Film Music Research Articles

쇼스타코비치의 초기 영화음악 연구 - 《새로운 바빌론》을 중심으로

본 논문은 쇼스타코비치의 《새로운 바빌론》에 나타난 그의 음악 특징들을 연구하고 영화음악 작곡가로서의 쇼스타코비치를 재조명하고자 하였다. 《새로운 바빌론》은 그의 첫 영화음악 작품이자 20세기 초 러시아 무성영화음악에 새로운 방향을 제시하는 모델이 되었다. 그는 젊은 시절 영화관에서 쌓은 피아노 연주 경험을 바탕으로 영화음악 작곡에 본격적인 행보를 보였다. 쇼스타코비치는 영화와 음악의 관계를 간과하지 않으면서도 음악이 영화에서 독자적인 역할을 수행할 수 있는 구조와 기술을 채용한다. 음악의 지속성, 대조의 원칙, 음악적 몽타주와 인용 기법, 그로테스크한 오케스트라의 연출 등 다양한 기법을 통해 단순히 삽입되거나 반주되는 영화음악에서 벗어났다. 특히 이 작품에는 그가 다른 장르에서 보여준 춤곡의 사용, 패러디 및 풍자, 오케스트라 음악의 내러티브 성격 등 초기 음악 특징들이 고스란히 담겨있어서 쇼스타코비치 영화음악의 탁월한 극적 연출을 확인할 수 있었다.

2001: A Pace Odyssey—The Donau Sequence as an American Film Musical Number

For many reasons—its narrative complexity, its obscure message, its proverbial slowness—Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) provokes bewildered reactions among audiences. At the time of ...

The Commutation Test and Chris Bacon’s Score for Source Code as a Framework for Film Music Pedagogy

This article lays out a theoretical foundation for the use of the commutation test as a film music-based pedagogical tool. The main titles sequence of Source Code (2011, directed by Duncan Jones) provides an effective example for classroom use, in which alternative musical accompaniments serve to reshape the viewing experience. An analysis of Chris Bacon’s original score for the sequence, supported by primary-source evidence, strengthens the instructional potential of this activity. Additionally, this essay provides a brief technical primer on how to prepare video clips for use in classroom teaching.

FromThere's Magic in MusictoThe Hard-Boiled Canary: Promoting “Good Music” in Prewar Musical Films

AbstractIn 1941, Paramount releasedThere's Magic in Music, a film about a soprano who sings opera in burlesque and wins a scholarship to attend Interlochen. The movie's utopian view of art music, however, caused difficulties for the studio in regard to marketing, leading to a studio-wide debate over the film's title. Archival documents positionThere's Magic in Musicas a valuable case study for investigating the transitional period of musical film production between the Great Depression and the onset of World War II, particularly with respect to operatic musicals. Just prior to the United States’ entry into the war, Hollywood moved away from the escapist fantasy of 1930s cinema toward the realism that would mark the 1940s. To reboot fading interest in musicals, studios toyed with the formula of the backstage musical to focus more on dramatic narratives and star power.There's Magic in Musicthus serves as a lens through which we might examine changes both in musical film production and in notions of “good music” at the eve of World War II.

Titus, Joan The Early Film Music of Dmitry Shostakovich (review)

REVIEWS 357 for concerts in Russia and abroad. This is decidedly not a portrait of a composer putting his affairs in order; it is a professional artist actively occupying himself with the future’ (p. 180). Bullock, following Chaikovskii, does not assume that there is ‘complete harmony between musician and man, of which you [Von Meck] dream’ (Chaikovskii, quoted p. 86). There is slippage between musician and person, as Chaikovskii himself often noted in correspondence, particularly when critics tried to tie down music’s effects too tightly or narrowly (pp. 41, 106, 146). Thus, within the ‘intimate world’ (pp. 9, 18, 43) that the Sixth Symphony embodied through formal innovation, through ‘Tchaikovsky’s ability to translate personal predicaments into artistic form’ (pp. 135, 193), and through musically ‘extreme emotional intensity and even suffering’ (p. 173), all three of which remain easily mis-readable as psychopathological symptoms, it is no surprise that Bullock, like many earlier listeners and critics, turns to the music’s ‘sense of speaking, of somehow communicating a truth inexpressible through mere verbal language’ (pp. 14, 58): the ‘voice’ trope (pp. 43, 52). He frequently describes Chaikovskii’s music as ‘sincere’ (though ‘authentic’ is his final word — p. 193), and the music’s distracting call as ‘inviting audiences to engage in acts of speculative and imaginative interpretation of their own’ (pp. 173, 21). Two minor points. It would have been good to read more about Chaikovskii’s love of the eighteenth century (pp. 80, 127, 132, 141) and his veneration of Mozart (pp. 98, 130); the latter figure could (without technical language) help to unpack key aspects of Chaikovskii’s aesthetic ideology. There are three typos (pp. 128, 149, 166). Final mention must go to a scene from Saint-Saëns’ visit to Moscow in 1875 that would have been worth witnessing: Chaikovskii and Saint-Saëns dancing an improvised ballet, with Nikolai Rubinstein on the piano (p. 28). Royal Academy of Music Anthony Gritten Titus, Joan. The Early Film Music of Dmitry Shostakovich. The Oxford Music/ Media Series. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2016. xv + 253 pp. Illustrations. Music examples. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £37.99. Studies of Shostakovich’s life and music have continued apace in the period since the composer’s death, and although it is well known that in his early years he earned money in the cinema and, later (in 1954) expressed clear and indeed pioneering views on the nature and demands of film music, relatively little is known about the nature of his early work in this genre. Joan Titus’s monograph is the first thorough attempt to describe the music with which he played a part in six well-known Russian films from 1928 to SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 358 1936. This comprehensively annotated volume is rich in musical examples and photographic illustrations of contemporary documents and scores. A unique and particularly valuable addition is of periodically signalled references to a companion website providing material unavailable in book form, such as, for instance, video clips: . The selection of early movies and music discussed are: the silent New Babylon (1928–29); an early example of sound film Alone (1929–31); an example of the new Soviet sound film Golden Mountains (1931); a Socialist Realist movie, Counterplan (1932); a minimal score film, The Youth of Maxim (1934–35); and finally Girlfriends (1935–36) about the girls of the future, as envisioned in Soviet society. A chapter is devoted to each film, preceded by an introduction that lays out the author’s main concepts behind her approach to Shostakovich’s film music, and the historical background to such studies beginning with Asaf´ev, and including several of the Titus’s own articles. An Epilogue attempts to assess the times in which these scores were written, their relation to his other music, and his significance as a pioneer who introduced a new era of Soviet film music. It also serves as a concise summary of the main contents of the monograph. Amongst the book’s many merits is the way Titus relates the writing of music for film to the narrative strand that many listeners seem to find in Shostakovich’s symphonic and chamber...

Editor’s Introduction: Special Issue on Silent Film Music

Introduction| April 01 2018 Editor’s Introduction: Special Issue on Silent Film Music Gayle Magee Gayle Magee Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Music (2018) 36 (1): 1–2. https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.1.0001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Gayle Magee; Editor’s Introduction: Special Issue on Silent Film Music. American Music 1 January 2018; 36 (1): 1–2. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.1.0001 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Music Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Grigorii Aleksandrov’s Spring: the last musical hurrah

This article explores the production history of Grigorii Aleksandrov’s most underrated musical film, Spring (Vesna, 1947), and situates the film in the context of the era, as well as within Aleksandrov’s work. Spring was created in the slippery space between a mild cultural thaw after World War II and the renewed strictures of Zhdanovshchina. Aleksandrov imagined Spring as a film about film, as his own professional manifesto and declaration of love for the cinematic process, its people and its world. Spring was Aleksandrov’s last musical film and his final collaboration with the composer Isaak Dunaevskii.

Two Humanitarianisms in Ambrose Bierce's 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge'

The oft-anthologized short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Union Army veteran Ambrose Bierce — long a staple of high school curricula and the subject of music videos, television, and film — is not typically thought of as a study in the dilemmas of humanitarian law. But it is. It depicts an execution for violation of the laws of war. Even better, the text embodies a central tension in the laws of war, one that emerged in Bierce’s time and persists today. On the one hand stands a sentimental humanitarianism that aims to minimize the human suffering of war; Henri Dunant’s book, A Memory of Solferino popularized this stance and helped establish the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863. On the other hand, a righteous humanitarianism chafes at the constraints that sentimental humanitarianism places on the pursuit of justice. Romantic nationalists like the Prussian-American political thinker Francis Lieber, whose code of rules for the Union Army was published a year after Dunant’s book, embrace the righteous justice of particular causes. Bierce’s “Owl Creek” straddles the two planks of the modern laws of war, conveying the power of both views.

CINEMA IN EVERYDAY LIFE OF THE INHABITANTS OF DROHOBYCH REGION IN THE POSTWAR PERIOD (1944 – 1958)

For party leaders, cinema was an instrument of propaganda. Therefore, the opening of new cinemas was one of the most important tasks. In the first postwar years, the number of cinemas grew. However, most of the cinemas were unsuitable for use. There was a disastrous lack of furniture, film technology and tools to repair them. The managers of the cinemas did not have a separate workplace or room. Often the office and accounting department of the cinema worked in the manager’s or cinema cashier’s flat.For the purpose of ideological influence on the population, propaganda films that praised Soviet life were shown to the inhabitants of the region with comedies and music films being the most popular. Movies, plays and ballet films were also shown. Cinemas demonstrated Italian, Mexican, German, Finnish, Austrian, Czechoslovak, Belorussian, and Indian films. During the celebration of Soviet holidays, film festivals were organized in the region’s cities. All the films, within the framework of the festival, were devoted to communist leaders, the history of the USSR, and the struggle against the Nazis during the war years. It was reported in the press, on radio and on advertising stands.To attract more viewers, the Soviet leadership reduced the price of tickets. In 1948, the ticket price ranged from 2 to 4.50 rubles. And it was much lower than the price of a theater ticket the maximum cost of which was 12 rubles.Movie theaters for children were organized in the cinemas of the region as well. During the holidays, cinemas showed films of Soviet cinematography for pupils. In children’s cinemas, cartoons were shown apart from full-length films.The films were shown not only in the cities but also in the villages. Each stationary cinema had several travelling cinemas for servicing the villages of the area. In the villages, cinema shows often were disrupted because of the lack of cinema mechanics, fuel, and the failure of cinema equipment. Often, the screens, which were used to show films in villages, were a white canvas or just a sheet. Sometimes, travelling cinemas did not have motor vehicles for transportation. Senior officials often used cars which were the property of the cinema for their personal needs. Film equipment from one village to another was carried on a cart which was taken from a collective farm. The movie was a means of russification. That is why the Ukrainian Insurgent Army’s (UIA) representatives obstructed the organization of cinema shows in the villages.For ordinary inhabitants of the region, cinema was a means of satisfying cultural and aesthetic needs. In the postwar period, cinema was accessible to all segments of the population. It was visited by people of different age groups, residents of cities and villages. It was a popular form of leisure and recreation for the inhabitants of the area.

A Lightened Lope de Vega: The Use of Music in the Soviet Tele-Adaptation of «The Dog in the Manger»

Russian director Yan Frid’s musical film Sobaka na sene (‘The Dog in the Manger’), produced by the Leningrad studio Lenfilm in 1977, is now considered a classic of Soviet cinema. This tele-adaptation of Lope de Vega’s The Dog in the Manger was a great success, thanks in part to the music written especially for the telefilm by the popular composer Gennadi Gladkov. The present article explores how the style of the music and the manner of its incorporation into the film privilege a specific reading of the Lopean comedy.

Batman by Danny Elfman

Reviewed by: Batmanby Danny Elfman Michael W. Harris Danny Elfman. Batman. Los Angeles, CA: Omni Music Publishing, 2016. [Film and book credits, prelim. p. [3]; notes on the music by the composer, prelim. p. [5]; contents, prelim. p. [6–7]; instrumentation, prelim. p. [8]; score, p. 1–364. ISBN 978-0-9890047-1-8. $85.] [End Page 497] James Horner. Willow. Los Angeles, CA: Omni Music Publishing, 2015. [Film and book credits, prelim. p. [5]; contents, prelim. p. [7]; "Willow: An Analysis of the Score," p. i–v; instrumentation, p. [vi]; score, p. 1–352. ISBN 978-0-9890047-5-6. $85.] Don Davis. The Matrix. Los Angeles, CA: Omni Music Publishing, 2014. [Film and book credits, prelim. p. [3]; contents, prelim. p. [5–6]; "The Matrix: An Analysis of the Score," p. i–v; instrumentation, p. [vi]; score, p. 1–315. ISBN 978-0-9890047-2-5. $85.] Jerry Goldsmith. Total Recall. Los Angeles, CA: Omni Music Publishing, 2016. [Film and book credits, prelim. p. [3]; 1 facsimile, prelim. p. [5]; "Total Recall: An Analysis of the Score," p. i–iii; contents, p. [v]; instrumentation, p. [vi]; score, p. 1–321. ISBN 978-0-9890047-6-3. $85.] In his article, "Catching Dreams: Editing Film Scores for Publication" ( Journal of the Royal Musical Association132, no. 1 [2007]: 115–40), Ben Winters poses a simple question, one that cuts to the heart of what the discipline of film musicology needs to ask when approaching a published edition of a film score: "in what circumstances is an edition warranted, and why should we attempt such a traditional task in this newest of musicological disciplines?" (p. 116). It is a question with a seemingly self-evident answer: it makes the task of music analysis easier by taking the guesswork out of notation, especially when cues might be altered in multiple ways from the original parts used for a recording to what ends up in a film. But this answer, and many other possible answers, raises the question of text, authority, and the so-called critical edition with the guiding hand of an expert editor. In the first paragraph of his article, Winters lays out this problem: Yet there are both practical and theoretical reasons why [the task of editing film scores for publication] is also potentially problematic, and one might legitimately question film musicology's need for a film-score edition: why, after all, should this relatively new area of musicology seek to re-inscribe editorial practices commonly associated with "Old Musicology" and its unquestioned acceptance of the musical work-concept? Indeed, is this not perhaps one of the strengths of existing film-music scholarship in the new "postmodern" musicological climate—that, without editions of film scores, it is free from those very claims of ineffability and authority that seem to plague studies of published works? In the end, Winters proposes several ways in which a film score edition can take lessons from published screenplays, and seek to be more useful for study, both for the academic and the enthusiast, as opposed to performance. Winters answers his question whether a film score should be published with a "yes," though with several caveats and ideas for how it should be approached. Fortunately, many of those suggestions are incorporated into Omni Music's film scores editions, while at the same time falling into some of the traps that Winters warns against. One of the biggest traps that Winters mentions is sadly unavoidable: the creation, either intentional or not, of a film music canon. ("… film musicology threatens to follow old-established paths of musicology by creating canons of authors and works worthy of discussion," [End Page 498]p. 117.) The formation of a canon is exactly what one can observe in the scores published by Omni. They are all by big-name Hollywood composers, are among the scores most often discussed by scholars, and come from major studio productions. The catalog so far consists of seven published scores: Danny Elfman's Edward Scissorhandsand Batman, Alan Silvestri's Back to the Future, Don Davis's The Matrix, James Horner's Willow, Bruce Broughton's Silverado, and most recently Jerry's Goldsmith's score...

Forgotten Episodes from the Works of Twentieth-Century Polish Composers: Film and Theatre Music in the University of Warsaw Library

Forgotten Episodes from the Works of Twentieth-Century Polish Composers: Film and Theatre Music in the University of Warsaw Library

Film Music Teaching Effect Evaluation from the Perspective of Audience Immersion

With the continuous improvement of national education level and system, film music teaching method has been greatly promoted in the classroom, especially the audience immersion, as the standard of classroom quality and effect evaluation, which has been recognized by experts inside and outside the education circle. Therefore, this paper uses the analytic hierarchy process to analyze and calculate the teaching objective, content, structure, method and effect, and establishes a reasonable teaching effect evaluation hierarchy model, obtaining the weight and consistency test results of each index element. Finally, the paper quantitatively summarizes the synthetic weight of index layer and obtains the final teaching evaluation results, which have a certain practical reference value to improve the teaching results of education workers.

The Developing Timbre Palette of Film Music: The Emergence of World Instruments for Non-ethnographic Association

The Developing Timbre Palette of Film Music: The Emergence of World Instruments for Non-ethnographic Association

On King's <em>The Beauty of Judaism on Film</em>

On King's The Beauty of Judaism on Film David B. Levy (bio) The Beauty of Judaism on Film. By Mike King. London: Stochastic Press, 2017. 216 pp., ISBN 978-0995648029 (pb), US $14.00. Mike King's The Beauty of Judaism on Film offers a thoughtful, insightful, and sensitive contribution to film studies, Jewish studies, cultural studies, philosophy, and religious studies. It lends itself superbly as a text for a course on Judaism in film, as a film-club guide, or as an introduction for anyone seeking a better understanding of Judaism. It can serve as a first—but not last—step in a journey of appreciating, respecting, and learning about but also from the holiness of Judaism. King's thesis is that the inner drama of Judaism is represented well by the dynamics of narrative cinema. In examining a wide range of both historical and contemporary films, King demonstrates that great insight and nuanced cinematic art can be found in films representing and exploring the cultural and religious aspects of Judaism. As King phrases it in his typically articulate manner, cinema offers an opening to "new religious vistas" (190), which can be explored by the unique nature of the medium. Like an entranceway to a Borgesian mystical maze or a Kafkaesque link to the "castle world," the book sends the novice reader on an introductory journey through various worlds of Judaism. Yet King's exegesis gives the reader a glimpse not into what Mordecai Kaplan in Judaism as a Civilization called the culture of Judaism but rather into the notion of Judaism as a religion. This is not merely a sociological perspective of how Jews [End Page 116] became white folks or what Nathan Abrams describes as the normalization of the Jew as a typical American, free of the past negative stereotypes of the "Jew as thief" or the "Jew as liar." King's book fills a void that Abrams identifies in his The New Jew in Film: "It is surprising to note that to date not much work has been done on Judaism, overshadowed by a tendency to focus on the image of the Jew/ess or on the Holocaust in film."1 Although this book can be enjoyed by lay readers and academics alike, King draws from the inspiring writing of foundational scholars such as Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, and Milton Steinberg. King uses examples from popular cinema that form the structure of the book, which is organized thematically. King recognizes the great importance of written sacred texts as sources in Judaism (3), which is part of Elliot Gertel's critique of the limits of the moving image.2 However King also argues against Michael Medved's assertion that film is inadequate to depict Judaism respectfully and factually.3 The chapters of King's book are organized into nine major, creatively conceived categories, including extended examinations of mystical Judaism, musical Judaism, Holocaust Judaism, and family Judaism. Forty films have been chosen and classified within these rubrics to illustrate the beauty of Judaism. For example, mystical film texts studied in the book include Pi (Darren Aronofsky, USA, 1998), Bee Season (Scott McGehee, David Siegel, USA, 2005), and A Stranger Among Us (Sidney Lumet, USA, 1992). Musical film texts include Yentl (Barbra Streisand, UK, USA, 1984), Fiddler on the Roof (Norman Jewison, USA, 1971), and two of the four produced film versions of The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, USA, 1927; and Richard Fleischer, USA, 1980). Holocaust Judaism texts include The Believer (Henry Bean, USA, 2001), The Diary of Anne Frank (George Stevens, USA, 1959), Left Luggage (Jeroen Krabbé, Netherlands, 1998), The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, USA, 1964), The Quarrel (Eli Cohen, Canada, 1991), and the Devil's Arithmetic (Donna Deitch, USA, 1999). In the appendix King rates the ten best films with plot summaries to aid the reader. King's analytic sharpness shines when he describes the following three main clusters of filmmaking: (1) Hasidic Jews in New York, (2) Haredi or ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem, and (3) shtetl Jews from Eastern Europe. One film, however, is about Sephardic Jews, and another takes place in North Africa. King acknowledges that the scope of his project is limited to...

Their Satanic Majesties' Celluloid Regret

Their Satanic Majesties' Celluloid Regret Justin J. Morris (bio) Rock 'N' Film: Cinema's Dance with Popular Music by David E. James. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 470 pages. $35.00 hardback, $13.45 ebook. Rock 'N' Film: Cinema's Dance with Popular Music, the long-gestating, virtuosic new work by David E. James, primarily known for his work on the American avant-garde in Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (1989) and The Most Typical Avant-Garde (2005), tackles the intersection of cinema and the shambolic, transformative, and appropriative cultural amalgamation that came to be known as rock 'n' roll. It is perhaps surprising that this topic remains unexplored, given the ongoing cross-medial nature of pop and audiovisual media evidenced by the recent ecstatic reception of Beyoncé's Lemonade and the ubiquity of televisual "backstage" industry musicals (Empire, Star, Nashville, Sun Records, The Get Down, Vinyl, etc.). Pop music continues to be dismissed as a doggerel and delinquent cultural form that persists in evading even the widening aegis of media studies. James's examination, closely argued with texts obvious and recondite, reveals a heretofore obscured history of pop's transformative influence on Western film forms ranging from classical Hollywood to independent, avant-garde, and documentary traditions. [End Page 132] Composed of eighteen chapters, James's history of rock 'n' roll's interactions with cinema reads as comprehensive yet surprisingly succinct. The author proceeds along a set of familiar dichotomies: low versus high, spectacle versus narrative, communal folk art versus commerce, black versus white, and pop music versus film. James enriches and augments these commonplace axes by suggesting that cinema's intermedial employment of rock 'n' roll served as much as a cross-promotional tool as it did to preserve the established hierarchies of the culture industry. For example, the use of Bill Haley and His Comet's "Rock Around the Clock" in Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955) was greeted with "frenzied jubilation from below augmenting apoplectic fear from above that linked it to threats of communism . . . and the escalation of juvenile delinquency" (25). Producers strove not only to normalize the music's rebellious potential but also to ensure that it "did not threaten cinema's position at the apex of the culture industry" (30). Columbia Studios, the distributor of the independently produced Blackboard Jungle, profited from the controversy surrounding the film, cashing in on a "800% return" on its shoestring budget (42). Rock 'N' Film restores historical significance to the resultant genre, jukebox musicals, feature films that built on the generic traditions established by the revue film, 1930s and 1940s backstage musicals, and the musician biopic genre formed around jazz bandleaders such as Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman (44). Initiated with the Alan Freed–starring Rock Around the Clock (Fred F. Sears, 1956), jukebox musicals were "low-budget films made by small independent production companies, the cinematic equivalent of the small companies that recorded early rock 'n' roll" (43). These particular films worked to normalize the transgressive possibilities of rock 'n' roll by placing an emphasis not on the biracial social interaction beyond the stage but instead on the industry-associated promoter or disc jockey (such as Freed). James reveals cinema's role in the whitening of the music, carefully noting that while these films proved "radically progressive" in "emphasizing the primacy of black musicians and integrating them with whites in concert," black musicians rarely migrated from spectacle to narrative, narratives that primarily concerned white teenagers and industry insiders (45). Often culminating in a televisual special performance, jukebox musicals contributed to the project of distancing rock 'n' roll from associations of delinquency by reimaging the genre as a positive social force while confining its ascendant economic possibilities within an established cultural hierarchy that placed it below cinema and television in mid-1950s America. [End Page 133] In addition to exploring a number of lesser-known musical film styles and stars, Rock 'N' Film also attends to the filmic transformations made in relation to the three most enduring artists of the period: Elvis, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. In the tightly composed fourth chapter, James contrasts the star image of Jayne Mansfield (primarily in the...

Onofre R. “Pagsi” Pagsanghan

“Pagsi” is a well-loved, multi-awarded teacher in his alma mater, the Ateneo High School, where he has been teaching English and Filipino since he graduated college in 1951. Pagsi founded the Ateneo High School Dramatics Society in 1956, which was renamed Dulaang Sibol in 1966. As both a teacherformator and a cultural icon, Pagsi has won numerous awards since the 1960s, among them the prestigious Metrobank Foundation Outstanding Filipinos Award for Teachers in 1985, the first year the awards were ever given. More recently he has received awards like the Gawad Paz Marquez Benitez For Outstanding Educator in Literature from Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas (2002), Bayaning Gurong Pilipino Award from the ABS-CBN Foundation (2003), and the Natatanging Gawad Buhay (Life Achievement Award) from Philstage (2015). One of the mainstay productions of Dulaang Sibol is Sinta, an adaptation of the long-running 1960 musical The Fantasticks. The adaptation made its debut in 1975 and won the FAMAS Best Musical Film Award in 1976. In this interview, conducted in 2002, Pagsi recounts his writing of Sinta, his reflections on growing up in Postwar Manila, and his insights on enduring love.

Love Me Tonight (1932) and the Development of the Integrated Film Musical

The 1932 film Love Me Tonight has been hailed for its influence on the development of the Hollywood musical genre, and is frequently cited as one of the first truly integrated musicals for the screen.1 Directed by Rouben Mamoulian with music by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, the film was a definitive aesthetic step away from the backstage musical of the early talkies, using songs to help tell the story instead of maintaining a separation between narrative and the spectacle of musical performance. Mamoulian claimed that in the film, “dialogue, song, and music were integrated into an organic unity.”2 And Rodgers similarly recounted that the creative team aimed for “dialogue, song and scoring [to] all be integrated as closely as possible so that the final product would have a unity of style and design.”3 Writers on the film musical have propagated this view, leaving the creative team’s claim to integration relatively unquestioned. Mark Grant, for instance, writes that Love Me Tonight was “arguably the first completely integrated musical comedy on stage or screen,” thanks to Mamoulian’s “holistically interweaving music, rhythm, blocking, and the ‘beats’ of the scene … to create a sculpture-in-motion that was not merely superficially exciting but expressive of the psychological subtext.”4 Similarly, Joseph Horowitz claims that “narrative structure and musical structure … prove one and the same.”5 Indeed, many of the filmic techniques in Love Me Tonight did become standard for Hollywood musicals of the next decades. Vincente Minnelli and Kurt Weill both subsequently called Love Me Tonight “the perfect film musical.”6

A Semiotic Approach toward Film Music

A Semiotic Approach toward Film Music

A Research on Characteristics of Theme Music in Musical Film <La La Land> －Focusing on the Theme Music “City of Stars”－

A Research on Characteristics of Theme Music in Musical Film <La La Land> －Focusing on the Theme Music “City of Stars”－