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Gabriel Yared's The English Patient: A Film Score Guide.

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Gabriel Yared's The English Patient: A Film Score Guide. By Heather Laing. (Scarecrow Film Score Guides, no. 1.) Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2004. [xix, 195 p. ISBN 0-8108-4965-8. $34.95.] Music examples, bibliography, index.

Elmer Bernstein's Film Music Notebook: A Complete Collection of the Quarterly Journal, 1974-1978. Sherman Oaks, CA: The Film Music Society, 2004. [xi, 579 p. ISBN 1-892050-01-3. $40.00.] Index.

How good it is to see these two volumes, a positive sign of the state of film music studies. With the Laing volume, Scarecrow Press has taken up where Greenwood Press left off--by continuing this important series on film music monographs, still under the leadership of Kate Daubney. In her admirable series preface, she elucidates the wide-angle vision of the series, to draw together a "variety of different analytical practices and ideological approaches in film musicology for the study of individual scores" (p. xiii).

The English Patient (1996), winner of 9 Academy Awards, is a worthy candidate for study. Its recent vintage allowed author Heather Laing to consult with Gabriel Yared, the film's composer, in order to view the score, and obtain intimate knowledge of his musical credo and working methods. Her resulting examination provides an example of contemporary practices in film scoring. Additionally, given the composer's nationality (Lebanese), training and place of dwelling (Paris), we are afforded an opportunity to view the working methods of someone who is not a product of American training and whose livelihood has been chiefly outside the Hollywood environment.

Laing attempts a dual track for approaching the work at hand, first dealing with preliminary musical issues, followed by a discussion of the film's narrative, and concluding with a synthesis of the two as embodied in the film's score. The first chapter provides a brief biography of Yared, emphasizing his musical and philosophical beliefs. These beliefs provide explanations for some of...

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