Composed under the direction of Herbert Stothart, the orchestral score to MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) is laden with musical quotations ranging from Kodály to Schumann. While the inclusion of outside musical sources in a film score is not unusual, Stothart elevates this practice to a high level of sophistication. In particular, he incorporates melodies previouslyassociated with silent film musical accompaniment, reinforcing Oz’s nostalgic character by hearkening to an earlier era of film exhibition. In this article I analyze the various implications of this musical nostalgia as they intersect with earlier cinematic practices, the film’s narrative, and Herbert Stothart’s musical aesthetics. In addition to bringing a retrospective quality to the Oz score, Stothart’s quotations interact musically and semantically with the film’s songs, furtherunifying orchestral background score and vocal material.

In many histories of American film music, Max Steiner's score for King Kong (1933) marks a new era by establishing norms in original, symphonic underscoring that would dominate Hollywood for decades. Kong's reign, however, eclipses diverse approaches to underscoring practiced at studios before and after its release. In this study, I compare the methods of Max Steiner at RKO and Nathaniel Finston at Paramount to show how both influenced film music implementation and discourse in the years leading up to Kong. Steeped in the practices of silent cinema, Finston championed collaborative scoring and the use of preexistent music in films like Fighting Caravans (1931). Steiner preferred to compose alone and placed music strategically to delineate narrative space in films, as in Symphony of Six Million (1932), a technique he adapted for mediating exotic encounters in island adventure films preceding Kong. Although press accounts and production materials show that Steiner and Finston's methods proved resilient in subsequent years, Kong's canonic status has marginalized Finston's role and threatens to misdirect appraisals of Steiner's other work. Considering Finston's practices at Paramount alongside Steiner's pre-Kong scores at RKO illuminates the limitations of using only Kong as a model, and shows that Finston's perspective on film scoring in the early 1930s provides a corrective balance for understanding film musicians' work before and after Kong.

Selznick’s co-productions with elite European filmmakers contrast noticeably with his Hollywood work. The Third Man’s hyper-stylized cinematography and solo zither score by Anton Karas resemble no other Selznick film, partly because Selznick’s role was much reduced. But with subsequent European co-productions the producer sought to reinsert himself into the music. This chapter traces these battles as they unfolded on the soundtrack, with Selznick reasserting his creative voice through re-edited versions distributed only in the United States. Most striking is the case of Stazione Termini, which Selznick released as Indiscretion of an American Wife. With Alessandro Cicognini’s score re-edited by Audray Granville, music in the new version does different work from its cinematic sibling. In his final productions, including Mario Nascimbene’s music for A Farewell to Arms, Selznick’s use of music to structure narrative and develop commercial appeal re-emerges as one of the producer’s greatest priorities.

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Production files detailing the construction of the musical score for the film Spellbound reveal an intense and complicated collaboration involving music editor Audray Granville, director Alfred Hitchcock, composer Miklós Rózsa, and producer David O. Selznick. Tracing the formation of the score from initial outlines through composition and editing shows how these four individuals contributed to the score’s development. Conflicting instructions from Hitchcock and Selznick as well as Granville’s preview score influenced Rózsa’s compositional decisions, and Granville’s revisions of Rózsa’s recorded music affected the content of the score. The music of Spellbound does not represent a single or even shared vision, but rather an intricate conglomeration of ideas, revisions, and interpolations. Illuminating these layers of discourse enriches musico-cinematic analysis by challenging conventional notions of authorship and artistic control in the Hollywood film score.