The adoption of synchronized-sound technology by Hollywood's major studios in the late 1920s is one of most fertile periods of inquiry in scholarship of film history, with recent work conceiving of the transition to sound not as an isolated technological shift but rather in relation to numerous forces that linked cinema to other arts, especially music. Thus, one result of the recent proliferation of scholarship has been a renewed attention to the role of music and musical performances in sound films produced prior to the codification of norms of classical Hollywood film music in the 1930s and 1940s. Many readers of this journal are familiar with those norms—the heavy reliance on leitmotifs, the use of lush orchestral arrangements—as proposed in landmark works that positioned the score as inheritor of musical characteristics of late nineteenth-century Romanticism.Footnote ¹ Newer work, however, has highlighted the heterogeneous practices of film music during sound cinema's nascent years. Nathan Platte and Michael Slowik, for example, have each described the various ways in which music and image were integrated in the half decade that preceded the release of Max Steiner's celebrated score for King Kong (1933), and Ryan Jay Friedman has examined the cultural import of all-black musicals that emerged in tandem with sound cinema.Footnote ² In histories of Hollywood's transition to sound, music has become a central object of inquiry.

A remarkably rich and intellectually provocative contribution to this growing body of research is Jennifer Fleeger's Sounding American: Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz, the twelfth book in the Oxford Music/Media Series from Oxford University Press. Focusing on the roles of opera and jazz in early sound shorts produced by Hollywood's major studios, the book makes the case that the studios leveraged a constellation of meanings associated with each musical genre in order to shape the racial, gendered, and ethnic identities of moviegoers in the United States. Early sound films made easy bedfellows of jazz and opera, despite the fact that by the 1920s the genres had acquired opposing associations: jazz with liveness, improvisation, and mass commodity, and opera with coherence, unity, and high art. Yet they were compatible in the cinema, itself positioned at the crossroads of commodity and art. Fleeger concludes that the Hollywood score of the classical era owed far less to the ideals of unification bequeathed by Romantic music than it did to the fragments of jazz and opera that became constitutive elements of soundtracks during the transitional years.

The argument builds over the course of three chapters before coming to fruition in chapter 4, which alone is worth one's purchase of the book, although the preceding chapters are no less consequential. Chapter 1 defines the cultural meanings of opera and jazz in the 1920s and highlights the ways in which the Al Jolson star vehicle The Singing Fool (1928) and the short film Yamekraw (1930) adapted two source texts, respectively: Ruggiero Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci (1892) and James P. Johnson's Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody (1927). “In both of these cases,” Fleeger writes, “music with high cultural roots … was snipped and simplified to play in far more pedestrian locations” (49), yet the same music brought cultural legitimacy to sound cinema.

The book's structure then bifurcates along two chapters, each of which provides a more nuanced discussion of opera and jazz, respectively, citing numerous short films and a handful of feature-length titles released by Warner Bros., MGM, Paramount, Fox, and RKO. The author's most insightful observations are deduced from her attention to elements of film form and style. For example, chapter 2’s explanation of gendered singing points up short opera films that tended to depict male tenors in single shots and female sopranos across several shots. The latter practice served to “limit the perceived power of [the female] voices” (71) because the edits suggested the failure of synchronized-sound technology to capture the female performance in a single take. In turn, Fleeger delivers a fascinating analogy: the sound cinema's male tenor “silenced” the female singer just as the operatic castrato replaced and “silenced” the female soprano two centuries before. The power of analogy in this case owes to the author's sustained consideration of stylistic strategies such as framing, staging, and editing.

Chapter 3 considers the racial and ethnic connotations of jazz. In questioning Theodor Adorno's infamous indictment of jazz, Fleeger showcases the ways in which the genre in early sound shorts manifested ambiguous, indeterminate meanings or “jazz images,” which she defines as “visions of an alternate history that slip their way into the dominant narrative created by the studio” (101–2). An emphasis on ambiguity prompts inventive and compelling analyses of films, including Sax Appeal (1931) and Rhapsody in Black and Blue (1932), in which depictions of jazz are read not as the studios’ complicity with racist ideologies but rather as tacit critiques of the studios’ dominant representations African Americans and black music.

The reflections on the myriad roles of jazz and opera in early sound cinema culminate in chapter 4, which poses a question that, in retrospect, seems to have been guiding the book's inquiry all along: “Could it be that in our desire to justify the value of film music, we've classified the score with an ear deaf not just to the persistence of opera and jazz but also to the essential discontinuities of the Hollywood film score?” (133–34). Since by this point Fleeger has advanced a cogent case for the many connotations of opera and jazz, her designation of the classical Hollywood score as a “jazz-opera,” characterized by fragmentation rather than coherence, discontinuity rather than unity, and polysemy, is ultimately persuasive. Even if one clings to the definition of the score as a unified entity, Fleeger sets at least one record straight: the majority of film scores of the classical era consisted of musical selections that required copyright clearance. Perhaps we have overstated the prevalence of original compositions in classical Hollywood film scores, at least during the 1930s. Finally, although a few parts of chapter 4 are less convincing than others, particularly those that are haunted by the perennially thorny topic of film spectatorship and subjectivity, even these sections include intellectual nuggets too brilliant to overlook. A shining example is the analysis of the prologue of Don Juan (1926), which stands as a masterful exercise in comparative interpretation.

Three other strengths of Sounding American are worth noting. First is its lucid weaving of theoretical concepts into historical writing. Rick Altman's thesis on crisis historiography looms large throughout the text, as does Lawrence Levine's distinction between highbrow and lowbrow cultures and film theorist Vivian Sobchack's notion of “echo focus,” a phenomenological account of moviegoers’ awareness of the cinematic apparatus.Footnote ³ Other works, drawn from musicology, film history, cultural histories of the United States, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, and feminist criticism, are integrated fluidly into the text, giving the book significant intellectual heft without it ever losing focus or seeming gratuitously theoretical. Fleeger is obviously an exceptionally well-read scholar, and Sounding American serves as an exemplar of expansive work in the field of film musicology (the evolution of which, by the way, is briefly accounted for in the opening to chapter 4).

Second, Sounding American paves a clear path for future scholarship, for example, in its proposal that a studio's identity is predicated upon practices not just of cinematography and mise-en-scène (as others have shown) but also sound and music. For instance, Fleeger shows how three studios represented jazz in different ways: Warner Bros. used jazz to offer a “rosy picture of plantation life” (98); Paramount organized its narratives as resolutions to the social problems posed by jazz; and MGM connected jazz with the visual spectacle proffered by white female bodies. The notion that a studio's “house style” may be determined by sonic practices is sure to bear fruit in subsequent work on Hollywood film music.

Lastly, the key attraction of Sounding American consists of Fleeger's analyses of an astonishing range of films produced by Hollywood's major studios. Through detailed and elegant readings of dozens of short and feature-length samples, she both revitalizes oft-discussed films (e.g., The Jazz Singer) and illuminates forgotten shorts that unquestionably merit inclusion in film histories (e.g., a recording of Marion Talley's performance of “Caro nome” from Rigoletto). The terms of analysis are highly accessible to scholars of either film or music who may be unfamiliar with the terminology of the other's discipline. I quickly forgave the few anthropomorphic readings, such as “the camera alleviates the threat of the castrato's return by chopping up the female body into recognizable parts” (78), on account of the precision with which they ultimately adduced techniques of film style (in this example, discontinuous editing calls attention to the technology of synchronized sound).

An intellectually robust work, Sounding American not only makes an important contribution to histories of film music, but also revises in significant ways our accepted definition of the classical Hollywood score. Best of all, it makes way for additional questions about the many forms and functions of music heard by moviegoers during a privileged period of technological change.