The Power of Music as the Suture of Imaginaries

I wanted to take some time to share a few thoughts I have been reflecting on since watching Disclosure Day.

As many of you know, Disclosure Day marks yet another collaboration between Steven Spielberg and John Williams, both iconic within their respective fields and, together, seemingly unstoppable.

This led me to think about the patterns behind cultural products, their creators, and the ways in which they contribute to shaping sociocultural thought.

Let us situate ourselves within Spielberg’s filmography. There, we find a clear inclination toward UFOs and the unknown, toward the possibility of life beyond Earth. Accompanying this fascination is his enduring partnership with John Williams. Together, they form part of a pattern that has unfolded since 1977 and has generated remarkable box-office success. Films cherished across generations. Iconic themes such as that of E.T., which brings together families and imaginaries around a central motif that portrays the unknown as something “friendly,” somehow intertwined with and interacting with humanity.

Now, why is this important to consider?

As the central thesis of this podcast has consistently argued, music is the resource most intimately connected to the emotional world surrounding a cultural product, in this case, a film. The fact that such a prominent creative partnership has remained unchanged over time suggests that these same individuals, through their own lens, have contributed to delineating the history of these imaginaries.

How might we understand this?

Imaginaries are assemblages of narratives, symbols, sensory experiences, and shared meanings surrounding a particular phenomenon. They are often sustained by abstractions established throughout history (here, for example, alterity, transcendence, and discovery). These imaginaries and their components become articulated with our ways of being and existing in society, with the ways we inhabit ourselves as humanity.

Music, then, does not truly musicalize a film about extraterrestrials; rather, it delineates the emotional map of the abstractions that sustain imaginaries surrounding extraterrestrials.

To translate this conceptually, let us think about E.T.: according to the narrative–music assemblage, an extraterrestrial can evoke tenderness. Consequently, an extraterrestrial is not a threat; the unknown is received not through fear but through wonder. We are invited to encounter the unknown through empathy and vulnerability.

Why do we think this way?

Perhaps it has something to do with the constant reproduction of these emotional coordinates, embodied in a film that generated $797.3 million worldwide upon release and remains one of the highest-grossing films in history.

Without question, Spielberg’s passion helped consolidate and create space for these abstractions, while Williams’ musical language drew the emotional compass through which we approach these impressions and the abstractions surrounding them. Without this articulation, we would likely not relate to these themes in quite the same way.

Another example of the historical force contained within director–composer partnerships in shaping imaginaries can be found in James Cameron’s fascination with the opposite pole: the ocean and the depths.

Primarily through his collaboration with James Horner (although perhaps this partnership was not able to develop as extensively as it might have, given Horner’s passing in 2015) these creators gave rise to the historic success that was Titanic.

If Spielberg and Williams helped delineate the emotional coordinates of that which inhabits what lies beyond Earth, Cameron and Horner did something similar with that which remains hidden beneath it. Within their collaborations, depth ceases to be merely a physical condition and becomes an emotional experience associated with immensity, mystery, transformation, and an encounter with that which exceeds the human scale.

Needless to say, behind this lies an image of immensity, solemnity, mystery, and transformation that represents the union between the depths of the Earth and the human being.

This makes even clearer to me the importance of viewing music as more than a complementary resource. Music can be understood as a form of suture through which individuals unite, articulate, or in some way repair (according to the perspective of those who place it) fragments of meaning, identity, memory, and experience that constitute a sense of coherence within a cultural context.

Music sutures spaces between the visible and the invisible, between emotion and image, between the individual and the collective cultural imaginary, between the abstractions that give meaning to the social relations we inhabit.

The question, then, is this:

Under which cultural assemblages and emotional coordinates do we allow ourselves to be orchestrated?

How many of our emotional orientations have been learned through the stories and creators we consume?