scholarly journals “Adventure is out there!”: Pastiche and Postmodernism in the Music of Up

2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradley Spiers
Keyword(s):  
Film Music ◽  
Musical Settings ◽  
Film Score ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Music Score ◽  
Musical Theme ◽  
Ultimate Result ◽  
Pass Through ◽  
Musical Genres ◽  
Classical Hollywood

Film music scholarship has historically focused its attention between two clear-cut scoring practices; the classical Hollywood score and the popular music score. This study attempts to break that mould by investigating the pluralistic trends found in Michael Giacchino’s film score for the film Up(2009), examining the motivic growth of specific leitmotif, and charting how that musical theme is set in a variety of musical. Unlike the classical Hollywood scoring model that is outlined by writers like Claudia Gorbman and Jeff Smith, these diverse musical settings pass through a plethora of distinct genres and styles—both “highbrow” and “lowbrow”—that have hitherto been unseen in film music history. These musical settings allow Giacchino to imbue specific leitmotifs with connotation of diverse musical histories, styles and traditions. The ultimate result is a binary system of signification, with the leitmotifs introversively signifying themes and characters within the film’s diegesis, while the diverse musical settings extroversively signify sights and sounds in the wider world. By synthesizing diverse musical styles into one musical thread, Giacchino’s film scores illustrate the power of music to draw on well-known musical genres from Western culture to enhance audiences’ narrative understanding. In this way, Giacchino’s work in Up straddles inspiration from both the classical and popular Hollywood score, adopting the diverse timbres, styles and aesthetics of the popular score, while still retaining the consistent use and development of a leitmotif that is found in the classical score. I call this new hybridized scoring practice the “pastiche score.”

From Film Score to Art Music and Back

2020 ◽  
pp. 173-192
Author(s):  
Julia Khait
Keyword(s):  
Musical Theater ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Compositional Techniques ◽  
Sergei Prokofiev ◽  
Film Scores ◽  
Film Score ◽  
Stylistic Evolution ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ivan The Terrible

Sergei Prokofiev was one of a few composers who worked equally successfully in the fields of film music and art music. His scores for Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible are as significant for the history of film music as are his operas and ballets for musical theater. He approached film projects with the same creative rigor as his stage and symphonic works. And so we must think of his film scores not as a separate enterprise but, rather, as one of the various theatrical and dramatic genres at which he tried his hand. While the operatic features of his music for Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible have become widely recognized, Prokofiev’s other film scores can also be placed in a broader context of the composer’s output. The cross-connections between genres can be traced at different levels, from common themes and literary ideas and similar stylistic evolution, to shared compositional techniques and borrowings of musical material from one work to another.

Film Sound Design

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Film Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sound Design ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Sound Effects ◽  
Holistic Understanding ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Classical Hollywood ◽  
Film Sound

Sound design is a relatively recent term, first used to credit Walter Murch’s work on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). Murch has frequently drawn an analogy between how he perceived his role as decorating the three-dimensional film theater with sound and the work of an interior designer who decorates an architectural space (LoBrutto 1994, p. 92, cited under Key Practitioners: Compilations). Sound design is also a topic of increasing interest within film music scholarship, particularly its history and how it might be analyzed. The history of sound design is inextricably bound up with the history of technology, notably the emergence of Dolby in the 1970s. In his Oxford Bibliographies article “Music and Cinema, Classical Hollywood,” David Neumeyer noted in the introduction that the end of the Classical Hollywood era could be situated c. 1972 when the “contemporary era of sound design began in earnest,” and this particular period is indeed crucial. Yet, this is not to suggest that the history of film sound design is brief; in fact, it has a long history of antecedents that have shaped the role of the sound designer into a somewhat fluid concept. As of the early 21st century, no consensus has been reached on the definition of “sound design” in current research; however, the distinction between sound design as the work of one individual as opposed to a mode of practice is apparent. Furthermore, “sound designer” also has a professional meaning; in the United States the labor union defines the sound designer as a person who designs the sound effects. Some scholars expound this relatively narrow definition of sound design as akin to sound effects editing in the post-production process, whereas others see it as a broad undertaking, concerned with every aspect of the sonic environment. Murch encourages a broader definition of the sound designer as “someone who plans, creates the sound effects and mixes the final soundtrack, and thereby takes responsibility for the sound of a film the way a director of photography takes responsibility for the image” (Murch 1995, p. 246, cited under Key Practitioners: Articles). Sound design can encapsulate all components of film sound, including music, dialogue, sound effects, and voiceovers. This holistic understanding of the term is reflected in a significant interdisciplinary edition that takes the concept of the integrated soundtrack as a central theme (Greene and Kulezic-Wilson 2016, cited under Analyzing Film Sound Design). Sound design can involve conceptualization and practical efforts as well as cooperation with the director, producer, composer, editors, and other creative personnel. Sound designer Randy Thom has highlighted the importance of developing opportunities for the creative use of sound when making a film and has appealed for filmmakers to design their films for sound (Thom 1999, cited under Key Practitioners: Articles). The combination of creativity, technical expertise, and the ability to conceptualize innovative interactions between sound and image inherent in the concept is reflected in the very title of “sound designer,” a label that is not officially recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awards. With the growing popularity of the term among some industry professionals, it is becoming common for sound artists to claim the credit “sound designer” in addition to those for recognized roles such as “sound editor” or “re-recording engineer” (Whittington 2007, p. 26, cited under Histories and Definitions of Sound Design). Within film music studies, the concept of sound design is increasingly used as a filter for analysis of a film’s soundscape, and thus publications now address how to analyze more complex film soundtracks. The focus of this article is divided into three broad strands: textbooks that give practical and technical direction for film sound design or aspects of it, literature on the history of sound design and the purview of the sound designer, and publications about and interviews with key practitioners.

Dream Analysis: Korngold, Mendelssohn, and Musical Adaptations in Warner Bros.' A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)

2011 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-236
Author(s):  
Nathan Platte
Keyword(s):  
Film Music ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Film Score ◽  
Dream Analysis ◽  
Musical Adaptations ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Erich Wolfgang Korngold ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn ◽  
Film Composers

Abstract In his first film score, Erich Wolfgang Korngold adapted the works of Felix Mendelssohn so that the music seemed to interact and respond with the visual editing of the film, A Midsummer Night's Dream (Warner Bros., 1935). By detailing the facets of this unusual production, which range from Korngold's presence on the set to the publicity department's efforts to spotlight Mendelssohn's music and Korngold's arrangements, I argue that the score for Dream played an important role in elevating film music and film composers within the hierarchy of Hollywood production and publicity. Not only was the Mendelssohn-Korngold score given greater consideration during the film's making, but also audiences were reminded to listen to the film's music, a facet rarely acknowledged in other contemporaneous publicity drives. Importantly, these changes were effected and rationalized through the self-conscious foregrounding of the music, principles, and rhetoric of nineteenth-century Romanticism. Documents at the Warner Bros. Archive reveal how the confluence of these factors not only established the unusual tenor of Korngold's career within the Hollywood studio system but also helped construct the film composer's public image as an incongruously independent artist working within an otherwise collaborative medium.

scholarly journals Interactions between symphonies and film music in the œuvre of László Lajtha

2017 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-253
Author(s):  
Viktória Ozsvárt
Keyword(s):  
Film Music ◽  
Visual Effects ◽  
Film Score ◽  
Common Features ◽  
The Third ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Symphonic Orchestra ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
New Perspective

In the case of Hungarian composer and ethnomusicologist László Lajtha (1892–1963) discovering the manifold potentials in a symphonic orchestra linked strongly with the composition of works for stage and screen. Nevertheless, it clearly makes sense to examine the long-term relations Lajtha had with the film as a genre, by searching for common features in the structure of his music composed for films and his symphonies. Much of the musical material in Lajtha’s Third Symphony is similar to those he used in his 1948 film music for Murder in the Cathedral. The similarity gains more complexity if one takes into consideration that the Third Symphony was marked by the composer as the starting point in a monumental, five-fold symphonic cycle composed through the 1950s. The article makes an attempt to explore the thematic and motivic relationship between the Third Symphony, the Variations and the film score Murder in the Cathedral by analysing the musical material and the structure, and by searching for correlation between the audible and visual effects of the music Lajtha used in the movie scenes. This kind of examination may offer a new perspective on the sources of inspiration that shaped Lajtha’s workmanship and it also gives some important information about his way of thinking about music.

“A Christy Minstrel, a Harlequin, or an Ancient Persian”?: Opera, Hindustani Classical Music, and the Origins of the Popular South Asian “Musical”

2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-350
Author(s):  
Rashna Darius Nicholson
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Musical Cultures ◽  
Marching Bands ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hindustani Music ◽  
Musical Genres

The story of South Asian colonial modernity and music offers up a multidirectional and polymorphous conceptual terrain featuring, among many agents, Hindustani royalty, touring minstrel and burlesque troupes, Jesuit missionaries and orientalists, and not least, social reformists. Nevertheless, scholarship on the history of Hindustani music consistently traces its development through classicization against the rise of Hindu nationalism while overlooking other palpable clues in the colonial past. This article argues for a substantial reevaluation of colonial South Asian music by positing an alternative and hitherto invisible auditory stimulus in colonial Asia's aural landscape: opera. Janaki Bakhle contends that “as a musical form, opera put down even fewer roots than did orchestral, instrumental Western classical music,” even though she subsequently states that “Western orchestration did become part of modern ceremonial activities, and it moved into film music even as it was played by ersatz marching bands.” Bakhle further argues that Hindustani music underwent processes of sanitization and systematization within a Hindu nation-making project, a view that has been complicated by historians such as Tejaswini Niranjana. Niranjana describes how scholarship that focuses exclusively on the codification or nationalization of Hindustani music through the interpellation of a Hindu public neglects “sedimented forms of musical persistence.” Not dissimilarly, Richard David Williams highlights how the singular emphasis on the movement of Hindustani music reform risks reducing the heterogeneous and complex musicological traditions in the colonial period to the output of a single, monolithic, middle-class “new elite.” Previous scholarship, he argues, concentrates on “one player in a larger ‘economy’ of musical consumption.” Following these calls for more textured perspectives on South Asian musical cultures, I suggest a somewhat heretical thesis: that opera functioned as a common mediating stimulus for both the colonial reinscription of Hindustani music as classical as well as the emergence of popular pan-Asian musical genres such as “Bollywood” music.

Restoring Pushkin: Ideology and Aesthetics in Prokofiev's Queen of Spades

2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 460-492
Author(s):  
Kevin Bartig
Keyword(s):  
Film Music ◽  
Soviet Government ◽  
Film Score ◽  
Queen Of Spades

Immediately following his repatriation in 1936, Prokofiev composed a film score for a screen adaptation of Pushkin's The Queen of Spades. Although the film was never finished, Prokofiev's completed score reveals an idiosyncratic approach to film music, one that is strikingly different than that found in his better known scores such as Alexander Nevsky. Reconstruction of the production and its context demonstrates how Prokofiev's aesthetic goals of a "new simplicity," characterized by lyricism, spare textures, and avoidance of dissonance, would successfully intersect with the ideological goals of a Jubilee celebration planned by the Soviet government for the centenary of Pushkin's death.

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