Theodore Shapiro (b. 1971) is one of the most prolific and successful composers of music for comedies during the first decades of the new millennium. Like Elmer Bernstein, his preferred strategy is to ‘play it completely seriously,’ even though he admits that in many films there is ‘a necessity to play some moments comedically.’ Drawing on examples from the sports comedy Blades of Glory (2007, dirs. Will Speck and Josh Gordon), the science fiction comedy Idiocracy (2006, dir. Mike Judge), and the action comedy Tropic Thunder (2008, dir. Ben Stiller), the chapter explores how Shapiro deploys serious music in different functions: to create comic effects by being incongruous with the images, to be part of set-ups that contribute to the comic effect of the punch, and to addresses serious aspects of the stories. Some selected scenes from The Devil Wears Prada and Blades of Glory are considered more briefly to demonstrate how Shapiro uses music as a comic marker to inform the audience that an ambiguous situation should be perceived in a humorous way.

The purpose of this book is to explore different aspects of contemporary film music through a combination of interviews with important film composers and essays about particular features of those composers’ work. In the interviews the focus is on the practical considerations of film composition, the relationships each composer has with the moving image, technical considerations, personal motivations in composing, the relationships composers have with their directors, and their own creative processes. The essays are written by fellow composers, musicologists and film academics, and explore particular elements of a composer’s output.

The Introduction provides a context for the following chapters by discussing how film composition has evolved in the twenty-first century into a period of both repetition and intense experimentation during an eccentric time in the history of the cinema. Seminal works of this period, such as the scores of The Social Network (2010) and The Dark Knight (2008), are used as point of departure for an account of wider trends as a transition to many full electronic/ambient scores in mainstream cinema, overorchestration, the influence of franchises on music, and the present ubiquity of film music well outside of the context of the film itself in other media, or even social media.

Research on opera was for a long time focused on either structural or symbolic aspects of the music. The purpose of this investigation is to broaden opera analysis by paying attention to the double role played by music in opera, the narrative and the performative. Drawing on theoretical approaches of film music analysis and performance theory it attempts to develop a method of analysis that takes both of these aspects into consideration. With point of departure in Puccini’s Tosca the paper demonstrates how this double role of the music plays a significant role for the construction of meaning in relation to verbal and visual media.

The essay explores how Dario Marianelli uses solo instruments to represent individual characters, a convention that has a long tradition in opera, programme music and film music. In representing characters, solo instruments most often speak for and not just about those characters, and Marianelli states that in Pride & Prejudice (2005) ‘the piano is the inner voice of Elizabeth’. In this way, solo instruments are used for what French literary theorist Gérard Genette calls internal focalization, that is, the narrator presents information from the point of view of a character. The essay examines the role different solo instruments play in conveying the inner states of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice and Robbie Turner in Atonement (2007), but also how the subjective perspective in the latter film is made ambiguous by its denouement.