From Brahms to Samuel Barber, the use of classical music in films can create all sorts of unlikely connections in the minds of the audience, as Tom Service explains
ILLUSTRATION: MARIA CORTE MAIDAGAN
THE LISTENING SERVICE
They call it ‘needle drop’: when directors use pre-existing music and drop the needle on a virtual record for an instant underscore. No need to hire a composer to write a new score, just drop the needle!
And when film-makers drop their needles on classical music, they release a special power that’s only latently realised when the same music is played in concert halls. It’s not only that they use Barber’s Adagio for Strings, say, for its ability to turn any image on screen into an acme of emotional intensity, as Oliver Stone does at the end of Platoon, when Willem Dafoe collapses to the ground and raises his arms to a pitiless heaven. The power of these moments changes the music itself, giving it new resonances and associations.
Take the opening of Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, which starts with one of orchestral music’s most powerful sunrises. Stanley Kubrick turns it into the dawn of the cosmos and consciousness in how he uses it in 2001: A Space Odyssey, making a cultural connection that’s once seen, never forgotten. Strauss didn’t compose Zarathustra for the silver screen – it was written in 1896 – but Kubrick’s use of it amplifies the overwhelming impact of Strauss’s music, sound and image each intensifying each other.
That moment has become a cinematic trope that’s ripe for parody. That’s what Greta Gerwig does in Barbie, when it’s the dawn of the doll – or rather, Margot Robbie’s personification of the new model Barbie – that Strauss’s music dramatises. It’s a moment of surpassingly sophisticated transmedial and intertextual signification – seriously! – that’s nonetheless hilariou
