Incidental music in full colour: the contribution of women composers to the film soundtrack

Abstract

There are several good examples of the instrumental and vocal colour that women can give through composing scores of incidental music; we can see easily how women are depicted in the music composed expressly for the purpose of accompanying predetermined color images as can be seen in theatre, ballet and cinema. The incidental music is in charge of providing us with the color description of the characters and their inner world, of bringing to life the atmosphere of romance, intrigue, or hatred surrounding the action we are witness to, of making a narrative ellipsis that will place us in a temporal sequence different from what we were seeing only seconds before. For this reason giving colour to incidental music, as is also the case for literature, painting or sculpture, is different if the artist, here the composer, is a man or a woman.