The music of horror
What does a vampire sound like? According to Philip Glass, the undead’s aural analogue is a quivering nest of minor arpeggios, pizzicati and dramatic swoops. Glass has written a new score for one of the mothers of all horror movies, Tod Browning’s 1931 version of Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi. Glass is a name in his own right, of course, but in this, he is only the latest in a long line of film composers who have experimented with the music of fear.
Music is especially important in films that are meant to scare us because the soundtrack can slip past the intellect’s guard and act directly on the reptilian brain. Music as a powerful mood-inducer, of course, is an idea that has been around ever since early man started stretching animal skins over wooden bowls and getting off his face on qhat, and in Plato’s Republic, Socrates and Glaucon earnestly discuss the possibly chaotic mental influence of certain musical scales.
Think “scary music” and you might at first imagine big, meaty soundscapes. Spidery low strings, pumping horns, banging orchestral drums and Orffish choirs. But intriguingly, Glass’s score is written for string quartet. Thanks to some studio overdubs, it can build into thrillingly rich, multilayered panic (which in next month’s live performances with the Kronos Quartet will need the addition of Glass himself at the piano), yet most of the time it is eerily intimate, more sinister than directly shocking. Its oozing sonorities blend beautifully with Lugosi’s chocolatey Hungarian accent, and the mood builds in long lines, a pulsing engine of doom. Continued →