We began with a simple question:
What happens when music is no longer simply accompaniment?
The question seemed at first to concern the film score.
What does music add to an image?
How does it alter mood?
How does it create suspense?
How does a leitmotif identify a character?
Those questions remain useful.
But as we followed music through the films of Stanley Kubrick, Peter Greenaway and Michael Nyman, the score gradually became a less adequate object of analysis.
Music could contradict an image.
It could transform the way an image was construed.
It could organise movement.
It could establish formal correspondences.
It could create narrative memory and anticipation.
It could become a sign.
It could become part of the architecture of a sequence.
And eventually, in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and Prospero's Books, music became so deeply interwoven with image, movement, colour, text, voice and space that separating the modes seemed to tell us less rather than more.
We had moved beyond the score.
What had replaced it?
Perhaps not another mode.
Perhaps a different kind of object altogether:
a work whose meaning is co-constructed across modes.
From accompaniment to participation
A conventional understanding of the score gives music a secondary role.
The film is already there.
Music accompanies it.
But our earlier investigation showed that even ordinary scoring is already more complicated.
Music can alter the construal of an image.
An image can alter the construal of music.
The two can reinforce one another.
They can contradict one another.
They can establish conventions.
The audience can learn those conventions.
The music can become a sign.
This is already more than accompaniment.
It is participation.
Music enters the film's semiotic ecology and acquires possibilities through its relations with other modes.
Recruitment
We called this process recruitment.
Music brings its own potential.
Rhythm.
Expectation.
Affect.
Memory.
Cultural association.
Formal organisation.
The film recruits these possibilities for functions within its larger semiotic system.
Nothing is erased.
The music remains music.
Its own organisation remains active.
But it now participates in another organisation as well.
This is why music can contribute to meaning without becoming a language.
It does not have to acquire an independent symbolic grammar in order to become semantically consequential within film.
It can be recruited.
Kubrick complicates recruitment
Kubrick showed us how far recruitment can go.
In A Clockwork Orange, pre-existing music can collide with the image.
The music does not simply support the violence.
It creates an aesthetic and cultural counterpoint to it.
The viewer is made to hold beauty and brutality together.
The meaning emerges from their relation.
In 2001, the relation becomes more structural.
The Blue Danube does not merely tell us how to feel about spacecraft.
It provides a temporal organisation through which their movement can be experienced as dance.
Music has become a resource for formal construal.
The film is using musical relations to help organise visual relations.
From interpretation to structure
This gives us a useful distinction.
Music can interpret the image.
But music can also structure the image.
Interpretation asks:
What does this image mean?
Structure asks:
How is this sequence organised as a form?
In Kubrick, music can contribute to both.
The score can create irony or suspense.
But it can also establish rhythm, recurrence, pacing and formal correspondence.
At this point, the distinction between music as commentary and music as architecture begins to weaken.
The music is becoming part of the conditions under which the film is formed.
Greenaway changes the direction of dependence
Greenaway and Nyman push the problem further because the normal hierarchy between finished image and added score can itself be reversed.
Music can precede the visual sequence.
A sequence can be choreographed to an existing musical structure.
The film can therefore be organised around music rather than simply accompanied by it.
The relation becomes:
music → image
rather than:
image → music
But neither direction is sufficient.
The richer relation is:
music ↔ image
Each becomes part of the conditions under which the other is organised.
Architecture becomes co-construction
This is what we meant by describing music as architecture.
Music can organise duration, repetition, anticipation and recurrence.
Images can organise space, movement, colour and composition.
Film brings these organisations together.
When they become mutually constraining, the result is no longer merely a picture plus music.
It is a jointly organised form.
The distinction between the modes remains.
But the finished work depends upon their relationship.
This is where the term co-construction earns its place.
Co-construction is not fusion
We should be careful here.
The modes do not literally become one.
Music is still music.
An image is still an image.
Words are still words.
A voice is still a voice.
Colour is still colour.
What changes is the relation of dependence among them.
A mode can provide conditions under which another mode becomes meaningful in a particular way.
The second can then alter the significance of the first.
The relation becomes recursive.
The modes remain distinguishable.
But the meaning of the whole cannot be recovered simply by adding their independent meanings together.
The Cook, the Thief...
This is what made The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover so revealing.
The film is saturated with colour.
The spaces are systematically differentiated.
Bodies move through them.
Costumes change.
Food becomes visual and material spectacle.
The camera moves with unusual continuity.
Nyman's music provides repetition, duration and formal coherence.
The narrative gives these formal structures human significance.
No single mode possesses the film's meaning.
The meaning emerges from their relations.
The excess is not merely an abundance of material.
It is an abundance of interacting semiotic resources.
Prospero's Books
Prospero's Books makes the interdependence still harder to ignore.
Text becomes image.
Images become layers.
Bodies become compositions.
Voice becomes a unifying narrative presence.
Music provides temporal organisation.
Typography moves through the frame.
Digital technology allows several visual orders to coexist.
The books become both objects within the story and models for the film's own layered form.
At such a point, asking which mode "contributes" a particular meaning can become positively misleading.
The meaning belongs to the configuration.
Relation among relations
We can now refine a formulation from From Mattering to Meaning.
A sign is a relation.
A multimodal configuration puts several such relations into relation with one another.
A film can therefore become a:
relation among relations.
The musical theme relates to its musical potential.
The image relates to its visual potential.
The spoken word relates to its linguistic potential.
The edit relates one event to another.
The audience relates all of these to its own repertoire and to the history of the work.
The film organises those relations.
The meaning emerges from their organisation.
This is why multimodality can produce something that no mode possesses independently.
The viewer is part of the co-construction
Co-construction does not stop at the film.
The audience participates.
The viewer brings cultural repertoires.
They recognise genres.
They know musical conventions.
They remember previous films.
They learn the film's local conventions as it unfolds.
They notice repetition.
They interpret variation.
They revise earlier construals.
The work therefore provides possibilities, but the viewer must actualise those possibilities in perception and interpretation.
Meaning is not simply in the work.
Nor is it simply in the viewer.
It emerges through their relation.
Yet interpretation is constrained
This does not mean that meaning is arbitrary.
The film establishes a field of possibilities.
Its formal organisation makes some construals more probable than others.
A motif that has appeared repeatedly acquires a history.
A musical contradiction creates a particular kind of tension.
A visual recurrence invites comparison.
A narrative revelation reconfigures what came before.
The viewer participates within a system of affordances and constraints.
Co-construction is therefore not unrestricted invention.
It is structured participation.
A film can create its own semiotic potential
One of the most remarkable consequences of co-construction is that a film can generate conventions that did not exist before it.
A musical motif acquires a new association.
A colour becomes linked to a character.
A recurring composition becomes a visual marker.
A particular combination of music and image becomes recognisable.
The audience learns the system.
The film has created a small semiotic potential of its own.
And once that potential exists, the film can use it recursively.
It can confirm the convention.
Reverse it.
Parody it.
Withhold it.
Transform it.
The work can therefore operate upon the semiotic environment it has itself created.
Co-construction is evolutionary
This points toward a larger cultural process.
An artist introduces a new relation.
An audience learns it.
Another artist borrows it.
The relation becomes conventional.
A later artist transforms the convention.
The cultural reservoir changes.
A new repertoire becomes possible.
The same process we observed within a film can occur across films.
The medium evolves through the accumulation and transformation of semiotic possibilities.
Artistic innovation is therefore partly the creation of new relations among existing modes.
The score was never isolated
Perhaps this is the deepest conclusion of the series.
We began by speaking about the score as though it were a thing that could be studied independently.
But the score has always existed within relations.
It belongs to a film.
It is heard by an audience.
It participates in a cultural history.
It responds to an image or helps produce one.
It acquires meaning through recurrence.
Its significance can survive the film that created it.
The score is therefore not really an isolated object.
It is a node within a semiotic ecology.
Why the atypical cases matter
This is why Kubrick and Greenaway have been so valuable.
They do not necessarily represent ordinary filmmaking.
They expose the limits of our ordinary categories.
A conventional score can make us think of music as accompaniment.
A more unusual score shows us music as recruitment.
Kubrick shows us music as counterpoint and structure.
Greenaway shows us music as architecture.
The Cook, the Thief... shows us formal saturation.
Prospero's Books shows us layered multimodal construction.
The atypical case reveals what the ordinary case was hiding.
From score to co-construction
We can now state the movement very simply:
accompaniment → recruitment → mutual construal → structure → architecture → co-construction
These are not rigid stages.
A single film can contain all of them.
But the sequence identifies increasing degrees of interdependence.
At the beginning, the music can be removed without fundamentally altering how the film was constructed.
At the far end, removing the music may destroy the formal logic through which the film exists as the work it is.
The question is therefore one of degree and kind of dependence.
What co-construction changes
When modes co-construct a work, meaning is no longer adequately described as the transfer of information from one mode to another.
The modes become resources for one another.
Music gives movement form.
Movement gives music a reference.
Colour gives space significance.
Space gives movement a structure.
Text gives image a history.
Image gives text a material presence.
Voice gives bodies a shared narrative perspective.
Music gives the whole composition temporal continuity.
Each resource becomes part of the conditions of possibility of the others.
This is what makes the result emergent.
The larger theory
And here we return once again to From Mattering to Meaning.
We began there by asking how significance can become meaning.
We learned that meaning can arise when differences that already matter become available for symbolic construal.
Film shows us what happens when different modes of mattering are brought into symbolic relation.
Music matters as music.
Images matter perceptually and culturally.
Movement matters bodily and temporally.
Language matters semantically.
Film brings these forms of mattering into a common semiotic environment.
The resulting meaning is not simply added to them.
It emerges through their interaction.
And once that meaning exists, it can change how the modes matter.
The film can make a melody ominous.
A character can make a colour significant.
A story can make a gesture sacred.
A memory can make a musical phrase painful.
Meaning feeds back into mattering.
The score becomes the film
Perhaps, then, "beyond the score" does not mean that the score disappears.
It means that the score becomes part of something larger.
The music is no longer best understood as a layer placed upon the film.
It becomes one of the relations through which the film is constituted as a meaningful whole.
The same may be true of every other mode.
The image is not simply the thing that the music comments upon.
The text is not simply the thing the image illustrates.
The modes can become co-participants in the emergence of the work.
A new object of analysis
If this is right, then perhaps the appropriate unit of analysis is no longer the score.
Nor even the individual mode.
It is the configuration.
We should ask:
What relations among modes are established?
Which potentials does each mode bring?
How do those potentials constrain one another?
What new possibilities emerge from their interaction?
How does the audience learn those relations?
How does the work transform them over time?
This is a different approach to film.
It is less concerned with assigning contributions to separate channels.
It is concerned with the evolution of meaning within a multimodal system.
And perhaps this extends beyond cinema
The implications may not stop with film.
A theatre production can combine voice, body, space, music, lighting and text.
A ritual can combine gesture, music, costume, place and narrative.
An advertisement can combine image, language, sound and cultural memory.
A video game can combine visual action, music, interface and player participation.
A digital installation can combine image, sound, movement and environment.
In each case, meaning may emerge through relations among modes that already possess their own capacities for mattering.
Film is simply one especially rich laboratory.
The final question
We began with:
What happens when music is no longer simply accompaniment?
We have discovered that the answer can be surprisingly far-reaching.
Music can alter the construal of an image.
The image can alter the construal of music.
Their differences can create irony.
Their similarities can create structural correspondence.
Repeated relations can become signs.
Signs can become narrative resources.
Music can become architectural.
The film can become a layered semiotic ecology.
And eventually, the distinction between "the meaning of the music" and "the meaning of the film" may cease to be adequate.
The music has become one of the ways in which the film means.
Not alone.
Not independently.
But through participation in a larger system of relations.
Beyond the score
So perhaps we can finally answer the question implied by our title.
What lies beyond the score?
Not a disappearance of music.
Not the triumph of image over sound.
Not a new hierarchy in which one mode becomes sovereign.
Something more interesting:
co-construction.
A film can become a work in which music, image, text, movement, space, voice, colour and technology participate in the generation of meaning together.
The modes remain distinct.
Their potentials remain distinct.
But the work emerges from their relations.
And that may be the deepest lesson of Kubrick and Greenaway.
They have shown us that the most interesting question is no longer:
What does music do to the film?
It is:
What can music and film become together that neither could become alone?
That question takes us beyond the score.
And perhaps beyond any simple distinction between modes.
Because when meaning is genuinely co-constructed, the work is no longer a collection of contributions.
It is a new semiotic whole.
That is what we have been trying to see.
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