Katherine Spring, Saying it with Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema .Michael Slowik, After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926–1934.
2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 57; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/screen/hjw035
ISSN1460-2474
Autores Tópico(s)Radio, Podcasts, and Digital Media
ResumoThe publication within a single year of two books concerned with Hollywood’s early deployment of recorded music may not have occurred entirely by chance, inasmuch as both writers acknowledge receipt from the American Musicological Society of an endowment supporting publication. Whether or not their Publications Committee was influenced by the fact, the volumes complement each other to mutual advantage, since between them they analyze the various ways in which Hollywood attempted to integrate prerecorded songs and instrumental music into films. Both authors reveal how the studios discovered that integrating recorded music was an altogether trickier thing to do than might have been expected. Today’s cinemagoers take it for granted that music will almost always be restrained from disrupting narrative’s right of way, but that was by no means obvious to producers of sound films in 1926. A variety of factors kept studios working out fresh ways of combining music and image. The first of these was the sheer novelty for audiences of experiencing prerecorded music synchronized with pictures. Initially the music was, therefore, the main centre of audience attention. Studios understood that and marketed early sound films accordingly. Katherine Spring (concentrating mainly on song) and Michael Slowik (dividing his attention between orchestral music and song) describe the broad range of musical genres they drew on.
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