May/June 2003

The Soundtrack For War

BY NICHOLAS ENGSTROM

David Graupner’s company, TM Century, creates news-music packages for talk radio stations across the country and the worldwide Armed Forces Radio Network. Stations buy music from TM, Graupner explains, because they need to “stand out” in an era when news is blandly similar. “The trouble with the news,” he says, “is that everybody’s reading from the same script.” TM’s latest attempt at distinction is Juggernaut, an aggressive and at times overtly militaristic music package that was completed in December under the assumption that within six months there would be either a war or another major terrorist attack on American soil. Graupner says Juggernaut reflects how drastically news music has changed in the last few years. “I’ve got two words for you: Fox News. I’d be a bald-faced liar if I said Juggernaut wasn’t inspired by what you hear on that channel.”

Five days before the war with Iraq began, I visited Fox News headquarters to pick up a CD labeled “Liberation Iraq Music,” containing what was to be the theme music for the war coverage. The Fox theme could be Metallica rehearsing Wagner, the guitar chords rising over thudding drums. It seemed ready-made for Apocalypse Now, when helicopters blare The Flight of the Valkyries from mounted speakers as they swoop down on a Vietcong-held village. Would the coverage fit this music?

PAST AND PRESENT

Television news music and sound effects announce that the news is on, create brand recognition, and provide “emotional fortification of the content of the news,” says the composer Bob Israel, who has created music for ABC and CNN.

But the early strains of music on TV were subtle. In 1959 the pioneer producer Fred Friendly chose Aaron Copeland’s version of the hymn Simple Gifts, from his ballet Appalachian Spring, to accompany the new news documentary CBS Reports. It was a bold move at a time when news was considered sacrosanct, not to be infected by the world of entertainment. In 1961 Richard Salant, then president of CBS News, banned all music from any program bearing the CBS News imprint. But on NBC, when Huntley and Brinkley switched to a half-hour nightly broadcast in 1963, the producer Reuven Frank decided to finish each show with a piece from the second movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Frank defends adding music. “The teletype opening of Cronkite’s show was used as music. It was no less artificial than the music we were using.”

Lawrence Grossman, former president of NBC News, who hired the film composer John Williams for the signature theme for the Nightly News in 1985, maintains that the evolution of news music is reflected in the changing technology and the relationship between music and graphics. When he started in TV news, crews edited news reports on film stock, prompting fewer edits and a slower visual pace. Today’s technology allows split-second cuts, freeze frames, multi-angle shots. “The music you hear today matches and reflects the visual manipulation,” Grossman says. “The big issue from my perspective is when the music hypes the emotionalism of the scene. That was a no-no in my day.” The sound effects on the cable channels, he argues, “tell you what to think.”

After Richard Salant left CBS in 1979, his conviction that news and entertainment shouldn’t mix persisted, influencing the network’s new guard. Among them was Eric Shapiro, the current director of the CBS Evening News. “When you get used to a policy like Dick’s, and then you start to add music, it sounds strange and inappropriate,” he says. “We are serious journalists. If there were a difficult decision to use music or not to use music, I would back off.”

The scores introducing each of the broadcast networks’ nightly news programs for more than fifteen years (NBC since 1985, ABC since 1978, CBS since the late 1980s) are similar enough in style to create a news-theme recipe, according to the Juilliard faculty member Bruce Brubaker, who adds that “because they are so grandiloquent, they would be very easy to parody.” He points out that all three belong to a singular musical category: the fanfare. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the cavalry played regimental fanfares with outdoor instruments such as horns and drums, the prominent instruments in the network news programs. But the fanfare developed as its own genre in the context of the military parade. Brubaker says, “Why is it so fun to march up and down the street? Because we can see how powerful we are, that if there were to be a battle, we would be able to beat our enemy.”

Score Productions has created music for TV since 1963, when Bob Israel left his post as the music producer for David Susskind’s Talent Associates and founded his own company. He has created most of the music on ABC News, including the signature theme for ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings and special news music for the first gulf war, as well as themes on CNN. “I decided long ago that the most important element in music on TV is an identifiable theme that people can hum,” he says. “That idea has given way to snippets similar to pop music, something I didn’t have to deal with when I started.” Israel, like Grossman and Frank, bristles at the sound effects on cable news. “It’s a Catch-22,” he says, “because once you give in to that it never ends. You’re going to always be changing your format to make it more enticing, more frenetic.”

As we talked in his cluttered office on East Forty-ninth Street, ambient music came from the recording studio directly above us. I wondered if ABC had contacted him to score the coming war, and Israel told me that that’s exactly what I’d been hearing through the ceiling. “It will be primarily electronic. I know it sounds a little lugubrious and strange.” It did. He called upstairs to ask his colleague, Gary, if I could come listen to the work in progress, but the answer was no, and after Israel hung up the phone, the moody soundscapes ceased. The business of making a soundtrack for war news, Israel noted, “sounds a little crass, but that’s what you have to do in this business to be prepared.”

SOUND OF THE FUTURE?

Fox News’s ascent to the top of the cable news heap has sent the rest of television news scrambling to figure out the secret of its success. Richard O’Brien, Fox News’s creative director, sounds as confident as his channel sounds on the air. “The people running the networks are a bunch of arrogant journalists,” he says. “Their style is so anaesthetized. Here, nothing’s sacred. We’re constantly changing our look and sound, because we’re constantly copied.”

The Fox Report with Shepard Smith, the network’s 7 p.m. program, may be the best example of the channel’s signature, aggressive style. Sound effects, called “whooshes,” pepper the hour-long program. I counted twenty-eight of them on the April 10 show. The segment “Around the World in 80 Seconds” features international tidbits with a timer counting down from eighty, underscored by an extremely rapid synthesizer jingle. Smith delivers the news in clipped sentences, as if he’s conversing with the sound effects and has to rush before they interrupt him. In a June 27, 2001, interview on PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Smith said, “Some items don’t need a bunch of me babbling on. Some items need a sound effect and a move to the next story.”

O’Brien chooses music that jolts him. He recently heard a choral arrangement, realized he had never heard such a thing on a news network, and attached the chorus to the Fox news theme. “Hearing such a high sound will make anyone in a room instinctively turn around and look,” he says.

The Metallica/Wagner war score, he contends, is “uplifting,” but “with a marching feel. The theme is guttural. We didn’t want to trivialize the situation. But we wanted the music to say, ‘Something big is coming this way.’”

O’Brien said before the war that music wouldn’t be used until after the initial “shock and awe” gave way to analysis. “When the war starts, it’s going to be all about the video, it doesn’t need prettying up,” he says. “After a few days, when there is not as much going on, the animation and the sound effects will start creeping in again.”

As it happened, the first couple of days were less visually dramatic than anticipated. By the first weekend the news channels had shed their inhibitions about inserting a musical garnish.

CBS was the only broadcast network to completely change its signature theme, introducing Dan Rather to an aggressive drumbeat with a reverberating bass guitar. The music on cable news channels, meanwhile, all had the tone of crisis. On MSNBC, nerve-wracking strings, drums, and tolling bells ushered in war updates every fifteen minutes. CNN’s theme was nearly identical to MSNBC’S, minus the bells. Fox News’s war theme was the tune I had previewed, but with more percussion and milder strings replacing the heavy guitar. O’Brien explained: “I nixed that first version because it was too shrill, too rock ‘n’ roll. I put in more tom-tom drums because they had more urgency. I wanted it to sound like, I don’t want to say war drums, but . . . .”

Within the first two weeks of war, music critics at The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Chicago Tribune wrote articles on the ideological impact of the TV news war music, respectively headlined "Media’s war music carries a message and networks’ theme music sanitizes war’s darkest realities." The martial style of the music was criticized. But this style didn’t materialize with the war. War exposed the trend. The cable channels were imitating Fox News before the war, but once the fighting started, Fox ramped up its operation and distanced itself from its competitors. Indeed, the lack of music and sound effects in the war’s first few days — in deference to the gravity of the situation — soon proved untenable (even unnatural) considering the modern viewer’s expectations.

As an alternative to sound effects, the two old-guard producers I spoke with, Reuven Frank and Lawrence Grossman, had mentioned the simple emotional power of natural sound. According to Frank, having no sound at all with an image “distorts the understanding of the news content” as much as sound effects might. The best NBC coverage of the days following John Kennedy’s assassination, he says, occurred on Saturday night, when Kennedy’s body was on display in the Capitol Rotunda. The only sound was of feet shuffling past the casket.

We didn’t hear much natural sound in this televised war. The stationary camera shots of the same buildings in Baghdad had no attendant sound, so the effect was of a security camera. The anchors and the military analysts spoke for the images. The reports of “embeds” were sometimes unintentionally most interesting not only for what they said, but also for the sound of the background — the dust storms and the grinding tanks. This became readily apparent on National Public Radio, but was missed on television. Television looked for the war but did not listen to it.

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Nicholas Engstrom is an intern at CJR.