In the Stacks: Some Thoughts on Libraries

It is now official that the University of Auckland is consolidating its Music and Dance, Fine Arts, and Architecture libraries into the General Library. In spite of vehement protests from students and staff, budgetary issues won out and we are losing our specialist library spaces and some staff. The consolidation will naturally entail a reduction of physical resources. We are told that less-used books will be moved to remote storage and that they can be called up in 24 hours. In reality it is likely that books that have not circulated in a while will be withdrawn from the collection; anyone who uses libraries frequently will know that weeding is a necessary evil because there is always a finite amount of shelf space, but we all hope that the weeding will be done in a sensitive way. Unfortunately, evidence thus far is to the contrary, as books I have myself used for research or teaching have been withdrawn, but we can try and be optimistic that collection management will be more reasoned in the future. That is not really the point of this little feuilleton, though. Rather, I want to make a case for the continued presence of physical resources (meaning books) in libraries and to argue that ebooks and other electronic resources are far from the panacea to the ills of education that they are often claimed to be.

A big problem comes up every year whenever I assign any kind of research project: students have limited research skills, and they deteriorate further every year. This is in spite of their being savvy digital natives and in spite of having a lot of directed teaching in how to use electronic resources in secondary school and at university. I've racked my brain about why this is the case: why can I find in two minutes the basic scholarly resources for a topic I know little about, while some students cannot find the same resources in two weeks of work? Of course I have spent a lot of time looking for resources; that's a major part of postgraduate work, and having a doctorate means I should have expert research skills. But surely my students' relative ease with using electronic media should give them an advantage that I, who remember the days before the internet was ubiquitous, cannot boat of? It dawned on me that the answer (or at least one answer) to the conundrum is rather simple: experience in library stacks. I spent an awful lot of time in library stacks as a child, both in school libraries and in public libraries. My experiences in the stacks taught me visually how resources are organised, and showed me physically how much knowledge is out there. Seeing the Dewey Decimal system manifested in real objects meant that I became fluent in that system from very early on (and even before this, seeing things in simple alphabetical order set up my brain for more advanced methods of organisation). Browsing the stacks also gave me a sense of the huge variety of books in the world. I learned quickly what scholarly books look like (they have notes and indexes), what different types of musical scores look like, what art books look like. I learned about what publishers to expect to put out what kinds of books. Browsing the university library stacks, first at George Washington University's Gelman Library then at Oxford's Music Faculty Library, taught me about the vast range of musicology and its surrounding subjects. While I may not have been studying a particular topic at the time, I knew where it was in the library and what sorts of books were in the section. I would file away the existence of a few books on Scriabin or on Moroccan music for future reference. Just looking at a library shelf, not even opening any books, is hugely educational. I learned as much browsing the stacks as I did in my classes, dipping into books here and there, honing in on writing styles and methods of scholarly enquiry.

This experiential learning is lost when students do not have stacks to browse. Searching for books online is an activity removed from reality: you miss the chance to see what other things are around the book you are searching for (which might be more useful than the book you were after), the chance to flip through the book to see if it will be useful (unless there is an ebook version, although these are impossible to truly flip through), the chance that a librarian might say, 'ah, but have you also seen book X?' when you take it to the counter to check it out. When you find a book online you find exactly one book. When you find a book in the stacks you find many more. The most advanced search algorithm is no match for human experience. I know what I saw in the stacks last week, but it will only come up in an online search if I use the right terms. Using an ebook engages one sense: sight, or sound if you use a text reader. Using a real book engages sight, sound (of the pages turning and the binding bending), smell (I can sometimes place publishers by the smell of their books), and, most importantly, touch. (Tasting the books is not recommended; remember the legend that turns up in Dumas' La Reine Margot and Eco's The Name of the Rose about the poisoned books, which kill anyone who licks their finger after turning the pages.) So much more is lost than physical objects when books are withdrawn or moved to storage. We risk losing an entire aspect of our cognitive functioning, and the effects are already visible. Students come up with online resources of dubious quality when excellent books are waiting for them to find in the library catalogue. Countless students, even ones who write well, will cite a short programme note of questionable provenance instead of a well written book by an expert in the field. My experiences in the stacks have taught me how to search, so that I can use the online algorithms more effectively. These search tools should be a means to an end, not the end in themselves. When they do become the end, good resources go unused, research loses nuance, and students get low grades because their work is not as thorough as it should be.

Is it too late? It might be for the current generation of university and high school students, who through no fault of their own were deprived of the chance to develop some of the skills that would be most useful to them in their studies. This is due to the criminal negligence of bureaucratic budget-wielders, the same people who advocate that the arts should be removed from schools, people who say that students need 'study spaces', not books. Without books, what on earth do they have to study? I know of no actual librarians who agree that e-resources are the only way forward, or who advocate reducing the number of books in the stacks. But we do have reason to be optimistic: public library use is now on an upswing, bookstores are finally opening again rather than closing, and people are starting to advocate more seriously and publicly for books. Just as school administrators are finding that putting the arts back into the curriculum can actually boost performance in other subjects, they might realise that physical libraries with real books are also beneficial to overall development.

While I doubtless spent more time in the library stacks than was typical for a child in the 90s, that time played a major role in why I have got to where I am, getting paid to research and teach things that interest me. I should also note that I'm not against the expansion of electronic resources. Having access to more material makes an inestimable difference in my own research and that of my colleagues, and I could not have completed my doctoral dissertation, articles, or my book manuscript without them. But they are only useful insofar as I know how to find and use them, and it was the experience of using physical resources in libraries that taught me how to do that. The next step for me as a pedagogue is to come up with ways to patch in some of that experiential knowledge so that our students can be empowered to produce better work. The moral of the story is, take your kids to the library and leave them in the stacks for a while!

L'enfant et les sortilèges: Dream or Reality?

Here is opera production journal part two! Danger: Freud ahead.

At the moment I am working on a translation on the libretto and a transcription into IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet, which our students use to help them with singing in foreign languages). Paying close attention to every word and phoneme is a good way to study the libretto in depth, and the more I look at Colette's work the more I am impressed by it. It is not merely a vehicle for Ravel's music but a rich text on its own, full of ambiguities, comic lines, and colourful turns of phrase, to which Ravel responded with unceasing invention. I had never really thought of Ravel as a great text-setter, but looking at his other vocal works having now studied this opera I can see that he is one of the best. Take the scene between the Child and the Princess as an example: the Princess uses a very elegant poetic style, with long sentences set to an undulating solo flute line, and the Child responds with short bursts over a more turbulent orchestral accompaniment (we'll just have piano and flute in our version). 'Qui sait si le malin enchanteur/ Ne va pas me rendre au sommeil de la mort,/ Ou bien me dissoudre en nuée?' ('Who knows if the evil enchanter will render me up to the sleep of death, or even dissolve me into a cloud?') vs. the Child's brusque 'Ne t'en va pas! Reste! Dis-moi...' (Do not go! Stay! Tell me...').

After emerging from the pages of the book of fairy tales the Child destroyed, the Princess introduces herself as the 'Princesse enchantée, celle que tu appelais dans ton songe la nuit passée', the Princess you called to in your dreams last night. This opens up the important question of whether the events of the opera are happening within a dream, or if they have some kind of objective reality. Are the enchantments the Child sees products of his imagination, or are they representations of mysterious uncanny forces acting upon him from the outside? As it premiered in 1925, it is not surprising that much of the early criticism of the opera is Freudian: the whole opera was seen by many critics as a psychological case-study. Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein read the opera (without having seen it or even looked at the score) as a study of the absent Father. This is a compelling reading, as a father is never seen or mentioned, but Klein sees his sublimated presence everywhere. All of the enchanted objects and happenings can be seen as Oedipal manifestations, mostly phallic: the child has taken out the clock's pendulum and has pulled the cat's tail. The mother and mother-figures are most prominent as signs of order and love, in particular the Princess and the Squirrel who sings of forgiveness. The father-figures represent chaos and/or oppression: destroyed objects, animal riots, cages. A Freudian like Klein would read the opera as a dream, specifically Colette and Ravel's dream, but this kind of autobiographical criticism has (for the most part justly) fallen out of favour today. Artists don't always have to produce expressions of their psyches, and are just as capable of putting on a persona for a given work as performers are of becoming someone else when they perform it (pace Lee Strasberg). Freudianism is essentially Romantic in spite of some Modernist trappings, but Ravel is a quintessential ironic Modernist. There is little in his (or Colette's) other work to indicate much interest in Freudianism or even dreams more generally.

This all leads to me think that the events of the opera are indeed happening in reality, albeit a heightened, fantastic reality. This reading seems rather more interesting to me than explaining it all away as a dream, which I've always found somewhat of a cop-out. The Oz books are narratively superior to the 1939 MGM film because Dorothy really does go to Oz; her trip isn't just a dreamy metaphor for the values of home but is a real experience. Ravel's opera sometimes has a similar ethos to the Oz books (or, perhaps more, Alice in Wonderland, though Lewis Carroll sold himself short by making Alice's adventures 'just a dream'). Rather than seeing it all as a dream, we could try the opposite: the Child has been figuratively asleep, unaware of the world around him, and the opera represents his awakening.

The Princess's sequence is central here, but playing with an interpretation that the opera represents awakening means we need to read her in quite a different way than as a Freudian mother-figure. She calls to the Child to rescue her from being pulled back into the land of night and sleep, that is, into his dream-time subconscious. She wants to break free of being a character in his childish fantasy (his dream). The Princess is a dream character who has come to life, insisting that the dreamer engage with her as a real figure. On the surface she is beautiful (as the fairy tale come to life) but really she is monstrous, a figure lost between dream and reality, suddenly making demands in waking life, a character out of Buñuel and Dalí's Un Chien Andalou or Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête. She does not want the Child to grow up; by calling on him to 'rescue' her she is really trying to enforce his childish dream-world onto his waking life. I suspect that if the Child were able to hold onto her longer, instead of pulling the Princess out she would have pulled him in with her. We could read the rest of the fantastic characters in the opera in a similar way: the animals and furniture cease being passive objects of the child's fantasy destruction and enter his waking life, although many of them offer him more positively-framed lessons in compassion than the negative temptation offered by the Princess. Far from being a representation of the dream, the opera demonstrates what happens when the dream starts to pervade reality, leading eventually to disenchantment and growing up if the lessons of the slippage are heeded. Woody Allen took a lighter (but just as profound) approach to this idea in his 1985 film The Purple Rose of Cairo, in which Celia, a depressed 1930s housewife, wills the romantic lead of her favourite movie off of the screen and into her life. The cinema is Celia's place in which to dream, and over the course of the film she learns that she must face reality and cannot count on her dream-prince to rescue her. This blurring of dream and reality provides another link to the avant-garde arts of the 1920s and 30s: surrealists and expressionists alike were interested in this slippage between dream and reality that the opera represents so well.

The Princess, then, is really a cautionary figure. Far from being a protective mother substitute, she represents regression and fantasy rather than progression and reality, almost a false/negative mother figure, essentially calling the Child back into the womb ('land of night and sleep') rather than sending her offspring out into the real world. The Child's real mother, who we meet at the beginning of the opera when she punishes the Child for not heeding her, could almost be seen as setting off the phantasmagoria as a lesson: all of the things come alive to teach the Child how to get through life's temptations and hardships, teaching him to be compassionate rather than selfish. The real mother turns up again at the end of the opera (though, perhaps significantly, she doesn't sing) to offer a guiding hand to help her son grow up: the Child has successfully met the challenges of the Princess's temptation to regress and the healing of the wounded squirrel. I should note that this is still a Freudian reading, but one from a different angle: while the opera still portrays the Child's development from self-directed actions to other-directed actions (it would be difficult to argue otherwise), the role I see for the mother is different from what Klein saw. For me, she is a more positively supportive figure than she is for Klein, for whom she only has her basic Oedipal role. I find it more interesting to examine the mother as an active character with agency, guiding the Child's development, rather than merely a catalyst for the Child's lesson. I prefer to see all of the characters as having more agency than productions usually afford them. It will be more interesting for the singers (and, I hope, the audience) for all of them to have 'real' roles with their own agendas, instead of only being manifestations of the Child's ego.

The idea that the Child has learned something is supported by his aria which follows, 'Toi le cœur de la rose'. It can be read as a song of wistful regret that the book's world of fantasy is now past; he may look back on it fondly, but his inability to rescue the Princess was really his developing subconscious holding him back for his long-term good. It ends with the Child brusquely saying 'Tous ceux-ci sont des livres arides' ('all these are dry books'), an indication that he is finished with fantasy and is ready to face more difficult matter (which in the next scene turns out to be mathematics, as he is chased by an old man who personifies arithmetic spouting out math problems with incorrect answers).

When I staged the Princess sequence as part of our 2015 opera scenes production we made her a glamorous Snow White-ish figure, needing to be rescued by the Child who is, alas, not yet strong enough to be her Prince Charming. This time around, to fit with the surrealist reading and with the way I'm now starting to understand the rest of the opera, we will of course need to stage it very differently. That this opera can stand so many interpretations (including variations by the same interpreter!) is yet more evidence for how good it is. Last time the 'land of Night and Sleep' was War, fitting the 1940s milieu of the production and allowing the shepherds and shepherdesses who sing the preceding chorus to be represented as ghostly soldiers. This time the Princess herself is the dangerous figure: she tempts the Child to regress. This time around, she belongs more in the expressionist forest Snow White runs away from than in the palace.

Towards a Production of L'enfant et les sortilèges

This year the greater part of our university's opera production will be Maurice Ravel and Colette's 1925 opera L'enfant et les sortilèges. As part of their coursework, the students in the cast have to write a journal documenting their experiences with preparation, rehearsals, and performance, and in the spirit of solidarity I am going to do the same as I prepare to direct the opera.

My directing experience heretofore has consisted of two productions of opera scenes and a few short one-off projects. This is the first full-length (albeit only 50 minutes), fully-staged opera I will have directed, and it is not a nice and easy one with which to start. Here is an opera that, in addition to being quite musically challenging, is full of various kinds of phantasmagoria and built-in staging demands. The opera's plot is deceptively simple: a young child disobeys his mother, and the furniture proceeds to come to life and animals begin to sing, punishing him for his misdeeds. He is thrust out of his bedroom into the garden, where the animals revolt and attack him. A squirrel is wounded in the melée and the child binds its paw, his first truly unselfish act. The animals sing a hymn to the child and his mother comes back to embrace him.

What is a director to do with living furniture, humanised animals, and a magical garden? On a big budget in a big theatre the opera is a great opportunity for creative stage and costume designers to pull out all the stops. Since its premiere it has attracted big names in design, perhaps most impressively a 1981 production designed by David Hockney for the Metropolitan Opera. A quick trawl through YouTube will show huge set pieces, elaborate animations, full choruses and corps de ballet, and extravagant costumes. Suffice it to say that our budget is not very close to that of the Met, and our Music Theatre isn't quite as big (150 seats vs. 3800). So how to manage this spectacle without all of these trappings? Is it even desirable or possible? Why not choose an easier opera? Each opera will have its own challenges, so L'Enfant is not particularly unusual in that respect, and it is one of the few operas with a large cast (and many female roles, always a challenge at opera schools). A major advantage of having to strip away all of the extravagant accoutrements is that the music and the text can come through more clearly. Ravel's score (and Colette's libretto) is a model of musical and theatrical economy; they stuff more into these 50 minutes than seems possible, yet every moment rings true and no character or event feels short-changed. This also makes it an ideal opera for a fairly large group of young singers: everyone gets something fun and challenging to do, without overtaxing any particular singer. A staging needs to be found that will add visual interest while not overwhelming the music. I see my duties as a university opera director as more than just visual, however. As part of a teaching institution, a production needs to be a learning experience for all involved. It needs to shed some new light on the work, or make the audience and performers understand it in a different way. Our 2015 production set a variety of opera scenes in 1940s Hollywood, a concept I used to demonstrate how close the genres of opera and cinema are, especially in the age of the 'studio system'. By the 1940s cinema had taken the place within society that opera had held until the early twentieth century, and I hoped to show that opera could and should be entertaining and enlightening in the same way as films of this period were. Last year I set our scenes in a 1950s diner, to bring out the community aspect of opera: many operas feature meeting-places that hold similar roles to that of the diner in the 1950s. Choosing a specific time was also a way to bind very disparate scenes together, and afforded some tongue-in-cheek connections to be made (I think the idea I'm most proud of was to stage the Brindisi from La Traviata as a 1950s Coca-Cola commercial).

But producing a full opera requires a somewhat different approach from doing scenes. If the scenes are to come together as a coherent evening, some general unifying concept needs to be imposed on them from above. Otherwise you have a meaningless variety show (I should say that many opera schools do just this, and successfully, but it seems to me that the grab-bag approach is too performer-directed rather than audience-directed; even in a university opera is a public art form that needs to earn its audience, so any director has a duty to present something cohesive and not just an academic exercise). For a single opera, the concept needs to come from within, otherwise you end up with the worst kind of Regietheater, where the opera is subjugated to the whim of a director's personality. Even with scenes I start by asking, 'what does this opera say to me?', not 'how do I use this opera to convey my ideas about XYZ?'

I'll now try to take you through my thought process of how I got to the central concept of the production I'm planning for L'Enfant. First comes the question, what does L'Enfant say to me? I see a very dark, mysterious work, not at all a 'safe' fairy tale. Even though the ending is happy (the child reunited with his mother) and there are moments of humour along the way, the general mood is of unease and danger. This starts right from the very beginning, as Ravel writes an undulating sequence of parallel fourths and fifths underlined by a dissonant bass line. There is little sense of solid tonality here. There are analogues to be found in early Disney movies: the scary forest escape and transformation of the Queen in Snow White, the transformation of the boys into donkeys in Pinocchio, the pink elephants in Dumbo, the death of the mother in Bambi, the mad libidinousness of The Three Caballeros. The Disney artists of the late 1930s-early 1940s were much more willing to look at the dark dimensions of childhood than their latter-day analogues. This opera is a trip into a child's nightmare, not a  (whether it is literally a nightmare or some sort of objective reality is a question I will return to in a subsequent entry).

So it's going to be dark. But that doesn't really get me very far. Next I think about the time in which the opera was written (this is the musicologist talking: we always look at texts historically and culturally). It premiered in 1925, and Colette first sent Ravel the libretto around 1917. Generally speaking, we're in post-First World War France. This is an extremely exciting period, and it makes sense that the production could be set during it. The music is full of references to other types of music of the time, including music-hall numbers and fox-trots. There is nothing at all original about setting an opera in the time it was written, and one of my favourite directors and major inspirations, Robert Carsen, often takes this route. But any kind of textbook approach to the early 1920s would be misguided as this is definitely not a 'realist' opera, full as it is of living furniture and talking animals. What is the opposite of realism but surrealism, and when was surrealism being developed? The early 1920s! Taking a surrealist approach does not mean that I think Ravel and Colette wrote a surrealist opera: neither showed much interest in the surrealist movement (or the Dada movement out of which it came), and the goal of this opera is not to 'épater les bourgeois' but rather to bring them enjoyment. But the temporal proximity is too good to pass up, and had the early surrealists been less snobbish about such bourgeois entertainment as opera they would have found a lot to like: living inanimate objects of course, but also a general interest in dreams, made-up cat language, and incorporations of wildly different musical and poetic styles.

How then to translate the language of 1920s surrealism onto our limited stage, in a way that makes sense to an audience and that doesn't overwhelm the text? Another project led me (somewhat roundaboutly) to a way in: I've been slowly chipping away at a book idea about 1950s film music and acting, and my studies of film led me into photography of that decade (Richard Avedon in particular, with his brilliant capturing of actors), which piqued my interest and led me further back in time. I latched on to 1920s photography, especially by Man Ray and André Kertesz, as a visual way in, and thought that using photographs as scenic elements would be a creative and cost-effective way to avoid a big cumbersome set (much as I liked our diner set last year, it was rather cumbersome and I wanted to avoid that this year). What attracted me to Ray and Kertesz is that they both take familiar objects and defamiliarise them through use of unusual angles or even modifications of the photographic process. Ravel and Colette do something similar in the opera, showing us hitherto unexplored dimensions of teacups, wallpaper, cats, insects, etc. I still need to continue developing the visual aspect, but I plan to have a large frame centre stage on which to project the photographs, and possibly two smaller frames on either side. Costumes are to be simple, with basic 1920s forms that can be accented with elements that reference the things/animals the singers represent.

With the basic structure in place, we can soon finalise casting of the opera and I can work on developing it further. Because I already know the singers involved, it will be easier to plan the specific aspects of the production around them. It will help knowing who is singing which role, as this will allow me to more effectively visualise the production before we begin rehearsals. The next idea to work out is an important and difficult one: are the events of the opera happening in the child's dream, or do they have an objective reality? This is the question I will return to in the next entry.

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.

Music Theory in Film Music

I've been trepidatiously getting my feet wet with Neo-Riemannian music theory since, for better or worse, it seems to have become a primary method for analysing film music. Unfortunately a straightforward, concise introduction to this subfield of theory doesn't seem to exist, so I've had to piece my understanding of it together from a few different sources. Neo-Riemannian theory, the dominant branch of so-called transformational theory, is named for Hugo Riemann, a late 19th-century German music theorist who came up with a system in which triads can be transformed into other triads by various standardised operations. It is most particularly applicable to late 19th-century music that stretches the boundaries of common-practice harmony (especially Brahms and Wagner, who stretched it in very different ways). Film music of the Korngold-Steiner-Williams-Goldsmith-Horner-Shore lineage has been seen to fit these transformational paradigms very well, which makes sense because these composers were influenced by the very type of music for which Riemann's theory was built.

I got started in this exploration by the use of this method in an article I stumbled upon in the most recent issue of Music Theory Online, Frank Lehman's 'Hollywood Cadences: Music and the Structure of Cinematic Expectation'. Lehman doesn't go too deeply down the transformational rabbit hole in this excellent article, as he focusses mainly on just a few typical cadences that show up frequently in Hollywood scores. He labels these by their Neo-Riemannian names, but a deep understanding of the method isn't required to understand the article. Another article by Lehman, 'Transformational Analysis and the Representation of Genius in Film Music' in Music Theory Spectrum, is another story entirely. This is a very dense analysis of James Horner's score for A Beautiful Mind, and to follow it you have to have substantial grounding in the theory.

This is where the problems start. How does someone, perhaps a Monteverdian who has recently developed an interest in film music, make use of such an analysis? And before one can make use of it, how does one make sense of it? Is it even worth the trouble? The answer to the last question is 'yes': it is indeed worth it. Too much film musicology never actually gets to the music, so any corrective to this lack is worthwhile. The same is true about studies in musical theatre, an issue to which Stephen Banfield devotes much space in a recent mostly damning review of the Oxford Handbook of the American Musical in JRMA. The lack of music in musicology is something that has been bothering me lately, especially as I've been preparing my teaching about musical theatre and film music. The focus is mostly on the words and/or narrative, where we really need to be doing what Banfield calls melopoetic analysis, looking at both words and music at the same time, or Michel Chion's audio-vision, exploring the sound- and image-tracks simultaneously. This also comes out of my music theory teaching, something I at first thought I wouldn't like but which I've actually been rather enjoying (other than dealing with voice leading, which is no fun for anyone).

So, musical analysis matters, but what about the Neo-Riemannian stuff? Lehman's footnotes pointed me towards an article by Richard Cohn in the Journal of Music Theory with the promising title 'Introduction to Neo-Rimannian Theory: A Survey and a Historical Perspective', but it is actually no such thing. It is only an introduction in that it introduces a series of articles in a special issue of the journal, and while it does give a history of how the theory developed it doesn't actually explain what it is. No use at all to the beginner, then. My next step was the Oxford Handbook to Neo-Riemannian Theories, which sounds good but is mostly preaching to the converted. Again, this large edited collection gives historical perspective and offers a few analyses without actually explaining what the theory consists of. You have to know the ins and outs of the theory for the book to be of any use; otherwise it's like reading a book in a foreign language knowing only the present tense.

I then finally found a chapter that might have been just what I was looking for: a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies on 'Transformational Theory and the Analysis of Film Music', by Scott Murphy (author of an interesting study of James Newton Howard's music for Treasure Planet: The Major Tritone Progression in Recent Hollywood Science Fiction Films, which like Lehman's article on cadences uses Neo-Riemannian labels but is limited enough in scope that it doesn't get overwhelming if you're not familiar with the theory). The chapter is a bit more useful because it assumes little prior knowledge of transformational theory, but it stays too much on the surface and is really just a literature review, rather than explaining the theory and showing how it can actually be used. I need something with musical examples: here is what a Leittonwechsel actually looks like in a musical context.

The next step was to look backwards, to what is always cited as the article that introduced Neo-Riemannian theory, David Lewin's 'A Formal Theory of Generalized Tonal Functions.' Like many foundational texts, it doesn't have all that much to do with the subfield it helped create. The Neo-Riemannian side is only one of many possible applications of Lewin's system, which can also be applied to post-tonal pitch-class set analysis. The article is as mathematical as it is musical and is therefore very tough going. Sample sentence: 'To see the salient mathematical aspect of the conjugate relationship, notice that (C,1,4) and (C,1,9) are paired, and that 4+9=1.' (That last bit isn't quite as weird as it sounds, because pitch-class notation only goes up to 11.) So it was an interesting thing to read, but didn't help much with trying to grasp Neo-Riemannian theory.

Oddly enough, though, after having read all of this material that doesn't make much sense on its own it's all starting to come together in my mind. I do have some idea as to what this stuff is about, but I would still find it very useful to have a concise introduction, or at least a book that doesn't already assume familiarity with the system. The lack of such a thing is a general problem in music theory, and perhaps even musicology more generally (though I'm so deep into that by now that it's harder to notice the lack). When applying a theoretical (or historical, political, social) paradigm to music, we really ought to be careful not to alienate too many readers. This is not at all akin to 'dumbing down': theoretical rigour is still necessary and there is no reason not to assume that readers are generally well-educated and capable of understanding complicated things, but some good, clear introductory work is needed. I am constantly reminded of this when teaching; if I want to assign a reading on post colonialism in music I'd better make sure I've told my students what post colonialism is, or I need to be sure that I've assigned something that introduces the field. Susan McClary remains a model that we should all follow in this regard: whether she is writing on gender theory or modal theory she always gives a clear introduction before she undertakes deeper analysis. Likewise Eric Clarke with ecological perception theory in his Ways of Listening, and Peter Franklin with philosophies of Modernism in Seeing Through Music. These introductions are useful refreshers for those of us who already have the theoretical background, and they don't leave newcomers high and dry. With such broad concepts as gender, Modernism, and transformational or Schenkerian theory, each scholar will have his/her own version of what it means, so an introduction is doubly important.

I'm now going to have a look at David Kopp's Chromatic Transformations in Nineteenth-Century Music to see if he sheds any more light on this group of theories. Whether or not I actually use any of this in my own studies of film music (and I suspect I probably won't), I think this exploration into theory-land has been worth the trouble, in spite of the lack of a good map.

When is a musical not a musical?

In studies of film genre, the musical is nearly always presented as a case study for analysis. Scholars and critics have spent a lot of time seeking to define what constitutes a film musical, but the more I think about it the more I feel they are asking the wrong question. Rick Altman's The American Film Musical (1987) is a seminal text not only in studies of the musical but in genre studies per se, and his structuralist narrative categorisation is still used. In its most basic form, the musical according to Altman stages the formation of the heterosexual couple through music. This often takes the form of a plot that starts with a man and a woman who dislike each other, but as soon as they sing or dance together they fall in love. Every Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie shares this narrative. In Shall We Dance (1937), for example, Astaire is a ballet dancer and Rogers is a tap dancer; their dance styles, as well as their personalities, seem incompatible but they discover in dancing together that they are in love. This plot was reversed in The Band Wagon (1953), with Astaire as the tap dancer and Cyd Charisse as the ballerina. Again, they don't get along until they dance together. There are plenty of musicals, though, that don't involve this narrative or even where it breaks down, but which everyone would still call a musical, so there is clearly something amiss with this categorisation (to be fair to Altman, he does recognise this). In Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) the heroine and hero never sing together in the final film (their only duet was cut). One could argue that this leaves a hole in the film, and the boy-next-door John Truett does always seem a bit of drip when compared to Esther. John never sings at all, and non-singing characters in musicals never seem fully-realised. In The King and I (1956) and My Fair Lady (1964) everyone sings but the leading man and lady never have a duet. In both of these cases, though, something stands in the way that would not allow a marriage to take place within the world of the film and, significantly, the world of the original audience (race difference, class difference, age difference). The lack of duets in these cases is actually using the convention against itself, the exception that proves the rule.

If we decide to define the musical based on this narrative structure (boy meets girl, boy and girl fight, boy and girl sing/dance together, boy and girl get together) we run into some troublesome cases. This is exactly the structure of David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook (2012), but not many people would call it a musical. (That said, I'm sure some producer somewhere is thinking at this very moment of adapting it for Broadway.) Why not? Though there is a lot of music in the film, it is all diegetic, 'real' within the world of the film. The characters never break into song or dance spontaneously, without being able to see/hear a band or recording accompanying them. Raymond Knapp calls this MERM, musically-enhanced reality mode. So let's re-define a musical as being a film in which MERM occurs. That way we include all of the couple-narrative musicals as well as the ones without that plot (Annie [1982] comes to mind). Yet there are plenty of film 'musicals' that do not evoke MERM. One such is Cabaret (1972); nearly all of the music (in the film, though not in the stage musical on which it is based) takes place within the cabaret itself, where it is entirely diegetic. Even though director Bob Fosse intercuts cabaret scenes with outside scenes, the cabaret can always be conceived of as going on in the background. Cabaret does not fit the narrative pattern either; Sally (Liza Minnelli) and Brian (Michael York) never make music together, nor do they get together at the end. So we need a different definition that will fit something like Cabaret. Perhaps a musical is best defined as a film that features a lot of musical performance, which can be based either in MERM or in reality. That sounds good at first, but the complications continue. Take the recent example of Inside Llewyn Davis or its stylistic prequel O Brother Where Art Thou, which do indeed feature many musical performances but which most viewers probably wouldn't consider to be musicals. A definition needs to be found that includes Cabaret but excludes Inside Llewyn Davis, so we need to think about the difference between the two films and their use of music. In Cabaret the music, even though it is diegetic, comments directly on the story (cabaret numbers as symbols of Weimer-era decadence), while in Llewyn Davis the music itself serves a plot function in that the characters are musicians but its subject matter does not do much plot-bearing in its lyrics or notes. Of course there is some connection; a song in one part of the film wouldn't work as well in another part, but without the songs Cabaret would have a very different plot (it would be like John van Druten's toothless play I Am a Camera, on which the musical is based) while Llewyn Davis would have the same plot (though it would be a pretty dull film). So can we define a musical as a film where music has an important plot function? That fits everything we've seen so far, but exceptions can be found. In some of the early Busby Berkeley musicals like Footlight Parade (1933) the music has no plot function at all, and  musical scenes are usually just tacked on at the end when we see the big show the characters have been working on throughout the film. Footlight Parade is about putting on cinema prologues, big musical stage shows that were performed in large cinemas before the movie in the early days of sound film. The musical numbers have no bearing on the movie's plot: the film is about the process of staging the numbers, not the numbers themselves, and the only music is whatever the characters happen to be working on at the time. Footlight Parade is more like Llewyn Davis than like Cabaret, but most would still consider Footlight Parade to be a musical.

I could go on searching for a definition of a 'musical film' but I think I've made my point: when dealing with generic categories there usually isn't a single blanket definition that can fit everything that it needs to. Genre is best seen as a constellation of definitions that overlap depending on the audience. And yet 'musical' seems a relatively straightforward category! In the film world 'film noir' is much more contentious, and the music world is chock-a-block with problematic genres. There's a very good article by Joti Rockwell that deals with some of these questions in relation to bluegrass:http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8711239. But if it's so problematic, what's the use of the concept of genre anyway? It is of course of great use: without categorisations like genre we couldn't talk to each other about much of anything. Think of the word 'tree', which is really a generic category. There are some things that we can all agree on as being trees, and there are other things we can all agree on as not being trees. The California redwoods are definitely trees just as Shall We Dance is definitely a musical, and a water lily is definitely not a tree just as Taxi Driver is definitely not a musical. Genre allows us to say things like 'New Zealand has a lot of trees' without having to spend hours saying exactly which trees are in New Zealand. If every different tree had a different name, if every pencil had a different name, if every piece of paper had a different name, we could never get anywhere because we would always be listing things. But even these seemingly foolproof categories like 'tree' can break down. Outside my front door is a plant that I assumed was a bush when I moved in, but in December it bloomed with bright red bristly flowers: my bush was actually a pohutukawa tree disguising itself as a bush. I still resist calling it a tree because it fit so well my previously-established category of 'bush', being a short dense plant with leaves close to the ground. It's the Silver Linings Playbook of the plant world. To sum up, I think that we should stop thinking of genres (or any other categorisation) as autonomous platonic concepts and start seeing them as socially-constructed concepts. Much more interesting than trying to decide once and for all what a musical really is is to ask why it is perceived as such. What is the history of the category? Where did it come from? How has it changed over time? I can't come up with a good concluding sentence, so here's what is probably the best of all the couple-forming scenes, Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in 'Dancing in the Dark' from The Band Wagon.

Academy Award Nominees and Their Music (Part 2)

Here are my thoughts on music in the rest of the Academy Award-nominated movies I've seen. Don't look too hard for a thesis, since these are just free-flowing reflections.

Hybrids: The Great Gatsby, 12 Years a Slave

I've called these two hybrids for the lack of a better word: both of them take a variety of musical approaches, none in particular being dominant. 12 Years a Slave has a score by Hans Zimmer and Gatsby has one by Craig Armstrong, but the scores of these two films are the least important aspects of their varied music.

Gatsby's compendium of music has been commented on by many since the film's release, with most critics falling into one of two camps: either the use of current African-American music is a very astute method to help the modern audience understand the excess of the 1920s, or it is a terrible symptom of the dumbing-down of the audience, implying that they would find authentic 1920s jazz so repugnant that they would stay away from the cinema. Scoring the movie with Jay-Z (who also produced) and a host of other contemporary rap, hip-hop, and R&B singers is a good way to make a link between the 20s and the present, but there is actually more at stake here than Luhrmann has been given credit for. It is easy to overlook the most interesting musical connection between the 1920s and now, which is the fact that in the 1920s as in the 2010s the most popular music among white listeners was coded as Black. This is something that Baz Luhrmann captures very well in the film, though it may have been a happy accident: even though we hear quite a lot of so-called 'Black' music we very rarely see Blacks on the screen, and when they are present they only appear in quick vignettes in bit parts. This demonstrates the fetishisation of black-ness among Whites: in the '20s, and probably in the present as well, one could argue that the popularity of African-American music among Whites was a smokescreen to hide oppression. White listeners use their approval of black music as a synecdoche for their approval of Blacks in general, assuming that because they say the music is so good they can get away with forcing Blacks to be subalterns (happy to have them perform on stage, but if they want to listen they'd better sit in the balcony). (My use of 'Black' rather than 'African-American' in regard to the 1920s is to avoid anachronism, though of course Whites in the 1920s were more likely to use 'Negro'.) At the same time, it probably would have been nice to hear more non-anachronistic music in the film, but if it had all been 'authentic' it wouldn't really have been a 'Baz Luhrmann' film. I'm a fan of Luhrmann and I think he manages to bring all of the music together with the images, providing a compelling case against historical authenticity. After all, you can't repeat the past. It will be interesting to see how well the film will have held up twenty years from now, when the current trendy music will be old-fashioned; using Bert Bacharach in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was cutting-edge at the time but now seems extremely silly. On an unrelated note, Luhrmann also provides Leonardo DiCaprio with the most exciting 'star entrance' since John Ford's introduction of John Wayne in Stagecoach.

I struggled mightily with the music of 12 Years a Slave; the score came very close to ruining the film for me. In addition to being nearly identical to Zimmer's score for The Thin Red Line, the score here is very intrusive, my pet peeve when it comes to film music. To put it succinctly, every time I heard the main theme I felt resentment for being told what to think about what I was seeing on screen. The other aspects of the film, including its sonic ones, are such a great achievement that having this pushy score frequently barge in is shockingly inept on the part of a director as gifted as Steve McQueen seems to be. This score exists out of fear, fear that the audience won't be able to 'handle' the tough questions the film asks, and fear that the screenplay and acting can't carry the audience through them. Without the music to direct our emotions in a conventional way (using culturally-ingrained tropes of musicalised sadness like downward motion, long slow tones, string instruments in harmony: the model is clearly the Barber 'Adagio') McQueen and Zimmer imply that the scenes of emotional suffering in the film would be more difficult to watch. That difficulty, however, should be the point! The score in this film is a balm, and I agree with Bertolt Brecht in feeling that music should not be used as such. Music is too powerful a medium to be used in such a simplistic way, the way that TW Adorno disdainfully called emotional listening. Because of its simplistic use of those emotional tropes, Zimmer's music encourages this type of listening. McQueen's professed desire is to make his audience think, but the poor use of music allows us to stop thinking and start merely feeling. There is a rather interesting paradox here: McQueen's goal is Brechtian: he wants to make the audience angry and inspire social change. But his directorial technique is grounded in Stanislavsky, not Brecht: emotional identification versus enforced alienation. The score, though, evoked in me a Brechtian response: in addition to the anger felt at being manipulated, it took me out of the film. For a viewer who doesn't care a fig for Brecht or Adorno the score would intensify the emotional identification because of the tropes to which it makes recourse, but at the same time it focusses attention away from what is happening on screen by acting as a balm. So does McQueen want us to identify or not? Can you be involved and alienated at the same time? Did McQueen hire Zimmer on purpose to annoy people like me? It's all especially annoying because the best single musical scene out of all of these films appears in this one. When Solomon, sold into slavery, attends the funeral of a fellow slave and the others start singing the spiritual 'Roll, Jordan, Roll', McQueen and actor Chiwetel Ejiofor do an extraordinary job of showing the divide between Solomon and the other slaves: Solomon, having grown up in the North, doesn't know the spiritual, and as he slowly begins to sing along, the tension he feels between his desire to regain his family and his feelings for his fellow slaves is palpable in Ejiofor's performance. McQueen shows this all in one long take, allowing us to see the character's entire emotional trajectory. It's an amazing tour-de-force of acting and directing.

Musicals: Inside Llewyn Davis, Frozen

By 'musical' here I simply mean a movie in which the characters break into song. Frozen is a traditional musical in that it employs what musicologist Raymond Knapp calls MERM (musically-enhanced reality mode), while Inside Llewyn Davis is about a musician whom we often see perform, alone and with others. The music of ILD was produced by T Bone Burnett, who also coordinated the music for the Coen brothers' two other musically-inspired films O Brother Where Art Thou and The Ladykillers. O Brother foregrounds musicking and sparked a major revival in 'roots' music in the United States, while The Ladykillers intelligently plays with classical/folk divide (though this is the only way in which the remake improves upon the British original). In ILD, however, the focus is squarely on the music. It is almost a work of musicology-as-film: it is a well-researched treatise on the 1960s folk music movement, the artist's place in society, shifting musical cultures and styles, and the music industry. It also highlights the need for an Oscar (or any award, for that matter) for music supervision: T Bone Burnett's work here and Randall Poster's for The Wolf of Wall Street, among other supervisors' work for other films, have not been given their due, though they contribute to the films just as much as editing, sound design, sets, or costumes. There used to be an award for Adaptation Score that could be transformed into such an award. (It was used mostly for musicals that were adapted from the stage; for example, André Previn won it for his work on My Fair Lady. Marvin Hamlisch won it for his adaptation of Scott Joplin for The Sting.) Burnett's work on ILD definitely fits into this category, as he took folk songs from the 1960s and worked with the actors to create idiomatic performances. The use of music in the film doesn't need much exegesis since it provides its own with astonishing perspicacity. Can a work of art be a doctoral thesis on itself?

The music and lyrics for Frozen aren't all that good (though I do quite like the 'frozen fractals all around'), but they work very well within the film and unlike the other recent Disney musicals like The Princess and the Frog and Tangled they sometimes develop plot rather than being merely parenthetical. 'Do You Wanna Build a Snowman' does this particularly well through careful orchestration and vocal arrangements to display the disintegrating relationship between the two sisters across their childhood. The influence of Wicked is everywhere, and that influence is usually negative, entailing songs that depend on simple modulations and high belted notes rather than intelligent lyrics and interesting harmonic development, as well of course as the plot that was lifted bodily from the musical to the movie. Even more interesting from a musicological perspective is the way in which people have taken ownership of the score, especially 'Let It Go', making their own YouTube videos singing the original lyrics and adapted ones. What's most surprising is that Disney not only has allowed this to happen without lawsuits, but has even encouraged it by including backing tracks on the soundtrack album for singing along. Perhaps this litigious company is opening up? Or do they just want people to buy the album so they can get the backing tracks? The iTunes version also has karaoke versions of the other songs, but they haven't caught on as well (my favourite is 'Love Is an Open Door' but I can't find anyone to sing it with me). A word here should also be said about the 'pop' version of 'Let It Go' that plays over the end credits. The editing of the vocal line on this track is extraordinarily bad; it sounds like each syllable was spliced together from different takes, the pitch correction settings went haywire at the end of phrases, the melismas at the end were performed by a vocoder, and some door creaks were added in at random. It's all very strange indeed, and if spread around a room could pass for a cubist sound installation. Perhaps Demi Lovato is a Braque fan and it was all done on purpose.

I could go on even longer about all of these films, especially if I saw them all a second time, but that's more than enough for now. If anyone is still reading, feel free to add comments. Let's get some arguments going.

Academy Award Nominees and Their Music

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.

Some Thoughts on Music in The Wolf of Wall Street

Yesterday I went to see The Wolf of Wall Street for the second time in the cinema. After the first viewing I thought that it was one of Scorsese's best films, up there with Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. It is certainly his wittiest, more so than After Hours, his so-called comedy that is very interesting but not very funny. The film is an explosion of the ironic vein present in Scorsese's other large-canvas life story movies (especially Goodfellas and Casino), but while those films attain much of their power from the juxtaposition of light and dark, WoWS stays light almost all the way through. Before I get to the music more specifically, a musical example can illustrate the difference. In Casino Scorsese uses the final chorus of Bach's Matthew Passion to serve as a marker of seriousness and sorrow, the piece having this signification not only because of its specific source but because it is the only piece of 'Classical' music among an omnivorous pop tunestack. WoWS's only 'Classical' piece is the Cold Genius's aria from Purcell's King Arthur, which accompanies the mind slowing effect of quaaludes on Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) in a Stratton Oakmont board meeting. The audio-viewer who is unfamiliar with Purcell won't get the joke, but will still note the irony of having an opera aria accompany a comic scene in extreme slow motion.

The second viewing confirmed all of this, but also intensified the frustration I feel at the commentators who insist on seeing the film as glorifying the excesses of Jordan Belfort and his colleagues and who either label the film as morally irresponsible or want to follow it as a role model. Such viewers are clearly not really watching the film, or are seeing only what they want to see. Even though the film is comic, it shows that the consequences of the characters' actions are not at all positive. The question should be asked, however, whose fault this is. Is Scorsese to be blamed for not making his message clearer, or is the audience to be blamed for philistinism? This is meant to be an essay on music in the film, so there isn't space to get into the rights of the author and the rights of the interpreter: you can read Umberto Eco for that. But the problem is certainly not unique to this film; Fight Club is another famous example of a film that has been read as condoning the kind of behaviour it roundly critiques. In case anyone agrees that Scorsese is approving of the behaviour in the film, look again at its last shot: a sea of zombie-like faces (supposedly in Auckland, but the accents are wrong) waiting for Jordan Belfort's wisdom to rain down upon them. Could this be Scorsese's satirical representation of his movie's audience, taken in by Belfort's posturing?

Leaving morality aside for another time, let's get to the music. As with many of Scorsese's films, WoWS is scored entirely with pre-existing music, much of it used non-diegetically (meaning that the characters don't hear the music: it isn't coming from live musicians or a radio or CD player). Scorsese is the great master of this kind of scoring, as he and his music supervisors and producers (here Randall Poster and Robbie Robertson) choose music that perfectly fits a scene musically, lyrically, affectively, and narratively without ever distracting from the acting or cinematography (Wes Anderson is the other expert at this). WoWS uses about fifty pieces of music, listed here: http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/all-the-songs-in-the-wolf-of-wall-street-including-devo-cypress-hill-foo-fighters-more-20131227. But this film is a musical departure from Scorsese's other films that use this kind of scoring. Starting with his first feature, Who's That Knocking at My Door (1969), and taking its full form in Mean Streets, the music has nearly always been representative of what the characters in the film would listen to, and has been carefully matched for time and place: lots of Motown and '60s rock in Mean Streets, Italian music for the early part of Raging Bull, Tony Bennett in Goodfellas, etc. Using this kind of music as underscore brings the characters together into a community: scoring the scenes with music from the characters' experience articulates their interrelationships in a deeper way than dialogue alone, or a newly composed score, would do. (At some point in the near future I'll write a book chapter about this use of music.) WoWS, however, uses a much wider variety of music, and it doesn't really have the same characterising function. In addition to the Purcell mentioned above, WoWS is scored with jazz, rock, funk, ska, disco, blues, etc. We never get a sense of what kind of music the characters would actually listen to. Instead, the smorgasbord of music contributes to the film's sense of excess; literally anything could come next. But that doesn't mean that the music is arbitrary, as Scorsese is playing with the connotations all of this music has. This is a well-theorised aspect of film music (see this collection: http://www.amazon.com/Changing-Tunes-Pre-existing-Ashgate-Popular/dp/0754651371/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1392595893&sr=8-1&keywords=Changing+Tunes+Stilwell), but I don't know of any other film where this connotative aspect is engaged with such consistency and vigour. Quentin Tarantino is a definite influence, having been influenced himself by Scorsese's earlier films, though Tarantino's choice of music is narrower than Scorsese's in WoWS. I'll need to see the film again with the ability to pause it and reflect before giving too many examples or coming up with a stronger theoretical position, but here are some more instances of Scorsese's rich musical sense.

While Belfort is wooing Naomi, Ahmad Jamal's bop version of 'The Surrey with the Fringe on Top' is playing in the background: the use of bop implies speed, and the song is itself a a wooing song.

The scene on Belfort's yacht in Portofino, when he is trying balance the need to go to Switzerland for his shady banking, to London for Aunt Emma's funeral, and to New York for the FBI investigation, is accompanied with Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross's 'Cloudburst'. The manic vocalese emphasises the sense of everything flying out of Jordan's control. This is also another wooing song (if you can follow the lyrics!), but because of the speed it seems more desperate; Jordan is trying to keep hold of his wife and all of his other luxuries.

'Goldfinger' is being sung at Jordan and Naomi's wedding, a rather poor choice on Jordan's part, but such is the character that he would probably like being thought of as a Bond villain.

Jimmy Castor's 'Hey Leroy, Your Mama's Callin' You' is playing over one of the tracking shots through the Stratton Oakmont office. In addition to the upbeat latin jazz feel, if we were to replace 'mama' with 'papa' the song would fit Jordan's relationship with his father (who is angry about his son's excesses but is fairly happy to go along for the ride). This reminds me very much of a scene in Who's That Knocking at My Door where Ray Barretto's similar 'Watusi' accompanies a party in one of the young men's apartments. The scene starts happily enough, but as the camera cranks faster (resulting in slow motion) through a series of progressive tracking shots across the apartment the party gets more sinister, all while the song's ostinato continues unabated.

Those are only a few examples of the musical craft that went into this film, but there are many more. Each audience member will react differently to the compilation score, depending on his/her own knowledge of the music used and the particular connotations it has, but the ability to be productively re-read is a mark of a good work of art.

How does this fit into my developing theory of film music? It wouldn't fit into my chapter on Scorsese and characterisation because the music in WoWS is more to do with affect and narrative. It therefore has more in common structurally with traditional Hollywood film scoring of the type Adorno and Eisler excoriated in Composing for the Films, with the obvious difference that pre-existing music is being used (so it's actually more like silent film scoring!). But unlike, say, a Dimitri Tiomkin score, the music here doesn't tell us what we already know, nor does it tell us what to think, nor does it hide poorly-executed editing or bad acting (this is the villain's theme! this music mickey-mouses the gunshots! this is cowboy music, and look there's a cowboy on the screen! that house is dangerous! this must be an exciting scene because the music is exciting!). It gives us more information than the visuals, dialogue, and sound effects do on their own, and it allows us as audience members to bring our own connotations of musical meaning to it. Scorsese has always used music as part of his filmmaking toolkit, instead of seeing it simply as something to be added on in post-production for some gloss. Music is as integral for Scorsese as any other aspect of filmmaking, which makes his work an ideal test case for theorising about film music. WoWS is the first of his films to use quite so heterogenous a collection of music, and can therefore join other work by him as a model for the many different uses to which music can be put in film. Already he has shown expertise in using pre-existing music to articulate character (Mean Streets), using newly-composed scores to emphasise the film's themes (Taxi Driver), using new scores to read against the film (The Last Temptation of Christ), making musicianship part of a film's narrative (New York, New York), compiling pre-existing music to destabilise a film from the inside out (Shutter Island), and making films about music (The Last Waltz). Perhaps there's a monograph somewhere down the line (but I have to get the one I'm working on about music and character underway first)!