Contemporary Film Music

Investigating Cinema Narratives and Composition

Lindsay Coleman, Joakim Tillman, Lindsay Coleman, Joakim Tillman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781137573742
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137573759
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The purpose of this book, through its very creation, is to strengthen the dialogue between practitioner and theorist. To that end, a film academic and musicologist have collaborated as editors on this book, which is in turn comprised of interviews with composers alongside complementary chapters that focus on a particular feature of the composer's approach or style. These chapters are written by a fellow composer, musicologist, or film academic who specializes in that element of the composer's output. In the interview portions of this book, six major film composers discuss their work from the early 1980s to the present day: Carter Burwell, Mychael Danna, Dario Marianelli, Rachel Portman, Zbigniew Preisner, and A.R. Rahman. The focus is on the practical considerations of film composition, the relationship each composer has with the moving image, narrative, technical considerations, personal motivations in composing, the relationships composers have with their directors, and their own creative processes. Contemporary Film Music also explores the contemporary influence of electronic music, issues surrounding the mixing of soundtracks, music theory, and the evolution of each composer's musical voice.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Figures
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: A.R. Rahman Interview
• Chapter 3: The ‘Alternate Space’ of A.R. Rahman’s Film Music
• Chapter 4: Zbigniew Preisner Interview
• Chapter 5: Music by Zbigniew Preisner? Fictional Composers and Compositions in the Kieślowski Collaborations
• Chapter 6: Carter Burwell Interview
• Chapter 7: Burwell and Space: Inner, Outer, Environmental and Acoustical
• Chapter 8: Rachel Portman Interview
• Chapter 9: Eero Tarasti and the Narratological Construction of Rachel Portman’s Emma
• Chapter 10: Dario Marianelli Interview
• Chapter 11: Solo Instruments and Internal Focalization in Dario Marianelli’s Pride & Prejudice and Atonement
• Chapter 12: Mychael Danna Interview
• Chapter 13: Mychael Danna: Music as Metaphor
• Chapter 14: John Williams and Contemporary Film Music
• Chapter 15: Musical Syntax in John Williams’s Film Music Themes
• Index