Film Musings: A Selected Anthology from Fanfare Magazine (review)

As a long-time reader of Fanfare, I was saddened when Royal S. Brown announced that he would cease contributing to the bi-monthly magazine in 2001. Brown's column "Film Musings" was always the first to which I faithfully turned when each new issue arrived in the mail. Here was a perceptive writer of not just concert music (for which he provided many reviews over the years) but also music used in film; a writer whose style was accessible and yet at the same time brimmed with intellectual substance. What I particularly appreciated in Brown's columns was his no-nonsense, call-them-as-I-hear-'em approach to his reviews. For instance, like many reviewers, he had his likes (Erich Korngold and Bernard Herrmann, to name two) and dislikes (James Horner frequented his columns). However, what set Brown apart from most other writers was a profound understanding of the subject, which provided him with the acumen to go on (at times) at length about why he had the opinions he did. As we all know, it is a type of writing that is sadly all too rare among critical journalism today.

Fanfare still carries on; at present this august magazine is in its thirtieth year of publication—although, in my opinion, things just are not the same when it comes to film music reviews. Yet what about Brown himself? Since he left Fanfare, his name has been conspicuously absent in the various music and film music forums of which I am aware. As it turns out, Brown essentially retired from film music criticism shortly after he left Fanfare. Looking back at some of his later columns, his departure was not entirely unexpected: during the late 1990s the tenor of these columns increasingly expressed frustration with both the low quality of new films and the music associated with them. However, ever since Brown left Fanfare, I have wondered about the large corpus of nearly twenty years worth of his writings for the magazine. Did the editor of Fanfare or Brown himself have any plans to collate this material for the general public? Surely such important criticism about both film and film music should not be relegated to the journal archives of libraries. (There has also been rumored for years a magnum opus about film theory, a work to complement his seminal book entitled Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994]. Given his eminence as a critic and scholar, one hopes that this book will appear in the not too distant future.)

Needless to say, it was to my great excitement that the present book, appropriately entitled Film Musings, appeared. Here it is, approximately fifty percent of all of Brown's film music contributions to Fanfare. At 414 pages, clearly some culling was needed in order to make the book marketable. As Brown notes in the introduction, since the book is a collection of earlier published work, he rarely altered the content of the material (although one change he employs throughout the book is the term music-track instead of soundtrack). Some reviews were eliminated altogether; others were reduced in size. I should note up front that Brown's sole interest was reviewing original music written specifically to complement the narrative of a film; in other words, compilation compact discs (music, virtually always pop, which more often than not does not appear in a film) held no interest for him. Throughout Brown's tenure as a reviewer his critical position was unequivocal: since sound and image are fused on the screen, there seemed little point in discussing the music of a film without the concomitant images. As he writes in the introduction to the present book: "This does not mean that film scores cannot be enjoyed on their own apart from the movie. It does mean, to my mind, that no critical and/or...