Balinese Music, an Italian Film, and an Ethnomusicological Approach to Screen Music and Sound

I first encountered Balinese music, albeit unknowingly, in the early 1980s. I was an undergraduate music major at the University of Toronto at the time and was taking “Introduction to Italian Cinema” as an elective. The film of the week was Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1969), “the most experimental of all his movies,” according to Maurizio Corbella (2011: 14). I found Satyricon to be not just over-the-top experimental, but shockingly and bizarrely so. I did not enjoy watching it and came away from the experience emotionally rattled and deeply disturbed.