Music in Film
Five Wednesdays, May 7 to June 4, from 10:00am to 1:00pm
In 1975, director Steven Spielberg made a film about a shark that terrorizes summer tourists on Martha’s Vineyard. What music did his collaborator, John Williams, compose to underscore the shark as it attacked its unsuspecting victims? Two notes.
In cinema, music doesn’t just accompany the story—it drives emotion, builds character, and holds the narrative together. We may not see the shark in Jaws, but Williams’s music proclaims its terrifying presence.
This five-week course at the Coolidge Corner Theatre offers an opportunity to explore some of the most renowned film music and to learn about the composers who created the scores that linger in your ear long after the credits have ended. Each week, we will study a different film, focusing on its music and the composer behind it. This list of films and composers includes King Kong (Max Steiner), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Ennio Morricone), Vertigo (Bernard Herrmann), The Pink Panther: A Shot in the Dark (Henry Mancini), and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (John Williams). These five composers have played a pivotal role in the development of film music language, each with a distinct musical voice that shaped how we hear the movies.
This course is open to participants with any and all musical backgrounds, and the instructor will explain any music theory during the course.
About Dr. James Heazlewood-Dale
Dr. James Heazlewood-Dale, a distinguished scholar, performer, and Grammy-nominated bassist, hails from Sydney, Australia. Venturing to Boston to pursue studies in jazz double bass at the prestigious Berklee School of Music and the New England Conservatory, where he received full scholarships, Dr. Heazlewood-Dale has shared the stage with world-renowned artists, including Jacob Collier, Maria Schneider, Grace Kelly, Terence Blanchard, and Zakir Hussain.
In recognition of outstanding academic achievement, Dr. Heazlewood-Dale was honored with Brandeis University's Provost Research Award. His Ph.D. research delves into the captivating intersection of jazz and video game music, a topic he has presented at esteemed national conferences, including those for the American Musicological Society, the Musicological Society of Australia, the Jazz Education Network, and the College Music Society.
Dr. Heazlewood-Dale's scholarly contributions can be found in various publications, including Jazz and Culture (University of Illinois Press), Environmental Humanities and the Video Game (Palgrave Macmillan), and Adaptation, Rearrangement, and Music Across Screen Media (Routledge). Notably, he was commissioned by Decca Records to craft the liner notes for the soundtrack release of The Callisto Protocol (2022) and featured as a scholarly guest in Adam Neely's acclaimed video essay "The Nintendo-fication of Jazz." He is currently a professor at Brandeis University, lecturing on film music and video game history.