The brief period of American sound film until roughly the mid-1940s was dominated by soundtracks and extradiegetic audio based on mostly sweet string orchestras, allusions to classical compositions and ballads. Then, in the 1950s and 60s, soundtrack composers increasingly used popular music of the decades before for police/detective/spy action productions, which would be in large […]
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Tag: Soundtrack
Musik im klassischen Film noir by Janina Müller (German) (2019)
Janina Müller’s study (“Music in classic film noir”) takes a close look at the scores of mostly the popular films noir and a few rather unknown ones. Here it means studying, juxtaposing and evaluating the scores of several films, while their uniqueness in comparison with standard Hollywood movies is questioned. As there is hardly one […]
Anxiety Muted. American Film Music … by Stanley C. Pelkey and Anthony Bushard (eds.) (2015)
In this volume the thirteen contributors research how in audiovisual media of the 1950s and 1960s (TV and cinema), the modern anxieties about conformity, urbanization, gender and family were represented audibly, that is, in sound of any kind or the lack thereof. This could be the soundtrack, music used in the media, but also all […]
Saying It With Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Hollywood … by Katherine Spring (2013
It may be hard for us today to imagine what moviegoers in the 1920s must have felt when they watched their first talkies in the cinemas. By now, there have been a number of movies describing just this peculiar sensation. But what the audience must have experienced when suddenly their movie stars uttered words could […]
The Occult Arts of Music: An Esoteric Survey… by David Huckvale (2013)
To start with: there are very, very few books that deal with this subject-matter. So finding literature about the music linked to the unspeakable, mysterious, secret and hidden (hence: lat. occultus) is interesting enough. But David Huckvale is not a novice when it comes to exotic topics, he is a writer and journalist who has […]