film score

In contemporary usage, music specially written to accompany a film on the soundtrack. In the early days of cinema a symphonic poem was composed as a loosely aligned accompaniment to a major silent film, or background music was improvised or assembled by pit musicians with the aid of a Kinothek theme catalogue. With the arrival of optical sound on film came the fully synchronized Hollywood film score. Composers in the European Romantic tradition, including Erich Korngold, Max Steiner, and Franz Waxman, initially tried to adapt the symphonic style to the faster moving screen action; a more successful transition was made by animated film music specialists, such as Scott Bradley. After 1950 a younger generation including Alec North and Elmer Bernstein adopted simpler, jazz-oriented idioms.

Composers for silent films include Camille Saint-Saëns, Arthur Honegger, and Edmund Meisel, whose music for Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) was banned by the authorities. Composers for sound film include Georges Auric, Aaron Copland, Sergey Prokofiev, William Walton, Bernard Herrmann, and Ennio Morricone.