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The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies. Edited by David Neumeyer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Since the late 1970s, when Roy Prendergast and Martin Marks published seminal pieces of modern film music scholarship, the field of film music studies has developed a significant and interdisciplinary scholarly discourse.1 Until the past five years or so, however, that discourse primarily took the form of case studies and analyses of individual film scores. This book consolidates the recent turn of film studies toward summaries, surveys, historical essays, and anthologies of source readings. As Neumeyer notes, “For the first time, [these broader topics] are not only desirable . . . but are also more firmly grounded” (7). Reflecting the interdisciplinary state of the field, Neumeyer has assembled essays from twenty-two scholars representing six academic disciplines and four countries. Apart from the two case studies by Mitchell Morris and Julie McQuinn, which are included as examples for Robynn Stilwell’s short critical essay on the writing of case studies, most of the book’s contributions strive to focus on broad issues of ontology, methodology, and historiography in the discipline, in addition to surveys of several key genres. Of particular interest are the three bibliographic essays by James Buhler. In the first, “Ontological, Formal, and Critical Theories of Film Music and Sound,” he surveys the evolution of film music studies through a variety of theoretical frameworks, from the ontological concerns of Sergei Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovkin, and René Clair in the 1930s, to the critical theory promoted by Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno in the late 1940s, to the more recent development of cinemetrics, neoformalism, and ideological critique. In his second essay, Buhler surveys the use of gender and sexuality theories in film music; he then applies several core concepts from these approaches to analyses of Suddenly, Last Summer and The Hours. His final essay surveys in similar fashion the use of psychoanalysis and apparatus theory in the film music writings of Jean-Louis Baudry, Jean-Louis Comolli, Mary Ann Doane, Rick Altman, Christian Metz, and Michel Chion, among others. The first part of the book, “Film Music: Central Questions,” addresses ontological questions about film music, ranging from film’s complicated relationship with opera (Marcia Citron), to the use of visual representations of film sound (Rick Altman), to the various analytical approaches that emerge from cognitive science (Annabel Cohen). Finally, the section includes Peter Schweinhardt and Johannes Gall’s essay on Hanns Eisler, which provides a rich context for one of the landmark texts in the field, Eisler and Adorno’s 1947 Composing for the Films.2 This essay covers both