Project #3 - Classical Music in Select Films

Music is an important component in making a motion
picture complete. Even in the early exhibition of moving
pictures, theaters would hire musicians, even entire
orchestras, to compliment the action shown on the
screen. Often complete scores would be written for
silent films; for example, the Gaylord Carter score
written for the James Cruze film The Covered Wagon
(1923) and usually played on a Wurlitzer organ.

With the discovery of the technique of synchronized
sound came the ability to lock a single, consistant, and
meaningful musical score to enhance the meaning of
the motion picture.

The music of Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and many
other classical composers is full of emotion: love, hate,
fear, happiness, tenderness, and even death. Changes
in tempo and arrangement make classical music
adaptable to various film requirements.

My third project explored the black box of the mind for
each audience member, using only the sense of hearing
music, adding the sense of vision, then, in some films,
adding the additional data of dialogue and effects.

Bruno Latour writes in his book, Science in
Action (Harvard University Press, 1987), "We
will carry with us no preconceptions of what
constitutes knowledge; we will watch the closure
of the black boxes and be careful to distinguish
between two contradictory explanations of this
closure, one uttered when it is finished, the other
while it is being attempted."

Blackboxing teaches us how to explore, listen,
and watch without preconceptions.