Within film scholarship, the use of the musical score to denote emotion has been frequently commented upon, but rarely theorised with any subtlety in relation to aspects of gender. The Gendered Musical Score questions the association between the portrayal of male and female characters in film and the diegetic and non-diegetic music created for them, asking how music impacts upon the audience's understanding of their subjectivity, and indeed upon society's conventional notions of gender. It is a study that reveals many of the conservative attitudes towards women and men in 1940s' USA, which had changed little since the previous century.
Laing's introduction is a well-reasoned justification for the need to look in more detail at the construction of gendered musical meaning in film scores of the 1940s. Film scores of this period were very much rooted in the hyper-romantic, nineteenth-century idiom. This meant that composers had few problems getting the audience to associate particular musical gestures with individual characters: the stockpile of clichés from the late nineteenth century were at their fingertips, it was simply a matter of shaping them into an appropriate style for the narrative. A lucid account of relevant theoretical issues concerning the construction of gendered meaning in Western art music sets the foundation of a variety of case studies, each addressing a separate element of the encoding of gendered identity in film scores, and the way in which those gendered identities are expressed across a spectrum of ‘logical’ masculine musical gestures and ‘irrational’ or overly emotional feminine ones.
The remaining chapters investigate musical characterisation of the female listener, notions of subjectivity, and the appearance of female and male musicians in film. Laing's main case studies are Now, Voyager (1942) (readers will be familiar with Kate Daubney's monograph on the same film (Reference Daubney2000), which this study complements well), Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Love Story (1944), and the Dangerous Moonlight (1941). Now, Voyager, inspires a detailed exploration of a film whose central character, Charlotte Vale (played by Bette Davis) is transformed from an emotionally repressed daughter to a self-confident, independent-minded woman who rejects the roles of wife and mother to follow her own path. The relationships between Charlotte, her family and her potential suitors are heightened dramatically by the employment of Max Steiner's underscore. The ways in which themes occur, are developed and are placed in combination with one another, and with the unfolding narrative, are shown by Laing to be subtle and complex.
In Chapter 3, ‘The Female Listener’, Laing extends her treatment of musical-emotional characterisation by considering the various levels at which characters act as agents within scenes that involve diegetic music. There is a distinction, Laing argues, between scenes in which women perform music themselves, or select music to be heard, and others in which women appear merely as passive listeners to the musical selections of other characters. In Letter from an Unknown Woman, which is discussed with admirable insight into matters of character psychology, cinematography and scoring, the female protagonist is anything but passive in her listening. Laing traces Lisa Berndl's development from naïve listener (idolising the unseen pianist playing Liszt's Concert Study in D flat), into a young woman whose over-reading of the personal significance of Stephan's performance leads her to concoct an elaborate fantasy in which she is his muse, and he her devoted lover. The absorption of the diegetic music into the non-diegetic score is shown to map Lisa's increasingly desperate attempts to find the happy ending that she seeks from the object of her passion. By hearing Stephan's performance (despite only ever hearing the opening thirty-eight bars of the work in the film) as representative of deep, unspoken romantic feelings towards her, Lisa Berndl is able to repress signs that Stephan is, in fact, a womaniser with no feelings for her at all.
Chapters 4 and 5 concern films in which the main characters are musicians, creators of their own diegetic (and subsequently non-diegetic) sound worlds. Laing finds a difference between the ways in which musicians of each sex are portrayed, and shows that the prevailing nineteenth-century attitudes relating to the dangers of excessive music had a clear impact on the narrative portrayal of these characters, as well as the ways in which aspects of their identities were scored. Frequently, a female musician who exerted herself musically was also portrayed as psychologically or physically damaged; if she was not frail, she was usually characterised as ‘unfeminine’. In a revealing twist on this formula, comparison is made between the pianist Stefan in Dangerous Moonlight, whom doctors make every effort to cure with the latest technologies, and Lissa in Love Story, whose heart condition is simply the cause of her journey to the coastline, where nature ‘inspires’ her to write her Cornish Rhapsody (in fact, written by Hubert Bath). Laing's point that only in films featuring a male musician's suffering do composers appear to go beyond conventional scoring style and tonality, could be developed further; such musicians are sometimes given more dissonant sounds to represent their tortured genius in a way that is a privilege of their sex, as is the use of exotic timbres such as the Theremin. There is potential to return at this point to some of the comments that Laing makes at the opening of the book, relating to the use of the nineteenth-century orchestra as universal and neutral in terms of its use for depicting almost any historical situation. Male musicians who suffer from an inappropriately high level of emotion in their musical expressions seem, uniquely, to transcend the conventions of the 1940s and demand a wider palette of scoring styles.
Laing's argument that music was used in the ‘woman's film’ of the 1940s to codify emotion is persuasive. The films that she has chosen to investigate are linked by their genre and date, but offer an assortment of perspectives on how music and emotion are joined in the creation of a meaningful, woman-centred narrative. The Gendered Score is an excellent book, with implications for further work that extend beyond its well-defined scope. The student reader may have difficulty with the density of language and description, especially in the earlier portion of the book, which deals with theoretical models of music, subjectivity and gender. The musical examples are not always conveniently placed for the reader, and on the whole the book would benefit from more of them, since some of the films and film scores will not be readily available to the reader. These are, however, minor quibbles that should not dissuade students and researchers of film from seeking out this enlightening study of a genre in which male and female characters' emotions – and our responses to their psychological trials – are constructed via subtle musical and extra-musical means.
