I’m not sure why I started writing about film music. When Greta was a professor at UC-Santa Cruz (1988-2001), I spent much of my off-time from Wesleyan on that beautiful campus, which happened to have some fine specialists in global cinema who had gathered a serious archive of VHS and then DVD copies of fascinating films. Somehow, my investigations of mainstream-minority interaction in American music also carried over to Hollywood’s stereotyped approaches in film scores and soundtracks. The two interests flowed into a creative urge to write towards an ethnomusicology of film, a topic that was just creeping into SEM convention papers. So following my tendency to make a network, I started contacting others to see if there was any good work out there I could learn from and gather, eventually resulting in the book Global Soundtracks: Worlds of Film Music (Wesleyan University Press, 2008), the first-ever anthology on the topic.
It’s an odd anthology- as editor, I wrote large chunks, covering both the Hollywood material and making a stab at methods for comparative research. I had to really struggle to find contributors, as so few people were thinking along lines congenial to my project. I asked Latin America cinema specialists for suggestions, assuming somebody must be writing about music in the films of so many countries over time, only to hear that nobody wrote about the music in their field. Finally, they found me a scholar who was willing to go beyond her first field and write about a fascinating, if very offbeat, Mexican movie that would not have been an obvious choice for the first-ever such study for a vast area. The search for an African contributor was similar. I was able to turn to local Wesleyan colleagues for Indonesia, Tamil cinema, and Disney’s view of Latin America as I tried to gesture towards a broad perspective on world cinema. At least the anthology offered a starting point, and it has been cited widely as the ethnomusicology of film has begun to mature.
Meanwhile, I wrote a variety of short pieces about film music that are included in this section of my writings. Some were solicited, some volunteered. By the time I retired in 2016, I moved off this track of thinking and research, and am even able to go to the movies and not pay much attention to the soundtrack after years of intensive listening and note-taking. But I still go to screenings where directors are present for Q & A and ask them about issues in the score or soundtrack. Usually, they’re delighted to answer a substantive query about their craft, as most questions are about the politics or personalities in the film.
I became friends with the wonderful ethnomusicologist Tullia Magrini around 2000 and hoped to do collaborative work with her, but alas, she died young. When I was asked to contribute to a Magrini memorial volume dedicated to Mediterranean music, I was eager but nonplussed, as I had not been researching that region. But as it was my film music period, I thought about the work of Srdjan Karanović, a fine Yugoslav (to use an old term) director who had become a friend during his residency at Wesleyan. His movies of the 1970s and1980s are fascinating explorations of social issues and take their music, both score and soundtrack, seriously in culturally relevant ways. I turned to this work as the basis of a short article for the title topics of “interpretation, performance, identity.”
This piece was designed for a journal special issue on world cinema music. I had been working around Soviet/post-Soviet materials for a while, sometimes as a member of a working group on Stalinist cinema through Greta’s circle of contacts who enjoyed having a music perspective. I had noticed the fascinating story of Central Asian film, particularly as it transitioned into world cinema after Soviet republics became independent countries. I thought of a methodological framework and turned out this somewhat tentative article. In response, Ted Levin pointed out a couple of errors and omissions, for which I’m grateful, but I think the approach holds up.
I had long experience with Yiddish-language cinema, dating back to the early 1970s. At that time, it was almost impossible to see the few surviving films of Jewish-American independent cinema, which dated back to the 1910s and faded out in the 1950s (there’s been a revival in recent years). In its heyday, the Yiddish film drew huge crowds in the US, Europe, and across the Jewish diaspora, even drawing attention from mainstream American media. It was neglected until J. Hoberman’s brilliant book Bridge of Light appeared in 1991.
For me, this cottage industry was just one example of a number of independent subcultural cinemas in the US and elsewhere, all operating in the shadow of the mainstream system of a given society. Hence my interest in local Central Asian cinema cited above. I guess I titled this article “unintentional history” because of the necessarily ironic way we view the great Yiddish films of the 1930s, given the impending destruction of European Jewry in World War Two. The most famous film, Yidl mitn fidl, featured a mixed American and local Polish cast on location in a shtetl, or small market town. The scenes of local town life and music-making and particularly the extended wedding dance sequence now have a documentary, even ethnographic dimension that was unintended at the time, as we have hardly any such extant footage. The plot resolution has the American cast (tho given as Polish Jews) on a liner heading to the US with people waving goodbye. It’s hard not to know that those left behind were mostly murdered, while the American crew safely survived.
Around 2011 I returned to film music in a more interdisciplinary vein. Film is a mélange of very different layers that get soldered together: dialogue, sets, costumes, camera work, sounds, and music each have independent lives and the task of the team is to make you not notice that. I decided to see if I could find any parallelism between the built environment and the constructed music of films after reading a fascinating book by James Sanders, Celluloid Skyline, which minutely examines Hollywood films shot in New York City. His deep knowledge of the history of set design and construction made me think about the film score as partner. Taking a sample of his examples – The Heiress, Life with Father, and Dead End- I actually began to see some kind of coupling going on, so I extended the survey to a few other films, including European movies, to check out the analytical possibilities, and I even threw in a Tamil film I knew (it’s featured in Global Soundtracks). That movie was one of a number of films all set in a small, stage set-like Scottish castle, so I found a way to include not just constructed sets, but also settings in my attempt at methodology. It was fun and illuminating.
I explained the project to architecture and film studies colleagues at Wesleyan, and they found it innovative and stimulating. So I was encouraged to try journals in those fields with the article I was writing. No such luck. I ran smack into the disciplinary walls of journals, being rejected by two in architecture and two in film studies. I was told that the article was innovative, but not suitable. A film history and architecture history journal said it wasn’t history. Another stricture was that I couldn’t use the word “architecture” in this context. This was kind of entertaining, to the point that I showed the rejection letters to a graduate seminar to enlighten them about the limitations of the interdisciplinary studies we all tell them to engage in.
Eventually I realized I had to trim and reshape the article for the Journal of the Society for American Music, which had just had a film music issue. This meant cutting the European and Tamil sections, and that worked. Here, I offer the full version of the piece in whatever shape I left it in, “architecture” and all- probably it could be refined and relocated somewhere should opportunity arise. But I was able to give the fuller account on a long lecture tour in 2012 that took me from Berkeley and Michigan to Oxford, Cambridge, Lisbon, Bern, and Vienna, getting some good positive feedback.