Great Film Composers: The Music of the Movies

The relationship between music and film is nearly as old as cinema itself. From its infancy, filmmakers recognised the power music had in creating atmosphere and enhancing an audience response to character's motives and emotions. With the advent of talking pictures, movies changed forever and so did the musical score from being played in the cinema to being married to the screen. Ground-breaking composers such as Max Steiner and Eric Wolfgang Korngold used established orchestral techniques to augment the action on screen. Throughout the 1940s and 50s, cinemas greatest moments were scored by some of the finest film music ever written. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman's emotional goodbye in Casablanca was accompanied by Max Steiner's lush strings. Joseph Cotton's desperate search through a post-war Vienna contrasted with Anton Karas' zither in The Third Man and the shadowy intrigue of Hitchcock's North by Northwest was underlined by Bernard Herrmann's complex modernist arrangements. In the 1960s, the spy thriller The Ipcress File was enhanced by John Barry's iconic score, whilst composer Ennio Morricone's work for director Sergio Leone, helped to create a new Western genre. The 1970's was another golden era in American Cinema. Nino Rota's delicate score on Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather influenced a whole generation of mafia films. New composers continued to make their mark, such as Jerry Goldsmith and David Shire. John Williams' many collaborations with director Steven Spielberg have resulted in some of the greatest films ever made. Advancements in recording techniques and the rising popularity of synthesisers perfectly suited the films of the eighties. Composer Brad Fiedel's industrial score for The Terminator echoed the movie's sparse design. Whilst Maurice Jarre brought a delicate beauty to the brutal world of Mad Max. As film's first century came to close, John Williams' haunting score for Schindler's List brought audiences to tears. German composer Hans Zimmer looked to old Hollywood for inspiration, to create his lush, rich score for Gladiator. Today, film scores continue to be as vital to the production as the original screenplay, the artistic interpretation and the visual realisation. Innovative composers around the world continue to take audiences on a magical journey filled with hope and despair, wonder and disbelief, love and sorrow. These are the masterful film composers continuing to shape cinema as we know it.