Music in Films on the Middle Ages

£41.99

Music in Films on the Middle Ages

Authenticity vs. Fantasy

Films, cinema Music: styles and genres Media studies History and Archaeology

Author: John Haines

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Collection: Routledge Research in Music

Language: English

Published by: Routledge

Published on: 30th October 2013

Format: LCP-protected ePub

Size: 4 Mb

ISBN: 9781135927769


This book explores the role of music in the some five hundred feature-length films on the Middle Ages produced between the late 1890s and the present day. Haines focuses on the tension in these films between the surviving evidence for medieval music and the idiomatic tradition of cinematic music. The latter is taken broadly as any musical sound occurring in a film, from the clang of a bell off-screen to a minstrel singing his song. Medieval film music must be considered in the broader historical context of pre-cinematic medievalisms and of medievalist cinema’s main development in the course of the twentieth century as an American appropriation of European culture. The book treats six pervasive moments that define the genre of medieval film: the church-tower bell, the trumpet fanfare or horn call, the music of banquets and courts, the singing minstrel, performances of Gregorian chant, and the music that accompanies horse-riding knights, with each chapter visiting representative films as case studies. These six signal musical moments, that create a fundamental visual-aural core central to making a film feel medieval to modern audiences, originate in medievalist works predating cinema by some three centuries.

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