Theories of the Soundtrack by James Buhler (review)

James Buhler's Theories of the Soundtrack is much more than the title implies. Part history, part current trends, and part theoretical text, the book is a significant resource for scholars of film music. While the focus is on theoretical approaches to the soundtrack, the book is also, by necessity, about theories of film. Indeed, it seems one of the underlying aims of the book is to bring film scholarship into the realm of music studies. Containing a significant quantity of admirably curated information belying its modest size, any scholar studying film music and sound will find at least some part of the book useful.

The book breaks into three disproportionate sections. After an introductory chapter, the next two chapters are chronological, presenting the earliest theoretical approaches to music and film just as the sound film was emerging as a cultural force. Chapters 4 through 8 are topical in nature, with each chapter focusing on a specific methodology that scholars have taken in discussing film and the soundtrack. The final chapter tackles digital cinema and the issues raised by the latest advances in technology.

With each new subject, Buhler begins with a general explanation of a theoretical approach. His distillations of far-flung topics, taken alone, offer a major achievement. Next, he fully critiques each approach while also highlighting the most useful aspects of an author's work, indicating how theories can be used to bring new light to soundtracks and films. One issue Buhler contends with frequently, especially in the first half of the book, is the visual bias to film studies that has dominated most scholarship. At times he is forced to extract the latent theory from a scholar's work on film and extend it to the soundtrack. As Buhler moves through history and topics, he introduces key terms and the issues surrounding them, such as mimetic synchronization and synchronous vs. asynchronous sound, counterpoint, stylization, diegetic/nondiegetic, focalization, rendering, and suture. As the book progresses, Buhler presents more extended analytical discussions of his own as a means of explicating a theoretical approach. Thus, the text travels on a continuum from historical summary and critique to active analytical and theoretical discussions.

Chapters 2 and 3 are historical in nature, presenting the earliest theoretical approaches to music and film just as the sound film was emerging as an art form. In the early years, 1926–35, the artistic status of sound film was greatly contested. Chapter 2 covers theories developed while the industry was transitioning to sound and the role of the sound film was still being questioned. What is sound film? Is it a viable art form? How does one approach an art form in which two distinct technologies are combined? Writers such as Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Illarionovich Pudovkin, Rudolf Arnheim, and Harry Alan Potamkin were distressed by how the soundtrack—especially dialogue—significantly upset the artistic values created through silent film and focused on how to add sound to a film to create something beyond simply recorded theater.

Chapter 3 discusses the second generation of theories, developed after the codification of the sound film. Instead of asking what a sound film is, these theories approach questions such as what is cinematic sound, and how does it function within the artwork? This chapter presents a range of approaches. In Sergei Eisenstein's later work on the concept of vertical montage, residual issues of the first generation of work on sound film still linger, as his work reads as a defense of the use of sound in the art form. Aaron Copland, on the other hand, took the sound film as an art form as given. His work, presenting seven functions and three reservations, is the most succinct and pragmatic. As Buhler notes, this was not a "theory" per se, yet Copland's functions reappear in various guises in the...