Kristine Dizon is the Assistant Artistic Director at the Gran Canaria International Clarinet Festival and Coordinator of the International Clarinet Competition at the American Single Reed Summit. Kristine is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Human Sciences at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Lisbon as a recipient of the Fundação para Ciência de Tecnologia. Her primary research focuses on “Remaking: The re-shaping of sound in Portuguese Musical Comedies.”

An international artist and teacher, Kristine has performed in Europe, Asia, and South America. Recently, Kristine was a Visiting Professor at the University of Saint Joseph in Macau as part of the Faculty of Creative Industries. She has also  taught clarinet masterclasses in Cyprus, Thailand International Clarinet Academy, and the Music Academy of Krakow in Poland. In 2017, she was the international guest teacher for the VI Taller para Jóvenes Clarinetistas organized by Clariperu and the Escuela de Música Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and served as part of the international jury for the V Concurso de Bandas Escolares 2016 and held a residency with PeruBandas where she also taught clarinet masterclasses in Cusco and Lima, Peru. She had several performances at ClarinetFest 2018 in Oostende, Belgium with the Cyprus Clarinet Choir, Canarian Clarinet Camerata, Ensemble Amistad, and Polish clarinetist, Barbara Borowicz. Kristine performed as the VII Congreso Nacional de Clarinete in Madrid, Spain and at ClarinetFest 2017 in Orlando, Florida.

Her research, “Croatian Clarinet Concertos: The Cultivation of Traditions after 1952” was accepted for the International Clarinet Association Research Competition in Orlando, Florida in 2017 and was published in the Clarinet and Saxophone. In 2014, she was also a semi-finalist for the ICA Research Competition in Baton Rouge, Louisiana for her research on “The Chronological Clarinet: Musical Identities of Widor, Milhaud, Smith, and Mandat”. She performed with Adagio Trio, comprised of soprano, clarinet, and piano. She has performed at the Vandoren Ensemble Festival and toured with the Grand Symphonic Winds in China, performing at the National Centre of the Performing Arts in Beijing and the Shanghai World Expo.

Kristine was previously the Assistant Conductor for the Minnesota Project Opera assisting in the premiere of Reinaldo Moya’s Memory Boy and Assistant Conductor for the Minnesota Youth Symphonies for the 2015-2016 season. Kristine has led the Escola Superior de Música Artes e Espectáculo, Richfield Symphonic Band, MYS Philharmonic Orchestra, Concordia University – St. Paul Concert Band, União Filarmónica do Troviscal, and the Southern Illinois University Symphonic Band.

​Ms. Dizon was awarded the J. William Fulbright/Camões Institute Scholarship to study clarinet and orchestral conducting at the Escola Superior de Música Artes e Espectáculo with António Saiote. Ms. Dizon received a Master’s degree in Clarinet Performance at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and degrees in European History and Music at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She has performed in masterclasses with Josep Fuster Martinez, Alain Damiens, Henri Bok, Nuno Pinto, Dr. Jane Carl, Richard Stoltzman, Charles Neidich, Howard Klug and Ricardo Morales.

Kristine is an artist for Uebel Clarinets, Silverstein Works, and Barkley Mouthpieces.

The relationship between the audio and visual is transformative

The relationship between the audio and visual is transformative; highlighting a suggested truth in the cinematic experience. In Portugal, the use of sound in film was first introduced in the 1930s and has evolved into more sophisticated forms of sound and image articulation with musical comedies from the 1940s and 1950s. However, Portuguese musical comedies were not favored because of its exaggerated depictions of reality and satire for viewers. Antonio Ferro considered ‘Portuguese comedies’ the cancer of national film (Gil, 2015: 2). Musical comedies were also censored because the regime did not want these productions to ridicule political ideologies and for the public to develop opposing views about the regime. Despite open intellectual and political rejection, both from left to right intellectual elites, these comedies have gained an unquestioned status that has been made from successful classics of Portuguese film (Gil, 2015: 5). This effective formula that combines music, sound design, and visual narrative provided a type of comic relief by highlighting non-functional aspects of reality during this period of time.

This research explores the role of sound narratives and their meaning in Portuguese musical comedies from the 1930s and 1940s and its respective remakes in the present time. Sound plays an important role in how film narratives are understood by audiences. For example, Michel Chion suggested that “the reality of audiovisual combination – that one perception influences the other and transforms it” (Chion, xxvi: 1994). He suggested that no hierarchy exists in determining whether the audio or the visual is more important, but in how each sense complements one another in producing a suggested truth, or truth effect, to visual images. The films examined for this study include A Canção de Lisboa, O Leão da Estrela, and O Pátio das Cantigas. The chosen film narratives establish a link between the past and present-day remakes of iconic Portuguese films.

The Film Sound Analysis Framework (FSAF), introduced by Alvaro Barbosa, will be applied, with the function to establish a relationship between audio and visual elements, as well as how the use of sound evolved between the originals and remakes, from a semantic and syntactic perspective. The FSAF will be used to analyze the originals and remakes of the chosen films in understanding not only how different film techniques are used in creating a suggested truth, but how sound in film narratives were understood and perceived by audiences through these methods. In addition, an interview with Portuguese composer, Nuno Malo, who composed the film music for the following remakes of A Canção de Lisboa,O Leão da Estrela, and O Pátio das Cantigas, will also be included to establish a link between the past and present in how he approached composing film music for these remakes.

This study argues that the Film Sound Analysis Framework will help reconstruct our understanding of Portuguese communities from the 1930s and 1940s and provide valuable insight to cultural representations of past and present film narratives in Portuguese musical comedies. In addition, attending to the fact that there are no scholarly materials regarding comparative studies between original works and modern remakes using the Film Sound Analysis Framework, this thesis also serves the purpose of testing its application in analyzing the construction of meaning through film sound narratives within a longitudinal time frame that spans over several decades from a cultural studies perspective.