Brief history of film music

Greek Melodramas

• spoken word is accompanied by music

• Music used to accent the drama

• No real singing

Opera

• Singing with lyrics

• Choruses

• Music highlights the drama or comedy

Wagner operas

• Extremes of emotion• Leitmotifs that follow characters and

ideas• meant to evoke associations with an

idea, character, or place• Considered it a total work of art, or

Gesamtkunstwerk, in which drama, music, dance, etc. was more than the sum of its parts

• Tristan und Isolde

Music and film

• December 28, 1895

• Lumiere brothers

• piano accompaniment

• Reason: to cover up the sound of a noisy projector

• to alleviate uncomfortable silence• not intended to affect the film’s emotional

import

Theme books

• First attempts to associate on screen action with the music

• themes were categorized by general names such as “Nature,” “Nation and Society,” and “Church and State,” as well as more specific ones, like “Happy,” “Climbing,” “Night: threatening mood,” and “Impending doom: ‘something is going to happen.’”

Soundies

• The Jazz Singer, the first movie with talking sequences, ushered in the era of “talkies” in 1927

• By the 1930s, producers and directors felt that there should be some logical reason for music appearing in a film.

• Occasionally ruined the intended effect of the music by providing ludicrously comedic situations that destroyed the mood of the film.

• a shepherd might be seen herding his sheep and playing his flute, to the accompaniment of a fifty-piece orchestra.

Music or no music

• Film directors had two choices during this period: use music constantly in the background, as in the continuous operas and silent films, or not at all.

• Since scoring a film during this period necessitated a great amount of music, it was unheard of for one person to compose the entire score for a movie. Instead, people would collaborate

Lots of music

• film composers began to rely on “a large number of habits, formulas, and clichés . . . [including] the brass-blasting Main Title

• But some composers held out for originality

• Most early film composers of this type were brought from Europe

• The classical music tradition begin this way.