Includes bibliographical references and index.

List of illustrations -- Preface and acknowledgments -- 1: Silent Cinema -- Why sound? -- Why music? -- Birth of film music -- Categories of film music -- Camille Saint-Saens and film d'art -- Cue sheets and anthologies -- Venues and ensembles -- Photoplayers and cinema organs -- Music for silent epics -- Charlie Chaplin and music for comedies -- Early film music in Europe and the Soviet Union -- Postlude: the silent-film revival -- 2: Sound On Track -- Sound debate -- New technology -- Photographing sound -- Animated sound -- Creative possibilities -- 3: Hollywood's Golden Age: Narrative Cinema And The Classical Film Score -- Studio system -- Practicalities -- Style -- Wagner and the filmic leitmotif -- Structure -- Max Steiner -- Erich Wolfgang Korngold -- Franz Waxman: horror and sophistication -- Alfred Newman -- Miklos Rozsa, Roy Webb and David Raksin: film noir and the music of psychological drama -- Dimitri Tiomkin and others -- Aaron Copland and the sounds of America -- 4: Stage And Screen -- Opera on film -- Film in opera; opera in film -- Film musical -- Scoring Shakespeare -- 5: Mainstream Divides: Post-War Horizons In Hollywood -- Epic and the intimate -- Modernism -- Bernard Herrmann: the composer as auteur -- Jazz and its influence -- 6: Never Let It Be Mediocre: Film Music In The United Kingdom -- Visitors from abroad -- Ralph Vaughan Williams -- Brian Easdale, William Alwyn and Benjamin Frankel -- William Walton and Malcolm Arnold -- Generic (re)takes: horror and comedy -- End of an era -- 7: Defectors To Television -- Documentary film -- Hanns Eisler -- Documentaries in the United States -- Information films in the United Kingdom -- Movies at war: reportage and propaganda -- Theatrical documentaries for the modern age -- Animation -- Cartoon music in the silent era -- Walt Disney and the animated musical -- Warner Bros and MGM: comic shorts -- Classical music -- Migration to the small screen -- Experimental animation -- Animation in Europe -- 8: Film Music In France -- Symphony and song -- 1930s: Maurice Jaubert and Joseph Kosma -- Georges Auric and others -- Nouvelle vague -- Jean-Luc Godard -- Francois Truffaut -- French modernism -- At home and abroad -- Poles apart: Krzysztof Kieslowski and Zbigniew Preisner -- 9: Global Highlights -- Early sound films in the Soviet Union -- Dmitri Shostakovich -- Vsevolod Pudovkin and Yuri Shaporin -- Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Prokofiev -- India: Bollywood and beyond -- Early Indian cinema -- Successes abroad: Ravi Shankar and Satyajit Ray -- Modern commercial cinema -- From Italy to Little Italy -- Federico Fellini, Nino Rota and the circus of life -- Ennio Morricone and the spaghetti western: eccentricity and populism -- Italians abroad -- Japan -- Traditional elements in silent and early sound films -- Films of Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa -- Toru Takemitsu -- Modern composers, modern genres -- 10: Popular Music In The Cinema -- Music of youth and race -- Title songs and interpolated songs -- Compilation scores and original song scores -- Synergistic marketing -- Pop (stars) in performance -- 11: Classical music in the cinema -- Romantic concerto and war film -- Classical biopics and milieu films -- Period, nationality, class -- Stanley Kubrick -- Back to Bach -- 12: State Of The Art: Film Music Since The New Hollywood -- John Williams and the new symphonism -- Electronics, sound technology and recording -- Pop scoring, dual tracking and the modern soundtrack album -- Minimalism -- Modern auteurs: Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch -- Modern mainstream -- Global and the glocal -- Bibliography -- Index of film titles -- General index.

From the Publisher: Mervyn Cooke provides a comprehensive and lively introduction to the major trends in film scoring from the silent era to the present day, focusing not only on dominant Hollywood practices but also offering an international perspective by including case studies of the national cinemas of the UK, France, India, Italy, Japan and the early Soviet Union. The book balances wide-ranging overviews of film genres, modes of production and critical reception with detailed non-technical descriptions of the interaction between image track and soundtrack in representative individual films. In addition to the central focus on narrative cinema, separate sections are also devoted to music in documentary and animated films, film musicals and the uses of popular and classical music in the cinema. The author analyses the varying technological and aesthetic issues that have shaped the history of film music, and concludes with an account of the modern film composer's working practices.