{"title":"Fostering a Public Appreciation of Film Music inthe U.S.A.","authors":"Elsa Marshall","doi":"10.1558/jfm.23826","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jfm.23826","url":null,"abstract":"The American periodical Film Music Notes spurred a critical consideration of film music and of building public appreciation of the arts during its run from 1941 to 1958. This history of its first decade starts with the connections and efforts of a group of Hollywood women on behalf of the National Federation of Music Clubs, to their founding of the National Film Music Council, to the final stage in editor turnover from the founding editors. It contributes to histories of professionalization of artistic and cultural study through its analysis of how the editors experimented with structuring content in a way to encourage the public to appreciate film music. This was influenced by changing relations between Film Music Notes and Hollywood studios, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, and educational organizations. This context explains how prominent composers and critics came to contribute to the periodical and the larger debates that were shaping their writings.","PeriodicalId":201559,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Film Music","volume":"58 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141112000","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Jester Hairston’s Film Music Career","authors":"Micah Bland","doi":"10.1558/jfm.23542","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jfm.23542","url":null,"abstract":"This article aims to introduce the film music community to the life and career of Jester Hairston (1901–2000)—a multitalented Black entertainer who composed, arranged, and conducted choral ensembles for notable film composers throughout the mid-twentieth century. Hairston’s seven-decade Hollywood career began in 1936 as the assistant conductor of the Hall Johnson Choir. Following his tenure with the ensemble, Hairston worked extensively with composer Dimitri Tiomkin for over twenty years. Hairston’s most significant contribution to film music occurred in 1944 when he established the first integrated choir in Hollywood. Later in life, Hairston found success as an actor, appearing in film and television shows such as The Alamo (1960) and Amen (1986–1991), earning him a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. As an entertainer Hairston garnered 114 film and television credits (68 as a musician) and published 56 choral works.","PeriodicalId":201559,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Film Music","volume":" 22","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138960732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Death by Tchaikovsky","authors":"Táhirih Motazedian","doi":"10.1558/jfm.19144","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jfm.19144","url":null,"abstract":"The 2010 film Black Swan embeds Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake ballet within a macabre meta-ballet, in which the “Black Swan” character subsumes the life of Nina, the prima ballerina tasked with playing the dual role of Odile/Odette. Nina fulfills the balletic role by succumbing to a nightmarish nineteenth-century “death and the maiden” narrative in which she attains “perfection” by disappearing into the ballet and ultimately dying. The weaving-together of threads of musical analysis, nineteenth-century music pathology, and twenty-first-century psychology reveals a darkly whimsical reading of the narrative in which Tchaikovsky himself is drawn into the filmic fray as the phantasmagorical force behind Nina’s psychological derailment.","PeriodicalId":201559,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Film Music","volume":" 32","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138961089","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Friendship and Flight","authors":"Denise Finnegan-Hill","doi":"10.1558/jfm.22029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jfm.22029","url":null,"abstract":"Many films use thematic development to support the narrative, although this has been less prevalent in the modern age of film in which many scores rely on drive over thematic development. One twenty-first-century score that shows great command of thematic development comes from the 2010 animated adventure How to Train Your Dragon. This score, and composer John Powell’s work in general, have been ignored from an academic standpoint despite Powell’s skillful usage of thematic development that rivals that of John Williams. In this article, I compare the dramatic and thematic associations of the themes relating to friendship in Williams’s score for E.T. (1982) and Powell’s score for How to Train Your Dragon. I scrutinize where these themes occur and their narrative import, tracing their development alongside that of the characters. Ultimately, I look at the similarities and differences of each composer’s thematic development to show how Powell’s technique sets him up as the “heirapparent” to Williams.","PeriodicalId":201559,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Film Music","volume":"113 17","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138959722","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Michael W. Harris, Jeffrey Lyon, Heather Fisher, Joshua Henry, Sienna M Wood
{"title":"Past, Present, and Future of the Collections of Cinema and Media Music Database","authors":"Michael W. Harris, Jeffrey Lyon, Heather Fisher, Joshua Henry, Sienna M Wood","doi":"10.1558/jfm.20817","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jfm.20817","url":null,"abstract":"For many scholars, critical analysis of film and media music is stymied by a lack of published or manuscript materials, and discoverability of such materials is many times hampered by how archival materials are cataloged. While numerous composers have deposited their papers at libraries and archives across the globe, discovery of these collections has occurred via citations in books and articles, or word-of-mouth between scholars.\u0000This is because archival collections are cataloged with a focus on the creator of the collection and not the individual object (such as a book or manuscript score). Therefore, if the score or other materials for a film are in a collection of a studio, or someone other than the composer themselves, they might be hard, if not impossible, to find without a lot of searching or a stroke of luck. Adding to the difficulty is that some of these collections are not fully indexed or searchable, so many materials remain hidden under a century of backlogged archival processing.\u0000In order to address this problem, the Collections of Cinema and Media Music (C2M2) has been designed, built, and populated by a small team spread across the United States. This paper will discuss the design and implantation of C2M2, with a focus on the task of creating a custom metadata schema that addresses the unique issues of film and media music, and the myriad of ways a researcher might try to access a particular score. It will also show the reader how the metadata functions and displays within the database, with discussions of the challenges inherent in a project of this scope.\u0000As research into film and media music continues to expand, scholars are clamoring for access to materials to expand their research beyond the realm of music–film relationships and into areas reliant on archival materials. In such a world, tools such as C2M2 will be critical in creating the ease of access that will eliminate the barriers that hamper such work.","PeriodicalId":201559,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Film Music","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122976655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Proceedings of the Second Max Steiner Symposium, “Film Scoring in the Classic Hollywood Period,” Brigham Young University, November 1–2, 2019","authors":"Brent Yorgason","doi":"10.1558/jfm.24894","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jfm.24894","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":201559,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Film Music","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123648672","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Jezebel (1938) and Citizen Kane (1941)","authors":"P. Wegele","doi":"10.1558/jfm.24725","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jfm.24725","url":null,"abstract":"One of Max Steiner’s most famous film themes is the waltz for Jezebel (1938). In this article, the Jezebel waltz will be analyzed and juxtaposed with Bernard Herrmann’s waltz for the marriage scene in Citizen Kane (1941). This comparison, between two composers of completely different styles, will exemplify the features of the music of the Golden Age of Hollywood, as represented by Steiner, in contrast to the newer aesthetic ideas represented by Herrmann.","PeriodicalId":201559,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Film Music","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125170999","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Music to Climb By","authors":"Jonathan L. Friedmann","doi":"10.1558/jfm.24722","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jfm.24722","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the influence of the “climbing motif” that scores the ascent of the Empire State Building in King Kong (1933). Similar rising chromatic lines occur in numerous later film and television sequences involving suspenseful climbs. The various iterations can be traced to Max Steiner’s landmark score, which has inspired generations of screen composers.","PeriodicalId":201559,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Film Music","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133850964","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Peter Franklin, Seeing Through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classical Hollywood Film Scores","authors":"Jessica L. Getman","doi":"10.1558/jfm.23512","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jfm.23512","url":null,"abstract":"Peter Franklin, Seeing Through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classical Hollywood Film Scores Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011 [208pp. ISBN: 9780195383454. £46.99 (hardback); ISBN: 9780190246549. £31.49 (paperback)], 28 screen stills, index.","PeriodicalId":201559,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Film Music","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117047769","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fractured Reasons and Fractured Reason in I Walked with a Zombie","authors":"Michael Lee, Sarah Reichardt Ellis","doi":"10.1558/jfm.24720","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jfm.24720","url":null,"abstract":"I Walked with a Zombie, a poetic horror film from 1943, enjoys widespread and intense admiration of a sort rarely bestowed on a “B” horror film from the studio era. Robin Wood (2003) sees the film as the genre’s finest and has observed that its treatment of the genre’s signal dichotomy of Superstition vs. Reason results in a series of expressive doublings within the film. This article amplifies Wood’s admiration by examining the film’s approach to music. Its soundtrack features the work of two composers. RKO’s Roy Webb offers the Western perspective of Reason while Haitian musician LeRoy Antoine provides the Caribbean perspective associated with Voodooism. By looking at the musical doublings in the film, this article argues that music functions in the film to further dismantle the posture of Reason. This film, more than any the author can think of from the era, criticizes the colonial project and dismantles the Western notion that any single perspective or explanatory model can lead to a sufficient understanding of human affairs.","PeriodicalId":201559,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Film Music","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115305904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}