Overview
- Examines the connections between musical modernism and German cinema from the Autorenfilm movement (1913-14) through the dawn of the recorded sound film (1932-33)
- Analyses a corpus of original compositions, films, and aesthetic writings
- Documents how modernist composers from the Austro-German area approached film music composition and engaged with cinema as an aesthetic phenomenon
- Reconstructs the connections between modernist composers and the film music universe through historically verifiable collaborations
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
About this book
This book investigates the relationship between musical Modernism and German cinema. It paves the way for anunorthodox path of research, one which has been little explored up until now. The main figures of musical Modernism, from Alban Berg to Paul Hindemith, and from Richard Strauss to Kurt Weill, actually had a significant relationship with cinema. True, it was a complex and contradictory relationship in which cinema often emerged more as an aesthetic point of reference than an objective reality; nonetheless, the reception of the language and aesthetic of cinema had significant influence on the domain of music. Between 1913 and 1933, Modernist composers’ exploration of cinema reached such a degree of pervasiveness and consistency as to become a true aesthetic paradigm, a paradigm that sat at the very heart of the Modernist project. In this insightful volume, Finocchiaro shows that the creative confrontation with the avant-garde medium par excellence can be regarded as a vector of musical Modernism: a new aesthetic paradigm for the very process – of deliberate misinterpretation, creative revisionism, and sometimes even intentional subversion of the Classic-Romantic tradition – which realized the “dream of Otherness” of the Modernist generation.
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
Table of contents (11 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
Back Matter
Reviews
“Finocchiaro’s study delivers compelling insights into the relationship between Musical Modernism and German silent and early sound cinema. Approaching cinema from the vantage point of its engagement with modernist composers manages to move beyond the boundaries between “high” and “low” art, opening up the wider field of the cultural status of cinema in relation to coexisting art forms at a crucial historical moment.” (Anna K. Windisch, University of Salzburg, Austria. Co-Editor of The Sounds of Silent Films. New Perspectives on History, Theory and Practice, 2014)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Francesco Finocchiaro is Senior Research Scientist at the Department of Musicology of the University of Vienna, Austria. His research interests focus on the points of connection between composition, theory and aesthetics in Twentieth-century music. He edited Arnold Schönberg’s Il pensiero musicale (2011) and has also published extensively on film music, with special regard to the relationship between cinema and musical avant-gardes. He has taught in Italy at the Universities of Bologna, Milan, Florence, as well as at Ferrara Conservatory, and in Austria at the University of Vienna.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Musical Modernism and German Cinema from 1913 to 1933
Authors: Francesco Finocchiaro
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58262-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-58261-0Published: 18 January 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-86362-7Published: 04 June 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-58262-7Published: 16 December 2017
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIX, 259
Number of Illustrations: 7 b/w illustrations
Topics: Screen Studies, Music, European Culture, Cultural History