Music Studies Colloquia

Hearing Pirates, Outlaws, and Swordswomen: Representations of Heroic Women in Hollywood’s Cold-War Action Scores

Abstract: In the 2010s, film critics celebrated the release of films like Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) as a point of arrival for heroic women characters in Hollywood action cinema. This was the end of a story that supposedly began after second-wave feminism in the 1960s, with Princess Leia from the original Star Wars (1977) serving as an early example. But in fact, the heroic woman is one of Hollywood’s oldest and most enduring obsessions, dating back to the silent period and flourishing after World War II. Women had joined the workforce to replace men serving overseas, and Hollywood processed this challenge to gender norms by producing a cycle of films about heroic women.

I argue that the scores for these forgotten films played an important role in constructing such characters and contributed to larger conversations about women’s rights across the Cold War era. The dominant scoring paradigm was the leitmotivic score, a model which paired characters with recurring, developing themes that relied upon a gendered musical vocabulary to communicate the characters’ narrative functions. In this talk, I explore the ways in which composers adapted this language to write themes for heroic women in three action genres: the swashbuckler, the western, and the sword-and-sorcery film.

Grace Edgar (University of Kansas; UMN BM 2010, MA 2014)
Bio: Grace Edgar is a musicologist who specializes in US film music. Her current book project analyzes depictions of gender and sexuality in Cold War–era Hollywood action scores from swashbucklers in the 1950s to fantasy films of the 1980s. Her publications include a chapter in the edited collection Music in Action Film: Sounds Like Action! and an article in the Journal of the Society for American Music. Originally from Wisconsin, she earned an MA at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and a PhD from Harvard University. She has also taught at Connecticut College and Denison University.