Reflections on the Music of Ennio Morricone: Fame and Legacy (original) (raw)
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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.
I want to be a writer of music: The role of music in Pasolini’s film
Ebbene, ti confiderò, prima di lasciarti, che io vorrei essere scrittore di musica. 1 Nell'opera cinematografica di Pasolini musica e immagini interagiscono, creando una realizzazione artistica ogni volta nuova e completa. L'approccio eclettico alla regia e la concezione del cinema come lingua scritta della realtà che caratterizzano il lavoro di Pasolini, rendono impossibile confinare l'artista in rigidi schemi teorici. Attraverso l'analisi di tre film, Accattone, La ricotta e Teorema e il loro rapporto con note teorie di musica del film, dimostrerò l'unicità dell'artista nel suo approccio alla musica nel film, e la sua non conformità ad alcuna delle descritte teorie.
Music Theory Through the Lens of Film
Music Theory Through the Lens of Film, 2013
"The encounter of a musical repertoire with a theoretical system benefits the latter even as it serves the former. A robustly applied theoretic apparatus hones our appreciation of a given corpus, especially one such as film music, for which comparatively little analytical attention has been devoted. Just as true, if less frequently offered as a motivator for analysis, is the way in which the chosen music theoretical system stands to see its underlying assumptions clarified and its practical resources enhanced by such contact. The innate programmaticism and aesthetic immediacy of film music makes it especially suited to enrich a number of theoretical practices. A habit particularly ripe for this exposure is tonal hermeneutics: the process of interpreting music through its harmonic relationships. Interpreting cinema through harmony not only sharpens our understanding of various film music idioms, but considerably refines the critical machinery behind its analysis. The theoretical approach focused on here is transformation theory, a system devised for analysis of art music (particularly from the nineteenth century) but nevertheless eminently suited for film music. By attending to the perceptually salient changes rather than static objects of musical discourse, transformation theory avoids some of the bugbears of conventional tonal hermeneutics for film (such as the tyranny of the “15 second rule”) while remaining exceptionally well calibrated towards musical structure and detail. By examining a handful of passages from films with chromatically convoluted scores—Raiders of the Lost Ark, King Kong, and A Beautiful Mind—I reveal some of the conceptual assumptions of transformational theory while simultaneously interpreting the scenes and films that these cues occupy. Ultimately, it is the notion of “transformation” itself—as a theoretical keystone, an analytical stance, and an immanent quality of music—that is most elucidated through this approach.""
Due di Uno : A composition dedicated to Horacio Vaggione
Contemporary Music Review, 2005
At risk of appearing disrespectful in the context of a Festschrift, this article focuses on Due di Uno, a composition of the author's own, dedicated to Horacio Vaggione. This composition reflects an attempt at designing and staging a small technological infrastructure whose audible result is the music. It is an effort in algorithmic composition and, at the same time, an attempt at implementing a network of dynamical interactions between two instruments (piccolo recorder and violin) and live electronics (an adaptive array of digital signal processing transformations). It is, too, a work in sound-that is, a music where timbre, textural polyphony and density, and a variety of noise artefacts are perceptual dimensions more important than others. In addressing such issues, the author keeps Vaggione's own work as a silent, but tangible infratextual reference.
Film Music avant la lettre? Disentangling Film from Opera in Italy
Opera Quarterly, 2018
Scholars have long sought to trace the ancestry of film music in the music-theatrical genres that preceded the cinematic medium. Two lineages of influence predominate. On the one hand, opera served as an aesthetic ideal to which filmmakers and critics aspired, in cinema’s early decades. On the other, pantomime and melodrama provided practical models of musical accompaniment that guaranteed quintessentially filmic forms of audio-visual synchronization. Yet at the level of individual scores, the distinctions between these two genealogies become blurred; and the notion of film evolving from preceding genres remains unquestioned. This article re-examines this historiographical tendency, making a case study of Carlo Graziani-Walter’s specially-composed score for _Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei_ (1913), a major historical epic from the “Golden Years” of Italian cinema. Graziani-Walter’s score, I argue, is clearly influenced by Italian opera—especially in three key scenes, which were to be accompanied by live singing. Operatic aesthetics are notably absent, however, in the two published extracts from the score, both of which draw on popular idioms. The juxtaposition and tension between opposing styles—between the operatic and the popular—in the score to _Gli ultimi giorni_ suggests that a new, distinctly filmic form of music was already emerging.