Film music, how it is used and how it is created.

Since the days of silent films, music has been integral to the cinematic experience, serving, variously, to allay audiences' fears of the dark and to heighten a film's emotional impact. Yet viewers are often unaware of its presence. In this bold, insightful book, film and music scholar and critic Royal S. Brown invites readers not only to "hear" the film score, but to understand it in relation to what they "see." Unlike earlier books, which offered historical, technical, and sociopolitical analyses, Overtones and Undertones draws on film, music, and narrative theory to provide the first comprehensive aesthetics of film music. Focusing on how the film/score interaction influences our response to cinematic situations, Brown traces the history of film music from its beginnings, covering both American and European cinema. At the heart of his book are close readings of several of the best film/score interactions, including Psycho, Laura, The Sea Hawk, Double Indemnity, and Pierrot le Fou. In revealing interviews with Bernard Herrmann, Miklós Rósza, Henry Mancini, and others, Brown also allows the composers to speak for themselves. A complete discography and bibliography conclude the volume.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American authors pioneered a mode of musical writing that quite literally resounded beyond the printed page. Novels gained soundtracks, poetry compelled its audiences to sing, and the ostensibly silent act of reading became anything but. The Great American Songbooks is the story of this literature, at once an overview of musical and authorial practice at the century's turn, an investigation into the sensory dimensions of reading, and a meditation on the effects that the popular arts have had on literary modernism. The writings of John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Walt Whitman are heard in a new key; the performers and tunesmiths who inspired them have their stories told; and the music of the past, long out of print and fashion, is recapitulated and made available in digital form. A work of criticism situated at the crossroads of literary analysis, musicology, and cultural history, The Great American Songbooks demonstrates the importance of studying fiction and poetry from interdisciplinary perspectives, and it suggests new avenues for research in the dawning age of the digital humanities.

Introduction - Archiving America: sound technology and musical representation - Opera cut short: from the castrato to the film fragment - Selling jazz short: Hollywood and the fantasy of musical agency - Opers and jazz in the score: toward a new spectatorship - Conclusion.

I love America, but America don't love me (Memoirs and Reflections) is a collection of experiences in a 64-year span. Having grown up in an era strife with racial overtones and undertones, Eddie Byirt has endured one episode after another. He has been able to live a decent life with empathy, love, and morals. It is his hope that America can adopt these values as well.

In his first collection of essays, author and educator Eric B. Olsen offers the reader a wide range of analytical thought and cultural criticism. The book opens by examining the history of film in the twentieth century and then analyzing literature from ancient Greek drama to modern American poetry, as well as commenting on jazz and popular music. The final group of essays concerns topics as diverse as climate change, popular culture, religion, anti-intellectualism and politics. Drawing on a broad base of literary and social criticism, from the philosophical thought of Plato and Aristotle to the writings of Lionel Trilling and Richard Hofstadter, The Intellectual American is a work of confident scholarship and the herald of a new voice in American letters.