AN INVALUABLE BOOK

Gergely Hubai's 'Torn Music:
Rejected film scores, a selected history',
recommended by PATRIC STANDFORD

The neglect of film music and its composers in our critical journals and the arts review pages of newspapers is a sad neglect of what is surely a formidable and underrated expertise. Having the ability to write an hour of music that underlines characters and situations, provides a third dimension to the visual story, searching out the hidden psychology, enhancing both fear and elation in a way that can stimulate the equal responses of thousands of viewers -- and all this perhaps in only week! -- is indeed a remarkable talent. Composers who went to work daily in their small offices as employees of the big Hollywood studios, composers whose everyday job was to create the music, usually noted beneath their name on the door, for opening flourishes and closing credits, romantic interludes, boisterous chases, suspense, mysticism, earthquakes, busy shopping centres and catastrophes at sea, fully orchestrated -- these were an army of technical wizards dealing in a commodity that few others in the studios could understand...