Music in Cult TV: an introduction

Hurrah - well, it's finally happening: my book on music in cult tv is coming out next month and is currently available to preorder via Amazon. It's all a bit useless at the moment as they both have the blurb I wrote as part of the proposal about 5 years ago and the book has changed significantly since then, not least because Hannibal aired whilst I was writing and utterly blew me away. Oh, and the U.K. site cannot spell music.....! So the actual blurb is below, and these are the links to the two sites. Currently half the price ($14 rather than $28) in the US than it will be after publication, no idea why!
US site: http://www.amazon.com/Music-Cult-TV-An-Introduction/dp/1784530298
UK site: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1784530298

Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens

Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens

Composer: oh, who do you think, John Williams, of course!

So, the bad news is that I have suddenly come down with a cold and feel absolutely blinking awful. The good news is that this week I finally saw Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens, a film I can happily admit to loving with a fiery passion. In fact, I saw it twice, and musically speaking, that was an interesting experience in and of itself.  Spoilers ahead: for crying out loud, why are you reading this if you haven’t seen the film already? Do you know how much time I have spent avoiding on the internet since December 17^th?

At my first viewing, I failed to notice a single new theme (and there are three big significant ones for Rey, Kylo Ren and the Alliance, as well as various smaller others). All I noticed, musically, was the old themes: The Luke/ main title theme; the ‘triumph’ chords that so often punctuate action in the original trilogy; the Force theme; Leia’s theme, and the Leia/Han love theme. Each one jumped out at me and my ears greeted it like a long-lost, much-loved friend, starting with the main title (grin the size of a slice of watermelon on my face), then the triumph chords as we see the Millenium Falcon for the first time (hello, Millenium Falcon!), the Force theme as Han remembers Luke, the Leia theme as we see the lovely General for the first time, transforming into the Han/Leia version as they talk to each other; even a quick blast of Darth Vadar’s Imperial March as we see the remains of his ruined mask on Kylo Ren’s little altar. Oh, my lovelies, how I’ve missed you! But new themes utterly passed me by: I was aware of the recurrence of these themes throughout but otherwise, was just too busy watching the film.

Second time round, out they started popping, as well as other things, such as the first time we get the Luke/ main title theme in the score is when Finn makes the decision that effectively sets the narrative rolling and tells Poe Dameron that he is going to help him escape – some of Luke’s agency in that moment seems to be passed on to Finn, a fascinating character who has had rather less attention as the first major black character of the franchise (do not get me started on Lando Calrissian) than its first female hero, Rey. However, I am going to focus in particular on Rey and Kylo Ren or we’ll be here forever.

Kylo Ren’s theme

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzP7D2Yjkd8

Kylo Ren has a classic ‘label’ theme of the type that Adorno and Eisler detested, seeing it as the musical lackey announcing the person we can all very well see is there. But the general stasis of this five note motif which we repeatedly hear in basically identical form throughout the film actually does quite a lot of work. It’s short and unchanging – this unchanging nature reflects his rigidity, his desire to hold to his path and I could make a possibly slightly fanciful argument about this being how he hears himself, the aural image of what he wants to be, sternly foreboding, a musical anchor that pulls him back to the dark side from that oh so tempting path of light. The motif is angular and chromatic – sorry, my notation software is up the spout, so I shall have to do it by description. Five notes: G, F sharp, C , E flat, G again, an octave down from where it started. So, we start with a falling minor second (G to F sharp), which then falls to the tritone  (F sharp to C) symbol of musical evil, the diablous in musica – no villain is a proper villain without a nice tritone in his theme; then rising by a minor third (C to E flat) before dropping down a minor sixth (E flat to C). It is almost entirely descending and therefore a theme for the dark side: heroic themes, by contrast, tend to be primarily ascending, constantly pushing upwards towards ever higher goals (e.g. the Luke/ main title theme and indeed the Force theme: nice bit of analysis here that demonstrates the idea well: http://www.filmmusicnotes.com/john-williams-themes-part-1-the-force-theme/). All the intervals in KR’s theme are either minor or chromatic – again, culturally coded towards the negative end of the spectrum, compared to the major key and unchromatic  Main title and Force themes.

Rey’s theme

https://youtu.be/nTmP0iBQUkA

Rey, by contrast, has a very long theme made up of several motifs; the opening rapid figure is derived from the (as you will learn!) all-important last three notes of the melody of the main motif. That main motif (6 notes in all) is the opening of a long winding melody that meanders all over the place, shifting and slipping into different keys, the melody becoming submerged in the textures and then re-emerging again: note already, therefore, the extreme contrast to the rigid brevity of Kylo Ren’s theme. Rey is unfixed, unformed at this point: unawakened!

Rey’s motif appears in so many different keys that I’m going to give it here in the version that best makes my point about its relationship with Kylo Ren’s. This gives us a theme that goes: C, E flat, G, C, F, G . [C up to E flat, down to G, back up to C, then up again to F and G]. So: the last three notes of KR’s theme are the first three of Rey’s; where his sinks down to the low G at the end, her’s rises up to the high one; where his motif starts with a chromatic fall from G to F sharp that in turn produces the tritone, her’s ends with the rising, non-chromatic F natural to G. There is both a reversal of the order of phrases and of the direction of the two notes at the start of KR’s and the end of Rey’s, which means that where his theme has only one ascending interval, her’s has only one descending one. These motifs are so astoundingly mirrored around each other that I do not believe for a second that its just one of those coincidences, because our John is altogether rather too clever for that.

The lack of chromaticism and the primarily ascending contour give Rey’s motif  much more potential as a heroic signifier. However, at the start of the film, it just ain’t heroic: its actually pretty softy-sweetie-girlie, in terms of its Hollywood cultural musical coding. Lots of woodwind and strings, nice overall sense of up-and-back down phrase shaping in the cue as a whole, smooth, legato feel – all things that good ol’ Philip Tagg (where would I be without him) identified as female coded musical characteristics in his 1987 study, which you can find here if you have never read it: http://tagg.org/articles/xpdfs/tvanthro.pdf

But her motif has potential to be heroic: its has the kind of open intervals around tonic and dominant (the C and G) that are commonly found in Williams’ hero themes; it is ascending; and it is strongly linked (as I am not the first to notice) to the force theme, in that it has identical harmonic movement and several similar intervals (he actually juxtaposes them in the final minute of the end credits cue, just in case you hadn’t noticed, something that brought another watermelon grin to my face as I stood by the exit door to let the poor ushers clean the cinema! Having working in one, I am acutely aware that people who stay to the end of the credits are pretty annoying for the ushers). The identical harmonic movement means that in the more extended Rey theme (going beyond her first six notes into the second part of the theme) both this and the Force theme move from a minor tonic chord to the major subdominant (so here, from C minor to F major). Technically, in C minor, the subdominant should be F minor, so the brightening of the shift into a major chord gives it a sense of hope (A New Hope! The Force Awakens! Woohoo!) that again pushes this toward the heroic.

And that latent heroism and the force awakening in Rey gets its musical realization in the final battle scene between her and KR, which you can hear here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnvaA984uIc

I will confess that I was getting mightly frustrated by the end of the film: we got the Force theme with the heroic bras (solo horn) mostly when people were talking about Luke -  when it was used for Rey, back came the strings and woodwinds;  and her own motif also kept on coming back on strings and woodwind. For crying out loud, John (I was thinking) when are you going to let her be a hero? And then, hurrah, in this cue, we finally get both the Force theme and her motif transformed into a properly brass-led heroism as she comes into her own and takes down KR. I may have cried a little at the sound of massed brass around 2.40 in the above clip.

And so, to the crazy speculation. Why do Rey and KR essentially share a (mirrored) theme? Why is the very first thing Leia does when she meets Rey is to clasp her in a fierce embrace? Could they all be – gasp – related??? I seriously do not know how I am going to get through a year and nine months without knowing the answers to these questions.

The Martian

I am clearly on a roll: second post in the same week!
I'm afraid I'm going to be really rather picky about this film because I really liked but it was not quite as good a film as it might have been on the musical front. Matt Damon  turns in an impressive and engaging performance as the guy accidentally left for dead on Mars, reminding me of just what a jolly fine actor he is, and which he needs to be as a lot of the film is just him and his potatoes and a lot of red dust. The film starts with some semi-subtle allusions to 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a planetary sunrise set to some low drones sounds that recall, perhaps, some of the Ligeti in Kubrik's compilation score; and then the first obviously musical sounds we hear are a rising open fifth, à la Strauss Thus Spake Zarathustra, but then the music and visuals leave that particularly vision of space behind (and undoubtedly a good thing too, but I enjoyed the nod).

Things start out promisingly musically, and after Mark, our hero, is abandoned, the music and sound design initially do a good job constructing his subjective experience as the only man on Mars. In particular, the sound design gives a range of slightly disconcerting hums, some evidently ambient, some more ambiguous; a lovely little tinnitus moment when Mark more or less blows himself up in the process of trying to grow his potatoes; plus there is some fabulously incongruous disco music which is the only music he has access to, a fact that causes him at one point to declare that he is definitely go to die here if he has to keep listening to this. The fact that he does keep listening to it suggests, probably quite rightly, that when you are completely alone on a planet, 100s of 1000s of miles and potentially four years from anyone else, any music is better than nothing. But here in lie the seeds of the problem. By my calculations, Mark is actually on his own for about two years, and by the end he is definitely starting to go a little crazy, but the underscore music rather undermines this by being pretty much wall to wall through most of the film. The film's makers might have chosen to use musical silence and sound design to help us understand his isolation and the constant threat of death that he is under, and to encourage us to see the ways in which Mark starts to fall apart, a process that begins when his crops are destroyed. Damon is acting his socks off but the music actually makes his performance of a man holding on to his sanity by his fingertips toward the end seem kinda cute, and that seems to me to do his acting a disservice both here and elsewhere: the music does too much work for us in glossing his emotions into something generally simple and easy to identify with, whereas the situation is astoundingly complex and not something I imagine most of us can begin to think ourselves into. The sounds design is, frankly, also acting its socks off: the sounds of the various storms and the sense of the habitat pods being under constant  threat of destruction really begs for more musical silence in which to make itself felt, but instead I cannot remember the last time I was so conscious of being emotionally manipulated by a score (Oo, will he die? Hurrah, he's ok! Can he make it work? yes, he can! He's so plucky - cue the Kleenex). I am not blaming the composer: Harry Gregson Williams will have written music for where he was told to write it, doing what he was told to make it do; but the film ended up too cosy for me, like a revisiting of  Apollo 13 as a fun adventure film, or Mission to Mars with a happier ending. He's complete alone on a planet and is an odds-on favourite to perish! It is genuinely scary! A wee bit more silence now and then, a dose of the uncanny, would have made this an altogether less comfortable and frankly better film. It's a good film; it has great acting; but the musical strategy plays it too safe in how it directs the audience toward emotion and away from allowing them to glimpse how completely terrible it would be for someone to spend two years on their own on Mars with no guarantee at all of rescue.

Crimson Peak (2015)

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Music: Fernado Velazquez

Sound design: Randy Thom

It is an incredibly long time (literally, years) since I blogged about film music but today, in celebration of finishing the proofing on my cult TV book, I went to see Crimson Peak and for the first time in a very long time I am inspired to write. Not much has inspired me in film music of late. Crimson Peak is a marvellous gothic romp of a film, with ghosts literally coming out of the woodwork (and the floorboards) and more blood than you can shake a stick at: even the opening titles are drenched in a wash of red, and the film takes its name from the fact that the red clay of the hill on which haunted house is built turns the snow bright red in winter. The titles are accompanied by the sound of a child's voice singing an unaccompanied, haunting and slightly creepy song amidst massive electronically manipulated reverberation. Immediately, we are pointed toward horror: children's voices often feature in horror soundtracks where the film concerns a child in danger, so that the sound of a child singing from the soundtrack paradoxically indicates the threatening evil as much as the innocent child victim. Here, it's an interesting double bluff: in the first scene after the title we meet our heroine, Edith, as a ten year old at her mother's funeral, so the winsome child's voice is, we might suppose, Edith herself, the girl in peril at the centre of the narrative. But no, it's cleverer than that - oh, I do so love a clever score! Spoilers ahead. Much later in the film, we hear the same melody being played as a Chopinesque piano fantasia by Lucille, Edith's new sister in law, who turns out to be the  agent behind the evil and the horror driving the narrative. Lucille reveals that the melody is a lullaby she used to sing to her brother (now Edith's husband) when they were children; and near the end we learn that as a child, Lucille murdered their mother with a gigantic cleaver she has kept ever since as a memento of that happy occasion. The child's voice we hear in the titles is therefore arguably Lucille's and rather than the voice representing Edith, the child in danger that it usually does (for example, Alien 3, Sleepy Hollow), we belatedly discover that it is the voice of evil itself, the voice of Lucille as a child.

The other really interesting thing about the music of this film is that we effectively have two scores. On the one hand we have a sumptuous orchestral score that represents all things to do with the real world and the living, no matter how horrible, and the lullaby slips from diegetic to non-diegetic music throughout. On the other hand, we have sound design operating as music, using electronic sounds and electronically manipulated noises (drips, knocking sounds) to represent the Otherness of the many and various ghosts. The first appearance of this other sound world, when Edith's mother returns after the funeral to warn her about Crimson Peak (unfortunately, she should have warned her about Allerdale Hall as Crimson Peak is just a local nickname and Edith has already married and moved in before she hears it for the first time). In this first haunting, the sound design is at its most overtly composed, with very little obviously real sounds, and lots of electronics, but it establishes the extreme difference of the ghostly soundworld. In other haunting sequences, the boundary between sound design and musical composition is much less clearly defined, and the sound operates both as the sound of the ghosts themselves as they bump and slither around the house, and as a musical atmosphere and ambience for their presence. There is even, in the credits, a member of sound design team credited with "atmospheric sound design". This duality in the scoring strategy is itself a marvellously gothic construction: if the classic gothic castle is a site of decadent domesticity above with dank and dangerous cellars below in which God alone knows what lurks, then here the orchestral music presents us with the sumptuous world of the living 'above' and the noisy, unnatural and manipulated sound design of the dead 'below'. I really enjoyed this film: it's silly, over the top, quite revolting in places and having rather too much fun with itself at times but Mia Wasikowska as Edith does a knock up job of not just being a victim in need of being rescued (and turns out to be handy with shovel) and I could happily watch Tom Hiddleston reading the telephone directory, so watching him being tragic, bad and tormented all at the same time is a joy. And the music/ sound was deeply satisfying: inventive, interesting and rewarding to listen to. Hurrah!

Anna Karenina

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1781769/

Yikes, it’s been a while: sometimes, life just catches up and there’s no time for thinking about it. Which I supposed (caution: glib segue ahead!) is Anna Karenina’s problem.  I am having mixed feelings about this film overall: mostly, I liked it very much, but it looses its way at the end and (I don’t often say this) probably needed to be about 20 minutes longer. One minute, Anna has left her husband and is living with Vronsky; there is some vague mention of her wanting a divorce; within about 10 minutes, she’s addicted to morphine, become a raving paranoiac and suddenly throws herself under a train for no clear reason. And poor old Vronsky is a bit of an empty space: he’s very pretty but one doesn’t have a clue if there is anything going on between his ears, nor what he actually feels for Anna – his love for her is oddly unconvincing. So, sorry Mr Stoppard, but somewhere between what you wrote and whatever happened to your script in the edit, characters got a little thin and plot got a little rushed.

But the thing you cannot get away from is the beauty of the production. The majority of the action is filmed in a 19^th century theatre, which they constantly redress to provide us with various people’s homes, workplaces, ballrooms, streets, railway stations, tea rooms, ice rink, even a race-course at one point. Oh, and every now and then it gets to be a theatre. It’s very Brechtian, especially at the start, the stage machinery quite literally revealed, with the result that we are very aware that we are watching a narrative, a story told by actors, the self-conscious artifice of it keeping us at an emotional distance – it’s a game, a process, a story with a very visible frame (sometimes, literally, the proscenium arch of the theatre). And the music works as part of this as well. There are two basic types of music in the film: dance music, which draws attention to itself, and more conventional underscore, although the two cross over in significant places. The dance music predominates at the start – it’s quirky, hints of the Shostakovich jazz suites, self-consciously stylized in the same way that the action is at the start. As one scene ends, we make a transition from this, set in Anna’s brother’s offices, to him and his friend Konstantin going to dinner in a restaurant. The office workers strip off the top players of their clothing, and are transformed into waiters; the actors move scenery and props out of the way and bring in screens to create the restaurant; the camera, in a long tracking shot, follows all this as we move from one side of the theatre space to another (or do we just go around in a circle?) and as the camera tracks, so various musicians – a clarinettist, a tuba player, a singer, pass in and out of view, making clear that the music we are hearing is not simply underscore but is also within the scene as well. It is overtly theatrical: I spent the first 15 minutes of the film wondering why they’d bothered to make a film at all, rather than doing this on stage. The music by Joe Wright’s usual composer, Dario Marianelli) has a very Brechtian role in defining and drawing attention to the narrative space: later, after Konstantin has made his failed proposal to Princess Kitty (yes, that really is what she is called), he leaves her salon, where a ball is beginning, and climbs up onto the gantries above the stage: this is the ‘street’, outside the salon which occupies the stage. The music follows him: in the salon, the violin melody was that of a somewhat vibrato-heavy waltz; as he climbs to the catwalks, populated by the common people, it is transformed into something folkish, Klezmerish. From the catwalk, he looks back down into the salon, and as the camera follows his gaze, the violin seamlessly moves back to the elegant waltz.

And then the music stops for a while, and we have a series of scenes, in which we first meet Anna, where there is a great deal of conversation and musical silence, as if to try and say “OK, we have established that, for budgetary reasons, we are shooting this whole damn thing in a theatre rather than on location, and it’s all very arch and camp, sorry about that, but we had to make the theatre thing work somehow; but now we want to get on with the real story and get you emotionally engaged with it so no more music, let’s have some proper acting”. And I am in two minds whether it really works: the Brechtian distancing that arises from spending a lot of our time visibly in a theatre makes it a little difficult to really engage with the story, to start seeing the characters rather than the actors. It is apparent that we ‘see’ the theatre and its machinery much less clearly in the scenes involving Anna, Karenin and Vronsky on their own – there is a definite attempt to avoid distracting (alienating) us with the frame when we are with these characters.

Musically, the central theme is the waltz heard at the fateful ball where Vronsky dances with Anna and throws over Kitty. Here, obviously, the music is diegetic – everyone is dancing to it so obviously they can hear it, although there is no visible sign of the orchestra. But here again, they play a lot of games with theatrical artifice: when Vronksy persuades Anna to dance with him, all the other dancers freeze as they take to the floor, and only come back to life as the couple pass them; and the dancing itself is gorgeous and bizarre, made up of languidly nonsensical hand and arm gestures more than anything else, as if the dancers are becoming physically entwined, tied in knots that they weave and then extricate themselves from – it is graceful yet suggests an underlying anxiety, a highly stylized, abstracted set of gestures that might have started out as some kind of fight.  The waltz theme then becomes the love theme for Anna and Vronsky, sliding from ‘real’ diegetic music at the ball into the nondiegetic undescore; and seems to suggest that their tale is, like the choreography, a convoluted, anxious, elegant but unsettled dance that we know will not have a happy ending.

The only happy ending is the one for Kitty and Konstantin, who do finally get married and go to live in the countryside. They are also the only ones who ever seem to escape the theatre into the real world: Konstantin at one point literally walks out of the theatre onto a snow covered landscape, and pretty much all the location work concerns him  - he has an actual house (rather than a home created out of a corner of the theatre); and he and Kitty also have proper non-diegetic underscore, as if they are the only conventionally 'real' people in the whole film - they do not want to be part of the performance, but to get on with life away from the labyrinthine workings of the theatre that Anna singularly fails to escape.

Well, I was kidding myself if I ever thought I'd post anything in May or June, the two busiest months of my year. However, have managed to see a few films, several of which I have enjoyed very much (Avengers, Cabin in the Woods, even Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter) and some of which I have not (Snow White and the Huntsman, Red Lights). The Abraham Lincoln film was on one level enjoyable hokum and on another rather distasteful (it's fine that all the confederate troops were slaughtered at Gettysburg because they weren't actually men at all, you see, they were naughty vampires trying to take over America). Musically, nothing much has grabbed my attention in a big way (The Hunger Games rather spoilt me, raised my expectations too high). Nice little love theme for Abe and his missus, which is then picked up near the end for the Union troops getting killed on the first day at Gettysburg, which worked rather well, and a rollicking hero theme for Abe swinging his axe at the vampires. The Avengers has another lovely hero theme from Alan Silvestri, working very much with the classical trope with its rising open fifth, and in the minor key as tends to be the norm these days (superheroes can't afford to be too happy, you know: this superheroing tends to leave you all moody and conflicted); and it was a damn fine film with some killer dialogue (Doth mother know thou wearest her drapes?) that had the audience in stitches both times I saw it. Cabin in the Woods had fantastically forgettable music for the most part, although there was a lovely little sequence where the scary old loner from the gas station was on the phone to the scientist techies in the underground bunker, speaking in dark and menacing tones of doom and sacrifice with suitably ominous music, which suddenly cuts as he says "am I on speaker phone?" (which he is, and the three scientist are all cracking up listening to him). They apologise, tell him he's off speakerphone, and he continues his monologue, the music resuming: and then it cuts again as he says "I'm still on speakerphone, aren't I?", which of course he is. Anyway, that made me laugh. The whole film made me laugh, as well as making me feeling rather ill (I don't do slasher horror well, not even Joss Whedon's postmodernly funny slasher horror). Snow White was turgid and paint-dryingly dull at times, and Bella Swan (or whatever the girl's name is) CANNOT ACT. The final scene was horrific: her coronation, where she stood in her pretty dress holding a symbolically flowering tree branch (i.e. large twig) and the expression on her face mostly seemed to be "I feel ridiculous". And she looked it, too. Struth. And just don't get me started on Red Lights: killer cast, diabolically bad film. Anyway, I have a summer of superheroes ahead of me: more Batman, more Spider-Man, I'm happy. Having been quite disappointed with the music of The Dark Knight after the fabulous score for Batman Begins, I am only dimly hopeful that Mr Zimmer will have bothered to do more than phone in his score for the last film, but you never know. The all new Spider-Man (didn't we just have one of those?) has a James Horner score which means it might be interesting (he has not done a big superhero franchise score before, although he's done lots of fantasy and lots of hero scores) - I shall just have to find out later on this afternoon! And then I'm off to the utter joy that is the biennial conference of the Whedon Studies Association, where I will be delivering a paper on the music of Dollhouse. Whoop whoop!

The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/

Let's just start by saying no, I haven't read the books and I appreciate there are a lot of people out there who have who are really disappointed by the film to which I would just say a film is not a book and there simply is not time in the scale of a film to deal with the discursive level of commentary and critique underlying the narrative of books set in dystopian alternate realities that you all seem to be so miffed about not being properly addressed in the movie. You have to do things differently, and that sometimes leaves things feeling too compressed, too much missing from the much-loved book. A film is not book. This was a very good film. It did not need to discuss the poverty and oppression of the districts: we could see it - and that general point could be made about many of the other criticisms I have read from disappointed fans. Films are primarily visual: the basic rule of film and TV is "show, don't tell". And this film showed very well. Fantastic cast, well drawn characters, and a particularly credible and marvellous heroine.

And really good music! The score is by James Newton Howard who has always been 'steady' and essentially interesting (liked his work on The Sixth Sense and  Batman films) but has never really set my world alight before. This, however, is a very intelligent score. The film has three environments. We start in district 12, Catniss Everdeene's home, a poor rural mining community surround by forest where Catniss hunts for squirrels and the occasional deer. We then move the capital city, a wealthy, hi-tech enclave of privilege; and from there to the arena in which the Hunger Games are conducted, which is also a forest but not an entirely real one - it is controlled and fabricated by the Gamemakers. The music responds to these environments, but most of it belongs to Catniss. At the start of the film, in district 12, the music has a distinctly folkish feel to is, voices and strings; and then Catniss goes to the forest to hunt. As she retrieves her bow from its hiding place in a tree, the folk music is punctuated by a single harp note, a monotone that repeats at the beginning of each musical phrase. In scoring Catniss, JNH hits on a sublimely simple and lovely metaphor, connecting the idea of Catniss's bow with its single string to plucked strings which we hear in various guises throughout the score in her music, whether it's the monotone harp underneath other textures, or the use of plectrum dulcimer, guitar or banjo - all manner of plucked string instruments are heard in the score. But her bow can operate on a second level of musical metaphor, because although the archery bow is 'plucked' the musical bow is used to play the other string instruments, so the strings that characterize the folk music of district 12, and Catniss's own music, are therefore also potentially part of the same extended metaphor that places Catniss and her bow at the heart of the narrative.

The music of the capital city initially intrudes diegetically into district 12 as the music accompanying the promotional film that the inhabitants of 12 are made to watch before the two tributes are selected. This is classic film score music: a full orchestral score in a quasi late romantic idiom - it could have been written by John Williams on his day off. We hear exactly the same music during the tributes parade, confirming its function as a piece of source music associated by the Capitol with the games. Other than the contrast of folk strings with orchestra between these two music, the important difference is also one of drive. The music of Catniss and district 12 is thoughtful, sombre, subdued and utterly lacking in rhythmic drive; that of the Capitol is grandiose, overblown by contrast with the quieter folk music of district 12, and typically has an obvious drum beat under it, and so the sense of moving from one environment to another is captured in the contrasting tone and feel of the rural and urban spaces sonically as well as visual.

When we get into the arena where the hunger games are conducted, we are in a hybrid space: it looks like Catniss's much loved forest, but is in fact created and controlled by the city, so both types of music - the folkish and the pulse driven - are found here: but the sense of contrast as we move into the new environment is achieved through a slightly bizarre use of a piece of music by the composer Steve Reich, and extract from his Three Movements for Orchestra (1986). I say bizarre because for me it was a "who let Steve Reich in here" moment, the music simply too recognizable to sit comfortably within the film, shocking me back out into my own reality for a second, but I realize I am probably in a minority.... and in fact, the extreme tonal difference has that same effect of letting us know that we are somewhere quite other than before: it has the pulse driven element of the city music, but the woody percussion of the marimbas is a completely new timbre, perhaps evoking the forest, but certainly achieving that same shifting of tone for the new environment. 

But perhaps the thing I loved most about this film was its use of silence. One of the criticisms (as well as one of the main functions) of mainstream Hollywood scoring is the way it can evoke fairly specific emotions in the audience: the music can tell you how to feel, which is why directors often use it so much, as it can impose an interpretation on a scene that might otherwise be ambivalent, or heighten the emotion in a scene that otherwise lacks the emotional punch it needs to have. Without music, audiences tend to have to work harder to understand what is going on, and silence can also be unsettling and make one too aware of things around you in the cinema other than the film - the result is that a lot of mainstream films have huge amounts of music in them, and it becomes like wallpaper, pleasantly ignorable (as Satie would say) and is so busy filling up the gaps between the car chases and explosions that it never gets a chance to do anything particularly interesting . But not this film: part of the strength of the score is connected to the fact that most of the film's intense and emotionally charged moments are allowed to play without music chipping in to tell us what to feel, although the musically silent scenes are no less affecting for it. The result is a kind of stripped down emotional rawness: the acting, the scripting and the shooting are all sufficiently good that we don't need music to tell us how to feel and this very 'difficult' narrative (let's get kids to murder each other and turn it into a game show) has a stark emotional honesty as a result. Film music can easily become devalued by being overused, lazily used: I love it when a film doesn't (literally) overplay the music - it leaves both film and score stronger. Played without music, the choices that Catniss is forced into remain terrible and painful: they do not suffer the sentimentalizing gloss that music is often asked to bring to difficult situations in film. And that is something that the people who loved the book should take comfort from - those silences speak volumes for the seriousness with which this film has taken its story.