Technology, Listening and Labor: Music in New Hollywood Film

FAIN: FEL-262699-19

Julie Hubbert
University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC 29208-0001)

Preparation for publication of a book about music in American films from the 1960s and 70s, and the impact of recorded music and technology on musicians’ labor unions and audience listening practices.

Technology, Listening and Labor: Music in New Hollywood Film reexamines film music in the 1960s and 70s when filmmakers abandoned classical orchestral underscoring for a range of practices, especially “compilations” of commercially-recorded music. While most scholars have focused narrowly on the use of rock music in youth films or Stanley Kubrick’s appropriation of classical music, my study finds the use of recorded music significantly more wide-spread and the range of styles more eclectic than previously understood. It also uniquely positions these changes within the context of two important aesthetic and practical shifts affecting the film industry: the dramatic changes in recorded music, specifically the listening practices that emerged from the “high fidelity” movement, and the dissolution of union labor. It joins the ongoing critical reappraisal of New Hollywood by outlining the network of technical, aesthetic and industrial shifts that permanently reshaped film music practices.