Experiencing Film Music

Experiencing Film Music PDF Author: Kenneth LaFave
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 144225842X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Of all the elements that combine to make movies, music sometimes seems the forgotten stepchild. Yet it is an integral part of the cinematic experience. Minimized as mere “background music,” film scores enrich visuals with emotional mood and intensity, underscoring directors’ intentions, enhancing audiences’ reactions, driving the narrative forward, and sometimes even subverting all three. Trying to imagine The Godfather or Lawrence of Arabia with a different score is as difficult as imagining them featuring a different cast. In Experiencing Film Music: A Listener’s Companion, Kenneth LaFave guides the reader through the history, ideas, personalities, and visions that have shaped the music we hear on the big screen. Looking back to the music improvised for early silent movies, LaFave traces the development of the film score from such early epic masterpieces as Max Steiner’s work for Gone With the Wind, Bernard Herrmann’s musical creations for Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, Jerry Goldsmith’s sonic presentation of Chinatown, and Ennio Morricone’s distinctive rewrite of the Western genre, to John Williams’ epoch-making Jaws and Star Wars. LaFave also brings readers into the present with looks at the work over the last decade and a half of Hans Zimmer, Alan Silvestre, Carter Brey, and Danny Elfman. Experiencing Film Music: A Listener’s Companion opens the ears of film-goers to the nuance behind movie music, laying out in simple, non-technical language how composers and directors map what we hear to what we see—and, not uncommonly, back again.

Experiencing Film Music

Experiencing Film Music PDF Author: Kenneth LaFave
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 144225842X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Get Book Here

Book Description
Of all the elements that combine to make movies, music sometimes seems the forgotten stepchild. Yet it is an integral part of the cinematic experience. Minimized as mere “background music,” film scores enrich visuals with emotional mood and intensity, underscoring directors’ intentions, enhancing audiences’ reactions, driving the narrative forward, and sometimes even subverting all three. Trying to imagine The Godfather or Lawrence of Arabia with a different score is as difficult as imagining them featuring a different cast. In Experiencing Film Music: A Listener’s Companion, Kenneth LaFave guides the reader through the history, ideas, personalities, and visions that have shaped the music we hear on the big screen. Looking back to the music improvised for early silent movies, LaFave traces the development of the film score from such early epic masterpieces as Max Steiner’s work for Gone With the Wind, Bernard Herrmann’s musical creations for Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, Jerry Goldsmith’s sonic presentation of Chinatown, and Ennio Morricone’s distinctive rewrite of the Western genre, to John Williams’ epoch-making Jaws and Star Wars. LaFave also brings readers into the present with looks at the work over the last decade and a half of Hans Zimmer, Alan Silvestre, Carter Brey, and Danny Elfman. Experiencing Film Music: A Listener’s Companion opens the ears of film-goers to the nuance behind movie music, laying out in simple, non-technical language how composers and directors map what we hear to what we see—and, not uncommonly, back again.

Music in Film (Preliminary Edition)

Music in Film (Preliminary Edition) PDF Author: Joseph Turrin
Publisher: Cognella Academic Publishing
ISBN: 9781516514540
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


The Synergy of Film and Music

The Synergy of Film and Music PDF Author: Peter Rothbart
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0810887592
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
Although writers on film music frequently allude to specific parts of scores, comprehensive examinations of entire scores are rare. In addition, most analyses of scores composed for the screen are discussed outside their cinematic context. To best understand the role music plays in the production of a motion picture, however, it benefits the viewer to consider all of the elements that comprise the film experience. In The Synergy of Film and Music: Sight and Sound in Five Hollywood Films, Peter Rothbart considers the aural and visual aspects of five representative films: West Side Story, Psycho, Empire of the Sun, Altered States, and American Beauty. For each film, the author demonstrates how a variety of elements work together to create a singular experience. After reviewing the various roles that music can serve in a film, as well as providing an overview of the film scoring process, Rothbart looks at each film, examining them one musical cue at a time, so the reader can watch the film while reading about each cue. In these analyses, timecode markings from commercial DVDs are provided in the margins alongside the text, which allow the reader to correlate the on-screen drama to the second. Rothbart explains how music is used in a specific cue and why the decision was made to use that particular musical idea at that moment. Consequently, film music aficionados--as well as students and composers of film music--can gain real-world perspective of how music is used in conjunction with other elements. In this way, the author raises awareness of music's relationship to virtually every other aspect of cinema--dialogue, sound effects, costuming, set design, and cinematography--to deepen the viewer's experience. Written in a deliberately nontechnical way, this book is intended for anyone interested in film to easily follow along. At the same time, the information can benefit professional filmmakers or composers because they can see with great detail how each cue unfolds along with all of the visual elements of the film. This unique analysis makes The Synergy of Film and Music a fascinating and instructive volume that both casual viewers and students of cinema will appreciate.

Film Music: A Very Short Introduction

Film Music: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: Kathryn Kalinak
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199707979
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
Film music is as old as cinema itself. Years before synchronized sound became the norm, projected moving images were shown to musical accompaniment, whether performed by a lone piano player or a hundred-piece orchestra. Today film music has become its own industry, indispensable to the marketability of movies around the world. Film Music: A Very Short Introduction is a compact, lucid, and thoroughly engaging overview written by one of the leading authorities on the subject. After opening with a fascinating analysis of the music from a key sequence in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, Kathryn Kalinak introduces readers not only to important composers and musical styles but also to modern theoretical concepts about how and why film music works. Throughout the book she embraces a global perspective, examining film music in Asia and the Middle East as well as in Europe and the United States. Key collaborations between directors and composers--Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, Akira Kurosawa and Fumio Hayasaka, Federico Fellini and Nino Rota, to name only a few--come under scrutiny, as do the oft-neglected practices of the silent film era. She also explores differences between original film scores and compilation soundtracks that cull music from pre-existing sources. As Kalinak points out, film music can do many things, from establishing mood and setting to clarifying plot points and creating emotions that are only dimly realized in the images. This book illuminates the many ways it accomplishes those tasks and will have its readers thinking a bit more deeply and critically the next time they sit in a darkened movie theater and music suddenly swells as the action unfolds onscreen. About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

Experiencing Latin American Music

Experiencing Latin American Music PDF Author: Carol A. Hess
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520961005
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
Experiencing Latin American Music draws on human experience as a point of departure for musical understanding. Students explore broad topics—identity, the body, religion, and more—and relate these to Latin American musics while refining their understanding of musical concepts and cultural-historical contexts. With its brisk and engaging writing, this volume covers nearly fifty genres and provides both students and instructors with online access to audio tracks and listening guides. A detailed instructor’s packet contains sample quizzes, clicker questions, and creative, classroom-tested assignments designed to encourage critical thinking and spark the imagination. Remarkably flexible, this innovative textbook empowers students from a variety of disciplines to study a subject that is increasingly relevant in today’s diverse society. In addition to the instructor’s packet, online resources for students include: customized Spotify playlist online listening guides audio sound links to reinforce musical concepts stimulating activities for individual and group work

The Cambridge Companion to Film Music

The Cambridge Companion to Film Music PDF Author: Mervyn Cooke
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107094518
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
A stimulating and unusually wide-ranging collection of essays overviewing ways in which music functions in film soundtracks.

The Presence of the Past

The Presence of the Past PDF Author: Daniel Bishop
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190932716
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
The Presence of the Past offers a new perspective on Hollywood's "New Wave" as engaged with the vitality of sensory experience and the affective imagination. As author Daniel Bishop shows, the soundtracks of several key films of the New Hollywood Cinema of the late 1960s and 70s cultivated an array of sensibilities regarding the American past. This importance of the past exceeded the New Hollywood's acknowledged use of genre revisionism as a vehicle for timely ideological commentary. There was also a vital tendency in this era to locate the past as an object of imagined phenomenal presence. Although this concept of the past never solidified into a self-conscious discourse, it was nevertheless woven into film culture, readable between the lines of criticism, cultural reception, New Wave aesthetics, and in the aesthetic and industrial transformations of sound design and film music. Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), The Last Picture Show (1971), American Graffiti (1973), Chinatown (1974), and Badlands (1973) are not only key texts of an exciting era in American popular cinema. They are also mediations upon the presence of the past, an image central to the polarities of visceral energy and ambiguous ephemerality, of utopian dreams and melancholy resignation that characterized this cinema. These sensibilities of pastness engage in diverse ways with myth, nostalgia, paranoia, and existential alienation. They are, however, also united by a concern both with the experiential actuality of the past and with the distances that inevitably separate us from this actuality.

Reeled In: Pre-existing Music in Narrative Film

Reeled In: Pre-existing Music in Narrative Film PDF Author: Jonathan Godsall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351970445
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
How and why is pre-existing music used in films? What effects can its use have on films and their audiences? And what lasting impact can appropriation have on the music? Reeled In is a comprehensive exploration of these questions, considering the cinematic quotation of Beethoven symphonies, Beatles songs, and Herrmann scores alike in films ranging from the early sound era to the present day, and in every role from ‘main title theme’ to ‘music playing in bar’. Incorporating a discussion of such factors as copyright and commerce alongside examination of texts and their effects, this broad study is a significant contribution to the scholarship on music in screen media, demonstrating that pre-existing music possesses unique attributes that can affect both how filmmakers construct their works and how audiences receive them, to an extent regardless of the music’s style, genre, and so on. This book also situates the reception of music by film, and by audiences experiencing that music through film, as significant processes within present-day culture, while more generally providing an illuminating case study of the kinds of borrowings, adaptations, and reinventions that characterize much of today’s art and entertainment.

Film, Music, Memory

Film, Music, Memory PDF Author: Berthold Hoeckner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022664975X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Film has shaped modern society in part by changing its cultures of memory. Film, Music, Memory reveals that this change has rested in no small measure on the mnemonic powers of music. As films were consumed by growing American and European audiences, their soundtracks became an integral part of individual and collective memory. Berthold Hoeckner analyzes three critical processes through which music influenced this new culture of memory: storage, retrieval, and affect. Films store memory through an archive of cinematic scores. In turn, a few bars from a soundtrack instantly recall the image that accompanied them, and along with it, the affective experience of the movie. Hoeckner examines films that reflect directly on memory, whether by featuring an amnesic character, a traumatic event, or a surge of nostalgia. As the history of cinema unfolded, movies even began to recall their own history through quotations, remakes, and stories about how cinema contributed to the soundtrack of people’s lives. Ultimately, Film, Music, Memory demonstrates that music has transformed not only what we remember about the cinematic experience, but also how we relate to memory itself.

Film Music

Film Music PDF Author: Roy M. Prendergast
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393308747
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
The expanded, updated, and revised edition of Film Music brings together the experience and insights of the professional film music editor with the scholarship and concerns of the film critic and historian. In this pioneering work, film music--from its beginnings to the present day--is analyzed both as composition and as an integral element of cinematic expression. Beginning with an extensive historical overview, the author recreates the process by which film music composers developed their own forms out of typical screen action. The techniques and achievements of filmmakers from the silent and early sound film eras to the 1990s are examined, including the unique demands of music for the rapidly changing images of cartoons and animated films. A new chapter about music for television has been added to the very informative discussion of techniques for synchronizing music to picture. And the latest technological advances are described in an entirely new section dealing with contemporary methods and tools, including video post-production, the advent of digital audio, and the pervasive influence of the music synthesizer. Replete with music examples drawn from actual film scores, this comprehensive study concludes with an extensive and up-to-date bibliography of related reference works.