Stanley Kubrick had an unusual confidence in the ability of music to make images mean differently.
Sometimes he placed music against the image so forcefully that the two seem to argue.
A brutal act is accompanied by beautiful music.
A scene of technological movement becomes a graceful dance.
A familiar popular song acquires a disturbing significance.
A piece of classical music becomes inseparable from a character whose behaviour seems radically opposed to the values we might associate with the music.
The result is not simply contradiction.
It is reconstrual.
Kubrick seems repeatedly to ask what happens when the image refuses to determine what the music should mean, and the music refuses to let the image settle into a single interpretation.
This makes him an ideal starting point for our more difficult question:
What happens when music works against the image?
Music need not agree
We have already seen that a film can use music to reinforce what an image appears to show.
Kubrick often does something else.
The music and image occupy different semantic territories.
The resulting tension forces us to hold both at once.
The music does not cancel the image.
The image does not cancel the music.
Instead, we are made to experience the relation between them.
This is one reason the use of Singin' in the Rain in A Clockwork Orange remains so disturbing.
Alex and his droogs violently assault a couple in their home while Alex sings the cheerful title song from the 1952 musical. The BFI describes the sequence as an ironic recontextualisation of a familiar song, and notes that Kubrick himself developed the idea during rehearsal.
The song is not functioning as background mood music.
It is doing something much more aggressive.
The song does not make the violence comic
It would be tempting to say that the cheerful song makes the scene comic.
But that is too simple.
The violence remains violence.
The song makes us experience it through an additional cultural memory: Hollywood musical exuberance, innocence, optimism, dancing in the rain.
The two worlds collide.
The result can be horrifying precisely because the pleasure of the song does not disappear.
We hear the familiar melody.
We may even experience some of the musical pleasure associated with it.
At the same time, we see what Alex is doing.
The film forces the two experiences together.
The meaning lies partly in that simultaneity of incompatible responses.
Beauty and brutality
Something similar happens throughout A Clockwork Orange.
Kubrick repeatedly places musical beauty beside acts of violence. The BFI notes the use of Rossini's William Tell Overture and The Thieving Magpie, as well as Wendy Carlos's electronic arrangements of Beethoven, in conjunction with scenes of violence and sexual transgression.
This creates a particularly uncomfortable question.
Does beautiful music beautify violence?
Or does violence contaminate the music?
Or does the film refuse to let us choose?
Perhaps it is making us confront the possibility that aesthetic pleasure and moral repulsion can coexist.
The music is not morally innocent.
But neither is it simply morally guilty.
It becomes part of the problem.
Alex and Beethoven
This is even more complicated in the case of Beethoven.
Alex genuinely loves Beethoven.
The music belongs to his private imaginative world.
It accompanies pleasure, fantasy and excitement.
The audience therefore cannot simply interpret the music as a sign of evil.
The relationship is more disturbing.
A work of extraordinary musical beauty exists within the consciousness of someone capable of extraordinary cruelty.
Kubrick refuses to resolve that contradiction.
The music becomes part of Alex's semiotic and affective identity.
We learn something about him through the way he hears.
This is a deeper role than accompaniment.
The music participates in constructing the character.
Music can reveal what the image cannot
The image shows us what Alex does.
The music can suggest how Alex experiences what he does.
That distinction is crucial.
Two characters can commit similar actions while inhabiting entirely different experiential worlds.
The score can help us enter one of those worlds.
This does not mean that the music gives us direct access to Alex's mind.
Rather, it creates a particular relation between the viewer, the character and the action.
We see violence.
We hear delight.
The resulting contradiction is part of our understanding of Alex.
The music has therefore contributed something the image alone could not have supplied.
The image changes the music too
But we must preserve the reciprocal principle from our previous series.
Beethoven does not arrive in A Clockwork Orange with one fixed cinematic meaning.
Our hearing of Beethoven is changed by the film.
The musical passage remains Beethoven.
Its harmonic, melodic and formal qualities remain.
But it now occurs within the history of Alex's pleasure and violence.
The image and narrative have changed its film-specific significance.
We cannot simply separate the music from what the film has taught us to hear in it.
Kubrick has created a new relation between the music and its cultural history.
A collision between repertoires
This is also a collision between different repertoires.
The audience brings a repertoire in which Beethoven belongs to a long history of serious concert music.
Singin' in the Rain carries another cultural repertoire: Hollywood musical, joy, dancing, optimism.
Kubrick places those resources within a very different narrative environment.
The audience therefore has to negotiate among several learned systems at once.
The music's significance depends partly upon the fact that we already know something about it.
Kubrick exploits that prior knowledge.
He does not have to create the associations from scratch.
He can place inherited meaning into a new configuration.
Kubrick's music is often culturally loaded
This is one reason pre-existing music is so powerful in his work.
A newly composed score can acquire significance through a film.
A familiar piece of music arrives carrying a history.
The audience recognises it.
That recognition is part of the material Kubrick can manipulate.
He can create a discrepancy between the music's previous cultural associations and the present image.
The gap between those histories becomes meaningful.
From irony to estrangement
The result can be called irony.
But I think estrangement is sometimes a better description.
Kubrick makes familiar music unfamiliar by placing it where we do not expect it.
A familiar song becomes disturbing.
A classical work becomes associated with violence.
A waltz becomes the music of spacecraft.
The music remains recognisable.
Its context has changed.
We therefore hear the familiar through the unfamiliar.
This is a powerful method of making us notice something we thought we already understood.
2001: a different kind of opposition
If A Clockwork Orange gives us music against the image as contradiction, 2001: A Space Odyssey offers a more enigmatic case.
The famous use of Johann Strauss II's The Blue Danube accompanies spacecraft gliding and docking in space. The BFI describes the sequences as graceful spacecraft movement set to the waltz, while the original Sight & Sound review already singled out the waltz as an extraordinary leitmotif for the spacecraft.
There is no obvious contradiction here.
The space station does not look like a ballroom.
The spacecraft do not literally dance.
Yet the movement becomes perceptually organised as dance.
The music has transformed the visual event.
The spacecraft become dancers
This is a remarkable change of construal.
Without the music, we might describe the scene technically:
spacecraft approach;
docking mechanisms align;
vehicles rotate;
one structure passes another.
With the waltz, the same movements appear graceful, rhythmic and almost choreographic.
The machines become dancers.
Space becomes a ballroom.
Orbital mechanics become choreography.
The music has not told us something explicitly about spacecraft.
It has provided a form through which their movement can be construed.
Music gives the image a different temporality
The spacecraft were already moving.
But the waltz organises how we experience their movement in time.
We anticipate rhythmic continuation.
The movements seem coordinated.
A rotation becomes a turn.
An approach becomes a phrase.
A docking sequence acquires cadence.
This is more than emotional accompaniment.
The musical structure provides a temporal framework through which the visual movement becomes perceptually meaningful.
Music has entered the formal organisation of the image.
The Blue Danube and irony
There is also something faintly ironic about the pairing.
The Strauss waltz belongs to nineteenth-century Vienna, human social grace and ballroom culture.
The image shows technological machinery operating in the vacuum of space.
The contrast is not as violent as A Clockwork Orange, but it is still striking.
Human cultural refinement has been transplanted into an inhuman environment.
The machines seem almost graceful enough to participate in human civilisation.
The music therefore creates a peculiar relationship between technology and culture.
We do not simply see machines.
We see machines through a human musical form.
A different kind of counterpoint
This suggests that "music against the image" does not necessarily mean direct opposition.
There can be several kinds of counterpoint.
Music can contradict the emotional construal of an image.
It can contradict its cultural associations.
It can provide a form from another domain through which the image is reconceived.
It can create an ironic distance.
Or it can establish a correspondence that is so unexpected that the image acquires an entirely new character.
The common factor is not opposition.
It is difference between the modes that becomes productive.
The music becomes a lens
Perhaps the best metaphor is a lens.
The music does not place something on the image.
It changes the conditions under which the image is seen.
The spacecraft were already moving.
The music allows us to see that movement as dance.
Alex was already violent.
The music allows us to encounter that violence through his aesthetic pleasure.
The image is therefore not simply modified.
It is reconstrued.
Kubrick's editing is musical too
There is another important dimension to Kubrick.
His use of music often coincides with a highly rhythmic approach to editing and movement.
The BFI's Sight & Sound discussion of A Clockwork Orange emphasises the dancing flow of movement and the frequent synchronisation of the violence with Rossini.
The music therefore does not merely run beneath the images.
The images can be cut and choreographed in relation to it.
A movement can land on a musical accent.
A visual action can unfold across a phrase.
The soundtrack begins to participate in the formal rhythm of the sequence.
This already moves us toward the next stage of our inquiry.
When music becomes structure
In A Clockwork Orange, the effect is often dramatic and ironic.
In 2001, it can become architectural.
The famous pairing of the Blue Danube and spacecraft is not simply a musical joke.
The music provides an organising pattern for a sequence whose visual movement is itself highly formalised.
The film invites us to perceive the spacecraft as moving within a musical space.
This is where the title of our next post begins to make sense.
Music can become not merely a counterpoint to the image but a structuring resource for the image.
There is a deeper relation here
We should now return to our earlier concept of recruitment.
Kubrick's music is recruited into the film.
But what is being recruited?
Not merely emotion.
Not merely cultural association.
Musical form itself.
Rhythm.
Repetition.
Phrase.
Pulse.
Cadence.
Graceful periodicity.
These become resources for the organisation of visual movement.
The film is using music not only for what it may signify, but for how it is organised.
That is a much more radical use.
When the modes begin to share form
This may be the threshold we are looking for.
In ordinary scoring, music and image may make meaning together.
In Kubrick, they can begin to share formal organisation.
The image is shaped musically.
The music is heard visually.
The two modes remain distinct, but the relations between them become so strong that a form established in one mode becomes a resource for organising the other.
The score has moved beyond accompaniment.
Two Kubricks
Perhaps this is the most useful way to understand the two films we have considered.
In A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick repeatedly exploits the semantic difference between music and image.
Beauty encounters brutality.
Joy encounters violence.
Classical refinement encounters cruelty.
The difference creates irony, estrangement and moral unease.
In 2001, he also exploits difference, but often turns toward formal correspondence.
Music and movement begin to organise one another.
The musical form provides a way of construing visual form.
These are different strategies.
But both treat music as a partner in construal rather than a subordinate accompaniment.
The question changes
We began by asking:
What happens when music works against the image?
We can now give a more precise answer.
Sometimes the opposition produces irony.
Sometimes it creates estrangement.
Sometimes it allows an image to be construed through a form borrowed from music.
And sometimes the relationship becomes so systematic that music begins to organise the image itself.
At that point we have crossed an important threshold.
The score is no longer merely against the image.
It is becoming part of its structure.
And this raises the next question:
What happens when musical form and visual form begin to organise one another at a larger scale?
That is the problem we will explore in 2001.
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