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Identifying and Interpreting
Incongruent Film Music
David Ireland

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN AUDIO-VISUAL CULTURE

SERIES EDITOR: K. J. DONNELLY
Palgrave Studies in Audio-Visual Culture

Series Editor
K. J. Donnelly
School of Humanities
University of Southampton
Southampton, UK
The aesthetic union of sound and image has become a cultural domi-
nant. A junction for aesthetics, technology and theorisation, film’s rela-
tionship with music remains the crucial nexus point of two of the most
popular arts and richest cultural industries. Arguably, the most interest-
ing area of culture is the interface of audio and video aspects, and that
film is the flagship cultural industry remains the fount and crucible of
both industrial developments and critical ideas. Palgrave Studies in
Audio-Visual Culture has an agenda-setting aspiration. By acknowledg-
ing that radical technological changes allow for rethinking existing rela-
tionships, as well as existing histories and the efficacy of conventional
theories, it provides a platform for innovative scholarship pertaining to
the audio-visual. While film is the keystone of the audio visual contin-
uum, the series aims to address blind spots such as video game sound,
soundscapes and sound ecology, sound psychology, art installations,
sound art, mobile telephony and stealth remote viewing cultures.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14647
 David Ireland

Identifying
and Interpreting
Incongruent
Film Music
David Ireland
School of Music
University of Leeds
Leeds, UK

Palgrave Studies in Audio-Visual Culture

ISBN 978-3-030-00505-4 ISBN 978-3-030-00506-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00506-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958591

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

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 Acknowledgements

The research presented in this book is the result of a project that began
with my doctoral thesis, which was completed in 2012. As such, there
are a number of people to whom significant thanks are due for their help
and support at various stages during this process. My doctoral research,
elements of which are updated and reworked in this text, was initially
funded by a University of Leeds Research Scholarship, and supervised
by David Cooper and Luke Windsor. I am grateful: to David and Luke
for their continued critical insight, enthusiasm, and encouragement; to
David for his assistance in proofreading early drafts of a number of sec-
tions of this book, which has undoubtedly sharpened the following chap-
ters; and to Luke for his ongoing collaboration on empirical elements
of my research into (in)congruence, which have continued to shape my
understanding of this multifaceted concept.
Particular thanks are due to all of the participants who have given
their time and opinions in the various strands of empirical work con-
ducted as part of this project. I am grateful to focus group participants
from the original tranche of research in 2010 and those who have par-
ticipated in the various rounds of survey research, including the most
recent iteration, whose responses are reported in Chapters 5–8. Their
perspectives have provided invaluable insight to complement the analy-
ses reported in the second section of this book. Thanks are also due to
my colleague Emily Payne for her generous assistance in this most recent
round of data collection.

v
vi    Acknowledgements

The School of Music at the University of Leeds granted me research

leave to complete drafting this book, which has been invaluable. I am
thankful to various colleagues for their support and advice during this
writing process, particularly Laura Anderson, Marian Jago, and Ian
Sapiro. I am also fortunate to have been able to attend several confer-
ences to present draft versions of some of this material over the years
and thank fellow delegates for their engagement with my work and their
stimulating questions and conversations.
The team at Palgrave Macmillan have been incredibly helpful as this
book has come together. Thanks are especially due to Lina Aboujieb,
Ellie Freedman, and Karina Jákupsdóttir for their patience and profes-
sionalism. I am also grateful to Kevin Donnelly, not only for his advice
in the capacity of series editor, but also for his continued enthusiasm and
support of my work.
Finally, I would like to express sincere thanks to the friends and family
who have been a continued source of support: to the friends who have
given me knowing looks whilst watching films as the music has done
something interesting, and who first introduced me to some of the case
studies featured herein; and to my ever patient and encouraging family
for their unwavering support.
 Praise for Identifying and Interpreting
Incongruent Film Music

“David Ireland’s book is ‘cutting edge’ scholarship in the best sense of

the term. It takes a deceptively simple question—what is incongruent
film music?—and examines it from varied disciplinary perspectives using
an impressive range of analytical tools. With its ambitious synthesis of
film theory, empirical research, and close reading, Ireland’s approach not
only displays methodological sophistication, but also offers a pathbreak-
ing model for future humanistic inquiry. I recommend it highly!”
—Jeff Smith, Professor of Film, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

“David Ireland’s book takes the reader on an engaging and enlightening

exploration of the concept of congruence, a term that permeates theoret-
ical and empirical discussions of film music, but has rarely been critically
examined. Ireland approaches the topic with astonishing breadth—bridg-
ing film music studies and music psychology with the meticulous schol-
arship and clarity that will appeal to readers across multiple disciplines.
This book should have a far-reaching influence on the study of film
music.”
—Siu-Lan Tan, James A. B. Stone Professor of Psychology,
Kalamazoo College, USA

vii
viii    PRAISE FOR IDENTIFYING AND INTERPRETING INCONGRUENT FILM MUSIC

“David Ireland has tackled a difficult problem in film-music studies by

carefully collating and coordinating a variety of approaches that have
often themselves been considered ‘incongruent’ in the past. The result is
not only a great success but also has broader implications for film-music
analysis and interpretation.”
—David Neumeyer, Professor Emeritus of Music Theory,
The University of Texas at Austin, USA
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

Part I Identifying Incongruence

2 Interrogating (In)congruence: The Incongruent

Perspective 29

3 Identifying (In)congruence 67

Part II Interpreting Incongruence

4 Introduction to Part II 107

5 Intradomain Incongruence in the Opening Battle

Sequence from Gladiator 113

6 Mozart, Harmonicas, and Aesthetic Incongruence

in The Shawshank Redemption 141

7 Jazz, Kazoos, and Conceptual Incongruence

in The Informant! 167

ix
x    Contents

8 Duran Duran and Semantic Incongruence in L4yer Cake 195

9 Conclusions 221

Filmography 237

Index 239
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Cohen’s Congruence-Association model—iteration 4

(Reproduced from Cohen, A. J. [2013], figure 2.7, p. 39.
By permission of Oxford University Press) 32
Fig. 2.2 Cook’s model of multimedia (Reproduced from Cook, N.
[1998], figure 3.1, p. 99. By permission of Oxford
University Press) 53
Fig. 5.1 The main section of the opening battle (Gladiator, Scott,
2000) 122
Fig. 5.2 The closing section of the opening battle (Gladiator, Scott,
2000) 123
Fig. 5.3 Thematic connections from ‘The Battle’ (My arrangement
from Gladiator, Scott, 2000) 127
Fig. 5.4 Still from film extract 1 (Gladiator, Scott, 2000) 130
Fig. 5.5 Still from film extract 2 (Gladiator, Scott, 2000) 131
Fig. 5.6 Participant responses to extracts from the battle sequence 132
Fig. 6.1 Still from film extract 1 (The Shawshank Redemption,
Darabont, 1994) 154
Fig. 6.2 Still from film extract 2 (The Shawshank Redemption,
Darabont, 1994) 155
Fig. 6.3 Participant responses to extracts from the opera sequence 157
Fig. 7.1 The opening titles (The Informant!, Soderbergh, 2009) 172
Fig. 7.2 Melodic material from ‘Meet Mark’ (My transcription from
The Informant!, Soderbergh, 2009) 175
Fig. 7.3 Melodic material from ‘The Raid’ (My transcription from
The Informant!, Soderbergh, 2009) 179
Fig. 7.4 Still from film extract 2 (The Informant!, Soderbergh, 2009) 184

xi
xii    List of Figures

Fig. 7.5 Still from film extract 3 (The Informant!, Soderbergh, 2009) 184
Fig. 7.6 Participant responses to extracts from the opening title
sequence 185
Fig. 7.7 Participant responses to extracts from ‘The Raid’ 187
Fig. 7.8 Participant responses to extracts from ‘Meet Mark’ 188
Fig. 8.1 The climax of the café sequence (L4yer Cake, Vaughn, 2004) 203
Fig. 8.2 Still from film extract 1 (L4yer Cake, Vaughn, 2004) 211
Fig. 8.3 Still from film extract 2 (L4yer Cake, Vaughn, 2004) 212
Fig. 8.4 Participant responses to extracts from the café sequence 213
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Introducing Incongruence
The opening case study of Kathryn Kalinak’s (2010) introductory over-
view to the functions and history of film music is an intriguing choice of
example. The sequence in question is the now infamous moment from
Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992, USA) in which the gangster
Mr Blonde (Michael Madsen) tortures Marvin Nash (Kirk Baltz), a cop
that he has captured. In the brutal sequence Blonde douses Nash in pet-
rol and amputates his ear. However, whilst doing so, Blonde turns up the
volume on a nearby radio and sings and dances along to the song that
is playing—Stealers Wheel’s upbeat and bouncy ‘Stuck in the Middle
with You’. Kalinak’s analysis demonstrates how this music achieves sev-
eral functional and emotional purposes in the sequence: it helps to shape
mood, provides information about the characters, supports and furthers
the narrative, and smooths over the transitions between different camera
shots. As such, the song plays a key role in providing information that
influences how a perceiver might construct and interpret meaning in the
sequence, and may impact their emotional response to the filmic events.1

1 Given the psychological focus of this book, following Kassabian (2001), I use the term

‘perceiver’ to refer to members of the audience engaging with a film. The term negates
over-emphasising processes of ‘viewing’ a film and any associated connotations of visual
bias, which are misleading given my focus on film sound and music.

© The Author(s) 2018 1

D. Ireland, Identifying and Interpreting Incongruent
Film Music, Palgrave Studies in Audio-Visual Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00506-1_1
2 D. IRELAND

However, the relationship between this cheery music and the bru-
tal imagery and narrative content is complex. As a result it has received
analytical attention from a number of scholars in addition to Kalinak
(including Coulthard, 2009; Ireland, 2012; Link, 2004; Powrie, 2005).
The violent action, some of which takes place off-screen (arguably add-
ing to its disturbing nature), and the response that this garnered at early
screenings (which included audience members walking out of the cin-
ema) have given the sequence a certain notoriety and status in filmic
history. Such qualities make it a noteworthy and familiar choice of intro-
ductory example for Kalinak, aside from its value in effectively demon-
strating a number of pedagogical points about the role of music in film.
Another reason that this sequence provides such an interesting talk-
ing point is that it challenges a number of traditional assumptions about
narrative film music. Historically a dominant perspective in film aesthet-
ics has been that music should function as an unobtrusive accompani-
ment for the concurrent images and narrative content.2 According to this
view, to quote the title of Claudia Gorbman’s (1987) seminal text, film
music should remain ‘unheard’ in order to not distract from the events
of the story. Focusing on classical orchestral scores produced under the
Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and 1940s, Gorbman demon-
strates how composers created ‘inaudible’ qualities by using methods
that included: dipping the volume of the music under dialogue; avoid-
ing instruments with a similar range and timbre to the human voice in
such moments; ensuring that musical length and form was determined by
the narrative form of a scene; and by seeking to convey a musical mood
that was appropriate to the action that was being depicted. Whilst this
reflects the prevailing paradigm of music composition for early sound film,
Gorbman’s (2016) more recent writing has explored a change in aesthet-
ics and addresses the idea of ‘heard’ music and the applicability of her ear-
lier work to contemporary post-classical cinema. However, aspects of the
earlier perspective continue to influence current practice and discourse
about the character and functions of film music. Indeed, the concomitant

2 In this book the label ‘accompaniment’ is used to describe music that is presented con-

currently with filmic images and narrative content. My use of this label does not imply any
allegiance with the idea that film music is in some way subservient to a film’s images or narra-
tive content either perceptually or aesthetically. Conversely, the active role that music can play
in the construction of filmic meaning and in influencing audience response is a central tenet
of this book.
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

‘classical model of the narrative feature film is understood by most to hold

sway into the present, despite the many changes over the years in produc-
tion structures, directorial priorities, exhibition venues, and textual (com-
modity) form’ (Neumeyer, 2014, p. 3).
A notable moment from an independent film produced over half
a century later than the studio era films of classical Hollywood, the
Reservoir Dogs ear-torture sequence does not conform to descrip-
tions of inaudible film music. Placed within the film’s diegesis (or tem-
poral and spatial narrative storyworld) the characters hear and interact
with the Stealers Wheel song, as reflected by Mr Blonde’s singing and
dancing along to it. These actions serve to draw further attention to
the music’s presence and its problematic relationship with the violent
narrative content. Moreover, the mood of the lively song does not on
a surface-level appear to correspond, match, or fit with the seriousness
and cruelty of the torture being depicted. This use of music has been
described as: ‘inappropriate’ (Cooke, 2008, p. 485); creating ‘an emo-
tional non sequitur’ with the brutal depiction of violence (Link, 2004,
p. 10); and reflecting a ‘principle of radical incongruity’ with the images
and narrative action (Romney & Wootton, 1995, p. 5). Like Kalinak, for
film theorists Steven Willemsen and Miklós Kiss (2015) the sequence
also provides a quintessential opening example, this time for a chapter
exploring incongruent film music, which they define as ‘a musical track
in narrative film, either diegetic or non-diegetic, which expresses qualities
that stand in sharp contrast to the emotions evoked by the events seen’
(pp. 103–104). These references to incongruity resonate with everyday
uses of the word, which imply a state of ‘disagreement in character or
qualities; want of accordance or harmony; discrepancy, [or] inconsist-
ency’ according to the Oxford English Dictionary Online (http://www.
oed.com).
The terms ‘congruence’ and ‘incongruence’ are also used throughout
a body of studies that investigate the psychological impact of music in
film and multimedia. In this context, these labels too tend to refer to a
relationship of perceived similarity, fit, and/or appropriateness between
images and music, echoing the qualities outlined in the OED definition
of incongruence. Congruence is a central concept in seminal theoreti-
cal models in this field, notably Annabel Cohen’s (2013) Congruence-
Association Model. Evolving from early experimental work (Marshall
& Cohen, 1988), the model outlines the stages involved in the percep-
tion of multimedia stimuli and offers explanations of how music can
4 D. IRELAND

influence the interpretation of filmic meaning and an audience member’s

emotional response.3 Despite the centrality of congruence to this body
of research, less sustained focus has been placed on the related idea of
incongruence or music that does not seem to share properties with filmic
images or narrative content.
However, incongruent film music has the potential to be highly salient
and memorable (Boltz, 2004), as the Reservoir Dogs example illustrates.
These moments can challenge traditional ideas about how film music
functions and often draw attention to themselves due to the complex
relationships that the music creates with the concurrent filmic material.
Consequently, they are worthy of further study. As the film theorist Kay
Dickinson (2008) highlights, such music can ‘deliberately and successfully
stretch the paradigms of what can make sense; [being…] purposefully
exploited for its transformative potential’ (p. 14). Given such qualities
the use of seemingly incongruent film music has become widespread
(Ireland, 2017), as is evident by the whole section dedicated to the syn-
onymous concept of ‘soundtrack dissonance’ on tvtropes.org, a website
that documents recurrent tropes across a range of multimedia (http://
tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SoundtrackDissonance). These
webpages illustrate that apparently misfitting or inappropriate music
­
from various genres has been used alongside multiple filmic depictions of
crime and violence. However, they also reflect that this is just one exam-
ple and that other forms of incongruent film music are prevalent and may
not rely on such extreme instances of audiovisual contrast. As a result of
this common usage, and given the various guises it can take, incongruent
film music may not always be as emotive, memorable, or successful as fre-
quently discussed moments like the Reservoir Dogs example. Dickinson’s
(2008) work, for example, analyses ‘numerous situations where music and
cinema misunderstand or embarrass each other’, resulting in commercial
or aesthetic failure (p. 14).
Matters of (mis)fit, (in)appropriateness, and (in)congruence are also
relevant to the process of composing or selecting pre-existing music
for use in film.4 Composer Hans Zimmer (2000) explains how after the

3 This
model and empirical study will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2.
4 The
brackets around the ‘in’ of (in)congruence and (in)appropriateness or the ‘mis’
of (mis)fit are used to indicate when either side of these dichotomies could be being
referred to—so (in)congruence here essentially equates to the phrase ‘congruence
and/or incongruence’. These brackets emphasise that such judgements are subjective,
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

initial difficulty of starting to write: ‘something happens … and I don’t

know how it happens, but suddenly something is there that’s appro-
priate for this film’ [01:59—my italics].5 He describes draft material
for Gladiator that was ‘nearly right, but … wasn’t quite’ [02:37], using
the analogy of the difference between a tailored suit and one purchased
from a department store which ‘looked alright but … didn’t quite fit’
[02:45—my italics]. In addition to emphasising the relevance of notions
akin to (in)congruence for a composer’s conceptualisation of their prac-
tice, Zimmer’s comments suggest a spectrum of rightness on which film
music might be judged.
David Chase, creator of The Sopranos—a TV series recognised for its
use of popular song as score6—uses similar language to describe the pro-
cess of selecting pre-existing music to use within episodes:

We have to try out a lot of different stuff. And some things are almost
there and then not quite right or … just […don’t] fit with the picture …
but you do know it when you see it. (The Music of The Sopranos, 2007,
[15:34])

These comments imply an intuitive understanding of a relationship of

perceived fit/appropriateness in which music is recognised as working
with or complementing a scene’s visual and narrative content. Describing
the similar task of choosing pre-existing songs for American Graffiti
(1973, USA) director George Lucas notes:

we could take almost any song and put it on almost any scene and it would
work. You’d put a song down on one scene, and you’d find all kinds of
parallels. And you could take another song and put it down there, and it
would still seem as if the song had been written for that scene. (As cited in
Smith, 2001, p. 410)

multidimensional, and that the boundaries between the two sides of these dichotomies are not
always clear. The brackets are not employed when either of the two states is being explicitly
referenced (such as in previous literature or when describing one specific side of the binary).
5 Timing references from DVDs are presented in the format [hh:mm:ss]. Timings from

soundtrack albums or special features on a film’s DVD release are presented in the format
[mm:ss] to distinguish them and to reflect their shorter duration.
6 See, for example, Annette Davison’s (2014) work on the show’s use of pre-existing

song in the end credits sequences.

6 D. IRELAND

Lucas’s anecdote illustrates that sometimes simply concurrent presenta-

tion of film and music may be sufficient to establish judgements of fit
and/or appropriateness, or to prompt a perceptual search for qualities
to understand their relationship. This idea chimes with Michel Chion’s
(1994) concept of synchresis, a psychological phenomenon whereby a
perceiver establishes a link between things that are seen and heard simul-
taneously: a ‘spontaneous and irresistible weld … independent … of any
rational logic’ (p. 63). Or as Chase puts it:

When you say ‘What will work? Why does this song work with that pic-
ture?’ You just really don’t know. There’s some kind of a, the two things
come together, and there’s this electric charge. (The Music of The
Sopranos, 2007, [02:06])

Despite this prevalent and intuitive attitude towards judgements of

audiovisual (in)congruence and the relevance of the concept to film pro-
ducers and audiences, very little research has presented a sustained the-
oretical focus on this topic beyond individual case studies. Equally, few
explicit definitions of incongruent film music have been offered at a
broad conceptual level, which can cause ambiguity. Willemsen and Kiss’s
(2015) chapter is a notable exception and specifically treats incongruent
film music as that which stands in clear emotional contrast to a film’s
images and narrative content. Indeed, when matters of incongruence
do receive greater focus, the concept tends to be associated with such
extreme examples of apparent audiovisual mismatch or cases where the
music provides a source of ironic commentary on the images and narra-
tive content.
Similarly, incongruent film music has sometimes merely been refer-
enced differentially as simply being ‘not congruent’. This quality can be
explained in empirical psychological studies by the fact that researchers
need to tightly control stimuli in order to make meaningful and system-
atic comparisons about the effects of certain musical or filmic parame-
ters on participants’ responses. Consequently, terms like congruence and
incongruence become operationalised (defined in the context of individ-
ual experiments) based on what the particular researchers are trying to
specifically measure. This situation can add subtle fluidity and distinction
to how the term is approached and has often resulted in congruence and
incongruence being presented as opposing either/or entities on bipolar
scales, as will be explored in greater detail in Chapter 2 below.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

Another challenge when trying to conceptualise (in)congruence is

the associated terms of (mis)fit and (in)appropriateness, which I have
used liberally throughout the preceding paragraphs. These labels carry
slightly different connotations and thus further complicate matters.
However, considering the everyday implications of these words can pro-
vide some insight to help navigate such terminological concerns. In
common parlance, the idea of appropriateness could be construed as car-
rying more subjective connotations of suitability when judging a relation-
ship. According to the OED, the word ‘fit’ carries similar connotations.
However, when treated as a verb it can be interpreted as a potentially
more objective judgement influenced by the properties of the component
items that are in relationship. To return to Zimmer’s analogy about the fit-
ted jacket, it is the physical tailored alterations that enable the clothing to
more closely fit the wearer. Indeed, definitions of ‘fitted’ in the OED ref-
erence properties like shape and size that enable something to be fitting,
which suggest a more tangible dimension on which to make such judge-
ments. In terms of film music, therefore, it might feel more instinctive to
discuss topics like synchronisation between accent patterns in the music
and movement on the screen in terms of fit. Equally, it may feel easier to
conceptualise the broader emotional profiles of the sound and images in
terms of appropriateness. Consequently, potentially very different crite-
ria can be applied to determine the extent to which a relationship is fit-
ting or appropriate, with the former arguably having the potential to be
a more clear-cut distinction to make. Yet, as will be highlighted through-
out this book, distinctions between (mis)fit, (in)appropriateness, and
(in)congruence are not always so easily discernible, nor are they mutually
exclusive.
Making these distinctions at the outset is beneficial because it reit-
erates the challenges of using bipolar labels to provide an overarching
description of what is in fact a multidimensional judgement. As the pre-
vious paragraphs suggest, judgements of (in)congruence in the film–
music relationship can occur on a range of structural, semantic, and
conceptual levels. These localised judgements in turn contribute to a
more holistic assessment of the overall nature of an audiovisual relation-
ship. To return to the presence of Stealers Wheel in Reservoir Dogs, the
song is far more than simply an auditory source of ironic commentary in
the ear-torture sequence. The music cannot easily be described as fitting
or misfitting, nor appropriate or inappropriate for the images and narra-
tive content. To return to Romney and Wootton’s (1995) description,
8 D. IRELAND

the sequence involves a ‘radical incongruity’ between sound and image

(p. 5). This type of evaluation has been described as the ‘received
notion’ of the sequence (Powrie, 2005, p. 100), and various forms of
incongruence have been identified within it: Willemsen and Kiss (2015)
emphasise the emotional contrast that the music provides; whilst Ireland
(2012) explores the aesthetic incongruities, or the way in which the ide-
ologies associated with the light and lively popular song challenge recep-
tion of the brutal violence.
However, whilst these interpretations focus on incongruities, within
a rich and multifaceted analysis Stan Link (2004) suggests that the
song is also ‘congruent’ with Mr Blonde’s character (p. 19). Blonde’s
engagement with the music serves to draw attention to his anti-social
tendencies. This point in Link’s assessment focuses on different ele-
ments of the scene to the descriptions cited above and emphasises the
perpetrator of the torture rather than his victim. Phil Powrie’s (2005)
analysis nuances the issue of describing this music as congruent or
­incongruent further still. Powrie argues that the audience may interpret
the sequence as either an example of ‘congruent incongruence’ or as an
example of ‘incongruous congruence’. The former label applies if the
audience can treat the episode as a moment of pure constructed cinema,
remain disaffected, and reconcile the differences between the violent
images and lively music. Conversely, the alternate reading of ‘incon-
gruous congruence’ applies if the audience struggle to reconcile these
­differences and interpret this as a moment of pure horror (p. 102).
This complex example highlights the interpretative act that is involved
when deciding to use the labels congruent and incongruent to holisti-
cally describe a film–music relationship. Categorising a film–music p
­ airing
in these terms can equally depend on inherently subjective responses that
are shaped by personal and cultural conceptions and expectations that
have been shaped by prior engagement with cinema and its music. Film
music can be judged as (in)congruent, (in)appropriate, or (mis)fitting
on multiple levels, some of which can be incredibly subtle or conceptual.
Consequently, music that is deemed as incongruent or lacking shared
qualities with filmic images and narrative content on some of these l­evels
may not be judged as incongruent overall, nor necessarily judged as
inappropriate.
Nicholas Cook’s (1998) influential Analysing Musical Multimedia
identifies a ‘terminological impoverishment’ in much film theory
that results from the ‘traditional categorisation of all music–picture
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

relationships as either parallel or contrapuntal’ (p. 107). These labels can

be compared to congruence and incongruence in that they also concep-
tualise the audiovisual relationship on the grounds of perceived similarity
and difference between music, images, and narrative action. However,
film theorists have applied these labels inconsistently over time (Heldt,
2016, pp. 105–106). Moreover, describing film music using either set of
labels ultimately creates an implied dichotomy which taken to its furthest
extremes could be inferred to suggest that such music either completely
corresponds with or totally contrasts with a film’s visual and narrative
content. In reality, of course, almost all film–music relationships will fall
somewhere between these two extremes.
This book addresses this more complex reality and explores the dom-
inant factors that can influence judgements about what constitutes (mis)
fitting, (in)appropriate, or (in)congruent film music. A (re)definition is
offered to provide a more holistic impression of incongruent film music.7
Developing descriptive language used by the psychologist Marilyn Boltz
(2004) who refers to a ‘lack of common stimulus properties between
music and film’ (p. 1202), in this book incongruence is defined as a lack
of shared properties in the audiovisual relationship. This choice of wording
limits the loaded implications that terms like fit or misfit, and appropriate
or inappropriate can connote. Equally, it facilitates consideration of the
various dimensions on which (in)congruence may be identified by not
specifying the levels on which the lack of shared properties might occur.
This enables consideration of localised moments of audiovisual difference
and their relationship to broader holistic judgements of (in)congruence.8
Equally, it facilitates the classification of other types of recurrent incon-
gruence in addition to the structural and semantic types of incongruence
that have been focused on in existing research: subsequently, in the fol-
lowing chapters, I will introduce the original ideas of aesthetic, concep-
tual, and intradomain incongruence.

7 This interpretation of incongruence can be conceptualised as both a definition given my

intention of further exploring and deconstructing the congruence/incongruence binary,

and given the absence of consistent explicit previous definitions across the relevant litera-
ture. However, it can also be considered a redefinition given its grounding in existing treat-
ments of the label. This dual status is reflected by the bracketing of the term (re)definition
throughout the text.
8 Drawing on Cook (1998), film-music difference here refers to the separate sensory

information provided by the audio and visual components of a film–music pairing.

10 D. IRELAND

The ability to conceptualise (in)congruence in this multidimensional

sense emphasises that overall judgements are subjective and offers fur-
ther nuance to explain how a perceiver has reached a given broad eval-
uation. Moreover, rooted in the terminological concepts of psychology
studies, this (re)definition facilitates consideration of the relationship
between the analytical and perceptual identification of (in)congruent
film music. As will be outlined in greater detail in Chapter 2, empiri-
cal research (e.g. Boltz, 2004) suggests that incongruent film music can
result in separate encoding and memory representations of the auditory
and visual information rather than the joint encoding that is facilitated
by congruent information. These perceptual implications can be used to
explore why certain examples of incongruent film music might attract
the perceiver’s attention and prove to be salient and memorable whilst
others might not.
The following chapters will reassess the relationship between congruence
and incongruence in the light of this (re)definition. Through the resultant
discussion, this book will achieve several nested aims, which are to:

• Position the (re)definition of incongruence as a lack of shared prop-

erties in the audiovisual relationship against existing research that
discusses (mis)fit, (in)appropriateness, and (in)congruity in the
film–music relationship (including literature on parallelism and
counterpoint).
• Examine how this (re)definition can better synthesise the concerns
of empirical studies investigating the psychological impact of film
music with theoretical research in film music studies.
• Examine how this (re)definition can account for the relation-
ship between holistic judgements of (in)congruence and localised
moments of difference in the audiovisual relationship.
• Identify the main recurrent types of incongruent film music, includ-
ing those that have not traditionally been labelled as such.
• Explore the potential perceptual impact of these various types of
incongruent music on the interpretation of filmic meaning through
inter- and multidisciplinary analysis.

Ultimately, through addressing these research aims, this book will

therefore further explore the factors that can lead to the identification
of incongruent film music and to consider the potential implications of
these incongruities for the interpretation of filmic meaning.
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

Investigating (In)congruence
To address these aims, and in response to the charge that inter- and multi-
disciplinary research is needed to further psychological study of the impact
of music in multimedia (Tan, Cohen, Lipscomb, & Kendall, 2013), this
book incorporates ideas and approaches from several bodies of scholarship.
Findings from empirical psychology research will be used to explore how
and why incongruent film music might influence perceptual and cogni-
tive activity, the interpretation of meaning, and emotional response. These
insights will be used to contextualise, complement, and challenge theo-
retical and analytical approaches that focus on specific films or film music
devices, and that consider relevant historical and sociological context.
Bringing these approaches together presents challenges, most notably that
perceptual experience may not always correspond with analytical findings:
incongruities that are identified by close textual analysis, for example, may
not always be consciously recognised by the perceiver in the moment of
engaging with a film text.9 In order to holistically study (in)congruence
in the film–music relationship, a combination of approaches is required
that considers matters of perceptual experience, whilst also accounting for
complexities in the film text that have been identified analytically.
In an attempt to strike this balance, this book adopts a psycho-semiotic
approach identified as the incongruent perspective, ‘an inter- and multi-
disciplinary approach towards the study of film-music difference and
its impact on perception, the interpretation of meaning, and emotional
response’ (Ireland, 2015, p. 55).10 Psychological elements of the per-
spective account for the impact of (in)congruent music on perception
and response; and semiotic elements draw on analytical approaches
that recognise the positions of the creators and perceivers of a film to
account for differing levels of engagement with the text. In addition to
also drawing on relevant ideas from film music theory, the perspective

9 See, for example, the discussion of textual analysis and participants’ responses to the

­opening of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Gilliam, 1998, USA) included in Ireland (2015).
10 The incongruent perspective was initially summarised in Ireland (2015) and is

expanded throughout this book. The use of the label ‘psycho-semiotic’ here reflects that
the present inter- and multidisciplinary approach incorporates ideas and approaches from
both psychological and semiotic theory. It is not, as will be come readily apparent in the
following paragraphs, intended to imply any allegiance to work within film studies that was
heavily influenced by psychoanalytic or Marxist ideas, approaches that fuelled later cognitiv-
ist film theorists’ critique of Grand Theory.
12 D. IRELAND

is broadly contextualised and conceptually influenced by poststructuralist

thought that advocates deconstruction of binary oppositions. The ideas
of Jacques Derrida, which support additional consideration of difference
within a text, are included to provide further conceptual insight. This
poststructuralist approach also encourages awareness of the discourses
that can influence societal views and hegemonic norms—factors that may
shape individual appraisals and broader societal consensus of what consti-
tutes audiovisual (mis)fit, (in)appropriateness, or (in)congruence.
A central difficulty of such inter- or multidisciplinary undertakings
is balancing the integration of specific ideas and perspectives to gain
maximum insight—interdisciplinarity—and juxtaposing these to retain
the individual qualities that initially made these approaches appealing
resources—multidisciplinarity.11 Certain boundaries have to be con-
structed to approach this task systematically and in a focused manner.
Consequently, given the varied aesthetic and narrative concerns of dif-
fering types of cinema, this book will primarily cite examples from west-
ern narrative film, which are presumed to be more familiar to a broader
readership.12 Equally, the discussion is weighted towards a focus on the
perceiver and how incongruent film music can influence their perceptual
and cognitive strategies, construction and interpretation of meaning, and
emotional response. Other types of cinema, film production, and the
composition and compilation of film music will be addressed as relevant
to the specific points under consideration.
This concept-driven inter- and multidisciplinary approach echoes cog-
nitive film theorist David Bordwell’s (1996) call for ‘problem- rather

11 For more on this distinction in relation to the psychology of music in multimedia and

film music studies more broadly, see Tan et al. (2013) and Rosar (2009) respectively.
12 The rationale for this focus is similar to that outlined by Heldt (2013), who contends

that ‘live-action fiction sound film is at the heart of most people’s understanding of cinema
in western countries’ (p. 10). My examples are not exclusively restricted to Hollywood film,
although the influence of the Hollywood model of film scoring will recur throughout the
subsequent discussion. Whilst notions of incongruence and deviance might be more stere-
otypically aligned with counter-cinema, film critics, audiences, or producers have described
each of the case studies in this book in terms similar to the present conceptualisation of
incongruence. Whilst these examples might evoke different expectations in perceivers
and involve a slightly different attitude towards the audiovisual relationship, the percep-
tual principles that belie engagement with their music are similar to those of the counter-­
cinema. As such, they provide a helpful set of examples by which to gain a broader and
more holistic perspective of incongruent film music and its perceptual impact.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

than doctrine-driven’ middle-level research (p. 28) and Noël Carroll’s

(1996) similar notion of piecemeal theorising, which seeks to provide
‘compelling answers … to small-scale, delimited questions’ (p. 58).
Using the (re)definition of incongruence and psycho-semiotic perspec-
tive outlined above, the specific delimited questions to be addressed
in the following chapters concern: what factors may lead to film music
being identified as incongruent perceptually and/or analytically; and
what the potential effects of such incongruities are in terms of influ-
encing the interpretation of meaning and emotional response. These
questions underpin the research aims identified at the end of the previ-
ous section and ultimately seek to provide a more holistic and nuanced
account that reflects the subjective, multidimensional, and context-­
dependent nature of incongruent film music.
Given its conceptual links with the psychology of music in multime-
dia, the inter- and multidisciplinary psycho-semiotic perspective that
is used to explore these questions concurs with Bordwell and Carroll’s
(1996) views about the benefits that the cognitivist tradition can bring
to film theory. In an early publication they describe cognitivism as both
a ‘stance’ and a ‘perspective’ (p. xvi). Echoing these comments, Ted
Nannicelli and Paul Taberham (2014) have recently demonstrated a
breadth of approaches being adopted by contemporary film and media
studies scholars subscribing to a cognitive perspective. However, they
suggest that key characteristics of this stance include researchers initially
looking to the human mind to explore audience response to film and
acknowledging the influence of culture and society on such processes
(p. 8). This endeavour ‘does not entail that scientific methods of inquiry
are encroaching upon humanistic methods of inquiry (or vice versa).
Rather, … these two lines of inquiry not only coexist peacefully, but are
mutually informative’ (p. 20).
Similar qualities are reflected in my inter- and multidisciplinary
psycho-semiotic approach and are particularly appropriate given the
­
nature of incongruence itself. The lack of shared audiovisual properties
in an incongruent pairing can challenge the automatic perceptual encod-
ing that more congruent constructions tend to invite.13 The inhibition

13 Similar explanations recur in several studies investigating various aspects of film percep-

tion and cognition, which encompass a range of methodological and conceptual approaches
including: Grodal’s (2009) neuropsychological and evolutionary theory of how we experi-
ence film; and Kiss and Willemsen’s (2017) cognitive account of the strategies perceivers
might adopt in response to a range of types of textual and narrative dissonance in film.
14 D. IRELAND

of these processes creates space to explore the differing information and

construct meaning, and as such can involve more top-down influences
that relate to factors like an individual’s experience, learning, and mem-
ories. Recruiting a range of approaches to facilitate exploration of how
the audience might draw upon such factors to interpret filmic meaning,
and that acknowledge the perceiver’s wider knowledge and expectations
about both film and music, provides valuable analytical tools to comple-
ment the psychological elements of this research. The semiotic and post-
structuralist ideas in the incongruent perspective help to achieve these
aims. However, this particular choice of disciplinary approaches might
initially seem somewhat incongruous with Bordwell and Carroll’s calls
for middle-level research and piecemeal theorising. Their rally for such
research activity largely arose from dissatisfaction with the Grand Theory
that had dominated film studies, which was primarily characterised by
psychoanalytic and semiotic approaches of both a structuralist and post-
structuralist nature. Therefore, some justification is necessary to explain
my turning to such influences and to demonstrate how they can com-
plement a broadly cognitivist perspective. The remainder of this intro-
ductory chapter will outline at a broad disciplinary level the rationale for
the semiotic and poststructuralist ideas incorporated in the incongruent
perspective. Chapter 2 will then apply specific ideas from these areas to
further deconstruct film-music (in)congruence.
Semiotic approaches have proven particularly fruitful analytical
tools in film music studies and have helped to consider the potential of
music to shape filmic meaning on a range of different levels. Equally,
various scholars have explored the combination of ideas from semiot-
ics and psychology in relation to film, including: Warren Buckland’s
(2000) Cognitive Semiotics of Film, which primarily focuses on a group
of European scholars whose work is influenced by the early film semiot-
ics of Christian Metz; and Roger Kendall and Scott Lipscomb’s (2013)
empirical studies investigating how a spectrum of ideas from semiotic
theory might be used to aid research into the perception of audiovisual
stimuli. Conversely, primarily semiotic works like Ron Rodman’s (2010)
theorisation of the communicative properties of television music have
incorporated ideas from cognitive theory to complement the broader
analytical approach. Recent publications by cognitive film theorists have
also addressed the role of semiotics. In his bioculturalist study of audi-
ences’ filmic experience, for example, Torben Grodal (2009) acknowl-
edges that ‘[l]anguage and language-like semiotic systems and discourses
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

are important’ (p. 11). However, these ‘exist on top of numerous

embodied mental processes’ given that ‘[m]any aspects of perception,
cognition, and action occur in sealed modules that work relatively inde-
pendently of language’ (ibid.). Similarly, Bordwell (2010) too recognises
that researchers who subscribe to an empirical-experiential perspective,
which he broadly aligns with a cognitive perspective, share some concerns
with those who adopt communication and signification perspectives.
These include: the recognition of a filmmaker with intentions of con-
structing a text, even though audiences may not necessarily interpret films
in the ways that these practitioners intend; and that cultural learning can
influence interaction with, and interpretation of, films despite the impor-
tance of innate or quickly learned perceptual processes.
A semiotic component to the incongruent perspective is therefore not
incompatible with a broader cognitive framework. Reservations about
such ideas that have been raised by cognitive film theorists are in part
inflected by the association of semiotics with psychoanalytically infused
Grand Theory and the lack of explanatory power connected with the
latter’s focus on unconscious processes. However, another recurrent res-
ervation is the ontological implications of the analogy between film and
language, a perceived connection that motivated some early attempts to
study film by using ideas from semiotic theory.14 A focus on film music
complicates these matters because music, particularly purely instrumental
music, does not share the more consistent directly iconic representational
qualities of film images or the lexical properties of language. In a sus-
tained discussion of the music–language relationship and its implications
for musical semiotics, Kofi Agawu (1999) concludes that the analogy can
be productive in that it provokes consideration of the limitations of the
comparison whilst also highlighting some points of similarity (pp. 141–
146). Consequently, I contend that such challenges do not prohibit semi-
otic approaches from providing a useful complementary dimension to the
incongruent perspective. The ideas incorporated throughout this book
could largely be described as ‘soft’ semiotic approaches. These place less
emphasis on purely structuralist identification of units and facilitate greater
focus on the social factors that can influence interpretation of meaning
(Monelle, 1992), corresponding with ‘a more anthropological view of the
musical work’ (Agawu, 1999, p. 154). However, the adoption of these

14 See Carroll and Seeley (2013, pp. 55–57) for an overview of some of these concerns.
16 D. IRELAND

ideas should not be understood to preclude recognition of nonlinguistic

perceptual processes that also contribute to filmic experience, and the lan-
guage analogy must be approached with suitable caution.
Another concern about semiotic approaches for Bordwell (2008)
surrounds the idea of codes. Strictly speaking these are learned sys-
­
tems that account for a relationship between an object and its associ-
ated meaning, which are an ‘arbitrary system of alternatives’ (p. 136).15
Bordwell contends that these qualities feel counter to the intentionality
that is involved when practitioners select particular conventional devices
for use in their films: the arbitrary nature of codes implies that certain
devices are essentially interchangeable if they support perception of
the same meaning. Equally, the idea of learned conventions can under-­
emphasise the fact that some conventions are processed more intuitively
due to basic perceptual capacities.16 For Bordwell the notion of schemas
or expectation sets, which support elaboration of the cues provided in
the text, avoids such difficulties. He contends that schemas offer a more
flexible and logical explanation for the audience’s active, yet often non-
conscious and rapid, process of meaning making. Schemas provide clear
psychological explanation of how perceivers draw on relevant knowledge
and experience to construct aspects of filmic meaning, and have proven
an influential concept in psychological studies of film music. As such,
they will recur throughout the following chapters as a valuable expla-
nation for aspects of film perception and cognition. However, concepts
from semiotic theory can still provide a helpful vocabulary to consider
the semantic content incorporated in schemas that are associated with
specific styles of music and musical devices. Concepts that describe the
different ways in which perceived meaning might relate to an object, like
connotation and denotation, are helpful for articulating the many levels
on which meaning might be interpreted in music. Equally these princi-
ples may even influence the development of semantic aspects of the asso-
ciated schematic frameworks.

15 Bordwell use the example of the colours of traffic lights to demonstrate the way in

which learned codes are essentially systems of fixed alternatives: that is that ‘red’ denotes
‘stop’ whilst alternatively ‘green’ denotes ‘go’.
16 Elsewhere, Bordwell (2008) uses the shot-reverse-shot technique to describe this point

(pp. 57–82).
Another random document with
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dictated by the artistic requirements of the subject, and not by the
necessities or allurements of what I may call for brevity, competitive
painting. It was never a question with him of the preparation within
twelve months of an annual poster, which was to occupy so much
linespace, and send the betting on him up or down as the case might
be.
What, on the other hand, were the essential ideas of Bastien-
Lepage’s work? To begin with, he was a painter of exhibition
pictures, of what are called in Paris machins. He was an inveterate
salonnier, with the ideals and the limitations of the typical uncultured
Paris art-student, the fort of his atelier. Faire vrai is the sum and aim
of his intention. Realists he and his like have been jauntily labelled
by the hasty journalist. But the truth in their work is truth of
unessentials, and their elaborate and unlovely realities serve only to
cover themes that are profoundly unreal.
To begin with, it was thought to be meritorious, and conducive of
truth, and in every way manly and estimable, for the painter to take a
large canvas out into the fields and to execute his final picture in
hourly tête-à-tête with nature. This practice at once restricts the limits
of your possible choice of subject. The sun moves too quickly. You
find that grey weather is more possible, and end by never working in
any other. Grouping with any approach to naturalness is found to be
almost impossible. You find that you had better confine your
compositions to a single figure. And with a little experience the
photo-realist finds, if he be wise, that that single figure had better be
in repose. Even then your picture necessarily becomes a portrait of a
model posing by the hour. The illumination, instead of being that of a
north light in Newman Street, is, it is true, the illumination of a
Cornish or a Breton sky. Your subject is a real peasant in his own
natural surroundings, and not a model from Hatton Garden. But what
is he doing? He is posing for a picture as best he can, and he looks
it. That woman stooping to put potatoes into a sack will never rise
again. The potatoes, portraits every one, will never drop into the
sack, and never a breath of air circulates around that painful
rendering in the flat of the authentic patches on the very gown of a
real peasant. What are the truths you have gained, a handful of
tiresome little facts, compared to the truths you have lost? To life and
spirit, light and air?
The tacit assumption on which the theory and practice of the so-
called realist rests, is that if photography, instead of yielding little
proofs on paper in black and white, could yield large proofs on
canvas in oils, the occupation of the painter would be gone. What a
radical misconception of the nature and function of art this is,
becomes evident when we paraphrase the same idea and apply it in
the region of letters. Few would be found to defend the proposition
that a stenographic report of events and words as they occurred
would constitute the highest literary treatment of a given scene in
life. A page of description is distinguished as literature from reporting
when the resources of language are employed with cunning and
mastery to convey, not a catalogue of facts, but the result of the
observation of these facts on an individual temperament. Its value
depends on the degree of mastery with which the language is used,
and on the delicacy and range of the writer’s personality, and in no
wise on the accuracy of the facts recorded.
Richter says somewhere that no artist can replace another, and
not even the same artist himself, at different periods of his life. One
characteristic of the work of the modern photo-realist in painting is
that almost any one of them could have painted a portion of the work
of any other without making any appreciable discord of execution
apparent. They are all equipped from the first at the studios with a
technique which serves them equally, once for all. It is known as la
bonne peinture. It differs from style in being a thing you can acquire,
and I believe it is even maintained, not only to be perfectible, but to
have been, on several occasions, perfected.
Nothing is more frequently brought home to the student of modern
painting than the truth that the work of the salonnier, the picture, that
is, that is born of the exhibition and for the exhibition, wears its air of
novelty and interest strictly for the season. If he meet it again in a
house, or in the holocaust of a retrospective exhibition, its date is
stamped upon it with the accuracy of a page of Le follet or Le
moniteur de la mode. And whether a picture be asserted at the date
of its exhibition as advanced, or the contrary, as daring or dull, if it is
born of the exhibition, it dies with the exhibition, and the brood to
which it gives birth hold their life on the same tenure.
It was impossible, on seeing Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc at the
Paris Exhibition of 1890, after a lapse of some years since its first
appearance, to resist the conclusion that it falls inevitably under the
heading of “machin.” In the composition, or in what modern critics
prefer to call the placing, there is neither grace nor strangeness. The
drawing is without profundity or novelty of observation. The colour is
uninteresting, and the execution is the usual mechanically obtrusive
square-brush-work of the Parisian schools of art. Dramatically, the
leading figure is not impressive or even lucid; and the helpless
introduction of the visionary figures behind the back of the rapt maid
completes the conviction that it was an error of judgment for a
painter with the limitations of Lepage to burden a touching and
sanctified legend with commonplace illustration. A faithful copy of so
strange and interesting a subject as Mme. Sarah Bernhardt cannot
fail to be a valuable document, but Lepage’s portrait has surely
missed altogether the delicacy of the exquisitely spiritual profile. The
format of the little panel portrait of the Prince of Wales evoked in the
press the obviously invited reference to Clouet. The ready writer
cannot have looked at so much as a single pearl in the necklace of
one of Clouet’s princesses.
To judge fairly of an artist, however, we must follow him on to his
own ground. In his portrait of his grandfather, at the same exhibition,
it was quite possible to see Lepage at his best as a workmanlike and
photographic copyist of a figure in repose. It was at the same time
possible to turn from this picture straight to Manet’s fifre, and to his
bon bock, and thus to measure the gulf that separates a meritorious
workman from an inspired executant of the first rank. No useful end
can be gained by obscuring this fact, and if, in league with the
modern gigantic conspiracy of toleration, we are to speak of Bastien-
Lepage as a master, what terms are left us for Keene and Millet, for
Whistler and Degas?
WALTER SICKERT.
Chelsea, 1891.
A STUDY OF MARIE
BASHKIRTSEFF.
In Possession of her Mother.] [Engraved by C. State.

Marie Bashkirtseff.
(From a Portrait by Herself.)
 A STUDY OF MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.

The brilliant sunshine of a glorious October morning poured through

the tall windows of Marie Bashkirtseff’s studio on my last visit to the
Rue de Prony. This mellow light bathing her canvasses brought them
out in fullest relief, and I had never had such a favourable
opportunity of judging her work in its entirety. I was struck more than
ever by the vigour and vitality of these studies, sketches, pastels,
and pictures struck off at a white heat of mental production between
the ages of seventeen and four and twenty. Hanging above the
gallery which runs along one side of the wall were her first studies
from life, which astonished Julian so much that he pronounced them
phenomenal; here were her numerous sketches showing the
sincerity of her efforts to be true to nature; and her finished pictures
full of individuality and power.
As the eye rested on these portraits where the keynote of
character had been so unmistakably struck,
on these bits of city life in their shabbier aspects, on these Paris
street children with faces so prematurely sharpened or saddened,
you became at once aware that this artist was a naturalist of the
naturalists. Her chief object was to seize life—to seize the flying
impression as she happened to see it; to render it with unflinching
faithfulness to nature without any attempt at arrangement,
composition, or beauty of treatment.
“Oh, to catch nature!” This is the cry of Marie Bashkirtseff, as it is
the cry of Impressionism, as it was perhaps the cry of the primitive
artist who with much labour and wrestling of the spirit modelled the
first rude image of the lioness or painted the first likeness of an
archer, bow in hand. Not quite the same, perhaps. For these early
workers in clay or pigments saw nature with the eyes of children—
those visionary eyes to which the leaves of the trees, the flowers of
the field, the dogs and horses and cats and cows are as much part
of the interminable fairy-tale in which they live as the more fantastic
figures in more orthodox stories. For these primitive artists looked at
the world with the eyes of children, and though they looked at her
with clear, wide-open eyes, they could not help seeing her
symbolically, seeing the analogy between men and beasts, between
beasts and plants, between the articulate and inarticulate phases of
nature, so that whatever they produced not only stood for itself but
for a host of subtly apprehended affinities linked together by
imaginative insight into the mystery of things. And in tracing the
development of this primitive style of art a little further, in following it
to its legitimate development into the loftiest forms of Greek art, we
cannot help seeing that it was the consummate flower of this archaic
symbolism. With this difference, that while Egyptian, Assyrian, and
Indian artists invented the most grotesque and fantastic forms to
express the wonder and mystery of the world, the Greeks tried to
find outward expression for that archetype of beauty which has as
yet only existed in the mind of man.
And nature, plus the mind of man, plus that master faculty which
refuses and chooses, and which reaches its highest results by
making fresh combinations from what is widely diffused in nature:
that, surely, is the secret of art. This faculty of selection and
concentration, within the limits of some more or less conventional
form, seems to belong to every manifestation of art, which can never
under any circumstances be a simple reproduction of nature. How
can it, indeed, since, as Blake so pithily puts it: “A fool sees not the
same tree a wise man sees”? And we question whether any two
people, any two painters would ever see precisely the same thing—
the same tree, however hard they might try to free themselves from
the bias of personality; or would succeed in giving us an identical
pictorial representation of any subject whatsoever. For the artist’s
own mind, unlike a photographic apparatus, would always intervene
so as to force him to see life through the medium of his
temperament. Indeed, will not the circulation of the artist’s blood, the
pitch of his nerves, the thoughts he has thought and the emotions he
has felt from the beginning of consciousness, have to be taken into
account as factors in any individual painter’s picture of a tree or any
other object? For this reason a picture can never be truly likened to a
window opening on nature unless, indeed, it be a stained-glass
window. On the contrary, the artist for the time being lends us his
eyes to see nature with. And as the eyes of a Titian or a Turner saw
combinations and harmonies of tones and tints whose magnificent
effect entirely escapes the eyes of ordinary mortals, it is much wiser
to accept their interpretation than to go into hair-splitting discussions
as to the precise exactitude of their copy to a reality which is
eternally changing.
Take only the painters of the realistic modern French school—can
we not tell at a glance, in going through the Louvre, whether it is
nature according to Corot, to Rousseau, or to Millet that we are
looking at? For whether the realists like it or no, the world will reflect
itself in their brains according to the laws of their peculiar
individuality, and the preciousness of all art expression seems
precisely to consist in this rare flavour which the artist’s self
impresses on nature outside himself. This priceless quality which we
call style is as inseparable from the genuine artist as the shape of his
nose. It clearly differentiates a peasant woman by Millet from any
ordinary peasant woman we may chance on in a field, and is as
marked in his simple pourtrayal of rustic subjects as in the most
sublime compositions by Michael Angelo.
These few inadequate remarks may not be entirely out of place
when speaking of the æsthetic views of our day; or of an artist who is
peculiarly representative of them. For the new scientific spirit which
has revolutionized our views of nature, has also penetrated the
realms of literature and art, and impelled artists to attempt a perfectly
unprejudiced reproduction of life. For the present this has led them to
a grim realism, which loves to dwell exclusively on the material side
of existence, scouting the romantic and ideal as figments of man’s
fancy to be relegated into the limbo of unrealistics along with the
dragons and griffins of the world’s childhood. The same movement
which has produced the extremely powerful but one-sided novels of
De Goncourt, Zola, and Guy de Maupassant may also be studied in
the works of the realistic French painters in their almost fierce
insistence on what is natural even to the pitch of repulsiveness.
 Impressionism was in the air when Marie Bashkirtseff entered on
her artistic career in 1877. It would amount to a truism to give any
fresh account of her birth, parentage, and early life at this time. All
the world has read her famous journal. All the world knows that she
was born at Poltava, in the south of Russia, in 1860. That her
parents were separated after a few years of marriage; that her
mother and aunt came to the West of Europe with the two children—
Paul and Marie, and a cousin Dina; that they travelled about after the
fashion of their kind, afterwards settling down first at Nice, and later
on in Paris. As Marie often bitterly laments, her education was
carried on in a rather desultory fashion. But her faculty for acquiring
knowledge was so surprising, her intellect so extraordinary, that she
became an admirable linguist, a skilled musician, a splendid singer,
a fair mathematician with a rapidity that seemed to amount to
intuition. Her powers of observation had probably been much
developed by all that she saw and heard on their travels. She had an
early opportunity of seeing the master works of all time in Florence
and Rome, and was an indefatigable frequenter of museums and
picture galleries. At the age of fifteen, her judgment was already so
independent that she had the audacity to speak of the “cardboard
pictures of Raphael” and the “stupid if glorious Venuses of Titian.”
She had never as yet lived in Paris, mixed with artists, or heard the
talk of the studios, yet in many respects she seems already a full-
fledged art student, with the last phrase of the hour on her lips.
Already she sought in pictures that scrupulous resemblance to
nature which was her chief aim when she herself took to painting.
But though deeply interested in art, it did not at that time occupy the
chief place in her thoughts. Music attracted her more, and the desire
to be a singer was her greatest ambition. In fact, she laboured under
the disadvantage of an embarras de richesses in regard to her
natural gifts, and for several years she found it difficult to make a
choice.
However, one day in October, 1877, there entered M. Julian’s now
famous life-school in the Passage des Panoramas two very tall
ladies, all in black, accompanied by a young girl dressed in pure
white from head to foot, as if she were a lily of the field. This strange
and striking trio made quite a sensation. M. Julian himself, with his
happy picturesqueness of phrase in describing the first appearance
of Marie Bashkirtseff in his studio, spoke of her as une blancheur—
something bright and startling, which seemed to have little in
common with the severe work-a-day routine of studio life.
Nevertheless, she had come, accompanied by her mother and aunt,
to be entered as a pupil; and in the letter which she brought him from
an eminent physician, he found this curt word by way of introduction:
“I have sent you a monster.”
All this was very unlike the usual order of things. But it was there
and then settled that Marie Bashkirtseff was to attend his classes,
and every morning found her duly at place, working away as if her
life depended upon it. At first, her master took this wish to paint for
the caprice of a spoilt child, which would soon pass when confronted
by the difficulties of execution. Before long, however, he recognized
his mistake; he felt that she was a power; that there was something
which lifted her out of the ranks and placed her apart among her
fellow pupils. Something which gave to her first efforts, however
crude and tentative, a vigour and spontaneity which were truly
astonishing. And he discovered, too, that so far from playing at art
she was in deadly earnest. Instead of being less regular in her
attendance than the other art students, she flung herself into her
work with the passionate zeal of an enthusiast. Morning, noon, and
night found her either at her easel, or else taking private lessons in
anatomy and modelling, or haunting sales and picture galleries—
always, on the alert to improve herself. Indeed, Julian found her a
little monster of energy, of talent, of ambition, of concentrated will.
Whatever she took into her head to do, she did and accomplished
the seemingly impossible.
In a surprisingly short time she had mastered the elements of art,
and her studies from the nude were considered wonderful by her
masters. By the intensity of her attention and fever of work joined to
her native endowment she managed after only two years of study to
produce a picture of a woman reading, which was hung in the Salon.
It evinces all her characteristic qualities—masterly vigour of drawing,
and a vivid and striking manner of painting human faces. Her
extreme sensitiveness to impressions gave her a peculiar facility for
catching likenesses and bringing out the salient and personal traits in
her models.
After some few years devoted to painting in the studio, Marie
Bashkirtseff began to feel very unhappy about her work as a
colourist. It fell so far below her own standard as to plunge her into
fits of despair. In the midst of this profound dissatisfaction, in the
autumn of 1881, she went to Spain, and there she seemed to
awaken to a new sense—for the first time to awaken to the full,
glorious significance of colour in the painter’s sense.
In reading those pages of her journal which describe the
picturesque Moorish palaces, the gloomy Gothic cathedrals, the
dark, crooked streets with their groups of gipsies and the treasures
of art stored away in museums and churches, it seems as if they
were illumined by a mellower light than the rest of the book.
Velasquez and Goya opened her eyes, and she “raised herself on
tiptoe,” as she says, to master the secret of their unique method.
Day after day she steeped herself in those glowing canvasses, and
on her return to Paris she began to reap the benefit of this
enthusiastic absorption. Soon afterwards she painted The Umbrella,
in which she made a great leap forward.
Her method and style of painting now placed her definitely in the
same school to which Bastien-Lepage belonged, or of which he was
the master. It was the school which said: “We will let the open air into
our pictures. Let us paint light just as it is out of doors, not the
artificial studio effects from north aspects and skylights.” The Plein
Air movement of the painters was precisely the same as that which
Zola inaugurated in literature. It was nature taking the citadel of art
by storm—at least, what these particular men and artists understood
by nature.
At the head of this school stood Bastien-Lepage, the young
painter who so early became what the French call Chef d’École. His
pictures taken fresh from the country—his Haymakers, and
Harvesters, and Potato Gatherers, and Rustic Lovers filled Marie
Bashkirtseff with boundless delight. “He is not only a painter,” she
says, “he is a poet, a psychologist, a metaphysician, a creator.” His
perfect imitation of nature, the quality which ranked highest in her
judgment, was beyond all praise in her eyes.
Many of the French critics called her the pupil of Bastien. But she
had of course never been his actual pupil, having been trained in
quite a different school, and it always gave her much annoyance to
be called so. But in spite of the striking contrast between the origin
and early associations of these two young painters they were
singularly alike in their love of realism, their early fame, and
premature end.
Look, on the one hand, at Marie, this offspring of Tartar nobles,
with savage instincts lying like half-tamed wild beasts in the
background of her consciousness. She was descended from owners
of lands and serfs, and the instinct of command, the pride of power,
the love of all things splendid became part of her inheritance. She
was the idol of two women, her “two mothers,” who, in her master
Julian’s incisive phrase, “would have burned down Paris to please
her, or had themselves cut into a thousand pieces to satisfy one of
her caprices.” Nature had endowed her with such lavish gifts that her
very talents turned into a stumbling-block, threatening to divert her
efforts into too many channels. Music, literature, sculpture, the stage,
were successively the goal of her ambition; and each one of these
arts was in her eyes only the means to an end—the one burning
desire for fame. However, as the deep meaning of work, of the
artist’s simple and disinterested absorption in what he is fashioning,
became familiar to her she began to forget herself more and more in
the things she did. Her devotion to art, her love and delight in it, grew
steadily with her increasing mastery over its technical difficulties.
She says truly: “Outside of my art, which I commenced from caprice
and ambition, which I continued out of vanity, and which I now
worship; outside of this passion—for it is a passion—there is
nothing.”
Little by little—with many outcries, it is true, and kickings against
the traces—Marie Bashkirtseff had begun to discover that there is no
royal road to art. That to him only is given who is ready, also, to give
up much. She found out that however great her natural gift might be,
it would remain a diamond in the rough, unless she regularly applied
herself to the task of acquiring technical mastery. After some years’
intense but interrupted application she would have admitted that no
work of first-rate talent can be produced without the expenditure of
as much courage, perseverance, and self-control as might have
made a hero. For, as Schumann truly says: “The laws of morality are
also the laws of art.”
What a widely different lot was that of Bastien-Lepage. He, the
son of French peasant proprietors, came of people who are perhaps
the most thrifty and industrious class in existence: people punctual to
their daily task as the sun himself in his rising and down-going;
clinging to the soil they till with the tenacity of rocks and trees;
working much and wanting little, asking no joy of life except rest.
Just as Marie’s parents lived apart in painful disunion, those of
Bastien were united by the tenderest family affection. The shrewd,
caustic, clear-headed old grandfather—a sort of village Nestor—the
thoughtful father, the devoted mother, were helpful influences which
unobtrusively helped in developing Bastien’s faculties. He began to
draw as naturally as another child learns to talk; and his father,
noticing his aptitude, very wisely set him to copy some object or
other every evening from the age of five. Country life, with its
primitive simplicity and its regular succession of daily tasks, sank
deeply if unconsciously into the little fellow’s mind: it sank as the
seed does, without question or self-analysis, to hide its time in
silence and shoot up strong and vigorous when the appointed hour
had come. Bastien probably never asked himself whether he should
be a painter, a poet, a psychologist, or metaphysician. He became
one very likely because he could not help painting. And I suppose he
never asked himself whether in his pursuit of art he was sacrificing
something that might be more precious. But he was not dazzled and
enchanted by the sight of Italian cities and Carnival festivities and
ball-room flirtations. Toil and hardship were the rule of life around
him, and in his love for art he was willing to undergo any amount of
it. Instead of rushing in express trains from Berlin to St. Petersburg
and from St. Petersburg to Paris, he remained stationary in his low-
roofed country home, seeing the same round of occupation going on
year after year: the labourer following the plough; the haymakers in
the mowing grass with the light beating on their sunburnt faces, or
stretched in the shade of full-leaved trees in the luxury of repose;
reapers reaping the orange-coloured corn; summer evening in the
village, with the cattle coming home to their stalls, as their shadows
deepen on the bright green meadows. Such were the impressions
which graved themselves always afresh on the lad’s receptive
memory, to turn themselves one day into those pictures of rural life
which may truly be called “the harvest of a quiet eye.”
Though Bastien-Lepage’s lot—who had to make his living by
turning post-office clerk while studying at the École des Beaux Arts—
may appear so much harder than that of Marie Bashkirtseff, it was in
reality more favourable to the development of an artist. For,
according to Goethe, “Character is formed by contact with the world,
while talent develops in seclusion.” Marie Bashkirtseff, with her
penetrating intelligence, was quite aware of this. She, for whom
nothing was ever sufficiently fine, would sometimes quite seriously
envy her fellow-students’ their poverty, their humble way of life, their
cares and hard work shared in common in a Paris garret. A stern
necessity seemed to lend dignity to their art work, while hers was so
often patted on the back by her fashionable friends as the pastime of
a charming young Mondaine.
I was particularly fortunate this year in finding in Marie
Bashkirtseff’s studio a picture by Bastien-Lepage, L’Annociation au
Bergers, which he painted in 1875 to compete for the Prix de Rome.
It was interesting to compare these two artists in their likeness in
unlikeness. The same uncompromising realism applied in different
ways, and the same power of catching expression and pinning it
down as you would a butterfly without losing any of the delicate
shades. This picture of a “far-off, divine event” is treated by Bastien-
Lepage in a surprisingly naturalistic way, and yet without sacrificing
that mystical element which sometimes belongs to the simplest
aspects of life. Here is none of that conventional treatment of
religious subjects against which Marie rebelled in those “old dusky
pictures in the Louvre.” Here was real atmosphere, there were real
shepherds, rough, homely, unsophisticated men, brown as the soil;
and yet, in spite of the reality, this picture gave you a sense of
unfamiliar awe. Sitting there in the twilight before the fire lit in the
open air, they seem to have been more or less overcome by
drowsiness. The first, an old man, an expressive, rugged figure, has
bowed his head in adoration and is kneeling before the angel whose
sudden apparition has taken the shepherds by surprise. Bewildered
and amazed the second leans forward with gaping mouth and
outstretched hands as if to assure himself by touch of the reality of
what he sees. Hardly able to rouse himself from sleep the third one
sits huddled together in the distance. It is as true as can be to simple
shepherd life. The apparition itself has nothing supernatural. It might
be purely human with only the angel light of tenderness beaming
from the face. The grace of the figure is suggestive of the “eternally
feminine” as the celestial messenger shows the shepherds the way
to Bethlehem visible in the distance by the luminous haze encircling
it like a halo.
This picture with its effect of gloaming light is an idyl of shepherd
life. It breathes that simplicity of nature which invests the calling of
the herdsman, the ploughman, the mower, the reaper, with the
poetry of primitive existence, I shall never forget the impression once
produced on me by a Highland shepherd and his flock slowly
winding along the solitary road of an upland moor. The long white
line of the wavering sheep with that sombre figure of the solitary
shepherd was thrown into relief by the smouldering purple of the
barren hillsides. It was a scene which seemed to carry one back to
remote ages. Even so in the mythic East might the flocks and their
shepherds have passed along similar roads in the vast silence of
deepening twilight. This same feeling of nearness given to what is
dimly remote appeared to me one of the chief attractions of Bastien-
Lepage’s work.
As Bastien by the country, so is Marie Bashkirtseff inspired by the
town. The boulevards and squares of Paris became to her what the
hay and harvest-fields had been to Lepage. Her pictures were
imbued with the atmosphere of Paris—those delicate, pearly greys
which strike one as its keynote of colour. She caught that misty light
which you see clinging to masses of architecture as you look from
one of the bridges along the blue-grey Seine to the picturesque old
Cité with the iron-grey towers of Notre Dame outlined against the
clouded azure above. Effects of roofs and clusters of buildings half
seen through the confusing haze of early morning; drab-coloured
walls enlivened by black and white placards and the flashy tints of
rival advertisements; narrow streets with masses of shadow
emphasizing the value of light on wall and pavement—these became
the dominant note in Marie Bashkirtseff’s work as a colourist.
Her subjects, too, are usually taken from the every-day life of the
French capital as you may meet it round every street corner. The
blouse of the artisan, the cap of the milliner, the rags of the gamin
appeared better adapted to Marie Bashkirtseff for pictorial treatment
than the thousand freaks of fashion with which society annually
delights to astonish the world. As a painter she preferred the
Boulevard de Batignolles or Avenue Wagram to the Champs Élysées
and the Bois de Boulogne. The faces of weary people sitting on
public benches casually seen in passing or caught sight of across
the counter of a shop had hints and suggestions of meaning which
she missed in the sleek features of the swells whom she met in the
drawing-rooms of her friends.
So it happens that instead of painting the pretty, neat, carefully
brushed children marshalled by stately bonnes in the Parc
Monceaux, she chose in preference the unkempt ragamuffins
running wild in the streets. She found more scope there for the
exercise of that scrupulous and powerful realism which was the
secret of her strength. In the Jean and Jacques, The Girl with the
Umbrella, Le Meeting, she has vividly rendered some of the
incidents in the town life of children. The faces of these little boys
and girls, so pathetic in their premature maturity, in their shrewd or
sad or pathetic outlook on the world, are extraordinary in their truth
to life. With most of the childhood taken out of their childish features,
they look at us, if we consider them well, with eyes where experience
has already taken the place of innocence—the experience taught
them by the teeming streets, those books of the poor, for ever
unfolding fresh pages before their inquisitive eyes.
 A Meeting.
(By Marie Bashkirtseff.)
They cannot be called beautiful, these pictures, in the sense that
fine forms, nobility of outline, charm of expression are beautiful. But
they are interesting, vivid, quick with life. Take that little piteous figure
clutching the big, gamp-like umbrella, while she draws her battered
shawl more closely around her. With what a look of stolid, inarticulate
suffering she seems looking through the rain on the life that is dark
and dreary as the prospect before her. You see the hair actually
blown back from the forehead, and one mesh has got caught round
the handle of the umbrella as she meets the force of the wind with
tight-shut lips—a humble subject, but remarkable for the solidity of its
handling. Indeed there is a Holbeinesque quality in the vigour of the
drawing and the truth of the pose.
Jean et Jacques, the picture of two boys, of seven and four years
old, is an equally striking work. They stand so naturally on their legs,
these little fellows, their attitudes are so unstudied, their expressions
so admirably true to life. The eldest has already that responsible look
which the offspring of the poor acquire so early. With his cap at the
back of his head, a shabby umbrella tucked under his right arm, he
steps along in his clumsy boots with the resolute air of a little man;
the handkerchief tied cravat-wise, but all on one side, the leaf stuck
between the lips as a make-believe cigar, show Marie Bashkirtseff’s
close observation of the ways of his kind. With one hand he grips the
unwilling Jacques, dawdling obstinately on his way to school, while
with the other in his pocket he pensively fingers the seductive
marbles that invite him to play.
Le Meeting, her most important work, is a fine, powerfully painted,
vividly realized picture. Just a group of Paris gamins met in council at
a street corner, discussing the use to which a piece of string is to be
applied, with the excitement of stockbrokers buying and selling
shares on the steps of the Bourse. It is a triumph of realism. The
faces speak, the limbs are informed with life; it seems as if any
moment their legs and arms might begin to move quite naturally.
There is nothing conventional about these figures, so fresh in their
unstudied attitudes and gestures. These faces, bathed in the pale air
of a Paris back street, breathe quite as much of town life as the
discoloured walls and palings in the background. How pert, how
Parisian, how wide-awake they are, with their thin, sharp-edged
features and their gimlet eyes which allow nothing to escape them.
The biggest of the six, with his back to the spectator, is eloquently
holding forth to his intently listening comrades, even as he may one
day hold forth to quite a different kind of audience, when, after due
graduation in the philosophy of rags, he shall begin to practise the
lessons which the stony streets have taught him. Quite a different
lesson from that which Bastien-Lepage’s shepherds have learnt on
the hillsides of the wooded Meuse. The execution of this picture,
hung in a place of honour at the Luxembourg, is extremely good.
There is a genuine feeling for colour in the grey and sombre tones in
harmony with the nature of the subject. The open-air effect is happily
caught, and the faces stand out in brilliant light. The powerful
realism, scrupulous technique, and excellence of the painting, make
a great success of Le Meeting, and it is a performance which at once
secured a wide recognition for Marie Bashkirtseff, not only in artistic
circles, but from the general public.
Marie loved to recall Balzac’s questionable definition that the
genius of observation is almost the whole of human genius. It was
natural it should please her, since it was the most conspicuous of her
many gifts. As we might expect, therefore, she was especially
successful as a portrait painter, for she has a knack of catching her
sitter’s likeness with the bloom of nature yet fresh upon it. She
seems to me equally good in her men and women and children, the
contrast of many of her heads showing the range and variety of her
power. Her portraits are noticeable for that absence of family
likeness which is often seen even in the works of great painters, as if
the artist had some ideal head before his mind’s eye to which he was
unconsciously trying to assimilate the faces of his models.
Marie Bashkirtseff’s impressionable nature was a safeguard in
that respect. All her likenesses are singularly individual, and we
realize their character at a glance. Look, for example, at her portrait
of a Parisian swell, in irreproachable evening dress and white kid
gloves, sucking his silver-headed cane, with a simper that shows all
his white teeth, and then at the head and bust of the Spanish
convict, painted from life at the prison in Granada. Compare that
embodiment of fashionable vacuity with this face, whose brute-like
eyes haunt you with their sadly stunted look. What observation is
shown in the painting of those heavily-bulging lips, which express
weakness rather than wickedness of disposition—in those coarse
hands engaged in the feminine occupation of knitting a blue and
white stocking. Again, take those three heads expressive of different
kinds of laughter. And nothing is perhaps more difficult than to paint
laughing or singing faces: the open mouth being apt to give a foolish,
strained, and unnatural look to the face. But Marie Bashkirtseff
evinces great skill in painting a natural effect of laughter. The little
smiling boneless baby face is a delightfully realistic study of an
infant, and equally good is that of the pert little girl whose mouth
bubbles over with a child’s artless laugh. Much more knowing is the
wicked laughter of the young woman with the stylish hat and bunch
of violets fastened coquettishly in her sealskin cape. She surely must
be laughing at somebody—at some lovelorn swain, whose antics
make all her features twitch with amusement.
One of Marie Bashkirtseff’s first portraits, and an admirably
painted one, is that of her cousin Dina. It was her first work exhibited
at the Salon, and shows a young woman with her elbow resting on a
table and her face in her hand. Her loose gown of light blue damask,
white muslin fichu and soft, pale golden hair harmonize very happily
with the green plush of the table-cover, the white of the book, and
the flowers beside the bare arm. The delicate flesh tints of a buxom
blonde are admirable in tone, and the face extremely characteristic.
It has the unmistakable Tartar type in the low brow, slightly oblique
eyes, flattened nose, and broad lips with their expression of
sensuous indolence. Here there is nothing of that vivacious charm
which is so marked an element in the portrait of Mdlle. de Canrobert.
This sketchy portrait looks as if the painting had been done at the
first stroke. The round hat, the well-fitting clothes, the plants in the
background seem dashed in with the facility of a master. The face
sparkles at us from the canvas as if about to utter a witticism. This
cleverly-painted figure is all life, all movement, and in its style of
treatment and freedom of pose is suggestive of Mr. Whistler’s
manner.
Her portrait of herself, palette in hand, painted in the last year of
her life, is extremely interesting. It is a three-quarters length, and she
is standing looking straight in front of her with a harp a little behind to
the left. She is done in that becoming black studio uniform with the
broad white frills and jabot which has been so often described, and
the gown fits as if moulded on the body. Her deep blonde hair, thickly
coiled on the top of the head, ends in a fringe over her forehead. Her
features are more refined and spiritual than we know them from the
photographs. It seems as if the invisible presence of death had
already laid a finger on her fair body and fined it down to a greater