Download Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung 8, Juli 2012

Philip Brophy ist in seiner Einschätzung noch rabiater. 6 Er versteht
Atonalität in der Filmmusik allgemein als ein Zeichen für »das Andere«
(»The Other«) oder »das Monströse« und führt als Beispiel hierfür die Art
der Verwendung von Dissonanzen in der Musik zu CREATURE FROM THE
BLACK LAGOON an:
In short, atonality in the film score signifies the Other:
the monstrous, the grotesque, the aberrant. Its deviation
from diatonic scripture is never slight, always excessive.
Like the ultimate death which must befall the movie
monster, the presence of atonality must be hysterically
marked as transgressive and unforgiving. Far from being
emancipated, dissonance is condemned; ritualistically
sacrificed at the grand altar of tonal resolve as »The End«
uncannily appears on the screen like an epitaph for the
avant garde.
[…] Jack Arnold's THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK
LAGOON (1954) exemplifies this. […] The accompanying
music by Hans J. Salter (a key composer of this carney
style of monster music) is remarkably brooding, shifting
through a kind of ›soft serialism‹, clearly connoting that
all is not as it appears. [N]ature is rendered beautiful but
beastly; its dissonance not emancipated, but set loose
ready to terrorize.
6 The Secret History of Film Music, erschienen in The Wire, 1997-1998, online unter:
http://www.philipbrophy.com/projects/scrthst/AcademyPeril.html
(Stand: 15.7.2012)
Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung, 8, 2012 // 84