The films are alive with the sound of music

Note: Claudia Gorbman, professor of film studies, was selected to receive the UW Tacoma 2008-09 Distinguished Research Award. She was chosen by a committee of faculty from a field of accomplished colleagues nominated for the award. Gorbman will receive a $5,000 honorarium and will deliver a lecture on her subject, open to everyone, next fall.

If Hollywood gave an Oscar for Best Study of Music in Film, Claudia Gorbman, UW Tacoma professor of film studies, would walk away with a shiny statuette. And if there were a category for Best Supporting Role in the Study of Music in Film, she'd get that one, too.

Gorbman, one of UW Tacoma's founding faculty, is arguably the most prominent scholar in her field and internationally acclaimed as the virtual founder of the study of film music.

"Without a doubt, her work has been the foundation for an entire discipline, but continues to be a guiding light almost a generation later," writes Daniel Goldmark, associate professor of music at Case Western Reserve University, in support of Gorbman's nomination for UW Tacoma's 2009 Distinguished Researcher Award.

Gorbman's 1987 book, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music, was the first to set the stage for academic research of music in film. It is still widely sought after by students and scholars in the field and, since it's out of print two decades after publication, a used copy fetches a couple hundred dollars. As a baseline for other writers, Unheard Melodies is cited in countless books and articles.

"There is virtually no subsequent book on film sound theory that does not cite Dr. Gorbman's work, and most use her ideas as a jumping-off point," writes Elisabeth Weis, professor of film at Brooklyn College.

Gorbman is modestly proud of her stature. "It is most pleasing when scholars disagree, or set my work up as a straw man, or at least develop an elegant argument about a given idea that may have arisen from reading my work and taking it somewhere new," she says. "This is, to me, what belonging to a community of scholars is all about."

She is currently working on a second edition of Unheard Melodies, as well as a book on Agnes Varda, whom Gorbman describes as one of France's great living filmmakers. And she is co-editing another work in progress, The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics.

Gorbman plays a supporting role as translator par excellence for a superstar of film sound studies, Michel Chion. A composer and prolific scholar in France, Chion has published dozens of books on film and sound. Because of Gorbman's knowledge of film, music and French — a rare combination — she has translated four of his books, giving the English-speaking world access to his work.

On the special challenges of translating Chion, Gorbman explains: "He has invented all kinds of strange and delightful words as he advances original ideas about film sound. Many of his terms are almost comically cumbersome, such as 'nondiscontinuity' and 'acousmatic sound.' I enjoy playing with his language, which often refers to things only the French mind would get, until I hit on equivalents in English."

Elisabeth Weis related an anecdote that proves the point. The storyline goes like this: Another, quite capable translator is hired to translate Chion's most recent book, but loses much in the translation. Chion refuses to allow it to be published. Gorbman is recruited to fix it. She starts over and produces a masterpiece of collaboration with the author, much to the delight of everyone involved (possibly excepting the first translator). Cue music. Roll credits.

Chion himself praised Gorbman's own scholarly work. He calls Unheard Melodies "one of the best works in existence on classical film music." As for her other publications, he said, "For her, film is a living thing and not merely an academic object to study."

Gorbman regularly receives invitations to give papers and speak at conferences and universities around the globe, and does so as frequently as her schedule allows. Recently she gave the keynote address at the international Screen conference in Glasgow. Since she joined UW Tacoma in 1990, she has given keynotes or lectures in Italy, Sweden, Poland, Australia, Germany, Hong Kong, Canada, England and Portugal, not to mention many American universities.