ABSTRACT
The musicological study of high-earning popular movies can easily seem far-fetched. Enthusiasts for their scores might distrust claims that film music was invented before film, or that the things we all say in praise or disparagement of the music for Star Wars or the Indiana Jones series rely upon attitudes and ideas that were current long before such films were made. But behind the web of slippery terms like ‘late-romantic’ (capital or small ‘r’), ‘classical,’ ‘neoclassical,’ ‘leitmotif,’ ‘symphonic,’ even ‘score’, lie tangled lines of cultural ideas and practices from times before our own. Some of these lines are easily traced; others have been suggested for possibly tendentious reasons but nonetheless borne fruit in critical assumptions, terminology, and modes of analysis that are now part of the baggage of contemporary film-music discussion. Within that baggage lurk serious questions about ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’ and the cultural value accorded to each, and by whom. History is often closer than we think.
