New books (2017)

1. Contemporary Film Music: Investigating Cinema Narratives and Composition (MacMillan Palgrave, 2017)  is a new anthology edited by Lindsay Coleman and Joakim Tillman. Its unique format pairs a chapter that is an interview with a composer with a second by a scholar analyzing "a particular feature of the composer’s approach or style." The composers are A.R. Rahman, Zbigniew Preisner, Carter Burwell, Rachel Portman, Dario Marianelli, Mychael Danna, and John Williams.

The interviews will always be of interest to students and of course could provide some background information or back story for papers or for class use. The analysis chapters vary considerably in the level of musical or film-critical knowledge required, but some may be accessible to most students.

2. The 19th entry in the Film Score Guide series is also the second by Mariana Whitmer: Elmer Bernstein's The Magnificent Seven: A Film Score Guide (2017). The volumes in the series have a set format: five chapters covering in turn the composer's background and training, his or her compositional and stylistic approach, the context of the film, music production, and scene analysis. Although each is focused on a single film, the guides thus offer a wide range of information about composers, films, and film scoring practices, the great majority of it easily accessible to the general undergraduate (the exceptions, of course, being some of the detailed scene analyses).

Whitmer's volume is also the last in the series. As of the day of this posting, you can read the series editor Kate Daubney's valedictory preface through Amazon's "Look inside" feature: link to the book page on Amazon. [link checked on 3-08-2024]  Here is the publisher's page for the Film Score Guide series: link.   [link checked on 3-08-2024]  

Below is a complete list of the 19 volumes.

• ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
• 19. Elmer Bernstein's The Magnificent Seven. May 31, 2017. Mariana Whitmer
• 18. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard's The Dark Knight. May 2, 2016. Vasco Hexel
• 17. James Newton Howard's Signs. January 14, 2016. Erik Heine
• 16. David Shire's The Conversation. October 8, 2015. Juan Chattah
• 
  
• SCARECROW PRESS
• 15. Ilan Eshkeri's Stardust. IAN SAPIRO. July 2013
• 14. Leonard Bernstein's On the Waterfront. ANTHONY BUSHARD. December 2012
• 13. Jerome Moross's The Big Country. MARIANA WHITMER. June 2012
• 12. Zbigniew Preisner's Three Colors Trilogy: Blue, White, Red. NICHOLAS W. REYLAND. December 2011
• 11. Franz Waxman's Rebecca. DAVID NEUMEYER AND NATHAN PLATTE. December 2011
• 12. Miklós Rózsa's Ben-Hur. ROGER HICKMAN. March 2011
• 11. Nino Rota's The Godfather Trilogy. FRANCO SCIANNAMEO. October 2010
• 10. Alex North's A Streetcar Named Desire. ANNETTE DAVISON. February 2009
• 9. Mychael Danna's The Ice Storm. MIGUEL MERA. June 2007
• 8. Erich Wolfgang Korngold's The Adventures of Robin Hood. BEN WINTERS. March 2007
• 7. Gabriel Yared's The English Patient. HEATHER LAING. February 2007
• 6. Bernard Herrmann's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. DAVID COOPER. August 2005
• 5. Louis and Bebe Barron's Forbidden Planet. JAMES WIERZBICKI. June 2005
• 4. Danny Elfman's Batman. JANET K. HALFYARD. September 2004
• 3. Ennio Morricone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. CHARLES LEINBERGER. September 2004
• 
  
• GREENWOOD PRESS
• 2. Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo: A Film Score Handbook. Feb 28, 2001. David Cooper
• 1. Max Steiner's Now, Voyager: A Film Score Guide. Jul 30, 2000. Kate Daubney

Jonathan Godsall on pre-existing music

Jonathan Godsall has written a very good blog post for The Avid Listener (a publisher's blog from W. W. Norton). Link to "Listening to Beethoven in and through The King’s Speech" (2010).  [link updated on 3-08-2024]   Godsall focuses on the use of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, second movement, for the film's climactic scene. Compact and accessible, the post has film and music clips. It even has questions at the end.

All in all, the post as it stands would make an excellent lesson plan, and might be used as early as Chapter 1 in connection with the commutation test (pp. 30-33). Godsall's second discussion question, in fact, is "Can you think of another real or hypothetical use of pre-existing music that might be considered inappropriate? What are the arguments for and against this?"

Link to a complete list of "Music and Media" posts to The Avid Listener.

Harmony series 3, triad pairs

As of March 20, 2024, the content of this post has been moved to a file published on the Texas ScholarWorks platform: Film Music: Some Posts from Blogs. 

Harmony series 2, postscript

As of March 20, 2024, the content of this post, including an example of music from the main title sequence for Mildred Pierce (1945; this film is discussed in Chapter 8), has been moved to a file published on the Texas ScholarWorks platform: Film Music: Some Posts from Blogs. 

Harmony series 2, bass/treble dissonance

TAs of March 20, 2024, the content of this post, including an example of music from the main title sequence for Casablanca, has been moved to a file published on the Texas ScholarWorks platform: Film Music: Some Posts from Blogs. 

Writing exercises and analyses using Film Art: An Introduction

When we first conceived the idea of a film music and sound textbook nine years ago, we modeled the work on David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's Film Art: An Introduction, not only for its rare combination of high standards and clear presentation but also for its focus on film analysis. As Bordwell puts it,

[The book is] aimed at undergraduate students and general readers who want a comprehensive and systematic introduction to film aesthetics. It considers common types of films, principles of narrative and non-narrative form, basic film techniques, and strategies of writing about films. It also puts film art in the context of changes across history.  (description on website: link)   [link checked on 3-08-2024]

 Film Art is now in its 11th edition. With the various content transformations along the way, several short analyses were deleted, but David has generously posted them to his website (at the same link as the quote above). Here is the list of film titles, in reverse chronological order:   [list checked on 3-08-2024]  

The Prestige. dir. Christopher Nolan, 2006.
Hannah and Her Sisters. dir. Woody Allen, 1985.
Desperately Seeking Susan. dir. Susan Seidelman, 1985.
Fuji. dir. Robert Breer, 1974.
Tout va bien. dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1972.
High School. dir. Frederick Wiseman, 1968.
Innocence Unprotected. dir. Dušan Makavejev, 1968.
Last Year at Marienbad. dir. Alain Resnais, 1961.
A Movie. dir. Bruce Conner, 1958.
A Man Escaped. dir. Robert Bresson, 1956.
Day of Wrath. dir. Carl Dreyer, 1943.
Stagecoach. dir. John Ford, 1939.
Clock Cleaners. dir. Walt Disney, 1937.
The Man Who Knew Too Much. dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1934.

 Since each of these analyses was intended as a self-contained section within a chapter, we can look at them as models for student analysis and writing exercises, even if only one of them focuses on sound (and none on music). These essays will be immediately relevant to chapters 8 and 15 in Hearing the Movies, and the compare-contrast writing exercises in Chapters 8 and 10, of course, but may be useful elsewhere for readings, assignments, or background reading for student projects. Of course, many similar analyses in the current edition of Film Art can be used for the same purpose!

Harmony series 1, a passage in Casablanca

As of March 20, 2024, the content of this post has been moved to a file published on the Texas ScholarWorks platform: Film Music: Some Posts from Blogs.