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  • The Encyclopedia of Film Composers by Thomas S. Hischak
  • Landon Palmer (bio)
Thomas S. Hischak The Encyclopedia of Film Composers Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015: 836pp. ISBN-13: 9781442245495

At the time of this writing, film composer Thomas Newman is in competition for his fourteenth Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score (for Passengers [Morten Tyldum, 2016]). Newman is contending against four first-time nominees for the award, including Mica Levi for Jackie (Pablo Larraín, 2016). Levi, better known under the stage name Micachu in her work as part of the experimental pop band Micachu and the Shapes, is only the fifth woman to be nominated for Best Original Score or Best Original Song Score (Smith, 2017), and Jackie is only her second narrative feature composition after her debut with Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013). 2016’s slate of Oscar nominations for Best Original Score speak to long-held tensions in the work and recognition of film composition. Perhaps more than any other category at the Academy Awards, Best Original Score cyclically recognises past nominees. To name just a few well-known living composers still producing celebrated work, James Newton Howard has been nominated for eight Oscars, Alexandre Desplat for eight (including one win), Hans Zimmer for ten (including one win), and John Williams has received a peerless 45 nominations and five wins, depending on how one defines this historically variant category. At the same time, as Levi’s emerging career indicates, there exists a great deal of innovative work being conducted by musicians who straddle the line between film composer, pop musician, songwriter, music supervisor, and even sound designer – work that often resides in the shadow of the most prominent names that Hollywood regularly employs and routinely honours.

Thomas S. Hischak’s The Encyclopedia of Film Composers seeks to expand our scope of knowledge regarding the many individuals who have contributed to this select line of work. This reference book features 233 entries covering the biographies and musical styles of film composers across the early sound era, the studio system, the international arthouse [End Page 119] renaissance, the recent names that have crossed over from popular music to film scoring, and the many figures residing somewhere in between. Hischak’s tome offers a useful introduction to cinema’s most canonised composers while also providing a thorough overview of lesser-regarded contributors to the form. Hischak’s work is admittedly not comprehensive, and any of the volume’s drawbacks exist less in an inevitable lack of totality and more in the author’s at-times narrow framing of what film composition entails, as well as the inherent limitations of subjecting such a diverse slate of figures to a singular authorial voice. However, this extensive volume invites film music scholars to further consider film composition as a unique site of musical work, from its most acclaimed contributors to past figures who otherwise might risk becoming lost to history.

While The Encyclopedia of Film Composers has substantial entries on this line of work’s canonised figures – including Bernard Herrmann, Ennio Morricone, Max Steiner, and John Williams – its most valuable entries detail the lesser-known contributors to film composition history. Indeed, Hischak treats the more obscure or seemingly generic film composers with similar care and inquiry to household names, such as the volume’s illuminating entries on Jeff Alexander, a midcentury composer for westerns and Elvis Presley movies, or Ray Heindorf, a ‘secondary’ composer housed at Warner Bros. during the studio era (pp.314–316). Hischak’s entries open with biographical information about composers from their early music education to their work on the big screen, then manoeuvre to textual overviews that exemplify composers’ musical styles, both through examples from certain film sequences and via aesthetic connections the author makes across works in terms of genre, instrumentation, and musical signatures. However, the greatest contribution Hischak’s reference volume makes is not in the value or insight of any given entry, but in its totality. By treating lesser-known composers as worthy of the same consideration as immortal figures of the form, Hischak creates a detailed and coherent picture of film composition’s history as musical work within the art...

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