Brief History of Music for Film
Even though the first film to ever feature music was “The Dickson Experimental Sound Film” (1894/95) made by William Dickson with his innovative Kinetophone, today it is considered “film music” all those musical pieces that were created to match or accompany the images that the public watch in the projector of their favorite cinema. The musical compositions that belong to this multi-billion world (statista.com states that the film entertainment industry had a revenue of 92.71 billion dollars in 2014 alone) are however, far from those pioneering pieces written for this line of business.
The music for the early films took many forms; songs whose lyrics were displayed on screen, introduced into seascapes to create emotion, to support ghostly images, and even to let the audiences know when they have to go in and out of the screening rooms. Nonetheless, the music that arguably changed everything in the field was Max Steiner’s King Kong (1933) soundtrack. His new technique in scoring and synchronization gave rise to the “classical-style era” in film composition, a term that lasted from 1933 until the 60s.
Alongside this era, a period known as the “Golden Age of Hollywood” started, and it would last until 1950. At this time, an average of 500 films were produced in a year, hence the given name. During the golden age, orchestral scores played a predominant role in the music for film, but during the 40s new ideas such as elements of Jazz and contemporary 20th century music were introduced by composers like Bernard Herrmann and David Raksin.
Steiner’s style stayed with those keen of films for twenty years, from 1930 to 1950. Despite that, some new experimental compositions during this time were already pointing to a new direction. Later on, time will confirm that a more dissonant, atonal and popular music vocabulary would impregnate the scores of the film world. The rise in popularity among the youth of new musical styles such as Big Band and Rock and Roll forced the composers in a way to include these genres into the soundtracks of films where the “rebel character” was becoming a tendency.
One of the great scores during this time was Alex North’s composition for “A Streetcar Named Desired”, where the use of Jazz vocabulary and dissonance, in a classical manner, made this soundtrack something else and contributed to the birth a new musical style.
Another distinctive musical piece for this time period was Henry Mancini’s 1961 hit “Moon River”. This composition was the theme tune for the film “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and became both the signature song for Mancini’s career as well as a standard for Jazz musicians to jam over.
During the 60s, the producers and directors were obsessed with theme tunes. It was common practice that every movie had its very own theme song sung by the main character. Later on, this would change, and the inclusion of popular songs in films would stop being associated to the main characters. Easy Rider’s soundtrack (1970) was made of Rock and Roll songs featuring artists such as Jimmy Hendrix, The Byrds, Steppenwolf, etc. Relating the movie scenes with “The Woodstock Generation” through Rock and Roll (Richard Davis, Complete Guide to Film Scoring, 1999) seemed like the perfect strategy for film studios to sell more albums, and therefore make their movies more profitable.
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The use of orchestral music followed its own parallel path in the movie business while popular music was becoming more and more used in films. The invention of multitrack recorders and synthesizers (1960s) added a new array of possibilities to an industry in its peak of experimentation.
With the addition of synthesizers to the musical domain, new sound opportunities for film scoring aroused. The creation of strange sounds seemed easier than ever, as well as emulating all kinds of real instruments. All at the key of your synth.
Notice the characteristic bassline played by a Moog synthesizer in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”, a James Bond 007 film released in 1969.
In 1974, Jerry Goldsmith scored the soundtrack for the movie “Chinatown”. This composition “was made of four pianos, two harps, one trumpet and strings” (Complete Guide to Film Scoring, 1999). The surprising feature of this score was that the pianos had been previously “prepared” for the recording of their parts. The preparation consisted in adding objects on the strings of the piano to change the sound and / or intentionally detune it.
Orchestral scores seemed to be dying, it appeared to be inevitable that popular and experimental music would end up taking over the film scoring field completely. It was then when Steven Spielberg and composer John Williams brought back orchestral soundtracks with a bang, and they would stay until the present day. The characteristic leitmotif in Spielberg’s film “Jaws” (1974) is for many the most recognizable one ever written for a movie. This score “has often been credited with beginning a resurgence of the use of traditional orchestral sounds and a Romantic, perhaps Neo-Romantic musical vocabulary” (Richard Davis, 1999). Two years later, in 1976, even a major hit was composed by Williams in George Lucas’s Star Wars. This classical score was different from the ones written by Steiner, it included Romantic musical language, but also contemporary compositional techniques.
Nowadays, it is not hard to find movies that combine all these vocabularies; orchestral techniques, popular music, experimental, synths, etc. The myriad of possibilities for scoring are virtually countless in the current period, and the movie lovers should be grateful for this, as no other pastime enjoyed such a richness, variety and quality on the movie’s soundtracks.
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