La crítica de Hegel a Fichte

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The film music of Carter Burwell is unusually effective in its forceful com-munication of dramatic tone through the simplest, most stripped-down means possible. This elemental quality is certainly, in part, the product of Burwell’s early life in the ‘downtown’ pop-music scene of the mid- seventies, lived in the context of clubs like the iconic CBGB, playing in bands such as Thick Pigeon and The Same, and bringing a post-punk sen-sibility into a synth-based music that was texturally simple, and melodically clear. What is ultimately important here, however, is the degree to which Burwell has simultaneously transcended the limitations of his earliest work in punk and art-rock, and retained their unvarnished simplicity, putting it at the service of a specific dramatic point of view. Whether the source material of one of Burwell’s scores lies in folk music (as it often does), or hymnody (on occasion), or a kind of generalized, rock-based harmony refracted through an orchestral setting (most of the time), they all impart an immediate sense of place and of the varied, complex human relationships

A. Waggoner (^*)

Professor of Composition, Setnor School of Music, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, USA

that unfold within it. This is accomplished principally through a specific, tripartite approach to the medium that works as follows:

• the constellation of the score around a small group of related and memorable gestures,¹ sharply etched in terms of both rhythm and timbre, and carrying profound metonymic potential

• the interaction of these gestures with the acoustical space of the film, its

‘natural’ environment, and, as a result, the film’s overall sound design

• an apparent disconnect between each film’s putative genre, or theme, and the music’s affective character, yielding a subtle and often complex understanding of the characters’ varied relationships to the space, that is, the physical world of the film, and to their own interior, psychological spaces

Our experience of a Burwell score, then, is one in which varied repetitions of a simple, yet strongly physical, set of musical gestures combine and recombine with image over time to produce a seemingly limitless range of emotional and dramatic significations. We’ll follow this process through four Burwell films that are especially illustrative of his work: Miller’s Crossing (Coen brothers, 1990), Fargo (Coen brothers, 1996), Gods and Monsters (Bill Condon, 1998) and True Grit (Coen brothers, 2010), with an ear towards a deeper hearing of the narrative opening-out each score effects, revealing aspects of place, time and character that would otherwise remain inaccessible to us.

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As stated previously, the materials of any Burwell score are simple, direct and physical in their sense of gesture. Burwell has said, ‘I’m a very simple composer, so I rely on simple means.’² Simple, but not simplistic, for the dramatic and affective range of Burwell’s music is made possible by the syntactic openness of the stuff of which it is made. This is a quality often difficult to quantify; one ‘knows it when one hears it’. But in Burwell’s case it reveals itself immediately, and withstands scrutiny, for it is a function not just of a sense of openness, of symbolic and syntactic possibility, within the ideas themselves (this may be sensed but resists explication), but more importantly within and between the varied micro-fragments that make up each motive. This sense of relationship, of motivic interdependence, is what opens the material up to constant recombination and resignification.

In Fargo, for example, the incisive, rhythmically accented Scotch snap figure in the hardanger fiddle-inspired violin writing is joined with a bassline and resultant harmonic progression redolent of the obses-sive, repeating bass figures from the ancient Spanish song ‘La Folia’

(‘Madness!’). The combination is musically seamless, but culturally and psychologically confounding: the Norwegian fiddle style is most certainly rooted in the Minnesota of the film, while ‘La Folia’ is not; it seems to get at something deeper, older, darker, more persistent in its tracing of the long arc of human obsession and violence. Both the rhythm and the repeating bassline of ‘La Folia’ were associated with the sarabande, the dance brought to Spain by the conquistadors, and subsequently banned at court for what was read as its obsessive lasciviousness. Repeating bass/

harmonic patterns have always been both beloved and feared; whether set in an affect of joy or despair, what always emerges is their physicality, and a concomitant sort of delirium that they seem to induce (think of the now- gleefully ridiculed clip of the evangelical pastor fulminating against early rock and roll: ‘It’s the beat! It’s the beat! It’s the beat! It’s the beat! …’). The principal music from Fargo embraces all of this, and more.

In Miller’s Crossing the elements are more clearly fused at the musical surface, and feel firmly planted in the cultural soil of the film; they seem to reflect our gaze, which is clearly through the eyes of the Irish gang-ster Tom. Burwell counterpoints the Coens’ grimly comic take on the murderous venality of early-twentieth-century Irish- and Italian-American mobs with another Scotch snap figure, this one building in additive fash-ion through ascending major and minor thirds, to describe an Irish tune (adapted from the folksong ‘Lament for Limerick’) that is both jocular and profoundly human; it has both surface lightness and a capacity for pathos. What is modular here is the relationship between the melody and a similarly ascending bassline. Each time we hear the melody we follow the progress of this twofold rise, and each time we find that it settles at a different point along the registral spectrum, with melody and bass often coming unstuck from each other such that one goes up while the other returns down the way it came. This changeable, at times abortive, voice-leading process finds its fullest, most unified expression (on the sub-dominant, always voiced below the tonic) only at signal moments in the film, such as the tentative reunion in the last scene between Tom, played by Gabriel Byrne, and the childlike and gleefully corrupt Leo, played by Albert Finney, boss of the Irish criminal and political machine. And, while the reunion may be tentative, the musical arrival is not. It tells us more

about what the rapprochement means to these two hard-boiled human archetypes than the screenplay could ever reveal.³

True Grit’s score is unique among Burwell’s films with the Coens in that it is based almost entirely on found material, in this case nineteenth- century American Protestant and camp meeting hymns. Hovering over fully a quarter of the the score is Anthony Schowalter and Elisha Hoffman’s ‘Leaning on the Everlasting Arms’; Burwell deftly mines this simple but distinctive melody for most of the film’s motivic material. He makes especially good use of the original’s heavily agogic treatment of the word ‘leaning’, as the line drops in successive, rhythmically accented thirds, a kind of American frontier incarnation of the renaissance ‘sigh’

figure, itself cast in repeating appoggiaturas, or ‘leaning tones’. The film is difficult to peg, in both psychological and genre terms, and Burwell has commented on his own uneasiness with its starkness, and apparent lack of humanity (Lindsay Coleman, Carter Burwell Interview, this book, Chapter 6, 95–96; c.f. also Baldwin et al., Art of the Score). This conflict seems to have drawn him to an unusually rich and fluid approach to spin-ning out the musical material. An especially lovely example of this is in his setting of ‘Talk About Suffering’, late in the film, wherein the song’s pentatonic material is refracted into the instrumental texture to provide an ominous background hum of pentatonic harmony. We’ll return to this moment later on, as it acts as one of the film’s most significant aural mark-ers of place and cultural position.

Gods and Monsters is, of course, not a Coen brothers film. Directed by Bill Condon, its uniqueness lies not in any ironic, mythic strangeness, but rather in its depiction of the aging film director James Whale (a real person, with a real and well-known history), best known for having made Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and The Invisible Man (1933), and played with a kind of reckless mastery by Ian McKellen. The film’s fascination, then, is not structural but personal. Burwell efficiently zeros in on the deep fissures in this compelling and deeply wounded char-acter with a principal melodic/harmonic motive built out of two half-steps, one which forms a tritone with the bass, opening out to a perfect fifth; the other forming alternating major and minor thirds with the bass, thus shifting modality from major to minor in a way that generates and maintains a high degree of harmonic uncertainty and resultant emotional tension. The treatment is more conventional than in Burwell’s work with the Coens, but it is, nonetheless, highly effective.