The aims of this research project are to 1) historicize the Classical Hollywood orchestra, and 2) interrogate the cultural significations of the orchestral sound that Hollywood both deployed and helped to form.

This article is fascinating as a historical document (from 1942); it backs up a culturally specific view of the superiority of absolute music using historical and psychological evidence.  The author, Dr. Horace B. English, was a professor of psychology at Ohio State University.  He argues that a film experience which is dominantly aural does not work psychologically.  His case in point is Fantasia which was purely received by “the musically sensitive.”  English offers historical and psychological arguments for the inevitable failure of any attempt to fit visual images to music.  Historically, all aural-visual combinations, namely theater and opera, have used sound to support drama; the story always comes first.  Psychologically, the ear is specialized to receive symbolic signals, while the eye is specialized for concrete, representative signals.  The dependence of English’s argument on a cultural privileging of symphonic and chamber music – which he calls the more “noble” forms – becomes clear in his insistence that music written independently of a story generates a wide range of unique responses in listeners (agreed), while music written to fit a story does not.  English’s argument also depends on a privileging of individuality, expressed most clearly in his conclusion, “When we are really responding to music, we are creating something unique and individual; and at the moment of such creation, anyone else’s response, be it ever so beautiful, is only a distraction and an annoyance.”

Ernest Lindgren is a self-reflective and knowledgeable film lover whose views are informed by his having witnessed the transition from silent to sound films; his goal in writing “The Art of the Film” wass to provide film goers with the critical skills necessary to view film intelligently.  Two chapters are of particular interest to me: “The Use of Sound,” and “Film Music.”  Regarding the use of sound, Lindgren is highly critical of sound that merely duplicates the information already provided by the image.  He provides a psychological argument for why the principles guiding the use of sight and sound in film are different.  Also, in an approach I’ve seen no other critic use and which seems to me quite fruitful, Lindgren compares sound in literature to sound in film, quoting from Tolstoy and Dickinson in order to demonstrate the unique functioning of sound (it can be tuned out and it can represent something other than the immediate visual surroundings).  Regarding music, Lindgren compares its use in silent films to its use in sound films, the latter being distinguished by its intermittency seeing as how the music was no longer the only sound present.  Ultimately, good film music is film music that is “not heard,” a view Lindgren rightly claims is widely held.  Lindgren again employs psychological principles in explaining the proper use of music, and though he lacks the terms diegetic and nondiegetic the distinction is an important one to him. 
Lindgren illustrates all his aesthetic opinions with concrete examples from films, which not only adds immeasurably to his arguments but also provides useful information about what films were innovative in certain techniques.  Interestingly, Lindgren ends the film music chapter with a discussion of poetry used in voice-overs, a discussion he put off from the sound chapter, where he also discussed voice-overs, because he thought it proper to music.  The synonymy of poetry and music was operative in the middle ages, but I’ve not before encountered it in the 20th century.  This is not relevant to my present purposes but is perhaps something to keep in mind for another time.
 

This book is amazing; it situates its contributions to our knowledge of silent film music – which our copious – within the existing body of literature, providing a solid point of departure for all further study. Marks gives extensive consideration to the availability and state of the historical evidence, and works to piece together the surviving (often partial) scores, advertisements and reviews in order to create a more complete picture of the silent era’s musical practices then has elsewhere been achieved. Marks debunks the notion that there was a period during which anything went musically as long as it covered up the noise of the projector and compensated for the uncanny flatness of the moving image by looking at music for some of the proto-film technologies (vitascope, biograph and bioskop). The more compelling case of bioskop took place in Europe, however, and their film music practices were not immediately taken up in America. In 1909 Moving Picture World dubbed the majority of pianists inadequate movie accompaniests, and only months later Edison published its first guidelines for film accompaniment. Marks observes that the 1910-14 period has been subject to severe music scholarly neglect due to the perceived lack of evidence. Marks finds and considers numerous “special scores,” i.e. scores written specially for particular movies, that predate Birth of a Nation (1915), the oft cited “first.” Birth of a Nation gets its own chapter too, however, for it was a significant and influential achievement. Marks includes numerous facsimiles as well as transcriptions of the surviving parts/scores, and subjects them to paleographic as well as music analysis. I would say this is THE book for silent film music.

This documentary spends an unfortunate amount of time on a present day studio orchestra recreating the event of recording a hollywood film score. However, besides that there are enlightening discussions and examples of film scores by Max Steinr and Erich Korngold in particular, and conversations with then still living composer of Laura, David Raskin. The state of film music archives depicted is exciting and depressing: some scores from classical hollywood era survive but many were thrown away when studios ran short of space. Much film music research is devoted to reconstructing the partially surviving scores.  The technique for achieving synchrony between sound and image - which involves punches and streamers - is well illustrated.

1. Theater Music During the Boom Years

2. "Making Friends with Music": Music Education in the Classroom and Concert Hall

3. "Symphonies Under the Stars": The Romance of the Hollywood Bowl

4. The Art of Pageants, Plays, and Dance

5. Leaving a Legacy: Early Recording of Indigenous, Classical, and Popular Music

6. "An Invisible Empire in the Air": Broadcasting the Classics during the Golden Age

7. Music on Film: Hollywood and the Conversion to Sound

Chapter 7 of Musical Metropolis is devoted to “Music on Film: Hollywood and the Conversion to Sound,” with the goal of demonstrating music’s vital role in creating “an atmosphere or mood in both nonanimated and animated films,” though to my mind Marcus’s argument amounts to, ‘films had music so music was vital.’ Marcus’s history of film music is concise and informative, however. Marcus shows that during the silent era most musical accompanied was drawn from preexisting European art music, and that the idea of composing music for films came only gradually. Marcus credits Warner Bros.’s 1926 The Jazz Singer, presented using Vitaphone, with “demonstrat[ing] with finality that audiences wanted to hear music on film (167). Many theaters kept their orchestras for the first few years of sound films, using them as entertainment between viewings. “In 1929 theaters were by far the largest employer of musicians in the country,” but the financial strain put on theaters by the Depression combined with sound film put an end to that.
While I find the explanation, “Because music had become an essential part of filmmaking, each of the studios formed a music department following the conversion to sound,” (168) wanting, Marcus’s account of the early music departments is informative, including figures for number of musicians employed and the typical pay around 1930. Marcus then turns to in depth biographical and musical discussions of the three leading symphonic film score writers, Max Steiner (the pioneer of letimotivc symphonic underscoring), Erich Wolfgang Korngold (the face of high-art respectability) and Alfred Newman (less educated but master of subtlety), and then to a discussion of music in animated films at Warners and Disney.

Carol Flinn discusses the relationship between the film music practices of classical Hollywood and romantic aesthetics, arguing that Classical Hollywood felt nostalgia for a romantic past in which the subject’s ability to express himself through art was prized. She analyzes what critics and composers said of film music during the Classical Hollywood period; she does not analyze any films. Hollywood’s most obvious connection to romanticism is the adoption of Wagner’s leitmotifs. However, according to Flinn, Wagner’s music achieves unity through “additive blending” while film music achieves unity through “redundancy and overdetermination.” In Classical Hollywood, that is, the music should support what is already present in the image and narrative, running parallel rather than in counterpoint. Critics and composers repeatedly emphasize that film music should go unnoticed. This is at odds with the romantic privileging of music’s autonomy and ability to express the ineffable. Flinn reconciles this conflict by arguing that rhetoric about the deficiency of film music in fact refers to an anxiety about deficiencies in the film medium itself, namely in its inability to create the illusion of “fullness and cohesion.” Music succeeds in promoting as sense of fullness and cohesion in film.
Flinn’s psychoanalytical reading of Classical Hollywood film music is fairly convincing. The article is particularly useful for its copious quotation of critics and composers from the Classical Hollywood period on music.