by Warren M. Sherk

The Hollywood Film Music Reader, Mervyn Cooke’s latest book, features material from Dimitri Tiomkin’s 1959 autobiography, Please Don’t Hate Me. The seven excerpts cover the composer’s interactions with directors Frank Capra and Alfred Hitchcock, exchanges with Columbia Pictures studio head Harry Cohn and, later, independent producer David O. Selznick, writing Alaskan Indian music for director Henry Hathaway, Tiomkin’s personal views on his own conducting skills, writing the music for High Noon, and Tiomkin’s explanation for his famous Academy Awards acceptance speech. Cooke does an admirable job of stringing the extracts together to create a unified narrative flow. In fact, without the telltale ellipses (…) it is often difficult to tell where the edits occur.

Published by Oxford University Press, Cooke has assembled and edited a diverse cross-section of writings on film music. He introduces each chapter with brief biographical and/or historical details and then sets the scene for the selection that follows. The Tiomkin chapter is in the “Film Composers in Their Own Words” segment that forms the heart of the book, wherein 17 composers from Aaron Copland to John Williams write or talk about their personal experiences scoring films in Hollywood, offering a window into their rarified world. The composers’ activities, anecdotes, life events, and stories of working in Tinseltown and interactions with producers, directors, musicians, and studio personnel are delightful. The other two sections cover silent films and critics and commentators. For silent films only two of the five chapters were written contemporary to the period. In fact, even though the book’s writings cover from the 1920s to 2000s, more than two-thirds were written in a narrower range, either in the 1940s or 1970s to 1990s. This is somewhat reflective of the literary interest in film music and volume of writings during those periods. Cooke draws evenly from books, primarily composer autobiographies, and periodicals and culls the best portions for inclusion so that the individual chapters coexist well, complementing here and furthering our understanding there. Similar volumes concentrating on narrower topics, such as performance practice for silent films, would be welcome.

In fact, Cooke hopes that his Hollywood Film Music Reader will be the first in a series. There is certainly plenty of out-of-print source material available for future editions, as my forthcoming Scarecrow Press book, Film and Television Music: A Guide to Books, Articles, and Composer Interviews will prove. A vast trove of untapped sources are ripe for plucking, starting with the Pacific Coast Musician. (Tiomkin is interviewed in the March 20, 1937 issue.) The Film Music Society has been at the forefront of bringing increased recognition to past writings. Five of the 31 excerpts in Cooke’s book were previously published or reprinted in Society publications, including The Cue Sheet, Film Music I, and Elmer Bernstein’s Film Music Notebook: A Complete Collection of the Quarterly Journal, 1974–1978. (The latter includes groundbreaking articles on Tiomkin by Christopher Palmer and William H. Rosar.)

For photographs, Cooke relies heavily, as have others before him, on Photofest, the New York stock photo archive. The two Tiomkin photos were obtained from this site. The cover is beautifully designed and layed out and the image, of proud composer Andre Previn holding a newly-minted Academy Award statuette standing next to a radiant Debbie Reynolds, conveys the public, glamorous side of Hollywood. But why Previn, and not someone more closely associated with both Hollywood and film music, such as Mancini, Tiomkin, or Williams?

The Hollywood Film Music Reader deserves a place on every music-lover’s bookshelf and makes the perfect holiday gift for anyone interested in music heard in movies, from the casual moviegoer to a rabid soundtrack fan. The Reader can be enjoyed by someone with no previous knowledge of the subject and yet would also serve well as supplementary reading and fodder for discussion for any college-level historical survey on film music. The selected writings, carefully chosen to document working practices, diverse musical styles, and genres and forms (features, shorts, documentaries), gathered together form a collective whole that offers insight and understanding into the creative process that, more often than not, involves much more than just creativity.

Mervyn Cooke is a Professor of Music at the University of Nottingham and authored A History of Film Music published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. The Tiomkin excerpts were used by permission of Mrs. Olivia Tiomkin Douglas and Volta Music Corporation. The book can be ordered from Oxford University Press or Amazon in hardcover or paperback.

Sources

• The Hollywood Film Music Reader by Mervyn Cooke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)