• Corpus ID: 31598986

Music and the Moving Image IX NYU Steinhardt

@inproceedings{2014MusicAT,
  title={Music and the Moving Image IX NYU Steinhardt},
  author={},
  year={2014}
}

• Published 2014
• Art

1. FRIDAY, May 30, 9:30 11:00AM. Frederick Loewe Theatre Keynote Presentation: THE CHANGING FACE OF ORCHESTRATION FOR THE MOVING IMAGE PATRICK RUSS Today’s film music orchestrator faces ever-tightening recording deadlines, the use of MIDI files as the final sketch by composers, a team of orchestrators on a project or even a single cue, and other developments changing the face of the craft. This once almost exclusive North American enterprise is now a global industry. Orchestrators encounter new challenges with music for video games, where multiple layers must work individually as well as together. Yet new opportunities abound with arrangements of film music for the concert hall, often with projection of live film, and publications of symphonic suites derived from film scores. 2. FRIDAY, May 30, 11:30 1:00PM, Loewe Theatre HOW BERNARD HERRMANN STOPPED THE WORLD IN THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL Stephen Husarik, University of Arkansas Fort Smith Bernard Herrmann's soundtrack for The Day the Earth Stood Still (1950) is widely celebrated among film historians yet remains almost unnoticed among histories of electronic music. This paper asserts that, aside from its use of Theremins and other electronic instruments, the orchestrations alone in The Day the Earth Stood Still make it the first comprehensive electronic composition in music history. Furthermore, composer Herrmann illustrated the power of music to describe the suspension of mechanical and electrical motion through musical means--a truly awkward assignment because music itself is an art of motion. A film director can use freeze frames or one-camera shots to show frozen action, but how does a composer freeze music? Three musical examples from the film are offered to explain the perceived suspension of motion in The Day the Earth Stood Still: 1) nullification of harmonic progress with polytonality 2) nullification of rhythmic pulse with polyrhythms and 3) nullification of instrumental acoustics by means of electronic instruments and tape manipulations. The author devotes a small introductory portion of this presentation to historical aspects of the cold war era to give the film a narrative context. ISOMORPHISM AND THE FEMALE DOUBLE: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE PSYCHE IN BERNARD HERRMANN'S SCORE FOR SISTERS (1973) Ariane Lebot, New York University Bernard Herrmann declared "that film music expresses what the actor can't show or tell"*. An analysis of his score for Brian De Palma's Sisters (1973) demonstrates how the composer did not consider his work to merely accompany the images, but that it is inseparable from both the narrative and its intricacies, serving an integral function towards the meaning of the film. Alongside Herrmann's customary practice of producing all aspects of the score, his involvement with Sisters after a prolonged separation from Hollywood gave him an extensive opportunity to manifest full control—his salary notably proved to be the greatest expenditure of the film's budget. Through the analysis of seemingly un-climactic cues, I will contend that Herrmann structurally transposes the psychological states of his characters in the writing of his music, and that he divulges the narrative's twists through the distribution of musical elements in his orchestration and especially through isomorphism—the visual representation of concepts. This paper will argue that the music transcends its initial function of creating and sustaining the anticipation and suspense fostered by the murder plot, rather manifesting a holistic vision of the film through emphasis on female twinning. Indeed, a comparative analysis of the film, of Herrmann's manuscript score and of his recording of the music, will reveal the Sisters score as a testimony of the composer’s personal vision of both the film and film music composition. PICNIC: A READING IN THE MELODRAMA OF ANTI-SUBLIMATION Jordan Stokes, CUNY Graduate Center Music speaks where words leave off, or so the theory goes. Many influential accounts of film music hold that scores expose tensions that otherwise must remain unspoken, stifled by either repression (in Freud's sense) or ideology (in Marx's). In the film theory literature, the same claim has been made -not only of music, but of any non-signifying aesthetic flourish -by scholars of melodrama such as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. This model is elegant and intellectually satisfying, not least because it is easily testable. We can use it to predict how music ought to behave in a given melodrama; if it does, this supports prevailing theories of both music and genre. Some of this work has already been carried out by scholars such as Heather Laing, who synthesizes the literature referenced above to show us how 1930s and 40s melodramas use elaborate nondiegetic music as the “voice” of female characters that are otherwise closed off from discourse. But although the model often succeeds, there are films for which it fails. This paper focuses on the lurid 1955 melodrama Picnic, where, rather than hinting at unspoken tensions, music marks the scenes in which those tensions are dragged violently to light. (It is the difference, perhaps, between using music as a censor's pen and using it as a highlighter.) Thus, in addition to exploring a George Duning score that really ought to be more widely known, this paper confronts an important meta-theoretical problem: how should genre theory deal with recalcitrant texts? 3. FRIDAY, May 30, 11:30 1:00PM , 6th floor SCORING TO ‘SCARE THE PANTS OFF THE AMERICANS’: ORCHESTRATION, PROPAGANDA, AND THE EVOLUTION OF VAUGHAN WILLIAMS’ MUSIC FOR 49TH PARALLEL (1941) Annabel Fleming-Brown, University of Glasgow In his autobiography, British director Michael Powell states that his 1941 film, 49 Parallel, commissioned by the UK Ministry of Information, was explicitly intended to “scare the pants off the Americans, and bring them into the war sooner.” Although much existing scholarship on the film focuses on its overt propagandist agenda, specific studies of Vaughan Williams’s score have treated this contextual information as relatively unimportant marginalia. Scholars of the music have focussed, instead, either on the use and manipulation of the German Lutheran hymn, Ein feste burg, or on the ways in which the film score inspired and influenced later works by the composer. We have yet to receive a detailed analysis of the score itself or a study of the particular creative processes that lay behind it. This paper proposes an analysis of the music for 49 Parallel that considers its orchestration a key mediator of the film’s political project. With specific reference to the autograph sketches and scores in the Vaughan Willliams archive alongside production material in the Muir Mathieson archive (both housed at the British Library) I trace the successive stages of the score’s orchestral realisation in order to show the relationship between this particular aspect of the compositional process and the pro-interventionist aims of the entire production. Ultimately, I demonstrate precise ways in which the composer’s selection and refinement of certain instrumental combinations contributed surprising depth and complexity to the propagandistic impact sought by the Ministry at this pivotal moment in the War. A VAMPIRE FILM FOR THE MTV GENERATION: TERROR, BANALITY, & MARKETING IN THE MUSIC OF THE LOST BOYS Sara Gulgas University of Pittsburgh This paper explores the aural technologies of eliciting terror and sympathy at once in American vampire films of the 1980s. I take as my case study The Lost Boys (1987), which incorporated teenaged vampires, American popular music, and cross promotion between the film and music industry in order to engage with the expectations of the targeted audience. As I show, the film’s audio-visual processes work to establish collective codes and create preferred readings but only so that they could be altered in order to terrify. The film allows the audience to sympathize with the on-screen characters while simultaneously altering the audience’s perception of reality through shifts between the familiar and the strange. Music is crucial in leading the perceivers to identify with the main protagonist, Michael, as he attempts to find himself within these vacillations. Subtle shifts between a composed score and a compiled score serve to link a range of previously isolated associations: those between religious and terrifying aspects of organ music as well as those between the perceivers’ previously formed identifications and the newly accrued connotations of famous rock songs. I analyze “Cry Little Sister,” “People Are Strange,” and “Walk This Way” within the context of three scenes in the film to show the ways in which the “MTV aesthetic” of rapid three-second shots aids in altering preconceived notions of a targeted group ostensibly marketing normalcy, but in the end only seeking terror in the familiar. BETWEEN GRACE AND NATURE: THE TREE OF LIFE’S MUSICAL DIALOGIC PROCESS AND FORMAL STRUCTURE Katherine Reed, University of Florida With its recurring images of fire and water, The Tree of Life is ruled by contrasts through which director Terrence Malick highlights a central binary between the ways of nature and grace. This opposition, first introduced in the opening voice-over, rules the lives of the film’s central characters and is clearly reflected the relationship between the O’Brien family’s father and mother. Narrative realization of the conflict between God and nature is extended to the very images and sound of the film, most notably in the reuse of compositions drawn from the art music canon and their incorporation with the film’s score by Alexandre Desplat. This interplay of contrasts provides an extra-narrative formal structure for The Tree of Life. In this paper, I track the musical dialogic process embodied in the film’s contrasting use of music by Mahler, Brahms, and Bach, among others. Calling upon historical narratives attached to th