Music

"Film music" as a term has come to refer to music composed or expressly chosen to accompany motion pictures. The practice of pairing music and image is as old as cinema itself. In fact, Thomas Edison imagined motion pictures as visual accompaniment to the music produced by his phonographs. From the first motion pictures projected to Paris audiences in 1895 to the widescreen, Dolby Digital Surround Sound films of today, music has been a persistent element in the filmic experience. It has been improvised and it has been scored; it has been experienced as live and as recorded performance; it has consisted of both original and previously composed music; and it operates differently from country to country, culture to culture, and genre to genre. The musical, for instance, like the concert film and the musical biopic, has a set of conventions that foreground music. Through all of its various guises, however, film music can be characterized by its expressive power to shape the meaning of the image and to connect the audience to the film.

Film music serves many purposes: it grounds a film in a particular time and place; creates mood and heightens atmosphere; characterizes the people on-screen and helps to define their psychology; delineates abstract ideas; relays the film's theme; and interacts with the images to sell a film economically. Film music engages with the deepest and most profoundly unconscious levels of the audience; it is a crucial part of the apparatus through which a film engages with cultural ideology; and it largely serves these purposes without drawing conscious attention to itself.

Of course, differences in historical and cultural traditions shape music's effect on the film audience. For instance, in the classical Hollywood style, certain of film music's functions have been emphasized over others, giving Hollywood scores a distinctive and recognizable structure. But music's expressive power crosses many borders, and the ability to resonate emotion between the spectator and the screen may well be film music's most distinguishing feature. Films, of course, have various techniques for conveying emotion, including dialogue, expressive acting, close-ups, diffuse lighting, and aesthetically pleasing mise-en-scène. Film music, historically, has been the most reliable and efficient of them. Music embodies the emotion that the image represents, prompting audiences to recognize that emotion and connect to the characters on the screen. Film music thus engages audiences in processes of identification that bond them to the film. The tremolo strings accompanying a suspenseful murder or the pop song heard under a love scene both embody the emotion that the on-screen characters feel and prompt the audience to identify with and share that emotion.

HOW FILM MUSIC WORKS

How film music works in relation to the image was a lively subject of debate among the first critics to consider the subject seriously. Beginning in the 1930s, classical film theorists as well as the first historians of film music posited that film music either paralleled or counter-pointed the visual image. Even today, much popular writing on film music perpetuates this model, limiting film music's function to commentary: music either reinforces or undercuts the visual image. But in the 1940s, the composer Hanns Eisler (1898–1962) and the philosopher and music critic Theodor Adorno, in one of the earliest and most important studies of film music, Composing for the Films (1947), raised objections. Eisler and Adorno pointed out the futility of conceptualizing film music in terms of the image: "A photographed kiss cannot actually be synchronized with an eight-bar phrase" (p. 8). The model based on the assumption that music either parallels or counterpoints the image, of course, cannot account for music that responds to what is not evident in the image, its subtext; moreover, it assumes that the visual image is a direct and unproblematic form of representation. Contemporary film music scholars have posited a different model for film music's operation in which music and image are interdependent, sharing power to shape meaning. As Claudia Gorbman put it in her pioneering study, film music works by anchoring the image, shutting off certain readings and emphasizing others, policing the ways in which the audience interprets the film.

Film music is, of course, music, and as such it brings to its functioning in film the basic principles of music: melody, harmony, rhythm, meter, volume, tempo, form, timbre, and instrumentation. Music derives its power largely from its ability to tap into conventions derived from these principles. Conventions, shared between composers and audiences, harness musical affect to concrete meaning through the power of association; through repetition, conventions become ingrained in a culture as a kind of collective musical experience. Composers can use conventions as shorthand to produce specific and predictable responses on the part of listeners. For example, brass instrumentation, because of its association with the military, is linked to heroism and became a staple of Hollywood scoring in historical epics, especially swash-bucklers. When John Williams (b. 1932) relies on the brasses in his score for Star Wars (1977) rather than electronic instrumentation or futuristic musical sounds, he underscores the heroic arc of the film and connects the narrative, not to the genre of science fiction, but to the great swashbucklers of the classical Hollywood era. Composers can also deliberately contradict conventions to unsettle an audience. The waltz, for instance, has historical associations of lyricism and romance; yet Bernard Herrmann (1911–1975) chooses a waltz to accompany the deterioration of a marriage in the break-fast montage of Citizen Kane (1941), an unconventional choice that dramatically underscores the couple's failed romance. Film music also has at its disposal the conventions of song, especially lyrics. When Quentin Tarantino chooses the 1970s pop rock hit "Stuck in the Middle With You" to accompany a graphically violent scene in Reservoir Dogs (1992), his unconventional musical choice, coupled with the song's innocuous lyrics, creates disturbing effects.

Musical conventions change across history and culture and operate differently from one musical style to another. Some composers depend on conventions more than others, and some refuse to use them at all. But musical conventions generate responses so strong that listeners are affected by them whether they are consciously aware of it or not. In fact, film music can short-circuit listeners' processes of conscious recognition and create meaning on something less than a fully conscious plane. Thus film music is one of film's most potent tools to shape and control our response to what we see.

The origins of musical accompaniment to moving images, and the evolution of this pairing over the course of film history, point to a psychic realm that needs to be considered in order to understand fully the ways in which film music works. This realm is the unconscious. Psychoanalysis seeks to understand the operation of the unconscious and in the 1970s and 1980s French and North American theorists used psychoanalysis to bring music into focus. From our earliest moments inside the womb, we experience the elements of music: the rhythmic patterns of our mother's heartbeat, breathing, and pulse as well as the pitch and dynamics of her voice. After birth, the newborn continues in a blanket of aural stimulation, including and especially the mother's voice experienced as music. (Think of the ways in which language itself incorporates musical elements such as rhythm, pitch, dynamics, and intonation.) From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, the reason why music is so pleasurable and indeed a central part of human experience is that it is experienced as repressed longings for a return to the original state of fusion with the mother. For critics adhering to this approach, film music both stimulates and encourages us to regress to that complete sense of satisfaction and pleasure. This facet of film music transpires in the unconscious and is thus inaccessible to our conscious selves. But it cannot be discounted in a study of what pleases and engages us when we listen to film music.

A theoretical investigation into the pleasures and power of film music also, however, leads in an outward direction, into culture. Beginning in the 1920s, Marxist critics associated with the Frankfurt School, especially Adorno, and other German intellectuals such as the play-wright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) and the composer Ernst Bloch (1885–1977), began to examine the nexus of economics, politics, and culture that shapes music as a social discourse. The Frankfurt School maintained that all art, including music, is a form of cultural ideology, largely reinforcing but potentially resisting or subverting the dominant ideological values of a culture. In staking out this position, the Frankfurt School attacked long-held assumptions about music's autonomous function, the unique creativity of the composer, and the ability of the individual subject to resist cultural ideology. For these critics, music served a political function under advanced capitalism: to pacify dangerous, anarchic impulses by lulling listeners into an acceptance of (or at the very least, a diversion from) their social conditions, thereby supporting the status quo. Even something as seemingly countercultural as rock music has been studied through this perspective by contemporary British and American cultural studies critics. Adorno, in collaboration with Eisler, extended this argument to the film score. Music holds the film together and masks its material constitution as a technological product. Film music's adhesion stems from its exceptional ability to create and resonate emotion between the screen and the spectator. In so doing, film music distracts spectators from the two-dimensional, often black and white, and sometimes silent images. Thus film music fulfills a potent ideological function: to promote the audience's absorption into the film. The audience is thus positioned to accept, uncritically, the ideology circulating through the film. Indeed, Eisler and Adorno refer to film music as a drug.

BERNARD HERRMANN
b. New York, New York, 29 June 1911, d. Los Angeles, Calfornia, 24 December 1975

Bernard Herrmann was a Hollywood rebel—cantankerous, combative, and brilliant. Working both inside and outside the studio system, he managed to put his unique stamp on a series of films for a variety of directors. His scores, sometimes brooding and anxious, sometimes sweeping and lyrical, sometimes jarringly modern, and sometimes lushly romantic, are always inventive (and some of them are decidedly more interesting than the films they "accompany").

Arriving in Hollywood with Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater in 1941, Herrmann scored Citizen Kane and, in 1942, The Magnificent Ambersons. Angered by studio changes to his Ambersons score, he insisted that his name be removed from all prints of the film. He would in later life proclaim that Welles was the only director he worked with who knew anything about music. He is most well known, however, for a series of films he scored for Alfred Hitchcock.

Herrmann championed modern music throughout his life, and his music for Hitchcock bears its imprint: unusual instrumentation (the all-string ensemble for Psycho [1960]; the all-brass ensemble for the discarded Torn Curtain [1966] score); arresting rhythms (the opening moments of Psycho, the fandango from North by Northwest, 1959); dissonant harmonies (the shower scene from Psycho), and polytonality (the famous Vertigo [1958] chord—two perfectly conventional chords, in two different keys, played together). Never reticent about expressing himself, Herrmann parted ways with Hitchcock over the Torn Curtain score, which Herrmann completed but Hitchcock discarded under pressure.

Reclusive and uncompromising, Herrmann spent a significant portion of his creative life working outside Hollywood, scoring films internationally and composing and conducting music for the concert hall and operatic stage. He adamantly protested being defined as a film composer, preferring instead to be known as a composer who also scores films. At the end of his life, Herrmann found himself rediscovered by the young directors Brian De Palma and Martin Scorcese. He died the night he finished conducting his score for Scorcese's Taxi Driver (1976). Herrmann's final collaboration with Scorcese would be a posthumous one: the director reused Herrmann's 1961 score for Cape Fear when he remade the film in 1991.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), Psycho (1960), Cape Fear (1961), Obsession (1976), Taxi Driver (1976), Cape Fear (1991)

FURTHER READING

Bruce, Graham. Bernard Herrmann: Film Music and Narrative. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985.

Smith, Steven C. A Heart at Fire's Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

Kathryn Kalinak

That art serves a political function was a radical notion, and in postwar America it raised suspicions.

Eisler, working as a composer in Hollywood, paid the price for his leftist views. He became a target of the Communist "witch hunts," was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee for alleged communist activities, and deported. That art is inextricably tied up with politics is clearly evidenced in the lives of many of the composers cited here, whose music, careers, and even lives were threatened and sometimes claimed by political events of the twentieth century.

Considering the form and practice of film music as an ideological mechanism has profound consequences for our understanding of how film music works within individual films as well. This ideological function of film music has been an especially rich site of investigation for contemporary film music scholars who have examined how such ideologically loaded concepts as gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity are encoded through music. Cultural ideology manifests itself in a work of art in indirect ways, operating on less than a conscious plane. Yet the results of that process, though complex, sometimes contradictory, and often elusive, are clearly audible. Can you recognize North American "Indian music" when you hear it and what does it mean when you do? Hollywood composers depended on a set of clichéd musical conventions to represent Indians on screen but also to encode a response consistent with the dominant cultural ideology of the era. Tomtom rhythms, descending melodic contours, and harmonies built on fourths and fifths were powerful indicators of the primitive, the exotic, and the savage. (It should be noted here that genuine native American music is not on offer.) In Stagecoach (1939), for instance, when the camera pans from the stagecoach wending its way through the western landscape to the Indians poised on a bluff, the "Indian music" we hear tells us not only of the Indians' presence but of their threat. Despite the fact that Stagecoach takes place during a period of western history when the government repeatedly reneged on its treaty obligations to many tribes, it is the Indians who are positioned as savage and untrustworthy. As culture changes, however, so does the film score. In Dances with Wolves (1990) the cliches for "Indian music" have been replaced by John Barry's (b. 1933) symphonic themes for the Lakota composed in the romantic idiom of the classical Hollywood film score.

MUSIC IN SILENT FILM

Film music was largely live in the silent cinema but its practice was specific to the various cultures and nations where it was heard. In the United States phonograph recordings were sometimes used in early film exhibition; in Japan the tradition of live narration extended throughout the silent period. The notion of pairing film and music had a number of antecedents, among them the nineteenth-century stage melodrama. The conventional explanation for the use of music in silent film is functional: music drowned out the noise of the projector as well as talkative audiences. But long after the projector and the audience were quieted, music remained. Music eventually became so indispensable a part of the film experience that not even the advent of mechanically produced sound could silence it (although for a few years it looked as though it might). Film is, after all, a technological process, producing larger-than-life, two-dimensional, largely black and white, and silent images. Accepting them as "real" requires a leap of faith. Music, with its melody, harmony, and instrumental color (not to mention the actual presence of live musicians), fleshes out those images, lending them credibility. Further, music distracts audiences from the unnaturalness of the medium. Adorno and Eisler even posit that film music works as a kind of exorcism, protecting audiences from the "ghostly" effigies confronting them on the screen and helping audiences, unaccustomed to the modernity of such sights, "absorb the shock" (Composing for the Films, p. 75).

The history of musical accompaniment in the United States has yet to be fully written, but this

important work has begun. Martin Marks, a musicologist and silent film accompanist, finds that original scores existed as early as the 1890s. The scholar Rick Altman shows that in the crucial early periods of silent film exhibition, continuous musical accompaniment was not the normative practice, and he provides compelling evidence that accompaniment was often intermittent and sometimes nonexistent. The US film industry began to standardize musical accompaniment around between 1908 and 1912, the same period that saw film's solidification as a narrative form and the conversion of viewing spaces from small, cramped nickelodeons to theatrical auditoriums. Upgrading musical accompaniment was an important part of this transformation; attempts to encourage the use of film music and monitor its quality can be traced to this era. Trade publications began to include music columns that often ridiculed problematic accompaniment; theater owners became more discriminating in hiring and paying musicians; and audiences came to expect continuous musical accompaniment.

Initially, accompanists, left to their own devices and untrained in their craft, improvised. Therefore the quality of musical accompaniment varied widely. The single most important device in the standardization of film music was the cue sheet, a list of musical selections fitted to the individual film. The most sophisticated of them contained actual excerpts of music timed to fit each scene and cued to screen action to keep the accompanist on track. As early as 1909, Edison studios circulated cue sheets for their films. Other studios, trade publications, and entrepreneurs began doing the same. Musical encyclopedias appeared, containing vast inventories of music, largely culled from the classics of nineteenth-century western European art music and supplemented by original compositions. Encyclopedias like Giuseppi Becce's influential Kinobibliothek (1919) indexed every type of on-screen situation accompanists might face. J. S. Zamecnik (1872–1953) composed the Sam Fox Moving Picture Music series (1913–1923). It included not only a generic "Hurry Music," but "Hurry Music (for struggles)", "Hurry Music (for duels)"; and "Hurry Music (for mob or fire scenes)." Even treachery was customized for villains, ruffians, smugglers, or conspirators. Erno Rapee's Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures (1925) offers music for scenes from Abyssinia to Zanzibar (and everything in between). Popular music of the day was also featured in silent film: in illustrated songs during the earliest periods of film exhibition; as ballyhoo blaring from phonographs to lure passersby into cinemas; and in "Follow the Bouncing Ball" sing-alongs, popular in the 1920s. It is not surprising that popular music crossed over into accompaniment.

Much more work needs to be done on the impact of geography (neighborhood vs. downtown settings; the urbanized east coast vs. the less populated western states) and ethnicity and race (the place of folk traditions, ragtime, jazz) on musical accompaniment. By the teens, however, silent film accompaniment had developed into a profession, and the piano emerged as the workhorse of the era. The 1920s saw the development of the mammoth theatrical organ, like the Mighty Wurlitzer, and motion picture orchestras, contracted by the owners of magnificent urban picture palaces. Orchestral scores, music transcribed for the orchestra, developed during the late silent era. Orchestral film scores based on original compositions were rare in the United States, but there are some famous international examples (not all of which, unfortunately, have survived): Camille Saint-Saëns's (1835–1921) L'Assassinat du duc de Guise (1908), Arthur Honegger's (1892–1955) Napoléon (1929), Dmitri Shostakovich's (1906–1975) Novyy Vavilon (The New Babylon, 1927), Erik Satie's (1866–1925) Entr'acte (1924), and Edmund Meisel's (1894–1930) Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925), blamed for causing riots at the German premiere and banned. Most orchestral scores, however, were compiled from existing sources, largely nineteenth-century Western European art music. The first American orchestral score, generally acknowledged as The Birth of a Nation (1915), was a compilation by Joseph Carl Breil (1870–1926) and the film's director, D. W. Griffith, raiding such classics as Richard Wagner's (1813–1883) Ride of the Valkyries, from his opera Die Walkure, and Edvard Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King, from his Peer Gynt suite no. 1.

Wagnerian opera and Wagner's theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) were early influences on accompanists. Wagner argued that music in opera should not be privileged over other elements and should be composed in accordance with the dramatic needs of the story. Accompanists envisioned film music as performing the same function. Especially influential was Wagner's use of the leitmotif, an identifying musical passage, often a melody, associated through repetition with a particular character, place, emotion, or even abstract idea. Silent film accompanists often used the leitmotif to unify musical accompaniment, and during the period of film's transformation into a narrative form, leitmotifs became an important device for clarifying the story and helping audiences keep track of characters. However, Eisler and Adorno, among other critics, argued that the leitmotif was inappropriate for such short art forms as films.

Spurred by reconstructions in the 1970s of silent film scores by scholar-conductors such as Gillian Anderson and by screenings of the restoration of Abel Gance's Napoléon, silent film has enjoyed a resurgence. The rebirth of the silent film with musical accompaniment has made it possible for audiences today to feel something of the all-encompassing nature of the silent film experience. Original scores have been rescued from oblivion, and new scores have been created. Some of these restorations exist in recorded form and boast the original music: Broken Blossoms (1919), scored by Louis Gottschalk (1864–1934); Metropolis (1927), scored by Gottfried Huppertz; Chelovek s kino-apparatom (The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929), with a recreation of the director Dziga Vertov's (1896–1954) score by the Alloy Orchestra. Other restorations feature newly composed scores: The Wind (1928), scored by Carl Davis; Stachka (Strike, 1925), scored by the Alloy Orchestra; and Sherlock, Jr. (1924), scored by the Clubfoot Orchestra. Giorgio Moroder (b. 1940) used disco in his restoration of Metropolis in 1985. But the most exciting development has been the success of silent screenings with live musical accompaniment at film festivals, in art museums, on college campuses, and sometimes even in renovated silent film theaters.

THE CONVERSION TO SOUND

Most filmmakers responded to the coming of sound by transplanting the live, continuous musical accompaniment of silent film to the mechanically produced soundtrack. Standardizing and upgrading the quality of musical accompaniment was one of the most compelling reasons for Warner Bros. to invest in Vitaphone, an early sound reproduction system. Warner Bros. hired the New York Philharmonic to record the studio's first sound feature, Don Juan (1926). Al Jolson's ad-libbing in their second Vitaphone venture, The Jazz Singer (1927), not only put the "talk" in "talking pictures" but ushered in a new aesthetic possibility: realism. Sound, specifically dialogue and sound effects, could now be used to heighten the impression that films captured reality. Musical accompaniment challenged this aesthetic, and thus the common practice in Hollywood in the transition years between silent and sound expunged background music entirely. Most films made during this period either have no musical score at all or include only music visibly produced within the world of the story. And yet the power of film music could not be ignored. Many films go to absurd lengths to include musical accompaniment "realistically." In Josef von Sternberg's crime drama Thunderbolt (1929), for instance, prisoners just happen to be practicing music in their cells (von Suppe's Poet and Peasant) during the film's climax.

Some filmmakers and composers proved more adventurous. In Hollywood, the composer Hugo Riesenfeld (1879–1939) used two different musical mediums simultaneously (a jazz band and a small orchestra) for distinctive effects in Sunrise (1927). Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977), who composed the music for some of his films, continued the practice of continuous musical accompaniment well into the 1930s for films such as City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936). In France, the director René Clair (1898–1981) used musical effects to replace naturalistic sound in Le million (The Million, 1931) and Sous les toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris, 1930); Maurice Jaubert (1900–1940) used electronic manipulation to produce an arresting musical cue for a slow-motion sequence in Jean Vigo's Zéro de conduite (Zero for Conduct, 1933). Eisler scored Joris Ivens's documentary Nieuwe gronden (New Earth, 1934) using naturalistic sound for the machines but music for the humans. In Britain, Arthur Benjamin (1893–1960) experimented with orchestration techniques to compensate for the problems in early sound recording, reducing the number of strings and even creating pizzicato from tuba and piano. And in Berlin, at the German Film Research Institute, experiments in scoring techniques for sound film produced filmic equivalents for musical principles, such as the dolly-in and dolly-out for crescendo and decrescendo and superimpositions for dissonant chords. Perhaps it was these experiments that Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was thinking of when he was approached by Hollywood. The story goes that he expressed interest if he could complete his score first and the film could be made to fit his music. It is tempting to consider Fritz Lang's M (1931) in this light, where the mesmerizing circularity of the motif from Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King, whistled by the murderer, finds its reflection in a series of circular visual motifs.

By the 1930s it was clear that sound film would replace silent film as the norm, and that film music fulfilled an important function in sound film. Sometimes cautiously and sometimes boldly, filmmakers began reintegrating background music. In Hollywood, music could be heard connecting sequences, underscoring dramatic moments, and providing accompaniment for the credit sequences (main title and end titles). But ultimately it was a giant gorilla that taught Hollywood the importance of film music. Worried about the credibility of the eighteen-inch models used in the creation of the monster in King Kong (1933), the film's director, Merian C. Cooper (1893–1973), asked Max Steiner (1888–1971) to write music to bring Kong to life. And bring Kong to life he did, scoring over three-quarters of the film's one-hundred-minute runtime. The success of King Kong validated Steiner's saturated scoring techniques. In 1934 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences added the originally composed film score as an award category.

THE CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD FILM SCORE

Hollywood has dominated filmmaking as an institutional practice, and its model for the use of music in film has had a determining influence on the history of film music. This influence can be traced to the classical studio era, roughly from the early 1930s to the 1960s. A wave of academic interest in film music that began in the 1980s has focused on the classical Hollywood film score with several important books devoted to the subject. In the 1930s several key composers—most importantly Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957), and Alfred Newman (1901–1970), but also Dmitri Tiomkin (1894–1979), MiklósRózsa (1907–1995), Bronislau Kaper (1902–1983), and Franz Waxman (1906–1967)—rose to prominence for their work in films. All but Newman had emigrated from Europe, many fleeing Hitler and the rise of fascism. (Korngold was Jewish, and his family had a narrow escape from Austria.)

The classical Hollywood film score follows a set of conventions so as to help tell the film's story and to engage the audience in the world that the story creates. To this end, music was subordinated to narrative and rendered unobtrusive through techniques developed both to mask its entrances and exits and to subordinate it to dialogue. Music served several important functions nonetheless: sustaining narrative unity by covering over potential gaps in the narrative chain (such as transitions between sequences and montages); controlling connotation; fleshing out mood, atmosphere, historical time, geographic space, and characters' subjectivity; connecting the audience emotionally to the film; and heightening screen action, often through mickey-mousing, or directly synchronizing screen action and music. (The term comes from the making of Disney animated films, where characters move in exact time to the music—think of Mickey conducting the brigade of brooms in The Sorcerer'sApprentice sequence in Fantasia [1941]). The medium of the classical film score was symphonic; its musical idiom derived from late romanticism, with its structure dependent on the leitmotif. Outstanding examples of the form are too numerous to list, but highlights include Korngold's The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Newman's Wuthering Heights (1939), and Steiner's Gone with the Wind (1939), the last with over three hours of music.

Studio filmmaking in the classical Hollywood era emphasized efficiency, following an assembly-line mode of production with a highly specialized division of labor. Work on the score began when the film was in rough cut and was usually completed within three to six weeks. (There were exceptions: Korngold, for one, got more time.) The process began with a spotting session to determine in which "spots" to place the music. Composers produced sketches of the music, but orchestrators (and sometimes arrangers for songs and choral material) produced the finished version of the score. (Again there were exceptions: Herrmann orchestrated all his own film scores.) The top Hollywood composers established long-term relationships with orchestrators or arrangers they trusted: Korngold with Hugo Friedhofer (1901–1981) (who would go on to become an important composer himself), Tiomkin with choral arranger Jester Hairston (1901–2000). Some composers had the privilege of conducting their own work, but usually it was the studio's musical director who conducted. Often, especially on "B" pictures, teams of composers, arrangers, and orchestrators worked together, so screen credit can be misleading. On Stagecoach, five composers shared screen credit, seven worked on the score, and four received the Academy Award^® that year for Music (Scoring). Ultimately, the producer had the final approval over the score and the studio owned any music written for its films.

Hollywood's mode of production did not accommodate individuality, perfectionism, or complaint. And yet some composers managed all three. Caryl Flinn argues that it was just these conditions and the sense of artistic frustration that they fostered that drove Hollywood composers to romanticism, with its idealized focus on the individual, the transformative nature of creativity, and art's transcendence over social and historical reality.

The symphonic film score remains an option for composers, especially in studio big-budget, action-adventure films and historical epics. The phenomenal success of John Williams's scores, such as Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and especially the first Star Wars trilogy (1977–1983), has been instrumental in revitalizing both the symphonic medium and a neoromantic idiom. Composers who work in the form include Jerry Goldsmith (1929–2004), Danny Elfman (b. 1953), James Horner (b. 1953), and Howard Shore (b. 1946), as well as composers who established their careers abroad, such as John Barry, Nino Rota (1911–1979), Ennio Morricone (b. 1928), Maurice Jarre (b. 1924), Georges Delerue (1925–1992), and Patrick Doyle (b. 1953), to name but a few. Even in films with more contemporary musical styles and instrumentation, it is interesting to note the extent to which classical scoring principles remain. Amid the rock scoring of The Matrix trilogy (1999–2003), for instance, the leitmotif for Neo, the protagonist, can be heard in a classically inflected, symphonic arrangement.

THE CLASSICAL SCORE AND BEYOND: INSIDE AND OUTSIDE HOLLYWOOD

In the 1940s and 1950s the classical film score began to undergo an evolution when the next generation of film composers arrived in Hollywood. With them came more contemporary musical language from the worlds of art music and popular music that opened up the stylistic possibilities of the Hollywood score. Largely American by birth and by training, composers such as Herrmann, David Raksin (1912–2004), Alex North (1910–1991), Elmer Bernstein (1922–2004), Leonard Rosenman (b. 1924), and Henry Mancini (1924–1994) incorporated American vernacular music (folk song and jazz), elements of modernism (dissonance, polytonality, serial music), and the popular song in their film scores. Later, composers from the world of art music brought postmodern musical techniques. And in the 1950s, concurrent with many of these developments, rock 'n' roll arrived.

Folk song had become a subject of interest to American art music composers in the 1930s. Rejecting the experimental techniques of modernism, composers such as Aaron Copland (1900–1990) sought to define a uniquely American idiom and turned to folk song and its distinctive melodies and harmonic textures. Copland's Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and Appalachian Spring (1942) are prototypical examples of this "American" sound, which crossed over into film in the scores for Of Mice and Men (1940) and Our Town (1940), by Copland, and for the documentaries The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), The River (1938), and Louisiana Story (1948), by Virgil Thomson (1896–1989). Perhaps because the western as a genre focuses so transparently on American values, its scores have tended to favor this approach. Tiomkin's scores for Duel in the Sun (1946) and Red River (1948), and Richard Hageman's (1882–1966) for several John Ford westerns, especially Fort Apache (1948) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), are exemplary. A more recent example of the use of this American sound can be heard in Randy Newman's (b. 1943) score for The Natural (1984). Contemporary composers have opened up the focus on American folk song to include various types of world music. Elliot Goldenthal (b. 1954), for instance, himself a student of Copland, uses Mexican folk traditions and indigenous instruments in Frida (2002).

JOHN WILLIAMS
b. Long Island, New York, 8 February 1932

With well over a hundred major feature films to his credit to date, the American-born and -trained John Williams may well be the most recognizable film composer in the Western world. He began his career as a studio pianist and arranger, working with the composers Alfred Newman, Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, Bernard Herrmann, and Henry Mancini, and went on to become Hollywood's most successful composer as well as one of its most prolific (although he has not caught up with the legendary Max Steiner and his 350-plus credits). Largely responsible for the revival of the symphonic film score written in a neoromantic style, and for adapting the film orchestra to the modern recording studio, Williams is a connection to Hollywood's classical era.

More important, Williams has raised the visibility (or to be more precise, the audibility) of the film score. In an era when much of the music heard at the movies is almost immediately forgotten, Williams's music has entered the popular consciousness—the shark motif from Jaws (1975), the theme from Star Wars (1977), the five-note melody through which aliens and earthlings communicate in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Indelibly identified with the Star Wars films, Williams has scored all six of them. He once described them as silent movies, and indeed the music is an important part of these films' success. At the age of seventy-three, he completed over two hours of music for the last installment, Revenge of the Sith (2005).

In 1975 Williams began what would prove to be his most enduring partnership, with the director Steven Spielberg. This collaboration on over two-dozen films across a variety of genres has given Williams a premiere showcase for his work. Although less known for his art music, Williams has pursued a career on the concert stage as a composer and conductor, wielding the baton at the Boston Pops from 1980 to 1993. He remains Hollywood's preeminent film composer.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), JFK (1991), Jurassic Park (1993), Schindler's List (1993), Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001)

FURTHER READING

Kalinak, Kathryn. "John Williams and The Empire Strikes Back: The Eighties and Beyond: Classical Meets Contemporary." In Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film, edited by Kathryn Kalinak, 184–202. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

Scheurer, Timothy E. "John Williams and Film Music since 1971." Popular Music and Society 21, no. 1 (1997): 59–72.

Kathryn Kalinak

Beginning in the 1950s, jazz proved another possibility, especially for films set in urban environments. In edgy urban dramas, jazz exploded onto the soundtrack in scores such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), by Alex North (1910–1991); The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), by Elmer Bernstein; Touch of Evil (1958), by Mancini; and in numerous biopics about (white) jazz artists such as Young Man with a Horn (1950) and Rhapsody in Blue (1945). Krin Gabbard makes the case that this focus on white jazz artists provides a key to understanding American ideology of race, gender, and sexuality. Later filmmakers such as Robert Altman (b. 1925) and Clint Eastwood (b. 1930) (who also composes film scores) have used jazz to great effect. Hollywood did turn its attention to black jazz performers in Mo' Better Blues (1990) and biopics such as Lady Sings the Blues (1972), about the singer Billie Holiday, and Bird (1988), about the saxophone legend Charlie Parker. Jazz on the soundtrack was initially associated with urban decadence; the extent to which it has shed this association remains an interesting question. A number of jazz artists have themselves scored films: Duke Ellington (Anatomy of a Murder, 1959), Charles Mingus (Shadows, 1959), Herbie Hancock (Death Wish, 1974), and Joshua

Redman (Vanya on 42nd Street, 1994), among others. But the premiere showcase for African American jazz performers in American film may well have been the live action and animated shorts, produced in the 1930s and 1940s, featuring jazz greats Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. The racism of the era is strongly in evidence in many of them. In cartoons produced by the Max Fleischer studio, for instance, jazz artists found themselves captured not only by animated form (Cab Calloway was a walrus) but by numerous racial stereotypes.

The introduction of rock 'n' roll occurred simultaneously with these developments. First heard on a feature film soundtrack when Bill Haley's song "Rock Around the Clock" was used under the titles of The Blackboard Jungle (1955), rock 'n' roll was initially limited to teen pics and used to target young audiences. In the 1970s soul could be heard on the soundtrack in films like Shaft (1971), for which Isaac Hayes wrote the songs as well as the background score. Rock 'n' roll ultimately functioned as a pressure point on the classical Hollywood film score and was an important influence in a new type of scoring that would emerge in the 1960s, the compilation score.

In the 1940s and 1950s, modernist musical techniques, such as dissonance, atonality, striking rhythms, and unconventional instrumentation, made their way into Hollywood film scores such as Rózsa's for Spellbound and The Lost Weekend (both 1945, and both making use of the theremin, one of the first electronic instruments), and Rosenman's for East of Eden (1955) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). The cutting edge of modernism, serial music, can be heard in Rosenman's score for The Cobweb (1955). Initially, electronic instrumentation was limited to horror films and science fiction or used for specific psychological effects (dream sequences, for instance), but it moved into the mainstream and high visibility with Giorgio Moroder's score for Midnight Express (1978) and Vangelis's for Blade Runner (1982). In the late twentieth century Philip Glass (b. 1937) brought minimalism out of the world of art music and into the film score. Characterized by repetitive musical

figures that disturb conventional notions of rhythm and time, Glass's mesmeric music first attracted attention in Koyaanisqatsi (1983) and The Thin Blue Line (1988). Glass's work in Hollywood has been limited (The Hours in 2002 is his most high-profile score), but not his influence: the distinctive techniques of minimalism (but with more conventional tonality) can be heard in many Hollywood films.

THE USE OF POPULAR SONG

The rise of the popular song precipitated the most fundamental and lasting changes to the Hollywood film score. Popular music had been used in film accompaniment from the beginning; by the 1920s studios began promoting songs written expressly for their films, known as theme songs, through sheet music and record sales. Popular songs appeared in sound film, too. Sometimes they were performed on-screen, as by Dooley Wilson, singing "As Time Goes By," in Casablanca (1942), and sometimes they were heard emanating from on-screen nightclubs or radios. In the 1930s and 1940s, songs were sometimes culled from a score's themes with lyrics hastily added to tap into additional profits. Raksin's leitmotif for the title character of Laura (1944) became "Laura," with the addition of Johnny Mercer's lyrics. The large-scale promotion of theme songs, however, was a product of the 1950s and the phenomenal success of Tex Ritter's "Do Not Forsake Me" from High Noon (1952). Theme songs were everywhere, now heard in films complete with their lyrics, cross-promoted on radio, television, and on record, and generating huge revenue for the studios.

The popularity of soundtracks dates from this era, although there are some interesting earlier examples, such as Disney's Snow White (1938). Often composed in advance of the score, theme songs had a determining influence on both the shape and sound of Hollywood films in the 1950s and 1960s. Mancini created many of the most memorable songs of the era, such as "Moon River" from Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961). Yet Mancini never defined himself as a songwriter, considering song melodies as motifs to be exploited in the scoring process. Jeff Smith argues persuasively that the theme song did not undermine classical scoring principles, positing that scores based on theme songs fulfilled the primary functions of classical film music: to attend to the needs of the narrative and to connect the audience to the film emotionally and psychologically. Classical scoring depended to a large extent on musical conventions to generate audience response and to lend meaning. Theme songs shifted away from those conventions to make use of popular culture, with lyrics providing an additional layer to make the meaning of a film resonate.

In the 1960s, new scoring possibilities produced a hybrid of the theme score and rock 'n' roll—the compilation score. Compiled scores consist of a collection of existing songs, often used in their original recorded format and largely derived from noncinematic sources (usually popular music but also opera and classical music); these can be supplemented by original songs and orchestral background scoring. The compilation score has brought cinema full circle, harking back to the days of silent cinema when accompanists would select music from a variety of sources, including popular song. The compilation score for Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Vol. I (2003), for example, contains Nancy Sinatra's cover of Sonny and Cher's "Bang Bang" and songs by Isaac Hayes, Tomoyasu Hotei, Charlie Feathers, Al Hirt, Quincy Jones, Meiko Kaji, and a cue from Herrmann's score for Twisted Nerve (1968). Other notable compilation scores feature various kinds of popular music: rock 'n' roll (Easy Rider, 1969), disco (Flashdance, 1983), rap (Dangerous Minds, 1995), country (Nashville, 1975), popular standards (Sleepless in Seattle, 1993) and eclectic mixes (Apocalypse Now, 1979, which includes Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries and the Rolling Stones' "[I Can't Get No] Satisfaction.") Cross-promoted on radio, MTV, and various recording mediums, soundtracks now precede a film's release and may produce higher profits than the film itself.

Compilation scores have brought dramatic changes to film scoring. Responsibility shifts from the composer to the producer or director (to name just two examples, Tarantino and Woody Allen), who select the music for their films themselves. The choice may fall to a music supervisor, whose job includes clearing copyright for the final selections. Compilation scores also present some formidable challenges to traditional film scoring. Because songs have a structural autonomy of their own, they sometimes do not correspond directly to the image track. Additionally, audiences may perceive songs on a more conscious level than background orchestral scoring. Preexisting songs also trail with them not only a cultural history, but often a personal history, triggering memories and experiences that may be at odds with the film's dramatic needs. Anahid Kassabian views this change as liberating, as compilation scores have opened up possibilities for alternative voices (especially women and minorities) to be heard. Interestingly, the job of music supervisor has opened up economic space for women. While female composers' access to Hollywood has been limited in the past (Elizabeth Firestone and Ann Ronnell found some work in the classical studio era) and more are doing so at present (Shirley Walker, Rachel Portman, Anne Dudley), women now dominate the ranks of music supervisors in Hollywood and thus have more access to film music than they had in the past. But even with these changes, compilation scores continue to respond to the image track, exploiting the associations that songs generate to fulfill some of music's most conventional functions: to create mood, heighten atmosphere, aid in characterization, establish time and place, and relay theme.

INTERNATIONAL FILM: OTHER TRADITIONS, OTHER PRACTICES

Outside Hollywood, national cinemas the world over have adopted and adapted film music to fit their own particular needs, sometimes emulating conventional Hollywood practice, sometimes departing from it in distinctive ways, sometimes ignoring it altogether. As compared to Hollywood, international film, historically, has been characterized by a less capital-intensive and elaborate machine for the production and distribution of film. Funding is different, relying more on government subsidies than sales, and many national cinemas have been or are protected from competition by legislation (import quotas, for instance). International directors have also been more interested in using composers from the world of art music, resulting in more stylistic diversity. In Britain, Arthur Bliss (1891–1975), Arthur Benjamin, and William Walton (1902–1983) each composed important early film scores. Most memorable are the scores for the futuristic Things to Come (1936), by Bliss; The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), by Benjamin and containing his original composition "The Storm Cloud Cantata" (retained by Herrmann in his score for the remake in 1956); and several of Laurence Olivier's adaptations of Shakespeare, including Hamlet (1948) and Henry V (1944), by Walton. Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughn Williams (1872–1958) composed scores for British documentaries in the 1930s and 1940s, with Song of Ceylon (1934) an important example. Michael Nyman (b. 1944) scored a series of films for Peter Greenaway, including The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), and Patrick Doyle did the same for Kenneth Branagh, including his adaptations of Henry V (1989) and Hamlet (1996).

Maurice Jaubert worked prominently in early French sound film, with Jean Vigo, René Clair (Quatorze Juillet, [July 14, 1933]), and Marcel Carné (Le Jour se lève, [Daybreak, 1939]), before his untimely death duringWorld War II. But George Auric (1899–1983) proved France's most prolific and versatile composer of the pre-and postwar eras. In France he scored Le Sang d'un poète (The Blood of a Poet, 1930), La Belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast, 1946), and Orphée (Orpheus, 1950) for the avant-garde filmmaker Jean Cocteau; in Britain, The Lavender Hill Mob (1951); and in Hollywood, Roman Holiday (1953). Maurice Jarre established his career in France in the 1950s and 1960s and catapulted to the top of the international "A" list with scores for Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). The French New Wave brought a new set of French composers to the fore, including Pierre Jansen (b. 1930), who scored over thirty films for Claude Chabrol, and Georges Delerue, who worked with Jean-Luc Godard (Le Mépris, [Contempt, 1963]), Alain Resnais (Hiroshima mon amour, 1959), and François Truffaut (eleven films, including Jules et Jim, 1962) before embarking on an international career, scoring Il Conformista (The Conformist, 1970), and eventually settling in Hollywood. Among the most striking film scores of the twentieth century are those for several Godard films that capture the unconventionality and iconoclasm of the director's filmmaking style: Martial Solal's (b. 1927) jazzy score for À bout de souffle

SERGEI PROKOFIEV
b. Sontsovka, Ukraine, Russia, 23 April 1891, d. Moscow, USSR (now Russia), 5 March 1953

It is sometimes described as one of the greatest film scores ever written; it is often described as one of the worst soundtracks ever recorded. The score for Alexander Nevsky (1938), one of three films that the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev scored for the legendary director Sergei Eisenstein, is to this day one of cinema's most striking and memorable film scores.

Like many international film composers, Prokofiev, born in Ukraine but raised in St. Petersburg, had an established reputation in art music when he turned to film scoring. His work with Eisenstein on Nevsky was a collaboration in the fullest sense of the word: some of the film was shot to Prokofiev's music and some of Prokofiev's music was composed to Eisenstein's footage. In The Film Sense, Eisenstein wrote that Prokofiev found the inner essence of the images, capturing the dynamic play of the frame's graphic content instead of merely illustrating action on the screen. The film was conceived to honor a medieval Russian hero and to ignite Soviet passions against Germany on the eve of World War II. Eisenstein, in trouble with Soviet authorities, had not made a film in years; Prokofiev, who lived extensively abroad before returning to Moscow in 1936, was finding his career similarly stalled. When Stalin himself asked to see the film, Eisenstein and Prokofiev hastily finished a rough-cut of the film's image track and soundtrack to meet with his approval. (Stalin liked the film, at least initially; Nevsky's fortunes would rise and fall with the Soviets' shifting political alliances during World War II.) In fact, it is highly likely that this rough-cut version is the film we see and hear today. Given the state of Soviet sound recording in the 1930s, the speed with which the score was recorded, and the size of the orchestra that performed it, the soundtrack is crude at best. Today, symphony orchestras around the world have accompanied screenings of Alexander Nevsky live in the concert hall, giving Prokofiev's score the performance it deserves.

On what turned out to be his last concert tour of the West in 1938, Prokofiev found himself in Hollywood, with his wife and children back in Moscow as collateral against his return. Touring Disney Studios, he met with Walt Disney himself to discuss the animation of Peter and the Wolf, one of Prokofiev's most enduring concert pieces, for Fantasia (1940). That idea would come to fruition not in Fantasia, however, but in Make Mine Music (1946), in which the Peter and the Wolf segment becomes Prokofiev's only "Hollywood" film score.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Lieutenant Kije (1934), Alexander Nevsky (1938), Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1944), Ivan the Terrible, Part II (banned 1946, released 1958)

FURTHER READING

Eisenstein, Sergei M. "Form and Content: Practice." In The Film Sense, translated and edited by Jay Leyda, 157–216. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942; revised ed., 1975.

Merritt, Russell. "Recharging Alexander Nevsky: Tracking the Eisenstein-Prokofiev War Horse." Film Quarterly 48, no. 2 (Winter 1994–1995): 34–45.

Kathryn Kalinak

(Breathless, 1960); Michel Legrand's (b. 1932) truncated theme and variations for Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live, 1962); Antoine Duhamel's (b. 1925) score for Weekend (1967), which features a concert pianist in a barnyard; Gabriel Yared's (b. 1949) score for Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Every Man for Himself, 1980), where characters in a shoot-out run past the orchestra playing the score; and Prénom Carmen (First Name: Carmen, 1983) with its mix of Beethoven, Bizet, and Tom Waits. The much-noticed score for Diva (1981) features a stylish mix of opera and techno, with recording itself becoming a part of the plot.

Hans Eisler worked in Germany and France before and after his stint in Hollywood, composing original and unconventional scores such as those for Kuhle Wampe oder: Wem gehört die Welt? (1932) and the documentary Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955). Peer Raben (b. 1940) lent a distinctive sound to the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in several films, including Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1979) and Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980). In Italy, Nino Rota forged an extremely important collaboration with Federico Fellini, as did Ennio Morricone with Sergio Leone. In the Soviet Union, Shostakovich continued to score films, including Grigori Kosintsev's Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1975). Serge Prokofiev's (1891–1953) famous collaboration with Sergei Eisenstein resulted in the scores for Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan Groznyy (Ivan the Terrible, part 1, 1944; part 2, 1958). In India, Ravi Shankar (b. 1920) scored Satyajit Ray's (1921–1992) Apu trilogy, and Ray himself scored his Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder, 1973) and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World, 1984). In Indian popular cinema, composers, arrangers, and "playback singers" like Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle (who dub songs for the stars), rank high in a film's credits and achieve enormous popularity in their own right: a film's success can often depend on the "hit" status of its songs. In Japan, Fumio Hayasaka (1914–1955) collaborated with Akira Kurosawa on many of his early films, including Rashômon (1950), Ikiru (To Live, 1952), and Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954). Tôru Takemitsu (1930–1996), whose extraordinary range encompasses a variety of historical styles, worked in Japan with Hiroshi Teshigahara on Suna no onna (Woman of the Dunes, 1964), with Kurosawa on Dodesukaden (1970) and Ran (1985), and with Nagisa Oshima on Tokyo senso sengo hiwa (The Man Who Left His Will on Film, 1970); in France he worked on the omnibus film L'Amour à vingt ans (Love at Twenty, 1962); and in Hollywood, at the end of his life, he scored Rising Sun (1993). The director Teinosuke Kinugasa (1896–1982) composed and recorded a score for his 1926 surrealist film Kurutta Ippeji (A Page of Madness) almost fifty years after its initial release. And Ryuichi Sakamoto crossed over from the world of popular music to the soundtrack with his score for Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983).

MUSIC AND ANIMATION

Music for animation has long suffered from critical neglect despite being the form of film music that many viewers first encounter. It diverges significantly from other film music practices. In the United States, for instance, although it developed concurrently with classical scoring principles (sometimes, as in the case of Warner Bros., at the same studio) and even shared composers and techniques, music for animation operates in a fundamentally different way. From the beginning, music for animated films was characterized by stylistic diversity (jazz, swing, pop, modern, and even serial music), an eclectic approach to musical genres (mixing opera, jazz, pop songs, and classical music), and an indifference to the leitmotif and other unifying strategies (in Warner Bros. cartoons, for instance, music emphasizes the cuts). Animated films were often created in "reverse," with the music composed in advance of the images, and decades before the classical score exploited popular songs, the

cartoon soundtrack was filled with them. The golden age of film animation in the United States spans the years from the conversion of sound to the breakup of the studio system, and during that period Disney Studios pioneered a number of important technical advances: mickey-mousing, a crucial model for the integration of music and action for classical Hollywood composers; the tick system, which facilitated precise synchronization and which developed into the click track, a standard operating procedure in Hollywood; and the forerunner of today's surround sound, Fantasound, a stereophonic multitrack recording and playback system that surrounded the audience in sound by positioning speakers around the theater.

But, ultimately, it was the composers who defined the form. Carl Stalling (1891–1972), who composed over six hundred cartoon scores in his career. Stalling began in the late 1920s with Disney scoring many of the early Mickey Mouse shorts and helped to inaugurate the Silly Symphony series, where classical music was accompanied by animated images. (The trajectory of the Silly Symphonies led to Fantasia, a box office failure at the time but much be loved today.) Later at Warner Bros., Stalling transformed the house style by creating a pastiche of quotes, some only a few measures long, from a number of sources and in a variety of styles. Scott Bradley (1891–1977) at MGM experimented with twelve-tone composition for Tom and Jerry cartoons, once stating, "I hope that Dr. Schoenberg will for give me for using his system to produce funny music, but even the boys in the orchestra laughed when we were recording it" (quoted in Goldmark, p. 70). At UPA in the 1950s, Gail Kubik (1914–1984) adroitly exploited percussion in his scores for the Gerald McBoing Boing series. The rise of television and the cost-saving measures attending the breakup of the studios signaled the end of the golden age, when the US animation industry, with some exceptions, transferred largely to television. The renaissance of Disney feature animation in the 1980s continued the practice of modeling Disney films and their scores after musicals, although as South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut (1999) reminds us, animated musicals do not have to be conventional. Internationally, music for animation has achieved high visibility in Japan, where soundtracks for Japanese animation, anime, have become an important part of the Japanese recording industry. Some of these soundtracks mix traditional Japanese and Western musics in interesting ways. Shoji Yamashira's Akira (1988), for instance, combines Buddhist chant, taiko drumming, and synthesizers. Film scholars and musicologists have begun to turn their attention to "cartoon music," and books on animation now often include attention to the score.

CONCLUSION

Film music, as the composer David Raksin (1912–2004) put it, "makes the difference. There's no doubt about that. All you have to do to get the point of film music across to the skeptical is to make them sit though the picture without the music"(quoted in Kalinak, p.xvii). This is exactly what Herrmann did during the production of Psycho. Hitchcock did not think the shower sequence should be accompanied by music; Herrmann thought otherwise and asked for the opportunity to score it. Hitchcock, not entirely satisfied with the shower sequence himself, was open to the experiment. Later, Herrmann screened two versions: one accompanied only by sound effects, the other, accompanied only by music. Hitchcock chose the latter, resulting in one of cinema's most powerful and arresting moments, a grisly murder made even more horrific by the shrieking violins that accompany it. Not all films use music, but the vast majority of films from every corner of the globe from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first have exploited it. All evidence points to its persistence well into the future.

SEE ALSO Animation;Ideology;Musicals;Silent Cinema;Sound;Studio System;Technology

FURTHER READING

Altman, Rick. Silent Film Sound. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

Brown, Royal S. Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Dickinson, Kay, ed. Movie Music: The Film Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.

Donnelly, Kevin J. The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television. London: British Film Institute, 2005.

Duncan, Dean. Charms That Soothe: Classical Music and Narrative Film. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003. Eisler, Hanns, and Theodor Adorno (uncredited). Composing for the Films. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947.

Flinn, Caryl. Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Gabbard, Krin. Jammin' at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Goldmark, Daniel. Tunes for 'Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Kalinak, Kathryn. Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

Kassabian, Anahid. Hearing Film Music: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Film Music. New York and London: Routledge, 2001.

Marks, Martin. Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies 1895–1924. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Smith, Jeff. The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Wojcik, Pamela Robertson, and Arthur Knight, eds. Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.

Kathryn Kalinak