Roger Hecht on the "golden age" of movie music:

>I don't know of any special schools, but I do think different circumstances
>came into play after this "golden era."

And then goes on to give a very lucid account of changing conditions in the
film business and the relationship to movie music.  He then goes on to say:

>By the fifties or so, however, classical music turned more atonal/serial,
>replacing the more romantic fare of Korngold, et al.  I suspect this new
>music that turned off so many people from the fifties through the eighties
>turned off moviemakers, as well.  Whatever else you want to say about that
>music, I would bet that most directors, etc., did not think it conducive
>to the moods they were trying to create in their movies.  I'd suspect,
>too, that they were afraid of it, believing that if it turned off concert
>audiences, it might turn off movie audiences as well.

Actually, "advanced" music was always a part of the movie business,
especially if you remember that Herrmann, Rozsa, Waxman, Elmer Bernstein,
Copland, and Eisler were considered wild moderns for their time.  Many of
these composers slipped in their most modern music into "horror films,"
where it was perfectly acceptable, even sought after.  This was, after all,
a genre designed to make your flesh creep.  Film noir of the Forties also
used highly dissonant music.  The genre which used the best composers,
working largely free of compromise, was documentary, but most documentaries
aren't mass-oriented.  There well have been this fear on the part of
studios and producers (most directors with creative control tended to seek
out the wildest of the wild men, John Ford being the great exception), but
it's really a baseless fear.  Film music makes most of its effect on a
subliminal level.  Copland talks about the final scene of "The Heiress,"
for which he wrote 12-tone serial music.  It fit the emotional nature of
the scene.  Almost nobody commented on that specific music, for good or
ill.  It was only later that Copland spilled the beans.

>It's tough enough trying to make a successful movie visually without
>having to worry about a difficult esoteric soundtrack killing audience
>numbers.

Unfortunately, this isn't the way film music works or the attitude toward
film music on the part of directors.  Most of them don't know enough music
to tell what's a serial score.  They are interested only in whether the
music is dramatically effective and appropriate.  Given the proper subject,
I don't see why a priori 12-tone music is a non-starter.

>I doubt very much whether movie directors and producers were that hot on
>the idea of going "cutting edge" with their musical scores.  Schoenberg's
>Five Orchestral Pieces may be a great work, but I can't imagine many movies
>that could successfully use a score written in that style.  A few, but not
>many.

The problem is that many such scores do exist, again mostly in the horror
genre.  It is true, however, that most of the first-rank composers living
in this country did not work in films.  Hindemith, Stravinsky, Schoenberg
(who really did want to work in films), and Krenek were out, while Newman,
Young, and Steiner were in.  To some extent, this is also a matter of how
most of these men worked - that is, painstakingly.  Generally speaking, one
doesn't get a lot of time to score and record music for a film.  Music is
usually regarded as an afterthought or a bottleneck to immediate release.
Yet the four people I've mentioned did write music for films, although they
didn't make a Hollywood living doing it.

Steve Schwartz