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)

Excellence in Being For the Good: James Ehnes, Neo-Fiction, and the Many Faces of Virtuosity

T  his is the best sort of virtuosity that you will hear tonight—because of its nuances, its extraordinary sensitivity and elegance!”
  —  Cynthia Siebert, prefatory remarks, introducing James Ehnes’s and Andrew Armstrong’s performance in Kansas City.

I  ncredible mix of action, special effects, and story!”
  —  DSM, after James Ehnes’s and Andrew Armstrong’s performance in Kansas City.

I  f I read one more review that says that something or someone is ‘virtuosic’—that their playing was ‘virtuosic’—my head will explode. It’s the lamest, laziest excuse for a compliment that a reviewer can write. It tells us nothing, in 300 words or less. Instead, I wanna read about whether he/she plays like Keanu Reeves fights in the original ‘The Matrix’. I wanna know details about how the fight went, note by note. I’ve got all the attention span in the world; I’ve got all night. Tell me. I wanna know whether his/her playing can save the World, and I wanna know how this can really happen. I wanna know whether this is The One. Make me believe!”
  —  Anonymous.

J   ust in case you were hoping to make it back, they’ve reconfigured the culture so there are hardly any phone booth [portals] left. We’re gonna need guns. Lots of guns. And an endless supply of logic, humor, tenderness, disobedience, defiance, and argumentative tenacity. The surviving members of the old crew are still on board, along with some new recruits, freshly located, unplugged, and debugged. Are you with us? You’ve already made your choice. Now you have to understand WHY you made it.”
  —  Jacket blurb, William Irwin book, The Matrix and Philosophy.

It’s astonishing how much we expect of the Arts—especially of music. How can it possibly deliver us out of the desert-like banality that comprises so much of modern life?

And yet it can and, surprisingly often, does. It awakens us, enables us to feel how alive we and others around us are, makes us feel deeply, truly human—immersed. Nobody ‘taught’ us this, in school or in out-reach programs. We haven’t succumbed to some seductive marketing scheme to make us consume this stuff. The music doesn’t exist to separate us from our money and divert us for an hour or two. The music we’re after may at times be sensual and escapist (that is, it can be part of The Matrix, for those who prefer the Blue Pill). Or the music can at times propel us into a novel and unexpected reality—one that may or may not be pleasurable but is, regardless, inherently meaningful (that is, it can be part of the Real World, for those of us exponents who take the Red Pill). In either case, we honestly and truly resonate with it and identify deeply with it. If you don’t want to call music that succeeds in doing this ‘virtuosic’, maybe the word you’re looking for is ‘engrossing’ or ‘profound’.

T  he public doesn’t need educating [about classical music]. It doesn’t need sexy marketing, or publicists, or icons [to save classical music markets]. It wants music it can enjoy or at least respect. Composers ... should have a long, hard think about why there is a far larger appetite for the music of [list of names #1] than there is for [list of names #2].”
  —  Christopher Pugh, Gramophone, 2008 March; 85: 8.

The classical music repertoire that sells—both old and new; both live and recorded—is not all righteous, redemptive, heroic ‘Matrix-oid’ stuff of course. Sometimes what we want is serene and pacifistic, so long as it’s not namby-pamby or face-losing. We desperately want to believe in the possibility of peace, and we crave music that consoles us and dramatically restores our hope. No mean feat, that. So, if you don’t want to call music that succeeds in doing this ‘virtuosic’, maybe the word you want is ‘irenic’.

F  or me the Regenlied [Song of the Rain, Brahms Sonata for Piano and Violin, Op. 78] is like a dear and true friend whom I would never forsake for anyone else. In its soft, contemplatively dreaming feeling and its wondrously consoling strength, it is one of a kind.”
  —  Eduard Hanslick, 19th-Century music critic.

The chamber music repertoire is rife with intimate narrative between parts. In that regard, we want desperately to be reminded that human beings can be beneficent and responsive. We want music that will remind us of friends and family who have loved us and helped us and who have worked for the public good. And, equally often, we want music that will remind us of our own good-heartedness and steadfastness—of our own radical devotedness to those we love. We want music that helps us plumb the depths of our aspirations to frenzied sacrifice for significant others: we would never forsake them, even if it costs us our lives. Most mothers feel such a love for their children—a ferocity that’s a natural correlate of childbearing and biology. Others of us have to get our other-centered ferocity in other ways. So, if you don’t want to call music that succeeds in helping us do this ‘virtuosic’, maybe the word you want is ‘altruistic’ or ‘rapt’ or just ‘berserk’ (in the Norse sense of that word).

O  f course you are aware—that no one can help loving it more than anything in the world, and that one becomes addicted to it by just studying and understanding it, by listening to it as in a dream, and by becoming completely absorbed by it ... When I play the last page of the E-flat major Adagio, I always think to myself that [Brahms] can only be a thoroughly good-hearted man.”
  —  Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, 19th-Century singer, remarking on Brahms’s Op. 78.

• Virtuous—commendable, ethically laudable, venerable, redemptive;
  
• Proficient—elite level of technic and interpretation;
  
• Incredible, illuminating, transcendant—giftedness defying mortality and the triviality of human existence; fluency beggaring belief; super-human, exceeding known limits; god-like omniscience and omnipotence;
  
• Courageous—scoffing at danger; gambling and winning against terrific odds; dynamic and processual; continuously (re-)earned, not a static ‘attribute’ of character;
  
• Strenuous—the virtue of sweat and ‘dirty hands’; self-sacrifice to others / to humankind or to the professional guild (see Godlovitch, pp. 74-78); extraordinary exertion on behalf of public goods;
  
• Orthodoxastic—integrity; embodying what the field believes or idealizes; beneficience; advocacy and regulatory role in opposition to wickedness or maleficence and mediocrity.

Oh, that last bullet, in the bulleted list above! Consider the plight of the arts in the U.S., and of art music in particular. The recently announced $16M cut in this year’s funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is outrageous. “It means we must redouble our efforts to raise the arts consciousness of those who are seeking elective office in the coming year… On VoteUsa candidates are compared on 35 important issues: foreign policy, environment, … I clicked on ‘Education’ and found 56 sub-topics; number 53 was ‘Art and Music,’ and 6 out of the original 7 major candidates had no statement at all on it, ” says Magaret Lioi, CEO of Chamber Music America, in her editorial in this month’s issue of Chamber Music magazine (March 2008; 25(2):7). Currently the candidates “have no platform on the arts… the word ‘art’ doesn’t even appear on their websites.”

But every thinking human takes pride in seeing humankind flourish, and in knowing that the cultural legacy that has been bestowed upon us has been successfully passed on to the next generation. So ‘virtuosity’ is partly about Dawkins’s self-conserving (‘selfish’) gene: H. sapiens appreciating that what we have been as a people will endure beyond our life on the planet as individuals. Therefore, playing and composing that (a) significantly advance the cause of the arts and (b) serve as emblems of what civilized governments’ policies should support—must surely be ‘virtuosic’ as well.

James Ehnes’s concert tonight ran the gamut from rapt, to altruistic, to irenic (in the Brahms Op. 78, Vivace ma non troppo and Adagio), to engrossing (in the LeClair Sonata in D Major, Opus 9, No. 3), to profound, to transcendent, to redemptive, to fantastical (in the Bartók Rhapsody No. 2), to berserk—beyond courageous. The playing was righteous throughout, with highly accessible, visceral, and addictive elements. Ehnes was uncanny in his technical proficiency, oracular in both ‘red pill’ (Bartók) and ‘blue pill’ (Richard Strauss Sonata in E-flat, Op. 18) phrasing: clearly capable of taking the guild of musicians and each of us as individuals yet farther. Pyrotechnical, yes; iconic, yes; prodigious, yes; and at times near-miraculous (Brahms Scherzo, Sonatensatz). Segulah (“well-choosing,” “sustaining learning,” “Samek-Gimel-Lamed,” “לּגּסּ”) ! Tenth Dan! Jinlong Golden Dragon!

Virtuosic? T’would be damning by faint praise.

But how would you know if I’m right about this? Check out Ehnes’s recordings. Attend one of his forthcoming concerts yourself. Check out the several links below—on the epistemology of ideals and on virtue ethics. You don’t have to be a card-carrying philosopher to find these things fascinating. You don’t have to be Morpheus to know virtue when you hear it.

C  onfucian virtues have been predominantly a perception of what it is to be a human being and how one should behave to fulfill the meaning of Life... recorded in Analects (Lu Yu) ... operating in a continually evolving process with no permanence or limit ... even the unknown is [a type of] knowledge [concerning which one can have, or not have, virtuosic mastery]. To Confucians, learning and discovery are themselves essential virtues ... not static but requiring interaction with others.”
  —  Tsung-I Dow, in Tymieniecka, p. 3.

• James Ehnes website
  
• Ehnes and Armstrong concert, 01-MAR-2008, Friends of Chamber Music, Kansas City.
  
• The Matrix website (Warner Bros)
  
• Adams R. A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good. Oxford Univ, 2006.
  
• Card O. Ender's Game. Tor, 1993.
  
• Card O. Speaker for the Dead. Tor, 1994.
  
• Chappell T, ed. Values and Virtues: Aristotelianism in Contemporary Ethics. Oxford Univ, 2007.
  
• Chong C, Yuli L, eds. Conceptions of Virtue: East and West. Cavendish, 2006.
  
• Dzherrold D. Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in the Matrix. Ul'tra-Kul'tura, 2003.
  
• Fairweather A, Zagzebski L, eds. Virtue Epistemology: Essays in Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility. Oxford Univ, 2001.
  
• Farrelly C, Solum L, eds. Virtue Jurisprudence. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
  
• Foot P. Virtues and Vices: and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. Oxford Univ, 2003.
  
• Gill C, ed. Virtue, Norms, and Objectivity: Issues in Ancient and Modern Ethics. Oxford Univ, 2005.
  
• Godlovitch S. Musical Performance: A Philosophical Study. Routledge, 1998.
  
• Grau C, ed. Philosophers Explore The Matrix. Oxford Univ, 2005.
  
• Howerton G. Music as one of the humanities. Mus Educ J 1962; 49: 28-30.
  
• Irwin W, ed. The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Open Court, 2002.
  
• Irwin W, ed. More Matrix and Philosophy: Revolutions and Reloaded Decoded. Open Court, 2005.
  
• Kupfer J. Prostitutes, Musicians, and Self-Respect: Virtues and Vices of Personal Life. Lexington, 2007.
  
• Lawrence M. Like a Splinter in Your Mind: The Philosophy Behind the Matrix Trilogy. Wiley, 2004.
  
• O’Dea J. Virtue or Virtuosity?: Explorations in the Ethics of Musical Performance. Greenwood, 2000.
  
• Roberts R, Wood W. Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology. Oxford Univ, 2007.
  
• Simmons D. Hyperion. Spectra, 1990.
  
• Simmons D. The Fall of Hyperion. Spectra, 1995.
  
• Simmons D. Endymion. Spectra, 1996.
  
• Slote M. Morals from Motives. Oxford Univ, 2003.
  
• Sosa E. A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge. Oxford Univ, 2007.
  
• Statman D, ed. Virtue Ethics: A Critical Reader. Georgetown, 1997.
  
• Swanton C. Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View. Oxford Univ, 2003.
  
• Tymieniecka A-T, ed. Virtues and Passions in Literature: Excellence, Courage, Engagements, Wisdom, Fulfilment. Springer, 2007.
  
• de Wijze S. Political Morality: The Virtue of Dirty Hands. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
  
• DSM. Bronfman: Is Virtuosity ‘Necessary’? Is Sublimity ‘Measurable’? CMT blog, 08-DEC-2007.
  
• DSM. Bronfman and Everest: Balakirev’s and Ravel’s Virtuosic Fantasies. CMT blog, 05-DEC-2007.
  
• DSM. Belder: On Fingermusik and Mere Virtuosity. CMT blog, 02-SEP-2007.