Response Blog #1

Wanda Sanders
Dr. Berry
1/9/09

1. In watching A Trip to the Moon, The Great Train Robbery, and The Battleship Potemkin, I felt having to watch these movies without any dialogue was very interesting. The first two being relatively short, I could sit through them and hear a lot of the chords and melody being played throughout out the movie. When it came to The Battleship Potemkin, however, I couldn't really keep up with the music that much because of it being a symphony. It felt that at some point the sequences were all running together, until they had battle scenes because the mode of the music would change from major to minor. Although I felt that I couldn't keep up, in the last scene of the movie, I did recognize Shostakovich's symphony from the Finale and fell in love with the scene because of his use of ominous and triumphant chords.
I thought that Siegfried was a good movie because it had a story plot that would come up on screen to at least help the watcher understand what was going on. In that movie I heard a nice use of dynamics, major & minor mode, and I believe there was a leitmotif going on also.
The Jazz Singer was enticing because of the story plot. In this movie we got to see some diegetic and photographic music when the young boy was singing at the saloon. We saw it yet again when he has made it "big time" and performed for the audience.

2. I found a lot of interesting things in the readings that we've had to do this week. I came into this class not really knowing anything about film music except for the fact that if you listened carefully, you might hear a song that you like. When I read what really happens when the people in Hollywood decide to make a movie, I was actually dumbfounded to learn all of this exciting and somewhat depressing information. Such as what orcherstrators do, how much film composers really make, who they have to pay, and the overall process of making a film. I thought that it was pretty cool that the directors of some films keep the same composer for what seems like forever. That's a pretty strong bond to have between director and composer. It was also interesting to know what a temp track was and how they use it to be able to score the music for the film. For some reason I speculated that classical and film composers could just flip-flop anytime they wanted to...well I know that's NOT the case. I think that the film composers have it way worse than a classical composer because of the amount of time that a film composer has to compose a score. 3-6 weeks to me is not enough time to even get half of some thoughts together! I was amused to see that nickelodeons back then were theatres and not a t.v. network!

3. This past week I have certainly learned a lot about films and the amount of stamina and time that it takes to make these, especially when it's going to have music incorporated in it. Who would've thought that the Lumiere brothers would invent something so wonderful that it still exsists today? I now have a full appreciation for the directors, producers, composers, and musicians and all the other people that are needed to make a movie because without their knowledge and time that goes into making a film or composing music, we wouldn't have what we do today.