PennTags Feed for /tag/classical_music_in_movies

Strategia del ragno / RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana ; Red Film s.r.l.

Verdi and Schoenberg in Bertolucci's 'The Spider's Stratagem'
Deborah Crisp; Roger Hillman
Music & Letters > Vol. 82, No. 2 (May, 2001), pp. 251-267

Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0027-4224%28200105%2982%3A2%3C251%3AVASIB%27%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O

Classics from the Silver Screen

Classics from the Silver Screen
A searchable database of classical music and opera used in films.

Soundtrack available : essays on film and popular music / edited by Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight.

Soundtrack available : essays on film and popular music / edited by Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight. [0822328003 (cloth : alk. paper)] Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2001.
Call#: Van Pelt Library ML2075 .S68 2001

Rick Altman's article calls for further attention to: interaction b/t “classical” music and popular song in films that include both. Song melody thematized, turned into leitmotif; song used according to “classical principles; lyrics/title imposed on “classical” material; “classical” theme repeated emulating pop song.

Flash Gordon (1936/I)

Only original music by Clifford Vaughan for main title and "Narrative" (resume). Uses tons of underscoring from previous films. See Richard Bush "The Music of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers" in Film Music 1.

Destination Unknown (1933)

Score by W. Franke Harling heavily derivative of Wagner, liberally quotes "Grail" theme from Parsifal "as a religioso." inerowen with Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 1. Reused in Flash Gordon, flight and arrival on mysterious planet Mongo (Richard H. Bush, Film Music 1, 146)

The Black Cat (1934)

Score by Roemheld features principal theme of Liszt's Sonata in B minor and part of symphonic poem Tasso, and paraphrase of Tchaikovsky's love theme from Romeo and Julet. Score re-used in Flash Gordon.

Jazz singer [videorecording] / Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc., and the Vitaphone Corporation ; directed by Alan Crosland.

Jazz singer [videorecording] / Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc., and the Vitaphone Corporation ; directed by Alan Crosland. [0792807596 ] Culver City, CA : MGM/UA Home Video : Turner, c1990.
Call#: Van Pelt Video Collection; ask at Circulation Desk. PS3535.A66 J32 1990

Conventional silent film score compiled and arrange dby Lou Silvers from Tchaikovsky, Lalo, Debussy and Sibelius, Hebraic, pop and folk melodies. (Fred Steiner in Film Music 1, p. 81)

The Informer (1935)

Won the first Academy Award for an originally composed score.

Analyzed by Kathryn Kalinak, "Max Steiner and the Classical Hollywood Film Score: An Analysis of The Informer" in Film Music 1 ed. Clifford McCarty. She briefly discusses Steiner's appropriation of classical repertory. "The Blind Man" melodically evokes the minstrel's song "Che faranno ivecchi miei" from Puccini's La Fanciulla del West. The melodies do not in fact appear related, though Kalinak may be correct that their locations in the story and subject of homesickness are similar. Kalinak suggests that Steiner again draws on Fanciulla when he matches each drip of water while Gypo awaits execution with a note from the money motif, as Puccini scores Johnson's drops of blood. When Gypo decides to betray Frankie Steiner borrows the rhythm of the theme from Dvorak's New World Symphony mvmt ii. Mary's theme is highly chromatic and reminiscent of Wagner's "Liebestod" from Tristan und Isolde. Steiner's "The money" (descending tritone followed by augmented chord arpeggiated downward against pedal point) derives from Verdi's Requiem Mass. Kalinak does not further detail these relationships.

Musical metropolis : Los Angeles and the creation of a music culture, 1880-1940 / Kenneth H. Marcus.

Marcus, Kenneth H. . Musical metropolis : Los Angeles and the creation of a music culture, 1880-1940 / Kenneth H. Marcus. [1403964181 (alk. paper) ] New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Call#: Van Pelt Library ML200.8.L7 M37 2004

1. Theater Music During the Boom Years

2. "Making Friends with Music": Music Education in the Classroom and Concert Hall

3. "Symphonies Under the Stars": The Romance of the Hollywood Bowl

4. The Art of Pageants, Plays, and Dance

5. Leaving a Legacy: Early Recording of Indigenous, Classical, and Popular Music

6. "An Invisible Empire in the Air": Broadcasting the Classics during the Golden Age

7. Music on Film: Hollywood and the Conversion to Sound

Chapter 7 of Musical Metropolis is devoted to “Music on Film: Hollywood and the Conversion to Sound,” with the goal of demonstrating music’s vital role in creating “an atmosphere or mood in both nonanimated and animated films,” though to my mind Marcus’s argument amounts to, ‘films had music so music was vital.’ Marcus’s history of film music is concise and informative, however. Marcus shows that during the silent era most musical accompanied was drawn from preexisting European art music, and that the idea of composing music for films came only gradually. Marcus credits Warner Bros.’s 1926 The Jazz Singer, presented using Vitaphone, with “demonstrat[ing] with finality that audiences wanted to hear music on film (167). Many theaters kept their orchestras for the first few years of sound films, using them as entertainment between viewings. “In 1929 theaters were by far the largest employer of musicians in the country,” but the financial strain put on theaters by the Depression combined with sound film put an end to that.
While I find the explanation, “Because music had become an essential part of filmmaking, each of the studios formed a music department following the conversion to sound,” (168) wanting, Marcus’s account of the early music departments is informative, including figures for number of musicians employed and the typical pay around 1930. Marcus then turns to in depth biographical and musical discussions of the three leading symphonic film score writers, Max Steiner (the pioneer of letimotivc symphonic underscoring), Erich Wolfgang Korngold (the face of high-art respectability) and Alfred Newman (less educated but master of subtlety), and then to a discussion of music in animated films at Warners and Disney.

cinema and orchestra ann.

The aims of this research project are to 1) historicize the Classical Hollywood orchestra, and 2) interrogate the cultural significations of the orchestral sound that Hollywood both deployed and helped to form.

Grand hotel (1932)/ Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer ; Loew's Inc. ; directed by Edmund Goulding.

borrows from Johann Strauss (waltzes) during shots of hotel's main floor. Rachmaninoff love theme, jazz for Kringelein's liberation. Music separate from dialogue. (Darby and Du Bois, American Film Music, 1990, p. 13).

There is in fact copious underscoring of dialogue with music.

The ballerina's manager, lamenting the empty house, says after this he will do no more dancing, just jazz.

With the entrance of the maid into the ballerina's room (34:25) pop-jazz-dance music starts. It continues during the entrance of several more people, a subtlely comic sequence. When the ballerina returns and her manager dumps her the music turns briefly minor, ominous. A muted trumpet solo accompanies the ballerina's undressing. It stops when she exits the frame in the nick of time not to expose herself. There are then some moments of silence as the baron takes his gloves off. Then music reenters with the ballerina, this time Russian-flavored accompanying her phone call. It smoothely transitions into pop-dance music and continues quite incompatibly with her desperate monologue and the baron's intervention, and continues to the end of the scene with some nuances changes appropriate to the dialouge (end 42:46).

Sign for American Bar Jazz Band at 57:45.

1:39 - "The music has stopped. How quiet it is tonight. It was never so quiet in the Grand Hotel."

Innovative concentration of (7) stars in one film.

Novel (Menschen im Hotel) first translated to broadway. Also Vitaphone musical comedy picture Nothing Ever Happens (1933).

Someone to Watch Over Me (1987)

Viens, Malika...Dome epais le jasmin (Flower duet) from Delibes, Lakme

Driving Miss Daisy / Warner Bros. Pictures ; a Zanuck Company production ; screenplay by Alfred Uhry ; produced by Richard D. Zanuck, Lili Fini Zanuck ; directed by Bruce Beresford.

Song to the moon from Dvorak, Rusalka, op. 114

Sunday bloody Sunday / Vectia Films, Ltd. ; screenplay, Penelope Gilliatt ; producer, Joseph Janni ; director, John Schlesinger.

Soave sia il vento from Mozart, Cosi fan tutte, K. 588

My Left Foot (1989)

Un'aura amorosa from Mozart, Cosi fan tutte, K. 588

Trading places / Paramount Pictures presents ; an Aaron Russo production ; written by Timothy Harris & Herschel Weingrod ; directed by John Landis.

Mozart, Overture to the Marriage of Figaro, K. 492

Family classics - A Farewell to Arms (1932) Paramount

Farewell to Arms - original love theme during opening credits and at key moments. Italian atmosphere established by opening of Mendlssohn's Fourth Symphony, "La donna é mobile" from Verdi's Rigoletto and traditional "Santa Lucia". Borrowings from Wagner: "Ride of the Valkyries" during battle scene, brassier treatment of Wagner while Frederic searches for Catherine, music from Tristan and Isolde while Catherine dies in Frederic's arms. (Darby and Du Bois, American Film Music, 1990, p. 13)

Scarface (1932)/ Universal; screen story by Ben Hecht ; continuity and dialogue by Seton I. Miller, John Lee Mahin, W.R. Burnett ; directed by Howard Hawks.

Tony whistles "Slaves' Chorus" from Verdi's Nabucco in opening murder scene.

Dracula (1931)/ Universal Studios ; produced by Carl Laemmle, Jr. ; directed by Tod Browning.

According to Darby and Du Bois, American Film Music (1990, p. 12):

uses passages from Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Schubert during opening credits and scene in concert hall.

A night at the opera / Metro Goldwyn Mayer presents ; directed by Sam Wood ; screen play by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind.

The birth of a nation, and, The Civil War films of D.W. Griffith / directed by D.W. Griffith ; screenplay by D.W. Griffith & Frank E. Woods.

Unfaithfully yours / Twentieth Century Fox presents ; written, directed, and produced by Preston Sturges.

cinema and orchestra

Tunes for 'toons : music and the Hollywood cartoon / Daniel Goldmark.

Goldmark, Daniel. . Tunes for 'toons : music and the Hollywood cartoon / Daniel Goldmark. [0520236173 (cloth : alk. paper) ] Berkeley : University of California Press, c2005.
Call#: Van Pelt Library ML2075 .G65 2005

This is the first and only book-length musicological treatment of cartoon music. In the chapter "Classical Music and Cartoons" Goldmark argues that the pieces of classical music that are used in cartoons are characterisized by "gestural immediacy," which makes them suitable for illustration. Goldmark credits Freleng with mastering the techniques of fitting classical music to cartoons. Goldmark discusses the construction of high art vs. folk/popular music in bugs bunny shorts, and these cartoons playing out of class struggles. Goldmark observes the impossibility of taking Fantasia seriously as high art when cartoons were seen only as a form of popular entertainment. Fantasia is excpetional in the world of animated shorts as a cartoon which seeks to glorify classical music rather than tare it down. Goldmark outlins the contrast between the original Fantasia and Fantasia 2000, the latter reflecting radically different notions of the musical canon and the propriety of including popular celebrities. This is a discussion I wish Goldmark had pursued more in depth for I think the comparison is a fruitful one on which further analysis and an investigation of the making of Fantasia 2000 would shed more light. While cultural notions had changed, clearly Fantasia 2000 demonstrates some kind of commitment to classical music.

Goldmark is kind of out on a limb here with cartoon studies which has no established precedent in musicology and no body of literature to build off of or respond to. I think he opens a productive path in both musicology and film studies - and their potential union - with this book. At an absolute minimum, he provides a very useful bibliography.

Understanding Toscanini : how he became an American culture-god and helped create a new audience for old music / Joseph Horowitz.

Horowitz, Joseph, 1948-. Understanding Toscanini : how he became an American culture-god and helped create a new audience for old music / Joseph Horowitz. [0394529189] New York : A.A. Knopf, 1987.
Call#: Van Pelt Library ML422.T67 H65 1987

Cited in Daniel Goldmark's Tunes for Toons (128) for observing that "suave or tempestuous embodiments of charismatic longhairs" were common in early to mid-20th century American and English cinema (215).

Provides insight into the vagaries of the classical music world in the first half of the 20th century. A cultural history as much as it is the story of Toscanini.

Art of the film, an introduction to film appreciation.

Lindgren, Ernest.. Art of the film, an introduction to film appreciation.London, G. Allen and Unwin, [1948].
Call#: Storage: From RECORD page, use Place Request tab PN1995 .L47

Ernest Lindgren is a self-reflective and knowledgeable film lover whose views are informed by his having witnessed the transition from silent to sound films; his goal in writing “The Art of the Film” wass to provide film goers with the critical skills necessary to view film intelligently. Two chapters are of particular interest to me: “The Use of Sound,” and “Film Music.” Regarding the use of sound, Lindgren is highly critical of sound that merely duplicates the information already provided by the image. He provides a psychological argument for why the principles guiding the use of sight and sound in film are different. Also, in an approach I’ve seen no other critic use and which seems to me quite fruitful, Lindgren compares sound in literature to sound in film, quoting from Tolstoy and Dickinson in order to demonstrate the unique functioning of sound (it can be tuned out and it can represent something other than the immediate visual surroundings). Regarding music, Lindgren compares its use in silent films to its use in sound films, the latter being distinguished by its intermittency seeing as how the music was no longer the only sound present. Ultimately, good film music is film music that is “not heard,” a view Lindgren rightly claims is widely held. Lindgren again employs psychological principles in explaining the proper use of music, and though he lacks the terms diegetic and nondiegetic the distinction is an important one to him.
Lindgren illustrates all his aesthetic opinions with concrete examples from films, which not only adds immeasurably to his arguments but also provides useful information about what films were innovative in certain techniques. Interestingly, Lindgren ends the film music chapter with a discussion of poetry used in voice-overs, a discussion he put off from the sound chapter, where he also discussed voice-overs, because he thought it proper to music. The synonymy of poetry and music was operative in the middle ages, but I’ve not before encountered it in the 20th century. This is not relevant to my present purposes but is perhaps something to keep in mind for another time.

"Fantasia" and the Psychology of Music: Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism: Vol. 2, No. 7, p. 27

This article is fascinating as a historical document (from 1942); it backs up a culturally specific view of the superiority of absolute music using historical and psychological evidence. The author, Dr. Horace B. English, was a professor of psychology at Ohio State University. He argues that a film experience which is dominantly aural does not work psychologically. His case in point is Fantasia which was purely received by “the musically sensitive.” English offers historical and psychological arguments for the inevitable failure of any attempt to fit visual images to music. Historically, all aural-visual combinations, namely theater and opera, have used sound to support drama; the story always comes first. Psychologically, the ear is specialized to receive symbolic signals, while the eye is specialized for concrete, representative signals. The dependence of English’s argument on a cultural privileging of symphonic and chamber music – which he calls the more “noble” forms – becomes clear in his insistence that music written independently of a story generates a wide range of unique responses in listeners (agreed), while music written to fit a story does not. English’s argument also depends on a privileging of individuality, expressed most clearly in his conclusion, “When we are really responding to music, we are creating something unique and individual; and at the moment of such creation, anyone else’s response, be it ever so beautiful, is only a distraction and an annoyance.”

TIME Magazine Archive Article -- Disney's Cinesymphony -- Nov. 18, 1940

One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937)

Stokowski is in this film as himself.

Mickey Mouse in living color / Walt Disney Enterprises.

DVD PN1997.5 .M54 2001

Includes 'The Band Concert' (1935) in which Mickey Mouse conducts the William Tell overture