Tobias Pontara

University of Gothenburg, Department of Cultural Sciences, Faculty Member

Followers

151

Following

Co-authors

Mentions

Public Views

Tobias Pontara is Professor in Musicology at the University of Gothenburg. His research interests lie at the intersection of audiovisual studies, musical aesthetics, media studies, and the cultural study of music. Among the journals in which he has published are Philosophical studies, 19th-century music, Music, sound and the moving image, International review of the aesthetics and sociology of music and Music and the moving image. Pontara is the author of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sounding Cinema: Music and Meaning from Solaris to The Sacrifice (Routledge 2020).

less

Katherine Butler Schofield

King's College London

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Vitor Guerreiro

Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto

Egil Bakka

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Wolfgang Huemer

Università degli Studi di Parma (Italy)

Alessandro Bertinetto

Università degli Studi di Torino

Tibor Pinter

Eötvös Loránd University

Emre San

Istanbul 29 Mayis University

Jihoon Kim

Chung Ang University

Maja Vasiljevic

University of Belgrade

InterestsView All (10)

Uploads

Papers by Tobias Pontara

Svar till Lilliestam, Ostrem och Lundberg

Interpreting Tarkovsky’s Cinema Through Its Music

The Music of Sacrificial Acts

Retorik, hegemoni och musikforskning : Mot en pragmatisk syn på musikvetenskapen

The wide range of materials and topics studied, the many different areas towards which the study ... more The wide range of materials and topics studied, the many different areas towards which the study is directed, and the reluctance towards theorizing about the fundamentals of the discipline as a whole…-all this has given us a discipline which encompasses ethnology, sociology, psychology, as well as aesthetics, culture theory, and history, but which like Peer Gynt's onion lacks a kernel, a self (Berglund & Østrem 2002, 15).

Download

Brev från den autonoma musikens värld : Den diskursiva konstruktionen av musikalisk autonomi i den samtida klassiska CD-skivan

Download

Recension:Sharon Bezaly: BIS, 1499/Naxos

Giles Hooper: The discourse of musicology

Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning, 2010

Olle Edström (red.), Säg det i toner och därtill med ord (Bo Ejeby förlag 2009)

Historiskt informerade framföranden : Några kritiska reflektioner kring en övergiven diskussion

Historiskt informerade framforanden : nagra kritiska reflektioner kring en overgiven diskussion

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sounding Cinema

Constructing the relevant listener : Power, knowledge and the construction of identity in the discourse of musical autonomy

Constructing the relevant listener : Power, knowledge and the construction of identity in the dis... more

The Voice of Truth

Bach at the Space Station

Music, Sound, and The Moving Image, Apr 1, 2014

Download

Memories, Dreams and Mysteries

Flauto con Forza (Recension CD)

Beethoven Overcome

Routledge eBooks, Dec 11, 2019

Andrei Tarkovsky's Sounding Cinema: Music and Meaning from Solaris to The Sacrifice

Andrei Tarkovsky&#39;s Sounding Cinema adds a new dimension to our understanding and apprecia... more Andrei Tarkovsky&#39;s Sounding Cinema adds a new dimension to our understanding and appreciation of the work of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) through an exploration of the presence of music and sound in his films. The first comprehensive study in English concentrating on the soundtrack in Tarkovsky’s cinema, this book reveals how Tarkovsky’s use of electronic music, electronically manipulated sound, traditional folk songs and fragments of canonized works of Western art music plays into the philosophical, existential and ethical themes recurring throughout his work. Exploring the multilayered relationship between music, sound, film image and narrative space, Pontara provides penetrating and innovative close readings of Solaris (1972), Mirror (1975), Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986) and in turn deeply enriches critical understanding of Tarkovsky’s films and their relation to the broader traditions of European art cinema.

Beethoven Overcome: Romantic and Existentialist Utopia in Andrei Tarkovsky's<i>Stalker</i>

19th-Century Music, Mar 1, 2011

Abstract The very last scene of Andrei Tarkovsky9s film Stalker (1979) portrays a young girl who ... more Abstract The very last scene of Andrei Tarkovsky9s film Stalker (1979) portrays a young girl who moves glasses around on a table just by fixing her eyes on them. As she performs this magical act the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven9s Ninth Symphony, alongside the sound of a passing train, briefly appears on the soundtrack. This brief but poignant appearance of Beethoven9s music is both arresting and perplexing, but although the scene has received a number of critical readings, it is often noticed without further considerations. The present article concentrates on this overlooked aspect in order to reread the scene and examine the role played by Beethoven9s music in it. I argue that Beethoven9s music has a symbolic function within the scene and, furthermore, that it can most plausibly be understood as representing the scientific revolutions, the political projects, and the ideological struggles of modern history. I also argue that this symbolic meaning is effectively recoded within the filmic context of the last scene, turning what can be understood as two of the master signifiers of modern civilization9s technological, political, and ideological triumphs into powerful representations of the transitory and ultimately meaningless dimension of those triumphs. In the last part of the article I examine a particular phenomenon in the film: the regular return of the compound sound-image consisting of classical music and the sound of running trains. Departing from an interpretive strategy developed by musicologist Lawrence Kramer, I attempt to show that the iteration of this sonic figure amounts to a particular structural trope in the film, namely what Kramer would call an expressive doubling. This eventually leads me to the conclusion that one very rewarding way of looking at Stalker is to see it as expressing or enacting a central tenet of the utopian aesthetics of early Romanticism: the idea of transcendence.

Arvo Pärt: Fratres/Passio/Berlinermesse (Recension CD)

Henrik Marstal, Arvo Pärt: Laengslen efter de hvide tangenter (Köpenhamn: Gyldendal 2008)

Svar till Lilliestam, Ostrem och Lundberg

Interpreting Tarkovsky’s Cinema Through Its Music

The Music of Sacrificial Acts

Retorik, hegemoni och musikforskning : Mot en pragmatisk syn på musikvetenskapen

Download

Brev från den autonoma musikens värld : Den diskursiva konstruktionen av musikalisk autonomi i den samtida klassiska CD-skivan

Download

Recension:Sharon Bezaly: BIS, 1499/Naxos

Giles Hooper: The discourse of musicology

Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning, 2010

Olle Edström (red.), Säg det i toner och därtill med ord (Bo Ejeby förlag 2009)

Historiskt informerade framföranden : Några kritiska reflektioner kring en övergiven diskussion

Historiskt informerade framforanden : nagra kritiska reflektioner kring en overgiven diskussion

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sounding Cinema

Constructing the relevant listener : Power, knowledge and the construction of identity in the discourse of musical autonomy

Constructing the relevant listener : Power, knowledge and the construction of identity in the dis... more

The Voice of Truth

Bach at the Space Station

Music, Sound, and The Moving Image, Apr 1, 2014

Download

Memories, Dreams and Mysteries

Flauto con Forza (Recension CD)

Beethoven Overcome

Routledge eBooks, Dec 11, 2019

Andrei Tarkovsky's Sounding Cinema: Music and Meaning from Solaris to The Sacrifice

Beethoven Overcome: Romantic and Existentialist Utopia in Andrei Tarkovsky's<i>Stalker</i>

19th-Century Music, Mar 1, 2011

Arvo Pärt: Fratres/Passio/Berlinermesse (Recension CD)

Henrik Marstal, Arvo Pärt: Laengslen efter de hvide tangenter (Köpenhamn: Gyldendal 2008)

Classical music for a mediatized world: Visual and audio-visual representations of Western art music in contemporary media and society

This project examines how ideas and beliefs about classical music are produced, negotiated and co... more This project examines how ideas and beliefs about classical music are produced, negotiated and communicated through the dissemination of visual and audio-visual representations in a variety of contemporary locations and media. Combining discourse analysis with methodological approaches taken from film-music studies, audio- visual studies and visual-culture studies, the project is realized in the form of five separate but mutually supporting sub-studies. Each sub-study examines representations of classical music in a specific media context, focusing on principal forms of media such as film, television and the Internet as well as on marketing and advertising discourses associated with established cultural institutions like opera houses and symphony orchestras. The project will run for four years and involve five researchers with complementary scholarly qualifications. The output of the project will be fifteen articles in peer-reviewed journals and an anthology, Classical music today, which will contain ten original chapters and an introduction. The project develops an approach for studying classical music as a contemporary cultural and mediatized phenomenon that has been largely unexplored in musicology and related areas of musical research. The importance of the project lies both in the originality of this approach and in how it systematically maps the representational practices surrounding and shaping our conceptions of classical music in present-day society.

Download

Everyday Devices. Mediatisation, Disciplining and Localisation of Music, in Sweden 1900-1970

by Toivo Burlin, Ulrik Volgsten, and Tobias Pontara

The aim of this project is to show how sound-reproduction technology interacted with and transfor... more The aim of this project is to show how sound-reproduction technology interacted with and transformed practices and ideas related to music, sound and listening during a period characterized by increasing mediatisation. The years between 1900 and 1970 saw the introduction and establishing of the gramophone, radio, film, tape recorder and television in Sweden, media that have changed the conditions for both music listening and other musical practices. Using different methods (e.g. discourse analysis, historical ethnography) the project investigates four mutually illuminating sub areas, all filling significant knowledge gaps. Important questions are 1) how did the emergence of the new living room interact with phonography and ways of listening to music? 2), how was home taping to be distinguished from music listening, considering both spatial/practical and ideological/substantial aspects? 3), how did the genre categories of the phonogram market, as well as what was written in advertisements and in the press, affect ideas about what was listened to? 4), how did sound film, through its representations of music reproduction devices and listening in different everyday settings affect (affirming? legitimizing?) the mediatisation processes that music went through in Sweden? In addition to musicological research the project will contribute to knowledge of an area that concerns many but is unknown to most: how our perception and apprehension of music and sound affect and is affected by processes of mediatisation, disciplining and localisation.

Download

Music as Embodied and Emergent: Expanding on a Theme by Joseph Margolis

by Ulrik Volgsten and Tobias Pontara

International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 2023

The article expands on Joseph Margolis idea of artworks as physically embodied and culturally eme... more The article expands on Joseph Margolis idea of artworks as physically embodied and culturally emergent. More specifically, how music emerges from the “precultural” sound in which it is embodied. This emergence of music is shown to follow a similar route as the development of a “sense of self”, as proposed by Daniel Stern, thus substantiating what Margolis suggests is a “strong analogy” between the emergence of artworks and of persons. The common precultural source is vitality affect, which we suggest is best seen as a form of protomusic. This common source explains music’s aptness to emotionally reinforce cultural and individual identifications in human cultures around the globe.

Download

Tobias Pontara

Uploads

Papers by Tobias Pontara

Log In