Chapter 10

Music, Music, Music

This chapter is divided as follows:

• 10.1 An Introduction to Music in the Movies
• 10.2 A Brief History of Music in the Movies
• 10.3 Back to Practicalities
• 10.4 A Spoonful of Music Theory
• 10.5 Key Points—Music, Music, Music

Later in this chapter, I deal with some of the tricks you can use to cut music around without producing a crime scene. The musicians among you may have to stand-by and prepare to suck some eggs.

10.1 An Introduction to Music in the Movies

Before we get down to theory and technique, let’s take a few moments to examine music and how it’s been used so brilliantly in the movies and on TV.

 The Sound of Music—When You Know the Notes to Sing….

I’ve touched on the importance of ‘sound glue’ when I talked about flow, and I said such sound glue can be in the form of music. And what glue it can be sometimes. Take Leonard Bernstein’s masterful score for On the Waterfront (1954), or Bernard Hermann’s chilling music for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) or Psycho (1960), and not just in the shower scene, but also on that scary car journey through the driving rain with the windscreen wipers going full blast and the oncoming traffic’s headlights blinding Marion Crane on her way to her fate at the Bates Motel.

Not to mention John Barry’s music for The Ipcress File (1965), which turned Harry Palmer’s (Sir Michael Caine) morning routine of dressing, reading the paper, and making coffee into an iconic opening credit sequence. Here, Barry’s use of a cimbalom tells us that the Soviet Union is not that far away from Palmer’s currently mundane lifestyle. Sorry to go on, but another favourite of mine would be Michael Nyman’s busy and evocative accompaniment to The Hours (2002).

Not forgetting the TV world, I wonder where series like Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Fireball XL5, Stingray, Joe 90, and of course, Thunderbirds, would be without the brilliant themes and underscoring work of Barry Gray.

Before my list closes, I must mention Dennis Potter’s use of 1930s dance band hits in Pennies from Heaven (1978), starring the late Bob Hoskins. Here, Potter was able to break the fourth wall and have his characters look directly at us as they launched into clever song and dance routines.

I’m not saying the programmes you might work on might be as well served by such musical greats as Nyman, Barry, Bernstein, Hermann, or Gray, but even with well-chosen commercial discs you can greatly enhance any cut sequence.

If you have any keyboard skills yourself, many modern keyboards can provide great sounds in a fraction of the time and effort it used to take (and no doubt cost). Sinister chords or echoed double basses breathing their bows across vibrating strings can greatly heighten the tension already present in your cut as an empty house is searched for the crazed gunman now on the loose. Equally, a tranquil melodic line will augment those long hot summer days walking in a field of hay. Well, that’s before the crazed gunman, lurking in the woods, claims another gory victim.

10.2 A Brief History of Music in the Movies

Sadly, this publication cannot go into too much detail of film composers and their music, as it would become a huge list of talented people and great movies, but it’s worth a small digression of a page or two to examine how music has been used in movie history.

 King Kong (1933)—Music as a Mouthpiece

The first film to use a musical underscore was King Kong (1933), directed by Ernest Schoedsack. Up to then, incidental music was generally only used to start and finish a film. The music for King Kong was composed by Max Steiner, who used a symphony orchestra in a somewhat romantic and operatic way to enhance dialogue and action, especially the thoughts and feelings of the obviously wordless Kong, and convey them to the audience through music.

The 1930s and 40s saw the scoring of film soundtracks become a new and essential element of a film’s production. Among the greats are Erich Korngold and his scores for The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and The Sea Hawk (1940); Max Steiner for Gone with the Wind (1939) and Casablanca (1942); classical composers such as Dimitri Shostakovich, who scored a total of 34 films, or Sir Arthur Bliss, who crafted one of the most original early soundtracks in the film Things to Come (1935). Scoring a musical soundtrack is still very much done today, but what has changed is the range of musical styles that are commonly used by composers and directors.

 A Street Car Named Desire (1951)—Music Replacing Dialogue

The film A Street Car Named Desire (1951) boasted the first all-jazz score which was written by Alex North. The jazz riffs and motives used here, where notes are bent and flanged, were more able to reflect the attitudes and feelings of the characters than a traditional classical score. Here, the music itself starts to sound more personal, more human, and much more like real speech. In this way, the music was able to tell us more about a character’s inner feelings than the visual evidence on the screen. Find the scene where Stanley (Marlon Brando) in his torn T-shirt calls Stella (Kim Hunter) to come outside and see him. It was certainly on the Internet when I last looked. Just listen to what the music does for the scene to heighten its sensuality.

It must be said that the music worked so well in this scene to imply a burning passionate desire that it was condemned by a moral defence group in the US, and the studio was forced to replace the lustful and ‘saxy’ music with strings! Happily, the less delicate audience of today is allowed to see and hear the original version.

 On the Record—Commercial Tracks versus Composed Music

I suppose it was from the 1960s onwards, with the rise of pop culture, that filmmakers started to turn away from having music especially composed for a film in favour of using contemporary tracks. Sometimes a song was commissioned for a film and it could stand alone commercially in the record shops long after the film had ceased playing in the cinemas. Take, for example, Windmills of Your Mind, which was composed by Michel Legrand and used in the film The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) or, more recently, James Bond’s outing in Skyfall (2012). Here, the title song was composed and sung by Adele, and in the body of the movie there are additional songs by Charles Trenet and The Animals, amongst others. The rest of the original music was composed by Thomas Newman, paying regular homage to John Barry and Monty Norman, the originators of the Bond theme. The title song, like many of its predecessors for the Bond dynasty, was a huge hit, won an Academy Award, and undoubtedly helped promote and fund the movie.

Certain films like Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965), which featured The Beatles, actually threw the spotlight on the composers as performers. This was music for a new generation, including younger directors who knew how to use it.

 A Fistful of Dollars (1964)—Music in Control

Sometimes the music acts as the controller of a scene, as in the famous shootout in the film A Fistful of Dollars (1964), directed by Sergio Leone with music by Ennio Morricone. Here, the characters are called into the arena in an almost operatic way by that great trumpet theme. They walk in step to its beat, they move in time to the music; in other words, the music is not only choreographing the drama, but also it has now replaced the dialogue.

 Bullitt (1968)—Music in the Driver’s Seat

This dialogue-replacing function of a musical score was further used in Bullitt (1968), where Lalo Schifrin’s score said more than Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen) did himself. We seem to have drifted back to the days of Korngold, Steiner, and Hermann where the music is composed specially for the movie.

 Mean Streets (1973)—Music on Record

However, with Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), we are back with a director wanting to use the music he grew up with to score his films. This was a low budget movie, funded independently of the big studios, so Scorsese couldn’t afford a composer; instead, he was forced to use music familiar to him from his youth, which, as the film was set in New York in the early 1960s, made a perfect match. The use of ‘Jumpin Jack Flash’ by The Rolling Stones as Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro) comes to meet Charlie (Hervey Keitel), shot in slightly slow motion, works so well and tells us this character can only be trouble.

 Saturday Night Fever (1977)—Music That Creates a Film

Occasionally, current trends in popular music have inspired the making of the movie itself. Take Saturday Night Fever (1977) set in Brooklyn, where disco, in the form of several hits written by the Bee Gees, is celebrated and forms the backdrop for Tony Manero (John Travolta) to become king of the disco floor. The soundtrack sold 15 million copies and encouraged a significant, if not permanent, relationship between the pop and movie industries.

Today, we are totally used to a CD or music download of the soundtrack of the latest movie release to be produced in parallel with that release. The soundtrack will, more often than not, contain a mixture of existing commercial tracks alongside new ones which were composed for the movie.

 Spellbound (1945)—Music from Electronics

I suppose the modern ingredient for producing music for films is electronics, and more recently, the computer. This is not a new phenomenon, as movie makers have always been keen to exploit the latest technology. Take Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), in which Miklós Rózsa used the sound of a Theremin, a monophonic electronic instrument, to imply the mental instability of the central character John Ballantyne (Gregory Peck).

 Thunderbirds (1964–1966)—Music for Strings

In the TV world, even though Thunderbirds (1964–1966) was probably the most famous of the puppet adventure series produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, Barry Gray composed the music for many other Anderson series, including the live-action UFO (1970) and Space:1999 (1975). Gray had an interest in electronic music and used an Ondes Martenot (an early keyboard-based electronic instrument, which produced a somewhat similar sound to a Theremin) in several of the Gerry Anderson productions he scored, most notably in Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967).

 The Score—Music and Effects

As computer and synthesising programs got more and more sophisticated, the musical sound track was increasingly made up of a musical score, now integrated with complex multilayered sound effects. The production of such complex soundtracks today is in the hands of a composer alongside a sound editor or engineer. This can, of course, be one and the same person who will blend music and effects into a complete, composite soundscape.

 Doctor Who (BBC TV) (1963)—Music from Technology

An early example of this synthesis between composer and technology from the TV world would be the collaboration of Ron Grainer with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to produce the theme music for Doctor Who (1963–present). The Radiophonic Workshop provided the backbone for many BBC TV themes of the 1960s and 70s.

 Forbidden Planet (1956)—Music from Another World

The first fully electronic score for a motion picture was Fred M. Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (1956). In the film, composers and sound engineers Bebe and Louis Barron produced, for the first time, an impression of sounds from another world. The futuristic effects are so neatly interwoven with any music, it’s sometimes hard to tell one from the other.

 The Birds (1963)—Music, What Music?

The continuing advance in electronics enabled director Alfred Hitchcock to use synthesised bird calls and shrieks in his film The Birds (1963). These effects were created on an instrument called a Trautonium. He even used Bernard Hermann, his musical collaborator of many years, to select and position the artificial bird effects to best match the pictures. Incidentally, there isn’t a single musical instrument in the film but there is still a score, as is clearly demonstrated by the result. As Hitchcock said, ‘When you put music to a film, it’s just another sound really’.

 A Clockwork Orange (1971)—Music from a Moog

I suppose one of the most memorable uses of synthesised music is Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971). Walter Carlos, who had already produced the iconic album ‘Switched on Bach’ on a Moog synthesiser in 1968, heard that Kubrick was filming a futuristic movie about a guy obsessed with rape, ultra-violence, and Beethoven. Carlos, without asking, sent Kubrick a tape of a synthesised version of some Beethoven, and Kubrick saw that this had great potential and might work in the film alongside the more conventional orchestral arrangements of the same pieces.

The hard nature of the tones that Carlos was able to produce then suited A Clockwork Orange perfectly, but as synthesisers became more subtle, they were let loose on more conventional dramas, such as Hugh Hudson’s Chariots of Fire (1981), which used the music of Vangelis.

 Apocalypse Now (1979)—Music in a Design

By the time we reach the 1970s, and accompanied by advances in sound recording and reproduction like stereo and quadraphonic sound, the idea of ‘sound design’ was born. With this new technological freedom, an editor, composer, sound engineer (call them what you will) could now layer many sounds on top of each other (including music), treat them acoustically, and place them in a three-dimensional space in such a way as to create a ‘sound design’.

Once again, the opening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) is a case in point. Here, sound editor (sorry, designer) Walter Murch produced a soundscape as complex as an orchestral score.

In the film, even before the first image is seen, the synthesised sound of a single beating helicopter blade moves around the cinema and surrounds us, for this was one of the first films to be produced in a surround-sound format, with a world we are not going to forget in a hurry. But where are we? Eventually, we find out we are in Captain Benjamin Willard’s (Martin Sheen) hotel bedroom and we are seeing his hallucinatic and drunken dream, influenced in no small measure by the rotating ceiling fan.

 Compact—Music for Today

Today, instead of the banks of hardware modules used in the synthesisers of the past, all these electronics, and more, can be sitting on your laptop, tablet, or mobile phone. There seems to be no limit to how many sound effects you can layer onto a sequence. And herein lies a problem—are we getting near the point of sound overload? Some would say yes, as a significant number of audience members are beginning to say, ‘Great, but I couldn’t hear what they said’.

The danger lies in the fact that these complex sound designs have to be produced on ‘state of the art’ kit, with their creators in ideal surroundings. The problem is that we mere mortals don’t often watch and listen to these movies in comparable surroundings, and care has to be taken by sound designers to pull back from the extreme and allow for less than perfect monitoring conditions.

10.3 Back to Practicalities

 Analysis—Back to Work!

It’s about time we got back to our edit suite and the practical aspects of dealing with music in whatever form it arrives.

When a piece of music is used in a film or TV, it is referred to as a cue, regardless of the source. With commercial tracks, once you have chosen an appropriate track for your sequence you will, more often than not, have to alter the cutting rhythm of your sequence to match the music more closely. However, that shouldn’t mean that you turn into a slave to the rhythm of the piece completely, but rather you should aim to match musical climax with dramatic climax and musical pause with dramatic pause. To achieve a good match with a commercial track, you will almost certainly have to cut the music around as well.

This timing adjustment is not usually necessary if you are having music composed for you. Here your cut sequence is king, and the composer will have to vary his or her tempi, along with rises and falls in the melodic line, to match the drama already created. A musician (unless you’re Erich Korngold, for such was his power) will never ask you for a recut, thank goodness. Well, at least that’s one person off the ever-growing list!

It would be impossible if they did—you’d never finish the wretched thing, with version after version being bashed forward and back in an endless reediting and recomposing tennis match—a scenario too horrible to contemplate.

 Cutting It—How to Start Cutting Music

Of course there’s nothing to stop you from cutting music anywhere you like, the equivalent of the vision jump cut, but let’s assume something more subtle is required. Music, just like speech, will only allow itself to be edited invisibly (okay, inaudibly) in certain places.

Back in the days when I was starting as an editor, a colleague of mine at the BBC would dub the piece of music to be edited to a ¼" tape, cut it long with splicing tape over the join, and proceed to shave slivers of tape off the join until perfection was reached. At the time this was considered to be slightly laborious, but we didn’t know just how advanced he was, because this technique is exactly how you might edit a phrase out of some music today with nonlinear editing software—cut the chunk out roughly and trim it until it sounds good.

Music can’t just be chopped around at will. It’s the same as the clumsy removal of a word from a sentence which can, at the very least, disturb the rhythm of that sentence and, at worst, change the meaning completely.

Just as you have to know something about sentence construction before you can start mucking the words around, you have to understand some of the rudiments of musical construction before you are able to take similar liberties with the notes.

Musicians! Here come the eggs.

10.4 A Spoonful of Music Theory

 Music Time—1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4

Sorry, only a little bit of music theory, but it’s necessary so that you’ll be able to make an attempt at analysing any future piece of music that requires editing.

Most popular songs are in what musicians call 4/4 time; that is to say, four beats to the bar. Try counting a regular, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4 to the next song you hear on the radio, and you’ll see what I mean, the 1-2-3-4 making up one bar. Building out from here, songs are constructed in sections, the main sections being called verses, choruses, and bridge passages.

 Discovering Music—Examining Verses and Choruses

Verses and choruses are usually constructed in multiples of eight-bar lumps (that is 8 four-beat bars). Verses are the main story telling parts of the song in terms of lyrics, because these are usually different each time the verse appears. The chorus is also repeated, but here the lyrics, more often than not, are repeated word for word, and they usually contain the name of the song.

It is surprising how many pieces from modern rock-pop combos (sorry, I couldn’t resist it) follow this verse/chorus structure. Even bands like the Sex Pistols, Rancid, or The Clash, wanting to smash the world and create anarchy, did so within an eight-bar verse/chorus structure.

Bridge passages (or middle eights), which are usually again in multiples of eight bars, offer a break from the verses and choruses heard so far and can also be identified as linking material. They can contain a new tune or idea that briefly takes us away and brings us back from the main verse/chorus sections. Beware they also can contain a key change (see later in this chapter).

 Songs of Praise—A Look at Song Structures

Different songs have different structures, and you’ll have to identify these in order to make successful edits within each song. This is simpler than you think, and the giveaway is repeats. Just plot the repeated tunes or lyrics, and the verse/chorus structure will be laid bare, waiting for attack.

My best advice is to play the song and mark the timecodes of such repeats, and these will inevitably turn into good edit points by which you can shorten the song successfully, which will not result in legal action from performer or composer. Do some maths and you can calculate the range of reductions in duration that are possible.

You’ll certainly need to do some analysis of the five pieces I have for you in the Ex 47 Editing Music 1 example. The exercise requires you to cut each of the five pieces of music down to one minute exactly, but at the same time retain as much of the shape of the original compositions as possible. What I mean by that is that you can’t just ‘come in’ later and offer the last minute of each piece; that would be cheating!

As always, you have my versions to listen to, after you’ve had a go.

Yet again, to those of you not working on Avid who have had to import my timelines via an EDL, you will not get any of my track level adjustments (rubber-banding, in other words). However, you can still hear my cut versions in the MOV files for this exercise, all five of which I have provided for you.

 On the Beat—Marking Time in ‘Play’

I find it more useful to mark potential musical edit points in ‘play’ rather than trying to position them manually. The reason for this could be my upbringing with linear editing methods, but I would urge you to try this technique here, in the nonlinear world. Simply mark the ‘in’ or ‘out’ points where you would tap your foot, and trim them in from there.

 Going for a Song—Editing Song to Song

Sometimes, a montage of several songs or different pieces of music has to be made. Here, rather like a DJ in a club, my advice is to get the heartbeats of the two pieces in sync, and then look for a contained phrase or lyric which ends reasonably well and that will allow you to most easily get across to the next piece. In other words, it’s important to get the bar lines matched up in order to preserve the 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4 structure over the join.

Luckily, music is rarely on its own on the soundtrack of a TV programme or film, so if you have to perform an uncomfortable join, all you need to do is bolster up other surrounding sounds to camouflage the musical crime.

Have a go yourself with Exercise 48: Editing Music 2. This uses the same music MOV files associated with Exercise 47. As usual, my version of the exercise is available for you once you’ve had a go (Ex 48-CUT All 5 Pieces.mov).

 In Tune—Dealing with Key Changes

One word of caution is to watch out for key changes in the piece of music you are dealing with. They will render direct edits from before to after the key change impossible.

If a cut-down version of a song containing a key change is required, you usually have to take the time out from the ‘before’ and ‘after’ sections totally separately, and include the key change as it was performed in the original song in your cut.

One of the most uneditable songs is Jerry Herman’s ‘I Am What I Am’ from La Cage aux Folles, as there is a key change every verse!

 The Culture Show—The Classical and Jazz Worlds

Searching for repeated passages and seeing if they’ll edit together is just as valid to cut down classical and jazz pieces, and you can employ the same techniques which we have looked at so far to achieve edits in this genre. I’m sure you found that was the case in the recent exercise.

I know there are fewer repeats in classical music, and the repeats that are there are usually differently scored or in another key, so invisible edits are more difficult here, but they are by no means impossible.

 Twilight of the Gods—Wagner’s Five-Hour Music Drama in Three Acts

Right, it’s about time for another exercise.

Musicians amongst you can now pay attention again, as we embark on a full analysis of the editing possibilities to take Siegfried out of Wagner’s five-hour opera Gotterdammerung (The Twilight of the Gods).

…Only joking!

10.5 Key Points—Music, Music, Music

• Music, either from commercial tracks or specially composed, can enhance any cut and give scene joins realflow.
• Most popular songs are written in a 4/4 time signature; that’s four beats to the bar.
• Verses and choruses are usually multiples of eight-bar lumps.
• Verses have different words each time they come round.
• Choruses when they reappear they repeat the words as well, and these usually contain the name of the song.
• When you are looking for edits in a song, analyse it by marking the timecodes of the arrival of each section, verse or chorus. These will turn into future edit points.
• Edits in music usually work best between repeated sections.
• Beware of key changes; they will restrict editing possibilities to either side of the change and not across it.
• Mark potential ‘in’ or ‘out’ points in ‘play’, and trim them in from there.
• Classical music is not so formulaic as popular music, but you can still perform invisible joins—you’ve just got to try a little harder.
• Siegfried had better watch his back, especially in Act 3.