S ome of the most compelling film music of the past year (2004-5) appeared not on the big screen but on the small one. Michael Giacchino’s score for the TV show ‘Lost’—the tale of several dozen plane-crash survivors marooned on a vaguely supernatural, ‘Tempest’-like island—has unsettled millions of American viewers with an eerie array of orchestral sounds: fluttery four-note figures, shivery tones produced by bowing strings near the bridge, nasty glissandos on the trombone, and, at moments of maximum tension, a low plucked note on the harp. According to convention, harps are called upon to herald angels or other vessels of goodness. Giacchino makes the instrument gaunt and deathly, much as Mahler did in the last song of ‘Das Lied von der Erde.’ In general, Giacchino has done such a bang-up job of generating menace that the scriptwriters may have a hard time satisfying the expectations that he has created. Something mighty grim will have to crawl out of that lush jungle in order to justify those twangs of terror... Music can take control of the image; it can also suggest a world separate from the image, or expose the image as a lie... Giacchino’s music for “Lost,” in its own non-Marxist way, plays this same game of estrangement. Dispatching the ghosts of Schoenberg, Xenakis, and other twentieth-century sonic terrorists into an island paradise, it touches on the universal modern suspicion that surfaces are not what they seem, that the center does not hold, that it ain’t necessarily so. When the images themselves are terrifying, music can bring about an even trickier reversal, providing ironic reassurance or genuine compassion.”
— Alex Ross, New Yorker, 27-JUN-2005.
T he character of motion-picture music has been determined by everyday practice. It has been an adaptation to the immediate needs of the film industry, in part to whatever musical clichés and ideas about music happened to be current. As a result, a number of empirical standards, rules of thumb, were evolved that corresponded to what motion-picture people called ‘common sense’... a kind of pseudo-tradition harking back to the intellectual milieu of Tin Pan Alley, of medicine shows and covered wagons. These rules have now been made obsolete by the technical development of cinema, as well as of autonomous [ambient] music.”
— Theodor Adorno & Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films.
E arlier this week I went to see
Star Trek. The Michael Giacchino sound-track was, for me, superb—a powerful, seamless accompaniment to the action on the screen; more than an ‘amenity’.
Y es, the scenes are held together by ‘leitmotifs’—the role that film music serves in virtually all commercial, mass-market films is one of ad hoc leitmotivic ‘glue’. The sonic clues/cues for the viewer/listener are meant to be ‘easy’, lubricious. Only in exotic art-film will you find soundtrack compositions that majorly subvert or compete with the ideas and emotions unfolding on the screen.
A nd yet. And yet there are a number of places in this new Giacchino score where the edginess presages what is about to develop, subverting the prevailing expectations of that moment. The constantly changing scenes and sheer overload of action in Star Trek make it a little difficult to notice this. But it was the feature that most captured my imagination as we were leaving the theater and driving home. I thought I’d share a little about how I think it works here, plus a few links at the bottom that you might find useful if your own curiosity leads you to want to explore how it works.
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