ABSTRACTS
Soundtracking Danger: Adapting the Jazz Noir Fallacy in Game Noir
James Heazlewood-Dale (Brandeis University)
Embedded in the sounds of a sultry saxophone solo, a walking double bass, and a swinging high hat are sinister and salacious undertones. Within cinematic contexts, jazz has accumulated codings to signify criminality, urbanity, and immorality. The jazz crime trope has pervasively made its way into the soundscapes of interactive media. There is a complexity in examining transmedial adaptations of film noir due to various periods of noir (classic noir, period noir, and neo-noir), and there is a great deal of nuance in the relationships between the jazz idiom and these three shades of film noir. Steven Reale, Andra Ivănescu, and Iain Hart’s ludomusicological scholarship focus on how jazz operates ludically, musically, and aesthetically in L.A. Noire (2011), establishing Rockstar Games’s love letter to classic 1940s film noir as a seminal case study for examining game noir.
The present research builds on the ideas, tools, and methodologies of these scholars, in addition to film scholars such as David Butler, Mark T. Conrad, Andrew Spicer, and Patrick Ness, to investigate a more extensive list of more than 70 game noir case studies, including Chicken Police – Paint it RED! (2020), Genesis Noir (2021), and Voodoo Detective (2022). I argue that these case studies illuminate how game noir perpetuates the fallacy of jazz noir, the mythologized relationship between classic noir and jazz music. By examining jazz in a wider range of ludic contexts, this research seeks to illuminate jazz music’s often-overlooked role in game scoring practices and offers insights into ludomusical storytelling and cultural representation.
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Musical Networks, Genealogy, and the Tree of Jesse in Fifteenth-Century France
Jeannette D. Jones (Maynard, MA)
French poetry demonstrated a cultural shift at the beginning of the fifteenth century that exalted the work of the artist as one whose works deserve tribute as artistic nobility, characterized by lists of poets and musicians. These lists depict an artist lineage that serves a discursive function, emulating genealogies of the ruling class. A dynastic system depends on the legitimacy of heirs, ensuring future legacy. The lists of poets and musicians build value for their work, establishing their lasting glory.
Sound imagery pervades these poems, but also reflects visual depictions of sound and genealogy, particularly in Tree of Jesse images. These images typically show a tree growing upwards from a supine Jesse with small portraits of the ancestors, reflected in several biblical genealogies. While the number of ancestors may vary depending on the level of detail, King David is always present, holding his harp. A cluster of miniatures representing the tree of Jesse emerged in fifteenth-century northern French sources in which all the ancestors hold instruments. The array of instruments reflects the soundscape of coronation and regal processions, as well as resonating with instruments surrounding the poetic scenes of artistic lineage. I argue that the tree imagery invites us to think of an ecology of artistic networks in France, especially adding a crucial dimension to what is known about the lives and institutions of musicians in these circles.
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Freder’s Fever Dream: How the Dies Irae Disrupts and Determines Narrative Logic in the Film Metropolis
Alex Ludwig (Berklee College of Music)
“Verily, I say unto you, the days spoken of in the Apocalypse are nigh…!” These words appear on an inter-title card during Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927) as the protagonist, Freder Frederson, suffers from an anxiety attack. Our bedridden hero envisions a series of apocalyptic images brought about by a “false idol” that eventually culminates in an enormous, Götterdämmerung-like flood of the titular city. Freder’s nightmare is sufficiently colored by the score’s frequent citation of the medieval melody Dies Irae.
Composed by Gottfried Huppertz, the film score for Metropolis contains multiple iterations of the Dies Irae in support its apocalyptic narrative. Given its status in the 19th century as a musical memento mori, the Dies Irae clearly shapes the narrative of the film, appearing more than ten times throughout Metropolis. In its incipit form, the Dies Irae functions as a leitmotif for a spy that follows Freder; full statements of the melody accompany descriptions or visions of the Apocalypse. By far, the most dense grouping of the Dies Irae appears in the “Intermezzo,” or middle act of the film, wherein the protagonist, Freder Frederson, frantically searches for his beloved Maria. Unbeknownst to Freder, Maria has been abducted and her likeness applied to a “False Maria” sent to not only sow discord amongst the workers beneath the city, but also to wreak havoc in the Frederson family, as she drives a wedge between father and son. Drawing on analyses of multiple cues in the score, including both the incipit and fully-fledged melody, I demonstrate how Huppertz’s use of the Dies Irae shapes our understanding of the film’s narrative.
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Cootje van Oven’s Legacy as a Student and Collector of the Indigenous Music of Sierra Leone
Richard Mueller (Willington, CT)
In 1960 at the age of 40, Cootje van Oven arrived in Freetown to take up duties as a music teacher at the Grammar School. Over the next 23 years she collected and studied indigenous music in all provinces of the country with the goal of creating a textbook to be used to teach Sierra Leone’s music to students in schools. Overcoming many obstacles, she published two books on Sierra Leone’s music (1981-2) and made over 300 recordings, 236 of which form her Collection in the Sierra Leone Museum. Once back in the Netherlands, she wrote a 532-page autobiography (unpublished) documenting, among other things, her work in Sierra Leone and the history of music education in Sierra Leone from 1960 to 1983. In 2003, Pan Records produced a CD “Bush Animals Don’t Like Hunters” that makes available 22 recordings. Her published books and the CD are available at various universities. Copies of her recordings were deposited at UCLA and Indiana.
My review of the analyses and descriptions of her books will illustrate some ethnomusicological shortcomings while showing the importance of her work as a historical document and a basis for scholarly work on Sierra Leone’s music and the yet-to-be studied life and music of an early Krio researcher and composer, N.G. Ballanta. Background details in her autobiography, books, and her Museum Collection help identify recordings on the unavailable cassettes of her books and aid understanding within and between indigenous musical traditions. I will discuss the music of the title piece and cover photograph of her CD while revealing how favorably her work was received by educators and musicians. In so doing, I seek interest among scholars in finding a publisher for her autobiography.
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SPEAKER BIOS
Musicologist and composer Mark DeVoto is an expert in early 20th-century music. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton University (Ph.D., 1967), he is professor emeritus of music at Tufts University. He wrote the revised fourth (1978) and fifth (1987) editions of Harmony by his teacher Walter Piston, and in 1997 edited the Altenberg Lieder, op. 4, for the new edition Alban Berg’s complete works. In 2004 he published Debussy and the Veil of Tonality: Essays on his Music, and in 2011 Schubert’s Great C Major: Biography of a Symphony, both with Pendragon Press.
Growing up in Sydney’s vibrant music scene, scholar, performer, and Grammy-nominated bassist James Heazlewood-Dale relocated to Boston to study jazz double bass at the Berklee School of Music and the New England Conservatory on full scholarships. He has since performed with world-renowned artists, including Jacob Collier, Maria Schneider, Terence Blanchard, and Zakir Hussain, and currently serves as Grace Kelly’s musical director.
A recipient of Brandeis University’s Provost Research Award, his Ph.D. research focuses on the rich intersection between the jazz idiom and video game music. James has presented ludomusicological research at several national conferences, including those for the American Musicological Society, the Musicological Society of Australia, the Jazz Education Network, the College Music Society, and the Society for the Study of Sound and Music in Games. His work can be read in Jazz and Culture (University of Illinois Press), Environmental Humanities and the Video Game (Palgrave Macmillan), and Adaptation, Rearrangement, and Music Across Screen Media (Routledge).
Most recently, James was commissioned by Decca Records to write the liner notes to the soundtrack release of The Callisto Protocol (2022) and appeared as a scholarly guest in Adam Neely’s video essay “The Nintendo-fication of Jazz.”
Jeannette D. Jones received her Ph.D. in historical musicology from Boston University in 2019. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the greater Boston area. Her research focuses on cultural and social networks in late fifteenth-century France. She has contributed to the collection Gaspar van Weerbeke: New Interpretations (2019) and the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability (2015). She is active in the fields of early music, disability studies, digital humanities, and environmental humanities.
Alex Ludwig is an Associate Professor in the Liberal Arts & Sciences department at Berklee College of Music. Along with Simone Pilon, he co-edited the book, Woodstock Then and Now: A 50th Anniversary Celebration, published by Clemson University Press. Alex has published articles and presented papers on various topics, including the analysis of Joseph Haydn’s string quartets and the role of rhythm in the editing of film musicals. His current research project concerns the medieval chant “Dies Irae” and its use in modern-day film scores. You can find more information on this topic, including an exhaustive list of films quoting the “Dies Irae” and a series of YouTube compilations, at his website <alexludwig.net>. Alex serves as a Director-at-Large for the Haydn Society of North America and the Secretary/Treasurer for the American Musicological Society’s Pedagogy Study Group. He holds a Ph.D. and M.F.A. in Musicology from Brandeis University and a B.M. in String Performance from Boston University.
Richard E. Mueller, an independent scholar and musician, holds degrees in music from Harvard (BA, 1966), Indiana (MMus theory, 1970), and University of Chicago (MA composition, 1974, and PhD musicology, 1983). Notable publications include Beauty and Innovation in la machine chinoise: Falla, Debussy, Ravel, Roussel (Pendragon Press, 2018, 2021), Imitation and Stylization in the Balinese Music of Colin McPhee (1983),“Javanese Influence on Debussy’s Fantaisie and Beyond,” 19th Century Music (1986), the two-part article “Bali, Tabuh-Tabuhan, and Colin McPhee’s Method of Intercultural Composition,” Journal of Musicological Research (1991), and a paper read at the 2023 MULICO conference in Montpellier celebrating the 100th anniversary of Falla’s El Retablo de Maese Pedro: “Continuities and Transformations of Stylistic Structural Procedures in Falla’s El Retablo and Harpsichord Concerto.” He is a research scholar at the Archivo Manuel de Falla, Granada, Spain since 1996, and his plans for research include Falla and other modernist composers, Chopin and Falla, the oriental music of Henry Eichheim, and Cootje van Oven and the music of Sierra Leone. He was elected New England chapter representative to the AMS Council, 2020-2023.