WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF FILM MUSIC? (In the Entertainment industry.)

Movie Music / Photo Credit: Pyragraph

WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF FILM MUSIC? (In the Entertainment industry.)         

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What is the history of film music?

According to Kurt London, film music "began not as a result of any artistic urge, but from a dire need of something which would drown the noise made by the projector. For in those times there was as yet no sound-absorbent walls between the projection machine and the auditorium. This painful noise disturbed visual enjoyment to no small extent. Instinctively cinema proprietors had recourse to music, and it was the right way, using an agreeable sound to neutralize one less agreeable."

   

History

Before the 1930s

Before the invention of the "talking picture," all movies were completely silent. The infusion of music into the film venue is speculated to have happened for many reasons. Music was already a commonplace element in the theatres and it was brought over to films not only because of tradition, but to add a depth to the two-dimensional image that appeared upon the screen. An added benefit was that it covered up the cacophony of noise that spewed from the projector.

The majority of silent films were accompanied by anything from full orchestras to organists and pianists. Books of music were published to provide the accompanists with ideas for scene music, categorized by mood, event, or element. Many of the films came with a "suggestion list" of what music to play in which scene.

It was Birth of a Nation that was the first to have a score compiled specifically for it.

The 1930s

With the advent of the talking pictures, music once again established itself as a vital element in the film industry. At first, sound films followed the precedent set by their ancestors, using compiled "western music" (Classical music, usually from the 19th century.) This practice soon gave way, however, to the creating of original scores. Max Steiner wrote the first completely original score for King Kong in 1933.

Though at first, music was used primarily as simple reinforcement, towards the latter half of the decade, the composers began to experiment and to develop their own style of unobtrusively supporting the film’s plot and characters.

The 1940s

In the 1940s, composers refined their expertise even more. One of the most important and influential composers was Bernard Herrmann, who broke many barriers and traditions to create music that greatly enhanced the films for which he wrote.

The 1950s

Up until the 1950s, film music had been entirely symphonic. In the 1950s, however, Jazz opened the industry up to a vast and new world of possibilities. Although it had been used for musicals and animated films, it had never been used in mainstream genre films of the 1930s and 1940s. The use of Jazz not only "contemporized" the sounds and theme of movies, but fewer musicians were needed, thus making orchestration less expensive.

The 1960s

The use of jazz and other experiments continued on into the 1960s. It was in this decade that acceptance of new music led to the scoring of INSERT TITLE HERE, the first movie to use a rock soundtrack.

The 1970s

The 1970s passed with very little new innovation. The decade was spent perfecting things learned in the previous decade. People such as John Williams created scores using these techniques that are highly memorable, even today.

The 1980s and the 1990s

The first widespread use of synthesized sounds in films occurred in the 1980s and film scoring once again underwent a major revolution. For the first time, it became theoretically possible to score an entire film with only one performer – using the synthesizer to produce the sounds of many instrumentalists. This advent (echoed in the general music world) caused popular songs (specifically contemporary rock music) to become the basis for entire scores.

Today, with the daily development of new technology and the general knowledge gained from a century of experiences, film composers have the ability to create the perfect score – accenting the movie’s plot and characters in such a way that it enhances the film and turns it into an experience.

Before the age of recorded sound in motion pictures, efforts were taken to provide suitable music for films, usually through the services of an in-house pianist or organist, and, in some cases, entire orchestras, typically given cue sheets as a guide. A pianist was present to perform at the Lumiere brothers' first film screening in 1895. In 1914, The Oz Film Manufacturing Company sent full-length scores by Louis F. Gottschalk for their films. Other examples of this include Victor Herbert's score in 1915 to The Fall of a Nation (a sequel to The Birth of a Nation) and Camille Saint-Saëns' music for The Assassination of the Duke of Guise in 1908. It was preceded by Nathaniel D. Mann's score for The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays by four months, but that was a mixture of interrelated stage and film performance in the tradition of old magic lantern shows. Most accompaniments at this time, these examples notwithstanding, comprised pieces by famous composers, also including studies. These were often used to form catalogues of photoplay music, which had different subsections broken down by 'mood' and genre: dark, sad, suspense, action, chase, etc.

German cinema, which was highly influential in the era of silent movies, provided some original scores such as Fritz Lang's movies Die Nibelungen (1924) and Metropolis (1927) which were accompanied by original full scale orchestral and leitmotific scores written by Gottfried Huppertz, who also wrote piano-versions of his music, for playing in smaller cinemas.[citation needed] Friedrich W. Murnau's movies Nosferatu (1922 - music by Hans Erdmann) and Faust – Eine deutsche Volkssage (1926 – music by Werner Richard Heymann) also had original scores written for them. Other films like Murnau's Der letzte Mann contained a mixing of original compositions (in this case by Giuseppe Becce) and library music / folk tunes, which were artistically included into the score by the composer.

In France before the advent of talkies, Erik Satie composed what many consider the first "frame by frame" synchronous film score for director René Clair's avant-garde short Entr'acte (1924). Anticipating "spotting" techniques and the inconsistencies of projection speeds in screenings of silent films, Satie took precise timings for each sequence and created a flexible, aleatoric score of brief, evocative motifs which could be repeated and varied in tempo as required. American composers Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland cited Satie's music for Entr'acte as a major influence on their own forays into film scoring.

When sound came to movies, director Fritz Lang barely used music in his movies anymore. Apart from Peter Lorre whistling a short piece from Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt, Lang's movie M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder was lacking musical accompaniment completely and Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse only included one original piece written for the movie by Hans Erdmann played at the very beginning and end of the movie. One of the rare occasions on which music occurs in the movie is a song one of the characters sings, that Lang uses to put emphasis on the man's insanity, similar to the use of the whistling in M.

A landmark event in music synchronization with the action in film was achieved in the score composed by Max Steiner for David O. Selznick's 1933 King Kong. A fine example of this is when the aborigine chief slowly approaches the unwanted visitors to Skull Island who are filming the natives' sacred rites. As he strides closer and closer, each footfall is reinforced by a background chord.

Though "the scoring of narrative features during the 1940s lagged decades behind technical innovations in the field of concert music," the 1950s saw the rise of the modernist film score. Director Elia Kazan was open to the idea of jazz influences and dissonant scoring and worked with Alex North, whose score for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) combined dissonance with elements of blues and jazz. Kazan also approached Leonard Bernstein to score On the Waterfront (1954) and the result was reminiscent of earlier works by Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky with its "jazz-based harmonies and exciting additive rhythms." A year later, Leonard Rosenman, inspired by Arnold Schoenberg, experimented with atonality in his scores for East of Eden (1955) and Rebel without a Cause (1955). In his ten-year collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock, Bernard Herrmann experimented with ideas in Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960). The use of non-diegetic jazz was another modernist innovation, such as jazz star Duke Ellington's score for Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959).

Sources, References & Credits: Google, Wikipedia, Wikihow, WikiBooks, Pinterest, IMDB, Linked In, Indie Wire, Film Making Stuff, Hiive, Film Daily, New York Film Academy, The Balance, Careers Hub, The Numbers, Film Maker, TV Guide Magazine, Blurb, Media Match, Quora, Creative Skill Set, Chron, Investopedia, Variety, No Film School, WGA, BBC, Daily Variety, The Film Agency, Best Sample Resume, How Stuff Works, Career Trend, Producer's Code of Credits, Truity, Production Hub, Producers Guild of America, Film Connection, Variety, Wolf Crow, Get In Media, Production Beast, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros, UCAS, Frankenbite, Realty 101, Careers Hub, Screen Play Scripts, Script Doctor, Any Possibility, Music Bed, Robin Hoffmann, Helena Keane, Twyman-Whitney,

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Movie Music / Photo Credit: Pyragraph