Music Editing: Process to Practice—bridging the Various Perspectives in Filmmaking and Story-telling

S Music and the Moving Image Conference May 27th 29th, 2016 1. Loewe Friday, May 27, 2016, 9:30AM – 11:00AM MUSIC EDITING: PROCESS TO PRACTICE—BRIDGING THE VARIOUS PERSPECTIVES IN FILMMAKING AND STORY-TELLING Nancy Allen, Film Music Editor While the technical aspects of music editing and film-making continue to evolve, the fundamental nature of story-telling remains the same. Ideally, the role of the music editor exists at an intersection between the Composer, Director, and Picture Editor, where important creative decisions are made. This privileged position allows the Music Editor to better explore how to tell the story through music and bring the evolving vision of the film into tighter focus. 2. Loewe Friday, May 27, 2016, 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM GREAT EXPECTATIONS? THE CHANGING ROLE OF AUDIOVISUAL INCONGRUENCE IN CONTEMPORARY MULTIMEDIA Dave Ireland, University of Leeds Film-music moments that are perceived to be incongruent, misfitting or inappropriate have often been described as highly memorable. These claims can in part be explained by the separate processing of sonic and visual information that can occur when incongruent combinations subvert expectations of an audiovisual pairing in which the constituent components share a greater number of properties. Drawing upon a sequence from the TV sitcom Modern Family in which images of violent destruction are juxtaposed with performance of tranquil classical music, this paper highlights the increasing prevalence of such uses of audiovisual difference in contemporary multimedia. Indeed, such principles even now underlie a form of Internet meme entitled ‘Whilst I play unfitting music’. Such examples serve to emphasize the evolving functions of incongruence, emphasizing the ways in which such types of audiovisual pairing now also serve as a marker of authorial style and a source of intertextual parody. Drawing upon psychological theories of expectation and ideas from semiotics that facilitate consideration of the potential disjunction between authorial intent and perceiver response, this paper contends that such forms of incongruence should be approached from a psycho-semiotic perspective. Through consideration of the aforementioned examples, it will be demonstrated that this approach allows for: more holistic understanding of evolving expectations and attitudes towards audiovisual incongruence that may shape perceiver response; and a more nuanced mode of analyzing factors that may influence judgments of film-music fit and appropriateness. MUSICAL META-MORPHOSIS: BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL THROUGH DIEGETIC-IZING AND METACAESURA Rebecca Eaton, Texas State University In “The Fantastical Gap,” Stilwell suggests that metadiegetic music—which puts the audience “inside a character’s head”— begets such a strong spectator bond that it becomes “a kind of musical ‘direct address,’ threatening to break the fourth wall that is the screen.” While Stillwell theorizes a breaking of the fourth wall through audience over-identification, in this paper I define two means of film music transgression that potentially unsuture an audience, exposing film qua film: “diegetic-izing” and “metacaesura.” While these postmodern techniques 1) reveal film as a constructed artifact, and 2) thus render the spectator a more, not less, “troublesome viewing subject,” my analyses demonstrate that these breaches of convention still further the narrative aims of their respective films. Both Buhler and Stilwell analyze music that gradually dissolves from non-diegetic to diegetic. “Diegeticizing” unexpectedly reveals what was assumed to be nondiegetic as diegetic, subverting Gorbman’s first principle of invisibility. In parodies including Blazing Saddles and Spaceballs, this reflexive uncloaking plays for laughs. The Truman Show and the Hunger Games franchise skewer live soundtrack musicians and timpani—ergo, film music itself—as tools of emotional manipulation or propaganda. “Metacaesura” serves as another means of breaking the fourth wall. Metacaesura arises when non-diegetic music cuts off in media res. While diegeticizing renders film music visible, metacaesura renders it audible (if only in hindsight). In Honda’s “Responsible You,” Pleasantville, and The Truman Show, the dramatic cessation of nondiegetic music compels the audience to acknowledge the constructedness of both film and their own worlds. Partial Bibliography Brown, Tom. Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Buhler, James. “Analytical and Interpretive Approaches to Film Music (II): Interpreting Interactions of Music and Film.” In Film Music: An Anthology of Critical Essays, edited by K.J. Donnelly, 39-61. Edinburgh University Press, 2001. Buhler, James, Anahid Kassabian, David Neumeyer, and Robynn Stillwell. “Roundtable on Film Music.” Velvet Light Trap 51 (Spring 2003): 73-91. Buhler, James, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer, eds. Music and Cinema. Hanover: Wesleyan/University Press of New England, 2000. Eaton, Rebecca M. Doran. “Unheard Minimalisms: The Function of the Minimalist Technique in Film Scores.” PhD diss., The University of Texas at Austin, 2008. Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987. Harries, Dan. Film Parody. London: British Film Institute, 2000. Kassabian, Anahid. Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music. New York: Routledge, 2001. Neumeyer, David. “Diegetic/nondiegetic: A Theoretical Model.” Music and the Moving Image 2.1 (2009): 26–39. Stilwell, Robynn J. “The Fantastical Gap Between Diegetic and Nondiegetic.” In Beyond the Soundtrack, edited by Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert, 184202. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2007. REDEFINING PERSPECTIVE IN ATONEMENT: HOW MUSIC SET THE STAGE FOR MODERN MEDIA CONSUMPTION Lillie McDonough, New York University One of the most striking narrative devices in Joe Wright’s film adaptation of Atonement (2007) is in the way Dario Marianelli’s original score dissolves the boundaries between diagetic and non-diagetic music at key moments in the drama. I argue that these moments carry us into a liminal state where the viewer is simultaneously in the shoes of a first person character in the world of the film and in the shoes of a third person viewer aware of the underscore as a hallmark of the fiction of a film in the first place. This reflects the experience of Briony recalling the story, both as participant and narrator, at the metalevel of the audience. The way the score renegotiates the customary musical playing space creates a meta-narrative that resembles one of the fastest growing forms of digital media of today: videogames. At their core, video games work by placing the player in a liminal state of both a viewer who watches the story unfold and an agent who actively takes part in the story’s creation. In fact, the growing trend towards hyperrealism and virtual reality intentionally progressively erodes the boundaries between the first person agent in real the world and agent on screen in the digital world. Viewed through this lens, the philosophy behind the experience of Atonement’s score and sound design appears to set the stage for way our consumption of media has developed since Atonement’s release in 2007. Mainly, it foreshadows and highlights a prevalent desire to progressively blur the lines between media and life. 3. Room 303, Friday, May 27, 2016, 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM HOLLYWOOD ORCHESTRATORS AND GHOSTWRITERS OF THE 1960s AND 1970s: THE CASE OF MOACIR SANTOS Lucas Bonetti, State University of Campinas In Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s, freelance film composers trying to break into the market saw ghostwriting as opportunities to their professional networks. Meanwhile, more renowned composers saw freelancers as means of easing their work burdens. The phenomenon was so widespread that freelancers even sometimes found themselves ghostwriting for other ghostwriters. Ghostwriting had its limitations, though: because freelancers did not receive credit, they could not grow their resumes. Moreover, their music often had to follow such strict guidelines that they were not able to showcase their own compositional voices. Being an orchestrator raised fewer questions about authorship, and orchestrators usually did not receive credit for their work. Typically, composers provided orchestrators with detailed sketches, thereby limiting their creative possibilities. This story would suggest that orchestrators were barely more than copyists—though with more intense workloads. This kind of thankless work was especially common in scoring for episodic television series of the era, where the fast pace of the industry demanded more agility and productivity. Brazilian composer Moacir Santos worked as a Hollywood ghostwriter and orchestrator starting in 1968. His experiences exemplify the difficulties of these professions during this era. In this paper I draw on an interview-based research I conducted in the Los Angeles area to show how Santos’s experiences showcase the difficulties of being a Hollywood outsider at the time. In particular, I examine testimony about racial prejudice experienced by Santos, and how misinformation about his ghostwriting activity has led to misunderstandings among scholars about his contributions. SING A SONG!: CHARITY BAILEY AND INTERRACIAL MUSIC EDUCATION ON 1950s NYC TELEVISION Melinda Russell, Carleton College Rhode Island native Charity Bailey (1904-1978) helped to define a children’s music market in print and recordings; in each instance the contents and forms she developed are still central to American children’s musical culture and practice. After study at Juilliard and Dalcroze, Bailey taught music at the Little Red School House in Greenwich Village from 1943-1954, where her students included Mary Travers and Eric Weissberg. Bailey’s focus on African, African-American, and Caribbean musics, and on ethnomusicological method, make her contributions distinct. From 1954, Bailey experimented with a new form of children’s music education, recreating a music classroom for television. Her innovative and well-received WNBT program, Sing-a-Song, featured Bailey at the piano, teaching children songs, dances, and games. Among the first racially integrated shows in the New York City area, Sing-a-Song was called by one reviewer “a sort of United Nations in miniature.” Using archival sources and interviews with Bailey’s former colleagues and students, I explore the genesis, format, and ultimate cancellation of Sing-a-Song, and offer an analysis of Bailey’s approach. Of particular interest are Bailey’s inclusion of the “home children” carefully assigned musical parts, so that they might learn along with the “studio children,” and her deliberate focus on an early multiculturalism. I will share footage of the single remaining episode of Sing-a-Song. ARTICULATING THE “AMERICAN-LATIN” ON SESAME STREET: THE ROMANCE OF LUIS AND MARIA Aaron Manela, Case Western Reserve University In a 2008 lecture, Sesame Workshop CEO Gary Knell referred to Sesame Street as the longest running telenovela in history, due to the romance and marriage of characters Louis (Emilio Delgado) and Maria (Sonia Manzano). Their relationship began in 1988, Sesame Street’s nineteenth season. It culminated in that season’s finale, a mini-musical wedding with music by Jeff Moss. Broadcast as a series of “street scenes” in between the show’s signature animated clips, many of the musical’s numbers feature Latin dance percussion rhythms, even when they accompany a more standard Broadway style of melodic and harmonic writing. I analyze this musical and other numbers involving Louis and Maria, drawing on John Storm Roberts’s conceptualization of “American-Latin” music, Terese Volk’s history of educational multiculturalism in music, as well as Pablo Vila’s writing on narrative identities in popular music. I explore music, rhythm, lyrics and staging, not only to illuminate the ways in which Moss’s music inscribes the idea of an abstract “Latin” for his child audience, but also to situate them within contemporary discourses of multiculturalism in education and politics. By showing the ways in which music transfers contested cultural signs from one generation to the next, incubating sociocultural ethnic presumptions, I seek to expand and bring attention to the nascent disciplinary study of children’s educational media. 4. 6th Floor, Friday, May 27, 2016, 11:30 AM – 1:00 AM RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN MUSICAL FORMS AND FILM NARRATIVE Vivien Villani, Independent Scholar In all logic, film soundtracks have inherited certain musical forms that developed in classical music over the last few centuries. In the context of movies, some of these forms tend to give the pieces a “geometrical” nature which can resonate deeply with some elements of the narrative and help convey specific feelings to the spectator. This is often the case with the ostinato, the fugato, the passacaglia or the mirror. The effects related to the use of these structures will often be consistent independently of the overall musical mood of the cues (tension, sadness, light-heartedness...). The use of such forms allow for the creation of deeper and richer film scores. Such correlations between musical structure and diegetic elements have been used for a long time by outstanding repertoire film composers like Bernard Herrmann. This study, however, will focus mainly on the work of contemporary composers and on movies produced after the year 2000, in order to focus on works that have generally been less studied. Among the composers whose work will be analyzed: Alexandre Desplat, Howard Shore, Marco Beltrami, Scott Glasgow. The study will be based on movie clips and sheet scores, some of which have been provided directly from the composers. The overall purpose of this presentation is not only to examine some of the deeper aspects of the relationship between music and picture, but also to encourage contemporary film composers to use these tools in the right contexts. VICIOUS CYCLES: SONIC STRUCTURE IN THE COEN BROTHERS’ BLOOD SIMPLE Matthew McDonald, Northeastern University Like almost all of their films, the Coen brothers’ first feature Blood Simple (1984) is the product of a highly collaborative process including the Coens, their composer, Carter Burwell, and their sound editor, Skip Lievsay. Partly because of the extent of this collaboration, the film provides an excellent means of analyzing the ways in which a film’s total sound track can reinforce and shape narrative structure. In this paper, I examine several components of Blood Simple’s sound track and the ways in which they contribute to an underlying cyclical form. These include recurring audiovisual gestures that occur at scene transitions, encapsulating the plot’s escalating violence and providing a large-scale rhythmic framework around which moments of tension and suspense are organized; diegetic songs, whose thematic and stylistic groupings help to articulate the film’s three-act structure; nondiegetic cues, characterized by a ground bass pattern, which drive the plot forward and generate momentum from one act to the next; two instances of Balinese kecak music, which frame the film’s violence; and several audiovisual motifs, including ceiling fans, whose revolutions constitute the film’s most potent symbol. All of these sonic elements contribute to the film’s overall symmetrical patterning. The resulting structure does not function abstractly, however, but provides an expressive vehicle for the film’s noir plot, in which the characters are trapped in an inescapable cycle in which the past is destined to repeat itself. BACH AND STRAUB. MONTAGE AND FUGUE TEXTURE IN THE MOVIE NOT RECONCILED Olivier Bélanger, Université de Montréal The films of Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub’s are tinted by their creators’ musical knowledge. It can be clearly seen in a film like Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach, a movie that represents very accurately the creative acts of J.S. Bach, but it can also be visible in the form of his films which look more as they were composed rather than written. In this paper, I will attempt to shed light on the contrapuntal texture of his movie Nicht Versohnt by analyzing the relation of the film’s montage and narrative repetitions to Bach’s fugue methods. The film is about three generations of architects who live in the same violent climate in different eras (pre-WWI, WWII and BRD during the period of remilitarization). Straub’s film concentrates on his characters’ habits and their similar conformist behavior presented in a complex, anachronic montage of events that leads to a revolutionary act of resistance. Bach’s music, inspired by Lutheran philosophy, represents a form of reaffirmation of the importance of faith over the closed systems of religion generated partly by his music’s montages that allows a personal approach to faith. Straub builds the same kind of intervals to create a way out of the fascist, objective, system he lives in and encourage a revolt against the religion of violence that this system generated. Thought an interdisciplinary approach, I will draw comparisons between Straub and Bach’s aesthetics that generate a sort of malaise or Lutheran despair (Kierkegaard’s ‘‘fortvivle’’) necessary to engage in faith or a true political change. 5. Room 779, Friday, May 27, 2016, 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM KOYAANISQATSI IN PHOTOGRAPHIC DISCOURSE: LACUNAE IN MUSIC AND IMAGE Lindsey Macchiarella, University of Texas at El Paso Roland Barthes claimed that photography and cinema exist in opposition to one another, but are, nonetheless, inseparable (Camera Lucida, 1980). With a narrative that exists only in the realm of hypertextual interpretation, Glass and Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi differs from the traditional narrative film, which strives to communicate an explicit message or story through connected imagery, dialogue, and musical topoi. Visually, the film is a collection of montages, lacking dialogue and characters entirely. Glass’s minimalist score features layered, repetitive ostinati without stereotypical affective and dramatic topoi viewers often rely on to interpret a film. The absence of an explicit teleological goal or conflict in both the sound track and image track creates the illusion of the film’s impartiality; moreover, it generates a lacuna between the filmmakers and their audience. This broad “gap” forces viewers to make sense of the film by relying on their creative imagination to a greater extent than with most other films. This is the same imaginative space that lies between a viewer and a photograph; in any still picture the viewer is responsible for determining the significance of the image or the progression of events that might occur when a narrative is implied. Though Koyaanisqatsi is composed of moving images and sound progressing through time, its lacunae make it, conceptually, more akin to photography than a traditional narrative film. This paper discusses Koyaanisqatsi in terms of Barthes’ continuum between photography and film, illuminating this work’s unique hyper-subjectivity. THE ‘CODE SONG’ IN HITCHCOCK’S THE LADY VANISHES James Wierzbicki, University of Sydney The films of Alfred Hitchcock are famous not just for their suspense but also for their whimsy, demonstrated as much by the director’s trademark cameo appearances as by his use of plot elements that are made to seem very important but which in fact have little to do with the actual stories. Borrowing a term from an old joke about hunting lions in Scotland, Hitchcock called these deliberately misleading elements MacGuffins, and surely one of the most endearing of them occurs in his 1938 The Lady Vanishes. The MacGuffin in this final installment of Hitchcock’s so-called thriller sextet takes the form of a melody that supposedly contains a ‘secret message’ vital to England’s security. Numerous commentators on Hitchcock have discussed the rich comedy that stems from the fact that the person to whom the titular vanishing lady dictates this encrypted melody—an ethnomusicologist who early in the film is shown to have quite a good ear—gets it increasingly wrong every time he hums it to himself; to date, no scholar has entertained the idea that the melody as originally stated might indeed contain a ‘secret message.’ The proposed paper will touch briefly on the long history of musical cryptography, and it will theorize a bit on the triadic relationship between audiences, filmic characters, and plot-related music. The paper’s essence, though, will be an exploration of the ever-evolving Lady Vanishes tune, and its climax will be the decoding of a ‘secret message’ that is quite in keeping with Hitchcock’s style. DOING HIS BIT: AARON COPLAND’S FILM SCORE FOR LEWIS MILESTONE’S THE NORTH STAR (1943) Paula Musegades, Brandeis University Following the collapse of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact between Russia and Germany, America’s Office of War Information encouraged the creation of pro-Soviet films to shed a positive light on America’s newest ally, Russia. Hollywood responded to these requests with Michael Curtiz’s Mission to Moscow (1943), Lewis Milestone’s The North Star (1943), and Gregory Ratoff’s Song of Russia (1944). While each of these films unabashedly promotes the Soviet Union, Milestone’s production remains distinct due its manipulation of music to further disseminate its political mission. Extending far beyond narrative, dialogue, and visuals, The North Star relied heavily on Aaron Copland’s score to bring the film’s messages to life. This paper demonstrates how Copland’s three disparate compositional styles employed throughout The North Star establish the American viewer’s bond with the Soviet Union. Moving chronologically throughout the film, he first inspires these responses with “Coplandized” versions of Russian folk tunes, followed by sparse, soloistic scoring, and concluding with militaristic cues as American viewer and North Star villager join together, fighting for the same goal: to defeat the Nazis. By adopting these markedly different musical styles, Copland manipulates the viewer’s attitude toward America’s involvement in the war. In a complete reversal of its predecessor, the film’s 1957 re-release Armored Attack! warns Americans against the evils of communism. In this version, much of Copland’s score is voiced over or entirely cut out. Such drastic changes indicate the music’s ability to both evoke emotional responses and send powerful political messages to mass audiences. 6. Loewe, Friday, May 27, 2016, 2:00PM – 3:30 PM FOLLOW THE BOUNCING BALL! HOW THE SONG CAR-TUNES ASSEMBLED AN AUDIOVISUAL RUBEGOLDBERG-MACHINE Jan Philip Müller, Universität Basel “Watch the bouncing ball, join in and sing – Everybody!” In 1924, following an order of this kind, an audio-visual object appears in the animated sing-a-long-films called SONG CAR-TUNES by the brothers Max and Dave Fleischer. By following the bouncing ball my talk aims to sketch the workings of this ambiguous object that shoots through fundamental divisions and thereby produces those strange disjunctions that mark audiovisual technologies until this day. 19 century cinematic machines – such as the machine gun or cinematographic apparatuses – can be described specifically as operating between continuous and intermittent motion by differently coupling moving and rigid elements. An incompatibility between these two modes of motion divides film from the phonograph, auditive from visual technologies, and their respective senses. In between the problem of synchronization – if, where and when they should and could be connected – opens up. Meanwhile, the early (silent) animated picture draws its main suspense from the division between still drawing and moving object; especially when it is coupled with the oscillations between organism and mechanism, between wholeness and assembly of parts. In this situation the bouncing ball emerges: It is initially invented as a pointing device moving over technical diagrams, thus instructing army recruits in the operation of machine guns for example, in the assembly and disassembly of their different parts and how they work together. In the SONG CAR-TUNES the bouncing ball mediates between the still and discrete writing of song texts and the moving image, between the flatness of the image and the space of the cinema, clocking the audience to sing a melody together ‘as one’. It thus animates ‘everybody’ to join in a remarkable kind of audiovisual assemblage. The attraction of the SONG-CAR-TUNES then seems to resemble that of a Rube-Goldberg-machine in its strange and surprising ways of coupling mechanic causalities with the contingencies in the anticipations and reactions of living beings and their modes of sense-making. I would like to argue that to follow the trajectory of the bouncing ball allows us to retrace the temporal disjunctions implied in audiovisual media, where their specific aesthetic possibilities between music and moving image unfold. HANS ERDMANN, LUDWIG BRAV & THE CATALOGUING PRACTICE OF GERMANY’S SILENT CINEMA MUSIC: TWO MISREMEBERED FOLLOWERS OF HERMANN KRETZSCHMAR Maria Fuchs, University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna In this paper I address the ‘silent’ film music in Germany of the 1920s against the background of prevalent academic debates about musical form and content, as they were carried out in German-speaking musicological circles around the turn of the twentieth century. I will show that Hermann Kretzschmar’s concept of musical hermeneutic forms the paradigmatic backdrop for the theory and also practice of silent film music. Kretzschmar located the core problem of musicalhermeneutic in the nomenclature of musical expression, which incidentally, formed the basis of silent film accompaniment, respectively the method of musicalillustration. In order to satisfy the musico-dramatic demands of silent film accompaniment, music pieces of various origins were edited and labeled in cinema music collections. To be used in film accompaniment, existing compositions, mostly from the classical European canon or newly composed cinema music pieces, were interpreted for their extra-musical content and classified in specific cinematic categories. Tempers, affects, emotions or specific conventionalized music forms were identified in different compositions and edited for these libraries. By doing this, the music illustration practice for film ties in aesthetically and theoretically with the debates around Hermann Kretzschmar’s concept of musical hermeneutics. On two examples of cinema music collection, which were contributed in the 1920s in Germany – namely Ludwig Brav’s Thematischer Führer durch klassische und moderne Orchestermusik (1928) and the more prominent Allgemeines Handbuch der FilmMusik (1927) – as well as on the basis of the aesthetic discussion about film accompaniment in Germany’s tradepress, I will show the implications of Kretzschmar’s musical hermeneutics. REALISM IN THEORY AND PRACTICE IN EARLY SOUND FILM: THE CASE OF RAPT (1934) Leslie Sprout, Drew University In 1930, poet/screenwriter Benjamin Fondane, lamenting the arrival of sound film, proposed a distinctly anti-realist vision for the new soundtracks: “Noises and dialogue that are exaggerated, deformed, as fake as possible: this is the only use of speech or sound that is likely to maintain all of the benefits of silent film, while altering its form and enriching its hypnotic power.” Meanwhile, composer Arthur Honegger embraced sound film’s potential to communicate the precise meaning of abstract instrumental music—its “reality”—to listeners through close coordination between image and sound. These divergent visions collided in Rapt, the first sound film project of Fondane, Honegger, Honegger’s co-composer Arthur Hoérée, and the experimental director Dimitri Kirsanoff. Characteristically, in writing about Rapt, Honegger declared that he and Hoérée eschewed “descriptive harmonies” in favor of “classic forms,” such as fugue to underscore a chase scene between a dog and a goat, so that “music would retain its autonomy.” However, the scenes I discuss not only demonstrate the ways in which both Honegger’s instrumental and Hoérée’s electroacoustic compositions blur the line between music and sound effect; the soundtrack’s complex interaction with the film’s images also undermines Honegger’s theoretical assumption that what images mean is concrete whereas what music means is abstract. As Fondane predicted, the unstable relationship of film’s visual storytelling to one distinct version of reality provided the opportunity for music, image, and dialogue to work together in Rapt to collectively communicate not just realism, but insight, to the audience of this new, “hypnotic” technology. 7. Room 303, Friday, May 27, 2016, 2:00PM – 3:30 PM GRIEF, MYTH, AND MUSIC IN TOMM MOORE’S SONG OF THE SEA Lisa Scoggin, Independent Scholar Tomm Moore's second feature, Song of the Sea (2014), uses various Irish myths – most notably that of the Selkie – in a relatively modern (1980s) setting to explore ideas of family, intentions, and grief. The family, consisting of a 10-year old boy, a 6-year old girl (and, unbeknownst to them, a Selkie), and their father, are still mourning in various ways the loss of the mother, whom they lost when she gave birth to the girl. As the story progresses, the characters – particularly the boy, as the protagonist of the story – must find a way to work through these emotions in order to save not only the little girl, but the spirit world as well. Perhaps unsurprisingly given current trends in Disney films and other animated features, the music, composed by Bruno Coulais in partnership with the Irish folk group Kíla, plays a central part in this story, particularly in relation to grief and other emotions. Unlike most Disney features, however, it is the actual act of making music, so vital to Irish myth and culture, which often propels the story forward as much or more than any lyrics that may occur, literally affecting both the emotional and physical makeup of many of the characters. This paper will consider the ways in which Song of the Sea combines music and myth to explore loss, grief, and recovering from them. MICKEY MOUSING, PERFORMANCE, AND DRAMATIC INTEGRATION IN DISNEY’S EARLY ANIMATION Daniel Batchelder, Case Western Reserve University This project examines the development of the Disney animation studio’s approach to the dramatic integration of music and narrative from its first sound cartoons through its foray into feature-length musicals. Key to the creation of these animated performance spaces is the aptly named strategy of mickey-mousing. Easily recognized and often maligned, mickey-mousing is frequently perceived as a violation of diegetic integrity. Yet in an animated film, the limits of what constitute a diegesis become blurred. To that end, an analytical approach that is specific to the animation medium is needed. Beginning with 1928’s Steamboat Willie, the Disney studio developed a systematic approach to audiovisual synchronization, graphically preplanning moments of alignment. Although this was fundamentally a practical solution to challenges presented by the still-novel medium of animation, Disney increasingly pursued mickey-mousing’s aesthetic and dramatic potentials. I draw on the work of Scott McMillan, Paul Wells, Richard Dyer, and others to examine these possibilities, including mickey-mousing’s utility as a tool for comedic gags and the quasi-utopic quality of sounds and images interacting in balletic symbiosis–features the studio explored in its fascinating Silly Symphony series. Finally, I investigate the ways in which sequences of hyper-explicit audiovisual synchronicity are used to delineate onscreen performance spaces. As I will demonstrate, all of these elements became fundamental components of Disney’s approach to constructing feature-length musical comedies. All told, this project offers a mode of analysis that is specific to music in animation and helps to account for how Disney’s early musicals operate. SELLING SINGING PRINCESSES: FEMALE VOCAL PERFORMANCE IN FROZEN AND BRAVE Colleen Montgomery, University of Texas, Austin Disney animation’s representational politics, particularly vis-à-vis women and gender, have long been the subject of academic debate. Indeed, numerous feminist scholars have examined the aesthetic codes, narrative conventions, and ideologies undergirding Disney’s, and more recently, its subsidiary, Pixar’s representation of animated female characters/female subjectivity. However, this literature fails to address the crucial role female vocal performance plays within these representational economies. Similarly, though scholars including Silverman, Lawrence, Sjogren, and Greene have analyzed the female voice in cinema through numerous theoretical lenses, their studies do not examine female vocal performance in animation. Thus, putting feminist scholarship on Disney/Pixar animation’s representation of women in dialogue with existing work on the female voice in cinema, this paper offers a comparative analysis the relationship between the female voice, the female body (animated/material), and female subjectivity in Frozen (2013) and Brave (2012). Although both films attempt to revise the problematic ‘Disney princess’ model of passive/domesticated femininity, their female vocal performances highlight important differences in their representational politics and the industrial logics informing them. Extending Fleeger’s work on the relationship between Disney princesses’ vocal performance styles and changing modes of production in animation, I consider how each studios’ corporate branding discourses and economic imperatives shape the films’ female speaking/singing subjects and vocal performance styles. I thus combine textual analysis of each film’s female vocal performance styles/strategies with an industrial analysis of the ways in which female voice actors/singers are discursively constructed in the films’ promotional campaigns. Works Cited: Fleeger, Jennifer. “The Disney Princess: Animation and Real Girls.” In Mismatched Women: The Siren’s Song Through the Machine, 106–36. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Greene, Liz. “Speaking, Singing, Screaming: Controlling the Female Voice in American Cinema.” The Soundtrack 2, no. 1 (2009): 63–76. doi:10.1386/st.2.1.63_1. Lawrence, Amy. Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Sjogren, Britta H. Into the Vortex: Female Voice and Paradox in Film. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror the Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. 8. 6th Floor, Friday, May 27, 2016, 2:00PM – 3:30 PM CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE—SORT OF: SOUNDTRACK CHOICES IN BEAT HAZARD ULTRA Enoch Jacobus, Independent Scholar Players have been able to insert their own music into console and computer games for some time now. But Beat Hazard Ultra, an arcade-style shooter available on a wide variety of platforms, capitalizes on this concept by making a player’s choice of music structure the gaming experience. Beat Hazard Ultra offers little that is revolutionary or even original in terms of concept or graphic sophistication. It’s gameplay mechanics do not differ widely from its 1979 predecessor Asteroids, with the singular exception that it provides a uniquely customizable audiovisual experience. Player choice (or the illusion thereof) has also been an element of video-game design for quite some time, but arcade shooters are not usually where one sees such efforts. Yet Beat Hazard Ultra appropriates a player’s choice of music and redeploys it to act as both an incentive and challenge to finish a given level. What I find especially compelling about this game is the way I, as a player, can set the tone of the experience; in so doing, I can choose a soundtrack that makes the relatively banal mechanics feel epic, lonely, desperate, even humorous. I support my discussion of this surprisingly addictive element with the help of Karen Collins's research into game interactivity, Michael Bull’s work with iPod users’ perceptions of their surroundings, and Gonzalo Frasca’s concepts of ludus and paidia, which situate the game in the interstices between categorical types. COURTING AND CREATING SONIC DISGUST IN ALIEN: ISOLATION (PS4, 2014) Beth Carroll, University of Southampton Alien: Isolation has won awards and accolades for its sound (e.g. BAFTA – Audio Achievement) and this paper will explore the role sound and music play in inspiring disgust in the gamer. The Alien series (1979-2014) has long engaged with discourses on body horror and abjection, aspects central to feelings of disgust. Abjection is the need to push away that ‘which is opposed to I’, to reject reminders of your own mortality and which threaten the sense of self (Kristeva). Alien: Isolation (PS4) enables the gamer’s environment to impact on the audio-visual landscape of the game; sounds the gamer makes whilst playing can alert the monstrous alien to the presence of the gamer’s onscreen avatar, inevitably leading to death; the ultimate abjection. The recorded score for Alien: Isolation will be examined in order to argue that it is the video game medium’s ability to enable the gamer to ‘compose’ music and sound that enhances the fear and complicity of disgust and abjection. Interactivity in videogames has been a strong focus of recent theorising (c.f. Game Studies), and Alien: Isolation epitomises these discourses. The gamer’s creation of sound interweaves with the music to instigate an emotional response. The soundscape of Alien: Isolation becomes more interesting when one considers that the PS4’s noise detection technology means that not only is the game audio-led (sound and music instigating action) but that, paradoxically, silence becomes desirable. This paper will argue that the game’s soundtrack is the driving force behind both action and feelings of disgust. CELESTIAL TRANSFORMATIONS: SIGNIFICATION IN REMIXES OF THE STAR THEME IN SUPER MARIO Danielle Wulf, Florida State University In many video games, sound is an integral component of a player’s experience. For instance, a shift in music away from a specific level’s song relays information to the player about a change in the game environment. Following Karen Collins’s (2013) conception of kinesonic synchresis, wherein sounds gain meaning by association with an action in a game, I argue that, through a player’s initial exposure to the star theme in Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. in conjunction with gaining invincibility, a player comes to associate the music with the change of state of Mario. This mechanism of aurally signifying such a transformation is not unique to the Super Mario series. However, the music is treated differently; in Pacman, the sounds correspond to transformation of the ghosts, and in Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog 2, the music for the invincibility theme differs across the series and rereleases. Thus, the recurring star theme of Super Mario Bros. offers a compelling example of musical signification of a change in state. I suggest that powerups in the Super Mario series fall into two categories based on the music that accompanies them. Those granting invincibility, however partial, involve a change of state for Mario. Beyond the distinction between powers and changeof-state, I examine various remixes of the star theme from later games and demonstrate music’s ability to signify a transformation to an invulnerable state, and to communicate nuanced meaning to players. 9. Room 779, Friday, May 27, 2016, 2:00PM – 3:30 PM SAMBA FOR SURVIVAL: SOUNDTRACKING URBAN VIOLENCE IN CITY OF GOD AND ELITE SQUAD Kariann Goldschmitt, Wellesley College Ever since the international success of Black Orpheus [Orfeu Negro] in the late 1950s, there have been few film musical cliches on Brazilian topics as persistent as the slum dweller surviving to the beats of samba. As films told against the backdrop of Brazilian slums have expanded to include the darker subject matter of drug trafficking and corruption, so too has the accompanying film music. It is now common to hear soundtracks drawing from soul, baile funk, and hip-hop for films depicting urban poverty and violence in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Yet, despite those gestures towards urban musical realism, the sounds of samba persist. This is especially the case for City of God [Cidade de Deus] (2002), a film that was vaunted to the international film awards circuit, and continues in Elite Squad [Trope de Elite] (2007). Despite their success, both films have been critiqued for sensationalizing urban violence and reinforcing international stereotypes. This presentation argues that the continued use of samba in these films extends its role as a musical representation of national essence. Through adaptations of pre-existing music and original scores, I show how samba serves as a musical topic for sequences that highlight a character's ability to improvise or thrive, tapping into the Brazilian ethos of jeitinho or "finding a way" through structural inefficiencies. Samba’s persistence demonstrates the challenge of expanding the market of Brazilian films abroad among audiences with little knowledge of the musical diversity of urban slums. TAP DANCE ON SCREEN: FROM STYLISTIC VARIABILITY TO CINEMATIC UNIFORMITY Veronika Bochynek, University of Salzburg, Austria Tap dance constitutes an indispensable part in production numbers of musical shorts and film musicals. Through the connection of dance movements and sound production tap dance contributes substantially to creating visual and audible spectacle. Therefore, tap dancers perform at the interface between dance and music. On the basis of the movement analysis method Movement Inventory by Claudia Jeschke using tools from Labanotation, I examine different tap dance styles regarding their movement concepts in relation to sound production and medial aspects of the production numbers. Therefore, I complement Movement Inventory, which focuses on movement production, with the categories sound production and staging to reveal interactions between movement, sound and film in the development of the musical short and film musical. The analysis of tap dance scenes in representative musical shorts of the 1930s and film musicals of the 1940s and 1950s shows that early film productions contained a high variability of tap dance styles. Tap dance styles were characterized by different movement concepts brought forward by tap dancers Bill Robinson, Hal Le Roy, the Nicholas Brothers, and others. In contrast, later productions did not display as many different tap dance styles and dancers as before. Instead, they stood out through a cinematic usage of tap dance and its mixture with different dance forms, performed by only a few tap dancers such as Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly. My analysis describes the development of tap dance styles on screen and reveals how tap dance uniquely interacts with the medium film through vision and sound. DANCING WITH THE BROADCAST: ENERGETIC INTERPRETANTS ON THE RADIO Emily Lane, Northwestern University Performances of dance highlight visuality and physicality, yet in the 1930s and 1940s the music and sounds of tap dance performances were often circulated on the radio, consequently unaccompanied by any visual element. In this paper, I investigate the ways the listening mind contributes to this perceptive boundary-crossing experience within tap dance on the radio through cross-modal experiences of radio, film and participatory dancing. Previous scholarship has addressed the ways that acousmatic sound is used to create a “theatre of the mind.” Extending this insight, I demonstrate that, through its situation in a network of historical and cultural signs, radio-dance manifests what C.S. Pierce calls energetic interpretants – a physical or mental reaction created as an effect of the sign in the listener. “Aural” dances permeated diverse radio genres – narrative stories, variety shows, and even instructional dance segments. These shows are incredibly effective in portraying movement through the sounds of tap dance on air, encouraging listeners to visualize it in their minds and feel it in their bodies. Many musicals, reviews, and comedy hours used tap dance as part of their programs, and a great number of performers participated, though none to the degree and acclaim of Fred Astaire. Using his film and radio performances as an example, I argue that an intermedial and historically-situated analysis of a number of radio shows illustrates the ways that aural media can create a sense of visual movement in the mind and body of the listener through a historical, cultural and creative orientation. 10. Loewe, Friday, May 27, 2016, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM SILENCE BOTH CASUAL AND FORMAL: THE INFLUENCE OF THE STEREOPTICON, TRAVELLING FILM AND NICKELODEON SHOWS ON MUSICAL PRACTICES FOR THE MOTION PICTURE Gillian B. Anderson, Orchestral conductor Supplementing work by Charles Musser, Rick Altman, and Eileen Bowser, this presentation will describe the sound practices associated with stereopticon slide shows and moving pictures to 1908 in order to suggest the long lasting musical influence these may have had on the motion picture. Around the turn of the 20 century, the public’s fascination with the machine appears to have habituated audiences to moving images accompanied only by the inoffensive click, click, click of the projectors or the casual background noise of the record player or mechanical hailer outside. A 19 second absolute silent scene from Way Down East, however, exemplifies a not infrequent feature of score and cue sheets from the later mute film era. While these were reported to be taking a page from high class theatrical dramas, a case will be made that practices common with stereopticon slide, travelling moving picture and nickelodeon shows prepared audiences to intuit the inherent musicality of some of the images and for the use of actual silences within later accompaniments. Live music was used as an attraction (between the films or for illustrated song slides) but rarely was it reported to have served as accompaniment to the films, whereas sound effects made from behind the screen were an increasingly common phenomenon. Sound of some sort was always associated with these shows, but it was considerably different from the constant live musical presence associated with pantomime or even its occasional presence in melodrama. After 1914 both practices appear to have been absorbed into moving picture accompaniments. And it will be suggested that the continued influence of the slide, travelling and nickelodeon shows and their emphasis on “lifelike” reproduction may be seen today in the avoidance of background music on the evening news and in the development of conventions about when to stop and start the music. CINEMATIC LISTENING AND THE EARLY TALKIE Jim Buhler, University of Texas, Austin Scholarship on the transition to sound has focused on, among other things, the economic issues driving the change, the effect of recorded and reproduced sound on filmmaking, the disruption of the existing system of production and exhibition, resistances to the talking film among filmmakers and theorists, and the cultural negotiations required to establish the conventions of the sound film. But less attention has been paid to a more basic and fundamental question: how was electronically reproduced sound made to be recognized and accepted as properly cinematic? In fact, during the years of the transition the trade and news press noted frequent complaints against recorded sound, both from those inside the industry who were suspicious of the new technology disrupting their work habits and from the public which was curious but uncertain about the conventions of [recorded] sound film. These complaints ranged from dialogue that was too loud, too deliberate, and technical difficulties with reproducing sibilants to overly intrusive and distracting sound effects. But special ire was reserved for recorded synchronized scores though the ability to provide such music remained one of the chief early selling points of the technology. This paper examines some of these early reactions to [recorded] sound film and looks at strategies filmmakers developed to convince filmgoers that recorded sound and music could be cinematic. MUSICAL STEREOTYPING AMERICAN JEWRY IN EARLY FILM Daniel Goldmark, Case Western Reserve University This paper explores how the music associated with turn of the century American Jewry was cultivated and shaped largely by the evolving mass-media/entertainment industry—vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, theatre, Broadway—and crystallized in early cinema. For a range of reasons, the various entertainment industries developed a more or less unified sound of the music of Jews portrayed in popular music, mainstream cinema, and (as a result) the larger mass culture in America, transforming music that had had historical links with Jewish themes into little more than cultural stereotypes. I will show how devices of mass culture that seem to have no origin—such as musical tropes—have their histories effaced, whether intentionally or simply through ignorance. By tracing how the musical profiling of ethnic groups was first practiced on stage and then perfected among music publishers, I show how vaudeville, Broadway, and most importantly Hollywood had a ready-made arsenal of musical codes to drawn on when the frequent occasion arose for a “Jewish scene” or “Hebrew situation.” By the time the sound film era began in Hollywood—ushered in by the most famous Jewish assimilation film ever, The Jazz Singer (1927)—the sound of American Jewry was not only cliché, it was a stereotype. This paper furthers the discussion on the ways in which themes of assimilation surface in music from this period, and how the identity politics in play for Jews at this time directly influenced how this music was received and understood. 11. Room 303, May 27, 2016, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM WALL·E-, HIPSTERS, AND ME: YEARNING FOR FORMER YEARS (?) Kent Kercher, New York University Jason Sperb posits, regarding the titular character in Andrew Stanton’s WALL·E (2008), that “[he] becomes a stand-in for the nostalgic impulses that dominate contemporary popular culture at the dawn of the twenty-first century, longing for a period he himself never experienced”–in other words, WALL·E is an avatar for the fond, self-aware anachronism endemic to the “Hipster” generation. Indeed, the whole film of WALL·E-–particularly its nearly-wordless first act–is rife with broadly nostalgia-generating content. Visually, Stanton provides, e.g., the affect of anamorphic widescreen artifacts; WALL·E’s semiotic use of various well-known mass-produced late-20 century ephemera; the sepia-toned lighting and landscapes; and even the inclusion of Hello Dolly! (1969). This paper will examine how Thomas Newman’s musical decisions in the score to WALL·E aurally heighten the effect of Stanton’s retrospective visual language. It will show how Newman expertly uses his postmodern composition style to weave together anachronistic, self-aware elements in three ways: his hyperorchestral minimalist underscore; the choices of pre-existing non-diegetic music; and his final theatrical score vis-à-vis Stanton’s original temp track. It will then tie each element to the whole to produce a cogent argument for WALL·E-, the Robot for the “Hipster” generation. BORROWING BEYOND THE STARS: JAMES HORNER’S MUSIC FOR STAR TREK II AND III Michael William Harris, University of Colorado, Boulder Prior to his death, James Horner had been a controversial figure among fans and critics of film music. Since he rose to fame via his scores for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), Horner had been dogged by accusations of plagiarism and lawsuits filed by the estates of composers from whose works he may have borrowed. But besides appropriating from others, Horner also borrowed from himself, and many of his musical signatures first appeared in his Trek scores. However, the genesis of many of the musical ideas in these films came in an earlier Horner score. Lesser known than Wrath of Khan and Search for Spock is Horner’s music for the 1980 Roger Corman-produced film Battle Beyond the Stars. In many ways, the music for Battle can be heard as the temp track for Khan and Spock, as there are numerous passages in the score that Horner reworked for his Trek scores. In this paper, I will examine these scores and explore the many instances in which Horner copied from himself, but also note where he borrowed from others, including Jerry Goldsmith’s score for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). The aim of this paper is not to add to the voices condemning Horner and his possible plagiarism, but rather to examine the origins of many of his musical signatures and further demonstrate the lasting reach Star Trek and Battle Beyond the Stars had on his Horner’s musical legacy. THE DANGER THEME: THE QUESTION OF SELF-PLAGIARISM AND RECYCLING MUSICAL MATERIAL IN FILM MUSIC Nicholas Kmet, New York University Few film composers have a calling card as well-known as the late James Horner’s “danger theme,” a motif he repurposed numerous times throughout his career in scores for films as varied as The Mask of Zorro (1998), Avatar (2009), Enemy at the Gates (2001), and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). While the “danger theme” stands out as a prime example, Horner was well-known (and often derided) for reusing other melodic material between his many film scores. However, in the lexicon of Hollywood film composers, he hardly stands unique in that practice. Hans Zimmer is almost equally as guilty, and even the most venerated composers—such as John Williams—have reused material between scores. This is, however, not unique to film composers; concert composers have engaged in the practice of reusing material between pieces for as long as music has been written. The demands of film scoring, though, often force composers to reuse material in ways they would likely prefer to avoid. Temp scores, short deadlines, and the fact that they are often hired for previous work all contribute heavily to pressuring composers into self-plagiarism. The rise of film music production studios, such as Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions, has only complicated the issue further. This paper contextualizes this aspect of film scoring through a presentation of musical examples, an examination of industry practices that encourage composers to reuse musical material, and a discussion of the implications of this practice for film music as an artistic medium. 12. 6 Floor, May 27, 2016, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM PLAYING TO WHAT? ENABLING SIMILARITY IN INTERACTIVE AUDIOVISUAL CONTEXTS Michiel Kamp, Utrecht University What does it mean to ‘play along’ with game music? Over the past few years, several scholars have given accounts of instances in which players experience themselves performing actions ‘to’ a game’s music. Kiri Miller talks about how Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas allows players to play with or against their avatar CJ’s culture and personality by choosing radio stations (2012); William Cheng notices how a particular cadence in a Sousa march compelled him to detonate a nuclear bomb in Fallout 3, because it was the ‘theatrical or cinematic thing to do’ (2014, p. 47). But these moments are not pervasive in games. Unlike the ‘kinesonic synchresis’ of sound effects and player action that Karen Collins points out (2013, drawing on Chion 1994), music’s ‘kinesonic synchronization’ is perhaps less dictated by the temporal coincidence of audiovisual events, and more by what Nicholas Cook calls the ‘enabling similarity’ between music and image (1998). In this paper, my intent is to both trace out the implications of moving from a non-interactive music-image model to an interactive music-action model, while simultaneously considering some of the parameters involved in ‘ludic’ enabling similarity. In other words, what could players experience themselves playing along to? By comparing several short case studies ranging from the obvious (running along to Super Mario Bros.’s power-up music) to the more complex (moving along to emotionally charged moments of loss in games such as The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and The Last of Us), I hope to deepen our understanding of the ways in which players hear and interact with game music. Referenced literature Cheng, William. (2014). Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Chion, Michel. (1994). Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press. Collins, Karen. (2008). Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cook, Nicholas. (1998). Analysing Musical Multimedia. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Miller, Kiri. (2012). Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. THE SOUNDS IN THE MACHINE: HIROKAZU TANAKA’S CYBERNETIC SOUNDSCAPE FOR METROID William Gibbons, Texas Christian University Like many works of late twentieth-century science fiction, the videogame Metroid (Nintendo Entertainment System, 1986) focuses on the rapidly blurring boundaries between humanity and technology. The game’s protagonist spends the entirety of the game encased in a cybernetic suit that obscures her human identity while providing superhuman abilities; its antagonist, meanwhile, is an organic brain wired to computers that grants her control over a massive underground complex. Metroid’s audio design plays a crucial role in depicting this uncanny mixture of the electronic and the organic. Eschewing the typical melodybased scores popularized by composers such as Koji Kondo (Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda), Hirokazu Tanaka’s unconventional sound design instead employed the technology of early game audio to create timbres evocative of electronic art music. By doing so, he hoped to (in his words) make players “feel as if they were encountering a living creature” by creating a soundscape “without any distinctions between music and sound effects.” Tanaka consistently blurs the boundaries not only between music and sound effect, but also between diegetic and non-diegetic sound, and between organic and electronic sources. Using the “living circuits” of Louis and Bebe Barron’s well-known electronic score for the film Forbidden Planet (1956) as both model and forerunner of Tanaka’s work, this paper explores how Metroid’s “cybernetic” sound design both reflects the game’s narrative and resonates with 1980s preoccupations with the electronic nature of video games. PLAYING GAMES / PLAYING MUSIC: AMATEUR MUSICAL ARRANGEMENTS FROM VIDEO GAMES Jonathan Waxman, Hofstra University Video game music arrangements played by professionals in a concert hall setting have become increasingly popular as performing groups seek to leverage the games’ popularity in order to increase ticket sales. During this same time, fans of the games have also created arrangements and performed video game music, increasingly in academic settings. In the last fifteen years, as video game consoles have become more technologically powerful, the music has also become increasingly complex. Music publishers have licensed and released more advanced video game sheet music collections and amateurs have been creating their own arrangements of music and sharing them on the internet. This paper will be devoted to two related case studies on amateur video game music. The first, video game sheet music for the Final Fantasy series published by Yamaha Music Media, focuses on examples from Final Fantasy VI (1994) and Final Fantasy IX (2000) to show the increasing complexity of the arrangements. The second will focus on arrangements created by college students. While student run "Gamer Symphony Orchestra" clubs, such as those at the University of Maryland and Ithaca College have arisen, students also have begun to create arrangements as part of their degree programs. I will draw on the example of two Hofstra University students creating and performing a string quintet arrangement of the music for the Mass Effect series. Starting as a project for an arranging class, the students were able to expand and perform this work in their recital accompanied by video and images from the game series. The increasing prevalence of these performances at universities shows the reticent acceptance of video game music arrangements in the academy. 13. Room 779, May 27, 2016, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM BUMPERS AND THE “GUZINTOS” AND “GUZOUTOS” OF TELEVISION ADVERTISING BREAKS Sarah Hall, University of Leeds Composers face a range of challenges unique to scoring for television; one of the most prominent is the question of how to approach and return from advertising breaks in a musically coherent way. This paper aims to distinguish the terminology used for techniques that bridge advertising breaks such as 'bumpers' and 'act-ins'/'act-outs' as well as examine the issues these breaks raise for television composers, primarily from the perspective of film and television composer Trevor Jones. Jones has scored a broad range of television programme types and genres produced in the UK, US and other markets, since the beginning of his career in the late 1970s up to the present day, and has had much experience with writing music for bumpers (or in his own words, "guzintos" and "guzoutos") and dealing with the problems interruptions by advertising breaks cause. Drawing on unique archival resources obtained from the Trevor Jones archive at Leeds University, which includes track sheets, VHS tapes and audio files, as well as Jones's personal insight of the process informed through interviews undertaken with the composer himself, a picture can be constructed of how advertising breaks can affect both the musical compositional process and the narrative of television programmes. LISTENING TO SHELL’S [FILMS] Annette Davison, University of Edinburgh In this presentation I explore the place of music and sound in what might be called “soft persuasion”: the audiovisuality of industrial or sponsored films where the aim is to generate positive public relations, as opposed to indoctrination or direct marketing. Such hybrid films synthesise expressive characteristics from narrative feature films and as well as aspects of documentary, but many could usefully be described as drama-documentaries. Drawing upon examples from films produced by the Shell Film Unit in the 1950s (the longest surviving in-house industry-based production unit in Britain), I will suggest ways in which “soft persuasion” via music and sound might be theorised. TROPE-SNATCHING: MUSICAL METAPHOR, GENRE, AND NARRATIVE IN INVASION (2005-2006) Robynn Stilwell, Georgetown University The short-lived ABC-TV series Invasion uses the science-fiction trope of body-snatching to explore a range of issues on multiple layers: identity in relationship to blended families, adolescence, authority, reproduction, trauma, and community, in the context of climate change, the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, the culture of conspiracy theories, and evolution. Our heroic point-of-view character, park ranger Russell Varon, introduces us to our nemesis in Sheriff Tom Underlay, but we gradually realize that Russell’s distrust of Tom — who is now married to Russell’s ex-wife — renders Russell an unreliable narrator. The music has a similar propensity for duality; as the presentation will elucidate, the thematic red-herrings are pervasive, but never genuinely deceptive. New information gives us new perspectives that add resonance and complexity. Just as Tom Underlay transforms from Southern Gothic villain to tragic hero, themes work in one way upon introduction but reveal layers as the story evolves: a rocking/circular theme in the vein of The Twilight Zone/The Outer Limits/The X-Files themes is unsettling, but also evokes the deep ocean waves that conceal the narrative’s mysteries, and gradually exposes its fundamental function as symbol of family and community. A fiddle tune lends the show an earthy Coplandesque Americanness, but also appears in the guises of eerie lament and of Pärtian holy minimalism in re faith; its attachment to Tom carries deeper connections to the overarching theme of evolution and to his highly tested sense of self. 14. Loewe, Friday, May 27, 2016, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM THE PARADOX OF FILM MUSIC “INAUDIBILITY”: INATTENTIONAL DEAFNESS, SUBLIMINAL PERCEPTION AND SUBSIDIARY AWARENESS Marko Rojnić, University of Zagreb Film music seems to have a paradoxical status. On the one hand, it is suggested that film music should be „inaudible“, inconspicuous to the viewer (like continuity editing should be „invisible“, smooth), while at the same time acknowledging that it affects viewers' cinematic experience (e.g., Gorbman, 1987; Kalinak, 1992). Thus, the puzzling question is: how can film music serve narrative functions if viewers are at the same time unaware of it? Most accounts emphasized that film music operates on an unconscious level, without further elaboration and despite different understanding of what „unconscious listening“ might entail. In an attempt to provide an explanation, this paper has three parts. First, drawing on Cohen's (2001) remark about „inattentional deafness“, and building on recent research of the phenomenon (e.g., Dalton & Frankel, 2012; MacDonald and Lavie, 2011), I will explore whether this phenomenon could be an explanation of the „inaudibility“ of nondiegetic music. Second, although Smith (2009) justifiably questions this explanation, I will explore his proposal that film music is perceived without conscious awareness, on a subliminal level (e.g., Dretske, 2006; Merikle, Smilek & Eastwood, 2001). Finally, I will suggest third explanation by adapting distinction between „focal awareness“ and „subsidiary awareness“ in tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1962; Polanyi & Prosch, 1975; Turković, 2007) to the explanation of film music's status. In other words, I'll try to argue that this idea nicely complements both inattentional deafness and subliminal perception explanations, and offers a potential resolution of the paradox. Preliminary bibliography Cohen, A. J. (2001). Music as a source of emotion in film. In: P. N. Juslin & J. A. Sloboda (Eds.), Handbook of music and emotion: Theory, research, applications (pp. 249-272). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dalton, P. & Fraenkel, N. (2012). Gorillas we have missed: Sustained inattentional deafness for dynamic events. Cognition, 124(3), 367-372. Dretske, F. (2006). Perception without awareness. In: T. S. Gendler & J. Hawthorne (Eds.), Perceptual experience (pp. 147-180). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gorbman, C. (1987). Unheard melodies: Narrative film music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kalinak, K. (1992). Settling the score: Music and the classical Hollywood film. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. MacDonald, J. S. P. & Lavie, N. (2011). Visual perceptual load induces inattentional deafness. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 73(6), 1780-1789. Merikle, P. M., Smilek, D. & Eastwood, J. D. (2001). Perception without awareness: Perspectives from cognitive psychology. Cognition, 79(1-2), 115-134. Polanyi, M. (1962). Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy. London: Routledge. Polanyi, M. & Prosch, H. (1975). Meaning. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Smith, J. (2009). Music. In: P. Livingstone & C. Plantinga (Eds.), The Routldge companion to philosophy and film (pp. 184-195). London and New York: Routledge. Turković, H. (2007). Myth of imperceptibility of film music. The Croatian Cinema Chronicle, 13(50), 3-16. VIEWING THE WRONG SIDE OF THE SCREEN IN EXPERIMENTAL ELECTRONICA PERFORMANCES Sonya Hofer, Independent Scholar While there is considerable attention in music and media studies on works that jump to the screen, from MTV, to Blu-ray ballets, to the Black Swan, to videogames, in this paper I look at works that jump behind the screen. Perhaps the most pervasive and poignant critique of experimental electronica performances concerns the use of the laptop as the main “live” instrument. A widely observed lack of visual spectacle and gesture by the performer, prompted by the use of the laptop, is read as lifeless, disengaged, tedious, and possibly effortless and automated by audiences. In this mode of performativity, the figurative “curtain”—or literally the backside of the screen—becomes what is viewed in the live setting, thus offering a curious perspective on mediatized musical contexts. And this backside of the screen, for something that we encounter perhaps just as frequently as the front face of the screen itself, is drastically under-theorized. The laptop is central to the conception and the experience of experimental electronica, with direct and clearly annunciated qualitative consequences. For this reason, and the very fact that I write this paper on a laptop, I want to pick deeper into the meaningfulness of our relationships with laptops, by thinking phenomenologically about screens. In considering screenness, I examine key performances by acclaimed experimental electronica musician Tim Hecker. Closely evaluating each live set and taking cues from their critical reception, I employ screenness as a mode framing our experiencing of the music, as it impacts our assumptions and expectations about laptop performativity, and also reveals significant ramifications with respect to how the music effectively works in dialogue with/within its varied musico-experiential contexts. FROM FILM SONG TO UNDERSCORE AND BACK: THE EVOLUTION OF SONG IN A. R. RAHMAN’S SCORES Felicity Wilcox, Sydney Conservatorium of Music Indian film composer A. R. Rahman’s twenty-year journey from leading composer for Tamil cinema to celebrated composer for Hollywood movies has left an indelible mark on the sound of both Indian and mainstream Western cinema. His early work with Tamil director Mani Ratnam pushed the conventions of film scoring in India and this extended to the ways songs were incorporated into narrative. While often conforming with the standard Bollywood and Tamil ‘film song’ treatment, where larger than life musical sequences of choreography, choirs and costumes appear in a “supra-diegetic” manner (Altman, Heldt: 2013), Rahman’s songs for Ratnam’s films also diverged extra-diegetically as commentary to narrative and character and as driving accompaniment to montage sequences, in an approach reflective of recent mainstream Western aesthetic. In British director Danny Boyle, Rahman found the perfect collaborator for his transition to Hollywood, as both have an innate understanding of song’s associative and dramatic value in storytelling. Their flexible use of song in film is evident in Rahman’s Academy Awardwinning score for Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle: 2008). This paper outlines the development of Rahman’s songwriting for film and explores the diverse ways in which he casts song as a narrative modality, through analysis of three of his scores: Roja, Bombay (Ratnam: 1992, 1995) and Slumdog Millionaire. Rahman’s flexible approach to songs within his scores draws on the aesthetics of both Indian and Western cinema and contributes to the shifting aesthetics of contemporary film globally. 15. Room 303, Friday, May 27, 2016, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM CREATIVE VISION AND INDUSTRY PRACTICE: MAKING THE MUSIC OF STAR TREK Jessica Getman, University of Michigan Epic and orchestral, the music of Star Trek’s original series performs a calculated task, carefully tailored by creator Gene Roddenberry to evoke a “grand human adventure”—mythic, heroic, and Wagnerian in scope. Producing the series’ soundtrack, however, required the collaboration of numerous individuals in specialized roles: Gene Roddenberry and Robert Justman as the show’s producers; Wilbur Hatch as music supervisor; Julian Davidson as music coordinator; Jack Hunsaker, Robert Raff, Jim Henrikson, and Richard Lapham as music editors; Alexander Courage and Fred Steiner, among others, as composers and arrangers; and an extended force of sound effects artists, sound mixers, and performing musicians. Despite the many creative voices involved, however, Roddenberry and his team managed to maintain an impressive and consistent musical aesthetic. Steiner recalled that scoring the series “was a very complex, time consuming, carefully planned and executed procedure,” in which the music crew successfully tended to the aesthetic needs of the series in spite of troublesome budgetary and scheduling restrictions—restrictions set in place by the production company, necessitated by union rules, and determined by the very nature of U.S. television production in the 1960s. Referencing administrative correspondence and paperwork, union documents, sketch scores, session recordings, and archived interviews with the series’ music and sound personnel, this paper deconstructs the collaborative process of making the music of Star Trek, outlining participant roles and examining the twin pressures of creative vision and industry practice through which the series’ sound was forged. MUSIC, THE STAR TREK BRAND, AND HOW JERRY GOLDSMITH ‘MADE IT SO’ Elizabeth Fairweather, University of Huddersfield By the time Jerry Goldsmith was asked to write the music for Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979, Star Trek existed already as a television series, running for three seasons between 1966 and 1969, with a burgeoning cult following. At present, the Star Trek brand is a global institution, available in more than one hundred countries, with an estimated worldwide audience of around thirty million every week. In composing for Star Trek, Goldsmith had to ensure that his music appealed to its global audience, whilst maintaining a sense of continuity not just between his five Star Trek scores, but also across the context of the film series as a whole. Marieke de Mooij in Global Marketing and Advertising: Understanding Cultural Paradoxes, observed that brands are ‘storytellers and vehicles to reinforce myths,’[1] acting as platforms to build consumer communities who then engage emotionally with the brand. This paper will draw preliminary conclusions as to how Goldsmith’s underscores, and their editing, in conforming to de Mooij’s principles, work representatively to enhance the construction, expression, and maintenance of the Star Trek brand. It will demonstrate how Goldsmith remained musically true to the ethos of the brand already familiar to its global audience, whilst allowing his own creative voice to help develop the brand, such that his avowed desire to score the underlying emotion of the narrative, and his own artistic license were not compromised. [1] De Mooij, Marieke, Global Marketing and Advertising: Understanding Cultural Paradoxes (Thousand Oaks, California, 2010). SCORING STAR TREK’S UTOPIA: MUSICAL ICONS IN STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE (1979) AND STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982) Paul Sommerfeld, Duke University Music forms an integral part of the Star Trek brand. Musical symbols like the well-known fanfare that opens The Original Series go beyond their original audiovisual framework to operate as constructed, learned musical-cultural texts. In adapting Star Trek to film, this symbolism became vital in shaping and editing the nascent franchise. Both The Motion Picture and Wrath of Khan function as direct adaptions of The Original Series. Yet the two films differ markedly not only in their visual style and reception, but also in their musical contents. This paper illustrates how the two films’ stark differences prove key to understanding the development of the Star Trek musical canon, the meanings forged in each film’s musical texts, and their allegiances to conflicting utopian philosophies. Despite reusing The Motion Picture’s visual effects, Wrath of Khan’s critical and commercial success re-oriented the franchise toward The Original Series, demonstrating the film’s importance for Star Trek’s subsequent musical directions. This intertextual analysis draws on Umberto Eco, Caryl Flinn, and Darko Suvin to demonstrate how Wrath of Khan’s realignment with the musical texts and scoring practices from The Original Series— which The Motion Picture discards—offers a nostalgic comfort for the past anathema to the previous film’s futuristic utopian vision centered in provoking cognitive estrangement. Here the ritual and its aura are key. Viewers continually re-watch and consume new Star Trek media, allowing these musical themes’ birth as shifting texts that, by being of a place and no-place, broach utopia and offer an enduring, malleable legacy. 16. 6 Floor, Friday, May 27, 2016, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM COMING TO TERMS WITH MUSIC AS NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE: JEAN GRÉMILLON’S LE PETITE LISE AND DAÏNAH LA MÉTISSE (1930;1932) Hubert Bolduc-Cloutier, FNRS, Université Libre de Bruxelles / Université de Montréal Université Libre de Bruxelles, and Dominique Nasta, Université Libre de Bruxelles In tune with the radical changes inside French cinema’s pathos of the 30s, Jean Grémillon’s (1901-1959) oeuvre meaningfully re-enacts the social setting of daily life and its often tragic consequences. However, Grémillon’s aesthetic is based on a narrative architecture that contrasts with that of his contemporaries. The first two sound movies directed by Grémillon – La Petite Lise (1930) and Daïnah la Métisse (1932) – are indeed playing on an innovative use of music and sound, far beyond their common use that correlates, opposes or transforms the visual discourse. In this context, music presents itself as a key player of the metaphoric and metonymic language, allowing Grémillon to translate the multiple dimensions of the characters’ environment and psychology through an economy of means. Grémillon’s musical background[1], along with his collaboration with Belgianborn composer Roland-Manuel and screenwriter Charles Spaak, fosters the emergence of new reflections on musical creation in early sound cinema, throughout the use of highly original compositional strategies[2]. The aim of our paper is to show how music editing in Grémillon’s oeuvre acts as a narrative trigger and allows “setting the tone for our response to the image but not interrupting that response with titles or with intercutting between the characters”[3]. Thus, we will assess whether or not the impact of music on perception and cognition of an emphatic message proves relevant and in what ways. [1] Jean Grémillon was himself violinist in an orchestra at the time of the silent films. [2] In particular the use of the “partition rétrograde” presented for the first time in France in the film La Petite Lise. [3] Dudley ANDREW, Mists of Regrets. Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film, Princeton (New Jersey), Princeton University Press, 1995, p.109. COLLABORATION ON AN ADAPTATION: JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE’S LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES (1950) Laura Anderson, University of Leeds Adaptations of literary works for the screen have always presented challenges to directors and invited critique from film critics and the public. Often absent from the source, the soundscape to a film adaptation can be powerful in reworking a novel cinematically. Jean-Pierre Melville directed Les Enfants Terribles in 1950, an adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s 1929 novel of the same name. The soundscape, which makes significant use of concertos by Bach and Vivaldi, plays a crucial role in this transformation, and the film is frequently cited as a model for New Wave filmmakers. Truffaut described how, ‘these two artists worked together like Bach and Vivaldi. Jean Cocteau’s best novel became Jean-Pierre Melville’s best film’,[1] yet the collaboration was not always smooth. Drawing on archival materials and published writings by Cocteau, this paper traces the complexity of the interaction between him and Melville concerning music and explores how the music and its placement contribute to the adaptation. Indeed, layers of adaptation are shown to be at play in the score: not only is Vivaldi’s Concerto for Four Violins in B Minor op.3/10 heard in Bach’s arrangement for keyboards, but in a further adaptation, the arrangement is played on pianos. The score provides another facet of Cocteau’s personality similar to that of the authorial voice in the novel, especially in combination with his voice-over, and ensures that, sonically, the audience experiences Enfants as a work indelibly linked to Cocteau. [1] François Truffaut, The Films in my Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1978). SURVIVING A DIRECTOR’S WHIMS: JEAN WIENER’S SCORE FOR JACQUES BECKER’S TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI (1954) Brian Mann, Vassar College Film composers are famously subject to the whims of their directors. Jacques Becker’s crime film Touchez pas au Grisbi (1954) features a score by Jean Wiener (1896-1982), an accomplished pianist and proponent of French jazz and popular music, and a seasoned film composer. Wiener struck gold with this score, writing a jazzy melody (“Touchez pas au grisbi”) that serves as a sonic symbol for the film’s main character, Max le Menteur (“Max the Liar”). And yet Wiener balanced this full-fledged melody with a more subtle idea, intended to represent the friendship between Max and Riton, his long-time associate in crime. As Wiener later recalled: I had a theme for Max and Riton’s friendship . . . which I liked a lot, and with which I’d written quite a lot of music. And I was very angry when first they recorded and then above all mixed it . . . because Becker had put almost all of this music in the wastebasket, for the benefit of this [other] melody that he wanted to put in a little throughout. The present paper identifies Wiener’s “Thème de l’Amitié,” analyses its structure, and examines those later appearances that survived Becker’s tampering. The theme sounds during the film’s opening credits, where its grandiose qualities establish the score’s ambitious framework. Wiener swiftly transforms it into a gentle waltz, as the camera moves from panoramic shots of Paris to a more intimate restaurant scene. These and other presentations play a central role in the film’s unfolding. 17. Room 779, Friday, May 27, 2016, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM A FRIGHTFUL ERA: EARLY DEVELOPMENTS OF THE JAPANESE SUPERNATURAL HORROR FILM SCORE Hannah Bayley, Keele University From the outset, Teppei Yamaguchi’s 1928 black and white Japanese ‘silent’ film Kurama Tengu: Kyōfu Jidai (The Frightful Era of Kurama Tengu) appears to be an Edo period Samurai drama of the ‘chanbara’ genre popular at the time. However, it can also be identified as presenting one of Japanese cinema’s earliest examples of onscreen horror, focusing specifically on an audiovisual presentation of the haunted house. This paper will explore how the use of music and sound in Kurama Tengu: Kyōfu Jidai is an example of Japanese horror cinema dealing, specifically, with the supernatural. Typically of Japanese ‘silent’ films of the time, Kurama Tengu: Kyōfu Jidai was intended for presentation with live narration by a Benshi. The reliance on the Benshi in partnership with music was crucial to the audience’s interpretation of the narrative. Historian Jeffrey A. Dym observes that the Benshi’s use of setsumei (a vocal narration that enhanced the moving images) could be described as ‘“seeing” with one’s ears.’ This paper will address the importance of the Benshi’s role in portraying the haunted house in Kurama Tengu: Kyōfu Jidai. It will address the use of mimetic voices to create character dialogue, the use of vocal sound effects, and their insertion of poetic commentary to produce a supernatural ambience. The paper will also address how the techniques used by the Benshi, along with the audio-visual relationship as a whole in Kurama Tengu: Kyōfu Jidai, influenced later Japanese horror film soundtracks. IN BETWEEN THE LINES OF DIALOGUE: READING OZU’S I WAS BORN, BUT... REMAKE, GOOD MORNING, AS A JAPANESE RESPONSE TO SOUND FILM Caleb Freund, University of Texas, Austin Yasujiro Ozu is one of the most celebrated Japanese film directors in cinematic history. Alongside other directors such as Kurosawa, he has done much to establish the foundation of Japanese cinema and its conventions. In addition to the many other merits of academic study of his films, Ozu provides a unique perspective in studying the Japanese transition from silent to sound film. By looking at the two Ozu films I Was Born, But... (1932) and the following loose remake Good Morning (1959), one is able to analyze how Japanese film directors responded to the emergence and gradual widespread acceptance of sound technology. In particular, the use of Ma (the concept of space in Japanese aesthetics) and Gekiban style film accompaniment in these films serve to illustrate how Japanese culture and idiom is reflected in the response to sound film. MODERN RENAISSANCE: THE MUSIC OF HENRY VIII FOR THE 21ST CENTURY IN WOLF HALL Erin Tomkins, New York University In the 2015 BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall, a combination of musical worlds embody the raw and intimate world of Hilary Mantel’s novels, creating a visceral and immediate connection to a long distant past. Balancing the past and present, Debbie Wiseman’s original score and Claire van Kampen’s arrangements and reconstructions of Tudor music bring to life the dangerous and tantalizing world of Henry VIII’s court and the political machinations of Thomas Cromwell. Wiseman’s score uses a decisively modern musical language to express the intrigues of the court, employing minimalistic thematic gestures and a freeflowing harmonic palette that salutes the musical world of the Tudor era without adhering to it. Wiseman balances her 21st century musical world with the use of 16th century instruments, including the theorbo, vielle, and mandolin, bringing timbral authenticity to an otherwise completely modern score. Complementing Wiseman’s score is period music selected and arranged by Claire van Kampen. This extant music exists in the world of the characters and is primarily played onscreen by Musicians of Shakespeare’s Globe, creating an atmosphere of verisimilitude that is echoed in every element of Peter Kominsky’s production. In this paper, I will examine the use of music throughout Wolf Hall, from the editing choices of original score versus Tudor era music, the manifestation of the characters through musical themes and ideas, and the musical connections between Wiseman’s original score and van Kampen’s Tudor arrangements that create an immediate relevancy between our time and the Henrician Age, both narratively and musically. 18. Loewe, Saturday, May 28, 2016, 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM WAGNER IN MAYBERRY: LEITMOTIFIC TRANSFORMS IN EARLE HAGEN’S MUSIC FOR THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW Bob Gauldin, Eastman School of Music In his recent Understanding the Leitmotif (2015), Bribitzer-Stull compiles a list of motific transforms employed by Wagner in his music dramas and then proceeds to relate them to the music of such epic movie cycles as the Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Harry Potter. Although similar traits may be observed in television series with continuous narratives (Brideshead Revisted, Lost, Downton Abbey), analytical studies of their employment in a “sit-com” format of self-contained episodes are rare (see Gauldin’s 2015 Sherlock Holmes article). It is therefore somewhat surprising that these Wagnerian leitmotific transforms might be alive, well, and residing in The Andy Griffith Show (1960-68), whose music for its 249 episodes was supplied by the prominent and prolific media composer Earle Hagen. The fact that the Griffith Show was filmed in the manner of a movie (so that a laugh/music track could be superimposed later) allowed Hagen considerable freedom in underscoring its various story plots. After composing the infamous “Ole Fishin’ Hole” opening theme (whistled by Hagen himself) and the closing TAGS credits, he fashioned and titled a group of themes associated with various characters or elements of the show, such as “Manhunt = Barney,” “Mayberry March,” “Ellie,” “Aunt Bee,” etc. This paper will demonstrate through handout examples and video clips how Hagen applied Bribitzer-Stull’s catalog of “transformation types” to these leitmotifs by using change of mode, harmonic corruption/redemption, thematic complex/truncation/ fragmentation/ evolution, associative tonality/transposition, change of texture/register, rhythmic modification, and thematic irony. MONSTRUOUS BURDEN: WAGNER’S RING AND LARS VON TRIER’S “DEPRESSION TRILOGY” Kristi Brown-Montesano, Colburn School At nine and a half hours, Lars von Trier’s “Depression Trilogy”—Antichrist (2009), Melancholia (2011), and Nymphomaniac (2013, in two volumes)—embraces Wagnerian scope and, to some degree, Wagnerian affect. The three films project a heavily Romantic aesthetic, not least in the framing of nature as nostalgic, portentous, or macabre; the characters and storylines are extravagant and idiosyncratic, yet also tend toward the archetypal. Possibly, the Wagnerian impulse of these films lies in Trier’s own failed effort at opera production. In 2001, Bayreuth Festival director Wolfgang Wagner (grandson of the composer) hired Trier to direct the 2006 Ring Cycle, but the auteur pulled out in 2004, overwhelmed by his own prohibitively expensive, hightech concept. Soon after, Trier wrote up a “Deed of Conveyance,” describing his process and hoping to “purge [his] mind...of the whole monstrous burden” of the Ring. Hospitalized for depression in 2007, Trier returned to the director’s chair for Antichrist and—perhaps—a more extended mode of creative closure for the lost Ring. This latest trilogy exhibits stylistic elements described by Trier in the “Deed of Conveyance” as well as his notes for two Ring operas: i.e. superimposition of realism and fantasy, and “enriched darkness,” his label for revealing the diegesis strategically with pinpoint lighting, leaving plenty of “dark” spots for imagination. Moreover, the musical content of these films interacts with the visual narrative in an “operatic” manner, both in terms of emotional impact and, correspondingly, temporal perception, exploiting music’s particular access to subjective (vs. clock) time. “O FORTUNA” AND THE “EPIC” IN CONTEMPORARY MEDIA David Clem, University at Buffalo SUNY While scholars such as David Huron and Nicholas Cook have offered theoretical models for the analysis of music in advertising, and a number of recent studies have focused on different types of advertising music, there is still much work to be done in the field, especially relating to the use of ‘art’ music in television advertising. This paper focuses on recent appearances of “O Fortuna” from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana in advertising and on YouTubeTM. Over the last three years, K9 Advantix®, Hershey’sTM Chocolate Spread, and Domino’s® Pizza, among others, have employed “O Fortuna” in their ads. In each case, the tune serves as a marker that connects their respective products to the concept of the “Epic”, capitalizing on the irony derived from this pairing. K9 Advantix® uses the tune to convey an epic battle between tiny animated soldiers and flees; Hershey’sTM uses it to suggest their chocolate spread can create an epic moment of pleasure; and Domino’s® Pizza uses it to confer epic status on their corporate history and name change. Building on the application of cognitive pragmatics to music laid out in Lawrence Zbikowski’s Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis, and Michael Long’s discussion of register in Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Multimedia, this study explores connections between the ironic use of “O Fortuna” in the above commercials and the rather extensive presence the song has on YouTubeTM in an effort to tease out how “O Fortuna” figures into a broader cultural conception of “epicness”. 19. Room 303, Saturday, May 28, 2016, 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM THE RAPPER IS PRESENT: SOUND ART, LIVENESS, AND IDENTITY IN JAY Z’S PICASSO BABY MUSIC VIDEO James Gabrillo, University of Cambridge On 10 July 2013, one of the most celebrated hip-hop figures in contemporary music pushed yet another artistic boundary: for his latest music video, Jay Z performed his rap song ‘Picasso Baby’ over and over again for the duration of six hours at the Pace Gallery in New York City. In this paper, I shall examine three themes crucial to his performance. First, I will look at the musical aspect of the work, evaluating how sound – through the act of repetition – sculpted the performance space and generated an exchange of energies between artist and audience. I will then link these deductions to the notion of liveness, specifically how Jay Z’s live presence magnified his proximity and intimacy with the spectators. Afterwards, I will embark on a concise symbolic analysis of the work, taking into account the song’s lyrical content, the artist’s intent, and the context of the performance space. Finally, I will weave all three threads together to offer my paper’s most significant assertion: that Jay Z’s performance was the poetic and political performance of his stardom. In doing so, he forced a momentous confrontation between high-art and hip-hop, redefining modern artistic practice – a reflection of the very story of his genre: while perpetually grounded in its African heritage, hip-hop is determined to constantly shift its values and signs. My analysis is rooted in interdisciplinarity, encompassing the work’s musical, artistic, and socio-cultural values, with the conviction that the critical engagement of a musical performance could uncover complexities that enrich one’s understanding of the contemporary culture industry. WAKING UP IN A POST-BEYONCÉ WORLD: HOW SOCIAL MEDIA ‘TECHNIQUES OF THE NOW’ EXPLODED A 2013 CONCEPT ALBUM Paula Harper, Columbia University On December 13th, 2013, fans of pop superstar Beyoncé Knowles awoke to social media feeds populated by a potent contagion. Literally overnight, BEYONCÉ, a so-called “visual album,” exploded from heavily-cloaked secrecy to full-fledged viral phenomenon. The album occupied the iTunes Store and overwhelmed social media platforms; fans’ resulting one-click purchases netted over 800,000 album sales in three days. This paper first explores the co-relation and co-constitution of social media platforms and their users, explicating the assemblage of devices, software, and human action that enabled the riotous commercial success of Beyoncé. Engaging with the work of Taina Bucher, Kate Crawford, and others, I consider the particular affordances of feed-based social media, as well as the techniques with which users encounter and engage them—together constituting a distinct mode of apprehending and participating in a viral “now.” Second, this paper considers the curious object BEYONCÉ, a pop culture product that, in the first wave of viral immediacy, could only be acquired as a holistic entity, an ordered array of music videos and audio tracks—exclusively available via iTunes. Only through the establishment of this circumscribed set of purchasing options could BEYONCÉ’s producers realize and market such a seemingly contradictory product: a superstar’s massively-produced “concept album,” promoted nevertheless on a platform of unmediated “honesty.” BEYONCÉ’s peculiar pop song forms and haunting audiovisual tropes were enabled by the unlikely, even contradictory reframings of intimacy, authenticity, and immediacy afforded by emergent viral techniques— techniques that worked alongside traditional industry practices, rather than entirely overcoding them. THE FIRST CUT IS THE DEEPEST: EDITING PRACTICES IN BRITISH MUSIC VIDEO BEFORE AND SINCE MTV Emily Caston, London College of Communication From a film-making perspective music video is arguably foremost an editor’s medium. Yet the development and diversity of the editor’s craft has been obscured in academic discourse by reductive arguments about the impact of MTV (chiefly about pace). This paper draws on original interviews with directors and editors working in the UK and Ireland in order to advance a more nuanced thesis about the influence, exchange and refinement of creative practices, the relationship of editing styles to genres, the impact of changes in editing technology, and the political economy of the music video industry. The integrity of the editor’s work in music video has often been compromised by relationships with directors, commissioners and record labels, to the extent that it is necessary to disentangle the network of practices at the level of production and post-production in order to recognize the primacy of editing at the cutting edge between sound and image. By examining the work of key practitioners in the round, this paper proposes, the fine art of music video can be better understood, and its cultural value better appreciated. 20. 6 floor, Saturday, May 28, 2016, 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM EVOKING UNEASE, DISCOMFORT AND VIOLENCE THROUGH THE SINGING VOICE Liz Giuffre, University of Technology, Sydney & Mark Thorley, Coventry University The central role which music plays in evoking, creating and managing audience response has received attention in existing literature (Chion 1994, Lannin and Calley 2005, Sonnenschien 2001). The role of music working alongside violent scenes has also received coverage (Coulthard 2009). The music may include vocal performance though this is often neglected in the literature. This is somewhat surprising as ‘the vocal line of most songs is the focal point that carries the weight of musical expression.’ (Moylan 2002:46). This paper, based upon a chapter entitled The Singing Voice used to evoke unease, discomfort and violence (Giuffre and Thorley2016) in ‘The Singing Voice in Contemporary Cinema’ (Evans and Hughes 2016) interrogates the role of the vocal performancein evoking, creating and managing feelings of fear, violence and unease. It explores examples ranging from Kubrick’s’‘Clockwork Orange’ through to Siegel’s ‘Dirty Harry’ and Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’. In exploring these extremes (and example inthe ground between) it looks at issues of song choice, performance and vocal production. Alongside song and production, itseeks to expose the voice’s ‘almost unlimited and subtle variations in pitch, timbre and dynamic range’ (Alten 1999:312) andhow these are used to evoke, create and manage feelings of fear, violence and unease. ReferencesChion, Michael (1994) ‘Audio Vision: Sound on Screen’. Columbia University Press.Giuffre, Liz and Thorley, Mark (2016) The Singing Voice used to evoke unease, discomfort and violence in ‘The Singing Voice in Contemporary Cinema’. Eds Evans, Mark and Hughes, Dianne. Equinox.Lannin, Steve and Caley, Matthew (2005) ‘Pop Fiction’. Intellect.Sonnenschein, David (2001) ‘Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice, and Sound Effects in Cinema’. Michael Wiese Productions. Moylan, William (2002) ‘The Art of Recording: Understanding and Crafting the mix’. Focal Press.Alten, Stanley R (1999) ‘Audio in Media’. Thompson. TERROR-FILED: THE SOUND AND NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE OF THE MONSTER MOVIETroy Armstrong, University of Texas at Austin The monster movie, a film in which creatures of natural, alien, or scientific origin run amok, is rarely considered a distinct genreof film. Scholars, including Barry Grant, Joshua Bellin, and Susan Sontag, have written articles examining the aspects andelements of monster films but their discussions address the monster movie in relation to the horror, science fiction,action/adventure, and fantasy genres from which it borrows. Bill Rosar’s widely regarded essay, “Music for the Monsters”,which examines the origins of monster film scoring, does address the monster movie directly but is limited to the Universalmonster films of the 1930’s. This essay distinguishes the “creature feature” as a distinct subgenre by expounding a five stage template detailing the distinctivenarrative structure of the monster film that is delineated not only by onscreen action but also by the band of the frequencyspectrum in which the salient sound of that stage occurs. These five stages and their respective frequency bands are: 1. “The Elusion” (1-50Hz)2. “The Reveal” (50-300Hz)3. “The Pursuit” (300-1000Hz)4. “The Scare” (2500-6000+Hz) 5. “The Defeat” (50-3500Hz) In working out this five-stage model, I examine scenes from King King (1933), Godzilla (1956)Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), The Terminator (1984), Jurassic Park (1993), War of the Worlds (2005), and Cloverfield (2008) andshow the various ways filmmakers and composers of monster movies have abided by and expanded upon these five stages thatstructure the subgenre. HORRIFIC IDENTIFICATION: STEVE REICH'S "THREE MOVEMENTS FOR ORCHESTRA" INTHE HUNGER GAMESNaomi Graber, University of Georgia John Williams has said that in Star Wars (1977), he to composed “brassy, bold, masculine, and noble” music for hero, a soundthat has become one of the dominant paradigms for scoring action cinema. But this begs the question: how do those conventionsshift if the hero is female? Because spectators may have trouble sympathizing and identifying with violent women, music androle it’s in easing the process of audience–character assimilation is crucial to the success of such films. The Hunger Games(2012) solves this problem in part by drawing on musical tropes of horror, particularly minimalism (a genre more likely to havea violent female protagonist). One especially violent sequence, accompanied by Steve Reich’s “Three Movements forOrchestra”, presents a striking example of how minimalism works within the matrix of gender and genre in modern film-making.Scholars have noted that minimalism often has a distancing effect, but in The Hunger Games, minimalism combined withgraphic visuals helps to suture the audience to the protagonist. Drawing on Naomi Cumming’s writings on musical subjectivityand K.J. Donnelly’s observations regarding the physiological nature of horror soundtracks, I demonstrate that “ThreeMovements” is crucial to Katniss’s representation as a sympathetic female action hero. In The Hunger Games, minimalist musicmimics the experience of an adrenaline rush, not only rendering Katniss’s body audible, but also transferring part of herexperience to the spectator, forcing him/her to experience the scene from Katniss’s point of view, cementing the bond betweenaudience and character. 21. Room 779, Saturday, May 28, 2016, 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM RECUT AND “RE-TUNED”: MUSIC IN FAN-PRODUCED PARODY TRAILERSJames Deaville, Carleton University The term “recut” designates a trailer that a fan has created by editing footage from a film/trailer to new sound. The resultingreimagined audiovisual text typically presents a genre-shifted parody narrative that intertextually relates to the source materialon a continuum ranging from hyperbolic to subversive (Hesford 2013: 161). Although music functions as the primary actor inthese fan-generated trailer parodies (Hartwig 2012: 226), the literature has not yet addressed the contributions of the aural realmto the act of re-signification. The “re-tuning” by fan-editors customarily involves the imposition of a new soundtrack(songs/instrumental music and narration) over reordered existing moving images, such as in the cases of the adapted family-friendly “Shining” (2005) from the horror film The Shining and the horror trailer refashioning of “Mrs. Doubtfire—Recut”(2009). But fans may also reuse the music from an existing trailer/film in alliance with re-arranged footage and new text like inthe iconic “Brokeback to the Future” (2006). This study will consider the processes behind such aural re-conceptualizations ofre-cut trailers through re-tuning by fans, especially in terms of how they mobilize genre-based audiovisual identifiers in thealternative soundtracks. As we shall see through a close analysis of the texts and contexts for “Shining” and “Mrs. Doubtfire—Recut,” the recut and re-tuned trailer represents a transformative nexus of sight and sound, where reimagined audiovisual texts(re)produce a multilayered cultural feedback loop that functions both as a creative outlet for recut fan-editors and as a bindingagent for their fan community. TAKING BACK THE LAUGHWilliam Cheng, Dartmouth University This article performs an acoustemology of comedy via modern consumers’ ambivalent attitudes toward canned laugh tracks. Inrecent years, fans who (hate)watch sitcoms such as Big Bang Theory or Friends have used methods of editing and recompositionto remove canned laughter from clips of episodes, thereafter uploading these strange, laughter-redacted products onto YouTubefor public appreciation and commentary. Alternately, other users have inserted laugh tracks into shows and films such as TheWire, Breaking Bad, and Schindler’s List. These playful DIY techniques variously use silence or surplus sound to break a show’soriginal moods, affects, and narrative cohesion. The gaping sonic holes or extraneous laugh tracks in the users’ clips can becomeso emotionally discordant that they produce a separate layer of metahumor (that is, funny on a whole different level): no longerpredictable or aesthetically sensible texts, the edited scenes goad laughter from viewers who may find the manipulation absurd,witty, or otherwise subversive. If, as writers such as Adorno, Baudrillard, and Žižek have argued, laugh tracks somehowcompromise consumers’ feelings of comedic agency, then fans’ new efforts to take out laugh tracks represent a curious means oftaking back laughter as well, reasserting a humorous sovereignty over contemporary entertainment media. SINCERELY FAKING IT': RE-EMBODYING THE VOICE IN LIP SYNC BATTLEPaula Bishop, Bridgewater State University, Boston University Lip-synching to music has been a part of television since the 1950s. Rock ‘n’ roll acts regularly stood in front of the camera onAmerican Bandstand, miming a performance to their own disembodied voice. As noted in trade journals, a good performancewas one in which the singer accurately synchronized the lip movements to the audible recording, thereby privileging the voiceover the physical performance. Lip and audio synchronization generally remained vital to the aesthetic with each passinggeneration of televisual music presentation. In the 2015 show Lip Sync Battle, however, other elements take precedence over audio-visual synchronization: the bestperformances—as judged by the audience—recreate the physical gestures and facial expressions of the original music video. Theshow features celebrity contestants lip-synching to well-known recordings, with costumes, staging, choreography, and backupdancers. In these performances, the body substitutes for the voice, and more specifically, for a voice that does not belong to thevisible body. By re-embodying the voice, the celebrities create a space for enacting and normalizing transgressive ideas. This paper examines episodes from the first season of Lip Sync Battle, and considers how the artistic choices made by theperformers shift the aesthetic of the lip-synched performance. It further investigates how these scripted performances createdialogues about gender, sexuality, racial, and genre expectations. By becoming someone else and “sincerely faking it” (as onecontestant called it), the performers deconstruct social conventions and give voice to reinterpretations of the original materialthrough their physical performance. 22. Loewe, Saturday, May 28, 2016, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM LUCHINO VISCONTI’S “SENSO” (1954) AND ANTON BRUCKNER’S SEVENTH SYMPHONY AS A SYMBOL FORAUSTRIAN DOMINATION OVER ITALYMichael Baumgartner, Cleveland State University Set before and during the Third Italian War of Independence in 1866, Luchino Visconti’s melodrama Senso (1954) tells the storyof Countess Serpieri, who begins an affair with the Austrian lieutenant Mahler. An investigation of the film reveals that themusic plays a preeminent role not only in supporting the narrative, but also in portraying the political situation in Northern Italyduring the Risorgimento. Visconti emphasizes the condition of the Italians under the Austrian yoke by juxtaposing Verd’s Iltrovatore with Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. Bruckner’s music dominates the film as an oppressive and overpowering force notunlike the Austrian supremacy over the North Italians. Visconti politicizes his Italy in Senso by having the occupier Brucknerovershadowing the occupied Verdi. Verdi—the epitome of a unified Italy—rivals Bruckner who is a fervent devotee of Wagner.Bruckner’s admiration for Wagner is reinforced in the film through the excessive recurrence of the Seventh Symphony’s“Adagio,” which Bruckner wrote around Wagner’s death. The conflict, solidified by Bruckner’s dominating music, stresses thedichotomy of south versus north, whereby the Italian attraction to the north is personified in Serpieri who is enticed withlieutenant Mahler. Visconti offers a larger discourse in Senso, reflecting on the political climate of Italy’s Risorgimento throughmusic. The film revisits the heated debate, ignited by E.T.A. Hoffman and continued by Schopenhauer, Wagner, Hanslick andNietzsche, regarding both the claimed superiority of Austro-German over Italian music and absolute over programmatic music. WHICH PEOPLE’S MUSIC? WITNESSING THE POPULAR IN THE SOUNDSCAPE OF RISO AMAROMaurizio Corbella, DAAD Research Fellow, Kiel University In his thought-provoking chapter ‘Music, people and reality: the case of Italian neo-realism’ (in European Film Music, Ashgate2006) Richard Dyer argues that Italian neorealist cinema exhibits a musical duality between diegetic and non-diegetic cues,where the former represent ‘the people’s music’ (Ibid., 30) and the latter provide external commentary on the plots. Dyer makesan exemplary case of Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, G. De Santis 1949): here, on one hand, diegetic music is dialectically layered,juxtaposing the mondine’s (female rice pickers) chants and boogie-woogie dance numbers; on the other hand, the score byGoffredo Petrassi offers an ‘unemotive, rationalistic, ... vanguardist perspective from outside the immediacy of the situation’(Ibid., 35). Detouring from Dyer’s captivating but somewhat constrictive framework, I wish to reassess each of these musical componentsand suggest that the film acts as a historical ‘witness despite of itself’ — to borrow Paul Ricoeur’s expression – of the musicalagencies of its time. For instance, the musical track adumbrates stratified authorships: the folk field recordings are partiallyreworked through scripted interventions; the boogie-woogie numbers are allegedly composed by then young and un-credited jazzpianist Armando Trovajoli; and Petrassi’s score is interspersed with quotes from popular repertoires. Rather than contrasting the‘people’s music’ with the judgemental gaze of the ‘high-brow’ composer, I contend that the soundscape of Riso amaro affordedthe dramatic terrain for conflicting conceptions of the popular to collide, each of which somehow resilient to the film’s tightideological prospect, and yet all concurring towards sketching a highly unstable historical notion of popular culture. PALIMPSEST, PLAGIARISM, AND MEDIATION: THE “ACOUSTICAL UNCONSCIOUS” OF FELLINI ANDROTA’S CINEMATIC ROMEEmilio Sala, University of Milan Many scholars, who have researched Fellini’s cinematic Rome, referred to the famous Freudian image of the palimpsest, whichFreud had used to describe the Eternal City, meaning a place in which the fragments of the past continue to live in the present.Other aspects of Fellini’s Rome, which scholars have insisted on, are the faulty conclusions made in terms of fiction and reality.In the city of cinema and power, it is no longer possible to distinguish between the role model and its reproduction, between theoriginal and its re-mediation. As is well known, in La dolce vita Fellini reconstructed Via Veneto on Stage No. 5 at Cinecittà.The “fake” Via Veneto (the one reconstructed in the studio) becomes “more real than the real”—i.e. hyper-real. Fellini’s oneiric(dreamlike) hyperrealism assumes a strong psychoanalytical connotation. How do we understand all this within the realm of music? Could a concept like the “acoustical unconscious” (extrapolated fromFreud and Benjamin) be a key to better comprehend films such as La dolce vita, Fellini’s Satyricon, Fellini’s Roma etc.? Mypaper will propose to answer these questions by examining various effects of mimicry and of “déjà entendu” that arecharacteristic of Nino Rota’s music. Not unlike Fellini, Rota lays out his compositional work like an opus continuum in which heoften reuses the same material albeit reconfigured and often non-recognizable. These intertextual correlations create a series ofcorresponding references more or less “mysterious” which constitute a rather well defined subtext for the filmic interpretation ofFellini’s, “fake” Rome. 23. Room 303, Saturday, May 28, 2016, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM MUSIC VIDEO INFLUENCE ON AUDIOVISUAL RELATIONSHIPS IN DARREN ARONOFSKY’S EARLY FILMSVisnja Krzic, Independent Scholar Today, the soundtrack has become “musicalized.” All of the intensified techniques in today’s cinema, to borrow DavidBordwell’s term, have long been foregrounded in music video, because they help clarify musical form: free-ranging cameramovement reflects music’s flowing, processual nature; blocks of image highlight a song’s structure; intense colorizationilluminates a song’s harmony, sectional divisions, and timbre; visual motifs correspond with musical ones; editing and editing-like effects not only show off the music's rhythmic aspects, and form aesthetic sequences on their own, but also function as aswitch among elements like narrative, dance, lyrics, or a musical hook, letting none of them take over. In the eighties, music video was the laboratory, while in the nineties, the often called “MTV style” streamed into movies andhelped drive the new, audiovisually intensified, postclassical cinema. This new audiovisual form favors blocks and segments,multiple temporalities, loops, musical and quasi-musical numbers that integrate enhanced musical behavior, sound effects andbits of music as fragments, tears in the film’s surface, and motivic work. It also relies on excessive repetition, unpredictableteleology, and ambiguous endings. Film director Darren Aronofsky is one of the early and most successful exponents of suchcinema. This paper traces audiovisual relationships in his first three films (Clint Mansell's original score is an essentialcomponent of all three), which the director himself calls his “mind, body, and spirit trilogy” — his “guerrilla” debut film Pi(1998), critically acclaimed indie film Requiem for a Dream (2000), and multimillion-dollar budget studio film The Fountain(2006). ‘THE MIGRATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS’: UNDERSTANDING ROBERT ASHLEY’S PERFECT LIVESTHROUGH MUSIC VIDEOCharissa Noble, University of Santa Cruz, California The late twentieth-century experimental music scene embraced many self-conscious pieces addressing critical cultural issues.Exemplifying this trend was composer Robert Ashley, whose opera for television Perfect Lives is an enactment of his theory ofthe “migration of consciousness in America,” a process he defined in three phases: linear, fragmented, and more fragmented butwith new meanings. Ashley associated each stage with different patterns of speech and with Westward migration. He explainsthat the break from Europe—geographically and conceptually—resulted in the emergence of a uniquely American consciousnessthat rejects linearity and heritage, preferring individually-determined meaning (or, in Ashley’s words, “fragmentation”). Ashleytheorizes that this fragmentation of consciousness is evident in the evolution of American vernacular speech, which Ashley saysconsists of clichés that have splintered off from formerly well-known (but now forgotten) anecdotes. By focusing on one of the frequently used devices in the opera, the disembodied voice, this paper explicates ways in which thesurface features of Ashley’s opera demonstrate his theory of “the migration of consciousness” on formal, experiential, andhermeneutical levels. The concept of the disembodied voice also marks many popular music videos, where it creates a sense ofunity in the absence of linear narrative or causal events. Building on the work of Carol Vernallis, I will show how this aspect ofPerfect Lives captures Ashley’s theory. Juxtaposing two seemingly disparate genres (opera and music video) also suggests a reconsideration of conventional genre categories and encourages an analogous negotiability of the lines between academicdisciplines. TRANSPOSING OPERA: YIDDISH AND ROMANI ARIAS IN SALLY POTTER’S THE MAN WHO CRIEDGeorgia Luikens, Brandeis University In his discussion of Peter Carey’s works of historical fiction1, Bruce Woodcock writes that these forms of literary appropriation“retell the stories of marginalized characters, outsiders and outlaws...in reinvented voices” (138). Sally Potter’s 2000 film TheMan Who Cried, features the adaptation and appropriation of two operatic arias: “Dido’s Lament” from Henry Purcell’s Didoand Aeneas, which is re-imagined as a Romani/Tsigani quasi-improvised folk song, and the aria “Je Crois Entendre Encore”from Georges Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de Perles which is sung twice, once in its original French, and once in Yiddish. These twointerpretations of canonic operatic works give musical ‘voice’ to the struggles of the oppressed Tsigani Caesar and hiscommunity, and the Soviet-Jewish émigré Fegele/Susan, as they navigate Paris in the months leading up to World War II. This paper will discuss the ways in which multi-genre musical arrangements in The Man Who Cried not only interact with oneanother, but also work in tandem with what is viewed onscreen. Through adaptation, appropriation, pastiche, andrecontextualization, the resulting musical narrative is complex, both questioning and enhancing the ways in which identity andselfhood are portrayed in film. Further, the melding of opera with folk music; formalist composition with extemporization; andvocal music with instrumental music all demonstrate music and film’s power to capture and record cultural memory. 24. 6 Floor, Saturday, May 28, 2016, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM BE CAUTIOUS OF THAT LUST: MUSIC, FATE AND SADOMASOCHISM IN ANG LEE’S LUST, CAUTIONGuan Wang, University of Alberta Although less glorious than his celebrated award-winning films, Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007) is another directorialmasterpiece in its own right. Controversially known for its audacious portrayal of the eroticism, the film is adapted from thenovella of the same name written by Zhang Ailing, the most revered Chinese woman writer of all time. Existing studies of thefilm discuss the intricacies of the adaptation, along with the political concerns it garnered. This paper instead takes a close lookat the original film score composed by the critically acclaimed composer, Alexandre Desplat. Through a series of stylisticanalysis, I explore music’s function in the representation of the female protagonist’s doomed fate as an expression of a hauntedand masochistic sexuality. Specifically, my analysis reveals how play-acting defines her fate in consequence of her tormentedpassion. I argue that her destiny is fundamentally changed at the moment she enters into a tangled relationship as someonedisguised in the role of the femme fatale, who has power to ensnare the male protagonist. Concealed in this role-play, however, isthe fateful submission of self that designates her role, inescapably, as masochist. Along with the narrative analysis, I present thesubtle ways in which the film score articulates and intensifies the representation of the “lust” -“caution” opposition that runthrough the narrative. All inquiries of the paper are based upon these two antithetical elements from the title, which define theessential narrative tone of the film as a whole. ART OR ACTION? ONENESS AND DUALITY IN TAN DUN’S MARTIAL ARTS TRILOGYStefan Greenfield-Casas, Stefan Greenfield-Casas According to Kenneth Chan, the success of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) led a worldwide revival of thewuxia martial arts genre. Though the film was awarded an Academy Award for Tan Dun’s score, only a handful of scholars haveaddressed its music. One such scholar, Li Wei, has briefly explored this score, though with a focus on the use of Chinese“national instruments.” Tan’s score, however, combines Chinese and Western instruments, reflecting his “1+1=1” compositionalphilosophy which takes two often contrasting ideas (East/West, Past/Present, and, as I argue, Action/Art) and merges themtogether into a single entity. In this paper I will show that Tan regularly employs his 1+1=1 philosophy as a musical means of balancing the art-versus-actionand mind-versus-body dichotomies exemplified by the wuxia genre. In particular, I examine fight scenes in Crouching Tiger,Hidden Dragon (2000), Hero (2002), and The Banquet (2006) and explore Tan’s varied musical approach, which uses not onlyaggressive, percussive, and rhythmic music that typically accompanies such action scenes in Hollywood action films, but alsomusic that Li describes as melancholy, sentimental, and desolate, as a counterpoint to the kinetic action. I argue that Tan’s use oftwo contrasting musical styles—the rhythmic action music that compliments the image, and the artful melodic music thatcontrasts it—both reinforces the wuxia narratives within these films, and exemplifies Tan’s 1+1=1 principle within his MartialArts Trilogy. JAPANESE, CHINESE, OR MONGOLIAN? MUSICAL CODES, PAN-ASIANNESS, AND MUSIC SUPERVISION INSTOCK MUSIC OF THE 1960’SReba Wissner, Montclair State University, Berkeley College of New York and New Jersey During the 1960s, three television shows created by Daystar Productions featured a single music cue composed by housecomposer Dominic Frontiere that represented Asian characters. In the Stoney Burke episode “The Weapons Man” (1963), forwhich the cue was originally composed, the Dorian mode music represents the Native American character with a Japanesehunting bow and his Japanese teacher. In The Outer Limits episode “The Hundred Days of the Dragon” (1963), the cuerepresents characters from China. Additionally, the pilot episode for the unsold series, Stryker, “Fanfare for a Death Scene”(1964), used the same cue to represent characters from Mongolia. Complicating these cultural portrayals is the fact that in allthree cases, each of these Asian characters is made to be the episode’s villain. The choice to use these cues in multiple contextswas that of the music supervisors, John Elizalde and Dominic Frontiere, who felt that the musical coding was vague enough toserve as a pan-Asian catchall.While the use of stock music in television has been discussed, the choice of a music supervisor to use a single music cue torepresent different ethnicities has not been explored. This paper examines the use of “Stoney Burke Cue 348,” and itsassociations with various characters of Asian heritage. I will discuss how Dominic Frontiere was able to compose a cue thatdepending on the visual and plot context, could successfully represent a culture and how a music supervisor could edit a cue forsuch different representations. 25. Room 779, Saturday, May 28, 2016, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM ELEMENTAL AND CORRUPTIBLE: THE SOUND OF EMPOWERMENT AND MORAL CONFLICT IN THEDARK KNIGHT TRILOGYSteven Rahn, University of Texas, Austin James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer’s music for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy contains unusually sparethematic content, departing from the heavily thematic, gothic scoring of previous Batman films. The most salient, recurringelement of the soundtrack is an ascending minor third motive, which Christian Clemmenson (2005) has criticized because, as theprincipal theme, it does not allow the duality of the Bruce Wayne/Batman relationship to be exploited as in previous films. JanetHalfyard (2013) defends the composers’ approach and contends, for example, that the lack of contrast between the music usedfor Bruce and Batman is an entirely appropriate strategy because of the absence of a dualistic relationship between the twopersonas in Nolan’s films. In this paper, I argue that the rising D-F motive highlights stages in the evolution of the Batman persona through threecharacteristic harmonizations: prolongation of the D-minor tonic; i-VI in D minor; and the SLIDE transformation from D minorto D-flat major. The prolongation version, the most common form, marks instances of Bruce’s personal growth early in thetrilogy. By contrast, the i-VI harmonization underlines feelings of empowerment, accompanying moments of triumph andsignificant transformations in the character. The harmonically ambivalent SLIDE transformation is fittingly the most complex interms of signification, underpinning scenes that feature ethical conundrums. In my analysis, I propose that these particularharmonizations of the minor third motive interact with the narrative subtext of The Dark Knight trilogy on a deeper level thancritics of the film scores suggest. MAXIMALISM, MASCULINITY, AND MILITAINMENT: PINPOINTING THE ZIMMER AESTHETICFrank Lehman, Tufts University The tremendous influence Hans Zimmer exerts over contemporary multimedia scoring practices has shaped both fan and film-musicological discourses in some surprising ways. For example, the apparent conventionality of Zimmer’s sound feeds intocritical refrains about stylistic homogeneity and anonymity, such as those offered by Neumeyer and Buhler (2015), who claimthat the composer’s approach “avoids strongly individualizing stylistic markers.” This presentation takes as its starting point theopposite view: Zimmer’s music is in fact brimming with highly idiosyncratic stylistic markers. However, we must distanceourselves from the sheer fact of musical ubiquity to recognize exactly what in Zimmer’s style is not generic, but rather striking,contingent, and symptomatic. In order to clarify the technical and aesthetic foundations of Zimmer’s style, I first discuss first two musical fingerprints,extracted from a comprehensive study both his scores and testimony in interviews. These are 1) the pre-2005 marcato actiontheme and 2) the post-2005 abstracted anthem, both of which operate through a maximization of minimalist procedures.Although I investigate selected cues from Drop Zone, Batman, and Gladiator with a degree of theoretical rigor not yet observedin Zimmer scholarship, my end goal is not stylistic analysis per se. The second half of my presentation examines the cultural andgendered aspects of Zimmer’s distinctive “Epic” style, in particular the representation of masculine (anti)heroism and itsconnection to a distinctively post-Cold War (and post-9/11) genre of “Militainment,” as heard in Crimson Tide, Black HawkDown, et. al. and more recently transmuted into superhero genre films. THE ORGAN IN INTERSTELLAR’S SOUNDTRACK: A CASE STUDY FOR SCORING TRANSCENDENCE IN APOSTMODERN SOCIETYSergi Casanelles, New York University Christopher Nolan asked composer Hans Zimmer to feature a pipe organ in his score for Interstellar, due to its capacity tocodify meaning. Although Nolan states that the movie is not religious, he acknowledges that it possesses “some feeling ofreligiosity” (Lowder, 2014). Further, the director believes that the organ serves as a signifier that represents “mankind’s attemptto portray the mystical or the metaphysical, what’s beyond us” (Lowder, 2014). By analyzing the organ’s function in Interstellar, this paper will describe the semiotic elements involved in the generation ofmeaning throughout a highly institutionalized Western instrument in a postmodern framework. In the intricate ontologyproposed in Interstellar, there is a redefinition of the idea of God, which implies a redefinition of spirituality, transcendence, andits links to physics and metaphysics. In deconstructing the set of signifiers associated with the organ—and in analyzing itsroots—I will provide a framework for examining how these signifiers might contribute to the construction of meaning in thisaudiovisual piece. Further, by selecting and transforming the signifiers attached to the organ as a symbolic entity, the composer is actuallygenerating a new object that I define as a hyperinstrument. Thus, the ‘hyper-organ’ in the movie will serve as an example of howhyperinstruments are key in contemporary scoring practices. In these current practices, composers use hyperinstruments as ameans to interact with higher levels of meaning and signification beyond the narrative, which is usually quintessential forpostmodern film narratives.