Mr. Mitchell inspired me to write an entry on the music in The Hours:
While watching The Hours, I was highly aware of an unnerving, seemingly unending, descending sequence of fourths. An interesting choice. In music theory, fourths are considered "dissonant" intervals, and as listeners, we expect them to resolve in the next beat or so.
The effect of the unending sequence is stressful and unnerving because the listener expects the music to resolve over and over and over, and it seemingly never does. Once the music has finally resolved, however, the listener is dissatisfied, because by this time they had practically given up hope.
In the process, the listener has quickly lost track of what the tonic, the central pitch, should be. In fact, it's almost impossible to know what the tonic should be (most can typically sense it, or can agree that a certain note is the tonic if it's played), because there is NO structure to the music at this point besides the sequence. Does this have significance? Does it imply that the characters have somehow lost track of their respective "tonics" in life? Or does it imply that life has no tonic, no central pitch?
One reason the tonic may be difficult to identify is that the listener does not notice the pattern starting necessarily, but realizes the music about halfway through as the tension and stress build. Does this imply that these downward spirals in life, or for the characters, cannot be prevented from being set into motion?
1 comment:
Wow--very good stuff; much more literate and specific than my more impressionistic comments. I like the idea of life having no central "tonic", but rather all relations are relative (to strike a redundant phrase). This seems like a very Woolfian idea to me, since she's so interested in the margins (Clarissa, Septimus) over the presumed "central" affairs of the day (Richard, the Armenians and Parliament, etc.). Her novel, the way it spins away from Clarissa as its presumed center, maybe reflects this idea, too.
But also the *mood* of this music, its non-intellectual effect on the viewer/listener apart from any music theory, is also so striking--we see a variety of "downward spirals" in these stories.
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