Música de cine en femenino: Las mujeres en la filmografía de Dimitri Tiomkin (The Female in Film Music: Women in the Filmography of Dimitri Tiomkin) by Lucía Pérez Garcia is now available from the University of Seville Press.
Lucía Pérez Garcia herein grandly expands and refines her 2017 Seville University doctoral thesis, Dimitri Tiomkin y la música del western (1940-1967). Garcia begins by familiarizing the reader with the composer Dimitri Tiomkin, music and women in world history, and music and women in the cinema.
Chapter one opens with an appropriate quotation from Tiomkin who says nowadays women are too strong to underscore with violins, one needs trombones. The heart of the book is comprised of Garcia’s astute music analysis on topics that focus on Tiomkin’s music for women in Westerns, Frank Capra and Alfred Hitchcock films, epics, and even mermaids in a Tarzan film, with mermaids lovingly translated as las sirenas.
The work is dedicated to the women in Tiomkin’s life, his mother Marie Tartakovsky and his wives, Albertina Rasch and Olivia Tiomkin and names more than two dozen female protagonists in films scored by Tiomkin, from Anna Magnani to Katy Jurado to Elena Verdugo.
The Prologue by Ángel Justo Estebaranz, a History and Art professor and Garcia’s thesis advisor, cites the numerous contributions Garcia makes and directs our attention to the strong, resolute, independent, adventurous, femme fatale, and epic women, whose character is underlined by Dimitri Tiomkin’s music in both melody and rhythm, harmony, and instrumentation.
The book takes its place in the publisher’s Colección Ciencias de la Comunicación (Communications Science Collection) following works on Andalusian and Spanish cinema, Spanish directors, and journalist Antonio Díaz-Cañabate.
A paperback can be purchased from the publisher, Editorial Universidad de Sevilla, for 16 Euros. To download a pdf of the front matter, prologue, introduction, methodology, and opening chapter visit the publisher’s website.
FURTHER READING: The Spanish government awarded Dimitri Tiomkin the Order of Queen Isabella, one of Spain’s highest decorations in 1964.