Post on 28-Mar-2015
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
Music and film
• December 28, 1895
• Lumière brothers
• piano accompaniment
• Reason: to cover up the sound of a noisy projector
• to alleviate uncomfortable darkness• 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.’”
• Motion Picture Moods
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.