Saying It With Songs: Popular Music And The Coming Of Sound To Hollywood Cinema by Katherine Spring (review)

Abstract

SAYING IT WITH SONGS: POPULAR MUSIC AND THE COMING OF SOUND TO HOLLYWOOD CINEMA By Katherine Spring Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 256 pp.REVIEWED BY K.J. DONNELLYI was extremely excited to receive Katherine Springs book, Saying It With Songs, greatly anticipating an engaging and detailed study that enlightened me on the turbulent history of the film and music industries during the "transitional" years from silent to sound-recorded cinema. I'm pleased to say that the book did not disappoint. Indeed, it was an utter joy to read. This is no simple "history of the period" book. All of the issues it debates are relevant today. Indeed, the sections dealing with business relations between film and music industries, musical copyright and synergetic cross-publicity not only gave me great insight into the 1920s and beyond, but also gave me a greater understanding of the current manifestations of these and how their currents have remained on tracks largely established in the third decade of the twentieth century Spring quotes an article in 1929 which asked, "It is now a question as to which has absorbed which. Is the motion picture industry a subsidiary of the music publicity business-or have film producers gone into the business of making songs?" Indeed, this question might well have been asked on and off ever since.Scholars increasingly have registered how historically defining and aesthetically bold the transition period between silent and sound cinema (both poor and misleading terms) actually was. Spring traces the industrial developments between the film and music industries in the 1920s, while attending to how this affected the product. In the late 1920s, films bent to fit the requirement of songs appearing. As Spring notes, plausibility was heavily strained on occasions, although by the end of the decade songs increasingly were integrated with the classical norms of Hollywood storytelling and diegetic construction. This meant that they were shifted more towards title sequences, set in locations where songs might appear, integrated with the non-diegetic score, or corralled in the more musically-defined "film musical," which stabilized around 1933.It is clear that the 1920s and early 1930s were a crucial decade for film history, with business, technological and aesthetic developments reconfiguring the Hollywood film industry. Spring's book, along with Michael Slowik's recent Afler the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926-1934 (Columbia University Press, 2013) illustrates how far the transition to recorded sound from live sound was not simply about dialogue and just how central musical concerns were in events. Indeed, while Slowik looks at the now less certain notion that film underscores emerged in Hollywood in the early 1930s, Spring details the startling degree of collaboration and coherence between film and music as industries and how this is directly evident in their products. Indeed, as she notes, the sheer volume of songs appearing in films in the late 1920s is really overwhelming. Few mainstream films seemingly managed to escape at least one. While musicals derived directly from Broadway accounted for a good proportion of these films, a surprising number were genre films and it is upon these that this engaging and authoritative study is focused.As her central and convincing argument, Spring illustrates how the changes to the relationship of the film and music industries in the late 1920s had a significant influence on the form of the Hollywood sound film. She also notes that the notion of the "musical" was not straightforward once the sound film arrived. Many films included only a song or two, while others included more and still were not considered "musicals." Indeed, we have tended to superimpose later notions derived from the heavily compartmentalized production and publicity of 1930s Hollywood studios. Spring's interest lies more in films that use songs rather than films based on Broadway stage shows. …