Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film

Winters, Ben

doi:10.4324/9780203768167

Cited by 16 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…For one, there is an apparent lack of 'imaginative resistance' among audience members here, in the sense that Ben Winters invokes in describing how his own immersion in a film's fiction is disrupted when actors fail to convincingly impersonate classical musicians. 30 Trained observers may notice the problems in Whiplash: Erskine asserts that 'his [Teller 's] hands are a mess in terms of technique, holding the sticks, etc. '; 31 in Figure 1, for example, note how the pad of Teller's right thumb does not appear to be in contact with the stick, where it should form the basis of the fulcrum.…”

Section: Visual Bias In Whiplashmentioning

confidence: 99%

Whiplash, Buddy Rich, and Visual Virtuosity in Drum Kit Performance

Godsall¹

2022

Twentieth-Century Music

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The 2014 film Whiplash depicts successful jazz drumming as an athletic exhibition of speed and endurance, in a manner that reflects its protagonist's idolization of Buddy Rich (1917–87). The crowd-pleasing virtuosity of Rich and Whiplash has drawn critics’ ire, but this article interrogates the ideas of musical authenticity that underpin their complaints, and offers a more productive analysis of the film's drum kit performances and their inspiration, informed by a range of jazz, film, and performance scholarship. Specific attention is drawn to the performances’ visual attractions. Whiplash's fast editing style and shots of exertion – grimacing, sweat, blood – give non-expert viewers a sense of drumming's physical and mental demands, and much the same is true of Rich's exaggerated movements and expressions, whether seen live or (as is commonly the case) amplified by a screen's mediation.

show abstract

Section: Visual Bias In Whiplashmentioning

confidence: 99%

Whiplash, Buddy Rich, and Visual Virtuosity in Drum Kit Performance

Godsall¹

2022

Twentieth-Century Music

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This background narrative plays out primarily through the score's reconfigurations of various themes from Korngold's filmography. Winters (, pp. 127–34) argues that the appearance and development of these filmic mementos come to reflect the formerly ‘serious’ composer's divided attitude towards his career and the competing tugs of musical modernism and Romanticism he felt so keenly.…”

Section: Analytical Prioritiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The ultimate lesson of the study of film‐as‐concert music is to hear not only recontextualised film underscore, but also film music as an entire genre musically , as music . Recent work, such as that of Franklin (), Winters () and Kulezic‐Wilson () proposes that narrative film is itself already innately musical. For Winters in particular, this is an active sort of cinematic musicality, where we the audience are involved and invested with the soundtrack in a way that might make a sceptical composer like Leonard Rosenman both embarrassed and secretly proud.…”

Section: Rehearing Cinematicallymentioning

confidence: 99%

Film‐as‐Concert Music and the Formal Implications of ‘Cinematic Listening’

Lehman¹

2018

Music Analysis

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

What does it mean for film music – subordinated, contingent, ‘unheard’ – to be plucked from its intended context and placed at the forefront of the listener's attention? The tradition of excerpting and arranging movie scores for the concert hall poses this question sharply. While scholarship on ‘cinematic listening’ has picked up in recent years, the specifically music‐theoretical issues raised by this repertoire have been largely unaddressed. In this article, I argue that film‐as‐concert music presents hearing ‘cinematically’ as a valid alternative to structural modes of listening, a form of hearing that subverts both naive formalism and reflexive anti‐formalism. Following a discussion of theoretical and interpretative priorities for analysing film‐as‐concert music, I begin investigation of a subset of the film‐as‐concert corpus: stand‐alone scherzi originating from action set pieces. More than any other type of underscore, action cues answer to dramatic, editorial and visual imperatives rather than to ‘absolute’ logic. My core data emerges from a detailed study of John Williams's film and concert scherzi, with short analyses of cues/pieces from E.T., the Indiana Jones movies and Star Wars. My approach emphasises the way in which formal alterations bring about drastically different ways of hearing the work tonally and expressively across multiple versions. A larger‐scale case study of ‘The Asteroid Field’ from The Empire Strikes Back serves to demonstrate the tonal, sectional and narratival transformations that occur between movie theatre and concert hall. To conclude, I propose that the film‐as‐concert mindset can be transferred to filmgoing itself, as a new mode of cinematic listening.

show abstract

Affect, Nostalgia, and Modernization

Wheeler¹

2017

A Companion to Latin American Cinema

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film

Cited by 16 publications

References 0 publications

Whiplash, Buddy Rich, and Visual Virtuosity in Drum Kit Performance

Whiplash, Buddy Rich, and Visual Virtuosity in Drum Kit Performance

Film‐as‐Concert Music and the Formal Implications of ‘Cinematic Listening’

Affect, Nostalgia, and Modernization

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About