composer: David Raksin), about which Royal S.
Brown writes:Almost every piece of music, diegetic and nondiegetic,
heard in the film either is David Raksin’s mysteriously
chromatic fox-trot tune or else grows out of it, partic-
ularly in the nondiegetic backing. The detective (Dana
Andrews) investigating Laura’s “murder” turns on a
phonograph: it plays “Laura.” The journalist throws a
party for Laura once she has “returned from the
dead”: the background music is “Laura.” But the way
in which the melody travels back and forth between
the diegetic and the nondiegetic, making that distinc-
tion all but meaningless, likewise reinforces the over-
all obsessiveness.^7A movie such as Stephen Daldry’s The Hours
(2002), which tells a story spanning some eighty
years in three different settings with three differ-
ent women, presents a unique challenge to a musi-
cal composer to find some way to unify all theseelements. The movie’s narrative concerns the dif-
ferent ways these three women are affected by Vir-
ginia Woolf ’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, including
the novelist herself (played by Nicole Kidman) in
the 1920s; an American housewife, Laura Brown
(Julianne Moore), in the 1940s; and a New York pro-
fessional woman, Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep),
in the present. Therefore, one might expect a tri-
partite musical score with one distinct sound for
each historical period and location, and perhaps
even a distinct theme for each principal character.
However, composer Philip Glass chooses a very dif-
ferent course.
A New Age classical composer with minimalist
tendencies, Glass links the three stories with recur-
ring musical motifs played by a chamber orchestra
of a pianist and five string players. To create fur-
ther unity among the lives of the three women,
Glass emphasizes the bond that Woolf ’s novel has
created among them by avoiding music from the
periods in which they lived. The tensions in the
score pull between the emotional and cerebral,
underscoring the tensions that the characters
experience in this psychological melodrama.1 2
(^7) Brown, p. 86.
TYPES OF FILM SOUND 407
Great music, bad boyOne of the principal concerns of
Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange(1971; sound editor:
Brian Blamey), the loss of moral choice through psychological
conditioning, is developed by a focus on [1] Alex (Malcolm
McDowell), a worthless, violent character, here staring at [2]
a poster of the German classical/Romantic composer
Ludwig van Beethoven. Alex’s only good trait is his love for
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony——especially the setting, in its
finale, of Friedrich von Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” music that
represents all that is most noble in the human spirit. Here,
however, this music is used ironically to underscore Alex’s
desire to preserve his freedom to do what he wants (which
consists mostly of violent acts) even though society tries to
socialize him away from these acts (using a fascistic treatment
that attempts to turn him into a “clockwork orange”). In the
somewhat muddled world of this controversial film, we’re
supposed to be glad that Alex is still sufficiently human to
embrace Beethoven andresist brainwashing.