About the Seminars--Sonic Dialogues
Hearing Film
Blake Wilson, Music 10:30 TTh
In the relatively short history of film there has already evolved an extremely varied and complex relationship between music and film. Nevertheless, music remains the most understudied aspect of film. This course will explore the significant use of music in film, and will focus upon a formative repertory of foreign and American films in which music plays an integral role and/or constitutes a substantial artistic component. We will approach our subject from a variety of perspectives, including films in which music is a primary subject (e.g., Amadeus, The Piano, Tous les matins du monde, Immortal Beloved), period films for which the music component has been carefully researched (Farinelli, Vatel), films involving the collaboration of major composers (Prokoviev, Bernstein, Copland, Takemitsu), films by music-savvy directors and film-savvy composers (John Williams), and films involving especially fruitful director/composers collaborations (Eisenstein/Prokoviev, Fellini/Rota, Hermann/Hitchcock). Does great music always make a great film score? How do we really listen to film scores? Can music do more than enhance a film?
Music and Drama: Cultural Collaborations in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Amy Wlodarski, Music 10:30 TTh
Since the Renaissance, music has played an integral role in dramatic productions, often providing subtle messages or subverting the literal meaning of the text through musical allusion or depiction. The union of the dramatic arts achieved a new height in the nineteenth century, when composer Richard Wagner envisioned opera as a “Total Artwork” in which music, text, and the visual aspects of a production combined to create a powerful expressive force. Wagner’s ideas influenced later composers working in a variety of dramatic mediums, including opera, musical theater, dance, and film.
This course considers the interplay between music and drama in Wagnerian and post-Wagnerian artworks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our concern is how music and text interact in an artwork and how each element infuses the drama with additional meaning or commentary. With Wagner’s operas as our starting point, we will progress to other dramatic mediums including dance (Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring), musical theater (Oklahoma! and West Side Story), political cabaret in Germany (Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill), and contemporary film music (Hitchcock). We will also consider music’s role in non-traditional “dramatic productions” such as political rallies and propaganda films from Nazi Germany.
