Showing papers in "Music, Sound, and The Moving Image in 2017"

'The First Cut is the Deepest' Excerpts from a Focus Group on Editing Music Videos, with Explanatory Historical and Theoretical Notes

Abstract: It is often said that one of the lasting impacts of music videos is the fast ‘MTV edit’ in mainstream narrative film. In this edited collection of excerpts from a focus group on music videos, British music video editors challenge the idea that the fast edit was the sole overriding concern, and talk about the impact of changing editing technologies, aesthetics and commercial practicalities on their craft. The editors participating in the group included: Tony Kearns who, between 1989 and 2005, edited iconic videos for The Prodigy, Radiohead, Blur, Paul Weller, Suede, Chemical Brothers, Coldplay, Manic Street Preachers, and Pulp, amongst others; Art Jones, whose credits include Adele, Armand Van Helden, Kaiser Chiefs, Stereophonics, Feeder, Moloko, and The Streets; Tom Lindsay who has cut videos for Will Young, Kasabian, Franz Ferdinand, the Arctic Monkeys, and The Shoes’ ‘Time To Dance’; director Dawn Shadforth who has directed videos for Oasis, Kylie Minogue, Moloko, All Seeing I, The Streets, Goldfrapp, a...

Fifty years of British music video

Abstract: This article was published open access under a CC BY license https://creativecommonsorg/licenses/by/40/

Music for Murder, Machines, and Monsters: 'Moat Farm Murder', The Twilight Zone, and the CBS Stock Music Library

Abstract: The re-use of storylines from radio plays on early television was not uncommon; indeed, much of the television programming of the 1950s and early 1960s consisted of repurposed radio scripts Columbia Presents Corwin 'Moat Farm Murder' (Bernard Herrmann, 18 July 1944) was among the many radio programmes from the 1940s that had music featured in The Twilight Zone Of the radio plays to feature music in the series, 'Moat Farm Murder' provided more cues than any other CBS radio score Cues from 'Moat Farm Murder' are found in eleven episodes of The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–1964) The use of music from radio dramas and their re-uses in television has thus far not been examined This essay looks at the composition of the 'Moat Farm Murder' radio score and Corwin's collaboration with Herrmann in it, as well as the re-use of radio music in The Twilight Zone Through this case study of 'Moat Farm Murder', better knowledge of how the CBS Stock music library was used, in tandem with the way in which other similar network and production company cue libraries worked

The World Within the Home: Tracing the Sound in Satyajit Ray's Films

Abstract: This article examines the aesthetic use of sound in Satyajit Ray’s films to retrace his position in Indian cinema as a reference point in the practices of synchronised monaural sound Ray is traditionally considered to be an auteur and a cultural icon – his legacy being on the fringes of popular mainstream Indian cinema The specifics of sound practice and the nature of sonic experience in his films, however, remain largely under-explored In this context, I argue that Ray’s treatment of sound in his films highlights a recognition of listening to place by means of a keen observation and recording of the site in monaural synchronised sound practice, which has created a precedence for realistic auditory settings later championed by Indian filmmakers in the contemporary digital era Investigating how Ray’s use of ambient sounds contributes to establishing an auditory setting and to constructing a sense of reality in his films, this article suggests that Ray initiated a tradition of audiographic realism in In

The Dancing Eyes of the Director: Choreographers, Dance Cultures, and Film Genres in British Music Video 1979–2016

Abstract: This article looks at the work of choreographers in British music video from Arlene Phillips (founder of Hot Gossip), to FKA Twigs and Wayne McGregor. The first section presents an overview of the development of genres of dance and choreography in music videos from the late 1970s to the present day, covering genres such as the loosely-choreographed pop act video, to the formal, tightly-choreographed routines of videos drawing on the Hollywood musical tradition, to the street dance video ushered in following Malcolm McLaren's breakthrough 'Buffalo Gals' video (1983). The article argues that British music videos should not be negatively compared to their bigger budget US counterparts but should instead be appreciated on their own merits – and those merits include the greater creative exchange with ballet and contemporary dance, and the use of techniques from experimental film and narrative film; and it argues that these features make dance in British music videos an exciting and critically acclaimed cultural form today. The author draws attention to the importance of 'social realism' within British choreographed music videos, and points out that the recent work of Matthew Bourne and FKA Twigs overrides the traditional distinction between 'dance film' and commercial music dance film.

British Landmark Music videos and the BFI National Archive

Abstract: Pop promos combine the commercial and artistic extremes of moving image production, capturing and expressing cutting edge contemporary attitudes in succinct and stylish ways. They have been an integral part of the British moving image industry since music video became a viable industry in the early 1980s, yet their place in British film and moving image history remains largely unsung. The British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive holds a varied collection of music videos acquired from the promo industry, TV broadcasters, and individual filmmakers that spans from the mid-1970s to the 2000s. A largely unexplored part of the national collection, it is a body of work ripe for research. This paper outlines various curatorial approaches taken to develop and enrich the archive’s music video collection, including details about the ‘British Landmark Music Video’ collection, curated as part of the ‘Fifty Years of British Music Video’ project. This article was published open access under a CC BY license https://...

The Occult Roots of MTV: British Music Video and Underground Film-Making in the 1980s

Abstract: This article provides a new exploration of the British underground film scene and its influence on, and relationship with, pop video tropes and techniques, and MTV. It considers the rich sub-cultural interrelations of the early 1980s that embraced esoteric ideas, queer occultism, punk, postmodernism, British art schools, Derek Jarman, William S. Burroughs, home video, Scratch Video, Video Nasties, Super 8, Michael Jackson, Grayson Perry, John Maybury, the Avebury Ring, Duran Duran, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Dr John Dee, Jean Cocteau, and Neneh Cherry. The article establishes the unique film and television context and culture in the UK at the turn of the 1980s which enabled experimental and underground film-making practices to reach a wider audience through innovative programming opportunities at Channel 4 and via the expanding medium of music video. It describes the powerful, exploratory nature of independent filmmaking that existed at this time and its basis in British art schools; several of the practition...

How Does It Feel?: Scorsese Contemplates Art through Music and Sound in Life Lessons

Abstract: Life Lessons, Martin Scorsese’s contribution to 1989’s New York Stories, tells the story of painter Lionel Dobie (Nick Nolte), and his young ingenue, Paulette (Rosanna Arquette) In the film, Scorsese ruminates on the life of the genius artist, whose personal relationships suffer for the sake of his art He does this primarily through the film’s soundtrack, relying on pre-recorded rock music, and to a lesser degree, sound effects, to convey the chaos that surrounds and fuels Dobie’s art Scorsese uses works from Italian composer Giacomo Puccini (‘Nessun Dorma’ from Turandot), British rock band Procol Harum (‘Conquistador’ and ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’), and, most importantly, a live version of iconic American songwriter Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ to speak for, and through, his characters In doing so, the director provides viewers with his most personal work on the life of the artist and the connection between personal suffering and artistic creation Overlooked and autobiographical, Life Lessons p

Music in Video Games: Studying Play eds. by K.J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner (review)

Abstract: K.J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner (eds) Music in Video Games: Studying Play New York and London: Routledge, 2014: 232pp. ISBN: 978-0415634441review by Michiel KampThis volume falls right in the middle of a boom in publications on video game music. Following Karen Collins's Game Sound and her edited volume From Pac-Man to Pop Music (both 2008), there have been a number of articles and chapters appearing on the subject, both throughout the various Oxford Handbooks and in journals that focus on music in audiovisual media. These are joined by Kiri Miller's Playing Along (2012) and William Cheng's Soundplay (2014), which, although bundled in book form, can really be considered collections of article-length (case) studies. Add to that Peter Moormann's edited volume Music and Game: Perspectives on a Popular Alliance (2013) and the question becomes how this Routledge volume Music in Video Games: Studying Play (2014), edited by K.J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner, distinguishes itself from or relates to this rapidly growing field.The question is perhaps unfair, as the academic study of video game music is still in its infancy and the field anything but saturated, but it is fruitful to consider the different strands and approaches that operate on this relatively new and exciting topic within musicology. And, to start with, it has to be said that this is first and foremost a musicology volume. Whereas, for instance, From Pac-Man to Pop Music offers a multitude of scholars from different disciplines - and even expands its topic to include game sound - the chapters in Music in Video Games almost exclusively employ methods from historical musicology and music theory. This means the book has no shortage of well-printed and clear music examples that, given the dynamic and adaptive nature of game scores, get quite inventive.Another thing that sets this volume apart from others is the fact that it, for the most part, eschews grand theories of game music in general in favour of more focused case studies - one, or a small number, per chapter. These include what might by now be called the canonical cases of Super Mario Bros. (1985), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998), and Silent Hill (1999, albeit only in passing in Rebecca Roberts' chapter), but also introduce a number of new and worthy topics of study, such as Plants vs. Zombies, representing the less-than-glamorous but ubiquitous non-dynamic soundtracks of low-budget mobile games; the soundtrack of Sid Meier's Civilization IV (2005), which features pre-existing music in a manner completely unlike other audio-visual media such as films, showing the idiosyncrasies of video games when it comes to representation; and all-but-forgotten soundtracks such as that composed for The Dig (1995). Together, these case studies uniquely represent the variety of video game soundtracks, whereas other collections have mostly presented the variety of approaches to game music.The chapters are loosely ordered according to topics, moving from 'chip music' to analysis of dynamic soundtracks to horror games to hermeneutics. This, admittedly, is gleaned from the introduction, as there are many threads that connect chapters in the book, although none of them explicit. The book starts with 'the classics': Neil Lerner's analyses of the Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. soundtracks. Central to this chapter is the link between early game music and early film music, a thread of research that Lerner further explores in his contribution to The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies (2014). There, he focuses on the very earliest video games, and his structural and semiotic analysis of Donkey Kong here is reminiscent of that chapter. However, particular attention is paid to the unity the soundtrack provides in an otherwise incoherent and inconsistent game world ('Why does Mario have three lives?' Lerner asks, following Jesper Juul [2005]). The tonal coherence Lerner notes is striking, and it is even more prevalent in his analysis of the later Super Mario Bros. …

After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926–1934 by Michael Slowik (review)

Abstract: Michael Slowik After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926-1934 New York: Columbia University Press, 2014: 400pp. ISBN-13: 978-0231165839review by Alexis BennettKing Kong (1933) features prominently, and right from the outset, in Michael Slowik's After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926-1934. And with good reason: Steiner's score has been consistently hailed by other scholars as immensely influential on countless other musical responses to films made in the US industry in the classic period and far beyond. But the aim of his book is to interrogate some of the assumptions that we might make about those critical years between the first successful attempts at sound film in 1926-1927 and the moment - roughly coinciding with the release of King Kong - when the turmoil seemed to settle into something resembling an industry which finally knew a little about what its products would look and sound like in the years and decades to come.Slowik's key argument is that Max Steiner's King Kong was not quite the original instruction manual of classic scoring that it is often hailed as being; or, at the very least, much important groundwork had been achieved in the language of the classic Hollywood score before King Kong was composed that has hitherto not been given the scholarly attention that it deserves. The author is a former student of Rick Altman at Iowa, and, following Altman, Slowik bridges the gap between late silent practices and early sound scores by tracing a line of development that effectively shows King Kong as being drawn not only from European art music but, crucially, via silent film and early sound experiments.Indeed, the author goes as far as to assert that this book actually sets the record straight in a way that breaks new ground:The historical record thus depicts the early sound era as featuring only a few primitive stabs at sound film music, followed by an absence of music until Steiner's innovative scores. By casting a wider net over the early sound era, this study reveals a far different story and suggests several surprising conclusions.(p.266)The 'wider net' that Slowik refers to is his methodological approach, which prioritises the lesser-known works of the early sound era in the United States rather than the established canon of 'great' or popular films. He is keen to emphasise that he has watched more than 200 relatively obscure (or 'ordinary') films from the period. As he mentions in his conclusion,studies of film style often restrict their focus to films of high artistic merit, thus implying that those films represent the whole of film production from a particular period. Such selective scholarship tends to distort the true situation, since 'exceptional' films often constitute a tiny, unrepresentative fraction of a period's output. As more early sound films are discovered, preserved, and made available for viewing, perhaps scholars will attain an even greater sense of the diverse musical approaches taken in the early sound era.(p.268)While Slowik is undoubtedly correct in this observation that film history is - to misuse and misquote a cliche - written by the winners, through the most well-known and critically praised films, this reviewer is uneasy with Slowik's aim of representing the 'true situation'. Slowik has just as many biasing factors at work behind his writing as the best historians. Indeed, an obvious drawback - or rather, a necessary limitation - in the book is that Slowik's project is focused on Hollywood. By drawing the boundary lines of a study at the borders of the greater Los Angeles area, one has to ignore the developments in other world cinemas and their scoring practices. This is not a problem; it's a book about Hollywood music, and it doesn't claim otherwise. But in boldly asserting that the book 'aims for comprehensiveness' (p.6), Slowik is perhaps putting himself in a position of omniscience that no historian can reasonably expect of him or herself. …

'Comparable to MTV - but better': The impact of The Chart Show on British music video culture, 1986-1998

Abstract: The Chart Show was a weekly UK TV programme showcasing music videos from the Media Research Information Bureau (MRIB) Network Chart and a range of independent and specialist pop music charts. It began broadcasting on Friday evenings on Channel 4 in April 1986 and ran for three series until September 1988. Its production company, Video Visuals, subsequently found a new home for The Chart Show with Yorkshire Television on ITV, where it went out on Saturday mornings between January 1989 and August 1998. What made the show unique in the British broadcasting context was that it was the first presenter-less pop chart programme that showcased popular music exclusively in video form. Beginning at a time when MTV was still unavailable in the UK, The Chart Show was innovatory in consolidating music video as the lingua franca of the pop singles market. Drawing on archival sources from Channel 4, and the trade and popular music presses, this article shows how The Chart Show helped shape the form of music video, contr...