Music and Cinema (review)

Music and Cinema. Edited by James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, University Press of New England, 2000. [vi, 397 p. ISBN 0-8195-6410-9 (cloth); 0-8195-6411-7 (pbk.). $70 (cloth); $24.95 (pbk.).]

In the introduction to this collection of essays on film music, editor David Neumeyer makes an interesting and essential observation. "It [is] gratifying," he writes, "to see the extent to which . . . film-music scholarship is now a discipline with a past; none of us exploring the subject confronts a blank page" (p. 8). As Neumeyer rightly points out, the question of literature is essential to defining any emerging field of inquiry. It is the irony of that introductory statement, however, that is this book's strength. Music and Cinema is important, even essential, precisely because the opposite is true--film-music scholarship still has little or no "past." Scholars in the field today might not be facing a completely blank page, but that page is hardly full of text. In fact, if we were to construct a past from the citations of almost every author in this collection, the literature specific to film music would appear to be very small, if not singular: Claudia Gorbman's book Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (London: BFI; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Nearly every essay refers to Gorbman's worthy book; many, in fact, work strictly from several of her key arguments. This observation is not meant to undermine Gorbman and the few other heavily cited scholars like Martin Miller Marks (Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895-1924 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997]), nor to question the central position they should have in the secondary literature. It is simply to say that, with a primary literature still undefined (witness the contradiction between authors in this collection on the use of preexisting music or popular song in film-music history, for instance) and a relatively small secondary literature (as opposed to the acres of library shelf space devoted to, say, opera), the discipline of film music is still emerging. That film-music criticism does not yet have a past is precisely why this collection of essays is so important.

If the introduction reveals the editors to be over-eager, however, there are two additional, salient observations telling us that this collection and the development of the discipline as a whole are nevertheless in good hands. Neumeyer's warning against the perils of "Beethoven-izing" film-music history shows an editorial approach both current and thoughtful. Just as film studies is still struggling, in some sense, against Andrew Sarris's director-as-auteur theory, film-music studies, too, Neumeyer cautions, should guard against "canonization solely through the imprint of the composer-auteur" (p. 21). We should resist casting composers such as Bernard Herrmann, in other words, as film music's Beethoven. In the collection, this statement is reinforced more by the inclusion of Marks's essay on Max Steiner and Adolph Deutsch than by Murray Pomerance's on Herrmann and Alfred Hitchcock. While none of the essays in part 3, "Style and Practice in Classical Film Music," overtly asserts a canonical position for any of these important composers, Marks's is the most successful in revealing the problems of assuming that there is such a thing as a "classical" Hollywood score or a "classical" Hollywood composer. (Pomerance's less successful style of narration, his shot-by-shot description of nine minutes of film, is distracting.) The inclusion of Ronald Rodman's essay on composer Herbert Stothart in this section also works subtly toward challenging the auteur theory, although from the opposite end of the argument. The analysis of Stothart's style of pastiche in the early Hollywood musical shows that he is just as original as Steiner or Herrmann, and that the measure of originality and greatness is just as sticky a critical issue in film music as it is in any other music genre. Jeff Smith's terrific...