A new way of experiencing a score_The use of unconventional music for Haneke's enigmatic film Caché.pdf (original) (raw)
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A new way of experiencing a score.pdf
The intention of this essay is to illustrate the stages and reasons behind my composition of the music score for Caché. It explains the compositional workflow, from the pre-production stage of intellectual research to the practical techniques used in the production phase. It investigates the features of the film by analysing its structure and consequent abstract value, how the music is composed to reflect the director’s idea and set the mood accordingly. It then moves on to depict the music techniques used to achieve the desired style and the history behind them, including how modern composers used these techniques artistically and technically and influenced the score. Finally, a more technical section presents the tools used to achieve what was planned during the pre-production stage of the project.
Foreword to Unheard Possibilities. Reappraising Classical Film Music Scoring and Analysis
2021
This special edition takes its origin from a 2014 conference in which SERCIA (Société pour l’Enseignement et la Recherche du Cinéma Anglophone) brought to the forefront a specific dimension of the film-going experience often neglected or underdeveloped in film studies and analyses: the sonic dimension. Under the title “Music and Movies: National and Transnational Perspectives” the three-day conference was co-hosted by the Department of American Studies at Radboud University in Nijmegen. The city of Nijmegen is not only the oldest town in the Netherlands but film experts and buffs also recognize a number of iconic historical locations from Richard Attenborough’s epic war film A Bridge Too Far (1977) – a fitting reference since Nijmegen celebrated its 70th anniversary of the Allied liberation at the time of our conference. Our conference in Nijmegen brought together 57 international scholars from diverse disciplines offering a discursive platform for the collaboration between film stu...
Türkiye Film Araştırmaları Dergisi, 2023
Sound and music, a significant issue in film studies, and associated phenomena, such as leitmotiv and diegetic/ non-diegetic music are essential notions as they serve many functions in the film experience of the audience. Sound and music, in general, have emerged as supportive elements for image and narrative in the art of cinema. Music is used in films to form a completeness with the images. In addition to these functions, film music has a significant place in terms of underlining the frames of mind of characters and expressing the emotions that are not spoken and not shown on the screen. Luchino Visconti used excerpts from Gustav Mahler’s third and fifth symphonies in Morte a Venezia (1971), while Michael Haneke used Schubert’s compositions in La Pianiste (2001). This article explores the parallel functions of music in these two films. In contrast to comparable research, this study discloses the presence of psychoanalytic theory concentrated on film music, elucidating it as a pivotal third component integral to the narrative. The analysis reveals that both Mahler’s and Schubert’s music contributes meaningfully to the narrative, playing almost a leading role. In both films, the music serves as a vehicle for expressing the unspoken emotions of the characters, intertwining their feelings with the musical compositions. Beyond emotional expression, the characters merge with the music, embodying the coexisting forces of Eros and Thanatos—love and death—throughout the films.
Mediating the ‘idea of One’: Arvo Pärt’s pre-existing music in film
Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre Dissertations 4, 2009
The principal aim of this dissertation is to examine the use of Arvo Pärt's pre-existing tintinnabuli compositions in contemporary film soundtracks in order to determine the aesthetic reception of this music in film art. This will be achieved primarily through film analyses that explore functions of tintinnabuli music in film, and expressive meaning this music is considered suitable to communicate (with). Two questions underlie this dissertation: 1) what kind of expressive meaning could be communicated through tintinnabuli music in film; 2) what musical attributes make tintinnabuli music suitable for expressing those particular meanings? I have focused on two representative examples of early instrumental tintinnabuli style, namely on the use of Für Alina (1976) and Spiegel im Spiegel (1978) in film soundtracks.
The Analysis of Silence in two Haneke movies Amour and The Piano Teacher
2019
When a movie is analyzed in terms of its soundscape, most of the time it is only its music that is paid attention to. However, there are many other components of the soundscape of a movie which includes all the diagetic, non-diagetic sounds and the main concern of this paper, the silence. Silence, therefore, should be considered as the complementary part of a soundscape rather than mere absence of any sound, and approaching silence as an intertwined sound with the whole soundscape would provide better and deeper understandings and connections for a movie. When these attitudes regarding soundscape are considered, it is inevitable to not to think of Michael Haneke, whose use of sounds and silence is so sophisticated, unconventional and intentional that they constitute another narrative apart from visuals, a narrative in which ''dynamics do not range from quiet to loud, but from a scream to a whisper'', as Erika in The Piano Teacher claims for Schubert. However, the dynamic shifts are not created with tender and gradual crescendos or diminuendos but with abrupt cut offs, no transitions and unexpected intrusions of music or silence, which disturbs and alienates the spectators. Amour and The Piano Teacher in this sense are worth analyzing, since silence and its relationship with the music and other diagetic sounds are of crucial importance in both movies in that silence not only disrupts the audiovisual expectations and disturbs the audience, but also provides psychological and allegorical dimensions in meanings.