At the beginning of this unit we cited some of the new technologies that developed alongside modernism in the arts. One of them, film or cinema, had an immense impact on all the arts of the twentieth century. Almost from its beginnings it offered an exciting new arena for musical composition — comparable, we might say, to the beginnings of public concerts in the eighteenth century (see page 154), but reaching an incomparably larger audience. Film music has come in a bewildering variety of styles. Avant-garde modernism, minimalism, jazz, pop music, rock, and rap have all found a place on soundtracks. Most prevalent of all, however, have been soundtracks employing the symphony orchestra in styles reminiscent of late Romanticism.

This connection was natural, given the Romantics’ interest both in opera and in program music. It began with the earliest history of cinema — when some late Romantic styles were still new. In the era of silent film (especially the 1910s and 1920s), live musicians were hired by theaters to provide music to accompany films as they were projected. Pianists or organists would improvise, responding moment by moment to the images on-screen; but their improvisations were often based on published catalogues of favorite themes from Romantic symphonies and operas. In matching these themes to the situations on-screen, the musicians produced something akin to Wagner’s leitmotiv technique (see page 268), and indeed some of the melodies in their catalogues were drawn from Wagner’s operas.

When new technologies in the late 1920s allowed for soundtracks to berecorded on the filmstrip itself, this leitmotivic procedure evolved. Now composers wrote more-or-less-continuous scores for full orchestra, employing leitmotivs synchronized precisely to the filmed action. An early monument to this new relation of music and film is the horror classic King Kong of 1933, with a soundtrack by the most important of early Hollywood composers, the Viennese émigré Max Steiner. This leitmotivic style has remained prominent in cinema composition ever since. (Many films you might see at the movie theater today use it in some form, but it is particularly apparent in recent mythic blockbusters such as the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter series.)