Music Production Libraries: The Craft and the Business

S Music and the Moving Image, May 31-June 2, 2013 NYU Steinhardt, Dept. Music and Performing Arts Professions, Program in Scoring for Film and Multimedia 1. FRIDAY, May 31, 9:30 11:00 AM Frederick Loewe Theatre Music Production Libraries: The Craft and the Business Doug Wood, President of Omnimusic & ASCAP Board Member Respondents: Ron Sadoff, Jeff Smith, Elisabeth Weis 2. Friday, May 31, 11:30 1:00PM. Room 303 FROM SHADOWS TO LIMELIGHT: FILM MUSIC AS FOREGROUND, MIDDLEGROUND, AND BACKGROUND Mark Richards, University of Lethbridge In contemporary scholarship on film music, non-diegetic music is generally regarded as “background” music (indeed the two terms are often synonymous), which is not consciously heard by the audience but still contributes to the understanding of a scene. However, as Buhler, Neumayer, and Deemer (2010, 316) have recently pointed out, “the system of regulating sound [in film] is functionally defined, meaning that different components of the sound track— dialogue, music, or effects—can serve different functions intermittently. The background, for instance, can be formed by any of the components. . . . Music, sound effects, or dialogue can all occupy the foreground position, which will be determined by narrative salience.” Thus, not all non-diegetic music is “background” music: when given “narrative salience,” it may be profitably viewed as “foreground” music, the importance of which has been largely unappreciated in the literature. Between these two extremes, I would add a third category of “middleground” music, which incorporates features of both. With this tripartite analytical model, one can more clearly understand the ever changing role that non-diegetic music plays in the construction of a scene’s perceived meaning. As will be discussed, distinguishing among these three “levels of ground” in analysis depends on several factors: whether or not the music is thematic, musical tension and emphasis, coordination between music and image, the presence of dialogue and sound effects, and activity in the diegesis. Examples will be drawn from such Hollywood classics as Casablanca, The Sea Hawk, and The Godfather. EARLY CINEMASCOPE SOUND EXPERIMENTS Matt Malsky, Clark University The Society of Motion Picture Engineers held a convention in 1953, during which a series of papers considered topics in stereophony and the new widescreen format, CinemaScope. Soon after Journal SMPE produced a special section entitled “Developments in Stereophony,” which brought together these papers and the discussions that followed each one. Addressed to a broad audience of engineers, this issue presented the latest implementation of and experiments with cinematic stereophonic sound within the context of existing scientific theory. It brought together contributors from three intertwined arenas: researchers from the Bell Telephone Labs, design engineers from the Research Unit of the Twentieth-Century Fox studios (the creator of the CinemaScope format), and industrial engineers from companies such as Westrex and Altec Lansing, that designed and manufactured equipment for CinemaScope’s stereophonic sound recording, post-production and exhibition. Together, these articles offer a unique opportunity to consider this means of achieving commercial cinematic stereophony and its objectives. In this paper, I will consider two issues. First, how did the general theory of auditory perception influence engineering practice, and what is the theory of listening that undergrids these practices. Second, by examining early CinemaScope films, I will consider how these theories and practices were realized in the emergent (if only briefly so) stylistic norms for soundtracks in CinemaScope films of 1953 and 1954. 3. Friday, May 31, 11:30 1:00PM. 6 Floor MUSIC’S DARK DESCENT: SONIC IMMERSION IN PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR GAMES Isabella Van Elferen, Utrecht University Psychological horror games (PHGs) are a relatively young subgenre of survival horror games (SHGs). While SHGs revolve around the slaying of horrific monsters, PHGs are geared towards implicit terror. Situated in dark dungeons and featuring invisible terrors, these games not only frighten players but also play with and upon their fear. PHGs are especially notorious for the sections in which gameplay is interrupted by “insanity effects”. In these sequences the game’s main character is revealed to be psychologically unreliable. Insanity effects influence the avatar through visual and sonic “hallucinations” or the occurrence of paranormal events. They also test players’ psychology by breaking the fourth wall: through seeming corruptions of the software or the interface, the graphics become blurry, the soundtrack gets distorted, the console may seem to delete saved games or even to have crashed. In game reviews the soundtracks to PHGs are often highly rated and assessed as vital parts of the games’ frightening effect. My paper explores the ways in which soundtracks contribute to the dark play in PHGs through a study of the mechanics of musical immersion. As I have argued elsewhere, three concurrent factors -musical affect, musical literacy, and musical interaction -cooperate in a process of signification, identification and play that leads to game musical involvement. As an extensive analysis of Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010) will show, the shift from external fright to internal psychological terror is achieved sonically through a blurring of the distinction between “outside” and “inside” sounds on the three levels of affect, literacy and interaction. This musical form of dark play leaves the player immersed in insanity only: her own insanity as well as that of her avatar. MEANINGFUL PLAY: A PERFORMATIVE ANALYSIS OF VIDEO GAME MUSIC Iain Hart, Sydney Conservatorium of Music Video games are a challenging object of study for the musicologist because they are never played the same way twice. As interactive texts, they lack the static and repeatable form of other audiovisual media. Furthermore, the timing of musical events in video games is dependent on both player interactions and conventional cues, and the analysis of these musical events must be able to account for a dynamic context of reception. The relationship between the pre-composed music of video games and interactive gameplay is consequently difficult to analyse. However, through an understanding of interactivity as a performative act, we can treat the musical experience of gameplay as the text to be studied—a text the player has a non-trivial role in creating. The player’s unique series of actions during gameplay evolves into an interpretation of the designers’ complete, preconceived game experience. Similarly, although music is received in a series of unique contexts during gameplay, the player’s actions shape the music into an interpretation of the musical experience envisioned by the composer. This paper discusses a video game music analysis which incorporates a performative approach to interactivity. It examines the types and sources of meaning found in video game music, with particular focus on the player’s role as a producer. In doing so, it argues that video game music exhibits a twofold semiosis, the analysis of which must contextualise both the music's initial composition and the player's interactivity in relation to the complete musical experience. HEARD MUSIC Claudia Gorbman, University of Washington Tacoma In earlier writing about film music, there is a tension between proponents of music as subservient to image, in the background, unheard, and those who reveled in the spectacular, operatic possibilities of music in movies. From the 1940s through the 1970s, music-for-background by and large constituted the paradigm for dramatic films, while the musical was the genre that literally made a spectacle of musical performance. The advent of an increasing array of stylistic possibilities for film music in the postclassical era reproblematized the foreground-background distinction, the question of whether music is (made to be, and experienced as) heard or unheard. The historical conditions of film audio-viewership have retroactively upset the paradigm as well: for example, modern audiences tend to hear (and be annoyed by) the “inaudible” music of 1940s and 1950s melodrama. What happens when a filmmaker tries to make “background” music (scoring) as audible as possible? Godard would likely figure as the progenitor of such attempts, and Tarantino’s cinephilic/musicophilic display has arguably influenced the norms of contemporary “hearing” and “not-hearing”. Into this lineage comes the 21st-century director Paul Thomas Anderson, whose experimenting in this respect, calling attention to music to achieve a wide range of effects, will constitute the focus of analysis. 4. Friday, May 31, 11:30 1:00PM. Room 779 BLOODLUST AND TRANSCENDENT EVIL: THE USE OF RICHARD WAGNER’S TRISTAN UND ISOLDE IN THE FILM APT PUPIL (1998) Matthew McAllister, Valencia College At once admired and suspect, prized and despised, the now-common practice of ironically deployed music in films makes audiences aware of both the surface features of the film, as well as its multiple, deeper conceptual layers. The complex interplay and dialectic among these layers allows film to transcend its immediate narrative and to make historical and ideological points. By synthesizing the work of film-music scholars as well as rhetoricians, this paper investigates the ironically-deployed music of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in Bryan Singer’s film adaptation of the Stephen King novella Apt Pupil (1998). Singer’s use of the “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde brings many subtle, deeper narrative layers into focus, and it functions in three capacities within the film. First, it both reinforces and challenges societal constructions of evil, femininity, sexuality, and ethnicity. Next, it makes explicit the inner psychology of the Nazi antagonist largely as a result of its purposefully-ambiguous narrative placement. Finally, it plays upon the longstanding accumulation of rumor that purports a direct, causal link between Wagner, Hitler, and the evils of the Third Reich in order to establish motivation for the antagonist. But this final point makes “evil” a kind of supernatural agent independent of those who actually commit evil, effectively alleviating those who perpetrate such acts of any responsibility. Singer’s sophisticated use and placement of Wagner’s music does indeed allow the film to transcend its immediate narrative, but a closer look at the historical and ideological points being made may justify some caution, if not outright criticism, on the part of audiences. VICTOR YOUNG’S SCORE FOR GOLDEN EARRINGS (1947): THE “HUNGARIAN” AND “GYPSY” CONNECTIONS Brian Mann, Vassar College In “Piercing Wagner: The Ring in Golden Earrings,” (Wagner & Cinema [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010]), Scott D. Paulin examines the Wagnerian elements in Victor Young’s score for Golden Earrings, a 1947 film starring Marlene Dietrich and Ray Milland. Given the Wagnerian focus of the volume in which his article appears, it was natural for Paulin to pay less attention to other, competing styles in this film: the most important of which are its “gypsy” and “Hungarian” elements (the scare quotes are indispensable). Hence the present talk. For this B film, Young first crafted an eponymous theme song (“Golden Earrings”) that sounds pervasively throughout the film, both diegetically and in the underscore. This melody has “Hungarian” and “Gypsy” features, both rhythmic and melodic, some of which it shares with Sarasate’s famous “Zigeunerweisen.” Young further incorporates themes from Liszt’s Fantasy on Hungarian Folk Tunes, as well as fragments from Les Préludes. Dietrich sings “Hejre Kati,” a now largely forgotten chestnut by Jeno Hubay (1858-1937), from the heyday of “gypsy” violin music. Remarkably, this melody later found its way into popular culture, both as a vehicle for jazz violinist Eddie South (who studied briefly in Budapest), and for Victor Young himself, who recorded a swing band version of it earlier in his career. Three other Hungarian folk melodies comment in various ways on the unfolding drama. HISTORICAL SIGNPOSTS AND MUSICAL ICONS FOR THE AUDIENCE: CONSIDERING STUDENT ANALYSES OF SONGS IN FORREST GUMP James Burton, Salisbury University In promotional interviews about Forrest Gump (1994), director Robert Zemeckis described how the composer Alan Silvestri’s “music underscores very specifically the feelings of the characters, where the records underscore the feelings of the time,” and act as “historical signposts [and] musical icons for the audience.” Resting at the level of plot and characterization, Zemeckis sidesteps the political resonances of the film and its music. The film’s critics, however, have read the film’s music in politically contrary ways. Representative of those who saw the film as reactionary, Robert Burgoyne describes the film’s use of songs as part of its project to “undercut both the mythology of the counterculture and the music that provided its anthems.” Conversely, Hilary Lapedis reads the songs as subverting the film’s apparent conservativeness by working as “an ironic gloss creating a Brechtian form of distance between diegesis and spectator, compelling the spectator to arrive at an adjusted textual decoding.” This Spring I am teaching a seminar class that uses Forrest Gump as a discursive relay station around which to consider issues of adaptation, film and history, film and politics, the socio-political resonances of popular texts, and the continued popularity of this cultural phenomenon. One presentation assignment will involve students selecting a song from the sound track. Students will then research the song, its artist, its use, and its place in the film. They will then critically consider its import, meaning and affect. This paper will consider the students’ responses and attempt to move beyond a reading of popular soundtracks that emphasize nostalgia, capitalist exploitation, and forgetting on the part of younger viewers. 5. Friday, May 31, 2:00 – 3:30PM. Room 303 OPERA-FILM HYBRIDIZATION IN KENNETH BRANAGH’S AND INGMAR BERGMAN’S MAGIC FLUTE FILMS Justin Mueller, Tufts University At a time when opera’s presence on television, in movie theatres, and on home video has brought the genre far beyond the stage, Kenneth Branagh’s 2006 cinematic adaptation of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte would seem to present scholars with an ideal occasion to discuss this increasingly-mediated artform. Yet, despite Branagh’s notoriety as actor and director, his production has so far generated very little critical commentary. In this paper I claim that this version of Zauberflöte is worth studying in particular because it engages with Mozart’s singspiel in a way quite similar to that championed by Ingmar Bergman thirty years earlier. This paper argues that both Bergman’s and Branagh’s versions of The Magic Flute attempt to fuse opera and film, stage and screen, into one fluid, hybrid form, and that the voiceovers and the use of CGI technology in the latter work towards the same goals as Bergman’s integrated use of stage and film technologies some thirty years prior. Besides a close reading of these two films, this paper also discusses how current scholarship in opera studies, film studies, and musicology have addressed recent trends of intermediality and mediatization. METAL MACHINE MUSIC: NOISE AND HYBRIDITY IN TETSUO: THE IRON MAN Katherine Reed, University of Florida In his first feature film Tetsuo: the Iron Man, director Shin’ya Tsukamoto explores mankind’s relationship with technology, showing the intrusive and transformative power of mechanization. In the violent obscuring of the human body by metal and machines, Tsukamoto’s monsters make manifest the struggle of mastery between man and his increasingly powerful tools. The film’s sound mirrors this central interplay. The machines of the film contribute much of the diegetic sound, while the music incorporates these mechanical elements as its rhythmic basis. Through the interaction of music and mechanical noise in the score, Chu Ishikawa’s compositions for Tetsuo succeed in normalizing this mechanization, bringing the machine’s aural analogue, noise, from background sound to musical element and, finally, to primary musical material. Using definitions of noise put forth by Jacques Attali and information theorists Shannon and Weaver, this paper analyzes the evolving roles of noise, music, and their hybridity in three key scenes within Tetsuo. Ishikawa’s score questions the division between and interaction of noise and music, presenting an aural mirror of the machine-human conflict visually articulated by Tsukamoto’s images. I argue that Ishikawa’s score frames noise as a controlling force that overtakes the hegemonic system of organization in music -tonality -in much the same way that machines invade and control the bodies of the film’s characters. This theoretical approach addresses both noise and music as they alter Tetsuo’s meaning and, more broadly, as they create meaning through their hybridity. WHAT I IMAGINE FILM MUSIC OUGHT TO BE: ANTI-WAGNERIAN LEITMOTIFS IN KURT WEILL’S THE RIVER IS BLUE Naomi Graber, University of North Carolina In March 1937, Kurt Weill was at work on the score for The River is Blue, a Spanish Civil War epic that knew would never be filmed. Far from being discouraged, he told his wife Lotte Lenya that he saw an opportunity to “show these people what I imagine film music ought to be.” Drawing on Weill’s extensive writings on film music and on archival material, including the newly discovered screenplay by Clifford Odets, this paper explores how Weill—a life-long anti-Wagnerian—wanted to revolutionize film-scoring practice in an era dominated by leitmotif-heavy scores. Weill’s music critiques the “illustrative” Wagnerian approach, in which he saw music merely running parallel to the story, rather than actually effecting or commenting on the events of the film. Close examination of the sketches, the studio copy of the score, and the screenplay reveals that Weill and Odets worked closely with each other to produce a film in which both source and score music played an integral role in the story telling. Source music motivates soldiers in battle, gives hope to starving children, and cements friendship between characters. Rather than a one-to-one relationship between a melody and a character or idea, the composer employs a technique similar to Bizet’s Carmen, in which a short fragment of music alerts the audience to important aspects of the film, a practice he praised in his writings. The River is Blue demonstrates Weill’s continuing commitment to experimenting with a broad range of music-dramatic genres in the United States. 6. Friday, May 31, 2:00 – 3:30PM. 6 Floor PLAYING CHOPIN: CLASSICAL MUSIC AND POSTMODERNITY IN ETERNAL SONATA AND FREDERIC: RESURRECTION OF MUSIC William Gibbons, Texas Christian University Though they differ significantly in terms of game design, the console role-playing game Eternal Sonata (2008) and the mobile rhythm game Frederic: Resurrection of Music (2012) feature the same unlikely protagonist: nineteenth-century composer Frédéric Chopin. Chopin’s music features as prominently as the composer himself in both Frederic and Eternal Sonata, albeit in strikingly different settings. Much of the music in Eternal Sonata is newly composed, and makes no obvious reference to Chopin’s oeuvre. Breaks between the game’s “chapters,” however, feature full-length performances of popular Chopin pieces played in a traditional manner by well-known Chopin interpreter Stanislav Bunin, visually accompanied by digital slideshows of relevant real-world locations and biographical narratives about the composer. The soundtrack to Frederic, by contrast, includes mostly electronic dance-style remixes of Chopin’s music, drastically altering the original pieces to fit into this new genre. Despite these significant differences in presentation, in both Frederic and Eternal Sonata the music forms part of a large-scale stylistic juxtaposition. The games both implicitly and explicitly revel in the fundamental contradictions: “high” and “low” art: classical and popular musics; artistry and play; reality and fiction; and art as opposed to gaming. These “high-concept” contradictions— ironically arising in what has been called a fundamentally unartistic medium—call into question the very idea of art in a postmodern era. Furthermore, Eternal Sonata and Frederic highlight the implications of pre-existing classical music as an aural and conceptual element of recent games writ large. A DIRECT LINK TO THE PAST: NOSTALGIA AND SEMIOTICS IN VIDEO GAME MUSIC Sarah Pozderac-Chenevey, University of Cincinnati Music’s ability to evoke a nostalgic response in listeners has long been documented: Jean-Jacques Rousseau recorded the existing story of the ranz-des-vaches and its ability to reduce Swiss soldiers to tears with the thought of their homeland in his 1779 Dictionary of Music. Much of the scholarship on the topic has focused on sentimental songs by Stephen Foster or Gustav Mahler’s intentionally childlike fourth symphony. The multimedia nature of video games and the interactivity of the medium create new possibilities and purposes for nostalgia, as Bastion (2011), Fallout 3 (2008), and The Legend of Zelda series (1987 to present) illustrate. In Bastion, composer Darren Korb uses iconic signifiers of nostalgia to create an empathetic response within the player to the in-game character’s longing for a lost world and time. Fallout 3, in contrast, uses the player’s own familiarity with the popular music of the 1930s and ’40s that comprises the most recognizable portion of its soundtrack to heighten the destruction of the world after an in-game nuclear war. Finally, The Legend of Zelda series, which made music a major part of its gameplay in Ocarina of Time, uses music indexically and symbolically in Twilight Princess to prompt a nostalgic response within the player that mirrors the response apparently felt by the main character in the game, Link. These careful uses of nostalgia create an emotional connection to the game and its characters, drawing the player in. KEEPING SCORE: THE GAME WORLD AS MUSICAL NOTATION Steven Reale, Youngstown State University In many video games, the musical score functions similarly to and serves roughly the same purposes as film scores: to accompany and provide emotional commentary on an ongoing story. In the genre of “music games,” by contrast, designers create spaces in which the player's interaction with the musical score is the telos. Ground zero for the genre are the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games, which have had justifiably close attention in ludomusicological studies, including Aresenault 2008, Kamp 2008, Miller 2009, and Svec 2008. In these games, prerecorded musical tracks are converted into a tablature-like notation, which it is the player's task is to accurately realize; success is measured by the amount of correct “notes” the player plays and rewarded by unadulterated playback of the song. Guitar Hero's and Rock Band's principles of interactivity and performance can be applied to music games that lack a one-to-one correspondence between an ideal musical object and the player's performance of that object. The scores to BIT.TRIP BEAT (2009), BIT.TRIP RUNNER (2010), and Dyad (2012) exist on a spectrum between fixed and dynamic. BEAT's scores are fully pre-composed and resemble those of GH/RB; the aleatoric levels in Dyad are essentially musical raw materials, mere possibilities for a near limitless variety of combination. Finally, ludomusical performance can be applied to games ostensibly outside of the “game music” genre: the interrogation scenes in L.A. Noire (2011) can be understood as highly abstracted musical performances, while fanmade tool-assisted gameplay videos reflect the sensibilities of mechanical virtuosity—the moving-image equivalent of Conlon Nancarrow's compositions for player piano. 7. Friday, May 31, 2:00 – 3:30PM. Room 779 AUDIO-VISUAL HAPTIC EXPERIENCE IN BILLY THE KID AND THE GREEN BAIZE VAMPIRE (1985) Beth Carroll, University of Southampton Film musicals are more than the often suggested divide between musical number and narrative; they are moments of reaching out and touching the audience as suggested by Jane Feuer’s work on the proscenium arch. Here, music and image are a single entity (one cannot exist without the other) challenging ocularcentrism. In their coming together and the dynamic movement between the two, an interactive, perceptual space is created. I will analyse how key numbers from the little known British musical Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1985) demonstrate how the interaction between audio-visual elements aims to induce a haptic experience in the spectator (a tactile relationship with the film’s space). Theory is increasingly turning towards multi-sensory analysis; however, image’s dominance is at the expense of thorough audio-visual understanding. Theorists such as Thomas Elsaesser and Vivian Sobchack have championed sensory analysis yet they stop short at examining music. Musical numbers demonstrate how music can be extended into visuals and become a single entity. I will illustrate how Billy the Kid, a musical about a snooker playing vampire that toys with the genre’s conventions, can be analysed both visually and more importantly musically to give a haptic reading of its numbers which thus enables an embodied tactile spectatorship through the negotiated space between music and image. Forms of notation will help analyse the audio-visual space and argue that the increasing trend towards multi-sensory analyses can and should be applied to music. BURSTING INTO FLIGHT: ADOLESCENT DESIRE AND EMBODIED SONG IN ANIMATED MUSICALS OF THE DISNEY RENAISSANCE Ryan Bunch, Community College Philadelphia “Bursting into song” is a transformative act in musicals. In animated musicals of the Disney renaissance (roughly the 1990s), adolescent protagonists experience a dramatic version of this transformation. The act of singing seems to enable these characters to fly—or at least to achieve extraordinary physical feats resembling flight at moments of intensely felt desire. Ariel floats in her underwater grotto, Pocahontas is carried adrift by the colors of the wind, and Quasimodo swings from the top of Notre Dame Cathedral. These moments of flight in song occur during exuberant expressions of adolescent themes typical of these films —desire for independence, adventure or romance. Young heroines and heroes–already possessed of youthful voices untethered from the unseen actors who supply them—physically soar through their environments as the vocals rise to climax and dynamic cinematography causes the viewer also to experience the sensation of flight. In these musical numbers, the childhood fantasy of flight joins with adolescent yearning and expected bodily transformation into adulthood to imbue characters with empowering subjectivity, asserted in various ways. Most of the boys seem to require assistance in flight—a magic carpet for Aladdin, a winged horse for Hercules—while the girls seem capable of flying on their own. The need to escape the normal constraints of the human body takes different forms of expression depending on the racial otherness or physical disabilities of the characters, along with their burgeoning, gendered adolescence—all categories of identity that were being transformed, contested, and negotiated at the time. THE SEARCH FOR ONE BRIEF, SHINING MOMENT: HOLLYWOOD’S ADAPTATION OF LERNER AND LOEWE’S CAMELOT (1967) Megan Woller, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Scholarship on Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s Camelot (1960) recognizes that the musical is saddled with a particularly disappointing film version. This paper reevaluates the 1967 film Camelot in terms of adaptation, seeking to understand the reasons behind the alterations. Veteran director of musicals Joshua Logan and his collaborators omitted a number of songs from the original stage version and modified others. While some of these adjustments accommodate the exclusion or reduction of characters, others simply reflect the change in medium. For example, both of Mordred’s songs were cut, which lessens his characterization. Rather than singing the song “The Jousts,” the film merely shows the jousting onscreen. Perhaps even more significant is the cinematic form that the remaining musical numbers take. Cinematography and editing enhance meaning in several key numbers, including “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” and “I Loved You Once in Silence.” These songs and their visuals reveal Guenevere’s relationships with both her husband and lover. In this paper, I examine the changes made to Camelot in the transition from stage to screen. This film attempts to emulate other lengthy musical adaptations such as The Sound of Music (1965), while simultaneously striving to remain viable in an increasingly transformed film industry. With the dissolution of the Hays Code and advent of New Hollywood, the highly successful, glossy genre of the musical necessarily responded to the shifting times. Camelot represents an awkward combination of traditional and new approaches to the film musical, which accounts for its negative reputation. 8. Friday, May 31, 4:00 – 5:30PM. Room 303 SCORING THE ETERNAL PEACE IN 1918. AN AUDIO-VISUAL ANALYSIS OF THE VIENNESE PERFORMANCE OF THE SILENT FILM “PAX ÆTERNA” Anna Windisch, University of Vienna To discover an original silent film score that can also be matched with the surviving film is a rare and treasurable trove. The Viennese Konzerthaus holds a complete score by Austrian composer Franz Eber, composed for the Danish silent film “Pax æterna” (Nordisk Film, 1917). “Pax æterna” was screened as part of a benefit performance in the main concert hall of the Viennese Konzerthaus on March 18th 1918, an event organized by the women's committee of the Red Cross in order to raise funds for the tuberculosis relief. By analyzing the source material of this performance, both the score and the film (special thanks to Thomas Christensen from the Danish Film Institute), I aim to fathom the composer's approach and style of composing for this film. The score also allows to raise questions about the composer's treatment of sound effects within the music, the implementation of Austrian repertoire and other aesthetic issues. Sources like news papers and trade magazines will help contextualize the performance and give insight into its reception. To put the screening in its cultural-historical perspective, I will discuss the social and political circumstances surrounding the film's exhibition. The insights gained from this analysis will be put into a larger context of silent film accompaniment and Viennese musical life of the early 20th century more general outlining idiosyncrasies in comparison with American or other well-researched traditions. MARIA’S VEILS, SALOME’S MACHINERY: THE DANCE SCENES IN METROPOLIS AND SALOME Monica Chieffo, Tufts University Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) has been judged by critics and scholars as a hallmark in the history of cinema and as the site of contentious statements about modernity, such as the aestheticization of technology and overtly formulaic gender roles. At the center of this discourse is the figure of the female robot Maria. In his influential analysis of the film, Andreas Huyssen notes how the perspective of the camera lens coincides with the male gaze, suggesting that the robot is constructed and subsequently animated by male vision throughout the film narrative. Lang’s crafted, five-minute dance sequence is reduced therefore to an instance of male vision. However, Huyssen leaves out completely any discussion of the orchestral score by Gottfried Huppertz, with whom Lang worked very closely. The film’s recent restoration and release on DVD of the uncut version synchronized to Huppertz’s score allows for a comprehensive interpretation that takes into account both the image and sound as sources of meaning. In this paper, I offer a critical analysis of the way in which music—in addition to visual grammar—regulates and contains dance as a more complex theatrical event. Through Huppertz’s music, this scene is both a spectacle of technology by cinematic means, and a self-contained aesthetic object. Music in particular is the medium that makes the dance present, but that also represents dance. If traditional interpretations have tended to reduce Lang’s imaginative montage to an instance in which woman is generated visually by male desire, here I argue that the insertion of the dance is also a tactic that relies on a certain familiarity with operatic tradition and conventions such as the Dance of the Seven Veils from Richard Strauss’s Salome. MUSICAL COMMON DENOMINATOR BETWEEN PANTOMIME AND FILM IN THE UNITED STATES Gillian Anderson In "Pierrot at the Cinema: the musical common denominator from pantomime to film," (MaMI Vol. 1, no. 1; vol. 2, no. 2 and vol. 6, no. 1), Carlo Piccardi demonstrated the musical connection between pantomime and the cinema in Europe. In this presentation I will explore the connection between the two genres in America. The relationship is not explored in Rick Altman's Silent Film Sound but with some variation many of the things Piccardi found were also true for the US. Cinema was considered a form of pantomime by some but disputed by others. Music was used to elevate both pantomime and the cinema and pantomime's use of music was cited as an example that the cinema should follow. Most importantly, the close synchronization in pantomime seems to have developed in American cinema accompaniments after the New York screening in 1914 of the confusingly titled film Pierrot the Prodigal (L'Histoire d'un Pierrot). It was advertised in the following provocative way: George Kleine has brought to this country and is soon to release a new and unusual kind of motion picture, in which every movement made by a character is fitted to music. It is a story with only a title and no subtitles of any kind. Pierrot, the Prodigal is the unique title and is adapted from the opera [sic pantomime] of that name. The composer of the opera [pantomime], Mario Costa, worked with the producer, writing a line of music for every movement in the film. The picture runs a trifle over three reels. (Washington Times 16 May 1914) To dramatize the relationship I will play examples from L'Histoire d'un Pierrot and from the modern story of D. W. Griffith's Intolerance. By focusing on the connection between pantomime and cinema in America, we can challenge the idea that synchronized sound only came in with the talking pictures and we can identify the common musical challenges that faced the composers who wrote for both genres and are still relevant today. 9. Friday, May 31, 4:00 – 5:30PM. 6 Floor OPERATIC CONVENTIONS AND EXPECTATIONS IN FINAL FANTASY VI Ryan Thompson, University of Minnesota Final Fantasy VI, released for the Super Nintendo in 1996, includes an opera performance as part of the unfolding narrative. The opera sequence, told in three scenes, toys with the player's assumption of how an opera plot unfolds by subverting expectations of the opera's finale; similarly, the narrative of the entire game plays with expectations and assumptions of narrative in a Japanese role-playing game. As a result, the opera, which takes place approximately one-third of the way through the game, neatly summarizes the narrative while foreshadowing a subversion of player expectation regarding the game's ending. Many other elements of Final Fantasy VI also engage operatic conventions. When lead characters are introduced, the game pauses and the screen fades to black as a brief biography of the character is displayed before the player names the character -equivalent to the program notes an opera audience member receives containing a brief biography of the main characters. At the end of the game, before the credits list containing the names of Square-Enix employees is presented, the game's playable characters all reappear in a lengthy orchestral sequence in which the cast is revealed to be taking on the role of characters in the narrative -"Character Name as Edgar Figaro," for instance. These allusions to operatic conventions raise a question: why include them in a game for which the target audience is not the target audience for opera? This essay addresses that question and others that it invites. MASS HISTORIA: REWRITING (MUSIC) HISTORY IN CIVILIZATION IV Kyle Roderick, Texas Christian University While many strategy games (both real-timeand turn-based-) use a fictionalized Earth history as a backdrop for their ludic elements, few seek to faithfully represent the progression of music history via the use of pre-existing music. Soren Johnson’s Civilization IV stands alone as it presents a thorough retelling of music history, with representative works from the Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern Eras, including works by Josquin, Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvořák, and American minimalist composer, John Adams. The game’s lead designer and AI programmer, Soren Johnson, personally selected each track included in the underscoring playlists. Drawing heavily upon new interviews with the game designers, this paper explores Soren Johnson’s personal representation of music history, analyzing in particular his use of John Sheppard’s Media Vita, Saint-Säens’s Cello Concerto No.1, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, and the works of John Adams. I also discuss the implications of Johnson’s personalized version of history and argue that we can identify him with auteur film directors. The paper also addresses the potential for Civilization IV to educate its players in genres they may have been unfamiliar with, helping them contextualize and appreciate previously unfamiliar musics. THE CIVILIZATION IV HISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC Michiel Kamp, University of Cambridge Among media and forms of art, video games possess a unique mode of representation, which Ian Bogost calls procedural rhetoric. In his view, underlying a game’s rules is a set of assumptions about how certain systems in the world work or should work. In Sid Meier’s Civilization IV (Firaxis 2004; Civ IV) players command historical civilizations— such as the Romans, the British or the Mayans—and guide them through roughly 6,000 years of history to become the most advanced, most powerful and/or most influential in the world. The rules and gameplay of Civ IV encompass a wide range of real world systems including warfare, diplomacy and technological development, which all fit into a kind of procedural historiography. The game’s musical soundtrack consists of existing musical pieces, ranging from medieval chant to modern western art music. I argue that through the choices of particular pieces and their allocation to Civ IV’s different historical eras, the game presents us with a rather unique history of music that contributes to its procedural rhetoric. In this history, Bach is a renaissance composer, there are an extraordinary amount of slow symphonic movements and orchestral dances in the pre-modern era, and the sole composer in the modern age is John Adams. These idiosyncratic choices of music are given context by the actions players take to progress through the game— exploration, warfare, expansion—resulting in an emergent but necessarily linear musichistorical narrative that moves from a symphonic German/Eurocentrism to an equally symphonic American centrism. 10. Friday, May 31, 4:00 – 5:30PM. Room 779 HOW DOES WUXIA BECOME GLOBALIZED?: MUSIC IN CONTEMPORARY CHINESE MARTIAL ARTS FILMS Zhichun Lin, Ohio State University The wuxia film is one the oldest genres in Chinese cinema that has retained currency to the present day. Since the 1980s, the wuxia films have not only kept their popularity within China, but have also become an internationally favored film genre. Yet during its progression to globalization, the wuxia film genre itself has struggled to strike a balance between particularization of Chinese cultural origin and a universalization of world market in terms of theme, choreography, nationalism, and transnationalism. Indeed, music plays an important role in identifying, and shaping such a film genre from an indigenous heritage to a transnational production. Therefore, this paper is a preliminary study of music in four wuxia films—Shaolin Temple (1982), Once Upon A Time in China (1990s), Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000), and Hero (2002) from 1980s to recent times. By analyzing several cases of music in theme presentation and in fighting scenes, I will display how music particularizes Chinese wuxia film as a genre evolved from a traditional justice-evil binary narrative to a reality mirrored legend, and then to Oriental fantasy. In the end, I will argue that music partakes both of its roots lie deeply within particular cultural traditions and its routes of well international travel, to assist contemporary Chinese wuxia film form to a genre that is thriving under globalization action, adapting to new conditions and taking on new meanings without losing all connection to its origins. CHINESE OPERATIC “THÉÂTRE FILMÉ” AND ITS DISCONTENT: A COMPARISON BETWEEN THE FLOWER PRINCESS (1959) AND THE LOVE ETERNE (1963) Ho-Chak Law, University of Michigan Chinese opera has been one of the major subject matters as well as an important formal and stylistic influence throughout the history of Chinese-language cinema. In the midtwentieth century, film adaptation of Chinese opera, including the classical kunqu, the national Peking opera, and other more vernacular regional operas such as Cantonese opera and Shaoxing opera, reached its maturity and greatest popularity all over mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Mostly in the form of “théâtre filmé,” many core performance features of Chinese opera remained in these adaptations. Yet, frustrated by the theatrical orientation and expressionist quality of “théâtre filmé,” some filmmakers sought to adapt Chinese opera in a manner that is more cinematically idiomatic. They adopted conventions from Hollywood film musical and utilized cinematic techniques such as film editing and cinematography to a much higher degree. Sharing the same taxonomical category, i.e., Chinese opera film (xiqu dianying), the deviated cinematic representation mentioned above is indeed different from the Chinese operatic “théâtre filmé” in many aspects. Using Cantonese opera film The Flower Princess (Dinü Hua, 1959) and Huangmei operatic film musical The Love Eterne (Liang Shanbo yu Zhu Yingtai, 1963) as examples, this paper differentiates these two forms of cinematic representation in musical, textual, and visual terms, aiming to theorize and establish a more systematic and transparent categorization of Chinese opera film. “SCORING KUBRICK’S 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY”: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF GYÖRGY LIGETI AND ALEX NORTH, AS THEIR MUSIC WOULD APPEAR IN THE FILM Natalie Matias, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand Since the release of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), controversy has surrounded the use of pre-existing “serious concert music" in place of the original score by Alex North. This paper sets out to compare the compositional styles of Alex North and György Sándor Ligeti as their music would appear in the film. Both composers were exploited by Kubrick’s musical decisions. Articles by Paul Merkley and Kate McQuiston highlight the fact that North was informed of Kubrick’s intentions to use pre-existing music such as The Blue Danube and Thus Spoke Zarathustra; however, it is not clear whether North knew about Kubrick’s intent to use Ligeti’s tracks in the first half of the film. The comparison’s main purpose is to discover if there are similarities in the composers’ music. The proposed paper will feature analytical charts that represent a timeline of the music in certain scenes, and it will compare these with sequenced cuttings of the film’s footage. The analysis is condensed into pictorial charts that are examined both vertically and horizontally. These charts help us to see what qualities the composers brought musically to the scenes, and they allow us to collate and compare the data. One of the obstacles faced while performing this study was the accessibility of scores. Ligeti’s scores were accessible, and his music was synced to the film. North’s music on the other hand had to be transcribed, and it was my task to sync the music to the scenes based on Kubrick’s, North’s and Jerry Goldsmith’s notes pertaining to where cues, in most probability would have been placed. Although the nature of the study is hypothetical, the proposed paper will offer some interesting findings, and it will demonstrate a newly developed approach to presenting analytical data. 11. Friday, May 31, 6:00 – 7:30PM. Room 303 SILENT FILMS/LOUD MUSIC: COMPOSERS OF CONTEMPORARY SCORES FOR SILENT FILM COMPARE NOTES Phillip Johnston One of the most oft-repeated truisms of contemporary film scoring is that the music must not draw attention to itself, that it is obligated first and foremost to ‘serve’ the picture/narrative. In addition, the composer has the explicit mandate to express the intentions of the director of the film. Hence the old bromide: music in a film is working best when no one notices it. However, in contemporary scores for silent film, these imperatives disappear. This theoretically frees the composer from both direct interference from others, and the need to adhere to timeworn conventions of commercial film music. Yet, composers working to picture have certain preconceptions/expectations of their role, and carry these into the work they do, regardless of the context. Does a composer feel a responsibility to ‘realize the director’s intent’ or does he/she feel free to ignore or even directly contradict the perceived intention of the director? Is musical anachronism (instruments or styles that postdate the making of the film) an acceptable technique? How does the structure and acting style of a silent film affect the music? In excerpts drawn from interviews with some of the most important contemporary composers for silent film–Richard Marriott (Club Foot Orchestra/USA), Ken Winokur (Alloy Orchestra/USA), and Gus MacMillan (Blue Grassy Knoll/Australia), as well as Richard Einhorn, composer of one of the most unique single contemporary silent film scores (Voices of Light for Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc), this paper will compare different practitioners thoughts about how and why they do what they do. WHEN RAMONES MEET RAVEL: PROPOSING A NEW APPROACH FOR COMPILED SOUNDTRACK ANALYSIS Christine Evans-Millar, University of Otago In Hearing Film: Tracking Indentifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (2001) Anahid Kassabian drew attention to a new breed of compiled soundtracks that had radically challenged the classic Hollywood film score. Soundtracks comprised of both pre-existing and original score music had become the ‘norm’ but, as Kassabian observed, there was little evidence of scholarship addressing this fundamental shift. She maintained these compilations demanded a different analytical approach to understand the relationships between disparate music works on a single soundtrack. In 2012, and thousands of compiled soundtracks later, there continues to be little focus on establishing new ways to analyse contemporary film music and Kassabian’s call for innovation and scholarly study is more compelling than ever. This paper presents a new methodology for soundtrack analysis that answers Kassabian’s call to action and addresses her concerns. I argue that the concept of ‘poetics’ (an analytical perspective originally posited by Aristotle for the study and critique of dramatic poetry and later enhanced by the film scholar David Bordwell) provides a holistic framework for soundtrack analysis. By exploring the preliminary application of the framework to the Rushmore (Anderson, 1998) soundtrack I will exhibit the flexibility and robustness of the method. Furthermore, I will demonstrate how a poetics-based approach can be readily adapted to ask questions of a single soundtrack or across a body of work. Finally, the paper will illustrate how a new paradigm for Film Music Studies — a discipline lacking ‘standard’ methodologies for the examination of contemporary soundtracks — can be realised. THEMATIC TRANSFORMATION IN MODERN ACTION-ADVENTURE FILMS Carter John Rice, Bowling Green State University The use of musical leitmotivs has become a major staple of storytelling in cinema over the last century. More than any other genre, action-adventure films have particularly championed this musical device. Indiana Jones, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Ben-Hur, Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, Superman, Braveheart, and dozens, if not hundreds of other films in the genre have clear, definable, thematic musical material that recurs throughout the movie to reference individual characters and situations. Many avid filmgoers could readily hum the theme to these and many other films if asked. On the contrary, if asked to hum the theme of a more recent action-adventure film, even one of the highest critical and financial success, perhaps The Bourne Ultimatum (2010) one might struggle. Why the inability to recognize and recall a clear leitmotiv? In the last decade, the musical approach to themes in films of this genre has begun to undergo significant evolution. In this paper, I illustrate the way in which the musical leitmotiv in action-adventure films has shifted into material of a different nature, as well as how, and if, this new musical material functions in the place of a traditional leitmotiv. An examination and comparison of thematic material from two films separated by nearly two decades, Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) illustrate the way in which this musical transformation has occurred. 12. Friday, May 31, 6:00 – 7:30PM. 6 Floor ARE YOU EXPERIENCED?: THE LEARNING AND EDUCATION PATHWAYS OF FILM SOUNDTRACK PERSONNEL Natalie Lewandowski, Macquarie University Personnel working in the contemporary film soundtrack industry have a significant creative influence on the feature film as a final product. These specialized soundtrack personnel include the music supervisor, sound designer and composer (Smith, 1998). There are several factors altering the terrain of these personnel, including; multi-tasking, education and work practices. This paper will focus on one of these inter-linked areas, the education pathways of soundtrack personnel. The paper examines how tertiary education, private tuition, apprenticeships, practical experience and self-training (Throsby and Hollister, 2003) are perceived by experienced personnel within the Australian and New Zealand industries. The broad education experiences of local composers and their strong links to the music industry have resulted in a widely disintegrated production base (Street, 2009). Additionally, crossover in soundtrack roles (Mancini, 1985) has affected the manner in which personnel are both educated and employed. Such issues have significant implications on education pathways offered to future soundtrack personnel not only in Australia and New Zealand, but also in larger Anglophone industries. Candid interviewee responses highlight imperative issues for educators to consider and provide an insight into how the education of future soundtrack personnel will shape the direction of film sound industries. Findings are based on ethnographic research with film sound personnel carried out by the author throughout 2007-2013. Participants surveyed covered a large breadth of feature film industry experience with their work spanning 266 feature films released between 1975 and 2012 (thirty-seven years). WORKLOAD DISTRIBUTION AMONG HOLLYWOOD COMPOSERS Vasco Hexel, Royal College of Music This paper addresses the uneven workload distribution among Hollywood film composers working on top-grossing Hollywood films, which impacts on prevailing creative output and practices towards those of a few disproportionately successful individuals. In today’s commercial film market, composers are freelancers who depend on contacts, connections, satisfied customers, and successful projects to regularly find work. As Faulkner observed in 1983, “the freelance Hollywood scene is a bunch of tangible film composers, with various track records and accomplishments, attracting to themselves and their work a population of buyers.” Providing the basis for this paper, a new study in 2010 looked at composers’ workload distribution in the 50 top-grossing Hollywood films each year between 1980-2009. It was inspired by work published by Faulkner in 1983 that investigated a similarly selected set of films for the twenty years prior to 1980. Among other remarkable results, the 2010 study revealed that the top 10% of composers (31 composers) scored 46.4% of all films in the sample. This concentration of market share indicates that these most successful individuals have a wider audience reach and clout within the industry, perpetuating further success and influence. Empire-building Hans Zimmer is a prime example for a composer who has leapt from strength to strength and whose successes have begun to transform the entire field of film music composition. Illustrated with recent examples and based on tangible evidence, this paper raises a number of issues that are of relevance to scholars and practitioners alike. STUDIOS, SYNDICATES, AND THE IMDB: THE EVOLUTION OF COMPOSER NETWORKS IN HOLLYWOOD FILM SCORING Peter Broadwell, University of California, Los Angeles Franco Moretti has argued that the computational analysis of literature and other cultural phenomena constitutes a form of “distant reading” that is particularly effective when it inspires further close readings and other, more traditional modes of humanistic and sociological inquiry. This study uses the “distant” technique of social network analysis to investigate and visualize the evolution of Hollywood film scoring practices from the early sound era to the present, employing freely available software tools and the online records of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) to achieve an unprecedented degree of insight into the creative networks that form between composers and other members of film scoring departments. The IMDb contains extensive information about composer-orchestrator partnerships, cooperative group composition, and the use of “ghost” composers in the approximately 60,000 English-language sound films screened during the past century. A computerized analysis of these records reveals three dominant collaborative paradigms: the rigid, studio-based structures of the Golden Age; a sparse, dispersed meta-network that arose following the demise of the studio system; and the composer syndicates that have begun to coalesce in recent years, which can be either informal or highly regimented (Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions is an example of the latter type). Visualizing and quantifying aspects of these models, such as the interconnectedness of a particular subgroup and the “between-ness” of key musicians, can help illuminate stylistic similarities in the music of closely connected composers and also reveals the significant contributions that prolific “ghost” composers made to the history of film scoring. 13. Friday, May 31, 6:00 – 7:30PM. Room 779 THE SPRING IN SPRINGFIELD: ALF CLAUSEN’S MUSIC FOR SONGS AND “MINI-MUSICALS” ON THE SIMPSONS Durrell Bowman Alf Clausen has composed numerous pieces of music for the TV show The Simpsons (1989), including its various songs and “mini-musicals.” Of these, 1996’s “We Put the Spring in Springfield” and 1997’s “You’re Checkin’ In” both won music Emmys. He was also nominated for the music of additional songs from 1994 to 2005: “Who Needs the Kwik-E-Mart?,” “The Stonecutter’s Song,” “Señor Burns,” “Ode to Branson,” “Everybody Hates Ned Flanders,” “Vote for a Winner,” and “Always my Dad.” In addition, Clausen was nominated for his musical direction of two 1997-98 episodes and for his dramatic underscore of nine of the show’s Hallowe’en episodes from 1991-2010 and three additional episodes in 1993, 2001, and 2008. Awards such as the Emmys only mean so much, and The Simpsons itself has frequently made fun of them. They can, however, serve as a starting point for considering the genres, styles, and specific pieces that are referenced and/or parodied by the works so recognized. For example, “We Put the Spring in Springfield” references rambunctious music-hall “stripper” music of the Jazz Age, “Who Needs the Kwik-E-Mart?” parodies the “tricky” rhythms of classic Broadway dance musicals, “Señor Burns” incorporates Tito Puente’s Afro-Cuban jazz style, one entire episode parodies the fantasy film Mary Poppins, and “Vote for a Winner” evokes Andrew Lloyd Webber’s concept musical Evita. Issues of camp, cultural literacy, cultural hierarchy, and a “no brow” aesthetic will also be addressed. UNDER THE SEA, UNDER THE STARS: THE SONIC CONSTRUCTION OF SPACE AND PLACE IN PIXAR’S FINDING NEMO (2003) AND WALL-E (2008) Colleen Montgomery, University of Texas at Austin Over the past two decades, Pixar has produced thirteen highly successful features and collaborated with thirteen directors/co-directors on a diverse array of animated films. Within this span of time; however, Pixar has only worked with four composers, three of whom have scored all but Pixar’s most recent feature, Brave (2012). Of these principal studio-composer pairings, singer/songwriter Randy Newman and composer Michael Giacchino’s work are routinely foregrounded popular, critical, and promotional discourses on Pixar’s music. Thomas Newman, who scored Pixar’s undersea action-adventure film, Finding Nemo and science-fiction/fantasy film, Wall-E, is seldom addressed in scholarly and journalistic writing on the studio’s film music. Yet, the two Newman-scored films are highly instructive case studies of how sound and music act semantically upon the image track in delineating space, place and location in Pixar films. This paper thus provides a semiotic analysis of Finding Nemo and Wall-E’s sonic construction of underwater and outer space environments. I focus specifically on each film’s musical representation of organic and inorganic loci— made manifest in Wall-E’s oppositional duplet of a post-apocalyptic Earth and the Axiom Spaceship and in Finding Nemo’s juxtaposition of two distinct underwater locales: the ocean and a dental office aquarium. Within these antithetical pairings, sound and music serve to normalize the film’s organic site (Earth, the ocean) as an unmarked space, and simultaneously code the film’s semiotically overdrawn ‘inorganic’ site (the spaceship, the aquarium) as primitive, exotic Other. This dialectical construct is, I argue, achieved through the semantic encoding and demarcation of space and place through sound and