Online
History of Film Music
Spend the summer with Summer MassArt's History of Film Music workshop.
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This course treats the evolution of film music from silent movies until the present. It introduces students to musical syntax, the aesthetics of film music, and the means by which composers synchronize music and script to convey mood and render action vivid. Working chronologically, the course explores the increasing importance of music in cinema and how music functions as an expressive element in a film. The course treats composers who wrote almost exclusively for the cinema (i.e., Charlie Chaplin and the contemporary John Williams), treats classical central European composers who migrated to the screen composition from wartime Europe (i.e., Korngold, Waxman, Alexandre Tansman, Bronislaw Kaper), and treats composer-director/producer collaborations such as Eisenstein-Prokofiev, Rota-Fellini/Visconti, and others. The course additionally treats the role of ethnic music (Morocco, India, China, Japan) in world cinema. Two term papers are assigned, one dealing with a composer-director partnership, the second treating the function of score in a major, iconic film such as Gone with the Wind. The textbook is Mervyn Cooke’s A History of Film Music.
*This course features live meetings*
Instructor: Paul Andre Bempéchat holds a DMA (Piano/Musicology) from Boston University, a Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies (M.Phil.) (Musicology and Comparative Literature) from Université de Paris Sorbonne, an MMus (Piano) from the Juilliard School, NY, and an MMus (Piano) and BMus (Piano) from the Manhattan School of Music. He has taught extensively throughout North America and Europe at colleges including Harvard University, Princeton, Rutgers, Pennsylvania State University and Massachusetts College of Art and Design.