What I'm Working On: Wes Anderson, Political Monteverdi, and James Dean

I've been neglecting this blog, so I thought an easy way to get back into it would be to give a quick overview of my current projects. In addition to the usual preparation of teaching duties I have three conference papers in the pipeline, all of which I hope to get published after receiving some live feedback. The first is a presentation for the New Zealand School of Music's Music Forum series of lectures on July 18. This will be probably the final talk version of my work on Wes Anderson before it gets sent out for publication. It's called '"What's This Music? The Performance of Recordings in the Films of Wes Anderson', and it's an expanded version of the paper I gave at the American Musicological Society conference in November. I'll have 45 minutes instead of 20, so will be able to go more in-depth with the material and show some longer film clips. It's really an examination of the ontology of 'performance' rather than a piece of film musicology, as I use scenes from Wes Anderson's films as examples to think about whether playing someone a recording can be considered a performative act. I think it's rather interesting (though I wrote it, after all), but its interdisciplinary nature makes it tricky to decide on the best journal to publish it in. That is not a decision to be taken lightly, because such is the state of academic publishing that wherever it goes it will be weeks, even months, before I get a response either way. The NZSM will probably film the presentation and put it on their website, so people unable to get to Wellington will be able to see it.

Next up is a flashback to my doctoral dissertation with a paper in September on the politicisation of Monteverdi's operas in the early twentieth century at a conference on the early music revival at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, Early Music Revivals and their Neoclassical Echoes. This is to be drawn from the first chapter of the dissertation. The research itself isn't particularly groundbreaking, but I give a unique spin on it by comparing the reception of Monteverdi across countries rather than sticking to just France, Germany, or Italy. Looking internationally shows that Monteverdi's music serves as a microcosm of wider aesthetic differences caused by the varied politics of those three countries between the world wars. The roots of this approach surely lie in my undergraduate degree in international relations, which has turned out to be good for something after all. My hope is that a conference proceedings will be published; I think a comparative study like this would serve nicely as an early chapter in the book.

In early December comes the final paper for this year, again in Melbourne, this time for the Musicological Society of Australia. This is the newest work, so new in fact that I've barely started working on it (I plan to make a start during this inter-semester break). It has a rather wordy and clinical title that will need to be sexed up eventually: 'The Articulation of Performance and Character through Music in the Films of James Dean'. I'm going to look at the way James Dean's performances are scored in the three films he made before his famous early death: East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955), Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), and Giant (George Stevens, 1956). The first two were scored by Leonard Rosenman, who draws equally from modernist concert music and traditional Hollywood film scoring. I think that the bivalent scores serve as a mirror of James Dean, who was very recognisable as the new figure of the American teenager but whose acting was highly stylised (the idea of 'method acting' being realistic breaks down in relation to Dean, who was doing something strikingly new and very unlike Marlon Brando, to whom he was and is incessantly compared). Dean's acting style was summed up well by François Truffaut: the acting 'flies in the face of fifty years of filmmaking; each gesture, attitude, each mimicry is a slap at the psychological tradition. Dean acts something beyond what he is saying'. That 'something beyond' is articulated by the music in the two Rosenman films. Dimitri Tiomkin's conservative 'western' score for Giant demonstrates this very clearly in its very betrayal of Dean's performance as the inarticulate oilman Jett Rink. Using a jaunty cowboy theme for this fascinating character flattens him out, and makes Rosenman's scores seem even more impressive in their ability to portray an acting style through music. I'll be very happy if I can pull this one off, since as far as I know nothing like it has yet been done in musicology; there have been quite a few studies based on the work of individual directors and their engagement with music (including some things I'm working on myself) but nothing yet on an actor's relationship with film music. This is one reason why I find film musicology so compelling: there are still many new approaches to be tried, and (most importantly, and not true in many other areas of musicology) a scholarly community which seems willing to accept experimentation. This is a somewhat tricky project: there is surprisingly little scholarly work on James Dean to draw on, as most of what's out there consists of fan biographies more concerned with whether or not he was gay than with a serious exploration of his acting and the cult that built up around him. That material is useful for reception history but it doesn't help provide any scholarly apparatus. Some work in the subfields of star studies and film acting studies is useful for providing some models of how to write about acting in more than a simply descriptive way, but none of it deals with embodiment through music. There is some fine work on Montgomery Clift, an actor somewhat similar to Dean in his not-quite-method stylisation, that explores the way he used his voice; this might serve as a nice way to start connecting the audio and the visual. This one is especially good: The Passion of Montgomery Clift. These early stages of work are what I find the most exciting (rather similarly to my preference for rehearsing over performing) because the possibilities are so wide open. Someone famous said there's nothing as exciting as a blank page.

What else? Next semester I'm teaching two classes on my own and team-teaching in two others. My papers are Contemporary Musical Culture and Introduction to Jazz Research, and I'm doing musicianship lectures for the first years and some music theory tutorials for the second years. When I learned a year ago that I would be taking theory lectures and tutorials I wasn't particularly excited, but now that I've survived it for two semesters I find that I've enjoyed getting in touch again with the building blocks of music. The Contemporary class is good fun since I get to talk about music I like for two hours every week. The good thing about a 20th century course is that there is so much material that one is forced to pick and choose, and it's easy to leave out people I dislike. If I were doing the 19th century I wouldn't be able to skip over Brahms, but in the 20th leaving out Carter is OK because there are so many other 'important' people to be covered. I can also get across my agenda of destroying the boundary between art and pop music by talking about innovations in recording by the Beatles, Beach Boys, etc. next to Reich, and by including things like the American roots music revival alongside the early music movement. The jazz paper is brand new for me, and it will be interesting working with a very different set of students with backgrounds unlike my usual classical performance/composition/musicology majors. Jazz research is a huge and growing field, and teaching this paper gives me a good excuse to get my hooks into something new.

So that's my life for the upcoming months. Some might find it desperately dull, but I think it's all rather fun.

Truffaut/Anderson: Parlons musique!

The many stylistic and narrative nods to François Truffaut in Wes Anderson's work have often been commented upon (he's often mentioned in Matt Zoller Seitz's interview book The Wes Anderson Collection). I've recently been binge-watching Truffaut's films, about which I plan to write more later, and having just seen Anderson's new Grand Budapest Hotel the connections seem even stronger than I had realised previously. These include subject matter (Les 400 Coups/400 Blows - Rushmore; L'Argent de poche/Small Change - Moonrise Kingdom), narrative style (Jules et Jim - The Royal Tenenbaums), and shooting style (La Nuit américaine/Day for Night - Fantastic Mr Fox and the American Express commercial). The musical connections are just as striking, and haven't been noted as much. The most obvious one is the use of Georges Delerue's cue 'Le Grand chorale' from La Nuit américaine in both the American Express commercial and Fantastic Mr Fox, as well as a cue from Les Deux Anglaises de le continent/Two English Girls in the latter (which is also heard intertextually in La Nuit américaine as a cue from the score-in-progress of the film-within-a-film Je Vous Présente Paméla). But having just watched Jules et Jim for the first time in a few years, and upon listening to the score in isolation on Spotify in a London Sinfonietta recording, the connection seems deeper than the literal occasional re-use of Delerue's music. Delerue's Jules et Jim score often employs a Vivaldian harpsichord-and-strings texture with interlocking ostinato figures over a repeating bass line. The same description fits most of the scores for Anderson's films, whether by Mark Mothersbaugh or Alexandre Desplat. I'm not sure whether Anderson specifically referenced the Truffaut music in his discussions with his composers or if in describing what he wanted he ended up describing what Truffaut had also wanted, but in either case the impetus clearly came from Anderson, evidenced by the fact that the scores by the two very different composers with whom he has collaborated are so similar. The classicising textures in Delerue's Truffaut music go well beyond Jules et Jim, of course, most obviously in the aforementioned 'Grand Chorale' cue that borrows liberally from the Vivaldi Gloria and Handelian trumpet voluntaries. It's important to note that these are the 'Vivaldi' and 'Handel' of the 1960s 'sewing-machine' style and not of the present's more embodied early music performance. Hence why I use the world 'classicising:' such performances take Vivaldi, who could really be quite unruly, and tame him by using a consistent mezzoforte dynamic, four-square rhythm, and as little phrasing as possible (for more on this, read Richard Taruskin). This can be especially clearly heard in the Vivaldi track from a mandolin concerto on the Grand Budapest Hotel soundtrack album from a 1975 record by Siegfried Behrend, which fits the Andersonian sound world to a T.

There is yet another Truffaut connection with the use of Vivaldi, whose music he used to score L'Enfant sauvage/Wild Child, again in the sewing-machine style (the film was made in 1970). According to Michel Chion (La Musique au cinéma, Fayard 1995) Truffaut was making a specific point with this, using Vivaldi's music for its 'purity and cleanness of line': 'It's perhaps for this reason, among others, that in L'Enfant sauvage, inspired by the Memoirs of Dr Itard about a wild child from Aveyron, he chose to have extracts arranged from Vivaldi's concertos for flautino and mandolin. This composer's extremely fresh line and the thematic simplicity of his refrains, with their rustic tonic-dominant/dominant-tonic harmony, and also their popular character of accompanied melody (in a sonority very "classical music", enchanting, thin and elegant), all come together to serve the purposefully didactic aspect.[...] But also certain Vivaldian tuttis, as when Dr Itard manages to light a spark of comprehension in his student, take on a sense of exultation: of triumph of light over darkness, of clarity over confusion' (p. 389-390). Chion might well be describing Anderson's use of the 60s-Vivaldian style, which would seem to be portraying the same desire for order and reason. In Rushmore this is particularly true: the Vivaldian side of Mothersbaugh's score is heard while Max Fisher goes about his usual business and when things are going well for him, emphasising the character's classicism and need for order. Vivaldi disappears when Max loses control, to be replaced by Mothersbaugh's drums or 1960s British rock. The film ends with the Faces' 'Ooh La La', which comes of course from the rock world rather than the Vivaldi world. Perhaps this is a musical marker of Max's reconciliation between his obsessive Rushmore side and his new looser Grover Cleveland High side: the song is not classical (in the 18th-century/sewing-machine/Stravinsky sense) but its texture of plucked strings and ostinati do refer back to Vivaldi (guitars rather than mandolins). This is a major point of difference between Truffaut and Anderson: the former never used rock music to score his films, the closest he got being the (very classical!) style of mid-century French singer-songwriters (of whom Yves Montand was probably the best-known exemplar in the States, and who also shows up in Rushmore!). Truffaut, then, would seem less willing than Anderson to reconcile the classical and (for the lack of a better word) romantic sides of his characters' personalities. That assertion might surprise Anderson's detractors, who tend to see him as an unemotional clockmaker more concerned with the arrangement of objects within the frame than with meaningful content, but that seems a superficial critique by people who don't share the idea that order is pleasurable. In a film like Les 400 Coups the disorder of Antoine Doinel's life is highlighted anempathetically by the order portrayed in the nostalgic music (by Jean Constantin); Antoine, however, like Catherine in Jules et Jim or Victor in L'Enfant sauvage, does not succeed in re-ordering his life in the way that Anderson's heroes are able to do (Max, the various Tenenbaums, Steve Zissou, Mr Fox, etc.).

In this sense of order, then, The Grand Budapest Hotel is Anderson's most Truffauldian film. Concierge M. Gustave is not able to re-order his life, and the theme of the film is this very lack of order beyond the 'world of yesterday' (as Stefan Zweig calls it) represented by the hotel and its denizens. This is also the first film by Anderson that does not use any contemporary music, being entirely scored by Alexandre Desplat aside from a few Russian folksongs and the Vivaldi concerto mentioned above. It is set mostly in the 1930s, partly in the 1960s, and is bookended by the 1980s, but we hear no music from these decades. This contributes to the staging of the hermetically-sealed world of the hotel and Zubrowka, the fictional country in which it lies. In this world, even the 'natural' noises are worked into the music that runs through the virtuoso escape sequence: the scrapings of prisoners, the squeaking of cable car wires, the chanting of monks, and probably more (I need to see the film again poste haste). The one outside reference the score contains is a mistake: the prominent balalaikas in the score do sound good, but for me their sound references Russia far too strongly. The rest of the film points to central Europe, so the balalaikas feel out-of-place and, worse, seem to be an example of Western European/American ignorance that many different cultures lie behind the former Iron Curtain. The balalaikas strike the only false note in a film that is otherwise as carefully-judged as any of Anderson's other works, on the musical plane as well as the visual one.

In spite of its many laughs, Anderson's newest film represents a new, somewhat more pessimistic direction for the director, and (as I would have expected) the music plays into the shift in mood. Comparing the final sequence of each film in turn shows that the shift shouldn't really be a surprise, though. Bottle Rocket ends with Dignan still in prison, though I think we can assume he won't be there long. Rushmore has the most optimistic ending, as discussed above: Max has taken control of his life by allowing some disorder into it, as demonstrated by the music. The Royal Tenenbaums ends with the death of the father, but the family is healed. Nico's 'The Fairest of the Seasons' strikes the right bittersweet chord. Similarly, The Life Aquatic ends with both tragedy (Ned's death) and healing as Steve carries his friend Klaus's son on his shoulders to David Bowie's upbeat but ambiguous 'Queen Bitch'. The Darjeeling Limited stays in the same mode of reconciliation-with-life as the previous two films, with the quite unexpected but somehow correct use of Joe Dassin's 'Aux Champs Élysées' (another Truffaut/Paris homage?). Fantastic Mr Fox strikes a new note of ambiguity: even though the family is together and happy dancing in the supermarket to 'Let Her Dance', they are effectively stuck underground forever, the evil Boggis, Bunce and Bean still waiting for them above ground. Moonrise Kingdom also ends more ambiguously, ending with Britten's 'Cuckoo!' from Friday Afternoons as Sam visits Suzy through her window; it's almost an Antoine Doinel-type ending, leaving us hanging (though in a good way) as to what will happen next to the characters. So Grand Budapest Hotel's ending on a more melancholy note is prefigured by the ambiguous endings of the previous films. Again, however, I was bothered by the balalaikas; it seemed somewhat inappropriate to go straight into the credits with some upbeat Russian folk music (the Kamarinskaya). Something more melancholic like the rest of the score would have been better, I think, at least for the first part of the credits. The musical ending of the film proper, however, is perfectly judged, with a return of the yodellers accompanied by cimbalom and whistling over simple harmonies. It's almost a nod to Mahler.