Many successful stage musicals have become additionally popular through the medium of motion pictures, but music as a basic element in filmmaking has gained recognition only since midcentury as something more than a means to heighten local colour or intensify emotional expression. In the early silent films, all kinds of music were recorded, classified, and adapted to fit different moods (Beethoven overtures for cowboy-Indian chases, for instance). Several talented hacks also wrote short descriptive pieces. A few bigger films, such as The Birth of a Nation, had special scores fitted to them. Since the 1960s it has turned a full circle of the wheel back to extensive musical quotation from classical resources for similar ends but in different ways.

Russian filmmakers first gave serious consideration to the contribution music could make. V.I. Pudovkin, a Russian musicologist, defined a theory and practice of film music in the early 1930s, advocating a close and contrapuntal relationship between sound and sight. The Russian film director Sergey Eisenstein described his careful collaboration with Prokofiev in making Alexander Nevsky (1938). His perceptive observations on the potential link between cinematic rhythm and musical rhythm suggested a technique that has influenced others, such as the British composer Sir William Walton in his score for Hamlet.

Hanns Eisler, a German-born composer, formed his own theories of film music, based on empirical experience composing in this medium. His published findings recommended short musical forms in a film context, the composer’s conscious awareness of the film’s realistic sound element (the “where” and “when” of its location), and music that could suggest an objective, universal character for the film’s emotions, rather than being introspective on its own account. Eisler also supported Pudovkin in maintaining that film music should create its own sense of line independently of, although related to, the film narrative.

Film music has travelled through five broad phases: an initial borrowing from existing conventional sources; the use of musical-cliché catalogs, which enabled any musician of modest ability to assemble an emotional or dramatic sequence and which served as the basis for most later background music in films; the active interest of major composers in writing original scores; a subsequent reaction of either near silence or advanced techniques of electronic sound generation and transformation; and the borrowing from classical sources for new purposes.

In France, in particular, the regular participation of leading composers in film music has been the rule rather than the exception. The opposite holds true in the United States and Great Britain, although most composers of distinction in both countries between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s made some original contributions to the motion-picture medium. In the United States these included Aaron Copland, Marc Blitzstein, and Virgil Thomson, who received the first Pulitzer Prize awarded to film music—for Louisiana Story (1948); in Great Britain, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, Sir William Walton, Alan Rawsthorne, and Richard Rodney Bennett.

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Isolated experiments to marry films to specific classical music have been made from time to time. These include the Austrian director Max Reinhardt’s film of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), which varied the cinematic structure to incorporate the complete suite of Mendelssohn’s incidental music originally written for the play. The American filmmaker Walt Disney’s celebrated Fantasia (1940) adapted the technique of the animated cartoon to illustrate a sequence of musical classics, outraging some people because the visual relationships were held to be irrelevant to the music but continuing to the present to entertain audiences, especially young ones, on an international scale.

When the making of motion pictures became an industry more than a craft, a situation developed in which music was recognized as desirable by the manufacturers, who nevertheless made no claim to “understand” music in the way they would be expected to understand motion-picture techniques. A parallel attitude among musicians unfortunately came to regard the skilled provision of a score tailored to the demands of script and camera as a spiritually impoverished relation of aspiring symphonic or operatic works.

In the late 1960s original film composition tended to decline in favour of renewed and often extensive borrowing from existing concert music. The slow movement from a Mozart piano concerto served to express the passage of time as well as for emotional mood in Elvira Madigan. The American film director Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) led an audience’s imagination outward into space by a transition from the diatonic (using the natural scale of five tones and two semitones) C major of the introduction to Richard Strauss’s tone-poem Also sprach Zarathustra to the polytonal Kyrie from the Requiem by the contemporary Hungarian-born composer György Ligeti. In the Italian film director Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, four repetitions of a long passage from the Adagietto movement of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 achieved a different expressive purpose in association with the visual scene each time it was heard.

Examples like these achieved an even greater impact than many original scores because they formed an organic part of the filmmaker’s conception. Conversely, even scores distinguished by their own merits—such as Copland’s for Of Mice and Men (1939) or Walton’s for Henry V (1944)—were added only after the film itself was more or less finished. The major hope for the future of this medium lies in what Vaughan Williams urged: the composition of original scores but prepared in conjunction with the director from the film’s inception. Film music might then be turned to more constructive instead of merely decorative purposes, without the dramatic license of the British film director Ken Russell’s treatment of extensive passages from Tchaikovsky’s music in his film The Music Lovers (1971).

Music for television

The screen medium’s first law, that the visual element must come first, has been intensified by television. On the home screen, the experience of music performed for its own sake customarily operates under a double disadvantage. First, it runs the risk of being swamped by its visual presentation, which may range in character from the matching of nonmusical images in varying degrees of relevance to the technique of using close-ups of musicians in action. Secondly, it suffers the continuing handicap of inadequate reproduction by the average television receiver.

Apart from rare exceptions—such as an occasional “television opera,” a dance-film, or Stravinsky’s mixed media The Flood (1962)—original music to television is chiefly confined to the provision of theme passages or supporting music hopefully intended to enhance verbal or dramatic presentation. Like the cinema pianist who played for silent films, television music has a limited repertory of conventional gestures. Even when these are given a more contemporary harmonic or instrumental garb, they remain basically governed by the 19th-century mode of musical thought, to which it is assumed that mass audiences will most easily react.

Programs about, rather than of, music have obtained a modicum of television success. While the occasional theme quotation has perhaps introduced a famous musical classic to millions who would not otherwise haveheard it, the “workshop” program, showing how music and musicians go about their business, has broken down barriers of technique and exposed the raw materials of music in a way that has probably helped to foster a wider interest in the finished product. Television cannot otherwise be accepted as a musical medium, until sets have a higher standard of musical reproduction.