Rahman, with his background in film song, and British director Danny Boyle share an understanding of popular music’s ability to drive and influ-ence narrative. Both bring a history of successfully incorporating popular songs into their storytelling language. In his cult classic Trainspotting (1996), Boyle harnessed the celebrity of pop icons such as Brian Eno, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed, along with newer ‘Britpop’ bands Underworld, Primal Scream and Blur, incorporating their songs into his film to add depth to narrative and characters. Boyle makes films ‘for today’s people’, constantly referencing popular culture and pre-existing popular music to create a focus away from ‘the musical artifact itself to musical styles, and the social discourse about music and beyond’.57 He uses the hit interna-tional TV show ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ to underpin the plot of Slumdog Millionaire, incorporating its musical theme within Rahman’s
original soundtrack. Sri-Lankan/British singer M.I.A.’s hit song ‘Paper Planes’ is used in Slumdog to score the montage sequence where the two central characters, Jamal and Salim, work the trains as child pickpockets, with Boyle trading on M.I.A.’s celebrity and ‘street cred’ to convey mes-sages about his story world, with lyrics such as ‘third-world democracy’
describing early 90s India. An original song co-authored by Rahman and M.I.A. for Slumdog, ‘O Saya’, opens with Rahman’s soaring solo vocal ushering in a storm of percussion, pulsing synth pads, and children’s rhythmic chanting, layered with heightened sound design that comple-ments the music. M.I.A.’s distinctive vocal tells us, ‘They can’t touch me, we break off, run so fast they can’t even touch me’; lyrics that under-score images of the boys dodging cops and gangsters in the alleyways of the slum. Here, M.I.A.’s identity, her rap singing style and London accent hold strong associative value for Western listeners familiar with her music. These associations are recalled towards the end of the film, when ‘O Saya’ returns in isolated fragments as backdrop to a private con-versation between Jamal and the ‘Millionaire’ show host, who reveals he shares Jamal’s past as ‘a guy from the slums (who) becomes a millionaire overnight’.
Rahman’s collaboration with British singer Dido58 on 127 Hours also harnessed the identity of a pop icon known to Boyle’s audience. The song
‘If I Rise’ was co-composed for the film, with lyric content reflecting the thoughts of the central character, Aron Ralston, as he endures one hun-dred and twenty-seven hours pinned under a boulder in a remote canyon.
The first time we hear the song’s lyric, ‘If I rise, have one more try, if I believe, there’s more than this’, Dido’s ethereal voice is foregrounded; a transcendent companion to the dying Ralston’s vision of his future child.
Rahman’s voice joins Dido’s, high and gentle, with autotune added to cre-ate an abstracted effect, and is synchronized with Ralston’s premonition of himself as a father playing with his young son. The delicate timbres sug-gest a vulnerability that affirms the more ‘feminine’ qualities of relation-ship, family and love; values that play a central role in Ralston’s choice to survive. In the full arrangement of ‘If I Rise’ that accompanies the closing credits, Dido’s already breathy vocal is couched in delicate chorus and delay effects to make it even smoother. She is accompanied by clean elec-tric guitar, fretless bass, soft brushes and airy synth pads, Rahman’s high, breathy voice, harp glissandi, strings, and a children’s choir; elements that embody the message of spiritual transcendence at the core this film. The placement of ‘If I Rise’ over the closing credits represents a paradigm shift
from the mood established with the opening title track, ‘Never Hear Surf Music Again’, performed by Free Blood.59 This track has a dance music aesthetic conveyed by breathy rhythms, groans and shouts, heavy grind-ing electronic bass, guitars and sampled drum loops. With its provocative lyrics (‘Take it if it makes you come’), this track is more typical of Boyle’s musical aesthetic as heard in Trainspotting, depicting a hyper-energetic music of youth, addiction and escapism that establishes Ralston as a Gen- X, extreme-sports adventurer, confident, masculine and invincible. The stark contrast between the songs for the opening and closing credits repre-sents the radical personal evolution Ralston undergoes through the course of his ordeal.
Boyle has said of his films: ‘There’s a theme running through all of them … They’re all about someone facing impossible odds and overcom-ing them.’60 This narrative arc is the classic ‘hero’s journey’ trope and, as Boyle suggests, is presented in both 127 Hours and in Slumdog. In 127 Hours Rahman identifies his hero with an instrument that represents the young male archetype: the guitar. The guitar sounds of Joel Shearer and Sanjay Divecha range from distorted electric guitar accompanying Ralston on his extreme mountain-bike ride at the start of the film; through puls-ing electric guitar drivpuls-ing his desperate bid for survival in the ‘Liberation’
theme; to the abstract, digitally treated guitar timbres of his nightly hal-lucinations; to the gentle electric guitar melody in the ‘Touch of the Sun’
theme, which is introduced roughly thirty minutes into the film, when sunlight floods the canyon for the first time. Here, the electric guitar, the instrument for Ralston’s character, is placed front and centre in the mix, clean and warm, playing in its lower register, reflecting a soft male essence that underscores the warm memory of his father bringing him to the can-yon as a child to watch the sunrise. This theme recurs when Ralston walks into the sunlight at the end of his ordeal, and again in the epilogue to the film, when the real Aron Ralston appears on-screen with his wife and baby son. Through this motif, Rahman indicates that the father/son relation-ships that underpin the ‘hero’s journey’ have come full circle.
Delineating the tale’s two extremes of entrapment and transcendence are two contrasting musical themes: ‘Liberation’ and ‘The Canyon’. The Canyon theme contains the main melodic idea from ‘If I Rise’, in a rendi-tion that resembles a hymn setting. It conveys the peace of the environ-ment to which Ralston is drawn, and hints at his unexplored spirituality.
In the scene where Ralston recalls lying in bed talking to his girlfriend, the theme signals Ralston’s potential for love; that this vision is abruptly
cut short by a clap of thunder signals that he is not there yet. The third time we hear the Canyon theme is over an hour into the film, when Blue John, the explorer after whom the canyon is named, visits Ralston in an hallucination. As Ralston teeters in and out of consciousness, the return of the Canyon theme is like a spiritual reckoning in preparation for his death.
Later, the theme briefly returns towards the end of the film when the image presents a boy standing witness to the amputation. The Canyon theme’s melody is louder and lower than before, a single phrase mixing with the driving rhythms of the Liberation theme in an unexpected, yet significant layering of leitmotif that, with the image, clarifies Ralston’s motivation to continue with his improbable bid for redemption. Throughout the film, the melodic connection between the Canyon theme and ‘If I Rise’
ties together narrative threads relating to the spiritual path of the central character—his evolution from boy to man, from outer strength to inner strength, and his acceptance of love—to underscore the hero’s journey narrative at the deeper level.
The Liberation theme draws on Eastern musical structures, while its instrumentation stays within a Western framework for this all-American tale. The different versions of this theme gradually build in intensity from the scene where Ralston initially tries to free his arm, through the scene where water rushes into the canyon, spurring fantasies of escape, to the climactic amputation scene. Rahman layers electric guitar (subjected to different EQ treatments), pulsing electric bass, glitch effects, distorted resonant pads, high piano tones, strings, drum kit, synth bass drones, and sampled percussion grooves, within a largely Eastern approach to modal-ity. Drones underpin each of the theme’s three iterations, and the prevail-ing guitar melodic figure is in the Phrygian mode. The darkness of the low drone and the minor seconds and sixths of the Phrygian guitar melody, while distinctly ‘Rahmanesque’, also tie in with the Western rock stylistic references in the soundtrack, and express the urgency and desperation of Ralston’s struggle. Piercing high-frequency noises, designed to represent the breaking of Ralston’s nerves (which Rahman indicates were created by the sound design team),61 blend with the musical content to create a visceral experience of Ralston’s physical pain. Rhythm, repetition and har-monic stasis are important constants in this theme that allow the drama to continue to build through this long and taxing scene.
In Slumdog Millionaire, it is ‘Latika’s Theme’, with its humming female vocal (performed by Indian singer Suzanne D’Mello),62 airy pads, pure electric piano tones, softly pulsing bass line, delicate guitar arpeggios,
string section and sitar, that most closely resembles the transcendental sound of ‘If I Rise’ in 127 Hours. These two themes share warm and airy timbres, rich reverbs, melodies in the major mode, and minimal rhythmic content. As with ‘If I Rise’, love and redemption are implicit in the mes-sage of ‘Latika’s Theme’, which reflects her purity, gentleness and femi-ninity. It underscores scenes where Latika’s presence is either actual or sensed by Jamal, such as her first appearance in the rain after the children lose their mother, her separation from the boys as they jump the train, her memory when the brothers return to Mumbai, her reappearance at Jarvin’s house, when Jamal sees her at the station during their attempted escape, and in their final reunion at the station. The elusiveness of the theme, which is teased out slowly in fragments throughout the film before its final full statement in the last ten minutes, reflects the girl’s elusive presence in the narrative. Here again, the hero will only taste her love and achieve his own redemption once his tortuous journey is complete.
In Coleman’s interview, Rahman alludes to the role his Sufi faith plays in his composition, and cites it as an important influence in his ‘softer’
compositions, speaking of his efforts to strive for ‘a pure feeling’.63 If such a state can be translated into sound, the breathy timbres of his own and his female singers’ vocals, the gentle instrumental gestures and suspended temporal quality of ‘Latika’s Theme’, the Canyon theme, and ‘If I Rise’, are surely manifestations of Rahman’s spirituality connecting with the underlying narrative of both films. At the other end of the sonic spectrum, Rahman channels the energy of an orchestra and his suite of electronic instruments to underscore the visceral human predicaments that Boyle so loves to present on-screen. Dramatic, high-action scenes feature percus-sion of various kinds, from Indian skin drums to thumping taiko and tim-pani, processed electronic percussion, and sampled breakbeats. In the riots scene from Slumdog, Rahman blends Eastern and Western instruments in his trademark approach, incorporating a dholak loop, the swaramandal (Indian harp), pulsing electronic timbres, low piano notes, warped synth bass tones, glitch effects, and a drone; music that feels contemporary and urgent even as it references the ancient culture torn apart by the events unfolding on-screen.
In 127 Hours, the cue called ‘R.I.P’ is perhaps most representative of the typical Rahman sound, with a low drone, steadily building percussion groove, layers of smooth, airy pads, female and male voices dripping with reverb, entwining in blended Western and Eastern styles of singing. This cue recalls the ‘Passion Theme’ in Fire, and the various vocal motifs in Bombay.
It fades out over a close-up of ants crawling over Ralston’s face, leaving us with the expectation that at this point in the story he dies. With its eerie grace, it signals both the low-point and the pivot-point of the narrative, for it is in the following scene that Ralston makes his decision to survive. Multiple voices also signal the high-point and end-point of the narrative, although this time neither the voice nor the composition are Rahman’s; rather the ambient rock track is ‘Festival’ by Icelandic band Sigur Ros.64 As Ralston stumbles away from his ordeal, people appear through the haze, while at the musical level, drums build through thirty- second- note runs, and we hear a falling string gesture, a throbbing bass pedal tone, and a messy falsetto chorus in an example of one of the many spellbinding ‘sonic dominant’ moments across Boyle’s oeuvre. Here, the wild collectivity of the voices and driving rock rhythms evoke an almost tribal, unconditional, human solidarity. This moment of communion and release is moving, and the particular alchemy forged between music and image justifies Boyle’s choice to go with a pre-existing composition at his film’s climax. That it sits so comfortably alongside the original score is a tribute to both Boyle’s and Rahman’s intuitive approach to overall musical design. This particular skill is also very much in evidence in Slumdog, through the way Rahman’s original score consistently works in interplay with the theme from ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’, which weaves across diegetic boundaries, at times heard as source music accompa-nying the show, and at others extending beyond the show’s parameters into non- diegetic music to underscore dramatic action.
Although the product of a British production team, Slumdog Millionaire is in many ways a Hindi film. Its five original songs were sung primarily by well-known Indian singers, including the legendary Alka Yagnik and Ila Arun, who perform on ‘Ringa Ringa’. This track embodies the sound of Hindi pop, with a high, piercing, lead female vocal, rhythmic and sensual backing vocals, shifting modality, which oscillates from minor to major and back, a catchy groove played on tambourine and dholak, counter-melodies played on bansuri and pungi, and a lush string section. While working as underscore to montage rather than as the supra-diegetic set-piece of a Hindi film song, there is nonetheless an ambiguity to the way in which ‘Ringa Ringa’ is used; it dominates the sound space, and stylized shots of Latika dancing for a client are cut to synchronize rhythmically with the track, in a manner that alludes to a choreographed film song performance. Another example of cultural ambiguity is the song ‘Jai Ho’, whose presentation takes the traditional form of a film song through its choreography, yet feels more like an homage to the genre, occurring at the
end of the film to neatly connect the resolving narrative with the closing credits. The song features several well-known Indian singers (Sukhvinder Singh, Tanvi Shah and Mahalaxmi Iyer), as well as Rahman, who sings the chorus chant. The instrumentation blends cultural influences: a string section articulating classic Bollywood riffs65 and countermelodies as well as a lyrical coda in the ‘classical’ Hollywood style; there are sampled beats, a santur ostinato, dholak rhythms, hand claps, and a tambura drone. A chorus of voices rapping in Spanish further extends this song’s cultural reach and appeal. Here, Rahman’s typically eclectic blend of instruments and styles celebrates modern India as a global melting pot, where money and love rain down.
c
onclusIonThe composer was expected to be a competent performer … was expected to know his audience … rising above his own likes and dislikes, in order to bring delight to everyone. This exemplified the traditional doctrine of non- attachment, propounded in the Bhagavadgı̄tā.66
This might sum up A.R. Rahman, a respected singer and keyboardist, who performs on his own scores, and composes music that is technically well crafted and aesthetically pleasing. He cites his Sufi spirituality as an important influence for his music, whose inspiration is derived from a non-attached state ‘when you become nothing, only pureness exists.’67 His ability to blend Eastern and Western musical elements to create strong associations for audiences from both contexts while supporting receptivity to sounds that might sit outside the listener’s cultural context is notable, even remarkable, and enriches every film he works on. His sound captures a multicultural aesthetic, drawn from his roots as a Tamil musician, that speaks to global audiences.
In summarizing his success, one must acknowledge the long tradition of eclecticism in the work of his musical predecessors in Tamil and Bollywood films. One must equally acknowledge the expertise of the directors with whom he chooses to work, who are respected as some of the leading film-makers in the world, and who understand that the best films find common elements of human experience, create narrative around these, and employ music and other modalities to embellish and deepen emotional response to their stories. In music for cinema, as distinct from music by itself, it is the film that provides context for the audience, often transcending cultural
specificity to communicate emotions and ideas through narrative drawn from shared human experience.
Notwithstanding the enormous contribution of his predecessors and collaborators, the ‘alternate space’ Rahman’s music inhabits is one of his own making, polished over years of practice in several cinematic contexts, and characterized by a flexibility that allows his talent to translate across boundaries of culture and style. His songs reference a multitude of tra-ditional and contemporary genres and work as both supra-diegetic set- pieces and non-diegetic music for montage. His leitmotifs layer regional and global musical references, and are embedded with triggers that touch Indian and Western audiences in different ways to draw the intended over-all response. The prevalence in his music of drones, of microtonal melodic ornamentation, and of modes that sit outside the regular Western lexicon are strong trademarks of his sound. The way he uses the human voice (the instrument shared by all cultures) as a primary agent to communicate character identity and emotional subtext is exceptional, and key to his scores’ success in traversing cultural boundaries. His well-produced sound includes the voice of technology so important to twenty-first-century peo-ple. Yet, for all the ‘multis’ it encapsulates—multicultural, multiplatform, multimodal, multi-instrumental, multi-referential—the sound of Rahman unifies its many polarities into a singular aesthetic, an ‘alternate space’ that speaks clearly to our common humanity.
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otes1. A.R. Rahman—The Official Site, http://www.arrahman.com/
biography.aspx, accessed 8 July 2016.
2. Lindsay Coleman, A.R. Rahman Interview, this book, Chapter 2, 22.
3. Joseph Getter and B. Balasubrahmaniyan, ‘Tamil Film Music:
Sound and Significance’, in Mark Slobin (ed.), Global Soundtracks:
Worlds of Film (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 116.
4. Guido Heldt, Music and Levels of Narration in Film: Steps Across the Border (Intellect: Bristol, 2013), 137.
5. Heldt, Steps Across the Border, 138.
6. Jeff Smith, The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music
6. Jeff Smith, The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music