Global Soundtracks is a collection of essays that apply ethnomusicological approaches and perspectives to film analysis in varied ways. Editor Mark Slobin has himself contributed roughly one third of the text—an introduction, a first “part” comprising three interwoven chapters on film music in the United States, and a comparative epilogue—which could almost have been a small monograph in its own right. The second “part” consists of nine essays by other contributors and falls into the genre of exploratory edited volume aimed at jump-starting a neglected topic, with the usual strengths and weaknesses that entails. Four of these essays address “cinema systems” in India, Nigeria, and China, while the other five deal with specific films and musicians under the rubric “cinema moments.”
Slobin himself equates an ethnomusicological take on film analysis with the position that “every film is ethnographic, and every soundtrack acts like an ethnomusicologist” (3-4, italics in original). In practice, this seems to cover the first of two functions he sees in the music of soundtracks predicated on a pervasive, supercultural approach he associates with Hollywood composer Max Steiner: “to produce...a musical ethnography of a given community...and...to use conventional markers of feeling to target and guide the viewer’s journey through the narrative” (29). Slobin doesn’t neglect the latter category—in effect, the orchestral score—but he focuses most of his attention on the former, or what cinema scholars typically call diegetic sound: music, in this case, that is supposed to be audible to the characters and to add verisimilitude to the fictional environment. In his first two chapters, Slobin explores gaps he finds between Hollywood soundtrack practice and the musical realities it purports to represent in films ranging from King Kong to The Man With the Golden Arm. Particularly interesting are his concepts of “erasure,” the denial of musical soundspace to characters of certain identities, and “displacement,” the substitution of a stereotype for a culture group’s own music. In The Searchers, for example, Swedish characters in the Texas of 1868 don’t get any “Swedish” music (erasure), while Spanish flamenco is passed off as “Mexican” music (displacement). This type of analysis yields interesting insights, although in explicitly evaluating all films as works of ethnography Slobin sometimes risks framing soundtrack choices as “inaccurate” rather than as manifestations of culture-specific logics it is the task of ethnographers of media to discover. In a third chapter, Slobin explores music in the soundtracks of cinema subcultures—“race” and “Yiddish” films of the 1930s and more recent Latino and Native American cinema—a key question being the extent to which these subcultures have adopted or resisted supercultural soundtrack conventions.
The second “part” of Global Soundtracks features an assortment of approaches to material drawn from cinema cultures around the world, the common threads being an attention to music and a more or less ethnographic perspective. Individual chapters address reflexive cinema in China as it pertains to film music and musicians; the gamelan-centered score of Nopember 1828 (Indonesia); the portrayal of Brazilian music in Disney’s The Three Caballeros; and such other specific works and performers as Angelitos negros (Mexico), La rue cases-nègres (Martinique), and the film singing of Abd al-Halim Hafiz (Egypt). India is represented by two chapters: an essay on the Bollywood music industry centers on the social and professional factors that have shaped its workings over time, while a chapter on Tamil film music includes a transcription and culturally informed interpretation of the score of one specific film, Kandukondain Kandukondain. Yet another chapter treats Hausa video dramas based closely on Hindi films that incorporated musical practices starkly at odds with prior local tradition; Abdalla Uba Adamu claims that these dramas instigated a broader acceptance in northern Nigeria of multiple-instrument ensembles, male-female duets, and an elevation in the status of the musician.
In a final section on “comparative vistas,” Slobin tentatively sets forth two avenues for the comparative study of film music. One is the examination of musical motifs common to multiple cinema cultures—the scene in which someone introduces a gramophone into a community unfamiliar with it, for example—something he variously calls a “narrative knot,” a “node,” or a “figure,” depending on how general or specific it is. The other is the use of music as “ornament,” to enhance the film audience’s pleasure beyond the need to support a narrative.
Global Soundtracks is a worthy contribution to a growing literature on the ethnography of mediated sound. As a “sampling of individual approaches” (xx), it offers little overall synthesis beyond what the authors initially brought to the table, leaving it to the reader to decide how the pieces might ultimately fit together. That said, too much synthesis at this stage might have been premature: the back cover asserts that this book is the “first volume focusing on film music as a worldwide phenomenon.” The cultural and geographic diversity of its subject matter certainly justifies the “worldwide” part of that claim, and it is to be hoped that its example—and the analytical frameworks Slobin has introduced—will inspire further ethnomusicological study of film soundtracks in a similar vein.
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[Review length: 841 words • Review posted on September 1, 2009]