In popular discourse, such as film reviews, instrumental film music is generally considered an accompaniment to a film’s visual component, rather than a specific object of interest. The proportion of the population viewing such content has increased substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic and, depending on the restrictions that follow, is likely to remain high. Film and television music permeates everyday life, with over half of households in the UK, for example, subscribing to one or more video-on-demand services, such as Amazon Prime Video or Netflix (Ofcom 2020), where the majority of content (films, television series, documentaries) possesses original instrumental score. Film music’s instrumental components include tonality, harmony, pitch, timbre, rhythm, dynamics, and instrumentation. Specifically, this article considers instrumental film music: original music composed for a specific film or films, which is prominent in, but not exclusive to, the Global North. Building on recent calls in human geography to better attend to the subtleties of acoustic phenomena (Paiva 2018a, 2018b), this article offers a detailed geopolitical case study of instrumental music.
In other words, music has been understood principally as text in popular geopolitics. Where music has been considered, this has generally addressed music with lyrics, rather than the instrumental component of music (Grayson 2018). Carter and Dodds 2014 Funnell and Dodds 2017 Power and Crampton 2007), but none of music. There have been several book length treatments of the popular geopolitics of film (e.g. As yet, however, music has attracted substantially less attention. Popular geopolitics has addressed a wide range of media – most frequently feature films (AlAwadhi and Dittmer 2020 Benwell and Pinkerton 2020 Hastie 2021), but also cartoons (Thorogood 2020), computer games (Bos 2020), and documentaries (Holland 2020).
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