The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music (review)

The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music. By Jeff Smith. (Film and Culture.) New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. [x, 288 p. ISBN 0-231-10862-X (cloth); 0-231-10862-1 (pbk.). $57 (cloth); $19 (pbk.).]

A mere ten years ago, one could count the useful, scholarly books on film music on two fingers--one, if one considers that Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno's infamous Composing for the Films (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947; reprint, London: Athlone Press, 1994) is so polemical and so rooted in modernist elitism and Marxist pessimism that it really provides no practical methodological model for contemporary film musicology. That left only Claudia Gorbman's seminal Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), a historical-theoretical exploration of film music, with case studies from classical Hollywood and French art cinema. Other books have appeared since then. Martin Marks's Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895-1924 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) sets a solid foundation for the practice of silent-film music. (A whole literature from the twenties, particularly in German, is also still available to modern scholars.) Kathryn Kalinak's Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992) serves a similar function for Hollywood under the studio system and demonstrates how pervasive much of that practice still is. Caryl Flinn's Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) is a theoretical exploration of the persistence of romanticism in Hollywood, though it contains little about the music itself. Fred Karlin's Listening to Movies: The Film Lover's Guide to Film Music (New York: Schirmer Books, 1994) provides the first "music-appreciation" book for film music, and Royal S. Brown's Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) has proved one of the most popular of the recent titles among film scholars and teachers. Its popularity, however, is worrisome, because despite its admirable breadth, it is dangerous on the topic of music; Brown's theories may appear perfectly plausible to nonmusicians, but musicians wince in disbelief.

The field is broadening and deepening at an encouraging rate, and Jeff Smith's The Sounds of Commerce is a very welcome addition indeed, because it, more than any of the others, bursts through that unacknowledged glass wall around classical Hollywood and European art cinema to embrace not only postclassical commercial cinema but also scores in popular styles. On the cover, David Bordwell hails the book as "three fine books in one": it examines "how pop music shaped film entertainment since the 1950s," traces the "history of the dynamic interaction" of popular music and movies in the media industries, and analyzes several scores, proving "how rich and subtle pop movie scores can be." In reality, of course, the first two of these are shades of the same thing, and the execution of these elements varies slightly in quality, but without a doubt, Smith's book belongs on the reading list of every serious course on film music, and even film.

Where Smith truly excels is in the discussion of economics and marketing. As he acknowledges in his historical sketch, the interdependence of movies and popular music extends back into the silent era, but because of various shifts of economic structures in the entertainment industry, the "synergy" (a term used in the seventies to describe something that had been going on for decades) of mutually dependent marketing of films and music came into its own in the postwar period. The first three chapters outline the business structures and strategies for the fifties and sixties, while the final chapter brings the story up to date. The research here is extremely thorough and well presented (though by the nature of the material, these chapters may not be a particularly thrilling read) and should provide the foundation for anyone wishing to pursue any kind...