Oxford Music / Media – serie

Korngold in America offers new ways of listening to the film scores and post-Hollywood concert works of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897--1957), a Viennese-raised Austro-Hungarian composer who left Europe for Hollywood in the mid-1930s to write for Warner Bros. It reassesses Korngold's place in twentieth-century music historiography and dismantles many of the myths that have obscured a proper understanding of his work. Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials, Korngold in America reveals Korngold's commercial and artistic relationships with studio processes and staff, highlights aspects of his compositional practice, and traces the way in which he adapted his skills as a musical dramatist and experienced opera composer to the demands of film. The book presents a more complete picture of Korngold's artistry than has hitherto been possible, showing both the important role played by his music in the Hollywood films of which it is a part and the importance in turn of Hollywood films for his compositional identity. In so doing, it challenges assumptions about the relationship between Korngold's film scores and his works for the concert hall and opera house in ways that draw attention to the significance of Hollywood for histories of twentieth-century music.

Immerse yourself in the groundbreaking exploration of diversity and representation in music videos with Audiovisual Alterity. This new research delves into the portrayal of marginalized and subaltern groups across a rich tapestry of genres of popular music, tracing the evolution of inclusivity and disenfranchisement in music videos from the 1950s to the present. Audiovisual Alterity not only furthers the scholarly conversation on representations of race, ethnicity, and gender in music videos but also broadens the scope to embrace Asians, Pacific Islanders, Indigenous peoples, the LGBTQIA+ community, religious minorities, and the incarcerated. Author Michael Austin traces the transformation of the music video landscape as he scrutinizes the medium's evolution across both traditional platforms and social media, including video-sharing sites and smartphone applications. Throughout, he offers new insights into critical analyses of contemporary debates on cultural appropriation and the nuanced portrayals of culture, race, indigeneity, gender, class, sexuality, and sexual orientation. Most compellingly, Audiovisual Alterity celebrates the self-representation of these 'others,' empowering them to voice their narratives on their own terms.

Immerse yourself in the groundbreaking exploration of diversity and representation in music videos with Audiovisual Alterity. This new research delves into the portrayal of marginalized and subaltern groups across a rich tapestry of genres of popular music, tracing the evolution of inclusivity and disenfranchisement in music videos from the 1950s to the present. Audiovisual Alterity not only furthers the scholarly conversation on representations of race, ethnicity, and gender in music videos but also broadens the scope to embrace Asians, Pacific Islanders, Indigenous peoples, the LGBTQIA+ community, religious minorities, and the incarcerated. Author Michael Austin traces the transformation of the music video landscape as he scrutinizes the medium's evolution across both traditional platforms and social media, including video-sharing sites and smartphone applications. Throughout, he offers new insights into critical analyses of contemporary debates on cultural appropriation and the nuanced portrayals of culture, race, indigeneity, gender, class, sexuality, and sexual orientation. Most compellingly, Audiovisual Alterity celebrates the self-representation of these 'others,' empowering them to voice their narratives on their own terms.

Hailed as a leading innovator of visual montage, unique storytelling style, and ground-breaking cinematography, Jean-Luc Godard is a prominent pioneer in sculpting complex soundtracks altering the familiar relationship between sound and image, but his achievements in sound have been largely overlooked. Such a lacuna in the extensive research on Godard's work is unfortunate, as Godard's lifelong preoccupation of exploring self-reflexively all aspects of filmmaking particularly affects film music. With the novel approach of metafilm music, extrapolated from Jean-Luc Godard's oeuvre, this book not only closes up a crucial gap in Godard research, but also offers detailed analyses of the music as metafilm music in Contempt, Alphaville, Band of Outsiders, Pierrot le fou, First Name: Carmen, Histoire(s) du cinéma, among other films and video productions. The innovative scholarly concept of metafilm music, enriching the burgeoning field of music in audio-visual media, describes how Godard thinks about film music with film music. This book thus provides a thorough examination of Godard's self-reflexive approach to film music which has resulted in a lifelong creation of multi-layered soundtracks pushing the envelope of film music and sound to the limit.

Hailed as a leading innovator of visual montage, unique storytelling style, and ground-breaking cinematography, Jean-Luc Godard is a prominent pioneer in sculpting complex soundtracks altering the familiar relationship between sound and image, but his achievements in sound have been largely overlooked. Such a lacuna in the extensive research on Godard's work is unfortunate, as Godard's lifelong preoccupation of exploring self-reflexively all aspects of filmmaking particularly affects film music. With the novel approach of metafilm music, extrapolated from Jean-Luc Godard's oeuvre, this book not only closes up a crucial gap in Godard research, but also offers detailed analyses of the music as metafilm music in Contempt, Alphaville, Band of Outsiders, Pierrot le fou, First Name: Carmen, Histoire(s) du cinéma, among other films and video productions. The innovative scholarly concept of metafilm music, enriching the burgeoning field of music in audio-visual media, describes how Godard thinks about film music with film music. This book thus provides a thorough examination of Godard's self-reflexive approach to film music which has resulted in a lifelong creation of multi-layered soundtracks pushing the envelope of film music and sound to the limit.

During the mid-1950s, when Hollywood found itself struggling to compete within an expanding entertainment media landscape, certain producers and studios saw an opportunity in making films that showcased performances by rock 'n' roll stars. Rock stars eventually found cinema to be a useful space to extend their creative practices, and the motion picture and recording industries increasingly saw cinematic rock stardom as a profitable means to connect multiple media properties. Indeed, casting rock stars for film provided a tool for bridging new relationships across media industries and practices. From Elvis Presley to Madonna, this book examines the casting rock stars in films. In so doing, Rock Star/Movie Star offers a new perspective on the role of stardom within the convergence of media industries. While hardly the first popular music culture to see its stars making the transition to screen, the timing of rock's emergence and its staying power within popular culture proved fortuitous for a motion picture business searching for its place in the face of continuous technological and cultural change. At the same time, a post-star-system film industry provided a welcoming context for rock stars who have valued authenticity, creative autonomy, and personal expression. This book uses illuminating archival resources to demonstrate how rock stars have often proven themselves to be prominent film workers exploring this terrain of platforms old and new - ideal media laborers whose power lies in the fact that they are rarely recognized as such.Combining star studies with media industry studies, this book proposes an integrated methodology for writing media history that combines the actions of individuals and the practices of industries. It demonstrates how stars have operated as both the gravitational center of media production as well as social actors who have taken on a decisive role in the purposes to which their images are used.

During the mid-1950s, when Hollywood found itself struggling to compete within an expanding entertainment media landscape, certain producers and studios saw an opportunity in making films that showcased performances by rock 'n' roll stars. Rock stars eventually found cinema to be a useful space to extend their creative practices, and the motion picture and recording industries increasingly saw cinematic rock stardom as a profitable means to connect multiple media properties. Indeed, casting rock stars for film provided a tool for bridging new relationships across media industries and practices. From Elvis Presley to Madonna, this book examines the casting rock stars in films. In so doing, Rock Star/Movie Star offers a new perspective on the role of stardom within the convergence of media industries. While hardly the first popular music culture to see its stars making the transition to screen, the timing of rock's emergence and its staying power within popular culture proved fortuitous for a motion picture business searching for its place in the face of continuous technological and cultural change. At the same time, a post-star-system film industry provided a welcoming context for rock stars who have valued authenticity, creative autonomy, and personal expression. This book uses illuminating archival resources to demonstrate how rock stars have often proven themselves to be prominent film workers exploring this terrain of platforms old and new - ideal media laborers whose power lies in the fact that they are rarely recognized as such.Combining star studies with media industry studies, this book proposes an integrated methodology for writing media history that combines the actions of individuals and the practices of industries. It demonstrates how stars have operated as both the gravitational center of media production as well as social actors who have taken on a decisive role in the purposes to which their images are used.

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.

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.

Music has always been at the heart of American television. Amongst the many roles it plays in broadcasting, music entertains viewers with live and videotaped performances, evokes moods and identifies characters and settings, and sells products through commercial jingles. Most importantly, television music steers viewers through the continuous stream of daily programming. Tuning In looks at and listens to the first fifty years of American narrative television music as a unique art form. Drawing on music in a wide variety of television genres - from westerns to science-fiction thrillers to police dramas to sitcoms and commercials - author Ronald Rodman develops a new theory of television music to explain how it conveys meaning to American viewing audiences. Music in television, Rodman argues, finds its origins both in radio and in cinema, and is thus a unique multimedia form that demands its own methods of analysis. From The Dick van Dyke Show and I Love Lucy to Twin Peaks and The X-Files, Rodman's arguments are grounded in a fascinatingly historically wide-ranging and diverse selection of shows. The book also crosses media genres, looking at how the Broadway stage and the Hollywood film musical have influenced television variety shows and situation comedies. Drawing on music analysis and narrative and semiotic theories, this stimulating book illustrates how music forms part of the code that makes television broadcasts culturally meaningful.

Music has always been at the heart of American television. Amongst the many roles it plays in broadcasting, music entertains viewers with live and videotaped performances, evokes moods and identifies characters and settings, and sells products through commercial jingles. Most importantly, television music steers viewers through the continuous stream of daily programming. Tuning In looks at and listens to the first fifty years of American narrative television music as a unique art form. Drawing on music in a wide variety of television genres - from westerns to science-fiction thrillers to police dramas to sitcoms and commercials - author Ronald Rodman develops a new theory of television music to explain how it conveys meaning to American viewing audiences. Music in television, Rodman argues, finds its origins both in radio and in cinema, and is thus a unique multimedia form that demands its own methods of analysis. From The Dick van Dyke Show and I Love Lucy to Twin Peaks and The X-Files, Rodman's arguments are grounded in a fascinatingly historically wide-ranging and diverse selection of shows. The book also crosses media genres, looking at how the Broadway stage and the Hollywood film musical have influenced television variety shows and situation comedies. Drawing on music analysis and narrative and semiotic theories, this stimulating book illustrates how music forms part of the code that makes television broadcasts culturally meaningful.

Arriving in cinema when synchronized sound had just been adopted, director Rouben Mamoulian demonstrated key early methods for making sound aid storytelling, for giving films a crisper sense of rhythm, for creating musicals set in backstage, fairy-tale, and folk environments, for providing intricate and arresting colour palettes, and for rendering sexual content more palpable under industry censorship. Mamoulian also wrote many articles throughout his lifetime and gave interviews and lectures where he advanced his complex ideas about the potentials of various artforms, including cinema. In addition, he left an extensive paper record of his work, including heavily annotated scripts for each of the sixteen films he directed. Mamoulian also enjoyed major success on the stage. He directed the original landmark productions of Porgy, Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma!, and Carousel, and his efforts in this domain informed his film work. Defining Cinema takes a holistic look at Mamoulian's oeuvre by examining both his stage and his screen work, and also brings together insights from his correspondence, his theories on film, and analysis of the films themselves. It presents a filmmaker whose work was innovative and exciting, who pushed hard on cinema's potential as an artform, and who in many ways helped move cinema towards the kind of entertainment that it remains today. The book thus tells a story that is vital not just for better understanding the work of a neglected filmmaker, but for anyone interested in the history of Hollywood filmmaking.

Arriving in cinema when synchronized sound had just been adopted, director Rouben Mamoulian demonstrated key early methods for making sound aid storytelling, for giving films a crisper sense of rhythm, for creating musicals set in backstage, fairy-tale, and folk environments, for providing intricate and arresting colour palettes, and for rendering sexual content more palpable under industry censorship. Mamoulian also wrote many articles throughout his lifetime and gave interviews and lectures where he advanced his complex ideas about the potentials of various artforms, including cinema. In addition, he left an extensive paper record of his work, including heavily annotated scripts for each of the sixteen films he directed. Mamoulian also enjoyed major success on the stage. He directed the original landmark productions of Porgy, Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma!, and Carousel, and his efforts in this domain informed his film work. Defining Cinema takes a holistic look at Mamoulian's oeuvre by examining both his stage and his screen work, and also brings together insights from his correspondence, his theories on film, and analysis of the films themselves. It presents a filmmaker whose work was innovative and exciting, who pushed hard on cinema's potential as an artform, and who in many ways helped move cinema towards the kind of entertainment that it remains today. The book thus tells a story that is vital not just for better understanding the work of a neglected filmmaker, but for anyone interested in the history of Hollywood filmmaking.

In her first volume, Joan Titus explored the early years of Dmitry Shostakovich's career as the first Russian musician to emerge as a composer for the Soviet cinema. In this second volume, Dmitry Shostakovich and Music for Stalinist Cinema (1936-1953), Titus explores Shostakovich's continued development as a preeminent Soviet film composer and his navigation of the Soviet film industry amidst the cultural politics of late Stalinism. Based on archival materials and contemporaneous press, Titus combines musical analysis of eighteen scores with discussion of socio-cultural context and reception of his work. She frames the discussion using the concepts of the mainstream and middlebrow to highlight the complex role of Shostakovich's film music within Soviet arts culture. The composer's experience with diverse filmmakers, genres, and styles allowed him the opportunity to experiment with film scoring and musical meaning, which revealed his heterogenous and thorough knowledge of musical styles and his integration of classical and popular musical trends. This unusual and varied experience makes him an excellent case study for examining the development of the film composer within Soviet film industry during late Stalinism, and situates his scoring within an emerging global film music history.

InMobilizing Music in Wartime British Film,author Heather Wiebe traces a preoccupation with art music and total war that animated British films of the 1940s. In acclaimed films such asThe Red ShoesandBrief Encounteras well as experimental documentaries, colonial propaganda films, and largely forgotten melodramas, music was persistently given a central role in the action. As this book demonstrates, these films were driven by questions around the efficacy of art music, not just in the conventional sense of uplift or morale-building, but as a sonic force acting on bodies, minds, and materials, and as a resource to be mobilized or demobilized. Wiebe explores what these films tell us about the experience of World War Two, but also about more contemporary pressures on the arts to be useful and productive. In their concerns with music and wartime life away from the battle front, these films offer insight into the affective experience of war: not just as violence and trauma, but as everyday boredom and melancholy, as loneliness, helplessness, and disappointment. Most of all, they show how music was used to test the limits of "total war," and to conceptualize its new reach into all corners of life

InMobilizing Music in Wartime British Film,author Heather Wiebe traces a preoccupation with art music and total war that animated British films of the 1940s. In acclaimed films such asThe Red ShoesandBrief Encounteras well as experimental documentaries, colonial propaganda films, and largely forgotten melodramas, music was persistently given a central role in the action. As this book demonstrates, these films were driven by questions around the efficacy of art music, not just in the conventional sense of uplift or morale-building, but as a sonic force acting on bodies, minds, and materials, and as a resource to be mobilized or demobilized. Wiebe explores what these films tell us about the experience of World War Two, but also about more contemporary pressures on the arts to be useful and productive. In their concerns with music and wartime life away from the battle front, these films offer insight into the affective experience of war: not just as violence and trauma, but as everyday boredom and melancholy, as loneliness, helplessness, and disappointment. Most of all, they show how music was used to test the limits of "total war," and to conceptualize its new reach into all corners of life

Four Ways of Hearing Video Game Music offers a novel account of the ways in which video games invite us to hear and listen to their music. By taking a phenomenological approach to characterize music in video games, author Michiel Kamp asks what it is we hear in the music when we play a game. Drawing on past phenomenological approaches to music as well as studies of music listening in a variety of disciplines such as aesthetics and ecological psychology, Kamp explains four main ways of hearing the same piece of music--through background, aesthetic, ludic, and semiotic hearing. As a background, music is not attended to at all, but can still be described in terms of moods, affordances, or equipment. Aesthetic hearing is a reflective attitude that invites hermeneutic interpretation; ludic hearing on the other hand invites "playing along" to the music, either through embodied movement, or in response to the music's cinematic or theatrical connotations. Finally, in semiotic hearing, Kamp argues that we hear music as transparent symbols or signals that provide information about the state of a game. The book investigates these four categories through detailed case studies of video games from a variety of eras and genres accompanied by gameplay recordings and images on a companion website.

Four Ways of Hearing Video Game Music offers a novel account of the ways in which video games invite us to hear and listen to their music. By taking a phenomenological approach to characterize music in video games, author Michiel Kamp asks what it is we hear in the music when we play a game. Drawing on past phenomenological approaches to music as well as studies of music listening in a variety of disciplines such as aesthetics and ecological psychology, Kamp explains four main ways of hearing the same piece of music--through background, aesthetic, ludic, and semiotic hearing. As a background, music is not attended to at all, but can still be described in terms of moods, affordances, or equipment. Aesthetic hearing is a reflective attitude that invites hermeneutic interpretation; ludic hearing on the other hand invites "playing along" to the music, either through embodied movement, or in response to the music's cinematic or theatrical connotations. Finally, in semiotic hearing, Kamp argues that we hear music as transparent symbols or signals that provide information about the state of a game. The book investigates these four categories through detailed case studies of video games from a variety of eras and genres accompanied by gameplay recordings and images on a companion website.

Televising Opera offers fascinating new insights into the early years of opera production on television in the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada. Examining both new operas written for television and repertory operas remade in the studio, the book tells the story of how English-language broadcasters remade opera in an effort to reshape performance, production, and composition in the mid-twentieth century. Author Danielle Ward-Griffin argues that opera on television may prove to be the missing piece in the historical debates that continue to swirl around the so-called “opera crisis” in the mid-twentieth century, as the experiments that took place in television studios influenced the way operas were composed, performed, and experienced. Drawing upon previously unexamined material from media and broadcasting archives, Televising Opera reconstructs how broadcasters intervened in operatic culture. Ward-Griffin examines how television renewed realism as an aesthetic, outlines how broadcasters sought to stimulate new composition, and delineates the early principles for co-production. In doing so, Televising Opera not only offers a new history of opera on television, but a broader reconceptualization of the relationship between the worlds of opera performance and broadcasting technology.

Korngold in America offers new ways of listening to the film scores and post-Hollywood concert works of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897--1957), a Viennese-raised Austro-Hungarian composer who left Europe for Hollywood in the mid-1930s to write for Warner Bros. It reassesses Korngold's place in twentieth-century music historiography and dismantles many of the myths that have obscured a proper understanding of his work. Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials, Korngold in America reveals Korngold's commercial and artistic relationships with studio processes and staff, highlights aspects of his compositional practice, and traces the way in which he adapted his skills as a musical dramatist and experienced opera composer to the demands of film. The book presents a more complete picture of Korngold's artistry than has hitherto been possible, showing both the important role played by his music in the Hollywood films of which it is a part and the importance in turn of Hollywood films for his compositional identity. In so doing, it challenges assumptions about the relationship between Korngold's film scores and his works for the concert hall and opera house in ways that draw attention to the significance of Hollywood for histories of twentieth-century music.

The true force of Star Wars is not a mystical energy field--it is music. John Williams's contribution to the Skywalker Saga is a singular achievement in the history of film music and the history of music more generally. His intricate, inventive, unforgettable scores define cinema's most beloved franchise. Imagine the twin suns of Tatooine setting without the sound of a solo French horn, or Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker battling without their themes clashing on the soundtrack. These contributions are crucial to the franchise's ability to capture the imagination of generations, in and outside the movie theatre. In this groundbreaking book, Frank Lehman explores the totality of Williams's Star Wars musical universe, an orchestral epic that spans nine movies and over four decades of cinematic history. Drawing on his unparalleled knowledge of the series' soundscape, Lehman argues for hearing the saga as a fundamentally symphonic experience, one where close attention to the soundtrack is rewarding, even essential. Engaging and accessible for casual fans, yet supported by rigorous research methods and critical perspectives, The Skywalker Symphonies lends Williams's magnum opus the seriousness it deserves.Sure to be the benchmark for future studies of this series, The Skywalker Symphonies will change how you hear Star Wars--and all symphonic music--forever.