The hearing loss of film theory eventually made way for a return to the interest in sound and music that had been integral to early sound-film theory, programmatically in the 1980 ‘Film/Sound’ special issue of Yale French Studies mentioned above. The quantity of film-music literature picked up as well, but widely read books such as Claudia Gorbman’s Unheard Melodies (1987) or Royal S. Brown’s Overtones and Undertones (1994) still show traces of the older, synoptic model (as does Helga de La Motte-Haber and Hans Emons’ Filmmusik in 1980), though new theoretical concerns now come to the fore.
Its balancing of survey and theoretical perspectives new to film musicology made Gorbman’s film-music book the first port of call for a generation: it uses ideas from semiotics, narratology and suture theory to explain the workings of underscoring in narrative fiction films, and applies its tools to classic Hollywood as well as to René Clair and Jean Vigo. The most eye- (or ear-)catching idea gave the book its title: that the melodies of film scores usually go unheard, evading conscious audience awareness. Already Arnheim in 1932 had averred that ‘film music was always good if one did not notice it’ (2002 [1932], 253; my translation), one of Adorno’s and Eisler’s bugbears. Gorbman recasts it via the concept of suture: the idea that film needs to overcome the ontological gulf between the viewer and the story on the screen, and that it has developed ways to suture that gap, to stitch the viewer into involvement with the narrative (1987, 53–69). Visual strategies were crucial to suture theory, for example shot‒countershot sequences. Music
offered another thread for the stitching of ‘shot to shot, narrative event to meaning, spectator to narrative, spectator to audience’ (ibid., 55), the more so since most viewers lack the concepts to assess critically the effects of musical techniques.
Suture is just one concept from what Bordwell ironically characterized as Grand Theory (1996): the confluence of ideas from (mainly Lacanian) psychoanalysis, (post)structuralist literary theory and (post)Marxist sociology that became a major strand of film theory in the 1970s (from hereon written
‘Theory’ to distinguish this complex of ideas from the generic term). Different strands of Theory try to show how cinema – as an institution, as a technology, as a (prefabricated) experience, as a narrative medium – and the structuring and editing techniques of film create illusions: of realism, of continuity and coherence, of meaning, of authority, of subject identity and connection, illusions reducing the viewer to a cog in an ideological machine. Despite the tempting capacity of music to help bring about the quasi-dream state cinema engenders (Baudry 1976), music has not played a significant role in Theory, nor the latter in film musicology. (Jeff Smith [1996] criticizes the idea of
‘unheard melodies’ with regard to Gorbman 1987 and Flinn 1992; Buhler 2014b discusses psychoanalytically grounded theories mainly with regard to film sound overall, with few references specifically to music.) One reason may be that film musicology discovered Theory when its heyday was coming to an end; another reason may be that musicology does not have a tradition of the ideas that informed Theory (and much film musicology was done by musicologists). The cachet of Theory has waned, together with psychoanalysis as a psychological theory, and with the socio-political ideas that had entered cultural theory with the Frankfurt School of social philosophers, Adorno in particular. Even if ‘critical theory generally understands psychoanalysis not as providing a true account of innate psychological forces … but rather as
providing an accurate model for how culture shapes, channels and deforms those psychological forces’ (Buhler 2014b, 383), the latter is not independent of the former, and Theory as a social theory is no less problematic than as a psychological one. But ideas about cinema as a dream-machine, and about sound and of music in it, may be partly recoverable in other theoretical frameworks, even if their original foundations have become weakened.
More durable may be the semiotic and narratological perspectives in Gorbman’s book. Semiotic functions of film music had long been a strand of the literature, even avant la lettre: the use of commonly understood musical codes to suggest time, place, setting, characters; the provision of an experiential context by establishing mood and pace; the interpretation of story and images by underlining aspects of them – in short, the creation, reinforcement and modification of filmic signification through music.
However, semiotics are more prominent in analyses of individual films and repertoires of films, often done in DIY fashion, without an explicit theoretical framework (not necessarily a bad thing); coherent theoretical or methodological models are relatively rare. The most elaborate one, Philip Tagg’s ‘musematic’ analysis, was developed for television music (Tagg 2000; Tagg and Clarida 2003 applies the idea to a wider range of television music);
other theoretical approaches to film-music semiotics can be found in Lexmann 2006 and Chattah 2006 (which distinguishes between semiotics as a focus on the relationship between signs and what they signify, and pragmatics as a focus on the relationship between signs and their users and contexts).
As with semiotics, narratological concepts had been applied to film music long before narratology came into play by name, chiefly in the distinction between ‘source music’ and ‘scoring’: music that has a source in the image (or suggested off-screen space) and music that has not, i.e. music on different levels of narration. Many different terms have been used for, more or less, this
distinction (see Bullerjahn 2014, 19–24 for a list), but the most common are diegetic and nondiegetic (or extradiegetic) music (see Gorbman 1980 and 1987, 11–30). To replace old terms by new ones needs a justification, and the obvious one is that ‘source music’ and ‘scoring’ are specific to the craft of film music, while ‘diegetic’ and ‘nondiegetic’ link into a theoretical system, developed by Gérard Genette (who borrowed diégèse from Étienne Souriau:
see Genette 1980 [1972], 27), but also common in film studies, and related to the story/discourse distinction more common in literary studies (see Heldt 2013, 19–23 and 49–51 for the terminological background). Film musicology has rarely ventured beyond the basic diegetic/nondiegetic distinction. Gorbman applied Genette’s term ‘metadiegetic’ to music which might be interpreted as being in a character’s mind (1987, 22–3), problematic because the embedded narration to which Genette applies it differs from Gorbman’s usage (see Heldt 2013, 119–22); and Jerrold Levinson (1996) tried to make Wayne Booth’s concept of the implied author useful for film musicology, though he misappropriates the idea (see Heldt 2013, 72–89). Systems of levels of narration extend further, however, from historical authorship via implied authorship and extra-fictional narration to nondiegetic, diegetic and metadiegetic levels, and also take in the differentiation between objective and subjective narrative perspectives, as in Genette’s concept of ‘focalisation’. (For examples of such systems, see Genette 1980 [1972], 227–37; Chatman 1978, 146–95; Bal 2009, 67–82; and Branigan 1992, 86–124; see Heldt 2013 for an application to film music.) How music relates to most of these concepts has not been explored, and much less other elements of film narratology, such as the relationship of music to temporal ordering with regard to aspects such as filmic rhythm, ellipses, anticipation and retrospection (see, for example, Chatman 1978, 63–79; Bordwell 1985, 74–98; Bal 2009, 77–109), to historical modes and norms of narration (Bordwell 1985, 147–55), or to the
distinction between narration and monstration (Gaudreault 2009 [1988]), important for film because the relationship is very different from that in literature, and most filmic ‘narration’ consists in the organization of access to information rather than the literal telling of a story.
The other hitch in the relationship of film musicology and narratology has been that film musicologists have worried about the diegetic/nondiegetic distinction more than scholars in other disciplines. Some have explored how music can blur the distinction, or how it can transition between categories (for example, Neumeyer 1997, 2000 and 2009; Buhler 2001; Biancorosso 2001 and 2009; Stilwell 2007; Norden 2007; J. Smith 2009; N. Davis 2012;
Yacavone 2012). Others have questioned the usefulness of the concepts as such, suggested alternatives or posited that they have been misused (for example Kassabian 2001, 42–9, and Kassabian 2013; Cecchi 2010; Winters 2010 and 2012; Merlin 2010; Holbrook 2011, 1–53). The main bones of contention have been the claims that the categories make an a priori distinction too rigid for the reality of film (music), and that to call music nondiegetic distances it from the diegesis and misses its part in establishing it. But the critique applies more to applications of the concepts than to their substance. Narratology has never understood them as quasi-ontological categories, but as heuristic constructs in the reader’s or viewer’s mind, in a process of ‘diegetisation’ (see Hartmann 2007 and Wulff 2007), an evolving understanding of the boundaries of the storyworld that is open to revision. The categories should also not be burdened with tasks they cannot fulfil: they say nothing about what music does in a film, or how realistically it tells its story. And the criticism that ‘nondiegetic’ falsely distances music from the storyworld (Winters 2010) misconstrues the relationship of narration and diegesis: the voice of a heterodiegetic narrator in a novel, for example, is by definition not part of the diegesis (and in that sense distanced from it), but it is crucial for creating the diegesis in the reader’s