Aesthetics and Rhetoric

Author(s): Claudia Gorbman

Source: American Music, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 14-26
Published by: University of Illinois Press
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CLAUDIA GORBMAN

Aesthetics

and

Rhetoric

Two terms, aesthetics and rhetoric, identify two distinct ways in which
musical multimedia can be considered. Though they are certainly not
opposites, they designate two kinds of discourses, and concomitant
sets of assumptions, about musical multimedia. Aesthetics, of course,
is the study of what is pleasing and beautiful. In its Kantian, apolitical sense, aesthetics sees the work as an object to be admired, as a
gateway to the sublime, to be explored and perhaps poked and prodded for the secrets of formal beauty and meaning that it can reveal.
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. Considering the rhetoric of the work
focuses on its manipulations of the audio-viewer, perhaps as a function of where those manipulative designs came from and how they
are embedded in the work.
Until relatively recently, academics have mobilized primarily aesthetic discourses in examining music for film, especially in the art cinema. Scholar Jeff Smith observed in 1996 that within the field of film
studies, film-music scholarship was "the last bastion of aesthetics."
Film studies were by then already dominated by a scholarly paradigm
that views films as cultural products, indissociable from their historical and social context. Smith was struck by the recalcitrance of filmmusic scholarship to get with the cultural studies program. By and
large, film-music scholars persisted in such pursuits as auteur analyses of Bernard Herrmann and Erich Korngold and studying the forClaudia Gorbman is professor of film studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma.She is the author of UnheardMelodies:NarrativeFilmMusic (Indiana and BFI, 1987) and over fifty articles and book chapters on film music and film sound. Her activities as a translator and editor include three
books by Michel Chion, and she is currently writing a book on the cinema
of Agnes Varda.
American Music
Spring 2004
? 2004 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Aesthetics and Rhetoric

15

mal coherence and unity of scores and films. Smith proposed a number of factors to explain the conservatism of film-music studies. First
and foremost, its parent discipline was not psychoanalysis or literary criticism or political science, but musicology, which lagged a generation behind literary and film studies' embrace of psychoanalysis,
Marxism, feminism, queer studies, and other culturally politicized
approaches.1 When musicologists turned to film music as a genre
worthy of study, they were obliged to treat it as high art in order to
maintain credibility in their institutional milieu, just as twenty years
before film studies latched on to auteurism, considering the director
as autonomous artist, as a crucial step in establishing film studies itself as a worthy pursuit in the academy.
A second factor contributing to the emphasis on aesthetics in the
film-music field is that to a much greater extent than film studies in
general, film-music scholarship has relied on the participation of practitioners. Composers have maintained a regular presence in the field,
in the form of interviews in scholarly publications and attendance at
conferences. This participation is eagerly sought by scholars, since
many composers have a gift for explaining what they do, and they
also prove more generous than directors or stars in actually showing
up and engaging in dialogue. It is more difficult to take an analytical
approach to a film score predicated on the death of the individual
autonomous subject if the composer himself has been telling you how
he got the idea for the musical gangster joke in the final scene. The
obvious temptation is to drop the theory and adopt an auteurist position with respect to the composer. This tradition of composer participation in academic activity-the Film Music Society's conferences in Los Angeles, Lukas Kendall's lively publication Film Score
Monthly, and several annual film sound conferences in Melbourne
(Cinesonic) and London (The School of Sound) spring to mind as exexplain the aesthetic emphasis in film-music studies
amples-helps
until recently.
In contrast, the academic study of such multimedia forms as television music and computer music, while scant, has forsaken the aesthetic approach to go full bore into music's rhetorical dimensions, its
functions and effects.2 Again, much of this is circumstantial, based on
the prevailing academic paradigm, which threw its weight toward
cultural studies by the time scholarly attention turned to the newer
forms. Furthermore, the composers of television quiz-show music,
music for commercials, and most other TV genres, as well as the composers of video game music, have worked in anonymity as far as the
public is concerned, aside from a very few such as Mike Post (numerous TV drama themes from Magnum, PI and Hill Street Blues to NYPD
Blue, Dragnet, and Law and Order and its spinoffs) and W.G. Snuffy

16

Gorbman

Walden (Thirtysomething, The Drew Carey Show, Sports Night, Providence, The West Wing, The Norm Show, Mister Sterling), and film composers whose credits include TV work.
But also, from the perspective of the actual formal features of each
audiovisual medium-or, more accurately, those features as determined by the specific historical and economic factors of their evolution-it is understandable that both aesthetic and rhetorical discourses have been used to address film music, and a more purely
rhetorical approach has characterized the discussion of music in
such environments as video games, mediated sports events, and television commercials.
Using the model presented in Rick Altman's essay on television
sound, one may inventory a media form and message, its formal constraints and its relationship to its audience, as a crucial first step to
understanding how its music functions.3 With video games, for example, music and sound effects are determined largely by the game's
genre and content, the presumed taste of the user, the physical nature of the medium, and the temporal dimensions of its use.
In a video game the player is usually the main character in the
fictional action world, moving through interactive space filled with
dangers and rewards, obstacles and goals, and disasters to be averted by evasion or by striking first. Sound effects are very important:
they lend credibility and dynamism to collisions and other events in
the digital imagery onscreen; they provide physical cues for fast response in playing; and of course ray-gun blasts and explosions inherently provide pleasure to adolescent players. Music provides dynamism, tension, genre identity, and occasionally mood in the manner
of movie underscoring.
A television drama, on the other hand, is consumed in highly regulated discrete eight-minute chunks timed to the second for the commercials that are the raison d'etre of television's economy. During program segments, television drama scoring behaves similarly to film
scoring. But the show's signature tune is all-important in establishing and maintaining the show's identity and viewer identification.
Unlike a film whose normal consumption pattern is to be seen once,
the dramatic TV series is a weekly ritual, announced and demarcated by the theme.
Television music also has a pragmatic function that has been called
hailing. As Altman says, the television is a box in domestic space; unlike the cinema, the TV must compete for the user's attention with
other events and activities in the home-and, since the advent of the
remote control, other channels, too. As you answer the phone or look
into your refrigerator, the TV cues you when something "important"
is about to happen that you ought not to miss, and music may be part

Aesthetics and Rhetoric

17

of this "hailing." You can get the dishes done during the half-hour
commercial break of The West Wing, and when you hear the familiar
Coplandesque theme, you can make it back to the living room and
not miss a beat of the dedicated presidential staff's scrappy dialogue.
The film's one-time consumption, its sustained and controlled unfolding over a hundred minutes, and the room its dramatic form provides for musical elaboration, allow the scholar or critic easily to consider it from an aesthetic perspective, using language inherited from
nineteenth-century discourses about concert music. But television (especially in its more highly segmented forms) and commercial digital
media use more fragmentary, rationalized bits of music and much
more repetition than do the sustained narrative forms. It is difficult
to invoke the sublime or think about internal coherence every time
you hear the jolly tick-tock tune of Jeopardy. The medium and functional music define each other. Music for TV commercials is so patently and concentratedly rhetorical that the commercial often disregards even the most elementary considerations of musical coherence.
Commercials deploy music for its evident cultural meanings in compact and often complex semiotic bonding with image and text.
Can we perceive any common points of critical intersection in understanding these disparate musical multimedia? While no one would
disagree that rhetorical considerations are important for the art film
and for popular film, would we also want to argue for an aesthetics of
the TV signature tune, the car commercial, or the corporate website?
The most important work on musical multimedia in the last decade
has been done by the British music scholar Nicholas Cook. His dense
and suggestive book, Analysing Musical Multimedia, expressly takes
on all the musical genres, regardless of technological basis or sociological category, though he restricts his examples for analysis to opera, music video, television commercial, and film.4 Cook attempts to
forge a common language and theoretical framework for all musical
multimedia. He proposes the model of metaphor as the basic mechanism of the creation of meaning in multimedia. A metaphor works
by presenting two separate terms and asking us to identify their
shared attributes, the shaded area where circles intersect, if you will,
to make sense of the metaphor. "My father is a lion": rather than take
this phrase literally, we understand an area of signification where the
two spheres of "father" and "lion" converge: pride, strength, nobility, courage. A metaphor does not "mean" those shared attributes, but
rather its meaning consists in the transfer of attributes from one term
to the other. From having made sense of the father/lion metaphor,
we can perceive the father in a new way. The two terms of a metaphor give meaning to each other in a dialectical process. Likewise, argues Cook, music and the other media mutually inflect each other

18

Gorbman

with meaning; what we understand from their co-presentation is like

the shaded area in the intersecting circles of a metaphor.
Music and image can never "mean the same thing," but we can still
identify differing degrees and qualities of relationship between music and images. Cook establishes three models of music-image interrelationship: conformance,complementation,and contest. He derives this
triad of types from a more theoretically sophisticated understanding
of music-image interactions than the long-established critical opposition in film-music criticism between "parallel" and "counterpoint."
Let us skip over conformance, which in any case Cook declares very
rare in film or television, and proceed directly to complementation.
In complementation, visual and musical channels work in a complementary way to one another. Cook locates the Hollywood cinema, at
least the way composers talk about what they do, as functioning according to this model. "The theory of classical Hollywood film, for
example, asserts that pictures and words tell stories, which music cannot, but that music does what pictures and words cannot: 'seek out
and intensify the inner thoughts of the characters,' as Bernard Herrmann puts it, and 'invest a scene with terror, grandeur, gaiety, or misery."'5
Cook takes an example from Herrmann's own score for Psycho
(1960). Marion is driving in her car, just beginning her escape from
Phoenix; her boss crosses the street in front of her. Her anxiety grows
as she drives. The string orchestra elaborates a short, busy motif
against the backdrop of harmonic tension that refuses to resolve. Cook
is taken with Herrmann's own characterization of how film music
operates: "I feel that music on the screen can seek out and intensify
the inner thoughts of the characters." The seeking out is what interests
him. In the segment from Psycho, the angular, repetitive music does
not connect in a literal way with anything that is visible onscreen. It
does not obviously synchronize, for instance, with the editing or later, when it starts to rain, the car's windshield wiper blades. Instead,
Cook argues that since there is no literal, visual, or gestural correspondence between music and anything in the image, the music
jumps the diegetic gap, so to speak, "seeking out" and uncovering the turmoil in Marion's mind, and thus transferring its own
qualities to her. Its angular contours embody her unease; the repetitions and the constricted quality of the orchestration create an
obsessive quality, rather like when you go over the same thing
again and again in your mind.6
Another example, this time a popular song placed in a film, will show
the crucial importance of contextual factors in the emergence of meaning when media intersect. Musical context enriches and complements

Aesthetics and Rhetoric

19

visual narrative in a scene from Grosse Pointe Blank (1997).7 A professional hit man returns to his childhood home only to discover that
the house was demolished to make way for an eyesore of a convenience store. Martin (John Cusack) has just run into an old high school
teacher; he is feeling expansive and nostalgic as he drives into his
neighborhood, as the beginning of "Live and Let Die," performed by
the band Guns 'n' Roses, is heard on the soundtrack. The lyrics and
music both start out calmly and reflectively enough. The lyrics begin, sung melodically:
When you were young
And your heart was an open book
You used to say "Live and let live"
You know you did
But in this ever changing world in which we live in
Makes you give in and cry...
This is where Martin sees the damnable convenience store and realizes it has obscenely obliterated the home of his youth. Both the musical properties (loud guitars, loud drums, and anarchic shouting/
singing) and lyrics give expression to Martin's rage and murderous
impulses:
Say live and let die
Live and let die.
The presence of Guns 'n' Roses on the soundtrack throws an anchor
of identification for the generation of viewers who constitute the film's
core audience in the early 1990s, and the timing of the onscreen action and the song (with its burst of angry passion) is delicious for
those familiar with the song. Since Guns 'n' Roses' version of the song
is itself a cover of Paul McCartney and Wings' original title song for
a James Bond movie of a decade before (1973), associations with a cool
hero (in the event, an antihero), and spying and surveillance, are also
brought into the picture-reinforcing the comic absurdity of this quotidian blight on the American landscape. Like the Psycho example, the
metaphor-like work is that the viewer has "sought out" a correspondence of the visual term with the audio, and the only possible point
of convergence is the character's feelings.
The category that Cook holds up as the paradigmatic model of
multimedia interaction (note that his is an aesthetics, too, in its hierarchization of types of music-media relationships) is what he calls
contest. Contest, he writes, involves some capacity of contradiction
between the media, wherein "the different media are, so to speak,
vying for the same terrain, each attempting to impose its own characteristics upon the other."8 I am interpreting Cook's definition quite

20

Gorbman

freely in proposing two film examples of extreme contest, one from

1934 and the other from 1991. Both contain such a high degree of contradiction between their component media that they risk not being
understood.
The first example comes from V.I. Pudovkin's early Soviet
soundfilm, Deserter (1933), with a score by the composer Yuri Shaporin. The film's aesthetic clearly draws both from Soviet montage principles and from the political aesthetic of the German composer Hanns
Eisler, who visited the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and would no
doubt be known to Pudovkin and Shaporin. For a sense of Eisler's
predilection for a music that refuses to slavishly illustrate the images it "accompanies," first consider a passage Eisler later wrote in his
book Composingfor the Films, regarding the 1931 Slatan Dudow and
Bertold Brecht film Kiihle Wampe, which Eisler scored. In a sequence
in Kiihle Wampe,
A slum district of drab, dilapidated suburban houses is shown
in all its misery and filth. The atmosphere is passive, hopeless,
depressing. The accompanying music [by Eisler] is brisk, sharp,
a polyphonic prelude of a marcato character, and its strict form
and stern tone, contrasted with the loose structure of the scenes,
acts as a shock deliberately aimed at arousing resistance rather
than sentimental sympathy.9
Anyone who has seen this passage of Kiihle Wampehas experienced
its strange effect. As Eisler writes, the film shows a series of shots of
lifeless gray apartment buildings, while on the soundtrack one hears
a very busy atonal music performed by an ensemble of woodwinds,
brass, and strings. One has to wonder how many viewers encountering the static, empty shots of tenements, accompanied by Eisler's
oddly energetic scoring, felt the intended effect of "resistance" rather than sympathy or, more likely, puzzlement. The shaded area of the
two intersecting "circles" of music and picture is by no means in evidence. Eisler posits that this extreme difference in media generates
shock and then resistance, but he may be indulging in wishful thinking in hoping that what we will "seek out" is our own (or the film's)
outrage at the images of drab poverty.
At any rate, sharp thematic and rhythmic contrast likewise occurs
in parts of Pudovkin's Deserter,a film that tells a story of German shipyard workers on strike. In one memorable example, the strike is wearing on, and hunger drives a desperate young worker to try to steal a
hunk of bread from a restaurant patronized by the decadent bourgeoisie. 10We see a moribund bourgeois diner at his table, being obsequiously attended to by a waiter. Nearby a chef and waiter prepare some
dessert with a ridiculously complex blend of sauces and flavors. In

Aesthetics and Rhetoric

21

this context of the decadence of the rich, we then see the poor striker
reach through a hedge and attempt to grab the humble piece of bread
on the restaurant's terrace. He is caught, he struggles, he frees himself and runs, panicked, into traffic where he is hit and killed by a
passing automobile.
The music accompanying the brief sequence is extraordinary in its
refusal to "match" the action. The busy, Felliniesque music that plays
as the rich man sits unmoving at his table provides comically ironic
contrast and emphasizes all the more his comatose indolence. But
when the worker takes the bread, and once he has been killed, a parodic-sounding musical passage, complete with slide trombone, plays
then, too. Surely Pudovkin and Shaporin did not intend audiences to
chuckle at this grotesque class tragedy. To what should we attribute
the tone of the music and the resultant meaning of the sequence?
Shaporin and Pudovkin seem to be aiming for the same kind of Brechtian modernism advocated by Eisler in connection with Kiihle Wampe
in creating an alienation-effect that foregrounds the divergence of the
media. Again, though, the metaphor-like work might not get off the
ground, since it does not provide sufficient navigational cues, or the
shared attributes between music and images which Cook calls "enabling similarities," for the audio-viewer to make meaning from.
Another example of extreme conflict between music and image as
they vie for control is found in Akira Kurosawa's Rhapsody in August
(1991), made when Kurosawa was in his early eighties. Rhapsody's
protagonist, Kane, is an old woman who survived the bomb at Nagasaki fifty years before because she and her husband lived well outside of town on the far side of a mountain. Her husband, working in
the city that fateful day, was killed. The film's action is set in the
present, 1991, in the few days of August leading up to the anniversary of the atom bomb. This year, Kane's grandchildren and other family members have been visiting, asking questions, and stirring up
memories. Kane starts showing signs of dementia, and in the last few
minutes of the film a clap of thunder convinces her she is reliving the
atomic trauma of five decades past. Rhapsody's ending is as daringly
lacking in closure as it can be. The confused old woman runs and runs
in a driving rainstorm, protected in vain by a broken umbrella, her
family members running after her. When the umbrella breaks in the
rain and wind, a Japanese school version of the Schubert "Heidenroslein" takes over the soundtrack, replacing all previous diegetic
sounds of the rain and the relatives calling after the old woman. The
song's performance is sprightly, in an almost march-like rhythm; a
simple, bright orchestration accompanies the children's chorus. The
film crosscuts among all the characters running in the downpour and
slows to a horrific ballet in slow-motion shots, until it slows to stop

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Gorbman

on a freeze-frame of Kane. This ending, which seems to express the

agonizing terror of Kane's remembrance, confusion, and isolation in
her past which is her present, is misread in the critical literature on
Rhapsody in August, largely because the happy rendition of the Schubert song tends to be misinterpreted as conformant with the images.
A conformant or even complementary reading turns the lost old woman into some sort of sprightly heroine at best, or buffoon at worst.
The contest here is not between western music and Japanese film;
Schubert's music was wholly integrated into Japanese school curricula, and this song constitutes a sort of leitmotif through the film. The
astonishing divergence lies between the tone of the song and what
we know of the protagonist's state of mind. What could possibly be
the relationship of music and images here? The mingling of the music's lovely simplicity (in its singsong guise as a schoolchildren's song)
with such stark pain (the evocation of the Armageddon of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) summarizes, perhaps, the blessing and curse of
modern Japan for Kurosawa's and the old woman's generation. The
song and scene evoke loneliness and profound sadness, and oppositions of youth / old age, present / past, innocence / knowledge, sunniness / tempest, reason / madness, beauty / torture. The music's
regular beat is opposed to the slower and slower motion of the images, and the single rose of the song's lyrics is opposed to the drained
colors of the images in the storm. As the final shot freezes, we may
still ask which medium has prevailed: the image of Kane, arrested and
arresting in its poignancy, or the song, whose movement persists a
bit longer? The sphere of overlap between the two may be small, but
the metaphorical process can set off powerfully moving sparks.
Both the Deserter and Rhapsody in August examples are anathema
to the focused rhetoric of some musical multimedia. A rhetorical form
calls for unambiguous meaning or at least a range of meanings that
in any case safely channel the audience into the desired responses.
The critical predilection for difference and originality-for
a diverthe
between
what
the
music
and
what
gence
says
images say, and for
in
them
ever
new
not
necessarily productive in consaying
ways-is
Musical
musical
multimedia.
conventions provide a case in
sidering
drumbeats
Consider
the
accented
point.
recognized as "Indian music." A cliche of the first order, this formula was familiar by the 1910s
and became a staple in westerns, and all manner of other media forms
from commercials to popular song. In movies of the 1930s through
'50s, the familiar drumbeats and modal melodic patterns had a clear
and unambiguous function-to represent Indians, whose narrative
function in turn was to pose a threat to the white hero. When postwar Hollywood became more self-consciously aware of racial matters, the available visual and musical language for Indians expand-

Aesthetics and Rhetoric

23

ed. But in the active life of the convention, it worked: conventions

are signs that signify efficiently. In traffic, you do not want to see a
sign which, instead of being a red hexagon saying "stop," is painted
in another hue and says "think," or is inscribed with a poem about
stopping. You don't have time for contemplating it before running
through the intersection and getting yourself killed.
The problem is that we do not like some of the uses to which conventions and cliches are put. They are rhetorical, even coercive-on
the other end of the spectrum from poetry and aesthetics. Consider
bumpers, the musical ligaments that bind together segments of news
programs or to the commercials that frame the news segments. The
television networks ordinarily have familiar musical formulas that
demarcate the segments, while National Public Radio's All Things
Considered,unaccountably and wholly pleasurably, inserts snippets of
every imaginable category of music-European classical, Arabic, hipnews stories, sometimes yielding a vaguely coherent
hop-between
to
the
relationship
subject at hand, sometimes with no perceivable link
at all. The selling point seems to be the very aleatoriness, the challenge to the alert listener to draw a connection if one is to be drawn.
On the other hand, what do the very newsroomy, fanfarey, major-key
themes for the TV networks accomplish? In their very familiarity, they
are reassuring, they connote newsroom busyness, professionalism,
Americanness, up-to-dateness, and authority. They constitute an important facet of each network's corporate logo, its identity, supposedly inspiring viewer trust and loyalty.
The automatism of convention and cliche, as an automatism overseen and controlled by corporations, is perhaps what offends. Or perhaps musicians are simply intolerant of convention and cliche, wishing that music could do its work in refreshed and renewed ways.
As the interactive dimension of digital audiovisual media evolves,
a new paradigm of music has developed with it. I will close by describing this new music, because it engages and challenges critical
categories for thinking about musical multimedia.
In the early 1990s, musicians, engineers, and programmers at Microsoft and elsewhere developed a working version of an artificialintelligence music composer. Even if this engine were given exactly
the same instructions ten times, it would produce a different piece of
music each time. By 1995 the Microsoft team had developed the engine to such an extent that the user could choose from among several dozen musical idioms, such as Mozart or marching band or bebop.
You could select the idiom, a key, major or minor, predominant instrumental sounds, register, tempo, and duration, among other parameters. If you asked for seventeen and a half seconds of something
sounding like a Bach invention, you would get a different 17/2-sec-

24

Gorbman

ond pseudo-Bach invention every time, with generally logical Bachlike harmonic progressions and a pretty acceptable harmonic resolution at the end. Such was the power and sophistication of this music
engine eight years ago, and it has evolved since then. Now, as Direct
Music Producer, it is enormously smart and flexible. It allows the
practitioner to "compose," and to input sounds and set parameters,
and to draw on a large library of downloadable sounds.
The music that results is termed nonlinear, or dynamic, in that it exists as a complex set of parameters and possibilities. There is no tape
playing within that can be extracted; the computer never generates
the same piece of music. Linear music, on the other hand, is the same
every time: once you have made a CD recording of even the wildest
jazz improvisation, it is fixed as those notes and no others. People
developing dynamic music envision a home stereo component that
might be called a dynamic music player, which would allow the consumer to insert a CD-ROM and hear music that is a different performance each time.
Since 1995 how has this technology fared, what niches did it find?
To be sure, a new generation of composers has embraced the technology. But thus far the most widespread immediate application of
dynamic music lies in computer video games. As mentioned earlier,
the problem with video-game music has been, precisely, its linearity
in a nonlinear environment. One game composer likens the music of
most 1990s video games to old Flintstones cartoons: as characters
move, you keep seeing the same tree go by. The music is normally
stored and played in ten- or twenty-second loops that repeat endlessly. Dynamic music can be programmed with triggers in the game to
respond to what occurs in the player's game experience. For example, it can respond as the player reaches a new location in the game
space, or to a new action, or to the approach of a threat.
Up front, in the composing, arranging, and programming phases,
the logistics appear impossibly daunting to linear music thinkers. The
composer must develop seamless musical transitions in anticipation
of every eventuality. Suppose that the player in the game, who has
been walking down a path, decides to turn and causes a villain to
appear. The previous ambient music can suddenly take on more sinister tones, or pause ominously, all in ways that make musical sense.
The easy way out for the dynamic composer would be to keep the
whole "score" in more or less the same key, but some game composers are interested in working with more key changes, thereby making all the more complex the combinations of possible directions the
music can take as it encounters new triggers.
The two revolutionary advantages of dynamic music in games,
then, are interactivity and variability. Because of its interactivity, it

Aesthetics and Rhetoric

25

responds immediately to changes the player makes, intentionally or

not, in the game experience. As for variability, a player can spend a
hundred hours or more with a game s/he likes. With linear loops,
typically the player turns the music off for aural relief from the repetition. Nonlinear music allows the composer to develop dynamic
scores that are constantly changing.
The most accomplished game score of 2000 was for a game called
"No One Lives Forever." When its composer, Guy Whitmore, was asked
about the imperative to work in a milieu of musical cliche, he acknowledged the problem of having to stick to a James Bond idiom for that
game, and his work is limited by the expectations of the largely adolescent market.11At the same time he and others yearn to widen the
range of the genre, and part of the appeal of dynamic game scores is
that they engage many possible relations between music and image,
foreshadowing and surprise, music and silence, and novel textures.
Dynamic music in a way resembles the skilled silent-movie accompanist almost a century ago, improvising in response to what s/he saw
on the screen. Only now there is no actual person at the piano, and
the repertory of improvisation is limited to a repertory of parameters
that may be executed in numerous different combinations. What kind
of blow does this replacement of human intelligence (or rather its displacement, since the musical parameters are in fact composed by humans) strike to notions of musical aesthetics and rhetoric? Is dynamic
music just a giant convention/cliche machine? And if we claim it is,
must we also acknowledge that the bulk of live musical performances are also convention/cliche machines? If there is a qualitative difference between live accompanists, composed and recorded film
scores, and dynamic music, how may theory be adequate to these differences? The rapid evolution of technology, markets, and social functions of music make these questions all the more compelling.
NOTES
1. The change in musicology began only in the 1980s, with Joseph Kerman's call for
a new music criticism in his Contemplating Music. For an engagement with the shift
from aesthetics in musicology, see the essays in David Schwarz, Anahid Kassabian, and
Lawrence Siegel, eds., Keeping Score:Music, Disciplinarity, Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997).
2. See, for example, Joseph Lanza, "My Aisles of Golden Dreams: The Beauty of Supermarket Music," in Cinesonic: Cinema and the Sound of Music, ed. Philip Brophy (St.
Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin Australia, 2000), 59-80; Steve Jones, "Music and the
Internet," Popular Music 19, no. 2 (2000): 217-30; Nicholas Cook, "Music and Meaning
in the Commercials," Popular Music 13, no. 1 (1994): 27-40; Craig M. Springer, "Society's Soundtrack: Musical Persuasion in Advertising," Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., 1992.

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Gorbman

3. Rick Altman, "Television Sound," in Studies in Entertainment:Critical Approachesto

MassCulture,ed. TaniaModleski (Bloomington:IndianaUniversity Press, 1986),39-54.

4. Nicholas Cook, AnalysingMusicalMultimedia(Oxford:Oxford University Press,
1998).
5. Ibid., 104.
6. Ibid., 66.
7. I am indebted to JeffSmith for this example.
8. Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia, 103.

9. Hanns Eisler,Composing
for theFilms (New York:Oxford University Press, 1947),
26-27.
10. For this example I am indebted to Amy Sargeant.See her book, VsevolodPudovkin:
Classic Films of the Soviet Avant-Garde (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000).

11. Interview with Guy Whitmore,Seattle, Spring 2000.