Introduction

Under suspicion: library music and the Musicians’ Union in Britain, 1960–1978

“…The tracks and their composers were, tellingly, left unnamed – recalling the in-built anonymity of library music (alternatively described as stock, background, production or programme music). Library music can be characterised as ‘music composed to be stockpiled, waiting to be used commercially’ (Taylor 2012, p. 120), referring as much to a type of applied music (defined by its audiovisual utilisation or function) as it does to a specific organisation of musical labour (Nardi 2012; Smith 2017). Anonymity – which Nardi more radically equated with ‘voicelessness, neutrality and genericity’ (2012, p. 81) – was inherent to the production of library music from the start, allegedly because what mattered most was the finished musical product and the ends (or destination) to which it might be put (this does not mean however that the musical product in question was automatically devoid of aesthetic originality).…”

The Cambridge Companion to Film Music. Edited by Mervyn Cooke and Fiona Ford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 438 pp. ISBN 9781107476493

“…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 2014) and the even newer Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound (Mera et al 2017). 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).…”