Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-4hhp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-15T21:44:38.865Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Mickey Mouse Muzak: Shaping Experience Musically at Walt Disney World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2017

GREGORY CAMP
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The academic assessment of the products of the Walt Disney Company is usually highly negative, drawing out their sexist, racist, and mercenary factors. Although such views are not easily denied, their strong ideology often hides how Disney texts actually operate and how their audiences interact with them. This article explores how recorded music is used in the Disney theme parks to condition audience response, finding a middle ground between an ideological view, exploring the part music plays in social control, and a hermeneutic view, seeing how music functions in articulating and enhancing the experiences in which Disney's guests participate. Disney's Imagineers draw on the language of film music to create a wide variety of narrative musical spaces that give guests the impression that they navigate through these carefully staged narratives as protagonists. Film-musicological models show that guests are encouraged to feel that they control the respective spaces, although filtering the model through critical theory will demonstrate that the spaces can actually be seen as controlling them. While critical theory and structuralist hermeneutics might seem at first like strange bedfellows, analyses of both the narratives themselves and of their social effects can usefully reflect each other, together providing a more nuanced view of Walt Disney World's experiential texts than has been presented either in the academy or by Disney itself.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , February 2017 , pp. 53 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baudrillard, Jean. Screened Out. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2002.Google Scholar
Bryman, Alan. The Disneyization of Society. London: SAGE, 2004.Google Scholar
Caron, Charles. “‘Whole New Worlds’: Music and the Disney Theme Park Experience.” Ethnomusicology Forum 13, no. 2 (November 2004): 228–35.Google Scholar
Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. Translated by William Weaver. San Diego: Harcourt, 1986.Google Scholar
Fjellman, Steven M. Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Francaviglia, Richard. Main Street Revisited: Time, Space, and Image Building in Small-Town America. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding” (1980). Reprinted in The Routledge Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, ed. Neil Badmington and Julia Thomas, 234–44. Abingdon (UK): Routledge, 2008.Google Scholar
Heath, Stephen. “Notes on Suture.” Screen 18, no. 4 (Winter 1977–1978): 48–76.Google Scholar
Knight, Cher Krause. Power and Paradise in Walt Disney's World. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014.Google Scholar
Krosnick, Brian. “Journey into Imagination: The Tragic Tale of Disney's Lost Attraction Masterpiece.” Theme Park Tourist, 19 April 2015. http://www.themeparktourist.com/features/20150331/30105/journey-imagination-timeless-tale-disneys-lost-attraction-masterpiece.Google Scholar
Lehman, Frank. “Hollywood Cadences: Music and the Structure of Cinematic Expectation.” Music Theory Online 19, no. 4 (December 2013).Google Scholar
Lehman, Frank. “Reading Tonality through Film: Transformational Hermeneutics and the Music of Hollywood.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2012.Google Scholar
Murphy, Scott. “The Major Tritone Progression in Recent Hollywood Science Fiction Films.” Music Theory Online 12, no. 2 (May 2006).Google Scholar
Murphy, Scott. “Transformational Theory and the Analysis of Film Music.” In The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, ed. Neumeyer, David, 471–99. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Nooshin, Laudan. “Circumnavigation with a Difference? Music, Representation and the Disney Difference: It's a Small, Small World .” Ethnomusicology Forum 13, no. 2 (November 2004): 236–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oudart, Jean-Pierre. “Cinema and Suture” (1969). Translated by Kari Hanset. Screen 18, no. 4 (1978): 35–47.Google Scholar
Schickel, Richard. The Disney Version. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968.Google Scholar
Stilwell, Robynn. “The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Non-Diegetic.” In Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Goldmark, Daniel, Kramer, Lawrence, and Leppert, Richard, 184–202. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Telotte, J. P. The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Winters, Ben. “The Non-Diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space.” Music and Letters 9, no. 12 (May 2010): 224–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar