Theory Tangles

‘Film-Music Theory’ is the obvious title for this chapter, but it may also mislead. Its simplicity suggests that there is something we can call ‘film-music theory’, an established body of thought a survey can chart. But arguably there is not, and the first thing to do is to identify some of the blank areas on the map of film-music theory, and some of the obstacles that stand in the way of colouring them in.

The least problematic word in the title is ‘music’, but it, too, hides questions, gaps and blind spots. Can film-music theory limit itself to music, or is music so closely interwoven with other film sound that they are one object for theory? Michel Chion criticized the idea with the formula ‘there is no soundtrack’: that just because music, speech and noises are all types of sound does not mean that they have to form a coherent whole (Reference Chion and Gorbman1994, 39–40; Reference Chion and Gorbman2009 [2003], 226–30). On the other hand, Chion has done more than most to think about film sound and music within the same theoretical horizon – a characteristic approach from the perspective of film studies, which tends to see music as a subcategory of film sound. It is a valid hierarchy, but it can obscure the specifics of music in film. Musicologists, on the other hand, tend to treat music as a thing unto itself, though one at times linked to other film sound. A minor question about the relationship of music and sound in film is whether we always know which is which; an example such as Peter Strickland’s Katalin Varga (2009), with its tightrope walk between musique concrète and sound design, shows how that ambiguity can become creatively fertile (see Kulezic-Wilson Reference Kulezic-Wilson2011 and J. Martin Reference Martin2015). Uncertainty regarding the sound–music relationship affects this chapter too; depending on the context, it sometimes considers both and sometimes focuses on music.

Some kinds of music in film have been more thoroughly theorized than others: the scarcity of systematic discussion of pre-existing music in film is the most obvious example. The most comprehensive study is by Jonathan Godsall (Reference Godsall2013); there is work on ‘classical’ music in film (for example, Keuchel Reference Keuchel2000 and Duncan Reference Duncan2003), and on directors known for their use of pre-existing music, such as Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard and Martin Scorsese (see Gorbman Reference Gorbman and Goldmark2007; Gengaro Reference Gengaro2012; McQuiston Reference McQuiston2013; Stenzl Reference Stenzl2010; Heldt et al. Reference Heldt, Krohn, Moormann and Strank2015). Another gap opens up if we change perspective and look at music not as a functional element of film. While it undoubtedly is that, a focus on function overlooks the fact that film has also been a major stage for the composition, recycling, performance, contextualization and ideological construction of music. It would be a task not for film musicologists, but for music historians to give film music a place in the story of music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The word ‘film’ is more of a problem. In the rapid expansion of screen-media musicology over the last generation, from the fringes of musicology and film studies to a well-established field with its own journals, book series, conferences, programmes of study, etc., music in the cinema has become an almost old-fashioned topic, at least from the vantage point of those working on music in television, in video games, on the internet, in audiovisual art and so on. (See Richardson et al. Reference Richardson, Gorbman and Vernallis2013 for a survey.) Yet even if this were an old-fashioned Companion to Film Music, it would still need to consider the problem: what we mean by ‘film’ is becoming fuzzy, and what film musicology has considered in depth or detail is less than what one can now categorize as film. Most of us have an ostensive idea of a ‘film’ – a narrative feature film, around two hours long, shown in a cinema – and most film musicology deals with such films. Yet films have had a second home on television since the 1950s; most of us have seen more movies on the box via direct broadcasts or video than in the cinema. The involvement of television broadcasters in film production means that this is not just a secondary use, but is built into the economic foundations of filmmaking. And what about music in TV films – is it within the remit of film musicology or that of the emerging field of television-music studies? And where in the disciplinary matrix are we when we flip through the TV channels and stumble upon the movie Star Trek (2009) and then upon an episode of the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–94)? Multimedia franchises are yet another solvent eating away at ‘film’; in such a world, the idea of film musicology as a separate field may have had its day. Moreover, with the digital shift in filmmaking and exhibition, the very term ‘film’ has become anachronistic. (‘Movie’ has always been more telling, and it may be only linguistic pusillanimity that has kept it from becoming academically common.) Digital technology drags film out of its former home in the cinema and transforms it into a dataset fit for an increasingly diverse multi-platform media world.

On the other side of the methodological problem, much of what we can see and hear in the cinema has been largely ignored by film musicology: short films, abstract and other experimental films, documentaries, adverts, trailers and so on. There is literature on cartoons (see, for example, Goldmark Reference Goldmark2001 and Reference Goldmark2005; Goldmark and Taylor Reference Goldmark and Taylor2002; Jaszoltowski Reference Jaszoltowski2013), but other forms have languished in the shadows. Music in advertising has been studied more from the perspective of television – understandable given its role in the economy of the medium (see Rodman Reference Rodman2010, 77–101 and 201–24; B. Klein Reference Klein2010) – though most insights translate to cinema adverts; music in documentaries has only produced a smattering of studies (Rogers Reference Rogers2015 is the most substantial, though ‘rockumentaries’ and other music documentaries have found interest: see T. Cohen Reference Cohen2009; Baker Reference Baker2011; Wulff et al. Reference Wulff, Levermann, Niemeier and Strank2010–11); and music in film trailers and in other filmic paratexts, such as main-title and end-credit sequences, is only just emerging as a field of study (see Powrie and Heldt Reference Powrie, Heldt, Powrie and Heldt2014 for a summary and bibliography). And then there is ‘theory’, where things get more tangled. In the sciences, ‘theory’ is a relatively straightforward concept: a model of part of the world that allows us to make predictions that can be empirically tested, and where experimental falsification allows theories to be improved to become better models. This summary glosses over complications in the reality of theory formation and testing, but may help to throw art theories into relief. Art theories, too, model aspects of the world in order to explain how they ‘work’. But while the sciences have an established ‘scientific process’, a particular nexus of theory, empirical testing and reality (however idealized), that relationship is looser in the arts, where the career of theories rests on a less tidy set of circumstances: on their inherent plausibility; on their fit with other theories; on their analytical power; on their originality or their capacity to generate original interpretations; on trends and fashions in a discipline and in the wider academic landscape (especially for small disciplines such as film studies or musicology, which historically have depended heavily on ideas from elsewhere); and on political, ethical and aesthetic stances that introduce a prescriptive element to some theories that has no equivalent in the sciences.

Closest to the scientific model is the cognitive psychology of the effects of film music. (For summaries of research, see Bullerjahn Reference Bullerjahn2014 and Annabel J. Cohen Reference Cohen, Juslin and Sloboda2010 and Reference Cohen and Neumeyer2014.) Music theory is another tributary, informing how musicologists analyse the structures of music in films: harmonic structures from local chord progressions to film-spanning frameworks; metric, rhythmic and phrase structures that may affect how music relates to on-screen movement or editing; or motivic and thematic relationships. All of this is the small change of music analysis and usually goes without saying; only recently has music theory approached film musicology with more complex instruments (see Lehman Reference Lehman2012, Reference Lehman2013a and Reference Lehman2013b; and Murphy Reference Murphy2006, Reference Murphy and Halfyard2012, Reference Murphy and Neumeyer2014a and Reference Murphy2014b). A different appropriation of music theory – on the general level of music as an abstract system – is music as a metaphor for formal aspects of film, in a move away from understanding film as recording or representation of reality (see Bordwell Reference Bordwell1980), a variant of the more common metaphor of the ‘language’ or ‘grammar’ of film (for example, Spottiswoode Reference Spottiswoode1935; Metz Reference Metz1971 and Reference Metz and Taylor1974 [1968]; Arijon Reference Arijon1976).

But mostly, ‘theory’ means film theory, and the challenge it poses to film musicology is its diversity (see, for example, Stam and Miller Reference Stam and Miller2000, Simpson et al. Reference Simpson, Utterson and Sheperdson2004 and Braudy and Cohen Reference Braudy and Cohen2009 for anthologies; Elsaesser and Hagener Reference Elsaesser and Hagener2010 for an unusual account; and Tredell Reference Tredell2002 for a historical overview). There is media theory, dealing with technological and communicative, but also institutional and economic aspects of cinema; there are theories of the ontology of film, of film language, of authorship, of aesthetics, of narratology, with regard to narrative systems and with regard to the story patterns they generate; there are semiotics and pragmatics; there is genre theory; there are psychological theories on a spectrum from psychoanalytical approaches, often close to cultural theory, to empirical psychology; there are sociological theories, including engaged ‘critical’ theories; theories of performance, within film and of film; theories of film and cultural identities, and of different national and regional cinemas; theories of audiences and spectatorship, of gender, of emotion, of time and so on. There is also ‘Theory’, that ‘blend of Marxism, psychoanalysis and structuralism’ (Macey Reference Macey2001, 379) that became prominent in Anglophone film studies in the 1970s (see Buhler Reference Buhler and Neumeyer2014b for an overview of sound and music in relation to parts of Theory, and Bordwell and Carroll Reference Bordwell and Carroll1996 for critiques). The situation is complicated by the fact that theoretical thinking does not need to generate theories in a strong sense; much film-studies scholarship that does not aim to theorize as such still contributes to the initiative: to the development of ideas that may eventually be adopted in theories.

How film-music theory might fit into this jagged panorama (or widen its frame) is not yet clear. Is it another glass pebble in the theoretical kaleidoscope, contributing its own bit to the picture? Or should music be absorbed into film theories and become as integral to them as music often is to film? In the audiovisual art of film, sound is part and parcel of all these theoretical perspectives, and music intersects with most of them. So far, sound has played only a peripheral role in film studies, and film musicology has mostly been a thing apart, a situation to which musicologists are accustomed, separated as they are from colleagues elsewhere in the academy by musical notation and theory and its arcane symbols, concepts and terminology. However cosy that may be at times, it is also dangerously isolating. If film musicology wants to be productive in film studies, it has to grow into it, and film-music theory into film theory. That puts an onus on film scholars to accept it as something with which they need to engage if they want to do their job properly, and an onus on film musicologists to make themselves understood. That does not preclude studies reliant on expert musical knowledge – they make the widening of the horizon possible. But the arcana need to serve a purpose, and the results need to be communicated so that others can use them.

Theories in History

The challenge for film-music theory has been exacerbated by the unstable currents of artistic and academic developments. Film is only 120 years old, and sound film (as a commercially viable mass medium) less than 90, and beyond the aesthetic change that is a constant in the history of any art, revolutions in technology and media mean that film has been a moving target for theory. Film studies as an academic concern is only two generations old and has imported many ideas (and scholars) from other disciplines. That influx may have been stimulating, but there has been scant time for a disciplinary identity to emerge, much less so for a peripheral topic such as music. And while there have been major studies of film music since Kurt London’s in Reference London1936, for decades these were few and far between; only since the 1980s has development picked up and formed a new subdiscipline (though whether one subordinate to film studies or to musicology is not clear). That the birth of modern film musicology is often identified with the special issue ‘Film/Sound’ of Yale French Studies (Altman Reference Altman1980) proves the point of the heterogeneous disciplinary history that makes film-music theory precarious; that the title of the special issue omits music – though five of its articles are about it – shows its peripheral place in film studies at the time (and to this day).

This chapter can only offer a whistle-stop tour of some milestones in the uncertain unfolding of film-music theory and try to trace how questions and ideas are threaded through the history of such theory. This neither amounts to a history nor a metatheory of film-music theory; given the sketchy nature of the matter, the chapter cannot be but a sketch itself.

Chasing After Film: The Accidental Theory of Silent-Film Music

Until about two generations ago, the honour of theory was accorded to practices understood as (high) art. But film started life not as art; it began as technological sensation and spectacle, and continued as (sometimes quite cheap) entertainment. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, music in silent film was theorized only in passing, as a by-product of the practice of making music for film. A venue for such accidental theorizing was the development in the 1910s of organized collections of titles, incipits or stock music deemed suitable for film accompaniment, such as the Kinotheken series in Germany (see Altman Reference Altman2004, 258–65, for their early development). The implicit assumptions that governed their categories for music could be analysed as a cryptotheory of the semiotics of film music in its own right and the introductions to such collections often also contain, intentionally or not, nuggets of nascent film-music theory. ‘The pianist should create a tone poem that forms a frame, as it were, for the picture’, advises one compiler (True Reference True1914, 2), and what can be understood as a prod for cinema pianists to take pride in their work can also be read as an acknowledgement of a key function of music in film: to bind the fragmented structure of shots and cuts in the visual images into a whole.

The purpose of such collections made a critical view unlikely; introductions usually describe what their authors see as best practice without judgement. An example is Ernö Rapée’s Reference Rapée1925 Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures. What Rapée describes would, two decades later and translated into the conditions of sound film, provide the aim for the sarcastic critique of the first chapter of Theodor Adorno’s and Hanns Eisler’s Composing for the Film (Reference Adorno and Eisler2007 [1947]): music provides setting, atmosphere or emotion; Chinese music is for Chinese characters and English music for English ones; characters have themes (Rapée does not yet call them leitmotifs) chosen according to a system of musical clichés: the music shadows the film and does what it does in the most obvious way. (See excerpts from Rapée in Cooke Reference Cooke2010, 21–7; Hubbert Reference Hubbert2011, 84–96; and Wierzbicki et al. Reference Wierzbicki, Platte and Roust2012, 39–52.)

A counter-example is Hans Erdmann, Giuseppe Becce and Ludwig Brav’s Allgemeines Handbuch der Film-Musik, which frames its ‘thematic scale register’ – classifying pieces of music by a multi-level system of moods – with a critique of silent-film practice and its ‘style-less potpourris’ of worn-out clichés (Reference Erdmann, Becce and Brav1927, vol. 1, 5). At the end of silent cinema, Erdmann, Becce and Brav justify their advice for matching music to film with a rudimentary version of what James Buhler (taking his cue from Francesco Casetti) calls an ‘ontological theory’ of film music: one that ‘attempted to determine [the] nature and aesthetic possibilities’ of film music by trying to determine the nature of film itself, an attempt that would become important in the transition to sound film (Reference Buhler and Neumeyer2014a, 190–4). Erdmann, Becce and Brav ‘explain’ the integral role of music in film by locating film between drama and music: to the former it is linked by ‘the representational objective, the material content’, to the latter by its ‘wordlessness’ that makes it ‘averse to pure thought’ (Reference Erdmann, Becce and Brav1927, vol. 1, 39; my translation). While the reasons for music’s integral role in film were historical rather than aesthetic – music was common in other forms of dramatic storytelling, and it was part of the performance contexts in which film first appeared – it was still tempting to justify it by looking for a common denominator of film and music. Carl Van Vechten, for example, in 1916 found it in comparing the wordless action of film to ballet: ‘and whoever heard of a ballet performed without music?’ (Reference Van Vechten and Wierzbicki2012 [1916], 20); and the idea of movement linking images and music is still used by Zofia Lissa (Reference Lissa1965, 72–7). The flipside of Erdmann, Becce and Brav’s critique is their call for coherence: ‘incidental music’ (that is, music as diegetic prop) should be historically credible, and ‘expressive music’ should not ‘chase after film scenes like a poodle’, but shape the emotional trajectory of the film (Reference Erdmann, Becce and Brav1927, 46); music is understood to possess its own formal and stylistic integrity that combines with the images to form the film. (For background to the Handbuch, see Comisso Reference Comisso2012 and Fuchs Reference Fuchs, Tieber and Windisch2014.) The ‘style-less potpourris’ were still an issue when Rudolf Arnheim, writing in 1932, bemoaned that music chasing after film scenes coarsened their effect because it had not been part of the balancing of continuity and contrast at their conception (Reference Arnheim2002 [1932], 253–4).

Counterpoints: The Challenge of Sound Film

Silent film is more musical than sound film, but the challenge for theorists of early sound film was that it is musical in a different way. The sound of a silent film is not part of the film text, but is added in situ as part of the performance of the film (even though the brain may combine the visual and auditive layers into the experience of a whole). Sound film offered the possibility for sound and music to disappear into the images: ‘realistic’ diegetic sounds could be understood as their counterpart, and music lost its visible presence in the cinema and could become ‘unheard melodies’ (Gorbman Reference Gorbman1987). One may wonder what would have happened had Edison succeeded and film had been furnished with synchronous sound from the start: would film theory have taken its cues from theories of drama? Probably only up to a point, as its patchwork of shots and cuts gives film a fundamentally different structure. But film theory carried the origins of the medium with its silent images and musical layer across the transition to sound, most obviously in the idea of film as an essentially visual art. That in 2003 Chion still felt the need to blow the trumpet of sound with the book title Art sonore, le cinéma (published in English as Film, a Sound Art, 2009) shows the long shadow of the idea. (A music-specific variant of the problem is found in Noël Carroll’s ‘Notes on Movie Music’, which set music apart from ‘the film’ and categorized both as complementary ‘symbol systems’ [Reference Carroll1996, 141].)

For film theorists, the transition to sound sharpened the question of what film was good for – a question not so much about film’s ontology as one about its aesthetic potential. The technical recording process involved in most cinematic images (and sounds) made it tempting to ascribe to film a unique capacity for capturing reality – the view of mid-century theorists such as André Bazin, for whom ‘the guiding myth’ of cinema is ‘an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist’ (Reference Bazin and Gray2005 [1967], 21), or Siegfried Kracauer, who distinguished between ‘basic and technical properties of film’ and saw as its basic property that film is ‘uniquely equipped to record and reveal physical reality’, while of the technical properties ‘the most general and indispensable is editing’ (Reference Kracauer1961, 28–9).

For Bazin, sound film ‘made a reality out of the original “myth”’, and it seemed ‘absurd to take the silent film as a state of primal perfection which has gradually been forsaken by the realism of sound and color’ (Reference Bazin and Gray2005 [1967], 21). But for theorists who had grown up with silent film, its relative lack of realism focused attention on ‘the freedom of interpretation of the artist’ enabled by the ‘technical properties’ of film – an achievement threatened by the illusion of realism which synchronous sound made that bit more insidiously perfect. And so Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Grigori Alexandrov feared that the realism of sound film might lead to sterile ‘“highly cultured dramas” and other photographed performances of a theatrical sort’ that would damage the aesthetic of montage which early Soviet films had developed, because ‘every adhesion of sound to a visual montage piece increases its inertia as a montage piece, and increases the independence of its meaning’; they called instead for an ‘orchestral counterpoint of visual and aural images’ (Eisenstein et al. Reference Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Alexandrov, Leyda, Weis and Belton1928, 84); Arnheim warned that sound film was inimical to the work of ‘film artists … working out an explicit and pure style of silent film, using its restrictions to transform the peep show into art’ (Reference Arnheim1957, 154); and Béla Balázs wrote that sound film was still a ‘technique’ that had not ‘evolved into an art’ (Reference Balázs and Bone1970 [1952], 194–5). Such scepticism was justified by film’s rapid move towards using speech and noises primarily in a ‘realistic’ manner (though exceptions such as René Clair’s films in the early 1930s show that creative solutions were possible, as did cartoons, which were freed from some of the expectations of realism).

One consequence of the shock of synchronized sound was to make theorists map how such sound could relate to images. There were two crucial issues: the degree to which sounds could be understood as realistic with regard to images, and the degree to which images and sounds converged or diverged conceptually. True to the title of the book, the most elaborate system was developed in Raymond Spottiswoode’s Grammar of Film (Reference Spottiswoode1935, 48–50 and 173–96). Spottiswoode places sound on different polar scales: it can be realistic or unrealistic in kind or intensity; realistic sound can have an on-screen or off-screen source (the latter he calls ‘contrapuntal’ sound; 174–8); sound can be objectively unrealistic (voiceover or nondiegetic music) or subjectively unrealistic (representative of a character’s perception). The second distinction is that between ‘parallel’ and ‘contrastive sound’: sight and sound ‘convey[ing] only a single idea’ or ‘different impressions’ (180–1).

Spottiswoode’s first set of distinctions is, in different versions and with a variety of terms, still part of the toolbox of film musicology: diegetic and nondiegetic music; on-screen and off-screen music; music representing objective reality or subjective perception (from Chion’s ‘point of audition’ [Reference Chion and Gorbman1994, 89–94] to ‘internal’ or ‘imagined’ diegetic music, ‘metadiegetic music’ and, conceptually wider, ‘internal focalization’; for a summary see Heldt Reference Heldt2013, 119–33). Distinctions added later are, for example, that between on- and off-track music (between music heard and music implied by other means; Gorbman Reference Gorbman1987, 144–50), and that between on- and off-scene diegetic music (between music that is diegetic with regard to the storyworld overall and music that is diegetic in a specific scene; Godsall Reference Godsall2013, 79–82), and temporality is introduced with the concept of displaced sound and music (see Bordwell and Thompson Reference Bordwell and Thompson2010, 280–98; Buhler et al. Reference Buhler, Neumeyer and Deemer2010, 92–113; Heldt Reference Heldt2013, 97–106).

Spottiswoode’s distinction between parallel and contrastive sound also had its career in film-sound theory (with ‘contrast’ often replaced by ‘counterpoint’, building on Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov’s audiovisual ‘counterpoint’; Nicholas Cook returns to ‘contrast’ [Reference Cook1998, 98–106]; see also Chion Reference Chion and Gorbman1994, 35–9). Whatever the terms, the distinction underlies Eisenstein’s statement that ‘synchronization does not presume consonance’ and takes account of ‘corresponding and non-corresponding “movements”’ (Reference Eisenstein and Leyda1942, 85), allowing for the complex system of image–sound relationships sketched in The Film Sense; it is there in Adorno’s and Eisler’s ‘music … setting itself in opposition to what is shown on the screen’ (Reference Adorno and Eisler2007 [1947], 26–8); it informs Kracauer’s distinction between parallelism and counterpoint (sound and images denoting the same or different ideas), perpendicular to that between synchronous and asynchronous sound (sound matching or not matching what we see; Reference Kracauer1961, 111–15 and 128–32). (For further discussion and examples of the idea, see Gallez Reference Gallez1970.) Lissa uses both distinctions more flexibly: she allows for a fuzzy borderline between synchronism and asynchronism via ‘loosened-up’ forms of mutual sound/image motivation that pull them apart ‘temporally, spatially, causally, emotionally’. Audiovisual counterpoint for her covers a range of options: music linking strands on the image track; music dynamizing static images; music commenting on images or characterizing protagonists; music adding ‘its own content’ to images; music anticipating a scene; music in counterpoint to speech and noises; and music in Eisensteinian montages of thesis and antithesis implying a conceptual synthesis (Lissa Reference Lissa1965, 102–6). The idea is still present in Hansjörg Pauli’s distinction between musical ‘paraphrase, polarisation and counterpoint’: music matching the ‘character of the images’; music imbuing images with an interpretation; and music contrasting with images (Reference Pauli and Schmidt1976, 104), a division he later retracted as too simplistic (Reference Pauli1981, 190). The problem with such systems is that they undersell the multi-layered complexities of sound film. Both sound and vision can consist of different strands, but whereas the use of split screens or layered images is rather rare, the layering of multiple auditive strands in more complex ways (that is to say, different combinations of dialogue, noises, diegetic and nondiegetic music at the same time) is not uncommon in film. When in a film ‘we hear one or two simultaneous sounds, we could just as well hear ten or fifteen, because there is … no frame for the sounds’ (Chion Reference Chion and Gorbman2009 [2003], 227). Furthermore, images, sounds or music can rarely be reduced to a single ‘character’, and a static model of image–sound relationships ignores the dynamic, temporal nature of both. This complexity does not preclude simplifying systems, but they need to be understood as heuristic crutches.

Another approach to ordering film music that proliferated from the 1930s onwards is to describe its functions. Lists of functions have been too many and too various to be surveyed here (early ones are discussed in Lissa Reference Lissa1965, 107–14; other examples include Spottiswoode Reference Spottiswoode1935, 49–50 and 190–96; Schaeffer Reference Schaeffer1946; Copland Reference Copland and Cooke1949, elaborated in Prendergast Reference Prendergast1992 [1977], 213–26; Manvell and Huntley Reference Manvell and Huntley1957, 69–177, and 1975, 63–198; Kracauer Reference Kracauer1961, 133–56; Gallez Reference Gallez1970, 47; La Motte-Haber and Emons Reference De la Motte-Haber and Emons1980, 115–219; Schneider Reference Schneider1986, 90–1; Chion Reference Chion1995a, 187–235; Kloppenburg Reference Kloppenburg2000, 48–56; Larsen Reference Larsen2005, 202–18; Bullerjahn Reference Bullerjahn2014, 53–74; for classical Hollywood film Gorbman Reference Gorbman1987, 70–98, and Kalinak Reference Kalinak1992, 66–110). Lissa’s list can illustrate a feature of such catalogues: their synoptic nature means that they range across the realms of different theories. Lists of functions focus on their being performed by music at the expense of their place in a particular theoretical framework. Lissa distinguishes between music underlining movement, music as stylization of sounds, music as representation of space, music as representation of time, deformation of sound material, music as commentary, music in its natural role, music expressing mental experiences, music as a basis for empathy, music as symbol, music as story anticipation and music as a formally unifying factor (Reference Lissa1965 [1964], 115–231). One of the categories, the deformation of sound material, is not a function in itself, but a range of techniques for different purposes; the others comprise aspects of the semiotics of film music, of its narratology, of its psychology and of film form.

Lists of functions are compiled not on the basis of understanding film as a super-system of formal systems – typical for neoformalist film theory associated with scholars such as David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson or Carroll (for example, see Bordwell Reference Bordwell1985; Thompson Reference Thompson1988; N. Carroll Reference Carroll1996; Bordwell and Thompson Reference Bordwell and Thompson2010) – but with regard to the making and perception of films. If we understand the former as anticipation of the latter, the two are related (though not as mirror images, because not all intentions are realised and not all perceptions anticipated), and we may see the categorization of functions of film music as part of the poetics rather than the theory of film – part of the craft of making rather than the science of analysing film. A counterpart of such a perspective is the phenomenological approach, an analysis of the experience of film music, which is an implicit part of many analyses, but has rarely been the subject of methodological discussion (Biancorosso Reference Biancorosso2002, 5–45, is the most elaborate example).

Monument Valley: Musical Monoliths in the Desert

Although early film-music theory was born of film-sound theory and the work of film theorists rather than musicologists, for most of the twentieth century not just music but sound itself became a sideline for film theory which was ‘resolutely image-bound … sound serving as little more than a superfluous accompaniment’ (Altman Reference Altman1980, 3). (Anthologies such as Stam and Miller Reference Stam and Miller2000 and Simpson et al. Reference Simpson, Utterson and Sheperdson2004 mention music on only 8 and 5 pages, respectively, out of total lengths of 862 and 1,487 pages.) For a long time, studies of film music were relatively few and were either practical primers (Sabaneev Reference Sabaneev and Pring1935); surveys of film music as a whole, made from historical as well as systematic perspectives, but without a specific theoretical aim, such as the studies of Kurt London (Reference London1936), Roger Manvell and John Huntley (Reference Manvell and Huntley1957), Georges Hacquard (Reference Hacquard1959), Henri Colpi (Reference Colpi1963), François Porcile (Reference Porcile1969) and Roy M. Prendergast (Reference Prendergast1992 [1977]); or idiosyncratic monoliths, such as Adorno’s and Eisler’s Composing for the Films (Reference Adorno and Eisler2007 [1947]) or Lissa’s Ästhetik der Filmmusik (Reference Lissa1965 [1964]).

The fame of Adorno and Eisler is indeed based on their idiosyncratic views more than on their work’s usefulness as a textbook, which it is not. In one sense, it is an adjunct to Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), a case study of ‘the most characteristic medium of contemporary cultural industry’ (Adorno and Eisler Reference Adorno and Eisler2007 [1947], xxxv); it is a polemic of two creative minds thrown by history right into the heart of the capitalist system that had occupied their thinking for many years; it is an exploration of alternatives to the Hollywood orthodoxy (using Eisler’s own film scores as counter-examples). The biting criticism of Hollywood’s ‘Prejudices and Bad Habits’ in the first chapter may be the least interesting one because it states the obvious: that much film music does what is expected of it in terms of musical style, semiotic referencing and narrative function, but does it in an unobtrusive way that relegates it to ‘a subordinate role in relation to the picture’ (ibid., 5). The book is also occasionally curiously retrospective: two of the bad habits, the attempt to justify music diegetically and the use of classical hits as stock music (ibid., 6–7 and 9), were not really relevant anymore in the mid-1940s, and many examples of scores by Eisler refer back to the early 1930s. But the chapters on musical dramaturgy, musical resources and aesthetics (ibid., 13–29 and 42–59) contain insights and ideas that show a belief in the potential of music to release ‘essential meaning’ from the ‘realistic surface’ of film (ibid., 23). Many of these insights remain unredeemed, and while film music has discovered the use of many ‘new resources and techniques’ (ibid., 21) since 1947, it has also transformed many of them into new ‘bad’ habits. The most important contribution of the book to film-music theory was perhaps that it widened the range of what ‘theory’ meant – that it need not be restricted to theorizing film music as a subsystem of the film text, but that the economic, institutional and social conditions of the making and reception of films were crucial to their structure. Even though that seems obvious, one danger of the theory-proliferation mentioned in the first part of this chapter is that theories of different aspects of film and its music do not speak to each other, and whatever one may think of Adorno’s and Eisler’s aesthetics, their attempt to intertwine sociology with the structure and style of films and their music was (and is) a salutary lesson.

Lissa’s own idiosyncratic monolith, written two decades later, takes almost the opposite tack, perhaps consciously so. Lissa ignores Adorno’s and Eisler’s lesson of socio-economic contextualization and casts music as part of film not as ‘mass culture’, but as art: a synthetic art reliant on the ‘organic cooperation of the means of different arts’ (Reference Lissa1965 [1964], 25). If Adorno and Eisler were anxious for music to become productive in film by retaining its integrity, Lissa sees its difference to the rest of the film as the potential to become an ‘integrative factor’ in the ‘dialectic unity of the layers of sound film’ (ibid., 27, 65). Through historical convention, music has become integral to film because it adds a dimension: unlike most elements of a film, music does not represent a (fictional) reality, but is a reality in its own right (though this does not apply to diegetic music, which is representational), and while the images ‘concretise … the musical structures’, linking them to specific meanings, they in turn ‘generalise the meaning of the images’ (ibid., 70). The dialectics smack of an attempt to justify music in film via an unnecessary reductive principle (there are enough films without music that work perfectly well, after all), but the idea of music as integral to a new multimedia art informs analyses of the functions of film music, of the role of form and style, of music in different genres and of its psychology that for the time were matchlessly detailed and differentiated. One idiosyncrasy of the book – at least for readers in Western countries – is that many examples are from films made in the Eastern bloc (though for the German version references to Western films were added; ibid., 6). Despite that, it is a loss that the book has never been translated into English; though its interest today may be mainly historical, for that reason alone a translation would still be worthwhile.

Becoming Film Musicology: The Constitution of a Discipline

The hearing loss of film theory eventually made way for a return to the interest in sound and music that had been integral to early sound-film theory, programmatically in the 1980 ‘Film/Sound’ special issue of Yale French Studies mentioned above. The quantity of film-music literature picked up as well, but widely read books such as Claudia Gorbman’s Unheard Melodies (Reference Gorbman1987) or Royal S. Brown’s Overtones and Undertones (Reference Brown1994) still show traces of the older, synoptic model (as does Helga de La Motte-Haber and Hans Emons’ Filmmusik in Reference De la Motte-Haber and Emons1980), though new theoretical concerns now come to the fore.

Its balancing of survey and theoretical perspectives new to film musicology made Gorbman’s film-music book the first port of call for a generation: it uses ideas from semiotics, narratology and suture theory to explain the workings of underscoring in narrative fiction films, and applies its tools to classic Hollywood as well as to René Clair and Jean Vigo. The most eye- (or ear-)catching idea gave the book its title: that the melodies of film scores usually go unheard, evading conscious audience awareness. Already Arnheim in 1932 had averred that ‘film music was always good if one did not notice it’ (Reference Arnheim2002 [1932], 253; my translation), one of Adorno’s and Eisler’s bugbears. Gorbman recasts it via the concept of suture: the idea that film needs to overcome the ontological gulf between the viewer and the story on the screen, and that it has developed ways to suture that gap, to stitch the viewer into involvement with the narrative (Reference Gorbman1987, 53–69). Visual strategies were crucial to suture theory, for example shot‒countershot sequences. Music offered another thread for the stitching of ‘shot to shot, narrative event to meaning, spectator to narrative, spectator to audience’ (ibid., 55), the more so since most viewers lack the concepts to assess critically the effects of musical techniques.

Suture is just one concept from what Bordwell ironically characterized as Grand Theory (Reference Bordwell, Bordwell and Carroll1996): the confluence of ideas from (mainly Lacanian) psychoanalysis, (post)structuralist literary theory and (post)Marxist sociology that became a major strand of film theory in the 1970s (from hereon written ‘Theory’ to distinguish this complex of ideas from the generic term). Different strands of Theory try to show how cinema – as an institution, as a technology, as a (prefabricated) experience, as a narrative medium – and the structuring and editing techniques of film create illusions: of realism, of continuity and coherence, of meaning, of authority, of subject identity and connection, illusions reducing the viewer to a cog in an ideological machine. Despite the tempting capacity of music to help bring about the quasi-dream state cinema engenders (Baudry Reference Baudry1976), music has not played a significant role in Theory, nor the latter in film musicology. (Jeff Smith [Reference Smith, Bordwell and Carroll1996] criticizes the idea of ‘unheard melodies’ with regard to Gorbman Reference Gorbman1987 and Flinn Reference Flinn1992; Buhler Reference Buhler and Neumeyer2014b discusses psychoanalytically grounded theories mainly with regard to film sound overall, with few references specifically to music.) One reason may be that film musicology discovered Theory when its heyday was coming to an end; another reason may be that musicology does not have a tradition of the ideas that informed Theory (and much film musicology was done by musicologists). The cachet of Theory has waned, together with psychoanalysis as a psychological theory, and with the socio-political ideas that had entered cultural theory with the Frankfurt School of social philosophers, Adorno in particular. Even if ‘critical theory generally understands psychoanalysis not as providing a true account of innate psychological forces … but rather as providing an accurate model for how culture shapes, channels and deforms those psychological forces’ (Buhler Reference Buhler and Neumeyer2014b, 383), the latter is not independent of the former, and Theory as a social theory is no less problematic than as a psychological one. But ideas about cinema as a dream-machine, and about sound and of music in it, may be partly recoverable in other theoretical frameworks, even if their original foundations have become weakened.

More durable may be the semiotic and narratological perspectives in Gorbman’s book. Semiotic functions of film music had long been a strand of the literature, even avant la lettre: the use of commonly understood musical codes to suggest time, place, setting, characters; the provision of an experiential context by establishing mood and pace; the interpretation of story and images by underlining aspects of them – in short, the creation, reinforcement and modification of filmic signification through music. However, semiotics are more prominent in analyses of individual films and repertoires of films, often done in DIY fashion, without an explicit theoretical framework (not necessarily a bad thing); coherent theoretical or methodological models are relatively rare. The most elaborate one, Philip Tagg’s ‘musematic’ analysis, was developed for television music (Tagg Reference Tagg2000; Tagg and Clarida Reference Tagg and Clarida2003 applies the idea to a wider range of television music); other theoretical approaches to film-music semiotics can be found in Lexmann Reference Lexmann2006 and Chattah Reference Chattah2006 (which distinguishes between semiotics as a focus on the relationship between signs and what they signify, and pragmatics as a focus on the relationship between signs and their users and contexts).

As with semiotics, narratological concepts had been applied to film music long before narratology came into play by name, chiefly in the distinction between ‘source music’ and ‘scoring’: music that has a source in the image (or suggested off-screen space) and music that has not, i.e. music on different levels of narration. Many different terms have been used for, more or less, this distinction (see Bullerjahn Reference Bullerjahn2014, 19–24 for a list), but the most common are diegetic and nondiegetic (or extradiegetic) music (see Gorbman Reference Gorbman1980 and Reference Gorbman1987, 11–30). To replace old terms by new ones needs a justification, and the obvious one is that ‘source music’ and ‘scoring’ are specific to the craft of film music, while ‘diegetic’ and ‘nondiegetic’ link into a theoretical system, developed by Gérard Genette (who borrowed diégèse from Étienne Souriau: see Genette Reference Genette and Lewin1980 [1972], 27), but also common in film studies, and related to the story/discourse distinction more common in literary studies (see Heldt Reference Heldt2013, 19–23 and 49–51 for the terminological background). Film musicology has rarely ventured beyond the basic diegetic/nondiegetic distinction. Gorbman applied Genette’s term ‘metadiegetic’ to music which might be interpreted as being in a character’s mind (Reference Gorbman1987, 22–3), problematic because the embedded narration to which Genette applies it differs from Gorbman’s usage (see Heldt Reference Heldt2013, 119–22); and Jerrold Levinson (Reference Levinson, Bordwell and Carroll1996) tried to make Wayne Booth’s concept of the implied author useful for film musicology, though he misappropriates the idea (see Heldt Reference Heldt2013, 72–89). Systems of levels of narration extend further, however, from historical authorship via implied authorship and extra-fictional narration to nondiegetic, diegetic and metadiegetic levels, and also take in the differentiation between objective and subjective narrative perspectives, as in Genette’s concept of ‘focalisation’. (For examples of such systems, see Genette Reference Genette and Lewin1980 [1972], 227–37; Chatman Reference Chatman1978, 146–95; Bal Reference Bal2009, 67–82; and Branigan Reference Branigan1992, 86–124; see Heldt Reference Heldt2013 for an application to film music.) How music relates to most of these concepts has not been explored, and much less other elements of film narratology, such as the relationship of music to temporal ordering with regard to aspects such as filmic rhythm, ellipses, anticipation and retrospection (see, for example, Chatman Reference Chatman1978, 63–79; Bordwell Reference Bordwell1985, 74–98; Bal Reference Bal2009, 77–109), to historical modes and norms of narration (Bordwell Reference Bordwell1985, 147–55), or to the distinction between narration and monstration (Gaudreault Reference Gaudreault and Barnard2009 [1988]), important for film because the relationship is very different from that in literature, and most filmic ‘narration’ consists in the organization of access to information rather than the literal telling of a story.

The other hitch in the relationship of film musicology and narratology has been that film musicologists have worried about the diegetic/nondiegetic distinction more than scholars in other disciplines. Some have explored how music can blur the distinction, or how it can transition between categories (for example, Neumeyer Reference Neumeyer1997, Reference Neumeyer2000 and Reference Neumeyer2009; Buhler Reference Buhler and Donnelly2001; Biancorosso Reference Biancorosso2001 and Reference Biancorosso2009; Stilwell Reference Stilwell and Goldmark2007; Norden Reference Norden2007; J. Smith Reference Smith2009; N. Davis Reference Davis2012; Yacavone Reference Yacavone2012). Others have questioned the usefulness of the concepts as such, suggested alternatives or posited that they have been misused (for example Kassabian Reference Kassabian2001, 42–9, and Kassabian Reference Kassabian and Richardson2013; Cecchi Reference Cecchi2010; Winters Reference Winters2010 and Reference Winters2012; Merlin Reference Merlin2010; Holbrook Reference Holbrook2011, 1–53). The main bones of contention have been the claims that the categories make an a priori distinction too rigid for the reality of film (music), and that to call music nondiegetic distances it from the diegesis and misses its part in establishing it. But the critique applies more to applications of the concepts than to their substance. Narratology has never understood them as quasi-ontological categories, but as heuristic constructs in the reader’s or viewer’s mind, in a process of ‘diegetisation’ (see Hartmann Reference Hartmann2007 and Wulff Reference Wulff2007), an evolving understanding of the boundaries of the storyworld that is open to revision. The categories should also not be burdened with tasks they cannot fulfil: they say nothing about what music does in a film, or how realistically it tells its story. And the criticism that ‘nondiegetic’ falsely distances music from the storyworld (Winters Reference Winters2010) misconstrues the relationship of narration and diegesis: the voice of a heterodiegetic narrator in a novel, for example, is by definition not part of the diegesis (and in that sense distanced from it), but it is crucial for creating the diegesis in the reader’s mind, and so integral to it; the same applies to nondiegetic music as one of the ‘voices’ of filmic narration (Heldt Reference Heldt2013, 48–72).

Such disputes stem from a general problem of film-music theory: it gets many of its ideas – usually via film theory – from other disciplines, not least from the much larger and livelier field of literary theory. That does not make ideas inapplicable, but they need to be vetted and adapted. As a narrative medium, film is structurally quite different from, say, a novel (the quintessential form of most literary theory). With few exceptions, a novel consists of a single data stream, and the task for the reader is to imagine; a film consists of sound and vision, which can both be split into any number of data streams, and the task for the viewer is to synthesize. What this means for the applicability of narratological concepts has been considered only fitfully by film theory, and hardly at all by film musicology.

What is true of semiotics is also true of other theoretical perspectives important to film studies, such as genre or gender; in recent film musicology, these have been more often theorized in the process of analysing film-music repertoires. Outlines of a theory of genre and film music have been suggested (see Brownrigg Reference Brownrigg2003; Scheurer Reference Scheurer2008, 7–47; Stokes Reference Stokes2013), and much work has been done on particular film genres. That is even truer of questions of film music and gender, necessarily linked to particular repertoires and their musical codes. The melodrama has been a field of such theorizing (for example, see Flinn Reference Flinn1992; Laing Reference Laing2007; Bullerjahn Reference Bullerjahn2008; Haworth Reference Haworth2012; and Franklin Reference Franklin2011 for a wider genre horizon), but questions of gender affect the musical practices of many other film repertoires as well.

Synthesis or Pluralism?

Trying to pinpoint the state of film-music theory is like taking a snapshot of an explosion. Film musicology has expanded so rapidly over the last generation – and is continuing to do so, and is already being subsumed into the wider field of screen-media musicology – that any summary will be outdated before it has been printed. Plus ça change … Writing in 1971, Christian Metz saw a ‘provisional but necessary pluralism’ in film studies, but hoped for a future time when the ‘diverse methods may be reconciled … and film theory would be a real synthesis’ (Reference Metz1971, 13–14; my translation). Not only has this synthesis yet to happen, it has not even come any closer, and the provisional pluralism seems to be here to stay. Perhaps we should simply enjoy the ride rather than worry too much about mapping its course.

Working in an Archive

For scholars wishing to work on American or British film composers, there are a number of useful archival holdings. In the United States, these include (but are not limited to): the University of California Los Angeles Film and Television Archive; the University of Southern California; the University of California Santa Barbara; the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills; the US Library of Congress (LOC); the University of Syracuse, New York State; and Brigham Young University, Utah. Holdings in the United Kingdom are wide-ranging, though some focus more exclusively on British composers and/or British film. Thanks to the diligent and detailed investigation by Miguel Mera and Ben Winters into the holdings of film-music materials in the UK on behalf of the Music Libraries Trust, there is now a comprehensive assessment of holdings available (Mera and Winters Reference Mera and Winters2009). These include university libraries such as those at Leeds, Oxford, Trinity College of Music and University College Cork; national libraries and archives such as the British Library, the BBC Music Library and the British Film Institute; and other small specialized collections.

Increasingly, contemporary composers keep their own digital archives of materials, including emails and MIDI drafts, and scholars who have the opportunity to work with such composers have the benefit of a sometimes greater range of detail than might have been sifted out in an older paper-based collection. Indeed, as the Scarecrow authors have found, the range of factors affecting the composition of a film score is both fascinating and, at times, overwhelming. The richness and diversity of materials available in an academic or personal archive enables study of a score’s composition in the context of scrapbooks, notebooks, letters, emails, interviews, memoranda and studio internal documentation such as production schedules and cue sheets. Furthermore, research is often not limited to one archive: in the case of David Cooper’s contextual research of Herrmann (Reference Cooper2001 and Reference Cooper2005), he used The Bernard Herrmann Papers at the University of California Santa Barbara; the Library of Congress for its microfilm copies of many of the holographic scores and some original manuscripts; and the CBS collections at the New York Public Library and the Music Library Special Collections at UCLA for Herrmann’s music for radio and for television, respectively.

It is easiest and most productive to visit an archive in person, if at all possible, and several days should be allowed for looking over the materials. Scholars must keep extensive and accurate records of archival research – particularly if they are able to visit only once – as it is not always possible to photocopy materials without securing a licence in advance. Most archives produce catalogues of their holdings which allow for preparation in advance and a more focused and productive visit. Building a relationship before arrival with an archive director or manager is also essential, as you are more likely to be able to access what you need if they understand what your aims are for the visit. You will also find out what limitations there are on copying or even viewing materials, due to fragility, preservation, external loan and so on.

Obtaining photocopies of original scores or from microfilm for study away from an archive can be extremely difficult, if not impossible, and often requires permission of the copyright holder as well as the archivist. A scholar intending to publish research, including transcriptions or reproductions of score material, will need to obtain copyright permission to do so, and in some cases also a licence to reproduce the score for research purposes. The archivist may be able to access the network of companies and individuals with the authority to grant copyright permissions, which can itself be a long and convoluted process: this issue is discussed in more detail later in the chapter.

During my PhD research on Steiner, content from which was later published in my Film Score Guide on Now, Voyager, I spent a week studying the Max Steiner Collection at Brigham Young University. The Steiner Collection is an excellent and diverse accumulation of materials, from personal letters to his four wives and his son, to the 177 volumes of bound manuscript film scores. The Academy Award statuettes for Now, Voyager and Since You Went Away (1944) sit in a vault, while three enormous scrapbooks covering the years 1930–53 chronicle the period of Steiner’s greatest industry through his own choice of newspaper reviews, underlined by the composer in thick blue or orange pencil. There is also, among other materials, correspondence with Jack Warner and David O. Selznick, and a collection of copies of contracts, royalty statements and original songs and other compositions from Steiner’s pre-Hollywood career in Vienna and on Broadway.

With such a range of material, it can be difficult to know where to start, and certainly it can be helpful to begin with a particular score and work outwards through the contextual material. A holograph may provide some sense of the composer’s personality through style of notation, approach to editing and, perhaps most conspicuously, through marginalia and other written commentary. For example, Steiner’s pencil drafts contain many ribald annotations to his orchestrators. His comments paint a vivid picture of his often scornful opinion of the films’ subject matter or leading actors, giving a clearer insight into his attitude and approach to process than many other more formal documents he wrote. For example, in the score for Dodge City (1939) he annotates a dialogue cue, ‘How d’you like these here onions?’ with the remark, ‘God help us!—The whole picture is like this—I am resigning!!’ (Steiner Reference Steiner1939b, 33). Bette Davis once observed that Steiner was ‘one of the great contributors to countless films with his musical scores. Many a so-so film was made better through his talents’ (Stine Reference Stine and Davis1974, 11), but she was doubtless unaware of how the composer judged her: in the pencil draft for The Bride Came C.O.D. (Reference Steiner1941) he complained that ‘She cries like a stuck pig’ (Reference Steiner1941, 28).

Steiner also demonstrates his frustrations over having to write so much music in such a short time. Against one long sustained chord in the score to The Oklahoma Kid (1939), he notes: ‘Always good when you don’t know what to write’ (Reference Steiner1939a, 163), and – lacking the time to write everything down in the pencil draft to Dodge City – he asks for an orchestration of ‘Everything bar the kitchen stove!’ (Reference Steiner1939b, 145). His notes sometimes indicate a desire to shift responsibility for decision-making to his orchestrator, as in the pencil draft to The Gay Sisters (Reference Steiner1942) where he admits to Hugo Friedhofer: ‘I don’t know how to orchestrate this—all I know is I hear a SORT of “sentimental” Children’s TUNE’ (Reference Steiner1942, 79).

The other advantage of archival research is the discovery of circumstantial materials that build a picture of the context in which the music was composed, shedding light on a particular strategy or situation which influenced a score’s construction. A studio’s internal documentation such as production schedules or chains of correspondence have significance for the deduction of process that is useful in a creative context where the means of production are often invisible. But personal documentation can also reveal this, such as letters from Steiner to his third wife, Louise Klos, written on his behalf by his secretary. For example:

This body of contextual detail often has to stand in the place of more formal documentation of the composer’s art. Steiner completed an (as yet) unpublished autobiography in 1964 entitled ‘Notes to You’, but its value to the scholar is fairly limited, as it is full of unsubstantiated and inaccurate anecdotes about his life, and contains comparatively little discussion of scoring practice. He also did not experience the cult of celebrity which generated the television-interview opportunities and greater media coverage enjoyed by later composers.

By contrast, students of Herrmann’s scores can find published interviews (as in R. S. Brown Reference Brown1994, 289–93) and footage of Herrmann talking about his work, but his scores tend to be fully orchestrated (rather than the short forms of the Steiner archive) and contain very little in the way of marginalia. As Cooper observes, it can be difficult to deduce process from such a clean manuscript:

Sometimes, archival work does not make matters clearer. When Ben Winters (Reference Winters2007) explored the relationship between Erich Wolfgang Korngold and his orchestrator Friedfhofer during the composition of the score for The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), he found that

Working with a Living Composer

It might seem that working on the scores of a living composer would be easier, but there are different obstacles and restrictions to gaining access to material. Sometimes individuals are unwilling to be frank about particular situations, or about colleagues and other participants in the film business, not least because they may have to work with them again in the future. Nevertheless, with access to a composer and the opportunity to discuss his or her work, the exploration of compositional process can be fascinating. Obtaining scores can still be a lengthy process because those of living composers tend not to be archived, and are often kept anywhere from studio libraries or storage facilities to the composer’s personal collection. The most effective approach is to contact the composer directly, via their agent or their personal music-production company. Approaching studios is not always useful, as staff are often unaware of what materials are held in storage, and catalogues are virtually non-existent. Cultivating and acknowledging contacts and developing networks are vital parts of the film-music research process.

Mera (Reference Mera2007) had the benefit of considerable access to the personal holdings of Mychael Danna while preparing his book on Danna’s score for The Ice Storm (1997). Danna provided access to all his personal materials, including MIDI and audio files, as well as making himself available to discuss his process of composition and the finished work. Working with MIDI and audio files might seem to provide a clinical, less intimate picture of the creative process, but in practice the technology makes it possible to view process on a more precise level. MIDI sequencer files show the set-up of a composer’s workstation, giving an added perspective on what equipment is used and how it contributes to the process. They also often contain an audio track with dialogue and sound effects, which, while helpful to the orchestrator and conductor, also gives an immediate picture to the analyst of how the composer accommodates the potentially competing elements in the soundtrack. This microscopic level of detail can bring a different focus to analysis, as Mera explains:

Danna’s generous co-operation with Mera emphasizes the personal aspect of working with a living composer. Trust is an important element in the relationship, and the emphasis moves towards sharing and discussion, from the more objective analysis that we engage in when composers are not personally known to us. Mera agrees that the input of the composer is ‘incredibly helpful’, but points out that a certain balance is required when a composer does co-operate with the research process:

Even with the composer’s participation, the musicological process is not always easy. Charles Leinberger (Reference Leinberger2004) had the opportunity to interview Ennio Morricone for his book on the score for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), an interview which was conducted on the composer’s terms, in Italian and in his home city of Rome. The opportunity to hear the composer playing from his own score at the piano was clearly a unique experience, as it would be for any scholar, although in other respects Morricone was less keen to participate in the analytical process. He was particularly reluctant to explain certain distinctive aspects of his technique for fear of being copied by other composers, and Leinberger was faced with a decision about how he should respect Morricone’s wishes and protect what the composer saw as his trade secrets.

Janet Halfyard (Reference Halfyard2004) had a completely contrasting experience when preparing her book on Danny Elfman’s score for Batman (1989). Elfman has consistently declined to engage with academic study of his work, though he has, in contrast with his classical-era predecessors, given a huge number of press interviews which provide an account of his scoring methods. Despite approaches to participate, Elfman was unwilling to contribute anything to Halfyard’s research, but she does see a specific advantage in this:

Elfman’s score for Batman sits beside Prince’s soundtrack album for the same film, and for Halfyard this was another area which would have benefited from the composer’s participation:

Tracking down all the contributors to the musical component of the film can be complicated and time-consuming, and with older films it can also be a question of exploring other pre-composed music contemporaneous to the film’s production or relevant to the period of its narrative, such as the extensive use of vernacular songs and march tunes in Gone With the Wind or the wartime popular hits of Since You Went Away. It also puts emphasis on exploring the role of other studio staff in the process. Was a temporary track used, or was there input from a music editor or even the director on scoring matters? It can be crucial to the process of analysing originally composed music to find out what form these other interventions and contributions took, so it is useful to explore whether studio papers are available.

An additional factor in Halfyard’s research was that the score she used was a full orchestral score written in the hand of Elfman’s orchestrator and assistant, Steve Bartek. Elfman typically composes about half the material on a sequencer, filling out the other half by hand onto the sequencer print-offs. Bartek then orchestrates in full this sixteen-stave short score. A photocopy of Bartek’s score was made available by the Warner Bros. Music Library, but small sections of his notation were illegible. The challenge to certainty created by this small detail is indicative of a larger, interesting question about the ability of the scholar to examine the authorial relationship between a composer and his orchestrator when the orchestrator’s score is the only one available.

Heather Laing (Reference Laing2004) revealed a similarly close relationship between Gabriel Yared and his orchestrator John Bell during research for her book on The English Patient (1996). In an interview with Laing, Yared gave an explanation of how he and Bell had collaborated on a later film score that brought a level of specificity valuable to the analyst:

A recurrent issue pondered by scholars is the role and nature of intuition in the compositional process, and this frequently emerges in discussion with composers. Several of the scholars mentioned above have discussed the process of compositional decision-making and its effect on analytical interpretation, and having a trusting relationship with the composer may make it possible to explore these issues. From an analytical perspective, we are often keen to pin down definitive explanations for why a particular instrument or chord or melodic motif is used, and answers from composers can appear to lend weight to the conclusions. But there is always an element of tension in the publication of research in which a composer has been involved. Laing observes, ‘I was really lucky with [Yared] – I’m not at all sure how I’d be feeling had I been working with someone who wasn’t as interested or supportive as he was. Nonetheless, my heart was in my mouth from the moment I sent him the draft manuscript to the moment I received his comments!’ (personal communication, 23 November 2004).

Copyright and Other Considerations

In general, if a composer has been dead for more than seventy years then there is greater freedom to quote extracts from scores because they are in the public domain, but because film music is still a relatively young art, most of the materials that scholars want to use are still covered by copyright. Finding the copyright holder and obtaining permission from them remain the biggest obstacles to the citation of film scores in published material. For example, Cooper was advised that he was the first person to have been loaned a personal copy of one particular Herrmann manuscript by Paramount, and found it difficult to track down the right person in the studio from whom to secure permission, before finally resorting to help from a film-music ‘insider’ (personal communication, 1 March 2004). Generally, studios are still unprepared for requests to study film scores or for copyright permission for score reproductions: it took over a year for me to secure permission for extracts from Steiner’s scores for Now, Voyager and other films, via a very circuitous route through Warner Bros. in California to IMI in the United Kingdom, who actually held the copyright.

Securing copyright permission relies primarily on making contact with the right person in the right organization. Ownership of copyright is not always clear, particularly with music from a film where the publication rights from sheet music, for example, may differ from the rights for the soundtrack recording and the video release. The composer’s own company may also be involved. It is vital to begin by finding out exactly which company or individual owns the rights to reproduction of the orchestral score, and it is recommended that this should be done right at the beginning of research, because it can be extremely time consuming and frustrating to locate the copyright owner, and then to get permission. Archivists can often be helpful in this respect with a composer who has already died. Sometimes companies themselves are not certain which copyright they own, and one must be prepared to make follow-up calls to individuals until permission is granted.

Whatever agreement is reached, it is important that permissions are obtained in writing, and negotiation is often worthwhile if a rate seems excessive. Even over the decade and a half since I first sought permission for reproduction in my Film Score Guide, there has been virtually no coherence in the way that companies approach granting of these permissions, or the costs incurred. Companies often pluck a figure out of the air to judge the scholar’s commitment to the project and to explore his or her potential revenue from the publication. It can also be difficult to compare different agreements and licences: some copyright holders will levy a charge per bar or per page, whilst others equate ‘cues’ to ‘songs’ in order to bring parity to other music-copyright agreements. It is always important to consider carefully what one is being asked to pay for.

International factors can also bring complications, firstly in terms of language. Laing’s research into Yared’s film scores necessitated working with French companies, and she recommends securing the help of a translator for all the languages in which the composer’s films were originally made, as the language of copyright negotiation can be complex (personal communication, 23 November 2004).

If the research outcome is a book, the publisher will usually have a form that can be used to request permission which gives details of what rights will be required, and it is worth stressing that the research and the eventual publication are of an academic type. This is because author royalties for academic books tend to be extremely low, and the copyright holder will be reassured that you are not hoping to make a lot of money from their copyrighted property. It is useful for the author to be able to indicate to the score’s copyright holder at the time of application how many musical examples he or she will want to use, and in what form. This may be a difficult decision if the research is still in its early stages, so it is worth asking for a ‘rate per bar’ rather than a fixed fee for usage. Scholars need to confirm whether they wish to make direct reproductions from the original manuscript or MIDI file, or whether they will be creating their own reductions to short score or single lines of notation. There may be some distinction made between these two types of usage, and if they are using a photographic or scanned reproduction of original manuscript material they will need to get permission from the archive, and possibly pay them a fee also, both for copyright and for reproduction of the image, which will often be done by the archive.

Copyright holders of scores are usually concerned that publishing the examples will deprive them of revenue from performance rights. In fact, it is more likely that published material on film music will increase an audience for recorded forms of the score, such as those on CD or DVD. Concern has arisen partly from ignorance about film musicology: copyright holders of film and popular-music scores are not accustomed to seeing analysis of their music in print, despite film musicology now being a well-established academic discipline. They are generally unaware that musicological usage does not involve large extracts of a complete score but usually just a few bars, of which public performance would be inconceivable. Film musicologists should be prepared to explain in their application for permission exactly how they are going to use the music, so that there is no doubt for the copyright holder. They should also clarify exactly how the permission will be referenced, and include that reference with every single notated example. They may also need to provide details of the quantity of the print run. However, despite scholars being as clear as possible about their requirements, attitudes have been slow to change within the industry (see Davison Reference Davison2007).

Halfyard’s experience with Batman was surprisingly easy, but she went into the process well prepared:

The scholar and copyright holder both need to be aware that the expenses for research are likely to come from the writer’s own pocket, as academic publishers very rarely have budgets sufficiently large to pay for many copyright permissions. A formal invoice by the copyright holder and a receipt for payment are valuable commodities. Where there is any doubt at all about the content or significance of a licence, legal advice should be sought before agreeing to it.

Analysing the Score: The Diegetic/Nondiegetic Crossover

Like many Hollywood films addressing the European war in the early 1940s, Casablanca has an unashamedly American agenda beneath its evident sympathy with the ‘good’ Europe of the Alliance – something strikingly marked by the opening credits’ musical flare for the name of the composer of the underscore. The (Austrian) Germanic appearance of his name is simultaneously acknowledged and publicly disavowed by Steiner’s having insisted upon using the opening of the Marseillaise as his own musical marker here – one that recurs throughout the film as a signifier of the ‘old’ French revolutionary values of Liberté-Égalité-Fraternité; the words are ironically glimpsed on-screen as the Free France sympathizer, who becomes caught up in the police hunt for the killers of two German couriers, is shot dead at the entrance of the Palais de Justice at the end of the opening scene. Here the Marseillaise motif assumes a tonally dark, minor mode, emphasizing the underscore’s sympathetic affiliations and exemplifying classical Hollywood’s use of recurring figures and motifs to reinforce moments of visual or narrative significance. Their recurrence or recollection has often been associated with Wagner and the Wagnerian ‘Leitmotiv’, occasionally with Steiner’s apparent assent (Thomas Reference Thomas1973, 122). But we must give more thought to the multi-faceted ‘Americanism’ of Casablanca’s agenda in relation to the music heard in Rick’s Café. It would be as well to start with its proprietor.

Humphrey Bogart’s Rick, deliberately unaffiliated in any obvious political sense, is ‘damaged by disappointments in the past … [He] has left his native America for shadowy reasons; he has a track-record of supporting underdogs – in Ethiopia and Spain. It is also clear that he has a core of decency’ (Reid Reference Reid2000, 63). Now he is running a sort of nightclub (with behind-the-scenes gambling). This functions as a dramatically charged way-station for all those trying to escape the war, and the Nazis; securing the prized exit visas will enable them to fly to America from their limbo-like waiting-room on the margins of the European conflict, although Major Strasser’s German officers keep a close watch on what is going on in this outpost of ‘Vichy’ France (the southern part not directly occupied by the Nazis, but politically subservient to its German masters in Paris and Berlin). Music plays a significant role throughout Casablanca, but particularly in the Café Américain. Its more than ‘aesthetic’ or merely ‘entertaining’ function is dramatically emphasized by the way in which the film shows the café’s clientele using it as a cover for clandestine deals and bartering smuggled family jewels for that ticket out to the fabled land of peace and normality on the other side of the Atlantic. But more than this: the very songs performed by singer-pianist Sam (Dooley Wilson) and the café’s band often have a textual as well as practical significance in relation to the situation and plot. It is this that generates what I would call the film’s ‘thematization’ of how popular music works.

On one level such music clearly distracts its participants and listeners from their immediate cares and woes through humour or by invoking the pleasures of love. But Sam’s launching into the audience-participation song ‘Knock on Wood’ (M. K. Jerome and Jack Scholl, 1942) does more than act as an aural cover for clandestine deals and furtive conversations. It also ‘performs’ the process of allowing musical immersion to ‘take us out of ourselves’, as we say, and to make life seem better:

Subsequent verses, all followed by the café’s clients ‘knocking on wood’ (tapping in time a three-beat figure on their tables), ask the same question with respect to being unhappy, unlucky and having ‘nothin’’. As if to convince everyone that through communal fellow-feeling and honesty music has indeed done its work, the last two verses ask ‘Now who’s happy?’ (‘We are!’ comes the response) and ‘Now who’s lucky?’ (‘We are!’).

Martin Marks notes that many of the songs heard diegetically (where we see the musicians or understand where the songs are being performed in the world of the characters) have a highly suggestive relationship (in terms of lyrics and titles) with ongoing events in the drama:

This sort of relationship between dramatic situation and ‘source’ (diegetic) popular music is one that would be utilized well beyond the era of classical Hollywood into the compilation film scores of our own period. The implications of the way in which such correspondences address the cinematic audience and its possible attentiveness to musical-referential detail also extend beyond the 1940s. They are nevertheless fundamental to the problem of ‘intention’ in the kind of film-scoring practice exemplified in Casablanca. How much musical information might its mid-1940s viewers have been expected to take in as part of their movie-going experience? One approach, as implied earlier, would relegate such correspondences to the level of a private, sub-surface game of musical reference that was being played by the composer or the studio’s Music Department for his or its own amusement. In the case of Casablanca, the foregrounded thematization of the role played by music that is both heard and seen to be performed as part of the mise-en-scène might lead one to the conclusion that Curtiz and the production team were envisaging, at least in part, a more knowing and attentive audience than sceptics would have us believe. Certainly no cinema-goer could miss the musically articulated drama of the scene in which Victor Laszlo, the Czech Resistance leader (as Ilsa’s husband, he is the idealistically noble third member of the central love-triangle) emerges from a tense private confrontation with Rick about the stolen letters of transit (Rick had concealed them on Sam’s piano after they were left with him by the ill-fated Ugarte). He is then confronted by an even tenser scene in the main café. A group of German soldiers has commandeered the piano and launched into an inflammatory patriotic rendering of ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ (Karl Wilhelm, 1854; text by Max Schneckenburger, 1840). Laszlo seizes the initiative and encourages the band to strike up the Marseillaise, which is powerfully sung by all the non-German café patrons, effectively drowning out the musical influence of the Germans.

The intensity of that musical/political confrontation was heightened by the fact that many of the actors participating were themselves refugees, some visibly crying as they sang (Harmetz Reference Harmetz2002 [1992], 213). It is common to refer to the scene as one of ‘duelling anthems’ (Buhler et al. Reference Buhler, Neumeyer and Flinn2000, [Introduction] 6), and while this in fact overlooks what Marks has noted about the relatively neat fit ‘in overlapping counterpoint’ of the two ostensibly ‘contesting’ themes (Reference Marks and Buhler2000, 184–5, n. 12, and 161; see also Franklin Reference Franklin2011, 121–2), the use of clear musical signification to make a powerful dramatic point is self-evident. Less so, perhaps, is the full significance of what the contemporary audience might or might not have known about the popular song that furnished Steiner with the main theme of his score and whose immortalization by the film’s use of it, some years after its initial appearance in a Broadway show (Everybody’s Welcome, 1931), is largely responsible for the fact that we still remember the name of its composer and lyricist, Herman Hupfeld.

‘As Time Goes By … ’

The use of Hupfeld’s 1931 song will take us into the heart of Casablanca’s underscore, which uses it and other key musical motifs (including the opening of the Marseillaise and Deutschland über alles) with both obvious and less obvious referential significance. Since it is introduced as a diegetic performance (and not anticipated in the musically rich extended title-sequence and ensuing introduction), it is worth considering it as it might have been recalled by members of the audience and as the song would subsequently be re-marketed as sheet-music, both advertising and capitalizing on the film’s success. The 1940s copy shown in Figure 8.1 had a cover photo of Ingrid Bergman and described the song (beneath the title and by-line) as ‘from Casablanca / starring / Humphrey Bogart / Ingrid Bergman / and / Paul Henreid / Directed by Michael Curtiz / A Warner Bros Picture’; it was marketed in London and Sydney by Chappell and Co. Ltd., but internally identified as copyrighted in 1931 ‘by Harms Inc., New York’. Its formal presentation, characteristic of the period, is worth noting.

Figure 8.1 Sheet-music cover (c. 1943) of Herman Hupfeld’s 1931 song ‘As Time Goes By’ (Chappell & Co. Ltd).

Reproduced by permission of Faber Music Ltd.

The song as we know it (though its sheet-music accompaniment is much less improvisationally florid than that heard in the film) appears on the inside two-page spread, headed ‘Refrain’, but prefaced with six closely printed lines of ‘Verse’ text (Hupfeld n.d., 2). A boxed note directs us to ‘See back page for Introduction and Verse’, where we find a four-bar piano introduction followed by twelve bars of Verse, setting those six introductory lines of text in parlando style, and in the primary key of E♭ major, concluding on a dominant seventh in preparation for the Refrain (for which we turn back to the central spread). This consists of a two-stanza opening section and a two-stanza ‘middle section’, the first of the latter pair in A♭ major, the second back in E♭, in which key the song concludes after a reprise of the Refrain. The complete text, with the preliminary Verse, is as follows:

The full text of Hupfeld’s original song thus interestingly contextualized the part that we know (the Refrain) from its use in Casablanca. That song about the basic existential authenticity of romantic love, absolving us from worry about ‘the future’, and thus somehow transcending time, proves to be just one part of a larger whole. The first two stanzas of the Refrain are what we hear in Sam’s initial performance, at Ilsa’s request. The ‘fundamental’ truths of love are celebrated with a gently lilting tune punctuated with laid-back, improvisatory links between the phrases (more fluid and jazzy than Hupfeld’s rather four-square original) from pianist Elliot Carpenter, who dubbed Sam’s on-screen accompaniment (M. M. Marks Reference Marks and Buhler2000, 174). The full text nevertheless ‘explains’ the dreamy celebration of love quite explicitly as an escapist indulgence. The lyrics adopt the tone of a down-to-earth ordinary soul, troubled and perplexed by modernity as manifested in technological progress and ‘Mr Einstein’s the’ry [theory]’.

More curious are the last two stanzas of the Refrain, which we hear Sam play and sing only in the Paris flashback. The relaxed and happy evocation there of Rick’s recalled love affair with Ilsa distracts our attention from the odd juxtaposition of ‘Moonlight and love songs’ with the next line’s ‘Hearts full of passion, jealousy and hate’. The ‘man must have his mate’ image seems crudely to validate and naturalize the binary, whose underlying tension is emphasized in the Refrain’s last stanza, where the battle of the sexes is tendentiously masculinized as ‘a fight for love and glory, / A case of do or die.’ In sum, this popular love song reveals the darker side of those ‘fundamental things’ which seem textually blown apart by the violent imagery that precedes the conventional gesture towards containment of the emotional damage in the final non sequitur: ‘The world will always welcome lovers’ – and emotionally destroy them, perhaps, as had Ilsa’s apparently inexplicable abandonment of Rick on that last train out of Paris.

The Underscore: Subjectivity and Gender

Of course popular songs don’t just mean what they say. They also mean what they have come to mean in the lives and emotional experiences of their consumers. The song that had become ‘their song’ for Rick and Ilsa has acquired a shared nostalgic charge of the memory of their love-affair; certainly for Rick, but perhaps so too for Ilsa, although we are led to question our initial assumptions. Her apparently surprising exercise of agency in leaving him in the lurch (reversing the usual gender politics of such things in Hollywood romances) seems to carry over to the very way in which the old song had arrived in the movie’s ‘present’ – in the world of Rick’s Café, that is – at the command of Ilsa when she overcomes Sam’s rational (and loyal) preference not to reawaken those particular memories of moonlight and love songs. Rick’s response, revealing his vulnerability and initiating the real drama at the heart of the film, is indeed to want to stop it. He angrily approaches Sam: ‘I thought I told you never … ’ – at which point he sees her. We learn more when he subsequently collapses, the worse for drink, in the darkened café after closing time. He has been waiting for Ilsa to come back, watched over by the loyal Sam whom he finally gets to play for him what he cannot bring himself to name (‘You played it for her, you can play it for me’). When he hears it, the camera becomes explicitly subjective. In the conventional way of such things in the period, it approaches closer and closer to Bogart’s face until the dissolve into the flashback in which we see what we know he is thinking, remembering Paris and their love-affair. The Marseillaise might redundantly seek to tell us we are in front of the Arc de Triomphe, but we know we are also in Rick’s mind, where the memory of it resides. The implicit ‘feminization’ of Bogart in this scene was attested to rather unpleasantly by Paul Henreid, the aristocratic Austrian actor who played Laszlo and is reported to have observed, shortly before he died, that ‘Mr Bogie was a nobody … ’:

That feminization has repercussions for the underscore. Motivic and place markers aside, this now comes into its own, rather more in what we have come to think of as the conventional style of classical Hollywood. It feels as if, for the first time since the title/opening credits/introduction sequence, a genuine underscore is allowed to escape the dramatic requirements of Rick’s clients for a steady stream of diegetic songs and distracting ‘light’ music, whose choice and placement in the level of the sound mix proves so complex and considered. The music for the opening section of the Paris flashback – a joyful stream of orchestral music that seems energetically goalless in the headlong, schwungvoll irresponsibility of its flight – has all the characteristics for which Hollywood film composition was mocked by critics like Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, who found it regressively irrational and emotionally manipulative (Reference Adorno and Eisler2007 [1947], 14–15). It is accordingly often treated to conventionally feminizing critical description (‘self-indulgent’, ‘sentimental’, etc.), or amusedly suffered as one of the standard ways in which, as Marks puts it, Steiner ‘approached his task like a composer of traditional dramatic music, constantly thinking about music’s ability to interpret what is depicted on screen’ (Reference Marks and Buhler2000, 163).

In fact, Marks’s essay amply demonstrates that the music does much more than redundantly ‘interpret’, or (to adopt another trope of popular film-music criticism) ‘tell us what characters are thinking’. While it certainly, and quite specifically does that in this case, it also functions on other levels. Here is Marks on its technical role here:

The issue of the ‘lead-in’ is vital here, since what actually happens is a visual dissolve (from Bogart’s face to the Paris of old, through which he once happily drove with Ilsa) accompanied by a seamless musical transition from Sam’s rendering of ‘As Time Goes By’ on the piano to the background orchestra. This continues and then expansively elaborates on the song’s theme, as if telling us that this is what it ‘means’ to Rick: remembered joy that inspires present sorrow at its loss. We might put it that far from ‘interpreting’ what we see on screen, the music is in fact actively playing a significant role in constructing Rick’s subjectivity (of course, the precise way in which it does that must depend upon Steiner himself having ‘interpreted’ the film before composing it).

If this famous flashback presents one site in Casablanca where Hollywood’s typical mode of late-romantic underscoring is encountered, others are no less interesting, both earlier in the film and later. Leaving aside for a moment the extended introductory sequence, heavily underscored throughout, an important earlier section of underscoring – also closely linked to the complex relationship between Rick and Ilsa and similarly arising from a diegetic performance of ‘As Time Goes By’ – follows its already discussed first performance by Sam, at Ilsa’s request. I have described its interruption by Rick, who angrily comes up to Sam to enforce his ban on it. At the moment Rick’s eyes meet Ilsa’s, the moment when he sees her for the first time in the film, an orchestral stinger emphasizes the melodrama of the situation before taking over the rendition of ‘As Time Goes By’ in a darker harmonic context that once again stresses Rick’s point of view, but actually does something rather more in what follows. It suggests now a shared subjective consciousness that wordlessly links Rick and Ilsa beneath and alongside the outwardly polite conversation that ensues when Rick makes an exception to his rule of not drinking with the customers. He significantly joins the table with Ilsa, Laszlo and Captain Renault (played by Claude Rains in skittish form as the local Chief of Police who deliberately balances his pragmatically ‘unspecified’ sympathies with the need for judicious cultivation of the Germans – particularly the overbearing Strasser, intent upon preventing Laszlo from leaving Casablanca).

The subtlety and complexity of Steiner’s underscoring is further demonstrated in the intensely ‘private’ conversation, or perhaps paired monologues, of the scene immediately following the Paris flashback, when Ilsa does finally appear in the darkened café, only to find Rick now decidedly the worse for wear. Her entry is marked by dramatic musical signalling. This again spells melodrama, from the viewpoint of the manipulative, virtual third-party observer and musical master-of-ceremonies of the cinematic drama, whose excesses are often assumed to be all that Hollywood underscoring does (not so much explaining the filmed drama as generically classifying or ‘marking’ it in ways derived from silent-era accompaniment practice and popular operatic models before that). Almost immediately, however, the music returns to its role of performatively constructing subjectivity: first, once again, that of the emotionally wounded and still uncomprehending Rick, but then, as if in a musical equivalent to a changed camera-angle, shifting its allegiances to Ilsa when she tries to tell her side of the story. Given what we assume of her past (on the basis of Rick’s Paris flashback) and have so far experienced of her personality in the present (as when hypnotically coaxing Sam into playing the song she wants to hear), it comes as something of a surprise when her underscoring assumes more conventionally Hollywood-style feminine characteristics that anticipate the near-normalization of gender roles in the final sections of the film. The key passage is when she tells Rick how she had first met her heroic and clearly idolized Laszlo. Her attempt to describe him is haloed (in a distantly faded-down underscore that one has to strain to catch behind her words) by high, angelic strings and what Marks, forgetting Laszlo’s Czech origins, describes as ‘a warm hymnlike melody with elemental diatonic harmonies [that] sounds like the national anthem for his unidentified homeland’ (Reference Marks and Buhler2000, 173).

It is, of course, Ilsa’s recalled infatuated image of Laszlo that, as I have suggested, in reality reflects perhaps more upon her than it does upon him – although its derivation is another indicator of Steiner’s attention to detail. Its opening figure may be interpreted as a kind of free inversion of the melody for the last two words of the first line of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’. The notes for ‘über al-les’ are simply realigned in pitch, and their general shape retained, but the three-note figure for ‘al-les’ is approached from below by two portentously rising notes, rather than the two descending notes of ‘über’ in the original. Ilsa’s idealized image of her husband is thus neatly marked as the converse of the German supremacy he seeks to overturn. If that detail was unlikely to be spotted by most cinema-goers, the revealing subjective femininity of the barely audible background music (might it ironize Laszlo’s constructed nobility?) is as unavoidable as the comparatively significant absence of any subjective underscoring for either party in the closely personal conversation Ilsa subsequently has with him in The Blue Parrot bar. Here we have only the place-defining orientalism (the underscore seems to imply some unseen diegetic source) that is associated with the much more ‘local’ and decidedly un-American establishment owned by Signor Ferrari: in this role, Sidney Greenstreet accommodates the standard Hollywood association of English accents with decadence and dodgy dealings.

An Ending and the Beginning

It is all too easy to mock classic-era Hollywood scoring. Steiner himself often affected to mock it, and himself, in score-annotations and messages to his orchestrator, Hugo Friedhofer (Franklin Reference Franklin2014, 115; see also Chapter 7 of the present volume). It would nevertheless be a matter of regret if, in concentrating here on those ostensibly unconventional aspects of the Casablanca score that richly deserve and no less richly repay careful study, I have appeared to downplay the significance and subtlety of its ‘conventional’ underscoring (albeit questioning that there ever was such a thing). By this I mean the kind of underscoring that stands outside the depicted narrative world of the film and appears to utilize a powerful generic rhetoric that might distantly derive from the old-fashioned showman’s cry of ‘Roll up, roll up! This is the show you must not miss!’; it expresses itself in an excitedly persuasive desire to ‘manage’ the audience’s enjoyment of the movie (‘This is where you will want to cry; here is where you will shiver at what may happen next!’).

Here too Casablanca seems more knowingly than deviously to perform such rhetorical moves – above all in the long title-sequence and ensuing introduction. Where Orson Welles’s ‘News on the March!’ in Citizen Kane (1941) seems to have used genuine newsreel music that exemplified all the rhetorical manners I have referred to, to the point of caricature, Steiner’s version here is in some senses more restrained and considered in its mode of address. Of course, the fanfared, drummed-up excitement is there in the Marseillaise flare for Steiner’s name and what Marks has called the ‘frenzied exotic dance’ (Reference Marks and Buhler2000, 164) that crudely places the action in a merely generic ‘Moroccan’ North Africa. But he knows, and we know, that that’s what we pay our money for: the kind of attention-grabbing introduction we need to settle into our seats and position the popcorn.

What is interesting is how it proceeds to give ground to an actual voice-over: the nondiegetic speech of the kind that always appropriates special power in classical Hollywood movies; we are to assume that it tells a kind of Truth. Here that Truth takes the form of a complex, condensed exploration of where and why Casablanca might be the site of a peculiarly relevant form of contemporary drama, at that stage of the war. As actual newsreel footage of displaced people and refugees flickers across the screen map of the route to Casablanca, the underscore, slightly reduced in volume, assumes a manner of impassioned sympathy for the unfortunates we gaze upon. This new theme, which will recur only once (as the plane bearing Strasser and his officers flies in across the heads of longing onlookers), assumes the tone of a kind of Rachmaninovian lament that seems to allude to the opening phrase of Irving Berlin’s song ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance’ (‘There may be trouble ahead … ’), which had supported a celebrated dance sequence for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Follow the Fleet (1936). Perhaps it is the range of sources of meaning on which this music draws – this music that is neither ‘classical’ nor ‘popular’ but has about it something of both – that makes us feel more in shared conversation with it than cowed by its grandeur or shocked by its vulgarity.

Introducing the ‘Lullaby of Antarctica’

Happy Feet has one of the most ambitious and arresting opening sequences in a feature-length animation. It sets the scene on a cosmic scale, going from the macrocosm of outer space to the microcosm of the penguin colony. (Similar openings can be found in Miller’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome from 1985 and Pixar’s WALL-E from 2008.) In less than four minutes, the audience is shown how Mumble’s parents Norma Jean (Kidman) and Memphis (Jackman) met and created his egg. The dialogue is minimal; instead the narrative impetus is provided by a collage of fourteen song quotations, plus a fifteenth in a short coda joined by some bridging material written by Powell. For a transcript of the scene, together with the sources of the songs, see Table 9.1.

Table 9.1 Transcript of the first mating sequence and song sources in Happy Feet.

A voice-over in a trailer to Happy Feet made it clear that ‘In the heart of the South Pole, every penguin is born with a song to sing – everyone except Mumble’. It helps to be aware of this basic premise in advance and to be acquainted with how Emperor penguins find a mate – the latter supposedly common knowledge since Luc Jacquet’s documentary March of the Penguins (La marche de l’empereur) was released in 2005 – in order to understand the primary narrative function of the (sometimes disembodied) song lyrics in the opening scene. The initial lack of action gives the soundtrack beneath the title sequence a special prominence. As the shape of a giant penguin amidst a galaxy of stars emerges from the blackness, we hear the melodies of two intertwined songs with minimal accompaniment. These are k. d. lang singing ‘Golden Slumbers’ (in what proves to be the role of a narrator) and a male voice singing lines from ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’, the latter written for Dames (1934). At this point it is unclear whether or not we are hearing underscore. This opening is reminiscent of the number ‘Lullaby of Broadway’ (Harry Warren and Al Dubin, 1935) in Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1935, which begins (and ends) in total blackness with the title song emanating from an invisible source. In Happy Feet, lang’s lines ‘Sleep pretty darling do not cry / And I will sing a lullaby’ also suggest that what follows will be a spectacular and musical fantasy: a ‘Lullaby of Antarctica’. (Miller pays homage to Berkeley’s distinctive choreographic style elsewhere in the film where the penguins’ underwater formations briefly make kaleidoscopic patterns typical of those in the ‘By a Waterfall’ routine from the 1933 backstage musical Footlight Parade.)

The ‘camera’ then hurtles us through space – past a red-hot planet emblazoned with the film title – and through Earth’s atmosphere into the penguin colony. En route we hear more fragments of songs from unseen voices (mostly male) intertwined with some spoken lines from a female – soon to be revealed as Mumble’s mother Norma Jean – who is overwhelmed at hearing ‘So many songs’. The line ‘Ridi, Pagliacci’ from the famous tenor aria ‘Vesti la giubba’ ends the final cacophony with a dash of late nineteenth-century Italian opera before the penguins finally come into view. Only now does it become apparent that we have been overhearing Norma Jean as she wanders around the colony (as a real Emperor penguin would), listening to the heartsongs of various males in the hope of finding her one true love. She launches into her own heartsong, an upbeat rendition of the opening verse and chorus from ‘Kiss’. The accompaniment is rendered through minimal rhythm and bass, throwing the vocal lines into sharper relief. Heartsong incipits (typically only one or two lines long) from more male suitors are expertly woven around her phrases in the manner of a Club DJ using multiple turntables. Norma Jean ignores them all until her attention is finally grabbed by Memphis and his rendition of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’; their union was pre-destined in her spoken line from this song (‘I’m feeling so lonely’) before she even met him. As Memphis stands before her on a mound of ice, he sings his courtship call (first verse and chorus) and stretches out his wings in an obvious impersonation of Elvis Presley. In time-honoured fashion from opera, operetta and musical, the pair signify their mutual attraction and impending union by instinctively being able to sing lines from each other’s songs in the manner of a love duet.

The official soundtrack recording (Warner Sunset/Atlantic 756783998–2, 2006) features a version of the ‘Kiss’/‘Heartbreak Hotel’ duet which is different from the film soundtrack in two key aspects. First, the breadth of the film’s opening has been curtailed, the track starting just before Norma Jean’s first spoken line (‘But how can you know for sure?’); and, second, the pre-existing pop songs interwoven with ‘Kiss’ have been entirely replaced by innocuous backing material supplied by Powell and his team, presumably for copyright reasons. This makes the album track anodyne in comparison with the opening of the film soundtrack.

The sophisticated beauty of the opening scene was lost on the reviewer in Sight & Sound, who reckoned that it ‘may put some viewers off the picture, as we’re thrust into the midst of CGI penguins mouthing pop and rock numbers in a kitsch parody of Moulin Rouge (2001)’ (Osmond Reference Osmond2007, 56). Hayward also noted how the presence of Kidman and the ‘use of disjunctured, “mashed-up” song dialogues between romantically aligned characters’ has marked similarities to Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Elephant Love Medley’ sequence in Moulin Rouge! when Christian (Ewan MacGregor) and Satine (Kidman) ‘exchange snippets of seminal popular love songs’ (Reference Hayward and Coyle2010, 95). Miller’s reference to this iconic love duet is much more than a kitsch parody or a token acknowledgement of fellow Australian artistry: it is dramatically apposite for the union of Mumble’s parents and constitutes a beautiful, albeit extremely brief, celebration of romantic love. Miller draws deliberate visual parallels by using Luhrmann’s trademark heart shapes (Armour Reference Armour2001, 9). Just as the romance between Satine and Christian is framed by a heart-shaped window and culminates in a kiss, so Norma Jean’s and Memphis’s courtship takes place within a heart-shaped space formed by the other penguins (see Figure 9.1) and the pair mark their union in accordance with real Emperor penguins by throwing back their heads, bowing and bringing their beaks together in a heart shape (see Figure 9.2). For real Emperor penguins, this ‘bowing’ often precedes copulation and is also associated with egg-laying (T. Williams Reference Williams1995, 157). Sure enough, as a coda to the first mating scene the narrative moves swiftly to the new parents with their egg, which Norma Jean entrusts to Memphis, singing ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’ as she and the other ‘wives’ bid farewell and leave for a fishing trip.

Figure 9.1 Happy Feet: the penguins make a heart-shaped formation around Norma Jean and Memphis.

Figure 9.2 Happy Feet: Norma Jean and Memphis bring their beaks together, forming a heart shape.

The essential purpose and necessity of heartsongs is only explained once the film is well underway, when a young Mumble and the other penguin chicks attend a special singing class. Here, the teacher, Miss Viola (Magda Szubanski), encourages her young charges to try out the song they can hear inside themselves, informing them that ‘Without our Heartsong, we can’t be truly penguin, can we?’ (Thus Mumble’s fate as a misfit is sealed.) The audience is given a foretaste of the second mating scene when two chicks, Gloria (Alyssa Schafer) and Seymour (Cesar Flores), attempt their heartsongs in embryonic form (the first verse of ‘Boogie Wonderland’ and the chorus from ‘The Message’, respectively; for song sources, see Table 9.2).

Table 9.2 Transcript of the second mating sequence and song sources in Happy Feet.

With the audience now fully conversant in the courtship rituals of these singing penguins, it seems entirely natural for the adult Gloria to be bombarded with lyrics from different songs when she is looking for a mate in the second mating sequence. Whilst the introduction and structure mirrors the opening sequence from the extreme-long shot of the colony onwards, in other ways this second sequence is the complete opposite of the first. It uses far fewer songs (six) yet is longer (over seven minutes) because it concludes with large quantities of dialogue and a mass dance extravaganza. Crucially, the narrative outcome is different because the anticipated union of Mumble and Gloria is thwarted. For a transcript of this scene (up to the point at which Mumble ‘sings’) and a list of song sources, see Table 9.2. Gloria – singing the first verse from ‘Boogie Wonderland’ in a slower, more soulful tempo than the original recording by Earth, Wind and Fire – meanders through bands of male penguins who compete for her attention by bombarding her with their heartsong incipits. Again, the accompaniment is an embryonic rhythm and bass; the harmonies are mostly provided by the choruses of male penguins. Gloria quickly stops and turns to scold her suitors (as Norma Jean did) and then is confronted by Mumble on a mound of ice, just as his father had appeared before Norma Jean. He attempts to woo her with a rendition of ‘My Way’ in Spanish, backed by his Adélie friends, but she quickly realizes that he is only miming – Ramon is the real singer – and turns away in dismay. Mumble then persuades Gloria to sing to the rhythm of his tap dancing, and she reprises the verse of her heartsong at a faster tempo, leading to a rousing uptempo version of the chorus which ‘featur[es] Mumble’s tap patterns as a polyrhythm’ (Hayward Reference Hayward and Coyle2010, 96). Unable to resist the ‘groove’, their entire generation of penguins joins in the dance until the elders put a stop to the frivolities and exile the aberrant toe-tapper.

Soft-Porn Penguins?

Whilst the soundtrack consists of an eclectic mélange of songs from several decades, the majority are a mix of iconic R&B, Motown and hip-hop numbers, originally recorded by non-white solo artists and vocal groups (see song sources in Tables 9.1 and 9.2) – hence the criticism that Happy Feet narrates, ‘however indirectly, the white appropriation of black culture’ (Allison Reference Allison and North2015, 114). Many of the animated penguins adopt the choreographed movements associated with their particular artist and the original performance context of the song, on stage or in music videos. This ranges from Memphis striking an Elvis pose before singing ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ in the first mating scene to a penguin ‘boy band’ in the second, who pester Gloria with their Boyz II Men parody (‘I’ll make love to you’) after which a male penguin wiggles his behind like Ricky Martin and entreats her to ‘Shake a bon-bon’. Certain characters carry over their musical personae into their dialogue and general demeanour: Memphis is clearly a ‘Southern boy’ with conservative views; and Seymour – even as a chick – has a bigger build than all the other penguins, like the American rapper Fat Joe who provides his adult voice. Such stereotyping can seem crude and offensive, but these rapid audiovisual cameos are a particularly efficient means of differentiating the main characters when the majority of penguins are indistinguishable from each other.

Miller and Powell made no attempt in these mating scenes to assign songs from one chronological period to a particular generation of penguins. Norma Jean sang ‘Kiss’ from the 1980s alongside Memphis’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ from the 1950s, whilst the next generation, Seymour and Gloria, had classics from the early 1980s and late 1970s, respectively. Older members of the audience should easily recognize the mashed-up pop-song selections and find them comic in their juxtaposition and in the incongruity of their new context; younger viewers need only follow the basic narrative, drawn in by the novelty of cute penguins singing and dancing to a groovy beat. Powell produced the two mash-up sequences to an exceptionally high standard; they are slick and have seamless transitions between the disparate elements. Despite the confines of working with other peoples’ song materials, there is still much originality evident in their combinations and production. Although all the song fragments are performances in the sense that the penguins are putting on a display to attract a mate, their function is categorically narrative and the song mash-ups are an expedient and apposite means of rendering the mating rituals musically. (The mating displays are also clear examples of how sound – particularly music – is often the catalyst driving the creation of the animated image and is at the core of its meaning and affect: see Paul Wells in Chapter 16 of this volume.) Indeed, it would be easy to re-imagine the first mating scene in the context of Moulin Rouge!, with Satine searching for her true love amidst a lascivious throng of men (appropriately dressed like penguins in black tie and tails) at the eponymous nightclub. However, the racy lyrics and choreography in this – and the second – mating scene are much more challenging within the context of an animation aimed at a family audience. (Christian commentators in the United States have picked up on this aspect more than mainstream reviewers: see Greydanus Reference Greydanus2006.)

The content of some songs was rendered more innocent chiefly by avoiding the narratives in the verses, sticking instead to the more memorable hook of a catchy chorus (for example, ‘I’ll make love to you’; ‘Gimme all your lovin’ ’; Shake your bon-bon’). In the case of ‘The Message’, using only the chorus avoided its grim narrative about inner-city violence, drugs and poverty. Other songs were tweaked to fit better with penguin society (and avoid receiving a higher-rated certification): ‘Let’s talk about sex’ became ‘Let’s talk about eggs’. Less easily dismissed are the heartsongs chosen for Norma Jean and Gloria (‘Kiss’ and ‘Boogie Wonderland’), whose lyrics received only minimal changes. For example, the opening verse of ‘Boogie Wonderland’: ‘Midnight creeps so slowly into hearts of those [men] who need more than they get, Daylight deals a bad hand to a penguin [woman] who has laid too many bets’ (the original words are indicated in square brackets). Whilst the message in the chorus is straightforward and appropriate to Happy Feet (‘Dance, Boogie Wonderland’), the opening verse seems a bizarre choice, given its narrative about a woman who is constantly searching for romance on the dance floor to dull the pain of her many loveless relationships with men; this also creates a gratuitous and unlikely backstory for Gloria.

Both female protagonists have human-like buxom, curvaceous bodies which are in stark contrast to the more penguin-like males surrounding them, and both give highly sensualized performances of their songs. Gloria, in particular, seems to be overtly aroused by Mumble’s tap dancing and is inescapably drawn to his ‘groove’. Norma Jean is patently cast in the mould of Marilyn Monroe by using the screen siren’s real forenames and through Kidman’s breathy singing style. Edward Rhymes (Reference Rhymes2007) has noted how celebrity status and artistic legitimacy have been accorded to certain white females like Monroe who are allegedly recognized more for their sexual assets than for any innate talent, yet black women (say in hip-hop videos) acting out the same behaviour are demonized for their sexual promiscuity and immodesty. It is therefore a strong statement for the ultra-white Kidman in the guise of Monroe to sing the extremely raunchy lyrics in ‘Kiss’, a song generally associated with male singers (Prince and Tom Jones). Rhymes would regard such a decision as having ‘“deified” and normalized white female explicitness and promiscuity’ (ibid.), despite the cloak of ‘digital blackface’ (Allison Reference Allison and North2015, 115) provided through the filter of an animated penguin.

The two mating sequences in Happy Feet, in appropriating ‘sexed-up’ songs and choreography from the music industry to portray lone, hypersensualized female penguins being pursued by groups of clamouring males, typify the soft-porn styling that is now endemic to many media forms. Concerns about the increasing ‘pornification’ of popular culture and the negative effects this is having on young people had already been raised by commentators in the United States prior to the release of Happy Feet. For example, Don Aucoin wrote in the Boston Globe:

It is telling that Happy Feet received classifications for theatrical release in Europe and North America which overlooked the raciness inherent in the lyrics and choreography. Moreover, the film examiners appear to have missed (or ignored) a latent porn reference: the Rockhopper penguin guru is called Lovelace – after Linda Lovelace in Deep Throat (1972) – and wears a ‘sacred necklace’ (a set of plastic six-pack rings) which eventually begins to choke him (see Massawyrm Reference Massawyrm2006; Osmond Reference Osmond2007, 56). The use of (barely disguised) sexual content in Happy Feet is merely part of an ongoing market trend. A 2004 study by the Harvard School of Public Health, reported in the New York Times, highlighted how ‘a movie rated PG or PG-13 today has more sexual or violent content than a similarly related movie in the past’ (cited in N. Brown Reference Brown2012, 278). Soft-porn styling and barely disguised racy lyrics in supposedly family-friendly fare are also present in Miller’s sequel Happy Feet Two (2011; again scored by Powell). This begins with a grand song-and-dance medley of pop songs performed by different sections of the Emperor penguin colony, in which the next generation of male chicks, led by Seymour’s son Atticus (Benjamin Flores Jr), do a break dance to the hip-hop song ‘Mama said knock you out’ (LL Cool J, 1990) – re-worded ‘Papa said knock them out’ – and the irresistible snow-covered female chicks respond with ‘We’re bringing fluffy back’, wiggling their behinds and urging us to ‘Get your fluffy on / Shake your tail’ in a brief mash-up of Justin Timberlake’s ‘Sexyback’ (2006) and Mystikal’s ‘Shake it Fast [Shake ya ass]’ (2000).

Who, exactly, was the target audience for Happy Feet? Walt Disney aimed his early animated features at an undifferentiated ‘child of all ages’ (a child-adult amalgam later identified by the American TV industry in the early 1950s as the ‘kidult’), whereas his live-action family movies gradually introduced a change in focus to an adult, middlebrow audience (N. Brown Reference Brown2012, 153 and 195). Arguably, films such as Happy Feet and its sequel also virtually ignore the young children at whom much of the merchandizing and marketing is aimed. Instead, the main target audience comprises adolescents and youth-obsessed middle-aged adults, the latter group now forming the biggest demographic in the Western world (and hence the one with the greatest potential spending power).

The annual Theatrical Market Statistics for the US entertainment industry (issued by the Motion Picture Association of America) since 2001 show a marked trend towards standardization of product, with films rated PG-13 (typically the blockbuster franchises based on comic books and toys) and PG accounting for around 80 per cent of the twenty-five top grossing films each year. (PG-13 films have supplanted films rated R (Restricted), which require a parental presence for any viewers under the age of 17, as the dominant group.) Notably, the vast majority of animated features receive a PG rating in the United States; the G rating is virtually obsolete. This in itself is indicative that many films nominally suitable for young children now regularly contain more adult content. In the case of Happy Feet, there are obvious aspects of its script, soundtrack and visual styling which may even suggest a PG-13 rating. Robin Murray and Joseph Heumann might suggest that these aspects are ultimately counterproductive and damage Miller’s heartfelt pro-environmental message, because in ‘enviro-toons’ such as Happy Feet, ‘the call to [environmental] action is diluted by the ongoing call to buy’ (Reference Murray and Heumann2011, 244).

Miller strengthened his warning about impending environmental disaster in Happy Feet Two, urging us all to unite in our aim to stop the effects of climate change. Jacquet also returned to the Antarctic to make the documentary Ice and the Sky (La glace et le ciel; 2015) about the career of veteran French glaciologist and climate-change expert Claude Lorius.The French director was shocked to see how, since his last trip to the continent, climate change has increased temperatures, introducing unprecedented rainfall – with devastating effects on the survival of penguin chicks (MacNab Reference MacNab2015). The giant panda might be the best-known ‘poster animal’ for environmental conservation, but in the world of cinema another black and white animal, the Emperor penguin, is the one still trying to get our attention.

Haptic Music

Studies of the haptic qualities of cinema have frequently argued that touch is not just skin deep but is experienced in both the surface and depths of the body. By dismantling binary demarcations of externality and internality, phenomenologists have highlighted the intimacy of cinema’s immersive connection to the human body rather than the distance created by observation. Hapticity does not refer simply to physical contact but rather to a mode of perception and expression through which the body is enacted. It describes our experience of sensation, how we feel the cinematic world we see and hear. As Vivian Sobchak argued, ‘the film experience is meaningful not to the side of our bodies, but because of our bodies’ with the result that movies can provoke in us the ‘carnal thoughts that ground and inform more conscious analysis’ (Reference Sobchack2004, 60; emphasis in original). For Jennifer Barker, ‘tension, balance, energy, inertia, languor, velocity, rhythm’ are all cinematic aspects that can be considered tactile, ‘though none manifests itself solely, or even primarily, at the surface of the body’ (Reference Barker2009, 2). Despite these broad and multivalent sensational aspirations, however, existing studies have been heavily biased towards the visual. Laura Marks’s concept of ‘haptic visuality’ (Reference Marks2002, xiii) tacitly seems to write sound out of experience. The same could be said of some of the most important books in this field: The Address of the Eye (Sobchak Reference Sobchack1992), The Skin of the Film (L. U. Marks Reference Marks2000) and The Tactile Eye (Barker Reference Barker2009). Admittedly, ‘The Address of the Ears’ or ‘The Ears of the Film’ do not make quite such punchy titles, but if we are interested in multisensory experience in order to ‘see the seeing as well as the seen, hear the hearing as well as the heard, and feel the movement as well as see the moved’ (Sobchack Reference Sobchack1992, 10), then there appears to have been a curiously superficial engagement with the sonic. As if to acknowledge this lack, Sobchak has more recently explored concepts of ‘ultra-hearing’ and ‘ultra-seeing’ (Reference Sobchack2005, 2) in Dolby Digital promotional trailers, although this does remain a rather isolated study.

The central claim I hope to advance is that in haptic film music the ears function like the organs of touch. In fact, more than this, I do not hear solely with my ears, I hear with my whole body. The ears are the main organs of hearing, but not the only ones. Total deafness does not occur since some hearing is achieved through bone conduction. Certain kinds of film music, particularly where there is a high degree of materialized sound, encourage or even demand a more embodied relationship with the audio-viewer. This is partly because of a mimetic connection to what is heard, a coupling of the body with the physical means of production of the sound itself. It is particularly true where instrumental music approximates noise, where materializing sound indices are more apparent. A clear definition of the ontology of noise is, of course, challenging, but here I adopt Greg Hainge’s five-point conception which ultimately suggests that ‘noise makes us attend to how things come to exist, how they come to stand or be (sistere) outside of themselves (ex-)’ (Reference Hainge2013, 23; emphasis in original). Hainge argued that noise resists, subsists, coexists, persists and obsists. He moved beyond the conception of noise as a subjective term by highlighting the ways in which it draws attention to its status as noise through material reconfiguration. Most usefully, he argued that there need not be a split between the operations of noise as a philosophical concept and its manifestations in expression; in other words, it is not necessary to separate the ontological from the phenomenological (Hainge Reference Hainge2013, 22).

Existing research has focused on how loud and/or low-frequency sounds permeate or even invade the body. In these cases, specific frequencies and amplitudes deliberately exploit the boundaries between hearing and feeling. Don Ihde explained that when listening to loud rock music, ‘the bass notes reverberate in my stomach’ (Reference Ihde2007, 44). Julian Henriques, likewise, demonstrated how low frequencies and extreme volume are deployed in the reggae dancehall sound system. Henriques argued that, in this musical culture, the visceral quality of the sound results in a hierarchical organization of the senses where sound blocks out rational processes. He described this process as sonic dominance, which

Does sound need to be dominant for it to be experienced haptically? I would argue that haptic perception is still evident in works whose recourse to volume and amplitude is less clearly marked. My focus here is on something more subtle; music does not need to make my whole body shake or beat on my chest for me to feel it. Furthermore, in cinema the interconnecting relationships between sound and visuals do not typically rely on the obliteration of one medium by another: there is unity in the symbiotic creation of the haptic.

Lisa Coulthard’s exploration of haptic sound in European new extremism, which is in many ways a close relative of this study, explores low-frequency hums and drones in relation to silence. I wholeheartedly agree with Coulthard’s celebration of the corporeal: ‘The blurring of noise and music works to construct cinematic bodies that move beyond their filmic confines to settle in shadowed, resounding form in the body of the spectator’ (Reference Coulthard and Vernallis2013, 121). She perceives ‘dirtiness’ in the sonic imperfections offered by the expanded low-frequency ranges provided by digital exhibition technologies. I share the interest in the blurred boundaries between noise and music, but whereas Coulthard shows how sound both relies on and frustrates the quiet technologies of the digital, I explore how musical noise is tied to material causality and announces its hapticity. My aim, therefore, is partially to rehabilitate instrumental music within recent phenomenological discussions, which I see as an increasingly relevant and important aspect of soundtrack production. I also see this phenomenon as part of a broader aesthetic film-music tradition that reflects an inherent conflict between materialized and de-materialized music and, by extension, between the body and the mind. In seeking to reconcile these concepts, I want to move away from the most obvious physical experiences of loud and low-frequency music, to explore the caress as well as the slap, and to locate gradations of materialized sound.

Sound Affects: There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Blood is rich in haptic, visceral experiences. The oil we see and hear bubbling in the ground is like the blood coursing through the veins of the film, ready to erupt at any moment. In an early scene, following the first oil discovery, the camera lens is spattered with the black, viscous substance, threatening to splash through the membrane between the screen and audio-viewer. In celebration of the discovery a worker metaphorically baptizes his child by rubbing oil on his forehead. These two-dimensional visuals cannot break through the screen, but sound can. The adopted son of protagonist Daniel Plainview, H.W., loses his hearing following an explosion and the audience is sonically placed inside his body, experiencing the muffled and phased sound. We are literally invited to perceive the sound phenomenologically, not just hearing but feeling it in the body. We sense interiority and exteriority simultaneously, the environment within the experience of an other, but also outside it as an experience mediated by an other.

Additionally, Daniel Day Lewis’s vocal representation of Plainview is so rough and grainy that it almost seems as if there is sandpaper in his throat. One cannot hear this without a tightening of one’s own vocal cords. In a scene where the dubious church pastor, Eli Sunday, exorcizes a parishioner’s arthritis, he explains that God’s breath entered his body ‘and my stomach spoke in a whisper, not a shout’. The ensuing guttural appeal, ‘get out of here, ghost’, repeated by the entire congregation and becoming increasingly more strained, is chilling in the physical immediacy of its impact. Barthes’s phenosong is invoked in these vocalizations. The film constantly revels in aural textures that remind us of our own bodily existence and experience. There is much more that could be said about these and other sonic aspects of the film, but my focus here is on the music, which works on a more abstract, but nonetheless potent, level.

Matthew McDonald noted that Greenwood’s score is ‘exceptional for the overwhelming intensity established during the opening frames and returned to frequently throughout the film’ (Reference McDonald and Kalinak2012, 215). The music used is extracted from Part One of Greenwood’s Popcorn Superhet Receiver for string orchestra. The score explores clusters and quarter-tones in the manner of Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, an enormous influence on Greenwood. The initial idea was to explore the concept of white noise created by two octaves of quarter-tones and to generate rhythmic material based on clusters, but the non-conformity of the individual players became more important to the composer as the piece developed:

Indeed, a single stave is allocated to each of the violins (eighteen), violas (six) and cellos (six) throughout the piece. The four double-basses are divided across two staves. The individual variations or ‘mistakes’ exploited in the score celebrate the lack of uniformity in an orchestra. Following Alex Ross (see below), McDonald identified a string cluster becoming a contrary-motion glissando and moving towards and away from the pitch F♯ as a distinctive moment in the score (Example 10.1). This glissando is synchronized first with an exterior shot of mountains, subsequently with Plainview crawling out of a mine shaft having broken his leg, and much later in the film with shots of Plainview burying the body of an imposter he has murdered. McDonald argued that the music’s connotative function shifts ‘from the realm of setting to the realm of character’ and he moved towards the idea that the landscape and the individual are connected and inseparable, ‘a demonstration that the nature of the westerner is shaped by the nature of the West’ (Reference McDonald and Kalinak2012, 218).

Example 10.1 Score reduction/representation, Popcorn Superhet Receiver, bars 37–9.

Music by Jonny Greenwood © Reference Greenwood2005. Rights administered worldwide by Faber Music Ltd, London WC1B 3DA. Reproduced by permission of the publishers. All rights reserved.

I want to take this idea a stage further and suggest that it is the connection made between the film’s landscape – the metaphorical body of the film – the central character, Plainview, and our own embodied experience that are substantially shaped by the score and constitutes its extraordinary power. That fruitful tension has only been realized subconsciously by some commentators, who have, perhaps understandably, struggled to identify the elusive impact of the music that they find caught in a liminal space between the representation of landscape and the representation of character.

The recurrent glissando passage highlights friction. We feel the massed weight of bows on strings and left-hand tension on the fingerboard as the instrumentalists slide towards and away from the F♯ pitch centre. The sound moves from a ‘noisy’ state towards pitched ‘purity’ and then back again, bringing about the reconfiguration of matter that Hainge describes in his ontology of noise. Through this process we become aware of the physical nature of the sound source shifting between materialized and de-materialized effects. The materialized sound, the noisy, dirty music, makes its presence known, keeping us in a state of heightened tension. Friction and vibration are enacted in our bodies and embodied musical listening plays a significant role in our connection to both character and landscape in the film.

In his insightful review in the New Yorker (Reference Ross2008), Ross seems partially aware of his own bodily experience but is not fully prepared to make the connection. He argues that the glissandi ‘suggest liquid welling up from underground, the accompanying dissonances communicate a kind of interior, inanimate pain’. Whose pain, though? For Ross, this seems to be tied exclusively to character so that the ‘monomaniacal unison’ tells us about the ‘crushed soul of the future tycoon Daniel Plainview’. I suggest that this is also ‘pain’ that the audience is encouraged to feel through the soundtrack and it belongs as much to them as to environment or character. Ross’s presentation of a series of unresolved binary oppositions is most forcefully expressed in his understanding of the music as both ‘unearthly’ and the ‘music of the injured earth’. He gets closest to what I argue when he suggests that filmgoers might find themselves ‘falling into a claustrophobic trance’ when experiencing these sequences. All of this goes towards, but does not quite enunciate, the audience’s embodied connection. The simultaneous interiority and exteriority explains why the music is at once ‘terrifying and enrapturing, alien and intimate’.

As I have been suggesting, the landscape in There Will Be Blood could be said to be metaphorically alive: the ground bleeds when it is ruptured, it groans and pulses through the use of sound design and music. Equally, Plainview could be seen to be emotionally dead, a walking cadaver, reduced to a series of bodily functions, motivated only by greed. Unsurprisingly, then, notions of burial, emergence, death and rebirth are central to the connection between the body and the land. In a scene in Little Boston, a worker in a mine shaft is accidentally killed by a drill bit that strikes him from above. As his mud-, oil- and blood-spattered body is removed from the shaft, the opening of Greenwood’s score for Smear (2004) is heard. Here the music emphasizes the space between pitches. The three-line staves in the graphic score (Example 10.2) represent a single whole-tone between concert G and A. Two ondes martenots, a clarinet, horn and string ensemble generate a constantly variable, insecure yet narrowly constrained texture. The fluctuating material is always in a state of becoming, never resting and never locating the pure tone. It is music in the cracks that highlights resistance to fixity, drawing attention to its own internal apparatus.

Example 10.2 Smear, bars 9–16.

Music by Jonny Greenwood © 2004. Rights administered worldwide by Faber Music Ltd, London WC1B 3DA. Reproduced by permission of the publishers. All rights reserved.

The cue ‘Proven Lands’, which is derived from Part 2b of Popcorn Superhet Receiver, is heard when Plainview attempts to purchase William Bandy’s land in order to allow smooth passage for a pipeline. (The cue’s title, and those given below, are as they appear on the soundtrack album, Nonesuch 7559-79957-8.) Travelling with his imposter brother, Plainview undertakes a levelling survey and we are shown a series of breathtakingly beautiful landscape shots. The music, however, has a kinetic energy that belies the purely functional nature of the surveying task. The upper strings are required to strum rapid and relentless muted quaver pizzicati using guitar plectra, enhancing the clipped and percussive nature of the sound. The double-basses repeatedly slap the fingerboard and play pizzicato glissandi. The primary characteristic of this music is the dynamic exposure of the physicality of its source, the focus on human motor action. When we hear it, I suggest, the neuromuscular system is activated sympathetically. It generates motion, or the simulation of motion, within us. This concept reflects current research within neuroscience, particularly in relation to mirror neurones (for example, Mukamel et al. Reference Mukamel, Ekstrom, Kaplan, Iacoboni and Fried2010), which suggests that neurones are fired in the brain not only when humans act but also when they experience the same action performed by others. It is primarily an empathetic mode that may help us understand or make connections to others. An embodied mode of film scoring may, in turn, help us to engage directly with characters and/or narrative.

One of the film’s most striking cues follows a gusher blowout where a derrick is consumed in flames. The subsequent attempt to put out the fire, intercut with H. W.’s hearing loss (‘I can’t hear my voice’), is accompanied by a relentlessly visceral five-minute cue. The music is adapted from Greenwood’s track ‘Convergence’, which was originally composed for the film Bodysong. This documentary about human life, from birth to death, was constructed from clips of archive footage taken from more than one hundred years of film history. Given the direction of my argument, it hardly seems surprising that a film about the human body would generate music for use in There Will Be Blood. The piece is dominated by a recurrent anacrustic-downbeat combination played by the bass, a repetitive, punchy ‘boom boom … boom boom’ pattern. Over this, using the same simple rhythmic cell, various untuned percussion instruments generate polyrhythmic, chaotic clutter that constantly shifts in and out of phase. The recurrent patterns here, obviously, resemble a heartbeat, or multiple heartbeats, or perhaps also the mechanism of the drill in an emphatic organic/inorganic axis. Ben Winters (Reference Winters2008) noted the recurrent trope and importance of the heartbeat in film soundtracks, which he perceived as effective at helping us experience fictional fear in the context of own fear-inducing corporeality. In this sequence the score sets the heart racing and generates heightened and enacted excitement.

The intensity of the cue is further enhanced by some significant additions and modifications to the original ‘Convergence’ music. Greenwood superimposes the string orchestra, playing nervous, rapid figurations, clusters, and ‘noisy’ and ‘dirty’ textures. The low strings are especially materialized, generating growling glissandi, with aggressive bow strokes that slice, razor-like, through the frenzied texture. The bass pattern is enhanced digitally with beefed-up and distorted low frequencies enhancing the mimetic thumping, but as the camera tracks into a close-up of Plainview’s face towards the end of the sequence, the music is gradually filtered, reducing the high frequencies and making a more internal sound, the rhythm as felt inside the body. The relentless rhythmic drive in the scene is, therefore, narratively subsumed into Plainview’s body, but it is also by extension subsumed into our bodies as it mimetically regulates the heartbeat, another form of embodied interiority and connection. The incorporeal of Plainview’s screen body is enacted through the music in our bodies. This could partially explain the curious fascination with the odious character: when we observe Plainview we also experience a tiny part of ourselves.

The examples derived from Greenwood’s pre-existing scores demonstrate the importance of the role of the director and the music editor in the selection and use of aural materials. Greenwood also composed music specifically for the film, but did not write music directly to picture and instead provided a range of pieces that were spotted, edited and re-configured: ‘Only a couple of the parts were written for specific scenes. I was happier writing lots of music for the film/story, and having PTA [Paul Thomas Anderson] fit some of it to the film’ (Nonesuch Records 2007). Unlike most soundtrack composers, Greenwood found that he ‘had real luxury’ (Nialler9 2011) in not being expected to hit specific cue points or to write around dialogue. He was given free rein to write large amounts of music with specific scenes only vaguely in mind. This working approach seems to have resulted in several striking combinations of music and image. It is noteworthy, however, that the purely ‘original’ music for the film is much less materialized and more traditional in its construction (for example, cues such as ‘Open Spaces’ and ‘Prospector Arrives’).

The materiality in There Will Be Blood reflects the fluidity of the collaborative method, the clear directorial selection of musical materials and the relative inexperience of the composer, a potent mixture resulting in the disregard for certain scoring conventions and ‘rules’. The choices made by the director, editor and composer, especially in the use of pre-existing music and modified pre-existing music, contribute to a striking embodied experience. Writing in Rolling Stone, Peter Travis explained that the first time he saw the film he ‘felt gut-punched’ (Reference Travis2008). The instrumental music is fundamental in generating much of the hapticity that is a marker of the profound impact of the film and its score.

Incorporeality Regained: The Master

There are many surface similarities between There Will Be Blood and The Master. The films are both about pioneers, dysfunctional families, the roots of American modernity, manifestations of nihilism and conflicts between the evangelical and the entrepreneurial. They are both astonishing and detailed character studies. In The Master, the frontier landscape of There Will Be Blood is partially replaced by the sea. Musically, however, we appear to be in the same territory, but this is only initially the case. Greenwood’s pre-existing orchestral music is once again employed, and we hear two movements, ‘Baton Sparks’ and ‘Overtones’, from 48 Responses to Polymorphia (Reference Greenwood2011). This piece is a homage to Penderecki’s Polymorphia (1961), composed during his so-called sonoristic period, where the focus on textural sound masses and timbral morphology provided a new means of expression (Mirka Reference Mirka1997, Reference Mirka2000). It is prophetic that the composer of Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) is a shadowed presence in a film that opens on an island in the South Pacific on V-J Day 1945. We might, therefore, expect materiality to be centralized in the score for The Master. Yet, despite several initial glimpses of a visceral mode of scoring, this music soon gives way to something more ‘refined’.

The opening shot of the sea is accompanied by an aggressive, if brief, Bartókian string passage – the initial gestures from ‘Baton Sparks’ – but this soon recedes into a series of slow suspended harmonies reminiscent of Barber’s Adagio for Strings (1936). Images of demob-happy naval officers wrestling on a beach and the inappropriate actions of the sex-obsessed protagonist, Freddie Quell, contain the strongest indication of the embodied musical potential in the score. Col legno low strings and a jazz-inspired bass spring around a solo violin playing jerky and scratchy gestures. The score for The Master begins where There Will Be Blood left off, promising a materialized aesthetic, but this is not what is ultimately delivered.

As the story progresses, particularly after we have been introduced to Lancaster Dodd, the leader of a movement known as The Cause, the music takes on a bittersweet, ironic quality. For example, the music derived from ‘Overtones’, which is first heard at a wedding on board a boat, contains lush string movement based around white-note clusters and artificial harmonics. It is almost too sweet and cloying, perhaps suggesting that Dodd is not to be trusted. There is clearly still a degree of materiality in the construction of the score, with a characteristic use of indeterminacy (Example 10.3). Greenwood employs I.R.I. tremolos, which he describes as ‘Independent, Random and Intermittent notes added to a held pitch – like a fingered tremolo but with only occasional use of the second note’ (Reference Greenwood2011, 15). However, the music does not emphasize noise, rather it generates a beautiful, gossamer-like harmonic texture revolving around C major, which could easily float away in the sea air. In Hainge’s ontological taxonomy, the potentially ‘noisy’ elements in this construction do not challenge: they coexist harmoniously and centralize musicality rather than critiquing it. The potential ‘noise’ is not a by-product of expression but central to the expressive harmonic content. To be sure, this is not standard mainstream film-music fare either, but equally it does not focus the audio-viewer’s attention on material sensation as was the case in There Will Be Blood.

Example 10.3 ‘Overtones’ from 48 Responses to Polymorphia, bars 22–9, fluttery textures and bitter-sweet harmonies.

Music by Jonny Greenwood © Reference Greenwood2011. Rights administered worldwide by Faber Music Ltd, London WC1B 3DA. Reproduced by permission of the publishers. All rights reserved.

Significantly, the more heavily materialized sound-mass sections from 48 Responses to Polymorphia – such as the first half of ‘Overtones’ – the moments that resonate most closely with Pendercki’s sonoristic musical language, have not been deployed in The Master. It is the sections with fewer materializing effects, the pitch-biased and harmonically rich music, that are used to support narrative representation. The choices made by the director, editor and composer in the use of pre-existing music function in this score much more like traditional film music.

The same is true of a good deal of the music Greenwood composed specially for the film. In a scene where Freddie Quell finds himself on board the Master’s boat and begins to learn the methods of The Cause, the music employs impressionistic gestures and patterns as a reflection of the journey (‘Alethia’ on the soundtrack album, Nonesuch 532292–2). Quell is adrift metaphorically and physically: he listens to a recording of Dodd explaining how man is ‘not an animal’; he observes a regression therapy session; he attempts to attract the attention of a woman to whom he has never spoken by writing ‘do you want to fuck’ on a piece of paper and presenting it to her. The cue is entitled ‘Back Beyond’ and the chamber ensemble, featuring clarinet and harp, bears some resemblance in harmonic structure and orchestration to Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro (1905). The modal vacillation, blurred and layered harmony, and consistent use of arpeggios reflect the unpredictability of the sea and the aimless drifting of the protagonist. This music is concerned less with materiality than a series of harmonic extensions built above the D♭ home pitch. It leads to the moment when Dodd begins a series of disquieting psychological questions designed to unearth Quell’s past traumas.

Later, when Quell supports Dodd in promoting his new book, The Split Saber, the score features a series of suspended F♯ diminished-seventh chords resolving onto C♯ major. The homophonic yearning created by the intimate chamber ensemble could easily be located within the rich panoply of film music’s harmonic heritage. Towards the end of the film, Quell takes another boat journey, this time across the Atlantic, in order to be reunited briefly with Dodd. Here the E minor harmonies generate a traditional tonal hierarchy, with particular prominence given to the dominant seventh and its tonic resolution. This suggests greater clarity, perhaps some degree of finality on Quell’s part – an effective way to indicate character progression through harmonic development. It is music rich in expressive harmonic potential, but not rich in its use of materializing sound indices.

One way of reading this softening of the connection between materiality and causality is that Greenwood had learned to become a ‘proper’ film composer by the time he worked on The Master, following his experiences on Norwegian Wood (2010) and We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011). The experiments undertaken in There Will Be Blood became more refined, less resistant and thus assimilated into a mainstream system. If it takes an outsider to question the normative model, the successful outsider also eventually becomes part of the formatting of the new system. Tempting though it is to pursue this interpretation, it is only partially true. We have already seen how the decision to focus on materialized sound is frequently encapsulated in the pre-existing music of There Will Be Blood and is, therefore, closely tied to the decisions of the director and music editor. The Master’s pre-existent music is much less materialized. Indeed, voices from the past in the form of Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘Get thee Behind Me Satan’ (Irving Berlin, 1936), Helen Forrest’s ‘Changing Partners’ (Larry Coleman and Joe Darion, 1953) and Jo Stafford’s ‘No Other Love’ (Paul Weston and Bob Russell, 1950) suggest an important role for nostalgic reverie, rather than materialized sensation.

The distinction I attempt to articulate here may simply say as much about the narrative and aesthetic differences between the two films as anything else. This in turn affects the function and purpose of both scores. Whereas There Will Be Blood worked hard to make the audience feel each moment, The Master focuses on internal memory. Dodd’s methods centralize the idea of past-life regression, recalling memories from before birth, as a beneficial and healing process. Freddie is a veteran suffering from nostalgia. The film constantly delves into the past and into the recesses of the mind. Anderson has suggested that Quell could be understood as ‘a ghost’ (Hogan Reference Hogan2012), a man who is both dead and alive. Indeed, it could be argued that the soundtrack, much like Quell himself, is an apparition, an intangible construct of the mind. In There Will Be Blood, Plainview is also dead, in a way, but the music brings him purposefully to life through landscape. Conversely, in The Master Quell’s impulsive and animalistic acts of violence (such as strangling a customer in a department store or smashing a toilet in a jail cell) are never accompanied by any musical score.

If we accept the conceptual framework of Cartesian dualism, then the aesthetic positioning of the two scores reflects a shift of focus from the body to the mind. In Principles of Philosophy (1644), René Descartes gave the first systematic account of the interaction between the mind and body. He discriminated between mental and material ‘substances’, arguing that they were distinctive and excluded each other, but he also suggested that the body causally affected the mind and the mind causally affected the body. The two films centralize material substance and mental substance respectively, a move away from texture, form, location and weight towards images, emotions, beliefs and desires. Whereas the representation of the land and Plainview in There Will Be Blood emphasized material embodiment, Quell and Dodd in The Master reflect the ethereal workings of memory.

I do not wish to suggest for one moment that The Master does not contain effective film music, or that it lacks narrative engagement, simply that its materiality is not as foregrounded as in There Will Be Blood. Some hapticity in The Master may be located, as Claudia Gorbman has suggested (Reference Gorbman2015), in Philip Seymour Hoffman’s varied and virtuosic vocal representation of Lancaster Dodd. In any case, there is a clear difference in the material nature of the two film scores, which invites us to identify and understand distinct approaches to the use of materializing effects.

Conclusions

Chion’s materializing sound indices, though previously considered solely in relation to sound design, could be used to describe the aesthetic and embodied differences between the instrumental scores for There Will Be Blood and The Master. There Will Be Blood attempts to engage the audio-viewer by infiltrating the body as a means of reaching the mind. The Master, instead, focuses primarily on the mind as the main narrative space of the film, and constantly scrutinizes memory.

By aligning Chion’s theory with phenomenology, we are able to understand the contents of aural cinematic experience as they are lived, not as we have typically learned to conceive and describe them. Indeed, a sliding scale of materiality could be a useful tool in exploring a range of film scores. Within this context, we could argue that Greenwood is a more ‘material’ composer than many others. Yet, there are also distinctions in his methods and approaches based on narrative context, collaborative relationships, interactions with pre-existing music and so on.

This chapter has attempted to re-establish a connection between the haptic and the aural, so that our understanding of instrumental film scoring is no longer unnecessarily disembodied. A phenomenological approach could usefully re-materialize our objects of perception. Indeed, if we were to re-evaluate some significant moments in film-music history using this conceptual framework and sliding scale, we might more fully understand the extraordinary visceral impact of Bernard Herrmann’s score for Psycho (1960) or of John Williams’s for Jaws (1975). This is film music that remains powerful to this day, in no small part because of its embodied qualities. Noise need not be understood as a by-product of the filmmaking process, or as a danger to the integrity of the body, or as a force to be attenuated. Some film scores feature prominent materialized elements that directly attempt to stimulate the material layers of the human being. There are modes of instrumental scoring where there is an abundance of materializing sound indices and we can simultaneously feel as much as we hear.