Maestro, A Touch More Strings, Please

The musical score has been an important implement in the moviemaker’s toolbelt since before “movies” were “talkies.” In the hands of an unimaginative director who can only muster slavish adherence to convention, a score can give away the game, clumsily seeking to manipulate the viewer with too-overt foreshadowing. Talented filmmakers, however, such as Mr. Hitchcock to name one, can turn the score into a character all its own, bringing depth and meaning to the production wholly apart from, but in close coordination with, the visual images.

Francis Ford Coppola is one of those cineastes who has turned a score into its own, compelling character. The theme for The Godfather, composed by his father, is a theme that manages to contain within it all that is great and fascinating about those films. One need not have seen the movies (but if you haven’t, what wrong with you?) to hear in the melody the languid sunbaked hills of Sicily, the mourning what was left behind in the Old World coupled with the hope thought to exist in the New, and under it all, menace in the not-quite-major, not-quite-minor sequence. It is a beautiful little piece of music, used by Coppola to brilliant effect in the Godfather movies as the central conceit, the Maypole around which the story revolves.

Real life does not come with a musical score. Unlike the popcorn-noshing viewer in a darkened theater, we never receive advance warning from dour cellos that life is about to take a turn for the worse, nor does a crescendo of lush violins herald a romantic encounter.

As someone who believes and thinks about such things, then, I was not sure how to react when at lunch today the faint strains of the Godfather theme wafted through my local diner. Songs on a sound system I can understand. We hear songs everywhere. A score, though, can actually be experienced as an enhancing backdrop even to a scene in real life, since that is how it is used on screen. I allowed myself the brief, unsettling sensation of imagining that I had dropped into the movieworld of the Corleones, that in a moment Vito Corleone would shuffle in to buy some oranges. An amusing moment in the middle of an ordinary day. There is nothing quite like music that carries the potential to lift you out of your present and dispatch you to a world far away.

Of course, if the Darth Vader theme had come on, I would have scurried out the back door as fast as I could.