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Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils is a shocking historical drama which, eclipsed by its own battle against censorship, has only recently had a critical revival. A landmark musical collaboration central to that film remains unexplored: Peter Maxwell Davies wrote the score, which is heard in tandem with ‘period’ performances from David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London. Though ostensibly historical, the film’s disruptive atemporal style is elevated through an art of stylized anachronism. This collaboration mirrors Davies’s opera Taverner (premièred in 1972), not only because that too featured Munrow and his consort but also because Russell was supposed to direct its première. This article posits Davies’s film score as a compelling work combining historicist compositional interests and a challenging aesthetic of excess within the popular context of mass cinematic spectacle. Informed by the close study of Davies’s own manuscripts, it argues for new ways of understanding the role of a persistent past in the music of a resolutely modernist present.

This article investigates the usage of music and sound in the 2015 video game Bloodborne, exploring how the game’s aesthetics of difficulty and maximalism exert a disruptive influence for a struggling player. In particular, it focuses on how the soundtrack attenuates the series of escalating monster boss battles around which the game is structured. Combining ‘Gothic’ and ‘Weird’ horror tropes with the techniques of musical modernism, these composite ‘musical monsters’ gesture, disturbingly, towards new kinds of monstrous materialities that challenge a simple distinction between sound and image.

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 awash with a stylise - sometimes contradictory - musical history. And yet for all its complexities, these representations of the past through music are integral to how our contemporary and collective imaginations understand history. More importantly, they offer a valuable insight into how we understand our musical present. Such representative strategies, the book argues, cross generic boundaries, and as such it brings together a range of multimedia discussion on the subjects of film (Lord of the Rings, Dangerous Liasions), television (Game of Thrones, The Borgias), videogame (Dragon Warrior, Gauntlet), and opera (Written on Skin, Taverner, English ‘dramatick opera’). This collection constitutes a significant, and interdisciplinary, contribution to a growing literature which is unpacking our ongoing creative dialogue with the past. Divided into three complementary sections, grouped not by genre or media but by theme, it considers: ‘Authenticity, Appropriateness, and Recomposing the Past’, ‘Music, Space, and Place: Geography as History’, and ‘Presentness and the Past: Dialogues between Old and New’. Like the musical collage that is our shared multimedia historical soundscape, it is hoped that this collection is, in its eclecticism, more than the sum of its parts.