MUSIC IN THE MOVIES

Is the Indian film woke to the advent of sound in 1931, it took off in a direction very different to what the West had done. The emphasis in the West was right away a movie score that was an integral adjunct of the movie - introducing, accentuating, heightening, emphasising, romancing, sometimes taking the moving image to a crescendo of rising emotions. These scores often went on to become musical pieces in their own right. A music composer wrote music which did not indulge the songs. If songs were brought in, they could well be songs often written and composed by someone else. In such cases, film titles always read ‘Musical Score By’ and ‘Song By’ separately.

The Indian film took flight purely in song for quite a number of years, not having much of a background score. Each mood had an appropriate song, so where was the need for music score to underline the sentiment? Or to put it in another way, when one had a number of songs expressing diverse emotions, in the full range of joy to sorrow, how can any cogent music score be composed which could go on to become a respectable music piece like in the Western (that is including Russian) films?

Very often, in the history of the Western cinema, recognised and respected composers were invited to score the music for films. One of the most famous duos of director and music composers were the great Sergei Eisenstein and Prokofiev. Eisenstein described occasions when he re-edited sequences so as to adjust them to music. Another collaboration of this special kind was that of Laurence Olivier with the composer William Walton who scored music for Olivier’s Shakespearean films, Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948) and Richard III (1955). The score for Henry V alongwith Nevsky, which also had music composed by Prokofiev, rank among the greatest for sound films. Aaron Copland, the composer of the 20th century, who has great works to his credit, also composed for a number of films, deliberately going away from the 19th century symphonic structure that dominated film scores then. He won the Academy Award and the Pulitzer Prize for two of his scores.

There are many instances down to the present day of musical scores for films being borrowed, and even improvised on recognised classical pieces — like Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto for the David Lean film Brief Encounter.

But there were giants who composed original scores for films using music as a crucial component of innovative cinema — the most famous of whom were Mark Steiner, who composed music for over 180 films, Franz Waxman, who scored for about 60 films, Alfred Newman for about 20, and Erich Korngold, who was a regular with Warner Bros. Steiner’s score for Casablanca and Korngold’s score for Robin Hood are revered and analysed even to this day. However the greatest director-composer duo were Hitchcock and Herrman. They collaborated for 11 years, beginning with The Man Who Knew Too Much, till the Torn Curtain. Of these, the symphonic scores for Vertigo, North By Northwest and Psycho are the peaks of achievement. Hitchcock consulted Herrman at every stage of the development of the script. The famous Psycho shower murder scene seems endless, though it is roughly 10 seconds long. As was quoted, “one is not aware whether the music is making the film go forward or the film is pushing the music forward.”

In recent years, musical scores for films have widened their range of available styles, drifting away from symphonic music to jazz, folk, pop, anything. Wasn’t everyone captivated by Ennio Maricone’s themes for the Dollar movies, or Lara’s theme for Dr. Zhivago, or The Graduate score based on Simon and Garfunkel, or the zither solos of Anton Karas for The Third Man, or the most recent Men In Black, the 250 million dollar-grosser in the US, the music of which is right now at top of the charts! All these tracks are available on tape or CD and are very popular.

The Indian sound film made its statement with the very first film. Alam Ara had seven songs, one De de khuda ke naam par pyare not only became an instant hit, but pioneered the use of commentating chorus, a devise adopted in several later films. Indra Sabha released in the following year had 70 songs! There was no question of a film without songs. But what songs? The West has nothing like the movie repertoire that India has in its diverse language films. Here, we had some great lyricist-composer teams. Combined they spun such magic, that today on reviewing some of the song sequences, one cannot escape the conclusion that they were ill-served by the filmmakers. Such was and is their undiminished brilliance. It is not necessary to name all of them — far too many any way. But just for samplers. Sahir with Burman, Devulapalli Krishna Sastry with S Rajeswhara Rao, Vylar Rama Verma with G Devarajan, Udayashankar with Vijaya Bhaskar, the great Kannadasan with Vishwanathan Ramamurthy...

Barsaat, Ek Thi Ladki, Andaz, Mahal and Shabnam were all released in 1949, and set the music world on fire. That was the watershed year. From the music before, to music after, we had suddenly jumped into the bejewelled era that was to last a breathtaking two decades, crammed with the finest of the finest. The better ones — of them there were plenty — could easily be turned into short orchestral works. That was their power.

But yet they were mere songs limited to scenes or sequences. What about the musical score for the film as a whole? None till after the watershed year. Even after that, the so-called background music rarely measured up to a respectable score capable of standing on its own. Bulk of the background score falls into what in the West is derisively termed ‘Micky Mousing-music’, following film action quite literally, like Dishum, the saat-swar Sitar in Hindi and Veena in the South for happy encounters, orchestral flourishes for emotions, marriage music for happy endings, funeral music for tragic ones, and so on, with no attempt at interlinks.

Yes, the songs were great, unbeatable actually. But the musical score which is considered for the ‘Best original music score’ award abroad, never really caught up in India. It is sad but true that in the entire vast creative output of sound in the Indian cinema, there is not a single music score sans songs which can stand on its own and be considered great in terms of a Max Steiner score for Casablanca. The principal reason of course was the ‘interference’ of songs if you like, which spelt out various moods, reducing the rest of the effect music to either nothing or plain ‘Micky Mousing’.

Take two films standing at either end of the half century, two great landmark films - Chandralekha in 1948, and Hum Aapke Hain Koun in 1996. Chandralekha has songs based on Carnatac, Hindustani, Bharatanatyam, Latin American and Portuguese folk music, as well as Strauss Waltz, each distinct and standing on its own, with barely much background score attempting to interlink anything, just periods of silence. Is it any surprise that long before fusion became fashion, our early music directors had achieved perfection in it. Not a note jars despite that absolutely heady mixture. In contrast, Hum Aapke Hain Koun has no silent moment. There is a continuous wave of concert violins at one level, superimposed by classical bits of flute or Sitar or even Hawaiin airs, like in the scene introducing the heroine. This is not fusion. Just plain confusion.

(To be concluded in the next issue)

(M. Bhaktavatsala headed the Karnataka Film Chamber of Commerce for almost a decade, shaping it into a totally self-regulated body. He also catalysed the new wave film movement in Karnataka in the 70s. He was the president of the South Indian Film Chamber of Commerce twice, and also served as the president of the Film Federation of India. He is a producer, distributor and exhibitor, and at present, the chairman of the Film Advisory Committee).