Set in post-World War One Birmingham, BBC’s Peaky Blinders focuses on the lives of a ruthless gypsy gang who operate in the poorest areas of the industrialised city. The show has drawn comparisons with HBO’s Boardwalk... more abstractSet in post-World War One Birmingham, BBC’s Peaky Blinders focuses on the lives of a ruthless gypsy gang who operate in the poorest areas of the industrialised city. The show has drawn comparisons with HBO’s Boardwalk Empire due to its thematic similarity, visual quality, and use of music. Considering its highly stylized cinematic aesthetic, Peaky Blinders fits comfortably within the broader context of TV’s “Third Golden Age”. Music is central to the show’s aesthetic. The show blends a melancholic original score, drawing on the gypsy roots of its protagonists, with an eclectic range of anachronistic music from alternative rock artists including Nick Cave, PJ Harvey and Jack White. Peaky Blinders attracted the attention of both David Bowie and Leonard Cohen; the latter composed a song specifically for season three. Lead actor Cillian Murphy also recruited PJ Harvey’s producer “Flood” who in turn recruited Paul Hartnoll (formerly of Orbital) to rework some of Harvey’s material for the series. Both forms of music used in the show help to create a unique texture for the world by augmenting the unrealistic steam-punkesque set design, foregrounding the interiority of the protagonists, providing music video-like moments of extreme violence, and producing moments of narrative hiatus where the show deviates from the story and instead lingers on the characters and settings. This paper investigates how music acts as a tonal pendulum throughout the series, underpinning and instigating dramatic lurches from the vividly violent to the surrealist, and how music ultimately shapes and forms the world inhabited by the Peaky Blinders.

Music, Film Music And Sound, Television Music, and Aestethics

In his biography of Hitchcock, The Dark Side of Genius, Donald Spoto writes that Hitchcock’s book-long series of interviews with François Truffaut “hurt and disappointed just about everybody who had ever worked wi... more abstract In his biography of Hitchcock, The Dark Side of Genius, Donald Spoto writes that Hitchcock’s book-long series of interviews with François Truffaut “hurt and disappointed just about everybody who had ever worked with Alfred Hitchcock, for the interviews reduced the writers, the designers, the photographers, the composers, and the actors to little else than elves in the master carpenter’s workshop” (495). Naturally, these interviews took an auteurist perspective because Truffaut, as a director himself, was one of its early exponents. However, diminishing the participation of other contributors in the creative and artistic process in favour of the director is still a very contentious issue for film scholars. In this paper I intend to interrogate the traditional idea of “auteurism” in relation to Van Sant’s role as director of the “Death Trilogy” and Paranoid Park, and posit instead the idea of “collective auteurism” involving Van Sant and his sound designer for the four films, Leslie Shatz. This collaboration produced a distinct audio-visual landscape that has become one of the defining characteristics of the four films. Other scholars still argue for Van Sant as the sole “auteur”. In his book Gus Van Sant: His Own Private Cinema, LoBrutto argues this position and attributes the soundscapes of Van Sant’s films to him alone. He writes: “Van Sant, like David Lynch and all good total filmmakers, is a master of sound design” (18). However, the “Death Quartet” is a very much a collective project; both Van Sant and Leslie Shatz incorporate the ideas of others (including actors, cinematographers, and musicians) while allowing the films to be open-ended in their meanings. Throughout the four films Shatz worked within the template laid out by Van Sant’s concept of the “Death Quartet”, and Van Sant’s creative aspirations had a subsequent impact on Shatz’s sound-design choices. Spontaneity, communication and trust all play their parts in the creative process, and I argue that this dynamic between the two men is crucial to the concept of “collective auteurism”. My paper argues for an approach to Van Sant’s “Death Quartet” that recognizes the director’s influence on the soundtrack of this particular project without writing sound designer Leslie Shatz.

Film Studies, Film Music And Sound, and Film/Television Music Scoring

Film Music And Sound

Film Music And Sound, Cinema and Television, and Music and Television

Showtime’s award winning tv series Dexter has garnered much critical attention for its wit, its risqué themes and its compelling characters. Throughout the series music has played a crucial role in helping the audienc... more abstractShowtime’s award winning tv series Dexter has garnered much critical attention for its wit, its risqué themes and its compelling characters. Throughout the series music has played a crucial role in helping the audience identify with its main protagonist, Dexter Morgan. Music underpins some of the most gruesome scenes, but it also overlays moments of genuine tenderness. The music functions in correlation with Dexter’s first person narrative as a gateway for the audience to the intensely private world of a serial killer. Because the music is often heard in conjunction with Dexter’s narrative, it is for the most part, Dexter’s own music. The majority of the music heard emanates from Dexter’s soundscape, and through this we are given access to the inner world of a killer. I examine how Daniel Licht’s score and other pre-existing tunes impact on the viewer’s understanding of Dexter as a character. I further examine how the music allows us access to Dexter’s most chilling counterpart the ‘Trinity’ killer and to his beloved sister and what these deviations from Dexter’s point of audition means for Dexter’s increasing ability to understand the people around him as a human.