Academic Major: Music Performance – Violin, Musical Studies – Music History
Title: Honeyed Tones: Film Violinists and the Rendering of Romance in Golden Age Hollywood Films
In Hollywood’s Golden Age (the 1930's and 40's), film music frequently employed the violin in emotionally charged scenes. Films such as Intermezzo and Gone with the Wind prominently set the violin’s sound with this intense romantic backdrop, and composition and scoring conventions developed by composers such as Max Steiner and Erich Korngold helped spread the instrument’s role in underscoring love themes across the industry. However, little attention has been directed toward how performance practices and audience reception shaped the violin’s cinematic identity. This association of lush violin playing to romance is one that continues to persist today, and understanding how this came to be is useful in contextualizing the development of the nascent medium and of the violin’s public role.
This project analyzed the societal and musical backgrounds of film violinists Toscha Seidel and Louis Kaufman and examines their performance practices in selected films. Using primary sources retrieved from archives such as the UCLA Center for Oral History Research, the Margaret Herrick Library, and the Library of Congress, I explored how their musical training, the technology of the time, and specific films in which they performed helped foster the violin’s distinctive characterization during the heyday of the Hollywood studio system. To share my findings, I presented a lecture recital at SUNY Potsdam and to attendees watching online. (A recording is available upon request by email to michaelwongmusic@gmail.com.)