1st Module (6 CFU) (42 hours)
Film Music History
Film music is at the center of growing interest and continuously arouses new historiographical issues. For a long period, musicological research has privileged the study of original scores and the "special" case of the collaboration of "great" composers from the art-music sphere; today's perspective instead extends towards the reconstruction of the everyday performative and compositional practices of cinematic music. The shift from a two-dimensional perspective, concentrated on the page, to a three-dimensional perspective, more attentive to the performative dimension of film music, obliges us to account for the extreme variability of musical accompaniments from the silent era onwards, which in turn depends on the varying of temporal, geographical, and cultural contexts. The course aims at introducing students to the themes and methods of musicological research on music for cinema. The analysis will focus on a significant corpus of cinematic works, alongside musical publications of the silent era, such as manuals, catalogs, and repertoires for compilations. The discussion will extend, on the basis of critical sources, to issues of a theoretical and aesthetic nature arising from the encounter between music and cinema, within the broader framework of the competition/convergence relationships between old and new media during the twentieth century.

2nd Module (3 CFU) (21 hours)
The song in the cinema
The leitmotif of the course will be the notion of the song as a "musical moment": a place of cinematic narration where music "takes over". The examples are countless: from As Time Goes By in Casablanca (1942), to Moon River sung by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), from The Sound of Silence in The Graduate (1967) to The End by the Doors at Apocalypse Now's main titles (1979).
Such moments constitute, in the words of Sergej Ejzenštejn, cinema's "ecstasy": the topos par excellence in which the common system of representation "comes out of itself". The musical moment cuts out an imaginary space in the story: it opens a window onto another dimension, in which the categories of time and space are suspended for a moment.
The song produces an interference of codes, a hybridization of expressive languages: by imposing its temporality on the narration, music breaks the illusion of reality of the most verisimilar one among the arts.