Baroque Music in Post-War Cinema by Donald Greig (review)

Abstract

I n an article on representations of the baroque era in film music, Miguel Mera identifies an important difference between concert music and film music: “Good concert music does not necessarily make good film music and vice versa. All of the major film scholars support this view.” Baroque music seems especially ill suited to the needs of film narrative. Baroque composers were keenly concerned not only with expressing but also with drawing out emotions in their listeners—as Sharri K. Hall wrote, “Music could no longer simply present affection but had to move in such ways that the listener was affected emotionally.” Nevertheless, historical beliefs in the connections between musical elements such as temperaments or modes and specific emotional states do not necessarily translate to modern conceptions of musical emotionality. As Roy Prendergast put it, the “rather square” melodies and phrasings of baroque music cannot respond to the pacing and flow of film narratives. And yet, throughout the sound film era, in spite of the dominance of music rooted in a so-called Romantic idiom (although often owing more to twentieththan nineteenth-century practice), baroque music or music inspired by the baroque pops up continually in film scoring, often in the unlikeliest of places. Clearly there is more to baroque music than is commonly assumed by the audiences, critics, and filmmakers who have long denigrated its suitability as film scoring. In Baroque Music in Post-War Cinema, Donald Greig provides a masterful overview and a number of pointed insights into the “hows” and “whys” of baroque music’s relationship to film music. At first glance, one might doubt Greig’s ability, in only eighty pages (including bibliography), to achieve such a feat. Rather than a fulllength monograph, this book is part of the Cambridge Elements series, which, similarly to Oxford’s Very Short Introductions series, packs a concise and focused introduction to a topic into a slender