Relatively recently, in a galaxy quite close to home, literary scholar Gerry Canavan vividly captured the ambiguity that shrouded the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016). The second Star Wars feature film to be produced after Disney’s well-publicized acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012, Rogue One was also… Read More
Consider five variations on music’s ineffability: Disjunction. Music can be magnetic—attracting very specific meanings and affects in one moment in ways that seem so right on—and in another moment, seem to be quite indifferent to those meanings and affects. In a scene from Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous (1999), a… Read More
I have this theory about Indians. Actually, the theory is not really about Indians, it’s about everyone else. Here’s the thing: although I don’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings, generally speaking white people who are interested in Indians are not very bright. Generally speaking white… Read More
In one of the final scenes of Avengers: Endgame (Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, 2019), the camera sweeps around Tony Stark’s (Robert Downey Jr.) memorial service, panning across generations of Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) characters, played by some of the most famous Hollywood stars. Read More
by David Brackett [Author note: This excerpt contains excerpts from chapters one and nine.] Like many readers of this blog, after I tell people that I’m a musicologist I’m frequently asked about what type of music I study. I usually answer something like “mostly… Read More
by Imani Mosley… Read More
By Naomi Graber It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Star Wars saga is inherently Wagnerian (Kalinak, 1992; Schroeder, 2002). Just how Wagnerian is up for debate (Paulin, 2000), but the musical parallels between… Read More
By Frank Lehman When approaching franchises that boast networks of leitmotifs, I find it helpful to bring in the use/mention distinction from the philosophy of language. In everyday speech, the distinction is fairly straightforward, exemplified in the difference between the two statements: Leitmotiv enjoyed a resurgence in American… Read More
Our associates at the Society for American Music and Cambridge University Press saw fit to promote the “Oscar-worthy” special issue of their journal with a pretty good deal. Read on. Read More
by William Cheng NOTE. Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination was published by Oxford University Press in May 2014. Here is an excerpt. Around the same time my dad dropped a Nintendo controller in my four-year-old hands, my mom tucked a Yamaha piano under my fingers and… Read More