Orchestrating war

From “Music at 6: Scoring the News, Then and Now,” by Carter Burwell, in the inaugural issue of Esopus, published last October. Burwell has composed scores for more than fifty films, including Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, and all of the Coen brothers' work.

It is 1914, and the unmistakable cadence of military drums and a fanfare of brass announce the arrival of the war news. On a screen embellished with gold, the machinery of war goes about its timeless business, the drama of each moment driven home by rhythms and melodies familiar from previous reports. This is the news of the First World War, courtesy of the Pathe Gazette biweekly newsreel.

The live music for the newsreel varied from theater to theater—sometimes a solo pianist, sometimes an organist playing a Fotoplayer Style 50, a 21-foot-long music machine capable of simulating everything from a 20-piece band to a pistol shot, horses' hooves, and crackling flames. In big-city movie palaces, the newsreels might be accompanied by symphony orchestras of up to 80 players. The actual notes varied as well, since the distributors didn't provide scores, and each theater's musical director had to find popular songs or classical music appropriate to each news story.

To ease this burden, publishers offered digests of music categorized by dramatic need, such as the Sam Fox Moving Picture Music, Volume 1 (1913, composed by J. S. Zamecnik, a student of Dvor'ák's). As the newsreel played, the musicians could simply turn to page 11 for “War” music (Sam Fox offers three kinds) or page 17 for “Hurry” music (four varieties).

The town crier is an obvious early example of the use of music in news broadcasting. His handbell served both to gather an audience and to focus its attention, and I suppose the difference in tone and ringing pattern between the famous bell of Antonio Pucci and that of any other fourteenth-century crier served what we might now call a “branding” function.

Written news was often the basis for the town crier's announcements, and its market value was established in Venice in the sixteenth century when the government sponsored readings of avvisi for the general public, price of admission one gazeta. (Hence the word “gazette.”) It's a good bet that the news reflected well on the Venetian republic and somewhat less well on its enemies, the Turks.

In the 1930s newsreels became “talkies” and began to include prerecorded music, putting many pianists and organists out of work but creating jobs for composers who could write music for the films. When the newsreel industry finally died in the late fifties, many of its foot soldiers joined the camp of its killer, television. Like radio, television was subject to more government regulation than film—the assumption being that when broadcasters use a public resource (the electromagnetic spectrum), they have an obligation to the public. As early as 1941 both the Federal Communications Commission and the National Association of Broadcasters made it clear that radio and television newscasts could not be “editorial.” Perhaps as a result, there was much less music in television news than in newsreels.

The first nightly newscast was that of Douglas Edwards on CBS-TV in 1948, but most stations thought news unattractive to their audiences. It was only in 1963 that CBS and then NBC sensed enough interest to expand the newscast from fifteen to thirty minutes, and President Kennedy's assassination that year established the role of network news as a place of common comfort, as well as information, for the country.

If music was present at all, it was only before and after the newscast, and it served the same branding function as theme songs did on serials and sitcoms. Because Americans' televisions remained on even when they weren't watching, music once again served to gather the audience.

The sixties brought a growing sense of civic responsibility among journalists who were discovering that much of the government's information about the Vietnam War was false. By 1968, CBS News was airing special reports like “The Vietcong” and “Hanoi,” which are startling to watch today. There is no music anywhere in these pieces, and since the footage was largely shot without sound, there is a pervasive sense of quiet and, at least to someone listening in 2004, what must be called seriousness.

Conventional practice has made an anchor of background music, such that it dictates what the viewers' response to the images ought to be. Remove it from a scene whose emotional content is not explicit and you risk confronting the audience with an image they might fail to interpret.

—Claudia Gorbman, from Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music

Poststructuralist literary theory holds that the meaning of the written word is diffuse, forever contingent on a web of constantly shifting contexts. How much more so for a filmed image? And how much more still for music?

Lalo Schifrin may have scored the tarring of a dusty road in Cool Hand Luke, but that didn't prevent ABC from appropriating the music to announce its evening news. To the folks at ABC, the piece wasn't about work gangs or the failure to communicate; it was about breathless urgency. But there's no way to know what it meant to the audience.

As it happens, the Cool Hand Luke theme partook—unintentionally, I'm sure—of the number-one cliché in news music: the rhythm of the teletype. Although this cliché is kept alive by news organizations around the globe, most composers make a conscious effort to get as far away from it as possible. The teletype rhythm does have one advantage over music: much less semantic baggage—it's not in a major or a minor key, and it has no melody that would color the broadcast. As we entered the age of branding, however, it also had one shortcoming: it could not be copyrighted. It is the simple sound of a machine doing its job.

News is serious and electric guitars are sporty, and in spite of the fact that Fox News has been doing a lot more sporty rock things, and some, particularly cable, networks have tried to introduce more contemporary sounds, brass is the sound of the important news.

—Cynthia Daniels, engineer at Score Productions, which has been responsible for most of ABC's news music as well as the original CNN music package

The two loudest instrument groups in the Western orchestra are brass and drums, so it should come as no surprise that they have served for centuries as long-distance communication devices, not only in the West but all around the world. Before metals could be worked to form brass instruments, animal horns were used for the same purpose—conch shells in the Pacific, the shofar in the Middle East, ox horns in medieval Europe. By the ninth century horns were associated in Europe with the military and the nobility, an association that is still with us today. Brass and drums compose the second cliché of news music, and we haven't gotten far from it since the first newsreels.

If you go into countries where this is not in the culture, it is still ingrained in them. When we do CNN Español the last thing they want is Latin music. They want Aaron Copland. And we give it to them.

—Gary Anderson, composer and executive vice president of Score Productions

War reporting is an ancient tradition of journalism, and it represents the crux of many of journalism's challenges. Wars always generate propaganda, and journalists are usually keen to distinguish their work—providing information—from propaganda. At the same time, war is traditionally a sport in which you cheer for the home team, regardless of the facts. Whether your side is right or wrong, you'd still rather not have your family or friends killed in battle.

Thus there is a thin line between German newscasts from the thirties and Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, or between American newscasts from the forties and Frank Capra's Why We Fight. The differences are more in form than in content—the propaganda films bring all the art of master filmmakers to bear on the finished product, while news programs simply don't have the talent, time, or resources to produce the news so well.

We did music for a special on the hunt for Osama bin Laden, finished the music at around 7:15, messengered it over to ABC here in New York, and at eight o'clock watched it on the television set.

—Gary Anderson

Technological advances in the second half of the twentieth century have allowed shooting, editing, and scoring to happen many times faster than before. Writing, however, has not kept up, and many reporters from the age of film, when it took at least a day to process and transport the footage of the Vietnam War, bemoan the speed with which live or almost live video can make it onto the air without any vetting or interpretation by a journalist.

In 1985, NBC erected a milestone in the use of music for news when it hired John Williams, who wrote scores for the Lucas and Spielberg films, to write a set of themes for NBC News. The package of orchestral music he created was called “The Mission,” and the network is still mining it almost twenty years later. Although the central melody is often carried in brass voices and in the self-ennobling Richard Strauss mode, its orchestral colors, countermelodies, and thematic variation and development create a much richer musical experience, and a much more diverse palette of moods and emotions, than any news music before—and probably since. It must have been a very expensive proposition to commission someone like Williams, but the effect it had, at least on composers, was to make television news, and by extension its music, seem like serious business, worthy of respect.

The other networks, they always go for that John Williams, big, grand music, but our music is always pointedly more aggressive. I feel the sound of Fox News Channel has branded us more than the look has. It's rock influenced, for sure. We try to keep the sound and look younger and hipper than what our competition is.

—Richard O'Brien, vice president and creative director for Fox News

News music is delivered in the form of a “package,” consisting of many, sometimes more than 100, different “cues,” short pieces that present the thematic material with a certain feel, duration, and purpose. A feel might be “funky” or “somber”; durations are typically between ten and thirty seconds; and purposes include a “teaser” to announce an upcoming show or an “open” to start it. Four feels each performed for four durations and for four purposes would generate sixty-four cues.

All the networks commission exclusive packages from composers such as Peter Fish (CBS) or Michael Karp (NBC), or from companies that represent teams of composers, such as Score Productions (ABC), but generic packages known as “libraries” can be licensed by anyone who can do without proprietary themes, and there is much of this in local news.

The package for the Gulf War was maybe fourteen or sixteen cuts, because basically there's tragedy and there's blood-and-guts. But if you do something for The Early Show you have to do tragedy, blood-and-guts, sports, Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Election Day, and what I call “dead Pope music,” for when the Pope finally dies.

—Peter Fish, composer for CBS Evening News, Face the Nation, and CBS Iraq war coverage

And so we come to the American coverage of the war in Iraq. It's important to note that there was a great divide between the tone of the coverage here and elsewhere in the world. In a striking return to the melodramatic traditions of the newsreel, American television invested every piece of war news, down to the titles and graphics, with an overwhelming amount of emotional context. Special music packages for the war were commissioned by each of the broadcast and cable networks. Who made these calls, and how was the assignment described to the composers?

On the Iraq war, the direction was: “Serious but not down, somber, or morbid. Serious but uplifting.” They also veered away from “military” or “martial.” Again and again the words are “serious,” “powerful,” “uplifting.”

—Gary Anderson

The creative brief in the first Gulf War had more to do with the conflict of cultures and ideologies—it was the Islamic or Arabic East versus the West, and so the conflict was set in those tones. The second time it was more like they were trying to promote the war the same way they would promote Terminator 3—it was like “Battle of the Megaheroes.” So the first time what I delivered was vaguely militaristic and vaguely Arabic simultaneously. And the second time it was just Techno-Ali vs. Frazier-IV, we're-going-to-knock-the-crap-out-of-them music.

—Peter Fish

Even if we agree that it's impossible to write music that is nothing but “serious and uplifting,” it is hard to avoid the impression that much of the music for the Iraq war strove to make one feel good about the war. This is particularly true for CBS and Fox, which invoked contemporary rhythm tracks to give an undeniable air of excitement to the proceedings. Clearly the networks had come to the conclusion that this was what the public wanted.

Although the music packages that were developed for the war included solemn pieces with deliberate tempos, those were not typically used. Of course, if the opening phase of the war had not gone well for the United States, we probably would have heard them. It goes without saying that no war goes well for everyone, and people were dying on both sides, but this rarely became the focus of the coverage or set the mood of the music. NBC even found a way to suck all the musical and emotional depth out of John Williams's “The Mission” by simply looping the opening measure of drums, creating a vapid bit of martial vamping.

As John Leonard noted after the first Gulf War, the American public wanted to “feel good about itself—it hadn't for a while.” Is it the responsibility of the news media to make us feel good about ourselves? Inevitably the current system of using advertising to pay for news, and pricing that advertising according to audience size, results in a competition to attract viewers. But advertisers are not driven by audience size alone. When CBS presented prime-time specials on the first Gulf War they got better ratings than the shows they had replaced. Still, CBS canceled them because they couldn't sell the ad time. Advertisers were afraid their products might end up following a shot of dead bodies.

We want to feel good about ourselves, the advertisers want us to feel good about their products, the producers want the advertisers to feel good about their news shows, the state wants the producers to feel good about its government. Someone has to compose the music for all this good feeling.

Leonard comes to the conclusion that “media should stand in a quasi-adversarial relationship to the government because the government lies to us.” In my opinion this skirts the issue. The media should stand in a quasi-adversarial relationship to us, the viewers, because we lie to ourselves.

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