Mysteriosos Demystified
Topical Strategies Within and Beyond the Silent Cinema
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jfm.v5i1-2.77Keywords:
topoi, silent cinemaAbstract
Musical topoi, such as religioso, battle, oriental etc., abound in generic silent film compositions (“photoplay music”) and catalogs of pieces for cinema musicians in the 1920s. As topoi are indeed useful to evoke meanings and to quickly produce a musical accompaniment for actions, they had been established in dramatic genres and program music long before film music became a profession after World War I. Misteriosos are a case in point to illustrate the formation and longevity of a musical topos from stage melodramas to sound films. When long feature films became mass entertainment and montage techniques advanced, cinema musicians had to develop new cataloging systems in order to gain control over a vast and rapidly growing repertoire of music suitable to accompany complex screen dramas at short notice. Accordingly, the catalogs grew increasingly complex and provided multidimensional taxonomies of nested categories by the end of the silent period.
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Altman, Rick and Richard Abel, eds. 2001. The sounds of early cinema. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Anderson, Gillian B. 1988. Music for silent films 1894-1929: A Guide. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress.
Becce, Giuseppe. 1919-33. Kinothek. Berlin: Schlesinger; Vienna: Haslinger.
Beynon, George W. 1921. Musical presentation of motion pictures. New York, Boston: Schirmer.
Bornscheuer, Lothar. 1976. Topik: Zur Struktur der gesellschaftlichen Einbildungskraft. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
Bowers, Q. David. 1986. Nickelodeon theatres and their music. Vestal, N.Y.: Vestal Press.
Brav, Ludwig. 1928. Thematischer Führer durch klassische und moderne Orchestermusik zum besonderen Gebrauch für die musikalische “Film-Illustration”. Berlin: Bote & Bock.
Buhrman, T. Scott. 1920. Photoplays deluxe. The American Organist 3, no. 5: 171-73. Chambers, Ephraim. 1728. Cyclopædia, or, An universal dictionary of arts and sciences. London.
Danuser, Hermann. 2009. Topos. Musik. In Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, ed. Gert Ueding, vol. 9, cols. 711-14. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Dawkins, Richard. 2006. The selfish gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Erdmann, Hans. 1923. Fantastisch-romantische Suite. Berlin: Bote & Bock.
Goodrich, Chauncey and Noah Porter, eds. 1986. Webster’s complete dictionary of the English language. London: Bell & Sons.
Gorbman, Claudia. 1987. Unheard melodies: narrative film music. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Lang, Edith and George West. 1920. Musical accompaniment of moving pictures. Boston: Boston Music Comp.
Marks, Martin. 1997. Music and the silent film: contexts and case studies, 1895-1924. New York: Oxford University Press.
McClelland, Clive. 2001. Ombra music in the eighteenth century: context, style and signification. Ph.D. diss., University of Leeds.
Messter, Oskar. 1936. Mein Weg mit dem Film. Berlin: Hesse.
Mirka, Danuta, ed. Forthcoming. The Oxford handbook of topic theory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Moyer, Birgitte. 1992. Ombra and fantasia in late eighteenth-century theory and practice. In Convention in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century music: essays in honor of Leonard G. Ratner, ed. W. J. Allanbrook, J. M. Levy, W. P. Mahrt, 283-306. Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press.
Panos, Nearchos, Peter Nelson, Vangelis Lympouridis, and George Athanasopoulos, eds. 2012. Proceedings of the International Conference on Music Semiotics in memory of Raymond Monelle. CD-ROM. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh.
Plebuch, Tobias. 2011. Was sind musikalische Topoi? In Ereignis und Exegese: Festschrift für Hermann Danuser zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Camilla Bork et al., 167-82. Schliengen: Edition Argus.
Rapée, Ernö. 1925. Encyclopaedia of music for pictures. New York: Belwin.
Ratner, Leonard. 1980. Classic music. New York: Schirmer.
Rosar, William H. 2006. Music for Martians: Schillinger’s two tonics and harmony of fourths in Leith Stevens’ score for War of the Worlds (1953). The Journal of Film Music 1, no. 4: 395-438.
Schneller, Tom. 2013. Easy to cut: modular form in the film scores of Bernard Herrmann. The Journal of Film Music 5, nos. 1-2: 127-52.
Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz. 1926. Die Musik zum Film. Die Musik (11 August): 807-17.
Vechten, Carl van. 1916. Music and bad manners. New York: A. A. Knopf.
West, George. 1920. Film folio: moods and motives for the movies. Boston: Boston Music Comp.
Wierzbicki, James. 2009. Film music: a history. New York: Routledge.
Published
2013-10-31
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Plebuch, T. (2013). Mysteriosos Demystified: Topical Strategies Within and Beyond the Silent Cinema. Journal of Film Music, 5(1-2), 77-92. https://doi.org/10.1558/jfm.v5i1-2.77
