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(b Yonkers, NY, May 14, 1948). American film scholar. She received the BA in French, the MA in Romance Languages, and took the doctorate in Romance Languages and Literature, all at the University of Washington (1969, 1971, and 1978). She studied in Paris from 1973–1974 with Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour, Roland Barthes, and Nadia Boulanger. She taught comparative literature and film studies at Indiana University from 1975 to 1990, then joined the founding faculty at the University of Washington, Tacoma, in 1990. Gorbman has written extensively on film music and film sound. She has also translated from French many of Michel Chion’s key theoretical works on the audiovisual, including Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1994), The Voice in Cinema (1999), and Film: A Sound Art (2009). Gorbman’s Unheard Melodies (based on her doctoral dissertation) examined the narrative and expressive functions of music in film. It was the first to draw on narrative, semiotic, and psychoanalytic theories that flourished in film studies in the 1970s. Her use of the narrative theory-derived terminology “diegetic/non-diegetic” to assess if and how music, and the soundtrack as a whole, participated in film narration was especially far-reaching, and has since been embraced within film music studies and far beyond to other disciplines....

(b Yambol, 30 March 1933; d Plovdiv, 12 April 2014). Bulgarian composer and music educator, famous for his work in different genres but mostly for his distinctive contribution to the field of film music. He graduated from the Bulgarian State Conservatory in 1961 under Pancho Vladigerov (composition) and Assen Dimitrov (conducting). Author of the music for over 120 cartoons and more than 40 feature films, Karadimchev also wrote songs for rock bands, marked usually by laconic yet highly attractive melodic lines. His lyrical Byala tishina (‘White Silence’), performed by Georgi Minchev and The Shturtzite, made a particular breakthrough for Bulgarian rock music on the national level by winning the first prize at The Golden Orpheus Pop Music Festival in 1967. And his close collaboration with The Tangra in the early 1980s developed ‘the melodic style of rock’ in songs such as Bogatstvo (‘Fortune’) and Nashiat grad (‘Our Town’). Some of his title songs written for movies such as the ...

(Augustus)

(b Nashua, NH, May 14, 1931; d Middletown, CT, Dec 1, 2021). American composer and educator.

He was educated at Yale (BA 1954) and Brandeis (MFA 1960), where his teachers included Howard Boatwright, Arthur Berger, Irving Fine, and Shapero; he also studied under Copland and Foss at the Berkshire Music Center (1958, 1959). After two years in Rome on a Fulbright fellowship, Lucier joined the Brandeis faculty in 1963 as director of the choral union; later he was head of the electronic music studio. He was a cofounder of the Sonic Arts Union, music director of the Viola Farber Dance Company (1972–7), and a fellow of the DAAD Kunstlerprogramm in Berlin (1990). He received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and the NEA. In 1970 he moved to Wesleyan University, where he was later appointed John Spencer Camp Professor of Music. At Wesleyan, he trained a number of prominent experimental composers before his retirement in ...

(b Hempstead, NY, Oct 12, 1952). American composer, media artist, and educator. Raised in California, she studied music and theater briefly at the University of California, Santa Barbara with emma lou Diemer before pursuing music theory and composition at Humboldt State University in California (BA 1975) where she studied with Charles Moon. Roberts studied contemporary music with robert Ashley and David Behrman at Mills College (MFA 1977), focusing on electronic music and recording media. Postgraduate studies centered on video production and editing as she focused her interdisciplinary skills into multimedia composition.

Her early avant-garde works include Suite for a Small Chamber (1974), an installation piece that included dance-activated sound, and brings to mind 1930s dance experiments with the theremin. Similarly, Factory (1976) echoes the multimedia collaboration, Ballet Mécanique, of George Antheil and Fernand Léger. Roberts endeavored to create a visually percussive piece through a patchwork of video clips. Roberts garnered significant attention with ...