The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music (review)

Abstract

A mere ten years ago, one could count the useful, scholarly books on film music on two fingers--one, if one considers that Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno's infamous Composing for the Films (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947; reprint, London: Athlone Press, 1994) is so polemical and so rooted in modernist elitism and Marxist pessimism that it really provides no practical methodological model for contemporary film musicology. That left only Claudia Gorbman's seminal Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), a historical-theoretical exploration of film music, with case studies from classical Hollywood and French art cinema. Other books have appeared since then. Martin Marks's Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895-1924 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) sets a solid foundation for the practice of silent-film music. (A whole literature from the twenties, particularly in German, is also still available to modern scholars.) Kathryn Kalinak's Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992) serves a similar function for Hollywood under the studio system and demonstrates how pervasive much of that practice still is. Caryl Flinn's Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) is a theoretical exploration of the persistence of romanticism in Hollywood, though it contains little about the music itself. Fred Karlin's Listening to Movies: The Film Lover's Guide to Film Music (New York: Schirmer Books, 1994) provides the first "music-appreciation" book for film music, and Royal S. Brown's Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) has proved one of the most popular of the recent titles among film scholars and teachers. Its popularity, however, is worrisome, because despite its admirable breadth, it is dangerous on the topic of music; Brown's theories may appear perfectly plausible to nonmusicians, but musicians wince in disbelief.