William H. Rosar

• Research Associate at University of California, San Diego

When Max Steiner arrived at RKO Studios in late December 1929, he came as a seasoned Broadway conductor and arranger to work on musicals. Applying the art and craft of song arranging from musical comedies on the Broadway stage to so-called “theme songs” that were sung in dramatic films in the early talkies, he developed what came to be known as “th...

This chapter’s ‘post-mortem’ of the Herrmann-Hitchcock collaboration focusses on what occurred between the two men during the fateful sessions in which Hitchcock fired Herrmann when he was dissatisfied with what the composer was developing for the film. However, the chapter searches more broadly for reasons why the partnership broke down, including...

I n 1965, with the publication of the fourteenth edition of the ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA, Alfred Hitchcock expressed what might be called the ''majority opinion'' within the movie business on the role of film scoring, writing in his entry on 'Film Production' of music 'serving to add a dimension of mood and atmosphere to the film' and evidently endo...

The empirical study of visual space (VS) has centered on determining its geometry, whether it is a perspective projection, flat or curved, Euclidean or non-Euclidean, whereas the topology of space consists of those properties that remain invariant under stretching but not tearing. For that reason distance is a property not preserved in topological...

Reviews the book, The Expressiveness of Perceptual Experience: Physiognomy Reconsidered by Martin S. Lindauer (2013). The Expressiveness of Perceptual Experience: Physiognomy Reconsidered reviews, summarizes, and seeks to synthesize the author’s four decades of research investigating this topic. Lindauer belongs to a vanishing breed of generalists...

The knowledge organization of film scores composed today reflects the history of repertoire practice systematized by the Kinothek (Cinema Library) of the silent era, which was based upon the melos of theatrical stage melodrama in the nineteenth century. Musicology can only benefit from understanding that system of knowledge organization and applyin...

Michael Beckerman and William H. Rosar explore, in dialogue fashion, the role of music in the Western pastoral tradition in film.

Since the turn of the 21st century the term “film musicology” has gradually come into use in Anglophone scholarship, though apparently without there being any published definition of its disciplinary scope and methodology in relationship to musicology and film studies, respectively. For example in reviewing the 2004 critical study Hollywood Theory,...

For a course in film music analysis, part of the University of Southern California’s Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television Program curriculum, I required my composer students to analyze a film score, preferably one of their own choosing. In addition to finding a copy of the score, if extant, students were also to research what the composers th...

After seeing Steven Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds on the 4th of July weekend 2005, an old friend who sat with me duringthe screening commented on how effective John Williams’ score for it was, and that it reminded her of film noir scores. An interesting coincidence, I thought, as many years earlier I had been struck by how passages in Lei...

Apotemnophilia straddles the boundary between neurology and psychiatry. It is a condition in which individuals experience the strong and specific desire for amputation of a healthy limb. Research suggests this disorder may be of neurological origin, specifically that the body image centers of the brain lack a cortical representation for a particula...

Physiognomic perception, a term coined by Heinz Werner, refers to a mode of perception attuned to expression or expressive attributes. The term applies readily to the perception of faces, gestures, intonation, and mood. It has also been implicated in the perception of the arts and music and is therefore relevant to understanding the perception of f...

Vibration powerful and specific stimulus to low-level reflex behavior. Report describes experiments on interactions between human operators and hand control device for control of extent of opening and gripping force of remote gripper. Major purpose of study to determine effects of vibrations in device upon ability of operators to control gripping f...

The geometrical incongruence between patterns in visual space and structures and patterns of activity in the visual cortex, long known to investigators, serves as a criterion for evaluating physical theories of visual space. The problem of determining the geometry of the visual world (visual geometry) is compared with that of determining the geomet...

The horror films produced by Universal Pictures in the thirties made the names of Frankenstein and Dracula household words and have enjoyed continuous popularity for five decades. The role played by music in these films was affected by prevailing trends in the industry as well as by the personal whims of those involved in their production.