Music and the Media, with Particular Attention to the Film

This report has originated from the need to synthesize, without any claims, the big love between these two forms of art, music and the cinema, which together conceive a unique sublime art. The 20th century, attuned with the great cultural and social changes, witnesses the spreading of new forms of show, aimed to escape and entertainment, as well as new forms of music, while figurative art is changing, too. With reference to the spread of the media, the places and occasions of musical consumption are multiplied while musicians are acquiring new professional abilities. All this in the name of culture. But if we assume that culture is information and the media, then, for the social being, information becomes the very condition of survival. Thus, in this age dominated by the media, the struggle for survival is the struggle for mass information. On this point, it is sufficient to follow the relationship between MUSIC and the CINEMA in their historical evolution: from the soundtrack of silent films, to the music of talking films. However, it must be said that the relationship between music and the cinema, maybe because of the very nature of both, the languages, intrinsically progressive and rhythmic, have always been very close. A musical pattern, with all its possible nuances, can express events, feelings and intimate thoughts; silences accompanied by music reveal a character's state of mind much deeper than an hour of dialogues or voice off can do. On the other hand, the images of the film generate sensations that can express themselves completely only through music, which sometimes becomes an integral part of the plot of the film. The present report ends with my personal homage to recently died Ken Russell, one of the most original film directors, first rate «master» in the art of shocking dull minds, the artist who brought classical music to a completely new and large public: a big iconoclast able to transform marble busts into flesh and blood