SOURCE: “Adorno and Film Music: Theoretical Notes on Composing for the Films,” in Yale French Studies, Vol. 60, 1980, pp. 157-82.

In the following essay, Rosen discusses Adorno's little-known volume Composing for the Films.

Important recent work on the ideological operations of cinema bases itself on a view of the history of the graphic arts deriving from studies by Francastel and a more or less Althusserian view of ideology.¹ But cinema incorporates non-graphic elements which have their own histories and social roles “outside of” and “before” cinema, and ideological analysis must account for the integration into cinema of such elements. One such component of film is music. An important study of film music based on a distinctive view of music as an autonomous art form and with a concern for the ideological operations of film already exists in the often noted but rarely discussed 1947 book Composing for the Films.

At...