Music
THE CLASSICAL SCORE AND BEYOND: INSIDE AND OUTSIDE HOLLYWOOD
In the 1940s and 1950s the classical film score began to undergo an evolution when the next generation of film composers arrived in Hollywood. With them came more contemporary musical language from the worlds of art music and popular music that opened up the stylistic possibilities of the Hollywood score. Largely American by birth and by training, composers such as Herrmann, David Raksin (1912–2004), Alex North (1910–1991), Elmer Bernstein (1922–2004), Leonard Rosenman (b. 1924), and Henry Mancini (1924–1994) incorporated American vernacular music (folk song and jazz), elements of modernism (dissonance, polytonality, serial music), and the popular song in their film scores. Later, composers from the world of art music brought postmodern musical techniques. And in the 1950s, concurrent with many of these developments, rock 'n' roll arrived.
Folk song had become a subject of interest to American art music composers in the 1930s. Rejecting the experimental techniques of modernism, composers such as Aaron Copland (1900–1990) sought to define a uniquely American idiom and turned to folk song and its distinctive melodies and harmonic textures. Copland's Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and Appalachian Spring (1942) are prototypical examples of this "American" sound, which crossed over into film in the scores for Of Mice and Men (1940) and Our Town (1940), by Copland, and for the documentaries The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), The River (1938), and Louisiana Story (1948), by Virgil Thomson (1896–1989). Perhaps because the western as a genre focuses so transparently on American values, its scores have tended to favor this approach. Tiomkin's scores for Duel in the Sun (1946) and Red River (1948), and Richard Hageman's (1882–1966) for several John Ford westerns, especially Fort Apache (1948) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), are exemplary. A more recent example of the use of this American sound can be heard in Randy Newman's (b. 1943) score for The Natural (1984). Contemporary composers have opened up the focus on American folk song to include various types of world music. Elliot Goldenthal (b. 1954), for instance, himself a student of Copland, uses Mexican folk traditions and indigenous instruments in Frida (2002).
JOHN WILLIAMS
b. Long Island, New York, 8 February 1932
With well over a hundred major feature films to his credit to date, the American-born and -trained John Williams may well be the most recognizable film composer in the Western world. He began his career as a studio pianist and arranger, working with the composers Alfred Newman, Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, Bernard Herrmann, and Henry Mancini, and went on to become Hollywood's most successful composer as well as one of its most prolific (although he has not caught up with the legendary Max Steiner and his 350-plus credits). Largely responsible for the revival of the symphonic film score written in a neoromantic style, and for adapting the film orchestra to the modern recording studio, Williams is a connection to Hollywood's classical era.
More important, Williams has raised the visibility (or to be more precise, the audibility) of the film score. In an era when much of the music heard at the movies is almost immediately forgotten, Williams's music has entered the popular consciousness—the shark motif from Jaws (1975), the theme from Star Wars (1977), the five-note melody through which aliens and earthlings communicate in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Indelibly identified with the Star Wars films, Williams has scored all six of them. He once described them as silent movies, and indeed the music is an important part of these films' success. At the age of seventy-three, he completed over two hours of music for the last installment, Revenge of the Sith (2005).
In 1975 Williams began what would prove to be his most enduring partnership, with the director Steven Spielberg. This collaboration on over two-dozen films across a variety of genres has given Williams a premiere showcase for his work. Although less known for his art music, Williams has pursued a career on the concert stage as a composer and conductor, wielding the baton at the Boston Pops from 1980 to 1993. He remains Hollywood's preeminent film composer.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), JFK (1991), Jurassic Park (1993), Schindler's List (1993), Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001)
FURTHER READING
Kalinak, Kathryn. "John Williams and The Empire Strikes Back : The Eighties and Beyond: Classical Meets Contemporary." In Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film , edited by Kathryn Kalinak, 184–202. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.
Scheurer, Timothy E. "John Williams and Film Music since 1971." Popular Music and Society 21, no. 1 (1997): 59–72.
Kathryn Kalinak
Beginning in the 1950s, jazz proved another possibility, especially for films set in urban environments. In edgy urban dramas, jazz exploded onto the soundtrack in scores such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), by Alex North (1910–1991); The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), by Elmer Bernstein; Touch of Evil (1958), by Mancini; and in numerous biopics about (white) jazz artists such as Young Man with a Horn (1950) and Rhapsody in Blue (1945). Krin Gabbard makes the case that this focus on white jazz artists provides a key to understanding American ideology of race, gender, and sexuality. Later filmmakers such as Robert Altman (b. 1925) and Clint Eastwood (b. 1930) (who also composes film scores) have used jazz to great effect. Hollywood did turn its attention to black jazz performers in Mo' Better Blues (1990) and biopics such as Lady Sings the Blues (1972), about the singer Billie Holiday, and Bird (1988), about the saxophone legend Charlie Parker. Jazz on the soundtrack was initially associated with urban decadence; the extent to which it has shed this association remains an interesting question. A number of jazz artists have themselves scored films: Duke Ellington ( Anatomy of a Murder , 1959), Charles Mingus ( Shadows , 1959), Herbie Hancock ( Death Wish , 1974), and Joshua
Redman ( Vanya on 42nd Street , 1994), among others. But the premiere showcase for African American jazz performers in American film may well have been the live action and animated shorts, produced in the 1930s and 1940s, featuring jazz greats Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. The racism of the era is strongly in evidence in many of them. In cartoons produced by the Max Fleischer studio, for instance, jazz artists found themselves captured not only by animated form (Cab Calloway was a walrus) but by numerous racial stereotypes.
The introduction of rock 'n' roll occurred simultaneously with these developments. First heard on a feature film soundtrack when Bill Haley's song "Rock Around the Clock" was used under the titles of The Blackboard Jungle (1955), rock 'n' roll was initially limited to teen pics and used to target young audiences. In the 1970s soul could be heard on the soundtrack in films like Shaft (1971), for which Isaac Hayes wrote the songs as well as the background score. Rock 'n' roll ultimately functioned as a pressure point on the classical Hollywood film score and was an important influence in a new type of scoring that would emerge in the 1960s, the compilation score.
In the 1940s and 1950s, modernist musical techniques, such as dissonance, atonality, striking rhythms, and unconventional instrumentation, made their way into Hollywood film scores such as Rózsa's for Spellbound and The Lost Weekend (both 1945, and both making use of the theremin, one of the first electronic instruments), and Rosenman's for East of Eden (1955) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). The cutting edge of modernism, serial music, can be heard in Rosenman's score for The Cobweb (1955). Initially, electronic instrumentation was limited to horror films and science fiction or used for specific psychological effects (dream sequences, for instance), but it moved into the mainstream and high visibility with Giorgio Moroder's score for Midnight Express (1978) and Vangelis's for Blade Runner (1982). In the late twentieth century Philip Glass (b. 1937) brought minimalism out of the world of art music and into the film score. Characterized by repetitive musical
figures that disturb conventional notions of rhythm and time, Glass's mesmeric music first attracted attention in Koyaanisqatsi (1983) and The Thin Blue Line (1988). Glass's work in Hollywood has been limited ( The Hours in 2002 is his most high-profile score), but not his influence: the distinctive techniques of minimalism (but with more conventional tonality) can be heard in many Hollywood films.