Quo Vadis, Film Music Studies?
At the present moment, the work of film music studies seems primarily preoccupied with constructing a new canon within “classical” music, that for film composers. The proliferation of textbooks for the growing numbers of courses about film music has encouraged this identification of a core repertory of film scores. While it is true that further research is needed for even such well-known composers as Max Steiner, Alfred Newman and Bernard Herrmann, this should not occur at the expense of more peripheral figures or composers working in other time-based media. Above all, those who study music in “live” media such as radio, television and the internet should not be classified as second-class citizens within a high/low aesthetic split as has originated both within and between jazz and popular music studies. Here Michael Saffle has pioneered a path through his research, championing the once disparaged Liszt and other manifestations of “low” musical culture like dialect songs and mountain music. Through his openness to the most diverse musical styles, he has managed to avoid canonizing any one style or group of musicians. Although he has only peripherally dealt with television music, Saffle’s wide-ranging knowledge and interests, as often revealed in one and the same publication, encourage us to eschew the elevation of film music over the music of “live” media. The commercialization of those musics has served as the complaint of the film-music elitists (who also like to reject recent Hollywood film scores) – yet again Saffle has paved the way by seriously studying the commercial aspects of Liszt’s activities.
Upon the basis of these Saffle-anticipated (if not -inspired) advances, I think it is possible to move further into the twenty-first century with the confidence that the study of non-canonic music for moving images will increasingly thrive. Indeed, the recent creation of the journal Music, Sound and the Moving Image (co-editors Anahid Kassabian and Ian Gardiner) serves as one manifestation of the desire to explore the full breadth of the interface between music and the time-based visual media. As the co-editors explain in their advertising for the new journal, it will be “the first international scholarly journal devoted to the study of the interaction between music and sound with the entirety of moving image media – film, television, music video, advertising, computer games, mixed-media installation, digital art, live cinema, et alia.... It is hoped that the journal also will provide an important focus for the similarly diverse and expanding community of media music scholars.” I can readily envision conferences and edited collections springing from such an initiative; the 2005 international conference “Over the Waves: Music in/and Broadcasting” (McMaster University) represented a first attempt to bring together scholars of music in “live” media within one forum. The resultant activities of the community of “media music scholars” will embrace film-music studies, but within the broader context of music for all of the time-based visual media. I can even imagine future sessions of the American Musicological Society devoting themselves to music for, say, television or computer games. As long as music is used to accompany and enhance the moving image, there will be a need for scholars to track and study these practices and their impact upon consumers of such media.
Little did Michael Saffle anticipate that when he encouraged and befriended a young Northwestern PhD in the late 1980s, it would lead to this!
Happy birthday, Michael!
Jim Deaville
Carleton University