Beyond the Score: VII. From Score to Co-Construction

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.

Beyond the Score: VI. Prospero's Books — When the Modes Become Indistinguishable

With The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, we reached a film in which music, colour, movement, space and narrative seemed to be composing one another.

Prospero's Books takes the problem further.

Here the image can contain text.

The text can become image.

The voice can belong simultaneously to a character, a narrator and a literary text.

Bodies can become moving paintings.

Music can provide temporal organisation.

Manuscripts can appear as layers over living bodies.

Digital images can be superimposed upon other digital images.

The film can place several semiotic processes in the same visual field.

At times, it becomes difficult to say where one mode ends and another begins.

This is why the phrase indistinguishable is tempting.

But perhaps the more precise claim is more interesting:

The modes remain different, but their contributions to meaning become so deeply interwoven that isolating them can obscure rather than clarify the work.

A film made of layers

Greenaway's starting point is Shakespeare's The Tempest, but Prospero's Books is not simply a filmed performance of the play.

Roger Ebert described the film as an experiment in form and content, more like an art book or record album than a conventional narrative film. He emphasised the way illuminated pages, typography and illustrations are superimposed over the central images, sometimes in several layers at once.

The BFI similarly describes Prospero's Books as a highly multilayered visual work made possible by new high-definition video technology, with manuscripts, typography and imagery becoming part of its elaborate visual design.

The effect is extraordinary.

A page may appear over a body.

Writing may move across a face.

An illustration may occupy the same visual field as a performance.

Another image may appear above both.

Then one layer may disappear while another remains.

The screen no longer behaves like a window onto a scene.

It behaves more like a palimpsest.

The page becomes image

This immediately complicates our usual distinction between language and visual representation.

A page normally belongs to writing.

It carries words.

The words have semantic and grammatical organisation.

But in Prospero's Books, the page is also an image.

Its typography has shape.

Its layout has spatial organisation.

Its illustrations become visual objects.

Its materiality becomes part of the composition.

The written word therefore participates simultaneously as language and image.

We cannot simply read it and then look at it.

We encounter the two operations together.

The visual arrangement affects how the writing is perceived.

The writing affects how the image is construed.

The mode has not disappeared.

It has become multimodally entangled.

Prospero's books are not merely props

The books are also important at the level of narrative.

Prospero's magical power is inseparable from his books.

They contain knowledge, memory, diagrams, classifications, images and imagined worlds.

Greenaway therefore does something particularly apt.

He makes the books themselves part of the film's visual construction.

The things that, within the story, provide Prospero with knowledge and power become the things that, within the film, generate layers of visual meaning.

The books are simultaneously:

objects within the story,

images on the screen,

written texts,

repositories of knowledge,

sources of magical power,

and formal devices through which the film constructs itself.

A single object participates in several semiotic systems.

The word becomes a visual event

This is one of the most striking features of the film.

We normally think of writing as something we read.

Greenaway also makes us see it.

A word can occupy a position in space.

Its typography can resemble an illustration.

A page can appear, disappear, overlap another page or move across the frame.

The written sign therefore acquires a temporal and spatial life.

It is no longer merely a sequence of words unfolding in reading.

It becomes part of the choreography of the image.

Language has entered visual architecture.

And the image can become readable

The reverse happens too.

An image can begin to behave like text.

The viewer searches it for patterns.

Figures recur.

Objects correspond.

Numbers appear.

Pages suggest classifications.

Images refer to other images.

The film invites us to read visual form.

This is especially characteristic of Greenaway's cinema, which repeatedly turns visual composition into a system of counting, ordering, classification and recurrence. Greenaway himself has spoken of his fascination with numbers and systems, and of the way those systems flow into Nyman's music and its pattern-making.

We are therefore no longer simply watching.

We are reading with the eyes and listening with the form.

Gielgud's voice

Then there is John Gielgud.

He does not simply play Prospero.

Greenaway has him perform the speeches of the other characters as well, so that Shakespeare's voices are all filtered through the voice of Prospero. The BFI describes this as a central feature of the film, while Greenaway himself explained that Prospero's role as a puppeteer made Gielgud's voice an integral part of the film's strategy.

This creates another extraordinary coupling.

The characters are visually separate.

Their voices are not.

The body we see and the voice we hear may therefore belong to different semiotic levels.

Prospero becomes not merely a character within the story but something closer to its narrative operator.

The voice helps generate the world it describes.

Voice becomes architecture

The voice therefore does not merely tell us what the images mean.

It gives them a temporal and narrative organisation.

The spoken Shakespearean text can establish relations between scenes.

It can identify characters.

It can describe events.

But because all the voices pass through Gielgud, language also acquires a structural unity.

The film's many bodies speak through one voice.

Its many visual layers are held together by one narrative presence.

Again, several semiotic relations have been superimposed.

Music enters the palimpsest

Now add Michael Nyman.

The music is no longer simply beneath the images.

It is one of the layers through which the film's temporal organisation is perceived.

The voice has rhythm.

The image has rhythm.

The typography has movement.

The bodies move.

The music repeats and develops.

The film therefore has several simultaneous temporal structures.

And these structures can interact.

A musical recurrence can coincide with a visual recurrence.

A spoken phrase can continue while the image transforms.

A page can appear while music maintains continuity across a visual change.

No single mode controls the whole experience.

The image as manuscript

This perhaps explains why the film feels so unlike conventional cinema.

A conventional film usually asks us to perceive a scene and then interpret the various elements within it.

Prospero's Books often gives us several scenes or levels at once.

One layer does not simply replace another.

It overlays it.

The effect is much closer to opening a manuscript whose pages have become transparent.

The viewer can see several orders simultaneously.

That means the film's meaning cannot easily be reduced to sequential interpretation.

It is stratified.

Stratification without separation

Here we encounter a distinction worth preserving.

The modes are clearly distinct:

words are not images;

images are not music;

voices are not bodies;

music is not typography.

But they are also simultaneously available within the same act of construal.

The film does not ask us to complete one semiotic operation before beginning another.

It makes them interact in parallel.

This is perhaps a stronger form of multimodality than we have yet encountered.

The modes remain separate at one level.

At another, they are inseparable in the meaning they collectively produce.

Greenaway and the body

The body intensifies this effect.

Greenaway has spoken of his desire to restore a corporeal dimension to cinema, drawing upon the tradition of Renaissance painting in which the nude body could act as the centre around which ideas circulate. In Prospero's Books, hundreds of bodies appear within the film's layered visual compositions.

The body therefore becomes another semiotic medium.

It is physical.

Visual.

Erotic.

Performative.

Symbolic.

Mythic.

The body can be read.

It can form patterns.

It can occupy a compositional position.

It can become one element in a larger tableau.

Again, no single mode dominates.

Painting enters film

This is another reason Prospero's Books feels like an art object rather than conventional cinema.

Many of its compositions resemble paintings.

The bodies are arranged.

The light is controlled.

The colours are carefully balanced.

The frame can function like a canvas.

But unlike a painting, the image can move.

Layers can appear.

Words can slide into view.

Music can alter the experience.

Voices can speak.

The film therefore turns the still visual arts into a temporal, multimodal system.

Painting has entered cinema without ceasing to be pictorial.

Cinema becomes something else

At this point, perhaps "film" itself becomes an insufficient description.

Greenaway's work draws upon:

theatre,

painting,

literature,

manuscripts,

music,

dance,

typography,

digital compositing,

performance.

The result is not simply a film containing references to these media.

Their formal possibilities have become resources for constructing the film itself.

The work is therefore better understood as a multimodal composition in which cinema is the organising environment.

The technology matters

This would not have been possible in quite the same way without digital technology.

The BFI notes that Prospero's Books made extensive use of then-new high-definition video technology to create its intricate visual layering.

Greenaway himself described how computer paintbox techniques made it possible to create layered images resembling transparent sheets in an old anatomical textbook.

The technology therefore did not simply improve the picture.

It changed what kinds of multimodal composition were possible.

New technical potential produced new semiotic potential.

That is an important point.

Technology as semiotic affordance

A medium's technology determines not only what can be displayed but what can be composed.

Digital layering makes it possible to place several visual planes together.

Editing makes it possible to rearrange time.

Synchronous sound allows voice, image and music to become tightly coupled.

Digital compositing allows text to move through visual space.

The technology becomes part of the film's semiotic ecology.

A new technical capability can therefore generate new artistic possibilities.

The book becomes the film

There is perhaps a wonderful conceptual reversal at work.

The film is called Prospero's Books.

Yet the books are not simply represented within the film.

They become a model for the film's own form.

A book contains layers of text and image.

The film contains layers of image, text, voice and music.

A book can be opened to different pages.

The film can move between different visual layers.

A book can preserve knowledge.

The film becomes an archive of knowledge, image and memory.

The object represented by the film becomes a model for the way the film itself is constructed.

The representation has become reflexive.

Prospero as a model of the filmmaker

The same reflexivity appears in Prospero himself.

He controls books.

Words.

Images.

Spirits.

Bodies.

Voices.

He constructs a world through magical knowledge.

Gielgud's Prospero therefore becomes an extraordinary analogue of the filmmaker.

He is the figure who appears to control the relations among modes.

But the film complicates this.

Prospero is also inside the world he has created.

He is both maker and participant.

That gives the film a strong reflexive dimension.

The medium is not simply representing a magician.

It is using a magician to reflect on the making of worlds through representation.

Meaning among meanings

This brings us very close to the conceptual language developed in our earlier work.

A sign can become a resource for another sign.

A meaning can become a resource for another meaning.

Here we see entire semiotic modes becoming resources for one another.

Text can become image.

Image can become narrative.

Narrative can organise music.

Music can organise movement.

Movement can organise image.

Voice can unify characters.

The film becomes a relation among relations among meanings.

Can the modes really become indistinguishable?

Now we can return to our title.

Strictly speaking, no.

The modes remain distinguishable.

We can still identify a musical passage.

We can still identify a line of Shakespeare.

We can still distinguish a body from an image of a body.

We can still recognise typography as typography.

The distinction does not disappear.

What disappears is the usefulness of assuming that each mode contributes a separately isolable portion of the overall meaning.

The modes are not indistinguishable as modes.

They become difficult to disentangle as contributors to the meaning of the work.

That is a more precise claim.

From contribution to co-construction

This gives us perhaps the strongest formulation yet of co-construction.

In ordinary scoring:

music contributes to the meaning of an image.

In multimodal recruitment:

music and image alter one another's construal.

In the more radical Greenaway cases:

music, image, voice, text, movement and space participate in constructing one another's conditions of meaning.

No single mode can be treated as the primary carrier.

The film's meaning is emergent from the system.

The viewer has to learn how to see it

There is one final participant.

The viewer.

Prospero's Books does not provide an easy path through its layers.

The audience has to learn how to look.

To notice recurring motifs.

To connect text and image.

To allow several layers to remain in attention simultaneously.

To hear Gielgud's voice in relation to multiple bodies.

To recognise the music as another structuring layer.

The film therefore places unusual demands upon the viewer's repertoire.

It is not simply giving us more information.

It is teaching us to construe differently.

The film expands the repertoire

This is perhaps the ultimate consequence.

A film like Prospero's Books can expand what an audience thinks a film can be.

After encountering such a work, the viewer has a new potential available to them.

They can imagine text as image.

Music as architecture.

Voice as multiple characterisation.

Digital layering as narrative form.

The film has changed not only what the viewer knows.

It has changed what they regard as possible in cinema.

A particular artwork has therefore altered the potential of the medium.

From score to co-construction

We can now see the trajectory of the series.

The conventional score accompanies.

Kubrick shows music opposing the image and reorganising its construal.

2001 shows music participating in large-scale visual structure.

Greenaway and Nyman push toward architecture.

The Cook, the Thief... shows music, colour, movement, space and bodies composing a saturated formal system.

Prospero's Books layers text, image, voice, music, bodies and digital technologies into a single complex field.

The progression is not toward the disappearance of modes.

It is toward their increasing mutual dependence.

The strange thing about multimodality

We began by assuming that different modes contribute different meanings.

That is still true.

But Prospero's Books suggests that something happens when enough such contributions become interdependent.

The question "Which mode means what?" begins to lose explanatory power.

The more interesting question becomes:

What relations among modes make this meaning possible?

This is a major conceptual shift.

We are no longer analysing a collection of channels.

We are analysing a system of co-constraining potentials.

A semiotic ecology becomes an artwork

We can therefore push our earlier idea of the film as a semiotic ecology further.

An ecology is a system in which elements affect one another.

A work such as Prospero's Books makes those relations unusually visible.

Music affects temporal organisation.

Text affects visual attention.

Images affect how text is read.

Voice affects bodies.

Bodies affect the meaning of text.

Technology makes new combinations possible.

The viewer learns the system as they encounter it.

The work becomes a self-contained ecology of meaning-making.

And this may be the furthest we need to go

We began this series by asking what happens when music ceases to be simply accompaniment.

We have now reached a point at which the question itself may have dissolved.

In Prospero's Books, it is no longer especially illuminating to ask:

What does the music do to the film?

or:

What does the image do to the music?

The more revealing question is:

What does the configuration of music, image, text, voice, body, movement and technology make possible that none could make possible alone?

That is the question of co-construction.

And it points toward our final task.

We have examined extraordinary cases.

Kubrick.

Greenaway.

Nyman.

2001.

A Clockwork Orange.

The Cook, the Thief....

Prospero's Books.

Now we need to step back.

What, exactly, have these atypical films taught us about cinema and meaning that a conventional theory of scoring could not?

Have we really moved beyond the score?

Or have we discovered that the score was never quite the right unit of analysis?

That is the question with which we will bring the series to its conclusion.

From score to co-construction.

Beyond the Score: V. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover — Music, Image and Excess

By the time we reach The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, the question of the film score has become almost inadequate.

There is music.

There is colour.

There is food.

There are bodies.

There is movement.

There is architecture.

There is costume.

There is language.

There is violence.

There is eroticism.

And there is an almost overwhelming density of visual and auditory pattern.

The film does not simply contain these things.

It composes them.

Peter Greenaway's cinema was already committed to systematic organisation. The BFI describes his films as built around predetermined structures — alphabetical, numerical, pictorial, musical and chemical — while Greenaway himself has spoken of his fascination with numbers and systems. He also explicitly connects the "flow" of those systems with Michael Nyman's music and its repetitive, pattern-making character.

In The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, that tendency becomes almost overwhelming.

Perhaps that is why excess is the right word.

The film does not merely give us more.

It gives us so much that the boundaries between its modes begin to blur.

A world organised by colour

The restaurant is divided into spaces whose dominant colours change dramatically: the dining room is red, the kitchen green, the bathrooms white. Costumes change colour as characters move from one space to another.

This is not naturalistic colour.

The spaces do not merely happen to look different.

Colour becomes a system.

Movement through the restaurant becomes movement through a sequence of visual domains.

A character crosses a threshold and the colour of their clothing changes.

The same person therefore appears differently according to the space they occupy.

Space becomes a semiotic resource.

Colour becomes part of the film's grammar of movement.

And music enters this system.

Nyman's music does not merely occupy the spaces

Michael Nyman's Memorial is perhaps the most important musical presence in the film.

It does not simply accompany the action.

Its repeated structures establish continuity across scenes whose visual environments are constantly changing.

The music creates an ongoing temporal field against which the film's spaces can change.

The colour changes.

The bodies change position.

The camera moves.

The food is prepared.

The lovers meet.

The violence escalates.

But the musical organisation gives the whole sequence a kind of continuity.

The film can therefore change almost everything except the underlying formal relation.

Music provides one of the threads through the excess.

And the music was there first

There is an extraordinary fact about the climactic sequence.

Nyman tells us that the sequence was deliberately choreographed to his pre-existing Memorial. In other words, the conventional direction of film scoring was reversed. The music did not merely respond to an already completed sequence; the visual action was constructed around music that already existed.

This changes the conceptual problem.

We are no longer simply asking:

How does music change the image?

We can now ask:

What kind of image becomes possible when the music is one of the conditions under which the image is constructed?

That is architecture in the strongest sense.

The music has become part of the conditions of possibility of the visual sequence.

Choreography rather than accompaniment

Once the sequence is choreographed to the music, bodies and camera movements can become elements in a temporal form established musically.

Movement acquires duration.

Camera movement acquires rhythm.

Visual recurrence can correspond to musical recurrence.

A change of colour can coincide with a change in musical organisation.

The scene begins to behave like a single composition distributed across modes.

It would be misleading to say that the image "illustrates" Memorial.

It does not.

Nor does the music simply "illustrate" the image.

The two are mutually organised.

The restaurant becomes a score

The restaurant itself begins to resemble a musical structure.

There are recurring spaces.

Recurring movements.

Recurring people.

Recurring colours.

Recurring actions.

And there are differences within repetition.

The lovers appear in different locations.

The same visual system is reconfigured.

The camera revisits spaces.

The music returns.

The viewer begins to perceive not isolated events but variations within a formal system.

The restaurant becomes something like a score written in space.

The kitchen, dining room and bathroom

This is particularly striking because the spaces have different functions but also become different expressive worlds.

The dining room is associated with the violence and grotesque sociability of the restaurant.

The kitchen is associated with preparation, labour and the creation of food.

The bathroom becomes a space of secrecy and intimacy.

The lovers move between these worlds.

The colours change.

Their clothes change.

The musical continuity persists.

The result is a peculiar sensation: the characters seem to be moving through different states of one composed environment.

The film does not merely locate action in space.

It makes space itself part of the meaning-making system.

Bodies become part of the architecture

The human body is drawn into this system too.

Clothing changes with space.

Characters move in choreographed patterns.

The camera tracks them.

Food is carried.

Tables are arranged.

Bodies are displayed.

The restaurant becomes a stage whose movements are governed by formal relations.

This is one reason the film can feel almost theatrical and painterly at the same time.

The BFI describes Greenaway as a multimedia artist and notes the immaculately composed nature of his images; commentary on The Cook likewise emphasises its saturated colours, choreographed camera movement and elaborate visual construction.

The image is not merely showing action.

The action is composed as image.

And the music participates in that composition.

Excess as formal organisation

The film's excess is not simply a matter of quantity.

There is too much colour.

Too much food.

Too much decoration.

Too much movement.

Too much violence.

Too much beauty.

Too much sensuality.

But the excess is itself organised.

This is crucial.

The film does not produce an undifferentiated sensory flood.

It gives the excess structure.

Colour differentiates spaces.

Music establishes continuity.

Camera movement creates trajectories.

Repetition establishes pattern.

Costume marks transitions.

Food becomes visual material.

The apparent abundance is therefore held together by formal relations.

The excess is composed excess.

Meaning through saturation

This creates a different kind of multimodal meaning from the relatively sparse shark experiment.

The shark study demonstrated that one changed mode can alter the construal of another.

Greenaway gives us a system in which many modes are changing one another simultaneously.

The music affects the sense of movement.

Colour affects the sense of space.

Space affects the significance of bodies.

Bodies affect how we experience the music.

Food affects the sensory character of the image.

The dialogue and narrative give these formal relations a story.

The resulting meaning cannot easily be assigned to any one mode.

It belongs increasingly to the saturated configuration.

The music and the image can exceed one another

This also changes our notion of multimodal correspondence.

The music does not have to match the image exactly.

The image does not have to reproduce the musical form.

Each can exceed the other.

The music can continue while the image changes.

The image can accumulate detail while the music maintains a repetitive pattern.

A visual transformation can occur inside an unchanged musical framework.

A musical transformation can reorganise how we experience a visually continuous space.

The relation between the modes therefore produces a kind of surplus.

Something remains after we have accounted for each mode separately.

That surplus is where co-construction becomes visible.

The lovers

The relationship between Georgina and Michael provides a particularly revealing case.

The film repeatedly places their relationship within the restaurant's highly organised visual and musical world.

A critical discussion of the film notes the recurring musical phrase associated with the lovers, while the visual organisation of the restaurant changes around them.

The result is significant.

Their relationship is not simply represented through dialogue or performance.

It acquires a formal identity.

The music helps make the relationship recognisable.

The spaces through which they move give it visual form.

Their bodies and movements give it temporal and spatial expression.

The colour changes as they move from one part of the restaurant to another.

The relationship has become a multimodal event.

Love and the restaurant

This also creates a striking contrast.

The restaurant is controlled by Albert Spica's grotesque appetite and violence.

The lovers' relationship develops inside that same environment.

Their intimacy therefore becomes meaningful partly through its opposition to the system surrounding it.

The musical and visual organisation can make this difference perceptible without explicitly explaining it.

Love appears as a different mode of relation within the same architectural system.

The film does not merely tell us that the lovers belong together.

It gives their relation a formal coherence.

Food becomes more than food

Food is another essential component of the film's multimodality.

It is material.

It is visual.

It is sensual.

It is social.

It is connected to pleasure, labour, hierarchy, consumption and violence.

And because the film is about a restaurant, food is already part of its narrative structure.

But Greenaway makes it part of the visual architecture too.

The abundance of food contributes to the film's sensory excess.

It also helps establish the moral contrast between refinement and brutality.

Food therefore participates simultaneously in several systems.

The same material resource can matter gastronomically, visually, socially and symbolically.

The title itself becomes a system

Even the title is doing formal work:

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.

Four roles.

Four positions.

A system of relations.

The characters are initially defined almost archetypically.

The film then complicates those positions through movement, desire and betrayal.

The categories remain recognisable while their relations change.

This is another recurring Greenaway principle.

A structure is established.

Then it is subjected to variation.

Meaning emerges from both.

Visual quotation and cultural repertoire

The film also draws on the history of Western visual culture, particularly seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painting. Critics and scholars have frequently noted this relationship between the film's sumptuous materiality and its painterly visual world.

This gives the film another layer of semiotic depth.

The viewer's cultural repertoire can bring paintings, still lifes, banquets, theatrical compositions and historical ideas about taste into the experience of the scene.

Greenaway does not need to explain these references.

The visual form recruits them.

Nyman's music adds another repertoire.

So does the theatrical tradition behind the narrative.

The film becomes a meeting place for several cultural histories.

Excess creates a perceptual problem

There is another important consequence.

Greenaway gives the viewer so much to perceive that attention itself becomes part of the film.

One critical account describes the crowded frames as presenting an array of stimuli rather than directing the viewer's attention to a single privileged element.

This is important for our theory.

The film does not necessarily tell us what matters.

It creates a field in which we must select what becomes salient.

The viewer's repertoire therefore becomes part of the film's semiotic ecology.

We scan.

Select.

Connect.

Remember.

Compare.

The film's meaning is partly produced through this active organisation of attention.

Music helps organise the excess

This is another role for Nyman's music.

When the image becomes saturated with simultaneous information, musical repetition can give the viewer a temporal thread.

The eye can move across the frame.

The body can move through the space.

But the music supplies continuity.

A repeated musical figure can give shape to the accumulation.

The listener knows that something is persisting even while the visual field changes.

The score therefore becomes an organising memory for the image.

The film as relation among relations

At this point, our earlier formulation becomes especially useful.

A sign is a relation.

A multimodal configuration places relations among other relations.

Here we have:

colour relations,

spatial relations,

bodily relations,

narrative relations,

musical relations,

cultural relations.

The film composes them.

Its meaning therefore becomes something like a relation among relations among relations.

We are several steps beyond the simple model of a sign pointing to an object.

The music does not have to mean the same thing

This is why it would be misleading to ask what Memorial "means" in the film in isolation.

The music has its own identity.

Its own structure.

Its own cultural history.

The film gives it a new role.

But that role does not exhaust the music's meaning.

Likewise, the visual composition has its own history.

The colours have cultural associations.

The spaces have practical functions.

The bodies have narrative roles.

The food has material properties.

The film does not reduce any of these to a single symbolic meaning.

It makes them participate together.

The film becomes more than its modes

Perhaps this is the crucial point.

We can analyse the music.

We can analyse the colour.

We can analyse the editing.

We can analyse the acting.

We can analyse the food.

But after we have analysed them individually, something remains.

The film as a whole has a quality that none of these components possesses alone.

That remainder is not mysterious.

It is emergent from their relations.

The work is more than the inventory of its materials.

Why "excess"?

This is why I think excess is an important word for the title.

The film gives us more than we need for straightforward narrative comprehension.

That surplus is not accidental.

It creates the conditions for richer cross-modal relations.

The music does not merely accompany the plot.

The colour does not merely distinguish rooms.

The food does not merely establish that this is a restaurant.

The camera does not merely show people moving.

Each resource has an excess of possibilities.

The film brings those possibilities into relation.

Meaning emerges from the overflow.

The boundaries begin to blur

We can now understand why this film brings us close to the conceptual limit of "score" altogether.

Where exactly does the music stop?

The musical structure establishes movement.

The movement establishes visual rhythm.

The camera follows the movement.

The colour marks the spatial transitions.

The costumes respond to the spaces.

The spaces organise the bodies.

The bodies enact the narrative.

The narrative changes our hearing of the music.

The music changes our experience of the narrative.

There is no obvious point at which one mode simply hands meaning over to another.

They form a coupled system.

And yet they remain different

But the boundaries have not literally disappeared.

We can still hear the music independently.

We can still see the colours independently.

We can still describe the narrative.

We can still identify the camera movement.

The modes remain materially and formally distinct.

What has changed is the degree to which their organisation is mutually constitutive.

This is why "indistinguishable" should not yet be our conclusion.

The more interesting claim is that the distinctions remain while becoming less sufficient.

We can distinguish the modes analytically.

But the meaning of the work cannot be reconstructed simply by adding their separate meanings together.

From architecture to co-construction

This is the point at which our working distinction between recruitment and co-construction becomes useful.

The earlier film-score cases demonstrated recruitment.

Music enters an audiovisual system and changes its meaning.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover pushes toward co-construction.

The music participates in the conditions under which the visual sequence is organised.

The image, in turn, participates in the way the music functions.

Colour, movement, space and narrative become part of the same formal field.

The work begins to look like something that is constructed through the relations among modes.

The next step is even more radical

And yet Greenaway has not reached the furthest point.

In The Cook, we can still distinguish a relatively clear hierarchy of music, image, narrative and performance.

But Prospero's Books will make that hierarchy much harder to sustain.

There we encounter:

Shakespeare's language;

Gielgud's voice;

music;

singing;

typography;

manuscripts;

painting;

bodies;

dance;

digital superimposition;

framing;

movement;

multiple layers of image.

The modes do not merely accompany one another.

They can occupy the same visual field simultaneously.

A word can be an image.

An image can contain a word.

A voice can belong to a character and to a literary text.

Music can establish a temporal layer over a composite visual field.

The film can become a palimpsest of semiotic modes.

The question changes again

With The Cook, we asked:

How can music become part of the architecture of the film?

The answer seems to be:

By entering the organisation of movement, recurrence, space and temporal form.

With Prospero's Books, the question becomes more radical:

What happens when there is no longer a single dominant mode around which the others are organised?

What happens when text becomes image?

When image becomes stage?

When voice becomes both character and quotation?

When music becomes one layer in a composition of many simultaneous symbolic forms?

Perhaps then we finally reach the point at which "score" becomes an inadequate concept.

And that is where we go next.

What happens when the modes become so deeply interwoven that the film itself becomes a single multilayered act of construal?

Beyond the Score: IV. Greenaway — When Music Becomes Architecture

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.