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.

Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983), Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994) and Grace Williams (1906-1977) were contemporaries at the Royal College of Music. The three composers' careers were launched with performances in the Macnaghten-Lemare Concerts in the 1930s - a time when, in Britain, as Williams noted, a woman composer was considered 'very odd indeed'. Even so, by the early 1940s all three had made remarkable advances in their work: Lutyens had become the first British composer to use 12-note technique, in her Chamber Concerto No. 1 (1939-40); Maconchy had composed four string quartets of outstanding quality and was busy rethinking the genre; and Williams had won recognition as a composer with great flair for orchestral writing with her Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes (1940) and Sea Sketches (1944). In the following years, Lutyens, Maconchy and Williams went on to compose music of striking quality and to attain prominent positions within the British music scene. Their respective achievements broke through the 'sound ceiling', challenging many of the traditional assumptions which accompanied music by female composers. Rhiannon Mathias traces the development of these three important composers through analysis of selected works. The book draws upon previously unexplored material as well as radio and television interviews with the composers themselves and with their contemporaries. The musical analysis and contextual material lead to a re-evaluation of the composers' positions in the context of twentieth-century British music history.

Critical annotations and supportive text will direct scholars to the most relevant studies in their discipline Multiple indices make it easy to locate items within the guide

When considering the role music played in the major totalitarian regimes of the century it is music's usefulness as propaganda that leaps first to mind. But as a number of the chapters in this volume demonstrate, there is a complex relationship both between art music and politicised mass culture, and between entertainment and propaganda. Nationality, self/other, power and ideology are the dominant themes of this book, whilst key topics include: music in totalitarian regimes; music as propaganda; music and national identity; émigré communities and composers; music's role in shaping identities of 'self' and 'other' and music as both resistance to and instrument of oppression. Taking the contributions together it becomes clear that shared experiences such as war, dictatorship, colonialism, exile and emigration produced different, yet clearly inter-related musical consequences.

This ground-breaking book takes as its focal point director Ken Loach's view that 'The only reason to make films that are a reflection on history is to talk about the present.' In the first book to take on this major genre in all its complexity, James Chapman argues that historical films say as much about the times in which they are made as about the past they purport to portray. Through in-depth case studies of fourteen key films spanning the 1930s up to the turn of the twenty first century, from The Private Life of Henry VIII and Zulu to Chariots of Fire and Elizabeth, Chapman examines the place of historical films in British cinema history and film culture. Looking closely at the issues that they present, from gender, class and ethnicity to militarism and imperialism, he also discusses controversies over historical accuracy, and the ways in which devices such as voice overs, title captions, and visual references to photographs and paintings assert a sense of historical verisimilitude. Exploring throughout the book the dialectical relationship between past and present, Chapman reveals how such films promote British achievements - but also sometimes question them - and how they project images of 'Britishness' to audiences both in the UK and internationally.

Music, the Moving Image and Ireland, 1897–2017 constitutes the first comprehensive study of music for screen productions from or relating to the island. It identifies and interprets tendencies over the first 120 years of a field comprising the relatively distinct yet often overlapping areas of Irish-themed and Irish-produced film. Dividing into three parts, the book first explores accompaniments and scores for 20th-century Irish-themed narrative features that resulted in significant contributions by many Hollywood, British, continental European and, to a lesser extent, Irish composers, along with the input of many orchestras and other musicians. Its second part is framed by a consideration of various cultural, political and economic developments in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland from the 1920s (including the Troubles of 1968–1998). Focusing on scoring and other aspects of soundtrack production for domestic newsreel, documentary film and TV programming, it interprets the substantial output of many Irish composers within this milieu, particularly from the 1960s to the 1990s. Also referring to broader cultural and historical themes, the book’s third and final part charts approaches to and developments in music and sound design over various waves of Irish cinema, from its relatively late emergence in the 1970s to an exponential growth and increasingly transnational orientation in the early decades of the 21st century.

Scoring the Score is the first scholarly examination of the orchestrator’s role in the contemporary film industry. Orchestrators are crucial to the production of a film’s score, yet they have not received significant consideration in film-music research. This book sheds light on this often-overlooked yet vital profession. It considers the key processes of orchestrating and arranging and how they relate, musical and filmic training, the wide-ranging responsibilities of the orchestrator on a film-scoring project, issues related to working practices, the impact of technology, and the differences between the UK and US production processes as they affect orchestrators. Drawing on interviews with American and British orchestrators and composers, Scoring the Score aims to expose this often hidden profession through a rigorous examination of the creative process and working practices, and analysis of the skills, training and background common to orchestrators. It will appeal to scholars, students, and practitioners of film music.

Lord Berners was one of the most colourful and flamboyant personalities of his day. This title offers a new documentary approach - interviews with leading figures and contemporaries who knew him and his work, set into context and complimented with much further information.

In the first half of the twentieth century, many writers and artists turnedto the art and received example of the Elizabethans as a means ofarticulating an emphatic (and anti-Victorian) modernity. By the middleof that century, this cultural neo-Elizabethanism had become absorbedwithin a broader mainstream discourse of national identity, heritage andcultural performance. Taking strength from the Coronation of a new, youngQueen named Elizabeth, the New Elizabethanism of the 1950s heralded anation that would now see its 'modern', televised monarch preside over animminently glorious and artistic age.This book provides the first in-depth investigation of New Elizabethanismand its legacy. With contributions from leading cultural practitioners andscholars, its essays explore New Elizabethanism as variously manifestin ballet and opera, the Coronation broadcast and festivities, nationalhistoriography and myth, the idea of the 'Young Elizabethan', celebrations ofair travel and new technologies, and the New Shakespeareanism of theatreand television. As these essays expose, New Elizabethanism was muchmore than a brief moment of optimistic hyperbole. Indeed, from moderndrama and film to the reinternment of Richard III, from the London Olympicsto the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, it continues to pervade contemporaryartistic expression, politics, and key moments of national pageantry.

The legacy of emigrés in the British film industry, from the silent film era until after the Second World War, has been largely neglected in the scholarly literature. Destination London is the first book to redress this imbalance. Focusing on areas such as exile, genre, technological transfer, professional training and education, cross-cultural exchange and representation, it begins by mapping the reasons for this neglect before examining the contributions made to British cinema by emigré directors, actors, screenwriters, cinematographers, set designers, and composers. It goes on to assess the cultural and economic contexts of transnational industry collaborations in the 1920s, artistic cosmopolitanism in the 1930s, and anti-Nazi propaganda in the 1940s.