Sholl, Robert (2017) Pärt and the sound of one-hand clapping. In: Arvo Pärt's White Light: Media, Culture, Politics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 47-73. ISBN 9781107182899

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Abstract

From the introduction to the book:

Robert Sholl's chapter returns to issues in film and television but this time for the purpose of assessing Pärt's impact as a musical model, in particular how his music has been mimicked and reconfigured by an increasing number of composers for film. His study examines how the reconfiguration of three of Pärt's tintinnabuli works - Für Alina, Spiegel im Spiegel and Fratres – operate in film through musical simulacra and extensions of Pärt's works. Crucially, Sholl's critique deciphers more than complementary relationships between Pärt and his ciphers. His chapter draws on the theoretical traditions of French psychoanalysis to explore the phenomenon of semantic over determination in his cinematic examples. Pärt's music halts cinematic signification and form (Jacques Lacan's "quilting point"), Sholl argues, and creates an invisible obstacle that structures the networks of meaning, while it sutures the subject to these identities. These identities or ciphers shape the meaning of what is given cinematically. Sholl brings these theoretical approaches to his case studies, analyzing The Crimson Field (2014) with Rob Lane and Benjamin Wallfisch's ornamented rewrite of Für Alina, Lisa Gerrard's altered version of Spiegel im Spiegel in Jonathan Teplitsky's film Burning Man (2012), and Thomas Newman’s adaptation of Fratres in Sam Mendes's film American Beauty (1999). Through Sholl's nuanced analysis of how the films are reconfigured by Pärt's music, he proposes a new way of understanding receptions of Pärt's presence in visual media, the mechanisms of its reinscription, and how, surprisingly, it is already anticipated as reconfiguration, play, or redemption.

Item Type:	Book Section
Subjects:	Music
Depositing User:	Robert Sholl
Date Deposited:	07 Jun 2016 05:04
Last Modified:	28 Aug 2021 07:20
URI:	https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/2376

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