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In entertainment, musical figure a matter of life and death
LAWRENCE – One particular musical figure has come to symbolize the fuzzy line between life and death in TV and movie soundtracks, from “Stranger Things” to “Outbreak,” according to a University of Kansas professor of music. Scott Murphy’s article, “S as a Latter-Day H: Mortally Liminal SLIDEs in Recent Popular Film and Television,” was published in the latest edition of the journal Theory & Practice.
Randall Fuller to deliver inaugural Distinguished Professor Lecture on March 29
LAWRENCE – University of Kansas humanities researcher Randall Fuller will present “The Last Days and Forgotten Life of Martha E. Hunt, Transcendentalist” as his inaugural Distinguished Professor Lecture. The event will take place at 4 p.m. Monday, March 29, as a Zoom webinar.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
In entertainment, musical figure a matter of life and death
LAWRENCE – As with clothing, musical fashions come and go, seemingly without coordination among tastemakers. And for the past 20 or 30 years, one particular musical figure has come to symbolize the fuzzy line between life and death in TV and movie soundtracks.
That’s the thesis of a scholarly article by Scott Murphy, University of Kansas professor of music. Published in most recent edition of the journal Theory & Practice, “S as a Latter-Day H: Mortally Liminal SLIDEs in Recent Popular Film and Television” compares the musical figure denoted by theorists as “S” or “SLIDE” with the different figure denoted as “H” that preceded it as the signifier of that mystical boundary.
Think of “S” as skinny jeans and “H” as Zubaz or JNCO.
Murphy said “H” is an abbreviation for hexatonic, the name for a six-note scale with the same pitches as the two chords in “H.” SLIDE — abbreviated to “S” in most uses — comes from the feeling a pianist gets when sliding his hand from one chording position to another. Both of these rubrics were proposed by other music theorists in previous papers that Murphy cites in his own.
Murphy’s contribution comes in sketching the transition between the two forms, detailing the recent usage of “S” and laying out some of its theoretical underpinnings. The article includes a spreadsheet of 34 scenes from 31 mainstream English-language films and TV shows released since 2001, showing where in the on-screen action the “S” figure comes in to underscore the “uncanny” juxtaposition of life and death.
The article makes mention of a particularly gruesome scene in the third season of the Netflix series “Stranger Things” where the “S” figure accompanies the action as the “Mind Flayer” monster absorbs the bodies of the townspeople it has hypnotized. Here, the soundtrack makes use of an excerpt from Philip Glass’ opera “Satyagraha.”
“This synchrony can be heard as highlighting the awesome horror of the Mind Flayer. … Visually and narratively, what immediately follows is also exceptional in being a singularly gory moment of carnage for the series: One by one, each flayed human dissolves, falls over, and adds their biomass to the Mind Flayer’s. A second S accompanies the fusion of human puddle and inhuman monster. The residents’ lives, in apparent jeopardy of being permanently lost before his point, appear now even more irretrievable,” Murphy wrote.
Some of the other recent films in which Murphy notes the “S” musical figure include “Donnie Darko,” “The Avengers: Age of Ultron” and “Watchmen.”
In a recent interview, Murphy said he started to notice the “S” figure recurring over and over again in movie and TV soundtracks, giving rise to the current study and related paper.
“I think it was primarily through acquiring this critical mass of examples,” Murphy said, “realizing that after you get to nine or 10 or 15, it’s not a fluke; that there seems to be some consistency in how composers are associated with this. And not only composers, but directors and editors, too. If they’re choosing this music … you realize it’s no longer a coincidence.”
Murphy traces this use of “S” back to James Newton Howard’s soundtrack for the 1995 global pandemic film, “Outbreak.” But it really ramps up in the 21st century, he said, so much so that he thinks it has now become a cliché and that musical fashion seems poised for another turn.
“Film people … tell me there are trends, like everyone using lens flares, and suddenly (director) J.J. Abrams wants lens flares in every shot of his ‘Star Trek’ films,” Murphy said. “So then lens flares become this hot thing, and it might last for a while or just burn out. It strikes me that the SLIDE has a pretty clear starting point. As of now, I feel like its heyday has already passed. It has probably already turned its way into a cliché, and it’s starting to decay.”
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
Randall Fuller to deliver inaugural Distinguished Professor Lecture on March 29
LAWRENCE – University of Kansas Distinguished Professor Randall Fuller will present “The Last Days and Forgotten Life of Martha E. Hunt, Transcendentalist” as his inaugural Distinguished Professor Lecture.
The event will take place at 4 p.m. Monday, March 29, as a Zoom webinar. The lecture will be recorded for those unable to attend and posted to the Faculty Development website.
Fuller is the Herman Melville Distinguished Professor of American Literature in the KU Department of English, a rank he has held since August 2017. He will explore the lingering impression of Hunt, a mid-19th-century schoolteacher.
The story of Zenobia in “The Blithedale Romance” by Nathaniel Hawthorne is taken from the suicide of Martha Hunt, Fuller said. Standing at the periphery of the Transcendentalists in Concord, Massachusetts, Hunt embraced its lessons of equality for women and its transformative intellectual lessons; however, the intellectual promise of her associations turned to despair and led her to suicide, illustrating the darker side of the movement.
Fuller’s book “Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism” is currently under contract with Oxford University Press. Fuller won a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship in July 2020 to resurrect the leading female intellects of the Transcendentalist movement of early 19th-century America into a book.
“Most of my professional life has been concerned with trying to understand why various aspects of 19th-century American literature and culture continue to resonate so powerfully unto our present day,” Fuller said. “How did the desire to transcend everyday reality lead to the most important philosophical movement in America? How did the arrival of Darwinian theory challenge that philosophy, known as Transcendentalism? How did the fiery conflict of the Civil War alter that literature and philosophy? And how did women, who typically were not given much of a public platform at the time, contribute to these important strains of thought and writing?
“These are some of the questions that have preoccupied me.”
Fuller has written four other books on topics ranging from examining the Civil War’s influence on American literature to the rise of Americanists. His most recent book was published in January 2017, “The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation.”
He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Missouri in 1986, his master’s degree in 1995 from Washington University in St. Louis and a doctorate in 1999 from the same institution. He began his career by winning the Richard Beale Davis Award for Best Article Published by “Early American Literature” in 1999, year one of a six-year run as an assistant professor at Drury University before being promoted to associate professor and eventually a professor.
Fuller departed for the University of Tulsa in 2012, where he served as the Chapman Professor of English for five years, which overlapped with three years as the chair of the English department starting in August 2014. During that time, he was named a 2014-15 Guggenheim Fellow. Fuller arrived at the University of Kansas in 2017 with the rank of distinguished professor. His written work has appeared in many publications, including the Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, The New York Times, American Literary History and The Wall Street Journal.
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