OLLI Talks: Lights! Camera! Music? The Magical Art of Music for the Movies (DRAKE HALL)

Since the birth of cinema in the 1890s, music has been an essential element of the movies. During the early silent film era, musical accompaniment provided by live performers in each theater was necessary to mask the clatter of the projector. Soon, however, improvements in projector design (and soundproofing!) eliminated this necessity. But film music did not go away. With every passing year, from The Great Train Robbery (1903) to Oppenheimer (2023), film scores have become increasingly important. They also have become increasingly popular. In 1977, the double-LP soundtrack to Star Wars sold over 1,000,000 copies and appeared on the 1977 Billboard top-20 list.  But why? After all, nearly every film strives to represent the world realistically. What business does music have playing in the background? The intent of some pieces is that the audience does not notice them. So, what are they doing in the movie? How does film music work, anyway? How does it enhance your viewing experience?  We’ll investigate these and other questions using extracts from interviews with famous composers along with audio and visual clips from well-known movies. (You need no specialized knowledge of music or cinema, just curiosity and a love of film.) I hope you’ll leave this course with a heightened awareness and appreciation of film music, the motion picture art that is heard but not seen.              

Michael Morrison was the David Ross Boyd Professor of Physics and General Education of the University of Oklahoma (OU) until he retired in 2010. There, he carried out and directed physics research and indulged in his first love, teaching. During his 40 years in the Physics Department, in addition to teaching obligatory physics classes, he taught courses on literature and film, created a workshop on writing for scientists and engineers, and developed a multi-course curriculum on Science in Contemporary Culture, for which he was awarded the 1997 Medal for Excellence in Teaching. After retirement, he abandoned physics to concentrate on his passions: cinema, literature, writing, and film music. In addition to two physics texts, he has written countless book reviews, many essays, and two books on the literature of the fantastic the topic of a series of courses he offered in the OU OLLI program. Finally able to live somewhere he wanted to, he moved in 2017 to Fort Collins, where he resides with his husband Gordon and the world’s most adorable cat, Tina.

Notes

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