Michael Giacchino: Veridical and Schematic Expectations, Fight!

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.


    [30-sec clip, Michael Giacchino, ‘Star Trek, That New Car Smell’, 0.9MB MP3]

M  ost of the score is bombastic, galactic, symphonic stuff. But there are segments that engage in cross-genre ‘chamber music’ idioms. Conducted orchestra and/or software-based virtual instruments, but still ‘chamber music’. And these cross-genre moments tend to be places where subversion of our expectations happens.

• Star Trek
  
• Nailin’ the Kelvin [leitmotif & reprise]
  
• Labor of Love
  
• Hella Bar-Talk
  
• Enterprising Young [Men]
  
• Nero Sighted
  
• Nice to Mind-Meld You
  
• Run and Shoot Offense
  
• Does It Still ‘McFly’?
  
• Nero Death Experience
  
• Nero Fiddles, Narada Burns
  
• Back from Black
  
• That New-Car Smell (clip above)
  
• To Boldly Go
  
• End Credits

B  eautifully done! The decision not to couple the new film’s soundtrack more closely with the original series’s music (Alexander Courage, Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, Leonard Rosenman, Cliff Eidelman) is getting some complaints from a few reviewers. But, by contrast, the new materials Giacchino lays down should be good for the renewed Star Trek franchise. The ‘identity’ of this soundtrack is recognizable and durable. A friend with whom we saw the film on Tuesday had already seen the film the day it opened, and commented on liking the music. But then she is also a fan of ‘Lost’ and other Giacchino projects.


S  o there are cross-genre features in some of Giacchino’s Star Trek pieces. Not to say that other video game and film composers don’t do this; they do. But the chamber-symphonic cross-genre elements in this soundtrack are, to me, more pre-meditated and ‘go for the jugular’ than normal.

C  ross-genre techniques exploit... a schism... between two kinds of expectations—what Hallam and others call ‘schematic’ and ‘veridical’ expectations. A genre-compliant piece of music contains few or no surprises. But cross-genre pieces violate our expectations, and, to the degree that intact expectations matter emotionally or aesthetically to us, such pieces usually generate interest with each listening or each performance.

W  e are fascinated by how they “push our buttons”, even though we often can’t quite put our “finger” on why or how they do that. Fascinated... in the way that continued to preoccupy me during our drive home from the theater. Is this a synthetic, heavily-signal-processed virtual instrument, or was it processed digitized human voice—or was it a meld of the two, part-doubling and dubbed, beginning predominantly with one and dissolving into predominantly the other? Is this a chamber passage whose floor will drop out from under us, into a symphonic chasm?

H  ow does this cognitive/emotional exploit work? ‘Schematic expectations’ are automatic—culturally received and ‘generic’; things in which we have maybe considerable investment, but maybe not. Schematic expectations are built-up passively over many years. We are often quite ready to reconsider our attachment to them; we may even resent that we have them, insofar as they do not feel like they are really our own.

B  y contrast, ‘veridical expectations’ are expectations about near-term future events in the story-arc or narrative we are listening to. They are truth-statements or beliefs that we have formed by our own direct experience; they are fully “ours”. We are reluctant to abandon them because much of our own effort has been put into processing the events, musical evidence, and story-arc that have led to the beliefs and expectations that we hold at this moment. We want not to let go of them because our making sense of the situation might have to start totally from scratch if we did.

S  o if veridical and schematic expectations that we have as we listen to or play a piece of music diverge—or if they diverge for awhile and then re-converge again—then we experience powerful drama and emotional tension.

H  uron says a bit about this, as does Bharucha. Have a look at the links below if you’re interested in this.


M  ichael Giacchino, born in 1967 in New Jersey; captivated as a kid by John Williams’s classic Star Wars scores; studied composition at Juilliard; worked for Disney and then Dreamworks; enlisted by Steven Spielberg to score music for the Playstation game ‘The Lost World’, followed by ‘Medal of Honor’ and its many sequels. Video games (VG) ‘Call of Duty’ and ‘Secret Weapons over Normandy’ for which he wrote game scores were massively popular. Giacchino also scored Spielberg’s network movie, ‘Semper Fi’, the series ‘Alias’ and the movie ‘Sin’. ‘The Incredibles’ (Pixar) was a big breakthrough, or, arguably, the television series, ‘Lost’. For your interest and ambient amazement, I’ve tabulated other of Giacchino’s hypernumerous accomplishments at the bottom of this post. Live long and prosper!

• Michael Giacchino website
  
• Giacchino page at Mounsey (U.K.)
  
• Varèse Sarabande
  
• Ross A. Sound and Vision. New Yorker, 27-JUN-2005.
  
• Amazon collection of Michael Giacchino Soundtracks
  
• Giacchino M. Star Trek. (Varese Sarabande, 2009.)
  
• Adorno T, Eisler H. Composing for the Films. Continuum, 2007.
  
• Bacciagalupo C, Plaza E, Donaldson J. Uncovering affinity of artists to multiple genres from social behaviour data. ISMIR, 2008. [1MB pdf]
  
• Barthes R. Image-Music-Text. Hill & Wang, 1978.
  
• Bharucha J. Tonality and expectation. In Musical Perceptions. Aiello R, Sloboda J, eds. Oxford Univ, 1994. Pp. 213-39.
  
• Bryant J, Vorderer P, eds. Psychology of Entertainment. Erlbaum, 2006.
  
• Huron D. Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. MIT, 2006.
  
• Stevens C, Byron T. Universals in music processing. In Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology. Hallam S, Cross I, Thaut M, eds. Oxford Univ, 2009. Pp. 14-23.
  
• Zehnder S, Lipscomb S. The role of music in video games. In Playing Video Games: Motives, Responses, and Consequences. Vorderer P, Bryant J, eds. (Ch. 17) Erlbaum, 2006.

• Land of the Lost (2009)
  
• Partly Cloudy (2009)
  
• Up (2009)
  
• Fringe (19 episodes, 2008-2009)
  
• Lost (92 episodes, 2004-2009)
  
• Earth Days (2009)
  
• Glock (2009)
  
• Fracture (2008) (VG)
  
• Speed Racer (2008)
  
• Turning Point: Fall of Liberty (2008) (VG)
  
• Medal of Honor: Airborne (2007/I) (VG)
  
• Ratatouille (2007)
  
• Six Degrees (13 episodes, 2006-2007)
  
• Lifted (2006)
  
• Alias (105 episodes, 2001-2006)
  
• What About Brian (4 episodes, 2006)
  
• Mission: Impossible III (2006)
  
• Black (2006) (VG)
  
• Lost: Revelation (2006) (TV)
  
• Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2005)
  
• The Family Stone (2005)
  
• The Karateguard (2005)
  
• Destination Lost (2005) (TV)
  
• One Man Band (2005)
  
• Sky High (2005)
  
• The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz (2005) (TV)
  
• Vowellet: An Essay by Sarah Vowell (2005) (V)
  
• The Incredibles (2004) (VG)
  
• Call of Duty: Finest Hour (2004) (VG)
  
• The Incredibles (2004)
  
• Call of Duty: United Offensive (2004) (VG)
  
• Alias (2004) (VG)
  
• Secret Weapons Over Normandy (2003) (VG)
  
• Phenomenon II (2003) (TV)
  
• Call of Duty (2003) (VG)
  
• String of the Kite (2003)
  
• Medal of Honor: Frontline (2002) (VG)
  
• Redemption of the Ghost (2002)
  
• Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002) (VG)
  
• Semper Fi (2001) (TV)
  
• The Trouble with Lou (2001)
  
• Muppet Monster Adventure (2000) (VG)
  
• Los Gringos (1999)
  
• Warpath: Jurassic Park (1999) (VG)
  
• My Brother the Pig (1999)
  
• No Salida (1998)
  
• Legal Deceit (1997)
  
• The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) (VG)
  
• Donald Duck: Maui Mallard (1995) (VG)
  
• Gargoyles (1995) (VG)

• 2008 Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media (Ratatouille)
  
• 2007 Film & TV Music Award for Best Score for a Short Film (Lifted)
  
• 2007 StreamingSoundtracks.com Award for Composer of the Year
  
• 2005 Emmy Award for Music Composition for a Series (Dramatic Underscore – Lost)
  
• 2004 IFMCA Award for Score of the Year (The Incredibles)
  
• 2004 IFMCA Award for Composer of the Year
  
• 2004 Game Developers Choice Awards for Excellence in Audio (Call of Duty)
  
• 2003 Game Developers Choice Awards for Excellence in Audio (Medal of Honor: Allied Assault)
  
• 2003 Interactive Achievement Awards for Original Music Composition (Medal of Honor: Frontline)
  
• 2001 Interactive Achievement Awards for Original Music Composition (Medal of Honor: Underground)