Alien | Music | Let there be leitmotifs!

‘It seems they’re trying to teach us a basic tonal vocabulary,’ notes one of the wisecracking line of scienticians during the scene from CE3K that James chose to kick off this week’s festivities with. Indeed they are: John Williams’ famous five-note phrase is the sound of a vastly superior species of space invaders talking down to a planet full of backwards retards – the sound of the sentiment, dissonance or a minor key or even more than five notes would probably be too much for them. The precise musical sentiment, in other words, that also seems to be behind Mumford and Sons’ lusty, publicschool singalongishness, The Vaccines turgid, literally nonsensical publicschool laziness, and a whole bunch of the other elitist, patronisingly half-arsed bullhickey currently selling by the bucketload.

But anyway. John Williams’ Close Encounters score is ridiculously brilliant, hugely significant because of its relationship with Stockhausen-esque aleatoric experimentation and non-tonal modernism, because of its ultimate decision to draw upon oboes and tubas instead of synthesisers (SF’s very own Peter and the Wolf), because Hans Zimmer said it was ‘as good as anything Stravinsky wrote’ and so on.

What I’m much more interested in, though, is the way that it has come to define the simple, arpeggio-like, easily-remembered one- or two-bar phrase as a symbol of, or even a metaphor for the alien, the otherworldly, the unexplained. Just as one hears a two-note ascent up a chromatic scale and thinks of sharks, and a couple bars of high pitched, monotone, mid-pace martellé and thinks of knives and shower curtains, whether they’re listening to the Jaws and Psycho soundtracks specifically or not, so the cultural residue orbiting the CE3K theme means one makes extraterrestrial assumptions about certain related phrases of notes regardless of their context. An observation that has, I think, the potential to radically redefine the meaning of a whole range of compositions, if one re-listens to them in a slightly different (by which I guess I mean more orange – see the image I opened with) light.

First though, a couple fragments of proof. What was it about the X Files theme that made it so uniquely evocative, so immediately recognisable as a precursor to strangeness? Could it maybe, just maybe have been the two six-note arpeggio-like self-contained phrases at its heart?

And why is it that so many people responded to the 800% slower version of Rebecca Black’s Friday with the words, ‘it sounds kinda…spacey…’ (or something along those lines)? Might it be that slowing it down makes it even more apparent that the song literally never deviates from the same five notes, which when broken down into measured, ambient phrases, come laden with trippily SF connotations?





Let us consider, then, a variety of other manifestations of CE3K-esque phrasing, and what they might therefore mean.

One, Dmitri Shostakovich…was an alien

Eleventh, on my list entitled ‘my twenty nine favourite things about Shostakovich’, is the fact that he inserted a musical signature, comprising his first initial and the first three letters of his surname (DSCH – or D, E Flat, C, B in German nomenclature) into various of his pieces. Two particularly striking examples are his String Quartets Nos. 5 and 8 – here’s the first movement of the latter, and the signature is the first little melody you’ll hear…





That’s right, Shostakovich actually defined himself in precisely the same way, even using some of the same notes (E Flat and C) as Spielberg’s aliens. No wonder Stalin wanted to keep him on side.

Two, Richard Wagner…wrote SF operas

Wagner’s Ring cycle is, famously, structured around little repeated melodies called leitmotifs, which both characterise and, in a way, recognise significant characters in amongst the big, throbbing mass of the most grandiose composition ever conceived. Here is a nice little video about leitmotifs which also serves as an introduction to Siegfried’s theme, probably the most well-known leitmotif of all…





You will not be surprised to discover that Wagner was clearly attempting to infer, with this, that Siegfried was an alien. Wagner wrote SF. Deeply, deeply anti-Semitic SF. (Incidentally, the fact that the CE3K leitmotif was intended as a symbol of sophisticated patronisation, rather than mere simplicity, offers a compelling rebuttal to Adorno’s infamous critique of Wagner: ‘The degeneration of the leitmotiv is implicit in this [the reduction of emotional complexity into a mechanised, crudely characterising shorthand] it leads directly to cinema music where the sole function of the leitmotiv is to announce heroes or situations so as to allow the audience to orient itself more easily.’)

Three, The late-nineties Balearic trance phenomenon…was an attempt to communicate with extraterrestrials

But then you probably knew that already. Here’s the most prominent example of all, ATB’s 9PM (Till I Come), which should really have been called 9PM (Till They Come, They Being Aliens, As A Response To This Track’s Utter Dependence Upon Close Encounters-ish Phraseology)…

See also the various trance ‘remixes’ of the X Files theme and, indeed, the CE3K theme itself. And thus, we come full circle.

To summarise, aliens and their messages are everywhere, deeply embedded within our highest, and lowest, cultures – and I can say that without even resorting to posting wonderful videos proving Barack Obama is, in actuality, a reptilian impostor. As my fellow Chitauri-spotters are prone to doing, bless them, bless them all. Shit, I think you'll agree, just got real.

Sam Kinchin-Smith

Music Editor

Hollywood | Music | Musical Hollywooding

J.K. Rowling's Minerva McGonagall - the Harry Potter books are full of po-mo references to other bad writing.

‘I love all films that start with rain,’ begins Rain, the final poem of Don Paterson’s most recent collection, Rain – that’s not a typo by the way, both poem and collection are in fact entitled Rain, and the first line of said poem also includes the word ‘rain’, so those three rains have to be there, I know, I’m as put out as you are… (What is the correct means of dealing with this problem of poems and collections sometimes sharing the same name – and the sometimes-necessity of putting both in the same sentence, thus creating a clunky, clunky sentence? Title-poem?)

‘I love all films that start with rain,’ begins Rain, the title- (and closing-) poem of Don Paterson’s most recent collection. It continues thus:

rain, braiding a windowpane

or darkening a hung-out dress

or streaming down her upturned face;

one long thundering downpour

right through the empty script and score

before the act, before the blame,

before the lens pulls through the frame

to where the woman sits alone

beside a silent telephone

or the dress lies ruined on the grass

or the girl walks off the overpass,

and all things flow out from that source

along their fatal watercourse.

However bad or overlong

such a film can do no wrong,

(For the whole thing, lookee here)

It’s a wonderful piece of writing, playing similar games with technique-expectation, art-about-art and the concept of simplicity as Song For Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze in the same collection, and The Rat and The Reading in Landing Light. And its point – at least, its point until the fabled Paterson italics kick in a couple stanzas down – is, I think, spot on also. Hell, I remember, eight years old, going to lie down and sky-face in my garden in my shorts whenever the summer rain came, because I’d seen somebody in some film I thought was awesome or something doing the same. It’s a bloody lovely feeling, incidentally. Makes you look like a prick though, so I stopped. Pity, really.

Rain: one of the most successful and common Hollywooding techniques there is. Hollywooding: the covering up of any number of individual crippling flaws in a film via evocative, heart-bursting shit – a method popularised, undoubtedly, by Hollwood. So, rain: one of the most successful Hollywooding techniques there is. Another one: music.

Lovely, lovely film-music. What follows is not going to be a lengthy diatribe about the subtleties of good and bad film-scoring slash -soundtracking though because, one, such things have been done far too many times already (yah, the thing about Tarantino is that his approach to track-selection for his soundtracks mirrors exactly the way his films are, in fact, a bricolage of reference and little nods to, y’know, B movies and stuff) and two, because the relationship between Hollywooding and music is about something much more specific than whole soundtracks. It’s about moments, see. (All this said, I’ll be including the Twin Peaks theme on this week’s essay-soundtrack-playlist for reference’s sake, because it’s so completely magnificent. Oh, and if anyone is, in fact, at all interested in what people are still saying about scores etc., you could do worse than read this.)

Moments. Individual moments during which the empty script and score or bad or overlong sequences are, particularly, unambiguously, shamelessly glossed with the music-equivalent of Paterson’s rain. It is these that are the currency of musical Hollywooding, not soundtracks as a whole. Everybody can call to mind one such scene immediately, surely… Here’s mine. Ah yes, we’re all at a funeral but we’re all going walk out halfway through, because that’s totally cool, in order to get our hands on a photocopy of Ryan Pillipay’s journal that we’re all suddenly aware of the significance of and that incrimates Buffy totally (I’M A BITCH! Benedict Bitch!) without any of us actually having the time to read it – to the point that her 70s-pimp-style blow-crucifix gets nabbed, poor love. And then two of us are going to ruefully shake our heads in the most breathtaking display of accidentally-comic condemnation ever filmed. And all of this, all of this is redeemed via ‘mad’ Richard Ashcroft and a set of vaguely convenient lyrics.

‘One of the best endings to any movie I have ever seen,’ gushes Youtube user Worldskye. Worldskye, it sounds to me like you’re a fucking idiot. (What a car though, right?)

Anyway, for the purposes of Music As Reading, I’m interested in whether this technique is capable of glossing bad writing of another sort. Poetry, specifically. Can the right music make awful poetry sound like a specific genre of good poetry because of its own connotations? Can Hollywooding save bad poetry? Don Paterson having been my starting point, I will be utilising that unlikely influence of his, the utterly great William Topaz McGonagall as the focal-point of this experiment. And to celebrate Brief Encounter’s perfect use of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 – no Hollywooding there – I will be relying upon ‘classical’ (whatever that means) work only. The following three ideas will be expanded upon – and accompanied by several others – on this Saturday’s mixtape, A Musical McGonagall.

The Tay Bridge Disaster + Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 = Hitchcockian suspense…?

…It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay,
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

The Christmas Goose + Bartok’s Violin Concerto No. 2 = Arthouse enigma…?

…When Smiggs bought the goose
He suspected no harm,
But a naughty boy stole it
From under his arm.

Then Smiggs he cried, “Stop, thief!
Come back with my goose!”
But the naughty boy laugh'd at him,
And gave him much abuse…

An Autumn Reverie + Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings = Lush panorama…?

Alas! Beautiful Summer now hath fled,
And the face of Nature doth seem dead,
And the leaves are withered, and falling off the trees,
By the nipping and chilling autumnal breeze.

The pleasures of the little birds are all fled,
And with the cold many of them will be found dead,
Because the leaves of the trees are scattered in the blast,
And makes the feathered creatures feel downcast…

(To access a Spotify essay-soundtrack-playlist to accompany the above, click here)

Sam Kinchin-Smith

Music Editor