What makes a great film score?

Analysis: memorable film scores can take on a life of their own, well beyond the stories or universes they were created for

Imagine Jaws without the suspenseful two-tone theme by John Williams or Janet Leigh screaming in the shower without Bernard Herrmann's stabbing strings in Psycho, (something which nearly happened). The opening crawl of Star Wars would feel stale if it weren’t for the dramatic fanfare of brass and the Harry Potter films would be a little less magical without the fantastical, melodic theme woven throughout.

Memorable film scores can take on a life of their own, well beyond the stories or universes they were created for. Whether they ripple in the background or jump off the screen, film scores are an integral part of the storytelling. But what makes a good score; Does it play on our subconscious minds and pull at our heartstrings without us taking notice, or does it grab us by the hand and tell us what to feel?

There's a lot of moving parts to film scores, says Anika Babel, film musicologist and PhD candidate at the School of Music at UCD. "The most memorable parts are usually melodically driven. But 90% of scores are more about speaking directly to our physiological self, our hearts and our brains, and provoking a reaction that we're not always aware of."

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"Melodies don't always do the trick there, it's more about colour and harmony. For example, horror films could probably illustrate this best; without the scores they don't work. They look silly, people running around frantic. Even with the music it can still be bit of a panto, but [the music] kind of masks it as tension."

The function of a film score is to deliver the stories to the audience and to help us connect with them, says Babel. "Often, we think of film music as this really pretty thing. But those horror examples illustrate that it's all about tension and release. It's to emotionally connect us to the narrative, by helping us to empathise with the characters and what's going on. It’s making that connection for us."

When it comes to film scoring, there’s typically two narrative layers; diegetic and non-diegetic music. "Diegetic music would be music that happens in the world of the film that the characters can hear, either because it's on the radio or they're playing the music themselves etc. Non-diegetic music is the 'underscore’. Usually the characters can’t hear it, it's solely for the benefit of the audience and to stir those emotions and engage us in the narrative. [Those terms] are a bit problematic because a lot happens in between, those boundaries are blurred," Babel adds.

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"Referring to classic Hollywood scores, a lot of critics would say the best scores are the ones that you don't notice i.e. the ones that go straight to our subconscious. But I would refute that slightly by saying music speaks more directly to our intuition than to our subconscious, if those things are even different," she adds. "But that's where its power lies, to stir our emotions. [Music is] this colloquial method of communication, that doesn't communicate in words, it communicates in feelings and emotions."

Let’s take a journey back in time. Film music has changed radically since the advent of motion picture technology, says Dr James Denis McGlynn, music scholar and Visiting Lecturer in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London. "If we look back to the earliest experiments in motion pictures and pre-advent of film sound — it was very different to what it's like today."

lm music then had an entirely different function and raison d’être. "The author Claudia Gorbman describes how one of the big reasons [for introducing music] was to temper the ghostly effects that audiences might have experienced seeing these figures having had life breathed into them, moving on screen for the first time. That everyone sitting in silence together in a big room might have been quite an unsettling thing."

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Film music was also used to mask the noisy projection technology, something that's easy to overlook when we think of the "luxury of silence" that we have in the cinema today, McGlynn says. If we fast forward to the mid 1920s and the advent of recorded, synchronised sound film, it would also be easy to overlook that the idea of film music need not have stayed, he adds. Film music had been compensating for a lack of voice, so what now? "It was a tricky and unpredictable time, when things were beginning to settle as to what the role of the film score was."

Then came the golden era of the classical Hollywood film score, which to many cinema-goers and film buffs is a sound that’s still familiar to this day. It was a style championed by composers like Max Steiner (Gone With the Wind, 1939), Erich Korngold (The Adventures of Robin Hood, 1938) and Franz Waxman (Rebecca, 1940). "It settled into something that drew a lot on 19th century romanticism, codes and musical shorthands that would have been familiar to audiences from an existing repertoire of music that was used to accompany narratives in ballet or opera."

"The epitome of this would be Gone With the Wind, with the sweeping Tara theme by Max Steiner," says John O’Flynn, Professor of Music at DCU and author of Music, the Moving Image and Ireland. "But tastes for scores changed after that. You find by the 1960s, particularly with the influence of French new wave and other European cinema, that even in Hollywood people are moving away from these types of scores and it's more of a compilation approach [a mix of original score and pre-existing music] and what people refer to as auteur films."

O'Flynn says it was the likes of Francis Ford Coppola and Stanley Kubrick that broke the mould. For 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Kubrick commissioned Alex North, "one of the great mid-century Hollywood composers". But when North delivered the original score, Kubrick preferred the temp tracks, music they had used as stand-in for the original score during filming, and scrapped North's work. The result was a soundtrack made up of pre-existing music. "For those of us that are interested in film music history that's a very well known story because it calls into question this difference between what the score composer envisions and what this director, or auteur director, sees instead," says O’Flynn.

Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) is another film famous for using pre-existing music on the soundtrack, combined with an original score. "What most people remember is the use of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. This is for the horrific massacre scene — that’s a very critical use of classical music in what might be termed an auteur film." O’Flynn adds 1982’s The Big Chill, opening with Marvin Gaye’s I Heard It Through the Grapevine, and 1996’s Trainspotting, which used pre-existing music to capture the clubbing scene of the time, to the list of films that use popular music to great effect.

But the 1970s also saw a return to the "neoclassical score" in the mainstream, revived by John Williams, the composer responsible for over 100 film scores, dozens of them critically acclaimed and instantly recognisable. "In John Williams’ films scores you have all of these ideas or themes and leitmotif. That is, music that's associated with a particular character. So for many people, the expectations of a really entertaining film score goes back to these 19th century ideas of music, from particularly the likes of Wagner, where we have music themes that are linked to characters and we also have this very expressive music."

Some of these themes "follow gendered themes, in today’s terminology," says O’Flynn. "For example Princess Leia's theme in Star Wars; it's a floating, serpentine melody, led by a wind instrument. Then if we take the Darth Vader theme, you have this whole idea of a march, it’s in a minor key and so on. Another great function of film music in the classical sense is, it gives continuity, it reminds us of different parts. It’s not just that the music is there as a complement, but music also has a narrative function, it helps with the overall structure of the film."

The classical Hollywood score and the idea that there should be a leitmotif or melody for every character, was often seen as "overly descriptive", says McGlynn. "Certain theorists and critics – most infamously, Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler – were especially critical of the classical Hollywood score and what they saw as its great misunderstanding of the leitmotif, as it was understood in the context of 19th century symphonic music. They criticised the overt leitmotif as a sort of 'musical lackey, who announces his master with an important air even though the eminent personage is clearly recognisable to everyone.'"

"I think to be so heavily critical of this kind of overt signalling is somewhat dismissive of the things that make film music quite distinct and unique in and of itself. For me that's indebted to the narrative function that it serves and how it's born of trying to communicate information.

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Scores or soundtracks are often a mix of pre-existing music and composed original music in recent years. Deft use of pre-existing music can play on prior associations and cause audience members to immediately recall every other context in which they’ve heard it in the past, McGlynn says. "Jeff Smith wrote a wonderful book, The Sounds of Commerce. He talks a lot about commercial factors and the way in which music could be used as a powerful cross-promotional tool — the idea of a soundtrack album serving as a really valuable form of ancillary revenue for a film, this was something that was incredibly popular in the late 50s/early 60s, in the so-called new Hollywood period."

By virtue of featuring in the film, the pre-existing music is transformed and garners associations of its own, he says. Think of films like 1969’s Easy Rider (Born to Be Wild by Steppenwolf) or 1967’s The Graduate (Mrs Robinson by Simon & Garfunkel). "Jonathan Godsall describes how the idea that some audience members will know a piece of music and others won’t, kind of renders any sort of distinction between originally composed music and pre-existing music kind of meaningless on the grand scale of things."

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Mainstream film scoring remains very conservative, says O’Flynn. "But I think that the more forward-looking composers are working with visions of films where the aesthetic has been moving into a 'less is more’ preference. That music’s function is not necessarily just to what was once called ‘underscore’, but that music can actually have a stronger narrative function if it's used more judiciously."

Music is a brilliant plaster in an editor’s toolkit, says Babel. "For films to be successful, it's all about maintaining this illusion of reality. Not necessarily our reality, but the film's own reality, whatever narrative they're creating. Music, like everything in the film, is to draw us into that illusion. You have to suspend your own beliefs about how the world works and submit yourself into this world."

Dive into film music with these 6 examples

The Letter That Never Came, A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) — Thomas Newman

Anika Babel: My favourite composer, hands down, is Thomas Newman. There's definitely a nostalgia factor there. You know instantly when it's him, he just has this very distinctive pallet that he digs into. The Letter That Never Came is my favourite track from the score. It does it all.

Ice Dance, Edward Scissorhands (1990) — Danny Elfman

Anika Babel: There are specific songs that have this huge afterlife from films, like Danny Elfman's Ice Dance from Edward Scissorhands. It feels very seasonal, it just plays straight to the heart. There's big orchestral swells in it, strings usually do the trick when it comes to emotions, whether that's to soothe us or scare us.

Briony, Atonement (2007) — Dario Marianelli

John O'Flynn: If you think about the opening to Atonement, the way we hear the sound of a typewriter. Then the sound effect becomes integral to the music that Dario Marianelli creates around it. There's an integration of sound and music and we're not even sure which one is which at the beginning of it. Marianelli has done this magnificently.

Come Healing (Elayna Boynton, Leonard Cohen cover), The Farewell (2018) — Music by Alex Weston

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James Denis McGlynn: There's some really incredible use of pre-existing music [in The Farewell]. Valentine Maniglia described it as music serving this purpose as being the language of lying. It's at the moment where the car finally drives away and Awkwafina's character has finally said goodbye to her grandmother and will never see her again. As the camera tracks away from the rear view mirror of the car, that song begins to bleed in, which is so at odds with the style in which the rest of the music is composed, the original music.

Annie's Song (John Denver), Okja (2017) — Music by Jung Jae-il

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James Denis McGlynn: One of the the most fascinating examples for me in recent years, that completely stuck with me afterwards and probably will for a very, very long time, was the use of Annie's Song by John Denver in Bong Joon-ho's Okja, during an incredibly frantic, swat team pursuit scene. We've got this very, arguably old ballad that comes in, completely slows down the motion of the scene. It’s a very unusual and striking combination of image and sound.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ