the filmic medium, particularly the narrative.”^5
Such music can be classical or popular in style,
written specifically for the film or taken from music
previously composed for another purpose, written
by composers known for other kinds of music (e.g.,
Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Philip Glass,
and Igor Stravinsky) or by those who specialize in
movie scores (e.g., Elmer Bernstein, Carter Bur-
well, Georges Delerue, Bernard Herrmann, Ennio
Morricone, David Raksin, Miklós Rózsa, Tôru
Takemitsu, and John Williams, among many oth-
ers), or music played by characters in the film or by
offscreen musicians, diegetic or nondiegetic. The
first film score was written by French composer
Camille Saint-Saëns for the 1908 movie The Assas-
sination of the Duke de Guise(codirectors: André
Calmettes and Charles Le Bargy).
Some of Hollywood’s most prolific contempo-
rary composers were formerly rock musicians:
Oingo Boingo’s Danny Elfman has scored many
Tim Burton movies, including Corpse Bride(2005);
Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh, another prolific com-
poser, scored Catherine Hardwicke’s Lords of Dog-
town(2005) and Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic
with Steve Zissou(2004). Songwriter and singer
Randy Newman, equally prolific, scored Gary
Ross’s Seabiscuit(2003) and Jay Roach’s Meet the
Fockers(2004). Jonny Greenwood, the lead gui-
tarist of the English alternative rock group Radio-
head, is also the composer of the unearthly,
beautiful score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There
Will Be Blood(2007).
Like other types of sound, music can be intrin-
sic, helping to tell the story, whether it pertains to
plot, action, character, or mood; indeed, music
plays an indispensable role in many movies. Per-
haps the most familiar form of movie music is
the large symphonic score used to set a mood or
manipulate our emotions.^6 Few old-Hollywood films
were without a big score by masters of the genre
such as Max Steiner (who scored Victor Fleming’s
Gone with the Wind, 1939). Although recent movies
have relied mainly on less ambitious scores, they
are still used when large stories call for them,
including Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000; com-
posers: Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard); Peter
Jackson’s The Lord of the Ringstrilogy (2001–3;
composer: Howard Shore); Ang Lee’s Brokeback
Mountain (2005) and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s
Babel(2006) (both scored by composer Gustavo
Santaolalla); Joe Wright’s Atonement (2007) and
Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre(2011) (both scored by
composer Dario Marianelli); James Cameron’s
Avatar(2009; composer: James Horner); Terence
Malick’s The Tree of Life(2011; composer: Alexandre
Desplat); and the Harry Pottermovies (2001-11; vari-
ous directors; composers include John Williams
[films 1-3], Patrick Doyle [4], Nicholas Hooper [5-6],
and Alexandre Desplat [7-8]).
Movie music can be equally effective when it
creates or supports ideas in a film, as in Orson
Welles’s The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice
(1952; music: Alberto Barberis and Angelo Francesco
Lavagnino; 1999 sound-restoration supervisor: John
Fogelson; 1999 music-restoration supervisor: Michael
Pendowski). Welles takes a deterministic view of
Othello’s fate, but he depicts the two central char-
acters, Othello (Welles) and Desdemona (Suzanne
Cloutier), as being larger than life, even as they are
each destined for an early death.
Accompanying their funeral processions is a
musical score that leaves no question that these
tragic circumstances are the result of fate. In fact, in
their cumulative power the sights and sounds
express the inexorable rhythm of all great tragedies.
The complex musical score covers several periods
and styles, but to most ears it resembles medieval
liturgical music. Deep, hard, dirgelike piano chords
combine with the chanting of monks and others in
the processions, spelling out (even drawing us into)
the title character’s inevitable deterioration and
self-destruction.
For John Curran’s We Don’t Live Here Anymore
(2004), a dark melodrama about marital infideli-
ties, composer Michael Convertino has written a
score that builds with the suspense and establishes
the mood of anxiety that hangs over everyone
involved. By contrast, Don Davis’s score for Andy
and Lana Wachowski’s The Matrix(1999) uses the404 CHAPTER 9 SOUND
(^5) Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 13.
(^6) See Larry M. Timm, The Soul of Cinema: An Appreciation of
Film Music(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), ch. 1.