A History of Film Music

A History of Film Music. By Mervyn Cooke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. [xxii, 562 p. ISBN 978-0-521-81173-6 (hardback) $120; ISBN 978-0-521-01048-1 (paperback) $24.99] Scholarly interest in film music has grown exponentially in the past twenty-five years. Most universities offer courses on the subject, presentations at academic conferences typically attract packed rooms, and the most august music journals have joined more specialised ones in publishing articles on film music topics. Major university presses and such academic publishers as Ashgate, Boydell, and Routledge have been issuing books exploring national repertoires, various genres and other increasingly specialised aspects of film music. Both Green wood and Scarecrow presses have new book series with each title focusing on an individual film score. Much less common is the single-author book taking a broad view of the subject. Indeed, since Claudia Gorman's landmark Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music appeared in 1987 (Indiana University Press), only a handful of such books have been published in English. For many, Roy Prendergast's Film Music: A Neglected Art (W. W. Norton, 2nd edition, 1992) remains a favourite for the range of films covered and the quality of analysis. Newer contenders include Roger Hickman's Reel Music: Exploring 100 Years of Film Music (W. W. Norton, 2005), a substantial volume intended for the non-music major, and Peter Larsen's Film Music (Reaktion, 2007), which is more modest in scope. With A History of Film Music, Mervyn Cooke has made an important and ambitious contribution to English-language literature on film music, producing a book that is comprehensive, accessible, and frequently thought-provoking. The book is arranged chronologically with some well-considered detours. In the first two chapters, Cooke examines the silent era and the early years of sound film. In chapter three, he explores Hollywood's Golden Age, setting out the context and working methods before focusing on some of the major composers of the period extending from the early 1930s through to the 1950s, including Steiner, Korngold, Waxman, Newman, and Rozsa. He continues this thread in chapter five, on post-war Holly wood, and rounds it off with chapter twelve, on the New Hollywood. In between, he provides excursions into musical genres: opera and the musical on film (chapter 4), the documentary and animated film (chapter 7); explores the use of popular and Classical music in film (chapters 10 and 11, respectively); and devotes three chapters to national cinema: British (chapter 6), French (chapter 8), and other parts of the world (Global highlights in chapter 9). …