SCORING SILENT FILM: MUSIC/NATION/AFFECT

BY

GEORGE STEELE

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE

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DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

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UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND

2009
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DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DISSERTATION

OF

GEORGE STEELE

APPROVED:
Dissertation Committee:
Major Professor

<—=— r' > ^ ^ - f » " - — — - — ^ — = iy-'Cl- J

DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

 ABSTRACT

Scoring Silent Film: Music/Nation/Affect studies the history of film music as a

way to understand how the "soundtrack" operates in contemporary popular culture.

Ultimately I argue that forms of playful appropriation of film music today, as in the

technological innovations of iPod culture, of re-mixing movie trailers on YouTube, or

most importantly, of performing original scores live to silent film are all implicated in

past industrial cinematic production practices.

Early twentieth century film accompaniment in America began as something

open, commentarial and improvisational before an industry increasingly preoccupied

with film music's social and affective influence began to shape its course. In time, the

ability for improvisational musicians to craft emotional associations with film

narrative on a local scale shifted toward massively distributed scores on a national

scale. With the onset of the advanced sound film, musicians' bodies vanished from the

cinema all together, a social space once enlivened and participatory. As a result,

industrial influences over film music became industrial influences over audiences and

over feeling.

To pursue these claims, the project begins by bringing Theodor Adorno's

notion of the "culture industry" and more recent theories of affect together, and asks

whether the body vulnerably encounters industrial formulae in film music, and if so,

what potential implications there may be. With this question in mind, the project

begins its survey studying local, improvisational music of the nickelodeon era;

concurrent literary exploration of music in the fiction of Willa Cather and James

Joyce; nationwide, massively distributed scores of early twentieth century

blockbusters (as exemplified by D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation): technical,

prerecorded scores of fully-fledged studio-system films of the 30s and 40s (as

exemplified by John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln); and contemporary forms of film

music play. My survey of three nodes of film music history, and a literary one,

contextualizes our contemporary moment against the historical background of

cinematic and literary production.

I argue that the evolution of film music involved drastic shifts in how

filmgoers bodily encountered film, from energetic participation with accompanists'

live bodies to increasingly silenced experiences, from emotive associations created on

the spot to prerecorded and predetermined ones. Because topoi linking Abraham

Lincoln and Barak Obama shape our contemporary political moment, I study specific

films about American political history and Lincoln, as well as the 44 Presidential

Inauguration's cinematic qualities, to explore whether certain mainstream films, as

well as political events, in rendering their sense of nation with certain musical

associations in their scores, also affectively access the body to political ends.

I conclude by arguing that the resurgence of scoring silent film live today

revives bygone early twentieth century film music practices. I argue that the return of

the film musician's body, a presence industry had previously removed, allow

audiences to feel film music differently. Industry directed feeling throughout the

twentieth century in developing its film music practices, industrial practices that with

the iPod appeared to become one's own. I close with forward-looking questions

regarding our musically participatory, technological, contemporary moment and its

cinematic characteristics.
 ACKNOWLEDMENTS

I am grateful to the University of Rhode Island Graduate School for awarding

me the 2008 - 2009 Dissertation Fellowship which afforded me the academic year to

complete this study. Additionally, I thank the University of Rhode Island Center for

the Humanities and the University of Rhode Island College of Arts and Sciences for

travel grants enabling me to attend the 27l Annual Pordenone Silent Film Festival in

Pordenone, Italy. I would like to thank David Robinson and also Riccardo Constanti

who as organizers of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival graciously invited me to take

part in their vigorous Collegium sessions, and made me feel welcome abroad. I would

also like to thank the numerous musicians I've interviewed (Pordenone accompanists

and others), with whom I've begun professional relationships I hope to maintain.

Thankful acknowledgment is also made to several professors at the University

of Rhode Island who as mentors have helped me cultivate this study. In particular, I'd

like to thank Professor Naomi Mandel for her indispensable counsel and

encouragement. I thank Professor Ted Shear for his comradeship. I also especially

give thanks to my Dissertation Committee who has given me so much guidance and

patience, Professor Stephanie Dunson, Professor Alain-Philippe Durand, Professor

Mary Cappello, and Professor Joe Parillo. Their ongoing tutelage has helped shape

this project.

And finally, this dissertation would not have been achievable, nor would it

have seemed possible, without the guidance and support of Professor Jean Walton,

whose sponsorship, enthusiasm, careful reading and extreme care for the project

iv
encouraged me throughout. She let me explore. Her commitment to excellence has

inspired me.
 DEDICATION

To my beloved, Stephanie, for whom I am so grateful. For support, patience, and love.
To my father, George Steele, who will forever play music with me.
And to my mother, Harriett Steele, who will forever dance to music with me.

vi
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .....iv

DEDICATION vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS vii

LIST OF FIGURES viii

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER 1: Affect and the Film Score 12

CHAPTER 2: "Back in Fifteen Minutes": Loose and Varied Early Film Music.......42

CHAPTER 3: Music as Cultural Critique in Cather and Joyce 73

CHAPTER 4: "Not Harmless": Griffith and Film Music's National Reach 118

CHAPTER 5: Strike Up the Mise-en-Bande .....141

CHAPTER 6: Contemporary Film Music Play: YouTube, iTunes, and Scoring Silent

Film Live 178

CONCLUSION 216

BIBLIOGRAPHY 224

vii
 LIST OF FIGURES

Cover Page for J.S. Zamecnik's Sam Fox Moving Picture Music Vol. 1 39

Excerpt from Erno Rapee's Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists 40

Comparison of Sam Fox Moving Picture Music Vol. 1 with iTunes Essentials 41

"Back in Fifteen Minutes." Moving Picture World, HF Hoffman 72

"Death Scene." Moving Picture World, HF Hoffman 72

Live Performance of Voices of Light to The Passion of Joan of Arc 215

viii
 1

Introduction:

On January 20th 2009, Barak Obama was inaugurated President of the United

States not when he gave his oath with his hand on Lincoln's bible, but by law

precisely at noon that day, during a musical interlude composed and arranged by John

Williams. I cried deeply, audibly, a few times during the course of his campaign, his

nomination, Election Day, and inauguration day. I especially did so when musicians

played that musical interlude during the ceremony. Williams blended original material

with archetypal quotes from Aaron Copeland, while the network I was watching,

although a televisual production, quite cinematically showed images of large then tiny

flags, people crying, the monuments, the masses in attendance, Obama looking

pensively down in his lap or turning around to look way up at the musicians who were

surrounded like a centerpiece by the whole assembly.

The ceremony wasn't a movie, but it was scripted, had a trajectory, and

consisted of moments that had to follow other moments, the shots of the limousines

cruising down the street in time leading into images of the poet's reading, the

blessings, and then the President's historic speech. It had a narrative. It wasn't a

movie, no, but was it somehow cinematic, because it was emotionalizing?1 Whether

televised or streamed live to a laptop or iPod, there were no commercials and for other

reasons the coverage of the inauguration ceremony superseded, forme, anything

merely televisual. And then there was this moment of music arranged by the most

renowned film composer.

1
A sampling of different networks' coverage of this musical interlude on YouTube reveals their
different sets of images producers decided to shoot during the musical performance, some footage
capturing more images, or different images altogether.
 2

It was when the talking ceased and the music began that I came apart. It didn't

start with simply bawling. I realized I was covered with goose-bumps. That my arm

hairs were standing on end. My skin moved. There was something electrical going on

in my body. I sort of caught up with these autonomic physiological reactions on my

skin. I wasn't crying because of them, but they preceded crying, and, sure, I cried in

tandem with them. Itzak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Anthony McGill, and Gabriela Montero

played their piece and their bodily expressions in montage with images of Obama's

pensive, yet delighted body language came together for me with Copeland, musical

Americana, in a way that was truly moving. Was this moment during the inauguration

scored? Was this moment during the inauguration reflective of something cinematic,

when orchestral music worked with a narrative? Was this moment during the

inauguration meaningful in that the most famous living film composer arranged it?

I argue that this was a moment of film music, not just because of the obvious

link to John Williams, but that it was music accompanying narrative in such a

magnifying way, at noon, at a really profound moment when the job of commander in

chief was transferred from one person to another, one of the most significant moments

in American history, supplied with emotive music arranged by a film composer.

Associations between the magnitude of the historic narrative unfolding in front

of me, my physiological reactions, emotions, and music spoke FILM to me. The fact

that John Williams composed the interlude demonstrates, to my mind, his film music

background as brought to the event. He is known most for his film scores. This is not
2
John Williams' music has been a huge part any number of blockbuster films directed by George
Lucas, Stephen Spielberg, and more. He is established not only as one of the most prolific film
composers living today, but themes from his film scores, it is safe to say, are some of the most widely
known.
 3

to say I felt like I was watching a Spielberg film, nor that the music contained any

arguably 'cinematic' traits. But it was the emotional impact that this music had over

me, that it catalyzed my physiological reaction, which made me think of the

ceremony, if only for a moment, as having a score. Live images of the historic

moment of long-awaited, significant American transmutation, transfiguration and

transformation had a score. In more ways than one, it was about skin.

I think of all of the other instances when I am moved by film precisely by what

I believe to be the score functioning in a certain way. Obama's inauguration arguably

had many emotional points, emotionalizing for the duration because of its historical

significance. This is to say that the narrative of the inauguration was emotional even

without music.3 But a convergence of narrative and music moved my body. The

interlude emotionally charged the inauguration, produced reactions on my epidermis,

just like film music at times has the same effect on my physiology, my body

affectively reacting to visual and aural material with its own visual and aural material.

As a musician and someone very thoughtful about music that I hear around me,

I wonder why I am affectively moved by film music. Whatever the case may be, I am

sure, certain, that if it were not for Williams' piece played by chance at noon (I think

they were running behind schedule), I would not have such an affective and emotional

reaction. I felt the inauguration by way of'that music, much like a film score can make

me feel in such profound ways. What is behind this? Music as accompaniment is

music somehow touching, literally, touching in that registers on and in my body that it

3
The John Williams piece was not the only music during the ceremony. Sounds of the inauguration
involved bugle and drum, American military music performed by The Marine Band.
 4

reaches, music heard but also something felt? Something tactile? Because of its

influence over my body so similar to what happens during a moment in a film when

the music accompanying narrative produces an effect, I associate this moment during

the inauguration with film, but further, when considering the clear connection between

the historic moment and John Williams' role in it, connections between the musical

interlude soundtrack aren't simply uncanny.

There are interesting things going on between history and film music,

cinematic production and emotion quite compelling to me. It's not just Obama's

inauguration but the sense of film music culture imported into the event which makes

me want to explore those interrelations, not just because the historical event was

emotional but because the film score has a history as an emotive device.

* * *

What is behind this affect-inducing element of film, the score? What is its

history?

What does it mean that some films are "tearjerkers"? What does that imply? 4

Film music is social and historical territory uncharted in its relation to

listening, feeling bodies. Whether considering film as entertainment commodity or as

art, the history of film music needs to be reexamined from the beginning of film as a

technology, to the present profusion of iPhone technology as portable cinema or

4
On its website, the movie mail delivery service Netflix offers the category "Tearjerkers" through
which consumers can browse and choose a film the cyber distributor labels likely to induce, tug or pull
out physical feeling, emotion. What provokes even the conception of such a film category? What does
its prevalence say about emotion, film and function?
 5

mobile cinematic sound system, because of its influence on the body. In this

dissertation, I will reexamine film music history, to study the multifarious ways the

evolution of film influenced filmgoers as listeners. I will reconsider film music as the

dynamic component it is. I will argue that the history of film music is the history of its

jurisdiction. The evolution of film music reveals various efforts to direct it, which

indirectly became a certain jurisdiction over physiology.

My overall argument is that through the industrial evolution of American

mainstream filmmaking, film music underwent its own co-evolution as an emotive

device that, through select nodes in film music history that I will discuss, implicated

moviegoers' bodies in different ways, film music once wholly organic, local,

participatory, commentarial, improvisational and live, before it shifted towards

complete standardization. Such shifts changed how film music operated.

The history of American mainstream film music is a history of capitalism, too.

Is film music where capitalism can reflect itself on the skin? Where sound carries

commerce? The evolution of film technology entails several shifts in format, in

exhibition practices, and in the turn from silent to sound. What have these shifts meant

for film music? And if film music influences the body, surely to study its evolution is

to study its influences on the body.

I argue that past cinematic production reflects itself in our contemporary

moment through various phenomena where film music becomes a form of play, but

simultaneously reflects certain socialization on behalf of past cinematic production. To

reconsider the history of film music as an emotive/industrial device enables us to ask

relevant questions about present notions of "soundtrack" circulating in popular culture,

 6

and phenomena of film music play, phenomena that I argue not only reflect the score

as a function instilled by past cinematic production, but echo conjunctions of film,

music and feeling. The main objective of this dissertation is to explore the history of

film music in an attempt to understand our present moment in relation to past

cinematic production. It is, in Michel Foucault's terms, a "genealogy of the present,"

an endeavor which questions our current moment in terms of what gave rise to it. I

argue that the history of film music helps provide a new understanding of our musical,

cinematic and technological present. And the stakes are that, if these connections go

underexplored, the ways in which, and the means through which music surrounds,

constructs and permeates us cannot be fully understood or questioned.

Chapter One develops a theoretical framework with which I consider the

development of film music. American mainstream filmmaking as a competitive

industry has a capitalist history. Throughout this history, music underwent huge

transformations as a variable within industrial, technological formulae. Affect theory

tries to explain how the body physiologically reacts to stimuli with and/or without

emotional acknowledgement of those stimuli. What does bringing together the history

of film music with theories of affect offer? I bring together on the one hand Theodor

Adorno's theory of the "culture industry," and theories of affect on the other, in order

to question and explore film music as something both extremely moving and at the

same time partly reflective of designs of industrial power.

Chapter Two starts with very early film music practices. The nickelodeon era

was an early phase of film exhibition roughly between 1905 and 1915. Simply put,

when some exhibitors began to increasingly weed out forms of entertainment in their
 7

program such as singing and dancing, and hence payroll costs for so many performers,

they offered more film in their place, and at an affordable price (hence the term

nickelodeon). The nickelodeon era was totally chaotic. Architecture varied, and

different levels of decorum existed. Music was central not only to the nickelodeon era

but to its chaotic context. Music thrived, a social component of the filmgoing

experience, with musicians right there in the social space of the theater. I will argue

musicians' presence constituted a specific circulation of affect shared between

participating audiences and live improvising bodies in what was an open, shared,

auditory atmosphere not yet silenced by the direction mainstream filmmaking would

take. Chapter Two surveys the sheer musical variety that existed in nickelodeon film

music practices, and also introduces concerns around establishing the direction of

those practices. No formal parameters to accompany film existed, but they began to

exist. I will argue that the beginnings of a constellation of the culture industry began

as reflected in various industrial sectors (trade press, music publishers) demonstrating

increased interest in the direction of film music, forming the beginning of film music

as a discipline, with disciplinary implications.

As the early twentieth century produces the profound ocular invention of film

technology, leave it to the literary inventors to explore acoustic implications of the

turn of the century. Chapter Three argues that certain modernist writers devoted

concentration to the aural which in their fiction could serve as means of social,

national, even emotional and bodily appraisal of modernity and the startling twentieth

century. In Willa Cather's novel Song of the Lark (1915), sound operates as national

critique by way of auditory moments in the narrative where characters are confronted
 8

by music, in specifically-constructed cultural soundscapes. Music in Gather's novel is

so coded with socio-economic, migratory, national or international characteristics that

music in some instances not only reflects immigrant and migrant communities in the

novel, music becomes meaningful because music migrates, in that its sounds travel.

James Joyce's Dubliners (1914) reveals similar notions of nation in short stories where

music of the other comes to represent auditory difference. Characters encounter

sounds as imports, or foreigners who impede them with music. While the female

protagonist in Cather's novel escapes the auditory trappings of her hometown by

becoming a musician tolerant and open to music beyond just her family's religious

ditties, Irish characters in Joyce's Dubliners don't have the same luck. Music frustrates

them, impedes them, and even affectively controls them. I argue that these two literary

modernists use music to question notions of nation, and in doing so are able to draw

on actual acoustic properties of music in their representations, its ability to travel

therefore defy topography and cartography, providing for wonderfully nuanced

relationships between turn of the century national concerns the texts address and

musical means to address them that have specific potential to speak to issues of nation

the authors question. I argue that literary production and cinematic production

contemporaneously employed music during the same few decades before film music

itself began to reflect concerns of nationalization, not by displacing local

improvisational film music, but by replacing it. Film music, which once could vary

anywhere, became, in time, the same everywhere.

 9

Chapter Four argues that one of America's first blockbusters , D.W. Griffith's

The Birth of a Nation, illustrates a national reach of film music, newly mass-

distributed. I claim that the film's score by Joseph Carl Breil not only operated as

sonic form of the film's xenophobia, but because of music's potential to influence the

body, the film as a nation-wide sensation perhaps rendered sensation nation-wide.

Affect-generating music for a film with a problematic sense of nation got mass

distributed without any local musical input on the spot. In the shift away from

improvisational musical accompaniment, The Birth of a Nation represented the

beginning of nationally distributed scores. Musicians' bodies still presided in the

cinema space in live orchestras, but no longer as a creative force, the cinema space no

longer a musically social space. Through close readings of the film's score, I argue

that the film about Lincoln, about "nation," was problematic precisely because its

racism mixed with what were new industrial factors, of distribution and affecting film

music on a new scale.

Chapter Five turns to another film about Lincoln and nation in order to

examine another shift in film music, to the sound film. John Ford's Young Mr.

Lincoln about the legal, political hopeful hailing from Illinois, represents a new era for

film music, that of the Hollywood studio system. Film composer Alfred Newman's

score represents new facility for film music in the sound era in that not only is the

score designed as aural background, it fluctuates within a mise-en-bande, a newly

conceived auditory field afforded the sound film consisting of a mix of sounds: of

5
The term "blockbuster" immediately brings together notions of a film's nationwide success, and the
local, the block, within which it occurs. Is something local "busted up" by something with such national
reach?
 10

dialog, sound effects, music coming from the narrative (diegetic music), and the score

(non-diegetic music). I will argue that the mise-en-bande is terrain within which the

score can rise and fall in amplitude having startling results, a new trait of the sound

film that technology could not afford silent film music. Young Mr. Lincoln as a film

about Lincoln deploys some of the same music as Birth does, not only representing a

perpetuation between narratives of American history and music, between Presidents

and the film score, but the films themselves come to represent as artifacts a certain

American history of affective influence. This chapter gestures towards our

contemporary moment by looking at suggestions on iTunes Essentials to score the

Obama Era, and concludes by exploring and questioning the linkage between the two

past cinematic renderings of Lincoln, and current notions around accompanying the

new American historical moment with a score, but with one that provides, according

to iTunes, the right "feeling."

The final chapter examines the iPod further as a new technology for film music

play where people can customize their soundscape in ways I argue do not reflect

management as much as thoroughly inscribed socialization on behalf of film music

history, of cinematic operations whereby music serves as accompaniment to begin

with. I also explore another phenomenon of film music play on YouTube where

people resituate film music in entertaining film trailers they recreate by rearranging

film music conventions, similar to the iPod where technology today allows people to

play with music associations, but I argue by and large reflects participation within

fully instilled film music traditions. This chapter concludes with examining the current

trend of musicians performing original scores live to classic silent films. This very
 11

popular movement harkens back to the nickelodeon era not only because musicians

directly provide their own musical material, but because their bodies return as part of

the cinematic space. The trend reconstitutes bygone qualities of early film music

whereby live music produced by live bodies involves a unique circulation of affect, of

energy, that the culture industry in its growth happened to extinguish. Film music

becomes social again, in that it is immediately shared, something no sound film nor

iPod for that matter can reproduce precisely because of its irreproducibility,

ephemerality, and fleetingness, an unrepeatable production of music and affect not for

distribution. In an age where film music carries over into forms of technological play

and customization, scoring film live today reflects a simultaneous return to film

music's social wellsprings. I share personal interviews with several silent film

accompanists who in their testimonies speak to ideas of authorship and commentary,

film music and feeling.

I conclude with forward-looking questions about the musician's performing

body in our prerecorded, atomized era. What is unique about the live musician's

performing body? What does the performing musicians' body offer in terms of affect?

I will return to President Obama's inauguration and the musical interlude scored by

John Williams. It was prerecorded. But musicians' bodies performed live, the quartet

comprising in their configuration a specific signifier meaningful to the watershed

event. For five minutes, the globe dwelled on these four musicians' performance, one

which, as I began, had the potential to move one's skin. Expression. Attack. Shifting.

Swaying. Their bodies played instruments. What is the value of fleeting musical

expression in our increasingly technological age?

 12

Chapter One:

Affect and the Film Score

Before I explore in subsequent chapters very specific moments in American

mainstream film music practices, technological evolutions ultimately informing our

contemporary moment as illustrated in "the soundtrack" for "the feeling" of the

Obama Presidency available on iTunes, the present chapter seeks to explain theories of

the "culture industry" as I see them in relation to theories of affect, and in so doing

hopes to provide a theoretical basis for interpreting film music as it pertains to the

body. Subsequent chapters will consider this through four different historical stages of

film music: 1. live, local, and improvisational music of the nickelodeon era; 2. live

standardized scores of early blockbusters (namely Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, a

film featuring Abraham Lincoln); 3. fully standardized scores of mainstream sound

films of the 40s (namely another film featuring Abraham Lincoln, John Ford's Young

Mr. Lincoln); and 4. contemporary technological trends exemplifying endeavors to

recoup film music. Each historical stage reflects typical uses of film music. I will

contextualize each within corresponding shifts occurring in technology that reflect not

just mainstream film's evolution, but film music in relation to those technological

advances.

What is the Culture Industry?

It's one thing to talk about film, another to talk about its industrial wellsprings.

Theodor Adorno theorizes that a "culture industry" exists, consisting of vertically

integrated, synergized companies profiting from culture it produces and reproduces, a

 13

"ruthless unity" of conglomerates comprised of entertainment and industrial sectors

tethered together ("Culture Industry" 1225). For Adorno, culture is business, and

commodities of mass-produced entertainment such as films or albums serve the status

quo and demonstrate in their subsistence audiences' complicity with what is provided.

Adorno's notion of a totalitarian culture industry not only liquidates the individual, it

offers something for everyone: "You need it, we supply it" (Ibid). Adorno thinks that

due to their efforts to maintain profitable modes of production, entertainment

companies teach audiences what to expect, and upon their immersion in what it

produces, they get what they expect.

It is difficult to fully accept Adorno's account of entertainment companies as

so diabolical. Perhaps Adorno's theories of the culture industry are too absolute, too

totalizing. That being said, to dismiss Adorno without considering the very likelihood

that not all but some aspects of what he says is true, or, in our contemporary moment

of massive corporate mergers within an increasingly technological marketplace, have

come true, would be unhelpful.

One of the challenges of accepting Adorno's model of power is his idea that it

is monolithic (perhaps a Marxist trait of his theory of the culture industry). This is

perhaps where it is best to alter Adorno's theory a bit, to attend to nuance ourselves

where he probably should have. For instance, instead of the culture industry being a

top down, overlord/underdog model, where anything and everything falls under an all

powerful culture industry, it is safer to say that several parties in contractual and

willing participation with entertainment companies enter into relationships with its

power. This enfolds a Foucaultian model of power with an Adornian one. For
 14

instance, in early American film, several parities constituted what became, I argue, a

specific constellation of Adomo's culture industry, not a massive entity but rather a

system of several relays of power producing industry's discourse, different

participants molding its formation, including musicians, audiences, film companies,

trade presses, exhibitors, even movie organ manufacturers. This echoes more of

Michel Foucault's notions of institutionalized power, whereby subjects willingly

participate (the moviegoer buys the ticket, the scriptwriter follows producers

instructions, the musician plays sheet music provided to earn his or her wage).

Foucault's more nuanced understanding of institutionalized power and discursive

formation more accurately reflects certain stages of film music history, but this is not

to fully abandon Adorno's notion of the culture industry. In fact, to reconsider

Adorno's notion of the culture industry together with Foucault's theories is useful for

the following reasons. Since the culture industry in the case of filmmaking produces

commodities bodies encounter, indeed that the senses encounter, the culture industry

can be considered as a disciplinary structure, formulations of power Foucault was so

interested in studying (like the medical clinic and the penal system). Docile bodies

become material with which and through which institutions define themselves and

implicate subjects though (a) discipline. I argue something similar happened in early

mainstream filmmaking where there wasn't so much a single massive entity

controlling everything, but multiple parties participating in the bourgeoning of a new

media that, precisely because of its audiovisual sensory influence and therefore its

implications for the body, can be reconsidered as another discipline and disciplinary

structure. This is where Adorno's theory of the culture industry can become useful,
 15

because not one but several parties helped create its discourse and the way it functions

as a set of disciplinary practices. The culture industry didn't just one day command

moviegoers become silent, but over time, it operated as a disciplinary structure

through several different shifts in film music where industrial development trained

audiences, to where the iPod as something enlivening the body today reflects

socialization of past cinematic, cultural production.

Remarkable are certain angles of the culture industry put forth by Adorno

which have to do with the body as it encounters industry. Drawing on a digestion

metaphor, Adorno says consumers "swallow [their] rebelliousness" (Ibid). The

industry's systemization, its scale, its relentlessness "will not leave the customer

alone, not for a moment to allow him any suspicion that resistance is possible" (Ibid).

Inbuilt in Adorno's theories about the culture industry are ideas of motion, of bodily

activity, or more prevalently, inactivity. For him, the culture industry drains

entertainment of liveliness which could move the populace toward reactive action, re-

action, particularly against the culture industry itself (or the state) which he claims

tames bodies.6 Has the film industry tamed bodies? Complete silence observable in

any cinema today reflects degrees of training. To be quiet? To listen to only what's

intended to be heard? Adorno would say that the culture industry thwarts people's

awareness that it exists as well as any activation of radical impulses. He explains "[it]

has always played its part in taming revolutionary instincts" and "[n]o independent

6
Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov's manifestos about the capacity to mobilize masses or lure them into
distraction or dream states speak to film's potential as political tool, a device in the service of either
imposing a dream state, or, in the case of his own non-narrative, communist filmmaking, the dream
nation "state." See Kino Eye for Vertov's particularly bodily descriptions of American mainstream
film's influence over populaces.
 16

thinking must be expected from the audience: the product prescribes every reaction"

(Ibid).

So what are these reactions? And why prescribe reaction? What alternatives

get excluded? Has some semblance of the culture industry perpetuated itself through

prescribing emotional reactions in and on bodies? Could film music exemplify this?

Or, through controlling film sound did emotion get encoded? Did industry influence

film music to begin with? This project grapples with these questions, and the stakes

are that, if such questions go unasked and unconsidered, whole connections between

specific past cinematic production and our contemporary technological moment will

remain underestimated, go underemphasized, leaving profound musical correlatives

between past industrial history and contemporary practices underexplored.

I argue that through the evolution of film music, from live improvisational film

accompaniment all the way to the profusion of the iPod, certain historical

constellations of Adorno's culture industry took shape, prescribing uses of film music.

Within Adorno's oeuvre, certain observations are gems, highly significant ideas which

in the contemporary moment of entertainment conglomerates and multinational

companies with global technological reach are crucial to reconsider. Otherwise,

Adorno's theories of the culture industry are indeed absolute. He is entirely sure of his

observations without much consideration for nuance and therefore reflects a certain

theoretical certainty.

Theories of affect on the other hand, are much less so. Theories of affect do not

so much disagree with one another as much as they reveal exciting uncertainties about

affect and the body. That is why, as such, this dissertation studying the object of film
 17

music history isn't as absolute as it is open (perhaps like the body) and is not an

attempt to promote its own absolutism but instead to hopefully generate new inquiry

and ultimately question what film music's implications are. If industry has been

behind film music, and film music generates affect in and on the body, is industry

behind affect?

What IS Affect? A Survey of Three Theorists

The so-called affective turn in the humanities reveals several attempts to

understand the body, hoping to provide new ways with which we can consider its

relation to film, to literature, to national politics, even to the stock market. This

chapter will survey theories of affect in order to develop a working definition of affect.

It also begins to question the influence of film music. The history of film music, so

fascinating in terms of industrial, economic and technological shifts, is also a history

of filmgoers' affective encounter with it. Surveying affect theory together with film

music history provides a basis from which we can question how film music operates,

why it is so engaging, and then, whether industrial influence behind the evolution of

film music may be industrial influence over affect and therefore the body.

Brian Massumi, Sylvan Tompkins, and Teresa Brennan each offer attempts at

understanding affect. None seem completely conclusive as much as investigatory,

ultimately inviting more theoretical work. Brian Massumi explains, "[m]uch could be

gained by integrating the dimension of intensity [or affect] into cultural theory. The

stakes are new" (Massumi 27). While keeping film music in mind, angles of each of

the three theories pertain to questions I wish to pose in this chapter, as well as carry
 18

over into subsequent chapters. Massumi, Tompkins and Brennan discuss the

circulation, conditions, autonomy, even the inflexibility of affect. I would like to

explore these theories in terms of the potential for the film experience not just to

produce affect, but also whether film music subjugates listeners to affect via what I

suggest are the body's simultaneous lack of freedoms, whereby affect reflects a certain

susceptibility, a vulnerability, and what that would imply in terms of the body as well

as industry providing it emotive material.

Theory of Affect 1: Brian Massumi

Massumi argues that affect is autonomous. He breaks down perception of any

visual image into two categories: intensity (the strength of the effect of the image), and

qualification, "the indeterminate content of the image given subjective context."

Intensity is found especially on the skin surfaces, whereas qualifications are "in depth

reactions" which trigger heartbeat and breathing reactions (Massumi 24). Whether

witnessed on or inside the body, visual images cause "immediately embodied"

responses (Massumi 25). For Massumi, intensity is affect, and "[m]uch could be

gained by integrating the dimension of intensity into cultural theory. The stakes are

new" (Massumi 27). My project RSVPs to Massumi's invitation.

Massumi argues affect is "unqualified" and "as such, it is not ownable or

recognizable and thus resistant to critique" (Massumi 28). Yet Massumi begins to

identify social dimensions of intensity (affect), explaining that the stimulations taking

place in and on the body are not independent of social circumstances but are in fact

"situated" whereby the body "doesn't just absorb pulses or discrete stimulations; it
 19

unfolds contexts" (Massumi 30). What are the contexts, then, within which the body

unfolds them? In suggesting the body is virtual and actual, such an idea "requires a

reworking of how we think about the body" (Massumi 30), but also, I argue, how

specific cultural surroundings and disciplines influence the body.

Autonomic affective reactions in and on the body are separate from cognitive

or conscious reactions. In other words, an aspect of Massumi's model is that affect is

autonomic, involuntary, versus any controlled or conscious nerve response.7 Affect is

autonomous itself from our conscious or cognitive processes. Even as we exercise our

will, affect can occur autonomously from us (We do not will goose bumps, they

happen by themselves). This is important to point out. I claim that if affect is out of

our control, in its involuntary form, it is therefore a potential vector of power

(institutional, ideological, or industrial). Our affective self is autonomous from us; it is

part of the autonomic nervous system; it is incontrollable, not part of cognitive nerve

responses. That being said, just because affect functions in our nervous system without

our knowing it does not mean that it is independent of, or completely out of the way

of, Adorno's culture system. In fact it is the opposite; I argue that via affect, systems

of power can influence the body through involuntary bodily processes.

Combinations of music and image in cinema therefore, as Massumi would

have it, materialize affect in and on the body, but as I will demonstrate in subsequent

chapters, combinations of music and image historically have been circulated in

influential ways by increasingly formulating and eventually dominant regimes of

7
To refer to affect as autonomous is not to say that affect makes us autonomous subjects (from say
ideological or disciplinary forces). Massumi refers to the autonomy of the affect itself, not people as
subjects who host the affect and are therefore autonomous.
 20

power with which we are complicity engaged. For instance, mass-distributed film

scores offer music image correspondences producing the intensity and qualifications

Massumi theorizes, but in an increasingly administrative way through means of

massive distribution. To take an example from classical theory, in the Republic Plato

strove to make unavailable altogether people's autonomic reactions to lyrical poetry

by censoring both its textual and musical content and therefore disbar the citizen's

social autonomy. For Plato, you control the poetry and you control the body's

experience of intensity. Plato sought to control bodies, control corporeality, through

censoring poetry. It is reasonable to deduce that a state's influence over an art or

entertainment commodity (in any manifestation that has either taken place or is now

taking place) therefore has an influence over the surfaces and depths of actual bodies

of its populace. No such complete control of art Plato envisioned would seem to exist

today, but angles of conditions of capitalism, (involving the marketability of filmic

and musical commodities of entertainment, produced and provided for masses), may

reveal traces of such indirect influence over the affect a text provokes, and therefore

influence over both surfaces and insides of listeners' bodies.

Massumi declares that, "Walter Benjamin, [because of his] concept of shock

and image bombardment... has much to do to offer an affective theory of late-

capitalist power" (Massumi 43). If Benjamin is right about film's incredible capacity

to ideologically drown masses via spectacle (Benjamin doesn't speak to sound as

much), and Adorno is right about the inability of consumers to escape the need to

participate with a culture industry (Adorno concurs with Foucault here in notions of

complicity), then affect exists where the text meets the body. This allows us to
 21

question the susceptibility of the subject via the autonomy of affect. Again, the

autonomy of affect does not mean autonomy for the subject; affect is autonomous

from the subject and therefore a physiological part of the subject that is both out of its

control and susceptible to what the subject encounters in culture. If indeed (cinematic)

texts (laden with emotive music) generate affect within increasingly prescribed

formulae enabling the maintenance of companies who compete, the autonomy of

affect is a means of both receptiveness and susceptibility of the subject. The movie

theater is a place of relative sovereignty for the subject to the extent that no one single

affect circulates; a social space of autonomy to the extent that there are an array of

bodies none of which could be said to be having exactly similar affective responses to

a film and its music. Yet, the circulation of affect in such an environment is suspect

when considering historic measures to shape the direction of film music. How is affect

therefore entrapping, all the more subjugating because affect is not wholly in our

control?

This is not to conspiratorially say that the body is being controlled by vertically

integrated corporations interested in maintaining relationships with consumers and

therefore consciously with their bodies. But I do claim that it seems the body in a

capitalist environment inevitably hosts affect and emotion inflected by mass-produced

entertainment, and that the body ultimately physiologically encounters what the

culture industry produces.

If companies produce entertainment commodities in part with an aim to profit

(films, albums, and now video games, and even the Wii with its new bodily platform),

then bodies (alas many bodies) encounter companies' artifacts and negotiate affective
 22

responses from texts, platforms and formats generated out of competitive formulae.

Affect, manifested in the body, can occur autonomously without the subject's control,

and can be a physiological result of formulae of the bazaar.

Theory of Affect 2: Sylvan Tompkins

The notion that there is a lack of freedom in affect is particularly interesting if

that lack is where texts can influence listeners. Sylvan Tompkins assesses both the

control and lack of control we have over affect. He lists the autonomy we posses over

affect, the freedom of time of the affect system, freedom of intensity of affect,

freedom of density of affect investment, and more. But two such freedoms "inherent in

the affect system" could be considered culturally conditional:

1. the freedom of the object of the affect system.

2. the freedom of substitutability of consummatory objects.

This sounds, at base, like freedom of choice, but when considering the

commoditization of entertainment, as exemplified in the standardization of

mainstream film and film music, is not one's freedom conditional upon the range and

quality of choices of objects offered? The freedom Tomkins theorizes seems

restrictive to the environment within which a subject "chooses" only among what's

offered, choices influenced by the market-driven economy arguably dictating what

choices there actually are. For example, I will explain in Chapter Two that during the

nickelodeon era, improvisational film music afforded audiences different experiences.

Exhibitors could advertise and provide musical uniqueness, choice, between what

could be the same movie screened up and down the street. In the case of Tompkins'
 23

theory, improvisational film music enabled one film to become any number of

different objects of the affect system; if the music varied, each screening offered a

different consumatory object (exemplifying Tompkins's second notion). One could go

hear this accompanist in this nickelodeon, or that pianist or trap drummer in that

nickelodeon accompany sometimes the same film. Nickelodeons screening the same

reels competed by offering music unique to their venue. This changed - and so too did

the consumer's ability to substitute objects within what became, in time, homogeneity,

a certain sameness in mainstream film scores, where stereotypes ensued as well as

national distribution of scores no longer inviting any local musical input. As I will

demonstrate, the shift away from open, live, creative film music towards standardized,

nationally distributes scores ended any local film music variety that existed. As a

result, the standardized film score impinges on the two said freedoms proposed by

Tompkins because there is no longer freedom to musically change and therefore

varyingly experience the object (film), nor freedom to really substitute film objects for

others due to so much narrative sameness as well as corresponding musical similitude.

To provide some perspective, Ernst Betts, a leading contributor to the international

journal Close-Up writes in his 1928 article "On Being Bored With Films": "[when

films] force a sensation upon us, then I am totally bored. At once I am conscious of

the goods being delivered for an order I never gave in a packing-case I do not

acknowledge. Not I! They are giving me what I want, in the preposterous belief that I

have not had it a thousand times before" (Betts 44 my emphasis). Such silent film

criticism speaks to the banality in reproducing over and over the same narratives, as

well as the banality of reproducing the same sensation, with which he is bored. And
 24

Betts directly speaks to music within this formula: "Finally I am bored with the music

to our films - painfully and insufferably bored . . . films are being accompanied by

exactly the same music to-day as they were five years ago. I do not know what was

written on the cue sheets, but I know that I had heard it all fifty times before. And I

was bored" (Betts 46). Betts blends notions of musical sameness with notions of

forced sensations in his complaints about physiologically encountering films and

music.

Tompkins lists freedoms inherent in the affect system, but also how affect can

be restricting.8 Tompkins labels these restrictions degrees of "freedom of choice . . .

we find it difficult not to feel angry if someone confronts us . . . We cannot in the same

way 'intend' to feel love or anger of fear and simply initiate these responses, or, if

they have already been initiated, continue them or turn them off as well" (as quoted in

Sedgwick 62). This refers to Massumi's notion of the autonomy of affect - that the

goose bumps occur sometime before we realize it. The ability to completely fend off

affect, or start affect, is impossible, resulting in " . . . a lack of control... the human

being can only deal with the affects indirectly... " (Ibid 63). Limitations that we have

over our own affect systems make us susceptible to affect in a way that allows us to

question our physiological susceptibility.

As I will demonstrate in subsequent chapters, the history of film music reveals

a wide array of musical practices which eventually shifted toward increased control

over film music. But throughout even the nickelodeon era, when musical practices

8
His list of "Restrictions of Freedoms Inherent in the Affect System" reflects fewer entries than his list
of freedoms (the restrictions seem somewhat totalizing, in ways in which one restriction might trump
many freedoms).
 25

were open and improvisational, musicians played specific affect-generating musical

cues to the extent that certain music "fit" certain narrative moments. Songbooks

circulated as authoritative recipes of musical ingredients for this or that filmic scene.

This is to say that long before streamlined, mass-distributed scores, and before

musicians' bodies vanished from the social space of the theater, certain practices were

already underway constructing, maintaining and perpetuating sought-after emotive and

affective responses by way of suggested music image correspondences. Industry did

not simply turn on a switch, and click, they influenced physiology. Very early on in

film music history, musicians themselves independently provided affective-generating

music, musicians' bodies that eventually vanished as part of the evolution that

increasingly normalized film music. Curious, however, is, during the beginnings of

film music, the ensuing constellation exemplifying Adorno's culture industry made of

trade presses, music publishers and film companies, over time, not only began to show

their vested interest in film music, they reflected a common interest in film music as

an influence.

Affect and the Film Song Book of the 1910s and 1920s

During the 1910s and 1920s, songbooks circulated among sites of film

exhibition. Some were designed to be handy, on-the-job tools for musicians,

particularly for organists or pianists. As a set of cultural artifacts they demonstrate the

aspiration for organization, cataloguing, and publication into print of explicit musical

ideas for film. They list a set of stereotypical film scenarios and issue music meant for

them. Several of these musical publications illustrate attempts at making film music
 26

ideas handy and accessible, yet correspondences which the publications prescribe

close off alternative methods and musical choice, and produce a closed set of musical

prescriptions. With the help of these publications, film music became more and more

predetermined and less and less ambiguous or open to alternative meanings which I

argue in the next chapter were vital to the nickelodeon era, publications ultimately

steering film music toward fixed correspondences with narrative and therefore

emotion music could underpin.

Chronology of some of these musical texts begins with J.S. Zamecnik's 1913

publication Sam Fox Moving Picture Music Vol. 1 (Figure 1). It provides short

musical pieces for film situations: "Cowboy Music"; "Grotesque or Clown Music";

"Church Music." It contains four entries for "Hurry Music": "Hurry Music: for

struggles," "Hurry Music: for duels," "Hurry Music: for mob or fire scenes," and the

rather non-descript "Hurry Music" (for those scenes where there's just general hurry,

of course). Two other non-descript entries in the table of contents identically read:

"Plaintive Music" and "Plaintive Music." These two entries are so general an

accompanist could use them for any number of situations.

Curious are Zamecnik's exactingly titled entries for ethnic or national film

content, conveniently listed right at the beginning of the table of contents, as if an

accompanist would immediately need these. Titles read "Indian Music," "Oriental

Veil Music," "Chinese Music," "Oriental Music," and "Mexican or Spanish Music."

These titles dictate associations between music and on-screen characters or situations

they racially predetermine. The songbook's longest entry is "War Scene," the only

entry with distinct subcategories: "In Military Camp," "Off to the Battle," and "The
 27

Battle." The combination of clearly defined ethnic musical pieces in addition to a

somewhat expanded set of war music makes Sam Fox Moving Picture Music Vol. 1 an

indictment of early twentieth century American prejudice and militarism.

In 1924, Emo Rapee published Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and

Organists (figure 2) in which a large number of musical pieces under fifty-two

headings suggested corresponding specific music to specific motif, action, theme, even

object. A list of such correspondences reads:

"Aeroplane" Mendelssohn's Rondo capriccioso

"Battle" third movement of Beethoven's "Moonlight

Sonata"

"Horror" the bride's abduction from Grieg's "Peer Gynt"

"Railroad" Spinning Song from Wagner's "The Flying

Dutchman"

"Sadness" first movement from "Moonlight Sonata"

According to Daniel Albright the songbooks collect "musical bits correlative to any

mood or action, a kind of textbook of musical physiology''' (Albright 48-9 my

emphasis). Albright explains the musical tablatures in Rapee's text "re-created the

music fragment as a hieroglyph, by fastening it to a class of visual action" (Ibid 49).

Albright's notion that Rapee's book forced a "classification]" of visual action speaks

to the already limited assigning of musical quotes to filmic elements, disallowing the

potential for the same musical hieroglyphs to belong to other "classes" of material as

well, or instead. Not only did industry categorize music, it categorized sets of images

and narrative situations for music to accompany, establishing before any

 28

accompaniment even occurred an already preventative glossary of defined film

scenarios.

According to film music theorist Royal S. Brown, prearranged musical cues

when fused with filmic content transfer "the morphopological affect of music into

specific emotions and allows us to 'have them' while also imputing them to someone

and/or something else, namely the cinematic character and/or situation" (Brown 27).

Brown theorizes that music is "a cogenerator of narrative affect that skews the

viewer/listener towards a culturally determined reading of characters and situations"

(Ibid 32 my emphasis). In the shift from creative to closed film music practices,

skewing affect was business, by way of the restrictive musical material accompanists

were increasingly instructed to play.

Brown explains that to neglect this role of music in film is to ignore its power

throughout the history of film. He explains that to not take film music seriously is "a

prejudice against film music's overt mobilization of affect-generating devices as one

of the means of narrativizing the film's dramatic action" (Brown 48). Moreover,

however, it is important to consider in the history of film music the industrial,

institutional, capitalist, competitive endeavors to steer film music conventions rid of

live musical commentary which could pose a threat to certain film logic.

In terms of Michel Foucault's notions of institutionalized formations of

knowledge, early American filmmaking formulated music image relationships it could

then define, deploy and redeploy, musical control maintained and administered on

such a massive scale that not to inquire as to the results on the body, its history as an

interface between industry and its capitalistic endeavors, is to ignore a whole set of
 29

economic, cultural and physiological variables which captivatingly come together in

film music. Industry and the body meet in film music.

These songbooks are the predecessors for predetermined playlists sold on

iTunes which listeners buy to provide accompaniment for events or activities Apple

defines as essential to supplement with music, a contemporary, highly technological

circulation of music whereby not only does industry offer music meant for an activity

or moment, it dictates musical associations between activities or moments it

delineates. While people roam with the mobile potential to apply music to whichever

activity or situation, it doesn't depict individualism as much as a thorough

socialization and organization on behalf of film music history (figure 3).

Theory of Affect 3: Teresa Brennan

Teresa Brennan explains that affect is first and foremost a social manifestation

happening in various public and private contexts involving two or more bodies, bodies

between which affect may be dumped out, transmitted, even deflected and rerouted.

As subsequent chapters will address, when the evolution of film involved the removal

of live improvisational musicians, the cinema was still a social space, but one no

longer hosting a musical mediator able to socially interact with the film and the

audience. By the time live musicians vanish from cinematic production, no longer was

a musical agent, participating in an open reading of the film with the audience, able to

morph and rearrange the public atmosphere. Through increasingly programmed music,

industrial and technological development of film removed such types of affective

circulations.
 30

It is beneficial to examine Brennan's notion of transmission of affect in terms

of film music because of her emphasis on affect as social production. In film music

practices of the nickelodeon era (the subject of my next chapter), participation and

interaction with film musicians would have been fundamental to the transmission of

affect in its social context. Brennan explains " . . . the transmission of affect, if only for

an instant, alters the biochemistry and neurology of the subject. The 'atmosphere' or

the environment literally gets into the individual" (Brennan 1). If the atmosphere or

the environment literally gets into the individual, I argue that when the evolution of

filmmaking and film exhibition removed persons generating music, interpersonal

affective exchange changed, leaving only the audience to constitute that atmosphere.

Brennan explains, "If transmission takes place and affects our behavior, it is

not genes that determine social life; it is the socially induced affect that changes our

biology" (Brenna 1 - 2), but what else in society besides other human beings can

generate this "socially induced affect"? In her theory, Brennan forefronts the

transmission of affect from person to person but it seems she neglects potential social

sites which may induce affect. As expressed earlier, this is why early American

filmgoing is a case study for transmission of affect as well the steering of emotions in

9
For instance, can mass-produced film music influence filmgoers' physiological reaction? No,
according to Brennan who rather limitedly states that affect is person to person. She claims, "[b]y the
transmission of affect, I mean simply that the emotions or affects of one person, and the enhancing or
depressing energies these affects entail, can enter into another..." (Brennan 3). But I disagree. If it is
true that the transmission of affect influences us, that "we are not self-contained in terms of our
energies," and that "[tjhere is no secure distinction between the 'individual' and the 'environment'"
(Brennan 6), then surely the sense of one's "environment" should expand beyond just the interpersonal
to include things people encounter throughout their day. For example, why can't Brennan's notion of
interpersonal affect include dynamics of social spaces where persons interrelate? Locations they go to,
cinemas they enter, products they consume, iPods they listen to and customize their soundscape with;
all these would seem to be other "environmental" or "atmospheric" factors providing for affective
transmissions.
 31

general, because affective social circulation shaped cinema at one time through

involvement and contact with improvisational music, before movie theaters became a

battleground for control where certain standards prevailed, ultimately resulting in

industrialized affective circulation.

Affect not as Emotion, but as Subjection?

Affect is not emotion. Emotion is conscious reaction to stimuli (i.e. you know

when you're crying, and can consciously acknowledge so). Affect operates first

without the subject knowing it. The subject gets goose bumps, and then the subject's

acknowledgement catches up, emotionally and consciously.10 Affect and emotion are

in sequence, respectively.

This is why film music is so intriguing because arguably film music is the most

emotive part of film. Movies make people cry. But emotion's counterpart, affect,

which precedes emotion, is not only something we are less aware of than emotion, it

operates without our knowing it, and therefore, I argue, turns film music into a very

peculiar social and historical material, one that helps cause emotional reactions (like in

a tearjerker), but also narrativizes physiology. Film music, whether showcased or in

the background (the latter a specific tool of mainstream filmmaking) is an operation

Marco Able provides another example: "[A]ffect - understood as becoming/pre-subjective force - is

precisely that which comes first... [AJffect is that which end up producing emotions and
representations. For instance it is because my hands tremble that I get nervous, rather than the other
way around. My hands tremble because my body has infolded a multiplicity of forces that impinged
upon me, but that now are absent; the effect of these forces, -lingering, intensifying - translate, however,
into a more recognizable emotion: my body narrativizes/represents, if you will, the initial a-signifying
encounter with said forces." (Able)
 32

that deserves critical attention precisely because it has the potential to work on

subjects both emotionally and affectively.

To construct a working definition of affect for this project, I begin with the

idea shared by the above theorists of the subject's powerlessness over affect, and

therefore the potential for film music to encounter the body via a listener's lack of

control. What intrigues me is the possibility of affect to fall into prescription, the

implication of affect among other sets of means through which people are subjectified:

discourse according to Foucault, ideological state apparatuses according to Althusser,

or the culture industry for Adorno. Considering Massumi's, Tompkins' and Brennan's

theories, I believe there are high stakes when looking at the history of film music and

affect together, and I am driven to claim the following: it is possible that affect

circulates within means through which we are subjectified (discourse, ISAs, or the

culture industry); and affect can serve as means of such subjectification. Early

American filmmaking was a form of subjectification, particularly auditory

subjectification by way of increasingly homogenized film music.

A Working Definition of Affect

Informed by theorists discussed above, my working definition for affect is,

most simply, the conscious or unconscious aspect of feeling or emotion. Affect is the

means through which the body, open for exchange and reception of energy, reflects

what it encounters, unconsciously, then consciously and emotionally. Affect renders

the body's openness to constant transmission of conscious and unconscious stimuli, as

well as its lack of control over that openness. I do not wish to divorce affect from
 33

emotion, though. They are counterparts. Affect, not emotion per se, is particularly

captivating because, since it operates without our knowing it we are susceptible and

vulnerable to the sources responsible for it.

During the first half of the twentieth century, American moviegoers

surrounded themselves with cinematic texts in the framework of a burgeoning

capitalist film market, to the extent that affect, an activity involving bodies

consciously and unconsciously, should be reconsidered as something implicated in a

marketplace. If Fredric Jameson's notion of the "Political Unconscious" is true (that

texts reflect their sociopolitical context and historical modes of production), and texts

have the ability to transmit affect, then affect can be understood as an indirect product

of politics, or even yet, a direct product with intentions to maintain modes of

(re)production. This seems to be the case with certain shifts in American mainstream

film I will critique. Without live improvisational musicianship able to immediately

and openly critique or interpret film, industry began to reproduce what it profitably

produced, building and recopying its own unchallenged emotional logic between

music and narrative and therefore affective influence.

It is important to point out how theorists of affect agree that we are both freed

by affect but also unwillingly bound by it. One can argue, considering the history of

the popularity of early American cinema, and the film industry as an increasingly

powerful influence in American culture, that affect reflects capitalism, affects as

physiological byproducts of a marketplace within which mass-produced commodities

 34

of film circulate. The marketplace triggers affect. Industry eventually galvanized

formulas bodies were exposed to, formulas responsible for generating emotion and

affect. Connections between the physiological and the industrial occur through critical

consideration of film music history.

Why focus on affect and film music, and not affect and the film imagel I

believe because sound can be felt differently. It is crucial to point out that sound is

vibration, literally in the form of kinetic waves of energy transmitted in air reaching

and vibrating within the cochlea (not to mention the ribcage if the waves are powerful

enough). As vibration, sound can occur in and on the body. Is sound therefore a more

powerful producer of affect than sight? Is someone freer to direct their sight around

the film frame, within the mise-en-scene, than negotiate sound of the mise-en-bande?

Does the mise-en-bande (sounds within an audible field produced by the film) have

the potential to be more touching, more influential because of sound's vibratory

characteristics? Does listening entail a different deftness, perhaps a lesser degree of

control than sight, whereby we can differentiate between sounds of dialog and music,

but not as effortlessly or easily as we can choose to look between, say, a character's

hands and their feet? In either case, advancements in film sound reflect a sort of

commercial inquiry into the auditory. Challenging questions about sound will be the

focus of subsequent chapters. Examples of evolution of mainstream film reveal the

hierarchy of music under image, and increasing attention to who's in charge of sound,

and what the cinema soundscape should become. What began with local, live
11
This connection acknowledged of course by economists of late commenting on "emotional" knee-jerk
reactions to failing money markets and banking systems, the total linkage between money and feeling.
We need not look any further than the crumbling financial markets as an example whereby nerves and
capital seem to entwine.
 35

musicianship playing openly shifted to expanded orchestras playing nationally

distributed scores, which then shifted from prerecorded scores emanating from cinema

sound systems to those of arguably little mobile cinemas with which so many listeners

today score their lives as they move. These shifts reflect changes in film music, but

changes in its technological mediation as well, away from the interpersonal to the

personal, whereby film music isn't as much social as it was in the nickelodeon era, but

increasingly becomes a way to experience being alone together.

Conclusion

If affect is an operation of our involuntary nervous system, and film produces

physiological reactions, then theories of affect and notions of the culture industry

converge and invite critical questions with serious social significance. Massumi,

Tompkins and Brennan all theorize the autonomy of affect can limit the subject

(aspects of affect inherently cannot be controlled by their host). Therefore, affect is

vital to question and explore if it is the case that bodies, particularly filmgoing bodies,

circulate in a market economy that arguably influences consumers with emotionally-

construed commodities. Most optimistically, the ambivalence of affect involves the

subject's own private ability to host conscious emotion and unconscious affect within

his or her own body; but it also reflects their own subjection to the influences upon

their body of various circulating, potentially conditioning formulae. This makes film

music history a field crucial to investigate. There are vital inroads to be made between

early formations of the culture industry on the one hand at the time American

filmmaking began to shift uses of music from heterogeneous to increasingly

 36

homogenous, and the restrictions of freedoms inherent in the affect system on the

other.

Affective responses to film can differ. Simply put, all bodies do not have

similar affective responses. However, this is not to say that there have not been

decisions on the business side of the equation arguably normalizing emotion through

film music. Although bodies may not all affectively react in common to certain film

content, I argue that the history reveals a sort of prearranging of emotion and affect by

way of course-plotting film music. American filmmakers and music publishers

together began to steer film music in a certain direction, and, as a result, whether

directly or indirectly, ended up designing and guiding feeling and affective reactions

in audiences through establishing their musical correspondences to narrative while

closing down alternatives to those correspondences. This is no more apparent than in

the circulation of film songbooks during the 10s and 20s directing musicians towards

specific correspondences, or blockbusters like The Birth of a Nation with massively-

distributed scores no longer suggesting but rather ordering audiovisual relationships

between music and narrative without musicians free to create them on the spot, and on

the fly. In its evolution, film music became increasingly static through unthreatened,

unchallenged and unquestioned relationships with narrative - stock relationships

bound up in mainstreaming the whole film experience, which was, after all,

figuratively, and sometimes literally, policed, enforced, and silenced.

If film music is such an emotive force, then I feel it is important to consider

any industriousness behind it. What can be gained by studying music, emotion and

mainstream film history? Did mainstream filmmaking institutionalize how bodies may
 37

react to film? I argue that suspicious efforts lurk behind the shift away from

improvisational film music that could shape cinema's socially interactive atmosphere.

"[T]he body is radically open" (Massumi 30), as Brian Massumi and other theorists of

affect claim. Affective energy circulates, lands, enters our epidermis and influences us,

moving our bodies even to the point of increasing the heart rate. Bodies are conduits

of affect and affect transmission. As my close readings of particular films will

demonstrate, closed film scores fused together on-screen emotions with non-diegetic

music for the audience to hear, whereby earlier practices open for live musicians to

direct music allowed for various renderings of emotion. An investigation into the

history of film music reflects industrial efforts away from improvisation toward more

controlling efforts to reach a desired, designable affective listener. These traditions of

uses of film music haven't been questioned in terms of affect theory. Arguably, the

most emotive element of film is music, and therefore what seem to be efforts to

maintain working music/image logic, relationships, methodologies, and manners of

exhibition without live improvisational critique all ensured an ongoing creation and

success of a streamlined film business. However, in that streamlining, film music

conventions ensued whereby the filmgoer's body is found in the balance between

emotion and industry, through film music where affect physiologically carries capital.

As the next chapter will demonstrate, early American filmgoing is a case

study for transmission of affect as well as efforts of, and implications in shaping it,

because not only was cinema at one time rife with affective social circulation due to

direct participation and interaction with live improvisational musicians, it became a

battleground for control over sound where certain forces prevailed, arguably resulting
 38

in a certain industrialization of affect. If music image relationships influence affective

and emotional responses in the body, what does it mean when those relationships

became mass-produced on a national scale?

And what does it mean if the local film musician's performing body was in the

cinematic space, and then all together segued out?

Finally, was my sense that President Barack Obama's inauguration had a score

a reflection of film music history? The next chapter begins with the first significant

shift in film music, turning to the nickelodeon culture of Chicago, after which, in

subsequent chapters, I'll aptly look at two films that render Lincoln in order to

question relations between film music, notions of nation, and the skin.
 39

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SAM FOX
MOVING PICTURE
MUSIC
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VOL. I PRICE 50 CENTS

CONTENTS
Pago
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Indian Music . 3
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Chinese Music 5
Oriental Music 6
Mexican or Spanish Music 8
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Death Scene 9
Church Music 10
War Scene
Part 1 (In Military Camp) .11
Part 2 (Off to the Battle) 12
Part 3 (The Battle) 12 and 13
Cowboy Music 14
Grotesque or Clown Music 15
Mysterioso-Burglar Music 16
Mysterioso-Burglar Music 16
Hurry Music (for struggles) . . . . . . . . . 17
Hurry Music (for duels) 17
Hurry Music 18
Hurry Music (for mob or fire scenes) 19
Storm Scene 20
Sailor Music 21
Fairy Music 21
Plaintive Music . . .22
Plaintive Music 23
Copyright MCMXIII bj> Sam Fox Publishing Co.. Clereland, Ohio. (Iatciattional Copyright Secured)

Published by S a m F o x Pub. Co. Cleveland, 0.

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 40

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 41

iTunes Essentials
SAM FOX 4th of July

MOVING PICTURE Bachelor Pad Music

Bachelor Party Music
Bachelorette Party Music
MUSIC Back to School Songs
Black Fraternity Party
By J. S. ZAMECNIK Break Up Songs
VOL. I PRICE 50 CENTS Bummer Christmas
Cheating Songs
CONTENTS Country Road Songs
Election Day
Festival March 2
Indian Music 3
Father's Day
Oriental Veil Dance 4 Gay Pride: Boys
Chinese Music 5 Gay Pride: Girls
Oriental Music 6
Mexican or Spanish Music 8
Healing Music
Funeral March 9 Hip-Hop Cool Down
Death Scene 9 Indie Wedding
Church Music 10 Kids Let's Go Outside
War Scene
Part 1 (In Military Camp) .11 Labor Day
Part 2 (Off to the Battle) 12 Lazy Summer
Part 3 (The Battle) 12 and 13 Manchester
Cowboy Music 14
Grotesque or Clown Music 15 Melancholy Winter
Mysterioso-Burglar Music 16 Museum Music
Mysterioso-Burglar Music 16 Positivity
Hurry Music (for struggles) 17
Hurry Music (for duels) 17
Patriotism
Hurry Music IS Prison Songs
Hurry Music (for mob or fire scenes) 19 Protest
Storm Scene 20
Sailor Music 21 Rock Songs About Jesus
Fairy Music 21 Romance in New York
Plaintive Music 22 Saturday Errands
Plaintive Music 23
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Figure 3.
 42

Chapter Two:

'Back in 15 Minutes': Loose and Varied Early Film Music

Introduction

Count fancies maiden; Court musician fancies maiden; Maiden fancies court

musician: So goes the scenario for DW Griffith's 1909 Biograph short The Sealed

Room. The plot thickens.

Count shows maiden her new special quarters; Court musician accompanies

the gathering merriment of the court with his lute; Countess and musician exchange

glances.

The court empties out; Maiden and court musician remain; Wooed with

musician, Maiden takes him into her new quarters, a smaller intimate chamber;

Unbeknownst to them, the count returns realizing maiden and musician's feelings for

one another.

The Count orders serfs to seal off the entrance to the private chamber; Brick

and mortal stack to the ceiling forming a complete seal, as count looks on with gleeful

revenge. Maiden and musician suffocate.

The Sealed Room renders what will befall live film music, its removal from

the social space of the cinematic "court." Griffith's short film renders music's

potential to deter, to influence and to redirect. The court musician's body produces

music and attracts attention, transmitting emotion and affect noticeable through the

maiden's bodily reactions to him. The attention she pays the musician competes with

the Count, who is only a visual presence, not as much an audiovisual one. Yet the

musician's body and the music it produces spookily get quarantined, the Count
 43

dramatically disconnecting both from the diegesis of the space of the court, creepily

closing them off, shutting off any further threat to him, visual or audible.

The horrendous finale: Musician frantically bounces around the sealed room in

efforts to escape, suffocating; Maiden stares right at the camera; they breathe their last

breath. Fin.

Griffith (a count or magnate himself in the making) created a harbinger in 1909

with The Sealed Room whereby hierarchy controls sound through removing its

producer from a larger social space. No longer is the musician a potential threat to the

superior. Eerily, Griffith went through a phase during his Biograph years, where

"claustrophobia, fear of entombment, and slow suffocation were major motifs"

(Merritt), and, "by the end of 1909, characters had been locked inside vaults, caught in

the bottom of gravel pits, suffocated under a mountain of cascading grain, and stuck

inside a chimney. Infants had been routinely boxed up, shut inside ovens, locked in

barrels and trapped inside hat boxes... [which] all end in dramatic rescues" (Merritt).

The dramatic rescue, however, is not proffered to the musician or his listener in The

Sealed Room. The film represents in the death of the court musician what would befall

the film accompanist in the early nineteenth century, as film music evolved in a way

eventually concluding musicians' direct input.

The royal court in The Sealed Room represents the eventuating of a hierarchy

in cinema between sound and image, within which the subordinate musician and his

music attracted attention away from the regal visual, and as rendered in the film's

conclusion, the potential risk to the center of attention that the jamming musician

posed.
 44

In the nickelodeon era, prior to any metaphorical stately authority over music

The Sealed Room depicts, film accompanists had free reign. Music was organically

supplied (by organic I mean un-mechanized, alive). Resident musicians of all types

and talents, in the varying exhibition formats through which film was beginning to be

defined, gave music to film screenings. To continue the metaphor still, the cinema was

not yet a visual monarchy. Music and image coexisted evenly. There wasn't yet the

divine right of the image. The chaotic beginnings of cinema, in its uncontrolled and

highly varied forms of exhibition, provided for just as many varied musical

approaches to film before "proper" exhibition became more defined. More proper film

exhibition meant shaping social behavior and musical material. In time, different yet

interrelated influences like trade presses, music publishers, as well as exhibitors began

to collectively show increasing interest in cultivating film music, an early constellation

of the culture industry. In the Foucaultian model of disciplinary power, several relays

of power began, as the technology of film moved forward, to discursively define and

institutionally shape it.

A survey of film music practices in the nickelodeon era lays bare the sheer

variety of film music approaches which existed prior to the evolution of film as an

increasingly attractive form of entertainment. In the multiplicity of early exhibition

practices musical critique was open; early film music involved a range of

instrumentation; musicians' talent varied; musicians could play to the audience, not

necessarily the screen; advertisements touted resident film musicians; exhibitors

competed by offering unique music. These factors amounted to a popular musical

 45

ingredient of what Tom Gunning calls the "cinema of attractions," an open musical

climate to match the variety of early exhibition practices.

Furthermore, I argue that early film music culture was heavily regional in

character with local distinctiveness. It was a means through which varying

socioeconomic communities could know film. While Rick Airman thoroughly surveys

sound during the silent era, he doesn't address in depth any one nickelodeon market.

At the same time, Jacquine Najuna Stewart's examines one nickelodeon market in

great detail, The Stroll, in Chicago. But she doesn't necessarily dwell on its film

music. I wish to bring together Airman's broader approach with Stewart's microscopic

one to argue that significant to any nickelodeon market were its music practices, and

that film music could serve as a form of cultural code. Building on Rick Airman's

study of silent film sound and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart's study of African

American nickelodeon culture, this chapter will establish that, prior to industrial

efforts to steer film music, local musicians could improvise in an expressive social

space, posing not only a musical threat to film in their capacity to comment, but also a

presence participating in affective transmissions with audiences. Musicians' bodies

shared the nickelodeon space with audiences, a heterogeneous space that had

demographical variety, until various relays of power in time removed the body of the

musician from the space. Furthermore, film musicians had choices. They could

lampoon film content, provide for mood, establish a tone, and ultimately comment at

will, competing with visual content through bodily production of aural content.

Walter Benjamin speaks of the aura of original paintings, something unique to

the original which is lost once prints are mechanically mass-produced. With
 46

mechanical reproduction, the aura of the original doesn't carry over to copies.

Benjamin argues this is positive; dismantling an artwork's aura through mass-

production strips it of rituals over its sacrosanct uniqueness. Positively, reproduction

means masses access to art in a completely mobilized and modernized context.

But I argue that there was an acoustic equivalent of aura in early film in the

form of its fleeting improvisational music prior to mass-production of identical copies

of standardized film scores. Capitalist mass-production standardized the film score and

commanded precise repetition; this not only dismantled original local film music, it

replaced what I want to argue was a musical aura: an ethereal, irreproducible, fleeting

bodily performance of improvised music night to night, market to market. The

evolution of film normalized film scores and the eventual technological innovations in

film sound no longer required live musicians and therefore shaped aesthetic

perception. Benjamin championed films' capacity to mobilize politically critical

thought but recognized that Western filmmaking (increasingly profiting from its

illusion-inducing narratives) disengaged critical thought and therefore political

conscientiousness. In the shift from live musical commentaries to the standardized

film score, atmospheres unique to individual screenings ended through dispersal of

standardized scores, an acoustic angle to the film experience that could be critical in

quality.

Film was mass-produced long before its music was. In fact, according to

Benjamin, unlike a painting, film was never meant not to be mass-produced. When

mass-produced visuals coexisted with regional, improvisational, irreproducible

musical commentary, there existed a sort of half-and-half concoction of mechanically

 47

reproduced images and organic irreproducible music. If Benjamin warned of films'

potential to shut off audiences' critical thought on a massive scale, then the last step in

the technology's potential to disengage critical thought was in fact something quite

critical and auditory: film music. Benjamin explains that the social significance in film

"particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive,

cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage"

(Benjamin 1169-70), and I argue that local film music's improvisational quality was a

form of cultural heritage musicians could bring to film that got liquidated with film's

progression.

Chaotic Variety - Nickelodeon Music

Of two cartoons critiquing nickelodeon film accompaniment, the 1911 cartoon

"Back in 15 minutes" criticizes careless film music (figure 1). Hanging near the empty

trap drum set, a sign reads "back in 15 minutes" while the pianist, with her back to the

screen and to her upright piano, plaintively puts her hair up. A dialog bubble coming

out of the piano reads "DEEP SILENCE" describing the haphazard accompaniment.

One musician gone, and another carefree, the film plays on. The cartoon depicts an on-

screen image of two men brawling while a maiden in distress looks on. The cartoon's

caption reads "The Struggle," a double entendre for the fight scene as well as the

lackadaisical, even absent film accompaniment.

12
A quick look at the discourse. The verb "accompany" means to go along with; to go together with; or
to exist in association. The noun "accompaniment" means something incidental for ornament;
something designed to serve as background, as support; a concomitant; something added for
embellishment or completeness; something added to make perfect. Nevertheless, nickelodeon film
musicians hired as "accompanists" could defy these definitions.
 48

A second cartoon, "Death Scene," depicts mismatching film accompaniment

(figure 2). A female pianist with disregard for the deathbed scene on screen turns her

head to a "gentleman friend" in the audience. The gentleman friend smiles back. With

her eyes on the audience member, the cartoon renders the pianist playing for him and

not the film. Neither watches the screen; they watch each other. The body of the

pianist receives the audience's attention. The tune "Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?"

wafts out of her piano, the music raising the question what is or is not seen. The

cartoon's caption reads "Death Scene," describing the deathbed scene on-screen, but

according to the cartoonist's critique of nickelodeon film accompaniment, the phrase

"Death Scene" is figurative for the "lost life" of the film accompaniment in not

tending to the image.

The two cartoons critiquing nickelodeon film music depict musicians leaving

and returning more or less at their leisure, playing what they want when they want, or

not playing at all, summing up the characteristics of nickelodeon accompaniment:

haphazard, slapdash, ranging in aptitude, concerned with audience reaction, and not

always taken seriously. But these characteristics matched the chaos that was the

nickelodeon era. Forms of exhibitions varied, architecture of nickelodeon space

varied, and so too did film music in its loose, improvisational, unrestricted form.

Musical heterogeneity of the nickelodeon era had roots in late nineteenth

century music hall and vaudeville traditions that were dominated by international

musicianship.13 Rick Airman explains, "[t]hroughout the nineteenth century, foreign-

13
Aspects of nickelodeon culture come right out of vaudeville and music hall culture, very proximate
nineteenth century predecessors each with their own unique musical dynamics and dimensions, namely
 49

born musicians made up a substantial proportion of the American musical profession"

(Altman 29), and in the loose and varied musical environment of the music hall and

vaudeville theater, music could be used with "total disregard" of theatrical content.

Wholly carefree, local musicians provided "home-baked arrangements" in what

Altman describes was an "aesthetics of discontinuity" (Altman 33-6). A major

contribution to the aesthetics of discontinuity was open communication between

audience and musician. Altman explains that to audiences' delight, musicians

throughout the nineteenth century critiqued "theatrical content which was 'Old World'

or 'high society' in character" (Altman 36). Communication between audiences and

musicians had the potential to reconstruct musical numbers or acts on the spot.

Audiences in certain cases demanded that live musicians repeat certain musical

material up to three times, "not encores as we know them, after the play has

concluded, but repetitions in situ, one after the other, permitting spectators to

concentrate their attention on a particular performer and performance, but thereby

encouraging neglect of the play as a whole" (Altman 36). Musicians' and audiences'

neglect of featured items constituted a social dynamic that continued on into the

nickelodeon era.

Nickelodeons unfolded in a variety of forms. They varied in many architectural

configurations. Business owners converted their storefronts, even restaurants, in order

to house film screenings in addition to their primary business. Tim Anderson explains,

"[w]hile the informality of these spaces meant that numerous sites could be considered

a type of socially and musically open participation with musicians which directly carries over into
nickelodeon atmosphere due to those models of vaudeville and musical hall venues and behavior.
 50

to be nickelodeons, this lack of uniformity allowed for an abundance of aesthetic and

exhibitionary practices" (Anderson 50). Whether New York, Chicago, or Grand

Rapids, the sheer assortment of cinematic schemes enabled eclectic musicians of

different backgrounds to creatively play to film, even wildly, before music became a

source of interest to several parties. Tim Anderson explains "nickelodeons existed as

potentially disruptive and heterogeneous spaces of spectacle and distraction not only at

the level of the filmic image but also in the possible musical aspects involving

audiences and employees" (Anderson 49-50). I argue that disruption and

heterogeneousness in nickelodeon culture was musical in character, and efforts by

various segments of industry to control the cinematic space were, in time, efforts to

control its aural aspects.

The sheer number of nickelodeons participating in a largely undefined,

unregulated and a yet-to-be-industrialized entertainment phenomenon meant a

diversity of musical applications. In 1907, Edison sold 12,000 projectors and by the

end of the aughts, several cosmopolitan locations had burgeoning nickelodeon

cultures: by 1907, New York had 400 storefront theaters; by 1908, Chicago had 300

nickelodeons; by 1908 Philadelphia had 200 nickelodeons.14 Even lesser cosmopolitan

centers had their share: in 1908, Grand Rapids, MI, had 17 nickelodeons.

Not only were they increasing in number, nickelodeons were often

concentrated together: In Kansas City, there were 6 picture houses at one intersection;

In Chicago, there were 6 nickelodeons in one city block; In New Orleans, there were 5

on one block of Canal Street; In Richmond, there were 12 on one block; In

14
Rick Altaian's Silent Film Sound details the arguable saturation of several nickelodeon markets.
 51

Philadelphia, there were 6 in one block of Market Street; In Harlem, there could be 5

to a block. And music was a way for competitors to differentiate from one another in

this concentrated, arguably saturated market. Since nickelodeons often screened the

same films, managers of venues competitively showcased musical performers as a

value over rivals who were often right down the street, even next door. Pre-

standardization, managers relied on sound as a differential, a customization, a way to

spruce up their screenings. Airman explains "[u]nable to obtain better - or even

different - films than the competition, theaters turned to sound as a manner of

differentiating their programs" (Altman 124). Musical originality between

nickelodeons became one way for venues to advertise themselves as alternative.

Not only was music unregulated inside the nickelodeon, the soundscape

outside the theaters reflected a similar acoustic free-for-all. Patrons walking down the

street deciding which nickelodeon to enter often would have heard plentiful

"ballyhoo" music, music produced in the street beckoning patrons into this or that

nickelodeon, a truly unregulated cacophonic acoustic dynamic of early film culture.

Sounds of live military bands, phonographs, gramophones and automatic player

pianos competed in the streets, a form of acoustic competition. In one instance, in a

nickelodeon hub in Kansas City, 6 gramophones from 6 close nickelodeons each

poured music into the street. Ballyhoo music even interfered with film accompaniment

inside the theater. Of this highly chaotic acoustic environment predating industrial

jurisdiction, Altman explains, "nickel theaters treated the auditorium and the street as

a single continuous sound space, with music produced in one area easily penetrating

into the other. Not only did streetside ballyhoo music regularly reach spectators, but
 52

owners also expected musicians performing inside the theater to play loud enough for

their music to be heard in the street" (Altaian 131). The fact that managers would not

only tout their film accompanists but demand that their sound reach even beyond the

venue speaks to the commercial influence of customizable music in the nickelodeon

era. Sound was far from controlled. Sound was wielded.

As the earlier readings of contemporary cartoons demonstrate, nickelodeon

accompaniment was essentially hasty. Since there wasn't really any standard for

nickelodeon sound nor any enforced guidelines even for exhibitors, solo pianists or

orchestras involving as little as a pianist and trap drummer approached film

chaotically. Lackadaisical approaches occasionally resulted in no music at all.

Orchestras would sit out initial screenings of film material so conductors could

arrange something fitting for subsequent screenings. There could be up to five minutes

of silence during a screening accompanied by even the most touted orchestras.

Accompanists could be found leaning back in their chairs until they felt suited to

accompany a scene of their choosing, and press suggested accompanists occasionally

stop to 'give the audiences a chance to think' (Altman 200). Despite claims that silent

film was never silent, indeed it was, but by way of silence seemingly at musicians'

disposal.

As music was free to start and stop so too was audience participation. The

unregulated soundscape of nickelodeon culture invited audiences to partake. Lively

and oral in character, audience involvement during the nickelodeon era ranged from

somewhat subdued to outright noisy. Altman explains, "Today, a concert or a stage

performance is a time to listen; a century ago, listening events began with street
 53

ballyhoo sounds and offered appropriate justification for making one's own sounds"

(Altaian 53). Together, musicians and audiences had the potential to construct the film

and the film experience as they saw fit, as it was customary for musicians to riff, pun,

play and joke with film content to audiences' vocal pleasure. To the chagrin of

nickelodeon managers, and eventually filmmakers concerned with the logic of their

product, improvisational, participatory, and playful film music regional in quality,

otherwise known as "Jackass Music," ruled in an era when live musicians shaped film.

Prior to the reformatory process that would eventually silence the organic mixture of

musical agency and spectator involvement, jackass music, not only as a form of

communication between audiences and musicians but as a means for diverse audiences

to understand film through sound, flourished.

Jackass Music

Trade press deemed jackass music the brand of fun accompanists had with

audiences in several markets. Jackass music provided for an open circulation of

enthusiasm that was musical in character. In the unregulated nickelodeon soundscape,

film musicians, sometimes untalented and unprepared, loosely improvised and

explored music/film correspondences. This annoyed filmmakers, exhibitors and trade

press contributors alike who, in time, would demand and then implement more

streamlined, less ambitious, unthreatening film music. But when jackass music ruled,

it existed in the autonomous acoustic space of the nickelodeon where the screen was

not yet the site on which musicians and audiences fully focused themselves.

Musicians' bodies were visuals audiences could watch in addition to the film, bodies
 54

producing music they themselves participated in. Both had fun with the screen, not in

an unruly manner as much as it was simply an open space, like nineteenth century

musical hall and vaudeville predecessors, where audiences' and musicians' sounds

were not yet subdued, nor were musicians' bodies yet detached.

Nickelodeon sound signaled uninhibited musicianship even to the extent of

casual amateurism. Anderson explains, "[f]or many exhibitors, the problem was not

unruly musicians but rather a lack of professional musicians" (Anderson 57). But the

price of unionized professional musicians dictated that certain exhibitors opt for more

affordable, less experienced ones. This economic context invited improvisation. Not

unlike the beginnings of jazz in New Orleans where procession bands, affordable and

inexperienced, relying on a surplus of brass instruments and drums leftover from war

began to improvise within their occasionally limited repertoire, some nickelodeon film

musicians resorted to improvising too. To extend Anderson's observation, I add that

the existence of improvisation in the nickelodeon era didn't mean accompanists were

unprofessional just because they lacked experience. On the contrary: lack of

experience invited the talent of improvisation. (Besides, there wasn't a vast amount of

experience to be had accompanying film at such an early stage, nor were there any

rules with which one familiarized and then professionalized oneself as a film

musician.) As a result of the economics of certain markets during the nickelodeon era,

musicians improvised and incorporated audiences: jackass music.

Jackass music enabled interpersonal circulation of affect Brennan suggests

because, of the attention it brought to the musicians' body. Anderson explains,

'"jackass music' maneuvers (i.e. playing to members of the audience, instead of

 55

playing to the film, or musicians leaving their post during the most dramatic portion of

the film)... [were] common indiscretions made by players who were irresponsible,

inadequate, or both" (Anderson 53). Slapdash musicianship influenced the feeling of

the space, and musicians with a certain amount of say so had the potential to call

attention to either the picture or their own presence. Musicians attracted interest from

audiences and drew praise because of witty, smart musical decisions. One example of

how musicians sought and gained approval in affective exchange was through

installing popular songs into their repertoire which would establish common terrain

with audiences. Certain pianists could play with popular songs to kid and comment

with film. Altman explains, "Choosing songs carefully, clever pianists could easily

exploit the ambiguities of language to create musical puns, jokes or ironic comments"

(Altman 220). Film accompaniment was live critique and could range from overt

commentary to more subtle musical statements. Crowds respected, appreciated and

verbally responded to musical critique because it not only addressed them but

acknowledged audiences' intelligence, their ability to get the joke. A popular form of

film at that time was the illustrated song film (a predecessor of the televisual music

video, only in public). Illustrated song films were shorts based on the subject matter of

a song. Musicians played the song to images depicting its narrative, and managers

often sold copies of its sheet music at the exit. In movie theaters, audiences sang along

during illustrated song films, following along to its lyrics (often choruses) projected

onto the screen. This custom of singing along to illustrated song films carried over into

other forms of film, a form of connection between audiences and musicians which

didn't remain only within illustrated song film screenings. This type of musical
 56

audience participation and open decorum carried over into screenings of other types of

films when musicians played popular songs audiences knew. The customization of

these moments at the hands of musicians, and the fleeting affective transmission in

such shared musical experiences in the nickelodeon era began to die off. Improvisation

entailed the possibility of something entirely different happening at any moment, an

un-programming at musicians' disposal, which eventually became increasingly

programmed along with affective and emotional directions improvisation could shape

so uniquely and freely.

However, jackass musical practices weren't enjoyed by all. Anderson explains

a disgruntled critic's reaction to it:

Musicians who went after the laughs by playing to the audience were

continually acknowledged and appreciated. These musicians were 'the

only fellows who seem to receive audible praise.. .They play comic

songs in classical pictures (the spectators often join in singing these),

the drummer injects some fool noise in a serious scene and your

"jackass audience" is delighted.' . . .This kind of behavior was

commonplace, as [the critic] had not only seen it in Chicago and other

neighboring towns but had heard that New York had similar problems.

(Anderson 55)

I want to emphasize that since unionized "professional" musicians were expensive, in

thrift settings musicians not unprofessional in quality but improvisational in style

played for socioeconomic communities they belonged to. I claim that when audiences

participated with musicians prior to a wholesale enforcement of the cinema

 57

soundscape, the sound of nickelodeon culture reflected regional and ethnic

sovereignty.

Musicians manipulated film with their commentary, but so could the audience

direct the musician. Anderson explains," [t]he noisy conduct of these urban audiences

and their effect on musical performances within these spaces reveal quite a bit about

the potential power of the audience in early cinema. Not only could these audiences

influence what selections the musician made, but they could alter the meanings found

in the dominant narrative of the film" (Anderson 55). The musician and the audience

both, through aural participation with one another, also created a significance of film

sound, something of social value, importing what could be heard with a social value

which in the case of the image couldn't be as augmented because the image in the

social space of the theater was already predetermined. Sound, because it was not yet

something wholly programmed, was significant because it could be shaped, by either

party, musician or audience, in collective exchange. In time, the industrial progression

of film closes down this aural form of social say-so, eventually shutting down musical

communication, which entails certain aural training within the cinema space through

the development of its musical atmosphere.

The sonic authority musicians and audiences had over the image was regional

and ethnic in character, increasingly diminished through certain shifts I will discuss

such as the massively distributed orchestral score, and then the complete shift to the

bodiless sound system. Nickelodeon culture in different markets inherited their own

regional practices, inherently producing heterogeneous film music practices by way of

different musical treatments. Film musicians had, and made, choices, and from
 58

location to location, even for the same film, film music could reflect regional and

ethnic expression. Airman explains, "Until at least 1911, both the choice of music and

its relation to the film image depended more on the extremely diverse knowledge and

expectations that musicians brought to the theater than on standards established within

the film industry" (Airman 208), and the extremely diverse knowledge, range of

experience, and socioeconomic background of film musicians helped produce the

sundry nickelodeon soundscape prior to the control of that regional, acoustic

contribution to cinema.

In fact, prior to its homogenization, film music, since it was creative and

improvisational, was a way for certain socioeconomic communities at that time to

engage with and relate to film material. Resident musicians could help convey a film

using music as a sort of ethnic or class code enabling audiences to understand film in a

local way. Anderson explains, "the performative nature of live film music may have

been a means by which a variety of marginalized audiences were able to gain pleasure

in the exhibition of both narrative and early film styles" (Anderson 56). It is ironic,

then, that the musicians' ability to help audiences increasingly access film material

would die off. Perhaps film music standardization is Americanization,

Americanization par excellence in that film music, increasingly without ethnic and

socioeconomic musical codes generated sight-on-scene, actually helped assimilate or

indoctrinate immigrant communities not just with film but with film music. Why else

would film music shift toward a form no longer enabling audiences to engage film by

way of a musical code? Because it provided too much authority to musicians when

filmmakers themselves could retain influence at the expense of communities' entree to

 59

film. In terms of affect, the musician as an influence over changeable energy in the

social space of the nickelodeons began to lose that influence, before ultimately no

longer bodily present at all with the arrival of the full fledged sound film where, as I

will show in Chapter 5, film music becomes fully tailored.

The non-restrictive nickelodeon soundscape and its creative music enabled,

according to Miriam Hansen, a "public sphere for particular social groups, like

immigrants and women, by providing an inter-subjective horizon through - and

against - which they could negotiate the specific displacements and discrepancies of

their experience" (as quoted in Anderson 56). Heterogeneous musical approaches like

improvisation provided "a sense of collective presence [which] allowed for locally and

culturally specific acts of reception, opening up a margin of participation and

unpredictability" (Hanson as quoted in Anderson 56). The musical improviser had an

ability to convey meaning that could vary depending on the socioeconomic

backgrounds of performers and audience. As Anderson explains, "Improvisational

performers . . . propose a melocentric [melody-centered] goal of executing new and

differing meanings and pleasures that are produced and offered through multiple

methods of'meaning fastening.' Indeed, the excessive possibilities in performance for

'meaning making' exist as a continual threat to all systems of meaning" (Anderson

57), especially the system of meaning which aspects of industry like trade presses and

music publishers wished to guarantee themselves.

The eventual removal of the film musician dismantles two potential threats to

film logic (which trade press cartoons and song books promoted): creative musical

material that was local and critical in character; and the body of the performing
 60

musician, the point of musical and affective production, energy deterring full

absorption in the screen, the screen at which industry wished to further direct

spectators' attention. It was the musician's ability to construct meaning musically, and

bodily, that seemed to pose an audiovisual threat to the stability of film logic which, as

evidence shows, angles of industry wished to shape. The eventual removal of that

influence meant a removal of differing socioeconomic musical accompaniment and a

corresponding variety of ways socioeconomic groups could understand film through

their own sounds.

This is why moviegoers became much less audiences than they became

.spectators. Nickelodeon filmgoers surely were audiences by definition because of the

emphasis on hearing music integral in that setting, and because film music was

conscious, as opposed to later in history when film music will increasingly occur on an

unconscious level. With its prefix aud-, it makes sense to explain nickelodeon

filmgoers with the word "audience,'" whereas, once the interactive musician is no

longer involved, "audience," as defined as a group of listeners, makes less sense.

"Spectators," a noun defined more by a groups' visual concentration, with its prefix

spec-, more accurately defines moviegoers post-nickelodeon era when film music

becomes far less conscious. The influence and authority over emotion and affect once

afforded to live musicians evolved into something more and more tailored on behalf of

mass-produced scores which were no longer produced live, something increasingly

homogenous, no longer reflecting choice as much as the perpetuation of convention.

 61

Case Study: The Chicagoan Nickelodeon Culture

The Great Migration of the early twentieth century brought large communities

of African Americans up from the south and into northern urban industrial centers

creating a unique socioeconomic community of moviegoers. African American

cinema culture represents a community's ability to construct its own brand of

cinematic space and spectatorship chiefly through open interaction between audience

and musical accompaniment. Music was central to African American patrons'

empowering formation of nickelodeon space.

In her book Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Identity.

Jacqueline Najuma Stewart examines African American movie culture in Chicago

during the nickelodeon era. Arguing that African Americans created havens in picture

houses, Stewart explains that movies often intended for white audiences were a means

by which African Americans could articulate themselves communally in the face of

continuing segregationist practices not only on screen but still alive in urban centers to

which they migrated. Smith explains, "African Americans approached the cinema as

they approached so many other elements of public life - with a wide range of

individual and collective strategies to incorporate, reject, and/or reconstruct the

institutions and practices shaping their daily lives" (Stewart 14). Looking particularly

at The Stroll, the entertainment hub in the south side of Chicago, Stewart identifies the

hub as a location through which African Americans defined themselves inside spaces

of entertainment.

To expand Stewart's argument that African Americans created their own

moviegoing culture, I wish to focus on the musical aspects of its communal formation.
 62

First, it is clear that nickelodeons on the Stroll ranged in atmosphere and in volubility.

Stewart explains:

Much like the ornate movie palaces of the 1920s that would attempt to

extend the fantasy space of cinematic narratives into theater spaces

occupied largely by working-class patrons (of all racial and ethnic

backgrounds), Black Belt theaters boasted (in print if not in fact) clean,

healthy, beautiful spaces in which African American viewers could feel

validated, even if Blackness was not represented (positively) on screen.

(Stewart 182)

I emphasize that advertising for theaters also boasted music as a way for listeners to

feel validated. Advertisements for certain theaters on The Stroll clearly point out their

musical uniqueness, whether it be the size or monetary value of their house organ, or

specific resident musicians or conductors:

"Vendome Theater: 1500 COMFORTABLE SEATS / MAMMOTH

PIPE ORGAN / ERSKINE TATE'S SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA"

"New Entertainer Cafe.. .BEST MUSIC"

"States Theater: E. W. Bailey' s Augmented Orchestra Every Show"

"The Owl: "a specially built Kimball pipe organ, installed at a cost of

$10,000"

"Phoenix Theater: $10,000 pipe organ"

"Atlas theater: $5,000 organ" (Stewart, advertisements from the

Defender 182).
 63

Through sound, clientele could feel validated due to the type of environment they

helped construct within the theater. I claim that the ability for audiences to participate,

vocalize and communicate with musicians instead of stay silent was an acoustic factor

central to Chicagoan nickelodeon culture. Of theater advertising, Stewart continues:

"By boasting quality films and fine musical performances, as well as modern

conveniences and amenities in beautiful surroundings, Black Belt theaters promoted

themselves as refuges from squalor, exclusion, and discrimination" (Stewart 182). As

refuges from social abhorrence, theaters on The Stroll had their own communal system

in which sound was not yet a point of jurisdiction. Chicagoan nickelodeon culture

exemplifies what communities had the capacity to create in their picture houses:

unique spaces open to local entertainment practices.

Jazz musicians made up a certain portion of film accompanists. In some

theaters where film screenings coexisted with other musical numbers, the musical

character of the stage numbers participatory in quality would carry over into the film

screening. Other numbers besides films had musical support at their core which,

carrying over into film screenings, resulting in a type of musical continuity tethering

more traditional theatrical numbers with newer, more sensational and technological

film installments.

Some Chicagoan nickelodeons were in fact rowdy. Stewart explains, "while

such places were inextricably linked in public discourses with Black efforts to achieve

social freedoms, political equality, and economic self-determination, Black urban

entertainments did not consistently adhere to traditional or middle-class definitions of

respectability" (Stewart 158). Prior to industry's increased interest to direct sound

 64

eventually ushering in a paradigm of dutiful silence, musical codes between audiences

and musicians contributed to the raucousness criticized by industry interested in

maintaining (profitable) decorum. Stewart explains:

[C]ertainly the Monogram [Theater] featured an incredible range of

Black entertainment, from stage legends to up-and-coming acts, and,

like the other Black Belt theaters, it provided audiences with an all-

Black venue free from racial discrimination. But it was also a loud,

raunchy, and unseemly establishment that could be unpleasant and

inappropriate for young people (especially women and girls) as

performers and spectators. (Stewart 174)

Communication with musicians was part of these atmospheres. A contemporary

newspaper article speaks to the audience's strong vocalized demands to hang on to

musical accompaniment that dealt in a shared communal code, even at the expense of

damaging the theater:

But the management had learned, at the expense of wrecked seats and

fistfights and performers forcibly ejected from the stage, that the

seasoned act, the perennial joke disguised only enough to give the

impression of newness while retaining the comfort of familiarity, the

bawdy song full of double meanings sung in a folk code language, were

what the audience wanted. (Dunham as quoted in Stewart 172)

Audiences demanded musicians who intimately knew them to remain in-house as

opposed to musicians who may accompany film without the added enjoyment of

"double meanings sung in a folk code language." Audiences demanded double

 65

meanings and folk code language for stage acts as well as the films interspersed

among them in the program.

Representing a community's acoustic intervention with film, the employment

of jazz musicians in movie theaters helped foster a sense of social identity and was a

crossover of African American musical culture into film screenings. Stewart explains,

"By moving beyond an emphasis on the individual, the textual, and the psychic to

include a consideration of the collective, the contextual, and the physical dimensions

of Black spectatorship, we can develop a fuller picture of how African Americans

have positioned and expressed themselves in relation to the cinema under particular

historical conditions" (Stewart 101). Stewart's definition for the act of communal

reconstitution via the cinema is "reconstructive spectatorship.. .the range of ways in

which Black viewers attempted to reconstitute and assert themselves in relation to the

cinema's racist social and textual operations. I read Black spectatorship as the creation

of literal and symbolic spaces in which African Americans reconstructed their

individual and collective identities in response to the cinema's moves toward classical

narrative integration, and in the wake of migration's fragmenting effects" (Stewart

94). The social space of the cinema enabled communal reconstitution.

I claim that reconstructive spectatorship was principally audible. Within the

social space of the cinema, communities exercised sound and music unique to them,

fending off "passive reception" indeed akin to what segregationist pressures wrought

on certain socioeconomic communities. Stewart's brilliant claim that reconstructive

spectatorship "was a varied, performative, and social element in Black film culture"

explains a unique aspect of preindustrial film when communities could shape the
 66

cinematic experience to suit them. But central to this was how communities controlled

the way their local cinemas sounded through music and codes, a heterogeneous and

organic space which flourished prior to administrative control both over social

behavior and the extent to which a musician could truly participate. The decades that

followed not only brought more segregation, they brought standardization of music in

spaces where it previously helped to subvert segregation. The following decades

ushered in a new system whereby quieted audiences and managed musicians absorbed

themselves in the screen and no more in one another, what Stewart calls "the rise of

the classical paradigm of narration and address" (Stewart 17). The removal of

ethnically unique, local improvisational musicians disenabled audiences from a

regional access to film that their musical codes had once enabled. It also meant the

removal of a certain type of social energy, a musically inflected transmission of affect.

The standardization of film music disengaged subjectivization and instead turned

moviegoing over time into yet another example of institutional formulation of the

subject, a form of auditory subjectification that cultural uses of film music were busy

circumventing in their communal uniqueness.

Conclusion

When a film could become less of an attraction than the film musician,

industry underwent a widespread campaign of normalization resulting in dismantling

local musicians' live ability to comment. Airman explains,

Whereas pianists and audiences thrived on what became known as

'kidding' - the use of a song to undermine filmic intentions - managers

 67

and trade press regularly aspired to what they called 'realism' - a style

that subordinated all sounds to the film. Owners understood that by

justifying the music from within the film's narrative they could

concentrate audience attention on the screen rather than on the pianist

and the exhibition situation. Simply put, pianists' use of popular songs

to 'kid' the film constituted one of the last bastions of a cinema of

attractions, while attempts to impose a more narrative-oriented style

were among the harbingers of the filmmaking practice that would

dominate from the teens onward. (Airman 226)

Missing in Airman's assessment is the sense of musicians' ability not just to kid but to

critique, to comment, a unique fixture of the nickelodeon era eventually changed

through the campaign to regulate sound. Controlling film music meant "determin[ing]

a textually prescribed spectatorship experience" (Stewart 109). Removing open film

music practices also in effect removed a form of cultural liberty. Communities could

use sound to help collectively constitute themselves prior to what became an

increasingly monitored, in fact policed acoustic environment ensuring success for "the

racially exclusionary institution of the cinema" (Stewart 6-7).

I argue that discriminatory practices on screen had an acoustic equivalent in

the more immediate social space of the movie theater in the shift from regional to less

local, more homogenized film music practices producing increasingly quieted

audiences. Shifts toward the standardization of the film score stamp out what were
 68

regional distinctions in nickelodeon culture, a heteroglossia among film, audiences

and musicians.15

The removal of the improvisational film musician also stamped out the

influence of their bodies. In the affective circulation between audiences and musicians,

the body of the musician, not simply as a supplemental presence, but as an important

visual producing participatory music was itself a moving image audiences could attend

to, along with, or instead of, the film image. Removing customizable music removed

its visual producer, uninstalling interpersonal affective circulation in exchange for

what would become highly emotive prescriptions in homogenized scores without the

live body producing them, without the live body to decide on them.

The soundscapes of entertainment venues often overflowed with music

produced by resident musicians who were in and of the socioeconomic community. To

extend Stewart's argument that African Americans created their own moviegoing

culture, I add that music was central to its reconstructivist quality, and that acoustics in

the cinema space, prior to the policing of it, was a special terrain for communal

formation. Anderson explains that "[i]f establishing the theatrical exhibition of film

necessitated the reformation of 'jackass music' as well as 'jackass audiences' in order

to prosper, then these same alterations also conceded that the above social

15
Mikhail Bakhtin's speaks of the literary novel as a system of languages, a heteroglossia, an
interrelation of speech types. I argue this was what live musicianship could supply, namely blending
music perhaps imbued with socioeconomic code with other content. He explains heteroglossia is, "[t]he
internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behavior,
professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious
languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and passing fashions, languages that serve the
specific sociopolitical purposes of the day, even of the hour . . . this internal stratification present in
every language at any given moment of its historical existence is the indispensable prerequisite for the
novel as a genre" (Bahktin 1192-3). Such may have been the case in early film due to the musician's
capability to insert a form of sociopolitics.
 69

compositions were exceptionally dynamic methods of mobilizing popular critical

pleasures" (Anderson 58-9). Cinema sound had the potential to be independently

constructed market to market enabling such critical pleasures before film's evolution

dismantled varying communities' chance to formulate themselves per the cinematic

sound experience.

In terms of Michel Foucault's notions of institutional power, I argue that film

in the nickelodeon era was not yet fully industrialized and therefore not yet

institutionalized. In a Foucaultian sense, it was still in the process of defining itself,

creating its discourse, and the ensuing campaign to standardize sound demonstrates

industrial efforts to shape a (self-serving and profitable) system of knowledge. Film

music normalization began with complaints against jackass music that circulated

among managers, owners, filmmakers, cartoonists, and journalists. All made efforts to

roll out new standards centered on attentiveness to the image, and they fixated on a

new protocol for film music to achieve it. This prevented a musical form of

subjectivization and formulated a certain institutional subjectification more cultural

uses of music were busy circumventing.

To return to my earlier close reading of the word "accompany," the prefix ac-

is a variant of ad-, which means toward, or toward an indicated direction. But

musicians' bodies while they accompanied film brought attention towards themselves.

Considering the accompanists' ability to draw attention to themselves and therefore

avert attention away from the screen image, the screen image by definition could just

as well have been the accompaniment to what was an active audiovisual relationship

between participatory audiences and film musicians. To "accompany" also means to

 70

protect, as in accompanying someone home. But it is clear musicians had the choice

whether or not to protect the film, and they often chose to toy with it, not go along

with it, therefore totally revising the meaning of the actual term used to define their

trade at that time. The noun "company" inside the verb "to ac-company" ironically

reared its head. Companies began to over-determine music before ultimately leaving

behind the live film musician in sound and in body.

With the coming of the standardized soundtrack and the shift to sound film,

business transformed the nickelodeon aesthetic of discontinuity. Anderson explains

that "although hardly sufficient, [the shift in film music] was necessary to fulfill the

needs of classical narrative film... But no matter how normative these processes have

become, their conventional statute can always be renegotiated" (Anderson 58).

Subsequent chapters examine two more historical moments along the nodes of film

music, namely the mass-distributed live orchestral score, and its descendent, the mass-

produced prerecorded orchestral score. In my final chapter I examine a current trend

which I argue renegotiates film music conventions, namely live performances of silent

film music by musicians who create their own score, a trend which celebrates original

music as well as reinstallation of the musicians' body into the social space of cinema;

only in the silent era and in this present trend are the musicians' bodies present. The

history of film music throughout the twentieth century included a whole range of

national, propagandistic, capitalist, heteronormative and/or hegemonic practices, styles

and forms, each worthy of their own study. A whole host of trends and styles emerged:

Eisensteinian sound montage (as actually executed by Vertov), Hitchcock and

Herrmann's strident approaches; Godard's contrapuntal use of music, Kubrick's

 71

fascination with and indulgence in source music. But at no point in the history of film

music practices is the body of the musician present other than in the silent era as well

as in our contemporary moment. Live, original music and bodily presence return only

in the current trend of performing original scores to silent films live (which my final

chapter will show is becoming increasingly popular). As I will demonstrate, examing

the nickelodeon period does not reveal a one to one direct correspondence with

today's practices. Instead, it helps to provide a larger context within which we can

understand how forms of music customization today link back to early twentieth

century film music history. As my final chapter will argue, the terrain of film music,

contested in the nickelodeon era, reemerges today in current examples where people

play with film music.

While musicians' bodies and creative music operated as predominant means of

organization in cinema during the nickelodeon era, literary modernists concurrently

incorporated music into their fiction. In film and literature both, music informed early

twentieth century narratives, making sound a means through which authors or film

musicians made sense of the increasingly modernized world. Certain modernist

authors likened their contemporary film musicians in that both used music as a form of

critique, and while improvisational film music eventually turned formulaic, music in

literary modernism and explorations of sound as a terrain for critique bloomed.

 72

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 73

Chapter Three:

Music as Cultural Critique in Cather and Joyce

Introduction

As explained in Chapter One, early film music practices afforded

improvisational musicians their own musical critique of film texts prior to what

Jacqueline Najuma Stewart calls the "the rise of the classical paradigm of narration

and address, which encouraged [audiences'] absorption in the narrative on screen

rather than in the social space of the theater" (Stewart 17).

The present chapter seeks to show how, during a time of increasing control

over music in film, certain literary modernists explored representations of music (and

sound in general) as means of cultural critique in their fiction; in film, what once was a

creative and open site for a musician's critique became increasingly commodified, but

literature remained imaginative in terms of its representations of music. Although in

two different registers, two artistic media roughly during the same era underwent

different transformations in terms of how music was represented or employed (and in

the case of film, how music was allowed to be employed). While representations of

music in literary modernism was arguably vital to the movement, during mainstream

filmmaking at the same time music stopped being such a creative part of film due to

increasing industrial influences over film music in efforts to streamline a film product

during a remarkable phase of increasing mass-production.

 74

Literary Modernists and the Acoustic

Most broadly, literary modernism in the beginning decades of the twentieth

century operated within a musical paradigm. The blurring of different media in

modernist explorations frequently included one-part music: Pound's "Great Bass"

poetics; Picasso's, Cocteau's, and Satie's 1917 ferociously dissonant opera Parade;

Eliot's multiple acoustic references even to phonographs in "The Waste Land."

Literary modernism was in several instances music-ism. Brad Bucknell explains that

for modernists, "late nineteenth-century debates about music's powerful, but non-

referential ability to make meaning became a significant focus for their written work"

(Bucknell i). He continues, "music became another complex trope deployed in

modernism's justification of its own aesthetic practice" (Bucknell i).

I am concerned most with certain literary modernists' attention to music in

their construction of the soundscapes inhabited by their characters. The presence of

music in the diegesis of a modernist novel, for instance, can be an acoustic marker of

affective responses for its characters. I believe this serves as cultural critique by way

of auditory moments where protagonists are confronted by music. Certain literary

modernists create meaningful components in their work in specifically constructed

cultural soundscapes. This is significant to consider because of film music practices

around the same time, practices which fell increasingly under control of an industry

responsible for emotive and affective responses.

I argue that during the same few decades of the standardization of the film

soundtrack, certain modernist literature not only remains a space where music was

portrayed as investigative, but certain literary works also contemplate the meaning of
 75

emotive and affective reactions and influences of music. Additionally, I argue that

regionally and culturally specific music remarkably shapes narrative, ultimately

positioning music in the literature in a place of importance, unlike its secondary

application in mainstream film around the same few decades.

Some literary modernists explored the auditory world in general (not just

music) to create specific soundscapes for characters to inhabit. Virginia Woolf and

William Faulkner rendered soundscapes specific to their times: Woolf s Mrs.

Dallowav. a novel depicting several characters' interiority, pivots on sonic markers

found in interwar London such as the tolling of Big Ben, backfiring cars mistaken for

exploding mortars, sound becoming a trope through which Woolf associates characters

via sounds they hear in common. Examples are the urban sounds which influence the

interiority of the isolated and lonely Peter Walsh. As he roams the London matrix, he

ponders the sounds of English soldiers who march up behind him:

A patter like the patter of leaves in a wood came from behind, and with

it a rustling, regular thudding sound which as it overtook him drummed

his thoughts, strict in step, up Whitehall, without his doing. Boys in

uniform, carrying guns, marched with their eyes ahead of them,

marched, their arms stiff, and on their faces an expression like the

letters of a legend written round the base of a statue praising duty,

gratitude, fidelity, love of England. It is, thought Peter Walsh,

beginning to step with them, a very fine training. (Woolf 43).

The militaristic sounds "overtake" Peter as he walks across the city; they influence his

body. He falls in step soundly not as soldier but as citizen within earshot of auditory
 76

influences, sounds representative of wartime England. Even other sounds of the city

cease so the marching can continue: "The traffic respected; vans were stopped . . . on

they marched . . . in their steady way, as if one will worked legs and arms uniformly,

and life, with its varieties, its reticences, had been laid under a pavement of

monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline"

(Woolf43-4).

Faulkner's Light in August arguably depicts a specifically American southern

soundscape which anti-hero Joe Christmas must endure as a character of mixed

ancestry, all within a racist environment rendered as such through its sounds. In the

following passage, Byron Bunch discusses the anti-hero's name with his prejudicial

foreman; the sound of someone's name becomes grounds for deciphering their skin

color. This is made clear after the two characters themselves have difficulty hearing

each other:

"His name is Christmas," he said.

"His name is what?" one said.

"Christmas."

"Is he a foreigner?"

"Did you ever hear of a white man named Christmas?" the

foreman said.

"I never heard of nobody a-tall named it," the other said.

And that was the first time Byron remembered that he had ever

thought how a man's name, which is supposed to be just the sound for

who he is, can be somehow an augur for what he will do, if other men
 77

can only read the meaning in time. It seemed to him that none of them

had looked especially at the stranger until they heard his name. But as

soon as they heard it, it was as though there was something in the

sound of it that was trying to tell them what to expect... (Faulkner

33)

I believe Woolf and Faulkner were innovators in that they not only heavily

incorporated sound into their fiction but made sound, and cultural, historical, and local

soundscapes (or acoustic milieus) variables worth critical attention.

Although scholars have studied musical aspects of the literary modernist

movement,16 I argue that certain modernist fiction indicated sound was something in

the non-fictional real world worth analyzing as essential to times and locales

modernists critiqued on a trans-Atlantic level; acoustics became a literary device.

Mark Smith claims there was an acute aural sectionalism in America during the

nineteenth century between north and south, where, in opposition to ocular modernity,

sound "was a faculty emphasized by contemporaries [...] that they took as seriously as

their seeing and other sensory understandings" (Smith 6). In his study of American

non-fiction of that era Smith argues that "[pjrinted aural projections of sectional

identity and a variety of other matters [which] were powerful and palpable because the

printed words used to convey the various sounds and their meanings rendered aurality

permanent and rescued them from the ephemerality of voice" (Smith 8). I would add

16
Brad Bucknell in Literary Moderninsm and Musical Aesthetics: Pater. Pound. Joyce and Stein, and
Daniel Albright in Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music. Literature and Other Arts both explore
musicality of certain literary modernists, but don't consider authors' uniquely rendered soundscapes.
 78

that certain writers of fiction devoted concentration to the aural in the face of

increasing prioritization of the ocular far into the twentieth century (Woolf and

Faulkner are two examples of authors with such keenness). The acoustic in fiction

could serve as a means of social, national, even emotional and bodily appraisal of

modernity and the startling twentieth century.

Cather and Joyce as Musical Modernists

Besides Woolf and Faulkner, however, two other modernists specifically made

music a means of similar critique. Music as it is heard in characters' surroundings

becomes vital. James Joyce and Willa Cather represent a transatlantic exploration of

music as both a force which moves characters, and as an aural component weighted

with cultural and regional characteristics characters as well as readers are able to

gauge. In particular works of fiction published within a year of one another (1914 -

15), both Joyce (more obviously) and Cather (much less accredited) incorporated

music to an extent where designs of soundscapes are profound and because they are

full of music make for rife spaces of study because characters not only inhabit the

soundscapes but negotiate what's in them, namely what the authors infuse there, music

with distinct characteristics whereby not only do the characters hear and in certain

situations exceedingly feel the music, music around them simultaneously reflects so

many socio-economic, migratory, national or international characteristics and qualities

(music in some instances not only reflecting migrant communities represented in the

fiction, but music as migratory, in that its sounds travel). Music competes, interrupts,

challenges, reminds, and affectively moves. Joyce, disgusted with its political and
 79

religious ineptitude, wrote about Ireland from abroad. Willa Gather reflected back on

her childhood on the American plains region from other locations, a region she

believed brutally transformed immigrants with its harsh climate and desolate

surroundings. Both writing about home (Dublin and Nebraska respectively) from self-

imposed exile, they also have in common the prominence they give to music: musical

references, descriptions, characters who are musicians. Most significant here,

however, I argue, is their use of diegetic music, music the authors make part of the

acoustic soundscape of their stories in captivatingly meaningful ways.

The exercise of this chapter is not to compare works of fiction to film, but to

compare the representation of music in literary fiction of film music; it seeks to

establish a firm ground for comparing film and literature during the first few decades

of the twentieth century as two media incorporating music. The benefits of considering

these literary works in terms of their concurrent film music practices are: to show how

literary modernists emphasized the auditory during a time when the most visually-

driven art form, film, began to shift in terms of the meaning of its musical

accompaniment and sound component; to show how literary modernists made music

meaningful in their fiction as a space of increasing cultural and political critique

during a time when music in mainstream film became that of decreasing critique, less

and less a creative component and more and more an affective variable in film (a

variable no longer of critique, but one for or to critique). Music in fiction could help

depict regional and ideological differences, as well as characterize varying emotional,

affective responses of characters, while in mainstream film around the same time,

music became more and more a homogenizing component because it no longer

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provided the potential for varying emotional, affective responses for audiences.

Instead, over time, film music began to inscribe emotion and affect, no longer by way

of practices open to alternatives. In certain instances, representations of music worked

in fiction as a way for authors to critique the upholding of a certain ideology, while in

film, music began to become a catalyst for subjectification, Foucault's notion of

institutional formation of the subject, with increasing commoditization of the

soundtrack, which I will argue in Chapter Four and Chapter Five through close

readings of the scores for Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and Ford's Young Mr.

Lincoln (respectively), can be an ideological component itself. Most significantly, in

both the film and fiction I wish to study, the sense of sound, the auditory, is where

ideological terrain is defined or explored. Sound, not sight, becomes space where

ideology is found or critiqued, perpetuated or altered.

Heterogeneous Music in Willa Cather 's Song of the Lark

In her novel Song of the Lark (1915), Willa Cather presents a fictional turn-of-

the-century Coloradan town called Moonstone, home to heroine Thea Kronburg, a

budding musician longing to escape the social and regional confines of her small,

insular and prejudicial home. In the course of the novel, protagonist Thea becomes an

independent musician breaking free of her hometown, a free-thinking young woman

eventually reaching the top as a big opera star in Chicago while remaining unmarried

in early twentieth century America, a celebratory overcoming of certain intolerances

of her times. Cather's employment of music in the soundscapes she creates provides a

sort of auditory palate in which, and through which, Thea seeks and gains
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independence. Gather scholar Richard Giannone emphasizes Gather's employment of

nineteenth century European music. But I wish to question ways soundscapes

indicate a competing musical heterogeneity, one that represents the mixture of various

immigrant communities as they commingle in Song. Much of Cather's fiction about

American rural life on the plains during that time involved her concern with the

immigrant experience: she wrote about communities of several types and how they

coexisted. Frequently in depicting those communities, Cather would evoke their

music. To discuss Cather's use of music in this way is to help make a meaningful

comparison between uses of music in literature and mainstream film during the same

time period. This comparison reveals how music was a source of critique in both

media, until, in film, that very mode of critique became increasingly prohibited.

In Song of the Lark, Cather's fictional town of Moonstone, Colorado is

rendered through sound. The region can sound desolate, almost uninhabitable (like

several examples in her fiction about life in the plains region). In the dunes near

Moonstone, "[t]here was no wind, and no sound but the wheezing of an engine down

on the tracks" (Cather 74). Or, the sound of wind creates a different ambiance: "The

wind was whistling up the street and whipping the naked cottonwood trees against the

telegraph poles and the sides of the houses" (Cather 117). In these two examples,

Cather depicts newly modern machinery, telegraph poles and steam-trains, as part of

the newly forming western landscape, but through an emphasis on their sounds. The

transformations of the plains Cather experienced included transformations of sound.

17
For example, in Music in Willa Cather's Fiction, he dedicates several chapters each to one novel, and
in covering Song of the Lark somewhat briefly by comparison, Giannone hardly dwells on music other
than European material, like Wagner.
 82

Music flows too in the protagonist's small town—music of various kinds. The emigre

Swedes, Germans, and Mexicans of Moonstone all produce music of cultural and or

religious origin. A range of characters make different sense of this musical mixture;

some welcome it while others are judgmental of it, music signifying for the latter an

auditory difference.

Two characters who appreciate this mixture of music in Moonstone are: the

tolerant and independent Thea Kronberg; and the first of many of Thea's musical

mentors—the socially and culturally displaced, drunken German piano teacher

Professor Wunsch. The novel begins with Thea's and Professor Wunsch's bond as

teacher and student over sophisticated Austrian musical compositions unheard

otherwise in Moonstone. Recognizing her talent, Professor Wunch is strict with Thea:

"It makes no matter what you think,' replied her teacher coldly. 'There is only one

right way. The thumb there. Eins, zwei, drei, vier'" (Cather 24). (The infusion of

German into his English is figurative of German music into the newly "American"

soundscape.) Despite his rigorousness, Thea admires Professor Wunsch. He exposes

her to music from their common Austrian roots, a welcomed departure from church

music she has been raised to play. Intricate German compositions contrast with

religious ditties.

Over time, Thea begins to produce such intricate music on her own; it can be

heard throughout the soundscape of Moonstone, as well as music of another cultural

source, Moonstone's Mexican community. In an area of Moonstone called "Mexican

Town," inhabitants live alienated from the rest of the town, segregated by class and

race. But none of this stops their sounds: the Mexican community's music transcends
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topography, district, and social stratification, unbound by demarcation—social,

geographical, or otherwise. In one scene, Professor Wunche and his landlord

experience this acoustic ambience: " . . . Fritz and Herr Wunche had their after-supper

pipe in the grape arbour, smoking in silence while the sound of fiddles and guitars

came across the ravine from Mexican Town" (Cather 27). Moonstone is a convergence

of different music. Music serves as a code for regionalism, nationality, tradition,

uniformity, and difference. This is no more apparent than when Thea strives to play a

challenging, obscure German piano piece at a local Moonstone recital for an intolerant

audience.

Although Thea understands the musical intolerance around her and wishes she

could play something else at the recital, "Mr. Wunsch insisted that Thea should play a

'Ballade' by Reinecke . . . Mrs. Kronberg [Thea's mother] agreed with her that the

'Ballade' would 'never take' with a Moonstone audience" (Cather 55). In front of a

less sophisticated audience, Thea, who, under the tutelage of Professor Wunsch is

becoming far more culturally refined than her peers, attempts the piece with disastrous

results. "The 'Ballade' took ten minutes, which was five minutes too long. The

audience grew restive and fell to whispering" (Cather 56). This episode exemplifies

conflict between music and audience in Song of the Lark, a type of auditory

intolerance, a discrimination of sound. Cather employs music and musical

performance as cultural critique: Thea's friends and family members who are far more

religious and prejudicial don't get the German piece. Musical challenge is regional

challenge, where music begins to clash with listeners; performer and audience do not

jive. This reflects the gravity of conformity in a narrative about transcending that
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gravity through music, a creative decision on behalf of Gather to render the

transcendence of forms of subjectification by way of a heroine-musician open and

accepting of a range of music. Song of the Lark exemplifies an author's creative

decision to make music a source of noncompliance, unconventionality, and

heterogeneity transcendent of social, as well as musical, conscription. For this reason,

Song of the Lark is interesting to consider in light of applications of music in film at

the time it was written. In 1914, pre-standardization of the soundtrack, varying

musical applications and practices flourished, before the era when music in film

became commodified and mainstream filmmaking no longer tolerated live, local

musical agency, improvisational or otherwise. When works of fiction depict musical

heterogeneity in response to cultural homogeneity, they speak to the cultural sameness

which would befall music in film, when non-improvisational, prescribed, pre-coded

film music became the norm, and varying regional, cultural, ethnic musical

applications to film went by the wayside. Film music eventually became itself a form

of conditioning, with emotive and affective impact, while the representation of music

in some fiction around the same time spoke against such conditioning forces. In Song

of the Lark, music is a discipline for conditioning in Moonstone, the means by which

church and civic practices reinforce middle class protestant values, sources of

subjectification in which the young heroine Thea intervenes through different musical

forms.
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Thea Listens

Examples of conditioning forces in Song of the Lark can be found in Thea's

house where her religious family is unsettled by her interests in music other than

church music. Religious ideology is elaborated through musical practice. Thea won't

allow the church music to construct her as a specific subject; instead, she critiques that

mode of (religious) subjedification through alternative forms of music: "foreign"

music. As Thea practices the Blue Danube waltzes, her bratty sister Anna exclaims

that the non-religious music emanating from their house sends the wrong message to

the neighbors, other church people: "Of course all the church people must hear her.

Ours is the only noisy house on the street. You hear what she's playing now, don't

you?" (Cather 122). Anna asserts that Thea's music is "noise," a degradation of the

soundscape by way of sounds supposedly threatening the reputation of the household.

Implied here is a hierarchical relationship between "music" and "noise," or in Anna's

opinion, church music she favors and less-familiar music or "noise" contrasting with

it. Characters in this sense hierarchize music in terms of their prejudices, what

characters conceive as music or noise in the novel indicates what they feel is pure and

impure, normal and abnormal, the absurd dichotomies taking on an aural form in

Song. And Thea's father, Mr. Kronberg, who is highly religious, wishes to make his

opinion clear to Thea: "He did, indeed, begin to admonish her not to forget that talents

come from our Heavenly Father and dare to be used for His glory, but he cut his

remarks short and looked at his watch" (Cather 141). By "cutting" his responses short,

her father controls sound in the wake of an episode where he could not control sound.

What is important about the scene with Thea's sister Anna calling the foreign music
 86

"noise" is, whether it is "noise," or "Mexican" music, or "church" music, or "talented"

music, characters' speech acts name what is heard in Song. In Foucaultian terms,

naming, as part of formulating and therefore defining knowledge, is an act of

discipline (institutions define and maintain power-knowledge through discourse they

define and control). In Song, it is interesting how utterances are preceded by what is

listened to or heard, the speech act not necessarily an attempt at understanding sound

but rather labeling it. In other words, intolerant characters like Thea's father or her

sister Anna hear things in the soundscape and their utterances attempt to define those

sounds; indeed, they categorize, taxonomize, or hierarchize them. Therefore, Cather

situates sound (music in particular) as similar to Thea as the heroine attempts to

navigate unwelcome, conditioning protestant middle class forces threatening to define

her. Thea is like the music she enjoys: different, and therefore unsettling to those

around her trying to define her. When characters speak in the novel about music, the

performative aspect of language becomes yet another part of the soundscape, language

which tries to define, explain, and control music becoming another part of the

complicated, rich acoustic environment Cather presents as navigable for some (Thea),

and disparaging for others, as seen in her friend from Mexican Town, Spanish Johnny.

Spanish Johnny

Unlike her relatives who prejudge what they hear, Thea has a "power of

listening intently" (Cather 69), which to me means she listens to the whole musical

landscape, not an exclusively religious one. The trains stopping near Moonstone bring

with them musical diversity as well, music circulating via rail from one culture to
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another, railroad workers depicted as ".. .cheerful at the prospect of getting into port,

and singing a new topical ditty that had come up from the Santa Fe by way of La

Junta" (Gather 112). Cather sets the religious intolerance for differing music (as

depicted via Thea's family) in contrast to the otherwise delightfully diasporic

soundscape. The landscape is full of circulating migrants and immigrants and a

corresponding soundscape full of their music which Thea ponders.

Further in the novel, Thea leaves Moonstone for big cities to pursue her career

as a musician and experiences in different metropolitan centers a succession of music

teachers. Despite the novel's ultimate favor toward European classical music, during

her rise to the top (the novel concludes with her penultimate operatic debut singing a

part in Wagner's Ring cycle), Thea sojourns back to the southwest to visit her family

once more before leaving Moonstone forever. During this episode, after having been

immersed in different urbane, musical circles outside of Moonstone, Thea visits

"Mexican Town" to jam with musicians there. This anachronism on behalf of Cather,

for Thea to travel east experiencing highly institutionalized, intense dedication to

mythical classical composers in aspiring musicians and teachers all around her, then to

return west to jam and with Hispanic neighbors, reflects a return to a differently public

music, one with requests, communal participation and interaction, and dancing. Her

sister Anna expresses disdain for Thea's decision: "Everybody at Sunday-School was

talking about you going over there and singing with the Mexicans all night, when you

won't sing for the church. Somebody heard you, and told it all over town. Of course

we all get the blame for it" (Cather 215). Indeed, the contrast between singing with the

Mexican community is made clear: "[Thea] had sung for churches and funerals and
 88

teachers, but she had never before sung for a really musical people, and this was the

first time she had ever felt the response that such a people can give" (Cather 210).

Gather perpetuates a distrusting racial cultural construction of certain communities as

naturally "musical" in Song, but curiously also attributes to the inhabitants of Mexican

Town a corresponding faculty of listening, a musically-informed listening, which Thea

shares with them.

One such intense listener of music in Moonstone besides Thea is her friend

Spanish Johnny, whose musicianship is characterized by how it takes over his body. A

central character and doppelganger for Thea, Spanish Johnny is likewise frustrated

with those around him and his means of escape is a musical one. When he sings and

plays mandolin, audiences' inattentiveness frustrates him. Unlike Thea, however, who

overcomes several challenges while making a career with her talent, Spanish Johnny's

musical talents are his "undoing." Otherwise "as regular and faithful as a burro"

(Cather 39), Spanish Johnny's musicality represents a departure from his role not only

as laborer but as a "faithful" one (echoing issues of religious faith around Thea). He is

also likened to Thea in his inclination to leave geographically as a result of an

uncaring, intolerant audience:

His talents were his undoing. He had a high, uncertain tenor voice, and

he played the mandolin with exceptional skill. Periodically, he went

crazy. There was no other way to explain his behavior. He was a clever

workman, and, when he worked, as regular and faithful as a burro.

Then some night he would fall in with a crowd at the saloon and begin

to sing. He would go on until he had no voice left, until he wheezed and

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rasped. Then he would play his mandolin furiously, and drink until his

eyes sank back into his head. At last, when he was put out of the saloon

at closing time, and could get nobody to listen to him, he would run

away - along the railroad track, straight across the desert. (Cather 39)

The desert, represented here as a place of retreat and escape, is where Spanish Johnny

flees via the rails—the railroad represented earlier as means of transportation of music

from one culture to another, music shipped along with commerce, like an aural

stowaway. Spanish Johnny as a member of the Mexican community is a tragic

character, as musical performance becomes a type of struggle for him indicative of his

immigrant experience. Both Thea and Spanish Johnny navigate the acoustically

discriminatory setting of Moonstone. The intolerance of Spanish Johnny's musicality

(because it invades sounds of the protestant middle class, or because it interferes with

his "faith" as a "burro") mirrors Thea's position within Moonstone. Spanish Johnny,

as an outsider and other to the protestant middle class, parallels Thea and her

otherness amidst the same protestant middle class indoctrination; Spanish Johnny and

Thea share an acoustic otherness.

""Rosa de Noche'

In a rich episode about their common fascination with a single South American

folksong, Thea bonds with Spanish Johnny in the "drugstore" where he works. She

asks him to write down the verses of the song for her using "the short yellow pencil

tied to his order-book" (Cather 205), the pencil reflecting inseparability of Spanish

Johnny from his labor. Thea explains "I want you to write down the words of that
 90

Mexican serenade you used to sing; you know, 'Rosa de Noche.'' It's an unusual song.

I'm going to study it" (Cather 205). The song which interests Thea is "unusual,"

representing her broad interest in music other than what she's been raised with.

Spanish Johnny explains what he believes are a few restrictions for her: the song may

not be in her vocal range: '"I don't think for a high voice, senorita,' he objected with

polite persistence. 'How you accompany with piano?" Thea doesn't care about the

vocal range. She wants to study the song regardless, indicative of her movement

beyond her social range. Thea persists but Spanish Johnny hesitates: "I do not know if

that serenata all right for young ladies. Down there it is more for married ladies. They

sing it for husbands - or somebody else, may-bee" (Cather 205). Again, Thea doesn't

care, as she defies the supposed marital jurisdiction of the material, as well as the

proposed vocal range.

The two continue to explore intricacies of Rosa de Noche. Spanish Johnny

explains to Thea that it isn't even Mexican in origin, how the song evolved out of

several exchanges and transportation northward. '"This-a song not exactly Mexican,'

he said thoughtfully. 'It come from farther down; Brazil, Venezuela, may-bee. I learn

it from some fellow down there, and he learn it from another fellow. It is-a most like

Mexican, but not quite'" (Cather 205). What Thea categorizes as "Mexican," an

assumption, isn't Mexican in origin, as she learns of the music's transportative

qualities across several national boundaries finally arriving in Moonstone, an analogy

to the music of "Mexican Town" wafting over into the more protective soundscapes of

the judgmental, intolerant middle class areas of Moonstone. Nor is the song passed

down within legitimate kinship rules of marriage (as Spanish Johnny explains women
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sing it to husbands "or somebody else, may-bee"), transmission of the song across

national boundaries as sound also representing a form of promiscuousness. Rosa de

Noche is un-static. After they bond over the song in the drugstore, Spanish Johnny

invites Thea to a dance in Mexican Town honoring relatives from Terreon: "Saturday

night the Spanish boys have a HI' party, some danza. You know Miguel Ramas? He

have some young cousins, two boys, very nice-a, come from Torreon. They going to

Salt Lake for some job-a, and stay off with him two-three days, and he mus' have a

party. You like to come?" Here, the immigrant movement equals the musical

transmission from territory to territory of Rosa de Noche. As immigrants move around

so do their songs, music and immigration taking on similar qualities of transmission,

and transmutation.

In a stirring section of Song of the Lark Thea visits Mexican Town to attend

the dance. Cather wonderfully devotes specifics to musicianship, musical material, and

how the party-goers' bodies feel the music in a scene where musically-induced affect

contrasts to that of Thea's religious house. When Thea visits what her mother calls

"them Mexicans," on her way "[Thea] could hear the scraping of violins being tuned,

the tinkle of mandolins, and the growl of a double bass. Where had they got a double

bass? She did not know there was one in Moonstone" (Cather 207). The exoticism of

the Mexican community (which I've already alluded to as problematic for Cather in

how she operates in certain musical stereotypes) involves even more unexplored

sounds for Thea; the double bass represents the community's ability to continue to

surprise and lure Thea. Plus, as an instrument typically used for the lower part of the

musical register, the double bass represents an extension to the lower spectrum of
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musical sounds in Moonstone in general. Does the double bass' extension to the lower

end of the musical spectrum in this case represent an expansion to further

acknowledge music of a "lower" "class" (meaning the Hispanic community of

Moonstone), or does it mean further expansion for Thea beyond just intellectual

modern composers to include somehow more bodily (i.e. "lower," less cerebral)

music?

When she arrives, Thea finds the sounds of the dance hall enthralling, the

affect that circulates pleasing:

This Mexican dance was soft and quiet. There was no calling, the

conversation was very low, the rhythm of the music was smooth and

engaging, the men were graceful and courteous . . . There was an

atmosphere of ease and friendly pleasure . . . Thea could not help

wondering whether the Mexicans had no jealousies or neighborly

grudges as the people in Moonstone had. There was no constraint of

any kind there to-night, but a kind of natural harmony about their

movements, their greetings, their low conversation, their smiles . . .

[their] guitar-like voices. (Cather 208)

Through sound, Cather renders the pleasantness of the party. And once it's over, the

attendees flock to Spanish Johnny's home to play more music where Thea begins to

sing with the musicians, captivating her audiences. The joyous atmosphere continues:

"When they had finished, Famos, the baritone, murmured something to Johnny; who

replied, 'Sure we can sing 'Trovatore.' We have no alto, but all the girls can sing alto

and make some noise'" (Cather 212). Here, "noise," as something fun and
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contributive, contrasts with the "noise" Thea's sister Anna accuses her of playing.

This contrast between the pleasant affective environments of Mexican Town is

furthered when, the following morning, her family learns she went there. Thea "on

Sunday morning, slept until noon" (Cather 213). Upon waking and going down to

breakfast, "[djuring the silence which preceded the blessing, Thea felt something

uncomfortable in the air" (Cather 213). Accentuating the meaningfulness of sound,

Cather contrasts the locations of Thea's family and Thea's friends in Mexican Town

with their acoustic atmospheres and affective responses to them.

"a pleasant sensation indefinitely prolonged"

A long novel shaped (confessedly by Cather) in the extensively descriptive

vein of Henry James, Song of the Lark follows Thea back and forth from the bright

lights of Chicago to the plains yet another time when she sojourns again, this time to a

different location, "Panther Canon," the ruins of ancient Pueblo cliff dwellers north of

Flagstaff, AZ. In an almost confusing array of music teachers as well as suitors

competing for Thea's hand, none of which ever really satisfy Thea, locations in the

novel shift repeatedly, and the episode in the Arizona cliffs, where Thea remains in

solitude for quite some time, is important because the passage is interestingly imbued

with sound, "the song of the thin wind in the pinos" (Cather 266). Finding delight in

the location, "[s]he could lie there hour after hour in the sun and listen to the strident

whirr of the big locusts, and to the light, ironical laughter of the quaking asps" (Cather

269). Most compelling however is the way the episode explores different expressions

of listening and hearing. With no music around (in the traditional sense of
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instrumental musical production), Thea internalizes her singing and equates it with her

thinking, music and consciousness synonymous in a rather synesthetic passage where

sounds, sights, and textures interchange:

Here she could lie for half a day undistracted, holding pleasant and

incomplete conceptions in her mind - almost in her hands. They were

scarcely clear enough to be called ideas. They had something to do with

fragrance and colour and sound, but almost nothing to do with words.

She was singing very little now, but a song would go through her head

all morning, as a spring keeps welling up, and it was like a pleasant

sensation indefinitely prolonged. It was much more like a sensation

than like an idea, or an act of remembering.

Music had never before come to her in that sensuous form . . .

[n]ow her power to think converted into a power of sustained sensation

. . . she could become a continuous repetition of sound, like the cicadas.

(Cather 269-70)

Music isn't even heard as much as it becomes something completely affectively felt,

something "sensuous," something this passage explains is not even sound any more

but music as something stirring "almost in her hands." Like affect, the song, not sound

anymore, nor even an "idea," "goes through" Thea in the form of sensory material,

whereby her body reflects, carries the sound, her body's "continuous repetition" of

sound. Cather's attention to music's potential to exist beyond its cerebral quality as an

idea, its potential to purely sensationally induct and influence the body, reflects

Cather's understanding of affect. Also, in terms of the setting in which this episode
 95

occurs, the prolonged existence of the ancient ruins is a physical representation of the

indefinite sensation Thea feels about her musical fiber. Alas, for Thea, the setting after

all is a "dead city," and she will leave her desired solitude yet again to perform for

others in major metropolises. Between Thea's two sojourns, to Mexican Town and

Panther Canon, Cather celebrates sound as part of the transformative qualities of

settings the heroine seeks out for revitalization or exploration. Cather creates not only

a heroine very mindful of the auditory, but also crucially specific soundscapes within

which Thea considers the affective energy of music. Thea identifies forces of

subjectification around her, and discovers ways around them towards self-realization:

the auditory is central to each, representations of music and affect not just showcased

but key for Cather's modernist novel.

Cather: Conclusion

Sounds of regionally and culturally specific music are so central to Cather's

novel that acoustics become the novel's most important investigation. Heroine Thea

Kronberg eventually achieves her dreams of becoming a famous opera singer

surmounting the pressures of Moonstone; those pressures of Moonstone as sonic ones,

problems for Thea which have acoustic characteristics, become unique and significant

as Cather brings the auditory front and center to her novel. In the work of Cather,

characters find themselves in soundscapes which contain music that changes them,

sound as a transforming force, a catalyst for transmutation. In Joyce, however, the

outlook is not so nice; music can trap and overtake characters forlornly in their

inability to overcome issues they face in turn-of-the-century Dublin. What is

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optimistic in Cather (in terms of tolerance of different music and music as means of

escape from one's small hometown), is much less so in some of Joyce's fiction, where,

instead, music can trigger inaction and distraction. Music can evoke limitation, or

control over one's self rather than one's ability to use music as means of escape.

Although both authors forefront music in their fiction, they do so in different ways

which speak to the range of ways sound can become so evocatively a form of social

critique in modernist fiction.

Musical Paralysis in James Joyce

Dubliners was in James Joyce's own words written "in a style of scrupulous

meanness" (Joyce ix). The collection of short stories is a scathing critique of turn-of-

the century Dublin life—in story after story, Joyce renders characters in the throes of

ideological prescriptions: to marry, to be economically successful, to be good

Catholics, or to tame one's radical politics. Not unlike Song of the Lark. Dubliners

depicts characters who face pressures to conform to protestant middle class values.

Joyce depicts the damage conformity inflicts on characters; specifically focusing on

what he called "the centre of paralysis," turn of the century Dublin. The urban center

was politically wrought, extremely poor, and imbued with grave forces unhelpful to

protagonists, their wishes and endeavors. Writing from his own exile, Joyce believed

Dublin paralyzed people disenabling them to achieve dreams, to escape, or live their

lives in ways they wished (the word "life" appears in each of the collection's 15 tragic

short stories).
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Joyce's prodigious incorporation of music has been thoroughly explored.

Scholars theorize about the musicality of his language, the rhythm of his phrasing18 (a

popular editorial anecdote is how Joyce decided to delete hundreds of commas from

Dubliners resulting arguably in quite elongated and therefore musical prose, often

consisting of three or four word phases with sonorous rhythmic quality). Scholars also

have mulled over the 'Sirens' episode from Ulysses arguing all kinds of things in

terms of its adoption of the fugue per cannon musical mode and multiple references to

musical pop-culture, as well as music used in "The Dead".191 on the other hand will

focus on three short stories from Dubliners. "Eveline," "After the Race," and "Two

Gallants" to consider ways Joyce, much like Cather, utilized music as an acoustic

means of social critique, particularly in terms of both authors' representations of music

from specific cultures. These stories are important to consider because they explore

notions of Irish independence and notions of nationalism within a larger international

framework through music. Of Joyce's entire canon, these three stories as a unit

uniquely represent Joyce's use of sounds of nations. Dubliners scrutinized Ireland's

position in the world community; these stories demonstrate Joyce's use of music to

speak to such issues.

In Song of the Lark, Thea Kronberg subverts musical indoctrination because

she hears and welcomes the full musical soundscape around her, in turn avoiding a

certain auditory subj edification, whereas in certain Joyce short stories, characters

18
In Joyce's Music and Noise. Jack Wayne Weaver surveys Joyce's canon drawing out musical styles,
tropes, phrasings he argues underpins the author's language.
19
Zack Bowen's Bloom's Old Sweet Song: Essays on Joyce and Music examines the use of over 170
musical references in Sirens, and Julie Henigan's article "The Old Irish Tonality": Folksong as
Emotional Catalyst in "The Dead" is a wonderful reading of Joyce's employment of distinct genre.
 98

aren't as fortunate. I will demonstrate in close readings of three short stories how

protagonists are not afforded the freedom to overcome forces the music represents. I

argue that in his formulation of acoustic space and characters reactions' to them, Joyce

implements music in Dubliners as an auditory marker facilitating characters' paralysis.

This section will discuss the nuanced way music is used in Dubliners,

exemplifying a highly creative approach afforded literary modernists who looked to

representations of music as a resource to somehow expand and help see anew their

own literary media. A comparison between certain modernist fiction and mainstream

film around that time reveals film to be an intensely more visual medium not

necessarily concerned with creative applications of music. The vitality of

representations of music in these literary works reflects authors' attempts to explore

music as a means of social critique. Musical applications in mainstream film around

the same time, however, stop short of such exploration.

Immigrant Music in "Eveline "

Like Cather, Joyce depicts foreign music in "Eveline" as a type of

heterogeneous threat to edgy characters. Music in "Eveline" is a device for critique of

an acoustically intolerant, prejudicial society. Music in Song of the Lark represents a

variety of forces in contestation (ideological, regional, familial, etc.), and works very

similarly in "Eveline."

In contrast to Thea Kronberg, however, the heroine Eveline does not escape

Dublin, despite her opportunity to leave with her new-found love interest, a naval

officer named Frank (who sings to her). Instead, Eveline stays behind in Dublin—to
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tend to her violent alcoholic father, naively keeping a promise she made to her mother

as her mother lay on her deathbed. While daydreaming of escaping her father and

living her own life, Eveline has a horrible flashback to a scene when she made the

ultimately dooming promise to her mother "to keep the home together as long as she

could" (Joyce 30). Eveline recalls music coming in through the window on the night

her mother died, music reflecting immigration from abroad her father vehemently

reacts to:

Down far in the avenue she could hear a street organ playing.

She knew the air. Strange that it should come that very night to remind

her of her promise to her mother, her promise to keep the home

together as long as she could. She remembered the last night of her

mother's illness; she was again in the close dark room at the other side

of the hall and outside she heard a melancholy air of Italy. The organ

player had been ordered to go away and given sixpence. She

remembered her father strutting back into the sickroom saying:

-Darned Italians! coming over here! (Joyce 3 0 - 1 )

The passage reveals the xenophobic father intolerant of the music, a bigot responding

to a complicated soundscape where sounds of the other emanate, sounds representative

for him of communities immigrating to Ireland (in a story about the protagonist's lost

potential to emigrate from Ireland because of him). As in Song of the Lark, sounds of

social difference are reflected in music entering homes, sounds unbound by borders

they both represent and defy. Eveline's father's intolerance of foreign music and his

efforts to rid the soundscape of foreign influence reflects forces influencing Eveline as
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well, namely the promise to her mother to stay in Ireland to support her father,

resulting in the ridding of her foreign love interest, Frank, who eventually leaves

Ireland without her. Foreign music "invades" Ireland, while Eveline can't evade

Ireland. "Darned Italians! coming over here" references immigrants' sounds, sonic

reminders of their movement in a story about domestic stasis. Such examples are an

acute use of music similar to that of Cather as the climates of the national settings in

each author's work have very important auditory components the authors interrogate.

As characters move around from location to location, escaping or fleeing from home,

or hopelessly remaining static in it, there is a musical, acoustic equivalent representing

degrees of mobility, a similarity found in both Joyce's and Cather's sharp attention to

acoustics.

Ultimately swayed by the need to fulfill her promise to her dead mother to

remain with her violent father, at the story's climax Eveline freezes at the docks,

refuses to abscond with Frank and board the ship that would remove her from Dublin

forever:

-Come!

No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in

frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish. (Joyce 31)

Unlike the Italian airs coming down the street and entering her home, and Frank's

sailor songs he would sing to her (both sources of music from people from abroad),

Eveline's figurative paralysis is most musically represented in the "broken

harmonium" in her father's home, representing not only an absence of music but an
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inability to produce it. Eveline's figurative paralysis keeping her in Ireland has an

acoustic opposite in the circulation of music into and out of Ireland.

"humming would confuse anybody ": Disillusioning Music in "After the Race "

"After the Race" is a story about a young Irishman's fruitless attempts to

make advantageous social connections in the continental automotive world. Jimmy

Doyle wishes to become a legitimate part of his foreign friends' racing company,

entrepreneurship and lifestyle. Music catalyzes the protagonist's financial downfall at

the hands of his foreign friends, conveyed significantly through soundscapes in which

Jimmy finds himself confused, caught up in a fast-paced world of auto racing,

partying, and gambling. Sound renders the protagonist futile.

An exhilarating automobile race traverses the streets of Dublin as the story

opens (based on the Gordon-Bennett automobile race of 1903), in which Jimmy and

his foreign friends race together in one car. The international team consists of:

"Charles Segouin, the owner of the car; Andre Riviere, a young electrician of

Canadian birth; a huge Hungarian [and pianist and singer] named Villona and a neatly

groomed young man named Doyle" (Joyce 33). Where they sit in the car (as well as

the order of their introduction) implies the hierarchy of the racers: the Frenchmen are

in the front, Villona and Jimmy are in the back. The racecar exemplifies progressive

continental (non-Irish) ingenuity: "through channels of poverty and inaction the

continent sped its wealth and industry" (Joyce 32). The gullible Jimmy Doyle, who
20
The Gordon-Bennett automobile race of 1903 had national and international implications for Ireland,
especially in terms of its potential to bring Ireland economic boost (which it did not), all the more ironic
in the context of Joyce's short story. See James Fairhall's contextualization of the two in "Big-Power
Politics: The Gordon Bennett Cup Race and 'After the Race'".
 102

wants to be an investment partner, represents Ireland; the international quartet in the

racecar represents the European community, within which Ireland is present, but in the

backseat. Through sound and music Joyce renders Jimmy's limited inclusion in the

international set in a brilliantly conveyed soundscape:

The car ran on merrily with its cargo of hilarious youth. The

two cousins sat on the front seat; Jimmy and his Hungarian friend sat

behind. Decidedly Villona was in excellent spirits; he kept up a deep

bass hum of melody for miles of the road. The Frenchmen flung their

laughter and light words over their shoulders and often Jimmy had to

strain forward to catch the quick phrase. This was not altogether

pleasant for him as he had nearly always to make a deft guess at the

meaning and shout back a suitable answer in the teeth of a high wind.

Besides, Villona's humming would confuse anybody: the noise of the

car too. (Joyce 34)

This soundscape indicates the hierarchy of the crew as well as that of the countries

they represent. Jimmy as a representative of Ireland tries to hear what the others say

but is limited in his ability to do so and therefore respond and be a genuine part of the

exchange. Sounds of the car and the humming prevent Jimmy both from listening and

being listened to. Sound becomes a source of struggle for Jimmy; the struggle to hear

is an analog for his struggle to belong.

Even though he is a small investor in their automobile, Jimmy is increasingly

anxious about his apparent segregation from the circle; the men are revealed to be "not

much more than acquaintances," his relationship with them rendered in Jimmy's
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attempts in the above passage to keep up with them aurally as they race, and later,

carouse, celebrate, and, gamble. They roam the city after the race dining and drinking

(the focus of the story, which, as seen in its title, doesn't dwell on the race itself but on

the aftermath, the competitive interpersonal jockeying continuing to exclude Jimmy).

The gang meets up with even more internationals: an Englishman named Routh, and

an American named Farley, rounding out the international set more fully. The party

increases, as do their sounds: "They talked volubly and with little reserve." As the

drinking continues, things get ugly:

The five young men had various tastes and their tongues had

been loosened. Villona, with immense respect, began to discover to the

mildly surprised Englishman the beauties to the English madrigal,

deploring the loss of old instruments. Reviere, not wholly ingenuously,

undertook to explain to Jimmy the triumph of French mechanicians.

The resonant voice of the Hungarian was to prevail in ridicule of the

spurious lutes of the romantic painters when Segouin shepherded his

party into politics. Here was congenial ground for all. Jimmy, under

generous influences, felt the buried zeal of his father wake to life in

him: he roused the torpid Routh [the Englishman] at last. The room

grew doubly hot and Segioun's task grew harder each moment: there

was even danger of personal spite. The alert host at an opportunity

lifted a glass to humanity and, when the toast had been drunk, he threw

open a window significantly. (Joyce 36)

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Reviere has to lift a glass generally "to humanity" in efforts to deride Jimmy's

awkward reproach against Routh the Englishman. Derivative of Jimmy's father, who

"had begun life as an advanced nationalist, [but] had modified his views early" (Joyce

36), Jimmy's inclination to rouse the Englishman about colonialist politics results in a

heated exchange, and Jimmy's passion for the topic, as well as his drunkenness,

begins to work against him. Soon, singing and music become auditory representations

of Jimmy's increasing lack of control.

Ready to gamble and play cards, the crew advances towards the American's

yacht "with linked arms, singing Cadet Roussel, stamping their feet at every: Ho! Ho!

Hohe, vraiment!" (Joyce 37). The song is a French march making fun of a too tense

army cadet, not unlike Jimmy so anxious about his relation to his entrepreneurial

peers. Once they reach the yacht, Joyce again depicts the international competitiveness

though the sounds of the party, the merriment beginning to bamboozle Jimmy who

tries to keep up (or tries to stay "in the race"). Drunk, he decides to make a speech:

They drank, however. It was bohemian. They drank Ireland, England,

France, Hungary, the United States of America. Jimmy made a speech,

a long speech, Villona saying: Hear! Hear! whenever there was a

pause. There was a great clapping of hands when he sat down. It must

have been a good speech. Farley clapped him on the back and laughed

loudly. What jovial fellows! What good company they were! (Joyce

37).

What is implied here, through sound, is that the peers are tolerating Jimmy and his

long speech (likely slightly acrimonious due to the Englishman's company), as they
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laugh at him, and fill uncomfortable pauses during his speech, the "great clapping of

hands when he sat down" indicative of the thanks that Jimmy's speech is over,

whatever it drunkenly was.

As Jimmy's disillusionment escalates, so does Villona's piano playing. During

the final hands of cards, "Jimmy felt obscurely the lack of an audience: the wit was

flashing. Play ran very high and paper began to pass. Jimmy did not know exactly who

was winning but he knew that he was losing. But it was his own fault for he frequently

mistook his cards and the other men had to calculate his I.O.U's for him" (Joyce 37-

8). Finally, the game winds down and "[t]he piano had stopped" (Joyce 38), music

ceasing as Jimmy's confusion does. The Englishman (of course) wins the final hand,

as Jimmy begins to wonder what he squandered: "How much had he written away?"

(Joyce 38). Through the Englishman's victory, Joyce punctuates the historical power

relations between England and Ireland; as representatives of various countries come

together in industry, as well as cards, political animosity towards England is alive and

well in the Irishman (Indeed, how much had Ireland "written away" to England?).

Sounds demonstrate the dynamic of the international set of cohorts, while

Jimmy Doyle, unable to hear or be heard, is indicative of the nation he represents

within a historically hostile European political field. In the competitive international

context of "After the Race," within with the Irishman flails, music functions to work

against him. Acoustics both confuse and exclude him. Joyce creates intricate

soundscapes that indicate the paralysis of his characters, who, despite their sincere

efforts to move away, remain in their station, their heartrending social immobility

conveyed in sound.
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"while his fingers swept a scale": Music Induces Affect in "Two Gallants"

In considering how certain literary modernists employ representations of music

creatively in contrast to an ensuing and incoming freeze on musical creativity in film

music around the same time, I wish to also focus on what I argue is a key emphasis on

music's affective impact on characters' bodies in some of Joyce's work.

Early twentieth century Dublin disallows characters to escape religious,

familial, and political conformity. Joyce's depiction of Dublin is much like that of

Cather's rendering of the American plains region in that both Dublin and the

American plains (locations the two authors themselves were able to flee from) contain

music representing assimilation. In Song of the Lark, Thea is able to avoid

permanently becoming a performer of church music; In Dubliners. various Irish or

national music acoustically represents social influences over characters' lives and their

bodies. Local music the city produces figures as another form of ideological influence

which, unlike that in Song of the Lark, bleakly disallows escape. As discussed earlier,

Joyce presents foreign music as intolerable and unwelcome in "Eveline." Now I turn

to a story which illustrates Irish music affectively moving bodies, a figurative national

and cultural auditory influence over them, contradictorily animating characters while

being a source of their "paralysis."

Joyce's short story "Two Gallants" exemplifies music's power to control

one's body autonomically. The auditory presence of local music wafting through the

streets of Dublin is rendered in the story as an acoustic extension of the city catching

characters in its throes.

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The story begins with its two main characters Corley and Lenehan loitering -

they're jobless, poor and desperate, meandering throughout Dublin in one another's

miserable company. The leader of the duo, Corley, boasts of his adventures and

accomplishments wooing and manipulating young women, while Lenehan, the "leech"

(he avoids paying for rounds at the pub), lives vicariously through Corley's tall tales.

The two represent what turn of the century Dublin sadly produces; early middle-aged

men with limited opportunities enduring both economic and ideological pressures

alive in Dublin, as they roam around its grid. Not unlike Laurel and Hardy, the portly

Corley moves boldly, while Lenehan, who "wore an amused listening face" (Joyce 39

my emphasis) leans in to hear Corley's stories, tagging along, occasionally having to

step on and off the sidewalk as he struggles to keep up, the only form of excitement

being his cohort's tales of "gallantry" with females. As the story unfolds, we learn

Corley is in pursuit of one of his adventures with a young woman, while he explains

all the while to Lenehan details of past successful endeavors to manipulate lasses: they

pay his tram, buy him cigars, and have sexual encounters with him. "Two Gallants"

depicts a sad and desperate dating culture. Corley convinces the lasses he courts to do

what he bids, a form of amusement for the otherwise bored Lenehan, later haunted by

feelings of loneliness and desperation that social forces inflict on him. I argue that

music following and controlling his body operates as an acoustic representation of

those forces.

As the two "friends" are on the way to meet Corley's next victim (a

chambermaid at the other end of town), they encounter a street musician playing a

harp:
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They walked along Nassau Street and then turned into Kildare

Street. Not far from the porch of the club a harpist stood in the roadway

playing to a little ring of listeners. He plucked at the wires heedlessly,

glancing quickly from time to time at the face of each newcomer and

from time to time, wearily also, at the sky. His harp too, heedless that

her coverings had fallen about her knees, seemed weary alike of the

eyes of strangers and of her master's hands. One hand played the bass

the melody of Silent O' Moyle while the other hand careered in the

treble after each group of notes. The notes of the air throbbed deep and

full.

The two young men walked up the street without speaking, the

mournful music following them. When they reached Stephen's Green

they crossed the road. Here the noise of the trams, the lights and the

crowd released them from their silence.

-There she is! said Corely. (Joyce 43)

In the final line of the passage, "she" is the chambermaid Corely will take to some

mysterious location on the grid, return with, and who will produce for him from inside

a house implied as her workplace, a gold coin. In typical Dubliners fashion, the ending

of the story is ambiguous, abrupt, and much is left to speculation (but because they

disappear for awhile and the chambermaid then gives Corely money, it is implied

there is some sort of sexual exchange.) What is less mysterious is what the harp

represents in the passage above. The harp (anthropomorphized as female, undressed,

weary of "the eye's of strangers and of her master's hands") represents the
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chambermaid who Corely will manipulate; and correspondingly, the musician

represents Corely. Joyce creates a musical equivalent for the duo of Corely and the

chambermaid through the particular qualities of the musician and the harp: their

common "heedlessness" and "weariness" which, when read closely, are quite

contradicting adjectives.

The musician's "heedlessness" illustrates Corely's blatant disregard for the

chambermaid he "plays." The harp, "heedless that her coverings had fallen about her

knees [and seeming] weary alike of the eyes of strangers and of her master's hands"

illustrates the chambermaid's carelessness. In the evidence both the musician and the

harp are "heedless." Heedlessness connotes recklessness. Corley doesn't care about

the chambermaid, nor does she really care about her circumstances in her willingness

to accompany and accommodate him.

In addition to attributing heedlessness both to the musician and the harp, Joyce

also attributes to them a common "weariness." So both the musician and the harp are

heedless (careless, reckless) YET weary? These adjectives contradict each other.

Heedless connotes a sense of liveliness, while weariness, a sense of lethargy,

disillusionment, even inertia. The adjectives heedless and weary together represent a

sort of simultaneous state of animation and in-animation, which actually renders quite

interestingly the contradictory paradoxical lives of Dubliners: their lives, unlike that of

Thea Kronberg in Song of the Lark, are a form of active resignation. Furthermore, in

the harp passage above, Joyce repeats both contradictory adjectives, their repetition

analogous to the citizens' apparently repetitive humdrum daily lives, emphasizing a

certain monotony in recurring encounters and behaviors as they re-circulate within the
 110

metropolis. The characters, even though they are in motion through the city, are

economically at a standstill and socially inert, the contradictory adjectives of the music

demonstrating the contradictory spatial mobility and socioeconomic immobility of the

characters. The musician and the harp produce music, but they are tired, disillusioned;

even music isn't a release from the paralysis Dublin inflicts on its inhabitants. Instead

of a release from the trappings of Dublin life, music demonstrates them in auditory

form.

As Corely and Lenehan leave the harpist's location (Joyce clarifies

meticulously and continually in Dubliners exactly where characters are on the grid),

the sound of the music intriguingly follows them. Joyce emphasizes their inability to

be rid of the harp's sonic production; the "mournful" music pursues them, haunting

them. They cease talking. The two friends' path bifurcates when Corley meets up and

leaves with the chambermaid (revealed as unattractive and clearly enamored with

Corely). Lenehan is left alone; feelings of lonesomeness come to him as he awaits the

results of his cohort's scheme. He continues to walk around the city to kill time and

here is where the music of the harp, still following him, begins to inhabit him

affectively:

Now that he was alone his face looked older. His gaiety seemed to

forsake him and, as he came by the railings of the Duke's Lawn, he

allowed his hand to run along them. The air which the harpist had

played began to control his movements. His softly padded feet played

the melody while his fingers swept a scale of variations idly along the

railings after each group of notes. (Joyce 45)

 Ill

The music physiologically controls Lenehan's body. Yet, Lenehan "allows" his hand

to run along the railings, as if there is a managerial decision to let the limbs of his

body do what they would do autonomically, a form of acclimation, of resignation, to

music. From his hands to his feet, the music incorporates Lenehan; He acknowledges

this in his decision to "allow" his body to play the sidewalk and railing like a harp.

Music controls his movements, under a sort of musical spell, as he plays the city.

The way the music affectively controls Lenehan becomes even more

significant once we learn more about his life. As he wanders alone, Lenehan thinks of

Corely's scheme and "[t]his vision made him feel keenly his own poverty of purse and

spirit" (Joyce 46). Alone, Lenehan ponders his personal circumstances:

He was tired of knocking about, of pulling the devil by the tail, of shifts

and intrigues. He would be thirty-one in November. Would he never

get a job? Would he never have a home of his own? He thought of how

pleasant it would be to have a warm fire to sit by and a good dinner to

sit down to. He had walked the streets long enough with friends and

with girls. He knew what those friends were worth: he knew the girls

too. Experience had embittered his heart against the world . . . He might

yet be able to settle down in some snug corner and live happily if he

could only come across some good simpleminded girl with a little of

the ready" (Joyce 46).

"The ready" is slang for a dowry, money a woman would bring into a marriage; a

"simpleminded" girl with a dowry is what Lenehan desires, reflective of how he's

been indoctrinated to believe that monetary and marital status have vital importance
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and would fulfill him. "Experience [living in Dublin, Ireland] had embittered him

against the world" and for Lenehan, marrying a rich girl would cure him, as would a

"home" with "a warm fire to sit by and a good dinner to sit down to," all reflecting an

ideological belief system whereby religiously sanctioned domestic life isn't just the

Irish standard but is also somehow antidotal. But in brilliant, typical Joyce fashion,

Lenehan doesn't even realize that even the remedy for his dull life in the form of

marriage, home life, and economic stability is ultimately conforming and therefore

dooming, the remedy representing only more entrapment, and Joyce renders this

throughout the collection of short stories: how there is no escape from Dublin.

This passage about Lenehan's idea of home life is particularly significant in

terms of the music affecting Lenehan earlier. If Lenehan's thoughts reveal the power

of particular ideologies in Dublin at that time: to marry, be socially and monetarily

secure by a certain age, to follow prescriptive, expected, institutionalized middle class

fantasies, all virtually impossible just the same, as rendered throughout Joyce's

collection of short stories in characters' failures to live up to largely unachievable

social standards, then the music that controls Lenehan's body becomes an auditory

form of such powerful influences.

The harp is also an emblem for the Irish nation. When read this way, the harp's

music acoustically represents various forms of subjectification of Irish society Joyce

critiques in all of the short stories in Dubliners. If the harp represents the country of

Ireland, as a musical image it indicates the country's forces of subjectification in

acoustic form. Conforming forces lie even in the sounds of music in Dublin that

follow characters, haunt them, and manifest themselves affectively in their bodies.
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Conclusion: Cather/Joyce/Film

As Cather and Joyce knew their music, they knew their film. Both Cather and

Joyce were familiar with film as a bourgeoning form of entertainment and both began

to tap it as a form of income for themselves. In his "Evenings at the Volta: Cinematic

Afterimages in Joyce," Philip Sicker thoroughly explains Joyce's stint in the film

business revealing Joyce's relationship with film as a form of entertainment. Joyce

helped manage (rather unsuccessfully) Dublin's first movie theater, the

Cinematograph Volta, and beforehand revealed "his pleasure as a movie-goer in

conversations and letters" (Sicker 100). Previous to his work with the Volta, Joyce

frequented the cinema in Trieste. And Cather watched some of her work adapted

(rather exploitatively) by mainstream Hollywood filmmaking. Both were witness to

the reshaping power of film, and were particularly aware of the big business behind

filmmaking practices. It's clear that Joyce interfaced with the owners of the Volta he

managed, struggled with lack of demand and financing during his short venture with

the Volta, in charge of selecting films and programs (Sicker 98), while Cather, who's

work was sometimes mass-produced serially in magazines, surely understood the same

mass-marketing of that material for the screen (Her novel The Lost Lady was adapted

in 1934 into "a product appealing to a mass-market of moviegoers") (Schueth 114).

Michael Schueth explains that Cather, like many other writers, couldn't resist the

temptation of Hollywood's huge financial offerings in exchange for rights to her work.

Cather had experience with and ran into "Hollywood publicity machines [which]

became a new force in the construction of a writer's reputation" (Scheuth 114). Surely,

Cather witnessed firsthand the film industry's impressive influence to shape its
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material, her own art, through control ensuring its profits, not necessarily her literary

status.21

The two authors' intimate knowledge of the impact of cinema in the early

decades of the twentieth century influenced their creative fiction. Philip Sicker

theorizes that, in the form of "cinematic afterimages," parts of chapters of Ulysses

reflect particular Italian films Joyce himself decided to screen for the Dublin public

(Sicker 100), while Cather watched her corresponding book sales increase during

releases of their film adaptation (Schueth 116). Joyce wrote to his brother Stanislas

that attending the cinema was affectively therapeutic to him, "its heightened

emotiveness which satisfies itself in the sixty-mile-an-hour pathos of some

cinematograph" (as quoted in Sicker 101). Charles Duff, a fifteen year old truant

schoolboy who frequented Joyce's movie house remembers "the joy of sitting in the

darkness with Joyce on winter afternoons and watching 'flickering old pictures,' while

a Dublin pianist, fortified by clandestine cups of Guinness, accompanied images of

galloping riders with music 'that made us all move with the horses'" (Sicker 103). The

music which made bodies move in the Volta, an energetic influence for the body, was

provided by a local musician, who, indicated by the implied amount of drink, provided

for a local film experience.

It would be speculative to say that the musical content of the films the authors

saw had affectively influenced them and therefore played a part in the authors'

judicious representations of music in their fiction. It is safe to say, however, as

21
Michael Schueth examines advertising around the Warner Bros, film adaptation of Cather's novel A
Lost Lady, revealing exploitation of an author for commercial purposes, dirough what Schueth calls the
transposition of Cather's material "into an entirely different language of entertainment" (Schueth 113).
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explained in the previous chapter and as I will elaborate in the next chapter, that

increasing mass-market appeal of film during the time Joyce and Cather wrote

involved musical formulae by way of film companies interested in establishing an

aesthetic without any influence by local critique. As Jeff Smith explains, music

publishers begin to program film music, which exhibitors would then sell in the lobby,

and would even provide star singers to plug the material, examples of increasingly

capitalist efforts to exhaust the potential for music publishers (not local musicians),

filmmakers, and exhibitors to all profit. No longer would local musicians supply

local approaches, and what the fifteen year old Irish schoolboy from Joyce's theater

recalled, being moved to the likes of a horse's gallop by the musician's

improvisational action, evolved toward an increasing industrial influence moving

bodies, no longer an interpretive one.

In their fiction, music remained a means of exploration and critique while the

ability for musicians to do so in film began to wane. In comparison to increasingly

safe film music formulae which were by and large un-exploratory and exceedingly

uncreative, implementation of music in Cather's and Joyce's fiction, as illustrated in

this chapter, was quite the opposite.

The examples of Cather and Joyce as explicated in this chapter demonstrate a

vital involvement of music in their material, as a crucial device of social and cultural

critique. Their attentiveness and devotion to aural dimensions of settings they depict

make these modernists fascinating writers to consider in terms of the modern

22
In "Banking on Film Music: Structural Interactions of the Film and Record Industries," Jeff Smith
surveys different instances in film history of common business purposes and outright vertical
integration between music and film companies, turning film music from an open practice into a device
for promotion of further sectors of profit.
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experience which included film. Joyce's stories which reflect ways music impinges on

characters' bodies can be aligned with contemporary film music practices at that time,

which, with increasing standardization, had the capacity affectively to manipulate

bodily reactions of moviegoers. This alignment of literary modernists using music as

social critique with their contemporary film music practices shows how

representations of music in fiction had the ability to depict what film music could do

to the body.

The potential for music to affectively and autonomically influence the body is

a means of critique in "Two Gallants," a critique of subjectifying forces of Dublin, a

city producing the music affecting its inhabitants. In mainstream film at that time, this

form of musical critique increasingly became something to be critical of: music with

bodily, affective implications.

While music in mainstream film in the early decades of the twentieth century

was becoming further and further removed from the text as something creative and

exploratory, sound and music taking a backseat to image, representations of music

were highly important in the fiction of these modernist writers. I argue sound and

music in literary fiction became more meaningful and integral to the text than in film,

even though film as a technology became more and more able to implement the

auditory in a variety of ways. Literature as a medium (which can be considered

"silent" in that the page doesn't necessarily produce audible sound itself), in the cases

of Cather and Joyce explained above, used music more richly and expressively and

creatively than film, which was a technology with actual auditory dimensions

(whether via musical accompaniment or the ensuing soundtrack component). This

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chapter discussed some ways Willa Gather and James Joyce implemented music

literarily, demonstrating music as means of social critique which film around the same

decades increasingly lost the potential to carry out.

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Chapter Four:

"Not Harmless": Griffith and Film Music's National Reach

Introduction

If literary modernism in the first half of the twentieth century explored music

as a means of critique, the fresh technological medium of film evolving during the

same time increasingly incorporated music in a more problematic way. Industrial

shifts away from regional, local musical commentary towards more normalized film

music lucratively secured the integrity of film by removing the audiovisual threat of

musicians' musical statements and bodily presence. I claim that with the eradication of

the improvisational musician from the theater, the campaign to standardize sound in

cinema was an industrial measure eliminating musical critique in exchange for design,

perpetuating musical formulae on a nationwide scale.

As established in Chapter Two, in deploying film music standards on a

national scale, industry delocalized it and ended various communities' opportunity to

experience film texts through unique musical code. This chapter will look at the

increasingly integrated trade press, film and music companies in their movement to

steer film music and standardize sound during the time literary modernists explored

sound.

This chapter will also perform a close reading of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a

Nation, and examine its score by Joseph Carl Breil. Unlike Cather and Joyce who

questioned notions of nationalism in their fiction through their prodigious use of

different kinds of regional or international music, the blockbuster film didn't help

question notions of "nation" through music as much as actually render its own notion
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of nationalism organized by musically xenophobic decisions. My close reading of this

film score demonstrates that through its prejudicial associations between Lincoln,

national anthems and white patriarchs, and tension-inducing villainous music with

unjustly portrayed African Americans, Griffith's film (which was witnessed live by

millions nationwide) implanted its own sense of nationalism, an excessive patriotism

chauvinistic and segregationist in nature, via its score. As race tends to involve visual

markers of skin, film music can adjoin audible markers into a raced system which can

have an effect on the skin.

The Campaign to Industrialize Film Music

One of the leading film trade presses of early twentieth century filmmaking,

Moving Picture World, published columnists' angst-ridden statements about film

music's potential to distract attention away from the picture amid a larger shift in film

exhibition toward aesthetic improvement. Aesthetic disturbance between music and

film content was a hitch for "a larger industrial movement that anticipated sizable

profits" (Anderson 53). Subordination of music to image meant that not only would

the film musician serve the picture, he or she would do so with music which fit

narrative as reasonably as possible, a restriction limiting the degree of independent

musical commentary supported by the nickelodeon period. Moving Picture World

published and publicized musical prescriptions. Anderson explains:

[Moving Picture World] advised that dramatic film genres should be

accorded both specific music and tones that would remain subordinate

and underline the needs of the master narrative. Tragedy, farce,

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melodrama, drama, light comedy, burlesque, fairy tales, and

mythological, biblical and historical films were categorized as dramatic

subdivisions that could and should be made easily recognizable through

complementary and sympathetic musical selections and/or

improvisations. (Anderson 53)

The shift from live improvisational film music commentary to totally controlled film

music wasn't sharp or immediate, but gradual. As noted in Chapter One, pre-

standardization, industry provided song books and cue sheets musicians could riff

with, during what I argue was a time of partial industrial influence. What industry

wanted immediately to eliminate was "bad" film music, improvisational film music

illogical or unreasonable in its correspondences. But this eliminated the potential for a

film musician to joke, pun, lampoon or critique film as industry instituted its sense of

logical, reasonable standards. Declarations stating that music should always fit the

film argued for a protection of the film without jeopardy to its integrity by musical

commentary. So the very auditory aspect which could asses film content actually got

enfolded into it. An auditory force eventually reflected what it previously could

critique. In other words, film music began to exemplify what it previously was free to

critique.

Over time, film musicians were increasingly unable to supply "narrative

interruptions, disorder, and sidetracks that exhaustively investigate, discover, and

create new meanings and spectacles" (Anderson 56). This was also an increasingly

control of sound and therefore the body in relation to sound in the cinema's acoustic

environment. Critics pressed for a new film music decorum because complete
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improvisation was "not invested in preserving a standard set of meanings or pleasures"

(Anderson 57). Anderson continues:

As a result of this potential semiotic anarchy, those persons invested in

creating film music that held a specific allegiance to the master

narrative were forced to contain signifying possibilities. One method of

containment was to restrain those improvisational opportunities by

criticizing 'inappropriate' improvisations and musical selections while

suggesting 'appropriate' or 'proper' codes and significant performative

parameters. (Anderson 57).

In efforts to properly develop narrative cinema, the reformation to standardize film

music disciplined musicians in limiting their auditory agency as well as their potential

to create the affective environment.

This initial shift away from improvisational, local film musicianship involved

two important factors: scores became less creative and more an example of industrial

oversight, but film orchestras increased in size. Larger and therefore louder orchestras

produced stronger film music ultimately increasing film music's status and profile, but

the new attraction of larger film music increasingly was on industry's terms. Film

evolved to a point where the same score was heard in each market, resulting in film

music on a national scale without any potential regional or communal traits, as well as

a social cinematic space no longer interactive with musicians. Although larger

orchestras supplied more power in terms of volume during this time, music louder in

character was un-improvisational and mass-distributed. Arguably with this increase in

size of the film orchestra, physical impact of film music on filmgoers' bodies
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increased as industrial control over that music increased (as will be the case again in

another shift in film music away from any live music at all towards totally amplified

film music even more designable in terms of deliberate spikes and peaks in volume at

certain narrative moments).

The blockbuster The Birth of a Nation had such grandiose live

accompaniment. With a full orchestra showcased in major markets, and an

indistinguishable score played in each market, not only did The Birth of a Nation

exemplify, in fact became the hallmark and benchmark for film music extravagant in

style, it was distributed for each and every market and unprecedented in its magnitude.

The blockbuster's score illustrates the combined shift away from customizable film

music, and from the capacity of local, communal interpretation of film. Musicians'

bodies' still produced live accompaniment, and depending on theaters' architecture,

audiences could witness whole orchestras, or fractions of them, or merely the

conductor. But no longer did the blend of improvisation, audience participation, and

Brennan's notion of interpersonal affective transmission between audiences and

musical authorities exist. Music was closed. I argue that The Birth of a Nation

represented, in its use of a controlled score, conveyance of specific emotions on a

national scale, a type of streamlining of emotion in that the score was no longer

generated on the spot by musicians with freedom to choose when, how, and which

emotion to provide.

A kind of emotional mathematics began when industry increasingly steered

film music. With the advent of the talkies, industry eventually exchanged musicians'

bodies (whether they generated prescriptive scores or improvisational ones, whether

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they were parts of large orchestras or not) for speakers and sound systems in what I

will argue in Chapter Five was the final shift toward complete omission of any bodily

exchange of musical energy between film musicians and moviegoers. And so began

the gradual move towards the iPod (a discussion in the final chapter), where recorded

music can unthinkingly accompany everything, an institutional, disciplinary operative

with wellsprings in film history when sound systems replaced live people bodily

performing film music, when accompaniment no longer came from a body producing,

but something operating increasingly at an unconscious level.

"Again, music's 'sweet compulsion' proves potent": Griffith's and Breil's Musical

Means

Griffith explored the power of music in his Biograph short The House of

Darkness (which preceded The Birth of a Nation). Doctors and nurses administer

music in order to manage the inmates of an insane asylum. In a disturbing film where

music meets industrial medicine, music in effect controls the inmates whom guards are

able to seize once music stalls them. An intertitle calls it "Musical therapy" and it

saves the life of a nurse who, stalked by an inmate, strikes a chord on her piano with

both hands, thus halting the patient just before he attempts to shoot her. Music soothes

him; he gives her the gun and apologizes, the intertitle reading "Again, music's 'sweet

compulsion' proves potent." In its emphasis on repetition and potency, the intertitle

describes Griffith's own efforts to program film music powerful in quality and to

control it almost clinically through repeating it in each market as illustrated in The

Birth of a Nation's nationally-distributed score.

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The Stoneman's, The Piedmont's, Silas Lynch the "mulatto," Gus the

renegade: The Birth of a Nation (hereafter referred to as Birth) renders a set of

characters dichotomous in skin color and in "morality." The film aligns white

characters with patriotism and wholesomeness, and African American or "mulatto"

characters with treacherousness. It presents an acoustic dimension to this in its hugely

popular score that I argue is as racially problematic in content as the rest of the film.

Quite varied, the score contains long drawn out adagio passages for strings, brass

marches, bugle calls, lilting waltzes, and frightening triple-fortissimo passages for full

orchestra. The film's racist implications need to be reconsidered within the social

context of film music at the time of its success, because I argue that, through music,

Birth was problematic in content as well as in form. A blockbuster film with clearly

xenophobic messages, it had sounds to accompany those messages, sounds emotively

underpinning an intolerant visual narrative, providing racial content in acoustic form.

Birth combined representations of Lincoln and American racist history with a

grandiose score massively distributed for the first time. To reconsider how Birth as a

public audiovisual production involved, by design, such an elaborate film music

program and an unprecedented scale of cinematic sound invites a new angle from

which we can question the film's racist insinuations. The score, as something that

through energy vibrated and entered filmgoers' bodies, conjoined with the film's

heinous subject matter producing for the first time on a mass-produced scale a

cinematic admixture of racist American history and affect.

While absolutely visually stunning for its time, the music for the film was

equally unprecedented. Joseph Carl Breil's score, unmatched in scale and volubility,
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was also the first compilation score. Much like compilation scores of the 1970s and

1980s it blended original orchestral music with other material like folk and popular

music, quotes from famous orchestral works, and patriotic anthems. Its folk songs and

southern hymns consisted of "My Old Kentucky Home," "Dixie," "Camptown Race"

and "Bonnie Blue Flag." "In the Gloaming" appears in the score as well,

contemporary pop culture mixed with historical music specifically referencing civil

wartime. In terms of the score's popularity, one of Breil's original numbers, a love

theme called "The Perfect Song," sold ten thousand copies in 1916 and went on to

become a piece of source music orchestras played for other films (Airman 294). In

fact, orchestras performed the whole score for Birth to other films. A massive success

in its own right, the score ushered in a whole new vista for film scores where

Hollywood producers favored music large and fierce in scale because it was a new

way to promote and market their pictures.

The score was performed on an unprecedented scale. After debuting in Los

Angeles with over forty instrumentalists and choral singers, Birth's New York debut

not only demanded the highest ticket price for a film (two dollars) but advance

advertisements announced that the score would be performed by fifty instrumentalists

(common for certain high-profile New York theaters); the engagement lasted over

seven months (Altman 293). This was unparalleled in terms of film music. The film's

score was so prioritized that twenty two road companies traversed the country

performing it for screenings in various markets. For the first time, small theaters

hosted large orchestras, and theaters accustomed to large orchestral accompaniment

expanded capacity. Within the first year of its release, three million people had seen
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the wildly popular film, "always accompanied by an orchestra of unaccustomed

proportions" (Altman 294). On occasion, traveling companies combined with local

orchestras forming tremendous film sound.

The film's very first image, an African American tied up below a minister

genuflecting during a slave auction, cuts to a shot of an abolitionist (elsewhere)

arguing for slaves' rights. Next, a swift image of a man with his hands on the

shoulders of a young slave speedily appears and disappears, a shot sympathetic

towards slaves in composition, yet unsympathetic in form because it is so fleeting.

This quick succession of the film's initial images speaks to the film's rationale argued

in its opening intertitles: "we do demand, as a right, to show the dark side of wrong,

that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue." Ironically, the polar use of dark and

light in the film's seemingly unbiased declaration actually illustrates its dichotomous

depiction of history based on visual markers of dark and light, of skin. The film does

not live up to its stated goal; it "shows the dark side of wrong" through its own

glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. Further, the "plea" that the film "illumate(s) the

bright side of virtue" through showing "the dark side of wrong" contradicts what it

actually renders through what I ague is a palpable musical bias toward the south,

glorifying the region with footage of pageantry, chivalry, and militancy.

The film opens with musical juxtaposition. Following footage of the slave

auction and pleadings of the abolitionists, the film introduces its characters from the

north. Three siblings of the northern Stoneman family frolic around their yard to

lilting cheery music in the score. The film then cuts to the southern Piedmont's with a

slow, drawn out, sweeping, sentimental, syrupy version of "Dixie." In juxtaposing

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geographic regions, the opening of the film scores the south with much more dramatic

music. Scenes introducing the southern family fittingly extend far beyond those of the

northern family, the document clearly emphasizing temporally, visually and musically

(within the first six of its one hundred and eighty seven minutes) which region it will

showcase. The families come together when the Stoneman's visit the south, bringing

with them the lilting cheery theme. And once the outbreak of war stresses the

friendship between the two families, the film clearly supplies more emotional musical

content for southern characters and concerns. Similar melancholy music accompanies

both north and south receiving news of dead kinfolk, but on the whole, as the film

progresses, it dwells much more on southern reactions to war and to reconstruction.

Four scenes in particular score actions of African Americans with musical

passages so large, dramatic and emotive in quality, they match those of actual battle

scenes. The first is a scene where Lydia Brown, the "mulatto" housekeeper of northern

congressman Stoneman, is "aroused from ambitious dreamings" of being an aristocrat

when the southern senator Charles Sumner after his meeting with Stoneman interrupts

her reverie. Sumner gives Lydia Brown "curt orders" and, as he is about the exit the

foyer, Lydia deliberately drops his top hat. Upon his departure she spits four times in

his direction. Lydia Brown falls to the floor ripping her blouse in hatred for the

southern leader, finally licking her hands like an animal, the film wildly conveying a

character of "mixed" race. The score for this scene consists of climbing eighth note

figures for violin, cello and double bass, building in tension as more voices conclude

the climbing phrase in striking minor chords, all to accompany an African American

housekeeper's behavior. This overly dramatic scene renders the African American
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female as lowly, savage; the dramatic music injuriously and expressively associates

her with uncultivated, hostile animalism.

Excessive musical representation continues when the film's first fast and

frantic music scores the "irregular force of guerillas" that raid the southern town

storming the Piedmont home. An intertitle reads "The scalawag white captain

influences the negro militia to follow his orders," while suspenseful music growing in

dynamic accompanies shots of black soldiers removing white females from their

houses and destroying and burning property. "The Confederates to the rescue"

describes the arrival of white soldiers. So begins the film's first battle scene, not

fought along regional lines of north and south, but along racial lines of black and

white within the south, scored with the film's first of many large and ominous musical

passages. Uplifting music accompanies "the rescue" of the town and the Piedmont

house. While the film unjustly portrays African Americans, it musically renders

valiant the southern white male.

Two notorious scenes discriminatorily depict African Americans: when Silas

Lynch, "the "mulatto," comes into political power during reconstruction and pursues

northerner Elsie Stoneman; and when a confederate soldier named Gus, "the

renegade," pursues, proposes to and prowls after southerner Margaret Piedmont. The

latter is the well-known scene resulting in Margaret's death which prompts her brother

to vengefully form the Ku Klux Klan. Both scenes unjustly render the African

American males as mindless and unruly in their pursuit of the two white females.

Again, in both scenes, the conflict is not geographic: Gus the renegade and Margaret

Piedmont are both southerners; Silas Lynch and Elsie Stoneman both align with the
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north. The conflict instead is sexualized and radicalized, and the score for each scene

renders African Americans males villainous, unjustly portraying them energetically

with a score unprecedented in history for its size, magnitude and impact, creating

excessive affective and emotional correspondences between music and race.

I argue that Breil's score doesn't just accompany the film's racist depiction of

characters; it is a musical form of the film's racism. Hardly ever does a lilting musical

theme accompany actions of an African American character (other than juke music to

which wrongfully stereotyped slaves dance for their masters visiting the slave

quarters). And white characters are constantly scored with sympathetic, positive, and

patriotic themes, some from America's national repertoire. This is the case not only

for truly impressive historical characters like Abraham Lincoln (the film blends

historical events with fictitious ones) but for fictionalized white southern "heroes"

inaugurating the Ku Klux Klan. The film is offensive in its inseparability between

historical figures and events on the one hand (Lincoln signing the proclamation calling

for 75,000 northern volunteers; recreations of various historic battles;

the official surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse,

and Lincoln's assassination) and fiction on the other because both are equally

accompanied by the emotive, moving themes, the score irrationally pairing figures like

Lincoln with clansmen. The film's racism has an acoustic form, a musical variable

large in design and loud in quality, music which, in the public space of so many

theaters nationwide, cogenerated emotion, and, in the form of physical vibrations in

the air, reached and entered filmgoers' bodies.

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"Your spine prickles and in the gallery the yells cut loose with every bugle note"

Any number of sclolars have discussed Griffith's wrongful portrayals of

African Americans. Donald Bogle in "Black Beginnings: From Uncle Tom's Cabin to

The Birth of a Nation" argues that Griffith's film instilled not just one but several on

screen stereotypes of African Americans, but his argument mainly treats visual

content. Bogle speaks to Griffith's skill "developing the close-up, crosscutting, rapid-

fire editing, the iris, the split screen shot, and realistic and impressionistic lighting"

(Bogle 18) but doesn't address at all any musical aspects. In explaining that the film

had the potential to "arouse hatred" (Ibid 21), Bogle doesn't question whether its

music functioned in causing such arousal. In arguing that the film in 1915 ushered in

"all the black screen stereotypes" which could influence "the naive and cinematically

untutored audiences of the early century," Bogle accurately and appropriately brings

together notions of stereotypes and audiences trained to recognize them. I suggest that

the film's music operated as a predominant means of perpetuating such African

American stereotypes but also as a means of training audiences to recognize heinous

stereotypes through music associations with narrative. Another reading of the film that

I argue would be more fully developed through considering the film's music is Phoebe

Davidson's '"History with Lightning'": The Legacy of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a

Nation," in which, Davidson accurately argues, like Bogle, why the film should be

seriously reconsidered for its inaccurate depiction of history, but, again like Bogle, she

speaks to the film's implications without mentioning its score once. Both scholars

situate the film within the tense circumstances of its early twentieth century release,

mention diffuse reactions to the film, and their close readings of scenes and characters
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expand the understanding of the text within a historical context of 1915 popular

entertainment. But not to mention the music at all misses an opportunity to

contextualize the film's more emotive and emoting elements arguably crucial to the

issues the scholars explore. Davidson explains "[t]he story relies heavily on the use of

didactic title cards and superimposed allegorical figures [like Jesus] to direct the

audience's thinking. Nonetheless, the movie retains a great deal of power because of

the skill with which the director intertwines plots and particularly because of the

innovative and masterful cinematic techniques he employs" (Davidson 224). But

something else arguably was directing audience's thinking, something I argue was at

the core of the great deal of power the film had.

Contemporaries who reviewed Birth and witnessed its release in different

parts of the country incredibly reported bodily reactions to its music. Contemporary

accounts spoke to the energy the film caused in audiences. A reviewer for Variety,

Mark Vance, wrote March 12th 1915, that the film "was worth seeing anywhere"

(Vance 22). Seemingly, it was also worth hearing anywhere, according to other

reviews, some which strictly dedicated themselves to what theaters sounded like. In

Moving Picture World on March 13th 1915, W. Stephen Bush wrote "there were hisses

mingled with applause" (Bush 27), and Moving Picture World published another

reviewer's account of "spontaneous and frequent applause" as well as "general

showing of approval" (Moving Picture World 28). One mob scene in the film in

particular received audible approbation that was "nearly incessant for a full half-hour"

and the audience "quickly moved from suspense to laughter and back again to

suspense" (Ibid 28). The account of opening night at New York's Liberty Theater
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describes hundreds of people turned away by the box office, and standing room only

behind seats in the loge section three people deep, the writer predicting Births' future

"sensational success" (my emphasis). Harlow Hare, reviewer for the Boston American

published his detailed account of Birth's music July 18th 1915, speaking precisely to

the score's affective results felt in the theater. He explained Briel's score combined

"the library of the old masters and the collections of songs and ballads of the 60s,"

where one "Virginia reel put rhythm in the feet and the tingle in the blood," a direct

statement to Birth's music's effect on and in Hare's body, the score "sensuously

intoxicating" with themes having "peculiar increasing effectiveness" (Hare 86). Hare's

review of the film describes not just the music's effects on the body but the crowd's

audible reactions. He explains, "spectators become almost frenzied in their applause.

Often the [bugle] call has a weird effect, as when the thin-voiced oboe plays it alone.

Often it comes stridently powerful against entirely different notes," enthusiastic

reactions to specific musical nuances.

Graphic and explicit, one review of the film for The Atlanta Journal published

December 7* 1915 by Ward Greene displays, to my mind, what can be so potentially

disturbing about film music in its capacity to rouse audiences, and in this case, in a

very carnal way. Greene's account is full of creepy details about spines, throats, and

hearts, not just revealing of his segregationist bias, but the way he witnessed the score

stirring bodies to fervor. Greene begins with a grotesque description of a quivering

heart: "There has been nothing to equal it - nothing . . . the heart of your country's

history, ripped from the past and brought quivering with all human emotions before
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your eyes" (Greene 30). He continues at length about the tremendous emotion in the

theater and affective reactions to the film:

It swept the audience at the Atlanta Theater Monday night like a tidal

wave. A youth in the gallery leaped to his feet and yelled and yelled. A

little boy downstairs pounded the man's back in front of him and

shrieked. The man did not know it. He was a middle-aged, hard-lipped

citizen; but his face twitched and his throat gulped up and down. Here a

young girl kept dabbing and dabbing at her eyes and there an old lady

just sat and let the tears stream down her face unchecked. (Greene 30)

Lips, throats, eyes, face and backs. Shrieks, yells, pounds, twitches, and gulps. This

survey details a range of reactions but tends to specific details of body parts and bodily

motions and reactions. Greene continues with numerous associations he makes

between Birth's score and feeling. He explains "[fjhere is the old Southern home in the

very first part of the picture, when the orchestra plays 'Sewanee Ribber' . . . And you

laugh out loud at the joy of it," and then, "[w]hen they go to war, your breast swells at

the sight of the flower of the Confederacy tripping away to the strains of 'The Bonnie

Blue Flag'" (Greene 31). These statements speak directly to the score's influence over

the body. Greene wrote certain scenes "thrill you to the core." I argue that he's not just

speaking to whatever satisfaction the film may have brought him as a southerner

clearly enthusiastic about the blockbuster, but he's talking about the core of the body,

even his spine roused by the film, as well as the whole crowd he reported was so

moved by the score. He devotes a whole section to this, "GALLERY GOES WILD,"

where he explains "You know it and your spine prickles and in the gallery the yells cut
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loose with every bugle note . . . And after it's all over, you are not raging nor shot with

hatred, but mellowed into a deeper and purer understanding of the fires through which

your forefathers battled to make this South of yours a nation reborn!" (Greene 33).

Prickles on the spine occur in tandem with the Klan's bugle calls and yells from the

crowd? Such physiology associated with the film's racial content should be

reconsidered as something central to the Birth's controversial existence. Greene

pitches that the sensation the film transmited was reason to see the film, and reason

people were going to see it again. Your spine prickles, you're mellowed. Greene

argues:

ft]hat's why they sold standing room only Monday night and why

every matinee at 2:30 and every night performance at 8:30 this week

will be packed. 'I wouldn't pay $2 to see any movie in the world,'

scoffed one man Monday. A friend took him Monday night. Tuesday

he spent $10 to take himself again, his wife, his two children, and his

maiden aunt. And if you haven't seen it, spend the money, borrow it,

beg it, get it any old way. But see The Birth of a Nation. (Greene 33 my

emphasis).

When considering how detailed the contemporary reviews of audiences'

physiological reaction to Griffith's film were, why hasn't its score been fully enfolded

into discourse about the film's racism, especially when those accounts describe

reactions to its music when people encountered for the first time film's new scale, its

mass production, and its discrimination?

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Birth's nationwide) music

Birth implies a sense of a nation divided along racial lines, not regional ones,

accentuated by the score's musical differentiations between actions of black and white

characters. Although the ultimate marital union between northerner Elsie Stoneman

and southerner Cameron Piedmont embodies regional union at the end of the film, the

famous extravagant ride and victory of the KKK just preceding the conclusion of the

film dramatizes a national rift along lines of race fully reinforced by affecting and

rousing film scoring. I demonstrated Willa Cather and James Joyce explored music as

a means of critique, particularly that of notions of nation. Birth employs music to

reinforce its own sense of nation through its stunning visual recreations of past racist

deeds and through glorification of that national history. Through combining patriotic

songs, even the anthem "My Country Tis of Thee," with visually discriminatory

portrayals of African Americans, the film does not reconsider nor press notions of

nation through music; it authoritatively impresses them through music, music which,

unlike other filmic components, materializes and physically implicates the body. So

began the new era of the film score, designed by film producers and withheld from

musicians empowered to acoustically respond to visual narrative.

It is ironic that Birth scored with Briel's music nationwide argued for the birth

of a nation. With the notion of nation in its title, what Birth really birthed was

standardized film music on a national scale. In its massive and controversial success,

the film helped birth the nationwide score. In other words, local musicians did not

score the film independently with any say so; the nation heard the same score; the film

in its rendering of nation birthed standardized film music practices.

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I wish to reiterate that in the shift from nickelodeon to pre-classical and

classical cinema, there was not an immediate shut off of improvisational film music.

The potential of film musicians to improvise lingered but on an increasingly shrinking

scale existing among growing pressure in trade presses for film musicians to acquiesce

to the picture, play only fitting music often suggested in the form of songbooks, or cue

sheets film studios would deliberately send out with their reels. There was a general

movement away from musicians' control of musical ideas with the rise of more

extravagant film music orchestras which the success of Birth brought about.

Orchestras couldn't improvise; musical choices increasingly belonged to those not

actually playing film music. With this shift came regulatory music in a public setting

void of the potential to alter music. The result was a highly emotional auditory

component of film yet in an increasingly fixed form.

"Racialized Animatedness " Meets Music

According to film music theorist Royal S. Brown, prearranged musical cues

when fused with filmic content transfer "the morphopoligal affect of music into

specific emotions and allows us to 'have them' while also imputing them to someone

and/or something else, namely the cinematic character and/or situation" (Brown 27).

Birth represents film music that aims to generate emotion in listeners which likens

them to emotions on-screen. But the emotions rendered on screen are part of

excessive, undue filmic representations involving issues of race, of skin. Brown

theorizes that music is "a cogenerator of narrative affect that skews the viewer/listener

towards a culturally determined reading of characters and situations" (Brown 32 my

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emphasis). This is precisely what is troublesome about Birth. Without any freedom of

local musicians to interpret or critique the film, the film supplies not only its culturally

determined reading of American history; it supplies an auditory component

manipulating affective and emotional reactions on a large scale. Birth troublesomely

renders the cultural determinism of white superiority, doubly troublesome when music

physically interacting with listeners' bodies adds persuasive force, actual physical

affective energy, to that determinism.

Music in the form of sound waves moves and oscillates in the air, and on the

body. These sound waves can enter the body: they vibrate the cilia of the cochlea, the

eardrum, and depending on amplitude, can even move the ribcage. Vibrations find our

auditory cortex. The inner ear and brain decipher the movements of the eardrum. And

although we can't feel it, millions of nerves fire which can't be sped up or shut off.

Acoustic sources outside listeners' bodies' cause neuronal firing, and with music, this

almost simultaneously can trigger emotional associations in humans due to music's

various ingrained codes: formulae of repetition and expectation, departure from and

return to the tonic, and more. Music has the ability to jog human memory resulting in

whole constellations of emotional associations. According to Daniel J. Levitin,

neuroscience proves the power of music to physiologically evoke emotions and that in

several forms this is a channel for social manipulation (Levitin 9). Film music has

tremendous power to manipulatively induce emotion for two reasons: music is already

arguably emotive before paired with visual narrative; and, once a pairing occurs (say,

one optimized by industry) new (sought-after) emotional associations can start

between a visual narrative and already stirring music. Film music develops
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associations with film content. Sounds with newly determined associations interact

with the body. Due to the level of industrial influence over film music and its

emotional associations, does film music disturbingly becomes an operative mechanism

of capitalism?

I contend that if music physically interacts with the body, associations between

music and race, or music and nation, encounter the body via film music in ways that

other film content does not. Race tends to involve visual makers. Sianne Ngai

theorizes that visual technologies such as film (especially animation) imbue visual

markers of race with affect. Ngai claims "[a]ffect becomes socially recognizable in the

age of mechanical reproducibility: as a kind of'innervation,' 'agitation,' or (the term I

prefer) 'animatedness'" (Ngai 91). Visual technologies racialize subjects on screen

through visually over-emotionalizing them with "the most basic or minimal of all

affective conditions: that of being, in one way or another, 'moved'" (Ngai 91). Surely

Birth visually racializes African American characters in this overemotional, animated

way. But I claim that the film adjoins visual markers of race with audible ones,

rendering its sense of chauvinistic and segregationist nationalism through audible

markers of race affecting the body in ways its visual ones do not, forming an actual

physiological manifestation of a raced system in the filmgoer's body. Birth visually

and overemotionally animates African American characters, but its score does so

while "moving" audiences. Ngai doesn't discuss sound as a source of "racialized

animatedness." But in Birth, racialized animatedness, visual in kind, admixes with

moving music, complicating Ngai's theory in its rendering of moved characters on-

screen, and music's potential to move audiences' skin.

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"Not harmless ": Conclusion

When filmmaking as a discipline provides its own ideas of film music, and no

longer invites musical participation of unique communities, regions, and

socioeconomic groups, industry is increasingly responsible for a raced system it

creates with audiovisual media. Music causes bodily responses; film industry

programs music; film industry programs bodily responses.

In Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth Century

America. Lee Greiveson explains the complicated history between early twentieth

century censorship boards and filmmakers. While documenting several accounts of

audiences' vocal and enthusiastic reactions to Birth (as well as a detailed account of

which markets banned the film), no mention is made of the score's impact or influence

as part of the film's larger scandalous reputation. When the film debuted in 1915,

certain markets needed security indoors: police stood between audiences and the

screen in a drastically different social model of the cinema space from the nickelodeon

era. Outrage at the film resulted in its suppression in several markets, as state control

intervened n a new era of cinema clearly so rousing that it needed not only to be

policed, but legal authorities recognized cinema's power to stir, to irritate, to motivate

and to indeed emotionalize audiences. The film's score needs to be reconsidered as a

significant part of this political, legal and cinematic historical context. The censorship

board of Ohio argued, upon banning the film, it was "not harmless," and later, after an

appeal from the filmmaker to push the Birth into release, the board reiterated its case:

the film "was harmful and not of a harmless character" (Grieveson 194). The film's

musical associations exhibit this argument.

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The score for Birth planed emotive correspondence between music and images.

Performed by a huge orchestra, regional improvisational musicians were no longer

available to comment on or play with the film. The score, and the new standard it

ushered in, was less improvisational and more determined, not only lessening audience

participation but inaugurating a form of musical obedience. If literary modernists

explored music as a means of critique of "nation," playing with sound in fiction to

question that very concept, film music departed from its improvisational beginnings

towards increasingly normalized forms, oppressive not only in fixed correspondences

between music and visual narrative no longer accessible for interjection (or objection)

of local musicians, but also in normalized emotions industry could import, here in a

film about "nation." Griffith's film implanted its own sense of nationalism, an

excessive patriotism chauvinistic and segregationist in nature, via its score. Film music

began to blanket over what were regional and communal interpretations, shaping on a

national scale cinema's administration of sound.

As a history film celebrating Lincoln's efforts for emancipation on the one

hand, and celebrating racism on the other, Birth was, and is, problematic. Widely

known as the first film to be screened for a President at the White House, Birth as a

history film becomes a cultural artifact of film history. And in the late 1930s, another

film, a sound film, renders the same lanky figure from Illinois. Another film about

Lincoln, in fact, celebrates him similarly, but as a sound film reflecting a whole new

stratum of technology for film music, produces new affective influences in its

representation of the national figure.

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Chapter Five:

Strike Up the Mise-en-Bande

The arrival of the sound film brought with it three significant changes for film

music: no longer was music produced by live musicians' bodies, and diegetic music

ensued, a form of music coming from within the narrative, sound film now providing

music from two points (the score as well as music coming from within the scene). In

the silent era, all film music was non-diegetic music (no audible music ever came from

within the narrative). In the sound era, the prerecorded soundtrack added a new

dimension, a combination of music strictly meant for the audience with music coming

from on screen sources within the narrative. This new amalgamation of musical

registers was new. Prior to sound film, pianists, organists, little orchestras or massive

ensembles provided music for audiences (all non-diegetic music). With the sound film,

such music intended for audiences began to occur sometimes in tandem or in exchange

with music coming from the action or diegesis, music heard by characters within the

soundscape of the film (diegetic music). What is significant is the sound film's new

capacity to render music as coming from the scene, not just from an accompanist.

Sound became increasingly layered, as non-diegetic music underpinned dialog, or

diegetic music blended with other diegetic sounds, and other combinations. This

creation of layered sound formed the mise-en-bande, the acoustic equivalent of mise-

en-scene, or composition of visuals within the frame. The mise-en-bande is an

acoustic assemblage of different sounds either happening simultaneously or

interchangeably with one another in an audible field, a palate for the ears within which
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there can be total cacophony of several sounds, or complete silence, or dramatic

articulations of certain sounds apart from others.

I said there were three significant changes ushered in by the sound film - the

live musician no longer being present, the new combination of non-diegetic with

diegetic music in the mise-en-bande. The third significant change was the ability to

design amplitude within the mise-en-bande. For instance, picture a large film orchestra

in front of you. An orchestra can play triple fortissimo as loudly as they can. They

won't reach heightened volume provided by amplification on a soundtrack, when,

once film music is recorded, the orchestra may be played back with much extra

volume and therefore potentially having greater impact at the design of filmmakers.

This impact over volume which the sound era increasingly afforded filmmakers turned

what was once a limited range in volume of ragtag film accompaniment into

something having much more range of amplitude beyond just musical dynamics.

Recordings could still reflect musical dynamics in the orchestration, but in addition to

total vacancy of any live body, new concoctions of diegetic and non-diegetic music

occurred, and for the first time, sound levels of recordings could be raised or lowered

within a newer technological capability involving sound mixes, providing for

industrially-driven affect-generating music to be that much more impacting, more

influential in terms of affect because of the sound film affording filmmakers the ability

to make film music more striking in its levels of volume over other sounds in mise-en-

bande.

Like the mise-en-scene, the mise-en-bande became a space of creation for

filmmakers, a newly expanded auditory field newly designable due to the development
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of the sound film. A question for me becomes, what are repercussions of the

expansion of the mise-en-bande, from simply live non-diegetic film accompaniment to

prerecorded non-diegetic film scores combined with sounds, sometimes music,

directly from the diegesis, the narrative on screen? Furthermore, since these sounds

are no longer produced live and are entirely pre-recorded, what does the new

technological jurisdiction over the mix of this sound field entail? A "hit point" is film

music vernacular for a moment when something occurs on screen while music clearly

does something to accentuate that point in the action. To take a somewhat

contemporary example, John Williams' wondrous chord beginning the brass-driven

fanfare of the title theme at the very beginning of Star Wars occurs right on first sight

of the film's title in yellow lettering. The initial intertitle in small blue lettering

preceding the main title situates the narrative (like in a silent film), reading "A long

time ago . . . in a galaxy far, far away..." And then the instant the title appears, HIT

POINT. The image of the film's title instantaneously fills the entirety of the frame,

simultaneously occurring with the orchestras' famous triple fortissimo chord.

But why the term "hit point"? In the example of the Star Wars title sequence,

from an empty black frame and total silence the image and the music dramatically

begin, they start, but sharply, quite startlingly. Do the image and the music "hit" each

other? Where is the "point?" In the term "hit point," does "point" mean point in the

23
"Mickey Mouseing" is the term for making music directly match, say, a character's footsteps, the
term deriving from early Disney cartoons where this device originated, an extreme example of the
combination of music and movement (combinations so compelling and futuristic to Sergei Eisenstein).
A "hit point" is more of a singular instance where image and music match sharply and briefly, coming
together in typically dramatic fashion, revealing overt design.
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action or narrative? Or is the "point" on or in the person seeing and hearing the film?

Is the filmgoer therefore figuratively "hit" because of the image and the music's

dramatic syncopation? To me, this sequence, time and time again, feels exciting, this

contrast between the quiet of the blue intertitle and the bombast of the beginning chord

once the gold letters flash on screen. But am I figuratively "hit" in some sort of way

with audiovisual unity? Not that this is a violence in any sort of way, but rather an

energetic influence, bang, a clap, a "strike" on the senses (Star Wars pun intended).24

The ability to create really voluble hit points was a new feature of the sound

film. Nickelodeon musicians could match precise musical moments with moments on

screen, certainly, but since musicians were often improvising and had never seen the

films before, the ability to create effective hit points would involve lots of chance.

Once the score was prerecorded, hit points could be punctuated as often and as

dramatically as one chose, a reflection of further control the sound film brought over

the auditory field but also over affective impact via the mise-en-bande. And when film

music became more standardized as it became more technologically delivered during

the time the Hollywood studio system was massively producing film, what were the

implications for the body when it encountered (on such a large scale via the popularity

of film), such standardized practices when music has emotional and affective

influence ?

To use just one more reference to Star Wars, preceding the blue intertitle

setting up the film is the all too famous 20 Century Fox logo and accompanying
24
In terms of thinking of images and music in unison having a striking effect, what would a reading of
Eisenstein's film, Strike!, offer if the film's title was reconsidered as not just speaking to labor action
but music and image working via montage in a striking way, a strike at once reflecting not only the
work of image and sound but also their "work" as indicative and generative of (proletariat) action?
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theme (film characters don't just get themes, companies do too). This famous musical

phrase was composed by Alfred Newman, a contracted studio film composer

representing studio system filmmaking at its peak, and because his film music

production was so prolific in quantity, Newman represents, to my mind, mass-

produced film scoring, as well as a film composer embraced by the culture industry

which by the time he is composing for so much film throughout the twentieth century

is beginning to increasingly establish its bearings. Embraced by the system within

which he composed, Newman won nine Oscars, the ultimate industrial

acknowledgement of his contribution to film, but was nominated upwards of thirty

times. He received four nominations in one year, 1940. Newman composed over 100

film scores. So not only did Alfred Newman write arguably the most famous music

for a film company logo, the one for 20th Century Fox, he also represents for me film

music industrialization par excellence because of the sheer amount of production,

industrial acknowledgment, and representing therefore a type of musical standard.

A decade into his film music career, Alfred Newman composed the score for

the John Ford film Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). This film represents everything

important about the new capacity to create the mise-en-bande, a field not just

composed with a score, but now with music as a source within the diegesis, and dialog

and sound effects too, all within an amalgamation of auditory components which

could, on the filmmaking side of things (no more on the social side via via a live

improvisational musician), be designed with certain emotive and affective results.

25
Newman is credited for composing over 200 scores, but as was often the case in the Hollywood
studio system, with its strict deadlines limiting creativity and pressing contracted employees to rapidly
produce, several other musicians and composers worked alongside Newman, and perhaps in place of
Newman, making 100 scores a conservative number and still a prolific amount of material.
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Young Mr. Lincoln also renders similar historical content as Griffith's Birth, as both

films follow the development of Abraham Lincoln (albeit one does so during the time

of his presidency, the other prior to his election campaign). Both films depict the same

historical figure while using a lot of the same music, and as a set of cultural artifacts

become their own history intriguing to consider in terms of their use of emotive and

affective music within their renderings of this particular American history. Both depict

Lincoln, both use some of the same music, but one was a silent film and the other a

sound film. As I argued in the last chapter, Briel's score for Griffith's film harbingered

mass distribution of film scores somewhat blanketing over any opportunity for local

musical interpretation on a national scale. Young Mr. Lincoln represents the same

thing in that what was heard in one screening was heard in another. Since both films

render particular notions of nation (one completely troublesome, the other much less

so), they also act in function and form as artifacts which themselves arguably had

national implications. They were widespread, far reaching, hugely popular, and their

music as something at their core can be argued as having a corresponding sort of

reach, because of what the films as representations of mass production replaced,

namely the potential for any musical variety. So when they rendered their own sense

of nation, on an emotional and affective level they also operated musically within a

nationwide context within which their function and form may be reconsidered. Two

films about American history became American history, but intriguingly so because

they circulated massively as technological artifacts with emotional charge. Their

music perpetuating stereotypes between the era and historical figures with patriotic

themes becomes not just something to study but fully reconsider because music was so
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emotively central to the films' depictions of that nationally defining time in American

history. To study these history films together is to study them as musically driven

depictions of history as well as how they bring together, through film music, emotion

and affect and America.

In our current economic times so reflective of the often spoken-of link between

emotions and money, or knee-jerk reactions and the stock market, Young Mr.

Lincoln's starts off near the beginning with a relevant line of dialog. New arrivals to

Illinois, a mother and her family are eager to financially succeed, but she says to

Lincoln, "We don't aim to ask for no credit," to which he responds, "If it relieves your

mind any, ma'am, the whole shebang here's worked on credit," communicating the

relevance between our contemporary American moment and this film, notions of the

complexity of how credit still works in America, the extent of its importance within

the "whole shebang," and possible relief to one's mind over such truths. The film is

also exciting to consider not just within the current financial situation, but its political

context as well with President Barak Obama's Illinoisan heritage and self-proclaimed

tutelage with regard to Lincoln.

"My politics are short and sweet. Like the old lady's dance. "

This line that Lincoln speaks at the beginning of Young. Mr. Lincoln (hereafter

referred to as Young) contextualizes politics with music, which the film as an artifact,

like Birth, does on the whole. The opening scene shows Lincoln's political competitor

speaking from a porch to a small crowd, a short speech without any score. Lincoln

speaks after him from the same place, and the non-diegetic score begins. Shortly after
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this scene (and the subsequent discussion over credit), the film depicts Lincoln

romantically reading law with his feet on a tree, riverside. Sounds of birds, running

water and the score all depict a sort of harmony and the idyllic scene by the river

escalates with the arrival of early love interest, Ann Hathaway. And, HIT POINT,

the image of the river from the idyllic springtime setting shared with Ann shifts to a

shot of the river full of ice as the score dramatically punctuates with a minor chord in

the brass. Several shots of the river help transition from the idyllic scene where Ann

and Abe's chemistry begins, to Abe at her tombstone, a jump into the future rendered

in a fade from one image of water to another, but literally rendered with a jump in the

score. While the two rather pleasant images of moving water transition via a fade, the

score abruptly shifts from the glissando line of a harp to on overbearing brass passage,

not fitting with the smooth fade between two images of flowing water but much more

striking in comparison, a "hit point" in that not only does new music simultaneously

accompany a new image (or a change in the image), but it does so suddenly,

startlingly, with a sort of emotional and affective shock. This transition from pastoral

spring to dead of winter contains no dialog, nor are there sounds of birds, or winter

wind. Here, nothing competes with the score in the mise-en-bande which renders the

jump in time, the death of Ann, the pain of Abe with quite striking energy.

Young is full of music. Almost from the very beginning of the film the score

does not relent. Finally, the first elongated scene without any score occurs when

Lincoln in his office settles a legal dispute between two citizens. Lincoln carefully

deliberates the matter, and without any score the scene unemotionally conveys the

26
After all, like Birth. Young is a love story, too.
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mental capacity for Abe to slowly and fairly weigh both sides and conclude

accordingly. At the end of this office scene, Lincoln announces to the men he's about

to attend the Grand Parade, speaking directly to its sounds. He says to the gentleman,

"I'll mosey on and see the parade. Gonna be a heap of yellin and carryin on. Gonna be

quite a pleasure to listen to, after this. Yessiree Bob." Upon the sound of his legal fee,

the coin Abe drops down onto his desk, he emphases the pleasure to listen to the

parade after the sounds of the meeting (the legal hearing), repeating, after the sound of

the coin landing on his desk, "Yerssiree Bob." A fade to black transitions to the

parade, with the sound film's first instance of diegetic music (music coming from the

scene on screen) as marching bands regally accompany war veterans, militiamen, and

other groups of marchers and participants in the parade. In this scene, non-deigetic

music and deigtic music begin to take over one another in interesting passages where

it's difficult to decipher where one leaves off and the other picks up, the shifts so

subtle that music intended for the audience and music for Lincoln and the audience,

through technology afforded the sound film and not the silent film, interchange.

During the parade, sounds of the marches fade to make auditory room for

dialog, reflecting undulation and mixtures of different sound elements available to

sound film. Not only can music spike in volume, it can decrease. Two women

watching the parade recognize one of their daughters coming down the street on a

carriage behind a banner "Illinois: Heart of the West." Music recedes and one woman

shouts to the other "Here comes Lily!" the daughter shouting in return as she passes

them by "Hi Ma!" Sounds of military music and familial shouts of acknowledgment
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between curbside mothers and float-riding daughters in the parade convey Americana

with sound as the music and the dialog are leveraged together in the mise-en-bande.

Like Birth. Young depicts all kinds of music reflecting American war history.

But as a sound film with added dimensions within the mise-en-bande to augment this

music with dialog and other sounds, Young represents military American music

inclusive with other sounds of national history, namely sounds of Lincoln, some actual

quotes, providing a different auditory sense of nation than Birth's segregationist, racist

one rendered with sound only by way of music. But because Young is a sound film, it

can evoke notions of nation or America through more means of sound beyond just the

score. This is also to say that Young can do so with more sonic influence than Birth as

well because of a whole sound mix created by filmmakers, which not only doesn't

reflect any regional improvisational musicianship, it depicts what filmmakers wish to

be heard through the construction of several variables of sound, as well as amplitude

within the mise-en-bande having the capacity to reach beyond the means of a live

orchestra.

One example of this occurs during the parade scene when Lincoln sits down on

the curb midst a throng of social elite seated in chairs. Much like Lincoln's spatial

position below those around him, the diegetic march lowers in volume. His dialogue

with the socialites begins after the score has been faded to accommodate its sounds.

Meet Mary Todd. A shot of Lincoln looking up from the curb at Mary Todd seated

and looking down at him from under her parasol is a visual metaphor for the sound

mix, the patriotic music lowered in volume representing the future president, and the

louder dialog rendering Mary Todd who says, "Mr. Lincoln, I've been hearing some
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mighty fine things about you." Conversation ensues about his political aspirations and

all the while the patriotic march underscores not as much past endeavors of veterans in

the parade, even revolutionary veterans, but Lincoln's plans to fight to run for office (a

topic of conversation during this scene). Then, strangely, when a pie contest starts in

which Lincoln is taster and judge, a scene lightheartedly showcasing Lincoln's fair

and careful deliberation, a seated military band accompanies him, and a drum roll

introduces his slowly produced verdict. This music is followed by strange, very

continuous subtle shifts between the diegetic music and non-diegetic music, music at

once reflecting the history the film depicts in the diegesis, but also making its own

historical depiction non-diegetically.

In terms of Newman's score as something emotional and affective, I argue that

it pleasantly lilts, martially bounces, and overall contains a range of emotion musically

represented. The film depicts a young Lincoln with which we can be sympathetic

towards in the loss of Ann Hathaway, which the film occasionally reminds us of

through certain recurring musical themes, acoustically rendering Lincoln stricken by

the loss. Like my discussion of Birth suggests, the film score communicates feeling

and can transport feeling. What's unique about Young however is the somewhat added

affective leverage of the score which the technology of sound film enables, namely its

sonic function to work in tandem with dialog and other sound effects, an auditory field

through which the score may be heard at various volumes. As I've argued, the score

for Birth was troublesome in its blatant associations between music and a racist

narrative, more problematic when the score is manipulatively put to images in a way

which evokes emotional and affective responses. In the case of Young, the issues, for
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me, are not around appropriation as much as two new functions of the score provided

by the sound film: that the score can work more unconsciously due to its often

consistent subservience to dialog, and that the potential for more intense affective and

emotional responses lies in sound film's ability to heighten and therefore punctuate

musical hit points during narrative moments with more intensity. As a mainstream

Hollywood studio film created by a leading director and film composer, Young

demonstrates what film music became after the era when films like Birth hosted live

orchestras - the sound field simply involved more; dialog, diegetic music and non-

diegetic music, elements controlled by creative decisions. Young also represents what

film music became much longer after the nickelodeon era - not just music mixed

within a enlarged cinematic field of sound, but also something bodiless, prerecorded,

and uninfluenced by any type of potentially regional musicianship.

In their use of mass-distributed scores played in each market, the two films

depicting their notions of nation, one silent one sound, perform their own act of

musical nationalism in that they represent the inability any longer for there to be

present (or be represented?) any regional musical voice in the form of live musicians'

creative contribution. Film music standardization on a national scale comes into play

very interestingly and affectively with Birth's and Young's representations of national

issues and topics.

What the films do with music can be read along with what else the films do.

For instance, if film music is so emotionally and affectively influential, how else can

we reread these historical cinematic documents as not only rendering notions of nation

but doing so each by way of different and similar uses of musical energy? Their
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statements about nation can be read alongside their uses of music, but importantly in a

way where their music involves much more emotional and affective potential in

conveying their notions about America due to film music's potential to influence the

body. Through their scores the films can reach bodies. Because the body is, as

Massumi states, radically open, affect arguably reflects certain bodily vulnerability

and susceptibility. Audiences can therefore be reconsidered as bodily vulnerable and

susceptible to the films' national messages via their music.

Following the pie contest, diegetic military music announces the transitions to

different contests, pure Americana, like the rail splitting content, and the tug-o-war

between the Hog Water Boys and the Speed Counter Demons. As Lincoln competes in

the events, the plot thickens as two local hoodlums in the crowd begin to harass a

young woman from out of town named Sarah. Her husband Nat and brother in law

Adam defend her as the hoodlums flee saying they'll see them all later. Lincoln

hitches the Speed Counter Demons' end of the tug-o-war rope to a horse drawn

carriage as it runs off, pulling the Hog Water Boys into the mud. The festivities

conclude with a bonfire, a fiery visual for the following scene where the same

hoodlums attack one of the brothers from out of town, a scene underpinned with much

fast-paced dramatic music. The brothers' mother witnesses the scuffle, attempts to

break it up, but a shot is fired, and instantly the dramatic score halts, the music

reflecting boiling tempers on screen ceasing as the fighting does. The mother stops

shocked at the development that someone in the fight has actually died - one of the

hoodlums. Sounds of crickets remain, as well as small, quiet exchanges of dialog

during what becomes, like the previous scoreless scene of the legal settlement in
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Lincoln's office, another small moment in the film where careful removal of the

emotive score accentuates characters' analytical deliberation. Several moments in

Young when the score temporarily falls away are moments where characters

rationalize what's at hand, the mise-en-bande without music reflecting a sort of

emotionless clearing in the soundscape when (as exemplified in a few instances

involving the young lawyer Lincoln), reason must trump feeling. The score

demonstrates this dichotomy often. Music emotionally starts up again with low, tense

strumming in the double bass while the townspeople begin to gather around the death

scene, silence no longer present to render rational behavior but music evoking

irrationality of the drunken crowd as it evolves into a lynch mob. One of mother's

sons has killed a local. The townspeople accost the brothers. The mother admits to

having witnessed the fatal fight, but won't confess which son did it. His silhouette

stable midst the stirring grey of the crowd and their torches, Lincoln all the while

observes the woman's and her sons' accusations from a distance. The mob drunken

with the day's festivities pursues the sons, as the score with brightly strident staccato

chords takes up again the emotionalism of the original brawl with affecting music in

tandem with sounds of the raucous crowd. The lynch mob hurries off in pursuit, and as

Lincoln the deliberator approaches the mother and other remaining relatives the score

opens up with other voices and slows to a calm. The mother asks him "Who are you?"

and he replies, over his comforting musical theme "I'm your lawyer, ma'am."

The ensuing scene when the lynch mob storms the jailhouse where the sons

have been held demonstrates so effectively measures in the mise-en-bande between

sounds of the rioters and sounds of the score. The score, still with striking staccato
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chords in the brass underpinned with steady strings in the lower register, is lower in

volume than the noise of the shouting, commanding, demanding crowd and pounding

of their battering ram on the jailhouse. Total cacophony reflects their riotousness. The

music is not as loud as the noise of the mob but together intensify as the mise-en-

bande in this scene reflects maximum amplification, communicating the frenzy of the

mob's assault, but also resulting in the film's assault in its variance in volume and

affective influence when its volubility peaks, its amplitude tops out, the mob scene so

loud with the score and the riot, it figuratively assails the body, the scene not only

suggesting the emotion on screen but with its sonic influence affectively materializing

it.

Enter Lincoln immediately. The mob about to battle ram the jailhouse door, he

shouts out about sound. "Hey! Hold on! Listen to me! Put down that pole and listen to

me! Put down that pole and listen to me! By Jing, I said listen to me! By Jing you

WILL!" Immediately as Lincoln kicks back the ram with his foot, the score stops, the

battling ram an emblem for the score which falls away as the pole is set down. The

crowd hesitantly stands down as the cacophony of their yelling ceases. "We seem to

lose our heads in times like this," Lincoln explains to the over-emotionalized crowd.

But why no music to underscore Lincoln's speech to the mob? Tressa Brennan's

notion of social transmission of affect not only applies to this mob scene but the film's

score to potentially render it. Affective influence of the film's music ceases when it

stops, which stops right when the mob does, the score therefore reflecting the mob's

contagiousness among one another. Lincoln expresses to the crowd that they may be

right, that the brothers inside the Sangamon County Jail may be guilty, but declares to
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them that they must receive a fair trial, in which he will serve as their council. His

speech to the finally focused mob could've been scored with affect generating music,

sappy and swooning, like so many other scenes in Young. But Lincoln's speech

directly speaks to affective contagion, and therefore, because the speech goes

scoreless, it represents a moment in the film without any infectious music while it

speaks to the social transmission of affect, to contagion, the film in content addressing

its own form. Even as the crowd turns away and departs, leaving Lincoln solely on the

front steps of the jailhouse, there is still no score, only the sound of their shuffling

footsteps. The scoreless scene concludes with the image of Lincoln alone with the

battering ram left on the steps of the jailhouse stairs, the lowered battering ram a

visual metaphor for the film's score, a tool placed on the ground no longer being used

much like the film music, too, has been put down in place of what is otherwise the

film's raison d'etre: Lincoln's composed levelheadedness, his calmness and coolness

among what are otherwise citizens quick to judge and fast to act.

Scenes where music completely falls out of the mise-en-bande can be read in

ways where their content renders their auditory form. Another interesting point about

the film is the otherwise abundance of music, underscoring so many other scenes and

transitions so fully. An example is a montage soon after the mob scene when Lincoln

prepares to attend a ball held by the town's elite for which Lincoln receives an invite

from Mary Todd. Lilting dance music accompanies his receipt of the invitation,

cutting to a shot of him shining his shoes, cutting to a shot of him trimming his hair all

in preparation for the event, where upon entering the party, the same dance music

carries over, but shifts from non-diegetic orchestral instrumentation to the band
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producing diegetic music at the ball. Another shift in music, this time within the

diegetic dance music at the party, when Lincoln dances with Mary Todd, reveals

Lincoln's lack of dancing skills when the song shifts in time signature from a % waltz

to 2/4, a shift in feel catching Lincoln off guard. He clearly looks over to the band off

screen. Both examples of musical nuance of the film (the shift from non-diegetic

music to diegetic music, and then the subtle change in time signature in the diegetic

music) just couldn't have been done during the nickelodeon period as both are purely

a function of diegetic music the sound era provides. A nickelodeon accompanist could

have played a waltz to accompany the dancing scene but the reaction of Lincoln to

slight musical change coming from the diegesis is fully realized because the mise-en-

bande of the sound film provides the ability to shift between the two registers more

effectively as well as import the diegesis with musical detail. A blatant shift between

diegetic music and non-deigetic music occurs when Mary Todd invites Lincoln out to

the balcony to talk. Once he sees the moonlit river, becoming wholly preoccupied by it

without saying a word to Mary, the earlier theme from scenes with Ann Hathaway

recurs, as it will throughout the film when Lincoln is near the river, music

representative of his emotional remembrance of his past love. Lincoln is revealed to us

through two musical sources provided by the sound film.

The transition from diegetic music to non-diegetic score happens in reverse

during the following scene when the same orchestral theme representing his loss

accompanies Lincoln riding his mule by the river. His sidekick, Nathan, says of

Lincoln's preoccupation "Abe, you sure do love that river don't you. Never saw a man

like you look at a river like you do. Folks would think it was a pretty woman or
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something, the way you carry on." Immediately, the non-diegetic score stops and

Lincoln produces a Jew's-harp. This shift to diegetic music combines interesting

ethnic and regional aspects of music Lincoln begins to play, most obviously the

reference in the instrument's name, but also what we learn is the riders' choice of

southern tune.

Nate: How come they call that thing you're playing a Jew's-

harp?

Lincoln: It comes down from David's harp in the Bible.

Nate: I don't want to say nothing against the Bible, but those

people back there, sure had funny taste in music.

Lincoln: (begins playing the rhythm to "Dixie")

Nate: What's that tune your playing?

Lincoln's own ironic playing of "Dixie" on a Jew's-harp, a regional theme song of the

south played on a instrument representing a group among others the south would

discriminate against, is not an irony afforded the even the film composer in this case

but the actual on-screen hero. In a silent film situation, the narrative moment would've

been open for an accompanist to play with, but here, with Lincoln as musician, the

film affords cultural and musical commentary to the screen, no longer any live

musical interpreter who could produce musical ironies on the fly and receive credit for

it with public acknowledgement. The sound film assigns Lincoln another laudable

trait, another aptitude, that of musical wit, which was once a tool in the silent film

accompanist's toolbox, yet here is afforded, in this case, the on screen star, revealing a

huge shift in musical agency from local entertainers not just to filmmakers but the
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further shift INTO the diegesis, musical critique now afforded the protagonist.

Arguably, the talent of film accompanists to perform musical puns, jokes, and codes

isn't altogether lost when an on screen hero performs something similar, an

acknowledgement of ironic uses of film music irony fully planned then recorded, still

witty but not improvised, not a live musician choosing to do it in a fluid, organic

approach previous cinematic social settings invited. Nate continues:

Nate: What's that tune you're playing?

Lincoln: Don't know. Catchy, though.

Here "catchy" perhaps speaks to Nate's next reply to Lincoln: "Makes you want to

march. Or something." To speak of music's affective influence, Nate says it makes

him want to march, a description not of martial movement of bodies, but that the

music makes him want to march, speaking directly to its potential to influence bodily

movements.27 Nate begins to whistle "Dixie," Abe articulating its rhythm on the

Jew's-harp. This scene speaks to music's affective influence but ironically through a

cross-cultural juxtaposition of musical material and instrumentation making this

instance of diegetic music so interesting in its foreshadowing of Lincolns' political

achievements leading the victory over the south in the Civil War. As such, it

represents the unique ability of the sound film to transfer musical commentary into the

diegesis from what exclusively were non-diegetic sources, expanding the sources from

which music commentary could occur to include the film composer or even the film

star, but no longer any live musical improvisational agent who at an earlier point in

27
Why refer to music as "catchy?" Is there an affective explanation for this? Is music catchy because we
somehow catch its energy or rhythm?
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film history had sole jurisdiction over musical critique the evolution of the sound film

striped away from live musicians and from the organic social space of the theater

within which the commentary could generate. Whether diegetic or non-diegetic film

music, in the sound film both come from the same predefined, preplanned,

predesigned, and prerecorded source, the soundtrack, the results of which are film

music that can affectively influence audiences, but film music also no longer germane

to a social space animated by live musical play. Musical critique is now afforded the

film, not any representative of whatever market it's screened in, nor anyone physically

present. This makes Young a film ironically about jurisprudence it doesn't itself

necessarily represent compared to its silent predecessors, due to its full containment of

music as a sound film. In a film about weighing both sides, hearing people out, as a

sound film it somewhat unfortunately illustrates what evolution to sound did, namely

no longer incorporate sounds independently coming from other sources, a notion

which runs antithetical to one of the film's messages.

In a sentimental scene when Lincoln sits on the porch of the accused family's

cabin, he shares with them details of his biography as a youth in Kentucky, his

growing up in Illinois in a cabin just like theirs, and his loss of a loved one just about

the age of one of their daughters, and during this scene, the music, in combination

with the dialog, peaks up and down in volume, the score underpinning Lincoln's

statements but punctuating the spaces in between his sentences and phrases with

climbs in the woodwinds, or sustained chords in the strings. This touch and go

28
There are exceptions to this however in the same scene, especially when Lincoln asks the mother
"Mrs. Clay, which one of your boys killed Scrub White?" at which point the score punctuates a minor
chord in unison with Lincoln's question to the distressed mother. However, the scene more often
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between the music and the dialog reflect the intricate design of sound in this scene

through its measured proportionality between music and dialog, a trait of the sound

film impossible with the silent film, resulting in what I argue is not only the design of

music for a national audience but the whole auditory field within which music is but a

component. This capacity of the sound film to mix sounds of music and dialog (and

sound effects) together allows for the intricate customization of film music in part due

to the capacity to create the degree of its presence. Young is charged with spikes in the

soundtrack where the score heightens in volume over other sounds, with affectively

stimulating results when the music intensifies beyond its often subdued volume, the

score becoming not just a musical tool with emotional and affective influence, but a

newly voluble tool in that the sound mix may quietly place the music just so, or really

foreground it with sudden rises in amplitude, making the film about Lincoln partially

reflective of its own content about levelheadedness, infectivity, and charges. The

dichotomy between emotional scenes scored to the hilt one the one hand, and scoreless

scenes of careful, reasonable deliberation on the other is most accentuated during the

actual court trial, a twenty minute scene during which there is no music at all (there's

too much reasoning to be had). Such contrast between emotion and reason is visually

rendered at the conclusion of the porch scene. Busy, intersecting lines of the log cabin

behind her frame the emotionally vexed Mrs. Clay, while Lincoln, representing less

emotional deliberation, stands against an open sky rendering relaxed clarity.

reflects an ebb and flow between dialog and music whereby certain musical phrases occur in between
characters' verbal exchanges.
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Sounds of the long courtroom sequence consist of the gavel, the legal speak

of judge and council, and vocal disruptions of the courtroom. No music. "Order!

Order" shouts the judge. If this scene had been in a silent film, music would have been

the predominant means of communicating the narrative. Also, if it were a silent film,

music would have occurred at some point during the twenty minute courtroom

sequence (if not run the duration of the entire film predominantly as the only supply of

sound). But here, in the legal sequence of a sound film, there is no music whatsoever.

Why no score in a long scene rendering law, justice, and reason on behalf of the court

system? The sound film in this case reflects not only full jurisdiction over music apart

from any live improvisational musicianship, it contains zero music during a scene that

in the silent era would have been, in all likelihood (since it is climatic and central in

the arc of the film's narrative of Lincoln) accompanied. The ability of the sound film

to completely drop out music reflects not just control of music, but the capacity to

punctuate narrative moments by leaving them un-scored, not to make silence

meaningful per se, but musiclessness meaningful. What is the relevance, in the case of

this court scene, of there being no music? The Birth of a Nation (if we go back to the

future) contains scenes rendering significant, legal historical moments of Lincoln in

chambers signing various documents surrounding the Civil War. These are all scored.

The silent film context demanded such. What are the implications of rendering such

historical legal moments with music or without music, and since these are filmic

renderings of history, what are the effects of underpinning them with the score or

leaving them scoreless? In silent film, music accompanies such history, yet the mise-

en-bande expanded by the sound film not only no longer requires constant film
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accompaniment, it allows for the rendering of history with or without music. Silent

film involved the potential for live musicians to score on the spot. Sound film places

all the potential control and influence in the film and whether there be music in certain

scenes at all. Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln as a mainstream Hollywood production

represents the evolution of the medium to the point where music is in the studios'

hands, yes, but also when music is or isn't heard. The film reflects new measures of

control over what music belongs, but when there be music during the narrative.

" Why don't Ijust call you Jack-Cass. "

In the dramatic courtroom sequence, Lincoln's wit and wordplay cause vocal

eruptions, laughter in a court of law. Lincoln cross examines the witness Deputy J.

Percy Cass about, among other things, why he punctuates his name, "Why not John P.

Cass? Or J.P. Cass? Or why not Jack P. Cass? Do you have something to hide?"

Lincoln's wordplay, his recoding of the witness's name concludes with a great joke to

the delight of the whole courtroom, "Why don't I just call you Jack-Cass." The

opposing lawyer gives his all to prevent Lincoln from earning such public credibility,

"I object to this ridiculous line of questioning! Mr. Lincoln's clownishness may win

him a laugh from his friends, but I ensure him, his entire game of buffoonery is lost on

this intelligent jury!" The questioning of the witness quietly recommences, and the

judge, in a matter of moments, sitting up from his seat up at the bench, leans over to

the stenographer and says, "Jack Cass! I just got it!", a lapse in the judge which

produces another loud outbreak of laughter from the jury, the judge himself now in on

the joke and laughing too at defense council. In the sacrosanct space of the courtroom
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where the judge himself otherwise barks out for decorum and silence, tomfoolery is

allotted Lincoln, who makes the jury roar with amusement and, figuratively and

phonetically, makes a jackass out of the witness, the quietude of the court erupting

twice with the joke about the deputy's name. To refer back to Chapter Two's claims

about the nickelodeon era, this scene represents play within a controlled setting

jackass music used to enact at the hands of the musical improviser, but here at the

hands of the hero of the film, a talent of wit now scripted, and a reflection of stretching

of the rules now afforded the screen character, and not a musician, no longer fun

poked at authority coming from outside the diegesis, but an actual feature of the

diegesis. Lincoln states "Well Mr. Cass, I reckon we can let all you said go in [the

court record], that we've heard from my side" (my emphasis). The court, bench, and

witness stand like a stage host a performance complete with audience of jury and

attendees, Lincoln directing the joking and outbreaks of laughter with his funniness, a

silent film within a sound film.

The twenty minute court scene in Young has no music, but has audible forms

of social disruption and interference which in terms of film sound represents more

how silent film music could operate. The court scene concludes, segueing into two

back-to-back scenes with non-diegetic music, first in the jail cell where relatives sing

and play banjo for the accused, then when Lincoln sits pensively playing his Jew's-

harp. In these two quick scenes, music appears again but in the diegesis, music as a

fixture within the narrative characters use themselves to sooth themselves, whereby

affect isn't just produced by the score for the audience, but music providing calmness

for characters they produce, a function of music projected into the narrative, affective
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and emotional reactions not produced by the score as much as produced within the

narrative, communicating characters' melancholy in a much more associative way

because the audience can hear what the characters hear resulting in something shared,

much different in quality from the score communicating character's emotions

provided only for the audience, in a way that's detached from the diegesis. The sound

film, through providing the dual usage of both non-diegetic score and diegetic music,

enables the audience to share affective music with characters, but also identify with

emotions through music provided only for them and not the characters, the dual usage

of music different from silent film practices in that identifying with characters can

occur on a two auditory levels. Does diegetic music allow audiences to be a part of

affective circulation among characters on screen? Does non-diegetic music perhaps

allows characters a way out of the screen, because music emotionally rendering them

makes them come to life? In the audience?

The court drama over, the sons released, the crowd cheering, Young Mr.

Lincoln ends with "Battle Hymn of the Republic", as Lincoln on foot reaches the crest

of a hill. The finale conjoins the patriotic hymn with sounds of thunder and lightning

and rain, fading away from Lincoln to images of the Lincoln memorial, the film

making its own homage to the American hero, but stormily so, foreshadowing

Lincoln's political future where he'll be vexed over the direction of the divided

country, the concluding scene of the film a crafty juxtaposition of rousing music with

stormy sounds. Birth of a Nation used "Battle Hymn of the Republic," too, as were

other pieces of source music in the Ford film also in the Griffith film (another example

being "Dixie"). An obvious but significant distinction to make between the two
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blockbusters is that one film was silent (the patriotic tunes produced by live

musicians), and the other was a sound film where the music is deliberately measured

in and out of the auditory field, along with other sound elements like dialog and sound

effects. In both cases, though, music gets appropriated for historical figures and

historical moments, creating musical associations between certain traditional music

and narrative whereby in each case, whether the score was mass- distributed in the

case of Briel's score for Griffith's blockbuster, or mass-distributed in the form of

Newman's recording, they represent a national reach of music through distribution

that meant a certain sameness between music and narrative on a national level,

whereby prior to standardization, resident musicians often freely supplied what they

chose, arguably with more organic results, with the potential to turn any film narrative,

whether about Lincoln or not, into something local, collaborative, social and

participatory.

William Darby in "Musical Links in 'Young Mr. Lincoln,' 'My Darling

Clementine,' and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance'" traces certain songs used in

each of Ford's films arguing that music in later films refers back to the same music

used in earlier pictures (namely, the use of "Cuckoo Waltz" first in Young Mr.

Lincoln and then in subsequent films). Although Darby provides in depth readings of

the score in certain sequences of Young, his argument that some of the same music

used in all three Ford history films enable the films to refer to one another,

exemplifying for him "much more critical insight" on behalf of the director and the

film composer (Darby 32), doesn't really fully explore what those critical insights may

be as much as point out they may exist. Although an interesting observation that such
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musical links may exist in Ford's oeuvre, a more meaningful one, in my opinion, is

how Ford's film portraying Lincoln shares musical similarities with a predecessor,

another blockbuster, but one from outside his oeuvre, one from the silent era,

Griffith's Birth, which, as I pointed out, associates music with racist content making

music actually emotively and troublesomely central to its racist reconstruction. The

two films together demonstrate a set of cultural artifacts both rendering Lincoln as

well as similar musical applications in that they share some of the same music. This is

to take Darby's argument and not just remain within Ford's work with regard to

similar uses of music, but to look to predecessors which not only rendered Lincoln on

screen but similar musical associations to historical content as well. This opens up this

notion of similar music practices beyond just what's in Ford's work to other films

about nation which had national impact. Both films implement emotive music and as a

duo represent the evolution from silent film to sound film, and from the live orchestral

score to the prerecorded soundtrack. But they also reflect, despite the change in

format, some of the same music ("Dixie," "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and more).

This is all to say that not only does one film instill associations between music and

American history, but so does another, showcasing the same historical figure, arguably

supplying similar associations, a certain perpetuation of musical associations in the

films. Ford's film doesn't necessarily respond to Griffith's, nor is it offensive like

Griffith's, but perhaps decades later it carries over part of Birth's musical framework

where patriotic hymns are paired with patriotic figures, Griffith's film not carrying

over its offensive associations as much as its sense of nation constructed with music of

or from the nation, patriotic music as a cinematic device in filmmaking about political
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Americana. In both cases, though, their immense popularity reflects the potential for

cinematic production to establish associations between music and history on a national

scale. The evolution of film disengaged local musical input, and since mass production

meant the same score was distributed nation-wide, film music became a component

with national and affective significance, arguably because it is both national and

affective. The evolution of film brought emotive music increasingly specified and

widely distributed.

John Ford himself said "Generally, I hate music in pictures - a little now and

then, at the end and at the start" (as quoted in Darby 30), but Young doesn't reflect his

opinion whatsoever because, with the exception of the twenty minute court scene

which goes un-scored for reasons I've argued, his film is full of music, and full of

sound, the mise-en-bande becoming something so complex that it itself, like the visual

mise-en-scene, can be thoroughly analyzed. The score doesn't happen "a little now

and then" - it won't relent at times. And as a film stereotypical of mainstream

filmmaking and the studio system, Young exemplifies mainstream film music

practices at that time, an evolution of practices away from a live musical commentator,

then away from live bodies of musicians at all, towards complete control over what is

heard via prerecorded material and sound mixes within which even precise volume of

that music, within a larger mise-en-bande, is manipulated. Throughout these industrial

shifts, film music practices changed, and as a result so too did the potential for film

music to impact the body differently, no longer film music with any performative

aspect in terms of Brennan's notion of affect as social transmission, but with

increasing calculation over musical content as well as the impact with the sound film's
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new technological terrain of the mise-en-bande whereby creating hit points and

spiking volume at certain narrative moments becomes standard.

I argue that it is important to reconsider these films in terms of their music not

only because music, as something emotive, is central to their reconstruction of

American history, but they themselves come to represent a history of nationwide

emotive production. They each render a sense of nation, but become a sense of nation,

too. I argue that these films should be reconsidered in terms of their music not just

because of what their music actually is but also because of what their music can do,

emotionally and affectively influence the body on what was, both with film's

evolution and popularity, an increasingly national (nationalizing?) scale. If these films

arguably are cinematic works of significance, their scores as emotive and

physiologically influential components of them should be considered not only in terms

of the films' importance, but as an active, powerful component of the national

narratives they reconstruct and therefore how those cinematic reconstructions can be

felt. To study their music is to study their potential for actual emotional, affective and

physiological effect, something I think is crucial to consider when the films as

narratives depicting American history have the capacity through music not only to

depict America but turn it into something registered on the body, especially when

those depictions can be so unpleasant, and wrong, while so driven by music which can

implicate the body within those wrongful reconstructions perpetuating stereotypes

precisely because music is so expressive and so animating.

A filmmaker with national connotations himself, Sergei Eisenstein praised

Ford's film about Lincoln specifically because of its harmonizing qualities he explains
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were so important during the 1930s and 40s during which time war ravaged nations on

an international scale. In his essay "Mr. Lincoln by Mr. Ford," Eisenstein explains "of

all American films made up to now, this is the film that I wish, most of all, to have

made" because of what he argues is its "astonishing harmony of all its component

parts, a really amazing harmony as a whole" (Eisenstein "Mr. Lincoln" 12). He

cherishes Ford's film because of its contrast to "discordant" times from within which

it comes, and it comes to represent for him a realization of certain ideals in "active

opposition to our discordant times, a force to help people hope for peace, to send

representative to conferences, to form national bodies, and to unite nations together"

(Ibid 13). Eisenstein's enthusiastic reception of the film continually speaks about how

successfully the film visually brings Lincoln "to life": Fonda's calm face, the actor's

well-casted lankiness, and even goes on about how well the film captures Lincoln's

"gaze" that Eisenstein explains is a "gaze that doesn't permit the least trifle to obscure

the great meaning of all that stands beyond life's trifles, errors, blunders, sins, crimes

- the evils of conditions and habits, all the accepted evils that must be changed for the

sake of man" (Ibid 25). The most charming tribute he pays to the films visuals is his

Eisenstein was at one point employed to help foster national harmony. This sentiment of national
harmony Eisenstein shared with another Russian filmmaker, Dziga Vertov, whose film Enthusiasm!, the
first Russian sound film, attempted to unify, to bring together the state through depicting disparate
urban/industrial and bucolic/agricultural locations using montage, as well as cross-cutting sounds of
each of the forms of production with visuals of the other (sounds of factories to images of wheat
production, or folksongs of field workers with images of steel production). Although Eisenstein's films
of historic Russian political figures, like Ivan the Terrible and Alexander Nevsky, meant to help unify or
harmonize Russia in the face of national and international struggles during the time they were released,
as narrative films they didn't quite achieve "harmony" in comparison to Vertov's non-narrative films,
especially Enthusiasm!, where harmony is more fully realized through sound, precisely because of
Vertov's actual layering together of sounds of the state. This was unprecedented during his time, and, as
depicted in its title, the film had a goal of energizing audiences with sound and music central to its
national agenda. A whole other dissertation could be written about sound in twentieth century soviet
cinema.
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likening of images of the tall and lanky Lincoln to a telegraph pole, a visual image but

one that also represents newly modern transmissions of sound. But Eisenstein, a

theorist so excited about the potential of sound film, hardly dwells on the sounds of

Young Mr. Lincoln as potentially constitutive of the harmony he claims it represents.

Recollecting his own youthful education when he learned about Lincoln, Eisenstein

cites Walt Whitman's firsthand accounts of seeing Lincoln, expressing with great

emphasis what it sounded like:

I shall not easily forget the first time I ever saw Abraham

Lincoln [...] The broad spaces, sidewalks, and streets in the

neighborhood, and for some distance, were crowded with solid masses

of people, many thousands. The omnibuses and other vehicles had all

been turn'd off, leaving an unusual hush in that busy part of the city [..

.] A tall figure steppe'd out of the centre of these barouches, paused

leisurely on the sidewalk, look'd up at the granite walls and looming

architecture of the grand old hotel - then, after a relieving stretch of

arms and legs, turn'd round for over a minute to slowly and good-

humoredly scan the appearance of the vast and silent crowds. There

were no speeches - no compliments - no welcome - as far as I could

hear, not a word was said. Still much anxiety was conceal'd in that

quiet. Cautious persons had fear'd some mark'd insult or indignity to

the President-elect - for he possess'd no personal popularity at all in

New York City, and very little political. But it was evidently tacitly

agreed that if the few political supporters of Mr. Lincoln present would
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entirely abstain from any demonstration on their side, the immense

majority, who were anything but supporters, would abstain on their side

also. The result was a sulky, unbroken silence, such as certainly never

before characterized so great a New York crowd. (Whitman as quoted

in Eisenstein 22)

Whitman continues to describe how raucous New York crowds were when other

political figures "native and foreign" arrived at the same location, "all that

indescribable human roar and magnetism, unlike any sound in the universe - the glad

exhausted thunder-shouts of countless unloos'd throats of men! But on this occasion,

not a voice - not a sound" (Ibid 22). In an article by a filmmaker and theorist so

enthusiastic about the potential of the sound film, the only significance attributed to

sound comes from the Whitman passages he cites. The poet is so wonderfully

descriptive of how full of meaning sound around Lincoln was in the example of his

arrival at the Astor House in New York City. Silence represented ambivalence about

the President-Elect, whereas noise commonly accompanied arrivals of other

politicians. Although Eisenstein includes Whitman's detailed account about silence

and sound as they pertained to Lincoln, Eisenstein doesn't do the same for the film

he's celebrating. The soundtrack goes completely untreated. For all the optimism,

unity and harmony he argues the film about Lincoln represents for the world

community at that time, he doesn't consider whether its music harmoniously renders

Lincoln, or whether it operates as an acoustic element within a larger harmonized

reconstruction, or any number of claims he could've made about the soundtrack in

terms of its function within his thesis. Young's soundtrack can be considered not only
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as one of many working parts in harmony in the film, it could be considered elemental

to that harmony and optimism Eisenstein argued the film illustrates. He says "I first

saw this film on the eve of world war" (Ibid 25) (another reference like the telegraph

pole revealing a newly modernized, mechanized world), and he strongly and

optimistically felt it illustrated what he hoped national and international forces would

emulate as something united in its interrelating parts. How does the film's soundtrack

operate in terms of Eisenstein's thesis? For one, with its emotive and affective

qualities music helps to communicate an understanding of the lanky, levelheaded,

optimistic legal scholar turned politician hailing from Illinois.

* * *

iTunes Essentials, a section of the digital music database where Apple offers

compilations of songs suited for events, activities, locations, moods and combinations

therein provides certain American, political selections like "Washington, D.C.,"

"President's Day," "Election Day." One mix is tailored for a specific election and

presidency, "Hope and Faith":

Welcome to the beginning of a new era in the US - Barak Obama's

history-making win is really a victory for all those who keep the faith

and firmly believe that people have the power to make a change. John

Lennon was one of rock'n'roll's most determined dreamers, and the

better world he dared to "imagine" may finally be within our grasp.

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Obama's goose-bump inducing victory speech on election night

referenced Sam Cooke's "Change is Gonna Come" (my emphasis)

Some of the advertising copy for this iTunes Essentials title speaks to affect.

Apple released "Hope and Faith" December 16, 2008 in four categories: "The

Basics," "Next Steps," "Deep Cuts," and "Complete Set." Advertising copy for "The

Basic" describes Obama's own musical references in speeches, but affective reactions

to that historic night he spoke. We begin to see, like in past cinematic reconstructions

of American presidents, how music operates not only as something integral to

narrative but how admixtures of political narrative, soundtrack and affect come

together with listeners' participation. Music can score the political moment, iTunes as

a film music store blending notions of soundtrack and feeling.

Copy reads "if you're pushing for progress, you've got to plant your feet as

firmly as our 44th President, face the obstacles head-on, and sing along with Tom

Petty's gutsy promise to persevere 'I Won't Back Down.'" With each category, the

advertising copy keeps introducing the next, "Get fully immersed in the feeling of

history happening in front of you, in Deep Cuts" (my emphasis). What is the feeling of

history! The copy for "Deep Cuts" reads in full:

The unprecedented arrival of Barak Obama brings with it a. feeling that

it's not OK, but vital to dream big. That confidence in the currency of

hope finds its enthusiastic echo in Richie Havens' acoustic reinvention

of "Here Comes the Sun." The heady cocktail of conviction and

optimism the U.S. is enjoying as it moves ahead feels just right

alongside the sunny glow of the Zombies British Invasion flashlight-

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on-the-future "This Will Be Our Year." And the classic-rock-meets-

R&B forward motion of Eric Clapton's Babyface-produced blockbuster

"Change the World" mirrors the way we'll all come together in

Obama's America to bring about a bold new vision, (my emphasis)

To discuss Apple's musical contextualization of the President Obama is not to belittle

in any way music's true inspirational function in whatever associations citizens have

made or will make between their personal musical libraries and the freshly-invigorated

political moment. But not to consider closely Apple's associations between our new

political moment, music and feeling is to ignore specific notions between what Apple

offers as accompaniment for our new national context and past cinematic production.

"Call it the Obama effect" begins the advertising copy for final category of

"Hope and Change" on iTunes Essentials, a mix of seventy five songs:

Call it the Obama effect - the feeling that we're living in times we'll

tell our grandchildren about; despite all the current crises, we're

looking at [not listening to?] a golden moment we can call our very

own. These are the tunes that move to the same beat of positive change

that's in the hearts of Americans on the eve of this new era. From the

giddy groove-pop of Sting's "Brand New Day" to the soulful bump of

McFaddin and Whitehead's driven-and-determined "Ain't No Stopping

Us Now," this is the soundtrackfor the new America we're about to

usher in, with the eyes-on-the-prize guidance of our new commander-

in-chief. Tune into the sound of a dream long deferred that's finally
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coming into focus. In other words, 'It's been a long time coming, but a

change is gonna come' (my emphasis)

The copy borrows from Langston Hughes' famous poem but refers to its sound. To

bring together statements like "this is the soundtrack for the new America" with

statements like "the Obama effect - the feeling that we're living..." reveals to my

mind how Apple is operating within film music operations long instilled, associating

soundtrack and feeling, musical associations between the extraordinary new President

and affect, "goose-bumps," not the Obama effect as the copy reads, as much as the

Obama AFFECT, meaning the physiological sensation on the skin, not just due to the

truly meaningful historical events happening in front of us, but those sensations as

production on behalf of associations provided between momentous America history

and music. Cynically, it's hard not to question whether Apple makes this significant

moment in American history somewhat trivial in its portrayal of feeling and the new

political moment (which I myself joyously felt, and can feel). Much like the

beginnings of film music standardization, do music associations become more

programmatic, with the music for these times iTunes "suggests?" Through its vastness

of suggestions within its four categories (as if by simply suggesting more, I will find

something appropriate for me), iTunes doesn't just suggest but actually declares "This

is the soundtrack", both a somewhat over-determined sense of accompaniment but

with precise music it claims is fitting. Why no Philip Glass on that list?

The "Hope and Faith" mixes on iTunes aren't the only relevant instances of

film music I argue are around the new energizing presidency. As the next chapter

explores iTunes more fully as a type of cinematic operative, I will return to the notion
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of the soundtrack with regard to the Obama presidency by looking particularly at two

instances where live performing bodies of musicians reflect notions of the film score,

but notions of accompaniment as well. Two examples where the musicians' bodies

appear during Obama's inauguration are the HBO event the day before the

inauguration where musicians performed live for masses (in front of the Lincoln

memorial), and the musical interlude composed by John Williams for the inauguration,

during which the musician's body, I argue, not only operates as marker for diversity

but does so specifically within a film music context.

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Chapter Six:

Contemporary Film Music Play: YouTube, iTunes, and Scoring Silent Film Live

Introduction

In this chapter I look at how three current phenomena of film music

customization reflect a larger twentieth century industrial film music history. I argue

that the three trends, each in different ways, represent contemporary examples of the

influence of past cinematic production. The expanse of auditory play on

YouTube.com, the proliferation of the iPod, and the trend of rescoring classic films,

especially live, can be seen as examples of responses to commoditized and

homogenized film music. YouTube.com enables audiences to rearrange audiovisual

correspondences established by industry; iPods enable mobile bodies to score any

given moment and location with music from a virtually continual music library; and

finally, the trend of rescoring classic films enables musicians to approach film music

in their own way. These three phenomena seemingly revise listeners' relationship to

industry. What once were closed musical practices more and more informed by culture

industry on a massive scale shift today towards users', musicians', or audiences'

renewed participation opened up by musical agency.

The three phenomena may or may not represent true liberation from auditory

subjectification the film industry arguably established: consider how film trailers

rescored and reedited on YouTube.com still revert to film music stereotypes; how iPod

culture still simply positions music as accompaniment for activity X; and how the act

of rescoring classic film can tend to reinforce, not critique, bygone musical styles and

traditions, reviving old practices rather than doing something new. I will present these
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three phenomena in this chapter as examples of film music play, but also question

whether each really represents liberation from auditory subjectification, true

departures away from historical formations of power, or whether they simply remain

within domains established by cinematic history without really exercising radical

revision, or rather reaudition.

This chapter also addresses signs that Adorno's culture industry is in operation,

especially now in our contemporary moment, and what it means in terms of the

extension of previously-conceived film music discipline as established by twentieth

century mainstream filmmaking. This chapter also considers the film musician's body.

Aspects of the nickelodeon era return with the current phenomenon of musicians

performing their own scores to silent film in a live context again, as bodies of film

audiences and film musicians come back into circulation. I will consider theories of

musical performance of Edward Said and Roland Barthes in order to argue that when

the film musician's body returns to the social space, so does a reinstallation of

transmission of affect between bodies the evolution of film uninstalled. Said and

Barthes prioritize, in fact celebrate live aspects of musical performance because of

their fleetingness and ephemeral quality, which, I will argue with them, have the

potential reinvigorate something increasingly lost in our more and more atomizing

pre-recorded music culture.

"Meet Jack Torrance ":

Trend 1 .Trailer Play on YouTube.com

There is a long history of audiences revising texts from popular culture. As

early as the 1970s, female fans have played with clips of "Star Trek" to accentuate
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homoerotic subplots and subtexts. Constance Penley studies fandom production of

"slash" material like "S/K," fiction or artwork rendering the homoerotic relationship

of Spock and Captain Kirk. "Star Trek" fandom recreates the sci-fi narrative in

response to the culture industry providing it; fandom reconstructs with pieces it has

been given, a form of autonomy. Penley explains that female-generated underground

pornography of S/K signifies a "marginal singularity" of democratized females who in

producing "guerilla erotics" have created:

both a unique, hybridized genre that ingeniously blends romance,

pornography, and Utopian science fiction [through which] women can

manipulate the products of mass-produced culture . . . They are not just

reading, viewing, or consuming in tactical ways that offer fleeting

moments of resistance while watching TV . . . They are producing not

just intermittent, cobbled together acts but real products. (Penley 135 —

36)

Penley explains that such fandom products "mimic and mock those of the industry

they are 'borrowing' from while offering pleasures found lacking in the original

products" (Penley 139). But I argue that most fandom production is predominantly

visual and doesn't play necessarily in auditory ways with the culture industry's

original content. In fact, Penley explains the ocular fixation seemingly busy within

S/K fandom and the bulk of S/K fandom production is either literary or visual.

One exception is what Penly explains is a small community of fans producing S/K music videos of
"Star Trek" footage with their favorite songs (called "songtapes"). Penley explains that an independent
quality of slasher fandom is its use of everyday technology and that one may participate without access
to advanced technologies. Most fans have had limited accessibility to multiple VCRs and editing
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The independent qualities of S/K fandom culture are predominately visual and

not auditory ones. The extent to which fandom culture neglects to recycle not dialog

but sounds or music of "Star Trek" shows both its visual preoccupations as well as an

unexplored capacity of the eroticism of sound, and even more specifically, the

possibility of homoerotic sounds of "Star Trek's" S/K subtext. The reuse of mass-

produced cultural products in the form of "Star Trek" slasher fandom is primarily

visual in part because of media through which the community chooses to work,

reflecting its efforts to maintain an underground aesthetic. Although the fiction, poetry

and drawings may have acoustic properties, the fandom doesn't specifically attend to

the series' sound as remnants for play, and therefore doesn't critique its sound or

explore homoeroticism in the sound of "Star Trek."

Trailer play, on the other hand, is auditory play. YouTube.com is an auditory

technology. Its platform enables masses to share, circulate, communicate, offer,

expose and critique sound in an unprecedented way. YouTube.com, like "Star Trek"

fandom, empowers audiences in this regard. Anonymous individuals post film trailers

rescored with new music, what I want to call "trailer play." Trailer play shows the fun

equipment resulting in a lack of auditory-based fandom like songtapes. Instead, the bulk of slasher
products began as fiction, poetry or graphic art.
Further, the visual appearance of fandom totally preoccupies publishers of fanzines. Publishers
debate whether to visually advance the look of the material (making it more glossy and sophisticated),
or to hang on to the underground look of the fanzine, even to the extent of a visual sense of packaging
in which it is mailed, a sensationalized visualization of fandom content not only in its publication but
even in its packaging (Penley 141). To leave the fanzines "looking slightly tacky to give them that
illegitimate pornographic cast" offers slash fan culture "the shared delight in the visual shock value of
the zines" (Penley 141). As a result of optic concerns, "deliberate decisions have been made to keep the
technology 'appropriate,' unintimidating, accessible, and hence democratic" (Penley 141). So not just
fandom but means of its creation both render users' independent play with bits of the culture industry's
material.
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to be had with film music conventions apparent in demonstrations of individuals'

creative agency in the digital age, showing how embedded film music conventions are

and the extent to which individuals want to comment on them. A close reading of an

example of trailer play on youtube.com called "Shining"

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfout_rgPSA), based on Stanley Kubrick's horror

classic The Shining, comments on film music conventions. The trailer isn't for a

horror film anymore - The Shining becomes a family film. Its creator demonstrates

through thier musical decisions that in manipulating film music alone, an individual

can transform a text into something entirely different. Trailer play reveals film music's

formative history, its capacity to manipulate (and be manipulated), as well as its

determining, yet transformative qualities.

The trailer opens with the sound of a cheesy male voice so typical to film

trailers: "Meet Jack Torrance. He's a writer looking for inspiration." We see Jack

Nicholson applying for his job at the Overlook Hotel and shots of him dancing around

edited to make him out to be a decent guy: sympathetic: a struggling writer. Corny,

quirky, upbeat orchestral music also stereotypical of family film trailers accompanies

the montage. The auditory decisions of the music and the voiceover transfix The

Shining; because of sound it becomes a family film.

"Meet Danny. He's a kid - looking for a dad." "Shining" turns The Shining

into a film about Jack and Danny bonding (so dissimilar from the original, where Jack

eventually hunts his son down). The the voiceover continues, "Sometimes what we

need the most is just around the corner." Enter the pop-song "Salisbury Hill" by Peter

Gabriel, a pleasing song in a lilting 7/4 time signature, with a positive message, put to
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reassembled images of Jack Torrance playing with his son, his wife Wendy, several

shots of playful physical activity. "Shining," using Peter Gabriel's song, recomposes

The Shining into an uplifting film not about the critique of "family" the original

arguably makes, nor murder, demonic possession, axes and ghosts, but about

reconnection, reconciliation, and a happy-go-lucky family unit.

Youtube.com hosts other examples of trailer play:

Mary Poppins and Cinderella recut as horror films;

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and Sleepless in Seattle as

psychodramas;

The Exorcist as a Christmas comedy;

Scarface as a buddy film;

Apocalypse Now as a frat film;

Silence of the Lambs and The Terminator as romantic comedies;

The Usual Suspects as slash

Taxi Driver, The Big Lebowski as tearjerker dramas;

The Ring as a family drama (scored with music from Shawshank

Redemption);

and (offensively) Schindler's List as a cheerful bachelor tale.

Some of these files are extremely popular: 993,302 people had seen, and heard,

"Shining" as of November 6th, 2008 and by December 16th 2008 the number had

increased to 1,048,774. Exploration of several trailer play postings shows their

attractiveness, but their effectiveness as parodies lies in their use of sound.

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The question becomes how self-directed rescoring film trailers on YouTube

really is. I believe it is independent play only to a certain degree because the majority

of YouTube trailer play simply uses film music conventions in place of others. When

film music conventions are simply swapped for others, the play remains within the

margins of the culture industry. "Shining" renders The Shining as a happy-go-lucky

family film through film music of that genre: lighthearted, upbeat popular music. It

switches out dissonant, frightening, jarring horror music typical of the horror genre,

replacing it with musical conventions of another genre. This play happens only within

what the culture industry over time has instructed. Individuals swap sounds of one

genre for sounds of another, which, in terms of the culture industry's influence,

reflects its ever-present jurisdiction in that even play occurs with building blocks it has

provided. Mary Poppins a horror film, Sleepless in Seattle a psychological thriller:

creators succeed in their entertaining recreations of these trailers precisely because of

their decisions regarding film music. But instead of newly conceived musical choices

outside of convention which revise rules, the simple act of swapping film music

conventions of one genre for another is play within the jurisdiction of the culture

industry. It therefore represents not any departure away from the culture industry but

participation with its pieces creators acknowledge to be operating. Individuals must

use film music conventions to comment on them. They can only critique them through

their use; conventions are critiqued only by way of other conventions themselves to be

critiqued. Trailer play emphasizes how entrenched film music conventions are, rather

than explore what may be possible outside those conventions. As a result, although

YouTube trailer play exemplifies how people play with film music in our
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contemporary moment, it reinforces certain socializing forces producing the

components for the play. Trailer play hilariously comments on film music, points out

how music defines genre, but it stays within, even reinforces conventions it critiques.

Another, much more hugely influential phenomenon in the digital music age is iPod

culture, where, for several reasons I discuss below, current trends in customizing one's

soundscape as they rove reflect (specifically in advertising which directly speaks to

notions of soundtrack and feeling) profound relationships between past cinematic

production and downloading music to one's body so activities it participates in can be

scored.

Trend: 2
Proliferation of the iPod as Related to Film Music History

The industrially derived, early twentieth-century notion of film accompaniment

is alive in the contemporary proliferation of iPod and iPhone culture.31 iPod use

exemplifies efforts in our current moment to soundtrack our lives. Found in certain

iTunes music marketing, notions of the soundtrack as well as affect genealogically

reach back to the silent film history I have discussed in previous chapters. Close

readings of Apple language show connections between how music organizes us today

and cinematic production in the early twentieth century. Similar to my last section, I

pose the question whether iPod culture is empowering or, like trailer play, may reflect

complicity with the culture industry.

During the nationally recession-bound 3 rd business quarter of 2008, Apple sold over seven million
iPhones (NPR News, October 24 2008).
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I argue that in its efforts to supply music as aural soporific, early mainstream

filmmaking formulated how we listen. In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction," Walter Benjamin explains "the mode of human sense perception

changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense

perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not

only by nature but by historical circumstances as well" (Benjamin 1170). The

skyrocketing popularity of mainstream film during the first half of the twentieth

century as leisure entertainment consumed on a massive scale constituted, I argue,

such a change in the mode of sense perception to which Benjamin alludes. The iPod is

an extension of such earlier sensory organization. New auditory technologies are

bound up in past industrial notions of musical appropriation. The history of

mainstream film exposes the consistent use of music as accompaniment, compliment,

and supplement. As music has been predominantly subservient to image, traditions

ensued whereby music becomes aural soporific: there, but not there to be listened to.

"The soundtrack to your life" and other rhetorical nods in music advertising echo the

notion that music can accompany "life." And the iPod, iPhone and iTunes as new

technologies enable mobile bodies to apply customized playlists for different narrative

moments, events and activities. This results in the backgrounding of music akin to

standardized film music. I draw on Johnathan Sterne's work on the history of auditory

technologies and Michael Bull's research on headphone culture in order to claim that

iPod reveals music's historical subservience to technology through it has been

mediated. Early film music practices foregrounded music, encouraging audiences to

consciously and communally listen for connections, regional codes, jokes and puns.
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Once standardization occurred and musicians' live critique vanished, instead of

listening for such connections, audiences began to hear film music supplied much

more at the unconscious level within formula still underway today in film as well as in

iPod culture.

In some sense, the iPod empowers listeners to completely reconstruct and

control their soundscape, to customize their individual acoustic space. I want to

emphasize, though, that the notion of music as steady accompaniment is an

industrially manufactured one. The fact that people use iPods so music can accompany

activity X is connected to film history in the conceptualization of music as additive to

begin with. As laid out in previous chapters, mainstream filmmaking and exhibition

practices eventually taught listeners to hierarchize music and image, and today, the

function of music not as central but often as additive is still an organizational

operative. And to this extent, customization via the iPod reaches a limit. Listeners may

customize their soundscapes as a form of independence, yet the notion that music be

appropriated at all for various soundscapes to begin with echoes capitalist constructs

within historic film music practices, therefore resulting not in independence for iPod

wearers as much as their auditory complicity and participation in socializing forces

coming out of twentieth-century film music evolution.

Johathan Sterne and the cultural history of headphone

According to Johnathan Sterne, headphones have historically been a marker of

cultural and social status, beginning with the stethoscope. Headphones indicated a

sense of privilege of acoustic space but such early listening devices were, in the case
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of stethoscopes, institutionalized by industry. Sterne: "the iconography of listening to

early sound-reproduction technologies, especially around ear tubes and headphones,

suggests a direct line of descent from the stethoscope" and he continues, "[s]ound-

production technologies disseminated and expanded these new technical notions of

listening through their own institutionalization" (Sterne 98). That is to say those new

listening techniques were articulated by industries underway in defining themselves,

as listening became linked to "logic, analytical thought, industry, professionalism,

capitalism, individualism, and mastery" (Sterne 95). But the iPod will come to

represent not the mastery of its listeners and headphone wearers, but, according to

Theodor Adorno, a culture industry's mastery over those listeners, and listeners'

complicity in an audible relationship to institutionalized power.

Music headphones around the 1920s became very popular and instrumentally created a sense of a
private bourgeois space, rid of sounds and noise from the outside world. A 1925 advertisement for
Brandes headsets reads in full: "You need a headset: to tune in with; to get distance stations - both
domestic and foreign; to listen in without disturbing others; to shut out the noise in the room — and get
all the radio fun; to get the truest and clearest reception - always. No one realizes these facts more
forcibly man the makers of the famous Radiola III A. They include Brandes as standard equipment. Be
sure your set is Brandes equipped. Brandes. The name to know in Radio" (As quoted in Sterne 90).
Sound was for the individual; and not only did headphones invoke a privatized listeningship, they
increased record sales. Further diversified tastes can be defined and then marketed to, and what was
once a central radio or record player in the family living room became a quarantined listening place for
individual consumers. But who was to buy sound? And who was this privileged listenership marketed
to? Namely a post-Victorian consumerist bourgeois middle class in part defined by sound technologies
marketed to it.
The iPod is clearly bound up in this economic history of concession but what is most
meaningful to emphasize is the shift from concentrated listening practices to a less intense listening,
listening hierarchized differently due to the ensuing business model in early twentieth century
filmmaking whereby music was often merely additive. The isolation headphones invoked emphasized
attention to sonic detail (Sterne 87), but I argue that with the onset of the iPod, this becomes something
different. Stethoscopes and private music headsets enabled highly concentrated listening, but
attentiveness changes. To attend to what's heard turns into attention to activity which music in the
headphones simply accompanies. Headphones become a signal of a regression of concentrated listening
they once ironically represented.
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Adorno theorizes that a culture industry is central to a consequential regression

of listening in consumers for whom it provides commodities. Regression of listening

for Adorno is the loss of "concentrated listening." A consumer who no longer listens

with concentration is tamed: by the purchase and the musical content in that purchase.

Adorno explains it is through the several ways in which music is exchanged

economically that a concentration of listening gets lost, or more accurately, listening is

distracted, while consumers' concentration and attention is caught elsewhere, namely

in their consumption, away from, in Marxist terms, modes of production and

consumers' relations to them.

Adorno intriguingly aligns consumer with listener; the cross-complicity of the

person both in their consumption and their listening involves, "[t]he delight in the

moment and the gay facade [which] becomes an excuse for absolving the listener...

The listener is converted, along his least line of resistance, into the acquiescent

purchaser" (Adorno 32). For Adorno, "regressive listening" is untroublesome

listening, a type of listening sought after by the culture industry and achieved through

the promulgation of auditory commodities (films, musical downloads) with which it

insures its economic success.

More fascinatingly, Adorno traces regression of listening back to silent film

accompaniment. He explains, "[music] inhabits the pockets of silence that develop

between people molded by anxiety, work and undemanding docility. Everywhere it

takes over, unnoticed, the deadly sad role that fell to it in the time and the specific

situation of the silent films. It is perceived purely as background" (Adorno 30). Film

music began as improvisational, creative, and open before it arguably shifted into the
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background, in the likes of Muzak, not unlike the potential for music to serve as

background to any activity an iPod accompanies. Muzak as a device used in locations

like retail stores, airplanes and dentists offices (locations where background music

distracts consumers) now perhaps follows the body anywhere one wears an iPod. For

Adorno, music used in the silent film ushered in a new function of music, not that of

activating listeners' critical attention, but of removing that critical attention, to put it to

sleep; to pragmatically cover the rickety-rack of the projector, but also to put people in

a dream state.33 This is where I depart from Adorno. As I explained in Chapter Two, I

argue that music in the silent era music could actually catalyze critical engagement

with film, a part of the social exchange with musicians in nickelodeon culture. To help

Adorno out a bit, it is in the sound era, when music loses what was its social, critical

function, that it becomes something less conscious, more backgrounded, and therefore

no longer activating filmgoers' critical attention as much as working affectively on

them, the evolution of mainstream film positioning music more and more within

several other parts of the soundtrack.

Claudia Gorbman and other film music historians explain silent film music may have functioned in
part to cover the machinery of the projector. Music distracted filmgoers from the noise of the machine,
but also provided for the dreamscape that noise from the machine would disallow in its alerting
reminders that, behind the dreaminess of the cinematic experience were the projector's pulleys, gears,
and belts - an apt metaphor for what will become mechanisms of the culture industry. The use of single
piano, a trap-kit drummer, small orchestras or other forms of accompaniment in part to cover up noises
of the production of the camera's projection offer a striking metaphor for what music does to consumers
in Marxist terms: bury means and modes of production they would otherwise perhaps be attentive to.
The lulling of the listener is figurative of his/her uncritical state. A lack of focus, or attention, in-
activates critique. Consumption turns off examination. The use of music to cover the rickety-rack of the
projector echoes the role of music in other ways it is consumed and listened to: to direct attention away
from the culture industry using it to distract consumers from its calculations, " [a] reduction of people to
silence" (Adorno 30), perhaps giving the "silent" film a whole new meaning.
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Certain said functions of film music became proverbial models for the iPod.

On "iTunes Essentials," rhetoric of the soundtrack pervades. Titles of playlists already

assembled and prescribed denote the use of music at certain times or for certain

occasions. The availability of pre-established playlists for certain narrative situations

shows the commercial and saleable associations between music and things people do.

There's music (prearranged) for everything. A thorough sampling of some of these

"essential" playlists available for purchase on iTunes Essentials:

4th of July

Bachelor Pad Music

Bachelor Party Music

Bachelorette Party Music

Back to School Songs

Black Fraternity Party

Break Up Songs

Bummer Christmas

Cheating Songs

Country Road Songs

Election Day

Father's Day

Gay Pride: Boys

Gay Pride: Girls

Healing Music

Hip-Hop Cool Down

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Hope and Change

Indie Wedding

Kids Let's Go Outside

Labor Day

Lazy Summer

Manchester

Melancholy Winter

Museum Music

Positivity

Patriotism

Prison Songs

Protest

Romance in New York

Saturday Errands

Soccer Mom Chillout

Study Rock

Traffic Jams

Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day Alone

Washington, DC

(iTunes, July 2007)

These mixes dictate musical associations for these occasions, locations and

actions. Some generic and some specific, some serious and others ironic, even in their
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variety of tone titles can appeal to different consumers. Ultimately to keep the

consumer buying, one can imagine an endless variety of even this small list of mixes.

Imagine potential alterations just of what is already there. For instance, why not

"Soccer Mom Commute,'''' "Study Jazz," "Busy Summer," "Grandparents Let's Go

Outside," or "Car Won't Start Jams?" In its reach of prescriptions of music for

everything, the list exemplifies the endless potential of accompaniment.

Another way in which iTunes Essentials is in relationship with silent film songbooks

of the 1910s and 20s (correspondences I discussed in Chapter One), is revealed in the

functionality of the ambiguously-titled playlist. Like entries from early film

songbooks, some entries are specific (i.e. here's music not just for winter but for a

melancholy winter), whereas others are totally vague, or imprecise enough in how

they're titled that they become somewhat versatile (remember from Sam Fox's

Moving Picture Music "Plaintive"?).

Take for example, Prison Songs. Is this a mix of songs about prison? Or like

other mixes intended to accompany a place or activity, are Prison Songs for my

incarceration? Or do I pull this mix up when I visit a prison? Are the songs' lyrics

about imprisoning things? (if that was the case, does Traffic Jams contain similar

tracks)? The point is that Prison Songs seems ambiguous enough, on the one hand, to

be appropriated for anything "prison," but on the other hand, ironically renders the

imprisoning sense of iTunes Essentials in general, the arguable musical confinement.

The advertising copy reads:

Sometimes you're looking for great music to fit a particular mood or

occasion. Maybe you want suggestions for that perfect soundtrack on

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Valentine's Day . . . With My Groove, we offer our choices for the best

music to fit the mood or mark the occasion . . . Let us help you find it,

so you can spend more time enjoying it.

(iTunes, July 2007)

"Let us help you find it, so you can spend more time enjoying it." So choosing is in

conflict with enjoyment? I don't want to lose time exercising choice, so I should give

it up? Or give up my ability to seek and "find"? Vital questions become: How many

nuances, activities, and occasions in life are presented as something to soundtrack?

How is the iTunes Store depicting life? How is the iTunes Store marketing occasions

to purchase music for? Musical associations seem now pretexts for living.

The iTunes Store markets music as "essential" to the event. Living is somehow

incomplete without background music for whatever moment is essential to score. And

through the overly-suggestive nature of iTunes, self-directed qualities of the iPod

come into question. Is iTunes less individuating than it is formalizing?

Michael Bull and soundtracking urban life

In his research of numerous headphone users living in urban locations, Michael

Bull finds that users feel it is essential to soundtrack their urban surroundings. Bull

grapples with Adorno's over-determined, pessimistic view of the ever-reaching culture

industry by conducting empirical research in the form of multiple interviews with

mobile personal stereo users in order to question how and why, as they move in an

urban environment, users employ headphones in the face of their increasingly

mediated lives. Evident in Bull's findings is that users interchange notions of

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"personalized" and "filmic." Important for me is Bull's consideration of Adorno

particularly with regard to what is "filmic" in headphone use.

Bull explains that headphone users feel, "a need for accompaniment as a

constituent part of experience" (Bull 38). On the surface, users' testimonies reflect a

degree of control as headphones enable a private listening space customizable the way

one sees fit at any time and location as they move: a form of management.

Headphones allow "[t]he site of experience [to be] transformed from the inside out.

Effectively it is colonized" (Bull 33). But Bull does not explore what is behind notions

of the filmic in the accounts he studies, neglecting a particular "sedimented meaning

structure of users' everyday experience" (Bull 32), namely the technology of film and

its historical appropriations of music. Bull explains that "users attempt to construct a

sense of narrative within urban spaces that have no narrative sense for them" (Bull

39). What Bull neglects to explain is how music, chosen to play though headphones

for personalized filmic experiences, reifies the culture industry twofold. On the one

hand, the precise music users apply to their personalized filmic situations may indeed

be prescribed music from advertisers for certain "life" instances, narrative moments or

occasions for music recommended by industry. And on the other hand, music, to the

extent that it is conceived of as accompaniment to begin with for customizable filmic

situations in everyday life reifies specific past cinematic production, namely the

standardized film soundtrack. Standardization of the film soundtrack, whereby on a

massive scale studios programmed and stereotyped music for this or that narrative and

affective moment, predates mobile customization. I argue that the concept that users

can soundtrack their day via the iPod and therefore exercise a certain amount of
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control or management over their various soundscapes is already derivative of an

industrialized film history out of which the notion arose that music accompany

anything and everything.

The work of Michael Bull critiqued above was published in 2000; it involves

Walkman and Discman users; iPod technology hadn't yet arrived (although his

forthcoming book focuses on iPod users and culture). Significantly, the new vista of

the iPod offers users even more filmic opportunities to soundtrack their life; the sheer

size and scope of their musical library, their whole musical catalogue, is on their

person. Walk/Discman users didn't likely travel wearing trench coats full of cassette

tapes or CDs; it is the sheer range of choice at hand with the iPod which make more

places and more activities more customizable. Furthermore, the iPod not only

associates soundtrack with mobility, but a "new" file is only a download away, in

order to make any one experience filmic if indeed music desired for it isn't already

purchased.

Theoretical concerns around the iPod

For me, the iPod raises serious theoretical concerns. I claim that not only is the

iPod a vehicle through which music isn't as much listened to as it is appropriated for

wherever the body goes (and activity and occasions it participates in), it is also a way

for the culture industry to maintain itself not through exchanges with live music, but

more prerecorded music. One concern, as Michael Bull alarmingly explains, is how

social interaction, particularly the interpersonal, now competes with ever increasing

mobile auditory technologies—discourse is supplanted by music which is non-

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communal (Bull 100). Furthermore, I claim that in addition to the decrease in social

interaction there is also a regression of listening particularly associated with the

suspect film music history I have scrutinized. There was, after all, a cinematic

equivalent of this decrease in social interaction, namely in the public space of the

theater, once the evolution of film removed live musicianship, programmed music,

and behavior in cinemas was essentially policed. Are we now cinematically removed

from one another roving around in our own cinemas with our own scores?

The iPod is emblematic of the culture industry's ability to monitor the

consumer as well. Although "to monitor" connotes visuals, monitoring of the

consumer in this case takes on more of an audible form in that power knows what

consumers listen to, Foucault's panopticon in auditory form: a panawcficon. In the

form of various popular on-line music sites (not only iTunes), databases know what is

downloaded and what isn't, what is popular and what isn't, what is purchased and

what isn't. The culture industry via various forms of Muzak has already reached and

implicated listeners in several public spaces the body enters (the mall, dentist's office,

elevator, passenger jet, even in the cinema as consumers wait in their seats for the

movie to begin), spaces where music is played as backdrop. But the iPod enables

industry to follow the body as it goes, its music no longer found in just those social

spaces, but any space, even in between spaces. No need to only reach the space to

which the listener goes to imbricate them, when the culture industry can now reach

listeners as they go.34

34
It is important to repeat that the culture industry's control is, like all disciplinary structures according
to Foucault, not solely a result of the institution's exercise of power, but involves subjects' resignation
to it. Consumers are participatory in their auditory submission to power. Fredric Jameson explains:
 198

On the one hand, the iPod may be technologically liberalizing, a

democratization, a form of control over one's auditory environment perhaps in

response to the history of commoditized music I'm analyzing here. But in the case of

the iPod, does the culture industry sell the agency it restricts? The individualized

listener is in a relationship with the power producing them:

[i]t is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated,

repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is

carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique offerees and

bodies [...] we are [...] in the panoptic [and perhaps pan-auditory?]

machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves

since we are part of its mechanism. (Foucault 217)

In terms of Foucault's ideas about disciplinary structures, certainly technologies for

distributing and listening to music are a part of those structures; the culture industry is

a disciplinary structure within a larger system of ideological, corporeal, disciplinary

institutions of power. For Foucault, the submission to power is in fact positive, the

resignation to it a participatory action in relation to it. Of the (listening) subject within

that system, Foucault explains:

The individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an 'ideological'

representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by this

specific technology of power that I have called 'discipline'. We must

"autosurveillance marks the penetration of information technology within the body and the psyche of
the individual subject: it implies a diffusion of computers on a generalized scale and a kind of passive
replication of their programs by the individual... Under autosurveillance, capital and the state no
longer have to do anything to you, because you have learned to do it to yourself (Jameson, forward to
Attali xiii).
 199

cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative

terms: it 'excludes', it 'represses', it 'censors', it 'abstracts', it 'masks',

it 'conceals'. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces

domains of objects and rituals of truth. (Foucault 194)

Film music can be seen as a cultural (perhaps national) fixture illustrative of that

which Foucault speaks. Film music seems at once a discipline in that it becomes a

field of knowledge shaped by various forces including filmgoers' and film musicians'

participation with it, and also a form o/discipline, in that its evolution helped direct

full absorption in the screen, audiences over time trained no longer to interact but to be

silent. As mentioned earlier, for Adorno the regression of listening happens when

music is "unobtrusive" in popular film (Theodor Adorno and Hans Eisler, "Prejudices

and Bad Habits" 29), and currently, music seems again unobtrusive to technology,

accessories, customizable accounts, retrieval, download, and files for occasions where

it can operate as additive for narrative and feeling.

Commercials for the iPod render bodies animated by music the industry

provides, dancing silhouettes contrasted with the signature (rather sterile) white

headphones. While people roam with the mobile capability to apply music to

whichever activity or situation, it doesn't depict customization as much as the

complete socialization and organization on behalf of film music history.

Trailer Play and iPod: Conclusion

The ability for entertainment companies to follow the body limits

democratization. Every location is now a space of purchase. A close reading of

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language around the iPod and other Apple idiom illuminates the listener's position

syntactically. Close reading of the words iPod, iTunes, iHome, iPhone reveal

subjectification. The "i," lowercased, represents subjectification to the Pod, the Tunes,

the Home, and the Phone the products define. Insignificant is the consumer

represented by the lowercase i, an i up against, attached to, subjected to what the

products do to them (represented in their very names): i fasten my body to the culture

industry, whereby there isn't even a hyphen representing the slightest detachment, or

defiance. The lowercase "i" connotes '"i'ndy" or egoless-ness, and leaves the capital I

for Industry.

Do trailer play on youtube.com and iPod culture represent slight forms of

empowerment? Do they enable users to reappropriate and customize music? To

consider these phenomena within a larger context of early twentieth century

filmmaking practices identifies them as auditory subjectification only in different

shapes. It becomes clear that both trends can be genealogically traced back to the

normalization of film music and the notion that music serves as designable

background. If trailer play on YouTube.com and iPod culture are genealogically

tethered to normalizing film music practices, it is arguable neither trend, even in their

customization, can subvert the culture industry they seemingly shirk, because in

character, form, or usability both trailer play and iPod culture require remaining within

the jurisdiction of the culture industry in order to engage in recreation with that

control.
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Trend 3:Rescoring Silent Film

The third and final trend I wish to examine is the phenomenon of rescoring

silent film. Very popular in our contemporary moment, this trend occurs in two forms:

either for DVD releases of newly digitized silent films, a growing commodity for

which there is demand for musicians to write scores; 5 or live performances of new

scores to silent film. Of all the trends I've outlined thus far, the trend of performing

new scores live to silent film is the most significant to explore in terms of affect

because of the return of the film musician's live performing body. The phenomenon

enables both musicians and audiences to experience classic films anew; it restores

affective and emotive energy back into circulation with a live musician again in the

social space of the theater; and thus, it has the biggest potential not to undermine the

culture industry as much as share film music with those who fleetingly produce it, the

film score again becoming a type of performance, the film a type of show again with a

resourceful auditory aspect.

Live, Improvisational Film Accompaniment: Case Study: Pordenone Silent Film

Festival

Whether traditional, dyed-in-the-wool piano accompaniment, or a total recast

of music by noise artists or multi-instrumentalists, the current trend of scoring film

live and refashioning the auditory element of the filmgoing experience exists in many

forms:

35
The latest release of Pabst's femme fatale silent classic Pandora's Box by Criterion Collection
commissioned four different scores to choose from.
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Musical Acts:

Alloy Orchestra, a percussion-based trio, tours with their screenings of

classic silent films (Phantom of the Opera, Blackmail. Underworld),

and are famous for playing items of junk (www.alloyorchestra.com).

Devil Music Ensemble, a trio of guitar, drums and percussion is

currently on tour screening the only Chinese full length kung-fu film

from the silent era, Red Herroine. They have performed original scores

for Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari all

around the country (www.devilmusic.org).

Vox Lumiere, "a place where film, rock concert, and theater become

one," combines original music, lyrics, and dance with silent films like

The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Metropolis, and Peter Pan. On separate

screens, they project different scenes from the same movie

simultaneously (www.voxlumiere.com).

Events:

The Pordenone Silent Film Festival is a weeklong festival celebrating

silent film restoration, digitization, and improvisational film

accompaniment by the most established composers in the industry

(www. cinetecadelfriuli .org).

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Found Film Jam is a free event in San Diego where vintage home

movie collector Pea Hicks moderates for guest noise musicians as well

as volunteers from the crowd as they score to old 8MM and 16MM

films they've never seen. The films have been gathered from swap

meets and garage sales and are often chosen out of Pea Hicks' bin at

random and screened for the public. Subject matter of movies ranges

from old home movies of trips to the zoo to scientific shorts on infant

eye movement to risque reels of borderline pornography, and musicians

score these on the spot. Some instruments are provided (Wurlitzer

piano, percussion, a couple of guitars), but audience members are

encouraged to bring their own instruments and participate in a finale

where, much like an open mike, they may score to film themselves live

and in public. Homespun, modified instruments are encouraged as well.

Audience members may also improvizationally narrate a found film.

The event emphasizes public participation in music/image

correspondences, ad-libbing and originality. The only enforcement is

that material and the event be "original and unscripted"

(www.myspace. com/foundfilmj am).

"Voices of Light" performed with Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of

Arc: performances of Richard Einhorn's score inspired by the silent

film including large orchestras and choral groups. Musicians perform

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live to the film, to remarkable close-ups of Maria Falconetti's tears.

There have been over one hundred live performances

(http://www.richardeinhom.com/VOL).

Brand Upon the Brain is a Guy Maddin film performed live with an

eleven piece orchestra, a team of five sound effects experts, and a

choice celebrity narrator (Tunde Adebimpe from rock band "TV on the

Radio," poet John Ashby, actress Issabella Rossellini, or rock icon Lou

Reed) (www.branduponthebrain.com).

Dear Reader, New Wizard is the creation of Brad Neely, a type of

narrator/artist, who screens Harry Potter movies with the sound off, and

narrates to them with original commentary and description: '"Fuck

Yes!' Harry releases a primal yalp!"

(http://www.youmbe.coni/watch?v=HPVhmZodaLA&feature=related).

Each of the above exemplifies new efforts to reopen musical approaches to film.

Instead of what became over time a vertically integrated film industry controlling

music, musicians/*//? again provides originality, personality, and reinserts music as act:

unrecorded, fleeting, momentary musical endeavor, and energy. Once a potential

threat to film logic and proper aesthetics, musicians' influence returns to the social

See figure 1.
 205

space twofold: in musical material, and bodily presence, two points of authority

industry in time deleted.

At the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, historians, critics, scholars, chemists,

archivists and digitization experts gather to celebrate silent film. Among the disparate

communities present, the only working artists are the musicians. They busily

improvise to screenings for the entirety of the festival. Interviews with several of these

silent film accompanists reveal care for their improvisational trade, as well as the

value they place on feeling—affect—between themselves and the audience. Close

readings of interview responses, as well as testimonies during the festival's

Masterclasses (where established silent film composers share their insights with

students learning the craft), reveal tradesmen's sense of their musical control, power to

comment, and influence to steer the audience as they see fit. As a group they represent

the craft, but also, because of their musical variety, the notion that the craft involves

unique approaches.

Testimonies speak not only to the power of film music but accompanists'

bygone control of that power. Festival musicians liken one another in their comments

on the influence of the musical improviser:

Neil Brand: The job is to comment. Opinion is important. If

you're going to critique you better have a good

reason for doing it. I do have my own political

agendas. So I do comment. I can't stand cruelty

to animals. I loathe war. If you don't comment,

you're not really there, so you have to comment.

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State your case. 'This is what I think is going

on.' Establish a rapport with the audience so they

know you, but still take risks. You're leading the

audience even if you don't know where you're

going. You're in charge. You're saying 'this is

where I think we're going.' A bad film can be

excellent with a sympathetic musician.

Guther Buchwald: The musician leads the public. We take them,

'C'mon, it's a comedy!' We give the

atmosphere.

Phil Carli: Base [your playing] on your own material. Start

playing with your information.

John Sweeney: There is not a rule.

Discussions during masterclasses (which met for six consecutive days during the

festival, for over two hours each) not only reflected the musicians' sense of giving,

leading, authorizing, and sharing but the musicians' sense of affect seen in the way

they emphasize their own corporeal presence:

Neil Brand: [When the accompanist isn't present] [t]here is

no longer a physical presence in the room, no

longer a conversation. [At Pordenone] [w]e've

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gone back to how things were. [There is] a

pregnant expectation, an energy that's exciting to

feel. You play that expectation - the pact with the

audience. Your music establishes what

everybody feels and feels together. And when

you're hidden away in a pit, you can't feel that.

Phil Carli: You feed on public reaction. Film music is an

ensemble between audience, film, music. We

[accompanists] are an audience too. You dance

with it. [I feel] so alone in the pit, it's hard to

play in the pit.

John Sweeney: There is a triangle of audience, film and music. If

audience can't see you there is less

communication.

Gabriel Thibaudeau: It's a live performing art. The pianist has lived

the same day as the audience. We all know about

the bank collapse and the stock exchange. We

[accompanists] are human beings. We're alive.

We're not dead. We draw on real life. Be wide

open. Be yourself. You have to transmit what

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you have inside through your body, through your

mind, but it's about the film.

Donald Sosin: We go deep inside our emotions as musicians,

and we say 'look at this. I want you to see it

more clearly.' A gift, not elevator music in the

background. You're restoring the heritage.

Musicians involved in the current trend of scoring to silent film testify that the

live aspect of film music is something extraordinary, emphasizing not only a bodily

aspect to improvising to film, but a bodily communication working that context. They

produce music with their bodies on the spot, which communicates something different

than when the musically performing body is absent from the social space and replaced

with recorded music inorganic in quality. Six musicians, although unique in their

approach to the craft, share a sense of film music as physiological and authorial. They

value film music's communal characteristics which they as practitioners help generate.

They revive live film music in a social space previously carved out by industry to suit

its technological progress. The Pordenone Silent Film Festival, as well as other acts

and events described above, reinstate a wealth of creative, public, diverse, and

affective musical features. As endeavor, these musicians or acts or projects restart

bygone film music practices whereby music instantaneously produced on the spot to

accompany narrative on screen was energetically and affectively shared between

bodies.
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Conclusion: Said and Barthes Take Adorno to Task

The trend of rescoring silent film celebrates the potential for new musical

approaches to revitalize older cinematic texts. More significantly, the trend of

rescoring film live reinstalls the musician's body back into the theater, reinstating

affective circulation by making present again the performing musician previously

removed. Whether the musical approach is traditional or experimental, scoring to film

anew revitalizes past admixtures of musical creativity and cinema.

As I have made clear in previous chapters, film music history during the first

few decades of the twentieth century convincingly reveals the formulation of a

specific juncture of Adorno's culture industry. I want to reconsider Adorno's theory in

light of theories of live music, particularly Roland Barthes' notion of "the grain of the

voice," as well as Edward Said's theories of musical performance in order to make the

claim that the culture industry has no direct influence over live, ethereal, passing,

fleeting, ephemeral, evanescent, momentary and temporal performance and the

absorbing impermanence therein.

By definition, Adorno's culture industry hinges on manufactured goods.

Industry profits because it produces. One of Adorno's biggest critiques was that music

was caught in the process of redundant production and made commodity to be bought

and sold. The culture industry makes things: recordings, copies of recordings, ever-

changing formats upon which to play those recordings, even current atomized forms of

recordings in digital code. And as I have argued, auditory subjedification is the

(purchasing) listener's complicit relationship to this type of capitalist institutional

influence, in which not only are subjects shaped by consumerist environments

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administered around them, sound plays a unique part in the formulation and

management of the listening subject.

Adorno is totalizing in his ruthless notion that a subject is completely sonically

entrenched in featureless music shoveled by companies. But I claim that there is an

exception to this in live performances of original music to silent films. The fleeting

experience of witnessing musically performing bodies playing an original score or

improvising to film circumvents aspects of the culture industry. Although concerts

involve monetary exchange (and therefore would be filed by Adorno under the list of

means through which the culture industry recycles and sustains itself), there is

something special about the ephemeralness and the physically shared aspect of

musical performance within the context of film music history I've been analyzing.

(Cather and Joyce, as I discussed in Chapter Three, represented physical reactions not

to recorded music, but live music, and explored what was unique about it, a link

between live musical production and its bodily effects.)

Roland Barthes and Edward Said help me resituate Adorno's model of power.

They respond to Adorno's totalizing dialectic with ideas about the positive,

transformative qualities of live music, Said in direct response to Adorno. Both

theorists offer compelling ideas about music, the body and affect.

Edward Said

Edward Said counters empirically totalizing theorists, listing Foucault as well

as Adorno. For him, in their critique of institutional power, both miss the potential of

international, that is, regional influences he feels are irrevocable. For Said, Adorno
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works within an "inescapable historical teleology that incorporates everything in its

relentless historical [dialectical] path" which Said finds "unacceptable for all sorts of

reasons" (Said xix). Said wants to offer an alternative to such totalizing theories like

the culture industry, "an alternative based on a geographical or spatial idea that is

truer to the diversity and spread of human activity" (Said xix). Such a cultural

approach beneficially reconsiders the influence of music:

[W]hat is impressive about musical practice in all its variety is that it

takes place in many different places, for different purposes, for

different constituencies and practitioners, and of course at many

different times. To assemble all that, to herd it under one dialectical

temporal model is - no matter how compelling or dramatic the

formulation - simply an untrue and therefore insufficient account of

what happens. (Said xix)

In the face of Adorno's theory and its arguably Eurocentric and therefore imperialist

traits, Said argues three angles of apprehension of music do escape Adorno's pattern.

First is the idea of "performance as extreme occasion," where live performance has its

own unrepeatable temporal essence, "something beyond the everyday, something

irreducibly and temporarily not repeatable" (Said 18). Second, musical

"transgression," the ability for music to escape certain nationalistic or cultural

domains and enter into others (Said xix-xx). And lastly, Said challenges Adorno's idea

of the regression of listening. He explores listening as ultimately private subjectivity,

untouchable and uninfluenced by the culture industry. For example, a person's

independent associations made between a performance of a work and a recording of

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that work allow for complexity of enjoyment. Said argues complex enjoyment

reconstitutes individual listening and underlying pleasures of "fulfilled conjunctions"

(Said 80). Said rejoices in the listeners' ability to "luxuriate in all sorts of byways, to

linger over details and changes in text, to digress and then digress from the digression"

(Said 60). Said rejuvenates music politically in considering how its live apprehension

can be a subjective experience independent of capitalism, music reinstalled as a site of

subjective pleasure and not prescribed pleasure through which listeners are only

directed. Barthes joins Said's efforts to recuperate music from Adorao's stifling

political contextualization.

Roland Barthes

Barthes famously wishes for a completely new way to discus music by way of

reconsidering what he calls "the musical object" (Barthes 181-2). He explains, "rather

than trying to change directly the language on music, it would be better to change the

musical object itself, as it presents itself to discourse, better to alter its level of

perception or intellection, to displace the fringe of contact between music and

language" (Barthes 181-2). Barthes is particularly interested in the ability to

reconsider vocal music in its own encounter with two realms: the voice and its notes,

and language in which the music is sung. Where they meet is "the very precise space .

. . of the encounter between a language and a voice ... the grain, the grain of the

voice when the latter is in a dual posture, a dual production - of language and of

music" (Barthes 181-2). His fascinating rereading splits music into two discernable

parts: the pheno-song (the more language-specific of the two), and the geno-song, the
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non-lingual yet bodily "volume," the "signifying play having nothing to do with

communication, representation (of feelings), expression; it is that apex . . . of

production where the melody really works at the language.. .where melody explores

how the language works and identifies with that work" (Barthes 181-2). In terms of

the potential of live film music to produce something unique, I wish to expand

Barthes' notion of the geno-song beyond just voice to the whole performing body. His

notion of "dual production" (of the pheno-song and geno-song) centers on the body

out of which music is projected, a new target, proposed by Barthes, to which people

should listen progressively. Barthes calls for new a type of attentive listening to the

body. This provides for a rejuvenated public relationship between listener and

performer, one formerly changed by the culture industry in its removal of the

musician's body from social spaces. It is the grain of the voice revealed though the

geno-song that potentially "sways us to jouissance" (Barthes 183). For Barthes, it is

the relocating and re-acknowledgment of music to the very body out from which it

emerges, and attention to the relationship between music and the performer's body,

the "grain" of their body, an exposure that opens up new relations of listeners to that

music, to that body, and to affect. What Said describes as Adorno's "apocalyptic

determinisms" neglects to fully consider the vitalizing effects of a live, musically

performing person.

Rescoring film live demonstrates the ability to remove music from industrial

traditions and revamp it in a way that revises ideas about film music, opening more

creative approaches to film. Said and Barthes speak of the positive, free influence of

music because the body of the performer uniquely and ephemerally produces it at only
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that fleeting moment, providing a circulation of affect special in its limitedness. In

removing the musician from the social space of the cinema, the standardization of the

film soundtrack removed affective circulation between performer and listener,

replacing it over time with calculations within the mise-en-bande with affective

influence. The live body of the musician for Said and Barthes is crucial to their joyous

outlook on the untapped capacity for live music to influence and reinvigorate the

listener. The affective relationship between a listening body and a musician's body

was there in the nickelodeon era, was no longer there in the sound era, and is not there

with regard to the iPod, but returns in this new phenomenon.

I argue subjectivist theories such as Barthes' and Said's can remain legitimate

in the face of such seemingly inescapable conditions Adorno espouses. It is hard for

me to reconcile the optimism of Barthes and Said when it seems music today,

especially film music, on a massive scale, still seems so reductive, prescriptive and

reifying. But examples of Said's "transgression," and Barthes' optimism of the live

performer positively manifest themselves in the current phenomenon of rescoring

cinematic texts in a live context. An existing filmic text is revised, rewritten and

played with again within an environment where the body of the performer and the

ability to witness affective production return.

 215

Figure 1.

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 Conclusion:

Literary modernists Willa Cather and James Joyce did not intellectually

explore music through depictions of recordings or listening to recordings. Characters

bodily generate music, and those sounds are heard and felt by others, not

representations of recordings but notions of music as waves emanating in a shared

space.

Why use music to suggest characters' challenges and impediments,

developments and progressions? Perhaps it is the case in Joyce's depictions of

stagnated Irish citizens, that music, as actual kinetic energy in the air, can influence,

even impede a body? Music in Dubliners best reflects what theorists of affect explain

can be our susceptibility and vulnerability to affect, especially when Joyce so

provocatively renders characters trying to fend off the music of foreigners. When

confronted by music coded with place, characters feel anxious.

Or, in Cather's Song of the Lark, perhaps music isn't something impeding the

body but enlivening it, when Thea Kronburg encountering so much different cultural

music becomes a vessel producing sounds independently, extending beyond regional

constraints through producing music that, too, travels?

37
Light in August. William Faulkner's novel about southern antihero of mixed ancestry Joe Christmas
depicts the story's most racist characters, his maternal grandparents who abandoned him for adoption,
with sounds of gramophones and scratchy records. When the characters speak, references to sounds of
needles scratching spinning records speak specifically to racist ideologies AS reproduced, sounds of
racist characters smartly depicted with notions of record players because they and their prejudice
threaten to be reproduced. Whereas Cather and Joyce explore live music, Faulkner begins to investigate
technological means of musical reproduction to question notions of nation in his work. In Joyce's
Ulysses and later in Finnegan's Wake, gramophones come to represent not only replication of certain
ideologies but also recurrence of themes and characters within Joyce's own oeuvre.
 217

Either way, whether it is Griffith's over-determined notion of nation, Ford's

more harmonious one, or Cather's or Joyce's inquisitive ones, I argue that music

assigns affective energy to those ideas in their texts, whereby characters' or

moviegoers' bodies aurally reckon with notions of nation. No matter whether it's

fictional representations of music, or music sonically coming from a film production, I

argue that it is important to acknowledge that around the first half of the twentieth

century, both media explored notions of nation in narratives through music.

Keeping with the literary innovators, on the one hand characters bodily

encounter music produced by ethnically, nationally, or regionally specific musicians in

Song of the Lark and Dubliners. Swedes, Austrians, Germans, Mexicans, Italians,

Irish, English, Hungarians. Such regional characteristics of the musician get imported

into his or her music wafting through the fictional soundscapes, music carrying codes

of the body producing it and where it too, the body, emanates from, allowing for quite

profound investigations of nation through musical detail. On the other hand, around

the same time the creative writers used music as a means of national critique, film

music began to operate in a way exemplifying what the concurrent modernist fiction

criticized - musical homogeneity - as film music grew away from local and regional

specificity to something more and more nationalizing, standard operations not

displacing but replacing varying interpretations. Film music operations became

precisely an example of what the fiction explored as a problem. Local improvisation

vanished, and with mass production film music began to shape feeling on a national

scale.
 218

The main objective of this project has been to explore the history of film music

in an attempt to understand our present moment in relation to past cinematic

production. Although sound in film and sound in certain literary modernist fiction

were both at one time creative terrains, mainstream filmmaking veered towards

closing down what began as film music's exploratory, commentarial, socially

enlivening course. The history of film music is a history of industry, mass production,

and feeling, and I argue that that history now informs our technological present, as

exemplified in how people play with film music on YouTube, soundtrack their lives

on iTunes, film music not just recreation and re-creation, but also a reflection of social

and physiological consequences of the movie business.

Today, as in the nickelodeon era, people express film music live again. They

make their film music. They open up previously closed and uniquely shared film

experiences. Scoring silent film live not only promotes original musical approaches

which may be locally or communally unique, it revisits the age-old practice of the

performing film musician, recovering a performative aspect of the film experience lost

with industrial removal of bodies. Live film music today resituates not just what

industry determined in its musical suggestions, but how it determined the circulation

of affective energy.

"sweetness of shared experience "

I conclude this project with questions about the musician's body. In

Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music, Glenn Kurtz celebrates the bodily aspect

not just of musicianship but of performance. A classical guitarist who regains a newly
 219

conceived sense of musicianship after a fifteen year hiatus away from his instrument,

Kurtz realizes the uniqueness in performance, and physically "letting music go,"

leaving behind his self driven and institutionally guided focus on technique, which,

after learned and followed for so long, constrained certain bodily aspects of his music

for the sake of so called "precision" and "perfection." In a book that celebrates music

as a physical force exchanged between musicians' bodies and audiences,

Kurtz touts "the performance" over all other musical experiences, ultimately

suggesting that if musicians practiced as if they were performing, they would

comingle playing with a fleeting sense of their living physical production.

The musician's physical presence was a source of social transmission of affect

in the nickelodeon moviegoing experience, one which, today, contemporary artists

scoring silent film live reinstall, recuperating a bygone form of cinematic experience

more social and performative in quality than what mainstream filmmaking instilled

and maintained in the spirit of aesthetic logic and continuity. Audiences at one point

could no longer share film music as performance. However, in the contemporary trend

of scoring silent film live, which I identify as significant precisely because it brings

film audiences back into a communal experience with the film musician, the

musician's body returns to the cinematic space, as well as a bygone means of affective

transmission of energy produced by that body.

For Kurtz, a performance is "the sweetness of shared experience" (Kurtz 99),

which is that much more unique because, "[e]ach moment is irretrievably lost" (Kurtz

206). The trend of scoring silent film live in our current moment reinstalls a type of

unrecoverable cinematic experience created by unrepeatable live music. It revisits

 220

aspects of performance lost when industry shifted away from live regional

improvisation, kept live orchestras but standardized scores, and finally replaced live

affect-generating bodies altogether with recordings.

In "Affect and Embodied Understanding in Musical Experience" D. Robert

DeChaine accounts for affective reactions to music within what he describes is a

context of communitas, as sense of intimacy or sharing when people experience

something as a group (DeChaine 83), fruitful ideas about what it may mean to feel

music among other people. I argue that listening to one's iPod alone doesn't provide

shared affective experience, either with other listeners or with a musicians' body. Nor

do recordings offer the matchlessness of experiencing fleeting live musicianship, and

the "grain" of the music which I argue is special because it is something fleeting.

DeChaine relies on Barthes' notion of music's "grain." - "the grain of the

music is music's body," he writes, "or more accurately, music's sound bodied forth"

by a musician. Moreover, "[t]he body offers itself up in collaboration with the sound

in the production of the musical text. In this way it functions as both performer and

instrument" (DeChaine 83). This is the uniqueness of performance. While feelings are

"not noted on the page," Kurtz explains, bodies register them (Kurtz 142). Bodies

register them. Kurtz imbues his accounts of playing music with bodily details about

musicians, acknowledging the function, form, and relevance of the "forearm or

shoulders or neck or palm or wrist" in what ultimately becomes a bodily production of

the way music sounds.

Physical production of music during a performance showcases musicians as

physiological beings with nerves, emotions, and matter, things of true physiological
 221

energy. Recordings don't directly relay physicality the way performance does.

Musicians physiologically bring with them their whole anatomy, making performance

a moment when their anatomy in all of its energy meets sound in producing sound.

This is where the 44th American Presidential Inauguration's musical interlude,

prerecorded yet showcasing musicians' bodies, gets really interesting. The musicians'

expressive bodies were so relevant to the historical event. As a multiethnic quartet

they performed before a government that historically mistreated communities they

represented. Since the interlude had to go prerecorded in the freezing cold, their

sounds were not live. Was a musical energy live? Was the "grain" live? Something

was live. Something was not prerecorded. What was it?

* * *

It is tradition for American Presidents to give major foreign leaders during

their visits to the White House gifts of Americana. Since the microscope is on

President Obama, it did not go unnoticed when he gave British Prime Minister Gordon

Brown a collection of classic films on DVD.38 President George W. Bush gave

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi who was a tremendous Elvis fan a

jukebox full of Elvis music (to which the Japanese leader replied with his best Elvis

impersonation for the press, "Thank-you-vety-much"), Bush's gift ideal Americana.

38
The gift to Gordon Brown drew scrutiny because the DVDs were the wrong platform, products
incompatible with players sold in the UK, the gift a gesture of America's illustrious film history, but
unfortunately evoking (albeit in a minor way) regional incompatibility. For a news report on past and
present gift exchanges like this between world leaders, go to Npr.org All Things Considered
"Presidential Gifts - An Elaborate Process," April 02,2009.
 222

Past foreign leaders have even received American cars from Presidents (what an

offense that would seem to be in our contemporary moment).

President Obama most recently gave the Queen of England the gift of an iPod

full of show tunes. These Presidential gifts reflect musical Americana in their music

but also in their technological format. There is something American about the

jukebox, and there is something American about the iPod in that it is music and

platform, artistry and industry, content and consumerism. These are quintessential

culture industry gifts.

This is all to say that the current political times which are so exhilarating

coexist with advanced technologies of our times (as I guess they always have). I argue

that new technologies like the iPod and older technologies like film both have

narrativized American Presidents, but specifically through operations of sound in

those technologies.

With the iPod President Obama now can be heard anywhere, more than any

other President in American history. He reaches citizens with sound through mobile

technology. He is totally technologically savvy. Americans got text messages from the

President Elect; he changed the rules so he could hang on to his Blackberry; citizens

can download his weekly Presidential address for free on iTunes. Only during this

election did the internet truly redefine how grass roots action could directly influence

presidential politics. In the lead up to the election, the Obama campaign advertised on

billboards inside of videogames, where players racing cars on their Xboxes flew by his

campaign ads, a whole new horizon where politics just isn't interactive, politics can

meet interactivity.
 223

Yet in this new political era inflected with electronics and gadgetry (as

exemplified by the "Hope and Change" mixes offered on iTunes), the simplicity of

musicians' bodies playing acoustic instruments during the inauguration was a

statement, for me, of very basic, very meaningful ideas about bodily connectivity vital

to reconsider in an age of gradually more corporeal removal from one another. In the

face of rising "social" cyber-connectivity ironically happening largely in private, do

we risk a loss in public energy shared between people and their physiological matter?

To me, this relates to the participatory energy live nickelodeon film music could drum

up as contrasted with the sound film leaving people sitting staring, alone-together,

without sharing the experience publically through interactive music.

The manner in which industry and technology shape music results in what

experiences can be shared.

* * *

Finally, there will be feature films about President Obama. How will they be

scored? With traditional tropes, methods, stereotypes and conventions, or, because

President Obama represents a drive to update what's outdated, will films about him re-

conceive methods, dismantle stereotypes and be scored in new ways? How were films

about other American Presidents, like Frost/Nixon, even W., scored? I believe such

questions clearly demonstrate the dynamism of film music as a field through which we

can explore any number of concerns, not just the ethical behavior of past presidents

but any other nationally or socially relevant topics films treat with their music.
 224

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