Electroacoustic Composition and the British Documentary Tradition
- Submitting institution
-
Canterbury Christ Church University
- Unit of assessment
- 34 - Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management
- Output identifier
- U34.064
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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10.1057/978-1-137-51680-0_27
- Book title
- The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- ISBN
- 9781137516794
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The chapter is published in an edited collection that seeks to address the division within film sound studies between film sound scholarship and film music scholarship, while at the same time proposing that the boundaries between scoring and sound design are becoming increasingly blurred. Birtwistle’s chapter makes a contribution to the overall aim of the collection by investigating the long tradition of electroacoustic experimentation within documentary filmmaking. Birtwistle’s research highlights the importance of historical context, showing that the integrated soundtrack is not an invention of recent decades, but rather is evident even in the early stages of sound cinema. The chapter uses British documentary cinema as case study to illustrate the historical intertwining of sound design and music. Focusing in particular on the work of Basil Wright (Song of Ceylon, 1934), Geoffrey Jones (Snow, 1963) and Anthony Short (Guinness for You, 1971), the chapter explores ways in which these filmmakers, and the composers they collaborated with – Walter Leigh, Daphne Oram and Tristram Cary respectively – approached recorded sound in a manner that prefigured and paralleled developments in avant-garde music after World War II.
The research process for the article involved analysis of archival materials held in the BFI’s Basil Wright Collection, the Daphne Oram Collection at Goldsmiths University of London, the Postal Museum’s Royal Mail Archive Collection, and the National Archives. In addition to close textual analysis of the three case study films named above, the article examines the historical context of electroacoustic experimentation within the British documentary. In tracing the continuity of electroacoustic experimentation within British documentary filmmaking, the chapter challenges the narrative of rise and postwar decline (which proposes that the experimentation central to the films of the British documentary movement became less evident in the postwar era) from a purely sonic perspective
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
