An Introduction to America’s Music

504 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II

timing section comments

2:11 triple meter Clear statements of the Bat-theme, now in triple meter, with gradual crescendo.

2:25 Percussion and sharp, staccato chords for full orchestra lead to a fi nal, unstable

diminished chord and a gong stroke.

CD 4.6 Listening Guide 20.1 Title music from Batman^ DANNY ELFMAN

Listen & Refl ect

1. How does the Batman title music resemble the romantic orchestral techniques heard in
   Amy Beach’s Gaelic Symphony (see LG 8.1), and how does it differ?


2. Compare this music with Aaron Copland’s title music for The Red Pony, which makes up
   most of the fi rst movement from The Red Pony Suite (LG 15.2).

for long-playing records had reached a saturation point and that the industry

strategy of segmenting the market, as described in chapter 19, was starting to

backfi re, reducing profi ts instead of increasing them.

Breathing new life into the record industry in the early 1980s was a new for-

mat: the compact disc (CD). Record companies promised music lovers that the

new digital format offered longer playing times than LPs (true), greater audio

fi delity (debatable), and virtual indestructibility (too good to be true). Intro-

duced in 1983, the CD gradually replaced the LP over the next decade, spurred

in part by the practice of reissuing older albums in the new format, with digital

mastering and bonus tracks thrown in to lure buyers into purchasing music they

already owned on vinyl.

In addition to the CD, the most signifi cant new medium to emerge from the

1980s was the music video, a miniature movie designed to accompany a popu-

lar record. The idea goes back to the 1940s and the short-lived phenomenon of

“soundies,” three-minute musical fi lms designed to be played on a coin-operated

jukebox containing a small projector; the soundies, some of which featured such

big-name performers as Cab Calloway and Louis Jordan, usually consisted of

performers lip-synching to their records before the camera in an imitation of

live performance, often with dancers.

Early attempts to create short fi lms that involved more than lip-synching

include a couple of sequences in the Beatles movie Help! (1965) and Bob Dylan’s

innovative prologue to Don’t Look Back (1967), a documentary about his 1965 tour

of Great Britain. In the latter, “Subterranean Homesick Blues” accompanies

images of a blasé-looking Dylan displaying a series of hand-lettered cue cards

containing key words from the song. Far more modest in budget than later music

the CD

the music video

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