Music and genre in film: Aesthetics and ideology

Title

Identifier

d_2009_2013:b540653b1653:11942

identifier

12605

Creator

Stokes, Jordan Carmalt,

Contributor

Royal S. Brown

Date

2013

Language

English

Publisher

City University of New York.

Subject

Abstract

This thesis examines the multivalent relationship between film music and film genre: the ways that generic syntax and ideological structure shape the use and meaning of music within a genre, and the ways that music, in turn, shapes and complicates film genres and individual films within each genre. Detailed accounts of Melodrama, Horror, and the Western are provided, with examples drawn from (among others) Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy, 1941), Penny Serenade (George Stevens, 1941), Picnic (Joshua Logan, 1955), White Zombie (Edward and Victor Halperin, 1932), I Walked With a Zombie (Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur, 1943), Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980) High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952), The 3:10 to Yuma (Delmer Daves, 1957), and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966).;The first chapter, "Genre and Music," outlines three possible interactions of film genre and film music, drawing on three basic approaches to genre in the film studies literature: interpretive, economic, and reflexive genre criticism. The interpretive approach argues that each genre has a hidden ideological value system that shapes the narratives and aesthetics of the films within that genre, with musical ramifications that will vary from genre to genre. (A Western, for instance, might use self-consciously old-fashioned music not merely to establish the setting but to establish distance between the world of the audience and the relatively unconstrained world of the diegesis.) The economic approach shows how market forces shape the development of a genre, as when studios use the music from a successful film in the trailer for another film in the same genre. Finally, the reflexive approach accounts for the ways in which artists (and critics) self-consciously shape and react to genres, as when a composer tries to avoid the use of generic cliches when scoring a particular kind of film. The later chapters of this dissertation take a primarily interpretive approach to genre, but the economic and reflexive approaches having been laid out here as a program for future research.;The second chapter, "Music in the Melodrama: Where Words Leave Off," argues that one of the currently dominant approaches to film music, according to which music is used to represent the fundamentally unrepresentable emotions of the characters, is in fact best suited to the scores of melodramas. This is, however, not the only thing music will do in melodramas: although it often depicts a character's repressed desires, it also depicts the collective will of the repressive society. This chapter also attempts to clarify the nature of the genre of melodrama (which is notoriously slippery, among film genre scholars), arguing that it is precisely the systematic use of aesthetic gestures such as music to represent underlying ideological conflicts that makes a film melodramatic.;The third chapter, "Music in the Horror Film: Terror Chords and Jungle Drums," argues that the genre of horror is undergirded by a structural opposition between some marginalized group and the dominant social order, which in the films takes the form of the conflict between the monstrous Other and the monster's threatened victim. Each of which receives a musical illustration, leading to a contrast between the musical Other (representing, often quite explicitly, the marginalized group) and the music of normality. After developing a general model of horror scoring, this chapter attempts to demonstrate the value of genre for the understanding of specific film scores by making a special study of the Voodoo zombie films of the 1930s and 40s. Although it would be simple enough to suggest that these films are crudely racist, careful attention to their plots and scores reveals a surprising variety of musical meanings, and gives us reason to question common-sense notions of the "appropriate" use of ethnically marked music in film.;The final chapter, "Music in the Western: The Cowboy's Epic Situation," advances a new definition of the Western, arguing that the genre is defined as much by an epic narrative voice (which privileges telling over showing, and makes the narrator imminent within the text) as by any subject matter or theme. This sense of epic distance is created in part through mise-en-abyme effects, including musical ones. In High Noon, for instance, a reoccurring song within the film recounts the plot of the film as it unfolds. However, there are also purely musical gestures that have the same effect: non-leitmotivic repetition of cues, the citation of specific musical styles outside of the "normal" language of film music, the use of elaborate performative musical gestures, and the use of simple and lucid musical forms. All of these call attention to the hand of the maker, and thus to the score (and the film) as a made thing.

Type

dissertation

Source

2009_2013.csv

degree

Ph.D.

Program

Music

Item