How Andrei Tarkovsky Uses Music
Exploring how Andrei Tarkovsky uses music in his films, especially Mirror and Stalker.
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If you said that Andrei Tarkovsky was the greatest filmmaker of all time, I would struggle to make a case against it. Across his seven feature films and assortment of other works, Tarkovsky reached spiritual and emotional depths that other directors could only dream of diving down to. An ‘artist’ in the truest sense of the word, he pulled from painting, sculpture, music, theatre, philosophy, religion, and history to create his works. The music that Tarkovsky chooses to accompany his frames with is deliberate, varied, and surprisingly sparing. With his two composers, Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov and Eduard Artymev, as well as a variety of other works, both Eastern and Western, Tarkovsky’s sound worlds are an endless well of interesting pieces and philosophies that we’ll take a deep dive into in this video. Though one can examine his entire filmography to see Tarkovsky’s evolving use of music, we’ll focus on two of his films from the middle period of his career: Stalker and Mirror. Stalker, probably Tarkovsky’s most famous film, is likely the one most people watching this will have seen, and therefore probably best as a broad frame of reference. It also uses a great mixture of originally composed music and works from the classical canon, an extremely broad and varied range of music that covers a lot of what Tarkovsky did. Mirror, as his most autobiographical and idiosyncratic work, perhaps best demonstrates the uniquenesses of Tarkovsky’s approach to sound and music. His earlier films like Ivan’s Childhood and Andrei Rublev, brilliant though they are, incorporate orchestral film scores in a fairly conventional manner (except when mentioned here). Though I’ll focus on these two films, I will also be referencing many of his other works—films and otherwise—so this video contains spoilers for all of Tarkovsky’s works, though that shouldn’t matter too much because he’s not really a ‘plot’ guy.
00:00 - Introduction
01:31 - Philosophy
05:02 - Classical Music
19:48 - Electronic Music
23:55 - Combination of Styles
28:21 - Final Thoughts
Music Theory, Albert Genower, Video Essay, Andrei Tarkovsky, Mirror, Stalker, Tarkovsky, Film, Film Video Essay, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, JS Bach, Beethoven, Eduard Artemyev, Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov, Leonardo da Vinci, Russian Film, Classical Music
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