I’ve been paying more attention to the background music in movies and television as of late, partly because I would like to write similar materials. It struck me the other day that a lot of quintessential movies scores are really just accompaniments. By this I mean they are the type of orchestrations a Tchaikovsky or Grieg would have used to support the lead instrument in a concerto or the lead voice in a opera. Of course, in movie scores there is no lead instrument or voice. That role is taken by the movie itself – the dialogue, the actors emoting, the scenes of hideous violence and wanton sexuality. Those components are the violins, the flutes, the sopranos etc of the film score.
Interesting argument: it was the availability in the early 1900s of cheap, plentiful guitars – purchasable from catalogs – that fueled the rise of blues music.
There was no Delta blues before there were cheap, readily available steel-string guitars. And those guitars, which transformed American culture, were brought to the boondocks by Sears, Roebuck & Co. … Guitars first appeared in the catalog in 1894 for $4.50 (around $112 in today’s money). By 1908 Sears was offering a guitar, outfitted for steel strings, for $1.89 ($45 today), making it the cheapest harmony-generating instrument available.
There’s a new review of my album in the print mag, The Sioux City Weekender. Author Earl Horlyk links the album to the era captured in the Mad Men tv show and states,
“Forbis’ tribute to a jazzier time is more lounge than it is supper club and more a dank, after hours juke joint than the Copa.”
Stuart Gordon turned his 1985 cult classic film “Re-Animator” into a musical horror comedy with the help of producer Dean Schramm and witty composer/lyricist Mark Nutter. Based on an H.P Lovecraft tale, the film and play both involve a gifted but mad student who has found a way to bring the dead back to life. Only problem is that when they re-animate, they are pretty pissed off and braindead.
Just recently the play took home an armload of awards (six L.A. Weekly Theater Awards, an Ovation Award and L.A. Drama Critics Circle Awards for everything from Best Musical to Best Blood Effects) and deservedly so. The play does everything bloody right.
Here’s a new piece I’ve written called “The Dark House.” As you listen, you can imagine yourself exploring a decrepit old mansion. Wisps of fog filter through the air. Blasts of unexplained cold tickle your spine. Out of the corner of your eye you see fleeting glimpses of a young girl with snowy flesh. Are those human or animal moans you hear coming from… SUDDENLY AN ENRAGED INBRED HILLBILLY LEAPS OUT OF THE DARK WAVING A BLARING CHAINSAW THAT SAWS OFF YOUR ARM!!! HE SCREAMS, “RAAARHHHHGH!!!” YOU SHRIEK LIKE A LITTLE GIRL AS THE MECHANICAL BLADE COMES DOWN ON YOUR FACE AND EVERYTHING GOES BLACK!!!
I’m on the final chunk of the book “Music, Language, and the Brain” and it’s revealing its treasures faster than a French whore undressing in your hotel room. The final section of the book discusses the human ability to perceive a beat e.g. our ability to tap in time with a song. This is so innate that we probably don’t think about it much, but it’s a skill lost on most animals. The book argues that this skill might have developed from a more generic skill called “temporal anticipation.” A good example of temporal anticipation is this: I throw you a ball. You have to position your hands in the right place at the right time in order to catch it. Basically, you have to anticipate when the ball will be at a certain coordinate in three dimensional space. Similarly, with beat perception we anticipate when the next beat will fall based on what we hear as a pattern. In both cases we are predicting an event in time. Beat perception may have evolved out of temporal anticipation.
I’ll add my own thoughts here. Perceiving beats is one of the more satisfying aspects of listening to music. Who doesn’t love pumping their fists in the air in time with AC/DC’s “Back in Black” and feeling Satan’s power coursing through your veins? I’d argue that when we correctly perceive a temporal event (say, the fall of a drum hit, or catching a ball in space) we probably get a little neurotransmitter “reward” – perhaps a mild blast of dopamine or serotonin – that gives us a sense of pleasure. Thus we enjoy musical grooves and going to AC/DC concerts (and catching balls.)
I’ll add a further level to this. Scientists have theorized about the existence of what are called mirror neurons – brain neurons that fire both when we perform an activity and when we watch someone else perform an activity. Thus when we seen a drummer nail a drum hit, or a ball player catch a ball, we get a little thrill because our mirror neurons are firing with the performer’s.
I’m reminded of my time in Olympia Washington at the height of the punk rock, riot grrl movement in the early 90’s. The level of musicianship in that town, especially in the dominant musical scene, was simply atrocious, mainly because these pseudo-egalitarian commie socialists felt that judging a person’s ability by any standards was a notion derived from the loathed, dominant patriarchal hierarchy (or some similar nonsense.) Thus there was an attitude of “Play drums in time? Why would I do that when I can express my non-comformity by banging away on the drums like a fucking retarded monkey??!” I can recall watching bands and being perplexed by the horrible rhythm I was hearing. I wanted to pump my fist in time, but when I hit the beat the drums weren’t there to support me. These idiots thought they were violating the laws of “society” (the particular law being “play drums in time”) but I would argue they were violating a much older law encoded into the human brain. If some four-foot tribal caveman from the past visited Olympia back then he probably would have said, “Man, you fuckers suck!!” If there was any justice he would have thrown his feces at them.
Anyway, the book mentions another interesting tidbit. A few other animal species can create a steady beat, including elephants. There’s even an elephant orchestra in Thailand. Check this out:
I’m finishing up this tome “Music, Language, and the Brain.” It’s been one of the more difficult books I’ve ever read primarily because its excessive use of academic terminology, but worth plowing through because occasionally you stumble across really fascinating nuggets of science. For instance, at one point the author is describing an experiment involving baby chickens and quails. As eggs, the embryonic birds were housed in isolation so that they could not hear the sounds of their parents. When they were hatched, the chicks showed a preference for the sound of chickens, and quails showed a preference for the sound of quails. This would seem to indicate that we have a genetic, inborn preference for the “talk” of members of our species.
But here’s where it gets weird. Check this out…
A decade after this original study, Long performed an impressive experiment that probed the neural basis for this preference. Using surgical techniques pioneered by Balaban, the researchers cut small holes in the eggs and operated on the embryos, transplanting different portions of the developing neural tube of quails into chicks. They then sealed up the eggs and housed them in incubators isolated from adult bird sounds. After hatching, they tested these chimera birds for their perceptual preferences using the methods of Park and Balaban. They found that when the transplant was in a specific region of the developing midbrain, the chimeras showed a preference for the quail maternal call.
It seems insane that they can even perform such surgeries, and even crazier that it actually worked: the chunk of brain responsible for responding to quail sounds happily set up shop in the chicken brain.
One must wonder if these mutant birds grew to gigantic proportions and developed an unceasing hunger for human flesh. The book doesn’t mention this, but that would be somewhat off-topic.
The reviews for my new album are starting to come in. The Mid West Record (yes, THE Mid West record) says:
WIL FORBIS and the Gentlemen Scoundrels/A Quarter Past Four: Here’s a fun record that doesn’t fit the format. After turning in a killer alt.country release a few years back, Forbis laid low for a while and now has a new set of originals that sound like classic jazz and Broadway tunes but retain the off center locus you need in the margins of today’s alt world if you want to be able to give up the day job. Old timey on it’s face, if you pay attention, there’s a wonderful joke here for you to be in on. Spiff up those spats, wax your mustache and give the guy at the door the secret password. This set is a riot. BTW–the cover art is a gasser.
Here’s an orchestral piece I recently finished in the flavor of adventure movie themes. It tells the tale of Pantoor (thusly named because the Persian santoor is prominently featured in the music) who travels the land vanquishing his enemies and bedding eager barmaidens. It starts out in the realm of Vivaldi and ends somewhere near Aaron Copland. The Adventures of Pantoor by Wil Forbis
Here’s an instrumental jazz tune I’ve just finished. It tells the tale of an espionage agent in a foreign land trying to avoid the seductive dangers of exotic women. Snake Charmer Blues by Wil Forbis