Since the late 1970s, when Roy Prendergast and Martin Marks published seminal pieces of modern film music scholarship, the field of film music studies has developed a significant and interdisciplinary scholarly discourse.Footnote 1 Until the past five years or so, however, that discourse primarily took the form of case studies and analyses of individual film scores. This book consolidates the recent turn of film studies toward summaries, surveys, historical essays, and anthologies of source readings. As Neumeyer notes, “For the first time, [these broader topics] are not only desirable . . . but are also more firmly grounded” (7). Reflecting the interdisciplinary state of the field, Neumeyer has assembled essays from twenty-two scholars representing six academic disciplines and four countries. Apart from the two case studies by Mitchell Morris and Julie McQuinn, which are included as examples for Robynn Stilwell's short critical essay on the writing of case studies, most of the book's contributions strive to focus on broad issues of ontology, methodology, and historiography in the discipline, in addition to surveys of several key genres.
Of particular interest are the three bibliographic essays by James Buhler. In the first, “Ontological, Formal, and Critical Theories of Film Music and Sound,” he surveys the evolution of film music studies through a variety of theoretical frameworks, from the ontological concerns of Sergei Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovkin, and René Clair in the 1930s, to the critical theory promoted by Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno in the late 1940s, to the more recent development of cinemetrics, neoformalism, and ideological critique. In his second essay, Buhler surveys the use of gender and sexuality theories in film music; he then applies several core concepts from these approaches to analyses of Suddenly, Last Summer and The Hours. His final essay surveys in similar fashion the use of psychoanalysis and apparatus theory in the film music writings of Jean-Louis Baudry, Jean-Louis Comolli, Mary Ann Doane, Rick Altman, Christian Metz, and Michel Chion, among others.
The first part of the book, “Film Music: Central Questions,” addresses ontological questions about film music, ranging from film's complicated relationship with opera (Marcia Citron), to the use of visual representations of film sound (Rick Altman), to the various analytical approaches that emerge from cognitive science (Annabel Cohen). Finally, the section includes Peter Schweinhardt and Johannes Gall's essay on Hanns Eisler, which provides a rich context for one of the landmark texts in the field, Eisler and Adorno's 1947 Composing for the Films.Footnote 2 This essay covers both Eisler's biography and his prolific film career, in addition to a detailed history of how Eisler and Adorno's book came to be.
The handbook's second part, “Genre and Platform,” consists primarily of genre surveys. Daniel Goldmark continues the trajectory of his earlier work on cartoon music with an overview of musical trends in cartoons ranging from Disney's Steamboat Willie (1928) to such cable television cartoons as Ren & Stimpy (1991–1998) and The Fairly OddParents (2001–).Footnote 3 In a similar fashion, Julie Hubbert traces the development of compilation scores from The Graduate (1967) to Marie Antoinette (2006) and There Will Be Blood (2007), with an emphasis on how magnetic tape, videotape, and MP3 players have affected the ways in which these scores are consumed and constructed. Reflecting the extension of film studies into the more broadly conceived field of media studies, Neil Lerner's study of early video game scores is a particularly welcome addition to the volume. However, the highlight of this part is Jeff Smith's economic history of cross-promotion between the film and music industries.
The third part, “Interpretive Theory and Practice,” features Buhler's aforementioned second and third essays and Stilwell's discussion of case studies. In addition, the section includes Lawrence Kramer's rather philosophical analysis of musical and erotic bodies in film, including an analysis of two scenes from James Lapine's 1991 Impromptu. That the essay fits uneasily in a book in which most contributions survey the state of the field should not detract from the interest that Kramer's analysis will undoubtedly provoke through its proposition that the originary condition of music in narrative film is rooted in “the double principle that the embodied psyche is incomplete without projection and that its projection—always a love story—is incomplete without music” (352). In other words, the film does not truly exist until it is seen by the audience, and even when seen, it is the music that focuses the audience's concentration and makes the film come to life. As an exemplary case study, it would perhaps have fit better alongside Morris's and McQuinn's essays, under the umbrella of Stilwell's short piece on case studies.
In the fourth part, “Contemporary Approaches to Analysis,” readers encounter three essays advocating for analytical techniques that are either new to or repurposed for film music. Music theorists Scott Murphy and Marianne Kielian-Gilbert address topics that are, at present, poorly represented in the film music literature. Murphy sets the framework for both of their articles with a three-dimensional representation of the field, based on spectra of scope, object, and approach. With that image in mind, he offers an initial foray into the most unexplored corner of the discipline: “technical-formalist study of the music of a large film repertoire with more concern for the ‘music itself’ than for how it interacts with the film” (475). Murphy then presents an argument for the value of transformational theory to address this gap in the literature. Kielian-Gilbert, on the other hand, is more interested in how spectators listen to and experience film music. Her analyses reflect recent trends that recognize film music as “multisensory, multidimensional, multimedia” (500). The essay pairs well with Altman's contribution to the first part of the book: whereas Altman is interested in how to represent the relationships between the different media of a film, Kielian-Gilbert is interested in a phenomenological understanding of how those relationships are experienced and interpreted. In the section's final essay, Ronald Rodman examines the current state of the emerging field of television music studies. One of his key observations is the growing discussion of agency in television music, “its ability to identify and interact with the television audience” (534). Building on an essay by Jim Collins, Rodman surveys work by such scholars as Nicholas Cook, Katy Stevens, Philip Tagg, and Raymond Williams, noting that many television music scholars have tended to focus less on the role of composer and more on the role of audience reception, employing a variety of postmodern frameworks for addressing how “TV music negotiates through the proliferation of signs and how it helps the commodity function of TV as a whole” (535).Footnote 4
The final section of the book turns to historical issues, primarily in relation to cinema during the first half of the twentieth century. Michael Pisani's essay examines the influence of nineteenth-century melodramas on early film music. Although this is one of the oldest tropes in film music studies, his argument brings fresh insight to the question by presenting a case study that is firmly grounded in archival research, score study, and reception history, rather than the unsourced generalizations that have long characterized this topic. Julie Brown's essay focuses on special scores composed for monumental silent films, such as D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). Her essay discusses the historical circumstances that led to the creation of these scores, efforts to restore them in synchronized digital prints, and more recent efforts to produce performing editions of the ephemeral manuscripts to these scores. The book ends with Nathan Platte's thorough history of cinema orchestras, from the orchestras in local movie theatres of the silent era, to exhibition films like the Vitaphone shorts and the MGM Symphony films of the 1950s, to narrative representations of them on screen in films like Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). As Platte notes, the failed strike by studio musicians in 1958 led to irrevocable changes in the sound of film music, most notably the disbanding of studio orchestras, signaling the end of an era for film music. Following the strike (though not solely due to it), Hollywood film music began to diversify. Although the “studio style” never died out completely, its classic orchestral sounds began to compete with jazz, rock, and electronic scores, among others.Footnote 5
If there is a shortcoming to the book as a whole, it is that it perpetuates a long-standing bias in the field toward Hollywood, despite the increasing scholarship on music in world cinema.Footnote 6 Although Schweinhardt and Gall's essay mentions a variety of European national cinemas, it focuses upon Eisler's film scores rather than engaging in broader discussions of those cinematic traditions. On the other hand, Kathryn Kalinak's short essay, “Performance Practices and Music in Early Cinema outside Hollywood,” is a very welcome contribution in that it surveys the pre-synchronized-sound years in India, Iran, Japan, China, Korea, and South America.
Taken as a whole, the book lives up to the expectations of the Oxford Handbook Series—it takes a very broad and interdisciplinary approach to evaluating the current state of the field. In doing so, it reveals numerous potential directions for future research, the most promising of which appear in conjunction with the expansion of film music studies beyond the feature film genre and beyond Hollywood. This volume is a must read for any scholar pursuing the serious study of music in film and other audiovisual media, and it will be of particular value to graduate students interested in film music studies.
