A History of Film Music: Classical music in the cinema

However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music from the past and from our own time? ( stanley kubrick, quoted in maclean 1994, 6 ) Hold it, boys! Beethoven isn't working – try Brahms. ( fred astaire, in funny face (1956 )) Classical music, by which is here meant the traditional catch-all definition discussed by Royal S. Brown (1994, 39), was a staple ingredient of silent-film accompaniment, and the stylistic precepts of orchestral romanticism and impressionism subsequently became the solid foundation on which Golden Age film scoring was based. It is therefore not surprising that, thereafter, classical music never had the significant impact on audio-visual style that the fresh perspectives offered by pop music began to achieve from the 1950s onwards. The structural and perceptual implications of pop-based soundtracks revolutionized both practical and aesthetic approaches to the creative combination of sound and image in ways which were to remain dynamic in films of the early twenty-first century. Indeed, it might with good reason be argued that the most significant soundtrack developments of the modern age were initiated by a conscious rejection of the outmoded values of structural cogency, musical logic and pseudo-highbrow art-music styles which the traditional orchestral film score had embodied.