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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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Save Those Compact Discs!

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-Add in the degraded audio quality of most streaming, MP3 compression, or home-based Bluetooth equipment, and you are suddenly in the cheap seats behind the restrooms–some distance away from what can be heard from a studio master released as a CD

A few years back I wrote a piece about whether we were done collecting books and music.  Many people are, but it can be a mistake to abandon those once-loved CDs. What is interesting now is how streaming has come to dominate the music industry. Streaming means you pay a fee to access a vast library service with the music you want to hear.  In most cases its incredibly small royalties are a thumb in the eye to musicians, but it is ever so convenient for people who want wall to wall music without having to lift a finger. No collecting required. In 2019 Spotify had become the dominant form of music delivery, with other services like Pandora, radio and YouTube not far behind.

What a different world the music industry was in 1999, when 900 million compact discs were sold.  But in the years that followed, the CD lost favor and went into a near total collapse of sales.  Suddenly perfect digital copies could be made without additional purchases. By 2007, most of the huge brick and mortar stores like Tower Records and HMV were shuttered, and favorite form of retail therapy died with them. CDs now sell at the modest rate of 31 million copies a year, with Japan the only remaining major consumer. In fact some who study music industry trends in the United States barely notice this superior older format.

As for streaming, what benefits consumers is often a nightmare for performers. Fee-based streaming services put performers at the end of a meager financial food chain that was mostly tapped-out before they were paid. In 2019 the Canadian cellist Zoe Keating reported that her royalty for each stream of her music played by Spotify was $0.0054.

This short essay came to mind after reading a recent article from the Guardian’s Matt Charlton, who wondered if there was any point in holding on to the silver discs that solved many of the problems inherent in vinyl records. Some audiophiles will disagree, but modern CDs can offer stunning sound.  They also eliminated the problems created by physically trying to race a stylus through a narrow trough of vinyl. Clicks, pops, inner groove distortion, warping, and washed-out sound from worn down grooves are problems listeners no longer have to contend with. But as Charlton still sees it, CDs “are inherently unlovable, with none of the richness or tactile nature of vinyl, or the kooky, Urban Outfitters irony of tapes.”

His reasons don’t add up to much of an argument. Is he serious about the sonically handicapped cassette tapes that were originally designed for dictation? And what about “tactile vinyl” with grooves everywhere that you are not supposed to touch?  I also must have missed the concerts at Urban Outfitters.  Overall, I’m not feeling the vibe.

 

A CD has the capacity for sound accuracy higher than what Apple, Amazon and other music services are routinely streaming.

In fact, CDs are amazing as carriers of music and its supporting images and texts. The standard sampling rate of 44,000 Hz a second is a phenomenal rate for accurately rendering what microphones have heard (assuming your playback device has a decent digital-to-analogue converter.)  This is the big remaining asset of the CD; it has emerged as an easy way to hold on to what avid music listeners call “lossless” sound. That is, a CD has the capacity for sound accuracy far above what Apple, Amazon and other music services are routinely streaming. Add in more degrading streamed audio files like MP3 compression or Bluetooth equipment, and you suddenly only qualify for the cheap seats near the restrooms.

Of course there are some caveats. Many listeners seem to have trained their ears to not care about less-than-optimal sound.  And even a well-made CD won’t help what started out as a bad recording. In addition, if smaller cards and memory chips can now hold the same accurate audio content, the CD remains the most accessible medium we have for holding the complete package of music, notes and images that a carefully thought-out album represents. For me, new music starts from a physical CD, a personal “master,” before it is stored somewhere else as a high-quality audio file. What’s not to love about these small silver marvels?