The Uninvited and Stella by Starlight

Here is a suggestion for a project/assignment that a student with jazz background might undertake. Victor Young composed the standard "Stella by Starlight" for the film The Uninvited (Paramount, 1944). This theme is treated in a number of different ways in the film, and charting and analyzing them can lead productively to interpretation.

As part of the backstory:

What the student will immediately realize is that "Stella" is not a song—it's a piano composition that is often treated like a concerto. In fact, Young himself created a 5-minute piano concerto version and recorded it in 1945 for Decca, with whom he had a long-term contract. Even after lyrics were added by Ned Washington, a song version was published in 1946, and then recorded by several well-known singers, "Stella" didn't really catch on (it was always on the B-side of the record). It was after John Coltrane included it in an album that it really took off, but still mostly with jazz instrumentalists. The best known set of changes for "Stella" are by Miles Davis. An interesting part of the project might be to compare Young's original harmonies with Davis's version (hint, though: they're surprisingly similar).

Changes in the Tags (Labels)

I have revised the blog's "Chapter" tags.

If you look at the right-hand side of the screen, below "Blog Archive," you'll find our long list of "Tags." Some of them identify topics ("film form", "leitmotif", "home studio"), others name films discussed (Glory, Prisoner of Zenda), name people ("Victor Herbert", "Katharine Hepburn"), or name institutions, things, and places ("theaters", "cue sheets", "Kinetophone", "Berlin").

Early in the blog's history we used a tag called "pedagogy" to call attention to material particularly suitable for classroom use. That tag is still in the list, but I have rewritten another set, "Chapters," to pinpoint information by chapter. The "1e-" tags refer to the first edition; "2e-" tags refer to the second edition.

Note: I did not attempt to label the large number of posts containing a variety of documentary materials. These are concentrated in the period from July 2009 to March 2010; they are relevant mainly to Chapters 4 and 5 (early film sound and music practices; the transition period). The tags "early cinema," "exhibition," "music for the picture," "source material," and "talking pictures" are efficient ways to get at certain aspects of this material.

Movie trailer assignment or project

In a post early last year (link)  [Link checked on 3-08-2024.]  we drew attention to Frank Lehman's discussion of recent Star Wars trailers (link to his post on Musicology Now)  [Link updated on 3-08-2024.]. I can't say that I am overly fond of comments threads in general, but the conversation in Frank's post is interesting and informative. James Deaville's subsequent post about trailers to Musicology Now is definitely also worth a look: link.  [Link updated on 3-08-2024.]

Between them, these materials could provide suitable background for a class assignment or a student paper project on film trailers. The trailer might make an interesting twist on the screening report (Chapter 6), for example, or on the compare-contrast paper assignment (Chapter 10).

Since trailers are now readily available for a wide range of films, both historical and contemporary, they could be incorporated almost anywhere in the chronological sequence from the classical period onward. Caution: in the transition period, what you will find labeled "trailer" online (even on the most respectable sites like Turner Classic Movies) is often just a clip of one of the film's song performances.

On the Beach (1959)

As of March 20, 2024, the content of this post, including discussion of "Waltzing Matilda" and two suggestions for exercises, has been moved to a file published on the Texas ScholarWorks platform: Film Music: Some Posts from Blogs. 

Linda Shaver-Gleason on Beethoven’s Deafness

In recent days, we've recommended two essays posted to the publisher's blog The Avid Listener. Here is another: "Beethoven’s Deafness and the Myth of the Isolated Artist" by Linda Shaver-Gleason: link.  [link updated on 3-08-2024]   Where the two previous recommendations offer material  very suitable for use in a class session, Shaver-Gleason's essay—both longer and more complex in its argument—might serve better as research material for a course paper. The two films Shaver-Gleason mentions at the beginning—Mr. Holland's Opus and The King's Speech—could form the basis for a compare and contrast paper (Hearing the Movies, second edition, chapter 10). Or, Shaver-Gleason's overall argument about inaccuracies in the common understanding of Beethoven's hearing in later life as they relate to ideas (myths) about the isolated artist could very well be folded into the final critical paper (Chapter 15).

Reba Wissner on Hearing the Unseen

On The Avid Listener (W. W. Norton's in-house blog), Reba A. Wissner writes about "Hearing with Your Eyes: Science Fiction Television and Hearing the Unseen": link. [link updated on 3-08-2024]  Her video examples include a spooky scene from 19th century composer Carl Maria von Weber's opera Der Freischütz and three scenes from TV sci-fi shows (The Invaders, The Outer Limits, and The Twilight Zone).

Although she doesn't use the term, Wissner is writing about what Michel Chion calls the acousmêtre, an unseen agent "embodied" by sound (Hearing the Movies, second edition, pages 74-75), but she also discusses actions (physical attacks) carried out by these agents and also not presented onscreen (Hearing the Movies, chapter 3, describes and illustrates a number of types of offscreen sound).

As with Jonathan Godsall's Avid Listener post that we recommended a few days ago (link)  [link checked on 3-08-2024], Wissner's post has discussion questions at the end. These, however, assume fairly substantial student knowledge of television repertoires. One might complement or substitute for those questions an exercise that compares/contrasts techniques and effects in the TV clips with those in a feature film scene, perhaps from one of the films mentioned in Chapter 3, one of the versions of The Invisible Man, or even a teen horror flick (some films in that genre have achieved a kind of cult status and might well be familiar to many undergraduates; your current writer has found that students may seem a little embarrassed about their own knowledge of this repertoire, but one has only to ask and they will quickly come up with titles and also be enthusiastic about the chance to make presentations to the class).

More to the Film Score Guide series; course papers

At the bottom of this post is yesterday's list of the 19 volumes in the Film Score Guide monograph series, arranged in reverse chronological order of the film's general release. A checkmark (√) at the beginning of an entry indicates that the film is discussed or mentioned in Hearing the Movies, second edition.

If a course based on the book includes a final paper developed incrementally across the semester, it will follow logically through the work suggested in Chapters 6, 8, 10, 12, and 15. Recall that Chapters 6 and 8 explore the writing of scene analyses and the short papers we called “screening reports." The final sections of Chapters 10 and 12 focus, respectively, on a compare and contrast exercise and the building of a historical argument. In Chapter 15, the several earlier elements contribute to grounding a critical essay whose objective is to draw the sound track and music into a thematic reading, especially a reading that shows how these elements support or resist the dominant directions or emphases of the narrative. [The preceding text, btw, is a compressed and edited version of the opening paragraph of Chapter 15, page 509.]

One possibility— workable only with a small class, to be sure —would be to assign each student one of the films covered in the Film Score Guide series. Thus, reliable background and other basic information about the music and underscore composer would be readily available, and for the final paper (the work of Chapter 15) the student might well find material that would lead to supporting or challenging the arguments or point of view of the volume's author.

• 2008
• √18. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard's The Dark Knight. May 2, 2016. Vasco Hexel
• 2007
• 15. Ilan Eshkeri's Stardust. IAN SAPIRO. July 2013
• 2000
• 17. James Newton Howard's Signs. January 14, 2016. Erik Heine
• 1997
• √9. Mychael Danna's The Ice Storm. MIGUEL MERA. June 2007
• 1996
• 7. Gabriel Yared's The English Patient. HEATHER LAING. February 2007
• 1993-94
• √12. Zbigniew Preisner's Three Colors Trilogy: Blue, White, Red. NICHOLAS W. REYLAND. December 2011
• 1989
• √4. Danny Elfman's Batman. JANET K. HALFYARD. September 2004
• 1974
• 16. David Shire's The Conversation. October 8, 2015. Juan Chattah
• 1972 ff.
• √11. Nino Rota's The Godfather Trilogy. FRANCO SCIANNAMEO. October 2010
• 1966
• √3. Ennio Morricone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. CHARLES LEINBERGER. September 2004
• 1960
• √19. Elmer Bernstein's The Magnificent Seven. May 31, 2017. Mariana Whitmer
• 1959
• √12. Miklós Rózsa's Ben-Hur. ROGER HICKMAN. March 2011
• 1958
• √13. Jerome Moross's The Big Country. MARIANA WHITMER. June 2012
• 2. Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo: A Film Score Handbook. Feb 28, 2001. David Cooper
• 1956
• 5. Louis and Bebe Barron's Forbidden Planet. JAMES WIERZBICKI. June 2005
• 1954
• 14. Leonard Bernstein's On the Waterfront. ANTHONY BUSHARD. December 2012
• 1951
• √10. Alex North's A Streetcar Named Desire. ANNETTE DAVISON. February 2009
• 1947
• 6. Bernard Herrmann's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. DAVID COOPER. August 2005
• 1942
• √1. Max Steiner's Now, Voyager: A Film Score Guide. Jul 30, 2000. Kate Daubney
• 1940
• √11. Franz Waxman's Rebecca. DAVID NEUMEYER AND NATHAN PLATTE. December 2011
• 1938
• √8. Erich Wolfgang Korngold's The Adventures of Robin Hood. BEN WINTERS. March 2007