Table of Contents

Introduction Mervyn Cooke and Fiona Ford; Part I. Making Film Music: 1. Evolving practices for film music and sound, 1925–35 James Buhler and Hannah Lewis; 2. 'Pictures that talk and sing': sound history and technology David Cooper; 3. The composer and the studio: Korngold and Warner Bros. Ben Winters; 4. Can't buy me love? Economic imperatives and artistic achievements in the British pop music film Stephen Glynn; 5. 'A film's first audience': the composer's role in film and television George Fenton in conversation with Mervyn Cooke; Part II. Approaching Film Music: 6. Film music theory Guido Heldt; 7. Studying film scores: working in archives and with living composers Kate Daubney; 8. Returning to Casablanca Peter Franklin; 9. Parental guidance advised? Mash-ups and mating penguins in Happy Feet Fiona Ford; 10. Materializing film music Miguel Mera; Part III. Genre and Idiom: 11. Film noir and music David Butler; 12. Another other history of jazz in the movies Krin Gabbard; 13. Horror and science fiction Stan Link; 14. The Western Robynn J. Stilwell; 15. The music of screen musicals Caryl Flinn; 16. 'Britannia - The Musical': scores, songs and soundtracks in British animation Paul Wells; Part IV. Music in World Cinemas: 17. Leone, Morricone and the Italian way to revisionist westerns Sergio Miceli; 18. Music, noise and silence in the late cinema of Jean-Luc Godard Danae Stefanou; 19. Hans Werner Henze and The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum Annette Davison; 20. Tōru Takemitsu's collaborations with Masahiro Shinoda: the music for Pale Flower, Samurai Spy and Ballad of Orin Tim Koozin; 21. Welcome to Kollywood: Tamil film music and popular culture in South India Mekala Padmanabhan.

Promotional Information

A stimulating and unusually wide-ranging collection of essays overviewing ways in which music functions in film soundtracks.

About the Author

Professor Mervyn Cooke teaches film music, jazz, twentieth-century music and composition at the University of Nottingham. He has edited The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten (Cambridge, 1999), The Cambridge Companion to Jazz (Cambridge, 2002, with David Horn) and The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera (Cambridge, 2005). He has also published A History of Film Music (Cambridge, 2008) and The Hollywood Film Music Reader (2010), and co-edited volumes 3 to 6 of Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten (2004–2012). Dr Fiona Ford completed her doctoral thesis, entitled 'The Film Music of Edmund Meisel (1894–1930)', at the University of Nottingham. She has wide experience of researching contemporaneous original scores for silent film and early scores for sound films. She has written a book chapter on Edmund Meisel for The Sounds of the Silents in Britain: Voice, Music and Sound in Early Cinema Exhibition (2012, edited by Julie Brown and Annette Davison) and a chapter on The Wizard of Oz for Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama (2011, edited by Sarah Hibberd).

Reviews

'Going beyond new historical research on early film music, genre studies, and film music analysis, this diverse collection of current essays is ambitious. … Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.' M. Goldsmith, CHOICE

'… a fine addition to the film music literature. … Particularly successful is the combination of general overviews (historical, technological, theoretical, methodological) with case-study chapters that exemplify a range of approaches to examining soundtracks. This book could readily be offered to undergraduate and postgraduate students as a 'toolkit' to inspire and guide their own studies, and while the balance is towards musicological study, the relatively accessible tone and varied methodologies additionally make the book worthy of attention for those from other disciplines. The editors are to be commended for assembling a collection that represents much of the variety of modern film music scholarship.' Jonathan Godsall, Popular Music