PICTURING
ATONALITY:
Death of the Natural
published in The Wire No. 169, March, 1998,
London
Those
stabbing violins from PSYCHO (1960, directed by Alfred Hitchcock).
Everyone knows them. No one can vocally imitate them. A million
film's mimic them. Far more than a residual icon of popular culture,
Bernard Herrmann's simple yet mortally effective musical device
contains what is perhaps the most profound treatise on the production
of music this century. Here's why.
Hallowed
for its mystical properties, the violin's design and purpose provides
us with a textual morbidity which few people recognize. Take a
living tree; chop it down and hack it apart; re-shape it in the
form of a limbless female torso; gouge a vaginal hole to create
an eviscerated resonating chamber; take the hair of a horse's
tail and fashion a tense bow; gut a cat and stretch its innards
into thin strings; add some detailing to affect an ornate piece
of domestic furniture. Then scrape the horse's tail across the
dead cat's remains and generate a howling screech. But to elevate
your destructive act to a creative one, you must obey a harmonic
code, and practice for years until you can effect pitch-controlled
melody. As a frail, gorgeous, feminine tone emits from this macabre
instrument, you will be hailed as a producer of music, art, beauty
and truth. Viewed this way, the violin is a perfect symbolic microcosm
of the desperate measures through which European High Art has
since the Enlightenment made much ado about taming nature through
such violence to produce a beauty predicated on death, destruction
and decay.
How
fitting that Herrmann - for his PSYCHO score - figures the specious
glory of the violin as a modernist, wail of multiplied clashing
frequencies to accompany the image of a naked woman being stabbed
repeatedly in the shower by a transvestite who has mummified his
murdered mother. Once again, Herrmann's score uses music as but
one vocabulary which must negotiate a textual relationship with
sound and noise. Despite its hysterical and excessive appearance,
the score to PSYCHO is no mere caricature of Otherness: it musically
simulates the collapse of meaning which propels its character
psychosis, using the venerated violin as a site of musical significance,
and thereby generating noise from an instrument designed specifically
to transcend noise.
Throughout
PSYCHO, Herrmann orchestrates chaos, conducts adrenalin, tempers
aggression, builds nervousness. When Marion (Janet Leigh) drives
towards her doom in the pouring Gothic rain, the windscreen wipers
cut the teeming shower like maniacal batons in time with the main
theme (forcasting the means by which she will die). When Norman
(Anthony Perkins) starts to loose his grip on things when casually
chatting with Marion, the score performs a delicate unfurling
of modulating atonal motifs which symbolise Norman's hazed and
phased thought processes. Higher frequencies on the violins mark
him clearing his head; lower drones by the double cellos echo
the rotting, ground swell of his mother's hold on his mental faculty.
Running at around 17 minutes and subtitled "A Narrative For Orchestra"
on the official stereo recording for Decca in the early 70s, there
is not a single gratuitous, vague, ill-prompted or ornamental
note in the whole score. Herrman is never an impressionist, lyricist
or even expressionist; he remains a passionate structuralist whose
sense of musical logic, psychoacoustics and dramatic temporality
marks him as the most modern and most cinematic of film scorers
this century.
Whether
or not other composers and directors are cerebrally fixed on this
does not dilute the essential quality of Herrmann's work which
propels a network of spindly shards and knots through numerous
'psycho' movies since. A knowing revision of Herrmann's contribution
to musical psychosis is found in the selection of music for Stanley
Kubrick's THE SHINING (1980) - in particular, the excerpts from
Krystof Penderecki's "De Natura Sonoris" (1966) and "Polymorphia"
(1961). Penderecki's work - possibly more so than the intricate
transpositions of insect harmonics and frequencies which gives
Bela Bartok's later work its fetid, corpulent richness - celebrates
the abject violence of nature is all its cosmological eventfulness.
Certainly the orchestra has for at least three centuries used
its mass and size to create intimidating landscapes, portraits,
visions and journeys which evoke the scale of nature's destructive,
creative and rejuvenative powers. But Penderecki's archly modernist
postwar decimation of harmonic fixture encodes the sonic detailing
of the destruction of the orchestra itself - overtly signified
by the agressive scaping of the sring section. Through his direction
of performer technique, Penderecki works beyond abstraction to
a pure material essence as he forces the players of his score
to rip open that polished wood detailing on the violin and expose
the shrieking soul trapped in its necrophiliac casing. His infamous
"Threnody For The Victims Of Hiroshima" (1960) is a desolate and
deafening abstract narrative which many people liken to an atomic
bomb blast before they know the title of the work.
As
Jack Torrens (Jack Nicholson) creeps up the stairs swinging a
baseball bat at his wife in THE SHINING, Penderecki's strings
slice the air like deadly bursts of steam expelled through Jack's
flaring nostrils. Elsewhere, during unsettling moments where Jack
is slowly becoming possessed by the psychotic ghost which haunts
the hotel, the orchestra rumbles like a needle left in a Deutsche
Gramophone disc while a mild earth tremor vibrates the diamond
stylus. Most importantly, THE SHINING eschews cues in favour for
asynchronous passages which extemporise the narrative and sculpt
a dramatic ambience wherein a character's psychosis becomes an
aura which taints, tinges and terrifies all other existence in
its space. As with Herrmann's charting of the surges in Norman's
emotional instability, Penderecki's passages function as a soundtrack
to the core synaptic overloads which induce psychosis, creating
a hyper-material effect of scoring neural and metabolic movement
instead of coding harmony to match known social norms and deviations.
In an ironic but committed manner, Kubrick is sourcing the High
Art realm of serious composition to provide first degree sonic
material to shape the aural world of THE SHINING. (Though it must
be pointed out that Herrmann did not copy Penderecki, and that
both were working from different angles to arrive at the destruction
of violin technique by 1960. Furthermore, William Friedkin's THE
EXORCIST (1971) contains a canny selection of excerpts from Penderecki's
"Polymorphia" (1961), "Canon For Orchestra & Tape" (19?) &
"String Quartet #1 (1960); Anton Webern's "Five Pieces For Orchestra
Opus 10" (1925) and George Crumb's "Threnody 1: Night of the Electric
Insects" (19?) to create an paranormal contra-social domain for
its tale of demonic possession.)
The
atonality fraternity of PSYCHO, THE EXORCIST and THE SHINING is
so much more than the odd bump of chromatic progression to signify
the absence of melodious accord. They are astute musicalisations
of ECG read-outs, charting the core impulses of moments well beyond
the moral conventionalism of 'character motivation'. A film which
captures this mystery of apparently 'unmotivated action' - so
confusing to those steeped in literary convention and classical
story-telling forms - is Agnes Varda's VAGABONDE (1985). The score
by Joanna Burzdowicz could superficially be described as Webernesque
in its austere and skeletal interlocking of chamber instruments
climbing over each other in serialist fashion, however that does
not accurately qualify its precise contribution to the film. The
film's eponymous unnamed character is a young woman (Sandrine
Bonnaire) hitching rides around Southern France, living in fields,
shacking up with whoever she meets, stealing food when the moment
presents itself. Using a cast of local non-actors, the film's
narrative is appropriately transient: it opens with the young
woman's body discovered in a farm ditch, then follows a presumed
narrative of her last few weeks based on casual interviews with
those whose paths she crossed in the lead up to her undramatic
death.
This
means that five minutes into the film, you're following a story
of which you know the outcome: this woman will die. As the story
unfolds, one is brought into close proximity with the transient
flow of life which governed both the young woman's philosophy
and the conditions under which she existed. The accompanying music
marks her actions and reactions with a haunting, stilling quality.
A strange draining of pathos and seeping of affection fatally
paints the young woman as a ghost: a fading being whose erasure
is proportionately framed by people's wavering feelings towards
her and her response to their lack or surplus of affection. Emotional
confusion reigns, as the music's atonality and arch serial escalations
stall one from committing to her character in one way or the other.
Soliciting neither a stream of ennui nor a fissure of existentialism,
VAGABONDE creates a vacuum within which harmony is posited as
a device deemed entirely incapable of coding the complexity of
people's shifting emotional states. (One of the other very few
films which works its atonal score along these lines is the rich
but often near-impenetrable film THE CONVENT - 1992, directed
by Manuel Olivera - which uses whole uninterrupted movements from
one of Stravinsky's more austere violin concertos with perplexing
yet magical effect.)
Perhaps
this is why music cues are so neurotically Romantic in their Hanna
Barbera reduction of humanist traits: when audiences cannot 'identify'
with on-screen characters, they have to delve into themselves
to question why they can't. And most people probably seem happy
to pretend they can relate to others, when in their social reality
they may be totally incapable of such engagement. Perceived in
this modern and somewhat harsh light, cinematic atonality - whether
serialist, abstractionist or hyper-material - can traumatize the
listener deeply when it is attached to the representation of human
activity and discourse. While films like PSYCHO, THE EXORCIST
and THE SHINING can be accepted through their excessive rendering
of psychotic and aberrant personalities - the Other which we hold
at a safe distance, which we desperateky believe we clearly are
not - films like VAGABONDE and THE CONVENT can make one realize
what little psychological territory we have covered in the musical
characterization of film scores this century.
