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Music and the Environment in Dystopian Narrative pp 57–72Cite as

Mozart on Ice: Expedition to the End of the World

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature ((PASTMULI))

Abstract

In the Danish environmental documentary Ekspeditionen til verdens ende (Expedition to the End of the World, 2013), music from Mozart’s Requiem sounds several times as Greenland’s melting ice and swelling ocean fill the screen. This recording is not mere ambience. The performance captured in a Copenhagen church sounds surprisingly provisional and fragile. Unlike the rhapsodic-atmospheric use of music in Werner Herzog’s environmental films, recent climate-science documentaries like Chasing Ice and Ice and the Sky, the Mozart fragments in Dencik’s film sound as contingent material artifacts of human presence in a rapidly dissolving visual landscape. In their brittle interruptions, they resemble the speech that makes song missed in Persephone in the Late Anthropocene. Closed-caption-style paratext throughout the film further amplifies this critical distance.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Marija Ciric, “Music as Word: Film Music—Superlibretto?” in Muzikologija, Journal of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 2013(15), 127–144.

  2. 2.

    For a discussion of the Romantic-melancholic mode in The Wild Blue Yonder, Herzog’s Athropocene fantasia, see Laurie Ruth Johnson, Forgotten Dreams: Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016), 31–41. While The Wild Blue Yonder contains elements of humor and self-referential material traces that link it to Expedition to the End of the World, it treats music more as atmosphere than artifact. For an analysis of Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, see Johnson, 81–93.

  3. 3.

    See Ludovico Enaudi, “Elegy for the Arctic” (Greenpeace). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DLnhdnSUVs, Web, accessed January 4, 2017.

  4. 4.

    Margaret Ronda, “Anthropogenic Poetics,” in Minnesota Review 83 (2015), 104.

  5. 5.

    Ibid., 103.

  6. 6.

    Ibid.

  7. 7.

    See Bronislaw Szerszynski, “The End of the End of Nature: The Anthropocene and the Fate of the Human,” in The Oxford Literary Review, 34.2, (2012), 165–184.

  8. 8.

    See Bjorn Sorenssen, “Radical Romanticism in Scandinavian Documentary: The Norwegian Nature Meme in For Harde Livet,” in Film History 13.1 (January 2001), 50.

  9. 9.

    Szerszynski, 171.

  10. 10.

    See Johnson, 92.

  11. 11.

    For an example of visual privileging in Anthropocene studies generally, see Davis and Turpin, eds., Art in the Anthropocene (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), which includes chapters on “The Desire to See in the Anthropocene” (Irmgard Emmelhainz), “Ecologicity, Vision, and the Neurological System” (Amanda Boetzkes), and others focusing on visibility/invisibility, design specs, and examples of projects visualizing clouds and smog.

  12. 12.

    Mark Pedelty, Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2012), 41.

  13. 13.

    See Jørgen Bruhn, “How Do ‘We’ React to the Anthropocene? Scientific Concepts Transformed into Media Products—And Affects,” Draft of Material Presented at IEAT Research Centre, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, May 2016, 8–9.

  14. 14.

    Ibid., 11–12.

  15. 15.

    Ibid., 6.

  16. 16.

    Sybille Krämer, Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy, trans. Anthony Enns (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 78.

  17. 17.

    Subtitle excerpts from Expedition to the End of the World, directed by Daniel Dencik (Copenhagen: Haslund Film/Det Danske Filminstitut, 2013, and New York: Argot Films, 2014), DVD.

  18. 18.

    Johnson, 88.

  19. 19.

    Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London and New York: Verso Books, 1999, 169).

  20. 20.

    For a thorough treatment of musical counterpoint in film by Brecht’s collaborator Hanns Eisler, see his 1947 book with Theodor Adorno, Composing for the Films (London and New York: Continuum, 2007).

  21. 21.

    Steven Shaviro, “Splitting the Atom: Post-Cinematic Articulations of Sound and Vision,” in Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, eds., Post Cinema: Theorizing 21st-century Film (Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016), open access. http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/. Web, accessed June 14, 2016.

  22. 22.

    In showing how “cultural claims can impede ecological thinking,” Marran maintains that “cultural production needs the biological world.” See Christine L. Marran, Ecology Without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 4–8.

  23. 23.

    David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Random House, 2010), 28.

  24. 24.

    Credits page, Expedition to the End of the World website. http://expeditionthemovie.dk/about/credits, Web, accessed January 16, 2017.

  25. 25.

    Johnson, 88.

  26. 26.

    Subtitle excerpts from Expedition to the End of the World, 2013/14.

  27. 27.

    See Royal S. Brown, “How Not to Think Film Music,” in Music and the Moving Image, 1.1 (Spring 2008), http://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/mmi.html. Web, accessed July 1, 2016.

  28. 28.

    Michael Chion, Film, A Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, 265).

  29. 29.

    Closed-captioning excerpts from Expedition to the End of the World, 2013/14.

  30. 30.

    Gérard Genette, “Introduction to the Paratext,” in New Literary History, 22, 2 (1991), 261. Paratexts can be distinguished spatially from “epitexts,” or materials not in the published source, such as fan-culture tweets or video spinoffs.

  31. 31.

    In some cases, most notably Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny opera, slogans on placards work as both paratext and performance, treating words as circulating currency or commodity, even as the texts’ appearance onstage exposes that very function. Rikard Schönström, “Quotes as commodities—The use of slogans in Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny,” International Brecht Society conference, Oxford University, June 26, 2016.

  32. 32.

    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Requiem, Dover Edition in Full Score (New York: Dover Publications, 2015), 26.

  33. 33.

    Nicholas Cook, “Beyond the Notes,” in Nature, vol. 53, June 26, 2008, 1187.

  34. 34.

    Closed-captioning excerpts from Expedition to the End of the World, 2013/14.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., subtitles.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., closed-captioning.

  37. 37.

    Ibid.

  38. 38.

    Tony Kushner, interview, International Brecht Society conference, Oxford University, June 25, 2016.

  39. 39.

    Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: New Left Review Editions, 1977), 24.

  40. 40.

    Closed-captioning excerpts from Expedition to the End of the World, 2013/14.

  41. 41.

    See Ben Winters, “The Non-diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space,” in Music & Letters, Vol. 91, No. 2 (2010), 237–238.

  42. 42.

    Closed-captioning excerpts from Expedition to the End of the World, 2013/14.

  43. 43.

    Ronda, 104.

  44. 44.

    Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 11.

  45. 45.

    Ibid., 12.

  46. 46.

    Ibid., 107.

  47. 47.

    Ibid.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., 11.

  49. 49.

    Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 5.

  50. 50.

    Lawrence Kramer, The Thought of Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 71–72.

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  1. Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA

    Heidi Hart

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Hart, H. (2018). Mozart on Ice: Expedition to the End of the World. In: Music and the Environment in Dystopian Narrative. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01815-3_5

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