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From There's Magic in Music to The Hard-Boiled Canary: Promoting “Good Music” in Prewar Musical Films

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2018

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Abstract

In 1941, Paramount released There's Magic in Music, a film about a soprano who sings opera in burlesque and wins a scholarship to attend Interlochen. The movie's utopian view of art music, however, caused difficulties for the studio in regard to marketing, leading to a studio-wide debate over the film's title. Archival documents position There's Magic in Music as a valuable case study for investigating the transitional period of musical film production between the Great Depression and the onset of World War II, particularly with respect to operatic musicals. Just prior to the United States’ entry into the war, Hollywood moved away from the escapist fantasy of 1930s cinema toward the realism that would mark the 1940s. To reboot fading interest in musicals, studios toyed with the formula of the backstage musical to focus more on dramatic narratives and star power. There's Magic in Music thus serves as a lens through which we might examine changes both in musical film production and in notions of “good music” at the eve of World War II.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , May 2018 , pp. 151 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2018 

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References

References

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Ussher, Bruno David. “Film Music and School Music.” Music Educator's Journal 26, no. 4 (February 1940): 18–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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AFI Online Catalog. “There's Magic in Music.” Accessed April 30, 2016. http://www.afi.com/members/catalog/DetailView.aspx?s=&Movie=26956.Google Scholar
Andrew L. Stone Papers. Special Collections. Margaret Herrick Library.Google Scholar
Interlochen Center for The Arts Records, 1927–2005. Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.Google Scholar
MPAA−Production Code Administration Records. Special Collections. Margaret Herrick Library.Google Scholar
Paramount Pictures Press Sheets. Special Collections. Margaret Herrick Library.Google Scholar
Paramount Pictures Production Records. Special Collections. Margaret Herrick Library.Google Scholar
Paramount Pictures Scripts. Special Collections. Margaret Herrick Library.Google Scholar
Hollywood ReporterGoogle Scholar
Modern ScreenGoogle Scholar
Motion Picture HeraldGoogle Scholar
Parents’ MagazineGoogle Scholar
Screen AlbumGoogle Scholar
ScreenlandGoogle Scholar
VarietyGoogle Scholar
What's On the Air?Google Scholar
Chicago Daily TribuneGoogle Scholar
New York TimesGoogle Scholar
Wall Street JournalGoogle Scholar
Washington PostGoogle Scholar
Stone, Andrew, dir. There's Magic in Music. Paramount Pictures, 1941.Google Scholar
Altman, Rick. The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Altman, Rick. “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.” In Film Genre Reader III, edited by Keith Grant, Barry, 27–41. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Biesen, Sheri Chinen. Music in the Shadows: Noir Musical Films. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Bird, William L. “Better Living”: Advertising, Media, and the New Vocabulary of Business Leadership, 1935–1955. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Birge, Edward B., Morgan, Russell V., and Grant, Richard W.. “M.E.N.C. at Hollywood.” Music Educator's Journal 25, no. 5 (March 1940): 12–13.Google Scholar
Birge, Edward B., Morgan, Russell V., and Grant, Richard W.. “National Music Camp Feature Film.” Music Educator's Journal 25, no. 5 (March 1940): 11–13.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Cary, Diana Serra. Hollywood's Children: An Inside Account of the Child Star Era. Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Damrosch, Walter. “Hearing is Believing.” Music Supervisors’ Journal 18, no. 1 (October 1931): 24.Google Scholar
Dixon, Wheeler Winston, ed. Introduction to American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations, by Dixon, Wheeler Winston, 3–11. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Doherty, Thomas. Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Fauser, Annegret. Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feuer, Jane. The Hollywood Musical. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Fleeger, Jennifer. Mismatched Women: The Siren's Song Through the Machine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Grant, Barry Keith. New Approaches to Film Genre: Hollywood Film Musical. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.Google Scholar
Haytock, Jennifer. The Middle Class in the Great Depression: Popular Women's Novels of the 1930s. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Howe, Sondra Wieland. “The NBC Music Appreciation Hour: Radio Broadcasts of Walter Damrosch, 1928–1942.” Journal of Research in Music Education 51, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 64–77.Google Scholar
Hubbert, Julie. “Carpet, Wallpaper, and Earmuffs (1935–1959).” In Celluloid Symphonies: Texts and Contexts in Film Music History, edited by Hubbert, 169–208. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackson, Paul. Saturday Afternoons at the Old Met: The Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts, 1931– 1950. Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Katz, Mark. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
MacDonald, Laurence E. The Invisible Art of Film Music: A Comprehensive History. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Morrison, Denis. “What is a Filmusical?” In Celluloid Symphonies: Texts and Contexts in Film Music History, edited by Hubbert, Julie, 234–37. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middlebrow Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, John, and Pokorny, Michael. “The Film Business in the United States and Britain during the 1930s.” Economic History Review 58, no. 1 (2005): 79–112.Google Scholar
Studlar, Gaylyn. Precocious Charms: Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Taylor, John Russell, and Jackson, Arthur. The Hollywood Musical. London: Secker and Warburg, 1971.Google Scholar
Thomas, Bob. King Cohn: The Life and Times of Harry Cohn. New York: G. P. Putnam's Songs, 1967.Google Scholar
Vancour, Shawn. “Popularizing the Classics: Radio's Role in the American Music Appreciation Movement 1922–34.” Media, Culture, and Society 31, no. 2 (2009): 289–307.Google Scholar
Welky, David. The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Wierzbicki, James. Film Music: A History. New York: Routledge, 2009.Google Scholar
Wierzbicki, James, Platte, Nathan, and Roust, Colin, eds. The Routledge Film Music Sourcebook. New York: Routledge, 2012.Google Scholar
Woll, Allen L. The Hollywood Musical Goes to War. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1983.Google Scholar
Ussher, Bruno David. “Film Music and School Music.” Music Educator's Journal 26, no. 4 (February 1940): 18–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zimmers, Tighe E. Tin Pan Alley Girl: A Biography of Ann Ronell. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2009.Google Scholar