The Grandmaster – Film Sound Analysis Wong Kar Wai ‘s much-appraised film “The Grandmaster” about the life and memoirs of a once great martial arts master, is a downhearted romance punctuated with breath-taking sequences of gravity-defying martial arts. The sound technique used in the movie provides an exquisite, rich, enveloping atmosphere that adds impact and…
Trailers, Tonality, and the Force of Nostalgia Film trailers are like hyperactive microcosms of the movies they herald. Their formal compression and immediacy makes these minifilms terrific laboratories in which to explore how musical structure can serve expressive ends. But trailer music isn’t just shrunken down movie music. It speaks its own dialect, a kind…
Film Music Themes: Analysis and Corpus Study – EXAMPLES AND APPENDIX The phrase structure of film music themes remains virtually unexplored in scholarly literature. In Mark Richards’s article from 2016, he proposes an analytical system that expands and adapts Caplin 1998 in order to categorize the gamut of film music themes in some detail. This…
Frank Lehman discusses what it means 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…
