This book offers a fresh approach to British film music by tracing the influence of Britain’s musical heritage on the film scores of this era. From the celebration of landscape and community encompassed by pastoral music and folk song, and the connection of both with the English Musical Renaissance, to the mystical strains of choral sonorities and the stirring effects of the march, this study explores the significance of music in British film culture. With detailed analyses of the work of such key filmmakers as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Laurence Olivier and Carol Reed, and composers including Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton and Brian Easdale, this systematic and in-depth study explores the connotations these musical styles impart to the films and considers how each marks them with a particularly British inflection.

In the first book-length consideration of the topic for sixty years, Kevin Donnelly examines the importance of music in British film, concentrating both on musical scores, such as William Walton's score for Henry V (1944) and Malcolm Arnold's music for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and on the phenomenon of the British film musical.

The Boston Pops Orchestra was the first orchestra of its kind in the USA: founded in 1885 from the ranks of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, its remit was to offer concerts of light symphonic music. Over the years, and in particular during the fifty-year tenure of its most famous conductor, Arthur Fiedler, the Pops established itself as the premier US orchestra specialising in bridging the fields of 'art music' and 'popular music'. When the Hollywood composer John Williams was assigned the conductorship of the orchestra in 1980, he energetically advocated for the inclusion of film-music repertoire, changing Fiedler's approach significantly. This Element offers a historical survey of the pioneering agency that the Boston Pops had under Williams's tenure in the legitimisation of film music as a viable repertoire for concert programmes. The case study is complemented with more general discussions on the aesthetic of film music in concert.

This handbook tackles the understudied relationship between music and comedy cinema by analysing the nature, perception, and function of music from fresh perspectives. Its approach is not only multidisciplinary, but also interdisciplinary in its close examination of how music and other cinematic devices interact in the creation of comedy. The volume addresses gender representation, national identities, stylistic strategies, and employs inputs from cultural studies, musicology, music theory, psychology, cognitivism, semiotics, formal and stylistic film analysis, and psychoanalysis. It is organised in four sections: general introductions, theoretical investigations, music and comedy within national cinemas, and exemplary case studies of films or authors.

A study of the British contribution to film music, detailing the idiosyncracies of British film, and showing how the differences between it and Hollywood affected composers on both sides of the Atlantic. Jan Swynnoe's study is concerned with the special British contribution to film music, detailing how the idiosyncracies of British film, and of the British character, set it apart from its Hollywood counterpart. She shows how the differences between the two industries in all aspects of film making variously affected composers on both sides of the Atlantic. In the mid 1930s, when film composers in America were perfecting the formulae of the classical Hollywood score, film music in Britain scarcely existed; within a year or so, however, top British composers were scoring British films. How this transformation was brought about, and how established British concert composers, including Vaughan Williams and Arnold Bax, faced the challenge of the exacting and often bewildering art of scoring for feature film, is vividly described here, and the resulting scores compared with the work of seasoned Hollywood composers. JAN SWYNNOE researched the material on which her book is based over several years, at the same time pursuing her musical life as pianist, percussionist and composer.

A biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival. Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) was one of the most innovative and creative figures in twentieth-century music, whose symphonies stand alongside those of Sibelius, Nielsen, Shostakovich, and Roussel. After his death, shifting priorities in the music world led to a period of critical neglect. What could not have been foreseen is that by the second decade of the twenty-first century, a handful of Vaughan Williams’s scores would attain immense popularity worldwide. Yet the present renown of these pieces has led to misapprehension about the nature of Vaughan Williams’s cultural nationalism and a distorted view of his international cultural and musical significance. Vaughan Williams and His World traces the composer’s stylistic and aesthetic development in a broadly chronological fashion, reappraising Vaughan Williams’s music composed during and after the Second World War and affirming his status as an artist whose leftist political convictions pervaded his life and music. This volume reclaims Vaughan Williams’s deeply held progressive ethical and democratic convictions while celebrating his achievements as a composer.

But is it a musical? This question is regularly asked of films, television shows and other media objects that sit uncomfortably in the category despite evident musical connections. Musicals at the Margins argues that instead of seeking to resolve such questions, we should leave them unanswered and unsettled, proposing that there is value in examining the unstable edges of genre. This collection explores the marginal musical in a diverse range of historical and global contexts. It encompasses a range of different forms of marginality including boundary texts (films/media that are sort of/not quite musicals), musical sequences (marginalized sequences in musicals; musical sequences in non-musicals), music films, musicals of the margins (musicals produced from social, cultural, geographical, and geopolitical margins), and musicals across media (television and new media). Ultimately these essays argue that marginal genre texts tell us a great deal about the musical specifically and genre more broadly.