To describe Caryl Flinn's Strains of Utopia as a book about film music would be to seriously underestimate the scope of its project. The subtitle Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music could be substituted by "Music, Nostalgia, and Criticism," since much of Flinn's argument centers on the process by which music is colonized as a utopian space in various critical discourses. While Flinn does analyze the role of music in two Hollywood films, her observations have at least as much to do with the consumption of these films, as with their production. Refusing to address films as objects with an autonomous existence separate from their historical, cultural, and institutional con- texts, Flinn locates their meaning in the readings performed by both filmgoers and film critics rather than in the filmic text "itself."

This book comes at a crucial juncture in the relationship between musicology and a wider intellectual field. It was published only one year after the first collection of feminist musicology, which was truly groundbreaking, shaking the foundations of the musicological community. (See Susan McClary's Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (1991), and more recent, her essay on the encounter between feminist theory and music scholarship in "Paradigm Dissonances: Music Theory, Cultural Studies, Feminist Criticism" in Perspectives of New Music 32 (Winter 1994)). As musicologists venture into the wide, wide world of critical theory, this book helps to bridge the gulf that has separated musicology from work in other traditional (and non-traditional) disciplines. At the same time that it offers a gentle introduction to contemporary thought, with chapters on poststruc- turalist and marxist criticism, this work stands as evidence that scholars in fields other than musicology can write intelligently about musical meaning.