A History of Film Music

As cinema moves into its second century, it is surprising that relatively few comprehensive historical accounts of film music have so far appeared in print. This is by no means to say that there is a dearth of perceptive and thought-provoking writing about film music: on the contrary, since the 1980s the field has become a rich growth area in both academic and popular circles, and an ever-growing understanding and appreciation of the filmic medium's often strikingly varied musical potentialities have helped rescue the film musician's craft from the stigma of hack commercialism which constantly blighted its reputation from the earliest years. At the same time, and equally late in the day, film scholars have begun to draw wider attention to the need not only to regard a film's soundtrack as an indivisible composite element, but also to consider it as at least equal to – and in some cases arguably more important than – the moving images which, as cinema's raison d'être, were traditionally viewed as its overridingly dominant parameter. Hopefully the days when it was possible to devote an entire volume to a discussion of the aesthetics of cinema without adequately addressing either its sound or music (for an example, see Aumont et al. 1983) are long since gone.