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Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-Existing Music in Film.

Article Excerpt
Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-Existing Music in Film. By Phil Powrie and Robynn Stilwell. (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series.) Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. [226 p. ISBN 0-7546-5137-1. $89.95.] Illustrations, music examples, filmography, bibliography, index.

In this collection of essays, editors Phil Powrie and Robynn Stilwell, both well-known for their own work in music and film, seek to illuminate the use of and responses to the inclusion of pre-existing compositions in a variety of film genres and historical periods. For the most part, the scholarship represented in this book is indicative of the newness of the field itself: some essays are paragons of clarity and reasoned analysis; others are trying to find an ideological home amid a wealth of information and a sea of possible approaches; and a few could have benefited from more space for explanation or more time for incubation before publication.

The true value of the collection lies in three outstanding articles by Kristi A. Brown, Jeongwon Joe, and Phil Powrie. Joe, in "Reconsidering Amadeus: Mozart as Film Music," offers a powerfully reasoned and well-articulated response to the myriad of musicologists (and others) who took offence at the much-edited and re-coded Mozart works used for the score of Amadeus. In her article, Joe reiterates the fact that the film is not, in fact, a true biopic of the composer, but rather what playwright Peter Shaffer emphasized, a "fantasia on events in Mozart's life." What makes the soundtrack for the film work so well, Joe argues, is that...

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