“Regeneration” in Rebecca

Confronting Compilation in Franz Waxman’s Score

Authors

  • Nathan Platte University of Iowa

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/jfm.v5i1-2.169

Keywords:

Waxman, Selznick, Hitchcock, Rebecca, Forbes, compiled score, characterization

Abstract

The music of Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick’s Rebecca flows from many sources. In addition to Franz Waxman’s original music, eighteen passages are drawn from nine other films. This practice of transplanting old scores into new films relates back to the compiled scores of theatrical melodrama and silent film, but its consequences in Rebecca, a film centered on an unnamed heroine whose trials were intended—in the words of Selznick— to “make every woman say ‘I know just how she feels,’” are especially complex. Close study of the film and its production documents reveals that these recycled passages alternately clarify and complicate the heroine’s characterization and Waxman’s artistic control over the scoring process.

References

Dubowsky, Jack. 2011. The evolving “temp score” in animation. Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 5, no. 1: 1-24.

Leff, Leonard. 1987. Hitchcock and Selznick: The rich and strange collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick in Hollywood. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mera, Miguel. 2008. Scoring Moth: beyond the temp track. In Cinemusic?: constructing the film score, ed. David Cooper, Christopher Fox, and Ian Sapiro, 33-49. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.

Neumeyer, David and Nathan Platte. 2012. Franz Waxman’s Rebecca: a film score guide. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press.

Platte, Nathan. 2010. Musical collaboration in the films of David O. Selznick. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan.

Sadoff, Ronald. 2006. The role of the music editor and the “temp track” as blueprint for the score, source music, and scource music of films. Popular Music 25, no. 2: 165-83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0261143006000845

Sullivan, Jack. 2006. Hitchcock’s music. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Ussher, Bruno David. 2011. Music in the films, 1937–1941. Ed. G. D. Hamann. Hollywood: Filming Today Press.

Published

2013-10-31

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Platte, N. (2013). “Regeneration” in Rebecca: Confronting Compilation in Franz Waxman’s Score. Journal of Film Music, 5(1-2), 169-177. https://doi.org/10.1558/jfm.v5i1-2.169