I was looking over my comments on The Sound of Music and I thought I came off as too hard on the score, which I actually like very much. So to make amends (?), I did this little arrangement of Edelweiss.
You get to choose whatever tempo you want – it works in different ways when it’s fast and when it’s slow. The tempo on this recording is somewhere in between. That works too.
Among other things, I’m constantly thinking about the classical music communication problem (that being: why don’t most people get much out of classical music?) and like anyone with a fixation, I frequently imagine that other topics relate to this topic. So here’s my imaginary connection of the day.
I was looking at a German sentence just now and thinking about the how the infamous verb-at-the-end construction creates a flavor of structural logic quite different from English. Different syntax might not mean different thoughts, but it does mean different thought-architecture. The German infinitive that waits until the end of the sentence is the coordinating truth that remains unspoken while its necessary underlings are arrayed before it. For me it’s a bit like an arch whose keystone must be fit in last, to sustain that which rises below it. Or something. Anyway, it’s not at all like English, where as much as possible, we try to have each thing lead to the next thing in an elegant line. Each German sentence loops back on itself and is tied up in a bow at the end; each sentence is a discrete hard nugget, a brick, and a paragraph is a wall of bricks. English readily breaks down into a flow of loose clauses, one after another…the difference between a period and an ellipsis is easily smooshed away…each verb might be the peak of a wave, but the waves just roll on in a line. This is how it seems to me, anyway, a fluent English speaker and a non-German speaker. Obviously my opinion here is suspect; fluent Germans very likely feel it quite differently. But hold on, it may not make a difference to my point.
Do I even need to make my point? I think you probably get it. But here it is.
The great 18th-19th century heap of works at the heart of “classical music” is mostly by German-speaking composers, and there’s something syntactically confusing about it to English-speakers. Like German, it’s cadence-oriented; phrases are meant to be evaluated as a whole, in light of how they end, rather than parsed in a steady linear stream. A central idea in musical construction is that something is introduced but not dealt with fully until later – that something can exist in an “unresolved” state, holding out for its coordinating fate to come. German speakers, unlike English speakers, are always holding big chunks of information in parsing limbo, waiting for the verb to consummate it all. English speakers, I imagine, have a much smaller buffer.
The whole notion of sonata form can be seen as based on a parenthesis – the exposition is waiting around for the recapitulation; the opening tonic is waiting around for the closing tonic. German speakers hear the auxiliary verb as a promise about the future, and they’re willing to wait a long time if need be; English speakers don’t make promises like that.
So no wonder classical music seems counter-intuitive and obscure. Listening to it without awareness of the arches, the bricks that build walls, means missing the point. I think we have a lot of English speakers today listening to classical music and hearing a boring endless series of waves stretching off in a straight line to the horizon when they should be hearing an arch that rises and falls from a single stationary keystone.
This might all be silly, but hey, it’s a thought I had.
directed by Robert Wise
screenplay by Ernest Lehman
after the stage musical (1959) by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse
music by Richard Rodgers
lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II
based on the book The Story of the Trapp Family Singers (1949) by Maria Augusta Trapp
Another one on the big outdoor screen. The crowd was dead-set on audience participation and insisted on it like it was a right, even when the movie resisted. Some of the crowd swayed their arms during “Climb Every Mountain.” People eagerly hissed at the baroness, even during her “graceful exit” speech, and booed at Rolf, even when he was just gearing up to sing “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.” Mind you, I wasn’t at this. It was just a showing of the movie. But people seem to really believe that an opportunity to clap in rhythm and shout during a movie must not be passed up. The whole phenomenon of Rocky Horror Picture Show-style congregational ritualization of movie-watching is interesting to me, in part because I truly don’t feel the impulse. Seems like movie-watching is already inherently ritualistic.
The movies that tend to invite this kind of treatment are, basically, “fabulous movie musicals!” It’s not just because musicals have songs – it’s because there’s something both artifical/irrational and utterly rock-solid confident about the way they’re presented. They’re sort of magnetic that way, in the way a charismatic cult leader might be magnetic. I’m still curious to hear a really good explanation of why “the gay community” has traditionally gravitated toward things like over-the-top musicals and female cabaret singers, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with these same qualities.
When Julie Andrews ended “My Favorite Things” with a series of stagy postures ecstatically clutching drapery, I thought, “wow, she’s doing something that makes no human sense, but emphatically and with utter assurance! This is what the material demands – and yet who would dare do this today?” Her character’s desire to feel self-possessed in her new and intimidating home is symbolized, fairly absurdly, by her desire to make new clothes for the children; the idea that she has obstacles to overcome is symbolized, again absurdly, by the Captain’s cold refusal to purchase materials for these new clothes; her eventual victory over obstacles is symbolized, quite absurdly, by her realization that the old drapes (she has gratuitously been told that the drapes are to be replaced) can provide her with materials; and her sense of self-assurance is, yes, symbolized by her triumphant musical revelry among the drapes. Symbol upon symbol upon symbol until what we are seeing is more ritual than life. Stylized out of all reality, but not yet out of all meaning.
I took a course on Nazi propaganda film techniques, the most interesting notion in which was that footage of enormous marching hordes, like Busby Berkeley spectaculars, were compelling for their patterns even though those patterns had no “meaning.” “Empty signifiers,” or something like that. “My Favorite Things” is far from an empty signifier, but it’s been stylized in that direction. All the old “fabulous” movie musicals tend toward the meaningless – the purely aesthetic – and audiences frequently love them for their emptiness rather than their significance. The audience shouted “boo” at the Nazis in The Sound of Music like they were so many Professor Coldhearts* and not an actual historical political reality that posed an actual threat to this actual family. And who could blame them? The next thing you know we’re watching a puppet show about goats.
What I mean is that stylized, half-empty signifiers are closer to ritual already and thus invite a kind of frenzy of participatory enthusiasm. (Just ask Rolf!) There’s some deep-programmed (very useful) human impulse toward social ritual. Hence the people dressing up to be a part of the violently meaningless Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the people dying to find a way to incorporate themselves into “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?” Not clear why homosexuality should tie in to this, but I will say that the gay attitude, that of “camp,” has something to do with the poignancy of simultaneously recognizing the absurd emptiness and wanting to be it. The scariest thing about Nazi propaganda was that Nazis didn’t seem to realize that the desire to be a part of shiny-uniformed mass ritual was indulgent, meaningless, and therefore possibly dangerous. Sing-Along The Sound of Music, on the other hand, seems to consciously identify itself as “indulgent” and “meaningless.” Phew.
There’s more to be said in that direction, obviously, but lets just wrap this up with some stuff about the movie.
When I was a kid and this would come on TV, I’d always give up after the first half hour, and watching it again, I remembered why. After “The Sound of Music,” none of the next three songs is satisfying. “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria” is the most plot-bound song in the movie and has that extra layer of opera-style clumsiness that musicals get when they try to explain what’s going on. The sheer lameness of that nun having to sternly say “A clown!” in both choruses puts me in a bad mood. Plus, the song is musically arbitrary. It neither sounds like nuns nor people trying to solve a problem like Maria; it tries to be both amusement and disapproval and ends up being basically the same half-assed barnyard song as “Everything’s Up To Date in Kansas City.” Not that I don’t whistle it; I’m just saying it’s lame.
Then the movie original “I Have Confidence,” which is really well filmed (and Julie Andrews wears a pretty cool hat during this number, I must say!) but never quite convinces me that it’s a real song. The introductory verse is a big mush of nothing, and then when it picks up with the real melody, it just doesn’t have enough personality to recover from our sense of being lost in mush. The performance far outweighs the material, which encourages distracted, lazy viewing in 8-year-olds watching it on TV.
Then the clincher, “Sixteen Going On Seventeen.” This song, as anyone can see in retrospect, doesn’t belong in the movie. None of the other kids gets an identity like Liesl does, and though the Rolf-grows-up-bad storyline deserves some screen time, this song doesn’t really relate to it. In fact I was a bit taken aback by the not-all-that-coy sexual undertones of the song, at least as presented here. The boyfriend says, “boys will want to do things to you that you wouldn’t understand, but don’t worry, I’ll take care of you, wink wink” and then she says, “ooh yes, I don’t know what you could possibly mean, wink wink, please take care of me, wink wink.” Maybe the original intent was for them to seem innocent and the “I’ll take care of you” to be amusing in its naivete, but it all read to me as a genuine “do you know where your sixteen-going-on-seventeen-year-old is?” warning. Naturally, this doesn’t make any sense to an 8-year-old, and at this point the movie really seems to have wandered off course. Why, why, after dinner, did we follow this girl out here to sing with this guy we’ve never even seen before? I always felt like I was in over my head by that point.
The movie is interesting for seeming like it has a sequel right in it. Once Maria and Captain Von Trapp get married, it really feels like everything has been wrapped up tight and what follows smells a bit like some writer’s clever pitch for “The Von Trapp Family 2.” Now they’re married, but the whole family is threatened by the Nazis and has to flee by singing in a festival! Brilliantly faithful to the original, but with a whole new twist. Obviously, that’s not how any of this was written. I’m just saying; it has that “same characters, new type of plot” quality that sequels do.
The movie really looks lovely throughout, and apart from putting her hand on her head every five seconds, Julie Andrews carries it all very gracefully. There’s something eager and focussed about the way it’s all shot and edited. It never gets tripped up in its own plot, like a lot of sillier musicals, and it never forgets to try to please the crowd. It’s old-fashioned theater thinking in its maturity, just before the call of “but look how ridiculous she looks clutching those drapes!” tore down the whole tissue-thin establishment.
I tried to find the 1st edition (1949) cover of Maria’s book, but no luck, though the book itself doesn’t seem to be rare at all. Here are two post-Broadway, pre-movie softcovers.
* Look it up yourself.