Breaking Point

GWTW restored Steiner to the top rank of film composers; and in 1940, Jack Warner assigned him to a series of A-pictures that remain jewels in that studio’s crown. In assessing scores for such movies as The Letter and Sergeant York, this chapter details the instrumental experimentation Steiner used to create fresh sounds (an aspect of his work often neglected). Max also was overjoyed to become a father: son Ronald, he hoped, would continue the Steiner musical dynasty. But years of nonstop work, worsening financial problems, and failing eyesight led the composer to suffer a breakdown in 1941. According to Louise, Steiner—usually a kind and generous man—exploded in a rage, striking his wife with a glass ashtray and hitting her in an apparent mental breakdown. Their subsequent separation initiated years of personal unhappiness, amid one of the most creative periods of Steiner’s life.

Copland on Hollywood

This chapter provides a critical discussion on Copland’s writings about film music, particularly the lecture he delivered at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) but also in his other publications, such as his book What to Listen for in Music and his articles in the popular press. In the MoMA lecture, a reflection of Copland’s initial experiences in Hollywood composing the score for Lewis Milestone’s film Of Mice and Men, he provides a critical assessment of Hollywood’s industrial enterprise and contemporary film composers such as Max Steiner, George Antheil, Ernst Toch, Warner Jansen, and Alfred Newman. Copland’s later writings present a synthesized and theoretic approach to the varied functions of music in film that became influential in subsequent film music scholarship.

Revueltas Sánchez, Silvestre (1899–1940)

Silvestre Revueltas was a Mexican modernist composer and violinist. Known mainly for his references to modern Mexican culture, Revueltas is regarded as an essential figure during the Mexican modernist and nationalist movement in music. He composed chamber works, vocal pieces, and music for larger symphonic orchestras, and was also one of the most successful film composers in the Mexican film industry during the 1930s. Suffering from severe alcoholism and health problems, Revueltas died of pneumonia in December 1940.

Analyzing Chromaticism in Film

This chapter provides a set of small analytical case studies meant to illustrate important methodological and interpretive issues that arise in the study of chromatic film music. Five central topics organize these analyses, each with interesting ramifications for the structure and expressive content of film music: contextuality, distance, voice leading, equivalence, and patterning. Examples are drawn from a range of film composers and styles, with special emphasis placed on the idiosyncratic and influential work of Bernard Herrmann. A recurring theme throughout is that of leitharmonie—the use of chords and harmonic progressions in a motivic- and symbolic-rich fashion. Increasing emphasis is placed on hermeneutics and the issue of how music, and harmony in particular, aid listeners in structuring and interpreting filmic narrative.

Neo-Riemannian Theory at the Movies

This chapter is dedicated to explaining the methodology of neo-Riemannian theory (NRT) and analysis. The historical background of NRT is introduced, and an inventory of transformations, including the well-known neo-Riemannian operators (L, P, and R) is laid out in a user-friendly manner. Important issues for NRT, including harmonic combinatoriality, parsimony, tonal agnosticism, and spatiality, are all introduced and connected to the analysis of film music. Special attention is given to the associative content of triadic relationships, with two progressions of particular interest to film composers—T6 and S—explored in depth. A pair of step-by-step model analyses from Waltz with Bashir and Batman: Mask of the Phantasm are presented as straightforward and difficult cases for neo-Riemannian techniques, respectively. The chapter concludes with the introduction of tonal space visualizations, such as the Tonnetz and transformation networks, and demonstrations through analysis of themes from The Da Vinci Code and Scott of the Antarctic.

Frustration

This chapter focuses on Mancini's work on the large-scale space alien film Lifeforce (1985). Mancini's handwritten sketches for his score to the film reveals how important the job was to him, coming at this stage of his career. At last someone was offering him the kind of blockbuster science fiction epic that John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, and even the young guys like James Horner (Brainstorm [1984]) and Alan Silvestri (The Abyss [1989]) were getting. With Lifeforce he might join the new ruling class of film composers on its own terms. However, the film was being supervised by Cannon Pictures, part of the infamous movie brokerage firm the Cannon Group. They had made their money by funding quick and cheap genre films on a one-time basis, turning a profit by almost immediately handing them over to their video-release branch. It was decided that Lifeforce would be chopped down to a more manageable length and into a form where most of the long reflective or descriptive visual sequences would be truncated. Along with them, their music had to go.

Looking Back, Looking On

This chapter discusses the legacy of Henry Mancini. Mancini should be remembered for three contributions to popular culture: first the reinventing, the freshening of film scoring in the 1960s. Mancini offered to the young Kennedy-era generation his own bright and clear sophisticated style—as clean and courteous as mainstream pop, but as cool and knowing as modern jazz. His second contribution was his repackaging of the melodic material from those colorful scores into jazz-pop record albums for home listening (coinciding with the invention of the stereo vinyl disc and high-fidelity recording techniques) that put his memorable tunes and orchestral inventiveness directly into people's lives and gave him, unlike past film composers, fame under his own name. Third was his reintroduction of lyricism into popular music—of carefully composed, personally expressive, harmonically interesting melody writing that had flourished once, then dried up in the 1950s when a cold war reigned between capitalism and communism as between one war-torn generation and their anxious offspring.