History+of+Film+Music

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_score

Before the age of recorded sound in motion pictures, great effort was taken to provide suitable music for films, usually through the services of an in-house pianist or organist, and, in some cases, entire orchestras, typically given [|cue sheets] as a guide. In 1914, [|The Oz Film Manufacturing Company] sent full-length scores by [|Louis F. Gottschalk] for their films. Other examples of this include [|Victor Herbert]'s score in 1915 to //Fall of a Nation// (a sequel to //Birth of a Nation//) and [|Camille Saint-Saëns]' music for //[|L'Assassinat du duc de Guise]// in 1908 — arguably the very first in movie history. It was preceded by [|Nathaniel D. Mann]'s score for //[|The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays]// by four months, but that was a mixture of interrelated stage and film performance in the tradition of old [|magic lantern] shows. Most accompaniments at this time, these examples notwithstanding, comprised pieces by famous composers, also including studies. These were often used to form catalogues of film music, which had different subsections broken down by 'mood' and/or genre: dark, sad, suspense, action, chase, etc. This made things much easier for the in-house pianists and orchestras to pick pieces that fitted the particular feel of a movie and its scenes. German cinema, which was highly influential in the era of silent movies, provided some original scores. Fritz Lang's movies //[|Die Nibelungen]//(1924) and //[|Metropolis]// (1927) were accompanied by original full scale orchestral and leitmotific scores written by Gottfried Huppertz, who also wrote piano-versions of his music, so that it could be played in smaller cinemas, too. Friedrich W. Murnau's movies //[|Nosferatu]// (1922 - music by Hans Erdmann) and //[|Faust – eine deutsche Volkssage]// (1926 - music by Werner Richard Heymann) also had original scores written for them. Other films like Murnaus's //[|Der letzte Mann]// contained a mixing of original compositions (in this case by Giuseppe Becce) and library music / folk tunes, which were artistically included into the score by the composer. Nevertheless fully developed original scores were quite rare in the silent movie era. It should also be noted that as soon as sound had come to movies, director Fritz Lang barely used musical scores in his movies anymore. Apart of Peter Lorre whistling a short piece from Edvard Grieg's [|Peer Gynt], Lang's movie //[|M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder]// was lacking musical accompaniment completely and //[|Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse]// only included one original piece written for the movie by Hans Erdmann played at the very beginning and end of the movie. One of the rare occasions on which music occurs in the movie is a song one of the characters sings, that Lang uses to put emphasis on the man's insanity, quite similar to the use of the whistling in [|//M//]. Though "the scoring of narrative features during the 1940s lagged decades behind technical innovations in the field of concert music,"[|[18]] the 1950s saw the rise of the [|modernist] film score. Director [|Elia Kazan] was open to the idea of jazz influences and dissonant scoring and worked with Alex North, whose score for //[|A Streetcar Named Desire]// (1951) combined dissonance with elements of blues and jazz. Kazan also approached [|Leonard Bernstein] to score //[|On the Waterfront]// (1954): the result was reminiscent of earlier works by [|Aaron Copland] and [|Igor Stravinsky] with its "jazz-based harmonies and exciting additive rhythms."[|[19]] A year later, [|Leonard Rosenman], inspired by [|Arnold Schoenberg], experimented with atonality in his scores for //[|East of Eden]// (1955) and //[|Rebel Without a Cause]// (1955). In his ten-year collaboration with [|Alfred Hitchcock], [|Bernard Herrmann] experimented with daring musical endeavors in //[|Vertigo]// (1958), //[|Psycho]// (1960)--and//[|The Birds]// (1963). The use of non-diegetic jazz was another modernist innovation, perhaps most notably in jazz star [|Duke Ellington]'s score for [|Otto Preminger]'s //[|Anatomy of a Murder]// (1959). A full film score widely regarded as the first made by a popular artist came in 1973 with the film //[|Pat Garret and Billy the Kid]//, by [|Bob Dylan]. However the album received very little critical acclaim. This had not been done before in popular film history: any featured band had films written around the music (notably [|The Beatles] with //Yellow Submarine//).