The Arnold Shaw Popular Music Research Center Spring 2024 lectures will focus on American cinema music. The guests are prominent scholars in the field of the history and interpretation of film sound. They will discuss the music of John Williams’s Star Wars series, the western, and more. There are two lectures.
April 16:Robynn Stilwell (Georgetown University),
“Scoring America’s Sense of Self: Music, Ideology, and the Cinematic Western.” Robynn Stilwell offers a lecture on music and the cinematic western.
Items to be discussed include Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) and The Native Americans (1994). Stilwell will focus on the role of the songs of Sebastian Robertson in these productions.April 23:
Frank Lehman (Tufts University), “Space Operas and Skywalker Symphonies: Listening to Film Music with Open Ears.” Frank Lehman offers a lecture on the music to Star Wars and other cinematic blockbusters. A long-standing attitude in film theory and criticism is that movie music should remain in the background, that it should be felt but unheard. But with more than a century’s worth of great music written for cinema, this bias is worth reevaluating. Movie soundtracks, film nights at the Hollywood Bowl, and especially the recent popularity of live-to-picture performances–what musicologist Brooke McCorkle tellingly calls “concert movies”–all suggest one thing: audiences are hungry to hear film music not as some suppressed adjunct to a movie, but on its own terms, as music. In this talk, Professor Lehman will walk through his own experience in consuming film music in this unusual way, and sketch a new model for film music appreciation: cine-symphonic listening.
