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I was reading an article in David Bordwell’s ‘The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960′ on how music accompaniment effects narration and this strongly affected my view on the basic principles of film scoring (it is also and interesting read.)
” From the start, musical accompaniment has provided the cinema’s most overt continuity factor. In the silent cinema, piano or orchestral music ran along with the images, pointing them up and marking out how audience should respond.”
” As early as 1911, a theater musician advised players not to stop a number abruptly when the scene changed. Hollywood composers claimed that sudden stops and starts were avoidable by the process of imperceptibly fading the music up and down, the practice known in the trade as ’sneaking in and out. This continuous musical accompaniment functions as narration. It would be easy to show that film music strives to become as ‘transparent’ as any other technique – viz., not only the sneak-in but the neutrality of the compositional styles and the standardized uses to which they are put (’La Marseillaise’ for shots of France, throbbing rhythms for chase scenes.) Thedor Adorno and Hanns Eisler have heaped scorn upon Hollywood music as pleonastic and self-affacing; Brecht compared film music’s ‘invisibility’ to the hypnotist’s need to control the conditions of the trance. Yet calling the music ‘transparent is as true but uninformative as calling the entire Hollywood style invisible. If music functions narrationally, how does it accomplish those tasks characteristic of classical narration?”
The sources of Hollywood film music show its narrational bent very clearly. In eighteenth-century melodrama, background music was played to underscore dramatic points, sometimes even in alternation with lines of dialogue. American melodrama of the 1800s used sporadic vamping, but spectacle plays and pantomimes relied upon continuous musical accompaniment. The most important influence upon Hollywood film scoring, however, was that of late nineteenth-century operatic and symphonic music, and Wagner was the crest of that influence. Wagner was a perfect model, since he exploited the narrational possibilities of music. Harmony, rhythm, and ‘continuous melody’ could correspond to the play’s dramatic action, and leitmotifs could convey a character’s thoughts, point up parallels between situations, even anticipate action or create irony. ”
Bordwell, David (1985) The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 London: Routledge
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