Franz Waxman (1906–1967) was one of the representatives of the “classical” Hollywood film music, but in contrast to his contemporaries Miklós Rózsa, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner, his life and work has so far only been researched incompletely. The project “Franz Waxman – Between Film Music and the Concert Hall” intends to open up a new and comprehensive view of Hollywood film music from the 1940s to the 1960s that goes beyond a purely biographical or analytical study of his film composition. It is little known that Waxman worked not only as a film composer, but also as a festival organizer, conductor and composer of concert music in an international context.

The project’s focus lies “in between” film and concert and does not aim to reveal supposedly contradictory spheres, but rather to illustrate the different medial and aesthetic transfers “between film and the concert hall” as an integral part of Hollywood film music from the 1930s to the 1960s. These transfers took place before a press discourse highlighting the contrasts between “art music” and popular “functional music” in the field shaped by the tension between modernism, canonized concert culture from the nineteenth century and contemporary popular music. This debate accordingly influenced the careers of emigree composers such as Waxman.

The project will deal with the following topics and point out the complex connections between them. It will also position Waxman’s career in the context of his contemporaries in the film and music business:

• Migration of film composers in the early 1930s. The example of Franz Waxman will be used to show that the networks of migration for film composers and their career perspectives differed from those of other groups in the music business.
• Waxman as founder and director of the Los Angeles Music Festival “between film music and concert hall”
• Inter(-national) reception and self-marketing of Waxman as festival organizer, conductor, concert and film composer
• Medial transfers in Waxman's musical work: Concert adaptations, film soundtracks and theme songs

Through the inclusion and combination of different methodological perspectives (historical source criticism, reception aesthetics, discourse-analysis, (film) music-analysis, media studies, sociology), the research results arising from the project have a broad applicability in a multitude of scientific disciplines. The project closes a large research gap in film music research and makes a large number of important and mainly unknown materials from various archives in the U.S., and Europe accessible.