The Cambridge Companion to Film Music is long overdue. A cursory web search turns up references to a forthcoming iteration of the book from as far back as 2006 (then to be edited by Peter Franklin and Robynn Stilwell, who remain as contributors here), and evidence of authors and chapters lost along the road to this final publication. A decade or even five years ago, a Cambridge Companion would have been a welcome endorsement of the expanding field of film music studies, and an automatic first port of call for students of the topic. As it happened, however, the field simply continued to grow, with conferences held regularly around the world and a plethora of journals, monographs and edited collections devoted to various aspects of the topic now already on library shelves. Where does this Cambridge Companion fit in?

In its cost, size and tone, the Cambridge Companion is more accessible than similarly broad collections such as The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies (Neumeyer Reference Neumeyer2014) and the even newer Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound (Mera et al. Reference Mera, Sadoff and Winters2017). The question of remit raised by comparison with the Routledge Companion is equally significant, and obscured in the Cambridge Companion’s introduction, in which editors Cooke and Ford suggest that their book considers ‘film music and the music of other related screen media’ (p. 1). Almost all of their contributors focus firmly on film music, however, with other media effectively receiving only passing mention. How are they ‘related’ to film? Can film music and its study be disentangled from other topics and approaches within a wider field? Further attempts to answer these questions would have been welcome, even if to the end of arguing that distinctions such as that suggested by this book's title are largely and increasingly arbitrary.

The book is split into four parts, each of five or six chapters. The first, ‘Making Film Music’, tackles production contexts and methods, with topics ranging from the responses of US and European film industries to emerging technologies in the transition to sound (James Buhler and Hannah Lewis) to the confluence of economic and artistic concerns in the British pop music film (Stephen Glynn). As is the case throughout the book, the aim here is not to cover all possible angles, but to consider a few key (and often understudied) topics via a range of approaches. Buhler and Lewis provide a detailed historical account that questions narratives of the period propagated by others, while Ben Winters draws on archival research to bust different myths in his chapter on collaborative authorship in the Hollywood studio system. Winters demonstrates that Erich Wolfgang Korngold was not, as has often been suggested, the ‘natural’ film composer and conductor who eschewed cue sheets and mechanical timing aids. David Cooper takes a broader perspective, discussing the evolution of sound recording and reproduction technologies from nascent sound–image synchronisation to the present day. His chapter offers a digestible summary of technical information sure to be a helpful reference for others, who might consider the effects of specific technologies on the production and reception of particular soundtracks in greater detail than Cooper can here. Glynn's chapter breaks less new ground, largely summarising ideas and examples from his book The British Pop Music Film (Glynn Reference Glynn2013), before the opening part concludes with Cooke's interview with composer George Fenton, on the latter's work for both film and television. Any wish for a ‘bigger name’ (or perhaps for a variety of names; this is the book's only interview) is mostly dispelled by the thoughtful discussion on topics from temp tracks to collaborating with Ken Loach; this interview will interest both scholars and budding composers.

The book's second part, ‘Approaching Film Music’, balances overviews of theoretical and methodological approaches to film music scholarship with case studies in which such music has been approached. Guido Heldt's chapter promises only ‘a whistle-stop tour of some milestones in the uncertain unfolding of film-music theory’ (p. 101), but even so appears relatively comprehensive with extensive reference to texts both familiar and unfamiliar, English and non-English. Along the way, Heldt clears up some common misunderstandings and misuses of theoretical concepts. Similarly useful for many scholars will be Kate Daubney's practical advice on archival research, working with living composers and dealing with copyright, based on her experience as author for and editor of the Scarecrow Press Film Score Guides series. Peter Franklin and Fiona Ford both offer straightforward but effective case studies, Franklin taking a fresh look at Casablanca and its ‘“thematization” of how popular music works’ for its listeners (p. 128), Ford discussing popular songs and associated issues of sex (the ‘pornification’ of popular culture) and race (white appropriation of black culture) in Happy Feet. Rounding off this part, Miguel Mera outlines his novel application of Michel Chion's ‘materializing sound indices’ to film music through close examination of two Jonny Greenwood scores. Key to the success of scores such as Greenwood's for There Will Be Blood, for Mera, is that ‘we can simultaneously feel as much as we hear’ (p. 172). This should be a fruitful avenue for future research.

The chapters of part three, ‘Genre and Idiom’, provide broad perspectives on the music of particular film genres and, in one case, the interaction of a musical genre with film. David Butler focuses on film noir, from the 1940s to more recent neo-noirs, and argues that musical approaches to that category have been much more diverse than is often acknowledged. Butler also briefly notes the influence of (an idea of) film noir's sound in the concert hall, a path reversed and examined in more detail in Stan Link's discussion of the music of science fiction and horror. Grouping those two genres allows for insightful consideration of their musical similarities and differences. Robynn Stilwell also compares and contrasts in an examination of approaches to Western scoring in Hollywood, spaghetti and revisionist subgenres, which additionally traces further influence on science fiction music. Although these chapters offer effective summaries, much of the ground they cover is familiar, not least from Cooke's own A History of Film Music (Reference Cooke2008). This is also the case in the chapter by Krin Gabbard, who here as elsewhere considers what films can tell us about jazz history (and particularly that music's reception). Gabbard runs chronologically though briefly through a number of illustrative examples from 1923 to 2014. A more original take comes in Caryl Flinn's chapter on musicals. Flinn explores problems of defining the musical, and argues for a greater focus on the music of screen musicals than has often been the case, providing more questions than answers for future scholarship. Finally, Paul Wells's chapter on music in British animation from the 1920s to the 1990s is a welcome attempt to shift the balance of study away from a Hollywood cartoon canon, arguing that British cartoon makers produced a different kind of product for a different audience, not least through their uses of music.

On one hand, the book's final part, ‘Music in World Cinemas’, is another important attempt to address an imbalance, as there remains too little English-language scholarship on film music in non-Anglophone traditions. On the other, it is a shame that two chapters here focus on relatively well-discussed individuals – Ennio Morricone and Jean-Luc Godard – while the very idea of fencing off five disparate topics into a ‘World’ section is also problematic, promoting a notion that the cinemas discussed are still ‘other’. Nevertheless, the essays themselves are all of high quality, and continue the book's exploration of varied scholarly approaches. Sergio Miceli, on Morricone's work for Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy, and Annette Davison, on Hans Werner Henze's score for The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, undertake more conventional musical analysis than any of the book's other contributors, to outline significant stylistic partitions in those composers’ scores. Danae Stefanou, on late Godard, and Timothy Koozin, on Tōru Takemitsu's collaborations with Masahiro Shinoda, explore how boundaries between musical composition and sound design can be blurred within production processes. For Stefanou, Godard ‘is far more concerned with sampling and processing entire musical compositions as sounds than with handling them as music’ (p. 298), while Koozin highlights Takemitsu's ‘creative shaping of the whole soundtrack’ (p. 325) across three Shinoda films of different genres. In the final chapter, Mekala Padmanabhan discusses Tamil film music (understudied even compared with the output of Bollywood), focusing particularly on the historical reasons for and effects of its synthesis of influences from within and outside India.

In all, this Cambridge Companion is a fine addition to the film music literature. Some chapters add more to the field than others, although any choice of topics and examples would inevitably leave gaps in coverage, and there are many fresh details and ideas here even for seasoned scholars. Particularly successful is the combination of general overviews (historical, technological, theoretical, methodological) with case-study chapters that exemplify a range of approaches to examining soundtracks. This book could readily be offered to undergraduate and postgraduate students as a ‘toolkit’ to inspire and guide their own studies, and while the balance is towards musicological study, the relatively accessible tone and varied methodologies additionally make the book worthy of attention for those from other disciplines. The editors are to be commended for assembling a collection that represents much of the variety of modern film music scholarship. We may not have needed a Cambridge Companion to Film Music, but this volume's companionship will be appreciated for years to come.