News
New Book on Film Music
Seeing Through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classic Hollywood Film Scores by Professor Peter Franklin has just been published by Oxford University Press.
Hollywood film music is often mocked as a disreputably 'applied' branch of the art of composition that lacks both the seriousness and the quality of the classical or late-romantic oncert and operatic music from which it derives. Its composers in the
1930s and '40s were themselves often scornful of it and aspired to
produce more 'serious' works that would enhance their artistic
reputation.
In fact the criticism of film music as slavishly
descriptive or manipulatively over-emotional has a history that is older
than film - it had even been directed at the relatively
popular operatic and concert music written by some of the émigré
Hollywood composers themselves before they had left Europe. There, as
subsequently in America, such criticism was promoted by the developing
project of Modernism, whose often high-minded opposition to mass culture
used polarizing language that drew, intentionally or not, upon that of
gender difference. Regressive, late-romantic music, the old argument
ran, was - as women were believed to be - emotional, irrational, and
lacking in logic.
This book seeks to level the critical playing
field between film music and 'serious music', reflecting upon
gender-related ideas about music and modernism as much as about film.
Peter Franklin broaches the possibility of a history of
twentieth-century music that would
include, rather than marginalize, film music - and, indeed, the scores
of a number of the major Hollywood movies discussed here, like The Bride of Frankenstein, King Kong, Rebecca, Gone With The Wind, Citizen Kane and Psycho.
In doing so, he brings more detailed music-historical knowledge to
bear upon cinema music, often discussed as a unique and special product of film, and also offers conclusions about the
problematic aspects of musical modernism and some arguably liberating
aspects of 'late-romanticism'.