Saying It With Songs
Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc
Published:28th Nov '13
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
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- Paperback£30.49(9780199842223)
In the late 1920s, Hollywood's conversion from silent to synchronized-sound film production not only instigated the convergence of the film and music industries but also gave rise to an extraordinary period of song use in American cinema. Saying It With Songs considers how the increasing interdependence of Hollywood studios and Tin Pan Alley music publishing firms influenced the commercial and narrative functions of popular songs in a variety of film genres. Whereas most scholarship on film music of the period focuses on adaptations of Broadway musicals, Saying It With Songs examines the functions of songs in a variety of non-musical genres, including melodramas, romantic comedies, Westerns, prison dramas, and action-adventure films, and shows how filmmakers tested and refined their approach to songs in order to reconcile the tension produced by three competing forces: the spectacle of song performance, the classical norms of storytelling, and the established conventions of background orchestral scoring inherited from the period of silent cinema. By 1931, a so-called "song glut" led the studios to curtail their use of popular music in favor of a growing alternative -- the classical film score -- but popular songs continued to fulfill critical functions of narration in Hollywood films of subsequent decades. Written in language accessible to film and music scholars as well as general readers, Saying It With Songs illuminates the seminal origins of the popular song score aesthetic of American cinema.
Combining archival research with impressive scholarship, Spring offers a stimulating, provocative, and often paradigm-shifting study of how popular music shaped the very definition of cinema in its transformation from a silent to a sound medium. Lucid and lively, a must-read for anyone interested in the convergence of film and popular song in Hollywood. * Kathryn Kalinak, author of Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood and Film Music: A Very Short Introduction *
Finally, a book that creatively covers popular song's contribution to the coming of sound. Katherine Spring's SAYING IT WITH SONGS is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the connections between Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley. * Rick Altman, University of Iowa *
An engaging and thought-provoking exploration of heretofore largely uncharted territory- that transition between the coming of synchronized sound and the emergence of classical Hollywood practice. Combining archival research into the corporate and legal maneuverings of the studios as they move to take over music publishing with nicely articulated readings of films from the late 1920s and early 1930s, Saying It With Songs maps out the boom-and-bust cycle of early musicals and the reaction against them before musical and narrative conventions 'settle' around 1933. * Robynn Stilwell, Georgetown University *
Essential reading for historians of film and popular music. In it, the author combines impressive scholarship with conceptual clarity, making accessible to readers the complex changes that took place in the motion picture and music businesses resulting from the coming of sound * The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television *
This title will also be of interest for researchers of popular music, since it gives a broad introduction of how one kind of pop song (the film theme song) was established, promoted by radio, sheet music and naturally in the movies and influenced/lured audiences. * Dr. A. Ebert, Pop Culture Shelf *
ISBN: 9780199842216
Dimensions: 160mm x 239mm x 20mm
Weight: 490g
256 pages