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Theories of Film Music Douglas W. Gallez

Siegfried Kracauer recently brought us up to date on the relationship of music and film, but his treatment of the subject in Theory of Film is primarily a synthesis of salient parts of Spottiswoode, Eisenstein, and Eisler. The familiar kinship of the muses Euterpe and Kinema is not yet so well defined that we cannot profit from a fresh attempt to compare the notions theorists share.

Spottiswoode wrote some thirty-five years ago (during the infancy of sound-film) that

The place of music in films is at present indeterminate and largely unexplored. It cannot be discussed with the precision attaching to the visual components, which have nearly all been given ample opportunity on the screen to form the basis of careful and extensive judgments.1

Nevertheless, Spottiswoode effectively delineated the functions of film music as reflected by usage in the early Thirties. He saw music performing the following roles, independently or in combination:

(1) imitation, in which "the score imitates natural sounds or the tonal use of speech"

(2) commentary, in which "the score takes the part of a spectator commenting on the visual film, usually ironically"

(3) evocation, in which "the synchronized score is given its fullest positive value. Silence as well as sound is deliberate. Leitmotifs act as emotives and assist the visual film towards insight into the characters they are attached to"

(4) contrast, in which "the score contrasts with, and so may heighten the effect of, the visual film"

(5) dynamic use, in which "correspondence of sight and sound brings out the rhythm of cutting rates"2

Exploration of musical potential was continued by Hollywood and other musicians, and by aestheticians in the world film centers. Maurice Jaubert is a familiar example of the more thoughtful composer who attempted to codify the use of music in film. Leonid Sabaneev pioneered aesthetic discussion of the evolving technique;3 and Kurt London pro-

1. Raymond Spottiswoode, A Grammar of the Film: An Analysis of Film Technique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), pp. 192-193.

2. Ibid., pp. 49-50. 3. Leonid Sabaneev, Music for the Films: A Handbook for Composers and Conductors,

trans. S. W. Pring (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1935), pp. 15-31.

CINEMA JOURNAL / 41

duced in 1936 a seminal work in the field, Film Music, which succinctly probed aesthetic and technical problems. Prokofiev and Eisenstein experi- mented further in Alexander Nevsky, and Eisenstein essayed a posteriori a rationale for the results. But it was Hans Eisler who reassessed the aesthetic implications of music and film in 1947, after performing extensive experiments at the New School for Social Research under a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

Eisler asserted that "to establish aesthetic principles of cinema music is as dubious an enterprise as to write its history."4 Yet, like Spottiswoode, he plucked up his courage and proceeded to take on the task. In doing so, he demolished the good intentions of both Sergei Eisenstein and Albert Schweitzer-no small accomplishment. Eisenstein, it will be recalled, had made a case in The Film Sense for the way he and Prokofiev had integrated musical and visual elements in the Battle on the Ice episode of Nevsky. For the attack, the picture was shot to match existing music; however, post- scoring was involved for a preliminary sequence prior to the battle. The visual pattern, according to Eisenstein, was always complemented accurately by the music. Eisler observed that Eisenstein was concerned with single frames or essentially static scenes and the way that the elements of the musical score formed matching patterns. Eisenstein did not primarily con- cern himself with the fact that it is movement within and between scenes that captures attention, and that music can imitate this movement and make sense, for both the visual elements and the music are dealing with time.

Eisler faulted Eisenstein for this analytical deficiency and went on to scorn the Russian film-maker's "high-sounding critical arguments," includ- ing his citation of Schweitzer's analysis of an excerpt from J. S. Bach's Christmas Cantata to support his aesthetic viewpoint. "Eisenstein," ac- cording to Eisler,

speaks of [Prokofiev's music for The Battle on the Ice sequence] as though he were dealing with the most difficult problems of abstract painting, with reference to which phrases such as steep curves, green counterpoints to blue themes, or struc- tural unity, have been used only too frequently. He uses heavy artillery to shoot sparrows.5

Perhaps Eisler's most significant contribution to film music aesthetics is his reaffirmation of the principle of montage. He emphasized that "if the concept of montage ... has any justification, it is to be found in the relation between the picture and the music."6 He went on to observe that "the aesthetic divergence of the media [motion pictures and music] is potentially a legitimate means of expression, not merely a regrettable deficiency that- has to be concealed as well as possible."7 Eisler's aesthetic models for film

4. Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 62.

5. Ibid., pp. 156-157. 6. Ibid., p. 70. 7. Ibid., p. 74.

42 / CINEMA JOURNAL

music were incidental music for drama and music found in musical comedies, which

functioned as stimulants because they were foreign elements, which interrupted the dramatic context, or tended to raise this context from the realm of literal immediacy into that of meaning.8

He asserted also that the function of music is not, as Eisenstein claimed, to "express" the movement or rhythm of the motion picture as such, "but to release, or more accurately, to justify movement."9 He saw the unity of music and picture to be attributable to the gestural element:

Its aesthetic effect is that of a stimulus of motion, not a reduplication of motion. . . . Thus, the relation between music and pictures is antithetic at the very moment when the deepest unity is achieved.10

Eisler admitted that he found numerous contradictions in the relationships between film and music, and he asserted "that there can be no question of setting up universal aesthetic criteria for this music. .. .11 Thus, having persuasively mustered his arguments for a montage theory of film music, he all but threw in the towel:

the criteria of [film] music must be derived in each given case from the nature of the problems it raises. The task of aesthetic considerations is to throw light on the nature of these problems and their requirements, to make us aware of their own inherent development, not to provide recipes.12

PUDOVKIN'S AESTHETIC VIEW

Pudovkin anticipated Eisler's emphasis on montage theory, wherein music that contrasts with the visual elements assists in producing an emo- tional response that neither stimulus can achieve by itself. In his Film Technique and Film Acting Pudovkin cited the treatment of music in a workers' demonstration sequence of Deserter (1933) which applied his dictum that music in the sound film "must never be the accompaniment. It must retain its own line."'3 Because Pudovkin felt that an "accompani- ment" to the visuals "would give only the superficial aspect of the scene, [that] the undertones of meaning would be ignored,"14 he asked for music "the dominating emotional theme of which [would be] courage and the certainty of ultimate victory."15 From the very first scene the music was affirmative, and it grew increasingly powerful to the last. As Pudovkin described it:

8. Loc. cit. 9. Eisler, p. 78.

10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., p. 88. 12. Loc. cit. 13. V. I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting, trans. and ed. Ivor Montagu (New

York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 190. 14. Ibid., p. 191. 15. Ibid., p. 192.

CINEMA JOURNAL / 43

The image's progress curves like a sick man's temperature chart; while the music in direct contrast is firm and steady . . . and when the workers hoist the flag at the end the music at last reaches its climax, and only now, at its conclusion, does its spirit coincide with that of the image.16

Finally, Pudovkin observed:

It will be appreciated that this instance, where the sound plays the subjective part in the film, and the image the objective, is only one of many diverse ways in which the medium of sound film allows us to build a counterpoint, and I maintain that only by such counterpoint can primitive naturalism be surpassed and the rich deeps of meaning potential in sound film creatively handled be discovered and plumbed.17 Pudovkin's use of asynchronism, of course, is the classic application in

film music of the manifesto issued earlier by him, Eisenstein, and Alexan- drov-a statement concerned with asynchronous sound in general. Yet Pudovkin's attempt was not altogether successful. Some observers found the music confusing and assumed that its rising exultation referred to suc- cessful repression of the workers' demonstration, rather than to proletarian victory.

It took most Hollywood composers at least twenty years to add asyn- chronism to their technique. They preferred illustration, mirrored scoring, parallelism-whichever term one prefers-to counterpoint. Even when the more sophisticated among them, especially an adventuresome generation of composers skilled in jazz improvisation or trained in forward-looking con- servatories and university music schools, made use of the counterpoint principle, they by no means embraced it exclusively. While they recognized its value to psychological implications not evidenced by the visuals or the remainder of the sound track elements, they retained the traditional principle of underscoring which often seems merely to reinforce what is already evident on the screen, but which also makes for continuity, helps maintain momentum, and propels the film at climactic sequences.

Kurt London warned in 1936 that if music "is employed to strain after effects which the film itself cannot induce, then it degrades the film and itself."'8 His admonition was regularly ignored by Hollywood producers and the composers they hired. Often the music was called on to obscure filmic flaws and save productions at the box office. Film sophisticates were never fooled; the mass audience, not concerned with aesthetic subtleties, accepted the easy pleasure of theme songs and "mickey-mouse" underlining of the action.

Today we find regular employment in film music of direct and indirect techniques of enhancing filmic meaning with music-that is, parallel and contrapuntal scoring. In both methods, as Eisler has noted, structural unity

16. Loc. cit. 17. Pudovkin, p. 193. 18. Kurt London, Film Music, trans. Eric S. Bensinger (London: Faber and Faber Ltd.,

1936), p. 125.

44 / CINEMA JOURNAL

is retained, and articulation of the music usually corresponds to the articu- lation of the film sequence.19

Despite decades of pragmatic demonstration that both principles are aesthetically viable in the sound film, we discover without surprise that John Howard Lawson still opts for the Eisler-Pudovkin dialectical notion about film music, and that Paul Rotha primly urges-at least as far as realist story-films are concerned, that music be discarded unless justified by a logical source.20 Rotha's austere recommendation seems unnecessarily restrictive, and few practitioners are willing to limit thus their resources of expression. Lawson's view is by now the familiar hue and cry:

Since the organization of sight and sound is almost totally neglected in today's commercial production, music is employed mainly as a means of underlining the plot .... The subordination of music to "theatrical" situations which have no musical interest has obscured the role that music is destined to play in cinematic composition. ...

There has been no general improvement in film music in the past fifteen years [roughly, since about 1949]. The experimental work initiated by Eisenstein and Prokofiev in Alexander Nevsky has not been appreciated in theory or utilized in practice. However, the most creative contemporary artists are beginning to recog- nize that music is not a passive accompaniment of the action, but a living force which is part of the pattern of contrasting values and interacting tensions.21

Counterpoint, the rather limited notion of Eisler, Eisenstein and others, constitutes but one item of Kracauer's taxonomy.22 It falls under the broad category of "commentative" music, and rests alongside parallelism. Kra- cauer's second broad category is "actual" music, under which he places "incidental music" and the "production number." His final broad category is "music as the nucleus of the film."

Study of Kracauer's arrangement of aesthetic functions of film music reveals the difficulty of being functionally comprehensive while maintaining logic and retaining semantic neatness. It must be said that, to his credit, Kracauer is virtually all-embracing in his categorization of music in film. But because he uses terms such as "incidental" music as a discrete category, without concern for its long-established meaning in drama-he tends to be confusing. It is also difficult to accept, for example, Kracauer's niceness of distinction between "incidental" music and the "interlude or part of the environment" which he lists as a sub-category of "integration" under "pro- duction number."

19. Eisler, p. 70. 20. John Howard Lawson, Film: The Creative Process, 2nd ed. (New York: Hill and Wang,

1967), pp. 343-344; Paul Rotha, Rotha on the Film: A Selection of Writings About the Cinema (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1958), n. pp. 22-23.

21. Lawson, loc. cit. Italics supplied. When the present article was delivered before the Society for Cinema Studies, Mr. Lawson commented that he does not insist upon film music being limited to the contrapuntal role. He also recognizes its synchronous function of parallel- ing screen action and/or heightening the cutting rhythm. Nevertheless, he tends to emphasize the important notion of conflicting elements in the sound-film.

22. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press [Galaxy ed.]), 1965), pp. 133-156.

CINEMA JOURNAL / 45

Kracauer's discussion of the physiological function of silent film music is excellent, by the way, although Kurt London predated him by twenty- five years. Whereas Kracauer asserts that the function of music in silent film was "to adjust the spectator physiologically to the flow of images on the screen,"23 his predecessor, London, wrote that music was needed because of "the rhythm of film as an art of movement. We are not accustomed to apprehend movement ... without accompanying sound, or at least audible rhythms."24

THE VIEWPOINT OF COMPOSERS

Besides the contribution of aestheticians, we find attempts by composers (other than Eisler) to come to grips with the problems of combining music

and film. We have already alluded to the work of Maurice Jaubert, who deplored the use of music to annotate film action, synchronism for the sake of synchronism, music as sound mucilage. "The function of the film musician," he said, "[is] to feel the exact moment when the image escapes from strict realism and calls for the poetic extension of music."25 Jaubert felt that music should "make physically perceptible . . . the inner rhythm of the image, without struggling to provide a translation of its content, whether this be emotional, dramatic or poetic."26 In his canon, music was psycho- logically useful for transitions and allusions; its task was to serve the film, not to call attention to itself.

Other composers, such as Constant Lambert27 and Virgil Thomson,28 have dealt with film music with wit and perception; but it remained for Aaron Copland to take a pragmatic, no-nonsense approach to the subject. He particularly noted five functions of music in film: (1) assisting the establishment of atmosphere of time and place, (2) psychological under- lining, (3) neutral filling-in of dialogue gaps, (4) maintaining continuity, and (5) building climaxes and providing "a sense of finality."29 We can see at once that Copland and Jaubert share some notions, but that they disagree on others. The common thread they share with the aestheticians is the psychological function of music.

The main areas of agreement among theorists and practitioners appear to be those which Kracauer identifies as parallelism and counterpoint. There is a further body of opinion that supports the notion of music as an aid to continuity; another affirms the idea that music can heighten the

23. Ibid., p. 134. 24. London, p. 35. Italics in original. 25. Maurice Jaubert, "Music on the Screen," in Charles Davy (ed.), Footnotes to the Film

(London: Lovat Dickson Ltd., 1938), p. 109. 26. Ibid., p. 112. 27. See "Mechanical Music and the Cinema," in his Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline

(Hardmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1948), pp. 185-195. 28. See the section "Music and Photography," in his The State of Music, 2nd rev. ed.

(New York: Random House [Vintage Books], 1962), pp. 157-171. 29. Aaron Copland, What to Listen For in Music, rev. ed. (New York: The New American

Library [Mentor ed.], 1963), pp. 154-155.

46 / CINEMA JOURNAL

visual rhythm of the film. Nobody seems to deny the naturalistic use of music in dramatic films or documentaries. Terminology varies; semantic problems occasionally intervene. The foregoing principles appear to be established.

Yet there may be others. The world of film is so varied that one would indeed be bold to circumscribe the possibilities for music. There are all kinds of films, many kinds of music. Theatrical pictures are increasingly experimental, and film music styles are having to keep pace. We are in a period of neo-Dada, of anti-rationality. Because the arts of music and film are heavily involved in the game of chance encounter, it may be that the aesthetic principle for our time is no principle at all. Random happenings will be sought-or rather, allowed. To some of us, this means chaos. Maybe it is because the possibilities are so great we cannot comprehend them.

Hans Keller, the British musicologist, once said of film, "this complex medium of aesthetic expression is far too young and uneducated to issue any artistic commandments at all...."30 His remark points up the groping experienced by those who have attempted to set bounds on the aesthetics of music for film. As the possibilities for both film and music multiply, as cross-media approaches enable us to realize total experiences incompre- hensible a short while ago, perhaps it is futile for us even to try to establish limits. But, even as we peer over the new threshold, we must continue to see where we have been and where we now stand.

TOWARD A NEW FUNCTIONAL SYNTHESIS

It seems useful to summarize the many approaches to film music by attempting a new analysis, essentially based on Kracauer's taxonomy, while allowing for the contributions of other authorities in the field. The fol- lowing outline is offered as a reasonable beginning.

It will be observed that the six categories as charted do not include Kracauer's "music as nucleus of the film," for in the author's judgment this category is not truly part of a functional taxonomy. Nevertheless, it is an aspect of film music which Kracauer and others have discussed under aesthetic implications. Such a nuclear role may occur when the picture reinforces the music, reversing the usual realtionships-that is, performed music is visualized by realist photography or by animation or other graphic design. Nuclear music also includes filmed opera, ballet, concerts, and the musical film. Nuclear music essentially determines the visual continuity of the film; in the six categories of the outline, the visual and aural portions of the film determine the kind and amount of music to be included in the soundtrack.

Close examination reveals that the categories can overlap-categories I and II, for example. Again, category III music can simultaneously estab- lish mood or retreat to a mood-setting function. Categories IV and VI

30. Hans Keller, "Film Music-British Music: Perspective," in Eric Blom (ed.), Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1955), III, 102.

CINEMA JOURNAL / 47

might be combined, if one would grant that a lack of pace (in terminal music) can ever be called dynamic. The fact is that functional music does not lend itself to nice categorization, but it is helpful to sort out the com- plications as a basis for production decisions and critical judgments.

A FUNCTIONAL TAXONOMY OF FILM MUSIC

I. INTRODUCTORY AND DESCRIPTIVE MUSIC A. Psychologically adjusts audiences by establishing general moods. B. Provides information as to initial and succeeding settings:

1. Period. 2. Location.

II. MooD (BACKGROUND) MusIC A. Intensifies apparent mood of sequence by synchronous:

1. Imitation (Mickey-Mousing). 2. Evocation (overall treatment).

B. Provides ironic contrast of sequence mood by asynchronous counterpoint. III. REALISTIC (SOURCE) MusIC

Provides musical realism by: A. Using justified incidental music. B. Integrating production number(s) in the film story.

IV. DYNAMIC MUSIC A. Emphasizes cutting rhythm. B. Provides continuity by:

1. Connecting dialogue sections with neutral filler. 2. Carrying on development of thought.

C. Psychologically advances action by: 1. Providing transitions. 2. Building climaxes and preparing further action.

V. IMITATIVE (ONOMATOPOEIC) MusIC A. Imitates mechanical or natural sounds other than human. B. Imitates human speech or utterances (screams, sighs, moans, etc.).

VI. SUSPENSORY AND TERMINAL MUSIC A. Suspends action. B. Terminates film.