Mervyn Cooke provides a comprehensive and lively introduction to the major trends in film scoring from the silent era to the present day, focussing not only on dominant Hollywood practices but also offering an international perspective by including case studies of the national cinemas of the UK, France, India, Italy, Japan and the early Soviet Union. The book balances wide-ranging overviews of film genres, modes of production and critical reception with detailed non-technical descriptions of the interaction between image track and soundtrack in representative individual films. In addition to the central focus on narrative cinema, separate sections are also devoted to music in documentary and animated films, film musicals and the uses of popular and classical music in the cinema. The author analyses the varying technological and aesthetic issues that have shaped the history of film music, and concludes with an account of the modern film composer’s working practices.

Contents

List of illustrations page xi

Preface and acknowledgements xv

1 The ‘silent’ cinema 1

Why sound? 1

Why music? 4

The birth of film music 7

Categories of film music 9

Camille Saint-Saëns and film d’art 14

Cue sheets and anthologies 15

Venues and ensembles 18

Photoplayers and cinema organs 21

Music for silent epics 23

Charlie Chaplin and music for comedies 27

Early film music in Europe and the Soviet Union 30

Postlude: the silent-film revival 37

2 Sound on track 42

A sound debate 43

New technology 47

Photographing sound 52

Animated sound 58

Creative possibilities 59

3 Hollywood’s Golden Age: narrative cinema and the classical film score 67

The studio system 69

Practicalities 73

Style 78

Wagner and the filmic leitmotif 80

Structure 83

Max Steiner 87

Erich Wolfgang Korngold 93

Franz Waxman: horror and sophistication 98

Alfred Newman 103

Miklós Rózsa, Roy Webb and David Raksin: film noir and the music of psychological drama 108

Dimitri Tiomkin and others 119

Aaron Copland and the sounds of America 123

4 Stage and screen 131

Opera on film 132

Film in opera; opera in film 141

The film musical 145

Scoring Shakespeare 166

5 The mainstream divides: post-war horizons in Hollywood 183

The epic and the intimate 187

Modernism 194

Bernard Herrmann: the composer as auteur 201

Jazz and its influence 212

6 ‘Never let it be mediocre’: film music in the United Kingdom 226

Visitors from abroad 231

Ralph Vaughan Williams 234

Brian Easdale, William Alwyn and Benjamin Frankel 237

William Walton and Malcolm Arnold 248

Generic (re)takes: horror and comedy 253

End of an era 258

7 Defectors to television 265

THE DOCUMENTARY FILM 266

Hanns Eisler 268

Documentaries in the United States 271

Information films in the United Kingdom 273

The movies at war: reportage and propaganda 278

Theatrical documentaries for the modern age 283

ANIMATION 287

Cartoon music in the silent era 288

Walt Disney and the animated musical 290

Warner Bros. and MGM: comic shorts 294

Classical music 298

Migration to the small screen 301

Experimental animation 303

Animation in Europe 306

8 Film music in France 309

Symphony and song 310

The 1930s: Maurice Jaubert and Joseph Kosma 312

Georges Auric and others 316

Nouvelle vague 319

Jean-Luc Godard 321

François Truffaut 326

French modernism 328

At home and abroad 332

Poles apart: Krzysztof Kieślowski and Zbigniew Preisner 338

9 Global highlights 342

EARLY SOUND F ILMS IN THE SOVIET UNION 342

Dmitri Shostakovich 342

Vsevolod Pudovkin and Yuri Shaporin 345

Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Prokofiev 347

INDIA: BOLLYWOOD AND BEYOND 353

Early Indian cinema 354

Successes abroad: Ravi Shankar and Satyajit Ray 356

Modern commercial cinema 361

FROM ITALY TO LITTLE ITALY 365

Federico Fellini, Nino Rota and the circus of life 366

Ennio Morricone and the spaghetti western: eccentricity and populism 371

Italians abroad 376

JAPAN 382

Traditional elements in silent and early sound films 382

The films of Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa 384

Tōru Takemitsu 389

Modern composers, modern genres 392

10 Popular music in the cinema 396

Music of youth and race 398

Title songs and interpolated songs 405

Compilation scores and original song scores 408

Synergistic marketing 415

Pop (stars) in performance 418

11 Classical music in the cinema 422

Romantic concerto and war film 425

Classical biopics and milieu films 429

Period, nationality, class 437

Stanley Kubrick 440

Back to Bach 448

12 State of the art: film music since the New Hollywood 454

John Williams and the new symphonism 456

Electronics, sound technology and recording 467

Pop scoring, dual tracking and the modern soundtrack album 474

Minimalism 478

Modern auteurs: Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch 483

The modern mainstream 489

The global and the glocal 503

Bibliography 511

Index of film titles 530

General index 547