Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (34 page)

HBO makes use of a different type of musical signature in its original programming. As it is supported by paid subscriptions there is no need to stop the diegesis for commercials and station identification.

The constant musical reminders, the curtain closings and openings are absent, making the shows feel more like feature films. Starting with
Sex and the City
and followed by
The Sopranos
, it was discovered that a lack of musical underscore lent verisimilitude. The places where music was used in the HBO scores were as source (diegetic), both because music happens in real life and also because it adds quickly readable sociological/psychological signs about the people playing or listening to the music. All non-diegetic underscore was minimalised for fear of exposing any intentional, emotional manipulation to the audience. ‘Trust me, this is real life’, the absent underscore lied.

The Music of
Six Feet Under

The music of
Six Feet Under
can be split into three distinct departments overseen by executive producers Alan Ball and Alan Poul – although it is reported that music is Ball’s domain. The three departments are: the main title composed by Thomas Newman (while the pilot was still in post-production); the licensed (pre-existing) music, which is suggested, researched and licensed by Thomas Golubic and Gary Calamar (of the firm SuperMusicVision); and the original underscore, composed and performed for each episode by Richard Marvin. As I shall argue, it is Alan Ball’s strong 193

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awareness and appreciation of these three branches that contribute to the success of the final product.

Thomas Newman

Thomas Newman was an obvious choice for Alan Ball when he was deciding on a composer for his new TV series about a dysfunctional family of undertakers. The two men had previously worked together on
American Beauty
to critical acclaim and commercial success. Newman picked up the Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music at the BAFTA Awards, the BMI Film Music Award and the 2001 Grammy for Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, as well as receiving nominations for Best Original Score at the Academy Awards and Golden Globes. Television producers have long turned to well-known composers to score music for the main titles. But the practice has fallen out of favour because of the high expense involved. In addition, many feature composers do not want to tarnish their reputations by working in television. Two recent exceptions are James Newton Howard, who composed the main theme for NBC’s hit hospital drama,
E.R
., and Mark Isham for its CBS rival,
Chicago Hope
. Newman had worked on television before, composing the main title of
Boston Public
.

One would hope not to have to mention Newman’s family background in writings such as this but for its Hollywood pedigree.

Newman’s father, Alfred Newman (1901–1970), came to Hollywood in 1930 straight from a successful career on Broadway. He scored hundreds of movies, including
Captain from Castile
(1947),
The Robe
(1953),
The King and I
(1956),
South Pacific
(1958),
How the West Was
Won
(1962) and
Airport
(1970), and was nominated for over 40

Academy Awards, of which he went on to win nine. He was later music supervisor for Goldwyn, a job he held for ten years before moving to Twentieth-Century Fox, with whom he worked for the next 20 years. His influence on film music during the heyday of the studio system was considerable. Alfred was not the only musical success in the family. His siblings, Lionel and Emil, have hundreds of scores to their credit, and Lionel ended up as head of Twentieth-Century Fox’s music department following Alfred’s departure. The second generation include three of Alfred’s children, David, Thomas and Maria, all of whom are successful composers, as well as their cousin, singer-194

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song-writer Randy Newman, who is also known for composing music for motion pictures (he picked up an Academy Award for the song ‘If I Didn’t Have You’, from
Monsters, Inc
., in 2001). And a third generation, Lionel’s grandson Joey, is already gathering credits.

Thomas Newman has a dual musical identity. One is as a worthy descendant of a musical line that goes from Charles Ives to Aaron Copeland and the Elmer Bernstein of
To Kill A Mockingbird
(1962).

He utilises a strong yet simple ‘American’ (read folk, triadic, modal) style that is closely crafted to the emotional key points. Examples from Newman’s work in this style include
The Shawshank Redemption
(1994),
Little Women
(1994),
How to Make an American Quilt
(1995) and
Road to Perdition
(2002). He is a master of this style, bringing an emotional strength and accuracy to these scores.

The other is a more idiosyncratic style, defined by an amal-gamation of ‘world music’ rhythms and instrumentation (perhaps the ‘classical’ music of our time (Ling 2003)) with an ambivalent, almost improvisational new age harmony and melodies. Fully realised in
American Beauty
, this style can be heard strongly hinted in
Desperately Seeking Susan
(1985), and makes noticeable appearances in films including
The Rapture
(1991),
The Player
(1992) and
Flesh
and Bone
(1993). Its strength is the accuracy of colour with minimal elements, balancing ambivalence and emotion.

This second style requires a different composing technique from the traditional. It does not presume the Western orchestra and disrespects traditional associations, so that an Indian tabla and a tropical marimba can accompany the story of white, middle-class Americans as in
American Beauty
. Newman says of his approach to scoring (Newman 1996):

My approach normally is to start from a point of colour, meaning do I hear woodwind sounds or do I hear plucking sounds or bell sounds, and I try to build up. I normally start from a point of colour as opposed to a point of melody, and that’s probably because I figure at some point I’ll have to write melody anyway, so it’s kind of a given, whereas colour is just fun to think about. What would happen if I did this or that, and what would happen if I used this kind of instrument?

In the ‘featurette’ on the making of the main title sequence (on the DVD of season one), it is revealed that both Ball and Newman share 195

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a working style of aesthetic management that I label ‘the patient shopper’. They might not know what they want but they know it when they hear/see it. In this spirit, one of Newman’s techniques is to use a group of instrumentalists specialising in making ‘out of the ordinary’ sounds on their instruments, either through their playing techniques or through physical and/or electronic modification.

Newman will describe a sound he might like, and when this group creates their varied responses he decides how and where he might use these ‘found objects’.

The Main Title

The main title of
Six Feet Under
enjoys a strongly symbiotic relationship between picture and music. The music was written first (more often not the case) and the graphic team then created the visuals to match the music, resulting in something more akin to a music video than a television main title. As a result of this process, both visual and musical accent points are highly synchronised, reducing the cognitive work required to reconcile the two elements and creating a strong impression of musical/visual ‘appropriateness’ (a phenomenon noticed in practice and confirmed in empirical studies (Lipscomb and Kendall 1994)). This particular example of a marriage between the visual and musical resonates with symbolic synergy.

Ching! Right on the downbeat. A chord that the high piano and icy synthesiser patch chime together. In one beat the public is alerted.

It is the musical brand for
Six Feet Under
, instantly recognisable to the viewer. The raised fourth (a B sharp) makes this dominant seventh chord special. It is bright, almost cheerful; its attack sharp, like something breaking, and yet extremely restless and harmonically, ambiguously unstable. Visually, we are looking at the sky crossed by a crow. There is no sense of how far down the ground might be. The chime fades into an ethereal, high sample/synthesiser note (the resolution of the raised fourth to a major third), as the camera pans down to a tree and a hill. The harmonic resolution seems to happen as the ground is localised. We are ‘grounded’ both harmonically and visually.

The major third is amusing for at least two reasons: a) this style normally relies on not committing to any third (the scale degree that defines the major from the minor), but, in a gentle way, it does so 196

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here; and b) Newman has consciously put a major third here. This is, after all, a show about a family working in the mortuary trade, and one thing musicians and non-musicians alike know about funeral music is that it is slow and minor. But here it resolves to almost

‘happy’, at least in the beginning. This tonal allusiveness is part of what makes the title music feel dreamlike and unsettled. And the tempo is perky, almost allegro.

This ethereal vocal/string-like sound, which the initial chime/

piano dissolves into, contains a burble of what might be the high partials of an automobile hubcap spinning loose on the pavement.

This is a subtle foreshadowing of the jingly-jangly percussion to come.

Four bars of four – neat and even. When it repeats with pizzicato strings, as the hands are broken apart by the chime, the basses play a jaunty dance rhythm, a syncopation of the second attack in each bar. The major third is then lost to the ambivalence of the root under the hand washing. The low violins/violas start a figure that somehow finds the line between energetic and stately. Everything falls into neat pairs of twos, building up, but first a stop for a bar of six to contemplate the idea with that hubcap spinning, like the sky above, in slow motion.

The gurney wheel spins and we are off. Various tickings add a mix of someone tapping his watch to show you time is getting on, and a jaunty enjoyment of the ride. The soprano saxophone/oboe d’amore leads (although, not being typical Newman instruments, it could just be a cor anglais) and aspires to the spiritual by reaching up to the note but always falling back. It feels mediæval, but there is also a jazzy, sensual cockiness.

The gurney continues along the corridor: a loose bearing in the wheel, a soft pointillistic cloud of higher string plucks teasing the major third again and creating an eccentric lightness of air effect.

Instead of the obvious death tradition of gloom and despair, Newman and Ball have decided to go with the always present opposite tradition.

Death is a ride in a clown car with a bunch of wild and weird party people: Nino Rota might approve.

The embalming fluid dances its six-beat dance with the jolliness of Balinese shadow puppets, the sliding bass pushing the very last drop out. A rest. We needed that. A brow is wiped. But then a brazilian
quica
(a squeaky percussion instrument) bird laughs at the folded hands! Nature doesn’t stop when we die. Then a two-bar surrealistic break to honour human hope and to set up a repeat of the main 197

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theme – as the flowers wilt, the music solemnly resolves and lifts up its eyes to the master. The reversed, backwards-sounding amplitude envelope adds to the surreal effect of the time-lapse photography.

There is an urban myth that the nursery rhyme ‘Ring-a-Ring-a-Roses’ is about the fourteenth-century plagues; the lyrics list the pathology of the illness, ending in death, and are sung as a cheerful chant. It is to this mediæval tradition that the
Six Feet Under
’s main theme belongs. Harmonically, it functions as a drone, hurdy-gurdy-like, while the pizzicato strings keep trying to trick us otherwise. The only true harmonic movement is at the hopeful turnaround (the flowers wilting) and at the end of the second statement of the melody.

The visuals in the second iteration of the melody are impressive, although lacking the same kinetic connection to the music as before. The slow-moving coffin masks the flying clouds that would otherwise carry the energy. The still pictures of gravestones and old photographs seem simply unwilling to dance. The basses get a little more rumbustious in encouragement. But at the end we are finally set right. The very last note of the second and last iteration of the melody slips down to the minor third, the bass sliding with it.

‘This is about death after all’, the image of the crow seems to rasp, although the echoes of the chirping accompaniment have not yet got the message. The crow flies away, knocking Alan Ball’s third credit off the screen with one last ‘ching’, as if to say ‘enough of this human malarkey’. The tree squeaks out its concurrence, and
Six Feet
Under
, the ground humming low, awaits us all.

The Licensed Music

Licensed music fills an important function in
Six Feet Under
at a time when music is meta-symbol of culture and lifestyle choices. It acts as a knowing wink from programme makers to the viewer, whether through actual lyrics or the cultural currency associated with the song. Licensed music has also usurped many traditional underscoring purposes, either reflecting a character’s interior state, altering the sense of time passing or quickly telling us what the images cannot. This is because, as the licensed music can be perceived as having a legitimate place in the diegesis, it can bypass many of the modern viewer’s sensitivities to emotional manipulation that a similar underscore would trigger.

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Much great thought and work goes into the licensed music of the show. It is the job of musical supervisors Thomas Golubic and Gary Calamar, who have for years been DJs at KCRW (Santa Monica), a radio station known for its cutting-edge, eclectic music appreciation. They bring not only a vast knowledge of different styles of music to the show but a ‘finger on the pulse’ awareness of contemporary musical tastes. In consultation with Alan Ball, they develop identifying styles for various characters (such as Brazilian bossanova sophistication for Brenda’s parents, rock for Claire or classical for Ruth), and establish the culture of the various locations (nightclubs, restaurants).