Nostalgia, the Silent Cinema, and the Art of Quotation in Herbert Stothart’s Score for The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Issue: Vol 4 No. 1 (2011)
Journal: Journal of Film Music
Subject Areas: Popular Music
DOI: 10.1558/jfm.v4i1.45
Abstract:
Composed under the direction of Herbert Stothart, the orchestral score to MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) is laden with musical quotations ranging from Kodály to Schumann. While the inclusion of outside musical sources in a film score is not unusual, Stothart elevates this practice to a high level of sophistication. In particular, he incorporates melodies previously associated with silent film musical accompaniment, reinforcing Oz’s nostalgic character by hearkening to an earlier era of film exhibition. In this article I analyze the various implications of this musical nostalgia as they intersect with earlier cinematic practices, the film’s narrative, and Herbert Stothart’s musical aesthetics. In addition to bringing a retrospective quality to the Oz score, Stothart’s quotations interact musically and semantically with the film’s songs, further unifying orchestral background score and vocal material.
Author: Nathan Platte
References :
Abel, Richard, ed. 2005. Encyclopedia of early cinema. London: Routledge.
———. 1999. The red rooster scare: Making cinema American, 1900-1910. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Altman, Rick. 2004. Silent film sound.New York: Columbia University Press.
Baum, L. Frank. 1997. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Edited by Susan Wolstenholme. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press (originally published Chicago: G.M. Hill Co.,1900).
Beynon, George W. 1921. Musical presentation of motion pictures. New York: G. Schirmer.
Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The future of nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.
Clague, Mark Allen. 2002. Chicago counterpoint: the Auditorium Theater Building and the civic imagination. Ph.D diss., University of Chicago.
Daubney, Kate. 2000. Max Steiner’s Now, Voyager: A film score guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Flinn, Caryl. 1992. Strains of utopia: Gender, nostalgia, and Hollywood film music. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ford, Fiona. 2011. Be it [n]ever so humble? The narrating voice in the underscore to The Wizard of Oz. In Melodramatic voices: Understanding music drama, ed. Sarah Hibberd, 197-214. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Fricke, John. 1995. The Wizard of Oz: an appreciation and brief history of the film and an annotated guide to the original motion picture soundtrack. Liner notes for The Wizard of Oz: original motion picture soundtrack—the deluxe edition. Rhino Records, B0000033JH, 2 CDs.
Goldmark, Daniel. 2005. Tunes for ’toons: Music and the Hollywood cartoon. Berkeley: University of California Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520236172.001.0001
Harmetz, Aljean. 1977. The making of The Wizard of Oz: Movie magic in the prime of M-G-M—and the miracle of production #1060. New York: Hyperion.
Higgins, Scott. 2007. Harnessing the Technicolor rainbow: Color design in the 1930s. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Knapp, Raymond. 2006. The American musical and the performance of personal identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kodály, Zoltán. 1955. Háry János Suite. Vienna: Philharmonia Partituren in der Universal Edition.
Lampe, J. Bodewalt. 1914. Remick folio of moving picture music. New York: Jerome H. Remick & Co.
Langley, Noel, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf. 1991. The Wizard of Oz: The screenplay. From the book by L. Frank Baum. Edited and with an introduction by Michael Patrick Hearn. London: Faber.
London, Kurt. 1936. Film music: A summary of the characteristic features of its history, aesthetics, technique; and possible developments. Trans. Eric S. Bensinger. London: Faber & Faber.
Marks, Martin. 1997. Music and the silent film: Contexts and case studies, 1895-1924. New York: Oxford University Press.
Metzer, David. 2003. Quotation and cultural meaning in twentieth-century music.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Neumeyer, David. 2004. Merging genres in the 1940s: The musical and dramatic feature film. American Music 22, no. 1 (Spring): 122-32. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3592971
Payne, John Howard. 1856. Clari: Or the maid of Milan, a drama in three acts, and a memoir of W. H. Smith. Boston: W. V. Spencer.
Proust, Marcel. 1932. Remembrance of things past, vol. 2. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff. New York: Random House.
Rapée, Erno. 1925. Encyclopedia of music for pictures.New York: Belwin. Reprint, New York: Arno Press & The New York Times, 1970.
Reynolds, Christopher Alan. 2003. Motives for allusion: Context and content in nineteenth-century music.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rodman, Ronald. 1998. “There’s no place like home”: Tonal closure and design in The Wizard of Oz. Indiana Theory Review 19 (Spring/Fall): 125-44.
———. 2000. Tonal design and the aesthetic of pastiche in Herbert Stothart’s Maytime.In Music and cinema, ed. James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer, 187-206. Hanover: University Press of New England.
Rosar, William. 1989. Stravinsky and M-G-M. In Film music 1, ed. Clifford McCarty, 109-22. New York: Garland Publishing.
Ryan, Roderick T. 1977. A history of motion picture color technology. London: The Focal Press.
Scarfone, Jay and William Stillman. 2004. The wizardry of Oz: The artistry and magic of the 1939 M-G-M Classic. Revised and expanded edition. New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books.
Sinn, Clarence. 1911. Music for the picture. Moving Picture World 8, no. 22 (3 June): 1250.
———. 1913. Music for the picture. Moving Picture World 15, no. 13(29 March): 1325-26.
Steiner, Max. 1937. Scoring the film. In We make the movies,ed. Nancy Naumburg, 216-38. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Stothart, Herbert. 1938. Film music. In Behind the screen: How films are made, ed. Stephen Watts, 139-44. London: Arthur Baker.
Sullivan, Jack. 2006. Hitchcock’s music. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Swartz, Mark Evan. 2000. Oz before the rainbow: L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on stage and screen to 1939.Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Thomas, Tony. 1997. Music for the movies. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press.
Wilson, Janelle L. 2005. Nostalgia: Sanctuary of meaning.Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
Young, Percy M. 1964. Zoltán Kodály: A Hungarian musician. London: Ernest Benn.