What is the greatest film score of all time? | Little White Lies

Composer X LWLies

What is the great­est film score of all time?

07 Dec 2021

Words by Sean Wilson

Older man with grey hair playing an electric guitar in a music studio with various instruments and audio equipment visible.
Older man with grey hair playing an electric guitar in a music studio with various instruments and audio equipment visible.
Com­pos­er Mag­a­zine takes a look at the ele­ments which earn a film score a place in the his­to­ry books.

What is the great­est film score of all time? That’s a debate that has the poten­tial to range all day, but what­ev­er one’s answer, the rela­tion­ship between music and the mov­ing image is incon­tro­vert­ible. As ear­ly as the begin­ning of the 20th cen­tu­ry, film­mak­ers were swift to cap­i­talise on the pow­er­ful­ly sym­bi­ot­ic rela­tion­ship between visu­al poet­ry and sub­jec­tive, illu­so­ry notes on a cue sheet. In the days of vaude­ville and silent cin­e­ma, it was com­mon prac­tice for live pianists to per­form live to pic­ture before increas­ing­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed work­ing prac­tices began to take hold.

Organs were installed that could mim­ic objec­tive sound ele­ments like bird songs, and a boom in cin­e­ma con­struc­tion saw movie the­atres equipped with spe­cial­ly designed orches­tra pits capa­ble of accom­mo­dat­ing the finest clas­si­cal musi­cians of the peri­od. An increased empha­sis on nar­ra­tive-dri­ven, fea­ture-length dra­ma result­ed in D.W. Griffith’s con­tro­ver­sial yet ground­break­ing The Birth of a Nation (1915), whose score by Joseph Carl Breil deployed the use of the Wag­ner­ian leit­mo­tif’ where­by spe­cif­ic musi­cal motifs are assigned to par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ters and situations.

Many of the ear­ly 20th century’s most promi­nent come­di­ans, includ­ing the likes of Char­lie Chap­lin, favoured a sense of intri­cate melody and har­mo­ny with­in their films. With the tran­si­tion from silent cin­e­ma to sound pic­tures, or talkies’, the film score was some­what desta­bilised and no longer the promi­nent ele­ment in the sound mix­ture. Full syn­chro­ni­sa­tion between pic­ture, music, and sound ele­ments would not be com­plete­ly achieved until Al Jolson’s musi­cal The Jazz Singer (1927), which show­cased the new­ly devel­oped Vita­phone sys­tem. Don Juan’s pio­neer­ing approach, mix­ing objec­tiv­i­ty of sound effects and dia­logue with the sub­jec­tive emo­tion of music, paved the way for every movie in its wake.
Howard Shore is one of the most cel­e­brat­ed com­posers of the mod­ern age.

Home recording studio with warm orange lighting, speakers, mixing desk, and electronic equipment.

Acclaimed for his work on a host of diverse gen­res, Shore broke new ground in fan­ta­sy scor­ing with his gar­gan­tu­an, extra­or­di­nary The Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy (20012003) for direc­tor Peter Jack­son, a land­mark achieve­ment that won the com­pos­er three Oscars. Shore says that the col­lab­o­ra­tion between sound and score can pro­duce inter­est­ing results”. He con­tin­ues: Mar­tin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) ben­e­fit­ed from Eugene Gearty set­ting the train sta­tion, clocks and train whis­tles in the same key as the score. Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) ben­e­fit­ed I believe from the close col­lab­o­ra­tion between music and sound edit­ing and design by Skip Lievsay.”

That said, it would still be some years until the non-diegetic film score came of age in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry. Non-diegetic refers to music heard out­side of the con­text of the film; diegetic means the source of the music is vis­i­ble with­in the con­text of the scene. In 1933, Max Stein­er deliv­ered what was arguably the first-ever crea­ture fea­ture adven­ture score, King Kong, a leit­mo­tif-dri­ven extrav­a­gan­za of inter­lock­ing themes and impres­sions. The score ben­e­fit­ed from the recent inven­tion of the click track, which allowed the com­pos­er to achieve infin­i­tes­i­mal syn­chro­ni­sa­tion by lis­ten­ing to clicks’ through headphones.

The indus­tri­al inno­va­tions, com­bined with Steiner’s dra­mat­ic intu­ition, inspired scores of tal­ent­ed film com­posers who flour­ished dur­ing Hollywood’s so-called Gold­en Era’, includ­ing Erich Wolf­gang Korn­gold, Alfred New­man, Bernard Her­rmann, Franz Wax­man, and Dim­itri Tiomkin. New­man would invent the 20th Cen­tu­ry Fox (now 20th Cen­tu­ry Stu­dios) fan­fare, one of the world’s most famous musi­cal sig­na­tures. The scores of this peri­od began to tran­si­tion from Euro­pean roman­ti­cism, import­ed from Aus­tria by the likes of Stein­er and Korn­gold, to a more typ­i­cal­ly Amer­i­can’ sound that had already been pop­u­larised in the con­cert hall by Aaron Copland.

Emile Mosseri is a com­pos­er whose sound mix­es del­i­cate tones, unusu­al inter­vals, and chord sus­pen­sions with lush orches­tral tex­tures. Off the back of praised works such as The Last Black Man in San Fran­cis­co (2019) and the Oscar-win­ning Minari (2021), Mosseri’s voice has been hailed as invig­o­rat­ing and distinctive.

The main rea­son why a com­pos­er is hired is that they’ve com­posed some­thing in the past that res­onates with the direc­tor,” Mosseri explains. It’s just your musi­cal instincts. Every­one has some­thing they grav­i­tate towards. It’s going to sound like you if it comes from you. In Minari, the music was intend­ed to float in an impres­sion­is­tic way. The music is dream­like and sug­gests things with­out using a heavy hand. Work­ing on that film was an absolute dream.”

The goal was to fig­ure out what child­hood mem­o­ry would sound like musi­cal­ly. I must praise the instincts of direc­tor Lee Isaac Chung and edi­tor Har­ry Yoon – they placed music where I hadn’t imag­ined it going. In a way, I feel like they co-scored the film. Cer­tain pieces of music weren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly pow­er­ful on their own, but via this strate­gic, poet­ic place­ment, the music took on a new life. On the oth­er hand, for a par­tic­u­lar scene in The Last Black Man in San Fran­cis­co, we removed the music and left it dry, which, as it turns out, was the best approach. In terms of spot­ting, where you put music is just as impor­tant as what goes in.”

This is an extract from an essay that orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Com­pos­er mag­a­zine.

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