1994 was the year for film music. Along with Listening to Movies: the film lover's guide to film music by Fred Karlin (reviewed earlier in these pages), Overtones and Undertones by Royal S. Brown and The Art of Film Music by George Burt almost double the number of books on the subject published in English in the last five years. With a few books currently in production, film music seems to have (finally) come into its own.
One of the real pioneers in the field has been Royal S. Brown of Queens College, the film music critic for Fanfare magazine, and the author of the article, `Herrmann, Hitchcock, and the Music of the Irrational', a high water-mark in the history of film music scholarship. It was thus with great anticipation that I began to read Overtones and Undertones. And I was not disappointed. As in the Herrmann article (and elsewhere), Brown combines compelling critical insight with sophisticated musical analysis. What distinguishes his work in Overtones and Undertones, however, is a overriding philosophical framework which situates film music in terms of the history of artistic expression and the human propensity, indeed need, for myth.
It is an interesting argument. Developing key concepts first articulated by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, Brown contends that `the degree to which...character, object, and/or event escapes from a causal or historical determination of that moment of time and piece of space is the degree to which that moment in the narrative becomes mythic' (p. 9). For Brown, music helps to catapult film into a mythic structure, arguing along the lines of Levi-Strauss that `music, with its reprises, its cyclism(s), and the sense of unity it communicates, presents mythic structure in an almost pure state' (p. 10). Thus film music becomes the antidote to films' impression of reality, feeding `our desire to escape from the historical, which is at the very base of bourgeois myth' (p. 28). Brown goes on to argue that it is film music's tendency to `mythify' that is at the base of its ideological function as transmitter of cultural values.
There are some fascinating readings of scores refracted through this prism: Herrmann's Shadow of a Doubt, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo as well as knock-out extended analyses of Korngold's The Sea Hawk, Rozsa's Double Indemnity, and Prokofiev's Eisenstein scores. As this last entry would suggest, one of Brown's real strengths is his consideration and consistent inclusion of non-Hollywood material. In fact, the chapter entitled `New styles, new genres, new interactions' moves into extremely fruitful territory--recent and contemporary world cinema--yielding persuasive and satisfying extended readings of Michel Legrand's score for Vivre sa vie, and Antoine Duhamel's for Pierrot le fou and analysis of the work of director/composer collaborations Federico Fellini/Nino Rota, Claude Chabrol/ Pierre Jansen, and Sergio Leone/Ennio Morricone. Included also in the book is a reprint of `Herrmann, Hitchcock, and the music of the irrational'; a chapter on contemporary film music seen through the focus of postmodernism; interviews with various film composers, many of them reprinted from the pages of Fanfare; an extremely useful appendix enticed `How to hear a movie: an outline'; and a discography and bibliography.
What would a review be without some nit-picking? And there is some nit to pick here: a certain generalness with respect to documentation which makes its difficult for other scholars to follow in Brown's intellectual footsteps, so to speak (although Roland Barthes and concepts from Barthes, for instance, are used by Brown and in fact Barthes' name turns up in the opening chapters, there is no citation in the notes or bibliography to him or his work); some oversights in terms of scholarship (for instance, in the analysis of the use of romantic music in film scoring, why not mention Caryl Flinn who has devoted an entire book to this subject?); and some laxity in terminology (using the word `back', for instance, to describe music's relationship to film, producing a kind of fuzziness which does not allow for much complexity in descriptions of this relationship). Yet these are minor flaws given the scope of this book and the level of its accomplishment.
George Burt comes to film music from a slightly different angle: he is both an academic (professor of music at Rice University) and a working composer. Having recently renewed Fred Karlin's Listening to Film Music, and seeing firsthand the wealth of material and unique insights chat a film composer can bring to the analysis of film music, I was duly expectant with regard to The Art of Film Music. Sadly, I was disappointed. Burt's book contains excellent musical analysis, in fact, some of the best analysis of specific musical cues chat I have ever read. But excellent analysis does not necessarily make an excellent book.
Described in its introduction as a basic guide to `how music worked in film' (p. vii), for composers and filmmakers without formal musical training, the book promises to deliver on two fronts: as a general introduction to its subject and as a specific guide to musical language and techniques. On this second front Burt is entirely successful. (More on this later.) On the first front, however, he is much less so. As Burt rightly argues in his introduction, his book is not meant to be a history of film music nor is he obligated to write one. But a book describing itself as a general introduction to film music and billed on its jacket as `a guide to creating music for dramatic films', has some obligation to be comprehensive or at least to offer to its readers a range of possibilities for confronting the challenges of film music. Burt has limited himself almost exclusively to Hollywood, to films from the 1940s to the 1970s, and to the work of four composers cited in his subside: Hugo Friedhofer, Alex North, Dand Raksin, and Leonard Rosenman. The result is a book limited in its scope and misleading in its mission.
The problem, I would hasten to add, is not the choice of the four composers, each of whom merits a book-length study of his own, but the manner in which their work is treated--as representative of the ways in which composers have solved the musical and dramatic problems inherent in the amalgamation of film and music. (It is just this problem chat Brown, by including non-Hollywood texts and widening his chronology, so successfully avoids.) In fact, there is an interesting argument to be made here chat at least three of these composers (Burt does not explain why he has chosen these four) shaped or more accurately re-shaped the art of film music during the mid-point of the twentieth century. A book devoted to these composers which attempted to get at chat issue, at exactly how these composers confronted the `unique structural, dramaturgical, and perceptual possibilities ... [that] emerge when music is combined with film (p. ix) would be a welcome addition to the growing body of literature on film music. But this is not that book.
The lack of specificity in the critical analysis of The Art of Film Music is also dismaying. Although aimed at a reader without formal musical training, it tends to rely on (frequently tired) overgeneralizations such as `The most distinguished composers possess a genuine theatrical talent and imagination as well as the ability to translate their thoughts into musical sound and gesture' (p. 3). It is hard to disagree, although Brown makes a compelling argument in his book that Herrmann, one of Hollywood's greatest composers, avoided precisely the type of musical sound and gesture Burt alludes to.
What is indeed impressive about Burt's book, however, is the precision of his musical analysis and his unique solution to the problem of presenting sophisticated musical material to the uninitiated. Most writers on film music do what Brown does in his book: offer a fairly thoroughgoing introduction to musical analysis--a kind of caveat emptor--and then forge ahead widh in-depth musical readings. Burt, however, not only includes a helpful musical glossary at the end of the book, but he has devised a system of analysis which separates a general overview of how the piece of film music works from a technical explanation. `Technical commentary has been placed in italics and may be skipped by non-musicians without loss of continuity' (p. viii). And Burt lives up to his claim, carefully summarizing material in an accessible way before he moves on to provide support for his position through sophisticated and in-depth musical analysis. In fact, Burt's system is so successful chat I hope it serves as the prototype for others working in the field.
Thus both books have something to offer in terms of film music but as an overall introduction to the subject as well as an advancement on the state of film music scholarship in general, it is Brown's text which has the definite advantage.
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