Stanley Kubrick showed us that music can do more than accompany an image.
It can oppose it.
It can reconstrue it.
It can organise its movement.
It can even provide a formal structure through which visual events become intelligible.
Peter Greenaway and Michael Nyman take this possibility somewhere else.
Their collaboration suggests a film in which music is not merely a resource brought into an existing audiovisual structure.
Music can become part of the structure itself.
This is why the word architecture seems appropriate.
Architecture organises relations.
It establishes proportions, recurrences, pathways and patterns through which other things can be experienced.
Music can do something similar in time.
And Greenaway's cinema is unusually receptive to such organisation.
A partnership rather unlike the usual one
Greenaway and Nyman worked together across a remarkable sequence of films, including The Draughtsman's Contract, A Zed and Two Noughts, Drowning by Numbers, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and Prospero's Books. Nyman himself describes their relationship as very different from that of most director-composer partnerships, with Greenaway giving him unusually wide scope.
That is already suggestive.
In conventional filmmaking, we tend to imagine a relatively simple order:
film → score
The composer responds to the director's completed or substantially developed visual structure.
But the Greenaway-Nyman collaboration repeatedly unsettles that sequence.
According to Nyman, the working method could vary dramatically from film to film. For A Zed and Two Noughts, he composed without having seen a single frame. For the climactic sequence of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, by contrast, the film was deliberately choreographed to an already existing piece of music, Memorial.
The direction can therefore run both ways.
film → music
can become:
music → film
or, more interestingly:
music ↔ film
This is no longer ordinary accompaniment.
Greenaway's films already think in patterns
The music fits because Greenaway's visual imagination is itself highly systematic.
The BFI describes his cinema as characterised by intricate, multi-layered visual compositions, while noting that Nyman's repetitive motifs "perfectly matched" Greenaway's images and editing rhythms.
Greenaway himself has spoken about the role of numbers and systems in his films, and specifically about the way Nyman's music relates to sequences and pattern-making.
This is important.
The connection between Greenaway and Nyman is not simply that one creates striking pictures and the other writes striking music.
Both are working with organisation.
Repetition.
Pattern.
Variation.
Symmetry.
Counting.
Recurrence.
Movement.
The music does not merely decorate this visual system.
It can become another way in which the system is organised.
The Draughtsman's Contract
We can already see the principle in The Draughtsman's Contract.
The film's seventeenth-century setting is filled with formal visual order: gardens, architecture, geometric compositions and the repeated construction of the draughtsman's drawings. The BFI notes the film's symmetrical visual splendour and the way that this is echoed by Nyman's celebrated score.
Nyman's music itself draws upon elements of Henry Purcell, but reconstructs them through the instrumentation and compositional language of the late twentieth century.
The result is not historical illustration in any straightforward sense.
The music and image establish a relationship between two systems of order.
The film shows a world organised through property, drawing, architecture, social rank and visual measurement.
The music provides another form of patterned organisation.
The historical world is therefore not merely shown.
It is made perceptible as a system.
Music as another dimension of form
This suggests a useful distinction.
A score can represent or comment upon what an image represents.
But it can also contribute formal relations that are not representational in the same way.
A repeated musical figure can correspond to repeated visual compositions.
A rhythmic pattern can align with recurrent movement.
A musical sequence can provide an expectation against which a visual sequence becomes intelligible.
The music can therefore help organise the film without having to represent an object within the story.
It participates at the level of form.
Repetition becomes architecture
Minimalist music is particularly suited to this because repetition does not simply repeat.
Each recurrence establishes recognition.
A pattern returns.
Something changes within it.
The listener recognises continuity and difference simultaneously.
Greenaway's visual structures often work similarly.
A number recurs.
A colour returns.
A framing device is repeated.
A composition is varied.
A movement echoes an earlier movement.
The spectator begins to perceive the work not as a succession of isolated images but as a network of recurrences.
The music can strengthen this perception.
The film becomes a kind of temporal architecture.
Time becomes visible
Architecture usually concerns space.
Music concerns time.
Film combines the two.
This is one reason music can become architectural within cinema.
A building can organise how we move through space.
A musical form can organise how we move through time.
Film can make those two kinds of organisation interact.
A camera movement can have duration and rhythm.
An architectural space can be entered through a musical phrase.
A repeated visual pattern can acquire temporal emphasis through repetition in the score.
The resulting form is neither purely spatial nor purely temporal.
It is spatiotemporal.
Greenaway's numbers
Greenaway's fascination with systems is especially relevant here.
In discussing his films, he has described the attraction of numbers and systems, and his remarks on Nyman emphasise the relationship between the music and the pattern-making of the sequences.
Numbers can structure a film visually.
But music can structure the experience of those numbers temporally.
A sequence of objects can be counted.
A sequence of musical events can be counted.
Repetition can create formal correspondence between the two.
The viewer can therefore experience numerical or structural relations not merely as information but as pattern.
The film becomes something to be perceived relationally.
Music does not explain the system
This is important.
Nyman's music does not necessarily explain Greenaway's systems.
It does not tell us what a number "means".
It participates in the experience of systematic organisation.
This is subtler.
The music and the image establish parallel or interacting forms.
The viewer perceives the relation.
The result is a sense that the film itself is organised according to a deeper order.
Meaning arises partly from the perception of that order.
The director's image and the composer's music
This brings us back to the unusual division of labour between Greenaway and Nyman.
If Nyman can compose without seeing the film, as he did for A Zed and Two Noughts, then the relation between music and image cannot be reduced to the composer simply illustrating visual details.
The music can possess an independent structure.
That structure can subsequently enter into the film's visual organisation.
The process therefore resembles a meeting of two already organised potentials.
The film does not give the music its entire structure.
The music does not give the film its entire structure.
They meet.
Their relations produce something new.
That is precisely the kind of co-construction we are beginning to investigate.
But The Cook reverses the arrow
If A Zed and Two Noughts shows music entering a visual system from an unusual distance, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover gives us the opposite extreme.
Nyman tells us that the climactic sequence was deliberately choreographed to his pre-existing Memorial.
Now the image has been shaped around the music.
The conventional hierarchy has been reversed.
The music is not merely responding to the finished scene.
The scene is responding to an already existing musical structure.
This is perhaps the clearest example yet of what we mean by architecture.
The music has become one of the conditions under which the visual event is built.
The film becomes choreographic
Once movement is organised around music, the distinction between cinema and choreography begins to weaken.
Bodies move.
The camera moves.
Objects move.
Colours change.
The sequence unfolds.
Music provides temporal organisation.
The image provides spatial organisation.
The two become coupled through movement.
This is different from simply synchronising a few actions to musical accents.
The whole scene can be experienced as a single organised movement.
The music does not merely accompany choreography.
It participates in making the choreography possible.
A formal relation, not a translation
Again, we should be precise.
We are not saying that Nyman's music "means" a particular visual movement.
Nor that the movement translates the musical notes into pictures.
Something more structural is happening.
The music provides relations of:
recurrence,
duration,
acceleration,
accent,
expectation,
release.
The choreography and camera work establish corresponding relations in another mode.
The meaning arises partly from the correspondence between forms.
This is one reason "architecture" is more useful here than "illustration".
The score becomes an environment
An ordinary score can sit beneath a scene.
An architectural score can become an environment within which the scene unfolds.
The music determines possibilities for movement.
Movement determines possibilities for framing.
Framing determines what becomes visible.
The image alters how the music is heard.
The relations feed back.
The result is a system of mutual constraint.
The music is no longer simply an object placed within the film.
It has become part of the film's conditions of possibility.
And this is why Greenaway is different
Kubrick often begins by creating striking relations between music and image.
Greenaway and Nyman can go further by constructing films in which the two modes participate in a shared logic of organisation.
The distinction should not be overstated.
Kubrick can do this too.
Greenaway does not always do it.
But the collaboration makes the phenomenon unusually explicit.
Both artists are deeply interested in formal systems, and their collaboration allows musical and visual organisation to become mutually reinforcing.
The audience encounters the architecture
What does the viewer actually experience?
Not necessarily a conscious theory of musical form.
We may not count the repetitions.
We may not identify the structural correspondences.
But we can experience a peculiar sense of order.
The film feels patterned.
Movement feels inevitable.
Recurrence feels significant.
A visual return seems prepared by a musical return.
A sequence seems to belong to a larger structure.
The architecture is experienced without necessarily being explicitly analysed.
Meaning can therefore arise through felt formal relations.
Music can make structure perceptible
This is perhaps the most interesting contribution of the score.
Some structures are difficult to perceive.
A sequence of visual events may be too complex to grasp as a whole.
Music can provide repetition and continuity.
It can make the recurrence perceptible.
It can give the viewer a temporal framework through which disparate images become connected.
The music therefore does not merely express structure.
It can make structure experientially available.
Structure can become meaning
And once structure becomes perceptible, it can matter.
The repeated pattern may suggest order.
Or obsession.
Or inevitability.
Or imprisonment.
Or symmetry.
Or absurdity.
A numerical system may begin as a formal device and acquire thematic significance.
A recurrence may become associated with a character.
A musical pattern may make a visual pattern seem ritualistic.
The film's architecture therefore becomes part of its meaning.
Form is not merely packaging.
It is a meaning-making resource.
From form to narrative
This matters even in a film that seems highly formalist.
Pattern can organise narrative expectations.
If a musical figure returns whenever something happens, the audience begins to anticipate it.
If a visual sequence repeats with variations, the changes become significant.
If a formal symmetry is broken, the break becomes meaningful.
The architecture therefore generates narrative possibilities.
Formal recurrence becomes a kind of memory.
Variation becomes difference.
Difference becomes significance.
The wider collaboration
Nyman's work with Greenaway eventually extended across several films, and the music from those films has itself escaped the cinema into concert performance and wider popular circulation. Nyman notes that pieces from the collaboration became widely familiar beyond the films in which they originated.
This introduces another interesting feedback loop.
Music created for a film can become independent.
Once performed outside the film, it acquires a new history.
Listeners who have never seen the film can know the music.
The musical resource has moved from:
film → music
to:
music → culture
The direction of influence is no longer one-way.
The music can outlive the architecture
This is especially interesting for our argument.
A musical work can be extracted from the film and performed independently.
It may still carry traces of the film.
But it can also develop new meanings.
In this sense, the film's architecture has been partially sedimented into music.
The music carries something of its original relational history into a new context.
This is another example of semiotic portability.
And yet the film changes the music
Even after extraction, we cannot simply return to an imagined "pure" musical meaning.
For listeners who know the film, the music may always bring aspects of it to mind.
A passage can become associated with a colour, a room, a body, a movement, a character.
The film has altered the cultural repertoire through which the music is heard.
The relationship has become historical.
The architectural principle
We can now formulate the central idea of this post:
Music becomes architectural when its formal organisation becomes part of the conditions under which the film's visual and temporal organisation is constructed or experienced.
This is stronger than accompaniment.
Stronger than mood.
Even stronger than ordinary multimodal counterpoint.
The music is participating in the architecture of the work.
But we should still resist saying that the modes become one
The next post will push us much further, especially with The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and then Prospero's Books.
But we should preserve an important distinction.
The music does not literally become image.
The image does not literally become music.
Their material differences remain.
What changes is the degree and type of interdependence.
The modes can remain distinct while becoming jointly constitutive of form.
This distinction may ultimately prove more useful than the idea of complete fusion.
From Kubrick to Greenaway
The progression is now becoming clearer.
Kubrick showed us:
music against image;
and then:
music organising image.
Greenaway and Nyman show us:
music as part of the architecture within which image, movement and time are organised.
The next question is therefore more radical.
What happens when that architecture becomes so densely multimodal that music, image, movement, colour and narrative cannot easily be separated without losing something essential?
That is the problem posed by The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.
Here, Nyman's pre-existing Memorial did not merely accompany the climax.
The sequence was choreographed to it.
And that means we can ask:
What happens when the film becomes a visual response to music, while the music simultaneously becomes part of the meaning of the visual response?
That is where architecture may become something still stranger.
Music, image and movement may begin to construct one another.
No comments:
Post a Comment