Film Music A History [Paperback]

Film Music: A Historyexplains the development of film music by considering large-scale aesthetic trends and structural developments alongside socioeconomic, technological, cultural, and philosophical circumstances.

The books 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 dealslogically and thoroughlywith 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 musics path.

Part One: Music and the Silent Film (18941927)

Chapter One: Origins, 18941905

Chapter Two: The Nickelodeon, 19051915

Chapter Three: Feature Films, 19151927

Part Two: Classic Film Music (19271950)

Chapter Four: The Coming of Sound (19271929)

1. transition:Edisons ideas
2. Early technologies (pre-1927) (Edison, De Forester, etc.)
3. Anticipations of a great future (Carl Van Vechten, George Antheil, etc.)
4. Problems of amplification, synchronization
5. Vitaphone: Don Juan, The Jazz Singer, etc.
6. Other systems and their costs, usefulness, adaptations, etc.
7. lH