Response: Music, image and the sublime

Abstract

This paper locates James' suggestion that the personal feelings produced by the sublime might serve to reinforce a safe conservatism wherein the individual is freed from reflecting on the ideological implications of his or her own emotions in the field of musicology. Using Bourdieu, Kubrick's 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968) and Stephen Speilberg's E. T. (1982), Armstrong shows how film music guarantees the safety of the educated, bourgeois listener by rescuing him or her from the fear of atonal, dissonant music by ensuing melodic harmonies and slowed rhythms. It is music's linguistic silence, the paper shows, that renders its ideological aspect more powerful however, highlighting the social context of music's production, distribution and reception.

Document Downloads