The passivity of the central figure, who comments and remembers endlessly, but who never acts, is emblematic of the composer's later music, which ruminates quietly on memories of itself.
Emblematic was the career of the minor composer Hermann Heiss, who, back in the Nazi regime, had written a "Fighter Pilot March".
For a classical-music lover, however, Russell is something else: a devotee of musical greatness whose memorializing of the composers he loved via film was emblematic of a time when high culture and cool culture briefly overlapped.
Instead, he said, he sought stories that were emblematic of his larger themes, stories like that of the composer Irving Berlin, the son of a cantor, who was responsible for "White Christmas," one of America best-loved secular Christmas carols, as well as the patriotic "God Bless America".
Along with the composer Milton Babbitt, who died in 2011, he was once considered emblematic of so-called uptown, the world of the academic avant-garde.
But in order for Wagner to present himself as the one truly emblematic German artist, he had to dismiss Mendelssohn along with many other composers, whether they were Jewish or not".
It's worth adding that the movie also has a cockeyed charm as drama, as a streetsmart paean to New York wiles, as a feast of tunes (by the great songwriting team of the composer Harry Warren and the lyricist Al Dubin), and as a verbal joust of emblematic dialogue and rowdy performance.
The composer-bandleader Maria Schneider, who just released her third album through ArtistShare, has been its emblematic success story, winning widespread acclaim and multiple Grammy awards.
He was frequently his own designer and composer, and his use of lighting and kaleidoscopic changes of imagery made his work seem perfectly emblematic of the psychedelia and hallucinations that became fashionable in the 1960s.
