Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utcsrgv.UUCP Path: utzoo!utcsrgv!oscar From: oscar@utcsrgv.UUCP (Oscar M. Nierstrasz) Newsgroups: net.music Subject: Re: sound and vision - something for everyone Message-ID: <3316@utcsrgv.UUCP> Date: Sun, 19-Feb-84 23:37:13 EST Article-I.D.: utcsrgv.3316 Posted: Sun Feb 19 23:37:13 1984 Date-Received: Mon, 20-Feb-84 00:30:52 EST References: <6783@unc.UUCP> Organization: CSRG, University of Toronto Lines: 79 Of the power of images to move and inspire, much has already been said. Of the worthlessness of television, much too has been said -- I haven't watched TV (regularly) since 1976. This matter about music and image, however .... I find not so much that music evokes images so much as it does emotions, or even, more importantly, *programmed responses*. I can't listen to Also Sprach ... or the Blue Danube Waltz without thinking of 2001, or to Singin' in the Rain without remembering Alex in A Clockwork Orange. These images, or emotions, are *after the fact*, however. Most of what I listen to inspires no image whatsoever, the exceptions being opera and programme (or `programmatic') music. Like being on drugs or being asleep, you see whatever you happen to be thinking about. If the music evokes an emotion, that emotion may spark images that are associated with that emotion -- a sort of Pavlovian response. It is *you* that provides the image, and it will be different for everyone. (Again, the exceptions being for some well-established image-evoking cliches, leitmotivs, or what-you-will.) A fine example of how the mind can be triggered by something as simple as a snatch of music or a particular phrase occurs in the writing of Tom Wolfe: Wolfe is fond of creating `macros' or `global variables' that automatically expand whenever you encounter them. The device is very simple yet astonishingly effective. In "The Right Stuff", for example, he describes early on the Precise Meaning of the euphemism "burned beyond recognition". He explains how it *is* a euphemism, and then he goes into gruesome detail for a page or two explaining what is Truly Meant by this oh-so-genteel turn of phrase. 'Nuff said, says Tom. Every time after this that he mentions this phrase, *without adding anything more*, the reader instantly fills in the missing detail with a veritable flood of ghastly images. Of course, Tom Wolfe has deliberately set us up, but this is an excellent illustration of what happen, I suspect, whenever we say, Oh, this music reminds me of such-and-so -- don't you *see* that? Sometimes these associations are set up publicly, so that the playing of The National Anthem (pick yer faverite) will illicit a certain response from all citizenry alike, and other times they manifest themselves privately: "It's *our* song!" In the two-hour epilogue to Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder gives us *his* rendition of the hero's `dream' (a coma-like revery that is the only possible reaction to the events preceding.) The story is set in 1928, but Fassbinder uses such music as Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen etc. etc. in this part of the film. He *doesn't* use this music elsewhere, but then only here are we seeing *Fassbinder's* dream of Biberkopf's dream. The music, blatantly anachronistic, is not out-of-place if we can accept the premise that this is a *dream*. (After 13 hours of this story, we are ready to accept *anything*!) In a dream, anything makes sense. We do not impose the limitation that everything be logical. Rather, we flow from thought to thought, image to image, like a stone skipping along the surface of a pond. Think of the dreams that you've had and remembered -- how often does the beginning of the dream have nothing to do with the end? Rather, each part leads to another without there necessarily being any grand pattern to the whole mess. Music can set one off on a spree of daydreaming that brings forth images as they do in real dreams. In Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder was using music that *he felt* belonged to the images he was showing us, the ideas he was trying to express. Film, however, is a medium of communication, which can only succeed if the language can be recognized. Fassbinder, therefore, must have been counting on us to bring to the film through the music some of the same associations that it had for him. (This would, of course, break down if Leonard Cohen reminded him of a thwarted love affair that he had that reminded him of Biberkopf, but we, the audience, have no way of knowing about.) So, yes, I think that music can evoke images, but it does so in complex and often personal ways that may have nothing to do with `what the composer intended' (as if that had anything to do with anything). Yes, propagandists and advertising executives can set up associations between pieces of music and images or ideas. Yes, an entire generation can have a particular association between a piece of music and an image that other generations do not (the first few notes of Beethoven's Fifth to anyone who heard German broadcasts throughout WW II; Beatles' music to kids growing up in the Sixties; ...). And yes, music may not bring forth any image whatsoever. For me it usually doesn't. Oscar Nierstrasz @ utcsrgv!oscar