Kathryn Kalinak, Ed., Music in the Western: Notes from the Frontier
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Journal of Film Music 6.1 (2013) 87-89 ISSN (print) 1087-7142 doi:10.1558/jfm.v6i1.87 ISSN (online) 1758-860X Kathryn Kalinak, ed., Music in the Western: Notes from the Frontier New York and London: Routledge, 2012. [ix, 237p. ISBN: 9780415882279. $39.99 (trade paper)] Routledge Music and Screen Media Series. Music examples, illustrations, figures, tables, and index. Mark DUrrand The University at Buffalo [email protected] he American western film is a remarkable contains essays that address westerns from the 1930s cultural product. For much of the twentieth through the 1960s. Care demonstrates, in “‘A Cowboy T century, the genre harbored America’s has to Sing’: John Ford, Walt Disney, and Sons of explosive optimism, as well as the deeply instilled the Pioneers,” how musical narration techniques in social and political biases that persist even today, the Disney short Pecos Bill (1948) was picked up by highlighting lines of race, class, and gender across the Ford for use in his film Wagon Master (1950). Care nation’s cultural terrain. A genre that is as sprawling shows an instance of unlikely aesthetic and technical and multifaceted as the frontier that gave rise to it, shared ground between animated and live-action the western film has long invited close scrutiny of its film. In “The Cowboy Chorus: Narrative and Cultural narrative intricacies. Adding a gloss of musical and Functions of the Western Title Song,” Corey K. soundtrack-related analysis to the subject, Kathryn Creekmur investigates the proliferation of the title Kalinak’s edited collection Music in the Western: Notes songs in westerns following Fred Zinneman’s High from the Frontier is a welcome and important volume. Noon (1952). With Dimitri Tiomkin’s highly successful Kalinak announces early in her Introduction the hit song “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling,” High collection’s interdisciplinary program, which, broadly Noon launched the title song frenzy that reached fever speaking, aims to open channels of communication pitch in the mid 1960s. Whitmer’s essay, “Reinventing between musicology and film studies. Of course, it the Western Film Score: Jerome Moross and The Big is worth recalling that the study of film music has Country,” explores Moross’s score for William Wyler’s always been interdisciplinary, with musicology proper 1958 film. According to Whitmer, the composer, a often playing, as it were, second fiddle. More or less younger colleague of Aaron Copland, wrote much in maintaining this trend, in this collection it is scholars the style of the older composer, establishing a model hailing from areas outside musicology that accomplish of musical westernicity that became a mainstay of the much of the heavy lifting. Just four of the twelve genre. Whitmer thus attributes influence to Moross contributors (Mariana Whitmer, Charles Leinberger, that is more commonly credited to Elmer Bernstein. Matthew McDonald, and Ben Winters) are full-fledged For Winters, in his “Silencing the Truth: Music musicologists, and, with the addition of composer and Identity in The Unforgiven,” music plays an active and freelance scholar Ross Care, the number of role in “the keeping of a secret, and efforts . to contributors with professional musical chops tops out expose the truth” (p. 77). (The narrative’s secret at five. involves the identity of a white settler-raised girl of The collection is divided into three categories. The Indian birth.) Winters contends that Tiomkin’s score first, “Music in the Classical Hollywood Studio Film,” operates less like an omniscient narrator, and more as © Copyright the International Film Music Society, published by Equinox Publishing Ltd 2015, Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, S1 2BX. 88 THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC something part and parcel with the “the motivations alternative formal logic of Leone’s westerns. K. J. and actions of the characters” (p. 78). He prefers to Donnelly’s essay “Europe Cannibalizes the Western: “approach the music for The Unforgiven (1960) not Ravenous” observes how the score for Ravenous (1999), as a document of a film scoring technique or as the a collaborative effort between Michael Nyman and product of a composer, but as part of a cinematic text Damon Albarn, features “repetitive structures, to be interpreted. .” (p. 90); thus, and importantly, additive and modular development, allied to regular Winters’s essay contains a polemical thread with pulses but uneven temporal structures” (p. 160); thus, implications for the study of film writ large, which the musical component of Antonia Bird’s film departs I will return to below. Filmic representations of substantially from both Copland’s Americanicity that historically gender-bending characters Calamity Jane was characteristic of Hollywood stock, as well as and Annie Oakley are center stage in Caryl Flinn’s from Morricone’s style that was popularized within “Songs, Western Novelty Acts, and 1950s Hollywood.” the Spaghetti western tradition. Donnelly remarks Flinn argues that Queer readings of film musicals of that “Ravenous depicts North America as an amalgam the 1950s featuring these characters overemphasize of European and Native American as well as . the homoerotic underlay beneath the pronounced contemporary American [elements]” (p. 161). Bird’s heteronormativity of the period in American culture, film reminds us that many parts of America’s past are but at the same time also suggest that even in the inflected by European influence. conservative foment of the time “queerness resides in The collection’s third section is entitled “The heteronormativity,” and “can be yoked to commercial Contemporary Western.” Peter Stanfield addresses ends” (p. 112). the thorny issue of authenticity in western film in The series second part, “Westerns Outside his essay “From the Barroom Floor: American Song, Hollywood,” takes into account the global influence Saloon Culture, Stack O’Lee, and Wild Bill, or, ‘Did of America’s darling film genre, as well as reciprocal you touch my hat?’” Throughout, Stanfield touches influences from abroad upon the Hollywood product. upon several films, but chiefly William Hill’s Wild Bill Both Yuna de Lannoy and Kalinak address works by (1995, score by Van Dyke Parks), and shows that even Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. De Lannoy’s anachronistic uses of popular Americana musics can “Innovation and Imitation: An analysis of the operate within contemporary vernacular imagination Soundscape of Akira Kurosawa’s Chambara Westerns” to lend a sense of authenticity to depictions of shows the musical influence of Wyler’s The Big Country America’s west. Claudia Gorbman’s “Musical Worlds (1958) and Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo (1959) on the of the Millennial Western” examines the scoring for Japanese director’s Yojimbo (1961) and Sanjuro (1962). two late westerns: Jim Jarmusch’s Deadman (1995, with She demonstrates how Kurosawa and film composer a score consisting of original songs by Neil Young); Kentaro Sato (also known as Ken-P) “challenged the and Tommy Lee Jones’s The Three Burials of Melquiades established conventions of Japanese period drama Estrada (2005, with a score by Marco Beltrami). In by borrowing the audio and visual grammar of both films, America is framed not as a place with the American western” (p. 127). Kalinak’s essay is “laws, justice, and opportunity,” such as represented entitled “‘How . Were We Going to Make a Picture by the classic western, but “as a corrupt and violent That’s Better than This?’ Crossing Borders from place” (p. 204). In essence, the scoring to these late East to West in Rashomon and The Outrage.” Here the westerns aids to invert rather than merely revise collection’s editor examines ways in which Kurosawa’s the conception of America propagated by the classic Rashomon (1950, score by Fumio Hayasaka) and western. Matthew McDonald’s “Mountains, Music, Martin Ritt’s The Outrage (1950, score by Alex North) and Murder” examines paradoxical views of the stylistically bridge the East–West divide, and thus defy American West. Two films from 2007 juxtapose a pair containment by generic boundaries. of contradictory conceptions: Paul Thomas Anderson’s In “The Dollars Trilogy: There Are Two Kinds of There Will Be Blood offers a view of the western frontier Western Heroes, My Friend,” Leinberger shows that as pregnant with limitless opportunity; and the Coen where the classical Hollywood western “[follows the] Brothers’ No Country for Old Men projects the specter model of exposition, development, and resolution of desolation, barrenness, and death. The latter effect [analogous to sonata form], Sergio Leone’s films results in large part from Carter Burwell’s sparse are a “departure from [that] formal design” (p. score. 133). Ennio Morricone’s scores, by employing an Kalinak prepares the reader in her Introduction idiosyncratic admixture of avante-garde compositional to be surprised by how well non-musicologists will techniques and pop aesthetics, contribute to the perform music-related discourse, and, conversely, © The International Film Music Society 2015. REVIEWS 89 how adept musicologists will be at addressing that draws all aspects of film into play, effectively film theoretical concerns. A divide roughly along rendering kinetic the potential interdisciplinary energy disciplinary lines is nonetheless apparent, with the latent within the filmic medium. five musicians in the mix more adept at addressing Of course, such an interdisciplinary benchmark musical detail (a factor especially evident in the essays exerts added pressure on both musicology and by Whitmer, Leinberger, and Winters). Stanfield’s film studies to move beyond the comfortable excellent historical work, for instance, would have circumscription of their discourses. There can be little been rounded out better with one or two musical disagreement that the subject of music and sound in transcriptions of the traditional American tunes he film has been and continues to be underrepresented explores; however, the fact that musicians are more within film studies, and film musicologists have adept at addressing musical detail is neither surprising a great deal of catching up of their own to do.