EMOTION AND
MEANING: APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF FILM AND TELEVISION MUSIC
A session organized by Erkki Pekkilä and
Ronald Rodman at the "MUSIC, SENSES, BODY". "LA
MUSICA, I SENSI, IL CORPO" in Rome 19-23 September 2006 Università di Roma
Tor Vergata Facoltà di Lettere e FilosofiaVia Columbia on Friday the 21st of
September.
Participants
James Buhler (University of Texas at Austin, USA).
Heloísa de A. Duarte Valente (Universidade Estadual Paulista, Sao Paulo, Brazil)
Ronald Rodman (Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, USA)
Erkki
Pekkilä (University of Helsinki, Finland).
Nicolai Joergensgaard Graakjaer (University of Aalborg, Denmark)
Susanna Välimäki (University of Jyväskylä, Finland)
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From left to right:
Susanna Välimäki, Erkki Pekkilä, Héloisa Duarte Valente, Ronald Rodman, and Nicolai Joergensgaard Graakjaer.
11.
EMOTION AND MEANING: APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF FILM AND TELEVISION MUSIC
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Fri 22/9/2006 |
10-13, classroom T28 |
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Chair |
Ronald Rodman |
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10-10:30 |
Heloísa de Araújo Duarte
Valente (São Paulo) |
The microphone as a means of
musical performance on TV (some remarks about the fado singer)
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10:30-11 |
Nicolai Joergensgaard Graakjaer (Aalborg) |
Commercial music and
transmutations in referential potentials
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11-11:30 |
Break
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11 :30-12 |
Erkki Pekkila (Helsinki) |
Song lyrics and perceptual
multi-tasking in television commercials
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12-13 |
Discussion |
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Fri
22/9/2006
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14:30-17:30, classroom T28 |
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Chair |
Erkki Pekkila |
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14:30-15 |
Susanna Välimäki (Jyväskylä) |
Sound and music as
anti-war discourse in contemporary WWII combat films |
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15:30-16 |
Ronald Rodman (Carleton) |
"Tube of Plaisir,
Tube of Jouissance": Popular Music and Restrained Spectacle in Classic
American Television |
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16-16:30 |
Break
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16:30-17:30 |
Discussion |
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17:30-19 |
Plenary
lecture: Costin
Miereanu, Quelques topiques
transformatives qui dynamisent la forme musicale, classroom T12a |
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Abstracts
Composer,
Inc.
James Buhler
In recent years, much music production for film and TV has become concentrated in such corporate firms as Media Ventures, Music Consultants Group, SandBlast Productions, and AMI Music Group. This has yielded what might be called a "corporate" mode of production, which organizes composers and production staff into corporate entities. Through the use of such relatively inexpensive, high-quality musical technology as synthesizers, samplers, sequencers and computers, these firms reduce costs, increase portability, while also changing the final product delivered to the studios. The written score, when it even exists, has become a step in this production process, no existing apart from its place within the fully produced cue as it will be used in a film or a TV show; producing a cue therefore generally involves a significant degree of collaboration. The result of this corporate mode of production has been the development of distinctive "house styles," which reside in the fully produced cue, not simply the music it contains. The whole production team works to reproduce a consistent "house style" in each cue, so that film and television producers know what sound they are purchasing. In this paper I will argue that composing to reproduce a house style has altered the semiotics of film composition. In particular, "style" whether house style or the style of an individual composer no longer serves, as it does in romantic aesthetics, as a sign of personal expression. Rather, it serves as a corporate brand that distinguishes one corporate music from another. Composers in turn are hired, not to produce a distinctive cue, but to reproduce the style associated with the brand.
James Buhler is an assistant professor of music theory in the
School of Music at the University of Texas at Austin. He is editor, along with
Caryl Flinn and David Neumeyer, of Music and Cinema (Wesleyan UP, 2000). He is
currently working on two projects: Music in Film, a study of the relation of
music to the sound design with a particular attention to how the technical
advances in cinematic sound reproduction have altered the place and function of
music in the sound track; and Especially for You, a collection of essays on
music, mass culture, and the dialectic of enlightenment.
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The
microphone as a means of musical performance on TV (some remarks about the fado
singer)
Heloísa
de A. Duarte Valente
In this paper, I investigate the idea of ‘media song’ (Valente, 2003), that is, the kind of song that is associated with electronic technology. In particular, I examine how an old tradition like the fado song is converted into another modality of media song after being absorbed by media (recordings, TV shows, radio programs). In examining the media song, I will focus on some aspects of song performance on television and the role of the microphone in the changes in performance tradition and conception. The microphone made possible a new way of singing (e.g., the "soft" crooners, in the 30’s), in opposition to the previous operatic models (e.g., Enrico Caruso). On the radio, it converted unknown bodies into lovely imaginary idols. On television, however, the singer’s body is necessarily present, and the imaginary body of the radio becomes the televisual body in a scene. As the image of the televisual singing body developed, performers created particular gestures (hands, eyes...) and body movements (walking, dancing...). Ultimately, this practice was assimilated by nearly all television singers, with some interesting exceptions, most notably the fado singer. The "fado castiço" singer (traditional fado), usually does not accept the apparatus of the ‘mise-en-scène’ demanded by television set. He needs the half-light, the small room, and the intimate ambiance. One notable example was the emblematic Alfredo Marceneiro, who accepted the invitation to perform on a TV program, but performing only once, late in his career in the 1970’s and subsequently regreting the experience.
Heloísa de Araújo Duarte Valente is a researcher in musical
semiotics in Santos, Brasil. She received her Ph.D. at Pontifícia Universidade
Católica de São Paulo (Catholic University of Sao Paulo). Currently she is
responsible for the development of the project “Media song: memory and
oblivion”, sponsored by the Arts Institute of UNESP (Public University of Sao
Paulo State), and financed by CNPp (a national institution for the support of
academic research). She is also one of
the coordinators of the International Music and Media Research Group along with
Susana González-Aktories (UNAM, Mexico).
In Brazil, she is the local leader of a similar group, the MusiMid -“Núcleo de Estudos em Música e Mídia”. She
has published “Os cantos da voz: entre o ruído e o silêncio” (The singing
voices: between noise and silence, São Paulo: Annablume, 1999) and “As vozes da canção na mídia” (Song voices in
the media, São Paulo: Via Lettera./ Fapesp, 2003) and a great number of
articles in scholarly publications in the fields of musical semiotics,
semiotics of culture and popular music.)
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"Tube
of Plaisir, Tube of Jouissance": Popular Music and Restrained Spectacle in
Classic American Television
Ronald
Rodman
Throughout it history, television has used music in all it genres to convey moods and identify characters in narratives, announce the beginnings and endings of programs, sell products, and transition from one program to another. Above all, music is part of television because it is pleasurable. Much of what makes music pleasurable in television is the interplay of two roles, or modalities, that arise from it. Music has an expressive modality as genotext, where listeners enjoy the sound of music for its own sake, and it also interacts with the visual images on the screen, thereby taking on a more denotative or communicative modality as phenotext, where music becomes a part of the process of signification. In this paper, I explore these two modalities of music—the expressive and the signifying—and how these modalities are controlled in American television situation comedies from the 1950s and 1960s. Given Roland Barthes’ dual-conception of pleasure in reading literature, and his influence of Kristeva’s literary theories, I explore how Kristeva and Barthes’ theories adapt themselves to music. Finally, analyses of three musical television texts from situation comedies from Hollywood’s Desilu Studios of the 1950s and 1960s are presented. The result of these analyses reveals that, due to the cultural and temporal strictures of television, music is often foregrounded as genotext as in a film musical, but also simultaneously restrains this spectacle into narrative phenotext. Thus, the jouissance of spontaneous musical televisual pleasure is restrained into the more cerebral plaisir of music as narrative signifier.
Ronald Rodman is Professor of Music and Media Studies at Carleton
College in Northfield, Minnesota, USA.
He received his Ph.D. in music theory at Indiana University in
1992. He is author of several articles
on music in film and television including contributions in Music and Cinema
edited by David Neumeyer, Caryl Flinn and James Buhler (2000), Changing Tunes:
The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film, edited by Phil Powrie and Robyn Stilwell
(2005), and articles in College Music Symposium, Journal of Music Theory and
Indiana Theory Review. He is currently
working on a monograph on music in American television.
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Song
lyrics and perceptual multi-tasking in television commercials
Erkki
Pekkilä
Television commercials are persuasive communicative texts, created with a specific goal in mind—to sell a product to viewers. As television texts, commercials have drawn their codes of meaning from the cinema, using cinematic images, narrative plots (sometimes), sound effects and soundtracks with source or underscore music. Like the cinema, many of these images, sounds and music are made to evoke different kinds of connotative meanings and emotions, many based on ideologies and myths. In this paper, I explore the role of song lyrics in television commercials. Gorbman (1987, 20) states that when a song is used in a film, its lyrics may threaten the balance between music and narrative cinematic presentation. Often the diegetic action freezes for the duration of the song. Moreover, when a song is heard nondiegetically, it behaves like a Greek chorus, with the song lyrics commenting on the narrative. In this paper, I maintain that the role of songs in audiovisual media is even more complicated than Gorbman’s contention. In television texts in particular, there are usually several audiovisual and visual lines functioning simultaneously: music interrelating with song lyrics, speech (dialogue and voice over), visuals, and graphics (written text on the screen). This kind of contrapuntal technique can be found especially in television commercials that are made to be short, quick, attractive, and entertaining. Rather than freezing the narrative, songs in commercials tend to create an environment of “perceptual multitasking” where the viewer must attend to many sensory channels at once. I will exemplify these and other points with some examples from films and television commercials where music with song lyrics is used.
Erkki Pekkilä is professor of ethnomusicology at the University of
Helsinki, Finland. He is author of Music as Text: A Theory and Method for the
Analysis of Aurally Transmitted Musical Cultures (Helsinki, 1988), Silent
Ecstasy (Helsinki 1990), Steel Pan, Mbalax and Gamelan: Studies in the Music of
Immigrants (Helsinki, 2002), and over 100 articles and reviews on topics
ranging from folk music to cell-phone ring tones. He is currently heading a
project on music and media, funded by the Academy of Finland. Currently he is
editing a book on music and media with Richard Littlefield and David Neumeyer.
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Commercial
music and transmutations in referential potentials
Nicolai
Joergensgaard Graakjaer
This presentation examines the mediations of a pre-existing song in a series of TV commercials for JYSK (a Danish based supplier of bedding materials). The song in question, composed in 1846, was originally intended to help strengthen regional identity and was supposed to appear as a community song at a particular meeting for people in Jytland (a region in western Denmark). Due to poor attendance the meeting was cancelled, but subsequently the song has found widespread use and is known to most Danes. Today, the first seven notes of the song appear as part of a jingle in commercials for JYSK, and commercials including this jingle have been broadcast on radio and TV since April, 2004 both nationally (Denmark) and internationally (Finland, Sweden, Norway, Poland). As the song has been mediated through both time and space – continuously subjected to structural changes – its referential potentials have been subject to transmutations in several ways. These transmutations involve processes of both extraction and insertion of referential potentials. Among these, I shall discuss how the song has changed from expressing a socially exclusive statement to expressing a socially inclusive appeal or interpellation (to paraphrase Althusser’s concept). This change has to do with the specific audiovisual framing of the jingle, in that the music appears diegetic and determines narrative significance, unlike music in jingles more generally.
Nicolai Joergensgaard
Graakjaer is a Ph.D. student and teaching lecturer
(with research obligations) at the University
of Aalborg, Denmark. He has
MA degree in music and psychology (1997),
and he has completed a Teacher Training course in Music and Psychology (1999).
He is currently preparing a doctoral thesis on advertising music in television.
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Sound
and music as anti-war discourse in contemporary WWII combat films
Susanna
Välimäki
This paper examines sound and music in several WWII combat films that contain anti-war criticism. My aim is to outline various musical and other audio-textual mechanisms by which the sound and music constructs anti-war iconography in a WWII combat film, and thus approach film music as a powerful constructor of ideological meanings, related to conceptions of nationality, history, militarism and masculinity. WWII combat films form an extensive film genre with powerful cultural imagery through which cultural conceptions of war, conflict, history, nation, ethnicity, gender, and humanity in general are negotiated. In particular, it is the music in the film that is the main vehicle for transmitting ideological meanings and also functions as a site for critical discourse. Also, because of the strong, established genre characteristics of the WWII combat film, it is possible to make compelling critical inversions and rewritings of the genre through music. In a WWII combat film, the music (and the sound world in general) communicates the attitude and perspective the listener-spectator (the audience) is supposed to take towards the events, characters and mise-en-scène of the narrated war. For example, music may communicate the death of a soldier as noble, meaningful, heroic, tragic, shameful, irrational, absurd, grotesque, horrible, futile, criminal, or unbearable, depending on the type of music played. Music often also plays a role in relating a nation’s mythic story in a war film, whether it relates a glorified struggle of virtuous men, a sick destruction, a requiem to the fallen, homage to veterans, an unavoidable historical event, an eternal problem of human race, the utmost shame of the mankind, or an analysis of human nature. Music and sound is critically responsible if the film can be called an anti- or pro-war film, or something between these poles.In my paper, I examine examples from the following films: The Iron Cross (Peckinpah 1977), Das Boot (1980), Come and See (Klimov 1985), Stalingrad (Vilsmaier 1993), When The Trumpets Fade (Irvin 1998) and The Thin Red Line (Malick 1998)
Susanna Välimäki, Ph.D., works as a researcher and teacher in the
Universities of Helsinki and Jyväskylä, Finland, in musicology, semiotics and
women’s studies. She has written on western art, popular and film music,
psychoanalytic music research, musical semiotics, and feminist, gender and
queer studies of music. Currently, she occupies a research position in an
Academy of Finland’s research project entitled Contemporary Music, Media and
Mediation, located at the Department of Music in the University of Jyväskylä.
Her current research interests include WWII combat films, contemporary
audiovisual culture, and queer studies in musicology. She is the current
Editor-in-Chief of the Finnish Musicological Journal, Musiikki. Her recent publications
include Subject Strategies in Music. A Psychoanalytic Approach to Musical
Signification (Acta Semiotica Fennica XXII, Approaches to Musical Semiotics 9,
Helsinki & Imatra: International Semiotics Institute 2005).
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