Prelude no. 8 in E-flat minor
I'm sorry, but that "grating" prelude was NOT played on a "perfectly tuned" piano. It sounded horrible because the pitch of the recording was bad, not because of the prelude or the key itself.
shareYes, it did. Remember he retuned the piano to escape the limitations of the octave system of music. He was breaking away from the arbitrary intervals created by the movie's namesake. At the end when Janos is in the hospital the uncle says he retuned the piano. He has given in to the status quo
shareI can't believe I missed that bit at the end about him retuning the piano. Thanks for bringing that up!
I'm a music nerd in my spare time, so all of this is very meaningful to me. The OP missed the point that there is no such thing as a "perfectly tuned" piano. The whole point of the movie is that the piano, and almost all modern musical instruments like the guitar, fretted bass, sax, clarinet, etc are tuned to the Werckmeister scale ("equal temperament") which is a compromise. If instead we tune a piano to pure notes based on the ancient Greek ratios, each octave ends up 16% sharp. So Werkmeister rounded it down and distributed the 16% error equally between 12 notes. It sounds good enough, but the point is that we never hear pure natural harmony.
If we tune a piano to the pure ratios, then within a particular 7-note scale (white keys, DO-RE-MI-FA-SO-LA-TI) it will sound fantastic, but if we add the accidentals (black keys) it'll sound like a train wreck.
This is a problem that has vexed musicians for centuries, and there's no real solution except to use Werckmeister's fudged scale. A few musicologists have toyed with the 53-note scale suggested by the ancient Chinese, and it's a lot closer to natural purity. But who would want to build (or learn!) a piano that has 53 notes per octave instead of 12? The thing would be the size of a barn, and you'd have to have hands the size of godzilla's.
P.S. But the OP was right about one thing, I think they deliberately screwed with the pitch of that recording to exaggerate how bad it would sound on a naturally tempered piano.
@ rooprect
Thank you for being a music nerd who contributes their thoughts re-the music and Werckmeister. Might I trouble you further to ask how this relates to the theme of Hungary being over powered by Russia and the compromise of the uncle with his piano at the end?
A bird sings and the mountain's silence deepens.share
Hi Poppy, thanks for reading my ramble. If it made any sense to you, I'm impressed; I just read back what I wrote and it sounded like a bunch of nonsense :p
Here's how I think the metaphor of music relates to the political story in the film (and I'll go ahead and admit that I know nothing about actual Hungarian history, so I'll just go by what's shown in the movie). The musical metaphor, as the uncle was saying into his tape recorder, is that certain natural events like musical scales aren't always neatly ordered. We humans feel the need to create order, whether we're making a 12-note musical scale or whether we're pruning our hedges in perfect, straight rows.
The problem is that nature fights back. Your hedges will grow unevenly until you prune them again, and eventually you'll quit or die, and the hedges will grow like weeds wherever they want. (Skip down 2 paragraphs for my theory on how this relates to music, if you're not bored to tears by then).
So with the political situation depicted in the film, we see governments trying to create order in the village, and it doesn't sit well. The Prince arrives, and he uses his propaganda to create another form of order (in this case a chilling, silent mob). In all cases, it corresponds with violence and madness. At the end when the (Russian?) troops institute martial law & lobotomize/drug Janos, that's just another flawed attempt to control the village.
So the bottom line is that we humans mustn't try to control everything, because the world can't always be neatly organized into evenly spaced "notes". Whenever we try to organize society like that (dictatorships, communism, totalitarianism), it's bound to backfire.
Haha ok if you read this far without falling asleep, here's my musical nerd theory on how the 12-note Werckmeister scales are dangerous. Since the scales are an approximation, that means we never hear pure natural harmonies anymore. Instead all the music we hear in the radio is slightly out of tune, even though you can't consciously hear it. I think this has a subtle grating effect on people. Maybe they become more irritable as they're sitting in their cars listening to the radio. Or in an extreme case, maybe our out-of-tune modern music is responsible for a lot of depression & mental disorders sprouting up. I'm not saying music causes it, but if you're already a depressed person and you listen to music that's slightly out of tune all the time, it can't help!
The solution is actually very easy. We need to get away from keyboards & digital instruments that use the Werckmeister tuning. So instead of pianos, synthesizers & computerized music, we should be listening to more organic instruments that use Natural tuning, such as violins & strings, brass, guitar (tuned properly) and especially THE HUMAN VOICE which is one of the last instruments that follows Natural tuning because that's how we instinctively think. Oops, but now we have digital auto-tune which kills that!
Anyway that's my take on the meaning of the film, as well as the demise of western music haha. Sorry for another long ramble, but as you know, this movie really wakes up a lot of deep ideas in our heads.
@ rooprect
Your self deprecation is amusing but not needed as you write well and it makes sense. I find it fascinating that the Werckmeister scales are out of tune and agree that this must have some effect at a somatic level and, if it does, the effect will be chronic, like depression or cancer. In fact these scales could be a form of control that make people ill in order to keep them in their place.
So the bottom line is that we humans mustn't try to control everything, because the world can't always be neatly organized into evenly spaced "notes"Or into animals that make sense ... but for God's imagination. Hence the opening play of the cosmos whose order, as we perceive it, is disrupted by total eclipses.
This is such an interesting film. If you don't mind one more question: The film's theme music that we hear throughout, how does that correspond in terms of Werckmeister's scales and order/chaos?
A bird sings and the mountain's silence deepens.share
Hah, thanks, Poppy, I'm glad it made sense to you, and I think your ideas & interpretations are spot on. As for music being used as a form of control over people, I'm sure that's going on, on some level. I generally don't give our governments & politicians enough credit to have the intelligence to even think of that idea (politicians are often musical idiots, as we see every 4 years when some candidate picks a campaign theme song that's actually a sarcastic dig against patriotism). But I wouldn't put it past corporations and the pharmaceutical industry to have a little conspiracy with the intent to control our health.
Just as a funny side note, I remember going to see the Broadway show "Cats" when I was a kid, and I swear at the big emotional finale when they sing "Memories", the theater kicked the AC blower into overdrive, dropping the overall temperature a few degrees and giving everyone the chills, literally. Sneaky bastards.
About the film's theme, that's a good question. I heard somewhere (maybe here on imdb) that the song was played on a naturally tuned piano (not Werckmeister). I googled it but couldn't confirm it anywhere. If that's true, it would be so perfect because (musical nerdism ahead) the song & melody are simple, always remaining confined to the 7 notes of the E minor scale. In other words, if you had an ancient Greek lyre tuned to E minor, you could play the piece and it would sound the way music sounded before Werckmeister changed things.
One way or the other, I do think the song is supposed to convey a sense of purity or "natural order" like the motion of planets and things far beyond the control of humans.
Thanks for your further thoughts. Questions beget questions but I'll leave them for now as I want to watch the film again.
I heard somewhere (maybe here on imdb) that the song was played on a naturally tuned piano (not Werckmeister). I googled it but couldn't confirm it anywhere. If that's true, it would be so perfect because (musical nerdism ahead) the song & melody are simple, always remaining confined to the 7 notes of the E minor scale. In other words, if you had an ancient Greek lyre tuned to E minor, you could play the piece and it would sound the way music sounded before Werckmeister changed things.If true, wow. It was a lovely piece of music and I was surprised to find Bela Tarr using music and music with such a mellifluous melody.
Btw I see that you include this film in your list of top 13 films and comment on the first 10 minutes as poetic. Have you seen the film Post Tenebras Lux? It would be interesting to know what you thought of the opening to that film. Unfortunately animal cruelty was depicted in the film although I don't think an animal was mistreated. At least I hope not.
A bird sings and the mountain's silence deepens.share
Hi Poppy, sorry for the long delay but I finally got around to seeing the opening of Post Tenebras Lux (not the whole movie, just the first scene). I thought it was fantastic. Very metaphoric, just like the opening to Werckmeister. Now I'm really curious to see how it fits with the rest of the film.
My guess is that the metaphor of the toddler is designed to convey the theme of a lone, vulnerable individual in an ever-darkening, menacing world? Possibly a very strong Existentialist theme, or something akin to a Herzog film where the person's surroundings are overwhelming and uncontrollable despite the person's best efforts to control them?
(You don't have to say anything if you think it might spoil the movie.)
About animal cruelty, yeah that's a big gripe of mine. *Fake* animal cruelty is fine with me if done with special effects or good editing; I just have a beef with filmmakers who abuse or kill real animals on camera. Unfortunately, there is a tradition of animal abuse amongst the greatest directors (one of my favorites, Herzog, included). But if the animal cruelty shown in Post Tenebras Lux is fake, then I have no problem.
For example in "The Misfits" there's a brutal scene near the end where a horse is (seemingly) mishandled. But after researching it, I learned that the scene of the horse panicking was filmed over the course of several days with different horses. Even though the movie was long before the American Humane Association, there were horse veterinarians on set to make sure the horses were ok. And in fact, I believe that film won a Genesis award for its good treatment of animals, despite how violent the scene looked after editing.
Anyway, thanks for the tip, I'll research it to see if that film is "animal safe" because I definitely want to check it out after seeing the start!
My guess is that the metaphor of the toddler is designed to convey the theme of a lone, vulnerable individual in an ever-darkening, menacing world? Possibly a very strong Existentialist theme, or something akin to a Herzog film where the person's surroundings are overwhelming and uncontrollable despite the person's best efforts to control them?My take on the opening with what follows would spoil it a bit. I think the idea of a person in a landscape that is beautiful but also 'ever-darkening and menacing' is a good description. I confess that I've yet to see any film from Herzog ...
I don't agree with animal cruelty, abuse or killing on film either and the arguments put forward by those who justify it are crap. Btw you might want to avoid the Australian film Wake in Fright; there's some horrific footage in that film of animal slaughter.
A bird sings and the mountain's silence deepens.share