From Bach to The Beatles: How Music Genres Make the Movies
A long time ago, In a galaxy far, far away…
Horn blast. You know exactly where you are. The hairs on your arm stand in attention as the cymbals crash. The Yellow Star Wars logo fills the screen and pulls back, dragging with it all of the backstory required to place you immediately into the action. Empathetic strings soar through the pitch black of space, as a cry for help from a damsel in distress. Tilt down. An unnamed tan-colored planet provides a back drop as an impressive space craft flies overhead. Hit the kettle drums. A declamatory death march sounds off, heralding the aggression of a triangular battleship, that keeps going, and going; to the point where our fear for the smaller vessel grows by the second. Alarm, excitement, sadness, fear, and bravery: All in under a two minutes.
Three young people: Two boys and one girl. Driving in a black pickup truck enter an underground tunnel. Halogen lights cast a dim yellow haze around them. As they speed up, the beautiful young girl hears “Heroes” by David Bowie on the radio. She turns it up. The effected guitar stirs up a recklessness that only youth holds. She opens the back window and climbs out into the bed of the truck. The driver, who happens to be her brother, has seen this before, but the younger smaller boy turns his head to see if she will be okay. She props herself up, holding on to the automobile, then let’s go and outstretches her arms. The boy looks up as the song plays on, telling him that he will be king and she will be queen. Traveling at high speed, she gracefully brings her arms up and down, as if she is flying. That is the minute he falls in love with her.
Here are two examples of music telling the story with the least amount of spoken words possible. We know exactly what the characters are feeling and why they are feeling it. The genres couldn’t be any more polarized, yet they evoke emotion in the simplest way. On one hand you have a classic John William’s composition which has several movements and motifs that lift and depress the soul symphonically. The use of a pop song inside the walls of the story can effect how the character behaves, causing a chain reaction on through the audience.
Genre can also have a major effect on the tone of the film. “Guardians of the Galaxy”, which in essence an action/comedy, uses 70’s pop music in lieu of a traditional film score as the grounding element from the audience to the alien characters presented on screen. The flipside of that is “American History X”, which is a gritty drama about neo-nazis. One would suspect that modern music would be heavily featured, yet much of the film is scored with operatic pieces that enhance the morality play.
Juxtaposition, which is the overlaying of contrasting sounds and/or images, is a common theme in modern cinema. “Reservoir Dogs” has a torture scene in which the interrogator (Mr. Blonde) cuts of a man’s ear and sings “Stuck In the Middle” by Stealer’s Wheel. The upbeat song on top of the excessive violence immediately causes the audience to feel the humor and shock of the scenario simultaneously. Perhaps an influence for Tarantino was Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange”, in which “Singing In the Rain” is played over a violent gang beat down.
A soundtrack can make a movie. “Tron” may not have just been a visual treat, if it had not been for Daft Punk’s incredible techno-dance music providing an other-worldly atmosphere. “Titanic” very well could have suffered financially, if it had not been for James Horner’s sweeping score and Celine Dion’s vocal power on “My Heart Will Go On”. Music is so important that it has it’s own genre of film. “Les Miserables” won several Academy Awards, but if the songs hadn’t been there, it would have fallen flat.
Music trends in film are always wavering between traditional and modern, yet both are necessary for storytelling. As cinema can blend styles together, such as comedy-drama, or western-science fiction, the desire to make a new art form grows in each film maker. With a hundred years of movies to cull from, fresh methods of telling stories that are familiar will become the standard of this era.
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