Available From UC Press

Celluloid Symphonies is a unique sourcebook of writings on music for film, bringing together fifty-three critical documents, many previously inaccessible. It includes essays by those who created the music—Max Steiner, Erich Korngold, Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein and Howard Shore—and outlines the major trends, aesthetic choices, technological innovations, and commercial pressures that have shaped the relationship between music and film from 1896 to the present. Julie Hubbert’s introductory essays offer a stimulating overview of film history as well as critical context for the close study of these primary documents. In identifying documents that form a written and aesthetic history for film music, Celluloid Symphonies provides an astonishing resource for both film and music scholars and for students.

Julie Hubbert is Associate Professor of Music at the University of South Carolina.

“This is an amazing resource and a required text for just about any serious film music course in the United States, undergraduate or graduate. The research involved is enormous, thorough, and intelligently undertaken. The choice of readings skillfully reflects the industry, the audience, and many of the critical issues in the development of film, sound, and music in the 20th century."

--Michael Pisani, author of Imagining Native America in Music