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Off Key
When Film and Music Won't Work Together
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Book Presentation:
• The first book to look at how film and music often don't work together
• A politically-conscious analysis of how the entertainment industry shapes film scores
• Looks at composer biopics and pop performers (Elvis, Ringo Starr, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and many others) crossing over into acting
In Off Key, Kay Dickinson offers a compelling study of how certain alliances of music and film are judged aesthetic failures. Based on a fascinating and wide-ranging body of film-music mismatches, and using contemporary reviews and histories of the turn to post-industrialization, the book expands the ways in which the union of the film and music businesses can be understood.
Moving beyond the typical understanding of film music that privileges the score, Off Key also incorporates analyses of rock 'n' roll movies, composer biopics, and pop singers crossing over into acting. By doing this, it provides a fuller picture of how two successful entertainment sectors have sought out synergistic strategies, ones whose alleged "failures" have much to tell about the labor practices of the creative industries, as well as our own relationship to them and to work itself. A provocative and politically-conscious look at music-image relations, Off Key will appeal to students and scholars of film music, cinema studies, media studies, cultural studies, and labor history.
About the Author:
Kay Dickinson, Lecturer, Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Press Reviews:
"an inspiring contribution to the debate on the meaningful difference between film and music, infusing the discussion of film music with a rare sense of political urgency and great intellectual depth." - Carlo Cenciarelli, Music and Letters
"I admire enormously the ambition and originality of the study" - Bruce Johnson, Popular Music
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
> From the same author:
Film Studies (2015)
A Global Introduction
by Glyn Davis, Kay Dickinson, Lisa Patti and Amy Villarejo
Subject: Film Analysis
> On a related topic:
Haunted Soundtracks (2025)
Audiovisual Cultures of Memory, Landscape, and Sound
Dir. Kevin J. Donnelly and Aimee Mollaghan
Music for Superheroes (2025)
Film and Television Scores Since 1940
Music Films (2024)
Documentaries, Concert Films and Other Cinematic Representations of Popular Music
by Neil Fox
The Music of Space (2024)
Scoring the Cosmos in Film and Television
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