COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS

COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS

*>
COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS
Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler

With a new Introduction by Graham McCann

A
c ontinuum
Continuum
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First published in 1947 by Oxford University Press, New York

This edition published 2007

© The Literary Estates of Theodor W Adorno and Hanns Eisler 1994

New Introduction and Index © The Athlone Press 1994

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record fo r this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-13: 9780826499028
ISBN-10: 0826499023

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A catalog record fo r this book is available from the Library o f Congress

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without
prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by BookEns Ltd, Royston, Hens.

Printed and bound in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd.
 Contents

New Introduction ••
VII
Preface xxxiii
Introduction XXXV

1 Prejudices and Bad Habits 1

2 Function and Dramaturgy 13

3 The New Musical Resources 21

4 Sociological Aspects 30

5 Elements of Aesthetics 42

6 The Com poser and the Movie-Making Process 60

7 Suggestions and Conclusions 78

Appendix
Report on the Film Music Project 92
Fourteen Ways to Describe Rain 108
Notes 116
Index 129

v
.
 New Introduction
Graham McCann

And just because he's human

A man would like a little bite to eat.
He won't get full on a lot of talk
That won't give him bread and meat.
Brecht/Eisler1

Today it goes without saying that

nothing concerning art goes without
saying, much less without thinking.
Adorno2

Hollywood, 1943: Alfred Hitchcock's new movie. Lifeboat, is in production

at 20th Century-Fox studios. The composer discovers one day that the
director has decided against using any music in the movie. Puzzled,
suddenly insecure, and a little angry, the composer asks why such an
unusual change of mind has occurred. 'Well/ he is told, 'Hitchcock feels
that since the entire action of the film takes place in a lifeboat on the open
ocean, where would the music come from?' The composer sighed,
shrugged his shoulders, gave a world-weary smile and replied: 'Ask Mr
Hitchcock to explain where the camera came from, and I'll tell him where
the music com es from.'
Music remains the least appreciated, and most overlooked, aspect of
the m edium of movies. It is still, for the most part, unspoken for.
Composing for the Films, when it was first published in 1947, was a unique
NEW I N T R O D U C T I O N

and challenging contribution to the theoretical and practical under­

standing of the nature, and potential, of commercial movies and their
musical scores. Today, fifty years after Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno
began their remarkable project, the book continues to stand alone as an
intelligent analysis of the social, political and aesthetic significance of
movie music. One may disagree with some of its arguments, but one can
still appreciate the rare critical respect it shows to a subject seldom taken
seriously. It is concise but ambitious, boldly suggestive, a richly enticing
overture. Its co-authors, Eisler and Adorno, represent two of the most
significant traditions in twentieth century Marxism: Eisler Brechtian
artistic practice, Adorno Critical Theory. Neither author recognized rigid
disciplinary boundaries; as a consequence, to read Composing for the Films
is to engage with aesthetic, economic, sociological, political and philo­
sophical issues and concerns. It is, in the circumstances, a surprisingly
lucid book.

Hanns Eisler (1898-1962), according to one of his biographers, 'paved the

way for a social art in a field which today is still considered rather as a
refuge from politics'.3 He was bom in Leipzig, but brought up in Vienna.
His father was the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Eisler and his mother
Marie Ida Fischer. He was the youngest of three children, his brother and
sister becoming professional revolutionaries in Berlin. In 1919 he
embarked on composition studies as the student of Karl Weigl at the
New Viennese Conservatory. It was not long before he tired of Weigl's
conventional, undemanding instruction, and, in spite of his lack of
financial means, began a four-year period of private tuition with Arnold
Schonberg, who waived his fee. It was an extraordinarily propitious time
to be accepted into Schonberg's master class, coinciding as it did with the
transition from atonal to twelve-tone composition. After Webern and
Berg, Eisler was the first to write in the new technique.
His political radicalism caused him to clash with Schonberg, and, in
1925, after an intense period of debate and rebellion, he moved to Berlin
to pursue his search for a new form of socialist music. He wrote direct yet
musically sophisticated songs for communist choirs and agit-prop shows.
As a militant composer he was to write several of the most outstanding
songs of the international Communist movement, including the very
familiar Komintemlied (Comintern Song), Lob des Lemens (In Praise of
Learning) and Einheitsfrontlied (United Front Song). Strongly influenced by
Bertolt Brecht's ideas on politically engaged art, he composed numerous
 NEW IN TR O D U C T IO N

theatre pieces and cantatas for texts by Brecht, in addition to incidental

music for plays by Clifford Odets, Brecht and George Bernard Shaw. He
began composing for movies in the late 1920s, working with such figures
of pre-Hitler German culture as Waiter Ruttman (Opus III, 1927) and
Slatan Dudow (Kuhle Wampe, 1931). His left-wing political associations
made his eventual departure from Germany inevitable.
In the early 1930s he headed a short-lived International Music Bureau
in M oscow, and worked in Vienna, Prague, Paris, London and
Copenhagen before emigrating to the United States of America. After
the war he was deported, settling first in Vienna and then, from 1950
until his death, in East Berlin, where he led a master class in composition
at the Academy of the Arts and composed a number of proletarian-
nationalist works for large choral groups, including the Deutsche Sinfonie of
the German Democratic Republic.
Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969) was once described as
'Germany's most prominent academic teacher and an outstanding citizen
of the Western European avant-garde'.4 He was bom in Frankfurt am
Main, the only child of a wealthy and assimilated Jewish businessman,
Oskar Wiesengrund, and his Catholic wife, Maria Calvelli-Adorno della
Piana, a singer of Corsican and originally Genoese descent (the son's
decision, on the brink of exile in 1938, to replace his patronymic
Wiesengrund in favour of his mother's maiden name was made on the
advice of his colleagues).5Precocious musically and intellectually, in 1921
he took courses at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in philosophy,
sociology, psychology and music, emerging in 1924 with a doctorate in
philosophy. He arrived in Vienna the following year to study music with
Alban Berg. It was natural, given his talent and his mother's family
connections, that Adom o should also establish personal ties with
Schonberg, Webern, Krenek, Steuermann, Kolisch and other representa­
tives of the m odem school. He remained closest, however, to Berg, who
seemed, to Adomo, a composer situated in between the modernity of
Schonberg and the nostalgia of Mahler.6 Although in 1927 he returned to
Frankfurt to resume his academic studies, he retained close ties with
Vienna, editing the influential journal Anhruch from 1928 to 1932.
His university teaching post at the University of Frankfurt, which he
had taken up in 1931, grew increasingly precarious after the Nazi seizure
of pow er in 1933. The rise of fascism changed the course of many
European intellectuals' lives and careers, and Adomo, like Eisler, was no
exception. Reluctantly, he had to leave his homeland. He would reflea.
ix
NEW I N T R O D U C T I O N

for the rest of his career, on the 'damaged lives' of himself and his fellow
refugees. He went into temporary exile in Oxford, at Merton College,
before joining the Institute of Social Research in New York.
The Institute had been established in Frankfurt in 1923, with classical
Marxism as the theoretical basis of its programme, but had undergone a
radical change in outlook in 1930 when the philosopher Max
Horkheimer, an old friend of Adorno's, took over as its director.7 In
contrast to the ahistorical, scientistic Marxism associated with the Party,
which seemed to discourage prudential forms of political theory,
Horkheimer's Institute proposed a Marxism that was true to Marx's
original, critical project: a theory for the times, a theory that changed with
the times. The Institute's reanimated Marxism was thus a 'Critical
Theory', radically opposed to dogmatism of any kind, constantly on guard
against the twin dangers of fetishizing the general or the particular. The
Institute was now committed to a programme of interdisciplinary study,
explicating the set of mediations which enable the reproduction and
transformation of society, economy, culture and consciousness.
The Institute was ideally suited to Adorno's prodigious and heterodox
talents. He became the dominant intellectual influence on most of the
Institute's research projects, both during the American exile and after the
return to Frankfurt at the end of the forties (when he became its new
director). He remained a resolute defender of the idea of 'nicht
mitmachen', not playing along, a refusal to compromise in the name of
practical expediency.8 His thought resisted the temptation to counte­
nance any premature resolution or reconciliation, seeking to preserve the
dialectical unity of part and whole, particular and universal. He once
wrote that, 'The dialectic advances by ways of extremes, driving thoughts
with the utmost consequentiality to the point where they turn back on
themselves, instead of qualifying them'.9 His style was to brush against
the grain of conventional thought, employing provocative exaggerations
and ironic inversions to bring contradictions into bold relief: 'the value of
a thought', he remarked, 'is measured by its distance from the continuity
of the familiar'.10
'Refugees', wrote Bertolt Brecht, 'are the keenest dialecticians. They
are refugees as a result of changes and their sole object of study is change.
They are able to deduce the greatest events from the smallest hints. ...
When their opponents are winning, they calculate how much their
victory has cost them; and they have the sharpest eyes for contra­
dictions.'11 European immigration had reached its peak by 1941. Six
 NEW I N T R O D U C T I O N

hundred and thirteen displaced academics entered the United States

between 1933 and 1945 under a rule giving exemption from the quota to
any emigres who had taught during the previous two years and had a
guaranteed American teaching position. The Emergency Committee In
Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars found places for 459 of them; 167
settled at the 'University in Exile', set up by the New School for Social
Research in New York. Eisler arrived there early in 1938, teaching a
number of courses on music. In terms of numbers, the New School was
by far the most important academic centre for emigre' scholars in the U.S.
It was not, however, the only significant institution associated with emigre'
intellectuals at that time.12In 1934 Columbia University provided a North
American home for the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. In its new
location in New York's Momingside Heights Park, the Institute, under the
direction of Horkheimer and characterized by the work of such figures as
Adorno (who arrived later than the others, in the February of 1938),
Franz Neumann, Leo Lowenthal and Herbert Marcuse, continued its self­
consciously interdisciplinary theoretical investigations into the nature
and causes of political totalitarianism.
Adorno, more so than any of his Institute colleagues, felt ill-at-ease in
his new surroundings. 'Every intellectual in emigration', he was later to
write, 'is, without exception, mutilated, and does well to acknowledge it
to himself, if he wishes to avoid being cruelly apprised of it behind the
tightly-closed doors of his self-esteem.'13 Although he joined the other
Institute members in acquiring American citizenship, he never enter­
tained the possibility of settling there. Indeed, Leo Lowenthal later
recalled that Adorno had been so slow to join his fellow critical theorists
in America that 'we had to drag him almost physically'.14 He considered
himself 'European through and through', and regarded himself as such
'from the first to the last day abroad, and never denied it'.15 One of his
new colleagues observed: 'He looks as you would image a very absent-
minded German professor, and he behaves so foreign that I feel like a
member of the Mayflower society.'16 Eisler was also uncomfortable with
many aspects of the U.S., but, early on, he was more preoccupied with
the fact of his chronic lack of money. Joris Ivens, with whom Eisler had
collaborated on Die Jugend hat das Wort in 1932, now was President of the
Association of Documentary Film Producers in New York, and Eisler
hoped to receive some commissions for film music. He soon developed a
network of supportive friends and potential patrons.
While most European academics found New York a congenial place to
NEW I N T R O D U C T I O N

work, other emigres found themselves, through either poverty or

curiosity, drawn to the West Coast, to California. Adorno would move
to Santa Monica, near Los Angeles, in 1941, when his colleague
Horkheimer's uncertain health necessitated a warmer climate. Eisler
would go there in 1942, hoping, among other things, to resume his
collaboration with Brecht. They were joined by some unexpected guests.
The European Film Fund, set up in Hollywood by several emigre' movie
makers at the end of 1939, had started to find minor jobs at the studios for
distinguished immigrants so as to justify their continued presence in
California. An elderly historian, for example, found himself working as a
'researcher' for a costume drama, and a musicologist was obliged to take a
position as an apprentice to an undistinguished movie composer. In time,
the strategy was extended to accommodate the new arrivals. As part of
the belated rescue effort, the Hollywood studios Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
and Warner Brothers, prompted by the European Film Fund, had offered
the Emergency Rescue Committee more than seventy 'blank' contracts as
proof that the prospective immigrant could work. A strikingly varied
group of poets, novelists, dramatists, musicians and artists arrived in
Hollywood at the beginning of the 1940s, drawing token salaries of $100
per week and contemplating, with varying degrees of apprehension, a
new, and perhaps permanent, career in the movies. Among those chosen
for this assistance were Alfred Doblin, Walter Mehring, Alfred Neumann,
Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Mann, Ludwig Marcuse and Ernst Lothar. Of this
group, only Brecht appeared to make a determined, if profoundly cynical,
attempt to succeed in the novel environment.
Brecht described Hollywood as the 'centre of the international
narcotics trade'.17 He had few genuine friends among the emigre
population, and he looked on with dismay as many of them settled into
either a self-destructive misanthropy or a submissive materialism. Eisler
met Brecht again, soon after the latter's arrival in Santa Monica, at the
house of Adorno. For the five previous years their only contact with each
other had been by correspondence. The reunion inspired them both.
Eisler helped revive Brecht's spirits. When he resumed his working
relationship with Eisler once more, Brecht noted that it felt 'a bit as if I am
stumbling around muddle-headedly in some crowd and suddenly hear
my old name called'.18
Neither artist, however, could afford to devote much of his time to
their joint projects. Brecht wrote, in his poem Hollywood, of the need to
'go to the market' each morning, 'where they buy lies', in order 'to earn
 NEW I N T R O D U C T IO N

my bread'. He could find few suitable collaborators at the studios; those

writers who regarded themselves as communists or fellow travellers were
largely under the spell of Russian theatre and, in particular, the ideas of
Stanislavsky. It was not easy for Brecht and Eisler to maintain their
shared vision, their sense of a common artistic and political strategy.
Eisler, in particular, was moving closer again to his old teacher Schonberg
(Eric Bentley19 recalls seeing the two men together at the time,
Schonberg 'motionless, unsmiling', Eisler 'flitting about him with rapid
gestures and broad smiles and a flood of flattering words') and was
looking to concentrate more than before on his chamber and orchestral
music. He was also obliged, in order to earn a living, to write a number of
movie scores for the studios.
The group with which Eisler and Brecht associated was rather
different from the larger refugee community in two basic ways: it was
com posed primarily of artists, and the politics of the group in general
emphasized a more distinctively left-wing and activist anti-fascism. It
was com m on at this time for many of the most distinguished emigres to
socialize together on Sunday afternoons, often at the Santa Monica
home of Salka Viertel, at 165 Mabery Road. Viertel, a former actor and
writer, had lived in the U.S. since 1927, was a close friend of Greta
Garbo and Charlie Chaplin, and her home became a kind of salon for
her artistic and political friends and acquaintances. It was an
extraordinary meeting place for an extraordinary group of artists: actors
Peter Lorre and Luise Rainer; conductor Otto Klemperer; composers
Max Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin, Bronislaw Kaper and Erich Komgold;
directors William Dieterle, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder;
and writers Thomas and Heinrich Mann. In this odd society, unexpected
friendships were forged, and unlikely alliances arranged. It was here, for
example, that Charles Laughton befriended Brecht and Eisler, resulting
in a collaboration on the first production of Galileo20 and, less
successfully, the hiring of Eisler as Laughton's German accent coach
for the undistinguished movie Arch of Triumph (1948). It was here that
Adorno and Thomas Mann would sometimes discuss the work-in-
progress that would later become Doctor Faustus (1947), a novel marked,
as Mann acknowledged, by 'brazen snatches' of Adorno's essays on the
philosophy of music.21 It also was here that Schonberg and Adorno
would meet, as would, on occasion, an eclectic range of theatrical and
musical figures, such as Clifford Odets, Stella Adler and Harold Clurman,
Max Reinhardt and Christopher Isherwood, Artie Shaw and Ava
NEW I N T R O D U C T I O N

Gardner, Igor Stravinsky, Vladimir Horowitz, Vincent Price, Lion

Feuchtwanger and Orson Welles.
In Viertel's memoir of the period. The Kindness of Strangers, she notes
how Eisler found it much easier than Brecht to establish friendships at
these meetings. Eisler, she remarks, was 'already acclimatized to Holly­
wood', his 'brilliant mind and jolliness' helping to make him a popular
figure in American literary circles. Brecht, she recalls, was by far the more
reserved of the two, appearing aloof and reticent because he 'refused to
express himself stumblingly in an alien tongue', in stark contrast to Eisler,
'who, unconcerned about grammar and his atrocious accent, enlivened
the dullest parties'.22
It was Salka Viertel who introduced Charlie Chaplin to Brecht and
Eisler. Chaplin was rather suspicious of what he saw as Brecht's tendency
to theorize systematically but at times obtusely about art, while Brecht, in
turn, treated Chaplin with unusually 'cordial, attentive respect'. Eisler's
relationship with Chaplin was noticeably warmer: Eisler had always
regarded Chaplin as one of the most accomplished screen actors in the
world, and Chaplin would later, in his autobiography, describe Eisler as a
'great musician'.23 In 1946, Eisler acted as musical adviser on Chaplin's
Monsieur Verdoux (1947). He wrote excitedly to Clifford Odets of his early
experiences at the studio:

Charlie has begun work here; he made a number of extended

rushes and I watched him directing - his mastery is truly fantastic.
Not only does he demonstrate to his actors what he wants but also
what he does not want. He writes very good scenes, but naturally
he is no author and often certain weaknesses and naive
pseudophilosophical observations are unquestionably bad ... But
these are only small faults, and taken as a whole what he is making
is really a masterpiece. He has very rudimentary notions about
music and composes vocal numbers and songs himself which do
not please me at all. I don't see how I could work with him. But he
is a marvellous chap and it is always a pleasure to spend an evening
with him.24

Eisler came to believe that he and Brecht had radicalized Chaplin, and he
regarded, rather grandly, the sharply ironic comic moments in Monsieur
Verdoux as evidence of their influence.
 NEW I N T R O D U C T I O N

Eisler's own, direct, experience of movie-making in Hollywood, however,

was, in general, much less satisfying. As a musician, his position seemed
particularly insecure. The emigre writers, although they found many
aspects of Hollywood and the studio system difficult to comprehend,
knew enough about popular fiction and commercial cinema to appreciate
what was expected of them (even if they chose not to supply it). For
European musicians, on the other hand, Hollywood bore scant relation­
ship to anything that they had known in Germany or Austria. Few
European movie producers chose to immerse a drama in the kind of all-
enveloping score that was, it seemed, common to American cinema.
Ernst Krenek, after a brief, near farcical, meeting with Sam Goldwyn,
retreated to the East Coast to teach at Vassar. Arnold Schonberg, apart
from a brief flirtation with the movie studios, established himself as a
teacher at UCLA. Eisler, on the other hand, although he found a teaching
post at the University of Southern California, had to come to terms with
commercial cinema.
Eisler composed a number of scores for commercial movies, including
(in collaboration with Brecht) Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die (1943),
Clifford Odets' None But the Lonely Heart (1944), Frank Borzage's The
Spanish Main (1945), Gustav Machate's Jealousy (1945), Harold Clurman's
Deadline at Dawn (1946), Douglas Sirk's A Scandal in Paris (1946), Jean
Renoir's The Woman on the Beach (1947) and Edward Dmytryk's So Well
Remembered (1947). They were not, for Eisler, particularly rewarding or
encouraging experiences. Even his contribution to the more openly
political Hangmen Also Die, which attracted an Oscar nomination for Eisler,
was marred by the bitter arguments between the director, Fritz Lang,
Bertolt Brecht and his co-writer John Wexley over screen credits. If Brecht
was increasingly frustrated by the compromises forced on him by the
studios, Eisler, even though he lacked his friend's obstinacy, sometimes still
found the lowly status accorded to the composer intolerable.
Eisler was, from the beginning, startled by the difficult conditions in
which musicians and composers were expected to work. The movie
studios had developed their own music departments. From their
composers they required the simplest thread of a tune, which their
arrangers could then expand into a score appropriate to the musicians
available and the overall 'house style'. The studio composer, Eisler noted,
needed ca kind of blue-print in mind, a framework which he must fill in
at each given place and only then see to it that the fillings are vivid and
striking'.25 Because the completed score could subsequently be disturbed
xv
NEW I N T R O D U C T I O N

and distorted by the director's cuts, the composer had to develop a talent
for 'planned improvisation', anticipating such hazards within the very
structure of the score.26 The studios thus favoured those composers who
were capable of producing music to order, with a fluency and speed
seldom, if ever, required elsewhere.
It was through such painful experiences that Eisler became the most
articulate, and passionate, critic of movie music. In Composing for the Films
he railed against the 'often grotesque artistic incompetence' of the music
department heads, and the lowly status accorded to the composer.27 He
reflected on the individual composer's insecure position in the department,
warning against both the lazy compromise and the proud but destructive
act of defiance; both attitudes, he stressed, 'would only manifest his
impotence'. Eisler also attacked the rigid structure of movie orchestras
(confined by union agreement to a stria number of strings, woodwinds
and brass), the wide spread praaice of farming-out orchestration, and the
habit of handing conducting duties to popular 'celebrity' performers or to
mediocre orchestra players. He had some sympathy for the musicians
themselves, forced to tolerate 'unworthy and often unendurably shabby
cinema scores', a demanding studio regime 'that combines senseless
pedantry with irresponsible bungling', inadequate conduaors, and, the
stress that came from the need to work long hours to complete a scene
followed by weeks of unproductive idleness. Such working conditions,
Eisler argued, encouraged carelessness and indifference, and an attitude of
'silent contempt toward the whole business'.28
What most exercised Eisler was the programmatic struaure of the
music they were obliged to play:

There is a favorite Hollywood gibe: "Birdie sings, music sings".

Music must follow visual incidents and illustrate them either by
direaly imitating them or by using cliches that are associated with
the m ood and content of the piaure ... Mountain peaks invariably
invoke string tremolos punauated by a signal-like horn motif. The
ranch to which the virile hero has eloped with the sophisticated
heroine is accompanied by forest murmurs and a flute melody. A
slow waltz goes along with a moonlit scene in which a boat drifts
down a river lined with weeping willows ... When the scene is laid
in a Dutch town, with its canals, windmills, and wooden shoes, the
composer is supposed to send over to the studio library for a Dutch
folk song in order to use its theme as a working basis.29
 NEW INTRODUCTION

Arnold Schonberg had experienced this kind of humiliation at first hand.

Irving G. Thalberg, the vice-president in charge of production at Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer studios, had asked Schonberg to compose a score, to be
reminiscent of his early, 'lovely' music, for the movie version of Pearl
Buck's Chinese saga The Good Earth. Schonberg startled Thalberg by
announcing his terms, which included 'complete control' over the actors
to ensure that they would 'speak in the same pitch and key' as his score,
producing an effect, he promised, 'similar to Pierrot Lunaire, but, of
course, less difficult'. Thalberg, in a cool hour some time later, let
Schonberg know that he had com e across some Chinese folk songs that
had inspired the head of the music department to compose some 'lovely'
music for the movie.30 The studios, Eisler noted, were powerful enough
to ignore the principled gesture. The composers who worked were
generally the composers who were willing to adapt and conform.
Com posing for the movies had become little more than the routine
selection of a standard musical device which would result in a specific
audience effect already indicated in the dramatic scene. Composers
became specialists in choosing the appropriate devices from the store­
house of musical effects. A working knowledge of the popular classics
thus formed the basis of the typical Hollywood composer's career. It was
not unusual, for example, for relatively cheaply-made horror movies,
such as The Mummy (1932), to be graced by music from such works as
Swan Lake. As Max Winkler had confessed: 'We murdered the works of
Mozart, Grieg, ].S. Bach, Verdi, Bizet, Tchaikovsky and Wagner -
everything that wasn't protected by copyright from our pilfering.'31

Music had always been an important part of Adorno's life and work.
Movies, on the other hand, were, at least during his stay in the U.S.,
impossible to ignore. Living near Los Angeles, during the early forties, he
had a unique opportunity to witness the extraordinary impact of
Hollywood movies. When he was preparing to begin work on his
collaboration with Eisler, he sought out his old friend and fellow emigre,
Siegfried Kracauer (who was working on his own major study of movies),
for advice.32 He was aware, after all, that he was far from being an expert
on the subject. Unlike Eisler, he had not worked for the Hollywood
studios, and his contact with other people involved in making movies
was, it seems, relatively slight. He had much more experience, practical
and theoretical, of making music. Indeed, his earliest work in America
had involved the sociological analysis of radio music.
XVII
NEW I N T R O D U C T IO N

In New York, Adorno had worked half-time for the Institute and the
other half for the Princeton Radio Research Project, directed by another
emigre, Paul Lazarsfeld. Adorno's task was to direct the Music Study
section of the Project. There were tensions from the very beginning.
Lazarsfeld was a master of empirical social science techniques, which he
encouraged Adom o to employ to test his theories about music and
popular culture. Adom o was never convinced that such techniques were
reliable and illuminating methods of understanding 'the utter obscurity of
what w e call "musical experience"

I hardly knew how to approach it. A small machine which enabled

a listener to indicate what he liked and didn't like by pushing a
button during the performance of a piece of music appeared to be
highly inadequate to the complexity of what had to be discovered;
and this in spite of the seeming objectivity of the data supplied. In
any event, I was determined before I took the field to pursue in
depth what could perhaps be called musical "content analysis",
without confusing music with program music. I still recall how
bewildered I was when my late colleague Franz Neumann ...
asked me whether the questionnaires for the Music Study had
already been sent out, when I still hardly knew whether the
questions that I regarded as essential could be done justice to by
questionnaires.33

Adom o continued to insist that culture is the condition 'that excludes a

mentality capable of measuring it'.34 He found a sympathetic colleague in
George Simpson, an American sociologist who was also familiar with the
European tradition. Simpson encouraged him to be as radical and
uncompromising as he felt he needed to be, and assisted him in the
writing of four articles based on his research. Adom o would later pay
tribute to Simpson's invaluable support:

Time and again I have observed that native Americans were more
open-minded, above all more willing to help, than European
immigrants. The latter, under the pressure of prejudice and rivalry,
often showed the tendency to be more American than the
Americans and were also quick to consider every newly arrived
fellow European as a kind of threat to their own "adjustment".35
 NEW I N T R O D U C T IO N

Although A dom o had begun, with Simpson's assistance, to transform his

distinctive arguments into American sociological language, his role on the
Project was terminated in 1940, w hen its sponsor, the Rockefeller
Foundation, withdrew its support from the musical section.
Adorno's work within the Institute itself proved to be much more
coherent and constructive. When he and Horkheimer moved to Santa
Monica, they began work on a major (but by no means definitive)
statement of their common position: Dialectic o f Enlightenment.36 One of
their major concerns, and the one that was made to seem especially
prominent because of their move near to Los Angeles, was the critique of
mass culture. Mass culture, they insisted, had an important political
function. It was a mass culture for a class society; far from arising
spontaneously from the 'masses' themselves, as it presented itself as
doing, it was actually imposed on them from above: 'The effrontery of the
rhetorical question, "What do people want?" lies in the fact that it is
addressed ... to those very people who are deliberately to be deprived of
this individuality.'37 In order to distance themselves from the conven­
tional idea of mass culture as a genuinely popular culture, Horkheimer
and A dom o coined the polemical phrase 'the culture industry'. The
expression was not meant to be taken entirely literally: it referred 'to the
standardization of the thing itself - such as that of the Western, familiar to
every movie-goer - and to the rationalization of distribution techniques,
but not strictly to the production process'.38
The culture industry, they argued,

perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises.

The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on
pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all
the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that
the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied
with the menu.39

The culture industry, integrated into capitalism, in turn integrates

consumers from above. It operates to ensure its own reproduction; the
cultural forms it produces must therefore be compatible with this aim.
Cultural commodities must be instantly recognizable and attractive while
seeming distinctive and new; the familiar must therefore be promoted as
the unfamiliar, the old re-styled as the ever-new: routine standardization
is thus obscured by 'pseudo-individualization':
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NEW I N T R O D U C T I O N

Pseudo individuality is rife: from the standardized jazz improvisa­

tion to the exceptional film star whose hair curls over her eye to
demonstrate her originality. What is individual is no more than the
generality's power to stamp the accidental detail so firmly that it is
accepted as such. The defiant reserve or elegant appearance of the
individual on show is mass-produced like Yale locks, whose only
difference can be measured in fractions of millimeters. The
peculiarity of the self is a monopoly commodity determined by
society; it is falsely represented as natural. It is no more than the
moustache, the French accent, the deep voice of the woman of the
world, the Lubitsch touch: finger prints on identity cards which are
otherwise exactly the same.40

It is extremely important that one places this critique in its proper

historical context. Adorno and Horkheimer were, as ever, seeking a
'theory for the times', a critical theory that concerned itself with timely,
not timeless, interpretations and judgements of changing circumstances.
Their Hollywood was the Hollywood of the late thirties and early forties, a
Hollywood dominated by the immensely powerful studios. The movie
industry was characterized by a small number of vertically-integrated
companies: the so-called 'Big Five' studios - Warner Bros., RKO, 20th
Century-Fox, Paramount and MGM - and the smaller Universal,
Columbia and United Artists. The so-called 'studio system' was based
on the oligopolistic control by the studios of production, distribution and
exhibition. During the peak years of the studio system, the eight majors
controlled 95 per cent of all movies exhibited in the U.S. As each of the
major studios produced more movies every year, the centralization of
administrative procedures became essential: buying stories, reserving
stage space, controlling and co-ordinating the working schedules of
performers, building sets and commissioning scores, were tasks assumed
by managerial personnel who could oversee the entire complex
operation. Production came to be organized increasingly on an 'assembly
line' basis marked by highly-developed divisions of labour and
hierarchies of authority and control. The screenwriters sometimes found
themselves being spied on to check that they were always writing; actors
were trained, groomed and sometimes re-styled. Stars, directors, writers,
musicians and technicians were kept on contract by the studios. Each
studio had its own repertory of leading men and women, character actors,
singing stars and comedy acts. Each studio cultivated an instantly-
 NEW I N T R O D U C T IO N

recognizable style: Warner Bros, for example, tended to specialize in

certain genres (gangster movies, backstage musicals and, later on,
romantic adventures) with a distinctive 'look' (low-key lighting, simple
sets) and a notably populist image, while Universal concentrated on
expressionistic horror movies and MGM favoured large-budget costume
dramas and lavish musicals.41 It was this calculated appearance of
diversity within a rationalized commercial system that Adorno and
Horkheimer came to observe.
Hollywood was at that time, they felt, the real dream factory of the
culture industry. Where there was once innovation, there was now
imitation. Repetition had taken the place of development. The culture
industry functioned like an enormous 'multiple-choice questionnaire'
without a correct answer; what mattered now was not so much the
choice itself but more the fact that one chose at all. The consequence,
feared Horkheimer and Adorno, might eventually be a society without a
sense of past or future, an individual without memory or imagination;
history would be dissolved by the endless flow of the present. The spectre
that was haunting this world was the 'spectre of man without memory',42
without the ability to recall or dream that things could be other than they
currently are. The culture industry encourages forgetfulness and
distraction. The breathless pace of most Hollywood movies, for example,
left little room for serious reflection on the part of the audience: 'The
liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and from
negation.'43
Adorno, earlier in his American exile, had noted the effects of this
tendency on music; the familiarity of the musical work, he argued, 'is a
surrogate for the quality ascribed to it. To like it is almost the same thing
as to recognise it'.44 Standardization sought standard responses. With the
fetishism of music came the regression of hearing, a decline in the ability
of the listener to concentrate on anything but the most truncated aspects
of a composition. The process was by no means limited to the reception of
so-called 'popular' music. Connoisseurs of 'serious' music were inclined
to listen in the distracted manner promoted by classical programming:
'The tired businessman can clap arranged classics on the shoulder and
fondle the progeny of their muse.'45 'Classical' works were either broken
down into semi-precious gems ('the man who in the subway trium­
phantly whistles loudly the theme of the finale of Brahms's First is
already primarily involved in its debris'), or else were rescued from the
clutches of exchange only to be fetishized for their quaint appearance of
XXI
NEW I N T R O D U C T I O N

wholeness ('if the romanticizing of particulars eats away the body of the
whole, the endangered substance is galvanically copper-plated').46
Vulgarization and enchantment, the two 'hostile sisters, dwell together
in the arrangements which have colonized large areas of music'.47
Adorno's specific criticisms of music in the movies were founded on
his more general critique of the culture industry. He did not, as Eisler did,
have direct experience of composing for the movies. Hollywood, he
argued, was reducing music to the status of an advertisement for the very
movie it appeared in. By lending the vision a veneer of humanity, music
was obscuring the movie's absence of humanity. He compared the music
which accompanied the movie's opening credits to a barker's spiel: 'Look
here, everyone! What you will see is as grand, as radiant, as colourful as I
am! Be grateful, clap your hands and buy.'48

By the 1940s, Adorno and Eisler were, in many ways, unlikely

collaborators on a study of movie music. Theirs had been a troubled
relationship from the very beginning, in 1925, when Alban Berg brought
them together. Adorno was remarkably well-read, critically astute and
intimidating, while Eisler was politically active and a celebrated young
musician, and, it should be added, egregious modesty was certainly not
one of either man's most remarked upon personal foibles. They regarded
each other as potential rivals, although, it seems, they recognized and
respected each other's talents. Adorno had written a very positive review
of Eisler's Duo op. 7 for violin and cello, performed at the Venice Music
Festival that same year. He described Eisler as 'the composer who
represents Arnold Schonberg's latest generation of students', and praised
the imaginative talent 'which may be very personal to him without being
so overtly in evidence as his melodic inventiveness, his harmonic
eloquence and his knowledge of his instruments'.49 Eisler's controversial
transitional work, Zeitungsausschnitte op. 11 for voice and piano, first
performed in Berlin in December 1927, also attracted a sensitive and
supportive response from Adorno, who commended the brio and
distinctiveness of the songs. The two men had already begun to drift
apart, however, at the same time that Eisler had rebelled against
Schonberg.
Eisler attacked the 'new music' for what he regarded as its elitism; he
believed, that it had 'turned a deaf ear' to the social conflicts of its times.
As part of his practical protest against this perceived elitism, Eisler began
his critique of musical culture immanently, through the text, renouncing
 NEW I N T R O D U C T IO N

bourgeois art while using bourgeois methods. The m odem composer,

declared Eisler, 'must change from a parasite into a fighter'. His own
music was further transformed when, at the end of 1927, he joined the
Berlin agit-prop group Das Rote Sprachrohr (The Red Mouthpiece) as its
composer, pianist and conductor. In writing for the group, he learned
how to express himself in a manner that, he felt, the working class could
understand. A new kind of musical rhetoric was required, more basic and
idiomatic, one that synthesized elements from accessible 'low' genres
with the resources of m odem music. Eisler composed a number of songs,
incidental music and ballads for the group, including one of his most
well-known, the Komintemlied.50
It was Eisler's insistent drive towards musical practice, uniting a sharp
theoretical awareness with an urgent practical activity, that distinguished
him from most other composers of his time. His project was, primarily, a
political one: to give concrete musical expression to the Marxist vision of
society and the aspirations of the working class. Eisler's militant songs and
political ballads were to be distinguished by their topicality and precise
political content, whose impact was heightened by the music. They were
songs for the workers in the great m odem cities, and they sought to lend
their weight to the complex process of enlightening people about their
own material interests.
This work had been encouraged by the vital figure of Brecht, who saw
in Eisler a very appealing, and rare, combination of outstanding musical
technique and urgent practical commitment. Their enduring collabora­
tive relationship, which began in 1928, ranged from the didactic 'oratorio'
Die Massnahme (1930) to the Schonbergian 'Hollywood Elegies' Lieder
cycle (1942). To support Brecht's dramatic techniques Eisler developed
compositional methods designed to break the audience's identification
and immediate rapport with musical sonority so that music and text
could, once again, be experienced consciously.
Adorno was opposed to this didactic form of art, which he regarded as
akin to the reactionary 'community music' of composers such as Paul
Hindemith. In stark contrast to Brecht and Eisler's self-consciously
'political' approach, Adorno argued that only a music that refuses easy
communicability can be regarded as genuinely revolutionary. Music, he
believed, was the index of the culture in which it was composed, all the
more so because its codes are so hard to fathom. 'Works of art do not lie,'
he said, 'what they say is literally true. Their reality, however, lies in the
fact that they are answers to questions brought before them from
NEW I N T R O D U C T I O N

outside.'51 Radical music was music which recognized the disjunction

that had occurred between art and social life, a disjunction which could
not 'be corrected within music, but only within society'.52 In m odem art,
he argued, 'direct protest is reactionary'.53 According to Adomo, it was
not constructive for music 'to stare in helpless horror at society'; music
fulfilled its social function 'when it presents social problems through its
own material and according to its own formal laws - problems which
music contains within itself in the innermost cells of its technique'.54
Genuinely autonomous art never settles, never rests, never allows itself to
be taken in by its own designs: 'To be true to Schonberg', Adomo
observed, 'is to warn against all twelve-tone schools.'55
Brecht's overtly political art, Adom o contended, only succeeded in
making art apolitical. Although Adom o sympathized with Brecht's
intentions (and the two men remained relatively friendly on a personal
level), he was critical of his proposed solutions.56 Far from making social
reality appear strange, Brecht's dramatic techniques make it seem
straightfoward - thus projecting yet another illusion which he under­
writes by presenting it in such a coercive manner. His didactic posture,
according to Adomo, 'refleas intolerance of ambiguity that touches off
thought and refleaion. In this Brecht is authoritarian ... [H]e wanted to
be influential at all costs, if necessary by employing techniques of
domination.'57 Brecht, in turn, regarded Adorno and his Institute
colleagues as politically complacent, having, in his view, defused their
Marxism of its revolutionary urgency. Although he continued to socialize
with them, he started to use them and their aaivities as raw material for
his long-gestating, never-completed Tui-Novel, a satire on the follies of
intelleauals that he had been working on since 1934. Eisler, himself
stung by some of Adorno's criticisms, had encouraged Brecht to make
such a critical conneaion; the latter recorded in his diary.

With Eisler at Horkheimer's for lunch. After that, Eisler suggests for
the Tui novel: the story of the Frankfurt Institute for Social
Research. A wealthy old man dies, worried over the suffering in the
world, leaves in his will a substantial sum of money establishing an
institute that shall search for the source of misery - which of course
was himself.58

(It is intriguing, not to say a little disturbing, to note that Brecht and Eisler
could both miss the irony in making such a tart criticism after.
 NEW I N T R O D U C T I O N

presumably, they had both enjoyed a free lunch.) In a later remark, made
from his East German home, Eisler would complain that #half-baked'
Marxists such as Adorno 'only want to be more clever than the bourgeois
theorists, they do not want to take issue with them'.59
The episode remained a source of tension between the two camps. As
late as 1978, Leo Lowenthal, as the last surviving critical theorist of that
first generation, felt m oved to offer a defence of the Institute: 'I have
never heard that miserable living conditions and substandard nutrition
are necessary prerequisites for innovative thought. If Marx and Nietzsche
at times suffered insults of material deprivation, their theoretical
creativity survived, not because of but despite such painful conditions.'60
He also noted that this kind of critic sometimes 'found his own ways of
comfortable survival' in the East, 'in a political environment where many
other heretic Marxists', those not privy to the strategy of adaptive
behaviour, 'had their heads chopped off'. As for Brecht's attack on
Adorno and his colleagues for their 'failure' to unite theory with practice
in an appropriately urgent manner, Lowenthal, with bitter sarcasm,
replied:

True, had Adorno and his friends manned the barricades, they
might very well have been immortalized in a revolutionary song by
Hanns Eisler. But imagine for a moment Marx dying on the
barricades in 1849 or 1871: there would be no Marxism, no
advanced psychological models, and certainly no Critical Theory.61

Adorno himself had responded to such criticisms on several occasions.

'Pseudo-activity', which congratulates itself on its radical gestures,
measuring its engagement by the sweat of its brow, was, he argued, a
reactionary phenomenon. The genuinely critical thinker, he insisted, was
the one w ho was not afraid to speak the truth, even when the truth is
difficult to com e to terms with; the honestly committed theorist was the
one 'who neither superscribes his conscience nor permits himself to be
terrorized into action'.62 Brecht's fetishized 'activism' was profoundly
anti-Marxist, for it sought, through an act of will, to transcend the effects
of capitalism's division of labour, a division of labour which a socialist
revolution was supposed to destroy: 'The elitist segregation of the avant-
garde', Adorno insisted, 'is not arts fault but society's.'63 One should not
confuse a depressing realism with an unjustified pessimism.
In their com m on exile in America, however, Eisler and Adorno were
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NEW I N T R O D U C T I O N

sufficiently motivated to collaborate in 1944 on a serious study of the

composition and consumption of movie music. In 1939, Eisler, armed
with a commission from Oxford University Press for a book on music in
movies, won a grant of $20,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation for a
research project on the subject. The object was to investigate the
relationship between the movie, music, original sound and synthetic
sound with a view to discovering new possibilities. The hypothesis was
that radically new music could be much more constructive and effective
in movies than the now cliche'd traditional music. The hypothesis was to
be tested by a practical demonstration of how advanced musical material
could be introduced into a movie score; four experimental productions
were planned, with Eisler, using sequences from feature films and
documentaries, contrasting the existing music with his own alternatives.
The heart of the project, and at the same time the starting point for the
results that were later formulated in the book, was a detailed analysis of,
and a subsequent composition for, an early silent film by Joris Ivens, Rain
(1929). Numerous visual effects of rain had been filmed by Ivens as
symbols of sorrow. Eisler composed music, in the form of variations for
quintet, which he felt best captured the expressive possibilities of these
images. The finished work, Vierzehn Arten, den Regen zu beschreiben, was
regarded by Eisler as his most effective piece of chamber music.

The book that followed the project combined description with prescrip­
tion, balancing Adorno's critique of standardized musical structures with
Eisler's insistence on the possibility of overcoming them through the
exposure of their mechanisms. The specific theoretical underpinnings of
the book, particularly evident in its early critique of the culture industry,
point clearly to Adorno's influence. Those moments in the text when the
two authors seem to speak with one voice occur in the context of the
analysis of the shortcomings of common commercial movie music. The
first two chapters, in particular, on 'Prejudices and Bad Habits' and
'Function and Dramaturgy', and the fourth, on 'Sociological Aspects',
carry the inner cadence of Adorno's distinctive critique of the culture
industry. Movies, it is argued, cannot be understood in isolation, but only
as 'the most characteristic medium' of the culture industry.64 The
standardized Hollywood movie of the period was marked by the 'pretense
to immediacy', a pretence which masked the contradictions inherent in
the medium (such as its technological nature and its administrative
remoteness). Movie music served to underscore the movie's illusion of
 NEW I N T R O D U C T IO N

immediate, naked life, bringing 'the picture close to the public, just as the
picture brings itself close to it by means of the close-up'; the music works
to 'interpose a human coating between the reeled-off pictures and the
spectators'.65 Ultimately, the methods and results discourage real contact
in production or consumption between a movie and the actual needs of
its consumers.
The character of movie music was determined by the immediate
needs of the industry. The music had no autonomy: in subordinating
itself to a text outside itself, it offered the opposite of Adorno's aesthetic
standard of generating musical meaning. All the music 'is under the sign
of utility', to be 'tolerated as an outsider who is somehow regarded as
being indispensable' (partly because of a practical need and partly
because of the fetishistic idea that all the existing technical resources
should be exploited to the full).66 Far from representing a contradiction
of the silent movie, the synchronized sound movie is its continuation;
music remains on the side of the image, the apparently artificial musical
score being a psychological condition for the existence of the apparently
natural movie image. A number of standard practices are singled out by
the authors for criticism: the leitmotif, whose 'classical' function had
'been reduced to the level of a musical lackey, who announces his master
with an important air even though the eminent passage is clearly
recognizable to everyone';67 melody and euphony, employed for their
immediate 'easy intelligibility'; unobtrusiveness, 'the premise that the
spectator should not be conscious of the music';68 visual justification,
whereby music, out of a chronic fear of silence in an age of sound,
becomes 'a sort of acoustical stage property', as in the musical imitation
of a storm;69 illustration, whereby music mimics visual incidents either
through slavish imitation or the use of basic melodic cliches for moods;
geography and history, in which music, like costume, 'cues' the spectator
to the setting; stock music, which transforms, for example, the Moonlight
Sonata into a mere signpost, a sound trademark, to accompany stock
dramatic events; cliches, standardized details which contribute to the
'elaboration of typical situations'; and standardized interpretation, the
form of pseudo-individualization which, as Adorno wrote elsewhere,
'fools us about predigestion'.70
In a passage which echoes Adorno's earlier essay on the fetishism of
music and the concomitant regression of hearing, the authors stress the
'archaic' character of acoustical perception, its ability to preserve 'traits of
long bygone, pre-individualistic collectivities' more effectively than
XXVII
 NEW I N T R O D U C T I O N

optical perception, and the regressive process whereby industrial

capitalism debases the nature of hearing through commercialized music,
mechanical mass-reproduction, and the utilization of music in advertis­
ing. The communal, hedonistic, utopian elements of musical perception
had been fetishized, 'put into the service of commercialism'. Music, the
memory - and anticipation - of collectivities, had become the 'medium in
which irrationality can be practiced rationally'.71 The commercial movie
score encouraged identification: emotional proximity was achieved by
means of a familiar musical language and an identity of sound and vision
which screened out contradictions and projected an impression of
wholeness with which the spectator could identify. This was the problem,
stated by the authors as provocatively as possible. There was, however, a
possible solution.
Movie audiences, in spite of the effects of the culture industry, had not
yet becom e com pletely passive: 'resistance and spontaneity still
survive'.72 Eisler's distinctive perspective becomes more discernible here,
as a critical strategy is sketched out. Although Adom o agreed with Eisler's
conviction that there still existed the potential for critical reflection and
action, he was sceptical of Eisler's specific practical proposals. Drawing on
his own experience of composing music for Hollywood movies, such as
Hangmen Also Die,73 Eisler insisted that the 'task is not to com pose
ordinary music for unusual instruments', but, on the contrary, 'it is more
important to compose unusual music for ordinary instruments'.74 The
composer, he argued, needed the power to exert greater influence, as
consultant on and contributor to the movie-making process, entering the
production at the beginning, rather than the end, and working with,
rather than for, the screenwriters and director. Movie music should speak
with its own voice; it should act as well as react. The use of music in the
movie really should be inspired by 'the intrinsic requirements of the
work'.75 Each movie must establish its own unique relations. A 'proper'
dramaturgy would distinguish sharply between 'pictures, words, and
music, and for that very reason [would] relate them meaningfully to one
another'. The proper aim of the composer should be 'to compose music
that, even if it is listened to inattentively, can as a whole be perceived
correctly and adequately to its function, without having to move along
beaten associative tracks that help the listener to grasp the music, but
block any adequate fulfilment of its function'. The familiar should be
made unfamiliar, the normal made strange, encouraging a more troubled
kind of entertainment. Good cinema music 'should sparkle and glisten'.
XXVIII
 NEW I N T R O D U C T I O N

working to 'make everything completely sensuous', achieving whatever

it achieves 'on the surface' rather than becoming 'lost in itself'.76
Composing for the Films is, in many ways, an uncomfortable and
sometimes frustrating hybrid of a book, reflecting (as well as, at times,
threatening to transcend) the distinct dispositions and styles of the two
co-authors. Some of the more deliberately provocative and felicitous
comparisons (such as the remark that the musical accompaniment to the
images 'converts a kiss into a magazine cover, an outburst of unmitigated
pain into a melodrama, a scene from nature into an oleograph' ) would
not have been out of place in Adom o and Horkheimer's knowingly
elliptical Dialectic of Enlightenment. The Adomian juxtapositions and
exaggerations, however, can perhaps best be seen to work constructively
to open up a space for Eisler's critical imagination, alerting one
simultaneously to the seriousness of the current problems and the
urgency of the proposed solutions. As the two authors noted:

In order to emphasize the "critical" ideas by means of which the

existing stagnation can be overcome, drastic examples have been
chosen, extreme instances that do not, however, preclude the
possibility of a less pointed relationship between m odem pictures
and music.78

The text is at its least coherent, however, at those places late on in the
discussion where Adorno's theoretical argument is obscured and,
apparently, contradicted by Eisler's more pragmatic approach. Eisler's
evident confidence came, in part, from the memory of the best moments
in his ow n Hollywood experiences working with sympathetic writers and
directors, such as Brecht, Odets, Sirk and Renoir. It is not very clear, none
the less, how Eisler would have been able to compose a successful and
suitable score, one that had a genuinely emancipatory effect on the movie
in which it was set, without alienating either, or both, the producers or
the consumers - both of whom were, it seemed, steeped thoroughly in
the identification he wished to undermine. At the end of the discussion, it
has to be said, Adorno's criticisms remain rather more convincing than
Eisler's prescriptions.

If Composing for the Films had a peculiar conception, it also had a difficult
birth. It first appeared in English, published in New York by Oxford
University Press in 1947 (and in London by Dennis Dobson in 1951),
x x ix
 NEW I N T R O D U C T I O N

under Eisler's name alone. In his preface Eisler acknowledged that the
'theories and formulations presented here evolved from co-operation
with [Adorno] on general aesthetic and sociological matters as well as
purely musical issues'. According to some sources, Adorno withdrew his
name as co-author in order to avoid being implicated in the House Un-
American Activities Committee's investigations into Eisler's political
associations (his brother, Gerhart, was a well-known communist who
had been interrogated by the Committee early in 1947).79 It was certainly
true that Eisler was regarded by the Committee as a very suspicious
figure. Although he, like Brecht, had never actually been a member of
the Communist Party, he had never tried to disguise his politicial beliefs.
Eisler's sister, Ruth Fischer, who had lived in the U.S. since 1941,
denounced him and Gerhart to the FBI, and wrote a number of fiercely
critical articles against them which made the front page of several leading
American newspapers. Fischer, since her expulsion from the German
Communist Party in 1926, was a bitter figure for whom the new anti­
communist movement proved highly opportune. She now sought to
drive her two brothers, among others, out of the country. 'In your
family', Charlie Chaplin remarked to the demoralized Eisler, 'things
happen as in Shakespeare.'80
In April 1947, Richard Nixon, a Californian delegate of one year,
declared that the Committee was about to begin collecting 'facts'
concerning Eisler's activities and political affiliations: 'The case of Hanns
Eisler', he said, ominously, 'is perhaps the most important ever to have
come before the Committee.'81 Eisler was first interrogated in Hollywood
in May, followed by a three-day interrogation in Washington in
September. Robert Stripling, the chief interrogator, informed the chair­
man of the Committee, Parnell Thomas, that his purpose was 'to show
that Mr Eisler is the Karl Marx of communism in the musical field and he
is well aware of it'.82 Eisler replied that he 'would be flattered' by such a
comparison. His case was a very significant one; a committee was founded
for his defence, and he received considerable public support from other
luminaries, such as Picasso, Chaplin, Matisse, Cocteau, Einstein and
Thomas Mann. It was to no avail; he judged it advisable to leave the
country early in 1948.
Eisler, in his remaining years, did not revise his basic ideas on movies
and their use of music in any fundamental way; indeed, in his testimony
to the House Committee on Un-American Activities he had gone on
record as claiming Composing for the Films as his artistic credo. Adorno,
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however, while continuing his critique of the culture industry, did,

during the sixties, devote more space to the discussion of the critical
potential that was still inherent in certain aspects of modem art.83
A slightly revised edition of the book, Komposition fur den Film, without
any credit accorded to Adomo, was published in Berlin in 1949 by Bruno
Henschel und Sohn. It was only when the original version, authorized by
Adomo, was translated and reprinted in West Germany in 1969 by
Rogner 8- Bernhard that Adom o was finally acknowledged on the cover
as co-author. The book became a curious kind of classic: a study which
marked the results of a pioneering analysis of the character and potential
of film music; a rare collaboration which represented a unique attempt at
finding some common ground between Brechtian practice and Critical
Theory; and a book which was often cited but seldom read.
It deserves to be rediscovered today. It makes musicians take note of
politics, and political theorists take note of music; the signature it signs is
memorably unorthodox. Many of its arguments continue to command
respect. Hollywood still appears to favour the idea that music in movies
should be easy on the ear and should know its place. The commercial
soundtrack, for example, marketed in record form, suggests that the
culture industry persists in celebrating, and benefiting from, its
integrative powers. The original demand for a radical change in practice
continues to go unanswered. The promissory note, however, goes on
being played; hope can still, faintly, be heard. Adom o once likened his
theoretical efforts to 'messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism'.85
Composing for the Films can be seen as one such message, still afloat, and
still in search of its unknown addressee.

Editor's Note
Footnotes in the text added by the editor for this edition have been
incorporated with the original notes.

The index has been compiled for this Continuum edition.

xxxi
 Preface

This small book, an account of theoretical and practical experiences with

cinema music, is an outcome of the Film Music Project of the New School
for Social Research, financed by the Rockefeller Foundation. When I took
charge of the direction of this Project, it was at once foreseen that the
results would have to be published. The several years I spent in
Hollywood made it possible for me to expand the book by considering
the problems of music within the practical set-up of the motion-picture
industry. However, I neither aimed at systematic completion nor ever
intended to make a survey of contemporary motion-picture music and its
tendencies. The guiding point of view was that of the composer who tries
to becom e conscious of the requirements, conditions, and intrinsic
obstacles of his work.
The Film Music Project is indebted to Alvin Johnson, President
Emeritus of the New School; its dean, Clara Mayer; and John Marshall of
the Rockefeller Foundation, without whose active co-operation this study
never would have com e into being.
With regard to the present book, my thanks go, above all, to T. W.
Adorno, w ho conducted the music division of another Rockefeller
undertaking, the Princeton Radio Research Project. The problems with
which he had to concern himself were those of a social, musical, and even
technical aspect, closely related to the moving picture. The theories and
formulations presented here evolved from co-operation with him on
XXXIII
 PREFACE

general aesthetic and sociological matters as well as purely musical issues.

I wish to mention the names of Clifford Odets, Jean Renoir, and
Harold Clurman, contact with whom was very important. Reference
should also be made to the poet Bertolt Brecht, who stresses throughout
his work the gestural elements of music.
The art of Charles Chaplin proved to be a continuous inspiration.
Finally I wish to express my thanks to George MacManus and Norbert
Guterman for their help in the translation and editing of the manuscript.
The publishers Harcourt, Brace and Company and Faber and Faber have
kindly permitted the use of quotations and musical examples from The
Film Sense by Serge Eisenstein and Film Music by Kurt London.

Hanns Eisler
Los Angeles, California

xxxiv
 Introduction

The motion picture cannot be understood in isolation, as a specific form of

art; it is understandable only as the most characteristic medium of
contemporary cultural industry, which uses the techniques of mechanical
reproduction. The popular messages conveyed by this industry must not
be conceived as an art originally created by the masses. Such an art no
longer exists or does not yet exist. Even the vestiges of spontaneous folk
art have died out in the industrialized countries; at best it subsists in
backward agrarian regions. In this advanced industrial age, the masses are
compelled to seek relaxation and rest, in order to restore the labor power
that has been spent in the alienated process of labor; and this need is the
mass basis of mass culture. On it there has arisen the powerful
amusement industry, which constantly produces, satisfies, and repro­
duces new needs.
Cultural industry is not a product of the twentieth century; however,
it is only in the course of the last decades that it has been monopolized
and thoroughly organized. And because of this process, it has assumed an
entirely new character - it has become inescapable. Taste and receptivity
have becom e largely standardized; and, despite the multiplicity of
products, the consumer has only apparent freedom of choice. Production
has been divided into administrative fields, and whatever passes through
the machinery bears its mark, is predigested, neutralized, levelled down.
The old distinction between serious and popular art, between low-grade
and refined autonomous art, no longer applies. All art, as a means of
filling out leisure time, has becom e entertainment, although it absorbs
materials and forms of traditional autonomous art as part of the so-called
XXXV
 INTRODUCTION

'cultural heritage/ It is this very process of amalgamation that abolishes

aesthetic autonomy: what happens to the Moonlight Sonata when it is sung
by a choir and played by a supposedly mystical orchestra now actually
happens to everything. Art that does not yield is completely shut off from
consumption and driven into isolation. Everything is taken apart, robbed
of its real meaning, and then put together again. The only criterion of this
procedure is that of reaching the consumer as effectively as possible.
Manipulated art is consumer's art.
Of all the media of cultural industry, the motion picture, as the most
comprehensive, most clearly displays this tendency to amalgamation. The
development and integration of its technical elements - pictures, words,
sound, script, acting, and photography - have paralleled certain social
tendencies to amalgamation of traditional cultural values that have
become commodities. Such tendencies were operative earlier - in
Wagner's music dramas; in Reinhardt's neo-romantic theater, and in
the symphonic poems of Liszt and Strauss; later they were consummated
in the motion picture as the amalgamation of drama, psychological novel,
dime novel, operetta, symphony concert, and revue.
Critical insight into the nature of industrialized culture does not imply
sentimental glorification of the past. It is no accident that this culture
thrives parasitically on the products of the old individualistic age. The old
individualistic mode of production should not be set up against it as
necessarily superior to it, nor should technology as such be held
responsible for the barbarism of the cultural industry. On the other
hand, the technical advances, which are the triumphs of the cultural
industry, must not be accepted under all circumstances. Which technical
resources should be used in art should be determined by intrinsic
requirements. Technology opens up unlimited opportunities for art in the
future, and even in the poorest motion pictures there are moments when
such opportunities are strikingly apparent. But the same principle that
has opened up these opportunities also ties them to big business. A
discussion of industrialized culture must show the interaction of these
two factors: the aesthetic potentialities of mass art in the future, and its
ideological character at present.
The following pages are intended as a partial contribution to this task.
In them we have dealt with a strictly delimited segment of the cultural
industry, namely the technical and social potentialities and contradictions
of music in relation to motion pictures.

xxxvi
 1
Prejudices and Bad Habits

The character of motion-picture music has been determined by everyday

practice. It has been an adaptation in part to the immediate needs of the
film industry, in part to whatever musical cliches and ideas about music
happened to be current. As a result, a number of empirical standards -
rules of thumb - were evolved that corresponded to what motion-picture
people called com m on sense. These rules have now been made obsolete
by the technical development of the cinema as well as of autonomous
music, yet they have persisted as tenaciously as if they had their roots in
ancient wisdom rather than in bad habits. They originated in the
intellectual milieu of Tin Pan Alley; and because of practical considera­
tions and problems of personnel, they have so entrenched themselves
that they, more than anything else, have hindered the progress of
motion-picture music. They only seem to make sense as a consequence of
standardization within the industry itself, which calls for standard
practices everywhere.
Furthermore, these rules of thumb represent a kind of pseudo­
tradition harking back to the days of spontaneity and craftsmanship, of
medicine shows and covered wagons. And it is precisely this discrepancy
between obsolete practices and scientific production methods that
characterizes the whole system. The two aspects are inseparable in
principle, and both are subject to criticism. Public realization of the
antiquated character of these rules should suffice to break their hold.
Typical examples of these habits, selected at random, will be discussed
here in order to show concretely the level on which the problem of
motion-picture music is dealt with today.
1
 COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS

The Leitmotif

Cinema music is still patched together by means of leitmotifs. The ease

with which they are recalled provides definite clues for the listener, and
they also are a practical help to the composer in his task of composition
under pressure. He can quote where he otherwise would have to invent.
The idea of the leitmotif has been popular since the days of Wagner.1
His popularity was largely connected with his use of leitmotifs. They
function as trademarks, so to speak, by which persons, emotions, and
symbols can instantly be identified. They have always been the most
elementary means of elucidation, the thread by which the musically
inexperienced find their way about. They were drummed into the
listener's ear by persistent repetition, often with scarcely any variation,
very much as a new song is plugged or as a motion-picture actress is
popularized by her hair-do. It was natural to assume that this device,
because it is so easy to grasp, would be particularly suitable to motion
pictures, which are based on the premise that they must be easily
understood. However, the truth of this assumption is only illusory.
The reasons for this are first of all technical. The fundamental
character of the leitmotif - its salience and brevity - was related to the
gigantic dimensions of the Wagnerian and post-Wagnerian music dramas.
Just because the leitmotif as such is musically rudimentary, it requires a
large musical canvas if it is to take on a structural meaning beyond that of
a signpost. The atomization of the musical element is paralleled by the
heroic dimensions of the composition as a whole. This relation is entirely
absent in the motion picture, which requires continual interruption of
one element by another rather than continuity. The constantly changing
scenes are characteristic of the structure of the motion picture. Musically,
also, shorter forms prevail, and the leitmotif is unsuitable here because of
this brevity of forms which must be complete in themselves. Cinema
music is so easily understood that it has no need of leitmotifs to serve as
signposts, and its limited dimension does not permit of adequate
expansion of the leitmotif.
Similar considerations apply with regard to the aesthetic problem. The
Wagnerian leitmotif is inseparably connected with the symbolic nature of
the music drama. The leitmotif is not supposed merely to characterize
persons, emotions, or things, although this is the prevalent conception.
Wagner conceived its purpose as the endowment of the dramatic events
with metaphysical significance. When in the Ring the tubas blare the

2
 PREJUDICES AND BAD HABITS

Valhalla motif, it is not merely to indicate the dwelling place of Wotan.

Wagner meant also to connote the sphere of sublimity, the cosmic will,
and the primal principle. The leitmotif was invented essentially for this
kind of symbolism. There is no place for it in the motion picture, which
seeks to depict reality. Here the function of the leitmotif has been reduced
to the level of a musical lackey, who announces his master with an
important air even though the eminent personage is clearly recognizable
to everyone. The effective technique of the past thus becomes a mere
duplication, ineffective and uneconomical. At the same time, since it
cannot be developed to its full musical significance in the motion picture,
its use leads to extreme poverty of composition.

Melody and Euphony

The demand for melody and euphony is not only assumed to be obvious,
but also a matter of public taste, as represented in the consumer. We do
not deny that producers and consumers generally agree in regard to this
demand. But the concepts of melody and euphony are not so self-evident
as is generally believed. Both are to a large extent conventionalized
historical categories.
The concept of melody first gained ascendancy in the nineteenth
century in connection with the new Kunstlied, especially Schubert's.
Melody was conceived as the opposite of the 'theme' of the Viennese
classicism of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.2 It denotes a tonal
sequence, constituting not so much the point of departure of a
composition as a self-contained entity that is easy to listen to, singable,
and expressive. This notion led to the sort of melodiousness for which the
German language has no specific term, but which the English word 'tune'
expresses quite accurately. It consists first of all in the uninterrupted flow
of a melody in the upper voice, in such a way that the melodic continuity
seems natural, because it is almost possible to guess in advance exactly
what will follow. The listener zealously insists on his right to this
anticipation, and feels cheated if it is denied him. This fetishism in regard
to melody, which at certain moments during the latter part of the
Romantic period crowded out all the other elements of music, shackled
the concept of melody itself.
Today, the conventional concept of melody is based on criteria of the
crudest sort. Easy intelligibility is guaranteed by harmonic and rhythmic
symmetry, and by the paraphrasing of accepted harmonic procedures;

3
 COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS

tunefulness is assured by the preponderance of small diatonic intervals.

These postulates have taken on the semblance of logic, owing to the rigid
institutionalization of prevailing customs, in which these criteria
automatically obtain. In Mozart's and Beethoven's day, when the stylistic
ideal of filigree composition held sway, the postulate of the predominance
of an anticipatable melody in the upper voice would scarcely have been
comprehended. 'Natural' melody is a figment of the imagination, an
extremely relative phenomenon illegitimately absolutized, neither an
obligatory nor an a priori constituent of the material, but one procedure
among many, singled out for exclusive use.
The conventional demand for melody and euphony is constantly in
conflict with the objective requirements of the motion picture. The
prerequisite of melody is that the composer be independent, in the sense
that his selection and invention relate to situations that supply specific
lyric-poetic inspiration. This is out of the question where the motion
picture is concerned. All music in the motion picture is under the sign of
utility, rather than lyric expressiveness. Aside from the fact that lyric-
poetic inspiration cannot be expected of the composer for the cinema, this
kind of inspiration would contradict the embellishing and subordinate
function that industrial practice still enforces on the composer.
Moreover, the problem of melody as 'poetic' is made insoluble by the
conventionality of the popular notion of melody. Visual action in the
motion picture has of course a prosaic irregularity and asymmetry. It
claims to be photographed life; and as such every motion picture is a
documentary. As a result, there is a gap between what is happening on
the screen and the symmetrically articulated conventional melody. A
photographed kiss cannot actually be synchronized with an eight-bar
phrase. The disparity between symmetry and asymmetry becomes
particularly striking when music is used to accompany natural phe­
nomena, such as drifting clouds, sunrises, wind, and rain. These natural
phenomena could inspire nineteenth-century poets; however, as photo­
graphed, they are essentially irregular and nonrhythmic, thus excluding
that element of poetic rhythm with which the motion-picture industry
associates them. Verlaine could write a poem about rain in the city, but
one cannot hum a tune that accompanies rain reproduced on the screen.
More than anything else the demand for melody at any cost and on
every occasion has throttled the development of motion-picture music.
The alternative is certainly not to resort to the unmelodic, but to liberate
melody from conventional fetters.
4
 PREJUDICES AND BAD HABITS

Unobtrusiveness

One of the m ost widespread prejudices in the motion-picture industry is

the premise that the spectator should not be conscious of the music. The
philosophy behind this belief is a vague notion that music should have a
subordinate role in relation to the picture. As a rule, the motion picture
represents action with dialogue. Financial considerations and technical
interest are concentrated on the actor; anything that might overshadow
him is considered disturbing. The musical indications in the scripts are
usually sporadic and indefinite. Music thus far has not been treated in
accordance with its specific potentialities. It is tolerated as an outsider
who is som eh ow regarded as being indispensable, partly because of a
genuine need and partly on account of the fetishistic idea that the existing
technical resources must be exploited to the fullest extent.3
Despite the often reiterated opinion of the wizards of the movie
industry, in which many composers concur, the thesis that music should
be unobtrusive is questionable. There are, doubtless, situations in motion
pictures in which the dialogue must be emphasized and in which detailed
musical foreground configurations would be disturbing. It may also be
granted that these situations sometimes require acoustic supplementa­
tion. But precisely when this requirement is taken seriously, the insertion
of allegedly unobtrusive music becomes dubious. In such instances, an
accompaniment of extra-musical sound would more nearly approximate
the realism of the motion picture. If, instead, music is used, music that is
supposed to be real music but is not supposed to be noticed, the effect is
that described in a German nursery rhyme:

Ich weiss ein schones Spiel,

Ich mat' mir einen Bart,
Und halt mir einen Fdcher vor,
Dass niemand ihn gewahrt.

[I know a pretty game:

I deck me with a beard
And hide behind a fan
So I won't look too weird.]*

In practice, the requirement of unobtrusiveness is generally met not by

an approximation of nonmusical sounds, but by the use of banal music.

5
 COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS

Accordingly, the music is supposed to be inconspicuous in the sam e sense

as are selections from La Boheme played in a restaurant.
Apart from this, unobtrusive music, assumed to be the typical solution
of the problem, is only one and certainly the least important o f many
possible solutions. The insertion of music should be planned alon g with
the writing of the script, and the question whether the spectator should
be aware of the music is a matter to be decided in each case according to
the dramatic requirements of the script. Interruption of the action by a
developed musical episode could be an important artistic device. For
example, in an anti-Nazi picture, at the point when the action is dispersed
into individual psychological details, an exceptionally serious p iece of
music occupies the whole perception. Its movement helps the listener to
remember the essential incidents and focuses his attention o n the
situation as a whole. It is true that in this case the music is the very
opposite of what it is conventionally supposed to be. It no longer
expresses the conflicts of individual characters, nor does it persuade the
spectator to identify himself with the hero; but rather it leads him back
from the sphere of privacy to the major social issue. In pictures o f an
inferior type of entertainment - musicals and revues from which every
trace of dramatic psychology is eliminated - one finds, more often than
elsewhere, rudiments of this device of musical interruption, and the
independent use of music in songs, dances, and finales.

Visual Justification

The problem relates less to rules than to tendencies, which are not as
important as they were a few years ago, yet must still be taken into
account. The fear that the use of music at a point when it w ou ld be
completely impossible in a real situation will appear naive or childish, or
impose upon the listener an effort of imagination that might distract him
from the main issue, leads to attempts to justify this use in a m ore or less
rationalistic way. Thus situations are often contrived in w hich it is
allegedly natural for the main character to stop and sing, or music
accompanying a love scene is made plausible by having the hero turn on
a radio or a phonograph.
The following is a typical instance. The hero is waiting for his beloved.
Not a word is spoken. The director feels the need of filling in the silence.
He knows the danger of nonaction, of absence of suspense, and therefore
prescribes music. At the same time, however, he lays so much stress in

6
 PREJUDICES AND BAD HABITS

the objective portrayal of psychological continuity that an unmotivated

irruption of m usic strikes him as risky. Thus he resorts to the most artless
trick in order to avoid artlessness, and makes the hero turn to the radio.
The threadbareness of this artifice is illustrated by those scenes in which
the hero accompanies himself 'realistically' on the piano for about eight
bars, w hereupon he is relieved by a large orchestra and chorus, albeit
with n o change of scene. In so far as this device, which obtained in the
early days of sound pictures, is still applied, it hinders the use of music as
a genuine element of contrast. Music becomes a plot accessory, a sort of
acoustical stage property.

Illu stra tio n

There is a favourite Hollywood gibe: 'Birdie sings, music sings.' Music

must follow visual incidents and illustrate them either by directly
imitating them or by using cliches that are associated with the mood and
content of the picture. The preferred material for imitation is 'nature,' in
the m ost superficial sense of the word, i.e. as the antithesis of the urban -
that realm where people are supposed to be able to breathe freely,
stimulated by the presence of plants and animals. This is a vulgar and
stereotyped version of the concept of nature that prevailed in nineteenth-
century poetry. Music is concocted to go with meretricious lyrics.
Particularly landscape shots without action seem to call for musical
accompaniment, which then conforms to the stale programmatic
patterns. Mountain peaks invariably invoke string tremolos punctuated
by a signal-like horn motif. The ranch to which the virile hero has eloped
with the sophisticated heroine is accompanied by forest murmurs and a
flute melody. A slow waltz goes along with a moonlit scene in which a
boat drifts down a river lined with weeping willows.
What is in question here is not the principle of musical illustration,
certainly musical illustration is only one among many dramaturgic
resources, but it is so overworked that it deserves a rest, or at least it
should be used with the greatest discrimination. This is what is generally
lacking in prevailing practice. Music cut to fit the stereotype 'nature' is
reduced to the character of a cheap mood-producing gadget, and the
associative patterns are so familiar that there is really no illustration of
anything, but only the elicitation of the automatic response: 'Aha,
nature!'
Illustrative use of music today results in unfortunate duplication. It is

7
 COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS

uneconomical except where quite specific effects are intended, or minute

interpretation of the action of the picture. The old operas left a certain
amount of elbow room in their scenic arrangements for what is vague
and indefinite; this could be filled out with tone painting. The music of
the Wagnerian era was actually a means of elucidation. But in the
cinema, both picture and dialogue are hyperexplicit. Conventional music
can add nothing to the explicitness, but instead may detract from it, since
even in the worst pictures standardized musical effects fail to keep up
with the concrete elaboration of the screen action. But if the elucidating
function is given up as superfluous, music should never attempt to
accompany precise occurrences in an imprecise manner. It should stick to
its task even if it is only as questionable a one as that of creating a m ood -
renouncing that of repeating the obvious. Musical illustration should
either be hyperexplicit itself - over-illuminating, so to speak, and thereby
interpretive - or should be omitted. There is no excuse for flute melodies
that force a bird call into a pattern of full ninth chords.

Geography and History

When the scene is laid in a Dutch town, with its canals, windmills, and
wooden shoes, the composer is supposed to send over to the studio library
for a Dutch folk song in order to use its theme as a working basis. Since it
is not easy to recognize a Dutch folk song for what it is, especially when it
has been subjected to the whims of an arranger, this procedure seems a
dubious one. Here music is used in much the same way as costumes or
sets, but without as strong a characterizing effect. A composer can attain
something more convincing by writing a tune of his own on the basis of a
village dance for little Dutch girls than he can by clinging to the original.
Indeed, the current folk music of all countries - apart from that which is
basically outside occidental music - tends toward a certain sameness, in
contrast to the differentiated art languages. This is because it is grounded
on a limited number of elementary rhythmic formulas associated with
festivities, communal dances, and the like. It is as difficult to distinguish
between the temperamental characters of Polish and Spanish dances,
particularly in the conventionalized form they assumed in the nineteenth
century, as it is to discern the difference between hill-billy songs and
Upper Bavarian Schnaderhupferln. Moreover, ordinary cinematic music
has an irresistible urge to follow the pattern of 'just folk music.' Specific
national characteristics can be captured musically only if the musical

-A
\
 PREJUDICES AND BAD HABITS

counterpart of beflagging the scene with national emblems like an

exhibition is not resorted to. Related to this is the practice of investing
costume pictures with music of the corresponding historical period. This
recalls concerts in which hoop-skirted elderly ladies play tedious pre-
Bach harpsichord pieces by candlelight in baroque palaces. The absurdity
of such 'applied art' arrangements is glaring in contrast with the
technique of the film, which is of necessity modem. If costume pictures
must be, they might be better served by the free use of advanced musical
resources.

Stock Music

One of the worst practices is the incessant use of a limited number of

wom-out musical pieces that are associated with the given screen
situations by reason of their actual or traditional titles. Thus, the scene of
a moonlit night is accompanied by the first movement of the Moonlight
Sonata, orchestrated in a manner that completely contradicts its meaning,
because the piano melody - suggested by Beethoven with the utmost
discretion - is made obtrusive and is richly underscored by the strings. For
thunderstorms, the overture to William Tell is used; for weddings, the
march from Lohengrin or Mendelssohn's wedding march. These practices
- incidentally, they are on the wane and are retained only in cheap
pictures - correspond to the popularity of trademarked pieces in classical
music, such as Beethoven's E-flat Concerto, which has attained an almost
fatal popularity under the apocryphal title The Emperor, or Schubert's
Unfinished Symphony. The present vogue of the latter is to some extent
connected with the idea that the composer died before it was finished,
whereas he simply laid it aside years before his death. The use of
trademarks is a nuisance, though it must be acknowledged that childlike
faith in the eternal symbolic force of certain classical wedding or funeral
marches occasionally has a redeeming aspect, when these are compared
with original scores manufactured to order.

Cliches

All these questions are related to a more general state of affairs. Mass
production of motion pictures has led to the elaboration of typical
situations, ever-recurring emotional crises, and standardized methods of
arousing suspense. They correspond to cliche effects in music. But music
is often brought into play at the very point where particularly
 COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS

characteristic effects are sought for the sake of 'atmosphere' or suspense.

The powerful effect intended does not come off, because the listener has
been made familiar with the stimulus by innumerable analogous
passages. Psychologically, the whole phenomenon is ambiguous. If the
screen shows a peaceful country house while the music produces familiar
sinister sounds, the spectator knows at once that something terrible is
about to happen, and thus the musical accompaniment both intensifies
the suspense and nullifies it by betraying the sequel.
As in many other aspects of contemporary motion pictures, it is not
standardization as such that is objectionable here. Pictures that frankly
follow an established pattern, such as 'westerns' or gangster and horror
pictures, often are in a certain way superior to pretentious grade-A films.
What is objectionable is the standardized character of pictures that claim
to be unique; or, conversely, the individual disguise of the standardized
pattern. This is exactly what happens in music. Thus, for example,
throbbing and torrential string arpeggios - which the guides to Wagner
once called the 'agitated motif' - are resorted to without rhyme or reason,
and nothing can be more laughable to anyone who recognizes them for
what they are.
Such musical conventions are all the more dubious because their
material is usually taken from the most recently bygone phase of
autonomous music, which still passes as 'modem' in motion pictures.
Forty years ago, when musical impressionism and exoticism were at their
height, the whole-tone scale was regarded as a particularly stimulating,
unfamiliar, and 'colorful' musical device. Today the whole-tone scale is
stuffed into the introduction of every popular hit, yet in motion pictures it
continues to be used as if it had just seen the light of day. Thus the means
employed and the effect achieved are completely disproportionate. Such a
disproportion can have a certain charm when, as in animated cartoons, it
serves to stress the absurdity of something impossible, for instance, Pluto
galloping over the ice to the ride of the Walkyries. But the whole-tone
scale so overworked in the amusement industry can no longer cause
anyone really to shudder.
The use of cliches also affects instrumentation. The tremolo on the
bridge of the violin, which thirty years ago was intended even in serious
music to produce a feeling of uncanny suspense and to express an unreal
atmosphere, today has become common currency. Generally, all artistic
means that were originally conceived for their stimulating effect rather
than for their structural significance grow threadbare and obsolete with
10
 PREJUDICES AND BAD HABITS

extraordinary rapidity. Here, as in many other instances, the motion-

picture industry is carrying out a sentence long since pronounced in
serious music, and one is justified in ascribing a progressive function to
the sound film in so far as it thus has discredited the trashy devices
intended merely for effect. These have long since become unbearable
both to artists and to the audience, so much so that sooner or later no one
will be able to enjoy cliches. When this happens there will be both need
and room for other elements of music. The development of avant-garde
music in the course of the last thirty years has opened up an
inexhaustible reservoir of new resources and possibilities that is still
practically untouched. There is no objective reason why motion-picture
music should not draw upon it.

Standardized Interpretation

The standardization of motion-picture music is particularly apparent in

the prevailing style of performance. First of all, there is the element of
dynamics, which was at one time limited by the imperfection of the
recording and reproduction machinery. Today, this machinery is far
better differentiated and affords far greater dynamic possibilities, both as
regards the extremes and the transitions; nevertheless, standardization of
dynamics still persists. The different degrees of strength are levelled and
blurred to a general mezzoforte - incidentally, this practice is quite
analogous to the habits of the mixer in radio broadcasting. The main
purpose here is the production of a comfortable and polished euphony,
which neither startles by its power (fortissimo) nor requires attentive
listening because of its weakness (pianissimo). In consequence of this
levelling, dynamics as a means of elucidating musical contexts is lost. The
lack of a threefold fortissimo and pianissimo reduces the crescendo and
decrescendo to too small a range.
In the methods of performance, too, standardization has as its
counterpart pseudo-individualization.4 While everything is more or less
adjusted to the mezzoforte ideal, an effort is made, through exaggerated
interpretation, to make each musical motif produce the utmost expres­
sion, emotion, and suspense. The violins must sob or scintillate, the
brasses must crash insolently or bombastically, no moderate expression is
tolerated, and the whole method of performance is based on exaggera­
tion. It is characterized by a mania for extremes, such as were reserved in
the days of the silent pictures for that type of violinist who led the little

11
 COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS

movie-house orchestra. The perpetually used espressivo as

completely worn out. Even effective dramatic incidents are ma e
oversweet accompaniment or offensive over-exposition. in
ground/ objective musical type of interpretation that reso s
espressivo only where it is really justified could by its economy gr
enhance the effectiveness of motion-picture music.

12
 2
Function and Dramaturgy

The function of music in the cinema is one aspect - in an extreme version

- of the general function of music under conditions of industrially
controlled cultural consumption. Music is supposed to bring out the
spontaneous, essentially human element in its listeners and in virtually
all human relations. As the abstract art par excellence, and as the art
farthest removed from the world of practical things, it is predestined to
perform this function. The human ear has not adapted itself to the
bourgeois rational and, ultimately, highly industrialized order as readily
as the eye, which has become accustomed to conceiving reality as made
up of separate things, commodities, objects that can be modified by
practical activity. Ordinary listening, as compared to seeing, is 'archaic'; it
has not kept pace with technological progress. One might say that to react
with the ear, which is fundamentally a passive organ in contrast to the
swift, actively selective eye, is in a sense not in keeping with the present
advanced industrial age and its cultural anthropology.1
For this reason acoustical perception preserves comparably more traits
of long bygone, pre-individualistic collectivities than optical perception.
At least two of the most important elements of occidental music, the
harmonic-contrapuntal one and that of its rhythmic articulation, point
directly to a group modelled upon the ancient church community as its
only possible inherent 'subject/ This direct relationship to a collectivity,
intrinsic in the phenomenon itself, is probably connected with the
sensations of spatial depth, inclusiveness, and absorption of individuality,
which are com m on to all music.2 But this very ingredient of collectivity,
because of its essentially amorphous nature, leads itself to deliberate
13
 COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS

misuse for ideological purposes. Since music is antithetical to the

definiteness of material things, it is also in opposition to the unambiguous
distinctness of the concept. Thus it may easily serve as a means to create
retrogression and confusion, all the more so because, despite its non-
conceptual character, it is in other respects rationalized, extensively
technified, and just as m odem as it is archaic. This refers not only to the
present methods of mechanical reproduction, but to the whole develop­
ment of post-medieval music. Max Weber even terms the process of
rationalization the historical principle according to which music devel­
oped. All middle-class music has an ambivalent character.3 On the one
hand, it is in a certain sense pre-capitalistic, 'direct/ a vague evocation of
togetherness; on the other hand, because it has shared in the progress of
civilization, it has become reified, indirect, and ultimately a 'means'
among many others. This ambivalence determines its function under
advanced capitalism. It is par excellence the medium in which irrationality
can be practised rationally.
It has always been said that music releases or gratifies the emotions,
but these emotions themselves have always been difficult to define. Their
actual content seems to be only abstract opposition to prosaic existence.
The greater the drabness of this existence, the sweeter the melody. The
underlying need expressed by this inconsistency springs from the
frustrations imposed on the masses of the people by social conditions.
But this need itself is put into the service of commercialism. Because of its
own rationality, so different from the way it is perceived, and its technical
malleability, music can be made to serve regression 'psycho-technically'
and in that role is more welcomed in proportion as it deceives its listeners
in regard to the reality of everyday existence.
Such tendencies affect culture as a whole, but they manifest
themselves with particular blatancy in music. The eye is always an
organ of exertion, labour, and concentration; it grasps a definite object.
The ear of the layman, on the other hand, as contrasted to that of the
musical expert, is indefinite and passive. One does not have to open it,
as one does the eye, compared to which it is indolent and dull. But this
indolence is subject to the taboo that society imposes upon every form
of laziness. Music as an art has always been an attempt to circumvent
this taboo, to transform the indolence, dreaminess, and dullness of the
ear into a matter of concentration, effort, and serious work. Today
indolence is not so much overcom e as it is managed and enhanced
scientifically. Such a rationally planned irrationality is the very essence
14
 FUNCTION AND DRAMATURGY

of the amusement industry in all its branches. Music perfectly fits the
pattern.
The examples discussed below are opposed to this pattern. They are
intended to show on what considerations any new attempts to solve the
problems of musical dramaturgy, or the 'function' of music in motion
pictures, are based. In order to emphasize the 'critical' ideas by means of
which the existing stagnation can be overcome, drastic examples have
been chosen, extreme instances that do not, however, preclude the
possibility of a less pointed relationship between motion pictures and
music. The musical solutions will be examined here solely from the point
of view of dramaturgy, not that of purely musical structure and material.
Each of these dramaturgic ideas permits of a variety of purely musical
interpretations.

Sham Collectivity

A scene from No Man's Land, a pacifist picture by Victor Trivas, dating

from 1930: A German carpenter receives the mobilization order of 1914.
He locks his tool cupboard, takes down his knapsack, and, accompanied
by his w ife and children, crosses the street on the way to his barracks. A
number o f similar groups are shown. The atmosphere is melancholy, the
pace is limp, unrhythmic. Music suggesting a military march is introduced
quite softly. As it grows louder, the pace of the men becomes quicker,
more rhythmic, more collectively unified. The women and children, too,
assume a military bearing, and even the soldiers' mustaches begin to
bristle. There follows a triumphant crescendo. Intoxicated by the music,
the m obilized men, ready to kill and be killed, march into the barracks.
Then, fade-out.
The dramaturgic clarification of this scene, the transformation of
seemingly harmless individuals into a horde of barbarians, can be
achieved only by resorting to music. Here music is not ornamental, but is
essential to the meaning of the scene - and this is its dramaturgic
justification. It does not merely produce an emotional atmosphere, for the
accom panying picture makes this atmosphere fully apparent. The
interpenetration of picture and music breaks through the conventional
effect that usually connects both, because this very connection is
explicitly represented, and then raised to critical awareness. Music is
unveiled as the drug that it is in reality, and its intoxicating, harmfully
irrational function becomes transparent. The composition and perfor-

15
 COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS

mance of the music combined with the picture must demonstrate to the
public the destructive and barbarizing influence of such musical effects.
The music must not be continually heroic, else the naive spectator would
become intoxicated by it, like the men portrayed on the screen. Its
heroism must appear as reflected, or to use Brecht's term, 'alienated/ In
this case, the desired effect was achieved by overshrill instrumentation
and harmonization with a tonality that constantly threatens to go wild.

Invisible Community

The closing scene of Hangmen Also Die, by Fritz Lang: Gestapo Chief
Daluege is reading the official report on the shooting of the alleged
assassin of Heydrich. According to this report, the Gestapo is well aware
that the person in question is not the murderer, but a trusted Czech agent
of the Gestapo, who has been 'framed' by the underground. Daluege signs
the report after reading it carefully. The episode is quiet and matter-of-
fact, but musically it is accompanied by a chorus and orchestra, which
contrast sharply with the scene, performing a marching song in an
animated tempo that increases dynamically from pianissimo to fortissimo.
At the end, there is a long shot of the city of Prague, as though to show the
real hero of the picture, the Czech people.
Here again the music acts as the representative of the collectivity: not
the repressive collectivity drunk with its own power, but the oppressed
invisible one, which does not figure in the scene. The music expresses this
idea paradoxically by its dramatic distance from the scene. Its dramatic
function here is the sensuous suggestion of something unsensuous:
illegality.

Visible Solidarity

La Nouvelle Terre, 1933, a documentary film by Joris Ivens, showing the

dredging of the Zuider Zee and its transformation into arable land: The
picture includes a harvest scene in the fields newly conquered from the
sea. But it does not end in triumph: the same people who have just
harvested the grain are throwing it back into the sea. This incident took
place during the economic depression of 1931, when foodstuffs were
destroyed to prevent the collapse of the market. Only the end of the
picture reveals the true meaning of its 'edifying' part. Those who drained
the Zuider Zee are, viewed sociologically, identical with those w ho have
to throw the food into the sea. Later the faces of the workers on the new
16
 FUNCTION AND DRAMATURGY

land are seen in hunger demonstrations. The musical treatment of some

episodes was designed to indicate this latent meaning of the whole
picture, even during the dredging scenes. Twenty workmen are shown
slowly transporting a huge steel conduit. They walk bent under their
tremendous burden, their motions almost identical. The pressure and
difficulty of their working conditions is transformed into solidarity by the
music. To achieve this, the music could not confine itself to reproducing
the 'mood' of the scene, a mood of gloom and great effort. This very mood
had to be transcended. The score tried to make the incident meaningful
by an austere and solemn theme. Although the rhythmical beat of the
music synchronized with the work rhythm of the incident on the screen,
the m elody was rhythmically quite free and, strongly contrasting with the
accompaniment, pointed beyond the constraint represented on the
screen.
The following examples show how music, instead of limiting itself to
conventional reinforcement of the action or mood, can throw its meaning
into relief by setting itself in opposition to what is being shown on the
screen.

Movement as a Contrast to Rest

Kuhle Wampe, by Brecht and Dudow, 1931: A slum district of drab,

dilapidated suburban houses is shown in all its misery and filth. The
atmosphere is passive, hopeless, depressing. The accompanying music is
brisk, sharp, a polyphonic prelude of a marcato character, and its strict
form 26 and stem tone, contrasted with the loose structure of the scenes,
acts as a shock deliberately aimed at arousing resistance rather than
sentimental sympathy.

Rest as a Contrast to Movement

In his Outline for a New Musical Esthetics, which contains many ideas for a
new musical dramaturgy, Busoni cites the end of the second act of the
Tales of Hoffmann, in the palace of the courtesan Giulietta, in which a
bloody duel and the flight of the heroine with her hunchback lover are
accompanied by the quiet tender rippling of the Barcarolle. By not
participating in the action, the music expresses the cold indifference of
the stars to human suffering, and is, as it were, congealed into a part of
the scenery. Almost every motion picture affords an opportunity for such
dramaturgic ideas.
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 COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS

Dans les Rues, 1933: The screen shows a bloody fight among young
rowdies against the background of an early spring landscape. The music,
in the form of variations, is tender, sad, rather remote; it expresses the
contrast between the incident and the scene, without touching upon the
action. Its lyrical character creates a distance from the savagery of the
event: those who commit the brutalities are themselves victims.
Hangmen Also Die: A short scene shows Heydrich in a hospital bed, after
the attempt on his life. He has a broken spine and is receiving a blood
transfusion. There is a gloomy hospital atmosphere in the whole scene,
which lasts only fourteen seconds. The attention of the spectator is
centered on the dripping of the blood. The action is stalled, as it were, and
for that reason the scene needs music. The most natural solution was to
take the dripping of the blood as a point of departure. There could be no
question of expressing the dying man's emotions or of duplicating the
hospital atmosphere shown on the screen. Because Heydrich is a
hangman, the musical formulation is a political issue; a German, fascist
picture, by resorting to tragic and heroic music, could have transformed
the criminal into a hero. The composer's task was to impart the true
perspective of the scene to the spectator, and to bring out the significant
point by brutal means. The dramatic solution was suggested associatively
by the death of a rat. The music consists of brilliant, strident, almost
elegant sequences, in a very high register, suggesting the German
colloquial phrase auf dem letzten Loch pfeifen (literally, 'to blow through the
last hole,' which corresponds to the English: 'to be on one's last legs').
The accompaniment figure is synchronized with the associative motive of
the scene: the dripping of the blood is marked by a pizzicato in the strings
and a piano figure in a high register.
The solution sought here is almost behavioristic. The music makes for
adequate reactions on the part of the listeners and precludes the wrong
associations.

Suspense and Interruption

Musical techniques for arousing suspense have been developed for the
most part since the middle of the eighteenth century. The development of
the orchestra crescendo by the Mannheim School paved the way and the
Viennese Classicists and nineteenth-century Romanticists up to Strauss
and Schonberg exploited these potentialities to the fullest. In this
connection it is sufficient to mention the technique of dynamic pedal

18
 FUNCTION AND DRAMATURGY

points - for instance, the transition from the third to the fourth
movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or the beginning of the
Allegro of the Leonore Overture No. 3 - the false ending and extension of
the 28 cadences. The possibility of resorting to such means of suspense in
the cinema is only too obvious. Its music has stereotyped these means
almost to the point of absurdity.
However, interruption, the complement and counterbalance of
suspense, has been musically unexploited. In the drama, it plays a
predominant role as episode or 'delaying action.' Interruptions are not
extraneous to the drama; on the contrary, the antagonism between
essence and appearance, of which the unfolding is the very core of drama,
is deepened by the introduction of seemingly accidental elements that are
not directly connected with the main action. One may think, say, of the
m onologue of the drunken watchman the morning after the murder of
the king in Macbeth. Such interruptions could be particularly effective in
motion-picture music.
For instance, in Dans les Rues, there is a scene showing a couple who
have just declared their love for each other. The scene must be drawn out
in order to show the genuineness of their emotion through little
mannerisms of behavior, for the heroes are two young people who after
their 'I love you' really have nothing to say; they are overwhelmed by the
presence of love. In this case the crudest solution proved to be the most
tender. The proprietress of the bistro sings a chanson. Its text has nothing
whatever to do with the couple, but represents the love pangs of a servant
girl w ho enumerates the different Paris subway stations at which she has
waited in vain for her lover. This interruption gives the embarrassed
young lovers an opportunity to smile.
In a conventional way, music is inserted episodically over and over
again in all film revues and operettas. Their plots are repeatedly
interrupted by songs and dances. In the present examples, however,
the interruptions perform a dramatic function, by helping to master
indirectly a situation that could not be directly unfolded as the main
action.
A somewhat more general consideration of the form of the motion
picture will cast light on such possibilities. The motion picture is a hybrid
of the drama and the novel. Like the drama it presents persons and events
directly, in the flesh, and the element of description does not intervene
between the events and the spectator. Hence the requirement of
'intensity' in the motion picture, manifested as suspense, emotion, or
19
 COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS

conflict. On the other hand, an element of story-telling is inherent in the

motion picture. Every feature film has to some extent the character of a
pictorial reportage; it is articulated into chapters, rather than acts, and is
built upon episodes. It is no accident that novels and stories can be more
easily adapted to the screen than plays; aside from box-office considera­
tions, this fact is directly related to the epic form of the motion picture. To
be suitable for the screen, a play must be invested with novelistic features.
But there is a disparity between the dramatic and the epic elements of the
motion picture - its one-dimensional course and epic continuity detract
from the intense concentration demanded by the dramatic quality of the
events on the screen. This determines the objective task of music - it must
at least replace, if not create, that intensity for the 'epic' parts. Music
serves as the stop-gap for drama in the novel. Its illegitimate dramaturgic
place is wherever intensity wanes and action assumes the form of
exposition, which music alone can retranslate into direct presence.
Here is a simple illustration. The hero is walking home after a lovers'
quarrel. Music is necessary to give intensity to this scene, which might
otherwise fall flat. This function of music is clearest at points where the
film jumps forward or backward in time, like a novel. When the passage
of time must be expressed - and visually this is often done in a clumsy,
mechanical fashion - music is needed to countaract the slackening of
suspense. The story-telling element required to weld the plot and connect
or separate the times and scenes of action, all that encumbering
machinery of exposition and story-construction, are by music made
more fluid and more intense and raised to the level of dramatic
expression.

20
 3
The New Musical Resources

As we pointed out earlier, there is a striking discrepancy between

contemporary motion pictures and their musical accompaniment. Most
often this accompaniment drifts across the screen like a haze, obscuring
the visual sharpness of the picture and counteracting the realism for
which in principle the film necessarily strives. It converts a kiss into a
magazine cover, an outburst of unmitigated pain into a melodrama, a
scene from nature into an oleograph. But all this could be dispensed with
today because, in the course of the last few decades, autonomous music
has developed new resources and techniques that really correspond to the
technical requirements of the motion picture. Their use is urged not
merely because they are 'timely'; it is not enough to demand only that
the new motion-picture music should be new. The new musical resources
should be used because objectively they are more appropriate than the
haphazard musical padding with which motion pictures are satisfied
today, and are superior to it.
We refer to the elements and techniques elaborated particularly in the
works of Schonberg, Bartok, and Stravinsky during the last thirty years.
What is all-important in their music is not the increased number of
dissonances, but the dissolution of the conventionalized musical idiom. In
truly valid new music, everything is the direct result of the concrete
requirement of structure, rather than of the tonal system or any ready­
made pattern. A piece full of dissonances can be fundamentally
conventional, while one based on comparatively simpler material can
be absolutely novel if these resources are used according to the
constructive requirements of the piece instead of the institutionalized
21
 COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS

flow of musical language. Even a sequence of triads can be unusual and

striking when it does not follow the accustomed rot and is conceived only
with regard to its specific meaning.
Music based on constructive principles, in which there is no room for
cliches and embellishments, can be called 'objective' music, which is
equivalent to the potentially objective music of the cinema.
The term 'objective' is susceptible to incorrect and narrow interpreta­
tion' such as, for instance, connecting it exclusively with musical neo-
classicism, the 'functional' stylistic ideal as developed by Stravinsky and
his followers. But advanced motion-picture music need not necessarily be
cold. Under certain circumstances, the dramaturgic function of the
accompanying music can consist precisely in breaking through the
soberly objective surface of the picture and releasing latent suspense. We
do not mean that the musician, in composing objective motion-picture
music, must assume a detached attitude, but that he must deliberately
choose the musical elements required by the context instead of
succumbing to musical cliches and prefabricated emotionalism. The
musical material must be perfectly subordinated to the given dramatic
task. The development of m odem music tends in the same direction.1As
intimated above, it can be regarded as a process of rationalization in so far
as every single musical element is at each moment derived from the
structure of the whole. But as music becomes more pliable through its
own structural principles, it also becomes more pliable for purposes of
application to other media. The release of new types of resources, which
was denounced as anarchistic and chaotic, actually led to the establish­
ment of principles of construction far more stria and comprehensive than
those known to traditional music. These principles make it possible
always to choose the exaa means required by a particular su b jea at a
particular moment, and there is therefore no need to use formal means
unsuitable for a specific purpose. Thus it has become possible to do full
justice to the ever-changing problems and situations of the motion
piaure.
It is easy to see that the traditional resources long since frozen into
automatic associations cannot achieve this, although even they can be
used meaningfully again if they are clarified and 'alienated' in th e light of
advanced praaice. Here are a few instances of these petrified associations:
A 4/4 bar with regular accents on the strong beats always has a military or
triumphal charaaer; the succession of the first and third steps of the scale,
played piano, in a quiet tempo, because of its modal charaaer suggests
22
 THE NEW MUSICAL RESOURCES

som ething religious; an accented 3/4 bar suggests the waltz and
gratuitous joie de vivre. Such associations often place the events of the
film in a false perspective. The new musical resources prevent this. The
listener is stimulated to grasp the scene in itself; he not only hears the
music, but also sees the picture from a fresh point of view. True, the new
music does not represent conceptually mediated ideas, as is the case with
programmatic music, in which waterfalls rustle and sheep bleat. But it
can exactly reflect the tone of a scene, the specific emotional situation,
the degree of seriousness or casualness, significance or inconsequence,
sincerity or falseness - differences not within the possibilities of the
conventional Romantic techniques.
In a French puppet film of 1933 there was an ensemble scene - a board
meeting of industrial magnates - which required a benevolently satirical
accompaniment. The score that was submitted, despite its puppet-like
thinness, appeared to be so aggressive and 'critical' in its use of advanced
musical resources that the industrialists who had commissioned the
picture rejected it and ordered another.
The 'non-objectivity' of epigonous music is inseparable from its
seeming antithesis, its cliche character. Only because definite musical
configurations become patterns that are resorted to over and over again
can these configurations be automatically associated with certain
expressive values and in the end seem to be 'expressive' in themselves.
The new music avoids such patterns, meeting specific requirements with
ever-new configurations, and as a result expression can no longer be
hypostatized and made independent of the purely musical content.
The suitability of modem, unfamiliar resources should be recognized
from the standpoint of the motion picture itself. The fact is that this form
of drama originated in the county fair and the cheap melodrama has left
traces that are still apparent; sensation is its very life element. This is not
to be understood solely in a negative sense, as lack of taste and aesthetic
discrimination; only by using the element of surprise can the motion
picture give everyday life, which it claims to reproduce by virtue of its
technique, an appearance of strangeness, and disclose the essential
meaning beneath its realistic surface. More generally, the drudgery of life
as depicted in a reportage can become dramatic only through sensational
presentation, which to a certain extent negates everyday life through
exaggeration, and, when artistically true, reveals tensions that are
'blacked out' in the conventional concept of 'normal' average existence.
The horrors of sensational literary and cinematic trash lay bare part of the
23
COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS

barbaric foundation of civilization. To the extent that the motion picture

in its sensationalism is the heir of the popular horror story and dime
novel and remains below the established standards of middle-class art, it
is in a position to shatter those standards, precisely through the use of
sensation, and to gain access to collective energies that are inaccessible to
sophisticated literature and painting. It is this very perspective that
cannot be reached with the means of traditional music. But modem
music is suitable to it. The fear expressed in the dissonances of
Schonberg's most radical period far surpasses the measure of fear
conceivable to the average middle-class individual; it is a historical fear,
a sense of impending doom.
Something of this fear is alive in the great sensational films, for
instance in the scene of the collapsing roof in the night club (San
Francisco), or in King Kong when the giant gorilla hurls a New York
elevated train down into the street. The traditional music written for such
scenes has never been remotely adequate to them, whereas the shocks of
m odem music, by no means an accidental consequence of its technolo­
gical rationalization - still unassimilated after thirty years - could meet
their requirements. Schonberg's music for an imaginary film, Begleitmusik
zu einer Lichtspielszene, op. 34, full of a sense of fear, of looming danger and
catastrophe, is a landmark pointing the way for the full and accurate use
of the new musical resources. Naturally the extension of their expressive
potentialities is applicable not only to the realm of fear and horror; in the
opposite direction, too, that of extreme tenderness, ironic detachment,
empty waiting, and unfettered power, the new musical resources can
explore fields inaccessible to traditional resources because these latter
present themselves as something that has always been known, and
therefore are deprived in advance of the power to express the unfamiliar
and unexplored.
For example. Hangmen Also Die, after the preliminary music, begins by
showing a large portrait of Hitler in a banquet hall of the Hradshin Castle.
As the portrait appears, the music stops on a penetrating widespread
chord containing ten different tones. Hardly any traditional chord has the
expressive power of this extremely advanced sonority. The twelve-tone
chord at the moment of Lulu's death in Berg's opera produces an effect
very much like that of a motion picture. While the cinema technique
aims essentially at creating extreme tension, traditional music, with the
slight dissonances it allows, knows of no equivalent material. But
suspense is the essence of m odem harmony, which knows no chord
 THE NEW MUSICAL RESOURCES

without an inherent 'tendency' toward further action, while most of the

traditional chords are self-sufficient. Moreover, even those traditional
harmonies that are charged with specific dramatic associations have long
since becom e so tame that they are no more capable of giving an idea of
the chaotic and fearful present-day reality than nineteenth-century verse
forms are capable of giving an idea of fascism. To make this clear it is
enough to imagine an extreme case, such as the picture of the explosion
of a block buster, accompanied by conventional martial music in the style
of Meyerbeer or Verdi. The m odem motion picture, in its most consistent
productions, aims at unmetaphorical contents that are beyond the range
of stylization. This requires musical means that do not represent a stylized
picture of pain, but rather its tonal record. This particular dimension of
the new musical resources was made apparent by Stravinsky in his Sucre
du Printemps.
Here are, briefly stated, some of the specifically musical elements
suitable to the motion-picture:

Musical Form

Most motion pictures use short musical forms. The length of a musical
form is determined by its relation to the musical material. Tonal music of
the last two and a half centuries favored relatively long, developed forms.
Consciousness of a tonal centre can be achieved only by parallel episodes,
developments, and repetitions that require a certain amount of time. No
tonal incident in the sense of major/minor tonality is intelligible as such;
it becom es 'tonal' only by means of relationships revealed in the course of
a more or less extensive whole. This tendency increases with the specific
weight of the modulations, and the further the music moves away from
the original tonality, the more time it needs to re-establish its tonal center
of gravity. Thus all tonal music necessarily contains an element of the
'superfluous,' because each theme, in order to fulfil its function in the
system of reference, must be expressed more often than would be
required according to its own meaning. The short romantic forms
(Chopin and Schumann) contradict this only in appearance. The
expressive power of certain aphoristic instrumental compositions of these
masters is based on their fragmentary, unfinished, suggestive character,
and they never claim to be complete or 'closed.'
The brevity of the new music is fundamentally different. In it, the
individual musical episodes and the patterns of the themes are conceived

25
 COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS

without regard to a pre-arranged system of reference. They are not

intended to be 'repeatable' and require no repetition, but stand by
themselves. If they are expanded, it is not by means of symmetrical
devices, such as sequences or resumptions of the first part of a song form,
but rather by means of a developing variation of the given original
materials, and it is not necessary that these should be easily recognizable.
All this results in a condensation of the musical form that goes far beyond
the romantic fragments. Instances of this are Schonberg's piano pieces op.
11 and 19, and his monodrama Erwartung; Stravinsky's pieces for string
quartet and his Japanese songs; and the works of Anton Webern. It is
obvious that m odem music is especially qualified to construct consistent
precise short forms, which contain nothing superfluous, which come to
the point at once, and which need no expansion for architectonic reasons.

Musical Profiles

The emancipation of each motive or theme from symmetry and the

necessity of repetition makes it possible to formulate specific musical ideas
in a far more drastic and penetrating fashion, and to free the individual
musical events from all unessential gewgaws. In the new music there is
no room for padding.
It is because of this capacity for unfettered characterization that the
new music is in keeping with the prose character of the motion picture.
At the same time this sharpening of musical characterization permits a
sharpness of expression, which the 'stylization' of the elements of the
traditional music made impossible. While traditional music always
preserves a certain restraint in the expression of sorrow, grief, and fear,
the new style tends to be unrestrained. Sorrow can turn into appalling
despair, repose into glassy rigidity, fear into panic. But the new music is
also capable of expressing absence of expression, quietude, indifference,
and apathy with an intensity beyond the power of traditional music.
Impassiveness has been known in music only since Eric Satie, Stravinsky,
and Hindemith.
The range of expression has been widened not only with regard to the
different types of musical profiles but above all to their alternation.
Traditional music, with the exception of the technique of surprise used,
for instance, by Berlioz and Richard Strauss, usually requires a certain
amount of time for the alternation of themes, and the necessity of
achieving an adjusted balance between the tonalities and the symmetrical

26
 THE NEW MUSICAL RESOURCES

parts prevents the immediate juxtaposition of themes according to their

own meaning. As a rule, the new music no longer recognizes such
considerations, and can fashion its forms by means of the sharpest
contrasts. The new musical language can satisfy the technical principle of
abrupt change elaborated by the motion picture because of its inherent
flexibility.

Dissonance and Polyphony

For the layman, the most striking feature of the new musical language is
its wealth of discords, namely the simultaneous employment of intervals
such as the minor second and the major seventh and the formation of
chords o f six or more different notes. Although the wealth of dissonances
in m od em music is a superficial characteristic, far less significant than the
structural changes of the musical language) it involves an element of
especial importance for the motion picture. Sound is robbed of its static
quality and made dynamic by the ever-present factor of the 'unresolved/
The new language is dramatic even prior to the 'conflict,' the thematic
development with its explicit antagonisms. A similar feature is inherent
in the motion picture. The principle of tension is latently so active even in
the weakest productions that incidents which of themselves are credited
with no importance whatsoever appear like scattered fragments of a
meaning that the whole is intended to clarify and that transcend
themselves. The new musical language is particularly well-suited to do
justice to this element of the motion picture.2
The emancipation of harmony also supplies the corrective for the
requirement discussed in the chapter on prejudices: melody at any price.
In traditional music, this requirement is not altogether meaningless,
because the independence of its other elements, particularly harmony, is
so restricted that the center of gravity inevitably lies in the melody, which
is itself guided by harmony. But for that very reason the melodic element
has becom e conventionalized and outworn, while the emancipated
harmony of today unburdens the overworked melodic element, and
paves the way for ideas and characteristic turns in the vertical, non-
melodic dimension.' It also helps to combat melodizing in another way.
The conventional notion of melody means melody in the highest voice,
which, borrowed from the Lied style, is supposed to occupy the
foreground of the listener's attention. Melody of this type is a figure,
not a background. But in the motion picture the foreground is the scene

27
 COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS

projected on the screen, and permanent accompaniment of this scene

with a melody in the highest voice must of necessity lead to obscurity,
blurring, and confusion. The liberation of harmony and the conquest of a
genuine polyphonic freedom, which is not reduced to academic
conventional techniques of imitation, permits the music to function as
a background in another sense than that of a mere backdrop of noise, and
to add to the true melody of the picture, namely the action portrayed,
meaningful illustrations and genuine contrasts. These decisive potential­
ities of motion-picture music can be realized only by the use of the new
musical resources, and so far have not even been seriously considered.

Dangers of the New Style

The elimination of the familiar frame of reference of traditional music

results in a number of dangers. First of all, there is the irresponsible use of
the new resources in a hit-or-miss style, modernism in the bad sense of
the word, that is to say, the use of advanced media for their own sake, not
because the subject calls for them. A poor piece composed in the
traditional musical language can easily be recognized as such by any more
or less trained musician or layman. The unconventional character of the
new musical language and its remoteness from what is taught in the
conservatories make the recognition of stupidity and pretentious
bungling in m odem music more difficult for the average listener,
although objectively such bungling can as well be spotted as it could
before. For instance, certain novices might be ready to exhaust the
listener with completely absurd twelve-tone compositions which seem
advanced, whereas their sham radicalism would only weaken the effect
of the motion picture. It is true that this danger is today far more acute in
autonomous music than in motion-picture music, but the demand for
new composers might lead to a situation in which the cause of new music
will be so badly represented that the trash of the old guard will triumph.
The methods of new music imply new dangers that even experienced
composers must take into consideration: excessive complexity of detail;
the mania for making every moment of the accompanying music
arresting; pedantry; formalistic trifling. Especially dangerous is the hasty
adoption of the twelve-tone technique, which can degenerate into a
mechanical task and in which the arithmetical consistency of the
sequence is supposed to replace the genuine consistency of the musical
whole - resulting in no consistency at all.

28
 THE NEW MUSICAL RESOURCES

While it is unlikely that the motion-picture industry, organized as it is

today, will permit wild experiments on the expensive medium of motion
pictures, another danger is much more imminent. The defects of
conventional motion-picture music are generally realized, more or less
consciously, yet radical innovations are largely excluded for commercial
reasons. As a result, a certain tendency to follow a middle course is
beginning to make itself felt; the ominous demand: modem, but not too
much so, is heard in several quarters. Certain m odem techniques, like the
ostinato of the Stravinsky school, have begun to sneak in, and the
abandonment of the routine threatens to give rise to a new pseudo­
m odem routine. The industry encourages this tendency within certain
limits, while at the same time composers who have adopted the modem
idiom, but w ho do not want or cannot afford to spoil their chances on the
market, tend to work for the industry. The hope that an advanced and
original musical language can impose itself by the detour of false
moderate imitations is illusory; such compromises destroy the meaning of
the new language, rather than propagate it.

29
 4
Sociological Aspects

In his painstaking and informative study. Film Music} Kurt London has
collected the data of the history of motion-picture music. It would be
superfluous to repeat the facts here; however, it is pertinent to inquire
whether the historical approach is applicable to motion-picture music;
and to analyze the significance of the developmental phases outlined by
London. One can hardly speak of a genuine history of motion-picture
music, even in the dubious sense in which this term is generally used:
that is, to imply that any form of art has an autonomous history. Up until
now motion-picture music has not developed according to its own laws
and has hardly taken cognizance of problems and solutions posed by the
nature of its own material. The changes it has undergone relate to some
extent to methods of mechanical reproduction and to some extent
represent ill-considered, clumsy, and backward attempts to pander to the
imagined or actual taste of the public. While it is reasonable to speak of a
qualitatively progressive development, for instance, from Edison's
apparatus to the m odem sound picture, it would be naive to speak of a
roughly corresponding artistic development from the Kinothek to the
musical scores of m odem sound tracks.
The haphazard development of cinema music is comparable to that of
the radio or of the motion picture itself. It is first of all a question of
personnel. In the early days of the amusement industry, owners and
directors were the same persons. Experts were used far less than in the
older industries, either in the administration as a whole or in the
individual production groups, and as a result a pioneer spirit of
incompetence prevailed. What is true of motion pictures and the radio
30
 SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECTS

also holds true for motion-picture music: the artistic level of these media
was determined by those who first entered the field, attracted by the
commercial prospects of the new ventures. Motion-picture music,
however, suffers from a particular handicap: from the very beginning it
has been regarded as an auxiliary art not of first-rank importance. In the
early days it was entrusted to anyone who happened to be around and
willing - often enough to musicians whose qualifications were not such
as to permit them to compete in fields where solid musical standards still
obtained. This created an affinity between inferior 'hack' musicians,
busybodies, and motion-picture music.
In order to understand the personnel problem of cinema music, some
more general reflections on the sociology of the musician may be
appropriate. The whole realm of musical performance has always had the
social stigma of a service for those who can pay. The practice of music is
historically linked with the idea of selling one's talent, and even one's
self, directly, without intermediaries, rather than selling one's labor in its
congealed form, as a commodity; and through the ages the musician, like
the actor, has been regarded as closely akin to the lackey, the jester, or the
prostitute. Although musical performance presupposes the most exacting
labor, the fact that the artist appears in person, and the coincidence
between his existence and his achievement, together create the illusion
that he does it for fun, that he earns his living without honest labor, and
this very illusion is readily exploited.
Before the jazz age, most people used to look with contempt at a
musician who led a dance orchestra. This deprecating glance is the
rudiment of an attitude that has to some extent shaped the social
character of musicians. In the early bourgeois era musicians were called
in from the servants' quarters where even Haydn had to take his meals,
and were subject to the laws of competition. But the taint of social
outcasts still clings to them. Even the austere chamber-music player
sometimes assumes the posture of an obsequious and resentful head-
waiter w ho hopes for a tip. Even he still takes note of the ladies and
gentlemen of the audience, and ingratiates himself by the sweetness of
his playing and the smoothness of his manners. His tumed-up coat collar,
the violin under his arm and the studied carelessness of his appearance
remind his audience of his colleagues of the cafe, from whose ranks he
has often come.2
Som e of the best qualities of musical reproduction, its spontaneity, its
sensuousness, its aspect of vagrancy opposed to settled orderliness - in
31
 COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS

short, everything that is good in the much-abused notion of the itinerant

musician - is reflected in the popular picture of the gypsy. If this picture
were eradicated, musical performance, too, would probably come to an
end, just as, if complete technical rationalization were achieved and if
music could really be 'drawn' rather than written down in symbols, the
function of the interpreter, the intermediary, would merge with that of
the composer who 'produces' music.
At the same time, the habit of rendering 'service' - in Germany,
orchestra players speak of Abenddienst, evening service - has left ominous
marks on musicians. Among these is the mania to please, even at the
price of self-humiliation, manifested in a thousand ways that range from
over-elegant dress to zealous pandering to what the audience wants. This
conformism of professional musicians shackles modem composition even
more than the passivity of the concert-goers. There remains also a very
special and anachronistic kind of envy and malice, and a fondness for
intrigue, the disreputable heritage of a profession only superficially
adjusted to competitive conditions. It is such archaic features that fit
paradoxically into the trend of musical mass culture, which does away
with competition, while still needing the old-fashioned gypsy-like traits
as an added attraction. A servility both coquettish and impudent is useful
for ensnaring the customer; intrigue and the irresistible urge to deceive
one's colleagues, often combined with insincere 'comradeship,' harmo­
nize with the more pragmatic role of business. The musicians in control
have a spontaneous understanding of the aims and practices of the
amusement industry. In fact, the late-comer industry of motion pictures
has not rid itself of the pre-capitalist elements of musicianship, the social
type of the Stehgeiger,3 despite its apparent contradiction to industrial
production and the artistic incompetence of its outspoken representa­
tives. On the contrary, this 'irrational' type itself has been given a
monopolistic position in the streamlined set-up. The industry, out of
deepest kinship, has attracted him, preferred him to all musicians with
objective tendencies, and made him a permanent institution. He has been
regimented like other sham elements of a former spontaneity. The
cinema exploits the barber aspect of his personality as a Don Juan, and his
head-waiter functions as a troubadour deluxe, and occasionally even
gives him the role of a bouncer to keep undesirable elements out. Its
musical ideal is schmaltz in a chrome metal pot. But since the
regimentation of the gypsy musician deprives him of the last vestiges of
spontaneity which the inexorable technical and organizational machin-
32
 SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECTS

ery has already undermined, objectively nothing is left of the itinerant

musician except a few bad mannerisms of performance.
Under these circumstances, it is preposterous to use words such as
'history' with reference to an apocryphal branch of art like motion-
picture music. The person who around 1910 first conceived the repulsive
idea of using the Bridal March from Lohengrin as an accompaniment is no
more of a historical figure than any other second-hand dealer. Similarly,
the prominent composer of today who, under the pretext of motion-
picture requirements, willingly or unwillingly debases his music earns
money, but not a place in history. The historical processes that can be
perceived in cinema music are only reflections of the decay of middle-
class cultural goods into commodities for the amusement market. At
most, on e can say that music has parasitically shared in the progress of
the technical resources and the growing wealth of the motion-picture
industry. It would be ludicrous to claim that motion-picture music has
really evolved, either in itself or in its relation to other motion-picture
media.

Musical Administration

This does not mean that motion-picture music has stood still. On the
contrary, the economic might of the industry has set a tremendously
dynamic machinery in motion. There is a constant stream of improve­
ments of all kinds: new composers, new ideas in the sense of gadgets,
marketable tricks that are sufficiently different from earlier ones to be
conspicuous, yet not different enough to offend established habits. But
what is true of all mass cultural advances under the prevailing system is
true in this instance, too: ostentatious spending has increased, and the
mode of presentation, the technique of transmission in the broadest
sense, from acoustical accuracy to the psycho-technical treatment of the
audience, has been improved in direct proportion to the capital invested,
but nothing essential has changed in the music itself, its substance, its
material, its function as a whole, or in the quality of the compositions.
There has only been a streamlining of the facade. The progress is one of
means, not of ends.
There is a striking disproportion between the tremendous improve­
ment in the technique of recording, on which all the miracles of this
technique are spent, and the music itself, either indifferent or borrowed
without taste or logic from the stock of cliches. Formerly the movie

33
 COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS

theatre pianist thumped out the Lohengrin Bridal Chorus in the semi­
darkness; today, after the extermination of the pianist, the Bridal Chorus,
or its made-to-order equivalent, is projected in neon lights of a hundred
different colours, but it is still the old Bridal Chorus, and the moment it
resounds everyone knows that lawful wedded bliss is being glorified. The
triumphant procession from the Kinothek to the movie palace has really
been marking time.
If there is such a thing as a historical phase of motion-picture music, it
is marked by the transition of the industry from more or less important
private capitalistic enterprises to highly concentrated and rationalized
companies, which divide the market among themselves and control it,
although they fondly imagine that they are obeying its laws. This
transition was accomplished before the development of pictures with
sound, according to Kurt London, between 1913 and 1928. It might be
placed in the early 'twenties, when the first big movie palaces were built,
when the custom of the 'opening night' was deliberately grafted on the
cinema in a strenuous effort to make it a social event, and when deluxe
'super-productions' were first promoted with the aid of extensive
national and international advertising. The musical equivalent of these
innovations was the replacement of the inconspicuous little group of
musicians, such as is used in cafes, by the symphony orchestras of the
great moving-picture theatres.
The full-fledged and quantitatively pretentious scores composed for
the last silent pictures were essentially the same as those composed later
for sound pictures. They merely had to be recorded, as it were, and
synchronized with the speaking parts. Kurt London comments on this
stage:

Finally, in the last few years of the silent film period, the big cinema
palaces were served by orchestras which, composed, as they were,
of 50-100 musicians, put to shame many a medium sized city
orchestra. Parallel with this development, a new career for
conductors offered itself: they had to lead the cinema orchestra
and select the illustrative music. Prominent men often filled these
posts with salaries which more often than not exceeded those of an
opera conductor.4

The term 'prominent' as used here does not express real artistic
accomplishments, but is part of the grandiloquent phraseology affected by
34
 SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECTS

all advertising in the entertainment industry, with its insincere slogan

that nothing is too good for the public. This kind of prominence is
determined by the fabulous salaries paid to those whom the publicity
agencies elect to build up - the prominence of Radio City, the Pathe
Theatre in Paris, or the Ufapalast am Zoo in Berlin. It belongs to the realm
that Siegfried Kracauer called Angestelltenkultur, culture5 of the white-
collar workers, of supposedly high-class entertainment, accessible to
recipients of small pay checks, yet presented in such a way that nothing
seems too good or too expensive for them. It is a pseudo-democratic
luxury, which is neither luxurious nor democratic, for the people who
walk on heavily carpeted stairways into the marble palaces and
glamorous castles of moviedom are incessantly frustrated without being
aware of it. This kind of opulence, manifested, for instance, in
submersible and floodlighted monster orchestras, marks the beginning
of a development that has left behind it all the obvious naivete of the old
amusement park, but raised the technique of the barker to the point of
anonymous yet all-embracing practice.
This development, however, is not merely a quantitative one. The
careful planning and sumptuous presentation of motion-picture music
has changed its social purpose. Its inflated power and dimensions
ostentatiously and directly demonstrate the economic power behind it.
Its rich display of colours masks the monotony of serial productions. Its
excessive ebullience and optimism enhance its universal advertising
appeal. Music thus becomes one of the departments of cultural industry.
The administrative element was inherent in cinema music from the
very beginning. The time beater who selected the pieces, the editor of
the Kinothek and the arranger have always thumbed through the
treasury of traditional music as through a stock of standard goods, and
chosen what best suited their purpose. The summary way in which they
handled the cultural riches at their disposal, utilizing 'Asleep in the
Deep' or the fate theme of Carmen according to the circumstances, was
always that of the bureaucrat who finally divests works of art of all their
meaning and brings them down to the status of auxiliary means
designed to produce a predetermined effect. Today this attitude has
become all-pervasive. It is as though the process of rationalization of art
and the conscious command of its resources were diverted by social
forces from the real purpose of art, and directed merely toward 'making
friends and influencing people.' Progress has become perverted into
calculating the audience's reactions, and the result is a combination of
35
 COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS

third-rate entertainment, maudlin sentimentality, and boastful adver­

tisements of what is going to be shown.
In earlier motion-picture music, bureaucratic manipulation was
mitigated by overt barbarism - then no fiction of taste invested the
mutilated melodies with the glamour of intellectual achievement, and no
highly complicated machine put itself between the music and its effect on
the public. The pianist who played 'Asleep in the Deep' when the ship
went down on the silent screen, coloured in brown or green for the
occasion, and even the small orchestra that pandered to the maharajah's
favorite wife by playing an exotic medley w hen she walked down the
stairs were doubtless also employees free from any artistic scruples; but
they understood their audiences and were not too different from them;
they were not completely subjected to their superiors, and still had in
them something of the ribaldry and lust for adventure that characterized
the county fairs in which the moving-picture theatres originated. It is this
'illegitimate,' still impromptu and anarchistic element that motion
pictures as big business drove out of their music. And it is this 'purge'
that is called progress, and doubtless is progress as far as wealth of
resources and planning of their distribution is concerned. But such
progress is of dubious value. Since its streamlining, cinema music has
become a helpless victim of culture without becoming one whit more
cultured than it was before it attained respectability. Its progress consists
only in the fact that trash was taken out of its humble hiding place and set
up as an official institution.

Stagnation

Subjection to administrative control is responsible for the stagnation of

motion-picture music. The catalogue and pigeon-hole treatment of
musical material automatically results in the tendency to confine it to
the existing supply, and, whenever anything new emerges, in the attempt
to mould it to fit administrative classifications. No more than any other
department of bureaucratized culture does music leave any room for the
freedom or fantasy of the artist, and even when, more or less for
considerations of prestige, so-called creative minds are called in, they are
engaged on such terms that they either comply at once with prevailing
standards or are taught by the businessmen and their representatives in
the industry to produce, with more or less resistance, what everybody
else produces. To be sure, the difference between the trained musical

36
 SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECTS

expert and the amateurish old-timer can still be felt, but it tends to
disappear - the old-timers will eventually die off, and the experts will
behave like the old-timers. Up to now attempts to induce the most
important European composers, Schonberg and Stravinsky, to write for
motion pictures have failed. Any other eminent musician who wants to
crash the gates of the studios in order to make a living is forced to make
concessions that are not justified by the objective requirements of the
industry, although these requirements are invoked as an excuse.
Everyone is subject to the same pressure, which produces the
harmony between the system and its executive organs. The statement
frequently made that avant-garde composers have a deep interest in
moving pictures and are attracted by the technical novelty of the medium
is false. The Baden-Baden Music Festival, where experiments in cinema
music were first undertaken, tried in a pretentious fashion to glorify the
dubious concept of Gebrauchskunst, or commercial art, but Baden-Baden is
not Hollywood, which decided these matters long ago with unself­
conscious candor. The only result of the experiments with 'mechanical
music' was that a few composers were encouraged to enter the new
market and rationalized their adjustment to it as an advanced achieve­
ment of the technocratic spirit. The truth is that no serious composer
writes for the motion pictures for any other than money reasons; and in
the studios he does not feel that he is a beneficiary of utopian technical
potentialities, but a regimented employee who can be discharged on any
pretext.6
Since independent composers have lost their old economic base and
are now forced to give up even their last footholds, it would be both
sentimental and heartless to blame anyone for making a living by writing
commercial music. However, no one should invoke the alleged spirit of
the times to foster ideologies designed to comfort himself and his
employers. The composer working under duress should rather try to
impose as much novel music as possible, contrary to the prevailing
practice, in the hope, however feeble, that he will thus help to improve
the standards of the whole industry.
It would be superficial, however, to explain the stagnation of motion-
picture music on the basis of personnel. The present distribution of
positions of musical importance is only a tangible symptom of the social
laws to which the whole system is subject. The rationalization of the
motion picture is identical with its complete subordination to the
producers' idea of the effect it will make on the public, and it is this
37
 COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS

fact which cuts off any possibility of a real development of cinema music.
Only music rated as 'sure-fire box office' is accepted, and is refers not only
to effectiveness in general, but to highly specific and thousandfold tested
effects in specific situations. Because, for real or pretended reasons of
economy, no risks are permitted, the industry accepts only material
similar to that which has already proved its market value. The art
directors in the service of the mammoth concerns conform to the
aesthetic verdict pronounced during the final phases of free competition.
This explains the present situation. For at the time when motion-
picture music was in its rudimentary stage, the breach between middle-
class audiences and the really serious music which expressed the situation
of the middle classes had become unbridgeable. This breach can be traced
back as far as Tristan, a work that has probably never been understood
and liked as much as Aida, Carmen, or even the Meistersinger. The operatic
theatre became finally estranged from its audience between 1900 and
1910, with the production of Salome and Electra, the two advanced operas
of Richard Strauss. The fact that after 1910, with the Rosenkavalier - it is
no accident that this opera has been made into a moving picture - he
turned to a retrospective stylized way of writing reflects his awareness of
that breach. Strauss was one of the first to attempt to bridge the gap
between culture and the audience, by selling out culture.
Since Strauss, all really m odem music has been driven into the
esoteric. Throughout the world, the taste of the public, particularly the
operatic audiences, has become static and no longer tolerates anything
new. This stagnation is perhaps more pronounced in America than
elsewhere, for reasons such as the special position of the Metropolitan
Opera, indicative of the absence of a musical tradition with an old
audience and the innumerable channels of musical erudition that existed
in Europe; insufficient familiarity with the old works acts as an obstacle to
the acceptance of the new.
The practitioners of commercial music must reckon with this state of
affairs. They have had to deal with an illiterate, intolerant, and uncritical
public taste, and they have had to bow to it if they wanted to remain true
to their dubious maxim: give the public nothing but what the public
wants. The contradiction between the middle-class public and its music
was resolved in antipathy against anything experimental, anything that is
even remotely suspected of being intellectual, and even anything that is
just different. The overlords of the motion pictures have made the public
judgment their own, and even outdo it by the provocative display of their
38
 SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECTS

authority. Motion-picture music has no history, because even before the

rise of the motion picture, opera and concert audiences resented their
artistic development whenever it touched sensitive spots, or whenever it
contradicted the ideal of relaxation and amusement in a thoroughly
'rationalized' society. Motion-picture music only denies to the listener
what he refuses to listen to in any case.
The motion pictures are made to measure for their customers, planned
according to their real or supposed needs, and reproduce these needs. But
at the same time the products that are most widespread, and therefore
closest to the public, are objectively most remote from the public, as
regards the methods by which they are produced and the interests they
represent. Motion-picture production is entirely divorced from that living
contact with the audience, which is still operative in every stage
performance; the alleged will of the public is manifested only indirectly,
through the box-office receipts, that is to say, in a completely reified form.
The contradiction between universal directness and unbridgeable
remoteness marks the weak link in the planning of the effect, to which
everything is subordinated. To conceal this weakness is one of the main
purposes of manipulation, and indeed one of the most important
elements of the effect itself. Hence, along with exaggerated advertising,
the importance of the movie magazines, the movie columns in the
newspapers, and the syndicated gossip that transforms even the intimacy
of private life into an appendage of the movie machinery.
It is to this sphere that motion-picture music belongs socially. It is not
only an element of the manufactured general irrationality, the so-called
relaxation that is intended to mask the heartlessness of late industrial
society by late industrial techniques; it also, more specifically, brings the
picture close to the public, just as the picture brings itself close to it by
means of the close-up. It attempts to interpose a human coating between
the reeled-off pictures and the spectators. Its social function is that of a
cement, which holds together elements that otherwise would oppose
each other unrelated - the mechanical product and the spectators, and
also the spectators themselves. The old stage theatre, too, was confronted
with a similar need, as soon as the curtain went down. Music between
the acts met that need. Cinema music is universalized between-the-acts
music, but used also and precisely when there is something to be seen. It
is the systematic fabrication of the atmosphere for the events of which it is
itself part and parcel. It seeks to breathe into the pictures some of the life
that photography has taken away from them.7 Not for nothing did music
39
 COMPOSING FOR THE FILMS

migrate from the orchestra pit to the screen, of which it has become an
integral part. It works on the spectator together with the picture strips.
Manipulated comfort has been transformed into human interest, and in
the end it is nothing but another ingredient of that universal advertising
into which the pictures themselves tend to develop.
Today, the roar of MGM's lion reveals the secret of all motion-picture
music: a feeling of triumph that the motion picture and motion-picture
music have become a reality. The music sets the tone of the enthusiasm
the picture is supposed to whip up in the audience. Its basic form is the
fanfare, and the ritual of musical 'titles' shows this unmistakably. Its
action is advertising, and nothing else. It points with unswerving
agreement to everything that happens on the screen, and creates the
illusion that the effect that is to be achieved by the whole picture has
already been achieved. Occasionally, by the use of standardized
configurations, it interprets the meaning of the action for the less
intelligent members of the audience, somewhat in the way patent
medicines are promoted by means of pseudo-scientific explanations. The
whole form language of current cinema music derives from advertising.
The motif is the slogan; the instrumentation, the standardized pictur­
esque; the accompaniments to animated cartoons are advertising jokes;
and sometimes it is as though the music replaced the names of the
commercial articles that the motion pictures do not yet dare mention
directly.
It is impossible to predict where all this will lead. Thus, it would be a
real Hollywood idea that could be expressed in dollars and cents to give
each actor his personal advertising leitmotif, to be heard every time he
makes an appearance. The basic structure of all advertising: the division
into conspicuous pictures or words and the inarticulate background also
characterizes motion-picture music. It is either a hit or an amorphous
sound, made up of senseless sequences of triplets which are contemp­
tuously called 'noodles' in the jargon of the studios. There is nothing in it
other than tunes that can at once be picked up and remembered by the
audience, and a vague droning of imperceptible harmonies.
The collective function of music has become transformed into the
function of ensnaring the customer. But ultimately, the subordination of
everything to the advertising effect may well defeat its own purpose. The
hits have become so trite in order to be easily remembered that they can
no longer be remembered at all. The omnipresent advertising and the
sugar-coated crooning grow tiresome, and the effect they arouse is
40
 SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECTS

indifference, if not open resistance. Thus, in the musical field, too,

industrial rationalization ultimately proves to be what it has long since
becom e in the economic field: its own enemy. Even according to the
standards of the industry, motion-picture music should be fundamentally
changed. But the same industrial standards make such a change
impossible.

41
 5
Elements of Aesthetics

To establish aesthetic principles of cinema music is as dubious an

enterprise as to write its history. Up until now all attempts at an aesthetic
analysis of motion pictures and radio, the two most important media of
the cultural industry, have been more or less formalistic. The rule of big
business has fettered the freedom of artistic creation, which is the
prerequisite for a fruitful interaction between form and content; and a
concrete aesthetics must necessarily refer to such an interaction. Because
of the vulgar materialism of the content of motion pictures entirely alien
to art, aesthetic considerations about them so far had to dodge the whole
issue of content. That is why they have only been abstract. They have
dealt predominantly with technicalities such as the laws of movement or
colour, the sequence, the cutting, or with vague categories such as 'the
inner rhythm/ Although the criteria derived from such analyses can to
some extent circumscribe the framework of metier within a given
production, they are completely insufficient to determine whether the
product is good or bad. It is possible to imagine a motion picture - and this
applies to its music as well - which conforms to all these criteria, upon
which an enormous amount of conscientious labor and expert knowledge
has been spent, and which is nevertheless utterly devoid of any real
value, because the falseness and emptiness of the underlying conception
have degraded the formal achievements into merely technical ingredi­
ents.
Quite apart from the detrimental influence of commercialism,
aesthetic analyses of the motion picture easily become inadequate
because it is rooted less in artistic wants than in the fact that in the
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twentieth century optical and acoustic technique reached a definite stage,

which is essentially unrelated, or related only very indirectly, to any
possible aesthetic idea. An attempt to formulate the aesthetic laws of the
Greek tragedy, for instance, might be based on concrete social and
historical factors, such as the symbolic rites of the Greek religion, the
sacrifice, the trial, the primitive family conflicts, and the dawning critical
attitude toward mythology. To attempt anything of this kind with regard
to the motion picture would be puerile. Its connection with the
developmental tendencies of dramatic or novelistic art is defined only
by the fact that it takes for granted and assimilates these traditional forms,
that is to say, reproduces them with some modifications dictated by
requirements of technique or social conformity. Its potentialities are far
more closely connected with those of photography and electrical sound
developments. These media, however, have evolved entirely outside the
domain of aesthetics, and aesthetic principles in relation to them are so
insubstantial that they need not even be challenged. The possible
contribution of these fields to the aesthetics of the motion picture is about
the same as that of the physical theory of contrasting colours to the art of
painting, or that of overtones to music.
Hence caution is particularly advisable with regard to pseudo-
aesthetic considerations in the functionalist style, such as were popular
in Germany in the name of the principle of Materialgerechtigkeit, or
adequacy to the given material. With regard to the most essential
instrument in cinema music - the microphone - the experience of the
radio showed long ago that the creation of compositions 'adequate' to
the m icrophone led in practice to an unjustifiable oversimplification of
musical language.
So-called adjustment to such supposedly objective material conditions
fetters musical imagination, generally for the sake of that kind of
popularity which is the main concern of the motion-picture industry. The
postulate of adequacy to the material would make sense only if it referred
to the musical material in the proper meaning of the term, namely, to the
tones and their relationships, not to extraneous and relatively accidental
recording techniques. A truly functional procedure would consist in
adapting the microphone to the requirements of the music, not vice
versa. Even in architecture, which is practised with a tangible material,
the term 'functional' would not be applied to a structure that is adapted to
the nature of the trucks and cranes that serve for transporting the
building material, but rather to one that is adapted to the nature of the
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available building material and the end of the whole. The microphone is a
means of communication, not of construction. Incidentally, the progress
of recording techniques has today made speculations on aesthetic
limitations of that sort obsolete.
Even more dubious are speculations that seek to develop laws from
the abstract nature of the media as such, for instance from the relation
between optical and phonetical data in terms of the psychology of
perception. At best this results in the ornamental applied-art duplicate of
the 'abstract' picture. The antidote to commercialism in motion pictures is
not the foundation of seas which dwell, let us say, on the affinity
between certain colours and sounds and which mistake their obsessions
for avant-garde ideas. Arbitrarily established rules for playing with the
kaleidoscope are not criteria of art. If artistic beauty is derived exclusively
from the material of the given art, it is degraded to the level of nature, but
does not thereby acquire natural beauty. An art that aims at the
geometrical purity, perfea proportions, and regularity of natural objeas
infeas beautiful forms, if they are still beautiful at all, with the reflexive
element that inevitably dissolves natural beauty. For the latter, 'both with
regard to the abstraa unity of form and the simplicity and purity of the
sensuous material' is 'lifeless in its abstraaion and is not a truly real unity.
For true unity presupposes spiritual subjeaivity, and this element is
totally absent from natural beauty/1

Basic Relation between the Music and the Picture

Thus far, Sergei Eisenstein has been the only important cinema direaor
to enter into aesthetic discussions. He, too, polemizes against formalistic
speculations about the relation between music and motion piaures, let
alone between music and color. 'We conclude,' he writes,2 'that the
existence of 'absolute' sound-color equivalents - even if found in nature -
cannot play a decisive role in creative work, except in an occasional
"supplementary" way.'
Such 'absolute equivalents' are, for instance, those between certain
keys or chords and colors, of which the mirage has haunted theorists
since Berlioz. Some of them are obsessed by the idea of associating every
shade of color in a piaure with an 'identical' sound. Even if such an
identity existed - and it does not exist - and even if the method were not
so atomistic that it flagrantly negates any continuity of artistic intent, the
purpose of this identity would still be questionable. Why should one and

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the same thing be reproduced by two different media? The effect achieved
by such repetition would be weaker rather than stronger.
Eisenstein also rejects the search for equivalents of 'the purely
representational elements in music/ that is to say, the effort to achieve
unity between picture and music by the addition of pictorial equivalents
to the expressive associations of single musical themes or whole pieces.
However, Eisenstein himself is not altogether free from the formalistic
type of thinking he so properly attacks. He inveighs against the
shallowness of pictures based on a narrow representational idea of
music; thus, the Barcarolle from Tales of Hoffmann inspired one film
director to show a pair of lovers embracing against a background of
Venetian scenery. 'But take from Venetian "scenes,"' he writes, 'only the
approaching and receding movements of the water combined with the
reflected scampering and retreating play of light over the surface of the
canals, and you immediately remove yourself, by at least one degree,
from the series of "illustration" fragments, and you are closer to finding a
response to the sensed inner movement of a Barcarolle.' 3
Such a procedure does not transcend the faulty principle of relating
picture and musioeither by pseudo-identity or by association; it merely
transfers the principle to a more abstract level, on which its crudeness and
redundant character are less obvious. To reduce the visible waves to the
mere motion of water and the play of light upon it, which is supposed to
coincide with the undular character of the music, is to move toward the
same kind of 'absolute equivalence' that Eisenstein rejects. It owes its
absoluteness merely to the absence of any concrete limiting element.
The basic law formulated by Eisenstein reads: 'We must know how to
grasp the movement of a given piece of music, locating its path (its line or
form) as our foundation for the plastic composition that is to correspond
to the music.'4 The manner of thinking exemplified here is still
formalistic, both too narrow and too vague. The basic concept of
movement is ambiguous in both media. In music movement primarily
signifies the underlying constant time unit, as it is approximately
indicated by the metronome, although it may suggest something
different; for instance, the smallest groups of notes (such as the
semiquavers in a piece of the Bumble Bee type, the basic unit of which
is, however, the crotchet). Or 'movement' is used in a higher sense, that
of the so-called Grossrhythmus, the proportion between the parts and their
dynamic relationship, the progression or the stopping of the whole, the
breath pattern, so to speak, of the total form.
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The concept of movement as it is used in motion pictures is even more

ambiguous. It can mean the tangible and measurable rhythm of
symmetrical optical structures, such as animated cartoons or ballets. If,
in the name of higher unity, picture and music were made to present this
rhythm incessantly and simultaneously, the relations between the two
media would be pedantically restricted, and the result would be
unbearable monotony. Movement can also mean a higher aesthetic
quality of the motion picture; and it is this quality that Eisenstein
obviously has in mind. Kurt London, too, introduces it under the name of
'rhythm/ declaring that it is 'derived from the various elements in its
dramatic composition, and on the rhythm again is based the articulation
of the style as a whole.'5
Such a 'rhythm' unquestionably does exist in the film, although a
discussion of it can easily degenerate into empty phraseology. This
rhythm results from the structure and proportions of the formal elements
- as in musical compositions. To mention only two such 'higher'
principles of movement, there are in the motion picture drama-like
forms, i.e., extensive dialogues that employ the dramatic technique, with
relatively few camera changes; and epic-like forms, i.e., sequences of
short scenes, 'episodes' that are connected only through their content and
meaning, frequently strongly contrasting with each other, without unity
of space, time or main action. The Little Foxes is an instance of the dramatic
form, and Citizen Kane of the epic form. But this rhythmical structure of
the motion picture is neither necessarily complementary nor parallel to
its musical structure. It might enter the process of composition, e.g., by
the choice of-short 'episodic' or long and elaborate musical forms, but this
relationship would of necessity be of a very indirect and vague nature.
Even the idea of adjusting the total structure of the music to that of the
picture remains problematic, if for no deeper reason, because the music
does not accompany the whole picture, and therefore cannot follow its
temporal totality. One may admit that an ultimate relation between
visual and musical form can be established, the common denominator
being the 'sequence.' As long, however, as one remains on the level of
generalities about movement or 'rhythm,' and looks for an accord of the
two structures, the actual result is likely to be an affinity of moods - in
other words, something suspiciously trite that contradicts the very
principle of adequacy to the motion picture in the name of which that
'rhythm' or 'higher movement' is invoked. It is hardly an exaggeration to
state that the concept of m ood is altogether unsuitable to the motion
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picture as well as to advanced music. It is no accident that pictures

supposed to express music usually resemble photographed landscapes or
genre paintings, and strike one as spurious and stilted. And one cannot
imagine Schonberg or Stravinsky stooping to compose genre music.
It is true that there must be some meaningful relation between the
picture and the music. If silences, blank moments, tense seconds, are
filled out with indifferent or naively heterogenous music, the result is a
complete nuisance. Picture and music, however indirectly or even
antithetically, must correspond to each other. It is a fundamental
postulate that the specific nature of the picture sequence shall determine
the specific nature of the accompanying music or that the specific music
shall determine the specific sequence, although this latter case is today
largely hypothetical. The actual inventive task of the composer is to
compose music that Tits' precisely into the given picture; intrinsic
unrelatedness is here the cardinal sin. Even in marginal cases - for
instance, when the scene of a murder in a horror picture is accompanied
by deliberately unconcerned music - the unrelatedness of the accom­
paniment must be justified by the meaning of the whole as a special kind
of relationship. Structural unity must be preserved even when the music
is used as a contrast; the articulation of the musical accompaniment will
usually correspond to the articulation of the motion-picture sequence,
even when musical and pictorial expressions are diametrically opposed.
However, the unity of the two media is achieved indirectly; it does not
consist in the identity between any elements, be it that between tone and
colour or that of the 'rhythms' as a whole. The meaning or function of the
elements is intermediary; they never coincide per se. If the concept of
montage, so emphatically advocated by Eisenstein, has any justification,
it is to be found in the relation between the picture and the music. From
the aesthetic point of view, this relation is not one of similarity, but, as a
rule, one of question and answer, affirmation and negation, appearance
and essence. This is dictated by the divergence of the media in question
and the specific nature of each. Music, however well defined in terms of
its own structure, is never sharply defined with regard to any object
outside itself to which it is related by imitation or expression. Conversely,
no picture, not even an abstract painting, is completely emancipated from
the world of objects.
The fact that it is the eye, not the ear, that perceives the world of
objects affects even the freest artistic process: on the one hand, even the
purely geometric figures of abstract painting appear like broken-off
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fragments of the visible reality; on the other hand, even the most crudely
illustrative program music is at most related to this reality as a dream is to
awakened consciousness. The facetiousness characteristic of all program
music that does not naively attempt something that is impossible to it
derives from that very circumstance: it manifests the contradiction
between the reflected world of objects and the musical medium, and
exploits this contradiction in order to enhance the effect of the music.
Roughly speaking, all music, including the most 'objective' and non-
expressive, belongs primarily to the sphere of subjective inwardness,
whereas even the most spiritualized painting is heavily burdened with
unresolved objectivity. Motion-picture music, being at the mercy of this
relationship, should attempt to make it productive, rather than to negate
it in confused identifications.

Montage

The application of the principle of montage to motion-picture music

would help to make it more adequate to the present development phase,
to begin with, simply because those media have been evolved
independently of each other, and the modern technique by which they
are brought together was not generated by them, but by the emergence of
new facilities for reproduction. Montage makes the best o f the
aesthetically accidental form of the sound picture by transforming an
entirely extraneous relation into a virtual element of expression.6
The direct merging of two media of such different historical origins
would not make much more sense than the idiotic movie scripts in which
a singer loses his voice and then regains it in order to supply a pretext for
exhausting all the possibilities of photographed sound. Such a synthesis
would limit motion pictures to those accidental cases in which both
media somehow coincide, that is to say, to the domain of synaesthesia,
the magic of moods, semi-darkness, and intoxication. In brief, the cinema
would be confined to those expressive contents which, as Walter
Benjamin showed, are basically incompatible with technical repro­
duction. The effects in which picture and music can be directly united
are inevitably of the type that Benjamin calls 'auratic'7- actually they are
degenerated forms of the 'aura,' in which the spell of the here and now is
technically manipulated.
There can be no greater error than producing pictures of which the
aesthetic ideas are incompatible with their technical premises, and which

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at the same time camouflage this incompatibility. In the words of

Benjamin,

It is noteworthy that even today particularly reactionary writers

pursue the same line of thought, and see as the chief significance of
motion pictures their capacity for expressing, if not the ritual, at
least the supernatural elem ents of life. Thus, in discussing
Reinhardt's production. Midsummer Night's Dream, Werfel says that
it is doubtless the sterile imitation of the external world with its
streets, interiors, railway station restaurants, cars and beaches, that
has so far stood in the way of the rise of the motion picture to the
realm of art. The motion picture,' to quote his words, 'has not yet
grasped its true significance, its real potentialities ... These consist
in its unique capacity for expressing the realm of the fairy tale, the
miraculous and the supernatural with natural means and incom­
parable convincing power.' 8

Such magical pictures would be characterized by the tendency to fuse

the music and the picture and to avoid montage as an instrument for the
cognition of reality. It is hardly necessary to stress the artistic and social
implication of Werfel's program - pseudo-individualization achieved by
industrial mass production.9 It would also mark a retrogression from the
achievements of modern music, which has freed itself from the
Musikdrama, the programmatic school, and synaesthesia, and is working
with might and main at the dialectical task of becoming unromantic
while preserving its character of music. The sound picture without
montage would amount to a 'selling out' of Richard Wagner's idea - and
his work falls to pieces even in its original form.
Aesthetic models of genuine motion-picture music are to be found in
the incidental music written for dramas or the topical songs and
production numbers in musical comedies. These may be of little musical
merit, but they have never served to create the illusion of a unity of the
two media or to camouflage the illusionary character of the whole, but
functioned as stimulants because they were foreign elements, which
interrupted the dramatic context, or tended to raise this context from the
realm of literal immediacy into that of meaning. They have never helped
the spectator to identify himself with the heroes of the drama, and have
been an obstacle to any form of aesthetic empathy.
It has been pointed out above that today's cultural industry unwit-
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tingly carries out the verdict that is objectively pronounced by the

development of the art forms and materials. Applying this law to the
relation between pictures, words, and music in the films, we might say
that the insurmountable heterogeneity of these media furthers from the
outside the liquidation of romanticism which is an intrinsic historical
tendency within each art. The alienation of the media from each other
reflects a society alienated from itself, men whose functions are severed
from each other even within each individual. Therefore the aesthetic
divergence of the media is potentially a legitimate means of expression,
not merely a regrettable deficiency that has to be concealed as well as
possible. And this is perhaps the fundamental reason why many light-
entertainment pictures that fall far below the pretentious standards of the
usual movie seem to be more substantial than motion pictures that flirt
with real art. Movie revues usually come closest to the ideal of montage,
hence music fulfils its proper function most adequately in them. Their
potentialities are wasted only because of their standardization, their
spurious romanticism, and their stupidly super-imposed plots of success­
ful careers. They may be remembered if the motion picture is ever
emancipated from the present-day conventions.
However, the principle of montage is suggested not merely by the
intrinsic relation between pictures and music and the historical situation
of the mechanically reproduced work of art. This principle is probably
implied in the need that originally brought pictures and music together
and that was of an antithetic character. Since their beginning, motion
pictures have been accompanied by music. The pure cinema must have
had a ghostly effect like that of the shadow play - shadows and ghosts
have always been associated. The magic function of music that has been
hinted at above probably consisted in appeasing the evil spirits uncon­
sciously dreaded. Music was introduced as a kind of antidote against the
picture. The need was felt to spare the spectator the unpleasantness
involved in seeing effigies of living, acting, and even speaking persons,
who were at the same time silent. The fact that they are living and
nonliving at the same time is what constitutes their ghostly character, and
music was introduced not to supply them with the life they lacked - this
became its aim only in the era of total ideological planning - but to
exorcise fear or help the spectator absorb the shock.10
Motion-picture music corresponds to the whistling or singing child in
the dark. The real reason for the fear is not even that these people whose
silent effigies are moving in front of one seem to be ghosts. The captions
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do their best to come to the aid of these images. But confronted with
gesticulating masks, people experience themselves as creatures of the
very same kind, as being threatened by muteness. The origin of motion-
picture music is inseparably connected with the decay of spoken
language, which has been demonstrated by Karl Kraus. It is hardly
accidental that the early motion pictures did not resort to the seemingly
most natural device of accompanying the pictures by dialogues of
concealed actors, as is done in the Punch and Judy shows, but always
resorted to music, although in the old horror or slapstick pictures it had
hardly any relation to the plots.
The sound pictures have changed this original function of music less
than might be imagined. For the talking picture, too, is mute. The characters
in it are not speaking people but speaking effigies, endowed with all the
features of the pictorial, the photographic two-dimensionality, the lack of
spatial depth. Their bodiless mouths utter words in a way that must seem
disquieting to anyone uninformed. Although the sound of these words is
sufficiently different from the sound of natural words, they are far from
providing 'images of voices' in the same sense in which photography
provides us with images of people.
This technical disparity between picture and word is further accented
by something much more deep-lying - the fact that all speech in motion
pictures has an artificial, impersonal character. The fundamental principle
of the motion picture, its basic invention, is the photographing of
motions. This principle is so all-pervading that everything that is not
resolved into visual motion has a rigid and heterogeneous effect with
regard to the inherent law of the motion-picture form. Every movie
director is familiar with the dangers of filmed theater dialogues; and the
technical inadequacy of psychological motion pictures partly derives from
their inability to free themselves from the dominance of the dialogue. By
its material, the cinema is essentially related to the ballet and the
pantomime; speech, which presupposes man as a self, rather than the
primacy of the gesture, ultimately is only loosely superimposed upon the
characters.
Speech in motion pictures is the legitimate heir to the captions; it is a
roll retranslated into acoustics, and that is what it sounds like even if the
formulation of the words is not bookish but rather feigns the 'natural.'
The fundamental divergencies between words and pictures are uncon­
sciously registered by the spectator, and the obtrusive unity of the sound
picture that is presented as a complete reduplication of the external world
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with all its elements is perceived as fraudulent and fragile. Speech in the
motion picture is a stop-gap, not unlike wrongly employed music that
aims at being identical with the events on the screen. A talking picture
without music is not very different from a silent picture, and there is even
reason to believe that the more closely pictures and words are co ­
ordinated, the more emphatically their intrinsic contradiction and the
actual muteness of those who seem to be speaking are felt by the
spectators. This may explain - although the requirements of the market
supply a more obvious reason - why the sound pictures still need music,
while they seem to have all the opportunities of the stage and much
greater mobility at their disposal.
Eisenstein's theory regarding movement can be appraised in the light
of the foregoing discussion. The concrete factor of unity of music and
pictures consists in the gestural element. This does not refer to the
movement or 'rhythm' of the motion picture as such, but to the
photographed motions and their function in the picture as a whole. The
function of music, however, is not to 'express' this movement - here
Eisenstein commits an error under the influence of Wagnerian ideas
about the Gesamtkunstwerk and the theory of aesthetic empathy - but to
release, or more accurately, to justify movement. The photographed
picture as such lacks motivation for movement; only indirectly do we
realize that the pictures are in motion, that the frozen replica of external
reality has suddenly been endowed with the spontaneity that it was
deprived of by its fixation, and that something petrified is manifesting a
kind of life of its own. At this point music intervenes, supplying
momentum, muscular energy, a sense of corporeity, as it were. Its
aesthetic effect is that of a stimulus of motion, not a reduplication of
motion. In the same way, good ballet music, for instance Stravinsky's,
does not express the feelings of the dancers and does not aim at any
identity with them, but only summons them to dance. Thus, the relation
between music and pictures is antithetic at the very moment when the
deepest unity is achieved.
The development of cinema music will be measured by the extent to
which it is able to make this antithetic relation fruitful and to dispel the
illusion of direct unity. The examples in the chapter on dramaturgy were
discussed in reference to this idea. As a matter of principle, the relation
between the two media should be made much more mobile than it has
been. This means, on the one hand, that standard cues for interpolating
music - as for background effect, or in scenes of suspense or high emotion
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- should be avoided as far as possible and that music should no longer

intervene automatically at certain moments as though obeying a cue. On
the other hand, methods that take into account the relation between the
two media should be developed, just as methods have been developed
that take into account the modifications of photographic exposures and
camera installations. Thanks to them, it would be possible to make music
perceptible on different levels, more or less distant, as a figure or a
background, over-distinct or quite vague. Even musical complexes as
such might be articulated into their different sound elements by means of
an appropriate recording technique.
Furthermore it should be possible to introduce music at certain points
without any pictures or words, and at other points, instead of gradually
concluding the music or cautiously fading it out, to break it off abruptly,
for instance at a change of scenery. The true muteness of the talking
picture would thus be revealed and would have to become an element of
expression. Or the picture might be treated as a musical theme, to which
the actual music would serve as a mere accompaniment, consisting of
musical base figures without any leading voice.
Conversely, music might be used to 'out-shout' the action on the
screen, and thus achieve the very opposite of what is demanded by
conventional lyricism. This latter possibility was effectively exploited in
the orchestrion scene of Algiers, where the noise of the mechanical
instrument deafened the cries of mortal fear. However, even here the
principle of montage was not fully applied, and the old prejudice that the
music must be justified by the plot was respected.

The Problem of Style and Planning

The foregoing analyses have certain implications regarding the style of

motion-picture music. The concept of style applies primarily to the
unbroken unity of the organic work of art. Since the motion picture is not
such a work of art and since music neither can nor should be part of such
an organic unity, the attempt to impose a stylistic ideal on cinema music
is absurd. We have sufficiently stressed the fact that the prevailing would-
be romantic style is inadequate and spurious. If it were replaced by a
radically 'functional' style, as might be the temptation in view of the
technical character of the motion picture, and exclusively mechanical
music were employed in the neoclassical manner, the result would be
hardly more desirable. The present shortcomings - pseudo-psychological

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aesthetic empathy and redundant reduplication - would only give way to

the defect of irrelevance. Nor can it be expected that a compromise, the
middle course between the extremes, a style both expressive and
constructivist, would remedy the evil. The piling up of antagonistic
principles intended to safeguard the composition from all sides only
defeats its purpose and in practice results in the achievement of old effects
by new means. A hair-raising, 'thrilling' accompaniment to a murder
scene will be essentially the same even if the whole tone scale is replaced
with sharp dissonances.
Mere will to style is of no avail. What is needed is musical planning, the
free and conscious utilization of all musical resources on the basis of
accurate insight into the dramatic function of music, which is different in
each concrete case. Such conscious and technically adequate musical
planning has been attempted only in a few very exceptional instances.
But it must be stated at once that even if the routine business obstacles
were overcome, this type of planning would still have to cope with great
objective difficulties. The tendency toward planning was inherent in the
evolution of music itself, and it led to the ever greater control of the
autonomous composer over his material. But under the conditions of the
commercial cinema industry this tendency has many unfavorable aspects.
By planning, the autonomous composer has emancipated himself from
the dilettantism of so-called inspiration. He rules as a sovereign over his
own imagination; it was said long ago that in every domain the genuine
artist must master his spontaneous ideas. This is possible if the whole
conception of the work is rooted in his freedom, is truly his own, and is
not imposed upon him by another agency. His arbitrary rule is legitimate
only in so far as the conception of the work, which is the goal of his
efforts, preserves a non-arbitrary, purely expressive element. In the
moving picture, the situation is quite different. The work, the goal, is
determined extrinsically to a much greater extent than even by the text of
the traditional opera. As a result, the arbitrary element is deprived of that
sap of non-arbitrariness in the productive process, which raises what has
been made to the level of something more than just 'having been made.'
The achievements connected with the mastery of the material easily
degenerate into calculated tricks, and the spontaneous element - which is
indispensable, even though its value as an isolated quality is dubious -
threatens to shrink. The progress of subjective mastery over the musical
material jeopardizes the subject expressing himself musically.
Moreover, conscious selection among possibilities instead of abiding
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by a 'style' might lead t o syncretism, the eclectic utilization of all

conceivable materials, procedures, and forms. It may produce indiscrimi­
nately love songs com posed in terms of romantic expressiveness, callously
functional accompaniments of scenes that are intended to be disavowed
by the music, and the m ode of expressionism in scenes to which music is
supposed to supply tempestuous outbreaks. Such dangers make them­
selves felt in today's muddling-through practice. It is only a special
instance of the general practice of rummaging through all our cultural
inheritance for commercial purposes which characterizes the cultural
industry.
An effective way to meet that danger can be formulated on the basis of
a closer scrutiny of the concept of style. When the question of an
adequate style for motion-picture music is raised, one usually has in mind
the musical resources of a specific historical phase. Thus impressionism is
identified with the whole-tone scale, chords on the ninth and shifting
harmonies; romanticism suggests the most conspicuous formulas of
composers like Wagner and Tchaikovsky; functionalism is conceived as
the sum total of 'drained' harmonies, rudely stamping movements, pre-
dassical head motifs, terrace-like forms, and certain patterns that can be
found in Stravinsky and to some extent in Hindemith.
Such an idea of style is incompatible with motion-picture music,
which can employ resources of the most varied character. What counts is
the way these resources are handled. Of course, the two elements, the
resources and their treatment, cannot be mechanically separated.
Debussy's procedure is the consequence of the inherent necessities of
his musical material, and, vice versa, this material is derived from his
method of composing. However, one may venture the thesis that today
music has reached a phase in which its resources and methods of
com posing are becoming increasingly independent of each other. As a
result, the material tends to be in some aspects rather irrelevant to the
method of composing.
In other words, composing has become so logical that it need no longer
be the consequence of its material and can, figuratively speaking, dominate
every type of material to which it is applied. It is not accidental that
Schonberg, after evolving the twelve-tone technique and achieving
complete and consistent command of his material in all its dimensions,
tested his mastery on a piece consisting only of triads, such as the last choir
of opus 36, or that he added the finale of the Second Chamber Symphony.
This finale, written forty years after the symphony had been conceived.
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brings to the fore the constructive principles of the twelve-tone technique

within musical material that represents the stage of development of about
forty years ago. Of course, such a feat represents only a tendency, and is
inseparable from Schonberg's incomparable productive power.
As a matter of principle, priority goes to the truly novel musical
resources. However, motion-picture music can also summon other
musical resources of the most varied nature, on condition that it reaches
the most advanced contemporary modes of composing, which are
characterized by thorough-going construction and the unequivocal
determination of each detail by the whole, and which are thus in line
with the principle of universal planning, so fundamental for motion-
picture music. Thus the negation of the traditional concept of style, which
is bound up with the idea of specific materials, may lead to the formation
of a new style suitable to the movies.
It goes without saying that such a style is not yet achieved when a
composer is only shrewd enough to accompany a sequence with some
material that happens to fit. One would be justified in speaking of a new
style only if the disposal of such arbitrarily selected material reflected the
most highly developed experience of m odem composing. If this experi­
ence is truly present, the composer may also use triads; when subjected to
the principle of construction they will sound so strange in any event that
they will have nothing in common with the lyrical ripple of the late-
romantic convention and will strike the conventional ear as dissonance.
In other words, obsolete musical material, if it is really put to use and not
just commercialized by the motion picture, will undergo, by the
application of the principle of construction, a refraction relating both to
its expressive content and its purely musical essence. Occasionally,
musical planning may provide for applying the principle of montage to
the music itself, that is to say, it may employ contradictory stylistic
elements without mediation, and exploit their very inconsistency as an
artistic element.
In all this, one must not overlook the situation of the com poser
himself. It would be vain to decree 'objectively' what is timely or not,
while dodging the question whether the composer is capable of doing
what the times seem to require. For he is not merely an executive organ
of knowledge, a mirror of necessities outside himself; he represents the
element of spontaneity, and cannot be divested of his subjectivity in any
of his objective manifestations. Any musical planning that ignored this
would degenerate into arbitrary mechanical rules.
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This does not refer merely to the fact that many composers, and not
necessarily the worst ones, lag behind the intellectual level of planning
procedures in their method of composing; theory cannot condemn even
them as unfit for writing motion-picture music. But the situation of any
motion-picture composer, including the most m odem one, is to some
extent self-contradictory. His task is to aim at certain sharply defined
musical profiles relating to plots and situations, and to transform them
into musical structures; and he m ust do this much more drastically and
with much more objective aloofness than was ever required in the older
forms of musical drama. At the end of the era of expressive music, it is the
principle of musica ficta that triumphs - the postulate that it must
represent something to which it refers instead of merely being itself. This
alone is paradoxical enough and involves the greatest difficulties. The
composer is supposed to express something, be it even by way of negating
expression, but not to express himself; and whether' this can be done by a
music that has emancipated itself from all traditional patterns of
expression is impossible to decide beforehand.
The composer is confronted with a veritable task of Sisyphus. 'He is
supposed to abstract himself from his own expressive needs and to abide
by the objective requirements of dramatic and musical planning. But he
can achieve this only in so far as his own subjective possibilities and even
his own subjective urges can assimilate those requirements and gratify
them spontaneously - anything else would be mere drudgery. Thus the
subjective prerequisite of the composer's work is the very element that
the supposed objectivity of this work excludes; he must, so to speak, both
be and not be the subject of his music. Whether this contradiction will
lead we cannot predict at the present stage of development, when it has
not even been visualized by normal production. But it can be observed
that certain apparently sophisticated, aloof, and objective solutions that
sacrifice the expressive urges to avoid the romanticist jargon, e.g., some
French cinema composers in the orbit of the Circle of the Six, result in a
tendency toward automatism and boring applied-art mannerisms.
Not only theoretical reflection but also technological experience raises
the question of style. All motion-picture music has so far displayed a
tendency to neutralization11 - there is almost always an element of
inconspicuousness, weakness, excessive adaptation, and familiarity in it.
Frequently enough it does exactly what it is supposed to do according to
the current prejudice, that is to say, it vanishes and remains unnoticed by
the spectator who is not especially interested in it.12 The reasons for this
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are complex. First of all there is the system of cultural industry with its
standardization, and countless conscious and unconscious mechanisms of
censorship, which result in a general levelling process, so that every
single incident becomes a mere specimen of the system, and its
apprehension as something specific is practically impossible. This,
however, affects both pictures and music, and explains the general
inattention in the perception of movies, correlated to the relaxation that
they supposedly serve, rather than the fact that the music is not noticed.
This latter circumstance is the result of the spectators' concentration on
the visual plot and the dialogue, which leaves him little energy for
musical perception. The physiological effort necessarily connected with
the act of following a motion picture plays a primary role in this context.
Apart from that, however, the existing recording procedures are
themselves responsible for neutralization. Motion-picture music, like
radio music, has the character of a running thread - it seems to be drawn
along the screen before the spectator, it is more a picture of music than
music itself. At the same time it undergoes far-reaching acoustic changes,
its dynamic scale shrinks, its color intensity is reduced, and its spatial
depth is lost. All these changes converge in their effects; if one is present
at the recording of an advanced cinema score, then listens to, the sound
tracks, and finally attends the performance of the picture with its 'printed'
music, the progressive grades of neutralization can be observed. It is as
though the music were gradually divested of its aggressiveness, and in the
final performance the question whether the score is m odem or old-
fashioned has far less importance than one might expea from merely
reading it or even from listening to the same music in the concert hall.
Even conservative listeners in the cinema swallow without protest music
that in a concert hall would arouse their most hostile reaaions.
In other words, as a result of neutralization, musical style in the usual
sense, that is to say, the resources employed in each case, becomes largely
indifferent. For this reason, the aim of a genuine montage and an
antithetic utilization of music will not be to introduce the largest possible
number of dissonant sounds and novel colors into the machinery, which
only spits them out again in a digested, blunted, and conventionalized
form, but to break the mechanism of neutralization itself.13 And that is
the very funaion of planned composition. Of course, there may always be
situations that require inconspicuous music, as a mere background. But it
makes all the difference in the world whether such situations are part of
the plan and whether the inconspicuousness of the music is com posed
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and constructed, or whether the expulsion of music into the acoustic and
aesthetic background is the result of blind, automatic compulsion. Indeed,
a genuine background effect can be obtained only by planning, not as a
result of mechanical absence of articulation. The difference between the
two kinds of effects can be likened to that between Debussy, who most
perfectly and distinctly created a vague, indistinct, and dissolving
impression, and some blunderer w h o extols his own involuntarily vague,
amorphous, and confused structure, the product of an insufficient
technique as the embodiment of an aesthetic principle.
Objective planning, montage, and breaking through the universal
neutralization are all aspects of the emancipation of motion-picture music
from its commercial oppression. The social need for a non-predigested,
uncensored, and critical function of music is in line with the inherent
technological tendency to eliminate the neutralization factors. Objec­
tively planned music, organically constructed in relation to the meaning
of the picture, would, for the first time, make the potentialities of the new
improved recording techniques productive.
Insight into the contradictions characteristic of the relations between
motion pictures and music shows that there can be no question of setting
up universal aesthetic criteria for this music. It is superfluous and
harmful, says Hegel, 'to bring one's yardsticks and apply one's personal
intuitions and ideas to the inquiry; it is only by omitting these that we are
enabled to examine the subject matter as it is in and for itself.'13 The
application of this principle does not surrender motion-picture music to
arbitrariness; it means that the criteria of this music must be derived in
each given case from the nature of the problems it raises. The task of
aesthetic considerations is to throw light on the nature of these problems
and their requirements, to make us aware of their own inherent
development, not to provide recipes.

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 6
The Composer and the Movie-Making Process

It is beyond the scope of this book to give a description of the processing

to which the score of a motion-picture composition is subjected. This
processing includes recording, cutting, re-recording and final modifica­
tions related to the picture as a whole. It involves numerous purely
technological factors that have little to do with the dramatic and aesthetic
aspects of the question, and that the composer does not have to
understand any more than the author of a book needs to understand the
art of printing. Moreover, the relevant technological factors vary to a
considerable extent.
Yet the analogy between the making of a picture and the printing of a
book must not be carried too far. As regards content and literary value, a
book remains substantially, although not completely, the same regardless
of how it is printed. But there is no such thing as a motion picture
independent of technical recording processes. The manuscript of a book is
actually the book itself; a motion-picture script at best consists of the
directions for the creation of the picture. This is the basis for the following
discussion in which we shall deal with artistic aspects of the process of
production, indicate the musical nerve centres of the film industry, and
emphasize elements essential in motion-picture composing. We shall try
to communicate actual experiences, not to evolve a theory regarding the
musical technique of motion pictures. The fact that in these considera­
tions the technical problems of composing are in the foreground is a
corollary of the point of view chosen for this book as a whole.
Furthermore, the composer will be reminded at which points he must
proceed with care if he does not wish to be intimidated by certain
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compulsory elements of the productive process, which he often does not

understand, capitulating to them rather than making them as fruitful as
possible.

The Music Departments

Because of the commercial character of the film industry it is impossible

to separate its organizational from its technical aspects, and the composer
must acquaint himself, from the outset, with the prevailing organiza­
tional principles. As a result of the rigid division of functions within the
great companies, where all the important positions have long since been
occupied and controlled, there have been set up special music depart­
ments, which are responsible to the producers for the artistic, technical,
and commercial aspects of motion-picture music, and which have thus
assumed full authority with regard to the composers. The situation is
different in the case of some independent producers; there the composer
must content himself with relatively limited resources, but is also less
restricted. But under average conditions, the composer is far from
enjoying equal rights with the producer, script writer, or film director. He
is subject to the head of the music department, who regards him as a kind
of specialist. Like all specialists he is either employed under a long-term
contract or hired for a specific job. Thus the composer is usually in a
dependent position; he is only loosely connected with the enterprise and
can be easily dismissed.
In view of the composition of the departments, which has been
discussed in chapter 4, conflicts are almost inevitable. Music-department
heads generally select composers according to their own taste, just as
directors 'cast' their actors; only in exceptional cases are composers
appointed by different agencies, and even then their situation is not
always an easy one. In relation to the organization as a whole, the
composer, however important he may be, occupies a subsidiary place; he
must above all satisfy the department head who is his 'boss.' He is looked
upon as one of the latter's assistants, like the arranger, the conductor or
the sound man. The extent to which he succeeds in influencing the
musical planning, performance, and recording procedure depends on his
authority, adroitness, and, most important, the support he can obtain
outside the department. It behoves him to face these conditions without
any illusions and to approach his job in a manner that will enable him to
accomplish as much as possible within the existing set-up. Up until now it

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has proved impossible to break through it and to put th e com poser on the
same level as the script writer.
Nevertheless, the composer would be wrong to regard the department
as his enemy a priori, and to begin his work in a rebellious mood. The role
of the music departments reflects a much more general state of affairs.
Despite the inadequacy, the often grotesque artistic incom petence of the
heads, and the conceit prevailing in the departments, the technical and
economic aspects of the film industry are so com plex that without the
organization and division of functions of which the department is an
expression, nothing could be accomplished, at least under the prevailing
conditions. The composer may feel that the department is nothing but a
bureaucratic impediment and control agency for businessmen, but
without it he would be completely lost in the machinery. The path from
the score to the finished musical product, or the realization of artistic
intentions, leads often across artistic incompetence and agencies dedi­
cated to the business of making money. The departments are both
superfluous and indispensable. They could be dispensed with if artistic
production were emancipated from the profit motive; but today it is
impossible to accomplish anything without their resources, mediating
services, and often their experience. The composer must take this
inevitable contradiction into consideration. While he should not be a
conformist, he should not make a fool of himself either. Both attitudes
would only manifest his impotence.

General Observations on Composing

The motion picture requires prima facie no specific technique of

composing. The fact that both motion picture and music are temporal
arts does not imply the need for a musical technique sui generis, and
despite all talk about such a technique, the motion picture has not given a
genuine new impulse to music. Motion-picture music has merely adapted
certain procedures employed in autonomous music.
Nevertheless certain principles are beginning to take shape. O ne has
been mentioned above - the need for short musical forms, corresponding
to the short picture sequences. Such sketchy, rhapsodical, or aphoristic
forms are characteristic of the motion picture in their irregularity, fluidity,
and absence of repetitions. The traditional tripartite song form - a-b-a -
with the last part repeating the first, is less suitable than continuous
forms, such as preludes, inventions, or toccatas. The method of exposition

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and connection of several themes and their developments seems foreign

to the motion picture because such complex musical forms require too
much attention to be used in combination with complex visual forms. But
even this is not an absolute rule. Large musical forms related not to
picture sequences but to continuities of meaning are not inconceivable.
In short musical forms, each element must be self-sufficient or capable
of rapid expansion. Motion-picture music cannot 'wait/ Moreover, the
com poser must differentiate am ong the short forms themselves. For
instance, a two-minute sequence is m ore suitable for developing a short
motif than for a complete melody, and a thirty-second theme would be
out of place here. But this does not m ean that in a thirty-second piece the
theme must be still shorter; on the contrary, it may very well consist of
one long melody that covers the w h ole sequence.
The specific musical logic that assigns each of these elements a definite
place and connects them must also be adequate to the requirements of
the m otion picture. Quickly changing musical characterizations, sudden
transitions and reversals, improvisatory and 'fantasia' elements should be
predominant. To achieve this without sacrificing musical continuity one
must resort to a highly evolved variation technique. Each small musical
form accompanying a motion picture is a kind of variation, even though it
has not been preceded by a manifest theme. The dramatic function is the
real theme.
As has already been pointed out, the composer cannot disregard the
planning that is demanded by the dramatic concern for the whole of the
m otion picture and its relation to the details. But while thus far planning
has been bureaucratic and artistically barren, he must attempt to make it
fruitful. He must consciously use the simple and the complex, the
continuous and the discontinuous, the inconspicuous and the striking,
the passionate and the cold elements of music. The free and conscious
utilization of the potentialities created by the intrinsic evolution of music
will make motion-picture music fertile, if a specific motion-picture music
ever com es into being at all. Planning must be transformed to such an
extent that it will amount to a new spontaneity. The negation of naive
'inventing' and inspiration in motion-picture music should lead to their
re-emergence on a higher level.
We shall mention at least the simplest consequences of the type of
com posing advocated here. With regard to the logic and the genesis of the
work, there are, grossly speaking, two types of composition. In the first,
the whole is derived from the details, conceived as musical germs, and
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developed blindly under the compulsion of their inherent drive. The

works of Schubert and Schumann belong to this type, and originally also
those of Schonberg, who said that when composing a song he allowed
himself to be impelled by the initial words without taking the whole
poem into consideration. In the second type, which is the inverse of the
first, all the details are derived from the whole. The works of Beethoven
belong to the second type. The greatness of a composer is essentially
defined by the extent to which both types are integrated in his work -
Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schonberg are exemplary in this respect. If
the composer clings undialectically to the first type of composing, as did
Dvorak for instance, he produces a potpourri of 'ideas' connected
arbitrarily or schematically. The other extreme is represented by Handel,
and leads to a sweeping though somewhat abstract conception of the
whole, with sketchy, incomplete, and often superficial details.
Composers of cinema music are driven to adopt the second type of
composing, as is, incidentally, the case for most works made to order. In
motion-picture music, the idea of the whole and its articulation holds
absolute primacy, sometimes in the form of an abstract pattern that
conjures up rhythms, tone sequences, and figures at a given place
without the composer's specific knowledge of them in advance. The
composer must invent forms and formal relations, not 'ideas,' if he is to
write meaningfully. He can master the resulting difficulties only by
realizing them clearly and translating them into well-defined technical
problems, by dividing his procedure rationally into different steps and
ultimately achieve 'invention.' He must have a kind of blue-print in
mind, a framework which he must fill in at each given place and only
then see to it that the fillings are vivid and striking. In a sense, he m ust
have full control over elements that in traditional composing are, often
wrongly, considered to be involuntary and purely intuitive.
This filling in, this consummation of the concrete, is the Achilles' heel
of composing for motion pictures. Since the filling in is planned, by its
nature it threatens at every step to degenerate into mere padding, which
will appear dry, synthetic, and mechanical if the composer fails to bring in
sufficient spontaneity to counter the impact of his own plan. The result is
then one of those peculiar compositions, which despite their m ediocre
musical substance have a certain effectiveness that derives from a
felicitous idea of the whole. The current demand for showmanship on the
part of the composer refers to this specific musical ability, the flair for the
function, without demanding an equivalent sense of the material by
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which it is being fulfilled. Once the com poser has reached the level of
planned composing, be must focus his whole energy and critical
judgment on the problem of filling in.
Regarding the thesis of the primacy o f the whole, or form in a broad
sense, in motion-picture music, it must be emphasized that the galaxy of
forms evolved by traditional music and expounded in academic theories
is largely useless. Many traditional forms must be discarded; others must
be completely modified. To realize the primacy of the whole in motion-
picture music thus does not mean to take over the forms of absolute
music and to adapt them by hook or crook to the film strips - by analogy
with certain tendencies of contemporary opera, for instance those of Berg
and Hindemith - but the very opposite. It means building complete form
structures according to the specific requirements of the given film
sequence, and then 'filling in.' Good motion-picture music is fundamen­
tally anti-formalistic. The inadequacy of traditional forms and the
possibility of replacing them with advanced music has been discussed
in a previous chapter, and the prosaic character of motion pictures and
their general incompatibility with repetitions and musical symmetries
have been defined as the most important factors in that inadequacy. We
shall now discuss a number of other formal problems from the point of
view of motion-picture requirements, disregarding the specific musical
resources.
The prose quality of motion pictures cannot be taken into account by
the mere omission of repetitions in their various forms, such as the 'a'
part of the three-part song form, while in all other respects the
composition follows the traditional pattern, for instance, that of the
sonata exposition, which has been the prototype of all musical form for
more than 150 years. In autonomous music there are a number of
elements that have meaning only within the given formal set-up, in
'looking forward' or 'looking back' to some purely musical content. The
recapitulation in the classical sonata, with its structural change of the
modulation scheme that closes the circle of the form movement, is only
the most tangible instance of this fact. But such elements are found even
in the traditional exposition. The whole classical sonata form rests on the
premise that not all musical moments are equally relevant as such -
indeed, that not all of them are present to the same extent - but that the
presence of musical events is more intense with entrance and re-entrance
of the themes, and is meaningfully less intense in other passages. The
very essence of the traditional sonata form is defined by the variable
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degree of presence of musical events, that is, their differentiation

according to whether they are perceived 'themselves/ as anticipated or
remembered, or only prepare for or lead away from such anticipations or
recollections. Their articulation is equivalent to their different density or
presence at different moments. Not the symphonic movement in which
everything is equally present, or, to use technical terms, in which
everything is equally thematic, is the best, but the symphonic m ovem ent
in which the present and nonpresent moment are related in the deepest
and most comprehensive manner.
Only in the latest stages of autonomous music, in such works as
Schonberg's Erwartutig, are all the musical elements equally near the
centre. And even Schonberg, since he introduced the twelve-tone
technique, seems to have been striving for differentiation according to
the different degree of presence. Transitional parts, fields of tension, and
fields of release of tension are some of the resources of this differentiation.
It was just these elements of form which, in contrast to the 'inventions' or
the actual themes, were most exposed to bad schematic treatment, but it
was also through these same elements that the principle of the dynamic
construction of the whole triumphantly asserted itself in great works,
such as the Eroica. These elements, whose meaning consists in the
unfolding of an autonomous musical continuity, are denied to the m otion
picture, which requires a thoroughly and completely present music, a
music that is not self-contemplative, self-reflective, that does not harbour
anticipations in itself. When transitions or fields of tension are needed,
they come from the sequence of the picture, not from the inner
movement of the music. This circumstance alone sets very narrow limits
to the adoption of traditional patterns.
On the other hand, the composer is confronted with problems o f form
that hardly ever occurred in traditional music. For instance, a sequence
can require the 'exposition' of an event, but it must be done with a
concentrated brevity that was completely alien to the sonata exposition
before the disintegration of tonality. Thus the composer must be able to
write music of a preparatory character that is also entirely present and
does not utilize the stale means for creating moods, such as the repulsive
tremolo crescendi or other devices of the same kind. He must be able to
compose concluding passages, which round up a preceding dramatic
development of the picture or dialogue, without a preceding purely
musical and closed development - something like a stretta w ithout a
preceding piu moderate. The concluding character must be found in the
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structure of the music itself in the drastic characterization of its smallest

components, not in their relation to preceding components, which do not
exist in this case. Climaxes must som etim es be brought about directly,
without crescendos, or only with a m inim um of preparation.
This presents a considerable difficulty, for musically there is the greatest
difference between a simple forte or fortissimo passage and one that has the
effect of a climax. But while formerly a climax resulted from the whole
development, here it must be achieved, so to speak, separately, 'in itself.'
There is no general rule for such a procedure, but the composer must be
aware of the problem. It may he said that such an 'absolute' climax
without preceding intensification can be achieved through the nature and
emphasis of the musical profiles themselves, not through the mere impact
of noise. Every musician knows that there are themes with an inherent
'concluding' character, which is difficult to describe in words, but is
accessible to careful analysis. The closing section of the exposition of the
first movement of the Pastoral Symphony, the brief closing theme in the
first movement of piano sonata op. 101, or bars 82 and following in the
larghetto of the Second Symphony are instances of such themes in
Beethoven. Likewise there are 'primary' and 'auxiliary' characterizations
as such. The composer of motion-picture music must be aware of such
qualities in his material and attempt to produce them directly, without the
detour of preparation and resolution. The effects in question require
nothing that is alien to music. They have largely crystallized inside the shell
of the traditional form language. But the point is to give them new validity
by conceiving them as an independent result of that form language. It is
necessary to emancipate them from their usual formal presuppositions that
are incompatible with the cinema, to make them fluid, as it were.
Non-schematic forms are also known in traditional music under the
name of fantasies and rhapsodies. While the latter often approximate the
potpourri or, like Brahms' opus 79 and, to some extent, Schubert's
Wanderer Fantasy, are disguised song forms or sonatas, there is such a
thing as a specific fantasy form, such as Mozart's famous piano fantasies
in C-minor and D-minor. Official musical theory has kept aloof from such
works and contented itself with declaring that they had no definite form.
Yet Mozart's two fantasies mentioned above are no less carefully
organized than the sonatas, indeed, perhaps even more carefully, because
they are not subjected to a heteronomous order. Their formal principle
might be termed that of the segment, or the 'intonation.' They consist of a
number of parts, each of them unified, relatively complete, each
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following a single thematic pattern, in different tempos and keys. The art
of the fantasy consists not so much in elaboration and development of a
uniformly flowing totality as in balancing the various segments through
similarity and contrast, careful proportions,1modulated characterizations,
and a certain looseness of structure. The segments may often be suddenly
interrupted. The less definite their form, the more easily can they be
joined to others and continued by them. All this is similar to the
requirements of motion-picture music. Its composer will often be
compelled to think in terms of segments rather than of developments,
and what is accomplished elsewhere by the form resulting from the
thematic development, he will have to achieve by relating one segment to
another. This is a direct consequence of the postulate of 'presence' in
motion-picture music, and refers to relatively large pieces, which for the
time being are infrequent.
The interrelation of several forms also raises questions that cannot be
solved by means of traditional resources alone. Contrast through tempo is
insufficient. From a dramatic point of view it may be deemed necessary
that several movements in the same tempo should follow one another,
and that, as in the older suite, they should differ sharply, but only in
character. For instance, a slow tempo was out of place in the newly
composed music to Joris Ivens' Rain, not because it was necessary to
illustrate the falling of the rain, but because the music's task was to push
forward this plotless and therefore static motion picture. The composer
was forced to adopt means of contrast more subtle than the allegro
followed by an adagio. Thus motion-picture music does not necessarily
lead to the use of coarser means; on the contrary, if it is emancipated, it
will be a stimulus for new differentiations.
It must be kept in mind that the planning of the music can be effective
only if it is not separated from the planning of the picture; the two aspects
must be in productive interrelation. If the composer is faced with given
sequences and told to contribute thirty seconds of music at one place and
two minutes at another place, his planning is confined to the very
bureaucratic function from which he should be freed. Such a planning is
founded on the mechanical and administrative division of competence,
not on the inherent conditions of the work. Free planning signifies
combined planning, which could often lead to fitting the picture to the
music, instead of the usual inverse procedure. This would of course
presuppose genuine collective work in the motion-picture industry.
Eisenstein seems to be working in this direction.
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Music and Noise

Under conditions of responsible planning, well-arranged noise strips

might in many cases be preferable to music. This is particularly true of
background music with simultaneous dialogue. The role of a mere stage
setting is incompatible with the nature of articulated, developed music
and its adequate perception. Either it retains its character of music, and
then it diverts the spectator's attention, or it tends spontaneously to
approximate noise, and then the musical appearance becomes super­
fluous. Of course, it is often necessary to mingle music and noise, because
noise alone might produce an effect of dullness and emptiness. But in
such cases noise and music must be mutually adjusted. In terms of music,
this means that it has to 'keep open' for the noise, which is to be
integrated into it. The function of noise is twofold: on the one hand, it is
naturalistic, and on the other, it is an element of the music itself, with an
effect that can best be likened to the accents of the percussion
instruments.
From the foregoing it can be inferred: (1) that the rhythmic beats of
noise are provided for in the music, which, so to speak, reserves a place
for it; and (2) that the tone colour of the music is either similar to that of
the noise or is deliberately and distinctly contrasted with it. For example,
a man flees from danger in a bustling street and reaches a door. The
ringing of the bell concludes rapid string figures in the manner of a
cadenza. Thus music can dissolve into noises, or noises can dissolve into
music, as though they were dissonances.
Occasionally noise and music can be planned in co-ordination for a
long sequence. For instance, the screen shows a view of roofs in a city. All
the bells of the city begin to ring while ever new masses of roofs and
steeples are projected. A close-up shows the symbolic figure of death
emerging from a clock mechanism and striking a bell with a hammer. At
the end of the sequence a coffin is shown, while the dull echo of a church
knell is still audible. The accompanying music is characterized by
monumental coldness, and uses bells as an ingredient. But this is
insufficient to produce the density of sound resulting from the full ringing
of many bells, which is necessary for dramatic reasons. Such an effect
cannot be achieved if the picture and music are recorded simultaneously,
for the rhythmic irregularity of the bell sounds cannot be adapted to a
conductor's beat. For that reason, in the example cited here, the sound
had to be produced synthetically by combining several sound tracks: in

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addition to the music track, there were four separate tracks for the bells,
and two more for the church knell and the hammer stroke of death. The
four bell tracks were arranged to form a correlated whole. In the re­
recording, all the tracks were combined with the music track, and various
elements were alternately stressed. The point of this discussion is that
effects of this kind cannot be left to chance. A satisfactory result was
achieved in this instance only because the noise tracks had been
produced with due consideration for the music and because the total
effect had been carefully prepared.
Recording of noises has done away with program music. The musical
reproduction of a storm cannot compete with the recording of a real
storm. Tone painting has become strikingly superfluous - in fact it has
always been. It is justified only if it achieves what Beethoven demanded
of it in the Pastoral Symphony, i.e., 'the expression of feelings, rather
than painting/ or if it adds emphasis, over-explicit light, so to speak, and
tends to virtuosity, deliberately introducing artificiality, instead of striving
for realistic effects. Attempts to outdo a real rain by a musical rain, or to
invent the musical sound of a snowfall ('that is how falling snow should
sound') may lead to delightful effects, but these, of course, have nothing
in common with the traditional idea of program music.

Setting 2 Technique and Instrumentation

Concerning 'setting' technique and instrumentation - for a good

composer both are identical - the first thing to be noted is that the
postulate of suitability for the microphone, which was still fashionable in
1932, has since then become obsolete. The progress of music recording
has made it possible to reproduce any score with reasonable adequacy.
This was not always the case. Double and triple stops of string
instruments, instruments of extreme range, such as the double bass and
piccolo, and horns, flutes, and oboes, indeed the whole traditional string
section, were more difficult to reproduce than other instruments and
combinations of sounds. Today the sound-recording apparatus has been
greatly improved. That also means, naturally, that a poorly orchestrated
composition will sound as bad in recording as it sounded originally.
The limits of 'setting' and instrumentation are no longer set by the
inadequacy of the recording apparatus, but by the dramatic function of
the music. In concert music, a complex style such as Schonberg's is the
result of a specific musical evolution. It would be legitimate in motion-

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picture music only if it corresponded to definite dramatic requirements.

When music is driven toward the margin of the field of attention, as is the
case in the motion picture, its perceptibility is narrowly restricted. It
would be absurd to write more complex music than can actually be
perceived at any given moment. Even the subtlest problems of musical
setting depend upon the planning of the motion picture as a whole.
Today musical planning is achieved only in a distorted way as a result
of the mechanical separation between the composition - 'setting' - and
arrangement - 'instrumentation.' Such a planning is more of an industrial
facade than a genuinely organized procedure, and cannot be justified
either objectively or economically. This particular division of labour has a
spurious character, it is based only on considerations of personnel. In
reality, any qualified composer should be able to invent his instrumenta­
tion together with his music, instead of first composing and then
orchestrating it. It takes no more time to compose a score than to reduce a
still nonexistent orchestral version to a dubious piano score. Division of
labor here leads to entrusting the composing proper to amateurs, who are
thus encouraged to write, because their grossest errors are corrected by
the arranger, while still other experts rule over the supposedly mysterious
domain of orchestration, just as is the case in Tin Pan Alley. On the other
hand, the emergence of specialized arrangers has led to the standardiza­
tion of instrumentation itself. All this results in a tiresome uniformity of
all motion-picture scores. Even the most talented arranger grows sterile
through constant handling of poor material. However, this absurd
procedure is almost inevitable under the present conditions in the
industry. The composers often work under great pressure and have to
produce enormous quantities of music - eighty minutes of accompani­
ment to a motion picture - so that they themselves are unable to do the
considerable writing work required by a score, even when they imagine
the instruments as vividly as possible in the course of composing. It is no
accident that even among the highly qualified composers in Hollywood
hardly anyone orchestrates his own works. Considering the relatively
high standard of the arrangers, this does not seem too great a misfortune.
In reality, however, the division of labor means that an important part of
the work of composing is omitted. Any self-critical composer, when
preparing the final score, retouches and corrects, he never transcribes
mechanically. The use of arrangers eliminates this delicate part of
instrumentation, because the arranger either faithfully follows the
composer's original indications or, if such indications are lacking, replaces
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them with the safest and most oft-tried effects, whereas the composer
himself might have found what was specifically needed in the given
passage. Thus a further factor of leveling is introduced.
To some extent this sterility can also be attributed to the type of
orchestras prevalent in today's studios. It is true that a good composer can
achieve great variety even with the most modest instrumental resources.
But certain standard restrictions in the disposition of the instruments
nevertheless tend to standardize the sound itself. This refers above all to
the pseudo-glamorous titles and endings, to the monotonous homophony
always with blurred middle voices, to the predominance of honeyed
violin tones, the undifferentiated treatment of woodwinds, am ong which
only the bassoon stands out as the village clown and the oboe as the
innocent lamb, and the ponderous brass chords. Aside from a kind of
dialogue between the strings and the brasses, almost nothing can be
heard except an obtrusive upper voice accompanied by a feeble bass.
The disposition of the string section is particularly absurd. With few
exceptions, it consists of twelve to sixteen violins, treated usually as one
voice (i.e., first and second violins in unison), two or three violas, two or
three cellos, and two double basses. The disproportion between instru­
ments of high and low range preclude any distinct polyphony in the strings
and leads to the practice of 'laying it on' with mere stop-gap voices.
There is a similar disproportion between woods and brasses. Four
horns, three trumpets, two or three trombones, and a tuba are often
balanced by two flutes and, it must be granted, three clarinets (which
usually duplicate the strings), one and rarely two oboes, alternating with
the English horn, and often only one bassoon. The problem of an
adequate wind bass has not been satisfactorily solved even in concert and
opera orchestras; the studio orchestras ignore it. But even the higher
woodwinds are generally used as padding or play in unison with the
strings.
As a rule, full orchestras are employed only at the beginning and the
end, and for particularly important sequences; all the rest - intimate
music, background music for dialogues, accompaniments for short
sequences - is supplied by a small orchestra, lacking almost all of the
brasses and woodwinds, but retaining most of the strings. The result is
music that sounds intolerably like that in a cafe. The harp and the piano,
which are never absent, contribute their sugary coloration, mechanical
distinctness, and spurious fullness.
If there must be both a large and a small orchestra, they should be
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better proportioned, and more drastically distinguished from each other,

not only by the number, but also by the nature of their instruments. The
complete orchestra should far more approximate the symphony orchestra
than is the practice today, with a sufficient number of second violins,
violas, cellos, and double basses, and with twice or three times as many
woodwinds. This is done in isolated cases, but it should be the rule. On
the other hand, the small orchestra should correspond to a genuine
chamber ensemble - flutes, clarinets, solo violin, solo cello, and piano - or
might consist of string quartet, flute, clarinet, and bassoon. Many such
combinations could easily be formed; they have long since proved their
extraordinary value for chamber music; the first one mentioned, for
instance, is used by Schonberg in his Pierrot Lunaire. If new instruments
are also included, such as the novachord, electric piano, electric guitar,
electric violin, and others, and these are employed independently and
not, as is usual today, for mere color effects and doubling, the way will be
open for countless interesting possibilities, a real composer's paradise. The
following two combinations have proved their worth: (1) clarinet,
trumpet, novachord, electric piano, and guitar; and (2) novachord,
electric piano, violin, and flute.
Lately there has appeared a tendency to relax the standardization of
motion-picture orchestras by the introduction of unusual colors obtained,
apart from the electric instruments, through the use of delicate w ood­
winds, such as the alto flute and the contrabass clarinet. It is well to
remember that instrumentation is never a matter of selecting colors as
such, but a matter of 'setting/ of composing in a way that really activates
each instrument. The task is not to compose ordinary music for unusual
instruments; it is more important to compose unusual music for ordinary
instruments. This refers not only to the structure of the music, but above
all to the particular gift of 'inventing' in a specific instrumental sense. As a
rule, chamber-music ensembles require compositions in a truly chamber-
music style. The ordinary salon-orchestra composing is unsuitable for
such an ensemble. The piano or novachord part must be treated
soloistically; its purpose should not be merely to indicate the harmony.

Composing and Recording

The principal factor to be considered here is synchronization. The music

must hit definite points, the time of the music and the picture must
coincide down to the last detail. Consequently, the music must be
 C O M P O S I N G FOR THE FILMS

flexible, so that occasionally whole bars or phrases can be omitted, added,

or repeated; the composer must keep in mind the possibility of fermatas
and rubati; he must have at his command a certain amount of planned
improvisation - the opposite of bad, accidental improvised composing - in
order to achieve complete synchronization and a lively performance.
Examples of such planned improvisation can be found particularly in
operatic music.
Despite this the conductor is sometimes compelled to slow up or
accelerate the music for the sake of improving synchronization. If this
occurs, the music becomes distorted and senseless. Although experienced
composers and conductors try to avoid such accidental distortions,
ritenuti and accelerandi are only too often used without any real
justification. The same fault can be observed in poor performances of
advanced m odem music.
In long sequences requiring the continuous coincidence of pictures
and music, synchronization must be automatized. To obtain mathema­
tical exactness, the inability of human beings to observe mechanical time
relations must be corrected by mechanical devices. Rhythmograms enable
the composer at his desk to see, for instance, that clouds drift across the
screen from the second quarter note of the first bar to the third quarter
note of the fourteenth, and that between the first and the third quarters
of the twelfth bar the heroine raises her hand. Thus he can write a score
that follows every detail, however complicated and differentiated, with
the utmost precision. In such a score all modifications of tempo must be
clearly worked out; they are no longer subject to the whims of a
conductor or the constraint of synchronization. The conductor merely
controls and rehearses, he no longer interprets the music.
This type of technique affects the character of the music, excluding all
'fluid/ contingent elements. Utmost accuracy of structure from the
smallest detail to the complete work is a paramount consideration. The
music must run like clockwork, the art of com posing here consists in
meaningfully relating all the minute and often divergent details. It goes
without saying that such music is cool and remote rather than expressive.
The general technical level of musical recording is astonishingly high,
considering that the sound film has existed only a short time. However,
the apparatus is still deficient in many important respects. First of all, the
basic noise accompanying every sound film is still too loud. Further, the
total sound has no spatial depth, and the music is flat, with a foreground
character, as though it were perceived with only one ear. For this reason.
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densely scored pieces are difficult to record clearly. The 16-foot sound
tones (double-bass, tuba, contrabassoon) and the highest registers
(piccolo) are still less sure than the middle register. While many of these
defects could be eliminated by greater care, more generous expenditure of
time, and other reforms of the studio routine, a decisive advance can be
made only on the basis of new technical standards, not through isolated
efforts. Science has already made these standards possible, but the
industry has not taken them over for fear of having to make new
investments - every movie theater would have to install a new projecting
machine. The procedure applied by Disney in the otherwise questionable
film Fantasia, which he called 'fantasy-sound/ gives an idea of the new
technique.
Composers of cinema music are exposed to a special danger that other
composers hardly ever have to face: arbitrary cuts made by the film
director when he dislikes something, when any sound contradicts his
conventional ideal of beauty, or simply when a passage involves difficult
problems for the instrumentalists, so that rehearsing would take too
much time. Such cuts are made with total disregard of musical logic, and
the composer's position in the industry is such that his protestations have
n o chance of being heard, let alone heeded. This practice is another
reason for what we have called planned improvisation, i.e., for writing a
type of music that would not be thrown completely out of gear by certain
anticipated cuts. The situation of music as a secondary, auxiliary means is
painfully manifested here by such threats and by its frequent distortion
through inadequate performance. Under the prevailing conditions, the
only thing the composer can do about it is to be as careful as possible with
regard to the safety of his 'setting/ that is, he not only must avoid writing
any bar unless he can accurately imagine its sound, but must also be sure
that everything he writes is fully realizable under the average conditions
of performance. It goes without saying that such self-restraint constantly
impedes the freedom of his imagination.

Conductors and Musicians

As a rule the cinema studios do not follow the practice of European opera
houses, which hire talented young musicians after they have finished
their schooling. Conducting jobs still go to conventional performers from
night clubs or musical shows, or to orchestra players who have worked
their way up through diligence or connections, unless it is the composer
 C O M P O S I N G FOR THE FILMS

himself who directs his own works for better or for worse. The ordinary
conductors of motion-picture orchestras replace genuine musical experi­
ence and knowledge with the habit of automatic adjustment to the
conditions of recording and particularly synchronization. As a rule they
do not know how to rehearse or, often, even how to beat time properly;
they merely keep the orchestra going with a minimum of preparation.
With all this they maintain the fiction that they are experts whose
knowledge is something quite different from ordinary musicianship.
It must be granted that the working conditions of the studio conductor
hardly permit of adequate performances. Awareness that each additional
hour of rehearsal or recording means additional expense puts the
conductor under permanent pressure, and, as is the case in all
hierarchies, he merely transmits this pressure when he proceeds
autocratically. The whole process of production is marked by haste; the
composer must work from hand to mouth, the conductor has hardly any
time to study his score, and if he is compelled to do so he usually cannot
go beyond the most primitive task of synchronization, the providing of
cues at the proper times. Since he must make use of every minute, both
he and the orchestra are tremendously overburdened. Quite often he
must assimilate the freshly copied music only during rehearsal and have it
played long enough to cement it together somehow, and this again means
loss of time for real rehearsing.
The level of the orchestra players is, on the contrary, very high. The
best instrumentalists try to obtain work in the studios for pecuniary
reasons. But they have to pay a high price for the money they earn. They
suffer from the unworthy and often unendurably shabby cinema scores
they must play, from a regime that combines senseless pedantry with
irresponsible bungling, and from the inadequacy of the conductors.
Particular hardships are imposed by the absurd and inconsiderate
working hours, which result more from incompetence than from
necessity. The musicians are summoned at the most inconvenient hours,
often in the middle of the night; they are made to play until they are
completely exhausted, in extreme cases the same miserable sixteen
measures for eight hours on end, while problems concerning the
performance of difficult music are often ignored for lack of time. Short
periods of inhuman strain are often followed by weeks of idleness.
(Incidentally, such practices are among the most demoralizing in the
whole cinema industry.) The gifts of the musicians are wasted and ruined.
They become insensitive and indifferent, and are actually trained to be
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careless. In self-defense they end up by assuming an attitude of s

contem pt toward the whole business. They vent their resentmen ^
everything difficult and unusual that is to say particularly on
music, which should expect to find its best allies among the o
oriented orchestra musicians. Instead, they react coolly to
sounds and applaud when a brilliant E-major seems felicitous.
 7
Suggestions and Conclusions

Suggestions for improving the quality and the methods of using motion -
picture music are naturally open to suspicion. The cultural industry as a
whole, and particularly the realm of motion-picture music, is character­
ized by the fact that all the people concerned in it are fully aware of its
defects and often denounce them; at the same time, any innovation, even
the most modest, that is not in complete conformity with the prevailing
trend encounters the most stubborn opposition, which defies the best
intentions. What is in question here is not the arbitrary decisions of the
'big bosses' - these are invoked only in extreme cases, because anyone
who enters the lion's den is so resigned and prepared to adjust himself to
reality that dramatic clashes are ruled out in advance. The artists know
that any reference to art is apt to infuriate the management, and that
showmanship and box-office receipts must be accepted explicitly or
implicitly as the guideposts of their work.
However, even within the limits set by showmanship and box-office
success, every genuine innovation meets with opposition that manifests
itself not as censorship, but as inertia, as the rule of 'common sense' in a
thousand little matters, or as respect for allegedly irrefutable experience.
Attempts at reform degenerate into guerilla warfare, and in the end
break down completely because of the disproportion between the
hypertrophied power of a system rationalized to the point of absurdity,
and any possible individual initiative - not because of objections on the
part of the executive, w ho intervenes only occasionally, to teach the artist
that he is only a cipher.
There are various ways of adjusting oneself to this situation. Some -
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 S U G G E S T I O N S AND C O N C L U S IO N S

those w ho are most successful from the pecuniary point of view - go over
to the enemy and embrace the cause that they hate; they see in the mass
base of the motion picture a guarantee of its truth; they declare solemnly
that the artist can do anything, no matter how audacious, provided that
he knows his trade, and use their spurious authority as experts to throttle
the boldness in others that they themselves dare not display. Others are
vociferous in their disapproval; rebel, claim to be enemies of the whole
business; but in the end their products are curiously like those of the
people they profess to despise. Still others - the intellectuals of the
motion-picture world - adopt an extremist attitude and decide that the
motion-picture industry has nothing to do with art, and that culture is
doom ed in any event. This idea is used as an all-embracing mental
reservation, which enables them to yield in every detail while preserving
their good conscience. Such people are even more cynical than the
businessmen. Proud of their superior knowledge, they discourage every
would-be innovator by giving him a hundred reasons why his proposals
must fail. In their priggishness and learned conceit they condemn the
naive reformer on the ground that he is resorting to patchwork instead of
doing a thorough job.
While it is indisputable that even the most insignificant defects are
inseparable from the inadequacy of the whole system, theoretical
criticism of fundamentals should not be misused as a letter of indulgence
with regard to practice. Irresponsible radicalism of summary rejection is
not an infantile disease but a symptom of senile weakness in those who
are weary of futile opposition. To have a clear insight into the true nature
of the causes of the present evil and to refuse to indulge in the illusion
that the system can be changed by gradual corrections does not
necessarily mean that one must give up all efforts to bring about a better
state of affairs. Such efforts will not suffice to emancipate the musical
motion picture but they can give an idea of what the emancipated motion
picture would look like.
Even at the price of daily quarrels with wretched opponents, it is of
great importance that an unofficial tradition of genuine art be formed
which may one day make itself felt. For the new motion picture cannot fall
from heaven; its history which has not yet really begun will be largely
determined by its prehistory. The specific requirements of the material that
seem to have a hindering effect in many respects in other respects bring
pressure to bear in the direction of emancipation against the intentions of
the producers and consumers. When subject matter, however unworthy it
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may be, is approached objectively, an element of truth is introduced that

asserts itself against the existing limitations. This element is contained in
the present practices in a fragmentary and anonymous form; it must be
brought to consciousness and consciously furthered.
As regards motion-picture music, the possibilities of improvement are
considerably narrowed down, aside from the general conditions of
production, by a far more primitive factor, namely, the present nature of
motion-picture material pictures and dialogues. Fundamentally, no
motion-picture music can be better than what it accompanies. Music
for a trashy picture is to some extent trashy, no matter how elegantly or
skilfully it has solved its problems. The postulate that the music must
always have some sort of relation to the picture on the screen defines its
limits; it must follow the lead of the inferior material to which it is
subordinated. Good music accompanying hackneyed or idiotic action and
meaningless chatter becomes bad and meaningless - and this does not
mean that a music as bad as the picture is more adequate.
It is true that occasionally skilfully composed music can rebel and
disavow the picture that degrades it, either by ruthless opposition or by
revealing exaggeration. But the value of such stratagems must not be
overestimated, any more than that of artistic sabotage in general. Under
the present cultural conditions, they would hardly be noticed by the
public, and would usually be nipped in the bud by the agencies of control
within the industry. And even if such extraordinary tours de force could get
across, they would remain exceptions that prove the rule. They would
degenerate into specialized and ingenious applied art, adding a
'sophisticated touch/ Harsh music accompanying a post-card love scene,
for instance, would not merely contrast with it and result in a presumably
comical effect of the whole; it would also be ridiculous, naive, and futile.
Intended to convict the motion picture of banality, it would itself be
convicted of uselessly wasting energy. Likewise, bold musical colors,
whether of harmony or instrumentation, would be disfigured when
associated with sugary sweet technicolor. Far from 'refuting' technicolor,
they themselves would sound 'dirty,' by virtue of the contrast, no matter
how purely they were set forth or how shoddy the visual glamor on the
screen. Most important, however, is the fact that the seriousness of the
musical tone becomes spurious when associated with the show. In
claiming to be something that is compatible with the picture, it loses all
right to function as purely musical expression. In a conventional film,
conventional, essentially spurious music can occasionally be 'truer' than
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genuine m usic because the former at least does not degrade truth into an
element of spuriousness.
One does not necessarily sanction the complacency of zealous writers
of music when one holds that improvement of motion-picture music is
inseparable from improvement of the motion picture, that it cannot be
undertaken as an isolated specialized venture. However, the following
considerations do not take the motion picture itself into account, and are
deliberately confined to problems of motion-picture music that reflea the
disease of the macrocosm of which it is part.

Technique and Spirit

Superficially considered, the defeas of cinema music fall into two groups.
First, there are the technical imperfeaions of all kinds: barbaric vestiges of
the early period of motion pictures; avoidable irrationalities of manage­
ment and working methods; backward machinery and procedures that
are still used out of parsimony, despite the prevailing infatuation with
inventions and gadgets - in brief, everything that is incompatible with the
spirit of technological progress. Second, there are the defeas stemming
from social and economic sources: deference to the market, particularly to
infantile and immature consumers whose bad taste is often enough a
mere pretext for the producers; the unconscious will to conform and
agree with established norms in every realm, even where the remotest
problems of musical struaure are concerned; the deep-rooted tendency
to frustration - the consumer, instead of receiving something genuinely
and substantially new, for which he may be unconsciously yearning, is
fed on the endless repetition of the habitual. It is generally believed that
the first group of defeas might be corrected automatically with the
growing rationalization of the industry - this would be progress consisting
in the elimination of out-of-date and accidental elements; as for those of
the second group, they are believed to be irremediable, and bound to
grow in strength. The implicit critique of the motion picture as contained
in Huxley's negative utopia. Brave New World, seems to reflect this
judgment. In this novel, the talkies are superseded by the 'feelies' which
enable the speaator to experience all the physical sensations shown on
the screen - he not only can sample the kisses of his favorite stars, but,
greatest triumph of all, he can touch every single hair in the piaure of a
bearskin; but the content of the 'feelies' is completely moronic, even
worse than that of today's piaures, if possible.

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However plausible this prognosis may sound, however blatant the

contradiction between the technique of reproduction and the content of
the pictures, such interpretations oversimplify the facts of the case and
lead to romantic distortions. Technical and intellectual inadequacies
cannot be mechanically divided. Thus the phenomenon of neutralization
discussed in chapter 5, which contributes so much to endowing motion-
picture music with the character of a 'digest' of material pre-digested by
the machinery, and to bringing it down to the intellectual level of all the
other elements involved, cannot be separated from the technique of the
recording procedures; if the latter is thoroughly transformed, the
meaning of the music and even its social bearing may very well be
affected. On the other hand, the seemingly technical backwardness of
motion-picture music as manifested in many ways, from the taboo
against m odem musical resources to the vested privileges of incompetent
routinists, is determined by speculation on public taste, by the night-club
hedonism of those in control, and by the peculiar social structure of the
industry; and there is no symptom that the internal growth of the
musico-technological forces automatically does away with all this.
Within the motion-picture concerns that have developed in planless
competition, spirit and technique appear as alien to one another, and
their relationship as one of blind arbitrariness. But socially, these two
elements are connected by multiple channels, and although they
contradict one another, they are inextricably mingled and interdeter-
mined. The development of technology affects the spirit as much as the
spirit affects the selection, direction, and impeding of technological
processes. There is no absolute gull between technical innovations and
intellectual reforms, superficial changes and profound transformations,
practical and utopian proposals. In a petrified and stationary system the
most practical idea may seem eccentric, and at the same time the most
extravagant fantasy can come close to realization, thanks to a sudden
technical advance.

Artistic Objectivity and Public

We must repeat that the use of music in motion pictures should be

inspired by objective considerations, by the intrinsic requirements of the
work. However, after having shown in detail how preoccupation with the
audience spoils cinema music, we wish to state here that the relation
between the objective requirements and the effect on the audience is not

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one of simple opposition, and that there is an ingredient of truth in what

the public expeas of the cinema. Even under the regime of the industry,
the public has not become a mere machine recording faas and figures;
behind the shell of conventionalized behavior patterns, resistance and
spontaneity still survive. To imagine that the demands of the public are
always 'bad' and the views of the experts always 'good' is to indulge in
dangerous oversimplification. It must not be forgotten that the notion of
'the expert' is part of the same machinery that has reduced art to an
administrative and commercial matter. The argument of the advocates of
the existing motion-piaure music is: The people want to have it this
way, otherwise the thing won't go' - in other words, they invoke the
expert's appraisal of the audience, which always amounts to shrewd
manipulation of the public. To subjea cinema music to objeaive
requirements is to represent the public's objeaive interests as against its
manipulated interests, with regard to which the public is merely the
customer.
Thus, the public's vague awareness that music should come to the aid
of the piaure, that it should 'motivate' the events on the screen, is
legitimate. The industry takes this desire into account, but misuses the
music in order to give a technically mediated faaor the appearance of
immediacy. This ideological funaion is so close to the true and genuine
one that it is praaically impossible to set up an abstraa criterion for
distinguishing between the objeaively warranted use of music and its bad
use for purposes of glorification. Likewise, the public's general attitude
expresses both the human desire for music and the troubled need to
escape, and no individual audience reaaion can be subsumed under one
or the other category. The only possible method is to determine in each
individual case, on the basis of the funaion and nature of the music, to
what extent it aaually fulfils its mission or to what extent its humanity is
used only to mask the inhuman.
A more specific principle is that the music should not over-eagerly
identify itself with the event on the screen or its mood, but should be able
to assert its distance from them and thus accentuate the general meaning.
But even such a use of music is not a panacea; the fraud might very well
com e in at that point. It will have to be decided in each case with what
the music has identified itself and whether the identification - for
instance, with the despair of the charaaers on the screen - is aaually
achieved or replaced with cliches, which temper this despair and bring it
down to the level of conventionally allowed emotions. However, the
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public is always right in experiencing as boredom what was described

from an objective standpoint, as 'unrelated' music. Even here it should be
noted that today almost every product of the cultural industry is
objectively boring, but that the psycho-technique of the studios deprives
the consumers of the awareness of the boredom they experience.
In the prevailing practice, the effect on the spectator is planned while
the content of the music is planless. The situation should be reversed. The
music should be planned without an eye for the effect, and then the
public will get its due. Genuine planning is concerned with the relation
between picture and music and the structure of the music itself. Today
the music imitates the play on the screen, the picture, and yet the greater
the effort to assimilate the two media the more hopelessly they are split
apart. The important task is to establish fruitful tensions between them. A
proper dramaturgy, the unfolding of a general meaning, would sharply
distinguish among pictures, words, and music, and for that very reason
relate them meaningfully to one another.
As compared to the prevailing conditions, the music should in some
respects be brought closer to the motion picture and in other respects
taken further from it. It should not be a mere additional stimulus, as it is
in a farce with songs and dances, a kind of next course in a dinner, or
another 'feature'; on the contrary, it should at every moment be an
integral part of the picture as a whole. However, it should not be its
automatic duplication, it should not decrease the distance between
picture and spectator by creating moods; but by virtue of its character of
immediacy - and music still possesses this character to a greater extent
than any other art - it should stress the mediated and alienated elements
in the photographed action and the recorded words, thus preventing
confusion between reality and reproduction, a confusion that is all the
more dangerous because the reproduction appears to be more similar to
reality than it ever was.

‘I t ’s Non-commerciaP

The film industry opposes objective innovations in the music chiefly on

the ground that they would compromise box-office receipts and go
against the public's wishes, which the industry has allegedly ascertained,
although not even ordinary market research has been carried through in
this field. The standard argument against modem music, 'it is non­
commercial,' can be challenged on the ground that so-called non-

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commercial music has never been given a serious trial; that prejudice has
made it impossible to discover whether it is really as non-commercial as
all that, or whether on the contrary, by breaking through the universal
boredom, it would not increase box-office receipts to the discomfiture of
the old-timers. Take, for instance, Edmund Meisel's music to Potemkin.
Meisel was only a modest composer, and his score is certainly not a
masterpiece; however, it was non-commercial at the time it was written,
it avoided the neutralizing cliches and preserved a certain striking power,
however crude. Nevertheless there is not the slightest indication that its
aggressiveness impaired its effectiveness to the public; on the contrary, its
effectiveness was enhanced.
Other instances, too, prove that when, by way of exception, serious
composers have been permitted to write for cinemas, there was no
outbreak of panic among the audience. But until a large-scale experiment
with advanced music, masterfully composed and constructed, is made
within the big companies and their distributive apparatus - and is made
without the mental reservation that it is destined only for highbrows - the
thesis that decent and advanced music is non-commercial is nothing but an
empty phrase, which serves only to cover up the laziness, slovenliness, and
ignorance of vested privilege, and the abominable cult of the average.
New music could indeed be conspicuous, but only in a fundamentally
transformed, de-standardized motion picture. The usual argument that
new music is unsaleable refutes itself when applied to the prevailing
practice, for in today's motion pictures the music is so little noticed that its
nature is almost a matter of indifference. The average moviegoer is hardly
ever aware of the music, and probably he would be even less aware of the
degree of its modernism. This is, of course, no argument for the use of
m odem music, because it might easily be replied that since the type of
music used is a matter of indifference, one might as well continue the
existing state of affairs, and even add that radical music would only be
dishonored if it were tolerated by the industry. However, such
considerations involve the admission that the notion of 'poison for the
box office' should not be taken as seriously as all that. And those who
advocate attempts to carry out as many innovations as possible within the
existing framework, to serve as an eventual starting point for a
fundamentally changed motion picture, certainly have the right to insist
that the experiments should also include resources and techniques that
for the time being cannot fulfil their proper function, and even those that
are still in a rudimentary phase of development.
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Specificity and Routine

Whatever the nature of the resources used, motion-picture music should

be specific, derived from the particular conditions of the given case, and
should not be taken out of the storeroom, in the literal and figurative
meaning of this term. When a director makes a picture of anti-Nazi
resistance in a country invaded by Hitler, he takes great pains to see to it
that the telephone receivers are exactly of the kind used in that country,
and that the uniforms of the Elite Guards conform in every detail to the
actual garb. Since this kind of surface accuracy is generally achieved at
the cost of all genuine political and social plausibility, it is ridiculous and
disgusting. But cinema music has not even reached the level of that
accuracy. The question is not raised whether it coincides to som e extent
with even the most trivial interpretation of the subject, let alone whether
it expresses any truth of a higher order. To grab what is nearest at hand is
considered the best procedure when music is concerned - it is as though,
in our example, the director dressed his Elite Guard leaders in the
uniforms of the American Coast Guard, simply because they happened to
be available.
In other words, motion-picture music falls short even of the miserable
standards of the art of make-up, without having anything go o d by the
fact that it lags behind the bad. Guerilla heroes in Hollywood garb may be
spurious, but to accompany them with the music of a European masked
ball of 1880 is more spurious. Before the emancipation of motion-picture
music can be discussed at all, it must rid itself of the musical horse-and-
buggy atmosphere. This does not mean that music would have to catch
up with all the stupidities of literal imitation in order to acquire strength -
for instance, that the Elite Guard in our example would have to bleat out
the latest Nazi hit. But cinema music will not even begin to improve until
every single sequence is treated with exact regard to its special function.
Within the existing framework, the most important requirement is to cut
through the associative automatism, which always employs a hackneyed
type of music for a given sequence, according to the pattern: iet's have
more of the same/ Even the worst music that escapes from this constraint
would be better than the routine material that complies with it.
Another requirement, closely related to the preceding, is that no 'rules
of experience' should be recognized until they have been tried out. When
there is no genuine experience there can be no rules. Not even the
habitual practices have been developed in a consistent and progressive

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manner. The approved rules are nothing but the definitions that
circumscribe the musical horizon of the department heads. The struggle
against them constitutes the composer's martyrdom in his actual work.
Now, one should not cherish any illusions about the alleged power of the
personality in asserting itself against the industry. Nevertheless, one
should not consider the composer's struggle against common nonsense
completely hopeless. For there is at least one realm in which the will of
the low-grade businessman and that of the artist are commensurable over
short stretches: the realm of technique. Those who have seen how
orchestra players, who perform only reluctantly an advanced m odem
work under a conductor unsympathetic to and intellectually suspicious of
m odem music, change their attitude the moment they realize that
another conductor knows the score and handles it with the same
precision as a traditional one and that it has meaning in his hands know
where the opportunity lies for an uncompromising composer in motion
pictures. Masterful handling of resources carries a certain weight of its
own even when it is directed against every idea tolerated by the industry.
Orchestra players are in spite of everything most sensitive to it and their
confidence spreads under certain circumstances to everyone concerned
with the production of the picture.
The responsible composer can assert himself against convention once
he gives striking proof that he knows more than the routinist. It is difficult
to define in advance what this kind of knowledge is - it refers to a certain
familiarity with the sensuous practical aspect of music, to the ability to
'realize.' To be sure, technical competence that arouses confidence can
degenerate into professional automatism and lead to ultimate subordina­
tion to a routine; yet in it lies the only possibility of asserting the new.
This possibility is enhanced by the circumstance that actually the critical
and advanced musician is to a large extent also objectively more
competent even though he is often less 'practical.' It follows that the
composer has the duty to translate all his aesthetic and dramatic insights,
however speculative they may be, into technical problems. A good deal of
the technology of the industrialized work of art is inflated and
pretentious; but the composer proves his superiority only by measuring
himself against technology, not by abstractly and nobly negating it. If he
opposes to the director or producer general considerations about good
and bad m odem and reactionary music, he remains helpless, and his
cause is ridiculed with him. But if, against the conventional ideas of his
employers, he writes a composition more effective than the one they
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have imagined, which fulfils its function more exactly than the one they
wanted him to compose, he may prevail.

Discretion

A fundamental requirement that taxes all of a composer's sensitiveness is

that he should not write a single sequence, not even a single note, that
overlooks the social-technological prerequisite of the motion picture,
namely, its nature as mass production. No motion-picture music should
have the same character of uniqueness that is desirable in music intended
for live performance. In other words, motion-picture music should not
become the tool of pseudo-individualization.1 But therein the greatest,
almost insurmountable difficulties are involved. First of all, music, by its
nature and origin, seems inseparable from the factor of uniqueness, the
hie et nunc. The occurrence of the same music in different places at the
same time, especially when the intimacy of the moment, its whim, so to
speak, is emphasized, implies something that is almost anti-musical, as
manifested most clearly in motion pictures of concerts.2 As a matter of
fact, the motion picture itself consists of mass reproductions of unique
events, and thus compels the composer to deal with individual situations,
whose very nature resists such mass reproduction.
There is no sense in covering up such contradictions, the profoundest
that confront motion-picture music, far beyond the bounds of the existing
practices; on the contrary they should be made apparent. And since the
composer cannot evade them, they should enter as an element into his
music. The aim is to write music that abandons itself to its concrete
occasion as 'unique' - and this is the basic postulate of specific composing
- but at the same time takes care not to seek its fulfilment in the triumph
of intruding upon something 'unique.' One might almost say that the
profoundest requirement of cinema music is that of 'discretion' - namely,
that it should not behave indiscreetly with regard to its object, that it
should not suggest close intimacy, but that on the contrary it should
mitigate the inevitable impression of embarrassing closeness to an
intimate event, which every motion picture produces. This is the
contemporary form of musical 'taste,' and the picture itself can teach us
something in this respect. Thus, the portrayal of the departure of a ship
and the crowded pier is rightly considered more appropriate than close-
ups of kisses; the reason for this is not prudishness, but the circumstance
that in the ship scene the element of the uniqueness, of the hie et nunc,

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although present, is not as pronounced and does not affect the picture to
the same extent as in the picture of a lover's embrace. The cinema
com poser who in a sense is constantly driven to behave in the manner of
people kissing in public should heed this lesson. From the point of view of
advanced composing, music illustrating a noisy crowd seems more
appropriate than music illustrating an erotic scene. It is said that a
contract with Stravinsky was canceled because he stipulated that he
would not illustrate any love scenes.
The paradox inherent in motion-picture music - the fact that it is both
technified and obliged to have a character of uniqueness - if it is really as
inevitable as it appears to be - leads to a fundamental consequence
concerning the general attitude of the music. Being a 'multipliable
unique' it is always supposed to achieve what it actually cannot achieve.
It must give a hint to this situation unless it is blindly to succumb to this
contradiction. In other words, motion-picture music must not take itself
seriously in the same way as autonomous music does. Analysis of the
most fundamental premises of motion-picture music thus confirms what
we have inferred from the fact of its subordination to its purpose and the
impossibility of its autonomous development. With some exaggeration it
may be said that essentially all motion-picture music contains an element
of humor, speaks with its tongue in its cheek, as it were, and that it
degenerates into a bad kind of naivete as soon as it forgets this element.
It is hardly an accident that the music for those pictures in which the
idea of technification has made the greatest inroads on the function of
music, that is, the cartoons, almost always takes on the aspect of a joke
through the use of sound effects. The investigations made by the Film
Music Project show that almost all new and unconventional solutions are
based on ideas that are at least close to humorous elements. This should
not be misunderstood. What is advocated here is not that the music as
such should have a facetious character; on the contrary, it should make
use of the whole gamut of expression. Nor should the music necessarily
make mock of the events on the screen. The element of humor is rather
to be found in the formal relation of the music to its object and in its
function.
For instance (we refer here to an example studied by the Project), the
music imitates caution. Actually, this is impossible; caution is a specific
human behavior, and music cannot express it and accurately distinguish
it from similar impulses without the help of concepts. The music is aware
of this, and exaggerates itself in order to enforce the association of
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caution, which it actually cannot express. Thereby it ceases to take itself

literally in its immediacy; it turns into a joke something that it cannot do
seriously. By doing this, it suspends the claim of the physical immediacy
of the hie et nunc, which is incompatible with its technological situation.
By keeping itself at a distance, it also creates a distance from its place and
hour.
Something of this element - the formal self-negation of music that
plays with itself - should be present in every composition for motion
pictures as an antidote against the danger of pseudo-individualization.
The postulate of universal planning leads of itself to such functional jokes,
which at the same time are inseparable from technification. The very fact
that something is mechanically manufactured and is at the same time
music objectively implies a comical element. Music will escape being
comical involuntarily only by agreeing to be comical voluntarily. The
formal facetious function is nothing but the awareness of music that it is
mediated, technically produced, and reproduced. In a certain sense, every
productive dramatic musical idea in the motion picture is a paradox. It
hardly needs to be shown that such an affinity to jokes reflects the
deepest unconscious tensions in the audience's reaction to motion-
picture music.3
The same problem can be approached from a different angle - in
relation to the effect of music, which is today the exclusive consideration,
and which, despite its questionableness, is nevertheless always to some
extent revealing objectively. Cinema music is not carefully listened to. If
this fact is more or less accepted as an inevitable premise, the best of
which has to be made, the aim will be to compose music that, even
though it is listened to inattentively, can as a whole be perceived correctly
and adequately to its function, without having to move along beaten
associative tracks that help the listener to grasp the music, but block any
adequate fulfilment of its function. The composer is thus faced with a new
and strange task - that of producing something sensible, which at the
same time can be perceived by way of parenthesis, as it slips by the
listener. Such a requirement is closely related to that of music that does
not take itself seriously. Good cinema music must achieve everything that
it does achieve on the surface, so to speak; it must not become lost in
itself. Its whole structure - and it needs structure more than any form of
autonomous music - must become visible; and the more it adds the
lacking depth dimension to the picture, the less it must itself develop in
depth. This is not meant in the sense of musical 'superficiality'; on the
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contrary it is precisely the procedure diametrically opposed to the

superficial, fleeting, and comfortable convention. It implies the striving to
make everything completely sensuous, in contrast to musical trans­
cendence and inwardness. In technical terms, this means the predomi­
nance of movement and color over the musical depth dimension,
harmony, which governs just the conventional patterns.
Cinema music should sparkle and glisten. It should attain the quick
pace of the casual listening imposed by the picture, and not be left
behind. Tonal colors can be perceived faster and with less effort than
harmonies, unless the latter follow the tonal pattern and. are therefore
not registered at all as specific. Sparkling variation and coloristic richness
are also most readily compatible with technification. By displaying a
tendency to vanish as soon as it appears, motion-picture music renounces
its claim that it is there, which is today its cardinal sin.

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 Appendix
Report on the Film Music Project

The purpose of this appendix is not to report on a project that can be

judged only on the basis of its concrete results as regards cinema music,
and even less to present these results as a model for the correct
procedure,, but to illustrate the thesis of the present book, especially the
formulations of the last chapter, down to details of composition.
The limitations of what has been achieved are clear enough. If
modesty must be required of cinema music, then this quality is even more
necessary in regard to attempts that diverge in their most significant
aspect from commercial pictures, namely, by the absence of business
control. Outside the studios, innovations such as those to be discussed
here are not only suspected of being the fruits of utopianism nurtured in
an artificial preserve, but in addition the outside situation manifests itself
objectively as the isolation of the experiments from the production
process of the motion picture and in a certain arbitrariness of the whole
approach, which is as remote from real planning as the practice of the
studios.
In other words, we are dealing not with 'positive solutions,' but rather
with potentialities that are opened up under both exceptionally favorable
and limiting conditions and that might become fertile outside the zone
protected against the market. The idea of a 'positive solution' should be
treated with reserve under the prevailing assumptions anyway: usually it
amounts merely to smug conformity, rationalized by the dubious excuse
that it is always better to do something than nothing at all. What is
important, however, is not contributions and attempts at patching up
things, but formulations of problems which start from the existing praxis.
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and which lead of themselves to its reversal. In brief, the aim has been to
find out how a conscious formulation of the tasks of motion-picture
music becomes manifest in the material, and this refers both to the
pictorial element which is taken as is, and to the compositional which is
treated critically. The purpose of the project was completely experi­
mental.
Here prejudices and bad habits had not to be taken for granted. Even
where they seem to be a matter of plain common sense, they had to be
ruled out. Their hackneyed stereotype would reduce their effect to
naught even when they made sense in themselves. The only criterion was
dramaturgy, that is, the function of the music in the film as a whole. At all
times the composer tried to go to the very bottom of the problem of the
dramaturgic relation between music and motion pictures, to test extreme
instances of this relation: resemblance and contrast, warming up and
cooling down, distance and proximity, and in doing this to gain an insight
into the most adequate procedure for each case. In this task the new
musical material was helpful. But it, too, was subordinated to the primacy
of the dramaturgic and was not used indiscriminately in the manner of a
composer writing autonomous music, but viewed in accordance with
functional requirements. The question in regard to simplicity or
complexity upon which the character of each piece depends was, like
any other, determined by the over-all plan.
Sociological considerations were taken into account at least in so far as
strips serving in any way the ideology propagated by cultural industry
were eliminated. It goes without saying that the music everywhere
avoided to advertise the 'moods' of the picture - a function that is
generally attributed to it by business routine.
The aesthetic intention was to keep the style of the music flexible
without, however, falling into eclecticism. The composer was guided by
his confidence in his 'touch': a manner that is sufficiently developed to
impose itself in seemingly divergent stylistic fields and give them the
stamp of unity. Achieving a specific relation between each sequence and
its music was put above every other aim.
As regards the composition technique - in the sense of 'planning' -
attention was above all given to form problems, to 'architecture.' This was
a result both of the necessary restraint in other musical dimensions,
especially the contrapuntal one, and the dramaturgic function, which in
each case starts from certain structural units of action and contexts that
are reflected by the build-up of the music. However, other tasks, such as
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strictly synchronistic composing aiming at 'points/ and thereby the

principle of motion-picture music 'pointing/ were by n o means
neglected.
Thus the experiments of the project were not specialized or reduced to
the compositional aspect, but touched upon all problems of motion-picture
music. Therein, in emancipation of music from compartmentalized
thinking, lay its novelty; and the musical results achieved are due as
much to this conception of the film as a unity composed of heterogeneous
elements, as to the composer's interest in the tendencies of m odem music.
Sociological investigations might have been undertaken in connection
with the general plan of the project. For instance, some of the feature-
film sequences could have been performed for different groups of
listeners, accompanied sometimes by the old music and sometimes by
that worked out in the project, and the reactions could have been studied
under laboratory conditions, by means of questionnaires and interviews.
But such investigations lay outside the scope of the project; moreover,
their results would merely contribute data concerning the possible mass
audience reactions to the use of m odem music in motion pictures.
Nevertheless, it would be worthwhile to ascertain w hether the
motion-picture audience's aversion to m odem music is not merely a
legend, and whether it would not approve of m odem music that
adequately fulfilled its dramatic function. Such proof might help to break
down the prejudice against modem music in the film industry.

The Project

In the spring of 1940, the Rockefeller Foundation granted the New School
for Social Research the sum of $20,000 for systematic research in motion-
picture music. The New School appointed Hanns Eisler as director of this
project, which originally was to last two years. Later, the period was
extended by nine months.
The basic idea of this undertaking was to apply the new musical
resources, as discussed in chapter 3, to motion pictures. More particularly,
methods were to be studied for closing the gap between the highly
evolved technique of the motion picture and the generally far less
advanced technique of motion-picture music. Attention was focused at
first on practical experiments, rather than on theory. Only after the
completion of the project were the results analyzed and incorporated into
the present book.

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I
I
 APPENDIX

Although the project was entirely independent of the motion-picture

industry, the latter showed its interest in the project by releasing film
material for the experiments. Such material was submitted by Walter
Wanger, Twentieth Century-Fox, Paramount, March of Time, Frontier
Films, and by Josef Losey and Joris Ivens, independent producers.
Because the project had to content itself with the available material,
certain difficulties arose. Scenes severed from their context often lost the
meaning they had had as parts of a whole, and dramatic planning, as
discussed in the chapter on aesthetics, was narrowly restricted.
Documentary material predominated; but this was not a disadvantage.
In the prevailing type of feature films, music that represents more than a
background frequently appears in sequences with a documentary
character, such as scenes from 'nature/ panoramas of cities, and moments
in the plot when the action is suspended and the spectator's attention is
directed to something more universal. Although much of this practice is a
bad convention, it is reasonable, in so far as action, whenever it is
concentrated in the dialogue - and this is still true of most feature pictures
- is difficult to combine with music. The wretchedly blurred character of
the usual background music suffices to illustrate this.
Conversely, newsreel sequences often seem to be broken-off frag­
ments of feature films. Thus, even though the project, because of the
looseness of its connections with Hollywood business, was largely
confined to documentary sequences, it could study problems relating to
feature films. The fragmentary feature-film material was astonishingly
similar to the documentary material.

Methods

The practical work was divided into the following stages:

(1) Composing. Experiments were conducted exclusively with new

com positions written expressly for the project and used with the available
picture sequences. Hanns Eisler composed all the scores.
(2) Recording. This was done under the direction of conductors who
were particularly well-qualified to interpret advanced music.
(3) Cutting, mixing, and editing. The same working processes were
applied to experimental material as are applied to regular motion
pictures. Timing also followed the usual practices, since the purpose
was to make sure that the new results could be used in the production of

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films under present-day conditions. Even the time spent on composing

conformed to the average situation prevailing in the motion-picture
industry.

The following sequences were used:

(1) Scenes in a children's camp (performance time 22 minutes): Camp

life is shown in its various aspects: sports, handicrafts, tending animals,
quarrels, eating, sleeping.
(2) Nature scenes (18 minutes): Eruption of a volcano, a blizzard, the
collapse of an iceberg in the Arctic. The material produced a wide range of
expression.
(3) Fourteen ways of describing rain (14 minutes): New music
composed for Joris Ivens' Rain, with a great variety of rain effects.
(4) Excerpts from weekly newsreels (14 minutes): War scenes.
(5) Sequences from feature films (14 minutes): Excerpts from Grapes of
Wrath and Forgotten Village.

The total performance time of the compositions was 82 minutes.

Survey of the Work Done

The Children's Camp has no plot; it is a loose sequence of somewhat

genre-like pictures that are held together by the common scene of action,
a camp. The whole is simple and unpretentious. Josef Losey, the director,
clearly distinguished the scenes; each deals with a special phase of camp
life, and each is designed to make a special point. The relative lengths of
the scenes were carefully balanced.
The musical problem was to save the picture from the usual saccharine
sentimental and humorous romanticism of magazine stories about
children. The effect of the music could be neither stirring nor funny. Its
range of feeling had to include elements that usually are not associated
with children: genuine seriousness, such as children often show in their
• play; sadness, nervousness, even hysteria; but all this conceived loosely,
thinly, as though inconsequentially. Above all, the music should not tap
the children on the shoulder, as it were, and make them the object of
adults' jokes or ingratiate itself by adopting a spurious baby talk.
The form of the suite seemed most natural - in other words, not an
elaborate form with transitions and maybe leitmotifs, but a sequence of

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small, distinct, clearly differentiated pieces, each complete in itself with

an unmistakable beginning and ending.
American nursery rhymes - 'Strawberry Fair,' 'Sourwood Mountain,'
'Little Ah Sid,' and others - supplied a musical raw material that was
suitable because of its simplicity and associations. Eisler also wished to
show that it is possible to write unconventional music even with the
simplest material constructively differentiated, without the need of
pretentious disguise.
The score calls for seven solo instruments - flute, clarinet, bassoon,
and string quartet. The style is that of chamber music, with the
instruments alternately prominent, but without any developed poly­
phony. Harmonically it never goes beyond the limits of tonality, although
it uses all the steps of the chromatic scale as independent progressions.
Some characteristic passages are noteworthy. A short allegretto
introduction accompanying the film title gives the keynote. It contains
a children's song, but at first not as the main voice. It resounds vaguely in
the bassoon middle voice, and this stresses its introductory character. In
the second half of the little piece the children's song becomes the melody,
but is immediately dissolved by the use of its final notes. The next little
piece, set to a few spoken verses of Walt Whitman, is structurally a brief
coda to the introduction, but contains the beginning of a lullaby that for
the time being is left undeveloped.
The first little 'main movement' is an allegro assai accompanying a
playground scene. The games are not illustrated, the music has the
general character of a merry noise. Free from the constraint of following
the picture in detail, it approximates the structure of a sonatina
exposition, without development. A 'cantabile theme' stands out clearly.
The next little movement follows the picture more closely. The
children are painting toys with great seriousness and diligence. The music
imitates this attitude with a busy little fugato.
Then the children are shown dragging heavy stones. The music retains
the fugato theme and makes it laborious by purely structural changes. In
the end the children quarrel, and the music suggests the pushing
gestures.
The longest sequence - almost four minutes - is a potpourri of game
fragments. The task of the music is to introduce unity into this variety. It
consists of an introduction, a children's song with three variations, and a
coda. Here a form of autonomous music is applied exactly to the film.
In one of the following scenes, a dog is being washed. The dramatic
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purpose was to evoke the humming that often accompanies mechanical

work, although none of the children actually hums. Thus the music is not
drawn realistically from the event on the screen, but from the mode of
behavior that is represented by it. Only a short introduction refers to the
dog's resistance; the actual washing is accompanied by a children's song
on the strings (pizzicato, quasi a la banjo) and clarinet; it is somewhat
developed, and in the next strophe inverted. The dog shakes himself dry
to a brisk coda.
Then the children are shown feeding tiny newborn mice. They display
utmost care, and the music refleas their care, nothing else - it is a fast-
moving, high-pitched, anxiously squeaking piece.
Scenes of ball games gradually lead to a group using a live horse as a
model for painting. Here the playful regularity of the game is refleaed by
a playful canon on a children's song, which is construaed in such a way
that it also synchronizes with the sequence of painting.
The final scene is a visit to a farm. The children are watching various
animals, and here the music is pastoral in charaaer; it is purely
decorative, more related to the scenery than to the events. At the end,
a farm laborer gives the children a ride in a tiny wagon attached to a
traaor. The traaor is seen as an immense machine, and here the music
loses all childish charaaer, and associates itself with tanks and war, in
contradiction to the pastoral scene; it becomes serious, gloomy, agitated,
and the style of the preceding composition is completely altered.
In contrast to the suite-like charaaer of the music for The Children's
Camp, the music for Nature Scenes offered an occasion for more developed
and complex solutions. It had more elbow room, because it had no aaion
or any human elements of which it had to take cognizance. On the other
hand, the absence of any traces of dramatic continuity necessitated the
composer's clinging to articulate musical forms. This naturally created the
danger of unrelatedness - the music once unleashed might ignore
everything but itself and become too pretentious. This danger was met by
a composition that followed every detail of the piaure sequence and
changing camera angle, while fully preserving the formal independence
of the music. The autonomy of the music was balanced by an attempt to
achieve the exaaitude of an animated cartoon in the synchronized
treatment of single visual elements. The specific musical forms were made
to correspond to the picture by the precision of their details. This is not
formalistic, idle self-indulgence: every feature film still contains aaual or
virtual nature scenes with moods underscored by leitmotif padding. It
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seemed particularly important to point the way for more adequate

solutions.
Five major musical forms were employed: the invention, the chorale
prelude, the scherzo with trio, the etude, and the sonata finale. The
composer tried to complicate his task by the use of the twelve-tone
technique. Every element of the picture, for instance the collapse of an
iceberg or the movement of a ship whose bow plows through ice floes,
was thus subject to several requirements. As a concrete element of the
musical form it had to have an independent musical meaning; it had to be
'attuned' to the twelve-tone system without sounding mechanical; it had
to be structurally synchronized with the film, distinct, utterly precise.
Regarding the forms the following may be noted. The idea of the
invention, the constant use of the theme in different tonal positions, is
stimulated by the picture that shows the formation of a glacier - the
theme - in varying perspectives, on various levels, so to speak. The
chorale prelude is composed over a sustained cantus firmus. The etude is
scored for two solo violins with orchestra accompaniment; the etude-like
movement that runs through is a 'stylized' blizzard. The sonata exposition
represents rigid glaciers, which collapse during the development; the
recapitulation shows the result of the collapse - a bay filled with
fragments of ice.
The scoring was conceived in accordance with the 'coldness' of the
nature scenes. In addition to a normal chamber orchestra (flute, oboe,
clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, percussion, solo string
quartet, and solo double-bass) an electric piano and novachord were
used. The electrical instruments were not added for harmonic padding, as
is usually done in the studios, but were treated soloistically. Sometimes
there were real two-voice duets between them, accompanied by the
orchestra. The coldness and sharpness of their 'manner,' such as trills,
mordents, appoggiaturas, chain trills, were fully exploited.
The solutions attempted for the Newsreels were diametrically opposite
ones. Utmost freedom from formal structures was sought; the music
unreservedly adjusted itself to the picture, and the resultant form was
that of the improvisation. The terror of a city bombed from the air -
incidentally, it is utterly problematic whether music should be used for
such documentary scenes, yet this is unavoidable under present-day
conditions - resists treatment by autonomous musical forms. In so far as
there is form in this instance, it is one contained in the picture itself.
Countless details are shown, often lasting only a second each, which
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represent the many aspects of terror. The music follows along, constantly
varies its character, does not give itself time for any contemplation, and is
tied together only through contrasts.
Regarding the Feature Film Sequences, the task was to test various
musical solutions for the same scene. Several scores w ere com posed for
each sequence, and each score was based on a different musico-dramatic
idea. On the one hand, this procedure was suggested by the extraneous
fact that the sequences were part of pictures for which th e music already
existed, so that any solution was actually an alternate solution; on the
other, it was adopted for objective considerations. A feature film in which
every moment has or should have a 'meaning' permits a far wider range
of dramatic interpretation and a greater variety of possible attitudes
toward such meanings than a nature scene that show s facts without
trying to be meaningful. The purpose was to gauge the whole range of
these dramatic possibilities.
A relatively long sequence from Grapes of Wrath begins with the wind
blowing against deserted houses in the Dust Bowl region. It drives the
dust that has driven away the farmers, as well as papers, old tin cans,
refuse - the only traces left by the inhabitants. From a formal musical
standpoint, the scene is introductory (23 seconds); it leads to a figurative
'colon/ which opens the first important musical sequence - the westward
migration of the Joad family in an overloaded jalopy.
Musically this scene was approached from three different angles. First,
sound effects without music were tried, the representation of the natural
sounds of the picture. Then, a larghetto introduction voicing the despair
expressed by the scene, pointing at it, as if to say: 'Just look at this!'
Stressing of the meaning leads away from imitation of the events - there
is no wind in the score, nor any sound track. The wind is only seen, and
the effect of desertion is doubly strong. Finally, the orchestra reproduced
the wind. Great emphasis was placed on the brilliance of the musical
effect - the natural wind had to be surpassed, 'improved,' if the musical
wind was to have any function at all. At the same time care was taken to
achieve the utmost synchronization of the music with the tiniest details of
the picture. In musical terms, however, the wind was an 'accompaniment
system,' which carried a fragmentary melody for flute, and this melody
'expressed' the scene, just as did the second solution, although more
lyrically. This third solution seemed the most adequate. Still other
solutions are conceivable - for instance, aggressive ones, which would
conceive the scene as a social catastrophe and voice a protest against it.
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The contrast between music 'about' an event, from which it

emphasizes its difference, and music that draws its impulses from the
event in question defines the possible fundamental attitudes of music
toward the motion picture, but admits manifold variations. These two
attitudes are interrelated, productive of one another, not mechanically
opposed. For instance, the naturalistic synchronized solution of the scene
discussed here (the western trip of the Joad family) becomes a
'stylization' precisely because the music follows the trip in every detail;
because the imitation is achieved by purely musical means, the consistent
use of which gives birth to a specific formal principle. The stubborn
imitation of the picture by the music is transformed into expression, that
of intensive overcoming of resistance. The resultant 'character piece'
could even be played in a concert. However, the opposite solution, one
that takes its 'distance' from the film, solves a problem that was raised
when the film was performed: the sight of the wretched jalopy loaded
down with the poor belongings of the family was often greeted with
laughter. Therefore, in the second solution, the music underscores the
hopeless human struggle against the natural catastrophe, and before this
wretched scene the listener's attention was focused on the family's will to
hold out and survive the disaster.

Detailed Analysis of a Sequence

To illustrate the composing work done on the project, we give a detailed

musical analysis of one sequence. It is part of the score to Fourteen Ways of
Describing Rain (op. 70), which, as the richest and most complete of all
those written under the auspices of the project, offers the most appropriate
material for such an analysis. It is composed in the twelve-tone style, for
the same ensemble of instruments that Arnold Schonberg (to whom the
'Rain' score is dedicated) used in his Pierrot Lunaire - flute, clarinet, violin
(alternating with viola), cello, and piano. The task was to test the most
advanced resources and the corresponding complex composing technique
in their relation to the motion picture. The picture about the rain seemed
particularly suitable for this because of its experimental character and the
lyrical quality of many of its details, despite its thoroughly objective
treatment. Every conceivable type of musico-dramatic solution was
considered, from the simplest naturalism of synchronized detail painting
to the most extreme contrast effects, in which music 'refleas' rather than
follows a piaure. The score consists of fourteen pieces, some loosely

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juxtaposed, and some structurally knit together. At the beginning and at

the end there is a cadenza-like 'monogram/
The second piece has been chosen for analysis (see pages 107-15). The
picture shows the wind at the beginning of the rain. The dramatic concept
of the sequence is extremely simple - precise and synchronized imitation
of the picture events - but the musical resources are quite differentiated.
Measures 43 and 44 accompany a panorama showing clouds over the
city and a weak wind that is beginning to blow. Measure 45 accompanies
the picture of a detail - branches of a tree shaken by the wind. The music
intones a recurrent chorale-like phrase recognizable by its triplet ending,
to which the flute, clarinet, and cello join, while a violin figure, with trills
almost like a faint noise, reproduces the wind.
In measures 45 and 46, the shaking of the boughs is translated into an
incidental piano phrase, which is also important for the piece as a whole,
and which, from a formal musical point of view, has the significance of
the conclusion of a chorale stanza. Thus the form of the picture
determined the musical form down to the smallest detail.
During measures 47 to 52 the picture is again panoramic. The wind is
stronger, its effects can be seen in details: The music continues the first
chorale phrase and expands the stanza to four measures, while the violin
figure, as in the traditional chorale prelude, starts before the cantus firmus.
In measure 49 the chorale theme is taken over by the violin, and the
figure representing the wind by the flute; the underlying motif has now
been varied considerably. In measure 51, for the close-up of the effects of
a gust of wind, the incidental piano phrase is resumed, and in 52
combined with the wind - the picture shows a gust of wind striking an
awning. This picture motif continues during the third entrance of the
chorale, measures 53 to 56, in the form of a violent outburst of the violin
in its highest register, which, in relation to the first two, is like an
'aftersong/ The complex rhythm of the accompanying piano and cello
reproduces the syncopated, gust-like rhythm of the picture.
The following little musical segment (measures 51 to 62) accompanies
short scenes such as fallen leaves floating on a pond. The music is
transitional in character, not unlike a flute cadenza. The wind motif,
previously developed by the cello and transformed into a scale figure, is
enlarged by the violin as a 'remnant/ as in the classical resolution of a
motif, and thus logically continues the phrase described as 'aftersong/
The purpose of this procedure is to let abrupt contrasts grow out of one
another and mediate them, without softening them.
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Measure 63 corresponds to an important articulation in the picture:

the first drops of rain are falling. Their drastically simple reproduction by
means of coupled piano seconds results in a new theme that dominates
the rest of the sequence. But it is accompanied by the chorale half notes
in the clarinet and cello and then by the wind motif in the violin, while
the cello takes over the new theme in pizzicato. At measure 70 it returns
to the piano and is resolved in single quarter notes.
At measure 73 the raindrops have stopped and the pond with the
floating leaves reappears on the screen. Accordingly the music goes back
to the fragment of the flute cadenza, but divides it among the clarinet,
flute, and violin. The violin once again leads it to a 'motif resolution'
(measure 76).
Beginning with measure 77 a clear conclusion effect is produced. The
screen shows a gray motionless sky overcast with rain clouds. The music,
high above underlying harmonies, as though standing still, is a violin
melody whose half notes are again reminiscent of the chorale figure. The
peculiar brooding character of the passage is achieved by the way it is
orchestrated. Cello and piano are in unison, but in such a way that the
effect is a special coloring of the sound, not its reinforcement.
At measure 81 rain for the first time begins to fall thick and fast. The
music hurries to the end. It picks up the piano theme of measure 63, but
it no longer has time for any 'filigree work' and it flows almost without a
pause in simple motion. The accompaniment, except for the rest of the
deep harmonies that fades out soon, is a noise-like tremolo of the violin.
In the two last measures the cello adds a suggestion of the chorale figure.
The form of the sequence does not fall under any of the usual
categories. The recurring intonations of the melody in half notes are
reminiscent of a chorale prelude; the equally recurring violin figures, of
an etude. But neither of the two patterns corresponds to the actual form
of the sequence, whose spirit rather approximates a sonata exposition,
although the type of organization of the latter is not adopted externally.
In chapter 6 it was pointed out that features such as principal themes,
transitions, secondary themes, closing themes, or thematic resolutions,
should be liberated from the formal pattern and made independent. Here
an attempt was made in this direction. Thus the 'aftersong' in the first
main section (measures 53 to 56) clearly has the character of a closing
theme, of the fulfilment of a thematic development that actually has not
preceded it. Also, the ending that starts with measure 81 has the effect of
hurrying a detailed process to its conclusion, although such a process has
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not taken place. Such effects are made possible because the details of the
classical sonata technique, especially those pertaining to the utmost motif
economy and permanent variation, are retained, while the traditional
architecture is replaced with the form of the picture.
Finally, the economy of the musical resources should be noted.
Despite the prevailing filigree chamber-music texture of the composition,
everything superfluous, everything that is not absolutely needed for the
exposition of the musical idea, has been avoided. Even in this small
quintet group, all the instruments play simultaneously only at rare
moments. Such economy of means is particularly advisable in cinema
music, which should avoid all superfluities.

Counter-Example

In order to see the foregoing analysis in its proper perspective, it is

necessary to compare the composing procedure just described to the
prevailing practice. For the sake of fairness, the contrasting example is not
taken from the domain of commercial music, but from Eisenstein's book,
where it is cited as a model of proper musical treatment according to the
author's aesthetic theories. It is a short piece by Prokofiev, written to
accompany a sequence from Alexander Nevsky.
The piece was obviously intended to be completely subordinated to
the picture, without any independent musical requirements. Therefore
our task is to analyze it from a purely dramatic functional point of view,
not a musical one.
The underlying idea is that of similarity, not contrast. Eisenstein
constructs diagrams of 'the picture rhythm' and the musical 'movement,'
and considers the two identical. 'Now let us collate the two graphs,' he
writes. 'What do we find? Both graphs of movement correspond
absolutely, that is, we find a complete correspondence between the
movement of the music and the movement of the eye over the lines of
the plastic composition. In other words, exactly the same motion lies at
the base of both the musical and the plastic structures.'1
In chapter 5 we have shown that the identification of musical and
picture rhythms is questionable, because in plastic arts the concept of
rhythm is largely metaphorical. This becomes manifest in the present
case: Eisenstein's graphs refer to single shots, not to the time relation
between them. Aside from this general consideration, the inadequacy of
such analogies can be shown in detail with regard to Eisenstein's

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examples. Eisenstein#s graphs are supposed to prove that the actual

movem ent of the music is similar to the picture sequence. What they
prove in reality is that there is similarity between the notation of the music
and the sequence. But the notation is already the fixation of the actual
musical movement, the static image of a dynamic phenomenon. The
similarity between the music and the picture is indirect, suggested by the
graphic fixation of the music; it cannot be perceived directly, and for that
reason cannot fulfil a dramatic function.
For instance, shot No. V shows an avalanche. The music (see measure
9) imitates the steeply sloping rocks by descending dissolved triads that
actually have the appearance of a precipitously falling curve in the
notation. But the fall occurs in time, while the steeply sloping rock is seen
unchanged from the first to the last note. Since the spectator does not read
the notation but hears the music, it is quite impossible for him to associate
the sequence of notes with the sloping rock. And he is even less likely to do
so because the dissolved triad is such a conventional and worn-out phrase
that the listener has not the slightest urge to connect it with a heroic scene.
The musical formula used here is so inconsequential that it might relate to
anything or nothing at all. Whether it is really necessary to have musical
illustrations of steep rocks depends on the underlying plan. But if it is
attempted, the motif should at least be so clear that no doubt is left
concerning the relation between the music and the picture.
A further objection concerns the development of the sequence and
the music. If Eisenstein's thesis of a correspondence between the two is
accepted, the musical development would have to match that of the
motion picture. The music then should distinguish between panoramic
views and close-ups, as has been shown in the analysis of the rain
sequence, and developing dramatic events should be reflected in
specifically musical developments. The task here is to avoid having the
music - which is by nature, dynamic - overstep the mark, as against the
less m obile visual event. Paradoxically, the very opposite takes place in
the Prokofiev piece: the picture moves on while the music marks time.
For instance there is a clear difference in the stage of development
between the first three shots, which show details, and the fourth shot
which is a general view of a battle line with two flags. But measures 5 to
8 literally repeat measures 1 to 4, and Eisenstein's repeated recommen­
dations in regard to the correspondence between the picture sequence
and the musical movement here completely go unheeded. In shot No. IV
two flags are symbolically represented by 4 eighths (measure 8).
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Unfortunately, the same eighth notes have previously appeared in

measure 4, shot No. II, which does not show any flag, although there is a
lance in it, which one of the warriors brandishes in the air. If static
picture details are to be so pedantically translated into music, the
pedantry should at least be consistent, not practised one moment and
forgotten the next.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Beginning with shot No. VI, the character of the picture changes; it
progresses from medium shots to close-ups. Gradually people detach
themselves from the background, a rudimentary plot begins to appear.
The music, however, does not pay any attention to this, it repeats its
highly simple tone pattern, on the same g sharp that it has grazed in the
third measure and definitely reached in the tenth. Prokofiev follows the
neo-classical principle of impassivity, of unemotional repetition of
musical pattern as opposed to progressive action, and Eisenstein, quite
unconcerned with the true nature of this musical style, gives it an
interpretation, after the fashion of program music, that is absolutely
unjustified by the musical content.
However, Prokofiev himself does not remain true to his neo-classical
principle, but obliges Eisenstein, in so far as his rigidly repeated
fundamental pattern is supposed to represent a musical m ood of
agitation, the very opposite of rigidity. Thus a contradiction results
between the fundamental musical pattern he has chosen and his
treatment of it. The impassivity would have been genuine if it had been
exactly contrasted with the agitated picture, as is the case, for instance, in
some of Stravinsky's ballet scenes. But Prokofiev goes only half way, and
what is achieved is neither neo-classical impassivity nor romantic
program music, but merely a blurred and inexact relation between
picture and music. The basic patterns and the musical graphs are similar,
but the development of the music and that of the picture are quite
dissimilar and unrelated - in fact, the music does not develop at all.

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Finally, one of Eisenstein's fundamental misconceptions should be

pointed out. He transfers his w hole discussion to a sphere of high-
sounding aesthetic arguments,2 which is completely irrelevant to the
harmless piece that Prokofiev without much effort wrote for the sequence
in question. Eisenstein speaks of this piece and its relation to the picture
as though he were dealing with the most difficult problems of abstract

12 13 14 15 16 17

From Eisenstein's The Film Sense, p. 189. Courtesy of Harcourt, Brace and Company.

painting, with reference to which phrases such as steep curves, green

counterpoints to blue themes, or structural unity, have been used only
too frequently. He uses heavy artillery to shoot sparrows. The piece in
question so completely follows the beaten tracks of good old cinema
music that to speak of its 'structure' does not make sense. Tremolos are
supposed to suggest a suspense that no one any longer attributes to them;
a syncopated eighth-note rhythm that has long since become ineffective
is supposed to be 'ragged,' and a sequence of quarter notes rising to triads
is supposed to 'threaten,' while actually it does not even leave the safe
circle of the surrounding harmonies. The music is that of the old Kinothek,
only the terminology is that of Kandinsky's manifestoes.

Not even a provincial conductor would do it so:

Example from Schweitzer (p. 156).

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FOURTEEN WAYS TO DESCRIBE RAIN Hanns Eisler

In honor of Arnold Schonberg's seventieth birthday

No. 3

Fluit

Clar.inftt

Violin

Afiokaeallo

Kano

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110
Ill
 APPENDIX

112
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115
 Notes

New Introduction
1 Brecht/Eisler, 'Das Einheitsfrontlied' (1934).
2 Adomo, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 1.
3 Albrecht Betz, Harms Eisler Political Musician, trans. Bill Hopkins (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982). See also Manfred Grabs (ed.), Hanns
Eisler: A Rebel in Music (Berlin: Seven Seas Publishing, 1979). Heinz Josef
Herbort, 'Hanns Eisler - Portrat eines Nonkonformisten', Die Zeit, 14 June
1968; George Lukacs, 'In Memoriam Hanns Eisler', Alternative, 69, 1969; and
David Drew, 'Eisler and the Polemic Symphony', The Listener, 4 January
1962.
4 Leo Lowenthal, Critical Theory and Frankfurt Theorists (New Brunswick:
Transaction 1989) p. 53. See also Martin Jay's remarkably lucid yet concise
introductory text, Adomo (London: Fontana, 1984); Fredric Jameson,
'Introduction to T.W. Adomo', Salmagundi, 10-11 (Fall 1969-Winter 1970);
Kurt Oppens et ai: liber Theodor W. Adomo (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1968); Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science (London: Macmillan, 1978); and
Leo Lowenthal, 'Recollections of Theodor W. Adomo', in Critical Theory and
Frankfurt Theorists.
5 See Martin Jay, Adomo, note 22, p. 168.
6 See Adomo, Alban Berg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
7 The Institute's view of 'Critical Theory' is probably best summed up in
Horkheimer's 1937 article. Traditional and Critical Theory', reprinted in
Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell et al. (New York:
Herder & Herder, 1972). Martin Jay's The Dialectical Imagination. (London:
Heinemann, 1973) is still the most accomplished history of the Institute. Leo

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 NOTES

Ldwenthal's The Institute of Social Research', in An Unmastered Past

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), is an illuminating first-hand
account which neatly clarifies many common misconceptions. For further
background information, see David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory
(London: Hutchinson, 1980); Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism (London:
Verso, 1985); Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Polity,
1994); and Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986). For examples of the Institute's work, see Andrew Arato/Eike
Gebhardt (eds). The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum,
1990) and Stephen Eric Bronner/Douglas MacKay Kellner (eds). Critical
Theory and Society: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1989).
8 A position Adorno defended most precisely in his essay 'Resignation', reprinted
in The Culture Industry, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991).
9 Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1974) p. 86.
10 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 80. For a helpful discussion of Adorno's stylistic
techniques, see Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science, chapter 2, and Samuel M.
Weber, 'Translating the Untranslatable', in Adorno, Prisms (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT, 1981).
11 Bertolt Brecht, Fluchtlingsgesprache (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1961) p. 112.
12 See Helmut F. Pfanner, Exile in New York: German and Austrian Writers after
1933 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983).
13 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 33.
14 Lowenthal, Critical Theory and Frankfurt Theorists, p. 64.
15 Adorno, 'Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America', in Donald
Fleming/Bemard Bailyn (eds). The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America,
1930-1960 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 338. One
should resist the temptation to accept the common view of Adorno as 'anti-
American': as he makes clear in this essay, in America he discerned 'a
potential for real generosity that is seldom to be found in old Europe ... There
is an inherent impulse in American life toward peaceableness, good-
naturedness, and generosity, in the sharpest contrast to the dammed-up
malice and envy that exploded in Germany between 1933 and 1945', pp.
367-8.
16 Paul Lazarsfeld, 'An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir', in
Fleming/Bailyn, The Intellectual Migration, p. 301.
17 Brecht, Arbeitsjoumal (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 498.
18 Ibid., p. 422.
19 Eric Bentley, The Brecht Memoir (Manchester: Carcanet, 1989), p. 16.
20 The premiere, with Laughton in the title role, took place at the Coronet
Theatre in Beverly Hills on 31 July 1947. See Simon Callow, Charles Laughton:
A Difficult Actor (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 178-96, and Barbara Learning,
Orson Welles (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985), pp. 324-8.

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21 Thomas Mann, Letters of Thomas Mann 1989-1955, trans. Richard and Clara
Winston (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), p. 362. Adomo is
the unnamed source of the reflections on Beethoven in chapter VIII of the
novel, and appears as the Devil in chapter XXV. See Thomas Mann, The Story
of a Novel, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Knopf, 1961).
22 Salka Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1969), pp. 257-9.
23 Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964), p.
452.
24 Eisler, Letter to Clifford Odets, 23 April 1946, cited in Betz, Hanns Eisler
Political Musician, p. 195.
25 Adomo/Eisler, Composing for the Films, p. 95.
26 Ibid., p. 111.
27 Ibid., p. 91.
28 Ibid., p. 113.
29 Ibid., pp. 12-14.
30 See Salka Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, pp. 207-8.
31 John Baxter, The Hollywood Exiles (London: Macdonald and Janes, 1976), p.
219.
32 Adomo wrote to Kracauer on 22 December 1942. See Martin Jay, 'Adomo
and Kracauer: Notes on a Troubled Friendship', in Permanent Exiles, pp. 217-
36, and Adomo, The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer', in Notes to
Literature, vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1992) pp. 5B-75. Kracauer's own work on movies includes
From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960) and Theory
of Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960). For a discussion of his
earlier German writings, see Heide Schliipmann, 'Phenomenology of Film:
On Siegfried Kracauer's Writings of the 1920s', New Gennan Critique 40
(Winter 1987), pp. 97-114.
33 Adomo, 'Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America', Fleming/
Bailyn, The Intellectual Migration, p. 344.
34 Ibid., p. 347.
35 Ibid., pp. 350-51.
36 The text was written during the period 1941-1944, and was published in
1947. The original subtitle, omitted from the English translation, was
'Philosophical Fragments'. Other members of the Institute made certain
unacknowledged contributions to the text (see Lowenthal, An Unmastered
Past, p. 211).
37 Adomo/Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming
(London: Verso, 1979), pp. 144-5.
38 Adomo, 'culture industry reconsidered'. The Culture Industry, p. 87.
39 Adomo/Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 139.

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 NOTES

40 Ibid., p. 154.
41 See, for example, Tino Balio (ed.). The American Film Industry (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1976).
42 Adorno. Quoted in Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (London: Ark,
1986), note 19, p. 99.
43 Adomo/Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 144.
44 Adorno, 'On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening'
(1938), reprinted in Arato/Gebhardt, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, pp.
270-99. Ibid., p. 282. For background information on Adorno's sociology of
music, see Harold Blumenfeld, 'Ad Vocem Adorno', The Music Quarterly 75, 4
(Winter 1991), pp. 263-84; Ronald Weitzman, 'An Introduction to Adorno's
Music and Social Criticism', Music and Letters 52, (3 July 1971), pp. 287-98;
W. V. Blomster, 'Sociology of Music: Adorno and Beyond', Telos, 28 (Summer
1976), pp. 81-112; and Max Paddison, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993).
45 Adorno, 'On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening',
The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, p. 282.
46 Ibid., p. 281.
47 Ibid., p. 281.
48 Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music (New York: Seabury, 1976), p. 46.
49 Adorno, Musikbldtter des Anbruch, (Vienna) 1925, p. 423. A similarly positive
review, of the Piano Pieces op. 3, was written by Adorno for Die Musik
(Stuttgart), July 1927, pp. 749f.
50 Eric Bentley's The Brecht Memoir (p. 15) notes that when Stalin dissolved the
Comintern in 1943, Eisler 'bounded to the piano and "dissolved" his
Comintern anthem in a succession of harmonies that made the original tune
quite disappear'.
51 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 8.
52 Adorno, 'On the Social Situation of Music', Telos, 35 (Spring 1978), p. 130.
53 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 31.
54 Adorno, 'On the Social Situation of Music', p. 130.
55 Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT,
1981), p. 166.
56 See Adorno, 'Commitment', in Arato/Gebhardt, The Essential Frankfurt School
Reader, pp. 300-18.
57 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 344.
58 Brecht, quoted in Iring Fetscher, 'Bertolt Brecht and America', Salmagundi,
10-11 (Fall 1969-Winter 1970), p. 264.
59 Eisler, quoted from Hans Bunge, Fragen Sie mehr uber Brecht, Hanns Eisler im
Gesprach (Munich: Rogner 8- Bernhard, 1970), p. 189.
60 Lowenthal, 'Adorno and his Critics', Critical Theory and Frankfurt Theorists, p.
54.
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 NOTES

61 Ibid., pp. 55-6.

62 Adorno, 'Resignation', The Culture Industry, p. 174.
63 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 360.
64 Adomo/Eisler: Composing for the Films, p. ix.
65 Ibid., p. 59.
66 Ibid., pp. 8-9.
67 Ibid., p. 6.
68 Ibid., p. 9.
69 Ibid., p. 12.
70 Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, p. 31.
71 Adomo/Eisler: Composing for the Films, pp. 20-23.
72 Ibid., p. 121.
73 Ibid., p. 37.
74 Ibid., p. 108.
75 Ibid., p. 120.
76 Ibid., p. 132.
77 Ibid., p. 32.
78 Ibid., p. 23.
79 For information on this period, see Alvah Bessie, Inquisition in Eden (New
York: Macmillan, 1965) and Larry Ceplair/Stephen Englund, The Inquisition in
Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960 (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1980).
80 Quoted from Betz, Harms Eisler Political Musician, p. 197.
81 Los Angeles Examiner, 26 April 1947.
82 Hearings Regarding Hanns Eisler, Washington 1947 (Government Printing
Office) p. 25.
83 See, for example, Adorno's 'Transparencies on film' and 'Free time', both
included in The Culture Industry. For secondary material on Adomo and film,
see Thomas Andrae, 'Adomo on Film and Mass Culture', Jump Cut 20 (May
1979); Miriam Hansen, 'Introduction to Adomo, "Transparencies on Film"'
New German Critique 24/25 (Fall/Winter 1981-82); and Diane Waldman,
'Critical Theory and Film', New German Critique 12 (Fall 1977).
84 For Adorno's account of the multiple texts, see his Gesammelte Schriften, ed.
Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 15 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1976), pp. 144-6. For an
analysis of the original English version, see Philip Rosen, 'Adomo and Film
Music: Theoretical Notes on Composing for the Films', Yale French Studies 60
(1980), pp. 157-82, and, for the controversy, Hanns Mayer, 'An Aesthetic
Debate of 1951: Comment on a Text by Hanns Eisler', New German Critique, 2
(Spring, 1974), pp. 58-62, and Gunter Mayer, 'Adomo und Eisler' in Otto
Kolleritsch (ed.), Adomo und die Musik (Graz: Universal Edition, 1979), pp.
135-55.
85 Adomo, Minima Moralia, p. 209.

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1. Prejudices and Bad Habits

1 A prominent Hollywood composer, in an interview quoted in the news­
papers, declared that there is no fundamental difference between his
methods of composing and Wagner's. He, too, uses the leitmotif.
2 As a matter of fact, the modem concept of melody made itself felt as early as
within Viennese classicism. Nowhere does the historical character of this
apparently natural concept become more manifest than in the famous Mozart
critique by Hans Georg Naegeli, the Swiss contemporary of the Viennese
classicists, which is now made accessible in a reprint edited by Willi Reich.
Musical history generally recognizes as one of the greatest merits of Mozart
that he introduced the element of cantability into the sonata form,
particularly the complex of the second theme. This innovation, largely
responsible for the musical changes that led to the crystallization of the later
Lied melody, was by no means greeted enthusiastically in all quarters. To
Naegeli, who was certainly narrow-minded and dogmatic but had rather
articulate philosophical ideas about musical style, Mozart's synthesis of
instrumental writing and cantability appeared about as shocking as advanced
modem composition would to a popular-music addict of today. He blames
Mozart, who is now regarded by the musical public as the utmost
representative of stylistic purity, for lack of taste and style. The following
passage is characteristic: 'His [Mozart's] genius was great but its defect, the
overuse of contrast, was equally great. This was all the more objectionable in
his case because he continuously contrasted the non-instrumental with the
instrumental, cantability with the free play of tones. This was inartistic, as it is
in all arts. As soon as continuous contrast becomes the main effect, the
beautiful proportion of parts is necessarily neglected. This stylistic fault can be
discovered in many of Mozart's works.' (Hans Georg Naegeli, Von Bach zu
Beethoven, Benno Schwabe & Co., Basel, 1946, pp. 4B-9.)
3 In the realm of motion pictures the term 'technique' has a double meaning
that can easily lead to confusion. On the one hand, technique is the
equivalent of an industrial process for producing goods: e.g., the discovery
that picture and sound can be recorded on the same strip is comparable to the
invention of the air brake. The other meaning of 'technique' is aesthetic. It
designates the method by which an artistic intention can be adequately
realized. While the technical treatment of music in sound pictures was
essentially determined by the industrial factor, there was a need for music
from the very beginning, because of certain aesthetic requirements. Thus far
no clear-cut relation between the factors has been established, neither in
theory nor in practice (Cf. ch. 5).
* Translated by N. G.
4 'By pseudo-individualization we mean endowing cultural mass production

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with the halo of free choice or open market on the basis of standardization
itself.' (T. W. Adorno, 'On Popular Music/ in Studies in Philosophy and Social
Science, vol. IX, 1941, p. 25.)

2. Function and Dramaturgy

1 A remark of Goethe's confirms this. 'According to my father everyone should
learn to draw, and for that reason he had great regard for Emperor
Maximilian, who was said to have given explicit orders to that effect. He also
more seriously urged me to practice drawing than music, which, on the other
hand, he recommended to my sister, even keeping her at the piano for a good
part of the day, in addition to her regular lessons.' (Dichtung und Wahrheit.
Pan I, Book IV.) The boy, visualized by the father as a representative of
progress and enlightenment, is supposed to train his eye, while the girl, who
represents historically outmoded domesticity and has no real share in public
life and economic production, is confined to music, as was generally the case
with young upper-class women in the nineteenth century, quite apart from
the role of music throughout oriental society.
2 Cf. Ernst Kurth, Musikpsychologie, Berlin, 1931, pp. 116-36: e.g., 'There is not
only the perceptual space that is drawn into musical expression from outside;
there is also a space or inner listening, which is an autonomous musico-
psychological phenomenon' (p. 134); or: 'The spatial impressions of music
also claim their independence; it is essential... that they should not arise by
the detour of any perceptual image. They pertain to energetic processes, and
are autogenous' (p. 135).
3 This perhaps helps to explain why modem music meets with so much greater
resistance than modem painting. The ear clings to the archaic essence of
music, while music itself is involved in the process of rationalization.

3. The New Musical Resources

1 It is worthy of note that certain features of the work of Alban Berg, whose
late-romantic, expressionistic instrumental and operatic music is far removed
from the motion-picture and the new 'functional' style, illustrate the
prevalence in advanced music of objective tendencies in the sense of a
rational construction which come close to the requirements of the motion
picture. Berg thinks in terms of such exact mathematical proportions that the
number of bars and thereby the duration of his compositions are determined
in advance. It is as if he composed them with a stop watch in his hand. His
operas, in which complex stage situations are often accompanied by complex
musical forms, such as fugues, in order to make them articulate, strive toward
a type of technical procedure that might be called a musical close-up.

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2 The predominance of discords in the new musical language leads to the

dissolution of tonality, for neither the separate harmonic incidents nor their
functional connection and the harmonic structure of the whole can any
longer be adequately represented in the pattern, however broadened, of
traditional tonality. But this dissolution of tonality is furthered most by the
objective formal structure of motion-picture music itself. This structure has a
definite bearing upon harmony. With some exaggeration one might say that
motion-picture music is driven to atonality because there is no room in it for
the formally satisfactory expansion of tonality. To be sure, the individual
harmonic incidents of the usual motion-picture music are almost without
exception strictly tonal, or at most only 'seasoned' with dissonances. But the
tonality remains one of single sounds and their most primitive sequences.
The necessity of following cues, and of producing harmonic effects without
regard for the requirements of harmonic development, obviously does not
permit of really balanced modulation, broad, well-planned harmonic
canvases; in brief, real tonality in the sense of the disposition of functional
harmony over long stretches. And it is this, not the atoms of the triads or
seventh chords, which constitutes tonal organization. What was said above
concerning leitmotifs is in a higher sense true of the tonal principle itself. If
one went backwards, that is to say, from the dramaturgically inevitable
breaks and deviations of the composition, something like satisfactory tonal
relationships might be achieved by means of extreme care and virtuosity in
composition; but according to the prevailing practice, while the separate
chords are banal and over-familiar, their interrelation is quite anarchistic and
for the most part completely meaningless. True, the emancipation of tonality
does not, according to the strictest criteria, facilitate the harmonic disposition,
but at least it liberates the composer from the preoccupation of restoring the
basic key and the selection of modulations, which are hardly ever consistent
with the extra-musical requirements of the motion picture. Moreover, the
dissonances have far greater mobility and adjustability, and unlike tonal
chords which are derived from the pattern and need the restoration of the
pattern for their own fulfilment do not require to the same degree
unambiguous definite inevitable resolutions.
3 The extraordinary effectiveness of Stravinsky's earlier works can be partly
explained by his renunciation of neo-romantic melodizing.

4. Sociological Aspects
1 Kurt London, Film Music, London, Faber and Faber, n.d., pp. 50-61.
2 Flaubert described this type as early as the middle of the nineteenth century:
'The singer Lagardy had a beautiful voice, more temperament than
intelligence, more pathos than feeling. He was both a genius and a charlatan.

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and in his nature there was as much of a barber as of a toreador/ (Madame

Bovary.)
3 The violinist who stands while he conducts a cafe orchestra, the other
members remaining seated.
4 London, op. cit. p. 43.
5 Kracauer, S., Die Angestellten. Aus dent neuesten Deutschland, Frankfurt, 1930.
[Die Angestellten appeared more recently as volume five of Kracauer's Schriften
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971)].
6 This statement is not a sociological exaggeration, as can be seen from the
following clause that is part of a typical Hollywood contract: 'All material
composed, submitted, added or interpolated by the Writer pursuant to this
agreement shall automatically become the property of the Corporation,
which, for this purpose, shall be deemed the author thereof, the Writer acting
entirely as the Corporation's employee/ The extent to which the composer
renounces his artistic independence is shown in another passage of the same
contract, according to which the writer grants to the corporation 'the right to
use, adapt and change the same or any part thereof and to combine the same
with other works of the Writer or of any other person to the extent that the
Corporation may see fit, including the right to add to, subtract from, arrange,
rearrange, revise and adapt such material in any Picture in any manner/
However, when the corporation wants to protea itself against possible breach
of the contraa by the composer, his music is suddenly endowed with the
traditional dignity of a work of art. Thus, 'it is agreed that the services to be
performed by the Writer pursuant to this agreement, and the rights and
privileges granted to the Corporation by the Writer under the terms thereof,
are of a special, unusual, extraordinary and intelleaual charaaer which gives
them a peculiar value, the loss of which cannot be reasonably or adequately
compensated for by damages in a lawsuit, and that a breach by the Writer of
any of the provisions contained in this agreement will cause the Corporation
irreparable injury and damage/ The disproportion between the omnipotence
of the corporation and the impotence of those who sell their services to it
could not be more trenchantly expressed.
7 Cf. T. W. Adorno, who wrote in 1929 concerning the threadbare operatic
melodies used in Naples as accompaniments to motion piaures that they
could 'not be perceived as music by the speaators, but exist musically only
for the piaure ... It comes to comfort the piaure because the piaure is mute,
and lulls it gently into the darkness of the theater even when it assumes the
gestures of passion. It is not addressed to the speaator who notices it only
when the piaure drifts far away from him, separated by the abyss of mere
space/ (Anbruch, vol. XI, p. 337)

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5. Elements of Aesthetics
1 Hegel Vorlesungen uber die Asthetik, W. W. 1. Band, 1. Abteilung, ed. Hotho,
Berlin, 1842, p. 180.
2 Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense, New York, 1942, p. 157.
3 Ibid. p. 161. The example Eisenstein gives for the interpretation of the inner
movement of the Barcarolle is not convincing. In the Silly Symphony Birds of
a Feather (1921), Walt Disney related that piece to 'a Peacock whose tail
shimmers "musically'' and who looks into the pool to find there the identical
contours of its opalescent tail feathers, shimmering upside down. All the
approachings, recedings, ripples, reflections and opalescence that came to
mind as a suitable essence to be drawn from the Venetian scenes, have been
preserved by Disney in the same relation to the music's movement: the
spreading tail and its reflection approach each other and recede according to
the nearness of the flourished tail to the pool - the tail feathers are
themselves waving and shimmering - and so on.' However, Disney's pretty
idea does not imply the direct transformation of one medium into another.
The transformation is indirect, literary in character, based on the generally
accepted premise that this popular piece is associated with water, gondolas,
and therefore with Venetian opalescent effects. The intention here is to show
by the interpolation of a concept that the colors of a bird can symbolize
Venice. The idea of the playful interchangeability of different elements of
reality as well as subtle irony with regard to Venice, which is likened, in its
picturesqueness, to a peacock, are ingredients inseparable from the effect of
Disney's interpretation. This effect is certainly legitimate, but the doctrine of
inner movement does not even begin to account for it. It is a highly
sophisticated effect and Eisenstein's purely formal, literal interpretation
misses the point. - This example shows the inadequacy of formal-aesthetic
discussions of even highly stylized, nonrealistic pictures; with regard to more
realistic films, this inadequacy is even more flagrant.
4 Ibid. p. 168.
5 London, op. cit. p. 73.
6 'Two film pieces of any kind, placed together, inevitably combine into a new
concept, a new quality, arising out of that juxtaposition.' (Eisenstein, op. cit.
p. 4.) This applies not only to the clash of heterogeneous pictorial elements,
but also to that of music and picture, particularly when they are not
assimilated to each other.
7 'What is stunted in the age of technical reproducibility, is the aura of the
work of art.' The aura is 'the unrepeatable, single impression of something
presented as remote, however close it may be. To follow with one's eyes a
mountain chain on a summer afternoon or a bough that casts its shadow on
one resting under it - is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that

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bough/ The aura is 'bound with the here and now, there can be no copy of
it/ (Walter Benjamin, 'L'oeuvre d'art a l'epoque de sa reproduction
mecanisee', in Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, V., Paris, 1936-7, pp. 40 ff.)
[The English version of the essay is The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction', in Benjamin's Illuminations (London: Fontana,
1992), pp. 215ff.]
8 The quotation is from Franz Werfel, 'Ein Sommemachtstraum, Ein Film von
Shakespeare und Reinhardt,' in Neues Wiener Journal, quoted in LU, 15 Nov.
1935.
9 Eisenstein is aware of the materialistic potentialities of the principle of
montage: the juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements raises them to the
level of consciousness and takes over the function of theory. This is probably
the meaning of Eisenstein's formulation: 'Montage has a realistic significance
when the separate pieces produce, in juxtaposition, the generality, the
synthesis of one's theme' (op. cit. p. 30). The real achievement of montage is
always interpretation.
10 Kurt London makes the following illuminating remark: 'It [motion-picture
music] began not as a result of any artistic urge, but from the dire need of
something which would drown the noise made by the projector. For in those
times there was as yet no sound-absorbent walls between the projection
machine and the auditorium. This painful noise disturbed visual enjoyment
to no small extent. Instinctively cinema proprietors had recourse to music,
and it was the right way, using an agreeable sound to neutralize one less
agreeable.' (London, op. cit. p. 28.) This sounds plausible enough. But there
remains the question, why should the sound of the projector have been so
unpleasant? Hardly because of its noisiness, but rather because it seemed to
belong to that uncanny sphere which anyone who remembers the magic-
lantern performances can easily evoke. The grating, whirring sound actually
had to be 'neutralized,' 'appeased,' not merely muted. If one reconstructed a
cinema booth of the type used in 1900 and made the projector work in the
audience room, more might be learned about the origin and meaning of
motion-picture music than from extensive research. The experience in
question is probably a collective one akin to panic, and it involves the flash-
like awareness of being a helpless inarticulate mass given over to the power
of a mechanism. Such an impulse is easily rationalized, for instance, as fear of
fire. It is basically the feeling that something may befall a man even if he be
'many.' This is precisely the consciousness of one's own mechanization.
11 Cf. T. W. Adorno: 'The Radio Symphony', in Radio Research 1941, New York,
1941, pp. 110-39.
12 This could be checked by empirical methods. If the audience of a motion
picture were given a questionnaire after the performance and asked to state
which scenes were accompanied by music and which were not, and to

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characterize this music in a general way, it is likely that hardly any of them
would be able to answer these questions with approximate correctness, not
even musicians, unless they came to see the picture for professional
reasons.
13 Phdnomenologie des Geistes, ed. Lasson, 2. Auflage, Leipzig, 1921, p. 60.

6. The Composer and the Movie-Making Process

1 Cf. the 'closing' almost coda-like modification of the introductory adagio in
the C-minor fantasy in its reprise. It differs from its first form more than does
any sonata recapitulation of Mozart.
2 The word 'setting' is used as a translation of the German Satz in a specific
meaning for which there is no precise English equivalent. It refers to the way
the 'texture' of a composition, how it is 'set,' takes into account the
conditions of its actual realization in sound, e.g., the invention of themes out
of the specific character of an instrument, the choice of high or low
sonorities, the distance between different simultaneous parts, contrapuntal
complexity or simplicity according to the requirement of making every
musical idea clear and understandable. In other words, 'setting' is the way in
which the necessities of scoring express themselves in the structure of the
music, and will be used in this sense throughout the following discussion.
•

7. Suggestions and Conclusions

1 See p. 121, fn. 4.
2 More generally, the question must at least be raised whether the tech-
nification of the work of art does not lead inevitably to the ultimate
elimination of art. 'Art still has a limitation within itself, and therefore passes
into higher forms of conscious activity ... We no longer hold art to be the
highest mode in which truth acquires existence ... With the progress of
culture, every nation reaches a time in which art points beyond itself... Such
a time is our own.' (Hegel, Vorlesungen ueber die Aesthetik, vol. I, 1842, p. 132.)
In the second part of his Aesthetics Hegel discusses the tendency to self­
dissolution historically inherent in art, and connects it with the progress of
civilization. The following passage is directly relevant to the problems of the
motion picture and aesthetic planning: 'For the modem artist, to be bound to
a particular content and a manner appropriate only to a given material, is a
thing of the past. Thereby art has become a free instrument, which he can
apply equally with regard to every content of whatever nature, according to
the measure of his subjective skill.' (Ibid. vol. n, p. 232.)
3 The problem of the comical potentialities of music is inseparable from the
meaning of the motion picture itself. This is magnificently shown in the

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pictures of the Marx Brothers, who demolish an opera set as though to

express allegorically the philosophic insight into the disintegration of the
opera itself... or smash a grand piano and seize the framework and strings as
a sample of the harp of the future ... The main reason for the tendency of
music to become comical in the present phase, is that something so
completely useless should be practised with all the visible signs of strenuous
serious work. The fact that music is alien to industrious people reveals their
alienation with regard to one another, and the awareness of this alienation
vents itself in laughter/ (T. W. Adorno, 'Ueber den Fetisch-charakter in der
Musik und die Regression des Horens', in Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, VII,
1938, p. 353.) [The English translation is 'On the Fetish-Character in Music
and the Regression of Listening', in Andrew Arato/Eike Gebhardt (eds) The
Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1990) p. 297.

Appendix
1 Sergei Eisenstein. The Film Sense, New York, 1942, p. 178.
2 Eisenstein also shows a tendency toward uncritical adoption of certain results
of musical semi-erudition, such as are found in Albert Schweitzer's well-
known and highly overrated book on Bach.
'How far he [Bach] will venture to go in music is shown in the Christmas
cantata, Christum wir sollen loben schon. The text of the aria Johannis
freudenvolles Sprlngen erkannte dich mein Jesus schon refers to the passage in
the Gospel of St. Luke, "And it came to pass that when Elisabeth heard
Mary's greeting the babe leaped in the womb." Bach's music is simply a series
of violent convulsions.' (Eisenstein, l.c. p. 162 f.) In describing the passages
cited as convulsions, Schweitzer forgets that such passages belong to the
general musical resources of the whole Bach period, that they are found in
hundreds of his works with entirely different connotations, without
necessarily expressing embryos leaping in their mothers' wombs. To give
the effect of leaping, one would have to perform the music in a 'leaping' way,
and even the most ambitious provincial time beater would hardly indulge in
such romanticism.

128
 Index

acoustical perception xxvii-xxix, 13- stagnation 38

14, 58 autonomous music 1, 28, 66
speech 51-2 autonomous composer 54
action 5, 53, 84 avant-garde music 11, 37, 44
dissonance and polyphony 27-8
function and dramaturgy 17-18, Bach, Johann Sebastian xvii, 64, 128
19-20 Appendix n. 2
administration, musical 33-6 bad habits 1-12, 93
Adorno, Theodore Wiesengrund Baden-Baden Music Festival 37
viii-xxxi ballet 46, 51, 52, 106
advertising 35, 40-1 Bartok, Belia 21
aesthetics xxvii, 23, 38, 42-59, 87 Beethoven, Ludwig van 3, 64
Film Music Project 93-4, 94-101 Eroica Symphony 66
Alexander Nevsky 104-7 Fifth Symphony 19
Algiers 53 Leonore Overture 19
animated films 10, 40, 46 Moonlight Sonata xxvii, 9
art xxiii, xxiv, 13-15 Pastoral Symphony 67, 70
abstract 13-14, 48 Piano Sonata Op. 101 67
middle-class standards 24 Second Symphony 67
musical administration 35-6 Benjamin, Walter 48, 49
organic unity 53 Berg, Alban viii, ix, 24, 65
technology 87 Lulu's death 24
'Asleep in the Dark' 35, 36 Berlioz, Hector 26, 44
atmosphere 10, 15 Bizet, Georges xvii
audiences xxvii, 35-6, 58 Carmen 35, 38
aesthetics 52 Brecht, Bertolt x, xii-xv, xxiii-xxv,
artistic objectivity 82-4 xxix-xxx, 17
129
 INDEX

cartoons 10, 40, 46 Fourteen Ways to Describe Rain 96,

characters 11 108-15
Chopin, Frederic 25 elements 21, 22, 25, 26, 27
Citizen Kane 46 emotion 9, 14, 15, 23
classical sonata 65-7 function and dramaturgy 14, 16, 19
classical works xvii, xxi-xxii musical characterisation 26
classicism, Viennese 12In. 2 emotional proximity xxviii
cliches xxvii, 9-11, 22, 23 euphony xxvii, 3-4, 11
climaxes 67 European Film Fund xii
collectivity xxvii-xxviii, 13, 15-16 expression 26
commercialism xxviii, 14, 44, 55,
84-5 Fantasia (Disney) 75
competition 31-2, 38 fantasy 67-8
composers xvii, xxviii, 60-77 fear 24
autonomous composers 54 filling in 64-5
dangers of the new style 28-9 Film Music (Kurt London) 30
composing 55-68, 73-7 Film Music Project 92-6
conductors 74-7, 87 finales 6
continuity 63 folk music xvi, xvii, 14
contrasts 17-18 form, musical 25-6, 45-6, 62-8
costume pictures 9 function 13-20, 22, 53, 54, 55
counterpoint 13, 27-8 advertising 40
culture industry xviii-xxiii, 58 leitmotif 2-3
cuts, film 75 magical pictures 50

dance 14, 19, 52 gangster pictures 10

Dans les Rues (1933) 18, 19 geography xxvii, 8-9
Debussy, Claude 55, 59 grade-A films 10
departments, music 61-2 Grieg, Edvard xvii
dialogue 5, 51-2, 58
discretion 88-91 habits, bad xxvi, 1-12, 93
Disney, Walt 75, 125n. 3 Handel, George Frideric 64
dissonances 21, 24, 27-8, 54, 56 Hangmen Also Die (Fritz Lang) xv,
dramaturgy xxvi, xxviii, 13-20, 52, 84 xxviii, 16
Film Music Project 93 harmony 13, 27-8, 55, 73, 123
musical illustration 7-8 ch. 3n. 2
Dvorak, Antonin 64 suspense 24
dynamics 11, 66 Haydn, Joseph 3
Hindemith, Paul xxiii, 26, 55, 65
Eisenstein, Sergei 44-6, 47, 52, 68, history xxvii, 8-9
104-7, 128n. 2 Hollywood xii, xvii, xx-xxi, xxix
Eisler, Hanns viii-xxvii, 94, 95 horror pictures xvii, 10, 23, 47

130
 INDEX

idiom, musical 21-2 No Man's Land (Victor Trivas) 15-16

illustration, musical 7-8 noise 53, 69-70
impressionism 55
innovation 84 objective music 22, 122 ch. 3n. 1
instrumentation 10, 70-3 objectivity 22, 122 ch. 3n. 1
interruption 18-20 artistic objectivity 82-4
Ivens, Joris xi, xxvi, 68 non-objectivity 23
Offenbach, Jacques, Tales of Hoffman 45
King Kong 24 opera 38-9
Kuhle Wampe (Brecht &
•Dudow orchestras 34, 72-3, 76, 87
1931) 17 Outline for a New Musical Esthetics
(Busoni) 17
La Nouvelle Terre (Ivens 1933) 16-17
landscapes 7 padding 21, 26
language, decay of 51 pantomine 51
leitmotif xxvii, 2-3, 40 performance style 11-12, 33
Lifeboat (Hitchcock) vii planning 53-9, 63-5, 84
London, Kurt 30, 34, 68, 126n. 10 improvisation 74
lyricism 4, 53 setting and instrumentation 71
poetic melody 4
Meisel, Edmund 85 politics xxiii-xxvi
melody xxvii, 3-4, 27-8 polyphony 27-8
Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix 9 Potemkin (Meisel) 85
Meyerbeer, Giancomo 25 prejudices 1-12, 53, 93
Midsummer Nights Dream (Reinhadt) 49 profiles, musical 26-7
modernism 28 Prokofiev, Sergei 104, 105, 106
montage 47, 48-53, 56, 59 psychology, dramatic 6
mood xxvii, 7, 17 public see audiences
movement 17-18, 45-7, 52 Puccini, Giacomo, La Boheme 6
picture rhythms 104-5 puppet film, French (1933) 23
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus xvii, 3, 64,
67-8, 121n. 2 Rain (Ivens) xxvi, 68
Piano Fantasies 67-8 rationalization 14, 37-41
musicians 31-3, 75-7, 87 recording 44, 53, 73-5
muteness 51, 53 noises 70
resources 21-9, 55-6, 87, 104
Naegeli, Hans Georg 12In. 2 rest 17-18
national characteristics 8-9 rhythm 13, 17, 46-7
nature 7 music and noise 69-70
neo-classicism 22, 53, 106 picture 104-5
neutralization 57-9, 82 rhythmograms 74
new style 28-9 romanticism 3, 18, 23, 25, 53, 56-7

131
INDEX

Rossini, Giocchino Antonio, William stock music xxvii, 9

Tell overture 9 Strauss, Richard 18, 26
routine 86-8 Der Rosenkavalier 38
rules 1, 44 Elektra 38
Salome 38
San Francisco 24 Stravinsky, Igor 21, 22, 26, 47, 52, 106,
Satie, Eric 26 123n. 3
Schonberg, Arnold xvii, 18, 21, 24, 47 film music stagnation 37
Begleitmusik zu einer Lichspielszene 24 ostinato 29
Eisler and Adorno viii, xvii, xxii, success of early works 123n. 3
xxv-xxvi, xxvi, xxviii, xxix-xxx structure 46
Erwartung 66 style 28-9, 53-9
Op. 36 55 subjectivity 54, 57
Pierrot Lunaire xvii suspense 18-20
Second Chamber Symphony 55 cliches 9-10
setting and instrumentation 70-3 symbols 9
see also twelve tone composition synchronization 17, 73-4, 76
Schubert, Franz Peter 3, 64
Unfinished Symphony 9 Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilich xvii, 55
Wanderer Fantasia 67 Swan Lake xvii
Schumann, Robert Alexander 25, 64 technical aspects xxvii, 12, 5, 14, 26-7,
scripts 6 60, 121n. 3
sensationalism 23-4 competence/inadequacies 82, 87
sequences 46-7, 86, 101-7 technique 21-3, 29, 70-3
music and noise 69-70 meaning of the term 12In. 3
planning 62, 63, 68 recording 43
'setting' technique 70-3 variation 63
see also twelve tone technique
sham collectivity 15-16 technology 57, 60, 87
silence xxvii tension 24, 66
sociological aspects xvii-xix, 30-41, The Little Foxes 46
93-4 themes 26-7, 53, 63, 65-6, 67
sonata form 65-7 tonal music 25
songs xvi-xvii, 6, 8, 19, 55, 62, 65 timing 63
specificity 86-8 Tin Pan Alley 1, 71
spectators see audiences tonality 3, 25, 66
speech 51-2 dissolution 123 ch. 3n. 2
stagnation 36-41 tone painting 70
standards 1, 86 trademarks xxvii, 9
standardization xxvi-xxvii, 1, 8, 9-12, traditional music 24-5, 26-7, 56, 65,
40-1, 58 66, 67
stereotypes 7 transitional parts 66
 INDEX

triads 22, 55, 56, 105 sharpness 21

tripartite song form 62, 65
twelve-tone composition viii, 28, 55, 66 Wagner, Richard xvii, 2-3, 8, 52, 55,
121n. 1
unity, structural 46-7 Die Meistersinger 38
unobtrusiveness xxvii, 5-6 Lohengrin 9, 33, 34
montage 126n. 9
variation 63 The Ring 2-3
Verdi, Giuseppe xvii, 25 Tristan and Isolde 38
Aida 38 Weber, Max 14
visibility/invisibility 16-17 Webern, Anton von viii, 26
visual plot 4, 6-7, 46-7, 58 Werfel, Franz 49
justification xxvii westerns 10
passage of time 20 wholetone scale 10, 54, 55

133
 C O M P O SIN G FO R TH E FILj
T h e o d o r W. A d o r n o a n d H a n n s E r ,

T h e o d o r W. A d o r n o (1903-69) w a s a fo u n d e r a
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N ew York I n s t it u t e f o r S o c ia l R e se a rch a n d lai
ta u g h t at th e U n iv e r sity o f F r a n k fu r t u n til I
d e a th in 19

H an n s E isle r (1898-1962) b e g a n c o m p o s in g !
film s in th e la te 1920s. He e m ig r a te d t o th e US
th e 1930s w h e r e h e w r o t e a n u m b e r o f s c o r e s 1
H o lly w o o d p r o d u c t io

T h is c la s s ic a c c o u n t o f th e n a tu r e o f film m u
a e s th e tic s w a s fir s t p u b lis h e d in 1947' Its val
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c o m p o s e r s w h e n m u s ic is u s e d in th e p ro d u ct!
o f film s, w h ile A d o r n o w a s a b le t o c o n t r ib u t e
w id e r a e s th e tic a n d s o c io lo g ic a l m a tte rs as w
as s p e c if ic a lly m u s ic a l q u e s t io

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