Let there be background music. I saw Alien 17 times in Vijayawada’s Urvashi theatre. During at least three of the shows I’d just shut my eyes so that the visuals wouldn’t disturb my concentration on the music. I’d hide a tape-recorder
in a bag to record the music since CDs of soundtracks weren’t accessible then. Music is the most mysterious of all the art forms. The other arts create a physical presence for us to perceive whereas music works on our emotional complexities.
Background music cannot tell a story. It cannot convey a specific phenomenon as an act of violence. Yet it can direct you to perceive a scene’s emotional content. For instance, Ilaiyaraja had created a piece full of pathos for me, for a scene showing a fight sequence on a college campus. When I asked him why, he explained, “Students come to a college to study but they are fighting instead. So I just felt sad for them.”
Also careless use of background score can be very dangerous, driving a viewer’s expectations into the wrong direction. Case in point: when Company was released several distributors called me up to say that audiences had loved the film’s first-half but were disappointed with the post-interval portions. Viewers had expected full-on fight sequences and violent action.
Strange. I hadn’t indicated that at all in the promos. It took me a while to figure out that the culprit could have been the background score just before the interval. The fast-rising gangster announces to the established don, “Tu aur tere company KHALLAS!” (“Your company is FINISHED!”), the high orchestral blast planted the thought that the battlelines had been drawn. And from thereon, there would only be a fight-to-the-finish. That didn’t happen. But if I had treated the pre-interval sequence with pathos, including a sad flute piece, that would have worked. It would have made the audience feel sad that the two men who were so close to each other were parting.
Background music can also programme a heightened sense of sadness or joy. Case in point: when Urmila gets a call from Jackie Shroff in Rangeela, informing her about her casting. A high-pitched scream of Rangeela re accompanied the visual of her running towards Aamir Khan. That piece was designed to give the audience an adrenalin rush of joy which Urmila’s character would have experienced at such a point in her life.
For all my interest in analysing music, I have never really understood why music makes us experience an emotion. Still, what the hell? The process of creating a background score, more often that not, comes intuitively and effortlessly.
Unless one is an animal, a child or an unimaginative idiot, one’s reactions, responses and sensitivity to music do involve one’s values and also one’s deepest sense of oneself. Many feel that the way I use background music in my films is too dramatic and too in-the- face. But then I am too dramatic and too in-the-face, both as a filmmaker and as a person. So take me or leave me.