The Gendered Score

To my parents
Doris and Bill Laing
 The Gendered Score
Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman’s Film

Heather Laing
First published 2007 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Laing, Heather
The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman’s Film – (Ashgate
popular and folk music series) 1. Motion picture music – History and criticism 2. Women
in motion pictures 3. Sex role in motion pictures 4. Music – 20th century – History and
criticism 5. Melodrama in motion pictures
I. Title
781.5’42’082

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Laing, Heather.
The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman’s Film / by Heather
Laing.
p. cm – (Ashgate popular and folk music series)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and filmography (p ). ISBN 978-0-7546-5100-0
(alk. paper)
1. Motion picture music – History and criticism. 2. Gender identity in motion pictures. 3.
Gender identity in music. I. Title

ML2075.L33 2007
781.5’42082–dc22
2006032406
ISBN 9780754651000 (hbk)
 Contents

List of figures vii

List of music examples ix
General editor’s preface xi
Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction 1
1 The Siren and the Muse: Ideas of gender, emotion and subjectivity
in music and film 9
2 Music and the voice in the woman’s film 25
3 The female listener 67
4 The female musician 99
5 The male musician 139

Bibliography 179
Filmography 185
Index 189
 List of figures

The Publisher acknowledges that the quality of certain figures (where the images
have been captured from video stills) are not perfect quality, but this was the best
that could be achieved considering the age and rarity of the recordings

4.1a Love Story. Lissa (Margaret Lockwood) looks down at the waves
and hears music 122
4.1b Love Story. Lissa translates the music of the waves at the piano 122
4.2a Love Story. Lissa looks up at the seagulls and hears music 123
4.2b Love Story. Lissa translates the music of the seagulls at the piano 123
4.3a Love Story. Lissa stares into eternity and hears the voice of the
elements in the form of music 124
4.3b Love Story. Lissa in the personal performance mode, translating the music
of the elements at the piano and associating the theme with Kit’s voice 124
4.4a Love Story. The move to the personal performance mode reflects
Lissa’s distress during the cliff top concert 130
4.4b Love Story. The end of Lissa’s performance of the Cornish Rhapsody
in the Albert Hall concert, revealing her distress through
the personal performance mode 130
5.1 Dangerous Moonlight. Carol (Sally Gray) and Stefan (Anton Walbrook).
Stefan’s expression of emotion to non-thematic music 160
5.2 Dangerous Moonlight. Carol’s unhappiness linked to the disruption
of the love theme 160
5.3 Dangerous Moonlight. The idealized view of Carol 162
5.4 Dangerous Moonlight. The distanced view of Stefan 162
5.5 Dangerous Moonlight. Stefan in the personal performance mode,
immune to Carol’s displeasure 163
5.6 Dangerous Moonlight. Stefan directs the patriotic significance of the
Chopin Polonaise at Carol 165
5.7 Dangerous Moonlight. Carol is defeated by Stefan’s musical statement 165
5.8 Dangerous Moonlight. Stefan in a ‘feminine’ state of excessive emotion 169
 List of music examples

2.1aMax Steiner, Now, Voyager, p. 1. The Charlotte theme 40

2.1b Max Steiner, Now, Voyager, p. 13. The Mother theme 41
2.1c Max Steiner, Now, Voyager, p. 76. The Gift theme 41
2.1d Max Steiner, Now, Voyager, p. 85. The Jerry theme 41
2.1e Max Steiner, Now, Voyager, p. 73. The Tina theme 41
2.2 Max Steiner, Now, Voyager, pp. 7–8. The Mother theme 43
2.3 Max Steiner, Now, Voyager, pp. 73–4. The Tina theme  43
2.4 Max Steiner, Now, Voyager, p. 1. The Charlotte theme.
Opening title sequence 45
2.5 Max Steiner, Now, Voyager, p. 76. The Gift theme  45
2.6 Max Steiner, Now, Voyager, pp. 85–6. The Jerry theme 46
2.7 Max Steiner, Now, Voyager, pp. 17–18. The Therapeutic theme  47
2.8 Max Steiner, Now, Voyager, p. 142. The Vale theme 47
2.9 Max Steiner, Now, Voyager, p. 25. The Charlotte theme,
Charlotte’s flashback 50
2.10 Max Steiner, Now, Voyager, p. 89. The Mother theme, ‘calmed’ version 54
3.1a Franz Liszt, Concert Study in D Flat (Un Sospiro). Extract from bar 37  85
3.1b Daniele Amfitheatrof, Letter from an Unknown Woman.
The descending patterns of the Liszt cadenza and the resolution motif
combined with the ‘comment’ of woodwind orchestration 85
3.2a Franz Liszt, Concert Study in D Flat (Un Sospiro). Bars 3–5,
melody only. Anticipation–resolution pattern 89
3.2b Daniele Amfitheatrof, Letter from an Unknown Woman.
Extension and interruption of the resolution motif 89
3.2c Daniele Amfitheatrof, Letter from an Unknown Woman.
Repeated anticipation motif and introduction of brass instrumentation 89
3.2d Franz Liszt, Concert Study in D Flat (Un Sospiro).
Bars 9–12, melody only. Extended resolution pattern 89
3.2e Daniele Amfitheatrof, Letter from an Unknown Woman.
Extended resolution pattern 90
3.2f Daniele Amfitheatrof, Letter from an Unknown Woman.
Interruption of resolution motif for repetition of
whole theme an octave higher 90
3.2g Daniele Amfitheatrof, Letter from an Unknown Woman.
Whole theme with extended resolution 90
3.2h Daniele Amfitheatrof, Letter from an Unknown Woman.
Compressed repetition of anticipation motif without final resolution 90
4.1 Hubert Bath, Cornish Rhapsody. Bars 6–21; melody only. The main theme
of the Rhapsody and Lissa’s theme at the non-diegetic and
meta-diegetic levels 125
 The Gendered Score
4.2 The Miller of Dee (traditional song) 134
5.1 Richard Addinsell, Warsaw Concerto, pages 13–15; piano only.
The love theme that binds together Stefan, Carol and Warsaw 158
5.2 Fryderyk Chopin, Polonaise in A Major, Op. 40, No. 1; bars 1–4 158
5.3 Richard Addinsell, Dangerous Moonlight. The love theme disrupted 161
 General Editor’s Preface

The upheaval that occurred in musicology during the last two decades of the
twentieth century has created a new urgency for the study of popular music alongside
the development of new critical and theoretical models. A relativistic outlook has
replaced the universal perspective of modernism (the international ambitions of
the 12-note style); the grand narrative of the evolution and dissolution of tonality
has been challenged, and emphasis has shifted to cultural context, reception
and subject position. Together, these have conspired to eat away at the status of
canonical composers and categories of high and low in music. A need has arisen,
also, to recognize and address the emergence of crossovers, mixed and new genres,
to engage in debates concerning the vexed problem of what constitutes authenticity
in music and to offer a critique of musical practice as the product of free, individual
expression.
Popular musicology is now a vital and exciting area of scholarship, and the
Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series aims to present the best research in the field.
Authors will be concerned with locating musical practices, values and meanings
in cultural context, and may draw upon methodologies and theories developed in
cultural studies, semiotics, poststructuralism, psychology and sociology. The series
will focus on popular musics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is designed
to embrace the world’s popular musics from Acid Jazz to Zydeco, whether high tech
or low tech, commercial or non-commercial, contemporary or traditional.

Professor Derek B. Scott

Chair of Music
University of Salford
 Acknowledgements

This book began life as a doctoral thesis at the University of Warwick, and my first
thanks must therefore go to Richard Dyer—firstly for his intellectual support and
guidance as my supervisor and secondly for his encouragement to develop the thesis
into this book. Thanks also go to the many others who have offered advice and
support, be it intellectual or practical, at various stages, including Victor Perkins, Ed
Gallafent, José Arroyo, Phil Ellis, Valerie Orpen, Susan Bowles, Rachel Moseley,
David Wordsworth, Robynn Stilwell, Kate Daubney, Ian Garwood, Sarah Moore and
Peter Krämer. My parents gave me practical and emotional support for which I am
very grateful and my brother Keith Laing offered technical computing support. I also
express my gratitude to the AHRB for funding this period of study.
For their help in establishing copyright information and obtaining permission for
the use of copyright material in the book, I would like to thank Ralph Holmes at BBC
Television; Matt Smith at International Music Publications/Faber Music; Sheree
Bevins and Zaid Ahmad at Faber Music; Keith Wakefield at Stainer & Bell; Sally
Goodliffe and Ray Jenkins at Granada International; Jill Little at London Features
International; Liddy Barrow, Sarah Holcroft and Catherine Walker at Music Sales;
Shari Wied at Hal Leonard; and Cari Ginell at Alfred Music Ltd.
At Ashgate, I wish to thank Derek Scott for his enthusiasm, encouragement
and guidance, and Heidi May for her patience and invaluable advice on all sorts of
matters. Finally, as ever, my thanks go to my husband Tim Ayling for supporting me
through every aspect of the whole process.

Gratitude is also expressed for the following permissions to use copyright material:

Now, Voyager
Music by Max Steiner
© 1942 M. Witmark & Sons, USA
Warner/Chappell North America Ltd, London W6 8BS
Reproduced by permission of International Music Publications Ltd
All Rights Reserved

Letter from an Unknown Woman

Words & Music by Daniele Amfitheatrof
© Copyright 2000 Crystal Music Publishing Incorporated, USA
Campbell Connelly and Company Limited
Used by permission of Music Sales Limited
All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured

Images from Love Story are used by kind permission of ITV PLC (Granada Int’l)/
LFI
xiv The Gendered Score
Theme from Cornish Rhapsody
Music by Hubert Bath
© 1944 Keith Prowse Music Publishing Co. Ltd, London WC2H 0QY
Reproduced by permission of International Music Publications Ltd
All Rights Reserved

Warsaw Concerto by Richard Stewart Addinsell

World – Excluding USA and Canada:

© 1942 Keith Prowse Music Publishing Co. Ltd, London WC2H 0QY
Reproduced by permission of International Music Publications Ltd (a trading name
of Faber Music Ltd)
All Rights Reserved

USA and Canada:

Copyright © 1942 by Keith Prowse & Co. Ltd
Copyright Renewed
Published in the USA and Canada by Chappell & Co.
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved

Images from Dangerous Moonlight are used by kind permission of BBC Television

Dangerous Moonlight. Music by Richard Stewart Addinsell

World – Excluding USA and Canada:

© 1941 Keith Prowse Music Publishing Co. Ltd, London WC2H 0QY
Reproduced by permission of International Music Publications Ltd (a trading name
of Faber Music Ltd)
All Rights Reserved

USA and Canada:

© 1941 (Renewed) Keith Prowse Music Publishing Co. Ltd (PRS)
All Rights for the US and Canada Administered by WB Music Corp.
All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission
 Introduction

A film of the forties is airing on television. Even though you’re in the next room, you
are likely to find that a certain kind of music will cue you in correctly to the presence of
Woman on screen. It is as if the emotional excess of this presence must find its outlet in
the euphony of a string orchestra.

In the academic study of both film music and gender representation in film, the
intimate relationship between female characters and non-diegetic music has been
largely accepted as a given. The effect of this association is usually interpreted as
Claudia Gorbman describes it, linking women to the emotional and even irrational
aspects of the narrative and distancing them from the rational world of male
characters and its attendant emphasis on the power of vision. It seems that female
characters are burdened with a mode of musical–emotional representation that, as
Gorbman suggests, serves less to characterize them as ‘ordinarily’ emotional than
to distinguish them through an association with the ‘excessively’ emotional. As
a result, when female emotions become a particular focus of the melodrama and
woman’s film of the 1940s, the lush symphonic scores that seem to define cinema at
that time are bound to follow.
The sheer force of this representational convention, however, means that we are
in danger of being blinded to the fact that it is just that—a convention. Academic
study tends to focus more commonly on how female film characters are represented
through music—that is to say, the various compositional styles and conventions
that tend to accompany and characterize them. When it comes to the question of
why they are so surrounded by music in the first place, recourse is often made to
psychoanalytical explanations, which conceptualize non-diegetic music and its
predominant link with female characters and emotional subject matter through ideas
of the maternal voice and nostalgia for that voice. This explanation suggests, by
definition, that both the appeal and the affect of music in this context are deeply
rooted in subconscious responses, and thus that music enables the triggering of a
‘universal’ affect. While not wishing to dispute the possibility of this explanation, it
is inevitably more concerned with questions of emotional engagement with female
characters and their narratives. What it does not address is the question of the very real
effect that such a predominant association with music must surely have on the actual
characterization of the woman. As a result, several important questions have been
left unanswered. What, first of all, is the effect on the female characters themselves
of constant emotional determination through their association with music? And by
extension, what role does music actually play in the construction of emotional and/or
gendered characterization?


Claudia Gorbman (1987), Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, London: BFI, p. 80.
 The Gendered Score
These questions cannot be answered without being tied in to the very specific style
of music that is most commonly used in this respect. It may be particularly important
to psychoanalytical theories that music is essentially abstract in its nature. The fact
remains, however, that the music chosen to codify emotion in 1940s cinema is
composed predominantly in the late-nineteenth-century symphonic style. There have
been many explanations offered for the dominant adoption of this style in 1940s film
music composition, and the nineteenth-century belief in its capacity for emotional
signification and communication is generally accepted as its primary role in relation
to characterization—a capacity that also, of course, chimes with psychoanalytical
accounts of its role. However, can one element of contemporaneous thinking
around this music be adopted without also bringing with it an equal inheritance of
associated beliefs? The nineteenth-century ideas that contextualized this capacity
for emotional expression and representation must surely also be taken into account,
or at the very least held up for question, in any discussion of its role in or effect on
characterization. An examination of the musical–emotional representation of women
in 1940s melodrama and women’s films cannot, therefore, ask only: ‘Why women
and music?’ It must also ask: ‘Why women and nineteenth-century music?’
In all these respects, it is necessary to return to a basic interrogation of the very
assumption of the ‘given’ nature of the relationship of women and music. This
involves examining, from a cultural–historical point of view, why female characters
are so commonly associated with music, why this does indeed seem to make sense
to audiences, composers and filmmakers alike, and what, most importantly of all, the
real cost is to female characters in terms of their characterization and place within
the narrative. In short, we need to determine what is at stake in investing female
characters with this very particular style of emotional representation and what
burden of meaning it places upon them. This book approaches these questions by
examining the underlying related conventions of music, emotion and gender that
inform this association, and considering how they impact on both female and male
characterization in film. Its aim is to replace a fundamental assumption—in terms of
the study of both film music and gender representation in film—with a more nuanced
understanding of the place of music in gendered characterization.
The search for such conventions must begin with the music itself. Music shares
a long and complex historical relationship with cultural concepts of women, men,
‘femininity’, ‘masculinity’, human emotionality and self-expression. In order
to understand the way in which music works in association with women in film,
it is therefore necessary to look outside of cinema itself and recontextualize this
relationship within its own cultural–historical trajectory. Considering the broader
history of configurations of music and gender allows models and patterns to emerge
against which female characterization, or indeed cultural attitudes to real women,
may be assessed at any period of time, be it in 1940s film or any time or context
before or after. Following the lead of film itself, therefore, the primary focus of
Chapter 1 is on the cultural tenets of Romanticism and how they relate to women.
These are in turn contextualized within broader historical conceptions of gender
that return to the most ancient archetypes of female musicality, emotionality and
sexuality.
 INTRODUCTION 
This consideration of historical ‘models’ and ideas indicates the various codes
and assumptions that may be at work both in film’s general association of women
and music and in its representation of their involvement with actual musical activity.
It also clarifies the parameters of the study. It should be clear by now that it is not
the intention of this book to maintain any inherent, ahistorical connection between
women and music, any ‘natural’ musical mode of expression for either femaleness
or femininity, or indeed any ‘inescapable’ psychological reason why film music
affects audiences as it does. Rather, the emphasis is on how culture has positioned
women—and men—in relation to both music and emotion, as a result of music’s
conceptualization according to prevalent related definitions of femininity and
masculinity. The more refined definition of music and emotion as related to cultural
constructions of masculinity and femininity—rather than the biological distinctions
of male and female—that this initial survey reveals, re-opens questions of both gender
and genre. In order to relate such definitions to film melodrama, the generic and
musical precedents of theatrical melodrama and ideas of the melodramatic mode are
considered, as well as the representation of female characters in opera. This, together
with consideration of theories of musical–emotional expression and characterization
in film melodrama, allow me to theorize the broad position occupied by the female
protagonist of film melodrama in relation to self-expression and narrative agency.
The following three chapters then move progressively closer to the heart of the
issue that informs the musical–emotional representation of women in film—the
presumed ‘proximity’ of women and emotion, implied within both cultural thinking on
music and gender and the formal representations of film. This involves the systematic
removal of the protecting degrees of distance between the female character and the
music that represents her, thus gradually revealing the truth behind the association.
This gradual revelation, however, proves to be fraught with increasing difficulty for
the female characters themselves, the depth of which is incontrovertibly revealed as
the investigation culminates with the actual characterization of the female musician.
Chapter 2 begins by focusing on the woman’s film and ascertaining its particular mode
of female musical–emotional characterization in relation to the broader melodramatic
codes explored in Chapter 1. Its closer examination of the particular dynamic of
narrative and social agency, access to self-expression and musical emotionality that
characterizes the melodramatic female, establishes the broad generic parameters on
which the following chapters build. The woman’s film is scrutinized in terms of its
claim to represent female subjectivity, through an exploration of the dynamic between
the representation of the female character’s emotions and subjective experience, and
her actual personal and/or social ability to express herself. Since non-diegetic music
is one of the key means through which unexpressed or inexpressible emotions are
conveyed, the nature of its interaction with diegetic speech and behaviour is a crucial
means of ascertaining the woman’s film’s construction of femaleness. This concerns
not only the level of expression allowed to ‘feminine’ emotion, but also the degree
to which femininity and femaleness are conflated.
This brings into play a further key element of the study, which is concerned
with the potential range and balance of emotional functions that music can fulfil
in film. In particular, the balance must be addressed between the possibility of
music representing a particular character’s subjectivity, and its capacity for a more
 The Gendered Score
independent interpretation of events or characters. Women in melodrama and the
woman’s film, for example, are often placed in weak or vulnerable social positions.
If the music appears to represent or reflect their emotions as singular characters,
however, the implications of such a contradictory strong and privileged narrative
position must be investigated. This raises the question of how close musical
representation functions in relation to emotional ‘ownership’, self-expression and
agency. Close examination is therefore necessary of not only the meaning that the
music appears to carry, but also its relationship to the actions of female characters
and their narrative, filmic and generic context. Chapter 2’s case study film, Now,
Voyager (1942), is notable for the eloquence of its dialogue. It also combines various
sub-genres of the woman’s film in a particularly fluid way. Both factors render
it eminently productive as an introductory case study. The detail with which the
characters express themselves verbally is matched by the eloquence and intricacy of
the music, which gives voice to both their silences and the real thoughts, memories
and emotions that lie behind their words. At the same time, the importance of the
gendered relationship of music to the voice and modes of behaviour indicates the
necessity of maintaining a study of music as part of both overall soundtrack analysis
and a wider textual and narrative analysis.
Music is, of course, a defining element of the very term ‘melodrama’. It therefore
goes without saying—in terms of both generic parameters and gender focus—that
non-diegetic music will be prevalent in both the melodrama itself and the woman’s
film as its female-centred variant. The importance of music is, in fact, frequently
reflected in its actual thematicization. Through the involvement of a character who
is a professional or amateur musician, the interaction of all the characters with
diegetic, and by extension non-diegetic, music becomes foregrounded as part of the
wider narrative operation of the film. Since it is likely that such interaction will
reflect broader conceptions of music in relation to emotion and gender, these films
offer an obvious route through which to progress the investigation and reduce the
distance between the female character and her representative music still further.
Chapter 3 therefore considers the first of three narrative configurations of musicians
and diegetic listeners/audiences as subject matter. It deals with the female character
reacting to both diegetic music and its male creator or performer, and considers her
positioning as both listener and potential muse. This not only develops the ideas
of the woman’s relationship to her own emotions, voice and mainly non-diegetic
music suggested in Chapter 2, but also considers the importance of broader musical
and narrative issues to an understanding of this very specific scenario. Before the
musician and listener can be closely examined, this chapter therefore considers the
possible purposes and effects of situating a musician within a narrative and the wider
nature of the performer–audience/listener relationship.
Chapter 3’s case study of Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) then centres
primarily on its representation of the female listener. It focuses on the gendered


Christine Gledhill attributes the verbal articulacy of Now, Voyager to the source novel
of the same name. Christine Gledhill (1987), ‘The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation’,
in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, London: BFI,
p. 36.
 INTRODUCTION 
tension between respected ideas of Romanticism pertinent to nineteenth-century
music and the related—and often denigrated—concept of ‘romance’. This tension
is expressed in this film through a particular and perhaps unique twist on the
pattern of interaction between muse/listener and creator/performer that appears
to be conventional to male musician–female listener narratives. It suggests the
woman’s—notably youthful/immature—capacity for romantic elaboration as being
entirely responsible for a lifetime of seemingly ‘errant’ perception and action. At the
same time as taking a partially critical stance on her point of view, however, it also
sympathizes with her and actually accords a certain degree of truth to her romantic
interpretation of events. It admires the veracity and strength of her emotional vision
and mocks the blandness and pomposity of the ‘realistic’ life alternatives that the film
offers her. This apparently paradoxical approach is made possible by the creation
of a distinct place for ‘emotional truth’ within the film’s schema. Such a complex
representation successfully exposes and questions attitudes towards the woman and
her own ‘feminine’ musical–emotional imagination.
Despite the very careful construction and interrogation of the female listener’s
relationship to diegetic music, however, the male musician–female listener film does
not generally challenge the distance between the woman’s voice and her underlying
emotions. Instead, its starker exposure of this distance, and the injustice in terms of
its frustration of the female protagonist, remains an emotionally raw spectacle. It
therefore begs but also bodes ill for the final stage of the investigation, which considers
the results of allowing the woman a more active diegetic relationship to music, either
through the secondary means of playing records and/or making requests for music
to be played, or even as a composer and/or performer herself. Chapter 4 takes up
this challenge and examines the various consequences of removing the distance
between the woman and musical agency or production. What might be presumed
to be an antidote to the male musician­­–female listener relationship, however, in fact
turns out to confirm the worst fears attending previous chapters. Their implication
of the impossibility of collapsing the all-important ‘chasm’ of non-expression that
Chapter 1 found in relation to the restricted woman of the melodramatic mode is
finally realized. Chapter 4 therefore considers how 1940s cinema conceptualizes
the continuing problem of a female relationship to active creativity, and questions
whether Romantic ideas of the necessary constitution of the artist are still in evidence.
It also balances Chapter 3’s consideration of the female as musical or non-musical
muse with an assessment of the extent to which the Siren survives as a ‘model’
for active female musicality and related behaviour. As a result, it confronts the still
evidently highly problematic nature of identifying a positive characterization for a
musically and creatively active female character.
Together with Chapter 5, Chapter 4 also provides a contrast through nationality—
both case study films are British—and through the type of musician that they represent,
as both feature performers who also compose their own music. The subject matter
of Chapter 4’s Love Story (1944) and Chapter 5’s Dangerous Moonlight (1941)
concerns the relationship of the home front to combat in the Second World War.
The social codification of melodrama and gendered characterization is therefore
targeted towards very particular propagandist ends. The extremity of the situations
into which characters are placed in this context, however, actually highlights the
 The Gendered Score
processes of constructing and testing ideas of gender and emotion. At a time when
emotions are placed under extraordinary pressure both in reality and fictitious
representation, the respective roles of non-diegetic music’s ‘mute’ signification and
diegetic music’s non-denotative but highly self-conscious communication become
particularly fascinating. In the case of Love Story, the test concerns the very attempt
to envision an active but safe female musicality. The fact that the need for this test,
and indeed for this female musician, springs from the wartime context of the film,
however, also allows for the establishment of clearly mitigating circumstances for
such a representation. Paradoxically, therefore, Love Story’s apparently ambitious
and well-meaning attempt to represent a female musician becomes a prime example
of the impossibility of its own project. This is made clearest through the relationship
of the female protagonist to her own diegetic processes of musical composition and
the subsequent performances of her music—constituting as they do the moments
at which the distance between the woman and her own musical–emotional
representation is finally completely collapsed. It is also manifested, however, in her
formally and emotionally problematic relationship with her male listener, and her
consequent association with music at the non-diegetic level.
Having reached the end of the line, as it were, with regard to the musical–
emotional representation of female characters, it becomes clear that a further stage
of investigation is in fact necessary. Throughout Chapters 1 to 4, it emerges that the
musical–emotional representation of women or female characters is dependent upon
its balance with male relationships to music—be it the relationship conceptualized
between real men and music or the role of music in the emotional representation
of male characters in film. Not only does this suggest that a full understanding of
the place of music in the emotional characterization of women cannot be complete
without undertaking a matching investigation of music and male characters, but
also that the musical–emotional, or indeed the explicitly non-musical–emotional,
representation of these male characters is by no means as straightforward as it first
appears. This book therefore ends with a chapter that offers the beginnings of this
matching investigation. Despite the apparently less prevalent relationship of male
characters and music, and their seemingly greater distance from the excesses of
emotions signified by that music, it would be overly dismissive to suggest that the
subject of male musical–emotional characterization is any less complex than that of
its female counterpart. I will not pretend, therefore, that a single chapter can fully do
it justice. This said, Chapter 5 does build on the groundwork offered by men and male
characters in earlier chapters: the Romantic creators and apparently unromantic film
viewers of Chapter 1; the overtly non-musical Elliot of Now, Voyager; the seemingly
cool-hearted male musicians of Chapter 3; and the complex characterization of Kit,
the male listener, muse and sometime musician figure of Love Story.
Leading on from all these men, Chapter 5 considers what happens across a range
of genres when film represents male characters through a more conventionally
‘female’ style of music, so raising the question of femininity as a necessary element
to the construction of masculinity. What is most striking about this survey is the
revelation of the degree to which male characters are also restricted by this mode
of representation. Because of its association with the feminine, their emotional
representation through music is prohibited in all but the most extreme of moments—
 INTRODUCTION 
resulting in specifically and carefully contextualized ‘glimpses’ of what lies beneath
their otherwise controlled and socially acceptable exteriors. The musical revelation
of femininity thus becomes proof of the constructed nature of masculinity and
the behavioural demands that it makes on men, while simultaneously providing
assurance of the continuation of that construct and upholding it as painfully heroic.
It also emerges as a more fluid aspect of characterization than is at first evident.
A focus on the personality of the male musician himself, placed within the wider
context of masculinity and music, then examines how the balance of masculinity
and femininity is maintained when a display of emotion is necessary, but excessive
outburst is not a viable option. The case study of Dangerous Moonlight examines
both male and female characters in their balanced relationship to music. The account
of the female listener in this case offers a more explicit critique of the female musical–
emotional characteristics examined in Chapters 2 and 3. The most important focus,
however, is on the characterization of the male musician in a film that foregrounds
his own relationship to music as much as, if not more so than, that of his female
listener. Through this focus, his more conventionally elusive relationship to his own
creativity and the different types of emotion that his composition and performance
involve is itself thematicized. Even though, like the female musician of Chapter 4,
it emerges that such a potentially compromising representation must be couched in
clearly mitigating circumstances—to the different end of protecting his masculinity
against the threat of feminine emotionality and vulnerability—this does evidence
the much greater fluidity of music’s role in emotional, and therefore gendered,
characterization.
This allows me finally to arrive at a definition of gendered characterization based
on the interaction of cultural assumptions and cinematic–musical representation—
the underlying principle of which is that cultural codes of gender ‘allow’ and
‘disallow’ certain musical–emotional implications. This definition confirms that the
representation of gender in melodrama and the woman’s film is still informed in the
1940s by a combination of Romantic conceptions of emotion, music and gender, and
more ancient archetypes of musical, emotional, sexual and (anti-)social behaviour.
Following the investigation of Chapter 5, however, a broad model for gendered
characterization that extends beyond the generic boundaries of the original case study
texts becomes possible. This reconfigures the representation of gender according to a
balance of emotion and control, which is formed through a combination of cultural
expectation and filmic evidence. As a result, music takes on a crucial role less as
merely a signifier of emotion and more as a central element of the way in which we
actually understand emotion within the construction of gender.
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This filmography lists only composers of original scores or, if applicable, music directors (except for the
slightly fuller listings for the case study films). It does not list composers of any pre-composed music used
either diegetically or non-diegetically.