Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Rebecca Fülöp (bio) In desperation we turned to crime. We began to dismember the great masters. We began to murder the works of Beethoven, Mozart, Grieg, J. S. Bach, Verdi, Bizet, Tchaikovsky and Wagner—everything that wasn’t protected by copyright from our pilfering. —Max Winkler on common scoring practices for “silent” films, “The Origin of Film Music”1 It still bothers me when certain deeply cherished pieces of music are merged with visual images in such a way that the sounds take on a film master’s specific meanings, thereby depriving me of my own—or at any rate trying to. In that respect, Ingmar Bergman has a lot to answer for in the next world. I can’t pinpoint which of his films to blame, but whenever I hear a recording of Casals playing a Bach suite I am trapped in a dark room with a morbidly depressed woman. Outside the window, I believe, large black birds flap menacingly. It is hard for me to believe that Casals is somehow not to blame. —Donal Henahan, “Film Music Has Two Masters” 2 The use of preexisting “classical” music in film soundtracks has been part of the aural world of moving pictures ever since their inception. As the above epigraphs indicate, however, it has not always been accepted as best practice. Labeled “murder” by silent film accompaniment compiler Max Winkler and bemoaned by music critic Donal Henahan for ruining his associations with “autonomous” musical works, using recognizable classics for film underscore has long been debated. Composers, scholars, and audiences alike have discussed classical music in film in terms of its aesthetic qualities, suitability for the storytelling needs of narrative film, and even the supposed “mutilation” of autonomous works.3 Nevertheless, the past few decades have produced [End Page 1] a wealth of scholarship concerning the use of classical music in film, with the overall consensus that classical works can be and have been employed to great effect in Hollywood and beyond. Much attention has been paid to the use of opera in film, notably by Marcia J. Citron, Jeongwon Joe, and Jennifer Fleeger, as well as classical music more generally by Dean Duncan and others.4 Less attention has been paid to the use of J. S. Bach’s music in screen media. In part, this omission makes sense—baroque music has long been considered less suitable to film scoring than popular or Romantic-inspired idioms.5 Thus far, few scholars have delved deeply into Bach’s appearances in film, with a few notable exceptions, including Carlo Cenciarelli, Alexis Luko, Per Broman, and William Gibbons.6 The two 2019 volumes of BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute devoted to “Bach on Screen” seek to address this gap in the literature. [End Page 2] Bach on Screen opened with a successful one-day conference in February 2018 at Baldwin Wallace University, at which all of our authors presented earlier versions of the work to be published in this and the next issue of this journal. These articles address the use of Bach in screen media from a number of perspectives, from questions of “appropriateness” to the many meanings and stereotypes Bach’s music has accrued over the course of the twentieth century. They also represent the breadth of media included in what was once simply called the study of “film music,” including not only film but also television, video games, and advertising. By presenting this work in a publication devoted to Bach scholarship, we hope to open conversation between scholars of the seemingly divergent fields of Bach and media studies as well as to demonstrate the connections between our approaches. In grouping these articles together in the two issues, we have chosen to highlight two broad categories into which uses of Bach’s music in audio-visual media fall: the “sacred” and the “profane.” As is discussed by many of our authors, Bach’s music is often called upon to support “profane” narratives either of madness or of horror, as in the frequent use of works such as the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor or the Goldberg Variations, or conversely of “sacred” or semi-sacred...