Ashgate Screen Music Series
About the Book Series
The recent proliferation of research about music for film, television, video games, and the Internet—collectively called "screen music"—has resulted in a growing, diverse body of scholarly work that cuts across disciplinary divides, temporal partitions, and geographical boundaries. These studies nevertheless share a common dedication to advancing our understanding of how music interacts with moving images: supporting narrative, creating affect, suspending disbelief, and engaging audiences. The Ashgate Screen Music series dedicates itself to publishing such monographs and edited collections, which reflect the variety of topics and approaches adopted in current screen music scholarship while addressing specific encounters between music and moving images, regardless of medium, genre, time, or place. Our authors rely upon both ear and eye in coming to terms with the social, cultural, and historical meanings embedded within the audiovisual text. While maintaining the highest academic standards of peer-reviewed publication, series volumes also strive to speak to inquisitive readers in general, who wish to inform themselves about the subject under investigation. We hope that our readership will find the individual volumes in the Ashgate Screen Music series rewarding in and of themselves, and exemplary of how the varied themes and methods in screen music research of today can meaningfully and profitably intersect across increasingly porous boundaries.
Franz Waxman: Between Film Music and the Concert Hall
1st Edition
By Ingeborg Zechner
June 12, 2026
Franz Waxman (1906-1967) was a jazz musician, orchestrator, film composer, concert organiser, conductor and a composer of concert and opera works. It was only after his emigration to the United States in the early 1930s that Waxman built himself a career in the concert hall – before this point he ...
The Music of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings: Sounds of Home in the Fantasy Franchise
1st Edition
By Daniel White
January 26, 2026
The Music of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings provides an in-depth study of the music of two of the biggest fantasy franchises, focussing on music’s worldbuilding roles within the film-watching experience and elsewhere in videogames, trailers, plays, theme parks and other attractions, and the...
Bob Dylan on Film: The Intersection of Music and Visuals
1st Edition
By Jonathan Hodgers
December 26, 2025
In May 1967, during a discussion about his yet-to-be-released film Eat the Document, Bob Dylan cryptically remarked, ‘The film is finished. It’s different.’ It would not be the last time he could make this claim. Beyond his musical prowess, Dylan’s career encompasses a lesser-explored facet – that ...
Nordic Music Videos
1st Edition
Edited
By Anna-Elena Pääkkölä, Mathias Bonde Korsgaard, John Richardson
September 22, 2025
Nordic Music Videos fills a gap in the existing research on music videos by bringing together new perspectives on music videos across the Nordic region, from the academic to the practical, the aesthetic to the industrial, while addressing issues of local, transnational, and global significance. The...
Music, the Moving Image and Ireland, 1897–2017
1st Edition
By John O'Flynn
September 25, 2023
Music, the Moving Image and Ireland, 1897–2017 constitutes the first comprehensive study of music for screen productions from or relating to the island. It identifies and interprets tendencies over the first 120 years of a field comprising the relatively distinct yet often overlapping areas of ...
Musical Sincerity and Transcendence in Film: Reflexive Fictions
1st Edition
By Timothy B. Cochran
May 31, 2023
Musical Sincerity and Transcendence in Film focuses on the ways filmmakers treat music reflexively—that is, draw attention to what it is and what it can do. Examining a wide range of movies from recent decades including examples from Indiewood, teen film, and blockbuster cinema, the book explores ...
Scoring the Hollywood Actor in the 1950s
1st Edition
By Gregory Camp
August 01, 2022
Scoring the Hollywood Actor in the 1950s theorises the connections between film acting and film music using the films of the 1950s as case studies. Closely examining performances of such actors as James Dean, Montgomery Clift, and Marilyn Monroe, and films of directors like Elia Kazan, Douglas ...
The Screen Music of Trevor Jones: Technology, Process, Production
1st Edition
By David Cooper, Ian Sapiro, Laura Anderson
March 31, 2021
The first significant publication devoted entirely to Trevor Jones’s work, The Screen Music of Trevor Jones: Technology, Process, Production, investigates the key phases of his career within the context of developments in the British and global screen-music industries. This book draws on the direct...
Heavy Metal at the Movies
1st Edition
Edited
By Gerd Bayer
September 30, 2020
The chapters collected in this volume shed light on the areas of interaction between film studies and heavy metal research, exploring how the audio-visual medium of film relates to, builds on and shapes metal culture. At one end of the spectrum, metal music serves as a form of ambient background in...
Recomposing the Past: Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen
1st Edition
Edited
By James Cook, Alexander Kolassa, Adam Whittaker
August 14, 2020
Recomposing the Past is a book concerned with the complex but important ways in which we engage with the past in modern times. Contributors examine how media on stage and screen uses music, and in particular early music, to evoke and recompose a distant past. Culture, popular and otherwise, is ...
Re-Locating the Sounds of the Western
1st Edition
Edited
By Kendra Preston Leonard, Mariana Whitmer
June 30, 2020
Re-Locating the Sounds of the Western examines the use and function of musical tropes and gestures traditionally associated with the American Western in new and different contexts ranging from Elizabethan theater, contemporary drama, space opera and science fiction, Cold War era European filmmaking...
Reeled In: Pre-existing Music in Narrative Film
1st Edition
By Jonathan Godsall
June 30, 2020
How and why is pre-existing music used in films? What effects can its use have on films and their audiences? And what lasting impact can appropriation have on the music? Reeled In is a comprehensive exploration of these questions, considering the cinematic quotation of Beethoven symphonies, Beatles...