ABSTRACT

Andreas Huyssen's book After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, and Postmodernism are a groundbreaking work in the discussion of the cultural conflict between high and low in the context of modernism versus postmodernism. Since the beginning of the motion picture history, those composers who are mainly involved in film scoring have been qualified as 'film music composers' and this qualification itself reveals an implication that those composers are treated differently from classical composers. The tension between classical and popular music was not only an issue for scholarly or artistic debates, but it was also dramatized in some early cartoons. In spite of the reservations toward film and film scoring arising from the cultural status of cinema as a popular entertainment, a number of early twentieth-century classical music composers were captivated by the then-inchoate art form of film.