By exploring the relationship between music and the moving image in film narrative, David Neumeyer shows that film music is not conceptually separate from sound or dialogue, but that all three are ...manipulated and continually interact in the larger acoustical world of the sound track. In a medium in which the image has traditionally trumped sound, Neumeyer turns our attention to the voice as the mechanism through which narrative (dialog, speech) and sound (sound effects, music) come together. Complemented by music examples, illustrations, and contributions by James Buhler, Meaning and Interpretation of Music in Cinema is the capstone of Neumeyer's 25-year project in the analysis and interpretation of music in film.
...he bases his discursive flow on musicologico-narrative analyses, demonstrating the complexity and diversity (but not unlimited interpretive freedom) of comprehending genreand stylistically diverse ...musical references. ...the electronic score of the film Mirror (1975) is associated with a supernatural humanist presence, marked by a sonic abstraction that delves into the realm of existential Otherness and abjectness. ...although the selected examples from classical music are crucial in expressing the protagonist's mental images and emotional depth, the author also attempts to determine how electronic music enhances the effect of his alienation. ...the author has rightly identified Stalker as an important turning point in the director's sounding cinema, because instead of a somewhat predictable dichotomous relationship between classical and electronic music, it instead sheds new light on the nuanced interaction between the composite film score, human emotions and the socio-political climate. ...the paradigm of the "Tarkovskian diegesis" is used to deepen the discussion of the narrative indulgence of applied music, and alternative options to the transcendental diegesis are considered using the example of interpretative diversity and hermeneutic flexibility.
The Sound of Pictures is an illuminating journey through the soundtracks of more than 400 films. How do filmmakers play with sound? And how does that affect the way we watch their movies? Whether pop ...or classical, sweeping or sparse, music plays a crucial role in our cinematic experience. Other sounds can be even more evocative: the sounds of nature, of cities and of voices. In The Sound of Pictures, Andrew Ford listens to the movies. He speaks to acclaimed directors and composers, discovering radically different views about how much music to use and when. And he explores some of cinema's most curious sonic moments. How did Alfred Hitchcock use music to plant clues in his films? Why do some 'mix-tape' soundtracks work brilliantly and others fall flat? How do classics from A Clockwork Orange to The Godfather, Cinema Paradiso to High Noon, use music and sound effects to enhance what we see on screen? Whether you're a film-buff or a music lover, The Sound of Pictures will enrich your experience of the movies. 'Andrew Ford's book is delightfully snippy and entertaining. More importantly, it's also wonderfully informed in a way that will enhance film viewing past, present and future. A hugely enjoyable and revelatory read.' -Margaret Pomeranz 'Enjoyable and rewarding' -Adelaide Advertiser 'A must read' -Courier Mail 'The Sound of Pictures will be joyfully read by movie and music fans alike.' -Canberra Times 'Beautifully written' -Sydney Morning Herald Andrew Ford is the author of Earth Dances, Try Whistling This, Illegal Harmonies and The Sound of Pictures. He is a composer and broadcaster and presents The Music Show on ABC Radio National.
Film Music: A History explains the development of film music by considering large-scale aesthetic trends and structural developments alongside socioeconomic, technological, cultural, and ...philosophical circumstances.
The book’s four large parts are given over to Music and the "Silent" Film (1894--1927), Music and the Early Sound Film (1895--1933), Music in the "Classical-Style" Hollywood Film (1933--1960), and Film Music in the Post-Classic Period (1958--2008). Whereas most treatments of the subject are simply chronicles of "great film scores" and their composers, this book offers a genuine history of film music in terms of societal changes and technological and economic developments within the film industry. Instead of celebrating film-music masterpieces, it deals—logically and thoroughly—with the complex ‘machine’ whose smooth running allowed those occasional masterpieces to happen and whose periodic adjustments prompted the large-scale twists and turns in film music’s path.
Part One: Music and the "Silent" Film (1894–1927)
Chapter One: Origins, 1894–1905
Chapter Two: The Nickelodeon, 1905–1915
Chapter Three: Feature Films, 1915–1927
Part Two: ‘Classic’ Film Music (1927–1950)
Chapter Four: The Coming of Sound (1927–1929)
transition: Edison’s ideas
Early technologies (pre-1927) (Edison, De Forester, etc.)
Anticipations of a great future (Carl Van Vechten, George Antheil, etc.)
Problems of amplification, synchronization
Vitaphone: "Don Juan," "The Jazz Singer," etc.
Other systems and their costs, usefulness, adaptations, etc.
The immediate effect on the industry (cite numbers of installations, but also note persistence of ‘silent’ films in Japan, etc.)
transition: the lines/scene from 1953 "Singin’ in the Rain" ???
Chapter Five: Early Sound Films (1929–1933)
transition : the original "Singin’ in the Rain’
The fad for musicals (cite the numbers)
"Steamboat Willie" (the Disney innovations)
anti-musical, pro-musical industry shifts ca. 1931 (draw from all the extra research done for the Gershwin article in JAMS)
Approaches/aesthetics: wall-to-wall music vs. no music at all vs. only diegetic music (mention the various approaches in USSR, England, France, Germany, Italy, etc.)
Early commentary in the trade press (on sound in general, on musicals, on music, on ‘theme songs’)
transition : negative commentary on "theme songs"
Chapter Six: Music in the Classical-Style Hollywood Film (1933–1950)
transition : the reference to ‘theme song’ in "King Kong"
Max Steiner and "King Kong," "The Informer" (biographical info; earlier efforts) (info on how the "KK" score came about)
Definitions of "classical" style (cite Gorbman, Kalinak, Bordwell, Flinn, etc.); then offer a better definition/discussion of the idea of the ‘classical’ film; lead up to the idea of ‘classical’ = standardization
Standardization of genres
Standardization of gestures:
Standardization of production:
The composers (individuals, certainly, but holding to a standardized approach nevertheless): Stothart, Waxman, Korngold, Kaper, Carl Stallings, Newman, Rozsa, Webb, Donan, Herrmann, etc. (their early accomplishments; their backgrounds; studio-director affiliations; basic approaches/styles …)
Standardization of distribution:
transition : post-war troubles for the ‘studio system’ (the coming of television, the Supreme Court decision for divestiture, the gross revenue tax ca. 1952)
Part Three: Film Music in the Post-Classic Period (1950–2000)
Chapter Seven: Post-War Innovations; Struggle for Survival (1950–1960)
transition : disastrous economic effects on the studio system
Hollywood reaction: breakdown of ‘studio system’; epics, musicals, Technicolor, 3-D, Cinerama
The first "soundtrack albums" in the early 1950s (LPs)
The close relationship between Hollywood and Broadway
The rise of inexpensive scores (Ronald Stein for the Roger Corman films, etc. …)
Introduction of pop music and jazz ("Blackboard Jungle," teen rock movies, Elvis films, etc.)
The sci-fi genre and electronic music ("Forbidden Planet," "Them!", "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and many more) (but back up and deal with "Spellbound" (1945), "The Lost Weekend" (1945) and other theremin scores …)
Best-selling songs ("High Noon" (1952); Henry Mancini …)
Jazzy scores like "On the Waterfront" (1954), "Baby Doll" (1956), "Anatomy of a Murder" (1959), "The Man with the Golden Arm" (1955)
Hitchcock-Herrmann: "Vertigo" (1958), "North by Northwest" (1959), "Psycho" (1960)
Epics: "Ben-Hur" (1959), "The Alamo," "Spartacus" (1960) : epic scores, w. overture, entr’acte, exit music.
transition: budget considerations vs. a need to compete with television
Chapter Eight: Eclecticism (1960–1980)
transition: restrictions = opportunity ???
big themes, big songs: "Dr. No" (1962) (certainly this features a "big" song in the main titles …); "Born Free" (1966), "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962), "The Way We Were" (1973) (the first film to feature a "big" song in the end credits???)
weird stuff: "The Birds" (1963), "The Andromeda Strain" (1971) "THX 1138: (1971)
Kubrick and eclecticism: "Lolita" (1962), "Dr. Strangelove" (1964) "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), "A Clockwork Orange" (1971)
"To Kill a Mockingbird" (1962)
compilation scores: "The Graduate" (1967), "Easy Rider" (1969), "American Graffiti" (1973)
mixture scores (i.e., pop with classic style): "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969)
‘modernist’ scores: "Jaws" (1975), "Apocalypse Now" (1979), "Planet of the Apes" (1968)
rebirth of the classic-style score: "Star Wars" (1977), "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977), "Superman" (1978), "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981), "E.T. – the Extraterrestrial" (1982) of course, these are all by John Williams; what about the other composers who jumped on the neo-classic bandwagon?
issues: the compilation score, the re-birth of the classic-style score
transition: on to the postmodern age
Chapter Nine: (1980–2000) New Definitions and New Uses of Film Music
transition: define the "postmodern" as eclectic, non-linear, referential, etc.
raises the question: what, exactly, is film music, anyway? What is a film score?
mention the rise of technology that allows a composer to concoct a quasi-full score in a home studio (MIDI, sequencers, sound modules, ProTools, etc.)
note rising interest in sound effects as music …
note the new role of the ‘music supervisor’ (i.e., the acquirer of licensed materials …)
"The Terminator" (1984)
"Die Hard" (1988)
Michael Kamen, James Horner, Jerry Goldsmith, Hans Zimmer, Danny Elfman
Diverse examples: "The Terminator" (1984), "Die Hard" (1988), "Dirty Dancing" (1987), "Edward Scissorhands" (1990), "Thelma and Louise" (1991), "The Thin Red Line" (1998), "The Gladiator" (2000)
transition : so, where are we heading?
Epilogue: (the twenty-first century)
On the one hand, films like "Harry Potter" and "Lord of the Rings" suggest a return to tradition
On the other hand, things, like "Moulin Rouge" (2001), "Run, Lola, Run" (1998), "Kill Bill" (2003) suggest an embrace of the "postmodern condition" by the film audience (at least, by the younger members thereof)
James Wierzbicki is a musicologist who teaches at the University of Michigan and serves as executive editor of the American Musicological Society's Music of the United States of America series of scholarly editions. His current research focuses on twentieth-century music in general and film music and electronic music in particular.
Behind the Curtain Booth, Gregory D
2008, 2008-10-13, 2008-09-15, 2008-12-25
eBook
Beginning in the 1930s, men, and a handful of women, came from India's many communities — Marathi, Parsi, Goan, North Indian, and many others — to Mumbai to work in an industry that constituted in ...the words of some, “the original fusion music”. They worked as composers, arrangers, assistants, and studio performers in one of the most distinctive popular music and popular film cultures on the planet. Today, the songs played by Mumbai's studio musicians are known throughout India and the Indian diaspora under the popular name “Bollywood,” but the musicians themselves remain, in their own words, “behind the curtain” — the anonymous and unseen performers of one of the world's most celebrated popular music genres. This book offers an account of the Bollywood film-music industry from the perspective of the musicians who both experienced and shaped its history. In an insider's look at the process of musical production from the late 1940s to the mid 1990s, before the advent of digital recording technologies, the author explains who these unknown musicians were and how they came to join the film-music industry. On the basis of a set of first-hand accounts from the musicians themselves, he reveals how the day-to-day circumstances of technology and finance shaped both the songs and the careers of their creators and performers. The author also unfolds the technological, cultural, and industrial developments that led to the enormous studio orchestras of the 1960s–90s, as well as the factors which ultimately led to their demise in contemporary India.
Music, Movies, Meanings, and Markets focuses on macromarketing-related aspects of film music in general and on the cinemusical role of ambi-diegetic jazz in particular. The book examines other work ...on music in motion pictures which has dealt primarily with the traditional distinction between nondiegetic film music (background music that comes from off-screen and is not audible to the film's characters, to further the dramatic development of plot, character, or other themes) and diegetic music (source music produced on-screen and/or that is audible to the film's characters, adding to the realism of the mise-en-scène without contributing much to other dramatic meanings). This book defines, describes, and illustrates another hitherto-neglected type of film music -ambi-diegetic film music, which appears on-screen but which contributes to the dramatic development of plot, character, and other themes.
Consistent with an interest in macromarketing, such ambi-diegetic film music serves as a kind of product placement (suitable for commercialization via the cross-promotion of soundtrack albums, for example) and plays a role in product design. It also provides one type of symbolic consumer behavior that indicates choices made by film characters when playing-singing-listening-or-dancing in ways that reveal their personalities or convey other cinemusical meanings. Morris Holbrook argues that ambi-diegetic film music sheds light on various social issues -such as the age-old tension between art and entertainment as it applies to the contrast between creative integrity and commercialization. Music, Movies, Meanings, and Markets explores the ways in which ambi-diegetic jazz contributes to the development of dramatic meanings in various films, many of which address the art-versus-commerce theme as a central concern.
Henry Mancini, the first publicly successful and personally recognizable film composer in history, has practically become a Hollywood brand name. In his lifetime, he sold thirty million albums and ...won four Oscars and twenty Grammy awards. Through Mancini, mere background music in movies became part of pop culture--an expression of sophistication and wit with a modern sense of cool and a lasting lyricism that has not dated._x000B__x000B_The first comprehensive study of Mancini's music, Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music describes how the composer served as a bridge between the Big Band period of World War II and the impatient eclecticism of the Baby Boomer generation, between the grand formal orchestral film scores of the past and a modern American minimalist approach. Mancini's sound seemed to capture the bright, confident, welcoming voice of the middle class's new efficient life: interested in pop songs and jazz, in movies and television, in outreach politics but also conventional stay-at-home comforts. As John Caps shows, Mancini easily combined it all in his music._x000B__x000B_Mancini wrote his first dramatic music for a radio series in 1950. By the mid-1960s, he wielded influence in Hollywood and around the world with his iconic scores: dynamic jazz for the noirish detective TV show Peter Gunn, the sly theme from The Pink Panther, and his wistful folk song "Moon River" from Breakfast at Tiffany's. Following the evolution of Mancini's style, Caps traces the history of movie scoring in general: from the jazz-pop of the 1960s to the edgier, electro-funk harmonies of the Watergate 1970s, from the revisionist 1980s marked by New Age trends and new jazz chords to the frustrating New Hollywood of the 1990s when films were made by committees of lawyers rather than by artisans._x000B__x000B_Through insightful close readings of key films, Caps traces Mancini's collaborations with important directors and shows how he homed in on specific dramatic or comic aspects of each film to create musical effects through clever instrumentation, eloquent melodies, and the strong narrative qualities of his scores. Accessible and engaging, this fresh view of Mancini's oeuvre and influence will delight and inform fans of film and popular music.
To produce the song sequences that are central to Indian popular cinema, singers' voices are first recorded in the studio and then played back on the set to be lip-synced and danced to by actors and ...actresses as the visuals are filmed. Since the 1950s, playback singers have become revered celebrities in their own right. Brought to Life by the Voice explores the distinctive aesthetics and affective power generated by this division of labor between onscreen body and offscreen voice in South Indian Tamil cinema. In Amanda Weidman's historical and ethnographic account, playback is not just a cinematic technique, but a powerful and ubiquitous element of aural public culture that has shaped the complex dynamics of postcolonial gendered subjectivity, politicized ethnolinguistic identity, and neoliberal transformation in South India.
Long before Edith Piaf sang "La vie en rose," her predecessors took to the stage of the belle epoque music hall, singing of female desire, the treachery of men, the harshness of working-class life, ...and the rough neighborhoods of Paris. Icon of working-class femininity and the underworld, the realist singer signaled the emergence of new cultural roles for women as well as shifts in the nature of popular entertainment.Chanteuse in the Cityprovides a genealogy of realist performance through analysis of the music hall careers and film roles of Mistinguett, Josephine Baker, Fréhel, and Damia. Above all, Conway offers a fresh interpretation of 1930s French cinema, emphasizing its love affair with popular song and its close connections to the music hall and the café-concert. Conway uncovers an important tradition of female performance in the golden era of French film, usually viewed as a cinema preoccupied with masculinity. She shows how-in films such as Pépé le Moko, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, and Zouzou-the realist chanteuse addresses female despair at the hopelessness of love. Conway also sheds light on the larger cultural implications of the shift from the intimate café-concert to the spectacular music hall, before the talkies displaced both kinds of live performance altogether.
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