Anonymous Sounds : Library Music and Screen Cultures in the 1960s and 1970s

This cross-disciplinary collection provides the first comprehensive study of library music practices in the 1960s and 1970s. Library music was inexpensive, off-the-shelf music available to license for a small fee. It was widely used in television and film as a cheaper alternative to commissioned soundtracks. The book pays attention to the different individuals, groups, organisations and institutions involved in making library music, as well as to its transnational sites of production (from continental recording studios to regional cutting rooms). It addresses questions of distributed creativity, collective authorship, and agency. Combining empirical and theoretical research, the book unveils the modus operandi of a highly secretive yet enduringly significant cultural industry. By drawing attention to the cultural ubiquity and intersectionality of library music, the collection also shifts emphasis from individual film and TV composers to the invisible community of music publishers, writers, and session musicians. It argues that the latter were collectively responsible for fashioning much of the sonic identity of 1960s and 1970s film and television. As well as providing a nuanced understanding of historical library music cultures, the collection shows how they continue to inform contemporary audiovisual cultures.

Nessa Johnston is Lecturer in Screen Studies and Digital Media in the Department of Communications and Media, University of Liverpool, and co-investigator on the Leverhulme-funded research project Anonymous Creativity: Library Music and Screen Cultures in the 1960s and 1970s. Her research and teaching interests include screen industries (contemporary and historical), cult media, sound and music in media, independent cinema, and subcultures. Her monograph The Commitments: Youth, Music and Authenticity in 1990s Ireland is published by Routledge.

Carol Vernallis is Affiliated Researcher in Music at Stanford University and Visiting Professor of Music at University of California, Berkeley. She is author of Experiencing Music Video (2004) and Unruly Media (2013). She is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (2013), and on the editorial board of The Journal of Popular Music Studies.

Jamie Sexton is an Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies at Northumbria University. He is the author of the forthcoming British Musical Hauntology (Reaktion, 2025). Previous publications include Freak Scenes: American Indie Cinema and Indie Music Cultures (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) and The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema (co-edited with Ernest Mathijs, 2019).

Lisa Perrott is Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Screen and Media Studies at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. She is co-editor, with Holly Rogers and Carol Vernallis, of the Bloomsbury book series New Approaches to Sound, Music and Media, and the collected volume Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics. Lisa is also co-editor, with Ana Cristina Mendes, of David Bowie and Transmedia Stardom. Her interests include music video, animation, documentary and transmedia, with an emphasis on the relations between sound, music and visual media. Lisa is currently completing her second Bloomsbury monograph David Bowie and the Transformation of Music Video (1984-2016 and Beyond).

Elodie A. Roy is a media and material culture theorist with a specialism in the history of recorded sound. She is the author of Shellac in Visual and Sonic Culture: Unsettled Matter and Media, Materiality and Memory: Grounding the Groove, as well as the co-editor of Phonographic Encounters: Mapping Transnational Cultures of Sound, 1890-1945. Roy held research and teaching positions at the Glasgow School of Art, Humboldt University of Berlin, Newcastle University and Northumbria University, where she was the Research Fellow on the Leverhulme-funded research project 'Anonymous Creativity: Library Music and Screen Cultures in the 1960s and 1970s' (2021–2023).