37: Spartacus
Joel & Ethan Coen have a kind of stable of regulars they like to work with on their films. They of course have a regular stable of actors who pop up in many of their films, such as Frances McDormand, John Goodman, and Steve Buscemi. In addition many of their behind the scenes collaborators remain consistent. Until he decided to branch out and direct his own features, cinematographer Barry Levinson was a regular feature behind the camera. The very next cinematographer they worked with, Roger Deakins, has worked on every film of theirs since except Burn After Reading, Inside Llewyn Davis, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Storyboard artist J. Todd Anderson storyboarded every film of theirs from Raising Arizona (1988) until No Country For Old Men (2007). The most steadfast collaborator however has been composer Carter Burwell, whose first composition gig was the music for the Coens debut, Blood Simple, and has provided music for literally every one of their films since with the exception of O Brother Where Art Thou and Inside Llewyn Davis which were notably soundtracked with original recordings of bluegrass and folk revival songs respectively. Even The Big Lebowski, a film known for its 1960s burnout soundtrack of The First Edition, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Bob Dylan had a couple Carter Burwell original pieces put in when the Coens needed a swinging jazzy piece suggesting Raymond Chandler novels to introduce the private dick Da Fino, and an electro composition to stand in for music by Nihilist Uli Kunkel / Karl Hungus’s band Autobahn.
While Burwell is perfectly capable of writing a standalone melody for a film, his greatest skill is in recontextualizing existing melodic figures that evoke a specific mood and arranging them and pacing them to work specifically within the framework of scoring a film. For example with the Raising Arizona soundtrack, he took a few figures from Pete Seeger’s Goofing Off Suite (very notably the portion entitled “Stravinsky, Igor: Russian Folk Themes and Yodel” as well as Seeger’s interpretation of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony) and drew it out or compressed it or whatever was needed to fit the scene in question. Similarly, the majority of the score for True Grit (2010) comes from interpretations of the melody of the 1887 hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms”. Both instances of borrowing melodies from existing works are informed by the context of the films in which they appear. Seeger’s Goofing Off Suite consists of his banjo and voice alone (mostly just his banjo) and consists of Seeger quickly moving through small melodic fragments of half-remembered songs, what a musician does while playing for the fun of it while goofing off. It’s the kind of music the laid back “Hi” McDunnough would make while sitting on his lawn chair outside his trailer if he knew how to play the banjo. Similarly so the stern and deeply religious character of True Grit’s protagonist Maddie Ross is perfectly encapsulated by Burwell’s plain and plaintive piano rendition of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms”. “Joel and Ethan are very specific about location, period, the way people speak and dress, and I want the music to be specific in the same way” Burwell said of the way he works with the Coens. Therefore when scoring a movie about big business whose plot revolves around a scheme to manipulate stock prices, Burwell naturally gravitated to… a ballet by a Soviet composer about an Ancient Roman slave revolt?
please dear God click “play” on this video so that you can hear the music as you read the rest of this essay so that it will make sense.
The majority of the music of The Hudsucker Proxy comes from the Aram Khachaturian ballet Spartacus, mostly from its third act adagio, commonly called the “Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia”. In Khachaturian’s highly fictionalized version of the Third Servile War, Spartacus was a Thracian king, captured by the Romans and impressed into slavery and separated from his wife Phrygia, who was made to be a harem concubine. In the third act, Spartacus frees Phrygia, and this adagio plays as they see each other for the first time again and share a dance as they are reunited. The piece is built to express a deep longing and a triumphant end to that very same longing. The same major melodic figure is played twice, first by a flute with a very soft and gentle accompaniment by strings, and second by the full string section with horn accents, backed up by the full orchestra. The adagio is performed almost exactly as written as the film opens. The transition between the opening soft flute melody and its stirring bombastic repetition happens as the Hudsucker Industries clock’s second hand passes over the “12”.
The first melody plays as Moses delivers his opening monologue and the big repetition plays as the opening credits roll, creating a sense of how big and bombastic the film itself will be. The melodic figure of the adagio repeats at several points through the film, mostly during points of interaction between Norville and Amy. A quiet violin solo version of the theme plays as Amy pulls her sad despondent waif act on Norville. The theme plays again on the balcony outside the Hudsucker Fancy Dress Gala, coming to a crescendo as Amy and Norville kiss for the first time. It plays as Norville is at his nadir, drunk and wearing half a coat at Anne’s 440 as Amy tries to console him, and finally as Norville realizes he’s redeemed, reading the angelic Waring Hudsucker’s blue letter, coming to a crescendo as he lands on the ground unscathed and runs into Amy’s arms. While Amy is a part of all but one of these moments, each of them represents more than just their love story. The adagio plays at moments of Norville’s redemption. Its expression of longing and release informs us as the audience at the beginning of the film that Norville will end up in a heap of trouble, but will ultimately be redeemed, and will not in fact “jelly up the sidewalk” as Moses suggests in his opening monologue. He’ll rescue the girl (even if it’s all an act). Its triumphant crescendo plays just before he unveils the Hula Hoop, and it plays again just before he unveils the Frisbee. The adagio represents that Norville is a swell guy, and maybe not a moron after all.
Two other pieces by Aram Khachaturian appear in Hudsucker, both in the same scene. The beginning of the Hula Hoop’s development montage is scored by a theme taken from a different part of Khachaturian’s Spartacus, the “Etruscan Dance” from act 1, a highly lively piece that underscores the hustle and bustle of Hudsucker Industries as it prepares to launch its new product.
Etruscan Dance: music to extrude plastic dinguses to
The theme from the Etruscan Dance fades away however at the pivotal moment of truth when the product goes onto the market, fading into a more tense dance from Spartacus as the hoop fails to sell. Once finally one child does in fact pick up the hoop and starts to play with it, sparking the Hula Hoop fad and its monumental sales, Burwell takes the orchestration to Khachaturian’s best known work, the “Sabre Dance” from the ballet Gayane. Sabre Dance is an incredibly upbeat number, full of pounding timpanis and tight fast interplays between the strings and the horns, and is a highly well known feature among pops orchestras of the current era and in the realm of film and television. Trust me, you know this song.
Sabre Dance, as its name would suggest, was originally a dance in Khachaturian’s ballet Gayane in which dancers performed a lively dance with sabres. It has since however become a bit of shorthand for incredibly lively and sometimes overwhelming activity. It plays as Whoopi Goldberg’s dress is fed into a paper shredder in Jumpin’ Jack Flash and as a toddler wreaks havoc on a living room in Hocus Pocus. It no doubt highly inspired the highly frenetic compositions used in Danny Elfman’s score for Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, to the point where pops orchestra covers of the dance erroneously credit the song to “Sabre Dance (From Pee Wee’s Big Adventure)” despite it never actually appearing in the film.
A potentially simple explanation for why Carter Burwell opted to use Khachaturian’s compositions as the basis for Hudsucker’s score would be the fact that “Sabre Dance” suggests frantic activity, and therefore was a perfect piece of music for the frantic hordes of children swarming the toy stores to purchase Hula Hoops and then working backwards from there as an explanation of why a Soviet composer would so prominently feature in a film about capitalism. I suspect however that this is not the case; that Khachaturian was explicitly chosen to represent the mid-20th century as a direct result of him being a composer who lived and worked in the Soviet Union.
Much ink has been spilled on the influence of the Stalinist regime of 1924–1953’s influence on freedom of expression in the Soviet Union. Stalin famously refused to accept criticism of any kind of not merely the Soviet Union and its ideology of Marxist-Leninist Communism but also of his own person or any of his specific policies, to the point where former allies that Stalin had disagreements with were not merely sent to the gulags but were written out of history, their names being struck from records and their images airbrushed out of photos. This of course extended to the arts, with Stalin not merely censoring and punishing those who would create art that explicitly or implicitly criticized the regime, but also art that he personally found objectionable aesthetically. Stalin considered abstraction in art to be bourgeois and thus forbidden, and as a result a sharp contrast in official state propaganda can be seen from the Lenin period into the Stalin period as abstraction gave way to direct representationalism.
A 1919 Soviet propaganda poster: Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge
A 1941 Soviet Propaganda poster: The Motherland Is Calling
This aesthetic judgement of what was pro or anti worker extended into orchestral music. The early to mid 20th century was a tumultuous period for European and American music to say the least. Composers who were interested in pursuing novel sounds found themselves hewn in by expressions of music that had developed over the last thousand years of composition in the European tradition, and were branching out into compositional territories that had previously been thought of as overly dissonant and unpleasant sounding. Between composers like Stravinsky and Bartok abandoning traditional symphonic structures and adherence to consonance, and composers like Webern and Schoenberg completely abandoning the 8 tone scale, composed and orchestral music was drastically changing. The words people use when describing these compositions are commonly things like “interesting” and “difficult” and occasionally “unlistenable garbage”. Certainly not the kind of thing one might throw on at a party for some pleasing background noise. While rigorously structured, these compositions are the auditory equivalent of art by Rothko and Pollock, seemingly chaotic or nonsensical. Composers of this ilk in the Soviet Union were denounced as “formalist” in that they were accused of composing music for their own amusement and bourgeois intellectual titillation rather than creating music that a human being might actually like to listen to. Composers who thrived under Stalin were those who composed music with coherent easily hummable melodies, compositions with standard movements and motifs that were full of traditional consonance, be it because this was their genuinely preferred style of composition or be it because they recognized it as a political necessity. Composers who did not adhere to this either left the Soviet Union (such as Stravinsky and Prokofiev) or faced political consequences for their work (such as Shostakovich). In terms of musical theory, Khachaturian had much more in common with the Romantic composers of the late 19th century. Just as Johannes Brahms had based his compositions rooted in European Classical theory on traditional Jewish Klezmer dances, so too did Khachaturian base much of his compositions on traditional Armenian folk songs from his upbringing. While he was briefly accused of Formalism*, Khachaturian spent most of his career in the party’s good graces, very probably because his standard style of composition is exactly the kind of music that was popular in Stalin’s youth. Who among us over the age of 30 wouldn’t wish that popular music’s style weren’t frozen in time from when we first fell in love with it? If you’re Joseph Stalin, you get to base not just the aesthetic judgements but legal status of music based around how much it adheres to those exact standards. Khachaturian’s instrumentation however places him firmly in the 20th century, as composers began to rely less on string sections to do the heavy lifting in orchestras, bringing in more brass and percussion, making the music bigger, more bombastic, and more rhythmic, possibly as a response to the rise of amplified sound in popular music, as orchestral composers wished to display that nothing could beat the excitement of live unaltered sound.
So then you are Carter Burwell, finding inspiration for your score for a film about the mid 20th century and its important people who dress smart and talk fast. You can’t use Jazz, as Jazz was too avant-garde and too hip for the important suit-wearers of the Hudsucker board. Sidney Mussburger would sooner smoke a Dominican Cigar and drink American wine before he’d listen to Jazz on purpose. Besides, the film is a pastiche and spoof of the studio films of the 30s and 40s that were all scored with orchestral music, so orchestral music is the key, but taking inspiration from contemporary western composers just leads to too many weird directions. Norville Barnes can’t have his antics scored to Webern or Schoenburg. Suddenly though you remember the high energy compositions of Aram Khachaturian, and how well they’d line up with the manic pace of this screwball comedy. Suddenly the most obvious choice for a composition that would work in your comedy about big business is a communist composer, and after all, who can make fun of business like a communist?
* It’s highly likely that Khachaturian selecting the slave revolt of Spartacus as the subject of his third ballet after being accused of Formalism was a direct response to the accusation, as his revolt had become a kind of symbol among Marxist-Leninist thinkers of the early 20th century as a kind of proto-communist uprising (despite Spartacus having displayed no inclination in his lifetime of ending the practice of slavery in the Roman Empire). Spartacus did after all have nothing to lose but his chains. Khachaturian could therefore point to his composing Spartacus as a point in favor of how pro-revolution he was.