The discussion of music in cinema has, for the most part, adopted a unidirectional focus, concentrating on how music alters the image. This position presupposes that the image and the ‘narrative’ are already in place before the music is added – added, one is to suppose, in order to enhance the affective properties of scenes. Such an assumption, however, fails to recognize a number of central issues, and one in particular that forms the critical focus of this new volume – namely the sense in which music itself can act as the impetus behind a film and as a generator of the diegesis, whether as a feature directly within the diegetic narrative or as a figure in another aspect of a film's representation, such as the articulation of social class divisions.

Beyond the Soundtrack, therefore, sets out to explore how music has been represented within the cinematic narrative. In so doing it aims to challenge the dominant mode of discourse – in which music is subsumed within the critical background and relegated to a kind of supporting role – by choosing either films in which musicians are the protagonists or those that deal with composers or the influence of composers as a central part of the narrative. Music, the book contends, has served as a site for cinematic engagement, both as a dimension of the narrative and as a narrative supplement. As such, it has wielded more influence within the diegesis than much critical consideration has traditionally acknowledged. The present volume therefore seeks out new ways to feature musical discussion. Its sixteen essays by specialists in the field do not attempt a unity of approach and certainly not a unity of method. This position is boldly acknowledged by the editors at the outset in a bid to encourage the kind of methodological plurality that they claim is more suited to the identity of film but at the same time avoids the critical circumscription that has so often characterized film musicology.

The size of this review, the number of essays included in the book, and the different stances adopted by authors preclude an examination of each chapter in turn. Instead I shall draw attention to some of the varied issues that emerge. To manage these disparate strains, the volume groups the chapters into three broad areas of investigation: ‘musical meaning’, ‘musical agency’, and ‘musical identity’. It endeavours to examine the musical in precisely those instances where it is the dominant or the conceptually central strand of the narrative. It is thus concerned with the trope of music in film and not merely its effect as soundtrack. The editors go further: ‘some scholars have begun to ask not how to conceptualize the use of music in film, but rather how to understand the ways in which film conceptualizes music’ (3). This paradigm shift is crucial but not in itself pioneering. In conception, Richard Leppert's study The Sight of Sound Footnote ¹ dealt similarly with the tropes of music and their structure and presence outside of works of music themselves (the context, in that instance, being painting).

Part I – ‘Musical Meaning’ – is the section that deals most directly with what music represents in film and concentrates on music's narrative and representational features in general, both inside and outside cinema. The opening essay by Peter Franklin, ‘The Boy on the Train, or Bad Symphonies and Good Movies’, finds a way of theorizing the film score that also leads to productive readings of nineteenth-century symphonies in their move towards modernism. In this way, the volume opens with a bold reversal of the normal parameters of film musicology, offering film up as the paradigmatic trope for music. This critical repositioning highlights the concert-hall ancestry of the symphonic orchestral film score as well as pointing up its not-too-distant family relationship to verismo opera.

Part I continues with an excellent examination of the Beethoven myth and its manifestation in film. Nicholas Cook's chapter, ‘Representing Beethoven: Romance and Sonata Form in Simon Cellan Jones's Eroica’, focuses on a re-emergence of what Scott Burnham has called ‘Beethoven Hero’.Footnote ² Here Cook explains how, though the media through which the values of the traditional canon are represented may change, the values themselves and the status they are afforded essentially do not. Therefore Beethoven – or the Beethovenian figure – continues to be emblematic of ideas of greatness, genius, and the masterwork. Cook sees the BBC's television film of 2005, which grafted a biographical narrative onto a complete, specially recorded performance of the Eroica, as seeking to involve viewers (who are also listeners) actively by linking ‘music and narrative desire’ (43), encouraging them to use their knowledge of a familiar medium (film) to ‘read’ a less familiar one (classical music). This transformation of surface, but not of essence, suggests ways in which ‘old music may be newly experienced, and so contribute to the classical tradition's continuing search for a viable presence in today's society’ (44).

Lawrence Kramer and Michel Chion both – though in distinct ways – focus on the presence of music in Roman Polanski's The Pianist (2002), with Chion's essay also addressing Jane Campion's The Piano (1993). Both chapters deal deftly and richly with the textures of meaning that emerge from using music – and a pianist – as the focus of the visual narrative. Kramer, in particular, displaces the traditional kind of film-music analysis, in which the music is background or mere soundtrack, in favour of a richer interpretation, in which it is the music that enables the discourse of ‘witnessing’ to play such a vital part in The Pianist's detached quality: ‘it simply watches, records, often from a fixed standpoint, at a distance unwilling to interpret or edify. […] [O]nly a certain music can do that.’ (66).

Returning to the editors' claims of the subtle containment principles holding together part I – ‘[t]o represent music in film is to represent what the music represents’ (6) – this section successfully, one might even say brilliantly, engages a set of ideas that have remained persistently absent from film music studies. Susan McClary's contribution excels in this respect. She identifies in broad terms how changes in the generalized referential clichés used to invoke dominant emotions and ideological positions are brought to the fore in a trio of films that use minimalist scores: Angels and Insects (1995), The Piano (1993), and The Hours (2002). McClary notes how, of these three, Philip Glass's score for The Hours is clearest in its avoidance of reference to nineteenth-century musical idioms, while Michael Nyman's score for The Piano, by contrast, is the one that most obviously bridges the gap between those idioms and minimalism and is thus the most traditional. McClary might have commented too on Glass's score for Kundun (1997), which also avoids invoking classical scoring idioms and, as a result, enables scenes of significantly violent potential to channel their tension in very different ways.

Part II – ‘Musical Agency’ – shifts the critical focus onto a number of theoretical premises and positions that film music scholarship has traditionally emphasized. Particularly illuminating is Robynn Stilwell's chapter, ‘The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic’, which argues that this important distinction between ‘levels’ within the musical narrative, while remaining in certain respects critically useful, has at the same time become almost too solidly built into the process and ‘thinking’ of film music analysis. As a result the many instances of slippage between the diegetic and non-diegetic realms are neglected or certainly under-represented. Stilwell, however, cautions against too much subtle differentiation between the terms: ‘[a]lthough fine distinctions may be fascinating to explore, they also risk recapitulating the stratifying or branching taxonomic approach’ (196). Still, there are clearly cases in which a refinement of the diegetic and non-diegetic binary – or even its abandonment altogether – might lead to more productive interpretations. Films such as WongKar-Wai's Fallen Angels (1995) and Chungking Express (1994), for instance, blur both the function and distinction of the two categories, thus making a meaningful distinction less feasible.

Berthold Hoeckner similarly takes on an area with a strong critical history: the sense in which music in film enables, or even transports, the spectator, or, put differently, how it eases the spectator's passage into subjectivity. To illustrate his point he uses a varied series of case studies, including Casablanca (1944), with its now-famous invocation of music to encourage – to construct before our very eyes – historical depth in the narrative. This highly familiar example is complemented by, among others, reference to Woody Allen's deployment of music as a process of recollection in Radio Days (1987). Here Hoeckner astutely notes how imagination becomes the trigger of memory – just as both smell and music are for Proust. It is perhaps surprising that Beyond the Soundtrack does not offer any further comment on the way in which music supplies a frame for memory and how this aspect of music's potential is usefully and powerfully adopted in film.

Richard Leppert's chapter, entitled ‘Opera, Aesthetic Violence, and the Imposition of Modernity: Fitzcarraldo’, is a welcome contribution, bringing into the fold of discussion a consideration of opera, a field that the volume might have incorporated more prominently (only this essay and, to a lesser extent, Peter Franklin's chapter address the interrelation at any length). Leppert examines Werner Herzog's 1982 film to show how the diegetic incorporation of opera enables it to offer a kind of intra-narrative, in which the plots of the operas deployed are able to cut against the film scenes they accompany.

The concluding Part III – ‘Musical Identity’ – deals with the ways in which the representation of music in film discloses music's status and constitution, its culturally and socially grounded identity. In the words of the editors ‘[t]o represent music is to represent its self-representation. Music is not depicted in film, as action is; the music is heard. It is, indeed, heard in a fully real way that exceeds the “reality” of the visual images’ (7). In other words, the music is designed to be – indeed must be – heard, but its significance lies less in its identity as music than in the symbolic values that it so successfully absorbs. Perhaps no better context for this exists than that of music for cartoons. Daniel Goldmark's excellent chapter ‘Before Willie: Reconsidering Music and the Animated Cartoon of the 1920s’ interrogates the notions that shaped the parameters of cartoon music and their origins.

Richard Dyer's chapter, ‘Side by Side: Nino Rota, Music, Film’, has two broad aims: the first to offer an account of music's ubiquity in film, in spite of its seemingly awkward relationship to cinema, and the second to consider Rota's approaches to dealing with this apparent awkwardness. In following these objectives, Dyer prises out some of the many complications and contradictions that bedevil the alliance of music and film. Krin Gabbard also homes in on a specific individual – in this case Miles Davis – in a chapter that broaches the issue of music's role in the production and enforcement of racial values. Meanwhile, Rick Altman's thorough consideration of the processes surrounding music in early film and its latter-day conceptualization (‘Early Film Themes: Roxy, Adorno, and the Problem of Cultural Capital’) forces new ways of reading its subject matter, suggesting that the thematic, and in particular leitmotivic, approaches to film music analysis ‘[do] not stand the test of historical research’ (222). Focusing on the music of early cinema seems timely, sitting alongside a growing critical interest in Nickelodeon cinema in general – a welcome development.

The rich variety of scholarship offered in Beyond the Soundtrack and the volume's recognition, at long last, of the necessary plurality of critical approaches to the subject, make this work stand out as an important contribution to the field. Diverse in scope and context but with a strongly focused set of argumentative frameworks, this is an excellent collection, accessible yet critically uncompromising. It is to be highly recommended.