Contemporary Film Music
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Edited by LINDSAY COLEMAN & JOAKIM TILLMAN CONTEMPORARY FILM MUSIC INVESTIGATING CINEMA NARRATIVES AND COMPOSITION Contemporary Film Music Lindsay Coleman • Joakim Tillman Editors Contemporary Film Music Investigating Cinema Narratives and Composition Editors Lindsay Coleman Joakim Tillman Melbourne, Australia Stockholm, Sweden ISBN 978-1-137-57374-2 ISBN 978-1-137-57375-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57375-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017931555 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom Dedicated to my dear music and piano teacher, Mrs Bonni-Belle Pickard ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book is possible thanks to two individuals: Joakim Tillman and Chris Penfold. Joakim started out as a contributor and, in one interaction after another, I could clearly see this book would only be a lesser volume with- out his being my direct collaborator. It has been an honour and a privi- lege to work with him. Chris Penfold is the true originator of this book’s format. I had some notion of writing the theory chapters myself for the entire book, but Chris pointed out that the interviews were with sufficient personages to attract true experts to write individual chapters. Probably this was the best advice I received that entire year! I would like to give very special thanks to Jack Dubowsky. Similarly to Joakim and Chris, Jack was a big part of what made this book work. I am so grateful to him for his wonderful insights, and ongoing support. Thank you so much, Jack. The contributions of Joakim, Jack and Chris were invaluable in terms of the project’s inception, yet it is the composers, and other contributors, who have made this book a tangible reality. I thank all of the interviewed composers for their kindness and candour, their support of this project, long in gestation. For the contributors, I thank every one of them for their patience with cuts and redrafts, their skill and dedication as researchers and musicologists, and their tireless commitment to promoting a greater understanding of film music. For their assorted assistance I would like to thank Peter Golub, Rajiv Menon, Lina Aboujieb, and of course my little family, my wife Sarah and vii viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS our little daughter, Audrey. Daddy gets up every day for work because of the two of you! Lindsay Coleman I’m incredibly grateful to all the contributors, not only for their outstand- ing essays, but also for their diligent and committed work. I would like to thank Lina Aboujieb at Palgrave for her invaluable guidance and help in the production of the book. My deepest thanks go to Lindsay, first for approaching me to write an essay for this book, and then for the even greater confidence of asking me to join him as a co-editor. It has been a very rewarding collaboration, and I’m looking forward to future projects with Lindsay. Finally, I’m extremely grateful for the patience and support of my wife, Åsa, and our two sons, Daniel and Oscar. Joakim Tillman CONTENTS 1 Introduction 1 Lindsay Coleman and Joakim Tillman 2 A.R. Rahman Interview 17 Lindsay Coleman 3 The ‘Alternate Space’ of A.R. Rahman’s Film Music 27 Felicity Wilcox 4 Zbigniew Preisner Interview 57 Jonathan Godsall 5 Music by Zbigniew Preisner? Fictional Composers and Compositions in the Kieślowski Collaborations 63 Jonathan Godsall 6 Carter Burwell Interview 87 Lindsay Coleman ix x CONTENTS 7 Burwell and Space: Inner, Outer, Environmental and Acoustical 97 Andrew Waggoner 8 Rachel Portman Interview 119 Lindsay Coleman 9 Eero Tarasti and the Narratological Construction of Rachel Portman’s Emma 125 Lindsay Coleman 10 Dario Marianelli Interview 139 Lindsay Coleman 11 Solo Instruments and Internal Focalization in Dario Marianelli’s Pride & Prejudice and Atonement 155 Joakim Tillman 12 Mychael Danna Interview 187 Lindsay Coleman 13 Mychael Danna: Music as Metaphor 195 Peter Golub and Katy Jarzebowski 14 John Williams and Contemporary Film Music 221 Emilio Audissino 15 Musical Syntax in John Williams’s Film Music Themes 237 Konstantinos Zacharopoulos Index 263 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Emilio Audissino is a film historian. He is currently finishing up a post-doctoral research project at the University of Southampton, UK, concerning the applica- tion of neoformalism and gestalt psychology to the analysis of music in films. He holds a Ph.D. in the history of visual and performing arts from the University of Pisa, Italy, and specializes in Hollywood cinema, film style, film dubbing, and film music. He 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 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), the first English-language monograph on Williams. Lindsay Coleman is a film academic, and an independent documentary producer. His most recent books include Sex and Storytelling in Modern Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016), and The Philosophy of Pornography: Contemporary Perspectives (Scarecrow, 2014). In addition to these, he is working on a series of books on cinematography, film editing, musical composition for films, and visual effects in modern cinema. He is also working on documentary projects on Hollywood film editing, and Australian cinema. Jonathan Godsall is currently Lecturer in music at Plymouth University. He com- pleted a Ph.D. in musicology at the University of Bristol in early 2014. Jonathan has overlapping research interests in screen music, musical intertextuality, and musical reception, with publications to date addressing the use of pre-existing music in film. He also performs as a drummer and percussionist in various contexts. Peter Golub has taught composition at UCLA, Bennington College, and Reed College. Since 1998 he has been the Director of the Sundance Film Music Program, where he runs the yearly Composers Lab, an intensive workshop for xi xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS aspiring film composers. His film scores include:Frozen River (2008), Wordplay (2006), and The Great Debaters (2007) (co-composed with James Newton Howard). He has scored numerous Broadway productions. He was awarded the Classic Contribution Award by BMI, and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Katy Jarzebowski is a film composer currently based in Los Angeles, CA. In 2014, she was selected as a composer fellow for the Sundance Music and Sound Design Lab, at Skywalker Sound. Katy studied music composition and film studies at Yale University, and completed her master’s degree in film scoring at NYU, where she was awarded the Elmer Bernstein Award and the Sorel Women Composer’s Award. Her work includes numerous scores, notably for After Spring, a documentary produced by Jon Stewart, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival (2016), and follows the lives of Syrian refugees at the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. Katy is forever grateful to her parents for being unapologetically militant cinephiles, and her grandparents for passing their musical genes over one genera- tion to the next; she thanks them every day for their enthusiastic support. Joakim Tillman is Assistant Professor of musicology at Stockholm University, where he teaches courses in music analyses, nineteenth- and twentieth-century music (including film and game music), and opera. He has recently completed a research project about Wagnerian influences in Late Romantic Swedish opera, and his current research focuses on the film music of Elliot Goldenthal, James Horner, and Hans Zimmer. His research has appeared in numerous scholarly journals and edited volumes, including the article ‘Topoi and Intertextuality: Narrative Function in Hans Zimmer’s and Lisa Gerrard’s Music to Gladiator’ in Music in Epic Film: Listening to Spectacle, ed. Stephen C. Meyer (New York: Routledge, 2017). Andrew Waggoner is Professor of Composition in the Setnor School of Music of Syracuse University. Called ‘the gifted practitioner of a complex but dramatic and vividly colored style’ by the New Yorker, his music has been commissioned and per- formed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the JACK Quartet; and the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields, among many others. He has been awarded the Lee Ettelson Composer’s Award from Composers Inc., a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Roger Sessions Prize for an American composer by the Liguria Studies Center in Bogliasco, Italy.