Noted With Interest

"Over the last ten years the first lesson in my course on Music and the Moving Image has begun with an well-tried commutation trick. I have attempted to focus attention, as tangibly as possible, on music’s ability to bring about radical changes in our interpretation of the images it accompanies. This old trick consists of playing the same thirty-second sequence three times in succession, first with no music, to establish the visual sequence of events, then with the music written expressly for the sequence, and finally with music of contrasting character. It is worth describing this procedure in a little detail in order to concretise music’s power in influencing our interpretation of concurrent events. That power is both manifest and elusive, and it is necessary to identify this contradiction if we wish to address the question of manipulation in relation to music and the moving image.1

"The musical commutation trick I play uses the title sequences from the original series of the British TV soap Emmerdale Farm (Hatch 1972).2 This footage consists almost entirely of one single, slow, smooth helicopter pan, shot from a few hundred feet in the air looking right and diagonally downwards. This visually legato pan takes the viewer from right to left over rolling green hills, over irregularly and ‘organically’ shaped fields bordered with stone walls (Yorkshire Dales in northern England); it continues, all in the same take, over a small village nestling in the valley, its houses built in grey stone, its churchyard flanked by large, round leafy trees (not winter). In the mid distance of the same helicopter sweep, a small car moves slowly, also left to right, past the village green. A final soft fade, the only edit in the thirty-second sequence, points the viewer towards a grey-stone farmhouse and farmyard set against a green hillside.

"The original music for these sequences, Tony Hatch’s Emmerdale Farm theme (1972), belongs unquestionably to the same basic European tradition of pastoral music as do ‘Dawn’ from Grieg’s Per Gynt, or the idyllic herding section in Rossini’s William Tell overture, or the pastoral symphony in Händel’s Messiah. Like those pieces, the Emmerdale Farm signature is in 6/8 time and performed at a leisurely pace ( = 72). The title music’s legato e cantabile oboe tune, which moves mainly in quavers, and whose individual phrases span an octave, is, with the exception of short suspensions that are immediately resolved, accompanied by piano arpeggios reminiscent of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.3 The circle-of-fifths progressions heard in the piano part are padded out by a full string orchestra playing held chords.4 The pastoral sphere of connotation was recognised from the music on other occasions when it was played without visual accompaniment to respondents unable to identify the piece. Asked to write down the most likely scenario for this music, almost all of them provided one of the following associations: country(side), British, romantic, melancholy, nostalgia.5

"The music of contrasting character which replaces the pastoral music in the third viewing of the same visual sequences is a ten-second phrase, repeated three times from the AC/DC song Girls Got Rhythm. The effect is immediate and dramatic. My students leap from their chairs and dance uncontrollably as the undeniable power of the Scots/Australian power pop geniuses circumvents their cerebra and mainlines primordial rhythms into their basal ganglia. In moments, the pastoral scene is transformed into a Celtic bacchanal..."

(Modesty prevents me from quoting further.)