1

The Uncanny Ear: Film and Telepathy

By

Joel Edmondson (Bachelor of Digital Media Production)

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Bachelor of Arts with Honours

Faculty of Arts

School of Arts, Media and Culture

Griffith University

28 October 2005

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Statement of Authorship

This work has not previously been submitted for a degree or diploma in any university.

To the best of my knowledge and belief, the dissertation contains no material previously

published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the

dissertation itself.

Joel Edmondson

28/10/2005

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks must go my supervisors, Dr David Ellison and Dr Amanda Howell, who

have tirelessly supported my convictions and guided them to a comprehensible outcome.

Thanks also to friends and family who have let me be a talking machine for a while.

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Abstract

Musical narration occupies an uncertain place in the cinematic apparatus, living neither

inside the diegesis nor outside the text itself. In an effort to make sense of this paradox,

identification theory typically applies a personification heuristic to this voice of musical

commentary, which suggests that a person is directing the audience’s experience of the

visual narrative from a spatiotemporal location remote to the site of cinematic projection.

This dissertation presents a reconfiguration of the fin-de-siecle term telepathy (from the

Greek meaning ‘distant feeling’) to account for this uncanny form of transmission. While

contemporary use of this word relates almost exclusively to the occult phenomenon of

thought-transference, the emergence of telepathy is characterised by its relationship to

early sound technologies and musical Romanticism, both of which form the genealogical

basis of the classical Hollywood film score. It is the aim of this dissertation to

demonstrate that this naming, informed by a cultural context specific to the emergence of

the cinema, captures the inherently transcendental nature of music.

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Contents

Statement of Authorship 2

Acknowledgements 3

Abstract 4

Introduction 6

1. Wagner and the Derangement of the Senses (You’ve got the Music in you) 20

2. Doing for the Cinema what the Phonograph does for the Spirit 37

Conclusion 56

List of References 60

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Introduction

Hollywood, 1943: Alfred Hitchcock’s new movie, Lifeboat, is in

production at 20th Century-Fox studios. The composer discovers one day

that the director has decided against using any music in the movie.

Puzzled, suddenly insecure, and a little angry, the composer asks why such

an unusual change of mind has occurred. ‘Well,’ he is told, ‘Hitchcock

feels that since the entire action of the film takes place in a lifeboat on the

open ocean, where would the music come from?’ The composer sighed,

shrugged his shoulders, gave a world-weary smile and replied: ‘Ask Mr

Hitchcock to explain where the camera came from, and I’ll tell him where

the music comes from.’(McCann in Adorno & Eisler 1994, p.vii)

Although a fundamental aspect of our1 everyday audiovisual experience, the musical

soundtrack remains an uncertain presence in the modern cinema text. The composer’s

reciprocal questioning of the camera’s gaze here puts the familiar apparatus at ‘arm’s

length’ (Bordwell 1989, p.xi), enacting what Russian formalist Viktor Schlovsky calls

‘defamiliarisation – a process of making strange’ (Gunning 1998). Contrary to

subliminated, routine assumptions about the presence of music in a cinema text,

Hitchcock’s suspicion problematises the ontological and epistemological status of the

film score: from what invisible place is this voice of musical commentary coming, and

how does its invisibility facilitate a focused experience of the visual narrative?

1 I use this word ‘our’ throughout as a referent for members of the Western industrialised world for whom

audiovisual experiences are now ubiquitous, and from which modern theorisation of perceptual

technologies has predominantly sprung.

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The film score is itself not part of the diegetic world, yet it is central to how the

viewer interprets the diegesis, supplementing, ornamenting and expanding upon the

meaning of the film’s narrative (Lipscomb & Tolchinsky 2005). Music therefore occupies

an uncanny position in the audiovisual hierarchy, living neither inside nor outside of the

film’s constructed reality. With this in mind, the audio/visual dichotomy is marked and a

sense of ‘the film as gesamtkunstwerk’ (Paulin 2000, p.64) – an organic, coherent whole

– disintegrates. In Audio-Vision (1990), Michel Chion illustrates this separation by stating

that ‘there is no natural and pre-existing harmony between image and sound – the shadow

is in fact dancing free’ (Murch in Chion 1994, p.xvii).

The uncanny place of music in the cinematic apparatus is amplified by a

consideration of how theoretical discourse has constructed the correct use of music in

film. For example, as one canonical source of music identification theory, Claudia

Gorbman writes:

Any attentive filmgoer is aware of the enormous power music holds in

shaping the film experience, manipulating emotions and point of view, and

guiding perceptions of characters, moods, and narrative events. (Gorbman

1998, p.43)

Here, Gorbman isolates the functions of film music, but does so with nonchalance

concerning what Freud calls ‘the peculiarly directive power of the storyteller himself’

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(Freud 1919, p.251). For Gorbman, music itself holds the power to guide perceptions, but

her syntax ensures that a sense of the human agency controlling that power remains

occulted. In this literal interpretation, the score takes on a kind of sentient faculty, of its

own volition manipulating the viewer’s perception of the diegetic world. Gorbman

anthropomorphizes music in an attempt to describe its function, simultaneously and

paradoxically glossing over the role of the human hand and mind, which, while absent in

the apparatus itself, is absolutely central to the music’s original creation. Claudia

Gorbman is obviously aware that films are a product of human agency, but the mechanics

of the musical apparatus itself here assumes a complete precedence. How the cinema’s

musical apparatus may mediate human sensory perception remains repressed by

Gorbman’s syntax.

In Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema

(1989), David Bordwell suggests that audience members also typically apply a

‘personification heuristic’ (Bordwell 1989, p.152) to their comprehension of musical

narration, meaning that the ‘narrating presence’ (Ford in Bordwell 1989, p.162) displays

‘a perceptual and emotional understanding of the diegesis that can only be attributed to a

sentient being’ (Bordwell 1989, p.161). Metaphorically at least, this suggests that a

person is guiding the audience’s experience of the visual narrative, even though they are

not physically present at the site of cinematic projection. Andre Gaudreault confirms this

assertion by stating that the musical score is emblematic of the emotional perspective of

the ‘musical narrator’ (Gaudreault 1990, p.276), itself a personified term. If music can

have no sentient emotions of its own, then that emotional perspective is logically

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attributed to the person responsible for the production of the musical score. Human

agency speaks through the musical commentary, and as Cohen suggests, ‘it is well to say

that music is a source of emotion in a film, but the ultimate source is the composer’

(Cohen 2001, p.264). The cinematic apparatus is therefore a nexus point, a device that

uses the vehicle of musical narration to mediate communication between the composer

and the audience. Music as a form of personified narration ‘registers a spectatorial effect

of identification and intense emotional absorption’ (Bordwell 1989, p.165), and beyond

the audience’s oft-discussed identification with the screen, it may also be argued that the

audience identifies with the emotional perspective of the composer. Nevertheless,

Bordwell (like Gorbman) does not go so far as to interrogate this logical extension of the

personification heuristic he presents.2

Bordwell and Gorbman’s modes of analysis are in many ways predetermined by

the nature of mechanical reproduction. When someone says they are going to see Lord of

the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) at the cinema, they are obviously not going

to see Peter Jackson or Howard Shore themselves; it is the text itself that we encounter in

a common spatiotemporal domain, and in this sense it is our only materially verifiable

object of criticism and identification. At the same time, films, like any act of mechanical

reproduction, can ‘put the copy of the original into situations that would be out of reach

from the original itself’ (Benjamin 1968, p.220). All technologically mediated

2 In Making Meaning, Bordwell mostly associates this personification heuristic with the camera. The lens is

substituted for the human eye, as is done throughout the existing theoretical discourse when critics refer to

the gaze. It is arguable that reluctance to pursue this logic in relation to musical narration is grounded in the

lack of a comparable relationship between the production of music and one particular sense organ in the

body. This is further problematised by the fact that musical commentary tells the audience how to look at

the diegetic world, causing a confused slippage between looking and hearing.

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experiences allow the producer of a text to exert influence over the reader/viewer from a

distant time and place, metaphorically extending body and mind beyond the thresholds of

normal sensory experience.

Marshall McLuhan is famous for postulating that all media forms are ‘extensions

of man’ (McLuhan 1964, p.3). His seminal Understanding Media (1964) suggests that

‘electric technology extends the central nervous system itself in a global embrace,

abolishing space and time’ (1964, p.3). ‘Later in his career, McLuhan would use the term

“telepathy” to describe this psychic extension of the nervous system’ (Grosso 1997), a

word taken from the Greek, meaning ‘distant feeling’ or ‘distant conversation’, which is

as potentially useful to the role of musical narration for the cinema as it is to radio, the

internet, or television. The term telepathy came into common usage in 1882, coined by

British Society For Psychical Research founder F.W.H. Myers as an umbrella term to

describe ‘all cases of impression received at a distance without the normal operation of

the sense organs’ (Myers in Luckhurst 2002, p.61), including thought-transference,

mesmeric rapport, and the séance. 3

4 In McLuhan’s terms, technology extends those

sense organs and transcends their standard functions in the same way interrogated by

Victorian scientific research into psychic force.

Phonocentrism (the centrality of vocal and acoustic phenomena) is implicit in the

phrase ‘distant conversation’, to which scholars before and after McLuhan have testified.

3 The British Society For Psychical Research (c.1882) was a group of Victorian scientists committed to

finding empirical evidence for the uncanny phenomena presented by Spiritualist mediums. 4 Although the common use of telepathy today is almost completely directed at the phenomenon of

thought-transference, the origination of psychical research into telepathy related to ‘instances of community

of sensation’ (Luckhurst 2002, p.61), of which all three phenomena are concerned.

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‘Long before Freud [or McLuhan] made his famous comparison of the telephone and

telepathy’ (Enns 2005, p.17), nineteenth-century scientist W.M. Lockwood suggested that

telephony justified the existence of telepathy as such:

The sensation we call ‘vocal speech’, and its accompanying thought, leaps

from molecule to molecule of the wire, as an energy of consciousness …

vibrates the receiving diaphragm of the phone, is transmitted through the

auditory apparatus as a continuation of the electro line, and impressed

upon consciousness, where it is translated as vocal speech. (Lockwood in

Enns 2005, p.17)

According to Lockwood, the telephone privileges a system of encoded energy

transference over direct sensory contact. ‘Communication with the dead is a logical

extension of this principle’ (Enns 2005, p.17), as Lockwood continues to expound:

[T]his formula of co-relating matter and motion, thought and feeling, is

not limited to the activities and data this side of the grave, but its lines will

be found to be ‘alive and potential’ in a domain of existence beyond the

grave. (Lockwood in Enns 2005, p.17)

The telephone’s disembodiment of the human sense organs is here an analogy for

the uncanny forms of transmission studied by nineteenth-century psychical research. The

novel ability to speak to someone 100 miles away conjured up feelings of wonder, a

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sense that the telephone was allowing something magical to happen, something akin to

those communications imagined by the occult practices of thought-transference and the

séance. ‘The concern in psychical research – contact with spectral emanations of distant

bodies, whether via writing, images, sounds, or even touch – is part of a larger effort in

modernity to reorganise representations of the human body’ (Durham Peters 1999,

p.141), a reorganisation that makes bodies and media interchangeable vessels for the

human spirit. In this context, the technological medium becomes something through

which human agency speaks, much like the mediums of 19th century séances through

whom disembodied voices spoke and with which the coining of the word telepathy was

most concerned. As Nicholas Royle suggests in his study Telepathy and Literature:

Essays on the Reading Mind (1990), the awareness that there could be a metaphorical

relationship between technology and occult beliefs was so commonplace that ‘to ask

whether someone believed in telepathy was like asking them if they believed in the

telephone’ (Royle 1990, p.5). Alongside Edison’s phonograph, which for the first time

allowed people to replay dead sonic moments, telephony helped form the underlying

principles on which all modern sound reproduction is based, of which the cinematic

apparatus is no exception.5

As David Bordwell has elucidated, identification with a narrative voice (including

music) is inextricably linked to a ‘personification heuristic’ (Bordwell1989 p.152); thus

the cinematic apparatus, like the telephone or phonograph, manifests a kind of

disembodied communication between musical narrator and spectator. At present there is

5 The phonograph was originally a wax-cylinder device designed for the recording and reproduction of

sonic phenomena, patented by Thomas Edison in 1877. The full significance of this device to the history of

film music is covered in the second chapter of this paper.

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no discourse to account for this uncanny form of filmic communication, despite

McLuhan’s investigation of technological telepathy, and other writing on narrative fiction

which suggests that ‘the history of criticism of the novel is the history of the attempt to

deal, or avoid dealing with, this seemingly mad scenario’ (Royle 2003, p.256) in which

the narrative voice exerts influence over the reader, despite the physical absence of the

writer herself. From a time and place distant to the reception of the film itself, the musical

narrator is enacting a distant conversation, the strangeness of which theoretical discourse

has yet to reconcile.6 Hitchcock himself clearly grappled with this problem in his

conceptualisation of Lifeboat, but it seems our contemporary familiarity with the film

score has suffocated further interrogation of this scenario, pushing it deep down into the

hidden – taken for granted - recesses of technological modernity.

In this dissertation I will demonstrate the reciprocal emergence of film music and

the term telepathy, reconfiguring this otherwise fringe concept so that it may be useful to

describing the distant form of communication enacted between Bordwell’s musical

narrator and the audience. While McLuhan and Lockwood’s comparisons of aural

technology and psychic force are useful in an introductory sense, greater interrogation is

required to establish a correlation historically specific to the cinema. Returning to an

historical period in which encounters with invisible forces conjured an array of feelings

ranging from transcendental bliss to confusion, I will survey ‘the nexus of science,

literature and the occult’ (Thurschwell 2001, p.20) that generated synonymity between

music/sound technologies and telepathy at the end of the nineteenth-century. It seems

6 Nicholas Royle calls this ‘somnambulism in critical common sense’ (2003, p.256), meaning that

theoretical discourse is a form of sleepwalking in which telepathy passes without comment, while its

machinations simultaneously underpin all forms of technologically mediated transmission.

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appropriate that any term used to describe a defamiliarised hearing of film should come

from the fin-de-siecle, the period in which the cinema was in its infancy and the

strangeness of the aural world was at its most palpable. According to Tom Gunning,

defamiliarisation is a process by which we ‘rediscover technology at its point of novelty’

(Gunning 1998). It is one aim of this dissertation to simulate a sense of the novelty of

invisible film music by reading the accepted modern conventions of film music through a

magical logic of perception particular to the Victorian ear.

In the first chapter of this dissertation I will discuss the common emergence of

telepathy and German Romanticism, a musical movement that has in many ways dictated

the norms of the classical Hollywood score. Richard Wagner’s attempts to transcend the

conventions of Classical forms personalised the emotional content of his music, instilling

a sense of his physical emotions in the songs. For certain members of nineteenth-century

science and literature, Wagner’s music was an evolution of the human nervous system,

taking on a kind of invisible, prosthetic quality that exerted an uncanny physiological

influence on auditors; through the music, listeners were believed to be able to feel what

Wagner was feeling. Invariably, this drew comparisons to another emerging form of

invisible communication: telepathy. In this context, Wagner is articulated as a telepathic

composer; and as the archetypal film composer, he personifies David Bordwell’s musical

narrator.

Music, however, was not the only mediating structure to succumb to this regime

of analogical thinking. The second chapter of this dissertation will examine the fin-de-

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siecle nexus of science, literature and the occult to ascertain the role telepathy played in

the Victorian ear’s relationship to mechanically reproduced sounds. The telephone and

phonograph were believed to disembody the human voice/musical performance, and were

entangled with common beliefs about occult modes of communication; sound technology

was believed to transcend the spatiotemporal limitations of the human body, suggesting a

form of supernatural or ghostly agency. Both devices were technological discoveries

complicit in the development of reproduced music for the cinema, and if we attend to

Rick Altman’s assertion that sound technologies are ‘cultural products contingent on their

genealogical precedents’ (Altman 2004, p.16), it follows that any phenomenological

analysis of the cinematic apparatus may be related to the cultural conditions of its

prototypical forms. This logic will be applied in the second chapter to establish a sense of

the listening environment in which the novelty of disembodied or invisible music was

encountered generally. This is especially relevant in terms of how we might understand

the Victorians’ first encounters with phonographic accompaniment of cinematic

spectacle, characterised by the particularly uncanny disappearance of live musicians at

the site of projection. I will conclude the second chapter by demonstrating how some of

the musical recording and representation techniques of early cinematic apparatuses

(namely, the Vitaphone) betray this telepathic logic.

This chapter structure aims to provide multiple grounds on which the transmission

and reception of the film score may specifically (musically and technologically) be called

telepathy in the given historical context. In The Invention of Telepathy (2002), Roger

Luckhurst argues that:

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Telepathy is a hybrid object. It theorizes distance, but it also performs this

by binding together extremely diverse and sometimes bewildering

resources with a host of experts in different fields. (Luckhurst 2002, p.3) 7

In this sense, any reconfiguration of the term requires an interdisciplinary

approach to its meaning. Both chapters refer to examples of narrative fiction, natural

philosophy and experimental science, in an effort to comprehensively map telepathy’s

‘terrains of emergence’ (Luckhurst 2002, p.10). In many ways, umbrella movements in

Victorian culture preconditioned the connection of these discourse networks. What the

nineteenth-century emergence of telepathy and music fundamentally have in common is

links to the overwhelming Victorian fascination with sympathy. Nicholas Royle has

called telepathy ‘the inevitable hyperbolisation of the importance accorded to sympathy

in Romanticism’ (Royle 1990, p.5); both terms emerge from the Greek pathos, meaning

‘feeling’. Telepathy is merely the logical end-point of sympathy, in which the intimacy

between two people becomes so close that it transcends normal physiological constraints,

be it through the mediation of music and the phonograph, or via occult modes of

transmission like thought-transference and mesmerism.

This dissertation’s use of a Victorian, metaphorical logic of perception to describe

the transmission of the film score is a direct methodological response to the ‘crisis

7 Besides a range of texts circulating speculative explanations as to how telepathy works, The Invention of

Telepathy is the only available cultural history of telepathy; hence a greater reliance on it in this dissertation

than may be necessary given a larger selection of texts. In this context, this dissertation should be seen as a

provocation for the wider interrogation of the subject.

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historiography’ (Altman 2004, p.15) of Rick Altman’s 2004 text, Silent Film Sound, the

most comprehensive and recent title available on the subject. Altman contends that there

is presently an oversimplification of the history of sound technologies and industry

practice, symptomatic of a discourse that has ignored the ‘historical and social

contingency’ (2004 p.16) of those devices. In his words:

Media are not fully and self-evidently defined by their components and

configurations. They also depend on the way users develop and

understand them. (Altman 2004, p.16)

Considering the established relationship between telepathy and sonic phenomena,

and the implication of the phonograph and telephone in the technologies of the early

silent cinema, it is clear that there is a need to address how a telepathic logic might be at

work in the cinema’s musical apparatus.8 The novelty of early sound technologies

stimulated a kind of ‘magical thinking’ (Thurschwell 2001) in Victorian society, whose

members compared technological collapse of time and space to that manifesting in occult

forms of communication like the séance and thought-transference (Thurschwell 2001).

This same collapse of time and space occurs in the cinema’s musical apparatus, and it

will evident in the chapters that follow that such an analogical mode of perception is

particularly relevant to the emergence of film music.

8 In this context, this dissertation can be also seen as a work of media ecology, or ‘an approach within

communication studies that examines the consequences of technology upon the human communication

environment’ (Albrecht 2004, p.55). In Mediating the Muse: A Communications Approach to Music (2004),

Robert Albrecht suggests that ‘media ecologists place a great importance upon the ways in which

technologies affect the sensorium, that is, the way in which a particular medium or set of media restricts or

replaces the role of one or more of the five senses’ (2004, p.57). Telepathy is a technological derangement

of the senses, and therefore particularly relevant to the field of media ecology.

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According to Peter Pels, ‘magical thinking is a repressed dimension of

technological modernity’ (Pels 2003, p.30), the settlement of scientific naturalism and

technological determinism suffocating a wider cultural studies discourse on the

transcendental qualities of communications technologies. In Bruno Latour’s words, ‘we

were never modern’ (Latour in Pels 2003, p.30), modernity as we know it being

characterised by ‘the invented opposition of an unchanging magical past and a dynamic,

disenchanted modernity which ignored metropolitan transformations of magic into

occultism, based on the practices of phrenomesmerism and Spritualism’ (Pels 2003,

p.32). A revision of modernist technologies (the cinema perhaps being the most modern

of all) must include these magical dimensions if it is to articulate a truly inclusive

pluralism, especially when one considers the established relationship between

communications technologies and psychic force.

In this context, a complete reading of film theory is only possible through the

inclusion of such cultural histories. Persisting colloquial phrases like ‘the magic of

cinema’ illustrate an enduring common belief that there is something mysterious or

occulted in the machinations of the cinema. The common use of this phrase is concretised

by its repetitious appearance in academic writing, to be examined in greater fullness

throughout this paper.9 Magical thinking is indeed the uncanny shadow of technological

modernity, a haunting presence that, in Freudian terms, must eventually ‘come to light’

9 One such example is the introductory passage to Laura Mulvey’s classic essay Visual Pleasure and the

Narrative Cinema, in which she proclaims the need to study ‘how the magic of the cinema has worked in

the past’ (Mulvey 1986, p.198). Likewise, Stan Brakhage’s famous lecture on the silent filmmaker Georges

Melies called his cinema oeuvre ‘mechanical alchemy’ (Brakhage 1972, p.15).

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(Freud 1919, p.214). It is one aim of this dissertation to demonstrate that magical

thinking, as a drive to perceive hidden realities, is encoded in the accepted conventions of

film music identification theory. As Mary Ann Doane acknowledges:

The ineffable, intangible quality of sound – its lack of the concreteness

which is conducive to an ideology of empiricism – requires that it be

placed on the side of the emotional or the intuitive. If the ideology of the

visible demands that the spectator understand the image as a truthful

representation of reality, the ideology of the audible demands that there

exist simultaneously a different truth and another order of reality for the

subject to grasp. (Doane in Gorbman 1987, p.67)

In the following chapter I will investigate the emergence of the term telepathy in

terms of its relationship to these audible realms, especially the music of Richard Wagner,

to whom the conventions of the classical Hollywood film score are so indebted.

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1. Wagner and the Derangement of the Senses (You’ve got the Music in you)

Every conceptual breakthrough amounts to transforming, that is to

deforming, an accredited, authorized relationship between a word and a

concept, between a trope and what one had every interest to consider to be

an unshiftable primary sense, a proper, literal, or current usage. (Derrida in

Royle 1990, p.1)

The contemporary common use of the word telepathy, referring almost exclusively to the

phenomenon of thought-transference, is greatly reductive. Further interrogation of the

Victorian origins of telepathy reveals its almost symbiotic developmental relationship

with music. ‘Prior to the nineteenth-century junction of experimental science and

industrial revolution, sound was bound to the sacred notions of its apparent

unknowability’ (Altman 2004, p.5). The discoveries of the acoustic and physiological

sciences, especially those of Hermann von Helmholtz and the British acoustician John

Tyndall, provided physical, empirical models through which the eternal mysteries of

music could finally be deciphered. Music, however, was not the only mysterious,

universal language to which these scientific models were applied. Telepathy, the newly

‘black-boxed’ (Luckhurst 2002, p.69) form of communication in which thoughts and

feelings could transcend the constraints of oral linguistics, represented a similar potential.

The emergence of telepathy is characterised by the recurrent use of acoustic and musical

models to analogically explain the invisible workings of psychic force; if unseen

soundwaves could influence the physical body, the Society For Psychical Research and

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its patrons were convinced that brainwaves could achieve the same affect on the brain. In

an early transcript entitled Thought-Reading (1882), SPR members William Barrett,

Edmund Gurney and F.W.H. Myers make this provisional statement:

One tuning fork or string in unison with another will communicate its

impulses…Similarly, we may conceive, if we please, that the vibration of

molecules of brain-stuff may be communicated to an intervening medium,

and so pass under circumstances from one brain to another, with a

corresponding simultaneity of impressions. (Barrett in Ledger &

Luckhurst 2000, p.177)

Reciprocally, it may be argued that movements in nineteenth-century music

manifest a telepathic logic, a desire to engage the physical emotions of listeners from a

distance. This uncanny relationship between representational forms and bodily affect is ‘a

central concern of Romantic metaphysics, where symbols are said to represent underlying

spiritual realities’ (Altieri 2003, p.13). Nowhere is this more apparent than in musical

Romanticism, especially the work of Richard Wagner, for whom music was primarily an

extension of the emotional self, rather than a set of formal conventions to which the

composer was subservient. Alongside other major figures like Lizst and Chopin, Wagner

introduced ‘new ideas in harmony, especially extremes of chromaticism’ (Edwards 1972,

p.30), moving towards a ‘deeply subjective’ (1972, p.30), personalised mode of

composition in which the composer’s feelings could more accurately be expressed and,

therefore, received. Notably, in 1851 Wagner published a treatise entitled A

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Communication To My Friends in an effort to reconcile his status as an artist with ‘those

bound to deny [him] sympathy as a man’ (Wagner 1993, p.270), clearly stating the

communicative intentions of his musical practice.

Although Audrey Jaffe suggests that ‘cultural fictions and self-projections as acts

of sympathy have a tendency to ward off the actual bodies surrounding them’ (Jaffe

2000, p.7), it is arguable that the degree to which Wagner drew attention to himself

reiterates his own physicality, confirms that it is indeed his own physical emotions in the

music. For Wagner, music was a shared sensation, or in the terms of the occult sciences

that paralleled his own theoretical discourse, a point at which the nerve endings of both

composer and audience encountered an uncanny fusion. Sympathy is accorded a

privileged place across all Romantic movements, but the overt physical connection of

bodies here transcends sympathy, and becomes telepathy, meaning ‘distant feeling’.

Music in the mid to late-nineteenth century represented a hidden spiritual and emotional

life, a magical nexus point at which listeners gained access to the physical feelings of that

composer, feelings that came to them via the ‘invisible power of music’ (Kertz-Welzel

2005, p.81).

Philosophy contemporaneous to the development of musical Romanticism

reinforces this sense of music as an invisible force with prosthetic, physiological

ramifications. Nietzsche, seeking to ‘reduce aesthetic effects and states of consciousness

to purely biological states’ (Moore 2002, p.110), called Wagner’s music ‘applied

physiology’ (2002, p.109). In an unfinished paper from 1870-71 entitled Rhythmical

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Investigations, Nietzsche states that ‘physiologically, life is a continual rhythmic motion

of the cells. The influence of [musical] rhythm seems to me to be a minute modification

of that rhythm[ic] motion’ (Nietzsche 1871, in Moore 2002, p.116). Following this logic,

musical rhythms necessarily generate a predictable emotional response because the cell

structures of human beings are mostly uniform. In Nietzsche’s terms, an audience’s

ecstatic or rapturous experience of music was therefore an extension of the rapture

experienced by the composer during composition.

Nietzsche’s imagination of music as a kind of shared physiology concretises

Wagner’s desire for the audience to hear his physical emotions in the music. This

trajectory of personalisation turned music into a prosthetic form, mediating

communication between composer and audience. That listeners could be involved in a

direct musical conversation with the composer (via an orchestra) invited comparison to

the emerging umbrella concept of telepathy, a comparison that is encoded across

nineteenth-century culture and that will be interrogated over the course of this chapter.

The importance accorded to sensation in the philosophical and scientific discourses of the

nineteenth century is evident in Nietzsche’s assertions, and is likewise vital to an

understanding of how analogies between music and telepathy were drawn. In his

interpretation of human perception, Hermann von Helmholtz unified analogical and

scientific approaches to sensation by stating that ‘the sensations of our nerves of sense are

mere symbols indicating certain external objects’ (Helmholtz in Otis 2002, p.124). In

Helmholtz’s terms, should a man hear a horse galloping in the distance, the response of

his cochlea to that sound at a particular frequency was representative of the horse itself;

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sensations could be measured scientifically, but they were ultimately symbolic of the

external influences causing that bodily affect.

In accordance with this sensation heuristic, invisible forces like music and

telepathy necessarily took on imagined relationships to the human body.10

Leslie Blasius

argues that ‘the doctrine of sensation and association survives in the nineteenth century to

some extent by shedding its epistemological claims and renaming itself as a psychology’

(Blasius 1996, p.9), and this psychology remained a ‘flexible and powerful hermeneutics’

(Blasius 1996, p.21), permitting an interdisciplinary, analogous approach to the

phenomenology of invisible forces, be they acoustic or psychic. As will be evident, the

transmission and reception of sensory information was a concern of natural philosophers,

acousticians and novelists alike, whose views on music and telepathy frequently

overlapped. In the midst of these overlaps, the human body remains the physical locus of

meaning, unifying approaches to disparate invisible phenomena.

In this chapter I will investigate ‘the fin-de-siecle nexus of music, science and

literature’ (Sousa Correa 2003, p.11), illustrating the magical logic of perception through

which the Victorians encountered musical Romanticism. David Bordwell suggests that

‘the most important influence upon Hollywood film scoring was that of late nineteenth-

century operatic and symphonic music, and Wagner was the crest of that influence’

(Bordwell in Paulin 2000, p.58), so the associations Victorian culture made between

Wagner’s music and an emerging telepathic logic demands some interrogation. In terms

10 Rick Altman suggests in Silent Film Sound that ‘just as the Greeks and medieval Christians attended to

sound only because of its ability to signify the sacred, so we moderns attach importance to sounds only

when they have a demonstrable physical, visible effect.’ (Altman 2004, p.6)

25

of the wider concerns of this dissertation, it is my aim to demonstrate that the classical

Hollywood score has a genealogical relationship to Victorian modes of listening and

musical composition influenced by a telepathic paradigm. Wagner’s personification of

music prefigures the personification heuristic David Bordwell applies to musical

narration for the cinema, and provides a historical context from which the transmission

and reception of film music can specifically be named telepathy. Despite our

contemporary familiarity with the mechanically reproduced musical score - as an

encounter with a text - many Victorians imagined music as a form of ‘sympathetic

resonance’ (Helmholtz 1954, p.36) with the physical emotions of the composer.

The invention of telepathy and its conditioning of the Victorian ear is best

illustrated (appropriately in aural terms) as a feedback loop of discourse networks, which

I would like to briefly outline before continuing with more specific reference. The loop

was formed as such: Discoveries of the interphenomenal and physiological sciences

(especially acoustics) were central to the Victorians’ developing appreciation for music.

Many patrons of the Society of Psychical Research (including George Eliot) were

novelists who integrated psychical allegories of music and sound technologies into their

narratives, supporting the existence of psychic transmission and concretising its

relationship to aurality.11

These texts permeated the public consciousness, and their

familiarity to the Victorian public was played upon by the SPR in their designation of

aural analogies to seemingly inexplicable psychic phenomena.

11 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) will be discussed at length in a more dystopian context in the following

chapter.

26

Prior to any kind of popular speculation as to the similarities between music and

telepathy, investigation into the prosthetic qualities of music finds its greatest

embodiment as a scientific concept in the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, who is

widely considered the father of acoustic physiology. Helmholtz’s seminal work On the

Sensations of Tone (1862) was a major catalyst for the scientific explication of telepathy,

and literary interest in the telepathic qualities of music. On the Sensations of Tone

explores the vibratory relationship between different harmonic tones, demonstrating that

‘musical notes are composed of various partial tones reciprocally causing each other to

vibrate’ (Helmholtz 1954, p.36). ‘Although not the first to discover that, by striking a

tuning fork, another fork in the same vicinity tuned in unison would resonate at the exact

same pitch’ (Picker 2003, p.86), Helmholtz incorporated this concept of sympathetic

resonance into a unified theory of hearing, stating that the human ear received sounds in

the exact same way by resonating with the external source via a shared sonic frequency.

These sympathetic vibrations were already common knowledge to the Victorians, who

during parlour games would often ‘sing into piano strings to demonstrate that the strings

themselves could echo back the same note’ (Picker 2003, p.86), but until Helmholtz they

were unaware that the inner ear’s own vibrational response mechanism was identical.

John Picker has called Helmholtz’s resonance theory the birth of the ear as ‘microscopic

Aeolian harp’ (Picker 2003, p.87), meaning that this model heralded the possibility that

sound could transcend the accepted boundaries of physicality and mystically unite all

things.

27

The implications of Helmholtz’s discoveries are evident in the work of his

Victorian contemporaries. In his 1857 paper The Origin and Function of Music, Herbert

Spencer ‘invoked the extreme sensitivity of the musician to account for the apparently

transcendent and visionary character of music’ (Sousa Correa 2003, p.24), suggesting that

musicians had a particularly developed nervous system.12

Although ‘his account of music

was a prognostication of future human development rather than of mysterious spiritual

realms’ (2003, p.26), Spencer’s discussion of musicians - the transcendent powers of

their nervous systems - can be seen as an early attempt to align mysterious forces of

transmission and reception with the physiological sciences. Spencer was himself a

member of a proto-SPR society called The X-Club, and had a keen interest in

Helmholtz’s work. On joining the X-Club, Spencer embarked on a project to ‘subsume

all human knowledge under one developmental hypothesis’ (Luckhurst 2002, p.13),

which may explain the common physiological basis of his interests in psychical research

and music.

One of Spencer’s close friend’s enduring fascination with sympathetic

communication illuminates music’s privileged place in the cultural history of telepathy.

‘George Eliot, novelist and writer for the rationalist Westminster Review, was also an

avid séance goer’ (Luckhurst 2002, p.13). On 16 January 1864, ‘Eliot participated in a

séance at the London home of Charles Darwin’s brother, which was also attended by

Darwin himself and Eliot’s young protégé, Frederic Myers, the man who would later coin

12 This publication can be also seen as a response to Wagner’s Art Work of the Future (1849), which extols

the evolutionary virtues of music and the musician. Here, Wagner also introduces the idea of

Gesamntkunstwerk (total work of art), with which the cinema’s fusion of image and sound/music is often

associated.

28

the term “telepathy”’ (2002, p.37). Although sceptical of Spiritualism’s flamboyant

posturing, her late oeuvre, especially Daniel Deronda (1876), demonstrates a persistent

belief in telepathy, at that time called ‘sympathetic clairvoyance’ (Sousa Correa 2003,

p.181), and its relationship to musical performance. She was especially fond of the music

of Franz Lizst, and after visiting Weimar in 1855, introduced the work of both Lizst and

Wagner to England in an article in Fraser’s Magazine, entitled Lizst, Wagner and

Weimar. In this article, Eliot expounds Spencer’s evolutionary theory of music, claiming

that although she does not understand the melody, Wagner’s music demonstrates that

melody may simply be ‘a transitory stage’ (Eliot 1963, p.51) in the development of

musical expression. Eliot’s focus, like Spencer’s, is on the evolved qualities of the

musician himself, his conveyance of an individuated musicological aesthetic transcending

the conventions of pre-Wagnerian forms.

Delia da Sousa Correa remarks that ‘Eliot’s novels enlarge and clarify the issues

raised by Spencer’s theory of music’ (Sousa Correa 2003, p.15), focusing on the

transcendental form of physiological connection that music mediated between musician

and auditor. Parallels between music and sympathetic clairvoyance / telepathy abound in

Eliot’s oeuvre (Picker 2003) but of greatest relevance to my argument is the character of

the Lizst/Wagner double, Klesmer, in Daniel Deronda (1876). While Daniel Deronda is

mainly concerned with Daniel’s search for love and identity, the brief appearance of

musical characters highlights Eliot’s belief in the synonymy of acoustic and psychic

force. Klesmer’s character is particularly emblematic of the telepathic musician as

imagined by Herbert Spencer. Eliot presents Klesmer as ‘a young Ulysses’ (Eliot 1984,

29

p.41), a heroic portrait of the musician whose ‘sensitivity to the universal’ (1984, p.43)

derides the ‘puerile state’ (Sousa Correa 2003, p.134) of other contemporary music.

Mercilessly individualistic, he condemns the young Gwendolen’s performance of an aria

by Bellini, demonstrating his opposition to the belletristic fancy of the Italian composers.

Klesmer’s own ‘tip-top playing’ (Eliot 1984, p.43) remains incomprehensible to some of

the novels other characters, an obvious reference to Eliot’s bemused impression of

Wagner’s style. Despite (and, perhaps, because of) this incomprehensibility, the other

characters are so mesmerised by Klesmer that he often conjures shared physical

sensations. When asked to ‘observe and evaluate Mirah’s singing, the hearts of the four

Meyrick ladies beat fast with anxiety’ (Toker 2004, p.568), and while Leona Toker

argues that ‘this resonant pulsation is not publicly expressed’ (2004, p.568) in the world

of the story, it is clearly evident to the reader.

John Picker reminds the reader of the ‘interesting echo in Klesmer’s name of that

of Franz Mesmer’ (Picker 2003, p.92) and that here the ‘Yiddishization of Mesmer

suggests foreign musical prowess as well as foreign mental domination’ (2003, p.92).

Picker draws particular attention to a sequence in which Klesmer and Gwendolen are

performing The Winter’s Tale. As Klesmer ‘strikes the thunderous chord, as if to

mesmerically raise Gwendolen from her sleep’ (2003, p.93), the vibrations open a panel

in the parlour that reveal the image of a mysterious dead face. Seeing the photo,

Gwendolen is broken from her dramatisation and falls to her knees, sobbing. That

Klesmer’s playing could magically arouse conditions under which Gwendolen’s physical

state changed suggests an advanced form of sympathetic connection. Although mediated

30

by the opening of the panel, Klesmer’s musical performance suggests a kind of uncanny,

telepathic control over Gwendolen’s emotions not unlike the control of body coined by

his namesake, Franz Mesmer.13

It is arguable, then, that Eliot’s exploration of these themes was a predictable

upshot of her relationship with Spencer, and both writers’ avowed interest in the work of

Hermann von Helmholtz and the emerging Society for Psychical Research. In Victorian

Soundscapes (2003), John Picker argues that, for Eliot, ‘the ear was the most deeply

receptive organ, and the sound wave the most penetrative and conjunctive to the

individual held captive in the bounds of the ego’ (Picker 2003, p.88). Abstracting

Helmholtz’s theory that the transmitter and receiver of musical phenomena resonate at

the same frequency, musical allegory in Eliot’s work transcends the term sympathy to

become sympathetic clairvoyance, otherwise known as telepathy: Klesmer is able to use

his advanced music to physically influence his auditors. As the first to introduce the

music of German Romanticism to the Victorians in both essayistic and allegorical form,

Eliot loads Wagner and the other Romantic composers with a kind of telepathic power,

one prefigured by Herbert Spencer in his illustration of the musician’s advanced nervous

system. This is not to suggest that the relationship between music and occult physiology

was at the forefront of each and every Victorian listening experience, but it remains a

significant dimension of how those experiences were culturally constructed.

13 It is worth reiterating here the place of mesmerism in the cultural history of telepathy (as established in

my introduction). While Alison Winters suggests that ‘the context in which mesmerism developed was very

different from the one that would sustain psychic research toward the end of the century’ (Winters 1998,

p.8), mesmerism initiated professional science’s investigation of psychic force, an investigation that would

continue in the SPR’s work. George Eliot’s reference to both mesmerism and sympathetic clairvoyance is

indicative of the wider Victorian interest in ‘community of sensation’(1998, p.326), which was inclusive of

both phenomena.

31

That Daniel Deronda pre-dates the coining of the term telepathy by 6 years

demonstrates the influence of Eliot’s musical allegory on the proceeding investigation,

especially in her mentorship of Frederic Myers, and the abundance of sonic metaphors

used to describe the processes at work in psychic force. Whatever mystical connections

were insinuated by Helmholtz’s discoveries and Eliot’s allegory, the Society for

Psychical Research was quick to use them to justify the material existence of telepathy.

Despite spiritualist protests that this reliance on physiological metaphors for evidence

meant that the SPR should be renamed ‘The Society for Occult Physiological Research’

(Luckhurst 2002, p.71), the SPR claimed that the sympathetic resonance of the human ear

was proof that there could also be fugitive psychic forces at work (and receptors for those

forces in the body) which science had not yet become capable of recognising. In 1891,

SPR member William Barrett predicted that ‘by the close of the next ten years thought

transference will be freely accepted by men of science’ (Luckhurst 2002, p.73). Barrett

himself was an assistant to acoustician John Tyndall at the Royal Institution in the 1860s,

and ‘frequently borrowed from his tuning forks model in Sound (1867) to prove that

Helmholtz and Tyndall’s discoveries were as relevant to psychic force as they were to

acoustics; as two forks resonated with the same pitch, so too could separate human bodies

resonate with the same thought forms’ (Luckhurst 2002, p.76).

Roger Luckhurst suggests that ‘speculations on community of sensation, that is,

tele-effects, constituted a recurrent problem across many scientific disciplines in the

nineteenth century (2002, p.78), and it is evident that the nexus of all approaches to these

32

tele-effects - literary and scientific - resonated with connotations of musical phenomena.

Interestingly, greater social experimentation into the nature of telepathy often

incorporated musical instruments. In her 1919 pamphlet How I Discovered My

Mediumship, Mrs Cecil M. Cook extols the use of ‘specially manufactured aluminium

trumpets for the channelling of disembodied voices’ (Cook 1919, in Enns 2005, p.14).

‘W.W. Aber’s Guide to Mediumship (1906) provides similar instructions for producing

trumpet manifestations’ (Enns 2005, p.14):

Place the trumpet in a basin of water in the center of the floor;

form a circle around it, and connect the battery by touching feet all around

the circle … You may sit many times before the [spirit] guides are able to

even raise the trumpet, but after they begin to speak … the progress will

be very rapid. (Aber in Enns 2005, p.14)

Although our contemporary encounters with film music do not generally conjure

up such supernatural analogies (and likewise do not require such a dangerous apparatus),

some late 20th century writing on film music unconsciously betrays the same tradition of

magical thinking that permeates nineteenth-century science and literature. In fact, a brief

survey of Claudia Gorbman’s Unheard Melodies (1987), considered by most scholars to

be one of the definitive texts on film music and identification, reveals that this synonymy

of psychic force and aural phenomena has persisted in some of the accepted conventions

of narrative film music. Summarising the seven main reasons music was used in the silent

film era, she makes a final point that is especially quizzical:

33

7.As music, it bonded spectators together. (Gorbman 1987, p.53)

Gorbman here assumes that physiological and emotional prosthesis is an intrinsic

quality of music. However, rather than focus singularly on how music may unite the

emotional experience of the audience, she also invokes Jean-Louis Baudry’s assertion

that:

The classical narrative film encourages the film subject’s return to a

primitive narcissism, in which there are no boundaries between active and

passive, body and environment, self and other. (Gorbman 1987, p.63)

Gorbman elaborates music’s relationship to this erasure of physiological

boundaries by stating that ‘the underlying pleasure of music can be traced to originary

hallucinations of bodily fusion with the mother, of non-separation prior to the Oedipal

crisis of language and interdiction’ (1987, p.64). According to Gorbman, a successful

film score encourages ‘greater disposition for the subject to accept the film’s pseudo-

perceptions as his or her own’ (1987, p.64). Obvious parallels can be drawn here between

the role of music and telepathy, synonymous universal languages that magically

transcend physiological separation.14

Gorbman herself points to this synonymy by tracing

research into the psychological pleasures of music to Helmholtz himself, who ‘was

among the first to attempt to bring physics, physiology and aesthetics together to

14 In fact, this represents the logical end-point of telepathy, where both minds/nervous systems become

indistinguishable from a unified whole.

34

understand responses to the basic musical elements’ (Gorbman 1987, p.61), and with

whom a connotative relationship to scientific and literary interest in telepathy has already

been established.

What is most important about the resonance of magical thinking in Unheard

Melodies is Gorbman’s discussion of Wagner’s centrality to the emergence of the film

score. ‘The critical writing of Richard Wagner, to a greater extent than any writings on

music per se, provide insights into the nature of thematic music in dramatic

representational works’ (Gorbman 1987, p.28). As I have already elucidated, these forms

were imagined to bring musician and auditor into an uncanny form of physical contact.

Wagner, as allegorically constructed by ‘George Eliot’s Ear’ (Picker 2003, p.80) and

embroiled in the wider 19th century nexus of music, literature and science, had a

measurable association with the emerging concept of telepathy. As the prototypical film

composer, Wagner’s compositional philosophy encapsulates the telepathic logic with

which this dissertation is concerned.

How Wagnerian conventions like the leitmotif came to dominate the pedagogy of

film music can be traced to the same kind of unification paradigm that underscored

contemporaneous research into both psychical and acoustical research. As is widely

acknowledged in the silent film sound discourse, early musical accompaniment practice

was ‘heterogenous and non-standardised’ (Altman 2004, p.9), each cinema house

offering its own brand of musical accompaniment that could either parallel or contradict

the image track. The rise of Wagnerian forms in the silent cinema can be attributed to a

35

perceived need for homogenous musical practice, as outlined in a 1910 Moving Picture

World editorial, which expresses hope that ‘just as Wagner fitted his music to the

emotions, expressed by words in his operas, so in course of time, no doubt, the same

thing will be done with regard to the moving picture’ (Paulin 2000, p.66).15

Leitmotif

offered a standardised way of communicating information about the diegesis that could

universalise aural identification with the cinema. Just as music and telepathy constituted

universal sensory languages for nineteenth-century science and literature, so too did the

leitmotif offer a universal musical structure through which the viewer may more reliably

bond with the screen, or more accurately, the composer himself.

This search for homogeneity and unity in the cinematic apparatus can be seen as

an extension of the Wagnerian principle of Gesamtkunstwerk or ‘total work of art’,

introduced by Wagner in The Art Work of The Future (1849). Wagner’s unification of

music and drama in his operatic works ‘came to dominate discussion of how the

cinematic apparatus may possess the same qualities, despite the cinema’s material

heterogeneity’ (Paulin 2000, p.59). In an effort to transcend the material heterogeneity of

opera, Wagner concealed the orchestra in a hidden pit. As Avital Ronell remarks:

A totality without contamination is the Wagnerian dream. But something

had to be sacrificed to the dream of transparency, something had to go the

way of repression. Surprisingly, the orchestra itself became the excluded

15There is an obvious tension here between Wagner’s own drive to individual expression, and his invention

of structures like the leitmotif that have conversely homogenous outcomes. While this presents

contradictions, it does not nullify the possibility that each compositional theory has had some kind of

autonomous influence.

36

negativity – the scriptural space that converts the score into sound was

driven underground. The site of technicity, where music and instrument

coincide, slipped into darkness. Stuff the orchestra in a darkened pit,

Wagner said, under the stage, suffocate it the way you drive out the index

of otherness. Collapse one of opera’s lungs. The otherness of the orchestra

to the living operatic body is something Wagner made explicit for us.

(Ronell in Bjorkin 2001, p.32)

As our contemporary experience of the cinema attests, the film score fulfils this

same site of repression, concealed from sight, spatiotemporally separated from both the

diegesis and the projection itself. The otherness of music is reinforced by its invisibility,

its ghostliness of the living cinematic body. It is here that the telepathic qualities of the

film score extend beyond the aesthetic and formal features of Wagner’s music as

discussed in this chapter: the cinema’s prototypical sound apparatus, the phonograph,

facilitated invisible music for the silent cinema, and, like the music of German

Romanticism, has a measurable relationship to the emergence of the term telepathy. The

cinema is a technological apparatus, demanding interrogation of how its mechanical

reproduction of invisible music may of its own accord foster a kind of uncanny prosthesis

between Bordwell’s musical narrator and the audience. It is to the technological

parameters of this relationship that I continue in the next chapter.

37

2. Doing for the Cinema what the Phonograph does for the Spirit

How terrible it is to hear this copper throat and its sounds from beyond the

grave! It is more than a photographic, or I had better say cinematographic,

something; it is the voice itself, the living voice, still alive among carrion,

skeletons, nothingness. (Renard 1907, in Kittler 1999, p.53)

In 1924, Rudolph Lothar’s The Talking Machine: A Technical Aesthetic Essay demanded

not only that ‘we ignore and overlook its mechanical features’ (Lothar in Kittler 1999,

p.45) but also that ‘the machine demands that we give bodies to the sounds emanating

from it’ (1999, p.45). The history of phonography (and its offspring, the gramophone) is

characterised by its imagined prosthetic relationship to the human body. Edouard Leon

Scott’s 1857 phonautograph, from which phonographic principles originated, was ‘in all

parts a reconstructed ear, the membrane derived from the eardrum and the stylus with the

attached bristle from the ossicle’ (Kittler 1986, p.74).16

As a form of mechanical

reproduction, the phonograph also manifests what Strohmayer calls ‘a presence of an

absence’ (Strohmayer 1997, p.157), or ‘that defining aspect of modernity in which

everyday technologies betray the dissolution of a simple presence’ (1997, p. 156). In

other words, technologies like the phonograph suggest a body, a body that is not there

and must be imagined, as Lothar proposes, through our overlooking of its mechanical

features.

16 It is important to note here that the phonautograph prefigured only the recording capabilities of the

phonograph, as it was an inscription device rather than a talking machine, hence its privileged relationship

to the ear alone.

38

This very oversight, however, reasserts the uncanny simultaneity of a human

agency, be it the human voice or musical performance, operating through the phonograph

despite the lack of a human body. Technological prosthesis suggests a desire not only to

extend, but also to transcend the spatiotemporal limitations of the body. ‘Made in his

image and sound systems, man adorns himself with a mass of artificial supplement

disguised as divinity’ (Ronell 1989, p.88). If ‘God is the dream of absolute technology’

(1989, p.88), then technology may be articulated as a bridge to what is colloquially

referred to as ‘the spirit world’. This is a logical extension of Ronell’s assertion,

considering that phantasms of the body are usually called ghosts.

Much like phonography, the history of telepathy is defined by the desire for

physical communion with ghosts. Nineteenth-century mediums held séances at which

spirits are believed to have spoken through their bodies. The ghost’s disembodied voice

manifested the greatest distortion of space and time imaginable, emerging from a realm

invisible to the sensory capacities of the normal human body. It was only through the

especially sensitive medium that communion was possible. The contemporaneous

emergence of technological mediums like the phonograph that allowed access to dead

moments of oral and musical performance invariably raised comparison to these uncanny

forms of ghostly transmission and reception. Both new forms of communication aroused

magical thinking, simulating the ‘various imagined effects of collapse of time and space’

(Thurschwell 2001, p.20). ‘Communications with others’ bodies and minds contributed to

create a permeable, boundary-crossing, potentially telepathic subject at the turn of the

century’ (2001, p.20), regardless of whether it took a material form in technology, or in

39

the empirically elusive modes of the occult. Upon patenting the tin-foil phonograph in

1877, Edison himself stated that one of the main uses of his new contraption was to

record and replay ‘the last words of dying persons’ (Edison in Attali, 1985 p.93). The

final chapter of his memoir The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison

speaks of a desire to ‘bring science to the afterworld’ (Thurschwell 2001, p.23), outlining

his intention to build a device that would enable verbal communion with the dead.17

The phonograph provided a body for voices that were physically absent, but the

ear and larynx were not the only organs at which the device was aimed. As the

genealogical antecedent of all sound representation devices, Edison’s phonograph also

began the tradition of replacing musicians with machines that could reproduce their

performances. Much of Edison’s memoir is concerned with music, including his response

to ‘that elemental music of Wagner’ (Edison 1948 [1968], p.83), and the relationship

between phonographic recording principles and musical performance. However, one use

of the phonograph is missing from his account, that being its replacement of live musical

accompaniment at the site of cinematic projection.18

‘The very first Vitascope catalogue

issued by Raff and Gammon in March 1896 includes a page recommending the use of

music with selected films’ (Altman 2004, p.89), but as early as 1899 this procedure was

becoming superseded by phonographic accompaniment. As the 1899 F.M. Prescott

catalogue suggests:

17 Avital Ronell suggests that Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone (and the Graphophone,

a competitor to Edison’s phonograph), also became “an avid séance-goer after the death of his brothers and

was working through a pact to communicate with them”(Ronell 1989, p.250). It is not unreasonable,

therefore, to suggest that both inventors had an acute sensitivity to the synonymity of

phonography/telephony and telepathy. 18 Edison does discuss a phonographic/cinematic synergy, but only in relation to synchronised diegetic

sound.

40

‘With the advent of the Graphophone Grand, which reproduces as loud

and natural as the human voice or an orchestra or band, a combined

Cineograph and Graphophone is now possible, so that audience may hear

as well as see the performance.’ (Altman 2004, p.90)

Henry Warner (of Warner Bros. fame) commented on the uncanny distinction

between live and recorded musical accompaniment. His astonishment is recorded as thus:

‘When I heard the twelve-piece orchestra on the screen at the Bell

Telephone Laboratories, I could not believe my own ears. I walked in back

of the screen to see if they did not have an orchestra there synchronizing

with the picture. They all laughed. The whole affair was in a ten by twelve

room. There were a lot of bulbs working and things I know nothing about,

but there was not any concealed orchestra.’ (Ijsselsteijn 2003, p.24)

In the same way the mechanically reproduced voice of a deceased family member

may have seemed strange to Victorians first encountering the phonograph, so too would

invisible music for the cinema have been somewhat characterised by the marked absence

of a physically present musician, who had been replaced by the phonograph’s ghostly

agency. If, as Rudolph Lothar suggests, we look through the speaking machine to see the

body beyond, all modern narrative cinema betrays the ‘occulted sense’ (Kermode in

Bordwell 1989, p.2) that there is a composer or musician in another time and place,

directing our experience of the visual narrative with their musical commentary. Victorian

41

belief in the phonograph’s prosthetic or ghostly qualities have obvious ramifications for

how we may discuss Bordwell’s personified musical narrator. Through a nineteenth-

century magical logic of perception, in which the technological collapse of time and

space is analogous to that manifested by the spirit world, the mechanically reproduced

film score is necessarily read as a ghostly personification of the absent musician.

Sebastian Knowles’ ‘Death by Gramophone’ article in the Fall 2003 Journal of Modern

Literature recalls Aldous Huxley’s blunt demarcation: ‘Live music is life. Recorded

music is death’ (Huxley in Knowles 2003, p.9).

In terms of Edison’s desire to build a cinematographic device that ‘does for the

eye what the phonograph does for the ear’ (Edison in Gunning 2001, p.15), articulation of

the Victorian synonymity of phonography and telepathy highlights glaring gaps in the

existing cinema history scholarship. The cinematograph was, for Edison, a logical

extension of phonography, yet inquiry into the ‘uncanniness of film’ (Stern 1997) has

done little to penetrate the visual hegemony of cinema studies.19

The ghostliness of the

cinematic image is a prevalent motif in film studies discourse, in many ways stemming

from the primal scene of cinema history, the Lumiere Brothers’ 1895 Grand Café

cinematographe exhibition of Arrival of a Train, at which some of the more

impressionable members of the audience fled in terror at the sight of an oncoming train,

uncannily neither real nor unreal (Loiperdinger 2004, p.90). Afterwards, the December

30, 1895 edition of Le Radical would state that this new cinematic device ‘allows us to

19 Perhaps marginalisation of the aural uncanny in cinema studies can be linked to the visual language

commonly used to describe ghosts (for example, the word apparition), as opposed to the inherently

physical (and aural) sense of a presence. Frederic Myers himself ‘wanted a term that would not imply an

exclusively visual sense, whence his choice of phantasm over phantom’ (Durham Peters 1999, p.141).

42

see our friends or family as if living again long after they have disappeared’ (Christie

2001, p.8). 20

This is homage to what Nicholas Royle calls ‘the hallucinatory reality of the

photograph’ (Royle 2003, p.75), or ‘that rather terrible thing which is there in every

photograph: the return of the dead’ (Barthes in Royle 2003, p.75).

How the cinema’s musical apparatus may itself be considered to manifest an

uncanny logic has, nevertheless, gone mostly ignored by theoretical discourse, which is

strange considering that the phonograph, already imbued with a telepathic aura by

Victorian culture, was the silent cinema’s first mechanical form of musical reproduction.

If Edison’s cinematograph possessed ghostly visual qualities and was doing for the eye

what the phonograph does for the ear, then it follows that the mechanically reproduced

music of cinema texts may likewise be exhibiting a ghostliness all of its own. Claudia

Gorbman betrays this kind of magical thinking in Unheard Melodies, not only in

reference to the prosthetic qualities of music noted in the first chapter of this dissertation.

Her sixth reason for the silent cinema’s musical accompaniment is a clear provocation:

6. Like magic, it was an antidote to the technologically derived

‘ghostliness’ of the images. (Gorbman 1987, p.53)

Here, Gorbman suggests that music gives the cinematic apparatus a body, one that

compensates for the spectral quality of the image. Early live musical commentary

performed this task in an overt sense: piano players, organists and orchestras provided a

20 ‘In his discussion of the phonograph in The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan writes of the

“undercurrent of mechanical music” as being “strangely sad”, likening it to the feelings of longing for dead

relatives and friends.’ (Christie 2001, p.9)

43

human bridge to the otherworldly diegesis. The advent of phonographic accompaniment

transcended that physicality, suggesting a magical form of transmission and reception in

which the musician’s spirit defied the accepted spatiotemporal parameters of the human

sense organs by jumping into another body or medium: the phonograph. In this context,

the modern film score may be called a form of telepathy.

In this chapter I will explore the technological parameters of Gorbman’s magical

antidote. I do so in an effort to establish a wider context for how a covertly telepathic

logic, latent in the phonograph’s mediating presence, persisted in the silent cinema’s

early regime of musical representation. Spatiotemporal separation of diegesis and musical

narration here finds a commonsense rationale: the phonograph was itself originally a

social and material entity discrete from the cinema’s visual apparatus. Rick Altman’s

expansion of the silent film sound studies discourse to include ‘not just technologies, but

complex cultural signs’ (Altman 2004, p.15) hence demands further interrogation of the

social construction of the phonograph. Altman argues that listening is a complex activity,

of which a text’s semiotic and musicological content is not the only contributing factor;

nuances of listening experiences are also generated by accepted social attitudes to

technologies themselves (Altman 2004). The way the Victorians listened to the

phonograph around the time it was being used as an accompaniment for cinematic

projections is vital to our understanding of how audiences may have first identified with

the mechanised score itself. This is crucial if we are to grasp those magical aspects of the

musical soundtrack that have been repressed by our unconscious familiarity with a

unified apparatus.

44

Such an investigation is made in tandem with my first chapter’s investigation of

the telepathic qualities of Wagner’s musical vision, in an effort to establish various

grounds on which Bordwell’s musical narrator might be enacting a specifically telepathic

communication with the cinema audience. Parallelling contemporaneous trends in music,

nineteenth-century technological discoveries were also driven by the need to connect

physical bodies in new ways, mediating human experience through channels beyond the

normal operation of the sense organs. Cable telegraphy was ‘ubiquitously referred to as

“the true nerves of the Empire”’ (Luckhurst 2002, p.141), while the railroad was seen as

‘an attempt to bind the “distant sympathies” of the white English diaspora more firmly

together’ (2002, p.140). The phonograph is a technological hyperbolisation of this

sympathetic sentiment, imbuing the aural sense organs with distorted, telepathic abilities

transcending time and space.

The 19th century arrival of sound technologies like the telephone and the

phonograph also marks an age ‘alive with sound’ (Preece in Picker 2003, p.4).

Ubiquitous mechanization of everyday-life brought with it a whole new public

soundscape, the steam hiss of the railroad an unfamiliar shock to those conditioned to the

clip-clop of hooves and the creaking of wooden cart wheels. Industrial progress ensured

that anyone walking past a factory would encounter metallic scraping sounds that were

unheard of in the previous century. This cacophony was, however, somewhat muted by

the arrival of technologies like the telephone and phonograph that represented, for the

first time, the mechanization and simulation of the aural and oral sense organs (Lastra

45

2000). Although Faber attempted vocal mimesis in his Euphonia of 1846, the telephone

(1876) and the tin-foil phonograph (1877) were the first examples of technologies able to

actually reproduce a real human voice.21

Whereas the telegraph permitted a speedier form of written communication, and

the railroad allowed physical access to foreign places at a fraction of the time required by

other forms of transport, the telephone and phonograph enabled verbal communication

that literally disembodied the reproduced voice. For many Victorians, the overtly

prosthetic nature of this disturbance, its intimacy to the physicality and consciousness of

the individual, conjured a hysteria synonymous to that summoned by the ghostly voices

of the séance. Rick Altman suggests that ‘the phonograph’s novelty contributed to a

revolution in indoor sound’ (Altman 2004, p.28), and any assessment of this revolution of

strange sounds must include the séance, which shared an equal proximity to the parlour.

In his 1996 paper Metaphor, Parapsychology and Psi, Carl Williams argues that

paranormal metaphors are particularly useful to scenarios which privilege ‘intrusions,

connections, transmissions and forces’ (Williams 1996, p.8). It is evident that the

regularity of these characteristics to both phonography/telephony and telepathy, and their

almost simultaneous emergence in nineteenth-century popular culture, made

metaphorical comparison almost inevitable.

Mass-media responses to these mechanically disembodied voices were routinely

entangled with the hysteria accorded to telepathy. Victorian media magnate and

21 Faber’s Euphonia was an advanced automaton that could articulate intelligible answers to questions in

several languages, its ‘breath’, tongue, mouth and larynx controlled by a system of keyboard and bellows

(Lastra 2000). It was, however, incapable of reproducing a real human voice.

46

spiritualist W.T. Stead was firmly committed to ‘the democratisation of psychical

research’ (Luckhurst 2002, p.121), using his Review of Reviews to espouse the Society of

Psychical Research’s developing exploration of phenomena under the umbrella term

telepathy. The 1891-92 Christmas Review of Reviews extra Real Ghost Stories was

‘alleged by Stead to have sold 100,000 copies within two days’ (2002, p.121), saturating

the Victorian consciousness in the mystique of occult phenomena. Luckhurst argues that

this edition of Review of Reviews ‘heralded mass awareness of telepathy’ (2002, p.121).

In June 1893, Review of Reviews metamorphosed into Borderland, a ‘quarterly

journal committed to phenomena which lie on the borderland which science has hitherto,

for the most part, contemptuously relegated to Superstition’ (Stead in Luckhurst 2002,

p.126). Featuring prominently in Borderland were frequent references to ‘the body as

telephone’ (Stead in Ledger & Luckhurst 2000, p.285); Stead used advances in sound

technology, contemporary novelties at the forefront of Victorian popular culture, to

contextualise the workings of psychic force. In How We Intend to Study Borderland

(1893), the journal’s mission statement, Stead makes this provisional point:

Immortality, or at least the persistence of the personality of man after the

dissolution of this vesture of decay, that is the second object. It is indeed a

corollary of the first. For if life is manifested independently of the body,

even while the body exists, it cannot be supposed to terminate merely

because the organs of sense are no longer in use. It would be as rational to

suppose that a man ceases to exist when he rings off the telephone through

47

which he has been speaking, as to suppose that life, as we are now

discovering it, terminates when it lays aside the bifurcated telephone

which we call the body. (Stead in Ledger & Luckhurst, p.281)

Stead clearly refers to the spiritual extensions made possible by technological

prosthesis. Telephony becomes the material manifestation of telepathy, a technologically

assisted version of disembodied communication analogous to that simultaneously

popularised by the séance. In this model, technology becomes, like the spiritualist

medium, a vessel through which human agency may persist beyond the accepted

boundaries of time and space, and the normal channels of the sense organs. Stead’s

magical thinking can be seen as an auxiliary to the Society for Psychical Research’s

existing use of the scientific models of acoustic physiology to explain psychic force,

solidifying a public perception of telepathy inextricably linked to sonic phenomena.

Other prominent members of Victorian society aligned to the Society of Psychical

Research used different epistemological forms to demonstrate the analogical relationship

between aural technologies and telepathy. The novel features as the main disseminating

force for these analogies at the end of the nineteenth-century, most of which are

dystopian visions of technological prosthesis. Long after telepathy’s coining in 1882,

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) critiqued the potentially invasive qualities of phonography

by comparing it to vampirism. For Stoker, the phonograph in Dracula acts as ‘a locus of

sexual anxiety and symbolism among its protagonists’ (Picker 2003, p.135). Mina

Harker’s encounter with Dr Seward’s phonograph, on which he records his forlorn love

48

for Lucy Westenra, reduces her to a state of post-orgasmic exhaustion. Her intimate

access to his private feelings through the machine insinuates a kind of disembodied

sexual relationship. Later, the Count bites Mina, itself an act of sexual invasion, and

installs a kind of phonographic voice of his own in her body, requiring her to hear and

obey: ‘When my brain says ‘Come!’ to you, you shall cross land or sea to do my bidding’

(Stoker in Picker 2003, p.133). Through the drinking of her blood, Dracula swallows her

soul and therefore gains control of her body. In a reversal of this procedure, Van Helsing

eventually hypnotises Mina to gain access to the re-embodied voice of Dracula that

inhabits her body so as to learn of his movements. Here, Mina is herself turned into a

speaking machine, mimicking the mechanical ventriloquism, the record and playback, of

phonography. Dracula, then, is greatly concerned with the telepathic connotations of

phonography and the inherently prosthetic qualities of the device.22

Stead and Stoker’s visions of technological prosthesis straddle a spectrum of fin-

de-siecle hopes and fears about telepathy, but what both represent is a pervasive

Victorian belief that sound technologies allowed some kind of spiritual essence to persist

beyond the physical body. The phonograph and the telephone were imagined as a

spatiotemporal nexus, a meeting point for the living and the dead. As the technological

precursor to Edison’s Vitascope (rivalling the Lumieres’ Cinematographe), the

phonograph pre-empted the ghostly logic with which so many early cinematic

22 Jules Vernes’s Le Chateau des Carpathes (1892) and Villiers’s L’Eve Future (1886) feature similar

themes. L’Eve Future offers ‘a striking portrait of an Edison, who designs a woman with two golden

phonographs for lungs’ (Lastra 2000, p.18). Franz Kafka and Philip K. Dick, whose work was in part

concerned with the relationship between technological prosthesis and mysticism, continue this tradition in

the 20th century.

49

experiences were associated, the only difference being that an audience could now see the

dead person rather than just hear them. Although early experiments combining both

phonograph and cinematograph were a public failure due to ‘the acoustic gramophone’s

lack of an amplification system, thus rendering it useless to a sizable audience’ (Chanan

1996, p.259), sound-on-disc systems were eventually successful, and ‘phonographic

principles influenced the technical norms of the early cinema’ (Lastra 2000, p.195).

I would like to turn, then, to an examination of how the transition from live

musical accompaniment to the use of a phonograph or gramophone sounded the magical

birth of invisible music for the cinema. This transformation can be seen as the point at

which the cinema intersects with phonography, and in turn, a telepathic regime of

musical communication. While Claudia Gorbman suggests that music could magically

eradicate the ghostly indeterminacy of the images, mechanically reproduced music

installed another kind of ghost within the cinematic apparatus – the disembodied

musician. This dissertation will conclude with an interrogation of some of the first uses of

sound technology to accompany cinematic projection, which were regulated by the

everyday Victorian synonymity of phonography and telepathy. Consistent with the

phonograph’s ability to distort the accepted boundaries of space and time, the modern

cinema’s musical narrator is not physically present in the diegetic world or the site of

projection, but her ghost manages the commentary regardless. The phonograph allowed

the musical narrator to become ‘unseen’ (Neale 1985, p.101), or in Strohmayer’s terms,

manifest the ‘presence of an absence’ (Strohmayer 1997, p.157) that underscores the

everyday of technological modernity.

50

The uncanny disappearance of live musical accompaniment for cinematic

projections has not been explored by the existing historical discourse. Even the most

recent and comprehensive title, Rick Altman’s Silent Film Sound (2004), acknowledges

that ‘early film accompaniment offers maddeningly incomplete evidence’ (Altman 2004,

p.77), mostly due to a diverse, non-standardised range of practices in the pre-Hollywood

era that included lecturers, orchestras, piano players and phonographic reproduction.

Limited archival data on these practices invariably interferes with interrogation of how

the shift to mechanised music was received by the early filmgoer. Regardless, there is

evidence to suggest that telepathic principles were materially evident in the early

phonographic procedures of film accompaniment, especially in terms of an apparent

desire to reconcile the disparate spatiotemporal positions of the spectator and the unseen

musical narrator. This can be seen as a necessary response to the disappearance of live

musical accompaniment, which effectively embedded musical narration in the cinema

text, rendering it invisible. Because music now came from ‘a speaker located in the

orchestra pit, pointing upward, simulating the sound of the orchestra it displaced’

(Altman 1995, p.69), technicians needed new ways to locate musical narration in relation

to both the diegetic world and the audience itself. As will become apparent, responses to

this problem of invisibility reflect the telepathic logic already associated with

phonography throughout Victorian culture.

David Bordwell notes that ‘the invisible-witness model became classical film

theory’s all-purpose answer to problems involving space, authorship, point of view, and

51

narration’ (Bordwell in Lastra 2000, p.140). In Sound Technology and the American

Cinema (2000), James Lastra discusses how the Bell Laboratories’ Vitaphone (1926)

system, one of many early sound-on-disc systems, helped invent the invisible-witness

model of musical narration. Lastra remarks that the earliest recording techniques for the

silent cinema were centred on a phonographic or ‘perceptual fidelity’ (Lastra 2000,

p.138) model which ‘set as its goal the perfectly faithful reproduction of a

spatiotemporally specific musical performance’ (2000, p.139). This model assumed that

‘all aspects of the sound event were inherently significant, including long or short

reverberation times, ratios of direct to reflected sound, or even certain peculiarities of

performance space’ (2000, p.139). For example, ‘the Warner Brothers’ 1926 Vitaphone

system was based on the phonograph, privileging an absolutely faithful rendering of a

sonic performance conceived of as wholly prior to the intervention of the representational

device’ (2000, p.196); a microphone was often placed right in the middle of the orchestra

pit, favouring a faithful reproduction of the original space rather than the clarity of

particular instruments. ‘Vitaphone’s recording of Marian Talley’s “Caro Nome” (from

Verdi’s Rigoletto) causes her voice to increase in reverberation and diminish in volume

as she leaves the set, offering an instance where precise localisation of the auditor in

relation to the source enhances the overall effect of the scene, creating the vivid and

satisfying impression of her retreat’ (2000, p.196).

The unseen musical narrator here becomes a ‘point of audition (POA)’ (Lastra

2000, p.140) embedded in the apparatus itself, not only as an interpretation of the

diegesis, but also in relation to the original recording of the soundtrack itself. This

technique can be seen as an attempt to insert the viewer into the exact space of the unseen

52

auditor, substituting one for the other, fusing their nervous systems beyond the accepted

boundaries of time and space so that the audience is hearing exactly what the auditor

heard. ‘Intelligibility of the soundtrack (the narrative importance of certain sonic

elements) was not a dominant concern until the advent of synchronised diegetic sound,

and the phonographic or simulation model ruled the roost during the silent film period,

since it lent itself to the reigning theoretical orthodoxies of the day’ (Lastra 2000, p.139).

These theoretical orthodoxies can be traced to an everyday nineteenth-century synergy

between magical forms of transmission and phonographic representation, one that may

have been unconscious to many technicians but which occurred nevertheless.23

Lastra

suggests that POA phenomena ‘humanised machine perception’ (2000, p.140), and that

they represented spaces as heard by ‘an embodied perceiver within that space’ (2000,

p.141). In turn, musical narration itself became an anthropomorphised dimension of the

cinema text, the phonograph representing a disembodiment of that human perceiver.

Clearly, this phonographic logic is concerned with prosthesis and its telepathic corollary,

ghostliness, highlighting the particularly uncanny disappearance of live musical

accompaniment at the projection of silent films.

Phonographic synchronisation of the image track also contributed to music’s

performance of a telepathic function in the early cinematic apparatus. Claudia Gorbman

suggests that music for the silent film also ‘provided a rhythmic beat to complement, or

impel, the rhythms of editing and movement on the screen’ (Gorbman 1987, p.53), and

23 Lastra contends that phonographic models were later superseded by models of musical narration that

relied on ‘a more telephonic, intelligible’ (Lastra 2000, p.141) relationship to synchronised diegetic sound.

In terms of its analogous association to magical thinking, such a model still suggests that there is someone

on the other end.

53

the use of phonograph music to synchronise spatiotemporally broken images into an

intelligible diegetic flow is particularly relevant to a discussion of telepathy in the given

context. The piano-player or orchestra of the silent cinema existed to ‘ward off the

displeasure of the image’s ambiguity, which Barthes characterized “the terror of

uncertain signs”’ (Gorbman 1987, p.58). Elaine Scarry contends that any narrative voice

that focuses the vision of the percipient contributes to the ‘vivacity’ (Scarry 1995, p.1) of

that experience, directing and clarifying their perception of events. Without music, the

images could be articulated as ‘a form of daydreaming, as opposed to imagining under

authorial instruction’ (1995, p.1). She uses the analogous model of hypnosis to describe

the machinations of this direction, claiming that, like the hypnotist, the musical narrator

asks the audience to ‘look carefully at certain aspects [of the diegesis], and those alone’

(1995, p.20) in order to establish an intelligible relationship between images which may

otherwise remain incomprehensible. Similar to the patient in hypnotic trance, the film

percipient is instructed to succumb completely to the instruction of the musical narrator

and accept the intended reality of the images presented.24

While live musical accompaniment was intended to perform this hypnotic

function, human error and the lack of standardised performance practices in the early

cinema prevented a completely accurate synchronisation of images. As Clyde Martin

remarked in 1911:

24 Again, it is important to reiterate the place of hypnosis in the cultural history of telepathy. Society of

Psychical Research member Edmund Gurney stated in the second volume of the Society’s Proceedings

(1884) that ‘hypnosis and mesmeric rapport may be represented as a special extension of telepathic

sympathy between two organisms’ (Gurney in Luckhurst 2002, p.72).

54

‘In several picture theatres I found that the piano player had a tendency to

try and make the comedy pictures funnier than the authors had intended,

by adding music in contrast with what the scene portrayed…That is not

all; in some places I found that the piano player was taking advantage of

some dramatic scenes and getting a laugh up by springing comedy music

or effects during a dramatic production. Such practice is a great detriment

to any house, and the sooner the manager dispenses with the services of

such persons the better is will be for the business in general.’ (Altman

2004, p.280)

Phonographic accompaniment, especially in completely integrated systems like

the Vitaphone, ensured that synchronisation was exact; the composer’s intended mode of

hypnosis was guaranteed by the relative infallibility of the technology. In this sense, the

meaning of the visual diegesis was most accurately articulated by a telepathic medium

(phonography), rather than live musical performance, which seems fitting considering

Elaine Scarry’s illustration of narration as a form of hypnosis.

Telepathy’s connotative relationship to sound technology (as established by

nineteenth-century literature, science and psychical research) reveals the telepathic logic

at work in the early phonographic accompaniment of cinematic projections. This magical

logic of perception is repressed in our contemporary experience of a unified apparatus,

but Bordwell’s musical narrator remains a personified figure haunting the modern cinema

text, and it is in this context that a discussion of telepathy remains pertinent. As Rick

55

Altman’s crisis historiography attests, listening is an experience contingent not only on

technologies, but also on the social beliefs that surround them (Altman 2004), and it is

evident in readings of contemporary film theory that a fin-de-siecle synonymity between

phonography and telepathy continues to haunt the cinema’s musical apparatus.

56

Conclusion

In Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (1989),

David Bordwell states that an audience member or critic typically employs a

‘personification heuristic’ (Bordwell 1989, p.152) to understand the role of narrative

voices in the cinema. This suggests that, metaphorically at least, these voices should have

a human body attached to them. The paradox of this heuristic is that the cinema’s

technological apparatus literally disembodies the human agency that works through it.

For instance, the film composer directs our experience of the visual diegesis with a voice

of musical narration, despite the fact that he or she is not present at the site of cinematic

projection; the body with which we may associate that musical voice is in a different time

and place to our encounter with the film itself. Musical narration is therefore an

uncertain presence in the modern cinema text, one that requires an appropriate

terminology for further interrogation. Because this commentary on diegetic events is

characterised by the palpable absence of the human body (or, at the very least, a

prosthetic derangement of it), such a language should come from an historical period in

which the concept of disembodied communication enjoyed its greatest popular currency

and critical attention.

Given the analogical relationship between psychic force and aural phenomena

established by various nineteenth-century theoretical discourses, the term telepathy may

usefully be applied to the transmission and reception of this musical narration. In this

dissertation, I have justified extension of the term’s original common use (the séance,

57

thought-transference and mesmerism) to include modes of musical communication that

likewise betray the persistence of human agency beyond the spatiotemporal limitations of

the physical body. Musical narration for the cinema fulfils this definition in a binary

sense: both composer and performer are absent from the site of cinematic projection. As

the language of nineteenth-century psychical research would suggest, ghosts guide our

experience of the visual narrative, the cinema’s musical apparatus acting as a phantasm of

the human body. Contemporary identification theory has yet to reconcile with this

ghostly community of sensation, despite various instances (especially Claudia Gorbman’s

Unheard Melodies) in which its own rhetorical structures allude to a repressed awareness

of it.

John Durham Peters suggests that ‘every new medium is a machine for the

production of ghosts’ (Durham Peters 1999, p.139). Magical thinking, a form of

perceptual logic in which technological collapse of space and time is analogous to that

imagined by forms of occult communication, is useful to understanding how the

Victorians may have encountered the novelty of mechanically reproduced music for the

cinema. For many members of nineteenth-century culture, the phonograph was a

harbinger of death, disembodying the live musician and trapping their spectre in the

machine. Anecdotal evidence from fin-de-siecle figures like Henry Warner suggests that

the gradual disappearance of live musical accompaniment for the silent cinema was a

particularly uncanny one, characterised by its replacement with the phonograph, a device

loaded with ghostly, telepathic connotations by Victorian culture. Considering this

established connotative relationship between phonography and psychic force, the

58

reproduced film score may be read as a ghostly personification of the physically absent

musician or composer. In turn, the transmission and reception of that score may

justifiably be called a form of telepathy, especially when it is made evident that a

telepathic logic was at work in early sound-on-disc systems like the Bell Laboratories’

Vitaphone.

Even prior to the strange emergence of the telephone and phonograph, nineteenth-

century culture used a form of magical thinking to make sense of the nature of music

itself. Like the phonograph, music was seen as a magical nexus point, a mediating

structure enabling a form of communication between composer and audience that

transcended the accepted boundaries of the human sense organs. Musical Romanticism,

especially the theoretical writings of Richard Wagner, offered an emotion-centred,

personalised aesthetic, one suggesting that listeners could, through music, have an

uncanny access to the physical emotions of the composer. Contemporaneous movements

in natural philosophy and acoustic science concretised this belief, in so far as music

became, for the first time, a quantifiably physiological experience. That an invisible force

like sound could have a measurable bodily affect gave hope to the Society of Psychical

Research, who used models taken from the acoustic sciences to justify the existence of

psychic force. As the major formative influence on the conventions of the Hollywood

film score, Wagner’s relationship to the cultural history of telepathy is critical to an

articulation of how film music manifests a telepathic logic. A reading of Claudia

Gorbman’s Unheard Melodies betrays this connotative relationship, demonstrating that

telepathy occupies a hidden, taken-for-granted recess in the existing theoretical discourse.

59

Following Peter Pels’ assertion that ‘it makes little sense to talk of a single or

unilinear process of modernisation’ (Pels 2003, pp.29-30), film theory requires

integration of the occult dimensions of modernity if it is to maintain a democratic,

pluralist agenda. Previously, scholars such as Royle (2003) and Stern (1997) have

acknowledged the ghostliness of the cinematic image, but until now there has been little

to no interrogation of how music may manifest its own uncanny logic. In fact, it seems

most appropriate that the cinema’s aural components should acquire a theoretical

language taken from occult or transcendentalist discourse, given Mary Ann Doane’s

belief that sound ‘lacks the concreteness which is conducive to an ideology of

empiricism’ (Doane in Gorbman 1987, p.67). Telepathy is a concept drawn from these

discourses, and seems pertinent in terms of music’s fundamental ability to communicate

beyond the constraints of oral linguistics or the normal operation of the sense organs.

In fact, this specific naming of musical narration as telepathy reasserts its

transcendence of empiricism, concretises its uncanny or transcendental properties. A re-

evaluation of this uncertain aspect of our everyday audiovisual experience unveils the

hidden magical dimensions of modernity. The nineteenth-century was the period in which

the conditions of modernity were negotiated, and the degree to which occult discourses

were entangled with literature and professional science at that time beckons further

investigation, calls for a psychoanalysis of existing theory to bring those repressed

dimensions to light. In this critical model, the supernatural becomes an intrinsic part of

the everyday, returning it from the shadow designation of other.

60

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