Browsing by Subject "Film music"

This dissertation seeks to position the music of American arranger-orchestrator-composer Conrad Salinger (1901-62) as one of the key factors in creating the larger camp aesthetic movement in MGM film musicals of the 1940s and 1950s. The investigation primarily examines Salinger's arranging and orchestrating practices in transcriptions and conductor's scores of musical numbers from MGM films, though some scores from Broadway shows are also considered. Additionally, Salinger's style is frequently compared to other arrangers, so as to establish the unique qualities of his music that set it apart from his contemporaries from both a technical and an aesthetic standpoint and that made it desirable as an object of imitation. By inquiring into his musical practices' relationship to his subjectivity as a gay person in the era of "the closet," this analysis both proposes and confirms Salinger's importance to the MGM camp aesthetic. With the concept of "musical camp" thus established, the dissertation subsequently demonstrates its capacity to produce new readings of the politics of national belonging and gender that manifest in various musical numbers.

The “Hans Zimmer-effect” has become shorthand in both popular and academic discourses to describe a dominant mode of composing for Hollywood films that relies on digital tools to produce highly repetitive blockbuster scores. Likewise, pop-inflected soundtracks and hagiographic musical biopics have become ubiquitous to the point of parody, suggesting an overreliance on simple nostalgia and a formulaic approach to musical storytelling. The low cost of digital production tools has led to a drastically condensed production model and a reliance on temp tracks in the editing booth, leading to prognostications about film music’s fading relevance within an increasingly digitized audiovisual culture.

In contrast to these concerns and the factors that have engendered them, I submit that Hollywood’s digital era has proven to be more acoustically diverse than was once feared, reveling in the interplay between the sound and music of disparate eras. Through the lens of “hauntology” as coined by Jacques Derrida and developed by Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds, this dissertation considers how the persistence of analog devices and practices within a digital mediascape invites consideration of cinematic music as something caught between the folds of time itself, reflective of a dynamic and ever-changing relationship to past modes of representation.

Reinterpretations of classic film genres make use of the gray area between music and sound design to distort time itself, relaying epistemological confusion through means that transcend the digital-analog binary. Likewise, scores that foreground instrumental timbres usher in a new relationality between the vibrations of material sound and the embodied experiences of character and spectator alike. In auteur-driven cinema, the use of anachronistic music plays an active role in historical revisionism, problematizing the perceived value of “historical fidelity” in Hollywood practice. And finally, the tensions between live and recorded performances staged in music-centric historical films reflects the uneasy conflation of historic recordings and the historical “record.” The diversity and breadth of these examples give way to a paradox: the material foundations of cinematic music were never completely certain, and yet, they remain more powerful than ever.

The media texts explored include Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016), Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019), Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016), The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2018), Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2016), Inglourious Basters & Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2009 & 2012), Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2014), and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (George C. Wolfe, 2020).

“Scoring Star Trek’s Utopia” investigates music as articular of the Star Trek franchise’s shifting discourses. This study focuses on the role of the fanfare from The Original Series title theme in foregrounding, concealing, or initiating Trek’s ideological tensions. By analyzing how the fanfare is complicit in Trek’s narrative and philosophical efforts—that is, its part in scoring a futuristic utopia—this dissertation uncovers continuities and discontinuities within the franchise’s fifty years of production. Star Trek has become one of the largest brands of the twenty-first century: thirteen films, six television series, interactive concert performances, and thousands of fan creations. The contributions of the fanfare, a near-constant presence, are both lacking in study and vital to a more nuanced understanding of the growth of Trek's brand.

Using previously unstudied archival sketches and scores, the filmic texts themselves, and viewers’ reactions to them, this study grounds an analysis of Trek’s musical-ideological developments within the practice of media consumption. Through archival research and close viewing of Star Trek’s films and television series—arguably its most well-known media—this study traces music’s crucial role in building the franchise’s ubiquity for American audiences. It examines choices made during the filmmaking process, such as where the fanfare appears, how it is altered, musical material derived from its characteristics, and its audiovisual placement. Over thirty different composers have contributed to Trek’s scoring (not to mention the directors, screenwriters, and actors involved), increasing the directions the franchise has taken. Drawing on scholarship that considers the construction of meaning, memory, and nostalgia in music, "Scoring Star Trek's Utopia" argues that viewers can and do retain awareness of the fanfare’s past and present manifestations. Even as Star Trek reifies its past, the potential within its multifaceted directions offers an enduring, yet malleable legacy for the present and future. In so doing, “Scoring Star Trek’s Utopia” approaches an understanding of franchised film and television scoring as well as illustrates music’s integral role in branding an ever-expanding media universe.