ALMOST everyone has experienced that moment during a piece of music that goes beyond simply listening and becomes an emotion with no input from conscious thought.
From a slow dance to a triumphant sporting achievement, music has the ability to take us back to an instant in time.
Even a few notes can evoke individual memories and change your mood entirely, but is it the piece itself that creates the emotion or the associations that we have with it – and what about the ‘cultural memory’ of a tune that takes fans, a group or even an entire nation back to something they’ve experienced together?
Whether a full shiver down the spine or a simple sense of foreboding, concert and drama producers have long understood the effect that music can have – and have exploited it. Like canned laughter, many American dramas would be lost without music to tell viewers when to feel sad, happy or scared.
A recognised piece of music is often used to create a parody or ‘in-joke’ but this relies upon the audience being of the right age and experience to understand the reference – and remembering it correctly. Two low notes with a minor second interval invoke the arrival of something with large teeth from John Williams’s Jaws – and less scary arrivals in a huge variety of comedy situations since.
High, sawing violins regress many to the shower scene in Psycho but are unlikely to scare anyone who doesn’t understand the reference. Composer Bernard Herrmann went against the tradition of low notes for ‘something’s coming’ and used only strings for The Murder. This iconic theme nearly didn’t make it into the film as the director, the authoritarian Alfred Hitchcock, had decreed that the shower scene should be silent. After hearing the piece, even Hitchcock had the grace to admit that he was wrong.
The Jersey Symphony Orchestra has just performed The Planets Suite and Carmina Burana, both infamous for creating a sultry, even demonic, atmosphere in many of their movements. Both have been reused in modern culture as a shorthand for ‘scary’, but what have the original pieces to do with their modern uses – and are we falling for an image that’s now got little to do with the original composers?
Mars the Bringer of War is the most often reused movement from Holst’s The Planets Suite with its low, building chords giving listeners the definite sense of something unwanted sneaking up on the world. The ominous first section has been featured in everything from the Quatermass television series to songs by Led Zeppelin, King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer and definitely creates its own mood without any knowledge of its original setting.
The other piece performed brilliantly by the JSO was Carmina Burana, with its hundred strong Chorus doing special justice to the brooding opening, O Fortuna. This often brings to mind those eerie scenes from the film The Omen with the child Damien inflicting his own particular tantrums on all around him. If it does it for you, you’re part of a huge cultural misdirection encouraged by television programmes from Only Fools And Horses to The X-Factor.
Not one piece of Carmina Burana appeared in The Omen. All the music was original, composed by Jerry Goldsmith and won him an Oscar – the only vague similarity is that it included Latin chanting.
Even if Carmina seems to have dark overtones, the piece itself owes less to demons and more to sex. Carl Orff took his lyrics from Medieval poetry written by men about to enter a monastery. These men were, predictably, preoccupied by what they were having to give up including drinking, sex and, in one memorable section, what it might be like to be a swan roasting on a spit.
The film Excalibur did use Carmina Burana, as did the less culturally memorable Jackass: The Movie – but never The Omen. Musical purists bemoan this popular transfer of memory and Only Fools And Horses has a lot to answer for – from the time when Del Boy announced that he was having a son to the moment he named him Damien, the producers played Carmina Burana in the background to hint at a demonic connection. Not accurate, but an effective way of borrowing our collective memory for effect.
O Fortuna did, however, appear in an Old Spice aftershave advert. To anyone who lived through the 1970s near a male who drenched himself in the stuff, this was quite scary enough.
Classical or modern, music has the power to affect human emotions even if our conscious mind tries to object. Whether it is the original intention of the composer that pushes the buttons or where the music has been since (or where we think it’s been), it can provide a safe, legal and welcome way to lift us out of the ordinary for just a few minutes at a time.
• Picture: John Williams produced suitably scary music for the film Jaws
Article posted on 5th August, 2008 - 3.00pm
