City symphonies : sound and the composition of urban modernity, 1913-1931 / Daniel P. Schwartz.
"Cinema scholars define city symphony films of the 1920s and early 1930s in visual terms as organizing the visible elements of urban experience according to musical principles such as rhythm and counterpoint. Schwartz's book challenges this definition by exploring the unheard sonic dimensi...
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| Online Access: |
Full Text (via EBSCO) |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Montreal ; Chicago :
McGill-Queen's University Press,
[2024]
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "Cinema scholars define city symphony films of the 1920s and early 1930s in visual terms as organizing the visible elements of urban experience according to musical principles such as rhythm and counterpoint. Schwartz's book challenges this definition by exploring the unheard sonic dimension of these ostensibly 'silent' films. In doing so, it epxands the definition of the city symphony to accommodate a greater variety of artistic and distinctly sonic practices. These include performances like Arseny Arvraamov's 1922 Symphony of Sirens - a mass spectacle that attempted a 'live' re-enactment of the October Revolution in the streets of Baku, Azerbaijan - and Walter Ruttmann's Weekend (1930), an experimental radio work that sought to create a virtual polis on the airwaves. Through an interdisciplinary exploration of such works, this book develops an account of the audial techniques that constitute the city symphony as a sounding order - a syn-phonia - of the heterogeenous and oftentimes conflicting spaces of urban environments. Schwartz examines how city symphonies across media register, capture, or represent urban sounds; the role city symphonies ascribe to sonic phenomena such as noise, vibration, and rhythm; and the listening practices in which city symphonies are embedded. The book thus aims to understand the role of sound in the city symphony as an intermedial phenomenon - on that manifests itself across media practices (music, mass spectacle, radio, and cinema), translates media products from one qualified medium into another (e.g., music into film, film into radio, and so on), or mixes media in novel ways."-- |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (x, 220 pages) : illustrations |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 0228021421 9780228021438 022802143X 9780228021421 |
| Source of Description, Etc. Note: | Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on May 22, 2024). |