New Styles, New Genres, New Interactions 181 Young’s music for Ivan Passer’s 1988 Haunted Summer, which, like Ken Rus- sell’s Gothic, attempts to re-create the spaced-out experiences of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin (Shelley), and Lord Byron at the latter’s castle in Italy in the summer of 1816; and the music composed by Mark Isham, well known for his New Age sounds, for Kevin Reynolds's 1988 The Beast, in which the composer mobilizes diverse sampled timbres—the human voice, various in- struments, etc.—that move in and out of his floating planes of synthesized sound, all to rather incongruously accompany a narrative dealing with the So- viet war in Afghanistan. One might also include here the haunting and often quite obsessive scores composed by Michael Nyman for various films by British director Peter Greenaway, from the 1982 The Draughtsman’s Contract to the 1989 The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. Profoundly self- reflective and savagely antiromantic, The Draughtsman's Contract, like most (or probably even all) of the director's films, also involves “the rigorous structuring of a central idea carried through to the letter,” to use Greenaway’s ‘own terms,‘ a structure in which composer Michael Nyman played a role from the outset. Although an initial plan of assigning a different ground bass to each of two sets of six of the draughtsman’s architectural drawings proved unfeasible, Nyman was still able to create a score that offers “a musical paral- Jel with the organizational and temporal restraints that the draughtsman Neville imposes on the Herbert household as he goes about the task of completing the twelve commissioned drawings of the house and grounds.” To accomplish this, the composer turned to the music of Henry Purcell (the film is set more or less in 1695, the year of Purcell’s death), on whom he has done a fair amount of musicological research. Nyman then de- and reconstructed the Purcell into a series of what might be called “baroque minimalist” cues that foreground accompaniment figures as “closed harmonic systems” and that are played by Nyman’s ten-piece band, which includes two violins, a double bass, four saxophones, a bass guitar, a bass trombone or euphonium, and a piano or harpsichord. For Greenaway’s 1980 The Falls, Nyman broke down bars 58-61 from the slow movement of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola, and Orchestra into ninety-two separate versions to correspond to the ninety-two “biographies” contained in the film. For Greenaway’s exquisitely antipatriarchal Drowning By Numbers (1987), the composer “resited” these same four bars, at one point transforming the bass line of the Mozart phrase into a motif in its own right. One often has the impression, then, in listening to Nyman, of baroque bass figures (figured bass without the chords being filled in) that not only are not filled in with the usual chords (the supporting material instead tends to work parallel to the bass figures), but that also do not really generate a melody. In fact (and Nyman has stated that he does this in the Mozart resitings he worked out for Drowning by Numbers), the accom- paniment figure basically becomes the melodic line. Thus, listeners to Ny- man’s score pretty much have to fill in, on an aural/dramatic level, the same182 New Styles, New Genres, New Interactions kinds of voids they have to fill in for Greenaway’s films, whose enigmatic narratives and whose highly composed individual shots invite intensely active readings. Put a different way, the use of music strongly contributes to the sense of a series of superimposed frames coming out vertically from the screen that one has in most Greenaway films, the creation of these frames depending as much on a creative process of sorts on the part of the viewer/listener as it does on the director/composer creative processes. One of film music’s most important contributions, where film people have actually laid the groundwork in certain areas for nonfilm people, lies in the area of electric and electronic modifications of sounds and tones. As early as 1931, Rouben Mamoulian, for his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, devised, appar- ently on his own, an audio equivalent for the transformation scene. The direc- tor has described his efforts as follows: To accompany the transformations I wanted a completely unrealistic sound. First I tried rhythmic beats, like a heartbeat. We tried every sort of drum, but they all sounded like drums, Then I recorded my own heart beating, and it was perfect, marvelous. Then we recorded a gong, took off the actual impact noise, and reversed the reverberations. Finally we painted on the soundtrack; and I think that was the first time anyone had used synthetic sound like that, working from light to sounds Bazelon refers to Mamoulian’s brief cue as pre-musique-concréte. Interest- ingly, the film contains no other nondiegetic music, save the ambiguous re- appearance of a waltz as Jekyll breaks off his engagement, and the title and end music, both of which use an orchestration of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, which Jekyll also plays on an organ during the film (given the number of times it has appeared in films, silent and sound, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor should perhaps be considered as the first major film-music cue ever composed). For Fritz Lang’s 1948 Secret Beyond the Door, Miklés. R6zsa “experimented with having an orchestra play their music backwards, recording it back to front on the tape, and then playing it back as usual; the end result sounded the right way around but had an unearthly quality.”7 (A similar gimmick was used by David Lynch for the dream-sequence dialogue in the now-famous second episode of the Twin Peaks television series.) Numerous other examples could be cited. But perhaps the most original and extended use of true electronic music can be found in the Fred McLeod Wilcox Forbidden Planet (1956), which has what the film’s titles refer to as “electronic tonalities” composed by the husband-and-wife team of Louis and Bebe Barron, who had already provided electronic music for various experi- mental films between 1949 and 1953, and who were brought into the For- bidden Planet project by then MGM studio chief Dore Schary. At that time, the creation of electronic music demanded a great deal of painstaking workNew Styles, New Genres, New Interactions 183 designing circuits, laying down various tracks on tapes, and mixing all the di- verse sounds into a coherent, musical “composition.” An extensive article on Forbidden Planet describes the music as follows: The score for Forbidden Planet represents a great many circuits designed by the Barrons. These interesting compositions ranged from the hesitating “beta beat” of the Id monster, to the bubbly sounds associated with Robby the Robot. Many of the sounds that reached the screen were collages of different circuits taped by the Barrons and stacked like building blocks—the same principle on which the moog synthesizer now works. Some of these themes involved as many as seven different component sounds, each representing a separate cir- cuit. “From the beginning, we discovered that people compared them with sounds they heard in their dreams,” cays Barron. “When our circuits reached the end of their existence (an overload point) they would climax in an orgasm of power, and die. In the film, many of the sounds seem like the last paroxysm of a living creature.” Some of these circuits were nameless, but a few were de- rived from some of their favorite music. The theme used as night fell on Altair TV came from a song called Night with Two Moons.* In fact, the circuits designed by the Barrons, who used no synthesizers or traditional electronic-music techniques, were dubbed by them as ‘cybernetic circuits” because they functioned “electronically in a manner remarkably sim- ilar to the way that life-forms function psychologically.”? Certainly one of the most striking effects created by the exclusive use of the Barrons’ “elec- tronic tonalities” from start to finish of this science-fiction film built around the narrative of Shakespeare’s The Tempest is that the viewer/listener often has no sense whatever of the presence of a nondiegetic score. Rather, much of the music, whether in the sounds that accompany the spaceship's slowing down below the speed of light or the various attacks of the “monster from the id,” seems to be an integral part of the visual action. Not only do these elec- tronic tonalities evoke, by their very nonacoustic nature, “futuricity,” they seem to be as much a part of the profile of things to come as spaceships, robots, time travel, and, yes, invisible id monsters that show up only when trapped in an electric grid. Put another way, the sounds we hear when, for in- stance, the id monster approaches could be a) the sounds made by that crea- ture’s presence; b) an aural parallel (or correspondence) to the visual clement; c) nondiegetic “music” to get our emotions involved in the scene; d) all of the above, Jazz made inroads into film music in the 1950s, although these inroads have never become major highways. If classical music has, within its various styles, assorted devices such as the major/minor dialectic or the use of ex- treme dissonance, which evoke various quasi-Barthesian “icities,” the entire jazz genre tended to attach itself in the cinema to the “-icity” of “lower-class” people involved in sleazy dramas of sex, drugs, and/or crime. The same thing