Congratulations to Daniel Bishop, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Music (Music in General Studies) at Indiana University Bloomington and alumnus of the Musicology PhD program! His book, The Presence of the Past: Temporal Experience and the New Hollywood Soundtrack, was recently published by Oxford University Press. Bishop’s book focuses on the soundtracks of US films from the late sixties and early seventies that occupy a historical setting.
The abstract for The Presence of the Past can be found below, and the e-version of Bishop’s book can be accessed here (may require log-in credentials).
Abstract from Oxford Scholarship Online:
“In the tumultuous era of the late sixties and early seventies, several currents of American art and culture coalesced around a broad sensibility that foregrounded and explored the immediacy of lived experience as both an aesthetic and political imperative. But in films set in the historical past, this sensibility acquired complex additional resonances by speaking to the ephemerality of the present moment through a framework of history, myth, nostalgia, and other forms of temporal alienation and distance. The Presence of the Past explores the implications of this complex moment in Hollywood cinema through several prominent examples released in the years 1967 to 1974. Key genres are explored in detailed case studies: the outlaw film (Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands), the revisionist Western (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe and Mrs. Miller), the neo-noir (Chinatown), and the nostalgia film (The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti). In these films, “the past” is more than a matter of genre or setting. Rather, it is a richly diverse, often paradoxical concern in its own right, whose study bridges diverse conceptual territories within soundtrack studies, including the sixties pop score, myth criticism, media technologies, and the role of classical music in compilation scoring. Against a broader background of an industry and film culture that were witnessing a stylistic and aesthetic diversification in the use of music and sound design, The Presence of the Past argues for the film-philosophical importance of the soundtrack for cultivating an imagined experiential understanding of the past.”
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