In Alain Corneau’s biopic Tous les matins du monde, a few suggestive sentences in a brief eighteenth-century narrative about the enigmatic gambist known simply as Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe become the basis for a meditation on music’s role in society. Should a musician live a solitary existence and treat his music as a private outlet for spiritual expression? Or should he engage in public life and pursue a professional career, so that his music can be disseminated as widely as possible? Corneau imagines a conflict between Sainte-Colombe and his most famous student, Marin Marais. Sainte-Colombe spends his days playing in a small practice hut, where his wife’s ghost is his only audience. Marais strives to master the viol and parlays his technical abilities into a career at Versailles. His professional success leads to a break with Sainte-Colombe, who has been trying to teach him that music is a spiritual practice. The present article focuses on two cinematic sequences that depict this dichotomy between the pragmatic and the spiritual. Corneau uses various techniques to contrast these sequences, including mise-en-scène, lighting, and editing. But it is his use of the musical soundtrack that is most striking. Each sequence is accompanied by a single piece of music, heard as a discrete entity. It is the musical form that structures each sequence, and the musical continuity that unifies each. Corneau’s reliance on the soundtrack to create his cinematic diegesis in these scenes pushes against the conventional roles that film music typically plays and integrates the music into his cinematic vision in unprecedented ways.
David Ferris (Thu,) studied this question.