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 and feature classical music in their films, they release a special power that’s only latently realised when the same music is played in concert halls. These are often then translated into viral memes that travel around the internet and becoming inexplicably linked with the film's identity in popular culture.
Creating moments of emotional intensity
It’s not only that they use Barber’s Adagio for Strings (which we named as one of the best works by Barber), 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.
Using classical music to create parody and viral memes
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 hilarious, whether you get the references or not.
Uncanny moments: conflicting music and on-screen action
And when directors go beyond the cliché in how they use classical music, the meanings that classical music can make are at their richest and strangest. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s character consecrates the oil well he’s built to music that made my jaw drop when I heard it in the cinema. Not because it was so right, but because it seemed so wrong: the finale of Brahms’s Violin Concerto (which we named as one of the best works by Brahms) was Anderson’s choice to mark this moment of fossil-fuel eruption, making a baffling clash of European bourgeois sophistication and rough-hewn colonising Californian violence.
But in trying to make sense of the gap that I felt between the music and the image, new meanings and new connections were created: the film made me think that you can’t have one industry – classical music, its concert halls, the technology of its instruments – without the industries of energy and the engines of empire. In that moment, Brahms became an oil-man.
That’s the power of dropping the needle on classical music in film: turning Richard Strauss into Barbie, and Brahms into an oil magnate. Once seen, never forgotten!
Illustration: Maria Corte Maidagan
