An essay compiled by
Mario Cordina
Final Reflections
Music is generally thought of as a universal language. The eye is generally thought to be superior to the ear in our culture (Kalinak, 1992), though Aristotle and Theophrastus feel that hearing is the sense that most deeply stirs our emotions'" (Kalinak, 1992) and Hermann Helmholtz thinks that aural art "'stands in a much closer connection with pure sensation than any of the other arts'" (Kalinak, 1992).
My own opinion is that most studies about music have been carried out by scientists, film enthusiasts and not by musicians. Ask them. Ask me. Questions like what are the effects of ‘Art’ music or whether a film score is a musically weaker art than music for music’s sake shows that these so called experts have no idea of what music is about. It is an emotion. Some emotions need more colour and more complexity than others, some are more direct, imply easier song writing but even when I had to manufacture music, that is create music for a special purpose within specified criteria and limits, I put my heart into it and am equally as proud of music written for film as I am of the music I have written for my bands and solo projects. I wish I could explain what triggers my music when I apply it to film, but music goes beyond words. It gives wings to new inspiration, new challenges and doing music which I would otherwise never bothered or even thought of doing. Film music is a journey into music just as much as it is a journey into the moving picture.
A great friend of mine once visited me to see how I was getting on. We had been in a band together for years and he is one of the greatest musicians I have played with. A sad illness forced him to quit playing the bass and this I know from experience, as I too had to stop singing when I developed a voice polyp for half a year, is a tough thing to deal with as a passionate musician. However, as a respected musician in the local community, graduated from music school and with a portfolio of tracks, albums, and musical scores he was like a guru for most of us. I showed him the video promoting my band’s latest release. I will add that he is a musician bent on music and not in any way into modern media or modern ways of promoting music. His comment was that the video did not allow one to really listen to the changes in the song or concentrate on the music. In his eyes this was a negative approach. I still find myself questioning this. Was he right or wrong? Should people concentrate on the film content or on the music? This is a decision that musicians and their management have to make.
What is it like when music is used for film? Should music and the moving picture act like false friends or do they complement each other? Is film like music and sculpture and other art forms where the medium drives the artist away from his original intent and the result is an alien but refreshing statement that the artist had never observed. How often have artists looked at their finished work with a disappointed mood, that it did not encapsulate their primary concept and yet is a masterpiece in its own right. How much of a film is exactly what the director wanted in the first place and how much of it is a matter of evolution and the nature of the medium. Music is one of the elements that transforms film, together with the acting and natural limits of the techniques used for filming, camera crews, oversights, lighting, acting etc. There are so many things that will force a director to change track. It is just as well for art is a journey into the black hole of humanity. It is what makes us human and therefore incomprehensible to Science.
Hands on comments from experts in Film and Music.
- Composer Neil Brand, presenter of BBC Four's The Music that Made the Movies, believes our senses are already heightened as we enter the cinema.
- Science writer Philip Ball, author of The Music Instinct, says soundtracks can produce the same reaction in us whether the music is good or bad. "Our response to certain kinds of noise is something so profound in us that we can't switch it off," he says. "Film composers know that and use it to shortcut the logical part of our brain and get straight to the emotional centres." Some filmmakers are now using infrasound to induce fear in audiences. These extreme bass waves or vibrations have a frequency below the range of the human ear. Infrasound, has been demonstrated to induce anxiety, extreme sorrow, heart palpitations and shivering.
- Steven Spielberg said that music is 50% of a movie.
- In a 2007 interview with Craig McLean from The Observer, Scorsese said that it is “not just the songs I use in the film. No, it's about the tone and the mood of their music, their attitude. The music itself.” Referring specifically to The Rolling Stone’s songs (which he was willing to spend $30,000 of a $750,000 budget on), Scorsese puts an emphasis on the energy music can add to a film.
- William Alwyn (Alwyn, 1957) writes that music is "a vital part of the dramatic structure of the production and not an emotional prop filling the sound track with false stimulants" • William Wolf (Wolf, 1974) claimed that "music was applied to drama to tell an audience how it should feel at any given crisis."
- John Huntley and Roger Manvell (Huntley, 1957) explain that "there's always been some form of association between music and the presentation of drama" • They are asked to add music after a film is shot, rather than being part of the entire creative process. People walked out laughing upon initial screenings of The Lost Weekend. But, when the music was changed, it won best picture (Karlin, 1994).
- Dimitri Tiomkin states that music "has come to be one of the means of story-telling. It is easy to prove this. Just try to transplant any picture's musical score to similar scenes in another picture. You will find that the transplantation doesn't live" (Tiomkin, 1974).
- Roy Prendergast writes that people like a score within the context of a film but not outside of it (Prendergast, 1954). In addition, Leonard Maltin believes "[f]ilm music was never meant to stand on its own" (Maltin, 1994).
- Walter Leigh writes that every sound in film, unlike theater, is taken as significant and purposeful (Huntley, 1957).
- A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later. Stanley Kubrick.
- Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls. Ingmar Bergman.
Further Reading :
5 ways you can use music and film scores to make your film more dynamic
Music Makes Movies
Why-does-music-play-such-a-big-role-in-movies
A Brief Discourse on the Importance of Music in Film
EHow Bridgette Redman
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