Inside the Scores: Towards a Poetics of Theme Park Music
Location
Rosen Classroom 111
Start Date
21-6-2024 10:00 AM
About the Presenters
Dr Gregory Camp has taught at the University of Auckland School of Music since 2013, where he teaches a wide variety of topics in musicology, music theory, and musicianship. His current research focuses on singers’ understanding of linguistic structures and on Disney music. He has recently published two monographs with Routledge on mid twentieth-century film music: Howard Hawks: Sonic Style in Film (2020) and Scoring the Hollywood Actor in the 1950s (2021). His most recent book is Linguistics for Singers (Routledge, 2023), a manual that guides musicians through the poetic texts they work with via a holistic and comparative approach. Current work includes a monograph on music in the Disney theme parks, contracted with Routledge; an anthology of opera libretto translations under contract with Oxford University Press; and chapters on Disney choral arrangements, community singing in Disney texts, and the aesthetics of the Disney Channel Original Musical corpus.
Description
Since beginning its world-dominating theme park project in the 1950s, the Walt Disney Company has built its theme park attractions around its ever-expanding film properties from the classic Disney animated and live-action films to newer IP acquisitions like Marvel, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones. The designers of the parks draw from the scores of these films to help bring their audiences into the three-dimensional fictional worlds they construct. An aesthetic transformation occurs as film music, composed to be heard as part of a passive audio-viewing experience, becomes accompaniment to a live ride, show, or immersive area. The transformations go beyond the mere re-positioning of the music: composers and arrangers alter the fabric of the pre-existing music itself to fit these new uses. My primary case studies are Disney studio composer Buddy Baker’s adaptations of film music for theme park rides like ‘The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh’, and the use and adaptation of film scores by John Williams (notably from the Indiana Jones and Star Wars films) for both rides and ambient spaces in the Disney parks. This paper argues that a unique ‘theme-park’ style of composition and arranging exists, which uses tropes such as big themes, large instrumental masses, few layers of texture, loud dynamics, sharp transitions, alternation with sound effects for masking those transitions, and reliance on audio-visual synchresis to aid perceptual cohesion. I seek to demonstrate that theme park music is not just a rehashing of pre-existing music but is rather its own audio-visual narrative genre.
Recommended Citation
Camp, Gregory, "Inside the Scores: Towards a Poetics of Theme Park Music" (2024). Theme Park Music and Sound. 3.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/tpms/2024/friday/3
Inside the Scores: Towards a Poetics of Theme Park Music
Rosen Classroom 111
Since beginning its world-dominating theme park project in the 1950s, the Walt Disney Company has built its theme park attractions around its ever-expanding film properties from the classic Disney animated and live-action films to newer IP acquisitions like Marvel, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones. The designers of the parks draw from the scores of these films to help bring their audiences into the three-dimensional fictional worlds they construct. An aesthetic transformation occurs as film music, composed to be heard as part of a passive audio-viewing experience, becomes accompaniment to a live ride, show, or immersive area. The transformations go beyond the mere re-positioning of the music: composers and arrangers alter the fabric of the pre-existing music itself to fit these new uses. My primary case studies are Disney studio composer Buddy Baker’s adaptations of film music for theme park rides like ‘The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh’, and the use and adaptation of film scores by John Williams (notably from the Indiana Jones and Star Wars films) for both rides and ambient spaces in the Disney parks. This paper argues that a unique ‘theme-park’ style of composition and arranging exists, which uses tropes such as big themes, large instrumental masses, few layers of texture, loud dynamics, sharp transitions, alternation with sound effects for masking those transitions, and reliance on audio-visual synchresis to aid perceptual cohesion. I seek to demonstrate that theme park music is not just a rehashing of pre-existing music but is rather its own audio-visual narrative genre.