"Played Once - Heard Once" - Guest lecture by Ingeborg Zechner in Linz

In this guest lecture, Ingeborg Zechner will talk about music-ontological perspectives in Hollywood film of the 1940s. In Hollywood in the 1940s, the aesthetic status of film music was the subject of intense debate in the contemporary press. Composers such as Bernard Herrmann and Franz Waxman publicly pleaded for a higher appreciation of film music as an art form. In all of this, the unclear ontological status of film music - which is also aesthetically situated between popular and art music - remained an important topic. In my lecture, I will show how films such as Four Wives (1939) and City for Conquest (1940, both with music by Max Steiner), Hangover Square (1945, music by Bernard Herrmann), The Constant Nymph and Deception (1946, music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold), Night Song (1948, music by Leith Stevens) or The Paradine Case and Humoresque (1947 and 1946, both with music by Franz Waxman) dealt with ontological aspects of film music in different ways and brought them to the cinema screen. This should make it clear that the contemporary problem of the ontological status of film music had an important influence on its contemporary aesthetic perception and can therefore also be read as a commentary on values in the musical life of the USA in the 1940s. 

Event information

In addition to the guest lecture, Ingeborg Zechner will also take part in a research workshop in which ongoing research projects from Graz (GuDiE) and Linz as well as dissertation projects will be discussed.