Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

New Currents in Film Music, Television Music, and Streaming Media Music Studies

2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/19452349.40.4.06

1945-2349

Jacqueline Ávila,

Radio, Podcasts, and Digital Media

During the lockdown and quarantine for COVID-19, the majority of us found some solace and retreat in front of the television, laptop, computer, tablet, or cell phone, watching and listening—and also binging on—new and old serials and films, available on the growing streaming media platforms. No doubt many of us have increased our monthly subscriptions of streaming apps in order to augment our options, particularly when we hit the point where “there is nothing good on.” This period under quarantine was—and, in some sense, has continued to be—a startling experience for all of us. The need to find an escape became clear as we were isolated from each other. For me, the increase in watching and listening to TV and streaming media was not only a distraction, but it also brought new, potential projects for flexing my musicological muscle, particularly in relation to music and the moving image.Within the last 20 years, film music studies has experienced a significant rise in scholarship. While initially focusing on Hollywood cinema exclusively, several academic scholars have moved across borders and examined the musical practices of industries outside of the United States, especially within Latin America, which boasts several prominent national film industries that have impacted their respective country's society and culture. In my book, Cinesonidos: Film Music and National Identity during Mexico's Época de Oro (2019), I examine the music and sound practices within Mexican cinema during the mid-twentieth century. This is the first book to discuss film music in Mexican cinema during a significant period of Mexican history and film history. New exciting works of scholarship have also emerged in recent years, focusing on the strengths, nuances, and representations that music and sound offer to the moving image across the Americas. Musicologist and composer Martín Farias, whose extensive background in the history of theater performance in Chile enables him to explore the impacts of cultural identity politics of music in Chilean cinema, published his book Identidad y política en la música de cine chileno (1939–1973) in 2021.1 At present, Farias is a postdoctoral scholar at the Instituto de la Comunicación e Imagen de la Universidad de Chile. Emily Masincup, a PhD student in musicology at Northwestern University, is currently working on her dissertation, which examines the marriage between monstrosity, gender, and music in twentieth-century Mexican horror films. Masincup has already presented some of her research at the virtual conference for Society for American Music in 2022. And Camila Torres-Castro, a recent PhD graduate from the University of Texas at Austin, completed her dissertation in 2022 on the soundscapes in contemporary Mexican cinema, “Audible Melodrama: The Affective Politics of Sound in Contemporary Mexican Cinema (2000–2020).” Musicologists Susan Thomas and Cary Peñate have examined the archetypes from Cuban zarzuela, which transferred into Cuban and Mexican national cinema during the twentieth century.2 This growing concentration on Latin American film music practice was the focus of the II Coloquio Internacional, “Canciones populares, géneros y afectos en los cines pósclasicos (América Latina y Europa) [II International Colloquium “Popular Song, Genres and Affects in Postclassical Cinemas (Latin American and Europe)]” in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which had to postpone events in 2020 due to COVID-19 and transitioned to a virtual format in 2021. Scholars from across the Americas participated and discussed, albeit briefly, the impact of music and sound on several films from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that fell under the category of classic cinema with research focusing on technology and nostalgia, among other themes. Scholars outside musicology have also written extensively about the impact of music and sound on the moving image and its cultural impacts on moviegoers in Latin America. This scholarship has been growing and has also promoted a sense of inclusivity in a field that has been predominantly centered on Hollywood.Cinema has been the central medium for music and moving image exploration, but progressing further into the twenty-first century, this area has expanded beyond cinematic practice, encompassing new explorations of video game music, television music, and now, music in streaming media. The impact of streaming media platforms, such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, has opened up the field to more possibilities for investigation and also to new ways of watching and listening to films and serials. In my article “La música de las casas: Musicalizations in La casa de papel and La casa de las flores and Netflix's Global Audience,” written for the special edition of American Music focused on television music, I explore the influence and impact of the Netflix streaming service on the distribution of Mexican, Spanish, and Latinx programming.3 I focus on the musical constructions and sound design developed by two serials available in Netflix's streaming library, Spain's La casa de papel and Mexico's La casa de las flores, and I discuss how Netflix packages these serials for entertainment value and how the streaming platform attempts to shape a global subscription-paying audience, a concept that is consistently in flux. The significance of streaming media has led other scholars to examine the roles and uses of music. Musicologist Susan Thomas has branched into other realms by focusing on the music within streaming media with her essay “Mediterranean Modern: Streaming Television and the Re-Composition of Midcentury Histories from Spain, Italy and Turkey,” which focuses on the musics used and performed in the serials Kulüp (The Club, 2021–22, Turkey), Jaguar (2021–present, Spain), and Luna Park (2021–present, Italy). All three serials are available on Netflix. Thomas's work will be a contribution to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Television Music, edited by film music scholars James Deaville, Ron Rodman, and Jessica Getman.As the availability and options for experiencing the moving image have expanded, so has the content. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, which led to the social reckoning that spread throughout the United States, both educational curricula and entertainment have been criticized for a lack of representation and for not featuring the stories and the voices that have been marginalized and/or ignored. This movement has brought critical scrutiny to the Hollywood entertainment industry for the inadequate portrayal of any notion of diversity on screen. But this scrutiny did not begin in 2020; already in 2015, the #OscarsSoWhite campaign brought more public awareness to the lack of equity and diversity in Hollywood productions.4 This growing criticism of the entertainment industry has led to a rise in programming in several streaming giants, such as Netflix and HBO Max, to showcase ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity to audiences. New programming has focused in particular on the growing Latinx and Latin American audiences, with shows such as Gentefied (2020–2021, Netflix), Los Espookys (2018–present, HBO Max), and With Love (2021–present, Amazon Prime), to name a few. Each new show introduces a musical formula and soundscape that corresponds to the narrative and the communities represented on screen, often incorporating tracks of contemporary popular musics by Latinx and Latin American performers. While these shows have initiated a move toward more visual and aural representation on screen, several of them have been cancelled, despite the streaming platforms’ promises to provide more programming geared to and featuring Latinx and Latin American communities. Thus, regardless of this push for more diverse programming, many of these platforms are still falling short.Over the past few years, Disney and Pixar Studios have produced films that focused on Latinx and Latin American communities. It was not just the stories that became significant, but also representation behind the camera by employing production teams who identified as Latinx or Latin American, including the music department. Pixar's Coco (2017, dir. Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina) carried an important political message in 2017 at the beginning of President Donald Trump's administration by advocating for “the building of bridges and not walls” during a time of such strong prejudice and hostility.5 Pixar studios turned to Camilo Lara from the Mexican Institute of Sound (MIS) to serve as musical consultant and establish a collaborative rendering of musical representation where Mexico served as the dominant source. Composer Germaine Franco has stood out as one of the major contributors to films and serials that focus on the burgeoning Latinx population in the United States. Her cinematic contributions include Pixar's Coco and Disney's Encanto (2021, dir. Jared Bush, Bryon Howard, and Charise Castro Smith), which also features the musical talents of Lin-Manuel Miranda. These two films, which are available for streaming on the Disney+ app, will be examined in an upcoming piece that Juan Fernando Velazquez and I are cowriting for the Oxford Handbook of the Disney Musical (edited by Colleen Montgomery and Dominic Broomfield McHugh), entitled “Imagineering con sabrosura: Cultural Imagineering and Latinidad in the 21st Century Disney Musical.” This article will explore the musical depictions of Latin American and Latinx representation in Disney's animated films—where that representation has been and where it is going as diversity becomes central to the scoring process.As we begin to meet again in communal spaces (such as conferences, universities, and movie theaters), the refuge and safety of the home will continue to be the dominant location for experiencing visual and aural media. However, there is currently a more involved practice pertaining to watching and listening to the available content on streaming platforms and cable apps. As I have stated elsewhere, our listening and viewing practices are changing, becoming more individualized and more unique as our relationship to the technologies becomes more engaged and interactive. And this change is not only reflected in our capacity to watch and listen at our discretion; it also shapes what we are watching and listening to, and how those relationships form our understanding of the stories and the communities that are created and represented on screen.For the composers, bands, musicians, music directors, and producers who are working in this environment, there is a lot of pressure to provide and deliver fair and acceptable representations, particularly in regard to music and sound. Providing an adequate and convincing soundscape for these narratives demands both an understanding of past stereotypes grounded in musical exoticism and essentialism, and also the drive to create something that is new, empathetic, and also relatable to this growing global audience. Ultimately, in the media arts and entertainment, as in academia, one cannot make everyone happy, and each visual and aural representation will come with its fair share of criticism and close scrutiny. This transition, however, will be significant and will have a valuable impact for the audiences and production teams of the future. As a dedicated movie buff and streaming media serial binger, I am (cautiously) optimistic about the new and, hopefully, more inclusive avenues of entertainment and scholarly exploration, particularly after such a long period of isolation and neglect.