Keeping score of the greatest film composers

Movie magic hinges on aural as well as visual

June 26, 2011|By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

Lacking speech, the movies claimed music straightaway. There was live accompaniment, usually a piano but sometimes an entire orchestra. There was also montage. No other artistic technique approximates more closely the musical imperatives of harmony and rhythm than film editing.

A handful of directors have had such keen musical instincts they’ve functioned almost as honorary composers through their selections of preexisting music for their films. Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, and Terrence Malick are the most obvious examples. You can sit through Malick’s “The Tree of Life’’ with your eyes closed, and it’s as rewarding an aesthetic experience as watching it (well, almost). Another director has nothing honorary about his status. Clint Eastwood is acomposer-director, as well as actor-director, with six scores to his credit.

With the arrival of sound, in the late 1920s, film music took on a new and thrilling dimension. The score became as much a part of the allure of the motion picture as opulent sets and expressive lighting. Film composers, in their faceless yet unmistakable way, became stars, too.

The movies being such a populist form, their makers craved respectability. Thus symphonic music became the template for film scoring. Sometimes studios even enlisted classical composers. Erich Korngold and Franz Waxman, in fact, became far better known for their movie work. Prokofiev’s score for “Alexander Nevsky’’ remains a marvel. The indicting insistence of Philip Glass’s piano music for “The Thin Blue Line’’ itself becomes a kind of inquiry. Conversely, the fussbudget pageantry of William Walton’s music for Olivier’s “Henry IV’’ and Leonard Bernstein’s faux-jazz for “On the Waterfront’’ mostly just call attention to themselves — the very last thing a film score ought to do.

Two of the greatest figures in the history of movie music, Bernard Herrmann and Nino Rota, celebrate their 100th birthdays this year. Herrmann’s is Wednesday, Rota’s is Dec. 3. The Brattle Theatre, in Cambridge, observes the centenaries with a series devoted to each man’s films. Herrmann’s starts Friday, with a restored print of the last work he scored, “Taxi Driver’’ (he died a few hours after recording the soundtrack). Rota’s begins July 8, with “The Leopard.’’