Saying It With Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema
- Author: Spring, Katherine
Springs emphasis on songs during the conversion periodmatters not just because it helps us better grasp corporate relationships and cinematic storytelling, but also because it complicates the...
Saying It With Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema
- Author: Spring, Katherine
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Springs emphasis on songs during the conversion periodmatters not just because it helps us better grasp corporate relationships and cinematic storytelling, but also because it complicates the...
About
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.
Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1. Singing a Song: The Culture and Conventions of Popular Music in the 1920s
- Chapter 2. Owning a Song: The Restructuring of Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley
- Chapter 3. Plugging a Song: The Discrete Charm of the Popular Song, From Broadway to Hollywood
- Chapter 4. Integrating a Song: The Threat to Narrative Plausibility
- Chapter 5. Curtailing a Song: Toward the Classical Background Score
- Conclusion: The Fate of the Motion Picture Song
- Appendix 1: Confirmatory License Issued by Music Publishers Protective Association (1929)
- Appendix 2: Tieups of Film and Music as Reported by Variety
- Appendix 3: Timeline of Relationships Between Film and Music Companies
- Appendix 4: Agreement between Al Dubin, The Vitaphone Corp., and Music Publishers Holding Corporation
- Appendix 5: Summary of Agreement between Vitaphone Corporation, M. Witmark & Sons, and Ray Perkins
- Bibliography
- Credits
- Index
Awards and reviews
Springs emphasis on songs during the conversion periodmatters not just because it helps us better grasp corporate relationships and cinematic storytelling, but also because it complicates the generally accepted reading of classical Hollywoods romantic score. Indeed, Spring claims that conversion-era film offers early examples of both the popular song score and orchestral score thatwould become typicalmuch later. Her careful retelling of this periods history is therefore important for anyone who wants to understand Hollywood film music in any era
