Unsettled Scores: Politics, Hollywood, and the Film Music of Aaron Copland and Hanns Eisler by Sally Bick (review)

Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno’s Composing for the Films (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947) and Aaron Copland’s essay “Music in the Films” (in his Our New Music: Leading Composers in Europe and America [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1941], 260–75) have long been regarded as seminal texts for theorizing film music. Nearly every major academic publication on the subject invokes them—most recently, James Buhler in Theories of the Soundtrack ([New York: Oxford University Press, 2018], 69–76). Few publications on film music, however, offer the laser-sharp focus that blends archival research, music analysis, and film music theory found in Sally Bick’s Unsettled Scores.

Bick approaches the film music of Copland and Eisler through both composers’ writings on the subject and their first Hollywood film scores. In so doing, she places their work in a wider historical and intellectual context of both the Hollywood industry and musical modernism. This contextualizing practice follows recent developments in film music scholarship, such as Hannah Lewis’s French Musical Culture and the Coming of Sound Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) and Lea Jacobs’s Film Rhythm after Sound: Technology, Music, and Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). Bick positions Copland and Eisler as composers whose music and philosophies bridged musical modernism and Hollywood practice. Using a case study from each composer, Bick demonstrates how each of them infused their film scores with modernist techniques. Copland has long received recognition for his influence on film-scoring practices, but Bick extends this honor to Eisler, presenting a significantly richer snapshot of the development of film music in classical Hollywood and its ties to American culture, politics, nationalism, Marxism, musical modernism, and identity politics.

The first chapter establishes several important threads, including film- music historical background for less familiar readers and biographical backgrounds of both Copland and Eisler. Eisler is likely less familiar to most readers, and Bick could perhaps have provided more background on his circuitous journey to Hollywood, but her focus remains fixed on his experiences once he arrived in Hollywood, not on all that came before. After this initial introduction, Bick devotes two chapters to each composer: one on his theoretical writings and one on his first Hollywood film score: for Copland, Of Mice and Men (1939), and for Eisler, Hangmen Also Die! (1943).

Bick’s impressive knowledge and use of archival materials is one of her book’s greatest strengths. She uses a variety of archival materials to explore both composers’ developing opinions on film music within their larger biographical contexts. Sources for Copland include the transcript of his 1940 lecture at the Museum of Modern Art’s Film Library, his 1949 New York Times Magazine article, a chapter on film music added to the 1957 revised version of What to Listen for in Music (New York: McGraw-Hill), many articles written for Modern Music, and correspondence from the Aaron Copland collection at the Library of Congress. Bick contextualizes Copland’s writings with his own written reflections on composing the score for Of Mice and Men. Copland was able to maintain a greater degree of authority over the score and creative process than was typical in the studio system. Bick frames his positive comments about Hollywood in the 1940 lecture as stemming from that recent experience; Copland’s privileged experience shaped both his opinion on the possibilities Hollywood offered and his perceived inadequacies of the studio system’s larger power structures.

The most compelling chapter of the book, however, examines Eisler’s writings and theoretical approach to film music. Many other texts have discussed Composing for the Films, but none has provided such a thorough investigation of both the development of the text’s key ideas and the...