Experiencing Film Music by Kenneth LaFave

Author:Kenneth LaFave
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

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“Drama” covers a lot of aesthetic ground. Dramas come packaged as adventures, romances, coming-of-age pieces, and more. The challenge for the composer is to understand the exact nature of the drama being scored and to settle on a musical language—such as a harmonic vocabulary or an idiom—to match it.

Alex North’s music for A Streetcar Named Desire (1949) is the finest score ever written for the film adaptation of a stage play, and arguably the best score ever composed for a dramatic film. North met the challenge of creating cues to go with Tennessee Williams’s already musical words—musical in the sense that each character has his or her distinctive voice—by giving distinct instrumentation to each strand of the script’s manifold meaning. A Streetcar Named Desire is about the meeting of brutal, naked predation (in the form of Stanley Kowalski) and ritualized, refined predation (Blanche Dubois). At one time or another, each of the two central predatory figures also becomes prey, twisting the plot like a pretzel and bringing out the ambiguities as well as the vivid contrasts of sexual interplay. North’s use of woodwinds traces this interplay in musical colors—flute as feminine, sax as masculine, and clarinet for moments of neutrality or indecision. Strings are there to cull the memories of Blanche’s long-dead young husband, and the trumpet stands like a symbol both of New Orleans and of the title itself: desire that, like a streetcar, takes us where it will.

Because this is New Orleans, there is plenty of diegetic music, but North doesn’t try to link to it or mimic it in any way. His score is parallel to Williams’s script, not to the environment, and there is no mistaking his dramatic intent for local color. The main title opens brashly with a plunging line from the trumpets. The first interval is a descending minor second, a distillation of the blues. As the music continues, there is good reason to believe that we are going to see a drama of strictly human dimensions, as when the violins take up the brassy opening, turning it into a plaint instead of a protest. Over this, briefly, comes a solo trumpet, before the strings lead these ninety seconds of music to an end. Some hot jazz makes its way from a bar as Blanche wends her way to the home of her sister, Stella. The next cue comes at the moment when Blanche and Stella have their first fight. Blanche tells her sister she has lost their family home, and the blues theme from the opening comes back, but gently, because the fight, while animated, is more sad than angry.

Another cue follows almost immediately, and gives an answer to a question asked in chapter 3 on film noir: What was the origin of film noir’s sexy sax cue, usually associated with seductive blondes in detective offices? Well, here it is, and there’s not a detective in sight, and no murder mystery to come. What’s more, the seducer isn’t a female at all.

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