Lawrence Kramer & Richard Leppert 
Beyond the Soundtrack 
Representing Music in Cinema

This groundbreaking collection by the most distinguished musicologists and film scholars in their fields gives long overdue recognition to music as equal to the image in shaping the experience of film. Refuting the familiar idea that music serves as an unnoticed prop for narrative, these essays demonstrate that music is a fully imagined and active power in the worlds of film. Even where films do give it a supporting role—and many do much more—music makes an independent contribution. Drawing on recent advances in musicology and cinema studies,
Beyond the Soundtrack interprets the cinematic representation of music with unprecedented richness. The authors cover a broad range of narrative films, from the ‘silent’ era (not so silent) to the present. Once we think beyond the soundtrack, this volume shows, there is no unheard music in cinema.

Table of Content

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Phonoplay: Recasting Film Music


PART I. MUSICAL MEANING

1. The Boy on the Train, or Bad Symphonies and Good Movies: The Revealing Error of the ‘Symphonic Score’

Peter Franklin

2. Representing Beethoven: Romance and Sonata Form in Simon Cellan Jones’s Eroica

Nicholas Cook

3. Minima Romantica

Susan Mc Clary

4. Melodic Trains: Music in Polanksi’s The Pianist

Lawrence Kramer

5. Mute Music: Polanski’s The Pianist and Campion’s The Piano

Michel Chion

PART II. MUSICAL AGENCY

6. Opera, Aesthetic Violence, and the Imposition of Modernity: Fitzcarraldo

Richard Leppert

7. Sight, Sound, and the Temporality of Myth Making in Koyaanisqatsi

Mitchell Morris

8. How Sound Floats on Land: The Suppression and Release of Folk and Indigenous Musics in the Cinematic Terrain

Philip Brophy

9. Auteur Music

Claudia Gorbman

10. Transport and Transportation in Audiovisual Memory

Berthold Hoeckner

11. The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic

Robynn J. Stilwell

PART III. MUSICAL IDENTITY

12. Early Film Themes: Roxy, Adorno, and the Problem of Cultural Capital

Rick Altman

13. Before Willie: Reconsidering Music and the Animated Cartoon of the 1920s

Daniel Goldmark

14. Side by Side: Nino Rota, Music, and Film

Richard Dyer

15. White Face, Black Noise: Miles Davis and the Soundtrack

Krin Gabbard

16. Men at the Keyboard: Liminal Spaces and the Heterotopian Function of Music

Gary C. Thomas


Notes on Contributors

Index of Films Cited

Works Cited

General Index

About the author

Daniel Goldmark is Assistant Professor of Music History at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of Tunes for 'Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon.Lawrence Kramer is Professor of English and Music at Fordham University and editor of 19th Century Music. His many books include Opera and Modern Culture, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History, and Why Classical Music Still Matters.Richard Leppert is Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. His many books include Theodor W. Adorno: Essays on Music, and The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body.