The Hollywood Film Music Reader, and: Keeping Score: Interviews with Today’s Top Film, Television, and Game Music Composers (review)

Film music scholarship has been growing steadily over the past few decades yet many of the key early texts have remained relatively obscure as seminal early critiques, first-hand accounts, and composers’ manifestos remained out of print. While theoretical approaches and historical narratives have been the main focus of the field, we are left asking why such primary sources have been ignored. As seen in collections like Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, such immediate perspectives from composers and critics of their contemporary practice indicate a reappraisal of the usefulness of primary sources.

In 2010, within the space of a year, the field offered two books that collect together first-hand writing on audiovisual composition. The first, Mervyn Cooke’s The Hollywood Film Music Reader, addresses the oversight in a collection that presents valuable texts ranging from T. Scott Buhrman (1920) through Aaron Copland (1941) to Thomas Newman (1999), incorporating many of the key formative composers and critics of film music and offering a vivid snapshot of film music’s early discursive milieu. The second, Tom Hoover’s Keeping Score: Interviews with Today’s Top Film, Television, and Game Music Composers, provides us with the ideas of the contemporary composers exploring developments in new media. Together, these two books offer a nuanced and insightful glimpse into the world of audiovisual composition. But why, after decades of theoretical emphasis, have these two anthologies appeared? That a need has clearly emerged is evidenced by the publication of two further collections, which have arrived a year later: The Routledge Film Music Sourcebook, edited by James Wierzbicki, Nathan Platte, and Colin Rous, and Celluloid Symphonies: Texts and Contexts in Film Music History edited by Julie Hubbert. Reading these initial books alongside one another, emerging themes of value, responsibility, and function imbue Cooke’s group of early texts, concerns that continue to engage composers and critics alike today. A few central questions arise from a comparison of these two collections: does game music now battle some of the early prejudices that film music battled? And how do these modern composers view familiar issues of value – the high–low art conflict, the pressures of their work, and the functional aspect of their role?

Cooke is also author of the exhaustive A History of Film Music and this edited collection is an equally commendable work of scholarship. The first section focuses on silent-film music and contains accounts of the early practices of accompaniment and arrangement by Max Winkler, T. Scott Buhrman, Ernö Rapée, and Gaylord Carter, alongside the beginnings of film music scholarship by Leonid Sabaneyev. The second, larger section of the book is devoted to mostly first-hand testimonials by composers from Max Steiner, Aaron Copland, Franz Waxman, Dimitri Tiomkin, through to Bernard Herrmann, André Previn, Henry Mancini, Jerry Goldsmith, John Williams, and Thomas Newman. Welcome additions are the less well-known Ingolf Dahl’s ‘Notes on Cartoon Music’ and Gail Kubik’s ‘Music in Documentary Films’, offering an insight into different formats for composition, formats that have only recently attracted theoretical attention. The third portion of the book assembles a number of pivotal critical commentaries on film music from the late 1940s including those of George Antheil, Igor Stravinsky, David Raksin, Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, alongside Lawrence Morton’s key text, ‘Composing, Orchestrating, and Criticizing’ from 1951, and Frederick W. Sternfeld’s analysis of Hugo Friedhofer’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1947). Added to this dialogue are the relatively contemporary views of Elmer Bernstein (1976) and Sidney Lumet (1995). Positioning Sternfeld as pioneering film music appraisal, in advance of the later developments of the 1980s, Cooke explains his reasons for omitting this modern theoretical work, as part of his intention ‘to capture the flavour of sporadic commentaries written contemporaneously with the...