It’s always a little infuriating to be reading a perfectly well-made essay only to find, buried partway in, an egregious error which casts doubt on the authority of everything that’s gone before.
Take Alex Ross’s piece in the New Yorker about Tolkien and Wagner (and by extension Howard Shore and Wagner) ... there are any number of things to ponder here: the question of whether or not Tolkien was influenced by the Ring (Ross makes a good case), and what was lost and gained in the translation. But then
The experience of film — and, in particular, of music in film — has probably had a prejudicial effect on the way people view live opera. They expect images to set the tone and music to match — “Mickey-Mousing,” Walt Disney’s composers called it. Howard Shore, in The Lord of the Rings, practices the art of Mickey-Mousing at an exalted level.
is just so ...
wrong. “Mickey-Mousing” has nothing to do with the use of music to cue emotional responses in film. It’s not about matching
tone, it’s about synchronizing
action; about the use of musical events as surrogate foley events (think of the pizzicato low strings matched to Mickey’s footsteps in the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment of
Fantasia). And given the general
opprobrium with which the term is used in discussions of film music, it’s highly unlikely that it actually emerged from the Disney studio, especially since the use of the term is reserved for
non-animated films (one describes a musical gesture as “mickey-mousing” as a polite alternative to saying “Dude, that makes your movie look like a cartoon”).
(OK, here’s a nifty link I discovered in the course of googling around the word “mickey-mousing,” an article reading a score by Eisler against his and Adorno’s strictures about “hyperexplicity” in Composing for the Films. And yes, it does make me want to hear the soundtrack, if only for the sake of the novachord ... and it also yields this cheery quote from Eisler/Adorno :
In this way a symphony today will often sound like the music for main and credit titles: - It is as if a traveller, meeting a lion in the jungle, would expect his roar to be followed by the mystic words flashed on the sky - “M.G.M. presents.”
which follows predictably in the path of Adorno’s usual mourning of popular culture's coarsening of discourse, but which sweetly complicates Ross’s argument (that music in film is led by picture, but image in opera is led by music), sixty years ago already.)
Why does Ross feel this digression into misremembered film history necessary? Was he 3/4 of an inch short on his column budget? I think it’s more of a mammal thing, a territorial pissing: gratuitous erudition as dominance display ... particularly annoying when, as in this case, the learning being exhibited is just flat-out wrong. The intrusion of semi-relevant factoids conjures up an image of a bubbling-over cauldron of knowledge — See, I could go anywhere with this! I fling extensibility in all directions! This is my knowledge, worship it ye mortals and despair. — which is expected to enhance the authoritativeness of the central argument. Of course, if the factoids are simply incorrect, or incoherent, or inappropriately linked, this all goes very wrong very quickly.
