What is a film score?
The ordinary answer seems straightforward.
The film already exists as a story told through images, dialogue and action. Music is then added to accompany it — to heighten suspense, underline emotion, provide continuity, or establish atmosphere.
Sometimes that is exactly what happens.
But sometimes it isn't.
Sometimes the music seems to do something more radical. It does not simply accompany the image. It changes the way the image can be construed. Sometimes the image changes the way we hear the music. And sometimes music, image, movement and editing become so tightly organised that it becomes difficult to say which one is contributing meaning to which.
At that point, perhaps we have gone beyond the score.
The question is no longer:
What does the music contribute to the film?
It becomes:
What happens when music becomes part of the film's formal organisation?
That is the question of this series.
The ordinary model
It is useful to begin with the conventional distinction.
There is a film.
There is a soundtrack.
The soundtrack accompanies the film.
Music can tell us that something is frightening, romantic, comic or tragic. It can sustain continuity across an edit. It can create anticipation when the image is not yet doing so.
We have already seen that this model is too simple.
Music does not merely sit underneath an image.
It can change its construal.
The same shark can seem more threatening when ominous music accompanies it. A beautiful landscape can become disturbing. An ordinary gesture can become sinister.
Conversely, the image can change how we hear the music.
A melody can seem tender beneath one image and disturbing beneath another.
So the relationship is already reciprocal.
Music changes the image; image changes music.
That is the first step beyond accompaniment.
But it is not yet the furthest step.
When the modes begin to organise one another
Suppose a director chooses music for a completed scene.
The relationship is still potentially quite strong.
The music can transform the scene.
But imagine something different.
The director begins to organise the movement of the images around the music.
Cuts occur at particular musical moments.
Camera movement follows rhythm.
A character's gesture coincides with a musical accent.
A repeated visual form corresponds to a repeated musical form.
The music now does not merely interpret a finished sequence.
It participates in shaping the sequence itself.
And the same relationship can work in reverse.
The music may be selected or composed in response to the visual structure.
The final work is therefore not simply:
image + music
but:
image ↔ music
Each has become part of the conditions under which the other is organised.
This is a different kind of multimodality.
Kubrick gives us the first warning
Stanley Kubrick provides some of the clearest examples of what happens when this relationship becomes unusually intense.
In A Clockwork Orange, familiar music is repeatedly placed against disturbing or violent imagery. The effect is not merely to underline the violence. The music can make the violence beautiful, grotesque, comic, ecstatic or horrifying precisely because of the distance between what we see and what we hear. The BFI's discussion of the film notes that Rossini is synchronised with the exuberant violence of the fight sequence, while Singin' in the Rain becomes an ironic counterpoint during the home invasion.
Something important happens here.
The music does not simply tell us:
this is violent.
The image has already done that.
Instead, the music asks us to construe the violence through something else.
Beauty and brutality.
Ecstasy and cruelty.
High culture and barbarism.
Musical pleasure and moral repulsion.
The meaning emerges from the relation.
But A Clockwork Orange goes further
The music is not merely selected to contradict the image.
It is deeply entangled with Alex's identity.
Beethoven is not simply background music in the film. It belongs to Alex's world, his pleasures and fantasies. Wendy Carlos's electronic treatments of classical material become part of that world too. The BFI describes the film's use of classical music and Carlos's electronic score as integral to its distinctive style.
This creates an especially unsettling relation.
The music can be beautiful.
Alex can genuinely love it.
And Alex can simultaneously commit acts of extraordinary brutality.
The film therefore prevents us from using music as a simple moral code.
Beautiful music does not mean a beautiful person.
But neither is the music irrelevant to the character.
It helps constitute the strange world in which Alex's aesthetic sensibility and his violence coexist.
The score has entered the construction of the character.
2001 presents a different problem
If A Clockwork Orange demonstrates music against the image, 2001: A Space Odyssey gives us something more difficult to describe.
Here the music can seem to organise the visual world at a much larger scale.
The opening image of the sun, moon and Earth is inseparable from the monumental opening of Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra.
Later, the movement of spacecraft is accompanied by the graceful waltz of Johann Strauss II's The Blue Danube.
The effect is not simply:
spacecraft + pleasant music.
The music changes our sense of the movement itself.
The spacecraft becomes graceful.
Mechanical movement becomes dance.
Machines become participants in an almost cosmic choreography.
A spacecraft docking with a station is not merely shown.
It is construed as movement through space and time.
The music has become structural.
It establishes rhythm and proportion at a scale larger than any individual gesture.
Music as formal organisation
This is where the word structure becomes important.
Music is already structurally organised.
It has repetition.
Development.
Contrast.
Return.
Acceleration.
Suspension.
Resolution.
A film can recruit these relationships into its visual organisation.
A sequence of images can acquire something like musical phrasing.
A visual movement can answer a musical movement.
A cut can function like an articulation.
A recurrence can become a refrain.
A large-scale sequence can acquire the architecture of a musical form.
The distinction between score and image begins to become unstable.
The music is no longer merely telling us how to experience what we see.
It is participating in the organisation of what we see as a form.
The image becomes musical
There is therefore an interesting reversal.
We began by asking what music does to the image.
But perhaps in these cases the image itself becomes, in some sense, musically organised.
The visual sequence acquires rhythm.
Movement becomes patterned.
Repetition becomes structural.
The viewer experiences visual form through temporal and musical relations.
This is not metaphorical in the weak sense that everything "feels musical".
The film can literally organise movement in relation to musical structure.
The modes begin to share an architecture.
Selection can become composition
This also changes the role of the composer and director.
In a conventional model, the composer receives a finished sequence and creates music for it.
But the history of film contains cases in which this order can be reversed or disrupted.
Michael Nyman's account of his collaboration with Peter Greenaway provides an extraordinary example. Nyman notes that the working methods varied radically from film to film: for A Zed and Two Noughts, he composed the score without having seen a frame of the film, while for The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, the climactic sequence was deliberately choreographed to the pre-existing Memorial.
Here the conventional arrow:
film → score
can become:
music → film
Or, more accurately:
music ↔ film
The music can become a condition for the visual organisation.
What changes when this happens?
The distinction between "original material" and "accompaniment" begins to lose its usefulness.
Music may establish the timing.
Image may establish the spatial form.
Movement may respond to the music.
The music may respond to the movement.
Editing may organise both.
The final film is therefore not simply an image with music added.
It is a jointly organised form.
That possibility interests us because it takes us beyond the question we investigated in our previous series.
There we asked:
How does music make the film mean?
Now we can ask:
Can music participate in making the film into the kind of object it is?
That is a much more radical question.
Greenaway waits at the other end of the path
This is where Peter Greenaway and Michael Nyman become particularly interesting.
Nyman himself describes their collaboration as unusually unconstrained compared with the normal director-composer relationship, giving him "immense scope" and allowing radically different working methods from one film to another.
That makes Greenaway particularly valuable for our investigation.
If Kubrick shows us music becoming structurally important to the image, Greenaway may allow us to ask what happens when music, image, movement, space, text and performance are deliberately conceived as parts of the same formal system.
In The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Nyman's pre-existing Memorial was not simply placed under a completed sequence. The climactic sequence was choreographed to the music.
The implication is extraordinary.
Perhaps the right question is no longer:
What does the score do to the scene?
but:
What kind of scene becomes possible because the music is there?
Beyond accompaniment
This gives us a useful provisional distinction.
There is accompaniment.
Music supports an already organised audiovisual event.
There is recruitment.
Music's existing capacities are brought into a larger semiotic configuration and change the construal of the image.
And there may be something further:
co-construction.
Music and image participate so deeply in one another's organisation that the meaning of the finished work belongs to their joint configuration.
We should not assume that every unusual score reaches this third condition.
That is precisely what we need to investigate.
Why Kubrick and Greenaway?
Kubrick and Greenaway are useful because they approach the problem differently.
Kubrick often begins with music that already possesses a powerful cultural and formal identity: Strauss, Beethoven, Rossini, popular songs, electronic adaptations of classical works.
He then places these musical forms into unexpected visual and narrative relations.
The result can be irony, estrangement, grandeur, violence or transcendence. Kubrick's use of unexpected music against imagery has long been recognised as a distinctive feature of his practice.
Greenaway, particularly in collaboration with Nyman, seems more willing to make music part of the architectural design of the film itself.
The distinction is not absolute.
But it gives us two different routes beyond conventional scoring.
One begins with music whose cultural identity is already powerful and places it into a new audiovisual system.
The other can begin with a musical structure and allow the film to be organised around it.
The larger question
We can now formulate the problem more precisely.
Our previous series established that meaning can emerge between modes.
This series asks whether something deeper can happen.
Can the relations among modes become so intensive that they cease to function simply as relations between contributions?
Can the modes instead become elements of a single larger process of formal organisation?
If so, then the film score is not merely an interpretation of the film.
It is part of what makes the film this film.
A new kind of semiotic object
That possibility has implications beyond cinema.
If meanings can emerge from relations among modes, then perhaps a multimodal work should sometimes be treated as a new kind of semiotic object.
Not an image.
Not a piece of music.
Not a text.
Not a combination of the three.
Something whose properties emerge from their interaction.
Film would then be not merely a medium containing several semiotic modes.
It would be a system for composing relations among modes.
Kubrick and Greenaway become interesting because they push that system toward its limits.
What lies beyond the score?
We have therefore reached the threshold suggested by our title.
Beyond the score does not mean music disappears.
Quite the opposite.
It means that music becomes too deeply involved in the organisation of the film to be adequately described as mere scoring.
It can structure movement.
Create visual rhythm.
Establish formal correspondence.
Generate irony.
Shape character.
Organise memory.
Determine pacing.
Provide architecture.
And perhaps, in the most radical cases, participate in the very constitution of the filmic object.
We have seen hints of this in Kubrick.
Now we need to see what happens when the principle is taken further.
Because if Kubrick can make music and image confront and organise one another, Greenaway and Nyman may show us what happens when they begin to build the film together.
That is where we go next.
What happens when music works against the image — and then begins to work through it?
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