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The music of cinema’s earliest years played a crucial role in how audiences – with a live pianist or organist soundtracking the silent movie – experienced the stories on screen. But it wasn’t until the advent of synchronised sound that they were guaranteed the same musical experience.
Even that moment, widely regarded to be 1926’s Don Juan – an otherwise silent film – wasn’t a true soundtrack. Warner Bros used the Vitaphone system, essentially a recording on disc that was played with the picture. The same system was used for 1927’s The Jazz Singer, the first film for which voices were synchronised to the picture as well. Playing a disc to picture was unreliable, and it wasn’t long before music could be printed directly on to the celluloid of the film itself and the soundtrack proper was born.
Film music as we know it quickly found its feet in the early 1930s. This was largely thanks to European émigré composers who brought with them a stylistic flair and narrative framework born of opera, the symphony and the music hall. Tin Pan Alley and Broadway songwriters followed, adding to the rich seam of musicality that would be the bedrock of Hollywood music for years to come. Today, almost a century later, the basics of what a film’s musical soundtrack is and how it functions remain relatively unchanged. But which have moved the artform along and changed the way we listen to movies?
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
The great German expressionist film-maker FW Murnau made this Oscar-winning film in Hollywood at the invitation of producer William Fox. Though it is considered a late entry in the silent film era, thanks largely to its use of intertitles in place of dialogue, it was treated to a synchronised effects and music track courtesy of Fox’s trailblazing Movietone system. For the very first time, a film’s sound elements were optically printed directly on to the film. Audiences would have heard recorded music by the likes of Chopin and Gounod.
King Kong (1933)
Though he had cut his teeth on a string of films before this, most of them without credit, Austrian-born Max Steiner refined just exactly how a film score could function with this classic for RKO. His meticulous application of the orchestra to attend to matters of musical narrative, structure, scene setting and emotional nuance was a huge part of the film’s impact and success. Indeed, King Kong was the foundation and framework on which all symphonic Hollywood film music that followed was built, and in some respects still is.
Citizen Kane (1941)
Orson Welles’ feature film directorial debut was composer Bernard Herrmann’s first film score. Both had worked in radio drama in New York; in Hollywood, Herrmann’s was a singular voice, surrounded as he was (save for the likes of Alfred Newman) by European composers. For Kane, Herrmann set out his stall, eschewing the syrupy “Hollywood” symphonic palette of his peers and, with a keen sense of the dramatic, created a bespoke sound-world for the film, emphasising mood and atmosphere.
Blackboard Jungle (1955)
There were a few nails in the coffin for traditional symphonic film music, and Blackboard Jungle was the first. MGM licensed Rock Around the Clock, recorded by Bill Haley and His Comets, as the film’s main musical thread. It soundtracked a story about unruly teens at an inner-city school, and its popularity caused much anxiety for parents who feared it (and the song’s) influence. The song became a global hit, and studios realised how music could help promote their movies. Jazz scores soon followed.
Forbidden Planet (1956)
Years before the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was founded, pioneering couple Louis and Bebe Barron were creating otherworldly sounds for magnetic tape. Hollywood had flirted with electronic sounds, most notably the theremin – as used by the likes of Dimitri Tiomkin in The Thing from Another World and Herrmann in The Day the Earth Stood Still (both 1951). For Forbidden Planet, however, the Barrons crafted the first ever completely electronic film score. Its blurring of effects and music surprised and delighted audiences and inspired a new generation of composers.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)
Pop music and jazz had well and truly infiltrated movie soundtracks by the 1960s, and one of its greatest proponents was composer Henry Mancini. With Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Mancini pleased producers no end by crafting not only a hit song (Moon River), but also a score that was totally of its time. Mancini had a flair for “symphonic pop”, combining the melodic traditions of old with the upbeat sounds of the new. The likes of Mancini’s Hatari! (1962), Charade (1963) and The Pink Panther (1963) all benefited from this musical melting pot.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
It was something of a twist of fate that gave us one of the most brilliant, and impactful, film soundtracks of all time. Composer Alex North wrote an original score for Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece, but it was ultimately scrapped. The director had seemingly grown too fond of the classical pieces he had been using in the meantime. You have to feel for North, but it is hard to imagine Kubrick’s brilliant headscratcher of a film without its powerful mix of Ligeti, Richard Strauss, Khachaturian and Johann Strauss II.
American Graffiti (1973)
Before he gave us Star Wars, writer/director George Lucas had another hit in the shape of American Graffiti. It captures a night in the lives of a group of California teenagers as they listen to rock’n’roll, race cars and muse on life and love. The film features more than 40 songs from the era, each carefully positioned within the narrative of the film, and heard coming out of car radios or in diners. The popularity of the film, not to mention its chart-topping soundtrack album, would inspire a new wave of song-led soundtracks.
Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)
As much as Lucas’s American Graffiti was one in the eye for symphonic film music, his 1977 sci-fi smash Star Wars was a shot in its arm. On Steven Spielberg’s recommendation, Lucas approached composer John Williams to write the music for what was meant to be a loving pastiche of a bygone age. Williams promptly put his tongue in his cheek and created an old-fashioned symphonic score with knowing nods to Holst, Walton and Korngold. Ultimately Williams made Hollywood, and audiences, fall in love with the symphony orchestra all over again.
Crimson Tide (1995)
Hans Zimmer turned Hollywood film music on its head and Crimson Tide is the apex of that moment. It was an early showcase for the kind of huge, almost unyielding sound we’ve come to know from the German-born composer. Electronic music was always at the heart of what Zimmer was about as an artist, but its fusion with the real-world emotional heft of orchestral players and choir (as here) is something he truly made his own. And with it the sound of modern Hollywood film music was born.
