Monday 9 February 2015

Leit-musique vs the Modular Film Score

In his two-volume tome Stravinsky and the Russian Tradition Richard Taruskin mentions Igor Stravinsky's subsequent loathing of what the composer derivatively termed the 'leit-musique' in his 1910 ballet The Firebird. This is the descriptive plot-bearing music that was liquidated from all three of the suites Stravinsky culled from the ballet (the last, dating from 1945, which Stravinsky suggested should replace the full ballet score even when choreographed). The music consists mostly of bits of previously- or later-developed themes (Leitmotifs) that float through a rather nebulous sometimes-tonal sometimes-octatonic pitch space. Stravinsky didn't like this music because it was too descriptive, subjective, and emotional, three things the composer in his subsequent arch-Modernist guise could not support. At least the main dances could be detached from their context and studied as pure music. To hear how this works, listen to the 'Magic Carillon' (reh. 98 in the original score) through to the Dance of Kastchei's Retinue (reh. 126). The main theme of Kastchei's Dance gradually starts to form out of the musical ether at the beginning of this section, but Stravinsky delays a full statement until the dance itself six minutes later. Fragments of other themes float through, and the music is highly descriptive of what would be happening onstage, having clearly been worked on in close collaboration with choreographer Michel Fokine.

Whatever we think of Stravinsky's rejection of the descriptive music (which according to Taruskin is actually the most interesting music in the ballet, and the culmination of this kind of balletic scoring), it is clear that the 'classical' Hollywood film score operates on very much the same principles as this 'leit-musique': dramatically descriptive, motivic music of rapidly shifting tonality sometimes coalescing into fully-stated themes. Max Steiner and Erich Korngold are excellent exemplars of this technique in its early days. In Steiner's score for Casablanca, fragments of 'As Time Goes By' are heard throughout the film, alerting to the audience to the past relationship between Rick and Elsa even when the dialogue is not specifically alluding to it. At the emotional climaxes the full theme is stated. The recent master of the technique is John Williams, without a doubt the most influential film composer of the last forty years. The opening sequence of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, featuring River Phoenix as young Indy and an adventure on a train, provides a good example. The cue is called 'Indy's Very First Adventure' on the soundtrack album. The music is there to pull the story along, just as it is in the Firebird, and at first it is mostly unmelodic, meandering around various keys. Occasionally Williams will give us a snippet of melody or cadence-directed harmony, usually when something on the visual track is meant to induce wonder or excitement (for example, some Spanish-inflected music is heard as Indy discovers an antique cross in a cave and music with a more definite rhythmic contour plays as Indy runs across the top of a train). As the opening sequence progresses, allusions to the main Indiana Jones theme (the 'Raiders March') can be caught by astute ears (at 8'30'' in the horns and trombones, deconstructed melodically at 9'15'', just the beginning of the theme in the usual trumpets at 9'46'', and as very short points of imitation shortly after). At 10'30'' a foreshadowing statement of the Holy Grail theme can be heard, just as the block of leit-musique in Firebird that precedes the dance of Khashchei's subjects features hints of the dance's theme. Finally the cue ends (at 12 minutes!) with a near-complete statement of the Raiders March: the young scout has passed through his first adventure and grown into our hero. From its first major outing in Jaws in 1975, this neo-Steiner style dominated big-budget neo-classical Hollywood at least until the early 2000s.

But the past decade has seen a shift in the 'default' style of Hollywood music from leit-musique to a more modular-based scoring practice. In this style of scoring, repetition and variation of small melodic or harmonic cells governs the score rather than floating motives and themes. I would predict that Howard Shore's scores for the Lord of the Rings trilogy will be seen as the last hurrah of the earlier style; since then it seems that the majority of scores that the public has really noticed have been of the modular type, notably Hans Zimmer's scores for Christopher Nolan's Inception and the same director's Batman films (composed in collaboration with James Newton Howard), the scores by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for David Fincher's The Social Network and Gone Girl, and various scores by two other big names in film music at the moment, Alexandre Desplat and Thomas Newman. While it is in action movies that these scores are most noticeable (largely because of the quantity and decibel-level of the music), the style extends to every sort of film, just as the leit-musique style did previously. Animated movies are usually scored more conservatively than live action, but Newman's scores for Pixar films show how pervasive the modular style is: in Finding Nemo there is really no 'Nemo theme' and 'Dory theme', but rather a texture of repeating figures that are carefully manipulated by Newman to match the onscreen action or emotion. Compare his cousin Randy Newman's more traditional scores for the Toy Story films. Newman's Finding Nemo and Wall-E, or Desplat's scores for Wes Anderson, show that this technique can be just as sophisticated as leit-musique (I can't even imagine a motivic score working for Anderson). But just like leit-musique the modular score is easily abused; in some of the more inane superhero or science fiction movies the pounding of the repeated figures becomes unbearable. Zimmer's score for Interstellar forces the audience into submission rather then offering them an intelligent way into this tricky film.

Where does this modular music come from? The (perhaps too) obvious answer is that is is derived from concert minimalism by composers like post avant-garde Philip Glass and John Adams. This film music would fit nicely into Robert Fink's thesis of recombinant teleology in music (which takes in minimalism, disco, and the Suzuki method among other things), arguing that this type of music is based on repetition on a micro level to create development at the macro level. A possible influence within film music is Bernard Herrmann, who favoured repeating patterns over melodic themes, though the effect of his scores is usually quite different from that of Zimmer's or Desplat's. The driving music in Vertigo and Psycho does have a great deal in common with these modular scores, but Vertigo's music is always in search of cadential resolution, a feature borrowed from Tristan und Isolde, which modular music usually is not. The pattern repeats until it stops, often quite suddenly. But the musical technique in Vertigo's driving scenes is similar, if not the musical goal. Herrmann sets up a cell-based pattern, usually rhythmic, which he varies through orchestration and register but which retains its fundamental identity as a cell. Herrmann works within the bounds of tonality, knowing that by delaying resolution the audience will share Scottie's frustration as he tries to figure out the mysterious Madeleine.

Film scholar David Bordwell writes about 'intensified continuity' in the filmmaking of the past few decades, where directors, cinematographers, and editors use the basic language of classical Hollywood film but use more and faster cuts, more variations in close-up and long shot, and more camera movement. The use of a modular score that develops slowly and continuously rather than offering fragments floating through the texture might mitigate the sensory discombobulation caused by the rapid imagery. But that would not explain the effectiveness of modular scores in Wes Anderson's films (I'm thinking particularly of Desplat's scores for Fantastic Mr Fox and The Grand Budapest Hotel), as Anderson rarely moves his camera and favours planimetric shots. Perhaps with Anderson we are meant to notice the small variations that Desplat puts into the modules as the films run past. His most interesting scores have been for Anderson.

The rise of modular score might also be a symptom of a lack of desire for melody or 'theme'. Can anyone think of a movie theme more recent than those for Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings that have served as a major signifier for the film in which they appear? Frozen is the obvious exception, but as an animated musical it is a rather different kettle of fish. Perhaps the days of tune-plugging are over, not necessarily a bad thing. Similar trends can be heard in popular music, with the rise of beat-based music out of underground clubs and into the mainstream.

This clearly requires more thought (and more film-viewing), but this trend seems quite obvious, and would warrant discussion even if Zimmer, Desplat, Newman, and Reznor/Ross were its only practitioners, so important have their scores been. Of the films I've seen recently, the one that takes the modular scoring farthest is Gone Girl, which has nearly wall-to-wall music and very subtle variations on simple material based on the scene being played. Reznor and Ross are playing the scenes in a similar way to early Stravinsky or Williams, but using the language of modular development rather than leit-musique. Of course this isn't the only way that films are scored now, I'm merely claiming that it is a prominent trend. Leit-musique is still around, as are alternative approaches like Jonny Greenwood's Messiaen-influenced music for Paul Thomas Anderson, or Martin Scorsese's continued genius in scoring films with pre-existing music. But it seems that the big-budget, award-winning scores are mostly of the modular type.