Integration of Music and Movies

Today, movies and music go hand in hand, and it seems hard to imagine a time when movies had no sound; in fact, even from the very outset of images on screen music was played alongside them. Throughout the 20th century many possibilities have been attempted in regards to the integration of movies and music. These attempts usually became the conventionalities we see today, such as the cliché on screen of playing a slow sad musical composition with a slow sad scene in a movie. Eventually it has been attempted – somewhat successfully – to juxtapose two mixed aspects of sight and sound in order to convey some mixed concepts; this is when a director has a high suspense action scene and has a slow classical composition as the background music, and many times this contrast can effectively – if in a bromidic fashion – emphasis the event occurring on screen.

These attempts at using images and music can, if done correctly, result in magnificently portrayed abstract concepts. However, in almost every instance a movie director has a certain task – such as to project love – and merely uses love songs along with the story of Romeo and Juliet; when this happens all the director has accomplished is a simple bromidic surface level concrete of this complex abstract idea, and no one is left understanding what love really means or where it comes from. The combination of images and sound are capable of portraying much deeper concepts. Unfortunately, this has not been attempted properly very often; however, there are three movies where they have been: Immortal Beloved by Bernard Rose, Copying Beethoven by Agneszka Holland, and Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus by Milos Forman.

The first of these Immortal takes place primarily in the form of an inquisitive search. Beginning with Beethoven’s death, a letter is found; Beethoven’s last will and testament, which he names a new heir to his estates and it’s not his brother, but his immortal beloved. The letter sends one of Beethoven’s most faithful servants – Schindler – on a journey into Beethoven’s past. He discovers a troubling man. It is a story that delves into the making of a musical genius; it’s theme: the effects music has upon our emotions and what it can do to their creator.

The next movie Copying Beethoven covers a much smaller time span in Beethoven’s life; mainly the composing and debut of his 9th symphony. A female musical copyist is sent to help Beethoven finish his composition before the appearance in four days. The story is more about the copyist’s revelations through the genius of Beethoven.

Lastly, Amadeus is a movie that takes place in the story telling of the movies main character – the court composer Antonio Salieri. When Salieri discovers the musical brilliance he has always admired is wasted on a childish jokester like Mozart; he begins to plot for Mozart’s demise. Through a series of failures and successes Salieri is finally triumphant in defeating Mozart, but it has cost them both a great deal.

These three movies depict music in three distinctive manners. Immortal uses carefully selected images to convey the mood Beethoven was trying to impose. In Copying, they merely use the reactions of audience members to show the mood. Amadeus shows only what the two main characters feel as a result of their music. Amadeus is different than the other two because it is naturalistic to a much higher degree; the movies main goal is to enumerate the steps and consequences of a sadistic man’s jealous nature about his own inferiority. What makes the movie to be a mere surface level naturalist movie is the fact that it takes humans as readymade, and it presupposes people as being jealous without showing where it comes from or what causes a person to become so jealous.

Movies have an uncanny ability to express concepts to us using one of our most important perceptual senses; sight: it also can use our sense of hearing as a clear awareness of the mood the movie is giving us. To combine the two – sight and sound – is of profound importance that has not been properly accomplished. This is due to the fact that as far as our precepts go in music we have not discovered an objective manner in deciphering and understanding the meaning of sounds in regards to our subconscious mind.

Most movies, especially today, show a very crude understanding of music and what it is able to achieve. An example is a recent movie: The Soloist by Joe Wright. During an important scene wherein one of the main characters – Nathaniel Ayers played by Jamie Foxx – is taken to a private rehearsal of a local orchestra and is overcome by the music he loves so much. Mr. Wright has assumed the very worst in regards to music and our subconscious. The way in which music is ‘shown’ in this movie is by random colors thrown on screen in a Stan Brakhage manner. This displays the director’s vision of music; which is mystical, other-worldly and unknowable.

Art is a selective re-creation based on an artist’s view. In The Soloist the director has chosen to elucidate his ideals as to the epistemology behind music using random shapes and colors; in essence, he claims that music can only give the emotional equivalent of an annoying pin prick, but he doesn’t understand that music is capable of much more.

The most unfulfilled potential in art lies with movies. Since movies are a visual art, but don’t merely give one image but thousands of images over a certain span of time, they have the ability of communicating what an artist painting a series of paintings could never dream of doing. The movie has only one master and term-setter which is its literary aspect; this means literature is what provides the metaphysical element that enables the pictures on screen to become a concretization of an abstract view of human beings. When the literary aspect is removed from film it is simply a vaudeville or circus. Music has always been an incidental accompaniment to movies.

The most unique of the arts is music. This particular art form works backwards in regard to a human’s interaction between the conscious mind and the automatic functions of the subconscious. All other arts create a physical object such as a book or a painting, which then carries the person’s perceptual grasp upon the object to a conceptual grasp.[1] As Rand put it, the pattern is:

From perception – to conceptual understanding – to appraisal – to emotion… In
music it is perception – to emotion – to appraisal – to conceptual
understanding. (emphasis mine)

When listening to a piece of music it can seem very similar to dreaming. Ostensibly random images pop in the listeners mind, but these images are not exactly random since the abstract emotion is carefully selected by the composer. The power of music is to use the vibrations from sonorous bodies to bring about a particular feeling of a certain abstraction. For example, a musical composition cannot show you what piousness looks like – as in the Bellini painting St. Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy – but it can give you the feeling; it can’t show you what it is like to stand in front of your beloved after returning from war, but it can give you the feeling. With music’s ability to reach straight into your subconscious emotions and then allow your mind to perform the concretization process the possibilities for music is as of yet almost completely unknown.

In particular scenes throughout the three movies – Immortal Beloved, Copying Beethoven, and Amadeus- each director gives specific examples of what they believe music’s capabilities are, and of the three only Immortal comes close to any particular truth in this manner.

In Amadeus music is shown mainly through its effects upon the two main characters, which incidentally somewhat coincides with the plot-theme: The jealous Salieri’s destructive attempts to destroy Mozart. Also, the movies theme is the inspiration of genius, and what effects this has on inferiors. The movie fails artistically to convey where that inspiration comes from; and it also fails to properly use music to express the abstraction of jealousy. This is due to the naturalistic approach of the story. When we see a scene which has Mozart or Salieri conducting, the movie concentrates upon what it is doing to the composer, and sometimes a few audience members. This is presupposing the antecedent event; in other words, the movie’s director expects the viewer to simply enjoy the same emotions as the composer, which almost negates the effect the music might have.

Copying Beethoven is guilty of the same laziness as Amadeus. The director expects the viewer to garner a sense of what he wishes to convey as the concrete, but he does not want to do the work himself, he is like a child beating on pots and pans in his parent’s kitchen expecting beautiful meanings to emerge. Both directors are succeeding in producing very rudimentary concepts in regards to the abstract feeling or idea they want to allow the audience to understand. Immortal goes a little further in both the explanation of music and its subsequent portrayal of it throughout the movie.

In one of the scenes that sets Immortal apart in regards to understanding music, and being a bit more of a romantic story, is the scene when Herr Schindler – the character going on the journey to discover who Beethoven’s immortal beloved is – tells the story of how he met Beethoven: Schindler is listening to two virtuoso’s rehearse the new Beethoven Sonata, Beethoven enters and loudly starts talking to Schindler – Beethoven is mostly deaf by this point – and he explains his understanding of music

Music is a dreadful thing. What is it? What does it do..? If you hear a marching
band; you march. If you hear a mass you take communion. It is the power of music
to carry one directly into the mental state of the composer. The listener has no
choice, it is like hypnotism… So now, what was in my mind when I wrote this? A
man is trying to reach his lover, his carriage has broken down in the rain;
wheels are stuck in the mud, she will only wait so long. This is the sound of
his agitation.

What sets this movie apart in regard to understanding music is the image shown during this sequence. As Schindler listens to Beethoven’s Sonata an image comes to the screen of an incident that has happened in Beethoven’s mind that inspired the Sonata, and the image is of Beethoven struggling in a dark, muddy, insolent forest; rain dousing him, his muscles strained to the extreme trying to push this carriage back onto the road so he may reach his beloved. It is important to note when listening to this Sonata that nobody else will be imposed by this particular image of Beethoven pushing a carriage in the rain – the listener will only get the feeling the composer had at that time.

As an attest to Beethoven’s greatness many movies have used his 9th symphony in their musical score. However, the two movies, Immortal and Copying both sought to demonstrate what the cause and effect of this piece has on our subconscious emotions. In Copying the director illuminates his surface level approach with regards to musical capabilities. As Beethoven is conducting the concert the camera holds on the intense emotions of Beethoven, his copyist and Karl (his nephew); among a few other audience members. By holding the camera on those three individuals it is left unsaid how and why they are feeling such emotions. Immortal does a much more succinct job with this same concert. As the concert begins we are shown an image of a young Beethoven after just having been abused by his father; he is running away to the sound of The Ode to Joy. As the boy reaches a pond the music is approaching its climax. The boy takes his shirt off and lays half naked in the dark black pond reflecting the starry night sky above. The camera has a bird’s eye view of the boy; then it begins to pull back with the increasing intensity of the music, and as it pulls back the boy looks as if he is laying among the stars, which concretizes in one image the feeling of heroics and the feeling of being among the gods that Beethoven was trying to demonstrate.

This image is a great example of what a proper marriage of sight and sound in motion can be capable of in art. These two mediums, together, have the ability to more succinctly concretize certain philosophical abstractions in our minds. It is not enough to merely juxtapose music to an image and randomly hope people will grasp the full meaning of the idea being attempted. It is unfortunate that psychologically we have not intoned the meaning of sounds epistemologically. And, there is still room for much improvement in this art. If one were able to fully integrate abstract ideas in both sight and sound, through a story, an artist could reach a level of the human psyche rarely ever touched. Understanding the basic principles of a human’s ability to form concepts could inevitably bring about new forms of meaning in images and sounds on screen. It would take a genius psychologist, magnificent composer and brilliant philosopher all in one to formulate a brand new way of integrating sounds to images. This would bring about new possibilities in all of the arts, and would make possible grand achievement in other areas of human endeavors. This form of integration could bring about an entirely new artistic era and usher humans back to the knowledge of their own benevolent greatness.



[1] Rand, Ayn. Art and Cognition. The Romantic Manifesto. New York : New American Library, 1971