A History Of Film Music Mervyn Cooke Pdf Download
Anna Pybus
Mervyn was educated at Dover Grammar School for Boys, the Royal Academy of Music, and King's College, Cambridge, where he held an Open Scholarship and subsequently completed a PhD thesis on Asian influences in the music of Benjamin Britten. He was for six years Research Fellow and Director of Studies in Music at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, before moving to Nottingham to take up a lectureship in Music in 1993. At the University of Nottingham he has served as both Head of the Department of Music and Vice-Dean (Undergraduate) of the Faculty of Arts.
Life and music of Benjamin Britten; film and television music; jazz; twentieth-century opera; traditional music of Japan and Indonesia; Frank Martin; Stephen Sondheim; Astor Piazzolla and tango nuevo; composition; performance (keyboard); conducting
At undergraduate and Master's levels, recent teaching has included modules in film music, music on stage and screen, jazz, fusion and crossover styles, composition, dissertation and research techniques.
Applications for PG research places are warmly welcomed in any of the following subject areas: Benjamin Britten; early twentieth-century music; film music; jazz; and music on stage and screen (including topics relating to film, theatre, radio, television, opera, and ballet, with a special interest in stage and film treatments of Shakespeare's plays).
Mervyn's primary research interests are the music of Benjamin Britten, film music, and jazz. He is the author of a handbook on Britten's War Requiem (CUP, 1996) and the monograph Britten and the Far East (The Boydell Press, 1998), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten (CUP, 1999); he also co-edited (with Philip Reed) an Opera Handbook on Billy Budd (CUP, 1993) and worked for The Britten-Pears Foundation as co-editor (with Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed) of the multi-volume edition of Britten's correspondence, of which the sixth and final instalment was published in 2012. As part of Britten's centenary celebrations in 2013, he organised and performed (as pianist) in premiere recordings of two of Britten's unpublished theatre scores from the 1930s, which were released on the CD Britten to America, an NMC disc nominated for a Grammy Award in 2014. He edited The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera (CUP, 2005), to which he contributed a chapter on opera and film. He has authored two illustrated books on the history of jazz for Thames & Hudson -- The Chronicle of Jazz and Jazz (World of Art) -- and co-edited with David Horn The Cambridge Companion to Jazz (2003). His books on jazz and film music have variously been translated into French, German, Spanish, Czech, Polish, Chinese and Korean. He is the author of the New Grove article on film music, and has written book chapters on the film music of Dave Grusin, Duke Ellington, George Fenton, Bernard Herrmann, and John Williams. His substantial A History of Film Music was published by CUP in 2008, and his The Hollywood Film Music Reader by OUP in 2010. His most recent books are The Cambridge Companion to Film Music (co-edited with Fiona Ford; CUP, 2016) and an analytical monograph on the ECM recordings of jazz guitarist Pat Metheny (OUP, 2017). His chapters in other books include studies of music in ocean documentaries, Britten's collaborations with his librettists, music in the British war film, and music in the Carry On films. He is also the co-editor (with Christopher R. Wilson) of The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music, published by OUP in 2022, and the author of several articles on film-music topics in the 13th volume of The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World (forthcoming 2025).
ABSTRACT: The phrase structure of film music themes remains virtually unexplored in scholarly literature. This article proposes an analytical system that expands and adapts Caplin 1998 in order to categorize the gamut of film music themes in some detail. This system is then applied to a cross-section of 482 themes from Oscar-nominated scores ranging from the early 1930s to the present day. In doing so, notable divisions appear around 1960 and 1990, times that coincide with trends that drastically affected the composition of film music in general.
[10] Statement-response repetition generally involves an initiating tonic harmony in the first idea that is answered by a different initiating harmony in the second. In film themes, these situations usually employ one of three strategies. In films of the 1930s through the 1950s, the most common strategy involves dividing a descending-fifths-based progression between the two basic ideas. Examples include the following progressions (here and in the following text, Roman numerals indicate roots only, not chord quality, in order to show generalized patterns):
[35] The composite theme in film music is based on the principle of contrast between its two halves, the antecedent and departure. While the antecedent functions identically to that of the film period, the departure describes a unit that begins with a new contrasting idea that differs from that of the antecedent. Hence, schematically, the composite is arranged as follows:
In order for the third idea to be heard as something new and not merely a variation of A or B, it requires a substantial degree of difference from the previous ideas. Even so, this third idea usually has motivic links with the ideas of the first half.
[49] In many developing themes, the latter portion of the basic idea is instantly restated as the opening portion of the developing idea, producing what I call a hinge technique between the two that may be visualized thus:
[57] In analyzing this corpus of themes, it must be emphasized that, because this study focuses exclusively on thematic structure, the interpretations of the results advanced here necessarily remain speculative and provisional. My main purposes are to provide the reader with some of the common strategies for structuring film themes during particular historical periods and to raise questions and suggest possible answers that may be explored in future research, particularly with regard to the reasons for the dramatic shifts seen in the corpus.
[59] Themes were first categorized as grammatical, discursive, or motto themes. Example 36 shows the frequencies of these three categories across the entire corpus. At 74%, grammatical themes have clearly been the favored category and, as mentioned earlier, it is because of the prevalence of grammatical themes in the repertoire that they are the focus of this study.(48) We might well ask why this particular category of theme has been so preferred in the film music repertoire. Surely a large part of the answer derives from the compositional flexibility it offers. On the one hand, its opening basic idea or even its first half, which, in almost all cases, is highly distinctive, very often acts as a leitmotif for some prominent aspect of the narrative, usually the main character. On the other hand, whenever a longer statement is more appropriate, as with particularly important events in the narrative, and main-title and end-credit sequences, the full version of the theme provides an extension of the leitmotif that is both easily recognized and easily comprehended, with its usual breakdown into small units of roughly two heard measures. The grammatical theme is thus an ideal means by which to serve these needs.
[62] Another important aspect of these most-preferred themes is that they restate the basic idea somewhere in the form. Since it is the basic idea that generally serves as a leitmotif, its restatement within the theme serves to increase its familiarity among viewers. Within the sentence and clause classes, only the basic forms include this kind of restatement, whereas in the period class, almost all forms do so (save for those with a somewhat varied third idea). The four theme types that are most common in film music are the only ones to include both multiple basic ideas and a relatively clearly articulated second half. Hence, it seems that these attributes are fundamental to the structure of film music themes.(49)
Thus, scores in classical Hollywood, popular, and modernist styles began to coexist in film during the late 1950s and into the 1960s, and the influx of popular styles became particularly varied during the latter decade. As Smith observes:
[66] Another striking trend emerges in Example 41, which gives the frequencies of grammatical, discursive, and motto themes in the corpus by decade. A major division appears in the 1990s, where, compared to the 80s, grammatical themes drop by 20% and continue to decrease, while discursive and motto themes begin to increase and together form the majority of thematic structures. There are several likely reasons for this dramatic and unique change in the composition of film themes, and all seem to converge on one particular facet of these decades: continual advancements in technology. To begin with, since the 1980s, the industry has increasingly demanded composers skilled in the use of technology. As Cooke remarks,
[68] The present study has attempted to establish a detailed methodology for the analysis of themes in film music and to reveal something about their usage over time in the history of sound film. Despite the similarities that film themes have to those of the Classical repertoire, they must inevitably be understood in ways that are specific to film. Because film themes often lack a cadence in the strict Classical sense, instead frequently ending with a non-cadential tonic or dominant chord, their structures rely less on harmonic than melodic relationships, which are crucial to the operations of acceleration, variation, return, and contrast that define the four classes of sentence, clause, period, and composite. Since each of these four classes can assume a basic, hybrid, or developing form, I have identified a total of twelve theme types. Developing forms were found to be especially unlike Classical themes, as the latter tend to make an exceedingly clear distinction between a second idea that repeats the first and one that contrasts with it.
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