Other Places - The new sounds of electronic music
With the development and research in electronics since the early twentieth century, the generators of sound waves gave to music composers possibilities in creation never before achieved by traditional instruments. A new site was discovered through the sound modulations, vibrato and possible extended times in instruments such as, for example, theremin or Martenot waves.
Initially, the film used electronic for exotics, for alternate effect impossible by conventional tools. The theremin that Miklós Rozsa used in Spellbound (1945) and Lost Weekend (1946) served to strangeness in a music group already recognized by audiences as a family: the sound of the orchestra and the romantic idiom. In this scenario the theremin was an intruder. Jerry Goldsmith would do something like in his pioneering music for the drama Freud (1960).
The trails for science fiction films of the 50s, also used lots theremin for "alien" effect as, for example, in This Island Earth (1955) of Herman Stein or The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) by Bernard Herrmann. At least one production of this period was remarkably audacious in the use of electronics: Forbidden Planet (1956) whose soundtrack is made up of combinations of independent sound waves of generators circuits. To be rigorous is not music, is not performed via instruments nor obeys scales, or compositional rules, but as soundtrack is one of the most daring and inventive works ever made in its atmospheric succession of beeps, chirps and trills. To audiences of the time must have sounded really otherworldly to hear the electronic ripples developed by couple Louis and Bebe Barron.
After the war, with the development of integrated circuits and the possibility of sound wave manipulation the first synthesizers (like Ondioline, Moog or ANS) appeared. And electronics also provided new sonic possibilities in amplitude, duration and timbre and giving to composers a new ground of sound and musical exploration. The Russian engineer Eugene Murzin was a pioneer in the development of synthesizers and his research, initiated in the 30s, led to the construction of the ANS synthesizer in the 50´s. Murzin called it ANS in remembrance to Alexander Nikolaev Scriabin, visionary composer of the late Russian romanticism. Murzin´s work immediately leads us to the movies, because Edward Artemiev was his student and the first composer to use electronic (via synthesizer) to create a musical score to a film. The soundtrack of Solaris (1972) owes much of its effect to the alternating layers of sound giving emotional and spatial diffusion effect. With the use of electronics, Artemiev discovered a "new place" musical. In the film, we don´t hear music in industrialized society (the viaducts and roads) and even in the country retreat just nature sounds are heard. The music starts only when the psychologist leaves Earth toward space station. Director and musician repeat the partnership in The Mirror (1974) and Stalker (1979). In Stalker music is acoustic oriented, but much of its transcendent reach is constructed by electronic means.
Also an important work to incorporate electronic music in films was the German group Popol Vuh. Led by keyboardist and composer Florian Fricke, the group did several works made to the delirious and adventurer cinema of Werner Herzog. Aguirre (1972) was the first. The musical comment to the imponderable and frantic search for Eldorado is remarkable right in the first moments of the film. The mystical place suggested by music is just the opposite of chaos experienced by the expedition when led by Don Lope Aguirre (Klaus Kinsky).
Herzog and the Popol Vuh group would still work on Nosferatu (1978), a union so perfect between image and music that it can be considered the best of the partnership. The cadaverous look of Nosferatu has its acoustic counterpart in the macabre goings of On the Way, a recurring theme of the entire film. The Popol Vuh soundtracks received extended reissues the label SPV Records. As a curiosity, Florian Fricke appears in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1971) as a reclusive pianist among inmates for treatment.
More popular than the Popol Vuh was the German trio Tangerine Dream. Their music for Sorcerer (1977) is also a milestone in the history of the movie soundtracks. Similar to Aguirre and Solaris, Sorcerer is an adventure into the unknown (remake of The Wages of Fear by Henry G. Clouzot) in an epic production of William Friedkin on his following film after The Exorcist. Concentrating the use of music in the second half of the picture, the soundtrack is present at the beginning of the journey of the four truck carrying a load of nitroglycerin. The music is impressive as movie music and works almost “under film´s skin” to translate the desperation of the trajectory, the total deliver to an uncertain fate. Later the group would do emblematic works of his time as the technopop music for Firestarter (Flames of Vengeance, 1984) and underground atmospheres of The Keep (1983).
Former member of Tangerine Dream in its first years of activity, keyboardist Klaus Schulze had a curious passage by the cinema (erotic) with the music for Body Love (1977).
Other very interesting cases of approaching the pop, electronic and film occurred with the disco-music pioneer Jean Marc Cerrone in Vice Squad (1978) and Giorgio Moroder on the famous music of Midnight Express (1978), and also Jean Michel Jarre did an experimental soundtrack for the crime drama Les Granjes Brulees (1973), a kind of research of effects and ideas that Jarre later develop in his albums.
With the miniaturization of electronic components and increasingly versatile keyboards, the 80s were characterized by excess of synthetic soundtracks. Unfortunately most of them are just rhythmic repetition or simplistic climatic abstractions. A dark period for the soundtracks in movies. Still, some brave work stood above average. Deserves mention the music of Phenomena (1985) and of course Blade Runner (1982), one of the most popular works of the composer Vangelis. In the cult category, composer John Harrison had its partnership with director George Romero in Creepshow (1980) and Day of the Dead (1985) and Walter Carlos music for Tron (1981) was a pioneering work of what is done today when soundtracks seek the inclusion of various musical resources. Tron is a sum of synthetic possibilities, pop and symphonic in a very interesting result much above the ambitions of its period.
With the facilities brought by digital culture, electronic music (or electronic means) is irreversibly settled in contemporary production. Interesting mixtures appeared as symphonic construction merged to the electronic effects (as did Miklos Rozsa) on soundtracks such as Event Horizon (1997) by Michael Kamen, Plunkett & McLeane (1999) by Craig Armstrong or Matrix (2000) by Don Davis.
Special mention to the American double Tomandandy (Tom-and-Andy) that should have been more prominent in the movies. His work is invariably discreet and efficient (Killing Zoe, The Hills Have Eyes) even in conventional orders (The Apparition). The music of The Mothman Prophecies (2001) is one of their best moments and followed the ambitious concept of this production. The double CD edition is available by German label Colosseum.
Another prominent double in electronics: the English Orbital, who had participated in Event Horizon and had in Pusher (2010) a great moment. With remarkable elegance Orbital´s music worked to intensify the growing tension of the film without appeal to cheap excesses. Summing the best in dancing/rave constructions to dramatic subtleties, Pusher is the evidence that electronic music in film still continues in a healthy development process.
