Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (33 page)

Although these incessant ostinati and syncopations sometimes obscure the music's meter, they still emphasize the underlying pulse of the music. That pulse has a visceral, almost primal quality to it that can connote notions of “primitive,” “non-civilized,” or even “savage” to whatever the music is accompanying. When used to accompany scenes featuring apes, it marks the apes as “primitive.”

Many composers of modernist concert music would have had little interest in cultivating these types of associations, preferring instead to think of these sounds as materials for abstract music. But John Cage was one composer who worried less about the construction of music and more about the experience of music. Although Cage took positions that some considered extreme (he regarded
any
sound experience as musical), he did allow for the possibility that music could carry meaning. For
Cage, however, any meanings related to music lay primarily with the listener and the listener's musical experiences.

Cage's ideas resonated with those of sociologists, musicologists, and other composers who increasingly saw music as a medium capable of
carrying
meanings even if it held no
inherent
meanings. These individuals understood music as a communication system that's much like language and able to convey meanings in similar ways. Comparisons between music and language were themselves nothing new; even Kant's contemporaries wrote of the importance of using language as a model for creating music with internal coherence. What was different about this newer thinking was its focus on how music is received and perceived rather than on prescriptions for composition.

Jean-Jacques Nattiez is one of several musicologists who include music among other “symbolic forms” that can carry meaning using words, pictures, “sound-images,” or other
signs
that can refer to objects or concepts. Drawing on the works of pioneering linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce, Nattiez describes “meaning” as the result of an individual's receiving signs and using them to understand and make sense of his or her existence. These signs possess meaning only in relation to other signs, and they are able to possess and convey meaning only because and only as long as we collectively agree on the references and associations that they carry.

Just as words and other signs acquire meaning through repeated association with objects and concepts, music can take on meaning through repeated association with a particular context or experience. Listeners learn that certain musical gestures can carry particular associations by hearing those gestures used multiple times in similar contexts. Because the musical score for
Planet of the Apes
sounds like modernist concert music, it recalls that music for listeners who are familiar with those sounds.

Traditional Hollywood movie music, music of the “Classical Hollywood style” from the 1920s through the 1950s, is replete with associations like this, carried by music. Beginning with silent films and continuing through the early years of sound films, Hollywood composers developed an extensive stockpile of gestures, styles, and other “codes” that they regularly used to
evoke moods, settings, and characterizations, all to enhance the film being accompanied. Hollywood cultivated these associations because it assumed the ability of music to convey the meanings implied by these musical codes. Noel Carroll has called this movie music “modifying music.” Carroll compared the functions of film music to the ways that adjectives and adverbs modify and give information about nouns and verbs in a sentence. Similarly, movie music works in tandem with other film elements such as image, story, and dialogue, contributing its own associations to the meaning of the whole.

None of these elements, including the music, has any inherent meanings. However, all of them carry associations accrued from the broader range of cultural experiences that audiences bring with them. It's the interaction of these associations with the audience's cultural knowledge that produces meaning in a film and in its music.

In the case of the music for
Planet of the Apes
, the musical features that make it unique—the sounds of specific instruments, the rhythms and harmonies used, and even the compositional techniques used by the composer, Jerry Goldsmith—all carry their own distinctive associations. These allow the music to modify the images, story and dialogue of the film with ideas associated with those styles. In turn, those ideas affect how we receive the characters and understand the story based on our understanding of the cultural implications of the distinctive musical features of the score.

Angular, jagged melodies and discordant harmonies are features of the score that are probably most recognizable as “modernist.” All of these materials are essentially
atonal
, meaning that there is no primary pitch or tonic that provides the music with a harmonic resting point. Because all of the melodies and harmonies in the score are non-conventional, they don't convey pathos, triumph, humor, or other moods in ways that are readily perceptible to the audience. Perhaps the most immediate and consistent impression that a listener might get is one of unease; otherwise, the music may seem dispassionate, with no sense of mood.

Jerry Goldsmith created the melodies and harmonies in
Planet of the Apes
using methods of twelve-tone composition, a modernist technique that contributes to the score's unsettling dissonance. The film's main theme juxtaposes wide leaps and closely spaced intervals to avoid any suggestions of a more traditional melody. This theme appears prominently in the movie's main titles, sounding successively by the flute, oboe, and clarinet, all while being accompanied by ostinati in the strings and piano. Versions of this theme also underscore scenes in the Forbidden Zone, where the slow tempo and widely spaced accompanying chords emphasize the desolate and open space of the setting (22:29 and 1:48:45 on the DVD among others).

“Twelve-tone methods,” or “Composition with Twelve Tones,” was a means of creating music using the atonal sounds often found in modernist music, but in a methodical way that brought coherence and unity to the otherwise unfamiliar and frequently discordant harmonies. The Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg first wrote about the practice in the early 1920s and is credited with the concept, although other composers adopted and used a variety of individualized versions of these methods. Goldsmith self-consciously chose to use twelve-tone methods in the score, describing the process as “not avant-garde anymore; it's sort of old hat, but for film it is still sort of new.”

Essentially, a composer using twelve-tone methods first creates a “tone row” from the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale (C, C-sharp, D, E-flat, E, F, F-sharp, G, G-sharp, A, B-flat, B). The composer then manipulates the row in a variety of ways to generate the melodies and chords used throughout a given piece. In
Planet of the Apes
, Goldsmith used a complete tone row to create the movie's main theme and used fragments of the row to create melodies and ostinati elsewhere in the score. The rapid piano figuration accompanying Taylor's escape in the Ape City derives from the main theme's tone row. Other short, percussive piano gestures, such as those heard in the opening titles, also have their source in that series.

Because a primary goal of atonal music is to give all tones equal emphasis, there is usually no contrast between consonant and dissonant sounds to create a sense of harmonic tension and release. This gives the harmonies and gestures in atonal music an abstract quality comparable to works of abstract expressionism such as the paintings of Jackson
Pollock. As with modern art, most mainstream audiences found such music puzzling and unsettling because of its unfamiliar, dissonant sounds and its cerebral aesthetic. However, they could accept sounds like those of twelve-tone music more easily when they were included as part of a movie score, especially for a horror or science-fiction film like
Planet of the Apes
. The startling, disturbing, and uncanny scenes and subjects from these films provided a context that gave meaning to the otherwise bizarre and disconcerting musical sounds.

Part of Goldsmith's purpose in creating his twelve-tone score was to characterize the strangeness of the setting and story with some suitably strange music. But by using these methods throughout the score, he left no room for any heroic or triumphant music. How does this affect his underscoring of the movie's hero, Taylor? And how else might Goldsmith's use of this culturally charged method affect the perception of Taylor as a heroic and sympathetic figure?

We've already mentioned the evocative timbres in the score that mark the apes as primitive: the cuíka and slide whistle that both produce sounds like ape vocalizations, the ram's horn that sounds almost like a barbaric war call, and the other exotic percussion that is suggestive of instruments from non-Western “primitive” cultures. Although novel and unique in themselves, these sounds fulfill a traditional function of movie music by using their associations to give the audience information about the setting and characters. They not only mark the apes as “primitive,” but also mark the apes as “others” distinct from Taylor.

The unusual instruments, timbres, and other devices don't suggest notions of “primitive” solely from their sonic character. Take the prevalent ostinati and syncopations throughout the score. These features recall Igor Stravinsky's once-scandalous ballet,
The Rite of Spring
. Stravinsky's ballet depicts a human sacrifice conducted by an imagined prehistoric tribe to appease the gods of spring. The music features ostinati and syncopation along with dissonant harmony and fragmented, modal melodies to reinforce the primeval nature of the tribe and its
rituals. Goldsmith's music for
Planet of the Apes
achieves a similar effect by using similar devices. Its resemblance to Stravinsky's famous work also highlights the score's own modernist features and thereby evokes the cultural associations of modernism.

Part of what makes these characterizations effective is how they interact with the oppositions between “human-ape,” “advanced-primitive,” and “civilized-barbaric” present in the movie. In addition to being very articulate, the apes have power and control, even though the music and visuals mark them as crude and uncivilized. The music becomes an integral part of the film's deconstruction of the notion of “primitive.”

Traditional Hollywood movie music practice usually dictates that a film's protagonist will be accompanied by distinctive music, but as we noted earlier, this isn't really true of Taylor and his companions. They tend to be accompanied by atonal music that is mildly or moderately dissonant and provides little in the way of traditional cues for mood. Much of this music is either atmospheric or emotionally “flat” and dispassionate, as in the music accompanying the treks across the Forbidden Zone or even Taylor's pairing with Nova (heard at 42:18 on the DVD).

As the hero of the movie, Taylor should be the figure that the audience identifies with, but as Eric Greene has noted in his book,
Planet of the Apes as American Myth
, their identification with Taylor goes beyond just his character and includes the culture and civilization that Taylor represents. Yet, he has no heroic theme, fanfare, or any especially agreeable music. Even though Taylor is the movie's central character, the music
doesn't
perform one of its intended functions here, which is to encourage the audience to develop a strong emotional attachment to him. It's almost as if Taylor, despite being the protagonist, is somehow not a very likeable figure, and we sense that through the music.

Greene cites several critics who point out Taylor's alienated and even misanthropic nature, evident in his disaffected log entry at the movie's beginning, his goading and needling of his crewmates, his assumption of the inferiority of the apes he encounters despite their articulateness, and his ruthlessness and even brutality in taking Dr. Zaius hostage and tying him up. Much of Taylor's reaction is a response to his own harsh
treatment at the hands of the apes. Still, after having earlier stated his desire to find a species or culture more compassionate than man, Taylor maintains an air of superiority toward Cornelius and Zira even as they help him escape. He seems unable or unwilling to acknowledge the depth of personal and professional sacrifice they have made in recognizing him as essentially an equal.

Taylor is a classic anti-hero, and the music's dispassionate and non-heroic nature captures his stance as a cynical outsider. But is that the whole story? What about the cultural meanings behind the twelve-tone methods that Goldsmith used to create this dispassionate music? Could they allude to ideas and values that go beyond Taylor, implicating the Western culture that he inadvertently represents as somehow responsible for bringing about the Planet of the Apes?

Anti-heroes like Taylor were just the sorts of figures that filmmakers of the New Hollywood used as part of their social commentary. If Taylor is both an anti-hero and a de facto representative of Western culture, it's not hard to pick up on the commentary implied in this relationship. The music's style has its own connection to Western culture that strengthens the film's critique of Western culture through Taylor.

As an astronaut and scientist, Taylor is among the elite of Western technocratic society. Goldsmith's music, following the twelve-tone method, reminds us of Taylor's ties to the contemporary Western culture he shares with the audience by recalling the modernist concert music championed as the high art music of the West at the time. These associations invoked by the movie's twelve-tone music score are ironic, of course, because, in the story,
that
contemporary Western society is gone and its last surviving member is regarded as an animal by the newly dominant apes.