Film Music Studies Research Articles

Analyzing 'Himawari No Yakusoku' in 'Stand by Me Doraemon' through film soundtrack and communication theories

This study examines the impact of the song "Himawari No Yakusoku" on the narrative and emotional complexity of "Stand by Me Doraemon" using film soundtrack theory and film communication theory. The focus of this inquiry is the incorporation of music into cinematic storytelling in order to elicit emotions and strengthen narrative ideas. The significance of this study arises from the increasing acknowledgment of music's pivotal role in the film, requiring a more profound comprehension of how soundtracks enhance the viewer's experience. This research used a qualitative analytical methodology to investigate the structural components of the song, encompassing its introduction, verses, pre-chorus, chorus, instrumental section, and outro. The analysis utilizes theoretical frameworks from prominent works in the field of film music studies, such as Claudia Gorbman's theory on narrative film music, Kathryn Kalinak's observations on the purposes of film music, and David Neumeyer and James Buhler's debates on the emotional influence of soundtracks. The result suggests that "Himawari No Yakusoku" successfully utilizes important musical methods, including key selection, polyrhythm, thematic recapitulation, and harmonic resolution, to correspond with the emotional and narrative progressions of the film. The song begins with a warm tone in the key of Bb, the verses feature a polyrhythm that adds emotional complexity, the pre-chorus creates anticipation, and the chorus serves as a distinctive leitmotif. The instrumental portion adds introspective complexity, while the outro provides a gratifying conclusion. These features collectively improve the film's narrative, showcasing the song's essential function in influencing the audience's emotional and cognitive reactions.

Connecting the dots: La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, a musical score and censorship

ABSTRACT Film historians have long known that the version of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) shown at its French premiere was heavily censored by the state and the Catholic church. Exactly what was cut, however, has never been entirely clear, meaning that almost all of the critical literature about the subject has been forced to accept the testimony of those who claim to have seen it at the time. An overlooked source that would help resolve the debate is the score commissioned for its Paris premiere. It includes vital evidence in the form of intertitles and actions that correspond to a print acquired by the British Film Institute in 1947. A detailed comparison of screen and musical time convincingly demonstrates that the 1947 print is a copy of the censored version, and a broader analysis of empathetic musical gesture and specially written lyrics for choir and soloists supports that contention. This analysis underlines the valuable contribution that film-music studies can make to film history in helping reveal for the first time exactly what it was to which the authorities objected in Dreyer’s famous film.

Screenwriting sound and music: Towards a new field of study

Extensive research in film and media studies on film music and sound has delved into various aspects of their role in cinema, recognizing their significance. However, a crucial element in film production – the screenplay – has often been overlooked in the exploration of sound and music integration. Concurrently, studies on screenwriting have displayed limited interest in the acoustic dimensions of film, creating a research gap where film music studies intersect with screenwriting studies. This Special Issue aims to address this gap by emphasizing the screenplay’s importance in comprehending the role of sound and music in film. This introduction showcases the diverse ways in which music and sound are integrated into screenplays. The ongoing exploration of screenplays for the analysis of sound and music sets the stage for future research endeavours. The editors and authors of this Special Issue advocate for the screenplay as a valuable resource in film music studies, providing innovative insights into the film production process.

New Currents in Film Music, Television Music, and Streaming Media Music Studies

New Currents in Film Music, Television Music, and Streaming Media Music Studies

In awe of scores and roars: Audience phenomenological fragmentation between screen and soundtrack

Addressing audiences’ enthrallment with film soundtracks that complicate existing notions of cinema immersion, this article offers the original concept of phenomenological fragmentation. To do so, the article considers soundtracks as mnemonic devices and affective textual components that shape audiences’ identities. Additionally, whilst multiplex viewing theatres and technologies endeavour to disembody audio media production and shroud crowds in darkness, the article explores alternative cinematic environments that support phenomenological fragmentation. This is then applied to concert movies as a particular form of event-based experiential cinema where screenings are accompanied with an orchestra that play the soundtrack live. The article then focuses on Jurassic Park ‘Live in Concert’ as a case study of this. Thirteen concert attendees were interviewed, evidencing myriad instances of phenomenological immersion and fragmentation that are shaped by autobiographical histories with the film and the novel exhibition context. Resultantly, the research provides the much-needed empirical audience data to film music studies and expands the study of experiential cinema.

Max Steiner and Extended Tonality

Since the revitalization of film music studies in the 1980s, the field has been dominated by musicological approaches, with music theory and analysis taking a back seat. As a result, film music scholars lack a common set of techniques for grappling with the harmony, rhythm, form, and melody of film music cues. But this situation is beginning to change: recent research by Frank Lehman and Scott Murphy offers powerful new tools for thinking about film music harmony. The purpose of this essay is to test the systems developed by these theorists against the music of Max Steiner, hopefully contributing to the development of a share analytical vocabulary for film music, and deepening our understanding of Steiner’s compositional technique.

Musical Geopolitics: Masculinity, Nationhood, and the Scoring of Superman (1978–2006)

ABSTRACT This article explores the potential for the field of popular geopolitics of close attention to the form and structure of instrumental film music. Specifically, it analyses the film scores for Superman (1978) and Superman Returns (2006), showing how these, in conjunction with the films’ visual components, communicate a series of geopolitical logics and ideas about gender and nationhood. In so doing, this article extends existing concerns in popular geopolitics with music, principally lyrical popular music, contributing to a new research agenda that offers detailed readings of musical scores and notation, informed by semiotic perspectives. It advocates an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of film music, drawing on research in the rich and expanding field of film music studies. It supplements the close reading of the scores here with an analysis of audience reviews.

Geography and film music: Musicology, gender, and the spatiality of instrumental music

Film and music are key concerns in human geography. But rarely has film music been considered. Here, the scores of James Horner (1953–2015), one of the most successful Hollywood composers of recent decades, are used to explore future directions in the geographies of music. Through engagement with the fields of musicology and film music studies, the paper calls for greater engagement with instrumental, in addition to lyrical, music. Hitherto, the latter has encountered the overwhelming majority of attention in human geography. But instrumental music’s style, form, and structure convey distinctly spatial knowledge and thought. As such, instrumental music represents a crucial addition to the topics considered by musical geographies. Through attention to such music, the conceptualisation of music in musical geographies is expanded.

Unheard Possibilities: Reappraising Classical Film Music Scoring and Analysis. An Introduction

Comprised of eight articles that focus on mainstream and even independent cinema from the silent era to the 21st century, this issue explores the creative possibilities of music in US-American cinema and aims to contribute to a renewal of methodological perspectives. In a day and age when film music and sound studies are increasingly paying attention to the history, technique and technology of sound film and sound design, the articles refocus attention on music itself in order to assess the continued relevance of the analytical tools developed in the classical studies of film music, in particular those developed by the Michel Chion-Claudia Gorbman-Karthyn Kalinak trio. The articles demonstrate the continued applicability of their tools, notably when it comes to analyzing a score’s structure or the relationship between music and image. But taken as a whole, they also single out areas that require more critical attention, including the praxis of creating film music itself and its central role in the filmmaking process, as well as the central role of silence in a film music score. The authors also emphasize that music is steeped in ideology and that its non-verbal quality endows it with political power. As a whole, the issue suggests that music in US-American cinema remains constantly open to invention and experimentation; classical Hollywood music refers more to a period than to an actual style or set of conventions.

Sonic ‘Detheatricalization’: Jean Cocteau, Film Music, and ‘Les Parents Terribles’

Abstract Jean Cocteau’s adaptation of his controversial play Les Parents terribles for the screen stands out in his oeuvre as an attempt to reconcile theatre and cinema. It also presented a challenge in preparing a soundscape for a work that did not have any music in its original form. Parents occupies a unique, Janus-like position in the history of French film music, as forward-looking in its anticipation of New Wave treatment of music as material as it is representative of the turn to adapting stage plays for the screen that started in the 1930s. Drawing on production sketchbooks and testimonies, this article considers the development of Cocteau’s working method and his collaboration with Georges Auric, fuelled by the director’s desire to take control of sonic matters. The resulting employment of a monothematic score was not only a new solution to the famous problem of filmed theatre, ‘detheatricalizing’ Parents sonically and visually, it contributed considerably to the development of Cocteau’s status as film auteur—one whose role now extended to adapting musical material. Furthermore, the effect of this compositional technique in Parents suggests that it can be fruitfully situated in relation to recent work in film music studies on issues of anempathetic scoring practices.

Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the Sound of Cinema by Frank Lehman

Reviewed by: Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the Sound of Cinema by Frank Lehman Alex Bádue Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the Sound of Cinema. By Frank Lehman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. [xvii, 292 p. ISBN 9780190606398 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9780190606404 (paperback), $39.95; also available as e-book (ISBN and price vary).] Music examples, bibliography, index, companion website. When composer Dimitri Tiomkin won an Oscar for the score of The High and the Mighty in 1955, he accepted it stating, "I would like to thank Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Strauss, [and] Rimsky-Korsakov" (quoted in Thomas Maremaa, "The Sound of Movie Music," New York Times, 28 March 1976). Tiomkin was finally acknowledging the roots of twentieth-century Hollywood music in nineteenth-century symphonic music. Indeed, in the hands of several composers like Tiomkin, Hollywood film music began to gradually outgrow its roots and form its own aesthetics, functions, and style. It is this musical independence that Frank Lehman defines and investigates in Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the Sound of Cinema. His focus, implied in the title, is on chromatic harmony and its ability to "sculpt mood and structure narrative" (p. 10). He defends the treatment of harmony that creates the effect of sounding "like film music" to contemporary listeners (p. 7). His "goal is to help listeners understand film scoring practices better" (p. 9) by demonstrating that through the maneuver of harmony, Hollywood composers moved away from nineteenth-century music's influence and established Hollywood music's own sonic principles. Lehman establishes three main theses. First, he argues that the use of consecutive consonant triads characterizes Hollywood music. Second, he suggests that film-music analysis should center on how pitch design (chords, scales, progressions, and keys) is "interdependent with narrative, visuals, and editing" (p. 8). Third, he asserts that chromatic harmony in Hollywood music results from the negation of tonal norms of centricity, diatonicity, and functionality to triads. Richard Cohn called this "pan-triadic" tonality, or "pantriadicism" (Richard Cohn, Audacious Euphony: Chromaticism and the Consonant Triad's Second Nature [New York: Oxford University Press, 2012], xiv). Lehman devotes his study to demonstrating that Hollywood composers have resorted to the succession of nonfunctional, noncentral, and non-diatonic triads as their chief tonal idiom to achieve expressivity and drama. Therefore, Lehman's methodology relies heavily on music theory. Hollywood Harmony employs roman-numeral analysis and Schenkerian graphics. Transformational theory, however, occurs more prominently in the book, especially through neo-Riemannian theory (NRT), a branch of transformational theory that expands the triadic [End Page 303] transformations that Hugo Riemann postulated in the late nineteenth century. If film music is indebted to late romantic music, then NRT—a theory created to analyze this repertoire—should be a resourceful tool. Lehman demonstrates that NRT can reveal musical meaning and dramatic structures in pantriadic music and proves that Holly-wood practices have derived pantriadicism from romantic models. The author does not claim the combination of film music and transformational theory/NRT to be groundbreaking, but he brings his voice to the scholarship by proposing a broader spectrum than used in previous studies: he does not confine his book to just one composer, filmic genre, or time period; he treats Hollywood film music as a genre. Thus, his theses and methodology serve not only within the limits of the book but also to widen the borders between film-music studies and both music theory and musicology. The book moves from general conventions on how chromatic harmony interacts with narrative in Hollywood films to more specific approaches to pantriadicism and NRT. Chapter 1 demonstrates how Hollywood film music conforms to and distances itself from romantic European art music. Harmony "contributes most substantially to the tonal habits of Hollywood" (p. 20), and Lehman discusses practices of chromatic harmony and tonality that exemplify these habits. Chapter 2 furthers the study of chromaticism and tonality as generators of drama. Lehman first discusses a few unique harmonic techniques in Hollywood films and subsequently the expressive effects and dramatic functions of pantriadic harmony in Hollywood films, introducing the reader to the basics of NRT and marking the borders between NRT's own aesthetics and that of other theories, such...

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

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.

‘We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes. Haven't You?’ Musical Empathy in Hitchcock'sPsycho

ABSTRACTThis essay explores a web of cognised and embodied empathies that emerge while watching Hitchcock'sPsycho, focusing on the role of musical empathy as it relates to Marion Crane's story. Drawing on work on empathetic music in film music studies, I explore how the actors, the characters, the musical score and the filmic audience are drawn together by a ‘sigh’ figure, a symbolic gesture that unifies the soundtrack.

Book Reviews

K.J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner (eds) Music in Video Games: Studying Play New York and London: Routledge, 2014: 232pp. ISBN: 978-0415634441review by Michiel KampThis volume falls right in the middle of a boom in publications on video game music. Following Karen Collins's Game Sound and her edited volume From Pac-Man to Pop Music (both 2008), there have been a number of articles and chapters appearing on the subject, both throughout the various Oxford Handbooks and in journals that focus on music in audiovisual media. These are joined by Kiri Miller's Playing Along (2012) and William Cheng's Soundplay (2014), which, although bundled in book form, can really be considered collections of article-length (case) studies. Add to that Peter Moormann's edited volume Music and Game: Perspectives on a Popular Alliance (2013) and the question becomes how this Routledge volume Music in Video Games: Studying Play (2014), edited by K.J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner, distinguishes itself from or relates to this rapidly growing field.The question is perhaps unfair, as the academic study of video game music is still in its infancy and the field anything but saturated, but it is fruitful to consider the different strands and approaches that operate on this relatively new and exciting topic within musicology. And, to start with, it has to be said that this is first and foremost a musicology volume. Whereas, for instance, From Pac-Man to Pop Music offers a multitude of scholars from different disciplines - and even expands its topic to include game sound - the chapters in Music in Video Games almost exclusively employ methods from historical musicology and music theory. This means the book has no shortage of well-printed and clear music examples that, given the dynamic and adaptive nature of game scores, get quite inventive.Another thing that sets this volume apart from others is the fact that it, for the most part, eschews grand theories of game music in general in favour of more focused case studies - one, or a small number, per chapter. These include what might by now be called the canonical cases of Super Mario Bros. (1985), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998), and Silent Hill (1999, albeit only in passing in Rebecca Roberts' chapter), but also introduce a number of new and worthy topics of study, such as Plants vs. Zombies, representing the less-than-glamorous but ubiquitous non-dynamic soundtracks of low-budget mobile games; the soundtrack of Sid Meier's Civilization IV (2005), which features pre-existing music in a manner completely unlike other audio-visual media such as films, showing the idiosyncrasies of video games when it comes to representation; and all-but-forgotten soundtracks such as that composed for The Dig (1995). Together, these case studies uniquely represent the variety of video game soundtracks, whereas other collections have mostly presented the variety of approaches to game music.The chapters are loosely ordered according to topics, moving from 'chip music' to analysis of dynamic soundtracks to horror games to hermeneutics. This, admittedly, is gleaned from the introduction, as there are many threads that connect chapters in the book, although none of them explicit. The book starts with 'the classics': Neil Lerner's analyses of the Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. soundtracks. Central to this chapter is the link between early game music and early film music, a thread of research that Lerner further explores in his contribution to The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies (2014). There, he focuses on the very earliest video games, and his structural and semiotic analysis of Donkey Kong here is reminiscent of that chapter. However, particular attention is paid to the unity the soundtrack provides in an otherwise incoherent and inconsistent game world ('Why does Mario have three lives?' Lerner asks, following Jesper Juul [2005]). The tonal coherence Lerner notes is striking, and it is even more prevalent in his analysis of the later Super Mario Bros. …

Beyond Figures of the Audience

Readers of this journal have witnessed the proliferation of work in the field of film music studies over recent years. With this expansion has come a variety of ways of understanding the relationship between music and film, but no similar investigation of the relationship between audiences and soundtracks. Nevertheless, figures of the film music audience frequently emerge in much analysis of the function of popular music in film soundtracks. Jeff Smith’s and Anahid Kassabian’s models of film music perception and comprehension are the two most detailed accounts (1998 and 2001, respectively). Since publication well over a decade ago, their frameworks have been widely cited but rarely interrogated. Both models hinge on the idea that ‘knowing’ music can determine an audience member’s response (to both music and film). This article critiques Smith’s and Kassabian’s theories: my exploratory audience research suggests that audiences’ modes of relating to film soundtracks are much more complex than simply ‘knowing’ or ‘not knowing’ the music (Anderson, 2011; 2012). A fuller understanding of the role of popular music in film for audiences needs to take into account tastes, vernacular categorisations, senses of identity, and memory (both related to the self, and to the text at hand).

The Sounds of the Silents in Britain ed. by Julie Brown and Annette Davison (review)

Reviewed by: The Sounds of the Silents in Britain ed. by Julie Brown and Annette Davison Colin Roust The Sounds of the Silents in Britain. Edited by Julie Brown and Annette Davison. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. [xiv, 334 p. ISBN 9780199797615 (hardcover), $105; ISBN 9780199797547 (paperback), $36.95; (e-book), various.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliographic references, index. Over the past several years, the academic study of film music has reached a critical point of maturity. There are now general histories of film music by Mervyn Cooke and James Wierzbicki (published in 2008 and 2009, respectively); source readings anthologies, including Cooke’s The Hollywood Film Music Reader (2010), Julie Hubbert’s Celluloid Symphonies (2011), and the Routledge Film Music Sourcebook (2012); and two landmark state-of-the-field volumes, The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, edited by David Neumeyer (2014), and the Cambridge Companion to Film Music, edited by Robynn Stilwell and Peter Franklin (forthcoming). While these developments have been exciting, they have also largely tended to perpetuate the biases prevalent throughout the field. Mainstream, narrative Hollywood films have been privileged above other cinematic traditions; and sound films have been privileged above the silent era. Many of the limitations of current film music research on music in the silent era are the result of a lack of research opportunities: an incredible diversity of practices varied widely from one location to the next, and the surviving archival documents are limited in both scope and number. With this in mind, it is a particular pleasure to see a book published that so thoroughly explores a wide variety of archival records to reveal the idiosyncrasies of silent film traditions throughout the British Isles. This book is the product of an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research network that was organized by Brown and Davison, and that held several conferences and workshops between June 2009 and April 2011. Sponsored under the aegis of the AHRC’s “Beyond Text” initiative, this project is of necessity interdisciplinary, bringing together scholars in musicology, film studies, history, and English literature, alongside archivists and documentary filmmakers. The contributions to the book are drawn largely from the conferences and represent the major themes on the programs: “Speaking to Pictures,” “Accompanying Pictures,” “Performance in [End Page 372] Cinemas,” and “Musicians, Companies, and Institutions.” The first section documents the variety of spoken-word performance traditions that existed in British cinemas in the decades leading up to World War I. Unsurprisingly, these practices are largely extensions of nineteenth-century lecture traditions. Joe Kember focuses on a single cinema in southwestern England, but documents both a variety of types of lecturers and several genres of lecture films. Judith Buchanan focuses on the gap between the ideal lecturer described in trade journals and the actual practices described in eyewitness reports. Of particular interest in both these essays is the question of how lecturers struggled to capture and focus the audience’s attention. Stephen Bottomore’s essay presents a case study of Eric Williams, a noted actor who toured extensively as a film elocutionist. Drawing on articles from two trade journals, Bottomore examines the evolving practices of speaking to films from 1911 to 1918. Trevor Griffiths’s essay is likewise concerned with the evolution of film lecturing, though his angle is to examine the rise and fall of lecturers in Scotland during the heyday of picture palaces (1910–1930). The next set of essays turns to musical accompaniments and follows a similar trajectory to the first. Ian Christie’s essay presents early film music practices in London as a continuation of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century theatrical traditions. Drawing on Rick Altman’s landmark article about American silent film practices, “The Silence of the Silents” (Musical Quarterly 80, no. 4 [Winter 1996]: 648–718), Christie advances his argument based on thorough research into previously untapped archives. The essays by Jon Burrows and Andrew Higson both examine the gap between the idealized use of music advocated in trade journals and the actual practices in London cinemas during the decade before World War I. The last chapter in this section, by James Buhler, presents a case study of how one American trade journal covered British film...

Audiovisual Styling and the Film Experience: Prospects for Textual Analysis and Experimental Approaches to Understand the Perception of Sound and Music in Movies

Abstract Approaches to music and audiovisual meaning in film appear to be very different in nature and scope when considered from the point of view of experimental psychology or humanistic studies. Nevertheless, this article argues that experimental studies square with ideas of audiovisual perception and meaning in humanistic film music studies in two ways: through studies of vertical synchronous interaction and through studies of horizontal narrative effects. Also, it is argued that the combination of insights from quantitative experimental studies and qualitative audiovisual film analysis may actually be combined into a more complex understanding of how audiovisual features interact in the minds of their audiences. This is demonstrated through a review of a series of experimental studies. Yet, it is also argued that textual analysis and concepts from within film and music studies can provide insights and explanatory frameworks that have not yet been addressed in a sufficient manner by experimental approaches. Three such areas are identified: single film analysis, intramodal interactions, and questions of implied authorship. In these cases, concepts and analytic practices from within film and music studies can provide insights and afford great explanatory value. Accordingly, the point of this article is not only to address how experimental and textual approaches may benefit from each other but also to show that experimental studies of cross-modal interactions need to address issues and pose questions that are more intimately linked with present concerns within humanistic film studies.

Sexuality and the nation: urban popular music and queer identities in Krámpack

Since popular music entered film music studies debates between the mid-1990s and early-2000s (Romney and Wootton, 1995; Smith, 1998; Kassabian, 2001; Wojcik and Knight, 2001; Inglis, 2003; Lanin and Caley, 2005), scholarly attention for Spanish film music has grown (Vernon and Eisen, 2006; Fraile Prieto, 2010; Vinuela Suarez and Fraile Prieto, 2010) and contributions about songs quickly started appearing (Evans, 2002; Vernon, 2005; Shaw and Stone, 2012). There are obvious signs of a growing field including a broad range of disciplines. While different backgrounds produce a diverse picture, different disciplines can bring a certain focus, which predictably imposes a few recurrent limitations. Film scholars often focus on auteurs, often leaving not-yet-established directors off the scholarly map, while musicologists are still drawn towards the great film music composers – two sides that often come together to produce studies about established director-composer pairs. In Spain, film music studies remains largely centred in the musicological circles where these debates began and the interdisciplinary perspective which characterises Anglophone scholarship about Spanish films and their soundtracks has not yet reached film studies in the Spanish context.

Introduction to Pierrot at the Cinema Part III

Carlo Piccardi has demonstrated the connection between the music for pantomime and both silent and sound film. In the first two parts published in MaMI Vol. 1, no. 2 and MaMI Vol.2, no.2 “Pierrot at the Cinema” cites a number of critics whose comments about the relationship between music, mood and physical gesture in the silent film era are still relevant today to scholars and film composers. In this part he discusses the music for pantomimes that were made into films and what happened to the music in the transformation from one genre to the other. Sometimes the necessity to follow the screen action caused the music to become exceedingly linear, a slave to the image. It could even lose its internal logic. Often, however, talented composers came up with musical solutions that caught the physical gestures and moods on screen, and, while writing good “action” music, they developed an overarching musical logic as well. Piccardi discusses Andre Wormser’s score for both the pantomime and film versions of L’Enfant Prodigue, Pasquale Mario Costa’s score for the pantomime and film versions of L’histoire d’un Pierrot, Fernand le Borne’s film pantomime L’empreinte, Engelbert Humperdinck’s music for Das Mirakel, Arnold Schoenberg’s Die gluckliche Hand, Richard Strauss’ Josephs Legende and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pierrot au cinema. The variety of musical solutions used in the silent film era are traced into the sound film era right up to Nino Rota’s collaborations with Federico Fellini. Initially, in publishing this translation of “Pierrot at the Cinema,” our aim was to call attention to the very sophisticated school of Italian film music studies and the contributions they have been making to film music history. Piccardi was the first candidate for the obvious reason that his research and discussion of sources was simply in a league of its own. Many of the sources dwelt on the way music interacted with pantomime and film action, an element that we as scholar/ practitioners find particularly fascinating. However, it would be well to note that there is no chapter on pantomime in Rick Altman’s equally well-researched Silent Film Sound (NY, Columbia University Press, 2004). In a quick review of pantomime practices in the US to 1922 via Chronicling America, a Library of Congress/National Endowment for the Humanities digital newspaper archive, I found many references to an active dance, acrobatic and mime pantomime tradition (many accompanied by elaborate music) that included both American and European individuals and troupes. Carlo Piccardi has established the connection for Europe; the connection between pantomime and cinema music in the US still remains to be established. Gillian Anderson

Above and Beyond or Betwixt and Between?

Above and Beyond or Betwixt and Between? Review article on Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, Richard Leppert (eds), Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema (Ahmanson Foundation Book in the Humanities) Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, 333pp.NICHOLAS REYLANDEven film music scholars desensitised to advertising hyperbole by the shock and awe tactics of cinematic marketing must have found the promotional claims made in advance of the publication of Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema a tad bold. The copy on the University of California Press's website for this collection makes a series of statements surely designed to raise eyebrows, and perhaps even ire. Cue fanfare:This groundbreaking collection by the most distinguished musicologists and film scholars in their fields gives long overdue recognition to music as equal to the image in shaping the experience of film. Refuting the familiar idea that music serves as an unnoticed prop for narrative, these essays demonstrate that music is a fully imagined and active power in the worlds of film. Even where films do give it a supporting role - and many do much more - music makes an independent contribution. Drawing on recent advances in musicology and cinema studies, Beyond the Soundtrack interprets the cinematic representation of music with unprecedented richness. The authors cover a broad range of narrative films, from the silent era (not so silent) to the present. Once we think beyond the soundtrack, this volume shows, there is no unheard music in cinema.(University of California Press website 2007)'At long last', the deep-throated voiceover artist would growl in the Hollywood trailer for this book, 'a group of the most distinguished musicologists and film scholars' (as opposed, presumably, to those grubbing about in the subdiscipline of film musicology to date) 'has broken new ground by refuting the idea that music goes unnoticed in film' (an issue apparently never before problematised in the literature) 'and by drawing on recent advances in cinema studies and musicology' (but not film music studies) 'the result is unprecedented richness' (in comparison to the impoverished offerings thus far on this topic). One would not wish to imply, of course, that this copy came from the keyboards of Goldmark, Kramer and Leppert, although the rhetoric of their book's introduction may have fanned the copywriter's flames. Therein, earlier work in 'the film music literature' is described as being 'solid' but 'marginal' and as having 'tended to accept without serious challenge the status hierarchy that puts music on the bottom and treats film as above all a visual medium' (2). One cannot help wondering what some of the contributors to this very book (not least the one who penned the pointedly-entitled L'audio-vision back in 1990) might have had to say about that, or the notion that work on the topic over the previous twenty years (the period since the publication of another contributor's groundbreaking study, Unheard Melodies) has merely been 'winking an eye at the presence of music in cinema', or the fact that 'film is also a musical medium' (3).This would indeed be unequivocally ground-breaking work if no one had thought to question such matters before, or if scholars had uttered such thoughts, but without any kind of intellectual refinement. Even a passing acquaintance with recent, and to an extent revisionist, publications in the field of screen music and sound studies reveals, though, that this is not the case. One need only consider the James Buhler, Caryl Flinn and David Neumeyer edited collection Music and Cinema (2000), Anahid Kassabian's Hearing Film (2001), Annette Davison's Hollywood Theory, Non- Hollywood Practice (2004), Steve Lannin's edited collection Pop Fiction: The Song in Cinema (2005), the Phil Powrie and Robynn J. Stilwell edited volume Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-Existing Music in Film (2006), or the manifestos of new journals like the present one or the School of Sound's house publication, to realise that a good deal of fresh spade work has been done. …