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.