A Short History of Film Music

From silent-film accompaniment to trailer music, how music learned to tell a story.

Related

ModernContemporaryIncidental MusicTheremin

The question

The image gives time and place; music gives meaning. Whether a look between two people means reconciliation or rupture is often decided by a melody that says nothing.

Historical arc

When films were shown in 1895, a pianist or a phonograph played alongside. In 1908 Saint-Saëns wrote an original score for The Assassination of the Duke of Guise, among the earliest film music credited to a known composer. In the 1910s cinemas relied on cue sheets and improvising pianists; sound arrived in 1927 and music was recorded onto film. Hollywood set up studio music departments in the 1930s, Steiner scored King Kong, and Korngold brought late Romantic orchestral writing into the studio. Jazz and electronics entered after the war, Star Wars put the symphony back at the centre in 1977, synthesizers spread in the 1980s, and the Zimmer-style sound and trailer music took shape in the 1990s.

The turning point

Music shifted from accompaniment to narrator. Wagnerian leitmotif labelled characters, sync points locked notes to action, and in the trailer era music became a recognisable trademark.

What to listen for

Hear Danse macabre, the idiom Saint-Saëns brought to the silent screen. Then Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kijé suite, film music remade for the concert hall. The Ride of the Walküre becomes helicopter sound in a film, and the opening of Zarathustra needs only a few notes to start a story.

Related

The line crosses Modern and Contemporary; see Incidental Music and Theremin.

Sources

• Mervyn Cooke, A History of Film Music (Cambridge University Press) — chronology checked, not quoted
• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry "Film music" — outline checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.