Phoenix Rising: Relevance and Sexiness Returns to Classical Music.

Rather, the wide range in how music means derives from shifting habits of association between musical rhetoric and meaning that are historical and local, and which, in the twentieth century, have become increasingly standardized as a consequence of the ubiquity of recorded sound and music in mass entertainment. But as with his more famous earlier tone poems - I Don Juan i , I Death and Transfiguration - i and his later I Alpine Symphony i , the music is entirely comprehensible and appears complete without any reference to the framing story line or to the composer's intent to depict reality through music. Mozart did not suffer from the 1967 film I Elvira Madigan i any more than Brahms did from that underrated 1946 film noir I Undercurrent i featuring Katherine Hepburn, in which music from Brahms's Third Symphony frames the structure of the story. And last but not least, there is the significant period in Hollywood between the late 1930s and the early 1960s when a massive amount of fine music by distinguished composers was written for the film medium, most of it evocative or derivative of the concert and classical repertoire. [Extracted from the article]