Film music serves many purposes in supporting the visual media by setting the mood, location, or time-period, suggesting a principal ethnic group, reinforcing action, offering contrary information, and drawing attention away from undesirable visual images. Film scores borrow from well-known pre-existing music to suggest location, time, and ethnic groups. In John Cromwell's Of Human Bondage, the music switches from "La Marseillaise" to "British Grenadiers" to signal the main character's change in location. Film score composers allude stylistically to ethnic folk music idioms to suggest a particular group of people. These idioms are often spuriously employed through the repetitious use of a particular convention, such as a pentatonic scale, gongs, and temple bells to signify Chinese traditional music, or heavy drumbeats and chanting for Native American music. Film music composers often model compositions on stylistic conventions of a given period in Western art music. Max Steiner's score for The Informer, set in Ireland during the 1920s, borrowed the Irish traditional tune, "The Minstrel Boy," Miklos Rozsa's score for Ivanhoe reflects the film's setting through the music of French troubadours, and Elmer Bernstein's score for The Ten Commandments draws on the unique timbre of the ram's horn during the Exodus scene. Bernard Herrmann's score for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad did not directly borrow the corresponding ethnic idiomatic music, but implied its use through the borrowing of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. Early American film scores were often modeled on or borrowed directly from late nineteenth-century European composers, as Joseph Carl Breil's score for the 1915 Birth of a Nation used Richard Wagner's "The Ride of the Valkyries." Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson influenced the move towards sparse orchestration in later American film score composers by incorporating American folksongs. Jazz and popular music became frequent sources of borrowing in the 1940s, as did rock music from the 1950s through the 1970s in films as in Rock Around the Clock,Don't Knock the Rock, and The Twist.American Graffiti used rock music as background for stories of the turbulence and uncertainty of the period. Film score composers are now employing both rich symphonic scoring along with the "musical potpourri" of the silent film era.

Works: Max Steiner: score to Of Human Bondage (27), score to The Informer (28); Miklos Rozsa: score to Ivanhoe (28); Bernard Herrmann: score to The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (28); George Lucas, et al.: score to American Graffiti (32).

Sources: Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade (28); Richard Wagner: "Ride of the Valkyries" from Die Walküre (29); Jimmy DeKnight and Max Freedman: Rock Around the Clock as performed by Bill Haley and the Comets (32).

Index Classifications: 1900s, Film

Contributed by: Kathleen Widden