Music and Mythmaking in Film: Genre and the Role of the Composer - Softcover

Scheurer, Timothy E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0786431903 ISBN 13: 9780786431908

Publisher: McFarland & Company, 2007

Synopsis

This work studies the conventions of music scoring in major film genres (e.g., science fiction, hardboiled detective, horror, historical romance, western), focusing on the artistic and technical methods that modern composers employ to underscore and accompany the visual events. Each chapter begins with an analysis of the major narrative and scoring conventions of a particular genre and concludes with an in-depth analysis of two film examples from different time periods. Several photographic stills and sheet music excerpts are included throughout the work, along with a select bibliography and discography.

About this title

About the Author:

Timothy E. Scheurer is Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio. He has taught literature and popular culture courses for over 20 years.

Review:

"recommended"--Choice; "a wonderful examination of the dynamic process of the relationship between myth, storytelling, and music in the movies. Timothy Scheurer has written a book that is desperately needed in a scholarly field that often desires to obscure its subject rather than enlighten it"--The Journal of Popular Culture; "constitutes a major study of the conventions of film scoring in a number of set genres. Particularly convincing and intriguing are the sections where Scheurer explains how narrative genre conventions have changed over time and how corresponding compositional changes can be detected...this is a major study into the composition of film music and of the kind of techniques that composers use on a daily basis, and its discussion of the relationship between film music and film genre highlights areas for further investigation in music and moving image scholarship"--Music, Sound and Moving Image.

About this edition

• Publisher: McFarland & Company
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0786431903
• ISBN 13: 9780786431908
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 273