Theatrical Music

Early silent films were accompanied by a theater pianist or organist who improvised on a stock of clichéd musical conventions to underscore or explain the drama and to cover the sound of the projector. Some movie theaters maintained orchestras to play musical excerpts suggested and cued by the filmmaker. Occasionally a silent film had a specially composed score.

Cinema orchestras disappeared in the late 1920s after the invention of the sound track. On a sound track, visual patterns are recorded on the film beside the picture frames. When the film is projected, a photoelectric cell transforms these patterns into electric impulses that are converted into sound through loudspeakers. Except when music is actually part of a scene (such as hymn-singing in a church service), the film is usually made first. The music is then composed and recorded in coordination with the individual film frames. Occasionally a director and composer may work together throughout the filming; an outstanding example is the Soviet director Sergey Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938), with music by the Soviet composer Sergey Prokofiev. In film musicals the songs are recorded first and then mouthed by the actors during filming; dance sequences are also coordinated with prerecorded music. In cartoons, the composer and animator usually work together from start to finish. The animated classic Fantasia (1940), by the American filmmaker Walt Disney, was set to well-known concert music.

Film music reached a golden age in the 1930s and '40s. Noted composers such as the Englishman Benjamin Britten, the Frenchman Georges Auric, the Hungarian-American Miklós Rózsa, and the Austrian-American Erich Korngold wrote for films, and U.S. film studios employed composers such as the Austrian-American Max Steiner and the Russian American Dimitri Tiomkin as full-time staff. Much film music of that era drew on late-romantic musical idioms. Later, elements of jazz, popular music, and avant-garde and electronic music were also used.