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On 21 June, 2003, Reuters issued the following report:
BAGHDAD-U.S. troops psyched up on a bizarre musical reprise from Vietnam war film "Apocalypse Now" before crashing into Iraqi homes to hunt gunmen on Saturday, as Shi'ite Muslims rallied against the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
With Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" still ringing in their ears and the clatter of helicopters overhead, soldiers rammed vehicles into metal gates and hundreds of troops raided houses in the western city of Ramadi after sunrise as part of a drive to quell a spate of attacks on U.S. forces.
The reference, of course, is to the famous sequence from Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), the aerial charge on a Vietnamese village where Colonel Kilgore "psyches up" his troops by blaring "Ride of the Valkyries" out of his approaching attack helicopters. Coppola's scene, in turn, satirizes the "Ride of the Valkyries" accompaniment to the climactic charge of the Ku Klux Klan, led by Colonel Cameron, at the end of D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). Throughout the Apocalypse Now sequence, Coppola plants clues-the horse-head "cavalry" emblem on the nose of the copters; the similar names of the charging officers (Colonel Cameron, Colonel Kilgore); the racist invective of Colonel Kilgore ("Yeah, I use Wagner-scares the hell out of the slopes!")-to make his satire of Birth explicit. Flying with Kilgore's cavalry, we are returned to a primal site of American film, and simultaneously to a source of modern performance technology: to Birth and to Bayreuth. Fast-forwarding back to twenty-first-century Baghdad, with seven generations of Valkyries at our back, the motif refuses to die. But the motif is repeated, this time, with cynical rather than satiric intent, as Coppola's critique of Griffith's use of Wagner becomes just another soundtrack to war.
American film music continues to be deeply indebted to Wagner's techniques of composition and orchestration, particularly his conception of the total work of art (or Gesamtkunstwerk), his technique of composing with leitmotifs, and his idea that an opera score should comprise a single, unending melody.1 Contemporary American film composers such as John Williams, with his pulsing, neoromantic scores, his readily identifiable motifs marking both characters and themes within the film, and his attempt to make the film score...