Hooray For Hall's Massive Hollywood Tribute!

Film music writer and reviewer Roger Hall has spent a lifetime exploring music for the big screen along. He has reviewed hundreds of scores and honored a host of composers over the years on his Film Music Review and The Music Buffs web pages for decades. Now he has compiled a lot of that research into a complete book, Hooray for Hollywood, in a downloadable PDF format.

Hall's invaluable work is a must for anyone wanting to learn more about film music. It is also an important entry point to how one might begin tackling the massive amount of recorded material now available. The first portion brings together the Guide to Film Music: Songs and Scores from some thirty years of work. This portion has appeared in updates over the years and builds on the historical outlay of film music from the 1920s and onward. The chronological layout is a perfect way to see significant trends and scores across the century and includes a variety of photos as well.

An important section here is the collection of 100 Film Scores of the Twentieth Century. It focuses on Hollywood scores from the 1930s on and makes for a great place to start curating one's own film score collection. There is also a section helping explain how to best listen to film music with plenty of examples. A section providing an overview of core concepts in how film music is written also helps guide the reader to a deeper understanding.

Over the years, Hall has also included a variety of tributes to composers. This section now brings these together and allows for the reader to further explore the important music for these specific composers. Reviews of recordings are also interspersed here to add some additional highlights to the careers of the featured composers. (These include several of my own contributions to the website over the years). Interviews with producers and authors fill out this section.

Hall has also awarded the Sammy Award for significant works or recordings each year (1988-2020) and these are included. A variety of additional lists and articles help fill out this massive volume. Letters and photos from Hall's personal collection are also shared.

What Hooray for Hollywood is is a testament to Hall's dedication to the art of film music. The personal connections and astute discussion lays things out well throughout this volume. It pulls together a life's work from his long-running website.

You can order your own copy here: https://www.americanmusicpreservation.com/memorablemoviemusic.htm