Monday, November 14, 2005

Back from Beantown

I was offline for the last four days, attending the national meeting of the Society for Music Theory. I had a great time, seeing old friends and teachers, listening to stimulating papers, and having possibly the best dinner of my life at Julien's, thanks to my generous big brother. I'm not going to blog much more about the conference, as I'm still digesting the things I heard. I'm also inspired to work harder on my own research and writing, so a little less time at the old blog-wheel.

I do want to point out that Jaquandar has finally taken up my film music meme, willingly undertaking the longer list. To answer his question, the course will be on all uses of music in films, including source music. I also want to point out that not all source music is diagetic, nor all underscoring non-diagetic. A literal definition of "diagetic" is being produced by the narrative. One can imagine cases where source music is not directly part of the narrative, and there are plenty of cases where the underscoring is a direct result of the narrative (in Amadeus, Mozart imagines the music he is composing, which we hear in the underscore).

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