I mention 50 because, until Octopunk's Tron Legacy post a week ago, I had no idea that anyone on Horrorthon geeked out on movie music even more than me (since I've been known to get into discussing flattened fifths myself). (I've made a few special modifications myself. But, we're a little rushed...) Anyway, off the top of my head and in no particular order (with absolutely no assurance that anybody knows or cares what I'm talking about), 5 Great Cinematic Moments of the Bass Coming In:
1) Silent Hill (2006) During her frenzied first hour in "ash world," Rose follows the elusive, distant running girl to a cement staircase that leads down into a basement, and starts down the stairs. For the first time in the movie, the sky starts to darken...and, far in the distance, the air raid siren (that presages each transition to "the darkness") begins to blow. It's a slow, mournful two-note glissando -- a major fifth, tonic to dominant -- that repeats twice, as the sky darkens to black and rose ignites her (badass) Zippo lighter. And, on the third repetition, the cellos come in, deep and low, a minor triad on the dominant, and you get this uneasy chill.
2) The Queen (2008) Almost exactly the same move. Nearly at the end of the movie, Helen Mirren is standing outside her Scottish castle, facing the crowd for the first time in the movie, and she steps forward to speak to a young girl, who's holding a bouquet of flowers. The soundtrack has hushed down and the score has reduced to a two-note figure on the violins (a monophonic inverted third). (Somebody can correct me if I'm not referring to these intervals correctly.) On the third repeat (as the touching exchange between Queen and little girl concludes and the girl hands over her flowers), the cellos come in, with a loud major triad. Incredibly moving and fulfilling.
3) Twin Peaks (1990) Somewhere towards the beginning of Season 2, James Hurley busts out his acoustic/electric guitar, turns the reverb to eleven (this being an Angelo Badalamenti score) and sings a little song called "Just You," accompanied by Donna Hayward and Maddie Ferguson on vocal backup. They sing the first verse of the song, just like that (call-and-response vocals, guitar arpeggio) and then, as they turn into the second verse, out of nowhere, an electric bass guitar comes in, introducing a pleasant walking bass line. Not nearly as dramatic as the above two examples but very nice and very Twin Peaks.
4) Miracle Mile (1988) This one's extremely simple, but wow, is it effective. The movie's been going for about eighteen minutes, and, the entire time, Tangerine Dream has been doing their (unobtrusive, atmospheric, rhythmic) thing, just like they do in the opening scenes of Risky Business. Then it's nighttime and Anthony Edwards is at the garishly-lit diner where he just missed Mare Winningham, and all the music goes away (replaced by clanking dishes, etc.). He tries Winningham on the pay phone outside the diner, leaves a message, hangs up; the phone rings immediately, and he grabs it, thinking it's her...but it's not. I won't tell you what the phone call is, but, slowly, a very low, very loud single bass note fades in. (I think it's a single note; it's been a while.) Given that this is the 1980s, it's pretty obviously a synthesizer note, but it's got a rich, fat sound like a cello section; it's filled with power and dread, and you understand that the nightmare is beginning.
5) 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Not an isolated note or chord like the preceding examples, but I think I can include it just because György Ligeti is so weird. The piece in question is called "Requiem For Soprano, Mezzo Soprano, Two Mixed Choirs & Orchestra" -- it repeats four times in the movie (including the overture, where it's excerpted) (Why don't movies have overtures any more, damn it? Now all we get is fucking Coke ads), each instance corresponding to another appearance of the monolith. It's a strange, atonal (I think...help me out, 50) piece of modern music, with lots of eerie choral effects and extremely sparse orchestration. And, at a minute and 16 seconds, as the apes start touching the monolith, the cellos come in. Like I said, a slightly less obvious example, but I have to include it because it's the earliest such example I can remember. I still vividly recall being in the theater as a kid and (having played the phonograph record) anticipating that moment, without really even understanding that it involved the bass clef or anything like that, but feeling the excitement of, well, the (mythical) instant of human evolution that Kubrick conveys in that scene.
21 comments:
I'm a whore for bass. If my stomach's ears tingle, I kow it's doing something right.
With regard to #5: without looking it up or playing my soundtrack album, are you referring to the piece where it sounds like a basement full of men and women all chanting a version of "Eeeeeeeehhh-eeeeeehhhh-EEEEEEH"? It's certainly tough to type out phonetically.
The same haunting piece (I think) is playing when they discover the monolith on the moon, and then it's cut off by the signal aimed at Jupiter. Am I thinking of the right piece?
Plus, the opening bass chord before the opening strains of "...Thus Spake Zarathustra" still gives me chills. My subwoofer in the living room LOVES that noise, almost as much as that THX promo sound.
Yes, yes, yes, and YES. When you're seeing 2001 in the theater, there's that moment when the overture ends, the sky-blue MGM logo appears (it DOESN'T fade in; it CUTS) and then the bass goes "BAAAAAAA" and it's like, oh, hey....Kubrick's in town, folks.
2010 had an opening to rival 2001's, and I still feel like both book and movie were worthy follow-ups, Peter Hyams being a pretty good understudy for Kubrick. And they kept just about everything significant from Clarke's novel intact.
Anyway, the opening:
Black screen
Bowman's voice: "My God, it's full of stars!"
BASS
Thus Spake Zarathustra
I don't mean to ignore the other 4 points you made; #5 is just near and dear to my heart.
man -- this is a huge topic. and i'm embarrassed to say it, but i think jordan's attention to detail may trump mine here (not to mention i've only seen two of the movies on his list, and only one of them more than once)
when i'm hearing music in film at all -- which happens less than you'd think, considering what my aspirations are (mostly i'm just watching the movie.) -- it's less about entry and exit, and more about appreciation of pure theme.
what i mean is, i'm not so keyed into where things are entering and exiting a lot of the time, but if i think the theme is a pretty one, it'll get my attention. Bernard Hermann's score for Vertigo comes to mind -- there's a figure that gets hearkened back to repeatedly throughout the movie (heard here starting at 1:06). It's just a four chord sequence, lasting only a few seconds, but it's the musical staple of the whole movie.
i could say the same thing about my love for the TRON score -- it's not about moment to moment placement (or maybe it is -- i've heard the score by itself so many more times than i've seen the movie, i don't have any real idea of where the themes are coming in and out) it's that the themes themselves are stirring.
now that i'm sitting here trying to think of a moment of good film/score marriage, the one that comes to mind first is in the last few seconds of Brokeback Mountain. Ennis opens his closet to reveal Jack's coat, the main theme of the film playing (quietly) on guitar, and then more guitars and pedal steel. "Jack, I swear..." he says and then closes the door. And as he steps off frame, leaving us looking at a closed closet door, and out the window at nothing, the soundtrack surges -- in comes a bunch more guitars, including 12-string, bass, full orchestra -- and the screen fades to black, roll credits. one thing i find interesting about that moment is that the new layers of sound don't all come in simultaneously. there's a bit of hang time before the strings gain traction, and a couple more bars before the flute motif kicks in.
all of these choices, subtle though they be, are of massive importance to the sound. change the timing, or the volume dynamic of any of them and you've got a completely different piece of music. if you don't believe me, listen to any song you know, of which there are alternate takes available. exact same piece of music, but because it's a new performance and our muscles never quite fire the same way twice, we can tell something has changed and the music hits our psyche in a noticeably different way.
this is a tangential point, but it happens with dialogue too -- i've seen Apocalypse Now probably a billion times at this point. and so i know, not just lines of dialogue, but how they're delivered.
early on in the movie, captain willard has a top secret dinner meeting with Colonel's Lucas and Corman (heyyyy! i just noticed!) and a mysterious green-eyed man whose only line is "terminate with extreme prejudice." colonel lucas (harrison ford) says, "w he's crossed to Cambodia with his Montagnard army, who worship the man, like a god, and follow every order however ridiculous."
later on in the film, as willard is looking through his mission file, we hear lucas saying that same line, but it's a different take of that line. the rhythm of harrison ford's line delivery has changed.
again, tangential point.
Stan,
I HATE 2010, HATE Peter Hyams, HATE Clarke's novels (including 2001), HATE that opening, HATE what they did to the Strauss theme (by having fucking Dave Grusin re-record it) and, in case I missed anything, disagree with all the other phraseology in your statement ("pretty good understudy," "opening to rival," "everything significant," "worthy," "intact.")
Sorry, but I feel very strongly about this. Don't take it personally. That movie ruined my life back in 1984. It was like "Mona Lisa 2, by Rob Liefeld" or "The Great Gatsby II, by John Grisham." Ugh.
Love, Love, Love The Twin Peaks and Miracle Mile soundtracks! I have Miracle Mile on cassette. I really dig Tangerine Dream.
And Bowman never fucking said "My God, it's full of stars"! That's a bunch of Arthur C. Clarke bullshit, based on this silly idea of Bowman flying into the monolith. In Kubrick's movie, the monolith and the aligned moons of Jupiter make a cruciform figure on the screen before we pan upwards to the opening of the stargate.
Also, Clarke's "explanation" for Hal's behavior (which he kept bitching that Kubrick wouldn't put into the movie) is a bunch of nonsense and a cop-out. I do not think that Clarke has the intellectual and aesthetic wherewithal to understand what Kubrick's doing, and his frantic need to "explain" everything bears this out. Also, he seems to think that Heywood Floyd is some kind of great guy (and an interesting protagonist) even though all the reviews of the movie pointed out Kubrick's brilliance in creating "the soulless, empty man of the future," "the 'organization man' trapped in his machines and waiting for the spiritual release to come," etc.
I just started re-reading Childhood's End last week, by coincidence, and my opinion of Clarke hasn't changed. He had some interesting ideas (and he invented the fucking communications satellite, which is awesome) but he's a limited, gimmicky, smug, old-fashioned, wooden writer.
also, your reference to Atmospheres reminds me of this thing that happens in the Ernest Bour recording of the entire piece -- the overture is just an excerpt from a larger work (same can be said for Thus Spake Zarathustra, and also, albeit for a different film Tubular Bells (the Exorcist).
you hear more of the piece when dr. floyd and his entourage make their visit to the site of the Moon Monolith -- it's still not the entire recorded piece though, and it's possible the thing i'm talking about doesn't appear anywhere in the movie at all.
at the beginning of the full performance, you can hear the sounds of people shifting in their seats in the auditorium, and i think someone coughing, and the crack of something on wood somewhere. probably not in any way a part of the composition, but there it is, immortalized in the sound -- and now it's as much a part of the music as anything else you hear on the recording.
i find moments like that appealing because they give a sense of the *liveness* of the performance -- it's easy to ignore most classical music because there are so many musicians in an orchestra, and the music is so old and seemingly lacking in relevance to anything we go out of our way to listen to closely. so when we hear unintentional sounds on the recording our focus is drawn back to the music as having been an actual *occurrence* -- it didn't just appear out of the aether of the past. there were people there, singing, playing, and even watching. real people in real time.
you don't get a lot of those live moments in soundtracks. because they're, i dunno, messy?
what you do get are moments in which the ambient sounds on the screen play into the music -- like the bursting of sparks, and the zzt-zzting of exploding circuits from the stadium lights as Roy Hobbs is circling the bases at the end of the Natural (curiously, you don't hear *any* particular sounds of the crowd cheering even though you get closeups of a lot of faces), mingling nicely with the tinkle of chimes, and harp and piano.
fricking computer shut off right in the middle of my lengthy definition of atonality. i'm feeling procrastinaty today, so i'm going to attempt a rewrite.
there's a traditional definition of atonality, and then there's a fair-application definition.
traditionally, atonality exists in the same musical system as tonal music -- 12 tones spaced evenly from each other. think of a piano keyboard.
what makes the difference between tonal and atonal music is the lack of a tonal *center* -- a home pitch, we sense as the area of completely released tension. easiest example to use would be the last chord of any symphony by, let's say mozart. there's this stretch where you hear the whole orchestra playing DUN dun DUN dun DUN dun DUN...DUN-DUN...DUN DUNNNNNNNNN. and that last chord is the home chord. all tension built up over the course of the piece has been worked out and we walk away feeling resolved.
not so with atonality -- all 12 pitches have the same level of theoretical importance. there may be a momentary sense of tension resolved, but it's no longer the focus of the material. it's a completely different psychoacoustic ballgame altogether. but the pitches still count as pitches. the "b-flat" that one violin is playing is the "b-flat" the other violins are playing. it's just that there's no sense of priority of that "b-flat" over a "b-natural" -- we don't hear one and say, "oop, there's tension," and then another and say, "ahh, there we go. we're home."
now, a piece like Atmospheres works a little differently -- the orchestra is still playing traditional atonality. there's no home key, but the instruments are still playing notes selected from the 12 tone system (they'd almost have to be -- some instruments, the piano for example, only play anything other than those 12 notes when they're out of tune).
but it's a different story when you think of the human voices. they're not really singing pure pitches, and their goal isn't to match up in any deliberate way with the harmonies set by the orchestra. if anything, their role is textural, like a percussion instrument.
is this atonal? in the broader, applied definition of the word, of course: there's no tonal center. but it goes further than the traditional definition of tonality/atonality, because we're not really considering pitch at all -- i could be wrong: i've never seen the score for Atmospheres, and i've only ever heard the recordings Kubrick used for 2001. but there's so much off-the-pitch variance in any individual vocal part, there'd be no way to write it out with any real precision on a musical staff.
to illustrate the difference, think of a piano player playing every note, white key or black, between C and the C the next octave up. that's 12 distinct pitches (13 if you're counting each of the two C's as different from each other). that line can be considered atonal in the traditional sense because we have no indication that any note is more important than any of the others, other than that we played C twice, and that's where we started and stopped.
now think of a person playing from C to C on a slide whistle. we still hit those same 12 pitches at some point, but we're hitting a whole bunch of other in-between pitches.
in the case of the piano, you could write out the line and two players could play it exactly the same. in the case of the slide whistle, the only way you'd get a repeat performance is either by luck, or by the one slide-whistle player actually hearing the other slide-whistle player playing the line.
it's the harrison ford "montagnard army" repeat situation all over again.
Not to stray too far away from the musical importance of this discussion, but I can't NOT respond to Jordan:
I LOVE the fact that you hold 2001 in such high regard, and believe me, I do too. I totally respect your opinion of 2010, and I wouldn't go so far as to say that 2010 is an Empire to 2001's New Hope, but I've always found it worthy (and this is imagining a scenario where some OTHER guy, rather than Lucas, directed Empire. Oh wait, that actually happened...)
I credit my dad with this. He was always a Clarke/Kubrick fan, and he dragged my 10-year-old butt to a theater in Newport (when we lived there) in 1985 to see 2010. That was my first introduction to ANYTHING by either person, book or movie (granted it wasn't Kubrick directing, but still...) All I was struck by was the ENORMOUSLY powerful cues that triggered some deep responses in myself, mostly due to the music, and haunting images of monolith, HAL, and Bowman.
(I remember weird shit about that night. There was a chandelier in the movie house that never dimmed completely, because I looked at it when I got freaked out, and Hall & Oates' "Out of Touch" was playing on the radio on the way home. I was pretty stimulated...anyway...)
My point is that as far as "gateway drugs" are concerned, 2010 opened the door for me, both into Clarke's world of novels, and Kubrick's world of films. In subsequent years, upon finally viewing 2001, I was immediately blown completely out of the water by how absolutely groundbreaking and ridiculously legendary the film is. My favorite quote is (I believe) from John Lennon, by way of review: "This film should be shown in cathedrals all across the world." Not theaters, cathedrals. I couldn't agree more.
By way of rebuttal, Clarke in his novels can get a bit heavy-handed with the nobility of his characters, a trait I found myself getting annoyed with especially with Floyd in subsequent readings of 2010 & 2061. However, I have always grooved on his overall vision of our future, which shifted over time throughout his lengthy career (witness Light of Other Days - pick that one up, even though it's co-written).
I know Dave Bowman never ACTUALLY said the line. But, because my fragile little mind was warped first by 2010, I have a soft spot for the chills it still gives me.
So there. I would love to kick the fiancee out of the apartment one of these nights, and invite you over for a back-to-back screening. Game?
(And Childhood's End is FANTASTIC.)
Sorry, 50. I want to respond to you, too. But prudence demands I answer Jordan first :)
And one other thing, 50, while I read the rest of what you wrote - you've actually listened to the original Tron's score MORE than you've seen the movie?
I bow in deferential nerdishness. Well done, sir.
Okay, I can accept all that "gateway drug" stuff. For me, it was a similar and yet contrasting experience: my father took me to 2001 when I was eight or nine, and, had he not done so, my entire life would have been different (or at least that's how it seems to me).
I was in college when 2010 came out and I went to a theater in downtown Chicago and had one of the most painful experiences of my moviegoing life, literally starting with the opening frames of MGM logo, when I wanted to scream, "It's NOT EVEN IN ANAMORPHIC WIDESCREEN!" How the hell can you make a sequel to fucking 2001 and not be in the super-panavision ratio? It was downhill from there. I hate Peter Hyams. He depresses me obscurely because he's constant proof that it doesn't matter how grand your intentions are in the arts if you don't have the talent or the vision to back it up.
50, I'm getting to your stuff...it requires serious mulling over.
Okay, I posted clips of three of my five "great moments of the bass coming in" (and put up a new post on the home page about it).
To watch the aforementioned segments from Silent Hill, The Queen and Miracle Mile, go to http://www.jordanorlando.com/bass
Your experience reinforces my point about 2010. Think about the formative ages we both were when we experienced each film; which is not about an "age thing," it's "what you see first" thing...
I think back to a protracted conversation I had with a 10-year-old not five years ago about the finer points of the Imperial Star Destroyer fleet, and why Vader happened to be on the Executioner, rather than the Invader, or whatever (he knew more than me). I was stunned that here was a person that HADN'T EVEN BEEN BORN when I saw my first Star Destroyer, let alone started re-watching the crap in college, yet the creative images had transcended generations, allowing for a free-flowing exchange of ideas. The fact that a 30-year-old man was talking to a 10-year-old boy about spaceships is left up to you to judge.
The point is that differing timelines and different circumstances color our viewing experience differently. I, of course, think the prequels are absolute dogshit; a festering abortion that should have never been visited upon the human race.
However, I cannot in any way discount the fact that another generation has recaptured the magic and whimsy that we all felt (albeit in their linked-up, media-barraged version of a world), as kids. The feeling is the same. The imagery (lightsabers et al), the music, etc, allows the overall vision to transcend the ages.
THIS is what happened with 2010. I would probably feel exactly the same disdain if I saw 2001 first. I apologize if this makes no sense. I appreciate and admire your disdain for Hyams, I'm certainly not saying he's the Orson Welles of the Arthur C. Clarke-adaptation genre, but you gotta understand that Clarke and Kubrick spoke THRU Hyams, and I felt he was relatively faithful to both of them.
On another level, he was also making a sci-fi movie in the mid-80s, long AFTER 2001 broke the seal wide open, and Star Wars, Alien & Blade Runner jammed it through the hoop. In the context of everything, I still feel like he did a pretty solid job.
What's interesting to contemplate is Kubrick's theoretical version of 2010. He obviously gave his blessing, in whatever way, but I wonder how he would have tackled it, with all the Cold War tension, etc. Food for thought. (Although it's probably like the Richard Donner Cut of Superman II - completely not worth the hype, and a pile of crap, when you come right down to it *flinching for Jordan's onslaught*)
Good points all.
I guess my problem is less with Hyams (whose intentions were admirable, unlike many sequel-makers I can think of, like, say, Joel Schumacher), and who, yes, was facing the "mid-eighties" problem you're discussing) than with Clarke. My disdain for Clarke extends backwards to 2001, and the novelization (yes, novelization) he executed in 1970. It's been pissing me off for a long time that so many people believe that 2001 was "based on" a novel "by" Arthur C. Clarke (when, in reality, the novel is clearly labeled as being "based on a screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke," in that order).
I see Clarke's relationship to 2001 as being nearly identical to Stephen King's relationship with Kubrick's The Shining, complete with the intense (and misbegotten) need to go back and "explain" what Kubrick "left out." (Anthony Burgess was similarly pissed about Kubrick's Clockwork Orange.) For Stephen King, the response was his (awful) television remake, which "fixed" the "problems" in Kubrick's movie. For Clarke, it was his 2010 novel, which was supposed to do the same thing. You might say that Clarke had a more imaginative solution, except that it doesn't count because King had a complete bestselling novel he'd written alone (as did Burgess), whereas Clarke just had his co-written novelization of 2001 to draw from.
In the mid-fifties, Clarke was a good writer. But the world moved on, and Clarke became a pre-sixties anachronism. He was the perfect source for reasonable predictions about the technology of space travel, and he had some interesting silver-age-sci-fi ideas about the destiny of "man," but he was hopelessly out of his league, artistically, with 2001.
The thing never should have gotten a sequel, is what I guess I'm saying. It "solves" "problems" that don't exist, and, by forcing a single interpretation of HAL, the monolith, Bowman's journey etc. it reduces one of the greatest, most cryptic and mythical monuments (pun intended) of storytelling into a simple sci-fi procedural about "the Russians" and a big diamond.
Your Star Wars comparison is interesting, but look at it this way: Unlike you, I'm a big fan of the prequels. They accomplish something; they push film technology forward; they look and feel like nothing that's ever been done before; they're made without film etc. That kid has a point when he enjoys them. 2010, by contrast, isn't even technically up to the standards of its 16-year-old predecessor.2001 is a big landmark in the history of movies and the history of sci-fi; 2010 actively works to reduce the scope and meaning of its predecessor, and, in terms of the history of movies, is barely a footnote at best.
I just wanted to note that the Silent Hell warning siren is one of my ringtones!
here's that final scene in Brokeback i was talking about above.
and here's the whole piece of music.
the best soundtrack oscar gustavo santoalalla won for his score for brokeback was richly deserved. beautiful stuff.
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