For nearly as long as there’ve been films,
there’s been film music. Music predates
both human voice in films and the use of sound
effects. For early films, music was played
live at screenings, usually by an organist
or a pianist, sometimes by an orchestra. As
the otherwise silent film unspooled, intertitles
or title cards would to help explain the story
to the audience, but music was used to create
mood and feeling. Over the years the scoring
of films became more complex and sophisticated
just as the films did, and as magnetic sound
strips were invented, voice, sound effects,
and soundtracks were added right on the celluloid.
Now with digital mixing and presentation,
the opportunities for sound and music have
never been greater.
Sometimes, music is part of the story itself;
a character may be listening to the radio,
or they may be at a concert or club, they
may be listening to music on an electronic
device, or even playing a musical instrument.
This kind of music—which characters in the
film can hear is also referred to as diegetic.
Music that only the audience can hear, which
is the bulk of music in most films is non-diegetic.
Referred to as background or incidental music,
this music is written and laid in so as to
not upstage what you’re seeing but to support
it, creating atmosphere and heightening emotion,
to the point of encouraging a particular reaction
to the passage it’s added to. If that’s
done subtly enough, it won’t feel manipulative
or cheesy, so it’s important to get the
incidental music right.
Those incidental, non-diegetic pieces make
up film scores. New music is commissioned
for most film scores, but some scores are
made up of pieces originally written for other
purposes. The best of the scores written specifically
for a film are what, theoretically, get nominated
for Academy Awards every year. For example,
at the 90th Academy Awards in 2018, it was
Alexandre Desplat’s music for The Shape
of Water which won the Best Original Score
Oscar, some of which you’re hearing now.
A film’s diegetic music, which could include
songs that fill up a soundtrack album, can
be put together many different ways. At the
92nd Academy Awards in 2020, it was
I’m Gonna Love Me Again, the new Elton John song
written for Rocketman, that won the Best Original
Song Oscar. That film, a jukebox musical,
told Elton John’s life story through 21
of his classic songs, while adding a new one.
I want to talk about a film, Call Me By Your
Name, that could be called a jukebox classical.
The approach to creating its soundtrack, while
not unique, is atypical. Call Me By Your Name
incorporates several classical pieces both
in the background and played live to express
its protagonist’s musical milieu. It also
grabs songs that played on Italian radio in
1983 to ground the film in its era… and
to give the story its very own musical expression,
pertinent to our era, there are modern classical
pieces and there are three songs by Sufjan
Stevens, two written and one adapted specially
for the film.
Elio Perlman is the only child of a classics
professor and a multilingual translator. At
17 years old, Elio is surprised to find himself
interested in Oliver, a 24 year old grad student
who is spending six weeks with his family.
Elio feels he has to keep his crush a secret.
In the source novel of the same name which
Elio narrates, we are privy to Elio’s every
unverbalized thought and feeling. In the film,
short of spelling out those thoughts in a
voiceover, a device that does not typically
work if the director wants you to feel present
with the action, the filmmaker needs to find
another way of indicating what's going on
in Elio's head.
What’s going on inside is partly conveyed
through what’s going on outside, through body language
and facial expressions, both of which young
actor Timothée Chalamet excelled at, to the
point of winning many awards for his portrayal
of Elio. Body language and facial expressions
can only go so far though, and as the Elio
of the book is a brilliant young man, one
of the most endlessly self-analyzing characters
in recent fiction, another device is needed
in the film to better reveal his mind. As
Elio also happens to be a musical prodigy,
it's through music that director Luca Guadagnino
puts more of Elio's inner workings on display.
Elio’s musical passion is mostly laid bare
on the piano, typically as he works out or
performs solo piano arrangements for pieces
that were written for other instruments. When
Elio is away from the piano, and when he feels
more in control of his life, more at ease,
the pieces he’s been playing are laid-in
non-diegetically, in the background, although
typically recordings by other performers are
used. (Most of these pieces appear on the
soundtrack album.) When Elio feels less able
to control his life, and is put off his game
a bit by Oliver, modern classical music is
laid in, its more dissonant and complicated
chords, melodies, and timing indicative of
Elio’s inner turmoil.
The soundtrack pieces change whenever we’re
in a more social setting, and the radio is
on, or Elio's friends are around. He is a
17-year-old growing up amid the same socio-musical
setting that every local teenager does…
so he drinks in the same Italo pop-music radio
that would have been the basis of any Italian
teenager's environment in the summer of 1983.
Finally, Sufjan Stevens’ songs, the last
musical component of the soundtrack, are reserved
for when Elio's equilibrium is really turned
upside down by Oliver. Stevens' work is the
only music in the film written especially
for it. Commissioned by Guadagnino to create
songs that could act as narration for Elio's
emotional state, Stevens returned with three
pieces, one from his repertoire which was
re-recorded in a piano arrangement, and two
new pieces, all of which which address Elio's
journey. Stevens’ modern folkie pieces reflect
Elio's deepest confusion, joy, or despair.
Despite how important music is to Call Me
By Your Name, it’s fairly sparsely applied
throughout the film. When it is used, therefore,
the music takes on more meaning, enough that
I’m going to do a separate video on the
pieces themselves, and talk about the significance
that each carries. Look for that next.
For now though, I’ll wrap up by returning
to the awards that I mentioned earlier in
this video. While one of Sufjan Stevens’
two specially written pieces, Mystery of Love,
was nominated for Best Original Song at the
90th Academy Awards (Remember Me from Disney
Pixar’s Coco ended up the winner of that
category), there are other awards that recognize
film music, and in 2018 the Guild of Music
Supervisors, the professional peer group who
oversee the compilation of soundtracks, honoured
Call Me By Your Name’s Music Supervisor
Robin Urdang with the award for Best Music
Supervision for Films Budgeted Under $5 Million,
and the award for the Best Supervision of
a Song Created for a Film, for Mystery of
Love. That recognition is the cherry on the
cake for Call Me By Your Name’s gorgeous
music, which I’ll dig deeper into in the
next video.
