362 PART 3 | FROM WORLD WAR I THROUGH WORLD WAR II
Film accompanists generally played whatever they wished, choosing or
improvising music that suited the shifting action on-screen. Any type of pre-
existing music could be commandeered for the purpose: popular songs, tradi-
tional tunes, classical instrumental pieces, or selections from grand opera. Many
musicians worked from anthologies of movie music identifi ed by generic mood;
the fi rst such collection, published in 1909, consisted of fi fty-one short piano
pieces, each labeled with a tempo, mood, character, or situation. As an aid to
fi tting music to a fi lm, studios distributed cue sheets breaking a fi lm down into
scenes, with a suggestion for a musical genre or mood appropriate to each scene,
such as “Irish jig” or “Plaintive.” This practice indicated a growing appreciation
of music’s role in the cinematic experience and consequently in a movie’s com-
mercial success or failure.
Filmmakers and studio executives thus began to exercise increasing control
over musical accompaniments. Even before World War I the fi lm studios hired
musicians to create or compile musical scores tailored to specifi c fi lms. These
scores were prepared as a set of parts for a theater orchestra, including a con-
ductor’s score with cues for coordinating the music to the fi lm, to be distributed
to presenters along with the fi lm reels and promotional materials. If a theater
orchestra was not available, the score could be used by the pianist or organist.
One of the landmark fi lm scores of the silent era was Joseph Carl Breil’s music
for The Birth of a Nation, director D. W. Griffi th’s 1915 Civil War epic. Designed to run
nonstop through the entire three-hour fi lm, Breil’s music mixes original compo-
sition with a potpourri of borrowed material: Civil War songs and other patri-
otic tunes, but also snippets of Beethoven, Grieg, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner. Breil’s
score uses the technique of leitmotif, in which a musical theme associated with a
specifi c character, object, or situation in the drama recurs whenever its referent
is on-screen. Breil’s inspiration may have been Wagner’s operas, which use leit-
motifs extensively, but another likely source of the practice was the melodrama.
With the advent of sound fi lm technology in the late 1920s, it became pos-
sible to record the musical score, now often called the soundtrack, in perfect
synchronization with the moving picture. (A technological boon for the mov-
ies, sound recording was a death knell for theater musicians.) The fi rst feature-
length “talkie,” The Jazz Singer (1927), included a few scenes in which Al Jolson
sang and engaged in spoken dialogue with the other actors; his most famous
line was the prophetic “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.” Most of the fi lm, however, is
distinguishable from the old-style silent fi lm only in that the orchestral accom-
paniment is recorded rather than performed live.
The Jazz Singer makes a distinction between the two kinds of music heard in
a sound fi lm: diegetic music, or source music, which is part of the action on-
screen and thus audible to the characters in the story, and nondiegetic music,
or underscoring, which heightens the mood or clarifi es plot or character and is
inaudible to the characters.
In their fi rst few years, sound movies placed the emphasis on diegetic music,
since audiences enjoyed the novelty of hearing the people in the pictures singing
and playing instruments. Soon, however, Holly wood composers began to explore
the nondiegetic possibilities of the soundtrack’s close coordination of music and
action. One of the fi rst musicians to do so was Max Steiner (1888–1971), a Viennese
émigré with a background in operetta and musical comedy who came to Hol-
ly wood by way of Broadway (he was one of the orchestrators for the Gershwins’leitmotifsoundtracksource musicunderscoringMax Steiner172028_15_361-385_r3_ko.indd 362 23/01/13 8:36 PM