Film and Television Music
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10.5: Zachary Cairns, “Whole-Tone Collections and Temporal Dislocation in Film Music” - explores the use of the whole tone collection in contemporary film to convey that the characters or the audience are moving through time; ideal for introducing students to the sound and effects of the whole tone collection, and for engaging students in discussions about music, narrative, and musical meaning
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10.2: Brad Osborn, “Dual Leading-Tone Loops in Recent Television Dramas” - identifies a category of chord loops that create tonal ambiguity and connects this ambiguity to dramatic scenarios in recent television dramas; suitable for teaching chord loops and exploring the relationship between music and narrative/visual storytelling
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9.6: Jeremy Orosz, “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: A New Model for Sound-Alike Tunes” - explores how composers evoke familiar songs without breaching copyright law and considers the role of visual imagery, timbre, instrumentation, and melodic contour in producing sound-alike tunes
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9.1: Chelsea Oden, “‘We are dancing, We are flying’: The Feeling of Flight in Dance Scenes from Recent Popular Film” – discusses visual, metrical, and timbral aspects of dance scenes in film; introduces the distinction between duple, triple, simple, and compound meters in an embodied context, suitable for music fundamentals and beginning students; introduces the “sound envelope” (ADSR) and connects timbre to embodied experiences, suitable for students at all levels developing a vocabulary for describing timbre
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8.4: Stanley V. Kleppinger, “Appropriating Copland’s Fanfare” – argues that characteristic gestures from Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man came to symbolize Americanness in popular culture
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7.3: Orit Hilewicz and Stephen Sewell, “A Film Scene for Schoenberg’s Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielscene” – produces a new silent film to accompany Schoenberg’s music for an imagined silent film; accompanying materials: https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.21.27.1/mto.21.27.1.hilewicz.html
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4.1: Christopher Doll, “Was it Diegetic, or Just a Dream? Music’s Paradoxical Place in the Film Inception” – explains terms “diegetic,” “nondiegetic,” and “fantastical gap” as it relates to analysis of music in Inception (2010); shows interrelations between motives drawn from diegetic content used in Hans Zimmer’s film score, which serves both diegetic and nondiegetic functions; ideal for engaging analysis of film music and meaningful motivic relations