Film Music: Making You Cry Since 1933
Launching this term’s Music Series, The Sound of the Screen, Leo Walsh, Teacher of Music, delivered a fascinating seminar entitled Film Music: Making You Cry Since 1933. The talk explored the evolution of the film score from the silent era to the present day, examining how composers have used melody, harmony, orchestration, recurring themes, electronic sound and innovative techniques to shape our emotional response to what we see on screen.
Reflecting on the inspiration behind the seminar, Leo said, “I have always been interested in the points of contact between film music and nineteenth- and twentieth-century art music, particularly the way composers such as Berlioz, Wagner and Tchaikovsky developed musical techniques for character, memory, obsession and emotional narrative which later proved enormously useful to film composers.”
Beginning with Max Steiner and King Kong, the talk moved through Korngold, Newman, Rózsa and Herrmann to John Williams and more recent figures including Vangelis, Hans Zimmer and Mica Levi, exploring how the sound of film music has changed while its basic dramatic purpose has remained remarkably consistent.
Leo reflected, “My intention was to illustrate how much work music can do to tell a story, often without us being particularly conscious that it is doing it.”
The next events in The Sound of the Screen series are the Chamber Music Concert, 13 November, and the Symphony Orchestra Concert, 20 November, as the finale. You can book tickets here.
