Hollywoods Filmmusik und ihr Weg zur Populärkultur: Kontexte, Historiografie und Medialität in den 1940er- und 1950er-Jahren

Abstract

Today, Hollywood film music is considered a part of popular culture. Nevertheless, this association was not prevalent in the 1940s and 1950s, when film music emerged as an artistic genre. The present article details this process of aesthetic identification by examining contexts of (film) music production and distribution, historiographical narratives, and specific aspects of contemporary mediality. In particular, it explores the presence of film music outside the film medium itself through the example of the Selznick studio’s distribution activities which were aimed at diverse middlebrow listeners, involving production of albums with a symphonic soundtrack on one side and popular theme songs on the other. This discussion aims to demonstrate similarities between film music and the contemporaneous phenomenon of music for easy listening which likewise occupied an ambivalent aesthetic position. Both were experienced primarily in the form of recordings. It will be shown that the two genres exemplify a shared aesthetics shaped by contemporary agents. Methodologically, this article combines historical source criticism with reception analysis, thereby forming a link with the theoretical frameworks of empirical popular culture studies. Such an approach helps to clarify the complex circumstances in which recorded music in the United States operated during the middle of the twentieth century, and to illuminate the beginnings of film music’s aesthetic path toward popular culture.