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Auditory Ambivalence: Music in the Western from High Noon to Brokeback Mountain
Author(s) -
BLOUIN MICHAEL J.
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
the journal of popular culture
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.238
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1540-5931
pISSN - 0022-3840
DOI - 10.1111/j.1540-5931.2010.00794.x
Subject(s) - ballad , noon , theme (computing) , state (computer science) , movie theater , ambivalence , popular music , history , art history , art , media studies , literature , sociology , psychology , poetry , computer science , social psychology , physics , algorithm , astronomy , operating system
T HE MUSIC OF WESTERNS HAUNTS THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE. ONE NEED look no further than my seventy-five-year-old grandfather who, one day while speaking with me on the phone, began to sing (in its entirety) the theme song from High Noon—fifty years after viewing the film. The soundtracks of the genre are understood by many as ‘‘Americana’’ par excellence; these are the songs that seem to capture or forge the ‘‘traditional’’ sound of American culture. Film music scholar Tony Thomas would label these soundtracks successful: they sink into the audience subconsciously, are noninvasive, and they compliment the primary images of the film. Celebrated avant garde use of music in recent westerns such as No Country for Old Men (2008), however, leads one to scrutinize more carefully the history of sound in the western genre. Have the soundtracks always been used so conservatively? Or, before the innovations of the past several years, have they ever been used to challenge this ‘‘subconscious’’ role? K. J. Donnelly writes in The Spectre of Sound: ‘‘Screen music is a controlling device, in that it wishes to influence behavior, shaping audience reaction to the film or television program in which it appears’’ (Donnelly 4). Film music has often been recognized with a degree of contempt. Because of its ability to vanish into the background, it raises