Although the Western musical style, or Classical music as people refer it as, is not widely spoken of or heard on the radio, it is still present in our everyday lives. There are a variety of musical forms that integrate Classical music, a few being the symphony, opera, and even church Mass. People do not recognize that they are probably more familiar with this style music than they think. Not only is it incorporated into other forms of music but can be recognized in current television shows and movies.
One of the most crucial aspects of a scene in a film is the music, as it has the ability to manipulate what direction a scene may go in. For instance, scary movies commonly have very suspenseful music that succumb the audience to suspense and fright at almost any moment it appears. However, if one were to replace this music with a lighter and happier toned piece, it would have an entirely different affect and may even diminish any signs of horror that the director intended.
The person whom is responsible for transmitting the director’s vision through music is the music supervisor. It is his or her job to choose and incorporate an appropriate song for a scene to specifically contribute to its overall message or desired effect. Music supervisors may have to commission a composer to write new music for a film but are mostly responsible for being well educated and rounded in all genres of music. If a music supervisor does not do his or her job well enough, a film may end up lacking in scenes that produce a memorable effect on their viewers. Classical music is very common in film because its ambience and lack of lyric make it less distracting to a scene. However, in some films a classical piece may be a feature part of the scene rather than just background music. This may be because the connotations and/or content of the song contribute to what is occurring in a scene. This is often the case for Mozart and its placement in films, however our findings proved to be otherwise for Haydn. For our final project we essentially plan to make people aware of this issue and raise the question of what it is about Mozart music that makes it so popular.*
Stages of Development
- Met up for the first time to brainstorm ideas for the project and distribute the work that needs to be done evenly
- It was decided that one person would complete an analysis for 3 movies with Haydn music and the other would do the same for 3 movies with Mozart music
- During the second meeting, we discussed the problems that arose from our original plan. Haydn is much more inaccessible in terms of finding information for so we proposed a solution that the person doing the movies with Haydn will do a Mozart movies as well, to continue the equality of the division of work. These write-ups would then be posted on the blog page
- While attempting to create an analysis of Haydn vs. Mozart music in film, it was decided that we would only base our data on one website because there was an overabundance of Mozart data that it would not be suitable to use more than one website.
- At our final meeting, we decided upon the posters because we wanted to promote our blog page and use this as another outlet to promote Haydn Awareness Week.
*In each post links are provided for the pieces and scenes discussed.
Written by: Arianna Benincasa and Trisha Elegino
