Walter Carlos and Richard Wagner - Film, music and opera - Musical analysis to "The Clockwork Orange"

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The role of Walter Carlos in development of cinema’s music has been really important. His life and work has converted in a monument of an era where a revolution has occurred, musicians, physics, mathematics where in search of new sounds and new ways to make music with the help of new technology. Walter Carlos is a figure that, suddenly, had left an undeletable mark in art.

On Walter Carlos

Instrument player, composer, and the predilect musician of the famous Stanley Kubrick, with amazing abilities for the creation and interpretation of music, was responsible for bringing the academic music to the land of electronic music, a land for the moment unknown and little inhabited, this being a little explored ground, strongly criticized and also, for the time, had not developed even half of the resources that it would have in a future. All of this this accompanied by the tremendous amount of work that electronic music carried, let us remember, that for the 60s was created in an analogous way, recorded on magnetic tapes with consoles of very few channels and added to this, required good management of the devices to be used and a deep knowledge about music and its physical properties.

Clear examples of this musical "migration" carried by Walter Carlos are his albums, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer and Switched on Bach, in them legendary works such as the concert of Brandenburg by Johan Sebastian Bach, as well as works by composers such as Domenico Scarlatti and Claudio Monteverdi, all performed with the help of the legendary Moog Synthesizer.

Moog Syntetyzer

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Here’s an example of his first album, Switched on Bach, where you can hear the fugue of the double concert for harpsichord of Bach, played by Walter Carlos.

On Richard Wagner

Considering the formation of Walter Carlos within the standards of the academic music, the arrival of his music to the cinema came with a strong intellectual charge from the great composers of the academic music. So, it is inevitable to imagine the incidence of those concepts designed by these composers such as Richard Wagner who had penetrated, so deeply, in the music of the nineteenth and twentieth century, were transferred to the cinema.

The value of Wendy Carlos' musicalizations, in the filmic works, lies in the creative use of the resources that the old acoustic music and the new electronic music could give her. Carlos endowed the film works with the "dramatic" essence that works such as Tristan and Isolde by Richard Wagner possess. The soundtrack of the film "The Clockwork Organge", made by Walter Carlos, meant a transfusion of the Wagnerian legacy to the cinema, which without the knowledge and the creative capacity of Carlos would have been impossible; and that surely in his absence would make the current cinema something extremely empty, monotonous or at least very different from what we enjoy today.
The value of Wendy Carlos' musicalisation in film works lies in the creative use of the resources that old acoustic music and new electronic music could give him. Carlos gave the film works with the "dramatic" essence of Tristan and Isolde, by Richard Wagner. The soundtrack of the film "The Clockwork Orange", made by Walter Carlos, meant a transfusion of the Wagnerian legacy to the cinema, which without the knowledge and the creative capacity of Carlos would have been impossible; and that surely in his absence would convert the current cinema into something extremely empty, monotonous or at least very different from what we enjoy today.

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The Wagnerian language and The Clockwork Orange

The Wagnerian language consists of a use of dance (all movement that draws attention to the eye) to impress the senses, music to captivate the soul and poetry to connect soul and body through the intellect; for Wagner, when art consisted of these well-used elements, this was "purely human in character" And of course, only one of the great musical forms could contain all these elements, opera, or as Wagner preferred to call it the "Musical Drama".
What better example of this than The Clockwork Orange and the soundtrack Carlos did for this film, where music, choreography and conscience play a vital role.

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Another predominant Wagnerian trace in Walter Carlos's musicalizations is the leitmotiv,

Leitmotiv ("driver motive"; motif driver; leitmotif; motive-guide or fondamentale theme). Term coined in the mid-1860s by the musical historian A.W.Ambros to describe a recurring motif or theme in a piece of music (usually in opera) that represents a character, object, emotion or concrete idea. It is used especially in association with Wagner's late operas.
obtained from: (Latham, A. 2008) Encyclopedic dictionary of music.

Leitmotiv del filtro de la muerte, Tristán e Isolda. Obtenido de

Leitmotiv of the filter of death, Tristan and Isolde.

The presence of the Leitmotiv is observable throughout the film, clear examples are the appearance of the Gregorian melody or sequence "Dies Irae", (generally associated with evil and demonic themes) and its variations to represent the impulses of "ultra violence" of Alex Lestrange and his gang, usually accompanied by the famous funeral march of Henry Purcell to Queen Mary; in contrast to this, the famous theme of Beethoven's last movement from his ninth symphony and its variations were used to represent the happy moments and original pleasures of Alex Lestrange, and how these are deformed throughout history; both subjects were made with the Moog synthesizer, and were able to tell to the senses, the soul and the conscience where they were standing in every moment of the movie

In the following video, you can listen to the aforementioned melody, Dies irae, Greek sequence generally associated with evil, often used in religious works, motets, cantatas, requiems. Listen only a few seconds

Now, to check what has been said previously, let us listen carefully to the introduction of The Clockwork Orange.

Cases like this in The Clockwork Orange are infinite, but talk about each of them is a job that I leave for another moment, for now I invite you to find more leitmotivs and secrets that great musicians have left us in the cinematography on your own.

The wide musical knowledge of Walter Carlos was what allowed him to transfer these complex ideas to the cinema. His contributions are innumerable, in addition Walter Carlos has been an infinite source of inspiration and guidance for the subsequent cinematographic works, just as Wagner was for the opera. Despite having taken "The Clockwork Orange" as an example, subjecting it to analysis from the Wagnerian perspective, it is possible to find the elements of "Musical Drama" proposed by Wagner in all the films where Walter Carlos was involved, as well as in many other cinematographic works such as Star Wars, The Lord of The Rings, among others.

Now, I invite you, personally, to listen to the films in a different way and especially, if you already saw The Clockwork Orange, check it out with these new considerations.

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See you soon!