Claiming Amadeus: Classical Feedback in American Media

Lowe, Melanie

doi:10.2307/3052244

Cited by 13 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…On the one hand, classical music in popular culture signals and mocks upper-class pretentiousness. Melanie Lowe, in a wide-ranging study of uses of classical music in popular sitcoms and films, explores how certain classical tunes – she takes the specific example of Mozart’s – have become ‘a cinematic social code for the elite class’ (2002: 112), and more normatively for ‘snobbery’. Lowe looks at four occurrences in television series of Mozart’s ‘Little Night Music’ as a background tune for scenes featuring intellectual or openly elitist characters.…”

Section: Classy Classical or Classless? Mozart’s Liminal Cultural Statusmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Lowe looks at four occurrences in television series of Mozart’s ‘Little Night Music’ as a background tune for scenes featuring intellectual or openly elitist characters. ‘For the average American’, Lowe argues (2002: 102), Mozart’s famous tune has become enmeshed within a network of film and television references. Cultural associations deriving from this simple musical cue are mostly negative, pointing at the upper classes as patronizing and artificial.…”

Section: Classy Classical or Classless? Mozart’s Liminal Cultural Statusmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The ‘Mozart Effect’ exaggerated this treatment of music, with tremendous impact. As Lowe notes, ‘the influence of the Mozart Effect on the current situation of classical music in contemporary American culture can hardly be overstated’ (2002: 119) – because through it classical music became annexed by scientists, politicians, journalists and educators as a universal panacea. Though this superficially benefited music education, the ‘Mozart Effect’ was directly adverse to its interests.…”

Section: Mozart In the Age Of Technological Reproductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The ‘Mozart Effect’: A Sociological Reappraisal

Beauvais

2014

Cultural Sociology

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This article examines the 'scientific legend' of the 'Mozart Effect', which grew to become a largescale cultural phenomenon with political ramifications, focused on early childhood education, during the 1990s and early 2000s in the United States. The search for the 'Mozart Effect' and its commercial exploitation followed the finding by Rauscher et al. (1993) that listening to Mozart's music could improve performance on specific tasks of the Stanford-Binet intelligence test for a short duration of time. The 'Mozart Effect', this paper argues, was a particularly successful sociocultural phenomenon because its different components at the time of its emergence were propitiously situated to find particular resonance in late-20th-century America. Those components are identified as the emphasis on neuroscience and early childhood education in the 1990s 'Decade of the Brain'; the American interest in intelligence-testing and intelligence-enhancing methods, especially in children; the increasingly blurry distinction in musical preferences across socioeconomic classes; and the changed status of classical music in the era of easily-reproducible and arranged listening. The legendary figure of Mozart, at the core of the 'effect' that bears its name, is also analysed in depth, as it ensured the neat cohesion of those elements, and contributed to a shift in this phenomenon towards early childhood education in popular and political understandings of the 'Mozart Effect'. Beyond its value as a retrospective examination of a particularly successful 'scientific legend', this article aspires to present a case study in the diverse elements which can, under favourable circumstances, catalyse into popular phenomena of significant magnitude.

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Section: Classy Classical or Classless? Mozart’s Liminal Cultural Statusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Classy Classical or Classless? Mozart’s Liminal Cultural Statusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Mozart In the Age Of Technological Reproductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The ‘Mozart Effect’: A Sociological Reappraisal

Beauvais

2014

Cultural Sociology

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Baroque Music in Post-War Cinema

Greig

2021

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Studies of pre-existing music in narrative cinema often focus on a single film, composer or director. The approach here adopts a wider perspective, placing a specific musical repertoire - baroque music - in the context of its reception to explore its mobilisation in post-war cinema. It shows how various revivals have shaped musical fashion, and how cinema has drawn on resultant popularity and in turn contributed to it. Close analyses of various films raise issues of baroque musical style and form to question why eighteenth-century music remains an exception to dominant film-music discourses. Account is taken of changing modern performance practice and its manifestation in cinema, particularly in the biopic. This question of the reimagining of baroque repertoire leads to consideration of pastiches and parodies to which cinema has been particularly drawn, and subsequently to the role that neobaroque music has played in more recent films.

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The Requiem legend in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Keefe

2012

Mozart's Requiem

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Claiming Amadeus: Classical Feedback in American Media

Cited by 13 publications

References 1 publication

The ‘Mozart Effect’: A Sociological Reappraisal

The ‘Mozart Effect’: A Sociological Reappraisal

Baroque Music in Post-War Cinema

The Requiem legend in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

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