Fantasies Of Music In Nostalgic Medievalism

Fantasies of music in nostalgic medievalism offers an account of the way three threads - music, medievalism and nostalgia - have been woven together in the fantasies of writers and readers, musicians, musicologists, directors and listeners, film-makers and film-goers in the period between the Second World War and the present. This period has seen an extraordinary rise in the production of medievalist fantasy literature and film. In these genres, music has been essential to the evocation of a medieval fantasy. Over the same period of roughly seventy years, there has been an unprecedented interest in the revival, performance and invention of medieval music, an enterprise in which modern fantasies of the Middle Ages have exercised great influence. Together, these developments have placed music at the centre of a nostalgia for an imagined medieval, a longing for a lost past. In the nostalgia for a past known only in imagination, the listener may embrace a medieval fantasy to which music can take us. It is a past in the middle, that is - in one sense - at the heart of things. As such it has, in fantasy, become a kind of home - a place within. This book studies the ways in which three fields of creative activity inspired by the medieval - musical performance, literature, cinema and their reception - have worked together to produce and sustain, for some, the fantasy of a long-lost, long-mourned paradisal home.

The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism provides a snapshot of the diverse ways in which medievalism--the retrospective immersion in the images, sounds, narratives, and ideologies of the European Middle Ages--powerfully transforms many of the varied musical traditions of the last two centuries. Thirty-three chapters from an international group of scholars explore topics ranging from the representation of the Middle Ages in nineteenth-century opera to medievalism in contemporary video game music, thereby connecting disparate musical forms across typical musicological boundaries of chronology and geography. While some chapters focus on key medievalist works such as Orff's Carmina Burana or Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, others explore medievalism in the oeuvre of a single composer (e.g. Richard Wagner or Arvo Pärt) or musical group (e.g. Led Zeppelin). The topics of the individual chapters include both well-known works such as John Boorman's film Excalibur and also less familiar examples such as Eduard Lalo's Le Roi d'Ys. The authors of the chapters approach their material from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives, including historical musicology, popular music studies, music theory, and film studies, examining the intersections of medievalism with nationalism, romanticism, ideology, nature, feminism, or spiritualism. Taken together, the contents of the Handbook develop new critical insights that venture outside traditional methodological constraints and provide a capstone and point of departure for future scholarship on music and medievalism.

This book explores the role of music in the some five hundred feature-length films on the Middle Ages produced between the late 1890s and the present day. Haines focuses on the tension in these films between the surviving evidence for medieval music and the idiomatic tradition of cinematic music. The latter is taken broadly as any musical sound occurring in a film, from the clang of a bell off-screen to a minstrel singing his song. Medieval film music must be considered in the broader historical context of pre-cinematic medievalisms and of medievalist cinema’s main development in the course of the twentieth century as an American appropriation of European culture. The book treats six pervasive moments that define the genre of medieval film: the church-tower bell, the trumpet fanfare or horn call, the music of banquets and courts, the singing minstrel, performances of Gregorian chant, and the music that accompanies horse-riding knights, with each chapter visiting representative films as case studies. These six signal musical moments, that create a fundamental visual-aural core central to making a film feel medieval to modern audiences, originate in medievalist works predating cinema by some three centuries.

Ancestral North: Spirituality and Cultural Imagination in Nordic Ritual Folk Music offers a detailed exploration of Nordic ritual folk music, a music scene focused on the revival of ancient folkways and archaic music that has found remarkable popularity around the globe. Once the domain of Viking reenactors and neopagan practitioners, the niche sonic and visual aesthetics of this music have found widespread visibility through a new generation of popular films, television series, and video games. The authors argue that many of these musical and media products connect with longstanding cultural attitudes about the Nordic region that conceive of it as wild, exotic, and dangerous, while also being a place of honor, community, and virtue. As such, the Nordic region and its music often becomes a vessel for reactionary escapes from all manner of modern discontentment. However, the authors also posit that spending time re-creating the music of an imaginary past offers participants the possibility for engagement and re-enchantment in the multicultural present.

Exploring how music is used to portray the past in a variety of media, this book probes the relationship between history and fantasy in the imagination of the musical past. The volume brings together essays from multidisciplinary perspectives, addressing the use of music to convey a sense of the past in a wide range of multimedia contexts, including television, documentaries, opera, musical theatre, contemporary and historical film, videogames, and virtual reality. With a focus on early music and medievalism, the contributors theorise the role of music and sound in constructing ideas of the past. In three interrelated sections, the chapters problematise notions of historical authenticity on the stage and screen; theorise the future of musical histories in immersive and virtual media; and explore sound’s role in more fantastical appropriations of history in television and videogames. Together, they pose provocative questions regarding our perceptions of ‘early’ music and the sensory experience of distant history. Offering new ways to understand the past at the crossroads of musical and visual culture, this collection is relevant to researchers across music, media, and historical and cultural studies.

Is "goth music" a genre, and if so, how does it relate to the goth subculture? The music played at goth club nights and festivals encompasses a broad range of musical substyles, from gloomy Batcave reverberations to neo-medieval bagpipe drones and from the lush vocals of goth metal to the harsh distortion of goth industrial. Goth Music: From Sound to Subculture argues that within this variegated musical landscape a number of key consistencies exist. Not only do all these goth substyles share a number of musical and textual characteristics, but more importantly these aspects of the music are constitutive of goth social reality. Drawing on their own experiences in the European and American goth scenes, the authors explore the ways in which the sounds of goth inform the scene’s listening practices, its fantasies of other worlds, and its re-enchantment of their own world. Goth music, this book asserts, engenders a musical timespace of its own, a musical chronotope that is driven by nostalgic yearning. Goth Music: From Sound to Subculture reorients goth subcultural studies onto music: goth music must be recognized not only as simultaneously diverse and consistent, but also as the glue that holds together goth scenes from all over the world. It all starts with the music.

This book explores the role of music in the some five hundred feature-length films on the Middle Ages produced between the late 1890s and the present day. Haines focuses on the tension in these films between the surviving evidence for medieval music and the idiomatic tradition of cinematic music. The latter is taken broadly as any musical sound occurring in a film, from the clang of a bell off-screen to a minstrel singing his song. Medieval film music must be considered in the broader historical context of pre-cinematic medievalisms and of medievalist cinema’s main development in the course of the twentieth century as an American appropriation of European culture. The book treats six pervasive moments that define the genre of medieval film: the church-tower bell, the trumpet fanfare or horn call, the music of banquets and courts, the singing minstrel, performances of Gregorian chant, and the music that accompanies horse-riding knights, with each chapter visiting representative films as case studies. These six signal musical moments, that create a fundamental visual-aural core central to making a film feel medieval to modern audiences, originate in medievalist works predating cinema by some three centuries.

A wide-ranging survey of video game music creation, practice, perception and analysis - clear, authoritative and up-to-date.