this brilliant sequence was a taste of things to come. Unlike Fellini, whose musical voice developed in symbiosis with Nino Rota, Kubrick’s strength as an auteur lay in his inspired handling of pre-existing music.

In the process of making 2001: A Space Odyssey (UK/USA, 1968), the director appears to have made a definitive shift: henceforth he would bring pre-existing music to the fore, sometimes instead of, sometimes in addition to music specially commissioned from screen composers. As is well known, during post-production on 2001, he quietly replaced Alex North’s original score with orchestral and choral pieces that had at first been used as temp tracks during production. The change came as a cruel shock for North, who only found out that his work had been jettisoned when the completed film was released. In each of Kubrick’s remaining films – A Clockwork Orange (UK, 1971), Barry Lyndon (UK, 1975), The Shining (UK, 1980), Full Metal Jacket (USA, 1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (USA/UK, 1999) – pre-existing music would play a range of prominent and distinctive roles.¹ The audiovisual choreography the director achieved through his rhythms of narrative, editing, camerawork, and music came to define the Kubrick universe.

Of course, the cinema has borrowed from classical and popular music since its first flickering days. Kubrick’s deployments of pre-existing music exert a particular force, however, a tendency to assume an iconic status. Think of Alex’s Beethoven’s Ninth in A Clockwork Orange, the song ‘We’ll Meet Again’ at the end of Dr. Strangelove, and the ‘Blue Danube’ waltz and Alsosprach Zarathustra in 2001. What all these set-pieces have in common is not any one function of music, or its narrative status as diegetic or non-diegetic, or its historical provenance or form. Rather, once heard they are all choices that seem ineluctable, at once wittily detached and emotionally appropriate and poignant. Welding themselves to visual rhythms onscreen, they become the music of the specific movie scene rather than the piece one may have known before.

Film music scholarship defines classical film scoring as scoring that casts music as an inconspicuous part of the storytelling. The filmgoer is not supposed to notice or be distracted by the music, its primary role being to reinforce, intensify, and clarify narrative and emotive aspects of the film story.² A strongly codified set of scoring and mixing practices ensured music’s inconspicuousness in classical cinema. A music cue would often begin or end on an action the filmgoer would be focusing on, like the closing of a door or the transition to a new scene. It was standard to avoid orchestration that would ‘compete’ in register or tonal quality with a speaking voice; to synchronize dynamics of music and action, and parallel music with mood or action; and to use the very familiar language of late-Romantic music as the primary idiom of scoring, relying on its instantly recognizable reservoir of connotation.³

With the breakdown of the Hollywood studio system and developments in European art cinema, therefore, came a wide variety of new practices that may be termed postclassical. The postclassical era saw the influx of jazz, opera, modernist, ethnic, and pop idioms for non-diegetic scoring, along with the late Romantic idiom that had prevailed so long, as well as the foregrounding of music through unorthodox mixing, spotting, and cueing choices. Expanding on this general observation, Royal Brown defines one postclassical strain of music-image aesthetic as postmodern. For Brown, in the postmodern age the hierarchy of the image and music is up for grabs. Drawing examples from 2001 and Godard’s Une femme mariée (A Married Woman, France, 1964) among other works, he characterizes a new mode of using pre-existing classical music:

[T]he excerpts of classical music compositions that replace the original film score no longer function purely as backing for key emotional situations, but rather exist as a kind of parallel emotional/aesthetic universe […] [T]he affect …tends to remain within the music itself, which sheds its traditional invisibility rather than being transferred onto a given diegetic situation to which it is subordinated. Put another way, the music, rather than supporting and/or coloring the visual images and narrative situations, stands as an image in its own right, helping the audience read the film’s other images as such rather than as a replacement for or imitation of objective reality. (Brown, 1994, pp.239–40)

In his own book on 2001, Michel Chion echoes Brown’s idea of a ‘parallel universe’ suggested by some films’ uses of classical pieces. He sees Kubrick ‘…placing the music “outside”, in other words, not mixing it closely in with the dialogue and sound effects, but using it in broad, autonomous swaths, often borrowed from pre-existing works, songs or classical pieces’ (Chion, 2001, p.90).

As I hope to show in Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick continued to integrate preexisting music into his films after 2001, but in newly provocative ways. In fact, it is not clear how accurate Brown’s parallel-universe characterization is beyond the spectacular event-film that was 2001. After the 1960s, the director’s evolution toward meticulously aligned placements of musical material, sometimes re-editing scenes to accommodate the music even more precisely, yielded brilliant new effects. We might say that Kubrick’s music does not conventionally fit, but in not fitting like classical glue it forges a bond between story world and soundtrack that is much stronger, like the bond between the two elements that make epoxy.

Many of Kubrick’s placements of pre-existing music produce irony. But Kubrick’s music does not create the direct, self-conscious, heavy-handed irony underscored by, say, Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ in Luis Buñuel’s masterpiece Viridiana (Spain, 1961), heard while thieves and beggars wolf down their dinner at an elegantly set table where they are visually posed to parody the Last Supper. That irony resides in the distance between the comically rapacious diners and Christ- and-the-apostles as enshrined in religious iconography of the European tradition. Buñuel makes the scandalous move of equating them, through visual composition and the musical reference.

In contrast to Viridiana, consider Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, at the end of which battle-seasoned American soldiers sing the Mickey Mouse Club song as they march through a devastated and still-smoking Vietnam landscape. This is surely irony, the final touch of the absurd to ninety minutes that drag the viewer through the detailed hell of modem guerrilla combat. The song we would conventionally expect the young men to be singing would be ‘The Halls of Montezuma’ or whatever movie-soldiers march to; instead they sing the song of a children’s pop culture icon. But in Kubrick’s war, the song’s melody and martial rhythm turn out to be entirely apt. The words equate Mickey Mouse and the US government in an iconic summation of the film’s devastating exposé of the horrors of war: ‘Who’s the leader of the club that’s made for you and me?’ And historically speaking, it makes sense that these frightened children of the 1950s fighting in Vietnam would revert to the comfort of their youth even as they update it to their hellish circumstances. The song serves double duty as a strong, triumphant march tune (their triumph, as the first-person narrator says, is that they are alive) and a poignant reminder of the innocent childhoods that are now impossibly far behind them.

Likewise, Johann Strauss’s ‘Blue Danube’ waltz proves both ironic and sincerely appropriate in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Only the then-encrusted conventions of science fiction scoring – sounds of mystery and futuristic otherworldliness, whether via acoustic orchestras or electronics – made the waltz in 2001 such a surprise in 1968. The precision, clarity, and smoothness of 2001’s imagery of planets and space vehicles gliding through the jet-black heavens, imagery achieved by legendary efforts in special-effects technology of the time, seem to invite the shimmering waltz to create an elegant ballet through the fusion of sound and image. The fact that this particular waltz and its references to a river and an elegant social world of nineteenth-century Vienna are so well known, renders the waltz’s new placement in 2001’s river of planets and darkness all the more audacious. The big Von Karajan recording with the Berlin Philharmonic takes on a new dimension in keeping with the scale of Kubrick’s space imagery; we hear its spatial dimensions, the generous reverb in the recording, the elegance and clarity in both music performance and image, and the leisurely pace of both music and spaceships (when previous science fiction movies merely showed their soundstage spacecraft zooming across the flat screen; see Chion, 2001, pp.93–4).

Kubrick’s final work, Eyes Wide Shut, gives evidence of the increasing sophistication with which the director continued to treat music. Like the visual refrain shots of taxicab-filled traffic moving through the streets of Manhattan, and like the sinuous movements of the camera and the precise cutting, music underlines the film’s rhythmic, ritual core. Although its audiovisual set-pieces might be less spectacular than those in 2001, Eyes Wide Shut also features Kubrick’s marriages of music and image into super-operatic moments.

Eyes Wide Shut’s music is notably heterogeneous, deployed in perhaps the most carefully elaborated manner of all Kubrick’s films. We can delineate four kinds of music:

1. Waltz No. 2 from Dmitri Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite;

2. Segments of original scoring by a British avant-garde composer, Jocelyn Pook;

3. The second piece from Györgi Ligeti’s suite for piano, Musica Ricercata;

4. And a number of tunes from the 1930s to the 1990s, as well as brief excerpts from the classical repertoire.

Each musical type functions differently in the filmic operations of point of view, affect, and narrative commentary.

The waltz

The film opens with the gorgeous orchestral waltz by Shostakovich; it accompanies startlingly crisp visual editing and the odd, self-conscious acting of Tom Cruise, who the viewer will learn plays the supremely self-confident physician Bill Harford, married to Nicole Kidman’s Alice. Like the much better known ‘Blue Danube’ in 2001, this Shostakovich waltz does not conventionally fit, but it nonetheless becomes the film’s signature. Although the piece was composed in the mid-1930s, it nevertheless evokes the Old World; it is more folksy than the ‘Blue Danube’. Its minor key and its oom-pah beat, complete with snare drums, call up Eastern European associations. In the first stanza, a saxophone solos with the orchestra. The special timbre of the saxophone here conveys warmth, a sense of nostalgia or even melancholy, yielding a sardonic, even decadent tone at odds with what we see of Bill and Alice, the handsome, modem, blank Manhattanites whom the music strangely ac...