The Impact of Music in Cinema: From Silent Films to Modern Soundtracks

The relationship between cinema and music is as old as the history of the seventh art itself. The love affair between the two dates back to 1894, when the British William KL Dickson, who worked for Thomas Edisonshot the first experimental sound film in history.

It is a short film of just 20 seconds in which Dickson himself appears playing the violin in front of a phonograph. This first musical film, of a non-narrative nature, was made for the kinetophonoin an attempt to demonstrate synchronization between image and sound.

Now that we are about to leave 2023 behind, it is necessary to remember that this year the first sound film in Spanish celebrated its centenary. Is about From far Sevilledirected by Lee De Forest in 1923.

In this short documentary film, the young actress and singer Concha Piquer, only 17 years old, acts, sings and dances different musical pieces. The film was shot with the phonofilm created by De Forest and, again, to show the sonic synchrony, several musical moments were chosen. It is clear, therefore, that the relationship between cinema and music was predestined from the dawn of cinema itself.

Music chosen with an intention

The existing reflections on music and its functions in cinema are numerous. In fact, up to thirty can be mentioned. Music serves to generate tone, atmosphere, build characters, convey messages, define plots, and, above all, to connect emotionally with the viewer.

Already in the silent film stage, the projections were accompanied with selected music. What began as a pragmatic issue (hiding the noise made by the projectors) ended up being something common to enrich the show.

Wagner, Chopin, Mozart and Beethoven were not only used as ornamental music. The Italian catalog Giuseppe Becce It became the first major document that collected the musical intention of different classical compositions and detailed the specific sensations they expressed. Then the first scores designed and intended for a film would arrive, by Camille Saint-Saëns y Mihail Ippolitov-Ivanov in 1908.

From then until today, the list of composers who have contributed to the evolution of cinema is endless. Among the most remembered are names such as Max Steiner, EW Korngold, Miklós Rózsa, Franz Waxman, Maurice Jarre, Bernard Hermann, Henry Mancini, Jerry Goldsmith, John Barry, Nino Rota, Ennio Morricone, James Horner, Vangelis, Ryuichi Sakamoto and the still active John Williams, Howard Shore, Hans Zimmer, Alexander Desplat and Phillip Glass. An endless list of authors without whom the cinematographic medium cannot be understood.

What is music usually used for in cinema?

To summarize some of the functions that music fulfills in a film, we can highlight four.

Firstly, the most common is that it fulfills a dramatic function. That is, it intervenes with the purpose of providing the viewer with an element that allows them to identify an emotion. Here the viewer’s association between music and images intervenes, allowing the creation of a leitmotif even highlighting the evolution of the characters or the plot. In this regard, it is worth watching any of Jaime Altozano’s musical analyzes analyzing different film scores.

Secondly, music can fulfill a lyrical function, helping to reinforce the image and dramatic density. Certain sequences become memorable not so much for their images but for their musical accompaniment. It has little or nothing to do with, for example, the end of Star Wars without John Williams’ famous score.

Furthermore, music usually fulfills a rhythmic function, which aims to establish a cadence, an atmosphere, a tone that conditions the viewer’s reception of the message. Today, certain genres, such as horror films, can barely be understood without musical use that goes in this direction.

Finally, music usually fulfills a linking function, serving as a homogenizing element. Thus, it can unite two or more actions, integrate action nodes or give continuity to different images of different spaces and times.

In this aspect, there is almost a subgenre within cinema itself, that of the famous “montage sequences”: moments that serve to condense long periods of time into just a few minutes, seasoned with background music. Some of these sequences, such as those in the training sessions Rockyare so recognizable that they have even transcended into their own films.

When the revolutionary thing is the musical absence

One of the criticisms that the music of many current films usually receives is saturation and lack of direction, since many contain more minutes with a soundtrack than without it. Faced with viewers increasingly accustomed to a constant musical background, some filmmakers have chosen to dispense with music in their films. This manifests itself almost as a revolutionary act against the mainstream.

He Dogma 95 manifesto signed by several Danish filmmakers already addressed this issue. Following his second maxim, European filmmakers such as Michael Haneke, Thomas Vinterberg, the Dardenne brothers and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, among others, have made films without soundtracks or songs.

This contrasts with the other end of the scale, musical cinema. Therefore, beyond being an aesthetic or narrative question, we could say, referring to the famous phrase of Jean Luc Godardthat the use of music in a film is, almost, a moral question.

2023-12-27 22:40:18
#History #eternal #romance #music #cinema