FM Radio and the New Hollywood Soundtrack

2020 ◽  
pp. 54-72
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Film Music ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Fm Radio ◽  
Progressive Rock ◽  
Music Film ◽  
Orchestral Scores ◽  
Standing Sound

In studio production between the mid-1960s and early 1980s, the period often referred to as “New Hollywood,” the music soundtrack was the site of significant upheaval. As box office revues continued to plummet, the studios allowed filmmakers greater freedom to experiment with narrative structures and with soundtrack conventions. Specifically, they allowed directors to exert new control over film music, which they did often by jettisoning new composed orchestral scores in favor of compilations of preexisting, recorded music. Film music scholars have long acknowledged this shift, but few have recognized the degree to which the new soundtrack practices that emerged in the New Hollywood period were also the result of radical shifts in popular music and contemporary listening practices. By looking at two films from the early 1970s, Zabriskie Point (1971) and The Strawberry Statement (1970, this article considers the degree to which progressive rock, FM radio, and countercultural listening practices changed not only the content of film soundtracks but also the placement of music in film, unseating long-standing sound hierarchies and privileging music in new ways.

Country Music and Film

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Mazor
Keyword(s):  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Music History ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Cinema Studies ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
Film Archives ◽  
Music Film

This chapter presents an overview of available writing and research materials within country music history and cinema studies disciplines on the interaction of commercial country music and theatrical motion pictures—how the music and its practitioners have been represented on-screen and reception of both have been affected by that representation, and how the music has contributed to films. The deficit in systematic resources for study is described—the lack of country music film archives, filmographies of related motion pictures, and dedicated catalogues. Literature (or its absence) engaging country music and the screen as they evolved and related in the silent, prewar sound, postwar country music boom, and post-1970 “New Hollywood” periods is outlined. How country music performances have served narratives and as self-contained cinematic elements are differentiated, and film’s continuing use as an agency for shaping country’s cultural respectability is outlined.

Startling, Unusual Sensation

2020 ◽  
pp. 99-117
Author(s):  
Steven C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Film Music ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
New Era ◽  
Action Films ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Sound Technology ◽  
Title Character

Before leaving RKO in late 1932, David O. Selznick greenlit the studio’s most costly and ambitious production: King Kong. The result was a landmark in Hollywood special effects and storytelling; its influence continues today, in the fantasy/action films that dominate the industry. Just as significantly, Kong inspired a Steiner score that is still cited by many directors, screenwriters, and composers as the work that first made them aware of the power of film music. This chapter aims to provide a definitive account of the score’s creation, from Steiner’s use of lyrical melodies and startling dissonance to humanize and add credibility to the title character; through the challenges of recording music whose orchestral richness tested the limits of 1933 sound technology. King Kong’s box office success, at the height of the Depression, temporarily saved RKO. It also launched Steiner into a new era of creative experimentation.

Popular Music and Genre in Mainstream Nollywood

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 99-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emaeyak Peter Sylvanus
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Film Genre ◽  
Music Practice ◽  
Music Genre ◽  
Film Genres ◽  
Genre Film

This article examines how genres of Nollywood soundtrack, which draw mainly from Nigerian popular music, effectively give Nollywood film genres their unique identification. This music genre–film genre association not only sets Nollywood apart from other cinema traditions, but also confers a marginal genre identity on its film music. The approach of this study is primarily ethnographic: pooling and teasing out inferences from the local discourse on film music practice, which the experiential evidence from forty classic Nollywood film samples support. The outcome shows that popular music is and can be a critical tool for distinguishing among film genres.

Listening to Ravel, Watching Un coeur en hiver: Cinematic Subjectivity and the Music-film

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-275
Author(s):  
JULIE BROWN
Keyword(s):  
Music Theory ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
It Projects ◽  
Piano Trio ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Music Film ◽  
Love Triangle ◽  
Shed Light

This close reading of Claude Sautet’s music-film Un coeur en hiver / A Heart in Winter (1992) also reflects on issues raised by music-films generally. Films that take music as their central subject raise special questions about the role of music in cinematic representation. Un coeur en hiver’s musically saturated narrative explores people’s abilities to know themselves and others and to express themselves adequately in emotional contexts. At the same time, the film’s techniques interrogate both the role of music in the construction of cinematic subjectivity and the potential of cinema to engage with our understandings of musical subjectivity. On one level the music self-critically serves its classic role in cinematic narrative of encouraging – even coercing – us into filling in narrative gaps otherwise left open by plot and dialogue. On another level, however, Un coeur en hiver can be read as a species of cinematic meditation on Ravel’s music: traces of Ravelian biography are scattered throughout; on-screen performances of the Piano Trio provide a musical metaphor for the narrative love triangle; and the Trio’s first movement provides a formal skeleton for the film as a whole. Drawing on recent film-music theory as well as Naomi Cummings’ account of musical subjectivity, I suggest that the film reflects specifically upon the music by exploiting its cinematic resources – dramatis personae, narrative, and mise-en-scène– to position us as auditors of Ravel; it projects a sense that Ravel’s subjective presence inhabits his trio and sonatas. To shed light on the nature of this cinematic meditation on musical authorship, I draw on John Corbett’s account of recorded music as something that both promises pleasure and threatens lack. I also revisit Edward T. Cone’s understanding of ‘the composer’s voice’, proposing a reading of Un coeur en hiver as a cinematic reflection on our fetishism of composer biography in an era marked by the loss of human presence in mechanical musical reproduction.

Film Music in Concert

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emilio Audissino
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Historical Survey ◽  
Boston Symphony Orchestra ◽  
The Usa ◽  
John Williams ◽  
The Aesthetic

The Boston Pops Orchestra was the first orchestra of its kind in the USA: founded in 1885 from the ranks of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, its remit was to offer concerts of light symphonic music. Over the years, and in particular during the fifty-year tenure of its most famous conductor, Arthur Fiedler, the Pops established itself as the premier US orchestra specialising in bridging the fields of 'art music' and 'popular music'. When the Hollywood composer John Williams was assigned the conductorship of the orchestra in 1980, he energetically advocated for the inclusion of film-music repertoire, changing Fiedler's approach significantly. This Element offers a historical survey of the pioneering agency that the Boston Pops had under Williams's tenure in the legitimisation of film music as a viable repertoire for concert programmes. The case study is complemented with more general discussions on the aesthetic of film music in concert.

The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Heavy Metal ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Orchestral Music ◽  
Music Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Film Musicals ◽  
Music Film

Medievalism—broadly construed as the retrospective immersion in the images, sounds, narratives, and ideologies of the European Middle Ages—has left a powerful mark in both art music and popular music culture of the past two centuries. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism provides a snapshot of the growing field of medievalism in music by bringing together international scholars to explore a wide variety of past and present genres in which medievalism is present. The handbook is organized into six sections and takes up musical topics in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, in genres as far reaching as opera, orchestral music, film, musicals, heavy metal, folk rock, and video games.

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