Film score

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Film scores are original music written specifically to accompany a film or television program. They are built from discrete pieces called cues: timed, precisely measured stretches of orchestral, instrumental, or choral music that begin and end at exact moments to heighten the emotional weight of what is happening on screen. What you hear beneath a chase, a death, a reunion was not improvised. It was calculated to the frame.

  How did that practice begin? Why does a modern blockbuster need a full symphony orchestra? And what happens when a director falls so deeply in love with temporary music that they refuse to let it go? Those questions reach back to the very origins of cinema, touch on some of the most famous creative partnerships in Hollywood, and lead to an ongoing argument about whether film music deserves a place in the concert hall.

• 2. The Noise That Started It All

  ›

  Kurt London, an early writer on the subject, argued that film music began not from any artistic urge, but from a practical need to drown out the noise of the projector. In the earliest cinemas there was no sound-absorbing wall between the projection machine and the audience. The mechanical racket disturbed the viewing experience, and cinema owners turned to music as the most natural solution available.

  Film historian James Wierzbicki pushed back on that explanation. He suggested that the Lumiere brothers' first film screenings were social events lively enough that projector noise was barely a problem. As early films moved from exhibition spaces into vaudeville theaters, musicians were already on staff. Audiences expected live performance in that setting, so musical accompaniment to films grew out of an existing habit rather than a technical fix.

  A pianist was present at the Lumiere brothers' first film screening in 1895. From that point forward, the practice of accompanying moving images with live music expanded quickly. In 1914, the Oz Film Manufacturing Company sent full-length scores by Louis F. Gottschalk along with their films. Victor Herbert composed a score in 1915 for The Fall of a Nation, and Camille Saint-Saens wrote music for The Assassination of the Duke of Guise in 1908. Most accompaniments at the time, however, relied on catalogues of pre-existing photoplay music organized by mood: dark, sad, suspense, action, chase.

• 3. From Silent Scores to Sound

  ›

  German cinema of the silent era produced some of the most ambitious original scores of the period. Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen in 1924 and Metropolis in 1927 both carried full orchestral and leitmotif-driven scores written by Gottfried Huppertz, who also prepared piano versions for smaller cinemas. Friedrich W. Murnau's Nosferatu in 1922 had music by Hans Erdmann, and Faust from 1926 carried a score by Werner Richard Heymann.

  Richard Wagner's ideas about Gesamtkunstwerk, the total artwork, and his technique of the leitmotif, a recurring musical idea tied to a character or concept, were picked up and carried into Hollywood by composers who had trained in the European tradition. Max Steiner and Erich Korngold both emigrated from Vienna, bringing with them the harmonic language and structural ideas of late Romanticism.

  Early attempts to synchronize recorded sound with moving images ran into hard mechanical limits. Phonographs were nearly impossible to keep in time with film projectors, and even when synchronization was achieved, amplification was inadequate. Improvements in radio technology during the 1920s eventually solved the amplification problem, and the invention of sound-on-film solved synchronization. A landmark demonstration of what was now possible came in 1933, when Max Steiner scored King Kong for producer David O. Selznick. In one scene, as an aboriginal chief slowly approaches a group of unwanted visitors, each of his footfalls is reinforced by a chord in the orchestra, locking image and music together with a precision that had not been heard before.

  In France, before talkies arrived, Erik Satie composed what many regard as the first frame-by-frame synchronous film score. His music for director Rene Clair's Entr'acte in 1924 was built from brief, evocative motifs designed to be repeated and varied in tempo as projection speeds shifted from screening to screening. American composers Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland both cited Satie's score for Entr'acte as a formative influence on their own work in film.

• 4. The Modernist Turn

  ›

  Though the orchestral language of the 1940s lagged behind developments in concert music, the 1950s brought a new generation of composers willing to push against the conventions of the Hollywood score. Director Elia Kazan was open to dissonance and jazz, and the result was Alex North's score for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1951, which wove together blues, jazz, and dissonant harmonies in a way that was genuinely new for American film.

  Kazan then brought in Leonard Bernstein to score On the Waterfront in 1954. That score drew on jazz-based harmonies and the additive rhythms associated with Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky. A year later, Leonard Rosenman, inspired by Arnold Schoenberg, experimented with atonality in his scores for East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, both from 1955.

  Bernard Herrmann spent ten years collaborating with Alfred Hitchcock, experimenting across that partnership in films including Vertigo in 1958 and Psycho in 1960. Duke Ellington brought non-diegetic jazz into Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder in 1959, another step in expanding the vocabulary of what a film score could be. Since the 1950s, a growing number of scores have incorporated electronic elements, and today many scores combine orchestral and electronic instruments in what the field calls a hybrid approach.

• 5. Spotting, Writing, and Syncing

  ›

  The process of building a score begins with spotting. A composer typically enters the project near the end of filming, around the time editing begins. The director shows the composer an unpolished rough cut, and together they walk through the film deciding which scenes require original music, where each cue starts, where it ends, and whether any specific moment on screen needs to coincide precisely with a musical event. Composers take detailed timing notes throughout this process.

  Occasionally the relationship runs in the other direction. Director Godfrey Reggio edited both Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi to fit composer Philip Glass's music rather than the other way around. The final sequence of Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and the films Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America were all edited to Ennio Morricone's score, which Morricone had prepared months before production concluded. Steven Spielberg gave John Williams complete freedom for the finale of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, asked him to record the cue without pictures, and then re-edited the scene to match.

  In 2010, Hans Zimmer was asked by Christopher Nolan to write music for Inception based on his impressions of the script rather than a finished cut. Gustavo Santaolalla worked the same way on Brokeback Mountain, the score for which won him an Academy Award.

  Once timings are locked, composers write using whatever method suits them. Some use pencil and paper, performing works-in-progress on piano for the director. Others use software such as Digital Performer, Logic Pro, Finale, Cubase, or Pro Tools, building MIDI mockups for the director to review before the orchestra records. Depending on the post-production schedule, a composer may have as little as two weeks or as many as three months. Under normal circumstances, the writing process takes roughly six weeks.

• 6. The Temp Track Problem

  ›

  Directors often edit their films using temporary music pulled from existing recordings, chosen to suggest the emotional quality they are looking for. The problem is that temp tracks can take hold. Composers have been asked to imitate a specific style or composer already present in the temp. In more extreme cases, directors have refused to give up the temp music entirely.

  The most discussed case is Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick had commissioned a score and also hired Frank Cordell to compose, but in the end he chose existing classical recordings, including pieces by composer Gyorgy Ligeti, over the work of Alex North. Other projects where the composed score was set aside in favor of the temp or an alternative include Torn Curtain, which replaced Bernard Herrmann's score; Troy, which replaced Gabriel Yared's; Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, which replaced Alan Silvestri's; Peter Jackson's King Kong, which replaced Howard Shore's; Air Force One, which replaced Randy Newman's; and The Bourne Identity, which replaced Carter Burwell's.

• 7. Leitmotifs and Character Themes

  ›

  Richard Wagner developed the leitmotif in his operas as a way of attaching a recurring musical idea to a character, an object, or an emotion, so that its reappearance in the music carries meaning even when the thing it represents is not visible on stage. Film composers adopted the technique directly.

  John Williams built the Star Wars saga on a network of individual themes tied to Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and other characters. Howard Shore's score for the Lord of the Rings films used recurring themes for major characters and locations throughout all three films; Shore tied The Shire to a tin flute in a Celtic register to evoke nostalgic reminiscence. Jerry Goldsmith's Klingon theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979 was later quoted by subsequent composers in the franchise and became the standard theme for Worf, the most prominent Klingon character across the series.

  Michael Giacchino employed character themes in his score for the 2009 animated film Up, for which he received the Academy Award for Best Original Score. His orchestral work for the television series Lost also depended heavily on themes tied to specific characters and situations. Casual viewers often absorb these themes without noticing them consciously; they register as feeling rather than as formal musical structure.

• 8. Art, Preservation, and the Canon

  ›

  The question of whether film music deserves to be taken seriously as composed music has never been fully settled. Some critics have argued that scores by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Aaron Copland, and Bernard Herrmann belong in the classical canon. A few works have made that transition, most of them by composers already established in the concert hall: Sergei Prokofiev's score to Alexander Nevsky and Vaughan Williams' score to Scott of the Antarctic are frequently cited examples.

  The majority of film music is viewed differently. Critics who discount it argue that it borrows heavily from earlier works and is produced too quickly for serious artistic development. Composers typically produce three or four scores per year. The Norwegian contemporary classical composer Marcus Paus broke from that dismissal in describing John Williams as one of the great composers of any century, arguing that Williams had found a satisfying way of incorporating dissonance and avant-garde techniques within a tonal framework, and that he might have come closer than any other composer to achieving the Schoenbergian idea that ordinary listeners would one day whistle twelve-tone rows.

  Preservation of film music entered a new phase in 1983, when a non-profit organization called the Society for the Preservation of Film Music was formed. Its purpose was to protect the physical byproducts of creating a score: the written manuscripts, studio recordings, and documents that movie studios had in some cases discarded. Written music must be kept to perform scores in concert and to make new recordings. In some instances, archival recordings of film scores have not been released on disc until decades after the films were made, meaning that scores once thought lost are still periodically resurfacing.