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Catching Dreams: Editing Film Scores for Publication

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Abstract

There is a need for published film-score editions in film musicology, both to preserve the contents of manuscripts and to aid critical readings of films. How to accomplish this, without re-inscribing the Romantic conceptions of authorship commonly associated with edition creation, is the subject of this article. After considering the relevant editorial problems and models, a postmodern ‘anti-edition’ is proposed, using examples drawn from Korngold's score for The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2007

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References

1 In the UK, for instance, the PAL colour system in use in domestic televisions runs video at 25, rather than the cinematic 24, frames a second. This increase in speed means that pitch is raised by about a semitone.Google Scholar

2 In the manuscript sources for The Adventures of Robin Hood (Warner Bros., 1938), for example, both the composer (Erich Wolfgang Korngold) and his orchestrators use a musical shorthand to avoid the necessity of writing out repeated material.Google Scholar

3 Silent-film scores may be considered an exception to this statement.Google Scholar

4 Claudia Gorbman, for example, has written that ‘to judge film music as one judges “pure” music is to ignore its status as a collaboration that is the film. Ultimately it is the narrative context, the interrelations between music and the rest of the film's system, that determines the effectiveness of film music.‘ Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington, IN, 1987), 12. In addition, preparing an edition could involve separating the non-diegetic score from diegetic/source music, thus ignoring a potentially integral part of the score.Google Scholar

5 See Flinn, Caryl, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton, NJ, 1992), and Claudia Gorbman, ‘Film Music’, The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (Oxford, 1998), 4350.Google Scholar

6 See Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films, with a new introduction by Graham McCann (London, 1994).Google Scholar

7 Flinn, Strains of Utopia, 14.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., 30.Google Scholar

9 Brown, Royal S., for example, is almost vitriolic in his condemnation of those who disturb the ‘intentions’ of composers (Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music, Berkeley, CA, 1994, 64, 115). Similarly, the recently founded Journal of Film Music seems to stress film music's links with high art culture. In an issue devoted to Bernard Herrmann (in itself a canonizing act), William H. Rosar entitles his editorial ‘Bernard Herrmann: The Beethoven of Film Music?‘ (Journal of Film Music, 1 (2003), 121–51).Google Scholar

10 Ben Winters, Erich Wolfgang Korngold's The Adventures of Robin Hood: A Film Score Guide (Lanham, MD, 2007).Google Scholar

11 The composition of scores during the studio era (c. 1930–c. 1950), for example, frequently involved multiple composers and orchestrators (see Raksin, David, ‘Holding a Nineteenth Century Pedal at Twentieth Century Fox’, Film Music I, ed. Clifford McCarty, New York, 1989, 167–81 (pp. 171–3)). The changes a score could go through as it moved through the different stages of its production are arguably best displayed in notational format.Google Scholar

12 See Parker, Roger, Leonora's Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 6199.Google Scholar

13 In, for example, Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London, 1977), 155–64, and S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York, 1974).Google Scholar

14 Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago, 1983), 8990.Google Scholar

15 Roger Parker, for example, in Leonora's Last Act, explores the idea of opera as a multiply authored text with competing and destabilizing authorial intentions on the part of composer, librettist, impresario, set designers, régisseurs and principal singers.Google Scholar

16 Philip Gaskell, From Writer to Reader: Studies in Editorial Method (Oxford, 1978), 6.Google Scholar

17 McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, 8.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., 87.Google Scholar

19 The significance of the work-concept has provoked a great deal of debate in recent musicology. See, for example, the contributions to The Musical Work: Reality or Invention?, ed. Michael Talbot (Liverpool, 2000), made by Reinhard Strohm (‘Looking Back at Ourselves: The Problem with the Musical Work-Concept’, 128–52) and Lydia Goehr ('“On the Problems of Dating” or “Looking Backward and Forward with Strohm”’, 231–46). Harold Powers's article ‘A Canonical Museum of Imaginary Music’, Current Musicology, 60–61 (1996), 525, makes an interesting contribution to the debate in its discussion of the historical, cultural and geographical contingency of the work-concept. There are, of course, commercial considerations that also come into play: in trying to pin down a fluid tradition, be it literary or musical, as a unified ‘work’ suitable for mass audience consumption (whatever the level of critical aptitude assumed), the edited text cannot avoid some distortion.Google Scholar

20 The 1942 Warner Bros. film They Died with their Boots On, scored by Max Steiner, for example, uses musical material previously found in Santa Fe Trail (1940), Virginia City(1940), Gold is Where You Find It (1938) and Dodge City (1939). See Daubney, Kate, Max Steiner's Now Voyager: A Film Score Guide (Westport, CT, 2000), 10.Google Scholar

21 I am thinking here not of a symphonic suite adapted by a composer from a score and presented as a separate work, but of the possibility of playing large chunks of material directly from the full score.Google Scholar

22 The practice of revisiting films and releasing ‘director's cuts’ or ‘special editions’ produces these situations in abundance. One particularly unusual destination for the score is in the form of a narrated radio broadcast. On 11 May 1938, for example, Korngold's music for The Adventures of Robin Hood was broadcast along with narration by the actor Basil Rathbone. This was a shortened version adapted directly from the full score and trailer music, and consequently differs markedly from the score heard in the film.Google Scholar

23 John Caldwell, Editing Early Music (2nd edn, Oxford, 1994), 2.Google Scholar

24 The perceived boundaries between the diegetic and non-diegetic are, of course, not always clear-cut. See, for example, Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (New York, 2001), 42–9. While the manuscript sources may make it clear what does or does not belong to the musical ‘score’, a ‘performing edition’ of a film score would necessarily lose much that is ‘performed’ on screen.Google Scholar

25 Interestingly, no mention is made in the titles of the composer(s) of the score (supposedly Franz Waxman and William Lava), though the musical director (Leo F. Forbstein) and the composer of the film's theme song, ‘How Little We Know’ (Carmichael), are named.Google Scholar

26 See the pivotal scenes toward the end of the movie in Harry's room: the sound of Cricket's band can be clearly heard from the lobby below. Though the viewer/listener knows the music is diegetic, the source is hidden. In an earlier scene, as Johnson is killed by a stray bullet, Cricket intones a mournful tune (a version of Gustav Lange's Blumenlied) on the piano, much like a non-diegetic cue, only to be told to ‘cut it out’ by Harry.Google Scholar

27 Of course, to include them, assuming they were not fully notated in advance, might require a monumental effort, transcribing Carmichael's improvisatory style.Google Scholar

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29 For example, the film's producer, Hal Wallis, is known to have provided copious cutting notes concerning musical placement for other contemporaneous scores such as Captain Blood (see Kalinak, Kathryn, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film, Madison, WI, 1992, 76–7) and Casablanca (see Behlmer, Rudy, Inside Warner Bros. (1935–1951), London, 1986, 216). In this case, changes were made to the end of the cue following the film's first sneak preview in Pomona, California. An extra day's scoring session was undertaken on 11 April 1938 to revise the ending of 8A, in addition to changes made to other parts of the score. No evidence exists in the Warner Bros. archives to indicate on whose authority the changes were sanctioned, but Hal Wallis and Leo Forbstein seem the most likely candidates.Google Scholar

30 Indeed, in his four ‘constituent principles’ of editing, James Grier makes it clear that, for him, the task of editing is grounded in historical inquiry. See Grier, James, The Critical Editing of Music: History, Method, and Practice (Cambridge, 1996), 8.Google Scholar

31 See Andrew Porter's review ‘Giuseppe Verdi, Don Carlos: Edizione integrale delle varie versioni in cinque e in quattro atti (comprendente gli inediti verdiani), piano-vocal score with French and Italian texts, edited by Ursula Günther (and Luciano Petazzoni), 2 vols., Milan: G. Ricordi, 1980‘, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 35 (1982), 360–70 (p. 362).Google Scholar

32 Suzanne Scherr, ‘Editing Puccini's Operas: The Case of “Manon Lescaut”‘, Acta musicologica, 62 (1990), 6281 (p. 63).Google Scholar

33 Grier, The Critical Editing of Music, 157.Google Scholar

34 While this may be partly a commercial consideration (Grier advocates placing the commentary at the back rather than on the same page, so that the text may form the basis of a commercial edition; see Grier, The Critical Editing of Music, 157), the emphasis throughout Grier's book is understandably performance-centred.Google Scholar

35 Philip Gossett, ‘Toward a Critical Edition of Macbeth’, Verdi's Macbeth: A Sourcebook, ed. David Rosen and Andrew Porter (New York, 1984), 199–209 (p. 199).Google Scholar

36 The Works of Giuseppe Verdi, 1/5, ed. Claudio Gallico (Chicago and Milan, 1985), xxii.Google Scholar

37 See, for example, The Adventures of Robin Hood, ed. Rudy Behlmer (Madison, WI, 1979), 7.Google Scholar

38 Ibid., 8. What this actually means is not discussed. A sample facsimile page might have been useful to illustrate the readability problems with the original format.Google Scholar

39 To Have and Have Not, ed. Bruce F. Kawin (Madison, WI, 1980).Google Scholar

40 Ibid., 185.Google Scholar

41 Presumably Kawin has transcribed this dialogue himself from a print of the film, though he does not confirm this. The overall effect is a little unusual in that the transcribed dialogue sections contain virtually no stage directions. It is very clear, therefore, that these parts are intended to be read with direct reference to the film itself.Google Scholar

42 Kawin acknowledges, however, that certain sources were unavailable to him: he was unable to examine the ‘Revised Final’ screenplay dated 18 February 1944, extant and housed at the University of Southern California but not available for access, and some of the drafts of scenes by another writer, Cleve F. Adams (To Have and Have Not, ed. Kawin, 27–8).Google Scholar

43 Other examples in this series include The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, ed. James Naremore (Madison, WI, 1979). In his ‘Annotations to the Screenplay’, Naremore identifies which lines of the presented script are missing in the film, translates any Spanish dialogue, and notes how the script differs from both the film and the original novel.Google Scholar

44 The Marx Brothers: Monkey Business, Duck Soup and A Day at the Races, ed. Karl French (London, 1993), 6.Google Scholar

45 The publication of Mike Figgis's screenplay for One Night Stand (London, 1997), for example, contains only a note that ‘the following text represents the state of the screenplay as pre-production was about to begin’ (p. xxxi). Whether this is an editorial decision that is meant to privilege the author and present the screenplay as an autonomous ‘work of art’ separate from its realization in film is an interesting notion about which we can but guess, since there is no critical commentary or editorial discussion.Google Scholar

46 Budd Schulberg, On the Waterfront, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (London, 1991), 2.Google Scholar

47 The Marx Brothers, ed. French, 4.Google Scholar

48 This is no doubt helped when any authorial claims die along with the writers. Editions of screenplays by living screenwriters are understandably more aware of how the screenwriter's role in the process should be presented.Google Scholar

49 Indeed, I doubt the question is ever seriously considered in any publication of a screenplay. There seems to be a tacit acceptance that a ‘play’ destined for the screen cannot then be performed on the stage or reperformed on screen. Clearly, there are exceptions: remaking a film using the same screenplay has been tried (e.g. Psycho, 1998), though to almost universal condemnation. Why, then, do we naturally accept the convention of performing the film score on its own? Admittedly, it is a lot easier to reperform a film score than to recreate the dialogue and mise-en-scène of a movie screenplay effectively, yet this does not explain the convention entirely. Perhaps it is merely a result of years of doing the same with opera, extracting ‘bleeding chunks’ (in Tovey's famous phrase) and presenting them in the concert hall.Google Scholar

50 That said, in the Wisconsin screenplay for To Have and Have Not, Bruce Kawin claims that ‘it is also that auteur critic's dream, a film that clearly reveals the guiding influence and personal vision of a single artist, Howard Hawks’ (p. 9). Yet, because he is discussing the screenplay and not the mise-en-scène, Kawin maintains an approach that recognizes the complexity of the question of authorship.Google Scholar

51 Four complete edited cues from this film can be found in the appendix to my ‘Korngold's Merry Men: Music and Authorship in the Hollywood Studio System’ (D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 2005).Google Scholar

52 Grier, The Critical Editing of Music, 67.Google Scholar

53 Jeffrey Kallberg, ‘Are Variants a Problem? “Composer's Intentions” in Editing Chopin’, Chopin Studies 3, ed. Jim Samson (Warsaw, 1990), 257–67 (pp. 258–9).Google Scholar

54 Fortunately many movie studios have excellent archives, but we face, to some extent, problems similar to those of the editors of medieval music in locating missing music. See H. Stephen Wright, ‘The Materials of Film Music: Their Nature and Accessibility’, Film Music I, ed. Clifford McCarty (New York, 1989), 317, for a discussion of film-score archives.Google Scholar

55 Undoubtedly, the often prohibitive costs associated with copyright restrictions are a major barrier for many publications looking to reproduce film-music extracts.Google Scholar

56 Fred Karlin and Rayburn Wright, On the Track: A Guide to Contemporary Film Scoring (New York, 1990).Google Scholar

57 For a thorough explanation of these aids to recording, see Lustig, Milton, Music Editing for the Motion Pictures (New York, 1980), especially Chapter 5, ‘What is a Click?‘, and the discussion of the Newman system of flutter punches on pp. 107–14.Google Scholar

58 From the evidence of many short scores, it seems a common practice for the conductor to use the short rather than the full score for the recording session.Google Scholar

59 As these extracts are merely supporting their text, Karlin and Wright make no editorial claims. There is, therefore, no statement of editorial procedure that might explain what decisions were made when preparing the extracts.Google Scholar

60 Gustav Mahler: A Performing Version of the Draft for the Tenth Symphony, prepared by Deryck Cooke in collaboration with Berthold Goldschmidt, Colin Matthews and David Matthews (London, 1989).Google Scholar

61 Ibid., 165.Google Scholar

62 Such judgments should be made with great circumspection since we cannot guarantee that the composer did not communicate information about his preferred orchestration to the orchestrator orally or in some other unavailable manner. This approach would in any case be able to demonstrate what, in all likelihood, was not a creative contribution by an orchestrator.Google Scholar

63 Verdi, Stiffelio, The Works of Giuseppe Verdi, 1/16, ed. Kathleen Kuzmick Hansell (Chicago and Milan, 2003), 268. The marking is discussed on p. xxxviii.Google Scholar

64 Hector Berlioz, Incomplete Works, New Berlioz Edition, 4, ed. Ric Graebner and Paul Banks (Kassel, 2002), 134–71.Google Scholar

65 Both Milan Roder and Hugo Friedhofer, for example, seem to have used manuscript paper from the Kellaway-Ide Company in Los Angeles for their work on The Adventures of Robin Hood. Roder's choice of paper, however, differs slightly from Friedhofer's in its pre-printed layout.Google Scholar

66 Some screenplay editions (To Have and Have Not, for example) place the photos in a separate section before or after the screenplay itself. In this context, these function more in the manner of ‘eye candy’ than as any useful indicator of the film's relation to the screenplay. Others (On the Waterfront), in distributing the photos throughout the screenplay at appropriate places, at least suggest something about the visual aspect of the film at that point.Google Scholar

67 See Grier, The Critical Editing of Music, 158.Google Scholar