Teaching Music History by Mary Natvig

Author:Mary Natvig
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780754601296
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-07-05T04:00:00+00:00

Technical aspects

Because the functions of the film score are closely connected to the mechanics of the genre, I devote the second unit of the course to an investigation of how the technical medium of film shapes the character of the music. (In my course this unit is shorter than the first, but it might be expanded given available technical resources. Some teaching environments may have sound labs for demonstrations or may be located near a film studio where a recording session could be observed.) I introduce students to examples of directors' and composers' timing, breakdown, and spotting notes, as well as music editors' cue sheets.18 As an example of how these relate to the finished score, I use a metronome and Korngold's timing notes to a scene in Michael Curtiz's The Sea Hawk to simulate how a variable click track works. In our process of isolating and identifying exactly where and why Korngold chose to use slight tempo modifications to underscore the escape of Errol Flynn and the English prisoners from the galley of a Spanish ship, the crucial relationship between tempo and film scoring becomes evident. The subtle shifts in tempo are critical to the dramatic effectiveness of the scene. In modem film-scoring, professional digital editing programs such as Auricle add what are called "SMPTE time codes" to the image track and compensate for much of what was done mechanically to synchronize sound to image in the 1940s. But the click track and punches and streamers, devised by Steiner and Newman in the early stages of classical Hollywood scoring, are still a part of the technology. Now, however, exact frame-by-frame information has been computerized and can be manipulated with the same precision on video as on film stock.

Another important development in the last thirty years is the increasing sophistication of the "temp track," the director's and music editor's temporary synchronization of preexisting music to the film before the composer has finished writing and recording the score. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is particularly effective in demonstrating how a temp track influences the composer's choices. In this infamous case, Kubrick decided to lock his "temporary" classical music into the final cut of the film, rather than dub in Alex North's commissioned music. North's score has recently been recorded and can be synched to parts of the film for comparison. This process of commutation reveals how aesthetic aspects of the film beyond the dialogue and visuals are imposed on composers and often limit the originality of their contribution. (Compare North's "Sunrise," for example, to that of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra, used at the openine of the film.)

We also touch upon the recording and mixing process. It would be easy, and certainly misleading, for students to draw the conclusion that film music is better today simply because there are more sophisticated methods of recording and playback. I illustrate the problem of studio mixing in the earlier decades of sound film first by using a sequence from Joseph Mankiewicz's Julius

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