music for the documentary Eakins, by Christopher Speeth
\"I had very definite opinions about what I wanted to do, and wanted to avoid, in providing the music for EAKINS.
\"It had often struck me that the trouble with bad movie music was not that it was bad music but that it was music. (Those '30's raids on 19th century symphonic literature were plentifully available on TV-reruns to confirm this suspicion. What had been wanted was, no doubt, mood —but highclass for a change. What had been achieved was a level of surface activity and visually nonfunctional structure on the soundtrack which spiked any sense of visualaural blend.) Indeed my happiest recollections of soundtracks were recollections of elegantly sculptured 'natural' sound: environmental noise (and no music at all?) in Mr. Hulot's Holiday; counterpointed conversations in Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles was, after all, an oldtime radio man). In such cases, of course, the mere understanding that the sound is the sound of what you're watching (rather than the sound of some nonscreen people doing something to identifiable nonscreen instruments) carries with it a sense of blend; and in deciding that the music for EAKINS was to be purely electronic I hoped to remove a potential obstacle to the desired illusion of music, like 'natural' sound, seeming to emanate from the screenworld. (On the other hand, my decision to put exactly the same music into both channels of my final 2-channel (i.e., 'stereo') computer-synthesized tapes was merely in anticipation of the vagaries of projection equipment in movie houses, art museums, schools, TV studios, and who knows where.) Thinking of talk as merely the human part of the screenworld talking, and sound effects as its nonhuman part talking, I wanted to create an illusion of music as the whole screenworld's timeflow talking; music believable as the lighting in which a scene was photographed is believable—as color of; or believable as midwestern monosyllabics might be believable as the speechcolor, or coloring speech, of that screenperson—or long florid foreignaccented involutions, of that one; or believable as a gentle rustle or a spasmodic creaking and groaning, of this or that onscreen or offscreen forest. (Notice the recurrent reciprocity here: a believable sound of some look, a believable look of some sound; each believable as coloring, and as colored by, the other.)
\"It's the 'talking' idea that steered me away from super- deeply supermickeymousing the screen. Notice that a film's dialogue and sound effects already open up its coloring, and colored, soundworld; and that this sound- world does not deeply, or even sometimes at all, mickeymouse the screen. (The screenperson now talking may be in an offscreen corner of the room (a Wellesian favorite), or the screenforest now rustling may be in a vaguely positioned offscreen Beyond: in which cases even the frequent, but consider how shallow, mickeymousing of speech/lips or gesture/speech or rustle/leaves fails.) So that any music which aspires to enter into this sound- world need set no premium on even the shallow mickeymousing of tightly synchronized soundchange/screenchange; but rather, as the total screenworld's timeflow talking—(and the screenworld of EAKINS evolves at a quiet Brucknerian leisure) may retain its liberty to bind together the progression of visually disparate things as various articulants of, as counterpointed within and creating, the much slower drift of soundcolored timeflow.
\"This slow drift and minimal surface activity in the music—this injection of music at the level of the screen- world's larger timeflow— provides the crunch for my 'talking' analogy: think of the screenworld's particulars as the music talking; so that the focal screenworld comes across both fleshing out and fleshed out by, both grounded in and grounding —encapsulated by; immersed in— a peripheral world of sound: rather like one of those old Schenkergraphs, with the difference that only Background (music; and some of the natural sound) and Foreground (the rest of the sound) are in the soundworld at all, the heavily focal (here, as for Schenker) Middle-ground being visual, (One is tempted to make this definition of 'Background music' mandatory.) For me, it is precisely this sense of a soundbathed visual focus which a fully developed musical composition (bad or good)—of which deeply mickeymouse music would be just one (and the colorationally least interesting?) sort—so frequently jeopardizes by injecting itself at too middlegroundish (or worse, at too foregroundish) a level of the screenworld's timeflow; by providing not Ground, but rather a self-contained alternative to a hence detachable screen.\"
