Introduction — Why Music?

Part A: Welcome To The Show!

This course is about music and movies and what happened when they put together.

Textbook is like Google Earth view. Listening to lectures is like Google street view.

And I’ll see you again in Part B.

Part B: Our First Scene

This is the music written specifically for the scene. The film has already been chopped and the composer was writing music while watching the film on fold. The composer has synchronized the music they have written to what goes on within the scene. Watch the scene with the sound off. Then listen to the music with the sound on. VIDEO EXAMPLE 1-Apollo 13.

🎥 Apollo 13 🎥

The first part of the scene shows the wife of one of the astronauts in a hotel room. She is nervous — her husband is going to the moon, and she is scared he may never come back. While she is in the shower, her wedding ring slides off her finger and disappears down the drain, a powerful visual metaphor for her fear of losing her husband. There is no music during the shower scene. Why not? First, it is a small, intimate moment — music would risk over-dramatizing it. Second, the silence leaves “space” for what follows: after this scene, music continues for several minutes straight through the launch sequence. Where music isn’t can be as important as where it is.

Notice that James Horner leaves the music out of the shower scene so that when it comes in for the next scene, it carries more impact. If music plays constantly, eventually you stop listening to it — the breaks make the entries land harder. But the music does not start abruptly at the scene change. A bass note fades in while we are still in the shower scene, and then a snare drum triggers the transition into the Ready Room. The music prepares your brain for the scene change — without it, the cut would feel more abrupt.

The instrumentation tells us a great deal. We hear a small section of brass instruments — trumpets, trombones, French horns. Brass instruments have a long historical association with the military, and for good reason: they are tough, they can take abuse, and they are loud enough to signal soldiers on a battlefield or wake them up in the morning with a bugle call. All of the Apollo astronauts were military (with the exception of one geologist), and connected to the idea of the military are ideas such as heroism and sacrifice. Underneath the brass, the bass is provided by a synthesizer — electronic instruments are often used to evoke a sense of technology or futurism. The style is that of a chorale — a Protestant hymn — carrying connotations of faith and sacrifice. The tempo is slow, restrained, controlled, and professional. Notice also the change in musical texture as the scene transitions from the interior to the exterior launch sequence.

Part C: The Four Functions

Take any visual image, put any piece of music on it, and something will happen. Imagine a slow panning shot across a valley — trees, a stream, and a small cabin with smoke coming from the chimney. Play Ennio Morricone’s gentle music from The Mission over it, and most Western viewers will think: “What a beautiful, peaceful place — I bet the heroes live there.” Now play the same shot with Hans Zimmer’s music from The Dark Knight — and it becomes immediately clear that whatever you do, you do not want to go anywhere near that cabin. The visual image is identical; what changed your entire perception was the music.

A brilliant real-world demonstration of this principle is Mrs. Doubtfire — compare the original trailer to this fake horror re-cut trailer. By recutting the scenes, adjusting the visual look, and completely changing the music and sound, someone on the internet has made a Robin Williams comedy appear to be a horror film. The effect will vary from viewer to viewer depending on background and experience, but when a director and composer sit down to decide what the music will do within a particular film, they want the audience to notice and feel specific things.

But why is music there in the first place? The kind of film we focus on in this course is narrative film — it tells a story in a coherent, consistent manner. Central to this is the suspension of disbelief, essentially a contract you enter into with the filmmakers when you sit down to watch their film: “I will accept what what you show me is real.” You are watching Harry Potter — you accept that magic is real. You are watching Star Wars — you accept that aliens and space travel are real. The one thing the filmmaker cannot do is draw attention to the fact that what you are watching is not real. This can happen in small ways that internet sleuths love to catalogue: a cup on one side of a table that suddenly jumps to the other side, a bloodstain that vanishes and reappears, a microphone dropping briefly into frame, the reflection of a camera crew in a window, or an airplane crossing the sky behind a scene set in ancient Greece. Filmmakers go to enormous lengths to avoid these things.

And yet, layered over this carefully constructed reality, we have music. We do not have background music in real life. How great would it be if we did? You walk into a room, see someone attractive, start to approach — and hear a soaring string melody. You have probably just met the person you are going to spend the rest of your life with. On the other hand, if you hear ominous low brass, you should probably not accept their dinner invitation. It would be wonderful, but we do not have music in real life. The characters in the film cannot hear the score, but we can. It is entirely artificial. So why does it not break the illusion? Because music does something so powerful for the viewing experience that audiences accept it without question — whatever music contributes is worth the risk of violating the suspension of disbelief. The question then becomes: what exactly does it do?

The Four Functions:

1. Music can create a more convincing atmosphere of time and place — conveying historical, cultural, or geographical settings, though always filtered through Western conventions.
2. Music can underline or create psychological refinements — revealing the unspoken thoughts of a character or the unseen implications of a situation.
3. Music can provide a sense of continuity in a film — the structure of music “smoothes over” the discontinuous, chaotic nature of film editing.
4. Music can provide the underpinning for the theatrical buildup of a scene and round it off with a sense of finality — in other words, music can affect the pacing of a scene.

To see these functions in action, consider two examples:

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), composed by John Williams, demonstrates Functions 1, 3, and 4. During a rapid change of location from Tibet to Egypt, the music is continuous throughout (F3). A change in the note choice signals the shift in location upon arrival in Egypt (F1). When the action transitions to quiet dialogue, the music brings the action sequence to a close (F4).

🎥 Raiders of the Lost Ark 🎥

Alien Resurrection (1997), composed by John Frizzell, demonstrates Functions 2 and 4. The music reinforces the change from slow-moving dialogue to chaotic action, then slows the pace leading to the scene’s conclusion (F4). It also “catches” Call’s reaction upon hearing Ripley’s name — foreshadowing the connection between them (F2).

🎥 Alien Resurrection 🎥

Evaluating a Score

How do we talk about what we hear in a film score? This lecture introduces the key vocabulary and concepts for analyzing film music.

Diegetic vs. Nondiegetic Music

Diegesis — the world of the narrative. All characters, events, and environments depicted, suggested, or described within the story.

Diegetic music is music whose source exists within the diegesis — it is heard both by the characters and the audience. Also known as “source music,” “direct music,” or “foreground music,” its functions include establishing time and place, creating a sense of realism and immediacy, and offering ironic comment.

Nondiegetic music, by contrast, is heard by the film audience only. It is typically referred to as the “score,” “underscore,” or “background music.” It is normally composed originally for the specific film, though it may also include preexisting music adapted for the purpose.

An important distinction: a score is music written specifically to accompany the film, usually composed after shooting is complete. A soundtrack, in popular usage, refers to a collection of preexisting songs assembled for a film.

A nondiegetic score may use preexisting music adapted for the film. A famous example is The Sting (1973), which uses the ragtime music of Scott Joplin, adapted by Marvin Hamlisch:

A score may also include preexisting music used without adaptation. Platoon (1986), composed by Georges Delerue, famously incorporates Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings (1938) — a piece also used in The Elephant Man (1980) and Sicko (2007):

When all the music in a film is preexisting and used without alteration, the result is called a compiled score. The most celebrated example is 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), compiled from the works of Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss, and others.

Style

When evaluating a score, the first question is one of style: what type of music has the composer chosen? What instruments are used? How do these choices relate to the film as a whole?

Restoration (1995), composed by James Newton Howard, is set in the mid-1600s. The score is part original and part adapted, based on the work of Henry Purcell, an important composer of the period, and makes use of period instruments including the harpsichord:

Local Hero (1983), composed by Mark Knopfler, follows an urban American in a small Scottish village. The score blends folk and popular styles, with emphasis on the guitar. Knopfler developed melodies that evoke Anglo-Celtic folk music:

The Godfather (1972), composed by Nino Rota, follows the life of an organized crime family. Much of the instrumentation and melody draws on the folk music of Sicily. The solo brass is not military or heroic — it sounds mournful, tragic, and alone.

Concept

The next question is one of concept: is the music used in a consistent manner throughout the film? What is accompanied, and what is left without accompaniment? What “motivates” the music — action, characters, events, objects, flashbacks?

Most film music falls somewhere between two conceptual extremes. Playing the drama means the music attempts to reinforce primarily the emotional elements within the narrative. Hitting the action means the music accents visual events — car chases, physical comedy, and so on. This is the common approach to cartoon scoring, often called “Mickey Mousing” — a term for the tight synchronization of musical gestures to on-screen physical movements.

Musical Characteristics

Melody or Theme

Melody is considered the most recognizable musical element for Western ears. Do characters, objects, or situations have a particular melody associated with them? The technique of assigning recurring melodies to characters or ideas traces back to the German opera composer Richard Wagner and his concept of the Leitmotiv — a short musical phrase associated with a person, place, or idea. Melodies can be taken through variations to convey changes in a character’s inner state — thoughts, feelings, transformations. A useful rule of thumb: if a melody is smooth and easy to hum, it is likely associated with something positive in the film world. If it is angular and difficult, it probably signals danger or something undesirable — though this rule is quite generalized.

Tempo or Pulse

Tempo refers to how fast the music unfolds — how quick is the beat? The speed of the music directly influences the perceived pace of the narrative, interacting with on-screen action, framing, editing, and sound design. Consider this example from The Return of the King (2003), composed by Howard Shore:

🎥 The Lord of the Rings — The Return of the King 🎥

Harmony

Harmony — the vertical dimension of music — is harder to describe without musical training, but the basic distinction is between consonance (orderly, pleasant, resolved) and dissonance (chaotic, tense, unresolved), broadly mapped onto the major and minor scales. What do these differences suggest about events in the diegesis? Compare three examples:

• Highly consonant: the Main Theme from The Cider House Rules (1999), composed by Rachel Portman
• A blend of consonance and dissonance: Yes from Meet Joe Black (1998), composed by Thomas Newman
• Highly dissonant: Bishop’s Countdown from Aliens (1986), composed by James Horner

Technical Details and the Silent Era

Basic Timetable

of Film Production

1. Preproduction: planning phase, preparation: script / financing / casting / costume and set design / location scouting
2. Production:
   • finalization of script and production design
   • principle photography (主体拍摄): filming the actors, shooting various scenes.
3. Postproduction:
   • assembling and editing the “takes”
   • completion and addition of visual and audio effects
   • composition and addition of music
   • normally, an original film score is one of the final elements to be created and added to the film.
   • historically, schedule for the composition and recording of a score: 5 to 8 weeks on average. Although often still the case, effects-driven films often have longer post-production periods.

Composer’s involvement varies based on working style and specifics of a given project.

Scripts: - can give composers a “head-start” - research for “ethnic” or “historical” influences. Example: Hans Zimmer; The Last Samuri (2003) - production of important source music is done at this point - in general, composing the score cannot be done on the basis of a script – why? - scripts can change significantly - only words, no clear timing or pace for the composer to work with.

Screenings: - several different opportunities to see the film - rushes: film shot that day - assembly cut: significantly longer than finished film - rough cut: closer to finished film, but still undergoing significant editing - fine or locked cut: most if not all editing completed. This is what the composer is really waiting for, because rough cut might not be accurate in time. Basic timings will not change. - most composers begin serious work at the fine cut phase - concern that repeated viewings will alter the composer’s reaction - timing of scenes

Spotting Session and Cue Sheets: director, composer, music editor/music supervisor sit together, watch the films, discuss the placement of music, style of music. Music editor takes careful notes, produces a “cue sheet”/“spotting notes”. Cue: piece of music in the film. For example, music for the fight scene is a cue. In the cue sheet, we have cue number. Final category, notes, description for what the music is for, where the music goes.

Pic from https://soundclass.weebly.com/6-spotting-for-sound-design.html

Temp Tracks:

• “temporary” music added to film while still in production or early editing.
• gives more “finished” feeling to work in progress.
• often taken from other film scores, or “classical” music.

Composers are deeply divided on their view of temp tracks

• offer insight into director’s thinking process.
• BUT can influence the composer’s initial response.
• director’s familiarity with temp track can be an obstacle.

Composing:

• 5 to 8 weeks until “delivery” of finished score
• short timeline due to fixed release date
• frequently exacerbated by production phase running overtime

Generally, composers don’t have time to write every note for every individual instruments. So they have orchestrators to help them – skilled in composition, music theory, and knowledge of the orchestra. Before going to the studio recording, we have synthesizer demonstrations. Send a paper with all different instruments written on one page to copyist, who produces final individual parts for musicians. Music librarians organize parts for recording sessions. Finally, we get conductors and studio musicians (good sight readers).

Examples: Thomas Newman – Wall-E. John Williams – The Phantom Menace

Western Classical Music History

Check music 254, music 255, music 256.

Baroque Period (1600-1750)

• Key Composers: Vivaldi, Handel, Bach.
• Development of “Common Practice” – major/minor system of music theory.
• Musical structures most important.
• Even tempos, consistent textures, terraced dynamics.
• Example: J.S. Bach, “Brandenburg Concerto No. 6” 3rd Movement (1721)

Classical Period (1730-1820)

• Key Composers: Mozart, Hayden, Beethoven.
• Greater focus on melody and emotion.
• Expanding variety of tempo, texture and dynamics.
• Example: W.A. Mozart, “Symphony No. 40” 1st Movement. (1788)

Romantic Period (1800-1910)

• Key Composers: Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Strauss.
• Expression of emotion was most important.
• Even greater range of tempo, texture and dynamics in service of emotion and narrative.
• Example: R. Wagner, “The Magic Fire Music” from Die Walkure (1870)

1870 is only 25 years away from the birth of motion pictures. Not surprisingly, all composers in film industry have grown up listening to people like Wagner. Indeed the birth of film music.

Melodramas. In modern usage, a melodrama is a dramatic work wherein the plot, which is typically sensational and designed to appeal strongly to the emotions, takes precedence over detailed characterization (from wiki). It has a lot of music, quite unlike plays. Like early version of accompaniment for narrative film.

The Silent Era

1895 - 1927

The Persistence of Vision. See the detailed treatment on wiki. We can see continuous images. One toy: The Zoopraxiscope (1879) – project several images to present the illusion of movement.

Thomas Edison:

• The Kinetoscope (1891) Peephole viewer with a continuous loop of film. No sound.
• The Kinetophone (1895) A kinetoscope with a phonograph installed in the box.
• Problem with synchronization: the current technology does not line up the sound and visual image. So recording would be appropriate.

First Projected Films: The Lumiere Brothers, Paris December 28^th, 1895. “The Arrival of a Train”

Reasons for musical accompaniment:

1. Pragmatic: mechanical noise / mechanical problems
2. Psychoanalytic: Audience disturbed by ghost like images
3. Continuity of Tradition: Long history of musical accompaniment for visual presentation.

During the Silent Era: Three general approaches to music: originally composed, adaptations of classical music, arrangements of popular songs.

Venues: Vaudeville Theatres. Live variety shows played in theatres. In the intermission, photoplays: short fragment in real life like one from the Lumiere Brothers. When the photoplays are on. Musical accompaniment provided by vaudeville orchestra: accompany for the show, and continue playing for the photoplays. Very quickly, photoplays became the most popular part.

1905 “Nickelodeons”, solely showed the movie. Music provided by piano, player piano, small ensemble or gramophone. Rarely the music has anything to do with the thing on screen. It’s very popular. 1907 – 3,000; 1910 – Over 10,000.

The Shift To Narrative

George Melies: early experimenter with camera effects, A Trip to the Moon (1902), Not the first narrative, but over ten minutes in length, multiple scenes, sets, costumes etc. early model for narrative film to come. This youtube link is colored, but colored movies didn’t exist yet. George Méliès has a team, primarily women, who hand-paint each frame.

1905-1910:

• Narrative films become most important element - films become longer - plots become more complex.
• Change in musical aesthetic from entertaining the audience to “playing the picture.” Music can support the drama and helping the audience to follow the plot. “Fitting” the picture or “Synchronizing”: align the music up.

1910 – 1920s: film industry matures. The rise of Hollywood. Films become longer, more sophisticated. First of the “Movie Palaces” built, 1912. Larger Orchestras (under the stage, orchestra pit like opera) and Theatre Organs: massive electric organ, many sound effects.

Some early attempts at creating original scores, but standard practice is either compilation of classical or popular music, or improvisation. 1909 – First attempt at “standardizing” musical accompaniment: Edison Film Company releases “musical suggestions” with each film. These were the first “Cue Sheets” with general scene-by-scene suggestions for musical accompaniment. In 1912, Max Winkler (Carl Fischer Music) suggests specific pieces of music, with timings. Films would be shipped with the cue sheets, might also include music. But problems with parts getting lost, lots of musicians involved might not like/know the pieces suggested etc. Thus this not work quite well.

Sam Fox Moving Picture Music (Vol 1, 1913) J.S.Zamenik. Contain contents, which suggests music for particular scenes. Music for Duels, music for storms. This hopefully makes it more consistent from theatres to theatres.

Trade papers: Motion Picture World, Moving Picture World

• articles and columns on musical accompaniment
• musical accompaniment should be continuous. Once the film starts, music should play all way through.
• source music. For example, if the scene is dancing, the band should play appropriate music like waltz.
• use of themes. How theme can represent a character or setting. Thematic transformation and letimotive from Wagner.
• “good music” (classical music) to the masses

By mid 1920s – no real change:

• vast range of performing forces and skills
• rural (local piano teachers/record players) or urban (see (semi)professional musicians playing music)
• missing cue sheets and scores
• issues of “control”
• thus completely not standardized

An example: Birth of a Nation (1915). Composer/Adaptor: Joseph Carl Breil

• remarkable influential film, becomes the norm of Hollywood films for decades in various aspects. Financial success. It is horribly racist even in 1915, huge controversy. About civil war.
• D.W Griffith: Hollywood’s first “great” director
• Carli Elinor – a music “fitter”
• Breil, American born, European trained musician and composer
• assembles a continuous score 2/3s similar to Elinor, but 1/3 original material written for the film.
• Debut in March of 1915

EXAMPLE ONE: Small ensemble of strings, woodwinds, brass and piano (Start 33:00)

EXAMPLE TWO: Big orchestra (Start 32:00)

First, two completely different music to the same scene result in different perceptions. Second, if in local theatre, both accompaniment would be exceptionally good for the time.

EXAMPLE THREE: The really painful example… (Start 29:30)

This was the problem: music can be powerful for the film presentation, help the audience interpret the film. No conceivable way to standardize the musical performance. So someone must come up with a way to record the sound and visual together, and play them back.

The Birth of Sound and Max Steiner

Transition to Sound

Solution to the problems of musical accompaniment – recorded and synchronized sound.

In fact, almost a decade for the transition, late 1920s, early 1930s, sound and silent films existed together. Why big time lag? Economics. Expansive for the equipment, small theatres can’t afford. It may be weird that there were a lot of people who didn’t like sound films, sound films were a fad, novelty, they didn’t get used to it. 1920s, driven by progress in recording technology. Demonstrations of sound films as early as 1922.

Several competing systems emerge - the two primary approaches are:

1. Sound On Film (Phonofilm, Movietone). Photograph of sound waves on the edge of the film
   • excellent synchronization. Because both the visual image and the sound were being recorded on the single piece of media, the film strip.
   • poor audio quality. 1920s, new experimental way of recording sound.
2. Sound on Disk (Warner Brothers’ Vitaphone). The sound on giant records. By 1920s, records has been around for a couple of decades. Audio recording on a phonograph disk, synchronized with the film projector - excellent audio quality, poor synchronization. Vitaphone requites two devices, projector and record players. Also, disks are fragile.

As we moved to mid 1920s, Vitaphone became popular: the audio quality is much better. In 1926, Warner Bros releases a feature length motion picture: Don Juan.

• Recorded score primarily by William Axt, performed by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.
• Vitaphone – recorded music and some generalized sound effects. No dialog, still a silent film.
• Also had a second score composed for “live” performance, because very few theatres have Vitaphone systems.
• Even though no recorded dialogue, still big hit.

The Jazz Singer (1927) is often called the first “talking” motion picture, though it is primarily a silent film with several minutes of synchronized sound through the Vitaphone system. Most of the score is compiled or adapted.

🎥 The Jazz Singer 🎥

The effect was quite astonishing for audiences at the time. Notice the big gaps before and after the dialogue — the projectionist needed to switch the records. The dialogue itself is remarkably stilted: there were no script writers for sound, and the actor, Al Jolson, is essentially improvising. There is barely any camera motion because cameras were noisy and had to be enclosed in soundproof booths. The actor cannot move very far because of the fixed microphone position. And he is not really playing the piano.

Thus still conventionally silent film. Nevertheless, a financial hit. It signaled the “beginning of the end” of the silent era. Sound on Disk has the early lead, but Sound on Film will become the standard by the early 1930s. Sound on Film has surpassed the audio quality of Vitaphone.

Now we enter the transition era, 1927 \(\to \) 1931 or 1932. Let’s talk about how the change to sound alters the approach to make motion pictures.

1. Aesthetics. E.g., how does one act in the featured films. In silent films, one attempted to be overly dramatic with facial expressions or gestures, because no lines. Now they can say lines, so these old ways of acting look silly. Issue for industry: actors need to retool their acting skill. Another issue is the voices: decent voice is not necessary for silent films. In sound films, some of their voices are completely inappropriate. Also, a debate: Many worried about using none-diegetic music: “Where does the music come from?”
2. Making films.
   • all sound had to be recorded in real time. Postproduction does not happen straightaway.
   • musicians on set – balance of sound music and dialog. When actor is playing, musicians have to play the music.
   • cameras in large soundproof booths (because it is loud) – no movement.
   • “sound stages” (expensive) are built to reduce/isolate outside noises
3. Showing Films. Exhibition.
   • Too many contesting sound systems. Vitaphone competes with sound on film system.
   • Small number of the 20,000 theaters equipped for sound.
   • end of 1929 almost 1000 theatres equipped for sound.
   • by 1935 the transition is complete.
   • The 1952 film Singin’ in the Rain brilliantly satirizes the difficulties of this transition:

🎥 Singin’ in the Rain — Issues with Filming 🎥

🎥 Singin’ in the Rain — Issues with Exhibition 🎥

4. Industry Reorganization. The costs become higher for sound films so film industries are looking for ways to save money: All aspects of production are departmentalized – directors, actors, and musicians are put under contract – Leads to the STUDIO SYSTEM. Cost and control. Conglomeration: larger companies buy smaller. The “Big” Five: MGM, Paramount, Warner Brothers, 20^th Century Fox (1935), and RKO. The “Little” 3 – Universal, Colombia, and United Artists. Both of them have bought everything they need to produce a film, but the “big” five owns distribution network and exhibition locations. Issue: monopoly when controlling all three: production, distribution, exhibition.

Max Steiner (1888–1971)

Max Steiner was born in 1888 in Vienna — the center of European classical music — at the very end of the Romantic era. His father owned a theatre, and Steiner was formally trained in the tradition of European classical music. A child prodigy, he was conducting in theatre by age twelve and touring as a conductor by sixteen. One of his teachers was Gustav Mahler. He wrote operettas beginning at age seventeen and also worked as a composer and conductor for the stage in England. Facing deportation during World War I — England was on one side, Austria on the other, and Steiner was Austrian — he came to the United States in 1914.

Steiner worked on Broadway for fifteen years. In 1916, he composed a score for a silent film, The Bondman. He was invited to Hollywood in 1929 to work on Rio Rita. This was part of a larger trend: Hollywood was raiding Broadway for talent because many silent-era film actors had voices unsuitable for sound. Hollywood also needed writers who could craft dialogue, leading to a massive wave of films based on Broadway musicals. Broadway Melody (1929) was a huge success — its poster proudly advertised “talking, singing, dancing.”

By 1930, however, there was still very little music in dramatic films. The prevailing worry was: “Where does the music come from?” — the concern that nondiegetic music would confuse the audience. Cimarron (1931), scored by Steiner, used quite a bit of source music and found innovative ways of approaching the score. David Selznick, a producer at RKO, recognized that more music might be good for dramatic films. In 1932, Symphony of Six Million and Bird of Paradise featured continuous orchestral music, and audiences responded positively.

The turning point came in 1933 with King Kong. Early test audiences found the special effects laughable — they were laughing instead of screaming. The film had very little music. Afraid of losing money, the director convinced the studio to let Steiner write a full score. He composed it in just two weeks. This time, with music, the audience screamed.

🎥 King Kong — The Fog 🎥

The music hovers between consonance and dissonance, creating an atmosphere of mystery. It is used to indicate a transition from the normal world to the realm of the supernatural. As the ship arrives at the island, the music shifts: a view of the beach introduces Kong’s theme in an early, distant form. Notice the lack of distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic music — the score blurs the boundary between the sounds of the story world and the underscore.

🎥 King Kong — The Dance 🎥

The music for the ceremonial dance uses a full orchestra, yet only drums are visible on film — another instance of blurring the lines between diegetic and nondiegetic music. Steiner’s Broadway background is evident in this scene. We also see classic “mickey mousing” with the chief’s walk down the steps, where the tuba and low basses are perfectly synchronized to each footfall.

🎥 The Informer — Opening 🎥

The Informer (1935) is another key Steiner score. The opening features a folk-influenced theme for Gypo and a jazz-influenced theme for Katie. Listen for the musical quotation of “Rule Britannia.” The score won the Academy Award for Best Original Score.

Steiner eventually moved to Warner Brothers, where he spent the bulk of his career as head of the music department (1937–1953). Other notable films include Gone with the Wind (1939), Casablanca (1942), and A Summer Place (1959). A legendary workaholic, Steiner contributed to over 300 film scores during his career before his death in 1971.

Erich Korngold and the 1930s

Part A: The Émigré Composers

The 1930s was the decade in which sound film developed many of the conventions that would define it for generations. It began as an extension of the silent film, but by the end of the decade, technical advances and aesthetic changes had transformed it into its own medium.

The “Émigré” Composer

As the Nazi regime tightened its grip on Europe, many of the continent’s finest artists and intellectuals were forced into exile. Among them were several composers who would become giants of Hollywood film music: Erich Korngold, Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, and Miklós Rózsa. None of these composers had any intention of becoming film composers — film composing was a brand-new profession. But they were all thoroughly trained in the sound of late nineteenth-century European Romanticism, essentially the music of composers such as Wagner, and when they arrived in the United States, Hollywood was the one place hiring composers in the 1930s. This wave of what we now call émigré composers would come to dominate Hollywood scoring for decades.

Two of the few important American-born composers of the period were Alfred Newman and Herbert Stothart. Stothart is probably best remembered as the composer of the original score for The Wizard of Oz — not the songs, but the dramatic underscore: the witch’s music, the flying monkeys, and so on. Newman is one of those composers who deserves far more attention than a single course can give. He wrote over two hundred film scores, served as head of the music department at 20th Century Fox for twenty years, and was nominated for the Academy Award a staggering forty-five times, winning nine — the third-highest number of nominations in history, behind only John Williams and Walt Disney. His son, Thomas Newman, composed the music for WALL-E and Meet Joe Black (which we heard earlier in the course). As the professor puts it, “It’s hard to throw a stone in Hollywood without hitting a musical Newman.” And every one of us can hum at least one piece of Alfred Newman’s music, because he wrote the famous 20th Century Fox fanfare — that short brass flourish that makes you feel like a movie should start.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957)

Erich Wolfgang Korngold was born in 1897 in Vienna — like Max Steiner before him, a product of the city’s extraordinary musical culture. His middle name, Wolfgang, was a tribute to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a sign of what the family expected. His father was a noted music critic — and not the thumbs-up-thumbs-down variety; this was an era when criticism was considered a serious literary endeavour, and Korngold senior was deeply respected. Young Erich grew up surrounded by many of the great composers of the day, all family friends, and was recognized early on as a childhood prodigy. His teachers included Richard Strauss (composer of Also sprach Zarathustra, later famous as the opening music for 2001: A Space Odyssey) and Gustav Mahler, a giant of the orchestral world. By his twenties, Korngold had established himself as an immensely popular composer and conductor of operas and concert-hall music.

One of the things Korngold became particularly notable for was his interpretation of music by Felix Mendelssohn — specifically, Mendelssohn’s celebrated score for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (written in 1842). Shakespeare’s original play features a great deal of music, but the music has been lost; over the centuries, composers have tried their hand at replacing it, from Mendelssohn to the Canadian rock band the Barenaked Ladies, who wrote music for a Stratford production. Mendelssohn’s version became one of his biggest hits — you can certainly hum a few bars, because it includes the famous Wedding March. In 1934, Hollywood decided to film A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and someone needed to conduct Mendelssohn’s music. Korngold, the foremost interpreter of this score, was invited to supervise the production. He was surprised by what he found: coming from the world of high art, he had expected popular-culture sloppiness, but instead discovered top-notch musicianship and state-of-the-art facilities. In the concert world, a composer could write a piece and wait years to hear it performed; in Hollywood, you could hear your music played by a first-rate orchestra in a matter of weeks or even days.

He liked what he saw but did not stay. He was offered studio contracts and turned them down — a decision that made him an outlier in the studio system. Unlike Steiner or Newman, who held long-term contracts, Korngold preferred to return to Europe and come back once or twice a year for individual projects, averaging one or two films a year. His films were always a big deal.

Korngold won the Academy Award for Anthony Adverse (1936). In 1938, he was asked to score The Adventures of Robin Hood but initially refused. Then Austria was annexed by the Nazis, and all of his family’s wealth and property was seized. Korngold took the Robin Hood assignment and won a second Academy Award — notably, the first time the award was given directly to a composer rather than to the head of a studio music department.

Korngold remained in Hollywood until his death in 1957, disappointed that he was never able to regain his position as a “serious” concert composer. He freelanced throughout his career, composing only nineteen film scores in twelve years. He wrote in a 19th-century Romantic style — influenced by Wagner and Strauss — and considered his film scores to be like “little operas.” His music emphasizes extended melodies and makes extensive use of thematic transformation, where a musical theme is varied and developed to reflect changing dramatic situations.

Korngold also developed a distinctive set of approaches for battle scenes: loud dynamics, rapid scale passages, irregular aggressive accents, and occasional motivic references woven through the chaos.

Part B: The Sea Hawk and The Adventures of Robin Hood

The Sea Hawk (1940)

Korngold also made use of the overture at the beginning of each film, presenting the main themes before the story begins — a practice borrowed directly from opera.

🎥 The Sea Hawk — Opening 🎥

The opening credits function as an overture in miniature, presenting a heroic theme (brass fanfare) followed by a love theme (strings), then returning to the heroic material. This A–B–A structure gives the audience an emotional roadmap for the film before a single scene has played.

🎥 The Sea Hawk — The Battle 🎥

In the battle scene, Korngold phrases the drama — the music sets the mood and parallels the arc of the battle rather than hitting every individual action. Notice how the music drops under dialogue, hits the thrown knife precisely, then drops the pacing under the retreat. There is also a blending of source music and score when the retreat is sounded.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

🎥 Robin Hood — Opening Credits 🎥

The opening credits function as another overture, presenting three themes. The first two are based on a march rhythm — group activity, representing the Merry Men. The final theme is the love theme, characterized by soaring strings with a prominent sixth interval.

🎥 Robin Hood — Robin’s Theme 🎥

Robin Hood’s personal theme is short and fanfare-like — distinct from the Merry Men themes in the opening credits.

🎥 Robin Hood — Little John 🎥

The Merry Men theme is first heard when Little John joins the band, played on the French horn — an instrument with a long operatic association with the hunter or woodsman. The scene features a stylistic blend of source music and score, with the music “hitting the action” during the duel (played for comedy). Listen for the woodwind “water” theme, similar to many operatic water scenes. The scene concludes with a triumphant return of the Merry Men theme.

🎥 Robin Hood — Friar Tuck 🎥

The Friar Tuck scene follows a similar structure to the Little John scene. His initial theme is played primarily on bassoon and muted trumpet — instruments that convey a comic character. The sword fight reuses the same musical material as the Little John battle but with more excitement and energy. The woodwind “water” theme returns, and the scene again concludes with the Merry Men theme.

🎥 Robin Hood — Robin and Marion 1 🎥

When Marion first sees the Saxon refugees, a quiet variation of the peril theme underscores her growing awareness. During the dialogue between Marion and Robin, two themes alternate — the second being the love theme from the opening credits. The question is: which one is the “real” love theme — or are both?

🎥 Robin Hood — Robin and Marion 2 🎥

For the big romantic moment, Love Theme 1 receives its fullest statement — big strings, a moment of spectacle. Love Theme 2 follows in a quieter, more intimate setting on solo cello.

🎥 Robin Hood — King Richard 🎥

Love Theme 2 (from the opening credits) receives its most dramatic statement with the reveal of King Richard — a brilliant thematic choice that elevates the emotional stakes of the scene.

The Style of Korngold

Korngold’s approach to film scoring can be summarized in several key characteristics: a “Romantic” orchestral style with an operatic sensibility; extensive use of themes and thematic transformation; a preference for phrasing the drama rather than hitting individual actions; and limited, deliberate use of mickey mousing — reserved for comedy or key dramatic moments rather than applied indiscriminately.

Film Noir and the 1940s

Part A: Into the Darkness

One important reminder before we dive in: breaking history into neat decades is convenient for lecturing, but nobody at the end of 1939 went, “Oh, it’s a new decade, everyone — I guess we have to change our styles.” Most historical change is fairly gradual, and it is only after the fact that we can look back and see where the shifts occurred.

The 1930s were shaped by the Great Depression. A massive stock-market crash at the end of 1929 sent unemployment in the United States from a typical five percent to well over twenty percent, where it stayed for most of the decade — it was really not until the outbreak of World War II at the end of the decade that the rate dropped back to normal. To make things worse, during the mid-and-late 1930s, North America experienced a series of devastating droughts that triggered enormous dust storms, massive loss of topsoil, and the destruction of thousands of farming livelihoods — a period now known as the Dust Bowl. Not surprisingly, Hollywood’s response was often spectacular escapism: films designed to take audiences away from the problems of the real world. Lost Horizon (1937), scored by Dimitri Tiomkin, told of plane-crash survivors who discover the lost land of Shangri-La, where no one ever ages. The Wizard of Oz (1939) is pure escapism about a young woman living on a farm during the Dust Bowl who dreams of a better life — she is transported to a land where everything is suddenly in colour.

The 1940s brought a very different sensibility. Exactly what triggered the shift is hard to say — many attribute it to the outbreak of World War II — but audiences increasingly wanted stories that were more “realistic.” Rather than films set in Shangri-La or fifteenth-century England, more and more films were set in the present, in urban centres, and were supposed to represent something closer to the world the audience saw when they left the theatre. Characters became more complex: no longer unquestionably good like Robin Hood or unquestionably bad like Prince John, they were now driven by jealousy, greed, and passion, with flaws and redeeming qualities in equal measure. This gave rise to film noir. The term itself came from France. During the war, France had essentially lost touch with Hollywood; after the war, all these American films arrived at once, and French critics noticed how dark they had become — visually darker, shot often at night and in the rain, with lighting and shadow as key compositional tools. “Film noir,” they called them: dark film, black film. The genre was heavily influenced by German Expressionism — during the 1930s, many German directors fleeing the Nazis had ended up in Hollywood, bringing with them a visual vocabulary of deep shadows, high-contrast lighting, and moral ambiguity that would profoundly shape the look of film noir.

Miklós Rózsa (1907–1995)

Miklós Rózsa was Hungarian-born, the son of a classical pianist. He studied at the great music conservatories of Europe in Leipzig and in Paris, thoroughly trained in the style of composers such as Wagner, and enjoyed a successful career as a concert composer. In 1934, he had a conversation with another composer, Arthur Honegger, a member of the influential Parisian group known as Les Six. The French context matters: France has always viewed cinema with a high level of artistic respect, and working in film in France was considered a much more serious creative endeavour than in Hollywood, where film composing was already seen as a secondary level of work for composers who could not get “real” concert-hall commissions. Major French concert-hall composers like Honegger also wrote film scores without any loss of prestige. At Honegger’s suggestion, Rózsa decided to try his hand at film scoring, and through the rest of the 1930s he worked fairly regularly as a film composer in England, while still pursuing his concert-hall career.

Then history intervened again. Rózsa was in England in 1939, working on a production of The Thief of Bagdad, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September and war broke out. Production was suspended because of the outbreak of war, and in early 1940, largely because the producers were running out of money and needed to finish the film, the production was shifted to Hollywood. Rózsa went along to complete his work on the score. His music for the film was nominated for an Academy Award — the first time a film not entirely produced in Hollywood received such a nomination. Rózsa decided to settle in the United States because of the war, and the nomination got him a great deal of attention. He quickly established himself as a Hollywood composer. His score for a live-action Jungle Book (1942) was the first Hollywood film score to be widely released on record — on 78 RPM records, the dominant recording medium of the time — making it, in effect, the first film soundtrack that collectors could actually collect.

Double Indemnity (1944)

By the early 1940s, both The Thief of Bagdad and Jungle Book were very much part of the end of that cycle of fantasy-escapist films that had dominated since the 1930s. But the style of Hollywood was changing. These new contemporary, often urban dramas — more “realistic,” eventually known as film noir — were becoming more and more the mainstream, and Rózsa would quickly establish himself as one of the most important composers of the film noir style.

Rózsa’s score for Double Indemnity (1944) marked a turning point. The film is about murder for insurance: an insurance salesman (Fred McMurray) is seduced by a scheming wife (Barbara Stanwyck) into helping her stage her wealthy husband’s death on a train, triggering a clause in his insurance policy that will pay out double — the “double indemnity” of the title. It seems like they are going to get away with it, until the salesman’s partner, Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), suspects something is wrong. In the scene we examine, Walter and Phyllis believe they have gotten away with the murder. They have arranged to meet at Walter’s apartment, but Keyes shows up unexpectedly, convinced something is not right. All the while, Walter knows Phyllis is on her way — if Keyes sees them together, the secret is blown. The beginning of the scene is a great example of the composer staying out of the way: there is no music as Keyes talks and Walter nervously glances at the door. We do not get any music until Phyllis gets off the elevator, and then we hear a short, unsettling motive that Rózsa plays slowly for suspense, then rapidly as Keyes approaches the door. The best part comes when Keyes walks back toward Walter just to get a light for his cigar, and we can see all three of them — Walter, Keyes, and Phyllis hiding behind the door, with only the door between discovery and escape.

The score features short, unpredictable themes that are deliberately unsettling, with a greater use of dissonance and a move away from clear tonality. The little motive cannot be found in the major scale — that is part of why it sounds so unsettling, because we are not quite as familiar with the notes and not quite sure where they are going to go. When Paramount’s head of music heard the score, he was quite horrified, complaining that it was anything but “attractive.” Rózsa shot back that the film was about “ugly people doing vicious things to each other” and the music reflected precisely that. In a particularly telling moment during the argument, the studio head — intending it as an insult — described Rózsa’s music as “Carnegie Hall music,” essentially accusing him of making the score sound like contemporary concert music: edgier, nastier, more dissonant. He was not wrong, and that was precisely the point. Director Billy Wilder stood by Rózsa, and the music remained as the composer intended. The film was a hit, and the score received an Academy Award nomination.

🎥 Double Indemnity 🎥

Spellbound and The Lost Weekend (1945)

The love theme from Spellbound — the music that opened this week’s lecture — is built on the same major sixth interval we heard in the Robin Hood love themes and Princess Leia’s theme. It is entirely based on the major scale, a great example of consonance. This is an important reminder: scores are rarely one thing or the other. We will see an increasing use of dissonance, but consonance will almost always be there in some form, and the two will play against each other — consonant music sounding more familiar, safer, and reassuring; dissonant music playing moments of uncertainty, fear, and anxiety.

1945 was a particularly big year for Rózsa. He scored both Spellbound (directed by Alfred Hitchcock, whom we will talk about much more next week with Psycho) and The Lost Weekend — both were nominated for the Academy Award, and Spellbound won, even though Rózsa later said he actually preferred The Lost Weekend. Spellbound deals with a man suspected of murder who has amnesia and experiences dreamlike trances; The Lost Weekend is about a writer suffering from debilitating alcoholism who spirals out of control over a single weekend. Both films are psychological in nature, dealing with deeply disturbed characters, and both made use of the theremin, one of the earliest electronic instruments.

The theremin is a fascinating device. You play it by waving your hands at two antennas: one controls volume, the other controls pitch. In the hands of a skilled performer such as Clara Rockmore, you can get a remarkable level of control out of it. Its inventor, Leon Theremin, actually envisioned it as a serious artistic instrument — photographs show him standing before the theremin dressed and posed like a classical conductor. It never quite achieved that level of acceptance, but it did find a home in film scoring. In both Spellbound and The Lost Weekend, Rózsa uses the theremin to musically illustrate an unstable character — the amnesiac who may be a murderer, the alcoholic whose addiction is spiralling out of control. This was among the first important uses of an electronic instrument in a film score.

🎥 The Lost Weekend — Scene 1 🎥

In the first Lost Weekend scene, the writer Don Burnham has been to a local bar, where he told the bartender a story idea — not realizing the story is actually about himself. The bartender, who does not know this, says the character sounds like he would just end up killing himself. Burnham insists that is not how it ends, leaves the bar determined to write, and the music as he leaves is very positive, very upbeat, and very consonant. He sits at the typewriter and starts typing, and momentarily we get something almost like a love theme — a gentle French horn melody appears as we see the words “To Helen, with all my love” being typed. The music takes on a slightly comedic quality as he fumbles with his hat and gets the cigarette the wrong way around, then he stands, turns, and just before the two-minute mark he sees the empty bottle — and we hear the alcoholism theme, dark, threatening, and absolutely nothing to do with the major scale. First the orchestra plays it, then the theremin takes over as Burnham searches through his apartment, convinced he has hidden a bottle somewhere. His craving overtakes him as the music grows more and more intense. Think about what you are watching: a man basically having a temper tantrum in his apartment. From an outside perspective it is actually a rather pathetic scene. But the music is not playing that. The music is playing the struggle in his head, the monster of alcoholism slowly taking him over. There is a wonderful bit of subtle acting from Ray Milland — as he turns back from tearing apart his cupboard, his walk is subtly altered, almost as if he is not quite human anymore. Around the 3:45 mark, almost all the instruments fall away as he sees the matchbook for a nightclub. One of the only things still remaining is the theremin playing the alcoholism theme — everything else has dropped by the wayside and only the monster remains.

🎥 The Lost Weekend — Scene 2 🎥

The second scene is a continuation of where we left off and is a great example of a composer staying out of the way — and a brilliant use of source music to completely change the perception of a character. The very first thing we see is a piano player and singer in a nightclub, clearly establishing that what follows is diegetic music — a soft pop song, contemporary for 1945. Without Rózsa’s score, we see Don Burnham as the world sees him: a pathetic figure who has lost control, not deserving of respect. He realizes he cannot pay his bill, spots a woman’s purse, and painfully steals it — a scene that, with score, would have been dramatic and agonizing, but with only the pop song playing it feels small and humiliating. (There is also a fascinating period detail: a gentleman in the bathroom whose job is to polish shoes and hand out towels — a reminder that in 1945, the Civil Rights Movement was still ten to fifteen years away.) The best use of the source music comes when Burnham returns to the table and a voice says, “That’s the man.” The music stops. There is utter silence. It is so painfully embarrassing — you see the gentlemen behind him slowly stand up, all attention on him, and there is nothing to hide behind, not even music. Then, as they throw him out, the piano player starts up again and everyone sings along, laughing at him. The change from the previous scene is devastating: in that scene, Rózsa’s music let us feel the power of the illness; here, the music is gone and we get no sense of how Burnham feels internally.

Rózsa would go on to be an important composer of the 1950s as well — but for a very different kind of picture than film noir.

Part B: American Composers Rise — David Raksin and Laura

The influence of popular music on film scoring was already becoming apparent by the early 1940s. A telling example is Casablanca (1942), which used the pre-existing pop song “As Time Goes By” (written in the early 1930s by Herman Hupfeld) as its central musical theme. The song was performed in the film by Dooley Wilson, who played Sam the piano player — though Wilson was actually a drummer, not a pianist, so a ghost piano player performed just off-camera. Max Steiner, who scored the film, actually did not want to use “As Time Goes By” at all — he disliked the melody and wanted to write his own. But he was stuck with it, because there is a scene in which Ingrid Bergman sings the song, and reshooting was impossible: Bergman had already moved on to her next film and had cut her hair very short, so it would not have matched. Because of a haircut, the song stayed in the film and became one of the most famous pieces of music in cinema history.

The 1940s saw a rise in the number of American-born, American-trained composers achieving prominence in Hollywood, including Bernard Herrmann and David Raksin.

David Raksin (1912–2004)

David Raksin was born in 1912 in Philadelphia — the first American-born composer we have discussed at length, and the first born in the age of film itself (the silent era was hitting its stride when he arrived). His father was a conductor for an orchestra in a movie theatre, playing the music for silent films — so this is the first composer we encounter who was actually born into a family already involved in the film industry. While not recognized as a childhood prodigy in the manner of Korngold or Steiner, Raksin was thoroughly schooled in music and went on to study composition with some notable teachers, including Arnold Schoenberg — a tremendously influential European composer who had fled the Nazis and settled in Los Angeles. (We will talk more about Schoenberg in a couple of weeks, when we get to Planet of the Apes.) This gave Raksin strong European art-music credentials.

His early career, however, was in the world of popular music: he worked as a pianist and arranger for jazz bands and big bands — the pop-music stars of the era. Working with someone like Benny Goodman was the 1940s equivalent of being the keyboard player for Beyonce or Taylor Swift. The big takeaway is that Raksin had experience in both worlds: European art music through his studies with Schoenberg, and contemporary popular music through his work in the big-band scene.

His first film work came in 1935, when he was asked to help Charlie Chaplin with the music for Modern Times. Chaplin, in addition to being a brilliant filmmaker and comedian, was a very talented self-taught musician who often wrote the music for his own films. The problem was that Chaplin could not write music down on paper — and in the 1930s (and indeed right up until the 1980s), if you wanted film music performed by an orchestra, it had to be on paper. Being able to read and write sheet music does not make you a good musician — Paul McCartney of the Beatles cannot read a note, and it has not stopped him from writing some of the greatest songs of all time — but it becomes essential when dozens of other people need to play your music. So Chaplin would work out his ideas and play them for Raksin, and Raksin would listen, figure out what was going on harmonically, and write it all down. This was Raksin’s entry into the film industry.

Laura (1944)

For Laura (1944), director Otto Preminger wanted to use a pre-existing pop song, “Sophisticated Lady” (made famous by the Duke Ellington Orchestra), as the main theme. Preminger liked how the title related to the character of Laura — a young, urban, sophisticated, modern woman. The problem was that Preminger had not really listened to the lyrics: “Sophisticated Lady” is actually about an older woman who experienced great heartbreak when she was younger, never recovered, and has been living a life of shallow excess ever since. Raksin tried to convince Preminger that the song was wrong for the character, but Preminger did not care — until Raksin persisted long enough that Preminger gave him an ultimatum: you have until Monday to write something I like better, or I am using “Sophisticated Lady” and I am probably going to fire you.

What followed has become one of the most famous personal stories in the history of Hollywood music. Raksin went home knowing he had roughly forty-eight hours to save his job. His wife was away touring with a theatrical company; he had not seen her in a while. He checked the mail, stuffed it into his pocket without reading it, and went upstairs to write. He spent all of Friday night and Saturday writing, getting nowhere. Sunday morning, feeling terrible, he kept working. Looking for a distraction, he remembered the mail, pulled it out of his pocket, and found a letter from his wife. He opened it, hoping for inspiration. The letter said, essentially: I have met someone else, and I am leaving you. Raksin got devastatingly drunk, sat down at the piano, and out came the theme. Monday morning, horribly hungover and heartbroken, he played it for Preminger. Preminger loved it. Not only did Raksin keep his job, but Preminger used him for his next four films.

Laura is a psychological thriller, a whodunit driven by motivations and misdirection — the very first thing you hear after the opening music is Waldo Lydecker saying, “I shall never forget the weekend Laura died.” The score is monothematic — built almost entirely on a single theme — and has a distinctly non-European sound rooted in American popular music. The music does not drive the suspense so much as represent the ghost or the “ideal” of Laura, the woman everyone remembers but who is not there to speak for herself. It also provides crucial insight into the mind of Detective McPherson, who slowly becomes obsessed with this dead woman’s image.

🎥 Laura — Opening Credits 🎥

The opening credits focus on the portrait of Laura — sophisticated, urban, almost unearthly. (The portrait has a great backstory: Preminger hated the original painting, so the studio had a photograph taken of actress Gene Tierney, blew it up to portrait size, and then sent it to the art department, where studio artists added very light traces of almost transparent oil paint to make the photograph look like a painting.) The musical theme is linked to Laura herself: orchestral, but with a distinctly pop/jazz influence. Even without music-theory knowledge, you can hear the difference: the chord structures have more in common with popular music than with classical music. Raksin is adding notes — major sevenths, ninths, thirteenths — that would be uncommon in a classical work but are standard in the jazz and pop vocabulary of the 1940s. Even the way some of the musicians play is drawn from popular-music technique: listen to how the trumpet player deliberately slides between notes rather than articulating them cleanly as they would in a classical performance. After the film was released, lyrics were written for Raksin’s melody and the song became a major hit, recorded by numerous singers including Ella Fitzgerald — a reminder that before 1950, jazz and popular music were largely the same thing.

The end of the credits does not resolve — the notes that sound like they should bring the theme to rest instead push us forward, propelling us into the diegesis. We enter a transitional space: Lydecker’s monologue (“I shall never forget the weekend Laura died”), scored with a pedal point — a sustained bass note that simply refuses to move while the notes above it keep changing. Even if you are not consciously aware of it, the unchanging bass note creates a sense of anticipation: you keep wondering whether it will change, and it keeps not changing, drawing you forward into the story. The monologue is metadiegetic, existing on the boundary between the film world and the audience — not quite diegetic dialogue, not quite narration. The music ends precisely with the first actual line of diegetic dialogue — “Careful there, that stuff is priceless” — marking the transition into the narrative proper.

🎥 Laura — Lydecker’s Story Part A 🎥

The scene opens with an establishing shot of a restaurant, where a small band — accordion, piano, violinist — is playing Laura’s theme as source music. The theme permeates almost every aspect of the film’s world, a constant reminder of the absent Laura. When Lydecker begins to tell his story (around the 32-second mark), the visual narrative shifts to several years earlier, and the music seamlessly follows the transition: the little trio of diegetic musicians gives way to the full orchestra playing Laura’s theme as non-diegetic score. We get our first good look at Laura, and an interesting detail that is lost on a contemporary audience: the clothing that Gene Tierney wears in this scene was deliberately chosen to be out of fashion and not terribly well fitted, presenting Laura as a somewhat naive, very young, innocent character who has just come to the city and has not yet figured herself out.

When Laura reaches Lydecker’s table (around the one-minute mark), her theme drops away and is replaced by a waltz — a dance counted in groupings of three. But “waltz” is also a word used to describe someone who just comes up to you in a confident or almost aggressive manner, and to describe people circling each other, sizing each other up. That is essentially what is happening: Laura is trying to ingratiate herself with Lydecker (she wants him to endorse a pen), and Lydecker is doing everything he can to rattle her. The actor Clifton Webb is brilliant here — watch all the little business with his lunch, picking things off his plate, adding sauces, never actually eating anything, conveying this sense of a character who is incredibly fussy and picky. Laura’s theme returns around the three-minute mark, at precisely the moment she drops the act and says what she actually means — from Lydecker’s perspective, at least, this is the moment we see the “real” Laura.

🎥 Laura — Lydecker’s Story Part B 🎥

The theme grows in complexity as Laura’s career grows — all of it engineered by Lydecker, at least as far as he is concerned. But notice that Laura herself does not speak. There is even a line where Lydecker says she “listened more eloquently than speech” — a revealing and rather problematic statement from a man whose idea of the perfect woman is one who sits there and looks beautiful without trying to say anything. The montage relies on the music for continuity, with seamless transitions between source and score. Around the 50-second mark, as we cut back to the restaurant, you can hear the music move out of the orchestra and back into the little trio of musicians — though if you look closely at the candle on the table, it has burned down quite a bit, meaning they have been sitting there talking for some time and the band is still playing the same song.

🎥 Laura — The Apartment 🎥

The apartment scene is the pivotal sequence that the entire first two-thirds of the film has been building toward. It is a classic film-noir setting: night, rain, the darkness and reflectiveness of the water creating interesting effects of light and shadow. McPherson arrives at Laura’s apartment and notice how he interacts with the portrait — he looks at it, walks back and forth in front of it, but never stands directly in front of it. The portrait is often visible just over his shoulder, even out of focus, like the presence of Laura watching him.

At 0:25, as we see the portrait, Laura’s theme begins. McPherson starts to take his jacket off; the theme is incomplete at 0:45 — the interruption reflects his growing frustration, the music letting us see what is going on in his mind. At 0:58, the music hits the action when a lamp is switched on. It becomes more frantic at 1:16, anticipating McPherson’s agitation even though the scene itself is relatively calm — he throws down the letters, stands up, stubs out his cigarette. At around 1:40, another light switch, another hit. He moves into her bedroom, looks through her things, pulls her unmentionables out of drawers and smells her perfume — and we get an almost romantic statement of Laura’s theme. McPherson is essentially in a love scene with Laura at this point, mediated by the music and the portrait. Back in the living room, he pours himself a drink from the extraordinarily large liquor cabinet (because it is the 1940s and that is what you do) and walks over to the portrait. At 2:45, a fascinating statement of the theme uses the “Lean-a-Tone” technique — a technical innovation where the speed of the recorder used for the piano part was deliberately varied, causing the pitch to wobble slightly up and down, giving it a shimmering, almost supernatural quality. This is an early example of electronic processing applied to an acoustic instrument — technology that will become enormously important in the decades to come.

McPherson drinks too much and falls asleep next to the portrait, with Laura’s theme playing softly. Then the door opens and Laura walks in. She is not dead. The murder victim was actually a friend who had borrowed Laura’s apartment for the weekend — misidentified because the murderer used a shotgun at close range to the face, making identification impossible.

This is the moment the music has been setting us up for since the film started. And what does the music do when Laura walks through the door? Nothing. There is no big statement of the theme. Why? Because the Laura we have been hearing about for the past hour — this perfect, idealized woman as seen through the eyes of Lydecker and Shelby — is not the real Laura. The real Laura turns out to be a little bit whiny, a flawed person like everyone else, and she is about to become a murder suspect herself. Playing the theme at her entrance would have confirmed the idealized Laura as real. Instead, the silence forces McPherson — and us — to confront the gap between the fantasy and the reality. In the final third of the film, McPherson gets to know the real woman, and falls in love with her anyway.

This is a large part of what the film is actually about: the objectification of women. It is no accident that the murderer turns out to be Lydecker. Remember what the very first thing Lydecker says to McPherson is: “Careful there, that stuff is priceless.” His house is full of valuable items he has collected. Laura was just another one. When he found out she was starting to see other men, he was not crushed by romantic jealousy — he was enraged because he saw Laura as property that he owned. Once Laura returns and the illusion is broken, Laura’s theme largely disappears from the film. There is still music through the final third, but very little of it references Laura’s theme, because now we realize that the character it represented was never real.

The 1950s — New Technology, New Voices

Part A: The End of the Studio System

The 1950s marked the end of the studio system and the rise of a new challenge: television. The studio system had technically been illegal all along — a violation of anti-trust legislation that prevented an open competitive market from forming — but in the post-war era, Hollywood came under real pressure to dismantle it and open the industry to something closer to a freelance environment. Meanwhile, television was becoming a serious competitive threat. Hollywood fought back on two fronts.

On the technology front, the battle with television accelerated the move to all-colour films. Television in this era was a little box with a small black-and-white picture, received through an antenna with often unreliable reception — colour television sets existed as early as 1953, but the vast majority of households would not own one until the late 1960s or even the 1970s. Hollywood also experimented with various widescreen systems — Cinerama, CinemaScope, Panavision, and VistaVision — all competing for dominance, much as sound systems had competed in the late 1920s. Since the silent era, the standard aspect ratio had been four-by-three; television adopted the same ratio, so Hollywood pushed beyond it, creating wider and more immersive images that no living room could match. The decade also saw the development of the first multi-channel sound systems for theatres. For the first couple of decades of sound film, everything had come out of a single large speaker positioned behind the screen; now multiple speakers were placed at the front, along the side walls, and even at the back, so that dialogue still came from the front but music could drift from the sides and sound effects could come from anywhere in the room. This technology lent itself to big “sword-and-sandal” epic films, often set in the ancient world: Quo Vadis, The Robe, Julius Caesar, Lawrence of Arabia, Cleopatra, and The Ten Commandments. Ben-Hur (1959), scored by Miklós Rózsa, exemplifies this spectacle — the Parade of the Charioteers scene is designed to be visually stunning, with no narrative development, the focus entirely on the grandeur of sound and image. Historically, we have virtually no idea what the music of ancient Rome actually sounded like, but the work of Rózsa in these 1950s epics came to define the musical sound of the Roman Empire as far as Hollywood is concerned — an influence that persists to this day:

On the subject matter front, the Production Code (also known as the Hays Code), established in March 1930 and enforced from 1934, had long restricted what could be shown on screen. Films of the 1940s pushed the code; films of the 1950s began to break it altogether. A key distinction between television and film made this possible: a movie theatre is a public venue with a controlled entrance where you pay for admission, whereas the television sits in your living room, potentially watched by children when parents are not around. Controls on television content were therefore far stricter. Moreover, television programming was funded by advertisers, who had enormous leverage — if a show ran a storyline they disapproved of, they could pull their money and advertise elsewhere. The networks were beholden to advertiser sensibilities in a way that Hollywood was not, since films were paid for at the box office by the viewer. Hollywood could also restrict access by age, arguing that controversial material was only being presented to a mature audience. A third pressure came from abroad: as the studio system crumbled, theatres became independent and began showing European films that were not bound by the Production Code at all. Competition from television, competition from European cinema, and changing audience tastes all pushed Hollywood to stretch and ultimately break the code. It was finally abandoned in 1968, replaced by the first age-based rating systems.

Elmer Bernstein (1922–2004)

Elmer Bernstein was born in New York City in 1922, making him the first composer discussed in any depth who grew up entirely in the age of sound film — by the time he was five, The Jazz Singer had been released. He studied at Juilliard, the most prestigious music school in the United States, under Aaron Copland, one of the few American concert-hall composers who took film scoring seriously. Copland did not compose many film scores himself, but his influence on film music was profound through the training of younger composers like Bernstein. During World War II, Bernstein joined the army and was assigned to Armed Forces Radio — the first composer we encounter whose path to film music runs through radio rather than theatre, opera, or the concert hall. There he began composing music for radio programming, and the experience pointed him toward a career in media composition. After the war, he returned to pursuing concert piano but took a film scoring opportunity in 1952. Then, in 1953, he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). As a student, Bernstein had written record reviews to earn extra money; some of those reviews had been published by a communist newsletter. That was enough. He denied being a communist but refused to “name names” — the practice of identifying others who might have attended meetings — and was blacklisted. His career was nearly destroyed before it had begun. He was forced to take any work he could get, which meant writing music for B-movies — the low-budget second features shown at drive-in theatres, films produced on virtually non-existent budgets with unknown actors and terrible special effects. One such film was Cat-Women of the Moon (1953), a picture so bad it must be seen to be believed — or perhaps should never be seen again.

His breakthrough came through a sympathetic director named Otto Preminger — the same director behind Laura — who hired him for The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). The film centres on the character of Frankie, played by Frank Sinatra, a musician and card dealer who is also a heroin addict — subject matter that pushed the Production Code to its limits. The ensemble is a jazz big band within a conventional orchestra, and the score is strongly jazz-influenced — jazz suggesting the urban setting, particularly the darker side of the urban environment, with its associations to crime and drug abuse. In the first half of the scene, the music phrases the drama effectively, creating an appropriate mood for a 1950s bar without trying to follow the action moment by moment. But in the second half, when the drug paraphernalia comes out, the music shifts to extreme hitting of the action, and within a jazz-pop soundscape this feels heavy-handed, almost comedic — a useful demonstration of the danger of using popular music styles the way one would use a conventional orchestra. The same moment-by-moment changes would be unremarkable in a traditional orchestral idiom; within a pop context, they become distractingly obvious.

Bernstein’s career recovery was aided by an unlikely connection. While making ends meet, he was working as a rehearsal pianist for a prestigious ballet company led by Agnes de Mille. She liked Bernstein and knew his troubles, and her brother happened to be the legendary director Cecil B. DeMille, who was making The Ten Commandments and needed a last-minute replacement composer. Agnes lobbied relentlessly, and Cecil eventually gave in. The story goes that at the end of their first meeting, DeMille told Bernstein: “I saw that Preminger movie you did with Sinatra — that was great. But if you write any music like that for my movie, I guarantee you will never work in this town again.” Bernstein got the message. The music he wrote for The Ten Commandments sounded like something Korngold would have composed — a world away from the jazz of The Man with the Golden Arm, written barely a year apart. That contrast is the essence of versatility, the defining skill of successful film composers going forward. Bernstein went on to a remarkably successful career: fourteen Academy Award nominations, work on films such as Ghostbusters, The Blues Brothers, and Airplane! (all with director John Landis), and even the beloved theme for the National Geographic Society’s television specials.

🎥 The Man with the Golden Arm 🎥

Dimitri Tiomkin (1894–1979)

Dimitri Tiomkin was born in Russia and played piano in Russian silent movie theatres. He came to the USA in 1925, worked in vaudeville, and began working in Hollywood during the 1930s. Important films include Lost Horizon (1937) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

His score for High Noon (1952) was groundbreaking. It is based on a popular song Tiomkin composed called “Do Not Forsake Me,” which became a hit for singer Tex Ritter. The song was pre-released before the film, establishing the practice of the “movie song” as a marketing tool. Tiomkin received Academy Awards for both Best Score and Best Song. The score is notable for its high level of integration — the song melody is woven throughout the entire score.

🎥 High Noon — Opening Credits 🎥

🎥 High Noon — The Montage 🎥

The montage scene demonstrates the synchronization of music with the ever-present clock and the use of Frank Miller’s theme from the opening song.

Part B: Bernard Herrmann and Hitchcock

Bernard Herrmann (1911–1975)

Bernard Herrmann was born in New York City and studied at Juilliard. He joined CBS Radio in 1934 and in 1938 began working with Orson Welles. In October 1938, Herrmann conducted the music for Welles’ legendary radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds — the broadcast so realistic it caused mass panic. Herrmann traveled to Hollywood with Welles in 1940 and scored Citizen Kane (1941):

The breakfast montage from Citizen Kane

Herrmann’s approach was distinctive: he believed that the sound of a score depends fundamentally on instrumentation, and since film music is only required for a recording session — not for repeated live performance — there is no need to limit oneself to a standardized ensemble. For The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), he assembled a unique set of instruments: violin, cello, and bass (all electric), two theremins, three electric organs, three vibraphones, two glockenspiels, two pianos, two harps, three trumpets, three trombones, and four tubas.

🎥 The Day the Earth Stood Still — Scene 1 🎥

🎥 The Day the Earth Stood Still — Scene 2 🎥

The Hitchcock Collaboration

In 1955, Herrmann began his famous collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock, scoring Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and most famously, Psycho (1960).

Psycho (1960)

Psycho was made on a limited budget and shot in black and white. Herrmann matched this austerity with a strings-only score — a “black and white” score. He exploited the extraordinary variety of sounds a string section can produce. His cues tend to set a single mood rather than responding to moment-by-moment action. The overall mood is bleak, with little emotional warmth.

🎥 Psycho — The Money 🎥

A short, repetitive theme that fractures — quiet but unsettled, reflecting Marion’s discomfort with the theft. It grows slightly in intensity as she decides to take the money.

🎥 Psycho — The Flight 🎥

The music enters as Marion makes her escape. At first it seems to play her fear of being caught, but as her character transforms, the music shifts to play her descent to the “dark side.”

🎥 Psycho — Norman 🎥

Two semitones form the basis of the scoring. Herrmann uses string harmonics — an ethereal, glassy sound — as Norman spies on Marion. There is no emotion in the music, only cold observation.

🎥 Psycho — The Shower 🎥

There is no music until the attack begins. Then the strings “shriek” — there is no tonality, only pure sonic violence. As the murderer flees the scene, listen carefully: whose theme accompanies the escape?

Herrmann and Hitchcock parted company during the filming of Torn Curtain (1966). Bitter about the falling out, Herrmann moved to Europe, where he worked with François Truffaut on Fahrenheit 451 (1966). His last score was for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1975). Herrmann is fundamentally a composer of the 20th century — his music embraces modernism, dissonance, and unconventional instrumentation in ways that expanded what film music could be.

The 1960s — Versatility and Modernism

Part A: A Turbulent Decade

The 1960s were a turbulent period in American history — civil rights, Vietnam, and the generational gap all shaped the culture. The early 1960s in film were largely an extension of the 1950s, but by mid-decade the Production Code was abandoned. Films became more explicit in their subjects, visuals, and dialogue. The cultural revolution of the late 1960s resulted in films with a strong sense of irony and cynicism.

The end of the studio system led to freelancing and the rise of independent production. Costs escalated, and while orchestral scores were still produced, financial pressures led to many smaller ensembles or popular music scores. This was a period of changing of the guard — the end of the careers of Steiner, Newman, and Tiomkin — and the rise of American composers like Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, and Henry Mancini, alongside a second wave of European composers: the French Maurice Jarre, the English John Barry, and the Italian Ennio Morricone. The key word for this new generation was versatility — the ability to work convincingly across a range of styles.

Elmer Bernstein: The Magnificent Seven (1960)

Bernstein’s score for The Magnificent Seven shows the influence of Aaron Copland — clear melodies with a folk song influence, strong rhythms with syncopation, and a sound that evokes the American West and American nationalism.

🎥 The Magnificent Seven 🎥

Ennio Morricone (1928–2020)

Ennio Morricone was born in Rome in 1928. He is best known for his association with Italian director Sergio Leone and the “spaghetti western." Over his career, Morricone amassed over 400 film credits spanning an extraordinary range of styles from popular music to the avant-garde. His score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) makes innovative use of sound effects, voices, and electric guitars:

🎥 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly 🎥

His later work includes The Mission (1986), which blends Catholic texts and musical styles with indigenous musical elements and instruments.

John Barry (1933–2011)

John Barry was a classical pianist and trumpet player who turned to pop music in his twenties. By the early 1960s, he was a well-known British pop musician. His big break came with Dr. No (1962) and the James Bond franchise. The origins of the iconic James Bond theme are disputed — Monty Norman is credited, but Barry’s contribution led to a lawsuit. Barry composed the music for eleven Bond films and won five Academy Awards, including for Born Free (1966), Out of Africa (1985), and Dances with Wolves (1990). His style is defined by clear, tonal melodies with a strong pop influence.

🎥 Dr. No 🎥

Notice that when James Bond enters the scene, his theme begins — but when he makes a phone call, the music fades out, because it had not been recorded to the timings of the picture.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Atonality

In addition to the increasing impact of popular music, atonality was becoming more prominent as the traditional orchestral score diminished in importance. Modernism — the rejection of the past in favour of the new — was reshaping how composers thought about film music.

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey uses a compiled score drawn entirely from classical music, combining tonal late-Romantic music (Johann Strauss II’s The Blue Danube) with atonal 20th-century works (György Ligeti). This was seen as a radical new approach to the relationship between music and film.

🎥 2001: A Space Odyssey — The Earth to the Moon 🎥

The music accompanying humans is tonal — the graceful elegance of The Blue Danube waltz.

🎥 2001: A Space Odyssey — The Monolith 🎥

The music depicting the alien intelligence is atonal — Ligeti’s dense, unsettling clusters of sound.

Part B: Jerry Goldsmith — Radical Experimentalist

Jerry Goldsmith (1929–2004)

Jerry Goldsmith (1929–2004) represents a series of firsts. He was born in Los Angeles — the first composer of the week actually born in the heart of the film industry. He was born after 1927, making him the first to grow up entirely in the world of sound film. And he was the first person discussed on this course who made a conscious decision to try to become a film composer. The moment that triggered that decision was hearing Miklós Rózsa’s score for Spellbound — one of the two theremin scores discussed in the Rózsa lecture. Goldsmith studied music at the University of Southern California, where he took courses with Rózsa himself — a sign that universities were beginning to recognize film music as a legitimate field. By his own admission, Goldsmith was not the best of students; he loved the film courses but was impatient to get out and start working. He ended up at the community college level, where he got a much more hands-on education — coaching singers, playing piano for other musicians, writing music and hearing it performed immediately. In 1950, he got a job at CBS Radio. The way he got in the door is a wonderful story: CBS was not hiring composers, but friends at the network got him a position as a typist, except he could not type. They faked the typing test, covered for him while quietly arranging odd music-writing jobs, and by the end of the year the music department had noticed him and made him a staff writer. As television grew, he began composing for CBS shows, including several episodes of The Twilight Zone. He was doing film work by 1957. His big break came in early 1962 when a score he had composed was noticed by Alfred Newman, long-serving head of music at 20th Century Fox. Newman, who did not know Goldsmith personally, recommended him to Universal Studios — and that is how Goldsmith’s feature-film career began. He even wrote the famous Universal Studios fanfare. By the end of the 1960s he was a top-level composer, and the defining characteristic of his work was versatility: he could write highly modernist, atonal music (as in his 1962 score for Freud) and then turn around and produce something that sounded like it came straight out of the school of Wagner (as in The Blue Max, 1966, with its soaring violins evoking flight). The big takeaway: this is a composer who can write in any style the film demands.

Patton (1970)

Goldsmith’s score for Patton is remarkably sparse — just over forty minutes of music for a film nearly three hours long. Goldsmith preferred less music rather than more; his approach was to assume every scene did not need music unless it could bring something substantial. The film reflects the late 1960s’ growing irony about war — George S. Patton is portrayed as a complex, flawed man rather than a one-dimensional hero. Goldsmith builds the score around three contradictory aspects of Patton’s personality. Patton the general — the war hero everyone sees — gets an upbeat military march. Patton the Christian, who believed God fought on the Allies’ side, gets a hymn-like theme. And strangest of all, Patton believed in reincarnation — that whenever the world was in dire need, he would be reborn as a great military leader. Goldsmith represents this with three short trumpet notes put through an electronic echo device, creating a sense of the trumpet receding at great speed, evoking the image of looking down a long tunnel of history through which Patton has been called over and over to take up arms. This use of recording-studio processing to alter an instrument’s sound after it has been played represents yet another expansion of the film composer’s toolkit.

🎥 Patton — North Africa 🎥

In the North Africa scene, Patton and his aides visit the site of an ancient battle between the Romans and the Carthaginians. As they arrive, a modernist “sound cloud” fills the strings. When Patton steps out of the jeep, we hear the echoed trumpet. As he recounts the battle, a more developed version of the reincarnation theme enters low in the flutes, and when he says “two thousand years ago” the hymn theme appears — a Christian reference to the time of Christ. Then he says “I was here,” and the echoed trumpets return. Goldsmith’s music follows what the character is saying with remarkable precision, drawing on these musical reflections of Patton’s contradictory personality.

🎥 Patton — Advance Through Europe 🎥

The montage blends all three themes: the march accompanies Patton and the advancing troops; the hymn theme accompanies his commanding officers watching the results — Patton as the answer to the Allies’ prayers. Then the mood darkens sharply as we find ourselves in a German command centre, where an officer tallies the cost — thousands of wounded, missing, and killed. The reincarnation theme repeats and shifts in pitch, laying bare the true human cost. A grand restatement of the march as Patton rides at the head of his forces, then one final echo of the reincarnation theme as the German officer tallies even higher numbers.

Planet of the Apes (1968)

Made in 1968, Planet of the Apes is very much a film of its time — rooted in the distrust, cynicism, and irony growing ever stronger within Western culture. The film is not meant to be taken literally; taken literally, it is silly. It is a parable, a cautionary tale, and it does what good science fiction should do: it takes something familiar and twists it until you realize with a shock that you are looking at yourself. Think about the way ape society is structured: the orangutans — the lightest-skinned — are the leaders, judges, and politicians; the chimpanzees are the middle managers; the gorillas — the darkest-skinned — are the security forces and the army. The deciding factor is skin colour. The lighter you are, the higher up the ladder. It is a society structured on racism, and the film dares you to look at that and then turn around and examine your own culture, particularly in the context of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The film also asks pointed questions about the relationship between religion and science: the character of Dr. Zaius serves as both minister of science and head of the church, and when the two roles conflict, he resolves the contradiction simply by ignoring evidence. The character of Taylor, played by Charlton Heston, is very much a man of the late 1960s — completely disillusioned with the human race, which is why he left in the first place.

Goldsmith’s score renders all of this in sound. The instrumentation blends conventional orchestral instruments with elements like animal horns (not pitched instruments, but literally horns taken off animals and hollowed out), metal mixing bowls, and a prepared piano — a concept pioneered by modernist composer John Cage, in which objects such as metal, wood, paper, and plastic are inserted into the strings of a piano to change not the pitch but the timbre of each note, so that some ring, some buzz, and some are dead and muted. Musicians also use unusual techniques: playing their instruments without mouthpieces, playing just mouthpieces, operating the keys of brass and woodwind instruments without actually blowing air through them.

🎥 Planet of the Apes — The Crossing, Part 1 🎥

The astronauts have crash-landed on a mysterious, highly radioactive planet and are crossing a desert in search of food and water. The music sounds random, almost chaotic — no melody you can latch onto, just recurring sounds such as a thunder sheet (a large piece of sheet metal scraped with a smaller piece of metal), string players plucking their instruments with the sound put through electronic echo, and bowed strings slowly pulling out of tune with each other to create an almost plaintive cry. All of these techniques are highly modernist, entirely atonal, and designed to give a real sense of loss and emptiness — these characters have no idea where they are going.

🎥 Planet of the Apes — The Crossing, Part 2 🎥

Then the astronauts find their first plant, and one of them delivers a key line: “Where there’s one, there’s another — and another, and another.” (This line will later be echoed by Dr. Zaius during an interrogation, convinced that a nest of humans is ready to invade.) Now the music restarts, but this time there is structure and order — because the characters have found hope. The phrases come in groups of three notes, four groups making twelve notes in total, followed by a thunder sheet transition, then another pattern of twelve. What Goldsmith is using here is the twelve-tone technique developed by Arnold Schoenberg in 1923. The technique involves creating a tone row — a specific ordering of all twelve chromatic pitches, each used once and only once — and treating all notes with equal importance, deliberately abandoning the major/minor tonality that had defined Western music for centuries. Once a tone row is established, the composer can generate variations: starting the row on a different note (transposition), playing the row backward (retrograde), or flipping the intervals upside down (inversion). The second set of twelve notes in this scene is an inverted version of the first row. Goldsmith uses this tone row throughout the entire film — it appears in the main titles, in The Crossing, and in many other cues, with the other instruments playing transposed, retrograde, and inverted variations. This is the first originally composed film score we encounter that is written entirely in a twelve-tone style, marking the point where the gradual trend toward modernism in film music has fully caught up with what was happening in the concert hall.

🎥 Planet of the Apes — The Takers 🎥

The music for the astronauts is atonal but strongly organized, with a clear, even rhythm supported by snare drum. The music for the unseen “takers” is chaotic — chirping woodwinds and log drums create a more “primitive” sound.

🎥 Planet of the Apes — No Escape 🎥

The score appears to be unrelentingly modernist, but there is one remarkable moment of tonal music — a single, fat consonant chord — reserved for just after Taylor speaks to the apes for the first time: “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” For a moment the apes are speechless, and Goldsmith gives us the only point of musical resolution in the entire film. Throughout the vast majority of the story, Taylor is entirely at the mercy of others; this is the one moment where he has the upper hand, and Goldsmith places his one island of consonance precisely there.

🎥 Planet of the Apes — Final Scene 🎥

The famous ending is one of the finest in cinema history. Taylor rides off down the coastline toward apparent freedom, accompanied by the Crossing theme — which by this point in the film has become familiar enough to offer some comfort. Then he stumbles on the truth. And what does the music do? Nothing. There is no music at all. Goldsmith could have given us a massive restatement of the main theme as Taylor screams “Damn you all to hell!” — and frankly, that would have been a relief, because the music coming back would signal that this is just a film, you can go home, everything is fine. But we do not even get the modernist score we have gradually grown used to. All we hear is the sound of waves as the credits roll, and we are left feeling utterly defeated. That, of course, is the point. The film is trying to say: this is where we are going. If we do not stop doing all the stupid things we are doing, this may well be where we end up. It is one of the best examples in the history of film music of a composer’s most powerful choice being to stay out entirely.

The 1970s — John Williams and the Return of the Orchestra

Part A: Pop Scores and the Declining Orchestra

Think about the trend that has really been building since the 1930s. Korngold and Steiner defined the style for the sound film — a style rooted in their European, late-Romantic training, based on large symphony orchestras in the operatic tradition of Wagner. That style dominated through the thirties and remained important into the forties and fifties with films like Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments. But younger composers were pushing film music in two directions: toward greater dissonance and atonality (the modernism we tracked through Psycho and Planet of the Apes), and toward contemporary popular music, driven by composers with experience in pop styles — people like David Raksin and John Barry — and by the demographic shift brought on by the baby boomers, the appearance of rock and roll, and the growing power of the popular music industry. What was losing out was the big classical orchestral score in the middle, gradually fading in relevance.

At the same time, the film industry was undergoing a process called conglomeration, in which increasingly large multinational corporations bought up film studios along with recording labels and publishing companies. Nowadays you look at all sorts of different entertainment companies and they will often say they are a Disney company or a Sony company, because Disney and Sony are two of these mega-corporations that own numerous interests across the entertainment industry. The studio system, which had kept nearly everyone on salary and helped control costs, had largely been dismantled by the 1960s. The sixties were really the first full decade of freelancing, where most people involved in production were self-employed contract labor working for a given studio on a given film and then going off on their own. The thing about freelancing is that if you are good at your job, you can charge a significant amount of money for it — and that sent costs spiraling. Between 1972 and 1979, the cost of making a film went up by roughly 400 percent — a film that would have cost ten million dollars in 1972 would cost forty million by 1979. Ticket prices, of course, could not keep pace. Hollywood grew very cautious, averaging about 160 feature films per year through the 1970s — roughly three per week — compared to 538 in 1937, considered by many to be the height of the golden age. We start to see far more sequels featuring already-established characters, and genre films — science fiction, disaster, westerns — anything with a natural built-in fan base to guarantee a minimum income at the box office.

This environment favored pop scores. Using popular music could be significantly cheaper because you would not have to hire an entire orchestra of eighty or ninety people; songs were often already recorded, so it became simply a matter of buying licenses. Pop songs could promote the film, and the film could promote the pop songs — a cross-marketing relationship that had been developing since the movie song first appeared in the early 1950s. Not surprisingly, the promise of saving money and possibly generating hit singles led to an awful lot of films that did not use popular music in a terribly interesting way — it was simply there to fill audio space. But there were always examples of genuinely clever uses.

One of the things that limits the use of popular music in film is that songs carry a self-contained structure. If a familiar song is significantly chopped up to fit a scene, it becomes distracting. One effective solution is to have the music phrase the drama — creating a parallel mood without necessarily dropping in on anything specific. A film that uses this approach brilliantly is American Graffiti (1973), a very early film from director George Lucas. The film is set on a single evening in 1962 and follows a group of high school friends about to split up — some going to college, some joining the army, some staying in town to work dead-end jobs. It is really their last night of childhood before they become adults, a film about young people in their final moments of innocence. But 1962 is a fairly important year, because the following year President Kennedy would be assassinated, the United States would become entangled in Vietnam, and the end of the decade would bring a much more cynical, authority-questioning culture. In some ways the film is a metaphor for the end of America’s innocence.

The popular music works so well because there is no real overarching narrative — just a series of small scenes, each lasting about three or four minutes (roughly the length of a pop song), and each scene gets its own particular track. In one scene, Kurt (played by Richard Dreyfuss, who would later play Hooper in Jaws) is driving around with his friends Steve and Laurie — and yes, Steve is a very young Ron Howard, before he becomes director Ron Howard. At a stoplight, Kurt notices a beautiful blonde woman in a car next to them who appears to mouth “I love you” through the window, and he becomes completely enamored, begging Steve to follow her. The song that begins playing is “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” a 1956 hit by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers — the title and subject perfectly applicable to Kurt falling instantly in love with a woman he has never seen before. On one level the music functions as perfectly acceptable source music, reinforcing the diegesis of teenagers driving around in their cars in the early sixties listening to the radio. On another level, each song acts almost as a narrator or Greek chorus — an offstage commentator interpreting events and adding comments that the characters themselves are unaware of.

🎥 The Graduate 🎥

We also see cases where popular music functions not merely as a soundtrack but to some extent as a score. An excellent example is The Graduate (1967), where the music is a series of songs by the folk-pop duo Simon and Garfunkel — the Simon being Paul Simon, who would go on to a tremendously successful solo career. Rather than keeping the songs as they would sound on a record or radio, many are altered or extended to fit the visual narrative, and the vocals are reserved for locations where they would not distract from dialogue. Near the end of the film, the character Benjamin — played by a very young Dustin Hoffman in one of his first big roles — is frantically trying to reach a church where his true love is about to marry another man. The accompanying song is “Mrs. Robinson,” named after one of the main characters, but what we hear in the film is a more scaled-back version: just the guitars, no bass or drums, focused on the introductory riff. Notice how the guitar figures are timed so that we get a real emphasis on the moment Benjamin pulls up in the sports car and jumps out. The vocals drop out and the guitars get quieter so we can hear the dialogue at the gas station. There is even a little bit of hitting the action — as Benjamin smacks the table trying to find out where the church is, the guitar catches the smack, but because it is nowhere near as overt as what we heard in The Man with the Golden Arm, it simply serves to reinforce that single moment. Benjamin jumps back in the car and the guitars intensify, but then the car runs out of gas and the music starts to slow down — something you could not do if you were playing the pop song as a pop song. This is a film that bridges the gap between using a soundtrack and using a score.

John Williams (1932– )

John Towner Williams was born in 1932 in New York City into a musical family. His father was a professional drummer who worked for the CBS orchestra for many years and also played drums on movie scores and for pop stars of the big band era such as Jimmy Dorsey — very much in the forefront of the popular music and film industries through the 1930s, forties, and into the fifties. Not surprisingly, John pursued music as a child and turned out to be very good at it. He went to Juilliard, but also, possibly because of his father’s influence, became a highly proficient jazz pianist. His family moved to Los Angeles when he was a teenager, and he attended the University of Southern California, where he studied composition for film among other things.

His career in film and television really gets going in his late twenties, in the late 1950s. He wrote music for a number of popular television shows, including the main title music for the science fiction show Lost in Space (1965) — listen carefully to the opening and you can hear a theremin, which by the fifties had become closely associated with science fiction. Once the main theme kicks in, you can hear a drum kit playing a light popular music beat underneath the small studio orchestra, because we are in the mid-sixties and popular music is a huge presence in television scoring. He also scored shows like Gilligan’s Island, M Squad, and Land of the Giants. At the same time he was building his film career, working as an orchestrator and completing his first film score as early as 1959. He attracted attention with an Academy Award nomination in 1967.

By the early seventies, Williams had become firmly established, gaining considerable attention for a series of scores he wrote for the producer-director Irwin Allen — something of a J.J. Abrams of his day. Allen produced shows like Lost in Space, which is how the two started working together. In the early seventies, Allen produced a series of disaster films, including The Poseidon Adventure (1972), about a ship capsized by a tidal wave and a small group of survivors who must climb through the upside-down vessel to escape. The film was by far the biggest financial success of 1973, and Williams wrote the music for it. What is really interesting about the score is that the main theme is very tonal — not terribly modernist-sounding, very much a return to something from the forties or fifties. That said, there are also highly atonal moments within the same score. Already at forty, Williams was clearly a composer who could write both very tonal and very atonal material with equal conviction.

His first collaboration with Steven Spielberg came with The Sugarland Express (1974), a film starring a young Goldie Hawn in her first major feature role — she had come out of television, from the comedy show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. It was also the first feature film for its director, a young man only twenty-six years old named Steven Spielberg. The film was about a young woman who goes on the run from the law to regain custody of her child. Set in Texas, the score had a country-and-western influence and featured the harmonica as its main instrument. Although Spielberg was only in his mid-twenties while Williams was already in his early forties, the two got along very well and, by all accounts, enjoyed working together. The following year, when Spielberg was given the go-ahead for his next film, he naturally asked Williams to write the music.

That film was Jaws. Its success really establishes Spielberg’s career, but it also brings John Williams to the attention of the general public far more than any of his other film work — more, really, than any other film composer of the time. The two-note shark theme became an icon of popular culture, signifying danger lurking just out of sight. The following year, Spielberg and Williams collaborated again on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), a film about first contact with aliens. Spielberg was not convinced the film would do well; he was having trouble with the production. Now, Spielberg had a friend — another young director just getting his career going named George Lucas, the director of American Graffiti. Lucas was also working on a science fiction film and having a terrible time: the studios were not interested, he was struggling to get enough money to finish it, and he was worried it would be a flop. The two directors made a bet. Spielberg promised Lucas 2.5 percent of the profits from Close Encounters; in return, Lucas promised Spielberg 2.5 percent of the profits from his film. That film, as you have probably guessed, was Star Wars — and to the best of anyone’s knowledge, Spielberg still gets his 2.5 percent.

Lucas wanted a score for Star Wars that was reminiscent of the films of the golden age. He had created a temp track out of music by composers like Korngold — in fact, the piece he placed over the opening credits was from Korngold’s score for King’s Row. Spielberg told Lucas: you want to talk to John Williams, because he can write in that style. Williams came into the project, heard the temp track, and wrote one of the most famous opening themes in the history of cinema. Star Wars was released in the spring of 1977 — and note, that is what the film was called: just Star Wars. The “Episode IV: A New Hope” business did not appear until just before The Empire Strikes Back came out, and reissues of the original film suddenly had this episode number that nobody had seen before. The film studio expected Star Wars to bomb. Apparently only about forty theatres wanted to take the film initially, and most theatres did not want to book it at all. It was thought the film would play for a couple of weeks and then disappear. It was only when news reports started coming in that people were literally lining up for hours that the studio realized they had made a terrible mistake. Even George Lucas did not know — he was just out for a walk and came across a big lineup, and realized much to his shock that they were lining up to see Star Wars. Within a few weeks, the film had been re-released in hundreds of theatres, and it went on to become one of the most successful films of all time.

Very quickly, part of the credit was given to the music — this remarkable Neoromantic score full of big tonal melodies, very much in the style of Korngold. The main theme, associated with Luke Skywalker, is introduced with grand fanfare in the opening — and then it disappears from the score entirely through a battle in space and a harrowing crossing of a desert. The theme does not return until we see a young man working on a farm and hear his name for the first time: Luke. But now, rather than being grand and heroic, it is quiet, almost innocent, and in true operatic form performed on a solo French horn — the instrument of the outdoorsman, if you recall the discussion of Little John. Williams then puts the theme through complete operatic-style thematic transformation: a full battle-mode version with loud dynamics, irregular accents, and momentary quotes of themes — all the things we had in Korngold’s battle scenes. There is also a love theme built on the interval of a major sixth, and really harsh, nasty brass themes for the villains. The connection to Korngold is absolutely unmistakable.

Part B: Jaws and the Orchestral Renaissance

Jaws was released in 1975, and it marked a fairly important change in the way films were promoted and marketed. Up to this point — all through the golden age, through the forties, fifties, and sixties — when a new film came out, it would first be shown in a very limited number of theatres in places like New York or Los Angeles, where initial reviews would create some buzz. After a couple of weeks, it would open in a few more theatres in major urban centres like Boston, Chicago, or Toronto. After several weeks it would move to slightly smaller markets, and then after several months to smaller towns. A run might take as much as a year to a year and a half, and then the film would disappear — you would not see it again for four or five years until it appeared on network television. But with Jaws they tried a different approach: what would become known as wide release. The film debuted on 400 screens simultaneously and did something remarkable — it made its money back in less than two weeks, showing a profit after only thirteen days. This was unheard of. The wide-release approach very quickly became the industry standard: nowadays a new film will debut on thousands of screens simultaneously, and if it does not show a significant likelihood of profit after its first weekend, it is often pulled from theatres and repackaged for streaming within months.

More importantly for film music, Jaws — along with Star Wars two years later, both scored by Williams — began a shift in attitudes toward orchestral scoring, helping re-establish the orchestra and very tonal melodies as a dominant force in film music.

The score itself is a blend of modernism and a return to the sound of Korngold — a fusion that would come to be called Neoromanticism. But first, the shark theme. Steven Spielberg tells a wonderful story. They had just wrapped production and were in post-production when John Williams called to say he had an idea for the shark. Spielberg drove over, expecting something big and seafaring. Williams sat at the piano and started playing two notes. Spielberg laughed: “That’s so funny. No, seriously, what have you got?” Williams said, “No, that’s it. That’s the theme for the shark.” Spielberg spent about thirty seconds thinking his career was over — the film had already gone well over time and budget, and now his score would consist of two notes played over and over. But then he started to realize it was brilliance, because those two notes could be manipulated depending on what was happening with the shark. They were low in the bass, symbolizing both the size and power of the shark and the ocean depths. The theme could also stand in for the shark on camera: the two large mechanical model sharks kept breaking down once seawater got into them, and in the end Spielberg had to suggest the shark’s presence through movements in the water, glimpses of shadow, and the music. You do not actually see the shark with any clarity until the very end of the film. The two notes trundling over and over represent the unstoppable force of the shark — no subtlety, no rational thought, a machine that, as Hooper says, does nothing but eat, sleep, and make baby sharks.

The theme’s simplicity is its strength — it has no start, it has no end, much like the life of the shark itself. And the influence behind it is unmistakably modernist. In 1913, Russian composer Igor Stravinsky wrote music for a ballet called The Rite of Spring. When it was first performed in Paris, the story goes that it caused a riot — the audience was outraged, fistfights broke out (even in the orchestra, reportedly, while it was in the middle of playing), and Stravinsky hurriedly scooped up his sheet music and ducked out the back door before the police arrived. Williams alternates between two notes rather than keeping the note the same, but the feel is identical and the irregular accents are almost exactly the same — the influence of The Rite of Spring is unmistakable.

🎥 Jaws — The Fishermen 🎥

In this scene, two fishermen have thrown a large hook baited with a roast beef off a pier in hopes of catching the shark from the safety of land. Rather than a point-of-view shot, Spielberg uses objects on the surface — first a floating tire, then the dock itself after it is torn away from land — as representations of the shark. The theme enters as the tire is pulled out to sea and grows in intensity as the dock is pulled away, then dies down as if the threat is passing. The chilling moment comes when the dock turns around — there is a wonderful sound effect of the wood creaking — and then it launches at high speed back toward the shore and the fishermen stranded in the water. Listen to how the theme picks up at the moment the dock starts coming back. The fading away of the music as the dock drifts in harmlessly tells us the danger has passed.

🎥 Jaws — He Made Me Do It 🎥

By now a very clear pattern has emerged: we never get a good look at the shark; instead we get glimpses of shadows, objects on the water moving, or point-of-view shots from the shark’s perspective — and through all of those, Williams’ music. In this scene, all of the visual elements of a shark attack are present — the swimming, the splashing, the panic, an underwater point-of-view shot through dangling legs. But the one thing that is missing is the shark theme. In fact, there is music — a little polka band playing in a gazebo on the beach — which actually calls attention to the absence. The “attack” turns out to be two boys playing a practical joke. What this scene tells us is that the only thing you can genuinely trust to tell you the shark is real is the music. This is reinforced by the scene that follows: a young woman shouts “Shark!” and everyone assumes another prank, but you hear the music, and that tells the audience she is right. The music has become a kind of security blanket — if the shark is near, you hear the theme first.

🎥 Jaws — You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat / The Barrels 🎥

In the final third of the film, the three main characters have gone out onto the ocean — the home of the shark — aboard a boat called the Orca. And here the big payoff arrives: the shark appears without any musical warning whatsoever. For the entire film up to this point, the audience has depended on hearing the theme before the shark arrives. Now that security blanket is ripped away — the shark can appear at any moment without warning, significantly ramping up the fear. (There is also a great moment as Brody backs into the cabin and apparently improvises the now-iconic line, “You’re going to need a bigger boat” — a phrase that became a cultural shorthand for being in over your head.) Then comes a complex sequence: the shark theme builds as the shark approaches the boat, but when the shark actually passes and we get our first good look at the creature (1:25), Williams drops the shark theme entirely for music far grander and more expressive. It is a moment of spectacle — the sweeping music represents not the murderous monster but an extraordinary creature, and the wonder, admiration, and fear of the men seeing their quarry for the first time.

The music then differentiates the characters: for Quint (1:40) it is focused and precise — his only thought is to catch and kill the shark. For Hooper it takes on an excited innocence, reflecting his almost childlike glee at seeing the shark. As Quint prepares to shoot the harpoon, the build intensifies with the release coming only at the moment of the shot (4:17).

Then the music changes completely. From 4:22 to 4:50, the score is pure Korngold — pirate music that would have been completely at home in The Adventures of Robin Hood. And at 4:50, as the barrel disappears under the water, the music drops in intensity and pitch, slowing the pacing in a manner identical to the end of the battle scene in The Sea Hawk.

Williams’ Style and Legacy

The score for Jaws oscillates back and forth between modernism and Neoromanticism. With Jaws, we have a main theme that is highly modernist, but a score full of moments of Neoromanticism. With Star Wars, in a way, we have the reverse: the dominant themes are highly tonal and Neoromantic, but the score still contains a great deal of modernism — the music for the Jawas, the desert scavenger people, draws heavily on Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. This blending will be one of the defining elements of Williams’ style: a composer who writes very tonal, lovely Neoromantic melodies but still carries the potential for modernism when it is required.

On the one hand, Williams can write beautiful tonal melodies completely appropriate for the Korngold tradition, like his score for Empire of the Sun (1987). You can hear the populist influence of Aaron Copland — almost a folk-like quality — in the score for Lincoln (2012). And yet he is capable of atonal writing that would have had Stanley Kubrick wishing he had hired Williams for 2001. He also has a strong background in jazz: though he never strays into contemporary pop styles, he can write convincingly in jazz-influenced idioms, such as the cool-jazz score for Catch Me If You Can (2002).

This is why John Williams is recognized as the first truly post-modern composer in film music. We have talked about modernism — the aesthetic idea focused on overturning old rules, pursuing atonality and twelve-tone music. By the second half of the twentieth century, a new artistic ideal emerges, often called post-modernism. In music, post-modernism generally means a recognition that any style is valid if it meets the emotional moment. With Williams, composers can reach into any point in history to find what makes the most sense, and they do not have to stick with one set of rules. What is most important is the emotion of the moment: is the music doing what it needs to do within the context of the film?

There are not enough superlatives to describe the career of John Williams. Over his career he has received 25 Grammy Awards and been nominated for the Academy Award 52 times, winning five. At 52 nominations, he is the second most nominated individual in the history of the Academy Awards — the only person with more is Walt Disney. From 1980 to 1993, he served as conductor and musical director of the Boston Pops Orchestra, which had a weekly television show on public television seen by thousands of people. He began programming concert adaptations of his film scores, and these quickly became some of the most popular pieces the Pops performed. Other orchestras followed suit, and unlike any other composer up to that point, Williams’ music took on a life of its own outside the films.

And then, probably the thing that made the biggest impact: arrangements of Williams’ music for high school bands. Almost everybody who comes out of a high school music program in the Western Hemisphere plays at least one adaptation of a Williams film score at some point. That, perhaps more than anything else, is why his fame has persevered so long and extended so far beyond the film world. His influence, along with that of Hans Zimmer (whom we will encounter later), makes him almost certainly the most influential composer in the history of the Hollywood film industry.

The 1980s — Silvestri and Horner

Part A: The Neo-Romantic Generation

The 1980s were strongly influenced by the work of John Williams. This is arguably the decade when Williams is at the height of his powers — the late seventies through the early to mid-eighties see many of his best-known scores: Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. for Spielberg, the second and third films in the Star Wars trilogy. Through the 1980s, Williams’ style becomes very much a touchstone, a starting point for so many other composers. The big symphony orchestra has returned to the fore, and the dominant musical style became Neo-Romantic — heavily tonal, very much influenced by Korngold — fused with elements of modernism that appear in less obvious places, often underneath action sequences.

Several composers rise to prominence during this period, really the first generation after the appearance of Star Wars. They include James Horner, the American composer Michael Kamen (who contributed scores to the Die Hard series, Lethal Weapon, and at least one James Bond film, and who fairly early in his career worked with Pink Floyd on the film adaptation of The Wall in 1982 — he died in 2003, only fifty-seven), and Alan Silvestri.

Alan Silvestri (1950– )

Alan Silvestri was born in 1950, making him by far the youngest composer discussed so far — a teenager in the new popular music world of rock and roll, growing up when groups like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were at the height of their early careers. His most important formal music training came at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. We have talked about Juilliard as the leading institute for classical musicians; you can think of Berklee as essentially the Juilliard of contemporary popular and jazz music — just as reputable, just as hard to get into, with an alumni list that reads as a who’s-who of popular music in North America, accounting for almost 300 Grammy Awards. After Berklee, Silvestri moved into film and television almost immediately. His most notable contribution through the seventies was the music for the television series CHiPs. Where he becomes established as a major film composer is the 1980s, working particularly with director Robert Zemeckis — a very long and fruitful collaboration including Back to the Future (1985), Forrest Gump (1994), Cast Away (2000), and The Polar Express (2004). His more recent work includes the Avengers franchise (he scored the original Captain America and three of the four Avengers films), Ready Player One (2018), and The Witches (2020).

🎥 Back to the Future — Scene 1 🎥

The score Silvestri writes for Back to the Future has a very high level of similarity with something like Star Wars. Clearly the films are not alike — Back to the Future is a comedy — but the approach taken with the music is that it does not play the comedy. The music plays the film seriously, and that is part of what makes it funny: very dramatic music for fairly absurd moments. It is not hard to imagine the film was temp-tracked with music from Star Wars. This is not plagiarism — it is how film music works. Directors have an idea of what they want, and it is up to the composer to get close to it. But Williams has become the new normal, and all through the 1980s there are meetings between directors and composers that start with “I really want this to sound like John Williams.”

🎥 Back to the Future — Scene 2 🎥

When characters are in peril, the music turns highly rhythmic and modernist — intense, quite modernist-sounding music playing the sense of threat and danger. Then there is a wonderful moment when the scene cuts to Marty in the DeLorean: listen carefully and you hear the main theme, except now in true Williams/Korngold fashion it is almost battle music, with a driving rhythm and a thematic quote that says Marty is in danger because he cannot get the car started. Notice how fast the music shifts between tonal restatements of the main theme and modernist danger music as the scene cuts back and forth between Doc struggling with the cable and Marty in the car. There is a great moment where Doc accidentally pulls the cable out of its connector on the ground — the music plays up to it and then drops away for a reaction shot before cutting back to a snare drum driving the action along. The whole sequence is wonderfully put together.

🎥 Contact — OK to Go 🎥

Contact (1997), also directed by Zemeckis, was based on a novel by the astrophysicist and science popularizer Carl Sagan — a fiction about what first contact with an alien intelligence might actually be like, envisioning not a giant spaceship but a radio communication from a distant star packed with extraordinary information, including instructions for building a device to open a wormhole. Despite this grand element, it was also a very personal story about a brilliant young woman, Ellie Arroway, who loses her father young and becomes an incredibly driven scientist with great difficulty making personal connections. For the main theme, Silvestri focuses on Ellie the person rather than the grand space narrative, turning once again to the influence of Williams and Aaron Copland to write a very simple, beautifully intimate tonal melody — the kind of populist theme that could easily be turned into a folk song. You could play it for someone and they would guess it was about a couple falling in love, not a scientist about to travel through a wormhole.

This scene also introduces an important concept: minimalism. Minimalism does not mean minimal music; it means you build a piece from fairly small, simple materials — one or two basic musical ideas that repeat through several iterations, generally getting bigger and bigger with other elements layered on top, until you have a massive wall of sound by the climax. When the scene starts there is no music, reinforcing Ellie’s isolation above this massive piece of machinery. When the music enters, it consists of two components: a light, delicate repeating pattern and a set of slower notes outlining a simple line. Silvestri repeats these materials, the repetition building intensity. Watch what happens between 3:30 and 4:00 when the crew loses contact with Ellie: the quick repeating pattern drops away, replaced by an almost oppressive brass figure. They are on the verge of cancelling when Ellie’s friend Kent says, “I hear her” — and that first musical figure comes back, dropped right down to a very quiet, almost fragile structure. You realize that is Ellie: terrified but still wanting to see what happens. This approach — taking simple ideas, repeating them, building and building — is going to become central to the style of Hans Zimmer.

Part B: James Horner (1953–2015)

James Horner was born in 1953 in Los Angeles, California. His father, Harry Horner, was a very well-respected set designer and art director in Hollywood who received two Academy Awards for his work. When James was still very young, his father moved the family to London to pursue more opportunities for his own film career, and while there James began to take music seriously, attending the prestigious Royal College of Music. When he was a teenager, the family returned to Los Angeles.

Here we have an interesting irony: despite his father’s success in the film industry, James himself had no real interest in pursuing film music. By his own admission, he was one of those composers who viewed film composing as a lesser art form — if you were a really good composer, you would write “real” music, not second-rate music for films. He attended UCLA, pursuing studies to become a concert-hall composer, and was working on his doctorate in composition in the late 1970s when a friend who worked for the American Film Institute (AFI) asked him to write music for some short films. Horner was not interested at first, but his friend kept asking. When he finally agreed and saw his music accompanying a film in a theatre for the first time, he instantly fell in love with the idea. He was apparently in the middle of teaching a music theory course at UCLA, so he had to finish up the term, but when it ended he set off to establish himself as a film composer. Within a year he had his first major feature: The Lady in Red (1979), a gangster film set in the 1930s. He also did some work with the cult film director Roger Corman. But what really established him as a major force was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982).

Through the eighties and nineties, Horner had a very impressive run of success with films such as Aliens (1986), Field of Dreams (1989), Braveheart (1995), and Apollo 13 (1995). The score for Aliens is particularly notable because it was his first time working with director James Cameron — and the experience was something of a nightmare. Horner expected six weeks to do the score, but Cameron was still editing the film and was not ready for another three weeks, leaving Horner working under an extraordinarily tight time constraint. Once they reached the recording stage, Cameron did not like the score and wanted changes — but he was used to dealing with composers who used synthesizers, where re-recording was easy, and did not fully understand that once the orchestra was in the studio, that was pretty much it. Cameron ended up chopping up the score, moving pieces around, and bringing in music from other films. There was a famous exchange in which Horner said, “I do not have the time to write the score that this film needs,” to which Cameron reportedly replied, “Well, if you can’t, maybe I’ll hire someone who can.” Neither was happy — Horner described it as a nightmare, and Cameron to this day says he does not like the score. And yet, the score became one of the most used in temp tracks for years afterward, and one cue in particular — “Bishop’s Countdown” — has gone on to be used in more movie trailers than almost any other single piece of music.

The two eventually resolved their differences, and in 1997 Cameron asked Horner to score Titanic. Horner took the film’s main theme and, working with lyricist Will Jennings, wrote the movie song “My Heart Will Go On,” performed by Celine Dion. Interestingly, the song was the song no one wanted. Cameron did not want a movie song because he thought it would make his film too commercial. Dion did not want to sing it because she had already had a hit with a movie song for Disney. Even the producer-songwriter David Foster said that when he first heard the melody, he thought it was a terrible mistake — it sounded to him like they were going to put lyrics to the theme from Jaws. But the song became an extraordinary success, selling almost 20 million copies worldwide and remaining one of the best-selling singles by a female vocalist ever. Horner received two Academy Awards for Titanic — Best Original Score and Best Original Song — the only two he won, although he was nominated ten times. The original score recording went on to become, by many accounts, the best-selling orchestral album of all time, a position it won from Williams’ recording of the Star Wars score.

Horner’s characteristics: he was a strong melodic composer, though his melodies tended to be a little tighter and shorter than Williams’ long, extended Korngold-like lines. He typically worked with a conventional orchestra but was comfortable incorporating synthesizers and electronic sounds — unlike Williams, who rarely used electronics. He was adept at writing in contemporary popular styles, weaving in and out of pop with conventional orchestral writing. And he was exceptionally skilled at synchronizing music to visual elements such as scene and camera changes — not mickey mousing, but a close, precise alignment of musical gestures with cuts and transitions. All composers deal with the idea of hitting the cut, but Horner was remarkably good at writing music that could hit a whole series of cuts while still sounding smooth and flowing.

🎥 Glory — The Battle 🎥

Glory (1989) is set during the United States Civil War and follows a young, idealistic white officer named Robert Gould Shaw (played by Matthew Broderick), a real historical figure whose story was drawn largely from letters he wrote to his mother. Shaw believed strongly in the abolition of slavery and was given what he thought was the honour of leading the first all-Black regiment to serve in the Northern Army, only to find that there was virtually as much racism within the Northern army as in their enemies to the south.

Watch the opening sequence closely. After the title card and the first scene of tents with the rising sun, pay attention to how many times a strong musical entry coincides with a change in camera angle — around 34 seconds, 41 seconds, 49 seconds, 53 seconds, 55 seconds, and continuing until about the 1:30 mark. This is Horner’s trademark tight coordination at its finest. The opening features a simple trumpet melody deliberately recorded with lots of echo and reverberation, making it sound as if it is coming from a great distance — electronic manipulation that evokes a sense of historical distance, as though this is something from the past. Snare drums and field drums enter with the title card, at first muted as though still distant, then brighter and more aggressive as we draw closer. And what “instrument” carries the main theme in full orchestration? A choir — specifically a boys’ choir. Children’s voices symbolize both the optimism and idealism of Robert Gould Shaw and, ultimately, his naivety. As Shaw begins to speak in voiceover, a second theme enters with a lovely nobility, starting within the children’s choir before shifting into the strings with even more grandeur. Toward the end of the opening, Horner takes a falling phrase from this second theme and superimposes it on the opening trumpet theme, both playing simultaneously — a breathtaking passage with an astonishing sense of grandeur and dignity. And then the first real battle scene arrives, and all that music disappears. All you get is a snare drum — an instant, devastating juxtaposition of war as glorious noble endeavour and the reality of blood, pain, and death.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

Star Trek was an American television series that ran for three seasons in the mid-to-late 1960s — in many ways typical of its time, with plywood sets and rubber-headed aliens. Its popularity really took off in the 1970s through syndication, in part because its stories were quite subtle and nuanced, doing what good science fiction does: taking contemporary social issues and recasting them in a future world. The show was also remarkably optimistic for the cynical sixties and seventies: the captain was American, but the navigator was Russian (at the peak of the Cold War), the pilot was Japanese (only twenty years after World War II), and the communications officer was an African-American woman — extraordinary in the midst of the civil rights movement and the beginnings of the women’s liberation movement.

The first film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), scored by Jerry Goldsmith, was ambitious and beautiful but very slow-moving and not a huge success. The studio was willing to gamble on a second film with a much tighter budget. There is a famous story: producer Harve Bennett was asked by the Paramount studio head if he could make a better film, and he said yes. Then the head asked, “Can you make a better film for less than forty-five f***ing million dollars?” Bennett reportedly replied, “I can make five movies for that much money.” The budget was set at eight million, later raised to twelve. Director Nicholas Meyer wanted to evoke the imagery of sailing ships at sea — the age of the great galleons — and this nautical sensibility would pervade everything from costume design to dialogue to the staging of the battles. Goldsmith was the first choice to score the sequel, but the reduced budget meant they could not afford him, which is how James Horner got the job.

The score is primarily orchestral and tonal, with modernist elements and electronic instruments. The main title opens with a sustained note high in the violins, with synthesizers making rhythmic, almost ambient noise underneath — an example of Horner’s comfort with electronics. Then a trumpet fanfare: the opening line from the original television series theme, included deliberately to signal that this really is Star Trek. Horner’s main theme for Kirk and the Enterprise follows — beautiful undulating strings with a soaring melody over the top, something that would be in keeping with vast battleships with sails unfurled cutting a path through uncharted waters. But it is not a rousing heroic theme; it is much slower-moving, carrying a sense of uncertainty. Meyer wanted to humanize these characters, particularly Kirk. In the original series Kirk rarely made mistakes; now he is an admiral confined to a desk job, surrounded by antiques, getting older. His eyes are starting to fail, and whatever the twenty-third-century treatment is, Kirk cannot use it — he is allergic to it. Kirk is literally allergic to the future.

Khan’s theme is built from three notes clustered together — semitones, just like the theme for Norman Bates. No clear sense of major or minor, unpredictable in direction, reflecting a character whose only predictable quality is his anger. When Khan is first revealed, those three notes are very quiet, matching his calm, controlled exterior — watch for the moment, beautifully played by Ricardo Montalban, when you see just a glint behind his eyes as the anger and madness threaten to bubble to the surface before he gets it back under control. Later, those same three notes played aggressively become the embodiment of Khan’s anger unleashed.

🎥 Star Trek — Battle 1 🎥

Through this entire sequence, the battle between Kirk and Khan is also a battle between their two themes. As shots go back and forth between the two ships, the themes bounce back and forth — Kirk’s theme when we are on the Enterprise, Khan’s when we cut to the Reliant. Gradually Kirk’s theme dies away while Khan’s grows ever more dominant. Shots on the bridges are scored more quietly; exterior shots get grander, more spectacular articulations, almost always of Khan’s theme because Khan is in charge. The scene begins with the kind of bickering between McCoy and Spock that was very much part of the original series, and then Lieutenant Saavik (played by Kirstie Alley in her first big role) identifies the approaching ship as one of theirs — the Reliant. Playing against that identification entirely, we hear Khan’s theme, telling us Khan is on that ship while Kirk and his crew are completely unaware of their danger. Notice too that the battle is staged not like an airplane dogfight but like two galleons firing broadsides: the Reliant does not open fire until the Enterprise is right next to it, almost side by side, because that is how sailing ships fought. After almost four minutes of gradually building battle music, Kirk is informed he is being told to surrender. Horner brings the music to a stop. For the first time in over two and a half minutes, we hear Kirk’s theme — in a mournful, tragic version, thematic transformation mirroring Kirk’s shock.

🎥 Star Trek — Battle 2 🎥

Kirk appeals to Khan, offering to give himself up if the crew of cadets can be spared. It seems all may be lost — but at 1:11, quiet, uncertain music enters with a precise, orderly rhythm, suggesting Kirk and the Enterprise rather than Khan’s drive for vengeance. At 1:32, an exterior shot — Horner catches it, the music jumping in intensity, sounding like Khan’s theme except it runs out of steam and trails off, suggesting Khan is no longer in the advantaged position he thinks he is. And then the pivotal moment: at exactly 2:00, Kirk puts on his glasses. That is when Horner brings back the Kirk theme. What that moment says is that Kirk needs to embrace who he is now — a flawed man, not the one from the series who would end up shirtless and running off with the alien after thwarting the bad guys. Now he is older; he has to think his way out rather than blast his way out. And what happens next is one of the best moments in the film: Khan suddenly realizes Kirk has outthought him and frantically tries to mount a defence before Kirk opens fire.

Horner went on to tremendous success, including Avatar (2009) for Cameron. In addition to composing, he had a great love of flying and was a licensed pilot with a small collection of airplanes. In 2015, apparently flying fairly low through some canyons, he lost control and crashed. He was sixty-one. At the time of his death, he had just finished work on the score for the remake of The Magnificent Seven (2016), starring Denzel Washington. The film was still in production, but Horner had worked out the main themes and done early demo work. When the film came out, the score was completed by a friend and colleague based on Horner’s sketches. That is considered to be his final score.

Electronic Scores and Danny Elfman

Part A: The Rise of Electronic Music in Film

The lecture opens with the score from The Terminator (1984), composed and performed entirely on synthesizers by Brad Fiedel. The professor recalls buying his first serious keyboard synthesizer — a Roland Juno 106 — that same year, and going to see the film with his drummer friend Tony Azzopardi. Hearing that score was a revelation: you could produce an entire film score by yourself with synthesizers. He was even more impressed by Fiedel’s work on Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), which blended synthesizers with live percussion to create something that sounded simultaneously electronic and orchestral — an inspiration that, by his own admission, set him on the path to where he is today.

What is a synthesizer? Simply put, it is a musical instrument that creates and modifies sound through electronic circuitry — using electrons to make noise. Although something like Jerry Goldsmith putting violins through an echo unit would not count (that is an acoustic instrument being electronically modified), the theremin, which produces its sound entirely through electronics, can be considered an early forerunner. By the 1950s, synthesizers had become quite complex, but they looked nothing like what you would find in a music store. The RCA Synthesizer at Columbia University was massive — it took up an entire room, was tremendously expensive, and was not terribly user-friendly. There was no musical keyboard. You did not play one of these synthesizers; you programmed them, often through the use of paper punch cards. You would work out your piece by punching holes in computer cards, feed the cards into the machine, and the computer would think about it for a few days before producing a recording — either directly onto a record through a record lathe, or onto magnetic tape. That would be the first time you actually heard your piece. The term was not “performing” or “recording” the music — it was realizing the piece, and the process could take months or even years. Only highly established concert-hall composers or university faculty members could get anywhere near these instruments, and the composers drawn to them tended to be leading figures in mid-twentieth-century modernism. They were not using synthesizers to produce music that sounded like Wagner; the attraction was that the synthesizer could produce abstract sounds and textures utterly impossible for conventional instruments to reproduce.

Milton Babbitt’s Ensembles for Synthesizer (1964) is a characteristic example. Even a short excerpt took Babbitt — a major figure who was one of the composers most responsible for fully developing Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique — two years to complete. He had turned to electronic music when he found twelve-tone composition too limiting. He used synthesizers not only to move completely beyond tonality into something entirely abstract, but also to move away from the actual sounds of conventional instruments into a new world of timbres.

Clearly, though, using a 1950s synthesizer for film scoring was impractical: it took far too long to produce finished music, and the utter lack of tonality would sound cold and remote in any narrative that called for conventional emotion. Forbidden Planet (1956) featured “musical realizations” by Louis and Bebe Barron — a husband-and-wife team who not only composed electronic music but actually built their own instruments. (Bebe was a nickname; her real name was Charlotte.) The credit ran as “musical realizations” partly for legal reasons. The professor finds the result beautiful in a way, but notes that listening to it for an entire film is almost exhausting — there is never any real sense of whether a scene is romantic, dangerous, or comedic. The music presents an otherworldly frame but does not engage with the narrative in any tangible way, and the experiment did not catch on:

Where things get really interesting for film scoring is 1964, because in that year an inventor-musician named Bob Moog produced the first commercially available synthesizer. Three things made this instrument revolutionary. First, it was small — modular in design, with all the different components packaged in separate boxes that could be carried around. You created sounds by plugging short connector cables from one box to the next; these were called patch cords, and to this day a specific synthesizer sound is referred to as a “patch” for exactly this reason. Second, it came with a musical keyboard — the same type of keyboard attached to a piano — which meant you could actually play it like a conventional instrument. You could still create the very abstract sounds of the Babbitt era, but you could also very easily play music that sounded absolutely tonal. Third, it was commercially available: you could buy one and take it home. You did not need to be Milton Babbitt or a member of a university faculty to get access to one.

Walter/Wendy Carlos (1939– )

While Bob Moog was designing his synthesizer, he was consulting extensively with a composer-musician named Wendy Carlos. At the time, Wendy was still living under her birth name, Walter. She was a highly experienced, highly trained modernist who had done a great deal of work in university electronic studios, including the RCA synthesizer. But she was also interested in being able to play synthesizers the way one played a piano, and she advised Moog extensively as he developed the instrument.

In 1968, Carlos used the Moog synthesizer to record an album of music by Johann Sebastian Bach. The process was extraordinarily time-intensive: the early synthesizers were not polyphonic — you could not play more than one note at a time on the keyboard. If you pressed two notes down, you would only hear one of them. So each individual part had to be performed and recorded onto a multi-track tape machine, then Carlos would listen back and layer a second part, then a third, building up the entire piece one voice at a time. A single piece could take days or even weeks to complete. The album was called Switched-On Bach, and the record label that released it, Columbia Masterworks, regarded it as an interesting curiosity — just one of several classical albums they were putting out that year. To everyone’s surprise, the album became a genuine popular-culture phenomenon. It sold well over a million copies, was one of the most popular albums of the year, and received three Grammy Awards in 1969. It put the idea of the synthesizer front and center in the popular consciousness.

Switched-On Bach also caught the attention of director Stanley Kubrick, who asked Carlos to write and perform the score for A Clockwork Orange (1971) — some of it originally composed, much of it classical music realized on synthesizers. In 1982 Carlos scored Disney’s Tron, one of the first films to make extensive use of computer-generated graphics. The music makes use of synthesizers to create new and interesting textures, but clearly comes from a composer with one foot still in the world of classically trained modernism. Disney liked the idea of a synthesized score and the celebrity that Wendy Carlos brought to the project, but they were nervous that the score would not get finished on time. They insisted on orchestral instruments being added to speed up the process. Carlos agreed but was apparently very unhappy about it and never liked the addition, often producing synthesized versions to replace the orchestral passages wherever she had time.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, musicians working in popular styles began to experiment with synthesizers, leading to the emergence of progressive rock — guitar-based rock bands increasingly interested in the forms and techniques of classical music — and early electronica, popular music groups based largely or entirely on synthesizers. Both genres made extensive use of long instrumental formal structures, and long instrumental formal structures are, of course, something that can be used to very good effect in film scoring.

A notable early example came in 1973, when British progressive rock musician Mike Oldfield released an album called Tubular Bells. Later that year, the horror film The Exorcist used the album’s title track as its main theme. There is a great story behind that choice. The original plan was for the film to have a full score by Lalo Schifrin, an A-list composer with a strong jazz influence — best known for the Dirty Harry films and, of course, for the Mission: Impossible television theme. Schifrin had written about ten or fifteen minutes of music when the studio decided to do a test screening with some scenes from the film set to his score. The film was already quite frightening by the standards of 1973; combined with Schifrin’s music, it apparently terrified the test audiences — including some film executives — to the point that the studio was afraid of releasing the film. They dropped Schifrin’s music entirely, which is why The Exorcist actually contains very little prominent score.

The synthesizer quickly found its way into other scores of the period. Sorcerer (1977) was scored by electronica pioneers Tangerine Dream, whose approach established a template that many synthesizer composers would follow: a simple percussive pattern of some kind, then over that a repeating series of notes — what musicians call an ostinato — typically in the bass, and then over the top of that some sort of slowly evolving melodic texture. Halloween (1978) was scored by director John Carpenter himself. Carpenter grew up in a musical household — his father was a music teacher — but he did not have a lot of formal training and largely learned to compose and play by ear. The stylistic approach was similar: a rhythmic pulse, a repeating note pattern, and slowly evolving electronic sounds over the top.

This same approach is very much the inspiration behind the main title music for the Netflix series Stranger Things, composed by Michael Stein and Kyle Dixon. The whole first season is a tribute to the films of people like Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter. The monster from the Upside Down is essentially a combination of the shark from Jaws and the creature from Carpenter’s remake of The Thing; the character of Eleven — this lost, seemingly fragile little creature who turns out to have remarkable power — is clearly the character of E.T. If you watch carefully, movie posters in the background always have some reference to what is happening in the season, and even the opening-title font is the same one that appeared on the covers of Stephen King’s novels from this period.

By the early 1980s, synthesizers had become smaller, more powerful, and more affordable, but a composer still needed an expensive recording studio to layer up all the parts. In 1983, the industry adopted MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) — a specification for hardware and software that allowed synthesizers to communicate with one another and, crucially, with the emerging wonder of the decade: the personal computer. Without getting too deeply into technical details, what MIDI and a personal computer meant was that you could record not sound but information about a performance and then manipulate it in any way you wanted. For example: you play a series of notes on a keyboard; the computer records the fact that you played this note, then waited so long, then played that note. Now you can tell the computer to play the performance back at a faster tempo without replaying a single note. You can transpose it to a lower pitch. You can change the sound from a piano to orchestral strings. Each of those changes, if you were working with a tape machine, would have required you to replay the parts from scratch. With MIDI, you play once and manipulate endlessly. And the thing you no longer need is the giant, expensive multi-track tape recorder — you can do it all in a computer, then record the final result down to a single stereo track and send it off to your director.

The advent of MIDI meant that with a reasonably powerful personal computer and a few synthesizers, almost anyone could create fairly complex, fully orchestrated-sounding music in their spare bedroom. An entire generation of musicians who had grown up with perhaps a little formal training — or hardly any at all — but who knew how to play their instrument and had learned to compose by ear, could now get into the world of film scoring without having to write everything out on paper for an orchestra.

Vangelis (1943–2022)

Two of the best-known electronic scores of this period were created by a Greek composer named Evangelos Odysseus Papathanassiou — better known to the world as Vangelis, for reasons that are fairly self-evident once you see the full name. Vangelis started playing music quite early but did not take to lessons; in the end he was largely self-taught. In his early twenties he moved first to Paris and then to London, where he settled and began film scoring. His approach was to create scores entirely on his own, using the resources of a recording studio and layering up recordings of synthesizers, piano, and some acoustic percussion.

In 1981, he scored Chariots of Fire, a historical drama based on a group of British athletes competing in the 1924 Paris Olympics. Rather than a big sweeping orchestral period score, he used synthesizers, piano, and percussion. The main theme became tremendously popular — something of a hit of the time — and a music video was produced showing Vangelis performing alone on an empty stage surrounded by instruments, then in a recording studio with all his synthesizers, clearly reinforcing the idea that this was not a score performed by an orchestra but produced entirely by one individual musician:

Chariots of Fire — Main Theme

The following year, Vangelis composed the score for Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott. The film is science fiction but also very much a contemporary film noir, heavily influenced by the 1940s style discussed earlier in the course. The synthesizers create a lush, spacious sound — very slow-moving, atmospheric, and moody, with all sorts of different timbres functioning almost like the different sections of an orchestra:

🎥 Blade Runner 🎥

Part B: Danny Elfman (1953– )

Danny Elfman was born in 1953 in Los Angeles — more or less the same age that James Horner would have been had he not been killed in a plane crash. Interestingly, Elfman is the first composer in the course for whom the professor can say this: he had really very little interest in music. He did some sporadic studying, but his teachers described him as fairly pointless to have in music class. He was much more interested in motion pictures, particularly science fiction films. He does, however, recall the first time he noticed film music could be truly powerful: at about age eleven or twelve, he saw The Day the Earth Stood Still for the first time. The composer, of course, was Bernard Herrmann, and to this day Elfman has said that Herrmann’s work has been by far the single biggest influence on his own.

He developed an interest in music in his teens, teaching himself piano, guitar, and violin. In the early 1970s, his brother — who was very involved in theatre and film — asked Danny to become the musical director of his theatre troupe. Working for the troupe was, in a way, a bit like Bernard Herrmann working at CBS Radio: it gave Elfman opportunities to experiment with all sorts of unusual instrumental combinations and different types of music. In 1979 the troupe — called The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo — produced a film called Forbidden Zone, which was really Elfman’s first film-scoring job in a way, though it was more musical than narrative. By the early 1980s the troupe had morphed into an eighties pop band, shortened their name to Oingo Boingo, and achieved some fairly significant success. Their song “Weird Science” (1985) is representative — Elfman is the lead singer:

Oingo Boingo had some notable fans. A young director named Tim Burton and a young television star named Paul Reubens were about to embark on the production of a feature film built around Reubens’s best-known character, Pee-wee Herman. They approached Elfman and asked if he would like to do the score. Elfman was unsure — although he had done Forbidden Zone, he had never done a straight-ahead film score. But two things were going for him. First, it was 1985: MIDI had arrived, synthesizers were tremendously powerful, and it was much easier for a very talented but largely self-taught composer to work out complex musical ideas. Second, he had a secret weapon. His friend and fellow member of Oingo Boingo, guitarist Steve Bartek, had a degree from UCLA in composition and was trained in orchestration. Danny could work out his ideas with keyboards and synthesizers, explain what he wanted, and Steve could translate those ideas into parts that real orchestral musicians could play. This is actually quite similar to something discussed earlier in the course: Charlie Chaplin was a very gifted musician who lacked the formal training to write everything out for an orchestra, but because he was Charlie Chaplin the studio made an exception. Now, in the mid-1980s, the technology had reached a point where this collaborative approach was far more practical.

This raises a question: if synthesizers make everything easier, why bother with orchestras at all? The answer is that people use synthesizers for one of two reasons. First, because they genuinely want the unique sound that synthesizers bring — they use them by choice. Second, because they do not have the budget for a room full of live musicians. A room full of good musicians in a nice recording studio will always sound better than keyboards alone. The professor illustrates this with a personal anecdote: he recently spent about eight hours working on a ninety-second piece for a commercial for the Nature Conservancy of Canada, and the client was very happy, but he could not help thinking how much better it would have sounded with real strings instead of his digital approximations. The real breakthrough of MIDI and synthesizers, then, is that they allow someone like Danny Elfman to work out ideas for an orchestra that a formally trained partner like Steve Bartek can then turn into something that makes sense to a room full of orchestral musicians — the best of both worlds. And indeed, if you look at pictures of Elfman composing, he does not sit in front of sheet music. He sits in front of a musical keyboard connected to computers and synthesizers, working out his ideas entirely by ear.

Elfman’s breakthrough score was Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), directed by Tim Burton — the beginning of a long and fruitful collaboration. Elfman’s relationship with Burton is very much like John Williams’s relationship with Steven Spielberg. Even in this first film, many of the hallmarks of Elfman’s style are already audible — including the influence of Bernard Herrmann. In one scene where Pee-wee returns to find his beloved bike stolen, listen for the shrieking strings, clearly channeling the Psycho shower scene:

Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure — Stolen Bike

The professor describes Elfman’s style through a vivid analogy. Imagine growing up in a small town where, one day each summer, a bunch of tractor-trailer trucks pull into a big parking lot downtown and overnight an amusement fair appears — rides, arcades, candy floss. At night it looks terribly exciting, almost a mystical land with all the lights flashing and the rides going. But look too closely and you notice the paint is flaking off, there is rust where there should not be, the rides are held together by duct tape and spit. The people who work there seem very nice, but they do not blink quite as often as a human being should, and when they smile their smiles are a little too wide, perhaps with a few too many teeth. That is Elfman’s music: a frantic, almost chaotic sense of fun on the surface — child-like, not childish; there is a naivety and innocence — but lurking just beneath is a darkness, an ominous quality, almost like a nightmare where everything appears to be normal but slowly you realize nothing is where it should be and no one is who they should be. Part of this may be due to his lack of formal training fused with obvious musical talent: not having gone through the rigorous conservatory system, he is willing to do things that other composers might view as mistakes — putting instruments together that most trained composers would avoid. But it is not a mistake when Elfman does it, because it is exactly what he hears in his head.

In more concrete terms, Elfman often uses recognizable elements but twists them. He favors dance rhythms: 3/4 time (waltz — one-two-three, one-two-three) and a very fast 2/4 (polka — one-two, one-two). In The Simpsons theme, for instance, during a fast polka section the bass instruments shift to a note that is considerably more dissonant than expected, adding a sense of menace underneath all the craziness on top. His orchestration favors the glockenspiel — a percussion instrument with metal bars played with mallets (you almost certainly played a smaller version in public school music class) — and its larger, more expensive relative, the celeste, which looks like a piano on the outside but is actually full of glockenspiel bars, allowing you to play the instrument as if it were a piano. The most famous piece of music ever written for celeste is the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker — a connection that will prove relevant to Edward Scissorhands. The attraction of these instruments is their almost music-box-like quality, often used as a metaphor for childhood and innocence.

Elfman also makes heavy use of low woodwinds in their very low register — bassoons and bass clarinets creating a sense of foreboding; lots of harp glissandi (the sound of the harpist sweeping their fingers up and down the strings); and a wordless choir, where singers articulate oohs and ahs rather than words. A wordless choir can be remarkably powerful because when we hear the human voice it resonates with us in a way that instruments alone do not — we are hardwired to pick out the sound of another human voice. A wordless choir in a film score conveys not simply music or sound but a physical presence, an intelligence. That was one of the reasons the voices in Kubrick’s 2001 were so effective: the dense vocal writing of Gyorgy Ligeti conveyed a sense of intelligence within the monolith in a way that purely instrumental music could not have. Finally, Elfman frequently mickey mouses — he is the first major composer since Max Steiner to make extensive use of the technique. Much of this derives from his work with Tim Burton, whose films tend to be surreal, blending childlike elements with the absurd or the nightmarish.

Beetlejuice (1988)

Beetlejuice — It’s Showtime!

The story concerns a young couple who move into their dream house in the country, are killed in a car accident, and find themselves back in the house with instructions that they now have the job of haunting it. But they are not terribly good at it, and the Afterlife turns out to be a hopelessly tangled bureaucracy. Things get worse when a strange artsy family moves in and, rather than being horrified by the ghosts, views them as a status-enhancing curiosity. The only person with any sympathy for the couple is the artsy family’s daughter, Lydia, played by a very young Winona Ryder. Hanging over all of this is Beetlejuice — a thoroughly disreputable figure who is very good at haunting but whose services come with an equally horrifying price tag.

In this scene, a seance has gone horribly wrong and Lydia agrees to marry Beetlejuice in exchange for his help. At 0:09, Beetlejuice’s theme appears on violin — and this has a long historical connection. The devil is often portrayed as a virtuosic violinist; the story goes that the devil recognized the violin, when played incredibly well, had the power to get people to dance, and dancing led you straight to hell. At first we hear a little virtuosic line, and then — the really clever part — a bend that sounds almost like country and western. Elfman is drawing on the stereotype of the demonic virtuoso violin and immediately undercutting it with a country-and-western redneck quality: Beetlejuice is demonic, but he is also low-rent evil. At 0:24, intensity increases with the shot of the ghosts suspended over the table — note the organ, conveying a sense of the afterlife. There is even a bit of a tango rhythm building, audible in a tambourine in the background. At 0:52, the rhythm stops as Lydia begins saying the name three times; the music drops out entirely for just a moment before the third utterance, and then Beetlejuice says “It’s showtime.” At 1:20, a frantic Elfman polka as Beetlejuice emerges from the table — very similar to the polka elements in The Simpsons theme. At 1:40, brass-band “oompah” music gives way to a polka dominated by a calliope, an instrument closely associated with fairgrounds and merry-go-rounds. At 1:55, mickey mousing as the inflatable mallets appear — music alluding to the movement and then the striking of the mallets. At 2:09, as the couple is driven through the ceiling, the music drops to almost nothing — when you are all the way up, you have nowhere to go but down, and this creates a wonderful shift in tension as Beetlejuice bounces in front of the camera like a sleazy Las Vegas comedian. Then a rapid change: he becomes much more ominous, with low woodwinds — bassoons and bass clarinets — growling menacingly underneath plucked strings. There is a pop-culture reference as Beetlejuice does an impression of legendary late-night host Johnny Carson, complete with the trademark golf-swing gesture that Carson used going to commercial break; Elfman puts the snare-drum roll into the score, followed by mickey mousing as the Maitlands fall to the table. At 2:55, as the condescending interior designer Otho tries to flee, Beetlejuice puts him in an incredibly cheap leisure suit — Otho’s nightmare is bad fashion — and a polka returns, this time playing music appropriate for a circus act.

Edward Scissorhands (1990)

🎥 Edward Scissorhands — House on the Hill 🎥

This scene demonstrates the mysterious, supernatural side of Elfman’s work. Peg, an unsuccessful Avon Lady, is about to give up but decides to try the old house at the end of the road. At 0:00, there is no score but there is music: source music — badly played music on a cheap electronic organ coming from one of the nearby houses. It tells us something about this neighborhood. Peg is terribly frustrated, running out of hope, and then she realizes there is one house she has not visited — the mysterious house on the hill. The score begins as we see the house in Peg’s rearview mirror. Notice the wonderful squeak as she turns the mirror, suggesting that her car is old and not terribly maintained — this is not a terribly successful woman. Holding the music off until the moment we see the house very clearly establishes the link between the house and the music: harp, bass clarinet, mysterious strings, all ominous. At 0:50, Edward’s theme appears in an ominous variation with wordless choir — heavy percussion underneath and very snarling brass make what is normally a calm, reassuring theme sound much more like a warning, conveying the sense of a physical presence watching from inside the house. At 1:12, a significant shift marked by a harp glissando: the music moves into a waltz carried by the bell-like sound of a celeste. Compare this to the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker: the musical influence is obvious, but there is a deeper connection that was quite deliberate. The story of Edward Scissorhands is about an artificial human built out of a machine that originally made cookies; the narrative of The Nutcracker involves the dream of a child in which toys come to life and do battle with an army of mice, and also features an army of gingerbread. A toy that comes to life, and gingerbread — a very solid connection to Edward Scissorhands. At 1:46, the dread briefly returns with the tolling of a bell — a slow rhythm of single strokes, often a symbol of death — while the harp comes in more prominently, often a symbol of the afterlife or the supernatural. At 2:00, Peg passes through the gate and the music shifts again: gone, at least for a moment, is the threat. Edward’s theme returns in its gentlest statement, matching Peg’s sense of awe and wonder as she looks upon this remarkable garden.

🎥 Edward Scissorhands — Edward the Barber 🎥

Now an example of the frantic, almost cartoonish side of Elfman. At 0:00, there is no music — only the sound of Edward’s scissors and the hose in the background. Not having any music actually creates more tension: if the music sounded dramatic and frightening, we would know things are about to go badly; if it sounded positive, we would know it will end well. The absence of music ramps up the anticipation, and when it does finally arrive — not with the first dog but when we see the lineup outside Peg’s garden, everyone bringing their dogs — it is just that much more effective. At 0:56, a frantic Danny Elfman polka, reinforcing the energy and anticipation of the neighbors queued up. At 1:12, as we focus on Joyce and Edward, the bass clarinet creeps in underneath the polka — one of those moments where Elfman buries something ominous beneath an otherwise optimistic texture. As Joyce lifts her dog, listen for the melody carried by strings doubled with a saxophone — an unusual combination that somehow sounds genuinely funny, with a lightness and tongue-in-cheek quality to it. At 1:57, the first big transition: Joyce has the idea that Edward should cut her hair. The rhythm stops, there is a sense of a build, and we move into a tango — a South American dance rhythm associated with sensuality and passion. What follows is almost a metaphor for a sex scene as Edward gently turns her head from side to side with the scissor blades, a deeply sensual melody playing over a tango rhythm. At 2:24, the music switches to a virtuosic solo violin over the orchestra — again that connection between the violin and the supernatural. Edward’s eyes have an almost demonic intensity; the sexual metaphor continues with close-ups of Joyce’s face and, in perhaps the least subtle moment in the whole scene, her toes literally curling. At 2:57, a return to the tango accompanies a montage of haircuts, with mickey mousing at 3:40 between the scissors and the low woodwinds. Finally, at 3:51, Edward prepares to cut Peg’s hair and the tango undergoes thematic transformation into a beautifully gentle string arrangement. We have moved from sensuality into the world of genuine familial love — Peg has very clearly become Edward’s mother figure.

Elfman is still working today. Among his later credits: the score for Avengers: Age of Ultron (the one Avengers film that Alan Silvestri did not score) and the music for the Men in Black franchise.

Hans Zimmer and Current Trends

Part A: Hans Zimmer (1957– )

The lecture opens with music from Inception — and the unmistakable sound of Braams. The term is a form of onomatopoeia (a word that sounds like the thing it represents, like “splash”) used to describe those massive, low-frequency brass articulations that have become so popular over the last decade. The spelling varies — B-R-A-A-A-A-M-S or B-R-A-A-A-H-M-S — but the sound is unmistakable.

Hans Zimmer is the most influential Hollywood composer to emerge since John Williams, and his level of influence, particularly over the last fifteen years, is comparable only to the influence Williams had through the late 1970s and 1980s. The professor notes, from personal experience, that it became almost an obstacle for working composers: every job you went to, the temp track would be something by Zimmer — usually out of The Dark Knight, Inception, or Interstellar, the same handful of films used over and over again. It was almost a bit demoralizing to realize they would really rather have had Zimmer but could only afford you.

Zimmer was born in 1957 in Germany and, like Elfman, is almost entirely self-taught, with his primary instruments being piano, keyboard, and guitar. Like Elfman, he briefly took lessons as a child, but after a few weeks his teacher declared him largely unteachable — not because he lacked talent, but because he never practiced what he was supposed to. He was far too busy banging on the piano and listening to all the different sounds he could get out of it. Much to his mother’s horror and his father’s amusement, he would often take the piano apart and play the strings with his fingers, with guitar picks, or with whatever else he could find, just to explore different sounds.

By his early twenties, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Zimmer had become a very skilled keyboardist — though he did not read notation — and was very adept at programming synthesizers. He became what is known as a session musician, playing keyboards on the albums of pop stars who needed a backup band. He has an interesting historical distinction: he was friends with a synth-pop group called The Buggles, and in 1979 they recorded “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Zimmer did not actually play on the song, but when they were shooting the music video they needed someone else to appear in it, and they asked Hans to stand in the back, look cool, and pretend to play keyboards — which he did. That video became the first ever to air on MTV when the station went on the air in 1981:

In addition to pop recordings, Zimmer was increasingly getting work writing music for television and radio commercials — what were called jingles. Commercial music is very closely related to film and television scoring, and it was through this work that Zimmer, who had now settled in London, came to the attention of British film composer Stanley Myers. Myers was a highly trained orchestral composer over thirty years older than Zimmer, but he was very interested in fusing orchestral instruments with electronics and did not know much about synthesizers. Impressed with Zimmer’s work, the two began collaborating, producing several film scores through the early to mid-1980s, including Moonlighting (1982) and My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) — one of actor Daniel Day-Lewis’s first films.

Myers got Zimmer’s foot in the door, but the big break came in 1988. Director Barry Levinson was working on Rain Man starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman and wanted something new for the music. His wife had a compact disc featuring music composed and performed by this little synth genius from England called Hans Zimmer. She gave it to her husband, Levinson liked what he heard, and Hans Zimmer’s first major film-score credit was for Rain Man. The music is almost entirely performed by Zimmer on synthesizers and samplers — a specific type of synthesizer particularly good at reproducing the sounds of acoustic instruments, producing sounds that are very close to a clarinet, a violin, a trumpet, or even a human voice. Here is a key distinction: many of these scores sound as though they contain acoustic instruments, but by and large what you are hearing are keyboard instruments layered up by Zimmer, exactly as Vangelis or Wendy Carlos did before him.

The score for Rain Man was nominated for an Academy Award and led to Driving Miss Daisy (1989). Although the music was quite different — based very much on the theme of the southern United States, with a clarinet playing a slightly bluesy main theme — he still used the one-man-synthesizer-army approach. Yet you can see Zimmer starting to think in an orchestral way and starting to bring in other stylistic elements: the middle section still sounds like pure eighties pop, but the ending has a strong blues influence. His thinking was expanding. Through the 1990s, his range continued to grow: Thelma and Louise (1991) for Ridley Scott, Disney work including the incidental music for The Lion King and The Prince of Egypt. By this point, much of his music was actually being written for orchestra, but since he had no training in written notation he worked his ideas out on synthesizers and then a growing team of assistants translated those ideas onto paper for orchestral musicians to play. The ideas were still primarily Zimmer’s; he just worked through his ears.

The Thin Red Line (1998)

In 1998, Zimmer composed the score for Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, a World War II film following American soldiers fighting in the Pacific. In a cue called “Journey to the Line,” he began to experiment with something that would become inextricably linked with his style: taking a fairly basic, completely tonal melodic idea, repeating it numerous times with subtle variation, and slowly, almost relentlessly building in intensity. What makes this cue extraordinary is the complete blending of orchestra and synthesizer — there is no clear line between the two. Almost every orchestral instrument is layered with synthesizers of some kind, creating what the professor describes as a “wall of sound.” This approach would eventually become known as the “hybrid-orchestral” style: music where there is no clear division between orchestral instruments, synthesizers, and digital instruments.

The other striking feature is that this is extraordinarily powerful music with virtually no melody, virtually no theme. Everything Zimmer achieves is through stacks of notes and textures. He is certainly capable of writing beautiful themes — witness the melody from Gladiator (2000) or the love theme from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007), which sounds like something from a Wagner opera. Yet starting in 2005, when he began composing for Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, Zimmer returned to the texture-over-melody approach first heard in The Thin Red Line. When you strip down the musical ideas to their basic form, they are actually quite simple, but Zimmer repeats them with subtle variation, builds up multiple layers of orchestral and synthesized instruments, and drives everything with a perpetual rhythmic force. In the scores for The Dark Knight, he pushes further into abstract synthetic percussion, where the drums are not simply accenting rhythms but creating whole worlds of texture central to the characterization of the story. By keeping his materials simple, relying on textures and dynamic builds rather than melodic themes, Zimmer moved into a style broadly referred to as minimalism — not minimal music, but music in which the composer limits themselves to a fairly basic set of materials that undergo very slow transformation to build into much larger structures. One critic observed that Zimmer treats the cellos like rhythm guitars in a rock band, getting that relentless da-da-da-da-da-da-da articulation driving the energy forward.

Interstellar (2014) and Inception (2010)

One of the places where the minimalist technique is best illustrated is in the final sequences that Zimmer writes for Christopher Nolan’s films. Nolan’s endings tend to be fairly long, light on dialogue, and visually pull together many plot elements. During these scenes Zimmer is given free rein to create a basic musical idea and let it build. In the final scene of Interstellar, the musical materials are, in true minimalist form, quite simple — essentially a single basic melody that cycles over and over. At first there are subtle variations, but when it really kicks into gear is around the two-minute mark when Cooper’s daughter says the name “Brand.” From that point, every repetition adds another instrument; it gets a little more complex, slowly louder, the ranges slowly spreading out as higher and lower instruments come in — until, after about two minutes of continuous growth, it reaches a wall of sound. Nolan chose to remove all diegetic sound from the final two minutes, leaving only the daughter’s voice and the music, allowing the score to shine through completely:

Interstellar — Final Scene

With Inception (2010), Zimmer perfected the hybrid-orchestral minimalist approach. The musical ideas are even simpler than Interstellar — much of the film’s music is based on a very simple set of notes that repeats with one small change, and that, as the professor puts it, accounts for about eighty percent of the score. In the final scene, that pattern just repeats, building up — particularly once Cobb has passed through customs. Notice the guitar, performed by Johnny Marr (guitar player for The Smiths), a wonderful texturist who creates evolving patterns of sound with the instrument. The hybrid orchestra — clearly orchestral musicians layered with electronics — builds to an epic wall of sound before finally coming back down to the piano:

Inception — Final Sequence

In one of the film’s pivotal scenes — the moment of inception itself, where Robert Fischer finds his deceased father’s windmill in the safe — listen to the music as Robert first walks into the room. There are long sustained notes slowly fading in and out, almost like labored breathing, like the musical manifestation of his father dying. Then comes the key moment: the father says “No, I was disappointed you tried.” The music changes, and one of those relentless Zimmer builds begins in the strings — a repeating pattern over and over, cellos treated like rhythm guitars, with long sustained notes over the top gradually getting higher and building intensity. When Eames (Tom Hardy’s character) flips the switch and everything starts blowing up, the driving rhythm ends and the Braams arrive — dozens of brass players, primarily French horns and trombones, layered with growling synthesizers and almost apocalyptic percussion. Something remarkable: if you listen carefully just before each note, you can hear these dozens of brass players all take a big inhale to blow their brains out on the note.

There is a fascinating story behind the Braams. One of the film’s main plot elements is that as you go deeper into a dream state, your perception of time slows further and further. To signal the dreamers that it is time to wake up, they play a song by French vocalist Edith Piaf — “Non, je ne regrette rien.” What Zimmer realized was that if you take the brass accompaniment from the Piaf recording and slow it down, it starts to sound very much like the Braams. Slow it down a lot, and the resemblance is unmistakable. As the professor says: “When I figured that out, my head exploded.”

Zimmer’s approach to composing is also distinctive in another way. Particularly with Nolan, he has been writing quite a bit of the music while the film is still in production and still being edited. That music is then taken by Nolan, working with Zimmer and his team, and edited to fit scenes — and in some cases, the film is actually edited to fit the recordings. If you listen carefully to the Inception cue, there are points where you can hear crossfades between separate pieces of music that were composed independently and then assembled. It is not the first time a director has asked a composer to write music ahead of shooting, but it does seem to be happening more and more, and it creates another model for how composers and directors can work together.

The Zimmer Effect

Zimmer’s influence on contemporary film music has been enormous. The hybrid-orchestral style is now a dominant form of writing. One of the leading post-Zimmer composers working in this vein is Tom Holkenborg, better known by his DJ name of Junkie XL. His music for Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) is a textbook example — rhythm-guitar strings driving things along, walls of brass playing long sustained notes, and apocalyptic percussion underneath:

Another area where Zimmer’s influence is felt is in movie trailers. For a long time, trailer music was taken from existing film scores (remember how the cue from Aliens turned up in numerous trailers), often accompanied by legendary voiceover artists like Hal Douglas or Don LaFontaine — the “in a world” kind of voice. By the early 2000s, the industry was moving away from voiceovers toward trailers dominated by clips of dialogue and music. With the music now much more exposed, studios began calling on production companies that wrote music specifically for trailers, and the composer they most often gravitated toward was Hans Zimmer.

The trail of influence is fascinating. In 2007, Mike Zarin created the sound design for the teaser trailer for Transformers — very abstract, with a sound that was essentially the seed of what would become the Braam. In 2009, Zarin worked on the trailer for District 9, where the Braams can be heard starting to emerge. Later that year, Zarin and another composer-sound designer named Zach Hemsey created the first teaser trailer for Inception, well before Zimmer had even started working on the film’s score. For the second Inception trailer, Nolan sent Hemsey some of Zimmer’s music from The Dark Knight and asked him to blend his Braam ideas with Zimmer’s string-writing approach. And then Zimmer and his team came in and wrote the actual score, influenced in turn by the trailer music. Once you do the math, you realize that Zimmer’s score for Inception was heavily influenced by the work of two trailer composers who were themselves heavily influenced by Hans Zimmer. By 2010, Zimmer was so influential that he was influencing himself through his influence on other composers.

Even Zimmer recognized this. After finishing work on Batman v Superman, he said he could not write music like this anymore — he had gone about as far as he could and needed to come up with some new form of musical language. His score for Dunkirk was still in the same vein but far less grand, a much sparser approach.

New Trends: Neo-Minimalism

Where are we now? Orchestras are still prominent. The hybrid orchestra remains dominant. More traditional orchestral composers are at the top of their game — people like Thomas Newman, John Powell (whose music for How to Train Your Dragon is, in the professor’s words, one of his favorite pieces of all time, though he confesses it makes him cry a little), and Michael Giacchino, who came to prominence through his work on Pixar films such as The Incredibles and now has a long and fruitful collaboration with director J.J. Abrams.

But if there is a current new trend, it is probably an extension of what Zimmer was doing with minimalism. In the concert-hall world, there has been a recent wave of music referred to as Neo-Minimalism — a return to simplicity, emotional directness, and spare textures. The leading voice in this movement is Max Richter, born in Germany but raised in Britain. In 2004 he composed “On the Nature of Daylight,” a piece that has since been used in several film scores:

Max Richter — On the Nature of Daylight

One of the first film composers to emerge with a neo-minimalist approach was Johann Johannsson, an Icelandic composer who did several films with director Denis Villeneuve, including Arrival (2016). The music still has that minimalist characteristic of repetitive elements and slow changes, but not quite as overpowering as Zimmer’s work — beautiful, restrained. Johannsson had been nominated for two Academy Awards — for The Theory of Everything and Sicario — and was very much on the verge of becoming a major A-list figure in the film music world. Tragically, in early 2018, he died of what appears to have been an accidental drug overdose. He was only forty-nine years old.

Another composer who worked with Johannsson, and who also seems to be on the verge of quite influential success, is Hildur Gudnadottir. The professor is visibly pleased to be able to describe a composer as a young woman, noting how remarkable it is that so many women work within the film music industry as musicians, assistants, and orchestrators, yet the top level of credited composer remains extraordinarily difficult for women to break into — a situation he attributes entirely to chauvinism, since women are clearly just as capable of writing music. Gudnadottir won the Academy Award for her score for Joker (2019), very much composed in the neo-minimalist style. The score does reach moments of grandeur, but rarely achieves the wall-of-sound approach so characteristic of Zimmer’s peak work — the neo-minimalist tendency is to pare back rather than pile on.

And on a lighter note: here is a scene from the romantic comedy The Holiday (2006), in which Jack Black’s character takes Kate Winslet on a musical tour of a video store. Every comment he makes about film music is spot-on — and every movie he mentions was covered in this course:

The Holiday — The Video Store