I finally sat down and busted out Athena (yeah, I’m lame and name my external hard drives, so sue me). Athena is my ‘youngest’ media storage drive. She’s where I was storing my collection of Justice League Unlimited, Detective Academy Q, and Monster episodes (there’s some other stuff on there too, of course…).
I’d shelved her back when I managed to do incredible damage to my old laptop by dropping it on a concrete floor, and she’s sat and gathered dust since I got my tablet. I decided to dust her off and start consuming again. I mean, I had 60 episodes of Monster unviewed, and an entire season of JLU.
And it’s been good. It’s been a reminder of some of the reasons that I enjoy consuming fiction. There’s just something relaxing in sitting back and absorbing characters and context. In some ways it builds shared vocabulary (being able to refer to fictional events as illustrations can be pretty powerful), but it also serves as a form of fuel for my creative centers.
On top of that, I learn a lot about constructing media. For instance, JLU has an excellent musical intro piece. I like it a lot. Part of it is that I just like the electric guitar work, but a lot of it is the associations I have linked to it. I mean, this piece of music is now intimately tied with fond memories of enjoyable stories and snappy one-liners (I still grin when I think of the Flash delivering ‘You’re a stand-up guy, Bats. Don’t let ‘em call you a psychotic loner.’)
So in addition to being musically enjoyable, the theme song calls up powerfully resonant associations.
This is true of media in general, though I find that it’s particularly true in Cowboy Bebop, possibly due to the ecclectic nature of the music. The JLU theme recalls general associations, but pieces like ‘Green Bird’ call up specific scenes.
Now, I know that music is generally powerful. That is, to some degree or another these associations are part of the way humans absorb multi-channel media. But I wonder, is this something that’s more resonant with me than with most people? Is my brain wired in such a way that I have much stronger music-thematic links than other people? Or is this stuff just as powerful for everyone else? If it’s generally as powerful as it is for me, how come we never talk about it?
Thomas
I think it takes a unique mind to make these strong links between music and theme. I have a friend who wants to be an actor, director, screenwriter et al. who is a lot like that; He does a hell of a better job reviewing movies than any professional critic out there, because he considers the whole piece of media, to include the score, the timing of movements and lines with changes in the musical theme, everything.
For me, it has to be a piece of media that affects me pretty strongly, and even then it takes time, for me to really pay attention to the music beyond a passing interest. For instance, the opening score.. hell, the opening three beats to the “Firefly” theme song have that level of association to me, but I’d be hard pressed to think of any others.
I think part of it may be that our educational system doesn’t teach us very much about music, in comparison to the time it spends teaching us to take note of, say, literary themes.
That means that few people have been trained to consciously notice or identify the effects that music has on them. It also means that most people also don’t have a vocabulary with which to talk about it. So outside of musically-educated circles (conservatories, etc.), the specifics of the power of music and how it is or can be used remains largely unexamined.
Which is not to say that it isn’t powerful, of course. The people who actually make movies and TV shows pay a great deal of attention to the scoring! I think it quite possible, though, that far more people respond to those aspects of media subliminally, without much noticing them on the conscious level, than fail to notice consciously other ways in which the media is doing what it’s doing.