STUDY DAY: Current Work in Film Music / Sound Studies

Saturday 9 May 2015

School of Music, Australian National University (Canberra)

9.30 Registration

9.45 Keynote 1 Chair: Michael Christoforidis

James Wierzbicki (University of Sydney)
“Sound Effect / Sound Affect: ‘Meaningful’ Noise in the Cinema”

10.30 Session 1 Chair: Michael Christoforidis

Eloise Ross (La Trobe University)
“The Cinematic Pit of Anxiety: Sound in The Snake Pit”
Angie Contini (University of Sydney)
“Towards Indeterminacy: Modes of Presence between Music and the Cinematic Body”

11.15 MORNING TEA

11.45 Keynote 2 Chair: Natalie Lewandowski

Philip Brophy (Melbourne)
“Considering Quincy Jones: Blackness, Studiophonics and Cinema”

12.30 Session 2 Chair: Natalie Lewandowski

Johannes Luebbers (ANU School of Music)
“Evening the Score: The Collaborative Approach of a Jazz Trio in Film Music”
Phillip Johnston (Newcastle Conservatorium, University of Newcastle)
“Wordless! - Music for Comics and Graphic Novels Turns Time Into Space
(and back again)”

13.15 LUNCH

14.15 Session 3 Chair: David Irving

Gregory Camp (School of Music, The University of Auckland)
“‘It’s my leopard and I have to get it and to get it I have to sing’:
Music as Narrative Node in the Films of Howard Hawks”
Michael Christoforidis & Liz Kertesz
(Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne)
“A Genre Too Far: Michael Powell's Failed Musical Honeymoon”
James McCarthy (Sydney)
“Music at Film Australia in the Post-War Years”

15.30 AFTERNOON TEA

16.00 Session 4 Chair: Johannes Luebbers

Natalie Lewandowski (Queensland Conservatorium of Music, Griffith University)
“Everyone Makes a Sound: The Impact of National Screen Policies of Australia and
New Zealand on Post-Production Sound Personnel”
Craig Morgan (Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney)
“The Use of Virtual Instruments by Australian Screen Composers”

16.45 Round Table: Future Directions in Research for Film Music / Sound Studies
Peter Tregear (ANU School of Music) – chair;
Roger Hillman (ANU); James Wierzbicki (University of Sydney)

17.30 Close
 ABSTRACTS

KEYNOTE
Sound Effect / Sound Affect: "Meaningful" Noise in the Cinema
James Wierzbicki (University of Sydney)
Every sound has meaning, but some sounds give the impression of being more
meaningful than others. In the real world, the separation of sound that is somehow
significant from inconsequential background noise is always done—consciously or not—
by us. In the fictional world of narrative cinema, the separation is typically done for
us, by the filmmakers.
This paper explores various ways in which decidedly artificial sounds can, in the
context of cinema, be interpreted by audiences as real. Its primary focus, however, is
on sounds that in the cinema are made to seem somehow more than just real. The
paper deals with sonic symbolism and with sonic double entendres of the sort that
have figured into suspense films since the 1930s. It deals, too, with “special” sound of
the sort that has figured into cinema since the advent of three-dimensional Dolby
stereo. In general, the paper deals with the use of sound not just for effect but for
affect.
james.wierzbicki@sydney.edu.au

The Cinematic Pit of Anxiety: Sound in The Snake Pit

Eloise Ross (La Trobe University)
Anxiety expressed or felt in its extreme forms can, in some understandings of the
term, be understood as a mental illness. In fact, anxious thoughts pervade many of our
experiences of apprehension, vulnerability, and alarm, often manifesting themselves
as symptoms within the body that may seem uncontrollable or unconscious. As an
early and well-known portrayal of mental illness in film, The Snake Pit (Anatole
Litvak, 1948) registers various symptoms of anxiety and psychosis in the character of
Virginia Cunningham (Olivia de Havilland), interned at a mental institution. Litvak and
his crew at Twentieth Century-Fox created this sensation of mental illness in the
cinematic form that really gives the film a strength unique to its time. Virginia’s
internal sense of distress is transferred to us in the audience via a series of aural
techniques that affect a series of empathetic mirroring responses and, with a constant
sonic intensity, can provoke a whole range of sensory reactions in the viewing,
listening body. With specific attention to the psychological dimensions of sound
design, and the sensitivities of the body participating in the cinematic experience, this
paper will propound that it is the sound of A Snake Pit that is the most powerful in
involving the spectator-auditor in the experience of anxiety.
E.Ross@latrobe.edu.au

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Towards Indeterminacy: Modes of Presence between Music and the Cinematic Body
Angie Contini (University of Sydney)
Across the borders of film studies and film music scholarship, the concept of
“presence” recurs as the catalyst for contemplating cinema’s impression of reality.
When it originally appears in film theory, it is framed ambivalently as the “presence of
an absence”, as a complex paradox for thinking the existential relation between
cinema and reality through the cinematic body. When this paradoxical “presence-
absence” appears in film music discourse, it is reconfigured as the oldest set of binary
opposites in Western thought, where presence is privileged over and before absence.
In this very particular sense, the presence of music is privileged as restoring the life of
sentience and substance to the silent, cinematic body of absence.
How can we rethink the existential relation between music and the cinematic body
without abandoning the catalyst of “presence”? Does a return to the original,
paradoxical complexity of the cinematic body’s temporal and eternal “presence-
absence” enable music to be rethought through the same uncanny and irresolvable
space?
In allowing indeterminacy and liminality to thrive, does presence become a polymodal
threshold that creates a rupture for perception and a disturbance for thought rather
than reinforcing the idea of a reality governed by binary oppositions and hierarchies,
for the greater consolation of unity, certainty and resolvability?
acon8074@uni.sydney.edu.au

KEYNOTE
Considering Quincy Jones: Blackness, Studiophonics & Cinema
Philip Brophy (Melbourne)
Lost in the history of film music. Living in the grey zone between defiantly egocentric
jazz improvisation and the Eurocentric grandeur of tonal orchestration. Quincy Jones’
writing, arranging and orchestration for cinema (36 scores between 1966 and 1972)
belie an overlooked complexity. He radicalised film music equally through his
utilization of “studiophonic” production techniques, and his encyclopaedic referencing
of black musical idioms. With cool verve and bold respect, Jones wrenched the film
score from its Wagnerian cave and slammed it down in the midst of cross-town traffic,
where horns are sounded by cor anglais and Cadillacs, and where cop cars on the
prowl chase black men on the run.
pb@philipbrophy.com

Evening the Score: The Collaborative Approach of a Jazz Trio in Film Music
Johannes Luebbers (ANU School of Music)
As a style dependent on interaction and improvisation, collaboration is often touted as
a hallmark of jazz. Film music too involves the hands of many, with the contribution
of orchestrators, conductors and performers often required to bring the vision of the
composer to screen. Rather than a collaboration of equality though, with each having

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 ABSTRACTS

equal input to the creative process, this practice is frequently hierarchical and the
contribution of each individual is limited to their place in the chain. What happens
then when the collaborative approach of the jazz trio is transposed into the space of
film composer? This paper will explore the compositional approach taken by an
Australian jazz trio in the creation of a new soundtrack for Lotte Reiniger’s classic
animated short, Hansel and Gretel. Formed in 2013, the “Artefact Agency” is an
Australian jazz trio that explores collaborative compositional processes in a practice-
led environment. Comprised of three leading West Australian jazz musicians, the
group has explored collaborative composition in both traditional concert settings and
more unusual, dynamic environments, involving both musical and non-musical
collaborators. The improvisations of jazz musicians have been deployed in soundtracks
in the past, with The Necks Score to The Boys and Antonio Sanchez’s recent
improvised solo drum kit score to Birdman creating vibrant and original works. By
generating a collaborative, semi-notated score, this project builds on these existing
examples by activating the collaborators as both improvisers and composers. Using this
project as a case study, the possibilities and potential limitations of collaborative
processes in a small jazz combo will be discussed, and the assertion made that their
application in a collaborative compositional environment leads to unique
compositional outcomes.
johannes.luebbers@anu.edu.au

Wordless! - Music for Comics and Graphic Novels Turns Time Into Space
(and back again)
Phillip Johnston (Newcastle Conservatorium)
In late 2012, graphic artist/writer Art Spiegelman and composer Phillip Johnston were
commissioned by the Sydney Opera House to create a work for their 2013 Graphic
Festival. The hybrid art form they came to devise combined lecture, slide show, and
“silent film” scores performed by live musicians, that Art ultimately described as
“intellectual vaudeville”.
More than a slide show, yet not quite animation, the visuals retain the quality of a
book, moving from page to page, and present a unique challenge to the composer:
while a film is created to move relentlessly forward from beginning to end, at a pace
designed by the filmmaker, a book is meant to be read at the reader’s own pace, with
the option to linger on a page, or to go back to a previous page and reread pages or
panels. But when this experience is turned into a live performance, the creators of the
visuals (a series of QuickTime movies) must set a pace, decide what to focus on, and
the challenge to the composer of these miniature “silent films” is turned in a unique
way to storytelling, in order to insure that the audience can negotiate the transition
from (comic) book to live performance. The composer must do what a film composer
is almost always called upon to do: illuminate the narrative and render the complete
experience compelling. But in this case, it is manifested in a live musical performance
with 13 different graphic works, ranging across well over 100 years in origin, from
different graphic styles, countries and philosophies, combining cartoons, woodcuts,
and computer-rendered graphics, to create a cohesive whole. This paper looks at some
of the problems, and their solutions, involved in creating the music for this work.
phillip@phillipjohnston.com

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 ABSTRACTS

‘It’s my leopard and I have to get it and to get it I have to sing’:

Music as Narrative Node in the Films of Howard Hawks
Gregory Camp (The University of Auckland)
Howard Hawks is one of the most studied Hollywood auteurs, who according to critics
such as Andrew Sarris, Molly Haskell, and Robin Wood continually re-stages a master
narrative of social group formation: disparate characters come together and, though
teamwork, conquer whatever problems are placed in front of them. The important
role of music in this group formation, however, has been mostly neglected by film
scholars and musicologists: in more than half of Hawks’s thirty sound films, making
music together serves to cement the group, musical cooperation acting as a signifier
of social cooperation. This paper will explore the importance of song in Hawks’s
middle-period films, interrogating its place within the narrative, within film music
history, and within midcentury American musicality. In Only Angels Have Wings (1939),
the intrepid airmen conquer their anxieties about flying through community
musicking, accepting a new member of the group when she demonstrates her musical
ability. Ball of Fire (1942) concerns the adventures of a group of encyclopaedists
whose lives are changed when a jazz singer enters their ivory tower. The Martinique
nightclub in which most of To Have and Have Not (1944) is set acts as a stage on which
resistance to the war is formed alongside a new song and a new relationship. Finally,
Bringing Up Baby (1938) demonstrates that all you need to fall in love is a singalong
with a dog and a leopard.
g.camp@auckland.ac.nz

“A Genre Too Far: Michael Powell's Failed Musical Honeymoon”

Michael Christoforidis & Liz Kertesz
(Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne)
Michael Powell pursued multiple trajectories in his long career as a film-maker,
notably through his collaboration with Emeric Pressburger between 1939 and 1956. His
belief that film offered a way to synthesise all the arts led to their greatest success,
The Red Shoes (1948)—a spectacular blend of ballet, music and backstage drama—,
and to one of Powell’s greatest failures, a Spanish co-production entitled Luna de miel
/ Honeymoon (1959). In this first film without Pressburger, Powell created another
genre hybrid, in which he intertwines road movie, touristic travelogue, relationship
drama and dance film, and pays homage to the cinemascopic opulence of the late
1950s musical. Rich in concept, but missing the guiding hand of Pressburger in the
screenplay, Powell built his film around the Spanish dancing star Antonio and French
ballerina Ludmilla Tchérina; a commissioned score (including ballet dream sequence)
by the young Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis; and a ballet realisation of Manuel de
Falla’s El amor brujo. The varying musical elements, including the title song (which
became a popular hit), present a range of narrative and cinematic approaches to the
employment of music and dance. This paper will examine Powell’s conception of the
musical and choreographic elements in his patched-together Honeymoon.
mchri@unimelb.edu.au
ekertesz@unimelb.edu.au

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Music at Film Australia in the Post-War Years

James McCarthy (Sydney)
Government film making has been around since 1913. In 1947 the Commonwealth Film
Unit was established, merging into Film Australia in 1973. It is now absorbed into
Screen Australia with the National Film and Sound Archive handling public access to
the collection.
That a government agency in 1947 thought it a good idea to commission original scores
for their films is notable. It was down to a few farsighted public servants that money
was found to provide select films with original music. There are about 460 scores in
the collection.
Most of those scores and their orchestral parts are preserved in the National Archives
of Australia. The principal reason that many of the scores survived was due to the
simple fact that until 1988, there was a music department and a music officer. That
position, created in 1947, was abolished in 1988 when Film Australia became a
government owned public company.
It is one of the largest single collections of original Australian manuscript in existence,
something that has been largely overlooked by our academics and musicologists. Some
of those composers, such as Alfred Hill, Peter Sculthorpe and George Dreyfus, later
used material from their scores in their more substantial concert works. This should be
something of interest to students of Australian composition.
Music for films, including documentaries, is now very common; far too much so in the
case of many overblown and relentless Hollywood scores and the shock-and-awe music
tracks that accompany many TV documentaries. The modest musical beginnings at
Film Australia in the 1940s are now almost forgotten.
mccarthy@active-media.com.au

Everyone Makes a Sound: The Impact of National Screen Policies of

Australia and New Zealand on Post-Production Sound Personnel
Natalie Lewandowski (Queensland Conservatorium of Music)
This presentation examines the impact of screen policies in two closely positioned
Anglophone screen industries, Australia and New Zealand. Analysis within this
presentation is centered on the impact screen policies have on the feature film post-
production sound sector. This sector facilitates the employment of specialist
soundtrack personnel whose work is recognised internationally, a recent example
being 2015 Academy Award nominee David Lee, an Australian sound mixer who won
the 2000 Academy Award for Best Sound in The Matrix (Wachowski & Wachowski,
1999). Florida and Jackson’s (2010) study of location specific assets is applied to the
production environment of Australia and New Zealand to determine what factors are
needed to sustain film production personnel in a specific geographical area. An
examination of reports on macro-industrial trends and film finance structures is also
provided. Although these macroeconomic factors do not directly pertain to film sound

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personnel, the flow-on effect is demonstrated in the ethnographic material that the
author has collected through interviews with personnel (with a shared 37 years of
industry experience). In a style similar to Caldwell (2008) and Mayer (2011) this
presentation situates film policy analysis amongst the teamwork and collaboration of
film sound personnel in Australia and New Zealand.
natalie.t.lewandowski@gmail.com

The Use of Virtual Instruments by Australian Screen Composers.

Craig Morgan (Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney)
Recent technological advancements, intense competition, and ingenious marketing
strategies by virtual instrument merchants have established virtual instruments and
digital instrument samples as essential components of a professional screen-
composer's toolset. The democratisation of these powerful tools has led to broad
accessibility to virtual instruments and the digital sequencing software required to run
these sophisticated programs. Virtual instruments are portable, powerful, and
affordable—they are no longer the exclusive domain of expensive recording studios.
Amid much discussion and anecdotal recognition of the importance of virtual
instruments in the working methods of screen composers, until now there has been no
successful attempt to empirically quantify or systematically qualify the use of these
digital tools and the other key drivers that surround screen-music creation.
During October 2013, 102 Australian-based professional screen composers responded
enthusiastically to an on-line survey about their use of virtual instruments and in
January 2014, 23 from the same sample elected to be interviewed so as to elaborate
on a set of semi-structured questions.
The results are the first of their kind in this field as they link statistical quantitative
data with personal qualitative experiences—resulting in a host of profoundly satisfying
information about a little known group of professionals.
craig.morgan@hotmail.com

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