Celluloid Symphonies: Texts and Contexts in Film Music History (review)

The study of sound in cinema, together with the rediscovery of the (falsely called silent) primitive cinema, has been one of the privileged channels of the great renewal of film studies since the late 1970s. That we were still missing a comprehensive textbook on the history of the soundtrack within the broader frame of film history itself had become a historical anachronism, which this collection admirably rectifies.

Carefully and very didactically edited by Julie Hubbert, this book offers a combination of three lines of research that had been developed in relative isolation in the past few decades. First, there is a critical analysis of film music; second, the book offers a technical study of the soundtrack; third, we find the examination of contextual information related to sound technology. Celluloid Symphonies brings these three threads together, knitting them into an excellent survey of the mutations of the filmic medium itself. Yet the qualities of this book cannot be reduced to its merger of already existing research tracks. However, Hubbert does not aim to propose new, close readings of specific works—her focus is as much on the contexts as on the texts. In other words, her approach provides us with much more than just a new, musically expanded version of Hollywood, adding music, dialogue and sound or noise to the already known shifts from before and after the great paradigm shift of the talkies.

First of all, what her book offers is really a new history. This new history is both broad and microscopic. Broad, because it encompasses the complete history of Hollywood cinema, as shaped and transformed by its relationship with sound; microscopic, because it refuses the traditional vision of film as a sequence of autonomous periods, each rapidly replacing and remediating a previous, technologically lower-performance era. True, in Hubbert's meticulous account, the history of Hollywood cinema is nicely divided into five different eras, whose dominant features and respective frontiers will not come as a surprise, as the global structure of the book seems to follow almost slavishly what we all know about the watershed moments of the American film business: 1895-1925: the silent film; 1926-1935: the early sound film; 1935-1959: the Hollywood score; 1960-1977: the soundtrack during the years of the studio system's crisis; 1978-present: the postmodern soundtrack in the New Hollywood era. But Hubbert's well-documented research and detailed introductions succeed in an exemplary manner in complexifying this history without ever blurring the clear lines of the evolution. Particularly noteworthy is that each of the five parts has an editorial presentation of some 30 pages. These, in effect, are small books themselves.

The complexification is twofold: On the one hand, Hubbert shows the amazing diversity that is at work within each of the great historical periods that she distinguishes; on the other hand, she demonstrates very persuasively that transition does not mean rupture, and that the study of historical change has to pay as much attention to continuity as to revolution. Her program follows this idea in each of the five parts, which produces often-astonishing revisions of the often over-generalized claims one finds in traditional textbooks and in specialized case studies on film music. Good points are made in relation to the analysis of the gradual emergence of the score, which does not arrive overnight but can be seen as a technologically and contextually enabled continuation and transformation of the treatment of the motif structure during the silent era. At the other end of the historical spectrum is the foregrounding of the increasing convergence between film music and music in the game industry.

The second great achievement of this book, besides its clever rewriting of Hollywood's history, is the perfect balance that it strikes between major and minor voices and names. Once again, Hubbert respects the existing hierarchies, such as the great names of Hollywood film music (Steiner...