6. Reassessing King Kong ; or, the hollywood film score, 1933–1934

2014 ◽  
pp. 230-265
Keyword(s):  
Film Score ◽  
Hollywood Film

Dialogue without Words

2019 ◽  
pp. 247-278
Author(s):  
Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
The United States ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
World War ◽  
Film Score ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Piano Quartet ◽  
Single Piece ◽  
The Cold War

In Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett’s analysis, the “identities and dichotomies” of her title concern a single piece of music, Aaron Copland's Piano Quartet (1950) but also a number of extramusical issues that preoccupied the composer at the time. She places Copland’s work, including his Hollywood film score for “The Heiress” and the efforts of his contemporaries (such as Schoenberg, Virgil Thomson), within the complex political landscape post-World War II, the Red Scare in the United States, and the Cold War. Several incidents in Copland’s career circa 1950 indicate that he, with good reason, felt vulnerable to the forces of reaction at work. DeLapp-Birkett demonstrates conclusively that in his public statements and in his compositional development Copland was responding consciously to the pressures from a variety of sources.

Music for Spellbound (1945): A Contested Collaboration

2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 418-463
Author(s):  
Nathan Platte
Keyword(s):  
Shared Vision ◽  
Musical Score ◽  
Film Score ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Recorded Music

Production files detailing the construction of the musical score for the film Spellbound reveal an intense and complicated collaboration involving music editor Audray Granville, director Alfred Hitchcock, composer Miklós Rózsa, and producer David O. Selznick. Tracing the formation of the score from initial outlines through composition and editing shows how these four individuals contributed to the score’s development. Conflicting instructions from Hitchcock and Selznick as well as Granville’s preview score influenced Rózsa’s compositional decisions, and Granville’s revisions of Rózsa’s recorded music affected the content of the score. The music of Spellbound does not represent a single or even shared vision, but rather an intricate conglomeration of ideas, revisions, and interpolations. Illuminating these layers of discourse enriches musico-cinematic analysis by challenging conventional notions of authorship and artistic control in the Hollywood film score.

scholarly journals Remote Control: Collaborative Scoring and the Question of Authorship

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Nicholas Kmet
Keyword(s):  
Remote Control ◽  
Joint Venture ◽  
Film Scores ◽  
Film Score ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Music Department ◽  
Santa Monica ◽  
Pass Through ◽  
Selling Point ◽  
Controversial Aspect

Perhaps the most interesting – and controversial – aspect of Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions is the collaborative workflow that many of the film scores that pass through the Santa Monica studio are produced under. While Zimmer and business partner Steven Kofsky have taken great pains in interviews to emphasize the independence of composers working at the Santa Monica studio – Kofsky has said that “these composers are independent, have their own businesses, and secure their own movies” – the reality is one of frequent collaboration. The website for the studio’s parent company – a joint venture between Zimmer, Kofsky, and Lorne Balfe – advertises that “clients have access to over a dozen composers and music editors;” composer collaboration is clearly a prime selling point of Zimmer’s business. An important side-effect of this process is that it has often become difficult – if not impossible – for scholars and enthusiasts to determine the authorship of individual cues within scores. It is not uncommon for as many as five composers – including some of the more prominent names at the studio – to be credited as providing additional music or filling other roles in the music department. This article examines the collaborative process practiced at Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions, and how it challenges traditional notions of authorship in relation to the Hollywood film score.

Copland, Hollywood, and American Musical Modernism

2019 ◽  
pp. 40-74
Author(s):  
Sally Bick
Keyword(s):  
Migrant Workers ◽  
American Music ◽  
Shared Values ◽  
John Steinbeck ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Film Score ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Of Mice And Men ◽  
Mass Entertainment ◽  
Depression Era

This chapter provides a detailed musical and cinematic analysis of Of Mice and Men, Copland’s first Hollywood film score. The discussion begins by outlining Copland’s interest in film and Hollywood, his desire to engage in mass entertainment, and his eventual first Hollywood commission. Copland’s ideas are compared with the shared values of novelist John Steinbeck, which embrace Popular Front ideals, nationalism, and Americanism. Likewise, Milestone’s cinematic vision, which borrows Dorothea Lange’s photographic depiction of the realities of Depression-era migrant workers, is echoed by the sonic aesthetic of simplicity realized in Copland’s style. Copland’s score is discussed within the larger context of 1930s American music with references to Virgil Thomson and the critique of Arthur Berger.

Strange Voices: Subjectivity and Gender in Forbidden Planet’s Soundscape of Tomorrow

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHAN PROCK
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Real World ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Film Score ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Narrative Cinema ◽  
Double Function ◽  
Male Subjectivity ◽  
And Gender

AbstractAs the first Hollywood film to employ an all-electronic score, Forbidden Planet (1956) helped cement the association of science-fiction films with electronically produced sounds and music. While sounds lacking real-world referents were crucial for representing sonically the nature of fantastic objects and beings, Louis and Bebe Barron's soundscape also had to serve the more conventional musical demands of narrative cinema where music sets mood and atmosphere and creates the illusion of character subjectivity. This double function of their “electronic tonalities,” however, engendered a strange ambiguity in the film's sonic ontology. In this article, I examine how the practical and aesthetic issues arising from this ambiguity forced the Barrons to confront in their score a complex of intertwined musical and cultural messages: how electronic music evokes notions of the exotic Other; how conceptions of vocality and embodiment in their music intersect with other visual and narrative elements to illuminate a gendered divide among envoiced bodies in the film; and how music in the film evolves to illustrate and posit a threat to the male body and, thus, masculinity itself—only in order, ultimately, to restore and reassert conventional patriarchy and the primacy of male subjectivity. As I argue, by using modernist methods and materials to serve a conventionally populist representational form, the Barrons effectively exposed some of the deep underlying tensions and contradictions within modernism itself, even while revisioning fundamental aspects of the Hollywood film score.

Film Analysis: Image and Movement

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Radner ◽  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Film Analysis ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Poetic Expression ◽  
French Tradition ◽  
Classical Hollywood

This chapter assesses Raymond Bellour’s contribution to the area of research known as “film analysis,” arguing that it is best understood as an “art” rather than a scientific practice. Grounded in the French tradition of “explication du texte” as a means of approaching literature, Bellour was among the first film scholars to bring a French literary sensibility to the analysis of Classical Hollywood film, which enabled him to recognize the rhetorical refinements of the cinematic medium and its potential for poetic expression. The chapter explores the significant concepts that define Bellour’s approach: segmentation; “the unattainable text” (also referred to as “the undiscoverable text” or “le texte introuvable”); le blocage symbolique (also referred to as “the symbolic blockage”);“the textual volume”; Hitchcock and psychoanalysis; and enunciation.

: Film Score: The View from the Podium . Tony Thomas.

1980 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 44-45
Author(s):  
Claudia Gorbman
Keyword(s):  
Film Score
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