Response: Music, image and the sublime
2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 22; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09502360701842033
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Susan James, ‘Passion and Striving’, reprinted in this volume, pp. 55–70. 2 James, ‘Passion and Striving’. 3 James, ‘Passion and Striving’. 4 James Harris, 1744, in Edward Lippman, A History of Western Musical Aesthetics (University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 100. 5 Neal Zaslaw, Mozart's Symphonies: Context, Performance Practice, Reception (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). 6 Adam Smith, 1795, in Lippman, History of Western Musical Aesthetics, p. 115. 7 Leonard Ratner's work on rhetoric in eighteenth-century music has shown how, for composers at least, principles and materials extrinsic to music continued to inform compositional practices right through the baroque and classical periods. See Leonard Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form and Style (New York: Schirmer, 1980). 8 John Neubauer, The Emancipation of Music from Language (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 194, 202, 205. 9 N. Matossian, Xenakis (London: Kahn and Averill, 1990), p. 61. 10 Paul Griffiths, New Sounds, New Personalities: British Composers of the 1980s (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), p. 79. 11 Lucy Green, Music, Gender, Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 7, 9. 12 Allan Moore, Rock the Primary Text (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 17, 187. 13 Lucy Green, in Moore, Rock the Primary Text, 1996, p. 197. 14 Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 2–3. 15 The score to Kubrick's 2001 (1968) is in fact a compilation score although, originally, the film was to have been scored by Alex North whose score was rejected. The scene in question uses music from Ligeti's Requiem (1963–5), the modernist idiom of which would not have been at all well known to most cinema-goers and therefore not conducive to affiliating identifications. Because of this the music functions as if it had been specially composed, indeed its dense textures and dissonant harmonic clusters, alongside those of Penderecki's Threnody (1961), have now become part of the film music lexicon, witness John Williams' score for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Marco Beltrami's for Scream (1996). 16 Royal Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994,), pp. 30–1. 17 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1987). 18 Two distinct moments within the European avant-garde movement provide the musical materials for these cues. Ligeti's Requiem represents a strain of post-war avant-garde music in which emphasis was placed on textures of massed sounds. Here, surface details of the music were subordinated to the shifting densities and timbral qualities of the overall texture. John Williams' atonal lines on the other hand would not be out of place in a work such as Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire of 1912, one of a rush of expressionist pieces through which Schoenberg began to address the challenges of composing without the support of the major/minor tonal system. 19 A common technique in avant-garde string writing, glissandi (slides) are particularly effective on unfretted stringed instruments, which enable the performance of infinite pitch gradations. 20 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1757/1987), Part 2: XVIII, XIX, III, XXVII. 21 Gorbman, Vnheard Melodies. 22 This term refers to the way in which the cinema iconifies image and time: we read visual and temporal cinematic signs as real and non-arbitrary. See Brown, op. cit., p. 16 for a full explanation of this. 23 Brown, Overtones and Undertones, p. 31. 24 Brown, Overtones and Undertones, p. 31. 25 Brian de Palma pays homage to this episode in The Untouchables (1987). Ennio Morricone's scoring bears little comparison with Miesel. Morricone also takes a ‘single affect’ approach to the scene but he is concerned to create a mood of suspense, undercutting the narrative's disturbing violence. Although Morricone's scoring is quite original and undeniably effective, de Palma's use of the, by now rather tired, device of slow motion still encourages a mythic reading of the scene and a degree of passivity we do not experience in Eisenstein. 26 This separation of musical and filmic (visual/narrative) elements looks forward to the ‘vertical montage’ of Eisenstein's later work in which the image and music tracks are allowed to unfold with a degree of independence whilst still combining to powerful effect. 27 Gorbman, Unheard Melodies. 28 Kassabian, Hearing Film, p. 29. 29 Brown, Overtones and Undertones, p. 17. 30 Kassabian, Hearing Film, p. 29. 31 Gorbman, Unheard Melodies. 32 Adapted from Wagnerian practice, letimotivic technique in film music involves the association of brief musical ideas with key elements of the narrative such as characters, objects and places. E.T. has a plethora of leitmotifs representing the creature itself, its powers and the sinister ‘searchers’ who seem to be hunting it to name but a few. Leitmotifs frequently undergo transformation in conjunction with elements to which they refer. 33 Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (London: Athlone Press, first published NY: Oxford University Press, 1947), pp. 11, 33, 39, 37. 34 It is not easy to think of atonal film scores which are used in connection with anything other than the frightening, the disturbing, the alien, the irrational, and so on; there are however isolated scenes which come to mind. In his outstanding score to Planet of the Apes (1968) Jerry Goldsmith manages to respond to the intimacy between Taylor (Charlton Heston) and Nova (Linda Hamilton) without lapsing into tonal clichés and Bernard Hermann in his score to Psycho (1960), often highly dissonant but rarely atonal, maintains considerable harmonic tension in his underscoring of Marion's and Sam's hotel room liaison at the opening of the film. 35 James, ‘Passion and Striving’. 36 Gorbman, Unheard Melodies. 37 Brown, Overtones and Undertones, p. 26.
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