Conference Agenda

In the 1910s and 1920s, as nations began to recognize the power of cinema as both an artistic expression and a key medium for information and propaganda, sound and music in film witnessed a growing intellectual interest, fostered by the appearance of synchronization technology at the end of the 1920s. Within this context, the musicologist and film critic Sebastiano Arturo Luciani (Italy, 1884–1950) emerged as a pioneer proponent of music as a fundamental pillar of filmmaking. Film actors and directors, in his view, “with a silent and suggestive gesture, can reach a degree of intensity and expressive vagueness accessible only through music” (Luciani, 1921, my translation).

This paper examines Luciani’s contributions to the theory and aesthetics of film music before and after synchronized sound. At a time when a close relationship between editing and musical scoring was technologically impracticable (and conceptually inconceivable), I argue that Luciani’s musical thought emerged as one of the most original early theorizations of a structural role of music in film (Luciani, 1916). For Luciani, cinema existed as “music for the eyes,” and only a perfect symbiotic relationship between the two arts could generate a valuable cinematic experience. From this perspective, synchronization opened up to new exciting creative possibilities that were left unexplored by other artists and intellectuals.

Luciani is a relatively known figure in Italian cinema and film music studies (Caputi, 1954; Sanguinetti, 1995; Attolini, 1971; Miceli, 2000), but only a few of his theoretical writings on film music have been translated into English (Casetti, Alovisio, Mazzei, 2017). For this reason, the main focus of this essay is to offer an overview of Luciani’s writings, focusing especially on his works on film music spanning from the late 1910s to the early 1940s. Despite the numerous connections with many relevant voices of the time (Ricciotto Canudo, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Benedetto Croce, Luigi Russolo, among others), Luciani’s thought remained geographically isolated, but his intellectual legacy left morphological traces (see Ginzburg, 2019) that deserves further exploration.

Given recent industry success, Icelandic film and television composers have made significant strides in music for the moving image. Amid this, music supervisors, who guide the process and selection of composers and pre-existing songs and recordings, have begun to request, by name, an “Icelandic sound.” Based on recent field research, I have found that Icelandic composers, musicians, and their representatives have dealt with requests such as these while wrestling with what those two words mean for a craft that, by its nature, is dynamic and requires the control of a broad range of skills and compositional techniques to meet the narrative needs of the production.

This paper presents a series of score excerpts and transcriptions, along with audio excerpts that enlighten the examples. I critique and examine the notion of an “Icelandic sound” oft associated with nature and requested by music supervisors, criticized and contemplated by scholars (e.g., Dibben 2009; Sigurðardóttir 2017; Ingólfsson 2019; Hall et al. 2019; Størvold 2023), which confounds contemporary Icelandic composers. The analysis shares the results of traditional timbral, motivic, and harmonic analysis alongside ethnomusicological field research that interrogates what these music supervisors are requesting. Using examples from Icelandic film orchestras such as the Reykjavik Orkestra and SinfoniaNord, alongside compositional excerpts from scores by Jóhann Jóhannsson (Theory of Everything, Arrival), Hildur Guðnadóttir (Joker, Chernobyl), Herdís Stefánsóttir (Knock at the Cabin, Essex Serpent), and pop musicians who score films, such as Ólafur Arnalds (Broadchurch), Dustin O‘Halloran Marie Antoinette, Transparent), and Jónsi (We Bought a Zoo), this paper complicates the notion of a mono-sonic national scoring sound.

Composers have integrated choral singing into film scores since the medium’s advent. The practice is widespread and varied, but directors and composers in Hollywood still know how effective it is to integrate big choral “moments” into contemplative scenes, heroic deaths, or epic battles. There is surprisingly little scholarship about choralism in film scoring overall, and very few sources discuss general use in Hollywood soundtrack conventions. Considering “choralism” as already inflected by Euro-centric hegemonies, colonialism, and cultural imperialism (Olwage 2005, Minor 2012, Applegate 2013, Conte 2023), this presentation posits that hegemonic conventions of choralism are imbued in cinematic uses of choral voice—and that choralism in film has, in turn, changed how choirs conceptualize their affective aims in performance. Drawing on works tying film music to affect theory and voice—most recently thoroughly explored by Berthold Hoeckner (2019) though investigated as early as the 1980s by Claudia Gorbman (1987) and Michel Chion (1992)—I suggest that choralism is embedded with specific affective aims in Hollywood epics. I also argue that these affective alliances are distinct from the overall aims of orchestral underscoring, because of how audiences understand and respond to the embodied and spatialized qualities of aggregated human voice. I propose a few categories of distinct affective alliances that choralism is frequently used to convey within film scenes, narratives, and spectacles: (1) ethical/religious rumination; (2) spatial enlargement and bodily intimidation; and, (3) heightened stakes (“life or death”) for characters within the narrative. Using examples drawn from Howard Shore’s score for Peter Jackson’s epic fantasy film The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) as well as interviews and fieldwork with professional choral singers, I show how film has changed the function and understanding of choralism for hegemonic Hollywood film audiences. I also show how changing practices within the traditions of choral singing, artistic direction, and affective aims and goals for choral practitioners are indeed tied to repeated cinematic use of "hidden choirs” in film scores.