contemporaries in Hollywood, than on his own evolution. As early as 1933, with
the enormously successful score for King Kong, he had a good sense of which
elements in a film would benefit from musical accompaniment, but there is
surprising evidence of the features of his mature film scoring style in the musical
forms of his pre-Hollywood career. Chapter I explores the context and
experiences from which Steiner's approach emerged, and Chapter 2 considers
the distinctive features of this style, particularly as they appear in his score for
Now, Voyager.

While the score may influence readings of the film, it is also interesting to
consider how readings of the film might have influenced the composition of the
score, and the analysis of Steiner's music can take place in a range of critical and
historical contexts. Now, Voyager is a fascinating document of both Hollywood
and American preoccupations with women's lives and the issues which were
perceived to be important to them: love, family, work, social purpose. The film
invites complex, sometimes conflicting readings of the central character as a
vamp-ish adultress and displaced mother, and the narrative is dominated by
strongly drawn female characters. Chapter 3 considers the context in which the
film was created, the range of influences over its production, and how these
elements are manifested in readings and interpretations. Chapter 4 considers an
experiential view of the film's music and similarities with the sound of other
contemporary Steiner scores. The critical reception of the music is also explored
alongside the influence of this score on more recent canons of film musicology.

This range of critical, historical and interpretative readings and perspectives
creates a rich context in which to analyse the score. The juxtaposition of musical
analysis with narrative schemes exposes Steiner's dual intention: his thematic
design for the score seems superficially to emphasise the dominance of
characterisation, while concealing a far deeper scheme of thematic coherence,
created by motif, tonality and orchestration. The analysis, Chapter 5, adopts
what is likely to have been Steiner's own approach to composition and considers
exactly how his understanding of music's dramatic function is manifested in this
score. Valuable evidence for analysis is found in Steiner's short score for this
film, both in the musical notation and the margin notes and annotations; the
examples given are all taken from the original manuscript. The scores for his
other films composed in this period give further evidence of Steiner's scoring
practice, and his letters and scrapbooks and the unpublished autobiography,
Notes to You, all contribute the composer's own perspective to a broader debate
about how scores are interpreted. All of the primary resource material is from
the Max Steiner Collection in the Arts and Communications Archive at Brigham
Young University.

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