Harmony series 2, postscript

As of March 20, 2024, the content of this post, including an example of music from the main title sequence for Mildred Pierce (1945; this film is discussed in Chapter 8), has been moved to a file published on the Texas ScholarWorks platform: Film Music: Some Posts from Blogs. 

Harmony series 2, bass/treble dissonance

TAs of March 20, 2024, the content of this post, including an example of music from the main title sequence for Casablanca, has been moved to a file published on the Texas ScholarWorks platform: Film Music: Some Posts from Blogs. 

Harmony series 1, a passage in Casablanca

As of March 20, 2024, the content of this post has been moved to a file published on the Texas ScholarWorks platform: Film Music: Some Posts from Blogs. 

Chapter 3 Examples

Like Chapter 2, Chapter 3 covers a lot of terms. I began my lecture by identifying three basic distinctions: onscreen/offscreen, diegetic/nondiegetic and foreground/background. We then watched the "Tears Flowed Like Wine" performance sequence from The Big Sleep. The diegetic performance begins offscreen and in the background but quickly moves onscreen and to the foreground.

We then watched the party scene from Glory (HtM, 67-71) as a second example; as mentioned in the text, this is a very rich example, featuring extensive intermingling of diegetic and nondiegetic music as well as distortion of diegetic sound.

I then lectured a bit on diegetic and nondiegetic as a distinction that applies to the level of narrative. I find the following quotes to be useful:

Diegetic—"Pertaining to or part of a given diegesis and, more particularly, that diegesis represented by the (primary) narrative.”

Diegesis— “1. The (fictional) world in which the situations and events narrated occur. 2. Telling, recounting, as opposed to showing, enacting.”

—Gerald Prince, Dictionary of Narratology

And this succinct definition from Claudia Gorbman:

"Diegetic music: music that (apparently) issues from a source within the narrative" (Unheard Melodies, 22).

The third example I used was the de Lesseps' dance sequence from Shakespeare in Love (HtM, 71). As mentioned in the text, this example has subtle and narratively effective blurring of diegetic and nondiegetic music. This example is also a good one to initiate a discussion of the audio dissolve.

I find the title-song sequence from "Me and My Gal," which we discuss in the text (HtM, 83-84), to be particularly good for illustrating the audio dissolve proper, as the process is slow and deliberate. I also showed "The Way You Look Tonight" from Swingtime (at right) and "Cheek to Cheek" from Top Hat. In both the transitions back to diegetic sound after the song involve collapses that very much emphasize the way the nondiegetic sound creates an idealized space. "Cheek to Cheek" has the added complication of beginning with a dance orchestra so the dissolve itself is more conceptual than real, involving the disappearance of other dancers from the screen and the orchestration seeming to react empathetically to Astaire and Rogers dance rather than a shift from music anchored diegetically to nondiegetic orchestral support.

The best example of an audio dissolve used dramatically probably occurs in Casablanca, the transtion to the flashback sequence. Because I reserved this example for a quiz, I chose to illustrate the dramatic use of the audio dissolve with Pippin's song from the "Sacrifice of Faramir" sequence in Return of the King, which is discussed in the text (HtM, 83, 85).

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The other big topic of chapter 3 concerns issues of onscreen and offscreen sound. In fact because we often infer nondiegetic status from its systematic offscreen placement (since it does not belong to the scene depicted), it is not always easy, nor wise to separate the two distinctions and I use this slide to relate the two. To illustrate offscreen sound, I showed the scene from Bleu mentioned in the text (HtM, 74) and the first "Que Sera, Sera" sequence from The Man Who Knew Too Much, which uses offscreen singing to unite mother and son conceptually; the idea of this curious unity returns near the end of the film when the mother sings the song again in an effort to locate her kidnapped son. We also watched the end of The Apartment, with the misrecongized champagne cork (HtM, 78) to illustrate how filmmakers can play on the inherent ambiguity of offscreen sound. In the past, I've also used the approach to Skull Island sequence from King Kong, which features a misrecognition of drums and also seems to blur the distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic, and the end of the Indian attack from Stagecoach, where Mrs. Mallory recognizes the diegetic cavalry bugle amid the din of nondiegetic music.

Voiceover was the next topic. I used the opening narrations of Laura, Clueless and The Apartment. The openings of American Beauty and Sunset Boulevard (HtM, 81) are worth considering as well because they feature the "impossible" condition of the dead narrator. Letter from Siberia (HtM, 80) illustrates how effective narration can be in telling us how, and even what to see in an image; this holds important consequences for thinking about how nondiegetic music functions.

The opening narration of The Apartment also uses musical sweetening to underscore the returns of accounting machine (HtM, 86), which makes this example effective for making a transition to the concept of mickeymousing and sweetening. I showed two examples from Casablanca to illustrate this idea. I began with the final scene, after Strasser has been shot and Renault has to decide whether to accuse Rick. After Renault decides to protect Rick, he throws the Vichy water into the trash bin, which Max Steiner's score underscores with a sharp stinger. We then watched an earlier scene where Rick first sees Ilsa (image at right), a moment Steiner also underscores with a poignant stinger that serves to mark Rick's painful recognition (HtM, 87-88). Here, the stinger serves not as a sound effects sweetener marking a significant narrative action, but as a nondiegetic representation of emotional shock.

I concluded this week's lectures by returning to the "Mapping the Possibilities" slide and filling in the very counterintuitive fourth quadrant, onscreen nondiegetic. My favorite example of this is the band in There's Something About Mary, which functions something like a Greek chorus and goes completely unnoticed by diegetic characters despite being onscreen. As an example, I use the final scene because it is relatively short and the singer ends up being inadvertently shot by one of the diegetic characters.

I also played a clip from Ferris Bueller's Day Off; the title character's asides to the camera seem similarly nondiegetic, intended solely for the film's audience and externalized in a way that makes them difficult to interpret as interior monologue. The end of the Chez Quis restaurant sequence illustrates the difference by interpolating a clear interior monologue by Ferris' sister (rendered as voice-over, here understood as a voice of interiority rather than nondiegetic) and then shifting to Ferris speaking to the camera in the bathroom with the attendant completely oblivious to his words. (The mirror is perhaps a complicating factor in this particular scene, though most of Ferris' asides do not involve a mirror.)

* * * * *

Because I had a quiz scheduled, I deferred discussion of the acousmêtre. I plan to use Wizard of Oz and Psycho to illustrate the concept. In the past, I have also used 2001 and Friday, the 13th.

To Have and Have Not--additional comments

I have posted a music cue list for To Have and Have Not on the supporting materials page of the HtM website: Supporting Materials.

Two additional pedagogical comments about music:

1. Franz Waxman's music for the establishing sequence is built in a sharply defined two-part design, with a dramatic opening for main titles followed by a more melodically profiled and rhythmically robust "native music." The elements are similar to the main-title music for Casablanca, which in turn is a reworking by Max Steiner of his music that opens The Lost Patrol (1934). In its somewhat crude directness, the "native music" (that's what it's called in the studio cue sheet) is uncharacteristic of Waxman, and one has to wonder whether he was asked to write "something like Casablanca."

In Casablanca, a brief dramatic opening is followed immediately by "native" or "Arab" music, then by La Marseillaise. In The Lost Patrol, the opening is identical, but the end is a British military march. The three main title cues make for interesting comparison, and they provide an interesting instance of reuse as well as a case of style-topic duplication.

2. The second comment is about music as sound advance. The Hotel Martinique is the central and primary location of action in the film. Although even the basement is used at one point (to hide the injured resistance leader), the primary locations are the main floor restaurant-bar, a second-floor corridor and rooms, and the street outside the Hotel. Several times music from Cricket's band is heard before the scene changes to the restaurant-bar area, and the effect is very similar to sound advances that bridge more radical breaks in both time and place. The first example occurs after 00:11:00, with the entrance of "Martinique." (See earlier blog entries for more information about Hoagie Carmichael's music.)

Thematic association and Casablanca

As the final, summarizing example for style topics (HtM, Ch. 8), specifically for theme, leitmotive, and thematic association, I used these four sequences from Casablanca: Rick and Ilsa meet again -- DVD ch. 13; after hours (first night) -- DVD ch. 15; after hours (second night) -- DVD ch. 29; and the ending -- DVD ch. 34. The first three all make use of the signature stinger chord (in fact, these are the only three places it occurs in the film), and the second and third have some close relationships of other musical material (to the point that the third can virtually be considered a "variation" of the second). Students have no difficulty with the leitmotive (the opening of the chorus for "As Time Goes By"), given the way it is first introduced (in ch. 13), and the treatments of the theme in the four sequences offer opportunity for discussion of reinterpreted contexts.

Obviously, many other examples might work as well, but this was relatively compact (useful for a compressed summer semester course) yet gave a good sense of musical strategies in the film as a whole.