PICTURING
ATONALITY: Part 1
Birth Of The Monstrous
published in The Wire No. 168, February,
1998, London
'The
Emancipation Of Dissonance'. Despite the unfortunate austerity
which governed the application of Arnold Schoenberg's theory of
serialism, there is a beautiful dream contained in that phrase.
The idealistic notion that harmony could be collapsed into a non-hierarchical
plane is at once liberating and limiting. The persuasive psychoacoustic
and 'psycho-harmonic' power of music to manipulate the listener
through kino-dramatic commentary is central to the pleasure of
listening, and a difficult one to combat. Of course Schoenberg
spoke more from a composer's viewpoint than a listener's experience,
and his musical texts may be best appreciated initially as discursive
journeys and later as erogenous narratives.
But
if this yearning for a true dissonance seems like idle academic
wondering, it has been a desperate pursuit in the rigidly codified
terrain of the film score. There, a reduced emotional range is
guarded by harmonic sentinels - the major and minor modes - who
rationalize psychological nuances with all the subtlety of a cartoon
shrink. Pastel smears of classical music for the correctly socialized
human; dark sludges of avant garde music for the deviant being.
The deeper recesses of the European psyche - while being great
fodder for brooding characterizations in many Hollywood film genres
- have been caricatured often as an abrupt and irrational dissonance.
No wonder Theodore Adorno was so scathing of his experiences in
Hollywood. But while Adorno is still cited as a historical spearhead
launched at the narrow mindedness of Hollywood's approach to film
scoring (which is not restricted to the American cinema alone),
there has been little thought given to the complex musical semiotics
which operate in the glaring brashness of atonality in film scores.
In
short, atonality in the film score signifies the Other: the monstrous,
the grotesque, the aberrant. Its deviation from diatonic scripture
is never slight, always excessive. Like the ultimate death which
must befall the movie monster, the presence of atonality must
be hysterically marked as transgressive and unforgiving. Far from
being emancipated, dissonance is condemned; ritualistically sacrificed
at the grand altar of tonal resolve as "The End" uncannily appears
on the screen like an epitaph for the avant garde. But there is
no need to be moralistic about this (viz a viz Adorno and his
proponents). The narratological impulses which crazily guide a
movie may be rendered thin and shallow by classical notions of
myth or the purist ideals of the avant garde, but those impulses
are astounding when gauged by modern and postmodern audio-visual
perception.
Jack
Arnold's THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954) exemplifies
this. The film is a definitive tale which exploits the fear of
the unknown - more precisely, a self-enveloping series of unknowns:
the missing link, the unchartered lagoon, the depths of dark waters,
the presence you cannot see. All surfaces are rendered suspicious
through their suppression of Otherness. A disquieting domesticity
is generated through extraneous and protracted sequences of a
barge sailing deep into Amazonian tributaries as its manicured
passengers suntan, chat, smoke pipes, observe leftover stock footage
from nature documentaries. The accompanying music by Hans J. Salter
(a key composer of this carney style of monster music) is remarkably
brooding, shifting through a kind of 'soft serialism', clearly
connoting that all is not as it appears. As with many other 50s
films which explore oceans/jungles/caves/deserts to uncover monsters
(THEM!, 1954; IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA, 1955; ATTACK OF THE
CRAB MONSTERS, THE MOLE PEOPLE, TARANTULA, THE BEAST WITH A MILLION
EYES, all 1956; THE MONOLITH MONSTERS, 1957) nature is rendered
beautiful but beastly; its dissonance not emancipated, but set
loose ready to terrorize.
The
musical leitmotiv of THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON - a pseudo-prehistoric
three note burst of brass and cymbal hiss - signifies not only
the emergence of the Creature into the known, but also the cataclysmic
collapse of all controlled harmonious existence up to that point.
As blunt as a sledge hammer, the narrow atonality of the score
(a mere flat or sharp in the wrong place here and there) is a
symptom of the compacted pressure under which Otherness lives.
Typical of the 50s cycle of monster movies, the thrill of danger
is sharply momentous: less a lingering suggestion of shadow and
more a quick cut to glistening slime. That noisy burst of brass
is accordingly a marker of sudden shock rather than a passage
of psychological inquiry. The main theme by Fred Carling and Ed
Lawrence to another Jack Arnold film - THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING
MAN (1957) - similarly employs a rupturing brass burst to unsettle
a smooth and sexy jazz waltz. The bulk of the theme has a melodious,
drifting quality that despite its calm, empty, harmonious demeanour
is somehow haunting. In all good horror films - especially those
from the 50s with their surreal banality - the subtext is loud
and clear: normality and equilibrium make for a boring existence
which is soon to be pulled asunder. Like the rubber suit of the
Creature and the optical superimposition of a man down scaled
against a domestic cat, the atonal slashes of many monster film
scores of the era are cheesy but captivating. As is the nature
of artifice in a medium paradoxically predicated on its photographic
verisimilitude, film score atonality is less a matter of musical
significance and more a matter of cultural signage once cinematic
form recodifies musical language. Deep in their corniness is a
disturbing plea to acknowledge the monstrous, the grotesque, the
aberrant.
While
monster movie composers in the 50s and 60s like Hans J. Salter,
Les Baxter, Ronald Stein, Fred Katz and Gerald Fried could be
accused of cheapening or diluting the radical force of the European
avant garde academy, one should not be dismissive of the effects
their music contributes to their films, and the consequent role
those films play in film history. Certainly cinema history would
be less rich minus the gaudy iconography of horror music. For
the flexible ear, one score perfectly contextualizes the formal,
musical and cultural intercies of atonality and its heavy-handed
symbolism of Otherness: Bernard Herrmann's PSYCHO (1960, directed
by Alfred Hitchcock). Herrmann accepts the carney brashness of
his Hollywood contemporaries as a cinematic vernacular and then
explores the sonic properties and psychoacoustic qualities of
the sound of film music. He is thus complicit in promoting the
moral association of atonality with deviation, yet more then any
other composer Herrman painted a musical portrait of the most
aberrant and modern of psychoses: the serial killer.
The
chance intersection of motivation and circumstance attracts the
perverse and amoral plot lines which shape PSYCHO. The film's
story is emptied of meaningful coerced actions and left hollow,
spacious, frightening: the main actress is killed off halfway
through the film; the killer does not realize his chance victim
has a wad of money; the detective accidentally uncovers a separate
story and is dispatched for reasons of which he himself is unaware.
Such an inverted and anti-classical story structure cries out
for Schoenberg's dissonance, and Herrmann provides it with a logical
precision. His main tactic - especially in the first half of the
film - is to suggest two things: firstly, you never know what
chance events are about to befall you, and secondly, this fear
of the unknown renders your existence frail and insecure. Tonality
is employed specifically to enforce the futility of its scripture.
Far from the maddening alarm bell harmony of the Hollywood film
score, Herrman's PSYCHO not only accepts the monstrous, but also
marks its presence as continual, pervasive and unending.
In
contrast to the part-lulling part-brooding music in 50s monster
movies, PSYCHO's domestic scenes employ harmony that serially
modulates through a web of potential root keys. Starting with
the opening shots of Phoenix and the hotel room, a recurring motif
based on distracted rising/falling intervals (like Debussy fed
through a random generator), Herrmann performs a deft feat of
destabilization through numbing one to the controlling mechanisms
of diatonic harmony. As the intervals nonchalantly float like
a piece of paper caught in city wind, one is similarly uprooted
and detached. The air is then thickened as fate and chance murkily
combine to trap you.
This
device of hyper-modulation is in effect a semiotic variation of
Schoenberg's serialism. Whereas Schoenberg splays the diatonic
system into a modernist palette of variable relationships which
one must incessantly invert, Herrmann retains harmonic and intervallic
meaning purely in order to subvert it. Whilst such a dialectic
strategy is hard to imagine working in music alone, its effect
in a film score is one of powerful psychological resonance. From
the afore mentioned floating intervals to the chugging and pressing
title theme, extremely simplistic shards of melody are looped
and repeated like fossilised fragments from dinosaurian symphonies.
Repetition aggravates; modulation induces aimlessness; density
oppresses. Like the characters in Hitchock's perverse drama, we
are less manipulated by magisterial authorial forces then we are
set loose to roam a maze of indifferent possibilities - and we
are granted the meta-perspective of our meaningless journey as
the music makes us feel like mice in a maze. Atonality is the
musical key to the architecture of that maze. By subjecting us
to its moulding, Herrmann grants us more than the sensation of
being threatened by a monstrous Other. His score notes that in
the abject void of modern psychosis, both psychological motivation
and harmonic meaning must be absolutely discarded. As such, Herrmann
goes against the wooden grain honed by nearly every other film
composer in the history of the cinema.
