Empires of Sound

Beschreibung

“In Empires of Sound John O’Flynn navigates the complex ethical, moral, and political dimensions of film music’s historical relationship with imperial representation. Covering diverse contexts across twentieth-century cinema, the book reveals how sonic displacements, fractures, and layered authenticities shape uneasy acts of listening. Rich in insight and critical sensitivity, this important study invites us to rethink how we attend to musical difference.”

—Miguel Mera, co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound (2017)

“Empires of Sound is a candid, stimulating, searing, and politically vital series of encounters with the ‘colonial sonic gaze’. Through these encounters, O’Flynn confronts the ideologically coercive power of music in films representing five continents. He demystifies what film music ‘says’ in relation to concepts of (post)colonialism, nationhood, imperialism, ethnicity, racism, cultural assimilation, indigeneity, and the stakes of representation. We need this book as an unmatched matter of record, both to remember sonic history and to keep (re)hearing the world better.”

—Elsie Walker, author of Life 24x a Second: Cinema, selfhood, and society (2024)

O’Flynn’s absorbing study navigates film music’s dynamic relationship with imperial power, from the complicit to the critical. Drawing upon extensive archival research, O’Flynn reveals the long reach of empire into the daily creative decisions of film musicians. With deft analyses that span decades of filmmaking and feature iconic and overlooked composers, Empires of Sound brings an invigorated ethics to the sounds of twentieth-century film.

—Nathan Platte, author of Making Music in Selznick’s Hollywood (2017)

Empires of Sound interrogates ways that music contributed to—and occasionally interrupted—dominant constructions of colonial histories and related discourses of exoticism, primitivism and orientalism in narrative fiction film. Appraising soundtracks to over 70 feature-length productions from the 1930s-1990s, its ten chapters are thematically organized according to global regions; successive eras of film production in Hollywood and other major cinemas; associated stylistic developments in score composition and sound assembly; and the lived consequences of imperialism and (settler-)colonialism.

John O’Flynn is Professor of Music at Dublin City University.

Empires of Sound: Music and Colonial Encounters in 20th-Century Narrative Film presents the first comprehensive interrogation of film music’s involvement with imperial and (settler-)colonial themes across narrative fiction features from the 1930s-1990s. It interprets a recurring ‘colonial sonic gaze’ in soundtracks over this time, from the blatant exoticism, orientalism and primitivism of scores for early sound film to more nuanced dualisms of self/Other through incorporation of world music sonorities by the century’s end. Chapter themes include the (mis)representation of Indigenous Americans by Max Steiner; scores for (British) Empire-themed film produced on both sides of the Atlantic; Maurice Jarre’s compositions for postcolonial screen narratives; unique approaches to music and sound in mid-century Australian cinema; soundtracks to end-of-empire narratives set in East Asia; scoring for mission-themed film in the Americas; and musical portrayals of slavery on screen and associated white saviour themes. Overall findings lead to the original conception of ‘film aurality’ as potentially enabling future reparative approaches to film musicology.

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John O'Flynn

Themen in »Empires of Sound«

Sonifying empire Film scores Historical film (Settler-)Colonialism Composers Soundtracks

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“In Empires of Sound John O’Flynn navigates the complex ethical, moral, and political dimensions of film music’s historical relationship with imperial representation. Covering diverse contexts across twentieth-century cinema, the book reveals how sonic displacements, fractures, and layered authenticities shape uneasy acts of listening. Rich in insight and critical sensitivity, this important study invites us to rethink how we attend to musical difference.” (Miguel Mera, co-editor of “The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound” (2017))

“Empires of Sound is a candid, stimulating, searing, and politically vital series of encounters with the ‘colonial sonic gaze’. Through these encounters, O’Flynn confronts the ideologically coercive power of music in films representing five continents. He demystifies what film music ‘says’ in relation to concepts of colonialism, post-colonialism, nationhood, imperialism, ethnicity, racism, cultural assimilation, difference versus Otherness, indigeneity, and the stakes of representation. We need this book as an unmatched matter of record, both to remember sonic history and to keep (re)hearing the world better.” (Elsie Walker, author of “Life 24x a Second: Cinema, selfhood, and society” (2024))

“O’Flynn’s absorbing study navigates film music’s dynamic relationship with imperial power, from the complicit to the critical. Drawing upon extensive archival research, O’Flynn reveals the long reach of empire into the daily creative decisions of film musicians. With deft analyses that span decades of filmmaking and feature iconic and overlooked composers, Empires of Sound brings an invigorated ethics to the sounds of twentieth-century film.” (Nathan Platte, author of “Making Music in Selznick’s Hollywood” (2017))

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