Renderings of the Real: Experimental Music, Horror Film, and the Extra-Subjective Spectator

David Abel

 
This paper proposes the contemporary Horror film's appropriation of 'experimental' musical techniques as an exemplary context through which to explicate a new conceptual framework for interpreting post-classical utilisations of music that implicitly challenge dominant film-musical theories. In particular, the notion of non-diegetic music as 'suturing agent' is challenged with specific reference to Slavoj Zizek's description of extra- or trans-subjective states in contemporary cinema, in which the suture process is short-circuited. Reflecting this psychoanalytical model back into adjoining theories, including Elisabeth Weis' work on soundtrack and 'extra-subjectivity,' the paper focuses on particular sonic attributes, including atonality and timbre, describing their importance to what Zizek, through his late-Lacanian framework, describes as a 'rendering of the real.' With examples taken from Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977) and Ken Russell's Altered States (1980), the paper explains how the incorporation of experimental music, (within the larger audio-visual strategies of such directors), challenges the very relationship between sound and image in cinema; reconfiguring our preconceptions surrounding the supposed hierarchy of cinematic imperatives within contemporary cinema as a result, and demanding renewed acknowledgement of the spectator's libidinal investment in the cinematic experience.

 

 

Music and Memory in TV adverts: music as a condition stimulus in first and second-order conditioning
Margarita Alexomanolaki, Catherine Loveday, Chris Kennett

      
Music may play several roles and have many effects in advertising. Results of previous studies (Alexomanolaki, Loveday & Kennett 2007) indicate that music is effective in facilitating both implicit learning and retrieval of the commercial information.

In this experiment the strength of implicit retrieval for music and commercial-features association will be tested. It is hypothesized that music that is familiar - from an advertising spot - would not be easily associated with another commercial for a different product or brand. The aforementioned leads us to the hypothesis that, after a certain time period, a decayed association of music, could generate a 'new' music, ready to use and re-associate with new commercials.

For the test, 5 current advertising videos of drinks are used without their original audio, but with two new audio versions - one familiar and one non-familiar - both used in TV commercials before, on different products. Results indicate that in the case of unfamiliar music participants have more flexible options in associating it with various products and storyboards of commercials, while, when music is familiar, this restricts their options due to their consideration of the associations already established. The above results supported the hypothesis, indicating also that music is effective in creating associations with visual elements of the advert and not the product as such.

 

 

Rhythmic expansion, process based structure, visual polyphony: an exploration of musically sourced approaches toward composition in moving image
Rees Archibald

 

This study will present a variety of musically sourced compositional approaches to work in moving image focussing primarily on the author's use of polyrhythm and process based structures within a digital video context.
 
Although trained as an instrumental musician, since 2000 the author has been working almost exclusively in digital moving image, producing work with and without a sonic element. This body of work is informed by three distinct strands of music based research, an examination of which will form the main body of the presentation;
 
i. Research conducted in Japan as a shakuhachi student (Japanese Zen bamboo flute) investigating relationships between mind, body and consciousness in performance, Japanese Buddhist practice, and states of 'pure experience' prior to the establishment of subject-object distinctions.
 
ii. The compositional use of polyrhythmic structures in moving image through conceiving of frames or groups of video frames as rhythmic units.
 
iii. The use of process based compositional structures.
 
As part of the paper the author will present specific examples of original work, before concluding with a critical evaluation in terms of compositional aims and intentions and a discussion of future work in moving image.

 

 

Georges Auric's music in the films of Jean Cocteau: the musical element which will permit the film to soar

Ruth Austin

 

Cocteau notes in the diary he kept whilst making his film La Belle et la Bête (1946) that he had no interest in hearing Auric's music for the film whilst it was still being composed; he trusted his long-time collaborator to add the 'musical element which will permit the film to soar'. 

 

Their association dates back to Les Six, the group of composers of which Auric was a member and Cocteau their champion.  When Cocteau turned his hand to filmmaking, with his debut Le Sang d'un poète (1930) he would ask Auric to provide the music.  Whilst Auric would go on to be one of the most successful film music composers from France (providing music for several Ealing Comedies as well as working in Hollywood) he would also continue his collaboration with Cocteau.

 

Cocteau and Auric both recorded in autobiographical writings their working relationship and this paper will explore the way in which musical theory could be put into practice through the collaboration between Cocteau and Auric and in turn between film and music. 

 

 

Just like being there? A typology of representational practices common to concert films

Michael Baker

 

This paper offers a typology of representational practices common to concert films in an effort to more accurately describe and analyze the evolving relationship between the visual and audio dimensions of these nonfiction films. I will argue there are two key phases in the evolution of concert films.

The first phase, announced with their inception, is a structure based upon the access to images and sounds these documentaries offered viewers. That the camera could move fluidly from the perspective of the audience to the backstage space only confirmed their appeal and assured the sustainability of the subgenre as musical spectacle - if not artful cinema or historically significant records of live musical performance.

The second phase of this evolution is the initiation of the project of replicating the experience of hearing the music within the space of the event. With ever-evolving sound reproduction technologies, concert filmmakers strive not to merely document the event but to play an active part in shaping the production to ensure its sonic reproducibility in theatres and at home, often at the expense of other formal innovation.

 

Between the Silents and the Talkies. Music versus Dialogue and Sound Effect in Early Sound Film

Markus Bandur

 

In the screening of the silents up to 1930, live music was the dominant acoustic feature in comparison with sound effects and spoken dialogues or commentaries.

In the early years of sound film around 1930 the situation changed in reaction to the new possibilities of 'depicting' reality in an integral way: on the one hand, the film's soundtrack was mainly based on dialogues and sound effects, and it avoided extra-diegetic or off-screen film music at all (e. g. Fritz Lang's M). On the other hand, in these early stages of the Talkies, film music was often on-screen music and as such connected with filmed people singing, dancing and playing instruments. In short: the sound film's realistic tendencies led initially to a disappearance of off-screen film music.

Off-screen film music became subsequently integrated into the soundtrack, but this music now had to share its place with dialogues and sound effects and, at the same time, had to take over new - psychological - functions.

This paper explores how these shifts in the acoustical hierarchy of silents and talkies was reflected in film music theory as well as in the aesthetics of cinema as realistic or formalistic art.

 

 

Post-modernism as Romantic epiphany: the Bachian intertext in film scoring

Jeremy Barham

 

In the cinema of the last half century Brown and Gorbman identify as ‘post-modern’ the self-conscious deployment of music which disturbs illusions and hierarchies intrinsic to traditional aesthetic experiences of the medium. The music of JS Bach has been used diegetically and non-diegetically in a large number and range of films, predominantly, and problematically, as signifier of the sublime, and most notably in the works of Bergman. By examining levels of intertextual reference to Bach’s music in two science fiction film scores from the early 1970s—THX 1138 (George Lucas, 1970) and Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)—this paper suggests that, despite efforts to ‘de-familiarize’ musical content in the latter example, far from resisting the ‘grand narratives’ of the Enlightenment project so inimical to the so-called ‘post-modern’ condition, these forms of quotation instead reinforce contextualizing clichés of the ‘alien’ and the ‘Other’, which have since become central narratives in this cinematic sub-genre, and at the same time evoke past glories of the 19th-century Bach revival. In a category of film which addresses putative futures it is thus (unintentionally) ironic that such intertextual musical practice may reveal a ‘post-modernism’ which amounts to little more than a re-configured form of romantic yearning.    

 

 

The operatic climax in Italian melodrama

Louis Bayman

 

 

Melodramatic climax in Italian cinema is fundamentally influenced by opera. In Italian melodramma is synonymous with opera, and this goes beyond simply musical properties. My research considers how non-musical notions of lyricism and dramatic staging are integral to the 'musicality' of melodramatic form.
Gesture and mise-en-scène are considered crucial in producing a hysterical text that is more emotionally expressive than linguistic articulation in melodrama. However Italian cinema challenges this model of melodramatic excess, relying more on the emotional expressivity of the operatic interaction of sound and image.

 

Through looking at climactic, unsung, vocal delivery in La cieca di Sorrento (1934 version), its more complex integration into a full 'duet' in I figli di nessuno, and its complication in Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960), I show that Italian melodrama cinematically translates an operatic sense of climax. This heightens emotionality through staginess punctuated by vocal outbursts that, while not sung, resemble arias.

Thus my notion of the operatic sensibility aims to develop melodrama theory through reference to the interchange between genre cinema and other cultural forms.

 

Audio-Interactive Counterpoint

Axel Berndt and Knut Hartmann

 

The combination of music with different media enables new forms of expression and develops new musical functions. Its classical narrative functions from theatre and opera have been rediscovered and expanded in film scoring (e.g., by audio-visually contrapuntal functions). This potential is almost unexploited for interactive media music which opens up a multitude of new possibilities of expression beyond the narrative functions known from film music.

 

We will show that interactive media music does not have to be that duplicating banal entertaining background accompaniment, it mostly is, deemed to be needlessly redundant. It can perform the same essential functions film music does, and, beyond this, take a stand on the user himself. A musical comment does not just refer to an actor but to the player himself! This opens up the opportunity to reach him in a more personalised and intimate way than ever.

 

We intend to close the gap between music in static linear and non-linear interactive media. We will give a brief overview on music perception, detail the historical development of media music, especially interactive media music, elaborate and exemplify its functions in order to widen the scope of the field where music meets interactivity.

 

 

 Prescience as decadence: Tristan in Visconti's Ludwig

Giorgio Biancorosso

 

Wagner’s Tristan looms large over Visconti’s Ludwig as both a historical event that touches on the characters’ lives and a symbolic, oblique presence in the narration. Though references to it abound, it is never seen performed on screen, however. Visconti chose instead to use nondiegetically an excerpt of the Liebesnacht, arranged for instruments only. The status of this music, heard several times, is far from clear. Is it an instance of classical music, with its attendant baggage of cultural and historical associations, used as background scoring? What is its relationship with the other Wagner excerpts in the soundtrack, the rich tapestry of solo piano works by Schumann, and the Siegfried idyll performed diegetically as a birthday gift to Cosima? Is the sound of Tristan meant to represent someone’s memories, perhaps Ludwig’s own, of a performance? Or is it an objective record of the history of the opera moving in parallel with, not in relation to, the images of Ludwig’s life and possibly out of place with respect to them both temporally and spatially? If so, finally, could such record be of a performance occurred well after Ludwig’s life, rather like a testimony of the continuing presence of Tristan not only in our canon but also cultural imagination? At the core of this web of questions, as this essay will attempt to show, is the tragic interdependence of the King’s prescient, and in hindsight triumphant, championing of Wagner and his disastrous management of the kingdom. To retrace Tristan’s steps in Ludwig, then, is to revisiting Visconti’s most ambitious meditation on the relationship between the illusory power of art, the all-too-real power of politics, and the uncanny ways of posthumous fame and reputation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

See you in Walhalla: Audiovisual composition & game choreography

Johannes Birringer

 

The live computer game performance See you in Walhalla was developed over a period of 12 months in a cooperative EU-Culture 2000 project (i-Map: Integration of Media Art and Performance), linking Interaktionslabor Göttelborn with amorphy.org (Athens, Greece), Interspace Media Arts Center (Sofia, Bulgaria) and deWaag (Amsterdam, The Netherlands). The integrated sensor, 3D image, performance, sound and network designs were tested during last year's summer laboratory in Göttelborn, and the new work premiered in Athens on 13-14. September, 2006. This proposal suggests a brief film presentation (excerpts) from the Performance followed by an investigation of the compositional principles for the real-time processing of the interaction between live avatar, remote avatars and the game landscapes which were filmed in four European cities and recomposited for a specific sensor choreography (the main avatar-performer controls all the image movements of the game environments wearing 14 sensors).  The presentation will then address audio concepts and strategies for interactive sound and navigable music, asking why computer gaming has become an important and innovative environment for music creation and 3DVR. Particular attention will be given to the content of such a live game, i.e. to the embodied performance and its exploration  of the aesthetics and cultural environments often associated with computer gaming (interaction, youth culture, competitiveness, expertise, navigation, maps, puzzles, simulations, networks etc...).

 

 

Music, space and time in Sally Potter's Yes

Virginia Bonner and Chris Arrell

 

Created in direct response to the 9/11 attacks, Sally Potter's Yes (UK, 2004) seeks to humanize perceived enemies by comparing East and West, male and female, communist and capitalist, Muslim and Christian. Yet through its vertiginous camerawork, verse dialogue, and especially its music, Yes stresses the interconnectedness of these diverse themes. The soundtrack embodies the film's fluidity and global reach via its eclectic musical range. Diverse folk and popular styles - traditional Cuban and Armenian music, Philip Glass's Brazilian collaborations, B.B. King's American blues - engage with traditional pieces of the Western canon by Chopin, Satie, Rachmaninov, and Brahms, and with contemporary compositions by Potter herself. While these various musical traditions reflect stylistic differences of Eastern/Western nationality, of course, they also more subtly express various states of time. Our paper considers how the music of Yes destabilizes the film's sense of space - geographic and personal - and time - past, present, and future.

 

 

Radiofreccia a new direction for Italian film music?

Elena Boschi

 

Italian film music still constitutes a relatively unexplored world, especially by the English-speaking academy. There are few noteworthy exceptions, yet none of them respond to the growing use of popular songs which has entered the film music practices of contemporary Italian cinema. Radiofreccia (1998) represents a fascinating example of a new wave of films featuring prominent rock soundtracks which envelop the spectator in the world of the protagonists and, in this particular case, of director Luciano Ligabue who, after several years spent in the limelight of the Italian rock scene, decided to put his book Fuori e dentro il borgo (1997) on the silver screen. The soundtrack has a special place in the film and the large use of English-language songs in a non-English-language film where music plays a crucial - and undoubtedly audible - role poses several challenging questions regarding the negotiation of the protagonists' cultural identity. I shall examine the way the soundtrack is carefully woven in the narrative, reflecting on the broader questions of cultural identity which inevitably arise. Radiofreccia is not the first Italian film featuring a rock soundtrack. Nonetheless, it treads new film music paths for contemporary Italian cinema.           
 

 

Strong, Silent Types: Music and Swashbuckling in Early Feature Films
Peter Broadwell

 

Technological advances in sound synchronization have strongly influenced the development of new approaches to the task of complementing screen action with music. An especially suitable historical moment for studying this influence is the period that witnessed the introduction of mechanically synchronized soundtracks for feature films. Comparing two film scores from 1926 - Mortimer Wilson's original music for Douglas Fairbanks' silent swashbuckler The Black Pirate and the William Axt/David Mendoza score for Don Juan, the first film with a soundtrack entirely synchronized via the Vitaphone system - reveals that the advent of mechanical synchronization produced marked changes in the musical details of cinematic action accompaniments, yet little alteration of the music's overall role within such scenes.

 

The music accompanying action sequences in both films serves to establish their emotional tone, to 'sell' the flamboyant clashes on screen via equally exaggerated musical gestures and to punctuate key moments either in place of or in addition to non-musical sound effects. In general, though, a live accompaniment to an action scene, as in The Black Pirate, is more likely to delineate the large-scale progression of events, while the musical gestures of Don Juan's mechanically synchronized soundtrack tend more strongly toward succinct, immediate foreshadowing, reaction and commentary.

 

 

Enchanting cinema: sound practice in the nickelodeon, 1905-1908
James Buhler

 

As many scholars have noted, the nickelodeon programme oscillated between mechanically reproduced film and live performance.  For these scholars, this oscillation is evidence of the heterogeneity of nickelodeon exhibition practice.  My paper argues on the contrary that this oscillation does not preclude the coherence of a cultural form organizing the exhibition practice.  In particular I contend that the nickelodeon programme addressed in sublated form the anxieties created by the division of the senses, especially seeing and hearing, characteristic of the modern world: on the screen, individuals, cut off from the community of the audience, struggle to communicate in the absence of the voice, an absence that figures subjective isolation, an inability to communicate in the modern world; in the theatre, the live performance of the illustrated song leads the audience to discover its communal voice in song. The division of sight from sound is staged only to be overcome in a display of human presence.  If film presents the world in a mechanical, purely disenchanted state, the world reduced to the sense of vision, the final chorus of the illustrated song offered a script for reintegrating the senses - but also the individual - into a living, communal body.

 

 

From Disjunction to Discordance
Serge Cardinal

It is the technical synchronisation of sound and image that makes possible the aesthetical disjunction between the visible and the audible. Many filmmakers explore in detail this paradox. They explore every possible figurative opposition or material difference between sound and image. These disjunctions try to change our knowledge or experience of history, of subjectivity, of space, and of time, etc. Our paper intends to demonstrate that these disjunctions between the image and the sound can create a new and vital space-time only at the price of a discordant cut between an actual perception and a past memory. That is how we will analyse a famous sequence of The Passenger (M. Antonioni, 1975): if a disjunction between sound and image can be part of a substitution of identity, it has to be more fundamentally a discordant absorption of a foreign audible past by an actual meditative seeing. In other words, the disjunction between sound and image has to produce a discordant and unattached employment of the senses, the imagination, the memory and, ultimately, the thinking processes.

 

 

Non-Traditional Sound Design: A Model for Analysis
Juan Chattah

 

 

Most soundtracks of today's films aim for a discrimination of sound elements, orchestrating a harmonious balance between music, sound effects, and dialogue. A typical approach is described by award-winning sound designer/sound mixer Tom Fleischman: 'Everything is balanced against the dialogue...the dialogue is the key because that's where the information is...the music is the last thing that goes in.' A small number of films, however, have achieved a higher degree of interaction between music, sound effects, and dialogue, breaking free from standard formulas while creating dramatic and rhetorically intelligible soundtracks. How can we describe, categorize, and analyze innovative sound design practices?

In this paper, I develop a two-dimensional taxonomic structure that traces the constituent elements of a film soundtrack as lying either inside or outside the diegesis. Then, I propose three techniques (overlap, replacement, and transference) that operate among categories. Analysis of the music/sound effects/dialogue interaction according to the techniques of overlap, replacement, and transference, helps reveal hidden narrative processes at work. As a result, the proposed model provides a taxonomical shell through which we can describe, categorize, and therefore more deeply understand, the various ways a film soundtrack navigates the sonic and narrative spheres while creating meaning in non-traditional ways.

 

 

The Usefulness of Lies: the Music in Dennis Potter's Singing Detective (1986)

Geoffrey Chew

 

[Abstract to follow]

 

 

John, Yoko, and Mike Douglas:  Performing High Art and Radical Politics on American Television in the 1970s

Norma Coates

One of the odder occurrences on an American syndicated afternoon talk show before the tabloid era was the week in February 1972 when John Lennon and Yoko Ono co-hosted the highly-rated Mike Douglas Show.  Lennon and Ono were deeply into radical politics at the time, using their celebrity to advance their causes and viewpoints in the press and on television via talk show appearances.

The Mike Douglas Show, while very popular with what media scholar Victoria E. Johnson terms the heartland audience, did not shy away from presenting a range of popular music artists, including rock musicians and groups, on the programme. Nor did Douglas shy away from controversial guests.  In this paper, I argue that the most controversial guest of the week was not radical Jerry Rubin nor Black Panther Bobby Seale, but Yoko Ono.  I discuss how Ono's overt feminism, her musical collaborations with Lennon, and her attempts to involve the in-studio and at-home audiences in several conceptual art pieces transgressed the generic conventions of talk show and complicated Douglas' attempts to control and mediate the discourse on the programme.

 

 

Midnight, with the Stars and You: Musical Telepathy, Cinematic Irony, and The Shining

David Code

 

Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) has long been seen as a 'parodic' horror film, whose metageneric reflexivity serves a symbolic confrontation with American post-war history. Critical analysis of the film's score, with its excerpts from Bartók, Ligeti and Penderecki and its cunning selection of dancehall songs, unearths a deeper level of reflexivity, in The Shining, about the communicative systems in the cinematic art form itself. After toying, initially, with the diegetic/extra-diegetic distinction, Kubrick activates a 'middle realm' of music(s) to underscore the extrasensory 'shining' of the title. A glance to the composer's own remarks discovers just how aptly Ligeti's Lontano underscores key episodes of Danny's telepathy. But Kubrick's last use of Lontano, for a zoom onto the face of Jack Torrance, is more puzzling. Given the notorious inaccessibility of Jack's 'inner life,' this excerpt arguably invites us viewers to 'shine', and remember in advance the twin 'portraits' of Jack that close this temporal maze of a film: one frozen in the late-1970s hedge maze; the other, in a 1921 photograph, accompanied by a song whose suggestive lyrics - 'Midnight, with the Stars and You' - set the seal to this ironic take on cinematic illusions.

 

 

Billboard in sound: Errol Flynn and the music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Catherine Cooper

 

[Abstract to follow]

 

 

Cider Makers: an exploration of the relationship between sound and image within documentary filmmaking

Geoffrey Cox and Keith Marley 

 

This presentation consists of a ten minute contextualisation by Marley and Cox of their aesthetics and working methods drawn on in Cider Makers, a short film which will be shown following this introduction. Its central purpose is to attempt to make apparent the capabilities of the soundtrack as a powerful tool of signification within the field of what may be termed visual ethnography.

 

It could be argued that the relationship between sound and image in documentary film is stratified, in the sense that sound is often treated in such a way that it becomes subordinate to image. Cider Makers attempts to redress this imbalance through the creative treatment of diegetic sound. In doing so connections are made between the morphologies of different sounds, linked only by their role as signifiers in the film. In order to allow the viewer to concentrate more on the audio elements of the documentary, non-narrative montage editing is used in Cider Makers and is also structured so as to dislocate the viewer from a traditional mode of viewing, where the audience often searches for a cause and effect narrative. The process, or way of working, between image-maker and sound composer, and the importance of their combined efforts to encourage a specific way of experiencing the text, will also be discussed.
     

 

The changing sounds of war: television news music and the wars in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf

James Deaville

 

It was during the mid-1970s that local and national television news broadcasts across the United States started using musical elements at various points in a newscast.  These news-music practices exploited music’s capacity not only to provide structure for newscasts but also to function as the “ultimate hidden persuader,” which may brand a particular news program or – more perniciously – sell that broadcast’s take on the news.

 

A comparison of network coverage of the War in Vietnam (the American invasion of Cambodia in March-April of 1970) and the Persian Gulf War (the beginning of Desert Storm in January of 1991) reveals how far television news music had developed in the space of twenty years: music had become an essential component in the representation of armed conflict.  Through the sonic and visual elements in newscast items about the Vietnam War, the general absence of music realistically conveyed the horrors of combat into living rooms of Americans.  In comparison, the slick production elements for newscasts of the Persian Gulf War, especially music, not only sanitized the hostilities but also helped to build a consensus in favour of the conflict.

 

Music video and the construction of Icelandic National identity
Nicola Dibben

 

The pop artist, Björk, has claimed an explicit nationalist agenda for her album Homogenic (1997) and the associated music video, Jóga (dir. Michel Gondry 1997).  This paper uncovers the basis of this claim, and in doing so questions the status of this nationalistic representation.

 

Close analysis of music, visuals and interview material, reveals that the track Jóga is influenced by early twentieth-century Icelandic nationalist orchestral compositions and landscape paintings and their articulation of Iceland's nationalist landscape ideology. Perhaps the most significant of Iceland's landscapes in nationalist art forms is Thingvellir - both literally and metaphorically Iceland's geological and political 'heart'.  The analysis reveals the way this landscape is directly referenced both through the visuals of the video and through innovative treatment and spatialisation of the musical components of the track.  Furthermore, visual and sonic dimensions work together to articulate the identity between the persona Björk, the Icelandic landscape, and the nation of Iceland.

 

The paper contextualises this example of Björk's work within other representations of national identity in contemporary Icelandic film, visual art and music, and ends by revealing the conflicted character of Björk's artistic output in the context of ideas of national identity.

 

Movement-Image in postwar Japanese film: Woman in the Dunes (1964)

Yayoi Everett
 
Tôru Takemitsu's provocative score for Woman in the Dunes, produced by Toshirô Teshigahara in 1964, provides a powerful commentary on the psychological development of the protagonist. Feeling alienated by the urban landscape of Tokyo, entymologist Jumpei Niki seeks solace in a rural village by the sea while hunting exotic insects. The hunter soon becomes the one hunted, as Jumpei is trapped underneath a sand hill in a hut owned by a village woman - sand representing a destructive force as well as a means for survival for the villagers. This paper applies Gilles Deleuze's concept of movement-image to analyze filmic montage and sound diegesis in scenes that demarcate the narrative development. The notions of perception-image (a long shot in which perception relates movement to 'bodies'), action-image (a medium shot in which action relates movement to 'acts'), and affection-image (a close-up shot in which the image relates movement to 'quality' of lived states) provide a framework for discussing Teshigahara's manipulation of the visual parameter. In addition, I draw on Takemitsu's concept of 'negative space' to explain his treatment of sound and silence.

 

Meaning from Repetition: the Employment of the Ostinato in Science-Fiction Filmscores

Elizabeth Fairweather

 

Musical representation within a filmscore involves the use of musical elements that are perceived as emotionally meaningful by the viewer. This is a subjective phenomenon. It is difficult for a composer to invoke certain compositional procedures and be sure that they will create the intended effect. It is possible however, to build upon the cultural implications inherent within the audience's powers of autosuggestion by using certain sound events and compositional characteristics already established in Western culture. This paper will focus on the ostinato and its use in several different filmscores including Metropolis (1927), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Solaris (2000). It will define the generic possibilities of the ostinato, investigating how a repetitive pattern serves to propel the narrative using musical elements that often preclude melodic and harmonic development and draw instead upon colouristic and rhythmic variation. Given that composers often need to establish a mood or emotion quickly, the paper will examine the contribution of the ostinato to the creation of atmosphere within the narrative and will draw preliminary conclusions as to its overall use within the genre of the science-fiction film.

  

Synchresis and the construction of female subjectivity: a new score for Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart

Ian Gardiner

 

Joseph Cornell's 1936 film Rose Hobart is an important work in experimental cinema, anticipating the 'found footage' filmmakers of the 60s and 70s, and the work of recent mash-up video artists. As probably the first montage movie, it reassembles shots from the 1931 jungle melodrama East of Borneo into a mysterious, enigmatic portrait of the film's principal actor, Rose Hobart herself. In his own presentations Cornell shuffled 'found recordings' of Brazilian dance music in surreal synchronisation, but in 2006 I created a new orchestral accompaniment using a compositional analogue to Cornell's own montage techniques. The construction and orchestration of this score plays with Michel Chion's notion of synchresis - 'the forging of an immediate and necessary relationship between something one sees and something one hears at the same time.' As most of the film focuses on Hobart's reaction shots, making her anxiety and apprehension the focus of the camera's 'gaze', the paper (and score) addresses issues of gender and exoticism that Cornell's montage technique reveals, and the ways in which traditional film scoring practices, in alliance with camerawork and shot construction, have constructed female subjectivity.

 

 

A Parting of the Ways? Creating (Hollywood) Cartoon Music

Daniel Goldmark

While all cartoon studios of the early 1930s had markedly different scoring styles, the release of Disney's first feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), inaugurated a new realm of possibilities for cartoon composers writing in a long form, like their colleagues in the live-action field. Yet the music in Snow White is far from revolutionary; in fact, it is strictly the norm for musical features of the 1930s. The first several Disney features, from Snow White to Bambi (1942), as well as the two Fleischer features, Gulliver's Travels (1939) and Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941), struggled to meld the atmospheric underscoring of live-action features, the song-and-dance numbers common in musical films, and the close synchronization practices prevalent in animated short films of the 1930s. How the two forms, music for short cartoons and music for animated features, developed in polarized directions while being produced side-by-side is the focus of this paper.

 

 

Opera and the operatic cartoon

Michal Grover Friedlander

 

My paper develops a fantasy about the operatic voice that is expressed by way of an “operatic cartoon”, Disney’s The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met (1946).

In it a whale dreams of becoming a famous opera singer. The whale possesses an infinitely variable voice, an ability to reproduce all potential operatic voices. The animal, however, is killed by an opera impresario who does not believe his ears, and is convinced that the whale has swallowed three opera singers. At the end the whale ascends to heaven and is there, still, singing in a hundred voices.

The cartoon, I want to argue, spins a fantasy about the peculiar mode of embodiment of the operatic voice. The power of the operatic voice, its more than human quality, is represented by the sense that there must be more than one such voice that inheres in the singing body. The image is one of an entity that resides in a body. The possibility of imagining that multiple incorporation is itself dependent on the nature of the body of cartoon figures, their infinite plasticity, malleability, their fragmentable yet utterly resistant body, manifest in their withstanding any attempted annihilation (the whale continues to sing in heaven). Indeed, I want to argue, there exists an analogy between the immortality of a cartoon character and a sense of immortality pertaining to the operatic voice.

 

 

Hating Julia Roberts: singing and silence in My Best Friend's Wedding (1997)

Janet K Halfyard

 

Julia Roberts has built her career on her image as a lovable American Everywoman, characterized by her trademark smile. It came as quite a surprise to the makers of My Best Friend's Wedding when the test audiences actively disliked Julianne, the character she played, resulting in more than one change of ending, and the addition of a scene in order to let the character redeem herself in the audience's eyes.

This paper examines the reasons why Julianne is such a problematic character, focusing in particular on the fact that she is the only major character who does not sing at any point in the course of the film. This leads to the question of how we read the singing by other characters such that it makes them appear more sympathetic. Drawing on ideas of sincerity and authenticity, I examine the choices of song, the circumstances that give rise to singing, and what singing tells us both about the characters who sing and those who choose not to sing.

 

 

"There isn't any other song": Music, Monroe and female agency in Niagara

Catherine Haworth

 

Niagara (d. Henry Hathaway, 1953) opens with two young honeymooners, Polly and Bud Cutler, arriving at their Niagara Falls holiday cabin and being introduced to the charming Rose Loomis (Marilyn Monroe) and her husband George.  After Polly stumbles across Rose in the arms of another man, she realises that all is not as it seems in the couple's relationship and Rose's plot to get rid of George for good gradually becomes clear.

The presentation of Rose's adulterous relationship is constructed around the song 'Kiss', written for the film by Lionel Newman with lyrics by Haven Gillespie. This paper will examine the particular role played by 'Kiss' in both creating and containing the agency of female characters, especially Monroe's, in Niagara. The song becomes tied inextricably not only to Rose's duplicity and desirability in this particular narrative, but also to Monroe's carefully constructed sexuality, image and off-screen persona at this stage in her career. However, 'Kiss' also comes to symbolise Rose's downfall towards the end of the film, and its dual use as an accompaniment for some of Polly's scenes can perhaps be read as an aural expression of the difficulties faced by this character in getting anyone to take her suspicions seriously.

 

 

A Sense of the Past: Film Music and the Implicit Imperfect

Guido Heldt

 

That music can wander easily between a film's diegesis and extradiegetic space is exploited in the musical strategies of countless films. But how exactly such shifts of position in the narrative construction of a film happen is crucial for the way they can be understood.

Music that first occurs diegetically and is then taken up by the narration is the most common, seemingly most 'natural' case, leaving intact the fiction of a pre-filmic reality observed and (re)presented by the filmic narration. The shift from extradiegetic to diegetic music is hardly less common, but has more radical consequences for the understanding of narrative perspective.

Examples from Far from Heaven and Breakfast at Tiffany's will show how music introduced as extradiegetic and then 'revealed' to have a diegetic source connected to key plot points can implicitly set a whole film narrative in the past tense. The way this is done in Far from Heaven furthermore makes the central female character the implicit source of the past-tense narration. But Breakfast at Tiffany's also shows the limits of this interpretation and the merits of competing (or additional) ways of understanding the technique.

 

 

Wind in "That Blasted Pipe Organ": Nascent Film Noir and the Wavering Sound
Roger Hickman

 

An unnatural wavering sound had been a musical cliché in film noir for over a decade when, in the 1950 classic Sunset Blvd, a source for the sound is finally identified by Norma Desmond: 'The wind gets in that blasted pipe organ'. This tongue-in-cheek explanation acknowledges noir's frequent use of wavering sounds, often in combination with other unusual musical sounds and distorted visual images, to represent danger, dementia, unconscious states, the supernatural, gothic mansions, and the unknown.

An examination of several key films in the formative years of film noir (1940-1943) will illustrate the variety of roles this combination of sound, music, and image plays in the American films. Several classic features from 1940 establish the trend: Rebecca, Stranger on the Third Floor, They Drive By Night, and The Letter. Within the next three years, a number of major films continue to employ this disturbing aural and visual combination, including Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). These early examples establish a sound that will be exploited fully when film noir enters its classic age in 1944.

 

 

The Ipod Score?  Eclecticism in Recent Auteur Soundtracks
Julie Hubbert

Since the late 1980s, the compilation soundtrack has become increasingly stylistically porous.  Its range, traditionally limited to popular music, has been expanded to include music from a variety of genres and styles.  Excerpts of Bach have been mixed with David Bowie and television music from the 1970s, Rameau mixed with Bow Wow, Bollywood musicals mixed with jazz.   This stylistic diversity has also been displayed fluidly in a variety of cinematic spaces - foreground, background, frame and film proper.  By examining the soundtracks to two films in particular - Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006), this paper will examine the stylistic and spatial eclecticism of recent auteur soundtracks.  It will consider the extent to which the stylistic pluralism of post-Batman scoring model and emerging digital technologies have, in the post-MTV landscape, made this new eclecticism possible.

 

 

AUDITORIUM: tracing a drama of spatial plays of light and sound
Ed Hughes

 

AUDITORIUM is a new film by visual artist Sophy Rickett with music by composer Ed Hughes. The first presentation of the film will be at Glyndebourne Opera House in November 2007 with live orchestra and electro-acoustic sounds. The new opera house, designed by Michael Hopkins and Partners, and opened in 1994, is a modernist landmark set in rural Sussex. The film and sound track play on the associations of the opera house with lyric opera, and also upon the house's hidden mechanisms.

 

This practitioner-centred paper will explore the process of collaboration between two artists with very different backgrounds and trainings. It will chart their journey towards a film language which aims to cohere the complex relationship between moving imagery, music and sound design in a partly abstract and experimental exercise.  The ambivalence generated by the 'live' on-stage orchestra and the 'virtual' orchestras (pre-recorded as part of the spatialised soundtrack) will also be explored.

 

 

New voice, new body: female playback singer in early South Indian cinema
Kiranmayi Indraganti

 

My interest is in looking at the tradition of playback singing and the place of women playback singers in Indian cinema, and the link between the actress and the singer.

Historically, playback singing has emerged out of a practice of pre-recording the song, originally sung by the same actor or actress and 'played back' at the time of its shooting. In a modern context, the actresses no longer sing the songs - they appear to sing for the camera's frame but, in the background, technically perfect singers sing them. This is the only place where one finds women in an indispensable position in the image-making process.

My fascination is with this rare position within an historical context of early sound technology, and the way women singers have forged a new identity with the actresses.

I shall be looking at Jikki and Rao Balasaraswati Devi, two of the early popular South Indian playback singers, to present my argument.

  

 

Some Futures for Studying Sound, Music, and the Moving Image

Anahid Kassabian

 

The study of sound, music, and the moving image is finally becoming a mature field. The publication of a number of books, the development of smaller areas of specialization, the founding of journals, the establishment of regular and occasional conferences and more indicate that we are slowly passing into a new phase, and this moment ought to be one of self-reflection.

 

In this talk, I will consider some of the glaring absences—unstudied areas and theoretical and methodological orthodoxies—and some possible future avenues for the study of sound, music, and the moving image.

 

Moonlight Sonata (1936) behind the scenes
Alicja Knast

 

Openness to new experiences and novelty led Ignace Jan Paderewski (1860-1941), Polish pianist, composer and statesman, to adventurous albeit risky enterprises throughout his life. To become a movie star, whose acting and playing piano at the age of 75 touched so many, was a natural consequence of his attitude towards life. His inspirational personality resulted in a film scenario, in which Paderewski plays himself and eventually brings to producers Pall Mall Ltd. a satisfactory financial outcome. For the contemporary research concerning piano performance Moonlight Sonata, directed by Lothar Mendes, is a unique and at the same time invaluable account for piano technique, stage appearance and musical life in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century.

 

The paper follows Paderewski's campaign for better musical quality of the performance in the soundtrack and his struggle with the disadvantages of the technology in the film industry at the time. The documentation held by New Records Archive (Archiwum Akt Nowych) in Warsaw reveals the importance of instrument quality for Paderewski and also shows his internal fight between advanced age and the desired artistic level of his performance. As it appears in available records, decisions about musical content in the movie were made mainly by Paderewski but without support on the side of the producers. The widely criticized lack of coherence between the images  and the movie's soundtrack is explained in light of Paderewski's involvement in the piano trade and manufacturing and its artistic management.

 

 

Beastly and Sublime: Jonathan Glazer's Musical Approach to Film
Danijela Kulezic-Wilson
      
      
The notion of film as a medium that has the potential of being musical - with or without music in it - is not only a manifestation of a certain aesthetic or ideological attitude but also has a profound effect on the way film is conceived and created, influencing the approach to many aspects of film structure, including the employment of music. The unusual musical flare with which Jonathan Glazer executed his films Sexy Beast and Birth - the insistence on repetition and rhythmic patterning in the dialogue and editing in Sexy Beast, the fluent Steadicam shots in Birth and the imaginative merging of musical and visual kinetic properties into bold examples of audio-visual synthesis - demonstrate an approach to film which rejects the mainstream notion of film as a 'visual' medium and the ideological baggage attached to it. 

 

My paper relates Glazer's work to examples of similar practice elsewhere, and ultimately asks the question whether the musical approach to film, which has been increasingly embraced by the younger generation of European and American independent directors, is becoming a force that has the potential to change deeply ingrained bad habits of the industry, particularly those affecting the employment of music in film.
      
      
      

Pirates of the Mediterranean: Audiovisual bricollage in Moroccan Music video

Tony Langlois

 

Morocco enjoys a thriving music video industry, involving the production of thousands of low-budget VCD disks, mostly for sale in street markets for home entertainment. Musicians rarely benefit directly from videos, which serve a primarily promotional purpose. 

 

Because this 'street market' level of production and distribution is largely unregulated, some video makers have taken liberties with material available on satellite television and feature films from around the world. Consequently, scenes from western pop videos or dance scenes from Hindi films, may be 'ripped' and re-edited to synchronise with the rhythms and structures of local musics. These composite videos are of novelty value rather than an ironic critique, nevertheless the resulting audio-visual juxtaposition is comparable to that of contemporary VJ's in the west.

 

This paper considers the social context which allows such unregulated use of audio-visual media. It examines predominant aesthetic relationships between sound and vision of local material, by explaining the key links between weddings, music and video. In discussing the appropriation of global visual material and it's adaptation to local music it will suggest that such cultural interactions are the norm, not only in Morocco but internationally, in contradiction of theoretical and popular discourses about hegemony.

 

 

Film Scores and Nation Building in Post-Apartheid South Africa: a Composer’s Perspective on Representation, Ideology and Identity in the Film, My Black Little Heart

Christopher Letcher

 

Contemporary South Africa offers a revealing perspective for a study of the relationship between film music and society. Now, thirteen years after the end of Apartheid, dilemmas around the representation of South Africa and South Africans, and tensions around an indigenous South African identity are very much ‘live’.

 

Using my recently completed score for the Zentropa-produced film, My Black Little Heart, as a case study, this paper investigates themes of identity, and the politics of representation in post-Apartheid film music. It looks at the role of the composer in reflecting/contributing to ideas of national identity, and also at how musical representations of individual identities can play themselves out on the soundtracks of films.

 

While there was much scope for a composer to employ an unconventional approach to film scoring in this often provocative film, there was also pressure for the music to fall back on a number of clichés, and traditional, representative film scoring practices. In looking at the transformation of the score from initial sketches to the film’s final sound mix, the paper also examines how film music’s intensely collaborative nature shapes the final score.

Shades of Suburbia: Musical Representation of Race and Gender in Ghost World

Tim McNelis

 

Filmic representations play an important role in shaping cultural concepts of race, ethnicity, and gender, as film studies has shown. However, there has been very little scholarship on representation through popular music. As teenage years are a time of identity formation, the use of music to establish identity is crucial in films with prominent teen roles. In this paper I will analyse representation and character development through music in the film Ghost World (directed by Terry Zwigoff, 2001). Musical choices in this film give characters certain attributes familiar to audiences by drawing on cultural codes of race and gender associated with different genres of popular music in the United States. Enid, a recent high school graduate, attempts to use music to establish a stable identity and make the transition to adulthood less painful but fails to find answers in the masculine world of record collecting. In addition, early 20th century jazz and blues are utilised to lend qualities of authenticity, masculinity, and a certain racial coding to Seymour, a lonely music aficionado. In Ghost World, as in other films, representation and character development are highly dependent on music – an element which is all too often ignored in studies of representation in film.

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

If You Hear A Waltz, It's Already Too Late

Kate McQuiston

 

This paper investigates the waltz across a number of films to identify a cinematic category of meaning for this music: specifically, as a harbinger of doom.  Just how the waltz poses danger owes to dark episodes in its history, including its widespread condemnation in the 18th century, when it was deemed indecent and especially detrimental to women, and its associations with the Nazi threat in the 1930s and 40s.

The waltz's choreography itself confers a sense of foregone conclusion.  Relentless repetition, spinning, and the exclusivity of the couple from the crowd are defining features.  For narratives as for the dance, there is no turning back.  Waltzes - danced or merely heard, diegetic and nondiegetic alike - provide permissive but dangerous narrative spaces for characters in which the laws of social conventions like class difference and marriage are not in effect.  Liberties taken in this special space, however, rarely go unpunished.  

 

Further, the waltz's power manifests in the form of overly patterned dialogue, disorientation and dizziness, and circular camera movement, all of which emphasize the waltz as a bodily and sonic phenomenon, and acknowledge its control over the drama.  Max Ophuls' The Earrings of Madame de... furnishes my primary example.

 

 

The Screen as Performer: Perspectives on composing with moving image for the concert environment

Adam Melvin

 

In recent years, there has been an increase in the creation of interdisciplinary art works incorporating music and moving image, which have sought to explore the relationship between the two media beyond the more established realms of collaborative practices within film. Lately, the concert hall itself has been subject to such explorations. Yet, while music and the moving image continue to blossom together in the gallery and movie theatre, the same relationship in the live concert environment can still constitute a somewhat uncomfortable and often problematic combination.

 

Is this merely a simple question of temporality, a practical or aesthetic issue concerning interaction and synchronicity or is there more to it than that? Could one problem be that there is a visual element already in existence in any concert performance for the simple fact that we see the performer(s) onstage? Is the concert performance already an interdisciplinary environment?

 

Drawing on his current PhD research, the composer, Adam Melvin suggests solutions to some of the practical and aesthetic considerations surrounding this thoroughly engaging development in music and the moving image.

 

 

Reinventing Question Time

Miguel Mera
 
Since it was first broadcast on 25 September 1979 Question Time has become something of a national institution, offering British voters a unique opportunity to challenge leading politicians on the events of the day. The title music, composed by Stanley Myers (1930-1993), has been updated on several occasions, with recent incarnations by Matthew Strachan and Mcasso Music. Whilst all revisions remain faithful to Myers' central thematic material - a recurrent semi-quaver motive - none of the arrangers had access to the original score and relied on aural transcription to generate their own versions. The mutation of the music charts the prioritized listening of each arranger, the changing programme brand, and the evolution of television scoring practice over the last thirty years. In addition it reflects societal change and parallels the shifting British political spectrum, from the Capitalist Thatcherite government of the 1980s to the centre-left New Labour government of the late 1990s onwards. Using Myers' original score and archive examples of different versions of the updated theme this paper will demonstrate how thirty seconds of music can act as a rich repository of cultural, social, technological, and political meaning.

 

 

Between Reality and Nightmare: Audio Space in Konrad Niewolski's film Palimpsest
Urszula Mieszkielo

 

The psychological thriller Palimpsest (2006) drew contradictory opinions from the Polish critics. Some of them find it the best Polish film of last year and the best production with regard to techniques in the whole of Polish cinematography, while others reproach it for showing off, and for the lack of originality.
Palimpsest is a multilevel story, as the title itself suggests. The distinctive feature of this film is its specific climate - sultry, gloomy, mysterious, arousing fear and uncertainty. Not only the image draws the spectator into the oneiric world, created by the main character's sick psyche, and makes him or her watch it from inside - music, sound and image are of equal rank here and they establish a coherent entity.

 

The main subject of the paper is Bartlomiej Gliniak's music in the context of the other elements of the movie. The analysis of its functions at different levels of the narrative reveals to what degree the music creates the climate and diegetic space in the film. As a consequence of the results of the analysis, there arises the question about the convention and conventionality of the musical ideas in Niewolski's film. 

 

 

A 'Tragic Review':  Kurt Weill's Royal Palace as the First 'Film Opera'
Alexandra Monchick

 

Though Kurt Weill's Royal Palace was a box-office failure, it signified an important turning point in the composer's career toward a Brechtian socially conscious opera.  Called the first 'film-opera' by Paul Stefan, Royal Palace premiered at the Berlin Staatsoper on March 2nd, 1927.  Weill's use of a projected film within the action of the opera had a profound effect on composers of the next decade, most famously Alban Berg. 

 

With its fast pace of thirty-eight scene changes in fifty minutes, avant-garde staging, and its frenetic jazz-influenced music characteristic of the cinema accompanist, Royal Palace itself functions as a silent film.  The genre of silent film, much loved by the German middle class in the twenties, synthesized independent elements of text, photography, and music as a kind of popular anti-Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk.  Weill incorporated this film in Royal Palace not just for gratuitous shock value, but to create a multi-media vehicle for a new German opera that would appeal to a broader public.
       

 

Staging Tristan in the Age of Widescreen
Christopher Morris

 

In 2005 the Opéra de Paris presented the first full staging of a new production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Directed by Peter Sellars, it featured a specially commissioned feature-length video by Bill Viola. The video was projected onto a large screen behind the stage, its cinematic dimensions flooding the auditorium with light and dwarfing the live actors/singers, who performed dressed in black on an almost bare black stage.

 

Although much could be said about the production as a reading of Wagner's drama, this paper will focus on its self-reflexive potential. What, I will ask, might this staging say about the multimedia nature of opera and its relationship to cinema? What are the theoretical models that might allow us to investigate and critique the production's configuration of its constituent media? Drawing on recent theories of intermediality, in particular those developed in the field of theatre studies, I will focus on what I believe are illuminating tensions - spatial, corporeal, representational - generated by this convergence of creative forms and traditions.

 

 

The Art of Synchronisation: Concepts and techniques used in Installation for String Quartet

Dominic Murcott

Both an interactive installation plus a multimedia composition Installation for String Quartet uses film to solve some of the problems of musicians working in time with computers. In doing so the very nature of synchronisation becomes the object of scrutiny and artistic intent.  Featuring an increasingly improbable virtual conductor, the compositional techniques gradually leave tradition behind as the composer becomes choreographer, the conductor becomes composer, the string quartet controls the film and the computer improvises.  One section features a detailed exploration of multiple-tempi for live ensemble using computer-controlled film, theorised by Nancarrow in the 1980s, but in all likelihood, unrealised until now.

 

The culmination of several years' research, this piece evokes questions about the hierarchical relationship between music and film, the functional and the emotional, and the concert hall versus the cinema or the gallery. Using Max/MSP/Jitter software, the work is an example of the flexible boundaries between art forms that such software encourages.

 

Raymond Bellour and Film (Music) Studies: Music as the Unattainable Text  

David Neumeyer

 

Among early film semiologists, Raymond Bellour stands out as a practitioner of close reading. His highly detailed film segmentations are oriented around two closely related concepts: the pensive spectator and the unattainable text. Both terms refer to the basis of cinema in photography, an unrecoverable (unattainable) foundation because film adds motion, creates the 'moving image'. In music, on the other hand, the foundation is movement, through linear time and through links to embodied physical motion. Music has difficulty achieving stasis. Thus, the photograph and music are broadly related in terms of difference. In the classic cinema, the primary mediator is speech, which moves like music but is replete with images and names of objects. Human speech draws motion, the quality of music, into the image; at the same time, it lends to music the image's concreteness, its 'objectness'.
 
Bellour analyzed a brief scene from The Big Sleep (1945) in The Obvious and the Code, but he does not mention background music, which plays throughout. The omission allows us easily to set the (apparent) self-sufficiency of the analysis against the music to gauge the mediating capacities of speech.

 

Music and the Negotiation of 'Otherness' in Iranian Cinema: Bashu, Little Stranger
Laudan Nooshin

 

Bahram Beyzai's 1985 film, Bashu, Little Stranger, is set during the Iran-Iraq war and tells the story of a young orphan who flees the war-torn south of Iran by hiding in the back of a truck. He eventually reaches the peaceful northern province of Gilan, an area which is alien to him both in its landscape and in the regional language and culture of its people. Here, Bashu is taken in by Nai, a young mother whose husband has gone to the city in search of work, despite the objections of her family and neighbours to the presence of this outsider. In the case of Bashu, the concept of outsider focuses on his racial and ethnic identity as an Arabic-speaking 'black' Iranian (of African descent); none of the villagers has seen a black Iranian before.
 

A film of great humanity and compassion, the narrative of Bashu revolves around the central theme of difference: cultural, linguistic and ethnic. Bashu was the first Iranian film to forefront issues of difference in a country which has been multi-ethnic for centuries. This paper will explore the ways in which music and other sounds are used to represent and negotiate 'otherness'.

 

 

Adagio for Strings: the Cultural Exchange and Reception of Music in Mixed-media Settings
Louise O' Riordan

 

My paper will discuss Barber's Adagio for Strings (1936) as an example of constantly shifting musical representation and conscious cultural recognition within mixed media. I will examine how mixed media's use of music constructs a legacy of recognition and argue that this legacy not only enriches the meaning invested in the music, but also provokes a conscious examination of the machine of media itself and its power to effect aesthetic as well as commercial concerns upon music. I will examine the ready receptivity of music to appropriation and how this underlines the powerful effects of the media as cultural creator, rather than just a commercial enterprise that facilitates the broadcast of cultural creation, with reference to examples of cultural manifestations of the music (Platoon's  straight use, DJ Tiesto and Orbital's remix, The Simpsons, Soccer AM and Spaced's parody).

 

 

The role of audiovisual gesture in film

Maria Paraskevopoulou

 

This paper discusses the concept of gesture as an integrating tool for the analysis of musical multimedia. As such, it encourages the observation of the interrelationships of all elements in an audiovisual gestalt as well as their outer contours. While its structural foundations are also important, gesture is encapsulated in an act of performance. Consequently, looking at music as a component of audiovisual gesture demands attention to musical elements that a score fails to capture. Observing these more elusive moments and their embodied gestural meanings can also offer an explanation for the 'felt' experience of music, which encourages our identification with individual characters. The paper illustrates the role of music and/or audiovisual gesture in film through case studies, which use analysis of gestures to explain the perceiver's empathy with the protagonists. In some cases, a film's score does not only offer music-thematic development; rather, the audiovisual context creates a thematisation of gesture. Therefore, analysis of gesture can constitute a powerful tool in shaping our understanding of the audiovisual.

 

 

Moonlight Sonata

Neal Peres da Costa

 

Ignaz Jan Paderewski is remembered as one of the most expressive pianists of the late-Romantic era. Besides his extraordinary piano recitals he is also remembered for his role in the 1937 film Moonlight Sonata. The story is ultimately one of romance but woven into the action are several solo piano performances by Paderewski.

 

Paderewski's performances in Moonlight Sonata show strongly that he belonged to the late-nineteenth-century tradition of piano playing in which many expressive freedoms, not now generally acceptable, were thought of as indispensable. In particular, Paderewski exploits the technique of playing one hand after the other or melody note after bass note (dislocation) at important moments to create emphasis or relief. At other times he arpeggiates or rolls chords expressively even when not marked in the music. And he often changes the rhythm of the melody or accompaniment to suit the mood and to highlight a particular point in the music. Such liberties were considered important for sophisticated performance and were clearly documented in written sources.

 

Moonlight Sonata (1937) is thus a rare and important tool for the study of historical performing practice. This paper discusses Paderewski's expressive practices with reference to specific sequences in the film.

 

'Shot as an illustration of the music': collusions of music and image in Three Colours: Blue and the art movie score

Nicholas Reyland

 

'In a way', said director Krzysztof Kieslowski of Three Colours: Blue (1993), one of his most celebrated collaborations with composer Zbigniew Preisner, 'the film was shot as an illustration of the music'.  Kieslowski's statement raises a wealth of questions concerning, for instance, authorship and the interpretation of Blue - a 'music-film' in which composers diegetic, non-diegetic and meta-diegetic weave aspects of the narrative.  Through a close analysis of scenes from Blue, such as the grandiose climatic montage at the end (an idea, notably, that was credited to Preisner by Kieslowski), this paper will engage with these issues within the wider context of a reading of the film, not in terms of the already tired binary of 'classical Hollywood'/'avant-garde non-Hollywood' scoring practices, but rather as an example of what David Bordwell, in a well-known 1979 essay, termed an 'Art Cinema' drawing on, yet distinct from, its adjacent traditions.  Blue is an art film which innovates scoring practices neither to critique an ideology or a system, nor to fashion an alternative modernist aesthetic, but rather to dimensionalize its story-telling, and thus to find more subtle and replete ways of articulating a narrative through collusions of music and image.     

 

 

Musicology's pioneer in the Aesthetics of Film Music: Zofia Lissa

Albrecht Riethmüller

 

In 1929, the time when the talkies were changing the world of cinema, it was uncommon for a musicology student to write a dissertation on a subject as modern as Scriabin. It was even more uncommon that the author was a woman and most unusual that she subsequently began researching film music, publishing her results as early as 1937 in her native language, Polish. Evacuated from Lwow to the Soviet Union in 1941, Sofia Lissa (1908 - 1980) had to re-establish her musicology career in post-war Poland during the Stalinist and post-Stalinist years before she could summarize her relevant work in the seminal book Aesthetics of Film Music (Krakow 1964, German translation, Berlin 1965). Based on her own personal viewing experience through some 40 years, Lissa describes the principles, stylistic characteristics and psychological impact of film music in addition to analysing its specific conditions by systematically categorizing its structure and functions. The presentation reflects on Lissa's transdisciplinary theoretical efforts and her methodological approach.

 

Nevsky and Kizhe: Film Music in the Concert Hall
John Riley

 

The collaboration between the two Sergeis Eisenstein and Prokofiev on the 1938 film Alexander Nevsky is generally seen as a highpoint of audiovisual art and the score was one of the earliest to be subjected to lengthy critical scrutiny (albeit by the director). Shortly thereafter Prokofiev adapted the music as a cantata which has become one of his most popular pieces in the concert hall. 

 

Four years previously Prokofiev had completed his first film score for Lieutenant Kizhe. From that he had created a popular suite for the concert hall. However, as a film, Alexander Faintzimmer's pointed comedy has not enjoyed the critical or popular success of Eisenstein's political biopic and, rarely seen, its fame ironically rests mainly on Prokofiev's score.

 

But in reimagining these two film scores for the concert hall Prokofiev faced very different problems and arrived at very different solutions. Using clips and recordings John Riley will examine these four scores, showing how the film and concert hall manifestations achieve very different ends aesthetically and even politically.

 

'Sadness Is Just Happiness Turned on its Ass!' Musical Parody and American Song in The Saddest Music in the World

Marianna Ritchey

 

Guy Maddin's 2003 film The Saddest Music in the World employs 'The Song is You' (from the 1932 operetta, Music in the Air) to inform and direct the narrative in two crucial ways. First, the song becomes an individualized indicator of each character's subconscious; indeed, the song acts almost as a character unto itself, exercising enormous power, and eventually causing transformation on a grand scale. Second, it activates musical parody as a tool of cultural critique and as a means of highlighting the artifice of film, which in turn 'allows' us to become invested in otherwise-ridiculous situations and characters.

 

The choice of 'The Song is You' is a deft one. It typifies the Tin Pan Alley style: deceptively simple and easy to sing yet surprising enough to maintain interest, with an overall predictability that encourages a sense of familiarity and facilitates variation. Moreover, in a film preoccupied with things half-remembered, the song slips easily into a familiar operetta trope: the tune whose full recovery will resolve the narrative.

 

 

Sounding the Gallery: Video Installation Art and the Rise of Art-Music
Holly Rogers

 

This paper will trace the merging of music, art and film during the twentieth century.  It will challenge the notion that the result of the convergence - the so-called 'first wave' of video installation art (1963-1976) - is free from history and propose for it instead multiple lineages. 

  
Artists working in this area, such as Nam June Paik, began to investigate beyond the two dimensions of painting and film, into the physical possibilities of the equipment used and the space in which it is situated.  Visual montages were spread over many screens, each with its own soundtrack, to create 'video environments'.  Enabled by technological advancement, these environments have been heralded by practitioners and critics alike as a brand new art form that appears to operate within a generic and historical free space.  

 

And yet, while its material and modes of discourse are certainly very different from anything that has gone before, video installation is not an isolated art form.  Indeed, there has been a recent theoretical drive to contextualise it.  The problem has been, however, that those attempting to chart for it a history have been preoccupied exclusively with its visual ancestors.  I wish to argue that this is not only an inaccurate history, but is also one that fails to take into account video's most important innovation: its mixture of art with music.  Significantly, the creators of video installation during its first wave are often both artist and musician, and thus represent a radical and important break with the traditional visual / audio divide.  By focusing on the work of this 'first wave', I will argue that video installation art (far from having no past) has multiple histories: that it is the result of a musical and an artistic convergence, a melange of Environment and Body Art, Happenings, Installation, expanded cinema and various schools of musical composition and performance.

 

 

New sounds for a New State: film music in the early years of Portuguese dictatorship and the construction of a nationalised soundscape (1931-1938)
Manuel Silva

The introduction of sound movies in Portugal coincided with the outcome of Oliveira Salazar's dictatorship, and the implementation of the New State regime, strongly influenced by Mussolinian Italy (the first national talkie was produced the same year Salazar established his full powers, in 1931). The 'technical reproduction' of sound (radio, recording industry and sound movies) was radically transforming the national soundscape, and one of the dictatorship's first measures was the creation of a state propaganda service (SPN), whose function was to organise the development of mass media. In this context, the first Portuguese sound movies were the stage of a redefinition of musical categories, and especially of an intense debate on Fado and its position as the 'national song', on the use of traditional rural music, and the 'dangers' of the Anglo-American popular music. In this paper, we will analyse some important films of that period and confront the new audiovisual items produced by Portuguese directors and composers in the thirties, both with the necessities of the emerging cultural industries and with the political project of the New State regime to reshape and 'nationalise' Portuguese culture.

 

 

Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris: Cognitive Textual Channel through Sound-Visual Troping

Julia Shpinitskaya

 

The signification processes in Solaris by the legendary film-maker A. Tarkovsky occur across the set of music and visual quotations involved into the film body. They build up the fundamental cognitive textual channel of the film, which unfolds independently through the main film narration. A J. S. Bach's quotation becomes the most important musical paradigmatic event of the film. Another one is P. Bruegel the Elder's landscape: together with other art-images it interacts with Bach's topic. The sound and non-cinematic images mark all the key episodes of the film, where they encounter and provide cross-references to each other, acting as parallel but cognitively complementary fields. The meaning is revealed through a very intensive intertextual circulation. Comprehension runs as a reflection of one image in another one or refraction of one image through another. By the accumulation of metaphors there comes the multidimensional vision of a subject and the narrative reality doubles and trebles. The investigation follows the crossing points of the diachronical musical and visual textual chains and synchronises the meaning of the musical and visual metaphors.

 

 

Gender Representations through Music in Greek Cinema: Rebetiko in Stella (Kakogiannis, 1955)
Christos Stavrinides

 

In this paper I address the issue of gender construction and representation in film through music. In particular, I focus on Greek Cinema and examine how the musical genre Rebetiko mediates gender representations in films. As a case study, I use a landmark film of Greek cinema - Michalis Kakogiannis' Stella (1955). In the film, Rebetiko has a dual persona: both as the social domain constituted by the Rebetes - a group of insubordinate bon viveurs who look down on the conventional domestic life - and as the Rebetes' music. Using analysis of extracts from the film and taking into account the widely accepted theory of socialization as well as film theories and studies regarding the representation of gender in films, I examine Rebetiko in its dual function and identify gender attributes and behavioural models it offers to audiences. Furthermore, I place the film in its wider political contexts and examine how Rebetiko, as a principal bearer of gender attributes in the film, reinforces the film's political connotations. Finally, I argue that the widespread use of Rebetiko in films of this period is a primary means by which Greek films communicated gendered meanings.

 

 

'My Humping' the Prime Minister: Mash-up podcast politics in a Singaporean context

Shzr Ee Tan

 

Singapore is a city-state whose tough stance on media censorship is well known. However, this grip on press and internet freedom has been challenged over recent years, particularly in a series of underground podcasts culminating in what became known as the 'Mee Siam My Humps' saga. This incident, which ruptured at the height of the republic's general elections in 2006, saw the country's prime minister Lee Hsien-Loong represented in a mash-up of R&B group Black Eyed Peas' hit, My Humps. Was Lee that hip, or was this a piece of political commentary executed by way of kitsch? Segments of Lee's National Day speech criticising political podcasts were themselves sampled and transformed into self-referencing pieces of irony - or not. Such was the performative ambiguity of these mash-ups that they could not be officially damned as politically-controversial, even as they were celebrated by dissenting Singaporeans and Hiphop fans alike. Here, I will decode the interweaving manipulations of sound, music and image. As tapestried virtual-scapes, these podcasts have relied on the abstraction of visual, sonic and literal cues found within interstitial spaces of multi-media collage for effective communication, thereby also allowing for the varied interpretation and re-making of multi-layered socio-musical meanings.

 

 

Visual Images in Catalogue Music

Anna-Kaisa Uusipaikka and Erkki Huovinen

 

Catalogue music is typically selected based on producers' descriptions that state the intended function, genre, and/or affective or motional associations. Music should yield highly unambiguous associations to be easily attached to presentations of moving image. Catalogue music thus provides a useful medium for exploring the limits in the specificity of the visual images that may be communicated in and through music.

 

For ten pieces of catalogue music representing a 'business' category, 32 students were asked to write down what they imagined could be happening on the TV screen while the music is sounding. The results were first analysed by systematically classifying the types of action and types of agents that appeared in the descriptions. This revealed that certain musical textures are more likely to yield images of unpersonified, general movement or action, whereas other textures generate more specific images. Secondly, more specific visual associations were grouped according to flexible semantic criteria. This revealed surprisingly specific associative complexes that are difficult to account for in terms of individual musical parameters. The congruence between highly specific associations poses problems for several recent theories of musical meaning.

 

 

No Foolin': Using a Movie Flop to Reconstruct the American Musical Revue

Jonas Westover

 

Glorifying the American Girl was one of the first movie projects to begin production after sound became a part of film.  Planned as Florenz Ziegfeld’s debut using this new media, Glorifying The American Girl was to be the first filmed version of his Follies, and was to be released in 1927.   Thousands were spent on the film, but unfortunately, production was halted for two years while multiple creators were sought to forge the Follies into a feature-length narrative film.  The result was a movie that dissatisfied every reviewer who saw it. 

 

This paper will begin by examining the reception of Glorifying the American Girl on its release, focusing on the moments where reviewers both lambasted and praised the movie to determine why it was unsuccessful.  Beyond contemporary impressions, however, the movie offers today’s audiences the most extensive glimpse into Ziegfeld’s world ever captured on film.  Placing this movie in the context of other revues, including a recently discovered cache of new materials from Ziegfeld’s rivals, and combining that with the evidence from the show-inside-the-film, the great American Revue can become more clear than the original reviewers of Glorifying the American Girl realized possible.

 

 

No-Thing to Fear: Corporeality, Musical Heartbeats, and Cinematic Emotion
Ben Winters

Music's relationship with emotion has been the subject of numerous philosophical and psychophysiological studies in recent years. The question of whether music merely expresses or actively arouses emotion in its listeners, however, gains added complexities when considered in the context of film. What is going on when we believe ourselves to be afraid in the cinema; and how does the presence of a musical heartbeat contribute to this feeling?
 

In this paper I propose a 'heartbeat hypothesis' that combines empirical and philosophical approaches to musical emotion with theories of cinematic fiction, while continuing to question the fundamentally psychoanalytic bent of much film music criticism. It suggests that heartbeats are effective at helping us experience 'fictional fear' precisely because the real-world emotion of fear is fundamentally about the body; that there is a strong relationship between our response to music and our own ability to produce sounds (Cox's 'mimetic hypothesis'); and that, as a result, we may recognise and interpret certain cinematic musical gestures in the context of our own corporeality as fear-inducing.   

 

 

Nostalgia, Music and the Television Past Revisited in American Dreams
Faye Woods

 

This paper focuses on the area of music in television, examining the music/image relationship in the US television show American Dreams (2002-5). Music's place in the evocation of nostalgia, due to its emotional and time-specific connotations, is well documented, as is the nostalgic re-presenting of television's history in the form of reruns.  Despite a continual nostalgic return to America-past in shows such as Happy Days and The Wonder Years and the use of television performance in music-based documentaries, televisual depictions of America's recent past have rarely examined its musical television history. 
       
However, 1960s-set NBC family drama American Dream presented not just the American past but its musical television as well. This paper will examine how the show's recreation of and interaction with the music show American Bandstand can tie together the divergent experiences of the turbulent decade. American Dreams' recreation of and appropriation of original broadcast footage is intricately interwoven with dramatic action allowing comment and new layers of meaning to be read across the music and image relationship. Through inter-cutting and juxtaposition, music performance bridges nostalgic reverence and provides political and social comment as the show builds a complex web of reference, reproduction and commentary.