A Brief History Of Film Music

Right: lets get started. The whole reason for starting this blog about film music was to try and help those who aren’t musicians, composers or otherwise musically empathetic people to understand film music a little more than the man who sits next to them on the train talking about Trent Reznor’s impact on the observed universe. I’d love for you all to soon be able to tell good scores from bad scores and pick apart the relationships between music and picture in order to see why a scene has been crafted the way it has; and why you feel a certain emotion from it (or don’t…).

I think the best way to start off is to do a couple of short, summary-esque chapters on the history of film music, it’s forms and roles today and how it affects a scene. So without further ado, I present to you the shortest possible history of film music, direct from my fingertips. 

‘Read all about it!’

Music existed before films. It’s obvious right? But it has a significance that is easily overlooked. Music in the form of late-19^th-century and early-20^th-century operas and symphonies was pretty much all you had on offer before films (and recording technology), so it’s no surprise that the grandeur and voracity of the orchestra was first in mind for early filmmakers. They’d have to wait a little while to open the doors, though…

It would have been great if films had pit orchestras, but it might have been a bit costly. The solution was the well-known piano playing man who would literally improvise music to the earliest monochrome picture-shows. It soon became a necessity and players even started to make a craft for the art; extensive books of piano music for all the wondrous scenarios imaginable.

Page 5: Intimidation in the office. Turn to page 46 for Car Chase/Gun Fight! 
And in she walks, Page 22: The blonde who asks for cigarette and makes their jaws drop.

And so film music was born. All the solutions to all the motion-picture equations, neatly laid bare to tinker with. However, having sound on a film changed the game a little; recordings meant planning, not improvisation. So with a quick jump we move from recording bespoke piano scores to a yearning for Wagnerian characterisation alongside our moving images. With a few years of experimentation it seemed a group of Johnny Foreigners had developed a dab hand at the craft and the world saw Erich-Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, Hans Salter, Franz Waxman and Alfred Newman (to name a few greats) grace films such as The Adventures Of Robin Hood, Gone With The Wind, Casablanca, The Son Of Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights. The late romantic sweeping melodies and ambitious harmony had made it’s way into the cinema and left itself for some of the names above to start coining certain types of sound for certain types of films. Steiner and Korngold were the late romantics, epic and sweeping. Hans Salter set the stones for the sound of suspense, Alfred Newman infused a little Jazz into his grand and lush scores and Waxman made a start on Film Noir, notably scoring some of Alfred Hitchcock’s earliest films.

Hitchcock comes in as quite a nice link on how present day film music has ended up how it is. He had one of the earliest famed director-composer relationships (not like that) with a man who’s name you really must remember after today, lest I give up all hope on the world – Bernard Herrmann.  Herrmann is quite possibly the greatest film composer to have lived: a complete arse, antisocial, distasteful, with genius that probably still wouldn’t be enough to get him a job today. I would bet that between Bernard Herrmann’s scores for thrillers, Ron Goodwin’s wartime greats and Alfred Newman’s penchant for everything else that we could trace all lineage of orchestral music in film down to a devilish thievery of their well-established elements.

If at this point I could recommend you watching one film to conjure a more tangible picture of this Old-Hollywood sound it would be Vertigo, a film by Alfred Hitchcock, score by Bernard Herrmann. Those of you that have already seen it, ten points to Gryffindor.

It is this kind of style that John Williams, the man behind all of the melodies that you can remember (Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, Superman, Harry Potter, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Jaws, Schindler’s List, Close Encounters of The Third Kind, Home Alone, Memoirs Of A Geisha and Three American Olympic Games), started to build upon. If you can remember any other film score melodies other than Michael Giacchino’s Up (or other Williams scores) then I’ll be very impressed – unless you’re one of those cheaters that likes film music already to the unhealthy degree that I do, in which case I shalln’t be – because the man who makes the melodies is the last of the old style of pencil and paper composers who are afforded the luxury of locked pictures (completed films) and hearing their music for the first time at the helm of an 80-piece orchestra.

The pencil and paper has been traded for the computer based sequencer with realistic orchestral virtual instruments and synths, and the long and flowing melodies that modulate from one key to another have been swapped for small motifs, or motives: short fragments of melody such as Hans Zimmer’s incantation for Batman in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. When Vangelis composed, conducted, produced and performed his score for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner he ushered in a new era in film music with synthetic sound, all of which has sort of culminated in something of a Tron: Legacy world of music.

Now I’m rambling, so I’ll leave a gap underneath this cluster of black and white for you to rest your eyes. The next article will cover the aesthetics of today’s film music, its form and application, its successes and failures, and shall tie in very nicely where we’ve left off. After that, you’ll never have to read another word in your life! Actually, I’d hope that you would because I’ll keep writing reviews/discussions of film scores in slightly more digestible portions than this. For now I’ll thank all of you who actually got this far; good show, good show. Tata!

Alex

Oh I forgot, if I can contextualise anything I’ve written with a few films for suggested viewing and listening then here it is (and here they are):

Blade Runner (Vangelis)

E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (John Williams) (if you haven’t already seen it)

either Rain Man (Hans Zimmer) or Enemy Of The State (Harry Gregson-Williams and Trevor Rabin)

American Beauty (Thomas Newman)

Inception (Hans Zimmer)

That should sum up the brief history somewhat chronologically. And I know. I lied. But you’re the one that kept reading…

also on www.alexlamy.com with my music.