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This book offers an approach to film music in which music and visuals are seen as equal players in the game. The field of Film-Music Studies has been increasingly dominated by musicologists and this book brings the discipline back squarely into the domain of Film Studies. Blending Neoformalism with Gestalt Psychology and Leonard B. Meyer's musicology, this study treats music as a cinematic element and offers scholars and students of both music and film a set of tools to help them analyse the wide ranging impact that music has in films.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Who Is Entitled To Study Film Music?.- 2. PART I: Pars Destruens - Chapter 2. The Not-So-Fantastical Gap between Music Studies and Film Studies.- 3. Recent Attempts to Bridge the Gap and Overcome a Separatism Conception.- 4. PART II: Pars Construens - Chapter 4. The Neoformalist Proposal.- 5. Film/Music Analysis I: Music, Gestalt, and Audiovisual Isomorphism.- 6. Film/Music Analysis II: Functions and Motivations of Music.- 7. PART III: Pars Demonstrans - Chapter 7. Five Illustrations of Film/Music Analysis.- 8. Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. The Extraterrestrial. The Bonding Power of Music.- 9. Recapitulation and Final Thoughts.
About the author
Dr Emilio Audissino is a film historian and film musicologist based at the University of Southampton, UK. He has published widely on the topic of film music and is the author of
John Williams's Film Music: Jaws, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Return of the Classical Hollywood Music Style (2014).
Summary
Deals comprehensively with film music from a film scholar’s perspective
Applies Neoformalism and Gestalt Theory in place of a culturalist/hermeneutic approach
Widens our understanding of the agency of film music to include cases in which music performs formal/stylistic functions
Considers international films spanning from the classical to the contemporary cinema
