Beyond
the Soundtrack. Representing
Music in Cinema
by Daniel Goldmark,
Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert,
Editors
University of California Press, Berkeley,
2007
333 pp., illus. 19 b/w photographs, 2
tables, 5 music examples. Trade,
$60.00, £35.00; paper, $24.95, £14.95
ISBN: 978-0-520-25069-7 ISBN: 978-0-520-25070-3.
Reviewed by Jan Baetens
University of Leuven
jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.be
Beyond the Soundtrack is much more than
just another collection of proceedings
(in this case of a conference hosted by
the University of Minnesota in 2004).
Thanks to the innovative claims of the
editors introduction and the outstanding
quality of its various chapters, this
volume has everything to become a landmark
publication in the (too slowly) growing
field of film and music studies.
As convincingly argued by Claudia Gorbman
in her seminal study Unheard Melodies,
film music is supposed as its best when
it goes unnoticed, an observation closely
linked with the film industrys recycling
of a specific type of music, the postromantic
symphony, a default option in many traditional
Hollywood movies that helped bridging
the gap between the pre-cinematographic
tastes of the audiences and the new forms
of cinematographic narrative. This collection
exemplarily edited by a team of film scholars
and musicologists does, however, not limit
itself to update and renew our common
frames of reading film music, often reduced
to two stereotypical discussions: that,
first, of the difference between diegetic
(onscreen) and nondiegetic (underscore
or pit music), and that, second, of the
convergence or divergence between what
we see and what we hear (with the infamous
mickey-mousing or acoustic
mimicry in the role of the bad guy and
sound-vision contrast in that of the good
one). Beyond the Soundtrack achieves,
on the contrary, a complete overthrow
of these traditional interpretive frames,
proposing, and excitingly illustrating,
a real Copernican revolution. Far from
considering film music as a lucky or unlucky
accompaniment of the films language,
the editors suggest that it is the latter
that should be seen as a representation
of the former. Film, then, is no longer
complete by a score or a soundtrack, it
is, on the contrary, a way of embodying
a musical experience (this is the reversal
the authors of this book call the representation
of music by film).
The volume is organized following the
three dimensions that shape this new approach
of film music: 1) meaning: how
can film be studied as a way of visualizing
music, i.e. a semiotic experience known
to be meaningful yet very difficult to
conceptualize by verbal means; 2) agency:
how does music transform, create, question,
contest the global meaning of the cinematographic
world?; and 3) identity: does music,
which can express almost anything, mean
something, or does it merely represent
itself, i.e. something that is beyond
or beneath meaning in the traditional
sense of the word? Most essays in the
book obviously cover all three of these
dimensions, and it is, therefore, not
always easy to understand why this or
that particular chapter obeys primarily
to this or that aspect of film music.
But the merits of each essay make the
reader forget almost immediately the overall
structure of the book, which is a little
artificial, and focuses exclusively on
their own specific insights and thought-provoking
hypotheses. The 16 texts are without any
exception more than worth reading, and
most of them respond quite directly to
the stakes raised by the editors
preface. Since it would be unfair to mention
or quote this contributor rather than
that one, I would like to single out some
of the fields of research opened and
deepened, widened, or reinforced
by the essays.
First, the reinterpretation of the relationship
between the postromantic symphony and
cinema, and the clearly formulated idea
that the successful emerging form of narrative
cinema can be understood as a transfer
or transposition of an existing cultural
form shaped by symphonic music and its
ideological underpinnings, such as the
target-oriented narrative structure, the
exteriorization of subject-located impressions,
the tension between order and chaos, individual
and society, etc. Various articles disclose
important historical evidence to foreground
this link between film narrative and symphonic
music, suggesting how films have been
taking the place of an outdated musical
experience that was no longer possible
in itself.
Second, the critical reappropriation of
Adornos heritage. Clearly, Adorno
is the main theoretical point of reference
for most of the contributors to the volume,
yet nobody is reading Adorno uncritically.
The creative and productive role of popular
and commercial music within film is never
despised, while the Adorno-Eisler plea
for a negative relationship
between and vision does not function as
an unchallengeable dogma as it occurs
more than often in critical readings of
film music.
Third but of course not last
Beyond the Soundtrack manages also
to establish a permanent movement of back
and forth between the past and the present,
between auteur cinema and Hollywood movies,
between film and television, high and
low, and so on. The book does not fall
prey to established divisions in film
theory and the healthy acceptance of bad
film music as well as the clever refusal
of any idealization of good
film music, is paramount to its global
achievement.