This article is an adaptation of the keynote address delivered at the "Music and the Moving Image" conference at New York University in May 2007.

Some but not all of the material presented here has been developed from an article I wrote a few years back entitled "Music and/as Cine-Narrative, or Ceci n'est pas un leitmotif." The article's subtitle, which translates as "This is not a leitmotif," with apologies to René Magritte, is aimed at a particular type of film-music analysis that tends to be what I described as "an almost purely descriptive catalogue of all of the various themes and motifs in a given score and their tie-ins to various characters, situations, and places that turn up in the film, with little or no thought given as to why, just for starters, the filmic text needs these non-visual doublings." ¹ The degree to which the leitmotifs in question often function as what Claudia Gorbman, who gave the keynote address at the very first "Music and the Moving Image" conference, has referred to, in Unheard Melodies, as hyperexplications ² of the filmic text can be considered as the degree to which descriptive, linear analyses of these figures hyperexplicate the hyperexplication. What I am proposing to do here, then, is actually not to discuss how not to think film music but rather to examine several areas that will encourage new, broader, deeper, and, if you will, more polysemic ways of thinking film music. The first of these areas has to do with the very nature of film music, and how to distinguish this particular art form from music--Western "classical" music in particular but not exclusively--with which it shares an enormous number of traits.

            Film music--at least the film music we are dealing with here--is music written to accompany an art form whose formal characteristics, to one degree or another, are generated by narrative structure. Yet music--particularly Western "classical" music--presents, when approached from what might be termed a psychosemiotic perspective, numerous elements in common with classical narrative structure. Many of these elements are generated by what John Shepherd terms "functional tonality," which he describes as follows:

Functional tonal music is about sequential cause and effect--a cause and effect which depends, in the fashion of materialism, upon the reduction of a phenomenon into "indivisible" and discrete, but contiguous constituents that are viewed as affecting one another in a causal and linear manner. The analysis of functional tonal music often concerns itself with "showing" how the final satisfying effect of stating the tonic chord is "due" to previously created harmonic tension. It is no accident that completed and satisfying harmonic passages are frequently referred to as "harmonic progressions." ³

Susan McClary, in her scathing attack on the psychosocial implications of the tonal harmonic system, suggests that "closure is a far more absolute condition in classical music than in most other arts." ⁴ In his much less polemical Theory of Musical Semiotics, Eero Tarasti develops quite an elaborate narratology of music. Early on, Tarasti proposes a

narratological application as "temporal categories" of a series of linguistic terms--inchoativity, durativity, and terminativity [first proposed in this usage by A. J.] Greimas but strangely not pursued by either [Tarasti or Greimas]. Used in linguistics to label aspects, i.e., semantic representations of event structure, particularly in verbs, these terms have an obvious application to narrative structure, in which there is generally presumed to be a beginning (inchoative), middle (durative), and end (terminative) … although not necessarily in that order, as New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard is reported to have said. Any particular narrative element, within whatever medium, can be said to be encoded in ways that imply all three of these categories in varying degrees, with the heaviest weighting determining the temporal function played by a given element within the overall narrative structure. One is reminded of the sentence that, according to André Breton, French poet Paul Valéry refused to write--La marquise sortit à cinq heures (The Marquise went out at five o'clock)--precisely because, once written, that sentence implies so much narrative movement forward that Valéry would have been obliged to write a novel. Thus, the sentence itself, as potentially the first one of the narrative in a book one has opened, has, by dint of its physical position, a strong inchoative function, with a strong durativity also implied by the pages and pages of sentences that follow, and terminativity supposed by the solid probability that there will be a final, complete sentence, Finnegan's Wake to the contrary notwithstanding. More importantly, the presence of a Marquise as a character is all but guaranteed to suggest interesting aristocratic adventures to come (durativity), a constant, particularly in the early history of the French novel, on which the reader will want to follow through. The French verb sortir suggests not so much the completed act of going out (terminativity) as, by dint of its literary past tense (the so-called passé simple), the very pastness that is essential to almost every novel ever written (Robbe-Grillet to the contrary notwithstanding) and, for that reason, the guarantor of the storytelling mode that will keep the narrative moving forward (durativity). It also suggests the beginning (inchoativity) of an adventure yet to be told (durativity). The time of going out (five o'clock) is the classic, early-evening hour at which the aristocracy just begins to come to life. ⁵

           I would in fact disagree with Leonard Bernstein, in his nonetheless brilliant Harvard Lectures entitled, after Ives, The Unanswered Question, when he states that "there are no sentences in music, as there are in prose, since most continuous pieces of music do not reach a full stop until they end." He further reinforces this point by noting that "it is in the nature of music to be ongoing." ⁶ First of all, in no way can a period in a sentence of narratological prose, or other prose, for that matter, be considered as a "full stop," nor can the end of a paragraph, or even of a chapter. The narrative does not come to a full stop until the last period ends the last sentence in the last paragraph of the last chapter of the book, again Finnegan's Wake to the contrary notwithstanding. And even there… . And I would suggest that [interior] cadences in works of tonal music--say, a cadence that ends the first theme in a sonata-allegro movement--have exactly the same function as a period in prose, which is a moment of closure that is anything but full, a moment of terminative durativity, if you'll pardon the expression. With that in mind, it becomes pretty clear that superimposing a musical narrative structure over a cinematic narrative structure would almost have to result in a conflicted mishmash of narrative structures, not to mention an indigestible surfeit of same.

            But, of course, a quick listen to most film-music cues, even for the title sequences, reveals that, while they borrow from the styles of classical music, they more often than not lack much of the narratological backbone of that music. Listen, for instance, to the way Bernard Herrmann's title music for Hitchcock's 1959 North by Northwest ends in the movie. That essential signifier of musical terminativity, the cadence that produces the expected closure of a return to the tonic, never shows up. The film, on the other hand, by closing the title sequence while moving directly into the film's opening shot showing Hitchcock missing a bus--it is likewise the nature of the cinema to be ongoing--has exactly the same narratological effect of, forgive me, terminative durativity found in the interior cadences mentioned above. Herrmann's score, on the other hand, rather than providing the unnecessary and superfluous doubling of that effect that would come with its own cadence, simply stops on a suspended chord in a state of almost pure durativity. By cutting off at this point, the music passes its particular dose of durativity into the verbal and visual texts of the film, whose durativity has been reinforced by the musical effect. Nothing could be more misguided than tacking a whopping cadence onto the end of the North by Northwest overture, as was done in the concert suite offered as of the first-ever recording of Herrmann's score. That crashing closure onto an A-major cadence is simply wrong. It is no longer film music but rather a movie score transformed into ersatz concert music. (As a side note here, I point out that, having heard this god-awful cadence on so many different recordings, I figured that the cutting of that final cadence was the work of the film's music editor, as is so often the case in similar cine-musical circumstances, and that the original score--unavailable to me because the curator of the Bernard Herrmann archives sits over his collection like a dog in a manger--would reveal that cadence. As it turns out, however, North by Northwest's title music is a backward reprise of the long musical cue that accompanies Cary Grant's drunken careenings in a stolen Mercedes, a cue that, as Grant slams on his brakes to avoid an accident, only to be struck from the rear by a police car, comes to a halt on that suspended chord, followed by a few brass chords, likewise unresolved, not heard in the title music.)

            Getting away, in principle at least, from classical music for a moment, I turn, as a second example, to the 1959 Odds Against Tomorrow, directed by Robert Wise and scored by none other than John Lewis, best known for his work with the Modern Jazz Quartet, but also a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied, among other subjects, Baroque and Renaissance music. Scored for a brass-heavy ensemble of twenty-two instrumentalists, including Bill Evans on piano, Milt Jackson on vibraharp, Percy Heath on bass, Connie Kay on drums, and Gunther Schuller on one of the four French horns, Lewis's score provides a generally bleak, solidly dissonant, and sometimes overbearingly loud backdrop, without a leitmotif within earshot, for this grim, black-and-white bank-heist drama shot in New York City and upstate New York (the town of Hudson). The title music does in fact end on a big chord that, while not a closing cadence in classical music terms, is a perfect bit of big-band-jazz terminativity. But the opening sequence, which starts with a solo harp and then builds in texture and volume toward what should be a whoppingly dissonant climax in the brass and timpani, comes to a screeching halt right in the middle of what should be an ongoing (there's that word again) musical phrase.

            Interestingly, the music here stops right on a very obvious beat--Robert Ryan slamming his fist on the hotel desk--in the film itself, usually a no-no, since it calls attention to the music. Yet, also interestingly, the blow of the fist actually sets in motion the film's bank-heist narrative, since it leads Ryan to the room of a disgraced New York City cop, played by Ed Begley, who is setting up the heist. The music, on the other hand, folds back on itself. From the outset it plays back and forth, just as the main title music does, with two moods. On the one hand, there are quiet, thinly textured, and generally quite moody passages that complement throughout the film's cold, wintry settings, set up by the sound of wind and an empty New York City street. On the other hand, seemingly growing out of this coldness, we have passages in the brass that, in the opening sequence, start with a very dissonant, descending major seventh heard first in the trumpet and then in the horn. Both here and elsewhere in the music, the textures often build to points where almost all of the instruments of the score's brass ensemble--four trumpets, four horns, two trombones, and a tuba--seem to join in. The action in this opening sequence seems innocent enough, and, if caught unaware, we may even crack a smile as Ryan picks up the little black girl who has run into him. Within this perspective the dissonant brass music seems out of place. But Ryan's southern accent and his use of the word "picaninny" combine with the music to immediately create a sense of unease in the viewer that will grow as the film progresses, ultimately erupting in a deadly feud between Ryan and the third bank robber, played by Harry Belafonte, whose company, Harbel, also produced the film. It seems to me that both the visuals, many of which look like museum-quality photographs, and the music, which often seems disproportionately loud vis-à-vis the filmic action, stand somewhat apart from the narrative action per se; they lend their aura to the action but stand more as isotopies--according to Tarasti, "a set of categories whose redundancy guarantees the coherence of a sign-complex" ⁷ --that unify our reading of the text in a decidedly nonleitmotivic way outside the confines of the linear structure of the narrative.

            A final note here: in "thinking" the particular film score that is Odds Against Tomorrow it is easy see Lewis's music as a part of the movement that pretty much started in the 1950s to bring jazz onto the music track to accompany down-and-dirty crime movies such as The Big Combo (David Raksin, 1955), The Man with the Golden Arm (Elmer Bernstein, 1955), L'Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Miles Davis, 1958), and, the same year as Odds Against Tomorrow, Anatomy of a Murder (Duke Ellington, 1959). And there is a certain amount of truth in this thinking. But, first of all, one would be hard put to define the score by John Lewis (who received a B.A. in music and anthropology from the University of New Mexico and an M.A. in music from the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied Baroque and Renaissance music) as a piece of pure jazz. Although one could just as easily define the score's style as jazz-oriented modern classical, the music, for precisely the same reasons I discussed earlier, avoids the patterns of closure and resolution that are as much a part of jazz, both swing and bebop, as they are of classical music. Because of this lack of harmonic cadence, rather than supporting the dramatic points of the bank-heist narrative, the film provides isotopic support to a filmic text that, rather than seconding the stereotypes associated with crime, jazz, and black musicians, actually provides a broad contemplation of racial hatred.

            As a final, infinitely more obvious example of the film score as a unique creation that might be called "durational music" I cannot resist turning to the laser-beam cue in the 007 flick Goldfinger (1964), composed by John Barry, whose training was more in the pop and jazz styles than classical. In this sequence James Bond (Sean Connery), captured by the villainous Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe), finds himself spread-eagled on a table made of gold with a high-power laser beam pointed straight at the part that the Bond films set up as perhaps the most important of the superspy's anatomy, a plot device one can be sure was anything but casual, all the more so since one of Bond's archenemies in Goldfinger is a lesbian named Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman), whose evil ways he must sooner or later lead back to the straight and narrow via the joys of phallic sex. Narratively speaking, although the scene has a beginning (wisecracks between Bond in bondage and Goldfinger; the turning on of the laser beam), middle (the laser beam wending its murderous route toward Bond's manhood), and end (one of Goldfinger's assistants shoots Bond with a tranquillizer dart), the music, save for its long crescendo toward the end, remains devastatingly static. We hear, in various registers and instruments, one single, harmonic accompaniment--an F-minor chord with an added second, which turns up in countless other Barry scores, Bond and non-Bond alike--that runs throughout the musical cue, which initially hints at the "Goldfinger" theme in the violins, followed by the same, eight-note motif, which repeats no fewer than twelve times, followed by twelve repetitions of two-note truncation of it. If the music followed the narrative logic, then, at the moment Bond gets shot and passes out, the F-minor added-second chord would find its way to a cadence, no easy feat that, although one could imagine something such as a drop to a low octave unison on F. Instead while the visuals, including a complete fade-out to black, and dialogue provide us with cine-narrative equivalent of a period at the end of a chapter-closing sentence--it certainly does not suggest a full stop; among other things we know that the film is only halfway over, and that 007 most certainly cannot be dead--the music just simply floats in space. The closest punctuational analogy here would be what the French appropriately call points de suspension, three periods at the end of an apparent sentence, or an ellipsis. This type of juxtaposition of semantic representations of event structure--in this case durativity in the music against provisional terminativity in the visuals and dialogue--stands in an almost purely abstract manner outside any considerations of narrative, and it represents one of the least recognized riches of the cine-musical interaction.

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          I now arrive at a subject that I have examined any number of times, most particularly in my at-this-point ancient article "Herrmann, Hitchcock, and the Music of the Irrational," which I incorporated with few changes into two different parts of my slightly less ancient book Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music. My main point in the article is not unlike the durativity theory that I have proposed here, namely that Bernard Herrmann, while remaining grounded in the tenets of tonality common to Western "classical" music, moved these tenets into the domain of the irrational, thoroughly appropriate to the vision of the "Master of Suspense," of course, by subverting the patterns of closure and resolution that listeners expect when brought into the tonal domain. This can be produced, for instance, by parallel thirds moving in nonresolving ways over a single-note drone in (the "Carlotta Valdez" theme from the 1958 Vertigo). Or it can be produced by a dissonant chord, which I dubbed the "Hitchcock chord," formed of major and minor thirds--a minor/major seventh, to be exact--that should lead to a resolution on some sort of tonic but instead becomes a point of eternal, nonresolving return. Herrmann suggests this chord in his first Hitchcock score, The Trouble with Harry, and then deploys it full force in Vertigo and Psycho, both of which open on that chord (but in different keys and instrumental configurations). I never suggested, pace some of my critics, that this device was unique to Herrmann, but rather that Herrmann found a particularly appropriate inspiration to use it cine-musically in the work of Alfred Hitchcock, in which the irrational continually has a nasty habit of erupting into the world of the rational.

            At any rate, since Overtones and Undertones I had not further pursued that subject in any great depth until, during the spring 2006 semester at the CUNY Graduate Center, I taught my "Aesthetics of Film Music" course to a group composed (no pun intended) mostly of students in that school's PhD Program in Music. For the first time in my teaching of this course at the Graduate Center I had access to the complete score for string orchestra of Psycho. And so, one fine afternoon on Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, I sat down with my students and followed the musical score as we screened the film from a DVD. Following that, I asked the students to produce a paper analyzing Herrmann's efforts both on a purely musical basis and in its relationship to the rest of the filmic text. Now, I was well aware of the breadth and depth of musical training that these students in the Graduate Center receive, and I was also aware of the almost frightening expertise many of them have in harmonic analysis. But I had never before given my students a full film score to play with, and the results that this produced in their papers, almost all of them brilliant, blew me out of my socks, as the saying goes.

            I am going to refer here to the paper entitled "In Sickness and in Health: Prolongation of Thematic Elements in the Psycho Score," written by one of those students, Christopher White. White begins his analysis, which I will not go into in great detail here, by noting that "Hitchcock uses great organicism in his construction" of the title music, a point that he illustrates by defining various modules in the music that are organically interconnected by either their whole- or half-step germ, and/or their augmented sonority, and/or their minor-triad outlines. Later on White notes that, while the title music and other cues in the film's first third may be heard as "tense, due to their post-tonal nature and often loud and thrusting textures," the cues "are all clearly organized and audibly organic in pitch and phrase structure." While I maintain my "music of the irrational" arguments for this part of the score, I agree with White that the first third of the film more or less presents a "normative plot-conflict" (for a suspense film) with "normative characters." I will solemnly confess that I did not extend my analysis much beyond this stage. Christopher White did.

            Having analyzed the very nature of the music in Psycho's first third, White notes that this type of music "simply stops being presented [for the most part] after Marion is killed" (actually midway through her conversation with Norman in the office parlor at the Bates Motel), and that the "textures are never brought back, and are replaced with more dissonant cues." More dissonant indeed! In what can be considered as the first of the new set of musical cues, "The Madhouse," which begins as Norman reacts negatively to Marion's suggestion that his mother be put in an asylum, the music takes on an entirely different cast. White suggests that "Herrmann ingeniously uses audible set-theory to compose this passage," set theory having been devised to provide, among other things, a system for analyzing harmonic structures falling outside the norms--and even the abnorms, if you'll permit the neologism--of functional tonality. Certainly, the cue (1) has no tonal center whatever, and often moves in patterns suggesting atonality; (2) often engages wispy, dissonant, line-against-line contrapuntal textures; (3) brings in chords even more ambiguously related to tonality than the Hitchcock chord; (4) often moves into the extreme high ranges of the violins; (5) has an ambiguous rhythmic pulse at best, etc. Much, but not all, of the music in the remaining two-thirds of the film moves in somewhat the same orbit, and one suspects that Herrmann, even though he had much earlier scored a film--the 1945 Hangover Square--about a serial killer, for whom he even wrote a piano concerto, found himself, because of the macabre depths of Hitchcock's decidedly unromantic vision, in new territory here. There is simply nothing like this kind of style anywhere else in Herrmann's cine-musical oeuvre.

            But … . (points de suspension!) In order to find a musical solution for this new territory, Herrmann actually revisited considerably old territory, to wit a Sinfonietta for Strings that he composed in 1935, which features compositional audacities to be found nowhere else in his work, with the possible exception of a Prelude for Piano composed around the same time. Solid portions of the Sinfonietta get used in Psycho, but only as of the "Madhouse" cue. One has to figure that, in 1960, Herrmann was simply unable to get his compositional soul back in touch with the severe modernism into which he was plunged in the earlier stages of his career, which he probably knew was necessary for the final two-thirds of Psycho, but which, after years of writing in much tamer modes for both film and the concert hall, he was no longer able to access within himself. In many ways it is as if there are two scores for Psycho. The first engages tonality in order to violate its demands of closure and resolution while not totally losing touch with orders represented by tonality. It is also, as Christopher White noted, organically organized along fairly solid musical norms. The second score, on the other hand, belongs to another world that has nothing to do with the orders evoked and invoked by the norms of Western "classical" music, any more than the bleak inner world of Norman/Mother has anything to do with the norms of the outside world. The first score musically re-creates the rational/irrational dialectic that is an essential element of Hitchcock's suspense thrillers. The second score, on the other hand, goes into territory so bleak, so void, so detached from the familiar signposts that for most of us signal "normal" reality in music that such binary oppositions as rational/irrational become meaningless. It is a land fully explored by Herrmann only twice, in 1935 in a work of concert music and in a 1960 film score. It was likewise Hitchcock's first full exploration of this dark country, and he would return there only one more time, in his 1972 film Frenzy.

            What is truly frightening is how Psycho and its music initially lead us into the tension-filled but familiar territory of the crime thriller while moving toward the only slightly less familiar territory of gothic horror, only to pull the rug out from beneath our feet and plunge us into a chasm from which those who visit it rarely return, unless that visit has been provided by a movie and its score. Interestingly, the music gets us there first. We may become uneasy at Norman's righteous indignation at Marion's suggestion that he--sorry, Mother--be put in a madhouse. But it is the music that shows us, almost like a back-projected image, the void Norman lives in, a void of which the swamp will later offer, in a piece of delayed vertical montage, a visual image. Oh sure, those shrieking violins are scary, although many of my students and I find the shower scene even more terrifying without the score, as Hitchcock originally desired. And fans of back-reading meaning into the musical text from the cinematic text may take pleasure in describing the shrieking violins as calls from Norman's stuffed birds. But to discover what produces the deepest fears in the musical text you need to put on your harmonic-analyst hat. You may even want to take a shot, as I have, so far unsuccessfully, at understanding set theory.

            Before I move onto my next point I'll tell you a quick anecdote. You can go to all this trouble, you can maybe write an article, you may even get the article past a referee who doesn't want to see it published because that would step on his or her territory, you may even get it published. But basically, nobody is going to listen to you. I was called up in, I think, 2000, the fortieth anniversary of Psycho and asked to comment on its film score as a part of a feature on the whole film for the program "All Things Considered." And at one point they asked me, "Well! Herrmann says that the Psycho score is black-and-white music for a black-and-white film. What do you think?" And I said, "Well, I don't think that's a great description. I just really don't think that this says a whole lot, and Herrmann was probably being questioned by people like you." So we go along and talk some more, and they come back to the same question: "Well! Don't you think this is black-and-white music for a black-and-white film?" And I said, "Gosh, no, I really don't think so. To me, there's a lot more to be said." Well, when I heard the program, out of which maybe three-quarters of what I had to say was cut--which is still a lot, considering the six seconds I got on CNN--my black-and-white-music comments were not anywhere to be found. They did dig up Steven C. Smith, who wrote a biography of Herrmann, and asked him, "Isn't this black-and-white music for a black-and-white film?" "Oh yes! Of course it is!" End of the sad tale… .

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           In my keynote address on 18 May 2007, the following section, on a scene from Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, Part 1 (1944), with music by Sergei Prokofiev, was given without reference to a written text, since at the time it represented uncompleted work on the subject from a book I am currently writing, Images of Images: Myth, Lacan, and Narrative Cinema. Since thoughts from at least the musical implications of that scene have now been written out, the following text is extracted from the manuscript of my eternally-in-progress opus.

            The particular element of the cinematic language for which Eisenstein is best known is montage. Although somewhat influenced by the pioneering theories of Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970), Eisenstein almost immediately developed a more dialectical approach to montage that has come to be known as a "montage of attractions," in which the editing process jolts or shocks the viewer by juxtaposing disparate--sometimes wildly disparate--images to reach a higher level of communication. Eisenstein notes that "the juxtaposition of two shots by splicing them together resembles not so much a simple sum of one shot plus another shot--as it does a creation. It resembles a creation--rather than the sum of its parts--from the circumstance that in every such juxtaposition the result is qualitatively distinguishable from each component element viewed separately." ⁸ One can extrapolate from this that each montage unit combines, as the film moves forward, with other montage units, building increasingly complex creations that transparently reveal what Lacan and Derrida call signifying chains formed out of the smallest unit of cinematic signification, the single shot. Striking examples of montage of attractions are particularly evident in the director's first three feature films, all of them silent: Strike (Stachka, 1925), The Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin, 1925), and October (Oktyabr, 1928; also known as Ten Days that Shook the World). Eisenstein's "attractions" call attention to the montage process and the signifying chain, this in contradistinction to commercial Hollywood cinema, decried by Eisenstein and his colleagues, which does its best to smooth out the seams from shot to shot and make montage invisible, thus creating an illusion of closure by hiding the signifying chain; this chain, particularly when foregrounded, can suggest nonclosure extending almost literally into the infinite. Eisenstein, who studied the Japanese language and Japanese art, actually applied the principles of montage of attractions, which he saw in the Kabuki Theater, both to some of his earlier theatrical productions and to his analysis of Japanese ideograms. ⁹

            Going beyond pure montage theory, however, Eisenstein envisaged "the possibility of a total synaesthetic cinema, which stimulates, harmonizes, and fuses together all of the diverse sense modes into a physiological continuum or sensorium of multi-sensory experience." ¹⁰ It would take several books even to begin to trace the history of theories and realizations of a synthesis of the arts, including the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Suffice it to say that Eisenstein came directly out of extremely significant attempts to attain this goal by Russian artists working in other media. One thinks immediately, for instance, of composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), whose aesthetics and particular brand of Theosophical mysticism led him to attempt to push music to its extreme limits. The scoring of his Fifth Symphony, entitled Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1909-10), includes as one of its instruments a clavier à lumières, a "light keyboard" that causes colors corresponding to precise pitches to be projected on a screen as the work is being performed. One also thinks of poet/novelist/theorist Andrei Bely (1880-1934), who synthesized the principles of musical and verbal language in four "Literary Symphonies" written between 1902 and 1908. Bely's novels, the most famous of which is Petersburg (1913), reveal similar preoccupations. Eisenstein's postrevolutionary aesthetics not unsurprisingly reveal none of the mysticism one finds in Scriabin and in many of the Russian Symbolists such as Bely. As aesthetics, however, his principles are just as far reaching, and they have the additional advantage of being applied to a new art form that has Gesamtkunstwerk built into its very essence, the cinema. As already suggested, the realization of such an aesthetics "depends on the filmic principle of montage." ¹¹ And as Tarasti has noted, "The whole Wagnerian idea of Gesamtkunstwerk in its entirety can be regarded as a reconstruction of all the relevant aspects of the primal mythical communication." ¹²

            But the type of montage called for by Eisenstein is not simply the horizontally elaborated progression of separate images, as disparate as they may be. Rather, he calls for a "polyphonic montage, where shot is linked to shot not merely through one indication--movement, or light values, or stages in the exposition of the plot, or the like--but through a simultaneous advance of a multiple series of lines, each maintaining an independent compositional course and each contributing to the total compositional course of the sequence." Elsewhere Eisenstein refers to this process as "vertical montage," i.e., a montage of disparate elements--visual, musical, narrative, for example--stacked vertically within any given shot--coming out from the screen toward the audience, in a sense--and counterbalancing what we could call the "horizontal montage." Later on, in The Film Sense the writer/director/theoretician applies this concept in a detailed analysis, complete with various diagrams, of the twelve-shot visual/musical montage, with no dialogue, that opens the "Dawn of Anxious Waiting" sequence in his Alexander Nevsky (1938), the film--likewise based in Russian history--that he made before the Ivan series. ¹³ On the surface Eisenstein's analysis seems somewhat literal-minded and has been attacked by several writers on the subject, ¹⁴ including Kristin Thompson, who devotes quite a bit of space to vertical montage in her neoformalist study of Ivan the Terrible. Among other things, Eisenstein suggests one-for-one correspondences between upward, downward, and flat movement in the music and upward, downward, and horizontal movement suggested in the visuals of the twelve shots in question. But, as I wrote:

What Eisenstein's critics fail to perceive here … are the nonliteral implications of this director/theoretician's enthusiastically literal analysis. In attempting to establish a "vertical" montage that creates a quasi-contrapuntal simultaneity across the various senses, Eisenstein is not suggesting that each sense reacts in the same way over exactly the same period of time. Inheriting his aesthetics from French and Russian symbolism, Eisenstein posits the existence of a kind of synesthesia, correspondences between the senses in which, à la Baudelaire, les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent (smells, colors and sounds answer each other). In other words, during the time it takes that fourth shot [for example] from the Alexander Nevsky sequence to go by, the eye perceives a particular graphic rhythm that corresponds to a particular rhythm in the Prokofiev score. ¹⁵

           Eisenstein does not offer quite such an in-depth analysis of any of the sequences in the Ivan the Terrible films; but he does devote a few pages in Nonindifferent Nature to describing what David Bordwell has called the "dense weave of visual and sonic motifs" ¹⁶ in the sequence where the Tsar is mourning over his wife's coffin. Eisenstein even offers a fairly simple (as opposed to the gloriously complex elaboration for Nevsky) "polyphonic chart" of the sequence. ¹⁷ There is, however, a sequence in Ivan I that reveals not just instances of vertical montage but in fact of often remarkable independence in the "multiple series of lines" as they proceed on their "compositional course." This sequence, starting at 41:50 on the indispensable Criterion DVD of the film and concluding around 1:08:25, deals with Ivan's serious illness and near death, which occurred, historically, in March 1553. A bit of background: the narrative, such as it is, of the Ivan films consists of a chronological series of episodes, some more historically accurate than others, depicting events during the life and reign of Ivan IV (Nikolai Cherkasov, who earlier had portrayed Alexander Nevsky), described in a caption at the opening of Ivan I as the "man who was the first to unite our country in the sixteenth century, a prince of Moscow who created a single and powerful state from a hodgepodge of divided and self-serving principalities … , the first ruler who had crowned himself Tsar of all the Russias." The principal, narrative-generating conflict that runs throughout Ivan I and Ivan II is the enmity between Ivan, who seeks to consolidate the entire political power of the Russian state in a single, individual ruler--himself--and the boyars, the feudal elite who do everything they can to maintain their privilege and entitlement. The boyars enforced their power in often hideous ways and were possibly responsible for the death by poison of Ivan's widowed mother, Elena Glinskaya, when the future Tsar was seven years old, an event unambiguously depicted in a prologue featuring the young Ivan (Erik Pyryev) intended as the opening sequence of Ivan I. But the Soviet bureaucracy in charge of film production deemed the sequence too dark and forced the director to cut it entirely from Ivan I. Parts of it were later incorporated into Ivan II; the complete sequence can be found in the "Deleted Scenes" option on the Criterion DVD of Ivan I. The sequence runs some fifteen minutes, climaxing with the thirteen-year-old Ivan suddenly ordering the arrest of the chief boyar, Prince Andrei Shuisky, who, according to some accounts but not shown in the sequence, was thrown to a pack of starving hunting dogs by the young prince's kennel men. Thus began the rise to power of an autocrat who throughout his reign acted out on his need for power, his whims, and, some suggest, his paranoid delusions in such overreactive and often gruesomely sadistic ways that he earned the sobriquet of Грозный (Grozny), generally translated as "terrible," although various scholars suggest "awe-inspiring" or just plain "awesome" as a more accurate rendering of the word. ¹⁸

            The opening part of the near-death sequence is all but overloaded with what Neuberger calls "contradictory impulses." The sequence's opening shot (Figure 1), for instance, shows, on an interior wall beneath an arched canopy, a stylized, iconic face of Christ with oversized eyes and more than a passing resemblance to Cherkasov's Ivan. This type of image of a dark, stern, fear-inspiring Christ, common in the iconography of the various strains of the Orthodox Church and all but totally absent from Western iconography, sets Ivan and Christ on exactly the same paradigmatic level. As Tsar, Ivan was not only the all-powerful political ruler of the Russian people, he was, as the embodiment of God on Earth, the all-powerful enforcer of and conqueror for the Orthodox Church. In an article that all but canonizes Ivan IV, one scholar, in an examination of the word grozny beyond its immediate pejorative implications, notes that "groznyi might be applied to the great images of Christ in Majesty, Christ Pantocrator, stern and even angry, awe-inspiring so as to force the onlooker down to his knees; for example, the fourteenth-century icon of Spas Iaore Oko (see Figure 2), the Saviour of the Angry Eye, now in the Tret'iakov Gallery in Moscow." ¹⁹ Interestingly, this double role of the Tsar becomes subtly apparent as of the rousing music by Sergei Prokofiev heard during the film's opening titles. Although the theme in the high, unison brass over a furiously swirling figure in the very high violins, associated with Ivan throughout, has a strongly heroic cast, its first three notes, some repeated, and the manner in which they rise in scalar progression to the fourth note strongly evoke the hymn "Spasi Gospodi" ("O Lord, Save They People," which plays a major role in Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture"), a very old hymn we hear as a procession of Russian citizens marches, at the end of Ivan I, to the Tsar's place in exile to beg him to return as their ruler. (I note that, while I had felt for a number of years that there was, in my words, "something liturgical" about Ivan the Terrible's opening theme, it was Katherine Ermolaev Ossorgin who, in a series of e-mail correspondences with me in April and May 2007, came up with the "Spasi Gospodi" connection. As of this writing Ms. Ossorgin is working on her doctoral dissertation in musicology at Princeton University on the use of Russian liturgical music in Ivan the Terrible. She presented extracts from her dissertation in the "Music and the Moving Image" conference.)

	Figure 1. Ivan the Terrible, Part 1.

	Figure 2. Spas Iraoe Oko.

            There are two levels of musical discourse in the "illness" sequence. The central crisis in this sequence is Ivan's illness, which, throughout the first part of the sequence, is communicated in the boyars' dialogue, visually in the parade of priests and other characters, and on a purely aural level in the sounds of chimes and various choral singing, none of which, with one exception (the all-male chorus chanting as the monks gather next to the Tsar's bed to bless the Bible), can be clearly identified as diegetic or nondiegetic. Particularly striking--and disconcerting, from where I sit--are the high-pitched chimes that clang without any special rhyme or reason during the opening part of the sequence, creating a dissonance more reminiscent of a Pierre Boulez than of a chapter in the early history of Russian politics and orthodoxy. It should be noted that in Ivan the Terrible, as in Alexander Nevsky, Eisenstein introduces practically nothing that could be considered as "natural" sound. We hear no footsteps, no doors opening and closing, no swishing of robes--no trace, in other words, of the countless diegetic sounds and noises laid in, usually via the Foley process, on the soundtracks (as opposed to the music tracks) of most commercial, narrative films. Whatever sound makes its way onto the Eisensteinian sound track almost always exists as a part of the aural component, which also includes both diegetic and nondiegetic music, of the vertical montage, making the distinction between sound and music track essentially meaningless, which is often the case in the films of Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose usual composer, Michel Fano, deliberately blurred over this distinction.

            The central section of the "illness" sequence, on the other hand, takes on a much different character thanks to the introduction of nondiegetic underscoring by Prokofiev. On the line "The Tsar is waiting," spoken by Ivan's bodyguard Malyuta to two future members of the Tsar's future oprichniki, the film cuts, significantly, to a shot of the infant Dmitri sleeping in a crib next to Ivan's apparent deathbed, at which point Prokofiev's orchestral score begins with a quiet, slow, dirgelike cue in F minor marked Adagio. ²⁰ The opening part of the cue is essentially a themeless mood piece with broad figures in the winds playing over a kind of tick-tock accompaniment in the strings quite characteristic of the composer's orchestral music. This runs, with a partial repeat, for nearly a minute and a half as various boyars enter the chamber. The Tsar, his eyes closed, begins to speak, announcing that "The end is near." Then, as the film cuts to a close-up on his face (52:52), the second phase of the music starts. In solid contrast to the first part, the music here, marked molto espressivo, offers a highly lyrical theme, played over the tick-tock accompaniment that continues from the first part, that might best be described as a before-the-fact lament. ²¹

	Figure 3. Score excerpt from Ivan The Terrible, Part 1.

            Rather audaciously, Prokofiev uses the unusual timbre of the upper register of a solo string bass to play the melody, which wends its way upward, slowly and fairly chromatically, climaxing on a six-note figure, immediately repeated (the fourth beat of the fourth full measure followed by the last two measures in the example), that lands solidly on a B-minor chord, which is quite distant from the theme's key of F minor and in a tritone relation with it. Interestingly, at the time when Ivan the Terrible takes place the tritone (an augmented fourth or diminished fifth that splits the diatonic scale into two equal halves) was considered by the Church as Diabolus in musica--the Devil in music. Whether Prokofiev intended this as a musical comment on Ivan the Terrible's principal character will probably never be known.

            If I have gone into a certain degree of musical detail here (no doubt poison to partisans of Schenkerian harmonic analysis), it is because this particular section of Prokofiev's Ivan the Terrible score is highly symptomatic both of what I consider to be a major characteristic of much film music as well as of the type of music essential to Eisenstein's vertical montage. In the four minutes that ensue, during which Ivan ultimately crawls out of his bed to implore the gathered boyars to swear allegiance on the cross to the infant Dmitri, the lyrical theme simply folds back upon itself and repeats with mild modifications in the instrumentation: after the solo double bass presentation, the cellos take up the theme an octave higher, followed by a return to the solo string bass, this time doubled two octaves higher in the violins. And then the whole thing starts again. The impassioned six-note figure, always immediately repeated once, appears a total of fourteen times in this initial phase before the theme abruptly cuts off and, because of the music editing, awkwardly moves after a brief pause into a few measures from the next section of the cue; Ivan, after cursing the boyars, who have turned a deaf ear to his pleas, appears to fall dead on his bed. Initially climaxing on a loud, tutti chord in C minor, the music diminishes to a hushed C-major cadence in the strings as the film cuts to a close-up on the head of the seemingly dead Tsar (Figure 4). The point here is that, although the nondiegetic underscoring described above has both musically and dramatically logical starting and stopping points, throughout most of the four minutes that the nondiegetic score initially plays in this sequence there is not a single point where, in spite of the tonal style of the music, the harmonic language suggests closure, in the way that periods at the end of the sentences in a paragraph would, for instance. The six-note figure that acts throughout as a climactic moment always lands on the B-minor chord that all but screams nonresolution. And when, as the entire theme concludes in its fourteenth measure, low harp octaves seem to suggest at least momentary closure by playing the first four notes of the F-minor scale in descending order, the theme simply starts again on an upbeat before the harp octaves land on the tonic F.

	Figure 4. Ivan the Terrible, Part 1.

            The four minutes of music described above are infused with durativity--with a vengeance--particularly in the second, lyrical part, in which the same figures keep repeating in the same key with little change in the instrumentation, thus sustaining a mood and/or a feeling that would tend to vanish the instant the music, if tonal, as most film scores are, reaches any kind of cadence. Because of this the music stands paradoxically as a quasi-static independent block that makes it an ideal component in Eisenstein's vertical montage. The mood of the lyrical section remains constant throughout. The question is: how do we define that mood? My initial impression in early experiences with Ivan the Terrible was that the music simply, but expertly (Prokofiev, particularly in his operas and ballets, was a master of tragic lyricism), communicated the sadness of the situation. But when one plunges more deeply into the scene, that feeling, even though Prokofiev's musical strains play it completely straight, is somewhat mitigated, not only because Ivan is not dying but also because he takes a peek from beneath a huge Bible--part of the holy sacraments--before the nondiegetic orchestral cue starts. The isotopy of the angry eye has been mitigated in this scene, since it has combined, in a kind of thematic montage of attractions, with Ivan's illness to produce his long and histrionic plea to the boyars.

            Although I do not generally find the film-music/opera analogy to work particularly well in most cases, here Cherkasov's extremely dramatic reading of his lines, his melodramatic gestures, and the highly lyrical music combine to produce something not unlike an opera aria. How we "read" the music remains uncertain. To my sensitivities there is little doubt that, as I have already suggested, Prokofiev intended the lyrical theme here as a lament, which would tend to invoke pity in the viewer/listener. But the overtly political nature of Ivan's plea, even with hand on brow and heavily theatrical vocal gestures (Figure 5), to a group just waiting to reclaim their status as the ruling class certainly mitigates how the viewer/listener feels the music. Further, the threat represented by the angry-eye motif carries over into this scene, in which the viewer/listener might also, given the Tsar's peek from beneath the Bible, sense more than a tad of manipulation. In this case do we have to read the musical lament as ironic? The complexities of Eisenstein's vertical (and horizontal) montage, then, foreclose any possibility of a linear, monosemic reading of this scene, whether in its dialogue, Cherkasov's verbal and bodily gestures as an actor, or Prokofiev's nondiegetic musical backing. Instead, these quasi-independent elements, along with others, stack up vertically in a manner that allows the viewer/listener to create various levels of meaning out of their permutations and combinations.

	Figure 5. Ivan the Terrible, Part 1.

            Significantly, no sooner has the nondiegetic score provided that two-chord, major-mode cadence behind the shot of Ivan's head than it returns to the nonthematic music in F minor that opened the previous scene at the moment Ivan's plea begins. A heavy tremolo in the strings creates a moment of almost stereotypical film-musicality as Anastasia rushes to her infant's crib to protect him from the imposing presence of the boyarina Efrosina (Serafima Birman), who seems ready to devour her son's rival for the throne of Moscow (Figure 6). Then, as Anastasia takes over for her husband and begins to plead the case of her son's legitimacy to the throne, the lyrical theme in the solo double bass begins, just as it did when Ivan began making his plea, creating a parallel music-dramatic situation but, because of the change in character (and gender), also forcing the viewer/listener to once again rethink the implications of the musical text. And in the midst of this Eisenstein introduces a particularly audacious subversion of cinematic syntax: right in the middle of Anastasia's impassioned plea to the boyars the music cuts off at a totally illogical point right after the first sixteenth note in the theme's third full measure, giving way to a sudden outburst of crying from the infant Dmitri, as if Eisenstein, in a kind of frenzied application of the Gesamtkunstwerk principle, had decided to continue the lament in this fashion. Indeed, once Dmitri stops crying some twenty seconds later, the music picks up again at almost precisely the point, the upbeat leading into the seventh complete measure, that it would have reached had it continued to play. It makes one suspect that Eisenstein, in order to foreground the baby's crying, simply turned the music track off, let it run, and then turned it on again, much as French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard was to do even more flamboyantly, some twenty years later, in the car-theft scene from his Pierrot le fou (1965). ²² The theme then continues to run until the insertion of another close-up shot of the head of the seemingly dead Tsar, at which point, once again, it simply cuts off mid-measure.

	Figure 6. Ivan the Terrible, Part 1.

            There ensues a moment of anti-Tsar bluster from one of the boyars, followed by a particularly venomous outburst from Efrosina in support of her dimwitted son, Vladimir (Pavel Kadochnikov). Two rings from a low church bell mark the end of this episode, which immediately gives way to the entrance of Kurbsky, who, after inspecting Ivan and concluding that he has indeed shuffled off this mortal coil, begins to woo Anastasia, a move to which her facial expressions and bodily gestures would seem to indicate that she is initially open (Figure 7). At the same time the nondiegetic lyrical theme starts up one last time, finding yet one more new situation to underscore. The music continues through the angry-eye close-up scene described above, comes to an abrupt halt, and then, as Anastasia tells Kurbsky not to bury Ivan before he is dead, concludes on the same end material rising to a high cadence in C minor heard at the end of Ivan's plea as he falls backward onto his bed. From all of this discussion, it should be clear that not only does the F-minor cue for the sequence dealing with Ivan's illness have absolutely nothing to do with the leitmotif mentality, it has very little to do with the usual action-specific norms of film-scoring syntax. Throughout, and in several different situations, Eisenstein simply inserts the same music, several times cutting it off abruptly at dramatically logical but musically "impossible" points, and at one moment cutting it off at a point whose logic is neither dramatic nor musical but rather relates to a music/sound interaction broadly conceived within the framework of the director's overall Gesamtkunstwerk aesthetics. Indeed, the music cannot be described as a "theme" for Ivan's illness or for anything else, since it simply appears in too many different contexts. Rather, perhaps the best way to describe the music here is as a "cine-theme," i.e., the musical component in a series of components (visual, verbal, sound, etc.) that form the blocks out of which Eisenstein carefully elaborated his vertical montage.

	Figure 7. Ivan the Terrible, Part 1.

* * *

           The final points of my discussion bring us closer to the present day with the 2002 film Spider, directed by David Cronenberg and scored by Howard Shore, who has worked with his Canadian fellow countryman on a good dozen projects, most recently A History of Violence. In 2001 I stopped writing my "Film Musings" column for Fanfare magazine and offered as one of the reasons that so little of interest was turning up in the line of film music that I would not be able to maintain a new column every two months. Yet, if I may put on my critic's hat for a moment, I would say that Shore's music for Spider, which came out about a year after I stopped writing "Film Musings," is not only perhaps the best film score of the new decade to this point, notwithstanding Shore's Oscar-winning efforts for the Lord of the Rings films, it indeed belongs near the top of my all-time greatest film-music list.

            Based on a novel, begun in 1988, and screenplay by English writer Patrick McGrath (whose father was the medical superintendent at an institution for the criminally insane), the minimal narrative of Spider follows a short period in the life of Dennis Cleg (Ralph Fiennes), who arrives at a halfway house in London after having been released from a mental institution. Communicating rarely, and then in a nearly inaudible mumble, Cleg keeps a journal (one supposes it's a journal) written in some kind of hieroglyphics that apparently only he can understand. As the film progresses the audience begins to watch Cleg as he watches his preadolescent self (Bradley Hall) interact in scenes that may or may not have taken place with his mother (Miranda Richardson), a stepmother (also Miranda Richardson) who may or may not be an invention, and his father (Gabriel Byrne). Visually present in these scenes without actually being there, Cleg often mumbles the lines spoken by his parents and his earlier self before or after they have been spoken by the other actors. After witnessing the murder of the mother by the father, who has been caught in flagrante delicto, what may or may not have been the murder of the stepmother or the mother by the young Cleg, and the near murder by the adult Cleg of the patroness of the halfway house, usually played by Lynn Redgrave but also by Miranda Richardson throughout much of this scene, the audience comes to realize that, lying at the base of Cleg's apparent schizophrenia is a murderous rage, upon which he has probably, like most schizophrenics, never "really" acted, against his mother's sexuality.

            Perhaps the principal artistic decision made by director Cronenberg was, as he explains in his audio commentary on the Sony Pictures Classics DVD of the film, to make Spider as an expressionistic film, which means that we experience the film from Cleg's point of view, which pretty much shuts out the outside world. We therefore see the London street where the halfway house is located the way we never see a London street, that is, almost totally unpopulated and devoid of vehicles. This is Samuel Beckett, often invoked by Cronenberg in his commentary, via Giorgio di Chirico. In "thinking" Howard Shore's music, Cronenberg sees the score as seconding this vision of the story: "The music for Spider really comes very directly out of the austerity of the movie, and the focus on basically one person and his inner life. The music is to me a very lovely, beautiful, evocative score which helps to take you into the inner rhythms of Spider [Creg's nickname, for reasons that need not be gone into here]." One can hear this austerity in various elements of the music, starting with the sparse instrumentation, which includes only a harp, piano, clarinet, trumpet, and string quartet (performed on the music track by the Kronos Quartet), with the occasional appearance of a female vocalist and, in one cue, some electronics. Indeed, when the first nondiegetic cue appears about eleven and one-half minutes into the film as Creg enters his room at the halfway house for the first time--the title music is a sixteenth-century Elizabethan song, "Love Will Find Out the Way," performed by an amateur singer with piano accompaniment--we initially hear nothing but a quiet and thoroughly haunting--forgive the facile descriptive prose, but I feel I must use that adjective here--duet for piano and harp, later joined--again quietly--by the string quartet.

            From this perspective, then, Howard Shore's music for Spider--much of it, at least--has less to do with the film's narrative and character than it does with the ways in which Cronenberg and his crew visually evoke the sparse, quiet, even desolate reaches of Creg's inner universe, much as the post-title cue of Odds Against Tomorrow (which, interestingly, begins with a solo harp) ties in with the coldness and bleakness of many of the film's exteriors. But Shore's music moves solidly beyond the implications of its sparse instrumentation to explore other facets of the filmic text. First and foremost the interactions between the harp and piano are, harmonically, solidly bitonal, an element later reinforced with the entrance of chordal figures in the strings playing beneath the harp and piano. This is not, however, the rich polytonality, often formed by interlocking triads, of a Milhaud or an Honegger. Rather, Shore offers a threadbare, line-against-line texture--another element to take into consideration when thinking film music--that is just as significant in the aura of austerity as the reduced number of instruments, either one of which is quite capable of playing much more fleshed-out music. Further, even though each line has implications of tonality, the sparse texture, along with the proximity in timbre of the two instruments, produces clashes often so dissonant, so apparently far removed from tonality, that one sometimes has the impression of a kind of atonal bitonality (pardon the oxymoron)--something I'll have to examine further once I see the score, which has been promised to me by Howard Shore. Stay tuned.

            What to make of Shore's subtle and unsettling, yet highly lyrical, use of bitonality? It would be easy--and extremely facile--to suggest that the simultaneity of two opposed tonal centers symbolizes the "split personality" that many associate with schizophrenia, which literally means "split brain." But even a cursory glance at the literature of schizophrenia reveals that this dysfunction has nothing to do with a split personality per se and everything to do with an alienation from an outside world with which the afflicted individual does not entirely lose contact, as witness Daniel P. Schreber, who was able to write extremely lucid prose, in his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, about his dysfunction from within that "nervous illness." Indeed, Shore's use, which I find ingenious (again, forgive the descriptive prose), of two instruments that are close in timbre evokes something much closer to a slight out-of-synchedness in Cleg's inner world than the split that so many people erroneously attribute to schizophrenia. Perhaps a better way of looking at the bitonality would be to suggest it as an alienation from tonality, whose resolutions and closures mirror the rationalized order and discourses of modern, Western culture, as discussed earlier in this article, without entirely losing contact with tonality. From a more metacinematic point of view, the audience, initially introduced into a "normal" world that provides shelter for recovering mental patients, soon begins to enter another world that, because of the inherent realism of the cinematic image, looks just as real as the initial one.

            Yet this world is metaphorically a bitonal one in which the Cleg of the present stands in the world of the past without actually being there. And the fact that we have no way of knowing whether this past is "real," hallucinated, or a bit of both--and Cronenberg, never a director to furnish his viewers with facile explanations, provides no real clues--may tie in with the "atonal" quality of the bitonality. Both Cronenberg and Shore subvert many of the norms of the narrative-based languages of their particular art form without totally abandoning those norms, producing an artistic text perhaps best described as "liminal," in accordance with the precepts set forth by Laura Mulvey in her 1983 article "Myth, Narrative and Historical Experience." If I were to go one step further--which I will--I would also note the extremely poignant nature of music that I have called "haunting" and that director Cronenberg refers to as "lovely, beautiful, and evocative." Perhaps in a culture whose rationalized discourses seem to support, if Susan McClary is to be believed, the "murderous rage of a rapist" ²³ in the recapitulation section of the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, in a culture where, as Deleuze and Guattari have put it in Anti-Oedipus, a book that might be called In Praise of Schizophrenia, "the infinite chains of the unconscious become bi-univocalized, linearized, and are hung upon a despotic signified," ²⁴ the voice from the other side--not entirely the other side--becomes a sad and confused breath of fresh air.

            There is much more to be said about the musical score for Spider, and I may very well do so once I have had a chance to examine the manuscript. Before moving to my conclusion, however, I would like to take quick note of the song heard behind the title sequence, whose credits are set against various shots of walls whose various states of disrepair--mold, stains, cracks, etc.--often suggest Rorschach blots. In his commentary Cronenberg states that this song was sung by Creg's mother to him as a child. The ensuing film, however, gives not the slightest hint of this, and the melody barely makes its way into the film itself. On the other hand, if one examines the song's lyrics, necessary in "thinking" this particular amalgam of film and music, one finds that the words tell of a personified love so obsessive that, should a woman "be concealed from the day," "a thousand guards" should be "set upon her" lest love find its way to her. I also quote in its entirety the fourth stanza, the last one heard in the title sequence, which almost seems to describe Spider's main character: "Some think to lose him / By having him confined; / And some do suppose him, / Poor heart! To be blind; / But if ne'er so close ye wall him, / Do the best that ye may, / Blind Love, if so ye call him, / He will find out his way." I would also note that, in a cue entitled "The Allotments" not heard in the film, unless I really missed something, Shore bitonally juxtaposes this very tonal song, this time vocalized by the woman singer, over the already bitonal material described above.

* * *

            In conclusion, then, I would like to propose an approach to "thinking" film music, whether for a scholar, a critic, or something in between, that would have much in common with the proverbial Gesamtkunstwerk. Even remaining within only the musical domain, we find something of a Gesamtkunst that brings together a variety of disparate elements--harmony, rhythm, texture, structure, timbre, among others--all of which may, or may not, play a role, as a whole, separately, or in various combinations, in the meanings (I stress the plural here) of the cine-musical text. A really important thing is to get your hands on as much material as possible: try to get the score, the DVD of the movie (directors, on alternate audio tracks, often have interesting things to say about the score), the production notes; and, of course, try to talk to the composer if you can. But the most important thing is that when NPR calls you and asks you to describe Erich Wolfgang Korngold's score for The Adventures of Robin Hood, tell them it's a Technicolor score for a Technicolor film. You'll become famous.

Namaste.

ENDNOTES

        ¹ In A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).

        ² Claudia Gorbman, who gave the keynote address at the very first "Music and the Moving Image" conference, has referred to hyperexplication, in Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

        ³ John Shepherd, Music as Social Text (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1991), 124.

        ⁴ Susan McClary, "Sexual Politics and Classical Music," in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 61.

        ⁵ I quote, with modifications, from my article "Music and/as Cine-narrative," 456-57.

        ⁶ Bernstein, The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 61.

        ⁷ Tarasti, "Myth and Music: A Semiotic Approach to the Aesthetics of Myth in Music, Especially that of Wagner, Sibelius and Stravinsky," Acta Musicologica Fennica 11 (Helsinki: Suomen Musiikkitieteellinen Seura, 1978), 304.

        ⁸ Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense, trans. and ed. Jay Leda (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1970), 7-8.

        ⁹ Steve Odin, "The Influence of Traditional Japanese Aesthetics on the Film Theory of Sergei Eisenstein," Journal of Aesthetic Education 23, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 69-81.

        ¹⁰ Ibid., 71.

        ¹¹ Ibid., 71.

        ¹² Tarasti, Myth and Music, 14-15.

        ¹³ Eisenstein, Film Sense, 75, 74, 174-216.

        ¹⁴ See my Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 134-45.

        ¹⁵ Ibid., 136.

        ¹⁶ David Bordwell, "The Musical Analogy," Yale French Studies, Cinema/Sound 60 (1980): 146.

        ¹⁷ Eisenstein, Film Sense, 320.

        ¹⁸ See, e.g., Michael Cherniavsky, "Ivan the Terrible as Renaissance Prince," Slavic Review 27, no. 2 (June 1968): 196.

        ¹⁹ Ibid.

        ²⁰ The printed music that I consulted for this analysis comes not from the original film score but from an oratorio put together from the film score and printed in the complete works of Prokofiev. This music forms movement 17 of the oratorio and is entitled "Иван үмоляет бояр" (Ivan Begs the Boyars).

        ²¹ I am extremely grateful to Stefan Swanson, a student of my colleague Professor Ronald Sadoff at New York University, for transcribing this excerpt from the score and converting it to a computer file.

        ²² See my Overtones and Undertones, 200-19.

        ²³ McClary, "Getting Down Off the Beanstalk: The Presence of a Woman's Voice in Janika Vandervelde's Genesis II," Minnesota Composers Forum Newsletter (January 1987), n.p.

        ²⁴ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie: l'Anti-Oedipe Nouvelle édition augmentée (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 63 (my trans.).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Cherniavsky, Michael. "Ivan the Terrible as Renaissance Prince." Slavic Review 27, no. 2 (June 1968): 195-211.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Capitalisme et schizophrénie: l'Anti-Oedipe. Nouvelle édition augmentée. Paris: Minuit, 1972.

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------. Nonindifferent Nature. Trans. Herbert Marshall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

McClary, Susan. "Getting Down Off the Beanstalk: The Presence of a Woman's Voice in Janika Vandervelde's Genesis II." Minnesota Composers Forum Newsletter (January 1987), n. p.

------. "Sexual Politics in Classical Music." Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

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