1. INTRODUCTION Ludwig Wittgenstein posed the following question: how can one know something, but not be able to say that thing? To demonstrate, he asks the reader to say “how a clarinet sounds.”1 To ask a similar, admittedly synesthetic, question: what does sunlight sound like? It is difficult, if not impossible, to answer these questions with words. Figure 1.1: Stills from (left to right): a. The Seahawk (1942; music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold); b. “The Midnight Sun” from The Twilight Zone (1961; music by Nathan Van Cleave); c. Lawrence of Arabia (1962; music by Maurice Jarre); d. Spaceballs (1987; music by John Morris); e. Interview with the Vampire (1994; music by Elliot Goldenthal)2
Film composers, however, attempt to answer such questions routinely not with words, but with music. Musical answers to my hypothetical sunshine question, for instance, have been proposed countless times throughout cinematic history (Figure 1.1 gives five examples). Carolyn Abbate notes that in the silent film era “musicalized sound effects” like these for the sun “were often written into the score. As if sunlight, the luminous image, were indeed producing audible noise. But the audible noise is not realistic — it is a ‘rendering,’ a suggestion.”3 This music-as-sound-effects practice persisted even after (more realistic)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen = Philosophical Investigations, Rev. 4th ed. / by P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte.., Philosophical Investigations (Chichester, West Sussex, U.K.: Chichester, West Sussex, U.K., 2009), 36. 1
All film stills in this document are used in compliance with the U.S. Copyright Act, Section 107. See p. 115 for further publication details of the excerpted works. 2
Carolyn Abbate, “Sound Object Lessons,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 69, no. 3 (December 1, 2016): 821. 3
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