To write a ‘history’ of a phenomenon as culturally and technologically diverse as film music is a daunting task, and yet Mervyn Cooke achieves it with ease in A History of Film Music. Although the reader is carried forward at an energetic (and sometimes breathtaking) pace, this book is at once accessible and impressively well-rounded. The author explains that his history is intended as a

Although the primary focus of the book is mainstream cinematic practice, Cooke's engagement with a diversity of film styles beyond this tradition, ranging from experimental animation to the work of Akira Kurosawa, is most welcome. Not only does it enable the tracing of a more lateral historical trajectory than the usual linear journey through Hollywood's key composers, but it also allows Cooke to grapple with an unusually wide range of musical styles, including modernist and minimalist compositions, jazz film scores, composed scores, and compiled pop soundtracks. The result is a nuanced investigation into the different styles of music for film, an exploration framed by contextual reference to the historiography of the genre.

The overarching structure of A History of Film Music is historical, though numerous digressions guard against the monotony apparent in many chronological voyages that pass in similar fashion from ‘The “Silent” Cinema’ (here Chapter 1) to ‘Film Music since the New Hollywood’ (Chapter 12). Cooke's narrative is divided into sections that alternate between bite-sized historical outlines and more in-depth case studies that emphasize the main points. After the historical discussion of ‘Hollywood's Golden Age’, for instance, Cooke offers a series of case studies that demonstrate different approaches to film scoring (the work of Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Waxman, and Alfred Newman, among others, is discussed). The section on Bernard Herrmann is particularly useful, as it serves to illustrate several of the ideas outlined earlier during the historical discussion. Other case studies pursue more unusual lines of inquiry, such as ‘Scoring Shakespeare’ (166–83), which provides a perspective on music for stage and screen that is refreshingly different from the preceding sections on opera on film and the film musical. By progressing in this way, Cooke's work remains easily accessible, and the clearly delineated sections make the text a very useful teaching tool.

For the first three quarters of the book different styles of music jostle with each other in an energizing coexistence: it is not until the last 150 pages that the differences between ‘popular’ and ‘classical’ soundtracks are considered in depth. Delaying his discussion of a distinction that occupies much film-music literature allows Cooke to keep the narrative fluid and the references broad and refreshingly eclectic. That said, the chapter entitled ‘Classical Music in the Cinema’ is one of the most interesting sections of the book. Cooke opts to tackle the use of pre-existing classical music in film, a choice that shifts the discussion's emphasis from compositional strategies to audiovisual reception. After considering the visualization of ‘classics’ in the work of the early animators, the use of concertos in Hollywood melodrama (in films such as Brief Encounter and Dangerous Moonlight), the appropriation of Wagner's ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ in Apocalypse Now, and the composer/musician biopic, Cooke wraps up his discussion with a hefty case study of Stanley Kubrick, the ‘director who engaged most thoroughly and influentially with classical music’ (440).

Because of the large amount of territory that Cooke has to cover, especially as he attempts to redress the dominance of Hollywood in film-music literature, reference and engagement is sometimes fleeting, a problem recognized in Chapter 9, which is aptly entitled ‘Global Highlights’. Chapter 6 is given over entirely to films from the United Kingdom, which are used as a vehicle to explore the problems that faced composers trying to write ‘serious’ concert music: case studies of Vaughan Williams and William Walton illustrate well the struggles against artistic snobbery. Similarly thorough, Chapter 8 explores music in French cinema, moving from the work of Maurice Jaubert through the Nouvelle vague and Jean-Luc Godard to French Modernism. Such ample consideration contrasts sharply with Cooke's ‘Global Highlights’. That only twelve of the book's 510 pages are devoted to Indian cinema, for instance, and that similarly scant attention is given to film in Italy, Japan, and the early Soviet Union, requires some justification. Where is German film in this discussion, or the cinemas of Spain, Brazil, or Tunisia? Of course, tough editorial decisions have to be made in projects as large as this, and Cooke's choices are useful ones. It would have benefited the reader, however, if these decisions had been explained in terms of their technological, stylistic, or even cultural significance.

Cooke's examples from beyond mainstream cinematic practice are incorporated into the narrative with more success. Until relatively recently much film-music discourse was centred on the mainstream tradition at the expense of the cutting-edge experimentation of more avant-garde and experimental film-makers and composers. Cooke's frequent inclusion of such experimentation makes his book stand out as a truly inclusive and uniquely formed history. As early as page 30 there is a section on ‘Early Film Music in Europe and the Soviet Union’, for example, in which he discusses rescorings of films, including Battleship Potemkin, Napoléon, and Metropolis; by page 58 his consideration of ‘animated sound’ has drawn in Arseni Avraamov and Evelyn Lambert, practitioners who rarely make it into discussions of film, let alone film music. The investigation into experimental animation (in Chapter 7, ‘Defectors to Television’) directs the narrative to little-recognized pioneers such as Norman McLaren and Oskar Fischinger. With any project as big as this, however, there are, of course, omissions. Cooke's history stops with McLaren's Synchromy (1971) and does not mention in any detail the more recent work of the Whitney Brothers, or the drawn-on-film animations of Bärbel Neubauer, who composes her own music, or Richard Reeves, whose Linear Dreams (1994–7) also includes hand-drawn sound.

This bias towards earlier cinema dominates Cooke's history. The first third deals predominantly with pre-war film, at which point the discussion turns to the immediate post-war industry. Subsequent eras and trends are treated with diminishing space: his consideration of film music since the ‘new Hollywood’ begins 454 pages in, for example, starting with the 1970s. This is followed by an excellent, if brief, discussion of electronics, sound technology, and recording, which is taken up from the 1980s. In it Cooke elaborates his assertion that ‘Most film composers since the 1980s have needed to be equally proficient in electronic techniques and conventional orchestral scoring’ (471). This wide-ranging section gives a non-technical account of the changing technologies, its only fault being its brevity, a problem that is replicated in the allocation of only a few pages to Thomas Newman and a section that brings together Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and David Lynch under the heading ‘Modern auteurs’ (483). ‘The modern mainstream’ runs for only fourteen pages (489–503): had this section been enlarged, perhaps Cooke would have found it more difficult to assert that ‘classical music never had the significant impact on audiovisual style that the fresh perspectives offered by pop music began to achieve from the 1950s onwards’ (422). Such focus on earlier cinema is prevalent: the first 160 pages of James Wierzbicki's history (which, published only a year later, has a similar title to Cooke's) deal with film pre-1960;Footnote ¹ the last quarter (sixty-odd pages) engages with film from the fifty years between 1958 and 2008. This focus on early film is not only well trodden by historians but also dominates such early theoretical texts as those of Claudia Gorbman and Caryl Flinn,Footnote ² as well as the more recent projects of Rick Altman, Annette Davison, and Julie Brown.Footnote ³ Although more recent examples are being tackled in edited collections and in genre-specific monographs (on horror film in particular), contemporary film music could benefit from close comparative analysis in a historical survey such as this.

However, Cooke's focus on earlier cinema allows him to anchor his history to a rich network of sources, and this is one of the most impressive aspects of the book. Technical manuals, newspapers, and papers from the film industry's trade press are referred to, but the author also makes continual reference to the theoretical literature on audiovisual media. While stating clearly in his preface that ‘this book is neither a history of film-music theory nor a history of film-music literature’, Cooke acknowledges that he refers to theoretical texts ‘where they are directly relevant to the practice and consumption of such music at various points in its history’ (xv). The author's ability to evoke multiple authors and theorists at these ‘various points’ and to present complex ideas in a simple and accessible way is admirable. When dealing with the reasons why early film music favoured Romantic soundscapes (see especially 78–86), Cooke introduces a range of arguments, including those of Flinn, Gorbman, Christopher Palmer, Marcia Citron, Robynn Stilwell, and Roy Prendergast.Footnote ⁴ For most of the discussion this is a useful way to explain historical trends while also acknowledging the main debates. However, there are times when a more critical slant could have been offered. Cooke's section on musical and filmic modernism considers the dissonant soundtracks to films with an ‘Angst-ridden’ atmosphere (194) or a sci-fi setting: here the relationship between modernist music and these types of films is taken for granted, but the argument would have been enhanced by a more careful theorization of why this type of music fits so well within the horror genre. A similar question arises in the section entitled ‘Back to Bach’ (448–53). These few pages introduce some important concepts to the discussion, such as ‘pure music’, the visualization of musical counterpoint, and the problems latent in the reception of well-known pre-existing melodies; yet Cooke offers little in the way of explanation as to why that particular composer has been chosen over others whose music features heavily on the cinematic circuit, such as Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin.

To return to Cooke's position statement, this book was not intended to be a theoretically driven text, but rather a ‘straightforward introduction’ (xv). True to the author's initial idea, then, A History of Film Music exists on the watershed between history and historiography, giving the reader a glimpse into the technical, aesthetic, and other practices framed by its discourse. This ‘straightforward introduction’ is both comprehensive and original, and Cooke's writing remains accessible to the non-specialist while giving scope for further reading to the more theoretically inclined reader.