The Trouble with Onscreen Orchestrators

An orchestrator elopes with a composer’s beloved and then dies, leaving behind a pregnant widow and an incomplete melody. Discouraged but not defeated, the composer proposes, offering to adopt the orchestrator’s child and melody. Just before the composer conducts his new arrangement of the orphaned theme, a child is born. This synopsis describes one plot line within the Warner Bros. film, Four Daughters (1938), and its sequel, Four Wives (1939). Loosely based on a story by Fannie Hurst, the Four Daughters films appear fashioned specifically for musicological musing. But if the films’ intertwined creative crises receive a pat resolution, the film’s production was less tidy. This essay lends a careful ear to the offscreen voices of studio staff whose dissensions and compromises inflect the musical content and onscreen musicians of the films. Screenwriter Lenore Coffee, who replaced an “unreal and ridiculous” contortionist character with an orchestrator, waged battle with male colleagues for credit and narrative control. Collaborative construction of the fictional compositions—credited to Max Steiner but based on themes written by Heinz Roemheld and Max Rabinowitsch—was also initially muffled. After the onscreen orchestrator’s unfinished “Symphonie Moderne” became a central plot point, Steiner and his colleagues were impelled to concede, even celebrate, their shared compositional efforts more publicly. Drawing on sketches from the Max Steiner Collection (BYU) as well as scripts and production documents from the Warner Bros. Archives (USC), this paper considers how battles over creative control were waged through the conception, composition, and onscreen depiction of a musical work that became an unlikely vessel for anxieties over Hollywood’s intensely collaborative methods.

Desigualdade salarial de gênero e o abismo salarial entre os gêneros

Neste artigo estaremos discutindo a desigualdade salarial de gênero (unequal gender pay) e o abismo salarial entre os gêneros (gender pay gap) mostrando que embora os dois fenômenos façam parte da mesma lógica, ou seja, a injusta lógica de desvalorização das mulheres e do trabalho feminino, eles são dois fenômenos distintos. A desigualdade salarial de gênero acontece quando homens e mulheres recebem da mesma fonte pagadora salários distintos pelo mesmo trabalho, ou seja, os homens recebem mais para realizar o mesmo trabalho que as mulheres realizam. Já o abismo salarial (pay gap), acontece quando é feita a média dos salários pagos por uma empresa ou organização aos seus trabalhadores e verifica-se que a média salarial dos homens é maior que a média salarial das mulheres. Discutimos aqui porque estas desigualdades acontecem e propomos seis explicações de ordem cultural, moral e psicológica para os fenômenos, a saber, a ganância masculina, o apelo ao "direito natural" do pai de família, o falso mito da maior produtividade masculina, o "apelo do pavão", o efeito Matilda e o princípio Fannie Hurst.