Misusing Music

Music, sad to say, is often used to stir emotions that should arise from the film’s content but doesn’t. Other times it duplicates what’s already evident on the screen; summer music followed by snow music during one of those “and the seasons passed” montages would be gilding the lily. Music should never “picture point” the story by commenting too closely. Walt Disney was infamous for “Mickey Mousing” his films—the industry term for making scores into sonic strait-jackets around the minutia of action. The first of his “true-life adventures,” The Living Desert (1953, United States) was full of extraordinary documentary footage that Disney disfigured by making scorpions square-dance and supplying a different note, trill, or percussion roll for everything that dared to move. Used like this, music becomes a smothering form of control that aggressively bars the audience from making its own emotional judgments. Many documentaries of an older generation suffer in this way, as they also suffocate under patronizing, omniscient narration. Ethnic scenes in documentary pose particular problems and the riskiest solution is to make a poor facsimile of Thai music for a film set in Thailand.

Using Music with a Light Hand

Luckily, fashions change, and today less is considered more. A rhythm alone without melody or harmony can sometimes supply the uncluttered accompaniment that a sequence needs. Better illustrative music is that used to counterpoint the visible so it provides unexpected emotional nuance. In a story with fine shading, a good score can supply the sense of integrity or melancholy in one character and the interior impulsiveness that directs the actions of another. Music can enhance not just the “givens” of a character (what we already know about him or her) but also the interior development that leads to an action, thus implying moods, motives, or interior processes not otherwise accessible. Music can supply needed phrasing to a scene or help create structural demarcations by indicating transitions.

Frequently a succession of scenes constitutes a narrative building block, and music can unite them under a single thematic identity. It can also indicate a new act or other narrative departure. Short stings or fragments of melody are good when they belong to a larger musical picture. Stings are a well-established convention in fiction film, but use them cautiously in documentary unless the style of the film and its sound design have been boldly set up to allow it.

Good music can prompt the audience to investigate emotional aspects to the film that are not obvious. Errol Morris does this master fully in The Thin Blue Line (1988, United States). The bleak and beautiful repetitiousness of Philip Glass’s minimalist score underlines the nightmarish conundrum in which a man, trapped on death row for a crime he claims not to have done, must eternally relive the fateful events that led to his incarceration. Morris is quite justified in calling his film a documentary noir.

Where to Use Music

Films usually provide their own clues about where to use music. Often it seems natural during periods of tension, exhilaration, and in journeys or other bridging activities—a montage of a character driving across country to a new home, for instance. Transitions of any kind often benefit from music, especially when the mood changes as well as the location. Music can concentrate an emotional change when, for instance, an aspiring football player learns he can join the team, or when someone newly homeless must lie down in shame for her first night in a doorway.

Music can summon the spirit of an age or heighten the residual emotion in a landscape or city vista. It can help a film modulate from realism to a more prophetic mood, as Godfrey Reggio does in his Koyaanisqatsi (1982 United States), a long and grandiloquent parable about man’s rape of the natural world. It can supply ironic comment or suggest alternative worlds. Hanns Eisler’s score plays a major part in Resnais’ superb Holocaust documentary, Night and Fog (1955, United States) as noted in Chapter 5, Documentary Language. Instead of picture-pointing the deportation trains or playing an emotionally loaded accompaniment to the mountains of human hair and eyeglasses, his score plays against the obvious with a delicate, ghoulish dance or by sustaining a tense, unresolved interrogation between woodwind instruments.

Storyteller Voice

Now used more freely as documentaries dare to become subjective and lyrical, music is an aspect of the Storyteller’s voice. The best music doesn’t illustrate; it seems to give voice to feelings and an emotional point of view, either that of a character or of the Storyteller. It can even function like a Storyteller’s aside by expressing an opinion or alternative idea, implying what cannot be seen or commenting on what can.

Starting and Stopping Music

Film music, like debt and smoking, is easier started than stopped. Music being addictive, it can be a real problem to end a section without withdrawal pains. The panacea is to supply something in its place. This can either be a commanding effects track (a rich train-station atmosphere, for example—really a composition in its own right), or a new scene’s dialogue, or yet again an inciting moment of action that lugs the spectator’s attention forward into a new domain.

When using music not designed to fit your film, section ends can either be faded out or, better, come to a natural finish. In the latter mode, you would back-lay the music from the picture finish point, arranging to fade music up at the picture start or adjusting the scene length to make the picture fit the music from composer’s start to composer’s finish. With music that is overly long, you can frequently cut out repeated phrases. Composers like to milk good musical ideas, so most pieces are replete with repeated segments.

If you need something from the recorded classical repertoire, enlist the advice of a knowledgeable enthusiast. You can never tell if a piece really works until you play it against the sequence in question. Be careful not to select something overused or fraught with existing film associations, such as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, or Wagner’s Also sprach Zarathustra.

Spotting Session

Spotting for music is the process of viewing the fine cut, deciding where it needs music and where that music might come from. Some may be popular music or music from a particular era used for atmosphere. Unless it’s spontaneously coming from a radio in the street market and a legitimate part of the atmosphere, you will have to acquire the right to use it. The rest will need a film composer.

When the Composer Comes on Board

The composer who comes on board early will read the proposal and see the first available version of the edited film. He or she then mulls over the characters, the settings, and the film’s overall content, taking time to develop basic melodic themes and to decide what instrumental texture works best within the budget. Particular characters or situations often evoke their own musical treatment or leitmotif (recurring themes), and this takes time especially if the music must reflect a particular era or ethnicity and some research is necessary.

When There’s a Temporary Track

Sometimes while editing, the editor drops in temp (temporary) or scratch track music that nobody expects to keep but which helps assess the movie’s potential during editing. The unlucky composer is then confronted at a screening with a Beatles song or a stirring passage from Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony. Certainly it shows what great music can do for the scene and demonstrates a preferred texture or tempo. Now the unfortunate composer must extract whatever the makers find valuable (say, in rhythm, orchestration, texture, or mood) and try to reach for his or her own musical solutions.

Developing a Music Cue List

Once you have more or less locked down your film’s content, screen it with the composer, director, editor, and producer. A DVD or tape version given to the composer should have timecode identical to that displayed in your editing software, since you need a cumulative timing for the whole film as a common reference. The group will break the film down into acts and where these occur on the film’s timeline. They will discuss where music seems desirable, what it should achieve, and what seems most appropriate. When music’s job is to set a mood, it should do its work and then get out of the way, only to return and comment later. Sometimes a composer will point out just how effective, even loaded, a silence can be. The rhythms of action, camera movement, montage, and dialogue are themselves a kind of music and may require no enhancement. Typical questions center on how time is supposed to pass and whether or not you want music to shore up a weak scene, as it often must. The composer finds out (or suggests) where each music section starts and stops, aiming to depart the discussion session with a music cue list in hand and full notes as to the music’s function, with beginnings and endings defined as timecode in and out points. Start points may begin from particular cues in the imagery or dialogue.

If the editor compiles the music cues, sections should be logged from point to point in the cumulative timecode. If there are tightly fitting sections, then log them to the nearest half second. Figure 33-1 shows what this looks like. Because music is easy to start but hard to end, ending cues will take careful planning. As we’ve said, the rule of thumb is to conclude (or fade out) music under cover of something more commanding. You might take music out during the first seconds of a noisy street scene or just before the dialogue in a new scene. For best practice examples, study fiction films that successfully integrate music with the kind of action you have in your film.

The computer-savvy composer then takes the DVD or tape copy and either creates a traditional score to be performed and recorded or, working with computers and MIDI-controlled synthesizers, creates music sections directly.

FIGURE 33-1 Typical scene measurements for a music cue segment.

Unifying Through Time

Given that a long film is a progression of scenes whose longitudinal relationships often need strengthening, your composer may use special coding to help group scenes, characters, or situations into musically related families. In a 90-minute film there may be many music cues, from a sting or short punctuation to passages that are extended and elaborate. The composer may develop a theme for a main plot, then employ other themes for two subplots. Keeping these from clashing during cross-cutting can be problematical, and their relationship in key is important. Using a coding system keeps the composer aware of the logical connections and continuity that the music must underpin.

Keys: Diegetic and Nondiegetic Music

Any sound that is a part of the film characters’ world, as you may recall, is called diegetic sound. The film’s own music is something the characters can neither hear nor react to, since this is part of the film’s authorial commentary and addressed to the audience, so this is nondiegetic sound. In the planning stage the composer decides what progression of keys to use through the film, based on the emotional logic of the story itself. Especially when nondiegetic, composed music takes over from diegetic music on a radio, say, the transition between keys must not clash. This is true for all adjacent music sections, not just original scoring.

Conflicts and Composing to Sync Points

An experienced musician composing for a recording session will write to very precise timings, paying attention to track features such as dialogue lines and spot effects such as a door slam or tire screech. Instrumentation must not fight dialogue, and the arrangement cannot be too busy at points where it might compete with dialogue or effects. Music can successfully displace a diegetic track that is overloaded. Musical comment in place of a welter of naturalistic sound is more impressionistic and effective.

If the composer must work around dialogue and spot effects, he or she should have an advanced version of the sound track rather than the simple dialogue track used during editing. This is particularly true for tracks due for a cinema setting. There the sound system may be powerful and sophisticated, and your film’s track will come under greater scrutiny.

Conductor Needs

If a written score is played to picture, the score is marked with cumulative timings so the conductor can make a running check that sync points line up while the music is being recorded. Normally you do this to picture as a safeguard. Low-budget film scores make more use of MIDI computerized composing techniques. The composer builds the music to a QuickTime scratch version of the film, so music fitting is done at the source.

How Long Does it Take?

An experienced composer likes to take upward of 6 weeks to compose, say, 15 minutes of music for a 90-minute feature film but may have to do it in 3 weeks or less, with a flurry of music copyist work at the end if musicians are to play from scores.

The Live Music Session

Higher budget productions using live musicians record to picture with the editor present. The editing crew makes the preparations for live music recording. The director and editor supervise the session because nobody else can say for sure whether a shot can be lengthened to accommodate the slight mis-timings that always appear during recording. Be prepared anyway for conductor, composer, and soloists to pursue a degree of perfection invisible to anyone else.

Fitting Music

After a live recording session, the editor fits each music section and adjusts picture and sound where necessary. If the music is appropriate, the fi quantum leap forward in effectiveness. In the feature world, some editors specialize in cutting and fitting music. Such expertise could be a lifesaver for a documentary about music.

The Mix

The composer may want to be present at any mix session affecting the functionality of the music. When music has been composed using MIDI, the composer can return to the musical elements with minimal delay and summon a new version that incorporates changes of balance or content.