AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts sunday morning 167
POLITICS, WAR, AND DOCUMENTARY FILM MUSIC: ROY
HARRIS AND THE PROBLEM OF oNe teNtH oF A NAtioN
Julie Hubbert
University of South Carolina
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, scoring non-Hollywood films provided many emerging
American composers with the chance to participate both in film medium and in left-leaning
political and social causes. A League of Composers concert at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York City on January 12, 1940, illustrates how significant these twin interests had become
in the pre-war compositional landscape. The concert featured excerpts from six documentary
film scores: The Power and the Land (Douglas Moore), Valley town (Marc Blitzstein), The City
(Aaron Copland), The river (Virgil Thompson), one tenth of a Nation (Roy Harris), and roots
in the earth (Paul Bowles). Each film excerpt was prefaced by introductory remarks from the
score’s composer.
While recent scholarship has focused significant attention on Thomson’s and Copland’s
scores, and some work has been done on Blitzstein’s, Moore’s, and Bowles’ scores, virtually
nothing has been said about Roy Harris’ score for one tenth of our Nation. This silence may
be due to the troubled conception and reception the film experienced. The film focused on the
highly sensitive issue of Negro education in the South. While filming, the crew’s cameramen
were arrested as “fifth columnists.” When the film premiered at the Chicago Negro Exposition
in October, 1940, its tone and content were so troubled that the film was shelved until
revisions could be made. Harris, for various reason, was not engaged in the project until late
in the process. Far from resolving or neutralizing the film’s internal conflicts, Harris’s score
plays a significant role in heightening them. By viewing and analyzing sequences from this
rarely seen film, this paper will shed light not only on Harris’s only film score, and complicate
his reception as America’s “log cabin” composer, but create a more complete picture of the
significant role “serious” composers played in the documentary and sponsored film boom of
the late 1930s and early ’40s.
ALFRED SCHNITTKE’S FILM MUSIC AND
HIS CONCERTO GROSSO NO. 1
Michael Baumgartner
Boston, Massachusetts
Alfred Schnittke’s copious musical oeuvre for the cinema has been virtually neglected by
musicologists and film scholars, a surprising fact since Schnittke wrote roughly sixty scores
for—among others—such influential directors as Elem Klimov, Larisa Sheptiko, Aleksandr
Mitta and Chris Marker. These scores are of particular importance since Schnittke considered
his film work a laboratory for experimenting with a variety of musical concepts and compositional
techniques. In this respect, Sheptiko’s World War II-epos Ascent (1977), Mitta’s
light-hearted comedy How Czar Peter the great Married off His Moor (1976) and Klimov’s Rasputin
“biopic” Agony (1975) are at a crossroads regarding Schnittke’s further music-aesthetic
development.
Since the early 1970s Schnittke had increasingly occupied himself with a number of twentieth-century
compositional devices such as polystylistic forms, chromatic microintervals,
timbral relationships and modulations, static forms, use of rhythm to overcome meter and