One advantage of writing about music is that, if a film is dragging a bit, you always have something else to pay attention to. Yes, I know how sad that sounds. 'Dunkirk', however, was one of the best films I have seen in a while; I was enthralled by the non-linearity of multiple storylines, the stunning images and the overall epic scale and beauty of this project led by Christopher Nolan. As a musician, I found myself thinking about the score as part of this overall experience, rather than trying to distract myself in some private nerd-fest. 

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Hans Zimmer’s score has already attracted media attention due to its unusually front-and-centre role in the largely unrelenting tension throughout. The film’s dialogue is deliberately focused, allowing the music more space in the auditory foreground to guide us through the emotions of the film. In a similar fashion to other scores by Zimmer such as ‘The Dark Knight’, experimentation with electronic sounds is focused on pushing specific psychological buttons. In ‘Dunkirk’, the music becomes the head space of constant adrenaline and tension through static musical atmospheres. The extreme stress of the situation becomes one of the unifying elements of the film; this is why the interweaving between multiple and connecting character perspectives works so well. The characters’ heightened awareness and tension is static in itself, being sustained through both the anticipation and delivery of attacks by Stuka Dive Bombers. The stasis of the music reflects this psychology.

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Considering how this is achieved musically, a recent video analyses Zimmer’s fascination with the Shepard tone far better than I would here. Essentially, though, this is an auditory illusion that creates the effect of infinitely rising tones which do not actually extend beyond a fixed pitch range. Combined with the Shepard tone technique is a very simple method that complements the electronic aspects of the score. Zimmer makes full use of the inherent tension between a ‘centre’ note and the note a semitone above it.  A listener recognises subconsciously that this upper note finally needs to resolve back down to the lower one. The lack of resolution is acute and, unlike with tonal music, this unresolved harmonic relationship in this largely non-tonal score can be sustained indefinitely. Combine this harmonic technique with the Shepard tone and you build an atmosphere of sustained anxiety.

 

One of the cleverest things about this musical construction of tension is actually when it stops – something that does not happen until we see the characters in one story-line return to England. For the first time, there is no music – an incredibly simple expression of a situation where extreme stress has ceased, and is replaced with…what? The absence of music is disconcerting, as it should be: being no longer in “that place” was bound to feel singularly odd.

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Thinking about contrasts, there is the Elgar at the end. Initially, I thought it was strange, a rehashed version of ‘Nimrod’ with synthesizers and indulgent suspensions. I thought it was a bit of a cheap trick that, once again, does Elgar a disservice by seeming to ignore the true emotional depth and breadth of his music and propping him up as a symbol of 1940s “Pomp and Circumstance” heroism. In other words, an overly nostalgic, boring and simplistic view of British-ness. I enjoyed it. It was a necessarily violent contrast in atmosphere, and reflected the equally violent sense of disbelieving gratitude that must have been felt as a result of the effort and bravery that went into getting troops off the beach. Also, an historical, factual understanding of Dunkirk as an event must inevitably be mixed up with subjective emotions from during the event and afterwards. The Elgar quotation therefore offers a reinterpretation not just of the music, but of this inextricable relationship between nostalgia and historical events. At the same time, the strange pathos of this musical reassessment somehow manages to communicate the humanist agenda that I believe is behind the film as a whole. For whatever scientific reason, the timbre of E flat major helps carry an emotional breadth - under the right circumstances - and has been associated with concepts such as ‘triumph’. Given the thought that has gone in to this score, would it be going too far to suggest that the E flat key of ‘Nimrod’ here asks musically whether the evacuation of Dunkirk is to be regarded as a triumph or a failure?

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The slower, free tempo of this new 'Nimrod' is likely explained by a need to hit certain film cues, but it also re-enters the psychological domain. This altered musical timescale seems to capture the sense of time slowing down, due to heightened adrenaline, as we anticipate nervously the outcome of Tom Hardy's story. Put together with the images, it was beautifully done.

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I do not normally feel compelled to write 800 words on music for a film that I saw for enjoyment, but it was lovely to see (and hear) the way the music in ‘Dunkirk’  played such an integral and meticulously thought-out role. I will be on the lookout for more films where such effective collaboration is allowed to take place.