Seeing through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classic Hollywood Film Scores by Peter Franklin (review)

The third volume in Oxford’s ‘Music/Media’ series, Seeing through Music draws together Peter Franklin’s research on late romanticism and the ‘classical’ style of film scoring prevalent in Hollywood around the 1930s–1950s: repertories that have frequently been linked in terms of their musical style and language. Franklin’s focus is on the broader connections between ideology, identity, and cultural and critical ‘value’ that link popular late Romantic music, the Modernism that was so dismissive of it, and Hollywood itself—which drew on both traditions in its desire to combine commercial success with artistic credibility. The majority of films discussed are likely to be familiar to readers; while this means that the volume revisits some well-trodden ground, it also serves to make the text more accessible to scholars in the broader field of musicology. This particular community is an important audience for Seeing through Music, which persuasively argues that the close study and contextualization of film scores not only contributes to ongoing debates about interconnected issues of value, subjectivity, and gendered identity within film musicology, but also challenges and destabilizes standard narratives of twentieth-century music.

This revised narrative is one that centres firmly upon ‘art’ music traditions: in discussing what Franklin refers to as ‘popular film music’, the volume provides a detailed account of classical scoring’s debt to various concert hall forms, but skates lightly over other traditions that influenced early film accompaniment practices (for example, music hall, vaudeville, and popular song that provided important repertory for musicians during the ‘silent’ era). The linking thread between this musical discussion and the volume’s more specific consideration of gender is Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, and Postmodernism (London, 1986), which demonstrates the discursive feminization of mass culture in comparison to the intellectualized, elite, and masculine realm of the avant-garde. While this influential critical paradigm is amply supported by Franklin’s gendered reception histories, it sometimes translates less successfully to his consideration of identity within the cinematic narrative itself, where further exploration of critical and theoretical models would provide additional contextualization for case-study readings that occasionally feel a little too brief fully to unpack the interesting issues they raise. The theoretical and methodological foundations for both strands of this investigation are laid in chapter 1, ‘Men’s Musicology/Women’s Films’, which interrogates recurring critical constructions of both film music and late romanticism as ‘popular’, ‘regressive’, and ‘nostalgic’ (pp. 21–37). Despite its derogatory and expressly feminizing nature, this rhetoric frequently underpins the relationship between the soundtrack and the stressed subjectivity of female characters. In Brief Encounter (1945), Laura’s remembrance of her extra-marital affair is introduced and accompanied by Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, a marker of personal experience that Franklin links with the composer’s desire to write pleasurably accessible music that ‘symbolized the individual subject’ (p. 36). As in the case of its lateromantic models, film music’s feminized nature can also act subversively, facilitating unusual levels of access to female subjectivity—albeit often, as in Laura’s case, a subjectivity that is ultimately constrained by societal and generic convention.

The links between orchestral film music and specific late-romantic musical forms are explored in more detail in several chapters, beginning with a focus on popular opera. Franklin characterizes verismo opera as a ‘proto-cinematic’ form (p. 42): it uses music to appeal to the subjectivity of a broad and engaged (rather than passive) audience, negotiate between textual levels, illustrate aspects of narrative, and provide an almost continuous emotional barometer and means of affect. In Puccini’s Tosca, for example, music represents both Cavaradossi’s erotic pleasure at the sight of Tosca and her own pleasurable capitulation to his seduction, evoking standard gendered representations of eroticism while also constructing a sense of subjective response in these stereotypically rendered characters (pp. 42–6). Tosca’s reliance on...