man tells all

a column by bass player and musicologist Hans Mantel, on his current state of mind

maestro mantel

the Sound Track Drag

With the release of Al Jolson’s movie The Jazz Singer in 1927, the movie industry took a

quantum leap forward. Sound was now possible on movies. Until that historic event,

theaters had used an in-house pianist or small band that accompanied the events as

they unfolded on the screen. Naturally these performers would try to musically illustrate

what was happening in the various scenes.

This would later become sort of an artform in itself.

I remember seeing an old Tom & Jerry cartoon on tv and shutting my eyes to concentrate

on the soundtrack. Everytime Tom would fall down a flight of stairs there was this incredibly

fast and complicated marimba passage illustrating what was happening.

And it was all scored by the composer! This type of program music

(music that describes or portrays effects, feelings or impressions)

is so deeply connected with the visual effects that we hardly seperate them anymore.

But in the production there was a moment when the cartoon didn’t have a soundtrack and

the musicians came into the studio to record the soundtrack live with the cartoon!

Next time you put one on for your kids, concentrate on the music and marvel at the

incredible prowess of these musicians! Fantastic music, newly composed and tailor-made

for that cartoon.

Later on however, well-known (mostly classical or light-classical) music was used for

movies and that’s where my problem with movie sountracks lies.

Let’s look for instance at Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra. If you had heard this for the

first time while watching Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, chances are that

you could never listen to it again in your livingroom or in the concert hall without

feeling a weird combination of weightlessness and impending doom.

Such can be the power of the soundtrack. It would render it virtually impossible

to appreciate the music on its own intrinsic merits, as you would have had you

played it on your stereo first.

The other way around is even stranger: certain works you know (and love)

have evoked a set of emotions and feelings that are unique to you.

It’s what you feel; what the music tells you. If you see a movie and that music is

the featured soundtrack, new images and resulting emotions will differ wildly from your own.

The music is telling you to feel something else. The music changes meaning.

Not only that, it’s someone else’s meaning. Somebody (the director) takes away

your emotional connection to that music and replaces it with his own.

A lot of music has been more or less spoiled for me that way. Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9,

From The New World and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, Eroica were thrust upon me with

images so outlandishly out of my own context, I couldn’t even have imagined that combination.

Rimsky-Korsakov and Ottorino Respighi suffered similarly at the hands of unscrupulous

(or musically insensitive) directors. I’ll have my own images with my music, thank you very much.

This is not to say that there are no great soundtracks of music that weren’t written for a

specific movie, but these are lamentably few and far between.

My problem mainly concerns those movies that need classical music for bombastic,

dramatic or romantic effects. The director associates a specific scene with specific music he knows.

The simple fact is, he’s not you: he is unlikely to put images to the music that reflect

exactly what you have in your own head.

But it isn’t always music you know. Many composers have also written movie music in the

vein of the great late-Romantic classical composers but the quality of that music is such

that it is best preserved on celluloid and should stay away from the concert stage,

which (in most cases) it mercifully does. Should I abstain from going to movies where I run

the risk of getting my feelings for my music warped beyond all recognition?

The answer is no.

Luckily, most of these musical masterpieces are so strong in themselves that their stories

will remain standing tall and the beautiful melodies will stay with me long after

the memories of the scenes from the movie have evaporated.

Hans Mantel

man tells all

the Sound Track Drag

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