Around the Marvelous: Film Music Formulas from an Ethnomusicological Perspective

Stereotypes and conventions of film music have historically been understood by musicology as evidence of bad artistic practice (think for example of the influential Adorno-Eisler paradigm). But the great repository of musical conventions of the mainstream narratives—a consequence of production practices, true idiomatic competence of the film-music composer—can be scrutinized from the methodological perspective of oral-tradition studies, and understood as a formulaic system.