Chapter 5

Atonality and Eternity: The Musical Language of Comédie

David Foster

In January 1966, in a studio on the Rue Mouffetard in Paris, a small cast and crew came together to produce a highly unusual piece of cinema. Filmmaker Marin Karmitz, theatre director Jean-Marie Serreau, film editor Jean Ravel, sound engineer Luc Perini, and actors Eléonore Hirt, Michael Lonsdale and Delphine Seyrig, collaborated with the writer and dramatist Samuel Beckett to create a screen adaptation of the latter’s stageplay, Comédie. Directing the project was the Romanian-born, French-raised Karmitz, a graduate of the prestigious Paris film school, IDHEC, an acolyte of the nouvelle vague, whose aesthetics were also being shaped by the work of other eminent exponents of late modernism in mid-1960s Paris: the music of Pierre Boulez, the paintings of Jean Dubuffet and the novels of Marguerite Duras.1 The latter had written the script for his first major directorial project, the short film Nuit Noire Calcutta (1964). Filming on Comédie lasted around a fortnight, and Beckett, who was present throughout, seems to have had a significant hand in the work’s creation, not least because he had already spent a great deal of time rehearsing the same cast for Comédie’s stage production.2 After a lengthy editing process with which Beckett was also closely involved, the completed film received a largely unfavourable reception at its Venice Film Festival premiere, following which it appears to have been more or less forgotten and not seen publicly again until June 2000 when it was shown at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris as part of a group show called ‘Voilà, le monde dans la tête’. An exhibition at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery in London followed in December 2000, and the film has subsequently been shown widely in several exhibitions in Europe and beyond.3

Since its re-emergence, scholars have provided insightful overviews of the film,4 examining issues around its adaptation and its relation to the theatrical original,5 as well as exploring its formal and spatial structure.6 This chapter also engages with issues of form and structure but does so specifically in order to address one of Comédie’s most striking expressive aspects, an aspect that can be broadly described as its musicality. The study is predominantly concerned with drawing an analogy between the film’s images, structures and sounds, and recognized musical forms and language – specifically, the language of atonality. This gives rise to an exploration of the semantics of atonality in relation to the film. Finally, I suggest that this atonal language is incorporated into a style and patterning that is characteristic of aspects of musical Minimalism.

The original stage version of Comédie is, of course, the French translation of Beckett’s Play, the mise-en-scène of which consists solely of three funerary urns lined up side by side, from whose mouths three heads protrude: a man (M) in the centre, and a woman on each side (W1 and W2), all facing front. Situated at floor level between the urns and the audience is a spotlight that moves between the faces of the three protagonists, which sometimes splits in three to illuminate them simultaneously. The figures speak when, only when and always when their faces are illuminated by the spotlight, and their lines are delivered at a ‘rapid tempo throughout’.7 Play is divided into three distinct sections which Beckett described as the Chorus, the Narration and the Meditation.8 In the Chorus, all three protagonists are illuminated and so speak their ‘largely unintelligible’9 lines together. In the next section, the Narration, each takes it in turn to relate her/his own perspective on a series of events in which they were involved. The story related is a typical narrative of adultery: the man is married to one of the women, conducts an affair with the other, confesses his dalliance to his wife but fails to leave his mistress, then disappears completely. Both wife and mistress believe that he has ended up with the other. In the final section, the Meditation, the protagonists reflect on the circumstances in which we see them – compelled to speak by the spotlight – and on the aftermath of the affair. All three sections are then repeated, and Beckett gives the option to repeat the three sections exactly or to introduce an element of variation relating to the strength of the light and the characters’ voices, and/or the order in which the lines are delivered.

Critics have long approached readings of Beckett’s Play in musical terms. As Maurice Blackman notes, ‘nearly all commentators rely sooner or later on musical terminology or musical analogy in discussing Play. [It is] a piece of chamber music, as it were, cast in a rondo form and deploying language in a distinctly musical way.’10 The film adaptation of Comédie, whilst radically different in many respects, does retain all of the stage version’s musical elements, whilst adding a crucial medium-specific aspect, that of montage.11 Indeed, whilst the musical elements of the stage version derive almost entirely from the vocal content and vocal structure of the play, one of the driving principles of this chapter is the proposition that in the film version one of the primary ways in which we experience not only those vocal elements, but also the visual content and structure and the interplay between the two, is closely comparable or even tantamount to the manner in which we experience music.

The objection immediately arises that ‘the manner in which we experience music’ is not only extremely complex but also highly contested, so let us clarify the kind of response being referred to. To refer to Comédie’s musicality is to refer, initially, to a response that is primarily physiological, as opposed to intellectual, analytical or theoretical. As Michael Glasmeier and Gaby Hartel suggest, the ‘purely phonetic sound poetry’ of Comédie’s mostly indecipherable speech works in tandem with the dynamic and ‘rhythmic montage of the images’ to stimulate a response that ‘gets a grip on the viewer’s “nervous system”’.12 Of course, a physiological stimulus is not necessarily musical, but the specific content of Comédie’s tableaux, and the montage of those tableaux, imbues the piece with a manifest sense of musicality. Specifically, the sparse tableaux that make up all of the film’s images – three monochrome figures, each comprising a funerary urn from which a talking head protrudes, depicted at varying depths in relation to both the frame and each other – embody an interplay of distinct and clearly delineated elements of repetition and variation, both in terms of the composition of each individual arrangement and in contraposition to every other arrangement in the film. That is to say, all of the film’s tableaux are different versions of the same pattern, variations on a theme: figures suspended in an apparently infinite space, each of whom has clearly discernible but fluctuating spatial relations to two other figures with near-identical attributes and similarly discernible but fluctuating spatial relations to the frame inside which it is depicted. It is this aesthetic impression – that the mise-en-scène of the film is composed only and entirely out of these sparse, shifting differential relations – that gives rise to a primary experience of the montage that is commensurable or even homologous with the way in which we experience music.

The idea that it is not just aural but visual material that can produce a musical effect is not new: film theorists from Eisenstein to Deleuze have written of the visual music of montage. As one scholar paraphrases the latter in an article on the former’s resonance with Beckett: ‘Film montage, as a system, creates a mechanism that “invades” the nervous system by creating what may be called shock waves, to which the body responds by mapping its rhythms, as in the bodily response to the feelings evoked by music.’13 But how might this immediate, somatic way of experiencing the work be explored in a scholarly context? Short of examining a viewer’s actual physiological response to the work, we must, conversely, return to a mode of analytical, theoretical discourse and, specifically, a mode of analogical discourse. In fact, it is axiomatic that an analogical mode of one kind or another is unavoidable when using a different medium – in this case verbal language – to describe music: the attempt to represent it in another form, regardless of whether analogy or metaphor is conspicuously employed, can only ever point towards a likeness of the music itself.

The analogical mode of the present study works to equate Comédie’s visual, vocal and structural material with musical parallels, with the result that an extensive translation of the piece into an entirely musical framework is described. A large part of this translation is founded on a suggestion that the language and structure that the film employs to stimulate an initially physiological response may be considered analogous to the defining characteristic of atonal music, namely, the absence of a tonal centre. The analogy is followed through to suggest that the semantics of such atonality – most notably the expression of a refusal of conclusivity and arrival – might be understood to reflect the semantics that permeate Comédie. Having constructed a detailed impression of the film as music, the study concludes by suggesting that the piece’s atonality is incorporated into a style and patterning redolent of certain strains of musical Minimalism, on account of its highly repetitive patterning and reductive tonal palette. Further, I suggest that the overall music of the piece might even be understood to embody a kind of transition between these two major tendencies within twentieth-century music: atonality and Minimalism.

The chapter’s methodology, then, encompasses a twin approach. It attempts to point towards the film’s tangible musical affectivity: that is, it tries to account for a partly synaesthetic response in which one might ‘hear’ both its visual and its aural material as music. In order to do this, it also comprises a partially imaginative exercise (on the part of both writer and reader) whereby the film’s material is theoretically translated into musical parallels, such that one might recreate, either mentally or in actuality, the music thus described. Like any interpretation, the study does not claim to offer objective understanding; rather its modus operandi is one of suggestion. The musical parallels are no more than propositions that work to intimate (indeed cannot do more than intimate) a musical experience of the film. Since the methodological status of the analogy is suggestive in this way, its semantic implications – which chiefly result from the conceit of comparing the film’s visual and aural aesthetic to that of musical atonality – take on a similar status. That is, the interpretive possibilities that are outlined do not purport to rest on any kind of stable foundation. Instead, the analogy and its interpretive implications are suspended, rather like the figures themselves, reflecting the film’s own open-endedness. In fact, I want to suggest that the critical value of the chapter might be found not merely in the discussion of eternality that it alights on – a subject which has been discussed at length in countless studies of Beckett’s work – but particularly in the method this study proposes: the journey rather than the arrival remains the main locus of significance, again reflecting the work under discussion. The method illuminates a range of both productive and problematic aspects inherent to a discourse that translates aesthetic forms between a triumvirate of media – image, sound and the written word – in several combinations. It comprises a heuristic and somewhat experimental mode of analysis in which music, analogy and theory are combined to think systematically about the composition and structure of a cinematic work, both as a whole and in its various constituent parts.

An Analogy between Image and Music

We can begin to formulate the analogy by making the straightforward suggestion that the appearance of a figure on screen is analogous to the sounding of a single note, the duration of the note equating to the duration of the figure’s appearance in one position. So when all three are depicted on screen at the same time, this is analogous to the simultaneous sounding of three notes, in other words, a three-note chord. The figures are near-identical in their basic appearance, in that they all comprise the same basic shape, visual texture and chromaticity, and so, despite some facial differences, it seems reasonable to suggest that the basic tone-colour or texture of all three notes is also close to being identical (the implications of the figures not always being depicted with their urns is addressed in due course). Where the figures obviously differ from each other is in their positioning: their spacing in relation to one another and in relation to the frame of the screen. Let us posit these differential spatial relations as analogous to differential musical relations of pitch.

The configuration in which the three figures are first depicted – at equal size, in a line with a narrow interval of empty space between each urn – is replicated as the figures’ depicted magnitude increases, at six different scales in total. The proportions of the tableau are maintained in its replication: that is, the spacing between the figures stays the same whenever they are shown depicted in this visually balanced way (which they always are until, in the second section of the film, we see them depicted at different depths in relation to each other). Let us call this configuration the ‘basic tableau’ or, rather, the ‘basic chord’ of the piece (see Figure 5.1).

images

Figure 5.1 Still from Samuel Beckett and Marin Karmitz, Comédie, 1966. 35mm film transferred to DVD; 18.43 mins. Courtesy of Marin Karmitz

In considering what kind of chord we might compare this ‘basic tableau’ to, for obvious reasons, a triad of some kind immediately suggests itself: the term ‘triad’ occasionally referring to any chord of three notes, but almost always used in music to designate ‘a chord of three notes, consisting of a given note with the third and fifth above it. The third may be major or minor, the fifth perfect, augmented or diminished.’14 Evidently, there is a clear interval between the three figures in every instance of the basic chord and, importantly, both intervals are of equal width and remain proportionally the same throughout, suggesting that the triad we might compare this image to would be one with equal intervals between its first and third notes and its third and fifth notes. So what kind of triad has intervals of equal width between notes? There are two main possibilities: an augmented triad, which has an interval of four semitones between notes and is thus composed of a major third and an augmented fifth; and a diminished triad, which has an interval of three semitones between notes and is thus composed of a minor third and a diminished fifth. Additionally of course, we could choose instead to analogize the tableau to a three-note chord that is not triadic in the usual sense, and posit an interval between notes of one, two, five or more semitones instead. However, it is to the characteristics of a diminished triad which, in forging a productive analogy, the tableau can be most meaningfully compared.

A diminished triad comprises a tonic, a minor third and a diminished fifth. This last note, the diminished fifth, gives the defining interval of the chord, which is also known as a tritone, because the interval is three whole tones from the tonic. Deryck Cooke writes:

The interval between the tonic and the sharp fourth [i.e. the diminished fifth] should normally act as a modulation to the dominant [i.e. the perfect fifth]; but when it is exposed without any resolution of any kind, and becomes an ‘essential’ note, a tension in its own right … it acts as a ‘flaw’ which destroys the integrity of the tonic key – thus removing the music outside the categories of human joy and sorrow inherent in the major and minor systems.15

This is the defining characteristic of the diminished triad that makes for a fitting and apposite comparison with the ‘basic tableau’ of the film’s three figures. It allows us to denote the three tones of a triad to the figures, without any of those notes being a tonal centre. So, from left to right across the triad, we can denote F216 as the tonic, H as the minor third, and F1 as the diminished fifth, and yet each of the three notes is of equal status, is a ‘tension in its own right’. This engenders an ‘atonal equilibrium’17 between all three tones, and, as in the notes of the dodecaphonic scale of Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal system, the three figures ‘become equal in their structural standing’.18 Indeed, one scholar writes of this idea as nothing less than ‘a definite conclusion: Any tendency for a tonality to emerge may be avoided by introducing a note three whole tones distant from the key note of that tonality.’19 It follows that we could denote the triad from right to left instead, and the analogy would remain unchanged: the interval between F1 and F2 will be that of a tritone regardless of which is denoted as the tonic and which as the diminished fifth, and without any tonal centre to the piece, and without other tones outside those of the diminished triad, the designations of the tones are emptied of exterior reference.

Crucially though, the three tones of a diminished triad remain meaningful in relation to each other. For although the analogy bestows equal status upon all three figures, the basic facts of a triad’s spacing mean that, clearly, the three notes do not quite all share the same tensions. Each figure/note shares a tension, a relationship, with the other two, but whilst H shares an identical tension – a minor third – with both F1 and F2, they share a different tension with each other, namely a tritone. If we consider what we know about the actual text of Play, or perhaps the simple fact that in the film we can identify what the figures’ genders are, the structure of these dynamics makes sense: the relationship between H and F1 and the parallel relationship between H and F2 are characterized by the same tension, whilst the relationship between F1 and F2 is characterized by a quite different tension. It seems particularly apposite that the minor third is an interval of consonance, whilst the tritone – an interval equal to two minor thirds – is one of dissonance. Such relations reflect those of the figures’ fraught ‘eternal triangle’. That is, in terms of our whole chord, it is as though the intervals between H and each of the Fs are both set up in perpetuity as relations of potential consonance, but that because of the equally perpetual presence of the other F completing the triad, this potential consonance of the minor third is always disrupted by the dissonant tritone interval; thus we never ‘hear’ the consonant minor third, and only dissonance is expressed through the tensions between the figures themselves. The overall piece however, as it comprises only the three notes of the diminished triad, expresses no consonance or dissonance, but is entirely atonal.

How, then, does the analogy account for the changes in the depicted position of the figures? If we consider that the figures are essentially static upon a single diegetic plane, whilst the camera’s images engender the variations in the depicted magnitude of the figures,20 then the six manifestations of this ‘basic chord’ are in one aspect unchanging – namely, in the static relation between the figures/notes themselves – and in one aspect subject to variation, that is, in their changing relation to the framing camera. So, in what does the variation consist? Considering that we have analogized differences of tonal pitch with the spacing of the figures along the screen’s horizontal axis, it would perhaps seem to follow that the differentiation in the figures’ relation to the camera – the differentiation in their magnitude in relation to the frame along the axis of depth – should be analogized to a separate quality of the note. The quality of volume (as in amplitude) immediately suggests itself, especially as the figures do, in the way in which we perceive them, increase and decrease in magnitudinal volume along the axis of depth. But whilst such a comparison would perhaps be possible, it is also conceivable to analogize the figures’ variation in their spatial relation to the frame in terms of pitch too. The reason that it makes sense to do this is because ‘what has been termed the “basic miracle of music”, namely, the octave’,21 means that pitch can be understood to possess two different expressive attributes, to operate, in a sense, in two different dimensions: that of ‘pitch height’, which is ‘used to refer to perceived musical pitch that occurs independent of the octave’,22 and that of ‘pitch chroma’, which ‘refers to the perceived musical pitch of corresponding notes across octaves’.23

We can therefore posit that each one of the figures is denoted by one particular chromatic value, and this denotation does not change; however, the octaval pitch of the note – the pitch height – does change, and this is dictated by the figures’ depicted placement upon the continuum of depth. In terms of our musical analogy then, the camera operates both as a kind of conductor (a mode of musical direction that has often been brought to bear on the interpretation of Play, among other Beckett works24) and as a kind of composer/transposer, as a modulator of frequency and also a controller of the pace and rhythm at which these different frequencies are sounded. The figures in one sense remain the same, each remaining forever characterized by the same essential chromatic value, but are transposed octavally by the frequency modulation of the framing camera. Ernst Levy describes this kind of transposition effectively: ‘Here are two tones, different, yet so alike that we call them by the same name, taking them to form an identity – a peculiar, unique sort of identity: two and yet one’:25 different and yet the same. So, whilst every one of the film’s tableaux that depicts all three figures is analogous to the sounding of a diminished triad, with the intervallic tensions remaining unchanged, the tonal tensions are subject to variation. We can turn to Levy again to illustrate the point, who describes the triad as ‘the second “miracle of music”’,26 continuing:

Every interval name has a twofold meaning: it points both to a character and a distance. The term third, for instance, designates, on one hand, a distance: it is the third (diatonic) tone from a starting point. It also designates, on the other hand, a relationship between two tones. If one of the tones is transposed by an octave, away from the other tones [then] the melodic relation has changed. Not so the harmonic relation. A third remains a third at whatever octave distance the tones might be placed.27

In this way it might be suggested that the camera’s ability to give an impression or illusion of depth to two-dimensional space is analogous here to the manner in which octave transpositions of tone give an impression of depth to music. Thus the montage of the film embodies, or ‘enfigures’, a form of relational motion: a musical motion in which no thing moves. This is what we see, or ‘hear’, in Comédie: dynamic movement without the displacement of objects, a ‘pure motion’ or, rather, a purely relational motion. Of course, montage can often express this kind of musical motion, although arguably seldom with the ‘purity’ that is achieved in Comédie through the spareness of its mise-en-scène.

Such an approach might be further consolidated by considering more closely the range of planes upon which the figures are depicted, and noting that the figures’ depiction is restricted to only a handful of specific planes along the axis of depth. Moreover, there is always a considerable differential between each of the planes upon which they are seen. In all, there are nine different planes. As well as the six planes on which the ‘basic tableau’ appears, there are an additional three planes, depicting figures in three different magnitudes of close-up (and without their urns: a point discussed in due course). All of the planes that are occupied in the frames showing figures upon two different planes simultaneously can also be matched to these nine planes. So, analogously this dictates that the piece is played out across a nine-octave range, a frequency range which, appositely in terms of our analogy, spans almost the whole auditory range of human hearing (which is, of course, also the range within which all music is composed and experienced). To be exact, ‘frequencies audible to the average human ear are in the range between 20 and 20,000Hz’.28 Given that an octave transposition consists in a doubling or halving of frequency, the range of average human hearing can be calculated as being a little short of ten octaves (a ten octave range would span from 20 to 20,480Hz).

Another way to approach this idea is through the identification of a structural motif of doubling in the spacing of the triad in terms of both its intervallic tensions along the horizontal axis and its tonal tensions along the axis of depth. That is, the intervallic value of a minor third is doubled to give a tritone, which gives the unchanging intervallic tensions of our diminished triad. A tritone symmetrically divides the octave, so a doubling of its interval produces an octave interval. An octave interval is defined by its ratio of 2:1: that is, a frequency is doubled or halved to transpose it up or down by an octave, and this doubling and halving is made manifest along the continuum of depth to give the different octaval frequencies, the variable tonal tensions, of the piece. The tensions between the notes remain defined by the same ratio, but upon the screen’s horizontal axis, this ratio applies to the intervallic tensions, whereas, upon the screen’s axis of depth, the ratio applies to the tonal tensions.

It should be noted that an analogy based on this series of octaval transpositions is not logically perfect in terms of the change in the figures’ depicted size. Were it an ideal comparison, the figures would of course halve and double in their depicted size along the nine planes picked out of the continuum. Clearly this is not quite the case, so the analogy represents an interpretive strategy that partially imposes a meaningful musical structure onto that of the film, as opposed to one that precisely mirrors the film’s images. Arguably, this slight mismatch is justifiable in terms of the interpretive ideas that the analogy proposes.

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Figure 5.2 Still from Samuel Beckett and Marin Karmitz, Comédie, 1966. 35mm film transferred to DVD; 18.43 mins. Courtesy Marin Karmitz

The next question that presents itself concerns the direction of the frequency continuum. We can address this by considering what frequency actually is: namely the number of wave cycles completed over a given time, the difference between high and low frequencies being that the former completes more wave cycles over a given time than the latter. So, if we treat the camera as the modulator of frequency, then the length of time it takes to complete a cycle between modulator and modulated will shorten as the proximity between the frame of the camera and the figures increases, and thus the images of greatest apparent magnitude, the extreme close-ups, are ‘heard’ as the highest pitched notes in the piece. If we are considering the pitch continuum as the nine octaves that span the range of human hearing, then that is a very shrill pitch indeed, whilst those of the smallest apparent magnitude can be analogized as the notes of lowest pitch.

A coherent idea of how Comédie’s images might ‘sound’ is taking shape, but there are two further analogous qualities to consider: the dynamics (as in loudness) of the notes, and the texture/timbre of the notes. Regarding the former, it is worth turning to Lawrence Marks, an expert in the study of synaesthesia, on the findings of ‘sensory psychophysical experiments’:

When the reader or listener encounters a synesthetic metaphor, a metaphor of light and sound, the loudness tends to imply a perceptually equivalent level of brightness, or the brightness a perceptually equivalent level of loudness, in accordance with an implicit or explicit sensory correspondence between these two instantiations of intensity.29

Let us then go along with this straightforward conclusion that ‘there is a synesthetic association between brightness and loudness’ and consider the relative intensity of light to equate with the relative intensity of amplitude: the brighter the image, the louder the note.30 In order to confirm such an equation, we only have to consider that if a figure were not illuminated at all, it would not be visible on screen, and thus, in our analogy, a note would not sound.

This equation of brightness and loudness proves important in addressing our final analogous quality, that of the notes’ timbre, a consideration of which proves rather more complicated. The analogy began by equating the appearance of each figure with the sounding of a note, so it follows that the timbre or texture of this note might be compared to the pictorial content of the figure as it appears on screen. However, whilst the analogous qualities between music and images that we have dealt with so far operate along a continuum, both timbre and pictorial imagery clearly do not. As Roger Scruton notes, ‘timbre, and tone-colour generally, presents no parallel system of musical organization, on a par with rhythm, melody and harmony’.31 This fact helps to demonstrate why the equation of timbre with picture is entirely appropriate, but leaves us with some fairly insurmountable difficulties in terms of describing the specific type of sound with which we might compare the image. However, the way in which the images appear can tell us something quite important about the characteristics of the kind of note to which we might compare them: specifically, when we see a figure or figures appear on, or disappear from, the screen and ‘move’ between one cut and the next, they do not fade in or fade out (except at the very beginning of the film) but appear or disappear instantaneously. Furthermore, the level of illumination given to the figures frequently varies during a single composition (as the spotlight moves among them): that is, in terms of our analogy, during a single sounding of a chord. We can surmise from both observations that the kind of note to which we might compare the figures would have to be one whose amplitude does not decay (not the kind of sound made by, for example, a piano or other instrument which hammers or plucks a string, instruments which produce a sound which almost instantly decays), in other words, a drone and, furthermore, one that can increase and decrease in amplitude during a single sounding of a note. If we were to consider the physical cause of such a note, many instruments would satisfy these conditions, but such requirements certainly narrow the field and, more importantly, give us a much greater appreciation of the texture of Comédie’s ‘music’.

A further aspect of the figures’ appearance tells us something more about the timbre of their analogous sound, that is, the fact that the basic pictorial content of the figures changes and so, therefore, must the timbre of the note. This change consists, of course, in whether a figure is depicted as the juxtaposition of a head and an urn or just as a head, and analogizing this difference in timbre can tell us something about the timbre itself. That is, the head–urn combination can be understood as producing a tone with a more complex texture than the tone produced by the head on its own, and one way in which we might approach the notion of a tone’s complexity is by considering the phenomenon of its overtones (and Beckett would no doubt consider the present discussion as exemplifying the ‘headaches’ among them of which he spoke).32 It is worth citing two explanations of this phenomenon:

A tone produced by any musical instrument is not just a single tone, but is a simultaneous spectrum of other less obviously heard tones. These tones are called overtones, also known as harmonics, partial tones, or partials. The first harmonic with the lowest frequency is called the fundamental tone. The fundamental tone is acoustically louder than all the other overtones and determines the pitch of the composite tone.33



Musical sound sources produce a complex amalgam of partial tones that perceptually coalesce as a single tone having a fundamental pitch and a specific timbre, or tone color. The timbre of a complex tone is affected by the number, the frequencies, and the amplitudes of these partial tones.34

The incorporation of this factor into the analogy tells us something about the notes’ timbre in the following way. Firstly, if we consider that throughout the piece, the urn is always given a markedly lower level of illumination than the heads, then it makes sense to analogize the urn as comprising the note’s overtones; the urn being the partials of the tone that sound much more ‘quietly’ than the head, which we can analogize as the fundamental tone. Secondly, if we consider the urn’s relative size compared to the head of the figures, our analogy would dictate that the urn ‘sounds’ at a relative frequency that is considerably higher than that of the heads, so again this coheres with our equation of the urns with overtones, and the heads with fundamental tones. Thirdly, if this is the case, then it also seems to make sense that the planes closest to the camera are only ever occupied by heads alone, (see Figure 5.2) for we can consider that the overtones sounded by these high-frequency notes would be beyond the range of human hearing. Furthermore, given Comédie’s confusion of parts and wholes, it seems particularly apt that the very phenomenon of a tone comprising a fundamental tone and its overtones embodies a kind of tautological paradox, in that the fundamental tone is both a part and a whole: the fundamental tone is the composite tone and one of its constituents. In this way, Beckett’s ‘fundamental sound’35 can be seen in the present context to describe the head on its own and also the whole figure. As the OED definition of a fundamental makes clear: it is ‘the tone produced by the vibration of the whole of a sonorous body, as distinguished from the higher tones or harmonics produced by that of its parts’.36

The Musicality of the Voice

Having proposed a musical analogy of Comédie’s visual content, we can now turn to a discussion of the film’s aural content, before considering more thoroughly the overall effect and meaning of the whole of the film’s ‘music’. Clearly, the film’s aural content is entirely comprised, apart from the crackle of the optical soundtrack, of oral content: torrents of words that spill forth from the mouths of the three figures, the rapidity of which produces a kind of hyper-vocalization, with only short fragments of it comprehensible in the way we usually receive language (already rapid speech was further accelerated with a machine called a phonogène:37 a device which enabled early manifestations of what later became known as ‘timestretching’, that is, changing the temporal rate of an audio signal without altering the pitch). As Glasmeier and Hartel write of Comédie’s speech, ‘language no longer serves narrative or commentatory purposes. It has been turned by Beckett into structured noises … manipulated into a virtual rhythm-machine.’38

In his essay ‘The Grain of the Voice’, Roland Barthes makes a distinction between two modes of vocalization which he calls the ‘pheno-song’ and the ‘geno-song’. The former refers to ‘everything in the performance which is in the service of communication, representation, expression’,39 whereas

the geno-song is the volume of the singing and speaking voice, the space where significations germinate ‘from within language and in its very materiality’; it forms a signifying play having nothing to do with communication, representation (of feelings), expression; it is that apex (or that depth) of production where the melody really works at the language – not at what it says, but the voluptuousness of its sounds-signifiers, of its letters – where melody explores how the language works and identifies with that work.40

We might conceptualize Comédie’s voices in just this way: as tending towards a geno-song of abstract sound as opposed to a pheno-song of representative language; as spoken words striving to return to their origin in abstract noise, becoming absolute sound, tending towards the condition of melody. Comédie’s voices form the sound of a melody searching for itself, seeking to become purer, to become an abstraction. Their speech worms ceaselessly into the material of language, working at the negation of words, to become anti-words, to become music.

Each voice is almost continually monotone: the torrent of speech that each of the three figures deliver remains pitched almost constantly at the same three different levels (and each figure does pitch their speech at a noticeably different frequency to each other, the two Fs unsurprisingly being relatively close in tone and of a much higher frequency than H), though there are occasionally some brief flourishes of tonal variety. This monotony is no impediment to an ascription of melody to these voices: quite the reverse in fact, as such a sustained delivery at one particular pitch arguably works to highlight the voice’s inherent tonal quality. And, of course, tone is only one of the components of melody, the others being rhythm and, to a lesser extent, tempo.

Voice as Melody; Image as Harmony

Having approached the aural/oral elements of Comédie as the film’s melodic content, we might posit the film’s visual elements in our analogy as the piece’s harmonic content. Of course, these two elements of music form an opposition that cannot be decisively uncoupled. Almost all music contains melodic aspects within its harmony and harmonic aspects within its melody, and indeed this is the case with Comédie too. In the Chorus sections, for example, when all three figures speak together, the melodies of their speech become harmonic or, rather, they become disharmonic. In terms of the film’s harmonic content, like all variable harmony, this takes on melodic characteristics simply on account of its movements. Even discounting these particular ways in which harmony can be heard melodically and melody heard harmonically, these two musical phenomena are always inextricably related. As Victor Zuckerkandl writes:

when we hear a piece of music of the ‘melody-plus-harmony’ type, we do not experience two movements going on side by side, one of single tones, melody, the other of chords, harmony; we experience one integrated tonal motion.41

This integration characterizes the experience of Comédie’s music too, in that the way in which the melody of the speech affects us varies quite considerably depending on the ‘sounds’ made by the harmony of the film’s images. For example, the speech we hear and see emanating from a figure when it is depicted in isolated close-up (when the harmony consists of a single, very high-pitched note) has a markedly different affective power from the speech we hear when all three figures are seen (when the harmony is one of the many variations of the triadic chord). As Karmitz himself has remarked, on the subject of the film’s extreme close-ups: ‘Mais sur quel mot isole-t-on un personnage? C’est un question qui m’obséde encore. [But on which word should the figure be isolated? It is a question that obsesses me still.]’42 That this question appears to be so enduringly enigmatic is unsurprising, as the shape, pattern, movement and rhythm of the whole montage seems to be governed both by the content of the speech, and by certain formal and kinetic concerns connected with the piece’s overall intensive trajectory.43 To some extent then, a balance has been struck, in that, whilst the montage is being shaped in a particular way, cuts are executed upon particular words and around particular segments of speech, and the choice of these particulars is not solely dependent on the overall shaping, but equally seems to be based on a kind of musical or intuitive sensibility regarding the sound of the speech. The resulting effect is one in which harmony and melody – and perhaps most importantly, their rhythms – are engaged in a contrapuntal way: complementing one another and interrelating with each other, as opposed to one being in the service of the other. Put simply, the manner in which we receive the vocal/melodic content of the film is influenced and affected by the manner in which we receive the montagic/harmonic content and vice versa. What we see changes what we hear, and what we hear changes what we see. Even if we leave the analogy with music to one side, there is something here of the synaesthetic.

The analogy with atonality seems fitting with regards to the vocal/melodic content of the piece too. Each of the three voices sustains the same pitch throughout the piece and so there is no tonal movement in the melody (bar the occasional lapse, something we might connect to the impossibility of absolute atonality, as noted below), and the three voice-tones together create a chord with no aural sense of a tonal centre and one that actually sounds remarkably similar to the triadic atonality to which we have compared the film’s images. When we hear the three voices speak together in the Chorus sections or hear them abutting each other in the other sections, the combination of the three tones sounds harmonically dissonant in a way not dissimilar to a diminished triad, simply in terms of the perpetual unresolvedness that the three monotone voices evoke. It seems clear that, just as the film’s images lack any kind of ground, centre, origin or destination (discussed further below), its voices – both their many individual fragments of melody and their melodies taken as a whole – are characterized in the same way.

The Semantics of Atonality

Approaching Comédie as a work of atonality seems appropriate not only in terms of the equal tonal status it bestows upon each of the figures, but in terms of the shape and structure of its montagic movement: movement which is analogous, as we have already determined, to the harmonic movement of music: a motion in which no thing moves. That is, just as atonality is defined by the absence of a tonal centre, and thus ‘harmony ceases to communicate the place of departure, and also the destination’,44 in Comédie there is no single shot which we might locate as the central image of the film, against which the montagic movement of the film moves away from and returns. Whilst the ‘basic tableau’ can be seen as a kind of provisionally foundational image, there is no one magnitude of the tableau which we can definitively identify as being located in the centre of the frequency range, for two examples of its depiction can be seen to occupy the mid-range of the continuum and neither can be said to be located more centrally than the other. Just as the only true point of departure and arrival in atonal music is the silence that precedes and follows the piece, only the image of the blank, black screen can be seen in this way in Comédie.

In his analysis of the tritone, the musicologist Heiner Ruland crystallizes this idea of open-endedness, exploring the notion that the atonal expresses the eternal:

What makes the tritone a diabolus [is] that it dissolves the threshold between inner world and outer world and permits the untransformed inner world to work into the outer world. [We can] draw the boundary between inner world and outer exactly there, between fourth and fifth. We can also begin to sense dimly in the tritone how two worlds that are diametrically opposed as regards time, the inner world and the outer world, resolve themselves into a unity when they are experienced from the aspect of eternity – and this is the truly atonal experience of the tritone.45

The tritone, exposed without resolution, by engendering the atonal, simultaneously engenders a sense of the eternal, of infinite time. Schoenberg considered atonality in the same way:

The analogy with infinity could hardly be made more vivid than through a fluctuating, so to speak, unending harmony, through a harmony that does not always carry with it certificate of domicile and passport carefully indicating country of origin and destination.46

To be more precise then, what an atonal piece expresses is the endlessness of itself, of its musical space. Perhaps it would therefore be accurate to suggest that the ending of a truly atonal piece of music is a contradiction in terms and thus a kind of impossibility: that, by ending, a piece of music negates any claim to absolute atonality. Perhaps a piece that is truly atonal never ends or at least points towards its never-ending, as Play and Comédie do through use of the da capo repeat and by ‘concluding’ with an indication that, were it not for the constraints of performance/exhibition, they would cycle on endlessly. (Of course, in the age of the looping video installation, such constraints no longer exist.)

The dissolution of a distinction between internal and external time raises some fundamental questions with regards to the conscious status of Comédie’s figures, questions that Beckett confronts and presents us with in much of his work: namely, what would it mean to be eternally conscious? Is consciousness not predicated on its own finitude? If not, how would a conscious mind manifest a consciousness of its own eternity? In this connection, it is worth recalling Ruland’s claim that the dissolution of the boundary between inner and outer worlds is ‘what makes the tritone a diabolus’: that is, there is something inherently malevolent, or at least inhuman, within this conception of infinity. Theodor Adorno considered atonal music in a similar way:

[The twelve-tone] technique further approaches the ideal of mastery as domination, the infinity of which resides in the fact that nothing heteronomous remains which is not absorbed into the continuum of this technique. Infinity is its pure identity. It is, however, the suppressing moment in the domination of nature, which suddenly turns against the subjective autonomy and freedom itself, in the name of which this domination found its fulfilment. … It is a closed system – one which is opaque even unto itself – in which the configuration of means is directly hypostatized as goal and as law.47

Adorno’s comment can be seen to describe the ‘closed system’ of Comédie quite accurately, which, being ‘opaque even unto itself’, is also simply a state unto itself. The system has no ‘goal’ or end beyond its always already constituted ‘configuration of means’. There is nothing outside the continuum. Despite some apparent level of consciousness, the inhabitants of this system have no autonomy in terms of their own involvement within it. And yet the elements that organize the ‘technique’ of the ‘sounds’ the figures articulate – the modulation of frequency and rhythm and the varying levels of illumination – cannot be said to be exterior to them. That which is modulated remains a property of the note itself. The system, the whole state that the film represents, is beyond conceptions of interiority and exteriority: it suggests a state of absolute betweenness. This is the paradox of eternal consciousness: to be eternally conscious is to dissolve the boundary between interior and exterior time and to be divested, therefore, of the consciousness of temporality; and, since temporality is that which, in making consciousness present to itself, engenders consciousness in itself, the dissolution of temporality is simultaneously the dissolution of consciousness. This suggests the possible impossibility of eternal consciousness represented by the experience of Comédie’s figures, articulated through their atonal ‘music’. And of course, atonality itself, as I have hinted already, is a kind of possible impossibility. According to Schoenberg:

Everything implied by a series of tones constitutes tonality, whether it be brought together by means of direct reference to a single fundamental or by more complicated connections. … A piece of music will always have to be tonal in so far as a relation has to exist from tone to tone by virtue of which the tones, placed next to or above one another, yield a perceptible continuity. The tonality may then be neither perceptible nor provable; these relations may be obscure and difficult to comprehend, even incomprehensible.48

Were it possible for a piece of music to be truly atonal, there would perhaps be nothing more one could say about it beyond the significance of this atonality. Yet there is always a great deal more to a putatively atonal piece of music beyond the articulation of its atonality, just as there is always immeasurably more to tonal music than simply an articulation of the key in which it is composed, and likewise there is far more to Comédie than an articulation of the infinite. A piece’s tonality or lack of it is only one of a combination of elements that cohere to form a musical work, and, indeed, this study has proposed an extensive impression of the totality of the film’s content as music, enabling us to conclude by summarizing the work’s overall music that we have outlined and to then consider some of its affinities with aspects of musical Minimalism.

The Film as Music and Its Relation to Minimalism

One of the most striking aspects of Comédie’s overall soundscape lies in its intense, even maddening, repetitiveness and a sustained, almost obsessive focus on just three chromatic tones, in both its harmonic and melodic aspects. In the harmony, these three tones are sounded at nine different octaval pitches, employing the whole spectrum of the auditory range. In the melody, the three tones clearly sound at the same three pitches throughout (these may or may not be the same tones as those of the harmony; to resolve this question would perhaps be to push the analogy too far). Semantically, it is as though the music is perpetually and obsessively – though by no means systematically – probing at the same thing, or rather the same three things, as if continually interrogating, repeatedly questioning, perhaps repeatedly posing a question, perhaps repeatedly posing the same question: the same unanswerable question, the same unaskable question. When we come to consider the rhythms of the piece, the harmony is rhythmically very variable and unpredictable, sometimes moving between chord variations rapidly, sometimes sounding the same chord for an extended period of time. On the other hand, the rhythm of the melody is always rapid and fairly uniform in its machine-gun-like delivery. The sound of the counterpoint certainly creates some quite exhilarating moments of interplay at several different points in the piece. Taken altogether, the music amounts to a highly intense, hyper-iterative study of just a handful of specific tones.

The style of composition most often associated with atonality is, of course, Serialism, and works in this style, by definition, do not restrict themselves to just a few specific tones; on the contrary, they use ‘all 12 notes of the chromatic scale in any order selected by the composer’.49 On the other hand, some of the most notable early manifestations of what came to be known as Minimalism – a movement often considered to be a reaction to the austerity of Serialism and a return to tonality – are often characterized by the reductive tonal palette we have identified in Comédie. This is certainly the case with respect to seminal pieces by two of the central figures in the movement’s early development: Terry Riley and Philip Glass.

A well-established relationship already exists between Glass’s early work and the stage version of Play/Comédie: Glass has described how ‘as theater music, Play had [a] crucial effect on my thinking’50 and on the development of his ideas concerning the importance of an audience’s role in ‘completing’ a work of art. More pertinent to the present discussion is the fact that ‘the first piece of music Glass still includes in his corpus’51 was a piece he composed for a 1966 production of Play,52 and the clear significance that Play had in the development of Glass’s ideas concerning musical form and thus in the development of Minimalist idioms. Indeed, Glass notes that his prolonged engagement with Play was a ‘formative experience’ that ‘set the direction which eventually led to the ensemble music’53 and that he viewed the work and listened to a recording of his piece ‘many, many times’.54 No score or recording of Glass’s music for Play appears to exist now, but he has described it as a work characterized by ‘a highly reductive, repetitive style’55 that used ‘rhythmic structure to generate an overall form’.56 In more detail:

A piece of music based on two lines, each played by soprano saxophone, having only two notes so that each line represented an alternating, pulsing interval. When combined, these two intervals (they were written in two different repeating rhythms) formed a shifting pattern of sounds that stayed within the four pitches of the two intervals. The result was a very static piece that was full of rhythmic variety.57

One scholar has noted how the structure of the piece ‘imitates the spareness and stark formality of Play, without the attempt to trace any “dramatic” trajectory of recognition and revelation’.58 This interpretation could equally be applied to the ‘music’ of Comédie that we have outlined, but there are also further aspects of Glass’s composition that highlight the proto-Minimalism reflected in the film’s musical style. Glass’s description of a ‘static piece full of rhythmic variety’ sounds almost paradoxical, but it is strikingly reminiscent of the way in which Comédie’s figures are simultaneously represented as static and dynamic through the film’s montage, a phenomenon that manifests in the foregoing musical analogy as harmonic stasis in intervallic tension alongside harmonic movement in both rhythm and tonal tension. Two further interrelated characteristics of the piece point towards some core characteristics of early Minimalism that are clearly manifest in Comédie’s ‘music’: its stripped-down tonal palette and its use of highly repetitive tonal structures, these two features being co-dependent.

Ultimately then, Comédie’s arrangement of its atonal language into the kind of sparse, insistently repetitive structures we associate with Minimalism might alert us to the way in which the film reflects some of the predominant aesthetic concerns of its day. To read the film’s ‘music’ in the way proposed is to assimilate something of the changing face of the mid-century musical avant-garde, when the strictures and severity of largely European modes of atonality and Serialism were being challenged by the radically different systems of a predominantly American Minimalism. Perhaps we can see, or rather ‘hear’, this shift being played out through the music created by the language, formal patterning of, and interrelation between, Comédie’s sounds and images.

1 Karmitz discusses these influences and others in Marin Karmitz and Elisabeth Lebovici, ‘Entretien’, in Caroline Bourgeois (ed.), Comédie (Paris, 2001), pp. 14–25.

2 Jean-Marie Serreau was the putative director of the Paris production of Comédie, but, as James Knowlson recounts in his biography of Beckett, Serreau was often preoccupied with other aspects of the heterogeneous bill that Comédie was part of, and Beckett was left to rehearse the cast ‘practically single-handed’. Given Beckett’s exacting nature and the rigours of the play, it is perhaps not surprising that it took ‘nearly four months of rehearsals’ for Comédie to meet Beckett’s demanding standards. See James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London, 1996), p. 515.

3 The film is not commercially available. My thanks to Galerie Carlier Gebauer for allowing me to view a copy of the film.

4 See Michael Glasmeier and Gaby Hartel, ‘“Three Grey Disks”: Samuel Beckett’s Forgotten Film, Comédie’, in Bourgeois (ed.), Comédie, pp. 77–85; Graley Herren, ‘Different Music: Karmitz and Beckett’s Film Adaptation of Comédie’, Journal of Beckett Studies NS 18/1–2 (2009): 10–31.

5 See Graley Herren, Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television (Basingstoke, 2007), ch. 8.

6 See David Foster, ‘Spatial Aesthetics in the Film Adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Comédie’, Screen 53/2 (2012): 105–17; id., ‘Becoming Present, Becoming Absent: Movement and Visual Form in the Film Adaptation of Comédie’, Journal of Beckett Studies NS 21/2 (2012): 157–80.

7 Samuel Beckett, Play, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London, 1986), p. 307.

8 It was in conversation with Martin Esslin in 1966 that Beckett labelled the three sections in this way (see Martin Esslin, Mediations: Essays on Brecht, Beckett, and the Media (London, 1980), p. 139).

9 Beckett, Play, p. 307.

10 Maurice Blackman, ‘The Shaping of a Beckett Text: Play’, Journal of Beckett Studies OS 10 (1985): 87–107 (p. 88).

11 There is not the space here to describe the many differences between film and play. Useful sources include the essays by Herren cited above.

12 Glasmeier and Hartel, ‘“Three Grey Disks”‘, p. 7.

13 Jean Antoine-Dunne, ‘Beckett and Eisenstein on Light and Contrapuntal Montage’, in Angela Moorjani and Carola Viet (eds), Samuel Becket: Endlessness in the Year 2000, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 11 (Amsterdam and New York, 2001): 315–23 (pp. 320–21).

14 Oxford English Dictionary, online edn, June 2013, <http://www.oed.com/>, s.v. ‘Triad’.

15 Deryck Cooke, The Language of Music (Oxford, 1959), p. 84.

16 The figures’ designations – which stand for ‘Homme’, ‘Femme 1’ and ‘Femme 2’ – are taken from the playscript (Samuel Beckett, Comédie et actes divers (Paris, 1972), p. 9).

17 Reginald Smith Brindle, Serial Composition (Oxford, 1966), p. 66.

18 Bryan Simms, The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg, 1908–1923 (Oxford, 2000), p. 28.

19 Ibid.

20 The variation in the depicted magnitude of the figures is achieved through post-production editing of the filmed material. Sometimes, parts of one frame are interpolated within another, arguably creating the cubist-like impression of a single plane seen perspectivally. The result can still be understood to constitute ‘the camera’s images’, even though such photographic vision is radically different to that seen in more conventional cinema. See Foster, ‘Spatial Aesthetics’.

21 Ernst Levy, A Theory of Harmony (Albany, NY, 1985), p. 53.

22 E. Bruce Goldstein, Encyclopedia of Perception (London, 2010), vol. 1, p. 152.

23 Ibid.

24 See Thomas Mansell, ‘Different Music: Beckett’s Theatrical Conduct’, in Marius Buning et al. (eds), Historicising Beckett/Issues of Performance, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 15 (Amsterdam and New York, 2005), pp. 225–39.

25 Levy, A Theory of Harmony, 54.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid.

28 Dipak Basu (ed.), Dictionary of Pure and Applied Physics (London, 2001), p. 151.

29 Lawrence Marks, ‘Synesthesia and the Arts’, in W.R. Crozier and A.J. Chapman (eds), Cogntive Processes in the Perception of Art (Amsterdam, 1984), pp. 427–59 (p. 436).

30 Ibid., p. 438.

31 Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford, 1997), p. 77.

32 See Maurice Harmon (ed.), No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider (Cambridge, MA, 1998), p. 24.

33 Evangelos Sembos, Principles of Music Theory (Morrisville, NC, 2006), p. 93.

34 Burdette Green and David Butler, ‘From Acoustics to Tonpsychologie’, in Thomas Christensen (ed.), The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 246–71 (p. 250).

35 See Harmon (ed.), No Author Better Served, p. 24.

36 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘Fundamental’ (my italics).

37 See Karmitz and Lebovici, ‘Entretien’, p. 21.

38 Glasmeier and Hartel, ‘“Three Grey Disks”’, p. 79.

39 Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London, 1977), p. 182.

40 Ibid.

41 Victor Zuckerkandl, The Sense of Music (Princeton, NJ, 1971), p. 218.

42 Karmitz and Lebovici, ‘Entretien’, p. 23.

43 See Foster, ‘Becoming Present, Becoming Absent’, pp. 166–9.

44 Ernst Bloch, Essays on the Philosophy of Music, trans. Peter Palmer (Cambridge, 1985), p. 229.

45 Heiner Ruland, Expanding Tonal Awareness: A Musical Exploration of the Evolution of Consciousness Guided by the Monochord, trans. John Logan (London, 1992), p. 96.

46 Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy Carter (Berkeley, 1992), p. 129.

47 Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne Mitchell and Wesley Blomster (London, 2003), p. 66.

48 Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, p. 432.

49 Michael Kennedy, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, 4th edn (Oxford, 1996), p. 666.

50 Philip Glass, Opera on the Beach (London, 1988), p. 35.

51 Edward Strickland, Minimalism: Origins (Bloomington, IN, 2000), p. 205.

52 Somewhat remarkably, this Paris production – by the theatre collective that would later become Mabou Mines – took place in the same city and in the same year as the film adaptation of Comédie. Despite its location however, this was a production of the English-language Play.

53 Glass, Opera on the Beach, p. 35.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid., pp. 18–19.

56 Ibid., p. 38.

57 Ibid., p. 19.

58 Daniel Albright, Beckett and Aesthetics (Cambridge, 2003), p. 147.

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