Introduction

At the beginning of his 1985 book The Idea of Music: Schoenberg and Others, Peter Franklin announced a challenge for musicology that still resounds in the present day. Franklin’s own enterprise has always been one of criticism, a means of building a nuanced cultural discourse between the authors own times and the ones that they seek to engage and understand. From Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Franz Schreker, and others, Franklin’s published line of enquiry has moved subsequently into the sphere by which the ‘robes of the dispossessed Romantic Artist’ were deftly and sympathetically bought up, altered, and repackaged: namely, Hollywood film, of the Golden era and beyond. The study of Hollywood film music has burgeoned as part of a more widely conceived screen-music studies, and is regularly seen as a means of engaging undergraduate students, not as a risky repertoire that might divert them from their core studies.