"Composing the Past: Music and the Sense of History in Hollywood Spectacles of the 1950s and early 1960s", published in Screening the Past Issue 5, 1998. (original) (raw)

[This article was published 17 years ago in 1998, in the online journal Screening the Past: http://www.screeningthepast.com/2014/12/composing-the-past-music-and-the-sense-of-history-in-hollywood-spectacles-of-the-1950s-and-early-1960s/ ] The sound of history has long been a neglected area in the study of historical film. This is somewhat surprising when we think about the fact that historical films have always made auditive comments on the past, not only on how people spoke in the ancient times but also how the bygone period sounded, what kind of auditive elements did that particular historical era have: in ancient spectacle we hear noisy marketplaces of Jerusalem, roaring masses of Roman circuses, echoing catacombes of Rome. Films have not only given an illusion of seeing but also of hearing the past. This article emphasizes three specific questions. The first one is: How did composers themselves conceive the problem of historicity, the difference between ancient music and our modern perspective. Historical narration, no matter written or audiovisual, is always a dialogue between historical horizons, past and present. How was this dealt with in the case of film music? This problem is illuminated by analyzing Miklós Rózsa’s methods of composing. The next question is: How did film music encompass the interplay of historicity and universality, especially in the case of Biblical films that wanted to stress their ever-relevant message. Third question is: Did music have any real commentative role in these filmic historical narratives or did it only have a supporting function? To this end, Dimitri Tiomkin’s score for The Fall of the Roman Empire will be examined to consider whether music can make a serious contribution to the historical interpretation within a film.