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COPLAND AS A FILM COMPOSERBy FREDERICK WX.STERNFELD

ARON COPLANDhas written profuselyfor the concerthall,for solo instruments, chamber music ensembles, and orchestra,for one voice and for chorus. But it has always seemed to me thathis is a singularly dramatic flair. The inner spacing of his music istheatrical in the word's best sense. The tempo, the distribution ofpoints of repose, the quiet intensity with which climaxes are reachedand sustained, the uncanny judgment with which repetition andcontrast are employed --all reveal an awareness of the public'sresponses to dramatic entertainment without, however, any con-descension to that public. This recognition of popular and functionaldemands, coupled with the integrity of his esthetics and craftsman-ship, have won for Copland's film scores the rare distinction of ap-proval both by his fellow composers in the East and his Hollywoodassociates.The AcademyAward for the score of The Heiress makes itclear that the acclaim of the world's film center does not dependon an excess of emotional and instrumental lushness. The Heiress,moreover, makes no concessions to cheap popularity; it is a directdescendant of Copland's three earliest cinematic scores, The City(spring 1939), Of Mice and Men (1939), and Our Town (March1940). In these works, written within a compass of twelve months,the composer continued in a tradition that had been auspiciouslyinitiated in the United States by Virgil Thomson's The Plough thatBroke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937). That modernAmerican music owes a great debt to the French school is well known,and much of the dramatic pungency of Thomson and Copland canbe traced to their teachers and models: Satie, Boulanger, and themachine rhythms of Honegger's Pacific 231. But whatever the Frenchinfluences may have been, Copland's early film scores, made in NewYork and Hollywood, can take their place beside the best worksof Europe's screen composers. The over-all cast is one of deliberatecontrol that gives vent to lyrical or traditional expression only ata few well-considered points of the action. The idiom is essentiallyidentical with that of his works for the concert hall. Its texture is

161


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162 The Musical Quarterlysparse, and much of the counterpoint is diatonic and favors theinterval of the major second. These are, of course, the well-knowncharacteristics of Copland's style. But what are the processes bywhich he has distilled from this language a vocabulary particularlyfitted for the screen?A dramatic composer must realize the limits of complexity thathe may reach without losing his listener. The ballets Rodeo andAppalachian Spring, intended to exercise a wider appeal than theViolin Sonata and the Third Symphony,are written in a deliberatelysimplified style. The demand for plain expression is even more press-ing in the case of the movies, and the scores for Of Mice and Menand Our Town meet the need for easy intelligibility without sacri-ficing the traits peculiar to the composer'sart. To the inexperiencedpractitioner this would appear a simple trick indeed. What an easyrecipe, to retain the modes of expression but to reduce complexityin inverse proportion to the size of the audience! Actually, it is atechnical and artistic achievement of the highest caliber, for itdemands quality in spite of reduced means and such precision andintensity that not even the sophisticated listener might hope forricher and more varied effects.Most composers of entertainment music find no difficultyin com-municating with their massaudience; they either ignore the resourcesof modern music or berate them as bizarre and esoteric. But theresulting language is so trite and hackneyed, so "easy" that it hashardly any recognizable relationship to concert-hall parlance. Thecommunication with millions is, indeed, achieved, but in an idiomas artificial and unattractive as, let us say, Esperanto, whereas thelanguage of Copland's screen music might be compared to BasicEnglish. Its means of expression, though legitimately keyed to avast audience, never forsakes the tradition or the vocabulary of seri-ous music. But, in order to be "filmic",music must be reduced to itslowest common denominator, that is, stripped to its barest essentials,leaving the component parts basically simpler and shorter. Thisstylistic adaptation is by no means a mere bow to the box office; itshows a sensitive response to the structure and tempo of the mediumitself. The brief, yet precise, turns of musical language can be usedwith speed and ease to accompany the lightning-fast montage, theengrossing and direct impact of the over-size close-up and, besides,they fulfill the need of telling a story at a first and only hearing-a need that is not so pressing in the field of the opera or symphony.


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Copland as a Film Composer 163The commercial triumphs of Our Town and Of Mice and Menprove that movies do profit from suitable musical support. While

the dramas of Thornton Wilder and John Steinbeck elicited thatsupport, the credit for bringing about a happy union of script andscore lies with the director. To have been sensible of these latent pos-sibilities testifies to the discrimination of Sam Wood (Our Town)and Lewis Milestone (Of Mice and Men). On the other hand, it isthe more heartening, in these times of specialization which tend towiden the gulf between modern art and modern man, when a suc-cessful modern composer for the concert hall accepts the challengeto write music for the media of mass-communication. This he doesin the face of certain prejudices against him. Feature films usuallyentail considerable financial investment, and directors are loath tojeopardize box-officerbceipts. They are wary of the composer whoserecord stampshim asa rebel, given to violating established,and there-fore presumably profitable, patterns of movie music. But the choicesof a director like William Wyler have been both unconventional andsuccessful. For the armed forces of World War II he made MemphisBelle and Thunderbolt with music by Gail Kubik. Here sharp,clean,genuinely contemporary scores lent pungency to timely messagesthat lifted the final products high above the newsreel reportage ofthe average war film. In what appears to me as one of Hollywood'sfinest tragi-comediesof the postwarera, The Best Yearsof Our Lives,Wyler picked one of Hollywood's most sensitive and forward-lookingcomposers, Hugo Friedhofer. Friedhofer's music is often franklyreminiscent of Hindemith and Copland and steers clear of the emo-tionalism and lushness that fill lesser scores.1 In choosing Coplandto weave the orchestral fabric for The Heiress Wyler continued toexercise his discretion and acted on the basis of past experience.The transformation of Henry James's novel Washington Squareinto a movie posed a delicate problem. In their adaptation, first forthe stage and later for the screen, Ruth and Augustus Goetz reduceda story of narrative prose to fit the time dimensions of a dramaticpresentation. Yet, the burden of unravelling an essentially psycho-logical plot with little external motion, by means of the movingcamera, was a cinematic problem of inherent difficulty. Unlike itsparent, the stage play, the modern motion picture stands or falls notwith its dialogue but with its photography and sound-dialogue-musictrack.To depict the fall and rise of the heiressby methods indigenous

1 See The Musical Quarterly, XXXIII (1947), 520 ff.


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164 The Musical Quarterlyto the cinema, though alien to fiction or stage,Wyler'scamera"pans","dollies", and moves to close-ups. Since the plot is predominantlyconcerned with the development of character and proceeds in aleisurely and deliberate manner, the use of rapid, impressionisticmontage was rejected. At the high points of emotion the directorhad to rely on the strongest and simplest means at his disposal:close-up, dissolve, music. Laurence Olivier's success in translatingthe monologues in Henry V from stage to screen was largely basedon just these devices.In one scene that proceeds for over two minutes without anydialogue, we see the heiress, in close-up, harried and haunted.Catherine has just realized that her fiance has forsaken her, and thedialogue stops as she moans to her aunt that someone must love her,that Morris must love her for all those who did not. As the musictakes over, it is emphatically foreground, not background. A themeheard during the earlier love scene (Ex. 1) is played in variation

Ex. i.

over a pedal in the basseswhile the aunt and the girl sit in motion-less contemplation (first 5 measures of Ex. 2). After a dissolve wesee Catherine's face in close-up for well over twenty seconds, andduring this time a pounding basso ostinato gathers strength until itreaches a fortissimo climax (mm. 6-12 of Ex. 2), at which point theEx. 2 Ob.snlo 3

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Aaron Coplandconducting his music for Paramount's TheHeiWilliam Wyler, producer-director of the film, is a


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Copland as a Film Composer 16510 +? Bros s /

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heroine breaks down completely and sobs. Her aunt, unable to helpher, is seen next to her as the scene concludes and the music diesaway. It has been a succession of significant poses. After a fade-outwe see the same front parlor at daybreakand the image of Catherine,dry-eyed by this time, but hopeless and helpless and in utter deso-lation after her night's vigil. A variation of the first five measures ofmusic from the preceding scene is heard (Ex. 3; cf. also Ex. 2, mm.

Ex. 3

1-5 and Ex. i). It is a mere introduction. The main and decisiveportion of the scene, in which the heiress appeals to our pity as sheclimbs the stairs to her room, occupies the succeeding thirty seconds.The manner of her movements and the expressions of her face leaveno doubt that she is steeling herself to life-long spinsterhood; shemoves up the staircase as if she were going to the gallows. The factthat she actively propels herself from one place to another is impor-tant, for it stressesthe decisiveness of her action in a context of almoststatic scenes. Yet, as she proceeds up the stairs, the camera moveswith her and thereby minimizes her motion, showing, rather, herharriedcountenance in close-up. In these two scenes the photographergives us two statements of the central theme of misery, the firstimmobile, the second starting out in motion but climaxing in a still.The samenessof the drama firstenacted in the parlor and then on thestaircase is driven home by the composer, who interprets the ascentby repeating, with a few variations, the basso ostinato (mm. 6-12 ofEx.. 1) from the preceding scene.This is the denouement which, both in James's novel and inWyler's film, occurs about four-fifths of the way through the narra-


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166 The Musical Quarterlytive. In the movie its eloquence relies entirely on visual and musicalexpression, dispensing with dialogue altogether. The close-ups andground basses alike fulfill the,function of magnifying and intensify-ing the experiences of the jilted girl, and the strength of the sceneis derived from the parallelism between the procedures of photog-rapher and composer. This parallelism becomes the more convincingbecause it resides in the modes of operation rather than mechanicalsynchronization. Finally, both director and composer have usedmeans of expression peculiar to the cinema. It is illuminating, forinstance, to read in the first draft of the script more than a page ofdialogue that was wisely eliminated in the final version. This plead-ing between Catherine and her aunt would be eloquent, indeed, ina stage play that relied on verbal means. The earlier variant con-cludes the argument when the aunt exclaims indignantly, "You willnot let yourself be consoled", and the girl, rocking with pain, replies,"Not consoled-loved, Aunt, but not consoled". Instead of this inter-change Catherine'sagony is conveyed to the audience solely by visualand musical means. It is significant that this section of the score(Ex. 1) takesits title from the deleted dialogue, "Love Not Consoled".Some of the intensity of the music can undoubtedly be traced toits sonorities, which call into play several unique properties of themicrophone. A full orchestra of strings, woodwinds, and brasses iscovered, as it were, with a sheen of string sound. The effect wasachieved by two separaterecording sessions, one in which each choirof the orchestra played its proper part and one in which the stringswere divided into sections to play all the parts, their own as well asthose of the woods and brasses. In the dubbing session this stringsheen was superimposed upon the original body of sound, and theresults are both unusual and compelling. It is a process peculiar tothe cinema and unknown in the concert hall, and one cannot helpsharing the composer'sdelight in extracting new kinds of sound fromnew means.

Immediately preceding this climax are two scenes that illustratewell the assistance music may offer the director. Both are withoutdialogue, depending solely on pantomime, photography, sound, andmusic. The first sequence shows the young girl alone in the parlor,eagerly and impatiently anticipating her elopement. It comes to anend, as does the music, when her aunt enters and must be told of theplan. A second musical unit begins when the dialogue betweenCatherine:and her aunt concludes. A carriage noise is heard outside;


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Copland as a Film Composer 167proudly the girl saysgoodbye to her home and family and adds mag-nanimously, "I will write you, Aunt". There now ensues a pan-tomime with sound effects. Catherine hurries out of the house andinto the street where she expects her fianc6 to be waiting with thecarriage. To a crescendo of sound and music the carriage nears thehouse-only to pass it by. A defeated Catherine re-enters her homeas the scene and music come to a close.It is true that movies often proceed without the aid of the spokenword, but in its stead an external happening usually enlivens thescreen, such as the stereotyped chase, for example. But the sequencesin The Heiress are subtle and psychological, and our massaudiencesare so used to more obvious fare that the director looked to thecomposer to hold the audience. The fleeting scene of anticipationmust convey Catherine's feelings by way of her excitement as sherushes about the room. But beyond this it must presage the sadfate of her hopes. Copland succeeded in creating an interplay of runsin flutes, clarinets, and bass clarinet that is as skillful in its scoringas it is apposite dramatically (Ex. 4).

Ex. 4 N rto -

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The sextolet on which these runs are based is also used in the


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168 The Musical Quarterlysucceeding pantomime scene where the carriage is seen and heard,first approaching, then fading away. The motif continues, as it were,the air of eager expectancy from the earlier scene. But the antici-pation is too eager and in its tenseness betrays subconscious doubts.The chords, played by muted horns, muted trumpets, and trom-bones, against which the runs are set, convey the tragedy beforeCatherine faces it. At a preview showing this scene had no music,and the audience laughed-as neighborhood theater audiences arelikely to do when they do not understand what is going on. In orderto induce a comprehension of the tragic significance of the carriagescene, Wyler asked Copland to supply music (Ex. 5) and the com-posite result speaks for itself. In the final version, the average spec-tator probably did not notice the music, but neither did he laugh.

Ex. 5 Veryf"tand mnmab3 3 Imrd ed lhis

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Copland's path as a film composer is marked by an unbrokencontinuity. In fact, his critics have accused him of repeating his suc-cess formula, once he found it. On the surface, such a reproach mayappear justified, since the similarity of expression between Of Miceand Men (1939) and Our Town (1940) on the one hand and TheHeiress on the other is striking and unusual. One might even gofurther and say that the stark and austere language appropriate forthe early films seems a strange musical counterpart for WashingtonSquare, so far removed in setting and complexity from Wilder'sNew Hampshire town or Steinbeck's Western ranch. Yet, even at a


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Copland as a Film Composer 169first hearing of the score for the Henry James movie one senses arefinement of the means of musical expression employed in the earliercinematic works, and an examination of the scores makes clear thatCopland has not stood still. As an example, I should like to cite twostrikingly similar passages from Of Mice and Men and The Heiress.In both sequences the music soars high (and loud) and can by nomeans be dismissed as "backgroundmusic", a term that leads me toa slight digression.The psychological implications of the phrase "backgroundmusic"are potent, and it is unfortunate that musical amateurs think of filmscoresas background only. Even so intelligent and enlightened a pro-ducer as Dore Schary will use the terms "music" and "backgroundmusic" as synonyms, and the composer is thus confronted with anattitude that prevents him from making a full-fledged contributionto the total drama. Film composers are not little boys who like toplay with their own specialty "with the unconscious assumption thatthe film exists as a background for the advancement of music".2Theyknow show business as well as their own medium and are, therefore,qualified to participate in the councils that decide whether the musicis to be loud, soft, or silent. The judiciousness with which our bestscreen composers have abstained from imposing a musical score onlong and important scenes3shows the good sense of the professionand demonstrates that an obsolete phrase like "background music"is not needed to keep those egomaniacs, the composers, in their place.To return, then, to Copland's two "foreground" passages. Thefirst occurs in Of Mice and Men and is entitled "Death of Candy'sDog". It is a strong, taut scene in which Candy, the old cripple, andhis fellow farm-hands wait tensely until they hear the shot thatsignifies that old dogs must die when they are past their usefulness.It is the cruel threat that hangs over all mice and men, and theunsuccessful effort to avoid this lot is Steinbeck's theme. There hasbeen a good deal of talk about Candy's dog throughout the film,about the faithful devotion he induces in his owner on the one handand the bad smell that bothers the unemotional and unimaginativeCarlson on the other. Candy has just lost his last argument withCarlson. The dialogue is concluded, and the lower strings usher in

2 Dore Schary, Case History of a Movie, New York, 1950, p. 195.3 See The Musical Quarterly, XXXV (1949), p. 120o.


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170 The Musical Quarterlythe motif of the descending second (Ex. 6) that dominates the sound-

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track for the next three minutes until the shot is heard off-stage.During this time the cripple mourns in anguish at the defeat of hislove and hope; and the tense efforts of the others to play cards as ifnothing were amiss betray their thought that the old man is but asymbol of their own lives, is Everyman. The descending intervalin its characteristic inverted dotted rhythm governs the scene,and the intensity with which both the melodic and the rhythmicformulas are repeated is hardly interfered with. It is punctuatedonly three times, when the dotted rhythm is made even for onemeasure (first time at m. 24 of Ex. 6).To my mind the rhythm itself is reminiscent of the Scotch snapin Baroque opera (still alive in Gluck's Orfeo) rather than of modernjazz.Whatever its derivation, its slow build-up, within the frameworkof a sparse texture, is highly expressive. The pathos of the diatonictreble, proceeding gradually and in skips, is set off against a bass thatalternates between diatonic and chromatic passages.In Henry James's plot another old man suffers a crucial defeat:a father realizes that his daughter hates him. In the novel this antago-nism is but lightly sketched. The father has told Catherine, theheiress, that he is pondering his impending death and the altering


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Copland as a Film Composer 171of his will. She must promise not to marry the unfaithful lover afterher father's death.

. . there was something in this request . . .that seemed an injury to herdignity. Poor Catherine'sdignity was not aggressive .. but if you pushed farenough you could find it. Her father had pushed very far. "I can't promise,"she simply repeated. "You are very obstinate," said the Doctor . . . She knewherself that she wasobstinate,and it gave her a certainjoy ...The movie script spells out the understatement of "a certain joy",and the close-ups mirror the doctor's torment with ruthless clarity.It is difficult to say whether this is the brashness of our times, asopposed to the niceties of James's style of the 188os, or whether theamplification of James's refined phrase is a legitimate adaptation tothe medium of the screen. I venture to say it is both; yet, I suspectthat James himself would exhibit less abhorrence of the devices ofmodern mass communication than his more fastidious admirers.

Even before Catherine tortures her father by her cruel and bitterwords both the photography and music establish that he is sick andsuffering (Ex. 7). The instrumentation of the motif D-flat-A-flat

Ex.7 vv .A,Ap,3 Alt~k.

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illustrates the wealth of resources Hollywood may offer the musician.What composer for the concert hall would dare to score for three


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Copland as a Film Composer 173hatred (Ex. 9). The descending motif in its inverted dotted rhythm

Ex. 9 2 4Yl.,Vla., 3 Vb..2Ens.. con

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is here again, following the pattern in Of Mice and Men, and isrepeated until the music fades out at the point where Catherineurges her father to alter his will. The same musical means seems toserve its purpose now with even greater precision and impact. Therhythm has been sharpened by substituting a double dot for thesingle dot, and the melodic pungency has been increased by trans-ferring the chromatic progressionsfrom the bass to the treble of thispathetic Scotch snap. But beyond this sharpening of the tools in thecomposer'sworkshop there is also a more vivid realization of the tech-nique of film-making.In scoring Of Mice and Men, Copland workedas a concert-hall musician, making a guess as to how it would all comeout on the final celluloid print. Often the music would containsufficient pauses and fermatas, enough "give", to permit the spokenlines to sound without obscuring the melodic profile. At other timesthe musical climaxes would be carefully timed so as not to interfere(and not be interfered with). But in the final dubbing session thecomposer'sexcellent though naive intentions would come a cropper.There is, for instance, the fighting scene between Lennie and Curlywhere the accents of the music are supposed to precede and succeedthe punches of Curly so as to give the fight a blurred depth. How-ever, the time allowed between the sforzati of the orchestra is much


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174 The Musical Quarterlytoo short (a dotted quarter-note or less at a metronome speed of 16ofor the quarter); consequently by the time music and sound tracksare combined we have something so closely akin to the mechanicalsynchronization of a Western that the scene loses much of the forcethe composer intended it to have. Of course, no director wouldpermit the orchestra to obscure the dialogue, and he would rightlyinsist that in the dubbing session the volume of the music be reducedif it showed any tendency to cover the drama. In The Heiress thispainful reduction to an almost inaudible softness never has to takeplace, because with the deftness of a veteran screen composer, Cop-land allowed an ample margin for sound and dialogue tracks to maketheir point. The result is a seemingly effortless combination in whichneither the orchestral nor the verbal fabric loses its continuity. SinceCatherine is the obstinate aggressor in the foregoing scene, her angryretorts are so timed that they occur after the completion of a musicalphrase, and thus receive particular emphasis. Her father pleads:"You will meet some honest, decent man some day. You have manyfine qualities... " "And thirty thousand a year!" the daughter inter-rupts after the G-sharp in m. 5 of Ex. 9. The doctor argues, "Youknow him to be a scoundrel",and Catherine snaps back, "I love him,does that humiliate you?" after the G-sharp in m. 9 of Ex. 9. That is,again after the completion of the main motif. There are too manyfinely worked details to be included here, but an alert observer willbe aware of the team-work that is practiced between the men respon-sible for the various factors that combine to make the film.

Altogether, the lesson of Copland's success as a film composer maybe summed up in these terms: flexibility and team-work. Studios,producers, and directors are not persuaded by prima donnas but bycraftsmen who have proved themselves quick, efficient, and elastic.Is the game worth the candle? In financial as well as in social terms,it obviously is. The industry is capable of making available fundsthat exceed all the usual music awards and fellowships, but quiteapart from pecuniary considerations, to write good music for the mil-lions who see and hear the movies means doing something aboutmusical taste instead of preaching about it. Yet, in the last analysis thestrength of the cinema lies in the fact that its novel and plentifulresources challenge the artist as artist. Monteverdi responded to thechallenge of opera as did Stravinsky to Diaghilev's ballets, for it isnot possible mechanically to transplant existing art forms to a newmedium. The difficulties of adjusting to new types of dramatic enter-


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Copland as a Film Composer 175tainment have been defied and surmounted in the past. The statureand example of Copland augur well for the future.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND CREDITS

(All quotations from scores and scripts are printed here by permission of thecomposer and producer.)1939 The City. Producer: American Documentary Films. Directors: RalphSteiner and Willard van Dyke. Commentary: Lewis Mumford.1939 Of Mice and Men. Producer: Hal Roach Studios. Distributor: UnitedArtists. Director: Lewis Milestone. Based on the novel by John Steinbeck.1940 Our Town. Producer: Sol Lesser. Distributor: United Artists. Director:Sam Wood. Based on the play by Thornton Wilder. (Also Orchestral suite andPiano suite. Publisher: Boosey 8cHawkes.)1942 Music for Movies. An orchestral suite. Publisher: Boosey 8&Hawkes.Contains: (1) New England Countryside from The City; (2) Barley Wagonsfrom Of Mice and Men; (3) Sunday Traffic from The City; (4) Story of GroversCorners from Our Town; (5) Threshing Machines from Of Mice and Men.1942 North Star. Producer: Samuel Goldwyn. Distributor: R.K.O.Radio Pictures. Director: Lewis Milestone. Based on the story by Lillian Hell-man.1945 The Cummington Story. Producer: U. S. Office of War Information.1947 The Red Pony. Producer-Director: Lewis Milestone (Republic Pro-ductions). Based on the story by John Steinbeck.1948 Children's Suite from The Red Pony (for orchestra). Publisher:Boosey &cHawkes. Contains: (1) Morning on the Ranch; (2) The Gift; (3)Dream March and Circus Music; (4) Walk to the Bunkhouse; (5) Grandfather'sStory; (6) Happy Ending.1948-49 The Heiress. Academy Award. Producer-Director: William Wyler(Paramount Pictures). Based on the novel, Washington Square, by Henry James,and on the play by Ruth and Augustus Goetz.