The rich and deeply moving sounds of film music are as old as cinema. The first projected moving images were accompanied by music through a variety of performers—from single piano players to small orchestras—that brought images to life. Film music has since become its own industry, an aesthetic platform for expressing creative visions, and a commercial vehicle for growing musical stars of all varieties. In this Very Short Introduction, Kathryn Kalinak takes readers behind the scenes to understand both the practical aspects of film music—what it is and how it is composed—and the theories that have been developed to explain why film music works. This accessible book not only entertains with the fascinating stories of the composers and performers who have shaped film music across the globe but also gives readers a broad sense of the key questions in film music studies today. The updated second edition includes the music from film industries in Africa, Asia and South Asia, and Latin America, and focuses on previously under-represented film musicians, in particular women and minority composers.

Music in the Western: Notes from the Frontier presents essays from both film studies scholars and musicologists on core issues in western film scores: their history, their generic conventions, their operation as part of a narrative system, their functioning within individual filmic texts and their ideological import, especially in terms of the western 's construction of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity. The Hollywood western is marked as uniquely American by its geographic setting, prototypical male protagonist and core American values. Music in the Western examines these conventions and the scores that have shaped them. But the western also had a resounding international impact, from Europe to Asia, and this volume distinguishes itself by its careful consideration of music in non-Hollywood westerns, such as Ravenous and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and in the easterns which influenced them, such as Yojimbo. Other films discussed include Wagon Master, High Noon, Calamity Jane, The Big Country, The Unforgiven, Dead Man, Wild Bill, There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men.

Contributors

Ross Care
Corey K. Creekmur
Yuna de Lannoy
K. J. Donnelly
Caryl Flinn
Claudia Gorbman
Kathryn Kalinak
Charles Leinberger
Matthew McDonald
Peter Stanfield
Mariana Whitmer
Ben Winters

The Routledge Music and Screen Media Series offers edited collections of original essays on music in particular genres of cinema, television, video games and new media. These edited essay collections are written for an interdisciplinary audience of students and scholars of music and film and media studies.

Richard Hageman (1881-1966) was celebrated during his lifetime as a conductor, pianist, vocal coach, and composer. His art songs put him solidly in the vanguard of mid-century composers and he was routinely referred to in the same context as Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, William Grant Still, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. His opera Caponsacchi was the first American opera to premiere in Freiburg-im-Breisgau and Vienna. A conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, Hageman knew the great singers of the age, conducting Enrico Caruso and Geraldine Farrar, and accompanying Nellie Melba and Emmy Destinn. He wrote songs for John McCormack and Lotte Lehmann. By the late 1930s Hageman was composing in Hollywood, scoring westerns for John Ford and earning six Academy Award nominations. In Hollywood, he had drinks with John Wayne, rubbed shoulders with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, and shared the screen with Louis Armstrong and Elizabeth Taylor. Richard Hageman: From Holland to Hollywood is the first critical biography to reconstruct Hageman's colorful life while recreating the cultural milieu in which he flourished: opera in America during the first half of the twentieth century and film scoring in Hollywood in the heyday of the studio system. Here Hageman's most important works are analyzed in depth for the first time, from his famous art song, "Do Not Go, My Love" and his opera Caponsacchi, to his film scores such as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and 3 Godfathers. This biography offers a compelling read for opera lovers, film fans, and American history enthusiasts alike.

Film music is as old as cinema itself. Years before synchronized sound became the norm, projected moving images were shown to musical accompaniment, whether performed by a lone piano player or a hundred-piece orchestra. Today film music has become its own industry, indispensable to the marketability of movies around the world.
Film Music: A Very Short Introduction is a compact, lucid, and thoroughly engaging overview written by one of the leading authorities on the subject. After opening with a fascinating analysis of the music from a key sequence in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, Kathryn Kalinak introduces readers not only to important composers and musical styles but also to modern theoretical concepts about how and why film music works. Throughout the book she embraces a global perspective, examining film music in Asia and the Middle East as well as in Europe and the United States. Key collaborations between directors and composers--Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, Akira Kurosawa and Fumio Hayasaka, Federico Fellini and Nino Rota, to name only a few--come under scrutiny, as do the oft-neglected practices of the silent film era. She also explores differences between original film scores and compilation soundtracks that cull music from pre-existing sources.
As Kalinak points out, film music can do many things, from establishing mood and setting to clarifying plot points and creating emotions that are only dimly realized in the images. This book illuminates the many ways it accomplishes those tasks and will have its readers thinking a bit more deeply and critically the next time they sit in a darkened movie theater and music suddenly swells as the action unfolds onscreen.
About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

Settling the Score situates the classical Hollywwod film score and its practice in historical, theoretical and musical context. Kathryn Kalinak examines the conventions and strategies underpinning film scoring in Hollywood, investigating what has been considered the most influential and powerful relationship to have evolved between music and film, the classical Hollywood model. Beginning with the earliest experiments in musical accompaniment carried out in the Edison laboratories. Kalinak uses archival material to outline the history of music and film in America. Focusing on the scores of several key composers of the sound era, including Erich Wolfgang Korngold's ""Captain Blood"", Max Steiner's ""The Informer"", Bernard Herrmann's ""The Magnificent Ambersons"", and David Raskin's ""Laura"", Kalinak concludes that classical scoring conventions were designed to ensure the dominance of narrative exposition. Her analyses of contemporary work such as John Williams ""The Empire Strikes Back"" and Basil Poledouris ""Robocop"" demonstrate how the traditions of the classical era continue to influence scoring practices today. Underlying the author's historical investigation is an inquiry into the nature of film music itself. Exposing the visual bias in western culture in general and in film studies in particular. Kalinak argues that music is a fundamental part of the filmic exerience. She constructs a model for the perception of film that takes into account the shared power of image and sound in shaping response. Using contemporary theoy, ""Settling the Score"" makes the case that music should be an integral part of film analysis.