Abstract
Mazey provides an overview of the aesthetic diversity of British film music and investigates the industry conditions that give rise to its distinctive nature. The chapter opens with a brief outline of the key differences between British and Hollywood film music before focusing more closely on the British industry. It introduces the music directors and composers working in the British industry, and explores how their musical education aligns them with the historical mission that resulted in the English Musical Renaissance. The chapter concludes with multiple examples of the restrained use of music in British cinema that illustrate the poetic and expressive potential that was possible within the British system.
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Notes
- 1.
Margaret Lockwood, for instance, recalls working in the film studio during the day while appearing each evening on the West End stage (1955, 42–3, 47)
- 2.
In December 1939 Walton writes to the composer John Ireland that he has a film commission ‘which seems to be the only money I shall earn next year!’ (Hayes 2002, 127).
- 3.
Of the fifty-one composers in this study, thirty-three also scored documentary films, ten of whom worked on documentaries before scoring their first feature film.
- 4.
Love from a Stranger was based on a play by Frank Vosper which in turn was based on a short story by Agatha Christie. Britten’s score includes music from Grieg’s ‘Peer Gynt Suite’, and Michael Oliver hears in the film’s opening storm scenes a ‘clear anticipation of the storm music [in Peter Grimes]’ (1996, 59).
- 5.
The scraping metallic sound of the lamp blowing in the wind outside the workhouse finds an echo in the augmented sound effects that accompany the swinging shop signs in the opening scene of Lean’s 1954 adaptation of Hobson’s Choice , a sequence that intentionally mirrors the beginning of Great Expectations.
- 6.
The connection between the battle sequences in Alexander Nevsky and Henry V is noted by, among others, Roger Manvell (1971, 39), Neil Sinyard (1986, 3), Kenneth S. Rothwell (1999, 55), and Mervyn Cooke (2008, 170). In his autobiography, Confessions of an Actor, Olivier himself notes that Henry V was ‘littered with petty larcenies’ from Eisenstein (1982, 162).
- 7.
Dallas Bower had also been instrumental in promoting the idea of a film of Henry V, having prepared a script for a possible BBC Television production in 1938, upon which the film script was based (McFarlane 1997, 81).
- 8.
Onscreen horse-drawn journeys tend to be accompanied by music that matches the rhythm set by the hooves. This musical mirroring of the pace of onscreen movement is found in horse-drawn journeys in many films including The Flemish Farm (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), Tawny Pipit (1944), The Years Between (1946), The Brothers (1947), The Loves of Joanna Godden (1947), The Mark of Cain (1947), They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), Jassy (1947). In So Long at the Fair (1950), the tempo of Benjamin Frankel’s ‘Carriage and Pair’ explicitly mimics the gentle trot of the horses pulling the onscreen carriage.
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Mazey, P. (2020). Aesthetic Conventions: Distinctiveness and Diversity. In: British Film Music. Palgrave Studies in Audio-Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33550-2_2
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