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aron Copland’s score for the 1939 acclaimed Hollywood film Of Mice and Men, the composer’s first of six Hollywood film scores, was a great departure from the industry’s typical score of the era. One of the first “modern” composers to be enlisted to score

a Hollywood film, Copland abandoned many of the late romantic techniques that had come to be expected in a film. Unlike other modern composers who attempted to try their hand at scoring for Hollywood, Copland’s transition from concert hall to the big screen was highly successful, both commercially and critically.

In many ways the screen adaptation of Steinbeck’s novella was the perfect film for Copland to score. As music critic and historian Alex Ross observes, the story’s setting in an open American landscape “elicited stretches of music in the now familiar pastoral mode, while the later tragic twists in the drama prompted Copland to revive his ‘modernist’ voice.”1This paper will examine Copland’s incorporation of modernist techniques in Of Mice and Men, his abandonment of standard Hollywood musical techniques, and his integration of the pastoral sound into the film. Finally, this paper will also look briefly at the film score’s legacy on Hollywood.

A MODERN STORY IN SEARCH OF A MODERN SOUND

Depicting the harsh lives of California’s migrant workers of the 1930’s, Of Mice and Men was by no means a typical Hollywood

Luke Quin

OF AMODERN SOUND

A MODERN FILM IN SEARCH

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Figure 1: Aaron Copland, “Death of Candy’s Dog” in Of Mice and Men from American Music 23.4 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013-14): 445. Photo reproduced with permission from the Richard Feiner Company.

story in its time. The film’s heavy subject matter tackled current issues. Following its premiere, reviews in major newspapers praised the film’s “daring a screen subject,” saying that “ordinary and ephemeral entertainment it is not.”2 The film’s realism would “allow Copland to exploit dissonance, apply unusual rhythms and melodic structures, and experiment with new timbral and textural effects.”3 I wish to look closely at two cues from the score that employ modernist techniques, unlikely to be heard in prior Hollywood scores. The first is “Death of Candy’s Dog” and the second is “The Fight”. A 1951 article makes a point of referring to these two cues as the “foreground” passages of the film, as opposed to the typical “background” role played by film music.4

DEATH OF CANDY’S DOG

In this scene, which takes place in the bunkhouse, Candy is urged by his fellow workmen to put his elderly dog down. Unable to do it himself, another worker coldly volunteers to shoot the animal. While the euthanizing of the pet takes place off-screen, the viewer is left anticipating the sound of the gunshot. The drama builds as the camera cuts from one character’s face to another. The sadness is intensified not only by the fact that Candy is losing his greatest companion but also because a direct parallel is made between he and the dog – Candy is old, crippled, and fears the day when he too will become useless. Furthermore, the scene foreshadows the climax of the film, in which one of the two protagonists, George, kills the other, Lennie – a decision he must make in order to avoid a mob lynching.

The dialogue in the scene is limited, allowing the music to take on a central role. The music becomes the driving force behind the drama of the scene. Copland had a wealth of musical clichés at his disposal to draw upon in scoring “Death of Candy’s Dog.” It is after all a melodramatic scene, something for which there were many standard Hollywood formulae in practice. Copland’s approach, however, was quite different.

What stands out upon first listening to this cue is its construction upon a two-note rhythmic motif. With the exception of a single flute (doubled by the harp) intermittently playing a sustained note in the upper register (and a brief interlude), all other

THE FIGHT

This particular cue is the most overtly modernist of the film. Critics applauded Copland’s way of introducing such dissonance into the scene.7 “One doubts if Hollywood had ever heard anything like it before,” wrote one Copland biographer of the scene’s climactic chord sustained for over twenty seconds.8 Copland himself said that he hoped this was one of the most effective cues in the film. He justified the use of such dissonance because of the scene’s already tense screen action.9

One of the two heroes of the story, Lennie, a gentle giant with the intelligence of a child, possesses incredible physical strength but lacks the cognitive skills to gauge his own force. The result of which, we learn, has gotten him and his partner George into trouble in the past. Curly, the ranch-owner’s son is an insecure man, forever accusing the workers of trying to go after his wife. When Lennie innocently laughs at Curly’s expense in the bunkhouse among all the workmen, Curly insists on proving his manliness by fighting Lennie. Unwilling to defend himself, Lennie takes repeated blow after blow to the face from Curly. Bloodied and up against the wall, Lennie finally caves to the workers egging him on to fight back. He catches one of Curly’s fists and inadvertently crushes the much smaller man’s hand in his palm.

When Copland scored Of Mice and Men, synchronized sound to picture was still less than a decade old. Copland made use of the moviola, an editing device, which permitted some accuracy in putting music to image. He did not, however, make use of the more mechanically accurate click track.10 As a result, some have suggested that this had a negative impact on the fight scene (a scene requiring extremely precise matching of sound to image), causing it to “lose some of the force the composer intended it to have.”11Nevertheless, a viewing of the scene today shows highly advanced interplay between sound effects and the musical attacks.

Copland used cluster chords to provide the harmonic dissonances

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instruments play this motif in rhythmic unison for over three minutes. The effect, which can be considered minimalist in nature, is demonstrative of Copland’s desire to incorporate simplicity.

Harmonically, the cue seems to alternate between a C Phrygian (use of D flat in lower register), C Aeolian (with a D natural in the upper lines), and later perhaps C Dorian (with the entrance of the A natural in bar 26). Regardless of the minor mode employed, what is perceived most is the quartal harmony - a technique that offers some ambiguity to the minor modes in use. The upper line is almost always harmonized by a fourth or a seventh (the later interval in this case suggesting quartal harmony with the inner voice omitted).

The melody, or absence of one, in this cue is noteworthy. Copland steers clear of creating too strong a melody in order to focus on the mood created by the two-note motif. The upper line always features the second of the two notes descending, either by a major second or a minor third. This constant descending two-note motif reflects Candy’s deflated morale and his physical movement as he walks over to the bunk and collapses onto the bed. As Sally Bick puts it: “like the descending motion of the musical gesture, Candy is thrust downward both physically and mentally.”5

The cue is broken up by what could be described as cadences. Before the rhythmic motif restarts we hear a sustained upper note for solo flute, doubled by the harp. Sally Bick suggests this lone distant voice helps to further illustrate the isolation felt by the characters.6

Copland opted for a smaller ensemble rather than utilizing the entire orchestra for this scene. This went against the wisdom of the day, which said that using smaller ensembles in films scores drew too much attention to the music. This might have been true had Copland’s string ensemble played the rich chromatic harmonic language characteristic of melodrama for the time. However, he avoids this pitfall through the use of a simpler and more static musical language. Moreover, the sized down instrumentation offers a more personal effect.

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associated with the scene. The tension is heightened by the fact that the clusters appear on weak beats and have no clear rhythmic patterning. Unable to anticipate the musical attacks, the listener is “assaulted” at the same as Lennie.

Analysis of the interplay between sound and image reveals that the pace of the musical attacks is much slower than the repeated punching sound effects (which occur in rapid succession). One reading of this suggests that the score is meant to represent Lennie’s mental state – distraught and dragging behind the real-time events.12 The sixteenth notes near the end echo George’s pleas for Lennie to fight back.

SHIFT IN COMPOSITIONAL APPROACH AND THE SEARCH FOR A NEW AUDIENCE

Much has been written about Aaron Copland’s compositional shift in the mid 30’s towards a populist language. He himself wrote: “I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer… We composers were in danger of working in a vacuum.”13 At the time, he referred to his change in approach as an “imposed simplicity,” a term he later regretted because it suggested he was abandoning a cultivated audience in order to please the masses.14The dominant interpretation of Copland’s shift takes into context the political and economic climate of the 1930’s. He later wrote of the era, “in all the arts the Depression had aroused a wave of sympathy for and identification with the plight of the common man.”15 Artists were more eager than ever for their work to be functional and reach a greater audience. With eighty million viewers a week in 1939, Copland definitely saw Hollywood as a vehicle through which he could achieve this goal.

In spite of his name, breaking into Hollywood would not prove to be easy for Copland. His first attempts in 1937 did not pan out. Production studios were seen as self-sufficient and closed to the idea of engaging “new” or “art” composers from the East Coast. Determined to score a feature, Copland returned again in 1939, this time having a documentary score (The City, 1939) to his name.16Following a screening of The City at a friend’s,

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Figure 2: Aaron Copland, “The Fight” in Of Mice and Men from American Music 23.4 (University of Illinois Press, 2013-14): 460-61. Photo reproduced with permission from the Richard Feiner Company.

standards. In Copland’s view, “a composer knows that to take music out can at times be more effective than any use of it might be.”24

THE SOUND OF THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE

The pastoral idiom is characterized by pedal tones, use of existing folk melodies or imitations thereof, disjunct melodies, wind and brass timbres, parallel diatonic harmonies, and use of the pentatonic mode. Although neither the inventor nor the discoverer of these techniques,25 Copland managed to exploit them more effectively than other composers, in a modern context that didn’t sound like a pure re-quoting. Copland’s use of the pastoral sound was largely influenced by his contemporary Virgil Thomson, whom he had studied with in Paris (Dickstein 456).26Only a few years earlier, Thompson had scored the 1936 Pare Lorentz documentary The Plow that Broke the Plains,27 another film dealing with the Depression as subject matter. Copland spoke highly of Thompson’s score, which he considered to be aesthetically appropriate to its subject and very un-Hollywood.28

Of the three major Copland ballets that characterize the uniquely American pastoral sound that the composer is credited with developing, only Billy the Kid (1939) had been written at the time of scoring Of Mice and Men. The film, ripe with images of American scenery, was undoubtedly an ideal canvas for Copland to continue to expand and build upon this American “landscape” sound, which was still in its early stages. It would reach its high point in 1944 when Copland completed his magnum opus, Appalachian Spring.29

Copland described the opening prelude to Billy the Kid as a “pastoral theme harmonized in open fifths that gives the impression of space and isolation.”30 Isolation is certainly a prominent theme in Of Mice and Men, and open spaces are often the backdrop. Several scenes in the movie fittingly make use of pastoral techniques. Among them, I wish to look more closely at the cue “The Wood at Night”.

In this scene, our protagonists Lennie and George are camping out in the wilderness, en route to their next job. Before the

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Director-Producer Lewis Milestone offered Copland a $5000 contract to score Of Mice and Men. Upon rereading the novella, Copland accepted the offer, making him one of the first major modern composers to try his hand at scoring for Hollywood.17

CHALLENGING COMMON PRACTICES IN SCORING

The most popular film scorers of the day included Max Steiner (King Kong, Gone with the Wind) and Erich Korngold (The Adventures of Robin Hood). Both were émigrés from Europe and their musical language strongly reflected a late romantic European style – lush and chromatic.18 Korngold was said to treat films as operas without singing, including leitmotifs for each character. Copland was opposed to the use of the leitmotif in Hollywood film, arguing that “[the leitmotif] may help the spectator sitting in the last row of the opera house to identify the singer who appears from the wings, but that’s hardly necessary on screen.”19 This isn’t to say that Copland didn’t believe in using a recurring musical theme, he simply preferred to connect it with an idea rather than a character. This is done quite brilliantly in Of Mice and Men when Copland distorts a motif first associated with Lennie and George’s dream over Mae’s aspirations of being a glamorous Hollywood star.20

In his writings on film scoring Copland asked, “Why need movie music be symphonic? And why, oh why, the nineteenth century?”21 When presented with a story set in California farmland in the modern day Copland knew that a full piece orchestra playing the harmonies of Tchaikovsky and Strauss was uncalled for. Instead, he opted for a much leaner ensemble of musicians.

Copland avoided what he termed “mickey-mousing,” or having the score mimic the action that is seen on screen. “An actor can’t lift his eyebrow without the music helping him do it,” he once wrote.22For Of Mice and Men, he composed ten musical cues of two to three minutes each, appearing every five minutes or more.23 In an industry that often featured continuous music throughout a production, this would have been considered a very scaled-back use of music by Hollywood

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Figure 3: Aaron Copland, “The Wood at Night” in Of Mice and Men from American Music 23.4 (University of Illinois Press, 2013-14): 452-53. Photo reproduced with permission from the Richard Feiner Company.

pair go off to sleep, Lennie begs George to tell him about “the rabbits”. George indulges Lennie by describing how carefree and easy-going life will be for them in the future, when they acquire their own piece of land and Lennie can raise his rabbits.

The entry of the music in this scene is poignant. Another strong example of Copland’s use of silence, the music doesn’t arrive until after George has finished describing their future idyllic lives. Bick suggests this strategy reinforces that the characters dream still seems real and plausible to the viewer, suggesting that the addition of music might make their aspirations seem pure fantasy.31 The harmonic language is simple. The upper voice, played solo by the flute, is disjunct or “free” from the other voices, just as George says, “you sure feel free when you ain’t gotta job!”

The harmony sounds tonal but the key signature of E major doesn’t seem as relevant as B as a tonal centre. The melody features prominently the fourth and the harmony is characterized by the fifth. There are repeated motifs. These features are all characteristic of the American pastoral trope.

Many have described Hollywood’s use of music in the 1930’s in order to create a dream-like world or utopian-like place that is alluded to by characters.32 The music in this scene can be characterized as having this function, thus demonstrating that the pastoral trope, while capable of evoking nature, openness, and landscape, can also just as aptly convey feelings of hope, optimism, and in this case, the American dream.

Several other cues in the film represent the landscape and open environment in which it is set (“On the Ranch” and “Barley Wagons”) but it is only the theme from “The Woods at Night” that returns again in the film, twice, in “In the Bunkhouse” and most notably in “The Final Narrative Episode”. The latter is the cue to the film’s tragic final scene in which George shoots Lennie to avoid a lynching. Before killing him he asks him to remember “the rabbits” and describes their fantasy life one last time. Lennie is transported to a happy place

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in practice, but also the way in which music should thematically support the message of the film. By scaling back the use of music, he freed the soundtrack from the subordinate role it played in the work of earlier film composers, in whose work the score would be used to plainly imitate the frame-to-frame action on-screen. Of Mice and Men’s score comments on the film’s narrative in a way that is “subtle rather than obvious,” preferring to remain low-key and often silent in order to function more effectively at critical moments.35

Recognized both as a populist and a modernist, Copland possessed the spectrum of language necessary to a successful film soundtrack. He showed that the most intense uses of dissonance can at times be warranted, while at others simple harmony on lean instrumentation is all that is called for. Indeed, it is the simplicity of the score that earned Copland an enduring place in the history of film music, earning praise from even the renowned “Grandfather of Film Music” David Raskin, who applauded the score’s “absolutely clear and pure and wonderful style.”36 Ultimately, Copland’s greatest legacy as a film composer is his discovery of and demonstration of the fact that simplicity and artistic expression are not mutually exclusive imperatives.

and the theme from “The Wood at Night” enters until George pulls the trigger. The ominous theme that follows is clearly reminiscent of the two-note rhythmic motif in “Death of Candy’s Dog”.

OF MICE AND MEN AND COPLAND’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE SOUND OF HOLLYWOOD

Copland’s pastoral idiom is to this day intricately tied to the images and narratives of Hollywood. The sound of the Western was perhaps the first genre to adopt this voice. As noted by music historian Kathryn Kalinak, “Copland exerted something of a gravitational pull on composers of the genre and his influence is particularly pronounced in the musical evocation of landscape.”33 From the 1960s to the present, Hollywood narratives of all kinds have adopted the pastoral idiom (be it sports films, war films, and even space films like Apollo 13 or the original Star Trek theme).Today, the pastoral idiom is synonymous with heroism, self-sacrifice, and the American dream. This aspect of Copland’s legacy in Hollywood however, seems to stem more from his ballets than from his actual film scores (only two of which make use of the pastoral idiom.34

So then, what is the influence of a score like Of Mice and Men on films that followed? What Copland achieved in his first Hollywood score was a re-evaluation of the role of music in film. He questioned not only the instrumentation, orchestration, and musical styles

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L U K E Q U I N

Luke Quin has a degree in Communication Studies from Concordia University and works as a communications spe-cialist for a non-profit in the healthcare sector. Outside of of his professional life he is a life long student of the classical guitar and its rich traditions. Forever eager to share the beau-ty of the instrument, he loves to teach young guitarists and can be seen occasionally performing at cafés or special events.

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1923-1972, Ed. Richard Kostelanetz, (New York: Routledge, 2004): 113.20 Pollack, The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man, 343.21 Copland, “Second Thoughts on Hollywood,” 113.22 Copland, “Second Thoughts on Hollywood,”114.23 Pollack, The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man, 342.24 Ibid.25 Lerner, “Copland’s Music of Wide Open Spaces,” 482-483.26 Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression,(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2009), 456.27 Lerner, “Copland’s Music of Wide Open Spaces,” 482.28 Ibid, 485.29 Ibid, 48330 Bick, “Copland, Hollywood, and American Musical Modernism,” 450.31 Bick, “Copland, Hollywood, and American Musical Modernism,” 451.32 Bick, “Copland, Hollywood, and American Musical Modernism,” 451. Lerner, “Copland’s Music of Wide Open Spaces,”491.33 Kathryn Kalinak, “Introduction” in Music in the Western: Notes from the Frontier, Ed. Kathryn Kalinak (New York: Routledge, 2012), 4.34 Lerner, “Copland’s Music of Wide Open Spaces,”499.35 Ross, The Rest is Noise, 291.36 Ibid.

ENDNOTES

1 Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007), 291.2 Sally Bick, “Of Mice and Men: Copland, Hollywood, and American Musical Modernism,” American Music Vol. 23, No. 4 (Winter 2005): 429.3 Ibid, 4374 Frederick W. Sternfeld, “Copland as a Film Composer,” The Musical Quarterly 37.2 (1951): 1755 Bick, “Copland, Hollywood, and American Musical Modernism,” 447.6 Ibid, 448.7 Ibid, 462.8 Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (Henry Holt & Company, Inc. 1999), 343.9 Bick, “Copland, Hollywood, and American Musical Modernism”:462.10 Pollack, The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man, 343.11 Sternfeld, “Copland as a Film Composer,” 175.12 Bick, “Copland, Hollywood, and American Musical Modernism”:461.13 Aaron Copland, “Composer from Brooklyn: An Autobiographical Sketch,” Magazine of Art (1939) and The New Music (1968), Rpt. in Aaron Copland, A Reader, Selected Writings 1923-1972,Ed. Richard Kostelanetz,(New York: Routledge, 2004): vi. 14 Ibid, vi.15 Ibid, vii.16 Pollack, The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man, 337.17 Ibid, 340.18 Bick, “Copland, Hollywood, and American Musical Modernism”, 427. Neil Lerner, “Copland’s Music of Wide Open Spaces: Surveying the Pastoral Trope in Hollywood,”The Musical Quarterly 85.3 (2001): 492.19 Aaron Copland, “Second Thoughts on Hollywood,” Modern Music (1940).Rpt. in Aaron Copland, A Reader, Selected Writings

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10.4 (1933): 188-91. Rpt. in The Routledge Film Music Source-book. Ed. James Wierzbicki, Nathan Platte, Colin Roust. New York: Routledge, 2012. 308-10. Print.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sally Bick, “Of Mice and Men: Copland, Hollywood, and Amer-ican Musical Modernism,” American Music, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Winter 2005): 426-472. University of Illinois Press.

Copland, Aaron. “Composer from Brooklyn: An Autobiographical Sketch.” Magazine of Art (1939) and The New Music (1968). Rpt. in Aaron Copland, A Reader, Selected Writings 1923-1972.Ed. Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Routledge, 2004. xxvi.

Copland, Aaron. “Second Thoughts on Hollywood.”(1940). Modern Music (1940).Rpt. in Aaron Copland, A Reader, Selected Writings 1923-1972. Ed. Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Routledge, 2004. 113-114.

Dickstein, Morris. Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2009.

Kalinak, Kathryn. “Introduction” in Music in the Western: Notes from the Fontier. Ed. Kathryn Kalinak.New York: Routledge, 2012. 1-17.

Lerner, Neil. “Copland’s Music of Wide Open Spaces: Surveying the Pastoral Trope in Hollywood.”The Musical Quarterly 85.3 (2001): 477-51.

Of Mice and Men. Dir. Lewis Milestone. 1939. United ArtistsPollack, Howard. Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man. Henry Holt & Company, Inc. 1999.

Ross, Alex. The Rest is Noise. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. 2007.

Sternfeld, Frederick W. “Copland as a Film Composer.” The Musi-cal Quarterly 37.2 (1951): 161-75.

Thompson, Virgil. “A Little About Movie Music.”Modern Music