Criticality and Film Music

2013

This chapter focuses on the role of music in narrative fi lm. Unlike most other sensory information in a fi lm (i.e., the visual scenes, sound effects, dialog, and text), music is typically directed to the audience and not to the characters in the fi lm. Several examples will familiarize the reader with some of the subtleties of fi lm music phenomena. Two aspects of fi lm music are introduced: congruence, which focuses on purely structural aspects, and association, which focuses on the associative meaning of the music. The nature of and interplay between the emotional experience of the audience (referred to as internal semantics) and the external "reality" of the fi lm (referred to as external semantics) are discussed, and an assessment is made as to where music (in particular, fi lm music) resides with respect to these two domains. Because the two dimensions of structure and association are orthogonal to the internal-external semantic dimensions, they defi ne four quadrants for describing the relation between music (structure and associations) and fi lm narrative's internal and external semantics. Finally, the concept of a working narrative (WN) is introduced as the audience's solution to the task of integrating and making sense out of the two sources of information provided in the fi lm situation: sensory information (including the acoustic information of music) as well as information based on experience including a story grammar. The author's congruenceassociation model with the working narrative construct (CAM-WN) accommodates the multimodal context of fi lm, while giving music its place.

Music Analysis

According to modest constructivism, the spectator's freedom to imaginatively invent the meanings of films is limited to cases where a film is genuinely indeterminate. This essay argues that the relation between standard musical underscoring and a film's story world (or diegesis) is seldom indeterminate in this way. It also argues, however, that the diegetic status of much underscoring can be imaginatively constructed in radically different ways. Thus, modest constructivism is mistaken.

Journal of Film Music, 2010

Visual Communication, 2010

Narrative media music, music used for narrative purposes in multimedia such as film, television or computer games, is becoming one of the largest sources of musical experience in our daily lives. Though typically experienced on an unconscious and unreflected level, this kind of music actively contributes narrative meaning in multimodal interplay with image, speech and sound effects. Often, what we (think we) see is to a large degree determined by what we hear. Using Halliday's (1978) metafunctions of communication as a starting point, two short film scenes (from Jaws and The Secret of My Success) are examined, with a focus on the intermodal relationships of music and image. The examples illustrate how musical and visual expressions combine to form multimodal statements where the whole is certainly different than the sum of the parts.

2017

The way is surveyed in which film music has been traditionally and typically approached by Music Studies, on the one hand, and Film Studies, on the other, highlighting the limitations that can be detected in each field—besides a disciplinary bias in which music is seen more as a music text (a score) rather than an element of the film, there is a ‘separatist conception’ in which music and film are seen as separate entities instead of two interacting elements of the same filmic system. Moreover, the preference for a communications model makes interpretation of meaning more important than the analysis of agency.

Music is a multi-parametric construct that operates at an almost subliminal level to support, highlight, complement, or even negate any other aspect of the cinematic experience. Current trends of film scoring reflect a fading interest in the associative dimensions of music; rather, composers now strive to contribute with a phenomenological score. It is primarily through embodiment, a hardwired process grounded in our physiology and cognition, that music functions phenomenologically within lm. Embodiment mediates signification, enabling the music to guide the audience’s attention toward particular visual events, to shape the perception of segmentation at micro- and macro-levels, to trigger a myriad of bodily states, and ultimately to present a unique perspective on the discourse of characters and cinematic narrative. Although most film-scoring techniques have gradually emerged through the intuitive use of music, interdisciplinary strands of scholarship from embodied cognition can be instrumental to examine these techniques from empirical and theoretical perspectives, and thus shed light on the logic that motivates the interaction between music and other facets of the cinematic experience.

2004

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.

Music Analysis, 2018

What does it mean for film music – subordinated, contingent, ‘unheard’ – to be plucked from its intended context and placed at the forefront of the listener's attention? The tradition of excerpting and arranging movie scores for the concert hall poses this question sharply. While scholarship on ‘cinematic listening’ has picked up in recent years, the specifically music-theoretical issues raised by this repertoire have been largely unaddressed. In this article, I argue that film-as-concert music presents hearing ‘cinematically’ as a valid alternative to structural modes of listening, a form of hearing that subverts both naive formalism and reflexive anti-formalism. Following a discussion of theoretical and interpretative priorities for analysing film-as-concert music, I begin investigation of a subset of the film-as-concert corpus: stand-alone scherzi originating from action set pieces. More than any other type of underscore, action cues answer to dramatic, editorial and visual imperatives rather than to ‘absolute’ logic. My core data emerges from a detailed study of John Williams's film and concert scherzi, with short analyses of cues/pieces from E.T., the Indiana Jones movies and Star Wars. My approach emphasises the way in which formal alterations bring about drastically different ways of hearing the work tonally and expressively across multiple versions. A larger-scale case study of ‘The Asteroid Field’ from The Empire Strikes Back serves to demonstrate the tonal, sectional and narratival transformations that occur between movie theatre and concert hall. To conclude, I propose that the film-as-concert mindset can be transferred to filmgoing itself, as a new mode of cinematic listening.

Springer eBooks, 2023

A cold and grey day in an urban environment, monotony reigns and dictates the mundane lives of the city's inhabitants. A boy wants to express his love for the girl next door. Timidly at first he starts to sing and an orchestral accompaniment slowly rises as the girl joins him in song and they begin to dance. Here the environment changes, the camera begins to 'move along' with the characters and the scenery shifts to vibrant colours. We see the world through the lovers' eyes; we hear their song and feel