All posts by Gary C. Woodward

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The Irony of Expansive War Music

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When are atrocities so bad that any attempt to represent them in beautiful music is a bit dishonest?

Unlikely as it seems, The City of Prague Philharmonic has produced wonderful Hollywood film scores for years.  They play the skill of the original studio musicians recording in the Sony/Streisand and  Warner/Eastwood scoring stages in Los Angeles. But listening to their sumptuous scores from war movies written by John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith and others reveals a vexing irony. It turns out that the music we humans want to hear while watching portrayals of the worst of our actions is frequently vivid and beautiful.  The uglier the war, the more affecting the score seems to be, as in John Williams’ “Hymn to the Fallen” used in Steven Spielberg’s searing World War II drama, Saving Private Ryan.

There seems to be a pattern in which we convert our presumed hatred of combat and death into laments that ennoble what should perhaps remain ugly.  When are atrocities so bad that any attempt to represent them in beautiful music is a bit dishonest?

There’s no shortage of answers.  Classic war films predictably tend to define “our side” as especially heroic, and they are not necessarily wrong. But the musical jingoism that often creeps in is maybe more reassuring that it should be.

More to the point, music is a non-verbal abstract of feeling. Empathy for war’s casualties is a way for the heart to offer its own compensating response.  Because violence begets regret and loss, it has its own rich musical vocabulary.  Musical laments are especially their own forms of  consolement. Williams’ popular theme from Schindler’s List, written in D- minor is a sorrowful expression for victims and survivors of the Holocaust.  The conversion of the core idea within a film into music has rarely been more effective.

Director, Stephen Spielberg, seems to understand that what is harrowing to watch on film might be tamed and explained by the universals expressed in musical conventions that we already know.  It also helps if you are working with John Williams.

Following a very different logic, it may also be true that war music can also perform a tribal function.  It asks those who respond to it to recognize group norms of pride, vindication and moral superiority that are often implicit in the musical tropes of groups bound by a shared and just cause.  Simple and primitive, perhaps, but listening to the Prague musicians saw their way through the music of Max Steiner’s score for Sergeant York (1941), or Randy Edelman’s for Gettysburg (1993), or Maurice Jarre’s for The Longest Day confirms that we can feel tribal vindication for even the darkest of acts.

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Hearing is Our Newest Sense

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The pop recording “High the Moon” was the audio equivalent of an early photograph, or the first photocopy of an original. It changed everything. 

Granted, the heading for this piece is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.  In broad terms, a bit less than 100 years ago sound arguably became the premier source of leisure and pleasure. Think of radio, recordings, sound on film, concerts and dances, audio reports of events, and the growth of music education. These are just a few of the cultural landmarks represented by the capture of ephemeral sound on the medium of magnetic tape.

To be sure, Thomas Edison starting making stylus-in-groove recordings in the late 1870s.  But the German invention of audio tape during World War II perfected recording, creating  a level of accuracy in musical reproduction that surpassed the early Edison technology.  With tape, sound as we know it began to throw off its previous history as a subordinate sense.  More recent digital recording developed in the 1980s was certainly a technological breakthrough, but offered only slightly better sound. Magnetic tape provided the true gateway to the world of captured auditory content.

The pathway to this rebirth was certainly helped by the growth of what was then the supermax medium of radio in the 1930s. Radio networks and their stations would also benefit from new tape machines made by Ampex and others, adding stunning clarity and opening up a range of recording options.

In the recording studio the new system yielded greater clarity, and allowed for many synchronous tracks. A musician could now create amazing audio effects that would have been difficult to duplicate in live performance.  As mentioned in my recently published The Sonic Imperative, one particular song especially turned jukeboxes across the nation into the musical equivalents of slot machines. The only difference was that most jukeboxes came up with the same winning result: Les Paul and Mary Ford’s How High the Moon. Rarely has a single pop record meant so much. Prior to 1951 few had ever heard anything quite like its sound-on-sound and multi-track effects. It would signal the acceleration of music processing that continues down to the present.

A little more about that song. . .

Our dilemma is that we live in a loud world our ears were not designed for. Think of noise as aural trash: stuff that piles up around us that we hardly notice because it has no visual presence.  But its there: at music concerts where the sound is punishingly loud, or in the everyday equipment of modern life like leaf blowers, hair dryers and vacuums.  Previews shown in movie theaters, for example, regularly play at about 100 dB: only slightly less than standing at the end of an airport runway.  With this kind of noise, a person’s ears will not survive intact to adulthood.  This is why one in three older adults have hearing loss. It turns out that our newest sense is also the most vulnerable.