Filmmusik: Beiträge zu ihrer Theorie und Vermittlung (review)

The study of film music in Anglo-American academia has come a long way since its renaissance in the 1980s, a period that perhaps marks its birth as a discipline that might now be labelled confidently 'film musicology'. It is, for example, the subject of several refereed journals, in addition to numerous international conferences, an ever-expanding number of Scarecrow Press film score guides, and other university press monographs. While that first generation of new film music scholarship (particularly the work of Claudia Gorbman and Caryl Flinn) tended to reflect the psychoanalytic and narrative theory then in vogue in film studies, the subsequent fracturing of 'Theory' into a plethora of 'theories'—see David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (eds.), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison, 1996)—has likewise trickled down to film musicology, which now boasts some valuable contributions from music cognitivists and gender theorists. Similarly, the relatively recent collection of essays edited by Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert and published as Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema (Berkeley, 2007; reviewed in Music & Letters, 90 (2009), 113-16) reveals the wider interest in the subject among musicologists, who may no longer be averse to trying their hands at what was for a long time the almost exclusive preserve of film scholars.

Filmmusik: Beiträge zu ihrer Theorie und Vermittlung, although providing a mere snapshot of the situation outside the Anglo-American sphere, indicates that this variety of theoretical approaches and disciplinary backgrounds is also very much in evidence in German film music scholarship. As this slim book is entirely in German, and the editors thankfully do not attempt to draw much in the way of a common thesis from the diversity of approaches on offer, non-native readers may choose only to dip in and out, rather than read the collection from cover to cover. What follows, therefore, is intended primarily to offer a brief guide to the volume's contents.

The book has its origins in a short conference (Weimar, July 2004) devoted to the theorizing and teaching of film music, and its aim, as Oliver Fahle notes in his introduction, is to bring the disciplines of film studies and musicology into a productive dialogue (p. 9). Proposing to take both film and music seriously as independent media (in addition to examining their interaction), he occupies a deliberately provocative position: that film studies can learn from musicology, and that without an understanding of music, film is imperfectly conceived (p. 10). While this attitude is perhaps not without its dangers—in flipping a perceived binary in favour of its supposed weaker partner (musicology) and in threatening to construct film independently of its music—it is broadly to be welcomed, especially if it encourages further contributions from musicology and a greater degree of interdisciplinary collaboration. His claim that film music is marginalized in both film studies and musicology (p. 9), however, seems rather more difficult to support, at least in the context of recent Anglo-American musicology.

As the editors have chosen to present all nine conference papers—with the exception of Josef Kloppenburg's paper on the possibilities and limits of computer-aided learning in film music, which is replaced with Nina Noeske's reading of Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)—there is a pleasing variety of approaches on offer: from explorations of narrative positioning in music to questions of intertextuality, semiotics, and cognitive theory.

Cognitive approaches to film music, for example, are covered by Mirjam James, who addresses the thorny question of what might constitute the 'right' music for a particular sequence of narrative film—an issue frequently raised in practical guides for film music composers. After outlining the differences between Marshall and Cohen's 'congruence-associative' model and the contradictory 'shared semantic structural search' model of Bolivar, Cohen, and Fentress, James turns to her own work involving experiments with narrative and non-narrative music video to...