MUS210: Music in Film

Celluloid Symphonies is a unique sourcebook of writings on music for film, bringing together fifty-three critical documents, many previously inaccessible. It includes essays by those who created the music--Max Steiner, Erich Korngold, Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein and Howard Shore--and outlines the major trends, aesthetic choices, technological innovations, and commercial pressures that have shaped the relationship between music and film from 1896 to the present.

This book is comprised of interviews with composers alongside complementary chapters that focus on a particular feature of the composer's approach or style, written by a musicologist or film academic who specializes in that particular element of the composer's output. In the interview portions of this book, eight major film composers discuss their work from the early 1980s to the present day. The focus is on the practical considerations of film composition, the relationship each composer has with the moving image, technical considerations, personal motivations in composing, the relationships composers have with their directors, and their own creative processes

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).

Film Music: a Very Short Introduction takes a global perspective, situating the theory and practice of film music and its history in an international context. Offers expert insights into oft-neglected silent films and their scores. Gives a behind-the-scenes look at the process of film composition and how composers interact with other professionals.

Scoring the Score is the first scholarly examination of the orchestrator's role in the contemporary film industry. Orchestrators are crucial to the production of a film's score, yet they have not received significant consideration in film-music research.

The practice of blurring the line between score and sound design has transformed contemporary film soundscape by challenging not only the long-established hierarchical relationships between dialogue, music, and sound effects, but also the modes of perception shaped by classical soundtrack practices.

This book is an interdisciplinary collection exploring the impact of emergent technologies on the production, distribution and reception of media content in the Asia-Pacific region. Exploring case studies from China, Japan, South Korea, India, Thailand and Australia, as well as American co-productions, this collection takes a Cultural Studies approach to the constantly evolving ways of accessing and interacting with visual content. The study of the social and technological impact of online on-demand services is a burgeoning field of investigation, dating back to the early-2010s. This project will be a valuable update to existing conversations, and a cornerstone for future discussions about topics such as online technologies, popular culture, soft power, and social media.

This work is concerned with summarizing & critiquing theories of the soundtrack from roughly 1929 until today. A theory of the soundtrack is concerned with what belongs to it, how it is effectively organized, how its status in a multimedia object affects the nature of the object, the tools available for its analysis, & the interpretive regime that the theory mandates for determining the meaning, sense, & structure that sound & music bring to film & other audiovisual media. Beyond that, a theory may also delineate the range of possible uses of sound (& music), classify the types of relations that films have used for image & sound, identify the central problems, & reflect on & describe effective uses of sound in film. This text does not provide an exhaustive historical survey but rather sketches out the range of theoretical approaches that have been applied to the soundtrack over time.

This open access collection deals with musical moments in film as one of the most pivotal and compelling issues of current film music research. Musical moments as defined by Amy Herzog occur when a musical number inverts the normal relationship between the image track and the soundtrack in a film in such a way that what we see is determined by what we hear. As one potential approach, this definition provokes a variety of perspectives to investigate the disruptive potential of these moments and numbers as a creative device in the production of audiovisual narratives. In this sense, the book responds to a need for an anthology that introduces students as well as scholars of cinema, musicology, media studies and cultural studies more broadly, to recent discourses in film music scholarship. The volume includes contributions by early career researchers as well as by established experts in the fields of musicology, film studies, media studies, and cultural studies, promoting cross-disciplinary collaboration in film music research. 

Music, Sound, and Documentary Film in the Global South, edited by Christopher L. Ballengee, represents an important step toward thinking about the production and analysis of the soundscapes of documentary film, all while exploring a range of social, cultural, technological, and theoretical questions relevant to current trends in Global South studies. Written by a diverse set of authors, including filmmakers, academics, and cultural critics, the ten essays in this book provide fresh evaluations of the place of music and sound in documentary films outside the European-American milieu. On the whole, the authors illuminate how the invention of documentary film was at first a product of the colonialist project. Yet over time, access to filmmaking technologies led to the creation of documentary films relevant for local communities and national identities. In this sense, documentary film in the Global South might be broadly defined as a mode of personally or politically mediated storytelling that, by one route or another, has become a useful and recognizable means of memorializing traumatic histories and critiquing everyday lived experience. As the essays in this volume attest, close readings of documentary soundscapes provide fresh perspectives on ways of hearing and ways of being heard in the Global South.

Music in Horror Film is a collection of essays that examine the effects of music and its ability to provoke or intensify fear in this particular genre of film. Frightening images and ideas can be made even more intense when accompanied with frightening musical sounds, and music in horror film frequently makes its audience feel threatened and uncomfortable through its sudden stinger chords and other shock effects. The essays in this collection address the presence of music in horror films and their potency within them. With contributions from scholars across the disciplines of music and film studies, these essays delve into blockbusters like The Exorcist, The Shining, and The Sixth Sense, together with lesser known but still important films like Carnival of Souls and The Last House on the Left.

Music in the Western: Notes from the Frontier presents essays from both film studies scholars and musicologists on core issues in western film scores: their history, their generic conventions, their operation as part of a narrative system, their functioning within individual filmic texts and their ideological import, especially in terms of the western's construction of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity.

Re-Locating the Sounds of the Western examines the use and function of musical tropes and gestures traditionally associated with the American Western in new and different contexts. Each chapter focuses on a notable use of Western musical tropes, textures, instrumentation, form, and harmonic language, delving into the resonance of the music of the Western to cite bravura, machismo, colonization, violence, gender roles and essentialism, exploration, and other concepts.

In the late 1920s, Hollywood's conversion from silent to synchronized-sound film production not only instigated the convergence of the film and music industries but also gave rise to an extraordinary period of song use in American cinema. Saying It With Songs examines the functions of songs in a variety of non-musical genres, including melodramas, romantic comedies, Westerns, prison dramas, and action-adventure films.

Covering titles ranging from Rocketship X-M (1950) to Wall-E (2008), these insightful essays measure the relationship between music and science fiction film from a variety of academic perspectives. Thematic sections survey specific compositions utilized in science fiction movies; Broadway's relationship with the genre; science fiction elements in popular songs; the conveyance of subjectivity and identity through music; and individual composers.

Structured by the categories of Style, Subjectivity, and Desire, this volume advances our understanding of the aesthetics of the opera/film encounter. Case studies of a diverse array of important repertoire including mainstream film, opera-film, and postmodernist pastiche are presented. The book also refines and expands film-music functions, and details the impact of an opera's musical style on the meaning of a film.