Music - Journal Articles
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- ItemPeople and sounds: Filming African music between visual anthropology and television documentary(SIBE Sociedad de Etnomusicología, 2007) D'Amico, LeonardoWatching music, and not only listening to or writing about it, is a priority to deepen in the knowledge of traditional music both in Europe and elsewhere. Since visual anthropology was born, there have been different ways to convey this idea. Through a review of the documentary films produced from the fifties until the present time, the paper shows the historical changes on the film industry priorities with regard to world music portrayals. The dialectal tension between fictional and ethnographic approaches has been a constant. This paper supports the premise that auteur films can reach ethnomusicological level, although not being scientific, and have an added poetical value of great help in this field.
- ItemLa culture musicale traditionelle des Garifuna(Ateliers d'ethnomusicologie, 2000-01-01) Penedo, Ismael; D'Amico, LeonardoThe Garifuna are the descendants of Caribe Rojos Indians who occupied certain islands of the Lesser Antilles before the arrival of Christopher Columbus, as well as runaway and shipwrecked African slaves. Also known as Black Caribbeans, they represent one of the most unique fusions between African groups and indigenous cultures of Latin America. Music plays a fundamental role in Garifuna culture. The traditional musical system bears witness to this dual African and Amerindian heritage, the product of a cultural recreation resulting from a tortuous historical process and ethnic and cultural hybridization. Despite the pressures of numerous forced exoduses and the insidious process of modernization and emigration which threatens the bases of their culture and their ethnic identity, the Garifuna have managed to keep their music and their religion alive within a political reality and often unstable economy. Through them it is still possible to collect the most "authentic" part of their culture.
- ItemScoring Alien Worlds: World music mashups in 21st-Century tv, film and video games(Pejabat Karang Mengarang (UPSI Press), 2021-08-21) Stock, Jonathan P. J.This article provides three case studies of the use of world music resources to build alien worlds in mainstream screen media with Sci-Fi or Fantasy settings. The case studies—the TV series Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome, the film Avatar and the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) video game World of Warcraft— show how composers and associated music professionals in the early twenty-first century increasingly draw on such sonic materials to generate a rich sense of sonic otherness and note the means they employ to sidestep such music’s existing geographical and cultural references. Each case study explores a contrasting subject position—composer, music consultant and consumer—to better trace not only the creation of such soundtracks but also what senses disparate groups of ordinary listeners subsequently make of them. The examples suggest that outside the sphere of big-budget cinema there is a growing confidence in both the creation and reception of such sonic projections, and that, when sufficiently attracted by what they hear, listeners may actively seek out ways to follow-up on the expressive characterisations put forward in such soundtracks. Three broad types of mashup are uncovered, those that work with world music ingredients by insinuation, integration and creolisation.
- ItemRevisiting Vangelis: Sonic citation and narration in the score for Blade Runner 2049(Goldsmiths Press, 2020-10-06) McGlynn, James DenisIn August 2016, it was announced that Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson was to compose the score for Denis Villeneuve’s highly anticipated sequel to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). However, just weeks in advance of the film’s worldwide premiere, it became apparent that Jóhannsson’s involvement in the project had been terminated, making way for an apparent takeover by composers Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch. The popular narrative that developed to explicate this seemingly sudden shift was that Jóhannsson’s music didn’t adequately cite Vangelis’ original score for the 1982 Blade Runner. This article explores the extratextual musical citation present in Zimmer and Wallfisch’s score for Blade Runner 2049. While only one cue from the original Blade Runner is directly cited in the film, I propose that the composers adopt Vangelis’ 1982 soundtrack as a primary compositional referent for their whole score and that his source material permeates the entire film: melodically, harmonically, and sonorously. By separately addressing the film’s (i) sonorous and (ii) motivic citation of Vangelis’ original material for Blade Runner, I hope to highlight the diverse array of narrational, structural and musical functions that musical citation can facilitate in scoring practice, even without audience identification of the source context.
- Item"I am no longer afraid": A case study on the musical communication of trauma in narrative film and television(University of California Press, 2021-12) McGlynn, James DenisIn Hollywood film and narrative television, we often see filmmakers bestow narratives of personal tragedy, trauma and loss upon their protagonists. Whether or not this is seen as a time-tested and efficient literary device or as a hackneyed and superficial representation of trauma, it is undeniably one of the most recurrent tropes of characterization in narrative film. Exploring the traumatic past of a troubled protagonist is routinely used as an attempt to enhance audiences’ understanding of a character, affording us insights into their motivations, flaws and desires. Such narratives are equally used to account for the actions of unpardonable antagonists and antiheroes as Jeffrey Bullins reminds us [1] and, quite often, this “dark and troubled past” idiom simply serves filmmakers as a convenient means of narrative exposition. Pelin Başci describes this latter quality and the intersecting narrative frames it can afford a film, whereby diary entries, therapy sessions and other...