ABSTRACT
There are as many ways to analyze screen music as there are screen genres, formats, and historical eras. The swell of film musicological scholarship in the past twenty years (and more recent surge in music-video studies and ludomusicology) has brought with it a corresponding profusion of music analysis, some informal, some extremely meticulous. There are several reasons why screen music provides fertile ground for analysis, broadly defined here as the activity of closely examining “particular devices across a range of works or in a single work” (Bordwell 2008: 12). Music that accompanies the moving image encompasses an enormous global repertoire, one that is central to the way vast swathes of contemporary listeners experience the art of organized sound. As such, screen music provides many opportunities for socially relevant interpretation and critique—not to mention offering a convenient hook for introducing musical novitiates to more general musicological questions. Screen audio is always interconnected with visual, narratival, and, increasingly, interactive modes of engagement. The mediated nature of music in visual multimedia leads to a host of unique and difficult—and therefore academically enticing—challenges to traditional analytical approaches. Finally, despite disciplinary consolidation, there is still plenty of ‘unclaimed’ territory left for newly arriving analysts, with whole sub-repertoires still crying out for scholarly consideration. And this not to mention an abundance of finely wrought and fascinating music worth studying for its own sake. With the exception of, perhaps, Bernard Herrmann, there are virtually no screen musical artists who yet have come close to attracting the level of attention lavished on other, objectively more obscure targets of music analytical inquiry.
