Baroque Music in Post-War Cinema
Performance Practice and Musical Style

Film analyses raise issues of baroque style and form asking why 18th c. music remains an exception to dominant film-music discourses.

Donald Greig (Author)

9781108827867, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 4 March 2021

75 pages
23 x 15 x 0.5 cm, 0.145 kg

'… Greig provides a masterful overview and a number of pointed insights into the 'hows' and 'whys' of baroque music's relationship to film music.' Rebecca Fülöp, Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute

Studies of pre-existing music in narrative cinema often focus on a single film, composer or director. The approach here adopts a wider perspective, placing a specific musical repertoire - baroque music - in the context of its reception to explore its mobilisation in post-war cinema. It shows how various revivals have shaped musical fashion, and how cinema has drawn on resultant popularity and in turn contributed to it. Close analyses of various films raise issues of baroque musical style and form to question why eighteenth-century music remains an exception to dominant film-music discourses. Account is taken of changing modern performance practice and its manifestation in cinema, particularly in the biopic. This question of the reimagining of baroque repertoire leads to consideration of pastiches and parodies to which cinema has been particularly drawn, and subsequently to the role that neobaroque music has played in more recent films.

Introduction
1. Baroque Music Before World War Two
2. The Vivaldi Revival
3. Bresson, Pasolini, and Musical Disconnection
4. Authenticity and Historically Informed Performance
5. The Neobaroque, the New Baroque and Minimalism
6. Final thoughts.

Subject Areas: 20th century & contemporary classical music [AVGC6], Baroque music [c 1600 to c 1750 AVGC3], Western "classical" music [AVGC], Music [AV]