The Role and Evolution of Music in Cinema, Guide, Progetti e Ricerche di Storia Della Musica Moderna E Contemporanea

Scarica The Role and Evolution of Music in Cinema e più Guide, Progetti e Ricerche in PDF di Storia Della Musica Moderna E Contemporanea solo su Docsity! HISTORY AND RELATIONSHIP ABOUT MUSIC AND SOUNDTRACK IN MOVIES The film is a work of art in which all the fundamental languages converge: the moving image, the word, the music. In the beginning, however, the film was mute. Spectators read the words of the dialogues written on the screen, between one scene and another, but there was no silence in the room: in the first place, they were the spectators themselves who commented aloud on what appeared on the screen, they pronounced the actors' lines on the screen, and adding shouts and laughs. In fact, the success of a movie was measured by the popular participation. Then there was the song. Cinemas were furnished with a piano and sometimes they had even a small orchestra. The song carefully commented about what was happening on the scene; there was a repertory of songs for every situation: music for the scenes of fear, of love, persecutions, comedies and so on. With the advent of the record, even the pianist and the orchestra gradually disappeared: the record cost much less. If someone searches in the first cinematic spectacles will find that music in them exists since the beginnings, and of course the references to Lumière, Méliès and Edison are easy to do. With the improvement of cinema, we can say that also the repertory of musicals has grown. But not from the very beginning the music is synchronized or has a coherence with the visual part. Just later sound models that fit properly for the types of films will be created. So the musical “stereotypes” have success in the very origin. The first to create guidebooks and repertoires to follow were Rapée in America and Becce in Europe. At the end of the 1920s, a technique for recording the sound was developed, synchronized with the pictures. Now the voice of the characters could be heard in the speakers and it could be heard even the noises of the environment and of course, the music. Parlato, sound effects, music: these are the three sound ingredients that have characterized the unfolding of the scenes since that moment. All together they form the so-called soundtrack of the movie. The dialogues translate the thoughts of the characters; the sound effects emphasize the perception of reality. Music has the function of shape, decoration, and if it's well used it can reveal the possibility of giving meaning to what appears on the screen. The importance that assumes music in movies In a movie, music can be used in many ways. The simplest way is to show it inside the film. For example, if the protagonist sings or plays an instrument, his music is heard; if we are listening to a record or watching people dancing in a club, we can hear the music being played. The second way is the most complex and interesting: the director chooses a piece of music to comment on a scene and in this way adds some meaning to the scene itself. For example, music can make us understand one feelings of the character, or if the situation represented is serene, dramatic or comic. It can underline an event. It can recall something that is not present on the scene. One of the most frequent musical techniques for making a soundtrack is to build it around a leitmotiv, or a motif that returns several times in the film. It can be associated with a character, a feeling, or a particular event. A large number of experts made a movie. It's enough to take a look at the credits, to realize how many people need to give help to create it. The film director gives the guidelines and coordinates everyone's work. The film director is also the person who makes the decisions about the music included in the film. There are two possibilities to compose the music: the first one is to commit the task to a composer; in this case, the music is new every time; the second option is to use existing music; they can be old songs or even classical music. The full repertory of classical music, from medieval to contemporary, has been used as the soundtrack of the films. The year in which for the first time was given the opportunity to a musician to create music for a film was 1908. It happened in Russia with the film "Stenka Razin" directed by Drankov. He commissioned to Ippolitov-Ivanov (the director of the Moscow Conservatoire) the original music to accompany his film. That’s how the leitmotiv was born. Even in Italy, this will happen very early in 1914 with the movie "Cabiria" of Pastrone, and the composer Pizzetti. And in the USA, we can see the director Griffith with "Birth of a nation" working together with the musician Breil to create the music for the film. Others examples of movies are “Intolerance”, “Broken blossoms”, or “Iron horse” directed by Ford with the music of Rapée. The kind of music that for more than thirty years characterize the movies is a mixture of various genres. During this period, we can see a change in the figures of cinema too: the director, the producer and as an innovation, the music director. The productions of Marx Steiner played a key role. With the films "King Kong", "The Lost petrol" the foundations are placed for the creation of themes that become identifiable by the spectators. Music becomes not only an attribute to history, but capable of anticipating emotions, interpreting or emphasizing them. Even a line of distinction will be drawn between european composers (Krongold, Tiomkin, Deutsch, Friedhofer, Waxman, Rozs), and american composers (Stothart, Young, Skinner, Duning, Raksin). SOUNDTRACK FUNCTIONS AND STRUCTURE OF MOVIES Talking about the composer, between 1895 and 1915 the projections were part of larger shows, so if there was music in them, it was not committed to a composer but they used the one from the context. With the theatres and the music industry, it becomes adapted to the film by something that is already existed. The composers, therefore, were passive because they did not compose specifically for one movie in particular. The publisher "Sonzogno" founded a production company, the Musical-Film. The other publisher "Ricordi" published a reduction of piano music for films. In the early 1900s, it is possible to observe collages of various works or dramatic melodrama. We see later that three events happen: the "compilations" (selection of pre-existing music called Cuesheet, which guaranteed an accompaniment ad hoc), the "repertoires" (large collections of music in part pre-existing and partly original), the "manuals" (that give the contribution to the affirmation of musical film dramaturgy). It is due to tradition and the avant-gardes if Europe has a delay. In France and Italy, two distinct production houses were born that commit the production of films to specialists. For the movie of Oxilia, "Rapsodia satanica", Mascagni composes the music in a very careful way. He will be the only one to whom is given the opportunity to turn again the film to adapt it to the music. The academic tradition continues also with Mancinelli ("Frate sole" by Corsi and Falena) and Gui ("Fantasia bianca" by Masi and Pozzati). In Italy, there is the fear of "be a prostitute" and even after neorealism, there is, consequently, the fear of innovating. France instead responds positively with composers like Satie, Honnegger, Milhaud, Auric, Ibert, Schmitt. It is possible to observe a coherence between poetics, language and techniques. In the USA, even if there is the identification of a specialist, there is for him little creative freedom: it's the producer who has as much voice as the composer. Only Steiner, as already mentioned, has inaugurated a new method (with Hollander, Berlin, Carmichael, Porter, and so on...). With the advent of rock, in the second postwar period, there is the definitive detachment from the '80s and it is time to look at other musical cultures. It's created in France (first country to have specialists in Europe), a typical musical heritage: Jaubert invents a "popular" style that is abandoned in the second postwar period by Delerue, Sarde, Legrand, Lai, and Jarre ("Lawrence d'Arabia" by Lean ). Glass and Nyman break the rules of specialism and they create music that is indifferent to film narration. Zimmer, on the contrary, is more connected to the Hollywood world ("The Thin Red Line" by Malick). As already mentioned, in Italy, the production is disappointing, there is no great tradition, only a few and only partially. It's just fter the 1950s that italian specialism appears with Lavagnino, Rustichelli, Germi and Fusco, while Nascimbene and Piccioni tended to not became so provincial. Still, to be emphasized are Nino Rota (he assimilates well popular elements) and Ennio Morricone (which comes to the progressive fusion of different techniques). After the 1970s there is a self-reduction of the means of expression and a greater critical detachment with Piovani and Piersanti. Even the dance in the films enters in different kinds of form: 1. Dancing allusion: a movement that aspires to become a dance act (without the will). Some examples could be: Totò and Chaplin. The movies of Barrault and Méliès ("Journey on the moon"), but also "Odyssey in space" by Kubrick (confined episode: it's an act with definite outlines, placed in a plausible and coherent way); very often are related to the erotic theme. Some films like "American graffiti" by Lucas, "Blues Brothers" by Landis have in the dance a decisive role for the plot. It is important to assert that not every kind of musical has any of the kind of form and on the contrary, a simple movie can present some of these features. The dance is a combination of levels, which leads to occasional or prolonged contacts, legitimate or not, capable to expose the juice of the narrative predominant subject. But it is important to distinguish in two subcategories: a) dance as an inseparable component of the musical. The integration between narrative events and dance often coincides with the affirmation of one dancer that is part of a couple, in this case, one mention to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers ("Carioca", "Shall we dance", "Swing time"...) that anyway they both appear elegant and essential; or Gene Kelly in the movie "An American in Paris" and "Dancing in the Rain", which is more athletic and audacious. After these great characters, there is a metamorphosis due to the contamination of jazz and rock (see the movie "Rocky horror" by Sherman) or classical ballet ("West side story" by Wise and Robbins; or "Hello dolly" by Gene Kelly). The choreographic action thus implies an intrinsic significance to the work. 2. The dance as a central theme: in that regard, unfortunately, there is no tradition and unity like the previous category but the movies to mention are "The red shoes" by Powell and Pressburger and "Limelight" by Chaplin. Regarding one other type of film, the "Opera movie", it reflects the tendency to refer to literature and theatre. The original model is the english melodrama or the french "mélo": with the features of edifying dramas, having strong colours, and a complex weaving history. The most transposed operas are: "Carmen" (thirty-five times), "Faust" (twenty-seven times), "Cinderella" (twenty times), "Don Giovanni" (eighteen times), "Violetta Valéry" (twenty times). The specific features of the lyric opera have obviously occurred only after the introduction of the sound. Also, in this case, there are distinctions to be made. 1) The films can be freely inspired by subjects belonging to the musical theatre, in which the singing is marginal and not committed to the protagonists. 2) The parallel Operas, in which the protagonists are opera singers who interpret opera characters; there is, therefore, an overlap of the two narrative levels. 3) The Opera movies, that are more or less faithful film transpositions in which there are actors dubbed by real singers. Examples worth mentioning are: "The magic flute" by Bergman and "Carmen" by Rosi, which is one of the most genuine and intense. The interest of cinema for life and the work of famous composers have evolved in most cases with films of little importance, this is because cinema is an art of vision and it is difficult to "talk" or "see" the music. There is a reiterate fundamental principle: writing for the theatre is very different from the script of the cinema (which is mainly visual and can hardly demonstrate the act of composing). That's why some directors, even though they have the desire to want to show at all costs, they get the opposite result from the desired one. Besides, another deficit of cinema is the fact that it has a popular matrix. There are two types of cinema - the squared one -, it uses genres and transcends them, the sensitivity and cultural awareness of the external world are overcome and incorporated into the absolute film (as in Chaplin, Welles or Kubrick) - and the one as a narrative instrument: here the forms and the weak language when looking for realism, and the relations with the world become critical and improbable and the film often becomes limited. The first movie about a composer is from 1913, by Froehlich and Wauer and it's about Wagner. Also, it's the first movie that features an original score because it was impossible to use the music of Wagner himself. The cinema has also dealt with many classical music composers such as Strass, Schubert, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Verdi, Rossini, Puccini, Mascagni, just to name a few. In conclusion, we can assume that music is assuredly one of the most important evolutions of the cinema and has given even more communicative strength to it. It is easier to identify oneself thanks to the soundtrack. Some genres use the soundscape more than others. In the horrors film, for example, the horrifying and anxious scenes are represented by dark music and disturbing noises. In dramatic films, the soundtrack gives energy and underline the sad and dark moments. There are movies that have been successful, also thanks to the soundtrack (“Gone with the Wind” by Victor Fleming, Max Steiner; “Psycho” by Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann). Movies to list would be countless. The few examples mentioned serve to emphasize how much the music improves the vision and makes unforgettable the films in the memory and how much an element cannot be detached from another. The soundtrack is the distinctive element of the film. Bibliografia