What I am suggesting here is that in the Hannibal saga, with the conspicuous absence of a male hero and the elevation of the serial killer to media franchise, the possibility of cheering for Lecter becomes central to the films’ mechanism of distribution and consumption. See Robynn Stilwell, ‘“I just put a drone under him …”: Collage and Subversion in the Score of “Die Hard”’, Music and Letters, 78 (1997), 551–80. 148).ĥ4 Within the context of action film, Robynn Stilwell has shown how even in movies such as Die Hard (1988), which seemingly reinforce the stereotypical polarization of ‘brute force and native cunning versus intellectual sophistication’, the music can open up alternative interpretative possibilities, potentially undercutting and subverting the protagonists’ roles, and allowing the viewer to read against the grain of the text's dominant voice. Bach (New York and London, 2006), 377, and Richard Jones, ‘The Keyboard Works: Bach as Teacher and Virtuoso’, The Cambridge Companion to Bach, ed. See for example David Schulenberg, The Keyboard Music of J. Various authors have remarked on the piece's unusual nature and its kinship to the empfindsamer Stil of C. Of course what concerns us here is not the issue of authorship per se, but the fact that the Aria, as a galant piece, has been constructed against the trope of Bach's ‘brain music’ and ‘pure theoretical speculation’. For Neumann, ‘The Aria is a galant piece, but it is quite certainly not by Bach.’ Neumann's argument was part of his rebuttal of an influential article by Robert Marshall which used the ‘Goldberg’ Variations, and in particular the Aria, as part of a reassessment of Bach's relationship to the pre-classical or galant style. Doubts about the Aria's authorship were famously raised by Bach scholar Frederick Neumann see his ‘Bach: Progressive or Conservative and the Authorship of the Goldberg Aria’, Musical Quarterly, 71 (1985), 281–94. James Deaville (London, 2011), 183–97.Ģ2 The Aria's marginal relationship to the dominant discourse of Bach's music is powerfully encapsulated in the musicological controversy about its authenticity. For a discussion of the relationship between Gould and visual media, with a particular focus on questions of gender, see Julie Brown, ‘Channeling Gould: Masculinities from Television to New Hollywood’, Music in Television, ed. About Keitel's modelling of a ‘“Gouldian” approach to the piano’, see James Toback's audio commentary to the Warner Home Video DVD of Fingers (1979), T6299. About the posthumous, 1990s rise in Gould's popularity, see Bazzana, Wondrous Strange, 2–14. Outside American cinema, he has been the primary subject of cinematic focus in François Girard's Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993) and has appeared as a cartoon character playing Bach in The Triplets of Belleville (2003). His Bach recordings feature in Unbreakable (2000), Int. During the last two decades, in keeping with his rising posthumous fame, Gould's cinematic incidence has increased. Gould has acted as sound adviser (for George Roy Hill's Slaughterhouse Five (1971), which features his piano recordings of the Harpsichord Concertos in F minor and D major, as well as a selection of movements from the ‘Goldberg’ Variations), has served as inspiration for actors (in Harvey Keitel's performance of a troubled young pianist in Fingers (1978)), and has been the performer chosen for a number of American films ranging from Mike Hodges's The Terminal Man (1974) to Nights in Rodanthe (2008). See my ‘The Case Against Nyman Revisited: “Affirmative” and “Critical” Evidence in Michael Nyman's Appropriation of Mozart’, Radical Musicology, 1 (2006), 84 pars (11–32), (accessed 23 March 2010).Ģ1 This influence has taken many shapes. Elsewhere, I have discussed the relationship between the Western art canon and the cultural divide with a focus on ‘cannibalistic’ musical borrowings. In keeping with Huyssen's influential work, my intention here is not to essentialize the Great Divide, but rather to discuss in detail how the use of Western art music in a Hollywood production can both exploit and blur the dichotomy between high art and mass entertainment. A famous discussion of Hollywood as a paradigm of mass culture is found in Andreas Huyssen, Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, IN, 1986). 1 I am using the term mass culture as descriptive of the global strategies of cultural production epitomized by Hollywood ‘event’ movies, that is, cultural products that are pitched at the widest possible audience (as opposed to niche markets and specialized-taste communities) through the help of technologies of mass production and distribution, forms of pervasive advertising and statistical analysis.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |