Seeing Through Music

Hollywood film music is often mocked as a disreputably "applied" branch of the art of composition that lacks both the seriousness and the quality of the classical or late-romantic concert and operatic music from which it derives. Its composers in the 1930s and '40s were themselves often scornful of it and aspired to produce more 'serious' works that would enhance their artistic reputation.

Author of Mahler: Symphony No. 3, The Life of Mahler, and Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music: Singing Devils and Distant Sounds.

Introduction: Approaches, Problems, and the Great Divide
Part I Music Into Film: Critical Cross-Fades
1. Men's Musicology/Women's Films: Meanings of Late Romanticism
2. Exploitation and Seduction: Converging Responses to Popular Opera and Film
3. Into the Mists...Subjective Realms (and the Undoing of Men?): Film's Critique of Music
Part II Watching Symphonies: Cautionary Tales
4. Symphonic Narratives (and Promiscuous Pleasure): Film Music and Changing Perceptions of the Symphony in the Nineteenth Century
5. Return of the Undone Women: Hollywood's Music and the Critical History of Late Romanticism
6. Modernism and 'the Image of the Man': Hollywood Interprets Musical Modernism
Notes
Index