Music and The Hunger Games

There is a curiously ambivalent attitude towards music in Gary Ross's film of The Hunger Games. Music acts on the one hand as a vital form of communication, a metaphor for the last fragile shreds of the social bond itself (think of the ra-fe-mi-do code used by Katniss and Rue to signal to each other through the medium of imitating mockingjay birds); and on the other hand, as something profoundly suspicious. 

This is due in part to the fact that the first fully orchestral music we hear in the film takes the form of a proud brass fanfare diegetically accompanying a government propaganda film in the fictional country of Panem. So when, just a few minutes later, we hear a bed of lush, soaring strings entering as a - now non-diegetic - underscore to the action, we are apt to ask just what is being propagandised on behalf of in this film, The Hunger Games itself. Perhaps the kind of rootsy, aspirational self-determination exhibited by the film's lead characters - a quality that is itself musically coded.

In a recent article for New York Magazine's 'Vulture' blog, Nitsuh Abebe points to "a whole clutch of indie-folk guitar bands, up-and-comers and major-label crossovers alike, who enjoy dressing as if they just stepped out from among the coal miners of Hunger Games’ District 12." Abebe lists Mumford and Sons, Fanfarlo, the Magnetic Zeros, Of Monsters & Men, and Great Lake Swimmers, as artists responsible for "a form of polished, triumphal, suspender-friendly indie-folk" with a "smooth, punch-pulling sound ... cozy, attenuated, rigorously easy on the ears." These bands, Abebe claims, write music which "aims to be stirring, inspiring, or empowering ... But a striking amount of it winds up feeling inspiring on roughly the same level that your bank would like to inspire you to enjoy the freedom of no-fee checking, or your cellular provider would like to empower you to lead a rich, interconnected social life with your unlimited data plan." 

The connection is not simply a glib cheap short, Abebe insists, as this music is precisely the soundtrack of choice for many television commercials, with which it seems to share this same promise of a "highly-generalised self-actualisation." This music also makes up a great deal of the soundtrack to The Hunger Games: The Arcade Fire, whose song "Abraham's Daughter" features on the film's soundtrack, are mentioned in Abebe's article; The Civil Wars - who aren't mentioned in the article, but could be - have two songs featured on the soundtrack; and much of T-Bone Burnett and James Newton Howard's incidental music for the film inhabits the same soundworld of tentatively plucked acoustic guitars, winsome pentatonic flutes and stirring orchestral textures. 

But The Hunger Games, more than almost any other science fiction film recently produced, is all about a future, as in William Gibson's oft-quoted phrase, decidedly "unevenly distributed". There is a scene early on where the apparently medieval existence of Katniss Everdeen and her fellows in District 12 is suddenly interrupted by the appearance of a massive chrome-plated airship looming up over the forest like something out of Star Trek. The musical equivalent to this moment of sudden future shock and radical incongruity comes quite a bit later in the film and - perhaps surprisingly - it involves the oldest composed piece of music in the whole soundtrack. 

It takes place when Katniss and the other 'tributes' first rise up into the game arena, and it is preceded by a moment of complete silence, an absolute vacuum of sound which lasts for a remarkably long period of time. This use of absolute silence is an old sound designers' trick, often used before strange or shocking noises as a means of emphasising their shock effect. You'll often hear a sudden - and usually very brief - suck of soundlessness immediately before big explosions in action and science fiction films, for instance. But here it is being used to introduce a very different kind of sound. 

The piece of music is called 'Sediment' and it was created in 1972 by the American composer Laurie Spiegel using a monophonic analogue synthesizer called an ElectroComp 200. Spiegel's first compositions, at Shimer College, Chicago (where she studied under the Ford Foundation-sponsored Early Entrant programme) and at the Juilliard School in New York, were composed for guitar and mandolin, and influenced by the "American Primitivism" of John Fahey (whose record label, Takoma Records, released the first solo album by Hunger Games composer and "executive music producer" T-Bone Burnett). But in 1969 she was introduced by Morton Subotnick to Donald Buchla's pioneering modular synthesizer, the so-called "Buchla Box", an event she describes as "a mind blow" and "a revelation", claiming that she immediately "fell madly in love with it". 

Spiegel would go on to work at Bell Labs and Eventide, produce an electronic realisation of Johannes Kepler's Harmonices Mundi for the Voyager Golden Record, and create one of the first pieces of algorithmic music software, Music Mouse for the Mac. She was among the first to write about the digital distribution of music and the effects of computers on musical aesthetics. Seeing the possibility of a return to a kind of grass roots domestic music-making, she came to regard the computer as a new kind of folk instrument.

'Sediment' itself was created in the composer's Manhattan apartment and it was necessary to turn off the refrigerator while recording to stop the synthesizer's valves from dropping out of tune. Intricately worked out with pen and graph paper before its electronic realisation, the piece thrums with the kind of swelling, pulsing sounds that were contemporaneously beginning to characterise orchestral work by her friends and fellow New York downtown composers, Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros and Philip Glass, albeit with a cool, metallic sheen that gives it the resonant feel of a science fiction spaceship interior. 

In the film, it is followed almost immediately by another piece of musical minimalism, the first part of Steve Reich's Three Movements for orchestra, from 1985. Reich's delicately phased pitched-percussion instruments and eighth note string ostinati seem at first a curious choice for the violent bloodbath that it underscores in the film. But in combination with the Spiegel piece it follows, it produces a strangely delirious feeling, something like the "ecstasy of fumbling" described in Wilfred Owen's poem from the trenches of the First World War, 'Dulce et Decorum Est'. 

But what finally links all these musics, the Spiegel and the Arcade Fire and even the imitative song of the mockingjay itself, is this curious nostalgia for some lost organic solidarity; a misty-eyed pastoralism whose very condition, somewhat paradoxically, is advanced digital technology, whether Spiegel's synthesizer or the genetically engineered songbirds. Even the indie-folk groups identified by Abebe seem to be a direct outgrowth - if not of the whole Pitchfork phenomenon itself of which blogs like Vulture are not entirely disconnected - then of the alt.rock and alt.country tags, generic identifiers which signify their debt to the usenet discussion forums of the 80s and 90s.

Reflections on 'In C' following yesterday's performance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall

It is tempting to wonder if Pierre Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari and the other members of the Groupe Reserches Musicales were aware of the presence in 1963 of an American named Terry Riley at one of the studios owned and operated by the French national broadcaster, Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française. Riley apparently described the engineer from the RTF who helped him to record Chet Baker, Luis Fuentes, Luigi Trussardi, and George Solano jamming around the theme from Miles Davis's 'So What', as "a very straight guy in a white coat." Riley recorded the group, first altogether, and then individually on separate tracks. Allowing these tapes to go out of phase with each other, looping parts, and creating recurring delays, Riley created the music for The Gift, a play by the influential 'maker' of 'Happenings' Ken Dewey, with members of the Living Theatre and Anna Halprin's dance company.

When, on November 8th of the following year, the audience filed into the San Francisco Tape Music Center, its door held open to conceal a notice from the fire department declaring the building off limits, it was this music from The Gift that was playing on as background music. It is important to locate Terry Riley's 'In C' - the very piece said audience were attending the first performance of - within the history of electronic music, because in a way it is the first piece of music whose performance relies on human instrumentalists imitating the behaviour of tape recorders, as opposed to the serial music of Stockhausen and Boulez which essentially used machines as a kind of perfection of human fallibility, its basic concepts nonetheless derived from instrumental music. Playing the same thing, in the same way, over and over again, gradually phasing and going out of time with the other players around you is actually something very difficult for a human musician to do. For a tape machine, it is just what comes naturally.

This was the curious thing about the performance of 'In C' yesterday at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Recorded for Radio 3's Discovering Music series, the performance featured seventeen members of the BBC Concert Orchestra playing glockenspiel, vibraphone, marimba, xylophone, piano, and harp plus two flutes, two clarinets, two trumpets, and a string quintet. They just couldn't quite leave it alone. The pulse kept rotating between the different pitched percussionists, losing its gnawing insistence, players would show off by playing some of the piece's fifty-three reiterative motifs in octaves or in double time, flautists were flutter-tonguing, trumpeters fanning their mutes suggestively. The beat was considerably slower than usual, and much more sparse. Instruments would drop in and out an awful lot, playing a phrase just once or twice very delicately and then keeping quiet for a bit, not at all like the kind of frenetic hammering away one hears on early recordings. This was very much an 'In C' to contemplate and appreciate, rather than an ecstatic, trancelike 'In C', and as such it stood as a marker of the piece's newfound acceptance as the 'Rite of Spring' of the late twentieth century, a fully integrated part of the canon of great western classical works.

Warner Jepson was one of the performers playing 'In C' that night in November 1964. A few years later he would leave the Tape Music Center for the National Centre for Experiments in Television (NCET), but not before creating an extraordinary electronic score for Carlos Carvajal's dance-drama, Totentanz, based, like Franz Lizst's Totentanz, on the 'Dies Irae'. The piece was created using a combination of concrete sounds and sounds from a Buchla Box, the first ever electronic sequencer, designed by Donald Buchla at the Tape Music Center while Terry Riley was in France. The period in the early to mid-seventies, with Jepson as composer-in-residence was one of the most productive in the history of NCET. Jepson was interested in the full integration of sound and vision, creating images in much the same way that he had created music, by feeding into a variety of processors a combination of found images and raw electronic signal. It was around this time that Stephen Beck invented the Direct Video Synthesizer.

Jepson was far from the only member of Riley's group that night to go on to interesting things. Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick had started the Tape Music Center in 1962, and Subotnick's (1967) piece, Silver Apples on the Moon was the first piece of electronic music commissioned by a record label (Nonesuch), and thus, in a way, the first piece of music conceived specifically for a record and not a performance. In the seventies, Subotnick began composing pieces for live instruments processed through what he called a 'ghost score'. The ghost score is a series of predetermined control voltages that effectively patch the live instrument through the audio processing modules of an analogue synthesizer, creating an entirely new means for the performance of electronic music. The instrumentalist plays, and their performance is haunted by, and filtered through, this variable virtual mesh.

The composers Pauline Oliveros and Steve Reich were also present, and it was apparently Reich's idea to include the eighth note pulse to keep everyone together. As was the multi-wind instrumentalist, Jon Gibson, who has since gone on to play in the first performance of practically every major minimalist work by LaMonte Young, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Gibson also played on the recordings of Arthur Russell's Instrumentals. Phil Winsor, a composer whose graphic scores were part of the groundbreaking (1986/87) Eye Music touring exhibition, has more recently been composing using fractal and stochastic algorithms in order to create music based on the universe's "own rhythms" for the sake of its possible healing powers. Tony Martin, also part of the group, went from designing light shows to accompany concerts by Oliveros and Subotnick to creating lighting effects for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka. Stan Schaap, on the other hand, teaches a "practical spirituality" promoted through his Power to Share website, and Mel Weitzman has become the abbot of Berkeley Zen Centre.

I think in some way the sensibility of that first performance of 'In C' might be summed up by a sort of imagined triangulation point between the varied interests of its players, many of which seem to circle around the idea of the concert as a profoundly immersive and encompassing event, and around ideas of multi-media experimentation and interactivity. Terry Riley has described his initial conception of the piece as "a kind of cosmic vision of patterns that were gradually transforming and changing." This oh-so-Californian 'cosmic vision' was notable for its absence from the QEH on Thursday afternoon.

"Like a wind-up toy, you stutter at my feet" : Towards an Aesthetics of Stammering

The Shows of London is a small reading group, based out of the King's College English department and interested primarily in the "entertainment and display cultures of nineteenth century London." Last week saw them mounting a half-day symposium in the King's old anatomy museum under the heading 'Stutter London'. London, it seems, has always stuttered, always been noted for its sounds and its machinic rhythms, and this brief conference set out to explore the stammering, spluttering sounds of the city as circulation and disturbance, synaesthesia and unrest. Can we speak of a radical stuttering whilst simultaneously maintaing due sensitivity to those for whom a stammer is a serious impediment?

Sara Thornton, in a presentation on Dickens's Bleak House, evokes Deleuze's paper, 'He Stuttered' in which the stammer is enlisted in the schizoanalytic opposition of the smooth and the striated, and for which, "Style is to stutter in one's own language." She opposes the smooth, oily discourse of Chadband to the ellipses and aporias of Krook, exploiting the potential for innuendo behind stuttering's pathological designation as a 'struggle behaviour'. Louise Lee, however, notes that Charles Kingsley, author of the Water Babies and Westward Ho!, was crippled by a paralysing fear of new and unfamiliar situations as a result of his speech impediment, suggesting that stuttering is perhaps just as likely to be an agent of conservatism as unrest. Kingsley went to great lengths to try and cure his stammer, frequenting the very same Harley Street specialist as another famous British stutterer, Lewis Carroll.

From my own perspective, the most fruitful of the day's interventions were those that drew the notion of stuttering out of the context of the Victorian novel and into the art forms of the twentieth century. Laura Marcus explored the cinematic genre of the 'city symphony' from Cavalcanti's Rien que les heures to Jean Vigo's A propos de Nice, via Ruttman, Vertov and Joris Ivens. The city symphonies of the late twenties sought to project a kind of isomorphism from the urban rhythms of their chosen city to the rhythms of film and montage. As each of the films under consideration were silent, their status as symphonies must be understood as figurative, synaesthetic (Germaine Dulac dubbed Ivens, "One of the visual musicians of the future," and in general it seems to be one of the ironies of history that film-makers tended to forget the close family relationship between music and film at the very moment the cinema becomes sonorised).

As 'symphonic' cinema, it is striking that such city films offer rare examples, for which they were highly praised by Ezra Pound, of a kind of object-oriented cinema (elements of which are taken up later, in very different ways, by Ozu and Tati). It is clear that the only protagonist of such films is the city itself, in which any human subjects are merely subsumed, participants in a rhythm which is not their own. In Ivens's Regen, set, though not obviously so, in Amsterdam, the city, as Marcus pointed out, "knows it is raining." We see the first raindrops strike the canal before we see a man's upturned palm, testing the air for precipitants.

Though containing as much as four months worth of footage, the narrative time span of such films tended to be compressed, in the edit suite, down to the passage of a day. In this respect, we might see them, as was pointed out by a question from the audience, as heirs to the late nineteenth century fondness for using stage lighting effects to recreate the sensations of dawn and dusk, common to Puccini and French realist opera. In other respects, the musical antecedents of Ruttman and Cavalcanti are not opera composers, but the Zukunftsmusikers around Franz Liszt whose programmatic symphonic poems would be the source of Liszt's break with Wagner in the late 1850's.

Following Laura Marcus's presentation, came Tom Fogg's exploration of the craze for 'stutter edit' and similar sounds in what he insisted on describing with the rather unfortunate American term, IDM. Ever since Karlheinz Stockhausen offered his 'Advice to Clever Children' in which, at the prompting of Radio 3's Dick Witts, he compared the repetitive beats of the Aphex Twin to being, "like someone who is stuttering all the time, and can't get words out of his mouth," electronic beats have stammered with an infectious aphasic arrhythmia. The use of the stutter edit in works by Matmos or Caribou, has a kind of anthropomorphic effect on the computer, claims Fogg, while insisting that, perhaps more than any other instrument, the computer was "always already anthropomorphic."

Fogg's paper restricts its attention to the use of specific stuttering software plug-ins in recent computer-based music, his conclusion that stuttering is then a consequence of spread of home computers and their domestification, is thus largely tautological. But what would a general theory of musical stuttering look like? One that would have to go way beyond the rhizomatic glitch techno of the Mille Plateaux label (and their various imitators, discussed by Fogg), to take in Steve 'Silk' Hurley's 'Jack Your Body', Paul Hardcastle's 'Nineteen', the "uh uh uh" of Laurie Anderson's 'O Superman', the voice phasing of Steve Reich's 'Come Out' and 'It's Gonna Rain', even the repeated staccato quavers tht comprise the colloratura of the Queen of the Night's "Der Hölle Rache" aria in The Magic Flute. Indeed, just think how commonly Italian opera singing (perhaps most obviously in Rossini) is characterised by precisely the repetitions, unnatural prolongations, and curiously placed (from a linguistic point of view) cessations that comprise Wikipedia's definition of stammering. And that is just to speak of the most obvious vocal stutterings, whereas Fogg has already shown the possibility of expanding the term to an anthropomorphic description of instrumental and machine-made sounds.

If any piece of music were to, "Der Hölle Rache", one of the most venomous, but also one of the most beautiful, and certainly one of the most difficult to sing arias in all opera, right at the very top of a soprano's range, sits well with Deleuze's notion of a language "so strained that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or stammer ... then language in its entirety reaches the limit that marks its outside and makes it confront silence." But perhaps Fogg is a little overhasty in dismissing the possibility of a psychoanalysis of sonic stammering. In 'O Superman', in 'Nineteen', even in Matmos's A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure, don't we find precisely this re-mergence, this return of the repressed - as in the young Freud of his early Studies on Hysteria (co-authored with Josef Breuer), stuttering as hysterical symptom, "effects and residues of excitations which have acted upon the nervous system as traumas." The stammer marks the horror of the past, a nervousness towards the future, and the block of the unsayable.

All images taken from last summer's 'Stutter' exhibition at the Tate Modern.