British Film Music

Musical Traditions in British Cinema, 1930s–1950s

Paul Mazey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030335496
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030335502
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

 

© The Author(s) 2020

P. MazeyBritish Film MusicPalgrave Studies in Audio-Visual Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33550-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Paul Mazey¹

(1)

Department of Film and Television, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

Paul Mazey

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The music heard in many British films has an intriguing quality, a sound that colours the music, and in its turn the films themselves, with a particularly national hue. This quality causes the music to register as a marker of Britishness as strongly as more obvious indicators such as British accents and British settings. The central concern of this book is to explore the nature of this quality and to understand how it creates this effect. The answer, I will argue, lies in the connections between British film music of this era and historical traditions of music in Britain. While all film music exploits existing musical forms, British film music is notable for the extent to which it embraces styles of music that are culturally significant in the history of British music. This book traces the ways that British film music draws upon the heritage of British music, and reveals how British film culture mines a rich and emotionally resonant seam of connotations evoked by the musical styles it adopts. By investigating the intricate intersections between the film industry and the musical establishment, it proposes that the evolution of British film music can be best understood when considered in relation to the traditions and history of musical activity in Britain.

This work explores film music in British cinema from the 1930s to the 1950s, a period that represents something of a golden age for British film music, and for British film itself. Not only did film music practices develop and become established in the British industry during this era, but it was also the time when cinema played its most central role in the cultural life of the nation as the foremost medium of mass entertainment. In these decades, cinema was more popular and more attended than at any time before or since. This era witnessed the impact of the Second World War, when films provided first information and propaganda in support of the war effort and later entertainment and escapism from its privations. The postwar years saw cinema attendances climb to their highest ever levels, and also a peak in the popularity of British films with British audiences. This changed during the 1950s, when the spread of television began to usurp cinema’s position as the primary entertainment medium. With older audiences increasingly dwindling, film production declined and the industry sought to entice younger viewers. The resulting shift in the cinema-going demographic brought an equivalent alteration in the types of films being produced, and a notable rise in social realism and horror. This in turn saw a change in the nature of film music with a movement away from the traditional orchestral sound and towards a more contemporary idiom of modernism, jazz and popular music. The film industry sought to offer what television could not, and while traditional scoring continued in the epics that promised colour and big-screen spectacle, it developed in alternative directions in the genres aimed at the adolescent and young adult audiences.

The more modern scores of the following decades strike a contrast with those of the era that preceded them. These had been characterised by the diversity of music the films contained, and by the range of composers involved, including the eminent concert composers of the time. The concert composers brought to their scores their own musical voices and with them the sound of contemporary British art music. In addition, they brought to the film world a connection with the musical establishment, and a link to the Victorian campaign to raise the quality and appreciation of British music, a campaign that initiated a revival of creative activity that has been dubbed the English Musical Renaissance. The aim of the architects of the English Musical Renaissance was to establish a school of composition in order to foster a national style of music and to raise the standard of music and musical appreciation. The first step was accomplished with the opening of the Royal College of Music in May 1883, which, together with the existing Royal Academy of Music, was a place where the next generation of composers and musicians could not only learn their craft, but also take up the challenge of developing an accessible musical language that would draw its inspiration from the heritage of British music.

The direct involvement of concert composers illustrates the diversity of the film music soundscape in Britain and demonstrates the flexibility of the process wherein the British industry evolves its own aesthetic practices in the arena of film music. At a time when Hollywood films had captured international cinema markets, and America protected its own domestic market, the British industry resisted the Hollywood template in respect of film music. This represents an achievement of some significance, and demonstrates a clear artistic vision on the part of the filmmakers responsible. The film music practices that developed within the British industry impart a feel to British films that subtly differentiates them from the Hollywood films that dominated British screens during this period. K. J. Donnelly notes that ‘in terms of overall sound and function’, British film music ‘often appeared superficially similar to that in Hollywood films’ (2007, 8). All national film industries use music to create similar effects. Music may be employed, for example, to aid a film’s continuity; to create atmosphere and set the scene; to intensify emotion and dramatise subjectivity; to animate and enliven onscreen action; to unify the film and to guide audience response. However, the music itself can vary widely in both its style and how it is used within a film. These variations highlight different practices and conventions in national industries, and the filmmakers’ choices reveal cultural concerns that allow us to read the music as an element which inflects a film with a national character. The disparities between British and Hollywood film music make theories pertaining to Hollywood methods inappropriate to the British industry, other than to confirm different approaches and to make a case for research into the way music is produced within specific national film industries.¹

The first book-length study into the production and use of music in the British industry, John Huntley’s 1947 British Film Music, appeared at a historical high point for British cinema and reflects both the level of confidence and the scale of ambition for film music that existed at the time. This is illustrated by Music Director Muir Mathieson’s belief that, while Hollywood may have been technically ‘more advanced, or at least infinitely “slicker”’, the ‘average score written here has more intrinsic musical value’ (1944, 9). With his classical musical education, Mathieson strove to raise the standard of film music within the British industry, notably by pioneering the practice of commissioning concert composers to score British films. The European composers who established the Hollywood score looked to the late-Romantic idiom of an earlier period rather than to the modernism of much contemporary Continental art music. In Britain, the composers associated with the English Musical Renaissance had similarly drawn upon earlier periods of British music in seeking an accessible musical language and consequently their music was appropriate for the popular medium of cinema. Sixty years after Huntley’s contemporary assessment, Donnelly (2007, 14) notes that British film music is to some extent differentiated from its Hollywood equivalent by the ‘considerable influence’ it received ‘from the languages of concert music’. It is upon this foundation that this work builds and expands through a wider exploration of these influences and the ways they enrich the soundscape of British cinema. The involvement of concert composers in the British industry gave rise to a level of tension between the different musical worlds and their working methods and this tension sparked debates over the place of music in the British film. The debates centred on two related issues. First, whether music that retains too great a degree of autonomy may, by serving its own musical ends, undermine the film it accompanies and, second, whether the music should be judged separately from the film.

On the first point, the debate over whether it may be harmful for film music to pursue its own musical logic stems from the concern that in so doing, it may draw attention to itself to the detriment of the film. While dismissing the idea that music should be ‘criticised on the ground that it is “too good”’, the English composer Gerald Cockshott concedes that it ‘may be unsuitable because it is too developed’ (1946, 2, emphasis in original). The conflict between the worlds of film and music arises partly as a consequence of the power of music in film, and its status as an area not completely within the control of the director. Cockshott reports an unnamed director who finds ‘composers as a class difficult to deal with’, being ‘chiefly anxious that their music will stand out from the film so that other producers will notice it and it may be issued separately, on gramophone records’ (1946, 8, emphasis in original). A similar complaint is made by producer John Croydon, who accepts the desirability of commissioning eminent composers but criticises those who ‘write their music with one eye on concert hall receipts’ and in consequence ‘the unity of the film suffers’ (quoted in Huntley 1947, 161).

On the second point, whether the music should be judged separately from the film, commentators tend to agree that, as the music is written to be heard in the film, it is not possible for it be assessed outside of that context (Huntley 1947, 21; William Alwyn in Manvell and Huntley 1975, 222). Arthur Bliss takes the opposing view that the music should be judged ‘solely as music’ (Huntley 1947, 160). In 1942, William Walton expressed the opinion that film music ‘should never be heard without the film’ (Hayes 2002, 140), although he was to alter this view, a shift perhaps not unconnected to the commercial benefits of recordings and concert suites. In 1960 he writes to his publisher that he had ‘either forgotten or not realised that they were such money-makers after the initial payment’ (Hayes 2002, 316). It is also true that as Walton gained in experience, his film music increased in confidence and autonomy and therefore it became more suitable to be adapted for the concert hall.

The Hungarian-born composer Miklόs Rόzsa began scoring films in the British industry prior to his successful career in Hollywood, and his case highlights differences in film music practices that were already apparent in the mid-1930s. Rόzsa, a trenchant commentator, notes that he accepted his first commissions for scores

without any idea of how to set about it … I managed to find one or two books on film music and film-making in a bookshop on the Charing Cross Road, one by Kurt London and another translated from the Russian (1982, 66)

The young composer turned for guidance to the earliest published volumes on film scoring, Kurt London’s Film Music (1936) and Music for the Films by Leonid Sabaneev (1935). Both books adopt an instructional tone, and both are critical of practices that were to become established elements of classical Hollywood music: the scoring of dialogue and the close synchronisation of music and onscreen action (1935, 20, 49; 1936, 125). The range of choices in the use of music, the differences in style and aesthetic approaches between national cinemas were thus apparent to the earliest commentators. Even in the relatively early developmen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Aesthetic Conventions: Distinctiveness and Diversity
• 3. Pastoral Music: Representations of Landscape
• 4. Folk Song: National and Regional Music
• 5. Choral Music: Christian and Pantheistic Mysticism
• 6. The March: Military and Ceremonial Music
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter