Yes, I’m still alive.  Sorry for the lack of activity, but such is life in grad school some semesters.

I’ve just recently purchased the Film Score Monthly release of Leonard Rosenman’s Cobweb score (see the previous entry of Herr Vogler’s excellent FSFT5 Avant-garde film score).  And listening to it has made me go back and think of what other scores of Rosenman that I know…which is only two.  His score for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Beneath the Planet of the Apes (which is a great score, with the utterly creepy, atonal arrangements of hymns that the mutant humans sing to the bomb).  But listening to The Cobweb and also Edge of the City (which is also on the disc), and also given Beneath the Planet of the Apes, it is apparent that Rosenman is a film composer who did alot to bring 20th Century musical techniques to film after the heyday of Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner scores in the ’30s and ’40s.

In the excellent liner notes for the Cobweb release, Jeff Bond (who writes alot of reviews and articles for FSM and some other books) writes on Rosenman’s difficulty in trying to maintain a career as a film composer and a concert composer.  He studied with names familar to most music students: Luigi Dallapicolla, Roger Sessions, and Arnold Schoenberg, and was an up and comer when James Dean (who he gave piano lessons to) recommended him to score East of Eden, the film that put Dean on the map.

But after Rosenman became established in the film world, he found it hard to get his concert/chamber music performed, an unfortunate state of affiars that still persists today for composers trying to do both (composers like Toru Takemitsu are the exception in being able to maintain active careers in both).  And while Rosenman didn’t have much impact in concert music, listening to these early scores of his, Cobweb was only his second film, it is dissapointing that more people don’t know his name.  Sure, those who study and listen to film music know his name and appreciate him, but can his importance, especially to film music using 20th Century techniques, really be underestimated?

I’ve also been working Jerry Goldsmith’s Planet of the Apes score, hoping to do a project on it in my Post-Tonal analysis class, and it’s hard to imagine that score coming about had Rosenman not set the precendent beforehand with Cobweb.

Sorry that there isn’t anything more substantial after my long silence, but that’s it for now.

Hello dear readers.  I hope my abrupt departure has not caused anyone to go running to hills in fear that my life has been cut short by a “death panel” or some other such nonsense concocted by the Party Out of Power.  Sorry to drop in political commentary, but Kurosawa’s film Ikiru cannot help but make one think of the health care debate since it is about a man finding out he has only 6 moths to live and then trying to come to grips with his life and giving his remaining days meaning.  Granted, had this film taken place today, he might have had more time to live, but in the end, the question of the film is, “what has my life meant?”  But I’m not here to really discuss the film’s plot, but rather it’s sound and music…or rather, it’s lack.  One of the truly remarkable things about Kurosawa’s use of sound in this film is his manipulation of silence.

The first true silence occurs after our protagonist has received the news of his condition.  Kanji Watanabe (played beautifully by Takashi Shimura in one of his greatest roles), walks along a street but there is no sound.  As the scene continues, we realize that there isn’t just no sound indicating a quiet street, but literally no sound.  It is not until Watanabe takes a step into the street and is almost run down that the cacophony of the street comes screaming onto the audiotrack.  In many ways, this moment marks a structural break in the film, as it is this moment that Watanabe makes the decision that something has to change in his life.  Kurosawa uses similar aural cues in subsequent scenes to mark, literally, life-changing decisions of Watanabe’s (first the deafening sound of a train and then a chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’ – royalties paid to the estate of Patty and Mildred Hill? – in a restaurant).

But where Kurosawa’s use of silence is at its peak is in the last third of the film during the wake for Watanabe (yes, for the last 50 minutes of the film, the lead character is absent except for a photo and flashbacks).  To begin with, there is no underscoring for the wake scenes.  As recounted in Teruyo Nogami’s memoir, Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa, composer Fumio Hayasaka had written music for the scene, but after viewing a rough cut with the score, Kurosawa decided that the music overwhelmed the sequences and ordered it cut out.  The resulting sequence does indeed incur most of it’s power precisely becuase there is no score that could have made it more sentimental by it’s presence.  Instead, the absence of music creates another aural hole which parallels many of the temporal holes that the plot’s construction creates (a hole most visibly obvious by the absence of Watanabe as a living person in the last third of the film).

Where the silence is most deafening is when, many times, in the transition from flashback to present, the flashback will end with a long shot of a slowly weakening Watanabe in silence, and that silence will continue for a beat into the present and then the people at the wake will resume talking.  It is almost as if Kurosawa left the silent beat prior to saying ‘action’ in the final cut of the film.  In the end, he created a hole in the audiotrack, one that heightens the absence of the character of Watanabe.

Stephen Prince in The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa comments on the temporal “ellipses” in the film’s plot – how Watanabe will be absent and we’ll learn of his absence though dialogue from his co-workers or family, or though the occasional narrator.  I believe that Kurosawa very consciously uses these aural gaps in the wake scene to much the same end, just as Watanabe’s phyiscal absence to his co-workers is as if he is already fading from this world, the aural absence of sound reminds us of the loss.  The large silence on the street is almost our theme: Watanabe is so shocked by the news of his illness that he feels as if death has already taken him, but he returns when the sound returns – shocking both him and the viewer.

Kurosawa is a master of manipulating sound in his films, something that is rarely commented on by critics.  Yes, they will mention things such as the street scene, but I have yet to see anyone provide a description as detailed as those given to his visual technique.  It is my hope to one day rectify this deficiency.

(Note: This marks my 50th post on this blog…not all that amazing in the history of the blogosphere, but for me it is kind of impressive.  Consider the fact that my Livejournal has only 74 posts since I started it in 2004.)

Having now seen all but three films in official filmography of AkiraKurosawa, and having read some four books, and working on a fifth, this summer about the man, his life, films, and techniques, I’m starting to draw a few vague conclusions and ideas about his use of music.

First off is a tweaking of my thoughts on Rashomon.  While not backing off from the conclusions I drew in my paper (especially the idea of music and sound being another analytical tool for interpreting the film), but I’ve tweaked my thinking in light of hearing how Kurosawa uses sound in the films leading up to and following it.  Rashomon as a film is only 88 minutes in length with almost half of its running time having musical scoring.  While maybe it was not that unusual for Hollywood films of the era to have this percentage of score to film (I have no hard facts on this, but my general sense is that films of the 40s and early 50s had, in general, a large percentage of score to film), it does seem unusual for a Kurosawa film (I won’t say anything about Japanese film in general since I have seen very few non-Kurosawa films).

A good case in point is Kurosawa’s film Scandal, made just prior to Rashomon.  The film has very little underscoring.  I would venture to say, including end and closing titles, there is maybe 10-15 minutes total of score music, most of which is used during montage sequences.  (One caveat, though, the timing is an estimate based on only one viewing which was almost a monthago.  But what did stick with me is that there was very little non-diegetic music).

Kurosawa’s use, or lack thereof, of music reached it’s most minimal in 1955-57.  Of the three films made in that period, two have score music only during the opening and closing credits – those films being Record of a Living Being and The Lower Depths.  The exception being The Throne of Blood, which has some very interesting underscoring (or at least I remember it that way).  The lack of underscoring in the two films could be a factor of Fumio Hayasaka’s death, Kurosawa’s longtime composer-collaborator, during the filming of Record of a Living Being, but the fact that his replacement in the Kurosawa Team, Masaru Sato, seemed to have Kurosawa’s full confidence in Throne of Blood (the middle of the three films), makes that interpretation less likely.

So, if Rashomon represents a peak of percentage of scoring and Record and Lower Depths represent a peak of lack of scoring, and most films fall somewhere in between, what conclusions can we then draw about Kurosawa and music?  It is well stated that Kurosawa loved music, and would many time have classical pieces in mind when editing his films, and later on would temp in those pieces, much to the chagrin of Sato and, most famously, Toru Takemitsu (who walked out of the sound mixing sessions on Ran and told Kurosawa that he could do whatever he wanted to his music but take his name off the picture.  Peace, though, was achieved and Takemitsu returned).

The case of the amount of music in Rashomon versus the films before and after it, is an interesting one, and one that is answered in Kurosawa’s stated goal of trying to get back to a “silent film” aesthetic with the picture.  Not only was this evident in the stylized visual design and acting in the film (truly, one could watch it without subtitles and understand most of what’s going on), but also, as I said in the paper, the first woodcutter’s tale, which is almost without sound except for musical score, is very much in a silent film musical aesthetic – complete with “mickey mousing.”  What I didn’t really realize fully is that this silent film musical aesthetic carriers over into the other scored scenes.  Coming from our more modern perspective of films like Star Wars that have almost continuous scoring, it didn’t strike me as unusual.  Only in viewing it among Kurosawa’s other work did the comment of wanting to evoke a silent film aesthetic come into clear view: the scoring of the scenes in the forest is also an evocation of this aesthetic.

This again, though, brings us back to the question of why the forest scene scenes have music and those at the gate scenes do not (this was the main topic of my paper in which I answered the question in terms of an interpretationofthe film’s central mystery).  There are other issues surrounding the visual aesthetic, but those I will leave to others, my main topic is music.  The only time Kurosawa would approach this level of music scoring in his films again is with his two Sengoku-period epic from the 1980s – Kagemusha and Ran (again, I have no hard data to support this, but it was my sense when I viewed them).

But I can’t be 100% certain of this because I have only “watched” most of these films, not really studied them with a fine ear.  Should I continue this line of research to its logical end, I would next want to time the music cues in the films and compare percentage of music to film across Kurosawa’s career and see how his musical usage changed (not to mention how, in his later years, he seems to have given in and used the classical music he had temped in).

Kurosawa said time and again that music has a “multiplier effect” on the visual image and that one must be careful in its usage.  Kurosawa, many times, would use music very sparingly, especially towards the end of his career.  Though, interestingly, in his last two films (Rhapsody in August and Madadayo), there are many scenes of group singing.  These harken back to Kurosawa’s memories of childhood and the songs he would sing at school.  Also, as recalled in Teruyo Nagami’s Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa, the director would always gather the cast and crew at the end of the days shoot for food and drinking, and many times Kurosawa would lead the assembled people in old school songs (very much echoing the party scenes in Madadayo).

The most important thing, I think, though is understanding the function of music in a Kurosawa film.  As I indicated in my Rashomon paper, the aesthetic question of is the music “good” or not doesn’t interest me nearly as much as that of function and structure.  I’ve never much liked aesthetic value judgement because they have always seemed subjective no matter the amount of philosophy you but behind them.  And it for the reason of function and structure that Kurosawa interests me, not only did I enjoy his films, but I also find how the man used music – and his construction of the films themselves – interesting.

I’m leaving on a roughly week and a half vacation tomorrow and have a 9 hour drive in front of me.  For this drive, I am proposing to myself an experiment: can I listen to the scores of all six Star Wars films during that drive…and still emerge with my sanity?  For this drive I will be using the two-disc sets of Episodes I, IV, V, VI and the standard one-disc releases of Episodes II, III (to my knowledge, there have yet to be complete recording releases of either of those films).  So if my math is correct, that is 10 discs of John Williams goodness.  I’ll let you know the results sometime on Friday or this weekend, after I’ve recovered.  Also, FSFT5 will be going up later tonight since I doubt I will be in any shape to write it tomorrow evening.

Exciting News!!!  The complete score for Star Trek II has been released.  Go buy it now!