Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This book provides a comprehensive and lively introduction to the major trends in film scoring from the silent era to the present day, focussing not only on dominant Hollywood practices but also offering an international perspective by including case studies of the national cinemas of the UK, France, India, Italy, Japan and the early Soviet Union. The book balances wide-ranging overviews of film genres, modes of production and critical reception with detailed non-technical descriptions of the interaction between image track and soundtrack in representative individual films. In addition to the central focus on narrative cinema, separate sections are also devoted to music in documentary and animated films, film musicals and the uses of popular and classical music in the cinema. The author analyses the varying technological and aesthetic issues that have shaped the history of film music, and concludes with an account of the modern film composer's working practices.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface
• 1 The 'silent' cinema
• 2 Sound on track
• 3 Hollywood's Golden Age: narrative cinema and the classical film score
• 4 Stage and screen
• 5 The mainstream divides: postwar horizons in Hollywood
• 6 'Never let it be mediocre': film music in the United Kingdom
• 7 Defectors to television: the documentary film Animation
• 8 Film music in France
• 9 Global highlights: early sound films in the Soviet Union
• India: Bollywood and beyond
• From Italy to Little Italy
• Japan
• 10 Popular music in the cinema
• 11 Classical music in the cinema
• 12 State of the art: film music since the New Hollywood

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

With the intention of offering an overview of film-music history rather than a "film-music theory" or a "history of film music literature," Cooke (Univ. of Nottingham, UK) has written a book useful to readers with or without musical background. Perceptible throughout is Cooke's awareness and integration of previous film literature: he includes early accompaniment and film-theory studies as well as postmodern writings and the works of film music scholars such as Martin Miller Marks (Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895-1924, CH, Sep'97, 35-0192) and Annette Davison (Hollywood Theory, Non-Hollywood Practice: Cinema Soundtracks in the 1980s and 1990s, CH, Oct'04, 42-0833). In addition to US and European live-action films, Cooke covers music in animated films and films from other parts of the world. Though film-music scholars may wish for a more thorough explanation of sources mentioned (for example, why is Rudolf Arnheim's Film as Art, 1957, important to the study of film music?), they will appreciate a historical study that incorporates music and film studies yet keeps the film music, not the films, its focus. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. M. Goldsmith Nicholls State University