Global Soundtracks. Worlds of Film Music

by Mark Slobin, Editor
Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 2008
416 pp. illus. 17 b/w photos, 8 b/w figs. Trade, $85.00; paper, $34.95
ISBN: 978-0-8195-6881-6; ISBN: 978-0-8195-6882-3.

Reviewed by Jan Baetens
University of Leuven

In spite of the steadily growing interest in music as a scholarly topic in film studies, the soundtrack is still in many regards a hidden continent. There are various reasons for this persisting neglect: the bad reputation of traditional film music, scorned by Adorno and his followers; its very ‘invisibility’, convincingly studied by Claudia Gorbman in her seminal book Unheard Melodies (1987); the difficulty of mastering the musical metalanguage needed to communicate the gut feelings provoked by a film score; the frequent confusion between sound-track (which is now quite well known, thanks for instance to the numerous studies by Michel Chion) and music (which is not just a pars pro toto of the sound-track); and, most basically perhaps, the quasi-absence of training in music literacy in most film studies programmes.

Yet things are changing, fortunately. After the very interesting edited volume by Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert, Beyond the Soundtrack. Representing Music in Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007; see my review in Leonardo 41-4, 406-407), here is another collection, as attractive as the first one, but having a totally different tone and scope. As an ethnomusicologist, Slobin is not exclusively focused on the narrative function of music or on the history of musical performance within the film, either score or underscore, or within the theatre, during the silent cinema era. To this twofold dimension, whose importance he obviously continues to stress, he adds an aspect of film music that is so overwhelmingly active and present that it is systematically overlooked by all those who write on cinema: the contribution that film music makes to offer a credible socio-cultural and historical background of the story told and of the characters on screen. For film music does not only help to interpret what characters feel and what is happening or about to happen in the narrative, it makes us also understand the ethnic origins of a character, the features of the locale that serves as a backdrop to the story, the historical period in which the narrative is situated, and so on.

But how does film music reveal us that this character is, for instance, not a Polish but an Irish US immigrant and that the place and time were the story is set is “Texas 1868”, for instance? In this book, Mark Slobin demonstrates that the many answers that can be given to it are both amazingly straightforward and incredibly complex. On the one hand, and this is the hard side, it is impossible to do the right thing when one wants to reproduce in sound the idea of the abovementioned no longer totally Irish immigrant in a multifaceted Texas frontier situation around 1868. On the other hand, and this is the simple side, nobody seems to care, for there exists a conventional way of handling these problems, established at the time when Hollywood standardized the newly introduced film score and immediately imposed it as an almost universal model. This is the so-called “Steiner superculture”, as Slobin calls it, where “Steiner” refers to one of the Hollywood composers, Ben Steiner, who did most to set out the rules of efficient, i.e. cost-effective and commercially successful, film music, whereas “superculture” refers to the Hollywood filmmaking itself, which became the hegemonic model of all film-making after the silent era. In other words, the kind of film music Steiner and others have invented and Hollywood are one and the same. Industrial recycling of popular and folk art elements, narrative motivation of all filmic devices, emotional involvement through identification and suspension of disbelief, but most of all, at a more abstract level, the combination of repetition and change were no less key to Hollywood film making than to music writing in the studio age (1930-1955, roughly speaking). Hence the importance of stereotypes, i.e. of stock sounds and music, for the representation of domestic worlds (the ‘here and now’) as well as for the symbolization of temporally or geographically exotic worlds. Stereotypes ‘work’, even if they have only the slightest relationship with what an ‘authentic’ sound might have been. Think for instance of the ‘Roman’ music in Ben Hur and other historical movies, which is by definition a fiction (nobody knows very much about Roman music of that time), but a well-established, clearly recognizable, and hence useful and satisfying fiction.

One of the many interests of this volume is to show us that this ‘supercultural’ use of film music, which Slobin and his collaborators interpret in a very broad sense, is much more systematic than one might have thought. First of all because the use of this kind of stereotypes does not only characterize ‘silly’ or ‘camp’ movies like Ben Hur, but a large majority of all movies produced within the supercultural mould (even ‘intelligent’ Hollywood cinema relies often upon ‘assumed vernacular music’ when it comes down to represent otherness). Second, because the impact of the supercultural model does affect also the many types of subcultural cinema studied in this book (the European auteur cinema, the local countercultural cinema, the various forms of third world cinema, etc.). Subcultures borrow a lot from the superculture, and they fall as much prey to the reuse of stereotypes as Hollywood films. As all hegemonic models, the supercultural system allows contestation and negotiation, which often eventually reinforce the dominating position of the updated and transformed superculture.

Global Soundtracks offers two types of contributions. The first and last chapters of the book are written by the editor himself, who first gives an extremely illuminating overview of the history of the “Steiner superculture” and of the various ways it has been challenged by local and non-local subcultures, and then continues with an interesting reflection (strongly inspired by Oleg Grabar’s theory of ornamentation) on the psychological strength of music in cinema. The central chapters, all of them very well written and presenting most of the times works and authors regrettably ignored or neglected by film theory and history, concentrate on the subcultural recycling or contestation of the Hollywood superculture. Their scope is either general, focusing on national or regional traditions (both Asian and African, local as well as diasporic), or particular, focusing on well-chosen case studies.

In all cases, the reading of the book is extremely fluent, and the quality of the close readings –often a hard nut to crack in musicological studies read by non-musicologists– is astonishingly didactic and inspiring. In short, a more than welcome broadening of the study of film music and the soundtrack in cinema.