Film Music: A Very Short Introduction

Very Short Introductions #231

by Kathryn Kalinak

Film music is as old as cinema itself. Years before synchronized sound became the norm, projected moving images were shown to musical accompaniment, whether performed by a lone piano player or a hundred-piece orchestra. Today film music has become its own industry, indispensable to the marketability of movies around the world.

Film Music: A Very Short Introduction is a compact, lucid, and thoroughly engaging overview written by one of the leading authorities on the subject. After opening with a fascinating analysis of the music from a key sequence in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, Kathryn Kalinak introduces readers not only to important composers and musical styles but also to modern theoretical concepts about how and why film music works. Throughout the book she embraces a global perspective, examining film music in Asia and the Middle East as well as in Europe and the United States. Key collaborations between directors and composers--Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, Akira Kurosawa and Fumio Hayasaka, Federico Fellini and Nino Rota, to name only a few--come under scrutiny, as do the oft-neglected practices of the silent film era. She also explores differences between original film scores and compilation soundtracks that cull music from pre-existing sources.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Film, History, Audiobook, Art, Ebooks

160 pages, Paperback

First published February 24, 2010

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent intro to film music.

[Stan]

Not really sure what to rate, wasn't really what I was hoping it would be. I wanted a history of western film music from a cultural and technological development and instead got an academic and international approach! Wasn't a bad book, just the wrong reader

[Maisie Sexton · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Film music lies at the intersection of film and music”

“Background music—what is traditionally called the score—refers to the music playing in the background”

you learn something new every day I guess

[Kris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great little introduction that delivers exactly what it promises. It’s marketed as international and broad reaching, but luckily it doesn’t get too caught up in obscure foreign films — it gives Western filmmaking its due. Packed with good names and contains useful lists at the end.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very short yet quite extensive introduction to film music, spanning globally across some of the biggest film industries and interweaving history and politics.

[Cephalopodophil. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good introduction to film music with lots of transnational contexts.

[David Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book I read to research this post was Film Music A Very Short Introduction by Kathryn Kalinak which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Film music developed independently in Western Europe & the United States. Nobody is sure what the first film to have a soundtrack was or the first silent to be shown in a cinema accompanied by music. It caught on quickly though. One of the earliest films to have its own soundtrack was the 1915 Birth Of A Nation and it was co-composed by the director DW Griffith. A more recent development has been showing gratuitious acts of violence accompanied by light music. This happened in Tarantino's Reservoir Dog's where a police man was tortured and it helped drive home the horror of that. Another film which did this was A Clockwork Orange. Film music is generally the modern day equivalent of classical music. I know I used to listen to Classic FM and they frequently played music from films. Having said that there are soundtracks that are completely different. Take Bernard Herrman's score for Psycho where most of the impact that film has is due to the score which is wonderful. Some directors have a score written before they even have a script. They might have a rough outline and in the case of Peter Weir's Mosquito Coast composed by Jarre they could play the music as the actors were performing although in the case of that film, major changes were made to the final music score. In different countries you see different types of music score according to what is popular in that country. In the case of Slumdog Millionaire which won oscars for best song and best music score they used an established Indian film music composer even though the film was predominantly for the western market. I thoroughly enjoyed this book which although it's relatively short does contain a lot of information.

[K · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is good for anyone wishing to rapidly catch up on existing scholarly trends in film music studies. The chapter on theory, for example, is very useful as an overview of differing approaches to film music scholarship. However, it will not work as a textbook for any sort of class.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book nicely complemented the BBC documentary series "Sound of Cinema: The Music That Made The Movies". It covers a lot of bases in a short amount of chapters.

[Pieter Mannaerts · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short but very good and very legible introduction to the nature and history of film music.

[🌶 peppersocks 🧦 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reflections and lessons learned:
“...an audible definition of the emotion represented in the film...”

Familiar songs, new songs, songs written specifically for the storyline, score, underscore, click tracks... Randy Newman has done them all, and I’ve enjoyed and sought out further listening with all types, including excitement from indiekid icons such as Mansell, Greenwood, Albarn, Mothersbaugh, Air, Trent Reznor, Karen O and Underworld. I could list so many soundtracks and scores that I’ve enjoyed, songs discovered and played repeatedly often creating the imagery as a tie in. A love from music to the art of film to try and communicate and emote something in a different way. Contribution to the narrative and tonality, that back in the day we could take away as a memento from the cinema to continue a link to the film. Ooo, just lovely stuff!

This felt much more of a broad educational approach to the topic, but I think that’s what a book like this, clearly labelled as an introduction, needed - worldwide examples to reflect the range of the art

“...anchoring to a signifier... as if the music throws a net around the floating visual...”

[Stephen Theaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good when it focuses on the music, less convincing when it bangs on rather credulously about the theory (e.g. how could the psychoanalytic theorists know that babies are happy in the womb, let alone be sure that this feeling is what music recreates?), and the way that every non-European/US country's local styles and instruments are described as "native" and "indigenous" feels patronising and old-fashioned. The audiobook narrator is apparently human but sounds more like AI than any AI narrator I've heard – are there really any human narrators who can't pronounce Reservoir Dogs properly?

[iane]

This covers a surprising amount of ground in such a condensed space. I appreciate Kalinak's decision to foreground cinema across the globe, rather than focusing on Europe or America by default, and I particularly enjoyed the discussions of Hindi and Bengali film. Kalinak also spends some time on the inner workings of the contemporary film music business, and even if those parts have probably dated in the years since this book came out, I still learned a lot from them.

[M Pereira · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent foray into the history, cultural differences and scope of the film soundtrack. I love reading VSIs where I know a little bit but not a lot about a subject. There's so much about the film soundtrack and its history that I've learned about. One thing in particular is that film music has different cultural significance in countries around the world, from Tamil Sri Lanka to China. it's not just Erik Korngold and a singular historical narrative.

[Emma Jones-Gill · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 ⭐

A very useful book to get into film music. I'm glad I picked this up before the beast that is the Mervyn Cooke history of film music book.
The only reason it is not a 5 star is because some of the language used felt like a long word for the sake of a long word, where a simpler word would have been just as effective. The theory was easy to understand though, it was just those long words that threw me off.

[Riccardo L. Genova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Da semplice amante del cinema l'ho trovata un'ottima introduzione alla teoria della musica da film. Molto interessante è il punto di vista globale anche sulle cinematografie orientali come quella indiana, poco conosciuta dal pubblico occidentale

[Maria]

Another reviewer said he wasn’t the right reader for this book and I feel the same. I’ve seen many movies, but the author is constantly referencing movies I haven’t seen. This is more global than I expected.

[Michael Jolls · Rating 5 out of 5]

About a quarter of the way through reading this, I wanted to start suggesting it to friends. I think I need a copy of this excellent little book for my own library. Very enjoyable and informative to read.

[polzonetti pierpaolo · Rating 2 out of 5]

not a good synthesis

The book’s best part is the history of film music but for the rest does not provide enough core concepts and a glossary that can help students. It’s ok for the general reader.

[Charles M · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative but tries to cover too wide a field ( world cinema from the beginning to 2010) and as a consequence often just becomes an incoherent soporific list of movies and composers . Need some familiarity with musical terms to comprehend her points .

[Lovely Fortune · Rating 3 out of 5]

For Listening to Movies

Great class and great supplemental textbook. Taking this course really helped me understand and view the use of sound in movies differently.

[Cristina Aguilar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Me ha dado buenas ideas y tiene partes brillantes pero tiende demasiado a la enumeración (como muchos otros libros de cine). Al final se hace un poco pesado

[李沛璟 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting......but can't really understand some contexts without the knowledge of the films and the people mentioned in it. Can't wait to watch its recommended films !!!

[Audrey Kalman]

a good introduction

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very useful

[Simon Sweetman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love these short guides, well written. Great starting-point summaries.

[Alyssa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some very interesting information but overall felt a little...mushy.

[Andrew Reed · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short and sweet and I learned more than I thought I would!

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was leaning towards four stars until she wrote that Giorgio Moroder's music for "Metropolis" was 'disco.' Oy.

[Blair Hodgkinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know it's toted as "very short" but I thought there was a lot more to be told here. Still, a good and informative summary of film music's beginning to its changing present.