Film Music: A History

James Wierzbicki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135851422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Film Music: A History explains the development of film music by considering large-scale aesthetic trends and structural developments alongside socioeconomic, technological, cultural, and philosophical circumstances.

The book's four large parts are given over to Music and the "Silent" Film (1894--1927), Music and the Early Sound Film (1895--1933), Music in the "Classical-Style" Hollywood Film (1933--1960), and Film Music in the Post-Classic Period (1958--2008). Whereas most treatments of the subject are simply chronicles of "great film scores" and their composers, this book offers a genuine history of film music in terms of societal changes and technological and economic developments within the film industry. Instead of celebrating film-music masterpieces, it deals—logically and thoroughly—with the complex 'machine' whose smooth running allowed those occasional masterpieces to happen and whose periodic adjustments prompted the large-scale twists and turns in film music's path.

1 INTRODUCTION

Everything in creation has its history, and only when we are acquainted with that are we in a position to understand its real nature.

Kurt London, 1936¹

Composers of film music have sometimes been persons of genius, yet typically they worked at the behest of directors or producers whose sensitivity to music may or may not have been fine-tuned. Typically, too, film composers functioned in environments where economic or technological conditions placed limitations not so much on the composers’ imaginations but on the extent to which the fruits of their imaginations could be realized. And typically the music of film composers, in the multi-media hierarchy, has played a secondary role; in most cases it was created as a response to a filmic “product” that in essence was completed well before the composer was invited to participate.

Along with traditionally being secondary to overt narrative content, and thus more responsive than instigative, film music has long been derivative. This is not to say that composers of film music have lacked originality. On the contrary, film composers discovered long ago that their music’s forced subordination to film’s narrative concerns allowed them a freedom denied composers who sought to win audience favor solely in the concert hall; as early as the 1930s, cutting-edge idioms lauded by sophisticated critics yet irksome to the “average” listener easily found a place in film scores, largely because the attention of the audience of a well-made film was almost never focused on the music. But while the environment of cinema sometimes gave composers a stylistic free hand, it often demanded—for the purposes of storytelling—clear references to music that not only already existed but which, to film’s large audience, was very familiar.

Doubtless this is why film music for so long had been considered by academics to be, ipso facto, inferior to concert music.

The “Problem” with Film Music

The prejudice has lately abated, or its public voicing seems lately to have been muted.² One suspects, though, that some hallowed halls of academe still echo with negative ideas. Among them: Film music is motivated not by artistry but by market forces; film music is derivative to the extreme, sometimes exemplifying downright plagiarism and typically resorting to gimmicks and clichés; film music is a field for hacks, not for “real” composers; the only decent film scores are the occasional efforts by composers whose principal work was for the concert hall, and the only Hollywood regulars worth mentioning are those who at least made an effort to write for that more prestigious venue.

Ironically, some of the prejudice against film music can be traced to composers who benefited from the film industry’s largesse yet felt that film work was, if not exactly beneath their dignity, then at least a formidable obstacle to their “serious” musical pursuits. While it is not likely that George Antheil and Oscar Levant will ever be counted among America’s major composers, their articulate and witty autobiographical writings from the 1940s were nonetheless influential.³ What Antheil and Levant had to say about their participation in the film-music scene⁴ during Hollywood’s “golden age” was hardly positive, but even more damning were the widely read film-music critiques—some of them first published as newspaper articles and then anthologized in books—of Virgil Thomson.⁵ In the years surrounding World War II, shortly after the Hollywood film and its accompanying score supposedly “reached a level of classical perfection,”⁶ Thomson, Levant, and Antheil contributed significantly to a popular literature that denigrated music for narrative films. Readers were informed that “movie music … cannot possibly be up to the same standard” as symphonic music,⁷ that “picture music” consisted of bits and pieces inserted “with no recognition of the character of the complete score,”⁸ that almost all of commercial cinema’s innocuous yet ear-pleasing “commentary music” was “both architecturally and emotionally insufficient, because music can’t be neutral and sumptuous at the same time.”⁹ These writings were biased and often glib, yet their message proved to be unfortunately durable.

Recent articles in British and German journals have attributed the academic bias against film music to envy on the part of relatively ill-paid professors of composition and to snobbery on the part of idealistic musicologists who feel themselves charged with upholding the values of Western music’s canon.¹⁰ In a 1994 essay-review of several books on film music, James Buhler and David Neumeyer suggested that the bias at least in the United States had something to do with the fact that music for commercial films fairly flew in the face of the many young composers and music theorists who were educated at such prestigious schools as Yale and Princeton under the aegis of the GI Bill and then, in the 1950s, began to populate the faculties of public universities all across the country; these newly minted assistant professors were committed to the archly modernist ideology that held that “real” music should be autonomous and stylistically pure, and thus it seems hardly surprising that they would take a dim view of film scores that almost by definition are responsive, subordinate, and derivative.¹¹

Yet it is because film music is derivative that it has such a rich semiotic content. Whereas the strict modernist/formalist point of view prefers that music’s meaning be fully contained within the music itself,¹² the more open aesthetics of film music allows for self-contained expressive devices to co-exist comfortably with material whose meaning derives from associations quite independent of the music itself. Like the formalist composer, the film composer can easily make a “statement” whose emotive essence involves nothing more than the interplay of consonance and dissonance, or whose placement in a score’s large-scale rhetorical scheme depends entirely on the relationship of the statement’s content both to what has already been heard and to what is yet to come. Unlike the formalist composer, however, the film composer has always been free to mix purely musical niceties with whatever else might serve a film’s dramatic needs. Limited to “pure” music, the formalist composer perforce deals with matters of tension and release only in an abstract way. Not so restricted, the film composer has license to apply comparable psycho-musical dynamics to material that vis-à-vis a filmic narrative seems somehow concrete; in the film score, harmonic patterns whose expressive content might otherwise be ineffable gain enormous amounts of specificity when they are linked, however briefly, not just with musical “symbols” of place and time but with aural reminders—in the form of allusions, paraphrases, and even direct quotations—of how the film at hand relates to earlier films in a particular genre.

Similarly, it is because film music is typically subordinate to a film’s primary content that it so often has such subtle power. With few exceptions, music is something added to a film only after all of the film’s other elements—dialogue, imagery, narrative flow—have been decided upon and more or less permanently fixed in linear celluloid. Directors have occasionally re-edited scenes so that a play of images might better relate to especially potent shifts in the accompanying music, but over the long course of film’s history such privileged consideration of music has been exceedingly rare. Most often film music has been composed subsequent to the completion of the film per se, and most often the composer of film music has been charged simply with enhancing the director’s more or less carefully considered, and not likely to be altered, treatment of verbal-visual material. In filmic hierarchy the telling of the story has always reigned supreme, and film music has almost always been at the humble service of the storytelling. Quite apart from whatever formal agreements might have been struck by individual composers and the directors whose films they scored, the unwritten contracts between filmmakers and their audiences called for music to be in all ways dramatically effective but never so prominent that it drew attention to itself. Right from the start, it was expected that film music would “do the job” in so deft a manner that few in the audience would even notice it.

To be sure, not all who tried their hands at film scoring have been comfortable with the idea that music, in film, generally plays a subordinate role. The negative comments of American composers Antheil, Levant, and Thomson have already been noted. Alongside these could go the opinions of Ernest Irving, a “pioneer of British film music” who by the onset of World War II had conducted and/or composed scores for dozens of films¹³ and who in 1943 chose curiously to bite the hand that long had fed him. The time had come, Irving wrote, for sophisticated listeners to “pertinently inquire why music of anything approaching first-class quality is never heard in a kinema.”¹⁴ Having been a practitioner, Irving clearly knew that film music had special obligations, including the obligation to avoid as much as possible the forefront of the audience’s attention. But in his apostate screed he for all intents and purposes equated artistic worthiness with the extent to which musical ideas are indeed brought to the forefront. “If it is good concert music it is essentially bad film music,” he concluded, “and the converse is usually true.”¹⁵

Somewhat along the same lines, the German composer Hanns Eisler—in Composing for the Films, a book he allegedly co-authored with Theodor Adorno in 1947—observed bitterly that “one of the most widespread prejudices in the motion-picture industry is the premise that the spectator should not be conscious of the music.”¹⁶ Indeed, Eisler argued that it was largely because of this “often reiterated opinion of the wizards of the movie industry, in which many composers concur,” that the bulk of Hollywood’s film music was not just unobtrusive but banal.¹⁷ But Eisler, even though he provided scores for no less than eight Hollywood feature films,¹⁸ surely counts as a theoretical outlier, and there are many reasons to agree with Roy M. Prendergast’s opinion that Composing for the Films is a “testy and relatively valueless book.”¹⁹ To judge from autobiographies²⁰ and an almost countless number of interviews that have appeared in books²¹ and fan-oriented magazines,²² the vast majority of composers who have achieved even modest success in the industry have felt that their film music—clearly designed not for the concert hall but for the movie theater—is anything but banal. At the same time, it seems that most film composers have had no problem whatsoever with the fact that their music, vis-à-vis the filmic product as a whole, has remained largely in the background.

Apparently with this in mind, Claudia Gorbman used the phrase “unheard melodies” in the title of the 1987 study that is often cited as the trigger for the current wave of scholarly interest in film music.²³ Likewise, the title of a textbook from 1998 reminds us that film music is not just literally but effectively an “invisible art.”²⁴ Implying that for music to be “unheard” or “invisible” in a filmic context is a good thing, another textbook title from the same year tells us that film music is “the soul of cinema.”²⁵ Aaron Copland, a mainstream concert-hall composer who on several occasions made forays into Hollywood and who wrote about film music in his popular What to Listen for in Music,²⁶ expressed the same thought in less spiritual terms; he said that film music, in general, “is like a small lamp that you place beneath the screen to warm it.”²⁷ And film director Federico Fellini, commenting on his numerous collaborations with composer Nino Rota, complimented Rota on being free of “the presumptions of so many composers, who want their music to be heard in the film. He knows that, in a film, music is something marginal and secondary, something that cannot occupy the foreground except in a few rare moments and … must be content to support the rest of what’s happening.”²⁸

* * *

That film music at least to a certain extent supports “the rest of what’s happening” is self-evident. But exactly how film music performs this supportive function remains very much open to debate.

Discussion of how film music works—or how it ought to work—dates to before World War I, when columnists for various trade magazines regularly offered both criticism and practical advice to musicians who accompanied “silent” movies.²⁹ Discussion of a more intellectual sort transpired—sometimes quite interactively—in the pages of music-oriented British and American periodicals during the late 1930s³⁰ and then again in the years following World War II;³¹ it was renewed in the 1980s by a wave of articles and books emanating not so much from musicologists as from scholars who trained in literary criticism and then moved into the new field of film/media studies.³² And in recent years the intellectual discussion has accelerated markedly: it now takes place at academic conferences,³³ in new journals devoted specifically to film music,³⁴ and in established journals whose focus is musicology or film studies in general.³⁵

The current discussion on how film music works, or how it seems to work in particular films or types of films, is fascinatingly complex. It draws its examples from more than a hundred years of international filmic repertoire. And it interweaves strands from a great many lines of argument.

Studying Film Music

As noted above, considerable research has focused on the function of music for the so-called silent film; although the relevant scholarship concentrates on facts gleaned from a small number of extant manuscript or printed musical sources and a large number of journalistic accounts, it includes vigorous speculation on the music’s relationship to the narrative content of the on-screen imagery.

But it seems that relatively little formal thought has been given to the various ways in which music served film between the introduction of pre-recorded sound ca. 1927 and the establishment of the so-called classical-style Hollywood film ca. 1933. To be sure, plenty of work has been done on this transitional period of film history, but most of it concerns technology, distribution, and reception.³⁶ Music-related writing on the function of music in the pre-classical sound film is noticeably absent from the literature as a whole; with that in mind, the pertinent chapters in this book are quite large relative to the small amount of chronology they cover, and it is hoped that they will provide readers with not just helpful information but also a bit of theory.

There is neither a theoretical nor an informational lack regarding the role of music in the classical-style narrative film that blossomed between the mid 1930s and the decade following World War II. Authors have not stinted on telling the life stories of Hollywood composers active during this fertile period. Just as important, serious effort has been spent in explaining the various ways in which music serviced—and still services—films of this sort, that is, films in which the ultimate goal of the storytelling is to eliminate all traces of ambiguity. A neat account of the musical conventions of the classical-style film was offered by Gorbman in her Unheard Melodies and then embellished in book-length studies by Kathryn Kalinak, Caryl Flinn, and Royal S. Brown. But the codification began long before the classical-style film was even identified as such,³⁷ and it was the prime concern of writers who seriously addressed film music in the 1940s and ’50s. These accounts are enlightening for anyone who seeks to understand how film music “works.” But the archly unambiguous classical-style film, which is their focus, is of course not the only type of film that today’s audience encounters.

For more than a half-century the filmic style that eschews narrative ambiguity has coexisted with styles in which ambiguity is in one way or another embraced, and certainly inversion of the classical-style’s musical conventions is one way in which deliberate ambiguity has been achieved. Whereas music in the classical-style film typically holds to certain norms of sonority, since the 1950s numerous film scores have performed classical-style narrative functions not with orchestral/symphonic music but with music written idiomatically for such unconventional media as solo piano, electronic instruments, and jazz bands. Influenced by the French “New Wave” and the Italian “neo-realist” movement, many films from the second half of the twentieth century feature only what film theorists like to call “diegetic” music and which persons in the film industry have long termed “source” music—that is, music whose source is somehow contai...