Where does the music come from?: Studies in the aesthetics of film music

Abstract

This dissertation is a phenomenological account of the musical experience in cinema, with special emphasis on the American, Italian, and French narrative cinema (ca. 1940–1990). In simpler terms, it attempts to answer the questions: “How does film music contribute to my experience as a spectator?” “What is it like to hear film music?” and “How does it compare to other forms of music listening?” Drawing on recent work in aesthetics and the psychology of perception, I reject long-standing clichés about the perception of film music and propose to revive the importance of the concepts of aesthetic imagination and imaginative listening. I then show the specific contribution of music to the narrative film by revisiting, in terms of their soundtracks, pivotal scenes from such classics as Renoir's The Rules of the Game, Hitchcock's Rear Window and Vertigo, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Lynch's Blue Velvet (to name a few examples). I end with a meditation on the relationship between hearing, seeing, and knowing in cinema in the form of an investigation of the ambiguity between internal (“diegetic”) and external (“nondiegetic”) music.