ABSTRACT
The Department of Music at Leeds University in the late 1980s was a fairly traditional place to study music. Peter Franklin had responsibility for the “Twentieth Century” part of this syllabus, which began with Wagner and Strauss and navigated us through modernism. His passion for what these composers had achieved was always evident and inspiring, but when he offered a new course for second and third year students on film music and its operatic origins, I wonder if he was surprised by just how high the take up was from the students. The idea of the course felt fresh and it inspired curiosity.
Franklin made it clear that this was a new area of exploration for musical scholars, that not much work had been done on how this other more “frivolous” twentieth-century musical movement had evolved. It certainly felt like a guilty and subversive treat to hide in a corner of the Department to watch old movies on tiny television screens. Hindsight suggests to me that the course evolved from three key fascinations of Franklin’s: a desire to explore the music of Korngold in an orthodox academic context; Claudia Gorbman’s then recently published book on film music, Unheard Melodies; and his love of storytelling and narrative from opera. He joined all this up quite seamlessly for students, of course, making it seem as logical an evolution as any other twentieth-century movement. But I don’t think any of us understood that for Franklin as a scholar, this was the laboratory where his ideas would evolve, ideas that would profoundly influence and shape a new discipline. Nor that in finding both common ground and disagreement, my own evolution as a film musicologist would begin.
