Introduction

When classical music sounds in film, it sounds again. To be sure, spectators who hear the music for the first time may later discover that it has a history. Replaying classical music in the cinema defamiliarizes and re-familiarizes. If the moving image has now become unthinkable without the movement of music, works of classical music may conjure a moving image, imagined or remembered. Film music confronts music historians with a series of inconvenient truths that bristle up against foundational tenets of musicology and the musealizing approach to the musical canon which emerged in the nineteenth century: masterworks by immortal composers marked by opus numbers and preserved in real and imaginary vitrines of cultural distinction for our contemplation.

Cinema, however, makes audiences hear music as piecemeal and intermittent, ex-changeable and disposable. Since the favorite pieces of classical music had a life outside the concert hall or opera house, their use...