Category: Activities

Die Fachbereichsbibliothek Musikwissenschaft der Universität Wien verwahrt seit 2018 den Nachlass des deutschen Komponisten und Kinokapellmeisters Edgar Haase (1901–1967).

Der Musikbestand enthält über 500 Orchestersets aus deutschen, englischen und amerikanischen Kinomusik-Repertoires der Stummfilm-Epoche (bspw. Kinothek, Preis-Kino-Bibliothek, Boheme Kino-Lexikon, Sam Fox Film-Gebrauchs-Musik, Bosworth’s Internationales Kino-Orchester, J. S. Zamecnik’s Photoplay-Edition, Universal-Film-Musik, Robbins Red Seal Concert Series, Filmharmonie und vielen anderen). Ein solch umfangreiches Kompendium erlaubt einen historischen Einblick in die alltägliche Praxis der Stummfilm-Musik und kann Filmmusikforschern bei der Rekonstruktion der zeitgenössischen Technik und Ästhetik der Filmkomposition helfen.

Dr. Francesco Finocchiaro, Leiter des FWF-Forschungsprojekts Filmmusik als Problem im deutschsprachigen Journalismus (1907–1930), wird diesen Musikbestand im Rahmen eines Lecture-Recitals vorstellen: Der Vortrag wird von der Live-Musikaufführung ausgewählter Kinomusikstücke durch ein Kammerensemble flankiert.

Hörsaal 1 im Institut für Musikwissenschaft
Spitalgasse 2-4, Hof 9 (Campus), A-0190 Wien

KONZERT

Italian cinema of the fascist Ventennio (1922–43) used music and, more generally, the acoustic component in an anything but naive way: on the contrary, it focused on the most subliminal component of the filmic text so as to convey constellations of meaning that were useful to the regime’s cultural politics.

The musical component proves to be a strategic ideological tool especially in films with declared propaganda content. Fascist ideology translates into a pervasive musical polarization. On the one hand, music enhances fascism’s propagandistic myths, such as Latinity, Risorgimento, family, peasant land, war, etc. On the other, music is put in the service of anti-Communist, anti-Jewish, as well as anti-Ethiopian iconography, connoting spaces and environments, criminalizing the regime’s enemies (Africans, Marxists, Jews, etc.) through dissonances, cacophonic clusters, as well as the deformation of ethnic and jazz music.

The musical component of fascist cinema contributed toward structuring the regime’s rhetoric for all intents and purposes. Analysing the musical construction of spaces and places in the regime’s cinema can help reconstruct a fundamental chapter, so far neglected, of fascism’s cultural encyclopaedia.

Film Music as Propaganda: The Musical Construction of Space in Fascist Cinema was the title of an interdisciplinary panel conducted by Francesco Finocchiaro together with colleagues Leo Izzo and Elena Mosconi at the international conference Mapping Spaces, Sounding Places. Geographies of Sounds in Audiovisual Media, at the University of Pavia-Cremona (19-22 March 2019).

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Our workshop on silent film music at the IULM University Milan started right today with a class on film music restorations. (A breath of fresh air against stupididy and evilness!)

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

From March 11th to 15th, Francesco Finocchiaro will give a workshop on film music composition in the early 20th century, in the framework of an Erasmus Teaching Assingnment at the IULM University Milan.

At the Musicological Department’s “Semesterfrüchte 2019”, Marlene Penninger, Marie Huber, and Chiara Schmidt performed “Notturno amoroso”, a film music piece drawn from Giuseppe Becce’s Kinothek (1919-26).

On November-December 2018, the Austrian Filmmuseum dedicated a film retrospective to Elvira Notari (1875–1946), the Neapolitan film pioneer of the early silent era. Italian folk music stars Lucilla Galeazzi, Dolore Melodia, and Michele Signore contributed to outstanding live musical accompaniments for the films ‘ A Santanotte (1922), È piccerella (1922), Fantasia ‘e surdato (1926), as well as Roberto Roberti’s masterpiece Napoli che canta (1926).

See the full article on Amadeus.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

From the 1st to 13th of October 2018, Dr. Francesco Finocchiaro exposed the FMJ research findings in the form of an Erasmus Teaching Mobility for students in composition at the “F. Venezze” Conservatory Rovigo.