Emilio Audissino
A film historian and film musicologist, Emilio Audissino is currently Associate Professor at Universitas Mercatorum, Rome, Italy. He holds one PhD in History of Visual and Performing Arts from the University of Pisa (Italy) and one PhD in Film Studies from the University of Southampton (UK).
His research interests are film and television history; sound and music in film and media; audiovisual style and technique; screenwriting; neoformalist film analysis; comedy; horror; Gestalt and cognitivist film theories; the psychology of music; the aesthetic, history, and forms of concert performances of the film-music repertoire.
He is the author of The Film Music of John Williams. Reviving Hollywood’s Classical Style (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021, second revised and expanded edition of the 2014 book John Williams’s Film Music), the first book-length study in English on the composer, and the editor of the collection of essays John Williams. Music for Films, Television and the Concert Stage (Brepols, 2018). His book Film/Music Analysis. A Film Studies Approach (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) concerns a method for audiovisual analysis that blends Neoformalism and Gestalt Psychology. For Cambridge University Press, he published Film Music in Concert (2021), a case study of the concert presentation of the film-music repertoire. With Emile Wennekes (Utrecht University), he co-edited the volume Cinema Changes: Incorporations of Jazz in the Film Soundtrack (Brepols, 2019) and The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema (2023).
He has been a consultant or guest for BBC Radio (UK), WGBH/WCRB Radio (USA), Radio France Culture, FranceTV, WPB (Wisconsin Public Radio, USA), KPCC Southern California (USA), and SVT (Sweden’s public television). Some of his writing commissions include works for the Library of the Congress (USA), the Milan Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonic Orchestra of La Scala, (Milan), Decca/Universal Records, Piano Classics, Bloomsbury’s Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, and the Oxford University Press Bibliographies Online.
Supervisors: Prof. Kevin J. Donnelly
His research interests are film and television history; sound and music in film and media; audiovisual style and technique; screenwriting; neoformalist film analysis; comedy; horror; Gestalt and cognitivist film theories; the psychology of music; the aesthetic, history, and forms of concert performances of the film-music repertoire.
He is the author of The Film Music of John Williams. Reviving Hollywood’s Classical Style (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021, second revised and expanded edition of the 2014 book John Williams’s Film Music), the first book-length study in English on the composer, and the editor of the collection of essays John Williams. Music for Films, Television and the Concert Stage (Brepols, 2018). His book Film/Music Analysis. A Film Studies Approach (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) concerns a method for audiovisual analysis that blends Neoformalism and Gestalt Psychology. For Cambridge University Press, he published Film Music in Concert (2021), a case study of the concert presentation of the film-music repertoire. With Emile Wennekes (Utrecht University), he co-edited the volume Cinema Changes: Incorporations of Jazz in the Film Soundtrack (Brepols, 2019) and The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema (2023).
He has been a consultant or guest for BBC Radio (UK), WGBH/WCRB Radio (USA), Radio France Culture, FranceTV, WPB (Wisconsin Public Radio, USA), KPCC Southern California (USA), and SVT (Sweden’s public television). Some of his writing commissions include works for the Library of the Congress (USA), the Milan Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonic Orchestra of La Scala, (Milan), Decca/Universal Records, Piano Classics, Bloomsbury’s Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, and the Oxford University Press Bibliographies Online.
Supervisors: Prof. Kevin J. Donnelly
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Books by Emilio Audissino
Combining accessible writing with thorough scholarship, and rigorous historical accounts with insightful readings, John Williams’s Film Music explores why Williams is so important to the history of film music. Beginning with an overview of music from Hollywood’s Golden Age (1933–58), Emilio Audissino traces the turning points of Williams’s career and articulates how he revived the classical Hollywood musical style. This book charts each landmark of this musical restoration, with special attention to the scores for Jaws and Star Wars, Williams’s work as conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, and a full film/music analysis of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The result is a precise, enlightening definition of Williams’s “neoclassicism” and a grounded demonstration of his lasting importance, for both his compositions and his historical role in restoring part of the Hollywood tradition.
Cinema is the form of entertainment that can be, above all, identified with the twentieth century. It gradually replaced theatre as a popular form of performed storytelling, and replaced opera too as the new “multimedia” art form, soon incorporating music as one of cinema’s privileged means to co-tell stories. Speaking of music, jazz was as sensational a twentieth-century novelty as cinema was. The two soon teamed up, and jazz, with its various incarnations and styles, has accompanied the moving images and the cinematic narratives throughout the decades. It was inevitable that these two iconic art/entertainment forms, jazz and cinema, should meet, blend, cooperate, and have a reciprocal influence. While the early film music was mostly symphonic and inspired by the late-romantic nineteenth-century idiom, jazz and Afro-American music — in various form and with diverse and changing racial/social connotations — appeared onscreen even before the landmark film The Jazz Singer (1927), which officially launched the sound era. This collection of essays seeks to study the long-standing relationship between jazz and cinema, from the silent era to the contemporary sound cinema, on an international level.
Books Chapters and Journal Articles by Emilio Audissino