Hans Zimmer, Europe, and otherness

[damned_colonial]

So this might be a bit rambly, in which case I apologise in advance. Hopefully I can express myself at least sort of clearly.

One of the things I loved about the 2009 movie was Hans Zimmer's soundtrack. I found it atmospheric and interesting and very different from what one would expect, and I quickly downloaded it and have listened to it a lot over the last few months.

(ETA: if you haven't heard it, or don't recall it, and want to refresh, you can listen to previews on Amazon. It's also in the iTunes store with 30 second previews of each track. "Discombobulate" and "I never woke up in handcuffs before" are probably the best to listen to as examples of what's described below.)

Zimmer in interviews:

Holmes is such a quintessential English subject, but I didn't want to go over the Elgar ground, or the Vaughan Williams, or whatever... and I very consciously wrote with a Kurt Weill, Brechtian accent in the thing. [...] With Guy it was... Guy, what do you think of banjos? What do you think of Hungarian cimbalom?

We just talked about music that we liked, and somehow we got to Irish folk songs, and then I got to gypsy music, and suddenly we're talking about what was London like in those days? ... I believe Holmes is interested in other cultures, I think Holmes would be interested in how a gypsy violinist plays... Let's try and make music that's as quirky as the character, and as opinionated, and as outspoken... One thing that was important to me from the word go was to tell the audience, it's going to be different, this is not the Holmes you're used to. The first notes you hear are out of tune piano, out of tune Hungarian cimbalom, and a banjo.

So I find it interesting that Zimmer's really working the "outsider" vibe -- that Holmes, despite being English, has a soundtrack that is pan-European and non-orchestral and all about virtuosity and individualism rather than about fitting in and belonging.

It got me to thinking about Holmes's canonical French mother, and the fanon (I think originally propounded by Baring-Gould? it's described at length in his book "Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street" but it seems pretty widely accepted) that Sherlock Holmes spent a lot of his earlier life on the Continent. He certainly speaks many languages (eg. German in SCAN, and French of course, which was also shown in the movie) and knows his way around various parts of Europe (eg. the cases mentioned at the start of REIG).

It's also interesting that Zimmer talks about Weimar Berlin as a strong influence for the soundtrack, since the Weimar Republic was known for its sexual license and homosexual subculture. Berlin was known as a gay centre in Holmes's era too: looping back to my earlier post on Matt Cook's "London and the culture of homosexuality, 1885-1914", there's a lot of stuff in there about homosexual culture in cities like Berlin, Paris and Vienna; about the dominance of continental sexology (Ulrichs, Hirschfeld, Bloch, Krafft-Ebing, etc); and about Paris as the centre of fin-de-siecle decadence and the aesthetic movement that was so closely tied to Wilde and his circle. (Lest it seem that I'm ignoring Zimmer's comments about Irish folk music in favour of the Continent, Graham Robb points out (in "Strangers") that there was also a Victorian correlation between Ireland and sodomy: he writes, "it is remarkable that so many of the famous British sodomy scandals had an Irish connection," and gives a list of them, the most famous of course being Wilde.)

So to me, at any rate, the European-ness/non-Englishness of Zimmer's soundtrack doesn't just say "outsider" in a general way (though I'd love it for that alone), it also has some fairly strong queer overtones. Which is pretty much in keeping with the rest of the movie, really.

Anyway, I feel like I'm forever going on about how much I love Guy Ritchie's directorial choices, but I can't help but add the soundtrack to the list of things I love, for the way it helps flesh out Holmes's otherness.

Comments

[naraht]

Very thought-provoking post. It fits in neatly with my own current interests, which have involved reading quite a bit of new gay musicology. (Really interesting stuff.)

To start with, I agree entirely that the English pastoral school wouldn't suit the image that the movie is trying to create. One has to cast back a long way for other influential composers in England. (Like Handel, who wasn't even English. He might have been gay but sadly that's a topic for another time.) It wasn't until the twentieth century that English classical music became predominantly (in the words of Peter Pears) "queer and left and conshie."

Interwar Berlin, though? Isn't that a little anachronistic if you're trying to create an appropriate period atmosphere? One can certainly think about non-British music that ties into queer history and would have been known to Holmes himself. Schubert, possibly. Also Tchaikovsky.

One of the difficult and interesting things about "the love that dare not speak its name" is that it always ends up being coded in analogies and metaphors. This is fascinating from a textual analysis perspective, yet frustrating because it ends up participating in different varieties of othering. In American twentieth-century music for instance, gamelan-inspired music tends to be coded as gay because it is seen as "exotic" and "other." Queer or non-normative sexuality is in general often symbolized in music generally using orientalist elements. In this soundtrack it sounds like Gypsy violins and Hungarian music are carrying the burden of symbolizing the Other. And as interesting as it is in terms of what it says about the filmmakers' view of Holmes, it's by no means an unequivocally positive thing because it so easily becomes appropriative and exoticizing.

It would be very interesting to think more about Holmes' musical milieu, though. What was the opera that he and Watson were going to see in the movie? What would he have thought about Patience, which is certainly a very coded work?

Apologies now if I've rambled too much from your original theme. Hope there's some food for thought in there somewhere.

[forthwritten]

"In this soundtrack it sounds like Gypsy violins and Hungarian music are carrying the burden of symbolizing the Other. And as interesting as it is in terms of what it says about the filmmakers' view of Holmes, it's by no means an unequivocally positive thing because it so easily becomes appropriative and exoticizing."

As an observation, the person I went to see the film with (who is herself Northern Irish) and I both noticed that the music for the fight scenes tended to be Irish folk music - I recognised 'Rocky Road to Dublin' and can't remember if there were others. She felt that violence, criminality and the underworld were being strongly coded as Irish through the music, and wasn't comfortable with that.

[naraht]

She felt that violence, criminality and the underworld were being strongly coded as Irish through the music...

That was my impression as well. No doubt it was an association that the Victorians themselves would have recognised but not (I dare say) one that modern filmmakers ought to be trying to reproduce.

I'm fond of "Rocky Road to Dublin" but I do remember thinking, as the final credits rolled, that it made an odd end to the film.

[damned_colonial]

*nod*, the Irish music comes out most strongly in the boxing scene, and Rocky Road to Dublin is repeated over the final credits. There's definitely some problematic stuff going on there. But I'm not sure that violence/criminality/underworld accurately describes the boxing scene... it seemed to be a legal venue (The Punchbowl) and I don't think boxing matches of that kind nor betting on them were illegal at that time (anyone know?). What I saw in that scene was working class entertainment and Holmes "slumming", which has its own issues of course.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Prize fighting was illegal, though popular with the refined classes, like cock-fighting. The Punchbowl looks like it might feeder events that toffs would bet on.

That it was bare knuckle is accurate, and this did have the advantage of minimizing the percentage of head blows. Gloves were a 'reform' that sadly has resulted in more brain injury.

Sport was 'properly' the realm of moneyed amateurs.

[damned_colonial]

The opera he mentions in the carriage is Don Giovanni.

I'm not too worried by interwar Berlin being anachronistic. If I were to worry about anachronisms in the film, I'd be here all day ;) And after all, it's only 30 years off.

I suspect that looking for "non-British music that ties into queer history" is a bit of a tangent from what Zimmer was doing. From his interviews, it seems he was looking for music that expressed otherness and virtuosity. The queer part of the "otherness" doesn't seem to be something he was going for overtly/explicitly, so looking for gay composers wasn't high on his priority list.

I do wonder if anyone's done a round-up of music mentioned in the stories and considered it in this light? I know that Mendelssohn's Lieder are mentioned (ahem, even Rex Stout seems to think that's kind of gay)... what else?

[naraht]

I suspect that looking for "non-British music that ties into queer history" is a bit of a tangent from what Zimmer was doing. From his interviews, it seems he was looking for music that expressed otherness and virtuosity. The queer part of the "otherness" doesn't seem to be something he was going for overtly/explicitly, so looking for gay composers wasn't high on his priority list.

Hmmm, yeah. So is what you're suggesting that he wound up using queer themes and resonances almost accidentally, as it were, as another way of signalling otherness? That queerness, if evoked through musical resonances, is as much of a metaphor as Hungarian nationality is?

[damned_colonial]

Not quite, though I like that way of putting it.

I was thinking more that in evoking "otherness" (his explicit goal), he also implied homosexuality -- perhaps accidentally, perhaps knowingly but without making a priority of it.