THE MUSIC BOX

One fascinating and hitherto unexploited new use of music is in motion pictures. Until two or three years ago this department was a farce. The director would stick in a few bars of the William Tell overture to reinforce an action scene, or a few tender notes from "Juanita" for the love scene, and let it go at that. Historical settings would be sketched in by three or four tinkles of a harpsichord. Seeing the movie version of Our Town the other day brought home forcibly to me the tremendous recent advance in the quality of cinema music. Aaron Copland's score seemed to me every bit as impressive as the story itself, and people who heard the score done separately assure me that it is just as moving, though in a different way of course, off the screen as it is on. This should be enough to convince any skeptics who doubt the future of movie music. After all, music is a vital part of cinematic and dramatic production; it is not less essential than the acting, for it integrates and gives point to a work of art. The great climax, "Give me some lights! Away!," in Hamlet, simply cannot be staged effectively without music. There are too many blank spaces between spoken words to keep up the necessary amount of high tension for the necessary length of time. And if this is true of one of the greatest of plays, how much more so of the run-of-the-mill potboiler featured in the movie-house.

The hard task confronting the cinema composer, that which Aaron Copland has solved so consummately, is to compose a score which fulfills the requirements of the action and at the same time stands on its own feet as a piece of music and an expression of the composer's self. Most screen scores, even the more recent ones, tend to stick pretty closely to certain standard formulae. To compose music for a comedy especially leaves little leeway for originality, although Prokofieff's comic score to Lieutenant Kije, now recorded as a separate suite, is a masterpiece of its kind. A couple of years back, movie composers tinkered with classical themes as seeds for their music. The turned out by this method some very unusual scores, notably that of Swiss Family Robinson, which was built up on Schubert quartets. But the method had obvious disadvantages. To those who knew the music being played, it was harrowing to hear it repeated over and over again, piecemeal, in wrong keys, with wierd and incorrect harmonies affixed to it, distorted and tortured to fit the varying moods of the plot. A score like this can never represent any very important emotional contribution on the part of a composer; at best it is a facile hashing-up of some admittedly marvelous themes. Other Hollywood composers experimented with the leit-motif system, but this failed because it gave rise to some very absurd effects, such as that of a chase in which the music switched back from the pursued to the pursuer with every move of the camera. The leit-motif was abused, rather than used by composers for greater unity.

The inescapable conclusion would be that cinema scores must be written with almost as much logic, creative power, and structural concern as a symphony or tone-poem. Unless the hundreds of musical notes used in a movie have some organic connection with each other, besides that of being in the same picture, unless they form a coherent unity by themselves, they will be no better on the screen than they would playd to audiences in the concert hall. Our Town was the revelation of a new approach, a significant step in the growth of American music.