Lauren Redhead (University of Leeds)

Sound and Image in Kagel's Ludwig Van

Ludwig Van is the final film produced by Mauricio Kagel. It may be considered, as Bjoern Heile posits, the pinnacle of what he hoped to achieve in the film genre, despite its creation being far from the end of his career. But regardless of its description as such, is this really a film? And is the music that accompanies it really film music? Could this be considered as a piece of music, a film, a documentary, a discourse, or as a coherent whole - integrating all these elements - that cannot simply be defined as any one of them?
The use of aural and visual signifiers in this piece has implications for the way one thinks about Kagel, Beethoven, music, culture, and even society. These signifiers work in conjunction and in dialogue with each other as a significant feature of Kagel’s compositional technique, and therefore a further question arises from Ludwig Van: is there any musical difference between sound and image at all?


Tobias Pontara (Åbo University, Finland)

Ode to Silence: Beethoven’s Ninth and the Fate of Humanity in the Last Scene of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker

The last scene of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (1979) portrays a young girl who moves glasses around on a table just by fixing her eyes on them while the sound of a train and the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony are heard on the soundtrack. Although this scene has received a number of readings there have been no serious attempt to elucidate the presence of Beethoven’s music in it. The present paper argues that any plausible interpretation of the scene must take Beethoven’s music into account. It proceeds to demonstrate that this desideratum will support a reading of the scene according to which it must be understood as a massive critique of modern civilisation. This conclusion will be further established by a discussion of:

1. the scene’s relation to broader themes in the film,
2. the relation between classical music in Stalker and Tarkovsky’s use of classical music in other films, and
3. Tarkovsky’s own aesthetic convictions as well as his statements about the presence of classical music in his films.

The paper will be concluded with a brief discussion of how the presented analysis may affect our understanding of Stalker as a whole as well as some of Tarkovsky’s other films.

Connie Wallcraft (University of Leeds)

How might we think about Film Music? CINs and the Film Musical

For Zbikowski (2002) and Fauconnier and Turner (2002) conceptual integration networks (CINs) and conceptual blending provide avenues through which complex combinations of elements are understood and blended in the mind. This paper provides a methodology that expands these ideas to inform the analysis of film musicals. Approaching the film musical with an awareness of CINs helps to ground and validate film theorising as it engenders a greater understanding of how spectators’ engage with complex audio-visual phenomena.
Film musicals such as Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001), Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), and Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera (2004) may be considered as complex phenomena, and this paper will explore a scene from Phantom of the Opera and adopt and develop CINs as a mechanism to support and inform that analysis.


Dr Simon Trezise (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)

"I’ve Got to Sing a Torch Song": Losing a Song and Ensuring a Coherent Narrative in Gold Diggers of 1933

Gold Diggers of 1933 was one of several augurs of spring for the Hollywood musical in 1933. Although the quality and interest of the film have rarely been in doubt, Gold Diggers of 1933 encapsulates many of the vagaries of the musical genre in the relation of musical number to narrative, even to the extent of some writers claiming that the musical numbers were effectively dropped in as an afterthought. This view may be tested by the apparently arbitrary deletion of a key number, "I’ve Got to Sing a Torch Song", from the film after it had been filmed, and the changing placement of other numbers. These decisions might indicate a casual approach to the music, which would not have been tolerated in the dramatic structure of the dialogue, but this paper concludes that the numbers in their revised order are germinal to the narrative and contribute greatly to the integrity of the film.

Feng-Shu Lee (The University of Chicago, USA)

Musical Formation of Power Relations in Full Score of Fear

Full Score of Fear, Yasuichiro Yamamoto’s 2008 anime mystery, presents at its climax a striking struggle of power between two musics. During a concert performance of an aria from Handel’s Messiah, another singer approaches the stage from the auditorium, singing the hymn "Amazing Grace". The musical conflict is significant at multiple levels. Not only does the intrusion of the hymn break the etiquette of a traditional concert by forcing the musicians on stage to decide which singer they should accompany, but the two formidable performers also draw into the contest the listeners in—and of—the film.
Although stylistic clashes are commonplace in 20th-century music, the film provides a dramatic context that intensifies its jarring effect and enriches its hermeneutic significance. Standing out from the neutral soundscape earlier in the film, where various musics blend naturally, "Amazing Grace" asserts its agency into the story. The hymn functions as a trigger of memories closely associated with the characters involved in the concert. These memories turn out to be crucial to the outcome of the musical contest, as the pieces become proxies in the confrontation between the adversaries, who pit music’s power to kill against its power to rescue. Yamamoto thus imbues the counterpoint of styles with moral and mnemonic force that is particularly effective in the cinema.


Chen-Ching Cheng (University of Edinburgh)

Stories Reminiscing the Classic China and Calling for the Ideal China—the "Chinese Imaginations and Reappearance" in the narratives of musical Movies: Huang Mei Diao

Huang Mei Diao is one of the 'prototypes' classical Chinese opera in the branch of costume drama in movie genres. Since Huang Mei Diao musical movies became the focus of Chinese movie industry after Hong Kong evolved into the main Chinese movie industry in the 1950s, it was the leading trend in Chinese movie market in the 60s and 70s.
The main purpose of this paper is to understand how the costume drama of Huang Mei Diao musical movies put the imaginations of 'Classical China' into practice through conveying narrative images. First, it investigates the structure of music-text to probe into the texture of Huang Mei Diao movies, and analyze the aesthetics of its costumes and music narrative structure, in order to understand the insight and process of the reappearance of 'Classical Chinese imaginations' in Huang Mei Diao movies. Next, this study probes the external cultural context of Hong Kong and Taiwan at that time to clarify the status and 'relative position' of main creators, and further explains how the cineastes who moved from Mainland China to Hong Kong and Taiwan reformed the traditional expression techniques of Chinese drama, transformed the traditional Chinese opera into a brand new type of movie, the Huang Mei Diao movies, and made the spirit and culture reappear in China.

Professor John Richardson (University of Helsinki)

The Real and the Neosurreal in Waking Life: Sound and Images

Richard Linklater's rotoscoped film Waking Life has already attracted a certain amount of attention in film studies (Sobchack 2005; Shaviro 2007). This paper elucidates how Glover Gill's richly evocative neuvo tango underscore functions in relation to the image-track to direct attention toward the phenomenal qualities of the audiovisual media while further suggesting an immersive narrative world. Theoretically, the paper draws on C.S. Peirce's theorization of firstness, Laura Marks' work on video haptics and erotics, and Deleuze's idea of the affection image. Close reading shows how the emphasis on the sensory in the film is dependent on a close audiovisual bond rather than being attributable solely to the film's shimmering visual imagery. Ultimately, Waking Life is understood as the expression of an emerging neosurrealist aesthetic in film, which complicates our understanding of what is real and what is fictional in response to present-day technological and cultural priorities.


Dr. Matilde Olarte (University of Salamanca, Spain)
Dr. Joaquín López González (University of Granada, Spain)

Constructing His Own Soundtrack’s Records: Film Music in the Mature Years of Almodóvar’s Creation

In this paper we want to focus on four main points; first, the analysis and reconsideration of what importance Almodóvar (the Oscar-winning Spanish film director) attaches to music in his own mature films; second, which one can his purpose choosing a specific music, which composers he commissions for his music and the importance that music has in the overall perspective of his films; in third point, what type of music does he use; and, finally, what kind of functions does he give. We think that these points will help all of us to evaluate this director’s creative talent and, therefore, evaluate whether the fame and international reception given to Almodóvar are deserved or not. The method we are going to use to present this paper is the formal analysis of music as the metatext of film discourse, in its diegetic and incidental aspects, which should allow us to make an objective evaluation of his mature films since La flor de mi secreto (1996) until his last one, Los abrazos rotos (2009).

Maarten Beirens (KU Leuven, Belgium)

‘Music by Numbers’. Abstract Systems in Nyman’s Film Scores

A central feature in Peter Greenaway’s movies is his tendency to abandon traditional narrative structure and psychology-driven content. Instead, he uses a diverse range of devices for structuring his movies, such as lists, alphabets, series of numbers and other abstract systems, constituting catalogues of ideas and themes. Interestingly, the idea of catalogue-like systems instead of more ‘organic’ narrative development can also be found in the soundtracks Michael Nyman composed for the Peter Greenway films. Possibly encouraged by Greenaway’s idiosyncratic approach to cinematic narrative and because of the prominent place his music occupied in Greenaway’s films, Nyman developed a non-traditional approach to writing soundtracks, involving high structural autonomy, as well as the absence of mere underscoring sentiments and emotions.
Examining the music for The Falls and Drowning by Numbers, this paper will demonstrate how Nyman developed such a systematic musical approach. The Greenaway-like fascination for systems, combined with the ‘systems music’ from British 1960s and 70s experimentalism led him to develop a particular approach to musical structure in his soundtracks which – as examples from his First String Quartet or his opera The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat will show – was soon also to inform Nyman’s music that is not intended for the film screen.


Pwyll ap Sion ( Bangor University)

Minimalist Film Music in Context: The Case of Man on Wire

“Musique de Film, que me veux-tu”? Had Fontenelle been in a position to pose this question in the eighteenth century, one suspects that the answer would have been far easier than for the sonata. However, recent research has shown that film music yields a far richer and more diverse range of meanings than previously anticipated, and its relationship with images is often complex and multi-layered.
In this paper, I shall attempt to elaborate on this notion by looking at the application of pre-existing minimalist music in film. This area has been the subject of a recent study by Stilwell and Powrie (2006) but this looks at the use of classical music and pop songs rather than the contemporary music. During the 1980s and 1990s Nyman’s music was frequently used in a variety of contexts by film directors such as Peter Greenaway and Christopher Frampton, but James Marsh’s recent Oscar-winning film documentary on the extraordinary life of tightrope walker Philip Petit (which culminated in his walk across the towers of the World Trade Centre in 1974) is the first to draw exhaustively on pre-existing pieces. This paper contextualises both Nyman’s music and, by extension, the minimalist genre in general, by comparing multiple functions of the same music, including tracks from A Zed and Two Noughts, Drowning by Numbers and The Libertine.

Anthony De Melo (King’s College London)

From Prostitute to Diva: Maria Severa and Fado in the Classic Portuguese Cinema

Fado, a popular urban song, featured prominently in the Portuguese cinema in the 1930s and 1940s. The melancholy song could be seen in melodramas, rural folk films, and comedies, performed by leading singers and musicians. Maria Severa (1820-1846) is the iconic figure of fado’s early years, and many of the song’s traditions are drawn from her life and myth, such as, the wearing of a black shawl by female Fadistas, and lyrics that not only refer to her story but reference the melancholy longing of a lost love and early tragic death. My paper will explore how the films made during the years under the dictatorial regime of António Salazar represent the mythic figure of Maria Severa, a prostitute who not only represents fado’s melancholy, but also its connection to the more subversive elements of Portuguese society.


Kiran Indraganti (University of Nottingham)

Voicing emotions: sound companions of Indian melodrama

The melodious intent of a ‘situation’ in an Indian film is intrinsically tied to the way a song is generated in the film industry. Songs have fulfilled several narrative needs for a long time providing an end value to the Indian melodramatic tradition. What I am interested in is the voices that provide a materiality to the melody, namely playback singers, who have been the sound companions of actors in rendering songs. The production of songs using the voices of playback singers has been a significant industrial and aesthetic mediation to foster melodramatic tradition. Here, narrative situations never wither away as long as there are singers keeping the emotional value of the story going and its melodramatic appeal lasting. As companions to actors ‘voicing’ emotions, playback singers, I argue, stand as chief architects of ‘melodic situations’ that are integral to Indian cinematic narratives. I shall examine their role in the industry using an example each of the Telugu (south) and Hindi (north) language cinemas of India.

Vasco Hexel (Royal College of Music)

The Changing Morphology and Function of the Leitmotif in Recent Hollywood Cinema

Hollywood's heroes, villains and lovers used to go about their business to neoromantic fanfare. If in Wagner's operas leitmotifs were both a complex form of codification and a way of producing subtle sensations and associations in the perceiver, used in film music they veer towards overstatement. Much discussed and critiqued, stereotypes abound. There are those - filmmakers and audience members alike - who have grown aware and weary of clichés. Meanwhile, Hollywood banks on sequels, prequels, adaptations, and remakes. Yet some mainstream films emerge that challenge norms and established concepts, raise the bar on storytelling and deconstruct their heroes. Far from the avant-garde, post-structuralism permeates populist Hollywood cinema. Drawing on excerpts from The Dark Knight (2008) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), this paper illustrates how recent orchestral film scores, in largely dispensing with leitmotifs, are evolving to help shape, define and support less predictable and emotionally more complex characters and narratives.


Dr David Abel (Edge Hill University)

Challenging the Narrative Paradigm: New Appproaches to Post-Classical Film Music

This paper proposes a new theoretical and methodological approach to post-classical film music. Engaging with wider psychoanalytical framework(s), particularly Slavoj Zizek’s 'late-Lacanian' approach, the paper seeks to challenge the dominance of 'narrative-led', film-musical theoretical models, an approach originally expounded by Claudia Gorbman. Using post-1960 horror film - an exemplar of post-classical, mainstream cinematic aesthetics - as a case study, the paper outlines the usefulness of Zizek’s psychoanalytical approach in answering many of the questions left posed by more orthodox, narrative-led models. Not least of these being the troublesome, yet unavoidable, question of textual excess and, more importantly, our subjective relationship to it, which many, including Zizek, argue lies at the very heart of the contemporary cinematic experience. By recognising the de-hierarchilisation of cinematic imperatives that characterises the shift to a post-classical cinematic aesthetics, this paper proposes an approach more subtly suited to explaining film music’s crucial role in generating such moments of excess, in instances where spectacle and/or sensation, rather than narrative efficacy and symbolic assurance, drives the cinematic economy of sound and image.


Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (Independent Scholar)

After Excess – Abstinence: Notes on a new trend in music scoring (and its absence) in film and TV

Until recently "musical abstinence" has been a strategy almost unimaginable in the mainstream and only sparingly cultivated in art-house (mostly European) cinema. And yet, the trend has gained new impetus in film practice during the last decade, with a larger number of films and even some TV dramas manifesting a reserved approach to the use of non-diegetic music, to the point of its total absence in some cases. Drawing on examples from the new Romanian cinema, films by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Michael Haneke, Jim Jarmusch and the TV drama series The Wire, my paper looks at motives for adopting this strategy and explores modes in which its implementation replaces some of the functions previously assigned to film music while at the same time helping establish plural texts. It also points to the fact that in some cases the absence of a conventional score is "compensated" by a latent musicality on different levels of film structure and/or in sound design.

Dr. Scott Smallwood (University of Alberta, Canada)

An Introduction to the Film Music of Frank Lewin

Frank Lewin was born March 27, 1925, in Breslau, Germany, and immigrated to the United States in 1940 via Cuba. After studying Roy Harris, Paul Hindemith, and others, he settled in the New York area to begin a long career composing film music, as well as concert music.
He was primarily active during the 1950s and 60s, and produced music for hundreds of films, including music for the television series The Defenders and The Nurses. In particular, Lewin’s work was notable for its extensive use of studio manipulation and early experiments with electronics. This paper gives an overview of his work for film and television, as well as a general introduction to the Frank Lewin Archive currently being developed at Princeton University.


Ian Sapiro (University of Leeds)

"Your job is not to reinvent; your job is to is to make into three dimensions what is already there"

In 1960, former Hollywood studio composer Frank Skinner offered definitions of ‘orchestrating’ and ‘arranging’ in his book, Underscore. His views were, naturally, influenced by his own experience of nearly thirty years working in the Hollywood studio system (briefly for MGM, then for Universal), but with no such similar industrial framework in existence, the validity of his definitions in a contemporary context is unclear.
Although more recent literature on film scoring has charted the changing role of the composer, there has been little written regarding the orchestrator (or the arranger). Drawing principally on interviews carried out with professional film score composers and orchestrators, this paper begins to address this matter by re-evaluating Skinner’s definitions in the context of the contemporary British film industry.


Dr Miguel Mera (Anglia Ruskin University)
Dr Ben Winters (Christ Church, Oxford)

Screen Music Sources in The UK and Ireland

In recent years, as a result of the rising academic interest in music for film and television, some institutions and libraries have accepted film/TV scores into their collections, though many remain un-catalogued or unlisted. In addition, many scores and other relevant sources useful to the screen music scholar exist in private collections and archives, or remain with production companies. In recognition of the difficulty in locating these valuable research resources, and the danger of them disappearing altogether, the Music Libraries Trust has undertaken a scoping study of the locations of screen music sources in the UK and Ireland, with a view to ascertaining the contents of collections. Our paper will report on the results of the study, will highlight a number of issues encountered when undertaking the work, and will suggest some possible avenues for further research in this area.

Dr Charles Leinberger (The University of Texas at El Paso, USA)

Musical Gesture, Modality, and Dissonance in "L'Estasi dell'Oro" from Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo: Decoding Ennio Morricone's Micro-Cell Technique

Musicologist Sergio Miceli briefly mentions Ennio Morricone's micro-cell technique in his article in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Miceli describes it as "a pseudo-serial approach often incorporating modal and tonal allusions, which, with its extreme reduction of compositional materials, has much in common with his film-music techniques." The composer has acknowledged that he did in fact use this technique in his music for Sergio Leone's 1966 film Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, but he has politely declined to explain this technique in any detail. Although its role in his compositional process may remain somewhat of a mystery, it is the intention of the current research to describe the resulting characteristics of this technique as evident in the cue "L'Estasi dell'Oro."


Simon Parkin (Royal Northern College of Music)

Polystylism: Some Lessons from Film Music

The paper is given from the perspective of a composer working with polystylism, and will explore the mutually beneficial connections between polystylism and film music:

1. Polysylism in contemporary composition is often consciously referential and ironic. This distances it from the possibility of emotional expressivity. In film music, historical context is mainly unimportant. Music is chosen for the emotional triggers that have become associated with it over the past century.
2. Styles are often used in collage fashion in polystylistic composition. I propose a dynamic model, in which styles evolve/devolve, and cross over the various historical continuity breaks (late Baroque/early Classical, for example).
3. By utilising the emotional associations developed by film composers, a much richer emotional language can be developed. The dynamic model will create the possibility for emotional modulation or development, which may also be of relevance to film music composers.

Dr François Evans (Middlesex University, London)

Incorporating Spectral Composition Techniques in Film

When composed for film, spectral music calls for a specialised aesthetic approach that takes into account film music's rôle in influencing emotive response. To remain in compositional 'control' of a semantically complex sound world, and as a way of ensuring that new harmonic languages are in keeping with nature’s ways of shaping timbre, standard-bearing spectral composers for the concert hall, such as Tristan Murail, have advocated strongly an aesthetic which venerates naturally-occurring spectromorphologies. While natural sounds can be used emotively and their abstract beauty brought into extraordinary close-up, this approach is not necessarily useful to the film composer who wishes to forge coherent and effective musical languages across different ways of listening. This presentation presents work from François Evans’s score to the feature film Martyr, for brass ensemble and electronics. Techniques used in the soundtrack's production, demonstrate ways in which composers can incorporate spectral techniques into traditional approaches for film music scoring, as the film composer confronts nature for control of pitch to emotive ends.