After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926–1934 by Michael Slowik (review)

King Kong (1933) features prominently, and right from the outset, in Michael Slowik’s After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926–1934. And with good reason: Steiner’s score has been consistently hailed by other scholars as immensely influential on countless other musical responses to films made in the US industry in the classic period and far beyond. But the aim of his book is to interrogate some of the assumptions that we might make about those critical years between the first successful attempts at sound film in 1926–1927 and the moment–roughly coinciding with the release of King Kong–when the turmoil seemed to settle into something resembling an industry which finally knew a little about what its products would look and sound like in the years and decades to come.

Slowik’s key argument is that Max Steiner’s King Kong was not quite the original instruction manual of classic scoring that it is often hailed as being; or, at the very least, much important groundwork had been achieved in the language of the classic Hollywood score before King Kong was composed that has hitherto not been given the scholarly attention that it deserves. The author is a former student of Rick Altman at Iowa, and, following Altman, Slowik bridges the gap between late silent practices and early sound scores by tracing a line of development that effectively shows King Kong as being drawn not only from European art music but, crucially, via silent film and early sound experiments.

Indeed, the author goes as far as to assert that this book actually sets the record straight in a way that breaks new ground:

The historical record thus depicts the early sound era as featuring only a few primitive stabs at sound film music, followed by an absence of music until Steiner’s innovative scores. By casting a wider net over the early sound era, this study reveals a far different story and suggests several surprising conclusions.

(p.266)

The ‘wider net’ that Slowik refers to is his methodological approach, which prioritises the lesser-known works of the early sound era in the United States rather than the established canon of ‘great’ or popular films. He is keen to emphasise that he has watched more than 200 relatively obscure (or ‘ordinary’) films from the period. As he mentions in his conclusion,

studies of film style often restrict their focus to films of high artistic merit, thus implying that those films represent the whole of film production from a particular period. Such selective scholarship tends to distort the true situation, since ‘exceptional’ films often constitute a tiny, unrepresentative fraction of a period’s output. As more early sound films are discovered, preserved, and made available for viewing, perhaps scholars will attain an even greater sense of the diverse musical approaches taken in the early sound era.

(p.268)

While Slowik is undoubtedly correct in this observation that film history is–to misuse and misquote a cliché–written by the winners, through the most well-known and critically praised films, this reviewer is uneasy with Slowik’s aim of representing the ‘true situation’. Slowik has just as many biasing factors at work behind his writing as the best historians. Indeed, an obvious drawback–or rather, a necessary limitation–in the book is that Slowik’s project is focused on Hollywood. By drawing the boundary lines of a study at the borders of the greater Los Angeles area, one has to ignore the developments in other world cinemas and their scoring practices. This is not a problem; it’s a book about Hollywood music, and it doesn’t claim otherwise. But in boldly asserting that the book ‘aims for comprehensiveness’ (p.6), Slowik is perhaps putting himself in a position of omniscience that no historian can reasonably expect of him or herself.

However, the book is...