THE MOVIE, the MELODY and YOU: How Pop Music Connects Film Narrative to Its Audience
Screen Sound n3, 2012 THE MOVIE, THE MELODY AND YOU: How Pop Music Connects Film Narrative to its Audience Martin Armiger Abstract In recent years the authority of the composed film score has come under critical scrutiny. Some suggest it carries too much weight, freight and affect. The ‘song score’ has provided an alternative way of scoring film, one in which the emotional content and—crucially—the source and the authority for that emotional content exists somewhere outside the film. There is a body of common knowledge about popular music among cinema and television audiences, a familiarity on which the providers of film scores have long relied. For many years this familiarity was centred on ‘the song’ itself, that is, the composition. More recently, this familiarity has been with ‘the track’, that is, the recording of the song that has most recently achieved fame. But the song score has problems of its own, to do with its inherent form, which may be rhythmically inflexible, and its own subject matter, which may be not quite apposite. In this article, I provide a composer’s perspective on these issues, and look at examples of songs in film, both triumphs and failures, from American and British cinema and from my own work in Australian film and TV. Keywords Song score, soundtrack, composer, popular music, Australian cinema Introduction The following ten observations look at the ways that popular music connects film narrative to audiences through the ‘song-score’ and ‘song worked into score’ in a variety of film examples and in my own practice as a songwriter and film composer.
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