Overview

This wide-ranging and thought-provoking collection of specially-commissioned essays provides a uniquely comprehensive overview of the many and various ways in which music functions in film soundtracks. Citing examples from a variety of historical periods, genres and film industries - including those of the USA, UK, France, Italy, India and Japan - the book's contributors are all leading scholars and practitioners in the field. They engage, sometimes provocatively, with numerous stimulating aspects of the history, theory and practice of film music in a series of lively discussions which will appeal as much to newcomers to this fascinating subject as to seasoned film music aficionados. Innovative research and fresh interpretative perspectives are offered alongside practice-based accounts of the film composer's distinctive art, with examples cited from genres as contrasting as animation, the screen musical, film noir, Hollywood melodrama, the pop music and jazz film, documentary, period drama, horror, science fiction and the Western.

Full Product Details

9781107476493

Table of Contents

Reviews

'Going beyond new historical research on early film music, genre studies, and film music analysis, this diverse collection of current essays is ambitious. ... Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.' M. Goldsmith, CHOICE

Author Information

Professor Mervyn Cooke teaches film music, jazz, twentieth-century music and composition at the University of Nottingham. He has edited The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten (Cambridge, 1999), The Cambridge Companion to Jazz (Cambridge, 2002, with David Horn) and The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera (Cambridge, 2005). He has also published A History of Film Music (Cambridge, 2008) and The Hollywood Film Music Reader (2010), and co-edited volumes 3 to 6 of Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten (2004-2012). Dr Fiona Ford completed her doctoral thesis, entitled 'The Film Music of Edmund Meisel (1894-1930)', at the University of Nottingham. She has wide experience of researching contemporaneous original scores for silent film and early scores for sound films. She has written a book chapter on Edmund Meisel for The Sounds of the Silents in Britain: Voice, Music and Sound in Early Cinema Exhibition (2012, edited by Julie Brown and Annette Davison) and a chapter on The Wizard of Oz for Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama (2011, edited by Sarah Hibberd).

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