How the West Was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford (review)

Thomas Bauman

Notes, Volume 66, Number 2, December 2009, pp. 278-279 (Article)

Published by Music Library Association DOI: 10.1353/not.0.0236

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/not/summary/v066/66.2.bauman.html

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MUSIC IN CULTURE

Notes, December 2009

How the West Was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford. By Kathryh Kalinak. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. [x, 256 p. ISBN 9780520252332 (hardcover), $60; ISBN 9780520252349 (paperback), $24.95.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliography, index.
Students of music and lm already owe a debt to Kathryn Kalinak, and this volume signicantly deepens that debt. Based on painstaking archival research and guided by a clearly dened thesis, it offers a model for serious work in an arena still in its intellectual adolescence and with more than its share of quirky, unfocused, and selfindulgent studies. Its many virtues notwithstanding, Kalinaks rst book, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), had itself come in for its share of criticism for the deciencies of its technical discussions of music. Happily, How the West Was Sung sidesteps this difculty thanks to its central argumentthat in the Westerns of John Ford it is folk song, hymnody, and period music more than their newly composed scores that contribute to narrative trajectory, character development, and thematic exposition (p. 2). More than a few studies of Fords cinematic oeuvre, along with hundred of other books on lm, scarcely mention music at all. Here Kalinak restores it to its rightful place as a core narrative element and does so by focusing on a director whose ideas about music in his lms plays directly to her strength, to song as both a narrative device and a bearer of cultural meaning. The subtitle of the volume would seem to raise a problem in extending auteur theory to music in cinematic studies. Should a study of lm music really pay more attention to the director than the composer? (The title of Jack Sullivans Hitchcocks Music [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006] offers an unambiguous yes.) Certainly there is a consistency to what Ford wanted, as distinguished from what he got, in all his lms. His concern for music rivals his concern for dialogue, and not just in ensuring that each remain subordinate to the image. After the introduction and an initial chapter on the role of music in the life and lms of Ford, Kalinak organizes her monograph entirely by lms, taken either individually or in groups. In some cases the grouping pays dividends (as with her ne analysis of the Irishness of the cavalry trilogy), but not in others (she herself acknowledges that My Darling Clementine and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance make for an odd pairing [p. 76]). Chapters on single lms mark both the boundaries of Fords engagement with the Western in the sound eraStagecoach (1939) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964)and its zenith in The Searchers (1956), a revision of her contribution to The Searchers: Essays and Reections on John Fords Classic Western, ed. Arthur M. Eckstein and Peter Lehman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004; see pp. 10943). Within this taxonomy, several recurring themes lend consistency and coherence to the books narrative, especially Fords attitudes toward race and ethnicity, composers and arrangers, and the studio system. That no clear picture emerges of how Ford related to the composers assigned to his lms (most notably Richard Hageman, Max Steiner, Cyril Mockridge, Victor Young, and Alex North) scarcely counts as a demerit. A wealth of new archival evidence illuminates this issue about as well as one could hope or expect. Equally painstaking is the research devoted to individual songs. Kalinak artfully weaves the history and pedigree of nearly every tune incorporated into Fords Westerns (and some tunes that were considered but not included) with their social and cultural meanings both for Ford and his audiences. On occasion, it is true, her effort to mine this rich vein for interpretative nuggets seems overdone. For example, by 1956 American audiences could have retained scarcely an inkling of the minstrel origins of The Yellow Rose of Texas, much less have responded to more than its vague association with the Confederacy in grappling with the complex personality of Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. The general problem resides in Kalinaks urge to extend the attention to authenticity that lmmakers lavish on visual elements to

Book Reviews
its music. A survey of the profusion of goofs listed on the Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com [accessed 19 August 2009]), with their delight in anachronisms involving uniforms, rearms, haberdashery, and the like, will yield scarcely a single music item comparable to, say, the case of 10,000 Cattle Gone Astray sung by Chihuahua in My Darling Clementine. According to the lms press book, Ford was so concerned about musical authenticity that at his behest Twentieth Century-Fox dispatched researchers to Arizona to interview residents of Tombstone and Tucson about authentic tunes for the lm, and that 10,000 Cattle was among the yield. Interesting, because it wasnt written until 1904, muses Kalinak, but perhaps those old-timers in Tombstone remembered Chihuahua singing it (p. 79), which strikes a reader as a bit of a stretch, since presumably the press book research preceded release of the lm. The important thing, it seems, is that music doesnt have to be period music to sound like period music. The issue is made more complex by the role music plays within and without a lms diegesis. Claudia Gorbmans terminology for this distinction has become well-nigh standard among scholars of lm music: diegetic for music that (apparently) issues from a source within the narrative and nondiegetic for any music lacking such a narrative source (Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987], 223). The distinction oversimplies a relationship that Gorbman herself acknowledges is inherently ambiguous. As with the example of 10,000 Cattle, music enters the time of a lm (both the time of the story and the time of its telling) in a way different from image, sound, and dialogue. Music being tenseless, no one cares whether Rick Blaine hears the strains of the orchestra that Steiner slips beneath Sams piano as the music migrates from diegesis to narrative in Casablanca, but we distinguish clearly and for good reason between the youthful protagonist and the older narrator in To Kill a Mockingbird or Angelas Ashes, even though they are the same person. As her thesis demands, Kalinak is sensitive to the subtleties of deploying Gorbmans terminology. Especially commendable is her analysis of the musical differences between the pre-release and re-

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lease versions of Clementine. The rst reel, she notes, is identical, and includes nondiegetic cues different from the rest of the lm in its pre-release version, notably The Prairie and Elegy, both composed not by the lms credited composer, Cyril Mockridge, but by David Bottolph. Kalinak surmises, persuasively in my view, that these were added at the behest of Darryl Zanuck and stand out from the rest of the score as un-Fordian. Why is this? Not because they are nondiegetic, but because they disturb both the otherwise pervasive period avor in the lm and, Kalinak argues, how Ford throughout his career believed the West ought to be sung. Serious students of music and lm, either singly or together, will want to read and study this impressive book carefully not only for the skill with which it illuminates its immediate subject, but also for the example it sets in applying close cultural analysis and thoroughgoing archival research to musics singular role in lms and lmmaking. Thomas Bauman Northwestern University

Social Dancing in Peter the Greats Russia. By Elizabeth Clara Sander. (Terpsichore, Band 6.) Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2007. [xi, 143 p. ISBN 9783487134253. i 29.80.] Appendices, bibliography.
I consider a country-dance as an emblem of marriage. Fidelity and complaisance are the principal duties of both . . . [says Mr. Henry Tilney to his dance partner, Catherine Morland]. But they are such very different things! [replies Catherine] . . . . People that marry can never part, but must go and keep house together. People that dance, only stand opposite each other in a long room for half an hour. And such is your denition of matrimony and dancing. ( Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey) Social dance is always more about society than about dance, as Jane Austen (and her readers) well knew. Elizabeth Sander, in her Social Dancing in Peter the Greats Russia, points to the same essential element of dance in society, noting that although the social meaning of dancing in Russia was in some respects quite different from that in