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Popular music studies is a rapidly expanding field with changing emphases and agenda. This is a multi-volume resource for this area of study
Beginning with the earliest experiments in musical accompaniment carried out in the Edison Laboratories, Kathryn Kalinak uses archival material to outline the history of American music and film. 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 Raksin’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.
Westerns may have had their heyday, but they remain popular. The greatest films from 1914, when The Squaw Man and The Virginian were among the genre's best, through 2001, when American Outlaws and Texas Rangers were tops, are the subject of this work. For each year, the author names the outstanding western films in the following categories: picture, screenplay (original and adaptation), direction, cinematography, music, male and female leading roles, and male and female supporting roles. Also for each year, the author lists the westerns that received Academy Award nominations (and those that won), makes note of the births and deaths of notable actors, directors, producers, composers, cinematographers, authors and other such personalities, and describes the genre's significant achievements.
Announcements for the following year included in some vols.
Among the many fine examples of film scores by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957), the score for The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) stands out the most. Winner of the Academy Award(TM) for best dramatic score in 1938, it is seen by many as the archetypal accompaniment to a Warner Brothers swashbuckler, and it established Korngold as one of the leading exponents of film score composition at a formative point in its history. In Erich Wolfgang Korngold's The Adventures of Robin Hood: A Film Score Guide, author Ben Winters uses manuscript and archival research to challenge preconceived notions about the score's composer and its authorship. In the first two chapters, Winters examines Korngold's...
Proceedings of the Little Bighorn Legacy Symposium, held in Billings, Montana, August3-6, 1994.
Film Music: A History explains the development of film music by considering large-scale aesthetic trends and structural developments alongside socioeconomic, technological, cultural, and philosophical circumstances. The book’s four large parts are given over to Music and the "Silent" Film (1894--1927), Music and the Early Sound Film (1895--1933), Music in the "Classical-Style" Hollywood Film (1933--1960), and Film Music in the Post-Classic Period (1958--2008). Whereas most treatments of the subject are simply chronicles of "great film scores" and their composers, this book offers a genuine history of film music in terms of societal changes and technological and economic developments within the film industry. Instead of celebrating film-music masterpieces, it deals—logically and thoroughly—with the complex ‘machine’ whose smooth running allowed those occasional masterpieces to happen and whose periodic adjustments prompted the large-scale twists and turns in film music’s path.
A masterful and original classical composer as well as a renowned composer of film scores, Ernst Toch (1887 1964) made a permanent contribution to music in this important and widely praised book. Based on a series of lectures given at Harvard in 1944 and first published in 1948, this book is a brilliant examination of the materials and concepts that are the basic building blocks of music harmony, melody, counterpoint, and form. An admirable reconciliation of traditional and modern (mainly 12-tone) trends in composition, this book shows all types of writing must respond to psychological wants of the listener and how similar goals may be achieved in seemingly opposed styles. Illustrating his d...
A wide-ranging look at the role of music in film.
Sound has always been an integral component of the moviegoing experience. Even during the so-called “silent era,” motion pictures were regularly accompanied by live music, lectures, and sound effects. Today, whether we listen to movies in booming Dolby theaters or on tiny laptop speakers, sonic elements hold our attention and guide our emotional responses. Yet few of us are fully aware of the tremendous collaborative work, involving both artistry and technical wizardry, required to create that cinematic soundscape. Sound, the latest book in the Behind the Silver Screen series, introduces key concepts, seminal moments, and pivotal figures in the development of cinematic sound. Each of the...