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Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music
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Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music Hardcover - 2001

by Arthur Knight (Editor); Pamela Robertson Wojcik (Editor)


From the publisher

From the silent era to the present day, popular music has been a key component of the film experience. Yet there has been little serious writing on film soundtracks that feature popular music. Soundtrack Available fills this gap, as its contributors provide detailed analyses of individual films as well as historical overviews of genres, styles of music, and approaches to film scoring.
With a cross-cultural emphasis, the contributors focus on movies that use popular songs from a variety of genres, including country, bubble-gum pop, disco, classical, jazz, swing, French cabaret, and showtunes. The films discussed range from silents to musicals, from dramatic and avant-garde films to documentaries in India, France, England, Australia, and the United States. The essays examine both "nondiegetic" music in film--the score playing outside the story space, unheard by the characters, but no less a part of the scene from the perspective of the audience--and "diegetic" music--music incorporated into the shared reality of the story and the audience. They include analyses of music written and performed for films, as well as the now common practice of scoring a film with pre-existing songs. By exploring in detail how musical patterns and structures relate to filmic patterns of narration, character, editing, framing, and mise-en-scene, this volume demonstrates that pop music is a crucial element in the film experience. It also analyzes the life of the soundtrack apart from the film, tracing how popular music circulates and acquires new meanings when it becomes an official soundtrack.

Contributors.
Rick Altman, Priscilla Barlow, Barbara Ching, Kelley Conway, Corey Creekmur, Krin Gabbard, Jonathan Gill, Andrew Killick, Arthur Knight, Adam Knee, Jill Leeper, Neepa Majumdar, Allison McCracken, Murray Pomerance, Paul Ramaeker, Jeff Smith, Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Nabeel Zuberi

From the rear cover

"From Bollywood to Hollywood, Wim Wenders to Wong Kar-Wai, popular music permeates movies. Rigorous scholarship has finally begun to catch up with this phenomenon to make sense of its rich and varied cultural meanings. Wocjik's and Knight's first-rate collection is muscular, theoretically informed, historically textured, and full of exciting discoveries for all interested in the confluence of pop music, film, and identity."--Claudia Gorbman, University of Washington

Details

  • Title Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music
  • Author Arthur Knight (Editor); Pamela Robertson Wojcik (Editor)
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Pages 504
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Duke University Press
  • Date November 2001
  • Illustrated Yes
  • Features Bibliography, Illustrated
  • ISBN 9780822328001 / 0822328003
  • Weight 2.04 lbs (0.93 kg)
  • Dimensions 9.48 x 6.4 x 1.55 in (24.08 x 16.26 x 3.94 cm)
  • Library of Congress subjects Motion picture music - History and criticism, Popular music - History and criticism
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 2001033706
  • Dewey Decimal Code 781.542

Media reviews

Citations

  • Choice, 05/01/2002, Page 1594

About the author

Pamela Robertson Wojcik is Associate Professor of Film, TV, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame and the author of Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna, also published by Duke University Press.

Arthur Knight is Associate Professor of American Studies and English at the College of William and Mary and the author of Dis/Integrating the Musical: African American Musical Performance and American Musical Film, 1927-1959, forthcoming from Duke.