Composers who lavish attention on film music tend not to turn up in textbooks such as this one, yet they represent an important strain of twentieth-century orchestral composition. Along with Max Steiner, who composed the score for Gone with the Wind in addition to King Kong, we might point to the Italian Nino Rota, who collaborated with Federico Fellini on many films and with Francis Ford Coppola on The Godfather; to Tōru Takemitsu, collaborator with the giant of Japanese cinema, Akira Kurosawa (Ran); and to John Williams, whose scores for the Star Wars films have been fashioned into a regular repertory piece for pops orchestras across the United States.

A composer who devoted himself almost exclusively to music for film, radio, and television is Bernard Herrmann (1911–1975). His most famous scores came in collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock, in films such as Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960). The screeching violins in the shower-murder scene from Psycho are an icon of horror-movie music, repeated and caricatured everywhere from cell phone ringtones to The Simpsons.

Meanwhile, many twentieth-century concert or classical composers have turned occasionally to film as a creative outlet. We have already seen that William Grant Still composed and arranged film music after he moved to Los Angeles. Aaron Copland and his student Leonard Bernstein (see page 399) also wrote soundtracks. Copland’s film music, for example Our Town (1940), strongly evokes the American heartland; in this it is related to his ballet Appalachian Spring. Bernstein brought a touch of avant-garde modernism to his soundtrack for On the Waterfront (1954).

A more recent composer of concert music who has come to particular prominence for his film music is the Chinese-born Tan Dun (b. 1957). His score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) adroitly mixes instruments from the Western orchestra with those from the orchestra of Beijing opera (see page 297), in which Tan himself performed early in his career. These mixed forces play music styled after traditional Chinese melodies.

Our example of early film music comes from the Soviet Union, where cinema thrived from the 1920s on. Both of the USSR’s early leaders, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, recognized the power of film as a mass medium of socialist propaganda, so cinema was supported by the Soviet state. The two leading concert composers of the USSR, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, devoted much energy to the new medium. Shostakovich, in fact, had started his career as a silent-film pianist, while Prokofiev fell into a rewarding collaboration with the greatest of Soviet filmmakers, Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948).