John Williams and Contemporary Film Music

Audissino, Emilio

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-57375-9_14

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Naturally, the prevalence of stereotypes is in no way exclusive to library music. Faulkner (1983) and, more recently, Audissino (2017: 224), in their discussions of creative and labour practices in mainstream cinema, point to a connection between ‘formulaic’ and stereotyped approaches to composition and the need to meet ever-shortening deadlines.…”

Section: Viewers In a Hurry: Musical Stereotypes As Communication Sho...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Digital technologies have had profound impacts not only in the habits and practices that inform how music is created and accessed, but also in the ways musicians conceptualise their professional identity and balance various activities, tackling a wider array of tasks that previously would have fallen to different professionals (Théberge, 2015). In bespoke scoring for cinema, for example, Audissino (2017: 224) notes how film composers must today be proficient with digital tools, a factor which has ‘enormously quickened the [composition] process’, adding that ‘producers and executives have taken notice, shortening the minimum time they grant composers to deliver the music’. In the case of library music, too, our interactions with digital technologies and processes have produced ‘new experiences of time’ (Barker, 2012: 9).…”

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Library music as a matter of time

Durand

2024

Time & Society

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The industry of library music (pre-existing pieces that can be licensed for use in media) has grown considerably in the past two decades with its transition to a digital medium. A rising number of composers rely on this music as a source of income, along with audiovisual creators who increasingly use it in their productions. This expansion has accentuated a fundamental aspect of library music: the creation of large quantities of tracks at breakneck speed. Parallel to this, the video editors and videographers who form library music's main client base experience tight production deadlines where the choice of music is often left as an afterthought. This article explores the implications of the sped-up creation and use of library music in the current online media landscape. Although the interactions of composers and videographers with this music are often fraught with concerns of limited time, their attitudes towards this acceleration vary considerably: for instance, composers describe their fast-paced work in widely different ways, viewing it as a constraint, or, on the contrary, as a positive and freeing aspect. That being said, the sense of urgency shared by these agents has wide-ranging impacts on every step of the ‘life’ of a library track, from its composition and presentation to its selection and synchronisation with images. As composers attempt to appeal to hurried videographers browsing libraries, these, in turn, resort to this music as an invaluable strategy to retain their audience's attention. Furthermore, sonic stereotypes that are prevalent in library music are valued as communication shortcuts in audiovisuals where messages must be conveyed through instantly recognisable musical formulas. In addition to broader impacts on the workings of library music, this widespread perception of ‘lacking time’ is also a vital factor that shapes its sonic characteristics themselves, making library music truly a matter of time.

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Section: Viewers In a Hurry: Musical Stereotypes As Communication Sho...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Library music as a matter of time

Durand

2024

Time & Society

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“…lasting success and wide appeal (Golding, 2019). John Williams's contributions to the nine live-action films that make up the "Skywalker Saga" and its interlinked Original (1977-1983), Prequel (1999-2005), and Sequel (2015 trilogies have had a significant and continuing impact on cinematic scoring since the late 1970s (Audissino, 2021;Cooke, 2008;Scheurer, 1997). As an object of study, the music from the Star Wars films is particularly useful as a vehicle for corpus analysis given that the music was written by a single composer across all major series entries and over a period of four decades.…”

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confidence: 99%

Presenting the SWTC: A Symbolic Corpus of Themes from John Williams’ Star Wars Episodes I-IX

Arthur,

Lehman,

McNamara

2023

EMR

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This paper presents a new symbolic corpus of musical themes from the complete Star Wars trilogies (Episodes I-IX) by John Williams. The corpus files are made available in multiple formats (.krn, .sib., and .musicxml) and include melodic, harmonic, and formal information. The Star Wars Thematic Corpus (SWTC) contains a total of 64 distinctive, recurring, and symbolically meaningful themes and motifs, commonly referred to as leitmotifs. Through this corpus we also introduce a new humdrum standard for non-functional harmony encodings, **harte (Harte et al., 2005; Harte, 2010). This report details the motivation, describes the transcription and encoding processes, and provides some brief summary statistics. While relatively small in scale, the SWTC represents a unified collection from one of the most prolific and influential composers of the 20th and 21st centuries, and the under-studied subset of film and multimedia musical material in general. We hope the SWTC will provide insights into John Williams’ compositional style, as well as prove useful in comparisons against other thematic corpora from film and beyond.

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“…By convention, the origin of this hyperclassical return in Hollywood scoring is traced to the oeuvre of John Williams (Cooke, 2008), the film composer who has attracted the most scholarly attention (e.g., Scheurer, 1997;Schneller, 2013;Lehman, 2015;Zacharopoulos, 2017), famous for scores including Jaws (1975), and the Star Wars (1977 and Indiana Jones (1981-2008 franchises (see Audissino, 2014). Less attention has been paid to the work of James Horner (cf., Cohen, 2014;Lehman, 2012Lehman, , 2013, whose work has also embraced the Romantic tradition of classical Hollywood scores (Lehman, 2018).…”

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confidence: 99%