Papers by giorgio biancorosso
Music and the Moving Image, 2009
When music first heard as background scoring ("nondiegetic" music) turns out to be coming from a ... more When music first heard as background scoring ("nondiegetic" music) turns out to be coming from a source inside the fictional world of a film ("diegetic"), the switch may be hilarious, disconcerting, mildly surprising, or all of the above. Examples abound. Think of the "closeted" harpist in Woody Allen's Bananas or the fiddler in Ingmar Bergman's Fanny och Alexander. In this article, I address these and other examples in the context of the century-old debate on perceptual ambiguity. As is the case with ambiguous images, my examples elicit two conflicting perceptions of the same sensorial input. But unlike the textbook cases examined in psychological and philosophical discussions, they are also part of a rich and highly specific spatio-temporal framework. Embedded in a cinematic narrative, they both receive and project meaning. Far from being a curious, marginal instance of a well understood psychological phenomenon, the ambiguity between diegetic and nondiegetic music forces us to reconsider ambiguity in the light of a theory of knowledge. In Edward Yang's Yi Yi, over images of Ting-Ting arguing with her sweetheart on the street, we hear a slow, improvisatory introduction to a piano rendition of Gershwin's Summertime. 1 The music colors the scene with a sense of pastness and enhances the impression of distance conveyed by the extremely high angle of the shot. It is, one would think, a classic use of nondiegetic scoring, but a cut to a shot of Ting-Ting's auntie rummaging through her CD collection at home poses a question: was the music an instance of displaced diegetic sound instead, functioning here as a sound advance? Yes, but yet another cut takes us to NJ Jian's home, where Ting-Ting is now seen playing the very same music at the piano. The music, then, would seem to have been working ambiguously, not in the sense of being vague or indeterminate but rather of being equally fit to perform different tasks at different stages of a transition from one scene to the other: nondiegetic underscoring first, then recorded music, and finally a piano performance. Following a suggestion first put forward by Jeff Smith in these pages, one need not think of the music as ambiguous, but only initially misapprehended as the result of the absence of crucial information about its status and provenance. 2 Smith's suggestion relies on the classic formalist distinction between the narrative, or fabula, as an implied spatiotemporal world constructed by the spectator; and narration, or syuzhet, as the total sum of sounds and images that literally make up a film as it unfolds in time. Given this distinction, upon examining a number of cases of reversals or multivalence, Smith effectively explains away ambiguity as an attribute of the music. Ambiguity, put another way, impinges not on what sort of narrative space the music inhabits in the first place, but rather on how communicative the narration is; it lies not in the stimulus but arises out of the way in which the narration shapes our construction of the story world, and this is why it is eventually resolved. The status of the music in Yi Yi as a diegetic performance is never really in doubt; rather, due to the low level of communicativeness of the narration in this instance, it is revealed in successive stages. An ambiguity that is finally solved is no less ambiguous for that, however. In fact, it is common for ambiguous configurations to elicit contradictory or mutually exclusive perceptions, only one of which turns out to be right or at least plausible. As I will argue in this essay, multistability, the constant "flipping" of perspectives, obtains only in laboratories or under extremely controlled, and thus unrepresentative, circumstances. Moreover, something would be amiss in a reading that would privilege solely the site of provenance of the music as eventually disclosed at the expense of the process of disclosing itself, all the more so if such disclosure were to be foregrounded and thus were to call attention to itself as a nexus of meaning. In these cases, as Robynn Stilwell has argued recently, and as Edward Branigan pointed out a few years ago with reference to sound, "the misreading is relevant to-functions in-the reading of the text and in that sense is not a misreading at all but a necessary part of an ongoing process of interpretation." 3 When a reversal occurs, we do respond to the sudden shift, adjust to a new perspective, and take stock of its implications, thus recognizing, if only on the level of the fabula, our initial perception as a misreading. The experience of the shift retains its meaning, however, for it draws us in the picture, as it were, and is a reminder of the precariousness of our reliance on conventions. In the almost whimsical example from Yi Yi, for instance, the irreversibility of the successive changes undergone by our perception of the music, and the experience of not one but two successive false perceptions, intimate the possibility of having to reconfigure the world of the fabula surprise after surprise, as if endlessly at the mercy of the director-as-deus-ex-machina. The shot of Ting-Ting playing the piano would seem to settle the matter of where the music is coming from; but how can we be sure that the director, having done so twice already, will not pull the rug from under our feet once again? To be sure, if the film allows it, we will eventually forget about the possibility and comfortably settle into an attitude of trust in the stability of the world constructed on screen. But this is no more than a pragmatic solution to what is ultimately a metaphysical question, one that no empirical data or statistically ordered count will help us
Wong Kar-wai’s film In the Mood for Love (2000) is set in Hong Kong in the early 1960s and explor... more Wong Kar-wai’s film In the Mood for Love (2000) is set in Hong Kong in the early 1960s and explores the predicament and reactions of a female character (So Lai-chen) who experiences a personal crisis at a time of political turmoil. Like that other great film about passion and solipsism, Nagisa Oshima’s Ai no corrida (1976), In the Mood for Love poses as a mere love story only to open up, in a brilliantly off-handed fashion, a scenario of political devastation against which romance becomes all but impossible. For all its casual tone, the backdrop of the 1966 riots is a shivering revelation of the social and political conditions that have made possible the protagonists’ solipsistic absorption in their feelings as well as the fragility of Hong Kong’s status as a geographical and political island. This article discusses these elements of the film in the context of contemporary Hong Kong society and cinema.
Current Musicology, 2007
Reviewed by Giorgio Biancorosso This twelve-essay anthology is a collection of papers first prese... more Reviewed by Giorgio Biancorosso This twelve-essay anthology is a collection of papers first presented at two conferences on music and film held in 2000 and 2001 in the United Kingdom. 1 It brings together a diverse group of scholars-musicologists, film scholars, media and communication scholars, literature and area specialists-around one topic: the use of "pre-existing music" in film. Though the anthology is somewhat inconsistent in quality and type of contribution, its appearance is welcome, for it provides not only the most extensive treatment of the subject to date but also the most convincing proof of the topic's significance and intrinsically interdisciplinary, collaborative nature. The book is divided into two sections: "Pre-existing Classical Film Scores" and "Popular Music and Film." The term "scores" in the heading of the first section suggests that it deals only with classical music used nondiegetically; in fact, both sections touch on diegetic and nondiegetic uses of the repertories. Notwithstanding the division into two headings, the book brings together three areas of research under the rubric of "pre-existing music": instrumental art music, opera, and popular music (xiii). This grouping results in more than breadth of content; it is an implicit acknowledgement that "pre-existing music" is an aesthetic category in and of itself that cuts across genres and repertories. The volume's title, Changing Tunes, expresses a fundamental methodological assumption sustaining the collection: a commitment to the study of emergent musical meaning as music crosses social, political, and cultural contexts that transform, sometimes radically, its impact and reception. The essays range significantly in style and content. After a short and lucid introduction by the book's editors, Phil Powrie and Robynn Stilwell, Claudia Gorbman's treatment of the use of music in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and Mike Cormack's essay on the ambiguity of classical music in film serve almost as secondary introductions. We are then treated to chapters on the use of Mascagni in The Godfather III (Lars Franke), the history of Carmen on the big screen (Ann Davies), Mozart as film music (Jeongwon Joe on the film Amadeus), and a close look at three different cinematic uses of Grieg's Peer Gynt (Kristi A. Brown). The section "Popular Music and Film" is equally diverse, consisting of six chapters on such topics as the queer and
Yearbook for Traditional Music, 2020
The Opera Quarterly, 2018
Posted on YouTube under the “Film and Animation” category by “Movie Gamers” on March 13, 2017, “A... more Posted on YouTube under the “Film and Animation” category by “Movie Gamers” on March 13, 2017, “All Chandeliers Crashes” [sic] is a chronological montage of the fateful chandelier crash as shown in more than a dozen screen adaptations— including one cartoon—of Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l’Op era. Consisting of low-quality video footage of the relevant film excerpts playing on a television set, the video may be artless but is not without interest. For it effectively underlines that, second perhaps only to the unmasking scene, the deliberate and indeed murderous dropping of the chandelier onto an unsuspecting opera audience is the true pièce de r esistance of the countless screen versions of Leroux’s novel. Not that Leroux does not sufficiently draw attention to the episode in the novel itself. The catastrophic accident is perfectly timed and encapsulates the novel’s ambivalent appeal as an allegory of opera at once uplifting and lurid. It symbolizes the move from the allusiveness of neo-Gothic literature to the graphic literalness of a new, and wholly modern, sensibility, one which the cinema would be supremely well equipped to cultivate. But the chandelier scene also marks another important passage. Whether in novels, plays, or films, performances are often seen as an interruption of or at best a digression from the main line of action. In Le Fantôme de l’Op era and its progeny, it is quite the other way around. Through the episode of the chandelier, it is the inexorable unfolding of the action taking place offstage that interrupts a performance. Recast as cinematic spectacle, moreover, the crash is an unforgettable image of how the screen adaptations of Leroux’s novel have subsumed the representation of opera under a presentational agenda, the spectacle of cinema feeding off, engulfing, and ultimately moving past the reenactment of musical performance per se.
Nochimson/Companion, 2015
Musica Docta, Apr 27, 2014
Musica Docta, Dec 21, 2013
Cheung/A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema, 2015
The Music We Love to Hate, 2004
Representation in Western Music
Musica Docta, Dec 21, 2013
Representation in Western Music
Popular Music and the New Auteur, 2013
Music and Letters, 2008
DAVID HURON’S AMBITIOUS new book is a study in the psychology of expectation delivered in the for... more DAVID HURON’S AMBITIOUS new book is a study in the psychology of expectation delivered in the form of a skilful, seamless amalgam of music theory, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology. It combines painstaking statistical analysis of a large amount of data with speculations regarding the origins and developmentçthe ‘psychogenesis’, to use a term in vogue in the nineteenth centuryçof such common forms of behaviour as anticipating a desired outcome, freezing at a sudden and troubling surprise, or reassessing the significance of a misread stimulus. Throughout the book, data analysis and speculation serve the twofold goal of substantiating a general theory of expectation on the one hand while illuminating fundamental aspects of the listening experience on the other. The speculations are cast pretty much within the net of Darwinian and neoDarwinian thought, behaviourçincluding musical behaviourçbeing understood first and foremost as adaptive (or as a legacy of adaptive strategies). The theory itself is the result of Huron’s own distillation of decades of research, some of it his own, on the psychology of expectation. It is lucidly presented at the beginning of the book and conveniently recapped at the end.The theory is in essence a framework for understanding the encounter with an event in terms of one’s expectation and response. This encounter is described as a five-step process divided into two phases: imagination and tension fall under the rubric ‘pre-outcome’ response; the ‘postoutcome’ response consists of prediction, reaction, and appraisal. The five-step process is dubbed ITPRA, after Imagination^Tension^Prediction^Response^Appraisal (hence the ‘ITPRA theory of expectation’). ITPRA is in essence a plotting of the psychophysiological processes involved in expectation and is especially designed to account, in Huron’s words,‘for the many emotion-related elements of expectation.The [ITPRA] theory attempts to explain how expectations evoke various feeling states, and why these evoked feelings might be biologically useful.’ In this vein, imagination or, in Huron’s somewhat incongruous words, ‘imagination response’ allows one to experience ‘some vicarious pleasure (or displeasure) as though that outcome has already happened’. As such, imagining an outcome, and fearing or cherishing the thought of its consequences, functions as a motivator.Tension prepares one for the imminent event through arousal
Music Analysis, 2010
This article proposes a new understanding of dramatic scoring by revisiting the sequence of the n... more This article proposes a new understanding of dramatic scoring by revisiting the sequence of the notorious first shark attack in the horror film Jaws (1975). The success of the sequence, it is argued, turns on a bold and sophisticated use of preparatory material in the minutes preceding the attack. It is also suggested that, during the attack proper, it is the role of memory and the limits of attention that underpin the viewer-auditor's response to John Williams's famous motive. Drawing on the work of Richard Wollheim on the phenomenology of painting, it is proposed that the spectator ‘hears-in’ the music, and to buttress this central claim various articulations of the notion of ‘hearing-in’ are offered in the course of the discussion. The article ends with a rebuttal of the idea that music is heard unconsciously or subliminally.
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Papers by giorgio biancorosso