We have now reached a curious point.
A musical theme begins as music.
Through repeated association with a character, place, event or idea, it acquires a semiotic function.
Eventually, the image need not be present.
The music alone can bring something absent into the viewer's experience.
A character can be off screen, yet suddenly feel present.
A past event can return without being shown.
A future event can become anticipated before it occurs.
A place can be recalled without appearing.
A relationship can become audible before the narrative makes it explicit.
The score has acquired a remarkable power:
It can make the absent present.
Absence is not nothing
In ordinary perception, absence seems straightforward.
The character is not there.
The place is not visible.
The event has already happened.
The future has not happened yet.
But narrative film has a more interesting relationship with absence.
Something can be physically absent while remaining semiotically present.
A photograph can do this.
A word can do it.
A memory can do it.
And once a musical theme has become a sign, music can do it too.
The character need not appear for the audience to think of them.
The earlier scene need not be shown for its significance to return.
The future event need not occur for it to become anticipated.
The score can carry the relation across time and space.
The theme as memory
Suppose a character has been associated with a particular theme.
The character leaves the scene.
Later, the theme returns.
The character remains unseen.
Yet the audience remembers.
The music has become a thread connecting two moments that are otherwise separated.
This is more than simple recall.
The theme can make the earlier event relevant to the present.
Its significance has entered the current scene even though its original image has disappeared.
Music can therefore function as a form of narrative memory.
Memory changes the present
The power of this device lies partly in the fact that remembering is not neutral.
When a theme returns, we do not simply retrieve an old piece of information.
We bring a history into the present.
Suppose a theme was originally associated with happiness.
Later it returns after the character has suffered a loss.
The same notes now carry both histories.
The earlier meaning remains.
But the present context changes how we hear it.
The theme can sound nostalgic.
Bitter.
Regretful.
Ironic.
The musical sign therefore does not merely retrieve the past.
It reconstrues the present through the past.
The theme as anticipation
The opposite movement is equally powerful.
A musical theme can appear before the thing it signifies.
The music begins.
The character has not yet appeared.
The threat has not yet been revealed.
The event has not yet happened.
But the audience anticipates something.
The sign has made a future possibility present to the viewer.
This is one of the reasons film music can create suspense so effectively.
The image is still innocent.
The music is already telling us that the image should not be taken at face value.
The future has entered the present as a possibility.
Music can know more than the image
This can create a distinctive narrative relationship between film and audience.
A character may not know that danger is approaching.
The audience does.
The character sees an ordinary room.
The audience hears the threatening theme.
The film therefore creates two perspectives at once.
The character inhabits one.
The viewer inhabits another.
The score participates in the distribution of knowledge.
It can make us aware of something that the represented world has not yet revealed.
Music becomes a carrier of narrative information.
Foreshadowing without exposition
This is one reason music can achieve effects that dialogue would make clumsy.
A character does not have to say:
"Something terrible is about to happen."
The music can establish that possibility without stating it.
The viewer senses that the present scene contains more than the image explicitly shows.
The score has therefore become a resource for implicit narrative construal.
It can establish a future relation without describing it.
The Jaws example again
The Jaws motif provides an unusually clear example.
Once the audience has learned its association with the shark and approaching danger, the motif can appear before the shark is visible.
The shark is physically absent.
But the audience anticipates it.
The music has therefore become more than an accompaniment to an image.
It has become a warning sign within the film's semiotic system.
The original audiovisual relation has been transformed into a portable sign.
And the absence of the shark is precisely what allows the musical sign to do its work.
Absence becomes a resource
This suggests an important principle.
A sign becomes especially powerful when what it signifies does not have to be present.
The absence creates a space for construal.
A musical theme can occupy that space.
The audience mentally supplies what is missing.
The score can therefore contribute to the film without visually representing anything at all.
This is one reason film music can enlarge the narrative world beyond what the camera shows.
Off-screen becomes meaningful
Film already possesses techniques for making the off-screen world significant.
A voice comes from outside the frame.
A sound suggests that something is happening elsewhere.
A character looks towards something we cannot see.
Music can do something similar at a more abstract level.
It can invoke a person, place, memory or danger without giving us an acoustic representation of that thing.
The off-screen world becomes not merely spatially absent but semiotically present.
The theme can represent a relationship
A musical sign need not signify a person or object.
It can come to signify a relationship.
Two characters may acquire a shared theme.
It may appear when they are together.
Later, one character hears it alone.
The music recalls the relationship even though the other person is absent.
The sign now refers not to a thing but to a relation.
This is a more sophisticated form of narrative meaning.
Music can make the invisible structure of a story perceptible.
Themes can combine
Once musical signs have been established, they can interact.
Imagine one theme belonging to a character and another belonging to a relationship.
The two themes appear together.
The audience hears that the character is now implicated in the relationship.
Or two characters' themes become musically intertwined.
The combination can suggest intimacy, conflict or transformation.
The score has acquired something like a relational syntax.
Not a language in the full sense.
But a system in which signs can combine to generate further construals.
Absence can become conspicuous
The opposite can happen too.
A theme that we expect does not appear.
The character is present, but their music is missing.
Suddenly the absence itself becomes meaningful.
Perhaps the character has changed.
Perhaps the film wants to distance us from them.
Perhaps we are not seeing the situation from their point of view.
The audience notices the missing sign because the film has trained us to expect it.
The absence of a sound has become a positive semiotic event.
This is an extraordinary consequence of a learned convention.
Silence can signify
The same principle applies to silence more generally.
Silence is not automatically meaningful.
But if music has established an expectation, its sudden absence can become significant.
A score stops.
The scene becomes acoustically bare.
The viewer notices.
Perhaps the music's disappearance corresponds to emotional rupture.
Perhaps it marks a change in point of view.
Perhaps something terrible has happened.
The significance of the silence depends upon the history of the soundtrack.
What is absent can matter because something was expected to be present.
The score creates temporal depth
We can now see that music can give a film several temporal dimensions simultaneously.
The present scene is visible.
The past is available through musical memory.
The future is available through musical anticipation.
The absent can therefore coexist with the present through the score.
The film is no longer confined to what the camera is showing at this moment.
The soundtrack can carry a temporal history of meaning.
Retrospection
The process becomes even more interesting when later events alter the meaning of earlier ones.
Suppose a theme accompanies an apparently happy scene.
Much later, we discover that the character was already planning a betrayal.
The theme returns.
We hear the earlier scene differently.
What seemed affectionate now seems sinister.
The music has participated in a narrative structure that only becomes fully intelligible retrospectively.
The present changes our hearing of the past.
This is one of the extraordinary properties of narrative semiosis.
Meaning can travel backwards.
The score can create a second narrative
A film can therefore have something like two narratives unfolding at once.
The visible story tells us what the characters do.
The score tells us something about how those events relate across time.
A theme can announce a future event.
Recall a past one.
Connect distant scenes.
Suggest an unspoken relationship.
Mark a transformation.
The music becomes a kind of parallel narrative resource.
Not a second story told in words.
A second organisation of relations.
But the audience must learn the code
None of this happens automatically.
If a theme appears only once, its significance may remain ambiguous.
The audience needs a history.
The film establishes a relation.
Repeats it.
Modifies it.
Reinforces it.
The viewer learns.
This is why the repertoire of the audience matters so much.
Some associations are culturally inherited.
Others are created inside the film.
The viewer participates in acquiring them.
The film's meaning potential grows as the viewing experience unfolds.
The film creates a local semiotic potential
This gives us a useful way to think about the score.
At the beginning of a film, a musical motif may have a broad and relatively open potential.
By the end, its possible interpretations have been shaped by everything that has happened.
The film has created a local semiotic system.
The motif's later uses occur against this history.
A musical phrase heard for the first time is not the same semiotic event as the same phrase heard for the fifth time.
The material form may be identical.
Its potential significance is not.
The absent becomes culturally portable
Sometimes the association escapes the film altogether.
A theme becomes recognised outside its original context.
People hum it.
Quote it.
Parody it.
Use it to evoke the character or situation elsewhere.
The film has contributed a new cultural sign to the wider reservoir of meaning.
This is what happened, on a large scale, with the Jaws motif.
The shark no longer needs the ocean.
It can be conjured by two notes.
The original audiovisual relation has become cultural shorthand.
But the sign remembers its origins
Even when the music becomes culturally portable, its meaning still carries a history.
The reason the Jaws motif evokes danger is not contained in the intervals themselves.
Its cultural meaning is the sediment of its repeated use and the history of the film.
This reminds us of something we established in From Mattering to Meaning:
Meaning is not an arbitrary label placed on an indifferent form.
It grows from relations.
The musical sign carries the history of those relations.
Beyond the shark
The same mechanism is not limited to leitmotif.
A piece of music can become associated with:
- a particular place;
- a historical period;
- a memory;
- a relationship;
- a state of mind;
- a narrative possibility;
- an entire film.
In each case, music can make something absent present.
The sign does not need to reproduce the absent thing.
It only needs to make the relation available.
The paradox of musical presence
There is therefore a curious paradox.
The more established the musical sign becomes, the less the film needs to show.
A character can disappear.
The music remains.
A memory can be unspoken.
The music evokes it.
A future event can remain unseen.
The music anticipates it.
A relationship can become invisible.
The music keeps it present.
The score gains power partly by becoming independent of the image that taught us how to hear it.
That is one of the deepest transformations in film music.
From absence back to presence
But perhaps we should describe this differently.
The absent character does not actually become physically present.
The music gives the audience a way of construing the present as related to the absent.
That distinction matters.
The score does not conjure a ghost into the frame.
It changes the semiotic field in which the present is experienced.
The absent becomes relevant.
It becomes available.
It becomes part of what the current scene means.
Meaning stretches the present across time.
The next question
We have now seen how a musical sign can invoke what is not visually present.
It can remember the past.
Anticipate the future.
Carry a character's identity.
Mark a relationship.
Make an absent event significant.
Even silence can become meaningful when a musical presence has been established.
But this raises a larger question.
If a score can carry narrative relations that are not explicitly stated in the image or dialogue, then perhaps music is doing more than reminding us of people and events.
Perhaps it is helping construct the story itself.
A musical theme can make a character sympathetic.
Or sinister.
A relationship can become intimate before anyone speaks.
A scene can become memory rather than present action.
A revelation can transform the significance of everything that came before.
The score is no longer merely invoking things.
It is helping determine how the things belong together.
That is our next question:
When does the score become part of the story?
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