Film Music (Keyword) (original) (raw)

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