The fabulous Clinkerfields'
Label The Band Competition!!!

The Clinkerfields have been providing us with alchohol-fueled and pathetic (in the best sense) observations of life, beer and music since The Dues Issue 1! It's only fair we provide them with faces and names. But wait! They already have names - from left to right Boogs, Jimmy, Ash and Matty! So all you have to do is provide them with captions in order. Match the following captions to the number of the "person" they best apply to on the photo above and YOU could win a great prize:

• Just visiting this planet.
• Wotcha doin after the show?
• Crazed Messiah.
• Just a suburban boy.
  

Send your entries in a stamped self-addressed email, titled "Clinkerfield competition" to: musosunion@aol.com. First five correct entries get a copy of the boys' new rec'rd Take in the view. Judge's decisions is final, but we will correspond if you include an attractive photo of yourself.

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Music hath charms to sooth the savage beast

...continued from front page

The music played by these orchestras came from different sources. Sometimes music was written for a film in the same way it is today but this was rare. More commonly a score was created by the musical director of the theatre where the film premiered. This score would then travel with the film.

The music accompanying silent movies did not need a justification for its presence at a screening. It was outside the movie and the convention of musical accompaniment was readily accepted.

Then the sound movie arrived. This raised questions, not only amongst cinema theorists (of which the world has never been short, even as far back as 1929) but also among practitioners. The new theory said: "Now that movies have sound, they fully represent reality and therefore it would be unacceptable for music to appear 'out of nowhere' on a soundtrack". The practitioners were probably more concerned with the humorous response that they feared could be caused by music with no justification from the images on the screen.

The term "diegetic" is used to describe music whose presence is justified by the image. If you are watching a film and there is a radio visible on the scene then this can provide justification for the aural presence of a popular song. The song, then, is a piece of "diegetic music". A huge string section swelling behind lovers embracing on a lonely beach has no realistic justification for being there. Where are the players? This is "non-diegetic music".

A remarkable period followed the introduction of sound movies. During this period every time music was heard on a soundtrack, a justification was seen on the screen to account for its presence. The strings behind the lovers mentioned above, for example, might be justified by the sudden and unexplained appearance of a wandering fiddler in the background. There is an excellent example in the Marlene Dietrich classic "The Blue Angel". A teacher is in front of a class of students working quietly. Nothing is happening on the soundtrack. After a few seconds the teacher walks to a window and opens it. The sound of choir is immediately heard, the paper-thin justification being that there "just happened" to be a school choir rehearsing outside the window!

This period of theory's domination over sense was mercifully short, based as it was on narrow and hubristic assumptions. The mere addition of sound was , it soon became obvious, insufficient to allow a movie to encompass all of reality. For a start, nearly all films of the time were in black and white. More importantly, the nature of the medium makes it incapable of encompassing anything but a single view of reality (leaving aside double exposure and multi-screen experiments some of which have been remarkably successful). And what the camera sees is something no human can. The rapid change of "point of view" alone could only be matched by humans who could instantly jump continents!

So where does the fabled monkey fit into all this? King Kong was one of the very first Hollywood sound films to use non-diegetic music in a substantial way. Max Steiner's brilliant score is restrained in the first half of the film and adheres strictly to the current theory. This part of the film is set in New York. The characters then board a ship and sail to the mysterious island home of King Kong. As the island is approached, distant drums can be heard. These blend with the sound of breaking waves. Seamlessly these sounds morph into orchestral underscoring which is maintained for large parts of the rest of the film. Interestingly, a scene which has large sections unaccompanied by music is the famous battle between Kong and a prehistoric resident of the island.

In King Kong, Steiner used a musical approach which became the standard method of scoring Hollywood films. The constituent parts were: selected use of non-diegetic music, medium-sized classical orchestra, musical language of the late romantic period and lietmotifs related to characters, ideas and moods. It is probably going too far to claim that Steiner invented this approach in isolation. Other composers such as Newman and Korngold were at least as important. But King Kong stands as at least one of the first major examples.

The approach recogized that two dimensional images are not reality and that music can have an importnat in creating the entire experience of movie "viewing" especially the creation of "mood". New approaches have been developed since, but this recognition is still at the heart of all film scoring.

I have yet to see Mr. Jackson's remake but am heartened to hear that it is an improvement on the 1970s version. However good it is, it cannot be the movie music milestone that is the original.

(I am indebted to Kathryn Kalinak's book Settling the Score and recommend it to readers who wish to know more).

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