A Brief History of Film Scoring

Music has been a critical part of the moviegoing experience since the very beginning. In 1895, two brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, held one of the first ever public film screenings in Paris. They showed 10 short films, each about 50 seconds long, and showing scenes from daily life. The films themselves had no sound, so they hired a pianist to play along. This and other early moviemaking experiments kicked off the era of the silent film. Motion pictures with no recorded sound themselves, but frequently accompanied by live music or sound effects. Presenters of silent films used music for a variety of reasons. Initially, many motion pictures were just novelties of fairgrounds, and music could help catch people's attention and convince them to check it out. At other times, it was probably used to cover up the loud clattering of the projector or the sounds of the audience. Over time, filmmakers realized that music had the power to immerse audiences more easily in the action on the screen. The music for early silent films took a wide variety of forms. Often it was just the single pianist or organist improvising or picking out popular tunes of the day, a practice carried over from vaudeville or lantern shows. The famous filmmaker Georges Méliès actually played piano himself for the premiere of his classic Le Voyage dans la Lune. Bigger venues like the Mark Strand Theatre in New York City might feature an orchestra. Some venues even had mechanical instruments similar to a player piano playing tunes or sound effects off a piano roll. But there was a problem. As the popularity of motion pictures quickly started to explode, the quality was highly variable. Between 1905 and 1910 some 10,000 storefront theaters opened across the US. The famous Nickelodeons, so called because they cost just a nickel to attend. Each venue had their own approach to the music. In France, mediocre pianists were so common they even had a specific name for it, Tapeur. As films started to reach millions of people around the world, producers and theater owners needed some way to bring order to the chaos. One of the ways they did this is through the use of compiled scores, often called photo play music, starting around 1910. Basically, theater owners and their performers would draw on a variety of pre-written short pieces, often well-known themes, that were categorized by moods, emotions, or dramatic scenarios to accompany films. You might have a romantic theme for a love scene, a sinister theme for a villain, and so on. In many cases, directors would send theater owners cue sheets that would suggest specific themes, tempos, and lengths for specific scenes to help them select a piece from their existing library. Publishers published massive anthologies of photo play music that theaters could draw on for the themes they needed. You're probably already familiar with a lot of these themes, even if you don't know it. A big diminished seventh chord for a villain, for example, or a doleful violin for unrequited love. These themes feel quite melodramatic and even cartoonish today, but they did help communicate the narrative in the absence of words. The first all-original score for a film was actually written by famed French composer Camille Saint-Saëns in 1908 for the film L'Assassinat du Duc de Guise. Well ahead of its time, it wasn't until at least a decade later that the practice of commissioning original scores caught on. In 1915, many technical leaps in the history of film and scoring made their way into a single seminal and highly problematic film called Birth of a Nation. It sucks to have to talk about this movie because it's so appallingly racist. The film glorifies the Ku Klux Klan and has been cited by historians as an inspiration in the rejuvenation of the Klan in the American South. But it's also responsible for a myriad of firsts in the history of filmmaking, such as close-ups, flashbacks, color tinting, the sheer scale of the production, and a massive three-hour orchestral score. The score was composed by Joseph Carl Braille and included some original parts intermixed with compilations of well-known classical pieces like Wagner's Rite of the Valkyries and new arrangements of melodies from the American folk tradition like If you're getting the sense the music of the silent film era was a hodgepodge of different approaches, you're getting the idea. That said, it was probably a pretty good time to be a musician, especially a pianist. Future jazz greats Fats Waller and Count Basie both got their starts playing along to films, as did the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. But change was on the horizon. In 1926, the full-length film Don Juan premiered in New York City with a pre-recorded score and sound effects that were synchronized to the film. It used Vitaphone technology, a new system in which a phonograph turntable was mechanically linked to a film's projector so the two lined up perfectly together. A New York Times article of the time noted with delight, This living sound invention without a musician being present stirred a distinguished audience to unusual enthusiasm. This wasn't the very first synchronized score, but it may have been the first time people started to see the commercial potential of it, which spelled the beginning of the end for silent films. The next year, in 1927, the Jazz Singer came out and included synchronized music, singing, and dialogue by the main character, played by an It's worth noting that his performance relied on the troubling use of blackface, a practice that was all too common at the time. Ultimately, the combo of synchronized sound and dialogue was a hit and ushered in what we call the age of the talkies. In other ways, The Jazz Singer was still very similar to silent films. The score was basically a compilation of popular tunes of the day. There were only two minutes of dialogue in the whole film, but it was the start of a massive shift, a shift that almost overnight put a lot of musicians out of work and also created new opportunities for how music could be used to support the drama, even if it would take a few years for its full potential to be realized. In 1933, the film King Kong was released with an entirely original score composed by Max Steiner, a man who's often called the father of film music. Steiner and others like him helped usher in what's called the golden age of film scoring, which featured big orchestral palettes steeped in the tradition of romantic composers from the 19th century like Bogner, Verdi, and Strauss. This was also the era when Hollywood took its place as the center of the film world. Five major studios dominated every aspect of the industry from production to exhibition, churning out films at a rapid clip. Steiner's score for featured so many of what would become hallmarks of the time. He created specific leitmotifs or recurring musical phrases associated with characters, places, or ideas, including a dissonant chromatic one for Kong and a more romantic one for the film's heroine Anne. At the film's climax, the two motifs collide, becoming more stable sounding and helping the audience understand there's some tenderness between them in a way the camera can't. While it might seem over the top to some modern audiences, golden age film scoring music is so much fun. It's full of bombast and fanfare. It wears all the emotions right on its sleeve. Listen to the main title from Eric Wolfgang Korngold's score for the Oscar-winning Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938. Glaring brass, martial rhythms, clear melodic themes, and so much more. There's a lot to love. After World War II, the so-called golden age started to decline as TV started to eat into movie profits and antitrust action broke up the major studios. From the 1950s to the 1970s, film music entered a period of more liberal experimentation. Ennio Morricone, who scored the Spaghetti Westerns, Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, and so many others drew on a new range of influences, including jazz, rock, and modernist composers like Bartók, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. Another composer in this era was Alfred Hitchcock's frequent collaborator Bernard Herman. People like Bernard Herman realized that if everything's pre-recorded, why limit oneself to a traditional symphonic orchestra? Herman's interests lay in color, atmosphere, and emotion instead of leitmotif. Listen to Herman's unsettling score for Psycho. This score was recorded by a You can hear the rhythmic influence of Stravinsky in the quick, aggravated jolts and stabs. 1951's A Streetcar Named Desire was one of the first film scores to explicitly use jazz elements in its score. The composer Alex North used jazz to communicate sensuality and and to locate the action in New Orleans. Even when it started appearing in scores, jazz was often used initially to represent so-called loose morals or the seediness of urban life. It's a homegrown genre, but also one that originated with Black Americans who were still largely excluded from many aspects of mainstream American life. Jazz did appear in films before the 1950s, but usually within the action of the film, such as being performed inside a nightclub where a scene was taking place, often with white characters taking on the lead roles as jazz performers. In 1959, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn became the first Black American musicians to score a Hollywood feature film with Anatomy of a Murder. While this didn't exactly change Hollywood overnight, it did create space for more subtle uses of jazz and more opportunities for Black jazz composers in film, including Charles Mingus, Quincy Jones, and others to follow. Throughout the 50s and 60s, the rapid evolution of music technology would open doors for films to incorporate never-before-heard sounds. Perhaps unsurprisingly, sci-fi films led the way. In 1956, Forbidden Planet became the first all-electronic film score, composed by Louis and B.B. Barron. They used electronic circuits in an approach that was absolutely novel at the time, and provoking the ire of the Musicians' Union in the process, who were worried about the implications of electronic music for musicians. That recording was made by Krell Musicians a half a million years ago. The Musicians' Union forced MGM to title the Forbidden Planet score Electronic Tonalities instead of Music. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, they used that excuse to deny them membership in the Union in the 50s. The Union's primary concern was losing jobs for performers rather than for the medium itself. As a result, the Barron's never scored another film for Hollywood. I'll be back. The 60s and 70s also saw an increased salience of popular musical styles in film scores, including rock, folk, R&B, and funk. Pop songs had long been an important part of films, but in the 60s it reached a new peak, as studios wanted the profits hit songs could bring. Innovative composers like Henry Mancini figured out how to combine pop themes with more classical scoring techniques, as he did in 1961's Breakfast at Tiffany's. The song Moon River provided both a compelling background theme in the score, but also became a hit song in its lyrical version. 1967's The Graduate became one of the most successful films of the decade, with its soundtrack that included popular songs by Simon and Garfunkel alongside original score. There was also one new song written for the film, Mrs. Robinson. The songs exist in the background like a classical score, but help illuminate the inner dialogue of the main character. In 1971, the movie Shaft was a landmark, with a full funk score composed by Isaac Hayes. The score's album topped the Billboard charts. Shaft and other so-called blaxploitation films created space for more black American filmmakers and composers, and for a range of new styles of music and scores going forward. The 70s and 80s saw the rise of more synth-driven scores, such as Brad Fiedel's Terminator, Wendy Carlos' Tron, and Vangelis' Blade Runner. Giorgio Moroder's score for Midnight Express in 1978 was the first film with an entirely synthesized score to win the Oscar for Best Original Score. The way new technologies like synths allowed a small number of musicians to produce almost as much sound as an orchestra would have a massive impact on how film and TV scores are made. In 1973, John Carpenter produced the entire score for his film Dark Star on a synth by himself, something that would become much more common in the 21st century. That's not to say orchestral scores ever really went away. In 1977, John Williams' score for Star Wars revived the sound of golden age composers like Max Steiner. Replete with leitmotifs and bombast, it became one of the highest-selling non-pop albums of all time. Nowadays, the sheer diversity of musical tastes and the power of technology mean that film scores are as varied as you can imagine, and increasingly, musical influences may come from anywhere in the world. Hans Zimmer pops up all over the place with his thick wall of sound scores, often mixing full orchestras with synths or other production effects. A.R. Rahman's frenetically paced score to Slumdog Millionaire combines electronic beats with Indian instrumentation. 2010's The Social Network has a mostly electronic score full of dark, atmospheric tones, produced and performed entirely by Trent Reznor and his frequent collaborator Atticus Ross. Hildur Gudnoddottir's score for Joker combines melodic cello lines with frigid texture. Ludwig Göransson's score for Black Panther melds African rhythms and percussion with electronics and more traditional orchestral parts. And of course, there was also Kendrick Lamar's hit title song, All the Stars. Technologically, it's now possible for a single musician to score an entire film themselves without any collaborators, although that's still not common in Hollywood or for big budget films, at least not yet. But that reality has unlocked tons of new possibilities in terms of who can score a film and how that score is put together. It also means it's easier than ever for anyone to try their hand at the storied and extraordinary art of film scoring. If you enjoyed this video, we hope you'll check out our full course and subscribe on soundfly.com. We've got some amazing interviews and lessons from top professional scorers working in Hollywood or in independent projects today. A massive thanks to Mervyn Cook for his book, A History of Film Music, and many other great resources we've linked to below the video.