ABSTRACT
Music, sound and the moving image is without a doubt safely ensconced as both a field in musicology and as an interdisciplinary area in its own right. While there are many different ways to approach writing its history (tracing its roots in theatre and opera, studying early practices and their relationship to classical Hollywood scoring, a comparative study of how scoring traditions began and solidified internationally and so on), and while film music has been written and thought about since the earliest days of film, I would argue that the field as we know it actually begins to take shape with the publication of Claudia Gorbman’s Unheard Melodies in 1987.2 Following Unheard Melodies was a series of books throughout the 1990s, all of which came from film scholars.3 As musicologists’ interest in these works grew, and as musicology began to imagine including the study of film music, some scholars began to express their dissatisfaction with what they perceived as the musical imprecision, insensitivity or even incorrectness of these works. As a corrective to the – then and now – all-too-silent mainstream of film studies, these books were most welcome, but, it was whispered, they weren’t always so good musically.
