The Hollywood Film Music Reader ed. by Mervyn Cooke (review)

Intelligently introduced compilations of primary source material on film music are a bit like London buses. You wait for ages, and then three come along at once. Given that a course in film music has become a standard offering in many music and film departments, it is perhaps not surprising that academic publishers have simultaneously detected a gap in the market for resource texts that might be assigned for class purposes. Doubtless more will follow. But the volume under review was the first off the block, and assembled by Mervyn Cooke, prolific author both of the Grove article on film music and a history of film music for Cambridge University Press. Following quickly behind have been Julie Hubbert (ed.), Celluloid Symphonies: Texts and Contexts in Film Music History (Berkeley, 2011) and James Wierzbicki, Nathan Platte, and Colin Roust (eds.), The Routledge Film Music Sourcebook (New York, 2011). Each is slightly different in kind.

Cooke’s volume is called a reader, which today tends to imply a collection of scholarly essays. In reality it is a source book, containing—like the others—articles and essays of historical interest. If it lacks the variety of types of document that would be ideal in a source book (for the silent film era especially, this really ought to include advertisements and music columns from film trade papers), it compensates in convenient, economically introduced variety. Most of these documents are reproduced from long out-of-print sources, otherwise difficult to access.

The collection is organized into three sections: ‘From “Silents” to Sound’, ‘Film Composers in Their Own Words’, ‘Critics and Commentators’, with each essay afforded a short one- or two-page introduction and each section a few more pages. (Hubbert, by contrast, writes a substantial essay at the beginning of each of her five parts, into which she integrates references to her sources.) Why section 1 points to an era, and sections 2 and 3 to perspectives, is not clear. But the subheadings are a little misleading in another respect: most of the articles in the section ‘Critics and Commentators’ are written by people who were also principally composers (George Antheil, Igor Stravinsky, David Raksin, Aaron Copland—whose two essays in the volume perhaps overplay his significance, given the enormous choice available—and Elmer Bernstein) and others who were partly composers (Lawrence Morton and the much-anthologized Adorno and Eisler).

This slants the volume in favour of the composer perspective even more than word-count alone (200 of the 360 pages of text are already devoted to Part II); it really is about the history of the Hollywood score. A composer-centric perspective is not necessarily a drawback, of course, nor a snapshot of the conversation between composers in the art music sphere and those in ‘industry’. (There is a distinct element of that here, which doubtless partly reflects the mixed research interests of the compiler himself.) As so often with collections of essays, it is more a question of satisfactorily marrying up content with titling, and subtitling. Thus, it is important to note that the short section devoted to silent film focuses on the standardization of supportive accompaniment and the elements of ‘special scores’ compiled specially for particular films. Its lack of readings that might give an insight into the earlier Nickelodeon-style mixed programme, let alone even earlier sound presentation modes, may reinforce popular misconceptions that there was a smooth transition from Wagnerian opera to motif-based Hollywood scores, which Rick Altman and others have been working hard to explode. To that extent, it might have been useful to conceive of this first section (‘From “Silents” to Sound’) in terms of ‘Silent Era Compilers and Performers’, or ‘Towards the Classic Hollywood Score’.

This exclusive focus on Hollywood film music and its pre-history (signalled in the title, The Hollywood Film Music Reader) nevertheless gives the volume a clear identity, though students might need reminding that it does have this particular identity. An...