Andrew McAlister
Emory University
Royal Brown's Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music
synthesizes a variety of approaches to film music in its 396 pages. Were
the variety a bit more inclusive, Overtones would be more durably
relevant, and less self-contained.
Brown, chair of Film Studies at Queens College and contributor to
Fanfare and High Fidelity, has fashioned an important source book for
students and professional scholars interested in the complex relationship
between music and film. Combining analyses of scores by Erich Wolfgang
Korngold and Miklos Rozsa and close readings of important film/music
collaborations (Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, Eisenstein and
Prokofiev) Brown has addressed texts critical to his topic without
neglecting an historical perspective on the understudied topic of the role
of film music in the impact of a given work.
Brown emphasizes those works and artists who exemplify "rich
film/music interactions" (2) in an attempt to "scrutinize [music's]
interactions with the other arts that contribute to the cinema." (1) What
follows is essentially a textual consideration of these interactions. In
the course of it, Brown traces the uneven historical progression from
"invisible" film music which often elevates character action to a
"mythic" level (in short, a level removed from historical reality), to a
more parallel relationship of film music and narrative events, in which
music is more of an equal partner in the creation of filmic affect.
Music, then, rather than serving as an analogy for and/or complement to
the cinema's musical structures, has instead, for the most part, been
pitted against visual structure in a kind of dialectic that plays
representational prejudices against nonrepresentational ones. (22)
Later, in "Music as Image as Music," his concluding consideration of film
music and postmodernism, he says of more contemporary film:
...The music, rather than supporting and/or coloring the visual images and
narrative situations, stands as an image in its own right, helping the
audience read the film's other images as such rather than as a replacement
for or imitation of objective reality. (239-240)
Since this is a chapter on postmodernism, Baudrillard naturally
has a phrase for this, and Brown uses his "ecstasy of musicality" to
describe how film music, unconstrained within the frame by the conventions
of classical (invisible, nonrepresentational) scoring, can both lend its
nonrepresentational, or "mythic" power to the filmic events, and, through
deliberately visible editing of visual and music (or audience familiarity
with the chosen soundtrack), function as another representational (or
symbolic) element in a film's diegesis. In a rare cultural observation,
Brown partly ascribes this audience familiarity to the popularization of
classical music through the proliferation of vinyl and CD recordings since
the era of the classically and invisibly scored motion picture. This, he
says, popularized the consumption of classical music detached from all
human involvement save operation of a phonograph or CD player, in term
contributing to the perception of later film music as an autonomous
element of the film experience.
As an analysis of the history of film music, the book is very
useful. However, it only cursorily treats the latest developments in the
industrial packaging of films and film music. Envisioning a future in
which films will be marketed "not as a fixed objet d'art for passive
consumption" but as "a kind of software package, a collection of shots
and/or sequences subject to manipulation at will by the user" (266), Brown
neglects similar software designed to manipulate the user back into a
passive consumerism. Examples could include the limited releases on video
of the latest Disney offerings, the aggressive, pop star-centered
marketing of these same films' soundtracks, and a number of other films
notable for their two-front approach to film and pop music, such as
Saturday Night Fever (1977), Urban Cowboy (1980), Footloose (1984) and The
Bodyguard (1992). Brown misses an opportunity to combine his historical,
textual analysis with scrutiny of trends toward traditional narrativity
designed to exploit multimedia markets. Robert Altman's Nashville (1975),
which Brown lauds for its postmodern employment of diegetic music, posits
the "(post)modern individual...as a materialistic nonentity waiting, like
the filmic character, to become an image given affective substance and
dramatic importance by music." (245) In addition to The Big Chill (1982),
Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and the ubiquitous, but too-recent Forrest
Gump, this image is relevant to many contemporary films which perhaps do
not exhibit novel on-screen use of score or soundtrack, but bear
discussion as exemplary of the issues (specifically of postmodern
image-making through the use of film music, and the exhaustion or
anachronistic quality of the invisible, classical score) Brown uses film
music to approach.
Having brought film music to a fecund relevancy in the study of
film and beyond, Brown chooses not to predict new paradigmatic shifts in
the medium, citing Fredric Jameson to the effect that "artists of the
present day will no longer be able to invent new styles and
worlds--they've already been invented." (264) And there's the rub. While
the artistic variations may be exhausted, or simply encompassed by
existing critical language, the economic innovation in motion picture
marketing and distribution continues. Insightful as Brown's discussion of
innovative scores and soundtracks such as Diva, The Hunger, Liquid Sky, A
Man of Flowers and other recent films is, it is still primarily textual
and historical. Some new films will, as he notes, contribute to the
"inexhaustible variations" of film/music interaction, but many will have
as determinant factors in their creation synergistic cross-marketing with
other entertainment industries and strategic deployment of complementary
products after their theatrical run, and these film/packages could easily
alter the relationship of film and music within the frame.
In short, Brown's analytical style, even given its lip service to
the idea of the individual subject as a modernist construct, seems
reluctant to fully inculcate current discourses on the industrial
determinacy of film form. Brown acknowledges the malleability of film as
product (the artistic text...has begun to lose its illusory aura of
performance, its deceptive status as a kind of inviolable icon" [265]),
but chooses not to address ways in which contemporary commercial film is
always already overdetermined for maximum audience appeal. When one
considers the current popularity of "high concept" packaging, especially
in American film, using textual novelty as a criterion for analysis seems
more incomplete than anachronistic.
Despite this, the book has much to offer. In addition to extensive
bibliography and discographies, Brown provides a number of useful and
engaging extras. He reprints his interviews with eight prominent composers
featured in his analysis (Rozsa, David Raksin, Herrmann, Henry Mancini,
Maurice Jarre, Lalo Schifrin, John Barry and Howard Shore) in all their
pith. Herrmann, notably, pontificates on everything from Hitchcock's shift
to more popular music ("He said he was entitled to a great pop tune. I
said, 'Look, Hitch, you can't outjump your own shadow, and you don't make
pop pictures.'") to the use of pre-existing music in films ("I think it's
stupid. What's it got to do with the film? Nothing. Cover it with
chocolate ice cream, that's about it!"). (290-291)
Also included is a ten-page outline entitled "How to Hear a Movie"
that provides a structured approach to investigating critical questions of
authorship, style, and employment of filmic devices. Brown's outline
weighs heavily on the function of music within film, with special
attention to the relationship of diegetic and nondiegetic sound. The
outline should prove extremely valuable for readers of all levels
attempting to organize their thoughts and deepen their understanding of
film music.
The same goes for the book. Rather intensive as a monograph for
all but direct investigations into the relationship of film and music, and
a bit limited by its textual approach, Overtones and Undertones is
nonetheless versatile and helpful in its component parts as an
introduction and thorough investigation of the aesthetics of film music.
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