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Popular Music and the New Auteur
Visionary Filmmakers after MTV
Edited by Arved Ashby
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Book Presentation:
• Offers new arguments about contemporary directors and film scores
• Shows how music videos have inspired cinema
• Relates director's soundtrack to core gestures
Movies have never been the same since MTV. While the classic symphonic film score promised direct insight into a character's mind, the expanded role of popular music has made more ambiguous the question of when, if ever, we are allowed to see or share a character's emotions. As a result, the potential for irony and ambiguity has multiplied exponentially, and characterization and narrative capacities have fragmented. At the most basic level, this new aesthetic has required filmgoers to renegotiate some of their most basic instinctual connections with the human voice and with any sense of a filmmaking self.
Music videos widened the creative vocabulary of filmmaking: they increased speeds of event in cinema and deflecting filmmakers from narrative, characterization, and storytelling toward a concentration on situation, feeling, mood, and time. Popular Music and the New Auteur charts the impact of music videos on seven visionary directors: Martin Scorsese, Sofia Coppola, David Lynch, Wong Kar-Wai, the Coen brothers, Quentin Tarantino, and Wes Anderson. Ashby and his contributors define these filmmakers' relation to the soundtrack as their key authorial gesture. These filmmakers demonstrate a fresh kind of cinematic musicality by writing against music rather than against script, and allowing pop songs a determining role in narrative and imagery. Featuring important new theoretical work by some of the most stimulating and provocative writers in the area today, Popular Music and the New Auteur will be required reading for all who study film music and sound. It will also be particularly relevant for readers in popular music studies, and its intervention in the ongoing debate on auteurism will make it necessary reading in film studies.
About the Author:
Edited by Arved Ashby, Associate Professor of Music, The Ohio State University Arved Ashby is Professor of Music at The Ohio State University, where he teaches courses on 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century music in contexts of cultural history, critical theory, post-Marxist aesthetics, and media and communications. He is editor of Listening to Modernism: Intention, Meaning, and the Compositional Avant-garde (Rochester, 2004) and author of Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction (California, 2010)
Press Reviews:
"Popular Music and the New Auteur is an important collection. These essays demonstrate how certain contemporary directors use the selection of popular music in startling and innovative ways to imprint their films with a distinct musical signature." - James Buhler, co-author of Hearing the Movies: Music and Sound in Film History (2009)
"Not only is the auteur not dead, but many contemporary directors' films sing in distinctive ways. Ashby's collection is timely and brilliantly focused, revealing the key musical dimension to filmmakers we thought we knew." - Claudia Gorbman, author of Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
> On a related topic:
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
The Hyperorchestra (2024)
Screen Music and Virtual Musical Ensembles
Transmitting Opera in Movie Theatres (2024)
Dir. Marie-Odile Demay and Andre Gaudreault
(in English and French)
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