Conference Agenda

The art of pictorial caricature has a rich history, and a large body of analysis and criticism accompanies the genre; caricature in literature is likewise a well-documented practice in both scholarly and journalistic literature. Caricature through sound, however, whether through spoken language or music, is an under-theorized (though hardly uncommon) phenomenon. Rivers, the author of the most significant book-length study on caricature, lamented that musical caricature is “a largely neglected genre.” (1991, 100). In the three decades since Rivers made this claim, only a few scholars have studied this topic in detail.

This paper provides a preliminary account of how creators approach the process of caricaturing another musical work. Some of the most didactically clear examples are found in the music of Francis Chagrin (born Alexander Paucker, 1905-1972), a Romanian-born composer who settled in England after living in Switzerland and France. The score he composed for an animated short The Hoffnung Symphony Orchestra (1965), loosely based on the satirical picture books of Gerard Hoffnung, is a veritable “how-to guide” in the art of musical caricature.

The cartoon simply depicts an orchestra concert in which the musicians play a mischievous mélange of altered versions of familiar tunes by composers from Mozart to Mussorgsky. Chagrin identifies the characteristic features of the borrowed excerpts and exaggerates (or obscures) them through one or more of the following strategies:

• Expansion—Exaggeration of a characteristic feature by increasing the duration of its appearance.
• Saturation—Exaggeration of a characteristic feature by increasing the frequency of its appearance.
• Amplification—Hyperbolic exaggeration of the affect of a piece or passage, heightening its expressive characteristics.
• Distortion—Alteration that presents the piece in an unfavorable way by obscuring, not accentuating the stylistic traits.

Although The Hoffnung Symphony Orchestra offers some of the clearest and most explicit examples of each method, these approaches are not unique to the Chagrin; rather, I will demonstrate that many to other creators’ forays into musical caricature follow the very same strategies.

Silent film music research of the last several decades has been predisposed toward specific films, score recreations, genre studies, or accompaniment practices. Stock music, written for general use in silent film accompaniment, has received less robust scholarly focus (Buhler, 2013). Ephemeral in nature, much of this music can be difficult to locate, thought lost, or impossible to link to identifiable productions.

This paper combines newly created metadata for thousands of stock silent film music titles housed in the Library of Congress Music Division with close analysis of certain musical topoi to explore how silent film music developed. Although registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, many of these titles have been unknown to previous scholarship and comprise the bulk of a forthcoming digital collection. With over 130 discrete foreign and domestic stock music series represented, this music constitutes one of the most comprehensive collections of stock music for silent film that circulated in the United States from 1910-1930. These publications come from the expected publishers in New York, London, Paris, and Berlin, but also less-expected publishers in Stockholm, Brussels, Vienna, Copenhagen, and even Butte, Montana. Moreover, other non-film-music stock series, like Schirmer’s Galaxy Music or Jungknickel’s Artist’s Orchestra Repertoire, used similar musical content and techniques. These series were frequently used in silent film accompaniment, but not necessarily titled and marketed as such from their inception.

By drawing on the metadata gathered from these publications, I demonstrate the usefulness of big data to grasp how creators, but not necessarily contemporary practitioners, conceptualized music for film at the time. This data facilitates tabulation of topoi such as “hurry,” “pathetic,” “misterioso,” and terms used to characterize specific nations and ethnicities at levels previously unavailable to scholars. Moreover, close analysis of their musical content and data comparisons of additional descriptors (for example, a hurry in cases of storm and/or fire; a misterioso for cases of premeditated murder) allows us to unpack the development of American film music practices as well as reconsider how those very practices continue to inform film-scoring in the present.

The Walt Disney Company and Universal Studios have increasingly built their theme park attractions around their studios’ film properties like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Jurassic Park. The designers of the parks draw from the scores of these films to help bring their audiences into the fictional worlds they construct. An aesthetic transformation occurs as film music, composed to be heard as part of a passive audio-viewing experience, becomes accompaniment to a live ride, show, or immersive area. But the transformations go beyond the mere re-positioning of the music: composers and arrangers alter the fabric of the pre-existing music itself to fit these new uses. Over the course of the parks’ histories, a “theme-park” style of composition and arranging has taken shape. This style consists of tropes such as big themes (either one that is varied or multiple themes heard in succession), large instrumental masses, few layers of texture, loud dynamics, sharp transitions, alternation with sound effects for masking those transitions, and reliance on audio-visual synchresis to aid perceptual cohesion. My primary case study is the use and adaptation of film scores by John Williams in the Disney and Universal Studios theme parks. The parks feature individual rides that are scored to Williams’ music (“Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye” at Disneyland; “Jurassic World: The Ride” at Universal) as well as fully immersive areas that use Williams themes both as diegetic ambient source music and as non-diegetic underscore in the areas’ individual attractions (Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland and The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal). Building on Camp’s (2017) notion of the double diegesis, where park-goes hear music simultaneously as alluding externally to filmic texts they already know and as an internal accompaniment to help them imagine themselves to be inside a real-life film, and on White’s (2021) work on sonic world building in theme park attractions, this paper argues that a specialised “theme park” musical style exists and seeks to identify the markers of that style.