Igor Stravinsky once said, “Music has no meaning.” But Stravinsky never scored a film. He composed music intended for several movies, all of which the film producers declined.
The sounds we associate with different visual and emotional content aren’t random, but inherent in the way we hear music. They are meaningful. This is the artistic bread-and-butter of film composers.
Consider “The Magnificent Seven.” The classic Western from 1960 features a score of grand dimensions that exudes the character of the outdoors. It is music for open spaces and craggy vistas because it is music made of open harmonies and craggy rhythms.
Punchy, Soaring, Vast as a Landscape
The theme of the “The Magnificent Seven” is the most recognizable of his many compositions. The movie’s story is one of bravery and self-sacrifice on the part of seven cowboys who defend a village. Bernstein’s music is both heroic and noble. The rhythm of the famous main theme’s winds-and-percussion accompaniment is as angular and unexpected as a horse trying to throw its rider. Each of its two measures lands with a sharp accent on beat 4—normally the weakest of the beats in a typical measure of 4/4—creating a punchy, “off-balance” feel. Above that punchy rhythm are soaring, folksong-like long notes played by the strings. The theme is clothed in what composers call “open harmonies”—notes spaced far apart from each other, often in musical portraiture of vast prairies or other landscapes.Bernstein didn’t create the language of open harmonies and open spaces on his own. His teacher Aaron Copland pioneered that sound in his famous ballet scores of the 1930s and 1940s, especially “Appalachian Spring.” Nor was Bernstein alone in reimagining Copland’s “open spaces” harmonies and applying them to the Old West. Prior to “Magnificent Seven,” the best-known theme for a Western was Jerome Moross’s rich melody for “The Big Country” (1958), starring Gregory Peck. It in turn has precedent in Victor Young’s opening credits music for “Shane” (1953), a simple melody fashioned after American folksongs. These lyrical pieces were new to the Western, which previously traded on rougher music, often a stentorian march, typical of B-movie flicks starring Randolph Scott. Bernstein’s genius was to combine the rough and the smooth, the punchy and the songful, into an unforgettable composition.
Innocence and Lost Piano Notes
The visual credits are unusual for introducing viewers to the little girl Scout, off-camera. We first hear her briefly sing a tuneless little melody of her own composition while she opens a box containing the stuff of childhood—marbles and crayons, pens and jacks, small dolls, a ticking timepiece. But before any of that, Bernstein gives us four notes on the piano that sound like the end of a piece we’ve not yet heard, a clear hint of the story to come.Scout launches into song. When she finishes, Bernstein’s score proper starts up. The camera pans across the box’s childhood items, while Bernstein gives us a tender childlike melody, starting with five poignantly upward reaching notes. As for those first four piano notes—they are never heard again; they are lost, like Scout’s childhood. The score and the credit’s visuals combine to tell us that we are about to experience a film about innocence, and just possibly, innocence disillusioned.
At the End, Comedy
Late in his career, Bernstein entered a genre he had never ventured before: comedy, and broad comedy at that. Director John Landis has said that he made the unexpected choice of Bernstein, a composer experienced only in drama and adventure, to score his deliberately sophomoric “Animal House” because he wanted the music to convey the feeling of a “normal” narrative with comedic touches.Standard scoring of a comedy like “Animal House,” trading as it did on slapstick and frat jokes, would have been jokey music dominated by “Mickey Mouse” cues—cues that hit the cowbell when John Belushi spilled mustard on himself, blown a sour chord in the brass when the romantic couple split up, or provided frantic chase music for the chaotic closing parade. Bernstein did none of that. From the faux-college-hymn of the opening, complete with two silly timpani strokes, to the menacing music heard when the “evil” frat house plants incorrect test answers, the score feels like a “real” movie score, but one with a wide grin on its face.
