Music

THE CONVERSION TO SOUND

Most filmmakers responded to the coming of sound by transplanting the live, continuous musical accompaniment of silent film to the mechanically produced soundtrack. Standardizing and upgrading the quality of musical accompaniment was one of the most compelling reasons for Warner Bros. to invest in Vitaphone, an early sound reproduction system. Warner Bros. hired the New York Philharmonic to record the studio's first sound feature, Don Juan (1926). Al Jolson's ad-libbing in their second Vitaphone venture, The Jazz Singer (1927), not only put the "talk" in "talking pictures" but ushered in a new aesthetic possibility: realism. Sound, specifically dialogue and sound effects, could now be used to heighten the impression that films captured reality. Musical accompaniment challenged this aesthetic, and thus the common practice in Hollywood in the transition years between silent and sound expunged background music entirely. Most films made during this period either have no musical score at all or include only music visibly produced within the world of the story. And yet the power of film music could not be ignored. Many films go to absurd lengths to include musical accompaniment "realistically." In Josef von Sternberg's crime drama Thunderbolt (1929), for instance, prisoners just happen to be practicing music in their cells (von Suppe's Poet and Peasant ) during the film's climax.

Some filmmakers and composers proved more adventurous. In Hollywood, the composer Hugo Riesenfeld (1879–1939) used two different musical mediums simultaneously (a jazz band and a small orchestra) for distinctive effects in Sunrise (1927). Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977), who composed the music for some of his films, continued the practice of continuous musical accompaniment well into the 1930s for films such as City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936). In France, the director René Clair (1898–1981) used musical effects to replace naturalistic sound in Le million ( The Million , 1931) and Sous les toits de Paris ( Under the Roofs of Paris , 1930); Maurice Jaubert (1900–1940) used electronic manipulation to produce an arresting musical cue for a slow-motion sequence in Jean Vigo's Zéro de conduite ( Zero for Conduct , 1933). Eisler scored Joris Ivens's documentary Nieuwe gronden ( New Earth , 1934) using naturalistic sound for the machines but music for the humans. In Britain, Arthur Benjamin (1893–1960) experimented with orchestration techniques to compensate for the problems in early sound recording, reducing the number of strings and even creating pizzicato from tuba and piano. And in Berlin, at the German Film Research Institute, experiments in scoring techniques for sound film produced filmic equivalents for musical principles, such as the dolly-in and dolly-out for crescendo and decrescendo and superimpositions for dissonant chords. Perhaps it was these experiments that Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was thinking of when he was approached by Hollywood. The story goes that he expressed interest if he could complete his score first and the film could be made to fit his music. It is tempting to consider Fritz Lang's M (1931) in this light, where the mesmerizing circularity of the motif from Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King , whistled by the murderer, finds its reflection in a series of circular visual motifs.

By the 1930s it was clear that sound film would replace silent film as the norm, and that film music fulfilled an important function in sound film. Sometimes cautiously and sometimes boldly, filmmakers began reintegrating background music. In Hollywood, music could be heard connecting sequences, underscoring dramatic moments, and providing accompaniment for the credit sequences (main title and end titles). But ultimately it was a giant gorilla that taught Hollywood the importance of film music. Worried about the credibility of the eighteen-inch models used in the creation of the monster in King Kong (1933), the film's director, Merian C. Cooper (1893–1973), asked Max Steiner (1888–1971) to write music to bring Kong to life. And bring Kong to life he did, scoring over three-quarters of the film's one-hundred-minute runtime. The success of King Kong validated Steiner's saturated scoring techniques. In 1934 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences added the originally composed film score as an award category.