Auteurship and Agency In Television Music

This chapteroffers a survey of literature and analytical approaches in the study of television music. It explains the distinction between composer-based,auteurist models and agency-oriented models of television music, and describes the distinctive character of music video. It discusses the trend in current television and television music and evaluates the presentstate and prospects for television music research. This chapteralso considers the factors that significantly influenced the evolution of television music, including the advent of DVR technology.

Overview

This chapterpresents an overview of the coverage of this volume, which is about film music studies. It chronicles the development of film music studies as a discipline and suggests that its rise is associated with the commodity history of feature films. It describes the evolution of the application of music in motion pictures, from the silent films era to the present time. This chapteralso provides an outline of the chapters in the volume.

Film Music from the Perspective of Cognitive Science

This chapterexamines how the effects of film music on meaning, memory, and the construction of a reality within a film can be addressed or understood from a cognitive scientific perspective. It reviews studies that aim to explain why music is important to film as well as how music functions in film, and it discusses the principles of cognitive science and cognitive perspective. It also considers the Congruence-Associationist Model for understanding filmmusic, which was developed to account for the fact that the attitudes toward three geometric film characters were affected differently by background music.

Opera and Film

This chapterexamines the relation between opera and film. It describes how opera is integrated into films and how it can signify in wide-circulation dramatic feature films. It analyzes opera in mainstream film and opera-films that have attracted scholarly attention, and suggests that future movies will continue to find imaginative ways to involve opera, as suggested by the postmodern opera visit in the film Quantum of Solace.

Psychoanalysis, Apparatus Theory, and Subjectivity

This chapterexamines the relevance of psychoanalysis, subjectivity, and apparatus theory to film music studies. It explains that psychoanalysis provides the theory of subjectivity of the formation of social subjects, while critical use of psychoanalysis is unconcerned with clinical treatment and is interested in turning psychoanalysis back on itself in order to examine how it formulates the norm. It considers the relevant works of philosopher and cultural critic SlavojŽižek and Jean-Louis Baudry, who developed the idea ofcinematic apparatus.

The Order of Sanctity

This chaptertraces the connections between a prevailing mode of “authenticity” in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 film The Ten Commandments and the music Elmer Bernstein wrote for the film. It describes how Bernstein’s musical score for the riot around the Golden Calf created the necessary orgiastic impression and how DeMille’s narration created the distance that freed the scene from any risk of censorly reproach. It also considers the devotional and political elements of the film and its religious and social impact.

Performance Practices and Music In Early Cinema outside Hollywood

This chapterexamines the diversity of international practices in film music outside Hollywood during the silent film era. It describes performance practices around the globe and offers a broader context in which to consider American practices during this period. It suggests that music functioned as a cultural interface throughout the silent era in a way quite different from the sound era and that music in the silent era had an impressive power to interact with moving images in ways not controlled by films or their producers.

“The Tunes They Are A-changing”

This chapterexamines the history of interactions between the film and music industries. It suggests that this history shows a pattern of several long-term business cycles and that each cycle was influenced by an important change, in film technology, music technology, industry structures, or in some combination of these. It also highlights the trend of declining sales of music compact discs and the reduction in filmmakers’ music budget.

Drawing a New Narrative for Cartoon Music

This chapter provides a historical account of animated films and their music. It describes the variety of early studio practices, the centrality of production for music, and the effects of technological changes after 1950. It compares Disney’s Steamboat Willie and The Fairly OddParents with the works of Pixar, which deliberately avoided making a musical in the Disney mold. This chapteralso suggests that while the score of Pixar’s animated films are rich, provoking, and complex as any live-action Hollywood film, they still dip into some good old-fashioned cartoonism.

When the Music Surges

This chapterexamines the influence of the theater music of the nineteenth century on modern film music practices. It shows that the soundscape of the theater was considerably richer and more varied than has previously been suggested and that the techniques of the nineteenth-century melodrama also leapt beyond the silent film to influence underscoring practices in the sound film of the 1930s and 1940s. It provides examples to illustrate that many more useful connections could be made between the practice of composing music for the theater and composing for film melodramas.