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Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film
Shared Concert Experiences in Screen Fiction
by Ben Winters
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Book Presentation:
This book examines the relationship between narrative film and reality, as seen through the lens of on-screen classical concert performance. By investigating these scenes, wherein the performance of music is foregrounded in the narrative, Winters uncovers how concert performance reflexively articulates music's importance to the ontology of film. The book asserts that narrative film of a variety of aesthetic approaches and traditions is no mere copy of everyday reality, but constitutes its own filmic reality, and that the music heard in a film's underscore plays an important role in distinguishing film reality from the everyday. As a result, concert scenes are examined as sites for provocative interactions between these two realities, in which real-world musicians appear in fictional narratives, and an audience’s suspension of disbelief is problematised. In blurring the musical experiences of onscreen observers and participants, these concert scenes also allegorize music’s role in creating a shared subjectivity between film audience and character, and prompt Winters to propose a radically new vision of music’s role in narrative cinema wherein musical underscore becomes part of a shared audio-visual space that may be just as accessible to the characters as the music they encounter in scenes of concert performance.
About the Author:
Ben Winters is Lecturer in Music at The Open University, UK. He is the author of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s The Adventures of Robin Hood: A Film Score Guide (2007), and has published on film music in musicological journals, and in edited collections of essays for Routledge.
See the publisher website: Routledge
> From the same author:
Korngold in America (2025)
Music, Myth, and Hollywood
by Ben Winters
Subject: Others persons > Erich Wolfgang Korngold
> On a related topic:
Reeled In (2020)
Pre-existing Music in Narrative Film: Pre-existing Music in Narrative Film
Music for Superheroes (2025)
Film and Television Scores Since 1940
Haunted Soundtracks (2025)
Audiovisual Cultures of Memory, Landscape, and Sound
Dir. Kevin J. Donnelly and Aimee Mollaghan
Hearing Eyes, Seeing Ears (2025)
Collected Writings on Music in Audiovisual Culture
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