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In 1949, the composer Aaron Copland outlined five 'ways in which music serves the screen'.1 The first function identified by Copland was music's ability to create a 'more convincing atmosphere of time and place'.2 This potential for music to establish quickly the historical setting of a film's diegesis has remained the dominant theme in discussions of the temporal qualities music can bring to mainstream film. Claudia Gorbman's pioneering study of film music, Unheard Melodies (1987), echoes Copland in Gorbman's establishment of seven principles of the classical Hollywood film score. Once again, where time is mentioned (in relation to the principle of 'narrative cueing') it is in terms of the referential and signifying properties of music to locate the film in a particular time and place:
Strongly codified Hollywood harmonies, melodic patterns, rhythms, and habits of orchestration are employed as a matter of course in classical cinema for establishing setting [. . .] If one hears Strausslike waltzes in the strings, it must be turn-of-the century Vienna [. . .]; harps often introduce us to medieval, renaissance or heavenly settings.3
More recently, the composer and lecturer David Burnand, speaking at the first 'School of Sound' in 1998, referred to 'time and place', if the filmmaker wanted to evoke a historical period, as one of the four key dramatic functions of film music.4
Although undoubtedly an important function, it is odd that discussion of the temporal possibilities of film music has tended to remain rooted in music's ability, through its associational qualities, to evoke a particular moment in history. A wider consideration of music and time is also absent from Jerrold Levinson's discussion of film music and narrative agency and his survey of fifteen functions that 'critics and theorists have observed film music to perform'.5 I make these comments not as a criticism of any of the writers mentioned above. Copland, Gorbman, Burnand and Levinson all note that their respective lists are not intended to be complete and definitive (as Copland says 'we have merely skimmed the surface') but, as I hope this brief introduction has established, the relationship between music and time in film has usually been addressed in rather narrow terms.6 The lack of wider attention accorded music's temporal functions in film is surprising....