![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
Abstract
A handful of recent film studies publications have taken as their subject composers’ reflexive and analytical accounts of their own practice in creating music for film. This paper aims to take that approach a step further by exploring both the collaborative creative processes behind the composition of my score for the 2007 South African/Danish film, My Black Little Heart, and the cross-cultural representational issues raised by it. It is often unacknowledged by composers how much a director, producer or music editor informs the final score, and I examine the often very subtle decision-making processes, the constant adjustments and readjustments, that occurred between the film maker (in this case, the director) and myself, the composer, in the creation of the film's music. An unusual consequence of the high level of creative reciprocity on this project was the powerful influence the music had on the structure of the film. This paper adds to a growing body of recent scholarship that sees a consideration of the production process as fundamental to an understanding of music's active role in the creation of meaning in a film; the antithesis of seeing the score as simply music tacked on to a virtually complete film. This paper also examines the way the film uses a number of diegetic music cues associated with specific characters as a shorthand delineation of their racial, religious and sub-cultural identities. I look at the representational value of these cues and how they relate to stereotypes, myths and metaphors used to describe post-apartheid society, as well as how this relates to the film's representation of South African realities. The article ends with a brief analysis and interpretation of the music, its meaning and effects, but rather unusually, this is done from the perspective of the composer, something that is still relatively rare in film music studies.
Notes
1. Recent notable exceptions to composers offering up their own work and thought processes to scrutiny include Burnand (Citation2006) and Mera (Citation2008).
2. There are other examples of this type of approach, for instance Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) directed by Sergio Leone, where Ennio Morricone composed the music after reading the screenplay and before the film was shot, but it is certainly not the norm.
3. This created an unusual ‘temp’ track; often the initial edit of a film is made with pre-existing or library music in order to give an idea of the director/producer's intentions for the soundtrack in terms of mood, style, rhythm, pacing and so on, before the music has been composed.
4. A term often used by Angelique and which I associated with urban ‘street’ culture, or an ‘underground’ street culture; something that went against mainstream culture, in this case music that did not follow mainstream cinematic conventions and that would appeal to the global, urbanised youth audience that the film aimed to reach.
5. Some of the other music on the temp track was pre-existing film/TV music by the South African composer Warrick Sony. Angelique also used a small amount of generic library music for the film's first edit.
6. Also, see pages 65–72 in this volume for excerpts of the entire interview.
7. Alfred Newman scored more than 200 films during a career that lasted from 1930 to 1970 including Wuthering Heights (1939), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), The Prisoner of Zenda (1952), How the West Was Won (1962), and Airport (1970).
8. The film's sound editor used a high pass filter and artificial reverb to position the music within the scene. Compare my audio track (Audio Example 2) to the video track (Video Example 7) in which the music is mixed with the other sounds in the scene.
9. Lotus FM website: www.lotusfm.co.za.
10. Terukuttu is music derived from street theatre in Tamil-speaking parts of India, and Chutney is a Caribbean musical style that combines calypso with Indian filmi music.
11. Unusually, these ambient sounds were part of the final music track I sent to the sound editor, rather than sound effects added in post-production (though they were sent as separate ‘stems’ for the sound editor to mix).