Rebecca Coyle (ed).
Screen Scores: Studies in Contemporary Australian film music
Sydney: AFTRS 1998.
ISBN: 1 876351 00 4
Uploaded 18 December 1998
Despite a growing body of scholarship on the broad subject of film music, much of it talks about the subject in the trans-national sense. Little addresses the matter of individual nations and individual national cinemas, unless those states or cinemas fall within the hegemony of North America or the Anglo-American axis. Rebecca Coyle’s collection remedies this matter by taking the Australian cinema as her precinct, although it would be more correct to say, in a purely temporal sense, that it is the contemporary Australian cinema that constitutes her contributors’ subject. At the same time, the collection takes up a broad generic compass, for it includes, in addition to mainstream narrative, the cartoon, comedy and avant-garde narrative.
The essays are uniformally readable and devoid of excessive rhetoric. What unifies them in intellectual scope is the question of whether or not one can, in fact, isolate a national cinema or, more important, a national sound. The common answer to that question is negative or, at best,tentative. While it is indisputable that there are assumptions and assertions one might make about the whole of Australian cinema, there are fewer firm statements that might be made about whatever sonic democracy either the citizens of that nation or their film makers collectively inhabit. To be sure, there are sounds, instruments, and forms of expression that one, whether native Australian or not, associates with the country. However, whether or not one can say there is the sonic equivalent of “Australianness” remains another matter.
To assert that this collection fails to find a unified, or even a palpable, answer to that conundrum is not to damn it as an enterprise. Screen scores is an insightful and substantial examination of a body of screen and sonic practices. Citing individual essays risks slighting those left unexamined, but a sure hand guides all the contributors. One of my principal fields of research in film as well as music is the manner in which musical expression exists in a corporate, now transnational, context. While the study of popular musical expression remains steadfastly committed, by and large, to the demonization of that context and those who control it, the essays in Coyle’s collection neatly combine attention to industrial context and musical as well as filmic text. At the same time, the use of film music as but one more of many “revenue streams” in search of the fabled goal of corporate “synergy” means that, more often than not, film music is treated as an ancillary product, another means of merchandise and monetary reward. It was always so, I hasten to add, but the current climate finds the film score often lacking in unity as it can beome a loose baggy mess of individual cues, interpolated songs, and suggestive “stingers” meant to capture the audience in the theater AND in the record store.
Editor Coyle’s asssesment of the scores to the films by comedian Yahoo Serious take up this phenomeon with an acute sense of the demands made upon harried composers. The addition in the text as well of Mark Evans’s detailed account of the nature of copyright in the context of current film production and scoring gives a legal grounding to the complexities that haunt many present day composers. If the nation of Australia as a whole cannot be singularly constituted in a sonic sense, there is ample evidence in this collection that either gender or nationality can be so illustrated. The former is manifested with wit and insight by Catharine Lumby’s piece on the presence of camp in the soundtracks of Priscilla and Muriel’s Wedding. The latter is cogently shown by Tony Mitchell’s detailed assessment of how the body of Italian immigrants to the continent found themselves expressed in sonic terms in a body of films and television series.
Much of the detail in these essays focuses not so much on praxis as practice, specific musical choices made by composers Philip Brophy, as assessed by Philip Samartzis, or Martin Armiger, discused by Michael Hannan and Jude Magee. Equally striking is the essay on director Peter Weir by Bruce Johnson and Gaye Poole, which endeavors to illustrate the nature of the sonic auteurship in his films, specifically the manner in which the works have become more generalized and even banal as he has become a Hollywood figure rather than a specifically Australian one.
In conclusion, while one cannot (pace Benedict Anderson) imagine an acoustic community that connects all of Australian film, there are certainly any number of themes that prevail in the work of its contemporary musicians and directors.
David Sanjek