26 June 2022
Not a lot to say is there?
Steve Reich: Music for Pieces of Wood
We don't pay enough attention to silence. Contemplate for a few minutes Steve Reich's "Music for Pieces of Wood". The sounds are percussive. No drone, no sustain, all attack. We hear full music, but the majority of the space is filled with silence. Musically the gaps are termed rests. Rest is just as important as action.
In Western thought silence is usually a term for the absence of something, a lack of. Eastern traditions see silence as a thing. More on this in a couple of weeks. When you speak of nothing, you’d better know what you're saying. A joke for the Wittgenstein fans out there.
The theme for this week is diegetic sound or music.
But first, there is something to be gained by revisiting the notion of rest being just as important as action. Allow me some word play. I'm talking about gain, not volume.
Huh?
Like my philosohobby explanations, this is probably a gross over simplifi-amplification. Even wrong. But it's just a metaphor. Volume is the loudness of the output, the measure of what comes out. Think of gain as the amount of loudness of the input. Like a microphone. The measure on the way in. An audio engineer will tell you volume does not affect tone, but gain does. Tone matters. Turn your gain up, and your volume down. 1
The gain in thinking about ‘rest being just as important as action’, is guilt, or rather, the lack of it. Advice from self-help and nowness tells us that rest is important, to make time for rest. To book rest in. This seems to be misunderstanding what The Mandalorian calls The Way. This is not-doing by doing. Dao says do by not-doing.
Oh fuck off Julian, with your fortune cookie crap. Stay with me. I don't think booking-in some time off is a healthy work/life balance. "Allowing" a set period of time off for ourselves. I think we should constantly be trying to achieve. The difference is, we should accept those days when our shit just won't coalesce, and we spend our day looking at sock brands on the internet, not working. We should not feel guilty. Not doing anything, if that's what flows naturally that day, is as valid as beavering away like crazy. Going to the spa, ordering club sandwiches with chips on room service is equally important, but it is doing something. A little nothing does you good.
Wagner: Tristan und Isolde, Prelude - Liebestod
The first time I heard Wagner's music I was struck to what extent Hollywood film music resembled it. How emotive and beautiful it was. Then people started singing. What the fuck. Talk about a disconnect.
We think of having music play during a film as "natural". But it's not. It's a quirk thrown up by technological advances. Or the lack of.
Plays did not have background music. Actors spoke. People wobbled metal sheets as thunder in the background, and clomped coconut shells together. The audience were down with this.
OK, the reality of early theatre is a little weirder, but not for now. Next week. Or we'll never get to diegetic sound.
At the start of the enlightenment the habit of having introductory music before a scene in a play – I assume covering up the noise of scenery bumping about in the change over – and having descriptive poems or prose read out aloud over court ballet performances merged into the new art form of Opera in Italy.
Background music in plays did not happen.
Musical plays, which originally were always comedies, emerged out of vaudeville, only in the mid nineteenth century. Still music did not play invisibly behind the actors.
Then came the silent movie. I can only imagine how utterly appalling a dark cinema seating a multitude of people, all snuffling, coughing, scratching, chomping popcorn and rustling toffee wrappers would be to endure. For five minutes, let alone twenty, or an hour. Now wonder silent theatre was never a thing. I totally understand why you had to have someone hammering out overly-jaunty piano ditties as the movie screened.
Everyone accepted demented pub piano as anti mastication-noise protection, so when talkies finally hit, the music stayed. Hollywood baked in the formula of background music. 2
And Wagner was right there in spirit and score. Max Steiner, “The Father of Film Music” who wrote the music to some three hundred films between 1930 and 1965, adopted Wagner's leitmotifs – a musical phrase to accompany a particular character 3– and that formula has pretty much stuck, right up to today. Wagner. Nazism. Hollywood. Racism. All very entangled. Don't believe me? What played over the climatic scene of D. W. Griffith’s 4 “The Father of Film” silent movie “The Birth of a Nation” in 1915 – based on the racist novel “The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan” – why, Wagner's “The Ride of the Valkyries” of course.
There's a reason Francis Ford Coppola used it in “Apocalypse Now” as Amerika napalms the savages.
We digress. Diegetic music.
If anyone from the 19th century was time-warped into a 20th Century cinema, they would be really puzzled as to why all the actors were pretending there wasn't a large orchestra hidden, playing in their bedroom wardrobe, or train compartment, or behind the palm trees on the beach.
A great soundtrack can indeed enhance a film. Thank you Wagner, and your concept of Gesamtkunstwerk. Which translates as "Total Art" the complete union of music, drama, stage elements, and poetry. German phrases, in light of twentieth century history, can sound rather worrying.
Synchronising onscreen action with soundtrack has the derogatory term 'Mickey Mousing", from the way children's cartoons tend to have "musical footsteps". Once again, a Wagnerian concept, his stage direction for The Flying Dutchman dictates
The first notes of the ritornello in the aria accompany the Dutchman’s first step on shore... with the first crotchet of the third bar he takes his second step - still with folded arms and bowed head; the third and fourth steps coincide with the notes of the eighth and tenth bar
More often than not I find the musical score intrusive, subtracting from the suspension of disbelief, and acting as a lazy stand-in for emotion. Rather than being derived from script and performance. Serendipitously, taking a break from writing this post, watching the very entertaining 'The Outfit' featuring the ever watchable Mark Rylance, Anne suddenly proclaimed "what the fuck is this music doing?" during a particularly inappropriate outburst of faux jazzesque soundtrack.
Frequently I find myself wishing for silence. Here are three great films that have no background music
Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976)
Really this should be my recommendation, regardless of this week’s criteria. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who cited Chayefsky when he accepted his Oscar for the screenplay of “The Social Network,” wrote in an email that “no predictor of the future — not even Orwell — has ever been as right as Chayefsky was when he wrote ‘Network’” 5. It’s also Jim Carrey’s favourite film. 6
Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (2011)
Which Timothy, who illustrates these posts, loves to fall asleep in
The Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men (2007)
I can imagine Cormac McCarthy nodding in silent approval when the Coens told him they were planning to forgo background music in their adaptation. Disappointingly the trailer has music, and whomps!, and shoooms! galore.
Interestingly horror films make great use of sound to amplify fear and tension 7, so Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) stands out as having no music, while the found footage genre by it's very nature prohibits it, or should do. The breakout The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Cloverfield (2008) both being soundtrack free.
Diegetic music. Finally.
Diegetic music is the simple but brilliant concept that the characters in the film can also hear any music playing, as well as the audience. No hidden orchestra in the wardrobe. The actor turns on the radio. Click. Song starts playing. They start humming along. Simple. 8
Now we can have the emotive moment, the funky soundtrack, a dance scene, while retaining suspension of disbelief. Warning: once you are aware of this, it might alter your perception of watching films. Speaking of which, I also approve of metadiegetic sound, where the character hears sounds that other people in the film can’t, hallucinations and distorted perspectives. Where it makes sense that we the audience share their auditory experience.
A lot of the films I wish to recommend as diegetic classics will have to wait for next week, for reasons to be revealed. Silence revisited.
Of course the greatest film ever made has a diegetic moment. In fact it has two. There are people out there who haven't seen it. I'm on a personal mission to show it to them, one by one. Casablanca.
What? You thought it would be "As time goes by"? Made in 1942 with World War II raging across Europe and North Africa, director Michael Curtiz used actual French refugees as extras. None of whom in that scene are acting. 9
This edition is in part inspired by my friend Val, who posted her top ten films as a comment to ‘on making lists’ 10, reminding me of the extraordinary sound in ‘Portrait of a lady on fire’. Céline Sciamma, the writer and director, not only eschews background music, makes the sound of a brush on canvas an integral part of the narrative, but, as an essential element to the plot, weaves in an especially written diegetic musical number. La Jeune Fille en Feu composed by Para One and Arthur Simonini, performed by Sequenza 9.3 inspired by György Ligeti's Requiem.
Céline Sciamma: Portrait of a lady on fire
Normally I'd post the trailer, as this clip contains a spoiler, but the music is amazing and deserves to be heard. Although more fool you if you think you shouldn't watch the film. A modern classic, and one of the few movies that warrant a place alongside Casablanca. The trailer itself ironically has background music.
And yes, you have diegetic music without having to keep the musicians in the scene as the opening of La Grande Bellezza so wonderfully demonstrates.
Paolo Sorrentino: La Grande Bellezza
Finally, Tarantino, who is known for his soundtracks, even writing dialogue with a specific song in mind. Another friend, Bobette, in his top ten has Pulp Fiction as his number one film. Pretty inarguable. Except, sometimes I lie in bed at night, debating with myself (debating, you sick people, debating), whether “Jackie Brown" is in fact Tarantino's masterpiece?
This clip of his superlative diegetic usage of the Delfonics "Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)" may just convince it is.
Quentin Tarantino: Jackie Brown
Finally, to loop back round to musical gaps and rests, here's a YouTube only rendition of Arvo Pärt's "Hymn to a Great City". The best performance of it I think I've heard, by pianists Marjan Peternel and Primož Urbanč
Arvo Pärt - Hymn to a Great City
That space in the repetitive chiming d# notes. Magical.
My first recommendation, to counter all the contemporary classical featured, is Jamie XX's eponymous debut. Bringing a range of emotions to dance music, here's the euphoric "The Rest is Noise" which seems appropriate, in context.
Jamie XX: The Rest Is Noise
Another nineties cult classic book, from 1996, Rupert Thomson's "The Insult", about a man with Anton syndrome 11, where a blind person is convinced that they can in fact see.
No Oulipian bent this time. Unlike Casablanca, it may not be for everyone, so I suggest checking out the blurb on the back before purchasing.
"The Insult" by Rupert Thomson
Buy here | www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/178448/the-insult-by-rupert-thomson/9780679781509
Further listening
I know you’re going to need another dose of The Delfonics. Nine slices of Philly Soul, each a movie in it's own right. Plus a candy coated contemporary surprise.
Illustration by Timothy Hunt
©2016 Timothy Hunt
A shoutout to Timothy Hunt, my favourite illustrator, who very kindly allowed use of his work to enliven this post. Please do him a solid by following him on Instagram and liking all his posts. Even better would be visiting his shop and purchasing a print, gold star goes to commissioning him to design or illustrate your next project.
www.instagram.com/timothyjphunt
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A small ask
I’m currently interviewing a few more authors , who have kindly relented agreed to humour my inquisitiveness. I feel rather sheepish in the number of subscribers, and would love their words and work to reach a wider audience.
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References
See video above
Excellent! Lots of wonderful toughpoints here.
btw accidentally played Delfonics before switching of Reich's Pieces of Wood ... they work well together.
Came across the sung vs instrumental quandary recently ... found and like Bach's "Wiederstehe doch der sunde" recently (I like countertenors - maybe try a couple of mins of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBwjv-QJhIk ...and translation is worth noting too!) ... told a friend and he said he liked it ... great piano piece (adaptation by Vikingur Olafsson). Which is "better"?
V like the point of Diegetic music ... which I hadn't appreciated.
and also for fun ... try this compilation (from one of my top ... well at least 50 films) ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V_TXNdn5ss ... I repeat myself but with many scenes shot entirely in natural light!