Tip to Moviegoers: Take Off Those Ear-Muffs

New York Times: November 6, 1949, Section SM, Page 28

Copyright © New York Times 1949. All rights reserved.


The next time you settle yourself comfortably into a seat at the neighborhood picture house don’t forget to take off your ear-muffs. Most people don’t realize they are wearing any — at any rate, that is the impression of composers who write for the movies. Millions of moviegoers take the musical accompaniment to a dramatic film so much for granted that five minutes after the termination of a picture they couldn’t tell you whether they had heard music or not.

To ask whether they thought the score exciting or merely adequate or downright awful would be to give them a musical inferiority complex. But, on second thought, and possibly in self-protection, comes the query: “Isn’t it true that one isn’t supposed to be listening to the music? Isn’t it supposed to work on you unconsciously without being listened to directly as you would listen at a concert?”

No discussion of movie music ever gets very far without having to face this problem: Should one hear a movie score? If you are a musician there is no problem because the chances are you can’t help but listen. More than once I’ve had a good picture ruined for me by an inferior score. Have you had the same experience? Yes? Then you may congratulate yourself: you’re definitely musical.

But it’s the spectator, so absorbed in the dramatic action that he fails to take in the background music, who wants to know whether he is missing anything. The answer is bound up with the degree of your general musical perception. It is the degree to which you are aurally minded that will determine how much pleasure you may derive by absorbing the background musical accompaniment as an integral part of the combined impression made by the film.

One’s appreciation of a work of art is partly determined by the amount of preparation one brings to it. The head of the family will probably be less sensitive to the beauty and appropriateness of the gowns worn by the feminine star than his wife will be. It’s hopeless to expect the tone-deaf to listen to a musical score. But since the great majority of movie patrons are undoubtedly musical to some degree, they should be encouraged not to ignore the music; on the contrary, I would hope to convince them that by taking it in they will be enriching both their musical and their cinema experience.

Recently I was asked rather timorously whether I liked to write movie music - the implication being that it was possibly degrading for a composer of symphonies to trifle with a commercial product. “Would you do it anyhow, even if it were less well paid?” I think I would, and, moreover, I think most composers would, principally because film music constitutes a new musical medium that exerts a fascination of its own. Actually, it is a new form of dramatic music — related to opera, ballet, incidental theatre music — in contradistinction to concert music of the symphonic or chamber music kind. As a new form it opens up unexplored possibilities, or should.

The main complaint about film music as written today in Hollywood is that so much of it is cut and dried, rigidly governed by conventions that have grown up with surprising rapidity in the short period of twenty-odd years since the talkies began. But, leaving the hack composer aside, there is no reason why a serious composer, cooperating with an intelligent producer on a picture of serious artistic pretensions, should not be able to have his movie scores judged by the same standards applied to his concert music. That is certainly the way William Walton in HENRY V, Serge Prokofieff in ALEXANDER NEVSKY, or Virgil Thomson in LOUISIANA STORY would want to be judged. They did not have to lower their standards because they were writing for a mass audience. Some day the term “movie music” will clearly define a specific musical genre and will not have, as it does have nowadays, a pejorative meaning.

Most people are curious as to just how one goes about putting music to a film. Fortunately, the process is not so complex that it cannot be outlined here. The first thing one must do, of course, is to see the picture. Almost all musical scores are composed after the film itself is completed. The only exception to this is when the script calls for realistic music — that is, music which is visually sung or played or danced to on the screen. In that case the music must be composed before the scene is photographed. It will then be recorded and the scene in question shot to a playback of the recording. Thus, when you see an actor singing or playing or dancing, he is only making believe as far as the sound goes, for the music had previously been put down on film.

The first run-through of the film for the composer is usually a solemn moment. After all, he must live with it for several weeks. The solemnity of the occasion is emphasized by the exclusive audience that views it with him: the producer, the director, the musical head of the studio, the picture editor, the music cutter, the conductor, the orchestrator — in fact, anyone involved in scoring the picture. At that showing it is difficult for the composer to view the photoplay coldly. There is an understandable compulsion to like everything, for he is looking at what must necessarily constitute the source of his future inspiration.

The purpose of the run-through is to decide how much music is needed and where it should be. (In technical jargon this is called “to spot” the picture.) Since no background score is continuous throughout the full length of a film (that would constitute a motion picture opera, an unexploited cinema form), the score will normally consist of separate sequences, each lasting from a few seconds to several minutes in duration. A sequence as long as seven minutes would be exceptional. The entire score, made up of perhaps thirty or more such sequences, may add up to from forty to ninety minutes of music.

Much discussion, much give and take, may be necessary before final decisions are reached regarding the “spotting” of the picture. In general my impression has been that composers are better able to gauge the over-all effect of a musical accompaniment than the average non-musician. Personally I like to make use of music’s power sparingly, saving it for absolutely essential points. A composer knows how to play with silences; knows that to take music out can at times be more effective than any use of it might be.

The producer-director, on the other hand, is more prone to think of music in terms of its immediate functional usage. Sometimes he has ulterior motives: anything wrong with a scene — a poor bit of acting, a badly read line, an embarrassing pause — he secretly hopes will be covered up by a clever composer. Producers have been known to hope that an entire picture would be saved by a good score. But the composer is not a magician; he can hardly be expected to do more than to make potent through music the film’s dramatic and emotional values.

When well contrived there is no question but that a musical score can be of enormous help to a picture. One can prove that point, laboratory fashion, by showing an audience a climactic scene with the sound turned off and then once again with the sound track turned on. Here briefly is listed a number of ways in which music serves the screen: Creating a more convincing atmosphere of time and place. Not all Hollywood composers bother about this nicety. Too often, their scores are interchangeable; a thirteenth century Gothic drama and a hard-boiled modern battle of the sexes get similar treatment. The lush symphonic texture of late nineteenth century music remains the dominating influence. But there are exceptions. Recently, the higher grade horse-opera has begun to have its own musical flavor, mostly a folksong derivative.

Underlining psychological refinements — the unspoken thoughts of a character or the unseen implications of a situation. Music can play upon the emotions of the spectator, sometimes counterpointing the thing seen with an aural image that implies the contrary of the thing seen. This is not as subtle as it sounds. A well-placed dissonant chord can stop an audience cold in the middle of a sentimental scene, or a calculated woodwind passage can turn what appears to be a solemn moment into a belly-laugh.

Serving as a kind of neutral background filler. This is really the music one isn’t supposed to hear, the sort that helps to fill the empty spots between pauses in a conversation. It’s the movie composer’s most ungrateful task. But at times, though no one else may notice, he will get private satisfaction from the thought that music of little intrinsic value, through professional manipulation, has enlivened and made more human the deathly pallor of a screen shadow. This is hardest to do, as any film composer will attest, when the neutral filler type of music must weave its way underneath dialogue.

Building a sense of continuity. The picture editor knows better than anyone how serviceable music can be in tieing together a visual medium which is, by its very nature, continually in danger of falling apart. One sees this most obviously in montage scenes where the use of a unifying musical idea may save the quick flashes of disconnected scenes from seeming merely chaotic.

Underpinning the theatrical build-up of a scene, and rounding it off with a sense of finality. The first instance that comes to mind is the music that blares out at the end of a film. Certain producers have boasted their picture’s lack of a musical score, but I never saw or heard of a picture that ended in silence.

We have merely skimmed the surface, without mentioning the innumerable examples of utilitarian music - offstage street bands, the barn dance, merry-go-rounds, circus music, cafe music, the neighbor’s girl practicing her piano, etc. All these, and many others, introduced with apparent naturalistic intent, serve to vary subtly the aural interest of the sound track.

Perhaps it is only fair to mention that several of these uses come to the screen by way of the long tradition of incidental music in the legitimate theatre. Most workers in the theatre, and especially our playwrights, would agree that music enhances the glamour and atmosphere of a stage production, any stage production. Formerly it was considered indispensable. But nowadays only musical comedy can afford a considerable-sized orchestra in the pit.

With mounting costs of production it looks as if the serious drama would have to get along with a union minimum of four musicians for some time to come. If there is to be any combining of music and the spoken drama in any but the barest terms, it will have to happen in Hollywood, for the Broadway theatre is practically out of the running.

But now perhaps we had better return to our hypothetical composer. Having determined where the separate musical sequences will begin and end he turns the film over to the music cutter who prepares a so-called cue sheet. The cue sheet provides the composer with a detailed description of the physical action in each sequence, plus the exact timings in thirds of seconds of that action, thereby making it possible for a practiced composer to write an entire score without ever again referring to the picture. Personally I prefer to remain in daily contact with the picture itself, viewing again and again the sequence I happen to be working on.

The layman usually imagines that the most difficult part of the job in composing for the films has to do with the precise “fitting” of the music to the action. Doesn’t that kind of timing straitjacket the composer? The answer is, No, for two reasons: first, having to compose music to accompany specific action is a help rather than a hindrance, since the action itself induces music in a composer of theatrical imagination, whereas he has no such visual stimulus in writing absolute music. Secondly, the timing is mostly a matter of minor adjustments, since the over-all musical fabric is there.

For the composer of concert music, changing to the medium of celluloid does bring certain special pitfalls. For example, melodic invention, highly prized in the concert hall, may at times be distracting in certain film situations. Even phrasing in the concert manner, which would normally emphasize the independence of separate contrapuntal lines, may be distracting when applied to screen accompaniments. In orchestration there are many subtleties of timbre - distinctions meant to be listened to for their own expressive quality in an auditorium - which are completely wasted on sound track.

As compensation for these losses, the composer has other possibilities, some of them tricks, which are unobtainable in Carnegie Hall. In scoring one section of THE HEIRESS, for example, I was able to superimpose two orchestras, one upon another. Both recorded the same music at different times, one orchestra consisting of strings alone, the other constituted normally. Later these were combined by simultaneously re-recording the original tracks, thereby producing a highly expressive orchestral texture. Bernard Herrmann, one of the most ingenious of screen composers, called for (and got) eight celestas - an unheard-of combination on Fifty-seventh Street - to suggest a winter’s sleigh ride. Miklos Rozsa’s use of the “echo chamber” - a device to give normal tone a ghost-like aura - was widely remarked, and subsequently done to death.

Unusual effects are obtainable through overlapping incoming and outgoing music tracks. Like two trains passing one another, it is possible to bring in and take out at the same time two different musics. THE RED PONY gave me an opportunity to use this cinema specialty. When the daydreaming imagination of a little boy turns white chickens into white circus horses the visual image is mirrored in an aural image by having the chicken music transform itself into circus music, a device only obtainable by means of the overlap.

Let us now assume that the musical score has been completed and is ready for recording. The scoring stage is a happy-making place for the composer. Hollywood has gathered to itself some of America’s finest performers; the music will be beautifully played and recorded with a technical perfection not to be matched anywhere else.

Most composers like to invite their friends to be present at the recording session of important sequences. The reason is that neither the composer nor his friends are ever again likely to hear the music sound out in concert style. For when it is combined with the picture most of the dynamic levels will be changed. Otherwise the finished product might sound like a concert with pictures. In lowering dynamic levels niceties of shading, some inner voices and bass parts may be lost. Erich Korngold, one of Hollywood’s top men, put it well when he said: “A movie composer’s immortality lasts from the recording stage to the dubbing room.”

The dubbing room is where all the tracks involving sound of any kind, including dialogue, are put through the machines to obtain one master sound track. This is a delicate process as far as the music is concerned, for it is only a hair’s breadth that separates the “too loud” from the “too soft.” Sound engineers, working the dials that control volume, are not always as musically sensitive as composers would like them to be. What is called for is a new species, a sound mixer who is half musician and half engineer; and even then, the mixing of dialogue, music and realistic sounds of all kinds must always remain problematical.

In view of these drawbacks to the full sounding out of his music, it is only natural that the composer often hopes to be able to extract a viable concert suite from his film score. There is a current tendency to believe that movie scores are not proper material for concert music. The argument is that separated from its visual justification the music falls flat.

Personally, I doubt very much that any hard and fast rule can be made that will cover all cases. Each score will have to be judged on its merits and, no doubt, stories that require a more continuous type of musical development in a unified atmosphere will lend themselves better than others to reworking for concert purposes. Rarely is it conceivable that the music of a film might be extracted without much re-working. But I fail to see why, if successful suites like Grieg’s PEER GYNT can be made from nineteenth century incidental stage music, a twentieth century composer can’t be expected to do as well with a film score.

As for the picture score, it is only in the motion picture theatre that the composer for the first time gets the full impact of what he has accomplished, tests the dramatic punch of his favorite musical spot, appreciates the curious importance and unimportance of detail, wishes that he had done certain things differently and is surprised that others came off better than he had hoped. For when all is said and done the art of combining moving pictures with musical tones is still a mysterious art. Not the least mysterious element is the theatregoers’ reaction: Millions will be listening but one never knows how many will be really hearing, so the next time you go to the movies remember to be on the composer’s side. Remove those ear-muffs.