Music Monday ~ Nimrod : Word, Music, Why We Cry

Nimrod, the classical piece, part of Elgar's Enigma Variations, used in countless movies, most recently in the final scenes of Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, raising lumps in many throats. The piece is also played every year on Remembrance Sunday at the London Cenotaph, and is often heard during funeral services.

Who or what is, or was, Nimrod?

Once upon an Old Testament Time Nimrod was a mighty hunter, leader, founder of the city and tower of Babel and, rebel "against the Lord". He was son of Cush; grandson of Ham, and great-grandson of Noah. There's a good read about him, written by Shaul Wolf in a lighthearted style: The Life and Times of Nimrod the Biblical Hunter. I've mentioned Nimrod myself in an archived post about Sir Edward Elgar HERE.


In more recent times the name Nimrod has been given to ships and a fighter plane; but has also, overtime
gathered moss and become somewhat less "mighty". In modern American English the term nimrod has come to be used to describe a dimwit or stupid person, thanks in great part to cartoon character Bugs Bunny. Bugs ironically refers to hunter Elmer Fudd as "nimrod", as being an incompetent hunter (I guess!) Personally I have never heard the term used in this way exactly....except, perhaps, that a very dear one of mine, now long gone, did occasionally, and I should add affectionately, call me "Nimrod" as a nickname. I was unaware, at the time, of the name's origins and - I'm guessing - so was he!

Back to Nimrod the music. It's a piece that evokes emotion, not only because of the circumstances of its use, but due to something within the form of the music itself. I found partial explanation on the internet via "Guardian Answers". I hope I'm not overstepping fair use regarding copyright rules by including here two answers, from newspaper readers, to the question: Why do some tunes, like Nimrod from Elgar's Enigma Variations, make you want to cry?

SOME music arouses sad or happy emotions because of past events that we associate with it (the 'Listen, darling, they're playing our tune' syndrome) but this doesn't account for the fact that some tunes seem to have the power to affect different individuals' emotions in an apparently similar way, even when the people concerned have no shared history of experience to account for this reaction. Music scholars and philosophers have long disputed whether or not music actually 'means' anything, and if so, what. The late Deryck Cooke comes closest, in my view, to explaining this contentious area of musical aesthetics. In his book, The Language of Music (OUP, 1959), Cooke suggests that all composers of tonal music from the Middle Ages to the mid-20th century have used the same 'language' of melodic phrases, harmonies and rhythms to evoke the same emotions in the listener. If true, this could account for the fact that Nimrod seems to communicate the same feeling of melancholy to different people. This is a hideous oversimplification of Cooke's complex theory. He argues that it should be possible to compile a dictionary of musical idioms and their corresponding 'meanings' to identify which sequences of notes convey joy, grief, innocence, erotic love, etc. (Linda Barlow, Reading, Berks.)

IT IS a very rare tune which would cause a listener to want to cry. But a harmonised piece of music can very easily do so. Music often depends for its interest on creating and resolving tension. Tension is given to a passage by, for instance, moving away from the key in which the piece started. When the 'home' key is returned to it comes with a feeling of resolution. The classical sonata form is basically an exercise in waiting for the return of the tonic key. Composers started to use devices such as a long dominant pedal (signalling that we are about to return to the home key) and then delaying the final resolution longer than expected, giving added weight to the home key when it is finally reached.

Another way of creating and resolving tension is through dissonance. Two or more notes that do not sound pleasant together are changed for some that do. The more dissonant the interval, the more it can make you physically tense up (I find my neck and shoulders tightening). And probably the simplest trick of all is like a rhetorical device much loved by Hitler - start quietly and get louder. If you're really out to milk the emotions you are more subtle and reach the loudest point about nine-tenths of the way through and subside back to peacefulness.

Nimrod uses all of these tricks. The theme itself is harmonised using dissonances (some of which resolve into further dissonance, heightening the effect); it starts quietly and gradually builds up; just before the final statement of the theme there is a long roll on a timp while the brass extend the feeling of 'here we go back to the tonic key' by waffling in the dominant, and after the loudest bit of all it recedes to a quiet conclusion. Music can also make you cry if it is crap. (P S Lucas, Birmingham 18.)

And so...here's the version of Nimrod used in the movie Dunkirk, now doing the rounds, and which I blogged about last week HERE. The movie's full original score was composed by Hans Zimmer, who arranged Elgar's iconic piece to fit in seamlessly for the final scenes.

Dunkirk - Nolan-style

We saw the new movie directed by Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk, at the weekend. I'd wavered, and wondered, and tossed up whether or not to put ourselves through 1 hour and 47 minutes of cinematic tension and chaos which, from the couple of reviews I'd read seemed to describe what was on offer. Eventually, the chance to exchange the computer screen for a cinema screen, for a while, and to swap home air conditioning for a place even cooler (cold in fact) won the toss. We were two of just eight audience members in a late afternoon showing of the film. Movies about British war efforts are obviously not a big draw in semi-rural Oklahoma, at least not with so many super-hero tales, ape wars, and Despicable Me as alternative options.

My immediate reactions on leaving the theatre, into the car park and 90 degree heat:
"It was flippin' cold in there."
"They had turned the sound up so loud that I [English-born though I am] couldn't understand much of the dialogue."
And, my major criticism - of the movie, rather than of the surrounding discomforts was this:
The key element to the story of Dunkirk, as I have always known it, was the amazing rescue and evacuation effort, a major part of which was carried out by small vessels, fishing boats, yachts, pleasure boats, ferry-type craft, manned by non-military people who sailed into those very dangerous waters. Yes I know this is, obviously, part of the film's story - it has to be. However, the movie's rather "arthouse" arty farty Nolan feel features what I suppose are simply representative examples of the story's components, told in an interwoven, three-strand style, to show how the rescue played out on land, in the air, and by sea. I found that the scale of the soldiers' plight was much better represented than the scale of the small boat-aided rescue. The "sea" segment of the film concentrated on just one small boat and its crew, and those it rescued (on just a single trip). We see just one screen shot of the veritable armada of small boats and ships approaching the beach - from a great distance; later a shot of just a few small boats arriving is included - an almost throw-away shot at that! I came away with the feeling that when the film is seen by those who do not know the full story of Dunkirk - most of the generations much younger than me, and quite a few from all generations in the USA - that they could come away from the film with an unbalanced idea of exactly what went on.

There's plenty of information on the internet as to exact statistics, and detail of the events of the Dunkirk evacuation, what led up to it, and what came after. I shall not repeat such detail here, except to copy this paragraph from Wikipedia's page:

On the first day of the evacuation, only 7,669 men were evacuated, but by the end of the eighth day, 338,226 soldiers had been rescued by a hastily assembled fleet of over 800 boats. Many of the troops were able to embark from the harbour's protective mole [a kind of pier] onto 39 British destroyers of the Royal Navy and civilian merchant ships, while others had to wade out from the beaches, waiting for hours in the shoulder-deep water. Some were ferried from the beaches to the larger ships by what came to be known as the little ships of Dunkirk, a flotilla of hundreds of merchant marine boats, fishing boats, pleasure craft, yachts, and lifeboats called into service from Britain for the emergency. The B[ritish]E[xpeditionary]F[orce] lost 68,000 soldiers during the French campaign and had to abandon nearly all of its tanks, vehicles, and other equipment.

There are countless reviews of the movie online now. I read through several after seeing the film. They mostly repeat the same points, but fighting my way through multiple sliding and very annoying adverts, into the farther reaches of Google, I found what I consider to be one of the most insightful reviews of Dunkirk, it was written by "Darren" at The Movie Blog. If a passing reader has already seen the movie, or is planning to do so, I'd highly recommend a look at that review.

We were glad to have seen Dunkirk, even though it appeared to me, and to my American husband, who was aware of the events told of in Dunkirk, to be an unbalanced style of telling one of World War 2's most iconic British stories. What was shown was wonderfully atmospheric, affecting and scary, even other-worldly at times. I've read that the best way of seeing this movie is via IMAX huge screen - but our local cinema's screen was quite big enough for our taste, and even its level of sound proved too loud for our delicate ears!

POSTSCRIPT (for any interested in astrology)

Dunkirk's director, Christopher Nolan, was astrologically investigated in my post from 2012 HERE (scroll down to the post's second half).