Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Singing a Song: The Culture and Conventions of Popular
Music in the 1920s
Chapter 2. Owning a Song: The Restructuring of Hollywood and Tin
Pan Alley
Chapter 3. Plugging a Song: The Discrete Charm of the Popular Song,
From Broadway to Hollywood
Chapter 4. Integrating a Song: The Threat to Narrative
Plausibility
Chapter 5. Curtailing a Song: Toward the Classical Background
Score
Conclusion: The Fate of the Motion Picture Song
Appendix 1: Confirmatory License Issued by Music Publishers
Protective Association (1929)
Appendix 2: "Tieups of Film and Music" as Reported by Variety
Appendix 3: Timeline of Relationships Between Film and Music
Companies
Appendix 4: Agreement between Al Dubin, The Vitaphone Corp., and
Music Publishers Holding Corporation
Appendix 5: Summary of Agreement between Vitaphone Corporation, M.
Witmark & Sons, and Ray Perkins
Bibliography
Credits
Index
Katherine Spring is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University.
"Combining archival research with impressive scholarship, Spring
offers a stimulating, provocative, and often paradigm-shifting
study of how popular music shaped the very definition of cinema in
its transformation from a silent to a sound medium. Lucid and
lively, a must-read for anyone interested in the convergence of
film and popular song in Hollywood." --Kathryn Kalinak, author of
Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood and Film
Music: A Very Short Introduction
"Finally, a book that creatively covers popular song's contribution
to the coming of sound. Katherine Spring's Saying It With Songs is
a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the connections
between Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley." --Rick Altman, University of
Iowa
"An engaging and thought-provoking exploration of heretofore
largely uncharted territory- that transition between the coming of
synchronized sound and the emergence of classical Hollywood
practice. Combining archival research into the corporate and legal
maneuverings of the studios as they move to take over music
publishing with nicely articulated readings of films from the late
1920s and early 1930s, Saying It With Songs maps out the
boom-and-bust
cycle of early musicals and the reaction against them before
musical and narrative conventions 'settle' around 1933." --Robynn
Stilwell, Georgetown University
"Essential reading for historians of film and popular music. In it,
the author combines impressive scholarship with conceptual clarity,
making accessible to readers the complex changes that took place in
the motion picture and music businesses resulting from the coming
of sound." --The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and
Television
"While the reader learns a lot about movie theory and song
arrangement, it is still a very light and easy style we encounter
on these pages; this comes as a great
plus."--popcultureshelf.com
"If sound came quickly to Hollywood, its arrival inspired a burst
of experimental creativity. Dwelling longer on this brief moment of
heterogeneity might help us to recapture some of the novel wonder
of early sound film, which Spring's colourful and thought-provoking
account opens up as a fascinating new area of research."--Music,
Sound, and the Moving Image
"[A] groundbreaking study...Carefully crafted and meticulously
researched, Spring asks us to reconsider the importance of this
period that functions as a nexus from the silent film era to the
introduction of the classical background score. As such, it will be
of interest to scholars of film and culture, musicologists, and
film aficionados alike."--Film Matters
"Spring's emphasis on songs during the conversion period matters
not just because it helps us better grasp corporate relationships
and cinematic storytelling, but also because it complicates the
generally accepted reading of classical Hollywood's romantic score.
Indeed, Spring claims that conversion-era film offers early
examples of both the popular song score and orchestral score that
would become typical much later. Her careful retelling of this
period's
history is therefore important for anyone who wants to understand
Hollywood film music in any era." -- Journal of the Society for
American Music
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