Film Music: A History

The past ten years or so have seen a flurry of textbooks published for film music courses. Wierzbicki's book is billed as "not the history of film music. Rather . . . a history" (p. xiii) and provides a complement to most of its competition. Instead of the typical approaches of focusing on landmark films and instructing readers in the art of analyzing film scores, Wierzbicki focuses on history as seen through film music criticism and the changing practices of music making in the American film industry. Indeed, this work draws as much on the history of film in general as it does on the history of the music itself. In assembling his narrative, Wierzbicki has done such a commendable job of poring through newspapers and journals that the reader can't help but long for a source readings anthology to collect the numerous obscure and hard-to-find articles that are cited. Filling out the colorful journalistic diatribes, Wierzbicki places a great deal of emphasis on the realities of Hollywood filmmaking. He recognizes that the film industry is a business that responds to financial, commercial, and legal pressures, as well as to the audience. For Wierzbicki, aesthetic innovations seem to emerge from a realization that film composers are immensely practical people who creatively take advantage of the resources given them, even under the imposition of the strictest deadlines. As a textbook, Film Music: A History will be of great use for film music courses with a chronological organization or with an emphasis on "classical-style" Hollywood films. As a resource for film music scholars, it provides a useful overview of the silent, early sound, and "classical" eras and guides the readers toward a wide variety of primary and secondary sources.

One of the strongest sections of the book is part 1, "Music and the 'Silent' Film (1894–1927)." In addition to engaging with a wide range of contemporaneous articles in newspapers and trade journals, Wierz bicki draws heavily on the work of Martin Marks (Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895–1924 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997]), and Rick Altman ("The Silence of the Silents," Musical Quarterly 80, no. 4 [Winter 1996]: 648–718; and Silent Film Sound [New York: Columbia University Press, 2004]). The result is a rich, complex picture of the various settings for film viewing and the scoring strategies adapted for each. The lengthy discussion of cue sheets—including complete quotations of seven examples—and film music handbooks (such as Erno Rapée's classic Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists [New York: Belwin, 1924]) provides the foundation for examining changes in the musical practices of film exhibition between 1909 and the late 1920s. In contrast with much of the rest of the book, there is a strong international focus throughout this section—a necessity in this era when American and European film companies competed so fiercely for markets on both sides of the Atlantic. That said, Wierzbicki's narrative would be enhanced significantly by greater attention to French and Italian art film traditions during the 1910s and 1920s, when those industries tended to combat Hollywood's post-war dominance by opting for quality rather than quantity.

Part 2, "Music and the Early Sound Film (1894–1933)" is a thoroughly researched presentation of industrial and technological developments. As the dates suggest, Wierzbicki begins well before the introduction of the commercially successful Vitaphone and Movietone systems. The first chapter of this section discusses numerous American and European film-and-music technologies, from Edison's 1895 Kineto phone to the development of synchronized-sound systems by Lee de Forest, the Tri-Ergon laboratories, and Western Electric in the mid-1920s. However, this section is not just a technocentric narrative. Firmly rooted in exhibition practices, Wierzbicki places these technologies within the tension of contemporaneous audio culture (i.e., listening to three- to five-minute sound recordings in the privacy of one's home) and cinema culture (i.e., viewing a ninety-minute or longer program of films in the public space of a theatre). According to this account, the great success of The Jazz Singer can be seen as a fusion of cinema culture with that of Broadway and musical theatre, rather than of film and recording.

In part 3, "Music in the 'Classical-Style' Hollywood Film (1933–60)," the book loses some of its focus on historical narrative. Wierzbicki includes a lengthy discussion (pp. 140–45) of the concept of the "classical style," as defined by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson (The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Production to 1960 [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985]), and Claudia Gorbman (Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987]). This is followed, however, by a much stronger section that fits more tightly into the larger narrative of Wierzbicki's history. Here, he focuses on film music in the "golden age" (1933–49), as seen by the composer-critics George Antheil, Aaron Copland, Hanns Eisler, Leonid Sabeneev, and Virgil Thomson. Wierzbicki counter-points the attitudes and opinions of these Hollywood outsiders with the practical realities faced by "run-of-the-mill" composers in the studio music departments headed up by the likes of Alfred Newman and Max Steiner. Despite the Hollywood-centric perspective of this section, the reader inevitably has to wonder about those names that are so frequently repeated in the quoted passages, but that otherwise hold no place in Wierzbicki's narrative: such as Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, Sergei Prokofiev, and Dmitri Shostakovich. Any of these composers could be used as stepping-stones to more concretely contrast Hollywood and European film music practices. But the section does end on a very strong note with a chapter on "Postwar Innovations and the Struggle for Survival, 1949– 58." Here, Wierzbicki offers an extremely nuanced narrative of the challenges faced by the major Hollywood studios during these years, which witnessed cosmopolitan shifts in both European and American film-making. Of particular interest is the focus on transatlantic aesthetic debates between Thomas Beecham, Antony Hopkins, Hans Keller, Lawrence Morton, and Dmitri Tiomkin.

The final section, part 4, "Film Music in the Post-Classic Period (1958–2008)," is problematic in terms of the book's structure. Nearly half of the book's chronology—the eclectic portion that Wierzbicki describes as a "Cambrian explosion of styles" (p. 190)—is crammed into less than a quarter of the book's length. As the reader might expect, the historical content here is glossed over too quickly to be satisfying. Given the emphasis on the Petrillo strike in 1958 (pp. 183–86), the complete absence of the American Federation of Musicians strike in 1980 is a glaring lacuna as the resolutions of both strikes resulted in major, lasting changes to how music was made in Hollywood. Likewise, Wierzbicki's discussion of Dolby Stereo's impact (pp. 206–07) emphasizes the important shifts in sound aesthetic ushered in by this technology, but leaves the reader wondering about the impact of subsequent sound technologies, such as THX, 5.1-channel Dolby Digital, and Digital Theater System (DTS). However, the bulk of this section is not about historical developments, as the previous sections were. In stead, it is an examination of the scholarly discourse on film music from the 1970s through the early 2000s. The book's summary seems to acknowledge this change in tone and approach, even if it doesn't justify or explain the decision to treat the final section so differently: "One of the main themes of Film Music: A History has been the idea that for its first six decades, from its murky origins ca. 1895 up to the mid 1950s, the music that accompanied motion pictures at any given time was somehow 'of a piece.' . . . Always, during these first sixty or so years, film music followed a linear path" (pp. 233–34).

Taken as a whole, Film Music: A History makes an important contribution to the textbook market for courses on film music. It will be of particular interest to those instructors whose courses are organized chronologically or that privilege Hollywood films over their European and Asian counterparts. The lack of case studies (except for The Birth of a Nation [pp. 58–61]) grants instructors a great deal of freedom in the selection of which films to include in their syllabi. As a textbook, it also demands supplementation (p. xiv). For instance, this book could be balanced with a number of classic articles on film music analysis and aesthetics, exposing students to a number of the most celebrated articles on film music and to widely varied approaches to studying a given film's score. This book will also be of interest to those instructors whose courses focus primarily on films from the silent and "classic" eras. By situating the musical practices of these eras within the contexts of the industry, exhibition practices, and criticism, Wierzbicki's book offers a rich historical narrative that complements the aesthetic and analytic focus of much of its competition on the market.