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COPYRIGHT 2003 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
This panel discussion took place in "real time" in an on-line chat room devised especially for this event. Participants were then asked to offer their closing thoughts on the topics discussed as well as on the means of communication. The on-line chat room approach was used by the editors in order to capture some of the conversational aspects often lost in academic interviews.
[WELCOME] Welcome to the VLT Chat!
The History of Film Sound Research
Kyle: Hello, all. Thanks for participating in this somewhat experimental roundtable mode. I'm Kyle Barnett, the guy with the questions for you. First question: Why has the study of film music developed as it has, in fits and starts? Why the increased interest now?
David: Some quick thoughts to start the conversation. Film music studies was slow to develop because writing about film music was mostly in the hands of practical musicians (Erdmann and Becce, Sabanaev, London, Eisler, Manvell and Huntley, Bazelon, etc.--through On the Track [Karlin and Wright]). Increased scholarly interest started (slowly) after sound design integrated the sound track in the 1970s.
Sarah: Can you describe that integration, David?
David: I was thinking of Walter Murch's "invention" of sound design. Historically, that is. Michel Chion complains about classical sound tracks as being nothing but speech and that everlasting music.
Robynn: I think part of the reason it developed in fits and starts is the isolation in which people have generally started to work. This is also seen in the way that everyone seems to have to start afresh when speaking about it. As to why now, I think people are more interested in interdisciplinary topics, and musicologists are also starting to get back to the idea of meaning.
Jim: ... and the realization that music helps sell films, especially blockbusters.
Anahid: To follow on Jim's and David's points, maybe it's also the increased importance of sound design in blockbusters.
Jim: David and Robynn seem to be making a similar point. Much of the isolation has to do with the institutional structure of film music both in the studio and in the academy.
Musicology versus Film Studies: Conflict in Ideologies and Positions on Meaning Making
Kyle: Let's talk about disciplinary problems. It seems that any discussion of film music has to interact with a number of different traditions, which don't talk well with one another.
Sarah: Robynn, can you describe the field of musicology and how it's methodologically changed over time?
Robynn: The field of musicology began largely out of German positivism and the "ideal" of absolute music, so there's the initial resistance to musical "meaning" in the way film scholars usually engage with it. It has only been within my "lifetime" as a scholar (I got to grad school in the late 1980s) that such discussions have started to come back in. In fact, there was still a lot of resistance.
Anahid: From the point of view of musicology, I think the openings have been coming from canon critiques. And from the other direction, film theory got so caught up with vision as the basis for engagement.
Jim: Well, yes, vision remains primary still, I think. Look at Chion, who despite everything still seems to grant the image track an autonomy not granted the sound track. "There is no sound track" doesn't seem to carry the corollary that there is no image track. Yet for me, sound tracks alone are generally more narratively coherent than image tracks.
Robynn: Yes, in a nutshell, you had musicologists who didn't want to deal with meaning (narrative, dramatic, whatever), while film studies is largely "deaf"?
Jim: Surely, film scholars are sensitive to issues of film sound-more sensitive in many respects than film music scholars, who often seem a bit embarrassed by the fact that "their" music is associated with film in the first place. They are definitely more interested in composition for the film than music in the film, to borrow Rick Altman's distinction.
Anahid: I'm not so sure, Jim. Most film scholars don't even notice sound and music ...
Jim: Anahid, most film scholars ignore the music, to be sure, but I don't think the same can be said of sound. They certainly seem aware of how sound creates offscreen space.
Robynn: Jim, I'm a little surprised to hear that (although pleased if it's true). Anahid: Do you think so? Most of what I read is still pretty "deaf," as Robynn put it.
Robynn: Re: sound in film studies: I have been to Screen in the last few years, and most of the time I'm not only the only one talking about music, I'm usually the only one talking about sound at all. Maybe it's better in the U.S.
Anahid: No, I don't think it's better here.
Jim: Robynn, I can't judge on the basis of conferences. And yes, it is true that sound issues are often given short shrift in comparison to image issues, but I still think that film studies has offered more insight on sound issues than music studies-much more. This comes back to the hegemony of absolute music mentioned above: musicologists working on opera have a hard enough time bringing the libretto into play at a substantive level.
Kyle: I think all of you deal with how to use musicological approaches in the present context. Anahid, you suggest the need for a new language that would function in a larger arena, while David is analyzing musicology's analytical tools for uses separate from debates about absolute music.
David: "Musicological approaches" sells us short, I think. All of us (even me, despite the focus of my publications) are working in the middle ground between film studies and musicology, it seems to me.
Anahid: On Kyle's question . I do. I think as a film music scholar, I feel obliged to help folks develop a vocabulary. I'm not an editor, but I have a basic editing vocabulary. That's what I mean.
Robynn: It's true that musical vocabulary can seem arcane to nonmusicians. But I think there is also a willingness among film scholars to learn visually or narratively determined vocabularies like shot composition and editing but be strangely resistant-or oblivious-to sound/ music.
Anahid: Yes, Robynn, that's exactly my point ...
Kyle: I'm in full agreement with what is being said. I think one of the primary functions of film music studies is to create a workable language re: sound which crosses the bridge over the musicology/ film studies gap.
Sarah: How do film scholars analyze film sound to point to specific meaning making?
Jim: To take up the question of specific meaning making. I'm not sure what is being driven at, but certainly issues of the offscreen sound, ambient sound, and nondiegetic sound all contribute to filmic meaning making. I would also add the symbolic potential of sound, especially music, when certain musical or sound motifs "stick" to characters, events, etc.
Ana: Jim, what would be a movie you'd stress as corollary in the meaning-making issue? Actually, why don't you all mention a movie that is for each one of you the corollary of music as the movies' meaning making.
Jim: A particular example with respect to diegetic music might be the staged musical conflict between "Wacht am Rhein" and "La Marseillaise" in Casablanca (1942), where hearing the aural triumph of the latter is a good part of the "meaning" of the sequence. Likewise, music and sound can characterize. In the Star Wars series the heroes and the villains are clearly marked musically, indeed, by the sound design in general. In The Terminator series the pitched quality of the sound associated with the Terminator places it in a space wonderfully suspended between the musical and the mechanical and calls into question any attempt to turn the series into a simple tale of humanity at war with its machines. To the extent that the machines are musical, they have a claim, as it were, to a humanity of their own. Such examples can, of course, be multiplied indefinitely. Indeed, it would be a very rare sound track indeed that did not contribute in some fashion to meaning making. David: I think meaning making, at a basic level, is one of those things that just happens when image and sound are combined. That's Chion's notion of "added value."
Robynn: To follow on from David, yes, what interests me most is when it all comes together (one of my other areas of interest is dance, and that, too, is "added value").
Sarah: What about the use of film music to suggest melodrama or otherwise elicit "generic" emotional responses from the audience? Do musicologists and film studies scholars differ in how they interpret this aspect of the sound track? How would a musicologist approach analyzing sound in a particular film versus a film studies scholar (traditionally)?
Robynn: I suppose the first answer to Sarah's question would be that a film studies scholar (traditionally) wouldn't approach sound! I think the greatest advantage a musicologist has is sensitivity to the sound track through practice, although my parents tell me I was bugging them about the music to Lost in Space (1965) and Mission: Impossible (1966) when I was two. But also experience and skill (hopefully) at hearing organized sound over a long stretch. I went to see The Insider (1999) with another musician, and we both sat bolt upright at the same point, which was musically subtle, but we both got it. David: Re: the issue of musicologist versus film scholar: I don't think the question works, because musicologists before the 1990s didn't look at film at all-except to trash Amadeus and except for a tiny, tiny cadre of specialists, no more than half a dozen, including Gillian Anderson, Marty Marks, and Al Cochran. The generation that did, finally, take a more broadly expressed interest in film was, well, us. In film studies sound has infiltrated and naturalized itself over the years, starting with the bizarre sound tracks of spaghetti westerns, whose distancing effects can't be ignored. After that, it's Murch and sound design in Apocalypse Now and sci-fi movies like Blade Runner. By the 1990s sound design is as obvious and complex a filmic system as continuity editing and can't be ignored.
Robynn: David's reply is the flip side of mine, really! The two disciplines were regarding each other across the abyss.
Jim: I like Robynn's image of an abyss. I think bridging that abyss will make for extremely productive scholarship.
David: I said "can't be ignored" above, but I agree with Robynn (and Jim) that the field is just now really opening up. Mainstream journals in both fields are willing to publish in film sound and film music. Now we need more people to write well about them!
Kyle: Within film music studies there seems to be a split between scholars who deal with technological/historical questions and those who deal with questions of identity more fully. In what ways might we bring these two scholarly endeavors together?
Jim: To the issue of technology versus identity: I know for myself I tend to follow the technology angle, but I'm always trying to read the ideological formations of the technology. So ultimately I would argue that technology constructs identities--or...
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