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<p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:Arial" lang="EN-US">In answer to Mr
Kosovsky’s original post, and to add a different perspective to Prof.
Leinberger’s, things look and feel a bit different on this side of the pond. (It
would also be interesting, as part of this thread, to hear from colleagues
elsewhere in the world about the meaning[s] of ‘Film Musicology’ and its relationship, in different national and regional contexts, to 'Music Theory'.)</span></font></p><font>
</font><p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:Arial" lang="EN-US"> </span></font></p><font>
</font><p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:Arial" lang="EN-US">There have been a
number of recent discussions about the meaning of ‘Film Musicology’ amongst music
scholars working on screen scoring, and Prof. Leinberger’s description will
probably ring true for many film music scholars working in the States. In the
UK, though, scholars tend to speak of screen music studies, or even of
audiovisual studies – for instance, a British Audiovisual Research Network (a
group of musicologists and other scholars working on film, TV, game and other media) is in the
process of being formed. Discussions about ‘BARN’ (oh yes) took place at the Music
and Screen Media Conference last week at Liverpool University, beautifully organised by Holly Rogers. And there was
lots of close score analysis there – John Richardson’s keynote, in fact, was
entitled ‘Closer Reading’ – and, as has been my experience of work in this
field in the UK for the past ten years or so, much of it was informed by music theory.
Some of the papers at the conference, I suspect, may even have felt like SMT
fare: </span><span style="font-family:Arial">Frank Lehman
from Harvard, for instance, gave a fine paper on ‘Pantriadic music for
multimedia: tonal dialectics and the aesthetics of wonderment’. (Note, though,
how the paper title speaks of more than music theoretical issues – a topic to
which I return below.) There were also many papers at the conference in which
close musical and audiovisual analysis drew on other wellsprings of theory –
critical theory for one, film theory another. Further strong papers emerged
from the types of screen music scholarship Prof. Leinberger describes. For me, this is one of
the joys of screen music studies: it encompasses all such approaches – or, at
least, invites them all into its big tent (or indeed barn) to duke it out – and
is all the stronger for the dialogue. </span></font></p><font>
</font><p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></font></p><font>
</font><p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:Arial">It might be my
UK blinkers, but I’m also conscious of quite a lot of work (including some fine
analytical scholarship by Guido Heldt, actually) which, rather than spending ‘</span><span style="font-family:Arial" lang="EN-US">little time if any on the score itself’,
is very much focused on film score analysis. Admittedly, this does tend to happen in
the context of broader audiovisual analysis of scoring's role within a film’s
storytelling (or otherwise deployed) apparatus. Many examples – some of them
drawing, again, on music theory (and other approaches to close reading) – can be found throughout
the literature, not least in the Scarecrow Press Film Score Guides series, edited by Kate Daubney, and to
which Prof. Leinberger, of course, contributed a valuable volume on Morricone’s
score for _The Good, The Bad and The Ugly_. <br></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:Arial" lang="EN-US"><br></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:Arial" lang="EN-US">On the other hand, I am less aware
of work treating the score in isolation of its filmic, social, political,
historical and other cultural contexts – but I wouldn’t like to say it’s not
out there, and suspect people on this list will now rectify my ignorance. It could obviously serve valuable scholarly purposes, just as analyzing the
lyrics of a song in isolation as poetry can still be incredibly useful - just so long as
the scholar involved isn’t deluded enough to think it is the best or only
game in town. But – again, in my view, from my particular perspective – the best screen music theory and analysis tends to negotiate symbolic complexes
of music, sound and the moving image, and their performance of multifarious
cultural work. And the very best work in that area, in my humble opinion,
draws strongly on the traditions of theoretically engaged criticism and close reading that stems,
in part, from what we would all recognize, in an SMT-Talk context, as ‘Music
Theory’.</span><span style="font-family:Arial"></span></font></p><font>
</font><p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:Helvetica"> </span></font></p><font>
</font><p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:Helvetica">Having said that: </span><span style="font-family:Arial">film music theory and analysis will be a theme of the
UK Music Analysis conference next July (at which David Neumeyer is giving a
keynote lecture). And I know of at least one scholar preparing a neo-Riemannian
analysis of aspects of <i>Vertigo</i>… </span></font></p><font>
</font><p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></font></p><font>
</font><p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:Arial">(I, for one, can’t
wait.)</span></font></p><font>
</font><p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></font></p><font>
</font><p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:Arial">With best
wishes</span></font></p><font>
</font><p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></font></p><font>
</font><p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:Arial">Nick Reyland</span></font></p>
<br>-- <br><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:14px"><div><div><span><font color="#666666">Dr Nicholas Reyland</font></span></div><font color="#666666">Senior Lecturer</font></div><div><font color="#666666">Music & Film Studies</font><div>
<font color="#666666">Keele University</font><div><div><font color="#666666"><span></span></font></div><div><font color="#666666"><span></span> </font></div><div><font color="#666666"><a href="mailto:n.w.reyland@keele.ac.uk" target="_blank">n.w.reyland@keele.ac.uk</a></font></div>
<div><font color="#666666"><a href="http://www.keele.ac.uk/music/people/nicholasreyland/" target="_blank">www.keele.ac.uk/music/people/nicholasreyland/</a></font></div><div><span style="color:rgb(102,102,102)">T: +44 (0)1782 733297</span><br>
</div></div></div><font color="#666666">Music, The Clock House, Keele University, ST5 5BG, UK</font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div></div></div>
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