Nicktape 3, The Curtains Partingby Cypress Grove |
***Cross-reference with: III, Cave and the Seventh Art
So what exactly is the point of film music – what does it bring to the party? Its original purpose was to drown out the noise of the clunky old projectors, during the silent era. That is, of course, no longer a problem, and yet the music remains. My primary focus here is music created specifically for engagement with another artistic medium. The film score, rather than the film soundtrack – which is often a collection of unrelated songs that have previously been used in another context.
David Raksin said that purpose of music in cinema is “to help realise the meaning of a film,” and research conducted by Claudia Bullerjahn and Markus Guldenring found that “film music polarised the emotional atmosphere and influenced the understanding of the plot.”
Sometimes a film score remains largely unnoticed. Sometimes it can be so intrusive that it, rather than what is happening on screen, becomes the focus of attention – Jerry Goldsmith’s avant-garde twelve-tone score for Planet of the Apes being a case in point. There are however very few films without music or, at least, very few films that work well without music – The Asphalt Jungle being an often-cited exception, which hardly has any.
It was Aaron Copland who came up with the famous checklist for ways that music and film interact. For instance:
Music can create a more convincing atmosphere of time and place.
Music can be used to underline or create psychological refinements – the unspoken thoughts of a character or the unseen implications of a situation.
Music can help build a sense of continuity in a film.
Music can also be used in character development. “Another way of underscoring is to simply include a character’s theme throughout a scene, which provides the simple underscoring function of showing who’s on the screen. There would be a particular melody composed that would represent and accompany the said character throughout the film, and would have necessary variations needed for the different scenes.” (Yair Oppenheim)
A variant of this was frequently used in Sergio Leone Westerns to denote the (often unseen) presence of Clint Eastwood. The Morricone score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly uses the same two-note trill on different instruments for either Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef or Eli Wallach.
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis made excellent use of this device in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The genius of this score is that it manages to create tension and a continual generalised sense of unease in a film where not much happens – and we already know how it is going to end (even if you are a little light on American history, the title is something of a spoiler!).
1. ‘Song for Jesse’
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, from The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 2007
2. ‘Song for Bob’
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, from The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 2007
Of course, this device of providing a musical motif for a character to indicate their presence is not something that is required in post-apocalyptic road movies as, apart from mutants (I Am Legend) or cannibals (The Road), there are usually only one or two people in the film. The intimacy that this type of virtual face-to-face audience/protagonist shared exchange engenders, is a perfect exemplar of the extra-diegetic gaze that I mentioned in my essay. It is us and the person on screen – we are in this together. The music can play a significant part in evoking this response.
As Robert Spande said, “What I am trying to understand is that perfect fusion of diegetic ‘reality’ with the traumatic intrusion of music from nowhere, seemingly from just outside the limits of the screen, the result of which as everyone will agree, is the experience of being ‘lost in a film’, to have a film ‘take you over’.”
For me, James Newton Howard’s score for I Am Legend failed to deliver this experience, whereas the Cave/Ellis score for The Road succeeded spectacularly.
3. ‘The Cannibals’
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, from The Road, 2009
4. ‘Water and Ash’
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, from The Road, 2009
5. ‘The Bath’
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, from The Road, 2009
In addition to specifically commissioned scores, a number of Nick’s pre-existing songs have been deployed in movies. This one to minor comic effect in Shrek 2:
6. ‘People Ain’t No Good’
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, 1997
From The X Files to the Scream trilogy – Nick’s most utilised song in the movies:
7. ‘Red Right Hand’
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, 1994
Ironically, for someone who is such a consummate performer, arguably the least successful strand of Nick’s forays into cinema has been his acting. As he himself concedes, “Any acting I’ve ever done I’ve hated. I did it three times and the experience and films got worse every time…I just can’t act.” With a few exceptions (notably ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’), his music videos are generally straight-to-camera performance affairs. But there is a distinctly thespian element to this performance from Hal Wilner’s tribute to Kurt Weil, September Songs, and a damn fine performance it is too!
8. ‘Mack the Knife’
Nick Cave, 1995
From the Vesturport Theatre production of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, which premiered in 2006 at The Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, London:
9. From Metamorphosis
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, 2006
I thought it only proper that I made a musical contribution to this project with my band. This is the (often derided) first single from the (not terribly well-received) album Nocturama,
‘Bring It On’:
“Sailing perilously close to the regions of AOR.”
– The Guardian
“‘Bring it On’ is as bad as its title would suggest: AOR-ready pony-tail rock and easily one of the most bafflingly bad songs any talented artist has ever recorded.”
– Stylus Magazine
The accompanying (scantily clad, booty-shaking) video was also regarded as pretty offensive. “Johnny Hillcoat asked me what I wanted to make a video about,” explained Cave; “I asked him, ‘What do videos look like on MTV these days?’ And he said, ‘basically there’s a lot of black girls wiggling their asses at the camera.’ So, I said yeah, well alright let’s do that then.”
But I really like this song. I like the whimsical horticultural imagery and the gentle pastoral scene that it paints. The “ordinary flowers” responding to the “lightness of touch”. And it has some beautiful lyrical idiosyncracies, like rhyming “untended” with “bended”. In fact, there are some great rhymes scattered throughout the album, like “Guernica” with “hernia” and “the poor Pakistani with his lamb biryani.”
10. ‘Bring It On’
Cypress Grove & the Signifiers, 2011
This is a song brought to life by Nick’s chilling backing vocals:
11. ‘Ramblin’ Mind’
Cypress Grove, from We Are Only Riders, 2010
The score to The Proposition is replete with the previously mentioned device of recurring motifs with slight tonal or instrumental variations to depict…whatever it is that the composer wishes to depict. So within this score we have ‘The Proposition’ numbers one, two and three. Similarly, ‘The Rider’:
12. ‘The Rider #1’
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, from The Proposition, 2005
13. ‘The Rider #2’
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, from The Proposition, 2005
Culminating in the utterly transcendent ‘The Rider Song’:
14. ‘The Rider Song’
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, from The Proposition, 2005
***Cypress has very kindly agreed to offer his cover of ‘Bring It On’ as a free download to readers of Read Write [Hand]. Get your electronic hands on it here: www.soundcloud.com/silkworms-ink
– S.K.S.