Film Music Cues: Visualizing Social Reality Through Music and Film

Author(s):  
Richard P. Smiraglia ◽  
Joshua A. Henry

Taxonomies may contain functional vocabulary and display relationships among concepts to facilitate the work of a domain. Silent film music is a work-based genre of musical performance. Musicians worked from cue-sheets of musical terms. This paper describes the conversion of a working list of musical cues into a taxonomy. Results show the taxonomical differences that arise from a work-based vocabulary. Also, the social realities of the time are reflected in this vocabulary of music for silent film from the 1920s. Les taxonomies peuvent contenir du vocabulaire fonctionnel et mettre en évidence des relations entre les concepts et ainsi faciliter le travail d'un domaine. La musique de films muets est un genre de performance musicale basé sur l’expérience. Les musiciens travaillent à partir de repères («cue-sheet») de termes musicaux. Cet article décrit la conversion d'une liste de repères musicaux en une taxonomie. Les résultats montrent les différences taxonomiques qui émergent d'un vocabulaire basé sur l’expérience. En outre, les réalités sociales de l'époque sont reflétées dans ce vocabulaire musical pour le cinéma muet des années 1920.

Author(s):  
Richard Smiraglia

Taxonomy is the rigorous act of distinguishingdifferentiated concepts by naming and defining themwith precision. A case of taxonomic research arisesfrom film music history with regard to musicalcues, topoi, used to accompany silent film. Thepresent case study uses the Eyl Collection of Dutchsilent film music.La taxonomie consiste à distinguer rigoureusementles concepts différenciés par la dénomination et à lesdéfinir avec précision. Un cas de recherchetaxonomique est illustré dans l’histoire de la musiquede film, en ce qui concerne les signaux d’entréemusicaux, les topoï, utilisés pour accompagner lesfilms muets. La présente étude de cas utilise laCollection Eyl de musique de films muets néerlandais.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claus Tieber ◽  
Anna K. Windisch

Martin Marks holds an almost unique position to talk about silent film music: he is a scholarly musician and musical scholar. Besides his canonical book on the history of silent film music (1997), he has been playing piano accompaniments for silent films regularly for nearly four decades. In this interview we asked Martin about the challenges and complexities of choosing and creating music to accompany musical numbers in silent cinema. Martin relates how he detects musical numbers and he expounds his decision-making process on how to treat them. His explanations are interspersed with engaging examples from his practical work and based on both his scholarly knowledge and on his musical intelligence. He talks about the use of pre-existing music as well as about anachronisms in choosing music written many decades after a film was first released. In sum, this interview delivers detailed and informed insights into the difficulties and pleasures of accompanying musical numbers or other types of diegetic music in silent cinema.


2016 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 259-276
Author(s):  
Kendra Preston Leonard

2016 ◽  
pp. 156-163
Author(s):  
Richard P. Smiraglia ◽  
Joshua A. Henry

Author(s):  
Donna Kornhaber

“Watching films in the silent era” explains how viewing habits changed with distribution patterns and the growth of nickelodeons and movie palaces. Social stratification affected access to both cinemas and films. Those who lived far from city centers or who were prevented from visiting luxury venues by poverty or segregation saw older films at cheaper prices. Studios tried to manage the exigencies of filmmaking by selling motion pictures in batches, while theater owners had to choose among thousands of available options in picking the films they would exhibit. Live sound effects, narration, and even dialogue were surprisingly common elements of silent film exhibition worldwide, and silent film music was a thriving industry, with organists or groups of musicians working from books of standard music rather than film-specific scores.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 157-175
Author(s):  
Wécio Pinheiro Araújo

Resumo: Em O Capital, Marx nos alertou que a mercadoria tem um caráter misterioso que carrega “sutilezas metafísicas e argúcias teológicas”. Este artigo tenta decifrar um pouco desse mistério buscando decodifica-lo naquilo que denominamos como a estranha objetividade do valor. Para isso, analisamos a relação entre a ideologia e o valor a partir da crítica marxiana à mercadoria, consignada à lógica de Hegel. Vemos que o valor se constitui como razão ontológica da mercadoria enquanto produto do processo de trabalho que carrega uma racionalidade imanente, isto é, um espírito socialmente produzido que se objetiva à medida que é vivenciado pelos indivíduos como uma lógica social que rege as relações nesta sociedade. Isso se dá por meio de “sutilezas metafísicas” na formação da realidade social marcada por contradições estabelecidas entre, de um lado, o conteúdo objetivo das relações sociais, e de outro, a forma como essas relações são vivenciadas pela consciência na sociedade capitalista. Nesta relação entre conteúdo e forma, encontramos determinações de profundidade ontológica entre o valor e a ideologia, enquanto forma social que opera harmonizando as contradições constituintes da realidade social, a exemplo do que acontece no trabalho assalariado. A mediação ideológica se põe como uma progressão imanente à materialização da vivência concreta da relação entre capital e trabalho no salário, de maneira a naturalizar a exploração que se esconde na estranha objetividade do valor que se realiza na troca de mercadorias. Concluímos que a conexão ontológica entre o ser social e a mercadoria é socialmente ubíqua, precisamente por conta do seu caráter ideológico na formação da sociabilidade a partir do processo de trabalho subjugado ao capital.  Palavras-chave: Valor. Ideologia. Trabalho, Capital. Salário.  Abstract: In Capital, Marx warned us that the commodity has a mysterious character bearing "metaphysical subtleties and theological insights." This article attempts to decipher a little of this mystery by decoding it into what we call the strange objectivity of value. For this, we analyze the relation between ideology and value from the Marxian critique of the commodity, consigned to the Hegelian logic. We see that value is constituted as the ontological reason of the commodity as the product of the labor process that carries an immanent rationality, that is, a socially produced spirit that is objectified as it is experienced by the individuals as a social logic that governs the relations in this society. This is done through "metaphysical subtleties" in the formation of social reality marked by contradictions established between, on the one hand, the objective content of social relations, and on the other, the way in which these relations are experienced by consciousness in capitalist society. In this relationship between content and form, we find determinations of ontological depth between value and ideology, as a social form that operates by harmonizing the constituent contradictions of social reality, as in wage labor. Ideological mediation is seen as an immanent progression to the materialization of the concrete experience of the relation between capital and labor in wage, in order to naturalize the exploitation that is hidden in the strange objectivity of the value that is realized in the exchange of commodities. We conclude that the ontological connection between the social being and the commodity is socially ubiquitous precisely because of its ideological character in the formation of sociability from the labor process subjugated to capital.  Keywords: Value. Labor. Ideology. Capital. Wage.  REFERÊNCIAS  ADORNO, Theodor W. Teoria Estética. [Asthetische Theorie]. Tradução de Artur Morão. – São Paulo : Livraria Martins Fontes, 1988.  ADORNO, Theodor W. 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