Re-locating the Sounds of the Western

Re-Locating the Sounds of the Western examines the use and function of musical tropes and gestures traditionally associated with the American Western in new and different contexts ranging from Elizabethan theater, contemporary drama, space opera and science fiction, Cold War-era European filmmaking, and sampling in popular music. Each chapter focuses on a notable use of Western musical tropes, textures, instrumentation, form, and harmonic language, delving into the resonance of the music of the Western to cite bravura, machismo, colonization, violence, gender roles and essentialism, exploration, and other concepts.

Kendra Preston Leonard is a musicologist whose work focuses on music and screen history; women and music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; and music and disability. She is the author of The Conservatoire Americain: a History (2007); Shakespeare, Madness and Music: Scoring Insanity in Cinematic Adaptations (2009); Louise Talma: A Life in Composition (Ashgate, 2014) and Music for Silent Film: A Guide to North American Resources (2016). She is contributing editor to Buffy, Ballads, and Bad Guys Who Sing: Music in the Worlds of Joss Whedon (2010). She has been the Director of The Silent Film Sound and Music Archive (www.sfsma.org) since 2013.

Mariana Whitmer of the University of Pittsburgh, was Project Director for the Center for American Music, 2002-2016. Whitmer has published numerous journal articles, and book projects in progress include: Dissonance Intended: The Westerns of Max Steiner; Scoring the Plains: Music in the Classic Hollywood Western and Elmer Bernstein’s The Magnificent Seven: A Film Score Guide.