If one accepts that in Western cinema the ‘classical’ score ‘remains the standard with which film music in general continues to be compared’,31 a brief analysis of the key musical conventions embodied in that standard is helpful in understanding how an alternate sound might be constructed.
Musicologist Ronald Rodman cites the scores of leading mid-twentieth- century composers Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold as exem-plars of the classic Hollywood score, with their ‘traits of nineteenth-century concert and operatic music. These traits include: the use of symphony orchestras … (and) an adherence to functional tonality with highly con-ventional Germanic-style chromaticism.’32 Western film music’s basis in
nineteenth- century tonality and functional harmony has important rami-fications for how narrative and music interact within a film, which, as pro-posed by Royal S. Brown, have to do with expectation and resolution.33 The dialogue between what is musically ‘expected’ and what is expected from the drama within a scene is vital to filmic narrative.
Ethnomusicologist John Blacking’s extensive field research in Africa last century supported the idea that extra-musical communication only occurs within frameworks of culture where associations that pertain to tonality, rhythm, performance style and the like are shared, and that sounds that are divorced from their cultural environment are unlikely to communicate with any consistency.34 Shared understanding of its tonal language is key to the longevity of the ‘classical score’ in the West, yet Rahman positions himself both within and outside its tonal framework.
For example, he makes the observation that ‘a minor key is not sad’35 a view that, to Western ears, would appear to be anathema, and which reflects the extent to which Rahman’s Indian musical heritage shapes his perception of modality. Royal S. Brown asserts that an ‘extraordinarily important ele-ment of tonality constantly exploited by film music is the major mode- minor mode dialectic … To this day, composers of film music continue to exploit the emotional implications of the major/minor dialectic, no matter how modern their style, as long as it is based in tonality.’36 If this is so, how does Rahman communicate so effectively with his global audience?
Musicologists Phillip Tagg and Bob Clarida arrive at the same position as Rahman in their survey of music for the mass media, Ten Little Tunes, dismissing binary interpretations of modality such as ‘major is happy and minor is sad’ as ‘culturally restricted assumptions about links between the musical and paramusical’.37 They explain:
The unimodal development of the nineteenth-century Central European tonal system put minor modes de facto into the cultural position of archa-isms. Ousted by the then ‘more modern’ major key, minor could acquire general connotations of oldness and the past and, by further connotation resident in the European bourgeois symbolic universe, lead associations … into nostalgia, quietude and sadness.38
Tagg and Clarida further assert that, outside the Central European canon on which most Hollywood film music is based, associations between modality and affect are less codified: ‘There has never been anything intrinsically sad in most of Europe about minor modes, as anyone will
testify who has sung, played or danced to songs like What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor.’39 Rather, they cite research that establishes that sounds that are quiet, slow, of long duration, limited range, more legato than staccato, low in pitch, whose timbres comprise lower, rather than higher, frequency content, and that incorporate downwards-sliding tones, are most universally associated with ‘sad’ affect. By way of illustration, these parameters, rather than any clear minor modality, can be heard in Rahman’s cues for the night scenes in 127 Hours, where the main protago-nist experiences his most acute moments of despair and disorientation.
Here is music that broadcasts a depressed emotional state in any language:
unidentifiable timbres, guitar harmonics of indeterminate pitch, sustained bass drones, low-register pads sliding through downwards portamento gestures, dissonant chords on guitar muffled by heavy reverb, and the absence of a rhythmic pulse.
Rahman’s response to modality relies on his own set of influencing cultural factors. He refers to the Hindustani and Carnatic traditions of Indian classical music, where there is a raga ‘for the evening, there’s one for the morning, there’s one for the afternoon, one for the night, one for romance, one for sadness, one for anger, one to make the rain come down’.40 This points to the complexities of a musical tradition founded on the ancient Vedic aesthetic theory of rasa: ‘initially associated with theatre and poetry; it referred both to the state of bliss induced by artistic creation, and to the transitory states of being such creation induced in an audience. Traditionally there were eight rasa, linked with deities, colours, and the eight permanent emotions: love, laughter, sorrow, anger, energy, fear, disgust, and surprise’.41
Music was used in theatre to coordinate aspects of a performance and to induce specific emotional responses from an audience. Today, the per-formance of a certain raga is still calculated to induce a particular emo-tion, or rasa, in the listener. The ways in which this is done are complex.
While ragas are identified in part by their mode, other factors come into play in their classification, such as intervallic organisation of modes, which can vary depending upon the direction of the melody, and the manner in which ornamentation is applied, which can often be the discriminator between two different ragas:
Ornamentation can be defined as the connection between two given notes to enhance the beauty and aesthetic value of the raga. Thus many microtonal variations are seen in the frequency of any given note from one raga to another.42
Aside from modality, microtonality, varying scales in ascent and descent, and the execution of ornamentation, ragas can also be identified based on their position in a concert programme, the time of day they are per-formed, and subtle variations of phrasing in performance.43 For Indians to draw extra-musical meaning from modality, there is clearly a more exten-sive vocabulary to consider than that of major and minor intervals.
Indian classical music is based on three core components: drone, melody and rhythm. Drone, by its nature as a static harmonic entity, precludes any possibility of progression along the lines of functional Western harmony, which moves in vertical pitch organization that adheres to strict rules as to chord progression, voice-leading and intervallic layering. Rather, in the complex modal system that characterizes the ragas of Indian classical music, intervals may vary between major and minor versions according to the expressive choices of the performer, and factors such as melodic direc-tion and ornamental style. The drone provides a non-reactive harmonic support for the flexible melodic extemporization essential to performance of a raga. The most important instruments in both north and south Indian classical music have sets of strings for melodic and drone performance, including the long-necked lutes (the sitar and vina), the sarod, a smaller lute, and the bowed lutes (sarangi and dilruba). The four-string tambura (or its electronic equivalent) provides the continuous drone that under-pins every raga performance.
Drones feature in all Rahman’s scores for Indian and Western films, often underpinning ornamented, agile and microtonal melodic lines rich with shakes, vibratos, trills, grace notes, turns, portamenti and glissandi.
He explores the full range of modes, sometimes shifting from one to another within a single tune or even within a phrase. Here is a composer who could not be less interested in limiting himself to the Western stan-dards of Ionian major and harmonic minor modes. Consider, for example, the opening melody of the Bombay theme. Based on a Tamil lullaby, it is
‘music about humanity’,44 chosen to represent a united India to support Ratnam’s aspiration to heal a wounded nation in the wake of the Bombay riots of the early 1990s. Although its mode is the Aeolian (natural minor), the high-frequency timbres and high-register pitches of bell and bansuri, the melody’s quick tempo, agile ornamentation, repeated staccato notes, and the lullaby genre’s warm associations with childhood, family and security combine to give this tune an appealing and reassuring presence.
The only element that adds ambiguity to the theme is the bass synthesizer drone, suggestive of a brewing darkness. When the bansuri motif gives
way to a raw male vocal that articulates a note somewhere between yelling and singing, and a slow, low percussion groove sets in, we begin to fear the worst. Here, clear emotional signifying is achieved without the formulaic use of major modality as a trope for ‘goodness’, and minor for ‘sadness or badness’.45