jwilzewske: sherlock holmes

Saturday, December 24, 2011

Hans Zimmer & Co. save Holmes, entropically

I t’s the furiously melodic likes of Gladiator, The Lion King, Inception, Batman Begins, Dark Knight Rises, Pirates of the Caribbean, Kung Fu Panda, and Sherlock Holmes that’s elevated film music to a thing of rocking beauty, as Zimmer and his team have employed every oddball instrument and influence from Gustav Holst, Lebo M. and the sound of bat wings into percussively thematic adrenalin.”
— Daniel Schweiger, 2011.

I f you ask me, Zimmer’s score rescues Sherlock Holmes (and Guy Ritchie et al.) in the new ‘A Game of Shadows’ film.

Z immer and his composer-orchestrator colleagues at Remote Control Productions created a beautiful and varied score that augments the color and vista of the film, lending atmosphere, scope, and interest to what otherwise could seem predictable. Never gets in the way of what the script and imagery are doing, but never merely reinforces or sonically reiterates what’s been said or shown.

B ut more than this, I am really thrilled with the tempi and the rhythmic architecture of this score. I got the soundtrack and listened to it several times, measured the tempi bar-by-bar in each of the cues, and created a spreadsheet of the values (see jpeg above). I also put an EKG on myself and digitized my heartrate during each listening. Not only did my heartrate adapt to each of the tempo changes, but the heart rate variability (HRV, using the simple RMSSD metric) also synced with Zimmer’s music. Empirically, I suspect that that “N-of-1” experiment is indicative of why this music “works”—physiologic response “pulls” cognition, rather than the other way around.

S ee the book by Bacci and Melcher (link below) for more on phase-locking and rhythmic ‘entrainment’ of breathing, heartbeat, and other physiologic rhythms, syncing with music.

S ince I’d captured the tempo timeseries, I decided to do some other calculations on it, too. I used the open-source R system’s package ‘entropy’ (link below) to calculate the Miller-Madow, James-Stein, Tsallis, Chao-Shen, and Shannon/Jeffreys entropy values. The entropy of the timeseries of tempi for these 18 cues is H = 2.72... pretty high... indicating a substantial amount of variability/unpredictability/interestingness. If you do entropy calcs for “bad” or ineffective film scores (as I happened to do several times last summer), you get much lower values, H between about 1.10 and 1.90.

M ost film schools don't even mention music, much less compare examples of good and bad scoring.”
— Richard Bellis, 2006, p. 8.

T he cues’ titles (track-names) collect words and phrases from the screenplay that are cadential—perfect rhythmic-harmonic demarcations of the narrative arc and plotting. It’s clear that Zimmer applied an admirable amount of objectivity in the spotting session, to inject material that adds considerable depth to the character or the story without the material asserting itself as a vehicle for his own ego.

T he score (Die Forelle; The Red Book; Moral Insanity) makes Robert Downey Jr’s Holmes more alert and angry when he is facing Jared Harris’ Moriarty. The score (He’s All ‘Me! Me! Me!’) makes Jude Law’s Dr. Watson all the more hapless as he gets unwillingly caught up in the plot.

T he producers and Guy [Ritchie, the director] and Jude [Law, co-star] and I got together and tried to have it feel like an extension of what we think brotherhood is—the bickering and miscommunications are part of something that aspires to something higher.”
— Robert Downey Jr., Scotland BigIssues Magazine 05-DEC-2011.

A Game of Shadows’ stands as a valentine to the public-school buccaneer. It provides Ritchie with a licence to run wild with Gypsies, trade punches with cossacks, or just generally arse about in expensive hotels. It gives us anarchy as panto and global espionage in the guise of a homoerotic stag weekend.”
— Xan Brooks, The Guardian.

I n other words, Zimmer’s score truly ‘services’ the film’s narrative, neither over-writing nor under-writing. Naturally, given the big-action subject matter in this film, there are lots of huge orchestral cues. But there are more than half of the cues that are intimate, chamber-like pieces.

M any think that what we do is ‘Art’. I disagree. Music is an art form. Film music is a craft with its roots in art. Art is a form of self-expression, and the last thing a director wants is some composer coming in and expressing him/herself all over the director’s film.”
— Richard Bellis, 2006, p. 69.

F olk idioms in the Romani melodies (doina repeated-note gesture of lament), pentatonicism, Phrygian scale with the second and third scale degrees raised when ascending, and fraigish harmonic minor, flying-staccato, alla zingarese poco a poco accelerandos “hallgató/lassú-közép gyors-friss" (e.g., Kesergö or or verbunkos or csárdás style in ‘It’s So Overt, It’s Covert’; ‘Romanian Wind’) to breakneck speeds, acrobatic violin with pitches bending and glissing, and the tone growling and crying ... great colla parte tempo-leading.

T he Hungarian hallgató of the ‘Did You Kill My Wife?’ brass band is superb.

G ee, this soundtrack is an admirable thing! The tremolos begin slowly, and the accelerandi melt into the flourishes so that they sound like one gesture—far bigger ones than you imagined when they began. The playing and conducting are excellent throughout. Precisely nailing the tempo variations, yet sounding totally organic while remaining faithful to meter. Very, very nice!

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Chamber Music Noir: The Hearable, the Unhearable, and the Merely Suspected

O f all the criticisms ... of Schenker and his school, one has been especially persistent: it is that Schenkerian analysis fails to do justice to rhythm, that critical element without which there could be no music. ... In considering Schenker’s assumption that tonal events take priority over rhythm, we might well begin by determining whether we can even investigate these two aspects of music apart from each other. According to Charles Rosen such a separation is not valid, ‘as if a tonal melody could exist without a rhythmic contour’. ... But does it then follow that any separation of the elements of music must be ‘nonsensical’? Only, I think, if the separation plays no role in our perception of the music; in music theory the nonsensical is the unhearable.”
— Carl Schachter, Unfoldings, p. 17.

Music can provide atmosphere for a good story. In fact, it can propel a story or enliven what would otherwise be a scene or story of only moderate interest. Of course.

But is it proper to think of melodies as affect-generating archtypes? I normally would be inclined to say, ‘No.’ But then I come upon some example—often a miniature chamber music work—where I have to reconsider.

For example, Patrick Gowers’s Sherlock Holmes melody, for the 1980s series produced by Granada for U.S. public TV (directed by David Carson; developed by John Hawkesworth; starring Jeremy Brett). The melody is constructed from supple, irregular phrases—scheming, sleuthly, syncopal in its rhythmic progress. When we hear the suspenseful percussion of horses’ hooves on the cobbles of Baker Street, the music complies. When we see Jeremy Brett (Holmes) gazing cynically down from the upstairs window of 221B, the music completes the cadence and completes the scene, culminating an air-tight, coherent melodic process: supple phrases interleaved with the carefully edited dramatic flow of the imagery. Perfect trailer.

The 221B melody’s obvious pattern of short distinct phrases evokes a sense of ‘chamber music noir’. Continuity is achieved through connecting devices between the short (gasping?) phrases and between the rhythmic shapes of the several parts. The lyrical melody, through its connection to the drama, is revealed to be—by design—inextricably inter-dependent with non-musical elements such as the screenplay’s dramaturgy.

Film scoring at its best. Melodic and rhythmic contours of crimes committed, mysteries solved. Inherently ‘noir’, and supportive of Charles Rosen’s point.

[50-sec clip, Patrick Gowers, 221B Baker Street theme, 1.4MB MP3]

Patrick Gowers is now 72. He took his doctorate at Cambridge in 1965, with a dissertation on the music of Eric Satie. He was music director of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s ‘Marat/Sade’ (two seasons at Aldwych Theatre and one in New York). It wasn’t until the late 1960s that he started scoring feature and documentary films and television programs, first in Denmark and then in the U.K.

In 1982 Gowers won the BAFTA original music award for his scores for ‘Smiley’s People’, ‘The Woman in White’ and ‘I Remember Nelson’. In addition to his film work, Gowers has also written several virtuoso works for the organ, music for the Three Choirs Festival, and a ‘Guitar Concerto’ performed by John Williams. Patrick is the father of mathematician Timothy Gowers, author Rebecca Gowers, and violinist Katharine Gowers.

Other examples? The Helsinki quartet Apocalyptica, founded in 1993, does a number of ‘chamber music noir’ pieces—some of them composed by Metallica’s Lars Ulrich. Apocalyptica is comprised of classically-trained cellists Eicca Toppinen, Max Lilja, Antero Manninen, and Paavo Lotjonen. Below are a couple Apocalyptica MP3 clips, with peculiar, dark melodic-rhythmic contours.

[50-sec clip, Lars Ulrich, Apocalyptica, Nothing Else Matters, 1.4MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Lars Ulrich, Apocalyptica, One, 1.4MB MP3]