RD Burman’s Scoring Techniques

Bollywood film composers normally garner most of their praise for the songs on the soundtrack. R.D. Burman is no exception to this. As I stated in a previous entry, Sholay’s soundtrack is a major reason why the film was such a big hit in the theaters. One of the less  appreciated aspects of this Hindi cinema composer is his approach to blending the ambient soundtrack to scoring action sequences. For example, during the train scene at the beginning of the film, Burman uses the sound of the orchestra to mimic the sounds of the train whistle. It might be hard to miss except that the the brass blasts repeat at predictable intervals and their pitch changes as the scene progresses. As the action heats up, the percussion beats mimic the chugging sounds of the train. One might miss that Burman is borrowing the train sounds in this score were it not for their regularity and slight deviations in execution more typical of musical performance. As you listen to this scene, pay attention to how the sounds of the orchestral blasts and percussion are used to blend the action and the affect as Jai and Veeru do the honorable thing for Thakur, their captor.

Through his collaboration with his musicians, Burman is able to employ a similar effect in the chase scenes towards the end of the film (around 02:42:00); however, in this case it depends upon his use of traditional North Indian instruments thereby changing his role and the music’s function. When Basanti is attempting to escape Gabbar Singh’s men, the score introduces some ferocious tabla playing. The rapid beats on the right hand create a rough mickey-mousing effect with Basanti’s footsteps. As the scene progresses, the tabla blends with the sounds of the horse-hooves hitting the ground in a chase. It is a knowing display of compositional and improvisatory dexterity that mixes the affect and action of the scene. As a viewer, I can interpret the tabla beats and enharmonics as mimicking Basanti’s heart-racing panic as she tries to escape, or I can follow them to their physical logic in a manner similar to what the class has observed in other action sequences–an attempt to make the audience’s heart race through elevating tension. As my friend and colleague Allen Roda explained to me, tabla players are famous for being able to make their instruments mimic a wide variety of sounds: birds, trains, horses and more. It isn’t a surprise that the musician came so close to the sounds of the horse hooves. Further, the transition from first five seconds to the cart elevates the tension in the scene, demonstrating that the tabla player is accompanying the action in the scene through an improvisation more than playing a composition – he is clearly following and enhancing the action on-screen through his playing. The low pitched “ge” gives the music a cyclical sense of periodicity, or, in other words, a sense of stable time.

The other level at work here is how the music highlights the genre borrowing that is fundamental to the film. Through its narrative conventions, Sholay is a clear blending of Spaghetti Western and Hindi film;* it features gun fights, train robberies and a vigilante sense of justice. Yet, there are many instances when the film emphasizes its time-frame in the 1970s; Jai and Veeru enjoy their ride on a motorbike, and at one point, Jai picks up an automatic weapon to gain the advantage in a gun fight. By bringing the sounds of Hindustani music to the foreground in the chase scene, Burman further emphasizes the ways that the film blends 1970s India with narratives of honor and justice more fitting for the Wild West.

R.D. Burman’s musical approach is fundamental to making this blending work in a filmic context. As a composer, he was most famous for adapting “Western” (i.e. based in European classical and popular music, not the Western genre film style) scoring techniques to Hindi cinema through rhythmic complexity. As Ethnomusicologist Gregory D. Booth has argued, Burman’s adoption of Hollywood scoring techniques and linear notions of rhythm and time (in contrast to the cyclical nature of Hindustani’s tala) made his films more viable and current with a younger and more globally oriented generation. In both scenes above, Burman emphasizes the narrative imperative of the music and rhythmic regularity to ground the audience while also allowing them to feel tension and excitement. It makes these scenes especially satisfying when compared to scoring conventions from other parts of the world.

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* In this week’s reading, Ganti points out that the film blends other narrative conventions – love, action, comedy, drama, song – making it a masala.

Sholay

This week’s film is Sholay (1975), one of the highest grossing Bollywood films of all time. Due to the film’s length (just under 3.5 hours), we will be ordering pizza(s) for the group screening.

Fun fact about this film: it took a few weeks for it to find an audience, but the successful release of the soundtrack album (with snippets of dialogue) alongside good word of mouth helped propel it into the stratosphere of success. The film’s story and style borrow heavily from Spaghetti Westerns (e.g., A Fistful of Dollars). Slumdog Millionaire (2008) refers to one of the film’s stars, Amitabh Bachchan, in a comedic scene at the beginning of that film.

AAMITAAAAAAABH

Term Paper Proposals

Now that we are in Mod 2, written work is going to be directed towards a larger term paper. I generally require formal proposals to ensure that everyone is on the same page and is fully prepared to do the work necessary to write a good paper.

Proposals should state the research questions, the method, and attempt to place the inquiry into a larger intellectual framework. That larger framework means that you will consult other scholarly sources on your topic in addition to the textbook(s). Proposals should be 250-500 words, and they should append an annotated bibliography of at least 3 scholarly works to get you started (creative project proposals will require at least 2 scholarly works in the bibliography). This means that you should, at a minimum, skim the source you find and briefly explain how it will help you write a good paper.

In class, some of you asked about the best scholarly resources. I have placed a number of books on reserve in the library. There are also additional book-length studies that might be useful to you, depending on topic, that are available through UBorrow. In addition to JSTOR, Project MUSE, and Google Scholar, the best place to consult journal articles on music and film are in the following databases (all available through the “Databases” tab on the NCF Library website):

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature

Music Index

International Index of Music Periodicals

These three journals specifically address music and film and might be worth browsing online:

Music, Sound, and the Moving Image (via Project MUSE)

Music and the Moving Image (via JSTOR and EBSCOhost)

Journal of Film Music (available through ILLiad)

Proposals are to be emailed as a PDF by 11:59PM on November 1st. Please feel free to make an appointment to meet and discuss your ideas.

The Trucker Scene from Thelma & Louise (1991)

One of the most iconic moments from Thelma & Louise (1991) is when they surprise a lewd trucker by shooting up his haul after he refuses to apologize for being rude and mistreating women.

It’s deep in the third act when fate and poor decisions have pushed the two characters to full revenge mode. It is also the moment that appeared in the trailers (most likely because it allowed Ridley Scott to flex his action directing skills). One of the more interesting and puzzling things about this soundtrack is that the song that accompanies it, “Better Not Look Down” by B.B. King, was originally supposed to accompany the final sequence as the T-Bird drives into the abyss of the Grand Canyon. It was, after all, the song that inspired Callie Khouri’s award-winning screenplay.

According to Claudia Gorbman, it was intended as a celebration of their lives and as a pretty blatant pun: better not look down as your car falls. Of course, this song didn’t accompany that iconic final scene because nearly everyone agreed that it was too grotesque. Its use at a different point in the film’s third act is telling. The characters have nearly completed their respective transformations. They have shed their makeup, their skin is bronzed by the dirt and sun, and they appear in an exhausted and emotionally raw state as they make their drive through the Southwest. They hear the music from their car radio and bounce along to it in more frenetic movements than the Temptations sing-along from an earlier point in the film. The way that Thelma, in particular, moves to “Better Not Look Down” is a clear contrast from the more relaxed responses to music that pepper this story. Once they signal to the trucker that they are pulling over, the song continues as non-diegetic music and accompanies as the camera focuses on a reflection of the trucker in the shiny hubcap. He celebrates what he thinks is his lucky day through a brief twist dance move. After they shoot up the truck, Hans Zimmer’s blues scoring enters as Thelma triumphantly grabs the trucker’s cap and both women scream in delight.

Despite the scene’s depiction of an emasculated trucker, the music helps spectators root for the two doomed heroines. How can you not celebrate their misplaced vengeance when there is an upbeat blues playing? Blues is a genre normally coded as masculine due to its use of guitar solos. Yet, in this scene it functions differently; its beats, female choir, and lack of V-I resolution (and telos) help it work as expressions of the characters’ rage against the patriarchy with the trucker as proxy. Some could choose to ignore that larger framework and just poke fun at the trucker – he obviously isn’t very bright. That they perform such an act of violence as women also manages to help this film also reach an even broader audience (hence its use in the film’s promotion): filmgoers enjoy their violence and explosions.

This film was extraordinarily popular despite the fact that the U.S. was deep in the midst of a backlash against feminism. It struck a nerve and went on to be nominated for 6 Academy Awards (with Sarandon and Davis competing with each other for Best Actress). Even though some complained that the film celebrated violence against men at gunpoint, the scoring of scenes like this managed to win over a huge swath of the movie-going public.

Compilation Soundtracks

Next week we close out our brief history of Hollywood film music. Inevitably, this forces us to confront the practice of pop compilation soundtracks. Here is a link to this week’s additional reading from Anahid Kassabian’s Hearing Film (Routledge, 2000). While Kassabian uses pop songs to understand women-centric films of the late ’80s and early ’90s, other collections and monographs consider the proliferation of pop compilation soundtracks within the contexts of nostalgia and the (then) booming record industry. Consider that this practice grew into fruition alongside a revival of “classic” scoring practices for summer blockbusters…

Bernard Herrmann and Saul Bass in Psycho’s Title Sequence

At Monday night’s screening, I warned a student that she would know during the opening title sequence whether or not the film’s music was too much to bear. I was referring to the jarring sounds and buzzing, all-strings arrangement in Bernard Herrmann’s score. In the opening minutes of Psycho (1960),  Herrmann and Saul Bass (title sequence master of post-war film)* introduce the main themes of the film in geometric terms. Yes, the film involves a theft and some semblance of romantic love between Marion Crane and Sam Loomis, but those plot elements are in place to provide the motivation (or “MacGuffin,” as Hitchcock would have called it) to get those characters to the Bates Motel where the main action takes place. Instead of theft or love, the film prioritizes dualistic nature of Norman Bates’s personality, the competing desires of Norman and Mother, and how that pattern of murder eventually ends. What better way to propel the audience into that fractured psychological state than to introduce minimalist, two-toned geometric lines with an equally minimalist (serif free!) typeface traveling across the screen.

A few years ago, a blog dedicated to title sequences featured a nice discussion of the pairing of Herrmann’s music and Bass title design.

In the space of a few short minutes, with his minimal toolkit and Bernard Herrmann’s jagged score, Bass creates a parallel visual tension to the film that tells the audience everything they need to know about the plot, without saying much of anything at all. He artfully sets the tone by asking the viewer to read between the lines — quite literally — but he also asks that we read into them.

I would argue that Herrmann’s score serves this function, but, due to leitmotivic conventions, it complicates what the title sequence can mean. It is a rare thing to hear such an emphasis on the string section in a film (muted, no less). As Fenimore outlines in his article on sound and music in the film, there are basically five musical units that trade back and forth in the film’s prelude, all of them varying in how they approach small, repeating rhythmic patterns with one featuring strong melodic content. These figures are much more identified with Marion Crane (as some have already noted in written responses, Norman’s music and Mother’s music differ), her flight from Phoenix, and the tension surrounding her ill-fated attempt at theft. In this case, the music is all Marion, and the circuitous repetition mentally prepares the audience for the “musical tearing” (Fenimore, 87) in the film’s climax.

Fenimore, 85.

Fenimore, 86.

Thus, I would argue that the music and imagery of the title sequence represent the pairing of the fragmented psychology of a serial killer in Bass’s title designs with the circumstances (and victim) that set in motion the killer’s downfall in Herrmann’s music. It is an economy of story-telling through sound and image that I have yet to see elsewhere.

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*Another film that we are covering this week, The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), also features the title sequence artistry of Bass.

Post-War Film Music

Next week, we will screen Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic Psycho (1960). Alongside the film, I’m asking you to read Ross Fenimore’s essay on the use of music, sound, and voice in that film. Fenimore is a visiting assistant professor of music at Davidson College and he is an expert in all things Madonna.

In addition to Psycho, we will be discussing a few scenes from The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). For those of you looking for a way to discuss The Man With the Golden Arm in your mid-term papers, it is available on Amazon.com Prime Instant.

Meanwhile on Tumblr

Meanwhile on Tumblr

I gave a more thorough answer to a question on the semiotic link between Carmen Miranda and Chiquita Banana.

There is a connection between Miranda and Chiquita Banana, but it’s a bit more complicated. The song, like much of the music Miranda sang in Hollywood musicals, had almost nothing to do with Brazil. Notice it was written as a calypso (from Trinidad and Tobago), not a samba or marcha, and the original jingle lyrics were intended to educate the public about the banana’s nutrition rather than play up its tropical origins. During the campaign’s launch, the United Fruit Company and the BBDO ad agency picked an anthropomorphized banana to do the singing – the lady would come much later. The anthropomorphized outfit looks less Miranda-like and more reminiscent of the stage clothes worn by Cuban musicians. Miranda almost never wore skirts with ruffles, and her blouses, if they were ruffled, were a result of being worn off her shoulders. This is because her stage outfit had its origins in the Afro-Brazilian baiana. Earlier images of the anthropomorphized banana also showed maracas which are common throughout Latin America (and during this period were linked in the U.S. with Cuban musicians). The connection was there (since Miranda was extraordinarily popular during this period, and she sometimes wore fruit on her head), but everyone could claim it was far more reminiscent of a vague South-Of-The-Border essence than it actually was.

Feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe wrote about the semiotic link between Miranda and the Chiquita Banana campaign back in the late ’80s.

Mid-Term Paper

Two possibilities:

• Write about music in the representation of gender and/or race in a Hollywood film covered in class up to the conclusion of World War II.
• Take a talkie film from Unit 2 and imagine how it would have been put together, directed or conceived without synchronized sound. This is a speculative paper, and it can consider the variety of ways that filmmakers attempted to control (or not) the sound and music that accompanied silent films.

Both paper options must be based on information in the Wierzbicki text. They both must justify their claims through evidence and they need to have a clear point or thesis.

They should be 3-4 Pages, double-spaced, regular 1-inch margins, in a standard font. Papers must be emailed as PDFs by 11:59PM on October 11th.

The Pass-Along Song

During the class screening of Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), I heard a number of attendees audibly groan in annoyance at the emergence and re-emergence of the title song in the opening minutes of the film. Perhaps this strong reaction was due to the way the theme was passed-along from one character to another with no clear break between the realism of dialogue and action and fantasy of breaking out into song. Indeed, one of the more peculiar things about this film musical is that so many of the songs have a much more subtle transition between a marked performance in the film’s diegesis and the more robust accompaniment of the orchestration such as the ringing of the bell on the trolley to induct “The Trolley Song” and the music-as-entertainment set-up for “Under The Bamboo Tree.” (Indeed, what sets “The Boy Next Door” apart is that it is one of the few moments that doesn’t transition from realism to fantasy, and instead functions as a musical monologue.)

However, that there was something grating to so many of you in the opening song warrants more scrutiny.

In the minutes before the film provides Judy Garland’s version of the song at the piano (accompanied by her sister Rose), Agnes and Grandpa (and others) sing the song absent-mindedly. They aren’t singing the song for any audience in particular, but rather they sing for themselves as they whistle (outside), trounce around the house, waltz in the hallway, try on different hats (eventually settling on the fez hat*), or return from tennis across the street. This production of the title song is exceptionally self-aware. Grandpa even forgets the lyrics, replacing them with “la la la la,” as he admires himself in the mirror.

Interruptions and forgetting abound in this song. It’s almost as if the characters know that this is the title song and they never give it the break-out status that normally accompanies such songs in movie musicals from this period. Compare “Meet Me in St. Louis” to “Oklahoma!” from Oklahoma! (1955), which was based on the Broadway show from 1943.

Perhaps part of the reason the film uses the song in this way is that it was actually written during the time that the film is set and is loaded with inside jokes and sexual innuendos that only make sense from that time and place. According to Raymond Knapp, it was written in 1904 with many lyrics directly referring to what people would have encountered at the World’s Fair (“hoochie-coochie” referring to the “exotic dance” at the Egypt exhibit at the Chicago World’s Fair a decade before that eventually became known as the “striptease”; “tootsey” a reference to prostitutes turning “tootsie-wootsie” into a term of endearment between spouses with sexual undertones) thus leaving the characters without the self-awareness for the song’s references. He says, “beyond the casual hip-thrust from Judy Garland, none of the performances of the title song betrays any awareness of these meanings; indeed, Grandpa can’t even remember the exact words to this part of the song” (97). Even the ways the song is sung sets it apart from the rest of the songs in the film. It is sung straight-ahead slightly afield from the ’40s pop-vocal approach (with more scoops and jazz-influenced vibrato) that abounds throughout the rest of the film. Keep in mind that this film was released at the height of U.S. involvement in World War II. So much of what Hollywood produced in musicals were meant to fulfill two functions: remind the audience why they were sacrificing so much for the war-effort while also providing an escapist nostalgia. That this song was of the period the film portrays in such a “realist” manner (for a musical, of course) made the film feel less like a straight-ahead narrative and more like a series of greeting cards from the past. As it unfolds, the interrupting and forgetting is reminiscent of someone trying to remember something and missing some of the (more uncomfortable) details before being reminded of what actually happened. Perhaps that is what is happening in these opening minutes.

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* There was a lively debate from other academics watching the class twitter feed on the meaning of Grandpa’s fez hat. Most agreed that it was a Shriner’s hat with Orientalist undertones. In Jim Buhler’s words, “Shriners=’Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine’ or so says wikipedia, so no argument there.” Sam Baltimore, a specialist in musical theater, tweeted, “homosociality, Orientalism often used as substitutes for homosexuality in film musicals. Shriners hat = both.” Whether or not such coding for grandpa was obvious, there is something peculiar and humorous about him and his hat.