Film music and multimedia: An immersive experience and a throwback to the past

Abstract

Multimedia events are part of contemporary society. Music, theatre, and visual arts have been increasingly collaborating with each other to offer aesthetic experiences that are as immersive and multisensorial as possible. Film music has also entered the multimedia arena. Indeed, a very successful type of concert presentation of the filmmusic repertoire is the multimedia form: a live orchestra plays to projected film clips. This multimedia presentations of film music should be of interest not only to music scholars – film music has undeniably become a favourite repertoire to fuel concert programmes, and multimedia presentations are the most fitting form to present film music. Multimedia presentations should also be of interest to film scholars, as multimedia presentations are a revival of past film-viewing experiences that can be traced back to the silent era. The case study here is John Williams’s conductorship of the Boston Pops Orchestra, which has been seminal not only because it brought more film music into concert programmes, but also highly influential for its experiments with the multimedia presentations.