Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (35 page)

Licensing a piece of music can be an expensive business. There are two rights that must be licensed. One is with the owner of the song for the right to synchronise the underlying musical conception to picture. The other is with the owner of the recording. Each requires negotiating lawyers and contracts. You might have the perfect song for a scene but if either party decides they want a large amount of money, or do not want their song connected with the production, you can be out of luck. Sometimes the owners cannot be located, which causes additional problems. Although the budget for licensed music on
Six Feet Under
started small, it has burgeoned to six figures per episode over the four seasons.

Golubic and Calamar start by reading the script and listing possibilities while discussing ideas with Ball. By the final day, on the dubbing stage where the audio is mixed together, they may have assembled a handful of possibilities for each cue, edited so that starts, ends and possibly pertinent lyrics are properly placed. Each possibility has had to be researched in terms of copyright and permission acquired. Alan Ball reviews the choices and picks the one to use. To demonstrate their particularly creative use of licensed music, as well as some of its usual functions, I will use the pilot episode as a guide (‘Pilot’, 1:1).

The first piece starts right after the main title, a
faux
commercial for a ‘Millennium Edition’ hearse. The music used to accompany the commercial is the operatic aria ‘L’Amour est un Oiseau Rebelle’, from
Carmen
by Bizet. Since the music is out of copyright (Bizet died in 1875) there is no need for it to be licensed, and the recording could be from an inexpensive music library. Few will recognise the melody; fewer still will know the opera and its 199

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association with bullfighting. Almost all will recognise the sound as opera – elegant and glamorous. Exactly the message the advertiser is outlining in the voice-over. This cue also shows the conscious editing of the music with the perfect ending line, throttled by the collapsing of the picture and audio when the power is turned off.

Right into the next example, ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’, sung by Bing Crosby and written by Walter Kent, Kim Gannon and Buck Ram. It is used to introduce the doomed father of the Fisher family, Nathaniel, as it plays on the car radio in the brand new ‘Millennium Edition’ hearse driven by him. The song is also playing on the radio in the Fishers’ kitchen, where Ruth and David hear it. Although originating from World War II, it is a Christmas song played each year over the holidays; it thus establishes the time of year for us.

Moreover, identified with fifties pop and light jazz, it says much about Nathaniel and his tastes: he is more a smoothie than a rebel.

There are several examples of cognitive dissonance here that ironically comment on what we are seeing. It is contemporary times but the song is old; it is a Christmas tune but we are in snowless, sunny southern California. Another emotional frisson occurs when the sweet song plays on over the image of the bus colliding with the hearse and killing Nathaniel. We intuitively know that radios can play on in such situations, inviting us to suspend our disbelief, but we take note of the incongruence of the song and the situation. As the lyric ‘if only in my dreams’ wafts through the street after the fatal accident, back inside the house Ruth cuts her finger. The song’s lyrics concern a wartime soldier’s promise, and are filled with nostalgia and longing

– everyone will be nostalgic for Nathaniel for the rest of the series.

He will continue to appear, if only in the dreams of the other Fishers, and often he will be accompanied by fifties pop and light jazz.

Another interesting aspect of this cue is how it shifts between diegetic/source and non-diegetic/score. There is little concern for the realities of music here. It shifts from radio to commentator to score to represent the characters’ emotions with such skill that it disarms any resentment for the obvious manipulation. Notice how the cue starts out on the street; it is score, since the people on the street cannot hear it, only us. We cut into the hearse. Nathaniel is singing along; it is source. He turns down the radio when the phone rings, confirming it is diegetic sound. He picks up the phone and answers.

We cut to the exterior of the Fisher Funeral Home and family 200

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residence, while the music level stays the same; it is non-diegetic. It is also un-effected. This means that the myriad qualities our brains use to judge the source of a sound, including amplitude level, frequency content and phase and time anomalies such as reverb, remain unchanged. If it was diegetic a dubbing mixer would try to change these qualities from cut to cut to match up with what might be expected in the visible space; in this case it has not been done. We cut to the interior of the Fisher house, through a window between the kitchen and living room at the big music console, telling us the music is now coming from there; it is diegetic/source again. This demonstrates how much of this clever working of music is conceived early on. Here it is already in the shooting script. When the song finishes, no radio announcer comes on and there is no new music segue. It is score/

non-diegetic again. Much can happen, and much can be learnt about a family and the depth of its love for each other, in the two minutes and ten seconds that it takes this song to play.

One can compare this with the much more traditional use of source in the cue that follows. This cue intercuts with the interior of Claire’s car. On her car radio is a barely distinguishable piece of aggressive rock, identified as ‘Attitude’ by a group called Hardknox.

We hear it only when we are in the car with Claire, which solidly attaches it to the car’s stereo, and additionally it has been ‘effected’

to sound as though it is playing in a car. Although this appears to be library music it immediately notifies us that teenager Claire is a bit of a rebel. Spylab’s ‘Celluloid Hypnotic’ does double duty in the next scene, as it diegetically conveys some of the musical tastes and cultural aspects of Claire and her friends while they smoke crystal meth. At the same time it has a hallucinatory effect that helps us to identify with the internal state of the group, and, moreover, when Claire learns her father is dead and is momentarily speechless, the music becomes her internal state. When she utters the words ‘he’s dead’ to her friends the drums kick in and she panics.

Then there is the diegetic piece of baroque music by Albinoni, which, although particularly appropriate and tasteful for a funeral service at the Fisher and Sons Funeral Home (and even commented on, appreciatively, by someone at the service), is completely inappropriate for what Nathaniel’s son, David, is feeling. This is a sophisticated reversal, successful because of the amount of visual signals provided by the director and actor. We fairly explode with 201

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David in relief when he finally screams, and then giggle at ourselves because it was a fantasy. The same, particularly gentle phrase is looped, repeating its cloying rightness. We cut to another scene, and then back to where a mourner starts, aggravatingly, bearing down, camera zooming in and filling the screen with the tormentor’s face, music pulled down to heighten the reality. This time David really screams, the music flooding back with the other sounds of the room to heighten the sudden shameful awareness, its appropriateness now seeming a stern comment on the inappropriateness of David’s scream.

For ten minutes of the episode there is a piece of music playing that is identified, in the on-line music list, as Mozart’s Divertimento no.1, Andante. This is a tremendous understatement. Ten minutes is a long time for one piece of music in this medium, and Alan Ball himself reportedly put this section together. It is minutely and specifically worked in, both in the editing and the mixing, and is one of those great works of craft the effectiveness of which is measured by its seeming invisibility. At first glance it is just another use of appropriate funeral music for Nathaniel’s wake. Closer inspection reveals that it also works as the ‘zombie world’ score for Nate’s heart-felt admission to his sister; it is also an Italian movie soundtrack to accompany the surreal story of the Sicilian funeral that Nate recounts on his travels; a distant sadness for Ruth’s breakdown and the admission of her infidelity; and the score to a host of other vignettes involving the extended family, which range from comic to tragic.

The last song in ‘The Pilot’, ‘Waiting’ by The Devlins, is another unique kind of music use and the last example from this episode.

Personal to Alan Ball (who wrote it into the script) and not bothering to masquerade as source, it functions as Nate’s inner voice when he sees his father board the bus. The lyrics seem to be about something important; one can hear that the person will always be waiting. But this essentially trite paean to self-pity is masked by the earnest seriousness of the vocal performance and musical accompaniment.

As in the main title, the music and images are very carefully intercut so that one does not consciously notice the intentionality behind the dramatic musical break just before the bus moves, the space artfully filled with the rhythmic and emotional punctuation of the bus’s air brakes sighing. This is key to much of the music used in this style, and, as used in
American Beauty
, it implies importance but never tells you the significance of it.

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The Underscore and Interview

Richard Marvin’s more lyrical take on Thomas Newman’s eclectic style is another case of good casting by the producers. Although there is less underscore in this show than in most other television dramas, the licensed music fulfilling many of its traditional roles, it is still called upon for the most specific and important emotional moments.

The three cues that Marvin used to audition for the job worked so well that they remained in the pilot and are used as the music for the DVD menus.

One of these, during Nate’s nostalgic dream of his family in younger days (‘Pilot’, 1:1), shows the prescience to foreshadow the theme’s string/vocal ethereal note. A high, muted guitar tremolo note adds a pointillistic cloud not unlike the high pizzicato strings in the theme. The lack of diegetic sound and the incongruent tempo tell us that we should perceive this from someone else’s perspective. When the B flat chord (bVI) shows up
sans
third, it feels all of a sudden warm; only a promise, though, as the harmony moves to the C chord (bVII), but always thwarted by melodic appoggiaturas or harmonic suspensions. In the end it just barely fizzles back to the tonic D as we see Nate awaken.

A minute later we are presented with another non-committal, if a hair more sprightly, Celtic whisper as Nate satisfies Ruth’s desire that he stay. But the more prominent thirds and final resolution over Nate’s running provide just enough colour to tell us this is good. Both of these cues show a careful and sophisticated knowledge of the emotional/musical language.

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I interviewed Richard Marvin in July 2004 at his studio in Studio City, California.

PK: So, how did you come to be scoring
Six Feet Under
?

RM: My former agent, Seth Kaplan, told me about it and submitted a tape, and then we got a call back. There were four finalists and they asked if I would be interested in doing three scenes as a demo. I said, ‘Sure.’ I did that and it got down to two of us, and then we had an interview with Alan Poul and Alan Ball. I hit it off with the Alans, and they liked my music.

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PK: Had they given you the theme, or any instructions?

RM: No, the theme hadn’t been done yet. They gave me three scenes from the pilot. No instructions. I knew Alan Ball was from
American Beauty
so I had an idea that the direction would be minimal, ambient and piano-based.

PK: How long later did you start, considering the theme wasn’t done yet?

RM: It might have been a couple of months. The first episode was really easy as they just used my demos in the show. They liked them so much they put them into the ‘temp’ [a temp track is a music track that is put in just for viewing when editing]. To be replaced with the final music. And then there were just a couple of extra ones.

PK: When did Thomas Golubic and Gary Calamar come into the picture?

RM: They were already there, and we had a lot of interaction at that time because it was a low-budget show for HBO, so we made a deal for me to do the music editing as well as the composing, which was a complete disaster. They have a very unique [sic]

way of working. They give many, many, many choices for each selection, and each choice has to be cut up so that certain parts of the song land a certain way. So that was my job to do, and I lasted only seven episodes.

PK: It seems in the first season there was more an attempt to have the songs comment on the drama.

RM: I think that has kinda gone away in subsequent seasons. They still cut it very carefully; even on source you barely are going to hear.

PK: So, spotting; where does it start with each show?

RM: Now, Gary and Thomas have a session with the Alans. First because it takes longer for them to clear stuff. And then we have a spotting session with sound and score later – a week and a half in front of the dub.

PK: Do they make you score everything and then just make you one of the choices?

RM: No. Alan Ball, who is totally in charge of where the music goes, he oversees everything. He has got a really incredible knowledge of bands and music. Fortunately for me, he and I sort of relate to music in the same way.

PK: You don’t seem to get asked too much to score the traditional places, like transitions?

RM: I don’t think he knows what one is. He likes the show to be a little shocking. Not shocking, but when you go from one scene 204

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to the next he wants you to notice it. He doesn’t want to smooth out the show like other TV guys. And, also, he has such great performance that he’s not trying to fix something.