During the last two years of Filmbobbery‘s print run, I wrote reviews of instrumental movie soundtracks, culminating in a final article which summarized my favorites. Those eight reviews are included below, along with scans of the selected CD covers, front and back, that illustrate movie artwork and track listings of the titles discussed. The numbers which follow the titles are volume and issue numbers of the original articles.

Movie images and music have been intertwined since silent film days, when live piano and organ music accompanied the flickering films that audiences watched. Occasionally movie music is more special to me than the movies themselves; Roy Budd and John Scott seemed to specialize in terrific scores for films that were, well, not so terrific.  And of course a great score can make a great movie even greater.

It has been my intention to write about this music that means so much to me, in (hopefully) an eloquent, intelligent fashion.  Writing about music is much more difficult than about the movies themselves, I think.  I plan to continue this column, even if to only recommend cool CDs that arrive from the specialized companies that make them (Intrada, Varese Sarabande, La-La Land, Film Score Monthly, Kritzerland, GNP / Crescendo, Milan, Castle, etc.).  Whether this column becomes much more than that depends largely on the feedback I receive about it.  So let me know what you think — what your favorites are, who your favorites are, the state of film composing as it stands now, anything about movie music.  You’re about to read some of my opinions about it; now lets hear some of yours.