The Transition Of Film Composition

Film composition has had some traditional trademarks as well as radical makeovers from the early 20th century to the present.

In the beginning of film composition in the early 20th century film music was essential for most silent movies, often a pianist playing in the cinema to the film footage.

When spoken film dialogue became popularized in the late 1920s, the role of film music changed significantly. Music often served to represent the action and dialogue, in a manor that you could say was more 'expressive' than in a lot silent movies. The music was often a rich, big, extravagant orchestration, fastidiously created by a notable composer of the time, such as Prokofiev, or Bernard Herrman, the legendary Hitchcock collaborator. Much of this extravagant music was composed for epic films, and is still heavily used in many action and Hollywood films today.

It wasn't until the 1960s and the 1970s that film soundtracks started to feature a popular music soundtrack. The 1973 film American Graffiti carries a non-stop hit collection of popular music that was used to great effect. Quentin Tarantino, director of Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) is a major advocate of popular music soundtracks, using many popular songs in quite often humorously twisted ways. The major issue of using popular music in films is getting clearance to use them - often film music supervisors face rejections from artists over their use of music in a certain film, but when they see their royalty check for it's use they often retract their original statement.     

In the past 30 years, technology has been one of the major influences in film composition. For a lot of futuristic sci-fi films, electronic soundtracks are often used, created by synthesizers, to add reference to the film narrative's time and culture. If you are skilful and musically adept enough, you can create a lavish and colourful film orchestra soundtrack using software synthesizers and sequencing software. You wouldn't ever have to hire an orchestra, although you would probably need to know the expressive characteristics of classical instruments.

Film music has many aesthetics to it, and you shouldn't assume that one phase of film music has evolved from the other - because that would imply the old compositional styles were inferior to the newer ones. What is important is that film music has the power to fuse traditional methods with newer technologies and tastes.