Off the Planet: Music, Sound and Science Fiction Cinema
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Off the Planet: Music, Sound and Science Fiction Cinema
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Overview
In recent years, music and sound have been increasingly recognized as an important, if often neglected, aspect of film production and film studies. Off the Planet comprises a lively, stimulating, and diverse collection of essays on aspects of music, sound, and science fiction cinema.
Following a detailed historical introduction to the development of sound and music in the genre, individual chapters analyze key films, film series, composers, and directors in the postwar era. The first part of the anthology profiles seminal 1950s productions such as The Day the Earth Stood Still, the first Godzilla film, and Forbidden Planet. Later chapters analyze the work of composer John Williams, the career of director David Cronenberg, the Mad Max series, James Cameron’s Terminators, and other notable SF films such as Space Is the Place, Blade Runner, Mars Attacks!, and The Matrix. Off the Planet is an important contribution to the emerging body of work in music and film, with contributors including leading film experts from Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780861969388 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/04/2020 |
| Series: | Encounters: Explorations in Folklore and Ethnomusicology |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 221 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Off the Planet
Music, Sound and Science Fiction Cinema
By Philip Hayward
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2004 Philip HaywardAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-86196-938-8
CHAPTER 1
HOOKED ON AETHEROPHONICS
The Day the Earth stood still
REBECCA LEYDON
In 'Farewell to the Master' (1944), Harry Bates' short story upon which the film The Day the Earth stood still (1951) is based, an extra-terrestrial called Klaatu visits the Earth and is promptly killed by a deranged citizen. It is left to the robot 'Gnut' to somehow bring him back to life. The task is eventually achieved by reconstituting Klaatu's body from a tape-recording of his voice. This last intriguing plot detail was dropped in the reworking of the original story for the script of the 1951 film. In Robert Wise's adaptation, Klaatu is killed by military police, after moving covertly among the inhabitants of Washington, DC. His corpse is retrieved and reanimated by the robot, 'Gort', by means of a mysterious medical operation ("Nikto"?) conducted inside the space ship. Yet the notion of the alien being's essence as fully encrypted in pure sound remains a crucial part the film: the extra-terrestrial 'voice', as represented by Bernard Herrmann's score, plays a central role, for it is primarily through musical clues, rather than special visual effects, that Klaatu's alien nature is enacted. After all, Klaatu looks and behaves exactly like an ordinary human, as the two Medical Corps officers who examine him in the hospital observe:
Major: (studying a series of X-ray films) The skeletal structure is completely normal. (pointing) Same for the major organs – heart, liver, spleen, kidneys.
Captain: And the lungs are the same as ours. Must mean a similar atmosphere – similar pressure.
Klaatu blends in and moves inconspicuously among the human population. For the cinematic spectator, the only consistent evidence of his alien origins is the halo of otherworldly sounds with which the musical score envelopes him. The link between particular sonic elements and things extra-terrestrial is forged during the film's opening titles as the camera peers through celestial nebulae toward the planet Earth. But the music's defamiliarising function becomes important precisely in the unexceptional scenes, like those showing Klaatu walking through the streets of Washington. As Royal Brown might put it, Herrmann's music acts as a "fictionalizing" force against the iconicity of the cinematic visuals (Brown, 1994).
The film's score is often noted for the prominent role it assigns the theremin, a vintage electronic instrument developed by the Russian scientist Lev Sergeyevich Termen in the nineteen-teens. The instrument has always seemed highly peculiar because it is played without actually touching it: the distance of the performer's hand from an antenna controls a radio-frequency oscillator, which, combined with a second, fixed-frequency oscillator, generates a difference tone that is amplified through a loudspeaker. Movements of the hand towards and away from the antenna thus create a continuous glissando across some four or five octaves. (The lowest note on the instrument is determined by the frequency at which the two oscillators 'lock', ie when their difference approaches zero.) Volume is, likewise, controlled by movements of the performer's opposite hand, toward and away from a metal loop that projects horizontally from the side of the instrument. Skilled performers use precise adjustments in volume to mask the unavoidable 'swoop' that marks the movement from one pitch to another. The instrument is fiendishly difficult to play, not only for the physical coordination it requires to synchronise the hand movements around the two antennae, but especially for the demands made on the performer's sense of pitch. The player must be able to remember precise positions in three-dimensional space, without reference to frets or a fingerboard. Moreover, small inadvertent motions of the right arm will cause the pitch to fluctuate noticeably; in ensemble playing the performer usually compensates for flaws in the intonation with a deliberate measured vibrato produced by shaking the right hand.
By analogy with 'idiophone', 'chordophone', and other terms for instrument 'families', Termen's instrument was initially classified as an 'aetherophone', since its sounds were supposed to emanate from the ether, the imaginary propagating medium for electromagnetic waves. Termen and his disciples envisioned that the instrument would take its place in the concert hall along side respectable classical instruments. Much to the dismay of Clara Rockmore and other serious practitioners, however, it quickly found its way into movie music, where its 'action-at-a-distance' method of sound-production led to its use as a sonic marker for 'unseen forces': magnetism, unconscious drives, even substance abuse. As Philip Hayward describes, "it was a virtual instrument, one which involved the instrumentalist conjuring sounds by means of moving his/her hands in the air" (1997: 31), and this "conjuring" was easily mapped onto narrative situations involving mesmerism and the supernormal.
Herrmann's inventive orchestration in The Day the Earth stood still is developed through the combination of electronic sounds with more conventional orchestral resources. His use of the theremin – actually two theremins, to accommodate polyphonic writing – is only the most conspicuous of several unusual instruments in the score: a pair of Hammond organs plus a large studio organ, electric violin, electric cello, and electric bass (one of each), a trio of vibraphones, and electric guitar. Equally unexpected are the sounds Herrmann obtains from conventional orchestral instruments, through odd combinations and additive layering: muted brass, tam-tams struck with nail-files and triangle sticks, whole families of suspended cymbals, special effects performed on multiple harps, chimes, celesta, and glockenspiel. Figure 1 shows some of these resources as they are employed in the opening measures of the densely scored overture.
What are the narrative elements that call for such extraordinary musical resources? The film opens with the sound of radio broadcasts in many languages as a UFO is tracked by radar systems around the world. The flying saucer makes a landing at the National Mall in Washington, DC where it is quickly surrounded by tanks, guns, and nervous military personnel. A solitary figure, Klaatu, emerges from the ship, announcing: "We have come to visit you in peace and with goodwill". As he extends his arm to offer a gift (a special telescope for observing life on other planets), he is shot and wounded by a jittery soldier. This misdeed brings forth Gort, the indestructible laser-firing robot, who appears bent on revenge until Klaatu calls him off ("Gort! Deglet! Ovrosco!"). Klaatu is taken to a hospital to have his wounds treated. There an advisor to the president of the United States visits him but Klaatu insists that the message he bears must be delivered to all of the Earth's people, and not to any one nation alone. Klaatu requests a meeting with the United Nations, and when this proves diplomatically impossible, he escapes from the hospital to move secretly among the city's inhabitants. Under the assumed name of 'Major Carpenter' he takes up residence in a boarding house where he meets a widow, Helen, and her son Bobby, who become his confidants. With their help he arranges for a meeting with the international scientific community, lead by Dr. Barnhardt, deemed "the smartest man in the world". To illustrate just what is at stake for the Earth's people, Klaatu disables all electronic devices on the entire planet for an hour. Meanwhile, Helen's fiancé, Tom Stevens, reveals Klaatu's whereabouts to the authorities and the spaceman is shot to death before he can address the scientists. Helen must then deliver a message to the robot Gort ("Klaatu! Barada! Nikto!") which undertakes the recovery of Klaatu's body and its reanimation. Finally the re-born Klaatu is able to deliver his message: the nations of the Earth must dismantle their nuclear arsenal or face complete annihilation by extraterrestrial law enforcement.
The film weaves together a variety of themes drawn from heterogeneous sources, including Christianity, McCarthyism, the Manhattan Project and 'Big Science'. Klaatu's rebirth, his message of peace, and his adopted pseudonym plainly allude to Christian biblical events. But, as Krin Gabbard has pointed out, these Christian references are hybridised with expressions of anti-McCarthyism (Gabbard, 1982). In a parody of red-scare hysteria, one of the characters asserts that the mysterious space ship has come, not from the stars, but from the Soviet Union. Helen's fiancé plays the role of Judas when he betrays Klaatu's identity to the authorities; but the incident also clearly alludes to the 'friendly witnesses' who denounced their Hollywood colleagues at the 1947 HUAC hearings. In a different type of hybridisation, the scientist Dr. Barnhardt is presented as one of the few 'believers' in Klaatu's message. As Cyndy Hendershot has argued, the film represents atomic scientists as "mystics who impart political and ethical wisdom to a frightened American public" (Hendershot, 1997: 33).
Herrmann's electronic musical resources, then, serve several narrative goals in the film. First, they perform an alienising function – including the alienness invoked by xenophobia and anti-communist hysteria; second, they epitomise the sounds of science – including science gone horribly wrong; and finally they mark off a space of numinosity, associated with Klaatu's 'sacred' mission and that of the 'priestly' scientists. The theremin proves uniquely well adapted to all these functions. As Hayward notes:
[T]he theremin's otherworldliness invokes another, earlier association – the mystery of interplanetary space, that of the metaphorical 'music of the spheres', the celestial harmony of the movement of the planets which Earth's factionalism and arms race threatened, and which had prompted Klaatu to be dispatched as an ambassador to Earth, to invite us to change our ways. (Hayward, 1997: 38)
While the theremins are the most conspicuously 'alien' feature of Herrmann's score, some of the strangest-sounding passages are generated by other means. One example is the scene where Klaatu, masquerading as 'Mr. Carpenter', pays a nocturnal visit to his ship. The youngster Bobby follows him as he leaves the house late at night; from a safe distance, Bobby watches as Klaatu makes his way to the site and signals to Gort with a flashlight. Figure 2 shows a segment of the music that accompanies Bobby and Klaatu's passage through the streets of Washington. One consequence of this particular combination of instruments with this tessitura is that each layer is slightly mistuned with respect to the prevailing concert pitch. The harp harmonics sound a little sharp to the vibraphone, while the cup mutes on the trumpets also tend to pull the intonation noticeably sharp with respect to the same notes doubled by the Hammond organ (whose 12-tone gear train temperament approximates, but deviates very slightly from equal temperament). Next come the series of pedal glissandi in the low register of the harp combined with the sound of the chime, a naturally 'mistuned' instrument by virtue of its inharmonic overtone series.
This teetering ensemble nicely sets up the sonic landscape for the next scene: for the flash-light sequence, Herrmann introduces the two theremins, playing an interlocking chromatic neighbor figure, accompanied by long sustained notes on muted cello and electric bass and tam-tam. A particularly weird feature of the passage in Figure 3 is that while the higher of the two theremins performs with the instrument's characteristic vibrato, the lower one plays without. Exposing the inherent instability of the theremin's intonation, Herrmann once again sets up a wide pitch 'fringe'. (This particular pairing of the two instruments, senzaand con vibrato, and the same mewling chromatic halfstep figure will return later in the film to accompany the scene in which the world's electrical devices are temporarily impaired.)
A series of timpani glissandi, mimicking the portamento of the theremins, accompany Gort's disposal of the guards. Klaatu then makes his way inside the space ship to begin his calculations. The theremins now take on a new musical role: for the first time in the film, they play something resembling a full-blown melodic theme. Up to this point, the instrument has had very little to do in the way of thematic material, per se, mostly playing brief repetitive twonote fragments, like those shown in Figure 3. Now it is as if the theremin emerges in its 'natural environment', the interior of the spaceship, which offers a glimpse of the alien world from which Klaatu has come. The tune, shown as the upper voice in Figure 4, materialises as part of a dialogue: stated first by the solo electric guitar, it shifts to the first theremin, then the second, while a clockwork-like rhythmic accompaniment unfolds in the harps, glockenspiels, vibraphone, celesta and piano. The melodic imitation in this passage suggests a kind of rational communication among the voices of the musical texture. All this takes place as Klaatu speaks aloud in his mother tongue, issuing commands to the ship's controls. Klaatu's own movements in this scene actually mirror those of a theremin player: he waves his hand over panels as lights turn on and off and a projection screen is illuminated.
Klaatu's actions here will soon incapacitate electronic devices all over the planet, and the most elaborate orchestral effects of the film are reserved for the scene in which this event transpires. Herrmann once again employs the two theremins, along with the three organs, the electric bass and the full complement of brass; all playing dissonant sustained pianissimo chords. The most striking element in the soundtrack here, however, is a separate ensemble made up of three sets of chimes struck with steel mallets, two pianos, and crash cymbals. A series of sforzando chords played by this group is recorded both forward (track 1) and backward (track 2); the tracks are linked end to end in a chain of dramatic diminuendi and crescendi, articulated by the concussive chords. Figure 5 shows the first pair of these chords. Each 'stinger' corresponds to a shot in the film, showing first the streets of Washington, then London, Moscow, and Paris, all paralysed by Klaatu's stunt.
Herrmann's use of poly-triads in Figure 5 – for example, E? minor plus E minor (a particular juxtaposition that returns elsewhere in the film) – is a hallmark of his musical language and a technique he likely picked up from his close study of the music of Charles Ives. Like Ives, Herrmann tends to combine major or minor triads whose roots lie either a minor second or a tritone apart, for maximum contrast. (Triads of separated by other intervals tend to be less convincingly bi-tonal.) Another example of this technique is the music that accompanies Klaatu's arrival near the beginning of the film. Figure 6 shows the signature motif that is reiterated twelve times during the scene. This sonority freezes and sustains a harmony that had first occurred in the context of the overture, in a passage featuring alternating D major and A? major chords (reminiscent of the 'Coronation Scene' from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov). The tonal centers, A? and D, which lie a tritone apart, are juxtaposed here in this isolated 'Klaatu' chord. The chord also represents a particular configuration known as the 'all-interval tetrachord' – a four-note sonority in which each of the six possible interval-classes is represented.
It is a particularly rich sound, and is often used by composers to evoke a sense of chromatic saturation; in the context of Herrmann's score, it is analogous to the theremin slides, timpani glissandi, and harp pedal portamento and the way these slippery sounds allude to the complete chromatic gamut.
Herrmann went on to create similar 'slippery' effects in other film scores – for example, harp pedal glissandi (played by nine harps) for the octopus scene is Robert D. Webb's Beneath the Twelve Mile Reef (1953), and most famously, the shrieking violin glissandi in Psycho's shower scene. The theremin is a natural choice for producing this kind of irrational pitch wandering. But after its distinctive sound was featured in a number of mid-century film scores, the instrument was eventually abandoned in favour of more versatile and user-friendly synthesisers. Herrmann himself used Moog synthesisers in place of the theremins when he conducted selections from The Day the Earth stood still with the National Philharmonic Orchestra for a London recording in 1974. By then, the theremin had been superceded by a new generation of electronic instruments; in any case, there had only ever been a handful of truly competent players able to negotiate the theremin's slithery pitch space. Still, Herrmann's music had made the instrument's own limitations work in its favour, exacerbating its more freakish qualities through senza vibrato technique and through ensemble combinations with other electronic and acoustic resources to best serve the particular narrative goals of the film.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Off the Planet by Philip Hayward. Copyright © 2004 Philip Hayward. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,Sci Fidelity – Music, Sound and Genre History Philip Hayward,
Chapter 1 Hooked on Aetherophonics: The Day The Earth Stood Still Rebecca Leydon,
Chapter 2 Atomic Overtones and Primitive Undertones: Akira Ifukube's Sound Design for Godzilla Shuhei Hosokawa,
Chapter 3 Forbidden Planet: Effects and Affects in the Electro Avant Garde Rebecca Leydon,
Chapter 4 The Transmolecularisation of [Black] Folk: Space is the Place, Sun Ra and Afrofuturism Nabeel Zuberi,
Chapter 5 Nostalgia, Masculinist Discourse, and Authoritarianism in John Williams' Scores for Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind Neil Lerner,
Chapter 6 Sound and Music in the Mad Max trilogy Rebecca Coyle,
Chapter 7 "These are my nightmares": Music and Sound in the films of David Cronenberg Paul Théberge,
Chapter 8 Ambient Soundscapes in Blade Runner Michael Hannan and Melissa Carey,
Chapter 9 'I'll be back': Recurrent sonic motifs in James Cameron's Terminator films Karen Collins,
Chapter 10 Inter-Planetary Soundclash: Music, Technology and Territorialisation in Mars Attacks! Philip Hayward,
Chapter 11 Mapping The Matrix: Virtual Spatiality and the realm of the perceptual Mark Evans,
About The Authors,
Bibliography,
Index,