I thought it might be interesting to have a look at the way music is used across the various films nominated for Academy Awards this year (only the ones I've seen, which unfortunately isn't as many as I would like). I'll be looking at and listening to the following eleven films in this post, the list including the awards for which they are nominated and a quick description of the way music is used.
1. 12 Years a Slave (Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Production Design, Costume Design, Editing)
Score by Hans Zimmer, with a great deal of diegetic music (music within the world of the film, usually onscreen) from the 19th century.
2. 20 Feet from Stardom (Documentary)
A music documentary, so lots of music onscreen.
3. American Hustle (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay, Production Design, Costume Design, Editing)
Mostly a compilation score (by which I mean pre-existing music used nondiegetically, that is as underscore/background music that the characters in the movie don't hear or for which the source isn't seen on screen), alternating with a new score by Danny Elfman.
4. Blue Jasmine (Actress, Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay)
Compilation score.
5. Frozen (Animated Feature, Song)
A musical, so obviously a lot of music: songs by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, score by Christophe Beck.
6. The Great Gatsby (Production Design, Costume Design)
Everything, including the kitchen sink.
7. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Visual Effects)
Score by Howard Shore.
8. Inside Llewyn Davis (Sound Mixing, Cinematography)
A film about musicians, so lots of music onscreen and off.
9. The Lone Ranger (Makeup and Hairstyling, Visual Effects)
Score by Hans Zimmer, with various quotations of other music.
10. Philomena (Picture, Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Score)
Score by Alexandre Desplat, with occasional diegetic music.
11. The Wolf of Wall Street (Picture, Actor, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay)
Compilation score.
These are only a few of the hundreds of films released over the past year, so they can hardly be considered a representative sample, but what's striking is the heterogeneity of the way music is used in this group. The symphonic score is alive and well, and the busiest composers at the moment are all represented here (Desplat seems to be writing music for half of the films that come out these days). No John Williams, but he's nominated for The Book Thief, which I haven't seen. There is also a lot of music happening onscreen as well, though my being a musicologist is obviously going to lead me to those types of films.
I'm going to go through each one, but let's get the question of taste out of the way first: my favourites of these are The Wolf of Wall Street and Inside Llewyn Davis. I didn't despise any of these eleven, but The Hobbit was a great disappointment and The Lone Ranger was a mess, albeit a frequently amusing one. My vote for Best Picture would be The Wolf of Wall Street, though had Llewyn Davis been nominated it would have been a very tough decision between them. I'm more interested in narrative film, so 20 Feet from Stardom, a documentary, doesn't really fit within this discussion. That said, however, the film, which concerns the lives of the backup singers who worked for big-name groups from the 1960s to the present, is one of the best documentaries I've seen. The director Morgan Neville alternates interviews with the singers with concert footage, both recent and archival, and gives the audience a well-rounded view of these signers and why they do what they do. So see it if you haven't yet.
Compilation Scores: American Hustle, Blue Jasmine, The Wolf of Wall Street
These three are brought together by the fact that they are scored predominantly with pre-existing music. The previous post on The Wolf of Wall Street described some of the clever ways in which Martin Scorsese used music to convey a wide variety of affects to the audience (that's affect as in Affektenlehre). David O. Russell is after something similar in American Hustle, though his movie has more in common musically with Scorsese's earlier work, where the music used to score the film is drawn from the lives of the characters. The film takes place in the 1970s, and the music dates from that time. Russell isn't as adept at Scorsese in this, however (is anyone?). Where Scorsese was careful to use music the characters would have actually listened to in order to draw them together into an aurally-constructed community, Russell's goal is simple scene- and mood-setting. Mostly we've got rock and disco to tell us that we're in the 70s, in case the hair wasn't enough, though Duke Ellington does play a role in the plot. There is also some new underscore by Danny Elfman, but I can't remember anything about it. In all I was a bit disappointed with the music in American Hustle, since even though it sets the stage well it doesn't really go much beyond that to actually comment on what we're seeing. Russell's previous film, Silver Linings Playbook, was rather more interesting musically, as the final dance sequence could be seen as summing up musically the various aspects of the relationship of the two main characters and their neuroses. But that's for a future post. Blue Jasmine shows off Woody Allen's taste in music as do all of his other films, and his choices are just as successful here. One would never think that the best way to score a drama that mixes Tennessee Williams with Bernie Madoff would be to use early jazz and blues, but it works beautifully. Anyone other than Allen wouldn't be able to do it, but Allen is probably the only person who would want to. The song lyrics or titles often comment on the scene (A Good Man is Hard to Find, indeed) and 'Blue Moon' is a recurring motive within the diegesis. I thought this was a very fine film with consistent and clever use of music, but it doesn't have anything in it as wonderful as the murder scene in Match Point set to Verdi's Otello, the opening Gershwin-scored montage that opens Manhattan, or the motivic use of 'September Song' in Radio Days. Still, competence and intelligence in the use of music is pretty rare these days, so all praise to Allen for doing it.
New Scores: The Hobbit, The Lone Ranger, Philomena
Howard Shore's score for the second Hobbit movie was more of the same stuff we've had so much of already in the first Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Step one: write some dramatic choral music in Elvish; Step two: find a funny instrument (like cimbalom or hardingfele); Step three: use low instruments when underground and high instruments when flying; etc. It's all very well if you like that stuff, which I did when LOTR was first coming out, but I don't find it very interesting anymore. Shore is at least a very competent composer; very few would be able to write so much music without too much repetition. Zimmer and his composing collective's score for The Lone Ranger was quite unmemorable, just Pirates of the Caribbean with some nods to Jerome Moross. The only exciting musical moment was during the finale when the music bursts into the William Tell Overture with a cheekily extended trumpet fanfare that plays with our expectations of when the theme proper is going to start, then continues to play with increasingly grandiose variations and modulations that get deliciously absurd. I wish the rest of the score had had that much wit. That also might have helped the film get a better reception than it did; much of the criticism was about inconsistency of tone, and a more consistently lighthearted score could have mitigated that. Alexandre Desplat's Philomena score, though nominated for the Best Score Oscar, was of the type that would have Adorno and Eisler rolling in their graves. It mostly keeps a low profile and could just as well have been done without. It may seem a funny thing for a musicologist to say, but my view of film scoring is that if a scene doesn't need music it shouldn't have any. Most of The Hobbit does need music because it goes with the epic territory and enhances the excitement being created by the editing, and the music also gives temporal continuity to complex sequences. The final sequence of The Lone Ranger needs music because you can't have the Lone Ranger without his theme tune. But a small-scale melodrama about a woman trying to find her long-lost son doesn't need much underscoring, at least not as shot by Stephen Frears and acted by Steve Coogan and Judi Dench. A film score often becomes a crutch on which to hang unconfident directing, editing, and acting, but Judi Dench certainly does not need such a crutch. Philomena would have been a much braver film if her performance could have had its effect on its own terms, without saccharine music telling the audience what they already know.
The other four films will be discussed in the next post. Look out, Adorno fans: he'll be making an appearance in relation to 12 Years a Slave.
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