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...

For nearly twenty years, scholar and critic Royal S. Brown contributed a regular column, Film Musings, to Fanfare magazine. This single volume assembles the material from these columns and presents Brown's reviews of significant recordings of movie scores. Although many of the reviews are of original soundtrack recordings for films released during the column's run, a number of the reviews also cover reissues of earlier recordings, as well as newly recorded versions of classic scores. In certain instances, Brown was even able to include in his column interviews with composers such as David...