ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the happenings to the gendered musical conventions when the female character was a swashbuckler herself. It provides an overview of these conventions in the male-dominated swashbuckler, centering the discussion on Alfred Newman’s score for The Black Swan. The chapter also provides three examples of how composers responded to the new female swashbuckler in the 1950s: Roy Webb’s score for At Sword’s Point, Walter Scharf’s for Buccaneer’s Girl, and Franz Waxman’s for Anne of the Indies. Traditional approaches to scoring swashbuckler characters reinforced and contributed to the conservative gender politics of the films: composers coded male characters as active heroes and female characters as the passive recipients of their affection. In all three examples, the representation of the female swashbuckler within the film and film score is fraught, reflecting postwar concerns about shifting gender norms. The character of the female swashbuckler was a site of experimentation for filmmakers and film composers.
