Introduction: From Nineteenth-Century Stage Melodrama to Twenty-First-Century Film Scoring

Abstract

© Copyright the International Film Music Society, published by Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield, S3 8AF. I n the early 1990s I met a number of theatre historians at a Gilbert & Sullivan conference in New York. I was a newly minted Ph.D., and was hungry to meet established scholars inside or outside of my field. My new acquaintances that spring included David Mayer, Professor of Drama at the University of Manchester in England, who with Matthew Scott edited Four Bars of ‘Agit’: Incidental Music for Victorian and Edwardian Melodrama for Samuel French in 1983.1 I remember sitting with David in a coffee shop after the conference was over and sharing with him—in what must have been the earnest true-believer style of an enthusiastic young scholar—my ideas about the importance of music in the theatre of late nineteenth-century America, and the ubiquity of the theatre in the lives of everyday Americans during that period. I had recently completed my first book (an examination of the work of journeymen musicians in Washington, D. C. during the last quarter of the nineteenth century), and in the process had learned a great deal about both of those issues.2 The conversation that I had with David was a fortuitous one, for it resulted in an invitation to write a short introductory essay called “The Music of Toga Drama” for an anthology he was assembling for publication. This work (eventually called Playing out the Empire) is a collection of scripts of a particular type of late-century drama that came to be known (somewhat derisively) as “toga plays”; it includes scripts of five