Grunge drama, Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique

Elisabeth Moss is essentially Courtney Love in the Rock’n’Roll Drama Her Smell (2019). The film goes beyond the expected trappings of your usual rock drama and successfully manages to capture the convulsive core of musical artistry while suggesting that it’s possible for the individual to break free of its corrosive bonds. In the grand tradition of Velvet Goldmine, I’m Not There, and the latest iteration of A Star Is Born, Her Smell proves that using an already-existing musical act as a springboard often feels more authentic than a film about real-life musicians. Because there’s no expectation to faithfully retell an actual living or dead person’s story, Perry is free to draw from the rock ‘n’ roll tropes that are most narratively satisfying. 

“Her Smell” is set in the indie rock scene of the 1990s. The story follows the decline, flame-out, rehab and return of a Courtney Love-like star played by Elisabeth Moss. The film has its strengths, especially in Moss’ high-octane performance, Sean Price Williams’ terrific cinematography and some very creative sound design. Perry is, at his best, a deft, trenchant artist who sees in modernity selfishness, sadness, treachery, the maladies of subcultures, a cornucopia of self-perpetuating afflictions, lies, and the liars that tell them. “I think that self-destructiveness can also mean self-reflection, it can mean poetic sensibility,” Courtney Love said in her Spin interview in 1998.  “You were horrible but it never made me not love you,” Marielle Hell (Agyness Deyn) tells Becky when they reunite years later. Limited release beginning April 12th. Source: consequenceofsound.net

Romantic composers modified the formalism of classical music, and aimed at lyric expression and emotion. Many composers gave their works a nationalistic character by using folk songs as themes. Romantic composers include Franz Schubert of Austria; Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner, and Frederic Chopin. Program music aimed to absorb and transmit the imagined subject matter in such a way that the resulting work transcends the subject matter it seeks to represent. Instrumental music thus became a vehicle for the utterance of thoughts which, although first hinted in words, may ultimately be beyond the power of words to fully express. Practically every composer of the Romantic era was, to some degree, writing program music. One reason it was easy for listeners to connect a poem or a story with a piece of Romantic music is that often the composer himself, perhaps unconsciously, was working from some such ideas. Writers on music projected their own conceptions of the expressive functions of music into the past, and read Romantic programs into the instrumental works not only of Beethoven, but also the likes of Mozart, Haydn, and Bach. The diffused scenic effects in the music of such composers as Mendelssohn and Schumann seem pale when compared to the feverish, and detailed drama that constitutes the story of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique (1830).

Because his imagination always seemed to run in parallel literary and musical channels, Berlioz once subtitled his work "Episode in the Life of an Artist", and provided a program for it which was in effect a piece of Romantic autobiography. The foremost composer of program music after Berlioz was Franz Liszt, twelve of whose symphonic poems were written between 1848 and 1858. The name symphonic poem is significant: these pieces are symphonic, but Liszt did not call them symphonies, presumably because or their short length, and the fact that they are not divided up into movements. Instead, each is a continuous form with various sections, more or less varied in tempo and character, and a few themes that are varied, developed, or repeated within the design of the work. Les Preludes, the only one that is still played much today, is melodious and efficiently scored. However, its idiom causes it to be rhetorical in a sense. It forces today's listeners to lavish excessive emotion on ideas that do not seem sufficiently important for such a display of feeling. Liszt attempted to sum up the ideas of Romantic music in these words: "Music embodies feeling without forcing it - as it is forced in its other manifestations, in most arts and especially in the art of words - it is the embodied and intelligent essence of feeling; capable of being apprehended by our senses, it permeates them like a dart, like a ray, like a dew, like a spirit, and fills our soul." Source: studyworld.com