Music E-portfoilo

A History of film scoring

Nick Hurzeler

 

                One of the most popular forms of music, but probably one of the least recognized, would be film scoring.  The music in a movie can completely change the movie it can make a good movie bad and a bad movie great.  Some of the most recognized tracks of music are from film, like the star wars them songs Indian Jones, Lord of the rings, mission impossible, and Star Trek just to name a few.

            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. In those times there were 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.”

            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 brother’s first film screening in 1895.

The history of scoring films actually starts before sound was ever introduced into the film business.  Many movie theaters had pianos there and people to play them as the movie was played and thus, even during the silent era of the film industry music was still having an impact on the films.

The film industry and the music in it would be revolutionized with the idea of putting sound into films.  The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades would pass before sound motion pictures were made commercially practical.  The first film that would would have sound was the Jazz singer, released in October 1927, as it title suggest it was also the first film to have music sung by the charters in it, but it did not have what has become more popular today as theme music or background music.

The invention of the sound movie caused many actors to lose their jobs because of the sound of their voice it also led to the down fall of some directors as well it also led to the rise of the musical film they were the first wave of films to have singing and music incorporated into the film. 

The first film to have orchestrated music in the background was city lights a romantic comedy witch is believed to have one of the most moving endings in all of film history, made possible by much of the music, many movies when sound started coming about in films incorporated it into music and not the voices as done in city lights.

The music thought out these times were often used to form catalogues of photoplay music, which had different subsections broken down by mood or genre: dark, sad, suspense, action, chase, and so on.

When sound came to movies, others like disregarded using music completely director Fritz Lang barely used music in his movies anymore. One of the rare occasions on which music occurs in his movies is a song one of the characters sings, that Lang uses to put emphasis on the man’s insanity.

The scoring of narrative features during the 1940 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 combined dissonance with elements of blues and jazz. Kazan also approached Leonard Bernstein to score On the Waterfront.  A year later, Leonard Rosenman, inspired by Arnold Schoenberg, experimented with atonality in his scores for East of Eden and Rebel without a Cause. In his ten-year collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock, Bernard Herrmann experimented with ideas in Vertigo and Psycho, which probably has a very famous score in the shower scene. The use of n jazz was another modernist innovation, such as jazz star Duke Ellington’s score for Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder.

The 60s saw an even greater use of music in films with the advancement in the film industry James Bond was one of these film and now has a very well know theme, one of the most well known in all of cinemas history.  James bond was very influential in the film business as well as in the scoring of films.

The 70s saw a complete renovation of film scoring some of the films that made history like Star Wars with its unforgettable soundtrack that has become part of pop culture today.  Some the Star Trek films also came out here as well with some very wonderful pieces that are a part of the film history.  During this time some films began to incorporate more and more rock, disco and so forth and started to stray a little away from the orchestrated pieces, while it still held a very strong hold on the film the popular music of the day seamed to make it more and more into the films of the day.

As the film industry stated to evolve even more popular music became central to much of the film industry one of the most popular movies from the 80s top gun demonstrates this with its use of danger zone, and that song has come to define that movie. Another great example of this was in the rocky films much of the film scores for the whole series was done by the popular band survivor.  The film industry is still impacted by popular bands today and in many films meant to target the rising generation they will use bands that they are failure with our songs that are popular so that more people will go see them. ET was also a very influential movie that used more orchestrated film scores but being made in the earlier part of the 80s is not to surprising.

The 90s saw actually a slightly more move back toward the orchestrated scores with films like Jurassic park, schindler’s list , and Braveheart.  It still kept much of popular music as well in other movies during this time such as seen in forest Gump and titanic.

Today film scoring has seemed to lean back toward orchestrated music in its film scores, but popular music is used still to this day in movies used to target the younger generation. Films that have tried to do this are Transformers, clash of the Titans and many others.  But the most influential film score during the 21^st century so far would be The Lord of the Rings with amazingly orchestrated pieces of music.

Thought out film history many have helped compose the music for many of the films that we hold dear to our hearts I do not have time to go through them all but we will look at some of the most prominent and influential composers of film.

John Williams an American composer. In a career spanning over six decades, he has composed some of the most recognizable film scores in the history of motion pictures, including the Star Wars saga, Jaws, Superman, the Indiana Jones films, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Home Alone and its sequel, Hook, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, War Horse, and the first three Harry Potter films. He composed the music for all but of Spielberg’s major feature films. John Williams has won five Academy Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards. He has also been nominated for 22 Golden Globes, winning four, and 59 Grammys, winning 20. With 47 Oscar nominations, Williams currently holds the record for the most Oscar nominations for a living person, and is the second most nominated person in the history of the Academy Awards behind only Walt Disney’s 59. Forty-two of Williams’ Oscar nominations are for Best Original Score and five are for Best Original Song. He won four Oscars for Best Original Score and one for Best Adapted Score.

Jerrald King “Jerry” Goldsmith was an American composer and conductor most known for his work in film and television scoring. He composed scores for such noteworthy films as The Sand Pebbles, Planet of the Apes, Patton, Chinatown, The Omen, Gremlins, Hoosiers, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Rudy, Air Force One, L.A. Confidential, Mulan, The Mummy, three Rambo films, and five Star Trek films. He was nominated for six Grammy Awards, nine Golden Globes, four BAFTAs, and seventeen Academy Awards. In 1977 he was awarded an Oscar for The Omen. Jerry Goldsmith has often been considered one of the most innovative and influential composers in the history of film music.

Howard Shore is a Canadian composer, notable for his film scores. He has composed the scores for over 80 films, most notably the scores for The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, for which he won three Academy Awards. In 2003 he composed the score for the final film in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. The film was the most successful film in the trilogy and the most successful of the year. Shore won his second Oscar for Best Original Score, as well as a third for Best Original Song for “Into the West”, which he shared with Fran Walsh and Annie Lennox. The film was nominated for, and won a total of eleven Academy Awards, a record for the number of Oscars won by a single film, and a record that only two other films Titanic and Ben-Hur have matched.

Bernard Herrmann was an American composer was an Academy Award-winner, Herrmann is particularly known for his collaborations with director Alfred Hitchcock, most famously Psycho, North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo. He also composed notable scores for many other movies, including Citizen Kane, , Cape Fear, and Taxi Driver. He worked extensively in radio drama, composed the scores for several fantasy films by Ray Harryhausen, and many TV programs including most notably Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone and Have Gun–Will Travel. Herrmann is still a prominent figure in the world of film music today, despite his death over 35 years ago. As such, his career has been studied extensively by biographers and documentarians. His string-only score for Psycho, for example, set the standard when it became a new way to write music for thrillers.

The music in movies goes largely unnoticed by most, but has a great impact on how we perceive the movie.  I have come to love film scores and really most the time I hear a song I think more often than not what part of a movie would this go in were would it fit best and as the music plays the scene seams to just evolve out of my mind.  Film scores have had a drastic impact on our lives and continue to do so.

Sorces

http://www.bernardherrmann.org/

Howard Shore Biography

Clemmensen, Christian. Jerry Goldsmith

John Williams: the Art of the Score

Cooke, Mervyn  A History Of Film Music