Erich Wolfgang Korngold's 'The Adventures of Robin Hood', and: Mychael Danna's 'The Ice Storm', and: Alex North's 'A Streetcar Named Desire' (review)

Film music studies have come along way since Claudia Gorbman's influential publication in 1987 of Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Before Gorbman, most books addressing film music tended to be interviews with film composers, guides for would-be composers, and historical surveys: critical engagement with film music was almost non-existent in the available literature. Perhaps the most unexpected thing about Gorbman's volume (certainly from a more recent perspective) is that its writer was not a musicologist. After Gorbman, musicologists' contributions came relatively quickly, initially with monographs that replaced the historical surveys with critical surveys, and edited collections that currently seem to focus on genre studies, both filmic and musical.

In this burgeoning field of literature, editor Kate Daubney's Film Score Guides have occupied a somewhat different position, the focus of each guide being a specific film with a score that is of some significance in the history of film music, due to its reception, innovation or some other notable feature. A feature of the guides as a series is their shared chapter structure, with five chapters looking in turn at the composer's musical background, their scoring technique, the cultural and critical context of the film, the soundscape of the film overall (and/or a discussion of technical scoring processes), and a final chapter analysing the music in relation to the film. This very specific focus and structure allows the authors to explore aspects of a film, a composer and a score in much more depth and detail than is usual in the discipline: the only other place one is likely to find work solely dedicated to the examination of a particular film score is in the more compact medium of journal articles and chapters in collections.

The series was Daubney's brainchild and she has been its series editor for the last decade, publishing the first two volumes with Greenwood Press - exclusively in hardback and at eye-watering prices that meant they were inevitably destined for library shelves only - before moving the series to Scarecrow Press. Scarecrow, publishing in paperback and at much less stratospheric cost, have produced eight guides since 2003, and the range of the series (including the two additional volumes published by Greenwood) is laudably broad, encompassing films from the 1930s to the 1990s, and covering thrillers, comedies, dramas, westerns, action-adventure films and science fiction. There is quite a focus on drama, arguably at the expense of other genres (no rom-com, no animation, no film noir or war films as yet), and while popular music is often considered within the scores, the focus - indeed, the raison d'être of the guides - is acts of original composition.

There is also a notable gap in the historical coverage, with only one film representing the 1980s and none from the 1970s; there are currently seven films from the four decades before 1970 and only three from the four decades since. However, there is nothing to suggest that the series is complete, and it has always been the way of traditional musicologists to prefer composers deceased and their body of work therefore 'complete' before beginning the process of review and analysis of their contribution, a position quite different from those working in film studies or popular musicology but one that might explain the concentration on less contemporary repertoire. Nonetheless, the guides are a significant and useful contribution to the growing literature. Perhaps more importantly, over the last decade they have tracked the ways that musicologists approach the study of film composition, our developing understanding of the often complex working relationships between composers, directors and other practitioners, and how we construct and articulate those...