The Music of Film Composers

The Music of Film Composers

Film music began as a solution to a problem. Early film projectors were really loud, therefore something was needed to cover up all the noise. In addition, silent movies apparently seemed a bit awkward without any musical accompaniment. Enter, usually, a pianist, who would improvise musical accompaniments to the events on the screen. None other than Dmitri Shostakovich got his first job as a cinema pianist, honing his improvisatory skills, and sometimes receiving cat calls and boos for his fantasy filled musings that tended to stray away from the action on the screen. Music in the silent film era had to help the audience in pointing out important moments to the audience, enhancing the emotional effects of the story, and most importantly, it had to give a certain musical line to every character, giving to them the emotional depth that the audience couldn't get since they weren't going to hear their voice. To do this, early film composers turned to the idea of the Leitmotif, an idea developed by the opera composer Richard Wagner. This idea would take hold even once "talkies" took over the screen, with composers such as Max Steiner, Charlie Chaplin, and others setting the stage for a century of brilliant music, by composers like Bernard Herrmann, John Williams, Dmitri Shostakovich, Rachel Portman, Hans Zimmer, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Christopher Willis, and dozens and dozens more. Today on the show we'll talk about this development of film music, and also hear some of the greatest and most recognizable film music ever written. We'll also talk about why film music is sometimes looked down upon in the classical music world, and how we might begin to change that perception. Join us!

Episoder(283)

Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 (Part 2)

Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 (Part 2)

In a letter to Tchaikovsky's nephew Vladimir Davydov, Tchaikovsky wrote: "I'm very pleased with its content, but dissatisfied, or rather not completely satisfied, with the instrumentation. For some re...

2 Apr 47min

Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 (Part 1)

Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 (Part 1)

The great and somewhat controversial conductor Leopold Stokowski said this about Tchaikovsky: "His musical utterance comes directly from the heart and is a spontaneous expression of his innermost feel...

21 Mar 50min

Beethoven String Quartet, Op. 59, No.2

Beethoven String Quartet, Op. 59, No.2

I'm always tickled by composer trivia questions, like which standard canon works begin in a major key and end in a minor key? I'll give you one, but please comment others below: Mendelssohn's 4th Symp...

5 Mar 56min

Brahms Symphony No. 2 LIVE w/ The Aalborg Symphony

Brahms Symphony No. 2 LIVE w/ The Aalborg Symphony

Brahms spent much of his adult life battling with his ambition to write the next great symphony and his terror at the shadow of Beethoven standing behind him. Brahms tortured himself for 14 years with...

19 Feb 58min

Zemlinsky: The Mermaid

Zemlinsky: The Mermaid

The story of Alexander von Zemlinsky's The Mermaid begins with a passionate love affair and ends in heartbreak of the most unabashedly big-R Romantic kind. In 1900, the young, fabulously talented, and...

5 Feb 1h 1min

Pergolesi Stabat Mater

Pergolesi Stabat Mater

Many aspects of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's life seem relatively normal when it comes to composers of the Baroque era. He was prolific, died young, and his music became very famous only after his de...

22 Jan 59min

Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2

Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2

We humans seem to love comeback stories, and there is no comeback quite as compelling in the classical music world as Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto. It was written three years after the disastr...

8 Jan 52min

Handel Messiah w/ Aram Demirjian

Handel Messiah w/ Aram Demirjian

A piece that I have been asked to cover probably a dozen times is Handel's Messiah. It's a piece I love, but a piece that I've never conducted or played, and so therefore I don't know it incredibly we...

18 Des 20251h 9min

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