Readers may recall Mark Slobin's Retuning Culture (Reference Slobin1996), a timely anthology examining musical change in post-Soviet Europe. In addition to his published monographs on the music of Afghanistan and on Jewish music and contemporary klezmer bands, Slobin has made important theoretical interventions, notably his Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Reference Slobin and Hanover1993).
In that work, Slobin constructed an analytical framework within which ethnomusicology might at last breach its inward-looking, ethnocentric corral. Drawing together Appadurai's ‘scapes’ of global cultural flow, post-Marxist social theory, and subcultural theory, he proposed the use of overlapping planes of analysis: subcultural musics, which exist within the superculture (the hegemonic cultural mainstream) and are linked by interculture. Although this did not become the new orthodoxy in ethnomusicology, Subcultural Sounds opened up the discipline, encouraging colleagues to eavesdrop on the parallel worlds of popular music and on contemporary renderings of older musical traditions.
The essays in Global Soundtracks are book-ended by chapters in which Slobin provides historical context, a transposition of Subcultural Sounds' analytic framework to film music, and analysis of some film/music tropes. In mapping global cinema, Slobin moves outwards from Hollywood (the ‘superculture’ here) to the ‘subcultural cinema’ music of ethnic minorities in the USA, to European cinema, regional centres including Bollywood, the national cinemas in China and Indonesia, and finally to ‘accented’ (diasporic) cinemas. ‘Superculture’ is identified in the Hollywood film industry, in its ‘Steiner superculture’ of symphonic underscoring developed by Austrian-US composer Max Steiner, and in the system of musical symbols he employed. Confusingly, Slobin proposes that both the film composer and the soundtrack itself are ‘ethnomusicologists’.
Slobin's chapter on ‘Subcultural Filmways’ gives a more convincing exposition of the relationship he proposes between Hollywood superculture and the subcultural film of North American ethnic minorities, illustrated by comparing The Jazz Singer with a similarly themed Yiddish film. His analytical scheme, however, does not extend easily to encompass the more complex relationships explored in the remaining essays; nor do the authors adopt Slobin's framework, making this virtually two books. Yet both parts are rewarding.
Few of the essayists follow Slobin in assuming the universal adoption and understanding of the ‘musical tags’ Steiner deployed to signify the worlds of natives or monsters, and characters' actions and subjectivities. Speaking of musical tags, where are the references to Philip Tagg and Bob Clarida's Ten Little Title Tunes, surely an essential reference for this kind of work? Not in this volume; not even in the final chapter in which Slobin discusses ways in which filmmakers across the world can convey ‘extremely specific’ by employing the same combination of music and storyline.
The title of this volume suggests both the geographical and topical breadth of the essays and the complexities of that terrain, and this is reflected in the various approaches taken by the authors. Essays on ‘Global Film Musics’ outline the historical development of regional film industries in India, Nigeria and China. These are wonderfully rich in historical context and particularly strong in ethnographic accounts of musicians' experiences of musicians and the influences on their music making. Greg Booth's essay on ‘That Bollywood Sound’, for example, tells the story of a profession of orchestral players who moved across from the collapsing dance-band industry just as a film industry began to flourish in post-partition India. He outlines the important role of the musical director and the emergence of film song as a thriving popular cultural form. Joseph Getter and B. Balasubrahmaniyan show how popular Tamil film song has introduced some ‘easy to digest’ Western instrumentation into South India's Karnatic musical tradition, expanding its audiences while retaining the older aesthetic with its culturally specific system of musical symbols. Abdalla Uba Adamu, on the other hand, explains how in the smaller northern Nigerian Hausa film industry, traditional musicians have lost out to the synthesizer, which emulates the multi-instrumental Bollywood sound.
Other essays reveal the cultural and economic imperatives by which regional and national cinemas' film musics form a focus of the entertainment, rather than supporting plot or character developments in the narrative. These include Sue M.C. Tuohy's reflections on Chinese film's preoccupation with narratives about opera singers, whose livelihood it was partly responsible for displacing.
Several chapters give detailed explication of how music supports the narrative and psychological drama of the film narrative, problematising the ways in which ethnicity is represented in films generated through the interrelation of two cultures (Mexico/Cuba, Brazil/USA, Martinique/France). Here, the role of music is partly subsumed by a focus on visual images and song lyrics.
Most of the authors are ethnomusicologists who chart the transitions and transformations of musical traditions in the face of emerging film industries. These authors have produced the more thought-provoking essays, opening doors into new worlds of film music and new ways of understanding film, rather than producing closed interpretations. Exemplary is Martin Stokes's chapter on Egyptian film music of the mid- to late 1950s, focusing on the figure of Abd al-Halim Hafiz, an immensely popular singing film star (think Bing Crosby charisma and Umm Kalthoum artistry). With eloquent efficiency, he draws the reader into a cinematic world where the musician (like the cantor's son in The Jazz Singer) is the central figure and in which ‘music – properly modern music – is a social virtue’ while at the same time delineating the economics of the Egyptian film industry in relation to the reception of Hollywood productions and the role of Arab and Egyptian nationalism.
The essays in Global Soundtracks are without exception rewarding for their grounded knowledge of the musical traditions, historical context, cultural complexities and political and economic forces within and among world film industries. This collection would also serve as an excellent background to the close analysis that scholars and students in the fields of cinema or popular music studies might pursue.
