Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface and acknowledgements
- 1 The ‘silent’ cinema
- 2 Sound on track
- 3 Hollywood's Golden Age: narrative cinema and the classical film score
- 4 Stage and screen
- 5 The mainstream divides: post-war horizons in Hollywood
- 6 ‘Never let it be mediocre’: film music in the United Kingdom
- 7 Defectors to television
- 8 Film music in France
- 9 Global highlights
- 10 Popular music in the cinema
- 11 Classical music in the cinema
- 12 State of the art: film music since the New Hollywood
- Bibliography
- Index of film titles
- General index
Preface and acknowledgements
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface and acknowledgements
- 1 The ‘silent’ cinema
- 2 Sound on track
- 3 Hollywood's Golden Age: narrative cinema and the classical film score
- 4 Stage and screen
- 5 The mainstream divides: post-war horizons in Hollywood
- 6 ‘Never let it be mediocre’: film music in the United Kingdom
- 7 Defectors to television
- 8 Film music in France
- 9 Global highlights
- 10 Popular music in the cinema
- 11 Classical music in the cinema
- 12 State of the art: film music since the New Hollywood
- Bibliography
- Index of film titles
- General index
Summary
As cinema moves into its second century, it is surprising that relatively few comprehensive historical accounts of film music have so far appeared in print. This is by no means to say that there is a dearth of perceptive and thought-provoking writing about film music: on the contrary, since the 1980s the field has become a rich growth area in both academic and popular circles, and an ever-growing understanding and appreciation of the filmic medium's often strikingly varied musical potentialities have helped rescue the film musician's craft from the stigma of hack commercialism which constantly blighted its reputation from the earliest years. At the same time, and equally late in the day, film scholars have begun to draw wider attention to the need not only to regard a film's soundtrack as an indivisible composite element, but also to consider it as at least equal to – and in some cases arguably more important than – the moving images which, as cinema's raison d'être, were traditionally viewed as its overridingly dominant parameter. Hopefully the days when it was possible to devote an entire volume to a discussion of the aesthetics of cinema without adequately addressing either its sound or music (for an example, see Aumont et al. 1983) are long since gone.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A History of Film Music , pp. xv - xxiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008