Film Music

[The talking film] is a completely new and independent instrument for innovative artistic expression… [with] standards that up to now could only be reached by exceptionally gifted personalities like Charlie Chaplin. -Arnold Schoenberg

There is only one real function of film music – namely, to feed the composer! -Igor Stravinsky

In 1933, Adolf Hitler rose to power, and Arnold Schoenberg—leader of the classical music avant-garde—found himself in Hollywood, of all places. Just a few years later, his chief rival, Igor Stravinsky, had joined him.

Schoenberg and Stravinsky diverged on most things—from the promises of film music to the future of classical music. Neither fit into what we know today as the Hollywood Sound, established by Korngold's Adventures of Robin Hood. And unfortunately (or perhaps predictably), neither became much of a film composer.

But it still gives me a kick to imagine the world's thorniest, most provocative composers trying to write scores for mass market commercial success. And it makes you wonder, what changes when the music is part of the whole machinery of a film—when the interpretation chain looks something like

Plot > Script > Director > Composer > Musicians > Audience

…which is just one possibility. In reality there are many, many more components and moving parts. The chain can even loop back on itself. The music isn't an end in itself; it has to serve a very specific vision. It also doesn't have to do all the heavy lifting of connecting audience to emotion, as the rest of the machine (actors, cinematography, etc.) is all on the same team.

Today, composers seek out film work not only to “feed the composer,” as Stravinsky put it—it is also an outlet for personal expression in its own right. When Hans Zimmer looked to compose a requiem for his late father, he found himself doing so with The Lion King.

Film music is now an integral part of the classical landscape, standing alongside the older genres of opera and ballet—all music written for both the eyes and the ears. Film suites frequently find a home in the concert hall just like a Tchaikovsky ballet suite or a Mozart opera overture. With each new interpretation, this music, too, enters the repertoire, ready to take on new meaning outside its original context.

Up: Storytelling and structure

Depending on who you ask, there are about six major elements of music—structure, timbre, texture, melody, rhythm, and harmony. ^💬

In this chapter, we'll look at structure and timbre in film scores—and the ways we can listen to the classical canon in the same way as a soundtrack.

We begin with the first five minutes of Pixar's Up, which creates an entire world wordlessly, the only sound a waltz by Michael Giacchino. But let's listen in particular to when the music stops moving forward—when it slows down, holds a note, or pauses completely, and when it resumes.

What's amazing is that the music for the whole scene—and really the whole movie—is just based on one short theme heard over and over again, marking time as it moves forward. Just some subtle variations are enough to convey an entire lifetime of plot and emotion.

But there are two moments that we remember most. The first is when Carl and Ellie decide to have kids and then lose the baby. The second is when they decide to finally go on their adventure, but Ellie gets sick and passes away. In both cases, the music holds still and makes us hold our breath.

Then the music picks up again, and the story resumes.

Daniel Barenboim, who we previously saw accompanying his wife Jackie Du Pre in the Elgar Cello Concerto, writes (not about Up):

Unless [the musician] provides added energy, the sound will die… The terminology is plain: the note dies. Of course within a composition, it is temporary death, followed by the ability to revive, to begin life anew.

In Up, this pattern—the suspension of time where we wait to see if the music will be revived—is an example of structure. The music—like the story—is divided into sections for artistic effect.

Here's just the last minute as pure music, without the film. As it ends, sit in the silence. Outside of the film, the final silence doesn't have to specifically mean Carl's loss of Ellie, but there is a palpable sense of absence nonetheless.

Even without remembering exactly what's happening as each of these notes is played, the emotional weight remains in each moment, and the progression towards that final silence feels inevitable. In the context of the full movie, however, that silence is not final; it's the beginning of the rest of the story, which will play out over the next 80 minutes.

It was a silence that finally drew me into the cantatas of J.S. Bach. For decades I just didn't resonate with Bach's sacred music the way I did with his secular music. Then I discovered the silence in the middle of the Actus Tragicus—a silence that is not one thing or another, but poses a question—is this the end? The performer and listener must decide how to interpret it.

At each link in the chain, from composer to performer to listener, the text asks if death and life will remain in opposition or be reconciled. The conductor John Eliot Gardiner writes,

If we hear [the silence] at face value… that would indicate death as a kind of full stop. But perhaps we are being gently nudged to hear the final oscillation [as leading to the next movement]. In that case Bach's message is one of hope… that death is only a midway point on our journey, the beginning of whatever comes after.

Not to be flippant about it, but it's just like Up.

Structure—and its basic building block, silence—is the foundational element of storytelling. More complex structures can also break the brain in wonderful ways, which we'll encounter in the second half of the guide.

Transformation and Timbre

If structure can show us plot, timbre can show us character. ^📖

In a film far afield from Up, the music takes center stage in this wordless scene from The Joker. In fact, when actor Joaquin Phoenix first heard Hildur Guðnadóttir's music, standing in the bathroom, he started dancing, spontaneously. It became the entire scene in the film.

Even though Up's opening scene gives us a great, tear-jerking tragedy, the Joker's internal turmoil bears no resemblance in feeling or sound.

In this track, the cello alone creates the scene's murky color. In fact, the words timbre and tone color—or even just color—are used interchangeably. “Colorful” music is music that uses timbre to surprise us.

If we remove the visual context, we can see if it's enough by itself to draw us into the scene.

Cellists (myself included) regularly claim that the cello holds a special place as the instrument closest to the human voice. Frederic Chopin—who wrote almost exclusively for piano—made an exception for his most personal, introspective statements, where he used the cello or imitated its register.

The Joker's composer, Guðnadóttir, is a cellist herself, and I imagine it was never a question for her which instrument would play the Joker's music. And if you thought this sound was specific, the soundtrack to the Joker's sequel even uses a trench cello—a World War I cello variant played in the trenches.

All Together

Of course, structure and timbre don't exist in isolation. We'll see them together in Bach, and a moment where he feels the deepest desolation and transformation—the death of Christ.

Bach gives us the words, “it is finished,” and then a brief silence, a structural moment felt if not heard.

Then he calls on the gamba—a cello variant with a unique color—a historical predecessor that Bach had only ever used once before.

Here's the Netherlands Bach Society, as the gamba leads us back into the alto soloist's mourning, before we get an even louder silence.

Even though this is not my faith, that silence always makes me hold my breath before the alto tells us again, “It is finished,” awaiting a pronouncement that we already know to be true.

There is no film in this interpretation chain, but in the ensuing music, there are more cinematic silences—endings, transitions, and beginnings all without sound—that are as poignant as the gamba's music itself. This music repeatedly asks how one can hold sorrow and celebration side by side. There is no Hollywood machinery to add context to the answer; which one wins out is up to the performers and listeners.

The Classical Canon Co-opted

For those of you who just came back from the Whirlwind Tour above, welcome back from the overstimulation. Now we flip the script and come back to music that was written for its own sake—but has since been co-opted for movie soundtracks—and ask how it might respond to a new context that it never saw coming.

A simplified interpretation chain would look like Music > Director > Audience, with the extra-musical context being added after the music is made rather than before.

Sometimes the movie swallows the piece whole; sometimes the film brings out the best in it; sometimes it offers a new interpretation completely. Regardless, there's a new link between music and audience to reckon with.

Imagine for a moment: Strings burst upward, fusing with trilling woodwinds. The strings scamper now, up and down the fingerboard, almost frenetic but somehow in control, and at last the horns emerge, heavier, yes, but their rising fanfares, expelling pent-up energy, propel us forward. Finally the strings dive downward chromatically, gathering momentum and preparing to climb again. Our bodies may stay in our seats, but with each successive layer added, our minds take flight as we feel the beating of wings we do not have.

This music feels like it was made to describe the helicopter assault scene in Apocalypse Now so much so that for most of the world, that war cry is their association with the music. In fact, it was written as a battle cry for the Valkyrie soldiers:

If you keep watching, you see the absolute destruction of a Vietnamese village by the US Air Cavalry as Wagner's music blasts from the helicopter-mounted loudspeakers. The opening visual is almost a literal adaptation of Wagner, just shifted from Valkyries to helicopters. (Wagner's grandson once said, “If my grandfather was alive today, he would undoubtedly be working in Hollywood.”) But as the scene develops there's the undercurrent of something amiss—the triumphant music belies the helplessness of the Vietnamese village.

The crazy thing is that the allusion to Wagner here is actually film director Ford Coppola calling in some external context about the music's external context. Years after The Ride was written, the Nazi party—with Wagner's help—adopted it as their own propaganda, accompanying footage of Luftwaffe air raids. ^💬

The Ride has shown up in hundreds of films, becoming a piece of music that can never be heard “for the first time”—that is, without all of the cultural references that it has accumulated. This mountain of references has probably even buried the Nazi use of the music for most of the general public.

As Knausgård writes about Edvard Munch's painting “The Scream” (😱), “that's how it is with the familiar, isn't it, friends we've known for years – we no longer see them, we just note their presence, allowing it to fill the category we have created for them.”

This has become true for a large number of works featured in film. The first time I performed Carl Orff's similarly-epic Carmina Burana, my assumptions of what the piece was about—based only on what I knew from the introduction—were shattered by the lewd irreverence of the text. We can either let these cultural associations take over our own interpretation of the work, or we can use them as another input into our own thought process.

Classical Music as a Shorthand

There are countless scenes that use classical music as the background to destruction and villainy, but unlike Apocalypse Now, most uses are ironic. The music is there as a stand-in for beauty and properness (not unlike the shock value of Isabel Hagen's adult content comedy)—the notes themselves are not as important as what the institution of classical music represents. Or the evil billionaire listens to opera, because who else would listen to opera? (Answer: you, in the next chapter)

This isn't entirely without basis. The opera house was often an extension of high society; in Proust’s Belle Époque Paris, the opera house doubled as a social stage, where being seen could matter as much as the show. The patrons of classical music were all, let's say, of a type.

Still, this isn't really true today, and it's unfortunate for me to see the idea of “classical music for the rich” being perpetuated in film instead of dismantled.

Luckily, classical music also remains the go-to choice for monumental scale, and every so often a scene gives back to the music more than it borrows from it.

Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture—with real cannons actually in Tchaikovsky's score—finds new meaning in V for Vendetta. Originally written to commemorate Russia's defense against Napoleon's invasion, it now underscores V's symbolic destruction of the Old Bailey courthouse.

I have to admit that this overture is not a piece that I ever really liked in its original form. Even Tchaikovsky called it, “very loud and noisy, but [without] artistic merit.” But its use in V for Vendetta I find more engaging than the work by itself, as if the movie provided the artistic merit that Tchaikovsky found lacking.

One could learn all the historical context of the original work—what it commemorates, where its themes come from, etc.—and it may be interesting in an academic sense, but it doesn't help achieve the instinctual reaction of actually seeing the power of the music. In this scene, even before we know V's philosophy and motivations, we feel what the music means to V and we witness and question how it holds violence and beauty simultaneously. It is not just music that changes how we interpret film, but film, too, can offer an interpretation of music.

Does this music need the movie?

As a teenager, when I first read 2001: A Space Odyssey, co-written by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, I couldn't put it down. I loved the sci-fi, the world-building, and a plot that made me stay up all night.

The film version—which Clarke and Kubrick wrote concurrently with the book—is not that. It is abstract, experimental, “artsy.” It withholds all explanation, and asks the filmmaking—and the music—to evoke something beyond simple narrative. ^💬

The film opens with sunrise over the apes at the dawn of humanity, accompanied as literally as possible by a movement called “sunrise”—from the now forever-linked Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Richard Strauss. Here film and music share the same meaning. Intuitive and iconic.

Later, (the unrelated) Johann Strauss Jr.'s Blue Danube Waltz accompanies the weightless dance of Space Station and Space Plane, about as counterintuitive a choice as possible. But the odd perspective lends an old world elegance to space travel—and simultaneously imbues the old Viennese waltz with an unexpected timelessness. Here, both film and music are offered interpretations they could never have reached by themselves.

On the other hand, the music from György Ligeti was otherwise inaccessible to the general public. It was the type of thing that on a first listen, some people might say, “It just sounds like noise.”

Not everyone, mind you. Most importantly, Kubrick got it. Not in the intellectual sense, but in the trippy, world-changing sense. It gave outer space an atmosphere of simultaneous beauty, awe, and terror. And then through him, audiences got it too.

In fact, if it were in a film from the 2020s, it might just register as a standard creepy sci-fi soundtrack.

Not unlike a masterclass teacher unlocking an underlying jazz in a clump of notes by Messiaen, Kubrick nudges us towards an interpretation that we intuit.

With “Lux Aeterna,” Ligeti wanted to create music that “was already here when we did not hear it” and would “still be there when we no longer hear it”—captured by voices that start at the same pitch and then overlap as they expand. This goal is essentially realized by its use in the movie—man in deep space.

One of the joys of film is that new artists are in dialogue with the music, offering new perspectives you wouldn't otherwise have been able to access. And once you've seen them, you have access to them in all your future listening.

The counterpoint of knowing music through its film is that you don't really get to have your own interpretation. So I'll leave you with a different Lux Aeterna from Clint Mansell that drips cinematic potential, borrowing from Ligeti's ethereal, overlapping voices—but without the film.

In the next chapter, we move from film, in which music accompanies a story, to opera and song, in which the music itself often is the story. This small increase in freedom—removing the film's plot and director from the interpretation chain—opens up a corresponding range of interpretive possibility.