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Music for Silent Film: A Guide to North American Resources by Kendra Preston Leonard (review)

Scholarship and interest in film music continues to permeate the music world, and recently attention to the treatment of music for silent film has resurfaced. As Kendra Preston Leonard states in her preface, “Silent-film festivals and screenings are popping up across the United States and Canada, drawing large and enthusiastic crowds” (p. vii). Countless dissertations, scholarly articles, and monographs on this subject have been published since the turn of the twenty-first century. For this research guide, Leonard performed the arduous, though much desired, task of culling the leading primary and secondary sources on music for silent film in North America. By grouping these sources together for the first time, she provides “enthusiasts, performers, and scholars—anyone with an interest in music for the silent screen” (p. vii) with a focal point from which to explore a plethora of archival collections, interviews, monographs, articles, and dissertations, all dedicated to this crucial point in film music history. Following a practice similar to that epitomized by Vincent Duckles’s Music Reference and Research Materials (5th ed. [New York: Schirmer Books, 1997]), Leonard organized this volume as an annotated bibliography that covers 1,862 items on the subject of music in film history from approximately 1912 to 1929. The entries vary in length from a couple of lines (as in chapter 7, “Arti cles” in primary source periodicals) to couple of pages (as in the listing for the University of California, Los Angeles, Performing Arts Special Collec tions, in chapter 1, “Archives” [item 5, pp. 5– 6]). This is first and foremost a reference volume and not a book to be read from cover to cover, so it provides a detailed table of contents that leads researchers to primary and secondary sources organized in convenient categories (e.g., “Collections of Essays,” “Interviews and Biographies,” “Theses and Dissertations”). Moreover, the extensive indexes (for names, title, film titles, and subjects) serve readers looking for specific source(s) or source types. Researchers on silent film music, or those interested in performance of the music, are acutely aware of (or will soon become well versed in) copyright strument” (p. 6), as this statement infers an instrumental agency that is not sufficiently interrogated. Has the sound of the Hawaiian steel guitar changed the sound of modern music? A critical reader might answer yes, but only in the sense that modern music is changed by the presence or absence of any sound or instrument. A more productive question might be whether the sound and significance of the steel guitar have been overlooked, misunderstood, and misrepresented by forces of cultural imperialism, a racially divisive music industry, and similar trends in music scholarship. The answer of course is yes, and Kika Kila makes significant progress toward correcting these misrepresentations in a manner that is both compelling and accessible.