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Peter Kivy, Realistic Song in the Movies, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 71, Issue 1, February 2013, Pages 75–80, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6245.2012.01543.x
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I. INTRODUCTION
Contrary to what the title of this article might suggest, it is not about movie musicals. My subject is song as it occurs in fictional cinema with spoken dialogue throughout: in other words, spoken cinematic drama where a character may at some point in the drama sing a song. But in order to make clear what I am about here, I must make some important preliminary distinctions and, as well, put the kind of movies I am concerned with in what I take to be the relevant art historical context.
Let me begin, then, with what I mean in the title of this article by “realistic song.” The term was coined by the late Edward T. Cone in an essay entitled “The World of Opera and Its Inhabitants.” And it is to be understood in contrast to what Cone called in that same essay “operatic song,” which, as he put it, “replaces what in a more naturalistic medium would be ordinary speech.”1 But it can also occur in an opera that one of the characters should sing a song, which is to say, it will be fictionally true in the work that the character is singing rather than speaking, even though, in opera, the characters “speak” in song. Cone calls this “realistic song . . . as when Cherubino [in The Marriage of Figaro] presents his ‘Voi che sapate,’ a song he himself has written.”2
