We began this series with a deceptively simple question:
What happens when music is no longer simply accompaniment?
The question arose naturally from our previous investigation, When Music Makes the Film Mean.
There we discovered that music can alter the construal of an image. A shark can seem more threatening when accompanied by ominous music. A cheerful song can transform the significance of violent imagery. A recurring melody can become a sign of a character or event. Music can remember what is absent, anticipate what has not yet happened, and participate in narrative meaning.
But those examples still allowed us to think of music as a resource that enters an already existing film.
This series asked what happens when that distinction begins to break down.
Using Stanley Kubrick, Peter Greenaway and Michael Nyman as our principal cases, we moved from score to co-construction.
The argument can be sketched as:
accompaniment → recruitment → mutual construal → structure → architecture → co-construction
These are not rigid stages.
They are different degrees and kinds of relationship between semiotic modes.
Beyond accompaniment
The conventional model of film music is straightforward.
There is a film.
Music is composed or selected to accompany it.
The music may establish mood, sustain continuity, underline emotion or intensify suspense.
Sometimes that is exactly what happens.
But our earlier work showed that even this ordinary model is incomplete.
Music can change what an image is construed as.
An image can change how music is heard.
The same visual event can become threatening, comic, romantic or uncanny depending upon the soundtrack.
Conversely, a musical passage can become tender, sinister, ironic or nostalgic depending upon the image.
The modes therefore already participate in one another's meaning.
Music is not simply beneath the image.
It is part of the conditions under which the image is construed.
Recruitment
We called this process recruitment.
Music arrives carrying its own potential.
Rhythm.
Expectation.
Timbre.
Affect.
Memory.
Cultural association.
Formal organisation.
The film recruits those possibilities into a larger semiotic system.
The music remains music.
Its own organisation remains active.
But that organisation now contributes to the meaning of something larger.
A threatening rhythm can make a visual approach ominous.
A familiar melody can make a character emotionally present.
A musical quotation can transform the cultural significance of an image.
A silence can become meaningful because music has been expected.
The score therefore participates in meaning without having to become a symbolic language in its own right.
Kubrick: music against the image
Kubrick showed us how powerful the relation can become when music and image deliberately resist one another.
In A Clockwork Orange, beautiful music accompanies disturbing violence.
Singin' in the Rain becomes grotesquely ironic.
Rossini accompanies exuberant brutality.
Beethoven belongs to the inner imaginative world of a character whose actions are profoundly violent.
The music does not merely tell us that the violence is bad.
Nor does it simply make the violence comic.
It creates a collision between cultural and experiential worlds.
Beauty and brutality.
Pleasure and cruelty.
Aesthetic refinement and moral repulsion.
The meaning emerges partly from their incompatibility.
Kubrick thus shows us that difference between modes can itself be a meaning-making resource.
Kubrick: music as structure
2001: A Space Odyssey presents a different possibility.
The spacecraft gliding through space to The Blue Danube do not merely receive an emotional accompaniment.
Their movement becomes dance-like.
Orbital mechanics become choreography.
The waltz provides a temporal organisation through which the visual movement can be experienced.
The music has become a resource for formal construal.
Similarly, Also sprach Zarathustra participates in the monumental structure of the opening sequence.
The music contributes not only affect and cultural association but scale, recurrence, culmination and temporal organisation.
Music is beginning to function as structure.
It does not merely interpret the image.
It helps organise the form through which the image is perceived.
Form can cross modes
This revealed an important general principle.
Different modes have different affordances.
Music can organise time.
Images can organise space.
Editing can organise relations among events.
Language can classify, narrate and make explicit relations.
But those different forms of organisation can be brought into relation.
A visual movement can be construed through musical rhythm.
A sequence of images can acquire musical phrasing.
A recurring musical form can establish a pattern across visually separate events.
The modes remain distinct.
But a formal relation in one mode can become a resource for organising another.
This is more than accompaniment.
It is mutual construal.
Greenaway: music as architecture
Peter Greenaway and Michael Nyman pushed this further.
Their collaboration repeatedly unsettled the conventional direction:
film → score
Nyman's own account of their work describes radically different working methods. For A Zed and Two Noughts, he composed without seeing the film. For the climactic sequence of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, the film was deliberately choreographed to the already existing Memorial.
The direction of dependence could therefore be reversed.
The music could precede the images.
The images could be constructed around the music.
Neither direction is finally sufficient.
The deeper relation is:
music ↔ film
Music can become an architectural condition of the visual sequence.
It can provide duration, recurrence, acceleration, emphasis and expectation.
The image can provide spatial arrangement, movement and visual correspondence.
The film becomes a meeting of temporal and spatial organisation.
Architecture is not metaphorical decoration
Calling music "architecture" here is more than a poetic analogy.
Architecture organises relations.
It determines pathways, proportions, recurrences and possibilities for movement.
Music can organise analogous relations in time.
Film is especially suited to bringing these two kinds of organisation together because moving images already occupy both space and time.
When music shapes the movement of bodies, the camera, the editing or the recurrence of visual forms, it is participating in the conditions under which the scene is constructed and experienced.
The score has become more than an interpretive layer.
It has become part of the work's architecture.
The Cook, the Thief...: music, image and excess
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover showed what happens when this architectural principle operates within an extraordinarily dense multimodal system.
Colour divides spaces.
Costume marks transitions.
Bodies move through carefully organised environments.
Food becomes visual and material spectacle.
The camera traces complex trajectories.
Nyman's music creates temporal continuity and recurrence.
The narrative gives these formal relations human significance.
The film contains an abundance of semiotic resources, but that abundance is highly organised.
Its excess is composed excess.
The music helps hold the visual saturation together.
The image gives the music a particular world in which to operate.
Movement links them.
Space becomes meaningful.
Colour becomes structured.
The result cannot easily be reduced to separate contributions.
The film's meaning emerges from the relations among the modes.
Co-construction begins to appear
This is where our distinction between recruitment and co-construction became useful.
In recruitment, a mode is brought into an existing semiotic configuration.
In co-construction, the modes participate so deeply in one another's organisation that the meaning of the whole depends upon their joint configuration.
The Cook, the Thief... moves toward the second condition.
The music is involved in the movement.
The movement is involved in the visual form.
The visual form is organised through colour and space.
The narrative changes how we hear the music.
The music changes how we experience the narrative.
The relations become recursive.
Prospero's Books: layered semiosis
Prospero's Books pushes the problem further still.
Text becomes image.
Pages become visual layers.
Typography becomes spatial and temporal.
Bodies become compositions.
Gielgud's voice gives multiple characters a common vocal source.
Music becomes another temporal layer.
Digital technology allows several images to coexist within the same visual field.
The film becomes a kind of semiotic palimpsest.
The modes remain distinguishable.
But isolating their contributions begins to obscure the very phenomenon we are trying to understand.
A written word is simultaneously language and visual form.
A page is simultaneously an object, an image, a text and a narrative device.
A voice can belong simultaneously to a character and to the text that constructs the character.
Music can organise the entire layered composition.
The work becomes a system in which modes continually become resources for one another.
Indistinguishable — but not fused
This is why "indistinguishable" must be understood carefully.
The modes do not literally become one.
Music remains music.
Language remains language.
Image remains image.
Voice remains voice.
But the distinction between their contributions becomes less useful.
The meaningful unit is no longer:
music + image + text + voice
as though these were independent packages.
It is:
the relations among music, image, text, voice, movement, space and technology.
The film has become a relation among relations.
The viewer belongs to the system
The work does not, of course, construct meaning by itself.
The viewer brings a repertoire.
We recognise musical conventions.
We know visual traditions.
We understand literary forms.
We remember earlier occurrences.
We learn the film's local conventions as we watch.
A motif that means nothing at first can become significant later.
A visual pattern can acquire meaning through repetition.
A musical absence can become conspicuous because music was expected.
The viewer's repertoire therefore changes during the work.
The film is not simply communicating meanings.
It is teaching a new potential for construal.
Co-construction is not arbitrary interpretation
But the audience is not free to make anything mean anything.
The work constrains the possibilities.
Its repetitions establish expectations.
Its formal structures create relations.
Its cultural conventions make some associations more available than others.
A musical contradiction is meaningful because the viewer can recognise what would normally fit.
A motif can signify because it has a history.
A visual recurrence matters because the film has established a pattern.
Co-construction is therefore structured participation, not interpretive chaos.
The work can create its own semiotic potential
This has a remarkable consequence.
A film can create conventions that did not previously exist.
A musical motif acquires a new reference.
A colour becomes associated with a character.
A repeated visual structure becomes meaningful.
A combination of music and image becomes recognisable.
The audience learns the system.
The work has created a local semiotic potential.
And once that potential exists, the film can manipulate it.
Confirm it.
Reverse it.
Withhold it.
Transform it.
The work becomes capable of operating upon its own meaning-making resources.
Meaning feeds back into mattering
This also brings the investigation back to the larger argument developed in From Mattering to Meaning.
Music already matters.
Its rhythm matters.
Its expectation matters.
Its cultural associations matter.
A film recruits these forms of mattering into a semiotic configuration.
Meaning emerges.
And then the meaning changes what the music matters as.
A familiar theme can become moving because of what it signifies.
A motif can become frightening because it predicts danger.
A musical passage can become nostalgic because it recalls a relationship.
A silence can become powerful because it signals the absence of a theme.
Thus:
mattering → meaning → new mattering
The film score makes the feedback loop unusually visible.
What happened to the score?
We can now return to the title.
What lies beyond the score?
Not the disappearance of music.
Not the replacement of sound by image.
Not a hierarchy in which one mode becomes sovereign.
What lies beyond the score is a change in what we take the object of analysis to be.
We began by treating the score as a component of the film.
We end by seeing the film as a system in which music can participate in the emergence of the whole.
The score becomes a node within a semiotic ecology.
Sometimes it remains relatively independent.
Sometimes it is recruited.
Sometimes it helps structure the image.
Sometimes it becomes architectural.
In the most radical cases, it participates in co-construction.
From contribution to relation
This is perhaps the central methodological lesson.
Instead of asking:
What does the music contribute?
we can ask:
What relations does the music enter into?
Instead of asking:
What does the image mean?
we can ask:
What construals become possible through its relation with the other modes?
Instead of asking:
Where is the meaning?
we can ask:
What configuration of relations makes the meaning possible?
This is a different approach to multimodality.
It shifts attention from separate contributions to relational organisation.
And the principle extends beyond film
Film is only an especially vivid case.
The same logic applies wherever semiotic modes meet.
Theatre can combine voice, body, music, space and light.
Ritual can combine gesture, sound, costume and place.
A game can combine music, image, interface and player action.
A public ceremony can combine architecture, language, symbol, movement and collective participation.
A painting can acquire different meanings through music or narrative.
A song can acquire new meanings through images.
In each case, resources with their own potentials can be brought into relations through which new possibilities emerge.
The film has given us a particularly clear laboratory for the phenomenon.
The larger conclusion
We can now state the central result of the series.
A film score is not simply music attached to a visual narrative.
It is a semiotic participant.
Its own potential for mattering can be recruited into filmic meaning.
The image can alter its construal.
Its relation with the image can become conventional.
It can acquire narrative functions.
Its formal organisation can become architectural.
And, in sufficiently integrated works, music and image can become mutually constitutive elements of a single multimodal configuration.
The resulting meaning belongs neither to music nor to image alone.
It emerges from their co-construction.
Beyond the score
Perhaps, then, the deepest lesson of Kubrick, Greenaway and Nyman is not about music at all.
It is about the nature of meaning.
Meaning does not require isolated symbolic units that each carry complete meanings of their own.
It can emerge through relations among resources that already possess different forms of organisation and mattering.
A musical rhythm can become part of a visual form.
A visual form can transform the significance of music.
A text can become an image.
An image can become narrative.
A voice can become a structure connecting bodies.
A colour can acquire significance through a musical history.
A film can create conventions that its own audience learns while watching it.
Meaning is therefore not merely transmitted.
It is organised, negotiated, stabilised and transformed across relations.
What we have finally moved beyond
We have moved beyond the score because we have moved beyond the idea that the modes are simply containers of separate meanings.
We have moved beyond:
music + image
toward:
music ↔ image ↔ text ↔ movement ↔ space ↔ audience
And even that is not quite the final formulation.
The deeper object is the evolving configuration.
The work is not just the sum of its modes.
It is what their relations make possible.
That is co-construction.
And perhaps this leaves us with a useful final principle:
A multimodal work means not because its modes say the same thing, but because their differences can be organised into relations from which something new becomes possible.
That is why music can make a film mean.
That is why an image can transform music.
That is why counterpoint can be more expressive than agreement.
That is why repetition can create signs.
That is why a film can teach its audience a new repertoire.
And that is why, sometimes, the most interesting film music is no longer adequately called a score.
It has become part of the making of the film itself.
We began with music accompanying the image.
We end with music and image co-constructing the meaning of the work.
And somewhere between those two points, we discovered something larger:
Meaning is not contained in the modes.
Meaning emerges in their relations.
Beyond the score, there is therefore not less music.
There is more relation.
And in that relation, a new kind of meaning becomes possible.
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