Reading Film, Hearing Scores

The Italian film La dolce vita (1960) became internationally famous after it won the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm), the highest distinction, at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival. It was the sixth close collaboration between director and writer Federico Fellini (1920–93) and composer Nino Rota (1911–79), whose creative process involved sitting together as Rota composed original music and arranged previously composed songs. Before Rota began working on the film, Fellini selected composer Pérez Prado's (1917–89) song "Patricia" (1958). Rota's arrangement of the chart-topping hit accompanies pivotal narrative moments as protagonist Marcello, a journalist, gallivants in the worlds of Rome's most jaded rich and famous.
            By using autograph sources that include Rota's arrangements of "Patricia" (housed in the Nino Rota Collection at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice), my paper explores the song's structural and dramatic role in the film, Rota's compositional techniques and approach to arranging, and Fellini's use of the song within the context of the film's sound. Previous literature, like Peter Bondanella's The Films of Federico Fellini (2002) and Richard Dyer's Nino Rota: Music, Film, and Feeling (2010), just briefly explains the film's structure and use of "Patricia." Fra cinema e musica del novecento: Il caso Nino Rota: Dai documenti (Between Cinema and Twentieth-Century Music: The Case of Nino Rota: From the Documents, 2000), edited by Francesco Lombardi, discusses Rota's work and "Patricia" within the context of the film's narrative. This paper is the first to offer an analysis that considers the film's music, visual, and sound tracks. It is also the first to give attention to the history of "Patricia," in addition to Rota's scoring, Fellini's overdubbing the film's sound with Rota's arrangements, Fellini's sound sources (for example, a jukebox and an RCA album), as well as Fellini and Rota's sense of play with music.

Timbre constantly plays on our understandings of physical space (Butler, 1973). This phenomenon is all the more interesting in fantasy films, which break the laws of physics to portray the fantastical. How does musical timbre, which can narrate the film _or_ emanate from the story world, play into the cinematic physics of magic-making? Drawing on embodied theories of music (Chattah, 2015; Cox, 2016) and specifically musical timbre (Leydon, 2012; van Elferen, 2017; Wallmark, 2014, et al. 2018), as well as embodied film theory (Sobchack, 2004), this paper takes spellcasting in the eight-film Harry Potter saga as a case study to explore how musical timbre collides with sound effect, dialogue, and motion to convey magic.


The paper offers three ways musical timbre structures magic-making in the Harry Potter films. First, in response to a spell being cast, musical timbres often cross the diegetic/non-diegetic boundary. The soft, fluid, airy tones that accompany the rising feather after Hermione casts _Wingardium Leviosa_, for example, function not only as musical underscore (non-diegetic), but also as the sounds we might expect a magically floating feather to produce (diegetic). That the musical timbre emanates from the story world _and_ narrates it suggests that music and magic exist in the same narrative and physical space – a space that lies just outside of the characters' tangible world. Second, musical timbre can articulate the specific qualities of different spells. _Wingardium Leviosa_'s airiness, for instance, contrasts with the resonant warmth of Expecto Patronum_ and the iciness of _Immobilis_. Finally, the musical timbre of spells also shows how the significance of performing magic gradually changes over the course of the series. In the early films, the timbres of spells are much more sustained and musical, reflecting the awe of young witches and wizards first learning magic. As political tensions escalate and the characters gain a more technical working knowledge of magic, spell timbres become increasingly reflective of magic's utility.


By studying the ways musical timbre structures the performance of magic in cinema, we stand to gain a deeper understanding of how music works its magic both within and beyond the screen.

Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray introduces the titular character as a pianist, often playing a "nocturne" by Frederik Chopin. In the 1945 film of the same name, the composer's Prelude Op. 28, No. 24 can be heard diegetically and nondiegetically accompanying the character on his moral descent. Despite the prominence of Chopin's work in Herbert Stothart's score, few scholars have addressed the music to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Susan Felleman has examined the visual art prominently featured throughout the film, while Michael Long briefly noted the key relationships in Stothart's cuts of Chopin's prelude. However, none of these scholars have discussed the function of the music, particularly since Chopin's prelude is not heard in its original form or keys anywhere throughout the film. My paper, therefore, will consider the original conductor's score and its close relationship with the film's diegesis.


Stothart's piano reduction of the orchestral score provides a more detailed reading of both the film and the music, particularly with the precise cue sheet titles that correspond to dialogue and themes in the film. Stothart uses this Chopin piece as thematic material in his score, a practice that was not unusual for composers of many other classic Hollywood horror films, according to recent research by Sarah Reichardt Ellis and Michael Lee. Like the transformations in the novel, the thematic material from Chopin's prelude is arranged in different ways as the filmic narrative plays out, heightening Dorian's emotions and state of mind. In this paper, I map the transformation of this prelude onto Dorian's moral and mental decline throughout the film. Drawing upon Chopin's reception history in Victorian England, adaptation theory, and my analysis of this piano reduction, I will consider why Stothart decided to use this particular piece to argue a distinct connection between Frederick Chopin and Dorian Gray. 

Dimitri Tiomkin began his score for High Noon (1952) with the ballad "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin'" and integrated segments of it as leitmotifs, revolutionizing the way film composers approached the Western. Although it was not the first film score to rely on a popular song for structural coherence and cross-promotional marketing, its success swiftly made it almost obligatory for film composers of Westerns to follow suit. The theme-song score has attracted insightful attention from scholars from musicology and film studies, including Jeff Smith, Will Straw, Deborah Allison, Corey K. Creekmur, and Mariana Whitmer, many of whom have emphasized the theme song's power to guide viewers' expectations. Close analyses of individual scores, however, have tended to focus on the idiosyncratic example of High Noon, which has obscured a broader understanding of the phenomenon. Film composers did follow Tiomkin in composing theme songs that became leitmotifs, yet most did not return to the sung theme song so obsessively. At issue here is the staying power of the lyrics: just how "sticky" are the words after the theme song sheds them?
I argue there are limits to the theme-song score's ability to maintain these extramusical connections by analyzing a repertoire which features a tense relationship between theme song and leitmotif: the mid-1950s cycle of Westerns starring gunslinging women. After the wartime upheaval of gender roles, middle-aged actors like Barbara Stanwyck found success playing active female characters in the Western. Using Victor Young's score and theme song for The Maverick Queen (1956) as a case study, I explore how the theme song--particularly its sexist lyrics--establishes gendered expectations for Stanwyck's character during the opening credits sequence and how these connotations erode when the theme song melody transforms into her heroic leitmotif. I argue this transition from theme song to leitmotif weakens its original objectifying function, subjectifying the female hero's emotional state instead. Ultimately, I suggest that by expanding our focus beyond High Noon, we might better understand the Western theme-song score's constellation of possibilities and the boundaries of its narrative power, with consequences that extend beyond the Western.