Meaning and Interpretation of Music in Cinema
307 pages
English

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307 pages
English

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Description

By exploring the relationship between music and the moving image in film narrative, David Neumeyer shows that film music is not conceptually separate from sound or dialogue, but that all three are manipulated and continually interact in the larger acoustical world of the sound track. In a medium in which the image has traditionally trumped sound, Neumeyer turns our attention to the voice as the mechanism through which narrative (dialog, speech) and sound (sound effects, music) come together. Complemented by music examples, illustrations, and contributions by James Buhler, Meaning and Interpretation of Music in Cinema is the capstone of Neumeyer's 25-year project in the analysis and interpretation of music in film.


Preface and Acknowledgments
Part 1: Meaning and Interpretation
1. Music in the Vococentric Cinema
2. Tools for Analysis and Interpretation
Part 2: Music in the Mix: Casablanca
by David Neumeyer and James Buhler
3. Acoustic Stylization: The Film's Sound World
4. Music and Utopia: A Reading of the Reunion Scene
5. The Reunion Scene's Contexts
Part 3: Topics and Tropes: Two Preludes by Bach
6. Performers Onscreen
7. Underscore: Four Studies of the Prelude in C Major
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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Publié par
Date de parution 17 août 2015
Nombre de lectures 2
EAN13 9780253016515
Langue English
Poids de l'ouvrage 2 Mo

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Extrait

Meaning and Interpretation of Music in Cinema
MUSICAL MEANING AND INTERPRETATION
Robert S. Hatten, editor
A Theory of Musical Narrative
Byron Alm n
Approaches to Meaning in Music
Byron Alm n and Edward Pearsall
Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera
Naomi Andr
The Italian Traditions and Puccini: Compositional Theory and Practice in Nineteenth-Century Opera
Nicholas Baragwanath
Debussy Redux: The Impact of His Music on Popular Culture
Matthew Brown
Music and the Politics of Negation
James R. Currie
Il Trittico, Turandot, and Puccini s Late Style
Andrew Davis
Neil Young and the Poetics of Energy
William Echard
Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert
Robert S. Hatten
Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation
Robert S. Hatten
Intertextuality in Western Art Music
Michael L. Klein
Music and Narrative since 1900
Michael L. Klein and Nicholas Reyland
Musical Forces: Motion, Metaphor, and Meaning in Music
Steve Larson
Is Language a Music? Writings on Musical Form and Signification
David Lidov
Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony
Melanie Lowe
Breaking Time s Arrow: Experiment and Expression in the Music of Charles Ives
Matthew McDonald
Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz: A Study of Dance-Music Relations in Time
Eric McKee
The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral
Raymond Monelle
Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects: The Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber
Jairo Moreno
Deepening Musical Performance through Movement: The Theory and Practice of Embodied Interpretation
Alexandra Pierce
Expressive Intersections in Brahms: Essays in Analysis and Meaning
Heather Platt and Peter H. Smith
Expressive Forms in Brahms s Instrumental Music: Structure and Meaning in His Werther Quartet
Peter H. Smith
Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven s Late Style
Michael Spitzer
Death in Winterreise: Musico-Poetic Associations in Schubert s Song Cycle
Lauri Suurp
Music and Wonder at the Medici Court: The 1589 Interludes for La pellegrina
Nina Treadwell
Reflections on Musical Meaning and Its Representations
Leo Treitler
Debussy s Late Style
Marianne Wheeldon
DAVID NEUMEYER
Meaning and Interpretation of Music in Cinema
with contributions by James Buhler
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2015 by David Neumeyer
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Neumeyer, David.
Meaning and interpretation of music in cinema / David Neumeyer ; with contributions by James Buhler.
pages cm. - (Musical meaning and interpretation)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01642-3 (cl : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01649-2 (pb : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01651-5 (eb) 1. Motion picture music-Analysis, appreciation. 2. Motion picture music-History and criticism. I. Buhler, James, 1964- II. Title.
ML2075.N48 2015
781.5 42-dc23
2014047475
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
For Laura, who was named after the film;
Kat, who at five was already her own producer;
Dana, who wrote her own script;
and in memory of Livonia Warren McCallum, who was the model for Princess Glory in Gulliver s Travels (1939) .
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part I: Meaning and Interpretation
1. Music in the Vococentric Cinema
2. Tools for Analysis and Interpretation
Part II: Music in the Mix: Casablanca David Neumeyer and James Buhler
3. Acoustic Stylization: The Film s Sound World
4. Music and Utopia: A Reading of the Reunion Scene
5. The Reunion Scene s Contexts
Part III: Topics and Tropes: Two Preludes by Bach
Introduction to Part 3
6. Performers Onscreen
7. Underscore: Four Studies of the C Major Prelude
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
This book continues along a path I started down more than two decades ago: a synthesis of the methods and priorities of film studies and music studies. That is hardly a novelty in the present day, I am pleased to report, as the literature of film music studies continues to grow in both quantity and quality. Technological advances have certainly contributed enormously to these gains-over the past decade, the visual has become ever more a routine part of daily activity and has moved ever more firmly to the forefront of cultural attention-but progress has also come with the inevitable shifts of focus and priority that accompany generational change.
Readers who know my earlier work-a significant portion of it written in co-authorship with James Buhler-will expect to find that the text-object for study is the sound track, not the music track within it. That expectation will certainly be fulfilled here, but this volume is distinguished from my previous publications in that I posit a framework based on the priority of speech (dialogue) and then explore its implications for the analysis and interpretation of music in film. The voice is the place where film studies and (film) music studies meet: the voice-having its source in an agent-guarantees the priority of the image and narrative at the same time that it forces attention to sound and the image/sound dialectic basic to the cinema.
Organization
The book s seven chapters are gathered in three parts. The first of these is titled Meaning and Interpretation and moves about among issues and questions for film music analysis and film style in relation to sound. Chapter 1 lays out the ideological and methodological ground. The study of narrative sound film concerns itself with the two components of the film (sound and image) and their interplay with narrative; music is one component of the sound track. I argue that the sound track has a natural hierarchy in which speech has priority. Natural is in scare quotes here because I accept its status a priori without adding any specific cognitive or evolutionary arguments. 1 At the same time, the mise-en-bande (integrated or multiplane sound track; Altman 2000, 341), with its complex and historically contingent interplay of music, dialogue, ambient sound, effects, and silences, can be interpreted as a kind of musical composition, and aural analysis can then be brought to bear on the sound track as a whole, its relation to the image, and its contribution to narrative. The distinction between music for film (understood semiautonomously) and music in film (understood as an element of the sound track) is central (Altman 2000, 340). In the final section, three case studies of characteristic scenes with music from To Have and Have Not (1944) provide illustrations of the chapter s main points.
Chapter 2 continues the methodological work, first in the form of a discussion of an audiovisual analytic heuristic outlined by Michel Chion (1994, 189; 2003, 263), then in terms of a set of binary oppositions understood as the basis of film music s narrative functions. These five binaries are the familiar diegetic/non-diegetic, along with foreground/background, clarity/fidelity, synchronization/counterpoint, and empathy/anempathy. The internal dialectic of each of these functions and their interactions is construed in terms of a fantastical gap or complex field lying between oppositions (Stilwell 2007, 184). Examples include scenes from The Big Sleep (1946), North by Northwest (1959), Casablanca (1943), 2 M (1931), Written on the Wind (1957), and Pr nom Carmen (1983). The final section of the chapter begins with discussion of the correlations of diegetic/nondiegetic and onscreen/offscreen. Apart from their joining in song performance, music and voice come most closely together in the several modes of the acoustic and the acousmatic. After an excursus on presence/absence, an opposition even more fundamental than the five binaries, the discussion leads to a summary example for the chapter s presentation: the opening sequences from Rebecca (1940).
Parts 2 and 3 continue the work by extended example. They are in effect mirrors of each other, though both are devoted to close reading: part 2 offers an extended reading of music in a single film, Casablanca , and part 3 looks at a variety of (mostly) recent films that make use of two compositions by J. S. Bach: the C Major Prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier , Book I, and the very closely related prelude from the Cello Suite in G Major. The original plan for part 3 was to focus entirely on the C Major Prelude, but because the number of films in which it appears is not large, I was obliged to add the G Major Prelude, which has come into increasing favor with filmmakers over the past twenty-five years.
The notion of the sound track as musical composition receives its most extended treatment in chapter 3 . James Buhler and I particularly emphasize the impact on interpretation of the concept of acoustic stylization, the recognition that sound tracks, like image tracks, are not merely recorded but edited, constructed. In chapter 4 , a very detailed analysis of one scene-when Rick and Ilsa first meet in his caf -brings with it a return to the central issues of vococentrism, which are worked out here in the form

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