A sound connection with the past: recordings of early music in screen media

Abstract

When Powrie and Stilwell’s Changing tunes: the use of pre-existing music in film was published in 20051 it marked a significant contribution to the field of film music studies. It explored the use of classical and popular musics in screen media in detail for the first time, and considered the role that pre-existent music has to play in the production of films and our own cinematic experiences. Looking back at this volume more than a decade on, it is significant that extended discussions of early music, construed broadly for this essay as music composed before about 1750, are notable only by their absence. The closest we get is Jeongwon Joe’s chapter on Amadeus, which offers a thoughtful account of a film often maligned by the musicological community.2 Instead, cinematic scores are, quite understandably, situated within the context of 19th-century art music traditions. Over the last decade, the presence of early music has been felt more strongly in popular media, a phenomenon which is now beginning to be explored across the field. For example, the work of the Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen study group, which I co-lead, has sought to interrogate the theoretical and experiential implications of using early music in stage and screen media. The recently published volume, Recomposing the past: representations of early music on stage and screen3 explores this issue in the greatest detail to date, and highlights the ways in which our sense of the musical past is shaped by music used in film, opera, television and videogame. In effect, the musical past is recomposed through such engagement, forming parallel musical histories across media. However, this essay does not intend to repeat the work presented in that volume. Instead, my aim here is to consider the extent to which the general viewing audience has a sensory connection to the musical past, and the ways in which recordings of pre-existent early music for specific filmic contexts are deployed.