Tuesday 4th July 2023

Abstracts

Diana Díaz González

Trends in Spanish documentary film soundtracks: an overview of the genre, from the 1940s to Franco's developmentalism

After the Spanish Civil War, the Franco regime established a film policy characterised by ideological restriction and the protection of the Spanish industry. This paper proposes an approach to the Spanish documentary, from the 1940s to the technocratic phase of the Franco regime, focusing on the soundtrack of this period of Spanish non-fiction cinema. Thus, an overview of the genre is offered, focusing on the musical trends in soundtracks up to the 1970s. First, we will review frequent musical practices in NO-DO, the Franco's cinematographic Spanish Newsreel, in its section of production of documentaries for the dissemination of the regime's ideology. 

Music was a fundamental element in the soundtrack of Spanish documentaries in the 1950s, as in other European cinemas. In Spain, these were the years of national-Catholic predominance in the context of the country's isolation after the Second World War. From the end of the 1950s, with the influence of realism in Spanish cinema, the proposals of directors who tried to reconcile the educational function of documentary film with the critical expression of the filmmaker, often conditioned by censorship, were diversified. The country broke its isolation during Franco's developmentalist regime, although the authoritarianism of a traditional state was maintained. Thus, in the 1960s there was an interesting dialectic between the discourse of the regime and other ideological, cultural and artistic discourses that were gaining ground in Spain. The documentary tried to make visible the ignored part of Spanish society by providing a revision of Spanish cultural identity. We will assess the styles and functions of the musical soundtrack in a selection of titles from the renovating path of Spanish documentary, which began in the late 1950s, also with the influence of contemporary artistic trends, such as Lejos de los árboles (Esteva, 1963-1970) and Rías y Ramblas (Pérez Olea, 1968).

Maria Fuchs

Scoring 'Africa': Sampling Politics in the Production of Global Soundtracks

"Africa" found its way into cinema as early as the silent film era, for example, as a topos in the various music libraries. Entries such as "cannibal," "jungle music," "wild music," etc. are indicative of the colonialist foreign designations in anthologies that were associated with the African continent and that set racist stereotyping processes in motion. The audiovisual clichés meant to suggest otherness, exoticism, and alterity can still be found in contemporary film and television today. In this lecture, I would like to use the example of a German-speaking television genre – the "Africanized" Heimatfilm (sentimental films in regional settings) – which has been successfully broadcast on German television since the late 1990s, to question the neo-colonial sound practices not only on the textual level, but also on the level of the musical production of television itself. In doing so, I draw on Marc Slobin's (2008) as well as Mera's and Morcom's (2009) ideas about global perspectives on the soundtrack and aim to take up the debates of the intersections between ethnomusicology and screen music studies.

Conor Power

“American in Spirit”: John Williams and the Legacy of John Philip Sousa

When Leonard Slatkin dubbed John Williams the “Modern-Day March King,” he was surely thinking of the music we indelibly associate with the Galactic Empire, Superman, and Indiana Jones. Williams has shown a propensity for crafting marches that have transcended their filmic associations, with many, now iconic, tunes entering the canon following performances by the likes of “The President’s Own” US Marine Band, once led by the original “March King”, John Philip Sousa. The Sousa era, described by Williams as a traditional America of ‘hot dogs’ and ‘ballparks’ (Colburn, 2004), is occasionally nostalgically and stylistically referenced in bombastic marches from Williams’s less popular scores. This paper explores the implications of this traditionalist and patriotic form in films such as Midway (a 1976 star-studded war film) and 1941 (a 1979 war-paranoia “comedy”). Described by Williams as ‘American in spirit,’ the marches in Midway vividly illustrate, in my reading, the values of this (clichéd) idiom. “March from 1941”, by contrast, shows how this usually earnest and sincere topic can be satirized through an unrelentingly optimistic tone, triple counterpoint, and cannon fire. These comparative case studies lead me to reflect on how Williams navigates the space between nationalistic nostalgia, patriotic parody, and Hollywood propaganda. Might the perpetuation of Sousa-esque militarism and patriotism in these marches suggest an ‘uncritical’ attitude to the American military complex (Lerner, 2004), or is Williams merely recalling his own wartime youth and training in the US Air Force?

Marc Brooks

The Mash-Up-Image in Baz Luhrmann’s The Get Down

Baz Luhrmann’s vibrant if controversial TV series The Get Down (2016-18) deals with one of the major innovations in popular music—the emergence of hip hop in the slums of the South Bronx in the 1970s. I want to argue that many of the musical numbers—designed to illustrate the birth of the new genre—are themselves audiovisually innovative in a way that complements the technical innovation in the music. 

Recently, a number of film scholars have suggested that, following Deleuze’s ‘movement-image’ and ‘time-image’, which provided the basic models for cinema before and after the Second World War, respectively, there might now be a third image at work in digital or post-cinematic audiovisual arts. Patricia Pisters has found the neuro-image, Sergi Sanchez the no-time-image, and Steven Shaviro hauntological time. Shaviro’s work is of particular interest because, in his examples from music video and music-video-like moments in film, music plays a crucial role in the formation of hauntological time. (Indeed he drops ‘image’ from his version of the third image to emphasize its thoroughly audiovisual nature.) Just like the time-image, the third-image has multiple instantiations. In this talk I’d like to join Pisters, Sanchez, Shaviro, in working towards a complete taxonomy of the third image by putting forward the special audiovisual technique found in the musical scenes in The Get Down as another variety.

In Shaviro’s hauntological time, musical time haunts images in which the passage of time has been frozen or effaced in some way and so constitutes an audiovisual extension of Sanchez’s no-time-image. In The Get Down, music stemming from multiple geographical locations in the diegesis is ‘mashed-up’ in a manner that effaces space leading to a mash-up-image, which I correspondingly identify as a no-space-image. In dialogue with Shaviro’s discussion of hauntological time, I consider whether the new configuration of space-time found in the no-space-image in The Get Down trivially reflects our globally interconnected world or whether, like the 1970s hip hop that inspired it, it has the potential to inspire cultural, social, and political change.

David Etheridge

Musical Scrabble: Modular Composition in Barry Gray’s music for  ‘Thunderbirds’

I have discovered various differing definitions of modular composition, dependent on idiom and context. Saunders (2009) refers to ‘standardised units, and a procedure for fitting them together’. Walus (2012) covers the use of modules in film music in depth, noting that Aaron Copland’s film music was assembled from musical modules, while Bernard Herrmann used ‘motific cells’ as building blocks for modules.

Barry Gray (1908-84) is enduringly celebrated as the in-house composer for Gerry Anderson’s science fiction TV series, with the music for ‘Thunderbirds’ being his most iconic and familiar theme. He  only scored nine out of the thirty two episodes of ‘Thunderbirds’ and used modular techniques in both composition, recording and tape editing to create a system of ‘musical scrabble’ where by musical modules could be re-edited and re-assembled in any combination for use in the series. Modules could range from a single bar to several minutes in length. He also included material from previous series such as ‘Stingray’ and ‘Supercar’ in ‘Thunderbirds’.

In this paper I demonstrate  Gray’s use of modular composition and I will include original source session recordings and examples from his scores.  I will show Gray’s modular approach in practice, showing how one particular cue may consist of several modules, or be developed into many different versions and variations.

Tim Summers & Will Farmer

Towards a Transformational Theory of Music in the Multimedia Franchise

It has become something of a truism to acknowledge that modern Western popular media culture is dominated by franchises. Yet, while excellent music scholarship has engaged with music within series (e.g. Webster 2018 on Harry Potter, Decker 2017 on Fast and Furious, Brame 2011 on The Legend of Zelda) and across transmedial hypertexts (e.g. Winters 2017 on Indiana Jones), there has been little holistic theorization of music in the multimedia franchise.

This paper begins the work of developing a model for understanding music in the multimedia franchise. A franchise’s musical identity and discourse may exist on the level of specific thematic recurrence and reconfiguration in a franchise, but it is not limited to this kind of precise signification. It is also evident through broader questions of musical style, the aesthetics of audiovisual synchronization, or any number of other factors (what we elsewhere describe as a franchise’s ‘musical register’).

Building on the pattern theories of Christopher Alexander (2002), we suggest that music in the franchise can be understood as a set of nonlinear transformations, evident as creators and audiences move through (and construct) the franchise space. Identifying and describing these transformational changes are not ends in themselves, but serve to reveal dynamics of music in the franchise. An adapted Alexanderian approach to transformation is flexible and versatile, recognising that musical continuity and change in a franchise is complex. 

This paper will outline the transformational theory of music in the franchise, before illustrating its application through the example of music in the Star Trek franchise. By examining comparable moments in the franchise (e.g. title themes) through the lens of pattern transformation, we may better understand how the audience experiences a franchise, and the factors affecting its musical articulation. 

Lauren Berlin

A New Class of TV: Television Infrastructure, Educational Programming, and Omnibus (1952–61)

Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts are conventionally treated as an outgrowth of his exceptional career as a conductor and educator. However, Bernstein’s television presence was merely a side-effect of a new emphasis on music appreciation programming in the United States. Following World War II, the rapid growth of nationwide TV broadcasting in America was out of control. Infrastructural developments were poorly regulated, and television signals interfered with each other because of station proximity. To alleviate this problem, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a building “freeze order” for new stations in 1948, and in 1952 the “Sixth Report and Order” ended the freeze. In this memorandum, legislators placed educational programming at the highest priority for new developments in broadcasting infrastructure, and the resultant genre of educational television was born. By greenlighting noncommercial programming at a significantly higher rate than other programs, the FCC conferred a value on middlebrow TV performances. In this paper, I argue that TV musical variety shows became an instrumental part of the auditory aesthetic of middlebrow television in the long 1950s. Following the infrastructural turn in media studies (Parks and Starosielski 2016; Devine 2019; Plantin and Punathambekar 2019), I suggest that FCC policy changes cultivated a space for non-commercial programing to thrive. Scholars in music studies have highlighted the importance of made-for-TV operas and musicals in this context. However, variety shows have been relegated to the realm of commercial television. On programs like the Ford Foundation’s Omnibus (1952–61) and in publications like the Music Educators Journal, an intricate network of producers and musicians educated the American public about a canon of musical repertoire by employing television’s domestic reach. When musical variety shows contributed to the American middlebrow, they moved beyond commercial popular culture and into tastemakers of aesthetic values.

Elizabeth Hunt

Moving Image Music in Concert: A History

This paper will present a history of moving image music concerts. Within this study, the term moving image music concerts refers to live orchestral concerts of music originally written for film, television, and video games. My research aims to analyse such concerts and contextualise their history. The research discussed here draws upon the small amount of existing literature produced by scholars such as Mccorkle Okazaki (2020), Audissino (2021), and Sureshkumar (2022), all of which discuss concerts of film music. This paper expands upon these scholars’ work through archival research and discussion of television and video games alongside films. 

I open this paper with a discussion of Pops concerts which focuses on the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Following this, I will present programmes and dates of some of the earliest concerts that focused on the orchestral presentation of moving image music in order to present a timeline of the development of such programming. This includes investigation of orchestral archives on a global scale including such orchestras as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, and the Tokyo String Music Combination Playing Group. Along with the demonstration of impactful figures and moments in the history of film music’s presentation, this paper will illustrate the different stories of both television and video game music’s journeys to the concert hall. I also discuss within this paper the live accompaniment presentation of moving image media, suggesting how and why it is presented in this manner.

Julin Lee

“Guided by the Instruments”: Accentuating Musical Instruments in Behind-the-Score Featurettes of Contemporary Television Series

“That was what I was trying to achieve when I locked myself into the studio for a month...to be guided by the instruments,” explains Ludwig Göransson in an online featurette (Variety Artisans 2020) describing his creative process for the Disney+ series The Mandalorian (2019–present). In this exclusive look “behind-the-score,” Göransson highlights the various musical instruments he used to create the new soundscape that would take the Star Wars franchise into new sonic territories. While film soundtracks and their composers are no strangers to such “making-of” engagements, featurettes such as this one are indicative of television series soundtracks’ increasing visibility within the paratextual media sphere in tandem with the rise of streaming services in the past decade. Furthermore, it represents the larger trend of spotlighting physical musical instruments despite the ubiquity of virtual instruments and DAW-based soundtrack production environments. Drawing on current organological approaches that regard musical instruments as sites of meaning construction (Dawe 2011), I aim to elucidate the role of musical instruments in soundtrack featurettes in guiding the reception and interpretation of contemporary television series by taking selected soundtrack featurettes of The Mandalorian and Netflix’s Stranger Things (2016–present) as case studies. In particular, I investigate the appeal and significance of “residual technologies” (Sexton 2015) within an increasingly digital soundtrack production landscape and argue that their renewed meanings within a digital age serve to elevate the status of these television series and their soundtracks. By tracing television series music back to its instrumental elements, I aim to highlight how a soundtrack’s aesthetic and narrative impact is contingent upon the technology utilized as much as upon the inspired cognition of the composers, thus drawing attention to the material and practical conditions of soundtrack production and reception.

Ana Djordjevic

“Attack him with music!” – Music as a Weapon in Post-Yugoslav War Films

In Vinko Brešan’s film How the War Started on my Island (1996), in the stand-off between Yugoslav commander and Croatian Army, while discussing how to lure the commander out of the army base, one of the Croatian soldiers suggests to “attack him with music” (“tući ćemo ga glazbom”). The Croatian soldiers then conjure up an elaborate plan that includes an all-day long performance program, hoping that the music will emotionally and mentally affect the commander enough to make him stand down and surrender. 

In this paper I want to present how the music used as a weapon, or a torture tool in war films about Yugoslav civil war, notably film How the War Started on my Island, Cabaret Balkan (Goran Paskaljević, 1998) and Pretty Village Pretty Flame (Srdjan Dragojević, 1996). Some of the methods were filmic variations of real-life situations (Cusick 2008), while others could be inspired by relations between music and violence in other films (Coulthard 2009). I will discuss and show examples in which music is used to break a character mentally which leads to violence and physical harm. I will also discuss the music used for those purposes and the meanings and references the songs carry and what makes them “deadly” in the context of Yugoslav conflict.  

James Heazlewood-Dale and John MacDonald

The Dance of Combat: Drum Fills, Boss Fights, and The Evolution of Aggressive Game Audio

The sound of striking a drum kit has long evoked a myriad of musical meanings. Synonymous with rhythm and power, the drum kit (and the various percussion instruments it comprises) is deeply entangled with American popular music and its rich, complicated (and at times problematic) history. Many of the instrument’s long-standing assumptions and associations continue to operate within the context of media as musical coding for combat, violence, exoticism, virtuosity, climax, and masculinity. While extant discourses explore how drums operate in the context of film, TV, and especially popular music performance practice, minimal research examines how composers and sound design teams maintain (and subvert) these meanings in video game soundworlds. How do technological advancements inform how video game composers utilize and implement drums in scoring? How does the instrument’s application to shifting ludic contexts contribute to the evolving reception and meaning of the drum kit? The present study addresses such questions and argues that technological advancements demark critical changes in how the drum kit participates in dynamic audio. These changes engender significant shifts in how the drum kit operates as musical coding for violence, sexuality, and exoticism. This interdisciplinary study draws from a range of scholars in gender studies (Susan McClary and Marcia Citron), ludomusicology (Roger Moseley and Steven Reale), and jazz studies (Vijay Iyer and George Lewis) and examines several case studies that richly demonstrate the complex relationship between the drum kit and gameplay. These include Donkey Kong Country (1994), Sonic R (1997), No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle (2010), and Superliminal (2020). This inquiry aims to illuminate the drum kit’s plurality of meanings and how they participate in a player’s gameplay experience.

Jeronimo Sarmiento

Cinematic Polyphony in Lucrecia Martel’s Cinema: The Musicality of Narrative Film in The Headless Woman

This article provides a brief overview on the concept of musicality in fiction cinema language, understanding the comparative analysis of both art forms and considering cinema as a potentially musical construction. Furthermore, the examination of polyphonic musical textures and its methodical application in the formal analysis of Lucrecia Martel’s cinema (namely in her 2008 film The Headless Woman) provides a new perspective on the aesthetic values of the Argentinian filmmaker’s work with sound and image, which unveils other forms of assuming fiction film narration. Initially, a brief consideration on the old concept of ‘Pure Cinema’, which many European avant-garde filmmakers from the beginning of the 20th century elaborated as a way to conceive cinema’s authentic language, places the musical form as the closest and purest in relation to cinema. These ideas enlighten the first clues to understand the musicality embedded in the film medium. Filmmakers like Germaine Dulac and later scholars and thinkers will address the problematic of musical forms and cinema language, namely in regard to three elements: movement, rhythm and time. During the analysis of both art forms, these three concepts seem to emerge as the linking areas of both universes, as the defining characteristics of cinema’s potential analogy with music that both film scholars and film creators cannot deny.