Introduction
This parcours will reflect on the compositional and aesthetic consequences of technical changes in scoring Hollywood super-productions in the digital age and on the position composers take on new technologies. Although the focus will be on the post-1990 years, we will occasionally look back at the decades preceding the digital transition in order to better understand the transformations at work and the issues they raise. This parcours will take a rhizomatic form, seeking to cover a range of issues related to musical composition, sound creation and technology in contemporary Hollywood cinema, while at the same time taking a two-fold approach.
First of all, this parcours highlights how technological change has affected music composers’ work and on the very way they conceive their scores, taking advantage of the possibilities opened up by new technologies with respect to colours, blending virtual instruments with acoustic sonorities, differentiating sonic layers and organizing music and sound effects. Julien Bellanger’s text, which offers a diachronic overview of the use of synthesizers in the original soundtracks of American films, is mirrored by Cécile Carayol’s case study of Alexandre Desplat’s position towards machines, demonstrating the vitality and foregrounding of the symphonic vein coupled with new technologies in this musician’s Hollywood work. In a final complementary section, Michael Saffle explores the repercussions of the way the boundaries between music and sound effects have been blurred in genre cinema by way of the emblematic example of science fiction.
Second, this parcours interrogates how music is considered and used in contemporary films. Music will thus be discussed in its specific visual and acoustic context through several production stages: before composition, with temporary tracks and digital musical mock-ups showing the material to be in a highly advanced state well before the recording sessions — here Jérôme Rossi provides a concrete and detailed look at today’s music recording studio, based on the specific technical tools available to composers; and in post-production, with intensive labour on musical scores by music editors to ensure that the score conforms to the visual editing, which is constantly modified right up to the film’s commercial release, as seen in Nicholas Kmet’s contribution based on several representative films by James Cameron and George Lucas which closes out this parcours on very up-to-date questions.
