Introduction

Music in the Western: Notes from the Frontier presents a series of essays exploring music for the western. As the field of film music begins to emerge from the disciplinary specificity which has marked its development, film studies scholars and musicologists have begun to learn from one another’s perspective. It is my hope that this anthology will be an example of the fruitful insights that can be gained from such interdisciplinarity. In fact, some readers may be surprised by who authored what: musicologists concerned with the history of the western and including detailed analyses of mise-en-scène and editing; film studies scholars quoting and analyzing musical passages and contextualizing western scores in terms of music history; and scholars from both fields concerned with the film score in both narratological and ideological terms. Although the western has been marked as a typically American genre, it has been adopted and adapted by filmmakers around the world. Part of the project of this anthology is to consider the global reach of the Hollywood western and investigate both its effect on filmmaking traditions internationally and the effect of these traditions on its development. Music is no small part in this process. Finally, some notes about the frontier. On the most obvious level, the essays here treat music as part of the western’s representation of the frontier. But the frontier signifies in other ways as well. The anthology is positioned on the frontier of genre studies, extending the boundaries of what constitutes the proper study of the western and it presents cutting-edge essays which represent the frontier of film music scholarship.