The field of Film-Music Studies has been increasingly dominated by musicologists; this book brings the discipline back squarely into the domain of Film Studies, offering an approach in which music and visuals are seen as equal players in the game. Blending Neoformalism with Gestalt psychology and Leonard B. Meyer's musicology, this study treats music as a cinematic element, offering scholars and students of both music and film a set of tools to help them analyse the wide-ranging impact that music has in films. This second edition provides an updated survey of the field and a new chapter featuring additional case studies, including a novel analytical category for studying the contemporary 'sound-design style' film music.

In Hollywood’s classical period (1930s to 1950s), there used to be a hierarchy of importance within the soundtrack: sound effects typically ranked at bottom, music in the middle, and dialogue at the top; as technological limitations made it difficult to feature too many tracks simultaneously, clarity of dialogue was prioritised. Improved stereo technologies became available in the late 1970s, and then, at the beginning of the 2000s, digital technologies allowed for unprecedented possibilities and a collapse of the old hierarchy. A stylistic change in film music was enabled: the ‘integrated soundtrack’ (Kulezic-Wilson 2019) and of the ‘sound-design style’ (Audissino 2017a). In my previous work (Audissino 2017b), I have identified three key functions that film music performs: the emotive function (triggering emotions, feelings, and moods in viewers); the perceptive function (guiding the viewers’ attention within the filmic space or modifying their perception of the film’s pace); and the cognitive function (helping viewers comprehend and interpret the narrative). Film music has fulfilled such functions by adopting thematicism and the harmonic conventions of the Western classical music. An observable trait of the post-2000 ‘sound-design style’ is the decrease in number of memorable melodies, pointed out both in the trade press (Pearson 2024) and in academic articles (Richard 2016). ‘Sound’ has taken pre-eminence over ‘music’ in the traditional sense; sound effects have become musicalized in the complex layering and nuancing that constitute today’s sound design, and music in turn has become closer to what one would have traditionally called ‘noise’. With melodic writing on the wane and contemporary cinema pursuing experiences as immersive as possible, film music has been called to be a key device in the creation of immersive atmospheres, now performing what I call a ‘somatic function’: music has to act like a sort of umbilical cord, linking viewers to the film narrative, and not only immersing them into it, but also connecting them bodily. Illustrative examples from Dunkirk (2017) and Oppenheimer (2023) will be used. 

References:

·       Audissino, E. (2017a). John Williams and contemporary film music. In, Contemporary Film Music: Investigating Cinema Narratives and Composition, edited by Lindsay Coleman and Joakim Tillman, 221-236. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

·       Audissino, E. (2017b). Film/Music Analysis. A Film Studies Approach. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

·       Kulezic-Wilson, D. (2019). Sound design is the new score: Theory, Aesthetics, and Erotics of the Integrated Soundtrack. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

·       Pearson, B. (2024). Where Have All the Memorable Movie Themes Gone? Hollywood Composers Speak Out, Slash/Film, June 12, 2024, https://www.slashfilm.com/1598470/where-have-memorable-movie-themes-gone-hollywood-composers-speak-out/. 

Richards, M. (2016). Film Music Themes: Analysis and Corpus Study. Music Theory Online, 22(1), https://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.16.22.1/mto.16.22.1.richards.html.

In the Argento canon, the giallo film Profondo Rosso (1975) stands out for its exemplar deployment of a memorable soundtrack. Music is an integral presence of the narrative world because the protagonist is a jazz pianist. To take care of the jazz element in the soundtrack, Argento called in the renowned jazz musician Giorgio Gaslini, who also authored the iconic children's song—“Lullaby”—that the mysterious killer plays before unleashing her homicidal fury. The score, for its part, features the prog-rock music by Goblin, in particular the famous main theme “Profondo Rosso”, heard as an ominous accompaniment to the killer's preparatory routines. The chapter investigates the multiple nature of the authorship of the Profondo Rosso soundtrack and offers an analysis of its narrative function through the lens of Freud's concepts of “Uncanny” and “Repetition Compulsion”. A film centered on madness, childhood traumas and irrational drives, Profondo Rosso exploits the polystylism of the soundtrack, itself the product of multiple authorship, as its most powerful tool in the expression of these psychopathological dynamics.

The article mobilizes the concepts of “canon” and “canonization” to discuss John Williams’s legacy. It sets the scene by providing an overview of the most noted formulations of “canon”—from Joseph Kerman’s 1983 articulation to the most recent revisions by Mark Everist and William Weber—and of the most noted controversies and debates around it. The invocation of such unstable and problematic concept is warranted by the deep roots that the film music of the classical Hollywood had in the nineteenth-century operatic and symphonic tradition, a tradition that also included, in its aesthetic and philosophical tenets, the very concepts of canon and canonization. In turn, the film music of John Williams is deeply rooted in the tradition of the film music of the classical Hollywood and hence, for transitive properties, also in the aforementioned nineteenth-century musical and aesthetic traditions. Specifically, the concepts of “canon” and “canonization” are applied to Williams’s work by considering the composer’s importance in relation not only to the “Hollywood music canon” but also to the “art music canon” of Western music. Williams has arguably worked within a tripartite set of canons: his film scores have been referencing past canonical works consistently, not in an uninventive plagiaristic manner but in a productive paraphrasing one, as most conclusively demonstrated by James Orosz in 2015. In such a canonizing function, Williams has been long praised as a sort of herald of symphonic music—particularly a brand of updated late-Romantic symphonism, which he has called “Romantic atonalism”—an advocate who could bridge the gap between “art music” and the masses and keep the influence of the “long nineteenth century” still relevant in today’s music. Second, he has been instrumental in the canonization of the past Hollywood music, not only in reviving that style, which was considered dead and buried in the late 1960s when Williams was consolidating his credentials in the film industry. Williams has also been instrumental in igniting an interest for the past music of Hollywood in the record market and on the concert stages, particularly with his parallel career as a concert conductor. Third, as the current dean of film music, Williams has been himself the object of a process of canonization, becoming the point of reference for those who wish to keep symphonic film scoring alive, but also for concert composers who have found in Williams’s idiom a source of inspiration. John Williams has been an important figure both as a canonizing revivalist and as a canonized model.

The Rezort (Steve Barker, 2015) tells the story of a post-zombie apocalypse U.K. in which the remaining specimens of the zombie population are employed as attractions at “The Rezort,” a leisure island on which humans can have zombie-theme safari experiences, including remorseless shooting of the undead. The apparently formulaic narrative comes with an ambitious social commentary. The film directly links zombies, and their exploitative and persecutory treatment, to refugees, reflecting the worries of public opinion in the U.K. around the migration crisis at the time of its production. The article offers textual analysis inspired by the four levels of meaning (referential, explicit, implicit, symptomatic) found in David Bordwell’s Making Meaning (1989). The eye-match dynamics are analyzed as textual cues for the creation of the explicit meaning (zombies are people too), and the narrative turning point and holocaust references are interpreted as cues to the implicit meaning (the refugee crisis is like previous persecutions in history). Finally, cues in the film are interpreted as symptoms of the impending Brexit, the referendum for which would take place the year after the film’s release.

Comedy and humour have intrigued and puzzled philosophers and scholars since time immemorial. What is the difference between tragedy and comedy? What is the essence of comedy? What are the traits that qualify something as humorous? Why do we laugh? At the same time, with the philosophical curiosity came an inveterate suspicion: comedy and humour have been considered lowly genres not worthy of serious study and unbecoming for intellectually superior audiences; comedy can stir up base instincts that are better kept hidden behind the propriety of good manners; comedy can be immoral and malicious and hence is to be condemned. The chapter surveys this tension between scholarly curiosity and haughty condemnation in philosophy, religions, and aesthetic criticism. It presents the three principal theoretical families which have tried to account for the mechanics of humour and laughter: the superiority theories, the release theories, and the incongruity theories, from ancient Greece to the present day. Finally, the specificities of film comedy are considered—what devices make a comedy a film comedy and which techniques of the medium are deployed by film humour—and a summary and discussion are offered of the principal theories within film studies, from Gerard Mast’s to Jerry Palmer’s to Andrew Horton’s.

To the wider audience, John Williams is firmly associated with the string of dramas and fantasy/adventure films he scored for Steven Spielberg, or with the fairy tale/sci-fi Star Wars saga. More knowledgeable connoisseurs are also aware of his association in the 1970s with some of the most successful disaster movies of the decade—The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure, etc. Yet, Williams has also been substantially active in comedy, but the main scholarly literature on the composer has largely overlooked this aspect. Williams’s first landmarks in feature film scoring were in the comedy genre, back in the 1960s. Williams has also shown, throughout his production, a consistent presence of humorous touches and musical irony, whenever storytelling would allow for an appropriate presence. Williams’s concert music also presents traits of musical humour delivered through Prokofiev-like angular melodies, or extreme-range instrumental doublings (e.g. the tuba and the piccolo or the oboe), or unexpected harmonic twists. This chapter explores the comedic side of Williams’s music both in comedy and non-comedy cinema. The first part surveys the composer’s film production in the decades 1960s and 1970s, with a focus on his early career writing for the comedy genre and, later, on the subtler humorous touches in otherwise non-comic films. The second part deals with the post-1980 scores, demonstrating how instrumentation, harmonic language and rhythm, unusual timbres and idioms, and dissociations between music and the on-screen action create humorous touches and act as moments of comic relief or commentary within otherwise ‘serious’ films.

Annotated bibliography of the principal literature items and sources on composer John Williams

This handbook tackles comprehensively film music in comedies, instead of the more usual focus on dramas. It explores the ways in which musical and cinematic devices interact to produce humour within film comedy, and combines culturalist, formalist, and theoretical perspectives

In my previous work about film music, I had adopted Gestalt as a theoretical framework to explain the functions and effects of music in film, from a perspective that did not stem from musicology but from film studies. I developed what I call ‘micro/macro configurations’ analysis. In films, music contributes to the overall form with its specific gestalt (the configuration of the musical structures), and such musical gestalt meets the gestalt of some other cinematic device/s. Besides music, any device (light design, colour schemes, dialogue, acting, camerawork, cutting…) has a specific micro-configuration that can fuse with those of the other devices, and it can be analysed in terms of micro/macro-configuration. The product of the fusion of these micro-configurations is a macro-configuration in which the devices create an audiovisual whole that is ‘something else than the sum of its parts’. In this article I apply this Gestalt-inspired analytical approach to audiovisual humour, more specifically to ‘audiovisual puns’, ‘sight gags’, and ‘perceptual pranks’. The bulk of the examples come from the cinema of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker trio, whose comedy is largely based on a clash of incongruous micro-configurations, on perceptual accumulation that creates results similar to multistable figures, and even on comical optical illusions. Closing the article is a proposal that links Gestalt to the Release Theories of humour, explaining the laughter engendered by humour as a ‘Aha, Ha! moment’.