Film Music and Beyond

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Film Music and Beyond
For forty years after the Second World War, the Austrian émigré Hans Keller (1919-85) was a commanding critical voice in British music. Forceful, witty, pugnacious and brilliantly focussed, he addressed every aspect of concert, chamber and operatic music, ancient and modern, with crusading zeal and at the end of his life was awarded a cross of honour by the President of Austria. Few people, however, know that he was also the outstanding film music critic of his day, a category he more or less invented. For twelve years from 1946 to 1958 he went tirelessly to press shows, made himself known to composers, music directors and technicians, wrote columns for several journals, especially Music Review, and championed the achievement of the British beyond all else. But he was also a musician in the line of Arnold Schoenberg and a wide-ranging cultural thinker in the... Tovább

Fülszöveg

'ifi
i
î. ' ' i'V. 'f )!< VîfflP®
:.! r • I .1 , 1 I :' ( ' J. . V i. . .lAîiP.î
¦ ' ; I '
Film Music and Beyond
For forty years after the Second World War, the Austrian émigré Hans Keller (1919-85) was a commanding critical voice in British music. Forceful, witty, pugnacious and brilliantly focussed, he addressed every aspect of concert, chamber and operatic music, ancient and modern, with crusading zeal and at the end of his life was awarded a cross of honour by the President of Austria. Few people, however, know that he was also the outstanding film music critic of his day, a category he more or less invented. For twelve years from 1946 to 1958 he went tirelessly to press shows, made himself known to composers, music directors and technicians, wrote columns for several journals, especially Music Review, and championed the achievement of the British beyond all else. But he was also a musician in the line of Arnold Schoenberg and a wide-ranging cultural thinker in the tradition of Kant, Schopenhauer, Schiller and Freud. So as he dealt with the small change of journalism, he moved into the 'beyond' by reflecting deeply on the philosophy and topics of film music and the psychology of its composers. In 1959, during the nine months before he joined the BBC, he shifted his attention from cinema to television and wrote an innovative column for Musical Opinion.
This book brings together the bulk of his writings on music and the screen and arranges them in four parts - topics, composers, criticism and television music - with a preface arguing 'The Need for Competent Film Music Criticism'. The result is a fastidiously observed and unparalleled account of a great era for British film music and a volume that in philosophical and ethical rigour stands well beside the celebrated Composing for the Films (1949) by Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler. Vissza