CineMusic? Constructing the Film Score (review)

Abstract

David Cooper, Christopher Fox and Ian Sapiro (eds.), CineMusic? Constructing the Film Score (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 220pp.Diversity can be a quality of ambiguous merit for a collection of essays to possess. What seems a pleasing postmodern plurality of voices for one reader might be, for another, a perceived lack of coherence. Or, to put a filmic slant on things (and to re-use a rather tired, if useful, cinematic simile), an essay collection is rather like Forrest Gump's 'box of chocolates'. Reaching into the eclectic contents of CineMusic? Constructing the Film Score, one really doesn't know what one is 'going to get'. Clearly, coeditor Christopher Fox believes this to be a consequence of film musicology's status as 'a very new enterprise' (ix) and he writes enthusiastically of a 'lack of inhibition' and an 'undogmatic candour' to the contributions (ix-x). While there are grounds, perhaps, for questioning this view of the discipline, and thus the diversity of the volume's contents, the book thankfully turns out rather more polished hazelnut caramels than half-baked coconut eclairs, and is certainly worth a speculative dip.Fox's short introduction reveals the collection's origins in the film music conferences held at the National Media Museum in Bradford (beginning 2005), but is really an extended acknowledgements section that does little to explain the selection of papers other than to emphasise their wide-ranging nature. This is not necessarily a criticism, though: trying to uncover latent themes in conference papers that were never intended to go together is often little more than an act of academic dishonesty, and the editors have thankfully refrained from trying to pull the wool over their readers' eyes in this regard. Instead, papers are grouped into three sensibly-labelled sections ('Scoring Processes', 'Popular Scores' and 'Narrativity'), framed by two composer interviews (with Trevor Jones and Michael Nyman), and followed by an afterword by Anahid Kassabian. Of these sections, the middle one on 'Popular Scores' works least well; its chapters are not inherently unconvincing, just a little under-developed, and a firmer editorial hand may have helped shape these better. Although there is insufficient space here to discuss each of the book's chapters in detail, I hope at least to give a taste of what's on offer.Devoting a section to 'scoring processes' is a bold move, especially as it forms the opening section of the book. The difficulty arises not with the subject, which is frequently fascinating, but with the way it is presented. In short, reading about different drafts of music, or the technical intricacies of the scoring process, is often hard going without the audio-visual illustration that makes these papers so enjoyable in a conference setting. Ian Sapiro and David Cooper's chapter on the evolution of Trevor Jones's score for Sea of Love (a nice counterfoil to the interview with the composer that precedes it) is a case in point. Although richly illustrated, it suffers all the more from its narrow focus on a single cue - a cue from a scene that did not even make it to the final cut of the film (32) and is thus not available for the reader to consult. This is the kind of chapter that would find a more natural home as part of a Scarecrow Film Score Guide, such as Cooper's own volume on Herrmann's The Ghost and Mrs Muir. For all its undoubted scholarly merit, its illumination of Jones's working methods, and the comprehensiveness of Sapiro and Cooper's approach, this chapter may well be skim-read by all but the most ardent Jones fans or those scholars particularly interested in compositional process.Miguel Mera's illuminating chapter benefits from the unique perspective the author occupies as a musicologist and film composer. In tracing the composition of his own music to a short film, Moth, from temp track to finished score, Mera is able to probe further into the nature of the collaborative process, highlighting the complex interplay of personalities and factors that dictate compositional choices. …

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