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

Given the explosion in film musicology in recent years it does not seem unreasonable to ask why we need another book on gender and classic Hollywood film scoring. Caryl Flinn's Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia and Hollywood Film Music (1992) and Heather Laing's The Gendered Score: music and gender in 1940s melodrama and the woman's film (2007) are just two of the essential works in this field, both offering detailed insights. We might also point to several other important texts including Anahid Kassabian's Hearing Film: tracking identifications in Hollywood film music (2001) and Kathryn Kalinak's Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood film (1992), which also examined gender, albeit in the context of broader identity issues found within the Hollywood film scoring tradition. The fact that the majority of the case studies in Peter Franklin's Seeing Through Music have already been heavily covered in the literature, including, for example, Casablanca (1943) and Psycho (1960), could suggest the characteristic navel-gazing of a discipline in crisis. Indeed, knowing that this book contains a critique of Adorno and Eisler, a focus on Max Steiner and a close examination of King Kong (1933), we might be excused for thinking that film music studies has not moved on since Claudia Gorbman examined these very same topics in her seminal work Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music in 1987. What, if anything, is there left to say about this material?

Well, as it turns out, quite a lot. Peter Franklin's gossamer-like title provides a clue to his project, because this is not really a book about film music at all, but rather about the place of film music within twentieth-century musical canons. Franklin argues that classic Hollywood film music (primarily of the 1930s and 1940s) has often been perceived to lack the quality and rigour of late-Romantic music from which it is derived. The perception of supposedly irrational, regressive and emotional music both has a history that is longer than film and is indissolubly tied to discourses highlighting gender differences that Franklin believes were promoted by the developing project of twentieth century modernism. Franklin, therefore, invites us to see through various historiographical dialogues in order to 'glimpse an alternative history of music and musical ideas in the twentieth century' (18). This is a bold claim and one that is not always entirely convincing, but the journey is consistently fascinating nonetheless.

The book is divided into two sections, both dealing in different ways with the relationships between 'high-culture' music and music in popular cinema. Part 1 reconsiders the relationships between film music, late-Romantic concert music and popular early twentieth-century opera. If Part 1 seeks to discredit the historical vilification of film music, then Part 2 further emphasises film music's valuable connection to the above-mentioned 'high-culture' forms. Although Part 1 is more heavily theoretical than Part 2, numerous case-studies are employed throughout. This use of concrete examples usefully animates the writing, which is particularly engaging and direct, but at times it becomes challenging to disentangle the line of the argument. Perhaps more could have been done to distinguish the roles and perspectives of the two parts

In the introduction, Franklin invokes Andreas Huyssen's After The Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (1986). Huyssen argued that postmodernism itself could not be regarded as a radical break with the past, as its political and artistic strategies were beholden to other trends within the culture of modernity, particularly the historical avant garde. Franklin uncovers the problems inherent in relying on the 'powerfully institutionalized' discourse of the Great Divide arguing that the intersections between 'feminist film and cultural studies, "new musicology" and opera criticism, and the history discourses of Modernism are nowhere more provocatively revealed than in the study of movie music during the 1930s and '40s'. (15) Franklin is at pains to examine and...