Musica cinematografica e musicologia storica. Un oggetto intra-, inter-, extradisciplinare?

Abstract

The idea of including the study of film music in the disciplinary field of musicology has raised quite a few contradictions in the past. The fact that the musical accompaniment of a film could become an object of study of historical musicology has long been a controversial fact, defined by the concurrence of divergent and sometimes irreconcilable demands. The manifold forms of use of music in film have from the very beginning obliged scholars to confront ways of representing and conceptualising music that could not in principle be ascribed to the Adlerian musicological-historical paradigm. 

In consideration of that hiatus from the 'canonical' objects of historical musicology, the studies on film music have come into being in the last fifty years, at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, starting from Anglo-Saxon countries, with the awareness of occupying a disciplinary field with its own peculiarities. The epistemological discourse on the so-called film music studies has emphasised more than anything else the interdisciplinary nature of its object, its location in a space somewhere between film studies and musicology.

What, however, lies behind the appealing rhetoric of interdisciplinarity? Does the object 'film music' really occupy a no-man's-land between disciplines? On closer inspection, the crucial question of what is the founding ground of film music studies comes down to the answer we give to the question: what is historical musicology today?