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Reviewed by:
  • Anxiety Muted: American Film Music in a Suburban Ageed. by Stanley C. Pelkey II and Anthony Bushard, and: Epic Sound: Music in Postwar Hollywood Biblical Filmsby Stephen C. Meyer
  • Jordan Stokes
Anxiety Muted: American Film Music in a Suburban Age. Edited by Stanley C. Pelkey IIand Anthony Bushard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. ISBN 978-0-199-93617-5. Paper. Pp. xviii, 298. $99.00.
Epic Sound: Music in Postwar Hollywood Biblical Films. By Stephen C. Meyer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. ISBN 978-0-253-01451-1. Paper. Pp. x, 272. $35.00.

By their nature, edited volumes are often scattershot affairs, but Anxiety Muted: American Film Music in a Suburban Agefeels particularly chaotic. Not content with covering both film and television from the 1950s and 1960s, it also contains essays on later works set in those decades: the subtitle really ought to read American Film (and Television) Music in (or about) a Suburban Age. As a result, the volume contains essays focused on topics as widely spaced in time, format, and theme as the archetypal family sitcom Leave It to Beaver(1957–63) and the music industry biopic Cadillac Records(2008). Even with the net cast so very wide as this, one essay in the collection was transparently shoehorned in: Meghan Schrader’s “The Sound of Disability: Music, the Obsessive Avenger, and Eugenics in America” covers films ranging from 1916’s The Black Storkto David Cronenberg’s version of The Fly, made and set in the late 1980s. Judged on its own merits, Schrader’s essay is excellent, and I’m glad that it saw print somewhere. Nevertheless, it further blurs the focus of a collection that was already struggling to cohere.

Most of the essays in the volume are interpretive accounts of individual films or TV shows, with one entry—Linda K. Schubert’s essay on Quo Vadis(1951)—venturing into the realm of positivist history. The jacket copy claims that the book “explores how the central concerns of the Fifties and Sixties … can be examined and understood through the music of the time period,” which suggests that the volume means to offer interpretations of 1950s films as 1950s films(or to give an account of 1960s TV shows as 1960s TV shows, etc.), by which I mean either reading the films against the particular social-historical backdrop of the 1950s or explaining how scoring practices in that decade differed from the practices of other decades. Indeed, Pelkey’s introductory essay does a good job of laying out the basic historical, ideological, and aesthetic themes that readings of this kind should consider. Despite his attempts to link the other chapters to the themes he identifies, however, only a few of the essays are deeply engaged with these issues. More frequently, we find essentially self-contained readings of the scores that touch occasionally and glancingly on one of the central historical issues that Pelkey lays out. What is more, the historically contextualized passages are often the weakest parts of the essays in question.

For example, Mariana Whitmer’s chapter on Elmer Bernstein’s score for Far from Heaven(2002) is, for the most part, a good interpretation of the film and its score, but when it comes to the relationship between Bernstein’s music and the music of the 1950s, we are initially told only that “the main title theme … is reminiscent of the long, languid melodies of 1950s melodrama” (244). No additional support or explanation is provided: there is no detailed comparison to a specific 1950s melodrama score and certainly no attempt to thoroughly define a prevailing 1950s melodrama style. Later, a specific comparison is made between the use of timbre in Far from Heavenand Bernstein’s own score for To Kill a Mockingbird [End Page 269](1962), but it’s not clear whether we should read this as a specific attempt on Bernstein’s part to reference an earlier style or simply as an enduring aspect of his musical language. When Far from Heavenitself makes a specific intertextual reference to The Three Faces of Eve(1957), Whitmer duly catalogs the musical similarities to that film’s score...

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