Reinventing Sound : Music and Audiovisual Culture [1 ed.] 9781443885638, 9781443881050

Citation preview

Reinventing Sound

Reinventing Sound: Music and Audiovisual Culture Edited by

Enrique Encabo

Reinventing Sound: Music and Audiovisual Culture Edited by Enrique Encabo This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Enrique Encabo and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8105-8 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8105-0

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ...................................................................................................... viii PART I: NEW MEDIA, NEW AUDIENCES Chapter One ................................................................................................. 2 Popular Music and Transmedia Aesthetics: On the Conceptual Relation of Sound, Audio-Vision and Live Performance Christofer Jost Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 14 Baby you’re a star: Selfies, Lip Dubs and Parodies Enrique Encabo Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 29 Queen’s Snake: The Use of Audio Production as a means to Semantic Extension in Queen’s “Was It All Worth It” Jordi Roquer, Santos Martínez and Carles Badal Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 44 A Drop of megalomania, a Touch of generosity, A Dash of Selfpromotion: U2’s Release of Songs of Innocence Ismael López Medel Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 63 The Sunn O))) Album Cover as Puzzle Albert R. Diaz Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 73 Music Video and Advertisement Pedro Buil

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Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 85 Transmedia Storytelling and the Disney Universe: An Analysis of Some Successful Original Soundtracks Eduardo Encabo Fernández, Isabel Jerez Martínez and Lourdes Hernández Delgado PART II: MUSIC, CINEMA AND AUDIOVISUAL PRACTICES: NEW APPROACHES Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 102 Musical Meaning on the Screen: An Approach to Semiotics for Music in Cinema Rosa Chalkho Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 117 Temporal Semiotic Units (TSUs) in Audiovisual Analysis Diego Calderón Garrido and Josep Gustems Carnicer Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 128 Creativity in Sound Postproduction Francesc Llinares Heredia and Josep Maria Mayol i Puentes Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 144 Evil Bach Valentín Benavides Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 167 Resounded and Inverted: Musical World of Stanley Kubrick Mariya Gayduk Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 175 Capturing Music as a Protagonist: Audiovisual Narration in Films by Jim Jarmusch Saskia Jaszoltowski Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 188 The Origins and Evolution of Promoting Rock Music in Spain Juan Carlos Rodríguez Centeno

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Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 202 Henri-Georges Clouzot and Herbert von Karajan: The Filming of Music from the Perspective of Modern Cinema Ramón Sanjuán Mínguez Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 224 Alvis Hermanis Il Trovatore (Salzburg, 2014): How to Analyze a Stage and Musical Text from the Cultural Semiotics? Manuel A. Broullón Lozano

PREFACE REINVENTING SOUND: MUSIC AND AUDIOVISUAL CULTURE (THE CULTURAL STUDIES CONNECTION) DAVID WALTON PRESIDENT OF IBACS, UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA

As president of the Iberian Association of Cultural Studies (IBACS) it is a great pleasure to see Enrique Encabo’s collection of essays in print. The reasons for this are not only to do with seeing a colleague bring to fruition a well thought out and innovative book but also to do with the particular geographical space in which this has been accomplished. When a number of colleagues and I began to promote the area of cultural studies in Spain in 1995 (with the first Culture and Power conference in the Autonomous University in Barcelona) there was very little academic exploration of popular cultural forms in the Spanish university system. Since 1995 we have organised regular conferences, published books and articles and incorporated cultural studies courses into our teaching.1 However, cultural studies, as Clifford Geertz suggested,2 is a “blurred genre” which has meant that much has been presented under its banner. This is especially true in the Spanish context where there are no departments of cultural studies as such, something which has resulted in the area being particularly wide-ranging. In asserting this I am not arguing that this “blurred”, inter- (or multi-) disciplinary character is, in itself, a weakness—as I have stated elsewhere, its variety, flexibility and sense of openness may be seen as its greatest strength, and it is something that characterizes “cultural studies” in many parts of the world.3 It is this heterogeneous character that has resulted in this prologue and my connections with the MUCA (Música y Cultura Audiovisual) group of international scholars who have written the chapters that make up this book. That is to say, given the blurred lines and interdisciplinary crossover between many areas there is much in this collection of essays that is of

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interest not only to those working in musicology and the more specialized formal aspects of music and audiovisual phenomena but those working in areas like cultural studies (and related areas like Media Studies). For example, the authors who have contributed to this book discuss themes which would easily sit comfortably in a volume dedicated to the area in which I work. Examples include analyses of popular music and film, live performance, promotional activities (including self-promotion), ads, video, consumption habits and reception, new media technologies, social media and “transmedia”, audience studies, postproduction, and the role of fans and constructions of the self. Furthermore, some of the approaches draw on strategies and methods which are very common to cultural studies’ approaches like semiotics, and many of the contributions are very selfreflexive in terms of theory and show an awareness of the socio-political circumstances of the phenomena under discussion. Of course, this short list does not capture the full scope of the essays collected here for they also range over an impressive range of subjects from how music relates to popular and “art” film and video to rock music, the music of J. S. Bach, opera and beyond. In short, it is my belief that readers will find a minefield of stimulating reflections in a book which deserves a place on the bookshelves of scholars working in diverse areas of study. It is also a symbol of how scholars in Spain have been widening the scope of academic study to a point where the situation has changed very substantially since 1995 when cultural studies was hardly known on the peninsula. I hope these preliminary remarks will help readers appreciate what this collection of essays has to offer and understand why, a non-specialist in the field, like me has been asked to write this prologue. Finally, I would like to emphasize that I feel that this contribution is a real credit to the hard work put in by the organizers of MUCA and particularly to the book’s editor, Enrique Encabo.

References Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy, Chantal (ed). Culture and Power IV: Cultural Confrontations. Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza, 1999. —. “Cultural Studies or the Study of British Culture(s): The personal, the Political and the Academic.” Journal for the Study of British Cultures, 6(1) (1999):61-84. Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Hand, Felicity and Cornut-Gentille, Chantal (eds). Culture and Power, Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 1995.

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Jordan, Glenn. “Where is Cultural Studies Today?” Aedean (noviembre). Madrid: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, 2000. Martín, Sara. “Cultural Studies and English departments in Spain: margins and centers.” Links & Letters, nº 8 (2001). Walton, David. Culture and Power: Ac(unofficial)knowledging Cultural Studies in Spain. Bern: Peter Lang, 2000.

Notes 1

For the identity of cultural studies in Spain and what it should be, and what it might become see Hand and Cornut-Gentille, Culture and Power; Cornut-Gentille, Culture and Power and “Cultural Studies or the Study of British Culture(s)”; Jordan, “Where is Cultural Studies Today?”; Martín, “Cultural Studies and English departments”; Walton, Culture and Power. Anyone interested in IBACS should consult its webpage: http://www.cultureandpower.org 2 Geertz, Local Knowledge. 3 Walton, Culture and Power.

PART I: NEW MEDIA, NEW AUDIENCES

CHAPTER ONE POPULAR MUSIC AND TRANSMEDIA AESTHETICS: ON THE CONCEPTUAL RELATION OF SOUND, AUDIO-VISION AND LIVE PERFORMANCE CHRISTOFER JOST UNIVERSITY OF FREIBURG

What I always found striking about popular music—as both a fan and researcher—is the fact that its artists need to make a significant appearance, over and over again, in a multitude of medial settings. This is without any doubt a delicate task. Take the release of an album, for instance: as it is known, an album is very much about creating a distinct musical sound texture. But not only that: also a suitable cover needs to be designed; singles are taken from the record, which, in turn, comprehend a further set of visual representations; parallel to this a website is being created (for some time web activity also concerns social network sites); another task is to produce video clips and to promote the music on TV; and, eventually, the artists go on tour and play festival gigs. With this in mind, the current practice of producing and receiving popular music can be best described as a process of articulating and experiencing artistic selfconceptions within alternating media types. In other words: making a meaningful appearance in different media settings somehow seems to represent the norm within popular music culture.

What is “Transmedia”? Writing about popular music from a media theoretical point of view is linked to general assumptions concerning its analysis. Since the beginnings of popular music studies researchers were confronted with the question of what is meaningful about this kind of music and how its artefacts can be analyzed in an adequate manner. Some paid increased

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attention to the social significance of music, concentrating on the analysis of listening habits and symbolic orders, whereas others marked melodic shapes, harmonic structures or groove patterns as particularly relevant. Taking all the different approaches into account, what seems central to the understanding of pop and rock music is that it covers a wide range of artistic phenomena and social functions. Since the early days of rock ‘n’ roll popular music was accompanied by a manifest coupling of musicians and their audiences (which is, to some extent, already the case with swing music and other jazz genres in the first half of the twentieth century, but, nevertheless, with the rise of youth counter culture a “new” discourse between artists and audiences is established).1 From this coupling, pop and rock gained its social vitality and formative power. This implies that popular music, as we know it today, is a rather complex matter. The listener becomes recognizable via music; with the help of music he or she appears as a social subject. At the same time, this reveals that popular music has never been solely about the art of sound production. In fact, it makes those who produce the sounds while being engaged in all sorts of expressive actions stand out. Hence, the question arises how popular music can be best understood as a stimulus constellation that affects people in multiple ways. At this point the concept of technical mediation comes into play. In a sense one could claim that modern popular music took shape in the form of records, TV and radio programs, music films and so forth. Hereof, it is important to note that technical mediation as well as the manipulation of musical events that goes hand in hand with it are not restricted to mass media; it is also a relevant feature of live performances, which mainly concerns the use of the microphone, the PA set-up, audio-visual media and the stage apparatus as a whole.2 In light of the multiple options and standards of music-based media production it seems desirable to analyze popular music as a matter of how musicians (and, of course, all the other parties involved in the production process) succeed in creating a distinct product that attracts the biggest possible audience. The history of popular music reveals that there have always been musicians who urged to go beyond the mere self-presentation in the media. Once a particular topic or motif is brought into focus, a variety of links and cross-references emerge within the work of a musician or a band. Musical sound, audio-vision and performance are brought into effect in a sequence of mutually dependent events. Consequently, producing music becomes tied to a conceptual framework. Such practices challenge not least the notion of popular music as being created out of a recording, which means: primarily being determined by sonic qualities.3 The term

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transmedia addresses this specific reality of cultural production (the German equivalent is “Transmedialität”; the literal translation “transmediality” is not common in the English speaking world, therefore I will drop it). Following media theorist Irina Rajewsky transmedia/“Transmedialität” refers to the occurrence of a specific subject, aesthetics or discourse within various media types, without it being necessary or possible to identify a particular source medium.4 In other words: there is no piece of work that inheres in the status of the original. All manifestations of transmedia aesthetics share the same level of authenticity (or inauthenticity, if you like). Rajewsky uses the term in line with the concepts of intramedia/“Intramedialität” and intermedia/“Intermedialität.” What the three terms have in common is that they address the hybridization of media production. Intramedia refers to media phenomena that involve only one medium (e.g. literature), in which textual references (e.g. text-textreferences) are being conveyed.5 The concept of intermedia/ “Intermedialität”, in turn, addresses hybrid forms that include at least two media types.6 Both terms are just as important for the analysis of the artifacts of popular culture as the concept of transmedia. But the latter has the advantage that musical phenomena are not reduced to the aspects of media combination or media reference. Music can be analyzed as a process of aesthetic production by using different media forms. As indicated above, the artists and their creative staff are forced to renegotiate their appearance as music making persons against the backdrop of media diversity. Analyzing popular music needs to recognize both the dynamics of artistic production in the course of time and in the context of alternating media types. The term transmedia can play an important role concerning this task, since the identification of special characteristics within a given case is not restricted to the sphere of musical sounds and structures, rather the overall phenomenological spectrum of popular music, including gesture, (moving) image or fashion, is factored in. It is very likely that this perspective captures the realities of popular music fans. The para-social relationships of fans with “their” music support the idea that the attractions of popular music need to be scrutinized in a holistic manner.7

Transmedia aesthetics in practice: Three case studies By means of three examples I will illustrate how transmedia aesthetics comes into being and which artistic agenda is at the basis of it. In so doing, an overview of different periods of modern popular music shall be given.

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1. The man-machine: Kraftwerk The German exponents of electronic pop music Kraftwerk play a pioneering role in regards to the subject matter. Just recently, the band has entered the cathedrals of contemporary high culture, such as the MoMA, Tate Modern and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The fact that their work is presented in museums of fine arts somehow gives evidence to the fact that it must contain aesthetic qualities that exceed the art of sound production. Founded in 1970 by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, Kraftwerk, in the first place, delved into endless improvisations, using typical rock instruments. Therefore they became part of a German rock movement that was subsequently labeled by British journalists as Krautrock. But already in the mid-seventies things changed quite significantly. Kraftwerk swapped their rock instruments with synthesizers and self-built electronic drums. The band wanted to revive a specific German tradition concerning the world of art and design—a tradition that was disrupted by the hypertrophic neoclassicism of National Socialism. One major reference was the Bauhaus philosophy, which, as a core element, conveyed the idea of combining art, architecture and technology. Thus, the band’s work would develop a very strong visual appeal.8 The imagery being used follows a sober-minded, minimalistic approach, which includes a little bit of humor and irony (Kraftwerk overly accentuate the cliché of the decent and slightly technocratic male German citizen). But despite this ironic element the band truly reflects upon the benefits and risks of technological progress and the relationship of men and machinery. Their vision is the man-machine, an entity whose creative output is based on mutual dependence. This is not only expressed with the help of album titles (“Autobahn”, “Radio-aktivität”, “Trans Europa Express”), covers and lyrics but it’s also in the music. One of the most widespread misconceptions concerning Kraftwerk is that the music is actually made by machines, in particular drum machines, sequencers or computers. But that’s not the fact: at least until the early 1980s most of the instrumental parts were performed in the studio, although programming tools were already available at the time.9 This artistic approach results in a refined and crisp sound that still can be associated with the performance of a band. The energetic, physically stimulating sound of electronic dance music would develop at a later time, with exactly those programming tools playing an essential role. On stage, Kraftwerk’s sonic identity is transformed into aesthetics of technological functionality, as I would call it. For instance, the stage from their 1981 Computerwelt tour looked like a control room of a factory or a

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power plant, and, furthermore, a set of dummies was part of the show— they served as the materialization of “the robots” which the band addressed in the song of the same name. In the recent performances at Neue Nationalgalerie, the robots were again called into action, now they completely replaced the musicians, at least for one song (which is a regular feature of Kraftwerk concerts since the 1990s). Another interesting point concerning the latest stage set-up is that the equipment is reduced to table-like stands, and it is not clear what is actually inside of it (keyboards, computers, or sequencers?). So instead of four musicians singing and playing instruments the audience experiences four male persons standing almost motionless in front of four toolbars. Watching the performance then almost makes the beholder feel like as if he or she experiences somebody’s everyday work routine. Also the video screen in the background (displaying 3D visuals) is bound to the idea of functional minimalism. In present days it is a widespread practice—at least in the pop mainstream segment—to set up giant stages that take the effect of (temporary) artificial worlds, with the video screen being integrated into the overall stage conception. In the case of Kraftwerk’s recent performances there is only a rectangular screen behind the musicians that marks the end of the stage and looks like a cinema screen. To close the analysis on Kraftwerk, the sphere of audio-visual media shall be mentioned by the example of the band’s video clip oeuvre. First of all, only in its early days (1974௅1983) the band seemed interested in producing music videos or promotional clips (this period comprises nine clips). From 1984 until today only five clips can be listed. This might result from the fact that throughout their career Kraftwerk increasingly became aware of what they actually wanted to achieve artistically, what they wanted to stand for (“the man-machine”). This implied the rejection of “normal” stardom. Accordingly, they ignored many of those activities (such as producing video clips) that “normal” stars would pursue in order to please their audiences. But besides that, in all video clips their passion for technology and modernity shimmers through. In Trans-Europe Express (1977) they are shown as businessman-like passengers of the train of same name, which was back then commonly regarded as a highly modern vehicle. In The Model (1981) their performances within the futuristic stage set-up of the Computerwelt tour are shown; this is combined with found footage depicting typical scenery of the fashion world. Perhaps most obvious in terms of conveying the band’s aesthetic agenda is the video clip to Showroom Dummies (1982). The clip is basically composed of all the components that are mentioned above: the businessman-like image, the dummies and the sparse use of additional visual elements. The band

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presents itself as a group of androids. Not only the dummies evoke this impression, but also the band members themselves. Their part in the clip comprises being in a freeze position and moving in a mechanic manner. At the end of the clip, the four “androids” even enjoy their time in a club-like setting, being engaged in all sorts of robotic dance actions. The latter may also be taken as evidence to the fact that Kraftwerk’s technoid universe includes the integration of humor and irony and a sense of lightheartedness.

2. “Achtung postmodernism”: U2 (1991-1993) The second case study covers the sphere of mainstream rock culture. The Irish superstar band U2 might not be associated with intellectual pop music, but rather with big commercial success and gigantic live shows. Yet their artistic biography clearly comprises a period in which their music became part of an overall aesthetic conception, revealing some strong contemplation on social reality. During the recording of Achtung Baby in early 1991 U2 witnessed just like the rest of the world the outbreak of the Gulf War. And just like the rest of the world U2 were stunned that this war is broadcasted on TV twenty-four hours a day. Music journalist Bill Flanagan commented on this: “Bono sits at the TV transfixed, amazed that CNN is broadcasting the war live twenty-four hours a day, and that he— like millions of TV viewers—finds himself watching war as if it were a football match”.10 In an interview with German filmmaker Wim Wenders Bono stresses that the war coverage is synonymous with the influence of the media on people’s consciousness. Within media reality the boundaries between news, entertainment and advertising vanish.11 U2 wanted to reflect upon this issue. As a consequence, they became concerned with various aspects of constructivist and postmodern philosophy, such as the ambiguity of information, the vanishing of common rules and the rising of irony and eclectic forms. Postmodernism and media reality merged into one overarching motif, which can be observed on all levels of artistic production, beginning with the front cover of the album: a serial composition consisting of sixteen images which represent a wide repertoire of subjects. Monochrome photographs mingle with coloured and sometimes blurry shots; people shots show truncated bodies and heads; the spectrum of motifs ranges from urban scenes (with and without band) to a cattle head and a painted Trabant car. Altogether, the disconnection of things seems to be the actual message. Also in terms of musical style the album appears to be patched together. Various ingredients such as heavily distorted guitars and vocals,

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samples and loops, congas, acoustic guitars and a Hammond organ make up the overall sound. Compared with the band’s previous albums the song compilation appears to be collage-like. An experimental piece such as The Fly follows on the love song So Cruel; Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World, a groovy, sample-based track, succeeds the psychedelic soundscapes in Mysterious Ways, which is then followed by Ultraviolet (Light My Way), a “classic” rock tune. U2 reveal an interest in overly artificial structures, which can also be detected in the songs themselves.12 Paradigmatic of this is the first track, Zoo Station, especially the intro. It starts with a back-plucked tone repetition with an eighth note rhythm. This is followed by a three note guitar riff, which is characterized by the high level of noise interference and room reverb and which is repeated several times in an almost mechanical manner. After the riff is played for the first time, sounds of the fret hand can be heard. Additionally, the pauses between the riffs are filled with noisy drum sounds. Only from the moment on when a back beat snare drum and a second one-note guitar riff are introduced the metric structure (four-four) becomes clear. Taken as a whole, the intro seems to be put together by sound fragments, meaning that the listener witnesses a musical structure that is not laid out to be authentic in one way or another.13 Whereas Zoo Station addresses the idea of the fragmentary within the postmodern agenda, the video clip for the track The Fly ties in with the lofi or do-it-yourself aspect. First of all, the editing is striking, most notably because of its edginess, which implies that harsh cuts occur in rapid succession. Furthermore, the visual track is mostly based on hand camera shots which reveal a grainy, somehow dirty texture. Altogether, these components evoke the impression of a cheap and crude lo-fi-production that denies the notion of auratic and masterful art. Finally, the allencompassing topic “media reality” is addressed: firstly, in the form of various TV sets and a blue cast in some shots which produces the effect of a TV performance within a TV performance and, secondly, via textual messages displayed on a huge video wall (filmed at Piccadilly Circus), amongst them the line: Watch more TV! The format which brings together all the band’s attempts to reflect upon postmodern living condition is the live performance. The world tour of that time is entitled Zoo TV. It started on February 29, 1992 in Lakeland/USA and ended after 157 shows on December 10, 1993 in Tokio. The title Zoo TV is, on the one hand, a reference to the Berlin railway station Zoologischer Garten, an important inner city transport hub (just like Times Square or Piccadilly Circus). On the other hand, U2 regard Zoo TV as an adoption of the US radio format Morning Zoo, in which disc

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jockeys almost simultaneously tell jokes, answer telephone calls and ironically comment on celebrities.14 This collage-like entertainment format which not only allows intertextual references but literally seeks them forms the conceptual framework of the show. The stage looks like a patchwork of various objects, which is exactly what the designers aimed for. By their own account, they wanted to create a “non-design”.15 The stage should look like as if it was made of the remains of post-industrial society. Not surprisingly, gigantic TV towers are an essential part of the stage design (in fact, they were made of video screens). Due to their size they seem to represent the omnipresence of the media in contemporary society. This arrangement is completed by big antenna-like constructions and Trabant cars used as spotlights. The re-functionalisation of the latter links to appropriation art, which is a genre within postmodern visual arts that is based on industrially manufactured goods being manipulated and re-contextualized as artworks.16 The reflection upon the general state of “postmodern confusion” is also subject to the visual material displayed by the TV/video screens. During the performance of the song The Fly short and concise sentences written in capitals are shown in rapid succession (including “Everything you know is wrong”, “Taste is the enemy of art”, “Death is a career move”, “Art is manipulation”, and “Watch more TV”; see above). The audience is literally beset with a multitude of truisms, assertions, antinomies, and cynical statements and therefore hardly able to select information. Here, one of the paradoxes of modern information society is addressed: the evocation of disinformation in the light of information overload. As part of Zoo TV, U2 promoted the idea of postmodern pastiche also with regard to the set list, which includes up to four cover versions of well-known pop songs, and Bono’s enactment of different stage personae (song personae plus fictitious characters that were originally created for the show). In the end, it is not possible to untangle whether Zoo TV imitates postmodern aesthetics or whether it is part of it. But this— according to postmodern philosophy—doesn’t need to be resolved, because: there is no imitation of the original, just the imitation of the imitation. In this sense, U2 operate at the very heart of the postmodern agenda. From 1997 to 1998 the band kept on pursuing a transmedia approach, changing from postmodernism as the overarching motif to pop culture and consumerism, respectively. Since the early 2000s no aesthetic conception that would shimmer through on all levels of artistic production can be detected in their works.

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3. The animated band: Gorillaz A more recent example of transmedia aesthetics in popular music is the band Gorillaz. It is the name of a virtual, cartoon animated band that exists since 1998, consisting of four (fictitious) members: 2D, Murdoc Niccals, Noodle and Russel Hobbs. The driving forces behind this project are Damon Albarn, mastermind of the Britpop veterans Blur, and Jamie Hewlett, a British comic book artist (“Tank Girl”). It is characteristic of this project that the cartoon image is conveyed across all medial channels of communication. In the following, two media types shall be examined in a more detailed fashion, since they transcend the standard within popular music culture. The first example concerns the band biography entitled The Rise of the Ogre published in 2006. Autobiographical works are usually not central to the understanding of the performances of pop artists. Such books appear as a surplus for ardent fans who urge to know “everything” about their beloved stars. But in the case of Gorillaz the prerequisites are different. Since there is no such thing as a personal identity of the band members which the fans can identify with, individual background stories need to be launched. Consequently, the book in question concentrates on telling the fictional biographies of the four band members. In so doing— and, of course, due to the performances in the video clips—personal characteristics as well as a group identity can be assigned by the audience. Furthermore, the book remains somewhat undecided, which, with some certainty, was intended by the authors. The stories of the four band members alternate with commentary by the actual creators and the press. Accordingly, the line between illusion and reality fades—conversely, the reader’s confusion rises. Secondly, the band’s stage performance shall be addressed. Even in the context of live events the four protagonists make an appearance. This is in the main realized in the form of film sequences that are shown parallel to the performance of the real musicians. Temporarily, the real-life companions were replaced completely, as in the case of the Grammy Awards in 2006 when the band was brought into effect as holographic projections (this was based on the Musion Eyeliner technology). But nevertheless, the real-life aspect plays an equally important role in the live performances of the band, as manifested in the concert documentary Demon Days Live (2006). Here, it can be seen that the stage is almost bursting. A rock band set-up, background vocalists, percussionists, a DJ and a string orchestra share the stage space. Additionally, several guest musicians perform, including a children’s choir. The cartoon appeal is transformed into the sphere of real-life performance with the help of

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movable screen elements that are used most of the time as light sources, taking on different colours. As a result, the stage becomes as bright and colourful as a cartoon image. Meanwhile, the accumulation of (inter) personal stage actions ensures that the high-density narration of a typical comic strip is translated into the concept of liveness. Thus far, the aesthetic agenda underlying the works of Gorillaz has been described as being based on textual, visual and audio-visual modes of representation. The last point that is to be made here is that the imagery coincides with the world of sound, in a way that you can interpret sound and vision as forming a coherent whole. The music is loaded with pop cultural references; it links to classic recordings of soul, hip-hop, electronic and rock music. Some of the icons of these genres are actually part of the production, like Bobby Womack, De La Soul or Neneh Cherry. This music creates a distinct pop universe or, one could say, it mirrors pop culture in a bright and colourful way, just like a cartoon creates a condensed and slightly surreal image of reality. Eventually, all modes of representation follow the same affirmation of artificiality and overdetermination.

Conclusions Dealing with transmedia aesthetics reveals that popular music is very much about creating an artistic identity by all possible means. Popular culture in general is determined by the permanent struggle for the audience’s attention, or, to put it more positively, for the hearts and thoughts of the people. There may be great, iconic albums which reveal the aesthetic elaboration of a symphony or evergreens that appear to be common property, but ultimately popular music is about recording and mixing those albums and songs, respectively, creating a suitable artwork, going on tour, performing on TV and so forth. All of this happens against the backdrop of an exuberant everyday output of medial events. Analyzing how the different fields of engagement are tied together, makes you understand the complex nature of popular music. It is quite challenging to create a distinctive and appealing narrative that the audience can enduringly stick to. Also genre conventions need to be taken into account, in so far that an appealing combination of the old (genre affirmation) and the new (genre innovation) is brought into effect. Transmedia approaches are a way to respond to this task. Thus, I assume that the concept of transmedia constitutes a special case within the aesthetic agenda of popular music. But I would add that coordinating elements of artistic expression in a meaningful and coherent way is at the very heart of pop

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culture. It begins with wearing the same jacket in a video clip or on stage and it ends with Kraftwerk turning into man-machines.

References Auslander, Philip. Liveness. Performance in a mediatized culture. London: Routledge, 1999. Bennett, Andy. Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Buckley, David. Kraftwerk: Die unautorisierte Biografie. Berlin: Metrolit, 2013. Eno, Brian. “Bringing up Baby.” In U2: The Ultimate Compendium of Interviews, Articles, Facts and Opinions from the files of the Rolling Stone, edited by Rolling Stone, 165-170. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1994). Flanagan, Bill. U2 at the end of the world. New York: Delta, 1996. Fast, Susan. “Music, Contexts, and Meaning in U2.” In Expression in PopRock Music: A Collection of Critical Analytical Essays, edited by Walter Everett, 33-58. New York: Routledge, 2008. Gracyk, Theodore. Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 1996. Harris, Paul. “U2’s Compositional Process: Sketching Achtung Baby in Sound.” MusikTheorie, 24 (2009): 137-162 Holding, Eric. Mark Fisher. Staged Architecture. Chichester: WileyAcademy, 2000. Krämer, Sybille. “Das Medium als Spur und als Apparat.” In Medien Computer Realität. Wirklichkeitsvorstellungen und Neue Medien, edited by Sybille Krämer, 73-94. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1998. Rajewsky, Irina. Intermedialität. Tübingen: A. Francke Verlag, 2002. Schramm, Holger and Hartmann, Tilo. “Identität durch Mediennutzung? Die Rolle von parasozialen Interaktionen und Beziehungen mit Medienfiguren.” In Mediensozialisationsprinzipien: Neue Modelle und Ansätze in der Diskussion, edited by Dagmar Hoffmann and Lothar Mikos, 201-219. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2007. Waldman, Diane. Collage, Assemblage, and the Found Object. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992. Wenders, Wim. “Lights, Camera, Achtung Baby! Interview mit U2.” In Sound & Vision: Musikvideos und Filmkunst, edited by Helbert Gehr, 66-71. Frankfurt/M: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1993.

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Wicke, Peter. “Sound-Technologien und Körper-Metamorphosen.” In Rock- und Popmusik. Handbuch der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, Vol. 8, edited by Peter Wicke, 11-60. Laaber: Laaber, 2001.

Notes 1

For further reading see Wicke, Sound-Technologien und Körper-Metamorphosen, 38-41; Bennett, Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place, 3451. 2 Auslander, Liveness. Performance in a mediatized culture, 51-54; Krämer, Das Medium als Spur und als Apparat, 83-86. 3 See Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock, 37-46. 4 Rajewsky, Intermedialität, 12. 5 Ibid,12. 6 Ibid,13. 7 See Schramm and Hartmann, Identität durch Mediennutzung?…, 201-219. 8 See Buckley, Kraftwerk: Die unautorisierte Biografie, 36-45. 9 Ibid, 220. 10 Flanagan, U2 at the end of the world, 13. 11 Wenders, Lights, Camera, Achtung Baby! Interview mit U2, 69. 12 See also Harris, U2’s Compositional Process…, 144-161; Eno, Bringing up Baby, 165-170. 13 Fast, Music, Contexts, and Meaning in U2, 40-49. 14 Flanagan, 32. 15 Holding, Mark Fisher. Staged Architecture, 98. 16 See Waldman, Collage, Assemblage, and the Found Object, 310.

CHAPTER TWO BABY YOU’RE A STAR: SELFIES, LIP DUBS AND PARODIES* ENRIQUE ENCABO UNIVERSIDAD DE MURCIA

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse... Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Introduction: from wannabe to broadcast yourself Nowadays, we commonly acknowledge the importance of the technological revolution achieved in the past decades as the catalyst for the emergence of a new interactive reality with infinite possibilities for communication, art, and culture. If until recently the frontiers between reality and virtuality were only possible in the minds of novelists and filmmakers, today they overlap and effectively dissolve, forcing us to rethink and re-imagine our own society. Terms like robot, cyborg, simulation, prosumer... they are no longer words associated with fantasy novels, but terms absolutely necessary to tackle and understand how we relate to our world. When analysing the role of the prosumer1 in musical processes it might seem logical to begin our first chapter in 2004, when web 2.0 is launched. However, from a strictly musical point of view, we should go back to 1981, to the birth of the first ever music-only TV channel, MTV.2 Much has already been written regarding the importance of music for youth,3 a phenomenon which obviously did not begin with this music channel. Nevertheless, the music video along with all of MTV´s unique innovations helped to create a new and powerful cultural universe. What was so different and new about this MTV Culture?4 Simply put, one could say that the superposition of musical language and visual language resulted in

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a new cultural format in which messages are intensely amplified. It didn’t just adding images to music, but rather represented a novel way to address storytelling, characterized by a fast and furious pace that would have a remarkable impact on other cultural forms such as narrative and films for decades to follow.5 With the advent of MTV, the phenomenon of the “wannabe” took on a new dimension. Of course, before MTV there were young rebels who grew their hair imitating The Beatles or shook their hips like Elvis Presley; but with MTV this need to “do as” became a global phenomenon. We can easily remember legions of female teenagers imitating Madonna’s choreography in her video Vogue or high school kids trying to master Michael Jackson’s moonwalk dance routine (which also triggered the design of its own moonwalk video game). This has been widely discussed and appropriately labelled the cultural iconosphere of MTV. According to Jack Banks, MTV coincided with the birth of the first truly international generation: “They wear Levi’s, shop at Benetton, wear Swatch watches and drink Coca-Cola. This is not to say there are not culture differences. We don’t state that the French are not different from the Germans. But a French teenager and a German teenager are much more similar to each other than they are to their respective parents.”6 We could argue that this desire to emulate idols responds only to the novelty of the TV station, but the continued growth of the phenomenon into the 90’s and 00’s provides evidence that this is a real solid trend. Again the youth around the world want to be like Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, Beyoncé, Take That, Backstreet Boys, Boyzone and Westlife. The height of this phenomenon can be observed with Spice Girls and One Direction (although the One Direction phenomenon owes more to the British talent show X Factor than to MTV.) This leads to the clarification that although MTV is the original music TV channel, some competition arose from the 90’s onwards, with The Box, The Hits, Viva, and many other music only TV channels coming into the picture, replicating the MTV model with a mix of local and global talent. Such fragmentation of audiences ended up affecting MTV’s potential to influence culture from the year 2000 onwards. As adolescents take on the serious endeavour of practising and mimicking their idols’ dances and looks in the mirror, parodies inevitably start to appear too.7 One of the most famous parodies was made by the band Blink 182 in the video All The Small Things. The single included in the album Enema of the State was an instant hit. For this video, the California band parodied a selection of elements from music videos from artists including Britney Spears (Sometimes), Backstreet Boys (I Want it

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That Way) or Ricky Martin (Livin’ La Vida Loca). Direct references to the sexual connotations of these videos were treated with comedy and irreverence.8 From the most stereotypical images of sexy Backstreet Boys to the candid Britney Spears, the effect of this mockery by three bad, rebellious and ugly guys was a propulsion towards success. Not surprisingly, Enema of the State was the final leap to fame for the band: The album sold 4.5 million copies in the US and over 15 million copies worldwide. It’s obvious that skits such as the ones performed by bands like Blink 182 require the viewer’s participation, deciphering and understanding the codes and comic clues. However, the fan’s role is strictly limited to spectator, an active spectator, yes, but ultimately just a spectator. A radical change took place with the emergence of Web 2.0 and the new interactive possibilities it made available. It is in the context of this new digital society where the figure of the prosumer acquires a special importance.9 The possibilities, at present, to interact with the original work are endless, from respectful imitation to scathing parody, always vis-à-vis the reappropriation of a specific artistic piece. We look at three recent examples in the following pages.

Worldwide happiness The singer and producer Pharrell Williams was no stranger to the music industry or amongst hip-hop fans, however his worldwide success came in 2013 thanks to the song “Happy.” Without denying the musical virtues of the song, the magnitude of its success owes more to its visual language than to the music itself. We are not referring to the original music video of Happy, but to the vast collection of covers and videos created by the prosumers, especially through the procedure of lip dub. A lip dub is a type of video that combines lip synching and audio dubbing. It is made by filming individuals or a group of people lip synching while listening to a song or any recorded audio then dubbing over it in post editing with the original audio of the song.10 This format reached a height of popularity thanks to its appearance in television programs such as MegaPlayback in Spain or Lip Sync Battle in the United States. Lip Synch Battle featured celebrities; it started as a recurrent segment in The Tonight Show and it became so popular that it launched as a stand-alone music comedy show in 2015. Although Nielsen ratings peaked at 2.2 million viewers on television per show at the time this chapter was written, the viewing figures in YouTube channel were astronomical.11

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Returning to Happy, according to the website http://wearehappy from.com/ there are over 1950 videos from 153 countries that covered in their own way the theme of Pharrell Williams (You can search for them on the same page or by entering the YouTube search term “Pharrell WilliamsHappy-We Are from [name of the city]”). The style of these videos is usually similar: relaxed atmosphere, dancing and joy (expressions of what the feeling of happiness looks like by different people). They feature adults, boys and girls, children, school groups... and, of course, the song used is always the original track sung and produced by Pharrell Williams. To offer some perspective on the phenomenon we look at YouTube audience figures: the official video of Pharrell Williams has 692 million views,12 while the first of the lip dubs (for instance) has 5 million views.13 This illustrates a colossal reception from prosumers of the Happy phenomenon, and it also highlights two paradoxical situations worth looking into. The first one, also related to phenomenon 2.0, is the selfies. On April 24th, 2014, a young girl from North Carolina had a car accident while uploading a selfie picture to her Facebook profile. She wrote “The happy song makes me HAPPY.” This event made the public reconsider the use and abuse of social networks. In this sad event we would like to underline the convergence of two phenomena: the appropriation of the music (in this case the message) and the obsessive display of the self (through social network selfies) linked to it. The second negative situation we highlight is even more disturbing: the Iranian regime sentenced seven young people to 91 lashes–their “crime” had been to record a video with their version of the famous Pharrell song. Music, image and ideology converge in this situation. Although the response of the Iranian regime to an entertaining video which does not contain a direct attack on the political principles of their government may seem very disproportionate and even illogical, it can be better understood by considering how music in totalitarian regimes has sometimes been a medium to say what could not be said. For example, let’s think of the protest song in Spain at the end of the Franco regime or in various musical events under Latin American dictatorships.14 We can therefore note greater implications in a seemingly simple and innocent phenomenon. Again, a clear demonstration of the social power of music (in this case associated with the image).

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Songs in a car Since its inception, the Russian band Serebro has been linked to audiovisual culture. Serebro was formed to represent Russia in the Eurovision Song Contest (2007), and despite the remarkable audience and impact of this annual event, the real global success of the band came in September 2011 with the single “Mama Lover” (from their second album Mama Lover, 2012). There is no doubt that this success stems mainly from the video clip, which shows the three members of the band driving on Russian streets. In a quick search on YouTube, it appears that the official video has a total of 26,517,438 views with 14,666 comments.15 At the same time it is surprising that the video Mama Lover (Jabugo version) has a total of 1,348,317 with 971 views comments.16 Who are the stars of this video? Three women (with a half-naked man as a special guest) which are far from the near-perfect beauty of the Russian girls in the original video. It’s a parody of the most hypersexualised Serebro girls using elements of everyday life (foods like bread, ham, etc.). The overflowing sexuality of the original video is transformed and is ridiculed; these three pranksters show us how easy is to cross that very thin line of ridicule while lipsynching to the original Serebro track. “Mama Lover” was Serebro’s first single to obtain remarkable international success outside Russia. The video achieved significant levels of popularity in countries like Spain, Italy and the Czech Republic, primarily due to the appearance of over 250 parodies of Serebro’s original work on the internet.17 While with the song “Happy” by Pharrell Williams prosumers were not using parody, but rather imitation, with Serebro there’s a clear desire to parody, ridicule, and caricature (it is common in the world of parody to replace the beautiful stars of the original video with beer-bellied, bearded men thereby enhancing the elements one wants to caricaturize with hyperbole and excess). In the case of Happy the prosumer wished to join Pharrell in the expression of joy and laughter. As in Happy, we find in Mama Lover interesting situations concerning the appropriation of original material by the consumer. In Spain two local policemen in Cerdanyola del Vallés (Barcelona) recorded themselves imitating the original choreography of Mama Lover while wearing their uniform and while being inside their patrol car.18 They were reprimanded and had to publicly apologize to the City Council for any damages caused to the image of the police and all public employees. No apologies were ever offered by Sketchshe or Hecatombe Productions; both groups have YouTube channels with a wide audience

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and both feature two videos which resemble each other and are heirs of the Mama Lover aesthetics. Both videos feature groups of men or women19 seated in a car (in the style of Serebro) and through a variety of mash-ups allude to various hits using lip synch. (Sketchshe reference global hits,20 and Hecatombre Productions draw from a mix of Latin and Anglo-Saxon hits).21 Although not a direct parody of the video in question, its influence is remarkable, and we notice two characteristics common to the parody universe: the desire for originality, and the desire to have fun. In these parodies there is always a touch of humour, but also a retrospective look at pop history and the most commercially successful songs vis-à-vis visual references that can only be understood by those generations of consumers born under the influence of the MTV cultural iconosphere. Again a cultural universe that transcends geographical boundaries.

A real Wrecking ball: Love, sex, parody If with Serebro we have seen how the birth of the group was directly linked to audiovisual culture, in the case of Miley Cyrus (daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus), this is even more noticeable. Obviously the task of transforming the super popular Hannah Montana into a more mature pop artist was never going to be an easy one. The passage of the sweet and guileless child prodigies of the American cultural industry rarely occur in a calm and peaceful way (we could list many examples of children who abandoned an exemplary image for a new image of excesses and follies: Britney Spears, Jonas Brothers, Lindsey Lohan, Justin Bieber...). But beyond the controversy, Miley Cyrus found a way with her song “Wrecking Ball” to provide real meaning to her passage. The appearance of the theme and video of the artist was a real wrecking ball. The song was the second single from Bangerz, the fourth studio album by the artist. All previous albums and singles were a success, largely due to an inherited fanbase from her previous career as Hannah Montana. But the numbers generated by Wrecking Ball were dizzying: the video set a record by reaching 19 million views within 24 hours of its release.22 It was Miley Cyrus’s first success, reaching # 1 on Billboard while also marking the beginning of the most transgressive image of the artist (coinciding at launch with the controversial performance of Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke at the 2013 MTV Music Video Awards). In the video, Miley Cyrus appears with a hypersexualized image, notably encoded via the hammer and undulating motion of the wrecking ball as visual references to sexuality, the sign of which is unmistakeably reinforced by the erotic positioning of the naked singer perched atop the

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instrument of sensualised destruction. Almost simultaneous with the release of the official video, we see the emergence of parodies, covers, memes... and the success of all these parallel cultural artefacts is not negligible: if we consider the parodies on YouTube, 14 of them have over 5 million views,23 an audience typically reserved only for a scant few “serious” artists. The impact of the video for Miley Cyrus has an anecdotal reflection on the disappearance of the pendulum from the University of Michigan, removed by the institution due to the use and abuse of said instrument carried out by students seeking to parody the former Disney girl. Wrecking Ball, clearly and evidently now belongs to the cultural iconosphere of the pop universe. No doubt the musical quality of the song is very high, but the visual picture in this case goes far beyond the musical language. Miley Cyrus was certainly not the first artist to allude to sexual desire and display explicit behaviours in music videos (remember artists like Lady Gaga or Madonna) but Miley was one of the most parodied. Why? We can argue two reasons: the first is obviously related to the difficult conversion of the Disney teen girl into a hypersexualized young adult. If provocation and eroticism are part and parcel of the image of artists like Madonna, Beyoncé, Nicky Minaj in the contemporary collective imaginary... the transformation in the case of Miley Cyrus was too bizarre and abrupt. Mockery is inevitably born from shock. The second reason is, of course, the coincidence of the release of the video with the increased role of the prosumer and viral phenomenon, something we will discuss below.

Video killed the Mtv’star? The aforementioned examples, despite their differences, share several characteristics in common. The first shared trait amongst the productions we are analyzing here is that the musical product has not been modified at all. Although there are parodies in which the lyrics are altered (and on rare occasions, the melody), far more frequent are the cases (and hence the intention of our analysis here) in which the original music remains intact. In addition to the already provided examples, we could add many others: “Call on me”, “Harlem Shake”, “Call me baby”, “Sexy and I know it.”... an interesting commonality shared by all of these is that, even though the original song is used, there is no record of legal complaints regarding copyright, authors’ rights, etc. in a time when piracy in the digital environment is also booming. And why not? It’s possible that the music industry is as

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interested in these parodies as it is in the originals, given their potential for roughly equivalent financial returns. In other words, whoever watches the parody is also listening to the original artist, the original music and, provided that this music proves attractive to the end-listener ear (as in the three cases explored above), the parody may result in the (hopefully legal) download (or streaming) of the original creation. In either case, the new creation promotes the circulation and consumption of the original music, and, simultaneously, increases the fame and furthers the marketing potential of the original artist. The second issue is, of course, the importance of the prosumer and the display of self in this reinterpretation of cultural materials. In the parodies we’ve seen there is always a primacy of the self, a self that does not want to be like, that does not want to look like, but rather wants to be the self doing like... as such we are facing a new cultural category, in which the central protagonists do not want to be singers, nor do not want to be artists, they want simply to have a moment in the sun of celebrity, a flash of fame perhaps completely and utterly ephemeral and fleeting but important at the precise moment in which it occurs.24 This parallels with the new forms of entertainment provided by games like Guitar Hero and the like. In such games, the protagonist plays at playing a musical instrument, but this is actually not the gamer’s true focus. The prosumer plays guitar in a double sense, at once playing in the musical sense of the word and playing in the ludic sense via the act of “doing like.” Interestingly, if we were to ask gamers about their relationship with the musical instrument, the majority would most likely report that they don´t actually play the guitar, nor do they feel any compulsion to take up any guitar lessons after playing. We are in the sphere of the playful game, and the only semiotic that matters here is play. Abilities are demonstrated here but not those of the musician, rather those of the gamer. It's very similar to what happens in the parodies: nobody wants to be a singer, or an artist... they only want to be recognized for their skills at providing a new cultural product whose value is determined by the speed of consumption and the immediacy of the moment. The music products are non-existent, they are just a mere imitation or copy;25 the prosumer’s satisfaction is enormous as he/she has (most importantly) enjoyed the experience while, perhaps unknowingly, giving rise to a new cultural artefact. In either case, we are facing the desire of one to be “me, as...” not me, looking like (an artist, a singer, a professional musician). It is uncertain if the prosumer aspires to celebrity vis-à-vis their performances; nor is it important for our analysis because, in the end, what we are considering is

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the new form of reappropriation of the artwork. Absent here is the implicit pact between artist and audience member in which the hierarchy of functions is present. It is, rather, the clear depiction of the theories of Barthes and Eco; it is the rereading and reinterpretation of the artistic work, as has always existed, but now contributing a new product that does not deny but instead strengthens its links with the original work. I receive and reinterpret this work and show it to the world. According to what criteria? Not artistic or creative, clearly, what counts is originality, the ability to attract attention, and a good sense of humour. The third characteristic, directly connected with that above, is the immediacy both in reception and issuance of new messages. This immediacy is brought about precisely thanks to the new framework provided by the Internet and its society 2.0. Before the advent of internet, Postman had already identified some of the characteristics of the so-called era of propaganda.26 Postman couldn’t have suspected (speaking with respect to TV) the effect that the internet revolution would have in this regard. Nowadays, anyone can send a message to the world, without reflection, for right in your pocket is all you need to do it.27 Advances in technology have made it so that in a single device it is possible to record and disseminate the slightest occurrence. Everything is quick and easy. If you’re not very handy with this new gadgetry, no worries, there are now applications like Jibjab where just by uploading a single headshot you can click yourself into a (for instance) Gangnam-style dance line.28 Once again, me, and once again, fast, easy and funny. A recent Hollywood anecdote captures the sign of the times: during the 2014 Oscars, despite the fact that it was worked by the biggest professional names in red-carpet photography, shooting and editing with the most massive of budgets, the most celebrated and shared image of the night, though technically quite inferior, was the famous selfie shot by Ellen DeGeneres.29 Again, fast, easy and funny.

Conclusions The aforementioned examples, despite their differences, share several characteristics in common. What we have presented here represents a brief sketch of a new cultural phenomenon, the consequences of which are readily observable and are ripe for further development. These new cultural productions have developed in part as a result of the contemporary significance of the pop culture iconosphere (undoubtedly prompted by MTV) and the development and rise of web 2.0. We have provided here as examples three music videos with worldwide impact, not to mention the

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variety of applications that have enabled the prosumer to star in his or her own music video. In the examples analyzed, it is not important if one sings (in the case of lip dubs or parodies) or plays (in the case of games like Guitar Hero), the important thing is “doing as if” and, crucially, “being seen.” We are facing a new audiovisual culture that, in terms of musical creation, is, in fact, not so new. In the cases analyzed, the music was always the same, faithfully consumed according to how it was intended by the record companies that released it. We can say that, on a strictly musical level, these products lack any effort toward reinterpretation and are, in their very essence, devoid of any true innovation. There is no musical parody, with the exception, perhaps, of the lyrics. The spoof lies, especially and particularly, in the iconic and visual language. This situation is, if only in regards to the music itself, extremely interesting. If parody is achieved solely on a visual level, we find that the prosumer offers a new cultural artefact, yes, but in terms of music, nothing has changed. The reception of that which is musically consumed is identical, whether it be via the original video clip or the parody. In other words, I can consume the music of Miley Cyrus or Pharrell Williams by watching the artist’s original music video or the video that parodies it. Whichever the case, I still am consuming their music, satisfying my curiosity, perhaps downloading the song legally or illegally (remember that we are dealing with a sound whose production and musical arrangements are impeccable). We can easily understand, given such circumstances (along with the increase in fame enjoyed by the parodied artist), the permissiveness of the record industry regarding these parodies and reappropriations. From the point of view of the image, the situation is completely different. There is a radical reinterpretation of the product received, a reinterpretation, in the case of the parodies, which always must maintain a link with the original work (for in order to achieve the comic effect intended, the audience must be able to recognize the signified to which it refers). Beyond this issue, what we want to emphasize here is the importance of the exhibition of the self in all cases; a self not as the I which “wants to be like” but the I which “does like.” I’m doing it my way, different, original, and for this I want to be recognized. In the case of “wanting to be like”, I need to hide myself in every respect, masking any detail of the self that is unlike the artist I copy; in the case of parody, I do not wish to disguise the self, I wish to emphasize it. The protagonist of the parody or the lip dub is me, and the reference image or video is nothing but an excuse for my own self-exhibition.

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Note that, of the three examples analyzed, two have abundantly clear erotic and sexual connotations. This is most likely due to the tendency of the excessive elements of any piece to lend themselves best to parody, and, of course, the fact that sex and violence have always been known to sell especially well. It has been shown that adolescents dedicate more of their free time to musical activities than to any other sport or hobby.30 This is logical if we consider the critical function of music as a tool to help us narrate ourselves as social individuals (which in adolescence is fundamental). Given that this adolescent need to “Sing Your Life” typically coincides with an age of sexual awakening, the music industry shrewdly and consistently launches hypersexualized products targeted at this age group. The reception is as expected or, in the cases observed, quite distinct as parodic reappropriation (perhaps just a way to give free rein to so many subconscious needs and desires) giving rise to new cultural products, framed in a pop iconosphere. This iconosphere is very similar to that which was already firmly established during the 80’s with the birth of MTV, but it does have new connotations. Web 2.0 adds features specific to the XXI century. We can classify all these productions under the acronym FEF: Fast, Easy & Funny. Fast (to such a degree that I can create and launch my original idea to the world in a matter of minutes—the matter of minutes being nothing more than the duration of my idea), Easy (because to do so I need only my mobile) and Funny (because, in the end, I am not striving for permanence or an artistic production that upholds the values of inherited tradition, but rather just something original and funny; an authentic moment. All of the above shows the importance, today, in the instantaneous velocity of the information society, of the self in the here and now. Ambition seems limited nowadays; existing only in the present, a present that lasts only a moment. In recent years we have moved at a dizzying pace, going from communicating immediately via e-mail (which added an unthinkable speed over mail) to being able to “see each other” through videoconferencing. Later we managed to open our own windows to the world through Facebook, which would be followed by YouTube, Vimeo and other channels where motion was added to image. Despite the fact that technological advances have permitted more and more possibilities for communication, the tendency is to increasingly reduce the message. So it is easy to understand the boom in recent times of phenomena such as Twitter, Instagram or vines, where what matters is the condensation and the immediacy of the message. Fast, Easy & Funny (at the level of the consumer, receiver and prosumer which, in most cases, is all the same person). An immediate consumption in which the image of the self is

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becoming more important and where what matters is not creativity or best/worst artistic result but originality, the ability to call the world’s attention, even if it be, as in a tweet, via messages of 140-characters or fewer, or as in a vine, via videos clocking in at around six seconds.

References Adorno, Theodor W. Essays on Music. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. Ayats, Jaume, and Salicrú-Maltas, María. “Singing against the Dictatorship (1959-1975): The Nova Cançó.” In Made in Spain. Studies in Popular Music, edited by Silvia Martínez and Hector Fouce. New York: Routledge, 2013. Banks, Jack. “MTV and the globalization of popular culture.” Gazette, 59 (1) (1997): 43-60. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, 217-51. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Calderón, Diego, Llinares, Francesc, and Gustems, Josep. “Música, sonido e intenciones comunicativas en los Lipdubs.” In Música y Cultura Audiovisual: Horizontes, edited by Enrique Encabo, 65-76. Murcia: Editum, 2014. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes. La litterature au second degre. Paris: Seuil, 1982. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of TwentiethCentury Art Forms. Champaign and Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Jones, Steve. “MTV: The Medium was the Message.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 22 (1) (2005): 83-88. Kristeva, Julia. “Problemes de la structuration du texte.” In Tel Quel: Théorie d'ensemble, 297-316. Paris: Seuil, 1968. MacDonald, Raymond, Miell, Dorothy, and Hargreaves, David, J. (eds.). Musical Identities. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Markman, Eliel. “De l'identité musicale à la représentation politique : le rock argentin pendant la dictature.” Sociétés 3/117 (2012): 73-86. Middleton, Richard. Studying Popular Music. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990. North, Adrian C., Hargreaves, David J., and O’Neill, Susan A. “The importance of music to adolescents.” British Journal of Educational Psychology, 70 (2000): 255-272.

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Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1985. Strank, Willem. “Nuevos medios, nuevos contextos: perspectivas analíticas de la música en la era de Internet.” In Música y Cultura Audiovisual: Horizontes, edited by Enrique Encabo, 21-41. Murcia: Editum, 2014. Vila, Pablo. “Identidades narrativas y música. Una primera propuesta para entender sus relaciones.” TRANS-Revista Transcultural de Música, 2 (1996).

Notes * The author wishes to express gratitude to Michael Arnold and Rosa Martinez for their corrections and very interesting opinions and contributions. 1 The origin of this term and even its meaning admits various interpretations. While some consider it a contraction of “professional” (or pro-active) and “consumer”, we prefer to use it here as the contraction of the terms “producer” and “consumer”; prosumers are consumers that become involved with designing or customizing products for their own needs. A prosumer can be defined as the digital version of a consumer. The syllable “pro-” underlines the interactive portion of new media in general. 2 On Saturday, August 1, 1981, at 12:01 a.m. MTV (U.S.) launched with the words (spoken by one of MTV’s creators, John Lack): “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll”. The Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star was the first music video to air on the new cable television channel, which initially was available only to households in parts of New Jersey. Today, more than 50 countries across 5 continents have their own MTV channel. 3 See, among others, MacDonald, Miell, and Hargreaves, Musical Identities; Middleton, Studying Popular Music; Vila, “Identidades narrativas y música”. 4 It is worth remembering that MTV is a thematic channel for music; it is comparable, therefore, to other thematic channels devoted to sports, cooking, fashion, history... yet we are all too well aware that MTV goes far beyond this condition of thematic channel, resulting in (without finding any thematic channel comparable in this respect) a genuine culture, an easily recognizable and detectable cultural iconosphere. 5 In the field of cinema this influence is clearly observable in directors such as Baz Luhrmann, Andy Wachowski, Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry, amongst others. 6 Banks, “MTV and the globalization of popular culture”, 43-60. See also Jones, “MTV: The Medium was the Message”. 7 The general characteristics of parody have been analyzed in the following studies: Kristeva, “Problemes de la structuration du texte”; Genette, Palimpsestes. La litterature au second degre; Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms.

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8 The image used for the first single was also irreverent: in What’s My Age Again the protagonists appear streaking the streets of Los Angeles. It helped to establish an image of rebellion associated with the band, despite the fact that it had been marketed through the same channels as the works it parodied. 9 See Strank, “Nuevos medios, nuevos contextos”, 21-41. 10 The term is attributed to Jake Lodwick. The co-founder of Vimeo coined the term “lip dubbing” on December 14, 2006, in a video entitled Lip Dubbing: Endless Dream. In the video's description, he wrote, “I walked around with a song playing in my headphones, and recorded myself singing. When I got home I opened it in iMovie and added an MP3 of the actual song, and synchronized it with my video. Is there a name for this? If not, I suggest lip dubbing”. For more information see Calderón, Llinares and Gustems, “Música, sonido e intenciones comunicativas en los Lipdubs”, 65-76. 11 For instance, Anne Hathaway’s parody of Wrecking Ball reached 15.6 million just on the official Lip Synch Battle on Spike channel. There are several entries of this video in other channels too; we estimate her total number of views is approximately 20 million. 12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6Sxv-sUYtM. Accessed May, 5, 2015. 13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGrHwBlf-7M Accessed May, 5, 2015. 14 More information available in Ayats and Salicrú-Maltas, “Singing against the Dictatorship (1959-1975): The Nova Cançó”; Markman, “De l'identité musicale à la représentation politique : le rock argentin pendant la dictature”. 15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDRnkTSdbRE Accessed May, 5, 2015. 16 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McJZEBfiWgM Accessed May, 5, 2015. 17 In Spain, the EuropaFM radio network launched a promotional campaign inviting its audience to make their own version of the video and upload it to the internet with the hashtag #retoserebro. 18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcXeqgROpbw Accessed May, 5, 2015. 19 It is not the issue at hand, but this division with respect to gender-related parody is really quite interesting. In the examples analyzed, provided the performance is carried out exclusively by men or women (regardless of the appearance of special guests of the opposite sex whose purpose is solely to enhance the playfulness and ridiculousness of the resulting product). 20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMpQUsQcJFg Accessed May, 5, 2015. Mime Through Time by SketchSHE at the time of this text’s composition it had 24,479,530 views. 21 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1cQ2lP4pjA Accessed May, 5, 2015. Concierto Entusiasmo 2 at the time of this text’s composition it had 1,024,955 views. 22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My2FRPA3Gf8 Accessed May, 5, 2015. At the time of this text’s composition it had 765,538,566 views and more than 1,100,000 comments. 23 Notably Wrecking Ball (Chatroulette Version), with 135,795,281 views (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6DmHGYy_xk) and the parody by Bart

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Baker with 69,748,081 views (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLtmauJLP-A) Accessed May, 5, 2015. 24 It should be noted that this movement coincides with the rise of certain type of “celebrity”: people who are not actors, nor singers, nor are they recognized for any particular profession or capacity, they are famous simply due to their prominent role in the media. 25 Therefore, the analytic criteria which we use to approach them must be different to traditional standards, a change similar to that employed by the Frankfurt School theorists with regard to the technology boom of the early twentieth century. See Adorno, Essays on Music; Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 26 Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death. 27 To wit, note the controversial claims of some artists in their official twitter accounts and their corresponding public corrections. 28 http://www.jibjab.com/ecards. Other applications that enable the consumer to be “creative” are Flipagram or JamCam, where again, the music is always from the original version. 29 Degeneres tweeted the famous Oscar photo (with Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep, Kevin Spacey and others). The tweet was seen by 37 million people worldwide, according to Twitter numbers. In contrast, 43 million viewers tuned in to the broadcast to see the Samsung snap. Maurice Levy has valued Ellen DeGeneres’s Oscar selfie at between $800 million and $1 billion, arriving at this large sum due to its massive sharing on social media. 30 See North, Hargreaves, and O’Neill, “The importance of music to adolescents”, 255-272.

CHAPTER THREE QUEEN’S SNAKE: THE USE OF AUDIO PRODUCTION AS A MEANS TO SEMANTIC EXTENSION IN QUEEN’S “WAS IT ALL WORTH IT” JORDI ROQUER, SANTOS MARTÍNEZ AND CARLES BADAL UNIVERSITAT AUTÒNOMA DE BARCELONA

An approach from the semiotics perspective From the 1960s, and especially during the last two decades, semiotics has been an important influence on the ways of thinking about music. Sign and signification have been set to foreground and semiosis has emerged as an interdisciplinary path to perception and knowledge. Authors like David Lidov, William Dougherty, Robert Hatten, José Luiz Martinez, and Eero Tarasti1 have applied the ideas of American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce to musical analysis from different perspectives, obtaining noteworthy results. Semiosis can be defined as the process by which meaning is produced and understood.2 This process includes three elements that Peirce called sign (also called representamen, a thing that represents another thing), object (what the sign represents), and interpretant (the sense made of the sign). Peirce establishes a classification of signs based on three trichotomies: first, we have the sign’s relation to itself, then the sign’s relation to its object, and finally the relation between the sign and its interpretant. Three types of sign will arise from each trichotomy, resulting in a total of nine different kinds of sign. Peirce’s second trichotomy—the sign’s relation to its object— distinguishes between icon, index, and symbol, and will be particularly

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interesting in relation to our analysis object. Icons are signs that imitate or are similar to what they signify. As an example, we can take the birdsong at the end of the second movement of Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony”, where the flute mimics the nightingale, the oboe imitates the quail, and the clarinets sing like the peekaboo. Indices are signs directly connected—by causality or by spatial, temporal, or cultural proximity—to what they stand for (e.g. flamenco guitar as a sign of Spanish music), while symbols are connected only by convention to what they represent—its relationship must be learnt, like a national anthem or a leitmotiv.3 However, it should be noted that, in many cases, different forms of semiosis are not isolated from each other. As we shall see later in our analysis, there are several levels of interdependence between the modes of significance. Also influenced by Peirce’s ideas, Philip Tagg has proposed an analytical model which emphasises the communicative potential of what he has called “parameters of musical expression.”4 These parameters are defined as “sets of properties constituting the vast variety of sounds we hear as musical”,5 and can be thought of in four interrelated and overlapping main categories: 1. Time, speed, and space. 2. Timbre and loudness. 3. Tone and tonality. 4. Totality (diataxis and syncrisis).6

Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning Tagg’s words: Very few concepts denoting parameters of musical expression fit neatly into any one of the first three categories and [...] category 4 includes several by definition. For example, nothing in categories 2 (timbre and dynamics) or 3 (tone and tonality) can exist without the parameters of time and space (category 1); nor can elements of temporal organisation like rhythm and metre exist without timbral, dynamic or tonal patterning, nor can tone or timbre be understood without considering pitch and loudness.7

Over the last fifty years, technology has allowed the treatment of audio signals in multiple forms, enabling the alteration of the timbre of an original sound source in many different ways. This can be done especially through the use of a vast array of effect devices, ranging from distortion and filters to modulation and loudness effects.8 Tagg is very critical about the academic world’s tendency to “conceptualise parameters of musical expression hierarchically, as either primary—“syntax-based discrete relational categories (pitch, duration)”—or secondary—“tempo, dynamics, timbre.” Such conceptual hierarchies are inapplicable to most of the music

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we hear on a daily basis.”9 His criticism towards this hierarchical separation of parameters has much to do with that treatment given by the academy that we spoke of. From Tagg’s 1982 analytical model we could already deduce a division between traditional analysis objects (i.e. time, melodic, orchestrational, tonality/texture, and dynamic aspects) and those less attended by music scholars (i.e. acoustical and electromusical / mechanical aspects). As far as popular music is concerned, the works of musicologists such as Richard Middleton, Keith Negus or John Covach somehow cover this first group using traditional analytical models.10 On the other hand, proposals of scholars like Paul Théberge, David Carter, Paul Ramshaw and, more recently, Simon Zagorski-Thomas,11 usher in a new approach that considers audio production techniques as an object of academic interest. Much of this interest is certainly a logical heritage from initiatives such as the “Art of Record Production” or the “Audio Technologies for Music and Media” that, amongst others, have started a promising debate using audio production techniques as a means to approach academic discussion. At the same time, this publications pay attention to production techniques mostly used by certain recording engineers or concrete references to recordings considered cornerstones of the music of our time. In most of these publications, the reader is usually given the knowledge needed to comfortably use these tools properly and, most importantly, to apply them in a creative way.

From technical praxis to reception The study of audio production techniques from their first uses in commercial recordings to its social reception asks for the analysis of which effects have been applied to which sounds in which situation or context. At the same time, looking at their context, we need to understand why these effects are used. At this point, it is essential to give a more detailed description of the effects involved in our analysis object: phasing, flanging and panning. We will focus on the analysis of both its operation and its perception. Though there’s no need to delve into this techniques on a detailed technical level, it is important to understand some basic acoustics and electro-mechanics to see why they sound the way they do. On a technical level, our starting point will be a simple sine wave. If we duplicate it and, afterwards, we delay and superimpose this copy to the original wave, the sound will be reinforced in several places as soon as the phases of both waves are close to each other. When both waves are exactly

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180 degrees out of phase and at equal amplitude, however, total cancellation occurs. With more complex waveforms, the overlapping of a slightly delayed duplicated signal creates what is known as a comb filter. In this kind of filters, frequency response has several amplitude peaks and valleys called teeth, which are distributed throughout the harmonic spectrum. Because of phase differences in the spectrum, some frequencies are reinforced while others are cancelled. When the delay time is modulated using a low frequency oscillator, the teeth move through the frequency spectrum, thus creating the characteristic rippling effect common to phasing and flanging, although both effects actually happen in different ways. In phasing, the signal passes through all-pass filters which have a nonlinear frequency phase response. This results in phase differences in the output signal that depend on the input signal frequency. Therefore, different frequencies of the original signal are delayed by different amounts, causing peaks and valleys without harmonic relation in the output signal. The flanging effect, in turn, uses a delay which is equally applied to the entire signal. However, in this case, the delay—and therefore the phase shift—is uniform across the whole sound. This results in a comb filter with peaks and valleys that are related harmonically. Usually, the comb filter created by this uniform delay will have multiple evenly spaced teeth, while the phasing effect—depending on the design of the circuitry—will show few unevenly distributed teeth the spacing of which can be configured manually. The reiterated use that the Beatles made of the automatic double tracking (ADT) and their mass-media stars position, could explain why many voices point them out as the pioneers in the use of this type of effects. Although ADT accidentally created an interesting palette associated with sound modulation—including the coining of the term flanging by Lennon and Martin12—, the procedure itself was devised earlier. In “Mammy's Boogie” (Capitol, 1953), Les Paul worked with a speed control in one of the coils used in the recording process.13 Some years later, Toni Fisher recorded “The Big Hurt” (The Big Hurt. Signet, 1959) and, while trying to strengthen the final mix, engineer Larry Levine decided to double-track the whole recording “layering a copy of the tape over the original at a slightly different speed.”14 The process, quoted here by Levine himself, represents a testimony of great value as it moves precisely between the technical description and social reception: I lined up the two tapes and started the two machines simultaneously... and it stayed together, pretty much, for the first eight bars, and then one went

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out of phase with the other. […] It ended up being a big hit record when it was released back in 1959, and people were trying to guess where it was made […] a lot of disk jockeys were talking about it on the air, wondering if it was made at an airport with a big jet passing by.15

From a technical standpoint, Lavine’s testimony may not represent a matter of particular interest. From the reception point of view, though, the association between the effect and the sound of an aeroplane can be revealing as it shows how the relation between sound effects and nonmusical elements can play an essential role in the reception processes. These relationships between phase modulation and significance will grow proportionally to the inclusion of this kind of effect in the sound production field. As it happened with distortion—which went from being an unwanted effect to such a creative tool throughout the 1950s—effects like flanging or phasing turn their early accidental condition into a powerful weapon with an interesting semantic potential. At this point, the effect begins to surround itself with a certain significance related to specific concepts such as unreality or dreamlike reverie. As Richard Brice says, “perhaps precisely because the sound quality was so unusual (recording engineers having striven to avoid its acoustic equivalent), John Lennon even employed this effect on vocals to depict the dreamy experiences of childhood.”16 Therefore, it is not unreasonable to consider that the use and acceptance of these “sound-equals-concept” associations got more and more relevant as some of the prime artists started to use them in similar directions. So we can assume that the uses of these effects in recordings like “Tomorrow Never Knows” (Revolver. Parlophone, 1966) or “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Parlophone, 1967) may have played an important role helping to promote the use of an effect as a new instrument. Despite the Beatles using this type of effects, it was not until the recording of “Itchycoo Park” (Immediate, 1967), by The Small Faces, that one of the first clearly intentional uses of flanging took place in popular music. During the recording, George Chkiantz (sound engineer who was not related to the record but working at the same studio) suggested the effect to Glyn Johns, the producer. Johns looked for a place in which to use this effect. The choice of the song, considering its subject and the placement of the effect in the lyrics—the song was banned by the BBC due to its obvious reference to drugs17—cannot be coincidental.

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Sound and movement In sound production, there are a number of techniques that can be used to imply or signify movement. Using natural or artificially generated reverberation, it is possible to project the sense of space needed to give some context to any type of movement. Nonetheless, there are other effects that offer more possibilities when it comes to the discussion of this type of motion. It is the case of panning, in which movement is generated and perceived through the distribution of sound across the stereo field. Unlike reverb, panning is only possible in stereo or surround, but never in monaural systems. This is because the latter send the same signal to each output channel or speaker, independently of its number. However, panning is generated precisely by managing different intensities in each one of the channels. Once these tools have been analysed on a more general level, we need a model to understand how they work in each particular musical situation. At this point, it is necessary again to address some of the concepts that Philip Tagg often uses in his semiotic analysis: kinetic and spatial anaphone. As a result of the union of the terms analogy and sound (phonos), the term anaphone refers to the imitation of non-strictly musical (paramusical) sound objects through music. Tagg classifies anaphones into three categories: sonic, tactile, and kinetic. At the same time, he refers to the three modes of perception that operate interrelated: sound, touch, and movement. That leads us to classify certain sound in one of these categories depending on “which mode of perception [...] is most striking in the link between musical structure and paramusical phenomena.”18 When these modes of perception act simultaneously, a fourth category is generated. We are talking about the composite anaphone. Since few times in the perception of sound a sole possible interpretation is derived, this category offers a more open and realistic analysis.19 Sonic anaphones are fundamentally related to imitation of sounds external to the musical discourse (Tagg calls this process stylisation). It could be any existing sound generated by any element of the world around us: human, animal, mechanical, artificial or natural. It could also be the sound of a train (its wheezing or its mechanism), an ambulance siren, a song of a bird, etc. Secondly, we find tactile anaphones, which refer to the various tactile sensations that can produce sound perception and that, as Tagg observes, are often associated with the timbral properties of music. This applies to adjectives like soft, gentle, velvety, rough, coarse or grainy, all of them used in areas as diverse as audio production, musical criticism or musical analysis very often.

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Finally, kinetic anaphones refer to the relationships that can be established between sound and movement. Tagg subdivides this category depending on the complexity of the movement that the music depicts. Within this category, we first find those anaphones that refer to broad movements like those of a body or a group of human bodies, animal or mechanical objects. Here, we can place activities such as running, driving, jumping, galloping, etc. It is what Tagg calls “the gross-motoric side of kinetic anaphones.”20 On a second level, we find the fine-motoric element: finer, smaller, and lighter movements. We could include a blink, a kiss or a chill here. Having reached the third level, we must consider that the concept of movement has, in any situation, spatial implications. In this “physical domain of representation” the elements of the other two levels are combined in a space-time interaction. Tagg labels them as holokinetic anaphones in which different objects or bodies are positioned in relation to themselves and to a virtual space only through music. It is within this last level that we find spatial anaphones. This type of anaphone can be observed in any musical situation where, either by using effects or by using specific recording techniques, a “virtual acoustic space in the listener’s speakers, headphones and actual head”21 is generated. This sound’s ability to create spatial sensations has implications that go beyond the simple virtual location of a musical band and its different parts. As we have mentioned when speaking about the reverb effect, it is possible to create a room-like feeling which is not real but realistic. The accurate use of it can enable the listener to project complex situations like a singer in a big hall or a full band in a small room in her or his mind. But as Tagg himself states, the most usual form of anaphone is its composite version. Let’s see some examples.

Queen’s Snake: a case analysis Modulation effects as a semantic tool in Queen’s catalogue British rock band Queen made an extended use of modulation effects in vocals, guitars, and drums. In fact, their first single “Keep Yourself Alive” (Queen. EMI, 1973) is already an interesting sample of an intentional use of tape phasing.22 The opening guitar riff is based on the so called gallop rhythm,23 a rhythmic pattern typically used in heavy metal songs, either on rhythm guitar or on drums. What takes the riff from “Keep Yourself Alive” further than others is precisely the phasing effect that seems to meaningwise fill in the horse galloping feel of this rhythmic pattern. Again, the result of the effect—with its periodic oscillation—

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enhances the concept of movement adding another kind of periodic circularity to an already cyclical pattern (see Fig. 3.1):

Fig. 3.1. A prototypical gallop pattern based on the alternation of one quaver and two semiquavers.

Here, we can go back to Philip Tagg’s theory and his “gross-motoric side of kinetic anaphones.” Tagg already uses the gallop rhythm to explain this perception of movement in the aesthesic side of musical communication. Later, though, he admits a wider meaning to this example relating it to sonic anaphones, too, as it is clearly a stylisation of the sound of a galloping animal, not only of its motion. As he explains, this double meaning of the same analysis object forms a composite anaphone. We could find a pretty long list of tracks in Queen’s catalogue where modulation effects play some kind of semantic role. In “Bohemian Rhapsody” ’s intro (A Night at the Opera. EMI, 1975), a panned shifted crash with a flanging effect is heard upon the words “any way the wind blows” (00:41) enabling us to hear the wind moving from left to right. In the same album we find this same effect in “I’m In Love With My Car”, this time used on guitars and drums. The use of flanging is even more apparent in “Killer Queen” (Sheer Heart Attack. EMI, 1974), where we can hear it on vocals upon the phrase “dynamite with a laser beam” (00:31). In this case, we find an obvious relation with the sci-fi genre in movies and TV, where flanging has been largely used to represent the sound of all kind of laser artefacts. In the first two examples we are facing composite anaphones which add the sound of the wind and the car engine respectively to those ideas of motion. A snake tongue travelling in time In 1978, Queen released their seventh album (Jazz, EMI) including the song “Let Me Entertain You” in which we find some interesting production tricks like several heavy volume swells and sudden dynamic level changes. These techniques were widely used by the band in many of their records and were usually related to some concept expressed in the text. “Let Me Entertain You” offers different examples: from an artificial volume rise at the end of the first verse (00:38) to a drastic volume and panning change applied to guitars while Freddie Mercury sings “sound and

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amplification, listen…” (01:32). But our interest will focus on a particular part of the text that is treated with such a weird effect: a panned flanging sound synchronised with the final phoneme in the word merchandise (01:01): I've come here to sell you my body I can show you some good merchandisssse I'll pull you and I'll pill you I'll Cruela-de-ville you And to thrill you I'll use any device

Why is this flanging effect there? Is it accidental? Of course it might not be so at all but, if there is an intention, what is the hidden meaning behind this sound manipulation? Except for those readers with—let’s say—some kind of foresight, we had to wait more than a decade to discover the meaningful use of this effect. In 1989 Queen release their penultimate studio album (The Miracle, EMI) and we find this same trick in the song “Was It All Worth It” again but, this time, a stronger relation between sound effect and text gives us the ultimate clue: 02:37 - “yes we were vicioussss, yes we could kill...”

The flanging effect applied to the final syllable causes a deformation and a prolongation of the phoneme [s]. Possible semantic extension: "Vicious" ĺ "sssssss" ĺ "snake tongue"

Fig. 3.2.

Figure 3.2 shows us that we are facing a semantic extension where sound acts as the trigger that moves the text towards a new meaning. As in “Bohemian Rhapsody” ’s intro, the effect has been produced using a crash cymbal, treated with flanging and later panned and synchronised over the end of the word vicious. This causes a possible extension of the semantic field by lengthening the phoneme [s] and creating a sound that unequivocally resembles the tongue of a snake. The sound alteration of a single phoneme of the word “vicious” metaphorically expands its meaning

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("sssssss" ĺ "snake tongue"). This is a clear example of a sonic anaphone where the sound effect upon the phoneme [s] acts as a musical sign (icon) connecting us with the idea of a snake. We must recall that in many cases, the different forms of semiosis are not isolated from each other; there are several levels of interdependence between the modes of significance. In this case, the iconic relation between the extension of the phoneme [s] and the sound of a snake’s tongue becomes a symbolic relationship that extends the information provided by the sign. At this point, it will be interesting to review, although superficially, the strong cultural connotations of the snake as a symbolic element. The serpent has been used as a symbol by many societies and cultures throughout history. However, different meanings—often contradictory— are attributed to it. In many worldviews, snakes have been regarded as the embodiment of the vital principle and the forces of nature and have also been considered as a symbol of the soul and the libido. Kundalini, Ananta, Naga, Ouroboros, Leviathan, Quetzalcoatl, Atum or Python are some of the names that the serpent has received, holding a prominent place in the imagination of many cultures. Although in some Christian texts the snake is interpreted from different perspectives, since the Middle Ages a negative image of the serpent—that will become malignant, bearer of the worst vices and representative of temptation and sin—was generalised. But in the last two centuries, numerous poets and artists have claimed for the integration of nocturnal snake symbolic values. According to French writer, philosopher, and theologian Jean Chevalier, since the Romantic period the symbol of the serpent will be strongly claimed again as a metaphor of the inseparable link between good and evil, pleasure and pain, the lawful and the forbidden.24 Chevalier also points to the Surrealist movement as one of the most interested in solving these indivisible forces. And although it may seem a coincidence, surrealism leads us back to the relationship between sound and text in our analysis object. “Was it all worth it” is a song with a strong autobiographical content, and through the symbol of the serpent, Queen looks back into a past where vice played a role that does not have to be repudiated at all. Surrealism also appears in the text to describe some of the creative sides of the band, and it is in this case where the semantics of sound plays an interesting role for analysis again. Figure 3.3 shows how the result of the process applied to the word surrealistic is similar to the previous one (Fig. 3.2) but, in this case, it does not involve any semantic extension: the flanging and panning effects enhance the meaning (surreal) by altering the sound of the whole signifier:

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04:30 - “we went to Bali, saw God and Dali so mystic, surrealistic...”

Flanging, panning and dynamic compression. Lead voice is duplicated whispering.

Fig. 3.3

Finally, dynamic compression25 also plays an important role as the voice of Freddie Mercury is duplicated with a whisper. To get that whisper clearly audible when it is next to the loudness of a rock band, the vocal track must be moved towards a sonic plane which is obviously unnatural in terms of acoustics. Even though this is an effect that goes beyond our approach, dynamic compression helps to generate what neuroscientist Daniel Levitin has described as “sound hyper-reality”—i.e. sensory impressions made by audio production techniques that we never actually have in a real world.26 That completes a battery of resources used with a clear intention: to affect the message's perception even beyond the meaning of the text. While in the case of audio compression we could think of some professional inertia in the field of audio production, the use of flanging and panning becomes a creative tool whose semantic potentiality has not been much studied yet.

Conclusions The aim of our analysis of “Was It All Worth It” is to show how the use of flanging and panning can run as an effective tool for semantic purposes. Although our analysis is focused in such a particular case, we find it stimulating enough to broaden the academic debate about the relationship between sound and meaning. In that sense, the theoretical and analytical apparatus proposed by Phillip Tagg is of great interest not only because it offers an alternative to traditional models of musical semiotics but because it has been able to identify some elements of musical expression that come from the audio production field and have not been addressed yet. At the same time, this perspective opens the door to rethink the way we understand this techniques and tools, removing the distinction between

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technology and musical instruments. Music creation has always been built around technology changes—e.g., key mechanisms in flutes or the invention of fortepiano—and this modifications have continued affecting music in every new device used to make it. This statement leads us to see sound production and its techniques as a natural next step in music creation. Furthermore, some of these techniques contain a lot of elements that are not accidental at all: they have been “embedded” to work with a particular intention and therefore, they are sources of meaning. The study of these elements allows a particular approach to the popular music phenomenon that, together with other complementary perspectives, may be helpful to dig deeper into both technical and musical creativity.

References Brice, Richard. Music Engineering. Oxford: Newnes, 1998. Carter, David, “Well Past Time: Notes on a Musicology of Audio Recording Production.” Paper presented at the first Art of Record Production Conference. London, 2005. Chevalier, Jean. Diccionario de los símbolos . Barcelona: Herder, 1986 Covach, John and Boone, Graeme, (eds.). Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Dougherty, William P. “The Play of Interpretants: A Peircean Approach to Beethoven’s Lieder.” In The Peirce Seminar Papers: An Annual of Semiotic Analysis 1, edited by Michael Shapiro. Oxford: Berg, 1993. Frith, Simon and Zagorski-Thomas, Simon, (eds.). The Art of Recording Production: An Introductory Reader for a New Academic Field. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2012. Harald, Bode. “History of Electronic Sound Modification.” Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, 32 (1984). Hatten, Robert. Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation and Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Hellier, John and Hewitt, Paolo. Steve Marriot: All Too Beautiful. London: Helter Skelter Publishing, 2009. Levitin, Daniel J. This Is Your Brain in Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. New York: Dutton, 2006. Lewisohn, Mark. The Complete Beatles Chronicle: The Definitive Day-ByDay Guide To The Beatles’ Entire Career. Chicago Review Press, 1992.

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Lidov, David. “Music.” In Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, edited by Thomas Sebeok, 577-87. Amsterdam, Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1986. Martin, George and Pearson, William. Summer of Love: The Making of Sgt. Pepper. London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd, 1994. Martinez, José Luiz. Semiosis in Hindustani Music. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2001. —. “Semiótica de La Música: Una Teoría Basada En Peirce” Signa. Revista de la Asociación Española de Semiótica, 10 (2001). Massey, Howard. Behind the Glass, Volume II: Top Record Producers Tell How They Craft the Hits. Milwakee: Backbeat Books, 2009. Middleton, Richard. Studing Popular Music .Filadelphia: Open University Press, 1990. —. (ed.). Reading Pop. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 Negus, Keith. Popular Music in Theory. Cambridge, Massachussets: Polity Press, 1996. Ramshaw, Paul. ‘”Is Music Production Now a Composition Process?.” Paper presented at the first Art of Record Production Conference. London, 2005. Ribowsky, Mark. He’s a Rebel: Phil Spector, Rock and Roll's Legendary Producer. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000. Tagg, Philip. “Analysing Popular Music.” Popular Music, 2 (1982): 37-65 —. “Musicology and the Semiotics of Popular Music.” Semiotica, 66 (1987): 279-98. —. Music’s Meanings: A Modern Musicology for Non-Musos. The Mass Media Music Scholars Press, 2013. Tarasti, Eero. Signs of Music: A Guide to Musical Semiotics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002. Théberge, Paul. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology. New England: Wesleyan, 1997. Thompson, Art. The Stompbox: A History of Guitar Fuzzes, Flangers, Phasers, Echoes and Wahs. Milwakee: Hal Leonard, 1997. Zagorski-Thomas, Simon. The Musicology of Record Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Further Reading Case, Alex U. 2007. Sound FX: Unlocking The Creative Potential Of Recording Studio Effects. Burlington: Focal Press. Cunningham, Mark. 1996. Good Vibrations. London: Sanctuary Productions.

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Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing Rites. On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Martin, George. 1979. All You Need Is Ears. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Mayol I Puentes, Josep Maria. 2014. “Cine para los oídos: El lenguaje del sonido grabado.” In in Música y audición en los géneros audiovisuales, edited by Gustems, Josep, 69-85. Barcelona: Publicacions i edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona. Smith III, Julius O. 2007. “Introduction to Digital Filters with Audio Applications”, Stanford.edu, 2007. http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/filters/. Accessed December, 2, 2014. —. 2010. “Physical Audio Signal Processing”, Stanford.edu2, https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/pasp/. Accessed December, 2, 2014. Tiffin, John and Nobuyoshi, Terashima. 2005. Hyperreality: Paradigm for the Third Millennium. London: Routledge, 2005.

Notes 1

See Lidov, “Music”; Dougherthy, “The Play of Interpretants…”; Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven…; Martínez, Semiosis in Hindustani Music…; Martínez, “Semiótica de La Música”…; Tarasti, Signs of Music…. 2 Tagg, Music’s Meanings…, 156. 3 Martinez, “Semiótica de la música”…. 181-2. 4 Tagg, Music’s Meanings, and Tagg, “Analysing Popular Music’”…, 37-65. 5 Tagg, Music’s Meanings, 263. 6 Tagg defines diataxis as the “arrangement/disposition/order of musical episodes in terms of chronological placement and relative importance” and syncrisis as “musical form in terms of the aggregation of several simultaneously ongoing sounds perceptible as a combined whole inside the limits of the extended present”. Tagg, Ibid, 586, 603. 7 Ibid., 271. 8 Ibid., 309-315. 9 Ibid., 265. 10 See Middleton, Studing Popular Music; Middleton (ed), Reading Pop; Negus, Popular Music in Theory; Covach and Boone, Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis. 11 See Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine; Carter, “Well Past Time: Notes on a Musicology…”; Ramshaw, “Is Music Production Now a Composition Process?”; Frith and Zagorski-Thomas, The Art of Recording Production…; ZagorskiThomas, The Musicology of Record Production. 12 See Brice, Music Engineering; Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Chronicle; Martin and Pearson, Summer of Love: The Making of Sgt. Pepper.

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13 See Harald, “History of Electronic Sound Modification”, 730; Thompson, The Stompbox: A History of Guitar Fuzzes, 24. 14 Ribowsky, He’s a Rebel…, 120. 15 Massey, Behind the Glass, Volume II, 32-44. 16 Brice, Music Engineering. 17 Hellier and Hewitt, Steve Marriot: All Too Beautiful, 154. 18 Tagg, Music’s Meanings, 503. 19 Ibid., 509. 20 Ibid., 499. 21 Ibid., 500. 22 In the seventies, tape phasing was made by taking the tape off the sync head, putting it through a couple of other tape delays, and then bringing it back with the play head. That could be applied to a particular track or even to the whole mix — e.g. the fade out in “Killer Queen” (Sheer Heart Attack, EMI 1974) or in “If You Can’t Beat Them” (Jazz, EMI 1978). 23 When played on the guitar, this rhythmic figure may be used on palm muted power chords providing an accompaniment rhythmic ostinato. Some well-known examples are “Barracuda” by Heart, “Immigrant Song” and “Achilles Last Stand” by Led Zeppelin, “I Was Made For Loving You” by Kiss or the famous bass riffs created by Iron Mainden’s Steve Harris. 24 Chevalier, Diccionario de Los Símbolos, 937. 25 Dynamic compression reduces the overall dynamic range of a signal eliminating peaks and giving more presence to quieter sounds. It reduces gain automatically as the signal level goes beyond a threshold —a preset level in dB. The amount of this reduction is controlled through the compression ratio. A ratio of 2:1 would mean that for every 2dB over the threshold in input amplitude, only 1dB would make it to output signal. Under the threshold, signal stays unaffected with a ratio of 1:1. 26 Levitin, This Is Your Brain in Music, 106.

CHAPTER FOUR A DROP OF MEGALOMANIA, A TOUCH OF GENEROSITY, A DASH OF SELF-PROMOTION: U2’S RELEASE OF SONGS OF INNOCENCE ISMAEL LOPEZ MEDEL AZUSA PACIFIC UNIVERSITY

The struggle to remain relevant has been a driving force in the music industry. A number of elements inevitably affect the outcome of the creative process: Performers age along with their audience; musical preferences and tastes vary; and technology adds an extra tension to the equation. Often times the final result is dried up creativity. This seems to apply even for well-established performers who have sold one hundred million records in their career.1 Past success is no longer a guarantee of success for any new release. On the contrary, simply looking at Billboard’s top 100 songs of 2014 could support the argument against aging musicians: The list reveals that only one song out of the hundred top selling belongs to an artist that has had a career longer than 20 years.2 In stark contrast, top selling artists of all time are still musicians with lengthy careers sometimes spanning over forty years.3 Therefore, artists struggle to improve their performance levels, the live productions, and above all, to continually explore creative ways to present their art to the audiences. One of the latest and most renowned such cases and the case study of this chapter is the 2014 release of U2’s thirteenth album, Songs of Innocence. Instead of utilizing the traditional marketing strategies, the Irish band opted for releasing the album for free over Apple’s iTunes, reaching to over five hundred million iTunes users around the world. What was initially conceived as a smart public relations stunt, and presented as a logical next step in the longtime collaboration between two of the most innovative brands in the world, rapidly backfired in social

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media forums as consumers criticized the unwanted and yet obligatory download, and complained about the consequent storage space lost. The industry also reacted negatively, through open criticism from fellow musicians, mostly arguing about the unfairness on the initiative. The release was also seen as an almost risk-free initiative, due to the gigantic size of U2. Apple quickly reacted to the backfire by trying to solve the main cause of grief, the loss of storage space, and launched an application to remove the album from the iTunes library. A few days later, Apple’s website included instructions on how to remove the “gift” of free music. The initial response from the band took the form of a mild apology: “It’s like we put a bottle of milk in people's fridge that they weren't asking for,”U2’s front man Bono explained in a interview with Rolling Stone magazine “It is a gross invasion! But it was kind of an accident. The milk was supposed to be in the cloud. It was supposed to be on the front doorstep”.4 Later on, as the first news of download figures appeared, the band backtracked from their apology: “I’m working on an apology for the apology”wittily revealed Bono to New Musical Express magazine “Because I’m very proud of what we did. It’s one of the proudest moments in U2’s history.”5 A close look at the results clearly supported the singer’s faulty apology: the goal of expanding the reach of the band’s audience was clearly met: according to Apple, at the end of the free period, twenty-six million iTunes subscribers had downloaded the album, making this the widest album release in history, and the band’s most successful. This paper will explore the release of Songs of Innocence, the creative process that fueled it, measure its effectiveness in terms of album sales, and discuss the repercussions in terms of public opinion, industry criticism and the band’s response. It is not the intent of this chapter to conclude on a definitive analysis of the case study, but to scrutinize the evidence and leave the final thought for the reader.

The Context The scope of the release must be understood within the context of U2’s long and successful career.6 Since the band’s debut Boy in 1980, U2 has grown to become one of the world’s largest performers, reaching a solid fan base,7 selling over 150 million records, and delivering Guinness-record breaking world tours,8 as well as receiving the most prestigious awards from the industry.9 Therefore, an argument could be made in favor of the adventurous initiative of releasing a record for free when the band’s level of success and complacency would certainly suggest a more conservative approach to new releases.

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Despite the long career and the success obtained, the band inevitably faces the challenge of irrelevance. Any new release will be measured against older albums, and critics and publics will certainly try to place the new music in the general narrative of the band’s long and successful history. And they seem to be well aware of it, on a BBC interview in February 2014 Bono admitted to be “on the verge of irrelevance in our lives. How you get through is to make stuff that's relevant to you and you have to make an honest account of what you're going through”.10 Earlier in 2014, Bono hinted a similar issue when the band released for free on the iTunes Store the single Invisible to launch a partnership between Product Red and Bank of America: “Invisible is a great song, but I don't know how accessible it is. We'll find out if we're irrelevant. I'm perfectly prepared for people to try and blow us off the stage. We're just not going to make it easy.”11 While the live touring has kept U2’s creative and financial muscle in perfect condition, record sales show a slow but steady decline in the past decade, not just for U2 but for the entire industry. The previous release strategies combined strong marketing efforts with public appearances on prime time television and radio shows, as well as series of promotional events leading to the released date of the album. With the growth of technology, however, it has become incredibly more difficult and costly to preserve the secrecy of the music. The enormous speed of popular culture consumption in our technological world also calls for more creative strategies when releasing new music.

Previous examples Therefore, for over a decade artists have tried to innovate and release music through more unorthodox ways. One of the earlier and most notable examples was Radiohead’s 2007 release of In Rainbows. The band utilized a “tip jar” commercial strategy that consisted in offering the album first and encourage fans were encouraged to determine the price of the music. The outcome was not as successful as expected: Only 30% of the downloaders contributed financially to the project, and the album was pirated at a rate ten times higher than normal. Perhaps this disappointing consequence led former U2 manager Paul to question the release: “Radiohead's honesty-box release of their album, to some extent, backfired. Even though it was available on their own Web site for no money at all, if that was what you preferred to pay60 to 70 percent of the people who downloaded the record stole it anyway.”12 Nevertheless, Radiohead would repeat a similar strategy with their 2011 King of Limbs release.

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In July 2010, rappers Jay-Z and Kayne West released Watch the Throne using a progressive release strategy: First, the album was made available from the artists’ websites (with four alternative versions). Then it was released a month later for the iTunes store. The physical record was exclusively sold at Best Buy stores. Finally, in late August the album was available everywhere. Concerns about loss of privacy and Internet leaks were addressed through a simple protective strategy: using less technology. Therefore, the artists avoided electronic mail and Internet, recorded the songs together, and involved fewer technicians and recording assistants than usual. The artists were intentional: “We made this album and it took us eight months,” Jay-Z explained, “We should be able to release it the way we like, without everybody being up in arms. The real reason behind it is we didn’t want the music to leak. We wanted to present to the people in its entirety. When you send it out, once it leaves the plant and that’s the end of it.” The strategy worked and they were able to avoid Internet leaks.13 In the same spirit, Jay-Z designed a new campaign for his 2013 album Magna Carta Holy Grail. The album was first made available as an app exclusively for the first million Samsung Galaxy SII, S4 and Note II47 phone users. The South Korean company paid $5 per user for the exclusivity, and released a heavily supported marketing campaign to promote it. The artist explained that his initial idea was “to really finish the album and drop it. Giving it to the world at one time and letting them share it, and it goes out.”14 As with the previous release, the released to the general public was intentionally delayed. Later on the year, the music industry witnessed another example of an unconventional release, when pop superstar Beyoncé made a self-titled album available on iTunes without prior notice.15 Weeks before the album was made available on stores, Beyoncé decided to break with the industry out of boredom with the entire process: Now people only listen to a few seconds of a song on their iPods and they don't really invest in the whole experience. It's all about the single, and the hype. I felt like, I don't want anybody to get the message when my record is coming out. I just want this to come out when it is ready and from me to my fans.16

The strategy proved to be successful: the album sold 911,000 copies in ten days, while illegal downloads only numbered 250,000 during the same time. Beyoncé supported the release by creating a distinct video for each song. Critics praised the strategy and saw it as a welcoming disturbance for a traditionally conservative industry. Forbes magazine music business

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expert, Zach O’Malley Greenburg, hinted that a few artists could only replicate such a release: The result: an opening week total that was more than Gaga’s and Katy Perry’s, combined. Is her success replicable? Probably not. Would it have worked for someone else? Perhaps five or ten other stars. And it’s worth noting that the album, only available as an iTunes download for its first week, was pirated extensively. But having the gumption to take such a risk? That’s what it takes to run the world.17

The Release In early 2014, the web was filled with rumors about the upcoming release of U2’s newest album. Since the release of No Line on the Horizon in 2009, the Irish band had been working on different projects with material left out of the record, making the five-year interim the longest period of silence between records in the band’s history. During this time, the band worked on it without a clear release date. The project originally consisted in at least two albums; Songs of Ascent, and Songs of Innocence. Bono admitted in 2014 to be working “on three albums at the moment and we haven’t decided what order we’re going to put them out but The Songs of Ascent have the kind of beautiful intimacy that we’re speaking of now. They fit into this moment, the mode of some of these artists that I was hanging out with on Christmas Eve.”18 Few were surprised about the long hiatus: U2 usually takes long periods of time to record and produce the music. Some reports as early as 2010 suggest that the material was already in postproduction stages. Billboard magazine published a review of the upcoming album, probably fueled by former Paul McGuiness, quoted in the article as confident in a release within the first half of the year.19 That release did not come to fruition and the band continued in the studio, working with different producers including Danger Mouse, Paul Epworth, RedOne and Ryan Tedder and Will.i.am. Later on the year, on September 9, 2014, rumors spread about U2’s participation in an Apple product launch event. Rumors included the showcase of the new material for an upcoming album finally set for the Christmas. Some speculations even connected the album with the release of Apple’s new iPhone 6. Live Nation, (the band’s management company since McGuiness departure in 2008), gained control of the situation and contributed to the expectation: Ben Sisario, The New York Time’s technology expert, hinted what the following day would bring:

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Exactly what U2 will reveal on Tuesday, and how it is connected to Apple, is unclear, and people close to the band grew hushed and reluctant when pressed for specifics. Last week, when speculation about the band’s involvement began to circulate through the music industry, the best guess was that its next album would come installed on the iPhone 6. People close to the band dismissed that idea, but said that U2’s deal with Apple would involve the release of new music in an innovative way, and Apple’s event would partly serve as a big, splashy stunt to generate publicity.20

At the same time, other media reported almost the exact opposite information, elevating the confusion, expectation and impatience: Hot Press quickly published an update to inform its readers that, according to an official spokesperson: “They are not releasing their album on the iPhone, and they are not performing at the iPhone launch”.21 Unlike other artists, U2 is a well-oiled Public Relations machine, certainly used to managing times and media’s interest. Public appearances were tightly controlled, and Bono’s humanitarian work has been widely publicized. Tour announcements were anticipated and celebrated throughout Internet, not exclusively through the band’s official outlets, but also by the countless fan-based sites online. The history of Apple and U2 as partners dates back to 2003, when Jimmy Iovine, co-chairman of U2’s label, Interscope Records and one of the most respected actors in the music industry, introduced the band to Apple founder Steve Jobs. The connection was instant, as the musician’s excitement over the introduction of the iPod was latent: “It's the most interesting art object since the electric guitar in terms of music”, Bono explained. The result was the first brand partnership in the band’s history.22 In 2004, Apple launched a special U2 iPod along with an iTunes exclusive U2 box set including more than 400 songs. In 2006, while promoting the album How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, the band agreed to have the first single, Vertigo, featured as an iPod television commercial. Apple was one of the first brands to join Bono’s 2006 charitable project, the Red campaign,.23 Therefore, rumors of a new joint effort between the Cupertino giants and the Irish musicians were naturally perceived as another step in the ongoing partnership. Then, during Apple’s Watch launch event, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook made a special announcement: A decade ago, we began a deep collaboration with one of the best bands of all time. And that band is U2. U2 has agreed to perform for you today. And we couldn’t be happier about it. U2 is among the most respected artists in the world; among the best selling. They’ve won more Grammy awards than any single band in history. They are member of the Rock and Roll

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Chapter Four Hall of Fame. And as accomplished as they are in music, they have also made incredible accomplishments by focusing in human right causes and the advancement of the human race. It is an incredible honor for us to have U2 join us onstage and perform.24

U2 took the stage to perform the first single of the new album, a song entitled The Miracle of Joey Ramone. What followed was a theatrical announcement of the new album, in an onstage conversation between Cook and Bono full of mutual praises worth transcribing: Tim Cook: “Wasn’t that the most incredible single you’ve ever heard? We would love an entire album of that!” Bono: “There are rumors that U2 hasn’t made an album in the last five years. That is untrue. We have made several albums we just didn’t release them. And we are making music all the time. That is what we do. With this one we wanted to wait until we had one that was as good as the best record we’ve ever done.” T.C: “You know, we feel the same way about products”. B: “We’re the blood in your machines! Oh Zen Master of hardware and software Tim Cook! As of last week we finished our album, it’s called Songs of Innocence. We’re very excited about it, the question is now, Zen Master, How do we get it to as many people as possible? Because that’s what our band is all about” T.C: [Looking at the cover projected on the screen] “Are we the very first people to see this in the world?” B: “Yes. [Applause and cheers] Kind of see it” T.C: “Is this a white label copy?” B: “That is a white label copy. And the question is, I think you can help us, how do we get this to as many people as possible? T.C: “Well, you know, we do have iTunes… [Cheers] B: “I do believe you have over a half a billion subscribers to iTunes, so could you get this to them?” T.C: “Sure! We can do that” B: “Could you do that in five seconds just by pressing a magic Apple send button, you can do that?” T.C.: “If we gave it away for free… B: “First you would have to pay for it” [laughs] Cause we are not going for the free music round here… You would consider?” T.C: “I’ve been told I’m a good negotiator. B: “You would consider putting Songs of Innocence out to half a billion free… in say… Five seconds from now? T.C: “Yes. We press the button and it’ll take a little longer to get across the Internet. But we can start in five seconds” B: “U2… Let me just get this straight. U2’s new album Songs of Innocence, is going out for free to a half a billion people in the next five seconds… five, four, three, two one!”

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[Bono and Cook join index fingers] B: “Wow that is instant gratification! That really happened? Did that really happened” T.C: “We’re not kidding. That just happened! B: Thank you at everyone at the Apple team. This is a very, very big deal for us. It’s our core DNA. Clue is in the name. We put everything we had into this; it’s our most personal record. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much.” T.C: “So, just to make sure we’re all clear. Every iTunes customer gets this album, this incredible album for free. That’s over a half a billion customers and it makes music history, because it is the largest album release of all time… Now, just to go through the details. Every iTunes customer in 119 countries, it’s available throughout the day in your iTunes music library, all you have to do is click and you can begin listening to this incredible music. It will also be on iTunes radio and Beats music and it will only be with Apple until mid-October. But if you are not an iTunes customer today, become one before mid-October and you will get this album for free. I’d really like to thank the band, this is incredible for us and for all of our customers and I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t want to have this music.”

After dismissing the band, Cook introduced the thirty-second commercial that would be used during the massive advertising campaign to follow. Apple had paid Universal Music $100 million for the five-week deal, and had exclusivity to the digital format of the record. In an attempt to soothe the traditional retailer’s dismay over digital releases, during the initial launch period, physical stores would only distribute a deluxe edition of the album with four additional songs and acoustic versions of the songs of the album, to be priced around $15, clearly targeting the band’s extensive fan base.25 Benefiting from the giant marketing effort, Apple also used this opportunity to push the band’s back catalog. Also, to comply with a long established tradition, Irish DJ Dave Fanning became the first to broadcast the entire album live on his RTÉ 2fm radio show.26

The Reaction The album was received with anticipation and the bold marketing move applauded as an astute and unexpected move. It would not take long until the first complaints surfaced. Ironically, it would be the way in which the record was released, not so much the album itself, what would drive the conversation in the days to follow: whilst the music was generally praised, the free release raised more questions.

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Critics generally applauded the new direction in the band’s narrative. Rolling Stone’s David Fricke explained that: “No other rock band does rebirth like U2. No other band – certainly of U2's duration, commercial success and creative achievement – believes it needs rebirth more and so often.”27 Spin magazine’s review concluded that “Fans will be glad it dropped by, and while there’s no definitive anthem, several songs will settle in the memory.28 And Billboard concluded that “Songs of Innocence is a colossal-sounding record from rock's ultimate stadium wreckers, and a quick listen reveals why no other marketing strategy would have worked.”29 At the end of the five weeks marked as the “free gift” period, Apple released data to showcase the success of the initiative. According to the Cupertino Company, by October 13th, 2014, more than 87 million customers had “experienced” the music, with a total of 26 million downloads according to Apple, making it the widest album release in history, and the band’s most successful in terms of reach.30 At the same time, physical sales marked a new long record, continuing with the slow decline in album sales experienced in the band’s recent history. Songs of Innocence barely made it to the top selling lists in the UK and the US, although it did receive gold and platinum records in smaller European markets. According to www.officialcharts.com, Songs of Innocence is the lowest selling U2 record of all time.31 Other data surfaced and added to the discussion: Time Magazine calculated that only 5% of the half billion iTunes subscribers had downloaded the record.32 A study conducted by Kantar Group released in January 2015 found that 23% of music listens had played some U2, and out of those, 95% had listened to at least one song from the album.33 According to Business Insider analyst James Cook, “U2's total album sales to date have been estimated at about 150 million. The band's previous album, "No Line on the Horizon," sold five million copies”.34 Although the press generally praised the album, and the downloading numbers seemed to satisfy both Apple and U2, the strongest opposition came from the industry. Fellow musicians openly criticized the strategy, mostly accusing the band of complacency, lack of risk and diminishing the value of music altogether. Brian Caesar of Slow Motion pictures complained, “I just spent several years writing and recording a full length and invested a ton of money in something that I truly believed in. Having U2 come out with yet another formulaic record and charge nothing for it makes my charging $9 seem a bit over-priced.”35 Irish band Fight Like Apes also focused on the size of U2: “Is the biggest band in the world giving away an album really the right message to be sending when so

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many bands are struggling to get people to appreciate records again so the industry doesn’t die on its feet?”36. Black Keys drummer also included Spotify in the mix, and argued that U2 had “devalued their music completely, sending a huge mixed message to bands … that are just struggling to get by. I think that they were thinking it’s super generous of them to do something like that.”37 Keith Nelson, guitarist for Buckcherry, added another element to the debate, the fact that U2 had already been paid: It is crazy, and I’m sure the band got paid, so they made their money, but they’ve sent a message to everyone that music is free, and that’s disturbing. It’s easy to do that when you’re a multi-millionaire-billionaire and money isn’t really something that you worry about, but when you’re a working rock ‘n’ roll band and you count on every dollar, it’s disappointing to see someone do that. I don’t really like the message that it sends that music is free.38

One unexpected reaction from the record was the storage space usage. Although the idea was to offer the record for free to iTunes user, it was in fact downloaded obligatorily, thus taking up storage space and invading the customer’s privacy. Consumers filled online public opinion forums and social media with complains about the invasion of privacy and the unwanted music. Media all over the Internet echoed the heated reactions. Some websites even offered tips on how to remove the album from the library.39 The backfire even forced Apple to release an official app to remove the music and include a short and laconic explanation on their website.40 Punk legend Iggy pop defended the outraged fans when he explained that the people who don't want the free U2 download are trying to say, 'Don't try to force me,’ and they've got a point. Part of the process when you buy something from an artist, it's kind of an anointing, you are giving people love. It's your choice to give or withhold. You felt like they were robbed of that chance and they have a point.41

Chris Richards, The Washington Post music critic called the release “junk mail” and harshly criticized the band for transmitting “all of rockand-roll’s misguided egotism into one ridiculous statement: Our music is technically worthless and everyone in the world should hear it” to then that’s what this band is “all about,” and then urged readers to take action: “So as you delete “Songs of Innocence” from your memoryas you should, without hesitationremember the fleeting heebie-jeebies as they crawl around your follicles.42

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Linda Zoladz of Vulture magazine admitted that the effort was impressive: “U2 simultaneously out-Beyoncé-d Beyoncé and out Jay Z-ed Jay Z”, and a bit naive: “there is something delightfully silly, characteristically presumptuous, and just so U2 about the conjecture that 500 million people would like to drop what they’re doing on a Tuesday afternoon and listen to a new U2 album”, to later ask whether everything was “an act of selfaggrandizement disguised as globally resonant magnanimity? Looks like U2 also out-U2-ed U2”.43

Response from the band In the midst of the backlash, the band offered a two-sided response. Initially, there was a soft apology. During an interview on NPR, Bono defended the release and explained that the band did not consider the harm of the automated download: "We wanted to deliver a pint of milk to people’s front porches, but in a few cases it ended up in their fridge, on their cereal. People were like, 'I’m dairy-free.’"44 A few days later, Facebook broadcasted a Q&A session with the musicians responding questions from Facebook users. Obviously prepared as a Public Relations moment, the session included a direct question about the release: “Can you please never release an album on iTunes that automatically downloads to peoples’ playlists ever again? It’s really rude.” Bono humored the band with the usual quirkiness: Oops, I’m sorry about that! I had this beautiful idea and we kind of got carried away with ourselves. Artists are prone to that kind of thing. Drop of megalomania, touch of generosity, dash of self-promotion and deep fear that these songs that we poured our life into over the last few years mightn’t be heard. There’s a lot of noise out there. I guess we got a little noisy ourselves to get through it.45

Humor aside, the following days offered the band an opportunity to explain in depth. In an interview with Time magazine, Bono argued “songs are like your parents. They tell you what to do, how to behave. This time we’ve worked really hard and these songs don’t want to be ignored”to then reiterate the release mantra: What do we really want for these songs? We wanted to get them to as many people as possible. Could we talk somebody into helping us with that? We went to Apple. We’re not interested in free music. We think music is undervalued; it’s a sacrament, as far as we’re concerned. Would you be interested in buying our album and get it to 500 million iTunes accounts.46

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Using the official band’s website as a platform, Bono specifically addressed the negative reaction in an article precisely entitled “Remember us?”. The goal was reaching a wide audience, Bono explained: “Part of the DNA of this band has always been the desire to get our music to as many people as possible.” Then the argument shifted to the gratuity of the album: Free, but paid for. Because if no one's paying anything for it, we’re not sure “free” music is really that free. It usually comes at a cost to the art form and the artist… which has big implications, not for us in U2, but for future musicians and their music... all the songs that have yet to be written by the talents of the future… who need to make a living to write them.47

In order to avoid potential backlash, Bono also included a message for those who may not be interested in the music: “And for the people out there who have no interest in checking us out, look at it this way… the blood, sweat and tears of some Irish guys are in your junk mail.”48 Later on, as the Kantar survey data surfaced, the apology turned into reaffirmation: “This is fantastic news! If these figures suggest that these songs still matter to people, then we're knocked out. That's all any songwriter wants.”49 Guitarist Edge concurred, “We took a big risk but today we can say that the experiment worked.”50 Furthermore, Bono turned the narrative around, questioning the heated reactions in a Mojo magazine: “Of the great crimes against mankind…? This is an honest mistake, and we’re just not going to lose sleep about it. I’m already working on the apology… for the apology, because I’m very proud of what we did. It’s one of the proudest moments in U2’s history.”51

Conclusion One of the commonly accepted crisis strategies consists in generating news to drive the discussion in hopes that public opinion will turn to the new topic. That seemed to be the strategy utilized by U2 when in December 3, 2014 the new world tour was announced. The relevance of the tour, its gigantic proportions, and a well-thought series of public appearances quickly replaced the controversial release as the main news about U2. After all, it is a well-established truth in the recording industry that live shows have been the cornerstone of economic survival for music acts. And above all others, U2 can rightfully claim their place in rock history as the most successful live act. Regardless of whether the announcement was skillfully planned to divert attention or if it was merely

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a lucky accident, the controversy surrounding the release of Songs of Innocence seemed forgotten. However, there are lessons to be learned from this experiment. First of all, the element of surprise benefited the band. Fans and media were taken by surprise, as both U2 and Apple intelligently added another element to make the usually exciting event even more interesting. Demonstrating a clear understanding of the intricacies of media in the digital age, both brands managed to find a smart idea at the perfect time. Did U2 need to pull this rabbit out of the hat? U2 sits unquestionably in the pedestal of popular music history, but it seems reasonable to question whether the Irish quartet will be able to hold that position for much longer. As each record sells notably less than its predecessor, and heavily relying on the live experience, it can be argued that the drive for relevance is now crucial in the immediate future. In an industry that finds creativity at its very core, what happens when the creative genius dries? U2 seems to understand that the industry they once dominated has changed forever. The music industry has been continuously challenged by technological improvements since its very inception; however the rise of technology in the early nineties has been a fatal blow. Old distribution models have become obsolete, and the fight against piracy has proven futile for the most part. In such an apocalyptic environment, the question becomes how to stay noticeable and relevant. It is then understandable that one of the initial goals of the release was to achieve notoriety in the media. And it is safe to assume the goal was widely met. Propelled by the connection with Apple, U2 reached a new generation of consumers unfamiliar with their work, effectively expanding their reach. Proof of the efficiency of the release was the notable increase of back catalog sales seems to confirm this particular point. According to The Rolling Stone magazine, an “unprecedented” number of U2’s albums have entered iTunes album chart since October 2014. Titles such as The Joshua Tree (1987) or Achtung Baby (1991) were already well established records, but War (1983), The Unforgettable Fire (1984) or Rattle and Hum (1988) were not among the band’s best selling catalog. In the fast-paced world of technology, it was only a matter of time until public opinion turned its attention elsewhere. With an upcoming world tour set to break every record, it seems as if U2 fared well from the adventure. The remaining unanswered question is what will they be able to produce for future releases. Apparently the partnership with Apple is now directed to a new project related to the music industry, aimed to change the distribution strategies of the music publishing companies to benefiting musicians everywhere. If anything, U2 is a band that has proven

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successful in reinventing itself. They have been able to succeed doing so in the past; nothing indicates they can’t do it again in the future.

References Adams, Gregory. “U2 Further Apologize for 'Songs of Innocence,' Shed Light on Upcoming Follow-Up and Seemingly Scrapped Danger Mouse LP”. http://exclaim.ca/Music/article/u2_further_apologize_for_songs_of_in nocence_shed_light_on_upcoming_followup_seemingly_scrapped_danger_mouse_lp Accessed January, 3, 2015. Apple. September 9th event. http://www.apple.com/live/2014-sept-event/ Accessed January, 3, 2015. BBC Entertainment and Arts. “Beyonce puts surprise album on iTunes”. http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-25362941 Accessed March, 25, 2015. Billboard magazine. “Year end 100 hot songs” http://www.billboard.com/charts/year-end/2014/hot-100-songs Accessed March, 1, 2015. Bono (September 9, 2014). “Remember us?” http://www.u2.com/news/title/remember-us Accessed October, 19, 2014. Booth, Robert (October 15, 2014). “U2’s Bono issues apology for automatic Apple iTunes album download”. The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/oct/15/u2-bono-issuesapology-for-apple-itunes-album-download Accessed December, 19, 2014. Buckley, Dan (September 10, 2014). “500m people get album after hitting send” The Irish Times. http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/500mpeople-get-album-after-hitting-send-285667.html Accessed January, 11, 2014. Christman, Ed (September 11, 2014). Billboard magazine. “Exclusive: UMG Reveals U2 Bonus Package Release Plan for Retailers”. http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6251246/u2-retail-songsof-innocence Accessed May, 9, 2014. Cohen, Warren (November 5, 2014). “U2 Talk iPod Strategy. Band’s partnership with Apple has deep roots”. Rolling Stone magazine. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/u2-talk-ipod-strategy20041105#ixzz3WF8iIB5A Accessed December, 20, 2014. Cook, James (September 11, 2014). “People Are Freaking Out Over Apple's Forced Download Of U2's New Album On iTunes”. Business Insider magazine.

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http://www.businessinsider.com/everyone-is-freaking-out-over-u2snew-album-2014-9#ixzz3WFpMKzgXwww.businessinsider.com/ everyone-is-freaking-out-over-u2s-new-album-20149#ixzz3WFonbMOr Accessed March, 1, 2015. Cornell, Jeff. “Buckcherry Guitarist Keith Nelson Calls out u2 for ‘disturbing’ free album decision. Loudwire magazine. http://loudwire.com/buckcherry-keith-nelson-calls-out-u2-free-albumdecision/ Accessed March, 1, 2015. Dyke, Peter (March 25, 2014). “Simon Cowell’s desperate plea for Rhianna to join the X Factor as his fourth judge”. Daily Star. Accessed May, 9, 2014. Ecclestone, Danny (November 21, 2014): “Bono: “I’m Working On My Apology… For The Apology”. Mojvo http://www.mojo4music.com/17648/u2-bono-refuses-to-apologise/ Erlewine, Stephen (No date). “Allmusic: U2 (Biography)”. All Music. www.allmusic.com/artist/u2-mn0000219203/biography. Accessed March, 1, 2015. Feinauer, J (September 11, 2014) “The passion of Bono and U2: Biggest band in the world is also one of the most spiritual”. The Washington Times. http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865610731/The-biggestband-in-the-world-is-also-one-of-the-most-spiritual-The-passion-ofU2.html#ixzz3W4yitLyR. Accessed March, 2, 2015. Garland, Eric (November 16, 2009). “The 'In Rainbows' Experiment: Did It Work?” National Public Radio. http://www.npr.org/blogs/monitormix/2009/11/the_in_rainbows_exper iment_did.html. Accessed June, 11, 2014. Harding, Courtney (January 12, 2010) “U2 "Songs of Ascent" Album Preview. Billboard magazine. http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/960737/u2-songs-of-ascentalbum-preview Accessed June, 11, 2014. Hickman, Martin (October 14, 2006). “Apple joins Bono's campaign for Africa with special Red iPod”. The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/apple-joins-bonoscampaign-for-africa-with-special-red-ipod-420044.html Accessed January, 4, 2015. Hudson, Alex (February 24, 2015). “U2 Say Their Apple Rollout Experiment Worked After All” http://exclaim.ca/Music/article/u2_are_most_listenedto_artist_on_itunes_study_says Accessed March, 1, 2015. Jesse. “Jay-Z & Kanye West Miraculously Manage to Keep Watch the Throne Leak-Free”. XXL magazine, August 11, 2011.

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http://www.xxlmag.com/xxl-magazine/2011/08/jay-z-kanye-westmiraculously-manage-to-keep-watch-the-throne-leak-free/ Accessed February, 21, 2015. Kornelis, Chris (October 15, 2014) “Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney: U2 and Spotify ‘devalue music’”. The Seattle Times. http://blogs.seattletimes.com/soundposts/2014/10/15/black-keysdrummer-patrick-carney-u2-and-spotify-devalue-music/ Accessed January, 11, 2015. Lewis, Randy (February 24, 2014). “U2’s 'Songs of Innocence' stunt paid off after all”. Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-u2-albumsongs-innocence-iphone-ios-apple-20150224-story.html Accessed March, 1, 2015. Lindell, Karen (October 14, 2014). “Bono interviewed on NPR’s world cafe”. http://www.veooz.com/news/jHaK0Yx.html Accessed October, 21, 2014. Martin, Chris. “U2 - 100 Greatest Artists”. Rolling Stone magazine. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-artists-of-alltime-19691231/u2-20110420 Accessed February, 11, 2014. Newman, Jason. “9 Biggest Revelations in Bono's 'BBC' Interview About U2”. Rolling Stone magazine. February 3, 2014. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/9-biggest-revelations-inbonos-bbc-interview-about-u2-20140203#ixzz3W4vqQzUw Accessed February, 11, 2014. O’Malley Greenburg, Zack. “Music Industry Winners 2013: Beyonce, Streaming, Rap DJs”. Forbes magazine. http://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2013/12/30/musicindustry-winners-2013-beyonce-streaming-rap-djs/ Accessed March, 4, 2015. Ramírez, Erika. “Jay-Z Announces New Album, 'Magna Carta Holy Grail,' In Samsung Commercial”. Billboard magazine. http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/the-juice/1567101/jay-zannounces-new-album-magna-carta-holy-grail-in-samsung Accessed February, 21, 2015. Richards, Chris (February 21, 2011). “Chris Richards reviews Radiohead's ‘The King of Limbs’” The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2011/02/20/AR2011022003466.html. Accessed October, 23, 2013.

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Sisario, Ben (September 8, 2014). “U2 Said to Play Role at Apple Event”. The New York Times. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/u2said-to-play-role-at-apple-event/?_r=0 Accessed February, 21, 2015. Tsai, Diane (September 18, 2014). Exclusive: Bono and U2 on Why They Released a Free Album on iTunes. Time magazine. http://time.com/3394701/u2-free-itunes-album/ Accessed March, 1, 2015. The Hot Press Newsdesk (September 5, 2014). “U2’s new album will not be launched as iPhone 6 tie-in”. Hot Press magazine. http://www.hotpress.com/U2/news/U2s-new-album-will-not-belaunched-as-iPhone-6-tiein/12436920.html#sthash.hyOOAej1.dpuf. Accessed March, 1, 2015. Waddell, Ray. “Rolling Stones No. 1 on List of Top 25 Live Artists Since 1990”. Billboard magazine. May 27, 2014. http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6099232/top-live-artiststouring-grosses-rolling-stones?page=0%2C1 Accessed March, 4, 2015. Whitney, Lancey (October 10, 2014). “Apple's free U2 album scored fans despite complaints”. CNET. http://www.cnet.com/news/apples-free-u2album-scored-many-fans-despite-complaints.Accessed February, 21, 2015. Wilner, Elizabeth (February 23, 2015). “U2's bet on Apple still "paying" off”. Kantar research group. http://us.kantar.com/tech/mobile/2015/kantar-data-on-free-u2-albumusage/. Accessed March, 4, 2015.

Notes 1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_music_artists#cite_note-161 Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s “Love Never Felt So Good”. http://www.billboard.com/charts/year-end/2014/hot-100-songs 3 According to sales reported by the own record companies, the top selling artists of all time are (millions sold in parenthesis): The Beatles (600), Elvis Presley (600), Michael Jackson (400), Madonna (300), Elton John (600), Led Zeppelin (600), Pink Floyd (250), Mariah Carey (200), Celine Dion (200), and Whitney Houston (200). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_music_artists#cite_note-161 4 http://exclaim.ca/Music/article/u2_further_apologize_for_songs_of_innocence_sh ed_light_on_upcoming_follow-up_seemingly_scrapped_danger_mouse_lp 5 http://www.mojo4music.com/17648/u2-bono-refuses-to-apologise/ 6 Rolling Stone magazine ranked them #22 in the top 100 greatest artist in the history of the music industry. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100greatest-artists-of-all-time-19691231/u2-20110420 2

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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/sep/11/the-biggest-band-in-theworld-is-also-one-of-the-m/?page=all 8 According to Billboard, U2 ranks second in the list of highest grossing tours in the history of the industry, with over 20 million people attending 526 shows and grossing $1,514,979,793. The number one artist is The Rolling Stones, but U2’s 2015 tour will push them to the first position. http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6099232/top-live-artists-touring-grossesrolling-stones?page=0%2C1 9 The list of awards received by the band is impressive. Over the years, U2 has received more than 90 awards: 22 Grammy Awards, 9 Billboard Music Awards, 7 BRIT Awards, American Music Awards, Craig Awards, 2 Golden Globe Awards, 15 Meteor Music Awards, 6 MTV Video Music Awards, 10 Q Awards, 2 Peoples Choice Awards, 12 Pollstar Concert Industry Awards, 2 NME Awards and 3 Juno Awards. See the complete list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awards_received_by_U2 10 http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/9-biggest-revelations-in-bonos-bbcinterview-about-u220140203?utm_source=dailynewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ne wsletter 11 Idem 12 http://www.npr.org/blogs/monitormix/2009/11/the_in_rainbows_experiment_did .html 13 http://www.xxlmag.com/xxl-magazine/2011/08/jay-z-kanye-west-miraculouslymanage-to-keep-watch-the-throne-leak-free/ 14 http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/the-juice/1567101/jay-z-announcesnew-album-magna-carta-holy-grail-in-samsung 15 Much to retailer’s dismay: Target and Amazon refused to carry it. http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6251246/u2-retail-songs-of-innocence 16 http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-25362941 17 http://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2013/12/30/music-industrywinners-2013-beyonce-streaming-rap-djs/ 18 https://songsofascent.wordpress.com 19 http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/960737/u2-songs-of-ascent-albumpreview 20 http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/u2-said-to-play-role-at-appleevent/?_r=0 21 http://www.hotpress.com/U2/news/U2s-new-album-will-not-be-launched-asiPhone-6-tiein/12436920.html#sthash.hyOOAej1.dpuf 22 http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/u2-talk-ipod-strategy-20041105# ixzz3WF8iIB5A 23 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/apple-joins-bonos-campaign-forafrica-with-special-red-ipod-420044.html 24 The entire presentation can be watched online at http://www.apple.com/live/2014-sept-event/

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25 http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6251246/u2-retail-songs-ofinnocence 26 http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/500m-people-get-album-after-hittingsend-285667.html 27 http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/u2-songs-of-innocence20140911 28 http://www.spin.com/2014/09/u2-songs-of-innocence-review/ 29 http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6244153/u2-songs-of-innocence-albumreview 30 http://www.mtv.com/news/1959796/u2-26-million-itunes-downloads/ 31 http://www.officialcharts.com/artist/21874/U2/ 32 http://www.cnet.com/news/apples-free-u2-album-scored-many-fans-despitecomplaints/ 33 http://us.kantar.com/tech/mobile/2015/kantar-data-on-free-u2-album-usage/ 34 http://www.businessinsider.com/everyone-is-freaking-out-over-u2s-new-album2014-9#ixzz3WFonbMOr 35 http://www.mtv.com/news/1928425/u2-apple-album-release/ 36 http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/500m-people-get-album-after-hittingsend-285667.html 37 http://blogs.seattletimes.com/soundposts/2014/10/15/black-keys-drummerpatrick-carney-u2-and-spotify-devalue-music/ 38 http://loudwire.com/buckcherry-keith-nelson-calls-out-u2-free-album-decision/ 39 http://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-hide-the-u2-album-from-your-ios-device/ 40 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201396 41 http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/professor-iggy-pop-criticizes-u2praises-thom-yorke-at-bbc-lecture-20141014 42 http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2014/09/10/u2-apple-androck-and-roll-as-dystopian-junk-mail/ 43 http://www.vulture.com/2014/09/album-review-u2-songs-of-innocence-appleiphone.html?_ga=1.193945259.761848504.1428066330 44 http://www.veooz.com/news/jHaK0Yx.html 45 http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/oct/15/u2-bono-issues-apology-forapple-itunes-album-download 46 http://time.com/3394701/u2-free-itunes-album/ 47 http://www.u2.com/news/title/remember-us 48 Idem 49 http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-u2-album-songsinnocence-iphone-ios-apple-20150224-story.html 50 http://exclaim.ca/Music/article/u2_are_most_listenedto_artist_on_itunes_study_says 51 http://www.mojo4music.com/17648/u2-bono-refuses-to-apologise/

CHAPTER FIVE THE SUNN O))) ALBUM COVER AS PUZZLE ALBERT R. DIAZ UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

Puzzles are not for everyone, and perhaps that is the point. Defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, they are “devised or made for the purpose of testing one’s ingenuity, knowledge, [and] patience” and, when they are unsolved, they preclude the player from attaining a richer network of knowledge, cultural capital, and spiritual awakening.1 The album covers of drone band Sunn O))) present their own unsolved visual puzzles. What types of things might an album cover reveal, and what of the visual is even possible to decipher? On December 17, 2014, LAWeekly.com published a piece titled “The 10 Most Ridiculous Metal Album Covers of 2014.” They are as follows: #10 Foreseen, Helsinki Savagery #9 A Breach of Silence, The Darkest Road #8 Krokodil, Nachash #7 Helldorados, Lessons in Decay #6 The Prophecy 23, Untrue Like a Boss #5 American Heritage, Prolapse #4 Allen/Lande, The Great Divide #3 Funereus, Return of the Old Goat #2 Hombre Malo, Persistent Murmur of Words of Wrath #1 Riot V’s, Unleash the Fire2

I encourage readers to view these covers online, either through the original LAWeekly.com article or through a Google search of each album. There is nothing particularly striking or odd about this collection of covers. The illustrations of vultures, wolves, skulls, cyborgs, cadavers, severed appendages, and inverted crosses are what one comes to expect from metal’s visual culture. By contrast, examine the following “canonical” metal album covers (images can again be found online): Black

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Sabbath’s Black Sabbath (1970), Heaven and Hell (1980); Iron Maiden’s Killers (1981), The Number of the Beast (1982), Powerslave (1984), Somewhere in Time (1986); Pantera’s Vulgar Display of Power (1992); Metallica’s Master of Puppets (1986), … And Justice for All (1988). In this set we observe demons, devils, a mysterious figure lurking in the woods, angels smoking and playing cards, repeated crosses as puppets, and a fist to the face. Are the LAWeekly.com images any more ridiculous than the ones we just mentioned? Perhaps. Are they extraordinary? Certainly not. The LAWeekly.com covers are, in fact, an all-too-ordinary collection of archetypal visual tropes and signifiers of metal: skeletons, mutant and mutilated bodies, mythical creatures, crucifixes, and gothic scripts. It seems that we should conclude that visual literacy of the metal album cover is nothing more than the most general recognition of the heavy, extreme, or aggressive nature of metal. I destabilise this conclusion by analysing and interpreting the album covers of Sunn O))), a drone metal group formed in Seattle, Washington in 1998. This analysis allows me to understand how the band communicates with its audience, fans, and consumers through the visual domain and beyond the basic tropes on the heaviness of metal. The album covers I’ve chosen to discuss are the following: The Grimmrobe Demos (1999) Altar (2006) White Box Set (2006) Dømkirke (2008) Monoliths and Dimensions (2009)

I examine these album covers through several different lenses: the historical, for example, the way in which the band posits itself within a particular musical or artistic lineage; the social, the way in which the band invites and possibly mobilises fans to be a part of a social project; the aesthetic, the desire to craft something with values, images, and icons borrowed from Western art movements (and all the cultural capital that comes with such things); and of course, the political, which is always already folded into the previously outlined domains.3 To clarify, insofar as the historical, social, and aesthetic produce social relations between actual people in real culture, there will always be an observable political stake or outcome. My project started out as a question of signification: Do the visual signifiers of metal signify anything beyond the genre itself? The pentagrams, the goats, the blood and gore, the fallen angels, all of it! Has metal successfully vacated any signification beyond the metal-ness, or the

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heaviness, of metal in the space of the album cover? If this is the case we are experiencing a closed system of visual signification. As I contemplated Sunn O)))’s records I found myself decoding the visual signifiers of the album covers vis-à-vis play. By “play” I mean, the production of meaning within a system of constraints. Grasping the gestalt of the album cover involved an interactive process that required me to consciously piece the signifiers together. This chapter draws on discourses surrounding games and play in order reconceive of the difficulty and obscurantism of the visual elements of the Sunn O))) album covers as puzzles. Solving the puzzle in this case is no longer about persevering through the difficult task, nor attaining a grand objective perspective, but about producing meaning through play within a system of visual constraints. I use this play on meaning to demonstrate how the visual aspect of Sunn O)))’s packaging enriches the sonic experience of its music. The band’s success is part and parcel of the success of Southern Lord Records, a label owned and operated by Sunn O))) band members Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson. Based in Los Angeles, California, Southern Lord remains an independent label during a time in which many other indie labels are being bought up by major labels. Southern Lord is successful, at least in part, thanks to the resurgence of the vinyl market in the United States, a trend which, as a whole, capitalises on recordings’ packaging and scarcity to appeal to audiences’ material consumerism. In addition to playing guitar on Sunn O))) recordings, Stephen O’Malley serves as art director on the band’s releases and thus creates an aesthetic through-line by his involvement in both the sonic and visual domains of each Sunn O))) record. O’Malley has clearly stated, “Each release has a strong visual concept, which attempts to personify what I hear as our conceptual audial approach.”4 In other words, O’Malley selects album art that is representational of the music. Sunn O)))’s The Grimmrobe Demos was first released on CD in 1998 in run of either 500 or 700 (sources provide conflicting information) by the label Hydra Head Noise Industries, a subsidiary of the independent record label Hydra Head Records.5 In 2005, the album was rereleased by Southern Lord Records on CD and vinyl. O’Malley’s cover art for The Grimmrobe Demos is un-credited in the album liner notes. The medium of the original piece is unknown, but possibly a screen print (see image 5.1). The image depicts three distinct natural phenomena. First is some sort of celestial body, a reference to the dedicatee of this album, the band Earth, and to the original name of Sunn O))), which was Mars.6 Second, net-like venations suggest fauna, roots, a

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cotyledon, or perhaps the bark of a tree. Last, we see something like the scene at the beginning of David Lynch’s film Eraserhead: an intimate, albeit artistic interpretation of the moment of fertilization. All three of these images share the theme of an all-too-intimate examination of an object. They illustrate a sublime proximity to the natural. The viewer is in the position of being uncomfortably close, invasively examining something that had heretofore remained unexamined. The image consists of two colours, a subdued deep purple and a lighter, lowly saturated grey; this results in a matt finish to the image. The root-like structures extend beyond the border of the image, giving the impression that the pattern continues outside the frame. The image seems to be both close up and far away. Paradoxically, the image communicates in two- and three-dimensionality simultaneously. The lower portion of the image appears in decidedly flat two-dimensions, in alignment with the flatness of the matt colour scheme. As the net-like venations sprout towards the top of the image and become denser, they produce a hallucinatory effect that brings about a three-dimensional quality. The diffusion of the veins around and away from the circle near the top right of the image interrupts the vertical flow while also establishing a threedimensional perspective. The circle then can be read in at least two ways: either as a dissonant blemish, as something that has burned through what would have theoretically been the densest point of the venations, or as the locus from which a new consonance will form. In other words, this thing might bring a new kind of harmony to that which surrounds it. The 2006 release Altar is a collaboration album between Sunn O))) and the Japanese metal band Boris, with cover art by Aaron Horkey, an American graphic designer who works extensively on film and band tour posters, as well as album covers (see image 5.2).7 In this cover the contrast between smoky blackish greys and olivine green excites a glow that emanates from a vacuum tube hovering in an opening near the base of a contorted tree. The tube and the tree form some kind of new, symbiotic relationship that combines the natural with the technological. The roots that splinter from around the vacuum tube outward to the background of the image suggest a flow of energy from the tree. The roots lead towards five hooded figures whose silhouettes are fragmented to look like cornstalks in a field. On the left side of the tree are the members of the band Boris, and the two figures on the right side of the tree are the members of Sunn O))).8 The unification of both bands is communicated through the “natural” energy source they share: the treehoused vacuum tube. This interconnectedness privileges the social and

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invites the spectator/listener to be a part of a unified social project. If, as depicted in this image, all energy has a single source that inspires individual musicians to reproduce and amplify those initial vibrations, then an audience exposed to such energy, in this case the music of Altar, will become unified as part of a community participating in a sonic ritual. Thus, the tree housing the vacuum tube becomes like the album’s title—an altar, in the sense of a “raised structure […] used as the focus for a religious ritual, especially for making sacrifices or offerings to a god or gods.”9 The solution to the puzzle posed by Altar resides in deciphering Sunn O)))’s valuation of community through music as a social project. The visual presentation of WHITEbox is a personal favourite of O’Malley, who oversaw the art direction for the release. WHITEbox is a box set containing two recordings, White1 and White2. Reflecting on his vision for this package, O’Malley elucidates on the design for White2, as well as the typography, graphics, and art design for the entire project: As far as Sunn O))) is concerned White2 is a favorite for certain. The Breugel image on the cover [The Beekeepers and the Birdnesters by Pieter Bruegel the Elder] symbolised the psychedelic and illusionary elements that were emerging from the music more presently then for the first time. It’s simply an image of 15th century beekeepers, but seems alien to the viewer’s modern sensibilities. Much as Sunn O))) may exist in some ways in early 1970s heavy rock but orbit far from contemporary metal. Beside this, the typography, graphics and art direction were a highlight for me. It’s implied sophistication, or rather a minimal approach allowing the listener, viewer, to draw their own impression out of the canvas on their own terms.10

We gain the sense that O’Malley intends to puzzle the viewer with Bruegel’s image. The wicker masks of the beekeepers seem bizarre to the modern viewer, but everything else about the image—the robes, the countryside—is familiar. The two figures in robes on the cover of White2 are evocative of the Pleurants, or the Mourners of Dijon, a set of sculptures carved to decorate tombs in near Burgundy about a century or so after the time Bruegel lived. This connection adds to the sense that a ceremony is taking place. The heavy fabric of the robes and the downward gaze of the human figures communicate the solemnity of the ceremony. Our fourth Sunn O))) album cover is for the 2008 release Dømkirke, a live album recorded in the cathedral in Bergen, Norway. The original art is oil on canvas abstractly depicting the aggressive point of the church’s central spire. Shades of blue, black, grey, and white combine to produce a washed out atmospheric image that registers as an ominous sky. Motion

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and light seem to erupt from the lower left corner diagonally across the frame. The artist’s minimal use of paint makes extensive use of the canvas texture to lend momentum to the brushstrokes. The painting is by Norwegian visual artist Tania [Tanja, Tanya] Stene (b. 1973), best known for her cover art and photo shoots of the Norwegian black metal bands Darkthrone, Isengard, Thorns, and Satyricon in the early 90s.11 Using Stene’s painting for the cover of Dømkirke posits Sunn O))) within the lineage of the noteworthy Norwegian black metal bands. The puzzle, then, is here solved by making the connection between Sunn O)))’s inspiration from the black metal scene. The final example is the 2009 release Monoliths and Dimensions, which features Richard Serra’s piece out-of-round X (see image 5.3). outof-round-X was created with paintsticks, an oil-based pigment that blends chalk and graphite; Serra melts these paintsticks to form large pigment blocks that he presses on highly textured and absorptive type of paper manufactured by Hiromi Paper, INC. A large, black circle dominates nearly the whole of the album cover. In the corners of the image where the circle does not reach, small black spatters dot the negative space. Serra’s process involves applying the pigment blocks in thick layers and using a curved piece of cardboard to overlay the circle. As Serra presses on the cardboard, liquid material shoots out under the pressure and produces the diffusion of spatters beyond the border of the stencil.12 Writing of the properties of the colour black, Serra has said, “Black is a property, not a quality. In terms of weight, black is heavier, creates a larger volume, holds itself in a more compressed field. It is comparable to forging. […] To use black is the clearest way of marking against a white field.”13 This language is reminiscent of our earlier discussion of the heaviness depicted through metal album covers, and is also analogous to the weight and the loud volume of the music we hear on this album. The densely layered black of the paintstick adds dimensionality to the image, having the effect of absorbing the spectator as the work similarly absorbs the surrounding light. Some areas of the central circle are a less thick black, and possess a grainy, sedimentary surface. The splatters at the perimeter suggest an evacuation of skill from the artist, not unlike Pollock, in the sense that Serra has produced something that is visually aleatoric. The ink seems to be shooting out from the central indentation as if it is the jettisoned material that has, at least partially, escaped what feels like the crater of a celestial body. The monochromatic quality of the image makes it difficult to focus on a single element; thus, the identification of figure and background is never resolved. My argument is that out-of-round-X plays a game with the

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spectator, who is positioned out of bounds if they fail to acknowledge the sculptural site produced by the oscillation of background and foreground elements in the image. O’Malley gives an account of his selection of Serra’s out-of-round X work, saying, “There was heavy resonance […] especially in the physicality of his surface emerging from a rather minimal material use. Out-of-Round X provides many metaphors with [Sunn O)))’s] moniker, the implication of radiation and collective colour, movement and energy in stasis, etc.”14 And of Serra’s sculptural work in general, O’Malley elaborates, “[Serra’s sculptural work] has provided [me with] a large sense of inspiration and pleasure [… his] blatant elemental use of magnetism and gravity appeals as a physical sense of some of the principles we see in our music as well. I guess we are fortunate to have this sculptural metaphor with our music.”15 The sculptural metaphor is a powerful one. If we permit Sunn O)))’s album covers to be sculptures, or sculptural, then there are an infinite number of viewing angles from which we can appreciate them. The idea of the sculptural accounts for the process by which images can potentially create a meaning-rich experience for fans. We may retroactively conceive of this entire set of records by Sunn O))) through the lens of the sculptural, understanding them first as a puzzle and second as a puzzle that is sculptural in nature. Each cover of these Sunn O))) records supplements the recorded content of each album and creates a physical site in which to view the images and listen to the album. We solve the puzzle as we tease out the rich network of associations tied to the cultural object from the infinite number of viewing angles afforded by the sculptural site.

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Fig. 5.2.

Fig. 5.3.

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References Bregenz, Kunsthaus. “Richard Serra: Drawings–Work Comes out of Work”. In Press Release Richard Serra, June 14–September 14, 2008, KUB 08.03 (2008), accessed April 10, 2015. http://www.kunsthausbregenz.at/presse_serra/PresseinformationEL.pdf. Roche, Jason. “The 10 Most Ridiculous Metal Album Covers of 2014”, LA Weekly, December 17, 2014, http://www.laweekly.com/music/the10-most-ridiculous-metal-album-covers-of-2014-5289782. Sinclair, Mark. “Sunn O))) and the Art of Being Heavy”, CR Blog (blog), Creative Review, May 21, 2009, http://www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/2009/may/sunn-0-and-the-art-of-being-heavy.

Notes 1 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “puzzle, n.”, accessed October 10, 2014, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/155300?rskey=a8Zzgq&result=1. 2 Jason Roche, “The 10 Most Ridiculous Metal Album Covers of 2014”. 3 The domains that I’ve outline are not strict and most certainly overlap. They are meant to illustrate the ways in which I’ve situated particular pieces of data within broader categories while doing my research. 4 Mark Sinclair, “Sunn O))) and the Art of Being Heavy”, CR Blog (blog), Creative Review, May 21, 2009, http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2009 /may/sunn-0-and-the-art-of-being-heavy. 5 “Sunn O)))–The GrimmRobe Demos”, Discogs, accessed October 10, 2014, http://www.discogs.com/Sunn-O-The-GrimmRobe-Demos/release/600406 (accessed October 10, 2014). 6 Inspired by Earth, Sunn O))) positioned themselves alongside Earth, albeit in a lesser size, more distant orbit from the sun. 7 For more info about Horkey, see his page on his agent’s website: http://jackywinter.com/artists/aaron-horkey/. 8 These are Atsuo, Wata, and Takeshi, and Anderson and O’Malley. 9 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “altar, n.”, accessed October 10, 2014, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/5752?redirectedFrom=altar. 10 Sinclair, “Sunn O))) and the Art of Being Heavy”. 11 “Tania Stene”, Encyclopaedia Metallum: The Metal Archives. 12 Bregenz, Press Release Richard Serra. 13 Ibid. 14 Sinclair, “Sunn O))) and the Art of Being Heavy”. 15 Ibid.

CHAPTER SIX MUSIC VIDEO AND ADVERTISEMENT PEDRO BUIL UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID

To carry out this research, it is pertinent to make a brief reference to certain ideas which provide a sociocultural context for the object of study. Although this chapter does not intend to reopen the debate on the critique of mass culture as Arce did,1 nor to raise questions on whether the so-called mass society led to the degeneration of neoliberalism or whether capitalism was the result of the former. It would be impossible to conduct an analysis of certain elements of audio-visual media, such as music videos or adverts, without considering that everything we call culture is integrated into everyday social practices that are all around us. Another issue we can observe in the relationship between economics and culture in the postmodernism era is the influence of the logic of the market economy and the measurement of growth in terms of competitiveness and production. This leads to all objects being transformed into commodities. Thus, culture and all objects derived from culture are submerged in the duality of goods and consumption, as revealed by the semiotic conception of Cultural Studies. This shows how consumers of culture possess a range of tools and content that they accumulate and how they draw from previous social experiences. This notion is somewhat reminiscent of Bourdieu’s ideas about the instrumentalisation of culture, not so much as an essential instrument to preserve class differences and social hierarchy, but rather in terms of who decides how to categorize a particular object, be it in aesthetic or qualitative terms. Bauman refers to what he calls “the chosen ones.” In one example referring to the music industry, he somewhat sarcastically described “the chosen ones” as [those who sing the praises of the values that they themselves hold whilst also ensuring they win the song contest).2 Worthy of note is the fact that it is precisely the assertiveness of statements such as “this is beautiful” that can lead to the establishment of

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this category of the chosen ones, without any regard for any perceptive virtue which allows beauty to be appreciated and accessed. Moving on to the case at hand, this notion has huge resonance if we cast our minds back to the heyday of the major record labels in the late twentieth century. If we take the model of the radio formats and radio stations that established different record charts for instance, it is clear that they played a key role along with the most influential players in the promotion of artists and hits in the music industry. Some attempts may have been made to ascertain how these rankings were set up and what criteria were used to rank hits. We are unsure whether the criteria are based on artistic merit or merely on the number of records sold. That said, there is no denying that the music industry operates like any other business with commercial transactions involving the purchase and sale of products and service. The radio became a key player that had a very attractive offering of services. Record labels played an active role in keeping their media phenomena at the top of the various podiums. The figure of “the chosen ones”, as alluded to above, is an attempt to reflect how the leading record labels were actively involved in this bidding process to ensure their artists remained at the top of the numerous music industry charts offered to consumers. Indeed, we can observe a subtle similarity with the notion of ensuring they won the song contest as mentioned above. The patronage of radio stations and the financial backing they provided led to higher profits for record companies.

Music Industry and Music Video Radio formats still attract audiences however, since the advent of the Internet, they coexist with other formats and traditional models of consumption have changed. Consequently, both distribution and sales methods have also changed, as have peoples’ habits. The giants of the music industry have become fragmented with impact of technology that brought innovations, first in the format of music products and later in the way music is consumed. With regard to the digital era, it should be noted that the music industry, in particular, recorded music, proved to be highly innovative once it found itself immersed in the new logic of the telecommunications era. Indeed, the experience of the music sector serves as an interesting reference that reveals some of the key transformations that subsequently spread to other sectors of the Culture Industry. Bustamante indicates that [the record industry in the digital age has been a pioneering laboratory

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where battles were fought out between the key players in the culture industry and other sectors and where new business models were created].3 A brief contextualization of this technological regeneration begins with a retrospective look at the new markets that emerged in the so-called digital age, and the rise at that time of MP3 and P2P networks which later led to the sharing of music on-line through websites such as Kazaa, eMule, or Napster and later i-Tunes which became the new paradigm established by selling music by the unit. A few years later, consumption of music through streaming was to take the market by storm, with the arrival of platforms such as Spotify or Deezer, which in 2009, became as the leading platforms for music consumption on the Internet. It is also worth mentioning You Tube another key player that now plays an essential role in the consumption of online music. Despite its short history, this video portal has become firmly established. In the early days, YouTube had just a few video-fans and has now become the portal where leading figures of music media are promoted through their official channels. This reveals how consumers of music do not perform an isolated task of listening to a sound element, but rather have been listening to music for some time as part of a broader experience through the audio-visual media we know as the music video. The rise of the music television channel MTV in the eighties started defining new ways of accessing popular music. Music videos became a phenomenon that evolved with the development of audio-visual technology, the media and the music industry and today music videos are more accessible to users than ever before. This has been described by John Mundy as [a continuation of the history of the relationship between music and image throughout the twentieth century].4 As we embark on an in-depth analysis of everything that surrounds this genre, beyond an analysis of what is happening in terms of music in this audio-visual genre, new communication plans and new possibilities unfold. The use of clichés, pastiche, and intertextual relations shape the overall context of this audio-visual media. When Viñuela studies postmodernism,5 he refers to authors like Straw [who see in this decontextualization a vehicle to renegotiate the meanings of a musical style which belongs to the past, placing it in the present, as is common practice in the history of music, as he himself points out may be observed within musical parameters and reused in other aesthetic elements]. The different schools of thought that emerged on the analysis of music videos each, in turn, attempted to fill the gaps that the previous school of thought may have left unresolved. Therefore, after the rise of postmodernism, semiotic studies rose in prominence demanding greater attention be

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devoted the musical element rather than to images with no relation to sound. For Frith,6 for instance, the inherent characteristic of music videos is lost if its root causes are not taken into account i.e. regardless of the fact that music videos are played on television and the fact that music videos are products of the music industry, the examination of the music videos is devoid of its essential component. Following structuralism, which led to musicology playing a more important role as a key player in the study of musical language using tools from the field of semiotics, we saw the emergence of social semiotics. This school of thought was critical of the method of conducting partial and isolated structural analysis of elements of music videos and favoured a holistic methodology that analyses music, lyrics and images as an indivisible whole.

Music and image Our methodological approach is based on this very assumption i.e. that music videos are an indivisible whole. The aim is to set out a sequenced analysis in order to conduct a comparative study of two audio-visual media whose common link is the musical element, but that are equally inextricably linked owing to the relationship between music and image. Clearly, in both audio-visual phenomena,—adverts and music videos—, it would not be possible to establish coherent links if their components were isolated. A common component can establish cohesion between the two yet continue to regard them as indivisible objects for the purposes of analysis. The music-image duality has historically been discussed from multiple perspectives. Depending on the audio-visual medium in which this relationship has taken place, we observe how one of the elements becomes subordinate to the other. Specifically, in the film industry the notion of complementarity of the soundtrack has prevailed for some time. The soundtrack is attributed a secondary role intended only to complete the film strip. Music videos as a phenomenon turn this assumption on its head, since the hypothetical subordination is inverted. Today, it may be redundant to reopen old debates about the role of music at the service of images and the notion that the music served merely to add value to the visual narrative. Frith7 already mentioned the differences that exist from the very outset, in the production of different audio-visual media, such as producing a soundtrack for a particular film strip and vice versa i.e. when a visual text is created to add value to a piece of music. It is not possible to undo the homogenization process that

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characterizes an audio-visual media such as music videos to break it down into its constituent parts with the intention of obtaining isolated information about the whole. This broad overview transcends beyond the field of musicology and indeed it has become increasingly common to find interdisciplinary studies that conduct research on music videos and their relationship with other audio-visual media from the perspective of different academic fields. Regarding the view of Frith, Chion argues in The audiovision that “television is never as visual as when broadcasting music videos, when images are ostensibly added to music which was already a whole, self-sufficient entity.”8 The interrelationship described in this chapter may be understood more readily when placed within a more precise analytical framework, bearing in mind the narrative functions of music in an audio-visual medium. Of all possible meanings that narrative may have, we opt for the following definition, [narrative is the act of turning a series of events into on a series of intelligible forms, in any media, that convey knowledge about these events].9

Methodological Proposal First, we will consider the structural functions through which music gives audio-visual media formal and narrative unity. Both audio-visual media shall be analysed in this section. The stylistic devices used in this section are linked to repetition and variation of sound material to unify and give coherence to the audio-visual media. Another possibility that music offers has to do with transitions between two different scenes. Music acts as an element that provides structure to the pauses between scenes. This section also takes into account the function of sound that defines diegetic and non-diegetic space as well as sound outside the audio-visual field. Music also contributes to the construction of space when it enhances sounds that occur within the diegetic frame. Tagg’s10 system organises different types of signs including anaphones, diataxemes, and style flags. Anaphones merit a special mention with regard to the relationship mentioned above whereby music highlights aspects of the sound in the scene in audio-visual media. It is also important to mention the role of music in raccord i.e. the idea of continuity that covers formal aspects that require of a certain amount of consistency between consecutive shots. If a fragment requires visual consistency between one section and the next, the musical treatment should be performed in the same way [observe the chains of relationships that allow the construction of the sequence and its perception as such, and

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the relationships between sequences which ensure the meaning is consistent throughout the story]. The second analytical layer will cover both music videos and adverts since intertextual functions are at play in both. The term intertextuality has its origins in the field of literature. It was coined by Kristeva who identified intertextuality as the relationship between one text and another, a product of a dialogue that has been established. [All text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations, all text is the absorption and transformation of another text].11 Such relationships are established in other areas so it is not confined to this field of knowledge. Intertextuality is also present in the context of popular music,12 and its importance has been acknowledged. Talbot13 highlights some of Middleton’s ideas that everything that shapes the network of texts and interactions that emerge from a particular song, is of greater importance than the song itself. The true meaning of these products is a result of the inherent relationship that they have with intertextual networks that connect them with other meanings, which in turn have been acquired as a result of interacting with other texts. What allows intertextuality to fully exist is the cultural and literary heritage of the recipients, who have to identify references to previous texts and understand how they relate to the hypertext. The last element of the narrative functions of music is the interrelationships between music and images. There are different degrees or levels of gradation according to which a broad range of nuances for each of the effects that the music and image produce in their joint interaction. Cook14 characterized the multimedia as a combination of similarity and difference in which distinctions can be made. The similarity is subdivided into two categories, consistency and coherence. If there are two media and each of them has a variant of a third media and they try to emphasize aspects of its range of meaning, it is said that these two media are coherent. However, consistency is when both media convey an identical meaning of the third media. When this occurs, Cook refers to this as conformance, which in turn may be unitay, dyadic or triadic. Conformance shall be the first of the three models of range to be considered. The range of conformance is related to the appropriateness of the music for what the visuals are seeking to convey. The concept of synesthesia,15 which creates so many possibilities in the field of semiotics, is not a viable option since this attribute is only present in one out of ten people. At best, a brief reference can be made to what Cook calls quasisynaesthesia, as a phenomenon that a greater number of people experience when establishing relationships between two parameters of different areas such as the association between lighting and brightness of the visual level

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with high acoustic frequencies. Thus, this conformance shall be determined depending on other associations, that are more perceptive than synesthetic, with regard to the association and relationship of some musical parameters such as harmony, melody, rhythm, timbre, or variations of agogics and dynamics with others that the image will reveal either around the composition of the image and key points of information about the visual element, or other graphic qualities, as well as the use of the camera to select different shots, or the use of travelling. The complementation range occurs when the two separate media add non-redundant functional information regardless of the overall result. The video provides denotative information while music can provide connotative information that contributes to the overall result. It allows for ambiguity to be added to a scene and enhance a certain feeling when what we hear reinforces the coherence of what we see. Within this range, Chion speaks of the empathetic and non-empathetic effect that music creates. If we take a visual narrative in slow motion, with a context in which the circumstances occur gradually, and all this is accompanied by energetic music with an accelerated tempo, a certain overall ambiguity is generated. A parallel message is being sent in which the rhythm of the scene is highlighted in contrast to the sound perception of the viewer who continues to live in a real rhythm. A certain style may also trigger the creation of such effects. Cook adds a third range, contest, whereby two separate media can be functionally redundant and a collision between different levels of meaning occurs.

Case Study Our case study is one of the examples that have been analysed to ascertain whether there is a possible transfer of meanings and other possible relationships between music videos for the song “We Are Young” by the US band Fun, and an advert released in August 2013 by Mahou a Spanish brand of beer, which used fragments of that song as background music for their advert. The relationship that exists between these different audio-visual media that are linked by music, however the intention is by no means to take the musical element and analyse it in both media but rather to take the music video as a whole as the object of analysis and the advert as a whole as an inter-objective comparison. We analyse how the advert uses the mechanisms developed in the audio-visual narration in the music video, as described above. The advert uses music from 00':07'' of the music video, which starts with ostinato

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rhythm drums, which supports the first scene of both media. The music video uses this rhythmic-strophic repetition to toggle the information revealed by the lead singer who plays the role of a subjective narrator in real time. The music video describes a story that matches the visuals using slow motion whereas in the advert, a voice-over appears which delimits the context of a music star and its surroundings which are also in slow motion. At 00':15'' the audio track is cut and skips to the chorus so the second verse from the music video is omitted. As regard raccord, in both media the narrative can be understood so it is fair to say that care has been taken to ensure both thematic continuity and the suitability of camera framing on the players and the surroundings. We can also observe a similarity in the contexts in which the events take place: people drinking in a nightclub and a bar with people drinking the beer being promoted in the advert. This leads to continuity in the perception of the events, which are presented to the viewer as a story in which each narrator puts us in a specific, real situation that is perfectly synchronized with what we see in the images of both texts. We can even observe synchronization of literal elements with the action during the crucial moments of the image. In the music video, moments before the chorus, an object (in this case a mobile phone) is thrown as we hear the lyrics “falling down” before reaching the climax of the song. In the advert, when we hear “falling down” a replica is carried out with a gesture of disapproval with an arm falling down and heads looking at the floor. Therefore, staying with the same example, we shall analyse the text in the advert, taking into account the different intertextual relations which, according to Genette would be grouped under the term "transtextuality.” This concept defines the relationship of some texts with others. In literature, it is emphasised how hypertext or later text that is related to an previous text, will be understood in its many aspects by the reader, provided the reader was already familiar with the hypotext or original text through which different types intertextuality takes place. For the case at hand, we could talk about the types of intertextuality that the hypertext, or advert, takes from the hypotext or music video in this instance, although Mahou beer had previously made other adverts. “We Are Young" was selected as the soundtrack of a one-minute Chevrolet advert for the Chevy Sonic, aired during Super Bowl XLVI on February 5th, 2012 so we could also study this as text taken from the music videos of the band Fun. For the purposes of this chapter, we shall restrict ourselves to a single advert. We share that [a socio-semiotic perspective, cultural, and critical, in a negative sense, means recognizing the limitations of formal and purely immanent analysis of the visual text].16 Limiting ourselves exclusively to

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the properties of the image that the hypertext projects, or to the technique used to create audio-visual products, other factors such as gestures and the facial expressions of the actors might be missed, the focus and detail of each text, or iconographic elements located in the different scenes that allows points of cohesion between different texts to be established. In our example, advertising makes use of quotations and plays fragments of the song by the North American band, and although it may seem obvious, this is the element that connects both media. In turn, we can detect another intertextual process such as allusion. Regarding the narrative text, we can observe certain similarities between the contexts of the scenes in which both actions occur: leisure spaces, with people drinking; in both scenarios the action takes place in slow motion with initial calm until the start of the chorus and euphoria is unleashed in the visual field. We can observe this build-up visually through the audio spectrogram of the music video, from the calm beginning until its peak.

Figure 6.1

In the music video, the moment when the decibels are at their highest, coincides with someone hitting a girl on the head with a bottle. The advert shows a group of fans celebrating a goal looking utterly euphoric. We shall now take an in-depth look at the relationship between music and image in both audio-visual media. After observing the spectrogram, if the two media are displayed we can say that the conformance range is guaranteed. The slow tempo of 116 bpm is perfectly synchronized with the slow motion images. The pop aesthetics of the band is identified with the music of this single, which it is also catalogued under what is popularly known as The 50s progression, widely used in pop music. This chord progression is: I-vi-IV-V. For example, in C

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major: C Am F G and in our case F major: F Dm Bb C. However, this reveals no irrefutable information because the music styles do not exist independently. And we understand that a style, beyond being characterized as an essential element that brings a very specific quality, emerges in the collective thinking of listeners who identify common features in a number of songs that they associate with each other under the same label. [Styles can, however, be referred to in another way, which is akin to quotation. Songs can pastiche a style that other songs have previously constituted, by making explicit reference to that style].17 Continuing with our example, we return to the author who, when speaking of the different progressions, mentions [Pattern extending a thirdbased move beyond the second stage are very rare when stepping upwards but more common moving downwards: They include the widely used "Stand by me" changes (ionian I-VI-IV-V).].18 We emphasize not so much the use of one given chord progression over another one but rather that the progression we are discussing here has become popular even within the academia of musicology taking the famous hit Stand by me as the “seed” from which a number of prominent pop songs used the same sequence. With respect to complementation, this is a case where the same music generates two different effects. The initial object of analysis tells a story that, at first, seems to agree with the use of the music and establishes a certain synchrony between what the lyrics say and what the images show. These points of narrative synchrony favour the empathetic effect that music produces through the connotative information provided to the whole. It will fade when the chorus comes. The impassive attitude of the band on stage to the fight that has broken out in the bar has the opposite effect, considering the euphoric lyrics of the song. In the case of the advert, however, we can observe some differences. The scenario is about a fan that goes into the wrong bar and cannot celebrate his team’s goal since he is surrounded by fans from the opposing team. In this case, the music at the beginning accompanies a sequence with little action that precedes the moment when the chorus starts. We see how music permeates the second scenario, in which the same individual is in another bar, surrounded by his team’s fans. Here, the chorus reflects emotions such as joy or euphoria so the empathetic effect on the advert brings music and image together perhaps to highlight the advertising message being narrated in that moment, while the music video, with the fight scene, generates an ambiguity to encourage viewers to listen to the lyrics. This fight scene takes us to the subjective world of the singer, who seems to be recounting a personal experience.

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Conclusion By way of conclusion, it is worth emphasising that this methodological approach to the analysis of the similarities between music videos and adverts is not methodology as such but rather a theoretical approach about which a doctoral thesis is being written. At the same time, it is worth noting that this may be somewhat problematic insofar as different fields of expertise may study audio-visual media from different methodological points of view and therefore findings may differ, depending on the approach taken. However, this should be regarded as a challenge rather than a problem. These differing perspectives combine so that each perspective can serve to enhance future research projects and lead to a more complete and rigorous study of audio-visual media. The audio-visual analysis of these fields aims to discover the nexus through which adverts can incorporate a mainstream musical hit to reinforce the advertising message. Through the use of music videos, a network of meanings is established that, in turn contributes to adverts that strategically transfer meanings and create associations by using music as a common link.

References Abril, Gonzalo. Análisis crítico de textos visuales. Madrid: Síntesis, 2008. Arce, Julio. Cuadernos de Música. Música popular urbana. Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2006. Bauman, Zygmunt. La cultura en el mundo de la modernidad líquida. Cambridge: Polity Press Ltd, 2011. Bustamante, Enrique. Hacia un nuevo sistema mundial de comunicación. Las industrias culturales en la era digital. Barcelona: Gedisa, 2003. Chion, Michel. La audiovisión. Introducción a un análisis conjunto de la imagen y el sonido. Barcelona: Paidos, 1993. Cook, Nicholas. Analysing Musica multimedia. Oxford: Clarendom Press, 1998. Córdoba, Mª José de. “La investigación científica de la sinestesia. Aplicaciones en las didácticas generales y específicas. Proyectos de innovación para comunicación audiovisual.” In España: Cuadernos de Comunicación, 3 (2009): 40-48. Frith, Simon. Music for Pleasure. New York: Routledge, 1988. —. “Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music.” In. Music & Society: The Politics fo Composition, Performance and Reception, edited by R.

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Leppert and S. Mcclary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Kristeva, Julia. Semiótica. Madrid: Fundamentos, v. 1, 1978. López Cano, Rubén. “Música e intertextualitad.” In Pauta, Cuadernos de teoría y crítica musical, 104, (2007): 30-36 Moore, Allan F. Rock: The primary text. Developing a musicology of rock. Surrey: Ashgate, 2001. Sánchez, Jordi. Narrativa Audiovisual. Barcelona: UOC, 2006. Sedeño, Ana. “Cultura de la escucha y videoclip musical: aportaciones de este formato audiovisual a la recepción de la música popular.” In Valparaíso, 15 (2012). Tagg, Philip. Music’s Meanings: a modern musicology for nonǦmusos, New York: The Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press, 2012. Talbot, Michael. The musical work: reality or invention. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000. Viñuela, Eduardo. El videoclip en España (1980-1995).Gesto audiovisual, discurso y mercado. Madrid: ICCMU, 2008.

Notes 1

Arce, Cuadernos de Música. Bauman, La cultura en el mundo de la modernidad líquida, 11. 3 Bustamante, Hacia un nuevo sistema mundial de comunicación. 4 Sedeño, “Cultura de la escucha y videoclip musical”, 2. 5 Viñuela, El videoclip en España, 34. 6 Frith, “Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music”. 7 Frith, Music for Pleasure. 8 Chion, La audiovisión. 9 Sánchez, Narrativa Audiovisual, 16. 10 Tagg, Music’s Meanings, 486. 11 Kristeva, Semiótica, 190. 12 López Cano, Música e intertextualitad, 30-36. 13 Talbot, The musical work: reality or invention, 59-87. 14 Cook, Analysing Musica multimedia. 15 Córdoba, “La investigación científica de la sinestesia”, 40-48. 16 Abril, Análisis crítico de textos visuales, 19-20. 17 Moore, Rock: The primary text, 201. 18 Ibid., 57. 2

CHAPTER SEVEN TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING AND THE DISNEY UNIVERSE: AN ANALYSIS OF SOME SUCCESSFUL ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACKS EDUARDO ENCABO FERNÁNDEZ, ISABEL JEREZ MARTÍNEZ AND LOURDES HERNÁNDEZ DELGADO UNIVERSIDAD DE MURCIA

Redefining the recipient: The Transmedia phenomenon The classic stereotype of listener, reader or spectator suggests to us a person who interacts with a book, a piece of music or a film that they have in front of them, using them for pure enjoyment or for learning. This cliché has not disappeared, but has evolved, incorporating new forms and modalities which represent adaptation to the present day. Jarauta points out: Today we are experiencing a totally new situation, the result of the great economic, technological, social and cultural changes that are taking place in the world. We are seeing changes that have fundamentally modified the way we look, read and understand, the way we establish knowledge connections and written connections. A new reader has been born who sails through information loops with the same freedom that, in their day, those well-known sailors of the high seas might have enjoyed, guided by the portulan charts of the time.1

Indeed, the new recipient is not someone who is anchored to fixed structures, but rather who directs their inquisitiveness towards social

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stimuli that have transformed text into different forms.2 Thus, starting from the platforms on which this textual content is displayed, there is a whole spectrum of possibilities available to this person which allow them to choose where to navigate and which route to follow. There is no discussion about the existence of this situation, although there is debate around its advantages and disadvantages. Logically, the process of opening up the text and the way in which it is then filtered into different media mean that the activation of the person’s senses is something tangible. Furthermore, this expansion is related to a point made by Tascón: Never before have there been so many “appliances” for reading as there are now… but perhaps the most important change has to do with mobile screens, in the same way that, at the time, the change in the way music is consumed had to do with the devices that allowed people to carry their favourite songs around with them. It is not just about the digitalization of text; that has existed for decades. The change is this new ability to transport this digitalized text and have access to it wherever one goes.3

This ability to access media is the greatest existing advantage to the free-sailing recipient, as they can find artistic displays in spaces other than in those in their daily routines, providing remarkable accessibility and convenience. However, in return, we must be aware of the flexibility that can become imprinted on our way of thinking due to the fact that any of these media can be open to different interpretations, given the multitude of forms and formats in which they are presented. There is a need, therefore, to redefine the recipient, as their patterns of behaviour are not the same as they have been in the past. We find ourselves faced with a recipient who has a range of possibilities to choose from, who can choose what to read and when, can do it digitally or opt for the traditional format. In fact this someone can even combine different media in such a way that the text becomes unconfined, a transmedia entity, in that it could appear just as easily on a cinema or television screen as it does in the pages of a paperback. These circumstances mean that fragmentation is possible, but it does not stop an enjoyable interactive learning experience. Linearity gives way to circularity, or even perpendicularity, in the pursuit of the information that is taken from a piece of writing, music or film.

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The house of Disney as a social reference point: possible negative aspects in the personal development of individuals What we can say about the Disney aesthetic, and above all about its content? It is difficult to find objections to the aesthetic; the character designs presented are ideal for consumption by children, and the technical level of the illustrations and animations is difficult to fault. However, it is easy to object to the content of the stories. Why? Largely because there is a significant ideological component built into the storylines. In many cases, the axiological content of the stories is eclipsed by the aesthetics, the special effects, the songs, the quality of illustrations, etc. In other words, the form is given higher priority than the content. What are the educational implications of this? We can clearly see that, if Disney productions are taken as the point of reference for children, there is more interest in keeping them occupied than in the content of what they are actually being shown, meaning that we are achieving one of the main objectives of stories for children, which is to entertain, but neglecting the educational aspect. Equally worrying are the clearly delineated stereotypes that are presented to us by stories from the Disney studios. It is quite obvious that if we look at what is created for us by this company, we see that the masculine and feminine characters are differentiated in the extreme, and that there are classic gender markers attributed to each of them, which generates a clear problem for teachers. We can, therefore, question the educational aims of Disney stories, and if we analyse the cartoons on offer and the books that correspond to these cartoons, we can consider that the foundations of the stories are weak and that priority is given to aesthetics in order to make an impact on the reader or viewer. It seems obvious, therefore, that when it comes to encouraging reading, or to working with texts for children and infants, we have a serious handicap given that we are starting from the Disney concept that the target audience perceives, so the work of the teacher becomes much more complicated. Groups working in the field of youth and child education, and who work with texts for children and young people, must look for alternatives in order to prevent future generations being marked by the Disney conceptualisation of stories and characters for children and young people.4 We do not mean to say that they should be avoided, but rather that other types of texts, original texts, should also be included, and above all that we should reflect on these, rather than being simply passive recipients of information, and for that matter, of reality.

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The transmedia phenomenon and the Disney universe: towards cultural globalization The transmedia narrative involves the construction of new worlds, and to achieve this it uses different languages and media to support this. Its expansion through diverse systems of meaning (verbal, iconic/pictorial, audiovisual or interactive) is carried out through different media (cinema, television, videogames, videoclips, comics, the internet, etc.)5 and in the process will shape universes like the one we are looking at, the Disney Universe with its distinct languages (musical, verbal, audiovisual) and platforms for interaction with contemporary recipients. We will see how, in this instance, the process of transmediation aims to create extraordinarily large worlds and narrative arcs which are not confined to producing versions of a single story. Disney created a fusion between music and cinema, and an absolute fusion, because music helps to fix the story being told in our collective memories. The demand on the recipient to explore all the diverse aspects relating to the Universe in question results in products, such as, multiple versions of a single musical composition, and new platforms on which to display them (on DisneyMania we find versions of five successful songs, which we will analyse later, on which contemporary 21st-century singers re-interpret the harmonies, giving them new rhythms and styles). If, as Jenkins states, 6 contemporary storytelling has been transformed into the art of creating new worlds, then the recipient, in order to explore them, will need more than one medium or product to do so, given that in the end the Disney universe is larger than the stories on which it was based and tells them in its own way. It is greater than the films produced, the songs shown in the film, or the videogames made as a result. Popular culture today moves at a vertiginous speed and is constantly reinventing itself, with huge influences from visual and digital culture (this is one of the fundamental reasons why Disney is, for modern generations, one of the great storytellers of the 20th and 21st centuries, with all the pros and cons that this entails for educators and for society in general and its view of roles and stereotypes.) Storytelling is a human attribute that goes beyond expression in that it has the ability to construct identity, both collective and personal, by giving new and constant meanings to the human condition. So then, what is the “responsibility” of the Disney Universe? Or, in other words, what does it contribute to modern society and culture? In its cinema (in which we have already affirmed that music is an inseparable part, and an ally when it comes to fixing these stories in

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people's memories), Disney introduces considerable modifications to stories which are taken from written and oral literary traditions. Scholars like Naomi Wood, Jack Zipes or Gemma Lluch,7 among others, agree that these stories have become impoverished, or that the capacity to fix the story, as it is created and reformulated in the Disney universe, so strongly, and from so many different angles and with so many media, means that, the original sources (literary, musical, etc.) are lost to the recipient. Disney's modification-manipulation creates products that are diversified and recreated on different platforms; and, that in many cases have lost their original narrative meaning due to the changes that have been made, causing an impoverishment of metaphoric and symbolic function. The danger is the power of this Disney Universe, which is capable of erasing from collective memory the history of these stories and the original meanings by which they were created, and for which they were created. Are these products of false universalism born out of the entertainment industries? Is this just another product of cultural globalization? There are also some positive aspects to the Disney Universe. The music, the songs (restoring the primitive use of the fusion of words and music to tell a story). The fact that it is a mirror of the 20th- and 21stcentury system of ideas relating to childhood is also positive. It allows us to analyse its system of representation and to have a clearer idea of where we are in order to be able to emphasise, as teachers or educators, the cultural aspects that Disney leaves out of its films, in its way of telling stories, in its powerful and artificially sweetened globalized universe.

DisneyMania and the Billboard hot 100 Given the importance of music in the shaping of the Disney universe, we will go on to briefly mention some of the songs from the soundtracks of some of its films and will try to elucidate (via a semantic and musical analysis) the reasons for their success, and whether they contribute to the progress of the narratives or to amplifying the meaning of the stories being told. To this end we have selected the songs that have had the greatest influence on popular culture and on recipients. To do this we have used the songs whose success was reflected in the Billboard Hot 100 lists in the United States, which is the generating matrix, the alma mater of that globalized culture to which we previously alluded. This list, ranking the most popular singles by highest sales figures in the United States is released weekly in Billboard magazine and on the internet. It has been in existence for more than fifty years, promoting the sale of singles, and even today it is still the standard by which to measure

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musical popularity, success and sales figures. It uses a combination of the ranking a song attains on radio (according to the number of times it is played) and its sales (retail, wholesale and internet sales). Digital sales (downloads) are also taken into account. The Hot 100 tries to support the music industry, providing reference points for popular culture (while also having a great impact on this culture, which in turn leads to the product finding favour with the mass media culture, and thus consumed). It has gradually begun to focus more on the sale of albums than singles, as well as placing more importance on digital downloads via the internet, in its quest to accurately reflect the popularity of songs. Is there any Disney music among these successful songs? Yes. Below, in chronological order, are the songs that have been named among the musical triumphs of this list: Aladdin (1992) with A Whole New World, The Lion King (1994) with Circle of life, Pocahontas (1995) with Colors of the Wind, Tarzan (1999) with You'll Be in My Heart and Frozen (2013) with Let It Go. The very fact of being on that list already puts these songs in a privileged position. They will be listened to on the radio, and, thanks to the Disney industry, on its own many platforms (television channel, theme parks, cinemas, web sites, etc.). But in addition to this they are created by composers and sung by successful artists, who nurse the product and merge their own image with the idea that characterizes this Universe and that it purports to project, thereby generating expectations in the recipients. As we have previously stated, popular culture is not static, and nowadays it flows by means of visual and digital environments which Disney uses in order that new and updated products-versions of its music can also be created. New generations of potential Disney consumers, can easily hear new versions of these songs (which were already successful in the nineties) with modern musical arrangements and the today’s performers. This makes for easy listening, as the ear is already accustomed to hearing these voices and rhythms, to seeing these famous faces and these videoclips. And it was to this end that DisneyMania was created, compiling these songs and releasing their more recent versions. On the one hand, the consumers of the nineties want to listen to them again, and on the other hand, it serves as a platform for the younger consumers to discover these successful songs more easily. In DisneyMania we find performers such as Anastasia, Christina Aguilera and Selena Gómez singing hits from Mulan, Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs and 101 Dalmatians. There are rappers who are introducing new styles using songs that were originally played by orchestras, and pop-rock videos that refer

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directly to these films-songs-ideas and which generate comments on social networks or inspire user-created new versions in different languages. Universality, globality, constant updating, a creator of products and platforms for immediate consumption... The Disney universe equals guaranteed success.

Analysis of the songs Musical analysis First case study: Aladdin. Title of the song: A whole new world. Year: 1994. Composer: Alan Menken. Lyrics: Howard Ashman and Tim Rice. Performer: Brad Kane and Lea Salonga (pop version: Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle). Simple, quaternary time signature. Four-four. Tempo: Allegro. Key: D major with key change to F major (shift upwards a tone and a half). Instrumentation: classic orchestral instruments (woodwind, strings and percussion). Structure: intro, verse A, verse A', chorus B, chorus B', bridge, verse A', chorus, end (motifs from chorus B). Relevant performance features: voice duo with a dialogue between the male and female voice; the characters sing; male voice from the beginning until chorus B and the female voice from chorus B' until verse A. In the final refrain B+B' the voices intertwine until finally joining in unison. Relevant instrumental aspects: some of the songs from this film have an Arabic twist; there is none whatsoever in this song. Classical orchestration in major key. Musical style: classical. The song contributes to the progress of the narrative. It was a commercial success, as it entered the Billboard Hot 100 list. It was very successful, which led to the sequel, The Return of Jafar, in 1994, and a further sequel in 1996, Aladdin and the King of Thieves. The transmedia projection is as follows: inspired by the work of literature A Thousand and One Arabian nights; there is a videogame, Disney's Aladdin; there are franchise products for sale at the Disney Store and the Disney Store on line; there is a themed attraction at Walt Disney World; “Aladdin's magic carpets” have been made; the original soundtrack and other popular merchandise are sold online (musical versions in the recipients' networks) there are games online: Aladdin and the magical map and the Disney princess games; the Disney Channel is broadcast online (videos, films, competitions. There is a virtual community for children to comment and exchange information, itunes, etc) A Whole New World won the Oscar for Best Soundtrack and Best Song.

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Second case study: The Lion King. Title of the song: Circle of life. Year: 1994. Composer: arrangements: Hans Zimmer; music: Elton John; Lyrics: Tim Rice. Performer: Carmen Twillie (and African chorus by Lebo M.). Time signature: simple quaternary. 4/4. Tempo: Andante. Key: B flat major (with key change in chorus B' where it shifts up a tone and a half). Instrumentation: percussion (drums), woodwind, strings (fretless electric bass) and piano. The percussion is very important. Structure: intro (solo male voice and choirs, first without percussion and then choir and percussion); verse A (female voice and choir. Then the drums and fretless electric bass creep in softly); verse A'; chorus B + B' (instruments come in at full volume); chorus A + A' (Instrumental + choir on pedal notes); chorus B+B' (In B' the key changes up a tone and a half); end. Relevant performance features: the choir is essential; the characters do not sing. Relevant instrumental aspects: percussion is fundamental in this piece. Musical style: Gospel with an African influence. The song’s contribution to the progress of the narrative: music, lyrics and voice accompany the images and give us the context and the location of the events. It was very successful and entered the Billboard Hot 100 list. Its popularity and success, in cinemas and musical theatres alike, gave rise to the sequel The Lion King 2 in 1998. The transmedia projection is as follows: loosely inspired by Shakespeare's theatrical tragedy, Hamlet. Some characters also have similarities with the manga series Kimba, the white lion; there is a videogame of The Lion King; there are franchise products for sale at the Disney Store and the Disney Store on line; Walt Disney World: Animal Kingdom (animal theme park within the Disneyland amusement park. Stage show The Lion King; the original soundtrack and other popular merchandise are sold online (musical versions in the recipients' networks); games on the Disney Channel (the network). There is a virtual community for children to comment and exchange information, itunes, etc.; official website for different countries and languages; theatre version: the Lion King musical is staged on Broadway and in London (among many other locations, including Spain, and languages). Prizes won: a Tony (for musical theatre): music by Elton John and lyrics by Tim Rice; Oscar for Best Original Soundtrack. Third case study: Pocahontas. Title of the song: Colors of the wind. Year: 1995. Composer: Alan Menken; lyrics by: Stephen Schwartz; orchestration: Danny Troob. Performer: Judy Kuhn. Time signature: simple quaternary 4/4. Tempo: andante (variable. It slows down in certain

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bars and then returns to the original tempo again). Key: D major, in the score. D flat major in the film audio. Instrumentation: orchestral, woodwind, percussion and strings. Structure: intro; verse A+A'; chorus; verse A+A'; bridge; chorus; instrumental end (similar to intro). Relevant performance features: female voice; the character sings. Relevant instrumental aspects: importance of the wind instruments. Musical style: classical. It contributes to the narrative progress by showing the feelings of the female protagonist (who is singing) towards the male character, who is in the scene, listening to the song, as are the audience. It made it into the Billboard Hot 100 list. Its premiere in cinemas was sold out. More than 100,000 views. It gave rise to the creation of the sequel, Pocahontas 2 in 1998. Transmedia projection: story based on the life-legend of the Native American woman known as “little silent one” who after her marriage would become Lady Rebecca Rolfe (1595 Virginia– 1617 London); the illustrators based the character design on supermodel Naomi Campbell and on the actress who voiced the character in the original film, Irene Bedard; online games (Disney Princesses); franchise products for sale at the Disney Store and the Disney Store on line; Walt Disney World theme park: Pocahontas and her Forest Friends; the original soundtrack and other popular merchandise are sold online (musical versions in the recipients' networks); Disney Channel (online). There is a virtual community for children to comment and exchange information, itunes, etc. It won an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Grammy. Fourth case study: Tarzan. Title of the song: You’ll be in my heart. Year: 1999. Composer: Mark Mancina and Phil Collins. Performer: Phil Collins. Time signature: simple quaternary 4/4. Tempo: tempo moderato, constant. Key: F sharp major, E flat major, F major, A flat major* (key change). Structure: intro; verse A+A'; chorus B+B'; verse A; chorus; B; Bridge A+A'; chorus B+B'; end. *The verses are in F sharp major, the choruses in E flat major. This whole harmonic structure undergoes a key change to A flat major (bridge) and F major (final chorus). The key changes follow an internally consistent pattern so that they do not sound too abrupt and considerably enrich the harmony of the song. Relevant performance features: male voice + choir + second voice; the characters do not sing. Relevant instrumental aspects: pop music. In the film the song lasts less than two minutes. It illustrates what is happening, accompanying the animation and providing context to the viewer. The analysis has been carried out using the full version of the song-score by Phil Collins. The song gained Collins re-entry into the Top 40 of the

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Billboard Hot 100 list. The sequel, Tarzan and Jane, was created in 2002. In 2005 the second part, Tarzan 2, was released. Transmedia projection: the film is a children's version of a story based on the fictional character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) that tells the myth of the noble savage, a feature of literary tradition where the central character is raised by animals, as with Mowgli (The Jungle Book. Kipling) or Romulus and Remus (Virgil); computer game: Tarzan franchise products for sale at the Disney Store and the Disney Store on line; Walt Disney World theme park: Tarzan and Jane show and attractions; the original soundtrack and other popular merchandise are sold online (musical versions in the recipients' networks); Disney Channel (online). There is a virtual community for children to comment and exchange information, itunes, etc. Prizes won: Oscar for Best Song and Golden Globe. Fifth case study: Frozen. Title of the song: Let it go. Year: 2013. Composers: Kristen Anderson-López and Robert López. Performer: Idina Menzel. Time signature: simple binary 2/2. Tempo: Allegro (at 68). Key: F minor with key change to A flat major. (There are key changes throughout the piece). Instrumentation: piano (keyboard), percussion (drums), violins and woodwind instruments. Structure: intro; verse A+B; chorus; verse C+B; chorus; bridge A+B; chorus on which the song ends. Relevant performance features: the female character sings, highpitched voice (soprano); Relevant instrumental aspects: at times the music accompanies the image and the character's movements. Musical style: pop. The character sings and her song contributes to the narrative progress. Disney launches the musical sequence in 25 languages. It entered the Top Ten of the Billboard Hot 100. It is the highest-grossing animated motion picture (not including sequels) of all time. It beats Toy Story 3. Transmedia projection: based on Andersen's fairy tale The Snow Queen; videogame Frozen: the adventures of Olaf (2013); multiple versions of the song have been made, shared and broadcast online (not the official film), different languages, global reach; franchise products for sale at the Disney Store and the Disney Store on line; Walt Disney World theme park: new attractions in 2014 include A Frozen Sing-Along Celebration, as well as Frozen Summer Fun Live; sales of the original soundtrack and other popular items online (musical versions in the recipients' networks in 25 languages); Disney Channel (online). There is a virtual community for children to comment and exchange information, itunes, etc.; Amazon is bringing out colouring books, stickers, etc.

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It won the 2014 Oscar for Best Original Song (also nominated for the Golden Globes).

Semantic analysis In order to complete the analysis of the scores of the chosen songs, we will now focus on the lyrics of these songs and perform a semantic analysis, to look at the significance of the lyrics in order to see the meaning conveyed by the whole song, and also whether there is any linguistic concordance between any of the songs. We will classify the words as verbs, nouns and adjectives: First case study: Aladdin. Nouns: world, view, feeling, princess, heart, dream, shooting star Verbs: imagine, decide, soaring, see, share, reach, take you, dreaming, discover Adjectives: dazzling place, fantastic point of view, indescribable feelings, new horizons, unbelievable sights

We can see that there are no proper nouns but rather that all are common, abstract and general. Although less abundant in the lyrics, the positive light of the adjectives adds that sweet, humane atmosphere which is typical of Disney songs. In terms of the verbs, in this song and the others, they are the most important category, as they guide the meaning of the song, from someone who is teaching or showing someone else to open their eyes, to discover, to dream, to imagine, to soar. Almost all of the verbs are transient, meaning that they demand an object. We also highlight, in general, the use of the infinitive, which nominalises and emphasises the verb. By way of the pronouns “you and I”, “with you”, we are shown this desire to share a dream together in order to be able to go on being together. We emphasize the semantic construction of: “The world shining, shimmering, splendid” and “No one to tell us no or where to go”, which are part of what the Disney factory wants to convey to us, as we will see, in all of its songs. Second case study: The Lion King. Nouns: circle, planet, sun Verbs: to take in vs. to see, we must find, reach, search Adjectives: sun, great

In this song once again minimum importance is given to the adjectives, as well as having non-concrete nouns, and it coincides with A Whole New

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World in the words “world”, “sun” and “sky.” The verbs carry the weight of the lyrics, since, like in Aladdin, we are being urged to look at things, to discover, to find, to learn and to reach; in fact, to coexist in the world with all other beings. Third case study: Pocahontas. Nouns: thousand places, earth, rivers, tree, rock, wolf, moon, lynx, mountains, wind, colours, forests, fruits, heart, creature, life, soul, people, brothers, friends, skin, footsteps, flavour, wealth, etc. Verbs: you know, you own, you see, cry, grin, sing, to be, know, run Adjectives: ignorant, savage, equal, strange

In Pocahontas we find a greater lyrical wealth, as each element of nature is bestowed with life: the mountains have voices, the bobcat grins, etc. This song appeals to the senses, creating synaesthesia like the “colors of the wind.” The adjectives in this case are put together on an antonymic basis, with the purpose of comparing two different worlds. The verbs are no longer in infinitive but instead they start in the second person singular (“you think, you've been”) then, in the second verse, changing to the imperative (“come run, come taste”). We have that same sense of coexistence and sharing as before. The meaning of the lyrics is that of trying to advocate for native culture, to not have prejudice, and to open one's heart to see the whole world as equals and to be able to coexist together: “we are all connected to each other, in a circle, in a hoop that never ends.” Once again we have that circle from The Lion King and its naturalistic message, that everything is alive and that you have to respect the world around you. A very current message, where the invaders see everything different as bad, hunting is signalled as an imminent problem and greed seeks to dominate more territories and possessions. Fourth case study: Tarzan. Nouns: hand, heart, this day, bond Verbs: don't cry, take (my hand) hold it, I'll protect (you), I'm here, hold you, you'll be Adjectives: strong, small, bond [that] can't be broken, not so different

Again the lyrics speak to us of coexistence, help, protection. As in Colours of the Wind, we are all different but the same on the inside; and as in A Whole New World, it doesn't matter what the lyrics say. With love for each other you'll never be alone: “This bond...can't be broken.”

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Fifth case study: Frozen. Nouns: snow, mountain, tonight, footprint, solitude, kingdom, queen, wind, cold, distance, fears, storm Verbs: paints, to breathe, to feel at peace, I chose this life Adjectives: power, cold, good girl, I'm free, everything seems small

In Let it Go we have the antithesis of all the previous meanings in the universe we are dealing with. The previous nouns, love, sun, heart, here change to snow, wind, storm, distance, cold, isolation, etc. The lyrics evolve along with the protagonist, who arrives sad and confused in the solitude of her current world, but then the song becomes one of desire: everyone longs to be loved by someone and she desperately wishes to be free. Elsa describes the years in which she repressed her powers, with a swirling storm forming inside her until she could no longer contain it: “Don't let them in, don't let them see, be the good girl you always have to be, conceal, don't feel, don't let them know... Well, now they know. Let it go.” This is, therefore, the song which has the least overlap with the other songs we have analysed, and it is adapted to the social viewpoint of the present day. This is, it still insists on the desire to coexist, to share and to be part of something, but this time with one’s own self, accepting yourself the way you are and not changing because of what other people want: “The cold never bothered me anyway.”

Conclusions After having analysed the chosen songs in this submission, we are in a position to provide some conclusions. With regard to the musical aspect, we will say that these are very emotional songs, which highlight the characteristic emotiveness of Disney films. Composers and songwriters like Alan Menken, Howard Ashman, Tim Rice and Stephen Schwartz appear as part of the team on many successful Disney films and songs (to a greater or lesser extent), creating and sometimes bringing together the musical style that is typical of this prolific universe. The choice of vocalists is no trivial thing, as they are all globally acclaimed singers, and are also selected according to public acclaim in the various countries where the films are dubbed into different languages. Musically they are no different from other songs from musicals (Broadway or London). However, it should be emphasised that they are very easy to listen to because they are written in the diatonic scale, the base for all western music. The resources used most, harmonically speaking, are tonal modulations (key changes) and the occasional mode change (exactly the type of change we see in Frozen.) It is also worth noting that all the time

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signatures are simple, quaternary, with binary subdivision (except for Frozen which is in binary, 2/2, with binary subdivision), and that there are no ternary time signatures in these songs. We did not find any further musical patterns that characterise the songs beyond the aspects already mentioned, other than perhaps the emotive and naive force that they exude and which characterizes them as Disney music. If we look at the semantic analysis of the texts which comprise part of these songs, we can say that all of them are built upon common words and simple constructions, clear sentences and direct messages which allow a few easily understandable concepts to be taken from the lyrics. There is a scarcity of adjectives. There is an emphasis on verbs, which give the lyrics a sense of action or movement. These verbs all have the common aims of Seeing, Looking, and discovering the world around us with new eyes. The abstract and common nouns ask us to look with the heart in order to find a new world with new horizons, but with a single nature. Ultimately what is sought is coexistence, sharing, and being happy whilst loving and respecting others. We can therefore say that music is not just an element of Disney films, but rather a fundamental aspect that gives space and resonance to the stories being narrated. Disney have been carefully manipulating the image and the music ever since the early films, in which the action would often be synchronized with a complete musical track throughout. It contributes to the progress of the narrative and to creating the right atmosphere, in the same way as with the colours or the illustration design, to convey the central idea of the story—perhaps a sweetened version, which may on occasions distort its original function. The musical elements are adapted to the times, and the styles of the moment, because they are based on the artists and rhythms of the day (Frozen) while maintaining that characteristic essence of the vision of childhood which Disney both displays and constructs. Although the early films used popular melodies and classical music (Beethoven, Stravinsky or Bach), Disney gradually moved towards commissioning songs from pop writers which, as a result of its success, led to the creation (in the fifties) of its own musical label. In the sixties Walt Disney worked with rock songwriters and would do so until his death, which meant that he would not see the consequences and musical evolution of the films, the songs bearing his stamp, and the rest of the cultural products that have come out of his company. Nowadays, in transmedia culture, any type of production that comes from the brand created by Walt Disney still generates global expectations. New rhythms and characters from different parts of the globe are being

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introduced by/for the configuration of this global society. The music helps to fix scenes, characters and stories in the collective unconscious. It will always be looking to reach global scale, and, in doing so, will continue to shape global thought. The danger perhaps lies in the chance that in the end society will only recognise the stories (with the inescapable and inseparable help of the music) exactly as they are told by Disney Studios, without any comparison, criticism, argument or reasoning, with no analysis of stereotypes, and without the history that these stories possess, thus creating, as we stated at the beginning of this study, a false universalism born out of the entertainment industry. Just another product of cultural globalization.

References Cordón, José Antonio and Gómez, Raquel. “Lectura fragmentaria.” In Diccionario de nuevas formas de lectura y escritura, edited by Eloy Martos and Mar Campos, 382-383. Madrid: Santillana, 2013. Jarauta, Francisco. “El hilo de Ariadna.”, In El hilo de Ariadna, 14-23. Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones culturales, 2012. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Lluch, Gemma. Análisis de narrativas infantiles y juveniles. Cuenca: Servicio de publicaciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2003. Scolari, Carlos Alberto. “Transmedia storytelling: implicit consumers, narrative worlds, and branding in contemporary media production”, International Journal of communication, 3 (2009): 586-606. Shortsleeve, Kevin. “The Wonderful World of Depression: Disney, Despotism, and the 1930s. Or, Why Disney Scares Us”, The lion and the Unicorn, 28 (1) (2004): 1-30. Tascón, Mario. “La nueva lectura.” In El hilo de Ariadna, 78-83. Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones culturales, 2012. Wood, Naomi. “Domesticating Dreams in Walt Disney's Cinderella”, The Lion and the Unicorn, 20 (1) (1996): 25-49. Zipes, Jack. “Breaking the Disney Spell.” In The Classic Fairy Tales, edited by Maria Tatar, 332-352. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999.

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Notes 1

Jarauta, “El hilo de Ariadna”, 21. Cordón and Gómez, “Lectura fragmentaria”, 382-83. 3 Tascón, “La nueva lectura”, 80. 4 Shortsleeve, “The Wonderful World of Depression”, 1-30. 5 Scolari, “Transmedia storytelling”, 586-606. 6 Jenkins, Convergence Culture. 7 See Wood, “Domesticating Dreams in Walt Disney's Cinderella”, 25-49; Zipes, “Breaking the Disney Spell”, 332-352; Lluch, Análisis de narrativas infantiles y juveniles. 2

PART II: MUSIC, CINEMA AND AUDIOVISUAL PRACTICES: NEW APPROACHES

CHAPTER EIGHT MUSICAL MEANING ON THE SCREEN: AN APPROACH TO SEMIOTICS FOR MUSIC IN CINEMA ROSA CHALKHO UNIVERSIDAD DE BUENOS AIRES

On meaning in music in the audiovisual field The most prevalent assumption about the function of music in cinema considers its essential power as being able to semanticize the narrative, to invest a scene with meaning and even to be able to codify films through the system of genres. Its efficacy is demonstrated by an exercise that has been widely used in film studies: musicalizing a single sequence a number of times with music of various genres and in this way verifying that the meaning is modified and even, in some cases, that a meaning that is the opposite of the original scene is created. The opening sequence of The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) is one of the most used examples of this thesis that argues the way in which music semanticizes images. By removing the sound and observing the sequence in silence, we see that there is nothing in the images that anticipates an ominous or horrific sensation. We simply observe aerial shots of beautiful mountain landscapes and a car driving along a road on a sunny, bright day. The possibilities with respect to the film’s genre are multiple at this silent moment. It could be anything from a comedy to a family movie, and even a commercial for mineral water or an eco-friendly gasoline, maybe a road movie. Nothing about the visual aspect of the film invokes the terror towards which Jack Torrance and his family are heading. Repeating the sequence with the soundtrack transforms everything. From the very first sound, we can interpret that this is a horror film and all of the images that up to that moment seemed beautiful and peaceful

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become evil and threatening: the forests, the snow, the shadows and even the high aerial shot or the rapid camera movement over the lake take on a change in meaning that foreshadow the nightmare. The resulting meaning is not the sum or average of forces. The peacefulness of the images does not temper the twistedness communicated by the sound, but rather the music covers and modifies all the signs in a dominant direction. With all of the possibilities that the silent images open, in terms of both genre and narrative, the music anchors the sequence’s complete meaning in one of those possibilities, defining from the very beginning its belonging to the genre of horror film. This example is representative of a complete order, a technology and a manner of operating and producing music for the audiovisual discourse, that is historically established by the so-called “classic cinema” or what Nöel Burch1 names the institutional mode of representation (IMR) and shortly after the advent of sound films in the 1930s. It is during this period that the post-Romantic symphonic movement takes its position as the almost-universal style for incidental music that, although with some variants, today continues as the standard of industrial cinematographic music. This discursive order places incidental music (or extra-diegetic in the terms of Michel Chion)2 as the preferred element for the creation of a scene’s or an entire film’s mood, turning it into the privileged factor of the representation of feelings and emotions, and as a necessary participating element for the codification of the genre. The music of the sequence just mentioned is a version of the Dies irae (Day of Wrath), played on synthesizers and composed by Wendy Carlos for the film. It is a Gregorian chant that is part of the misa pro defuntis (Mass for the Dead or Funeral Mass), better known as Réquiem, from the eighth century, attributed to Thomas of Celano. This plainchant has been used in various compositions such as the Symphonie fantastique by Berlioz, Requiem by Mozart, and Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini by Rachmaninov, among many others. So, why does this music connote terror? What sonorous and compositional characteristics allude to this meaning? This chapter postulates that there is nothing immanent in the music or the sound that in its essence carries significations, but nonetheless the music meaning functions in an effective manner, and not only in the cinematographic music. The construction of meanings forms part of and has been built by the advent of changing culture that, in a back and forth exchange between meaning and interpretation, has been historically attributed to the music.

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The meanings of music as we understand it today is born in Modernity and commences specifically with the so-called Doctrine of the affections3. The Doctrine crystallizes afterward in the paradigm of musical meaning as an expression of emotions and feelings, in a framework and context in which these meanings contemplate a high level of polysemy and ambiguity belonging to artistic discourses. This cultural and historical dimension of musical meaning allows for the articulation of a second postulate: the processes of musical signification have been more and more rapidly codified since the beginnings of the twentieth century as a consequence of the utilization of music in the cinema and its great power of influence in the social production of meaning. If the first assumption stated at the beginning as the most widespread in studies of music and audiovisual field concerns the primacy of the semanticizing function of music, this paper aims to highlight the results of a reverse process by studying how music has been affected by its pairing with the cinematic image. The socio-semiotic loop between production and reception has built a network of meanings that allow for, on one hand, understanding the character of the scene, the characters, genre, etc., through musical expression and style and, on the other, attributing to the music concepts, emotions, categorizations, feelings and belonging to genres that come from cinematographic association and the function off screen, in the extracinematographic reception of the music. A paradigmatic example of this idea is the use of the final part of Overture of the opera Guillaume Tell (1829) by Gioachino Rossini that musicalizes the opening of the U.S. television series The Lone Ranger (1949-1957). Within the social discourse, this music is much more associated with the television program than with Rossini’s opera, it quickly brings to mind images of riding horses and westerns. Constants and clichés in the modes of receiving music made for the screen emerge in this way, functioning for pre-existing traditional academic music as well as for original scores for the cinema. The re-signification of the music and its relative and positional value are verified in its circulation since the same work has various connotations depending on the mediatization: Guillaume Tell has a meaning in the concert halls while it adopts different variants of meaning in the TV series of the 1950s and brings new reminiscences in its specific and representative use in a musical cue in the new 2013 cinematographic version of the Lone Ranger. Clearly, the reception is affected by these

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variations to the extent that the mass audience not specialized in classical music, associate musical works with the audiovisual format that popularized them. Philip Sarde, composer of film music, commented on the adaptation of works by Bach that he made for the film Une histoire simple (Claude Sautet, 1978): (...) it is very difficult to use classical music in cinema without modifying it. In a scene, people are listening to music, but immediately, the music becomes cinematographic music. It stops being “music by Bach” as soon as it becomes the close up shot of Romy Schneider... 4

The problem for the study of a semantics of music is not only related to the inexistence of extra-sonorous for determined notes or musical sounds, but also that the semantics is, at least in Western aesthetics, practically nullified when the idea of absolute music is installed in the eighteenth century. However, even those productions playing with story and narrative in a semantic level such as the programmatic music of the Romantic and postRomantic periods of the nineteenth and early twentieth century maintain the absolutism of orchestral composition. It is impossible to reconstruct the narrative program or tale of Symphonie fantastique by Hector Berlioz only by listening to the symphonic score (or without reading the program) or to recreate Friedrich Nietzsche’s poem Also sprach Zarathustra only by listening to the music Richard Strauss composed based on it. From the referentialist perspective, Also sprach Zarathustra, for example, is a piece that is loaded with significations that flow from it, and it is in large part the cinema that creates this tapestry of referential meanings that cover such works. Starting with its inclusion in the opening of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), this piece becomes impregnated with new meanings such as science fiction, evolution, the passing of time, the cosmos, spaceships, artificial intelligence, and incommensurability. From Nietzsche’s poem to Kubrick’s film, through the music of Strauss, a tapestry of meanings and mediations has been woven whose origins may be lost to the masses, but allow us to intuit that these meanings will not be crystallized, but rather will become the object of temporal layers and presents and futures kneaded together.

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The problematic of musical meaning The central question that underlies this argument is the problem of musical meaning, whose relevance in debates and studies gives evidence to its complexity and current topicality. The positions on musical meaning can be located, roughly, in what Leonard Meyer in his book Emotion and Meaning in Music5 names absolutists and referentialists. The legacy of Western music strengthened, especially for music of the academic tradition, the position of absolute music (in the words of Carl Dalhaus),6 as one that rejects or minimizes any extra-musical reference. This idea crystallizes with the consecration of the symphonic music of the eighteenth century. Starting with the alleged absolute abstraction of the musical act, it would be quite tempting for audiovisual music studies to sustain that meanings are provided by the gears of the audiovisual field as a side effect of musical experience that comes from the industrialization of leisure, while music maintains its absolutism within the concert hall. Nevertheless, an approach to musical studies from a culturalist perspective challenges the Manichean division of an alleged claim of abstract music, on one hand, and referentialist contamination on the other. The perspective taken for this work is to consider the musical meanings and connotations as significations that result from a sociocultural construction and not as naturally emanating from sounds. The meaning does not lie in a place of immanence but rather is constructed from associations that socio-semiotic changes have codified with varying levels of force. These associations are what we are interested in investigating within a framework that holds as essential the consideration of context and historic change for the practices of audiovisual musicalization. Meyer affirms this relational nature of the construction of musical meaning by stating that, “the association is produced by contiguity, that is, some aspect of the musical materials and their organization is linked, by dint of repetition, to a referential image.”7 The codifications of music are social and historical processes, and this amassing of signs in temporal layers has undergone an accelerating process during the course of the twentieth century with the use of music, both pre-existing and original, in film. On this point, we could expect a conclusion: music, which is completely lacking in analogies or mimesis of some piece of reality and is only analogous to itself, reveals that all meanings that it carries are arbitrary. They are constructions that cultures and societies build and .

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transmit historically with such a high degree of naturalization, that they often conceal as personal and intimate specific responses to music that are not so individualized, but rather respond to social stereotypes and a prior encoding. Each genre and each piece of music upon sounding puts to work an entire engine of associated cultural meanings and, to a greater or lesser extent, the music becomes a spokesperson for these social meanings. These cultural contexts related to musical genres may perhaps define one of the strongest relationships between music and meaning: that of a musical genre with its public, ways of life, consumption, class, geography, etc. In this way the close relationship between musical genre and film genre emerge, with associations that are historically consolidated like the American film noir of the 50s and jazz, or the so-called Blaxploitation films of the 70s with funk. Each musical genre functions in direct association with the culture that begot it as Keith Negus stated: “I shall be highlighting how genres operate as social categories; how rap cannot be separated from the politics of blackness, nor salsa from Latinness, nor country from whiteness and the enigma of the ´South´.”8 This is how the musical genre associated with the representation of a group, class or community operates, such as at the beginning of the Brazilian film Cidade de Deus (Fernando Meirelles, 2002) and the frenzied chase of a hen through the alleyways of a favela to the rhythm of a samba, a strong symbol of the Brazilian music of the working classes. Examples like The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973) which takes place in the Chicago of the 1920s and is musicalized by the ragtime songs of Scott Joplin; or Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979) which is accompanied by arrangements of jazz and jazz-based compositions of George Gershwin; or Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996) and English pop and rock songs in direct association with the music listened to be the film’s characters: all cases of the many examples that exist of this relationship between genres.

The codifications of cinematographic musicalization In effect, music creates cinematographic meaning. However, is this casual meaning, inherent to each piece? Do the meanings function at the core of each film as a result of intrinsic and specific relationships? Or do invariants and reiterations exist that allow us to be warned of some kind of codification in the way in which the music articulates it? For Michel Chion9 the codification of music for the audiovisual field has an anchor prior to the cinema: its construction linked to the narrative begins with the theater, ballet and opera. It is possible to trace the

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genealogical tree of a musical sign or feature in its melodramatic heritage: in some cases these features reveals themselves very evidently such as, for example, the value of the trill as an unstable musical element for construct a sensation of imbalance. Its origin dates back to the pre-Baroque period of Western music (in relation to the previously mentioned doctrine of the affetti) first related to the emotional affectation and later, in the Baroque period, as an essential structural element for the harmonic construction of the cadence. Its function was to increase the tension (reinforced by the support in dissonance of the superior note) before resolving in the tonic. Trills and tremolos function as signs of tension and their use in cinematographic music has been and continues to be copious and recurrent. It is enough to mention the trills by the string section in the scene in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) in which Scottie waits for Judy, who enters dressed as Madeleine. The trills as a characteristic element of this cue semanticize the scene, building the tension of the character that waits and expressing the uncertainty of that which is imminent. The tension generated by the trills resolves musically and narratively in an amorous atmosphere when Judy/Madeleine (played by Kim Novak) appears. To paraphrase Michel Foucault, such investigations constitute an archeology of musical signs, a raking of the past to reconstruct the evolution of the meaning of music or musical signs, and account for how they were produced and thought about in each cultural order. Maria de Arcos devotes a section of her book Experimentalismo en la música cinematográfica to address the functioning of cliché and standardization of music for film and reaffirms the previous historical positioning of these musical conventions: “The catalog of clichés employed in film music, particularly those pursuing an emotional response in the viewer, actually come from long-accepted conventions in the language of Western autonomous music.”10 It is in this way that while some associations are lost in an unreachable past, film and film music are constructed in a preferential observatory for studying the life of signs for at least two reasons: the first has to do with how recent and near is the emergence of the phenomena of cinema in comparison to the creation of other discourses (music itself) and that therefore it offers the strong possibility of tangibly studying its transformations; and second, as previously explained, is the solidification of the codes of musicalization with the aim of making them intelligible, at least for the largest part of industrial film production. One of the visible paths for assigning meaning that film gave to music is the semantic value invested in the new music of the twentieth century:

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dodecaphonic music, the so-called experimental music and electroacoustic music, among others. New sounds were needed to represent new extraordinary subject matter and electronic instruments such as the Theremin and the Ondes Martenot fit this need like a glove. These sound resources are appropriated by the cinema in order to create associations with aliens, the supernatural or terrifying phenomena. An example that illustrates this idea is the film Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956) which is the first feature length to use music that is integrally composed on electronic media, by the composers Bebe and Louis Barron. This association also produces the genre of horror films, in which this new music and new sounds position themselves as one more element of the unknown and, in doing so, as a new tool for the production of “fear” in the narrative, based on the psychological roots of terror as fear of the unknown, as an originating or unconscious dread. The synthesizers, the dissonances and the atonalism are sound resources that were not heard before, and they were used to associate the idea of the unknown, the mysterious or terror. Again, the example of The Shining and the synthesized high pitched phantasmal voice that Wendy Carlos designs for the cue of the title sequence can be explained in this way. Of course the repetitive use in production (the industry’s tendency to repeat with slight variation those things that function for it) of these sonorous-musical characteristics creates through the reception of the public the forming of the cliché or stereotype. These are signs with a high degree of codification and in many cases with a low artistic value, an equation that Adorno11 reached as a conclusion in his critique of the cultural industries. In this example we find this text’s opening statement with respect to how music was affected by the cinema: the use of the new sounds of the avant-garde and post-avant-garde of the twentieth century for the cinema of science fiction and terror constructed a strong association and the massive social reception upon hearing contemporary music references it as “scary music” or “extraterrestrial music.” Russell Lack12 states that film music has a highly codified emotional message, constructed from the use of pre-existing scores to musicalize silent film, which appeals to something that is already internalized within the socialized way of listening: the triggering of an adequate emotional response at the appropriate moment. For Lack, these conventions have endured significantly, as can be verified by the musical production of John

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Williams, Alan Silvestre and even Hans Zimmer, to name a few of many examples. Let’s take the music of Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) with music by Zimmer, as an example: while the film deals with a futuristic idea or is linked to science fiction and its screenplay also presents innovations associated with non-linear narratives (a story within a story within a third constructed with successive compressions of time), the music appeals to safer and more effective conventions. Taking into account that Zimmer is a composer who in the beginning of his career worked in popular electronic genres like synthpop and new wave, his scores are in the most traditional wing of cinematographic music. In the fight scene in the hotel corridors with an alternating editing technique that cuts back and forth from a vehicle falling into the river from a previous dream, Zimmer uses one of the most utilized techniques in cinema which consists of an ascending design with tremolos in the string to highlight the growing tension of the sequence. Why does the musical design stay so conservative while the other cinematographic elements play with an introduction of changes? Even the sound design in terms of effects, Foley effects and ambient sound introduces a large number of innovations including experiments such as pushing to unsuspected limits the fidelity of the sound with the image and putting synchresis to the test in terms of its role in the construction of credibility. The richness of the non-musical parts of the soundtrack has been growing in recent years, starting in the 1990s and especially within the genres of action, science fiction and animation. One of the possible answers to explain the conservatism of musical composition is the solidity of the codification for representing a film’s emotions and atmosphere. In a highly complex scene, in which the fragments of a dream are edited into another scene, each taking place at different times with respect to the story, and further with the camera rotating according to the varying center of gravity of the scene, the music unequivocally drives the tension curve and the atmosphere of the scene. The musical stereotype does not merely connote a negative stereotype for cinematographic analysis, but rather it is the evidence of the function of the code and makes a great contribution to the clarification and understanding of the discourse. The composer George Antheil, who among other works is the author of the music for Fernand Léger's Ballet mecanique, expresses, through his commentary of his experiences as a spectator, the power of cinema to build meaning for music:

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Hollywood music is very nearly a public communication, like radio. If you are a movie fan (and who isn’t) you may sit in a movie theatre three times a week listening to the symphonic background scores which Hollywood composers concoct. What happens? Your musical tastes become moulded by these scores, heard without knowing it. You see love, and you hear it. Simultaneously. It makes sense. Music suddenly becomes a language for you, without your knowing it.13

This cannot be explained in a more straightforward manner: the construction of meaning is produced by the mere existence of the association, and the association in the case of the images and sound is controlled by synchrony. The sounds and images that take place simultaneously are perceptually understood as the same phenomenon. A love scene turns the music that accompanies it into amorous music, and to the extent that the music by itself and in a different context will carry the stamp of this meaning, it is capable at the same time of tinting—with its baggage of meanings—any other situation. One of the clearest agreements with respect to the music the cinema has made an agreement with and codified from its very beginnings is the pit music or extra-diegetic music. While this technique has its origin in the opera, film narrative claims to be something that opera is not: in the large majority, narrative cinema aims for a realistic representation of a story, and one of the greatest acceptable digressions from this pretension of reality is the inclusion of extra-diegetic music. This music that takes place “nowhere”, that does not take place in the story, that the characters don’t hear, but that in some almost inescapable manner will create the ambiance or atmosphere that is more oriented towards provoking an emotion in the spectator than to portraying reality. There is no music in real life during a car chase or when the murderer is stalking a victim or when two people are falling in love. But this musical inclusion, far from seeming ridiculous, absurd or some kind of treason of reality, from the beginnings of cinema to this very day, is an element that is completely incorporated. This is true to such an extent that it produces the contrary effect: the feeling of estrangement appears when there is no music, especially in those scenes in which its insertion is virtually a law, such as in endings and conclusions. Up to this point, we have treated musical codification in a broad sense in search of those invariants that make up a code that is understood by many and used according to a system of genres. Now, returning to the questions from the beginning of the section, musical codification can build itself within the film by use of an idiolect that establishes a unique relationship but maintains a codified relationship with the system.

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The leitmotiv is a musical motif, an idea or theme—melodic as well as rhythmic and harmonic—that in a narrative audiovisual context is associated recurrently with a narrative character or situation. This category is not a cinematographic invention, but rather comes about from genres of opera, and more specifically from the romantic and post-romantic opera. Each musical motif is characteristic of each film and its operation constructs a meaning between the music and what it represents, valid for that film and whose pregnant meaning produces in the spectator an idea of anticipation and immanence. When the music that is characteristic of the presence and attack of the shark begins to play in Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) the public “feels” the foreshadowing of its presence. And it is not that this music is the music, and much less so the sound, of a shark; it is simply that upon the second or third time that this association occurs it is enough so that these two associated facts (leitmotiv and shark) construct a chain of meaning in which the music has as its meaning shark, danger, stalking, death or attack. In the majority of these films this association ends when the film finishes, but in some cases such as Jaws, Psycho,14 the Indiana Jones and Star Wars films, the musical motifs transcend the film and circulate in society producing meaning according to the meaning that they had in the film they came from. Another masterful example is the leitmotiv from the film Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932) in which curiously the leitmotiv is an aria whistled by the ferocious and indifferent murderer Tony Camonte, played by Paul Muni, and effectively the whistling is the prologue to each murder. The variation of this film is that the leitmotiv is halfway between being music and a sound object. It is not music typical of the period, played by a large omnipresent orchestra, but rather a simple whistling by the character. It is worth asking at this point where the strengths and weaknesses of musical codification lie: if the strength of the code is given for the universality of its use (whistling that aria does not mean there will be a murder in just any context) or for the strength this is created in that particular construction (all spectators understand, without a doubt, the meaning of the whistling in that film). Is a code stronger when a greater number of spectators speak of it or decode it? Or is it strong because of the unequivocalness of its meaning, although it is only effective within a film? This vision changes the question of the strength of a code in many senses, with its variable being not only the number of people who understand the code, or the universalization of the code in all audiovisual productions, and even less so its immanence in nature both visually and

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sonorously. A single production, a single scene of a film, can express a slang or dialect that is powerful and valid enough to refer to itself.

Musical meaning and parody Parody is built upon and its humor functions through a previous discourse, so that when film music is parodied it is the more complete confirmation of the existence of signs and codes. One of the main conditions for the functioning of parody is that the original film is recognized and that is when humor can act such as the case of High Anxiety (Mel Brooks, 1977) because the films that it makes reference to are canonized, such as Vertigo (1958) and The Birds (1963), as well as other films in an homage to Alfred Hitchcock. Brophy, the chauffeur driving Dr. Thorndyke (played by Mel Brooks) from the airport to the institute, insinuates that the doctor’s predecessor did not die a natural death, and as he finishes the sentence a disturbing music begins to play, orchestrated in the style of Bernard Herrmann. Curiously, the two characters begin to look around as if to see where the music is coming from. In the following instant, a bus passes with an orchestra inside it playing the music, and Dr. Thorndyke breathes a sigh of relief. Upon revealing itself as diegetic, the music drops off the weight of being a bad omen that it would otherwise have for the audience. The gag lies in that we hear in the diegesis—the characters hear the music—what we suppose is extra-diegetic music. Wherein lays the humor of this scene? Basically, the humor emerges by overthrowing one of the most established codifications of the audiovisual discourse: the placement of music as extra-diegetic. The evidence of the arbitrariness of incidental music functioning as a sign emerges powerfully provoking the humor of the gag. One of the musical signs that has been parodied repeatedly is the music from the shower scene of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). The famous motif is produced by glissandi in the higher notes of an orchestra’s string section in a repetitive ostinato with a constant rhythm. A highly interesting form is the parody that not only involves the hypotext or film of origin, but also the entire collection of conventions and codes that set the rules of the audiovisual discourse. In the chapter The Springfield Files (Matt Groening, 1997) of the animated television series The Simpsons, Homer, supposedly pursued by alien creatures, drives off the road and into a forest and at that moment, to unequivocally signal alarm, the previously mentioned musical fragment of Psycho starts to play. But then abruptly, the alarm becomes comedy when

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a bus carrying the members of the Springfield Philharmonic drives by playing the music. What happened in this fragment? We can note a double articulation that gives meaning to the gag: on one hand, the already mentioned musical symbol of Pyscho, and on the other the parody of High Anxiety, when absurdly a bus appears in the diegesis that is playing the music was supposedly extra-diegetic. This construction of meanings by accumulation or interaction of established meanings looped back and forth between grammars of production, circulation and reception encounter in humor and parody the greatest demonstration of those significations that have been instituted and established.

Final reflections One of the approaches to consider, in terms of drawing conclusions to this presentation, is that of the life of musical sign in a temporal perspective: meaning, an archeology of the construction of objects and practices that reveal the “layers of meaning” and their conditions of production including those meanings prior to cinematography. For example, we can mention that there is a pre-existing feature for the overture of Guillaume Tell which is a “gallop.” The association with horseback riding existed before as belonging to dance, while the relationship to the western is new. And the layers of meaning through the examples of High Anxiety and its resignification by The Simpsons are also evident. In relation to the relative value that music assumes in the construction of the meaning of film, Roy Pendergast’s comment to this respect is worth noting: A related technique is the use of musical devices that are popularly associated with foreign lands and people; for example, using the pentatonic idiom to achieve an Oriental color. The “Chinese” music written for a studio film of the 1930s and ’40 is not, of course, authentic Chinese music but rather represents our popular Occidental notions of what Chinese music is like. The Western listener simply does not understand the symbols of authentic Oriental music as he does those of Western music; therefore, Oriental music would have little dramatic effect for him.15

That the public considered the music constructed by Hollywood to be Chinese music and associated it with a “Chinese” quality is revealed as the proof of a mix of arbitrariness based on some preexisting element (a pentatonic scale) in music and its meaning.

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On the other hand, this verifies the way in which the cinema has affected how we hear as a way of receiving the signification which is constructed from the film towards the music. This is especially the case for music that a priori arrives with a significant level of abstraction and without heavy historic baggage of reference (such as electro-acoustic music) and that begins to adopt associated meanings through its use. Another observation that emerges is that the process of constructing meanings for music by the cinema is becoming more and more accelerate. The success or impact of a musical idea that is associated with a film or film genre is enough to cause a wave of new films to use this resource in their storylines and from there on begins the rooting of the signification, production of the reiteration of that association. This subject is not concluded here but rather the paper proposes an approach for continued research and opening new questions for research within a socio-semiotic framework of music as applied to audiovisual discourse.

References Burch, Noël. El tragaluz del infinito (contribución a la genealogía del lenguaje cinematográfico). Madrid: Cátedra. Signo e imagen, 1991. Chion, Michel. La audiovisión. Introducción a un análisis conjunto de la imagen y el sonido. Barcelona: Paidós, 1993. —. La música en el cine. Barcelona: Paidós, 1997. Dalhaus, Carl. La idea de la música absoluta. Barcelona: Idea Books, 1999. de Arcos, María. Experimentalismo en la música cinematográfica. Sevilla: Fondo de Cultura Económica de España, 2006. Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Lack, Russell. Twenty four frames under. A buried History of Film Music. London: Quartet Books, 2002. Meyer, Leonard B. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago: The University Chicago Press, 1956. Negus, Keith. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London: Routledge, 1999. Prendergast, Roy. Film Music a neglected art. A Critical Study of Music in Films. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1992. Thomas, Tony. Music for the Movies. New York, 1973.

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Notes 1

Burch, El tragaluz del infinito… Chion, La audiovisión… 3 La Teoría de los Affetti (Doctrine of the affections) was born in Italy during the transition of the Renaissance to the Baroque period. It establishes guidelines such as combinations of intervals and rhythms related to the rhetoric of the word that is sung, through which the music produces an emotion or affectation of feelings directly in whoever listens to it. 4 Chion, La música en el cine, 255. 5 Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music. 6 Dalhaus, La idea de la música absoluta. 7 Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music, 263. 8 Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures, 30. 9 Chion, La audiovisión. 10 de Arcos, Experimentalismo en la música cinematográfica, 71. 11 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. 12 Lack, Twenty four frames under… 13 Thomas, Music for the Movies, 17. 14 While the musical motif of the tensest scene of Psycho, the shower scene, is not exactly a leitmotiv, the way in which it has transcended the film, circulated and become a symbol, allows it to be placed in this category. 15 Prendergast, Film Music a neglected art…, 214. 2

CHAPTER NINE TEMPORAL SEMIOTIC UNITS (TSUS) IN AUDIOVISUAL ANALYSIS DIEGO CALDERÓN GARRIDO AND JOSEP GUSTEMS CARNICER UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA

It is often observed that music has a productive dimension, which is the result of the creative process, and a receptive dimension, which involves how it is perceived. This second dimension, which we might describe as how music is heard or listened to, is also creative because it is ultimately the listeners who complete the comprehension of the work. The listeners are the ones who assign meaning to what they hear and, by doing so, effectively transform the content of the audiovisual product as a whole. This paper therefore focuses on the listeners—or, more precisely, on three types of listening—in order to elucidate a complex phenomenon that is no less intriguing or intangible for its being so common. Beyond simply identifying music with the musical content in audiovisual media, this paper proposes that music should be understood as an activity, and as reception as well as action. This may help us to bypass the tradition of aesthetic formalism1 which distinguishes between “truly musical” and “extra-musical” features,2 and to focus on the sounds themselves, leaving aside the composers, producers, receivers and uses of the musical act.3 As observed by Small4, the essence of music lies not in musical objects or works but in what is “being done” with music. And I therefore propose that if music is about “doing” then the word itself should denote not a noun but a verb meaning to take part, whether actively, passively, comfortably or uncomfortably, in musical activity. In the context of this paper, it would also mean that the spectators are the true protagonists of the music they listen to in audiovisual media insofar as they complete its meaning.

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Music and motion in audiovisual media: the importance of the gesture In audiovisual media, every person, action and moment is generally linked to and characterized by movements or gestures. These, in turn, are in turn enhanced by sounds, sometimes even music. The sounds or music accompany each gesture and heighten our sense of its reality, underlining each frame in an audiovisual product. This use of sound to reinforce motion by exploiting the congruence and synchronicity between action and reaction in sound is most commonly observed in Mickey Mousing,5 the sync sound technique originally developed to support animated cartoons but now used across the sector to explore the relationship between sound and image. Going one step further than the silent cinema pianists who recreated synchronicity by imitating in sound what was happening on the screen,6 Mickey Mousing transformed our understanding of animated cartoons. It allowed audiovisual artists to redefine physical space according to the whims of their protagonists, turning down the ambient sound we would expect to hear in real life and enhancing the cartoon soundscape of that protagonist’s fictional universe.7 The interaction of diegetic and nondiegetic sound also created intentionality and subjectivity8 and today this is generally how we experience any audiovisual product, where what we hear and see is determined by the figure of the sound engineer, who modifies the soundscape to draw attention to one element or another. Certainly, Mickey Mousing has come a long way since 1928, when Walt Disney Studios first used it in Steamboat Willie to present the fictional character from whom the technique takes its name.9 The synchronicity between sound and motion in audiovisual media has also been made infinitely more elastic. But at the same time, the close ties that Disney created between the film director and the musical composer have endured; and as Farrar has observed, in today’s animated cartoons, considerable time has already been invested in the combined planning of the animation and musical score before real production actually begins.10 Moreover, this relationship has led to a new form of music and animation notation, the “bar sheet” or “dope sheet”, which processes visual and aural elements holistically, creating a kind of single aural and visual narrative. The discussion of staged motion brings us to the discipline of dance, which turns on our appreciation of a metaphor: of the gestures made by a character in response to ambient sound.11 Dance helps us to directly associate a character with their movements and understand how the movements effectively make the character:12 how protagonists are

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definable by how they move. Indeed, when we appreciate the many relationships that can exist between music and dance, gesture and dance, music and action, etc., all we are doing is establishing a relationship between each character and the sound that accompanies them, which in the context of audiovisual media means each character and their gestures or movements on the screen. If motion and sound are essential ingredients of audiovisual media, then they must be studied together. And if that is what Delalande’s TSU proposal sets out to do, then it becomes particularly useful system for our purposes here.

TSUs: a link between music and motion François Delalande and musical reception Born in 1941, the French composer François Delalande is considered to be one of the main forces behind the renaissance in music education in Europe and South America. Delalande’s work has been decisive in both teaching and research. For this reason we can establish a series of connections between the two fields which are relevant to the subject in question at a global and practical level, whether we are discussing the concepts of sound and motion, the procedures that contribute towards musical invention, the relationship between making music and listening to it, the importance of the gesture and the body or, perhaps most importantly for Delalande scholars, the parallelism that exists between universal musical behaviour and the developmental phases spontaneously experienced by children.13 In all these areas, moreover, we find that Delalande’s contributions are interdisciplinary, combining psychology, anthropology, musical semiology, pedagogy, aesthetics and musical analysis. As observed above, Delalande’s primary motivation is analytical insofar as he addresses certain varieties of music, especially electronic music. But because this music often exists without a score or material medium to describe, locate, segment or explain musical content, an alternative method of analysis must be found. Delalande’s answer is a theoretical and practical model of what happens when listeners listen and the types of behaviour they exhibit while listening, which can then be used to extract criteria from musical fragments that might help us to analyze them. Finally, note that the objective of any musical analysis is to select from the various parts of a musical work those specific elements we wish to analyze and to have designed the criteria that can effectively filter these

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elements from the rest of that work. Of the varieties of analysis that are available,14 Delalande chose an esthesic process of analysis, meaning that he decided to retrieve information about people’s listening behaviour during the act of listening to fragments of a musical work in order to get at the substance of the work itself.

Listening behavior Inevitably, what happens when listeners listen is closely tied to the more general subject of human behaviour, meaning the cognitive, affective, emotional and motor activity that we engage in to obtain some final result. On the specific subject of listening behaviour, as Delalande observes, “in listening attentively to a piece of music one adopts, more or less consciously, a goal: one expects something at this moment of listening (which becomes clearer during listening), which determines a strategy and specifically focuses on this or that...”15 Delalande classifies listening behaviour in what he calls listening behaviour types or reception behaviour types. These are a classification of the strategies listeners use and each type groups together strategies that are used for the same purpose or for a similar purpose. Of course, listening behaviour is highly variable and personal, especially “momentary behaviours” which are conditioned by the circumstances under which listeners find themselves and their mental disposition. But at the same time, Delalande’s analysis of listeners’ reports reveal that there are constants in such behaviours and suggest that there is no infinite number of ways to listen to a piece of music. Rather, in the moment of listening the listener chooses one of a series of behaviour types which can be described and classified as finite groups. Delalande and others have made this proposal in various studies, using broad samples of listeners.16 Delalande proposes that there are three types of listening behaviour: taxonomic listening, figurativization and empathic listening. All three involve different ways of receiving, assimilating and comprehending sound: taxonomic listening involves searching for an overriding structure, figurativization involves an interest with context or contextual function, and empathic listening is associated with the feelings. In most cases in the studies mentioned above, when individual listeners heard the same musical fragment more than once they continued to conform to the same listening behaviour type. We should bear in mind that although all musical works include elements that could prompt listeners to adopt any of these three types of listening behaviour, what they actually choose will depend on the

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intentions of the author and also on their own intentions—especially their own intentions, perhaps. This explains how the same piece of music can be found attractive by one listener but not by another, whatever its implicit qualities, and in this way the listener becomes the centre of our knowledge about the music. This is also why we need to understand a little more about the three listening types. As observed above, taxonomic listening behaviour searches for structure and so taxonomic listening to music is concerned with structural elements, which are traditionally important components in western musical notation. Because of this, the taxonomic listener tends to be someone who is ‘in the know’ about music rather than a person with no formal musical education. Taxonomic listeners are driven by the desire to have an overall picture of the work. Consciously or not, they make it their objective to assimilate the work, understand its various parts and describe how one part relates to another. In the studies mentioned above, the taxonomic listener was often but not always a music professional, meaning a composer, instrumentalist or teacher. It would appear that music professionals’ analytic experience and the fact that they customarily listen to and talk about music makes them more inclined to be an analytical, technical and formal taxonomic listeners. In empathic listening behaviour, musical appreciation is fundamentally measured by the feelings. The listening experience is dominated by the senses and the experience of feelings through these, often at a very profound level, prompted by the inner effect of the sound material. Empathic listeners make no effort of memory, meaning that their attention is focused on the present and they avoid establishing connections with the musical discourse prior to the listening moment. They experience the music directly and personally, and their observations on its events—a sense of unease or wellbeing, for example, or the feeling of a shock, physical blow or sudden loss of balance—are made as if they themselves had been subjected to the event. For empathic listeners, the musical fragment provided an occasion for different forces to act upon one another but also to act upon them. In the studies, their experiences of the same musical work could also be diametrically opposed. Finally, the research shows that empathic listeners are generally non-music professionals. Finally, figurativization is that type of listening behaviour which constructs an imagined scene in space and time where an action of some kind can take place. Listeners who figurativize tend to use metaphors and adjectives not simply to label sounds but to describe the images that impose themselves on the imagination during the listening act. Generally

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speaking, such listeners are not music professionals. Delalande’s work follows this listening behaviour type.

The Temporal Semiotic Units The research on Temporal Semiotic Units by the group of composers and artists directed by François Delalande at the Laboratoire Musique de Informatique de Marseille17 provides us with a useful system to understand and describe figurative analogies between music and motion. According to Delalande,18 these units can be used to take the description of sound elements one step beyond the morphological illustration that was proposed by Schaeffer.19 They can also effectively address the persistent problem of time and motion, still present but somewhat neglected in the debate on electronic sound and music. For the listeners to appreciate the temporal meaning of sound in the TSUs, it is particularly important for them to understand that the music’s meaning becomes subject to their choice of one listening behaviour type over the others. To explain this, Delalande20 uses the analogy that analyzing a piece of music in TSU terms resembles the harmonic analysis of atonal music: we know full well that harmonic chains are just one component of the sound discourse and that in real listening by real listeners harmony will merge with other elements such as attacks, phrasing, instrumental density, transparency, etc. For this reason, the listening behaviour that can determine and describe TSUs requires the listener to receive prior orientation towards the temporal organization and signification of sound.21 The TSU construct seeks to define the temporal meaning of a brief fragment of music by considering its morphology and kinetic structure.22 The units themselves must maintain their particular meaning and importance when they have been isolated from their original context; and they must also be able to cause a similar “effect” in different contexts. The attributes that Delalande’s team considered relevant in defining the TSUs were of two kinds: morphological attributes and semantic attributes.23 The former include the duration of the musical fragment, reiteration, number of phases, stability of the material, acceleration and temporal development. The latter include the direction of the musical fragment, movement and energy. The vocabulary defining each TSU uses a metaphor of some kind as an intermediary agent to structure an unknown domain of experience according to a known domain. To date, the MIM researchers have identified a total of nineteen TSUs divided in two main blocks: units that are unlimited by time (“à durée

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indéterminée”) and units that last for a specific period of time (“à durée déterminée”). The following units are unlimited by time. x Floating. The feeling that events gradually appear on a smooth and even continuum devoid of suspense. x Suspended activity. The feeling that opposing tensions of equal strength have brought everything to a standstill; that one is waiting, for something to happen without knowing what it is or when it will occur. x Heaviness. The feeling of slowness making it difficult to advance. x Obsession. The feeling of insistent, constant, mechanical repetition. x Moving in waves. The feeling of being pushed forwards in repeated cycles. x Moving forwards. The feeling of being carried forwards at a regular pace, progressing purposefully. x Turning. The feeling of being made to turn rather than moving forwards. x Wanting to start. The feeling that one is trying to start; the intention to take action of some kind. x Having no direction because the information is too varied. A feeling of indecision caused by encountering too many possible directions with no apparent connection. x Having no direction because there is too much information. A feeling of confusion caused by encountering too many possible directions which do not lend themselves to decision making. x Stillness. The feeling of standing still but without waiting. x Inexorable trajectory. The feeling of seeing no end ahead and of constantly moving in different directions. And the following units last for a specific period of time. x Falling. The feeling of losing one's balance; the loss of potential energy that is transformed into kinetic energy. x Contraction–expansion. A feeling of compression followed by a feeling of relaxation. x Propulsion. The feeling of being pushed forwards by a steady but accelerating force. x Stretching. The feeling of taking a process to its limits and of pressure being used to make something longer.

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x Braking. The feeling of being forced to slow down or suddenly stop. x Suspension–interrogation. The feeling of a movement that is interrupted while waiting. x Inertia. The feeling of moving ever more slowly towards a final resting point (the image of a boat which shuts off its engine and continues to cross the water, until it is finally still). Note that all these TSUs are described by Delalande’s team at www.labo-mim.org/site/index.php?2013/03/29/225-temporal-semioticunits-tsus-a-very-short-introduction. Note, too, that from their beginnings, they were developed in the context of cooperative research between specialists, musicians, artists in the plastic arts and musical composers, focusing on the interactions between music and visuals. Mandelbrojt24 and MIM25 have both studied the interaction between painting and music and issue 2 of MIM’s own publication Les Cahiers du MIM is entirely addressed to the subject of music and the plastic arts.26 Hautbois27 focuses on audiovisual animation using SodaZoo software and Bootz and Hautbois28 do the same using a TSU visual simulation program. Dance has also been explored with TSUs as a description of choreographic gesture, even though the research has been hampered by certain technical difficulties.

Conclusions This text proposes that defining, describing and characterizing the listening act is a complex process which can be made even more difficult by the shortcomings in our research language, but that there are common denominators in listeners’ reports about their listening experience. The reports reveal that while listening to musical segments taken from an audiovisual product, listeners will adopt one of a number of different, clearly identifiable positions. The types of listening behaviour or reception behaviour examined in the paper (taxonomic listening, figurativization and empathic listening) clearly operate as conceptual “magnets” that can account for and elucidate the listening acts of almost all the subjects who participated in the studies described. By adopting a particular type of listening behaviour, it can be seen that each listener made certain features of the musical fragment salient to him or her while other features were not, and that for this reason each person’s listening response could be different. In other words, listeners did not hear the same sounds and then describe them differently; rather, their particular

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type of listening behaviour determined which sounds they heard of all the sounds that could be heard in the fragment, and this is what could make two different listeners’ experience of the same fragment different. Therefore, we might argue, during the listening act each listening strategy (and each listening behaviour type or receptive behaviour type) brings into play cognitive, affective, emotional and motor factors; each strategy involves expectations and experiences which listeners manage as the nucleus of their musical thought and foundation of their listening behaviour. In this sense, the contributions made by François Delalande and his team provide us with a certain guiding light. And this is especially useful where they locate the listener at the centre of musical knowledge, so allowing us to describe the relationship between music and motion in products of audiovisual media.

References Alcázar, Antonio. Análisis de la música electroacústica -género acusmático- a partir de su escucha. Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla la Mancha, 2004. —. “Análisis de la música electroacústica -género acusmático- a partir de su escucha: bases teóricas, metodología de la investigación, conclusions”, L'analyse perceptive des musiques électroacoustiques. Lien. Revue d'esthétique musicale, Musiques & Recherches, (2006):3039. Alcázar, Antonio, Gustems, Josep and Calderón, Diego. “Los modos de escucha como generadores de pensamiento musical: a propósito de François Delalande”, Observar, 8 (2014): 86-108. Bootz, Philippe and Hautbois, Xavier. “Modélisation des structures temporelles par les MTP”, Les UST: enjeux pour l’analyse et la recherche. Musimédiane. Revue audiovisuelle et multimédia d’analyse musicale, 5 (2010). Bruner, Jerome. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1986. Cohen, Anabel J. “Film Music and the Unfolding Narrative.” In Language, Music, and the Brain, edited by Michael. A. Arbib, 173-200. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013. Cremades, Antonio. “El pragmatismo y las competencias en educación musical”, Revista electrónica Leeme, 22 (2008). Delalande, François. La música es un juego de niños. Buenos Aires: Ricordi, 1995.

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—. “La construction d’une représentation de l’espace dans les conduites d’écoute’.” In Musical Signification Between Rhetoric and Pragmatics. Proceedings of the 5th International Congress on Musical Signification, edited by Gino Stefani, Eero Tarasti and Luca Marconi, 127-135. Bologna: CLUEB, 1998. —. “Music analysys and reception behaviours”, Journal of new music research, 27(1-2) (1998): 13-66. —. “Les Unités Sémiotiques Temporelles: problématique et essai de definition” in Les Unités Sémiotiques Temporelles, MIM, 16-25. Marseille: MIM, 1996. —. Las Conductas Musicales. Santander: Ediciones Universidad de Cantabria, 1993. —. “La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune: essai d’analyse esthésique”, Analyse Musicale 16(3) (1989): 75-84. Duerden, Rachel. “Dancing in the Imagined Space of Music”, Dance Research, 25(1) (2007): 73-83. Elliot, David. J. “Modernity, Posmodernity and Music Education Philosophy”, Reseach Studies in Music Education, 17 (2001): 32-41. Farrar, Eric. A Method for Mapping Expressive Qualities of Music to Expressive Qualities of Animation. Dallas: Eric Farrar, 2003. Hautbois, Xavier. “Une animation visuelle composée en UST”, Les UST: enjeux pour l’analyse et la recherche. Musimédiane. Revue audiovisuelle et multimédia d’analyse musical, 5 (2010). Lysey, Barrère P. and Frémiot, Michel. “Eymogrammes, instantanés, UST: cheminements d’une plasticienne”, Les Cahiers du MIM, 2 (2009). Mandelbrojt, Jacques. La peinture s’exprime-t-elle, comme la musique, en UST?. Marseille : MIM, 2003. MIM. Les Unités Sémiotiques Temporelles: nouvelles clés pour l’écoute. Ouil d’analyse musicale.Marseille: MIM, 2002. —. Peintures parcourues. Marseille: MIM, n.d. —. Les Unités Sémiotiques Temporelles. Marseille: MIM, 1996. Nattiez, J. Jaques. Musicologie générale et sémiologie, «Musique/ Passé/Présent». Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1987. Neumeyer, David and Buhler, James. “Analytical and Interpretive Approaches to Film Music (I): Analysing the Music.” In Film Music: Critical Approaches, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly, 16-38. Nueva York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001). Regelski, Thomas. “La música y la educación musical: teoría y práctica para marcar una diferencia.” In La educación musical para el nuevo milenio, edited by David Lines, 21-47. Madrid: Morata, 2009.

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Schaeffer, Pierre. Tratado de los objetos musicales. Madrid: Alianza Música, 1988. Smith, Marian. Ballet and Opera in the age of Giselle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Whalen, Zach. “Play along. An Approach to Videogame Music”, Game Studies, 4(1) (2004): 1-31.

Notes 1

Regelski, “La música y la educación musical”. Elliot, “Modernity, Posmodernity and Music Education Philosophy”. 3 Cremades, “El pragmatismo y las competencias en educación musical”. 4 Small, “El Musicar: un ritual en el espacio social”. 5 Cohen, “Film Music and the Unfolding Narrative”. 6 Neumeyer and Buhler, “Analytical and Interpretive Approaches to Film Music”. 7 Whalen, “Play along. An Approach to Videogame Music”. 8 Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. 9 Rosenberg, “Image and Stereotype: Bluegrass Sound Tracks”. 10 Farrar, A Method for Mapping Expressive Qualities of Music. 11 Duerden, “Dancing in the Imagined Space of Music”. 12 Smith, Ballet and Opera in the age of Giselle. 13 Delalande, La música es un juego de niños. 14 Nattiez, Musicologie générale et sémiologie. 15 Delalande, “La construction d’une représentation de l’espace dans les conduites d’écoute”. 16 See Delalande, “La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune”; “Music analysys and reception behaviours”; Alcázar, Análisis de la música electroacústica -género acusmático- a partir de su escucha. 17 MIM, Les Unités Sémiotiques Temporelles. 18 Delalande, “Les Unités Sémiotiques Temporelles: problématique et essai de défnition”. 19 Schaeffer, Tratado de los objetos musicales. 20 Delalande, Las Conductas Musicales. 21 Alcázar, Gustems and Calderón, “Los modos de escucha como generadores de pensamiento musical”. 22 Bootz and Hautbois, “Modélisation des structures temporelles par les MTP”. 23 MIM, Les Unités Sémiotiques Temporelles: nouvelles clés pour l’écoute. 24 Mandelbrojt, La peinture s’exprime-t-elle, comme la musique, en UST?. 25 MIM, Peintures parcourues. 26 Lysey and Frémiot, “Eymogrammes, instantanés, UST”. 27 Hautbois, “Une animation visuelle composée en UST”. 28 Bootz and Hautbois, “Modélisation des structures temporelles par les MTP”. 2

CHAPTER TEN CREATIVITY IN SOUND POSTPRODUCTION FRANCESC LLINARES HEREDIA AND JOSEP MARIA MAYOL I PUENTES UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA

When John Purcell gave the intriguing subtitle A Guide to the Invisible Art to his book on dialogue editing,1 he coined an expression (the invisible art) that can be aptly applied to sound postproduction as a whole. Ironically enough, postproduction is often at its best when it goes unnoticed, elevating the soundtrack to its highest level of technical and aesthetical perfection and making it able to accompany the images in a seemingly natural way. Of course this is a false naturalness, since it is only achieved through hard technical work in the studio. In fact, if we consider the procedures and tools used in postproduction work, it can’t be denied that there is an important technical side to it. This is even truer nowadays, when digital technology has given sound engineers access to an array of resources and possibilities that could not even be imagined some years ago. But the problem with emphasizing the technical side of audio postproduction is that it can make us neglect or even totally ignore another very important aspect which Purcell did not forget to include in his subtitle: sound postproduction can be an art, and its technical resources can be used in a highly creative way. Our aim in this chapter is to give importance to the creative side of sound postproduction. We will show that it can go far beyond the mere handling and correction of recorded audio, and make its own artistic contribution to the overall audio-visual work. Without forgetting the technical role of postproduction, we will focus our attention on some cases where this invisible art becomes visible, so to say, and contributes in an obvious way to the audio-visual narrative.

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What is Sound Postproduction? The term postproduction basically refers to the last of the three stages that traditionally make up the audio-visual creation process.2 These stages are: 1. Preproduction (or prep), which is the preparatory stage that begins as soon as the decision is made to start a project and continues until shooting commences. 2. Production (or shoot), which centres on the recording of images and sounds. 3. Postproduction (or post), which includes all the processes carried out after the shoot in order to complete the final product and make it ready for delivery. As far as the audio is concerned, the postproduction stage is when the various sound elements that will eventually form the soundtrack to the audio-visual project are selected, organized and worked on. This involves a great many technical operations (which may at the same time be creative, as we will see later), including the following: — Improving the sound of the dialogues and other audio elements recorded during the shoot (using noise cancellation, equalization, compression, etc.). — Substituting dialogues that may not have been captured correctly during shooting. These are replaced by another version of the same dialogues recorded in the studio (a procedure known as automatic dialogue replacement or ADR). — Adding extra spoken material (voiceovers, radio commercials, public address system announcements, etc.), and any other sound elements that involve the human voice, such as the buzz of conversation, crowd noise, etc. — Adding background noise, i.e. sound passages of varying complexity that help to locate the action in a particular place or environment, whether physical or emotional. — Incorporating Foley effects (rustling, slamming doors, footsteps, zips, crashes, etc.). — Using sound effects from pre-recorded sound libraries. — Creating new sound effects, which is the only way to obtain sounds that are so unreal or infrequent that they cannot be found in

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libraries or be recorded as Foley effects. This is one of the tasks involved in what is known as sound design. — Composing and recording original music to accompany particular scenes. — Choosing pre-existing pieces of music when these are considered preferable to music composed specifically for the purpose. — Editing and assembling all the audio elements so that they are perfectly synchronized with the images they have to accompany. — Mixing all these elements as appropriate, assigning each of them to a suitable plane according to their function and importance. — Mastering the soundtrack, i.e. working on the audio that has already been mixed, giving it whatever final touches it might need and adjusting it to the levels and formats required by the audio-visual medium. As we can see, audio postproduction is a complex process that brings many technical procedures into play and applies them to sound elements of various types and origins. Nevertheless, this complexity should not make us lose sight of the obvious: the end product of any audio postproduction process is a piece of recorded sound. This being the case, we believe it would be interesting to apply some of the ideas for studying recorded sound in other areas, mainly musical, to the audio postproduction carried out in the audio-visual field. To be specific, we will focus on the intriguing idea that recording does not consist simply of photographing sounds but of creating a totally new audio reality.

Recorded sound, the great unknown Before we go any further, we want to point out that the world of recorded sound seems to us to be characterized by a level of relative ignorance among both the general public and those working in the sector.3 Today, when film, videos, video games and other audio-visual forms are already the focus of attention for the academic world and information media, recorded sound is only just beginning to be seen as an area worth studying.4 Naturally we are not referring to its more technical side, for which there is a large bibliography and a certain didactic tradition. We are speaking of the study of the artistic resources that are characteristic of recorded sound. These are the very elements that give it a creative dimension that takes it far beyond its role as mere “photography” of live sound and raise it to the status of an artistic language in its own right. We believe that these resources continue to some extent to be the exclusive

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reserve of sound technicians and that they have not yet received the attention they deserve outside the study areas in which they are used, especially at a general information level. It will be easier to understand what we mean if we establish some parallels with other fields. In the visual arts, for example, there are plenty of books aimed at teaching people how to look at a picture,5 and they do this by focusing on certain key aspects of the painting as an artistic language: the composition, the texture, perspective, the use of colour and so on. These are aspects that can be understood—and to some extent evaluated—even from a non-technical point of view without knowing how to paint. The same applies in the field of music, where educational information6 often focuses on a series of elements considered fundamental to the appreciation of music: rhythm, melody, harmony, timbre, texture, the musical form, etc. These elements have a technical side full of complexities but anyone can to some degree understand and identify them once they have been explained. This also happens in other artistic fields like cinema, where it is understood that full technical expertise in the discipline is not needed in order to acquire a certain literacy7 in the subject. Returning to the field of recorded sound, we can see that as yet there is no comparable informative tradition that aims to teach people to listen to it and understand it from an artistic rather than a technical point of view.8 While we wait for recent academic interest in the subject to bear fruit, we believe that a brief explanation of some of the basic resources of recorded sound as an artistic language needs to be provided. It will also enable us to deal with the main subject of this chapter—the assertion that audio postproduction is a creative field—if we all know the possibilities that recorded sound provides as a field of play for creativity.

Shaping Sound: Audio Editing The introduction of the tape recorder in the 1930s for the first time made it possible to modify recorded sound, whether for corrective or creative reasons. What at that time was done by cutting and splicing pieces of recording tape is today done digitally via workstations9 with possibilities that include: — Copying, replacing and deleting recorded sounds with no loss of quality.

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— Moving them in time and even changing the order in which they are heard. — Modifying their intensity and amplitude envelope. — Modifying their pitch. — Undoing the changes made and returning to the original audio recording (non-destructive editing). It should be understood that some of these operations are only possible up to a certain point, and although advances in the field mean that recorded material can today be edited in ways that were unthinkable just a few years ago, there are still some things that cannot be done.10 Nevertheless, the possibilities for editing are so great that some sectors frown on its use, believing it leads to the creation of an artistically debatable and ethically reprehensible fake sound.11 Even so, audio editing’s contribution to the creation of audio realities is such that it is only fair to consider it a key element of the language of recorded sound.

Moulding the Tone: Equalization The term equalization is somewhat misleading as regards what an equalizer actually enables people to do, which is modify the frequency spectrum of a sound at will. Doing this changes its timbre or tone colour, which may be helpful in correcting faults in the audio or creating new sounds. Boosting the relevant frequencies or toning them down can make a voice sound darker or clearer than it really is, or make it take on the nasal tone of a phone conversation or even become a mysterious hissing. A drumroll can be transformed into a muffled menacing murmur or a sharp crackling staccato. Equalization is an essential tool in sound design; by equalizing the recording of a particular sound source, designers can modify its tone colour until they obtain a result that matches whatever they need to express.

Creating a Space: Reverberation Reverberation is the persistence of sound that we perceive when a sound is made in an enclosed space. It comes about due to the sound waves reflecting off the walls, ceiling, and floor of the enclosure. This phenomenon plays a very important role in our everyday auditory experience because it tells us what the space in which we hear the sound is like (shape, dimensions, materials) and how far we are from the sound source. It also has an important emotional dimension; the sound

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experiences that we accumulate as memory throughout our lives are imbued with the reverberation of the spaces in which they came about.12 In the world of recorded sound, reverberation is also a basic resource. It is normal practice in studios to record sound sources without reverberation. This enables them later to be placed in whatever type of space may be desired (a room, a cathedral, a dungeon, etc.), with the kind of reverberation characteristic of that enclosure being added electronically. And by measuring out the amount of added reverberation it is possible to modify the sense of distance between the listener and the sound source. As can be imagined, the creative potential of reverberation is huge. As well as reproducing credible sound situations, it also enables imaginary spaces to be invented, in which sounds reverberate in ways that do not exist in the real world.

Modifying Sound: Effects Another important resource for recorded sound is the effects, which are devices that enable the sound to be processed and transformed in a variety of ways. These are some of the most common: — Delay: this slows down the sound for a while, enabling echo or rebound effects to be created. The delay leads to effects like the chorus and the flanger, each with its own characteristic sound. — Compressor: this compresses the dynamic range of the sound. — Enhancer: this gives the sound greater brilliance and clarity of detail. There are also many others, which sometimes come together in the devices known as multi-effects.

Positioning the Sound Source: Panning Various different procedures have been used over the years to enable recorded sound to distribute sound sources in space. For a long time it was normal to use stereo, which today is still the preferred choice in many contexts. More recently we have seen the appearance of new technologies such as surround sound, which makes it possible to position a sound source at any point in the 360º field that envelops the listener.

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Isolating the Sound Source: Multi-track Recording This procedure involves recording each sound source on a separate track from the others. Hence all the sounds included in a sound set can be worked on individually as regards volume, compression, equalization, reverberation, effects, panning, etc. And although the resulting sound set is perceived as a whole, unified by the mixing console, the fact that it is recorded on multi-track means that any of the different sounds that form part of it can be modified selectively. Another possibility of crucial importance needs to be added to this capability provided by multi-track recording: the tracks that make up a mix can be recorded either simultaneously or in succession. This makes it possible to break away from one of the unavoidable conditions of live sound: the need for each of the sounds in the mix to effectively occur at the same time in the same place. Hence the multi-track procedure means that we can listen to musicians who have never coincided in space or time playing together,13 or to a daughter recording a duet with her late father,14 or to just one musician playing all the instruments in a musical piece.15 These are situations that would be absolutely unthinkable outside recorded sound and show the interesting way in which multi-track recording has contributed to the creation of new sound realities.

Postproduction: technical or creative? When we venture further into the area of audio postproduction, we cross a threshold that leads us to a place where sound as reality coexists with sound as imagination. Each of the different processes of this stage (the design, where the soundscape is given shape mentally; the production, where the work is structured, balanced, and given meaning; the mix, where the perspectives and priorities of the different sound layers or strata are established) sees some kind of creative contribution made to the final result. As far as we are concerned, a clear indication that audio postproduction involves creativity is the huge number of times that sound distances itself from realism, which would be the most obvious solution, and it does this for reasons of expression: less realism often means greater expressiveness. Here we can establish a parallel with the idea of divergent or lateral thinking, a term coined by Edward de Bono.16 This way of thinking, which can be used as a technique for imaginative problem-solving, involves seeking alternatives or creative and different solutions to a problem.

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Audio Hyperrealities or Unrealities Levitin (2006), referring to the work done by recording engineers, says that they create what he calls “hyperrealities”: we experience sensory impressions that we never actually have in the real world.17 In the beginning, recorded sound did not aim to be anything more than a “photograph” of live sound. With the passing of time, however, the technological and conceptual evolution it has undergone has enabled its resources to be used to faithfully recreate existing audio realities and create new ones, thereby leading to the situation described by Levitin. We can give examples of different situations in which a creative process is needed to generate what we have taken to calling “audio unrealities”: x

The assignment of sound to situations or actions that in real life have no sound or whose sound is unknown because they are uncommon.

One example would be the recreation of the sound made by the tsunami in Juan Antonio Bayona’s film Lo imposible (The Impossible, 2012), with sound design by Oriol Tarragó. Tarragó himself speaks18 of his search for audio hyperrealism when he describes the sound design process for the tsunami in the film: my brain was incapable of imagining the sound of that huge mass of water smashing into the land. On the basis of that premise he believed it was not simply a question of reproducing the sound of the water; he would also need to add the irrational as an ingredient, the primal fear of the unknown. This did not mean adding the sound of a storm or a raging ocean; it meant finding a sound that would bring with it a feeling of terror and mark out a frontier of sound to contrast with the stage following the cataclysm. Continuing this train of thought he concluded that, when someone tries to remember a traumatic or distressing experience, the brain changes the sequence of events by retaining small fragments in the memory but unconnectedly, in no linear or chronological order. It was this idea that Tarragó used as the basis for designing the sound of the tsunami. Once the tsunami had happened, Tarragó wanted to make a complete contrast by showing the resulting desolation using sound. This took the form of an eerie, unusual silence that aimed to instil a fleeting and psychological sense of semi-deafness in the viewer. All the audio aspects of the film apart from the dialogues were created in the postproduction stage, which shows how important and decisive the treatment of sound can be in this phase.

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The assignment of sound to situations or actions that sound different in real life.

A realistic sound does not necessarily convey the feelings and emotions associated with the source of that sound. An example of this would be fire; simply recording the real sound of fire does not necessarily convey the feeling of threat or danger that it can represent. Gary Rydstrom, sound designer on Ron Howard’s film Backdraft (1991), combines the noise a fire makes with the howls and growls of animals. These are not consciously perceived as the animal sounds they actually are, but they imbue the sound of the fire with greater strength, thereby creating a far more overwhelming sensation in the viewer. x

The use of non-realistic sound intensities.

An example of this would be the food critic’s dropped pen in the animated film Ratatouille (2007), directed by Brad Bird with sound design by Randy Thom. As a way of magnifying how impressed the critic is when he tastes the ratatouille, he drops the pen that he uses for making notes and we hear a huge crash as it hits the floor. The intensity of this sound is far removed from the sound it would make in real life, but it serves to give the viewer a clear perception of the feelings bubbling up inside this character in the course of the sequence. x

The use of non-realistic reverberations.

Sometimes the reverberation added to a sound does not correspond to the reverberation that would be made in the location shown in the image. An example of this can be found in the first episode of the Spanish TV miniseries Los Nuestros (2015), with sound design by Juan Ferro, where reverberation is added to the cries of two children that have just been kidnapped and are being driven away in the middle of the desert. This reverberation, which would not exist in a real desert, makes the cries sound more dramatic and expressive. Another example to illustrate this procedure is the reverberations that accompany the desperate shouts of the official looking for survivors among the victims of the shipwreck in James Cameron’s film Titanic (1997). In this case, as in many others, although the sound we perceive is not realistic, it has certain qualities that imbue the sequence with affective, emotional, physical, and aesthetic value.

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Sound design The concept of sound design took shape in the 1970s—driven by Walter Murch’s outstanding sound work on Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)—with the aim of giving audio-visual sound a creative value beyond the purely technical value it was considered to have had until then. According to Alten,19 sound design represents the overall artistic style of the audio material in an audio-visual production, although the meaning of the term has evolved over time. Nowadays sound design is sometimes used as a synonym for the creation of original sound— especially effects—for a particular audio-visual project. In this intrinsically creative task, a single sound is not always enough to achieve a particular sensation. It then becomes necessary to construct an effect by superimposing a number of different sound elements. This layering leads to an end result that is more detailed and complete, which achieves the desired sensation. Complementing one sound effect with other sounds that could be described as auxiliary has become known as audio sweetening. For instance the sound of a crash can be obtained using a single sound or by combining different audio elements to achieve a more dramatic effect, such as: — A sound before the impact to suggest movement. — A brief silence just before the impact. — Different crash sounds superimposed on each other. — A diminishing sound to prolong the sensation of collision and destruction. As we saw earlier, even though the resulting sound effect might not be realistic, its depth and emotional impact will probably make it more effective than the sound of a real crash. Sound design also makes a decisive contribution when it comes to creating unreal or fantasy worlds like in The Matrix,20 animated characters like those in Wall-E,21 and extreme situations like in Saving Private Ryan.22

Sound Assembly Sound assembly, which is very closely linked to sound design, is the process whereby all the sounds that will be heard in the final version of the audio-visual are selected, structured, and assembled. This involves making

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important decisions because choices as seemingly simple as applying one type of synchrony between sound and image rather than another23 can give very different results. The sound assembly process, as well as being when the right music passages and sound elements for an audio-visual are chosen, is also the moment that decisions have to be made as to when and how they will be inserted. This positioning of elements can greatly influence the emotional, expressive or narrative message of a sequence, and decisions in this area therefore have a significant creative value. For instance, expert sound assembly can take a series of fairly unambiguous, straightforward and possibly boring shots from a particular environment, and transform them into a thrilling trip through sinister yet fascinating surroundings. Randy Thom24 warns that the amount of creativity involved in the sound assembly process should not be underestimated because it is of great value when it creates continuity, when it varies with time, when it is dynamic and heard in combination with other sounds and other sensory experiences.

The Mix or Sound Perspective One of the last processes carried out in audio postproduction and which requires extremely creative work is the mixing. This consists of giving consistency and uniformity to the soundtrack, assigning priorities to the various sounds it comprises, and seeking balance and maximum clarity from all the elements of the whole. On a practical level, the sound of an audio-visual presentation is usually divided into four layers: voices (including dialogues, monologues, and voiceovers), ambiences, effects, and music. Each of these layers can be made up of various sound tracks. We agree with Saitta25 in that this division in no way corresponds to perceptive reality. On the contrary, the resulting confluence between these layers can blur their boundaries, creating synergies that depend on chance or creative intent depending on the case. The mixer has to be aware of how the sounds work together and adjust the various parameters of the mix26 with artistic sensitivity so that the resulting audio enhances the content presented. The mixer should naturally also take care of the relationship between sound and image. It is surprising how a sequence can change by increasing or decreasing the volume of the music or the audio background that accompanies it, boosting the sound of out-of-shot footsteps or silencing a piercing cry despite the fact that the character is screaming frantically in the image.

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By way of conclusion Towards the end of the 1990s Randy Thom27 stated that: in virtually all film schools sound is taught as if it were simply a tedious and mystifying series of technical operations. Thus he lamented the fact that postproduction was reduced to its technical side and that the creative side that we have championed and illustrated in this chapter was completely ignored. Today’s situation is not quite the same. We have shown that the current technical literature on audio postproduction frequently stresses that the tools and processes it tells us about should be applied creatively. However, despite this insistence, very few of the works consulted give specific examples of this applied creativity. In order to find examples we need to refer to other types of text, such as interviews with sound designers or studies on the subject of sound in the cinema. These do indeed mention the creative uses that concern us here, but they do not explain the underlying technical procedures. Between both these extremes there is a vacuum waiting to be filled, an open field for studies that should look at audio postproduction from both technical and artistic points of view. Or studies that, if they focus on one aspect, at least do not completely ignore the other. Who would benefit from these? First and foremost any student at film or audio-visual school, who would acquire a more detailed and balanced view of audio postproduction. Also anyone studying the audio-visual medium, who could examine the relationship between sound and image by looking further than just music, the only aspect of a soundtrack that tends to receive any attention. And of course teachers and information givers, who would have a wider knowledge base they could use to explain the important expressive function that sound has in the audio-visual medium.

References Alten, Stanley R. Audio in Media, 9th edition. Wadsworth: CENGAGE Learning, 2008. Benedetti, Robert et al. Creative Postproduction: Editing, Sound, Visual Effects, and Music for Film and Video. Boston: Pearson Education, 2004. Blesser, Barry and Salter, Linda-Ruth. Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2007.

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Cook, Nicholas. The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Copland, Aaron. What to Listen for in Music. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939. De Ávila, Óscar. “Especiales Goyas Sonoros ’013: Oriol Tarragó y Marc Orts nos presentan el mundo sonoro de -Lo imposible-, de J. A. Bayona”, web log post dated February 14, 2013. http://labobinasonora.net/2013/02/14/especiales-goyas-sonoros013oriol-tarrago-y-marc-orts-nos-presentan-el-el-mundo-sonoro-de-loimposible-de-j-a-bayona/#more-3964 De Bono, Edward. The Use of Lateral Thinking. London: Jonathan Cape, 1967. Doyle, Peter. Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. Emerick, Geoff and Massey, Howard. Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of The Beatles. New York: Gotham Books, 2006. Frangne, Pierre-Henry and Lacombe, Hervé (eds.). Musique et enregistrement. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014. Guijarro, Toni and Muela, Clara. La música, la voz, los efectos y el sonido en publicidad: La creatividad en la producción del sonido. Madrid: CIE Inversiones Editoriales Dossat 2000, 2003. Levitin, Daniel J. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. New York: Dutton, 2006. LoBrutto, Vincent. Becoming Film Literate: The Art and Craft of Motion Pictures. Westport: Praeger, 2005. Massey, Howard. Behind the Glass: Top Record Producers Tell How They Craft the Hits. Volumes 1 and 2. San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2000 and 2009. Milner, Greg. Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music. New York: Faber and Faber, 2010. Moore, Allan F. The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Purcell, John. Dialogue Editing for Motion Pictures: A Guide to the Invisible Art. Burlington: Focal Press, 2007. Rooksby, Rikky. Inside Classic Rock Tracks: Songwriting and Recording Secrets of 100 Great Songs, from 1960 to the Present Day. San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2001. Saitta, Carmelo. La banda sonora. Apuntes para el diseño de la Banda Sonora en los lenguajes audiovisuales. Buenos Aires: Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo, UBA, 2002.

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Thom, Randy. “Designing a Movie for Sound.” In Soundscape. The School of Sound Lectures 1998-2001, edited by Larry Sider, Diane Freeman and Jerry Sider, 121-137. London: Wallflower Press, 2003. Woodford, Susan. Looking at Pictures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Further Reading Ament, Vanessa Theme. The Foley Grail: the Art of Performing Sound for Film, Games, and Animation. Burlington: Focal Press, 2009. Case, Alexander U. Sound FX: Unlocking the Creative Potential of Recording Studio Effects. Burlington: Focal Press, 2007. Chanan, Michael. Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music. London: Verso, 1995. Chion, Michel. L’art des sons fixés ou la musique concrètement. Fontaine: Métamkine, 1991. Day, Timothy. A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. Izhaki, Roey. Mixing Audio: Concepts, Practices and Tool. Oxford: Focal Press, 2008. Katz, Mark. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley: University of California, 2004. LoBrutto, Vincent. Sound-on-Film: Interviews with Creators of Film Sound. Westport: Praeger, 1994. Mayol, Josep Maria. “Cine para los oídos: el lenguaje del sonido grabado.” In Música y audición en los géneros audiovisuales, edited by Josep Gustems, 69-85. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 2014. Ondaatje, Michael. The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. London: Bloomsbury, 2002. Owsinski, Bobby. The Recording Engineer's Handbook. Boston: Course Technology, 2009. Rose, Jay. Audio Postproduction for Film and Video. Oxford: Focal Press, 2009. Sonnenschein, David. Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice, and Sound Effects in Cinema. Seattle: Michael Wiese Productions, 2001. Wyatt, Hilary and Amyes, Tim. Audio Post Production for Television and Film. Oxford: Focal Press, 2005.

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Notes 1

John Purcell, Dialogue Editing for Motion Pictures. See Benedetti and others, Creative Postproduction…, 1-5. 3 A situation that might have something to do with the lack of consideration shown towards sound within the world of audio-visual production, as shown in Guijarro and Muela, La música, la voz, los efectos y el sonido en publicidad, 13. According to these authors, sound has always been considered the “poor relation” in the audio-visual creation process. 4 Although it should be mentioned that some excellent pieces of work—some of which are cited in the bibliography for this chapter—are now focusing on it, and that augurs well for its future as an area of study in the academic world. 5 For example: Woodford, Looking at Pictures. 6 With emblematic works such as: Copland, What to Listen for in Music. 7 An appropriate term that we have taken from LoBrutto, Becoming Film Literate, a book aiming to educate filmgoers about the art, craft, and lexicon of motion pictures. 8 Although there is no lack of books that help people to listen to specific recordings, such as these: Moore, The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; Massey, Behind the Glass,Vol. 1 and 2; Rooksby, Inside Classic Rock Tracks; Emerick and Massey, Here, There and Everywhere. 9 Also known as DAW (digital audio workstation) and consisting basically of a computer—to which can be added other complementary devices—plus the appropriate software. 10 Although sometimes the vox populi seems to say the opposite. 11 An accusation that is not, however, levelled against film. See some contributions in Cook, The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music, 13-15 and 30-35; Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever, chapter 6; Frangne and Lacombe (eds.), Musique et enregistrement, 97-103 and 173-92. 12 A dimension that is not studied much in the more technological literature but which is very present in texts such as: Doyle, Echo and Reverb; Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music; Blesser and Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?. 13 As in the performance of Yesterdays that brings together Art Tatum and Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band (in the latter’s album Act Your Age, 2008). 14 In the Ghetto (released on iTunes, 2007) as sung by Lisa Marie Presley with her father Elvis Presley, who had died exactly thirty years earlier. 15 Like Stevie Wonder on various tracks on his album Innervisions (1973), among many other cases. 16 De Bono, The Use of Lateral Thinking. 17 Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music, 106. 18 De Ávila, “Especiales Goyas Sonoros ’013”. 19 Alten, Audio in Media, 277. 20 Directed by the Wachowski Brothers (1999) with sound design by Dane A. Davis. 21 Directed by Andrew Stanton (2008) with sound design by Ben Burtt. 2

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Directed by Steven Spielberg (1998) with sound design by Gary Rydstrom. Hard sync (when the sound comes before the image) or soft sync (when it comes after). 24 Thom, “Designing a Movie for Sound”, 121-137. 25 Saitta, La banda sonora, 14. 26 Definition, presence, dynamics, sound planes, distribution in space, and depth. 27 Thom, “Designing a Movie for Sound”. 23

CHAPTER ELEVEN EVIL BACH* VALENTÍN BENAVIDES UNIVERSIDAD DE VALLADOLID

Cinema is—and has always been—a powerful means to manipulate reality, create new meanings, and assign these to pre-existent elements. Image and music coexist in a symbiotic way: the image takes from the music its extraordinary ability to express emotions, and the music acquires from the image some meaning that it inherently does not possess. The music of Johann Sebastian Bach is not an exception to this rule. The works by the German composer have been repeatedly used for cinematic purposes,1 sometimes to illustrate the evil side of human nature: crime, murder, oppression, genocide, etc. The where, when, and more interestingly, the how and why the music of Bach has become a convincing vehicle used to transmit all these dreadful acts. These are the key questions that this article aims to answer. But firstly, it is necessary to determine what Bach’s music generally means to us...

The Good Bach The art of J. S. Bach is considered to be the zenith of sacred music in Western culture. This is, most likely, why he is known as “the Fifth Evangelist” in many circles. Notwithstanding that Bach was Lutheran, even Catholics concede his probable connection with the divine—after all, only God could inspire such music. Furthermore, some have requested— clearly in a more romantic than well-founded manner—his canonization.2 Saint Johann Sebastian? It would be, indeed, an unprecedented ecumenical gesture from the Vatican. But, could it be possible? It is often said that truth is stranger than fiction, but sometimes fiction really is stranger than truth. This is the case of the film The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (dir. Harald Zwart, 2013), in which a fictional reality is portrayed: a lot of demons live among us all over the world,

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hidden beneath a human form and, therefore, undetectable to ordinary people. Only a small group of Nephilim, a race of half-human half-angelic beings also named the Shadowhunters, have the means to unmask and destroy them. In one scene from the film, the two protagonists, a Shadowhunter named Jace Wayland and a teenage girl called Clary Fray, are talking. Jace is seated at a piano and makes a surprising disclosure: “Demons react to certain frequencies when two tones cross. It drives them crazy. See, Bach discovered this and put it into a system... using a mathematical progression of tonal combinations. It allows us to expose demons.” In the meantime, he plays some chords to exemplify what he is saying, and immediately a non-diegetic music emerges. It is the first few bars of Prelude No. 1 in C major (BWV 846) from the First Book of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. Clary asks him if Bach was a Shadowhunter, and he answers “yes.” Then, she concludes with a hilarious simile: “So Bach is to demons... what garlic is to vampires.” Of course it is not long before the theory is put to the test: in a later scene we can see how Jace is able to unmask a demon by playing the Aria from Goldberg Variations (BWV 988). No more evidence is needed to answer the aforementioned question: if reality were like fiction and Bach’s music actually had supernatural powers against evil forces, the Catholic Church would have the conditions required for his beatification. What I have discussed so far may appear bizarre. Nevertheless, it serves to show the extent to which cinema has contributed to fix a highly positive image of Bach in the public’s mind. Beyond religious connotations, many examples can be found where Bach’s music is used to illustrate concepts such as goodness, piety, and transcendence. Even in dramatic or tragic contexts, even when pictures are sad and depressing, or even when the screen is tinged with violence and the images are painful to watch, his music functions as a kind of consolation, a time for reflection, or a means for redemption. Many filmmakers, including Ingmar Bergman or Andrei Tarkovsky, have approached Bach’s work from some of these perspectives. Bach’s music seems to be especially suitable for the representation of the good side of human nature. One more example of this—and again, taken to the extreme—can be found in the film The Day the Earth Stood Still (dir. Scott Derrickson, 2008), a remake of the 1951 sci-fi film of the same name. Klaatu, a humanoid alien (played by Keanu Reeves) is sent to Earth as the representative of a group made up of extraterrestrial races. His mission is to evaluate whether or not the human race must be exterminated in order to preserve the rest of the planet. The Universe cannot afford to lose such a precious planet, a planet able to support life. It is not long

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before Klaatu becomes aware of humanity’s destructive tendencies, so he decides upon its annihilation. It is at this critical point that Dr. Helen Benson (played by Jennifer Connelly) and Nobel Prize-winning Professor Karl Barnhardt (played by John Cleese) try to convince him that humans can change, and they ask him for a chance to improve the world. The three are at Barnhardt’s house when something catches Klaatu’s attention: the music playing on the Hi-Fi. Helen notices the situation and without being asked, answers: “It’s Bach” (more specifically, it is the first variation from Goldberg Variations). Klaatu says: “It’s beautiful.” Karl then takes the opportunity to state: “So we’re not so different after all”, to which Klaatu replies: “I wish that were true.” This scene presents the turning point in Klaatu’s mind and, consequently, the fate of mankind. Bach reveals himself as the link between humans and aliens.3 Moreover, Bach’s music provides the first piece of evidence that mankind is worth saving. What I have shown, up to now, is the cinematic use of Bach in accordance with the benevolent vision we have of him. However, I am more interested in the dark side of his music rather than the good. Obviously, music cannot be good or evil per se, but music is a tremendously efficient instrument to increase the power of the image in its representation of good and evil. So, the main goal of this text is to analyse how cinema has used the music of Bach to illustrate evil.

The Sinister Bach If there is a paradigmatic piece by Bach—in fact, by any classical composer—linked to the dark side, it is undoubtedly the Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565).4 It is likely that no other piece of Bach’s work has been so overused in the audio-visual media, most often to illustrate mysterious characters.5 First appearing in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (dir. Rouben Mamoulian, 1931), this organ piece has become cliché for horror movies6 because of its use in films like The Black Cat (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934) or The Raven (dir. Lew Landers). Even films that do not fall into the horror genre have used this piece to illustrate sinister characters like Captain Nemo from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (dir. Richard Fleisher, 1954).7 The best proof that something is becoming cliché is its reiterated and effective use for parody. And, in this respect, the Toccata and Fugue in D minor is a prime example, with some hilarious appearances in films like Gremlins 2: The New Batch (dir. Joe Dante, 1990) and the cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants (Season 1, Episode 13: “Scaredy Pants”, 1999). So let’s examine the key to the success of this organ piece.

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The beginning of the Toccata in particular has some musical elements that make it—as I will discuss below—very suited to creating the typical uncanny atmosphere depicted in Gothic fiction. But there are also some cultural elements that connect this work with the Gothic aesthetic. Isabella van Elferen has specifically studied the latter in her article “The Gothic Bach.”8 What are these cultural associations? a) The organ—more specifically the pipe organ—is a musical instrument that fits in very well with Gothic imaginary: its natural habitat is generally made up of vast, cold (often provoking shivers), gloomy, and ultimately impressive spaces, such as churches and cathedrals, and allude directly to the spaces in Gothic novels.9 Actually, it is not only the spaces that hold the organ, but the instrument itself is also very impressive, in part due to its enormous size and the complexity of its mechanisms which connect thousands of pieces to produce its sound. It is precisely the sound production that is the most intriguing aspect about the organ. In the vast majority of cases, one can intuitively understand—at least basically—the relationship between an instrument and the sound it emits, just by watching a musician play it. There is a visual connection between the movements and effort of the performer, and the sound produced. Moreover, the sound originates close to the musician. But this is quite different in regards to the case of the organ. An organist can be seated at the console playing the keys without any apparent physical effort, and a group of pipes begin to sound at a distance. So, what kind of magic allows a distant pipe sound to be so loud by just pressing one ridiculous key? What shadowy power controls something as elusive as the wind to activate the desired pipes?10 All these questions nourish the aura of mystery that surrounds the instrument. Regardless of how the sound is produced, what is certain is that “the immensity of the sound of a pipe organ seems well suited to a horror film’s sense of monumentality, and its desire both to scare and to create larger-than-life characters.”11 And, it is also certain that “the sound of the organ evokes Bach” even to listeners who are less well versed in classical music. To put it into Gothic terms, each time an organ is played, “the spectre of Bach himself is present.”12 b) From a romantic perspective, Bach’s name inspires a sense of eternity. Like a ghostly presence, his shadow is projected through his work: “Bach the undead master haunting generations of musicians.”13 c) Bach himself has developed a certain Gothic identity given his cultural and religious background, which is mostly strange to modern audiences.14 Some of the Lutheran texts referenced by Bach in his cantatas and passions are very explicit in their depictions of blood, flesh, and

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bones. Just like in a gore film.15 In fact, “what baroque theology endorsed as the “healing shock” of sacred tragedy appears as plain shock to audiences who are less familiar with Lutheran devotional practice and the baroque aesthetic of cruelty.”16 Richard Taruskin has approached this issue, which he calls “Bach’s Dark Vision.”17 The author argues that the essential Bach is precisely that of the dark cantatas, the raw texts, and the merciless dissonances: Anyone exposed to Bach’s full range [...] knows that the hearty, genial, lyrical Bach of the concert hall is not the essential Bach. The essential Bach was an avatar of a pre-Enlightened—and when push came to shove, a violently anti-Enlightened—temper. His music was a medium of truth, not beauty. And the truth he served was bitter. His works persuade us—no, reveal to us—that the world is filth and horror, that humans are helpless, that life is pain, that reason is a snare. The sounds Bach combined in church were often anything but agreeable, [...] for Bach’s purpose there was never just to please. If he pleased, it was only to cajole. When his sounds were agreeable, it was only to point out an escape from worldly woe in heavenly submission. Just as often he aimed to torture the ear: when the world was his subject, he wrote music that for sheer deliberate ugliness has perhaps been approached [...] but never equalled. [...] Such music cannot be prettified in performance without essential loss.18

Thus, according to this “dark vision”, Bach is shown as a sort of doomsayer whose message—like a curse—builds upon beliefs not based in reason. Certainly, this seems very Gothic, since the Gothic genre is a manifestation of counter-Enlightenment: it is a return to concepts that the Enlightened movement struggled to remove, a return to a superstitious past, a revival of myths, religious beliefs, and supernatural phenomena, which cannot be explain by Reason. Therefore, the conception of Bach as essentially anti-Enlightened puts him in an aesthetical context shared with the Gothic. d) Bach’s nationality adds another factor to his Gothic side. As van Elferen points out: Bach’s music and person also connote Germany, the country with perhaps the darkest of histories. In popular culture, a certain inherent Gothicism is often attributed to Germany, an association that has evolved from a combination of factors. The German Schauerroman was an important precursor of the Gothic novel [...] The link between Germany and the Gothic was further consolidated in the twentieth century. German expressionism has had a lasting influence on international horror cinema

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[...] Finally, with two wars, an internal separation and a not immediately successful reunification, the events of the twentieth century have completed Germany’s embodiment of Gothic trauma, excess and uncanniness.19

Thus, it can be concluded that “Bach’s Gothic potential is embedded in the simple fact of his German nationality.”20 Even admitting the plausibility of all the arguments listed above, I find them insufficient in establishing why the Toccata and Fugue in D minor— and not any other piece by Bach—has succeeded in acquiring such sinister connotations. If it were accepted that the Gothic Bach is a cultural construction only due to the Gothic connotations of the instrument (the organ), his religion (Lutheran), and his nationality (German), this would lead to the erroneous conclusion that any of Bach’s organ pieces— furthermore, any organ work by any German, Lutheran composer—could be used to generate the spooky feeling that the Toccata does. Indeed, such a generalization would be nonsensical. Could anyone imagine the chorale prelude Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (BWV 645) as the opening credits music for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or Captain Nemo playing Jesus bleibet meine Freude (from cantata BWV 147) in the Nautilus, or horror icons like Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff performing the Piece d’Orgue in G major (BWV 572), without completely losing their aura of mystery? Of course not! Interestingly, Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde still gives us two more excerpts from Bach’s organ catalogue as a musical antithesis to the spooky Toccata.21 The first one occurs at the very beginning of the film. The first few images on screen, immediately following the opening credits, show Dr. Jekyll playing the chorale prelude Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ (BWV 639) on his own organ at home. A remarkable musical contrast is produced, and consequently, a profound change of mood. After the impetuous—almost violent—title credits, the opening shot creates an oddly serene atmosphere. Serene because of the music, and odd as a result of the camera movements and the subjective point of view. Actually, the audience does not see Jekyll but what Jekyll himself sees: the organ tubes, his shadow cast on the sheet music, his hands on the keys... In this way Mamoulian keeps Jekyll’s identity a secret from the audience until his face is finally revealed in the reflection in a mirror. But, in spite of the slight suspense created by the subjective camera work, the music remains peaceful. Jekyll seems relaxed while he is playing the organ. When he is interrupted by Poole, the butler, reminding him of an important appointment, Jekyll becomes upset but retains a friendly tone, saying: “You know, Poole? You’re a nuisance. But I don’t know what I should do

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without you. Your sense of duty is as impregnable as Gibraltar. Even Bach can’t move it.” What it is interesting here is that, in this case, Bach’s music is treated as a paradigm of inner calm—which later in the film contrasts, with Mr. Hyde’s brutality—and a sign of sensitivity and humanity.22 It is also Hyde’s lack of any musical impulse that reflects another symptom of his inhumanity.23 The second occasion that the film employs Bach’s organ music in a different function from the opening Toccata occurs in the scene after Jekyll has been given permission to marry Muriel. Jekyll enters his home absolutely exultant and announces the good news to Poole. He immediately sits at the organ and begins to play some measures of the fugue from Toccata and Fugue in D minor. There is no trace of mystery or Gothic reminiscence, just pure joy. I agree with Neil Lerner when he says that “Jekyll here feeds his romantic impulse with the organ music, allowing himself an unmeasured moment of emotional exuberance.”24 Indeed, the selected music seems well suited for this extroverted moment. It is the last episode of the fugue, before the recapitulation of the toccata, characterised for its great virtuosity and complex counterpoint. A sequential passage leads the music back to the original key, D minor, followed by a coda over the tonic pedal in which the fugue subject (or theme) is stated one last time. A final element breaks the joyful atmosphere, an interrupted cadence, coinciding with an interruption by the butler that brings Jekyll back to his more worrying reality. These two cases demonstrate something expected: even when cultural factors may be prone to the dark side, Bach’s organ music has not always to be necessarily sinister. To put it in medical terms: even if one is genetically predisposed to a pathology, it might not develop. The key then is to uncover which external factors have been crucial to the ultimate result. So, turning to the matter at hand, what extra-musical elements in a film could make a peaceful piece of music turn into an eerie one? Definitively, image has the ability to change the perception—and the meaning—of music. A childish song, for example, can become truly sinister just by adding a disturbing image.25 But the Toccata, as it appears in the opening credits of the film, is not accompanied by any disquieting images—just the characteristic Paramount Pictures Logo and the plain title credits—, and nevertheless its presence is threatening. Thus, if there are no external factors, then internal ones must be at play. If cultural associations cannot fully explain the dark side of this piece, and cinematic (visual) factors do not contribute here, there must be some purely musical elements that testify as to why this, and not another, piece by Bach sounds so sinister. Let’s examine them:

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a) The impressive start, with the impetuous initial trill and the incandescent melodic descending scale that follows. b) The Minor mode, which immediately sets up a serious mood. c) The recurrent minor 2nd motive (fig.11.1).

Fig. 11.1: Minor 2nd motive

The minor 2nd is the interval that better represents the essential duality of tension-resolution in music. So, when insistently repeated, this interval creates a tense atmosphere.26 d) The diminished 7th chord (fig. 11.2).

Fig. 11.2: Diminished 7th chord

The diminished 7th chord is very unstable, provoking great tension. Moreover, it is a chord formed by two superimposed tritones. And, it is also well known that the tritone has historically been called Diabulus in musica, i.e. the devil in music, and prohibited by music theorists due to the strong dissonance that produces.27 e) The mighty orchestration. At the opening credits of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Toccata does not appear in its original organ version, but is cleverly orchestrated. The power of the sound of a full symphonic orchestra is clearly greater—and consequently more impressive—than that

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of a solo organ. On top of this, the brass section is truly outstanding, emphasising the grave tone. All these musical elements, albeit obvious, are the keys to explaining the sinister side of the work. And for this reason it is worth analysing them. Only now, with both cultural and musical elements exposed, we can truly understand why Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor has achieved such a prominent status in horror, thriller and suspense films.

The Elitist Bach As Mervyn Cooke rightly points out, “one of the most common and least creative uses of classical music in film is as an agent for establishing the appropriate period, national or cultural associations.”28 In this section I am particularly interested in the latter. Historically, classical music has been associated with the social, economic or intellectual elite. So, its cinematic use to depict characters that fit within these categories seems obvious. Indeed, this association between classical music and elitism has been widely exploited by film directors and producers. But this has not always been the case. It is not so of the origin of cinema, the silent era. The film industry soon realised that music was an essential element in attracting audiences. Production companies began “to take a keen interest in the nature of the music that might accompany exhibitions of their products”, and consequently “started publishing cue sheets [...] to encourage the selection of appropriate musical numbers from both classical and popular sources to accompany screenings of its films.”29 In his autobiography, Max Winkler, an American pioneer of these publications, confessed: In desperation we turned to crime. We began to dismember the great masters. We began to murder ruthlessly the works of Beethoven, Mozart, Grieg, J. S. Bach, Verdi, Bizet, Tschaikowsky and Wagner—everything that wasn’t protected from our pilfering by copyright. The immortal chorales of J. S. Bach became an “Adagio Lamentoso” (“for sad scenes”).30

Certainly, this use of the classics appears not to have any elitist connotations. Quite simply, classical music provided high quality material at a low cost to act as the soundtrack to silent movies.31 But this situation gradually changed during the sound era, and classical music acquired more complex meanings. For example, “leading film makers of the 1950s, including Fellini, Bergman, Visconti and Buñuel, utilized classical eighteenth-century music as something of a hallmark of quality and a very

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adult maturity.”32 The elitism here is not just applied to the characters in the film, but to the film itself and, hence, to its authors. So, the music of Bach, among other classical composers, may function as a means for distinction, i.e. a recognisable element that serves to discriminate between commercial films and auteur cinema. Intellectual or artistic elitism need not be a bad thing necessarily. I mean elitist attitudes may appear unfriendly, even disagreeable, but not perverse. However, the truth is that elitism is easily associated with evil. The cinema has shown us many evildoers who absolutely love classical music, notably pieces by Bach.33 In particular, their passion for music— actually, for any high-level artistic expression—is proof of their superior intelligence. They belong to an intellectual/cultural elite and, fully aware of their superiority, they apply all their intelligence to obtain what they want, regardless of the harm inflicted on others. The end justifies the means. As with all elitists, they show contempt for those who do not appreciate culture as they do. The film Unbreakable (dir. M. Night Shyamalan, 2000) approaches a typical comic book story of heroes and villains from an original perspective, adapting the characters into a more realistic context than usual, far from the outlandish scenarios of classic superhero movies. The protagonist, David Dunn (played by Bruce Willis), is an ordinary man, so humble that he does not even recognise his extraordinary qualities. On the contrary, the wicked antagonist, a comic book specialist named Elijah Price (played by Samuel L. Jackson), is an extravagant and arrogant character. He uses his supreme intelligence to compensate for—and try to understand—his extreme physical weakness. In a scene from the film, Elijah is at his art gallery showing an original comic drawing to a potential buyer. Immediately after the purchase agreement is reached, the client admits that the drawing is to be a gift for his four-year-old son, Jeb. Elijah then gets mad at him and says: “you must think this is a toy store, cause you’re in here shopping for an infant named Jeb. One of us has made a gross error and wasted the other person’s valuable time…”, and concludes: “This is an art gallery, my friend, and this is a piece of art.” During the entire scene, music can be heard in the background. It is the Allemande from the English Suite in A minor (BWV 807) by Bach. The last scenes of the film also take place at the gallery, where Bach’s music is ever present. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that Bach is Elijah’s favourite composer. And it seems logical to assume that no one who loves Bach would degrade a piece of art to the rank of a mere toy. It is possible that in this case some may agree with Elijah’s angry reaction. Elitism here appears to be fully justified: it is indeed a fair attack against the

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trivialization of art. However, besides being a comic art and Bach lover, Elijah Price ultimately reveals himself as a heartless man, a psychopath able to provoke terrible accidents—and consequently the loss of hundreds of human lives—in order to find a survivor, a superhero immune to disaster (David). Just to prove his theories correct, just to demonstrate his superior intellect, he has killed people—or, like he euphemistically says: “made so many sacrifices.” Although it is not shown in the film, one can easily imagine Elijah planning his terrible attacks seated in his office at the art gallery listening to Bach. The last words of Elijah in the original script by Shyamalan—which were deleted in the final version and therefore do not appear in the film—are absolutely fundamental in the revealing of his extreme and perverse elitism: “There are millions and millions of mediocre people in the world, David. Isn’t it great that we aren’t one of them?”34 Cultural or intellectual elitism may not necessarily entail social or economic elitism. The protagonist in The talented Mr. Ripley (dir. Anthony Minghella, 1999) is a penniless young man who earns his living as a restroom attendant at a New York theatre in the 1950s. Notwithstanding his current low-class status, Tom Ripley (played by Matt Damon) is well mannered and cultivated. When the theatre is empty, he grabs the opportunity to come on stage and play Bach’s Concerto Italiano (BWV 971) on the beautiful grand piano. In truth, Ripley’s social status does not match his intellectual capabilities. Indeed, as the film’s title states, Ripley is a talented boy. Talented in music and in lies. And it is precisely these two talents that allow him to enter the high-class circle of the wealthy Herbert Greenleaf (played by James Redborn) and his wayward son Dickie (played by Jude Law), who spends his time in Italy. Ripley approaches Dickie pretending to be a former Princeton student and a lover of jazz, just as Dickie himself is. Quite soon, Ripley is seduced by his lifestyle, and falls in love with him, but Dickie ultimately rejects him. Ripley, as a jilted lover, attacks Dickie and accidentally kills him. Then, to hide the deed, Ripley impersonates him, which triggers a new spiral of deceit and murder. His cold mind soon deletes any sense of guilt or regret. Quite the contrary, he seems entirely comfortable with his new status—“better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody”, he says at the end of the film. Some time after Dickie’s death, we can see Ripley at what it is supposed to be Dickie’s apartment in Rome. As at the theatre, Ripley plays Bach’s Concerto Italiano, but now at his own grand piano and at his own place. Indeed, it is his own place, not Dickie’s. When Greenleaf’s old friend Freddie Miles (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) enters the apartment, he is immediately suspicious of Ripley. He cannot believe that this could

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be Dickie’s apartment: “Did this place come furnished? It doesn’t look like Dickie. Horrible isn’t it?—so bourgeois”, he says to Ripley, “in fact, the only thing that looks like Dickie is you.” Freddie is completely right— not knowing that his fine insight will cost him his life. There is nothing that is reminiscent of Dickie, not the decoration or the music. Let us pay closer attention to the music. Throughout the film, music plays a key role in defining the personality of the characters. There is a duality between Dickie and Ripley that is represented by the duality between jazz and classical music—namely, Bach. Ripley plays the piano and Dickie, the saxophone.35 In the film, the piano appears to be a cold and mechanical instrument, while the sax is regarded as warm and spontaneous. The associations seem obvious: jazz represents Dickie’s carefree lifestyle, while Bach’s music illustrates Ripley’s cold calculating mind. But there are also some significant social associations. At the beginning of the film, Herbert Greenleaf says: “Dickie’s idea of music is Jazz. He has a saxophone. To my ear Jazz is just noise, just an insolent noise.” It is not difficult to suppose that, to Dickie’s father, jazz music is something vulgar, related to those of a lower class. Thus, to Dickie, jazz is not only a hobby but also a sign of his independence from his father’s constrained mind and life. Despite his social origins, Dickie likes to mingle with common people. In fact, he loves going to bustling nightclubs and interacting with the locals. On the contrary, Ripley prefers the elitist environment of the opera. Certainly, it seems like Ripley is the son that Herbert would have liked to have. Classical music is the best representation of the upper class society that Ripley aspires to belong to. To him, cultural and social status should match. And, certainly thanks to his talent—both musical and criminal—Ripley achieves his objective, albeit at a very high price: utter solitude. One of the most emblematic cases of intellectual and cultural elitism is that of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the infamous character from the novels by Thomas Harris who has been brought to the screen several times. What Lecter most detests is a lack of good taste, and mediocrity.36 The latter may, in fact, have fatal consequences. At the beginning of Red Dragon (dir. Brett Ratner, 2002) a flutist is killed—and eaten—by Lecter (played by Anthony Hopkins) for his awful performance at a concert. An extreme measure indeed. But, what makes Dr. Lecter a singular case is the fact that he is not just limited to murder but he aims to do something artistic with his victims: from a sophisticated culinary dish—like in the case of the poor flautist—to a complex and provocative Installation Art piece—like the crucified policeman in The Silence of the Lambs (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1991). And he certainly appears to enjoy the entire process. As Thomas

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Fahy argues, Hannibal Lecter is an “aesthete serial killer […] whose savagery is inextricably linked with high culture.”37 In fact, he represents a major antithesis to Matthew Arnold’s idea that culture gives us our humanity.38 But, how is it possible that culture does not humanize us? On this matter, George Steiner argued: Unlike Matthew Arnold [...] I find myself unable to asset confidently that the humanities humanize. Indeed, I would go further: it is at least conceivable that the focusing of consciousness on a written text [...] diminishes the sharpness and readiness of our actual moral response. Because we are trained to give psychological and moral credence to the imaginary [...] we may find it more difficult to identify with the real world [...] The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in [a] poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in [a] novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room. Thus there may be a covert, betraying link between the cultivation of aesthetic response and the potential of personal inhumanity.39

Undoubtedly, this thesis could explain the case of Hannibal Lecter. Dr Lecter’s high culture is expressed by his good manners and his love of art. Throughout all of the Hannibal Lecter films—with the exception of Manhunter—there are many occasions where we see him enjoying classical music, mostly music by Bach. But among them, without a doubt, there is a particularly shocking scene in The Silence of the Lambs. While listening to Goldberg Variations, Lecter kills and mutilates two police officers to escape from prison. This scene simultaneously shows Lecter’s fine education and brutal nature. In fact, as Fahy rightly points out: “this is the only moment [...] where the audience witnesses Lecter’s physical violence. Our assumptions about civility are shattered as Lecter casts aside his gentlemanly pose and becomes a monstrous killer.”40 Elijah Price, Tom Ripley, and Hannibal Lecter are elitists and criminals—and all adore Bach—but the results of their acts, albeit horrible, are quantitatively limited. There is, however, a type of elitism whose consequences are absolutely devastating. In fact, when taken to the extreme, socioeconomic elitism is probably the most pernicious, since it ultimately results in class discrimination and oppression. Aristocracy versus people, upper class versus middle and low classes, First versus Third World, in short, the rich versus the poor. The amount of injustice, misery, hunger, disease, and death caused by class struggle is incalculable. History is repeated over and over again: a group of humans—although a minority, very powerful—dominate an entire society (even the world) by

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oppressing and depriving the rest of their rights. There is no one villain here—such as Elijah, Ripley or Lecter—but a group of people who exert evil upon others. Sometimes, the oppressed rebel against their oppressors. Sometimes, they are even victorious. And sometimes, the formerly oppressed then become the new oppressors. It is certainly a grim landscape, but class conflict has always existed and, probably, always will. It appears to be part of human nature. This is why so many futuristic films base their plots in a class-warfare context, such as Elysium and Snowpiercer. And in both films, Bach’s music serves to function as a distinguishing mark of the ruling class. Elysium (dir. Neill Blomkamp, 2013) sets its action in a future where the Earth is diseased, polluted and vastly overpopulated. The wealthiest inhabitants have fled the planet to preserve their way of life on a hi-tech space station named Elysium. In contrast to the ruined Earth, Elysium is a clean and beautiful place with all the comforts imaginable, but principally, with the technology to heal any disease or damage. Evidently, only Elysium citizens have the privilege to use it. Any citizen of Earth who intends to enter the station will be arrested, or even killed. Because of such perverse class discrimination, a rebellion starts, and finally all citizens will be equal. Besides the evident visible differences between the Earth and Elysium, there are some invisible differences, but nonetheless interesting. I am referring to the soundscape. While the Earth is unpleasantly noisy, Elysium is a symphony to the ears. The luxury of its buildings, the beauty of its gardens, and the elegance of its citizens all fit with the relaxing and quiet sound atmosphere, composed by a mild breeze and light birdsong... and one more thing: Bach of course. The scene where the full splendour of Elysium is first shown in detail is accompanied by the Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No.1 in G major (BWV 1007). In a non-diegetic manner, Bach’s music functions empathetically with the environment and, moreover, adds another element to illustrate the fancy and elitist lifestyle of Elysium citizens. Though narratively and aesthetically different to Elysium, the film Snowpiercer (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2013) shares the vision of a dystopian world divided into two social classes. In this case, Earth has been devastated by a failed scientific experiment that has frozen the entire planet. All life has been destroyed, except for the group of people aboard the Snowpiercer, a super high-tech and self-sufficient train that travels around the globe without stopping. For the last seventeen years, the survivors have developed a new society with its own economy and class system. Lower-class citizens are in the overcrowded wagons at the back, living in squalor and prohibited to enter the rest of the train. Like Elysium,

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a group of oppressed people starts a rebellion, determined to reach the front wagon. As they move forward, the contents and occupants of each section of the train are revealed. There is a particular wagon that clearly marks the separation between the low and high classes. Upon entering, the rebels are astonished to discover a precious greenhouse full of plants, flowers, and fruits. The visual contrast with the preceding sections of the train is drastic. Accordingly, beautiful music can be heard: it is Bach’s Goldberg Variations in a harpsichord version. Once again, Bach’s music works with the image to describe an exclusive and elitist world, unreachable for the majority.

Bach in Auschwitz I have left a complex and sensitive subject to end on: the relationship between Bach’s music and the society that committed the Holocaust atrocities, and how this has been portrayed in the films. The link between high culture and genocide is a thorny issue, one that has been discussed by many writers and philosophers. Here, Bach appears to be the representative of that high culture—or better said: what Nazis regarded as high culture and that, in a captious and perverse manner, ascribed to the Aryan race. In 1939, the German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels planned the making of the definitive anti-Semitic film, which he himself qualified as “a masterpiece of propaganda.”41 Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew, dir. Fritz Hippler, 1940) was the result: a shameful documentary whose ultimate purpose was “to prepare viewers for the Final Solution, [...] [to] turn honest citizens into indulgent mass murderers”,42 by depicting Jews as filthy, deceitful, corrupt, degenerate, and greedy for power. In a scene from the film, where many artworks are on display—not only German art, but also Greek and Roman sculptures, and Italian Renaissance paintings—the narrator states: Jews are most dangerous when they meddle in a people’s culture, religion and art, and pass judgement on it. The Nordic concept of beauty is completely incomprehensible to the Jew and always will be. The rootless Jew has no feeling for the purity and neatness of the German idea of art. What he calls art must titillate his degenerate nerves. A smell of fungus and disease must pervade it; art must be unnatural, grotesque, perverted, or pathological.43

Curiously, the most recognisable German artwork in this scene cannot be seen but is heard: it is Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor.

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For this part of the article, I have borrowed the title of another film documentary, which is the polar opposite of Der Ewige Jude. As a matter of fact, Bach in Auschwitz is the English title of the French-Belgian-Dutch co-production La chaconne d’Auschwitz (dir. Michel Daeron, 1999), which tells the story of the women’s orchestra in Auschwitz through the testimony of twelve female survivors of the concentration camp. Two of these women, “Zosia and Helena [...] literally return to Auschwitz. There, surrounded by silence, Zosia describes how terrible it was to play during selections, deceiving the prisoners with reassuring music.”44 In fact, this was the orchestra’s purpose. For the Nazis, “the music simply rendered the prisoners more manageable until they were selected for the gas chamber.”45 A cinematic example illustrating such a perverse use of music can be found in the Polish film PasaĪerka (Passenger, dir. Andrzej Munk and Witold Lesiewicz, 1963). A scene shows all the occupants of a concentration camp (both Nazis and Jews) at the entrance door, waiting for the arrival of a train carrying more prisoners. Meanwhile, an orchestra—in this instance made up of male prisoners—plays Adagio from Bach’s Violin Concert in E major (BWV 1042). Sylvia Levine Ginsparg affirms that “Bach in Auschwitz, as a film title, is actually an oxymoron. It combines a representation of the highest level of human culture with that which is most debased.”46 But, is it really an oxymoron? The answer is yes if we think that high culture is—or at least must be—incompatible with inhumanity. But, if that were the case, how could what has been called “the Schindler’s List problem”47 be explained? Both in La chaconne d’Auschwitz and PasaĪerka, those playing the music were the victims. But in Schindler’s List there is one scene where an SS soldier plays the piano at an apartment in the Krakow ghetto, while his comrades are shooting Jews hidden in the building. When the music is heard, two of the comrades enter the room and begin a discussion: “Was ist das? Ist das Bach?”, one asks; “Nein. Mozart”, the other answers. The soldier is actually playing Bach’s English Suite in A minor (BWV 807). The most disturbing thing in this scene—“the Schindler’s List problem”—is the coincidence of two antagonistic concepts: the good with the evil, the beautiful with the ugly, exemplified at the same time in the same person (the SS soldier). It is then that the oxymoron exists. But, let us observe it more carefully. Surely we all consider Nazis and their acts as evil, but are they or their acts ugly? We may agree that Bach’s music is beautiful, but is it good? The problem is that we often use the same language to make both ethical and aesthetical judgments. But, we should not. Something beautiful does not have to be good; something evil does not have to be ugly. So, the real problem, as

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Peter Kivy rightly points out, is that ‘we do want to be told—want to believe—that great music such as that of Bach, Mozart, and Chopin has power for the good.’48 But, what is certain is that the ‘love of Bach does not engender love of humanity, or of the good. Or, put another way, the music of Bach is not a moral force in the world.’49 Therefore, finally the title “Bach in Auschwitz”, is not an oxymoron, because the two implied parts cannot be judged in the same terms. The piano scene from Schindler’s List has been marked by Michael André Bernstein as a “clumsy literalization of George Steiner’s meditations on Nazism.”50 Maybe due to this alleged clumsiness, some have noticed only the irony of the scene. For instance, Cooke points out: “it is the singular inability of the soldier’s comrades to identify the composer [...] that creates an ironic conjunction of sophistication and brute ignorance.”51 However, I do not really think that that is the point. Even if the comrades cannot specify whether it is Mozart or Bach, the soldier playing the piano can obviously differentiate between the two. In any case, it does not seem to me that this is “brute ignorance.” This type of argument is, in fact, an oversimplification—probably for our mind’s sake—to try to justify the disturbing coincidence of high culture and brutality. Nevertheless, Steiner prevents us from this erroneous thinking: “We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant.”52 Thus, regardless of whether the piano scene is clumsy or not, the certainty is that there is no irony possible. But then, if there is no oxymoron, nor irony, what is there? Notwithstanding his anti-Enlightened vision of Bach, even Taruskin admits that “the Enlightened, secularized view of Bach is the one advanced by most modern scholarship.”53 So, it could be said that Bach is a metonymy of the age of Reason, and his music a metonymy of enlightened thinking. A thinking that, as Horkheimer and Adorno had observed in 1944, “contains the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today.” So, it is the Enlightenment itself that if it “does not assimilate reflection on this regressive moment, it seals its own fate,” namely, self-destruction.54 That is indeed the context where “the Schindler’s List problem” must be understood. So, “Bach in Auschwitz” is not an oxymoron, nor an irony, since Bach is a metonymy of an intellectual movement—Enlightenment—whose failure led to the Holocaust.

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And finally, the Beautiful Bach The main conclusion of this article is that no general conclusions can be established about how Bach’s music has been—and will continue to be—used by films whose purpose is to illustrate evil. Several cinematic examples have been discussed to conclude that there are no formulae. Indeed, the point is that it is not as simple as “playing a chorale for sad scenes” or “playing the Toccata in D minor for mystery scenes”—like the antiquated and scantly imaginative musical cues for silent films. On the contrary, it is quite complex. And, with complex, I do not mean difficult for us to understand how a particular piece by Bach operates within a particular scene or film, but being polyhedral in the nature of the relationship between this particular piece and this particular scene. In some cases, Bach’s music adds a new meaning to the image—like the Toccata in the opening credits of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In other cases, it simply cooperates with the meaning of the image, without adding anything new—like the decorative musical pieces in Elysium or Snowpiercer. And finally, there are those cases where Bach’s music provides a contrary—or apparently contrary—meaning to the image—like in Hannibal Lecter’s escape scene in The Silence of the Lambs or the piano scene from Schindler’s List. Thus, the only general conclusion possible is—as we already suspected—that the music by J. S. Bach has an extraordinary ability to adapt itself to any cinematic situation, even when the characters or the film’s contexts are evil. But, there is nothing inherently perverse in Bach’s music. We are the ones who have assigned many different—and at times, even contradictory—meanings to it. And cinema, not exclusively, but largely, has been responsible for these new associations. So, the reader can put their mind at ease: Bach is not evil, nor induces anyone to be evil. We can safely listen to him. After all, it is not Bach’s fault that evildoers also like his music... Well, actually it is. It is his fault for having composed music so good... I mean, so beautiful.

References Bernstein, Michael André. “The Schindler's List Effect”, The American Scholar, 63 (1994): 429-432. Brown, Julie. “Carnival of Souls and the Organs of Horror.” In Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear, edited by Neil Lerner, 1-20. New York and London: Routledge, 2010.

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Cooke, Mervyn. A History of Film Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Fahy, Thomas. “Killer Culture: Classical Music and the Art of Killing in Silence of the Lambs and Se7en”, The Journal of Popular Culture, 37:1 (2003): 28-42. Ginsparg, Sylvia Levine. Never Again: Echoes of the Holocaust As Understood Through Film. Xlibris Corporation, 2010). Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Hornshøj-Møller, Stig and Culbert, David. “‘Der Ewige Jude’ (1940): Joseph Goebbels' unequalled monument to anti-Semitism”, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 12:1 (1992): 41-67. Insdorf, Annette. Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Kivy, Peter. Antithetical arts: on the ancient quarrel between literature and music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Lack, Russell. Twenty Four Frames Under. London: Quartet Books, 1997. Lerner, Neil. “The Strange Case of Rouben Mamoulian’s Sound Stew: The Uncanny Soundtrack in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931).” In Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear, edited by Neil Lerner, 55-79. New York and London: Routledge, 2010. Loewy, Erich H. “The Role of Reason, Emotion, and Aesthetics in Making Ethical Judgments.” In The Health Care Professional as Friend and Healer: Building on the Work of Edmund D. Pellegrino, edited by David C. Thomasma and Judith Lee Kissell, 210-226. Washington: Georgetown University Press. Moskowitz, Clara. “If Aliens Exist, They Will Probably Love Bach”, Space.com (August 14, 2010). http://www.space.com/8951-aliensexist-love-bach.html Steiner, George. Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman. New York: Atheneum, 1967. Taruskin, Richard. “Facing Up, Finally, to Bach’s Dark Vision.” In Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance, 307-315. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Van Elferen, Isabella. “The Gothic Bach”, Understanding Bach, 7 (2012): 9-20. Winkler, Max. A Penny from Heaven. New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts, 1951.

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Notes * This chapter has been written thanks to a Research Scholarship from Spain’s Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports. (Programa FPU del Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte de España). 1 Mervyn Cooke says that Bach’s “music is the most inherently abstract in conception of any classical style to have featured prominently in the movies, and thus perhaps the most susceptible to contrasting interpretations.” See: Cooke, A History of Film Music, 448. 2 The dilemma about the sainthood of non-Catholics has occasionally been discussed. In 1998 the Ecumenical Commission of the Central Committee of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000 sent a letter to the National Committees entitled “The Holy Spirit and the Ecumenism”. Item number 5.3, titled “Communion of Saints”, reads as follows: All Christians agree that the Holy Spirit is the sanctifying spirit. In many places Christians have acknowledged in their midst martyrs and exemplary confessors of faith, hope and charity - both men and women. Some of these, such as Francis of Assisi, Roublev, Johann Sebastian Bach, Monsignor Romero, Elizabeth Seton, the martyr Anuarite of Zaire, and Martin Luther King, have been for various reasons recognised beyond confessional boundaries. Ecumenical groups could look at the example of some of these witnesses with a view to identifying how the work of the Holy Spirit can be distinguished in them and what their role might be in the promotion of full communion. The whole document can be read at: http://www.vatican.va/jubilee_2000/magazine/documents/ju_mag_01091997_p49_en.html 3 This question has not only been addressed by cinema. Some scientists have discussed the possibility of making contact with intelligent aliens, and concluded that, in most cases, “they might be more interested in learning about Van Gogh and Bach than Einstein or Newton.” See: Moskowitz, “If Aliens Exist, They Will Probably Love Bach”, Space.com (August 14, 2010), available at: http://www.space.com/8951-aliens-exist-love-bach.html 4 Some scholars have denied that this is actually a Bach’s work. Nevertheless, the discussion about the authorship of the piece is not relevant here. From a reception point of view, it is unquestionably ascribed to J. S. Bach. 5 There is a large list of films and TV series featuring this piece. The list can be easily accessed on the Internet Movie Database website (www.imdb.com). 6 Actually, it’s not only this piece, but organ music itself that is strongly linked to horror films. This has been addressed in Brown, “Carnival of Souls…”, 1-20. 7 More precisely, it is Jules Verne's 1870 novel by the same name that inspired this film, where the “idea of making the organist an eccentric, dangerous genius probably originates”. See: Brown, “Carnival of Souls…, 5-6. 8 Van Elferen, “The Gothic Bach”, 9-20. 9 Brown, “Carnival of Souls…”, 5.

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10 It is enchanting that the heart of the organ, called a wind chest—that is, the box on which the pipes sit and from which the compressed air (the wind) is admitted into them—is called secreto in Spanish (literally, “secret” in English). A very poetic word indeed for a very fascinating and intriguing device. 11 Ibid., 5. 12 Van Elferen, “The Gothic Bach”, 11. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 12. 15 This may appear to be an exaggerated comparison, but a film like The Passion of the Christ (dir. Mel Gibson, 2004) has shown the extent to which Christian narrative and gore aesthetics, characteristic of the splatter subgenre, can be combined. Yet far from being outraged, the Catholic Church hierarchy reacted very positively to the film. 16 Ibid., 12. 17 Taruskin, “Facing Up, Finally, to Bach’s Dark Vision”, 307-315. 18 Ibid., 310. 19 Van Elferen, “The Gothic Bach”, 12-13. 20 Ibid., 13. 21 For an overview of the music used in this film see: Lerner, “The Strange Case of Rouben Mamoulian’s Sound Stew”, 55-79. 22 Van Elferen, “The Gothic Bach”, 10. 23 Lerner, “The Strange Case of…”, 59. 24 Ibid., 64. 25 Many examples spring to mind, such as the naive skipping rope song from A Nightmare on Elm Street (dir. Wes Craven, 1984) announcing Freddy Krueger's arrival, or the funny ditty (“Naughty little fly, why does it cry? Caught in a web! Soon you'll be...eaten.”) sung by Smeagol/Gollum while poor Frodo is stuck in Shelob's web in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (dir. Peter Jackson, 2003). 26 For instance, this is the case of the celebrated main theme music from Jaws (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1975) composed by John Williams, and also of the second piece from Musica Ricercata by György Ligeti, used in the film Eyes Wide Shut (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1999). 27 This diabolic quality has been widely exploited in cinema. In L'assassinat du duc de Guise (dir. André Calmette and Charles Le Bargy, 1908)—one of the first original film scores in history—the music composed by Camille Saint-Saëns for the central scene (the Duke's assassination) is based on the tritone. Another example is the famous initial motive of the main theme from Cape Fear (dir. J. Lee Thompson, 1964) composed by Bernard Herrmann, which is also based on the tritone. 28 Cooke, A History of Film Music, 437. 29 Ibid., 15. 30 Winkler, A Penny from Heaven, 237.

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31 Actually, these days classical music continues to be a major source of inexpensive soundtracks for producers who cannot afford to hire a competent musical composer, nor to pay for the copyright for the use of some modern music. 32 Lack, Twenty Four Frames Under, 298. 33 The film Dogboys (dir. Ken Russell, 1998) tells the story of a secret society formed by prison guards who use prison dogs to hunt down escapee inmates as a sport. One of these dogboys listens to Bach on his Walkman while hunting. The director of the film commented on this issue: “as every filmgoer knows, if a character plays classical music in movieland, he is inherently evil and beyond redemption [...] So I supposed the baddie's love of Bach was just a cinematic cliché, a sort of last straw at an attempt at characterisation.” Quoted from: Cooke, A History of Film Music, 439. 34 The whole script is available at: http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Unbreakable.html 35 Obviously, the piano is also used in jazz, and the saxophone—less frequently— in classical music, but in these cases, the piano assumes the role of the classical instrument and the sax represents modern music, like jazz. 36 When FBI cadet Clarice Starling first meets Dr. Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1991), he initially treats her with respect, but shortly afterwards he launches a violent verbal attack on her: “Do you know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube. A well-scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste [...] But you’re not more than one generation from poor white trash.” Despite her questionable taste and her poor origins, Clarice is not mediocre, and this saves her from becoming another of Lecter's victim (“I have no plans to call on you, Clarice, the world being more interesting with you in it”, Hannibal says to her once he has escaped from prison). However, Dr. Chilton, the arrogant and incompetent director of the sanatorium where Lecter is jailed, will suffer quite a different fate at the hands of his famous prisoner. Mediocrity is unforgivable. 37 Fahy, “Killer Culture…”, 30. 38 Ibid., 29-30. 39 Steiner, Language and Silence, 51. 40 Fahy, “Killer Culture…”, 31. 41 Hornshøj-Møller and Culbert, “Der Ewige Jude (1940)”, 41. 42 Ibid. 43 Translation taken from Hornshøj-Møller and Culbert, “Der Ewige Jude (1940)”, 63. 44 Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, 303. 45 Ginsparg, Never Again: Echoes of the Holocaust, 52. 46 Ibid. 47 See: Loewy, “The Role of Reason…”, 220. 48 Kivy, Antithetical arts…, 218. 49 Ibid., 216. 50 Bernstein, “The Schindler's List Effect”, 430. 51 Cooke, A History of Film Music, 448.

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Steiner, Language and Silence…, ix. Taruskin, “Facing Up, Finally, to Bach’s Dark Vision”, 309. 54 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xvi. 53

CHAPTER TWELVE RESOUNDED AND INVERTED: MUSICAL WORLD OF STANLEY KUBRICK MARIYA GAYDUK N. RIMSKY-KORSAKOV MEMORIAL MUSEUM

Over the 100 years of cinema’s existence, film music has come a long way from pianists’ improvisations and sheet music collections of the era of “silent film”, where simple musical pieces “for all occasions” were used as an accompaniment, to exceptional examples created by professional musicians and eminent composers. Many techniques of film music which have become classics originated in the early 20th century, in the era of the formation of cinema, when there was an almost complete absence of synchronous sound, and speech only increased the value of the musical accompaniment of the film. Today, film music as part of modern art has access to the widest possible audience. Currently the enormous gap between music accessible to a wide audience and so-called elitist music, which is often interesting mainly to professionals, has been reduced by film, being one of the few ways to apply music equally to various categories of people. The role of music in film is difficult to overestimate. Music is one of the most important tools through which the author conveys the idea of his film to the audience, and each director reveals the possibilities of music in the context of the frame in his/her own way. The object of study in this chapter is the role of music in the films of Stanley Kubrick and the principles of interaction between music and the frame in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and The Shining (1980). The choice of these Kubrick films is due not only to their artistic value, but primarily to the fact that the director makes the composition of his cinematic intentions known through classic works of Bartók, Khachaturian, Richard Strauss, and outstanding composers of the second avant-garde epoch: Penderecki and Ligeti. Moreover, Kubrick chooses a

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very special way to organize the interaction of visual and musical levels in the holistic concept of the film. Although the literature on Kubrick is very extensive (most importantly, monographs by John Baxter and James Naremore), there are only a few articles on the role of music in his films. Among them is the article by D.W. Patterson “Music, Structure and Metaphor in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odysseyand V. Sbravatti’s The Music in the ‘Shining’.” The article of Patterson is about semantic functions of music in the context of the idea of the film, and the symbolism of the director's interpretation of the main musical themes. The article of Sbravatti focuses on a detailed description of the musical material constituting the film soundtrack. This article also contains working sketches by Kubrick and Steynfort for the musical installation of The Shining. Among Russian research, the work of the Moscow musicologist Uvarov stands out, containing valuable observations on the question of the cooperation of music and visuals in Kubrick’s films. Finally, the works by Karganova, Frolov, and Z. Lissa, devoted to the general problems of film music, should be noted. Questions of the subtle semantic interaction of music and video frames, the suggestive influence of the ways of audiovisual synthesis on the perception of film viewers, and the dialogue between music and visual series in the development of the higher idea of the film in its philosophical and psychological aspects are most important in the context of Kubrick’s directorial approach. Moreover, when researching Kubrick, it becomes clear that the music in Kubrick’s films is often equivalent to the frame, and sometimes comes to the foreground. However, to achieve such a strong expressive effect, this approach sometimes totally changes the original intent of the composer. Using musical compositions as paint, Kubrick mixes and interchanges, expanding the music and vice versa, concentrating images inherent in music that make the frame convex and three-dimensional. Kubrick comes to his own understanding of the function and specificity of film music during the process of working on Space Odyssey. The film 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick has a special place in the history of cinema. In the film, Kubrick doesn’t hesitate to connect cinema, as one the most popular genres of entertainment, with music for the “elite” —not only being academic music, but concentrated intellectual and ultramodern music simultaneously. Even taking into account the creations in this area by Eisenstein and Prokofiev (Alexander Nevsky, 1938), Kozintsev and Shostakovich (Hamlet, 1964), Andrei Tarkovsky and Vladimir Ovchinnikov (Ivan's Childhood, 1962; Andrei Rublev, 1966), Andrei Tarkovsky and E. Artemyev (Solaris, 1972; Stalker, 1979), and F.

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Fellini and Nino Rota (Orchestra Rehearsal, 1978; Road, 1954), it should be noted that in Space Odyssey, for the first time in a film of such a mass character, designed for the widest possible audience, there was such a specific musical content, designed for a very narrow circle of specialists, and that moreover this music appeared in such an innovative context. This film became a landmark for Kubrick. Following the Odyssey, Kubrick uses classical and modern music in his films, perceiving it not as an untouchable monument, but as material with huge potential. Kubrick's idea to make a film about space appeared in the mid-1950s, at that time when he became interested in science fiction. At the heart of the Odyssey are works of the famous science fiction writer Arthur Clarke. Kubrick worked a lot and tried many options before the film gained the “voice” it has today. However, before looking for suitable material for the soundtrack to The Odyssey among classical and contemporary musical heritage, Kubrick turned to Alex North, composer of many famous Hollywood films of that time. North wrote the music for Space Odyssey with unprecedented passion and speed, but when the work was already two-thirds ready, Kubrick decided to refuse North’s music. Subsequently, film critics have included this score in an informal list of the ten most significant untapped scores in the history of cinema. At the same time Kubrick researched already the existing “ready” musical compositions. As possible musical pieces for scoring scenes of weightlessness in space, Kubrick considered waltzes by Frederic Chopin and fragments of a Midsummer Night's Dream by Felix Mendelssohn, and as the sound of the episode Stargate (Episode of Flight) he considered (Sinfonia Antarctica) by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Kubrick even appealed to Carl Orff to write the music for the Odyssey, but due to his old age the composer refused. As a result, the final version of the film included: Atmosphere by Ligeti, the waltz On the Beautiful Blue Danube by Johann Strauss, the opening fragment from the symphonic poem Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, and the Adagio from the ballet Gayane by Aram Khachaturian. The use of Ligeti’s music in the film is associated with scandal: Ligeti sued Kubrick and MGM for illegal use of Atmosphere in the film without the author’s consent. As a result, the conflict was settled out of court. The director pleaded guilty and paid a symbolic fine to Ligeti. Subsequently, the relationship between Kubrick and Ligeti changed. Ligeti appreciated the talent of the director and a decade later gave him permission to use excerpts from Lontano for the movie The Shining and piano compositions for the film Eyes Wide Shut.

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In the Odyssey, Kubrick gives the music the utmost importance—on a par with the visual line. Using minimal resources, he forces the viewer to focus on separate elements pushed forward from the whole. He is trying and experimenting by disabling at first one layer and then the others. Thus, in the film we find pictures without music, and music without visuals. In the first case, Kubrick makes silence act and have sound. As in Bergman’s films, silence in Kubrick's film is not just the absence of music or any offscreen noise. Kubrick's silence really sounds. Sometimes it affects the viewer no less than the bright expressive themes of Strauss or Ligeti. Characteristically, in the middle of the last century, silence, as an integral part of sound space, attracted special attention from directors (Hitchcock, Bergman, Tarkovsky) and composers (Cage, Ligeti, Penderecki). They perceived silence not simply as the absence of sound effects, but as a strong (sometimes emotionally-tinted) means of expression as an important part of dramatic development. Thus, in Ligeti’s Atmosphere, which Kubrick took for Odyssey, the composer sometimes uses sonority and sonor, which are beyond human perception. The last part of Atmosphere (bars 76-110) serves as an epilogue, and gradually goes to pppp. Even when everything is seemingly over, the composer urges us to listen to silence, and writes in the end of the score that there are three pause bars. At this point, we are listening to the ghostly sonority that is left after the just sounded piece, and we are still listening to our own impressions. This gentle treatment with sound can be heard at the very beginning of the film, and the very principle of treatment with expressive possibilities of silence goes throughout the film. Music in Kubrick's Odyssey is woven into the narrative of the film, and when the director “disconnects” the visual range, it becomes the only active forceful frame, a single narrative line. Bright examples are symmetrical episodes of the framing picture: Overture, where on the black screen in a completely dark cinema hall, out of nowhere, gradually invades the sound of Ligeti’s Atmosphere, and the final episode after the titles, where once again against the dark screen in a dark cinema hall sounds Strauss’s waltz On the Beautiful Blue Danube as a symbol of the presence of man in the universe, who overcame the great way of evolution, and reached the status of a new, higher intelligence. The appearance of Ligeti’s Atmosphere as a big holistic musical prologue in the film in fact exposes one of two main musical themes of the Odyssey. This prologue is vitally connected with the body of the film and has a philosophical reflection in the musical epilogue of film. The special structure of the film (prologue, epilogue, film chapters with titles) and the special existence of music in this film lets us draw an analogy between the

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“Odyssey” and two other movies that are close to it: Solaris by Tarkovsky and Melancholia by Trier. Solaris was created in 1972, a few years after The Odyssey. Odyssey and Solaris, in spite of their independent artistic value, have many similarities, including at the musical level. A bright piece of music in each film is chosen to reflect the nature of alien life. This piece of music is played in full (or almost in full) at least couple of times throughout the film. But in contradistinction to Tarkovsky or Trier, Kubrick uses with the already mentioned Atmosphere and other musical themes as the characteristics of the monolith, movement in space, the sound of space and others. Tarkovsky, in his film, chooses the way of monothematicism. In Solaris, except for the occasional use of a separate strained sonor, there is only one bright musical theme—J. S. Bach’s Chorale Prelude in f-moll (BWF 639), which, as in the Odyssey, appears in the beginning of the film as a musical prologue, and in the most significant points and dramatic moments in the development process. It then appears at the end as an epilogue. Although the Chorale Prelude serves as a philosophical commentary, it does not merge with the plot of film, and does not influence the frame as much as in the Odyssey. Melancholia (2011) is a modern movie and is close to Solaris in the structure of its musical line, which is based on the principle of monothematicism: it has a great musical prologue and epilogue based on the musical material Tristan and Isolde by Wagner. As in the Odyssey, the rhythm of Wagner’s music is connected to the visual line, and affects our perception: the viscous leisurely development of Wagner’s music is fully consistent with the slow motion at the beginning of the film. Thanks to the epic development of Wagner’s music film, the frames in Trier’s Melancholia also become a part of an epos. In the Odyssey, dialogue is assigned to only one-third of the film (speech appears only in the 25th minute, and the final 25 minutes of the film are also deprived of words). Viewers’ perception of the film change in connection with this. Kubrick believed that film, like music, should reach the viewer on an unconscious level, and give the right to the viewer's own subjective experience. Comparing the Odyssey, in particular, with the symphonies of Beethoven, the director stressed the importance of motives and symbols present in the film, as well as their development and the impact on the viewer's subconscious. He tried to avoid the only possible interpretation of what is happening: “You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film–and such speculation is one indication that is has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level—but I don’t want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001

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that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he’s missed the point.”1 The most striking and innovative in this regard is the Episode of the Flight (Stargate), which appears in the last chapter of Space Odyssey. Kubrick creates his own vision of space and overcoming of space with great speed by using the music of Ligeti in collaboration with a surreal sequence of frames. Ligeti’s Atmosphere in this episode sounds from beginning to end and is uncut. The changes affected only the finale of Atmosphere. In this film chapter the sound of the initial bars of Atmosphere is overlaid by musical montage on the concluding silence bars of this musical piece. It creates a new reprise in addition to those already available in the reprise of Ligeti (probably this interpretation of Atmosphere caused the composer’s greatest indignation and forced him to go to court due to copyright infringement). Words are completely absent in this episode, and the visual content is derived from the music. The three-part form, which can be traced in Atmosphere, and the change of sections, are reflected in the visual line with the same boundaries of the sections in general terms. The extraordinary importance of texture and rhythm in this piece of music is noteworthy. The rhythm is picked up by the rhythm of the frame. The breath of music is turned into the breath of video. Changes in these two measurements often define the shape. Kubrick aspires to subordinate the detailed development of the visual line to musical content: the video responds to all the significant events of the score and almost every new episode of Ligeti’s piece described in the film by principled change of image and visual texture. Among the films of Kubrick where music plays an important role in the deployment of film narrative and assumes functions associated with broadcasting the basic idea of the film, we should highlight the film The Shining. This is a horror film. It was created in 1980 and became a second bright example of the Kubrick’s appeal to sonorism. The interaction of music and image in The Shining is subject to the same principles as in the Space Odyssey: with the exception two original compositions specifically written for the film by composers Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind, most of the soundtrack for The Shining is made up of “ready” pieces of music carefully selected by Kubrick from works of modern classical music. The Shining includes fragments of Lontano by György Ligeti, Utrenja, Przebudzenie Jakuba, De Natura Sonoris ʋ 1 and ʋ 2, Canon for 52 strings and tape, and Polymorphia by Krzysztof Penderecki, and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta by Béla Bartók. The sonoristic techniques that can be heard in these works not

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only emotionally color the frame and create a specific density, tension and intensity of the atmosphere, but also make it possible to manage the viewer’s perception, and sometimes radically change the impression of quite harmless (at first glance) frames. Work on the musical content of the film began after the end of filming and montage, but during filming Kubrick always played the musical material on the film set that entered in the final version of the soundtrack of the film in order to create the necessary atmosphere and emotional state. Basing his film on knowledge of the characteristics of human nature and the human psyche, Kubrick skillfully manipulates the viewer's perception through music. Of the whole soundtrack to The Shining, the music of Penderecki and Ligeti most contributed to the implementation of Kubrick’s intention regarding the audio line. Typical of most sonoristic pieces, the music used in The Shining is mostly devoid of a themed beginning, but instead of this it has a bright, “live” texture. These pieces of music act along with the picture: like a piece of litmus paper, the music shows the feelings and fears of the characters to such an extent that we almost can “touch” their horror, fear, anger and despair. Of course, the music of this film is not a carrier of the deployed philosophical ideas (especially compared with The Odyssey). The objective of the music in The Shining is not so much a philosophical narrative as the narrative for the subconscious mind and focused on the psyche. In turn, this was a key topic of many sonoristic pieces in the 1960s–1970s, including music by Ligeti and Penderecki. Unlike the works of Ligeti, which first met before in the legacy of Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey), the music of Penderecki was used by the director for the first time. Interestingly, part of the works of Penderecki—Polymorphia and Canon, which were chosen by Kubrick for Shining, had already been used six years before in the William Friedkin film The Exorcist (1973), also in the horror genre. Besides sonoristic compositions, the film soundtrack includes two musical elements: the Midnight song and the theme of the medieval sequence Dies Irae, performed in The Shining as a kind of overture (like Atmosphere in the Space Odyssey). It is curious that this theme also opens another Kubrick movie–A Clockwork Orange (1971). In fact, both films pose the problems of “evil”, “death” and “time”: the objective evil and evil is subjective; the evil that exists in the world regardless of our involvement, and the evil that exists in us, evil that we carry into this world. Stanley Kubrick worked on the music for The Shining together with his assistant Gordon Stainforth. They together worked with all the nuances of

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connecting the already shot footage with the music chosen by Kubrick. They focused not only on questions of musical montage and synthesis of rhythms of the visual line and music in general, but also on more detailed work. By the plan of Stainforth and Kubrick, the music was not supposed to just accompany the picture and comment on what is happening on the screen: it was supposed to be a personal experience, to make personal emotional feelings of the viewer, and that is why it was necessary to make more “volume” possible. In one of his interviews, Stainforth recalled working with Kubrick on The Shining: “Trying to make this feel more like a direct experience, like you are really experiencing this now, for real. No comment with the music; it's happening to you.”2 The genre specificity of film (“horror”) demanded of the director new and different techniques of working with musical material than in the Odyssey. Here the music not only creates the atmosphere of the frame and reproduces the emotions of the characters (in The Shining this is fear, horror, hysteria, and stupefaction), but also commented on (and commented by) plastics of actors. In comparison to The Odyssey, where musical pieces were given minimal changes, in The Shining they are subjected to numerous transformations. Few directing sketches are preserved for the montage of the music for the last two scenes of The Shining. Where the left sight prescribed the sequence of episodes, and the right–the music sounding at the moment. Frequent change of fragments of different musical pieces and their montage caused stressful development of action, frequent changes of mood, and the reactions of characters to what is happening. When Kubrick and Stainforth created the musical line of Shining, they did not use sheets of this music, but applied existing recordings using a variety of techniques: montage of records, notes and “gluing” inside a single composition, regulation of dynamics, and changing the tempo of music records.

Notes 1 Patterson, D. W. Music, Structure and Metaphor in Stanley Kubrick's “2001: A Space Odyssey”, 469. 2 http://www.archiviokubrick.it/opere/film/shining/stainforth.html

CHAPTER THIRTEEN CAPTURING MUSIC AS A PROTAGONIST: AUDIOVISUAL NARRATION IN FILMS BY JIM JARMUSCH SASKIA JASZOLTOWSKI KARL-FRANZENS-UNIVERSITÄT GRAZ

Jim Jarmusch: Musician, Auteur-Director Jim Jarmusch is one of the most prominent filmmakers in the USAmerican independent movie scene. Since his debut in 1980 a dozen musically and thematically diverse films have been released in which musicians play a major role and music itself acts as a protagonist in the film narrative. Beyond this, he is also a musician himself. In fact, the origins of his film career lie in his affiliation with the musical underground scene in New York at the turn to the 1980s. As a member of the band The Del-Byzanteens, he once confessed that his musical surroundings shaped the vision he intended to achieve by stepping into the film business: “If it hadn’t been for that music scene, we probably wouldn’t be making films,” he states uncompromisingly.1 His musicality can be both heard and seen in his films. These stand out foremost for their unique audio-visual iconicity. Jarmusch’s films are about music and music history, about musicians, and even about music theory. But still it would not be appropriate to categorize them in the genre of music films—rather, aesthetic characteristics from a variety of genres are picked up and transformed into Jarmusch’s own musically driven style. Consequently, the cast—especially in his early films—consists of befriended musicians who contribute to the narrative with their own musicality without playing the role of a strictly spoken musical protagonist. Another fact, which is even more important to consider, is that Jarmusch usually develops an idea for a story while already knowing which actor should eventually play the lead role.2 Furthermore, his script

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writing is not only intimately linked with a specific actor in mind but as well with a certain type of music in his ears which sometimes goes hand in hand—the music comes along with the actor or vice versa. Hence, it can be argued that the role of music is casted much in the same way as the role of a protagonist is casted for a film. Jarmusch decides on the type or style of the music and involves the composer at an early stage of his film making. He allows for music’s ability to enhance the general aesthetics of his films while writing the script, providing great freedom for the composer as well as the actors to contribute to the story with their very own personal characteristics and interpretation of their role. The role of music in this respect is intended to be understood in three ways: first, considered as part of the film cast; second, on behalf of its function within the narrative and third, defining its significance within and outside the depicted reality. Considering music as a protagonist implies its role as a major narrative device within the audio-visual artwork as well as its part in society portrayed in the films. The following analytic insights in Jarmusch’s oeuvre give an audiovisual reading of how music plays a significant role in various ways and how it always aims at being the main protagonist. The films comprise a narrative diversity and feature a variety of different characters as well as distinctive musical styles. The analysis raises no claim to completeness since only those parts of the film music will be mentioned that are most prominently represented on the soundtrack. Despite the incoherence of musical style or genre, all the scores manage to establish coherence and continuity as this is one of the main principles and aesthetic functions of film music in general.3 As a conspicuous detail of Jarmusch’s work, though, the soundtracks are mainly responsible for challenging the border between fiction and reality.

Music of an Idol Jarmusch’s first film and graduation work at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts is entitled Permanent Vacation (1980) and sets the stage for his unconventional approach to film making. It consists of a successive depiction of different places disregarding a continuous timeline, while coherence is established by the narrator and main character, Allie (Chris Parker), who drifts through the city of New York searching for the meaning of life. Music seems to be a part of this aim: Allie passionately listens and dances to his Charlie Parker records. Moreover, additional saxophone music composed by the director himself

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and John Lurie, who also recorded the soundtrack, serves as an acoustic red line throughout the film. The saxophone’s melody and timbre are thoroughly interwoven with the sounds and sirens of the city. Environmental noise and music are linked by the phenomenon of the Doppler Effect, which is frequently mentioned in the narration. This acoustic effect describing the perceived rise of pitch level with the decreasing distance between the sound source and the listener is imitated on the saxophone by a citation of the first few notes of the bridge section in Over the Rainbow followed by a free improvisation. This Academy Award winning song, written by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg for Judy Garland’s role in the film musical The Wizard of Oz (1939), is referred to both on a narrative level—Allie’s search for a better place to live—and from the perspectives of music history: By citing the song, Jarmusch intends to pay tribute to Charlie Parker, who in the director’s words “[…] can play at what was at the time considered an incredibly outside solo, but he will quote a standard within that solo. He’s not playing the standard, but he is referring to it and weaving it into something completely new and his own.”4 This adopted performance technique in particular and the film in general invigorates more than once the Jazz musician as if he took part in the narrative. Parker is not only the main character’s last name and idol, but also appears as a slightly surreal reincarnation played by the film’s composer and musician John Lurie, dressed in a white suit and pretending to be a street musician. The saxophone’s voice on the soundtrack of Permanent Vacation is fixed to an image of Charlie Parker as a drifter and outstanding musician in Jazz history. Visually, he might only be alluded to but his influence on the score is well heard. Via the music, all the outsiders presented or mentioned in the story become linked to Parker as an invisible but audible protagonist.

Musical commentator Due to its achievement of winning the Caméra d’Or at the Festival de Cannes and its success at the Sundance Film Festival, Stranger than Paradise (1984) established Jarmusch’s name in the independent movie scene. The film’s visuals stand out for their slow movements and almost still-like cinematography. Correspondingly, the story, depicting an uneasy and lonesome life in immigration, develops at a leisurely pace while verbal communication between the three main characters is used rather sparsely. Besides Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ I Put a Spell on You—which is mainly associated with the female character Eva (Eszter Balint), who

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listens to the song on her tape recorder—strings dominate the score. John Lurie, besides taking part in the film as an actor, composed the music again, but this time on his own and in a very different tone. In addition to Lurie’s Music for String Quartet, Aaron Picht’s Music for Two Violas, written in the same musical style, acoustically enhances the laconic slowness of the visuals and substitutes the lack of dialogue in the narrative. It is most prominently heard when communication between the protagonists doesn’t seem to work. The music steps in, takes the conversation further, and expresses the unspoken word when the dialogue is interrupted or comes to a halt, leaving questions unanswered or concerns unarticulated. The musical dialogue between the two violas enacts a commentator who finishes the conversations and explains the feelings of the visible characters.

Tailed by Music For Jarmusch’s third film, Down by Law (1986), the music once again is composed by John Lurie, yet in but another distinctive tone. Additional music for the beginning and ending titles of the film is written by Tom Waits. Both Lurie and Waits enact the lead roles with the support of Roberto Benigni. Since the story is set in New Orleans, the jazz score with trumpet, trombone, saxophone, bass, and percussion might be interpreted as the metaphoric sound of the city. Interestingly though, it is much more prominent when the three main characters escape from prison and flee through the surrounding marshlands. In these scenes Lurie’s music mingles with nature’s eerie cracking and whooshing noises. In consequence, the sounds can be understood as an invisible protagonist who is on the escapists’ heels, serving as Jarmusch explains, “to underscore what’s happening. […] I was unhappy with some scenes”, the director states, “and John [Lurie] was able to change their tone by the music he composed.”5 It is not only Lurie’s score, though, but as well Wait’s songs which provide the “tone” in the film and underscore the narrative. Tango Till They Sore and Jockey Full of Bourbon clearly frame the story as fiction and mainly are responsible for setting the local atmosphere. The fact that Waits and Lurie respectively interpreted the songs and composed the score as well as enacted the lead roles in the film gives rise to the assumption that Down by Law first and foremost aims at a specific representation of the musicians through the story told.

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Medium and Myth The musical protagonist in Mystery Train (1989)—as the title already suggests—can easily be described as the myth of Elvis Presley. The song with the same title, written by Junior Parker and Samuel Phillips, sung by Presley, introduces the film whereas the original version interpreted by Parker himself accompanies the ending credits. Far from being a bio-pic, the songs on the soundtrack, originating from the 1950s and 60s, only hint to the interaction between pop music history and the mechanisms of marketing. Most of the songs were produced at Samuel Phillips’ Sun Studios, which are interrelated to the overwhelming success of Elvis Presley and his less-promoted colleagues. Apart from these songs, John Lurie composed additional music that imitates the musical style of the Memphis era. The film centres on a young Japanese couple (Youki Kudoh, Masatoshi Nagase), who travels to Memphis as a kind of pilgrimage to the King of Rock’n’Roll and at the same time argues about Carl Perkins, Presley, and racism in popular music of the 1950s and 60s while listening to the same songs through the earphones of their shared Walkman. Obviously, the chosen accommodation is influenced by Elvis’ myth in every way. The receptionists—one of them is played by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins—talk seriously about Presley’s possible weight on planet Pluto. Each room, of course, is decorated with a portrait of the singer and features a radio. Its programme is commented on by the voice of Tom Waits and consists of songs by Roy Orbison and Elvis Presley. Moreover, it functions as a linkage amongst the hotel guests located in three different rooms. The programme is listened to not only by the receptionists and the Japanese couple, but also by two other groups of people that unknowingly share the same experience of a turbulent night in Memphis. A lady hallucinates the appearance of Elvis’ ghost when falling asleep. Coincidently, she shares a room with another lady whose ex-boyfriend’s name is Elvis, and this Elvis is involved with criminal entanglements of the third group. Even though the events are developing simultaneously, they are shown successively, which in consequence leads to the fact that the same radio programme is heard several times throughout the film. Especially the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart song Blue Moon sung by Presley is prominent because of its repetition in the film even though it is only played once within the programme. With this trick, Jarmusch links the three different groups of characters and clarifies their shared listening experience at the hotel. The Elvis song in the radio not only explains the

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course of events; though, it also hints at the potential of the medium: As a technical and musical device it is able to join separated people only by perceiving the same song. In Mystery Train the radio can be considered as the main protagonist of the story because it merges the narrative threads and promotes the myth of Elvis Presley.

Theme and variation Night on Earth (1991), Jarmusch’s fifth film, allegorizes a musical form as an audio-visual protagonist. The story as well as the score is constructed on the basis of theme and variation. Visually, the theme consists in a taxi ride by night–musically, in Tom Waits’ song, Good Old World. Five successive episodes portray taxi drivers with their individual guests in five different cities. The visual build-up stays the same in each episode: It begins with nightly scenes of the city and a passing taxi, shots from inside and outside of the car alternate during the actual ride, and it ends with the taxi driving out of sight. As unique as the cities of Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki are, so are the acting characters of each episode and the language or dialect in which they speak. Jarmusch explains: “The cities become characters even though they’re enclosed in a cab; the atmosphere, the colour, the quality of light in each city is very different and has a different effect on the people who live there and on your emotions when you are there.”6 The settings are accompanied by instrumental variations on the song’s melody composed by Waits. Whereas style and function of the score stay the same throughout the film, the instrumentation, timbre, and rhythm vary from episode to episode, consequently expressing the distinctive atmosphere in each city and the peculiar mood of its citizens. The opening song functions as an overture and states the musical theme. It accompanies the turning Globus and the gradual zooming in towards the earth. Each episode thereafter starts with a depiction of a clock, varying in background colour—as a metaphor for the lights in the city—and musical timbre—as a metaphor for the sounds of the city. Los Angeles is introduced with a pink background whereas the distorted sound of an E-guitar dominates the score. For New York, the colour changes to green and the timbre to a Jazz trumpet. A blue light is shed on Paris and the variation is played quietly and slowly on an accordion. Contrastingly, the episode in Rome starts with an orange background and a lively interpretation of the theme is delivered by acoustic guitar, percussion, and brass. The last variation takes place in Helsinki, violet in colour, musically dominated by a breathing saxophone and restricted accordion tones.

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The musical variations culminate in the summarizing last song which accompanies the ending credits. Back in the Good Old World is a transformation of the opening song, changing the straight metre into a characteristic waltz rhythm. Whereas Good Old World served as an overture, going along with the visuals of the turning Globus, the ending song encompasses the notion of a globally-acting, emotional protagonist provided by the score. No matter how different and how far apart the portrayed individuals are, they have some abstract feeling in common which is expressed in the music of Night on Earth.

Invisible protagonist Jarmusch’s next film, Dead Man (1995), seems to mark a turning point: Not only does the story play in the past but the lead role is casted by a well-known and established actor, Johnny Depp. The score for Dead Man quite concretely picks up the notion of an emotional protagonist, even though it evolved in an exceptional way. Parallel to the screening of the film, Neil Young improvised on acoustic and E-guitar. With this in mind, it is hard not to consider the musician as an unseen, but well-heard protagonist within the film narration. His improvisation seems to be tied to the visuals as if it acted within the set, coming and going like an actor, leaving a void when it is quiet, and delivering an independent perspective when it sounds. Jarmusch himself explains: [Neil Young] refused to have the film stop at any moment. He did that three times over a two-day period. Neil asked me to give him a list of places where I wanted music, and he used that as a kind of map, but he was really focused on the film, so the score kind of became his emotional reaction to the movie. Then Neil came to New York to premix the stuff and we thought in a few places we’d slide it around a little, but it almost never worked—in general it was married to where he played it.7

The music as well as the story is based on repetition and escalation. It accompanies the main character who is on his way to die. His gradual losing of his senses goes along with the intensification of the score. Young’s guitar sounds enter more frequently with increasing volume and become more distorted as the story progresses until the climax. The music, hence, plays the role of death coming nearer, acoustically perceptible as the transformation of the E-guitar as an instrument of mere accompaniment to a leading powerful and sonorous voice.

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Rock Documentary In the Rockumentary Year of the Horse (1997), Jarmusch captures music as a protagonist in the most literal way. The film is a portrait of Neil Young and the Crazy Horse. Hence, the narrative, the visuals, and the soundtrack centre on the musicians and their songs. The borderline between Jarmusch’s narrative feature films and this documentary is remarkably thin. Year of the Horse might as well be perceived as a story told in an improvisational way—the script evolves during the shooting on the set—becoming arranged and stylized during post-production (editing, sound editing, and placement of songs) in order to highlight the narrative thread. The iconicity of Rock bands and musicians dressed in a specific style, acting with a well-defined (moral or musical) attitude, expressing their messages through the lyrics, is at least partially fictive.

Music for murder The music in Ghost Dog (1999) is intimately linked with the main character, played by Forest Whitaker, who combines Far Eastern philosophy and Martial Arts with New York Hip-hop style and Gangsta Rap. This combination can be found in (and might even be inspired by) the texts, outer appearance, and attitude of the Wu-Tang Clan. One of its members, RZA, composed the music for Ghost Dog using the sampling technique inherent in Hip-hop. Due to its reliance on a regular beat and its emphasis on rhythm rather than harmonic movement, RZA’s score enhances the film with an audio-visual drive, unusual for Jarmusch’s work so far. Interestingly, RZA did not create the samples with particular scenes in mind but left the decision on their placement up to the director. He only gave following advice: “[…] you gotta use hip-hop style, you can edit it, you can change it, you can put two together […].”8 Similar to Dead Man, where Neil Young’s guitar improvisation seems to play an invisible role within the narrative, here, the Hip-hop music visually materializes in the main character Ghost Dog. Every time he drives out to commit his next murder, he listens to a CD with RZA’s tracks and other Rap songs. Although the visual perspective changes during the drive, from inside the car to an outside shot of the city with the passing vehicle on the streets, the music’s loudness does not change. Not only does the story develop from Ghost Dog’s perspective but also the Hip-hop listened to is linked with his acoustic point of view. Hence, the “cinematic” and “visually inspiring”9 score, as Jarmusch defines it, is a constituent part of the main protagonist.

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The depiction of music being started and played on technical devices is repeated in Ghost Dog several times hinting at the importance Jarmusch attaches to the role of music in the portrayed characters’ lives and, in consequence, to the choice of music for his films. Not only the visuals of Forest Whitaker shape his fictive figure, but also the music he listens to and the rhythms he moves to.

Musical Tapestry Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) is the title of eleven short films that portray mainly actors and musicians meeting up for a coffee. Although a vague script exists for each short film, the way of acting strengthens the idea of a coincidental real life (non-fictive) event. Music here doesn’t seem to play a significant role within the set. Except for one episode, music functions as an acoustic tapestry at the places for coffee consumption. It is only passively listened to as background music. Excepting the very last short film, music is not actively referred to by the protagonists. Even though the music was planned for each episode, Coffee and Cigarettes seems to be coincidental and spontaneous—neither narrative nor fictive—and rather similar to a documentary. Music is shown as one part of the environment where leisure time is spent. The last episode, though, is different because here, songs are not merely played as background music in a public place, but contextualized as the protagonists’ imagination. Two old men on their coffee break listen to Gustav Mahler’s song Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen. One of them states that the lyrics expressed his state of mind, whereupon he falls asleep and dies. Mahler’s music in this film clearly serves the aesthetic function of expressing the inner thoughts and emotions of the twodimensional representations of humans on the flat screen. Through the music the audience becomes more involved in the presented story and more affected by the characters’ pretended emotions. The way of referring to Mahler within the narrative endorses the vision of music’s attributed transcendental abilities.

Personal Music In Broken Flowers (2005), music is listened to by the actors in a more active or conscious way: Again, the chosen music functions as a projection of inner thoughts, emotional states, and memory. In a repeating manner— similar to the depiction of music listening in Ghost Dog—the visuals show the action of starting to play music on a technical device and perceiving it

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while being occupied with raising-up children, driving a car, or thinking about the possibility to drink champagne or not. With Broken Flowers, Jarmusch quits portraying outsiders and instead starts telling the story of adapted but only superficially integrated people. He also refrains from hiring a composer and instead takes on this role himself by compiling the score with songs, not originally written for the film. Nevertheless, it functions in the same way as the previous original scores and the theory of capturing music as a protagonist is even more evident in this film than in his earlier ones. The main character played by Bill Murray sets sail in search of his grown-up son. To cheer him up and to wish him luck, his neighbour compiles a personal CD with Latin Jazz and Reggae music mainly by Mulatu Astatke. The CD not only functions as “groovy” driving music which is “good for the heart,” as the neighbour confesses, who listens to it himself and whose optimistic character comes along on the road trip via this present. The tracks on the CD also serve as the film score. In this case Jarmusch decided on using music by Astatke for the soundtrack because of its adaptability. Nevertheless, he looked for ways of integrating the music in the narration amongst the set of actors: Music often leads me. I discovered Mulatu Astatke’s music maybe seven years ago, and I was blown by a few things I found that he had recorded in the late sixties, I was in a hunt for a number of years: I bought some vinyl; some of his jazz stuff; some Latin jazz recorded in the states; other Ethiopian stuff. And then I was like, “Oh, man, how can I get this music in a film? It’s so beautiful and score-like.” Then when I was writing “Broken Flowers”, I was like, “Well, this neighbour is Ethiopian-American, I can turn him on to the music.”10

The music is considered as an integral part in the process of film making and as an active acoustic protagonist. It is able to change perspective and to transgress the modes of realities, ranging from a very intrinsic mode, e.g. clarifying the unspoken thoughts of a character, to a rather public mode, e.g. underscoring the end credits of the film. The soundtrack’s localisation easily moves from within the narrative to the real world situation of watching a film and somewhere in between. Similar to the driving scenes in Ghost Dog, the volume of the music here, shown as originating from the car’s stereo, is perceived on the same level, disregarding the changing shots. In addition to the neighbour’s optimism, the message of the music lies in the mission of finding the long lost son. One could even argue that the music acts as the acoustic version of the searched for protagonist. At the very end of the film, a car passes by

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with a young man who listens to loud music. The driver looks just like Bill Murray in his twenties and the song is familiar as well: It is written by Astatke, features as one of the tracks on the presented CD, is an integral part of the score, and is finally connected with the sought after protagonist.

Music to go Music is not very obvious as a protagonist in The Limits of Control (2009). The story is dominated by the main protagonist (Isaach de Bankolé) who is about to fulfil his mission, though, its content stays unclear. The soundtrack is mainly provided by music written by Boris, performed by Jarmusch and members of his recently formed band Sqürl, and contains fifteen titles, e.g. works by Daft Punk, The Sun O))), The Black Angels, traditional Cante Jondo, and an excerpt from the second movement of Franz Schubert’s String Quintet in C-major. Within the story, the exchange of instruments takes up a lot of narrative space, but for no obvious reasons. Various philosophical statements run through the film as a red line—for example, the idea that wooden musical instruments resonate with the tones of their memory even when they are not played; or the notion of perception, visually depicted with the main character visiting the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, looking at paintings of violins and guitars, paying most attention to Juan Gris’ El Violín. The belief that life is not worth anything— “La vida no vale nada” —that every great man will eventually become only dirt, as the lyrics of the performed Cante Jondo convey, is stated frequently and dominates the narration. It is less the music, though, but rather the message that counts. Music functions only as a carrier of this message. Hence, the soundtrack emphasizes an essential narrative element of the film, challenging the audience’s perception.

Musician’s Portrait In Jarmusch’s latest film, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), the lead role for the first time actually portrays a fictive musician (played by Tom Hiddleston). Adam, the musician, is not of the normal kind, though, because not only is he some hundred years old and a vampire, but he also composes and plays music only for himself. He rejects going with the changing fashion and keeps to his Rock music style. Afraid of not being able to survive on the popular music market, he lives isolated collecting guitars and composing songs that nobody will ever listen to. In any way, it is not a story of a musician that is being told; rather, the film focuses on a

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love story of an unusual couple (female lead played by Tilda Swinton), struggling with their long distance relationship and being inventive on where to get more blood supplies. The soundtrack is composed and played by Jarmusch’s band Sqürl. Audio-visually and narratively, the music’s characteristic as an emotional bondage between the portrayed lovers, between the screen and the audience, or as an aid to come closer to one-self is captured. In an almost therapeutic way, Adam secludes himself during his recording sessions with a magnetic tape recorder. This antique musical device, in fact, is one of the more modern features in his apartment and its mise-en-scène hints at the importance that the advent of tape recording played for the further development of popular musical styles. Music is omnipresent on various figurative, narrative, visual, psychological, and metaphoric levels and hence acts as a main protagonist. Only Lovers Left Alive seems to be, for now, Jarmusch’s most subtle and diverse way of capturing music in film, and it builds a bridge to the beginning of his career when he started with Permanent Vacation portraying the non-mainstream musical protagonists in music history.

Conclusion Despite the diversity of musical styles which intersect with the variety of distinctive stories told by Jim Jarmusch, the role of music seems to be based on a unifying approach towards film making: The casting of the soundtrack as well as the characters is executed in the same process, using identical criteria in the choice for the composer or the music and the actors alike. Jarmusch develops the script not only with an actor in mind, but also with a certain kind of music. Both actor and composer have the capacity to influence the creation of the story and the visual aesthetics of the film with their personal style. Music is an active protagonist in Jarmusch’s work. Furthermore, it is portrayed as playing an important role in the characters’ lives by means of a meticulous visual depiction of audio devices and media for the consumption of music such as vinyl records, radio, tape recorder, Walkman, car stereo, CDs, etc. In this respect, music is not only contextualized as existing independently apart from its filmic function. It also serves as the protagonist in Jarmusch’s oeuvre as a whole: Music history is sensitively captured in his films–and negotiated with every film in a new facet.

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References Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies. Narrative Film Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Hertzberg, Ludvig (ed.). Jim Jarmusch. Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Lissa, Zofia. Ästhetik der Filmmusik. Berlin: Henschel-Verlag, 1965. Schindler, Oliver. Jim Jarmusch. Independent-auteur der achtziger Jahre. Alfeld: Coppi-Verlag, 2000.

Notes 1

Hertzberg, Jim Jarmusch. Interviews, 90. Schindler, Jim Jarmusch. Independent-auteur…, 107, 113, 129. 3 Gorbman, Unheard Melodies. Narrative Film Music, 73, 89-91; Lissa, Ästhetik der Filmmusik, 214-223. 4 Hertzberg, Jim Jarmusch. Interviews, 189. 5 Schindler, Jim Jarmusch. Independent-auteur…, 80. 6 Hertzberg, Jim Jarmusch. Interviews, 184. 7 Ibid., 157f. 8 Ibid., 190. 9 Ibid., 198. 10 Jarmusch cited on: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesse-kornbluth/mulatuastatke-watch-a-vi_b_529948.html. Accesed March, 11, 2015 2

CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION OF PROMOTING ROCK MUSIC IN SPAIN JUAN CARLOS RODRÍGUEZ CENTENO UNIVERSIDAD DE SEVILLA

Introduction Rock ‘n’ Roll was born in the United States in the early Fifties. What initially seemed to be just a new musical movement became in a few years one of the largest cultural and social revolutions of the twentieth century. A generation of young Americans discovered a symbol of identity; a way to differentiate themselves from the rest of society which went beyond music, from the way of dressing to the way of expressing themselves, from the skin-deep superficial to the more profound. In the latter case, rock played a key role in the fight against racial segregation. It is worth remembering that young white pioneers of the new genre, such as Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, and many others, adapted a music style in the Forties called “Rhythm and Blues”, also known as “Ebony music” or “Race music”, which was dance music produced by black musicians for the African-American community. These white musicians’ interest in those “sinful” rhythms, coupled with the evolution of black musicians’ music towards rock (Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, and many others) —among other factors such as film and television—contributed to the rise of Rock ‘n’ Roll in the mid-1950s as a cultural phenomenon. Not only did it expand its influence locally, but it also swiftly crossed the American borders to reach the rest of the continent, leaving an impact firstly in Mexico and Cuba, and later arriving to Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, etc. However, the Spanish situation was different. In the early Fifties the country was still subject to severe economic conditions, with ration books and serious malnourishment and absence of healthcare. Dictator Francisco

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Franco’s government’s support for the Nazi-fascist Axis powers during the Second World War led to the country’s isolation for nearly a decade. This situation ended in 1953 when Spain and the United States signed the Pact of Madrid, whose agreements included the building of four US military bases in Spain (three air and one naval). The locations of these bases were specifically in Torrejón de Ardoz (Madrid), the sea port of Rota (Cadiz), Morón de la Frontera (Seville) and Zaragoza. Until then, the country was cut off and to justify this situation, the official propaganda appealed to the patriotic ultra-nationalism which filtered into all areas of daily life, including the culture. With regard to the music industry, the Copla and Folklore formed the basis of Spanish nationalistic pride, which was above all else, an emotional concept which nobody dared to challenge. The setup of military bases marked the beginning of the end of Spanish isolation, which ended definitively in 1955 when Spain officially joined the UN. The arrival of thousands of American soldiers not only brought in ships, aircraft, weapons and other military supplies into the country, but also imported some aspects of American culture as well, including its music, most notably Rock ‘n’ Roll. Thus, the military bases became the new movement’s main gateway; a movement which was already highly successful in much of the West but was still hardly known in Spain. The American military enclaves were set up like small towns with all kinds of amenities and services, including radio. Each base had a radio station which played music that the young soldiers wanted to listen to, particularly rock. These rhythms crossed natural limits and could be heard in nearby towns. Moreover, many Spaniards had access to these military bases, either as hired civilian personnel, or as conscripts completing their military service at these military bases. This was how the first noteworthy and logical cultural “diffusion” took place. Many notable pioneers, such as Pepe Barranco, came into contact with rock ‘n’ roll in this way. Barranco, founder of the famous Spanish rock band Los Estudiantes, listened to Radio Torrejón non-stop, and regularly attended the military base music clubs. El Dúo Dinámico was another band that recalled that “we Spaniards had absorbed the rock ‘n’ roll coming from the US through albums we obtained at Valenzuela air base in Zaragoza.”1 Rocky Kan (José Luis Cano) worked as a waiter in this base and “as a result, he was the first national rocker to find out about musical and aesthetic innovation in rock.”2 For many years these military enclaves remained the main source of musical knowledge regarding the innovations taking place on the other side of the borders. Miguel Carreño, the charismatic singer of Micky y los Tonys, said that he discovered The Beatles during a performance at Torrejón’s military base. The Arbex brothers, Fernando and Luis, also did

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their military service in Torrejón, which provided them with extraordinary musical learning and insight. While the American military bases were the main gateway for rock into Spain, it was not the only one. It is worth noting at least two others: the sea port areas and the personal relations between Spaniards and foreigners. With regard to the former, it could be said that the large coastal, port cities with busy maritime traffic, like Valencia, Barcelona and Bilbao, also received, together with the unloaded goods, the sailors’ cultural influences from all over the world. In the clubs, bars and other leisure venues located around the ports, people started listening to rock through albums brought by sailors and performed by young fans. Rock’s third gateway into Spain should not be ignored, namely, the connections that some pioneers had abroad, which later turned out to be fundamental to the music’s evolution. For instance, Micky's father was a diplomat and lived in different countries. He also had access to rock albums that were almost impossible to obtain and diffuse in Spain. In Barcelona, Los Sirex were first influenced by foreign albums supplied by a relative of Guillermo Rodríguez, the bassist. Pedro Gené moved to London in 1959 after finishing his piano studies at the Liceo de Barcelona. He lived there for a year and witnessed the reality of rock ‘n’ roll first-hand. Upon returning to the Catalan capital, he founded the legendary band Lone Star. The Mayolas brothers founded Los Pájaros Locos after a trip to Italy and Switzerland in the summer of 1958, where they discovered the existence of many rock bands and went to some performances which left an impact on them.

The early years (1955-1964) During the latter half of the Fifties the aforementioned gateways for rock into Spain were opened. Despite the fact that these new rhythms had already taken over much of the world, this genre would take a few more years wandering the desert before it would become popular in Spain. According to José Ramón Pardo: Very few people realized what was happening. It could be said that rock entered Spain by chance, due to a number of young visionaries who found a way of having fun with modern music and making enough noise to express their own feelings and form of communication.3

At first, these young visionaries met with many difficulties to provide an outlet for their passion for the music. This led to many giving up no sooner had they started. However, many others persevered with their passion and

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strove on, managing to build the pillars of Spanish rock. “One of the constants in Spanish pop has been its persistence in breaking through. It seems almost supernatural that [...] thousands of bands appeared out of nowhere in a country that had been suffering from scarcity as a result of autarchy”,4 says Diego A. Manrique.

The Initial Difficulties The essential infrastructure in setting up a rock band is based on two requirements: firstly, the players need to get instruments—electric guitars, a bass guitar and drums—and secondly, a place to rehearse. All of this goes hand in hand with the need to dedicate enough time to rehearsing. In the second half of the Fifties, achieving this set of requirements was practically impossible in Spain. The electric guitar was a rara avis which was rarely found in the few instrument stores at the time, and the ones on offer were sold at prohibitively high prices. In other words, electric guitars were luxury goods. Therefore, many pioneers had to improvise and combine imagination with craftsmanship. The first electric guitars were acoustic ones with electromagnet guitar pickups and metal strings. It was a similar story for the other instruments. Here are some examples of personal accounts: “The guitars we played were not electric ones at all. They were acoustic ones made in a workshop in Massanassa (Valencia) [...]. We got there with photos of the bands we liked and they managed to craft close imitations of what we were looking for”,5 reported Salvador Blesa, guitar player of Los Milos. Manolo González, bass player of Los Brincos, recalls that in his first band “we made our own guitars. We bought the parts separately and we assembled the guitars. Besides, an American man from the air base lent us a Fender and we copied it. My audition to join Los Estudiantes was with a bass guitar I assembled by myself.”6 “My drums consisted of a drum from the army, which was painted red, a bass drum that looked like it had come out of a circus, and a hi-hat without a pedal. I had to use a Latin dictionary to prop my left foot up”,7 said Fernando Arbex, drummer of Los Estudiantes. Since approximately 1956, the manufacturing of electric guitars in Spain began, although “these first models were not strictly Spanish; the wooden part was made in Spain, but the electric part was imported, mainly from Germany, and then assembled here.”8 A few years later, national brands started to be manufactured such as Azor, Solar, Ideal, and Jomadi, to name a few. Nevertheless, the most popular brand was Kuston, which

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started to be manufactured around 1959, and whose owner, Maxi Baratas, a musician and song writer, founded a music chain store called BIOK. Due to an increase in the demand for instruments and musical equipment, he developed a new line of products, which he would then distribute in his stores. Together with the Kustons, Hofner guitars and basses manufactured in Zarauz under German license also became very popular. However, the quality of these first domestically manufactured guitars was poor compared to the sound performance of those heard on North American and English records. Getting a Gibson or a Fender was every young Spanish musician’s big dream in the late Fifties. Some of them used their contacts abroad to get a guitar model that would become the envy of everyone. In the case of Julian Sancristóbal, lead guitar player of Los Flaps, he managed to import a Daphne Blue Fender thanks to his father’s negotiations with the Spanish Ambassador in England. Not only did those primitive instruments not satisfy their owners, but the rest of the equipment also received criticism. “At that time there was nothing. We had to strap the amplifiers to the ground because the volume had to be cranked up so high in order to hear them, that they started moving by themselves. They walked on their own... They were completely useless”,9 remembers Pepe Barranco. In Barcelona, the Mayolas brothers, Salvador and Antonio María (Los Pájaros Locos) set up a workshop where they made audio and sound equipment marketed under the brand Tecnoson, which was used by a great number of Spanish bands in the early Sixties. When a band had overcome the first obstacle, namely, acquiring instruments, they were faced with the next logistical problem: the question of where to rehearse. Back in the day, rehearsing studios didn’t exist as we know them now today, so musicians had to use the family home. Los Estudiantes started playing in Pepe Barranco’s (the lead musician) family home; Los Pekenikes, started in the basement of the Sainz brothers, the founders of the band; Mike Ríos and Los Relámpagos started rehearsing in keyboard player Pablo Herrero’s home; Micky y los Tonys in Juan Fuster’s home, the bass player; The Polaris at organist Fernando Muñoz’s parents’ house; The Mustang in Santi Carulla’s home, who was the singer of the band. The first bands were mainly formed in university and secondary school environments. Los Estudiantes and Micky y los Tonys were formed at the Colegio del Apóstol Santiago; Los Pekenikes at the Instituto Ramiro de Maeztu; Los Teleko and Los Diablos Negros at the Colegio de la Sagrada Familia (popularly known as the SAFA). In Valencia Los Milos were formed at the University Club.

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In the late Fifties, student environments were mainly composed of the Francoist socioeconomic elite. The sons of the middleclass bourgeoisie (high rank military officers, diplomats, businessmen, high rank civil servants, politicians, professionals, etc.) fed the centers where Spanish rock took its first baby steps. In this regard, there was a significant difference in the socioeconomic background between the pioneers of the US and Spanish rock. In the United States, the founders of the new movement were the children of the working class and even some marginalised communities. In Spain, however, it was the opposite case, and it was in fact the children from more privileged backgrounds who first flew the banner of rock music. And they did this coming from strict religious schools, whose headmasters viewed the musical novelty light heartedly at first, but did not take long to cotton onto the sinful nature of the phenomenon. “It is interesting that precisely these "diabolical" experiences took place in religious schools. However, these schools gave way to the first echoes of Rock 'n' Roll in Spain”,10 reported José María Rodríguez.

The first steps Logically, as the first bands (some of them still unnamed) were born out of a student environment, their first performances and fans would emanate from such environments as well. Student parties became the first springboard for these youngsters who had more enthusiasm than means. One of Los Estudiantes’s first performances took place in the Faculty of Medicine in Madrid in 1957. However, at that time they didn’t yet go by that name. They were a duo (Pepe Barranco and Jose Alberto Gonsálvez), and they only had an acoustic guitar and a drum. Colleges and secondary schools formed the first rock “tour” routes in Madrid, including the Instituto Ramiro de Maeztu, the Colegio Maravillas, the Colegio Calasanz, the Colegio Mayor San Javier, and the Colegio de los HH.MM. San José, to name a few. Moreover, the Colegio de la Sagrada Familia and the Colegio Calasanz would later become particularly significant in the development of the rock scene in Madrid. The “revistas habladas”, or entertainment magazines Enlace and Altavoz were born at the heart of these schools. These magazines were similar to radio or television entertainment programmes, where a group of students with journalistic vocations would gather their classmates and relatives in the auditorium on Sunday mornings and conduct interviews and reports. Musical performances were programmed and as José Ramón Pardo points out:

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Rock found its way with great effort and little broadcasting. The media paid little interest to the phenomenon that had had so much success abroad. In 1956, a journalist even predicted that the “rock ‘n’ roll pastime would only last eight months longer.”12 However, in the late Fifties rock had established itself in those metropolitan areas close to its gateways. Madrid, Zaragoza, Valencia, Bilbao, Cadiz and Seville already had bands which had overcome the initial obstacles. These bands performed regularly and had a loyal fan base. The growing tourism industry helped to boost the young bands. In the late Fifties the Spanish tourism sector took off, especially on Catalonia’s coast, the Spanish Levant and on the Costa del Sol. Thousands of tourists from the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Scandinavia found a sunny and cheap destination to go to on holidays in backward Spain. The growing hospitality industry had to provide leisure and entertainment to its guests, as well as food and accommodation. Thus, hotels, clubs and coastal terraces hired orchestras to liven up the summer nights. However, the younger tourists were unimpressed by the outdated orchestras’ rhythms, and businessmen began hiring more modern bands in order to meet the new demand. Los Estudiantes were once again at the forefront. In the summer of 1958 they were hired to perform for two months in Alicante. In Catalonia, El Dúo Dinámico and Los Pájaros Locos toured the Costa Brava. In the South, Los Rocking Boys, a band formed in the Linea de la Concepcion (Cadiz), performed in coastal towns of Andalusia, Northern Morocco and Portugal. These summer performances allowed bands to gain invaluable experience, both in handling instruments and stage presence. But there were also negative experiences. For instance, penny pinching businessmen forced some bands to play for long hours for very little money, and in some extreme cases they were hired in exchange for accommodation and food.

The Radio 1957 marked the turning point in the history of Spanish rock. Elvis Presley became a worldwide musical, social and economic phenomenon.

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His films were released in Spain and for the first time, a rock song entered the charts: the renowned Jailhouse Rock. From that moment onwards, the media ended its embargo on rock and new modern rhythms gradually began to appear. While the press was very critical and scorned rock, the radio treated it differently. In the Fifties, music on radio programs was mostly live due to the fact that the studios’ rudimentary recording techniques and playback systems produced poor quality broadcasting. Some local radio programs started offering opportunities to young modern music bands, providing the platform that would enable them to become famous. The Chilean Raul Matas was the first radio presenter to introduce music on the radio in Spain. In the mid-Forties he set up the programme Discomanía in his native country, which was later broadcast from Mexico and the USA, until he moved to Spain in 1958. He then began broadcasting his programme from Radio Madrid. All genres were played on Discomanía, including rock, a movement which Raul Matas had witnessed the rise of during his professional career in New York and which featured in his broadcasting. Ángel Álvarez also deserves a special mention. He was the creator of the legendary radio programme Caravan Musical (on the radio station La Voz de Madrid, 1960) and Vuelo 605 (on Radio Peninsular, 1963). Álvarez’s occupation as a crew member of Iberia’s airline allowed him to travel frequently to the United States. There, he bought albums that were not available in Spain and which he then played on his programmes. It was thanks to him that people discovered bands and solo artists that would eventually become part of popular music history in Spain. Another figure worth mentioning is Miguel Ángel Nieto, an active player on the music scene in Madrid, festivals promoter, editor of specialised journals (Fonorama) and general press. On Radio España he ran Nosotros los jóvenes and Canal de color, two programmes which were produced with a live audience and which included music performances. Miguel Ángel Nieto, who maintained close ties with many young musicians in Madrid and whose brother, Pepe, was the drummer of Los Estudiantes, usually counted on them for their broadcasts. Roberto Baci, presenter of Festival del disco and Cita con la música programmes on Radio Juventud de España; and Eva María Zver and Marisol Tomás Lázaro, presenters on Discodial, should also be mentioned. This programme was broadcast by the Department for Promoting Sales and Radio of the advertising agency IG Publicidad, a fact which demonstrates the commercial relation between the radio stations and the music publishers.

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At the beginning of the 1960s, Barcelona had become “the university of modern music.”13 According to the music press in Madrid: Barcelona is undoubtedly Spain’s major music powerhouse, not only because of the number of singers it produces, but also because of the public’s open predisposition to attend any type of musical event and discerningly defend anything they consider to be of high-quality.14

In a few years, the city and its surrounding towns became the birthplace of many bands which contributed significantly to the establishment and development of rock in Spain: Los Pájaros Locos, El Golden Quartet, Los Blue Stars, Los Ticano, Lone Star, Los Salvajes, Los Gatos Negros, Los Telstar, Los Bat-Mans, Los Mangas Verdes, as well as Los Sirex and Los Mustang, who were particularly noteworthy. Barcelona had a remarkable music industry and a large number of establishments and clubs where bands regularly played for a growing audience. Local radio also contributed to placing the city on the map as Spain’s reference for modern music. Among the many music programmes broadcast in the early Sixties, a few are worth noting: El show de las dos by Joaquín Soler Serrano on Radio Barcelona; Europa Musical by Luis Arribas Castro on Radio España; La vuelta al mundo en ochenta discos by Pepe Antequera on Radio Miramar; El show de Escamilla by Salvador Escamilla on Radio Barcelona; Fantasía by Federico Gallo and Jorge Arande on Radio Nacional. The radio programmes invited up and coming modern music talents to compete and become known. For many years, this was very common in musical styles like the copla and la canción española, and in the early Sixties, the radio gave these bands with new rhythms an opportunity to take part in these competitions for the first time. The radio became the essential key to launch a career in music.

Festivals of modern music In the collective imagination live music is associated with the night. However, in the early days of modern music in Spain, rock owed its staged performances to Sunday matinées, or “matinales.” In the Spanish popular music’s memory, the word “matinales” is inextricably linked to the theatre Circo Price in Madrid. But neither were the Matinales del Price the first to be staged, nor was Madrid the only city where they took place. Its origin must be placed at the convergence of interests between businessmen in the leisure sector and young organizers of festivals in universities and secondary schools. The former had noticed the economic

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potential of the new rhythms that were becoming so popular among younger audiences; a growing but unmet demand. The latter wanted to expand its activities beyond the student scene. Financially, these activities did not bring in revenue for them or the bands involved, as states José Ramón Pardo: “the youth began to feel exploited, playing almost every week in these festivals without making any profit.”15 In Madrid the matinales in the Teatro Alcalá, Teatro Maravillas and club Consulado (scheduled by the music journalist José Luis Álvarez) were common, although the most important ones were obviously those of Circo Price. The first Festival of Modern Rhythms, whose official name was Festival de Ritmos Modernos, was held on November 18th 1962. Ontiveros (solo artist rocker), Dick y Los Relámpagos, Eddy (solo artist), Los Tonnys, Los Pekenikes and Los Cinco Estudiantes shared the historic line up of the festival. Los Diamond Boys also played in the festival although they did not appear in the line-up. The Head of Programming was Pepe Nieto (Los Pekenikes’ drummer) and he was introduced by his brother Miguel Ángel Nieto (previously mentioned). A significant advertising effort was made in order to promote the festival: ads were placed in the newspapers ABC (2.700 pesetas or £11,70) Pueblo (1.600 pesetas or £6,90) and Marca (675 pesetas or £2,90). Furthermore, 1.500 pesetas (£6,50) were invested in printed programme handouts, and 1.200 pesetas (£5,20) in posters and billboards.16 These festivals took place every fortnight between approximately 11am and 2pm o’clock. They ended their first season on March 10th 1963 and were a tremendous hit with the public, with about two thousand people per edition. The second season began on December 8th 1963 and then ceased due to a governmental ban on 17th February 1964. In total, there were twenty-four festivals where the main bands from Madrid and other cities like Barcelona (Los Gatos Negros), Valencia (Los Rangers) and Cadiz (Los HH) performed. As it has been stated, the Matinales del Price were the most famous ones, but not the only ones. Festivals were held on Sunday mornings in many cities across the country. Moreover, in Barcelona there was also a “Circo Price” with modern music sessions, and those in the Teatro Barcelona, Palacio de los Deportes, and the Shangri-La room should also be mentioned. In Valencia these sessions were common in the Teatro Principal and the Apolo theatre; and in Seville they were held at the Teatro San Fernando. Alberdi festivals deserve a special mention. Alberdi was also the name of a music chain store which mainly sold instruments and was expanding from Barcelona to the main cities in Spain. Alberdi created his modern

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music festivals with sales and advertising objectives. Thus, this became one of the first cases of private sponsorship in relation to show business. The most influential Alberdi Festival was an intriguing encounter between bands from Madrid and Barcelona, held at the Palacio de los Deportes in Barcelona in March 1964. The local bands from Madrid which played were: Micky y los Tonys, Los Pekenikes, Los Continentales, Karina, Los Sonor and Mike Ríos (born in Granada. In the early Sixties he moved to the capital where he began his professional career). Among the most wellknown Catalan bands who participated were Los Sirex, Los Mustang and Los Gatos Negros. This musical event was presented as if it were a football match between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. In the capital, the press criticised the hostile environment and poor reception for the bands from Madrid.

The first recordings (1959-1964) The Spanish record industry didn’t pay attention to Rock ‘n’ Roll until Elvis Presley shot to fame. However, like the press, the managers of the music production companies thought it would be a passing craze, another rhythm, another fad that would quickly fade into a distant memory and be replaced by another trend. With this kind of attitude, the aim was to make investment profitable as soon as possible and at the lowest possible cost. Record labels used some artists they had already signed and tried to adapt their style to rock. These artists had developed their career in other genre, mainly in the canción melódica. Thus, the albums of Elder Barber, Ramón Márquez, Víctor Balaguer, Rudy Ventura, Gloria Lasso and José Guardiola were launched into the market with covers of international music hits. However, younger audiences rejected this product with which they could not identify themselves, which resulted in a huge sales flop. From 1959 onwards, an important change occurred in the record industry, which had learnt its lesson from previous failures and had concluded that, to make rock profitable, it was necessary to sign young groups and solo artists. The record labels were based in Madrid and Barcelona, so logically the first bands to record were those situated in either city. In 1959, Philips signed Los Estudiantes, who recorded their first EP (four songs) in Madrid. The same year the label La Voz de Su Amo launched El Dúo Dinámico. Thereafter the record labels started expanding their catalogs with the addition of new bands, including bands from other parts of Spain who were forced to move to one of the two only cities with recording studios. In the capital, the aforementioned Philips launched Mimo (Pilar García de la Mata, one of the first women to sing rock in

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Spain), Mike Ríos and Los Relámpagos. Iberofón signed Rocky Kan, a rocker from Zaragoza, and Víctor Ponti. Hispavox signed a contract with Los H.H., from Cadiz, and Los Pekenikes. RCA signed Los Sonor. Zafiro to Micky y Los Tonys and Ontiveros. In Barcelona the label Vergara launched Los Sirex, Tony Vilaplana, and Golden Quartet into the market. The record company La Voz de Su Amo signed Lone Star, Gelu from Granada, and Tony (Ronald) and Charlie. Regal recorded Los Mustang. Discophon signed with the two great pioneering bands of Valencia, Los Milos, which it signed during a series of the band’s performances in a theater in Barcelona, and Los Pantalones Azules. An unusual fact was that one of the pioneering bands of Spanish rock, Los Pájaros Locos, recorded with a label from Madrid, Variety. There were common features to these recordings. First of all, recording studios still used primitive technology and the final product was low quality albums. In addition, bands and solo artists had a limited time available for recording, which was caused by the need to make the largest possible profit. In other words, the shorter the recording period, the lower the cost, and since the product was aimed at a young audience, it had to be affordable. Secondly, when a band signed a contract with a record label, the decision as to which songs would be recorded, usually covers of international hits, were made by companies’ managers. Thus, the financial risk was reduced and investment was assured. These albums combined several styles, and along with rock songs there were Italian ballads, madison and other popular rhythms. The musicians, young and inexperienced in matters of negotiation, had no stake in what would be recorded. For many of them the important thing was to record. Having an album on the market was a dream come true, which could open doors to a career in music, but once achieved, it would become a source of frustration. The record labels only allowed them to include their own songs on EP (Extended Play, the standard format for those years) once they’d become profitable. However, they had to be accompanied by covers of other successful hits, which was the ultimate way of attracting sales. For instance after the success of their first album, El Dúo Dinámico were able to add one of their own songs in their second album. Producers, sound engineers, art directors and other record label staff who were used to recording other genres of music had no experience in producing the conventions of rock music. In this regard there was very little coherence between the musicians’ expectations and the technicians’ abilities, and this lack of coherence was reflected in the final product.

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Record labels often exploited the musicians. This was the case for Los Relámpagos, whose experience reflected the exploitation suffered by other bands as well. Their first company, Philips, forced them to combine their own recordings with other artists and to perform as their accompaniment. In some cases like that of Mike Ríos, there was mutual understanding and interest between the musicians, but for many others, the difference in style was so insurmountable that the results were disastrous. The first issue of the magazine Fonorama reported on this topic regarding the use of other artists in the recordings. The article stated that when this idea was first proposed to the musicians, “they did not like it very much, but in the end they resigned themselves. Some of these recordings can be named, but there are others which the musicians themselves say they feel too embarrassed about, as they are downright awful.”17 Another feature of these first recordings was the almost total lack of investment in advertising to promote the albums. Everyone relied on the radio as a means of broadcasting and, later on, the television. This situation continued until 1964 when the Spanish record industry began to change its attitude towards modern music. This change in attitude was attributed to the worldwide success of The Beatles and its impact, both socially and economically. The music production companies began to understand that they had to adopt a new vision and a new approach to the phenomenon of music aimed at young people in order to make the highest possible profit. And the first step was allowing qualified people with experience in the younger music scene access to management positions. Luis Sartorius, guitar player for Los Estudiantes, left the band in 1963 when he was hired by Philips as the public relations, advertising and creative assistant. This was the first step forward for the new business strategy, but what was most significant and relevant was when Luis Sartorius was signed in 1964 by the record company Zafiro. The company put him in charge of the creation of a record label specialising in modern music, which was called Novola (the name fused the contraction of “nueva” and “ola”, “new” and “wave” respectively). At the end of the year, and under his management, Los Brincos appeared, one of the most important bands in the history of popular music in Spain. The appearance of Novola and Los Brincos marked the turning point in the history of the Spanish music industry, and the start of a new era.

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References Álvarez, José Luis. “Los Relámpagos. El mejor conjunto instrumental de España”, Fonorama (1963). Álvarez Alija, José Antonio. “Como se fabrica tu guitarra eléctrica”, Fonorama, 7 (1964). Campoy, César. Érase una vez Los Brincos. Y Juan y Junior. Valencia: Efe Eme Ediciones, 2006. Domínguez, Salvador. Bienvenido Mr. Rock. Los primeros grupos hispanos. Madrid: SGAE, 2002. Manrique, Diego A. “La gran familia de la música española”, El País Semanal, 1.983 (2014): 30-44. Martínez Sánchez, Jesús, Cervezas, chicas y rockabilly. Historia del rock’n’roll en España. Barcelona: Quarentena Ediciones, 2011. Nieto, Miguel Ángel. “Barcelona, Universidad de la música moderna”, Fonorama, 6 (1964). Pardo, José Ramón. Historia del pop español. Madrid: Rama Lama, 2005. “Rodri”, José María Rodríguez . “Malos tiempos. Madrid, 1960.” In Rockin’Spain. Un viaje al corazón del Rock’n’roll, edited by Antonio Alay, 82-85. Barcelona: Lunwerg, 2011. S.A., “Barcelona y la música moderna”, Fonorama, 6 (1964).

Notes 1

Domínguez, Bienvenido Mr. Rock, 90. Martínez Sánchez, Cervezas, chicas y rockabilly, 37. 3 Pardo, Historia del pop español, 18. 4 Manrique, “La gran familia de la música española”, 40. 5 Domínguez, Bienvenido Mr. Rock, 100. 6 Campoy, Érase una vez Los Brincos, 46. 7 Domínguez, Bienvenido Mr. Rock, 30. 8 Álvarez Alija, “Como se fabrica tu guitarra eléctrica”, 17. 9 Domínguez, Bienvenido Mr. Rock, 33. 10 “Rodri”, “Malos tiempos. Madrid, 1960”, 84. 11 Pardo, Historia del pop español, 17. 12 Martínez Sánchez, Cervezas, chicas y rockabilly, 23. 13 Nieto, “Barcelona, Universidad de la música moderna”, 2-4. 14 S.A., “Barcelona y la música moderna”, 1. 15 Pardo, Historia del pop español, 20. 16 Ibid., 9. 17 Álvarez, “Los Relámpagos. El mejor conjunto instrumental de España”, 9. 2

CHAPTER FIFTEEN HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT AND HERBERT VON KARAJAN: THE FILMING OF MUSIC FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF MODERN CINEMA1 RAMÓN SANJUÁN MÍNGUEZ CONSERVATORIO PROFESIONAL DE MÚSICA DE ELCHE

Die Kunst des Dirigerens The first music film of Die Kunst des Dirigierens was made in November 1965 in the Rosenhügel Film Studios in Vienna.2 The piece chosen for this first programme was Mozart’s Violin Concerto no. 5 K. 219, performed by Yehudi Menuhin. In spite of the expectations generated by this first film, the programme was cancelled in 1967 after the recording of Verdi’s Requiem in Milan Cathedral due to important financial problems related to the management of the labels’ rights, which would eventually weaken the company Cosmotel.3 Thus, only five of the thirteen programmes initially planned were finally filmed. This paper focuses on Clouzot’s 1966 film of the Symphony no. 9 in E minor, op. 95 “From The New World,” written by DvoĜák in 1893. As well as in the rest of the programmes in Die Kunst des Dirigierens, the broadcast is complemented with an informative document about the piece to be performed. On this occasion, this document consists of a conversation between Karajan and professor Joachim Kaiser, a musicologist that would hold the position of professor of Music History at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Künste in Stuttgart between 1977 and 1996. In this conversation, and with the purpose of bringing the Czech composer’s symphony closer to the viewers, Kaiser and Karajan reflect on some of the compositional features of the piece, like the presence of American elements, its Bohemian character, or the use of

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pentatonic scales and modal harmonies. Although it is not the aim of this paper to question Karajan’s musical performance or musical knowledge, the truth is that his words correspond to a Eurocentric and stereotyped vision of music rather than to a real musicological reflection. In fact, Karajan does not provide a solid argument on DvoĜák’s piece, and when professor Kaiser asks him about his views on this symphony, the Austrian conductor avoids answering the question and states that he prefers to explain it to him by conducting the piece.4 Hence, the conversation between professor Kaiser and Karajan does not contribute any decisive element that could help us to better understand the symphonic work of the Czech composer. However, as we intend to demonstrate below, the thorough film planning devised by Clouzot brought the symphony closer to the cinematic experience of the viewers, and will reveal itself to be a hermeneutical work aimed at the field of visuals and based on the dramatic meaning and the structure of the piece.

Filming pieces of music for television The birth of commercial television in the late thirties5 coincided with the publication in 1936 of The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. In this work, Walter Benjamin reflected on, among other things, the loss of aura in the process of musical technification inherent to industrial society. This reflection shows a paradigm shift in the way artworks are produced and listened to, as well as a split between the cultural elite and a commercial conception of culture, typical of the middle classes. In the same years, Robin George Collingwood defended that recordings could not reproduce the exact degree of dynamic nuances of music,6 that is to say, “the reproduction of a musical performance by wireless or gramophone, does disfigure the original,”7 and “real acting cannot be represented on the screen.”8 Therefore, art lovers defended that art was not intended for the masses and that the quality inherent to artworks could not be mechanised or broadcast. In fact, Benjamin considered that the exhibition of art divested it of its ritual value and that, for instance, in the 19th century, painting faced a crisis precisely when it tried to reach the masses through museums.9 Consequently, whereas art is an object of devotion for some minorities, “in the case of the masses, the artwork is seen as a means of entertainment,”10 as some sort of vending machine whose purpose is to satiate the audience’s most basic instincts. The split between two opposite forms of assimilating the cultural fact was unavoidable. In fact, although from a biased point of view,

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Collingwood recognised the existence of an increasingly deep division “between a so-called highbrow minority, which enjoys good art and is publicly despised for doing so, and a frankly philistine majority [lowbrow] which regards that enjoyment as a contemptible form of self-deception.”11 According to this British thinker, “whereas the reader of a poem enjoys the poem itself, that is, derives pleasure from the objective contemplation of its structure and effect, the audience at a film enjoys, not the film, but the emotional “kick” which it gets out of the film.”12 From this perspective, filming a musical piece belonging to the highbrow repertoire involves a certain degree of risk, not only because it subverts the ritual sense of live concerts, conditioning and directing the viewers’ eyes, but also because it is necessary to fragment the piece during the filming and editing process, using manipulation techniques typical of mass culture. In any case, the consolidation of television as a mass medium will imply a reconsideration of the interaction between technology and artworks. In 1954, when How to Look at Television by Theodor W. Adorno was published, 56% of Americans already owned a television set.13 The strength of the new medium was such that Adorno admitted that “the old cultured elite does not exist any more” because of “the increasing strength of modern mass culture.”14 Likewise, the German thinker claimed that “modern audiences, although probably less capable of the artistic sublimation bred by tradition, have become shrewder in their demands for perfection of technique and for reliability of information, as well as in their desire for ‘services’.”15 In this manner, mass culture pervaded all the aspects of everyday life so that the limits among different cultural layers were increasingly imprecise. Whereas in the thirties it was questioned whether artworks could be broadcast mechanically through the radio or sound recordings without losing their essence, in the fifties television was reviled in some academic and university sectors. Thus, in 1953 an Ivy League professor complained that “a Yale faculty member who owned a television set lived dangerously. In the midst of an academic community, he lived in sin.”16 It was also very significant that in 1967, one year after Clouzot filmed the symphony by DvoĜák which is analysed in this paper, Carl Sagan was denied tenure at Harvard University partly owing to (according to some sources) his work as a populariser in press and television, both of which were considered foreign to academia.17 In the academic circles, television was considered as a medium for insubstantial entertainment, not suitable to transmit scientific knowledge, or as Frank Lloyd Wright would describe it, “chewing gum for the eyes.”18

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Hence, there was a clear conflict between those who embraced the technological progress inherent to mass culture and a cultural elite anchored in a nineteenth-century conception of art that did not seem to be compatible with the sociocultural reality of those years. It is precisely this clash that can be seen in Umberto Eco’s Apocalypse Postponed, a book published in 1964 in which the Italian thinker reflects on television, among other things. In this sense, Leonard Bernstein’s Young People's Concerts, first broadcast in 1958, demonstrated that television could also be an excellent popularising medium for the new generations. Unlike Toscanini’s televised concerts between 1948 and 1952, Bernstein’s programme was aimed mainly at a young audience, at viewers that had been born in the era of television. The purpose of the American conductor and pianist was to explain music in an educational and pleasant way, using for that purpose many musical examples from popular culture and direct references to Irving Berlin, Bob Dylan, and The Beatles, among others. In doing so, Bernstein does not intend the viewers to experience the sublime through the musical pieces performed in the programme, nor does he ponder about the alleged loss of aura through television broadcasting. His real purpose is to bring music closer to the new generations by offering them some guidelines to understand it and enjoy it from a perspective of unprejudiced cultural eclecticism. That is to say, Bernstein is somehow “integrating” the Central European canon into American popular culture. On the other hand, also in 1964, when Apocalypse Postponed was published, Canadian pianist Glenn Gould took the unprecedented decision of abandoning live performance. In an article published in High Fidelity in 1966, the Canadian pianist argued that the public concert would eventually disappear and that its functions would be “entirely taken over by electronic media.”19 Gould based his argument on the fact that the improvements in the recording process and in the quality of microphones attained “a more effective unity between intensity of action and displacement of sound than could be afforded by the best of all seasons at Bayreuth,”20 citing John Culshaw’s production of The Ring of the Nibelung for Decca/London as an example of this. Thus, the reservations that Collingwood had expressed in the thirties about the quality of recordings seemed to be overcome at a technical level. In addition, the Canadian pianist claimed that the way in which musical pieces were recorded had “an enormous influence upon the way in which certain kinds of contemporary repertoire are performed.”21 In addition, he also defended the sound recording and editing process, criticising those who were opposed to technology. According to Gould, we must accept

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that “recording will forever alter our notions about what is appropriate to the performance of music.”22 And it is in this context of dialectic between art and mass culture, between tradition and technology, that Clouzot and Karajan made their music films between 1965 and 1967. For the first time, technology afforded a higher filming quality and made it comparable and even superior to the experience of a live performance. Therefore, although television still had significant flaws regarding quality of sound and image, it was possible to enjoy pieces of music at home without the distractions of live performances. In fact, thanks to this process, those pieces started to blend with popular culture. Although Walter Benjamin had anticipated that “technological reproducibility emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual,”23 perhaps television and mass culture were decisively contributing to democratising and secularising what until then had been considered as artworks. In this sense, it should be clarified whether Karajan’s real intention was to bring music to every household (thus democratising art) or, on the contrary, to use television to increase his cult of image as well as his profits by addressing millions of new potential consumers who had never attended a concert hall before. In any case, Clouzot’s purpose seems to be quite different, as we will demonstrate with the audiovisual analysis of DvoĜák’s piece.

Antonín DvoĜák. Symphony Nº. 9 in E minor, Op. 95. First movement. Adagio-Allegro molto: An audiovisual analyis In the notes written for the artwork of the DVD published by C Major Entertainment in 2010, Harald Reiter states that Karajan and Clouzot “had produced a real musical thriller with their realisation of DvoĜák's ‘New World’ Symphony,”24 a thriller whose architecture had been based on “breathtaking structures” and “inbuilt tensions of the symphony’s design.”25 Reiter acknowledges the French filmmaker’s accurate camera work, and explains that Clouzot successfully creates “extremely precise chiaroscuro effects” with lighting and that, through the editing process, he manages “to increase or reduce the tension depending on the way in which the music itself, in Karajan’s hands, allows the tension to ebb and flow.”26 Finally, Reiter defends that Clouzot and Karajan “were also able to translate that understanding into an appropriate cinematic language.”27 However, the interrelationships between musical and cinematic language pointed out by Harald Reiter are imprecise and do not actually reflect the

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meticulous film planning and editing carried out by Henri-Georges Clouzot. In this sense, the first aspect of Clouzot’s filmmaking that attracts our attention is the wide range of camera shots used: from pan shots with the entire orchestra to cut-ins of certain instruments which even exclude the performers themselves. Some shots have a strong innovative character, as some bird’s eye view shots, and although in those years they were not uncommon in modern American cinema, they show the orchestra from a unique perspective for concert hall audiences. On the other hand, Armand Thirad’s careful lighting of this black-and-white film and the arrangement of the instruments on the stage enhance the depth of field, an expressive resource typical of modern film directors such as Orson Welles, which widens the dramatic space by distorting perspective. According to Mark Cousins, “deep staging and deep-focus filmmaking would continue to be used, especially in dramatically and thematically intense movies.”28 Moreover, Clouzot uses different and complex movements of the camera, which travels “apparently effortlessly through the orchestra but always following the main musical lines.”29 However, as we will demonstrate below, and contrary to what Reiter defends, the camera does not always show the main melodic line and, in addition, its movement causes some blurred images due to the speed at which it is moving. Consequently, our intention is to use audiovisual analysis to show that all these shots and camera movements do not intend to dynamise musical content using random visual elements, but to create a narrative and dramatic discourse of a cinematic nature, based on the musical and expressive structure of the first movement of DvoĜák’s symphony.

Introduction The beginning of the symphony clearly reveals the French filmmaker’s cinematic intentions. Instead of highlighting the beginning of the piece by starting with a pan shot of the orchestra and then moving to a frontal shot to show the conductor, Clouzot chooses a disturbing cut-in of the main cello, so as to focus the attention on the thematic material played by this instrument. After this shot and through fragmented editing, the subsequent parts of the French horns and the woodwinds are shown in a medium shot before we can actually see Karajan for the first time, indicating the anacrusis of the strings. In doing so, Clouzot refuses to show the Austrian conductor as the centre of attention (which would become a rule some years later in the films made by Karajan himself) and focuses the viewers’ attention on the

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dramatic depth of the descending thematic motif that the piece begins with. This aspect is also evident in most of the scenes where we can see Karajan conducting. Sometimes, we cannot even see his face because the camera focuses only on his hand gestures. Some other times, the Austrian conductor appears between the violins and the bass strings and, although appropriately lit, he is filmed from a long distance from which only his movements can be noticed. On the other hand, the presentation of the first motivic cell performed by the first cello personalises collective drama in the individual. This is a common expressive resource in cinematic language that allows the viewers to internalise and better understand a narrative that would otherwise hinder the empathetic identification of the viewers. Secondly, in the shots taken from behind the violins in the shadows, Clouzot uses lighting carefully so as to show the movements of the conductor, without him becoming the real star of the film. The similarity between this initial approach and the beginning of the film Lift to the Scaffold (Louis Malle, 1958) is particularly significant and illuminating. In Louis Malle’s film, the sociopolitical context remains in the background and all the attention is drawn towards Florence Carala, the character played by Jeanne Moreau. Florence is having an affair with one of his husband’s employees and both of them devise a secret plan so that they can consummate their love. Indeed, the film begins with an extreme close-up of Florence that concentrates our attention on her, eliminating any possibility of distraction. Only when the shot widens do we understand that she is talking on the phone and, later, that she is in a telephone box, not at home, which means it is a clandestine conversation. In this manner, Louis Malle builds his narrative by starting from an individual drama which expands into an external world which can only be understood through the projection of his personal desires. And this is exactly the technique that Clouzot uses to personify the dramatic content in the first cello, as well as the Bohemian mystery of DvoĜák’s symphony which Karajan mentioned in his conversation with Joachim Kaiser. Regarding depth of field as an expressive resource, Clouzot disconcertingly decides to align the French horns diagonally. Although positional continuity, defined by the neck of the cello in the first frame, is always maintained, the dramatic contrast between this string instrument and the eight French horns playing simultaneously is somehow disturbing. This is not only an opposition between the individual and the collective, between a plain background and a large depth of field, but it also entails a sharp contrast between the phenomenon and the noumenon. In fact, only by doubling the number of instruments specified in the score by the

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composer was Clouzot able to create this effect. In this way, the French filmmaker was laying the foundations for a new conception of music films: the most important thing is not that those eight French horns double the sound power of the original four, but the fact that their visual impact creates a sharp, dramatic contrast through cinematic resources. That is to say, this is apparently no longer artistic contemplation, but an “emotional kick” to the stomach, as Collingwood would say. In the biography of Clouzot by Jose-Louis Bocquet, he relates an altercation between the French filmmaker and Herbert von Karajan during the filming of Verdi’s Requiem in Milan Cathedral, which would be the last broadcast of Die Kunst des Dirigierens. The conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic categorically refused to triple the number of trumpets, as Clouzot had requested. In the end, the French director threatened to abandon the filming if his request was not fulfilled and Karajan had to give in.30 This does not only prove that it was Clouzot who made the final decisions on issues that should initially be on the conductor, but also that film planning and visual expression were finally more important than sound content.

Exposition After the introduction, the sonata form structure of this first movement begins with the exposition of the main themes. The presentation of the first theme implies an expressive dynamisation of the dramatic content since, for the first time, the camera crosses the axis which had remained constant during the entire introduction. On this occasion, the French horns present the antecedent phrase of the first theme (Fig. 15.1), while the clarinets and the bassoons introduce the consequent phrase from the opposite angle (Fig. 15.2), although on the stage these instruments are actually in front of the horns. This technique produces a distortion of the stage space that enhances the visual and dramatic speech, creating a spatial tension that will be developed throughout the whole movement. Next, the repetition of this first theme is shown by moving the camera towards the oboes and keeping the same shot until the end of the theme. After this, a medium shot of the concertmaster personalises the development of the thematic material by the strings. Afterwards, we can finally see the conductor, in a medium shot, at the exact moment when the bridge passage is prepared, cueing the entry of the trombones in bar 59.

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Fig. 15.1. Antecedent phrase of the first theme

Fig. 15.2. Consequent phrase31

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From a musical point of view, these last two shots are markedly artificial. First, Karajan cues the entry of the trombones that starts the bridge passage by incomprehensibly turning towards the violins, thus violating screen direction rules. However, from the perspective of a viewer without musical knowledge, this visual choice should be considered a wise decision: when Karajan cues the entry of the trombones and turns towards the violins, what he is actually doing is addressing the viewers by visually showing the dramatic intensity of the passage that follows. That is, instead of conducting the orchestra, Karajan is visually interpreting the music so that his audience can understand it. Furthermore, there is a flagrant violation of visual continuity between the shot of the trombones, filmed as an insert, and the pan shot of the whole orchestra that we can see afterwards. In the latter, it is impossible to ignore the presence of a tuba and its player, absent in the previous shot. On this occasion, this is an obvious continuity error that was impossible to correct in the editing process. The moment of maximum harmonic instability is presented through the first pan shot used by Clouzot. In doing this, the director is resorting to collectivity so as to amplify the personification made on the cello at the beginning of the movement. In a way, this resource reminds us, for instance, of that used by Vittorio de Sica in his 1948 film Ladri di biciclette, in which an individual story turns into a collective drama in a pawn shop. After the bridge passage ends, Clouzot directs our attention to the entry of the second theme by using a tracking crane shot that leads to a medium shot of Karajan. This theme is presented by the woodwinds, filmed diagonally from the opposite angle to that used during the consequent phrase of the first theme. Thus, Clouzot visually emphasises the melodic differences between both themes as well as the harmonic confrontation between E minor and G major. Nevertheless, the repetition of this second theme does emphasise the figure of the conductor. Somehow, Clouzot intends to convey its musical meaning through the conductor's gestures and facial expressions. Once again, Karajan is not portrayed as a musician who is conducting the orchestra, but as an actor who is interpreting the musical meaning of this second theme for the viewers. This process is repeated at the entry of the third thematic element. A medium shot of the conductor warns of the imminent arrival of this new theme, introduced by the first flute, so that due attention is paid to it. Next, Clouzot uses a dissolve and centres our attention on this woodwind

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instrument, which is shown in a medium shot and carefully lit in order for it to stand out among the musicians around. Afterwards, when this theme is played by the first violins, Clouzot uses an elaborate, virtuoso sequence shot: with the help of a crane, the camera rises from a close-up of the concertmaster to an almost bird’s eye view shot (almost perpendicular to the stage) of the string instruments. This shot coincides with the crescendo ending of the exposition, and this is how the French filmmaker translates the increase in sound intensity into a visual arch that expands until it covers the entire stage. However, the real meaning of this sequence shot at a dramatic level goes far beyond a simple visual crescendo. In fact, Clouzot is using a very common resource in Alfred Hitchcock’s films. The British filmmaker used to choose bird’s eye view shots for the outcome of the storyline. Thus, he managed to show both the dejection of the characters who had not succeeded in their endeavours and the theatrical sense of every performance. It is precisely this type of shot that can be found, for instance, at the end of The Paradine Case, a film directed by Hitchcock in 1947. In this sense, it is not a coincidence that Clouzot has selected a bird’s eye view shot to present the end of the exposition of the sonata form in a dramatic way. In doing so, the French filmmaker is drawing an extraordinary expressive arch, which starts at the beginning of the movement with the cut-in of the cello and culminates in a disturbing bird’s eye view shot showing the orchestra from above. This is the verification that the initial personification of the narrative has turned into a major collective drama. Furthermore, by using a bird’s eye view shot here and not at the end of the movement, Clouzot is opening up the possibility of redirecting the dramatic tension symbolised in this overhead shot. This is how the French filmmaker constructed what Harald Reiter had previously called a musical thriller.

Development The development of the sonata form, the equivalent to the climax in a story, is the moment of maximum harmonic and melodic instability of the whole movement. The thematic and harmonic elements presented throughout the exposition are fragmented and evolve, leading to passages with great expressive and dramatic content. In this sense, Clouzot resorts to a large number of space distortions and a greater dynamisation of the visual editing process in order to reflect the unstable nature of this section, as well as its great expressive sense. Each shot, each violation of screen

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continuity, each camera movement is designed from a dramatic perspective and performs a very particular function according to the musical structure created by DvoĜák. First of all, we find a shot of the cellos, aligned diagonally with a large depth of field. This arrangement of the cellos is very different in the long shots, in which they are arranged in two rows. Therefore, not only does this shot establish an obvious structural parallelism with the beginning of the movement, but it also expands towards the collective using depth of field as an expressive resource, similarly to what happened at the end of the exposition. Clouzot chooses to keep the same framing until the entry of the French horn in bar 193, despite the fact that in this interval the main melodic material is played by the violins. After the entry of the first French horn, which retakes the third theme, Clouzot shows us the intervention of the piccolo and leads us to the violins, while the woodwinds develop one of the main motivic cells. In this manner, the entry of the cellos in the anacrusis of bar 205 causes a new distortion of space because the cellos are shown from the opposite angle to the violins. This distortion would not occur if the camera had started moving from the position of the woodwinds. Once again, the French filmmaker refuses to show us the main melodic line in favour of a better visual dramatic structure. On the other hand, Clouzot is aware that he cannot continuously fragment visual discourse through editing without weakening structural and dramatic cohesion. Thus, after the visual fragmentation found at the beginning of the development, the French director presents the modulating progression that begins in bar 213 in a very different way. On this occasion, Clouzot stratifies the consecutive parts of trumpets, trombones, and horns in a sequence shot, created by using very precise camera movements that show us each group of instruments exactly when they start their part. In this way, the French filmmaker highlights the internal structural logic of this musical fragment and creates an interesting expressive contrast with the fragmented editing with which he had begun this section. Next, Clouzot uses a long shot of the orchestra again in order to represent a new modulating process, thus establishing a symmetry with what had happened in the bridge passage of the exposition. After this section, a new tracking shot starting from behind the violins leads to another medium shot of the conductor, thus drawing our attention towards a new presentation of the first theme. Karajan’s gestures interpret the musical expressive content of this theme for the viewers. Finally, the development concludes with a long shot of the violins that leads to the

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recapitulation of the first theme by the French horns. Clouzot avoids distracting our attention with the entry of the first flute in bar 269, which could be considered as an artificial or misleading recapitulation of the first theme, since this is not presented in the main tonality. In this manner, he guides the viewers towards the beginning of the recapitulation in a clear and educational way.

Recapitulation The visual planning of the recapitulation confirms our previous considerations, since the expressive criteria we have described are also applied here. Likewise, Clouzot carries out some specific modifications based on the structural changes typical of the last large section of the sonata form. The first of these modifications neutralises the axis shift with which the first theme was introduced. At the beginning of the exposition there was an axis shift that enhanced the contrast between the antecedent and consequent phrases of the first theme, played by the French horns and by the clarinets and bassoons respectively. However, in the recapitulation both the French horns and the woodwinds are shown from the same angle while playing this first thematic element and its repetition. The French filmmaker is thus visually emphasising one of the basic principles of the recapitulation of the sonata form: the resolution of the dramatic tensions created throughout the exposition. Then the bridge passage is again presented by a long shot, this time played by the string instruments. The high angle from which it is filmed evokes the expressive and symbolic meaning of the end of the exhibition, although this time the final result of the sequence is significantly different. After the bridge passage, Clouzot uses this bird’s eye view shot to create the most accomplished moment in the visual and dramatic planning of this symphony. Using a crane, the camera moves with great virtuosity until it focuses on a close-up of the concertmaster's violin. Whereas at the end of the exposition the camera rose from the principal first violin in order to symbolically reveal the theatrical space as a whole, this time Clouzot executes the opposite movement to focus the attention on the concertmaster, thus establishing a new expressive parallelism with the shot of the cello used at the beginning of the piece. In both cases the drama is personified in an instrument and the performer does not seem to be visually important. But the most important element in this sequence shot is neither its virtuoso nature nor the expressive connections established with previous sections. A careful analysis of the score reveals that, while we are contemplating the close-up of the concertmaster, it is the

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first flute who is presenting the main melodic material, that is, the recapitulation of the second theme. From the perspective and experience of the viewers in a concert hall, this decision by Clouzot is at least disconcerting. However, there is a second reading to this fragment which is much closer to the alleged cinematic experience of the viewers to whom this film was addressed. In fact, Clouzot seems to have been inspired by a sequence shot used in Notorious, a film by Hitchcock starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman which premiered in 1946. In one of the most memorable scenes of this film the camera starts an intricate descent from the first floor of Alexander Sebastian’s mansion and stops at the female protagonist’s hand, where she keeps a key that can help solve the enigma created around the secret activities of the character played by Claude Rains. In this manner, Hitchcock focuses our attention on an object that would have otherwise gone unnoticed, hidden among the many guests at the party hosted by Sebastian. Similarly, Clouzot refuses to show the most evident melodic material, introduced by the first flute, and decides to centre our attention on a secondary melodic line, played by the strings and personified in the concertmaster. This melodic line consists of only three notes and reveals the most basic structure of the second theme, which is thus stripped of all artifice. That is to say, Clouzot wants to show us that under the external appearance of this second theme there is a less attractive but more intimate truth, which shifts the harmony towards G# minor with a modal flavour. Were it not for Hitchcock’s meticulous planning of this scene, the elegant gowns at Alexander Sebastian’s party would not let us see the key hidden in Ingrid Bergman’s hand, which is a symbol of her personal drama. Drama is not concealed in the obvious, but moves among the hidden lines, on the edge of the unconscious. Thus, the personification of the collective into the individual found at the beginning of Clouzot’s film reaches its maximum expression by showing a minimal detail, hidden to the audience of the concert hall, but extremely revealing and meaningful to the viewers. After this virtuoso scene, the recapitulation continues and the second theme moves on to the woodwinds, and later to the bass strings. Meanwhile, we are shown a medium shot of Karajan interpreting the music with gestures, without addressing the instruments playing the theme. Next, a lateral high-angle shot of the violins introduces a new modulating process. On this occasion, a reflection of the string instruments can be seen in the back panels of the stage. We ignore the expressive or aesthetic reasons why this reflection was included at this particular point of the symphony, but we would like to

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emphasise the important harmonic change that occurs in those bars. Through a melodic progression, harmony moves from G# minor to A‫ݟ‬ major, previously passing through B‫ ݟ‬minor. Although the shot of the violins is interrupted some bars before reaching the last of those tonalities, it is clear that G# and A‫ ݟ‬are two enharmonic notes in the system of equal temperament. In other words, they are two different ways of expressing the same sound content, but they are also a way of reflecting the duality that exists between two irreconcilable parts of the same entity. Let us not forget that this concept of the Doppelgänger had been developed in German Romantic literature, but also in Alfred Hitchcock’s cinema. And in this context, it does not seem strange that Clouzot uses the metaphor or symbol of the mirror, another common resource of modern cinema to refer to split personality. Immediately afterwards, a new tracking shot takes us from behind the violins to the conductor in order to highlight the recapitulation of the third thematic element. Once again, Karajan marks the entry of the first flute, but he is addressing the viewers, not the performer. His facial expression and gestures convey the expressive meaning in a much more tangible and compelling way than the sound of the flute. This aspect is even more noticeable during the repetition of the theme by the strings. A few bars before returning to the main tonality, Karajan turns to the wind instruments and marks the entry of the French horns. This lateral movement is an evident change of attitude towards the music. Thus, the lyricism of the third theme of the strings, in pianissimo, turns into an energetic, almost violent sound when the French horns play the same theme again, preparing the fortissimo in bar 400. Therefore, all the attention and all the dramatic weight fall onto the Austrian conductor. Clouzot refuses to show the main instruments and, instead, shows us a medium long shot of Karajan throughout the fragment. Nevertheless, the expressive result of the sequence is excellent, because it manages to accurately convey everything that is happening at a dramatic level. When the conductor turns around to mark the entry of the French horns, his face is no longer shown in order to focus our attention on the energetic movements of his arms. These movements would have gone largely unnoticed from a frontal shot. In doing this, Clouzot is illustrating the shift from the melodic part to the vigorous way in which the horns continue the theme. In both cases the theme is the same, and so is the type of shot, but the expressive meaning is quite different. The last section of the first movement begins with a fortissimo tutti that Clouzot introduces through a reverse tracking shot moving away from the conductor. Since the pianissimo had been filmed using a medium shot, we

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could expect the crescendo to be visually conveyed by the camera progressively moving away from the conductor (as at the end of the exhibition) into a long shot of the orchestra, the visual equivalent of a fortissimo. However, the movement of the conductor’s arms does not successfully reflect the great dynamism of this last section. Consequently, Clouzot decides to include a long shot of all the first violins while they are vigorously moving their bows as if they were a projection of Karajan’s gestures. In this case, movement is shown as the most important element, even more than sound. Next, Clouzot inserts a shot of the brass instruments, behind which the timpanist can be seen. With this shot the director tries to visually transmit both the loudness of the music and its dynamic energy, expressed through the tremolo of the timpani. Somehow, Clouzot not only uses the counterpoint between sound and image defined by Eisenstein, but he also approaches the precepts of expressive transfer typical of Kabuki, the Japanese theatrical genre that the Soviet filmmaker refers to to explain this concept. In this manner, Clouzot is making us hear movements and see sounds.32 Finally, a lateral shot taken from behind the violins leads us to the end of the movement. Once again, the careful lighting of the scene enhances the depth of field. We cannot see the conductor’s face, half hidden among the string instruments, but, despite this, we can clearly see his vigorous movements, ultimately aimed at the viewers. These movements are the most important factor in this resolution of the dramatic structure, in which the personal drama presented at the beginning of the movement has been successfully resolved in an almost heroic way.

Filming music: Karajan vs Clouzot Herbert von Karajan Herbert von Karajan criticised Furtwängler’s and Toscanini’s music films because they showed the orchestra as an anonymous mass, unrelated to the conductor or the music.33 With the intention of overcoming this limitation, the Austrian conductor intended “to show the work as it is constructed, the ebb and flow of the tension, the musical line, the many voices” to help the audience’s “understanding of music.”34 However, there was a confrontation between this popularising purpose and the commercial ambition to reach every household. According to Karajan, “television has expanded in such a way that we are no longer entitled to keep music as the treasure of a small circle of enthusiasts; we can reach millions of people.”35 Finally, the Austrian conductor also

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intended to immortalise his work, bequeathing it to posterity: “when I am dead they will see me.”36 In any case, Clouzot did not like the previous films of the Austrian conductor. In July 1965, before they began working together, the French filmmaker described a film that Karajan had shown him to ask for his opinion as “terrible.”37 According to Christian Labrande, manager of Classifilms, the reason why music films are not satisfactory is that filmmakers do not understand music.38 But that was not the case of Clouzot. The French filmmaker had started playing piano at the age of four, and did not abandon this instrument until he was fifteen.39 In addition, Karajan himself acknowledged Clouzot as a music lover with an extraordinary knowledge of scores, a wonderful ear, and a sensitive view of music, which he also shared.40 According to the Austrian conductor, Clouzot wanted to show “the individual performer, the orchestral player, with the orchestra as a group of many such individual musicians, all working together as artists.”41 In this manner, not only would the link between music, conductor, and orchestra (absent in Toscanini and Furtwängler, according to Karajan) be achieved, but also the dramatic projection of the individual into the collective, as we have demonstrated through our audiovisual analysis.

Henri-Georges Clouzot Clouzot’s music films stem from his excellent command of cinematic language and its expressive resources, together with his in-depth knowledge of musical language and its dramatic structures. Moreover, the films in Die Kunst des Dirigerens were made using cinematic means, assuming a production cost which was too high for a television programme in those days. The orchestra was filmed from all angles while the musicians were miming, and medium shots and close-ups of the instruments were inserted later. Thus, Clouzot used the members of the Berlin Philharmonic as if they were actors who had to repeat the scenes again and again until they achieved the desired result. In this sense, Karajan said that the recording sessions “were an especial torment for the musicians” in the orchestra, since “they had to wait patiently for Clouzot to devise some particular camera angle.”42 In any case, Clouzot’s work cannot be analysed only from the perspective of cinematic language. Harald Reiter’s opinions on this matter do not reflect the close interaction between musical structure and its expressive visual rendition. For instance, although Reiter argues that the camera always follows the main melodic line, we have found out that

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sometimes Clouzot shows us a secondary element which would have otherwise gone unnoticed, or keeps a shot of some musicians who have completed their parts while they are waiting for their next entry. Whereas from a musical point of view the viewer’s eyes tend to follow the sounds in the foreground, from the cinematic perspective it is much more interesting to observe the reaction experienced by the interlocutor of the person who is speaking. In this sense, it is very significant to recall Alfred Hitchcock’s opinion regarding the matter, reflected in François Truffaut’s interview book: “the words exchanged […] are superficial formalities and quite meaningless, whereas the essential is elsewhere in the guests’ thoughts, thoughts that we can identify by staring their looks.”43 That is to say, the most important thing is not to show who is talking or playing an instrument, but the reaction that their words (or sounds) cause in the listener, since is in the latter’s thoughts that the essential takes place. And this is precisely what Clouzot does when he shows Karajan in close-ups while the musicians are presenting certain thematic materials. As mentioned above, the viewers can thus empathically internalise musical meaning through the facial expression of the conductor who, in those moments, is just an actor at the service of the French filmmaker. Moreover, film editing allows Clouzot to modify the viewer’s point of view, as well as to show the orchestra from inaccessible angles for the audience attending a live performance. Hence, what Glenn Gould called “proscenium psychology” in reference to this specific music film is subverted.44 Thus, it is not only the ritual of the concert that is being modified, but also the very conception of the performers in a musical performance. In any case, film editing enables an expressive transfer from the contents inherent to the musical piece towards a very dynamic, visual approach closer to the viewers’ experience. Despite the fact that editing the images filmed by Clouzot modifies both the musical performance and the live concert ritual, this is done applying strictly musical criteria. In this sense, Hitchcock noted the similarity between musical composition and film editing when he said that “Pure cinema is complementary pieces of film put together, like notes of music make a melody.”45 And it is through editing that Clouzot manages to create the connection among the orchestra, the music and the conductor that Karajan was missing in Toscanini’s and Furtwängler’s films. In this sense, Walter Benjamin stated that in cinema “the work of art is produced only by means of editing.”46 Clouzot’s music films can be considered as cultural works of art that inaugurate a new paradigm in the reception of musical pieces. Norman Lebrecht defends that Walter Legge’s sound recordings of Karajan in the

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fifties eventually modified “his musical style to conform to consumer requirements,”47 so it is no less true that the films we are analysing offered a new perspective of musical performance from the viewers’ cinematic experience. This perspective integrated artistic works of the highbrow tradition into mass culture. Another different issue would be to assess the viewers’ reception of these films in those days, as well as its possible cultural and democratising sense. Although that is not the purpose of this paper, it is clear that Clouzot’s filmmaking encourages an active audiovisualisation of music. But the fact remains that the television medium lends itself more to a passive contemplation of images. In fact, according to Umberto Eco, this is a major issue in relation to the survival of democratic civilization. In his opinion, democratic civilisation will only be saved “if we make a provocative critical reflection out of the language of image, not an invitation to hypnosis.”48 And carrying out a critical reflection on music films is exactly what we have tried to do in this paper.

Conclusions Through the audiovisual analysis of Clouzot’s film of the first movement of Antonín DvoĜák’s Symphony no. 9 in E minor, “From the New World,” conducted by Karajan, we have verified the presence of visual expressive resources from modern cinematic language. These resources have been used to emphasise musical structure and dramatic content through a meticulous process of film planning. Thus, the perception and understanding of the musical piece is transferred from sound contents, described by Kaiser in his conversation with Karajan, towards a cinematic visual expression that enhances and conditions the meaning of the piece. Clouzot’s film of the last symphony by the Czech composer transforms the auratic ritual of the live concert into a visual experience which, although still contemplative, separates the reproduction of the musical piece from the traditional way in which music is performed, bringing musical pieces closer to viewers who did not frequent concert halls. In this manner, Clouzot updates DvoĜák’s symphony from the perspective of mass culture through a technological medium like television, reformulating the cultural boundary between highbrow and lowbrow. Therefore, Clouzot’s visual proposal means a paradigm shift in the reception of Western art music. Whereas at the beginning of the 19th century Beethoven’s symphonies demanded a new type of audience as well as the transfer from aristocratic halls to public theatres, Clouzot

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successfully introduces music into the living rooms of mass culture, a new, inter-class, eclectic auditorium, accessible to millions of viewers. Finally, although Clouzot’s films are normally critically acclaimed, a thorough study of Die Kunst des Dirigierens from an interdisciplinary perspective combining audiovisual and cinematic language has not been carried out yet. From our point of view, Clouzot’s musical work remains in full force and offers some interesting interdisciplinary and interdiscursive educational applications in both the field of music films and harmonic-formal analysis of musical pieces.

References Adorno, Theodor W. “How to Look At Television.” In The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television, 8, (3) (1954): 213-235. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008. Bocquet, Jose-Louis. Clouzot Cineaste. Paris: La Table Ronde, 2011. Bogdanovich, Peter. Who the Devil Made it. New York: Knopf, 1997. Collingwood, Robin George. “Art and The Machine.” In Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment. Studies in Folktale, Cultural Criticism, and Anthropology, edited by D. Boucher, 291-304. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Cousins, Mark. The Story of Film. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2004. DvoĜák, Antonín .Sinfonía IX, E minor, op. 95, edited by Otakar Šourek. Praga: Editio Supraphon, 1955. http://javanese.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/5/51/IMSLP54080PMLP08710-Dvorak_op.095_Sinfonie_Nr.9_1.Adagio_Allegro_molto _fs_SNKLHU_3_9.pdf Accessed February, 4, 2015. Eco, Umberto. Apocalípticos e integrados. Barcelona: Lumen, 1997. Eisenstein, Sergei. “The Unexpected.” In Film Form. Essays in Film Theory, 18-27. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1977. Endler, Franz. Herbert von Karajan. My Autobiography as told to Franz Endler. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1989. Gould, Glenn “The Prospects of Recording.” In The Glenn Gould Reader, edited by Tim Page, 331-352. New York: Vintage Books, 1984. —. “Oh, for heaven's sake, Cynthia, there must be something else on!” in The Glenn Gould Reader, edited by Tim Page, 369-373. New York: Vintage Books, 1984.

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Karprielian, Maxime. “Christian Labrande, Classique en Images au Louvre”, ResMusica. Musique Classique et dance, 2008, February 27. http://www.resmusica.com/2008/02/27/christian-labrande/ Accessed March, 30, 2015. Labrande, Christian. Henri-Georges Clouzot, N. F. Theater, August, 2003) http://www.mecd.gob.es/cultura-mecd/dms/mecd/cultura-mecd/areascultura/cine/mc/fe/cine-dore/notas-a-laprogramacion/2009/enero2009dore_clouzot.pdf Accessed February, 4, 2015. Lebrecht, Norman. The Maestro Myth. Great Conductors in Pursuit of Power. New York: Kensington Publishing Corp., 2001. Martin, Brett. Difficult Men. New York: The Penguin Press, 2013. Morrison, D. “Carl Sagan's Life and Legacy as Scientist, Teacher, and Skeptic” Skeptical Inquirer, January-February, 2007. http://www.csicop.org/si/show/carl_sagans_life_and_legacy_as_scienti st_teacher_and_skeptic Accessed March, 23, 2015. Osborne, Richard. Herbert von Karajan. A Life in Music. London: Chatto & Windus, 1998. Reiter, Harald. “Everything else is gaslight!” Programme Notes in HenriGeorges Clouzot (dir.). Herbert von Karajan. Berliner Philharmoniker. DvoĜak Symphony no. 9. Berlin: C Major Entertainment, 2010. Silber, John R. “Television: A Personal View.” In The Meaning of Commercial Television: The Texas-Stanford Seminar, edited by Stanley T. Donner, 113-139. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968. Truffaut, François. Hitchcock. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1984. Wasko, Janet. A Companion to Television. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Wild, L. Television in the US: History and Production. Resources. Northern State University. http://www3.northern.edu/wild/th100/tv.htm. Accessed March, 23, 2015.

Notes 1

Translation: Ana M. Barreira Endler, Herbert von Karajan, 102. 3 Osborne, Herbert von Karajan, 542 4 “Herbert von Karajan in Conversation with Prof. Joachim Kaiser” in HenriGeorges Clouzot (dir.). Herbert von Karajan. Berliner Philharmoniker. DvoĜak Symphony no. 9. (Berlin: C Major Entertainment, 2010) DVD 5 Wild, Television in the US: History and Production. 2

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Collingwood, “Art and The Machine”, 294. Ibid., 292. 8 Ibid., 298. 9 Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, 36. 10 Ibid., 39. 11 Collingwood, “Art and The Machine”, 296. 12 Ibid., 298. 13 Martin, Difficult Men, 22. 14 Adorno, “How to Look At Television”, 217. 15 Ibid., 217 16 Silber, “Television: A Personal View”, 113. 17 Morrison, “Carl Sagan's Life and Legacy as Scientist, Teacher, and Skeptic”. 18 Wasko, A Companion to Television, 11. 19 Gould, “The Prospects of Recording”, 331. 20 Ibid., 335. 21 Ibid., 336. 22 Ibid., 337 23 Benjamin, The Work of Art…, 24. 24 Reiter, “Everything else is gaslight!”, 3. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 4. 27 Ibid. 28 Cousins, The Story of Film, 179. 29 Reiter, “Everything else is gaslight!”, 4. 30 Bocquet, Clouzot Cineaste, 456. “Une seule altercation entre les deux hommes: le cinéaste veut que les trompettes soient triplées. Le chef d'orchestre refuse. Clouzot menace d'abandonner le tournage, Karajan cède”. 31 Antonín DvoĜák, Sinfonía IX, E minor, op. 95. 32 Eisenstein, “The Unexpected”, 22. 33 Endler, Herbert von Karajan, 102. 34 Lebrecht, The Maestro Myth, 122. 35 Labrande, Henri-Georges Clouzot. 36 Lebrecht, The Maestro Myth, 152. 37 Bocquet, Clouzot Cineaste, 453. 38 Karprielian, “Christian Labrande, Classique en Images au Louvre”. 39 Bocquet, Clouzot Cineaste, 26. 40 Labrande, Henri-Georges Clouzot. 41 Endler, Herbert von Karajan., 102. 42 Ibid., 103. 43 Truffaut, Hitchcock, 20-21. 44 Gould, “Oh, for heaven's sake, Cynthia, there must be something else on!”, 372. 45 Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made it, 522. 46 Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age…, 66. 47 Lebrecht, The Maestro Myth, 146. 48 Eco, Apocalípticos e integrados, 332. 7

CHAPTER SIXTEEN ALVIS HERMANI’S IL TROVATORE (SALZBURG, 2014): HOW TO ANALYZE A STAGE AND MUSICAL TEXT FROM THE CULTURAL SEMIOTICS? MANUEL A. BROULLÓN-LOZANO UNIVERSIDAD DE SEVILLA

Introduction Leaving a character singing offstage and making him interrupt— providing a sense of contrast—is a common technique used resource in Verdi’s operas. In Act I Scene II of Il Trovatore, a seductive melody comes from behind the scene: Deserto sulla terra, col rio destino in guerra e sola spese un cor al trovator! Ma s’ei quel cor possiede, bello di casta fede, e d’ogni re maggior il trovator!1 (All alone on the earth,/ at war with his evil fate,/ his only hope is in one heart,/ a heart for the Troubadour.)

A coded statement in Italian appears in which the “poetic function of language”2 predominates, communicated by the heptasyllabic verse in the first, second and third lines, and a tetrasyllabic in the fourth one; consonant rhyme and a quatrain with aabb structure. This rhythmic dominant opposes the appropriate instrumental use of spoken and written natural language. Yet, if one wishes to put it on paper, in black on white,

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such a fragment can be transcribed differently through the musical language—revealing a second expressive aspect. Given that the scansion of the verse has a radical break, transforming its rhythmic shape, the statement is also encoded in musical language according to certain rules of the genre: the shape of a tenor romantic Verdian aria articulated in two repetitions of the same phrase. In the second repetition the tenor has the opportunity (or rather, almost the obligation) to resolve the cadence ad libitum in order to show his command of vocal technique and knowledge of the work. In the version studied here, Francesco Meli does this using a ritardando throughout the dominant chord and embroidering the melody with a grupetto, resolving in a trill on natural F. All this on the harp imitating an arpeggiated lute. In the syntagmatic chain, this sinuous melody emerges as if from nowhere, bursting through, and creating a powerful contrast with the recitative supported by the strings, sung up until that point by Count di Luna (Plácido Domingo acting not as a tenor but as a baritone in this case). Neither does this statement makes sense as notation: not even as a mere musical performance. It only acquires full significance through its stage representation, in a relationship between an internal space inhabited by Count di Luna and Leonora, and an external from which that seductive song originates. This proxemic procedure generates an interaction between the inside and the outside, in Alvis Hermani’s version, by using two portraits of noble ladies and Giovanni Cariani’s Gentleman playing the Lute. The paintings are windows which communicate both spaces, both worlds. It also proposes two issues that may well be studied by Semiotics both from a staging point of view (the idea of the limit or border so important to Jurij M. Lotman’s Cultural Semiotics) and from a musical one. Indeed this scene depicts a crash or collision of reasons, a contrast between different musical motifs, approachable from a possible theory of intonation, as I will later discuss. It is ultimately a framework of signs coded in various ways forming a single system of signification and set for someone who perceives them: the complex phenomenon of Opera. According to Edgar Morin, complexity does not mean neither complicated nor incomprehensible. So, this study aims to establish some key points for the analysis of a paradigmatic operatic text such as Il Trovatore (a standard repertoire opera often considered as canonical) through a staging that works with plastic elements organized in levels inside the text (inside/outside, reality/fiction, natural/artificial).

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For this, the first step is to establish a set of definitions that reveal the typical semiotic mechanisms of this dramatic form. Subsequently, the cataloguing of both scenic and musical signs by a method of analysis appropriate to each object will follow. I will propose some conclusions about the significance of the analyzed text, and will offer key points that may be germane to the study of other phenomena in the Performing Arts.

Key statements about Opera First, because all scientific coding reveals to us the phenomenal world, both the formal object and the material object should be defined using the semiotic methodology. Opera can be defined as an “integrated semiotic code”,3 that is, as “complementarity of verbal or nonverbal signs, with texts and speeches” encoded into other characters. Opera is an intersection of three subspecie semioticae, namely literary discourse (in its dramatic and lyrical genres); Western musical language configured around our tonal system; and scenic codes comprising ephemeral architecture, costumes, makeup, hair, proxemics and body language stage direction (sometimes also dance), lighting, atrezzo, and so on. It should be noted that, together with the appropriate codes of Opera as signical elements, subcodes are regulated 1) by a behavioural and ritual grammar which, through the lighting and silence set the times in which one is allowed to stand up, applaud or remain silent; and 2) a specific syntax depending on the border element of the backdrop (or, in the absence of this, the front of the stage) also coexists. These two axes, perfectly comparable with the concepts of “beginning” and “end” of the narrative text or the frame of a painting, are critical, since they pose the problem of the “composition, of the structural unit of the world” in the work of art.4 This issue is especially relevant when organised in metalevels, which question the delimitation and the finitude of the artistic text. This happens, as shown in the following pages, with the staging used by Alvis Hermanis5 in which both the curtain and the proscenium arch act as borders between very distinct universes, governed by their own specific laws. Furthermore, it should be reemphasised that Opera as artistic discourse does not exist except through its stage realisation. There is indeed the possibility of attending an opera as a concert performance, but it must be objected that even then the singers dressed in tuxedos or long dresses often resort—to a greater or lesser extent—to mime and proxemics between them, simply to express a particular dramatic situation. Yet we must not

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lose sight of the fact that Opera differs from other stage forms in its substance regarding the particular expression articulated in terms of some specific codes and sub-codes: musical language within the framework of certain stylistic features as strong as they are, in this case: those of Verdian opera. Therefore, and following Asafyev’s observations,6 when we understand music as an uttered speech, one can think of “intonational units” as “events, which succeed and relate to each other, the whole making a meaningful impression on the listener.”7 Consequently, in Opera, any literary or scenic sign whatever its type, is not regulated by the utterance (namely, its materiality or its articulation in its natural language, normally and prescriptively Italian) but by the musical intonation. This, according to Stefano Jacoviello implies the semiotic study of music as discourse.8 In order to illustrate this idea we should examine Manrico’s cabaletta at the end of Act III. His text, decoded directly from the natural language even with the secondary language of modelling superimposed, is an imperative threatening statement regulated by the compound modal verb /want to do/ that reports obstinacy and is adorned with suitable thymic implications and “protensivity” (that is, the “semiotics of passions” according to Greimas and Fontanille,9 expressed in the nouns “Madre”/”figlio”, “amarti”.. or adjectives like “orrendo”, “infelice”). From then on, the narrative object of the subject “Manrico” goes from Leonora (the lover) to Azucena (the mother), resulting in confusion and shock for the former: Di quella pira l’orrendo fuoco/ Tutte le fibre m’arse avvampò!/ Empi, spegnetela, o ch’io fra poco/ col sangue vostro la spegnerò!/ Ero già figlio prima d’amarti,/ non può frenarmi il tuo martir. Madre infelice, corro a salvarti, o teco almeno corro a morir!10 (The horrible blaze of that pyre/ burns, enflames all of my being!/ Monsters, put it out; or very quickly/ I'll put it out with your blood!/ Before I loved you, I was yet her son;/ your suffering cannot restrain me.../ Unhappy mother, I hasten to save you,/ or at least, hasten to die with you!)

However, we may wonder why the action stops in a climactic moment of tension as this. In the opinion of the critic Rosselli, the answer is found in the intonation and the actual musical substance, specific to Opera:

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Indeed, the climatic moment of the whole scene in the shape of an upward curve is provided by the classic Verdian recitative, duet, scena and caballetta structure with a brilliant end.12 Following the Rossinian compositional model, in this structure, the last part is bright according to the tone (the tenor’s G/high treble C), dynamics in terms of tempo (groups of eighths and sixteenths, which implies acceleration) and finished in perfect authentic cadence in collaboration with the whole orchestra and often with the choir, as it is in this case. The caballetta can be studied as an “intensity curve”13 through its texture (G/Manrico’s high treble C and authentic cadence supported by strings, french horns and the men’s choir) and dynamics (melodic impulse imposed by the subdivision and cadential resolution) so as to rightly cause the drop of the curtain with consequent resounding applause from the audience, seduced and persuaded by the “heroic experience of romantic love”: the question at the core of Il Trovatore.14 Considering Agawu’s theory, this is the climax that the whole scene heads towards. Nevertheless, it should be noted that climatic points as moments that offer possibilities to shine, are only highlighted in the very same act of musical and stage performance of a text that is already known by the audience in other versions. “As such they are thrilling to audiences, whose consumption of these arias may owe not a little to the anticipated pleasure of experiencing these moments in different voices.”15 Given that Cultural Semiotics considers the fact that “ya nadie puede acceder a dicho mundo sino a través de otras representaciones” (“no one can access this world but through other representations”),16 what can be deduced from this relational idea of performance as the decision adopted from a memory of a text?

A semiotic twist: the analysis as performance From a methodological point of view, one could argue that the analysis must also be conceived of as “a performance, as a mode of composing, not as an unveiling of resident truths, not as an exercise in decoding.”17 This is especially apparent with works like Il Trovatore, which has been one of the most popular operas of the Verdian repertoire but, simultaneously, and

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perhaps consequentially, has been “parodied, ridiculed, detested by critics, often thrown on stage with cardboard sets and with no rehearsing.”18 Performing Arts, while requiring the co-presence of performer and spectator when it comes to the performance, demands the sensory and emotional involvement of both, who are invited to participate in the game of interpretation. Thus, it can be said that these Performing Arts are pure means of persuasion (/make believe/, even if it appears unlikely that someone would sing a caballetta in a dangerous situation however gentlemanly he is), or rather, of seduction, when the curtain rises and reveals the scenic universe, breaking a certain communicative pact of the fourth wall.

Opera as text in culture: a proposal of a cultural typology Consistent with these principles, it is appropriate to define the act of interpretation of an opera as an enunciation/intonation with the particularity that it takes place before certain recipients who know the content of the work in advance but who, at the same time, expect to be surprised both by the virtuosity of the group of voices and orchestra and by the staging which is new in each particular act of performance. The textual value of Opera within a culture emerges from its sensory perception in the present, silhouetted against the memory of a piece of repertoire housed in the collective imagination. In the words of Cultural Semiotics: “culture as non-inherited memory of the community [...] that is necessarily related to the historical past experience.”19 According to this view of the “semiosphere” and, in order to outline a possible cultural typology, it could be argued (with the Tartu School of thought) that 21st century Western musical and scene culture is a “textual culture”, “ritualised” and “facing the expression”20 in which the manifestations of the text prevail over the underlying system of rules. Collage and citation, as seen in the stage production by Alvis Hermanis through the large iconic archive that is the gallery, are proper to baroque as opposed to the classicism of the “grammatical” or “content-oriented” cultures. The French culture of the 19th century belonged to the latter type, to which Giuseppe Verdi himself was subjected with the remarkable resulting works of Don Carlo (1867), Aida (1871), and even with the translation of the very same Trovatore (Le Trouvère, Brussels 1856 and Paris 1857), which would form the basis for an interesting case study. The defining feature of an academic culture like this is the dictate of structural rules, the set of voices and the formal themes that form the prerequisites of a new piece of work. Specifically, in the case of the Opéra Garnier in Paris

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where the Busseto’s master worked (which he ironically referred to as “la grande boutique”21), this structure demanded five acts, a ballet, great scenes and a minimum of four characters vocally virtuosos.22 Also, the Italian opera, whose patterns are followed by Il Trovatore, became a set of forms highly encoded by Rossini and his contemporaries (Donizetti and Bellini to some extent), and then corrected by the aesthetic program of Mercadante, who simplified the “unnecessary coloratura deployments and arbitrary Rossinian crescendo.”23 Verdi’s contribution and his characteristic genius consists precisely of an allowed transgression of that structure becoming a role model, for example: the congruence between stage and music prompted by the awareness in 1948 that Lady Macbeth demanded “an ugly voice”24 so powerful, imperative and rough as the decorum of this evil character. By contrast, today, Opera lives off repertoire. Or rather, relives through repertoire. Opera today is a set of canonized texts which, through each new performance, require a formal baroque twist (sometimes even resorting to “distortion”) of the elements provided by the score and the libretto. In this textual culture, much of novelty value that could be defined as “informative” lies in the emergence of an unknown speech through the scenic dimension of the opera as a complex text, providing “great room for hidden potentialities.”25 Why does a part of this responsibility fall on the scenic, plastic dimension, rather than on musical virtuosity? Since the staging of La Traviata by Willy Decker at the same Salzburg Festival (2005), it is interesting to test how stage directors are gaining more prominence not only through illustrating with lavish set designs and excessive costumes, but also by creating a parallel discourse, sometimes even overlapping with the musical or the dramatic ones; that goes so far as to contradict the original (highlighted in recent years by Michel Levine’s Don Giovanni at La Scala in Milan (2011) or Dimitri Tcherniakov’s at the Royal Theatre in Madrid (2013)). In both cases, stage directors actually contradict the meaning of the work. Still, while Levine’s proposal was impressive, and fearlessly addressed both the Italian president and prime minister in the theatre the night of the première, Tcherniakov received a loud jeering and was denounced for his insufferable work. In any case, these instances highlight that the potential of the performance as a discourse is based on that idea of seduction between the memory of the text and its updated version. The issue of the border is picked up by Alvis Hermanis, a night at the museum where he ends up becoming (or rather, “being translated into”) the chivalric delirium of

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García Gutiérrez’s dramatic work adapted by Salvatore Cammarano for the libretto of Verdi’s Il Trovatore.

The text according to the topological conception of cultural semiotics When the curtain rises in Salzburg, the viewer, at least at first glance, sees absolutely nothing of either the chivalric universe, or the Zaragoza imagined by García Gutiérrez from the idealising perspective of the Spanish Romanticism. Then, a gallery that resembles one of the great European museums appears: perhaps the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Prado Museum in Madrid or the National Gallery in London. There, of course, there are tourists in shorts equipped with cameras, audio guides and hand-held fans to ward off the summer heat. Ferrando, the veteran soldier in the service of Count di Luna, is nowhere to be seen. Soon, this character announces himself as the guide of that group, and will tell/sing the story of the gypsy witch while showing with his pointer the several paintings arranged in the great room. Then the night falls. According to Cammarano’s libretto (p.6 and ff.), from here on, the noble Leonora (Anna Netrebko) confesses to her lady Inés the passion triggered by the troubadour. Directly after, Leonora hides in the gardens while, at the same time, the Count di Luna (Plácido Domingo) arrives and the sensual song of Manrico begins. However, in Alvis Hermanis’s proposal these characters are “only” common night watchmen. The interesting thing about this scene is that—returning to the fore mentioned Act I Scene II—the troubadour’s song minstrel comes from nowhere, since the guards are standing before a huge painting of a knight with a mandolin. Then, before the song emanates from the painting, the common watchers identify themselves with the Renaissance portraits placed across the stage, as the walls of this museum, in a whimsical dream, begin to move. Leonora even turns repeatedly to the painting of a lady, whose stoicism seems to appeal to the vicissitudes of passionate experience. What is happening? What is this quid pro quo? Alvis Hermanis presents a group of characters (Ferrando Leonora, Inés, Count di Luna, Ruiz and Azuzena) which are border elements, definable in two different textualities. In this operation the renowned paintings act as shifters: “operators that serve to transfer a structure into another, to pass from one code to another.”26 On the one hand, Leonora and the Count di Luna are the night watchmen of a major European museum as the scenery and their costumes demonstrate, as well as their behavior in such a represented space. Yet, at the same time, they become

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the alter ego of the paintings that watch over and surround them, and so they start to behave like an Aragonese nobleman and a lady in the Zaragoza of the 15th century respectively. When Cariani’s huge painting of knight and the lute comes to life through Manrico’s sultry singing fuori scena, the characters are translated, changing the context and thus their clothing and behavior. Another key element of this staging is revealed by the movement and the arrangement of the paintings, which exert a kind of supplementary narrative from their structure. The first appearance of the gypsy Azucena (Marie-Nicole Lemieux) arises under the mask of an agitated and uninhibited tourist guide who shows a group of visitors several large paintings which feature the common pictorial motif of the motherhood of Mary. During her explanations, the guide gesticulates in a state of wild delirium, subsequently fainting and then transforming into the gypsy now wearing her costume. From this moment, this is the iconographic cycle that accompanies her. Her behaviour on stage and vocal intonation enter into conversation with the images of sacred motherhood, a bond that links her both to Manrico and to the dark legend of the witch that haunts her: “Mi vendica! Mi vendica!”27 The stage machinery finds a new meaning also with the projections, since during the aria of the Count di Luna “Il balen del suo sorriso”,28 the ceiling comes down to a vertical position and acts as a backdrop on which parts of the faces of Leonardo Da Vinci’s portraits of ladies are projected. Therefore, pictorial imaginary acts as a boundary within the space of representation between the chivalric world and today’s world. The gallery, clearly identifiable by the spectators who, at the same time, will recognise many of these paintings and will see them translated into the carefully made costumes of the world of “ghosts” (that is, gypsies and Manrico himself). In Act I Scene II, the characters are seduced by sensual and bright melodies in the middle of a dark night in the museum. We, the spectators are also seduced to join that romantic world.

Content level in Il Trovatore The definition of culture provided by the Tartu school is perfectly applicable to the content level of Il Trovatore, both in terms of the composition of the plot and the diegetic elements: spaces and characters. Culture is defined as textuality and as an attitude toward the sign that can be analysed both from the point of view of a given communication and through “codes in which the communication is decrypted in the text.”29 Therefore, it should be accepted that, even in a textual culture such as this,

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oriented towards the expression, acts of performance are not merely empty signs for vocal virtuosity or based on an alleged technical expertise, but significant ways that show important contents. From this perspective, one can identify the implicit significant relevance between the interiors of the Aljafería Palace of Act I Scenes I and II, and the exterior spaces that correspond to the universe of gypsies from Scene III onwards. For Alvis Hermanis, this inside/outside concept does not correspond to the chivalrous spaces of García Gutiérrez’s ideal Aragon (Zaragoza, Castellor, Vizcaya) but rather with the border, which is indeed the painting between the “boring” world of museums and the world of dreams or burning chivalrous passions. The topological configuration of the space (inside/outside) corresponds in all cases with expressive features of the musical discourse. This can be observed, for instance, if one compares the bright chorus of gypsies in Act I Scene III—outdoors, natural, counter-cultural,30 light, and with the ringing of the anvils—against the oppressive atmosphere of Act III Scene I, in which the Count di Luna interrogates the gypsy Azucena—interior, artificial, structuring and oppressive culture placed under suspicion as is typical in representations of the oppressor in the semiosphere of the Italian Risorgimento—. Even within the same scene musical and spatial levels reflect the conflict of interest between the main characters. Thus, the prodigious “Miserere” scene31 overlaps Leonora’s interior monologue, the prayer of the monks and the lament of Manrico (“non ti scordar di me”). In short, from the musical viewpoint, a combat appears between a light coloratura soprano, a tenor with the troubadour’s melody and the old chorus style of “inner voices” that carry such content under the masks, under the textual form of three different attitudes before the “life/death” sign. In Alvis Hermanis’ staging of Il Trovatore, after Leonora’s shock in the end of the combat scene at Castellor, she wakes up in the “real world” of the museum, where all the pictures have disappeared. She loosens her beautiful red costume and now appears dressed in her original uniform of the night guard. She has ben re-translated into the initial code. The change of scenery between the third and the fourth act takes place with the curtain opened. While Anna Netrebko-Leonora is unconscious, a brigade of operators cleans the scene, leaving only the red walls completely empty. At the same time, the faithful Leonora’s friend Lady Inés, with her lantern, finds the shocked Leonora lying on the floor and goes to ask for help. The soldier Ruiz then brings Cariani’s portrait of the troubadour without the frame. The painting, then, no longer has limits. Music begins with the dark recitative “Vanne… Lasciami” and Leonora’s

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aria “D’amor sull’ali rosee.” During both scenes Leonora takes off the uniform, becoming almost naked. She finally leaves the costume and the mask of the monotonous night guard life of the museum to become a truly medieval lady, a guise maintained until the last and tragic consequence, as we see during the “Miserere” aria and chorus. According to the Semiotics of Passions, at this moment of decision she develops the narrative program of the fulfilling passion. Finally she resolves what to do to help Manrico (she is again wearing the dresses of the medieval lady) as Alvis Hermanis stages during the cavatina “Tu vedrai che amore in terra.” Leonora has become a real icon of nobility: looking at herself in the mirror, which becomes Cariani’s painting.

Conclusions Il Trovatore is one of the most popular operas of the standard repertoire. Due to this, it has often been staged with old-fashioned set dressings, untalented singers and the fastest and most impossible tempos. In addition to this, Il Trovatore has a deficiency of meaning itself: reading Cammarano’s libretto, the story of the gypsy sorceress and the two sons of the Count is never clear. However, as I have demonstrated in Alvis Hermanis’s version, any new act of performance offers a new interpretation of the general sense, which may solve that initial deficiency. In other words: as the music may launch the character’s passions signifying their deepest psychology, the staging has the responsibility to generate the meanings that Cammarano may have forgotten. Consequentially, that omission offers a space for creativity or, according to Umberto Eco in Opera aperta and even in Lector in fabula, a textual space of cooperation for the reader. The reader/watcher of the Opera may be invited not simply to make a proper decoding of the text, but also to help the author and the performers to build the experience of sense. From Cultural Semiotics, Jurij M. Lotman explains this phenomenon of co-sensorial and emotional involvement through mechanisms that are unique to the artistic text: the executor for me is him, but I lay all his speeches and feelings in myself. Even in a culture like ours, in which Opera has become an entertainment for the elite offered inside particular places and around a closed number of standard works in the repertoire, new interpretations such as Alvis Hermanis’s may be considered as a possibility of unlimited semiosis within the Opera discourse. Even nowadays, inside our postmodern culture, where the code of honour is old-fashioned and often not fully understood, decoding Verdi’s Trovatore may promote an aesthetic experience translating the signs inside our culture’s memory.

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According to Roland Barthes’s concept of the “shifter”, which may allow the translation process between two different codes, Opera finds a new set of possibilities exploring the act of performance, as much by the music language as by stage elements organised by the idea of limitation. This is why, in the study of Opera, the idea of the border of Cultural Semiotics becomes an interesting and useful tool, as it considers a structural analysis of the text (encoded/not encoded) but also an approach to the scenic space (space of the performance/space of reception). One should not forget that Jurij M. Lotman defines the artistic text as a “structural reserve” and this is its distinctive property: its informational value, “unpredictability”32 or “hidden potential of meanings.”33 Finally, a proper performance is intended as the appearance of a certain value of strangeness, an effect of strangeness produced on those viewers who are watching the work of art according to the semiotic agreement which begins with the form “if then…”

References Agawu, Kofi. Music as Discourse. Semiotic adventures in Romantic Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Alier, Roger. History of Opera. Barcelona: Robinbook, 2011. Asafyev, Boris. “The Theory of Intonation.” In Linguistics in Music, edited by Raymond Monelle, 274-279. Nueva York: Routledge, 1992. Barthes, Roland. The Fashion System. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1983. Cammarano, Salvatore. Il Trovatore. http://www.kareol.es/obras/eltrovador/acto1.htm. Accessed May, 5, 2015 González Gil, Mª Dolores. Un taller de folclore para el siglo XXI en Literatura Infantil. Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2000. Greimas, A. Julien and Fontanille, Jacques. The Semiotics of Passions. From states of affairs to stgates of feeling. Minneapolis: University of Minnessota Press, 1993. Jacoviello, Stefano. La rivincita di Orfeo. Esperienza estetica e semiotica del discorso musicale. Milán-Udine: Mimesis Edizione, 2012. Jakobson, Roman. “Linguistics and Poetics (1960).” In The Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader, edited by Lucy Burke, Tony Crowley and Alan Girvin, 334-339. London: Routledge, 2000. Lotman, Jurij M. Semiótica de la Cultura. Madrid: Cátedra, 1979. —. Culture and Explosion. Semiotics, Communication and Cognition. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009.

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Rosselli, John. The Life of Verdi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Vázquez Medel, Manuel Ángel. “La Semiótica de la Cultura y la construcción del imaginario social.” In Entretextos. Revista electrónica semestral de estudios semióticos de la cultura, 11-12-13 (2008-2009). Verdi, Giuseppe Verdi. Il Trovatore. Vocal scores. Milán: Ricordi, 1986.

Notes 1

Cammarano, Il Trovatore. Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics (1960)”, 334-339. 3 González Gil, Un taller de folclore para el siglo XXI… 4 Lotman, Semiótica de la Cultura. 5 Daniele Gatti and Alvis Hemanis, Il Trovatore, available online (15.08.2014): http://www.medici.tv/#!/trovatore-anna-netrebko-placido-domingo-salzburgfestival 6 Asafyev, “The Theory of Intonation”, 274-279. 7 Agawu, Music as Discourse, 9. 8 Jacoviello, La rivincita di Orfeo... 9 Greimas and Fontanille, The Semiotics of Passions… 10 Cammarano, Il Trovatore, 36. 11 Rosselli, The Life of Verdi, 114. 12 Alier, History of Opera, 254-255. 13 Agawu, Music as Discourse, 49. 14 Rosselli, The Life of Verdi, 114. 15 Agawu, Music as Discourse, 50. 16 Vázquez Medel “La Semiótica de la Cultura y la construcción del imaginario social”, 16. 17 Agawu, Music as Discourse, 5. 18 Rosselli, The Life of Verdi, 111. 19 Lotman, Semiótica de la Cultura, 71. 20 Ibid., 77. 21 This is how Verdi describes the Ópera Garnier in a letter sent to Leon Escudier the 12th March 1868, where he laughs at the strict French Academy: “Con tutto ciò la Grande boutique continuerà la medesima routine fino alla fine dei secoli… Fino ad ora gli effetti d’ottica e gli salti mortali, da qui in avanti la metafísica. Più tarde forse l’astronomia… tutto, tutto, fuori la musica. Almeno la musica che sgorga dal cuore e dall’ispirazione” (With all this, the big boutique will go on as it has done until the end of time… until now, optical effects and somersaults, nowadays metaphysics. Then, astronomy… everything, everything except the music that comes from heart and inspiration). In spite of this, we can recall that the Italian musician aimed to acquire the French Legion of Honour, which was imposed to him in 1894. 22 Alier, History of Opera, 257. 2

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Rosselli, The Life of Verdi, 53. Ibid., 62. 25 Lotman, Semiótica de la Cultura, 101. 26 Barthes, The Fashion System, 5. 27 Verdi, Il Trovatore. Vocal scores, 72. 28 Ibid., 92 and ff. 29 Lotman, Semiótica de la Cultura, 41. 30 Le fosche notturne spoglie/ de' cieli sveste/ l'immensa volta;/ sembra una vedova/ che alfin si toglie/ i bruni panni/ ond'era involta. This tutti in G and the hammer’s jingles (the reason why this famous choir is often known as “the anvil choir”) depicts an external space, free, natural, not-encoded. 31 Verdi, Il Trovatore. Vocal scores, 188-198. 32 Lotman, Culture and Explosion. 33 Lotman, Semiótica de la Cultura, 101. 24