Musical Form
Film Score
The orchestral tradition, still very much alive, on movie screens.
Modern Application
A film score is orchestral (or sometimes electronic, or a mix of both) music written to accompany a film, and it's arguably the place where the classical orchestral tradition reaches the widest modern audience by far. Far more people have heard John Williams's Star Wars score than have heard most Romantic-era symphonies performed live.
The classical toolkit behind it
Film composers draw heavily on Late Romantic orchestral technique, especially the sound world of Wagner and Richard Strauss. One tool borrowed directly from Wagner's operas is the leitmotif: a short, recognizable musical theme attached to a specific character, place, or idea, which recurs and transforms throughout a score as that element's role in the story develops. Williams's Force theme and Imperial March are both leitmotifs in exactly this sense, and Howard Shore's Lord of the Rings scores weave together dozens of them.
Composers also borrow the orchestra's full color palette: shimmering strings for wonder, low brass for menace, a solo instrument for loneliness. Some film music has even been taken straight from the concert hall - Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra and Johann Strauss II's The Blue Danube in 2001: A Space Odyssey are the most famous examples.
How a score gets made
A score's job is functional in a way concert music's usually isn't: it has to match specific timings, support dialogue rather than compete with it, and shift mood on cue. In a spotting session, the director and composer watch the film together and decide where music should start and stop. The composer then writes cues timed to the frame, often working from a temp track - existing music the director has used as a placeholder. Recording usually happens with an orchestra playing to the picture, guided by a click track so every hit lands exactly.
Film people also distinguish underscore - music only the audience hears - from source music that exists inside the story, like a band playing at a party on screen.
A short history
The silent era. "Silent" films were rarely silent: theaters had a pianist, an organist, or even a full orchestra playing along, often from compilations of existing classical pieces. Camille Saint-Saëns wrote one of the first original scores, for The Assassination of the Duke of Guise (1908).
The Golden Age. With synchronized sound came the classic Hollywood score. Many of its pioneers were European émigrés trained in the Late Romantic tradition: Max Steiner (King Kong, 1933; Gone with the Wind, 1939) and Erich Wolfgang Korngold (The Adventures of Robin Hood, 1938). Bernard Herrmann followed with darker, more modern scores, including the shrieking strings-only music for Psycho (1960).
Concert composers on screen. Major concert composers wrote for film too: Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky, Shostakovich's many Soviet film scores, and Copland's Oscar-winning score for The Heiress.
New sounds. From the 1950s on, jazz, pop, and electronics entered the mix - Ennio Morricone's spaghetti-western scores are a whole style of their own. Then in 1977, Williams's Star Wars revived the full symphonic score, and it has dominated blockbusters ever since. Today, composers like Hans Zimmer blend orchestra and electronics, while others, like Hildur Guðnadóttir (Joker), use the orchestra in strikingly spare, modern ways.
Film music in the concert hall
Film music now has a concert life of its own. Orchestras around the world perform "live to picture" screenings, playing an entire score in sync with the film, and suites from popular scores are a reliable way for orchestras to draw new audiences. For more on how the two worlds relate, see our guide to film scores versus classical music.
Where to start listening: John Williams's scores for Star Wars, Jaws, and Schindler's List each show a different mode - adventure, tension, and elegy - from the same composer. For the Golden Age sound, try Korngold's The Adventures of Robin Hood; for how much a score can do with very little, Herrmann's Psycho.