film music styles

[calimac]

In my latest review, I wrote of the orchestrations by a film-music composer that they were "in the common vocabulary of post-American-nationalist film-music style." This is because they reminded me strongly of a lot of film music that I've heard from the last two or three decades.

Thinking over what I know of film music arranged historically, I get a sense of three clusters or prevailing styles that gradually succeeded each other. These are generalizations, mind. I'm speaking only of conservative orchestral scoring, mostly for dramas, and even within that there are many exceptions and composers who took very different paths. I mean only that there were periods when a lot of the leading composers wrote work which had a strong family resemblance, both to each other and to some particular period or style in concert music.

Here's my perception.

1. The post-romantic music of the 1930s and 40s. This is the style of Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Sweeping, with massed strings, often subtly beefed up by other instruments. While the vocabulary comes from composers like Tchaikovsky and especially Liszt, melodic lines in this music tend to be much more chromatic, with little reliance on strong cadences, and to be rhapsodic rather than rhythmic. The classic original "movie music" style, associated especially with adventure films.

2. The populist modern music of the 1950s through 70s. The guiding spirits are Stravinsky and Richard Strauss, but the film composers are more populist than their models. This is the style of Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, and John Williams. Hans Zimmer is a somewhat younger composer who still writes in this style. Punchier in impact than style 1 and addicted to catchy tunes - so much so that the melodies are sometimes now more famous than the movies - it's also focused on the brass and winds, and it thrives on elaborate rhythmic patterns.

3. The post-American-nationalist style since the 1980s. A kind of smoother, polished version of the music written by the mid-century American nationalists, not so much Copland (who was, in this context, a Stravinskian modernist) as Samuel Barber, Howard Hanson, Randall Thompson. Capable of building to grandeur, but mostly contemplative, blended orchestration more string-heavy than style 2, richly consonant but not so strongly melody-based. This is the style of James Horner, Thomas Newman, Stephen Warbeck. The family resemblance between their music, and its difference from other styles, is probably more distinctive than with style 1 and definitely more than the relatively diverse style 2.

There are many other noted film composers who don't fit into these categories - Danny Elfman has the spirit of style 3 but a very different sound world, while Bernard Herrmann has the vocabulary of style 2 but a more harshly modernist spirit actually closer to style 1 - so I don't need to be told of exceptions, but I will ask: do you see these same clusters as I do? Do you consider them significant or representative of film music of their time?

Comments

[mastadge.livejournal.com]

Do you mind if I link to this on a film score message board?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

As long as it's clearly understood that these are generalizations, trends, and not universals. I don't want this "forest" post to be over-run by tree-counters.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I see those patterns, yes.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Where would you slot British film score composers such as Vaughan Williams and Bliss? Or perhaps Italian composers such as Rota?

I often wonder what direction Korngold might have taken had he not had to leave Europe. Would we have had a second Richard Strauss on our hands?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

VW and Bliss are are of the time period of style 1, but they didn't write like that. Generally, composers with strong careers in concert music who write film music on occasion write in their own styles, and on't fit the general film-music practice of their day.

Korngold is an exception. I hear his "style 1" film music - a style he did as much as anyone to create - to be very different from his concert music, and my guess is that he adopted the style he did, especially the orchestration, to fit the needs of the primitive film-sound recording equipment of the era. After he retired from Hollywood, he went back to his concert-music style - see his Symphony in F#, a neglected masterpiece - and while he stayed where he'd been, the cutting edge had moved on.

So that about answers your question. He would have been another Richard Strauss, a modernist abandoned by the avant-garde in later years. Unless the answer, the more probable one, to "what would have happened if he'd stayed in Europe," was "Sent to Treblinka and never came out."

Rota and Maurice Jarre might form a fourth style, except that I don't know as many others like them. A leaner post-romanticism than style 1, with subtler and more varied orchestration, more diatonic and with as strong a melodic sense as style 2, but more of an emphasis on lyrical rather than rhythmic melodies.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I see (hear?) what you're saying. As usual, I look (listen for?) the technology as a guiding principle.

First off, you're missing an historical period: Silent films weren't silent. Many had original scores, most big studio productions had full orchestras in the major venues. While these tended to be closer to the post-romantic period you mention, there are a couple of key points. First off, outside of those major venues it was virtually impossible for a studio to control (or know about) the music being used. (Read Harpo Marx's account of his movie piano playing in "Harpo Speaks".) So while scores were available for a specific movie, the music cues had to be generic and obvious to help cue the audience reaction.

Early film sound tracks weren't all that well recorded. Again, the major theaters had better sound, but most of the theaters around the country were little more than silent film emporiums with whatever cheap speakers the owner could scrounge up. So "massed strings" et all were used because they sounded good on cheap speakers. That's a guess on my part, but I'm sure that was a consideration. That's why there was "little reliance on strong cadences" et al; it was easier to slap some music together around the dialog than write to the action of a scene. While theaters got better and better, it wasn't really until the arrival of television that your average small-town theater needed good sound to help attract people.

And then Dolby. Since the mid-70s (eg "Star Wars"), it was possible to have the sound be as much a part of the special effects as the visuals. So they did. A composer could not merely cue the audience's emotions or add to emotional content, but create emotional effects. Wowza.

As you say, there are exceptions and the dividing lines are very blurred. I will leave the comments on style to you. But I can often place a movie's release within a few years just by listening to the sound quality.

Aside: You seem to be using "film-music composer" to the exclusion of musicals. A large swath of movie musicals from the early 30s to the early 60s were big, loud and brassy when accompanying the dance numbers... and reprising them when the dancers fell in love later in the pic. And each dancer/choreographer had their own style. You could probably write a similar essay on the music behind Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Busby Berkeley numbers (among others). Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim moved musicals to a more orchestrated setting ("West Side Story", "A Funny Thing Happened On The Way to the Forum").

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

True, I'm not talking about musicals, or even much of comedies, because those have separate scoring traditions. The patterns I'm seeing apply only to "conservative orchestral scoring, mostly for dramas," which I specified at the beginning. I could write a wholly different essay on musicals, but it would be an entirely different subject already explored in a way the one I'm discussing is not. Rather than "more orchestrated," I'd say that Bernstein introduced a more Stravinskian style (equivalent to the style 2 of my classification) to a previously more-Romantic idiom. It's possible that pre-60s movie musicals were more pop-song oriented than the more fully symphonic stage musicals of the 40s-50s; certainly the songs in movies of that era that weren't fully musicals were.

I know very little about music for silent movies, so that's why I left it out. What I do know, or have been told, is that very few silent movies had purpose-written scores. Most music for silent movies was improvised by the performer or taken from whatever he knew how to play that seemed appropriate for the scene.

The technology does explain a lot about style 1, but I didn't want to get into that here. In fact, mass strings sound very bad on poor speakers, which is why the strings were often backed by unison accompaniment by stronger instruments such as trumpet placed unobtrusively - a highly characteristic element of style 1. But the lack of cadences was an artistic choice rather than being forced by the crudity of the matching process. Early film music composers got their jobs because they could write fast and accurately, and matching the music to the action was a high priority from the beginning. (Especially in cartoons, hence the term "Mickey Mousing", but also in live-action drama.) I think the unobtrusiveness of the music's harmonic flow was due to a desire to use the music as underscoring and commentary rather than as strong punctuation.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

About all I have to add to this is that the first time I heard Schoenberg's "Transfigured Night" (back in college days) it sounded like it contained every trope from your style #1. Of course, it was the other way around, but it took me a long time to be able to hear that particular piece as its own thing rather than filtered through film-composers who borrowed from it.

I'm also fascinated by the use of concert music in films. Wes Anderson made deft use of Britten's music to score Moonrise Kingdom (nice article about that in The New Yorker), and the same could be said for the use of John Adams in I Am Love. On the other hand, it was almost a shock to hear Rautavaara's "Cantus Arcticus" in Malick's To the Wonder, but it was the shock of recognition.