Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2013 June 12 • Wednesday

Mervyn Cooke's A History of Film Music is one of the most interesting books I've ever read. This sampling of headings will give an idea of how much ground it covers: "Why sound?", "Why music?", "Photographing sound", "Hollywood's Golden Age: narrative cinema and the classical film score", "Opera on film", "Bernard Herrmann: the composer as auteur", "Defectors to television", "Animation", "Film music in France", "Early sound films in the Soviet Union", "India: Bollywood and Beyond", "From Italy to Little Italy", "Japan", "Toru Takemitsu", "Popular music in the cinema" and "Back to Bach".

Cooke's viewing and reading are impressive. I was surprised, for instance, that he didn't mention this throwaway gag from Nobody Lives Forever, in which an uneducated gangster is asked if he likes Bach and the gangster thinks he's being asked if he likes bock.

While consistently interesting throughout, the greatest thrills came from Cooke's overview of the so-called silent era, during which filmmakers made use of "subception or subliminal auditive perception". If you saw something that was producing sound, e.g., clapping hands of breaking glass, there was no need to hear the sound itself.

The first film music was not concerned with matching music to film but rather the other way around. "Illustrated songs" were the starting point, in the nineteenth century. Popular music of the day would be performed with lantern slides made to fit as the audience sang along. (This doesn't seem to be that different from certain popular "reality" television shows.)

The silent era was also an age of experimentation and exertion in the name of art. Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927), which used three screens and three projectors, is one of the most famous examples. Cooke tells us that "At the Paris Opéra premiere … the unusual priority accorded to the music saw the conductor equipped with a device for altering the speed of the projection to suit the pacing of the score".

Other items of interest include the fact that David Raksin's famous theme to Laura was made to take the place of "Sophisticated Lady", which was director Otto Preminger's first choice. For that film, Raksin also recorded chords on the piano "whithout their initial percussive attack and then mixed them using bumpy playback heads to create a wavering effect".

Is anybody doing this kind of thing now?