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Chapter 4 begins by proposing that the longstanding disagreement between the film critics who hated The Sound of Music and the large general audience who loved it stems from the film's volatile blend of the beautiful, the sublime, the kitsch, the playful, and the sacred. While the nuns in The Sound of Music have been lambasted as silly, saccharine stereotypes, the chapter provides an alternative reading by focusing on the relationship between Julie Andrews's novice Maria and Peggy Wood's Mother Abbess, their solidarity in time of trial, and their spirit of transcendence through fortitude, exertion, and self-giving in the great women's song “Climb Every Mountain.” The chapter concludes with Change of Habit and suggests how the upbeat message that Maria expressed in the songs of The Sound of Music is no longer articulated by the film nun protagonists, but rather by Elvis Presley's male lead who conducts a chaste but melodious romance with Mary Tyler Moore's activist Sister Michelle.

This chapter discusses that what goes on when a listener engages with music is above all a function of how that listener construes the musical event. In particular, it matters if and how the listener believes that there is an intentional agent behind the music. The science of music, with its particular origins, can be presumed to be under constant pressure to align with values of the dominant cultures which support and fund it. These cultures have predominantly economic imperatives which underpin the aims of science to classify and de-individuate in favour of isolating broad trends and key marker variables. There are certain characteristics of the ‘sound of music’, which are shared by several non-musical stimuli, particularly speech, and gesture, which allow simple emotional messages to be ‘read off’ the sound surface, and which allow certain basic effects of arousal modulation to occur.

Through its encounter with China, the West remade itself in sound. That is the argument of this book, which tells the story of Western people experiencing China with their ears around 1800. To tell it, the author draws on two sets of sources. The first set are documents of Western listening in China—to music and musical theater, but also to other human-generated sounds such as gongs, cannon salutes, and speech—at the height of the “Canton System,” the trading relationship between China and the West that came to a violent end in the First Opium War of 1839–42. The second set of sources are texts by European writers, mostly music scholars, who wrote about China and Chinese music around 1800. None traveled to China or heard the country’s music directly. Indeed, whether or not they even heard real Chinese music, Westerners in this era did not always distinguish between it and other kinds of Chinese sounds. This is not only a book about music; it is also book about sound, as it was shaped in and through global narratives and imperial encounters.

Struggling broadcast networks sought to gain big ratings from a now fragmented, ever-fickle, and platform-ambivalent viewing audience by attempting to use a bit of nostalgia and celebration of liveness to temporally woo back audiences hungry for multi-platform viewing and time-shifting. NBC and Fox sought to resuscitate the live television musical with new productions of iconic shows like The Sound of Music, Peter Pan, The Wiz, Grease, and Hairspray. The years 2013 through 2018 looked like a crash course in designing these millennial musical live events, as the two networks repeatedly shifted their live musical presentation. Clear negotiations of liveness, viewership, and shooting/staging style emerged through the specials’ contested relationships with theatre itself. Through an exploration of the networks’ perception of the millennial cachet of Broadway and shifting choices in performance style and digital promotion, this chapter explores the rise and plateau of the early twenty-first century’s revival of televised live musicals.

This chapter begins with 20th Century-Fox’s decision to make a film version of the Broadway musical The Sound of Music. The studio was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and needed a hit. Veteran director William Wyler was approached to direct, but said no. West Side Story director Robert Wise accepted the job. Broadway star Julie Andrews was cast in the lead. The film was shot on location in Austria and at the Fox studios in Southern California. Andrews’s first film, the musical Mary Poppins, was released during the making of The Sound of Music, and was a huge hit. So, too, was Warner Bros.’ big-budget screen version of My Fair Lady. By the time of The Sound of Music’s release in early 1965, it was believed that film musicals were enjoying a great surge in popularity. When Music became the biggest moneymaker in film history, that belief was confirmed, and every studio proceeded to put big budget musicals into production.

The technology to reproduce a film’s soundtrack for home consumption didn’t arrive fully until the early 1950s; it was no surprise that the Capitol soundtrack recording to the 1955 film of Oklahoma! was the biggest seller of its day. Film soundtracks gave home listeners a second chance to hear their favorite scores and often, as in the case of West Side Story, the film soundtrack provided a new opportunity to discover the music (that soundtrack stayed longer at No. 1 than any album in history to this day). The performer who sold more soundtrack albums than anyone else in the 1960s was Julie Andrews, whose simultaneous recordings of the films Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music made her the most ubiquitous singer in pop culture.

This chapter deals with Wyler's final three films. It opens by recounting Wyler's involvement with The Sound of Music, which he was scheduled direct — and he did cast Julie Andrews — but later asked to be let out of. Instead, he directed a much smaller film, The Collector, in England. The chapter offers a visual analysis of Wyler's claustrophobic mise-en-scène for this project as well his difficulties in drawing an effective performance from Samantha Eggar, who was making her film debut. His involvement with the film Patton is also discussed, although he had to shelve that film due to casting difficulties. Wyler's next project — his first musical — Funny Girl, is analyzed, as well as his relationship with its star, Barbra Streisand, in her film debut. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Wyler's final film, The Liberation of L.B. Jones, which remains among the most uncompromising films about race ever to be released by a Hollywood studio.

This chapter charts the constantly fraught relationship between musical theatre and musical film—mutually dependent, often hazardous, sometimes respectful, occasionally disastrous. It considers musicals from The Desert Song in late 1928 to Anything Goes and Show Boat in 1936, to Annie Get Your Gun and My Fair Lady and Evita and onward to Les Miz. The chapter then examines the difficulties—and potential rewards—in adapting theatrical shows onto film. The chapter looks at the problem of too much fidelity or too little, the question of how many songs should be retained, problems related to length, the conflicts between realism and stylization, and the relative merits of perceived staginess versus those of cinematic potential.

What can make a musical a great film? Some answers may be found by looking at some of the genre’s most sublime specimens. From the opening scene of Love Me Tonight to the elegant balance of Gigi and astute calculation of The Sound of Music, there are numerous ways to captivate an audience and balance the song and dance and script. The best of the lot are timeless, like The Wizard of Oz, while the 1929 smash Gold Diggers of Broadway was so much of its era that it eventually vanished. As for Singin’ in the Rain, much of its triumph revolves around its shrewd awareness of its history, its genre, and its ancestors.

Nuns in popular media today are a staple of kitsch culture, evident in the common appearance of bobble-head nuns, nun costumes, and nun caricatures on TV, movies, and the stage. Nun stereotypes include the sexy vixen, the naïve innocent, and the scary nun. These types were forged in nineteenth-century convent narratives. While people today may not recognize the name “Maria Monk,” her legacy lives on in the public imagination. There may be no demands to search convents, but nuns and monastic life are nevertheless generally not taken seriously. This epilogue traces opposition to nuns from the Civil War to the present, analyzing the various images of nuns in popular culture as they relate to the antebellum campaign against convents. It argues that the source of the misunderstanding about nuns is rooted in the inability to categorize these women either as traditional wives and mothers or as secular, career-driven singles.