Arthur Honegger composed his first sound film scores in 1933–34. For Les misérables, Raymond Bernard, who was under contract at Pathé-Natan to direct big-budget theatrical films that would compete with Paramount's French-language productions, expected Honegger to provide intermittent orchestral underscoring for already filmed sequences that privileged dialogue over music. For Rapt, the musically trained Dimitri Kirsanoff used independent financing to collaborate from the start with Honegger and Arthur Hoérée on what the director called “a hybrid form … in which music, image, and dialogue work together.” The innovative electroacoustic and sound editing techniques in the soundtrack for Rapt have, I argue, overshadowed the strikingly reciprocal relationship between the soundtrack's more conventional instrumental underscoring and the images on screen. Honegger theorized in 1931 that, in sound film, music's “autonomy” would free it from the burden of mimesis. Instead, the images on screen would teach listeners about music's abstract “reality.” In practice, however, in Rapt, mimetic music and musicalized sound effects bridge the gap between aesthetic goals of hybridity and practical demands for intelligible dialogue. My analysis of the abduction, washhouse, storm, and dream sequences in Rapt demonstrates that a successful hybrid of sound and image ultimately has the potential not just to use images to pin down music's elusive “reality,” but also to use music's mimetic possibilities to influence our reading of ambiguous imagery. It also shows that music does not need to be in itself groundbreaking in order to contribute to groundbreaking innovations in sound film.
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Spring 2019
Research Article|
April 01 2019
Composing Film Music in Theory and Practice: Honegger's Contributions to Les misérables and Rapt
Leslie Sprout
Leslie Sprout
LESLIE SPROUT is Associate Professor of Music at Drew University. She is the author of The Musical Legacy of Wartime France (University of California Press, 2013), which received Drew's Bela Kornitzer Award in 2016. Her scholarship focuses on music, modernism, and nationalism in twentieth-century France. She has published articles in the Journal of Musicology, the Musical Quarterly, and the New York Times. She is currently working on a monograph about the film music of Arthur Honegger.
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Journal of the American Musicological Society (2019) 72 (1): 43–113.
Citation
Leslie Sprout; Composing Film Music in Theory and Practice: Honegger's Contributions to Les misérables and Rapt. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 April 2019; 72 (1): 43–113. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2019.72.1.43
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