Lights! Camera! … Atonality!

Can the cinema offer a home to music rejected in the concert hall? asks Philip Clark

Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey took Ligeti into the cinema (© AF archive / Alamy)

Bernard Herrmann: who championed New Music alongside his film work (© AF archive / Alamy)

The clandestine darkness of the cinema auditorium changes perspectives on the world. As we cosy into our cinema seat, we’re prepared to take it on trust that a Kansas farm girl can travel to a place of make-believe to meet a wizard, that Harold Lloyd can dangle out of a New York skyscraper without falling off, that six strikingly different looking men can all somehow be James Bond and, finding yourself unfortunately lumbered with a dead body, Harvey Keitel is the man to sort it: just phone him and he will ensure you get away with murder.

In this intoxication of the senses, music plays a major part. At the very mention of The Wizard of Oz, Harold Lloyd, James Bond or Pulp Fiction, we ‘see’ music as vividly as the image of Lloyd’s wiry frame hanging off the Chrysler Building, or John Travolta doing a twisted twist with Uma Thurman, rewinds through our mind’s eye. A Viennese waltz suddenly becomes an ideal sonic metaphor for the leisurely spin of spaceships orbiting the earth, while a neurotic New Yorker, who finds he’s woken up 200 years in the future, gets chased around a sci-fi landscape accompanied by the swing of archaic King Oliver-styled Classic jazz.

As we sink into that swanky red velvet cinema seat (just why exactly are cinema seats always red?), we invite film directors to teleport us to worlds far outside the day-to-day – and I wonder if that’s why audiences who might baulk at the prospect of going to hear Ligeti’s Requiem or Penderecki’s Anaklasis and Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima in concert, or whose idea of musical hell is a fortissimo high-register string cluster, will gladly submit to those same sounds, and those same pieces, when hooked around Janet Leigh being stabbed in the shower, or off the narrative of 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining or The Exorcist? Why is a vast public so petrified of sound, they will only accept its more extreme manifestations if given a psychological reason, a visual cue, to do so?

It’s an intriguing problem, and I like that the answer is obvious, but also curiously imponderable. When Arnold Schoenberg wrote his Begleitmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene ('Accompaniment to an Imaginary Film Scene') in 1930, he raised these same issues for the first time, writing music purely in the abstract that, with its glutinous counterpoint and atonal bite would certainly have been deemed as essentially useless to accompany any film, especially as, after the release of Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer in 1927, silent cinema began its gradual fadeout. If Schoenberg’s chamber, pit-sized, orchestra showed some empathy with the realities of film-making, he determined to keep this film music ‘imaginary’; as the programme-note housed on the Arnold Schoenberg Centre website sternly puts it '[he] would never have agreed to play a subordinate role to a director's or producer's conception of art'.