Thursday 6th July 2023

Speakers

Emilio Audissino

Swan Lake: From the 1931 Tod Browning Film to the 1979 John Badham Remake.

This paper proposes to investigate the association between the ‘Swan Theme’ as presented in  Act II, Scene 10 of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and the Dracula character as portrayed by Bela Lugosi  in Tod Browning’s 1931 film. As shown by William Rosar in his study on the music for Universal  Pictures’ classic monster films (Rosar 1983), the ‘Swan Theme’ had experienced a history of previous  usage in in the silent-cinema cue sheets, for its ‘misterioso’ qualities, and the theme was recycled a  number of times in other Universal films –The Mummy (1932) and Murders in the Rue Morgue  (1932). Yet, the ‘Swan Theme’ has become particularly attached to the Dracula figure and to its iconic  actor Bela Lugosi, to the point of becoming a musical identifier for Lugosi in such films as Ed Wood (1995) and Bela Lugosi: Hollywood’s Dark Prince (1995). My contention is that the use of the ‘Swan  Theme’ for Dracula is not a completely haphazard choice but may also be predicated on an affinity  between Odette, the protagonist of Tchaikovsky’s ballet, and the character as depicted by Lugosi.  After tracing the parallelism between the Tchaikovsky work and the 1931 Dracula, I shall move my attention to John Badham’s 1979 Dracula, which can be considered a remake of the 1931 film. In the  film score, John Williams, while not citing directly the Tchaikovsky theme, evokes the atmospheres,  timbres, and the musical profile of the ‘Swan Theme’, while the film narration stresses the doomed love elements in the story that give further relevance to the affinity between Odette’s story and  Dracula’s story. 

Marie Bennett

‘“Bohemian Rhapsody” will never be that song’: How Wayne’s World Revitalized the Career of Queen in the United States

Although it was a phenomenal success in the UK following its release in October 1975, staying at the top of the charts for 9 consecutive weeks, the single ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ by Queen did not fare so well in the United States, only reaching the number 9 position. However, Mike Myers decided to include sections from the song in a scene at the beginning of the movie Wayne’s World (1992), thereby introducing it to a new generation. Despite suggestions that a song by American rock band Guns N’ Roses would be more appropriate in the scene given the musical tastes of the main characters, Wayne (Myers) and Garth (Dana Carver), Myers was insistent that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ be used, as he was a big fan of the song. Its inclusion in what is regularly described as an iconic scene not only increased the popularity of the film’s soundtrack, but also led to a revival of interest in both the song – which re-entered the Billboard charts and reached number 2 this time around – and Queen’s music in general.

In this paper, I will discuss the career of Queen in the United States up to this point, and how the inclusion of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in Wayne’s World resulted in an increased interest in the band themselves. This was in part due to a new accompanying video, which featured segments from the original promo of the Queen song interspersed with references to the movie and other material. 

David Ireland

What a wonderful world? Charting the evolution of incongruent post-existing film music.

Since its juxtaposition with war imagery in Good Morning Vietnam (Levinson, 1987), Louis Armstrong’s tranquil ‘What a Wonderful World’ has been quoted on multiple occasions in equally incongruent filmic contexts, including recent action film Nobody (Naishuller, 2021). Such moments have invited parodic response (e.g. animated film Madagascar, Darnell & McGrath, 2005), and the song has featured prominently in lists of overused film songs (WatchMojo, 2020), becoming one of just three musical works to have its own page as an exemplar of soundtrack dissonance in fan-curated community tvtropes.org. Compared to similarly placed media quotations of Barber’s arguably more semiotically ambiguous ‘Adagio for Strings’, whose performances in memorable funereal contexts have also impacted that work’s reception history (Howard, 2007; McQuinn, 2009), these uses of ‘What a Wonderful World’ are especially influenced by the incongruent filmic contexts, not least given the ironic relationship these often create with the song’s lyrics. Consequently, these moments demonstrate a particular facet of what Jonathan Godsall terms ‘post-existing’ film music.

Following a systematic survey of placements of the song, this presentation will analyse influential filmic quotations, citing theories of expectation, memory, and audiovisual incongruence to explore the influence of incongruent context on the song’s subsequent semiotic and perceptual potential. Conceiving such quotations as incongruent provides rich opportunity to investigate the plethora of interpretative responses they might invite, and how these increasingly common types of audiovisual construction may be considered as a schematic framework that may nuance audience response and the future life of the quoted material (Ireland, 2017). Consequently, this paper will further scholarship on post-existing film music and evolving uses of audiovisual incongruence, via detailed analysis of a single, iconic piece of frequently-quoted film music.

Jacques Dupuis

Inverting the Acoustmetre

Since Michel Chion described the trope of the acousmetre—film’s acousmatic being—in 1994, critics and scholars have deployed the concept as a vehicle for fruitful analysis and interpretation. The concept has largely been taken in its primary form: the audibly-voiced, unseen omniscient who loses power upon being “de-acousmatized” (visually revealed), epitomized in The Wizard of Oz (1939) or The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933). Less considered is Chion’s more variable, less straightforward “paradoxical acousmetre.” In this form, the acousmetre may lack omniscence or else misunderstand what they “see.” These figures’ fallibilities and flaws make them special, offering hermeneutic possibility.

In this paper, I extend Chion’s concept and, through a limited set of case studies, present a scheme for a particular subtype of “paradoxical acousmetre”: the inverted acousmetre. While inverted acousmetres retain certain features of the generic archetype, particularly its omnipotence, other features are not simply absent or affected (as in Chion’s “paradoxical acousmetre”), but indeed reversed. In the case of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), the omnipotent Michael Myers is seen but not heard. In Richard Curtis’s Love Actually (2003), visually apparent characters mutual influence one another through physical presence despite language barriers preventing direct address, or else employ a kind of recorded prosthetic vocality to manipulate off-screen characters. And in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019), an archetypically powerless character (a profile different from many acousmetres) unsettles class-based power structures through electronically-mediated communication in “unvoiced” visual Morse code. In each case, an indispensable moment of de-acousmatization occurs, absolving the acousmatic condition. The paper concludes by considering more closely Bong’s class critique through Parasite’s thematically-essential inverted acousmetre.

Ben Winters

World-building and Symphonic Discourse in Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014)

When Antonio Sanchez’s innovative percussion score for Birdman or (the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) was deemed ineligible for the Academy’s ‘Best Original Score’ category, the film’s director, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, argued for its centrality to his film’s identity. In so doing, he suggested the choices of Western classical music, which included extracts from symphonies by Mahler and Rachmaninov, used throughout his film were, by contrast, inconsequential: that any classical choices would have been appropriate. In this paper, however, I suggest that the choices of Mahler and Rachmaninov (two composers who occupy contested places in the discourse of modernism and its relationship with popular culture) are, in fact, far from inconsequential: that they offer us an opportunity to explore pertinent questions about the nature of cinematic reality and the world-building attributes of both symphonic listening and the film-scoring practices that are derived from these traditions.

Through consideration of its fantastical flying scenes, and the superhero genre Birdman  appears to satirise, I suggest that—for all its long-take cinematography— Iñárritu’s film ultimately offers us a rejection of cinematic ‘realism’ in order to embrace what Richard Rushton has called film’s ‘reality’, an understanding of film that values it for its ability to create (rather than merely reflect) reality. As such, in featuring works by these composers, Birdman (intentionally or not) might be seen to be embracing a romanticised world-building impulse that resists the modernist anxiety to which film studies and discourses of twentieth-century music have long been subject. 

Miaotong Yuan

Soundscape in Films: Spatial Construction, Aural Narrative and Audience Identification

From the late 1970s, scholars pointed out that the soundscape is the product of social practice,  politics, and ideology (Schafer, 1977; Truax,1978). Today, people's knowledge and practice of  soundscape have developed from individual or social perception and understanding of the acoustic  environment to multiple levels of our real-life environment and imaginary environment. Looking  back on the research over the past half century, soundscape became a publicly circulated entity,  which is the sum of all sound energy in a specific context. It can not only be seen as the subject's  impression of the sound environment, but also includes the aural communication, audible  experience, and auditory methods of people in the environment(Truax, 1984; Rodaway, 1994; Thompson，2002). Cinematic soundscape, is the aural-based space in which the characters live,  including the ambience, signal tome, and audio events. This multi-dimensional space helps the  audience to obtain the impression of geographical location, personal perspective and certain mood.  In recent years, the importance of soundscape theory has been increasingly reflected in film sound  design, outstanding examples include: Dune (2022), 1917(2020), Ad Astra (2019) and Roma (2018). Firstly, multi-channel audio production and playback technology, leads to different directional and  spatial characteristics of sound, enabling accurate positioning and displacement of sound, forming  an authentic auditory space, which expanded the spatial dimension of the screen. Digital audiovisual  production tools enabled creative designers to simulate the experiences of characters in films, the  surrounding sound scene with diffused sound field, created an immersive sense of being present. Secondly, post production formed a dramatic narrative which suits the emotional atmosphere in  films, the recognizable environmental sound evokes the audience's association and cognition of the  story space. Thirdly, in multiple social attributes such as identity, the soundscape has its social  connotation. It is both the shaping of the listener's ego consciousness by sound and space, and the  interpretive reconstruction of the listener's space for producing sound. It is both private and public,  both emotional and imaginative, and may trigger rational speculation or critical practice. (Lu, 2018) The auditory cultural connotation of identity improves the construction of film narrative space from  a social- cultural perspective. This study uses a grounded approach, through literature research on  film sound and actual case analysis, to clarify the interactive relationship model between film  soundscape, screen, and audience, then conducts discussions based on the theory of remediation,  providing novel value imagination on the topics of film audio-visual art. 

Matt Lawson

Tolkien before Jackson: The Music of the Animated Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films

J.R.R Tolkien's fantasy world of Middle-Earth has been represented across a range of visual media, ranging from the television shows Sagan om Ringen (Sweden, 1971) and The Fabulous Journey of Mr. Bilbo Baggins the Hobbit (Soviet Union, 1985), to the the incomplete Ralph Bakshi adaption of The Lord of the Rings (1978), via the Peter Jackson trilogies (2001-2014), to open world video games and multi-million dollar Amazon Prime Video series released in the opening decades of the twenty-first century.

This paper will take musicological approaches to a few of these adaptations to ascertain commonalities and contrasts in the musical depictions of Tolkien's expansive world. This paper considers the challenges and considerations of scoring a fictional world depicting multiple races, ethnicities, and locations in a range of contexts. From the much derided films of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, to the monumentally successful Peter Jackson trilogies, music plays a consistently important role in bringing one of the richest fantasy worlds in literary history to life. Interdisciplinary in nature, the paper will adopt film, television, and video game music theory, build on strong foundations set by Doug Adams ("The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films"), with the ambition of suggesting and understanding the possibility of an inherent musical sound of Middle-Earth through audio-visual analyses of the chosen case studies. 

Hunter Wallace

Cinematic Musical Layering in HBO’s Game of Thrones 

Ramin Djawadi’s score for HBO’s Game of Thrones sets a new paradigm in cinematic storytelling due to its intricate and intense cinematic layering, which enhances the narrative of the on-screen media through adding, subtracting, and combining layers of musical texture to invoke a scene’s emotions. Through this process, Djawadi acts as a bridge between the story of the show and the audience, using musical cues, textures, motives, harmonies, orchestration and timbres to convey emotions to the audience by anticipating, shifting, and delaying layers in relation to what is appearing on screen. 

This paper will examine one of the defining scenes of Game of Thrones’ 6th season finale, where the Queen of Westeros, Cersei Lannister, is on trial by the religious leader of the Faith of the Seven, the radical polytheistic group which looks to imprison her for breaking their religious laws. In this scene, cinematic layering is constant, as layers are added and taken away, primarily based on how much danger the characters are in and how close the end of the scene is. As the scene progresses, it introduces a handful of motivic ideas, each representing a character's journey to the end of the scene. The first layer, played on piano, is incredibly significant, not only because of its haunting nature, but because it’s the first time in the entire series Djawadi has ever used piano (New Rockstars, 2016). The second layer, introduced by the cello, and later expanded and chromatically altered a duo of voices, gives a foreshadowing effect that something isn’t quite right. The third theme, introduced and performed exclusively by the voices, clashes semitones to create a further sense of uneasiness. The last two layers, which include aggressive strings playing arpeggiated patterns and a pipe organ combining all of these sounds, leads to a thunderous conclusion. The interaction of these layers, as well as their own individual importance, enhance the narrative through cinematic layering.

Daniel White

Cinematic Worldbuilding and Howard Shore’s Big Shoes: Amazon’s Rings of Power and the Musical Extension of an Existing Franchise

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022-) is noteworthy not only through its record-breaking budget, its controversial adaptation of Tolkien’s legendarium or its extension of an existing franchise, but also through the use of composer Bear McCreary who until recently had been slowly making a name for himself in different corners of the film, TV and game industries. With Howard Shore providing only the series theme tune, the cultural legacy of Shore’s soundtracks – their ‘epic’ nature and significant fanbase – left some big shoes for McCreary to fill. Furthermore, licensing restrictions meant that neither composer could reuse musical material from the film trilogies. How, then, did McCreary go about creating music for Rings of Power, and in what ways does it relate to the pre-existing musical world of Middle-earth?

This paper seeks to explore these questions, looking firstly at Shore’s theme tune and its familiar approaches to conjuring a fantasy world, before focusing on McCreary’s scores. Analysis here uses musical examples to demonstrate similarities and is divided into three sections. First, an exploration of thematic relations and a focus on the opening intervals of McCreary’s themes. Second, an exposition on the use of non-orchestral instrumentation for exoticist or fantastic effect. Third, a focus on specific harmonic progressions including chromatic mediants and other tonal shifts. All three of these facets demonstrate ways in which McCreary aims to create something quite new, while drawing on established practices that are either specifically related to Shore’s Middle-earth music, or more generally influenced by popular approaches to fantasy scoring. What is also noteworthy about McCreary’s music is the sheer number of soundtracks released (one per series and one per episode), paired with the detailed information he has provided through blogs, articles and interviews, priming this music for the scrutiny of the forensic listener and (aca-)fan.

Emin Bülbül

Ecology Underscored:  Sonic Agency, Multispecies Soundtrack, and  Geographies of Solitude 

In cinema studies, the term score accounts for a piece of music composed specifically for  a film. Often non-diegetic, it accompanies the narrative, sets the tone, conveys emotion  or creates and releases tension. And despite the auditory differences in form, technique,  and acoustics, it is prevalently produced by human beings. Aiming to problematize the  anthropocentric views of score, this paper both listens to and examines the sensuous and  ecological soundscape of Jacquelyn Mills’s documentary Geographies of Solitude (2022).  In my analysis, I bridge three theoretical concepts in order to better grasp the ways Mills  experiments with the natures of composition. First, Salomé Voegelin’s (2014) aesthetic  possibilism for it helps us explore the concrete materiality and contingency of  environmental voices. Second, Eben Kirksey’s (2015) multispecies communities, because it  provides an overview for recognizing the sounds of entangled species and modes of  coexistence in Sable Island where Geographies of Solitude is set. And third, Brandon  LaBelle’s (2018) sonic agency, since, as acoustics of assembly and resistance, it politically  resonates with the film’s musical pieces collectively composed by living things ranging  from such invertebrates as Calosoma beetles to snails. My overall argument is that in  Mills’s multispecies soundtrack, the sonic ways beings manifest themselves present us  with a decentered, antihierarchical experience of hearing. Music, noise, voice, sound— and score: Agency is shared, creativity is multiple, it is all more-than-human. 

Paul Greene

Three Way Tie: The Soundworld of Tomas Riedelsheimer’s Rivers and Tides’ 

The 2001 documentary feature ‘Rivers and Tides’ by the German filmmaker Tomas Riedelsheimer focusses on  the work of the British landscape artist Andy Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy’s work is most often ephemeral and  located in outdoor environments, where the particular location, the vernacular materials and the act of time  on the artistic object are key elements of his practice. In the film we see Goldsworthy working in various  locations including Canada, Scotland and England’s Lake District.  

The film’s rich cinematography is enhanced by the score composed by the British experimental musician Fred  Frith; throughout the film Goldsworthy’s work is a gift for the camera and Frith’s compositions provide  understated but crucial structural support throughout. His contribution frames and enables the position of the  various elements of the soundworld in relation to the image. The instrumentation used by Frith has elements  of both ‘noise’ and a purity of timbre which form a distinctive empathetic relationship with the visual aesthetic  of the work. 

My paper argues that within this work there is an overarching structural equality in the triangulation of (a) the  artists visual presence and actions, (b) the art itself, and (c) the cinematic soundworld, inhabited as it is by non diegetic music, diegetic sound, sound design and the artists voice.  

Informed by interviews with the composer and the sound editor these sometimes complex interactions are  examined in the research to establish how this equality is arrived at.

Sanna Qvick

Soundtrack as a creator of the audience’s relationship to nature in the  film Ailo 

This paper examines the nature document film Aïlo: Une odyssée en Laponie (France 2018) by  French author Guillaume Maidatchevsky with the method of audio-visual analysis and perspective  of ecomusicology, and it is based to my published article about the film and my close readings of  it. 

In his work Maidatchevsky tells the story of Ailo, reindeer calf’s first year in the landscape of  Lapland. As story-based nature film and aimed at families, Ailo introduces the audience to both  scenery and wildlife of Lapland. In the paper, I utilize the concept of storialization and view point of ecomusicology to my audiovisual analysis examples. I am searching answers for among other  things, how does the sound world of Ailo create the experienced story world and the filmed  nature of Lapland? 

Ailo’s sonic surroundings are very clear. Soundtrack’s different layers (sound effects, voice-over  and music) are segregated, and they have distinctive roles in the film. When observing these roles  at the boundary of the story word’s authenticity, a question rises whether fidelity to realism is needed in a document, which uses fictionality as its means of expression.