days five and six

All That Heaven Allows, 1955, Dir. Douglas Sirk

     Throughout the 1955 film, All That Heaven Allows, there’s an even balance present between diegetic and non-diegetic music. Whenever Mrs. Scott is placed in an ordinary and expected situation for a woman in the 1950s, the music affiliated with the activity is diegetic. Whether it’s the music on the radio her daughter selects, or the background music at the country club, a source can be identified. Moreover, when Mrs. Scott is placed in foreign territory, a shift occurs in the music from diegetic to non-diegetic. This shift can be foreseen as Mrs. Scott’s transition from her reality, where one can see all that’s around, to a fantasy life that isn’t as clear and concise, but vivacious.

     The non-diegetic music of the film can be associated to Mrs. Scott’s perception of love. As Harvey asks for her hand in marriage after their evening at the country club, a hesitant and distant theme accompanies the characters’ proceeding dialogue and actions. Soon after, when the remainder of her yard work has been completed by Mr. Kirby, he asks her to visit his green house. This is the second time non-diegetic music is used to portray Mrs. Scott’s perception of love, and ultimately becomes their leitmotif. Their leitmotif is an uplifting concerto that bounces back and forth from a lead pianist and violinist. This leitmotif carries through the rest of the film, although it takes a hiatus from the moment Mrs. Scott calls off their engagement, to the instant she visits the the miller house after the holidays. As the primary source of music throughout the film, variations of the score do occur. As an example from the scene Mrs. Scott calls off her engagement, suspense is articulated with the music’s key change, as well as by the tremolo applied to the violin line when she states “it’s all over.”

 

Lady in a Cage, 1964, Dir. Walter Grauman

     As the 1960s began to take shape, American films were drastically transitioning. Methods of production began to shift as the big-name studios fell from power, and out spouted an immense amount of independent studios throughout the nation. Not only would this create a grand sense of competition, but it would additionally wipe the notion that studios are identified by a certain type of film genre or technique.

     During this period of transition, prominent film techniques experienced a drastic transformation as well. The balance between music and visuals has deteriorated from the principles set forth by mutual implication and in turn, an audience is left with minimal music accompaniment. This lack of music evokes the feeling that the events that are occurring throughout the film are realistic and could be experienced on a day-to-day basis outside of the theatre. In the film Lady in a Cage, the music is minimal and primarily occurs diegetically. My perception of the film was greatly influenced by the opening credits and the manner in which it was completed. Although the opening theme successfully set the stage for the anxiety the film would induce in its viewers, what was more influential were the visual effects added in post-production. All of the abstract shapes that were incorporated were reminiscent of suprematism, an art movement prominent in Russia after 1913. The intention of the movement was to induce a sense of pure feeling from the most basic visual components of shapes and colors, which can be seen in Malevich’s video work, Suprematism. With the lack of music in Lady in a Cage, this same sensation of pure feeling is present as the protagonist is representative of this ordinary façade that is able to pull empathy from its audience as she’s the only morally competent individual in the film.

     Refocusing our attention to the diegetic music of the film, I feel as if the scenes affiliated with the music-playing cigar box could easily be a synopsis for the film. The melody creates a pure and innocent feeling, although the events that are transpiring are quite the opposite. This melody is experienced three times throughout the film: first when the son leaves home, second when Elaine is dancing in the living room and third during the murder. In a sense, the three events can continually circulate in that same order as the idea of death is prominent in the mind of the Mrs. Hilyard’s son. The same child-like feeling can also be representative of Mrs. Hilyard as an individual, as she’s oblivious and helpless throughout the film, in the same manner a child that is lost and unknowledgeable of their surroundings would be.

one, My Huckleberry Friend: Mancini, "Moon River," and Breakfast at Tiffany's by Jeff Smith

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two, TV Jazz--For Good or Ill? by John Tynan

•  "'People are beginning to accept more and more the principle of humor in advertising. What we're after is to make our commercials humorous and musically memorable. We've found that people remember our jingles and sing them because of the good jazz beat.'" (Tynan, pg. 2)
• "Prevailing scale for AFM (American Federation of Musicians) members on such dates is $27 a sideman for the first hour and $18 an hour after that. If the spot commercial is used on TV and radio,t he musicians get a double check. But residuals are out of the question." (Tynan, pg. 2)
• "What is the AFM doing about correcting this situation? Max Herman, vice president of Los Angeles Local 47, blames it all on Cecil Read's Musicians Guild of America, which he says, is holding up acceptance of new contracts containing residual provisions "Because they want to be the bargaining agent.'" (Tynan, pg. 3)

three, Prejudices and Bad Habits by Theodor Adorno and Hans Eisler

• "All art, as a means of filling out leisure time, has become entertainment, although it absorbs materials and forms of traditional autonomous art as part of the so-called "cultural heritage." ... Art that does not yield is completely shut off from consuption and driven into isolation. Everything is taken apart, robbed of its real meaning, and then put together again. The only criterion of this procedure is that of reaching the consumer as effectively as possible. Manipulated art is consumer's art." (Adorno, pg. 46)
• "A discussion of industrialized culture must show the interaction of these two factors: the aesthetic potentialities of mass art in the future and its ideological character at present." (Adorno, pg. 47)
• The leitmotif:
• "...they are also a practical help to the composer in his task of composition under pressure. He can quote where he otherwise would have to invent ... The atomization of the musical element is paralleled by the heroic dimensions of the composition as a whole. Ths relation is entirely absent in the motion picture, which requires continual interruption of one element by another rather than continuity ... The effective technique of the past thus becomes a mere duplication, ineffective and uneconomical." (Adorno, pg. 27)
• Melody and euphony:
• "Melody was conceived as the opposite of the "theme" ... It denotes a tonal sequence, constituting not so much the point of departure of a composition as a self-contained entity that is easy to listen to, singable, and expressive." (Adorno, pg. 28)
• "'Natural" melody is a figment of the imagination, an extremely relative phenomenon illegitimately absolutized, neither an obligatory nor a priori constituent of the material, but one procedure among many, singled out for exclusive use ... All music in the motion picture is under the sign of utility, rather than lyric expressiveness." (Adorno, pg. 28)
• "As a result, there is a gap between what is happening on the screen and the symmetrically articulated conventional melody. A photographed kiss can not actually be synchronized with an eight-bar phrase. The disparity between symmetry and asymmetry becomes particularly striking when music is used to accompany natural phenomena..." (Adorno, pg. 28)
•  Inobstrusiveness:
• "One of the most widespread prejudices in the motion-picture industry is the premise that the spectator should not be conscious of the music ... Music thus far has not been treated in accordance with its specific potentialities. It is tolerated as an outsider who is somehow regarded as being indespensable, partly because of a genuine need and partly on account of the fetishistic idea that the existing technical resources must be exploited to the fullest extent ... the music is supposed to be inconspicuous in the same sense as are selections from La Boheme played in a restaurant." (Adorno, pg. 29)
• Visual justification:
• "The fear that the use of music at a point when it would be completely impossible in a real situation will appear naive or childish, or impose upon the listener an effort of imagination that might distract him from the main issue, leads to attempts ot justify this use in a more or less rationalistic way ... Music becomes a plot accessory, a sort of acoustical stage property." (Adorno, pg. 30)
•  Illustration:
•  "Music must follow visual incidents and illustrate them either by directly imitating them or by using cliches that are associated with the mood and content of the picture ... The ranch to which the virile hero has eloped with the sophisticated heroine is accompanied by forest murmurs and a flute melody ... the associative patterns are so familiar that there is really no illustration of anything, but only the elicitation of the automatic response: "Aha, nature!'" (Adorno, pg. 31)
• "But in the cinema, both picture and dialogue are hyperexplicit. Conventional music can add nothing to the explicitness, but instead may detract from it, since even the worst pictures standardized musical effects fail to keep up with the concrete elaboration of the screen action." (Adorno, pg. 31)
• "Musical illustration should either be hyperexplicit itself--over-illuminating, so to speak, and thereby interpretive--or should be omitted.," (Adorno, pg. 31)
•  Geography and history:
• "Here music is used in much the same way as costumes or sets, but without as strong a characterizing effect. A composer can attain something more convincing by writing a tune of his own on the basis of a village dance for little Dutch girls than he can by clinging to the original." (Adorno, pg. 31)
•  "Related to this is the practice of investing costume pictures with music of the corresponding historical period. This recalls concerts in which hoop-skirted elderly ladies play tedious pre-Bach harpsichord pieces by candlelight in baroque palaces. The absurdity of such "applied art" arrangements is glaring in contrast with the technique of the film, which is of necessity modern." (Adorno, pg. 32)
• Cliches:
•  "Today the whole-tone scale is stuffed into the introduction of every popular hit, yet in motion pictures it continues to be used as if it had just seen the light of day. thus the means employed and the effect achieved are completely proportionate. Such a disproportion can have a certain charm when, as in animated cartoons, it serves to stress the absurdity of something impossible ... But the whole-tone scale so overworked in the amusement industry can no longer cause anyone really to shudder." (Adorno, pg. 33)
• Standardized interpretation:
• "[On standardization of dynamics] The different degrees of strength are levelled and blurred to a general mezzoforte--incidentally, this practice is qute  analogous to the habits of the mixer in radio broadcasting. The main purpose here is the production of a comfortable and polished euphony, which neither startles by its power (fortissimo) nor requires attentive listening because of its weakness (pianissimo)." (Adorno, pg. 33)
• "The perpetually used espressivo has become completely work out. Even effective dramatic incidents are made trite by oversweet accompaniment or offensive overexposition. A "middle-ground," objective musical type of interpretation that resorts to the espressivo only where it is really justified could by its economy greatly enhance the effectiveness of motion-picture music." (Adorno, pg. 34)

four, Eisler/Adorno's Critique by Claudia Gorbman

• "The administrative rationalization of culture has led to the standardizing of cultural production: works produced in this system share a "sameness" as they serve and affirm the existing order ... The culture industry produces standardized works for mass consumption, materials that serve as "entertainment." The artwork has become a product, a commodity, and its value is judged solely in terms of its exchange-value." (Gorbmon, pg. 101)
• "Motion-picture production is entirely divorced from that living contact with the audience, which is still operative in every stage performance; the alleged will of the public is manifested only indirectly, through the box-office receipts, that is to say, in a completely reified form." (Eisler, pg. 106)
• "A contradiction inheres in the cinema: between the remoteness of its mass production, and the immediate, "here and now" quality of its images. The studio further plans a film not for the meaning of its component details in the film's formal whole, but for their immediate audience effects. Cultural values, not the filmic form, mediate textual details. It is presumed that audiences desire formulas and tried-and-proven effects: details that bear instant, automatic signification and which may be "read," and thus consumed, with ease and passivity." (Gorbmon, pg. 106)
• "[Gorbmon's to Eisler/Adorno Critique on studio music] First, such music aims directly at "suturing" (immediacy) effects, along with other standard devices such as the close-up, the matching of sound and image, and continuity editing. Music aids and abets the standard film's illusion of reality, of immediate life--the illusion that we are not mechanized ... Eisler would wish for a film-musical practice that would lay bare the image's mediated nature; instead, the classical film masks it." (Gorbmon, pg. 106)
• "The swell of emotion music can provoke, the epic dimension it can contribute to the experience of the narrative event, is put to calculated use in Hollywood. This use masks a contradiction: between music's "direct relationship to a collectivity," and its rationalized, technified deployment in commercial film." (Gorbmon, pg, 108)
• "As we have seen, the classical film score encourages identification: emotional proximity through the use of culturally familiar musical language and through a matching, an identity of sound and image which masks contradictions and posits a wholeness with which to identify unproblematically as subject. It is this situation that Adorno and Eisler criticize most insistently. Elsewhere Adorno puts such music in its place: "Identification with it compensates for the universal defeat that is the law of each individual life. Just as poor old women shed tears at a wedding of strangers, the consumed music is the eternal strangers' wedding for all.'" (Gorbmon, pg. 108)

five, The Acousmêtre by Michel Chion

• "Human vision, like that of cinema, is partial and directional. hearing, though, is omnidirectional ... Sight is generally what we rely on for orientation, because the naming and recognition of forms is vastly more subtle and precise in visual terms than with any other channel of perception." (Chion, pg. 17)
• "The sense of hearing is as subtle as it is archaic. We mot often relegate it to the limbo of the unnamed; something you hear causes you to feel X, but you can't put exact words to it." (Chion, pg. 17)
• "Acousmatic, specifies an old dictionary, "is said of a sound that is heard without its cause or source being seen." ... Since his term is ambiguous, we prefer to speak of visualized listening. The talking film naturally began with visualized sound (often called synchronous or onscreen sound). But it quickly turned to experimenting with acousmatic sound--not only music but more importantly the voice." (Chion, pg. 18)
• "We should emphasize that between one (visualized) situation and the other (acousmatic) one, it's not the sound that changes its nature, presence, distance, or color. What changes is the relationship between what we see and what we hear. The murderer's voice is just as well-defined when we don't see him as in any shot where we do. When we listen to a film without watching it, it is impossible to distinguish acousmatic from visualized sounds solely on the basis of the soundtrack. Just listening, without the images, "acousmatizes" all the sounds, if they retain no trace of their initial relation to the image. (And in this case, the aggregate of sounds heard becomes a true "sound track," a whole)." (Chion, pg. 19)
• "When the acousmatic presence is a voice, and especially when this voice has not yet been visualized--that is, when we cannot yet connect it to a face--we get a special being, a kidn of talking and acting shadow to which we attach the name acousmetre.  A person you talk to on the phone, who you've never seen, is an acousmetre. If you have ever seen her ... [it's] of another kind, which we'll call the already visualized acousmetre." (Chion, pg. 21)
• "Being involved in the image means that the voice doesn't merely speak as an observer (as commentary), but that it bears witth the image a relationship of possible inclusion, a relationship of power and possession capable of functioning in both directions' the image may contain the voice, or the voice may contain the image." (Chion, pg. 23)
• "The acousmetre, as we have noted, cannot occupy the removed position of commentator, the voice of the magic lantern show. He must, even if only slightly, have one foot in the image, in the space of the filmj' he must haunt the borderlands that are neither the interior of the filmic stage nor the proscenium--a place that has no name, but which the cinema forever brings into play." (Chion, pg. 24)
•  "[On the powers of the acousmetre] The powers are four: the ability to be everywhere, to see all, to know all, and to have complete power. In other words: ubiquity, panopticism, omniscience, and omnipotence." (Chion, pg. 24)
• "The acousmetre is everywhere, its voice comes from an immaterial and non-localized body, and it seems that no obstacle can stop it." (Chion, pg. 24)
• "The acousmetre is all-seeing, its word is like the word of God: "No creature can hide from it.'" (Chion, pg. 24)
• "The acousmetre's omniscience and omnipotence ... [Seeing all] implies knowing all; knowledge has been assimilated into the capacity to see internally. Also implied is omnipotence, or at the least the possession of certain powers whose nature or extent can vary..." (Chion, pg. 27)
• "The most disconcerting, in fact, is not when we attribute unlimited knowledge to the acousmetre, but rather when its vision and knowledge have limits whose dimensions we do not know. The idea of a god who sees and knows all ... is almost natural. Much more disturbing is the idea of a god or being with only partial powers and vision, whose limits are not known." (Chion, pg. 26)
• "As long as the face and mouth have not been completely revealed, and as long as the spectator's eye has not "verified" the co-incidence of the voice with the mouth (a verification which needs only to be approximate), de-acousmatization is incomplete, and the voice remains an aura of invulnerability and magical power." (Chion, pg. 28)