Though the first cinema films had no sound track, the early picture
palaces were not silent. To blot out noise from the projector and the
audience and also to create atmosphere, a piano, organ or band,
sometimes with many instrumentalists, nearly always provided music. The
music was often extemporized or adapted from a stock repertory, but was
sometimes composed specially for the film. Increasingly ingenious
attempts to replace live players by mechanically reproduced sound led in
1928 to the first talkies. Their sound track carried not only speech
but also the film’s musical backing, though the orchestration had at
first to make allowances for distortions inherent in early sound
systems. By the mid-1980s, film music was developing as an essential
part of cinematic art, not just in musicals and other films that more or
less naturally called for music but also in productions of every sort
from light comedy by way of the Westerns to heavy drama.
The vogue grew also for giving a film a ‘theme tune’, either a song or
an instrumental motif that was given great prominence. In 1931–2 an
Oscar was awarded for Best Sound Recording, but in 1934 there were
Oscars for Best Song and Best Score. In Britain, Arthur Bliss composed
the score for Korda’s film of H.G.Wells’ Things to Come; his example was
followed by William Walton (The First of the Few, 1942, and Henry V,
1944). Ealing Studio’s Ernest Irving regularly commissioned leading
British composers, such as Vaughan Williams (Scott of the Antarctic,
1948). Malcolm Arnold, with eighty film scores to his name, won an Oscar
for his music for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). Particularly
when not foregrounded but used rather to help create mood, film music
offers the composer opportunities for experiment both in musical forms
and orchestral coloration. Like nineteenth-century composers who
quarried orchestral works out of their incidental music for the theatre
(for example, Georges Bizet’s Arlésienne suite (1872)), the earlier
writers of film music often made concert arrangements of their scores.
Today, CD versions of scores for successful films, such as John Horner’s
music for Titanic, sell well. The use of music in radio and television
parallels developments of film music, though generally (despite
exceptions like Benjamin Britten’s score for a BBC adaptation of T.H.
White’s The Sword in the Stone in 1939), on a more modest level.
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