Download Louis and Bebe Barron`s Forbidden Planet: A Film Score Guide.

The Journal of film music
Volume 2, number 1, fall 2007 Pages 79–81
issn 1087-7142 coPyrighT © 2007
The inTernaTional film music socieTy, inc.
James Wierzbicki: Louis and Bebe Barron’s Forbidden
Planet: A Film Score Guide.
Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005 [xii, 183 p. ISBN: 0810856700. $24.95] Music
examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.
david cooper
J
ames Wierzbicki’s guide to
Bebe and Louis Barron’s film
Forbidden Planet, a cult classic
of the science fiction genre, is the
fourth Scarecrow Film Score Guide
to be published under the series
editorship of Dr. Kate Daubney.
It is a score which has attracted
a fair degree of attention, as
much perhaps for the novelty of
the sounds used as their musical
sophistication, and it seems to
retain a strong following among
both music students and film
enthusiasts. One of my own
graduate students at the University
of Leeds used it as the focus of his
Masters dissertation several years
ago, and his study demonstrated to
me the difficulties of researching
and analysing this strange and
elusive score.
Analysts of “symphonic”
film scores in the western artmusic tradition can rely on a
well understood vocabulary for
their discussion of timbre and
texture, and may reasonably expect
musically sophisticated readers to
be able to “auralise” a sound by
reference to standard instrumental
tone colours and combinations.
Depending on the “competence”
of the reader—the depth of their
knowledge and experience—the
possibility of increasing levels of
refinement of timbral description
exists. Thus, for example, the
sound of the clarinet playing the
note F5 in the clarino register can
be more precisely described by
reference to dynamic level and
contour, method of articulation,
and ultimately even the country
of manufacture of the instrument
and the hardness of the reed
being used.
This type of classification,
which uses the name of the
sound source as a referent, is
clearly very different in kind to
the taxonomy of colour, for the
tone color of the clarinet does not
fall within a specific region on a
one-dimensional continuum of
instrumental timbres in the way
that yellow or green shades lie
within frequency ranges of the
visible electromagnetic spectrum.1
There have been a number of
attempts to define an appropriate
“timbre space,” the classical
example being that of John Grey,
who used multidimensional-scaling
techniques to analyse experimental
data from listeners” perceptions
of the differences between
instrumental sounds and plot them
in three-dimensional space. Thus
1 In fact, the timbres of instrumental sounds are
often described by reference to light and shade,
and thus employ luminance as the underlying
model.
far however, the mathematicallydefined interactions of timbre
space have not offered the music
analyst a more convenient means of
identifying and differentiating the
sonorities of musical instruments.
In the domain of electroacoustic
music, in which Bebe and Louis
Barron”s score for Forbidden
Planet stands as a pioneering
document, any conceivable sound
can in theory be employed and
thus the description of timbre
becomes much more complex
than for instrumental sounds. The
composer and academic Denis
Smalley developed the concept of
spectro-morphology as a means
of identifying the characteristics
of both synthesised and natural
sounds, but as with timbre space
this model does not readily
translate into handy descriptors and
thus in the absence of a universal
typology for sound the analyst will
generally (as James Wierzbicki
has done in this guide to Forbidden
Planet) turn to onomatopoeia or
structural isomorphism between
the sound source and a “real world”
sound, whether it is “siren-like,” a
“whoosh,” a “whine” or a “rumble.”
Clearly the relationship between
“matter” and “meaning” is a
particular issue in a compositional
field where sounds may be strongly
80 THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC
allusive of real-world sources, for
it is hard to escape from the aural
reality that a sound which has
been recorded or sampled from the
creaking of a door (such as that
found in Pierre Henry’s Variations
pour une porte et un soupir) acts
as an auditory code for a door,
whatever its syntactical placement
and intended semantics. And in
the audiovisual context of cinema,
rather than the acousmatic arena
of electroacoustic music, sound,
image and narrative are inevitably
intimately connected.
Louis and Bebe Barron’s
music track for Forbidden Planet
(1956) is usually held to be the
first feature-length electronic
film “score”. Although I have put
the word score in scare quotes,
Wierzbicki’s thesis is that despite
its use of electronically-generated
source material, it at least partly
functions through principles of
pitch construction that, although
attenuated, are comparable to
those found in more conventional
“symphonic” scores of the period.
For Wierzbicki:
The score “works” because in
many ways it holds to Hollywood
norms, yet the score will forever
stand apart not just because of
its unprecedented medium but
because it violates convention
at almost every turn. The cues
of Forbidden Planet are open to a
multiplicity of interpretations,
and therein lies the score’s
enduring wonder (p. 153).
Wierzbicki’s interest in pitch
formations does not mean that
he avoids discussion of the sonic
objects from which the score
is fashioned, but although he
presents a useful overview of early
technology in his second chapter,
“Compositional Techniques”,
he is able to cast little new light
on precisely how Louis Barron’s
circuits were constructed or
interacted with each other, or how
they were influenced by Norbert
Wiener’s cybernetic theory—secrets
that apparently died with Barron.
The fact that these circuits were so
prone, or perhaps so easily driven,
to self destruction (their failure
sometimes generating signals that
have been anthropomorphically
interpreted as their “death cries”
in the literature surrounding
Forbidden Planet), and Louis’s
inability to replicate them, may
suggest to the more sceptical reader
that perhaps he was not quite the
technical genius that Bebe gave him
credit for.
Wierzbicki remarks that
rather than being conventionally
“composed,” the Barron’s “score” is
“a compilation of highly processed,
carefully edited bits of sonic
material generated by electronic
circuits that, in effect, made music
of their own volition” (p. 41).
Louis Barron’s “cybernetic” devices
might thus be regarded as analogue
prototypes of the algorithmic
compositional tools which have
proliferated since the development
of the personal computer. As a
preparation for his discussion
of the relationship between the
Barron’s “electronic tonalities” and
the film, Wierzbicki reviews the
structure of the version released
in 1977 on the so-called “original
MGM soundtrack” album in his
fourth chapter. Interestingly in this
track-by-track analysis he reveals
that this differs in a number of
respects—some subtle, some more
substantial—from the sound track
on the release print.
A primary focus of this
discussion is the examination
of pitch relationships, and the
author suggests that not only
does the Barrons’ score employ
specific motives associated with
the character Robby, the Krell
civilization, the “monster from
the Id” and more abstractly,
the emotion of love, but it also
embodies tonal relationships which
prioritise the pitches Db, F and
B. Wierzbicki proposes that when
the score is considered in a highly
reduced and schematicized way (as
western art-music rather as than
“organized sound”), a series of
symmetries can be observed in its
structure and, despite the generally
atonal characteristics, a tonal
design that unfolds an implicit
underlying progression from iiº7 – I7
in Db major.
The author also detects a nested
series of proportions based on the
Golden Section, akin (though not
remarked upon by the author) to
those detected by Ernö Lendvai
in the music of Bartók and by Roy
Howat in Debussy’s oeuvre. For
Wierzbicki:
It is tempting to read theatrical
intentionality into all this. Like
the suspenseful opening harmony
that ultimately has a bright but
not-quite-stable resolution, other
purely musical relationships
within the album indeed suggest
parallels with the Forbidden
Planet plot. An ambiguous chord
depicting utopia is balanced by
a simple dyad associated with
death; a melody flavored with
romance is later inverted in
music that depicts violence; a
dissonance that remains subtle in
the seemingly “friendly” Morbius
scenes later rages uncontrollably.
By the same token, the narrative
thread that leads to a seemingly
happy ending is knotted, at a
mathematically significant point,
by a climactic battle; the line that
leads to the battle is interrupted,
at the same proportional point,
by a romantic idyll, and the arc
that leads to the idyll is similarly
broken by a foreshadowing of
disaster (p. 97).
This is an intriguing and
sophisticated analysis of the album
soundtrack and, incidentally,
an approach to pitch structure
that bears comparison with Paul
Rudy’s analysis of Smalley’s
WIERZBICKI 81
electroacoustic works Pente and
Empty Vessels.2 Despite Wierzbicki’s
acknowledgement that the residual
tonal structure he has inferred
from (or perhaps imposed on) the
soundtrack album was probably
fortuitous and the result of Bebe
Barron’s musical intuition rather
than careful planning, the reader
may question the extent to which
this emphasis on pitch accords
with the experiences of the
“average” listener. If one of the
tasks of the film music analyst is
to provide a “map” of the auditory
terrain of the score, just as the
cartographer creates a graphical
representation of the topographical
features of the natural world and
the human environment, he or
she may clearly elect to prioritise
certain elements within the space.
Maintaining the geographical
metaphor, the mapmaker may
also develop specialized readings
or constructions of the landscape,
for example by overlaying the
geological characteristics on a
two-dimensional representation
of the terrain. There is no doubt
that western art music theory
has, at least until recently, tended
to place pitched sounds higher
in the auditory hierarchy than
non-pitched or noise-based ones,
and although a continuum can be
conceptualised between sounds
which are perceived as pitched
and those which are not, there is a
culturally-constructed, and perhaps
to a degree biologically-determined,
difference in the ways that these
elements are generally understood
to function and signify. Given that
in film, sounds are conventionally
reproduced as effects that may be
non-naturalistically transformed,
understated or magnified for
narrative purposes it is arguable
2 Paul Rudy, “Spectro-morphological
Diatonicism: Unlocking Style and Tonality in the
Works of Denis Smalley Through Aural Analysis,”
Journal SEAMUS 16, no. 2, (Spring 2003), 18-27.
that the ambiguity which can
result from the interaction of the
nondiegetic sounds of an electronic
score and the diegetic sound effects
may well intensify the relative
impact of pitched events for the
audience.
As the author moves out from
Forbidden Planet as potentially
autonomous composition to
contingent film score in his final
chapter, so he expands his analysis
to retrieve the more broadly sonic.
The value of any analysis will
ultimately be judged by the impact
it has on the viewer/auditor of
the film. (This highlights another
terminological lacuna, for there
is a wide scale tendency to give
precedence to the visual over
the auditory modality by talking
about “seeing” or “watching” a
movie, and a token does not seem
to exist in the English language
which completely encapsulates
the complexity of the process of
reception and interpretation of
films as audiovisual artefacts.) A
successful film score analysis will
make apparent the detail that the
casual observer may not notice; it
will offer a hermeneutic gloss on
the score, explaining the role it
takes in relation to the narrative
(though this is not by any means
intended to suggest that music
always functions as a narrative
agent); and it will illuminate
the scores contribution to the
structural coherence of the film.
James Wierzbicki’s film score
guide seems to me to satisfy these
three criteria very effectively. In
his fifth chapter, “The Film Score,”
he lays out a detailed map of the
aural landscape, clearly tying
it to the narrative development
and in his summary draws on
his discussion of the soundtrack
album in the fourth chapter to
demonstrate the score’s structural
role in the film. This discussion is
thoroughly contextualised in the
three opening chapters which are
scrupulously researched and very
densely referenced (the first and
third chapters each have more than
a hundred endnotes), and consider,
respectively, the score’s origins
and connections, the Barron’s
compositional techniques and
historical and critical perspectives.
Although the Barrons are curiously
omitted from the index, in other
respects it is easy to navigate the
volume, which is written in clear
and straightforward language and
is well illustrated with musical
examples and graphs. It should
provide a useful resource both
to the scholar of film music and
the student of electroacoustic
composition, and stand as a
testimony to the groundbreaking
work of Louis and Bebe Barron in
this most idiosyncratic of films.