Contributions by Kate Altizer
Back to contributors list
[+] Anderson, Paul Allen. “The World Heard: Casablanca and the Music of War.” Critical Inquiry 32 (Spring 2006): 482-515.
The music of Casablanca was a metaphor for the power of political unity against the adversaries of America: American music defied enemy music and thus enemy culture. This metaphor is accomplished both diegetically and through Max Steiner’s score, which creates leitmotifs out of national songs and the famous ballad, As Time Goes By. Because current wartime tensions created political insecurities for audiences, it was difficult for viewers to regard the film as fantasy, and the film’s music aids in a transition to fiction. For example, the relationship between the diegetic performances of As Time Goes By and Steiner’s appropriation of the ballad reinforces a past of assured political ideology as well as American unity and idealism. Additionally, the film demonstrates fantasies and realities of race and segregation through the treatment of and musical performances by the character Sam.
Works: Michael Curtiz (director) and Max Steiner (composer): score to Casablanca.
Sources: Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle: La Marseillaise (484, 497-98, 500-501); Carl Wilhelm: Die Wacht am Rhein (484, 497-98, 500-501); Herman Hupfeld: As Time Goes By (485, 487, 497, 502-14).
Index Classifications: 1900s, Film
Contributed by: Kate Altizer
Individual record
[+] Code, David J. “Rehearing The Shining: Musical Undercurrents in the Overlook Hotel.” In Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear, ed. Neil Lerner, 133-51. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Scholarship on music in The Shining has largely ignored the semiotic richness of the incorporation of modernist musical works, but the historical subtexts of the pieces contribute to a unique Kubrickian approach to horror that relies on more than purely visceral audience response. By exploring congruencies between music and visual elements, certain symmetries come into focus that allow for a broader reading of music in the “Kubrick universe.” During the maze scene, Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta is a temporal phenomenon and is thus not congruous with the four-dimensional maze. Ligeti’s Lontano is used in two instances to accompany scenes of “shining,” but the third instance of its use deflects this established association. The symmetry between the music of Penderecki and the film extends even to the level of musical notation. Ultimately, one could read The Shining as an allegory of literate culture in the face of post-literate culture, represented in part by the use of modernist graphic scores.
Works: Stanley Kubrick (director) and Wendy Carlos (composer): soundtrack to The Shining (133-51).
Sources: Anonymous: Dies irae (131-32, 135); Bartók: Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (134, 136-41); Ligeti: Lontano (136, 141-44); Penderecki: The Awakening of Jacob (144-46), Polymorphia (147).
Index Classifications: 1900s, Film
Contributed by: Kate Altizer
Individual record
[+] Garner, Ken. “‘Would You Like to Hear Some Music?’: Music In-and-Out-of-Control in the Films of Quentin Tarantino.” In Film Music: Critical Approaches, ed. K. J. Donnelly, 188-205. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001.
There are three primary categories in which Tarantino uses pre-existing music in his films: main themes and underscoring, incidental diegetic music, and diegetic music chosen by characters. While it is tempting to view Tarantino’s use of dated music in his credit themes as distorting filmic conventions of soundtrack and temporal location or as a postmodern smirk, in reality it can function as an authentication of characters’ identity, as audio-visual counterpoint, and as an authorial statement on the film’s tone and mood. Each of Quentin Tarantino’s major films, Reservoir Dogs,Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown, features a scene in which a character selects and plays a piece of music. Such scenes differ from other uses of diegetic music in that they foreground the process of music selection, thus granting characters power to control the score and allowing the selection to represent and illustrate characters or situations. Young audiences of Tarantino’s films will empathize with these foregrounded musical situations, witnessing how an act similar to their own private, mood-related engagement with music is projected onto other characters. This empathy also has an impact on record sales: if youth are able recognize the act of private, mood-boosting engagement with music, they are also likely to enjoy the music itself.
Works: Quentin Tarantino (director): soundtrack to Jackie Brown (188-93, 198-201), soundtrack to Reservoir Dogs (188, 191, 193-96, 202), soundtrack to Pulp Fiction (188, 191, 196-201).
Sources: The Delfonics: Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time) (189-91); Dusty Springfield: Son of a Preacher Man (191, 200); Urge Overkill: Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon (191, 200-201); Stealers Wheel: Stuck in the Middle with You (191, 202); Bobby Womack: Across 110th Street (192-93); George Baker Selection: Little Green Bag (193-96); Dick Dale: Misirlou (196-97); Roy Ayers: soundtrack to Coffy (198-99).
Index Classifications: 1900s, Film
Contributed by: Kate Altizer
Individual record
[+] Hepokoski, James. “Temps Perdu.” The Musical Times 135 (December 1994): 746-51.
Two paradoxical interpretations of Charles Ives’s use of borrowed music coexist: an authorial reading and a reading based on the element of lost time (“temps perdu”). The mature music of Charles Ives is internally teleological, building pieces or movements out of “memory fragments” of pre-existing American popular or sacred tunes and quoting the entire tune only at the end of the work (a form called “teleological genesis” or elsewhere “cumulative form”). An authorial reading of this technique situates the meaning of the piece in the creation of a peak experience, which itself intimates to the audience a transcendental understanding of the music beyond the sound itself. Listeners might consider thinking of Ives’s use of “memory-fragments,” or musical borrowings, through the filter of Ives’s personal experiences with his sources, which they may discover (at least in part) through his writings. The second reading of this phenomenon is that striking dissonance, “memory fragments,” and musical manipulation in Ives’s mature pieces represent his attempt to protect a treasured American past from the effects of adulthood and the modern world. Ives’s stylistic plurality in his mature years can be heard as a radical attempt to recover traditional securities of the past, a narrative thread (the “Motive of Lost Wholeness”) common in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought in general. Such pieces depict the past as only existing imperfectly in memory; thus listeners are invited by Ives to embark on a musical journey in search of lost time.
Works: Ives: The Fourth of July (747), Symphony No. 3 (747), Piano Sonata No. 2 (Concord, Mass., 1840-60) (747), String Quartet No. 2 (747), Violin Sonata No. 2 (747-49), Violin Sonata No. 4 (749-50), Violin Sonata No. 3 (750).
Sources: Robert Lowry: Need (750); Asahel Nettleton or John Wyeth (attr.): Nettleton (747); David T. Shaw: The Red, White, and Blue (Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean) (747-49); William Bradbury: Jesus Loves Me (749-50).
Index Classifications: 1900s
Contributed by: Kate Altizer, Chelsea Hamm, Daniel Rogers
Individual record
[+] Hillman, Roger. “Music as Cultural Marker in German Film.” In Unsettling Scores: German Film, Music, and Ideology, 24-46. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.
Pre-existing music creates historical montage in a film, layering historical times to occur simultaneously in a single cinematic act. Reflecting their proximity to and distance from World War II, the films created by West German directors of the 1970s and early 1980s are particularly engaged in this act of historical montage. They are also distinct from Hollywood in their particular use of nineteenth-century art music, and New German filmmakers used the cultural weight of and audience deference to art music to resist traditional bourgeois values and highlight filmic and musical auteurs. Filmmakers juxtaposed the historically recent reception of Germanic music under the Nazis and the immediate reception of it by modern audiences, culturally marking the music, highlighting questions of national identity, and asserting cultural resilience in the face of both Germany’s history and the encroachment of Hollywood. Due to historical Germanic emphasis on music as a nonrepresentational art form, Germanic film music must transcend the theory of mimesis, commonly demonstrated by movies outside Germany. While reception theory is a promising tool for uncovering musical meaning, semiotics and the musical language of the borrowed work are also crucial elements in film music studies.
Works: Billy Wilder (director): soundtrack to A Foreign Affair (28); Rainer Werner Fassbinder (director): Deutschland im Herbst (35); Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (director): soundtrack to Hitler: A Film from Germany (37).
Sources: Miklós Rózsa: Violin Concerto, Op. 24 (28); Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125 (36-37, 41, 44-45); Haydn: Deutschlandlied (36-37, 44-45); Wagner: Götterdämmerung (37).
Index Classifications: 1900s, Film
Contributed by: Kate Altizer
Individual record
[+] Hillman, Roger. “The Great Eclecticism of the Filmmaker Werner Herzog.” In Unsettling Scores: German Film, Music, and Ideology, 136-50. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.
Unlike many New German filmmakers, director Werner Herzog is not concerned about the historical baggage of twentieth-century Germany but is rather focused on forging new territory for the cinematic image. Similarly, he ignores the reception history of the Western art music he uses, in particular Germanic music. Herzog resists interpretation of his musical choices, despite the variety of music he employs, as well as his diverse treatment of that music. Music is used quite differently in the films Woyzeck (to underscore the transcendence of society), Fitzcarraldo (to enhance artifice and unreality and to underscore Herzog’s self-generated mythos in cinematic history), and Lessons of Darkness (to be a universal, rather than Germanic, herald of death and destruction). In each film, Herzog selects pre-existing music to enhance dramatic and narrative elements specific to the film, but does not engage the historic memory of the music itself.
Works: Werner Herzog (director): Nosferatu (148-49), Woyzeck (139-40), Fitzcarraldo (140-46), Lessons of Darkness (146-50).
Sources: Beethoven: Piano Sonata in E-flat Major, Op. 81a (139); Richard Strauss: Death and Transfiguration (141); Bellini: I Puritani (141, 145-46); Verdi: Un ballo in maschera (141), Requiem (147, 150), Ernani (141-46); Wagner: Die Walküre (141), Parsifal (147-48), Das Rheingold (147-49), Götterdämmerung (147); Grieg: Peer Gynt (147, 149); Mahler: Symphony No. 2 (147, 149); Pärt: Stabat Mater (147); Prokofiev: Sonata for Two Violins, Op. 56 (147); Schubert: Notturno in E-flat Major, Op. 148 (147).
Index Classifications: 1900s, 2000s, Film
Contributed by: Kate Altizer
Individual record
[+] Long, Michael. Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
Musicology is in need of generalist methodologies and perspectives for fragments, clichés, and non-sequiturs of classical music that occur in twentieth-century media and culture. Such music is related to the “vernacular imagination,” the shared phenomenon of twentieth-century American (and occasionally European) media audiences in which an artist’s imaginative priorities intersect with the past and with memory. Musicologists can adapt the notion of register, a tool used to locate a work culturally, to study this music in a way that traces the development and intersection of its fluctuating meanings, emphasizing audience reception of an expressive mass media rather than arguing for the absolute value of a musical object.
Works: Barry Manilow: Could it Be Magic (17); Kiss: Great Expectations (17); Billy Joel: This Night (18); DMX: What’s My Name? (34-40); Busta Rhymes: Gimme Some More (34, 38-40); Alan Crosland (director) and Louis Silvers (composer): score to The Jazz Singer (51-55, 73-81, 86, 177); Otto Preminger (director) and David Raksin (composer): score to Laura (42, 44-47, 52, 58-59, 76, 163); Irving Rapper (director) and Max Steiner (composer): score to Now, Voyager (59-60); Victor Fleming (director) and Max Steiner (composer): score to Gone with the Wind (69-70); Gregory La Cava (director) and Max Steiner (composer): score to Symphony of Six Million (86-101); Jefferson Airplane: White Rabbit (122-24); The Doors: Light My Fire (124); Led Zeppelin: Stairway to Heaven (126-27); Procol Harum: A Whiter Shade of Pale (129-39, 149-51); The Swingle Singers: Aria (135-37); Lawrence Kasdan (director) and Meg Kasdan (composer): soundtrack to The Big Chill (152-56); Alfred Hitchcock (director) and Bernard Herrmann (composer): score to Psycho (171-73); Robert Z. Leonard (director): soundtrack to Strange Interlude (181-83); James Whale (director) and Franz Waxman (composer): score to Bride of Frankenstein (190-95); Stephen Herek (director) and Michael Kamen (composer): score to Mr. Holland’s Opus (196-202); William Hanna and Joseph Barbera (directors) and Scott Bradley (music editor): score to Tom and Jerry, no. 29, The Cat Concerto (197-98); Friz Freleng (director): score to Merrie Melodies, episode Rhapsody Rabbit (197, 205); Carlos Santana and Dave Matthews: Love of My Life (214-16); Albert Lewin (director): The Picture of Dorian Gray (216-21); Queen: Bohemian Rhapsody (222-35); Penelope Spheeris (director): soundtrack to Wayne’s World (222-23, 231-32).
Sources: Chopin: Prelude in C minor, Op. 28, No. 20 (17); Beethoven: Piano Sonata in C Minor, Op. 13 (18); Richard Addinsell: Warsaw Concerto (34-35, 41); Bernard Herrmann: score to Psycho (34, 38-40); Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture (51-58), Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74 (59-63); Handel, “Ombra mai fu” from Serse (69-70); Ravel: Bolero (123-24); Johann Sebastian Bach, Air from Suite in D Major, BWV 1068 (133-34), Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 140 (133-34, 136-37); Procol Harum: A Whiter Shade of Pale (152-56); George Antheil: Symphony No. 4; Dukas: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (190); Gottfried Huppertz: score to Metropolis (194-95); Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 (198, 204-6); The Toys: Lover’s Concerto (196, 202-9, 213); The Supremes: I Hear a Symphony (196, 202-4, 213); Brahms: Symphony No. 3 in F Major, Op. 90 (214-16); Chopin: Prelude in D Minor, Op. 28, No. 24 (217-21); Queen: Bohemian Rhapsody (222-23); Mascagni: Cavalleria rusticana (227); Richard Strauss: Ariadne auf Naxos (227-31).
Index Classifications: 1900s, 2000s, Popular, Film
Contributed by: Kate Altizer
Individual record
[+] Mazulo, Mark. “Remembering Pop: David Lynch and the Sound of the ‘60s.” American Music 23 (Winter 2005): 493-513.
David Lynch uses compilation scores comprising American popular songs to establish individual sound signatures in his films. He is especially attracted to pop songs released during his adolescence that make use of distinctive vocals or mixing, which create a certain peculiarity with the naiveté of a song’s message, sincerity, and compositional elements. Lynch capitalizes on the dualistic nature of these songs by deploying them as historically unproblematic and desired objects of nostalgia, in some instances using them in violent, psychologically deviant, horrifying, and self-consciously staged scenes as passageways to strangeness and the uncanny. Such a use allows audiences to reimagine the history of these songs and the culture that created and consumed them and represents a new employment of the compilation score consistent with his aesthetic of the “ridiculous sublime.” In Mulholland Drive, the pop song I’ve Told Every Little Star represents the film’s theme of duality. In Lost Highway, the use of Lou Reed’s cover of This Magic Moment rather than the well-known pop versions matches the soundscape of the film and is metacommentary on the reception of American popular song. In Twin Peaks, a newly-composed pop song disrupts the security of reality, and in Blue Velvet, pop music complicates multiple layers of diegesis, performance, and reality.
Works: David Lynch (director): soundtrack to Lost Highway (494, 502-3), soundtrack to Eraserhead (494, 499), soundtrack to Blue Velvet (507-9); David Lynch (director) and Angelo Badalamenti (composer): soundtrack to Mulholland Drive (494, 494-501), soundtrack to Twin Peaks (494, 503-6).
Sources: Bill Post and Doree Post: Sixteen Reasons (Why I Love You) (500); Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern: I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star (500-501); Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman (songwriters) and The Drifters (performers): This Magic Moment (500-502); Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman (songwriters) and Lou Reed (performer): This Magic Moment (502-3); Bobby Vinton: Blue Velvet (507-8); Roy Orbison: In Dreams (508-9).
Index Classifications: 1900s, 2000s, Film
Contributed by: Kate Altizer
Individual record
[+] McGinness, John. “Has Modernist Criticism Failed Charles Ives?” Music Theory Spectrum 28 (Spring 2006): 99-109.
To secure Ives’s compositional reputation against modernist criticism, revisionist scholars have adapted the untenable position that Charles Ives was a modernist composer. Such characterizations attempt to situate his music within Western European tradition and refute the categorization of Ives as an experimentalist. Two critical processes, the idea of experimentalism and the use of musical analysis, are important to understanding how Ives’ reputation was created. In post-1974 Ives scholarship, music analysis is often used as a determinant of aesthetic value. It is frequently employed to “prove” that Ives’s music is systematic and logical, and by extension is skilled and therefore valuable. This motivation also lies behind scholarship which demonstrates how Ives’s music is more “traditional” and how it relates to European art music. For example, some scholars have tried to show how Ives’s uses of musical borrowings fit into a European tradition. Such traditionalist studies seek to redefine the term “experimentalism” as it was originally conceived in the 1930s by Cowell—a type of music which deliberately sought to break with European tradition—to a term that signifies compositional uniqueness. The motivations of such analyses, which have attempted to place Ives’s musical reputation within a context of “skill and value,” should be examined. Perhaps Ives’s music, aspects of which (such as his uses of pre-existing music) intentionally undermine conventions, should not be subject to formalist analysis and scholars should instead examine the validity of evaluating Ives through a modernist lens rather than characterize his music as modernist.
Works: Ives: Tone Roads No. 1 (104), Study No. 5 (104), The Cage (104), Piano Sonata No. 2 (Concord, Mass., 1840-60) (105-6).
Index Classifications: 1900s
Contributed by: Kate Altizer, Chelsea Hamm, Amanda Jensen
Individual record
[+] McQuinn, Julie. “Listening Again to Barber’s Adagio for Strings as Film Music.” American Music 27 (Winter 2009): 461-99.
Scholars cannot assume that Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings has a stable meaning in film and must examine the multiplicity of meanings and ambiguities created by its use in film. In four films the Adagio transgresses boundaries of filmic diegesis and narrative into ambiguous meanings and spaces. The audience is required to contend with the Adagio in Oliver Stone’s Platoon because it stands out not only from the brutality of the film but also from the composed score and the diegesis of the movie. André Téchiné’s Les roseaux sauvages uses the Adagio with subtlety and restraint at dramatic moments of external rupture among characters, and the piece also functions as an indication of the internal world of the characters, or metadiegesis. In George Miller’s Lorenzo’s Oil the Adagio is one piece among many borrowed classical compositions used in the film, and it is the only one that represents hopelessness and deep anguish. The soundscape established in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, composed of both underscoring by John Morris and diegetic sound, is violent, and the single instance of the Adagio in the film occurs during the ending sequence involving the diseased protagonist’s resignation and suicide. The Adagio is a mindscreen reflecting the metadiegesis of the protagonist and its connection to forces in the universe beyond human control.
Works: Oliver Stone (director): soundtrack to Platoon (461, 464-74, 493); David Lynch (director): soundtrack to The Elephant Man (461, 464-65, 480-81, 486-93); Jean-Pierre Jeunet (director): soundtrack to Amélie (464); Liam Lynch (director): soundtrack to Tenacious D (464); Andy Ackerman (director): soundtrack to Seinfeld (464-65); André Téchiné (director): soundtrack to Les roseaux sauvages (464-66, 474-80, 493); George Miller (director): soundtrack to Lorenzo’s Oil (465, 480-86, 492-93).
Sources: Samuel Barber: Adagio for Strings, Op. 11.
Index Classifications: 1900s, Film
Contributed by: Kate Altizer
Individual record
[+] Rosar, William H. “The Dies Irae in Citizen Kane: Musical Hermeneutics Applied to Film Music.” In Film Music: Critical Approaches, ed. K. J. Donnelly, 103-16. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001.
Rachmaninoff used the Dies Irae chant to create a five-note motif in Isle of the Dead, and the motif crafted by Bernard Herrmann for the title character in Citizen Kane is strikingly similar to that of Rachmaninoff. Two possible explanations for this semblance exist: the motif of Herrmann resembles that of Rachmaninoff because it is modeled on the Isle of the Dead, or the resemblance exists because the two motifs are modeled on a common source, the Dies Irae. When applying musical hermeneutics to film, it is necessary to consider the musical associations composers may make when viewing films as they prepare to compose a score. The application of musical hermeneutics to the Kane motif suggests that Herrmann modeled it on the motif of Rachmaninoff because when Herrmann first saw cinematic images of Xanadu he was reminded of the painting by Arnold Böcklin, The Island of the Dead, which had inspired Rachmaninoff’s symphonic poem. That Herrmann never attributes this motif to Rachmaninoff could be explained by his general silence on the issue of musical borrowing in his music or by the process of cryptomnesia, in which an artist or writer unintentionally borrows from a work he or she has forgotten.
Works: Orson Welles (director) and Bernard Herrmann (composer): score to Citizen Kane (104-13); Rachmaninoff: Isle of the Dead (104-13).
Sources: Anonymous: Dies Irae (104-13); Rachmaninoff: Isle of the Dead (104-13).
Index Classifications: 1900s, Film
Contributed by: Kate Altizer
Individual record
[+] Sadoff, Roger H. “The Role of the Music Editor and the ‘Temp Track’ as Blueprint for the Score, Source Music, and Scourse Music of Films.” Popular Music 25 (May 2006): 165-83.
The analysis of film scores must consider not only the finished score but also the various layers of the construction process, including the so-called “temp track,” a temporary soundtrack often comprising cues from existing films or other pre-existing music. The temp track maps the topography of the future score and its relation to the film, and along with its precursor, the compilation score, it is limited in its ability to synchronize with the film by its use of units of pre-existing phrase structures and forms. Despite its limitations and the artistic misgivings of many composers, it is often extremely influential upon the final score. Music editors are thus increasingly powerful and significant in the establishment and perpetuation of musical filmic conventions, acting as surrogate composers.
Works: Antoine Fuqua (director) and Roy Prendergast (music editor): temp track to Tears of the Sun (170-74); Antoine Fuqua (director) and Hans Zimmer (composer): score to Tears of the Sun (172-73); Jonathan Demme (director) and Suzana Peric (music editor): temp track to Philadelphia (176-79); Jonathan Demme (director) and Howard Shore (composer): score to Philadelphia (176-79).
Sources: Alan Silvestri: score to What Lies Beneath (171-72, 174); Bruce Springsteen: Streets of Philadelphia (176-79).
Index Classifications: 1900s, 2000s, Film
Contributed by: Kate Altizer
Individual record
[+] Smith, Jeff. “Popular Songs and Comic Allusion in Contemporary Cinema.” In Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight, 407-30. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
Modern films often use popular songs to generate comic allusions or puns that rely on audience connections to either lyrics or pop culture references. Musical irony’s cinematic history began with “film funners,” took on a less comic tone in Classical Hollywood, and regained its humorous function in New Hollywood. American Graffiti (1973) was influential on Hollywood’s use of popular music for its innovative deployment of popular songs. After American Graffiti, there was a strong economic impetus to use popular music in movies, but this does not reflect how the music is actually used. Musical puns have three primary relationships to comedy: narrative function, the relevant perceptions audiences might have of the music, and bisociative qualities.
Works: Jerry Bruckheimer (director): soundtrack to Con Air (407); George Lucas (director): soundtrack to American Graffiti (410-11, 423); Lawrence Kasdan (director): soundtrack to The Big Chill (417-20); Renny Harlin (director): soundtrack to The Long Kiss Goodnight (419-20); Lana Wachowski (director): soundtrack to Bound (420); Arlene Sanford (director): soundtrack to A Very Brady Sequel (421-22); David Mirkin (director): soundtrack to Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (421-22); Wes Craven (director): soundtrack to Scream (422); Joel Coen and Ethan Coen (directors): soundtrack to The Big Lebowski (423-24); Paul Thomas Anderson (director): soundtrack to Boogie Nights (423-27).
Sources: Lynyrd Skynyrd: Sweet Home Alabama (407); Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong (songwriters) and Marvin Gaye (performer): I Heard it Through the Grapevine (417-19); The Zombies (songwriters) and Santana (performer): She’s Not There (420); Ronnie Shannon (songwriter) and Aretha Franklin (performer): I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You) (420); Homer Banks, Carl Hampton, and Raymond Jackson (songwriters) and Luther Vandross (performer): If Loving You is Wrong (421-22); Blue Öyster Cult: Don’t Fear the Reaper (422); Creedence Clearwater Revival: Lookin’ Out My Back Door (423-24); Gene McDaniels (songwriter) and Roberta Flack (performer): Compared to What (424); Melanie: Brand New Key (425-26); Hot Chocolate: You Sexy Thing (426); Jeff Lynne (songwriter) and ELO (performers): Livin’ Thing (426-27); Randy Newman (songwriter) and Three Dog Night (performers): Mama Told Me Not to Come (427).
Index Classifications: 1900s, Film
Contributed by: Kate Altizer
Individual record
[+] Stilwell, Robynn J. “‘I Just Put a Drone under Him . . . ’: Collage and Subversion in the Score of ‘Die Hard.’” Music & Letters 78 (November 1997): 551-80.
Michael Kamen’s score to Die Hard is both an integral part of the complete text and an interpretation of the film. The score focuses on the character of Hans Gruber rather than the hero John McClane, and Kamen’s choices aid in the characterization of Gruber as a sophisticated anti-hero rather than a villain. In a particularly illuminating scene, Kamen further musically distinguishes Gruber from McClane by scoring a speech as a recitative and aria, and the music is sensitive to Alan Rickman’s delivery. Kamen communicates cultural information and further elevates Gruber by the extensive use of borrowed music. Whereas McClane has no musical theme, Kamen assigns quotations and manipulations of the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to Gruber. The choice of Beethoven was a suggestion from the film’s director, John McTiernan, influenced by Wendy (formerly Walter) Carlos’s score for A Clockwork Orange. Kamen’s uses of Beethoven (and Singin’ in the Rain, also used in A Clockwork Orange) are dramatically and musically distinct from the earlier film. Whereas in A Clockwork Orange the borrowings are largely quotations that frame the violent and transgressive onscreen acts, Kamen’s score manipulates the borrowed melodies as themes appropriate to the dramatic action and cultural suggestions of the film.
Works: John McTiernan (director) and Michael Kamen (composer): score to Die Hard (552, 561-72, 575-80); Stanley Kubrick (director) and Wendy (Walter) Carlos (composer): score to A Clockwork Orange (568-72).
Sources: James Lord Pierpont: Jingle Bells (561-62); Felix Bernard and Dick Smith: Winter Wonderland (561, 563); Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne: Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! (561); Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown: Singin’ in the Rain (561-63, 568-71); Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 (563-71).
Index Classifications: 1900s, Film
Contributed by: Kate Altizer
Individual record