Miguel Mera, University of Southampton.
Mozart’s Requiem (1791) is a work shrouded in myth and tragedy, largely due to the mysterious circumstances of its commission, composition, and incomplete nature. In live performance, the piece poses significant challenges to the multicamera director, particularly in achieving a balanced representation of choir, orchestra, soloists, and conductor, while preserving the work’s structure and narrative. The Kyrie presents particular polyphonic complexity, because it is constructed as a double fugue with two subjects unfolding as a matched pair throughout. How then should the multicamera director approach shot selection to serve the dramaturgy? This presentation compares several performances of the Kyrie from the 1970s to the present day, identifying how different audiovisual strategies focus and shape audience attention. Some facilitate analytical listening by using editing, phrasing, and camera movement to visually scaffold the evolving fugal subjects, helping the viewer decipher the polyphonic trajectory. In contrast, others introduce choices that obscure or contradict the musical structure, particularly during extended melismatic passages, leading to a sense of confusion or disorientation. I argue that the effective representation of a fugue in performance conveys the direction of its development, and when audiovisual choices fail to clarify this journey, the audience may feel lost in the music’s progression. Furthermore, I will highlight specific instances where emphasising internal contrapuntal movement at the expense of key musical subjects leads to cognitive audiovisual dissonance, resulting not only in a less effective representation of the music’s development but also creating a perceptual phenomenon that the performance is ‘out of sync.’ I coin the term synchrophonia to describe the sliding scale of audiovisual factors that generate audiovisual alignment or fracture.
Miguel Mera is Professor of Screen Music and Sound and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Southampton. He is a composer and a musicologist. Miguel is the author of European Film Music (2006), Mychael Danna’s The Ice Storm: A Film Score Guide (2007), and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound (2017). He serves on the editorial boards of Music and the Moving Image, Music Sound and the Moving Image, The Journal of Film Music, The Soundtrack, and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association.