Jonathan Godsall
Jonathan is primarily a musicologist, with overlapping research interests in music and screen media, musical borrowing and intertextuality, and musical reception. He also performs as a drummer and percussionist in various contexts.
Jonathan was awarded his PhD in musicology from the University of Bristol in 2014. His research on screen-music topics is published in journals and edited books, as well as in his monograph, 'Reeled In: Pre-existing Music in Narrative Film' (Routledge, 2019). In 2020, he co-organized the conference 'Hidden Figures of Screen Music and Sound'.
Jonathan has taught music at City (University of London), Keele University, Oxford Brookes University, Plymouth University, the Royal College of Music, Royal Holloway (University of London), the University of Bristol, and the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Jonathan was awarded his PhD in musicology from the University of Bristol in 2014. His research on screen-music topics is published in journals and edited books, as well as in his monograph, 'Reeled In: Pre-existing Music in Narrative Film' (Routledge, 2019). In 2020, he co-organized the conference 'Hidden Figures of Screen Music and Sound'.
Jonathan has taught music at City (University of London), Keele University, Oxford Brookes University, Plymouth University, the Royal College of Music, Royal Holloway (University of London), the University of Bristol, and the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
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From the introduction:
The goals of this study are four-fold. Drawing on expertise in medieval history, film studies, communication theory, and musicology, the authors first bring attention to the historicity of battle orations and the purposes they served, and how those purposes have changed to appeal to modern-day theatergoers. Second, showing how film harangues are made and taken up in recurrent ways allows one to see speech in action as not merely constative, but as performative and persuasive utterances. In other words, the delivery of these harangues on screen accentuates their content and rhetorical power, while fostering a shared experience among viewers. Third, the issue of accuracy vs. authenticity of battlefield speech depictions allows one to observe the complicated interplay between real and reel history, and suggests that there is value in the latter for understanding a component of medieval warfare. Last, it is argued that filmmakers have cleverly utilized music scoring as an integral part of their battle oration scenes, drawing on film-music conventions to emphasize the general significance of the speeches and punctuate both their unique and common themes for the audience.
This chapter is accompanied in the book by an interview with Zbigniew Preisner, which I conducted by email in mid-2015. The interview can also be downloaded separately: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/978-1-137-57375-9_4
The clips in the playlist illustrate various manners and effects of classical music’s use in film. The playlist begins with nondiegetic uses of classical music, before moving to examples of characters interacting with diegetic classical music, and finally to clips from films in which classical music is the focus. The notes give brief commentary on each clip, and in most cases also suggest a specific scholarly article or chapter that discusses the example in more detail.
The original teaching resource, with embedded clips, can be found here: https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/teaching-materials/teaching-resource-for-classical-music-in-film-playlist/
In this paper, an analysis of Whiplash’s performance scenes reveals the visual construction of virtuoso drumming performance. Comparisons are drawn to the real career of Buddy Rich (1917–87), the drummer idolized by Whiplash’s protagonist. While editing tricks were not required in Rich’s case, visual appeal and exaggeration were similarly central – and polarizing – components of his popular virtuosity, amplified by the ongoing dissemination of his performances via screen media (from a youthful starring role in a Vitaphone short, to performance clips now posted on YouTube). Visual aspects of virtuosity have long been acknowledged, though without particular attention to drummers, despite the significant visual attractions their movements present. Further attention must also now be given to the double-layered visual interaction with musical sound present in both cases here.
Music and Lyrics contains fictional songs supposedly from its past (the 1980s) and present (the mid-2000s, with music both already complete and composed during the narrative’s course). These showcase different compositional strategies, from novel composition in established styles to pastiche of specific existing songs (forming applied musical analyses of those songs). The music, through its own attributes and placement in and around the story (i.e., diegetic and non-diegetic use), contributes to both the romance and comedy of the film, the latter not least by offering commentary on real-world music, musicians, and audiences. Focus on songs written for the film by Adam Schlesinger additionally demonstrates that the line between musical reality and fiction is often blurred, here because much of the music Schlesinger writes for himself to perform elsewhere also utilizes other ‘voices’ in a manner that can be described as ‘authentically inauthentic’, in Lawrence Grossberg’s terms.
This paper principally considers the notion of thematic variation, examining different approaches to avoiding the kind of exact, wholesale repetition that the use of pre-existing music might seem in general to promote. Forwarding Serge Lacasse's concepts of autosonic and allosonic quotation (where autosonic quotation is the quotation of recorded sound, and allosonic quotation is that of abstract musical structure) as useful categories for study of the importation of pre-existing music into a film in relation to this issue and others, consideration of several examples – from the use in Casino (Scorsese, 1995) of multiple existing versions of particular songs, to the newly composed and recorded 'variations' on existing themes heard in On the Beach (Kramer, 1959) and Babe (Noonan, 1995) – illuminates differences in method and result. The primary case study examines the appearances of 'Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)' in a range of forms across the two Kill Bill volumes (Tarantino, 2003, 2004), unifying the music tracks of those films and also pointing, for the audience, to the agency of Tarantino the musically shrewd director.
Music in film can encourage us to generate such expectations: a rising tremolo string passage suggests that some shock or revelation will occur in the coming seconds, for instance. When we recognise the music in question as having pre-existed the film, our potential recollection of its musical progression can lead to short-range predictions for the forthcoming filmic action that are very specific, in relation to when something will occur, and perhaps also to what will occur (particularly when we also recall images and ideas associated with that music in previous contexts). Looking at a number of cases, including that of the climactic sequence of The Artist (2011), this paper considers the unique possibilities offered by pre-existing music in this regard, from the perspectives of both audiences and filmmakers. This is one as-yet-underexplored issue tackled in my PhD thesis on the general topic of pre-existing music in fiction sound film.
From the introduction:
The goals of this study are four-fold. Drawing on expertise in medieval history, film studies, communication theory, and musicology, the authors first bring attention to the historicity of battle orations and the purposes they served, and how those purposes have changed to appeal to modern-day theatergoers. Second, showing how film harangues are made and taken up in recurrent ways allows one to see speech in action as not merely constative, but as performative and persuasive utterances. In other words, the delivery of these harangues on screen accentuates their content and rhetorical power, while fostering a shared experience among viewers. Third, the issue of accuracy vs. authenticity of battlefield speech depictions allows one to observe the complicated interplay between real and reel history, and suggests that there is value in the latter for understanding a component of medieval warfare. Last, it is argued that filmmakers have cleverly utilized music scoring as an integral part of their battle oration scenes, drawing on film-music conventions to emphasize the general significance of the speeches and punctuate both their unique and common themes for the audience.
This chapter is accompanied in the book by an interview with Zbigniew Preisner, which I conducted by email in mid-2015. The interview can also be downloaded separately: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/978-1-137-57375-9_4
The clips in the playlist illustrate various manners and effects of classical music’s use in film. The playlist begins with nondiegetic uses of classical music, before moving to examples of characters interacting with diegetic classical music, and finally to clips from films in which classical music is the focus. The notes give brief commentary on each clip, and in most cases also suggest a specific scholarly article or chapter that discusses the example in more detail.
The original teaching resource, with embedded clips, can be found here: https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/teaching-materials/teaching-resource-for-classical-music-in-film-playlist/
In this paper, an analysis of Whiplash’s performance scenes reveals the visual construction of virtuoso drumming performance. Comparisons are drawn to the real career of Buddy Rich (1917–87), the drummer idolized by Whiplash’s protagonist. While editing tricks were not required in Rich’s case, visual appeal and exaggeration were similarly central – and polarizing – components of his popular virtuosity, amplified by the ongoing dissemination of his performances via screen media (from a youthful starring role in a Vitaphone short, to performance clips now posted on YouTube). Visual aspects of virtuosity have long been acknowledged, though without particular attention to drummers, despite the significant visual attractions their movements present. Further attention must also now be given to the double-layered visual interaction with musical sound present in both cases here.
Music and Lyrics contains fictional songs supposedly from its past (the 1980s) and present (the mid-2000s, with music both already complete and composed during the narrative’s course). These showcase different compositional strategies, from novel composition in established styles to pastiche of specific existing songs (forming applied musical analyses of those songs). The music, through its own attributes and placement in and around the story (i.e., diegetic and non-diegetic use), contributes to both the romance and comedy of the film, the latter not least by offering commentary on real-world music, musicians, and audiences. Focus on songs written for the film by Adam Schlesinger additionally demonstrates that the line between musical reality and fiction is often blurred, here because much of the music Schlesinger writes for himself to perform elsewhere also utilizes other ‘voices’ in a manner that can be described as ‘authentically inauthentic’, in Lawrence Grossberg’s terms.
This paper principally considers the notion of thematic variation, examining different approaches to avoiding the kind of exact, wholesale repetition that the use of pre-existing music might seem in general to promote. Forwarding Serge Lacasse's concepts of autosonic and allosonic quotation (where autosonic quotation is the quotation of recorded sound, and allosonic quotation is that of abstract musical structure) as useful categories for study of the importation of pre-existing music into a film in relation to this issue and others, consideration of several examples – from the use in Casino (Scorsese, 1995) of multiple existing versions of particular songs, to the newly composed and recorded 'variations' on existing themes heard in On the Beach (Kramer, 1959) and Babe (Noonan, 1995) – illuminates differences in method and result. The primary case study examines the appearances of 'Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)' in a range of forms across the two Kill Bill volumes (Tarantino, 2003, 2004), unifying the music tracks of those films and also pointing, for the audience, to the agency of Tarantino the musically shrewd director.
Music in film can encourage us to generate such expectations: a rising tremolo string passage suggests that some shock or revelation will occur in the coming seconds, for instance. When we recognise the music in question as having pre-existed the film, our potential recollection of its musical progression can lead to short-range predictions for the forthcoming filmic action that are very specific, in relation to when something will occur, and perhaps also to what will occur (particularly when we also recall images and ideas associated with that music in previous contexts). Looking at a number of cases, including that of the climactic sequence of The Artist (2011), this paper considers the unique possibilities offered by pre-existing music in this regard, from the perspectives of both audiences and filmmakers. This is one as-yet-underexplored issue tackled in my PhD thesis on the general topic of pre-existing music in fiction sound film.