Editorial: Recent Music for Film
For lack of another place to introduce
myself, this seems to be the spot. My name’s Michael McLennan. I’m an
econometrician trying to make a full-time jump to film-making (I’ve made three
short films as writer/director), and I’ve been a soundtrack collector since
year nine high school in 1995. Firstly, I must apologise for our regular
readers that this edition of FMOTW comes a couple of weeks later than expected
– I’m still finding my feet as editor, and the choice of update time was poor
planning on my part. I intend to make sure the late May update will come closer
to running on schedule. Secondly, I’m very honoured that Ian Lace has asked me
to edit the site’s updates, and while it’s been an eye-opener to what editing
material for publication must be like in the print world, I’ve found it a steep
learning curve putting it all together with the (very-patient) Tina Huang. Thirdly,
I should thank all our reviewers for all their efforts for this update – I
really appreciate your work guys.
Reviewing recent music for film
One of the things I feel is a bit remiss of
soundtrack review sites is overemphasis on the soundtrack album as a delivery
device for music that otherwise would never be heard in its pure form unsaddled
by sound effects and dialogue. Yes, we’re reviewing the product, but it
couldn’t hurt I feel to consider the motivations of the music as an element of
storytelling through film. So I’m experimenting here with the idea of a column
that tries to discuss a soundtrack album as though it was a way to reflect on
how the music worked in the originating films.
This is close to the way I treat soundtrack
albums to those films I love – as a way to re-insert myself into the experience
of a film and capture again the emotions bound to that music via the synchresis
of the image and sound. For anyone with a good memory for what music
accompanies what image, neither operates on its own anymore – it’s impossible
to completely separate the feelings generated by image and music when listening
to the music, even if prior to experiencing the film, the music might not have
had anywhere near the structural power or emotional content it does after.
(Actually, Howard Shore’s Fellowship of the Ring album on Reprise
Records back in 2001 didn’t really connect to me at all until I saw the film
beyond the pleasant pastoral material for the Shire and the finale.)
Actually, the relationship between the
feelings generated by the music and by the artwork as whole is even more
connected than that. Like many soundtrack collectors, being attuned to the
musical voices of different film composers, I find myself buying their works
whether I’ve seen the film or not, and often as a prelude to looking at the
film. In this way, a higher proportion of music used in film is familiar to me
in a way that the classical or rock standards used in Kubrick’s 2001: A
Space Odyssey or Hopper’s Easy Rider respectively are familiar to
the average filmgoer. So for me, unless I’m too overwhelmed by the moment to
think clearly, I usually recognise most music when I hear it in the film, even
if it’s only having a vague sense of where the next note will be.
This obviously has a radical effect on how
music in films seems to me. I’m obviously very sensitive to the work of the
music editor – I pick up the deviations from material I know. Also, as the
music is the first part of the film I’ve experienced, the other elements of the
film-making very much act as contrasting colours to the music, which is of course
the opposite reaction to what the end-of-the-film-conveyer-belt position of
soundtrack production would suggest. I point this out, because obviously it
influences how I experience a film as a whole. Hopefully this column will
combine a bit of my own prejudices towards film music for its own sake, and my
desire to find out what really does work best for film.
For this time around, I’ve picked a very
socially conscious film that left an impression on me: Fernando Mereilles’s
adaptation of John le Carre’s The Constant Gardener. I was impressed by
the film’s blend of love story and thriller, even if I think at its base, it
handled the former element far better than the latter, though it didn’t seem
that way at the time.
The Constant Gardener
Music composed and conducted by Alberto Iglesias
Higher Octave Music (EMI 09463-36887-2-8)
See Also: April 2006 Publication Review of The Constant Gardener
Alberto Iglesias’ score
for The Constant Gardener, of all the five Oscar nominees for Best
Original Score, seemed to encourage the most ambivalence from those who notice
film music most. Partly this is the way Oscar trends work, and The Constant
Gardener was a surprising inclusion by these standards. At least Brokeback
Mountain, for all the relative simplicity of its score, was attached to a
film whose technical nominations could be said to be part of the parcel of
being the big fish in the Oscar pond – films nominated for Best Picture tend to
get many other nominations besides, whether they deserve them or not. But what
of The Constant Gardener? What precedent was there for the prestige,
when the film was shut out of awards in the most relevant categories –
cinematography, direction and acting?
The Score Concept
I believe there’s something more than
politics to the ambivalence with which this music is regarded. It is written by
a European composer (no problems there), but with the intention of serving as a
voice for the people held victim to pharmaceutical amorality, the people of
Kenya in the literal space of the film, but as these are surrogates for the
economically-disadvantaged all the world over, so too the music is straining to
be the voice of a globally disadvantaged people. To suggest the specificity of
the film’s fanciful application, Iglesias works with musical structures that
are very specifically sub-Saharan African in origin –polyrhythmic counterpoint,
with a wide array of rhythmic timbres to create discernible coincident layers
of rhythm. (Those who do not fear the wisdom of wikipedia and want to know more
should check it out: here.)
The story thus gives Iglesias his musical form – one that is geographically true.
But his choice of colouration involves far
more lateral thinking, and speaks to the bilateral drama of the film – English
people in Kenya – and the global subtext of the story (that people in all disadvantaged
countries are disposable life for the wealthy). There’s an orchestra of strings
back there somewhere – an old Iglesias weapon of choice that he uses sparingly,
but effectively, here. There is of course a carefully selected percussion
section (Paul Clarvis), and a variety of culturally appropriate instruments for
Africa – the plucked nyatiti and voice of Ayub Ogada. Unsurprisingly
there are more standard western colours – things like the marimba standing in
for the local equivalent of the xylophone, but also western instruments with no
local equivalents, piano, harp, clarinet, viola, cello – these are the white
Anglo-Saxon protagonists whose interactions in local affairs are the subject of
the story.
And then there’re instruments that don’t
have anything to do with the English protagonists or their Kenyan hosts: the
baritone sax, zumara, kawala, Turkish clarinet, ronroco (a Brazillian charango),
and an accordion. These colours, noticeable throughout the score, are where
Iglesias draws a connection between the plight of the sufferers in the story,
and the economically deprived all-the-world over. The ronroco takes us to Brazil,
and the slums of Mereilles’s previous film City of God. The duduk-like Turkish clarinet,
and the shriller timbres of the single-reed zumara and the kawala flute put us in the proximity of the Middle East,
and populations on the edge of political existence. And the accordion? It’s a
stretch, but perhaps Iglesias included that one for himself. (His scores for Carne
Tremolo and The Dancer Upstairs also showcase accordion.)
It should have sounded like John Barry…
So you have music based on dense
polyrhythmic counterpoint, featuring an array of colours from all corners of
‘world music’. Now among soundtrack aficionados, there is a strong, you could
almost say a stubborn, preference for minimal deviation from
theme-and-variation structure, voiced in romantic idioms by, of course, an
orchestral voice. Automatically, Iglesias’s score, which must seem like a
strange blend of world music and pop music (polyrhythmic forms being familiar
from jazz and blues of course), is discounted. Because to an ear given over to
orchestral works in non-contemporary forms, world music difficult to access,
and pop music about as far from what they want their film music to be as
possible. (By contrast, Santaolalla’s music for Brokeback Mountain is quite melodic, but with minimal variation from the core material,
prompting the response ‘Is that all?’) And while I can appreciate the reasons
for this, I do think we limit our appreciation of music for film by not
allowing ourselves to be affected by forms of music that we regard as beneath
our attention. Iglesias’s score for The Constant Gardener isn’t pop
music or world music – it’s film music, by a capable and intuitive dramatist.
The perfect score for a film set in Kenya in the preferred approach would seem to be John Barry’s beautiful orchestral score for Out
of Africa. Now Barry rightly reasoned in his scoring of Sydney Pollack’s
film that he was scoring the feelings of a European woman, not a sense of
place, and that his lilting string themes were emotionally more appropriate to
smooth a western audience into the world of Karen Blixen than any concessions
to local cultural reality. And it’s a classic, and understood to be one. It’s
no coincidence that the most popular sections of Gabriel Yared’s subtle English
Patient score, and Niki Reiser’s score for Nowhere in Africa, are those
that follow Barry’s example – where scoring the setting does not involve
extensive use of traditional music styles.
A Thriller, and a Love Story
But if music is to be emotionally
appropriate, the needs of the film must come into account. A glib reading of The
Constant Gardener is that it is the same situation as Out of Africa:
white people running around Kenya acting as surrogates for a Sunday
afternoon crowd. But they’re very different films – Pollack’s film is a
travelogue and feminine-discovery-of-independence story – wonder and loneliness
are the preferred expressions. Mereilles’ film is a thriller delving in conspiracy
theories, dark deeds, unexplained actions, and unexpected revelations – shock, mystery,
and finally, love, are the key ideas here. The prevalent mode should be one of
discomfort. Holding back satisfyingly coherent tonally-centred themes until
those one or two moments in the film where they really pay off, moving musical
ideas around in short motif form, playing with the tension-inducing power of
polyphony and the emotional power of colour – this is what Iglesias’s score
does to perfection.
I believe his success is in avoiding a more
typical score structure and idiom. He catches us off guard and yet his less
recognisable music is no less effective in achieving its results. I’ve become
used to figuring out how a score is working as I’m seeing a film, but in the
case of The Constant Gardener, I couldn’t really get a handle on the
structure of the music, only its effects. It’s only with repeated viewings that
I’ve been able to get a better understanding of the structure of the score, and
I think it’s to his credit that Iglesias subverts comfortable approaches to
music for film. The spotting is subtle for the most part, and the gratifying
thematic cues never trump the story as a result – they feel like they’ve been
earned, much like John Williams’s score for Munich. (Which is not to say
that the music doesn’t play well on its own, more that you won’t remember it
specifically for a given scene of the film, because chances are it was working
too subtly for you to notice it was even there. You only felt the effects of it
being there.)
So how is this score put together? For
reasons mentioned above, it’s a hard score to talk about in terms of themes.
They’re there for those who look for them, but they’re so associated with
particular colours that it’s more useful to talk about the score in terms of
timbre. And attention to the dramatic effect of texture is what distinguishes
the writing here, showcased in impressive set pieces for special
instrumentation. I’m going to look at the relationship between ideas and
colours throughout the film.
Grief – ethnic woodwinds and choir
A great deal of the story concerns grief,
and the slow way it overcomes. The Turkish clarinet opens with a melancholy
ascending theme over solemn low strings in ‘Tessa’s Death’. Both the theme and
the string writing (a slow rhythmic dirge) are recognisably the work of the
composer of The Dancer Upstairs and the Almodovar films. The ambivalence
of the single reed instrument here is like Justin’s grief – it comes slowly.
The bird-like kawala (an Egyptian short end-blown cane flute) takes up the cue
at the halfway mark, with light guitar and percussion accompaniment. A bass
flute motif closes the cue. (Remarkably, all these winds and flutes are played
by the same musician – Javier Paxarino – a composer in his own right.) The
turkish clarinet returns in ‘Justin returns to the house’, but the grief here
is undercut by suspicion of Tessa’s fidelity, voiced by ambivalent clarinet and
guitar motifs.
In ‘Funeral’, Justin visibly starts to show
his grief as gravediggers attempt to encase his wife’s coffin in cement. In the
score’s first genuinely emotional piece, a spare piano theme with African male
choir accompaniment renders the sadness intimate (the piano) and connects it to
a history of human experience of grief (the choir). The climax of the album,
coming about halfway through the film, is ‘Justin’s Breakdown’. A grief
stricken dialogue for Turkish clarinet and kuwala leads into a haunting choral
reprise of the ‘Funeral’ theme. Combined with Fiennes’s passionate devastation,
it’s a heartbreaking scene. Trilling dissonant kawala writing over accelerating
overlapping percussion and string rhythms bring the cue to a climax as a flood
of images bring the past back to the Fiennes character. Sadly the ‘Dropped Off
at Lake Turkana’ cue is not the film version – the film featuring a haunting
cello solo where this cue highlights the Turkish clarinet in a manner almost
identical to ‘Justin returns to the house’.
The choir is only used in one other
prominent place in the score, the Sudan sequence, as aid workers are evacuated
and locals left to defend for themselves when horseback bandits come to raid
the town for slaves and goods. (Were it not for its climactic place in the
film, you wouldn’t necessarily buy the scene – it one of the more fanciful le
Carre setpieces.) After a strident percussion and strings piece that lends suspense
to the arrival of the bandits, Iglesias scores against the frantic action drives the
suspense preceding the band’s arrival, Iglesias scores against the frantic
action with less thematic writing for choir (similar to some vocal ideas in
John Williams’s Amistad) to capture the loss of life in the ‘Raid’. The
grief here is intended to be the viewer’s – the main character is not privy to
this view, it is something shown to the western audience to shame them for
indifference. (The mournful Turkish clarinet solo of ‘Destruction’ works in a
similar way.)
Solo vocal – the spirit of activism
The main theme of the score of sorts is
ironically a piece of pre-existing music by the performer of vocals in the
Iglesias score. The Ayub Ogada song ‘Kothbiro’, an elegiac vocal piece with
piano and guitar support that serves as a musical theme for the compassionate
activism that arises from personal loss. When Tessa’s baby dies, it underscores
her immersion into exposing the underbelly of pharmaceutical companies. When
Justin continues her work after her death, it underscores the sense he has of
getting closer to her by continuing her work. When both lovers lie dead at the
end of the film, the use of ‘Kothbiro’ over the end credits suggests that Tessa
and Justin have connected through their martyrdom – that they leave the world
together. (It is also almost a call for people who would give their lives to
make a difference, an uncompromising pacifism.)
Fragments of the song appear for solo
guitar and piano throughout the score, the closest thing to a driving theme. I
suspect it was tracked over some of Iglesias’s original writing for the film,
and while the spotting is well executed, the piece comes with a feeling of
being faded in and out rather than being tailored to the scene – never quite
finishing. (The price of using music for film that isn’t written exactly for
the image.) Parts of ‘Hospital’ and ‘Destruction’ seem to be replaced by this
piece. While ‘Kothbiro’ is beautiful in context, it would have been interesting
to hear the more subtle score cues in their place. Fortunately the instrumental
base of the song and the vocalist are integrated into the whole score, and the
pieces don’t sound out of place at all.
There is another Ayub Ogada song ‘Dicholo’,
with vocals, nyatiti, and kawala. If ‘Kothbiro’ is elegiac, this is sprightly,
underscoring Tessa’s initial unblinkered foray into activism in the slums.
Guitar, ronroco, harp – marital bliss
The guitar and the ronroco are used so
prevalently through the score, that it may seem foolish to assign it a dramatic
function, but I believe this colour has a lot to do with relationship of Justin
and Tessa – whether it is passionate love or the awkward ennui of early marital
blues. Opening for harp, accompaniment in the form of guitar and nyatiti gently
interplay in a beautiful simple theme in ‘Tessa in the Bath’, a scene of
marital bliss that is unsettled by the intrusion of an email that suggests
Tessa’s infidelity (dissonant kawala vibrato). Over tenser overlapping rhythms
for marimba with dissonant flute interaction, the gentle timbre of the ronroco
recalls this theme in ‘Hospital’. After the death of her baby, the tension
between the two undercuts the bond of the couple, and the guitar writing here
reflects that.
Question-shaped ascending guitar motifs raise
doubts on Tessa’s fidelity after her death in ‘Justin Returns to the House’.
The same motifs return in ‘Dropped off at Turkana’ as Justin crosses the salt
lake to the site of her death, those questions resolved, but with doubts in his
mind as to how he can get closer to her now her work is complete. And in the
film’s most extraordinary cue, a masterpiece of subtlety, the second half of
‘Justin’s Death’ is a piece for ronroco and guitar that underscores Justin’s
wait for the men who killed his wife. It almost sounds like aleatoric writing,
though it hits too many marks in the scene to have been anything other than
carefully composed counterpoint for two skilful players. The little motifs for
guitar from the earlier cues return, speeded up, tumbling over each other
towards the inevitability of the main character’s death.
The extreme of Justin’s love in this scene is
such that he will give his life to see her work succeed (he seems to be a
fatalistic sort) – and the music is the culmination of the music that has
accompanied their love throughout, plucked and strummed timbres. The dramatic
effect of the piece is not of coming death, though there is an ominous passage
dovetailing the rounding-the-corner of the assassin’s car. Rather it’s one of
coming ascension, and of the nervous heartbeat of a committed man as he waits
for the martyrdom he’s actively sought. And at the end, the guitarists simply
stop playing, as though they were distracted from their dialogue – the final
space of silence before the credits, thankfully not punctuated by gunshots, is
magical.
(Another nice aspect of ‘Justin’s Death’ is
the first half – while mixed below dialogue in the film’s penultimate sequence,
the three sections – the delightfully ambivalent clarinet over jazzy
cymbal-snare hits, the flute solo, and the guitar solo – all perfectly
underline the emotional needs of that speech. It’s a bit on-the-nose in the
film, but so is the scene, and the film has possibly earned it by this stage.)
Polyrhythmic writing – the travelogue and the thriller
As a story of latter day colonialists in
Africa, there is unavoidably a travelogue aspect – and Mereilles lifts it by
showing us an Africa we haven’t really seen before. For Justin’s first
investigations into his wife’s death, Iglesias wrote ‘Roadblock I’, an allegro
travel montage cue with multiple rhythmic lines in a number of unique colours –
including accordion, guitar, ronroco, staccato African male vocals, marimba and
nyatiti – while David Daniels’ cello arcs a beautiful melody through the piece.
The melody is passed between the various participating instruments, creating a
piece fluid in its separation of rhythmic and melodic voices. Sadly it wasn’t
used in its complete form in the film. (Nor was ‘Roadblock II’ for that matter,
another polyrhythmic piece presumably written for the same scene with similar
instrumental base and prominent vocals by featured vocalist Ayub Ogada and the
Turkish clarinet.)
As the film progresses, the journeys take Justin
further into the mystery behind his wife’s death and the knowledge of
wrongdoing, and the travelogue aspect becomes less significant. Rather than
packaging the landscape, Iglesias counterpoints the images with motion and
tension. ‘To Airport’ is dense polyphonic percussion writing as Justin is
packed back to England. Just as Justin lacks clarity in his search for the
truth, so too the music confounds the western ear by withholding a melodic
through-line. ‘Jomo gets an HIV test’ and ‘Motorcycle’, with their dissonant
jazzy interchanges for zumara, kawala and baritone saxophone, work in much the
same way – chaotic dissonant mystery.
Everything changes after ‘Justin’s
Breakdown’, and these travel cues are increasingly centred around string
soloists – a device Iglesias used equally effectively in The Dancer Upstairs.
Armed with the knowledge that Tessa truly loved him, Justin travels ‘To
Germany’, his intent underscored with a cello solo over over-lapping string
orchestra and ethnic percussion rhythms, a pattern reprised in the more intense
if shorter ‘To Loki’. Though it is more adagio than allegro in style,
‘Kindergarten’ (which I don’t remember hearing in the film) is an extended solo for viola over subtle bass guitar, flute and
marimba accompaniment. It’s a tremendously effective sound for the strength of
Justin’s love for Tessa, and I suspect it was written for (and partially used
in), the scene following Justin’s beating in the German hotel. As noted before,
the climax of the use of the cello comes in the film version of ‘Dropped off at
Lake Turkana’, where the film’s opening theme for Turkish clarinet is given a
cello reading.
Besides the travel scenes, there are many
cues throughout where Iglesias uses multiple rhythmic layers and a blend of
instrumentation to give suspenseful arcs to scenes or to suggest a sense that a
darker structure of motivations lies behind facades. Examples include: ‘Kenny
Curtis’ (the keyboard and bass flute at the start before the Dancer Upstairs-style
piano comes in is chilling), ‘We’ll both be dead by Christmas’ (drums and
marimba set the stage here – it’s beautifully mixed, as is Iglesias’s work in
general, here done by Jose Luis Crespo), and ‘Three Bees Testing’ (furiously
kinetic).
Conclusion
I hope I’ve done some justice here with my
makeshift musicology to the architecture of Iglesias’s very fine score for the
Fernando Mereilles film. It’s organic to the film, and a departure of sorts for
its composer, though his voice is never too far away. Unlike our reviewer
elsewhere in this edition, who found the music
intrinsically interesting, I believe it is also a fine film score.
The subtle consistencies of the work probably aided the
strangely-plotted film considerably towards its emotional power.
I should note this survey only scratches
the surface of the writing throughout the score. The thing that’s great about
film music is that it is a very subtle thing – capable of achieving multiple
effects at any given moment. This is a rich ensemble score by a very distinct
musical voice – I would take it over what many have claimed is a similar
effort, the Black Hawk Down soundtrack, good as that score by Hans
Zimmer was. Hopefully this will not be the last collaboration between this
director and composer.
(c) 2006 Michael McLennan