Musical Eclecticism and Ambiguity in The Sweet Hereafter

The Sweet Hereafter (1997), directed by the independent Armenian Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, tells the story of a tragic schoolbus accident and its devastating effects on a small northern community. In adapting the 1991 novel by Russell Banks, Egoyan relocated the story from upstate New York to rural British Columbia and incorporated Robert Browning's poem "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" as a commentative overlay on the themes of accountability, beguilement, and the loss of children. Egoyan also shattered the straightforward chronology of Banks's narrative into a swath of glittering fragments. Composer Mychael Danna, with whom Egoyan had collaborated on six previous films, ¹ fashioned a restrained composite score featuring four musical elements, each with a distinct stylistic character: a melancholy modal tune performed by early music consort, a series of contemporary songs arranged for a laid-back rock band, rhapsodic intonations on the ney (Iranian flute), and a minimal loop for piano, drenched in reverb. A fifth element—ambient electronic noise—hovers in status between music and sound design. Within a limited emotional palette, Danna designed his materials to create maximal axes of contrast: tuneful/tuneless, texted/textless, metric/free, archaic/modern, elite/popular, and European/North American/Middle Eastern, to name a few. Some of his musical choices relate directly to elements of the story—one character hopes to gain fame as a popular musician; her playlist includes covers of songs by Canadian artists Jane Siberry and the Tragically Hip—while others are more poetically motivated: the Renaissance flavor of the consort picks up on the period setting of the Pied Piper story, for instance, while the ney evokes the "foreign," magical influence of his pipe. In fact, much of the freshness and expressive power of Danna's score results from its unexpected, oblique correspondences: lute and recorder for a bus ride to school, Iranian ney against wintry northern mountains, rock music as a marker of contemplation.

Egoyan's art-cinema storytelling displays a predilection for multiple perspectives and disjunctions of space and time. ² Danna correspondingly works with a plurality of musical "voices," most of the time maintaining discrete boundaries between them. Eclecticism and patchwork are nothing new in film-music tradition; to borrow Bernard Herrmann's words, film is a "mosaic art." ³ Yet it will be helpful to distinguish the "pragmatically inspired eclecticism" of early Hollywood composers like Max Steiner from Danna's postmodern usage. ⁴ In Hollywood convention, the separate pieces of music as of film were organized to serve narrative continuity. This meant following certain codes for grasping spatial relations, temporal sequence, psychological motivation, and causal logic. Composers routinely combined elements from different discursive spheres (such as folk, exotic, avant-garde, theatrical, and symphonic) for representational purposes while taking care to modulate between elements or otherwise clearly define the nature of their interaction. Such dialogical effects generally remain subordinate to the style of an individual composer or the house style of a particular studio. Often, as in the case of Steiner, stylistic homogeneity goes hand in hand with stock emotional or semantic associations. Thus Steiner's score to the wartime romance Casablanca (1942) incorporates generic exoticism along with references to "La Marseillaise," inspirational hymns, and American popular song in the interests of semantic directness in connection with setting, character, and plot points. In other cases, composers exploit topical diversity for more ambiguous associations. For example, in the dark psychological thriller Sunset Boulevard (1950), Franz Waxman's inflections of style lend themselves less instantaneously to rationalization. At the first glimpse of aging film star Norma Desmond, one hears alto flute in Phrygian mode, harp flourishes, and snatches of tango rhythm. This stirring of exoticism does not attach in any straightforward way to the contemporary Los Angeles setting, depending rather on symbolic connections yet to be developed. Likewise, for the car chase that brings Joe Gillis to Desmond's mansion in the hills, the music takes on the accents of a Gershwinesque piano concerto, whose suggestions of New York brashness, urban energy, and jazz chic create an oblique field of signification in relation to the action sequence. ⁵

Danna's...