Aesthetics of Tho­mas Newman’s Music to “Six Feet Under” TV Series

Abstract

This article analyzes the aesthetics of modern Western audiovisual art by the example of the opening titles of “Six Feet Under” TV series (2001—2005). This titles sequence, as well as the series itself, were proclaimed as “cult art” and became widely influential in the US television culture. The visuals of the sequence had been created by a team of Digital Kitchen designers on the basis of music by Thomas Newman, who was a trend setter of the soundtrack genre in the 1990s—2010s. This work is of interest, being one of the most significant in modern mass culture, which allows to analyze the aesthetic trends within the postmodern audiovisual art in general. The research is based on R. Barthes’ method of analyzing objects of mass culture, in which the literal meaning of artistic ima­ges and the symbolic one (connotations, metaphors, allegories) are considered separately. T. Newman’s music is ana­lysed by using M. Chion’s view upon soundtrack as both musical work and acoustical image. The article analyzes the coherence between the music, the frame (literal) content of the video, and the connotative (symbolic) meaning of the visual images. The concept of “affect”, taken by the historians-poststructuralists G. Deleuze and F. Guattari from the aesthetic theory of Baroque art, is used to describe similar phenomena in postmodern art. Interviews, additional materials and other sour­ces that tell about the idea of the series’ creators and about its workflow expanded the source base of the study. The audiovisual composition’s analysis revealed the aesthetic techniques of artistic images’ affective (feelings-emotional) transmission, “counterpoint” of allegorical and realistic (naturalistic) images in the visuals and the music, central role of the pairs of images-antithesis (warmth/coldness, movement/static, life/death, and some others). The author concludes that the studied aesthetic model is similar, both in its content and in the form of expression, to the Baroque aesthetics in a modified postmodern form (Neo-Baroque).