Conference Agenda

Amid the global lockdown triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, virtuoso pianist Igor Levit started livestreaming “house concerts” from his apartment in Berlin’s Mitte district on April 11, 2020. Between April and May, Levit livestreamed fifty-two evening recitals that reached hundreds of thousands of viewers and turned him into an international media star featured on both sides of the Atlantic. Beethoven’s piano sonatas anchored and bookended the series' heterogeneous repertoire, which also included music by Bach, Rzewski, and Morton Feldman. For Levit, live musical performance brings forth the “spirit of freedom” that constitutes the “truly utopian dimension of music,” linking performers and audiences to nurture an intimate sense of community. As we witnessed, the COVID lockdown abruptly took away the very possibility of attending a concert, suppressing at once the corporeal forms of communal immediacy that live music affords.

Examining Levit’s livestreamed series, I underscore the medium-specific ways in which they restaged and amplified a concert format as traditional as the piano recital to produce a communal mode of immediacy that merged physical absence and aural presence in the intimacy of domestic spaces. Levit’s sonic experiment newly complicated distinctions between the private and the public inherent in the taxonomy of musical genres codified around 1800, instilling a disembodied yet lasting affective bond that kept together performer and listeners through fifty-two quarantined nights. Taking stock of the apocalyptic context, I argue that Levit’s livestreamed concerts reformulated Marshall McLuhan’s infamous dictum—“the medium is the message”—turning the act of musical performance into the unwritten message of an aural ritual that superseded the technological inadequacy of its medium. Following Sybille Krämer’s media philosophy, I suggest that the audiovisual glitches prompted by Levit’s inadequate equipment ultimately heightened the drastic immediacy of his performances, rendering tangible both medium and messenger without ever disrupting the message. Enacting a transhistorical paradox, Levit’s "house concerts" fulfilled modernity’s entrenched desire to simultaneously channel and transcend the opaque materiality of new media technologies, surpassing the inadequacy of livestreaming to deliver a new aural mode of communal immediacy throughout the virtual continuum of cyberspace.

How does music for and about children reflect that era’s cultural understanding of childhood? And how does such understanding influence the process of composition of music that is considered “children’s”? In the scholarly discourse on domestic life in the USA during the early Cold War period, the 1950s are often characterized as an age of domestic revival. Scholars comment on the era’s “child-centered” character; however, despite this emphasis on family values, children themselves, as well as the process of rearing them, were treated with a great deal of anxiety and suspicion. Such attitudes are evident in music written for children.

Grieve (2018), Holt (2014), and Peacock (2008) have demonstrated how schools, print media, books, magazines, and television constructed a specific image of childhood to match the existing Cold War ideologies. However, little attention has been given to the role that music played in the shaping of this new conception of family.

This paper investigates how American children were imagined in Disney’s music for animated films in the 1950s, analyzing specific songs in the context of recent scholarship on children, family life, and propaganda during the Cold War. Building on the film narratology model as formulated by Bordwell (1985) and employing Foucauldian discourse analysis techniques (2010), I examine two animated films, Lady and the Tramp (1955) and The Sleeping Beauty (1959). I argue that the fictional universe depicted in these two films through music, lyrics, and images is constructed as a distinct storyworld modelled after the real world. Children who viewed these films are then musically and mentally socialized into this storyworld. The specific songs that help convey the films’ narratives serve as reminders of the existing conventions and beliefs, as well as cautionary devices that illustrate to children that an inability or refusal to undergo this process of socialization will lead to their exclusion from the real society. Ultimately, these popular Disney songs represent an enculturation device, playing into the existing anxieties about children’s abilities to make morally correct choices without adult interference. In this way, they provided a dramatically expressive summary of the behavioural norms and cultural values of adult American society during the 1950s.

The “Hans Zimmer-effect” has become shorthand in both popular and academic discourses to describe a dominant mode of composing for Hollywood films that relies on digital tools and processes to produce highly repetitive blockbuster scores. The low cost of digital production tools and the shift away from studio-controlled filmmaking has led to a drastically condensed production model and a reliance on synthesized temp tracks in the editing booth, leading to concerns about instrumental timbre’s fading relevance within an increasingly digitized audiovisual culture.

In this paper, I offer a close reading of a pair of scores that reject the binarism between digital and analog scoring practices through a process of apparent dematerialization. Jóhann Jóhannsson composed the score for Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016) through experimental and improvisatory recordings of instruments and voices, but rendered those sounds alien through overdubbed tape loops and aleatoric performance. Likewise, Mark Korven developed an entirely new instrument dubbed the “Apprehension Engine” for The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019) to “perform” library sound effects rather than relying on repetitive digital cliches. The music in these films resembles both underscoring and sound design, operationalizing the inherent risk of aural confusion to sustain atmospheric intensities and drive the narratives. As I argue, they revel in the ontological uncertainty between acoustic and digital sources to resist the reified cultural hierarchies that lament the “absent” materiality of instrumental timbres in film music, demonstrating that even in its most illusory rendering, timbral materiality remains phenomenologically inescapable.

There remains a steady stream of Hollywood scoring that foregrounds instrumental timbre in novel ways, but the frequent tendency to label such scores as being implicitly “legitimate” compared to their digital counterparts merely affirms a troubling hierarchy of a different sort. Arrival and The Lighthouse point toward other possibilities of production, interpretation, and critique: as meta-cinematic texts that explore various incarnations of the cinematographic image, they offer commentary on the assumed reality of material sound within the temporal and historical framework of the moving image.