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Barthes kept music separate from semiology, refusing to regard sounds as signs. By analysing music from the perspective of his body, he made audible its discreet phenomenologies. Many experiences, mental, psychic, and corporal, are at stake in performing and listening to music, and they played a subtle role in Barthes's thought. His listening and his musical practice led him to favour a relationship to his piano that permitted an imaginary appropriation and erotic play. Musical pulsation develops an intimate resistance to the law, one that combines repetition and perversion. Barthes highlights obsessive rhythms such as accents, syncopations, and off-beat rhythms. His writings on music, alluding to the language of the solitary body, emphasise erections and back-and-forth movements. He frequently over-interprets the performative indications on musical scores, such as the rubato or fingering, choosing to hear in them the sexual power of desire which leads the pianist towards a disseminated jouissance. By recording himself playing the piano, he extends this pleasure to enjoyment of his own rhythm as in an onanistic practice. From a theoretical perspective, musical practice allowed Barthes to bid his farewell to semiology and to maintain a subjective resistance, both philosophical and psychological, to social language.

This chapter analyses the evolving attitudes regarding strict adherence to the musical score or otherwise, aided by a discussion of the development of editing, of Urtext editions, and of the piano from the late 18th- to the 20th-century. It is argued that musicians today often treat a musical score with an unhistorical and pedantic reverence unlikely to have been the norm during the time most standard-repertoire scores were themselves written.

This chapter continues the analytical agenda of Chapter 5 in examining the different types of musical sources in relation to the score of My Fair Lady in order to give rise to new interpretations of the musical numbers. This chapter focuses on the songs of Alfred Doolittle, Freddy Eynsford-Hill, and the ensemble pieces.

This chapter develops the notion of χορεία, according to Plato’s usage of the term, as the proper, restored rubric within which to understand the rhythm and harmony of ancient Greek poetry in both its stichic and lyric forms. The approach to such poetry via the ancient dictum, ‘art is imitation’, is given a brief developmental history and then critiqued. The importance of dance origins for Greek metres is discussed, with comparisons to examples of modern European ‘survivors’ of danced epic verse as preparation for a new accounting of such peculiar phenomena in Homeric poetry as noun-and-epithet phrases (understood to be analogous to ‘signature lines’ in opera) and ring composition. A case is made that Homeric and other Greek texts are not language in themselves, but musical scores instructing the production of performed speech.

Carl Stalling's work as a composer for Hollywood cartoons was apparently headed for the same fate as practically all film music: heard but never widely recognized for its creativity and originality. That changed two decades after his death in 1972, when Greg Ford and Hal Willner produced The Carl Stalling Project (1990–95), two CDs of Stalling's music taken from his time at Warner Bros. (1936–1958). The discs sold surprisingly well for a niche release; the first of the two discs actually appeared briefly on the Billboard album chart. As a result, a new interest in cartoon music began to emerge in the early 1990s. Through the CDs, Stalling suddenly became visible to animation fans who had never before thought about him or his work for the cartoons. This chapter examines how the two sides of Stalling's personality as a composer—the humorous side and the practical side—came together in each score through his use of precomposed or popular music. It also looks at how, during his twenty-plus years at Warner Bros., Stalling's approach to musical scoring naturally evolved.

Before interest in Carl Stalling's music surged in the late 1980s, most of the critical writing on music and cartoons focused on Scott Bradley. During his almost twenty-five years of composing cartoons for MGM (1934–1957), Bradley not only made a name for himself as a composer but also developed a unique composing style that became highly influential in his own time and afterward. Though the stories of the MGM cartoons are often quite generic, they have a unique signature: violent action sequences combined with Bradley's illustrative approach to musical scoring. The penchant for extreme cartoon violence appears to have originated at the MGM studio during a time that America was involved in an unprecedented global conflict. Bradley took great pride in composing music for animated films, expressing high hopes for the future of cartoon music and of animation in general, and, as the sole composer for one of the major Hollywood animation studios, believed he could bring about change in his small corner of the industry.

This chapter presents the text of the report about George and Ira Gershwin's signing of a contract worth $100,000 to write a musical comedy for Fox Movietone Co.'s motion pictures Delicious and Blah, Blah, Blah, which was published in the August 1928 issue of the New York Evening Post. The size of the contract indicated the star power of the Gershwins. However, George found their first Hollywood experience distasteful because upon completion of the requisite songs he played such a small role in fashioning the final musical score.

This chapter explores the surviving scores for Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria and L'incoronazione di Poppea. Most of the questions raised by the Ritorno score are connected: its proximity to the composer, its differences from the librettos, the many corrections and inconsistencies within it, its provenance and dating, and its presence in Vienna. The manuscript consists of 136 folios in seventeen numbered gatherings, all but two comprising eight folios. Meanwhile, the Incoronazione scores reveal that Monterverdi's music and text of the premiere were some considerable distance away from the composer's original conception.

Most music in the world is communicated orally from musician to musician (that is, by ear). Western concert music is exceptional in depending on writing for transmission. If most classical musicians cannot play by ear and need a written page in front of them, the page itself takes on importance. Thus the way music is written down and the way we understand the writing have an important effect on the music that results. The issues of what was intended by the writing and what should be read back out of it become central to our musicking. Over time, however, the meaning of written musical symbols has gradually shifted. This chapter examines how the writing and reading of music has changed in fundamental ways, especially around 1800. It discusses descriptive notation and prescriptive notation, the incomplete musical score, written music's oral element, the essential in rhetorical music, implicit notation, Strait style and the neutral “run-through” style of music versus interpretation, and composer-intention before the Romantic period.

This chapter discusses the common conflation of elements that so often distorts the view of what a record actually is. Record making is a compositional process that produces musical works. Most recorded songs can easily be separated from their specific contexts and performed in any number of ways; arrangements are often dependent upon the particularities of the recording. Analytical division between track and arrangement may sometimes be artificial and misleading. Anyone involved in making a record is a potential contributor to the arrangement, which may, in its final form, represent many modes of musical creativity. Records represent more than musical thought. They also encompass musical utterances and sonic relationships—material—whose particularity is immutable and thus essential to the work's identity.

This chapter discusses Roxy's career from 1928–1931. Topics covered include the tremendous success of Roxy Theatre, which had sold six and a half million tickets and had cumulative grosses over $5.5 million by its first anniversary on March 11, 1928; Roxy and his musical director Erno Rapee's scoring of Fox feature films throughout 1928; and Roxy's departure from the Roxy Theatre on January 1, 1931 to work for RCA-NBC-RKO on their new theater-radio project at Rockefeller Center. For the remainder of his career, radio and the stage would capture Roxy's imagination and attention. He would not abandon feature-length films, but he could no longer score, edit, or enhance their assembly.

By collecting artistic and natural artifacts and wonders, the early modern cultivated individual sought to achieve connoisseurship through the careful balance of receptivity to the marvelous and repeated, careful parsing and categorizations of items. This chapter studies one aspect of the early modern collection, which is the musical scores and instruments, collected along side other artifacts. The collecting of musical scores appears to have been more common in the later seventeenth century, while the sponsorship of musical performances was crucial in the spread of new music through the Italian courts a half century earlier. The primary means of “collecting” and thus “recollecting” sonic experiences was to place them in memory and find appropriate strategies to revisit the memorized events and the feelings they might have evoked, and in the process to establish categories whereby those musical experiences might be parsed and then “displayed” through discussion with fellow virtuosi. Seventeenth-century manuscripts tend to reflect a variety of repertories and composers and may have functioned as visual aids to the recollection of musical experiences, allowing the connoisseur to retrace in his memory the events and/or emotions that formed part of his “aural collection.”

By the 1920s, jazz permeated the collective musical culture of America, from recordings and live performances to films focusing on the nature of jazz itself. Cartoons became an especially potent site for spreading the sound of jazz nationwide. Jazz would have a featured role in hundreds of Hollywood cartoons, inspiring stories and enlivening performances in shorts from every studio. This chapter examines the different workings of jazz in cartoon musical scores, touching on the issue of race and representation—and the deplorably racist effect of the imagery. Primitivism was a theme running through much early writing on jazz, for it seemed to explain both the essential attributes of the music and what made it so desirable. A take on primitivism and jazz is offered by the Warner Bros. short The Isle of Pingo-Pongo (Avery, 1938). The chapter also discusses early impressions of jazz as film music, the Fleischer brothers' unusual approach to jazz in the late 1920s and the 1930s, Warner Bros.' use of jazz and popular music in cartoons, and the use of swing music in cartoons.

This chapter discusses how the musical score has lost a good measure of the authority and prestige. For some, the central features of the score are its incompleteness and imprecision, up to and including a fundamental falseness. Scores come in many editions and versions, undercutting the idea that the work of musical art can claim a single unimpeachable source. Furthermore, the effective power of music ultimately comes from performance. The chapter concludes that although scores provide the tradition of classical music with a nominal consistency, in the sense that the same scores are used repeatedly as a basis for performance, the most authentic act of performance is departure from the letter of the score.

This chapter the text of George Gershwin's letter to his mother Rose Gershwin dated May 19, 1937. In this letter, Gershwin tells his mother about his excitement in finishing the musical score for Fred Astaire's motion picture and he talks about the new Goldwyn Follies. He also informs her that he and his brother Ira were working very hard to get some new songs started and that they were planning to take at least a month's vacation after finishing the scores for two Astaire films.

This chapter focuses on Aaron Copland's film career, which began in 1939 at the World's Fair in New York City. Copland got his “big break” when Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke approached him on behalf of the American City Planning Institute to score The City, a film portraying the evils of unregulated urban growth. With its evocations of small-town America, horrific industrial slums, and the improvements enabled by conscientious urban planning, his contribution to The City had the desired impact on Hollywood producers and directors, including Lewis Milestone, the man behind three of the most important film projects that Copland subsequently scored. The most immediate result of the Copland–Milestone connection was Of Mice and Men (1939).

This chapter details events following Mancini's break with Blake Edwards. While the break was a private event that seemed to put his future career into a state of flux, Mancini sensed a chance to advance, an opportunity in the making, when a phone call reached him at that songwriting contest in Rio. It was Paramount Studios calling. They had been bankrolling a gritty film about the 1876 Irish coal miners' strike in Pennsylvania called The Molly Maguires (1970), and the project was in trouble. The film was being judged too monotone and grim, while the music was deemed too little, too light, casting the drama into doubt. The studio' thought was that with a little more color in the score, and especially a firmer sense of musical drama, the whole momentum of the film might be lifted. And from Mancini's point of view this was just the breath of fresh air that this composer-in-transition had wanted. Almost immediately on finishing The Molly Maguires, Mancini would receive another surprise call from even further afield, announcing that the great Italian neorealist director Vittorio De Sica and the great producer Carlo Ponti wanted to work with him in the film I Girasoli (1970), soon to take the American title Sunflower.

After considering their contrasting dramatic structures, this chapter plays the three works against each other, and through comparative analysis attempts to recover a sense of the missing music of Nozze. It tries to say something about what a Le nozze d'Enea score might have looked like, extrapolating from other information—librettos, scenario, and also from the sources of the other two operas, Ritorno and Incoronazione. The chapter also examines the genre and the modern taste.

This book is about musical hermeneutics. It provides a broad survey of “interpreting music” in the two complementary senses of the phrase: understanding musical works and performing musical scores. Hermeneutics is the art of interpretation. Embracing the Enlightenment model endows subjectivity with certain rights and dignities based precisely on its singularity, its irreplaceability, its finitude—even its opacity to itself. In the diversity of its results and its striving to maintain its own openness—no easy thing—open interpretation as a cultural practice continually reanimates this conception. And so does music, insofar as we link music to feeling, sensation, emotion, memory, and desire. Subjects make interpretations; interpretations make subjects. On what terms? To address this issue, we need to revisit two of the founding texts of hermeneutics, Friedrich Schleiermacher's “The Hermeneutics: Outline of the 1819 Lectures” and Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method (1960). The book also examines the objections to musical hermeneutics that are conveniently clumped together in a review by Richard Taruskin of several books about the concept of classical music.