Film Score Music
...of the most important and popular art forms of yesterday and
today. We underestimate the effectiveness and power that music, in any form ,
can have over even the most insensitive of people. In almost everything we do
and see music is involved in some form or another. Be it a piece played at a
wedding, a song played on the radio or even the music played in the background
in a television commercial. The music is always there, reminding us of past
experiences, making us smile and feel exhilaration and sometimes even making us
cry. It is this power that music has over us that film score composers take
advantage of when they are writing the music to accompany the movies. As
listeners we often do not appreciate that the music that is scored for films or
played in films is put there on purpose to create a certain feeling, emphasize a
point, give more life to a character or sometimes to simply add humour. What
the average moviegoer does not usually realize is that a great deal of time and
thought goes into writing the score for a film and choosing the background music
for a scene. None of the music is arbitrary; themes and sub themes have been
created with specific ideas in mind and have been put in place only to add to
the story and the characters. It is also important to acknowledge that the
evolution into the type of film scoring that we are accustomed to today was not
a quick or easy transition. It has taken almost a century to develop the
specific techniques that are used in today's
films. When the first moving
pictures were seen they were known as silent films, although they were not
actually silent. They contained a very primitive type of musical accompaniment
that laid the foundation for what was to later develop. As time passed the type
of music found in films developed into a fine art containing specific
guidelines and techniques that most composers...
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