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TOEFL Directory > TOEFL writing > 25. Movie Music
25. Movie Music
Accustomed though we are to speaking of the films made before 1927 as
"silent? the film has never been, in the full sense of the word,
silent. From the very beginning, music was regarded as an indispensable
accompaniment; when the Lumiere films were shown at the first public
film exhibition in the United States in February 1896, they were
accompanied by piano improvisations on popular tunes. At first, the
music played bore no special relationship to the films; an accompaniment
of any kind was sufficient. Within a very short time, however, the
incongruity of playing lively music to a solemn film became apparent,
and film pianists began to take some care in matching their pieces to
the mood of the film.
As movie theaters grew in number and importance, a violinist, and
perhaps a cellist, would be added to the pianist in certain cases, and
in the larger movie theaters small orchestras were formed. For a number
of years the selection of music for each film program rested entirely in
the hands of the conductor or leader of the orchestra, and very often
the principal qualification for holding such a position was not skill or
taste so much as the ownership of a large personal library of musical
pieces. Since the conductor seldom saw the films until the night before
they were to be shown(if indeed, the conductor was lucky enough to see
them then), the musical arrangement was normally improvised in the
greatest hurry.
To help meet this difficulty, film distributing companies started the
practice of publishing suggestions for musical accompaniments. In 1909,
for example, the Edison Company began issuing with their films such
indications of mood as ?pleasant? "sad? "lively? The
suggestions became more explicit, and so emerged the musical cue sheet
containing indications of mood, the titles of suitable pieces of music,
and precise directions to show where one piece led into the next.
Certain films had music especially composed for them. The most famous of
these early special scores was that composed and arranged for D.W
Griffith's film Birth of a Nation, which was released in 1915.
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