A larger-scale case study of ‘The Asteroid Field’ from The Empire Strikes Back serves to demonstrate the tonal, sectional and narratival transformations that occur between movie theatre and concert hall. My approach emphasises the way in which formal alterations bring about drastically different ways of hearing the work tonally and expressively across multiple versions. My core data emerges from a detailed study of John Williams's film and concert scherzi, with short analyses of cues/pieces from E.T., the Indiana Jones movies and Star Wars.
More than any other type of underscore, action cues answer to dramatic, editorial and visual imperatives rather than to ‘absolute’ logic. Following a discussion of theoretical and interpretative priorities for analysing film-as-concert music, I begin investigation of a subset of the film-as-concert corpus: stand-alone scherzi originating from action set pieces. In this article, I argue that film-as-concert music presents hearing ‘cinematically’ as a valid alternative to structural modes of listening, a form of hearing that subverts both naive formalism and reflexive anti-formalism. While scholarship on ‘cinematic listening’ has picked up in recent years, the specifically music-theoretical issues raised by this repertoire have been largely unaddressed. What does it mean for film music – subordinated, contingent, ‘unheard’ – to be plucked from its intended context and placed at the forefront of the listener's attention? The tradition of excerpting and arranging movie scores for the concert hall poses this question sharply. The case study here is John Williams's conductorship of the Boston Pops Orchestra, which has been seminal not only because it brought more film music into concert programmes, but also highly influential for its experiments with the multimedia presentations.
Multimedia presentations should also be of interest to film scholars, as multimedia presentations are a revival of past film-viewing experiences that can be traced back to the silent era. This multimedia presentations of film music should be of interest not only to music scholars – film music has undeniably become a favourite repertoire to fuel concert programmes, and multimedia presentations are the most fitting form to present film music. Indeed, a very successful type of concert presentation of the film-music repertoire is the multimedia form: a live orchestra plays to projected film clips. Film music has also entered the multimedia arena. Music, theatre, and visual arts have been increasingly collaborating with each other to offer aesthetic experiences that are as immersive and multisensorial as possible. Multimedia events are part of contemporary society.
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