Thematic Relevance of Music in Nollywood Movies (original) (raw)
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Music as an aid to story telling in Nollywood: Interrogating hybridization in selected films
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The agency of music to effectively convey ideas in movies and articulate visual-emotional experience of the audience during mise-en-scene has long been established. Existing studies have focused more on the elements that characterize film as a visual experience, than on the diegetic (foreground) and non-diegetic (background) music, especially along their aural aesthetic lines. This article, therefore, investigated the aesthetic connections between traditional and performative significations of music in selected movies of Túndé Kèlání, one of Nigeria’s foremost cinematographers. Using a qualitative (videographic) research design, three movies, Ti Oluwa N’ile, Saworo Ide and K’oseegbe, were purposively selected, based on their unique aesthetic traits and distinct cultural identity quality, for content analysis. A close reading of the musical and textual data was done. Findings revealed that cultural themes in the movies, bordering on entertainment, rituals, politics, philosophy, ...
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The creation of a believable reality in a film story requires appropriate application of both visual and auditory elements to achieve an effective communication. Thus, the film medium is a vital instrument in the hands of man for the transformation of his natural world and the projection of his ideal world to other human beings. Film is one of the fascinating and easiest means of communication in Nigeria, due to its wide range of audience consumption. Hence, the audience invariably accentuates the reality of the filmic experience. The concept of audience in film studies highlights a collective of people who are responsive to film viewership. The audience is necessary for filmmakers’ profit, and as such filmmakers construct their film very specifically in the hope of pulling substantial audience turnouts, which readily predisposes the filmmakers’ product to be predominantly audience-driven. Through the films produced, the audience is educated and entertained. This is therefore an obvious indication that film is a medium of mass communication that is very powerful when effectively packaged and employed. The artistic communication in film is enhanced by visual and auditory elements. Thus, film uses visual and auditory elements to create narrative messages. Sound may not be noticeable when watching a film story, but sound and music constitute powerful film technique(s) which, when appropriately applied, enhance effective communication. As a result, when watching a film, the viewers react with the variations in sound that are in tune with the action of a film story. However, despite the inseparable complementary role between the visual and auditory elements of film production, sound seems to remain a silent or a secondary issue in film production and analysis discourse. The study is therefore motivated by this apparent lack of attention, to highlight the invaluable significance of sound, while critically examining the indices that condition its perception in Nigerian Nollywood landscape.
HOW FILM & TV MUSIC COMMUNICATE - VOL 1
- WHAT IS MUSIC? (8,908) This chapter addresses some of the main intellectual and practical issues surrounding the whole area of how music is understood, rationalised, perceived and composed. The chapter looks at many underlying issues, including academia and how the taught history of music over the years (as opposed to the actual history of music) has shaped our understanding of music.
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This chapter focuses on the role of music in narrative fi lm. Unlike most other sensory information in a fi lm (i.e., the visual scenes, sound effects, dialog, and text), music is typically directed to the audience and not to the characters in the fi lm. Several examples will familiarize the reader with some of the subtleties of fi lm music phenomena. Two aspects of fi lm music are introduced: congruence, which focuses on purely structural aspects, and association, which focuses on the associative meaning of the music. The nature of and interplay between the emotional experience of the audience (referred to as internal semantics) and the external "reality" of the fi lm (referred to as external semantics) are discussed, and an assessment is made as to where music (in particular, fi lm music) resides with respect to these two domains. Because the two dimensions of structure and association are orthogonal to the internal-external semantic dimensions, they defi ne four quadrants for describing the relation between music (structure and associations) and fi lm narrative's internal and external semantics. Finally, the concept of a working narrative (WN) is introduced as the audience's solution to the task of integrating and making sense out of the two sources of information provided in the fi lm situation: sensory information (including the acoustic information of music) as well as information based on experience including a story grammar. The author's congruenceassociation model with the working narrative construct (CAM-WN) accommodates the multimodal context of fi lm, while giving music its place.
Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies , 2021
Studies of music in South Asian cinemas are dominated by discussions of popular film songs, their lyrics, vocal style, visual coding, placement in film narratives and their afterlives in diverse media formats. Moving away from the song-driven approach, this keyword is an attempt to expand the definition of film music by following its aural trace amidst shifting media technologies and listening practices. The aural force of film music carries an affective charge in excess of the verbal and has created a forcefield of intertextual memory that was not recognised by academics until very recently. Here, I focus on commercial Bombay cinema that has dominated popular music of the subcontinent and is the site of my own research. The overt presence of music in films as song has been framed as a continuation of the idiom of musical dramas that drew on classical raga-based melodies. Further, the predilection of audiences to hum film songs with an 'easy', 'repetitive' musical structure was linked to their affinity to communal folk music (Beeman, 1980). Interestingly, it was the dispersal of film music into other intermedial forms such as printed chapbooks and song booklets that nudged listeners to sing the lyrics and ignore the instrumental sections. The radio stepped in to keep listeners connected to these non-verbal musical sections of a film song. Highlighting the tensions and divergences between verbal and non-verbal as being critical to performing arts, Ashok Da. Ranade (2006) has drawn attention to the aesthetic principles that bring auditory and visual elements together in film music. Introductory non-verbal sections of film songs and background scores perform the work of effecting these divergences. Another vexed question for both composers and film-makers has been to establish a hierarchy of sources for film music. Satyajit Ray found Indian classical music unsuitable for background scores as it 'lacked a dramatic narrative tradition' (Robinson, 1989). Noticing how the Jatra companies in Bengal drew from a curious mix of both Indian and western instruments, Ray tried to bring in a similar experimental approach. Missionaries of the colonial period, military bands, jazz clubs in Calcutta, Bombay and Lahore, gramophone records and the exhibition of Hollywood films had introduced Indian listeners to Western classical and popular music genres. These influences made their way into films. In the 1950s Bombay, working in an industrial context, music directors like Naushad Ali expressed a similar concern as Ray. They felt that Indian instruments such as the sitar, sarod or the flute fell short in expressing violence or
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The Nigerian film industry (Nollywood) embraces both motion picture and television approaches; yet it cannot be called one or the other in its entirety. This ‘both and neither’ nature has forced scholars such as Kenneth Harrow to ask: ‘how are we to read their films?’ and, by virtue of this article, their film music. I argue that the capacity to do so subsists in a thorough understanding of the industry’s organisation and long-held divergent creative process. My ethnographic study reveals that Nollywood’s structure of film music production differs significantly from some other known cinema traditions of the world. One such striking observation is that Nollywood film music projects and production (recording, editing, spotting, etc.) are entirely carried out without the involvement of film directors. And this unique process and structure strongly influences its film music approaches and aesthetics. This paper, thus, presents and examines those differences with a view to offering insights on how Nollywood film music might be understood.
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