My research is centered around an ongoing fascination with material sound and its impact on social life, ranging from the physical impact of film sound to music’s relationship to political action. Click to skip to:
Upcoming Presentations
“The Historical ‘Record’ according to Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: Contingency, Reproducibility, and Injustice”
Music and the Moving Image Conference 2024: May 24-26, 2024, New York University.
ABSTRACT: A cinematic adaptation of August Wilson’s play of the same name, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020) could be interpreted as a variation of the musical biopic, granting spectators the opportunity to witness the creation of famous—or at least familiar—music. Historical films about musicians appeal to a composite audience with varying levels of historical and musical awareness, balancing biographical detail with expressive musicianship and a catalog of well-known recordings. But unlike the biopic proper, which implicitly claims authority and triumphalism in chronicling the (re)creation of shared “cultural treasures,” MRBB antagonizes the reified structure of historicism in order to consider the contingent and ephemeral elements of cultural memory. This is not to rewrite history through music, but to explore events and artists that exist on the periphery of that historical record-cum-memory. In doing so, the film’s audiovisual approach articulates a status of alienation between the musician and their “recorded” self, as well as an uneasy relationship between musical recordings and the de facto historicism chronicled therein. In this formulation, a recording is not a gateway into the musical past or an access point to the artwork’s intrinsic “aura,” but a void filled by the cultural imaginary. Breaking from popular understandings of physical media as repositories of historical truth or emotional authenticity, MRBB treats musical recordings as an uncanny collision between mechanical reproduction and the contingent and fickle irregularities of human memory. The film prompts us to recall what we remember, but also consider what we might have forgotten.
Research and Writing on Music and Film
Dissertation Research
“Material Ends: Hauntology, Anachrony, and Traces of the Analog in Digital Cinema“
Hollywood is haunted. Despite the emergence of a “digital hegemony” that has profoundly changed the way films are made and consumed, Hollywood film scoring practices remain indebted, and in some cases obsessed, with the music of the past. In contrast or perhaps in response to the “Zimmer effect,” the codification of industrial scoring practices making extensive use of developments in digital composing technologies, Hollywood’s digital era has proven to be more acoustically diverse than was once feared, reveling in the interplay between digital and analog sound and music. My dissertation explores this ghostly confluence, examining how contemporary filmmakers and composers utilize the apparent contradictions between “digital” and “analog” sound in ways that enrich narratives, engage in meaningful historical critiques, and even bend the rules of time and space. Through the lens of “hauntology” as coined by Jacques Derrida and developed by Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds, the persistence of analog devices and practices within a digital mediascape invites consideration of cinematic music as something caught between the folds of time itself, reflective of a dynamic and ever-changing relationship to past modes of representation.
In auteur-driven cinema, the use of anachronistic music plays an active role in historical revisionism, problematizing the perceived value of “historical fidelity” in Hollywood practice. Reinterpretations of classic film genres make use of the gray area between music and sound design to distort time itself, relaying epistemological confusion through means that transcend the digital-analog binary. Likewise, scores that foreground instrumental timbres usher in a new relationality between the vibrations of material sound and the embodied experiences of character and spectator alike. And finally, the spotlighting of physical media within digital spaces reveals an insecurity around immateriality itself, one that emerges time and again (like a specter) in new fields of cultural practice such as YouTube. The diversity and breadth of these examples give way to a paradox: the material foundations of cinema were never completely certain, and yet, they remain more powerful than ever.
The media texts I explore include: Marie Antoinette (Coppola), Inglourious Basterds & Django Unchained (Tarantino), Arrival (Villeneuve), The Lighthouse (Eggers), Moonlight (Jenkins), Joker (Phillips), and many more.
Other Research Interests
- Music and politics
- Materiality and hapticity
- Postmodernism and retro aesthetics
- Deconstruction and film theory
- Jazz and blues
Recent Conference Presentations and Panels
“Timbre Dematerialized: Illusory Instruments in Arrival and The Lighthouse.” Music, Technology, and Communication Session, American Musicological Society and Society of Music Theory Joint Meeting. Denver, Colorado. 10 November 2023.
Abstract: The “Hans Zimmer-effect” has become shorthand in both popular and academic discourses to describe a dominant mode of composing for Hollywood films that relies on digital tools and processes to produce highly repetitive blockbuster scores. The low cost of digital production tools and the shift away from studio-controlled filmmaking has led to a drastically condensed production model and a reliance on synthesized temp tracks in the editing booth, leading to concerns about instrumental timbre’s fading relevance within an increasingly digitized audiovisual culture. In this paper, I offer a close reading of a pair of scores that reject the binarism between digital and analog scoring practices through a process of apparent dematerialization. Jóhann Jóhannsson composed the score for Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016) through experimental and improvisatory recordings of instruments and voices, but rendered those sounds alien through overdubbed tape loops and aleatoric performance. Likewise, Mark Korven developed an entirely new instrument dubbed the “Apprehension Engine” for The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019) to “perform” library sound effects rather than relying on repetitive digital cliches. The music in these films resembles both underscoring and sound design, operationalizing the inherent risk of aural confusion to sustain atmospheric intensities and drive the narratives. As I argue, they revel in the ontological uncertainty between acoustic and digital sources to resist the reified cultural hierarchies that lament the “absent” materiality of instrumental timbres in film music, demonstrating that even in its most illusory rendering, timbral materiality remains phenomenologically inescapable. There remains a steady stream of Hollywood scoring that foregrounds instrumental timbre in novel ways, but the frequent tendency to label such scores as being implicitly “legitimate” compared to their digital counterparts merely affirms a troubling hierarchy of a different sort. Arrival and The Lighthouse point toward other possibilities of production, interpretation, and critique: as meta-cinematic texts that explore various incarnations of the cinematographic image, they offer commentary on the assumed reality of material sound within the temporal and historical framework of the moving image.
An interview with composer Michael Abels. Humanities Unbounded Lab, Duke University. 26 January 2023.
I was honored to be able to interview Michael Abels for this exciting event. Award-winning composer Michael Abels is known for his scores for Jordan Peele’s films “US” and the Oscar-winning “GET OUT.” As a concert composer, he has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts and Sphinx Organization and performed by the Chicago Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, and more. This conversation was part of the 2021-2023 Humanities Unbounded Lab, “Black Music and the Soul of America.” If you’re interested in learning more about Black film music, I invite you to view the presentation that Dr. Anthony Kelley and I collaboratively prepared and presented on the history of Black film music, soundtracks, and composers.
“’Would you please stop playing Beethoven?’: Classical Music as Postmodern Pastiche in Marie Antoinette, Inglourious Basterds, and Django Unchained.” American Musicological Society, Southeast Chapter, Virtual Conference. 1 October 2022.
Abstract: I explore a trio of films notable for their use of blatantly anachronistic soundtracks to populate their historical settings: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006), which pairs the doomed Dauphine with post-punk and new wave electronica, and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (2012), a pair of revenge fantasies that rely on extant film music and popular songs in their depiction of Nazi-occupied France and the Antebellum South, respectively. Musicological approaches to these films have prioritized scrutiny of these popular styles, while less attention has been devoted to the films’ deployment of western art music as a component of their postmodern arsenal. These examples paradoxically challenge classical music’s presumed status as a form of “universal” film music and generate tension between differing modes of temporality and cinematic history. I consider these films’ inherently postmodern and deconstructive agendas through the lens of a Derridean histoire, an understanding of history itself as a specter caught between fixed object and fungible narrative construct. Rather than imposing incongruities onto the film or even negating the notion of historicity, these soundtracks challenge the implicit ideological themes that accompany an unquestioned fidelity to historical “truth.” My discussion of Coppola and Tarantino’s unruly cinematic histoires will consider the use of classical music amidst the incongruity of setting and music, treating the Jamesonian notion of a “crisis of historicity” as an opportunity to engage layers of cinematic and musical history in a meaningful critique.
Panel Discussion Organizer and Respondent, “Music’s Placement in Academia.” South Central Graduate Music Consortium Research Conference, Durham, NC. September 2019.
“Decadence as Progress in Der Rosenkavalier.” South Central Graduate Music Consortium Research Conference, Charlottesville, VA. October 2018.
Scholarship Service and Volunteering
- Student Organizer, Duke Musicology Lecture Series. 2022-2023, 2018-2019.
- President, Duke Music Graduate Student Association (MGSA). 2020-2021.
- Coordinator, South-Central Graduate Music Consortium. 2019 – 2020.
- Secretary, Duke Music Graduate Student Association (MGSA). 2018-2019.
Cole D. Swanson, PhD 