Conference Agenda

As Marion's dead body lies in a shower, the most iconic of all 20^th century musical motifs plays in the background of Alfred Hitchcock's film, Psycho. Who would have thought that more than sixty years of film history would pass before "The Psycho Theme" from which this slasher music derives is discovered in the papers of Bernard Herrmann. Fred Steiner convincingly discussed the modular organization of this music in 1975, Graham Bruce sorted its themes into comprehensible groups in 1985, and William Wrobel showed the influence of reused material from Herrmann’s Sinfonietta upon Psycho in 2003. No one, however, has mentioned “The Psycho Theme” (labeled as such in musical cues for the film) and how it relates to another theme labeled by Herrmann himself as “the real Psycho theme.” Using cue lists, transcriptions and portions of Herrmann’s original manuscript, this presentation explores the rhythmic and tonal transformation of “The Psycho Theme” and illustrates how the celebrated slasher motif derives from it. The author asserts that Norman’s Bates’ “mother” is represented by the concept of atonality (not a theme) and explores the dramatic implications of this sound quality in the latter half of the film—especially during and after the psychiatric collapse of Norman Bates at the crux of the drama. Constructs borrowed from the fields of drama and acoustics provide a new context for understanding how the timbre of Herrmann’s monochromatic string orchestra is appropriate for this film.

This presentation examines the turn towards jazz in the French-language unit of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), which flourished during Québec’s Quiet Revolution and captured the intense sociopolitical upheaval of the 1960s. While original jazz soundtracks proliferated in commercial film and television during the 1950s, music for NFB films was still primarily derived from Western classical music idioms and scored using traditional methods. Given its then-stereotypical association with deviance, hedonism, and vice, jazz was generally considered unsuitable for NFB documentaries, which were expected to illustrate the policies and perspectives of the Canadian government. However, the turn toward verité-style filmmaking in the late-1950s and the demand for greater artistic freedom within the NFB unsettled the classically-based institutional style, and a more spontaneous approach to filmmaking was extended to the soundtrack. The newly formed French-language unit began inviting small jazz ensembles to improvise soundtracks, and by the mid-1960s, it was commonplace to hear jazz—particularly cool jazz—accompanying a variety of topics illustrative of contemporary Québecois society. In many ways, cool jazz became the new “house style” of the NFB's French unit.

The transformative sociopolitical change that Québec underwent in the 1960s—known as the Quiet Revolution—and the militant politics of the burgeoning sovereignty movement was felt intensely within the NFB, which had relocated to Montreal in 1956. While many Québec sovereigntists were inspired by and adapted the political and cultural expressions of Black nationalism to their own struggle—including a keen interest in jazz and free improvisation—the NFB remained a predominantly white male-dominated space both behind and in front of its cameras despite the concurrent Black Renaissance underway in Montreal. Notwithstanding the engagement of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman by the NFB’s Québecois directors for Le chat dans le sac (1964) and Population Explosion (1968) respectively, NFB filmmakers seemingly did not engage Black musicians in Montreal or elsewhere despite sovereigntists’ well-publicized affinity for Black aesthetics and politics. The use of cool jazz as a soundtrack for modern Québecois society in government-sanctioned films raises questions about the politics of jazz, and the complexity of race relations in Québec during this period.

In 1947, Dimitri Tiomkin scored Frank Capra’s classic It’s a Wonderful Life. Like many of his films, the music for It's a Wonderful Life included a theme song, intended for radio release coinciding with the release of the film. Tiomkin’s score, as originally composed, draws heavily from this song.

It's a Wonderful Life turned out to be the last collaboration between Tiomkin and Capra, when Capra deleted large portions of Tiomkin’s music at the last minute before its release. Most accounts of this deletion cite the dark tone of Tiomkin’s score as being deemed inappropriate for a movie whose release date had been moved up to five days before Christmas. And while it is true that a number of the deleted cues are quite dark, this is not the case for all of the music that was left unused. Most of the deleted cues share one common feature: strong melodic references to Tiomkin’s theme song. In fact, the song itself was scrapped, too – even though a recording had been made, it was never made available for radio broadcast as originally planned.

Utilizing score and sketch material provided by Paramount Pictures, this presentation traces these references through the film, including both the used and unused cues. I posit that the deletion of these cues was not exclusively to keep the film from being too dark, but rather to discard any references to the unreleased song. I will also examine closely the one moment in the film where references to this song remain: the cue “Wrong Mary Hatch,” where the un-born George Bailey encounters the woman who should be his wife. This moment holds a different significance when we realize that its underscore contains music that develops themes whose origin has been removed, much in the same way that George himself no longer exists, and Mary Hatch is disturbed and alarmed by his instance that they are married. An understanding of this context profoundly changes the viewer’s experience of this scene as we can now see this large-scale musical deletion as reflecting the main character’s situation.

Studies of nature documentaries’ efficacy have yielded mixed results, but that has hardly discouraged narrator-presenter David Attenborough. As nature’s foremost public ambassador approaches 100, he and his films have pivoted to a more active environmentalist stance. Ensuring that audiences hear Attenborough's message puts greater responsibility on his beloved voice -- and on the sounds that accompany it. In this paper, I analyze call-to-action music in Our Planet (2019) and the autobiographical David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet (2020), examining how composer Steven Price designs music for behavioral modification rather than mere aesthetic appreciation.

Tropes of Romantic-inspired symphonic density and wonderment in nature documentaries have generated debates over whether “cinematic” sound distances audiences from the natural world, threatening to undermine environmentalist goals (Westerkamp 2017, Delmotte 2017, Collins 2017). That concern resonates with film scholars’ view of nature documentaries as spectacle, fantasy, and entertainment (Bousé 2000, Sperb 2013), and music scholars’ view of film scores as a risky presence for message-oriented documentaries (Rogers 2015, Matthews 2021). In Attenborough’s recent work, some have identified more ambiguous depictions of nature as both fragile and resilient, echoed in the films’ visual language (Zemanek 2022). I explore how his shift has opened a similarly ambiguous sonic front, in which film music attempts gently to unsettle us into action.

In Our Planet, Price withdraws at solemn moments depicting natural disaster, but returns to uplifting harmonic/melodic trajectories and a sonically overwhelming orchestra to promote optimism about our ability to save the planet. In A Life on Our Planet, however, Price highlights the increasingly vulnerable and pragmatic voice of Attenborough himself through a more intimate and concise approach to instrumentation, register, timbre, and more. Resisting familiar sounds of both the catastrophic and glorious sublime, the composer traverses an alien electronic soundscape in Attenborough’s beleaguered portrayal of post-apocalypse; light but focused textures/rhythms for possible climate-crisis solutions; and equivocal harmonies surrounding the narrator’s open-ended closing plea. While even ambiguity may be aestheticized, I argue that music’s capacity for affective instability and contradiction grants it an essential role in “landing” nature documentaries’ increasingly prevalent (if still overly simplistic) demands for change.