ABSTRACT
During the past two decades, the academic study of film music has emerged as a prolific and productive area of film scholarship. This wave of scholarship was initiated by Claudia Gorbman's (1987) pathfinding study of music in narrative filmmaking, Unheard Melodies, which inspired many scholars in both cinema studies and musicology to follow in its footsteps. Since then, the field of film-music studies has grown exponentially, with authors such as Caryl Flinn (1992), Royal S. Brown (1994), Kathryn Kalinak (1992), K. J. Donnelly (2001), Annahid Kassabian (2001), and Daniel Goldmark (2005) producing important monographs on the subject. In recent years, this intellectual ferment has reached a critical mass, with no fewer than four scholarly journals devoted to the study of music and media, and two series of books in the works at major university presses. Film-music studies has, thus, emerged from the shadows of its more prominent counterparts in cinema and music studies, drawing contributors from the fields of cultural studies, media studies, sound studies, and cognitive psychology.
