From the time of the first public demonstration of a Lumière cinématographe, for which a pianist is said to have improvised an accompaniment, until today's widescreen features with their multi-channeled, digitally recorded scores, there has always been music for motion pictures. The pictures have fostered an abundant and rich variety of music-making, which for more than eight decades has affected us in ways both simple and subtle. Yet most of us have a very poor knowledge of what film music is all about. Why should there be this discrepancy? Why are the facts of film music not widely understood? Why should Peter Odegard, in a review of two mid-seventies reference works devoted to music of the twentieth century, have to take both to task for all but ignoring film music, "the most widely dispersed repertoire being performed today, and hence in its peculiar way the most influential"?

The answer, first of all, derives from the nature of the medium. Because film operates (at least potentially) through a conjunction of visual and auditory signals, research into film music requires an understanding of not one but two non-verbal systems of communication, as well as the problematical jargons with which we attempt to describe each of them in speech. In this age of specialized studies, few scholars have been able to master more than half of the subject. Those in film have been preoccupied with the broad essentials of its history and theory, with the result that music has been granted mostly cursory consideration. The subject also stands on the periphery of musicology. That discipline, little older than film itself, has emphasized the historical study of Western fine-art and folk idioms, along with the ethnological study of music in other cultures; relatively little attention has been given to recent music in the professional and popular idioms -- the idioms through which film music usually communicates. Textbooks of music history provide . . .