ABSTRACT

In a major expansion of the conversation on music and film history, The Routledge Companion to Global Film Music in the Early Sound Era draws together a wide-ranging collection of scholarship on music in global cinema during the transition from silent to sound films (the late 1920s to the 1940s).

Moving beyond the traditional focus on Hollywood, this Companion considers the vast range of cinema and music created in often-overlooked regions throughout the rest of the world, providing crucial global context to film music history. An extensive editorial Introduction and 50 chapters from an array of international experts connect the music and sound of these films to regional and transnational issues—culturally, historically, and aesthetically—across five parts:

  • Western Europe and Scandinavia
  • Central and Eastern Europe
  • North Africa, The Middle East, Asia, and Australasia
  • Latin America
  • Soviet Russia

Filling a major gap in the literature, The Routledge Companion to Global Film Music in the Early Sound Era offers an essential reference for scholars of music, film studies, and cultural history.

chapter |32 pages

Introduction

part 1|209 pages

Western Europe and Scandinavia

chapter 1|14 pages

"A Very Great Error Of Judgment"

Caution and timidity in the musical provision of Britain's early talkie features

chapter 2|16 pages

A Man Saying "Mooh" and an Actress Bursting into an Aria about Red and White Radishes

Early sound film in The Netherlands: developments & debates 1

chapter 5|25 pages

Eternally Feminine

Das blaue Licht (1932), Anna und Elisabeth (1933), Elisabeth und der Narr (1933), and cultural representations of womanhood in the scoring of early sound films from Weimar-Republic Germany

chapter 6|10 pages

Film Music in France, 1928–1940

chapter 8|15 pages

Coming to Terms with Music as Narrative Architecture

Jean Grémillon's Maldone (1928), La Petite Lise (1930), and Daïnah la Métisse (1932)

chapter 9|10 pages

Readymade Soundtracks

Musical accompaniment for Dada and surrealist film

chapter 13|17 pages

The Folkloric Film Musical in the Spanish Second Republic (1931–1939)

Imperio Argentina, Florián Rey and their Morena Clara

chapter 14|13 pages

Composing the Nation

The role of fado in A Severa, the first Portuguese sound film (1931)

part 2|162 pages

Central and Eastern Europe

chapter 16|13 pages

Battle of Songs

Music and language in left-wing Yiddish films made in Poland during the 1930s and 1940s

chapter 18|11 pages

Charms and Whispers

Musical comedy and vocal performance in Oldřich Nový's star image 1936–1945

chapter 20|15 pages

Composing for the Screen, Composing for the Stage

Hungarian film composers in the interwar period

chapter 21|11 pages

A Theme Runs through it

Early Hungarian sound films and the music of Tibor Weygand

chapter 23|10 pages

Early Greek Talkies (1930-1940)

Struggling between technological innovation and theatrical tradition

chapter 24|16 pages

Intercultural Synergies in Early Mediterranean Sound Cinema

Togo Mizrahi's Greek–speaking film The Girl Refugee (1938)

chapter 25|20 pages

From Alafranga to Alaturca, from Operettas to Melodramas

Music in early Turkish talkies

chapter 26|8 pages

The Dream of a Fatty

The first Lithuanian sound film in the context of early puppet-animation films

part 3|198 pages

North Africa, The Middle East, Asia, and Australasia

chapter 27|18 pages

Essentially Egyptian

The development of a syncretic film song style

chapter 28|10 pages

The Singing Cinema

Synchronized sound and the reception by press and audiences of singing films in Egypt, 1907-1934

chapter 33|13 pages

Mental Hearing of Sound

The evocation and mediation of acoustic experience in Two Stars in the Milky Way (1931)

chapter 34|20 pages

Film Songwriting Practices in Pre–War Hong Kong Cinema

A case study of director Chan Pei

chapter 35|15 pages

Charitable or Traitorous?

The ethics and aesthetics of performance in Myriad of Colors (1943)

chapter 36|12 pages

Singing Japanese Modernity

A genealogy of performance scenes in early talkies in Japan and their heterogeneous representation

chapter 37|12 pages

Emerging from Silence

Shochiku, Ito, and Ozu's early sound films

chapter 38|14 pages

Tarzan Meets Hiawatha

Musical representation in Australian indigenous films of the 1930s

part 4|109 pages

Latin America

chapter 39|9 pages

Imaginaries from Buenos Aires

From tango poetics of the 1920s toward sound films in the 1930s

chapter 40|9 pages

Film and Tango

The contribution of Luis César Amadori to the Argentine film industry in the late 1930s

chapter 41|11 pages

Songs Beyond "El Rancho Grande"

Trans/national and cross-media dimensions in the Mexican Comedia Ranchera

chapter 42|17 pages

Dance, Desire, and Cosmopolitanism

Early danzón performances in the 1930s Mexican prostitute melodrama

chapter 43|10 pages

Beyond the Musical Numbers

The Brazilian film Coisas Nossas and its arrangements with the local record industry

chapter 44|15 pages

Between Cinearte and Phono-Arte

On the arrival of Brazilian sound film in two magazines

chapter 46|16 pages

When 'Early' Sound Cinema was 'Late'

Differential chronologies in Chile, Uruguay, Cuba and Colombia

part 5|65 pages

Soviet Russia

chapter 47|19 pages

The Sound of Socialist Realism

Excess and ideology in Stalinist film

chapter 48|15 pages

"New Means of Enormous Power"

Music in early Soviet sound film

chapter 50|16 pages

Accordions as 'Sluts,' Guitars as Gypsies, and Pianos as Noble Fops

The images of Russian musical instruments in Soviet sound movies of the 1930s